Invaders Must Die (Ch. 3b: Day 1, pt. VI)

psikeout · Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2011 5:56 pm

There were just so many of the things. Rock had tried to buy more time for Jam to collect herself after letting loose such an electrical storm, but within seconds, opposition was bearing down on their faces, and more extreme measures became necessary.

Throwing all caution and preservation of equipment to the wind, the white primate did what was necessary to hold their ground for just a little longer. His left arm couldn't move very well, but he had the weakest of hand function; holding his pistol at just above hip height, he hooked his thumb through the trigger guard, gripped the gun strangely, and started bump-firing, using the semi-automatic weapon's recoil to simulate a machinegun-like spray at a blazing 600RPM. The entire hallway reverberated with the swirling torrent of firepower he created, and lit up brighter than when the lights had been working. He strode forward slowly and indiscriminately weaved his sights around like some kind of gangster with a tommygun. Heat from the blasts distorted the air; debris, shrapnel, and components flew; sparks rained from conduits and lighting fixtures; a fire extinguisher caught in the crossfire burst violently. It became an utter warzone.

Needless to say, this kind of display was something he could only do once, and not for long. It left his weapon painful to hold after just a few seconds, and, ninety rounds later, with a flash, a noisy KZZRT, and a puff of eye-watering smoke reeking of an electrical fire, it utterly refused to accept any further punishment. The gunman quickly jammed it back in its holster (with some grimace for its burning warmth), unsheathed his knife, and lowered and braced himself for the first wave of attacks of the remaining onslaught.

NPC · Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2011 8:46 pm

The onslaught of Rock's firing did its intended task well. Already the body count for the receiving end for their defense was beginning to pile up, and more in a literal sense. As more of the robots met cruel ends, bits of their heads and torsos flying everywhere in possibly the goriest scene imaginable from a machine's eyes, their lifeless figures began to create a layer of strewn metal parts across the corridor.

There was a brief, smoldering, smoking silence as the group seemed to reorganize itself from the carnage. Some of the robots were forced to dig out of the mass of bodies now on the floor, the multi-colored eyes glowing all the way down the hall as they merged into one group. Just as they started their quick paced march forward, another variety of eyes appeared even farther down the corridor, partnered with a new crescendo of running footsteps.

A second wave was approaching before the first was even completely destroyed.

The robots leaped over their now-dead partners with ease, charging straight towards the primates, a few standard humanoids launching themselves straight at them right away, eyes glowing bright.

Mie · Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2011 12:57 am

Too many things happened at once. She'd started to apologize for inadvertently (albeit indirectly) shooting at them both, and with Rock's own gun, to boot, but found one, an absence of breath, two an absence of time, and three, that with the mechanical cavalry charging onto the scene, she was in fact, not sorry to have added more indiscriminate fire to the chaos.

Though subtly panting with fatigue, she forced another round of surges through her crackling field, but found them to be, at best, shadows of their former potency. She was frustrated, but willing to continue banging the same drum out of sheer stubbornness alone, until she noticed her less than pristine comrade give ranged assault up as a lost cause; with an arid gulp, Jam dropped into a wide, firm stance in the same motion that her shield fell around her, immediately providing a much needed, but brief ease of her burden. It was enough to get a breath, though, and that was all she needed.

The air about her grew frenzied with a charge, erupting in violently erratic bursts of sparks, centralized predominantly around her lower arms, as she drew a slow, measured breath in through her nostrils. Comparable only to a very angry pitcher, the frizzy-furred simian lobbed a spitting ball of lightning right into the second wave's spearhead with an almost primal grunt, before pouncing forward electric fists flying.

In barely a blink, the eye had passed, and the storm resumed with a vengeance. Precisely whose storm it was, however, remained to be seen.

psikeout · Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2011 1:45 am

Rock was mostly a fistfighter. He had a whole separate repertoire of close combat techniques he very seldom employed, however. In truth, these were things that he had learned and practiced almost solely for the purpose of showing off and impressing girls some years back. (He really was that brand of ass; to him, in his youth, bloodying people up in a flashy way was a perfectly valid way to try to pick up chicks.)

