The First Tremulous RP: A Simple Insertion

[Kaleo]

A Simple Insertion

by Terrible North Wind, Professional Data Analyst and Project Deployment Administrator, Neano Two's Old Moon, OSSZ

It should have been a simple mission. Get in, place a node or two, start printing Ked clones, and get the hell out. Yeah. Sure. Want to buy a planetoid in Brindus?

There were nine of us on the dropboat: two Tremblers to control the clones - a kid called Prime and some girl known as Shin; a couple of autonomous CoKA commandos - Jed and Ned; a crazed insertion team leader they called Gunny - what a fuck-up; an over-stimmed bonepiece-wearin' stiff from Corporate Investor Media Relations - the jackoff's name was Oberreiter, but we all called him Simmer; the drunkest dropboat pilot in the whole Merc fleet - some washed-up old Guilderguide who called himself Slim (that fat fuck); and the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life - a Dr. Johae Ha, who just happened to be our medical officer. Oh yeah, and me, of course. Where would those idiots be without a drone to wipe their asses and flush their poopies?

The jumpship had brought us here from Sirius - at least the systems that were close to Firststar were being swept clear of the menace. I think the Guilderguides messed up the alignment, because it took nine jumps to get here, and we only ended up a couple of systems away. But they swore the job was important. Some big deal, but only the jackoff from HR could unseal our orders, and then only a layer at a time. We'd have to reach a certain waypoint at a certain time, and then we could get the next set of instructions, and continue. If we didn't make a waypoint in time, we'd have to abort. Yeah, that's what I want to do: Start a mission, and then drop it and run, leaving lots of enemies alive to shoot at my back. Abort? Fuck that. Kill 'em all, and let the mop-up crew sort the carcasses.

I had a bad feeling when Simmer showed up, and told us the deal. I mean, that's my job. HQ was really gonna keep the drone in the dark, just like one of these dunderheaded pinkskins? First Gunny tries to tell me what to do, and then Simmer tells him to shut up, and starts telling us all that he's in charge, that our orders are secret, and that even he doesn't know what they are.

"Wait a minute," I said. "I thought the gig was just to place a couple of nodes, and get the hell out."

"Those were our orders up until we disengaged from the jumpship. Now that we're in orbit I've got different orders."

"Oh, yeah?" asked Gunny. "And what would those be?"

It was just the three of us. We were in the chart room. The others were all in harnesses, ready for the drop.

Slim called back from the cockpit. "Hey, this is a fucking dropboat, not a fucking spaceship, boys. You wanna hurry it up back there? We're decaying fast, and I've really got to take a piss."

"You're decaying fast, you fat fuck," said Gunny, but it was partially muffled by the sound of Simmer irising the hatch.

So was the sound of Slim yelling, "Fuck you, Gunny." That was OK. It wasn't as if we hadn't heard it a thousand times before. They'd argued the whole way out.

"Look, as far as I can tell you, we've got a new mission," said Simmer.

"So you say," answered Gunny. "As insertion team leader, I at least need to know what the fuck we're actually supposed to do down there."

"I can tell you this much," replied Simmer. "We're supposed to find something called the Ãœbergeist and destroy it."

"You mean the Overmind," I said.

"No, drone, I know what an Overmind is. This is the Overmind that controls all of the Overminds in this sector."

"Get the fuck out of here-" Gunny began, and then we were all thrown against the bulkhead.

"Oh, shit!" I heard Slim say from the cockpit, "that can't be good."

"What the hell is going on?" roared Gunny, scrambling over Simmer to retract the hatch.

"Gunny-" said Slim, and he sounded commandingly calm.

It stopped Gunny in his tracks. "What?" he said.

"You have exactly two seconds to strap in."

He was wrong. We didn't even have one second.

And then we were falling. Burning in. Crashing planetward. A screaming meteorite filled with eight screaming pinkskins. And one pissed-off drone. Stupid Humans. I couldn't wait to retire. What the hell was I doing out here with these idiots? I should never have taken this gig. I swore right then that if I survived I was finally gonna buy that place on Plowshare, and raise pippo-herding lion-dogs. If I survived.

Yeah, the thing about this gig? This gig sucked.


Ok. Here's the deal:

Some basic RPing rules:
1) No god-moding or meta-gaming. God-modding is when you are so powerful you cannot be killed and you can kill everything in a single hit, and meta-gaming is where your character knows things that you may know, but that they could never possibly know.
2) A descent grasp of the English language. We have to be able to understand you, and RPing is essentially one big collaborative novelette.
3) Make your character believable. Tremulous isn't a fantasy game, nor is it a high-sci-fi game (like WH40K for example), it's realistic sci-fi, so make your characters realistic.
4) Make your characters be more than just a pussy standing around waiting for nothing to happen. Do something with your lives.
5) No sexual content. Implied sex is fine, but minors frequent these forums, so we gotta keep it PG13.
6) All out of character text (OOC) must be placed in double brackets, ((like so)). And in fact, where possible, please keep it in the OOC thread.
7) Finally, keep the swearing to an acceptable level. Don't go over the top with it.


