[IC] Tengoku no Owari CT, Chapter 1.2

[Empiricist]

Chapter 1.2 - Chaos

 

Immanuel

((I can roll for random civil sidequests as soon as you make a post wherein you look for trouble.))

 

Marina

((I got nothing to say here actually, just posting this to confirm that you're doing stuff with Remi and that I didn't miss you or anything.))

 

Sasha

Corpse delivered. You had a few civilians give you a glance look on the way over, but none for very long, not that you stayed in anyone's sight for too long. Your schedule is mostly clear for the day, foiling assassination attempts being matters that, while generally quick, could be expected to cause quite a lot of questioning and paperwork. Still, you do have a few appointments you couldn't reschedule, the next one coming up is with Tony at just before lunch.

 

Faznie and Tor

((Aaron is approaching your location, but we can say that he's not quite there yet so that Tor can answer Faznie's questions.))

[Yours Truly]

Immanuel confidently integrates his relatively new cloak of maneuverability onto the rest of his suit of armor; after an hour or so of some not very hard work that in all honestly mostly consisted of him pulling a cloak he was already working on out of storage, and finishing the enchantments present on it by literally drawing a single line he had forgotten to draw in a large and expansive web of practically invisible runes that somehow caused everything to not work properly when he first made it.

 

He then decided to head out of his home and basically spend a couple of hours to look for any troublesome situations that a flying man with plasma throwing gauntlets who wears full plate might be able to solve....maybe there was a kitten that needed to come down from a tree?

[Empiricist]

Immanuel

Well, no luck with kittens, but you do find the next best thing: a massive police siege around a major bank, masked malevolent men peering out from behind walls of carved stone guns in hand, no doubt trained on hostages. From you angle in the air you can't quite make out their choice in weapons, but it's definitely a fair bit bigger than a pistol. Big bank, big guns, big prizes.

 

Hah. Amateurs.

 

There's a certain science to this all, a science the people inside have failed to grasp. You want big glass windows with southern exposure. Time it right and they become mirrors. No one will even see what happens inside. You want costumes, not whatever godawful balaclava these chumps are wearing, no, big bight, colorful. Something to remember, something to focus on. You cannot stop people from remembering. You cannot force them to forget. But humans are simple creatures, and when you put an elephant in the room, they stare at that elephant, not the evidence, the incriminating, identifying details. You go in, you go out. Two minutes tops. Your getaway driver's waiting outside. They've got a scanner. They drive, they drive smart, not fast. Fast gets attention, fast gets you prison. You go on a high speed chase, you better savor that fresh air while you still can, you're not gonna lose them. No, you slip away. Get the hell outta there, by the time the fuzz show up, you're gone, and they don't know where.

 

Subtlety. It's all about subtlety. And it's wasted on these chumps.

[Yours Truly]

Immanuel decided that this was something that needed to be done with an amount of speed and efficiency that only a German could provide as he quickly formed two and loaded two shoulder mounted railguns and dove straight towards a hostage and police free windows and fired a single round at the floor near it as he dove closer and closer....until he suddenly unfolded his cloak and fired a blast from from his sabaton rockets to try and land inside of the bank in the classic superhero pose and not belly flop on the floor onto a bank robber.

[Empiricist]

Immanuel

A great thunderclap breaks the still air. Amidst broken glass and burning plasma you make your descent, hostage-takers scrambling away from your terrible wake. For a moment, time seemed to stop. For a moment, the scene was frozen in time, silent, serene.

 

BANG

 

"Arggh! FUCK!"

 

Okay, so... one of these geniuses shot you. They shot you right in the gut. At close range. They are now very rapidly learning why ricochets are dangerous. And also what a gunshot wound and bloodloss feels like. It, doesn't sound like they're enjoying it very much, but that's okay because not everyone likes to learn. The remaining five(?) you think it's five, might be more in the back, immediately start pointing their guns. Some at you, some at the hostages.

