Powder Miner

"I don't know what the hell NATO is. A country past my time? A country in your world in particular? I don't know, guess it might not matter. But, heh... in any event, let me tell you that a 45mm bullet wouldn't be tasing someone -- kind of hard to tase someone if your round has punched a massive gaping hole in them instead. Hell, I think a rubber 45mm would probably pulverize somebody's entire ribcage. 45mm... 45mm rounds are really, really not fucking around. To put them into imperial, they're one and three quarter inches in diameter. It's like firing a slightly larger golf ball at someone, made of metal, faster than sound. It's some serious fuckin' hardware." It sounded like Nader was grinning behind that mask. "40 pounds, too, that's pretty damn good. The Velociraptor where I come from is somewhat heavier than that and it fires bullets more than half the size of this one's. You have to keep this thing around and I'll reiterate it now: for Allah's sake, you have to let me take a look inside of this thing. I'm getting real excited."

Satomi held her katana in her useless, blinded pose for a few more moments more. Then her hearing came back. Slowly lowering her katana inch by inch, Satomi started to listen to the conversations in the room and to figure out what was going on... apparently something had gone horribly wrong with Julie, and apparently they were going to get shot because of it... and that they were going to be leaving because of that. Then, her sight returned. Though her eyes were as deficient as they usually were, it was kind of hard to miss the extra devastation, and that went a good deal to convincing her to unsteadily walk over to the others. Then, a realization hit her. "Oh, kami, I don't see... ...she's gone, isn't she?" She gulped, and a horrified expression crossed her face as she thought further on it. "Whatever... whatever led to this, Julie is gone, and now we're just running with our tails between our legs, aren't we...?" Slowly, she slid her sword back into its sheath, and despite her complaint about this course of events, she sped up slightly and started to follow Harry and the others. "How... why did this all even happen? We hadn't even been-- we'd-- we'd finished fighting the Aragami and everything, so why...? I don't really understand how any of this..."

Nader didn't let the time Alan spent looking up the weapon's schematics go to waste, poring over the gun himself and noting its various features. When Alan did get around to listing its various specs, an appreciative whistle came through the mouth-holes in Nader's faceplate, and he nodded. "Good speed, outstrips the Velociraptor even, but I suppose that's to be expected -- perhaps that's the benefit of the rotary model? I don't know what kind of effect a 'NATO' round has, but putting that aside for the moment... 45 millimeters? Those are gigantic rounds, even for a autocannon... I have to imagine this would blow the shit out of whatever you turned it on. Hmm... going to want one more piece of information before I can really judge its usability, though this is already the sort of thing I'd recommend for mounting on land vehicles: how much does it weigh? Obviously your robot can carry it, but I don't know how much stronger than a person your robot is, either. Still, it's a real impressive piece of tech, and I'd love the time to take it apart and put it back together." Nader poked and prodded at it, opening the ammo compartment and doing what he could without actually taking tools to the weapon already -- practically paying no heed to the doombot at all at this point, or at least not feeling threatened by it, Nader was just in full gun-geek mode.

Alan's query about the risks of being on the same ship as Leo was met with a fairly simple answer; just as Alan lapsed into silence, Nader replied with a rather loud, fairly frustrated "YYYYYUP." Then Alan spoke again, and Nader nodded. "It'd be an idiotic move to criticize anyone for being highly heavily armed on a mission to go and help save literally everything that exists, I say. Not that I'd be criticizing anyone for being armed anyway, heh." Nader fondly patted the barrel of his Horsekiller, at this. Then he proceeded to actually look at Alan's Doombot, and at the gun that it was holding. "Oh, shit, what's this?" Nader walked up to it, and made to extend his arms to start to examine it, but then of course the five-foot barrel of the Horsekiller proved to be somewhat obstructive for these purposes. "Ah, hell with it, give me a moment..." Nader moved his right arm to the base of his Horsekiller, and started sliding it around a bit, then detaching the large weapon. Then, he took it and carefully finagled it into a spot between the two smaller rifles, diagonal across his back. After that, he started detaching the braces and straps on the Sorraia from around his body, and detached the machine-gun itself, putting it too onto his back, in the triangular space below the Horsekiller. Then, with his entire array of guns on his back, he stepped forwards and stooped down to examine the gun, putting his hands softly on different sides of the barrel. "Rotary, but this clearly isn't from sixty years ag-- er, it clearly isn't from 1880. There has to be some form of improvement here... so some sort of futuristic machine gun, hmm? I'll want to take a look at it, if you'll let me. Can you give me specs on this?"

