Robots and Lizards? What the --
Jul. 3rd, 2004 03:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothWe had another session of Lazar's Stargate-themed shadake game last week. It was sort of confusing. Basically, though, we travelled to a robot city and got attacked by lizards for no apparent reason.
Theta team checked in with the quartermaster before getting sent off to the light world, but all he had in after fifteen weeks of waiting was a 'weaken' crystal. In some of the waiting lists they were *farther* from the front.
So, after that, they hopped through the portal and found themselves inside a massive, disorganized warehouse run by robots -- a big spider robot that rearranged the boxes, and little box-robots that repaired the boxes in a haphazard fashion when Kyrae cut into one (it was full of glowing legos that dissolved into poisonous mist).
The team had been sent over in environmental suits because the scientists suspected a radiation hazard, but their geiger counter didn't show any sign of radiation. At all. Not even normal background radiation. So they decided to stay in their suits for as long as possible, and summon a critter to act as a canary, assuming they didn't get in combat (getting in a fight seemed to reset all the spell's they'd cast out of combat) before it'd been exposed long enough for them to tell one way or another.
They worked their way out of the warehouse -- from the boxtops to a catwalk, to the floor, to the outer wall, and over to a glowing red panel that opened a large door -- and found themselves in what looked like New York City coated in gray plastic. The streets were covered with half a foot of poisonous water, so all the doors into the buildings were from catwalks like the one they were on, which circled the buildings at various heights and were connected by ramps.
Kyrae took a quick peek around a corner, and saw a quartet of gray knife-wielding lizards wearing rags of fur approaching rapidly -- one of them had glowing yellow eyes, possibly an LLC-carrier?
Carmine wanted to try out the C4-arrows, but they weren't sure that they'd come through the portal okay. Before leaving, they'd been informed that attempting to make C4-bullets had been a dud, as the portal had disarmed them just like normal gunpowder. So, as a backup, they set some normal C4 charges to collapse the catwalk, on a tripwire. If THAT didn't work, they'd have to just fight the things.
The enemies never came around the corner, though. JT decided he didn't really want to try to disarm his own booby trap ("I had to take an oath when I learned how to set the things that I'd never, ever, try to disarm them. It's just not safe.") so they left it there, with a mental note not to walk that direction.
They then went to a library Nuki had found. Like many worlds, the language on this world seemed to be every langauge they knew from home (or at least, that Nuki knew) mixed up with no apparent rhyme or reason. The books were also mixed up with no apparent rhyme or reason. While Kyrae guarded the door, Nuki and Carmine started examining the books, and JT searched around looking for something like a card catalog.
Instead, he found a map, although he couldn't figure out how to use it (it was basically Mapquest, in a hodgepodge of languages). Before he could come back and get Nuki, there was an explosion outside. Someone had set off the booby trap!
So they ran outside, and saw a bunch of TAN lizards with guns, who immediately attacked them. The C4 arrows *did* work, which is a good thing, as otherwise they'd have been cut down, since their next best weapons were things like cutlasses and spears. As it was, everyone was wounded, which meant the environment suits were now worthles.
Carmine healed everyone, including herself (although no one remembered when she'd been shot, not even her), then collapsed in apparent exhaustion. JT dragged her back into the library to try to figure out what was wrong with her, but while he was a biologist, he wasn't a doctor, so when he found the seeming poison running through her bloodstream, he was able to identify that she must have picked it up on the dark world, and observe that it was destroying her cells, but he had no idea how to get it out of her.
Worse, when he pulled out the laptop to open a portal home to take her to see a doctor, the return device had taken a bullet. He wasn't sure how THAT had happened, either, since he'd never been shot in the back. But, once again, they were trapped, although this time it looked like only the screen was broken, so it might be fixable. Maybe.
After looting the lizard who hadn't been blown over the edge of the catwalk, Nuki searched the map for anything like a hospital. The closest he could find was a 'repair kit' across the street -- it didn't specify that it repaired machines specifically, unlike all the other similar listings. So, figuring that it was better than nothing, Nuki and JT carried Carmine over to it, while Kyrae stood guard with the stolen assault rifle.
The repair kit was a room full of broken junk, with a little robot slowly and haphazardly fixing things. Nuki asked it to report its status, so it read off the things it was fixing and how close it was to completing repairs. "Autodoc 97%" was the one that got their attention. "How long would it take to fix the autodoc?" "The remaining components have not yet been retrieved from the source world."