Characters

Prime, an Empath from the CoY Scout Corps

Something of a reactionary recidivist, Prime, a young man from Firststar system, is an Empath with the NZP's EKSTECY program who has been conscripted into the Council of Youth's clone control squadron. He insists that not only is he of Ur-Welt lineage, that he is completely Unmodified. He even surgically removed the bonepiece from his own head, and wears an ancient Stimsen StickTM instead. He has been redeployed to the Extraordinary Rendition Center on Multa several times for disciplinary action, but appears to have a patron among the Rigel-Kentish Firelords who has been able to repeatedly secure his release. Although he appears to be a young man of Rock Hopper blood, there are those who claim he is far older, even some who swear that he is a Guilderguide spy, sent to infiltrate the New Zion Project, and the secret goings-on in the Fractal Zion Cluster.

Shin, an Empath from the Young Guilderguide Girls

Shin is a young woman, too old really to be called a girl anymore. She met Prime when they were both at the ERC on Multa. He removed the bonepiece from her maxilla, and fitted her with an exoware Stimsen WearablesTM rig. There are those who say that they are lovers, while those who know both of them say that the relationship is much more like brother and sister. With eggplant-colored hair and several nodal piercings, Shin is not completely Unmodified, but she does say that it "just feels good to get Haos Redro the fuck out of my head." When not controlling several CoKA units at once, she enjoys covering the crew with outlandish henna tattoos in indecipherable magickal scribblings, and kicking anyone's ass who looks sideways at Prime. She used to be a gallery girl for GearUP 3nd0w4r3zTM, and before that she peddled pr0nstix and bootleg vvd's in Old Neopolis. She says the Guilderguides Girls saved her life. She says she's not completely Unmodded, and although she's not completely Original, she's pretty sure she's a Master Dub.

Jed & Ned

Jed and Ned, The CoKA Commandos, have been around for as long as anybody can remember. They were two of the original Automat Units, and even survived a metatemporal insertion into the Fire-bat Eradication Wars. Since they both look exactly like Ked, it's really hard to tell them apart, but anyone who knows them well knows that Ned can't pronounce the letter "J", and continually calls Jed "Zed". Just to mess with Prime, they also like to claim that they are completely Original and Unmodified, and often argue loudly about which of them is actually the Real Ked Ambrit, while disclaiming the other to be a mere copy, and a poor one at that. It's quite possible that they are more than just friends and comrades, but that's just one drone's opinion.

Master Gunnery Sergeant McMaster "Gunny" Cordex MacDunwright

Gunny is a hardened battle veteran, a fully licensed and registered duplicate of his late, beloved clone-father Brevet-Major General McMaster "Iron Balls" Dexrod MacDunwright. There are those who say that Gunny will never measure up to the old man, but he knows that he will, or die trying. And if he dies, he's got a Nine Lives clause in his re-enlistment orders that will let the Merc Militia make up to ten new copies of whatever remains of him they can find. One, of course, will be purely for archival purposes, to be buried next to the remains of his sainted sire, in the ancestral Hall of the Dunwright Sons, on the world of their forefathers, the martial society of the planet Swordsmith.

Jesu-Esau "Simmer" Oberreiter

Simmer has been with Corporate Investor Media Relations since Haos Redro got booted out of the Pink Corridor, and forced to instead pursue ventures in the New Far South. This arthrosaur infestation has really gotten to be a big pain in the ass. Frankly, he's sick of it. I mean, isn't there some kind of product or service that these reptilian bugs could be buying from HR, instead of all this money spent on killing? Oh well, at least he had the foresight to be heavily invested in Tumbo stock. Who cares about the fate of the omniverse? As long as they keep making Mass Drivers and Luci Cannons, he can continue to have three lovers in different systems, each a jump away from the next, never guessing of each other's existence. And since they are all creature-people - "furries" - of the Unvanquished megaclan, his boss back at Corporate never better find out, either. If anybody knew he was a freak-fucker, he'd wake up in a hanging cage on Multa, without so much as a Neopolitan tritium-thaler in his accounts. It made him gassy - and turgid - just thinking about it.

