User:Nod/Flavor Text
Assassin Technologist:
This quaint village showed its age with cracked rounded adobe houses and huts, steam and the sounds of machinery echoed in the thick open air. As awareness surrounded him, so did the glances from the dirty people in brown robes; he must be very conspicuous in his shimmering black garb of tempered surreocule weave. He vanished more quickly than he had come to this place, just beyond to the thick of machinery and haze, so visibility he would be hindered unto the crowd.
He slowed to a blur to take in the construction of these hulking boxes of gear and smoke that churned endlessly with a timeless hypnotic hum. Each of the four largest structures stood billowing smog from a towering stack as a monstrosity of slowly churning, massive external gears and tubes audibly transferring thick liquid to its own innards. Bundles of cords and wires laced the exterior and buzzed with power. Directly above a web surging of blue and red bolts streaked amongst the four tower stacks in a thick sea of writhing jagged serpents blinding the sun and providing an eerie glow to the baked and cracked soil below.
He chose a smaller, more concealed location along the side of the rock face narrowly adjacent to the huge cluster. He stopped and activated the shimmer as he entered the building through the doorless entryway, then moved to the left to avoid a hovering drone swooping down to meet him. It stopped just outside this threshold and blinked with a soft blue light for a few seconds before a hypersonic pulse scanned the area, inaudible to most creatures but nearly deafening to him. Fortunately, the shimmer had accounted for this, and his heightened senses compensated for these eventualities. The probe moved away slowly across the room through a curtain at the back of the dim room. This place seemed to surge with power, but it was different from the chaos outside, smooth and controlled, and the waves waves assaulting his ears were regular and balanced. He knew what he was looking for, and this place seemed to have the potential of technology beyond the ancient facade.
He took his time examining each aspect of the main room. He found a phase transducer, two transwave harmonizers, a host of microquantum packs of various compression levels, and a strangely locked ornate box. It was made from a very light, very strong substance that resembled an organic material he’d heard about once. There were deliberate patterns burned into every side, and, although he popped the lock effortlessly, it still would not open. Were it a just a bit smaller he would have taken it with him, but he had no way to conceal something of that size, so he relocked it and placed it back exactly into the bare spot it left in the dust.
Jumping on the ENet:
The gleam and color of the ENet was absent. He knew that he was fused, but he did not feel the fling. Everything seemed to fragment and fizz like the snow on an old tube television. He could move only as though he was walking through hot tar. He could have been blanked and trapped here as his body was disposed of, but he still felt the attachment to tangibility. Maybe it was just an after effect of his mind not letting go of the real world. In any event, he was trapped and unable to launch for an exit.
Purity quest:
It had been eight days and he could not fathom why he had not reached the edge of the island. The blizzard had never ceased or even decreased its fury upon him. He walked through unfamiliar territory on an island he had traveled by sun and moon a thousand times. He remembered the last meager meal of snow rabbit, and salivated. Food was nonexistent and anything with a brain was hibernating, except him, cursed to wander until he had mastered himself.
Different from the rocky and mountainous terrain, the land became flat where he walked except for some mounds about two meters in diameter and slightly taller than him. They seemed to move with the wind and the direction of the snow but remained in essence stationary. He lightened himself and moved as swiftly as he could among the piles of snow. The ground beneath his feet gave way and he slipped face first into a drift. He felt sharp scaly protrusions and began to panic, thrusting himself upward with all available limbs to a height of thirty meters, gaining a better vantage point. The frozen landscape below him exploded like an icy volcano, blinding him and throwing him countless meters from where he started. He saw the storm surge of ice rushing toward him like a tsunami, and he blanked. His presence and all else became surreal, and he saw himself emit a fiercely distorting pulse across reality as the creature passed through his body. Through the chaos his anomalous perception designed a spectacular and rusty display of beast pieces being flung in great trails of freezing blood across the snow as the beast’s body imploded upon itself, spraying a crimson mist as thick as the blizzard to contaminate all white completely with red. He returned to himself, unscathed, and at the end of the island.
Arcane Technologist encounter with a Steam Shaper:
It was impossible for him to catch his breath in the murky atmosphere. He had surfaced in the Turbine Field, a gigantic powerhouse maintained by a group of eccentric engineers who achieved nearly legendary status for their ability to fix damn near anything with next to nothing. However, if these fix-it gurus came across a new piece of tech, they’d be liable to trade their own mother for it, and he had plenty of off world tech all over him. They’d not hesitate to take him clean apart to get it. He heard the hum of an approaching flight stand and hoped that the rider was not wearing spectral goggles.
