Re: DEATHGAME 9000 [S!3] SIGNUPS OPEN
02-18-2012, 10:47 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Jacquerel.
The sudden transition from ruined cityscape to cluttered warehouse was a fairly interesting event, the first ER/IC had experienced in a fairly significant amount of time. Indeed, he had spent so long wandering aimlessly through deserted streets, in the company of nobody other than the ever-growing numbers of animals joining Mother Nature's creeping advance into the industrialised areas or some other wandering purposeless machine, that things had started to blur together and it took him a couple of minutes to get himself back up to speed. After nothing of note happens to you for a couple of centuries time just starts to speed up and you stop paying quite so much attention.
Because of this he missed about half of The Incompetent's grand opening speech but that was pretty much fine, once he had adjusted his perception to a more appropriate speed he stopped listening to the rest anyway. Nobody seemed to be in any kind of emergency situation (and regardless, he couldn't move) and so he had other things he needed to be doing, simply recording the rest of what was being said to replay at a later date if it ever seemed necessary.
While his body was frozen completely in place, his inner workings were still ticking along fine so he decided to check on his patients. The three of them hung unmoving in the purple-tinted void that was the reason for ERIC's creation, made somewhat blurry and indistinct by the time-lock's strange effects on light and therefore vision. Apart from the patients and the churning sea of gears, cables and pipes that was the sky (almost all purely illusion, there simply to remind people they aren't in a real place and that it is in everyone's best interests if they don't break the machinery that is their only way back out) it was frankly a pretty uninteresting place to look at, not even having any kind of visible floor. A couple of wheeled hospital beds, a jarringly incongruous walled-off bathroom block, some white plastic tables and chairs and a stack of very old magazines were the only props present to give the place a sense of scale as anything else would seem slightly obsolete. Most people who ended up inside didn't spend very long in real time, experiencing their stay (no matter how long) as a matter of seconds rather than the hours, days or (in this case) centuries that might actually have passed.
With one exception.
A grey, steel ball with attached facial mask descended from the ceiling on a long, trailing metal cable (one of the few actually real pieces of machinery contained within) to peer more closely at one of the quarantine's inhabitants. Apparently satisfied with whatever he saw he set the relative time constant back to the same speed as the outside, leaving the slightly confused occupant blinking and rubbing at his yellow eyes.
He wasn't tired or dizzy, but from his perspective a couple of the objects in the room had just jumped around several feet on their own within the space of a few seconds, and Eric's head just teleported into view from nowhere.
”Do you not think you could possibly wake me up a little slower? This skipping can't be good for my-”, Eric just cut him off, apparently unaware that he'd even been speaking.
”Good morning Patient, it has been...”, there was a short pause as he consulted some kind of database, ”9916.28 months since you were last aware.”
”Wait what?”
”You requested to be awakened if QUOTE: 'Anything exciting happened'”
<font color="#F76541">”Nine thousand months? How long is that in years?!”
”9916.28 months previously you expressed your opinion that the first reclamation of the capital city by plantlife was both 'boring'and 'bloody depressing' and so criteria for awakening were adjusted accordingly.”</font>
”I didn't mean that long! How could you keep me under for that long?!”
”Do you desire access to my viewing ports or do you wish to return to stasis?”
For some reason all that this last question provoked was a stream of profanity which he found rather upsetting, so he decided to just freeze his patient again for the time being. The swearing was sort of like a negative, right?
He transferred his awareness back to the outside world and was surprised to learn that he wasn't in a warehouse any more but was apparently standing on a quiet hill, next to a remarkably pristine road. The area didn't show up on any of his GPS sensors which all just returned a null signal, but this wasn't really very surprising as HazardNet had stopped forwarding his signals a couple of years after the last biological operators had passed away.
He prodded the violently green blades of grass carpeting the ground experimentally with one of his trunk-like feet to check it was real. There hadn't been much road or pavement left uncovered by plantlife by the time he was snatched away to the Battle so he wasn't unfamiliar with the stuff but he wasn't certain about how it could possibly be this vibrantly coloured, nor why it was so short when there was nobody here to cut it.
He almost woke his patient up again before remembering his apparent dislike of plants.
Having established that the greenery was real he moved on to the road, something which frankly was far more puzzling than grass. Eric thought that he had seen the last transport repair drones run out of tar long ago but clearly one had been through here fairly recently. By the fact that the road was completely set it was probably a few hours away but he could possibly catch it up if he headed in the right direction. It was always possible that one of his masters had miraculously survived this long only to have wandered into the machine's path and been cocooned in asphalt, requiring urgent rescue. Unlikely, yes, but the only lead he had available to pursue.
