After the Win Game Thread

Having gotten back to reality, Oleandre thought about trying to diffuse the situation, but that sparkle of thought was quickly abandoned. Trying to convince someone who was already hostile tended not to end well, so unless the senator had a rare talent in that area, it was certain that the current situations will escalate even further.

Spending the little time he has before they barge in, he moved to a position from which he would have better aim, and once again prepared himself to throw something. This time, however, he waited patiently for the situation to develop before deciding on the weapon.

 

Khaled, Snoopy, and Borat all nod solemnly at Zebedev, obviously taking him to the leader. They all stand quietly under the ladder they all just came down, seemingly trying to hide without moving.

Argus, still monolocational and annoyed by it, climbs up Chris' unconscious body and yanks out as many tranq darts as he can carry (11).

Olaf and Billy float and run, respectively, to where Zebedev and Ililani are standing. Argus hops off of Chris' body, landing nearby, and Oleandre, the outlier, positions himself near the stairway-side door, preparing to throw...something...should the shit hit the fan.



No one having answered him, Blind Giant grunts in annoyance. "All right, you little shits. No one wants to talk to ol' Mikhail, eh? Well, you can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned. COME IN HOT, GUYS, THERE'S NO NEGOTIATING WITH THESE BASTARDS!!"

From the stairwell:
"Squad three, coming in hot in 4..3..."


Last-second actions, anyone?

 

Now being certain that nothing is going to stop the situation from escalating, and knowing that regardless of what he did, their chances of going against a squad of giants that was prepared for them were nil, Oleandre decided to resort to a more subtle approach.

As soon as he could, he started rapidly throwing large quantities of blink dust towards the doors, making sure that they flew far enough to reach whatever would be coming through them.

 

I make ten of the eleven tranquilizer darts available to Flinggy and ask the friendly giants to grad a desk or door or something to use as a shield before they barge in shooting more darts or worse.

 

Billy lights a new cigar and revs up the chain sword, calmly counting down with the giants he can hear down the hall, getting ready to jump out and scare someone.

 

Zebedev and Ililyana hide in each other's arms in the corner.
Olaf plops a table between them (and himself) and the stairway where the giants are coming from.
Billy counts calmly, his triangle floating around him like that weird Bit thing from Tron.

Argus walks up to Oleandre and offers him the tranq darts, but Oleandre is in the middle of pulling several packets of blink dust out of his bag. Argus turns to the surface giants and yells about getting a table.
The surface giants nod, impressed by Argus' tactics, and promptly each of them grabs a desk. Snoopy and Khaled hold theirs up like shields; Chris and Borat curl up in balls with their backs to their desks.

Oleandre times his blink dust so that it's arcing through the air as the giants come up the stairs.
Blind Giant sits up suddenly, hits the first few Blink Dust packets, and disappears.

"...0!"

With amazing fluidity, the first giant from Squad Three leaps up through the stairwell, rolls under the next blink dust packet, and comes up firing. He's spraying fairly randomly, but he gets extremely lucky and hits three people -- Snoopy, Khaled, and, by a miracle of ricochet, Zebedev.

The second giant just barely gets his head through the hole when he takes a blink dust in the face and sneezes his way out of existence. The third giant sees what just happened and cunningly throws a small shield up in front of him as he bolts out of the stairs. the shield vanishes, the giant smiles, and pops Oleandre with another tranq dart. "Little shit" he mutters as he hops backwards, out of the path of the next blink dust -- which plops down the stairs and makes something you can't see vanish...and reappear in one corner of the room, sideways from everybody's defensive desks. Fortunately, the fourth and final member of Squad Three is disoriented by his sudden teleportation and, in a fit of defensive discipline, pumps a dozen rounds into the large glass scrying panel on the wall (in which he sees everyone's reflections.)

