The Tale of the Laserjet

[zybork]

Once upon a time, there was a station on a remote Planet, named "Karith Station" after a nearby plateau, and this station had a problem, emerging from the mistake that humankind thought it was alone on this new world - all staff were slain and eaten by what emerged from the ice molten by the humans to create further space on this snowy planet.

So the UN-military sealed off the area and set a mission to reclaim the station, inserting a unit of soldiers, equipped with a portable reactor, medical and military equipment and means to have all this repaired during the mission, for main command knew it would be a tough nut to crack.

Amongst the soldiers now was a guy who decided not to take too many risks. Of course he knew that the teleporting nodes, tracking his last signal, could materialize him after getting killed by an alien, but why, that was his thinking, should he risk to die even if it was only to respawn again? The nodes could not keep his equipment, and it took a lot of effort to regain it, so why take risks?

So, instead of participating in his comrades effort to actually kill the aliens inside the sealed off station, he desided to take a more passive part in the operation, lurking near the human base, waiting for an easy kill, and after a while, after he absorbed enough energy from killed aliens, it finally happened: He could let the armoury tool produce a jetpack and a lasergun.

Sometimes, the aliens managed to take him down, but he had enough "credits", as this strange form of building capacity was called by his mates, to quickly regain his equipment after respawning, so it did not bother him too much.

And so he moved around in the air of the station's delivery entrance, he moved around in the air outside, and picked aliens with his lightening-fast lasergun, making many kills in the course of his operations.

His buddies struggled to fight the aliens down, and rushed and rushed over and over again against the creepy threat, but our faithful laserjet, well, he jetted around in the air, making sure that no alien would get too close to the precious buildings generated by the humans, altough it did not always work.

Karith station, you should know, is built on the principle that every spot in the station should have two ways to reach it, for if a part of the building got troubled, nobody would be locked in and had always a way to escape. Thus, he could only cover one side of the base, and because he hardly ever went out rushing with his teammates, and because the bigger aliens did not get damaged enough by his fast but weak lasergun while running through under him, the human base more and more got destroyed by the alien creatures.

And still he jetted around in the air, picking small aliens, high above the ground, where the jumps and spits of the six-legged menace below could not reach him.

Finally, he realized that if the aliens got to the reactor, that supplied his jets remotely with energy, it would be over even for him, so he tried to make a run, but how can you run from something that can walk on walls?

In the end, the creep did get the reactor, the jets failed, and he was sitting on a platform high above the ground, hoping that they may never find him.

They did. They sensed him, and as he saw them approaching on his helmet radar, roaring, jumping, wallwalking, sensing him, he pulled the plug, the force field holding his atoms together vanished, and what was his body ended up as bunch of bubbles of ionized matter.

There were no teleporter nodes left to rematerialize him...

[mooseberry]

I don't mean to insult but once upon a time.. so the, his teammates blablabla... is kind of grade school way of telling a story. If it's meant to sound that way... that's your choice, but if you would like to make it sound nicer (imo) try looking at this subforum for good ways to tell a story. (Not those mutli-colored crapstories that don't know how to handle dialogue )

funny story though, and sadly all too common. (I would take a wild guess and say that some experience influenced the writing of this )

[zybork]

Mooseberry: That's the intent. This is a kind of tale you would read to your little Tremulous kids in kindergarten, as a warning of the bad consequences of camping in general and especially jetcamping, GODDAMMIT!

So your wild guess is absolutely correct. I'll never forget that one match where half the human team was jetcamping on the outside space of Karith station, while some of my fellow aliens where eating the reactor. It was one of the most chilling moments in my Tremulous life when they all were raining down right into us evil bugs who were sitting under them waiting for our dinner.

People just don't realize that a jetpack is a tool for increased mobility and not for jerking around annoying the aliens and being useless to the humans.

In fact, I had one match a few weeks ago where exactly this happened: Camper, first with rifle, then with laserjet, always camped, rarely ever went out, human base deteriorated, and in the end, when it was down, he tried to hide and quit when we were on the way to snatch him. And this was such an epic example of how much useless jetcamping is that I thought it was absolutely story-worthy. The stereotype of a jetcamper, so to say.