[Yours Truly]

Immanuel stands up at a dramatically  appropriate speed before he opened fire on the weapons and hands of the bank robbers who were dumb enough to aim at the hostages. After he hopefully managed to neutralize them he would taunt them by saying, "What are you going to do? Shoot me?" Before he slowly walks up to casually fire at the rest of the bank robber's weapons.

[Zetaark]

Getting back into her garage, she stows the exoskeleton somewhere it wont be seen or noticed before checking which clients would show up. 

"Tony huh? Here's hoping his bike didn't blow up on him again," she chuckles before getting out various tools. Most of them were for adding or tweaking modifications on a bike, but a few others seemed ill suited for it. Those were for something else, in the event that his request wasn't for yet another bike mod. Once she got settled, she decided to wait for her client to arrive.

[Empiricist]

Immanuel

"Hands up! On the ground! Now!"

"AARGH! MY FUCKING LEG!"

BANG

PLINK

"AARGH! MY OTHER LEG!"

"Shit! Sorry!"

"Hold you fire goddamnit!"

 

Wow, not even going to let you stand up dramatically? How rude. And apparently not too hot on the pattern recognition either. You put bolt of plasma in each and every one of their weapons. Okay this part, you can't really hold against them, but if they were smarter and used handguns like a normal, this would've been way harder. Well y'know, without burning their hands and cooking off their magazines at least.

 

You know how in movies when the hero disables the crooks, everyone just kinda stare for a moment and start suddenly cheering like they rehearsed it? That, doesn't happen here. Instead, before any of the would-be robbers even gets to react to what the hell just happened, one of their hostages, looks like an employee of the bank, is already swinging. After that, the blood's in the water, and all over the floor, and this hostage situation has just about turned into somewhere between a localized riot, and a WWE cage match with the civilians just grabbing whatever's on hand to try and give them a piece of their mind. Which, in the confusion and chaos, seems to be doing a far better job of hurting people than those idiots ever could, at least, judging by the amount of people getting caught in someone else's swing.

 

Sasha

Soon enough, he arrives, "he" being this eye-patched hexagenerian, hair shot full of silver, suit shot through of bullets, looking less like a hitman and more like Bruce Lee, if y'know, Bruce Lee was in the mafia. The man isn't even halfway through the door when he starts talking.

"Oh Sashaaa... I need a new bike! Nitro! Both kinds! And lots of it too! Lots. Trust me. Trust me here, I need a LOT. Shielding too. Or armor. Whatever's the lighter. Just at the front. Need this to go fast, real fast. Oh! Grip enhancement too. Gonna need all that traction. Drift enhancers too. Burn out enchants are fine, not gonna be riding this for too long."

Loud as always. And judging by the order, soon to be in the market for a new bike. Possibly two new bikes.

[Zetaark]

"A custom order huh? Is your old bike too busted to fit that one or do you have plans for it still," Sasha asks as she starts writing a list of the aforementioned parts and starts looking around her garage. As she looks around, she's then reminded of a previous incident regarding Tony and a rush job she had to pull.

 

"By the way, when exactly do you need this thing by? Just out of curiosity," she asks, hoping that it isn't something ridiculous like last time.

[Empiricist]

Tor

Quote

The Goddard swings around, mounted on Fazine's shoulder to record the footage of the immediate aftermath, making her feel like those daring cable news filmers who are always the first ones to a scene of death and destruction. It would make good BTS B-roll footage for her actual movie. After getting a full roll, Faznie confronted the big man who was playing the trading cards on the plane, summoning real people from their cardboard confines. "Hey Thor! What the fuck is going on?! I catch one flight and then I'm stuck fighting off some ethnatioanlists with a bunch of magic people? How'd you learn to do the thing with your cards? I thought I was the only one who could conjure shit out of nothing, but I guess I'm not that speical after all?"

((Reposting this from the old IC for your convenience. Had to change the text color since it doesn't work well on Reborn's background.))

