As the large pile of Gear parts rolled away, a hand shot forth, with Martin Sanders following it as he emerged from the machinery as it dragged him away.
"Ah! Gah!"
Martin grabbed a hold of a rock and let the pieces of Gears tumble off from him. He didn't know who took them out, but the Clockwork that had been frying him got pulverized when he couldn't see (like when a Gear was punching him in the eye). There were still some electric burns, though... Then, almost all at once, the Gears pressing into him slumped down, the dark emanation he called "Evil Stink" having weathered their energy and health away.
"Ooh..." he grumbled as the last of the bits and pieces tumbled away, "I'm gonna be feeling that tomorrow. I'm starting to think that this was a big mistake."
The Hound made a whimper-like sound, opening one eye barely a slit to look at the scrapper.
"Ah... Jeez..." Martin grumbled as he pushed himself off the ground, "Now ya went and made me angry! Somebody's gotta pay!"
He looked around to the rest of the crew.
"I say we kick down that door and break us some bones!"
My Stories
Look at that. A full-grown woman pulling off pigtails. Her crazy is off the charts.
"What door? the bloody Soulhound just stopped in this abandoned intersection, no doors or manholes anywhere nearby, no buildings to enter, and I cant sense anything extradimensional."
Bladewing glanced at the Soulhound, seeing it whimpering in pain he grabbed an arcane crystal from his extradimensional pouch and shot a beam of healing energy into the Soulhound.
"There you go wierd reptilian pooch, that should fix you up!"
"You, dear sir, are a legend. "- nelly. "PIE DOESN'T HAVE TENTACLES!"
Bladewing Draconian lvl 30 KAT/SR scrapper
DarkNinjutsu lvl 50 DM/REG scrapper
Dajoji Hino lvl 50 elm/ela scrapper
Bloody Byakko lvl 20 claws/sr scrapper
"RAAAAAHT!"
Sanders punched the ground angrily with a hammer fist.
"Well then, let's get searching! There's gotta be a hole or a pile covering a door somewhere!"
He ran over to a pile of debris and started chuckings tones around.
"Come on! COME ON! I did not come all this way to stop here!"
My Stories
Look at that. A full-grown woman pulling off pigtails. Her crazy is off the charts.
Darkvapor gave a bemused smile beneath his hood.
He gave a smug look at the motley crew of heroes and villains around him.
So this is is what I have to work with.
He took a guess and decided that the Colonel and Scorcerer were most likely the leaders of the team.
Casually he walked over to them.
"My name is Darkvapor, I am here to assist you in your...investigation." he offered a hand for the two of them to shake.
-------------
Meanwhile....
"Ach this is great, just great. There are dead bodies all over ze streets. How typical of this city."
The wizened German scientist threw his hands up in disgust. There were corpses all over the place, and most of them were those ever annoying Outcasts and Trolls.
Doctor Klaus stood about 5'8" and weighed about 110 lbs. His neighbors used to called him "the kook next door", becuase of his rather eccentric behaviors. For example there was his frizzled grey hair that went everywhich way and had already begun to fall out. Then there was the strange little way he walked around, or how he often spoke to himself while walking down the street.
In fact, to the average guy on the street Doctor Klaus was completely 100% batty. Not that you could tell him that. He had a habit of flash freezing those foolish enough to cross him.
The strange scientist lived out of an old building inside of Boomtown. He'd moved there after the Rikti war in order to avoid his pesky neighbors and in order to continue his experiments. Many a hero had accidentally stumbled into his humble abode, only to recieve a nasty shock. That was another hobby of the doctor's.
From beside him the doctor heard a mechanical whirring.
"What is zis?" the man said in a heavily accented little voice. "A Clockwork toy?"
He suddenly found himself surrounded by Clockwork. They had been intended to trap unwary Vahzilok but instead they now faced the not so mighty intellect of Doctor Klaus.
"Get away from me you little tin can." he kicked the small Clockwork cog with his black boot.
It was only when he raised his chin and looked out at the sea of robots before him that his jaw dropped.
"Oh [censored]."
Dax shift his weight from one foot to the other. The crystals which formed the place were a humans mouth would be began to resonate and form words. "So we gonna sit here grab-assin' or are we gonna get down to business?" Dax shrank a little as he sent a wave of microscopic crystals to float around his body and act as a deterent to attacks by focusing different energies through the individual crystals.