In an incredibly showy opening, knife in reverse grip, he right-hooked the first robot to leap at him with the blade, followed through into a tight-and-fast 540 tornado kick through the next target in line, landed, stopped abruptly, and rolled backwards while hooking another robot from underneath with his tail; using the torque of his own body, he lashed it through the air as if a whip straight into the ground behind him, then side kicked it backwards with a crushing boot as he stood, then overhead stabbed another inbound hostile with the burning, glowing plasma cutter knife. All that was just a little over three seconds' worth of movement, too.

It was actually kind of insane to watch; he had basically flipped some mental switch and gone from no-nonsense streetfighter to all-out trick-fighter, flashing out more spinkicks and aerials than a wire-fu movie. It was only made possible and practical because he was dealing with a wall of blindly-tackling, not-terribly-bright, surprisingly-lightweight robots, but it was still something to behold.

And then reality set in.

Sometime around his fourth spinning kick, his head buzzed in protest. It would have probably done this without gratuitous head trauma, all whirling about considered, but the presence injury made it about ten times more disorienting and painful than it normally would have been, and he soon found himself sprawled and sliding across the floor under one of the kamikaze robots, caught solidly in a mechanized headbutt.

He hurled it off, but his head was already swirling, vision pulsating with the multicolored sparkles of overexertion. (Yes, seeing stars is a real phenomenon, and it doesn't require an anvil and a cartoon rabbit to happen.) Another pair of the machines pretty blatantly clobbered the primate as he tried to get up, and sent him scrambling backwards unsteadily on hand and feet. He got upright and in full motion again just in time to narrowly avoid becoming the victim of a would-be robo dogpile, and backpedaled a few staggering steps for breathing room.

"Fall back, s'too many," he huffed breathlessly, and narrowly juked out of the way of another attacker.

If Jam was able to get loose along with him, he'd start sprinting back toward the stairs they had come from.

"We gotta go make sure these things aren't pullin' Morrison's head off..."

Yes, it was important to keep the astrophysicist alive. While she was the one who had gone seeking whatever bizarre power got them into this mess in the first place, she was also the best hope for getting them back, like it or not.

NPC · Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2011 3:15 pm

As circuitry and metal went flying as Rock threw the beat down on the incoming hostiles, Jam's thrown sphere of electricity rammed successfully into the next charging group effectively, a few more robots meeting a sudden end. But compared to the casualties of her last pulse attack, it didn't do too much, just too many of the things coming forward at once. Soon enough, the hall was filled again, despite the amount they had already successfully taken down. In fact, Rock's plan of retreat was coming out to be the smartest option.

Until movement was seen above, and something suddenly fell right into their intended exit path.

The spider-like robot landed squarely on all its feet, six joints bending to hold its somewhat higher weight than the others. Gaping slashes in the ceiling marked how it managed to get so far, four of its legs ending in almost solid points, the last two circular and providing balance.

It skittered forward with barely a sound as its arm outstretched to swipe at Rock with a grabbing motion, fingers grasping for any sort of hold on his body. Either way, whether it succeeded in hanging onto him or not, a circular mechanism on its chest began to glow with a green hue, and was growing brighter by the second. It wouldn't be long before the monkey learned what the actual affect of such a device would be.

Meanwhile, the horde continued to rush forward, a few diving without hesitation towards Jam.

psikeout · Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2011 3:53 pm

Rock charged the thing head-on. In yet another move contrary to his usual nature, he was extremely indirect; dropping suddenly, he landed on his back, slid between its multitudinous legs and groping arms in the blink of an eye at automobile-like speeds that would have flat out road-rashed him if not for his white (now more scuffed-grey) fur, and popped back into full gait. He didn't even take a cut at it with his knife, as he was going much too fast for it to have effectively seared anything. Instead, he just made for the stairwell door like a bat outta hell.

