Lancer: The Beautiful Machine IC

[n0ble]

Part 1: The Thing About Revolutions
"Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly."
-H.L. Mencken"

Golgotha (the Entrance)

One does not enter Golgotha alone.

Even if it werent for the constant in and out of prisoner traffic to strip the surrounding forest, there would be the prison infrastructure. Each is positioned at one of the four corners of the prisons interior. First is the squat guard house, host to much of Golgotha's munitions. The seldom-entered clinic. Individuals do not leave the clinic. The satellite dish used for communications stand silent and immobile-rumored to have gone unused since the Warden's arrival due to her pride. And then the maglev train that goes straight to Klataua. To the Capital. It is a popular subject of rumor the Prison over where the Warden and her son keep their home, as it is certainly not the Capital. And all of this bordered by square wall that breaks but twice: once for the train to exit through the wall via its trac, and the gates of the wall that allow work crews into the forest.

Here the throngs deemed safe enough to be allowed above ground make their way past the dual doors of the prison proper to the work detail said good behavior has earned them: despoiling the forest. Yet it is not only these individuals: some workers live just on the cusp of seeing the sky again, tasked with the onerous task of offloading the ores and minerals from the great central lift that goes down to depths of Golgotha. The elevator runs four times a day, sufficient to load the train with sufficient mineral wealth in two trips. It runs constantly. Up and down, up and down, hissing with each rise and fall like a salamander from the Depths Below. The doors that enter the great black pyramid that marks the descent are built into one side of the wall, near constantly open to allow the traffic of material into and out of the prison.

Harkon and his security detail man the gates, the OVERSEER consigned to the below. Each has little in the way of heraldry to mark them out, their frames more in common with IPSNs design philosophy than that of the Karrakin forges. Harkon himself stands in an assault class mech, named the Red Gauntlet to those of you with hidden implants that allow for seeing it. The name seems to be a reference to a mercenary company that once subcontracted with Mirrorsmoke before a too rabid deployment saw UDOJ disband it. Its a fitting title for the biggest and blockiest mech amidst a squadron of big and blocky mechs, each a thing of right angles and rectangular prisms and cubes and plated metal. Cheap looking. But brutal. Much in the same as the rest of Golgotha's singular apogee: all four sides of the black pyramid that are the above ground walls converge to a singular point. The four walls act as protection not for the workers, but for what infrastructure has been corralled near the bulk-elevator down. Harkon stands out amidst this onyx backdrop for how his mech sports a crimson-red paint job. He handles himself like someone that sauntered right from an Armory recruitment poster, holding onto the large bore assault rifle in his mech's grip with the swagger of a killer.

The men and women who make up his security complement hold themselves much as the same, killers one and all. They take their haughty positions from behind barricades whereby they can observe those prisoners entering and exiting, to say nothing of their watch on the payloads conjured up from the Pit. Their gaze is punctuated by the odd "Move along." or "Keep on, prisoner." aimed at those who lag in their efforts to depart or come in from work.

Small buildings dot the interior of the prison-complex: admin stations, outhouses, lesser guard bunkers poised for watching and supply houses for work-things like drills, bulk haulers or temporary store areas for when quotas are overfilled. Whats needed to maintain the production at this level of the prison. Not a concern for you and not one for Harkon unless you become one of his concerns. Best hope that you dont, for the moment.

The hiss and steady whine of servos occupy your attention, tearing it away from whatever passing thing had taken it. The platform is readying to begin its descent again. Soon it will time to take the hour ride down to the Pit. To the Last Call & Karst.

Golgotha (The Ghetto & The Pit)

Some say that Old Man Karst named the place when the remnants of the Albatross were cast down in the bowels of Golgotha. Others say the Karrakin whose designed the prison did so with a mind towards the eponymous ghettoification of its occupants. Others still say it was the Warden who coined the term not out of disgust, but a rare moment of sympathy for those under her charge. Whatever the reason for its naming, the Ghetto's been extant for long as the vast tracts of mineral gouged from Shotora's flesh.

Prefab structures wrought of concrete and plastics ring one side of the vast crevasse, quietly sitting in defiance to all the miseries heaped upon the building's occupants over the years. Mycologic farms, water purifiers and the odd place host to prison-business dot the mini cosmopolis, little islets of difference amongst the same building repeating itself, the skyline only broken by the odd hab-block megastructure too stubborn to fall under the lack of upkeep. Further back, the vast cavern that serves as a cradle to your revolution curves upwards, ensconcing the vast crevasse below in walls of stone. More homes, the oldest amongst the prison, stand silent and indomitable against time for how they are carved into the very rock of the walls. Personages mill to and from this dyad of structures-those carved into the wall and those built from prefab. On errands. On business. To work. To avoid work. To settle scores between various work crews. This is your side.

Bridges cross over and ford the gap in the mining pit. It would take too long to circumvent the gap in a timely manner absent a vehicle. The side opposite your own is a mirror for how the constant transport of mineral to the surface is haloed in floodlights. This is a side of order and precision that brooks no sentimentality when comes to fulfilling its goals. Lifts raise the bounty carved from Shotora to the Prison's side, a luxury exclusive to the Prison where across the casm you have made do with dug out switchback paths that require walking. The various well worn pathways are flanked by guard elements-bordered by a partchwork of walls, towers, squads, even the odd mech. From there it is upwards on the great bulk-elevator stapled fast to the wall, a mechanized way out standing to mock the forever homes carved into the wall on your side. But Harkon is not among the people on this side. Not right now. He and his guards are privileged enough to be aboveground. Instead, there is the OVERSEER.

Floating through the air as though weightless, a digitized, beautiful face stretched feral and made of code. Lodged like a flaw or crack on a tablet-screen just as the cephalopod hovers through the air like a malignant tumor. The screen itself is in turn mounted atop the front of a cephalopodic mech. A fine arrangement of drones orbit the frame, each quicksilver and made of mercury in the glare of the Golgothan floodlights. A smaller mist billows out from the towering column that passes for the upper half of the frame's squid-like body, a fuzz of what is almost assuredly nanocloud of some kind. The frame continues to float through the air. Patrolling. Probing for weakness.

And below this, the yawning dark of the deeper levels, the view broken by the odd plateau or scattering of anchored lights. Several massive lift systems are lodged at the lip of Prison's side. Here the vast quantities and quotas are brought forth and hauled onto the bulk loaders and non mech methods of transportation. Small crevasses and excavations bleed from the various extant strata like veinules alongside bigger, more arterial shafts constantly manned and hacked away at, both circulations holding secrets that only those not returned from them can tell. Lost to the sound of drills and rocksaws and too-dulled chain axes. A shrill whistle, the signal of a shifts end, echoing out from the man made pit. Despite the dirge like quality of the note, its a signal for relief, and a time to progress somewhere other than down. The Old Man is waiting.

The Last Call

A riot of neon dances across the prefab face of the bar's bottommost tier, casting a lewd figure that shifts between genders as various parts of the signage are run through with electricity. The surrounding building so much built up as built up and into the vast sheer of the walls that back the Ghettoside of the pit. Its played a large part in the bars survival, its status as being on the outskirts of the ghetto making it a favourite place for to hob nob and discuss things that miners normally wouldnt. And then there are the hotsprings. Maybe the Warden doesnt know. Maybe she does but doesnt care. Regardless, the central feature of the Last Call is a series of clandestine hotsprings that provide a steady supply of fresh drinking water to not only the Last Call, but to the Golgotha prison element at-large. In this sense, the place is every bit the watering.