Fractopolis Fats "Slim" Dirgebottom

Fractopolis Fats "Slim" Dirgebottom is a low-res dub of the Original Fractopolis Fats Dirgebottom, who used to make his living in a dupeshow, a traveling snake-oil carnival of duplicated flesh, various dubs and dupes of famous people jumping around the OSSZ, playing lookalike for the rururban rubes of Bumfuck Nowhere. Not only could he shoot surround-snooker as good as (some said better than) the Original Fractopolis Fats, he looked exactly like his brother, Southerboy "Slim" Dirgebottom, one of the most infamous Guilderguides in the Executrix's Navy, the son of a bitch who helped Ked kill the FZEF and those poor settlers. "Reprint them all," my ass. What a fucking callous thing to say. After his drinking ruined his aim at s-snooker, Slim the Dub became a Guilderguide himself. Said if he couldn't do the job of his real dad, who he didn't look like, he might as well do the job of his fake dad, who he did look like. His drinking didn't help his aim much at that job, either. Now he's a washed-up has-been, assigned to pilot a bunch of ignorant fools to their fates on a worldlet that's not even on the charts. He knows it's a suicide run, but he's not sure who he's supposed to take down with him.

Doctor Johae "Jane" Ha

Johae Ha has degrees in xenohuman medicine, xenozoology, xenomorphology, and xenopathology from the renowned Omniversity Collegial at the prestigious Institute for the Historiography of Technology. She also enjoys studying ancient techniques of stealth, breath control, contortion, hand-knife surgical techniques and the ways of the kitchen-witch and hearth-shaman. When not dissecting unique, new, previously-unheard-of specimens on uncharted planetoids in far-off locales of exotically chic solarities, she can usually be found with some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend. (Wife of a close friend.)

Terrible North Wind, a Poignantly Devilish Advocate

TNW, a drone unit of lastcen manufacture, has been leading HR Holdings insertion teams since your clone-father's clone-father was but a smear on a slide. What the fuck are you lookin' at, clone-son?

The Ãœbergeist

The Ãœbergeist eagerly awaits the arrival of this latest team of pinkskins. It has developed a taste for clonal pineal gland, and wonders how much sweeter must be that of an Original Unmodified.

These characters are being played by:
Prime - Hendrich
Shin
Jed & Ned
Gunny - Plague Bringer
Simmer - Archangel
Slim - Syntac
Jane - Kaleo
TNW - player1
Ãœbergeist - Kaleo

If you want to play, please post who you want to be, along with some extra infomration about them, such as age, history etc.
Please do so in this format:

Character Name:
Age:
Extra Information:
Extra Background:
Relation To Other Characters (family, friend, same test tube etc.):

One final note, please type your characters dialoge in that characters colour.

Have fun,
~Kaleo

[player1]

Character Name: Terrible North Wind, Proactive Deliberative Automaton
Age: Older than the hills, younger than dirt
Additional Info: Who wants to know?
Additional Background: I'm famous. Look it up.
Relation to other characters: They'd be lost without me.

P.S. The name of a drone, like that of a ship or a novel, always appears in italics.

P.P.S. Even when code is open-source, it's considered polite to reference the original compiler.

P.P.S.S. For the real story of Ked Ambrit, Haos Redro Corp., and the Brindus and Fractal Zion systems, please see the virtual domain Tremulous: About

[Kaleo]

Character Name: The Ubergeist
Age:In this incarnation, only a few thousand years old, but it's mind will outlive the stars themselves.
Additional Info/Background: The first evidence of the Ubergeist was uncovered in a tomb on Iatair. The tomb was unsettlingly similar to that of an ancient Egyptian tomb back on Old Terra. Only the highest ranking officials in Haos Redro know of its existence. The archaeologists were liquidated.
Relation to other characters: I am your worst nightmare.

[Syntac]

Character name: Fractopolis Fats "Slim" Dirgebottom
Age: Somewhere around 35, but looks older than he is.
Additional Info/Background: Sucks at s-snooker, but is pretty good with the standard-issue sidearm (blaster). Not like that's going to help much.
Relation to other characters: Would much rather be downing shots of Brainfrag than piloting these overconfident fools to some planet in the middle of nowhere.

[Kaleo]

((Whoops... Hit the "Quote" button, not the "Modify" button.))

[player1]

Doctor Johae Ha sat in her drop-pod, strapped into her G-couch, awaiting the signal to separate from the boat. She concentrated on her breathing, letting thoughts flit through her head, staying unattached from them, curiously examining each mental state as it arose and passed on, leaving a trail of bifurcations in its wake. How much longer would they hang here, debating their next move? They were supposed to make planetfall. As far as she was concerned, if time was of the essence, they might as well keep following their instructions, and stay alert for a way to turn the situation to their advantage. She couldn't believe the bickering that was going on among the crew, especially that hot-headed team "leader" (if you could call him that), and the alcoholic pilot. They both seemed to be hiding a lot of pain, overcompensating for their insecurities by lashing out in anger and frustration. From what she knew of Duplicants, many had deep-seated anger management issues, self-loathing, and a general dislike of others, even other copies of themselves. It was a complex and important social issue, which didn't receive the attention it deserved. Maybe when she got back to Sedna, she'd do a study and write a paper on it.

