POOHEAD189

There's Always a Price: Sci Fi Bounty Hunters

"Then I'll fit right in," Dirk replied with a look that, even through his helmet, anyone could tell meant 'cut the bullshit.' It was also hard to ascertain whether he was insulting her, everyone present, or bounty hunters in general. He slowly looked away, gauging their surroundings to make sure no one was coming from their six. "I've done a few hard ops in my time. One of those men was a thug of someone associated with a target I once had. A target I killed cleanly, but not too quietly. I think it's best if we get off this rock after getting an idea of some more employment."

Jocasta gave him her own unspoken look, which led him to realize she wasn't one for patience or long silences. "Right." He told her, getting out of his seat. He grabbed the blanket covering the Riot Carbines and kept them close in his arms. Good arms were hard to come by. "Follow me."

The strobelights and the music was muffled when they stepped into one of the side doors, the jeers from the racaous crowd washed away to dull hums and thumping as they walked through a level II acess hallway lit from phosphorus lighting on the ceiling. A security officer passed them hurriedly, likely called in by some rich asteroid tycoon needing assistance with scratching his ass. Speaking of asses, he recognized the next shapely thing to walk down the hallway.

It was an Onorin. A humanoid xenos, standing slightly shorter than Dirk at her full height. Onorin were four armed, powerful but lithely built. The females sported indigo skin, whilst the males were crimson as blood. Her black hair tied into a ponytail, she walked past the two of them in military trousers and a plate of body armor, with twin pistols at her hips and a slug thrower lazily held with her hands located just above her waist. With one of her free hands, she gave a flirtatious wave at Dirk and winked one of her red-iris eyes. "Hey Dirk."

"Rixa," he said, not slowly as they passed her. Out of the corridor, they found themselves in a large, long-gallery type room, with scoundrels, loiterers, and some people who looked like they had climbed in through the air vents. A few toughs stood around, holding tactical shotguns and keeping a watchful eye. Dirk turned to Jocasta. "Stay here. I'd bring you with me, but my contact likes solo meetings. I'll get us some work off world in ten minutes."

With that he turned and left her at the foot of what looked to be a strange rogue's gallery of ne'er-do-wells, mercenaries, and would-be thieves.

Fire Emblem: The Slumbering Goddess

---

Kayden was more than a bit taken aback by the reactions of his classmates when it came to crests. He knew the things could potentially have adverse effects or dangerous abilities out of someone's control, but this seemed to be more common than he had anticipated. He couldn't even begin to guess what Clarissa's was, but judging by the theatrics it could hypnotize the lot of them. Still, it saddened him to see her distraught, even if they hadn't spoken more than three words to one another. It was the same with Derec, someone he still couldn't quite gauge but he seemed cool.

It irritated Kayden. His own group seemed either apathetic or happy to learn about their potential powers, with the possibly exception of Rudolph, but he was just barely a step above Kellen in the 'self esteem' category. However, the rest of the students seemed less sure of themselves and a few had even exploded, which also left their teammates bewildered. Auberon and Lienna were at their old banter again, and he smiled despite himself. They reminded him of the members he knew at court, but that only added to his dilemma. Should he be happy about their disunity as a rival, or distraught as a fellow student? His teachings on statesmenship and war were filled with cold, pragmatic self interest and mercilessness, but as his father said, Kayden had the 'soft heart' of his beloved mother, evidently.

He realized he was distracting himself and pushed the introspection away, doing his best to listen to Tomai and writing down what notes he could. His crest was likely social in nature, unless there was some deeper ability that he hadn't yet figured out, which was a disturbing thought. All the more reason to take the class, at least. The classes were not everyday either? Good, he could catch up on homework and practice his swordplay in a totally vain attempt to impress Kalliope before she kicked his ass the coming weekend.

Kayden turned to his fellow Eagles with a glance. “Do any of you have any concerns with the class, or are we good?” He asked. The best option for them was likely a 'wait and see' approach. Do the curriculum and try and find an edge in the meantime. Despite his notions of honor, the Prince already had a few seedlings of machiavellian ideas in the back of his pretty head, pieces on a chessboard moving in multiple directions for different outcomes. He simply had to wait and watch, and then make one of his moves.

SANDSTRIDERS: A Lost Land

Grimdark Aladdin

Amal Kalfir Mansur

I have heard audacity is the key to all victories. If this is true, why am I not Sultan?

