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dont be mean to me
May 2, 2007

I'm interplanetary, bitch
Let's go to Mars


Wentley posted:

C

The best reaction to a kidnapping. Time to get out, loot and see how we can profit from this.

This.

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Blasphemaster
Jul 10, 2008

Hexenritter posted:

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Also I must again state my enjoyment of your avatar. Rave Hitler amuses me greatly.

I just love that it was the first thing to pop up in google search when I heard about the discovery of speech rehearsal pictures. Don't change, internet. :allears:

Bee Bonk
Feb 19, 2011



Give your captors a grain or two of credit: If they'd stuck you in conventional restraints, you quite literally may have slithered out of them in your sleep.
Damper-cuffs are common-issue to security personnel on certain legally-challenged postings, where the typical clientele has little to do with descriptors like “civilized,” or “mentally-stable,” or “bathed”. They're designed primarily for use against cyborgs and aliens of unknown strength ratings, and create resistance based on the force applied by the wearer. This variable tension, however, with help from your well-earned experience with the model in question, has given you your ticket out; you just need a bit of boneless Raq flexibility, and a piece of metal thin enough to uncover, press, and hold the inset safety reset stud.

The safety release triggers with a faint whine and click, and you breath a squeaking sigh of relief through your proximal tubules: some enterprising operators have been known disable the safety features of the cuffs to prevent the very maneuver you just executed, but you're thankfully not dealing with top-shelf criminalia, here.

As you rub the hemolymph back through the vesicles in your forearms, you trigger your commlink with your tongue. There is no response, not even the tiny inner-ear click that tells you you're transmitting. A few repetitions assure you that your implanted communicator is well and truly deceased.
“This no-account collection of sleebs can't even tie a body up properly,” you grouse, rolling a couple of your eyes, “but they can sure manage to accidentally fry my 'link.”

In addition to symptoms including heart(s) arrythmia, loss of bowel control, acute seizure, and death, poorly-placed stunner hits are prone to damaging delicate electronics, such as those in implanted commlinks. That would explain the distinctive post-stun headache currently cramping your cranial coelum, as well as your lack of memory about the event; both similar but uniquely different to the suite of headaches and memory loss with which you wake on an average cycle. A useful addition to your hangover journal, if nothing else.

You rest for a moment, listening and feeling the sounds of the vehicle around you. From the vibrations in your gill and the particulars of engine noise and repulsor whine, you're fairly certain you're in a small passenger skimmer, and that you're zipping along at a fair clip. You peer through the gloom at the hatch mechanism, and sure enough, it's an older consumer model that proves trivial to pop from the inside.



Peeking through the crack in the cargo hatch, you see the dank environs of some neglected sub-level or another whizzing by, the air redolent with garbage, toxic industrial tailings, and salt water. You're not sure exactly where you are, but you've never met the slum, shadow port, shanty town, or wet sack you couldn't find friends and a smoke in.

But how to say goodbye to our kind hosts?
A. Looks like a lot of nice, soft garbage down there to break your fall. Tuck and roll, Kinu!
B. Wait for more hospitable surroundings before you jump; maybe a convenient mattress pile or a cantina. No need to endanger your giblets and gravy more than necessary.
C. It might actually be worthwhile to know who these sleebs are, and where they want to take you. Stay put for now; you can gather some intel and potentially break for it once you get “there”.
D. You've got a length of frayed pow-dat cable, a disabled set of damper cuffs, an assortment of small bits of scrap metal, and an empty wine bottle. If they didn't want you to hotwire a moving vehicle from inside the trunk, they shouldn't have given you all this stuff! (Specify a plan, if desired)

Bee Bonk fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Jul 14, 2016

Blasphemaster
Jul 10, 2008

D. How is anything else even an option?

Green Intern
Dec 29, 2008

Loon, Crazy and Laughable

D sounds incredibly fun.

Wentley
Feb 7, 2012
Why choose anything but D indeed!

Dog Kisser
Mar 30, 2005

But People have fears that beasts do not. Questions, too.