The first thing Nader did when Alan spoke up was very nearly jump, and start to jerkily raise his arms... but it seemed that on some level, Alan's decision to make his approach loud and obvious had been a good one, because the paranoid Forenian man arrested the motion rather quickly. Then he dropped his arms back down, letting the tip of the Horsekiller once again rest against the ground, his machine-gun arm simply hanging idly once more... at least until Alan spoke, and said Sorraia arm found a new purpose: traveling up to Nader's facemask, as he slapped his armor-gloved hand to it in a facepalm. "Ohhhh man... you're telling me that noone ever actually told you about Dysto? Ahaha... fantastic. Well, alright, get ready, because I'm going to tell you about the MASSIVE FUCKING THREAT we apparently have to deal with." Nader sighed angrily, and put his arm back down before turning his head to look Alan... probably in the eyes? It wasn't easy to tell, for obvious reasons. "Alright, so, to start from the beginning... not long into the mission with the pipeline, a gigantic bladed koala monstrosity dropped out of the sky onto Leo. I punched it right in the goddamn head, then I killed it with the Horsekiller, after which Freya revived it, but it raised questions... which Leo took it upon himself to answer. See, on his world, he comes from this place called the Barren Kingdom. Well, there's this GIGANTIC, FLYING, BIOMECHANICAL ISLAND MADE OF GENOCIDE, MONSTERS, AND WARCRIMES THAT TRAVELS DIMENSIONS, called Dysto," Nader took a moment to quiet down his voice, "And though he ended up assuring us that it'll only use SOME of its resources for this, it wants to hunt down everyone from the Barren Kingdom, including Leo, and kill them, and we're naturally getting caught in the goddamn crossfire."

Satomi hadn't managed to get up out of the room or anything, seeing as she didn't have rope or much of a way to get up out of the room. That didn't save her though, and then Satomi was assaulted by a wall of light, sound, and force. She came to (at least, she thought she did), and she could tell that she was on the floor... but she couldn't tell much else. She tried to blink her eyes open, but she wasn't seeing anything. Oh... oh no... had her eyesight finally gone for good?! She... wasn't hearing anything, either. Oh, no, no, this was bad, if Julie was still out there and turned crazy, Satomi wouldn't be able to defend herself...! Well, pretty much anything would be a better course of action than just lying there defeated. So Satomi rolled over with a groan she herself couldn't hear, onto her stomach. Then she twitched, then she started to shift around frantically until she finally managed to get a knee under herself. The blast and its aftereffects had horribly unbalanced her, and left her in a terrifying void that Satomi thought probably would be what Jigoku might be like, just without the screaming and agony, though, so that didn't take the first time and she fell back down. Slowly, and more methodically, she then tried again, getting her limbs under herself successfully this time, and then pulling herself to her feet. Then, though she was still stumbling and staggering and swaying, the blind and deaf samurai pulled her katana out of its sheathe and went into a defensive stance, gesturing with it at... nothing in particular.

