ctrlsaltdel

Blood Under Moonlight

@ctrlsaltdelI forgot to ask- what's the push for? I have a rating of 3 but I don't remember what that means in this context

@RickyG85

Check the orig post for more details, but Pushes are a resource you can expend to mitigate negative draws.

(May dial back on how many you get by default in the future, three is actually a lot it seems)

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

SPC "Mikey" Rangel

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She barely had time to drop the grenade launcher before Nil's first pair of shots went off, bathing the deck of the carrier in fire. "Jesus CHRIST!. The general conflagration she'd hoped to avoid seemed to have started right away; through the smoke she couldn't tell what had set it going, but that really wasn't all that relevant at the moment.

A voice came from over her shoulder, and Mikey took a startled pair of steps forward until she recognized it as Callie's.

"Fuck!" she hissed, with the anger that comes from being caught by surprise. "Threat from our own arms?! What does tha-"

Before she could finish her sentence, a third staff came flying out of the smoke. It smashed into the side of the bridge, leaving an ugly scar on the steel wall. The strike didn't come anywhere close to hitting Mikey, but she was already off balance, and the impact was enough to make her lose her footing and tumble off the side of the carrier's command tower.

Her world became a whirl of color and noise--for a terrifying second she couldn't make any sense of it, but acting on instinct she extended her hands and Angel Duster came to her call. Looking down the weapon's simple iron sights steadied her (in a way she wouldn't care to think about later), and crack she found herself rolling to her feet on the carrier's deck, thrown clear of the fire and the smoke.

Mikey ducked behind a nearby crate, taking a moment to get her bearings. Her hands began to shake just a little, as did her breath. Good news, didn't fall to my death. Bad news-- She peeked over the crate and saw the wall of smoke--white and black mingling together--between her and the rest of the task force. --no backup.

She had choices to make, and presumably very little time to make them. Going through the smoke was a no-go--the chances of shooting herself out of the frying pan and into the quite literal fire were too high. From her current position she couldn't get a clean shot back up to the vantage point she'd intended to use, and even if she broke cover to try it, damage control crews were swarming all over it, so her chances of getting spotted were high.

Then, like water poured on the ash of her hope, she saw the shapes of Wu Shufen and his squad emerge from the smoke. They mostly had their backs to her--still focused on the potential threat from the actually dangerous more visible members of the task force--but they were falling back with discipline, and they would definitely spot her in no more than a few moments.

Mikey gripped the wood of her Arm so hard her knuckles went white, turned to move further down the deck, and found herself looking into the eyes of a PLA soldier no more than a few yards away.

The soldier didn't have his sidearm drawn, but he wasted no time reaching for it. Mikey didn't give him the chance--Angel Duster fired three times, as fast as she could pull the trigger, and a spray of blood came from the soldier's unarmored shoulder. Then she spun around, aiming the carbine over the crate she had just been hiding behind, and found one of the ambushing soldiers, now turning to see where the gunfire was coming from.

Angel Duster might be able to bend space like a pool toy, but it fired what were still just .30 carbine rounds. There was no real chance of a small round like that piercing anyone's body armor at distance. The 12 gauge slug that came from the shortened shotgun Mikey had on her sling was a different story--especially fired directly into center mass, from where she had fallen at his feet.

Mikey yanked her finger off the trigger as she rolled to one side, brought up her Noble Arm, and shot herself past another one of the soldiers. He flinched at the gunfire, giving her the opportunity to plug him in the back, and then she shot herself again across the deck, looking to hide behind a still-parked jet.

What the fuuuuuuck am I doing?!?

Angel Duster's Clip

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Blood Under Moonlight

@Birdboy thank you ^^

@RickyG85, forgot to say--you can go ahead and describe how you destroy the fuel dump, unless you'd rather I do it.

Blood Under Moonlight

Post is up, sorry for the wait! @Birdboy@RickyG85@Digmata

Blood Under Moonlight

Rally drove her thrust home at the Sparos's other limb, and with a screech of metal it found itself completely disarmed. The right arm fell not far from the left; the Sparos stumbled forward drunkenly before regaining its footing and turning to face the new threat. The pilot seemed to be having more of a run of bad luck than anything, because they reacted quickly enough. The moment the machine trained its sensors on the Valkyrie, it began backpedaling using its ground-effect thrusters. Its head-mounted antipersonnel turrets began firing as well, but the bullets pinged harmlessly off of Valkyrie's steel plates. They were fired more out of anger than strategy, since the chances of them doing any damage were as good as none.

Despite their frustration, the enemy pilot clearly did not intend to stick around. Even moving backwards, they headed away from Rally--and towards the single road out of the base--at a faster clip than Valkyrie (or Daedalus, for that matter) could manage. She'd managed to end the immediate threat to Albert--but if that Sparos got within comms range of its squadmates on patrol...

Marcus's luck held this time, and the explosive round impacted the tank in the middle of its turret. The tank commander's brief moment of elation--he hadn't had a chancel to see how little damage he had, in fact, inflicted on Daedalus--was cut short in a blinding flash. The penetrator tip of the Myrmidon-sized round pierced the thinner top armor before going up, and the detonation took with it the remainder of the tank's magazine--and the munitions dump it had been driving past at the time. The concussive blast blew down a nearby storage shed; what it did to any enemy soldiers who happened to be nearby hardly bore thinking on. Where there had been tons of Athenian armed forces supplies, now there was only a smoking, blackened patch of earth, strewn with wreckage.