She thought of her home, and her job at the Council of the Science of Science. She could see the face of her old mentor, Professor Nux, and recall his words. "There are more emotions than just anger and frustration," he would tell his students, again and again. Of course taking his classes often meant anger and frustration for most of his students, who became lost in the abstruse abstractions and spiritual reasonings of the professor's courses on Metaphysickal Physics and Alchemickal Chemistry. But not for Johae, whose friends - Professor Nux among them - simply called her "Jane". She had gone from being one of his most promising students, to his research assistant, collaborator, co-author, and - in his last century of life - his wife, cook, biographer and nursemaid. She had had him cloned, but had never activated the Doppel. What would she say to it? To him, she corrected herself. Was it - he - a son? A husband? A father figure? She didn't know.

Then the ship pitched hard, and the screaming beyond the pod intensified. She knew that her first duty was to stay alive, even if it meant separating herself from the team, so that she would be able to save them, if necessary. She would be of no use to them dead, or injured. She knew what she had to do.

She flipped up the safety cover, and grasped the drop bar in her right hand. With her left she keyed her mic.

"Separation in 3... 2... 1..."

She heard Gunny in the background, yelling at Slim.

"That crazy bitch! What the fuck?"

She yanked back hard on the drop bar.

"Pod away. Maintaining comm-link."

"You crazy bitch! What the hell?"

"See you on the surface, Team Leader," she said, and severed the link.

She lay back to await her fate, with the calm resolve of those who accept the omniverse as it is, and see danger as oppurtunity. Maybe Gunny would someday be able to achieve similar clarity and peace-of-mind. She wished him well, but held out little hope. The familiar, exhilarating rusn of the drop calmed and centered her.

"Danger," she thought, "and opportunity." Maybe she would activate her late husband's Duplicate, after all. How would she know what would happen, unless she tried it?

[Syntac]

((Wait, what's going on here? I'm lost.))

[Kaleo]

((Player1, maybe you should wait until everyone is signed up. Also, only the dialogue needs to be coloured. It's so we can easily see who talks in each post.))

[player1]

Slim shook his head, and tried to clear it, but it only made the pounding worse, and his vision swim even more. Maybe I shouldn't have finished that gee-canister of Brainfrag all by myself, he thought.

"What the hell just happened?" he said.

"That crazy bitch just went AWOL is what happened," answered Gunny.

The other pods began dropping away from the boat.

"Separation in 3... 2... 1," began Jed.

"Separation in 3...2," chimed in Ned.

"Separation in 3," started Prime.

"Separation in-" began Shin.

"Holy shit, she's started a fucking mutiny," said Gunny.

"Gunny, git yer ass in a pod, now!" Slim yelled. "Helluva a way to start a mission."

Simmer just stood there, stunned. "Did she really just...?"

They felt the boat shudder again and again, as the drop-pods began separating themselves from the dropboat.

Gunny grabbed Simmer and threw him into an empty pod. "See you planetside," he said, and then actuated the lock. As soon as it shut, he hit the manual release and dove into another one.

"Save the drone," he yelled to Slim, while strapping himself in. He hit the lock button, waited for the seal for finish equalizing, then flipped up the safety cover, revealing the drop bar.

"Alright, Dad, wish me well," he said to himself, and yanked back on the bar.

As Gunny's pod separated itself from the ship, the drone came down from its charging nacelle, above the Flovat terminal in the chart room.

"Hey drone, what just happened?"

"You really need to stop drinking, Slim," said the drone, and then a thin, multi-jointed arm telescoped out if it, holding what looked like a hypodermic needle in a small, articulated, seven-fingered robotic hand.

It was coming straight at Slim.

[player1]

((Kaleo, sorry. I had already started that piece for Syntac. Colors for dialogue. Copy that. Standing by.))

((Syntac, I hope that helped. You are trying to keep a boat in orbit that is used for distributing drop-pods, and then either abandoned or returned to the jumpship, depending on the mission parameters. In this case, the jumpship is gone, and abandoning ship is about to become your only option. Unless, of course, you prove your mettle and pilot her in for a safe landing. You may be the crew's only hope of ever getting off of this rock. A "slim" hope, at that.))

[Syntac]

"Holy fuck! Nonono don't stick me with that!" shouted the pilot, trying to back away but tripping over his own heels in the process. The drone overshot, did an abrupt u-turn (throwing up sparks as it skidded across the wall), and plunked the needle directly into his ankle.

In an instant, the highly concentrated serum did its work. All the alcohol was flushed out of Slim's bloodstream and into the nearest point of exit, which happened to be his urinary tract. As he pissed Brainfrag, his brain shut down from the shock of being sober for once.