Soon after Nader had worked with Aquila and Contagion to upgrade the former's armor (it hadn't been pretty, but it had worked), he had found himself a nice corner of a room to set himself up in -- he hadn't wanted to take up one of the important rooms, but he did want a spot to work on his guns, because his earlier examination of this time period's guns had been pretty damn enlightening. And so that's what he had been doing the entire time up until now -- with pieces quietly scavenged here and there earlier, Nader revamped his entire arsenal, toying with the mechanisms of his older guns and smirking behind his mask as the work clicked together. Then he took the piddly, sad little PDW he'd got in Vitor's safehouse, and he really got to work on it: replacing the butt and the grips, completely changing up the mechanism to make the gun automatic... it wasn't a Personal Defense Weapon anymore, it was a Personal Assault Weapon. Nader was satisfied with that. If he learned and upgraded his guns at this rate, by the time he got back to Forenia, he'd win the war for them just by the accumulated knowledge he'd received; while vehicles may have been the sections of the military getting upgraded as of late, Nader doubted that the damn Cannalans would be anywhere close to able to cope with armor and weaponry upgraded using the knowledge that Nader was already getting. Then the Republic of United Forenia would be safe and secure... and not put into any camps, and not conquered by any pirates. Hell, with what Nader could potentially learn about weaponry, Forenia could ditch the Germans altogether, and win on its own. That would be wonderful. For now, though, Nader would be have to be simply satisfied with the uses in his own arsenal... and he was! He was better armed than he'd been in 1935, that was for damn sure, and he was rapidly getting used to being in the fight again, the way he'd slain that horrible bear thing proved that much. He didn't WANT to be fighting the evil island thing that was undoubtedly watching him (as one of Leo's companions) for any sign of weakness, and he didn't necessarily like the idea of being flown around a bunch of worlds so that people could try to put a round in his head, but as he was he was increasingly confident that when the interdimensional assassins suddenly jumped into the ship, he'd blow them away. Opening the door and exiting the room he'd holed himself up in and into one of the ship's passages, Nader left the room visibly better-armed than he'd entered it, with TWO rifles across his back rather than just one. He was, however, mumbling on and on to... noone, apparently, as he looked around the passageway to familiarize himself with the ship. "Yeah, that's right fuckers, bet you think you'll catch me off guard, won't you? Watching us all from another plane, are you? I'm already wise to your fucking game, I am. If that island thing Dysto can track us, I have no doubt there are more of you tracking us, and I don't intend for there to be a moment where I'm not ready for you. Aren't gonna get me, whoever the hell you are. I know you're watching, so heed my fucking warning, if you pounce there will be hell to pay."

To say that the scene in front of Satomi's eyes was a shock would be an understatement. Satomi, preoccupied as she had been with cleaning herself and then with the Engineering Bay, had not known about the tests. She had not known about Julie (or, of course, anyone) signing up for the tests, nor had she heard about the fatality rate, nor any of the other associated discussion. In fact, all of this was still pretty much unknown to her. So, walking into the room and seeing what Satomi recognized as Julie (from what wasn't grown over on her body, and from the part of her face not yet uncovered) frozen there twisted and mutated and overgrown by whatever horrible, unnatural affliction was hijacking her, was more of a surprise than Satomi had been anywhere close to prepared to process. Her hand dropped from the hilt of her katana, and instead for a moment she just stared slack-jawedly at what had become of the Earth Bet native. "I-I... Julie...? The-- is--" Satomi gulped, and closed her mouth. Kami, it did look like some particularly terrible, magic version of the Taint... but Satomi knew that didn't make any sense. She got her answer from Harry, soon, and she gulped. It really was her, and whatever kind of power was locked away in this base had been something Julie should not have dipped into. Still, if Satomi just stood there, she would not be doing her Duty... nor would she be helping Julie. Gulping again, Satomi began to respond to Harry, though she never took her eyes off of the twisted form of Julie. "Are you sure you want Calvera to be burning the room, Harry...? You... may be underestimating just what the potential damage fire can do is, and if it truly catches fire, it would be a greater problem for all involved. With the amount of heat Calvera can put out... it could spiral out of control. I... also would suggest that we consider trying to create something to block her vision. If she can't tell what is going on, she cannot attack us easily, unless... whatever this is... has given her the ability to do so."

Satomi very nearly outright jumped as the alarms sounded off, but she recovered with fair quickness, and followed after Licca, keeping up with her presumably rushed pace as she did. "What's going on?" Satomi asked simply, albeit with the requisite urgency in her tone -- it might not be a situation she was familiar with, but having come from the Crab Clan, Satomi was plenty familiar with urgent combat situations from the engineering perspective, and she already knew the tone with which she should approach it. "And how can I help?"

Things might have rocketed down the proverbial drain elsewhere in the base, but Satomi (at least for a few more minutes) was living in blissful ignorance of this fact, with her conversation with Licca in the Engineering Bay keeping her away from literally everything that was going on. Satomi gave Licca a little bow as she introduced herself, and then after contemplating and deciding to use an honorific since Licca's family name sounded Rokugani and just like Kusuke maybe there were then some cultural similarities: "It is nice to meet you, Licca-san! I am Satomi Kaiu, of the Crab Clan... though I suppose that doesn't mean much to you, eheh."