They decided to let the autodoc work on Carmine anyway, though, lacking any other options, considering their general lack of medical know-how and Carmine's rapidly deteriorating condition. The machine immediately started repairing her feathers, working quickly and methodically, but... well, it was going to take a while.
So they killed some time doing research. Kyrae mostly just stood guard over Carmine, while Nuki played with the map (locating the 'Central Central Intelligence' dome that came up searching for 'weapons', a 'transportation' room that came up searching for 'dimensional portals', and a 'Terry Repair' shop about six miles away searching for 'laptop repair') and JT dissected the dead tan lizard (discovering nothing of note -- the lizards seemed to be utterly ordinary, lacking everything halfway complicated that the Nimune possessed).
They also figured out that the laptop-sized boxes they'd stolen from the warehouse actually had laptops inside. In various languages, operating systems, and states of repair. They didn't seem really compatible with their own laptop, though -- the ports were all different, at least.
Eventually, they spotted three gray lizards skulking about, and decided to follow them and see what they were up to. Leaving Carmine behind was a risk, but there was no reason to think the people wandering around the city would have any reason to disturb the repair room, so as long as they didn't go too far...
Despite the fact that the Nimune were flying and the gray lizards were walking, slowly, they found it hard to keep up. They lizards did have a head start -- they found another dead Tan lizard just after setting out, with another gun etc, which they had to scavenge -- but not THAT much of one. Still, somehow, it took them until they reached the 'Terry Repair' shop to catch up. The lizards opened the door and went inside.
Nuki opened the door to follow them, but that finally got their attention. The party was all invisible, but one of the lizards came to the door and blasted the ENTIRE STREET with a wave of magical fire... dispelling the invisibility, as it started combat.
JT cut down the fire-spewer with the assault rifle -- it felt good to be using real weapons for a change, that actually killed their targets when you hit them! -- but the other mage still inside put up a barrier that stopped bullets, and after ejecting Kyrae from the general area (he ended up slumped against another building a block away) stepped through a green portal and escaped, closing it behind him. Leaving the party alone with one last lizard, the now-closed portal device, and a ticking bomb.
The lizard, at least, was easy to deal with. JT warily approached the bomb and looked it over. "Um, that's a nuke." "We'd better run!" Nuki said. "You can't run from a nuke, on foot, in five minutes. We'll have to disarm it somehow. Eheh."
While JT tried to work up the nerve to actually try that, Nuki started frantically hitting buttons on the portal device, trying to open a portal to anywhere so that (presumably) someone else could get themselves blown up instead of them. Of course, he forgot about the portal display, or perhaps thought that THIS device didn't have that problem since they'd seen no sign of it when the lizards opened the portal...
The good news was that JT and Nuki managed to leap out the door before the portal sent out its gouts of fire, that burst through various parts of the building, leaving huge steaming gaps. The bad news was that the pyrotechnics vaporized the nuclear bomb. As in 'converted into vapor'. JT hurriedly put on his breathing mask, but the geiger counter was already chattering off the scale. They were DOOMED.
So, they ditched all their equipment, and started looking around frantically for some source of non-poisonous water. JT discovered that 'barrier' seemed to
block radiation as well as magic, so he cast it on the three of them so they wouldn't take *further* damage, at least... then they headed back to the library to see if the map had any sign of water. If they were to have any chance of surviving they'd need to clean out their systems quickly.
When they got there, they found Carmine awake again. The autodoc had, indeed, repaired her. "I feel wonderful, in fact! Why are you all naked?"
"We were horribly irradiated by a nuclear bomb not exploding."
"Oh. How much radiation did you take?"
"It was off the scale. We were ten feet from it when the portal converted it to vapor."
"Right... then you're probably all dead. You'll know in an hour or so, when the radiation burns start showing up..."
Luckily, however, they had a mostly-working autodoc. It was a bit close for Kyrae (who insisted on going last), but the autodoc only took about an hour to remove and repair the radiation damage for each person, and they all pulled through. They also found a fruit-juice warehouse nearby, which had jalapeno juice and wine. Kyrae got very very drunk waiting for his turn.
"We are SO taking this autodoc with us when we go back. Assuming we can ever go back." Kyrae took a longer look at the laptop, and decided that he could probably jury-rig one of their PDAs to read the memory and run the software and hardware needed to open a portal. The laptop itself was toast, though.