---

___________________________________ P R O F I L E Age 27 Race Human Sex Male Height 6ft Weight 185 lbs Alignment Chaotic Neutral Class Thief Level 1 Health Points 24 ___________________________________ I N V E N T O R Y 40 feet of rope, 18 foot length of chain, camel hide sack, half a pound of dates, water flask, bedroll, lockpicking implements, tinder box ... ____________________________________ E Q U I P M E N T - Scimitar - Long Jambiya Dagger - Abs (If inapplicable leave blank or mark as NA.) ____________________________________ A T T R I B U T E S Athletics: 14 (10+4) Dexterity: 16 (10+4+2) Intelligence: 10 Wisdom: 10 Charisma: 12 (10+2) Constitution: 12 (10+2) ___________________________________ S K I L L S (A) Strength: 1 (A) Agility: 2 (1+1) (D) Stealth: 1 (D) Acrobatics: 2 (1+1) (D) Trickery: 3 (1+2) (I) History: 0 (I) Nature: 0 (I) Arcana: 0 (I) Religion: 0 (W) Perception: 0 (W) Medicine: 0 (W) Survival: 1 (+1) (C) Persuasion: 0 (C) Deception: 1 (+1) (C) Intimidation: 1 (+1) (C) Performance: 0

____________________________________________________________________________ APPEARANCE Amal has sly face, a well cut chin, and the grin of a jackal. His body is lithe but strong, many long years spent laboring, climbing buildings, and fighting for his life has given him a rippling physique. His hair and eyes are the same dark coloring as most of his people, his skin a baked, golden brown. He has no wealth, and so he adorns what parts of his body he can in fake jewelry, though even that is few and far between. What jewelry he finds tends to be real, and it tends to be sold very quickly. His garb is usually in pale, airy pants and a vest of either deep or loud colors, though he is partial to red and gold. His feet are as callused as a boxer's knuckles, so he rarely needs shoes, though he has some sandals when the need arises. ____________________________________________________________________________ BACKSTORY Amal Kalfir Mansur was born to a common woman. A woman with little means a few too many romps with important men, or men she believed was important, which could be any man that owned more than one pair of clothing. Amal couuldn't guess who his father was. Perhaps it was the man responsible for his first memories, a bearded face with kind eyes, but he would never know. Amal had recollections of siblings. A crying girl, a wide eyed boy, the vague face of another boy who he used to play with in the street. All of that changed when he was seven, perhaps eight. He couldn't remember. His age mattered little to him at the time. All he remembered was the fact his mother sold him into servitude to pay her debts. The man who bought him owned a brothel, and Amal served as the errand boy and servant to the guests. The girls treated him like a puppy and protected him from the angry patrons, until one day he ruined a guest's day two years after his service and was sold again, this time as a laborer for the Emir, breaking rocks for three years in the sweltering sun. He grew accustomed to the whip, but not the servitude. A teen is a teen, regardless of the shackles he endured. This rebellious nature came at an auspicious time, and ironically, it allowed him to escape through sheer bloody audacity. No one figured the easy going boy would murder one of the sleeping guards and lift his keys, but it was done. By the time they realized he was gone, there was naught a trace of him. Amal fled the city on the next caravan, meeting an old peddlar who masqueraded as his uncle. He had Amal steal a few things from some of his rivals in the caravan, and by the time they had made it to their destination, the peddlar was a far richer man than when they had set out. Amal had eaten hearty, and he evidently had found a new career for himself. He spent the next year living on the streets, stealing what he needed to survive, but delivering the peddlar stolen merchandise to gain some extra coin, which he promptly spent on the fairer sex. Life in the brothel had purged him of how many men treated loose women as objects, and so he treated women as investments instead, until he began to lose quite a bit of money and decided to go the quick and easy approach of charming and splitting. As for his career, he decided to make the lucrative decision to move up from pickpocketing to grave robbing and outright banditry, until he realized the risks were high and yet not too exciting except in a few notable exceptions, and so after a few years, he decided tomb diving was more his forte. ____________________________________________________________________________ PERSONALITY There has never been one so addicted to danger, which is strange because he also wants an incredibly comfortable life. Oddly enough, these extremes make him oddly easy going with life's misfortunes. He takes the good with the bad and finds the humor in most situations. Amal is very likeable. Charming, quick witted, funny, and smart. He is also a cold blooded killer and a greedy opportunist, who really only restrains his knife from people he is paid to protect, when it benefits him, and women unless they threaten him. ____________________________________________________________________________ MOTIVATION AND OUTLOOK Optional ____________________________________________________________________________ MISC ...

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Neil did not stay for long.

Taking a heavy wrench, he decided to leave the room untouched except for the one servitor whom he broke apart with a few heavy swings, mostly to see how well built they were and what made them tick with a cursory glance of the fallen corpse. It only took him one or two minutes of bludgeoning and examination before he ran off, leaving the children in the other servitor's care. As much as he wanted to liberate everyone here, the Highlander was not a nursery, and while he was pro-choice, this seemed to be a bit late in the pregnancy. The real injustice was to the women, particularly two he wanted to find pretty badly.