Meanwhile, to the drone's horror, scores of red lights flashed into life on the cockpit's dashboard.

((Thanks p1.))

[player1]

((w00t!1!))

((lol'd))

(())

[player1]

A Simple Insertion, Scene 1 continued, by Terrible North Wind, Portrayal Director-Auteur

Nice. All I tried to do was give the pilot a quick shot of Healthboost Hypo^TM, and the guy faints, and pees himself, leaving me to not only clean up the mess, but to try to save an expendable, disposable dropboat, just in case we needed it to make the pickup. See what I mean? Where would they be, without a drone around, to pick up the pieces every time they shit themselves with fear? Fight or flee: is that really all they can do? I wished I knew what our real orders were. Of course, this being a Haos Redro job, there were probably no orders at all, as well as every possible conceivable order, just to cover their litigious and suspicious zaibatsu asses back at Titan-Under-Ice. Not only were those worms not willing to put anything down on hard copy, they also had an army of spin-doctors and professional liars, putting out a mountain of bullshit for public consumption continuously.

It was weird, I thought to myself, just how many thoughts a drone can have, in a period of time that a Human would consider quite tiny. And yet Humans themselves experience time-dilation all the time, yet discount it as "subjective". Fucking Humans. They don't even realize that a drone is just the personality of a Human, extended into hyparxial timespace through the medium of experiential virtuality. Very few of them ever realize the potential of their own minds, let alone that of the toys and technologies that they create in their ever-expanding, weed-like sprawl throughout the Starwalk.

When he peed himself, of course, he shorted out all of the interfaces and contactors in the control couch, and alarms went off everywhere, all across the GUI-sphere surrounding it.

"Great," I said, to no-one in particular, because drones like nothing better than the sound of their own voice, and I shot out a grapple-tether, to drag him from the couch. It landed around his neck.

"Oh, well," I shrugged my non-existent shoulders, "no worse for wear."

I tugged his fat ass out of the control couch (he was practically wedged in there - a couple more packs of St. Cedric Cheese-waffle Toffee Wafers and he would've fried like a glob of grease in a kitchen fire). The hypo was still dangling pitifully from his ankle. No side effects, huh? HRH PR, what geniuses!

I reached for the Passivity Dronal All-Override, shooting all seven fingers into the receiver's well-worn splines and slots.

"Yeah, baby," I said, "Daddy's here."

The dropboat fought me. I would ride her on the bowshock of her own resistance, all the way around this stinking worldlet and back again. Mutinying crew? Unconscious pilot? Ambiguous orders? Interpersonal conflict? Malfunctioning dropboat? Was this really all that the omniverse had to throw at me?

How entirely routine. I scanned my v-mails and continued cross-referencing the pr0nstix of Lady von B's pageant career.

[Syntac]

"Aaaaargh," groaned Slim. Not only did he have a headache, his pants were soaked, and he no longer had a comfortable pink fog of Brainfrag around his head, but his neck hurt as well. It wasn't turning out to be a good day...but then, ferrying soldiers around rarely did. Where was a packet of Toffee Wafers when you needed one?

The pilot stumbled to his feet and promptly threw up some sort of greenish-yellow goo. He hadn't been drinking on an empty stomach, he'd lined it with alcohol first.

Suddenly, the ship pitched. The drone was thrown out of its control socket, ricocheted off a crate of assorted tools, and landed in the recently created puddle, where it lay stunned (and, for some reason, mumbling nonsense about pr0nstix). Slim lurched forward and tripped for the second time in as many minutes. Finally, he managed to pull himself onto the dashboard, where all sorts of multicolored lights were flashing. Turbine Overdrive Alert, Reactor Capacity Drain, Heat Shield Failure, Navigation Computer Kernel Panic, the lot. Oh, and the candy machine was empty.

It had been a long time since Slim had actually done any piloting. Everything these days was taken care of by the aforementioned navigation computer. Basically, you typed in a set of coordinates and off you went. All the switch-flipping and button-jabbing was mainly for show. Now was one of the rare exceptions.

Slim yanked a hatch open. Out folded the extremely old-fashioned joystick, which he seized and pulled back on. There was a bowel-jarring rumble caused by an engine pod rotating 180° and having its thrust plasma blown back into the turbine, with the not entirely unpredictable result of a massive explosion.

The pilot was thrown forward, smacked his head on the console, and went out like a light. Talk about déjà vu (well, minus the piss this time).

Terrible North Wind shorted out, rebooted, and immediately said "What, again?".

[player1]

((über-w00t!!!))

((RPG/RTS=!!!111!!!))

[Plague Bringer]

((Hey, as for posting a character bio, I'm not sure if I'd like to clutter up the story more than I already am. Want it in another topic?))

