Arcane Tower

    If I recall correctly, everyone has plans this weekend. I'll be able to run if anyone's plans change; just give me a call. I'm not certain what I''m cooking for dinner, but I have ham and rice as a backup if I don't find something else I'd like. 

  ***

Arc 1 Regression Begins the Final Countdown

You’re back on the conveyor belt, hung from a pair of hooks under your arms while a large-bore needle injects nanomachines into your lower back and the back of your head. Is this where it all began… no… its just the place is space where it began for you, but not the “when” it began. Clearly Raven has been dealing with this for much longer than you’d been aware of it, and clearly it wasn’t her first time. Her call for you to save here before you sent her back doesn’t make much sense, given how much more powerful and knowledgeable she is.

Your contemplation is interrupted when the hooks drop you to the floor where you crumple to the ground and struggle to get up, the anesthetic wearing off leaving your brain foggy with pain instead of drugs. Your lizard-brain takes over so you can stagger towards the door to the assembly room outside the locker rooms; the room that will be one of your linked teleportation targets when your critanium reactor finishes assembling in your lower back. The pain of the working nanomachines, combined with the added 30 kg of mass is making in hard to think while the other muscles attached to your soul give you pain in places you weren’t aware of a few minutes ago. Tattoos you were not supposed to have yet etch their way into your skin, bleeding through time and space to follow the soul they were attached to years ago/from now.

With what feels like lethal fatigue you stumble into the training room to meet your keeper drone and get bonded to the weapon you will be using (Star Marine Plasma HMG if you can use weapons with a d8 Strength requirement, or Star Marine Plasma Rifle if your carrying capacity is lower). With your weapon bonded, your lizard-brain autopilot has your stagger into the SABRE training room against the directions of Captain Tempo where you get a basic overview of the SABRE training while trading out one of your modules and establishing that you can use SABRE abilities to anyone who is watching. Next its to the locker rooms for final gear-up before meeting in the main summoning room; the Spawn Point. You rush through the “account creation” menu to establish your name and team while the Captain describes the polite fiction of your indentured servitude and your debt to humanity.

Your team looks like hell, somehow drooping while in rigid heavy armor. Simultaneously, your team is the most prepared in spite of the fatigue and drug-induced confusion. The site-to-site teleportation engages, sending you to a site two kilometers south of a mining camp on Sigir Gamma. You barely remember the first missions, but still remember the disappointment of not being rewarded as well for completion of the mission as those who just killed as many of te weaker bugs as possible… maybe this time you can do both.

As the Captain calls for the start of the mission you weren’t really listening too, its time to run north towards a small camp that should contain 15 survivors and a dozen combatant bugs along with a few non-combat bugs.

// posted by S'Ren @ 2:04 AM