Neil went off, searching high and low. Every twenty meters there was an archway; some had nothing but voids behind them, others had similar birthing chambers, and some were essentially armories or storage rooms. No matter where he went, he couldn't find where they held the women, at least until he found an archaic stairway, the railings emblazoned with silver lines and stars in constellations he vaguely recognized. He didn't dally and wait around. Instead he sprinted up the stairs, wondering if he would ever find his fucking girlfriend and Taya.

The first door on floor two, he saw Sayeeda breaking Taya out of stasis. Neil saw Gerome in one of the pods in the midst of the women and he shook his head. The old priest really should have known better than to fuck with his junebug. He couldn't help but admire the sheer audacity. For Neil's part, he lazily leaned against the archway as she unlocked and shut down the stasis chamber, the air depressurizing and opening up for Taya to wobbly fall out of her limp constraints and into Junebug's arms.

"God, you're terrible at this." Neil said, and Sayeeda's combat enhanced reflexes moved with the speed of a hunting cat, her gun barrel pointed at Neil, her recognition of him just a second quicker than her decision to kill whatever made an unexpected noise within her presence. She lowered her gun in relief and smiled. Neil just shook his head. "You're the damsel in distress. You couldn't wait for three minutes before I rescued you. God!"

A 'spring' and a small crater chipping into the steel above his head made him jump, and more gunfire followed as Neil leaped into the room as weapons cracked from the stairway. Neil hugged the wall by the door, and Sayeeda laughed and tossed the 10 mm pistol she had procured from Gerome's companion. "Now's your chance, cowboy." She teased, dragging Taya behind some of the pods while she woke her up.

Shouts were heard down the hall, followed by more gunfire. Neil looked around, looked at his gun, then decided on a course of action. Seconds later, the four colonists, three with handguns and one with a double barreled shotgun entered the room, the first two immediately firing to the left and right. They were the first two to get shot in the head, but from above. The bullets ripping into them sent them into spasms. Swinging his upper body upside down to gaze into the hallway, lower body on the roof of the arch, Neil shot three times, killing the last two colonists. The shotgun went off, cracking apart of the wall and ricocheting pellets across the hall. No one screamed out, so everyone pursing must be dead.

"Clear!" he called.

Hi!

Hope you enjoy your stay here!

Oblivion: Wrath of Akatosh

Meanwhile, me in my selfmade starship enterprise, leaving boring control of warp drive, phasers, shields and torpedos to the computer while spending my time in the turbolifts listening to this:

@Fetzen

Luckily, we have GCold working on a post for the other peeps so you need not wait much longer. Also that is the best choice of music.

Oblivion: Wrath of Akatosh

In case I'm still alive by the time weekend has arrived you can expect a post by me at that time. In case my work kills me within the next three days I hope that at least my malicious, ravaging entity of the afterlife will be powerful enough to perform such a profound and stylish overkill against a certain project I have to do that the whole world will go down with it so nobody has to witness me breaking my promise that way either!

@Fetzen

Nice post, my friend

SANDSTRIDERS : A Lost Land

Am later than I thought, but I am working on the character sheet!

Swords and Sorcery and Starships

What happened in that fight has been speculated in the Lexicons for centuries. No one bore witness save Calian himself, and as his old master-at-arms would say, he has a 'bloody wild way of embellishing the truth.' Only the gods truly saw how it ended, or the felling stroke. But in Calian's drunkest nights, and once or twice in his sleep, he would mumble to himself. One might ascertain that his life was saved by a single rock, though how that came to be was a topic of speculation. However it happened, an outcropping of the bridge was sundered, and the left statue of the two gargoyles at the front gate that framed the entrance was caved in and shattered.

The silent watchers within bore witness to the great gateway's shackled lock being lifted, and the heavy doors slowly grinding open. In the gloom of the eternal twilight, they would see the gleam of his glimmering eyes, and the glint of his sword as he unsheathed it. Within the wide chamber were shambling figures, rotted skin and boney framed, with gaping maws and fingers sharpened to points.

Calian stepped in, but in the light saw the multitudes of draugr-like creatures, many human-like, but some had multiple arms and elongated, xenos faces. A few had hooves and what abominations that still had skin were colored in strange fashions. He couldn't guess how long the Ebony Tower had been here, but many had apparently tried and failed, and had been arisen by those that looked. Calian slashed at one with his blade, cutting through whispy cartiladge and ligaments, but the blow sent a jarring vibration up his arm and he had to swing again to fell the closest ghoul. The knight backed up to the wall, realizing he wasn't entirely suited for this sort of fighting, at least until his head bumped into an iron rod that frightened him for a moment. Glancing up, he saw a baroque, black iron torch instrument. Calian grabbed at it and lifted it out of the rivets that kept it on the wall, and his next swing sundered the next skeleton with the ease of a battlehammer. The cracking of bones echoed through the endless halls, but it still took much doing and exhausted the knight, as did the stairs that led up to the third quarter of the tower.