I do not know my reasons for posting, but post I must. ~~Build
"We can't stop here, this is bat country."
--Johnny Depp
"I ain't bi-curious, I'm a man. Why do you think I'm wearing this tight spandex and got all these muscles?" Meatwad
Denniss's glowing hands faded ever so slowly as the remaining Clockwork simeaultaniously(sp? I'm prob'ly wrong.) disassembled, all moving in a linear style to a collection of scrap piles nearby, effectively ending the battle for the time being. As he touched back down on the ground, he could've sworn he heard Dusan mumbling '-old you they had it handled...', however, decided to ignore it.
"Wasn't much of a battle at all, was it?" He commented, looking around to assess the damage, quickly adding under his breath, "Still took a bit of a beating..."
Dusan seemed to be thinking a bit farther ahead than Dennis, already bored with the lack of action, granted, somewhat due to the fact that he was relatively useless against soulless beings. "So where's the next objective? I'm not exactly comfortable standing next to a pile of scrap that, up until just a few seconds ago, was trying to kill me." He laughed at his own joke, attempting to lighten up the mood, to no avail, sadly.
Jeez, you'd think someone died with their faces... Then again, that very well may be the case, but still...
And indeed, it almost felt like said scrap piles were watching the group.
-----
Said sea of robots fell onto Dr. Klaus like a metaphorical tidal wave. A large group of princes, a literal battalion of various knights, and enough cogs to occupy Paris attacked him all at once, with electrical charges punches, tesla cages, ball lightning, and so forth, and from everywhere, more and more Clockwork began to rise from iles of slag. Assembler Princes out of range of the Dr. began to summon more clockwork for the hell of it.
Now this was interesting. Why was there such a huge concentration of Clockwork here and not over where the task force group was currently?
Klaus gave a little yelp.
The clockwork horde suged inward, targetting the only living thing in the area.
Really it wasn't that odd that they were concentrated en masse here; the building was rather close to several places where Outcasts and Trolls liked to hang out at. Furthermore, there was a rather large assortment of high end lab equipment in the building.
Klaus ran back through the glass double doors of the building as fast as his legs could carry him.
The clockwork came in moments later.
They would find him hopscotching his way across the black and white tiled floor of the lobby.
Almost comically he ran into the elevator, nearly tripping over a dead Outcast and hit the button for the basement.
The moment a Clockwork cog stepped on the tile floor of the lobby all hell broke loose.
Turrets literally popped out of every imaginable place in the room: from the pots of fake plants to the ceiling, and everywhere in between high powered laser cannons appeared.
On a side note, in the dictionary, there is a picture of Doctor Klaus next to the definition of the word "overkill".
With the battle over, a curious thing happened to the puddle man. He slowly lowered to the ground, but when he reached it, he didn't stop. His body kept flowing into the ground until the only thing left was a small pebble sized piece of liquid metal
((I find it best to semi-remove my character from an RP with my interest is waning but still keep them in some how. That little pebble will follow whoever is going after the book thing until I decide to pop back in. That way the story is not interrupted but my character is still up to speed when I come back))
"Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid." - John Wayne
Energon X, now back up to full strength, and his collection of charms and boosts replenished from cross-D storage, flared the giant wing-disguised antennae and launched skywards, carefully watching the dispersion pattern of the apparently randomly bouncing Clockwork bits.
The Soulhound isn't moving, despite apparently being in reasonable health thanks to the healing. he thought silently, circling higher. Something else is going on. If that thing is here, then so is the City Rep. Or at least her soul.
He repeated that statement aloud. "If that thing stopped here, then the City Rep is here. Or, at the very least, her soul is here." He concentrated a little, still watching the Clockwork scattering, but also watching for the telltale traces of energy he could perceive that would warn him of the presence of a ghost.
Blazing yellow eyes narrowed as he hovered about a hundred meters above street level. "Anybody familiar enough with the sewer system to say what is directly under that lizard-thing?" he questioned. "Nothing says that the goon who bludgeoned States has to be keeping her at street level or in a building- there's so many bloody caves and rubbish under this city, it's a wonder the whole thing hasn't gone the way of Faultline and the Hollows."
He continued to glare at the bouncing and rattling bits of Clockwork, the beginning of a pattern starting to tickle at the back of his brain, but stubbornly refusing to coalesce into anything more than a tickle. A perimeter, maybe? But to wall us in or keep something else out?
