Quote Originally Posted by Thanqol View Post
It's a rough way to knock someone out. Watching people clutch their throats is spooky - if effective. 'Greg' winces and looks away while you're doing it. Makes you feel a little guilty. You do notice that while one of them tries to pull off his helmet he straight can't do it before he runs out of breath.

But he moves quickly once the guys are down. Immediately he produces a hand laser, cracks the covering to the data intake port, and pulls cables out from his backpack to plug into both suits of armour. After twenty seconds of sitting very still all the armour seals decouple all at once - and a thick orange gas leaks from every single joint and gap. It looks nasty.

It's... not what you thought underneath. One of the goons is a lady with a face like the bulldog that caught the car, and the musculature to subsequently bench press said car over her head. She's covered head to toe in prison tattoos. Sure, makes sense, that's not an unusual look for a mercenary - but the other guy looks like some sort of poindexter - clean shaven, thin and bony, the soft hands of an office worker. He couldn't look less suited to wearing a set of power armour.

And then there's the ventilators. You noticed these were weird when your nanobots had to punch through them - it wasn't just that they were environmentally sealed, which would be unusual but not weird. It's that they were already pumping that orange gas directly into the users' faces.

"The hell is that?" said 'Greg', backing up away from the smoke.
Brainstorm shudders, and does his level best not to ruin the past five minutes by retching onto the newly-earned power armor.

"At a guess, I'd say it's probably some kind of combat-enhancing psych-you-up juice," he quavers. "Bulldog here is the control, and the skinny nerd is the experimental group. The question is, can you turn them off?"