Gentlemanvaultboy

Multiverse At War - (MAW) (High Casual RP: Always Welcomed)

Richard braced in anticipation of a big boom, then nearly shrank in disappointment when there wasn't one.

It hadn't been a bomb.

Was was even the point then?

He fell back down through the sky. As he neared the ground he boosted to break his fall again, then found himself caught between on of the Zaku's big old hands. He looked up at it, for all the world looking like a childrens toy being held under the arms by the bigger robot. Then he was gently set on the ground.

"Better on your ankles sir." Ovid said helpfully. Richard could hear the dopey looking smile on his face, but he had to admit the boy had a point. It wouldn't do him any good to damage his machine anymore in a fall.

Still, it bugged him that there hadn't been a big explosion. The sight of a some kind of big truck tear-assing through the battlefield made up for it a little, but not by much. Maybe he hadn't hit it in the right spot? Where he came from when you shot something explosive it exploded but that wasn't true in other, apparently lamer, worlds. Maybe if he hit it with an explosive?

"She's pissed." Grand's monotone cut through Richards thought like a red hot knife, as if he'd known what the man was thinking. He looked up to see the Grand's Zaku staring looking off in the direction of the shot. Richard couldn't see anything, but he knew better than to doubt the man. "Sixth sense acting up?" He asked. Grand didn't answer. "She coming this way?"

Grand took a couple of seconds. "She's coming toward her men."

"You're talking about their commander, huh? Kill her with mind bullets!"

"It doesn't work that way."

"You don't practice enough."

"Should we move in to engage, sir?" Ovid interrupted.

Then it was Richards turn to think. "Naaaaah." he concluded. "If she's pissed that means whatever it was I shot, it's broken. Let her stew in the failure. Besides, I can't have two dates in one day. It'd be a bad sitcom." What he didn't saw was that he wasn't in the shape to be confronting anyone head on right now. He could still carry a gun, but felt naked with only two. "Come on you lummoxes. We'll circle around and try and link back up with your squad. Carry my weapons."

"Sir yes sir." Ovid said, running off to scoop Richards discarded weapons out of the sand. Richard made his way over and wrenched the the railgun out personally, and the three set off around the side of the battle, the Zakus leading the way.

Multiverse At War - (MAW) (High Casual RP: Always Welcomed)

I'm sure they would if they were able to find the time. A visual would at least help place where everyone is, at least that's how I think. Oda does it when One Piece starts to get too chaotic and it helps me.

I'm not Oda, all I have is MS Paint.

Sometimes you don't realize how ugly something is until you're about to show it to other people, but there's my crude example of a crude map. The blue boxes are the ships, the big thing is the base, and the lightning bolt is to indicate Mustang is engaging the knight. I'm sure there are better programs for something like this but you get the general idea.

Functionally I guess it's no different than a summery of what's happening.

Multiverse At War - (MAW) (High Casual RP: Always Welcomed)

I feel like some of the problems people are having following what's going on would be mitigated by a crude map. You could take crops of everyone profile pictures and move them around so you wouldn't have to redraw the map every time and put little symbols between them when they're fighting to show they are fighting. Maybe put colored borders around them to show affiliation?

I spend half an hour figuring out how to do that and making a crude map as an example, only to realize that I can't upload pictures to the website from my computer. At least I don't think I can.

Multiverse At War - (MAW) (High Casual RP: Always Welcomed)

It was the splendid view that only a proper battlefield could provide. Smoke, bodies, explosions and flashes like happy summer fireworks. A brilliant blue blast ripped through the air from the desert and just evaporated one of their control towers. That had been pretty dope, but he didn't have time to get distracted. He'd start falling any second now, so he had to take a quick scan of the fighting. He followed the path of the blast with his rifle to see some guy clad in blue at the end of it. He considered taking a shot but weighed his chances of surviving a fight with someone that could do that and found himself wanting. One close brush with death today was enough. So he swiveled around to search for easier prey.

He found a few potential targets before something in particular caught his eye. Some sort of valiant human drama was occurring over by the resistance dropships, and who had decided to crash that party but his eager new friend. He was about to turn away from whatever carnage was about to ensue when the woman was struck by a hail of laser fire and set off toward it. Intrigued, Richard followed her path to a bunch of soldiers that he hadn't seen before. Camouflaged commandos, arranged in a defensive formation around...