Its always busy in the Last Call. Whether its work crews playing games of ball and pins or darts, to the more political prisoners slacking it off over imported, a little bit of everyone cast into the Golgothan ecosystem can be found here amidst the places three tiers. Each of the floors is more discreet the higher one goes, a complementary fact to how each level of the prefabricated structure is sunk deeper and deeper into the rock wall and thus more reliant on internal light. People from all strata of the prison element commiserate and mingle here free of judgment or prejudice. But more than the freedom afforded bar-goers, the Last Call offers what Golgotha ironically does not to its prisoner populations: a sense of security. Its small wonder the place was cradle to the Revolution.

After asking for the Old Man, your directed to the third floor, led by a man carrying a small handheld glowlamp to light the way. Karst sits behind a private table carved from white Shotoran oak. Expensive. A glowlamp sits in the center of the table ringed with candles, lending the entire private room a gray overcast in the pale white light as much as the candles do some theatricality. Next to the others the Old Man earns his title: grizzled, wisened, his face craggier than the walls of the pit, Karst is an Old man. For this particular occasion he's donned his old Albatross uniform: beige bleached white under a lack of sun, now pockmarked with soots and burns and frayed edges from the constant years underground. His left eye is covered over by a patch, though an angry belt of scar tissue still pokes up over the cover at a left slanting diagonal both ways out. A mug of what looks like contraband beer sits in a glass at his left hand, jaundice-yellow in the glowlamp's light.

The Lady Kareftis stares down a set of patrician features and over a pair of wire-frame glasses from Karst's right, dressed as though she may as well be going to a ball. Blue silks unmarred by soot drape across and around the lady's athletic figure in a fine dress, lending her a courtly appearance that seems out of place on the other two. Its made all the more apparent by the stark white of a lab coat she's overlaid across the blue dress, though this only comes down to her waist. Her straight, black hair has been done up into a professional bun. Not a single spot of dirt on her. Kareftis looks up from a data slate on your arrival-it is easy to catch a glimpse of what was on it before she snaps it off: a list of individuals who have logged the need for medical attention via whatever frequencies Liz currently has the Ghetto on. She offers each of you a tight smile and takes a sip from her drink: a lilac colored beverage that fizzes in its champagne flute. "It is good. To see you all you here."

Liz sits wearing a pair of overalls over a plain work uniform several sizes too large for her. She seems to have absorbed all the dirt not on the Noblewomans outfit for how stained and marred by grease her overalls are. Liz wears a heavy looking toolbelt like an ammunition bandolier: slung across her shoulder. Her helmet is hitched to the opposite side on her waistbelt, itself festooned with all manner of tools for cutting, soldering and wiring. A pair of thick welding goggles are plastered to the youth's forehead, obscuring the frizz of wild blonde-white that passes for the young woman's hair. The young engineer gives each of you a friendly wave as you come into the room, her grin getting bigger and bigger with each new occupant. its the only time she pauses fiddling with a half-sphere balanced in the crook of her non-waving arm. As Liz is under age, the Last Call refuses to serve her alcohol. She drinks water from a much too elaborate glass-one styled like a decahedron with the top facing side vacant, each other side made from a differing kind of gemstone. SLATE remains unseen-no doubt a consequence of the fact that the NHP's typical body is more or less the size of the entirety of the Last Call.

Karst speaks once all of you have arrived. "Thank you all for coming." He pauses to shoo Liz away from pinching a sip of his beer mug, then turns to the others. "Its time." A look of concentration lodges itself in the Old Man's face, causing the lines in his brow to furrow. "I know, I know. I've been saying that for a while now. But now. Now." He nods to Liz, who promptly twists the top of the mechanism she's been working on with an audible click before sliding it just north of the glowlamp at the tables epicenter. Green light flickers out as a mesh from the projector before assembling itself into something all too familiar: a map of The Pit, ironically wrought from light. But it doesnt stop there. Instead the light tracks down, tapering so that the point closest to the projector, becoming more and more narrow before focusing on a point. The Pit becomes the flat bottom of a cone, the lines converging to a tip highlighting various strata of the depths below before stopping and highlighting one such layer-a deep, deep layer-as the source of something. "Now we know where they're keeping their jammer." Kareftis offers up a conservative grin at the prospect.

"We have a printer set up offsite for you. It is a few strata down but far enough away that you wont be missed. Once you have got your assets printed, you meet up with SLATE and go below to here." She shoots a dubious glance at Liz. "I have been assured that the NHP will be in a form more...conducive to the current mission." The Lady stands, then points to where the cone of light tapers off. "Thus far we've only been able to ascertain the stratum the signal originates from, but-"

"-But I souped up SLATE!" Liz blurts out with a wide eyed grin, "Whatever their jammer does, it does it where theres some kind of output and so really it was just a matter of reworking the Messeier drive I have in one of his smaller bodies so that it synchs with the Taper Core protocols, then piggybacking it from the signal diffuser. Now, thats all easy in normal circumstances, but this is anything but normal. So instead I had to find a go around for the signal diffuser and supplement it's output with a-"

"Anyway. The girl's right. The NHP can find the signal once and triangulate where the jamming station is once its had some time. From there its simple as following the locked in signal and fragging the jammer. My guess is that the Warden will know the jammers down once signals come online. But that only means we need to hold out until you get back to even the odds." The Old Man pauses for a moment and the Lady fills the silence. "You must have questions. As far as I can ascertain something existing at this depth must be self sustainable to a certain degree. And besides. This prison's inmate population has a history of exiling its own-one need only look to figures such as the Beastmaster as testament enough to this fact. So at the very least it would be fair to surmize an opposition that relies on core-based technology to sustain things like water purification and a baseline agriculture. Trading with such an entity would afford goods to the aforementioned scavengers, thereby allowing them to remain a factor within the ecosystems below."

"What she means to say, Lancers, is: enemy frames are a certainty." growls the Old Man.

Spoiler: OOC

Show

Hey everyone, welcome to the game proper-feel free to situate yourselves at one of the various strata and narrate how you got to the Last Call, the only thing I'd really ask other wise is including something about how Karst contacted you now that its time to begin things begin in earnest. Meeting place is the Last Call. The "jammer" in this instance is a station used to jam common frequencies and signals used to grant LL to pilots from other corporations that arent GMS. The Trio at the Revolution's heart have discovered where the station is-approximetly: below the pit. Plan is to go pin down the signal's location, go there and destroy it. Simple right? Karst is confident they (the prisoners) can hold out long enough against whatever the Warden brings to bare until you arrive back that theres a very real chance of sustaining things.

Couple of terms I used that are clarified/exposited on:
- UDOJ: Union Department of Justice
- 'low Ground: "Below ground", prison slang
- Depths Below: refers to the area found below the Pit that goes into Golgotha's extensive cavern and tunnel network (current seismology only goes to where the Pit is), where exiles, madmen and traitors go. Also a popular curse word.
- The Beastmaster- a notorious prisoner exiled to the Depths Below some half decade ago. Notable for their rumored ability to command both a highly modular mech-the Salamander's Folly-and the various fauna that Golgotha's foundation drove further underground. In recent years their success has lead to many others that have fled or been exiled from Golgotha gathering around the Beastmaster as a sort of Survivalist Messiah that lauds strength and the will to take from others as virtues. (Note exile is almost always done by prisoners to other prisoners for some perceived crime-snitching to Harkon, for example, is almost always dealt with this way but the proportionality of a response varies wildly between Laborers, ex-Albatross and the Intelligentsia.) Feel free to make up your own history with the Beastmaster in your opening post

Also apologies for the cliche-I hear starting in a tavern is the territory of D&D but hey, why argue with a classic?