End state: none of the enemies have really noticed anyone except Oleandre, who has another javelin-sized wound, this time in his throwing shoulder. Ouch. Zebedev 'merely' has a hole through-and-through one forearm and is sound asleep. Everyone else is fine.

 

I start throwing darts blindly in the direction I hear the shots coming from. (Presuming I am behind cover.) And I yell "Squad Three pullback. They are in the Great Hall! Reinforcements are needed immediately!

 

Seeing that giant number three is now within reach, or nearly enough, Billy chomps down on his cigar and charges in with his chainsword revving, aiming for what most people think of as the Achillies tendon, but he just calls "dat ouchy bit back dere."

 

_____ __ _ _____ __ ____ _______!

And once again, Oleandre felt a familiar tug inside of his body. Another poisoned weapon, huh? It was fortunate that all of their weapons were poisoned, that way he would not stay hurt for long.

But hurt he was, still. The previous hit wasn't that bad, having only hit his thigh and only slowing him in his walk. But with his shoulder being affected, he would not be of any use in combat until it healed.

"Fuck."

They couldn't lose that fight, could they now? So there was no time to suffer, something had to be done. The rest of them were hidden, with Oleandre being the only one standing in the open; thus, the assailants will have to waste time if he were to disappear. With that thought, Oleandre took a bag of blink powder into his other hand and threw it into the air, to get hit with hopefully appear somewhere hidden.

But as the bag of powder he threw fell on his head, he heard the sound of some machinery being spun.

 

(I'm taking over for Fax since he seems to have forgotten about the game)

Ililani strokes Zebedev's cheek gently and begins to sway. A moment later, a forlorn note bursts from her lips, and as a powerfully evocative tune fills the air, Zebedev's wound closes. He's still unconscious, just no longer bleeding. Ililani lies Zebedev down, stands with a fire in her eye. and begins to stride purposefully across the battlefield toward the giants.

Argus throws several javelin-like darts at the giants, but he hasn't Oleandre's arm, and the darts largely stick uselessly into the giant's boots. He shouts something about the Great Hall needing backup, and gets the attention of the Bad Giant I...who tilts his head and says "Are you trying to issue orders to me?" Said giant laughs and pops a tranq dart at Argus' chest -- which, in a bizarre coincidence, bursts a packet of blink dust in midair, but is traveling quickly enough that it hits Argus as it disappears, and the resultant metadimensional conflux between the blink dust and Argus' nonlocational innards causes an eye-warping reality flux. Argus somehow disappears while remaining exactly where he was and simultaneously turning into several thousand slightly different (and some completely unrelated) varations on himself, all colocational. It'll take a moment for reality to settle down in that five-foot square, most likely.

Billy steps calmly up behind Bad Giant III and takes the chainsword to his Achilles Heel. The giant, who only barely heard the sword's racket over everything else, yanks his foot off the ground, yelping, and glances down. He sees Billy (and some strange orange octagonal mess in between the two of them), and decides flattening this dude is the best bet. His heel comes down fast; Billy drops prone and props the chainsword against the ground, praying it can hold the giant's weight for just a split second...and it does. The giant's foot shatters the octagon, lands on the chainsword, and starts to descend down the blade in a fountain of gore and heelbone fragments. A split second later, Bad Giant III is on the floor, screaming in horror as though he just picked his nose and found Cthulu staring back at him in his own booger. The panicked giant shakes the chainsword loose from his foot and tries desperately to make it over to the stairs for getting away purposes.

Oleandre appears in a strange place. There's barely space for him in and amongst a tightly-knit pile of what seems to be pneumatic machinery. A second's examination informs him that he's apparently arrived inside of one of the giant's rifles, as there's a place right next to him where there's a long row of javelin-sized darts. Another second's examination tells him he's in deep shit, because one of the javelins slides into place and prepares to fire...right in front of him. He turns and sees out the front of the barrel -- the giant is aiming directly at Ililani, who is walking towards him looking like she might try to lecture him to death. Moments later, everything suddenly gets light, as the gun starts to inexplicably plummet toward the floor. The last thing Oleandre sees is a spray of blood moving past the barrel of the gun.