Mie · Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2011 4:46 pm

Jam didn't need to be told twice that it was time to take their leave, good reason or not; quite frankly, she'd expended what felt like enough energy to power a theme park light parade for a month, and with the number of hostiles still present (see: more than when she started), the characteristically tenacious teen could have really just laid down on the floor and napped... provided it wasn't crawling with gigantic mechanical bedbugs. With that shudder-inducingly disturbing thought fueling her second wind, she gave one last vindictive mule kick backwards, and fell in line behind Rock as if by muscle memory.

She was pretty close on him, too, when he ran into (and subsequently under) his would-have-been roadblock, and that only left one route for her to follow. Yup, up and over, Jam leapfrogged over the mecha-spider's body with both hands, delivering a surprisingly strong, and particularly nasty, dual-palmed parting shock just as something to remember her by. Or not.

She hit the ground running.

NPC · Posted: Thu Jul 28, 2011 12:08 am

The spider-bot gave a shudder as Jam's electrified hands grasped onto its upper body, but only a few sparks ran across its body. Looks like they had managed to discover another one of the electric-resistant types.

Now with its intended prey fleeing behind it, the multi-legged robot turned swiftly and scampered after them, its pointed limbs tapping on the metal floor. The green glow that now served as the brightest light in the hall coming from its peak now crackled with energy, and as it gave chase, its torso began to aim. When it appeared to find the pink primate in its sights and targeted, a sphere of light launched out of the mechanism, buzzing as it rocketed towards Jam.

The horde, in the meantime, continued onward, like a tsunami of metal and light. Unbeknownst to the two monkeys, a few of the humanoids were showing jolts of electricity, some even forming little spheres of the energy around them, although barely controlled and quite weak. There was even a couple that just fried their own selves at the attempt of mimicking the technique, but soon, there were at least a dozen pulling it off.

Mie · Posted: Thu Jul 28, 2011 12:35 am

With the majority of her attention dedicated to running, and what else beyond that dedicated to keeping hot on Rock's tail, Jam's unattended backside looked the perfect target. Even as quick as she was, there was really nowhere else for the shot to go in the quickly filling hall; the bright, buzzing orb sailed straight at her, and was only about two or three feet from its mark when its peculiar racket rose above the resonant chorus of multitudinous clanking, and drew the anterior simian's befuddled glance and subsequent double-take.

"...s**t."

The light slammed ineffectually into the newly reactivated shield with not even a second to spare, and rebounded back towards the sea of robotic imitators. ... Imitators. Both eyes flying wide open, Jam reallocated her efforts back to their getaway, pouring on the speed with an exaggerated swing of her arms as she pulled even with the whiter primate.

"We," she huffed with notable panic to her tone, staring resolutely straight ahead."We might have a huge... potentially damning problem."

psikeout · Posted: Thu Jul 28, 2011 12:53 am

"Here!"

Not having the luxury of time to respond to her concerns, he led her into the stairwell, and up it recklessly fast. It was just a short climb to where they were going; as soon as they got out on the second floor, he spun around, slapped his keycard through the reader, mashed a couple buttons, and...

*Fsshh-CLONK. Beep!*

... locked down the burly metal door with his security clearance.

And just to screw things up in the event the machines could find some way to override the system, he quickly stabbed his plasma cutter knife straight into one of the corners of the door—straight into one of the opening mechanisms.

"Blast the elevator console, hurry," he ordered hastily with a point to the nearby doors, covering all their bases. "Gotta stay movin'!"

The automatic door they had just disabled was heavy, and those robots (as he had noticed from having them pretty much all over him) were abnormally feather-light for their size, but that didn't mean they wouldn't be able to blast their way through with a little work, so time was of the essence.

Mie · Posted: Thu Jul 28, 2011 1:08 am

With an army of incompetent, albeit quick-learning, and disposable hers with a marked lack of self-preservation gunning for... she still didn't even know what -- just that she and the other monkey were in the way of it -- Rock's urging came as entirely unnecessary motivation. If Jam had wanted anything at all since setting foot on ARK, it was to be somewhere that was not seconds from death by rampaging mimicry.

Needless to say, her sparking, spitting, electrified fist was in the elevator console practically before the order was out, and they were off once again.

NPC · Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:39 pm

Time passed. The invasion continued.