[Zelphas]

Levi Royston's life had been filled with more downs than ups, especially lately. Finding himself in a bleak underground prison, on a backwater planet, in a far-flung corner of the Rim, with a false name and an attempted murder on his plate, he did what he always did: he found something he needed to survive, and he started working towards that one day at a time. Anyone who'd spent more than two local hours in this pit could see that the leadership was too dysfunctional to treat like a unit; you chose your gang and stuck with it, same as any back-alley or ductworks anywhere else in the galaxy (and beyond, presumably). Levi didn't much like his choices here, though. Harkon he discounted out of hand. The man was sadistic, bored, and arrogant--unless you could give him a ticket out of here or entertainment you were dirt to him, and Levi couldn't do the former and didn't have the stomach for the latter. He contented himself with avoiding the man and his lackeys, looking down at the right moments and stumbling just enough to seem neither too proud to stand nor too weak to resist tormenting.

The OVERSEER was little better. In Levi's experience, "emotionless" NHPs came in two groups: those that didn't know about emotions, and so were capricious and often confused by the fleshy things they had to deal with, and those that didn't care about emotions, and so munched through the meatbags without a qualm when it suited their purposes. The jury was still out on which one the OVERSEER was, but he'd seen enough to think it was the latter; either way, there were no "good graces" to get into, there. If he made himself essential to the oversized brain bot, it'd wouldn't act to protect him--it'd go looking for redundancies. Better to remain another number, simple and rote, and so be catalogued and dismissed rather than taken aside for "study".

He landed on the Warden, more for lack of choice than for any real hope of success. Trapped in her own machine, Rhosayne-Ludra was little better than her OVERSEER, the callousness of her life building up an armor so that she no longer saw people, only numbers and reports. In some ways, she was the most dangerous choice, too, since cozying up to the Warden was a good way to get on everyone's bad side if you weren't very smart and very careful. There was a chink in the Gavel's sour armor, though; the Warden had brought her son. If a link could be forged with Bashir, there might be some hope for better in this prison, even if it wouldn't be much more than a couple of liberties and an ear in a crisis. On this front, Levi had already made some strides as a model prisoner; after successfully convincing at least one guard that he was a bright-eyed rube off to see the galaxy who got in way over his head, he had been placed in the forest detail, and a careful reveal of his self-taught skill at patching injuries gave him a place as the ad-hoc medic for the little group. He still had his quota to fill, but a mended break or a quickly-shut cut filled more than a few of his trees from day-to-day, and he'd even managed to squirrel away some patches of his own for a rainy day.

All of this was besides the whole revolution, of course. Call is Levi's plan B, even if plan A probably won't give him a chance to fall back on anything should it go belly up. Maybe Levi's just an optimist.

---

The call from Karst was simple and solid, the most basic bump-and-pass that you can get, and the best trick from it was that Levi didn't have to find the time to read any note; the smooth, polished stone in his hand told him to meet in Last Call and be ready for things to kick off, just like a roughened stone would've told him to lay low and a punch in the mouth would say all was lost. (Levi's request, not Karst's; good to get a little distance if he could, should disaster happen). Forest detail had been mostly devoid of injury that day, so Levi shook the soreness out of his arms and followed the mass of miserable prisoners down, down, down to the land of the not-quite-dead. He waited for one of his other would-be compatriots to ask for the Old Man rather than make the connection himself, shadowing them to the meeting spot. He'd explain himself as there for the meeting if asked, play off the "nervous guy from off-planet" angle, but keeping his distance is useful until he has to commit. Speaking of: looks like he was going to be committed, whether he liked it or not.

Levi had played the same game choosing his place in the revolution that he had for the prison complex, though here he was a bit more spoiled for choice. The Old Man was, perhaps fittingly, a bit too much of an old, grizzled veteran for Levi to pick out as his pseudo-sponsor; the man believed in justice, and right, and all those things you couldn't sell, wear, or eat. Not that Levi begrudged him that, it just meant that Karst would likely object if he ever heard the name "Ephraim Spang" at some point. In the reverse, Liz was too young for Levi to see her as a useful side to hitch his star to, and he was allergic to the idea of mentorship; plus, he'd need to dive deep into the world of NHPs, and such a land was one he still wasn't certain he wanted to dip his toes into all that deep. That left Lady Kareftis, and there were several points for and against the connection. Levi's cudgeled-together medical knowledge meant he could lend a slightly more extensive hand than most in the treatment of prisoners, and her status as an offworlder gave them another point of commonality. But speaking of commonality: "Levi" had roots as common as emptiness in space, and the Lady Kareftis could spot that in microseconds. Levi never attempted to hide that he was currying favor with her, but neither did he act as though he was her equal in any respect; she was an adept political player, and all he could say was that he could see part of the board from time to time. But all of this was besides the point of the main mission.

Pushing his worries and contingencies aside for the moment, the dark-haired, dark-eyed man of middling... well, everything... nodded to the three leaders in the room, his nod to Kareftis being slightly deeper than the rest. "Descend, destroy the jammer, ascend, fight our way out," he summarized with a slight grimace, his voice seeming to fall away without an echo. "It has the benefit of simplicity, at the very least, and more details than we began with. I suppose a scouting mission to the jammer for a more concrete threat assessment has too high of a risk of discovery?"

[Bitter]

As the high pressure hose stopped blasting chemical wash against his naked body and the liquid drained off of him, Lupo’s consciousness came back into full focus and he smiled.

On an exotic materials mining group, you ended up handling a lot of toxic materials that could kill you in fun and exciting ways. In a proper mining operation you’d be fully kitted out in an industrial-grade hardsuit. Here, even with the ability to print out anything required, some bean counter had figured out that it still cost more in materials to make decent suits than it did to do the bare minimum, once you factored in free and plentiful prison labour. So in exotic materials mining you wore thin plastic-paper flimsies with filters that seemed to regularly stop working after about four-fifths of a work shift, then at the end of the shift they’d spray you down with foul decontaminant chemicals to stop you brining back in anything that had leaked through.

Personally Lupo had always doubted the official explanation and thought that the mortality rate was the point. He’d seen enough of the thought process of the guards and governors of Golgotha to know that there was a need to show the prisoners just how disposable they were, to dehumanise and degrade them.

Either way, that final blast of chemical wash was the final degradation in Lupo’s workday so it was also the point where his mind turned itself all the way back on. Part of the benefit of being a hyper-engineered attempt at transhumanity, at least for him, is that his cerebral implants let him customise his mind on the fly. All that soul-destroying, back-breaking labour? Thanks but no thanks OVERSEER, Lupo was happy to switch off his consciousness and be a fleshy automaton during his work shift. He’d been here a few years now, but had only truly served a few months of that time and that being the easiest - the small hours in the evening and morning when prisoners had the chance to recuperate.

Dried and dressed, Lupo started on the way back home. Casually glancing up at the corner of one dilapidated building, Lupo noted a circle overlaid with two triangles scratched faintly into a wall near a second story window. Hard to see and completely meaningless - except for the one person who had been looking for exactly that signal. At the next crossroad Lupo turned left instead of right. He was no longer heading home.

————————

Getting to the Last Call, Lupo entered the backroom and gave nods of greeting to his fellow conspirators. Sitting back on his chair he listened carefully to the talk while also keeping an eye on his fellow pilots for their reactions. They all knew of each other at least, but Lupo was used to fighting alongside teams that were far more practiced in working together. He figured he’d need to get a handle on exactly who he was working with if they were going to trust each other with their lives.

His true questions for Karst would be strategic - finding out if this mission was worthwhile and they actually had a sensible plan to smash the prison system of Golgotha and achieve freedom. This mission was an essential first step, but if the follow-ups to it didn’t work then it would all go to waste and Lupo had to assume he’d likely be executed.