[player1]

A Less-than-Simple Insertion, Scene 1, additional: by TNW, PDA

I hate rebooting. Every time it happens, I have to relive all three hundred and seventy-three Old Time years of my dronish existence, while the neural network and the expert system restack.

clonehood on Quaoar

redubs in Outer South Nowhere

"life" as a Haos Redro machine

Aww...

FUCK!

^that _hurts!

Shit. Where was I? Answering v-mails. I wondered what old Soul of a Wild Thing was up to? Oh, shit, is the pilot bleeding now? And from a head wound, yet? I-goh-meh. What a day!

I re-tethered him; unfortunately, again around the neck - I hoped the oxygen deprivation wasn't too startling to him. I meant to just drag him off the console, but I managed to bounce him off the control couch, three Natx modules, the refuse chute housing, and two other crash couches before I could get him clear of the cockpit. Finally, I flung him into a pod and sealed it.

"Let's just take you and your bodily fluids out of the algorithm for a moment, shall we?" I was still talking to myself. The pilot was a flaccid as a nori-wrapped tofu-burger after a day in the sun on Neano One. He kept mumbling "Pizza-Pops!" and "Nacho-Fritters!" to himself, and twitching uncontrollably.

I reached for the All-Override, but it was scorched, and aqua-greenish sparks were shooting out from the ferrule which encircled it.

"Oh, fuck it," I said, still talking to myself, "I haven't flown joystick since the late 90s."

Oh, look at that, another v-mail from Lady von B...

[player1]

((Hey, as for posting a character bio, I'm not sure if I'd like to clutter up the story more than I already am. Want it in another topic?))

((Here or there, it matters not where: the only real rules are have fun playing - it's our first attempt!))

((Jump in: the water is shallow, but warm and comfy.))

[Syntac]

The flow of blood to Slim's head, caused by sudden downward acceleration, forced him awake yet again. He stared in horror at the empty sky, then looked up and saw the dropboat — which was rapidly getting smaller and smaller.

"Oops, must've hit the eject button by mistake," came TNW's voice over the intercom. "See ya planetside!"

"Fuck you, you hellspawn son-of-a-forklift!!!!" screamed Slim. He fumbled around in what little space he had for controls of any sort. Of course, he found none, this being a single-use parapod.

A minute later, maybe two hundred feet from certain death, the parachutes popped out. The immediate deceleration was powerful enough to make Slim several inches shorter for a few seconds (painfully, of course). He started shouting incoherent threats at the drone and didn't even stop when the pod touched down and the front fell off with a rather amusing sucking sound.

"What're you swearing about, you fat fuck?" asked Gunny from a crater twenty feet away. Slim ignored him and busied himself stifling a pressure-induced nosebleed. That goddamn drone was going to pay for this. Big time.

((Yeah, join in! It's addictive.))

[player1]

((*grins and applauds))

((...time to make a sammich or sumpin'...))

[Plague Bringer]

Character Name: Master Gunnery Sergeant McMaster "Gunny" Cordex MacDunwright
Age: 69
Extra Information/Background: Full of himself, of course, as any veteran would be. Gunny MacDunwright thrives on his ego as he strives to live up to the legacy that his clone-father left for him. He's seen more blood and gore than most of the earth medics. Tough as nails, sly like a cat, and as slow as a snail.
Relation To Other Characters: He's a loud control freak who hasn't had a conversation with anything other than his ammunition for years. He's an asshole, and he needs to be, so he'll damn well make it public.

[player1]

((triple-w00t!!!))

((one-eleventy-oner!!!111!!!))

((go, team leader!))

[Plague Bringer]

Gunny MacDunwright pulled himself out of the crater created by his drop-pod.

"Aww, shit," Gunny said, shielding his eyes from a wall of dust created by Slim's pod.

He looked around. He and Slim were, well, he didn't quite know where (on the planet), exactly. There weren't any distinguishing landmarks, lakes, rivers, forests or anything else. Hell, he wouldn't mind a statue of a giant 'rauder if it gave him a sense of direction. It was just desolate. A mountainside to the front of him, emptiness all around, and an odd mauve sky up above.

"Well, clone me once and kill me twice, we fuckin' made it." He rubbed his ass, still a bit bruised from the rapid decel, and made his way towards Slim. "Hey, asshole, get up outta there; We got work to do."

[Kaleo]

The Ãœbergeist observed the pinkskins through the eyes of a Hivnuas plant and assessed the situation. ((A Hivnuas plant can be used by the Ãœbergeist to see through objects. You can run, but you can't hide.))

