I Dream of Lizards with Illusionary Flair
Jun. 5th, 2004 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothLast night we had a stargate themed shadake-kind-of game at Lazar's. Dan wasn't there, so we ran a sort of 'dream sequence'... except that we spent most of the night rejiggering our characters to deal with losing all our equipment and 'syntax chains' and building new chains, and spending the ludicrous overdose of advancement crystals.
Then we had one fight, in which a terrible bug in the combat system was uncovered (slow people, like my and Snowwy's chars, NEVER got to act in large combats), and it was time to go home. Whoops.
Still, enough happened to have a summary.
After Theta team got back from examining (and blowing up) the crashed ship, there were changes in base procedures. First, no more jeeps unless the team had already scouted and determined that they weren't going to sink to the bottom of the ocean immediately. Second, because the remote viewer, who psychically envisioned the worlds they were travelling to before they set off, had skipped out without telling anyone to 'take a vacation', they'd be going into the next few (dozen) missions blind.
Ironically, this meant *less* danger. The remote viewer had been sending them to 'interesting' worlds, where things would happen. Now, they arrived on deserted worlds devoid of sentient life -- a desert world, a blizzard world with hexagons of summery weather, a world of mile-diameter spires over posionous mist, a world of animal-like machines, a world of crystal cities.
After about a month of that, Theta team woke up in a plain white room, in hospital beds, naked. They felt fine, but had no memory of how they'd gotten there -- and they were certain that this room was not anywhere in their base.
Listening at the doors, they heard a group of doctors talking about how the 'reconstruction' was finally complete, and the subjects should be waking up in an hour or so. From the descriptions they were giving about what procedures they'd done, it was obvious that whoever they'd been working on (which Theta team presumed was them) had been in really, really bad shape.
Kyrae peered through a window at them, carefully, and saw that they looked like Nimune, but his head hurt to look at them, and if he look *just right* he could see them as they really were -- lizards, speaking a strange lizardy language.
JT checked the other door, but despite a thorough search for traps or sensors, failed to find not only the sensor set to go off when the door was opened, but the window in plain view in the middle of the door, and so was taken a bit by surprise when opening it alerted the eight-armed security robot waiting just outside.
The robot didn't attack immediately, so JT crept out into the hallway to look around. Right next to him, in each corner of the little security nook, were four apparently decorative fountains full of base (stat-raising) and syntax (spell-casting) crystals -- hundreds and hundreds of them! He went to reach in and take one, but the robot objected, so he tried to sneakily retrieve a few with his tail while holding his hands up where the robot could see, and got attacked.
During the months in the base, Theta team -- all the teams -- had learned how to control the transformation of the sort Croran had undergone earlier, and after the robot proved that it wasn't really all that dangerous, despite having four attacks, JT and Kyrae transformed and tore the robot to bits.
No one seemed to notice, immediately, so the team gathered up all the crystals, as well as the daggers the robot had been attacking with, and spent a while absorbing the base crystals and building spells out of the others. There was a much better selection than they were used to, of both kinds, so they made up some abusive spell chains (like 'first cast barrier all armor all' and 'attack slow weaken plus attack water acid') and pushed assorted stats to gross levels (JT pushed attack from 61 to 261, while Kyrae did the same with speed, and Nuki did magic attack).
Then they searched an adjacent locker room for clothing to 'disguise' themselves with, although they didn't expect it to work at close range. They found some other weird equipment in the lockers -- whose locks tended to randomly mis-recognize one or more of the Nimune as the rightful owner -- and grabbed it all, shoving it into a briefcase.
Suddenly, an alarm went off! They thought they'd been caught, but no, someone else was attacking the base. They ran out into the hall, only to see security forces closing in from all directions -- since they'd been raiding the armory. They ducked back into the white room, and passed the doctors who were also on the way to the armory without attracting much notice, and hid out in the examination room, which didn't seem to have any other exits, and they hoped would escape notice.
In the examination room, pinned to all the walls were x-rays of them, in various states of disrepair. With a little work, they could piece together the reconstruction, but the more medically inclined on the team were a bit shaken by the degree of mangling they'd started at -- there was no way they could have stayed alive like that! They didn't even have all their brains, in the first pictures!
Before they could gather all the pictures, though -- there were thousands, stacked one on top of another -- they were interrupted. The destroyed security robot had been noticed, and the computer, searching for intruders on their level to account for it, had detected duplicate signals for five people in the examination room, and dispatched troops.
The battle was a slaughter -- the first cast armor/barrier all raised the party's defense to where the enemies couldn't do damage, the attack plus attack chains resulted in instant kills whenever they hit, and the multi-status attacks Carmine used never failed to incapacitate their target, even though she couldn't do damage.
As each lizard was killed, the members of Theta team felt a pain they hadn't even really noticed in their heads subside a bit, as the illusion that these enemies were Nimune was dropped.
After it was over -- hidden from the computer's view by the 'auto fog rain' Croran had insisted on [note: Croran was played by the GM this time] -- they stole the enemies' clothing and went to report to their station, which just so happened to be the gate room.
The gate room looked a bit different than they expected, though -- instead of crystal disks, this lizardy race apparently used a pentagram, and stations a dozen powerful-looking robots to train their guns on the portal at all times. The robots recognized Theta team as the guards assigned to the chamber, though, and let them go about their business, which was to use the color coding on the x-rays to set the portal to what they hoped was their home world, and jump through.