And of course, they were out most of their equipment and samples. And clothing.
last session next session
Theta team checked in with the quartermaster before getting sent off to the light world, but all he had in after fifteen weeks of waiting was a 'weaken' crystal. In some of the waiting lists they were *farther* from the front.
So, after that, they hopped through the portal and found themselves inside a massive, disorganized warehouse run by robots -- a big spider robot that rearranged the boxes, and little box-robots that repaired the boxes in a haphazard fashion when Kyrae cut into one (it was full of glowing legos that dissolved into poisonous mist).
The team had been sent over in environmental suits because the scientists suspected a radiation hazard, but their geiger counter didn't show any sign of radiation. At all. Not even normal background radiation. So they decided to stay in their suits for as long as possible, and summon a critter to act as a canary, assuming they didn't get in combat (getting in a fight seemed to reset all the spell's they'd cast out of combat) before it'd been exposed long enough for them to tell one way or another.
They worked their way out of the warehouse -- from the boxtops to a catwalk, to the floor, to the outer wall, and over to a glowing red panel that opened a large door -- and found themselves in what looked like New York City coated in gray plastic. The streets were covered with half a foot of poisonous water, so all the doors into the buildings were from catwalks like the one they were on, which circled the buildings at various heights and were connected by ramps.
Kyrae took a quick peek around a corner, and saw a quartet of gray knife-wielding lizards wearing rags of fur approaching rapidly -- one of them had glowing yellow eyes, possibly an LLC-carrier?
Carmine wanted to try out the C4-arrows, but they weren't sure that they'd come through the portal okay. Before leaving, they'd been informed that attempting to make C4-bullets had been a dud, as the portal had disarmed them just like normal gunpowder. So, as a backup, they set some normal C4 charges to collapse the catwalk, on a tripwire. If THAT didn't work, they'd have to just fight the things.
The enemies never came around the corner, though. JT decided he didn't really want to try to disarm his own booby trap ("I had to take an oath when I learned how to set the things that I'd never, ever, try to disarm them. It's just not safe.") so they left it there, with a mental note not to walk that direction.
They then went to a library Nuki had found. Like many worlds, the language on this world seemed to be every langauge they knew from home (or at least, that Nuki knew) mixed up with no apparent rhyme or reason. The books were also mixed up with no apparent rhyme or reason. While Kyrae guarded the door, Nuki and Carmine started examining the books, and JT searched around looking for something like a card catalog.
Instead, he found a map, although he couldn't figure out how to use it (it was basically Mapquest, in a hodgepodge of languages). Before he could come back and get Nuki, there was an explosion outside. Someone had set off the booby trap!
So they ran outside, and saw a bunch of TAN lizards with guns, who immediately attacked them. The C4 arrows *did* work, which is a good thing, as otherwise they'd have been cut down, since their next best weapons were things like cutlasses and spears. As it was, everyone was wounded, which meant the environment suits were now worthles.
Carmine healed everyone, including herself (although no one remembered when she'd been shot, not even her), then collapsed in apparent exhaustion. JT dragged her back into the library to try to figure out what was wrong with her, but while he was a biologist, he wasn't a doctor, so when he found the seeming poison running through her bloodstream, he was able to identify that she must have picked it up on the dark world, and observe that it was destroying her cells, but he had no idea how to get it out of her.
Worse, when he pulled out the laptop to open a portal home to take her to see a doctor, the return device had taken a bullet. He wasn't sure how THAT had happened, either, since he'd never been shot in the back. But, once again, they were trapped, although this time it looked like only the screen was broken, so it might be fixable. Maybe.
After looting the lizard who hadn't been blown over the edge of the catwalk, Nuki searched the map for anything like a hospital. The closest he could find was a 'repair kit' across the street -- it didn't specify that it repaired machines specifically, unlike all the other similar listings. So, figuring that it was better than nothing, Nuki and JT carried Carmine over to it, while Kyrae stood guard with the stolen assault rifle.
The repair kit was a room full of broken junk, with a little robot slowly and haphazardly fixing things. Nuki asked it to report its status, so it read off the things it was fixing and how close it was to completing repairs. "Autodoc 97%" was the one that got their attention. "How long would it take to fix the autodoc?" "The remaining components have not yet been retrieved from the source world."
