Myth
Pacha Settler
Posts: 20
Character Gender: Female
Character Starting Age: 26
Height / Weight: 5'6" / 130 lbs
Expertise: Settlement Steward
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Post by Myth on Feb 20, 2023 23:37:50 GMT
OPEN TO ALL [convergence of both " calm before the storm" and " eye of the storm"] you can still join even if you haven't posted in those. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Inconvenient as it might seem, the anomaly wasn't headed toward either settlement, though it did dance around the possibility quite a bit as its swirling vortexes of mist or fog lit up from the inside with neon purple lights. They would blip into view, then seemingly blip out just as instantaneously. But if you looked hard enough you could see that they weren't gone, rather just imperceptible, given the way the land around where they had been continued to thrash and part from the force of it. Like a bunch of storm chasers, both corps set out as fast as they could to try and reach the anomaly. The closer they got, the harder it was to hear from the roar of the heavy winds, and the storm like weather. Thunder shook in the sky and lightning struck again and again inside the vortexes like the miniature tesla coils inside a plasma ball. It wasn't clear just yet who reached one of the vortexes first, but when they did, they'd come up short against a wall of energy, emitting electricity except in fire-like flames. This was the base of the vortex and the sheer size of it made capturing whatever this thing was seem hysterically unrealistic. But orders were orders, and they didn't come all this way just to look at it. As they stood there deciding their course of action, it seemed almost as if the cyclone sensed them, and shifted directions to move specifically in theirs.
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Rome Betzner
Aegis Settler
Posts: 14
Character Gender: Female
Character Starting Age: 30
Height / Weight: 5'6" | 135 lbs
Expertise: Advanced Mechanics
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Post by Rome Betzner on Feb 21, 2023 0:12:09 GMT
Rome had found a couple of seats for her and the other newbs riding in one of the all terrain vehicles leaving the compound. While she road in the backseat, she kept her eyes on her remote datapad and made sure the UAV she was flying stayed in formation with them.
easier said than done.
The weather quickly overcame the capabilities of her drone and she had to anchor it to the roof of their ride. So much for getting a birds eye view. Not even ten minutes into the assignment, and Rome was already grounded. "This sucks."
Taking her eyes off the device now, she finally picked her head up enough to see what they were approaching and all thoughts of flying the drone evaporated.
"Do you see that?!" one of the copilots in the drivers seat asked out loud, raising his voice enough to be heard. Rome nodded.
"How can we not?!" She said, but her voice didn't carry far enough.
Some of the cybernetically enhanced individuals in their caravan were engaging their noise canceling headgear. Rome had always been on the fence about installing some herself, but never could commit to using equipment that could otherwise feed into her business and her bank account. Thankfully, one of the more senior individuals along for the ride started passing out traditional head gear for the rest of them. They even had mics and channel sync with the mechanoids, making it possible to communicate.
The vehicle lurched to a halt and Rome accidentally stepped on Xahra's foot from the momentum.
"Sorry, Newtons law," she mumbled an apology. In the next second the doors were unlatching and swinging high. The bright purple light from the outside flooded in, nearly blindingly bright compared to the tinted visors they were looking through prior.
The roar of the monstrosity was deafened by her headset, but the blunt force of the wind beating against their cluster required a lot of leg work to push through.
"What the actual frak, IS that?" She asked into her headset.
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Dain
Aegis Settler
Posts: 7
Character Gender: Male
Character Starting Age: 21
Height / Weight: 5'11 / 83kg
Expertise: Engineering/Mechanics
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Post by Dain on Feb 22, 2023 22:33:11 GMT
The chance to see one of these anomalies first hand was not one that he was going to be passing up. Especially if this was something that the settlements and so on were going to have be dealing with, then that meant he was going to have to try and deal with it as well down the line.
So with that line of logic and reasoning, Dain managed to blag himself one of the spots on the inspection and capture teams for Aegis.
He nodded to the senior as they passed him a set of headphones, strapping it on to his head as he checked his gear for what seemed the millionth time. So far the strange energies of this world hadn't done much to his exo-legs, but this was allegedly going to be a massive concentrated form of it...
And they were NOT kidding! Dain blinked as he looked out through the tinted visors of the ATV at the substance before them. He could hear Rome swearing over the headsets, and before his brain could stop him, he replied.
"That looks like a massive wall o' wind and firey lightnin'!" he exclaimed, his voice equal parts excited and terrified at the sight before him. As well as the daunting prospect put before them.