They arrived in what *looked* like their home base, with familiar-sounding alarms going off, and tried to reassure everyone, 'It's us! Don't shoot!' But as the guards rushed in to cover them, they all felt a familiar pain in their heads -- these weren't really Nimune!
last week | next week
Not sure if we'll continue this next week, or what... it probably depends in part on whether Dan shows up.
Then we had one fight, in which a terrible bug in the combat system was uncovered (slow people, like my and Snowwy's chars, NEVER got to act in large combats), and it was time to go home. Whoops.
Still, enough happened to have a summary.
After Theta team got back from examining (and blowing up) the crashed ship, there were changes in base procedures. First, no more jeeps unless the team had already scouted and determined that they weren't going to sink to the bottom of the ocean immediately. Second, because the remote viewer, who psychically envisioned the worlds they were travelling to before they set off, had skipped out without telling anyone to 'take a vacation', they'd be going into the next few (dozen) missions blind.
Ironically, this meant *less* danger. The remote viewer had been sending them to 'interesting' worlds, where things would happen. Now, they arrived on deserted worlds devoid of sentient life -- a desert world, a blizzard world with hexagons of summery weather, a world of mile-diameter spires over posionous mist, a world of animal-like machines, a world of crystal cities.
After about a month of that, Theta team woke up in a plain white room, in hospital beds, naked. They felt fine, but had no memory of how they'd gotten there -- and they were certain that this room was not anywhere in their base.
Listening at the doors, they heard a group of doctors talking about how the 'reconstruction' was finally complete, and the subjects should be waking up in an hour or so. From the descriptions they were giving about what procedures they'd done, it was obvious that whoever they'd been working on (which Theta team presumed was them) had been in really, really bad shape.
Kyrae peered through a window at them, carefully, and saw that they looked like Nimune, but his head hurt to look at them, and if he look *just right* he could see them as they really were -- lizards, speaking a strange lizardy language.
JT checked the other door, but despite a thorough search for traps or sensors, failed to find not only the sensor set to go off when the door was opened, but the window in plain view in the middle of the door, and so was taken a bit by surprise when opening it alerted the eight-armed security robot waiting just outside.
The robot didn't attack immediately, so JT crept out into the hallway to look around. Right next to him, in each corner of the little security nook, were four apparently decorative fountains full of base (stat-raising) and syntax (spell-casting) crystals -- hundreds and hundreds of them! He went to reach in and take one, but the robot objected, so he tried to sneakily retrieve a few with his tail while holding his hands up where the robot could see, and got attacked.
During the months in the base, Theta team -- all the teams -- had learned how to control the transformation of the sort Croran had undergone earlier, and after the robot proved that it wasn't really all that dangerous, despite having four attacks, JT and Kyrae transformed and tore the robot to bits.
No one seemed to notice, immediately, so the team gathered up all the crystals, as well as the daggers the robot had been attacking with, and spent a while absorbing the base crystals and building spells out of the others. There was a much better selection than they were used to, of both kinds, so they made up some abusive spell chains (like 'first cast barrier all armor all' and 'attack slow weaken plus attack water acid') and pushed assorted stats to gross levels (JT pushed attack from 61 to 261, while Kyrae did the same with speed, and Nuki did magic attack).
Then they searched an adjacent locker room for clothing to 'disguise' themselves with, although they didn't expect it to work at close range. They found some other weird equipment in the lockers -- whose locks tended to randomly mis-recognize one or more of the Nimune as the rightful owner -- and grabbed it all, shoving it into a briefcase.
Suddenly, an alarm went off! They thought they'd been caught, but no, someone else was attacking the base. They ran out into the hall, only to see security forces closing in from all directions -- since they'd been raiding the armory. They ducked back into the white room, and passed the doctors who were also on the way to the armory without attracting much notice, and hid out in the examination room, which didn't seem to have any other exits, and they hoped would escape notice.
In the examination room, pinned to all the walls were x-rays of them, in various states of disrepair. With a little work, they could piece together the reconstruction, but the more medically inclined on the team were a bit shaken by the degree of mangling they'd started at -- there was no way they could have stayed alive like that! They didn't even have all their brains, in the first pictures!
Before they could gather all the pictures, though -- there were thousands, stacked one on top of another -- they were interrupted. The destroyed security robot had been noticed, and the computer, searching for intruders on their level to account for it, had detected duplicate signals for five people in the examination room, and dispatched troops.
The battle was a slaughter -- the first cast armor/barrier all raised the party's defense to where the enemies couldn't do damage, the attack plus attack chains resulted in instant kills whenever they hit, and the multi-status attacks Carmine used never failed to incapacitate their target, even though she couldn't do damage.
As each lizard was killed, the members of Theta team felt a pain they hadn't even really noticed in their heads subside a bit, as the illusion that these enemies were Nimune was dropped.
After it was over -- hidden from the computer's view by the 'auto fog rain' Croran had insisted on [note: Croran was played by the GM this time] -- they stole the enemies' clothing and went to report to their station, which just so happened to be the gate room.
The gate room looked a bit different than they expected, though -- instead of crystal disks, this lizardy race apparently used a pentagram, and stations a dozen powerful-looking robots to train their guns on the portal at all times. The robots recognized Theta team as the guards assigned to the chamber, though, and let them go about their business, which was to use the color coding on the x-rays to set the portal to what they hoped was their home world, and jump through.
They arrived in what *looked* like their home base, with familiar-sounding alarms going off, and tried to reassure everyone, 'It's us! Don't shoot!' But as the guards rushed in to cover them, they all felt a familiar pain in their heads -- these weren't really Nimune!
last week | next week
Not sure if we'll continue this next week, or what... it probably depends in part on whether Dan shows up.