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"
The turets activated by the floor sensors were all well-and-good. Normal Clockwork would have given up and gone back to collecting scrap.
But these wern't normal Clockwork.
They waited patiently for the turrets to recede into the walls, and then after a few tests involving tossing random minions into the room and watching them being blasted into bits, they concluded touching the ground was a bad thing.
So they sent in a few somethings that didn't need to touch the ground.
Several Prototype Oscilators, carrying Dukes, knights, and other minions between them, started ferrying the infinite horde of clockwork into the place...
-----
Energon X didn't detect even a wisp of etheral power that could be identified as a ghost.
Additionally, as it had been stated before, the Soul Hound had found its target at street level in the dead-center of the intersection. Not below, above, or to the sides of it.
Hammering away and tossing debris was getting nowhere. No doors, no holes... However... Martin turned to the poor animal, snuffling as it was in the center of the square. There had to be a reason.
Why didn't it move? Why didn't it run?
Was it pointing?
"What's that, boy?" he intoned as he walked slowly, "Right there?"
He approached the center of the intersection. Licking his lips, he peered closely a the ground.
My Stories
Look at that. A full-grown woman pulling off pigtails. Her crazy is off the charts.
Friggin heroes. Friggin Clockwork. Friggin soul lizard. Friggin sausage fest! Dax thought as E-X took to the sky.
"How many times have I already said it. When you fly you just make a better target! Stupid hero's don't know a thing about survival nowadays, I mean look at some of these guys. We got a boom type that goes out of his way to get shot at, a hobo who's only concern is a damn lizard, a scrapper with a sword ('nough said), a puddle who's no where to be found, and the lizard's keepers. Yeah I smell failure on the horizon." Dax said in a perfect Dennis Leary voice.
"The soul thing is probably going to take a squat, that's the reason it's got that look on its face and I bet you can't wait to get a whiff with the way you've been playing concerned mother." Dax stated annoyedly toward Martin
"Oh! I got an idea, lets sing Kumbaya and get drunk instead of finding the [censored]-hole and beating him to a pulp! I mean god! You guys act like you've never been jumped by an army of Clockwork before! And I still haven't found out what kinda reward I'm gonna get for doing this crap." Dax said with mounting anger.
"Let's hurry the hell up so I can get home and watch cartoons." He said exasperatedly. He tapped his foot for a few seconds, then went to stand at the edge of the group.
I do not know my reasons for posting, but post I must. ~~Build
"We can't stop here, this is bat country."
--Johnny Depp
"I ain't bi-curious, I'm a man. Why do you think I'm wearing this tight spandex and got all these muscles?" Meatwad
""Oh! I got an idea, lets sing Kumbaya and get drunk instead of finding the [censored]-hole and beating him to a pulp!" Energon X mimicked in a synthetic sing-song voice. "If you know where your erstwhile target is, then lead the way. Otherwise shut your noisehole- I may be visible from the air, but you can be heard from a mile away. I'm amazed you haven't already attracted more playmates for us."
He faded from view. Jerk the idiot might be, but he appeared to have stumbled on a valid point. "Better?" he continued, still on the team channel. "I don't like the looks of things from up here. Things look clear, but there's stealthy movement all around the perimeter of our position, and I can 'see' anomalous energy signatures that refuse to stabilize into anything concrete- could be nothing, could be the beginnings of a teleport trace, could be a freaking army of Clockwork nearby... couldn't tell unless they become clearer."
He paused, drifting downwards to perch invisibly on the ledge of one of the ruined buildings. "At the risk of sounding cliche and/or tempting fate, it's quiet. Too quiet. The clockbits that 'got away' from us formed a perimeter around where we are- no telling what would happen if we tried to cross it. And my gut is warning me that that may be the least of our worries."
Mostly because of the bizarre fashion in which those to Sword screwheads are acting. I'm starting to wonder if they're even entirely human. They certainly haven't offered any insights as to how their weird little reptilian pet is supposed to have found the City Rep when she's not visibly here.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"
The Watcher gave a mental huff. This was getting annoying. Despite everything, none of these guys seemed to be finding what they were supposed to, and that Dax guy was getting really annoying.
Wait...maybe he'd jumped to conclusions. At least one of them seemed to be getting an idea.
Still, there was that Dax guy. So he wanted a reward, huh? It figured. Where did the days go when heroes helped just for the sake of helping? It was Hero Corps all over again.