 

Sasha

"Not yet..." Oh. "But... I think this job will need me to pull the old switcheroo and y'know?" You in fact do not know, but your gut tells you it involves wrecking twice the number of bikes. "Ah! That reminds me! I'm gonna need security on it. Gonna be leaving it out on the street. Got it all figured out, we pass by that, probably fifteen minutes into the chase? Bike's probably gonna be chugging along, on fire, that kinda thing. But them bam! Jump off the bike, jump on the new one and run them done! It'll be great. Trust me. Trust me. You yeah, need to make no-one hot-wires it." Well, you can't say he's bad for business at least. "Oh and uh, next Tuesday would be great. But I can reschedule the hit if it don't work out."

[Zetaark]

"Tuesday huh? That should work out, barring any odd occurrences. Helps that I have more than a day to get everything set up too," Sasha chuckles, thinking of a past request. "So, anything else you'll need with the bike? Or will the mentioned things be enough for you," she asks, confirming his request.

[Yours Truly]

1 hour ago, Empiricist said:

Immanuel

"Hands up! On the ground! Now!"

"AARGH! MY FUCKING LEG!"

BANG

PLINK

"AARGH! MY OTHER LEG!"

"Shit! Sorry!"

"Hold you fire goddamnit!"

 

Wow, not even going to let you stand up dramatically? How rude. And apparently not too hot on the pattern recognition either. You put bolt of plasma in each and every one of their weapons. Okay this part, you can't really hold against them, but if they were smarter and used handguns like a normal, this would've been way harder. Well y'know, without burning their hands and cooking off their magazines at least.

 

You know how in movies when the hero disables the crooks, everyone just kinda stare for a moment and start suddenly cheering like they rehearsed it? That, doesn't happen here. Instead, before any of the would-be robbers even gets to react to what the hell just happened, one of their hostages, looks like an employee of the bank, is already swinging. After that, the blood's in the water, and all over the floor, and this hostage situation has just about turned into somewhere between a localized riot, and a WWE cage match with the civilians just grabbing whatever's on hand to try and give them a piece of their mind. Which, in the confusion and chaos, seems to be doing a far better job of hurting people than those idiots ever could, at least, judging by the amount of people getting caught in someone else's swing.

 

Sasha

Soon enough, he arrives, "he" being this eye-patched hexagenerian, hair shot full of silver, suit shot through of bullets, looking less like a hitman and more like Bruce Lee, if y'know, Bruce Lee was in the mafia. The man isn't even halfway through the door when he starts talking.

"Oh Sashaaa... I need a new bike! Nitro! Both kinds! And lots of it too! Lots. Trust me. Trust me here, I need a LOT. Shielding too. Or armor. Whatever's the lighter. Just at the front. Need this to go fast, real fast. Oh! Grip enhancement too. Gonna need all that traction. Drift enhancers too. Burn out enchants are fine, not gonna be riding this for too long."

Loud as always. And judging by the order, soon to be in the market for a new bike. Possibly two new bikes.

Immanuel stopped for a moment to stare at the scene unfolding in front of him for a moment, until he realized that he had absolutely no way of getting the crowd to disperse and stop kicking the shit out of the bank robbers. Which is why he slowly walked towards the door and held it open for the few hostages who decided to get out of here before one or more of the bank robbers decided to fight back and stop whinging in pain.

After a few moments and several civilians passes he turned slightly to get a better look on the policemen as they slowly approached the bank. He then tried his best to not come off as being absolutely terrified by the prospect of getting back inside with all of those angry people when cleared his throat to try and get the police's attention before he gestured at the cage match of the century and tried his best to affect a deep voice when he said, "You had a bank robbery, now you have a riot. You're welcome." And immediately flew away to the roof of a nearby building before any of them could try and arrest him.

[Chevaleresse]

She shook her head, avoiding the urge to sigh to herself. Not the way she would have done it. Too messy, too showy, and generally just inelegant. The situation was defused, though, the woman supposed, and more conveniently the individual that she'd wanted to speak with had flown to the very roof she'd concealed herself on top of. 