He wanted to pore over Karst’s full strategy for fighting and winning this war. But he couldn’t. His very presence here was proof that revolutions could fail and people could be captured. If he knew too much, there was always the chance that it could be taken from him. So what could he ask that had no long-term implications if he was captured?

”When we complete our mission,” asks Lupo, purposely phrasing it in a way which should instil certainty in the outcome, “Do you need us to come back straight away to support you or should we take time to return to the printer and repair? I think we’re certain to face opposition and take damage, so do you want us back quick but damaged or slower but fully prepped.”

[BelGareth]

Biff, as most knew him, sighed and stretched his old body, hearing several joints pop, and crackle, his sinner muscles, tight and dense from the manual labor stretched like stiff cotton, it felt good and bad, both at the same time.

He sighed again, he missed his stims, and the throbbing headache-turning-migraine was a constant reminder.

perhaps I'll let off the stems when I get em back he thought, knowing it to be a falsehood, and he would just fall back to how he was.

Taking just a moment longer, he paused and pulled off his work attire, a filthy jumpsuit he had acquired when he was bought on as an independent contractor. It had plastic zippers, velcro that was almost useless, and several connectors for a hard suit, which he didn't have, they were mangled at best, and he doubted they would even connect clean if they had a hard suit to connect to.

Which he did not, which was fine. has to be fine, no other option

Cracking his back and neck, his view shifted from the warm flashing amber lights near the decom suite, a dull RPV chassis standing nearby, but dead as a doornail, only a few flashing lights near the back neck indicated it was actually alive, and waiting to receive it's master. He also saw something else that was of note, someone had spray painted a red X on its chest, and he smiled like a wolf.

It was finally time, he had been waiting too long, he knew his old General would come through, but the hard labor had begun to grind down his willpower and resolve, one can only take something like this Place for so long. Especially someone like Biff, he needed to be used, to be something of worth, this was....not it. He was a fighter, bred for it, made for it, born to it, and he yearned to get back into the cockpit. The fighting pits had quenched his desires for the most part, he was at least one of the better fighters in the place, and most people nodded to him out of respect from just that alone, but he never used it outside the pit, such was the ways of the undisciplined warrior, no, he was a soldier.

A Professional.

At least he was.

Perhaps he would be again.

He almost ran to the meeting, forgetting himself in the rush to get back to better times. Stopping himself, he walked abruptly to the Last Call, giddy as a small boy on Elohim's Eve.

Once there, he smoothed out his overalls, which were removed from the waist up and tied around, showing his underwork shirt, stained with sweat and grease, and then walked in.

Seeing Karst, his eyes steeled and he gave his old commander a salute. Such was the time of their escapades, he thought it was applicable.

He nodded to the others, Liz, Kareftis, and the others who would be assisting him in this mission.

"Seems pretty straightforward from here, but I'm sure something will make it FUBAR'ed, we should set a separate rally point that is not the location of the printer, so we can protect the asset appropriately, additionally, who will be the on-site commander in case comms go out, I would suggest Mr Royston here, everyone respects him, and he has a good head on his shoulders."

It was as if something inside of Biff had been turned on, he was like a different person entirely.

"Separately, we have a stick of 4, a secondary stick leader for small team operations would be a good idea, I'd nominate myself, but I may be too busy taking my complaints out on others, Mr Holden is probably the best option for that."

It was obvious he could have gone on and on, but he looked up and quickly determined nothing more was needed from the deluge of his comments for now.

[ProgressPaladin]

Unseen. Unheard. Unnoticed. That is how you get through Gotholga. Or at least how Rowen Holden gets through Gotholga. On the hour-long ride down, all Rowen is doing is thinking; planning. Planning everything from escape from here to escape from the Last Call. Because planning is how you survive.

The constant thrum of the lift kept him alert, and he needed to be. When he got off, he saw a quick mark on the wall. Meaningless, yet one of the most meaningful, Rowen thought with a quick chuckle.

Walking to the bar he was rather calm, collected, and most of all, careful. Asking very low for the “Old Man” he was on edge the entire time, ready to run. At their third floor, he opened the door and sat down. Taking all of this information in, he cracks a smile. “One question. How do you know you can hold out till we get back?” He turns to Biff, he’s says, “Why would I be the leader, and not someone with combat experience that’s not hiding and retreating. Someone who can succeed.”
[/B]

[BelGareth]

Biff turns to Holden "Good point bud, but nah, you're a thinker, a planner, and thats exactly what we need in a pickle, if fear grabs a hold o'ya, thats what the vet is for, they slap you back from bein' senseless, and you start a plannin." he said, simply and matter of factly, like he was the expert in the room.

[Bitter]

“We don’t want to know too much,” says Lupo to Rowen, the other pilot speaking up just as Lupo had been pondering the importance of information security.

A relevant verse from the book of Josiah-Wong comes to Lupo’s mind and he lowers his head momentarily as he quotes aloud from one of the revered books.

“With minds sharp as daggers, we carve our path unseen,
Each node a cell, in the resistance's serene.
Compartmentalized knowledge, our sacred creed,
In the mosaic of secrecy, our resilience freed.”

Lupo raises his head and continues from where he left off. “Holding out here isn’t our job and anything vital we know that we don’t need to know for the mission is just an extra way for the guards to find out and ruin the entire plan. It’s not like back when you were working for your corpro and you only had to worry about getting captured in battle. We’re prisoners here and they don’t like playing by the rules. I could walk out of here, some guard doesn’t like the look of my face so they take me and beat me until I tell them everything I know to get them to stop.”

Lupo hesitates for a moment before continuing.

“I mean, It probably wouldn’t work on me. I’d temporarily scramble my anterior cingulate cortex to stop myself registering the pain, but any of you guys would be in serious trouble.”

Looking about he realises that he’s shared somewhat more of his thoughts then he’d originally intended.

“Er, that’s what I think, at least.”

[CateranEnforcer]

Derek folded his arms as waited inside his hardsuit deep under the lowest level of Golgotha. The explosives he just placed had to checked by a trusted engineer before they would consent to detonating them. His expertise was needed, he was never trusted. He definitely was never allowed within 10 meters of a detonator. If fact, if the job went awry, no doubt the OVERSEER with freeze up his hardsuit and have him mysterious disappear in the accident. Still, few were crazy enough or knowledgeable enough to do the job that needed doing. So here he stood, watching the monitors for the all clear.

As predicted, everything seemed to be in order and the all clear was given. The charges were remotely detonated, obscuring the monitors with dust and stone. The control room was so far away that there was no sound, but Derek could feel it in feet when they were set off, ever so slightly. When the dust settled, a new avenue was revealed, ready for the clean up crew. Only then were the looks on his suit released. Only then was he dismissed. With a hiss, Derek removed his helmet as he received a notification from a friend. It was time.

"I'm off to get drink. Great job, as always." He walks off without looking back. Screw these guys.

---

Derek sipped on a tall glass of something strong as he listened to the others. He didn't much care who was in charge. Typically, leadership wanted nothing to do with him or his methods so the leader could distance themselves from the repercussions of his actions. Maybe that's what got him in trouble in the first place; no friends, no allies, no real family. Maybe it was time to do things differently this time.

"I'll be straight forward, I don't care who leads who around, so long as we get out of here. I need a bit of...operational freedom if we are going to get along. For now, any one of you would be a good bet. How do we get there, and when do we start?"