Olaf sees Ililani walking in the open toward Bad Giant IV with daggers in her eyes. He was already preparing to eviscerate the giant, but his impulse gets impelled as the giant takes aim at the girl. Going from 'determined to kill' to 'overdrive', Olaf spins the glass around a central point -- the giant's heart -- while spinning each individual piece of glass around it's central point, creating a whirlwind of death that slashes into the giant from all sides, ending his life in a haze of pain and flensing. Then, he hears a familiar sound coming out of the giant's rifle as it drops toward the ground. Oleandre?

Chris leaps up from behind his desk and uses it like a battering ram to knock over Bad Giant I, who falls so close to Billy that he knocks the poor lumberjack onto his ass. Chris raises his arms in victory, and gets shot in the chest by Bad Giant I. Interestingly, he doesn't seem affected. Borat stays huddled behind his desk, muttering something incoherent.

Finally, Blind Giant's voice comes from downstairs. "They're getting fucking murdered up there! Don't waste time with tranqs -- get out the real guns!"

"SIR YES SIR!"

 

Billy scrambles up and reads his chainsword, babbling a barely coherent string of words that is either an insult about these giants' parents or a list of barnyard animals, possibly both. It's hard to tell with three quarters of the words comming out sounding like, "Haddabiggidibity".

Fortunately what brainpower isn't going into talking is going into kicking ass. Bad Giant III is not a concern at the moment so the angry lumberjack leaps at Giant I's head, which is now in reach, and delivers the hardest dropkick to the side of the head he can.

So not kicking ass, exactly, but you get the picture.

 

Right now, Oleandre was falling to the ground, still stuck inside of the tube that housed these weird javelins from before. Thus, he had to get out; using more of the teleporting dust was out of the question, not only did his current situation not allow him to use something like this, but he had no guarantees that he wouldn't put himself in an even worse situation.

"Damn it all."

Thus, he resorted to doing something that guardsmen with clockwork equipment usually did - propelling himself out of there with the force of an explosion. Of course he was much less resilient than the hulking armoured infantrymen, but hopefully he would be able to get out of there in one piece. He took a few smaller makeshift bombs out of his hyperspace pouch and threw them towards the closed end of the barrels. After that, he took as many softballs as he could, and placed them not only between him and the bombs, but also between him and the opening of the barrel.

A short moment later the bombs had exploded, as Oleandre, propelled by a sudden expansion of air in the barrel corked by a ridiculous amount of softballs, flew along with the mass of them towards the ground, hitting the mass of balls which flew before him and hit the ground first, causing them to scatter everywhere. Not even a second later, more balls, some of them intact but some already burning into nothing, as well as occasional fragments of something that undoubtedly came from the barrel he was in, started falling all around Oleandre.

"Ugh."

When Oleandre got up from the remainder of the pile he landed on, he heard persistent ringing. And that usually meant something bad.

A quick look at his body allowed him to confirm that he didn't seem to be missing any limbs, and that the wound in his arm was visibly healing, even if it still would take a few minutes for it to recover completely. One motion of his hand later he also confirmed that there was no blood coming out of his head, for which he was grateful to lady luck as the height from which he fell was not something to scoff at.

But that still did not make the ringing any less annoying.

He barely had time to do anything other than wonder where did he get the "bright" idea of using teleporting powder on himself in a situation as hectic as the one they had here when he heard one of the giants from before shouting something about "real" guns and murdering. Whatever these "guns" were, that didn't bode well; he could only assume that "guns" were the crossbow-like-but-not-really-crossbow-like weapons the giants were using, but even so, that meant they couldn't dawdle anymore.