 

Immanuel would find that he shared the rooftop with a woman, a woman previously rather difficult to notice due to her near-motionlessness and excellent camouflage. She had a rifle of some sort hung loosely about her, and she raised her right hand in a gesture that indicated both greeting and a lack of threat. An older woman, too, by the looks of it; at the very least, the lines on her face and the silver tone of her hair seemed to indicate such. "Hello there, Challenger One. I've been trying to catch up to you since that flight, I've got a few things to discuss with you."

[Empiricist]

Sasha

"Just need the bike, I can handle the rest. Call me if something comes up, gotta run now."

And run he does.

[Yours Truly]

23 minutes ago, King Murdoc said:

She shook her head, avoiding the urge to sigh to herself. Not the way she would have done it. Too messy, too showy, and generally just inelegant. The situation was defused, though, the woman supposed, and more conveniently the individual that she'd wanted to speak with had flown to the very roof she'd concealed herself on top of. 

 

Immanuel would find that he shared the rooftop with a woman, a woman previously rather difficult to notice due to her near-motionlessness and excellent camouflage. She had a rifle of some sort hung loosely about her, and she raised her right hand in a gesture that indicated both greeting and a lack of threat. An older woman, too, by the looks of it; at the very least, the lines on her face and the silver tone of her hair seemed to indicate such. "Hello there, Challenger One. I've been trying to catch up to you since that flight, I've got a few things to discuss with you."

As a person who regularly worked with and designed magical items and generally went around being awakened, Immanuel wasn't really surprised by the fact that he was greeted by a possibly awakened woman who just so happened to be on the same rooftop he was on. Although he was a bit more surprised by the fact that she both knew of his alter ego and the fact that he was involved with the whole 'Plane inexplicably loses its tail and disappears from the sky after being subsumed by a much larger flying transport thing', as that literally just happened this morning.

So either news travels at lighting speed among the awakened world (although to be fair he did help stop an assassination and bring down a plane in the flashiest way imaginable)...or this woman had something to do with the other woman, you know... the one who gave him his last mission. Of course there was always the possibility that she was nothing but some creepy fangirl with a big and presumably magical gun... but that was highly unlikely.

He tried his best to not seem as if he was a split second away from hurling a bolt of plasma in her direction as he put on a relaxed stance and said, "And I hope that none of those things involve arresting me for tearing off the tail of an airplane, because I was really looking forward to not getting into trouble with the authorities this early in my career.".

[Zetaark]

"Aaaamd he's gone," Sasha mutters as Tony makes his leave. Now that he's left, Sasha goes through the checklist of what she needs for his bike construction and looks around the shop to see what she does and doesn't have on hand. Following that, she checks her schedule to see if anyone else is coming by in the near future.

[Empiricist]

Sasha

Let's see... Okay nitro, you have plenty of. Coolant as well. Burn-out shields, burn-out grip, you have plenty of those in stock too. Drift enhancers typically don't come in burn-out form, if you're gonna drift, you generally intend to keep on drifting and have to reinstall them constantly, while non-recharging shielding is useful for certain situations and grip is good for bad weather, still you probably could rig one up yourself using a combination of those two, that's basically what the are anyway. Main problem's the arcane nitro injectors, you don't actually stock them, and why would you? They're supposed to jam into whatever car you come across, they're for in-field use, turbocharging hot-wired golfcarts and whathaveyous, not things that already come with nitro inbuilt. You'll probably have to order those online and figure out how the hell to integrate them into the damn thing. Normally you could just get Satoshi to fetch you some, but she's undercover right now, something about infiltrating the Appleton Estate.

 

You've got a couple hours free now.