Oh my. What was that? He zoomed in and focused on it to confirm that he wasn't just seeing things.

He fell just as the group was reforming to meet Darquesse's charge. He boosted a few times to try and kill his momentum, but the shock of his impact with the ground rattled the inside of the cockpit. "Again, again!" He said, and his men seemed to sense the urgency in his voice and quickly got back into position. Once more Richard was cast into the air, this time with a target in mind.

He spotted it in the thick of them. There were certain tell tale signs of camouflage, small little inconsistencies with the surrounding environment that stuck out to someone who know what to look for. Richard had fought in Arizona. He knew what to look for.

There were lots of reasons to sneak on the battlefield. Some important. Some not so important. A bunch of soldiers sneaking with something? Something that requires more than one set of hands to carry from the look of its size? That was super important sneaking, and it was super important that your cargo remain hidden. Otherwise you would put it in some kind of transport. So the question was, what was it? A jamming device to be activated at a critical moment? Some sort of teleport beacon to beam a million extra troops right to the battlefield? A bomb sufficient to take out the whole fortress once they got it inside? Oh, Richard so hoped it was a bomb.

He found them again on his way up. Two people were standing their ground against Darquesse while the rest seemed to be beating an organized retreat. He searched until he had the cargo in his rifle sight again. For a moment he wondered whether or not he should take the shot now just in case it was a weapon and Darquesse was caught in the blast. After all, she was responsible for leading him to it. He decided to com her.

"Thanks." spoke the little bead on her jacket.

In this way Richard soothed his conscience at the zenith of his ascent. There, in the moment of stillness between ceasing to rise and beginning to fall, Richard held his breath, focused his aim, and took his shot.

@Nightknight
@thewizardguy

Multiverse At War - (MAW) (High Casual RP: Always Welcomed)

Richard smiled as he watched her go. "Eager beaver. Woman after my own heart. Now, let get back to the part-"

"Sir Richard!!!" His coms suddenly blared, and exasperated young voice he recognized calling out to him. Richard Considered answering, but then decided on a more fun course of action. He opened the cockpit back up and lay there in silence. "Sir Richard, please respond!" the voice continued, desperation creeping in despite all attempts to hold it back. He could hear the rhythmic thumps of giant feet pounding on the sand. "If you can't respond that flip your communicator off...twice..."

He heard the footfalls, three sets of them, slow down. Very close now. They'd seen his machine. "Oh no." said the voice on the radio. "What happened here? Do you think he's...ya'know, de-"

"SURPRISE BOYS!" Richard shouted, popping out of the cockpit like a prairie dog. To his deep satisfaction he heard a strangled scream come over the coms, followed by an world weary sigh.

The two machine the stood in front of him were big, so much so that Richards own would have to be stacked three high just to see eye to eye with them. They were green, their faces like gas masks behind which a single pink "eye" swiveled back and forth. On their hips they wore axes, and in their hands were heavy machine guns of a caliber Richard only wished he could handle. As he understood it, this was a pair of bonafide museum pieces from their world and time.

Hider

---

Generally speaking there are many different types of people that make up the strength of an army. Near the top you have you special forces, elite units capable of performing tasks impossible for the rest of your army. There are your grunts, the guy's you throw into the meat grinder to take and hold areas. Supply specialists, intelligence, analysts, engineers, all have their place. But in this war that has caused so much upheaval and involved so many different places and peoples there is an uncommon abundance of a rather rare type. Quite possibly the most dangerous type of person you can have in your army: the enthusiastic amateur.

Thrill killers. Vigilantes. Avengers. Millitiamen. Criminals. Wandering warriors.

War reenactors.

One Year War reenactors.

It had not been long after Richard had first made Executive, far before he was unceremoniously demoted for resource guzzling projects such as ordering the construction of "some kind of star kraken" or trying to drown a rebellious world in hornets, that he had been assigned one such group of amateurs. They had been found on a routine scout patrol, drifting in space. 12 Zaku-II's. Their story was as confused as they were. They claimed to have been in the middle of a reenactment when a strange multicolored light had flooded over the "battlefield." They saw many of their fellows dissolved into sand by the light. They'd done what men can only do when faced with something of that magnitude: huddled together and prayed for a miracle. Someone must have been listening, because when they woke up a ship they'd never seen before was ordering them to drop their prop weapons.