Because he couldn't act right now, ringing in his head be damned, he had to think instead, even in his limited capability. If there was anything he had to admit, it was the fact that the situation was out of their control now. There undoubtedly was something they had to do in this building, or whatever it was, but there was also the fact that they tried to chew on more than they could bite. The only thing he could compare their current situation to was the story he heard, about some tribesmen engaging a squad of guardsmen in clockwork armours. Only, they were the natives and the giants were clockwork knights, but ten times bigger. Attacking blindly would thus only bring defeat, and what they should've done was hide, or back off and sneak in later, or even just try to talk, neither of these options available now unless they had a way to get out of there.

Of course, if they were a coordinated group, the whole situation would've played differently. With someone to coordinate their attempts and oversee the situation it would've been far easier to achieve anything meaningful, but for now the only thing they could do was concede defeat and run away. And without anyone to enforce that, they would just stay here and be slaughtered. Noticing that the ringing had faded while he was lost in thoughts, Oleandre turned to the giant named Chris, one who allegedly was on their side.

"Hey, you! Take all of them and get back to the entrance. Hide somewhere, anywhere, and don't let them find you. Just force them to go with you somehow, I don't give a damn how. I will try to give you enough time for that, so don't make me stay here for too long."

Then he swept every one of his "companions" with his sight and shouted once again.

"All of you, just frecking go with him! I don't want you here and you don't want to die here, so effing run away."

It was almost ironic that now he would do something that would endanger his life to try to make theirs safe, but someone had to do something. And he would not trust any one of them with his life, so he had to be the one to stay back. He turned his face to the doors from which the reinforcements were supposed to come and as hastily as his still healing arm allowed him to do it, started taking corked vials out of his hyperspace pouch and setting them aside. If one looked at the content of these vials, one could see vivid flames dancing inside, for some reason not stopped by the fact that flames weren't supposed to last eternally like that.

 

Billy delivers a WWE-style two-footed dropkick to Giant III's head, which whips away so quickly that his neck audibly breaks. Billy lands on his chest and pops up to his feet as the head lolls back into place next to him.

Oleandre delivers his dire warning, and the giants all eye him in fear. Chris bolts toward the door, and Khaled is hot on his tail.

Olaf appears to be pondering the situation, lost in thought. Then he sees what Oleandre has in his hand and turns pale, instantly recognizing it for what it is. A moment later, he has gathered up himself and the sleeping Zebedev and is right behind the giants.

Ililani isn't having any of it, though. Seeing one giant eviscerated with glass and another's neck snapped, she appears to be determined to show everyone that she's not to be trifled with, either. She turns toward the doorway where Giant I just finished tranquing Argus, and sings a rapidly crescendoing, aggressive scale that turns into a shriek at the end. As if in response, all Harry Potter style, a massive silvery-transparent Bantha-like creature bursts out of midair and slams into the surprised giant's chest, knocking him into -- and down -- the stairs. The sound of rapid-fire miniature explosions echo up the stairs, followed by a death rattle, silence, and the word 'oops'.

Then, in a burst of normalcy, the reality flux dies down, leaving a rather...different-looking...person in Argus' place. (Omni, your character shares all of Argus' memories as well as his own, so he knows exactly what's going on here.) Almost by reflex, the new guy reaches into the minds of all of his allies and yanks everyone into a mind-net.


ALL OF YOU MAY NOW TALK IN FAST_AS_THOUGHT MODE, WHERE NO OUTSIDE TIME PASSES UNTIL YOU ARE DONE TALKING AND DECIDE TO GET BACK TO THE ACTION. Commence the strategizing!

 

(And by Omni, I mean Daggle. Damn lack of edit button. )

 

You win Kazeto!

We may want to offer some details on DagglePlusPlus character, just for the people not actually playing, but who do read this.

The short version is this:
Gettout "Blue" Sarcozi

3 Earth (+Resist Temptation/-Bleeds Easily)
3 Fire (Passionate/Running Away)
6 Air (Convincing Speech/Tool Use)
4 Water (Sense Psychic Ability/Nearsighted)

0: Unnerving Stare
2: Familiar Steelhawk
6: Total Telepath

And the long version I will put in Spoiler tags.