"Hang on a tick, the 'ead buggers want us tae try and grab that?! Frakkers would have a better chance o' gettin' Nessie oot o' 'er Loch..." Dain mused, trying to figure out how exactly they were supposed to try and collect... well, lightning in a bottle. A whole lightning storm wall thing... in a teeny tiny bottle...
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Xahra Skye
Aegis Settler
Posts: 17
Character Gender: Female
Character Starting Age: 36
Height / Weight: 5'6 / 140lbs
Expertise: Procurement
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Post by Xahra Skye on Feb 24, 2023 3:00:43 GMT
Xahra pulled back on her natural reflexes as the brunette stepped on her foot and mumbled something about newton's law, whatever that meant. She was already on edge about being shoved in a tin can like she was some kind of grunt. Guess that was just life out here. No private limos or vip service, everyone had to pull their weight. There wouldn't be any calls for help or backup from Earth if they royally screwed up.
Slowly she got to her feet, straiting out her outfit and checking the familiar weight that pressed against her sides from her double holsters. In a fluid motion, she slipped out of the vehicle to join the others, her optics cycling through the various spectrums available to her. "Thermals and Infrared are off the chart. I wouldn't get close to that thing unless you want to both be vaporized."
She turned and walked to the back of the vehicle, where the larger gear had been stowed and started unstrapping a large cube with various blinking lights. It looked like it had been etched from a single block of steel by some alien machine, with the exception of two flaps on the top. "We need to set these in the path of the storm and then stay the hell out of the way, or at least that's what the techs who made these said. Doubt they've ever been in the field though."
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Dr. Robert Puck
Pacha Settler
Posts: 9
Character Starting Age: 37
Height / Weight: 5β11β 190lbs
Expertise: Biochemist
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Post by Dr. Robert Puck on Feb 24, 2023 3:22:53 GMT
Unbeknown to the Aegis convoy; the Pacha dispatch team had just arrived on the opposite side of the anomaly, hidden from line of sight by the ferocious vortex of purple flaming energy. Some of the folks shoved into the vehicle with Robbie did not look like they wanted to get out of the car. As for himself, despite the unavoidable sense of puniness this thing gave any sane person; he was FASCINATED. What could it be? He nudged Varis Allaria and leaned over so he could show her the scans on his portable Biocompound arbiter, something he requested from the lab shortly after completing orientation. The readings were incomprehensible, drawing conclusions briefly before fluxing and submitting different results, before fluxing again. One thing was consistent from the cursory glances at what was flashing by. This was not reading as an atmospheric phenomenon, but, if his machine was relaying with even a sinew of accuracy (and not just plain flabbergast and broken) then this was an organic organism. "DID YOU SEE THAT?" He tried to shout over the whirling sounds engulfing them, forgetting for a moment that he was wearing noise cancelling headphones AND a mic. In his defense, not all the noise was being canceled.
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Myth
Pacha Settler
Posts: 20
Character Gender: Female
Character Starting Age: 26
Height / Weight: 5'6" / 130 lbs
Expertise: Settlement Steward
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Post by Myth on Feb 24, 2023 3:43:05 GMT
The approaching vortex suddenly stopped moving toward the Aegis convoy as though an anchor had been dropped somewhere inside. Both sides (Pacha and Aegis) suddenly felt a strong pulling sensation on their bodies, as if magnetized and drawn toward the luminescent burning wall. The vehicles, however, seemed unaffected. In fact... The more mech-enhanced an individual was, such as Dain and Matthias Jayne , the lesser the pull seemed to be. Getting closer to the anomaly, whether willingly or not, the static electricity in the air started to do a number on peoples hair and clothing. The brushing of pant leg against pant leg, or sleeved arm against torso, would send jolts of static shock through them. "Dig in! Dig in!" Someone was shouting over the comms, and even their voice sounded distorted. The temperature rose drastically the closer you came to it, and funnily enough, the less the whirl of the wind sounded and the more it sounded like echos of nature sounds. Animals bleeting, birds calling, things... slithering and skittering.... It was like there was an entire ecosystem loudly bouncing back off the exterior walls of the vortex. "Fall back! Fall back!" Someone else on the mic, though it was hard to make out words passed all the grunting and panting and panicking from the rest of them.
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Rome Betzner
Aegis Settler
Posts: 14
Character Gender: Female
Character Starting Age: 30
Height / Weight: 5'6" | 135 lbs
Expertise: Advanced Mechanics
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Post by Rome Betzner on Feb 24, 2023 18:07:42 GMT
"Right, ok! Lets... do that then," Rome responded to Xahra's instructions, tapping Dain on the shoulder to try and redirect his attention to the box in back. It looked too heavy for the two of them to lift. She could be mistaken but she bet it'd take a lot more people, or perhaps some kind of dolly with wheels. She glanced around.