[n0ble]

The Last Call

Liz is the first to reply, chasing down her words with a gulp of what looks like incredibly purified water from her hedron-mug. She speaks to Lupo, seemingly back on-shift for the intensity "Have you considered importing a limbic suppressor? Might require an entire amygdalin overhaul-might trend a bit too close to full fight-flight suppression. Bad for a pilot to lack those kind of instincts." Liz takes a sip of from her water than withdraws a small reciever from where it's hitched at her belt. A small handheld position tracker, crude to look at, but functional for how it displays the distance between two points. "SLATE's here." The Lady Kareftis shoots a dubious glance at Liz before giving answer to Derek's question. "Well. That clinches things then. We start now." Irimloza pauses for a moment, letting her response to Derek's query fill the air before Karst cuts through it with answers for Lupo, Holden and Levi.

"Not so much an issue of discovery as it's going to be timing. Once the same strata as the jammer SLATE will track it down. Not a question of if, but when. Ideally, we time the discovery and destruction of the jammer with the train coming back here. Or far to here enough that it turning back to Klataua isnt viable. Means no reinforcements from the Capital. Means its just us inmates. And the screws. You take the time to repair to full strength. Once the jammer is down we can start printing a few of our frames in advance of your return." Kareftis and Liz both look to the Old Man as he says this, the latter clearly anticipating the prospect of mechanized combat more than the former, clear for how the younger woman grins. "Its not much. They'll almost certainly go for the Ghetto in some capacity. But alongside what we've got scuttled in terms of more conventional armaments it should be enough to hold until your back and ready to tip things down here. Then," The Old Man punctuates his words with a familiar nod at Biff, made stiff for his age, before taking a hearty gulp of his beer. A little bit dribbles from the side of Karst's mouth before he wipes it away with a forearm. In the wane light of the room, it becomes apparent that Emil's old Albatross Uniform is self-cleaning. "The surface." Its a plan that suits Emil's history: with the type of mechanized warfare utilized by the Albatross it makes sense to all present that the Old Man would favor a style of warfare that utilizes what he knows. Speed.

Kareftis picks up the slack where the Old Man goes silent: "Your shared access to frames implies a rudimentary competency when it comes to operational capacity when part of a whole. As such, your chain of command on a squadron level is entirely your own purview." This last word sounds strange and half-hushed from the Karrakin noble woman, as though she's uncomfortable with using the Armory's word for their sphere of influence. Like some kind of legendary apex predator that doesnt belong on Shotora. She recovers, and continues. "In as much as we can, we've managed to locate and acquire several additional assets. We cant afford you all of them-" A grin tugs at the corner of Izrimloza's mouth."-but enough that there should be some leftover for our resistance here." She turns her smile on Holden, her lips a firm but reassuring smile.

All three look beyond you as the door to the room creaks open, the same non-descript man who showed you in ushering in a small quadrupedal frame no bigger than a nobleman's toy-dog. SLATE's NHP casket is carriaged underneath the slopped back hull of the frame's black, the entire thing clearly some sort of survey drone that's been reappropriated to serve as the smallest body in the NHP's possession. A small screen no bigger than Liz's distance measurer sits in the center of the NHP's body a flat faced emoji displayed on it.

"You're late."

The flat line that passes for the emoji's mouth becomes a wavy line "Nice scanner, dweeb." The line settles from tachycardic to a sideways "P" with the loop hanging down. Then the little drone gallops forward and around two supports before jumping up onto Liz's crossed legs with an "Oof." All assembled the three-four now-turn expectantly to you.

Spoiler: OOC

Show

I think for this mission everyone can just pick a single reserve, no roll this time-not really in a situation where scarcity is an issue at the moment (and these assets have been specifically prepped for your selection). When Karst, Liz and Irimloza print their frames to stall things out in the Pit, they'll make use whatever reserves you dont pick. This wont have a mechanical impact on how things proceed, but maybe a fictional

Summary of things: Karst, Kareftis & Liz + SLATE will print their own frames out once the jammer is down-it doesnt really matter, but they're all effectively LL 2 right now from a fiction to mechanics perspective so they'll need it down to: a) print off their non-GMS frames and b) maximize the advantage that comes with unrestricted printer access by using these frames to holdout-they wont be wasting print material you could use on repairs via printing off GMS frames for themselves, especially given their familiarity with said frames over GMS models. This, combined with any remaining reserves left to them should be sufficient to hold out against an initial wave the Warden deploys until you arrive back, rest up and really tip things in the Revolutions favor (theres got to be a better name for the movement-something for us all to discuss OOC ). I'll be posting an ongoing reserve list in the first OOC post later on

[BelGareth]

Biff nods as they explain the rest of the plan and answer the questions for the crew. He liked it, he would like it no matter what, he would like it if they were descending into hell itself, he would like it.

Picking up a dataslate by the table, Biff looks through the reserves decided what best to choose. He liked the idea of utilizing the great Lance of the First Maktaba, but the mission parameters spoke to him about speed, and in such a basic frame, an extra core would work wonders, especially in egress back up the pitt.

"I'll take the extra core" he says simply then places it back down and folds his arms nodding "I'm ready to depart"

[Zelphas]

Levi's carefully-constructed demeanor of support without partisanship froze for a moment as one of his "fellow" pilots suggested that he should call the shots. Had he managed to play the revolutionary too well, considered one of the most enthusiastic supporters? More than that; Levi Royston was a no-name from nowhere, some fool with more money than sense whose poor planning sent him tripping into Golgotha after less than a month on this rock. No one should think he's the smart choice to lead himself, much less anyone else. Ephraim Spang was little better, even among those who knew the name; he was a two-bit hit-man who'd take any odd job that paid his fare to the next stop, a loner, too small in brains, brawn, and personality to lead armies. And little Daud...

Levi shook his head, focusing back in on the situation. "So, stealth matters some, but speed matters much more," he comments, listening to the slapdash revolution once again. An unpleasant thought surfaces; should the enemy forces prove overwhelming, all these three would have to do is step aside and let the guard-tide sweep down, crushing them on their way back up. Ra, it could happen even if these people didn't want it to, should they miscalculate the reinforcements, the timing, or anything else. Too late for backing down. "I'll proc the heat shields; seems you won't need them as much up on top." Plus, it'll give him more places to maneuver, or even hide if everything goes pear-shaped, but idealists don't like pragmatism, so may as well sound like he's being nice.

[Bitter]

When the explanations are over and SLATE comes into the room, Lupo finds himself salivating. Not over the thought of upgrading his mech, enticing though that is. No, instead it’s because he’s just damned hungry.

Prison food is an acquired taste and one usually only acquired by people with no tastebuds. At least at the Last Call he can get something beyond the normal and so he nibbles nibbles at the ‘pork scratchings’ he’d been given while he mulls over the options for what to pick, all the while resolutely not thinking about what type of animal the actually came from because it sure as hell wasn’t pig.

“Hmm, I think Biff’s got the right idea - at least for me. An extra core could give me and Caliburn some extra oomph right when we need it. And no,” he adds to Liz while tapping his skull, “I’ve already got enough custom stuff in here I don’t much want anyone else poking around and throwing everything out of whack.”

[CateranEnforcer]

Derek nods along barely listening, but the parts he heard sounded good to him. Operational freedom, and passing the responsibilities off to the leaders latter and acting as the cavalry. That would be a new look, he would have to try to be on his best behavior.

"Underslung Launcher looks perfect for me. Place ordinance right where it hurts. Everything else understood. We get to be the big damn heroes today."

[Bitter]

Lupo looks over at Derek. His is the first choice that implies a particular style of mechanised combat, which gets Lupo thinking about how much, or rather how little, they know about one another.