Spoiler

Gettout "Blue" Sarcozi

Air: 6
Fire: 3
Earth: 3
Water: 4

Powers:
6: Total Telepath (Frequent, Twice Versatile, Thrice Major). Any entity that 'Blue' knows the name of, he can speak with mentally as long as they are on the same plane or are on two planes currently connected by any form of open portal. Gettout can read the mind(s) of any entity he can see. He speaks Mental, and thus can communicate with anything with an Air score above 1. By focusing his thoughts on one entity that thinks, Gettout can rape it's mind, learning anything it knows and being able to use it's skills as his own until he breaks contact. Gettout can dominate and control any single creature with a mind, though if he controls it's actions, he cannot access their skills or he can mentally direct a creature to pursue his goals instead of their own, in which case he doesn't directly control them, but they will use their own skills to the best of their ability to achieve Gettout's goals. Both of these abilities require Gettout to touch the victim. Finally, by making eye contact with someone, Gettout can send them into an entirely fictional internal microcosm, dictating every element of the reality they perceive. This ability requires Gettout focus entirely, foregoing all other uses of this power, but time passes for the person affected at a 1000:1 rate, so Gettout can literally sculpt a large part of a person's life experience if he spends an hour or so staring into their eyes.

2: Familiar Steelhawk (Frequent, Major). Gettout has a familar: an avian version of Wolverine. It's about the size of a sparrow, and acts much like a sparrow, except that it cannot die and it can sprout sharp steel from just about any part of it's body at any time. The steelhawk was the first creature Gettout ever commanded to share his goals, and it simply never left. Gettout doesn't directly command it, but mentally tells it what he wants and it generally does the most helpful thing it can.

0: Unnerving Stare. Gettout's gaze has a tendency to make unintelligent creatures freak out and stay away. Also, he doesn't blink. Ever.

 

So, with that handled, how shall we wreck the giants day? Flingy has those unholy Wildfire vials ready to go. But I think we may want to hold off on that until we can get them all bunched up. If I can get in line of sight with them, I can have them basically kill one another.

I can make them scream that they are behind them and turn and once every other giant turns, they can shoot them in the back.

One of the first things I want to do is telepathically interrogate one of them. I want to know why they are here, and what they actually intend? I would like to know if it is possible to negotiate now that we have spilled blood, or if we are pretty much stuck fighting them until us or them lies dead on the ground. I might spend a few seconds examining the minds of our "Allies" too. Just to make sure we should not slaughter them and flee. (Like if they were the aggressors, rather than victims of circumstance.)

The Stealhawk is my private distraction to help me stay alive. But if they are going to come in guns blazing, I will need some help just to stay alive. Our resident telekinetic can help out in that regard presumably.

 

For Oleandre, it was very surprising to hear a voice inside of his head. And not only surprising; a row of metaphorical black candles lit in his mind, creating a free-forming flame of a sinister crimson and black. Regardless of the fact that the one speaking to him (and likely listening as well) was on his side, or at least appeared to be, such a thing could not be allowed. Humans with ability to veer into minds were dangerous, he knew that very well, and he had learned about it the hard way.