Blasphemaster posted:

D. How is anything else even an option?

Outrail
Jan 4, 2009

www.sapphicrobotica.com
:roboluv: :love: :roboluv:

Blasphemaster posted:

D. How is anything else even an option?

Just disable the steering and maximize the throttle before jumping clear. We can sift through the resulting wreckage for intel, free gifts and/or injured hosts to question.

Bee Bonk
Feb 19, 2011

Outrail posted:

Just disable the steering and maximize the throttle before jumping clear. We can sift through the resulting wreckage for intel, free gifts and/or injured hosts to question.

:siren: D Voters (which is everyone, mea culpa): Specify how you want to slot this skimmer. :siren:

CYOA: An adventure where you are the hero!

Wentley
Feb 7, 2012
Do we have any enemies we want to take out with a runaway car? Want to be on the news?

Hexenritter
May 20, 2001


Outrail posted:

Just disable the steering and maximize the throttle before jumping clear. We can sift through the resulting wreckage for intel, free gifts and/or injured hosts to question.

Definitely onboard with Plan Outrail

Green Intern
Dec 29, 2008

Loon, Crazy and Laughable

I voted D already: but Outrail has a good idea

Deadmeat5150
Nov 21, 2005

OLD MAN YELLS AT CLAN

Outrail posted:

Just disable the steering and maximize the throttle before jumping clear. We can sift through the resulting wreckage for intel, free gifts and/or injured hosts to question.

drat good idea

Blasphemaster
Jul 10, 2008

Hexenritter posted:

Definitely onboard with Plan Outrail

This if we can't explode the passenger compartment's climate control system or something like that. If we can pump an assload of drugs in there and set the autopilot to bring us to a bar while they're stoned out of their minds, all the better.

Outrail
Jan 4, 2009

www.sapphicrobotica.com
:roboluv: :love: :roboluv:
Oh, while we're waiting for a good spot to jump off set it so the doors lock and radio blasts something terrible.

Celine Dion comes to mind.

dont be mean to me
May 2, 2007

I'm interplanetary, bitch
Let's go to Mars


Outrail posted:

Oh, while we're waiting for a good spot to jump off set it so the doors lock and radio blasts something terrible.

Celine Dion comes to mind.

Fine, everything you said, but I'm starting to think there's something wrong with you.

Outrail
Jan 4, 2009

www.sapphicrobotica.com
:roboluv: :love: :roboluv:

Sir Unimaginative posted:

Fine, everything you said, but I'm starting to think there's something wrong with you.

Too cruel?

Bee Bonk
Feb 19, 2011



When you were young, dumb, and still had a tail, you spent much of your time fraternizing with a disreputable (for Thoon) skim-racer and his cadre of speed-hungry reprobates. Modifying a skimmer and getting out of a cargo compartment are two of the skills you picked up in that time, and two of the only ones you're willing to speak about in polite (for Thoon) company.
Which is to say, with a bit of scrap-metal surgery on the trunk lining, you have no difficulty finding the motivator assembly nestled beneath.

Initially, you consider disabling the skimmer; forcing the vehicle to land. But you quickly run into the question of how you would then deal with your captors, to which you have no easy answer. After pondering the approaches your varied companions would take, you come to the sober and measured conclusion that you should plow this thing into a wall at a high velocity.

You divert power from the maneuvering system to propulsion. All of it.



Muffled roars seep into the trunk from the cabin as the skimmer bolts like a vespe-stung vere, leaping forward with a lurch that sends you rolling painfully against the back of the compartment. The debris fields blur past beneath you as you peer from the hatch, and you hesitate, struggling to find a good time to bail out. As it happens, the protruding length of pipe that the clips the speeder's starboard stabilizer makes your decision for you; as the vehicle bucks and veers from the oblique impact, you first smash your head on the underside of the flapping cargo hatch, then tumble out entirely.



Having no skeletal structure has its advantages, however. You drop and roll, squishy and springy, down a trash embankment, in a bounding tumble that would certainly do unspeakable damage to the internal structure of devoted bone-havers, but that merely makes you dizzy and a bit bruised. The skimmer is less fortunate, and plows headlong into a bundle of heavy fluid conduits, filling the air with the screams of tortured metal and cloudy torrents of waters salt, fresh, and other.