They decided to let the autodoc work on Carmine anyway, though, lacking any other options, considering their general lack of medical know-how and Carmine's rapidly deteriorating condition. The machine immediately started repairing her feathers, working quickly and methodically, but... well, it was going to take a while.
So they killed some time doing research. Kyrae mostly just stood guard over Carmine, while Nuki played with the map (locating the 'Central Central Intelligence' dome that came up searching for 'weapons', a 'transportation' room that came up searching for 'dimensional portals', and a 'Terry Repair' shop about six miles away searching for 'laptop repair') and JT dissected the dead tan lizard (discovering nothing of note -- the lizards seemed to be utterly ordinary, lacking everything halfway complicated that the Nimune possessed).
They also figured out that the laptop-sized boxes they'd stolen from the warehouse actually had laptops inside. In various languages, operating systems, and states of repair. They didn't seem really compatible with their own laptop, though -- the ports were all different, at least.
Eventually, they spotted three gray lizards skulking about, and decided to follow them and see what they were up to. Leaving Carmine behind was a risk, but there was no reason to think the people wandering around the city would have any reason to disturb the repair room, so as long as they didn't go too far...
Despite the fact that the Nimune were flying and the gray lizards were walking, slowly, they found it hard to keep up. They lizards did have a head start -- they found another dead Tan lizard just after setting out, with another gun etc, which they had to scavenge -- but not THAT much of one. Still, somehow, it took them until they reached the 'Terry Repair' shop to catch up. The lizards opened the door and went inside.
Nuki opened the door to follow them, but that finally got their attention. The party was all invisible, but one of the lizards came to the door and blasted the ENTIRE STREET with a wave of magical fire... dispelling the invisibility, as it started combat.
JT cut down the fire-spewer with the assault rifle -- it felt good to be using real weapons for a change, that actually killed their targets when you hit them! -- but the other mage still inside put up a barrier that stopped bullets, and after ejecting Kyrae from the general area (he ended up slumped against another building a block away) stepped through a green portal and escaped, closing it behind him. Leaving the party alone with one last lizard, the now-closed portal device, and a ticking bomb.
The lizard, at least, was easy to deal with. JT warily approached the bomb and looked it over. "Um, that's a nuke." "We'd better run!" Nuki said. "You can't run from a nuke, on foot, in five minutes. We'll have to disarm it somehow. Eheh."
While JT tried to work up the nerve to actually try that, Nuki started frantically hitting buttons on the portal device, trying to open a portal to anywhere so that (presumably) someone else could get themselves blown up instead of them. Of course, he forgot about the portal display, or perhaps thought that THIS device didn't have that problem since they'd seen no sign of it when the lizards opened the portal...
The good news was that JT and Nuki managed to leap out the door before the portal sent out its gouts of fire, that burst through various parts of the building, leaving huge steaming gaps. The bad news was that the pyrotechnics vaporized the nuclear bomb. As in 'converted into vapor'. JT hurriedly put on his breathing mask, but the geiger counter was already chattering off the scale. They were DOOMED.
So, they ditched all their equipment, and started looking around frantically for some source of non-poisonous water. JT discovered that 'barrier' seemed to
block radiation as well as magic, so he cast it on the three of them so they wouldn't take *further* damage, at least... then they headed back to the library to see if the map had any sign of water. If they were to have any chance of surviving they'd need to clean out their systems quickly.
When they got there, they found Carmine awake again. The autodoc had, indeed, repaired her. "I feel wonderful, in fact! Why are you all naked?"
"We were horribly irradiated by a nuclear bomb not exploding."
"Oh. How much radiation did you take?"
"It was off the scale. We were ten feet from it when the portal converted it to vapor."
"Right... then you're probably all dead. You'll know in an hour or so, when the radiation burns start showing up..."
Luckily, however, they had a mostly-working autodoc. It was a bit close for Kyrae (who insisted on going last), but the autodoc only took about an hour to remove and repair the radiation damage for each person, and they all pulled through. They also found a fruit-juice warehouse nearby, which had jalapeno juice and wine. Kyrae got very very drunk waiting for his turn.
"We are SO taking this autodoc with us when we go back. Assuming we can ever go back." Kyrae took a longer look at the laptop, and decided that he could probably jury-rig one of their PDAs to read the memory and run the software and hardware needed to open a portal. The laptop itself was toast, though.
And of course, they were out most of their equipment and samples. And clothing.
last session next session