As might perhaps not have been expected by anyone who doesn't know Satomi, Licca's mention of the wall around the city caused Satomi to get even more excited than before, something of a silly grin spreading across her face. "A wall, you say? Oh, I must see it sometime! I'll have you know that my family in the place that I come from built and maintains a wall against our own murderous monsters. Oh, I really truly do want to see that wall! Even if it isn't today, if this wall is as advanced as you claim..." Satomi clasps her hands together giddily, her grin remaining. "I believe I'm in an incredible position to appreciate it! Transports, layers... incredible!"

Satomi shrugged at Licca. "Yeah, I'm not a shugenja, and I don't have some of the things that the others have, so I'm afraid you'll just have to go by my testimony to believe me." Satomi frowns when Licca mentions her kimono. "Yeah... it's been getting damaged, but I don't have a replacement. It's a little bit of a disgrace, but it's the cost of traveling around worlds in just a vehicle..." Satomi gets broken out of her slight dolor on the topic by the fellow engineer's mentioning that helicopters aren't their most complex devices. In fact, her eyes practically sparkle with excitement at the idea of even more complicated, incredible, advanced machines being around, and Satomi clenches her fists in front of her chest in anticipation. "Really?? Can I see?"

Satomi sighed and put her hand to her mouth for a moment, thinking. ”Ummm, well, I guess I might sound crazy, but since the commander around here already knows I guess I’ll just say it anyways. So, uh, I’m with the other people from the bus, and we’re from, well, different realms than this one. If you don’t already disbelieve me, I’m from a place called Rokugan, and the realm I’m from is, well... not quite so advanced as this one. The most complex machinery we have are siege crossbows and trebuchets, so when I ended up in worlds like this one and the one my group was in beforehand... just, there are so many things that are very complicated and very cool! Like this thing!” Satomi had gotten fairly excited towards the end of that statement.

Satomi couldn't help but blush a bit, still a little embarrassed, but she then answered Licca's question with some more enthusiasm. "Not before today, no! It's a fascinating device, and looking at it still like this it's very interesting to think that it was capable of lifting itself into the air and carrying all of us; the moment I saw it right here where I could look at it, I couldn't help myself, heh heh heh..." She was about to say something, but reconsidered it. "Ummm, let's see, I know that some people in the base know because of the initial briefing, but how much do you know about where we're from? I just realized that I'll sound very silly if you don't know the basics."

With a final, slowing scritch of her pen, Satomi kind of just trailed off mid-stroke, leaving a word half-finished. Oops... busted. Satomi froze for a couple of minutes before she slowly turned to face the engineer confronting her... who turned out to be a girl that appeared to be around her age, and that was the closest she'd seen yet to being at her height level, which caused her eyebrows to raise in surprise for a moment. It didn't erase the awkwardness of perhaps predictably being questioned about her activity near the helicopter though. "Ummmmmm..." Satomi hesitated for a moment. "Iii, um, I didn't intend to touch anything? I, um, just wanted to get a closer look at this vehicle. To, um, learn about it." She paused again, still embarrassed, and then spoke again a little quieter. "I, um, really like machines."

Satomi undisguisedly gaped when she saw some of the things in the engineering room. The wheeled vehicles were still amazing, even if Satomi had seen some back on Earth Bet, what with the cars and the bus that she had had the time to pore over (though she only was aware of the surface-level functions of the vehicles, for now). But what really grabbed her attention and refused to let go of it was one of the helicopters. Satomi wasn't quite sure how the device worked, but the... blades at the top and the piece of the vehicle that they were connected to did let Satomi know very quickly that it was an advanced, mechanical piece of technology. Satomi wasn't exactly known for not drooling over advanced technology, and so she immediately beelined right next to the helicopter. She wasn't climbing in or anything, but what she was doing was unabashedly standing right next to the vehicle and poring over it with notebook in hand, using her pen to write in her notebook; anyone managing to get a glimpse of it would find that the page it was open on was beginning to fill up with two sketches Satomi was darting between drawing at the same time, one of the helicopter as a whole, one of what she could see of the rotor.