When he stepped into the lacquered room, he noticed how comfortable and how unlike it was to the horrorible and gothic terrors he had just cut his way through. The air smelled of lavender and pine oils, and yet somehow, the bore that had devoured any and all magic was strongest here. Something here was undeniably sobering, as if one had just gotten home from a fun night out and found out their mother had died from a vehicle accident. Calian had never felt such a juxtaposition, but he swiftly got used to it. He would much rather be here than downstairs with the teeming masses of undead that wanted him to join their ranks, but either way, he was in a cage, albeit a gilded one. What manner of criminal resided here?

A snore broke him from his trail of thought, and he stepped into the next room to see what he didn't expect...a red head in a bed, sleeping the day away. She snored again, a bit more loudly this time.

"Oh." Was all he said, and with his armored ruined, a pauldron having been torn off and numerous cuts marring his otherwise striking visage, he looked more annoyed than anything. He walked up to her and shook her awake, gingerly but with impatience.

Swords and Sorcery and Starships

Calian had heard of this world, but he had never thought to see it. Corvus had a way of surprising him in ways he never had imagined, but truth be told, he didn't even know if where he was going was meant for him. Perhaps it was providence or serendipity that was leading him here, or he could very well be flying to his doom for little more than finding a legendary place to lay his corpse. As he approached, the planet looked to be an orb of indigo purple, the dunes and imperfections of the rocks upon the surface made it have the look of a very expensive cake.

The Stallion-Class battle transport cut through the atmosphere with the ferocity of a comet. To any soul looking into the deep night sky, it would look like a falling star slicing into the horizon. Calian watched with a hawkish gaze, catching sight of the Ebony Tower. It was sleek in form and robust in style, smaller baroque sectional towers connected via walkways and supports formed a seven pointed star around the greater keep. A road of stone snaked from some unseen origin towards the tower, where it halted just before a precipice that looked bottomless. There was a grim cruelty to its depths, and somehow Calian felt there was more evil than the fall if one were to drop within. Luckily, the road fed into a bridge, though made of wood, stone, or some form of steel he couldn't guess. The structure ended at the 'island' of rock and soil that held the Ebony Tower.

Calian Dwimmerblade landed in a small, broken alcove out of sight. His ship, as some called it, let out a hiss as it slowly landed on the bleak sand and rock. His transport was small. Barely enough for three people, including the pilot. It accommodated him well enough, he would claim, though truly it was also conveniently all he could afford. The glass of the cockpit lifted up, his body pinioned like the vehicles wings, steel plates sliding into nubs along the main body of the Stallion.

The Knight smelled the air, his eyes twinkling like stars when he opened them. The air was rank with magic, and yet somehow to his left he felt a void like a bore in the fabric of reality. The gleam of his gaze faded slightly, but it was ever present. Unfortunately, his tricks and galdorcraft would be of no use within the tower, so he could not utilize the majority of his arsenal. Rather, he pressed his hand against the panel just above the wing of his transport, the panel lighting up and opening a compartment for his weapons. He reached for his blade, Galdurkling. It was of Fey origin, one of the Erdenswords of their system, Vanahiem. Even without the runes or glyphs on the blade, it was as keen edged as the day it was forged. Donning his breastplate and powering down his transport, he began his long hike back to the Ebony Tower.

Calian now walked into full view of the tower, wandering over the stonework, closer and closer. He must seem some minuscule thing in the distance, only visible from the rising glow of the dying sun. His cloak suddenly whipped from a gust, and to him he felt it was the blast of an angered deity daring him to move closer. He clutched the cloak closer, and soon he was at the foot of the bridge. Finally, he dared look up at the Ebony Tower, the structure living up to its name with its foreboding darkstone base and obsidian crystal parapets. Should he announced his presence? Perhaps he needed to say a word of passage or summoning to keep the bridge aloft as he walked? He didn't recall any myths of such a thing, but many knights had fallen for a lack of patience and thought.

"Ware!" He cried, though he felt his voice die in the wind. Perhaps someone could hear him, but only if they had already been watching, likely. "Hearken to me! Be ye Dark Wizard, Maiden in distress, Dragon, Daemon, or a foul creature of the abyss! Hyperion has called me forth to come here and prove my mettle! Who resides here!?"