Having avoided impaling yourself on any jagged spars of metal, you come to rest in a heap of oily, spongy waste mass, even as the skimmer tears free of the nest of pipes and crashes down to the ground not too far away.
Looking around, all you can determine is that you're in one of the waste collection sub-sectors, but that distinction is not as helpful as you'd like. You consider, also, that you are likely in better shape than the occupants of the skimmer, and that this may be your only opportunity to get some answers. Shooing away a handful of local scavenger life, you wrench an arm-length (and arm-shaped; you'll have to write a note to that utility mech's family) of metal pipe from the rubble and make your way toward the falling vehicle.

Smoke billows from the wreck, even as wet mist from the burst pipes cascades down all around. As you get closer, wary for any signs of imminent explosion, you see a still form through the shattered canopy.
You round the side of the skimmer, makeshift sleeb-beater in hand, and...



Oh.


Well, then.

You rifle the mortal remains of the skimmer pilot-turned-sprinkler, and turn up the following, which you keep:

1 Hand Pulser, loaded with shady aftermarket alterations.
1 Credchip, containing 10 exoDucats.
1 Elaborate Hat, mercifully thrown free of the impact.



So outfitted, you examine the control panel. Most of the instruments are non-functional, and power is failing rapidly, but it looks as though the comms are still intact. You're not sure if you'll have the juice to hail and establish more than one call before it goes dead...

Who you gonna call?

Deadmeat5150
Nov 21, 2005

OLD MAN YELLS AT CLAN
That hat is magnificent and we shall don it and keep it forever.

Call Kam

Hexenritter
May 20, 2001


Don our newly-acquired piece of millinery, doff it to a jaunty angle, then call Kamula.

Outrail
Jan 4, 2009

www.sapphicrobotica.com
:roboluv: :love: :roboluv:

Hexenritter posted:

Don our newly-acquired piece of millinery, doff it to a jaunty angle, then call Kamula.

Yep. Then make friends with the local wildlife by giving them a snack/the ex-host.

Wentley
Feb 7, 2012
Only if the hat looks spiff on us do we keep it! We're classy.

I guess feed the dead dude to the rat things. That seems neighborly.

JT Jag
Aug 30, 2009

#1 Jaguars Sunk Cost Fallacy-Haver
We might have to poke a few holes in the hat for our eyes.

Deadmeat5150
Nov 21, 2005

OLD MAN YELLS AT CLAN

JT Jag posted:

We might have to poke a few holes in the hat for our eyes.

Sacrifices must be made in the name of fashion!

Grognan
Jan 23, 2007

by Fluffdaddy
Call Kam, we need muscle (Also we know that calling our main protagonist is not going to work probably.)

dont be mean to me
May 2, 2007

I'm interplanetary, bitch
Let's go to Mars


Does she know that Regal borged herself yet?

Wentley posted:

Only if the hat looks spiff on us do we keep it! We're classy.

If not, we save it for someone it would look good on. Hey, we're calling K anyway.

NastyToes
Oct 9, 2012

Call K because I don't think we've seen a one on one conversation between these two yet.

Blasphemaster
Jul 10, 2008

Does Tone have a strictly sub-based business model? This would be good info to haveright now.

Bee Bonk
Feb 19, 2011

Blasphemaster posted:

Does Tone have a strictly sub-based business model? This would be good info to haveright now.

You don't actually know for certain, but it wouldn't surprise you if Tone had his digits in a few other transport-based pies, especially after the recent influx of capital. And you're not space-racist or anything, but as a Vordubiri, he probably has a couple of dozen relatives he could call upon to pick you up in an unlicensed hovercab on the DL. You know how they are Based on rigorous demographic research.

Blasphemaster
Jul 10, 2008

Ok here's the plan: Tone, give us a ride you magnificent bastard! Want to piss on this hat with us? We're totally desecrating it before setting it on fire because keeping it is a bad bad bad idea.