Well, if he wished a reward so bad, the Watcher would tell him just what he'd be rewarded with...
--------------------
The tracker rose again, though the reptilian creature still seemed a little undteady on its feet, balancing about with asymmetrically arrayed wings to compensate. Oddly enough - if Bladewing could sense such things, of course; if he couldn't, it was more of a moot point than anything else, although other people who did have this ability may have picked up on the oddity - he may have observed that the healing energies simply flowed about the creature, following the contours of its scaly coat, then simply dissipated away into thin air.
"Weng." was the Sword Sorcerer's dry answer to Darkvapor's greeting, the man taking his hand into his own. Strangely enough, an almost creepy sensation entered Darkvapor's being as his hand touched the cold armor of the Sorcerer. It was as if he shook hands with a machine.
"Zweng." the Colonel introduced herself as well, and if Darkvapor chose to shake her hand, the same clammy feeling would arise once more. Were they just showing extreme antipathy to him in their very being, or was it something else?
After the chilling welcome, the Sword duo made their way over to Dax just as he completed his rant, the Colonel beginning with, "Oh, don't worry about that. Your reward will be greater than you can even imagine."
"Of course, if you don't want to stay," the Sorcerer continued, "you're always free to leave. But if you leave..."
"...then you won't learn anything." both Sword operatives said in eerie unison, then left it at that, making their way back to the group...
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
((ooc Happy B-day Devious, and Dax is a brute not a hero.))
I do not know my reasons for posting, but post I must. ~~Build
"We can't stop here, this is bat country."
--Johnny Depp
"I ain't bi-curious, I'm a man. Why do you think I'm wearing this tight spandex and got all these muscles?" Meatwad
((He's helping the good guys, isn't he? 
))
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
(Happy Birthday Devious! Here's to another year of happiness, health, and WMDs!)
Dusan was about to speak into his communicator when it was rudely snatched out of his grasp by a certain translucent hand. "What're the odds that it's a type of spiritual energy, if you can tell? Dusan and I could probably give a better evaluation in that case."
Needless to say, Dusan felt a bit belittled by Dennis's possessive action. "Now wait a minute, who gave you permission to use the comm link?" Dusan asked, insulted that Dennis had thougth so little of his ego when doing what he did. "Let's get this straight, I'm the hero, you're the sidekick."
Dennis nearly burst out laughing and put his hand over the mic to prevent this from being heard by the majority of the task force. "Really?" He said, stifling a laugh, "Well, I wouldn't want to take away that salve on your ego." He finished, bursting out laughing again as Dusan fumed.
((okay who controls the sword agents and the hound? can you please have the Soulhound tell us where to get started?, also I wonder what is going to happen with this odd and obviously over-paranoid scientist....hmmmm I SMELL PLOT TWIST!!))
"You, dear sir, are a legend. "- nelly. "PIE DOESN'T HAVE TENTACLES!"
Bladewing Draconian lvl 30 KAT/SR scrapper
DarkNinjutsu lvl 50 DM/REG scrapper
Dajoji Hino lvl 50 elm/ela scrapper
Bloody Byakko lvl 20 claws/sr scrapper
((Ach! You are reading my mind again!
*zaps bladewing with uberfreeze ray*
"Das what happens to nosy forum posters"))
Klaus' turrets may have popped out when the clockwork stepped onto the floor, but they didn't recede until they'd blasted everything they deemed "hostile" or Klaus shut it off. Sometimes they kept blasting the corpses of enemies until they were completely vaporized.
The turrets fired volley after volley, first at the clockwork in the front of the group and then the flying clockwork, along with the others.
One turret overheated from firing too much and burst into flames. A second one followed suit moments later.
And then another.
And another.
In fact, more turrets were dying than clockwork.
As happened so often, Klaus forgot to maintenance his used equipment. They weren't used to firing so frequently.
So more and more clockwork reached the elevator. Now all they had to do was figure out where Klaus had gone...
---------------
Darkvapor shook hands with both the Sorcerer and the Colonel.
"Pleased to meet you." he said in the most polite voice he could muster.
They would find that his grip too was cold. In fact the moment they touched his hand they felt an urge to pull away, but somehow managed to shake his hand and then walk away.
Maybe they were just imagining it, or maybe they just didn't like him...