The force of the blast washed past Albert, blowing an unmanned rocket artillery unit across his path like a 50-ton tumbleweed. Its launch unit had been damaged, but past the bent and jagged metal, he could see high-explosive rockets still held safely in their cradles.

---

Each of your cockpits lights up with a sensor warning--the fix is poor, but there seems to be another source of Chroma effect in the area, quickly gaining strength.

Pushes

Rally: 4 (+1 for choosing Death when a positive card was available)
Marcus: 3
Albert: 3

Daggerheart: The Witherwild

Hasdrubal Hjort

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Hasdrubal waited patiently as the human at the counter slid each coin one-by-one into a waiting hand. That wasn't necessarily the common practice here in Alula, but much like Hasdrubal himself, the innkeeper seemed to be a recent arrival in the village--presumably one of the wave of Havenite immigrants who had seen opportunity in the army's southern expansion. Dru hadn't asked, but the signs were fairly obvious; the building sat lower to the ground than any of the other available lodgings, and the interior decoration was full of metalwork and tapestries woven on the workshop-sized looms of the cities, rather than the hand-crafted, naturalistic style typical of villages in Faenwick.

Frankly, Hasdrubal found the innkeeper himself somewhat offputting, but he was willing to put up with that in order to minimize how much he dealt with the god-botherers running the other establishments. Watching the man deliberately count his money was a damn sight less rage-inducing than being yelled at to wash his feet, or scatter ground nut-shells across the threshold, or whatever ritual the other innkeepers might think the local faint deity demanded of their guests.

And besides, he was already finished. The human nodded as he dropped the coins into a purse below the counter, then turned his eyes up to meet the soldier's.

"Yes, that's plenty. The room is yours until the next day-week. Meals are served in the common room here, at..." The inkeeper's voice trailed off as he looked up at his guest's face.

Hasdrubal wasn't fazed; it happened often enough. (Personally, he thought it was the eyes; giants never really had any issue with it, but two-eyed people never seemed to know which of his two good eyes to look at.) He simply nodded back and reached over to grab the room key.

"My thanks,", he rumbled. The innkeeper just nodded instead of resuming his thought, and Hasdrubal turned and walked back out the front door.

He stopped at the railing in front of the building, planted his hands, and scowled. The primary reason was that from his lofty perch, he could see the pair of riding animals that he and his young charge had rode in on. Their riding packs were still slung on the creatures--he hadn't really thought theft was a concern anyway--but they were also approximately twenty feet down. The big man snorted. Another reason he had chosen this inn--the owner had sprung for stairs, rather than just a ladder--or, corpse of the serpent, bare braided vines.

His eyes then tracked up, sweeping over the rest of the building suspended among the trees. The young mage he'd been tasked to guard was somewhere out there; he couldn't see her, but he at least had a vague idea of where she had run off to. The rational part of his mind told him that there was only so much trouble she could find so long as she stayed in the village, but he couldn't help but remember how she had almost gotten herself eaten by the flora on their way in, and besides--the whole sense of the place set his teeth a little on edge. The last time he had been in a place like this had been as part of a squad of soldiers, and the visit had been significantly less friendly.

Well. Hopefully there would be no cause for anything like that.

The Wild Beyond Witchlight

@ctrlsaltdel Er...The helmet is in the room Sshizna's in. The door leading into that room is still locked.

Did you mean the watering can or the clay pots?

@Guardian Angel Haruki

Whoops, my bad--edited.

The Wild Beyond Witchlight

Rearden Keane

Rearden frowned at the back of Aurora's head. "Whoever she is"--she spoke in a low voice, hopefully audible only to the room--"it sounds like she's stuck here as much as we are. Moreso, really." She poked at the chest's big iron padlock with the butt of her staff, then shrugged. "I'd say that's pretty good reason to give her a chance." Despite her words, she didn't move to interfere; instead, she turned to examine the clay pots.

Daggerheart: The Witherwild

<Snipped quote by ctrlsaltdel>

Welcome back! ^_^

2) Staying at a ground based inn sounds good to me!

I was definitely thinking about 1, while you were away. Considering that Pepper is looking for another cure for Serpent's Sickness, I was thinking that Pepper would have gone to Alula in order to find a Sage who lives there who knows the most about Serpent's Sickness, and talk to them. She's hoping to learn as much as possible from them as a starting point for her quest on creating a cure for the Sickness.

@Guardian Angel Haruki

Ok, sounds good! Did you want to do a collab post for this? If not, I think it might work better for the characters to be at separate locations.

Daggerheart: The Witherwild

@Guardian Angel Haruki, back and caught up. I think the main things for us to get on the same page on would be 1) what we're doing in Alula and 2) where we're staying for the night. (1) seems like Pepper's territory--for (2), we can say that Hasdrubal got them a room at a (ground-level, Havenite-run) inn in town?