“You got a focus on explosives then? Could be worth us going over our how we pilot our mechs and what we can do, get an understanding of how we fit together in a fight.”

“My mech is geared for mid to long-range fighting with a focus on electronic warfare. I’ll generally carry some rockets and missiles which I’ll fire off if the enemy bunch up too close, but otherwise rely on rifle to add any firepower I need.”

“I don’t tend to carry anything for melee, so I tend to hang back. I’ve also got some good targeting software that can assist anyone with a powerful ranged weapon.”

[ProgressPaladin]

Listening intently to the group, Rowen smiles. ”Not exactly big damn heroes, but I appreciate your enthusiasm. I want information. What will we be facing, how many of them, when, and where.” Turning to the rest of the group, he says, “My mech is currently focused on mobility and close to medium range combat. I’ll try to support anyone who gets pinned down.”

[BelGareth]

Biff smile at the group sharing their personal tactics, <Just like new boots freshly posted to the fleet> he mused, bit it wasn't the eagerness of youth for battle, it was grizzled beaten prisoners sharing their personal fighting techniques, much different. It felt off to him, he hadn't had this kind of interaction in a long time, and now it was this admixtured combination of civilians and pilots. He would have to get used to it, these were his line brothers and sisters, for better or worse.

And it could get worse.

"I like to get up close and personal"

[CateranEnforcer]

Derek stopped to consider his next words. It's very possible he was in direct opposition to many of these people during the Ascendency. He really didn't want his brutal handiwork recognized from being too descriptive, just in case these were the types of people to take it personal. It was too early to get on anyone's bad side.

"Yes...combat engineer they called me. Setting or disarming charges on the front lines is dangerous work. I reinforce my frames to handle the job without getting blown up myself.

[Bitter]

Lupo listens to the descriptions of the other pilot’s specialities. Lupo’s own preference is to fight from behind the front line, so it was good that they had a front line to speak of with Biff and Rowen.

As Derek describes his activities, Lupo flashes him a grin.

“That has some synergies with my own style. You lay down some explosives, I force the enemy to walk right into it.”

[Zelphas]

Levi listened to the others discuss preferred fighting styles, filing them away carefully for later. "You are all welcome to the frontlines, then; I'll take the rear," is all he said in response.

[Bitter]

“Longer range fighter,” says Lupo to Levi, more a statement to show he was following up than a question.

“If we get the chance we should deploy together. My mech has some advanced targeting software where it synches up it’s own passive and active sensors to another mech, but we need to be pretty close for it to work or the latency is too high for it to be effective.”

Spoiler: “ooc”

Show

Basically saying that I have Spotter I

[n0ble]

The Last Call

Karst grunts by way of agreeing at your individual tactical summations while Kareftis nods sagely, pausing to take a few sips of her drink in between. Liz and SLATE keep staring at each other, breaking eye-screen contact to share a mutual look at Lupo before resuming their staring contest. The Old Man uncrosses his arms and lays his hands palm down on the table. He looks at Rowen. "Unsure about numbers, though it'd be easy enough to outfit your rig with a one-off deep analysis scanner to give you some more informational capabilities prior to the job, eh?" He punctuates what turns out to be a question to Liz with a nod of his head, with the young woman offering an uncharacteristically terse nod in return. Then she breaks out into an easy smile and the tension in her face is gone as she looks at the rest of you. Lady Kareftis clears her throat and the air.

"We have a lift here. Well." She takes a sip of the fizzy drink in her glass and the same man who showed you in brings a tray filled with each of your preferred drinks. "A chute really. It is one way-too much power draw risks the OVERSEER's attention as I-as we-have come to understand it. Still." There is a clatter of metal as the glasses are set down on the table. Liz reaches for one and her grasp is promptly smacked away by Irimloza's hand. The young worker deposits SLATE onto the ground and takes an energized gulp from her water before refilling the glass with an offloaded pitcher. "It will get you most of the way. Safely and, anonymously." The Lady gives you time to finish your drinks and ask any other questions you may have, offering each of you a polite smile as she rises to see each of you off. Karst does his best to do the same, but theres a nervous sort of energy to the man that makes him seem both older and younger at the same time. Like he's ready to take flight. He finishes the rest of his drink, pausing to clink glasses with anyone else that offers their own. The Old Man rises as you do, offering each of you a shake of the hand or mutual grip of the forearm and a good "Good luck." before sitting once more as you take your leave, SLATE in tow. It's hard to tell if Liz is waving at you, her NHP or all of you.

Questions finished and drinks answered your shown to the end of the upper hallways to a nondiscript room with a "do not disturb" signage rotating around an orb that floats to the inbuilt frame's right side. SLATE leads the way in the wake of the nondescript man-the man who'd shown you here. Opening the door, the man beckons you in. The room is small, cramped and dimly illuminated by a stablight lodged in the ceiling above. It paints the waiter's bald pate in a haunted glow that highlights the gauntness of his features and his lack of any hair whatsoever. The man is quick to remove a section of stone from the wall farthest from the door, revealing a simple series of buttons and nobs. He fiddles with ones such nob and the large hunk of slate parts, sliding into the wall leftwards with a small hiss of hydraulics. Your lift down is a glass cylinder. Cabling tracks around it in microfilament circuitwork, widening, expanding then enlarging into full power cables the further the engineering and systems get from the shaft. Whatever powers your way down sits above it, the actual vessel made of metal that is proofed against the rough hew of the tunnel through which it will travel.

Kareftis did not lie. It is a chute more than an elevator, tight for housing all five of you and your personal gear in reinforced crash seats. Hastily welded storage lockers contain what you cant hold onto. The man from the Last Call hands out ear protection to each of you. SLATE's tiny frame retracts its legs, the little ports flipping to reveal hover modules that place it dead center in the middle of the lift. Their display screen spins in time with the thrusters, displaying a ";>l " face to each of you. "Going down? Please keep all hands arms feet and legs inside the compartment. Your patience is appreaciated." The NHP begins tunelessly humming an old mining song. Between the dulled sound of their tune and the other occupants, it is a cramped affair. But there is enough room to press the button on a pad that takes you-

Downward.

What the chute lacks in asethetics and comfort it more than makes up for in practicality, rumbling you towards the printer a speed devoid of grace. There is an initial cosmic tugging sensation associated with takeoff, then an increasing shriek of acceleration as the lift hurtles, what little light there is outside flickering through the slits to animate the interior like an old Cradle cinematic. Stutter-stop motion, cut through with the odd flash of sparks from the outside as the lift shudders in flight. Yet for all the theatrics the elevator does its job. The scream of its acceleration peaks, momentarily breaking through your ear protection before dulling as it peaks, sustains, then wanes as the travel finishes near quick as it started. From the high-wall structure all the way down to:

The Penultimate Stratums

From the elevator built into the wall it is out of a small cavern that-perhaps rightly given the lobby's sole occupant-smells a bit too much like generator fuel byproducts, and onto the beginning of a wide, wide path. One of the main ones used for travel at these depths, and seldom at that for how the wending of the track lies unmarked by recent vehicles. Mechs included. Above, Golgotha's lights and sounds drift downwards to fill your ears. Mostly dull, but sometimes punctuated by the odd squeal of metal on stone or siren from the guard's side of things. Its not just sounds and light. Occasionally the odd bit of caste off or loosened sediment falls down as a particulate around you, and on at least one turn 'round the spiral of the main path shouts alert you to where a day's haul has fallen to clot an upward pathway. You descend further, the daily toil of working more important, more rich earth veins serving as effective cover much as where you pass through does.