The lot of them were forcefully conscripted and shuffled around from posting to posting. They were super eager to have a shot at real warfare, the only problem was they weren't every good at it. When put in robots that were actually worth a damn they were clumsy. They shot their own people, ran far past objectives, destroyed vital installations. It eventually became a bit of a sick joke among the higher ups. Executives would have them transferred under Executives that they hated, who would transfer the boys again to whom ever caught their ire. That is, until they landed in Richards lap.

The boys took an almost immediate shine to Richard. They had been raised by old school Zeon loyalists. They had space flowing in their veins. If they'd driven trucks the stickers on their bumpers would have proudly declared that "The Sides shall rise again." They'd grown up on stories of the Red Comet, of their grandfathers fighting a glorious war for freedom against Johnny Federation, and of the man that lead Zeon in its time of greatest need; Gihren Zabi.

Richard reminded them very much of what they'd heard of old Gihren, and this sort of leader caused them to coalesce and follow orders properly. This was helped by the fact that Richard put them back in the robots they'd trained in, paying out of pocket to have them upgraded to proper fighting condition. Perhaps he saw a dozen young men in basically the same situation he was, men with unfortunately weak machines that were all they knew, and it warmed the cockles of his black heart.

On the other hand, maybe he wanted to keep them alive because he liked saying their names. One can never know. Either way they became fast friends, trusted colleagues, and in a month a troop of poorly trained war reenactors were transformed into a group of hardened warriors under Richards careful supervision and guidance.

A month after that he contacted another executive to see if she would be willing to trade some antimatter for "like a trillion dead hornets", prompting the audit that got him sacked.

---

"Where's your date?" The screamer said. "Did you beat her?"

"Lets just say we made plans for next week, Ovid Jheek." Richard said, relishing the chance to speak that name aloud. He loved every name he'd ever heard from that universe. He laid back down, closed up the cockpit, and righted himself. "Where's everybody else?"

"We were the only ones that could break away." Ovid replied. "It's pretty heavy over there, Sir Richard."

"I sent that distress call across all channels, not just you jokers." Richard said.

"Well, you see, I mean yeah everyone heard it but, uh..." Ovid started uncomfortably, before the other one interrupted him.

"You're an asshole." He said without inflection, as though stating fact. "So everyone but our squad was hoping you'd die. Morale shot up when you called for help."

For a few seconds there was nothing to be heard but the distant explosions. Then, Richard started laughing. "MWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. How sweet! How rich!" The man, Grand Handsom, would certainly be the one to know. Richard was pretty sure that he had psychic powers or something. He kept laughing as he made his way over to where Darquesse had thrown his sniper rifle. He checked the scope as he turned back to the pair. "I need to do a survey, boy. Which one of you strapping young lads wants to give me a boost?"

A moment later he was standing between the Zaku's on their interlocked arms. With a count of "one...two...three!" the UC mechs catapulted Richards high into the air. He boosted upward to add a little more airtime, then bough the rifle up to to see which areas needed trouble stirring up.

Multiverse At War - (MAW) (High Casual RP: Always Welcomed)

@Nightknight

Yeah, but what kind of camouflage?

Well, let me just come out and ask: is it some advanced future thing, or is it something a guy from the present day/near future who's got experience fighting in the desert would reasonably be able to pick out as camouflage if he's scanning the area from a high vantage point looking for things?

Multiverse At War - (MAW) (High Casual RP: Always Welcomed)

Hey @Nightknight, what's that relay you're toting look like? How's it camouflaged and how much armor does it have?

Multiverse At War - (MAW) (High Casual RP: Always Welcomed)

@Gentlemanvaultboy

do you think I fucked up bad by picking the fight with the two of them?

@Saint Girralo

That really depends on how you think the Lust fight would of gone if homunculi didn't run out of power after, like, the twelfth time you blew them up.

But you also now have a sniper team in your corner, and that knight maybe might swing over to your side for a bit depending on how he feels about this interruption.

Multiverse At War - (MAW) (High Casual RP: Always Welcomed)

@Archmage MC@Savato@thewizardguy

Your mistake was not recognizing that Ichigo throwing Rukia like a football was the peak of Bleach and stopping there.

Multiverse At War - (MAW) (High Casual RP: Always Welcomed)

@Saint Girralo

I'm not nearly that heartless.

If things get too hairy for Roy's boys, which it sort of looks like it's about to there, they could just port out back to base. I didn't realize that until it was pointed out to me.