After coming into the base, Satomi had stayed long enough with the others to get the greeting that they all got, but as soon as that let out, she made a beeline to a bathroom (she had figured out modern bathrooms at the PRT headquarters): she was still heavily spattered with blood and gore thanks to getting sliced open earlier, though Harry's treatment ensured that she was no longer in trouble thanks to the wound, that didn't exactly get rid of the other, wildly splattered evidence of the attack she'd taken. So she just decided to wash it off, taking advantage of the fantastic thing that these high-technology people called "tap water". Satomi turned behind her, locked herself into the bathroom, peeled off her outer kimono, and got to work. After fifteen minutes, she hadn't managed to get rid of it all -- that wasn't going to happen right now, especially with her under-robe and her koshimaki underskirt both being white (well, nominally white at the moment). But she did manage to get all of the blood off of her arms, face, and neck, and she did manage to clear the worst of the blood from her kimono, for that matter. Now, leaving the bathroom, the blue-and-gray garment was still somewhat discolored, making it clear that she hadn't gotten out of things unscathed, but she was confident that there wouldn't be enough blood everywhere to make people stop and question her. And so, satisfied with the job she'd done cleaning herself, Satomi headed back out towards where most of the group still was, asked one of the nearby base staff where she could find where their engineers worked. After getting her answer, she proceeded to get on the elevator... but not without taking her notebook back out (mercifully, having it on the side of her obi meant that though it had fallen out earlier and had to be picked up again, it wasn't ruined with her own blood) and taking as many notes as she could manage from within the enclosed space. Then, finally, once she reached the engineering division she took a long look around the place, trying to see what mechanical things of interest there were in the area.

Nader is silent for a couple of moments, before he bursts into sudden laughter. "No shit, did you actually make one of these guys strip?! That's probably fucked up on some level, but it's honestly way funnier than anything I expected to hear. Ahah... still don't actually need it, though. All I need is the pieces of armor, maybe a little bit of extra metal depending on how things go, since we're just talking about upgrades here."

"There are a lot of us with masks, if you have not noticed. Are you referring to the other knight or to the guy who gasses people?" After letting Aquila reply to that question, he continues in order to say two more things. "You're lucky in some respects here; I'm already used to working with a large bureau of other engineers, so working with a group of other designers doesn't actually much bother me at all. I won't want the clothes, though; I don't really need a fabric backing for my armor work, and I doubt I'd need one just to upgrade your armor. Plus, that probably involves stripping a dead guy mostly naked, and that's a little creepy."

Nader bends at his hips slightly to peer down at the hole, letting out a "hmmmmm." "I think I could probably help, but I'll warn you not to expect miracles from me. A lot of your problem is probably just going to be metallurgy, and to be honest it seems to me that these guys have some pretty shitty armor materials. Still, I might be able to fit together armor upgrades that can deal with ballistics better, mess around with the involved angles... yeah, I could take a shot at it. Won't be doing anything like reshaping it as we are now, though."

Though Nader's expression is of course inscrutable on account of it being hidden behind his mask, his voice does take on a definite tone of pride at Aquila's query. "Well, the base of this armor was for the Moskurg military when I was a weapons engineer before the rebellion, so it isn't as if I was alone on it, but I did contribute to the design of the original Tiger Infantry Armor, particularly in terms of the shaping of and fitting together of plates to best deflect bullets. This right here is my Rabid Tiger Infantry Armor, though, and I've put seven years of work into it. The weapon mountings are my work, as are the joints everywhere but the shoulders. The fitted mask, and the armor on the legs as well as the undersides of the arms are my work as well. Why?"

Nader hadn't entered the ship until a few moments after the others had made contact with each other; he had no intention of being the first guy to find out if the other team was dead and it was an ambush, thank you very much. Now, when this turned out not to be the case, Nader did head inside, leaning on an inner wall with his Horsekiller's tip resting on the ground as he stood while others talked and did things, just taking the contents of the derelict in. Then Aquila approached him, and the Forenian turned his head to look in his direction, pulling himself out of his lean against the wall. "Yeah? Need something?"