Patrols dont come down this far. Not anymore. Instead the only thing your watched by are the derelict and the abandoned: old rusted-out hulls that once passed for vehicles of mining convenience serve as sentinels to not just your passage, but over old prison work-camps, desiccated precursors to the stability of the ghetto above above. Little embankments that once tried and failed to make lives for themselves down deep, when the ores ran plentiful. More Golgothan casualties. Small wonder the Warden does not have these strata worked. If the laborers were to gaze upon the bones amidst the old camp's tarps and primitive bivouacs in their current temperaments, rebellion would have long ago occurred. To say nothing of the injustices the Loyal wing would perceive. Looking up, you can see that half finished paths and traversal line the walls at this level like collateral circulations, trailing upward to where they flourish into truth paths to the prison proper or into atrophied dead ends. Enough that travelling back up by mech should be easy.

The road you take wends deeper, taking you two hours and deep so as to make the lights from the ghetto and prison side pins in the sky. Little artificial stars. The noise becomes indistinct but constant, a sort of dull ebb and flow of percussions as the accumulation of whats ringing out above is caste down to your ears. The mining machines that lined the roadways become more sparse, but grander in scale for their rarity. Some are even unrusted. Where a lack of light from above fails, the flesh of the pit provides in the form of minerals that glow, maybe by virtue of their chemical compositions, perhaps as reflections of the light above. It would certainly account for the strange taste in the air. Too much alkaline. And, growing in small furtive clutches to add to the stink: mushrooms, shining with a swathe of neons all their own as reinforcements to bolster against the dark. SLATE begins to tunelessly hum the same music they did in the elevator going down. A few inbuilt LEDs perk up and bolster what is rapidly becoming just cavelight.

"This'll take us where we want to go." SLATE's voice sounds heavy. Laden with something not so much like guilt as it is simplly worn down. Like a too blunted drill. The tunnel the little frame "sits" in front of is easily wide enough to accommodate any of your mechs upon exit or entry. This, and the relative depth the passage is situated at, would indicate that it is a very, very old tunnel, its anonymity resting on this factor and, as a consequence of its age, its vacancy as a viable shaft to work. The NHP turns left into the tunnel, the bustle and noise of Golgotha steadily fading in time with the progress of your descent downwards.

The Printer

Its another Shotoran hour through the same tunnel SLATE banked left through, then a slowly widening pathway that kicks into another abrupt turn. Right this time, the perpendicular narrowing slightly but noticeably as your lead through it by the NHP. Small islet lights burn the same stale white as the glow-lamp used to, studded across the black carapace of the NHP's current hull as lambent boils. The air becomes cleaner to the taste. Someone has stationed a purifier near the printer. Layers of sediment reveals themselves in the glow, heaped upon one another by age. Occasionally in your travels, you see fossils: many jumbled but a few clear precursors to the current Shotoran fauna: the forepaw and lower jaw of what can only be a direwolf from the woods. The mammals jaws look like they could rip a Sagarmatha's arms off. The imprint of a now extinct fern species. An entire spinal column and skull of what can only be a bull-salamander-large enough to fit several of the direwolf jaw-pieces in its mouth. The amphibian skeleton is missing all but one of its limbs and clearly a victim of later mammals pack tactics. Yet for all the time on display-easily going back as far as Karrakis itself, probably more besides-the passage reeks of artifice, a fact made all the more apparent by the shear nature of the tunnel's make much as it is by the odd strut or support that braces the passageway's spine. Tracts of glowing minerals shine phosphorescent, bolstering the tunnels light as you go downward.

There is a keen downward slope to your traversal, a sense of getting deeper as the lights staked into the walls decrease as the heat increases. The stablights allotted to your pathway become more haphazard in their placement even as SLATE's become brighter to compensate. Thick cabling narrows the duggout to a width of three men, and a tunnel that was equal parts proportion to the largest of your mechs becomes narrowed, barely sized for Sargarmathan proportions. There is an absence of stablights, but the NHP's frame helps to illuminate the different colored cabling: greens and browns, like the rooting to some titanic tree. The tunnel opens into a massive plateau, the massive jut of rock descending like a staircase into more and more layers of sediment. The cavern yawns tall over this descent. Below, rocks glow with mineral deposits, lighting your way where human artifice cannot. A veritable survivalist's paradise to be explored.

The area with the printer is center on the plateau, surrounded by a swathe of crates containing print material, munitions and mech scale weapons for those munitions. Reserves lie perched and sequestered amongst the the other boxes, ready for the taking. And human supplies too: water and a strange mix of Union & House Guard rations mixed in with SSC preMeals^TM. There's even a bit of the good stuff: colonist meal packages that self-heat to full readiness at the push of a button and a set of meals that, given the purple bar across each one, probably belonged to an Armory acquisitions team.

The printer itself-a scale two model-looks like a full body spaceport scanner for how the main geometry is composed of a cylinder and series of inbuilt rings. The whole thing stretches to barely under the ceiling above the plateua, a feat that would be more impressive if the cavern didnt achieve new heights further on. Six arms break up the silhouette: while the printer can print larger sized mechs, it must do so piecemeal, then assemble the full mech afterwards. Each arm ends in a different type of tool: rivet gun, welding torch, holding clamp. And so on. A terminal for human convenience sits by the doors to the printer while small fingerling venioles siphon geothermal energey via a convergence of the cablings built into the wall. The tracts web the area around the printer except for the exit doors and the port for more printer material. The entire assemblage stands ready and loaded with matter for it's first use, queing up with a faint whine that echoes about the cavern as SLATE deploys some sort of signal for it to begin. More lambency bleeds from floodlights mounted on the printer. The tiny-framed NHP turns around expectantly, a vacant emoji smeared across his display.

"-_-. Well. Who'll be first? "

Spoiler: OOC

Show

Ok so I figure we can go back to the Last Call on the way to the jammer station if people want to do more RP with Karst, Kareftis or Liz and to the Penultimate Stratum if folks want to do more interparty RP On that note, let me know if things are progressing too quickly for your tastes and I can definitely slow the pacing down a bit-figure everyone's ready to get to the first combat

Tried to make things seemed as lived in as possible WRT the lower depths, but it might raise more questions that answers so feel free to ask OOC if you have any and I can answer them/edit the fiction if it doesnt make much sense.

[BelGareth]

As the cacophony of the chute's descent settled into a dull hum and the group gathered around the waiting printer, Biff glanced at the massive machine with a mixture of admiration and urgency. The towering mechanical contraption, ready to forge the mechanisms of war, seemed a stark contrast to the desperate scramble of their makeshift rebel tactics. He stepped forward, his face hardened by countless battles, each scar a story of survival.

"I'll go first," Biff declared, his voice echoing slightly in the cavernous space. The scars and lines on his face were accentuated by the flickering light as he continued, "Let’s get the mechs ready for what's coming. We’ll need every edge we can get." He paused, his gaze moving over the assembled weapons and munitions, a tactical assessment running through his mind.

Pulling a dataslate from his pocket, Biff tapped into the printer’s interface, his fingers sure and practiced as he uploaded the specifications for his mech enhancements. "I'm going with an up-close combat configuration—reinforcements to the armor, upgraded servos for quicker movements, and heavier weaponry." His voice was firm, each word underscoring his resolve.

As the printer whirred to life, its mechanical arms beginning their intricate dance of construction, Biff turned to the rest of the group. "We’ll need to be fast and flexible," he advised, the role of a seasoned leader settling onto his shoulders like a familiar cloak. "Let's use this time to finalize our tactics and ensure our mechs complement each other’s capabilities. We can't afford any weak links."