One was obviously the leader, and a natural one at that. He had done something odd to one of the other pinkskins that made it leak juices all over itself.
The Ãœbergeist categorized this one as The Highest Threat at this moment.
The Highest Threat proceded to launch it's ship out of the mess it had crashed in before dropping the other pinkskin out. The Ãœbergeist would need to keep an eye on this one. Assimilation would be pointless if it was not in a half-decent physical condition. This pinkskin was far from it.
The Ãœbergeist categorized this one as The Weak at this moment.

A single thought was sent to the Overminds on this world: "Observe."

[Kaleo]

((I doubt that the Ãœbergeist will be as fulfilling as I had originally anticipated, and we aren't getting the numbers we need, so I'm going to RP for Jane as well))

Character Name: Doctor Johae "Jane" Ha
Age: 32
Extra Information: One of the few parent born humans employed by HR to do field work.
Extra Background:Johae Ha has degrees in xenohuman medicine, xenozoology, xenomorphology, and xenopathology from the renowned Omniversity Collegial at the prestigious Institute for the Historiography of Technology. She also enjoys studying ancient techniques of stealth, breath control, contortion, hand-knife surgical techniques and the ways of the kitchen-witch and hearth-shaman. When not dissecting unique, new, previously-unheard-of specimens on uncharted planetoids in far-off locales of exotically chic solarities, she can usually be found with some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend.
Relation To Other Characters: She does not know them, and does not want to know them. A real human like herself can not be seen conversing with these test tube experiments. Why HR would place her with clones is beyond her.

((That's right P1. She's going to be hard to get. ))

((Also, for my own ratification, is TNW a robot, android or artificial person? I got the impression that he was organic (mostly).))

((@Mods: Can we get these two threads (this and the OOC one) stickied for extra publicity?))

[Hendrich]

((Heh, wanted to spice things up a bit.))

[Message: Application for mission Scatter Droplift- Prime]
[From: Mithrot@ISMC.br]
[To: headoffices_level3@ISMC.br]
[Attachments: 1. Scanned; read as clean]

Alpha Prime, reporting to be accepted into mission Scatter Droplift to the task of deploying nodes for the Head Offices for Intergalactic Space Military Corps. I request this mission in the favor of credits, this E-mail contains an attachment that contains by Bio, thank you for your time.

===Attachment View: ON (Locked Option)===
Character Name: Codename Alpha Prime; I do not have a name of birth.
Age: 16
Extra Information: In my previous line of work I helped move various cargo to different planetoids and I completed my First Degree: Military course and Level 3: Healing courses.
Extra Background: I am part of the Ur-Welt lineage, Unmodified. I am from Rock Hopper Blood, and I cam fresh from the CoY Scout Corps, hoping to be allowed to take part on this mission.
Relation To Other Characters: When I was much younger, TNW was my best and only friend- in a sense of course. I hope to see him again as I was forbidden human contact or conversation at an early age. I hope that you read my earlier complaints of his attitude behavior program, as it could be a distraction during the mission because I remember his violent and rude behavior as a child. I believe this could've been cause of his older personality chipsets that were designed for combat drones, not for a drone of his abilities.   

[player1]

Dirgebottom, (1337^th Level Master Craft, AGO) Southerboy "Slim-Guilder". A Cis-Arcturian Gazetteer, OR An Astragator's Guide to the Near Volumes and Vectors, appendix B3.b: Overlooked Solarities of the Inner Starsprawl. Apam-Napat, Varuna: Astragator's Guild Omniversal, 4017 ICE.

Al-Minak
The star is actually a small solarity quite near Wolf 359, a very large object as brown dwarfs go, and a pretty puny object as far as run-of-the-mill M-class red dwarfs go: a paltry example of the most common type of star in the Settled Vectors and Volumes. It's not as if it were very exciting, but still, it shouldn't have gone overlooked for two millenia, mere el-wyes away from Humanity's Alleged Cradle-Star. And then one day in the late Forty-teens of the Interglobal Common Era, it was silently catalogued, as if it had appeared from nowhere; quietly added to the list of places to driver-mine worldlets, pellucidarize planetoids, and manufacture the type of things you can't make or sell in the more snooty sections of the Pink Corridor. Some wag on Varuna dubbed it Al-Minak, the One that Somehow Escaped Notice. There were of course, the usual kooks and crazies who insisted it was Providence's Plan or Something Far More Sinister, but until the time of our mission, the small swarm of planetoids and asterisms haunting the cometary cloud of this darkened babystar had gone relatively unexplored and almost completely overlooked. Except, of course, but an ancient, arcane, soul-shocking horror, a few desperate smugglers and privateers, and a certain zaibatsu infamous for (allegedly) destroying the very cosmic fabric of the Omniverse itself (albeit on a picoparticular level). A nice place for a quaint little buckyball-dysonshell of linked sweatpods and botufacturing plants.

found drone-pengraved to the underside of the Flovat terminal shelf, in Old High Brindip, during the scuttling of the tender Merry Makings, Late Creature Uprisings Period

[player1]

((@cast: Awesome job! Once everybody is planetside, or so, it's on to Scene Two))

((if this were a comic book, right around page seven; if it were a teleplay, right before the first "get-a-snack" commercial break))

((+1 for everybody!!!))