Energon X was scanning the ground with uneasy senses, trying to figure out what in the nine hells the Clockpowder was doing around them, when he happened to glance at Darkvapour and the Sword duo, his attention drawn by the brief chatter.
He froze. That's not a human nervous system. he thought with some shock. Even the crystalgoon over there has at least some traces of electrically active neurons that I can perceive, although it's very, very faint thanks to his energy absorption keeping most of it from escaping. He stared harder, yellow flames roaring out of his eyes sharpening to the point they threatened the integrity of his cloaking field.
These two? Unless Sword's doing some very funky new surgeries on their operatives, they're 'bots. Far more concentrated energies running in almost perfectly straight lines through a vastly simplified network. He hesitated for a split second. They're about to do something. Let's see if I can't draw them out.
"So, do you two rehearse that speaking-in-unison bit, or does it come unnaturally?" he commented offhandedly, deliberately blurring the 'un' in 'unnaturally' just enough that most people would automatically hear the 'come naturally' ending to the cliche. "The longer we sit here watching your pet lizard contemplate its navel, the more chance something unpleasant will have happened to the City Rep before we find her."
He shrugged. "Could you turn off the forcefield or whatever it is around the Soulhound so it can be healed and we can get on with this?" he added as an afterthought.
((E-X noticed the healing being deflected, but hasn't necessarily thought there was anything odd about it- this is a flying lizard that can smell souls, after all :/))
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"
(*Cough*Previous page Chameleon.
Dennis has a question for you. 
)
The Watcher tensed at Energon's remarks. This could mean trouble. For everyone.
Worse yet, he was still bound to inaction. All he had permission to do was observe and relay. He just hoped this would smooth over...
--------------------
Sword duo seemed not the least bit perturbed, nonchalantly answering Energon with calm tones, the Colonel following the Sorcerer's words.
"We're brother..."
"...and sister."
"Weng..."
"...and Zweng."
"We think very much alike."
"So we've been finishing each other's sentences for a long, long time now. Comes with the territory."
"And what are you talking about?" the Colonel extended her arm towards the reptilian, "Of course the healing worked. Can't you see? The tracker is doing just fine again."
"Are you sure your senses are working properly?" the Sword Sorcerer questioned further, subtlety trying to undermine the hero's competence, "This operation is very stressful, after all. I mean, we are pursuing one who took down the Statesman. You might want to rest your nerves a bit..."
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
E-X spared Dennis a glance, wincing slighlty as he did. Phantasms always gave him a headache with their bizarre amalgamation of ectoplasm and raw energy. "The random bits of energy? They're too diffuse for me to say with any kind of certainty that they're even there, much less what sort of energy they are. If you want to take a look for yourself, you're more than welcome to- your senses may be better suited than mine for this."
He returned his attention to the Sword duo, frown lines creasing his forehead, and resisting the temptation to ask where Louie was. Energon X slid smoothly downwards, landing next to Martin and joining him in peering at the ground after a perturbed glance at the Soulhound. "As soon as I become an expert on reptilian cryptozoology, I'll let you know whether or not I think the thing is 'fine', but unless it reacts vastly differently to stimuli than its more conventional cousins, it's not in the best of shape- in the lizards that I know of, those actions indicate discomfort or internal distress."
He stared at the ground, quite open to the possibility that the City Rep was cloaked in a way that he couldn't detect, shrunken down to germ size, dimensionally displaced, or any of a dozen lunatic scenarios that anybody with any length of time in this game ran into on a routine basis. He even gave an idle arm wave through the space the Soulhound seemed to be staring at.
Whoever... whatever those two are, they're smooth. Calling them out probably won't accomplish anything, and unfortunately, they're not likely to allow me to touch them after I tried to catch them out, so I can't get a clearer reading. Pity this suit is strictly recording sensors- with all the gear packed into it, SERAPH could probably give me an accurate readout. For now, eyes on goal. If they try anything funny, they're looking at a faceful of exotic energies.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"
((All Clockwork in Boomtown are currently under the control of Republ-ahhh...Under the control of evil persons. Yep.))
And that was it.
Silence reigned.
The battle was finished, Babbage was down, the Princes had been pulverized, and their minions crushed.
Something slightly odd then happened.
The remaining pieces of all the Clockwork that were still intact, bolts, screws, cogs, gears, and other bits all started rolling and sweeping themselves away from the group into random rubbish mounds...