Slssssh-scrrrp! The claws raking across Satomi's body made that two-textured sound, as they tore deeply into her stomach, ripped up to near the bottom of her ribcage, and then were thankfully hindered by her armor, the sound changing from flesh tearing to instead the sound of metal scraping as the claws poked into the outer plate of her armor, were arrested by the rapidly-shifting time metal, and then more or less bounced off. This meant that while Satomi's chest was protected aside from bruising, her waist and stomach fared a lot worse. Her kimono mostly survived the attack, with the fabric for the most part just shifted upwards and into the wound (including her now very-mussed-up sash), and this did disguise some of the extent of it, but nonetheless the front of her kimono was now very slick with blood, gore soaking through or having splashed out when Satomi was hit -- she was a bloody mess. She also hadn't been able to stifle a scream, either, because despite herself an agonized shriek was wrenched out of her. That wasn't going to stop Satomi, though; she clenched her teeth tight enough she almost worried they'd break, and then she got moving again, crawling up the support beams of the now-eight-foot wall and leaving a trail of blood on them as she did. Then she took in a deep breath, and called out as best as she could: "If you need to... grrgh, use this wall as cover! I... don't know exactly how resistant it is to attack... but I am here to repair it, kkh, and it's absolutely going to be better than nothing!" Then Satomi dropped back down, letting out another noise as she touched the ground, and she pulled out her wakizashi and grabbed a piece of rubble, preparing to repair the wall if the Vajra attacked it; she was absolutely not going to abandon her duty because of something so simple as a wound, even if it really hurt. She knew that she wasn't adept in combat quite in the way that the rest of the group seemed to be, and unfortunately the Vajra's attack was ensuring that the original plan Julie had had, but... well, Satomi was going to help out with this wall in some way, and to that end she'd keep it standing. Satomi delays her move until after the Vajra's last move, and then uses Structural Repair on the wall, presuming that it has been hit!

For now just supervising (well, with some level of awe) as Julie made good on her idea and started to grow the little wall she'd built to legitimately useful size, Satomi took note and mentally shifted her thought process from a destructive one to a constructive one -- if Julie really was going to grow the wall out to trap the monsters, Satomi found it likely that the monsters would make an attempt to break out, in which case it would very much behoove the Kaiu family samurai to put her repair skills to good use. Satomi switches out the Structural Disassembly trick from her loadout (because I only put it in by accident when copy pasting my ability texts) with Structural Repair!

First off, LOTUS spoke. "Alright... Samantha's the only one who came out of this really hit big, so I'm going to need our medics to focus in on her to make sure she doesn't go down to Lancer! Healing her is beneficial otherwise, anyway. Samantha is likely to be healing herself, but Isobel, Hikari, I need you two to patch her up too! Bridgett, Gozer, I can see you winding up to make people tougher, and extrapolating that to your targets... yes, keep on doing that, good plans! Ritsu, I want you to tase Lancer, and Friedhold, I want you to try to muck her up again, I want two people hindering her at minimum at any one time! Katsuo, you need to actually hit that damn Lahmu now, and I want you to use a strong attack on it! Morgan, I also want you to go at it now! Uh, the new arrival... I'm not familiar with what you do, but if you have anything that can help us put the pressure on Lancer over here, its use would be appreciated!" Isobel began to reach for the poppy in her pocket, but she found her attention briefly taken by the arrival of a new woman, one with a witch's hat, blue ringlets, and... "Ohhh goodness." Yeah, the new lady was also one of the most attractive women that Isobel had ever seen, and despite where she was, she couldn't help but look Marisa up and down for just a brief second, and though Isobel would have probably greatly appreciated lingering her gaze a place or two, she had to resist that urge what with how she was needed right now. Oh well, there would always be more time after the battle, assuming that the woman didn't just instantly leave... So Isobel jerked her gaze back to Samantha, and ran up to her, finishing pulling out that poppy and then getting it clearly into Samantha's view before tossing it to her -- directly handing it to her did look like it would probably get Isobel burned after all, and even though the bolt of freezing cold that had just hit her definitely did hurt, this wasn't a cartoon and fire would just also hurt her. "Samantha, quickly, eat this, it'll help you recover!" Isobel uses Healing Poppy, healing Samantha for 2d4+INT*1.25 damage! Also, she has a passive 10% dodge chance, and if stunned physically or chemically LOTUS' moves can still be used. Constitution: 3, Dexterity: 8, Intelligence: 11, Resistance: 2, Strength: 2, Synergy: 0