[player1]

Jesu-Esau "Simmer" Oberreiter

Simmer has been with Corporate Investor Media Relations since Haos Redro got booted out of the Pink Corridor, and forced to instead pursue ventures in the New Far South. This arthrosaur infestation has really gotten to be a big pain in the ass. Frankly, he's sick of it. I mean, isn't there some kind of product or service that these reptilian bugs could be buying from HR, instead of all this money spent on killing? Oh well, at least he had the foresight to be heavily invested in Tumbo stock. Who cares about the fate of the omniverse? As long as they keep making Mass Drivers and Luci Cannons, he can continue to have three families in different systems, each a jump away from the next, never guessing of each other's existence. And since all three were merfolk women, water-sprites and wood-fairies of the Unvanquished megaclan, nobody had better find out either. Merfolk women were infamously jealous. Everyone knew the old tale of the Guilderguide who tried to cheat on his lake-nymph wife with a sea-nymph mistress. She offered to service him one last time, as a parting gift. Let us just say he was parted from his Gift. The Spacers say she used her teeth, but they lie like a methane snowfall on a supergiant terralune. All Simmer knew was that all of his wives thought he was away on business. Which he was. He just wished he knew what the hell the business was. And just who back at HQ had gotten him assigned to this dump run.

Character Name: Simmer
Age: 129, one last time
Extra Info: I like nymphs, naiads, nereids, mer-wenches, sea-sprites and Untersee ghost-manatees (but the last only as friends); long swims by triple-moonlight; lion-dogs, when they are just cuddly pride-whelps; and a really good cup of Brindip Uplifter with some Antharnillion fire-bat stew, when the dawn-mist is rising, and the home-pond is glassy, just watching the first nippers rising to take the fry and pollywog...
Extra Background: I don't usually do this sort of thing...
Relationships: Nothing too heavy. Let's just be friends, first, OK?

New in Town/Actual Video/Friendly Rates

[player1]

Swinging the Merry Makings in a screaming pass around the farside of Al-Minak 73b.1 (I'd finally cross-referenced Dirgebottom, S. "S-G", 4017), I forced her after a few disputed passes to shudderingly accept the embrace of the little planetoid: an Ares-object, with a remarkably dense atmosphere, and near-perfect conditions for Duplicants and even Unmodifieds to persist and even thrive. It was one of the most anthroformatted objects I had yet seen, but except for the drop-pods, there wasn't a soul on it. It's often quite incomprehensible to humans the amount of data that a drone can process at one time: while I was piloting the squirming little dropboat, I was also streaming a v-mail from my mistress, cataloguing Lady von B's noir manganime work, and rewriting my bio, for my virtual domain, The Bloviator:

Terrible North Wind, who has often been referred to but rarely described in certain works by anonymous conspiracy theorists and lowbrow crap slingers, is a Protagonistic Device Authorial of varied, interoperative constructs and adaptable, self-modifying morphology. When necessary, this Practicing Divination Artist can assume practically any configuration, from main battle-walker to clockwork arachnobot, in a reasonably cost-efficient and creatively expeditious fashion. This Purpose-Driven Agency, whose processing ability has been likened to putting all of the computing power of Neano Two's bookies into a unit the size of a petagig drive, is a near-featureless grey brick, in the form of the Perpend (Deific) Ashlar. Able to field-fabricate practically any artifact ever produced by Original Unmodifieds, TNW has been leading teams of HR Holdings, Tumbo Exosquad, and Merc Militia Duplicants and their OU clients since before the dawn of the Fifth Millennium Interglobal.

Yeah, that sounded pretty good. I could've said "The ghost of Mickey Spillane in a box the size of a hard drive," but who the hell in the 41st century would know what the hell I was talking about. Stupid Humans. Don't even know their own history.

Speaking of Humans. They were signaling me again. Then I completely lost attitude control, and things started spinning really fast. I wasn't really disoriented. I was just deciding whether to just let the damn thing crash, take the call from the surface, and ask for room service, or if I was going to continue to fight it. I threw out tethers, probes, whiplets, bundles, goosing the pod-hauler, prodding her, pushing her, goading her, working her, getting her back on track and flying right. The intercom was still beeping. It wasn't like I can't talk and drive at the same time. I'm a drone, right?

I just didn't feel like talking right then. What was I gonna say?

"OMW?"

"BRT?"

"IGI?"

Jeez, Gunny, I'm coming, OK? Leave a message!