Terminal

The Elder Scrolls: Year of the Wolf

Making a character sheet now.

Printed guns, melded metal - An experimental GM-less Cyberpunk RP

@The Harbinger of Ferocity

Noted. Will endeavor to supply you with a much earlier response than previously.

The Elder Scrolls: Year of the Wolf

I am interested. Looking forward to the OOC.

Printed guns, melded metal - An experimental GM-less Cyberpunk RP

Tracy began swearing up and down as he shot glimpses towards the ring of scavengers around Golemeth while descending the exit ramp. The Hardware Spider had taken the CD and was already in the process of backing away; the thugs began to ply their tender mercies to the immobile solo to exact their pound of flesh. The Spider slinked out of sight, fading into the smog and murk of Night City's streets and likely about to duck into any one of countless remotely-opened electronically locked doors for the nearby buildings or even for city maintenance tunnels. He would be long gone by the time Tracy reached the bottom ramp - and seeing as none of the bozoz picking over Golemeth's now dormant hardware were objecting to each others' ministrations, the chances Tracy could stir up any trouble amongst them was close to squat. Even as he reached the bottom of the exit ramp Tracy was slowing, surprising the urge to pull her his out and scream in sheer frustration. Why did all his efforts and half-implemented plans mean so little when he put himself at such great risk...?

Moving off to the side from the bottom of the exit, Tracy ducked behind the corner-alley of the nearest building, crouching behind a dumpster as he peered beyond it to watch as the vulturs grabbed what they could and hauled it off. Which when Tracy observed something peculiar - the poser from earlier that he had shot at was standing back, coolly surveying the scene as if he had all the time in the world and nowhere to be.

Peeling off in pairs as they managed to yank out Golemeth's bits and pieces, the gangers split the scene, trailing long streamers of previous compressed, shivering cords and wiring had spilled from every divot and gap in the torn chassis of the appropriated hardware. Tracy peered back anxiously over the side of the dumpster and watched as Theron graciously hauled Golemeth's now substantially trimmer and lighter remnants up onto his back.

Doing some quick mental calculus, Tracy reevaluated the poser - no, the second solo as they dragged what little remained of Golemeth away down the street. Now that he had a better look of the guy, Tracy could tell there was a little more than him than was apparent at first glance - and not just because he was able to haul Golemeth's chassis around with little discernible effort. His jacket had a faintly raised contour, and the texture of the material looked enough like leather but was ever-so-slightly off - and Tracy was reminded of the ballistic fibers he had seen in storage aboard the Phantasmagoria. The solo had some discreet hardware, or maybe even wetware.

But he was also laden down with Golemeth's carcass, and was still out in the open. So all Tracy needed to do was get him to stop in his tracks for a single, scant moment. Without making any effort to hide himself any further, Tracy peeled out and away from the alley and walked up behind Theron, one hand assuming a relaxed position atop his swaying duffel-bag while he adopted a carefully calculated slouch.

"I have some business with your friend there. I can see he's still alive." Tracy spoke softly, projecting his voice as best he could at Theron without actually shouting. "I don't know who you are, but I can make it worth your while to help me get him cogent again."

Tracy did not bother trying to hide the anxiousness in his voice, but did go out of his way to keep his own motions and the cadence of his voice as steady as he could - he wanted to give off an air of shadiness, not twitchy panic.

@The Harbinger of Ferocity

Printed guns, melded metal - An experimental GM-less Cyberpunk RP

Post delayed to account for Harbinger's addition to the scene. Working on something new.

Printed guns, melded metal - An experimental GM-less Cyberpunk RP

I will post sometime tomorrow. My interest in this has been waning due to an apparent lack of activity, but I think in all fairness I have been contributing to that issue as much as anybody else. So from now on, I am going to try and get response posts up within one to two days. Hopefully that should revive my impetus to write.

Printed guns, melded metal - An experimental GM-less Cyberpunk RP

@SleepingSilence, your character has an opportunity to interject in the street fight now. Would you like to do so, or should I proceed?

Printed guns, melded metal - An experimental GM-less Cyberpunk RP

I would like to set up one or two common objectives that everyone should have cause to focus on, that either get our characters to converge or else to at least momentarily encounter each other. My thought is that, as they meet and reveal what each one of them individually knows - or rather, what each of us individually as GMs are aiming for - a bigger picture of the world should emerge, and new points of connection should become apparent.

Printed guns, melded metal - An experimental GM-less Cyberpunk RP

In the end, it was all a matter of death and more death. Possibly die now, or definitely die later. The simplicity of that realization did absolutely nothing to help quell Tracy's tremulous nerves as he rocked forward from where he was sitting, pushing himself back upright with both hands, one awkwardly clutching at the replica uzi still. He did not even wince when the first of the thug's bursts started firing down the overpass. He had known they were coming.

But he winced perceptibly when he heard the distinctive return-fire from the poser who had been coming on up. Then Tracy's eyes widened as he took a moment to realize that he could actually hear and place the shots from the overpass. Which mean the second firefight that had kicked off after Tracy had shot at the poser had either come to a close or was settling down. Managing to completely push the thought of the poser on the overpass out of his mind, Tracy rushed out of the back alley, across the street, and peered down at the lower street from over the lip of the high road's safety rail. He was struck at once by the peculiar fact that not only was the scene entirely too quiet, but that there was entirely too much ambient noise. Too much of the sounds of people ambling and moving around normally, of distant voices in close proximity. He could not really see where Golemeth should have been standing as the area was obstructed by a condemned three-story complex, but he could swear he heard multiple voices down there.