The robot intruders were pulsing through the halls of the ARK now, or at least the area consisting of the survivors. Their purpose there? Still unknown. Had there been any casualties? Not yet; they only seemed determined on taking out hostiles or were just that horrid of finding any of the hiding colony members. Were they still coming? Of course. The supply of the bot-soldiers seemed limitless at the moment.

Meanwhile, a certain shuttle was approaching the personnel bay, the returning detectives having managed to leave the abandoned ship with haste. Yet, instead of completely avoiding untimely deaths, it appeared they would be thrown right back into the fire. From the shuttle's limited windows, the group could easily make out that the neighboring cargo bays doors had been wrenched open to allow about twenty feet of width to be open to the cold space. A few pieces of unused equipment flew out every few seconds as the sudden change in pressurization shot them out. However, there was some other, darkened activity occurring beyond the crack, but difficult to make out.

This didn't hinder their landing, the shuttle managing to send a signal to the personnel bay, letting the doors open. Fortunately, the bay was free of whatever had managed to cause the damage to the nearby cargo one. Soon, the area was shut tight and filled with oxygen, allowing the crew to disembark from the shuttle.

The sound of a light alarm was not comforting, however...

psikeout · Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2011 2:49 am

Juke was doing a lot better by the time they got back to the hangar. In fact, maybe a little too well.

"Heh. Heh. Wow. I can't even feel it."

The bat, sitting near one of the windows in the bridge, had gotten a little first aid attention back aboard the ship, mostly consisting of a nice dose of foaming coagulant. That meant that where there should have been a big, nasty hole in his yellow and black leather vest (he had since shed his spacesuit), there was instead a rubbery, neon cyan gel—one that he found limitless amusement in poking.

"Oh. Oh wow," he babbled pointlessly in that grungy, nasally voice of his. Perhaps there was some slight blood loss making him delirious. "When I look really close? Like, really close? I can almost see my guts. It's like havin' a little porthole for my crrraaap—"

No, he didn't mean that the way it came out. That was actually just him noticing the damage done to the colony.

"Th'heck didjoo people do to this place?" he blurted, and shuffled off to be ready to disembark as soon as they landed. It probably wasn't the best idea to let him lead the landing party at this point, but he nonetheless strove to make himself the first one down the ramp, for whatever silly, injury-high reason.

Kazz · Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2011 3:53 am

It seemed that a low "great" was becoming something of Rodolf's catchphrase, as it got muttered yet again underneath the dizzy rambling of their... patient-cargo-ward. The unicorn grabbed a hold of the back of Juke's vest ("Try not to get yourself any more injured than you are.") in an attempt to avoid the bat running forward and causing more trouble. Whether or not it actually subdued the bat at all was a moot point as he moved past and stepped onto the ramp, cautiously taking a look around before pressing on.

Between the lovely sound of an alarm and the sight they had passed on their way in -- out of the frying pan and into the fire (though he noted, inwardly, that there were significantly fewer self-destruct functions on the ARK proper). Rodolf's eyes slid halfway down, gracing his unicorn-y visage with a wholly unimpressed expression. He cast a glance over his shoulder to the rest of the shuttle's crew. "Stay alert and try not to die," Rodolf said in an even, flat tone.

Such an encouraging leaderly type Rodolf was.

Sheff · Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2011 12:30 pm

Geoff's reaction to the damage that greeted them on the ARK was almost a mimic of that to the unicorn, and with a small roll of the shoulders and stretching of the neck, he began to prepare for whatever hostile robot or enemy that may be waiting for them within the colony. The one robot they'd encountered back on the abandoned ship was simple to take down with the size of their group, but whatever managed to bust into the ARK was sizable... or maybe just numerous in numbers. Guess they would find out.

"I'm a bit more worried about whoever is already in there, to be honest," he mentioned to the unicorn as he stepped out right after him, his eyes at full alert.

"But yeah, no one go doing anything idiotic."

There may or may not have been a questionable stare thrown Juke's way.

Invaders Must Die (Ch. 3b: Day 1, pt. VI)

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