Tran
Feb 17, 2011

It's a pleasure to meet all of you. Especially in such a fine settin' as this. Just need us some music an' a brawl an' we'll be set.
Call up Kamula

No way he was taken out by a couple croc mooks.

The Lone Badger
Sep 24, 2007

1) Find a shiny piece of scap to help us adjust the hat to a jaunty angle.
2) Get away from the crash site and find concealment, in case the pilot's friends come looking
3) Call somebody

Outrail
Jan 4, 2009

www.sapphicrobotica.com
:roboluv: :love: :roboluv:
Or wait for their backup to arrive and crawl into their trunk while they aren't looking...

dont be mean to me
May 2, 2007

I'm interplanetary, bitch
Let's go to Mars


Outrail posted:

Or wait for their backup to arrive and crawl into their trunk while they aren't looking...

Which would totally make this all a worthwhile expenditure of effort.

Outrail
Jan 4, 2009

www.sapphicrobotica.com
:roboluv: :love: :roboluv:

Sir Unimaginative posted:

Which would totally make this all a worthwhile expenditure of effort.

This guy had 10 exoducats, a gun and a pimp cool hat. How much cool poo poo do you think the backup will bring us?

v: Username/post combo bonus :v:

Outrail fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Jul 16, 2016

dont be mean to me
May 2, 2007

I'm interplanetary, bitch
Let's go to Mars


Outrail posted:

This guy had 10 exoducats, a gun and a pimp cool hat. How much cool poo poo do you think the backup will bring us?

Uhh... poo poo, that's a good point.

The Lone Badger
Sep 24, 2007

Catching up, the baykit playing mousey with our opponent's neurons was adorable. We need to give it toys more often.

Bee Bonk
Feb 19, 2011

Outrail posted:

This guy had 10 exoducats, a gun and a pimp cool hat. How much cool poo poo do you think the backup will bring us?

An actual killteam instead of some sleeb with a taser and a van?

Candy, lots of candy.

Bee Bonk
Feb 19, 2011

This hat, though.
Call the Verdugar cruel, thuggish, greedy, lazy, self-interested, untrustworthy, gluttonous, poorly-groomed, or bad tippers, but they do have panache. If you keep this particular bit of haberdashery, and you fully intend to do so, some minor alterations will have to be made in the interest of not excessively squishing your eyestalks. For now, you will simply suffer for fashion.

You ponder the crackling, smoking control panel of the crashed skimmer for a moment. Sweeping away a scattering of glass and wreckage from the navigational display, you squint deeply into the cracked, discolored interface, struggling to read the fractured and rapidly fading characters.
“Prophets of the Mud,” you saw with a scowl, “of course I'm in the CHUZ.”

The Central Habitation Utility Zone. The Space Betwixt. The Big Hole Where All the Habs Dump Their Garbage. Take your pick. On the upside, it means you're at least in the right sector, instead of squishing around down in the Sub-levels.

As you ponder who to hail with your limited comm opportunity, a distorted warbling suddenly shrieks out of the damaged comm-unit; a notification of an incoming transmission as squeezed through the trachea of a dying vere. You wave your fingers uncertainly over the cracked interface as the abstracta swim and flicker, then simply hold your breath and mash what you sincerely hope is the right button.

The tone mercifully stops at your command, but your relieved exhalation turns into a flatulent blat as a holographic face flickers to life above the emitter. The image is grossly degraded and threatens to de-resolve at any moment, but you would recognize those fleshy barbels and that unctuous voice anywhere: The Honorable Poole Midas.



You cringe, waiting for an expression of smug recognition from Midas, but it doesn't come.
"Is that you, Ylez," the image crackles, "your signal quality is three shipments of hot Varsuvian drokk. Wait, no, there's no mistaking That Hat."

