Campaign
"That woman needs assistance!
Of the drugs kind!"
Summon painkillers - Tylenol or something like that - and administer a dose or twelve to her. Whatever the helpful label says.
Also shoot some newspapers and duct tape at Nikolai.
You summon a small glass jar filled with tiny white spheres that glow with a faint yellow light.
Hmmm... No label... Guess you're going to have to use your medical knowledge!
You open the jar, empty its contents in your hand and shove it down the woman's throat. There! Good as new!
Aaahhh, this brings back memories of your
days as a surgeon...Well, no time to reminisce, there are more lives that need saving!
"Help please? My leg is broken."Like this man! This man clearly needs your medical expertise!
Oh. Here, I'll help.Hmmm... This is clearly a case of brokenboneitis. And there is only one way to make that better. A highly concentrated dose of Alan's adhesionification actualiser! That will keep his bones from flying away.
A few seconds later, the man's brokenboneitis is cured. Or at least it isn't visible anymore, because the man is buried under large amounts of sticky tape. But you don't bother yourself with such technicalities! You focus on the important things! You save lives!
Nikolai, Campaign
"Help please? My leg is broken."
Step 1: Splint my leg with the newspaper and tape. Keep any extra tape.
Step 2: Try to obtain painkillers.
Step 3: Go loot the breastplate and the sword and scabbard. Also check his pockets for anything worth taking.
Step 4: Go loot that golden pendant, it might be magic. Also check her pockets for usable stuff.
Step 5: Cauterize the ends of those tentacles in my bag, so they stop leaking everywhere.
Step 6: Bash the breastplate with a rock until it is wearable.
Well, your leg is sort-of splinted now. Along with the rest of your body.
With some effort, wiggling and slight tearing of your clothes, you finally manage to free yourself from the sticky grip of Alan's "help".
That done, you half-crawl half-hobble to the now burning man and loot his sword and sheath. It looks like a gladius. Its quality is very good, although it appears as if it has either been misused or not maintained properly for a while, since its edges have become slightly blunt and dented, one more so than the other. You can also see traces of somewhat fresh blood on it.
The breastplate is a bit harder to remove from the body, mostly because it has been partially crushed and bent into it and said body is now on fire. Still, with some effort, you manage to remove it and avoid getting burnt in the process. The straps keeping it in place are missing, so that makes removing it slightly easier.
Finally, you stick the tentacles at the end of your newly acquired sword and hold them over the burning corpse in what would be the weirder take on camp-fire activities. Hmm... Wonder if those tentacles taste like chicken...
"It... it was like a flash of light. Something very intense and hot. You've already seen my burns. I would strongly advise against going back there unless you have some kind of blast shield."
He watched as the rest of the team attacked the new humanoids, himself preparing his focus again in case he needed to draw up a quick defense.
After they were done fighting, he went up to check the humanoids.
"Let's try to aid them. We'll need to find out what those yellow octopi are, but for now let's see if we can help these two out"
I wonder if those octopi are some form of Shadow... their yellow color seems to suggest otherwise, but then again, this is an entirely different multiverse. Maybe Shadows appear differently here.
I'll definitely have to see if that is true. If so, this is a battlefield that I'm familiar with already.
Check the humanoids and determine if they're still alive or not. If at least one of them is, go ahead and see if I can provide some basic treatment with what I have. If not, go ahead and collect the weapons and stow them away for now. Also, examine the tentancles and the octopi - carefully. What can I ascertain from them?
You don't need more than a look to deduce that the mummified man that is currently on fire is dead or at least extremely good at playing dead. The woman... well, she's warm and her limbs are flexible, her body doesn't feel dead... Or more accurately, it doesn't feel like it has been dead a long time. But she doesn't have a pulse, she's not breathing and she is not moving. Seeing as even if there was any hope of resuscitating her, you lack the equipment to do so, I assume you are going to give up and not perform CPR in the hopes of inducing some sort of
Lazarus syndrome.
See below for Ike's dissection results.
Campaign, Ike!
"That settles it! I need an axe!"
There's doors that respond to touch and behave like funny glass bubbles. Behind the one to the left is what can best be described as a dark spider singularity. It seems to mean us harm, which is further evidence of its spidery nature. It has already given Jesus a fire and shockwave-based makeover. Also, the shadows vibrate and absorb sound at the same time.
Jesus smells okay, in other news.
River increasingly reminds me of Ted.
Yellow land octopuses are apparently present and possibly quite dangerous!
Update: yellow land octopuses aren't so bad when you stab them in the center of mass repeatedly and firmly!
The room on the right has a set of four large eggs, surrounded by eight sizable benches and eight not-so-large eggs.
Clearly whoever built this place has a strange fascination with the number four, or multiples of four. This either completely rules out or utterly confirms the involvement of the Nipponese.
I am starting to get slight flashbacks to the start of the previous mission!
Yellow land octopuses can become invisible! Or maybe there's a breed or species of invisible land octopus! May require some breeding to get a clearer picture of their relation. Still yellow on the inside, though! In addition, they appear capable of making mortal mindslaves without any trouble at all.
In addition, people live here. Or humanoids, at least. They seem to have been subjugated by the yellow land octopuses, or octopodes. One's a nice red and purple lady, and the other one's dead as a doorknob.
Compare the yellow land octopus, invisible yellow land octopus and mind-controlling yellow land octopus anatomically, based on my general knowledge of their internal components attained by repeated knife mutilation and part handling.
Also, check what's happening outside. There still octopus-dominated people around, or did they disappear entirely?