[Zetaark]

"Guess my schedule's free. Perfect," she grins as she grabs the exoskeleton from its hiding place and heads into one of the back rooms in her garage. This place was sort of like a personal studio room, except used for more of her volatile tinkering. Though this time its less volatile and more corpse, not that it bothered Sasha that much. Once she set the exoskeleton on the table, she grabbed an assortment of tools, some for machinery tinkering, others for dealing with human anatomy, and started too look over the thing, checking for any glaring details before poking into the thing.

[Empiricist]

Sasha

The main thing that stands out is that well, the exoskeleton seems to be comprised of cabin materials - plastic, cushioning, carpet, wiring, and aluminium, a lot of aluminium. Not exactly the typical material for armor, indeed, it probably only took your attacks as well as it did thanks to the spirit energy that was no doubt being pumped into it. A bit of a closer inspection and you notice the the positioning of the inner metal. Remember when you blew apart that exoskeleton's armor and found metal piercing basically all the important stuff ever? That, doesn't seem to have been chance. All throughout the body, every piece of missing armor exposes more spikes, all going through arteries and organs. You've the feeling it's the same story everywhere else inside.

 

It couldn't have been by chance. It couldn't have been from combat damage. This was on purpose. The exoskeletons were designed to kill their own wearers.

[IntSys]

Marina took a look at the clock. She got a day off, apparently, and it was just 9 AM. She had a day to herself... She shouldn't be lying on bed. She called Remi again.

"Marina?"

 

"Yeah, it's me again. I was just thinking if there's anything you want, like a wish list."

"Aww, thank you! But, wouldn't it be inconvenient for you? You must be busy... "

 

"Not really! I don't have work today, and Gramps' books can wait. More importantly, it's been like, an year since we part ways. I just want an excuse to see you again... "

 

"Hee... In that case, I only want one thing now... You."

"Wha-" Marina blushed slightly.

 

"-Oh wait no, two things! The other being a camera with a tripod. My work gotta look professional, after all! Ahaha... "

Remi hung up awkwardly. Marina on the other hand, thought about the presumably more serious part of the request. "Hrm... I'll just visit Mitsukoshi Mall. And then I'll fly to Remi's. It's just thirty minutes from here anyway, I think."

 

She plucked up a sticky note and scribbled the following, then slapped it onto the door to her room.

Going to Remi's! Won't be home for lunch! Call me if you need me! ~ Marina

 

 

With that, she grabbed her randoseru and rushed out of the cafe, taking flight in a snap and flying toward Mitsukoshi Mall to buy a fine camera with tripods for her favorite aspiring fashion designer.


(More filler later)

[Zetaark]

"Sheesh. Guess whoever made these really didn't want the users to be talking after," Sasha frowns as she takes note of her observations. The exoskeleton seemed less like armor and more like a glorified death trap for whoever was in it. It seemed to be powered by spirit energy primarily, and the spikes appeared to be positioned so that the wearer would almost certainly die from using it. The next question then was whether the spikes were stuck into the poor soul who had to wear it or whether they were run through the body mid fight. Preparing her equipment, she started to crack open the armor to see where things were attached, along with any other oddities she could find.

[Empiricist]

Sasha

Thinking back over the fight, you recall something, a noise faint beneath the chaos and gunfire, now oh so loud in the silence, reverberating in your mind. It was the screech of pistons, so close they melded into a single noise, and muffled beneath the armor. You remember now, their wearers were talking. They were talking up until that point. And past that, they seemed to change, the pylons went up, they went silent, and they started throwing out those heavier spells. Prying open the armor, you find a mangled corpse and no real mechanisms to have done some of that mangling. The stabbity stabby part of that mangling. Spikes must've been magically projected then.

 

Hmm. There's something weird in the chest. Looks like some of the spikes have projected additional branches? Curving around in strange geometric patterns in the chest cavity. Guessing that's ritual magic, makers might've skimped out on the size of the Shard needed (and it'll already be a pretty small Shard) by having them power themselves by sacrificing their own wearers. Yeah, sounds about right. What a cheapskate. You'd look for traces of an energy storage mechanism, but chances are it's probably fried already or built into the ritual and you, really aren't the best person to ask about rituals.