Taking a moment to think, Tracy then remembered the posse he had seen heading down the street, doubtlessly to flank Golemeth. He supposed that could be them down there, having come down around on the high road's short exit ramp onto the street below. But that was ridiculous. Even if they had caught him by surprise, the idea of Golemeth getting geeked by a bunch of random two-bit street roughs was laughable.

...Which prompted Tracy to begin swearing viciously up and down as he trailed along the safety rail for the high road to peer around the edge of the complex only to see the colossal heap of scrap metal and munitions platform that had been Golemeth collapsed in the middle of the street, the barrel for the machine gun still visibly smoking lightly. How?!? Golemeth had been tanking hits for the last few hours without showing any signs of wear, how could some idiots with shoddy replica guns have possibly felled him-

Which was when Tracy noticed the distinct lack of blood, viscera, or even of scattered circuitry. Golemeth was collapsed and motionless on the ground, unmoving, but also apparently uninjured despite that. It was then when Tracy's attention was drawn to the figure standing over Golemeth, and Tracy mentally breathed a sigh of relief. It was a Hardware Spider.

The figure was disturbing to look at, or at least would have been if Night City had not already been filled to the brim with much stranger and more alien sights. Wearing ratty, baggy pants over a skin-tight one-piece polysuit with silver tracers along the limbs, the distinguishing feature of this and every other Hardware Spider was the hunch-backed configuration of gleaming gunmetal-grey hardware chassis protruding out from and along their spine, with multiple cables running from the top and into the back of their shaved head. Composite-armored casing for their Spider's hackware was actually the least intrusive of the augmentations made to their body despite being fused directly with their spine and hooked into multiple cerebral datajacks - the silver tracers along their one-piece polysuit were not for show, as they were the external motivators for the Spider's wireframed body, and near the end of their arms was a pair of wrist-mounted, high-velocity, subsonic, precision flechette-launchers. Now that Tracy had a better look at the street, he saw that the gangers who had been cruising to flank Golemeth from behind had held up and were circling around the Spider and his prize warily, and rightly so. Everyone in Night City knew that trying to mess with a Spider was dicey, even when you outnumbered and outgunned them. Their sophisticated neural-linked hardware, almost always coupled with omnidirectional monitors, could let them see a bullet moving past as though it were as slow as a lazily drifting leaf. The wireframe augs surgically installed in their limbs were powered, which meant they could also react and move nearly as fast as they could think, which meant trying to standoff with one was almost always suicide.

Surrounding the Hardware Spider as they were, outnumbering him and outgunning him, it was not a question of whether the gangers could take the Spider on - they could see everything and were as fast as bad news, but they were not invincible - there was just the sticky problem that, whichever of them decided to start hostilities would invariably die instantly when the Spider reacted to them beginning to move to attack. None of the thugs wanted to be the first one to shoot, and so for the moment a fragile detente existed between the Spider and them. What had happened here was apparent - Golemeth had been rampaging through the streets for hours, laying waste to any poser and solo that got in his way. It only made sense that either somebody higher up in the local food chain would have sent a heavy-hitter after him in response, or else the Spider had come out of their lair of their own volition. Likely because they knew what Tracy did about Golemeth and their connection to Davidson. They had tracked Golemeth via some kind of netrun, and then had just shut down everything in Golemeth's body, turning them into an oversized paperweight. The towering monster was still alive, but probably entirely immobilized and unconscious.

The Spider's presence was both a blessing and extremely bad news. Tracy immediately knew that the situation was preferable to the previous arrangement - the only drugs the Spider might conceivably be hopped up on were opioids instead of steroids, and they were unlikely to be drunk, outraged, and inclined to shoot absolutely anything that so much as twitched or looked at them funny. A Spider Tracy could doubtlessly negotiate with or outmaneuver with a bit of acting and quick thinking. It was also preferable to trying to do the same with a large group of posers who would instantly know Tracy was not one of them and who would be too stupid to trick. The downside, of course, was that the Hardware Spider's mere presence meant that the squall that had been Golemeth's shooting spree might shortly turn into a hurricane if there were any more heavy-ordinance solos like the Spider closing in. Which meant Tracy had to get down there a minute ago. But it was not like he could just haul up Golemeth and drag him off, so what was the goal here...?

No sooner had Tracy begun to think as much, when a small disc-port popped up from a small concealed ridged set in the behemoth's back, and the Hardware Spider reached down to retrieve the now-exposed laser disc protruding from Golemeth's body. That was it. Tracy immediately forgot about trying to interrogate Golemeth, which had frankly always been an awful proposition to begin with. Chances were, if he had the information Tracy needed, it was now on that disc - and that would be far more pliant.

Even as Tracy started to turn towards the exit ramp down towards the lower street, starting to plan how to work the scene to his advantage, he got the niggling feeling he had forgotten something important...

Like the fact that Theron had been barreling down the overpass when Tracy had left the back-alley, and that the shots from that direction had stopped several moments ago.

@The Harbinger of Ferocity

Printed guns, melded metal - An experimental GM-less Cyberpunk RP

Post will be up in a few hours.