You reel with shock, and you begin to inflate your throat pouches to convey a convincing Verdugar growl to answer Midas, but that ultimately proves unnecessary.
"No," Midas interrupts your non-reply, "don't say anything; just listen. We've got an opportunity here, and I want to make sure you laggardly sleebs don't slot it up. None of the other acquisition teams have reported in: Just as I predicted, they bit off more than they could chew with those oversized meat-manglers they call mouths. It's like I said: The Raq is the soft target, and now we've got a chance to go for all the sphericals. Forget bringing Kinu back to the Matriarch; I'm sending you a dot for a safe house I've secured in F-3. We'll use the Raq to bag the rest, and hand them all in to Revered Yzbeyla at once. This is your ticket back into the good graces of the torus, gentlemen, so get it done. Oh, and tell that dour scrab you call a partner that Kinu needs all her parts attached; we might need a few fingers and toes later. Midas out."

An acidic tendril of dread uncoils in your left ventral gut sac as the signal cuts out, and you hurriedly punch in Kamula's comm-code, silently praying to the Ecstatic Smokes that the failing power holds out for one more transmission. Your crew all have many things to recommend them, but when it comes to armed exfiltration, K's still your man...machine...guy.

The hailing tone peals out with no response long enough for you to wonder if the transmitter actually is broken, but a moment before you give up, you hear the transmission resolve.



“Kinu,” Kamula growls. “Nice hat.”

“I think it could be a good look,” you reply conversationally, “but I'll need to shop for a few ensembles to incorporate it, oh and I'm hip-deep in trash, smoking wreckage, and dead Verdugar.

“Bit of that going around,” says Kamula. “Mild krumping case myself.”

The signal flickers and goes dark for a moment, and you slap the smoking console until Kamula's distorted figure resolves again.

"K, I do love a palaver, but I'm in a bit of a time-sensitive scenario, here. I'm in the CHUZ, at the smoking ruins of a skimmer next to the giant disposal tower...you can't miss it. I could really use a timely lift to a place that isn't quite so here, Big Guy, so if you could..."

Kamula says something garbled to indecipherability, fades again, then flickers out entirely.

"K, did you get that?" You stand, doffing your and stretching your cramped eyestalks with a sigh. "Wait...what was that about a partner?"



In the distance, you hear the whine of approaching repulsors, and you quickly scurry down the embankment of scrap, sliding as much as climbing, and dislodging up a small avalanche of garbage. At the bottom of the heap, a pool of oily discolored runoff stands, fed by your bit of amateur vehicular-assisted plumbing, and you plunge into it without a second thought. You watch from beneath the murk as four very rough-looking levcycles roar into view, closing with the fallen skimmer. They look cobbled together from scrap, ornamented with jagged spikes and junk fetishes, and their engines glow threateningly from poorly-shielded cowlings. You can't determine the nature of the pilots, concealed as they are in protective gear, patched and ragged cloaks flapping in their slipstreams.



The 'cycles do a brief circle of the site, before the lead vehicle dips alarmingly, diving to the ground and swerving to a stop in a spray of debris. The three other follow in short order. The pilots dismount and look around, unlimbering weapons seemingly as jury-rigged as their rides. The leader makes a series of hand signals, and the three other scavengers fan out around the smoking hulk.

The brackish water tickles your gill as you settle down in the contaminated mud, and you send up silent thanks to the celestial engineer that rendered your species largely immune to most toxins. You hope Kamula got your last transmission and is on his way, but you can't be sure, and you might be able to parley this giant pile of scrap into some help from these beings. Would you like to approach the scavengers, and how?

A. No, stay hidden. Kamula will be here, and even if these scavengers only want the wreck, they might take exception to my presence. There's also the hypothetical second Verdugar to worry about.
B. Come out, slowly and visibly unarmed. Don't begin negotiations by getting shot. Disavow any claim to the wreck.
C. As B, but try to barter the wreck for assistance.
D. Come out, but with a hat-assisted swagger and that giant spiky Verdugar pulser riding your hip. Barter the wreck, but start from a position of strength.
E. Some other angle: _____________________________.

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Outrail
Jan 4, 2009

www.sapphicrobotica.com
:roboluv: :love: :roboluv:
B and E "Hi guys! This scaley poo poo couldn't drive for poo poo, but he's got some mates turning up pronto. If you can lend me a ride I'll give you the down low on taking them down wqithout them putting you low down, if you get my drift."

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