"Ugh!" she huffed as the air was squeezed from her lungs unexpectedly and she felt herself being snapped backwards like there was a bungee cord tied around her mid drift. What was that? Her hair began to frizz and raise and she felt goose flesh on the back of her neck. I do not like that, she thought.
The comms on their headset was suddenly too loud as the number of people mic'd up started talking all at once. She could make out a few voices and words but most of it was unhelpful. Except perhaps "Dig in" and "Fall back". Words like "I don't want to die," and "It's alive!" seemed less so.
She focused on the first two, and did her best to dig in her heels and lower her body to the ground for balance. It wasn't much help though, she could still feel the way the invisible line was pulling her along side the vehicle and toward the cyclone. Desperately, Rome grabbed for the doors, but they were so sleek and modern, there were no door handles to latch onto. Maybe she could grab the side door mirror? She tried to prepare herself to catch it when her body was inevitably pulled passed.
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Dain
Aegis Settler
Posts: 7
Character Gender: Male
Character Starting Age: 21
Height / Weight: 5'11 / 83kg
Expertise: Engineering/Mechanics
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Post by Dain on Feb 24, 2023 20:07:21 GMT
The tap on his shoulder snapped him back to the reality of the situation, and his brain caught up with what Xahra had said earlier. He made his way over to the box like device, raising an eyebrow at the design of it all. "...It's a ruttin' oversized battery." he surmised, looking back at the massive storm front thing, then back to the battery device in the truck. "We're gonna be needin' a bigger battery." the Scotsman gave a light chuckle at what was quite possibly a very old and very lost reference at this point.
Dain squatted down a little as he fiddled and adjusted some knobs and dials on his exo-legs, before reaching into the back of the truck to start trying to move the device. "Lift with yer knees as me mum would say." he mused, gritting his teeth all the same at the sheer bloody weight of the whole thing. Even with the reinforcement and load bearing from the exo-leg frame, this damned thing was a helluva lot heavier than it looked!
Then came the shouting over the microphones, and the screams? "What the frakkin'... OI! ROME!" Dain called out as he looked on at her and a few others who were apparently getting dragged in towards this anomaly of a storm! He quickly started to look around for anything and everything that was around them, anything that was readily within reach, his mind awhir with calculating speed variables for wind and gravity. Scotland and the rest of the UK had its fair share of high winds over the years after all, admittedly nothing like this though.
Dain lowered the device before firmly planting his legs into the ground in a squatted position, and then did something that was either quite stupid or quite brilliant, or quite possibly just insane enough to be both. He unplugged his legs, Gods above that still stung like a mother frakker, leaving him stranded there like a babe in a high chair before taking the neural cord and throwing it towards Rome like a makeshift rope! "GRAB ON!"
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Rome Betzner
Aegis Settler
Posts: 14
Character Gender: Female
Character Starting Age: 30
Height / Weight: 5'6" | 135 lbs
Expertise: Advanced Mechanics
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Post by Rome Betzner on Apr 3, 2023 16:18:29 GMT
She didn't know how exactly Xahra was hanging on, but she had little time to ask as she was sliding past the vehicle with fading hope of anything extruding to grab when a long cable flew in her face. She raised her hands to protect her face as her eyes squeezed shut and her legs swept out from under her. Now she screamed, a yelp bellowing from her lower diaphragm to her chest voice like a seasick frog croaking. The effect of defying gravity was her hands reflexively grabbing onto the very literal lifeline in her face. she opened her eyes as her elbows popped from her fully extended arms and her feet dangled behind her pointing directly at the swirling glowing vortex.
"OH MY GAWD" She whispered and then shifted her eyes up to where her life line was tethered. She felt immediately sick. Dan had disconnected his exosuit legs and was using himself as the anchor. She felt the onset of her moral dilemma as she debated what to do. Should she let go so he can put himself back together, or should she hold on? He had to be in pain. She knew from operating on plenty of retrofitted cybernetics how much neurological damage and pain the users experienced latching and unlatching. and if he was unlatched how was he going to survive....?
How was she going to for that matter. Her wide eyes went from starring at Dan to starring back at her feet again and the purple flames dancing just out of reach. "Someone please activate that damn battery, or whatever the hell it is, do something!" she shouted into her mic and hoped she was still connected to someone who could actually do it.
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