 

You pull something over. A machine, an imaging tool, your standard boxy looking medical device cast in inoffensive beige looking almost mundane save for what it's connected to, this hand held device that traces an otherworldly locus of twisted light. SFSIT. Scanning False-Soul Imaging Tool. Curses, geasa, assorted other bewitchments, rather than using Shards use countless false souls bound to an object to alter its physical properties, and if they're not hidden, this tool can find them. It basically just applies a trivial geis that emits radio-frequency light when it breaks, and it breaks immediately. If a curse or whatever is exposed for some reason, such as say, because the construct that was wrapping it has fizzled, this impairs the geis, causing a signal drop.

 

Now, normally when someone thinks about constructs, curses don't really come to mind. When everything runs like a damn anime sometimes people forget that there's more to this world than just that, and behind the technology there still must be reason, not a writer smoking, whatever they smoke, or a market research paper. You've, heard of curses in constructs before, they're usually not present in your patients since their Shards can handle everything and they work best on mindless automatons, but you have heard of them, and have installed some experimental modules with them before, they're pretty good for their lower cost, so they do pop up in those more frequently, though not strictly in this same context.

 

And for combat construct that, you can't imagine to have much of a lifespan, in between apparently constructing itself out of cabin materials and killing its own wearers, it's this matter of cost that comes to mind. Whoever made this would want to keep costs as low as possible as evidence by the ritual, minimize Shard draw and all that.

 

You slowly sweep your tool across the construct. Something appears in the monitor.

 

Bingo.

 

This construct, it's got curses, a lot of curses. What those curses do the FSIT can't tell you, but you can make an educated guess. From what it does tell you, chances are, basically all of the logic is encoded with those. So there will be curses describing broad situations and what the construct will do in general, then other ones describing aspects of those situations and aspects of those responses, going all the way down to the ones hooked up to the internals that let it move. Curses rather than quasi-life or algorithmic logic. Basically hard-coded too, with a set up like this there's no learning, there's no adapting, only what the curses tell it to do. Every situation, every response hard-coded, purpose-built for this single mission. Even killing their own wearers. Even trying to crash the plane. That was all part of their purpose, perhaps not something they had to do, you can't call it either way, but it still was something their makers were willing to have them do, and wanted to have them do should it have proved necessary.

[Zetaark]

"For the love of..." Sasha groans after running through the scan. Everything about this exoskeleton screamed of being a cheap job. And to make it worse, the things could have simply been automatons if whoever made them really cared enough. Putting aside her frustration for the needless sacrifice of life, she decided to focus her attention on the armaments present on the exoskeleton. She was half curious if corners were cut here too, or whether or not there was actually something of note present.

[DragonRage]

"They're this crazy cult who recruits people like me that can bring trading cards to life," Tor explains, "They call themselves the Kings of Cards or something, and they're incredibly stupid.  They're trying to take over the world by collecting rare cards and exploiting their powers.  This would be pretty doable considering how many of them there are, except practically all of them are terrible at actually playing the game their powers depend on.  I'm actually good because I'm not so worried about taking over the world or having the right cards in my deck to also fight the police or hold ordinary people hostage to ward off a military counterterrorism squad.  People who have to worry about that aren't exactly the sanest, or the most focused on tuning their sideboard.  Obnoxious idiots, the lot of them.  I've fought them three times now, and I could almost say they've gotten worse.  Maybe it's because their skilled people keep getting arrested?"

[Chevaleresse]

"Nothing like that. I wanted to ask you for help. You seem interested in keeping this city safe, which is what I've made my business. Besides, as far as I can tell, nobody at the level of the police in town knows who you are yet, and somehow I doubt they necessarily want to send the man who just thwarted a terrorist attack to jail immediately." Jumpy, he was. Perhaps she should have done her approach differently, but in her defense she'd been on this rooftop far before he got here. "Now, how much do you already know about the men that initiated that attack?"