Well, the creatures' anatomy is the same. Just a small central part filled with organs with a large number of very thin and long but surprisingly strong tentacles sprouting out of it.
Slicing a tentacle in half, you discover that they lack muscles, which kinda begs the question of how they managed to move them in the first place. Instead, they are composed of four tubes (two large and two small) arrayed around a central part that feels and looks like very flexible cartilage. Around those tubes are very small, almost invisible clusters of black things, (some sort of organ, probably) that correspond with very small dimples on the outside. Maybe they emit something from there? Or maybe it's some sort of sensory organ? Or maybe it's used for camouflage? Or communication? Who knows. The area between the tubes and the skin of the creature feels very mushy and soft, breaking apart easily.
With careful observation, you notice that when the tendril twists, a large number of very small spikes are pushed out of its skin on the inside of the curve. You can't discern whether this is meant to inject something like microneedles or if it is just a means to grapple things and achieve better friction.
A quick inspection of the place the creature wrapped its tendrils around your arm reveals very tiny yellow needle-like things stuck in your skin, although none of them have managed to penetrate it.
An inspection of Nikolai reveals something similar. The fact that his skin has become more red around that area and has started to bruise prevented you from noticing it with casual observation, but he appears to have very tiny holes around the places the creature wrapped its tentacles around him, some of them bleeding slightly. Hopefully he won't start turning into any sort of octoman.
After that, you move to the central part of the creature. A thing of note is that it lacks any sort of visible mouth, eyes, nose, means of excretion or any of the other things you'd expect the central part of a creature to posses.
A large section of the central part of the creature is composed of two sacks, one larger, containing that yellow goo (or white with a yellowish tint in the case of the later ones) and the other containing a black substance. Each of them is connected to the tubes that compose the greater part of the creature's tendrils, the black with the smaller ones and the brighter one with the larger one. The rest of their insides are filled with organs, although you can't tell exactly what they do. They have some connections between them, but they don't reveal much. Curiously, while you can identify many organs connected to the bright tubes, none of them are (visibly) connected to the dark ones.
Their insides don't smell so good, especially the ones of the creatures you encountered earlier. Smell like rotten and oil. Now that you think about it, the earlier creatures looked far worse than the later ones. The later ones were more of a whitish yellow than pure yellow, they were slightly larger and their internal organs were in much better shape.
As for what's going on outside, a quick look shows that there is nothing out there. At least nothing that looks living. Even the remains of the creature you and Nikolai killed are gone. You wait until a lightning bolt passes overhead and lights up the surrounding area, but even then, you don't see anything. Just a dead windy rock out there.
Irine, Campaign
I gather all the remaining flames into an elevated sphere, leaving it up over our heads where it is available but not dangerous to anyone.
"It... it was like a flash of light. Something very intense and hot. You've already seen my burns. I would strongly advise against going back there unless you have some kind of blast shield."
He watched as the rest of the team attacked the new humanoids, himself preparing his focus again in case he needed to draw up a quick defense.
After they were done fighting, he went up to check the humanoids.
"Let's try to aid them. We'll need to find out what those yellow octopi are, but for now let's see if we can help these two out"
"Ok..."
I move forward to the female and check for a pulse
If I don't find a pulse:
"I think she's dead."
look over her pendant before picking it up and turning to face Zech, inspecting his burns and making sure he's going to be ok.
Once River shows up, go over to him and show him the pendant, explaining to him what happened here as best as I can before asking:"Do you recognize this? I found it on her" as I point to indicate the female body
You keep your fire and the fire coming from the burning body in the small domes above the hallway, providing helpful illumination to the people there.
You make your way to the body of the woman and like Zechariah before you, you too find no pulse. You carefully remove her pendant,
a golden circle with wavy lines joining each other near its top. There's nothing extraordinary about it, just a golden pendant, still warm from the woman's body heat or maybe from your fire attack.
Zech... well, it would probably be best if River healed him at this point, given that he has not bandaged his burns and yet he is helping Ike dissect those creatures, a task that is probably not very sanitary when done unprotected and with open wounds.
River comes through the northern door after a while with Their behind him and quickly makes his way towards you and the rest of the team. He looks much better than before, no longer tired, the burns on his hands healed.
You explain to him what has happened from the moment you got out of the rod room as best as you can. While you do so, he looks around inspecting his surroundings, his eyes turning black.
When you're done, you show him the pendant and ask your question. He cocks his head to the side.
"I do not know what this is."He leans forward and downwards a bit to look at it better.
"Small imperfections in its structure. More visible on the lower part. Small cut near the bottom. Very faint magical residue in it. Constructed with mundane means. Maybe with the assistance of magic or from magical materials. Or maybe the magic was used as a sort of identifying mark. Or there was an enchantment on it that the Parasites destroyed. Drag marks spread equally around it. Probably normal wear. Meaning it is old. Unless it was inserted into a rigid slot when not worn."After finishing his examination, his eyes return to normal and he stands up to face you again.
"That's all I can tell you about it. You should keep it. It is worth investigating. If we can not discover something about it or if it is purely decorative, then perhaps it could be used to trade. Humans tend to think gold is valuable for some reason."He starts walking towards the woman.
"She can tell us more. More information before we decide what to do next is better."He grabs her limp body by the neck with one hand, lifts her and starts dragging her with him towards a nearby pillar.
"Good thing she is intact."He turns to address all of you as he hides behind the pillar with her.
"Do not look at what I am about to do."
Poll
14 (41.2%)
Author
Topic: Special People: Mechanical Syndrome (Read 1078278 times)