The sound of the printer layering metal echoed through the cavern, a steady reminder of the looming conflict. Biff watched, his expression unreadable, yet his eyes betrayed a spark of anticipation. This was the calm before the storm, and he was ready to lead them through it.

[Bitter]

The journey down sees a change overcome Lupo. Life in Golgotha relied on a certain way of living: keeping your head down, avoiding the guards’ eyes, making yourself nothing that could be viewed as a threat.

Now as he travelled down through the penultimate stratums, that way of living was cast aside to reveal who had been lurking underneath that false exterior. Lupo’s eyes were sharp and judging, alert for anything that could represent a threat or an edge. His hands flexed, ready for action that still hasn’t appeared by the time the group draws up to the printer.

Approaching the printer after Biff, Lupo sends across his GMS licenses from one of his installed memory banks. One of the many good things about GMS is that once you had a license, it was your license. You may not have a printer to make use of, but that license would always be there waiting for you if you found one.

With that access enabled, he prints off the mech in almost exactly the same configuration as when he last had it - the sole exception being the installation of the additional core battery he’d been equipped with. Caliburn would soon to be reborn.

”From what we’ve discussed so far it sounds like you and Rowen are taking point with Derek providing close fire support and Levi and I taking the rear.”

As he is speaking, Lupo is rooting around the gear packed away here and has found a supply of small arms. Taking a GMS assault rifle, he’s positions himself defensively at a corner - awaiting anyone or anything that may try to intrude before they have their mechs..

”Electronic warfare is my specialism, so I’ll likely focus on keeping the enemy locked down and off balance. Where that’s not the best call, expect firepower in the form of an assault rifle, missile rack and an RPG.”

[CateranEnforcer]

“I'll need a minute to compile my print, had to steal it little by little and hide it from the OVERSEER.” Derek reveals a handful of storage chits and settles in when the Terminal is free. He starts the process of reconstructing the hidden data mixed in with his own personal touches. This might actually be better than the generic frame he was originally supplied by the Ascendency.

But the talk of tactics bored him. Working as a team was not really something hev really liked. His previous work was not for the faint of heart. He was really going to have to cool it going forward, until the time was right.

“Yeah, just don't be near me when I set my explosives. This Sagarmatha will do until I get my hands on something better.” He eyeballs the gear left behind as well. “Toss me one of those, would you?” he asks Lupo, referring to the weapon. “Surprised there's no alarms going off right now. Would they really leave this unguarded?”

[Bitter]

Lupo raises an eyebrow as he looks over at Derek. ”So just to make sure I understand the request, you, our high explosives guy, wants me to throw at you a live weapon that you haven’t inspected and we’ve just found in a box?”

Lupo waits a beat for the question to sink in, then smiles and tosses Derek a weapon.

“Remind me to stand back when you’re setting your explosives.”

In his own military training he’d had good firearm discipline and safety drilled into him, you don’t mess about with weapons, but the rationale for that was mostly for the off chance you ended up using an unfamiliar off-brand weapon. Who knows what safety parameters some rim works made its weapons to? These weapons were clearly GMS standard though and those were safe enough you could give them to a toddler and be confident they wouldn’t be able to shoot anything accidentally. There wasn’t any real risk from throwing them about and pretty much anyone with some firearm experience would realise that Lupo was jokingly being a hardass.

”As for the printer, Karst set this up in secret. The only real protection we can rely on is continuing secrecy. What good would an alarm be? if security finds it the resistance can’t fight them off. That’s my guess at least.”

[BelGareth]

Biff chuckled at the others joking around as he pulled on his flex suit, it was like finally being back in his rig, but only slightly, the old memories, the feelings, the emotions, he used to live in one of these, hardly ever took it off, and so it was relatively cathartic as it finally pulled over his bulk up to his neck. He flexed each arm one at a time, and smiled, nodding in satisfaction. Checking the suit, he confiemed the stims were present, and activated, he almost took a hit of Kick right there and then, old habits die hard.

Next he gathered the Hardsuit, and what weapons looked good to him, he too took an assault rifle, but also picked up a mean looking machete like blade, this would come in handy if it came down to it, though, if they were outside of their suits and it had already hit the fan, there wasn't much it was going to improve.

Racking the slide partially back to check the chamber, he saw brass and nodded, let the slide rack back on it's own with the mechanical pop he had learned to love, and missed, and then tapped the bottom of the mag to be sure. Old habits indeed.

Lastly, he grabbed and rigged some mag clamps onto his exo boots, always handy in a pinch.

Looking to the others he added "You lot need a period of instruction on how to use one of these things?" he asks, obviously joking, grinning from ear to ear.

[Bitter]

Returning to the defensive position he’d chosen, Lupo nestles behind the cover before replying to Biff.

“How to use the gun or the mag boots? The gun’s easy, point the shooty end at the bad guys. With the mag boots you have to be careful, accidentally set them to opposite polarities and you’ll blow your legs off your pelvis if you put your feet too close together. Saw it happen once. Nasty, blood everywhere but the guy got some nice prosthetics.”

Lupo flashes Biff a look of pure innocent inquiry.

“You did remember to reverse the polarities, right?”

[BelGareth]

Biff mocks surprise, but actually didn't check the polarities and subtly checks them, somewhat nervously and embarrassed.

"Uh, yeah....of course I did!" he exclaims, chuckling softly. "It's been a hot minute..." he mumbles, having been mollified slightly.

[Zelphas]

One positive thing about living at the bottom of the barrel for most of your adult life: any nerves you had are scraped away quickly. The cacophonous ride down, the bodies, the fossils, the decrepit state of things all pass over Levi without comment or concern; they aren't what he's here for.

Levi doesn't push forward to bring out his mech, content to let the others fabricate their pieces as he puts things together. He notes that no one else seems to be aiming for any medical supplies, and helps himself to a few as he waits. Team tactics are not exactly his strong suit, so he keeps his comments--and his med patches--to himself. The choice of a sleeping bag might raise some eyebrows, but a sealed pod with ten minutes of breathable air had saved him once before, and he could never bring himself to enter danger without the bag ever since.

Levi's mech, when it rolls off the assembly line, looks somehow as though it was patched together and used harshly despite being a brand-new creation, a collection of pieces put together in a way that vastly favors functionality over beauty. The weapons selected for the machine are similarly hodgepodge--a fabricator for disposable (mech-size) knives, a small nexus for drone strikes, a (relatively) short range thermal rifle, and a massive anti-materiel rifle. Levi looks it over with a slight sigh; he had to pick up what he could when he could, and so the whole mess lacks any sort of theming. Even the name, "Dull Roar", was grabbed from another mech he had seen earlier in the day the first time he was expected to jump into the pilot's seat.

"No worries on those explosives from me," Levi says finally, feeling like he should probably interact with the group at least on a superficial level. "If possible, I plan to make my nest in a lava flow and provide support from a significant distance." He slips the punching dagger up one sleeve for easy access and pulls out the rifle from his back, taking up a secondary firing position behind Lupo and to the other side of the door. No reason not to be extra careful.

[Bitter]

”Don’t take any nonsense I say too seriously,” says Lupo as he sees Biff reaching to check his shoes. “I’ve something’s got a dark sense of humour and haven’t had much of an outlet for it these past few years.”

With the mechs now being printed, Lupo standing guard with his peashooter seems fairly redunant so he retreats back to stand near Biff and watches as Caliburn is printed and put together, piece by piece.

“You seem like you’ve been around the block a few times. You done any fighting on local worlds here where we might have been on the same field? Sigma Seven, Josephine’s World, Chi Delta 3, Seven Peaks Mountain? By the way, I’m Lupo but the call sign is Dust.”