As it came upon him, he saw the distortion aura created by its antipolar eminators and some of the modifications made to the stand. The emilators had been hardwired to a glowing appendage jutting from the main console bypassing the secondary computer stabilization. It looked to him like a slew of high compression microquantum packs had been mounted on the eminators and wired to this same system. He also noticed that the aura surrounding the propulsion system was much denser than he was used to seeing from a Seir Flight Stand, so much so that it seemed like he was staring through refractive lenses. All images behind it were a mess of color like a thin sheet of oil on some water's surface swirling and swimming in complete distortion. The normally sloshy, somewhat boat like stand stopped on a dime and remained stock still as the MechHand stared at him with his goggles hanging from the glowing addition to the craft.
“What a ya got boyo? Ya don’t look!” said the man, gruffly. “Well? … Ain much, eh?” He yelled over the roar of the turbines through the burnt bronze filter covering his mouth and nose that muffled his consonants. “Look like ya ain long a way. Say I give breath for that box. Not fair me but you got get. Eh?”
The MechHand stared at the man coldly as the man strove to breathe, his lungs burning, and throat choking. He could not conceive why he could not release the box, and he had nothing else to trade. If he killed the MechHand he’d be swarmed by others and certainly killed himself. Through this, he surmised that the custom addition to the craft may be organic in nature due to its rounded shape and apparent lack of any type of metal component. The surface was smooth and bore no mark of any kind save the connections from the twisted bundle of dirty wires. He cautiously reached toward the device as the MechHand drew his Mode 5 Dephazon and pointed it directly at the aggressor’s head. The man looked directly into the barrel of the weapon as he moved forward, showing no fear. The MechHand stood silent training the gun to the man’s every step. It was the MechHand's code to not kill until someone made a real and present attempt to take tech from them. This suited their lifestyle and allowed them to interact and work together freely rather than become protective of their possessions when someone tinkered with a piece.
As he approached the stand the MechHand began to see the man’s body distort in the slithering writhing mess of the eminators, but he still knew where the man’s head was. The MechHand saw the man’s hand emerge from the visual mess and rest slowly on the dull glow of the mod attached to his control panel. The glow flickered and brightened with increasing intensity. The man’s image started to come into focus with a slow ripple and then quickly, as though through a lens donned only slightly misshapen. The man removed his hand and backed away.
“Oy! You did focus flow bet me gear! Monk! Have breath!” The MechHand excitedly tossed the man a burnt bronze respirator much like the one he was wearing and flew away at speeds far beyond those with which he had approached, and vanished from sight almost instantly.
He quickly strapped on the mask and took a breath of fresh air. It was the sweetest thing he had tasted for a year.
Bio/Purity fights Biogenetic:
He resented the unnatural to his core as his master had taught him, but his master had also said that one's path can lead him to accept abhorrent things. This faction had manipulated him into submission. The massive city structure was sealed and controlled utterly by the Great Manipulator. This entity was largely a mystery, and what little there was to know was all hearsay.
Even in the shifting gravity, he felt the bounds of the arena constrict around him as his opponents closed from below and behind. The gravity field was off now as he waited for the other augments to be just out of arm's reach. He collapsed the atmosphere around him, then pushed just out of reach one opponent grasped at air, and prematurely lit into the grasp of another before the fool was prepared. He stole that moment and abused the ascending combatant's momentum with a downward thrust of speed with a driving force that allowed him to take the aug's arm as a prize, separating it from the unwitting host. In stride this uninjured fighter caught the fleeting challenger on both sides of his head, inverted himself, and brought his knee smartly to the face of the injured combatant. His helmet disintegrated as a blood trail marked his descent to the arena floor.
Just then the lights flickered signifying a gravity change as the G board registered twenty six times terran norm. His back hit the floor, forcing all breath from him and pinning the grotesque arm across his chest. When his opponent landed he could feel the arena shake as though the planet were protesting this affair, accompanied by a crunchy splat from the deceased corpse. While his remaining attacker methodically trudged toward him, he assessed the damage: broken ribs, dislocated hip, concussion, whiplash. He could remember worse injuries in the past, but none produced this level of pain. His eyes watered as he felt his opponent's approach through the floor. Despite the immense gravity and injuries, he pushed up with one fist, keeping the other close to his chest, catching a hook from the oncoming foot, and twisting his body away from his attacker, applying pressure to the knee and thigh. The creature was pulled forward hit the alloy floor face first. The man snatched the severed arm and wrapped it around the neck of the aggressor, pulling until he lay still. He wasted no time drilling the final stomp into his skull. The rush of hyper-pressurized blood rang in his ears, his muscles burned like hellfire, and the lights dimmed as his grasp went limp to match the rag doll he he still held with the severed arm. He exhaled finally, and blood ran from his nose and mouth, quietly pooling beneath him. He too now lay still atop the fallen adversary amidst the gongs and alarm as the arena opened the combat floor for cleanup and retrieval.