It was not that they could turn psycho on you on a moment's notice, nor was it that they were all repentantly evil (or too chaotic in their actions), no. Rather, it was the fact that telepaths were capable of reading your thoughts at a moment's notice, even without announcing their presence, and they could use the knowledge they gained that way to manipulate others against you, or to blackmail you into doing some things; and there was also the fact that a skilled enough telepath could read not only your conscious thoughts, but also thought commands you gave to your body, giving them something akin to combat precognition when fighting against opponents not numerous enough to overwhelm them. And for Oleandre, that was bad; even if his current position was not one that marked him as the "bad" one, there were things from his past he could not let the others learn, or he would undoubtedly be left out to die (that is, if he managed to live through their current predicament).
Of course, there were ways to defend against both of these things, but not everyone was capable of using them. The most commonly cited solution was simply learning the basics of mind reading, as that allowed one to deny access to his mind to any other mind reader that was not powerful enough to break through the guard, but that was not accessible to every person as some did lack the necessary talent in magical arts. For those less fortunate in the department of magical prowess, the ways to fight against it were learning to mask your thoughts, though it had not marked the presence of thoughts themselves, only making them appear as obviously crumpled gibberish to those who could read your thoughts and doing nothing against those powerful enough; learning to fight to such an extent that the motions you used in combat become something natural for your muscles instead of something you have to think of, albeit that left you vulnerable against some other opponents and took a lot of training; and never fighting them on your own if you could help it, instead bringing a whole group against them. It was good that Oleandre learned how to defend himself against these, but he still did not know if his defences were strong enough against this telepath. Hopefully, they were.
Of course, if you could ensure a telepath's absolute loyalty to you, they were were a great asset in combat, capable of making it possible for you to coordinate actions of people who would otherwise be likely to impede each others' moves, and able to stop other telepaths from taking control over your people. And they could screen people you talked with and give you information about them and about their attitude towards you, making it impossible for you to be ambushed during negotiations. Overall, telepaths are monsters, but ones that could be tamed if you knew how to and controlled yourself enough not to slip in your thoughts.

Now he had to gather his thoughts and speak with the telepath. It was likely that the others would be able to hear him as well, so he had to be careful with his words. He had everything to lose and not much to gain, after all...

'Who the hell are you? And how in the everlasting crap did you manage to get into this place?'

That... was a complete failure. Trying to close his thoughts closed, Oleandre berated himself for letting his emotions run rampart in the crucial moment and started again. He had to appear a different person as he really were, nothing different from the norm, it was just a tad more difficult than the usual and he only had to let go of his disdain for telepaths to do it...

'No, scratch that. I think I know how you got there, what I want to know is what happens with Argus. And how are we supposed to call you since I highly doubt you are Argus. I don't know if you are on our side or not, but your actions now make us think that you are, so I will not attack you.'

Now that was much better, or at least he hoped it was. There were many unknown factors.

'And we aren't in need of help "right now". Evacuate with the others, I will set up a trap and leave the room behind you if I can. We won't be able to hold this room even with your help, and there's nothing of any use for us left in here, so we will stop them by torching the entire room and then coming back. There's no other way, and even if there were I can't do anything about these now.'

 

Big Blue's thoughts are a bit slow and sluggish in entering Billy's think skull. Hard packed as the bone might be, the brain within is almost as bad. Worse, at the peak of combat coherent thought was less... coherent than it might be in normal people's minds. Rather than a string of words, Blue connects to a series of images.

Surprisingly, one is of a green forest of normal dimensions (not the enormous trees of the Giant Lands they found above ground). Billy and a handful of other lumberjacks work at cutting trees there, Billy occasionally shouting to people to move around as the trees begin to creak and fall.

Another is of a backstreet brawl. A young Billy hammers one kind with his fists while another clings to his back, trying to pull him to the ground.

Another half dozen are flashbacks to the fight so far, as Billy runs over what has just happened or tries to extrapolate what might come next. Right now, a lot of them involve fire and passing out from smoke. This appears to be a major concern of Billy's.

As fast as those images flicker past, wooden logs begin to fall over them and obscure them. Blue can still see what's going on, but Billy's clearly trying to block him for the moment. As the timber falls a mental avatar of Billy jumps out from one tree, looking more than a little upset.

"Who-and-what-the-Krong-cussed-piece-of-rotting-pond-scum-are-you?" He spits, talking a full mile a minute. On the bright side, Billy's speech impediment doesn't seem to carry over to mindspeak.