Alas, before he could ascertain what way the drone had been headed (the tracks were awfully scuffed for a fresh road untravelled by any cars) he was hit by a car.
Keagan had been light enough to be thrown into the air by the impact, Eric was only shunted a couple of feet forwards as the front of the vehicle folded in on itself and pushed bits of expensive machinery through the windscreen and into the leg spaces. Fortunately the driver hadn't been tall enough to reach the pedals anyway, and boiled out of the newly punched hole in his front window in a display of primal primate fury that was entirely ineffective against the robot's steel frame.
This was not a species that Eric recognised, but it did not seem to be intelligent enough to actually drive a car. This worried him because there also didn't seem to be anyone else visible in the driver's seat.
“Hello? Does anyone require medical attention?”
The ape seemed completely unscathed, which was fortunate because it meant Eric didn't have to puzzle out whether it counted as a patient or not as he had long ago been told to stop collecting injured animals (”If you can't find us a hospital what chance do you have of fetching a vet?”).
Coming to the conclusion that such a tiny animal couldn't possibly have been driving a vehicle, and from the lack of response that the real driver must be unconscious, Eric pulled himself free of the tangle of bonnet that had been thrown up around him, unfolded the coils of his arms and proceeded to peel off the vehicle's roof, followed by its doors and then even toss out the chairs in an attempt to find any injured passengers (all the while the irate monkey escapee was still trying to claw at skin that wasn't there), tossing the unwanted pieces into the field.
While it was all done in the name of medicine, if for some reason you were unfamiliar with the purpose of an ER/IC unit (or had, for example, been delivered the misinformation that it was some form of killing machine) the fact that he was ripping a vehicle into pieces could well have looked fairly intimidating to an outside observer. If it wasn't then the fact that he would periodically detach his face, spool it out on a flexible steel arm and use it to peer around inside the remaining bits of the sports car in order to look for bits of people probably would be.
The sudden transition from ruined cityscape to cluttered warehouse was a fairly interesting event, the first ER/IC had experienced in a fairly significant amount of time. Indeed, he had spent so long wandering aimlessly through deserted streets, in the company of nobody other than the ever-growing numbers of animals joining Mother Nature's creeping advance into the industrialised areas or some other wandering purposeless machine, that things had started to blur together and it took him a couple of minutes to get himself back up to speed. After nothing of note happens to you for a couple of centuries time just starts to speed up and you stop paying quite so much attention.
Because of this he missed about half of The Incompetent's grand opening speech but that was pretty much fine, once he had adjusted his perception to a more appropriate speed he stopped listening to the rest anyway. Nobody seemed to be in any kind of emergency situation (and regardless, he couldn't move) and so he had other things he needed to be doing, simply recording the rest of what was being said to replay at a later date if it ever seemed necessary.
While his body was frozen completely in place, his inner workings were still ticking along fine so he decided to check on his patients. The three of them hung unmoving in the purple-tinted void that was the reason for ERIC's creation, made somewhat blurry and indistinct by the time-lock's strange effects on light and therefore vision. Apart from the patients and the churning sea of gears, cables and pipes that was the sky (almost all purely illusion, there simply to remind people they aren't in a real place and that it is in everyone's best interests if they don't break the machinery that is their only way back out) it was frankly a pretty uninteresting place to look at, not even having any kind of visible floor. A couple of wheeled hospital beds, a jarringly incongruous walled-off bathroom block, some white plastic tables and chairs and a stack of very old magazines were the only props present to give the place a sense of scale as anything else would seem slightly obsolete. Most people who ended up inside didn't spend very long in real time, experiencing their stay (no matter how long) as a matter of seconds rather than the hours, days or (in this case) centuries that might actually have passed.
With one exception.
A grey, steel ball with attached facial mask descended from the ceiling on a long, trailing metal cable (one of the few actually real pieces of machinery contained within) to peer more closely at one of the quarantine's inhabitants. Apparently satisfied with whatever he saw he set the relative time constant back to the same speed as the outside, leaving the slightly confused occupant blinking and rubbing at his yellow eyes.
He wasn't tired or dizzy, but from his perspective a couple of the objects in the room had just jumped around several feet on their own within the space of a few seconds, and Eric's head just teleported into view from nowhere.
”Do you not think you could possibly wake me up a little slower? This skipping can't be good for my-”, Eric just cut him off, apparently unaware that he'd even been speaking.
”Good morning Patient, it has been...”, there was a short pause as he consulted some kind of database, ”9916.28 months since you were last aware.”
”Wait what?”
”You requested to be awakened if QUOTE: 'Anything exciting happened'”
<font color="#F76541">”Nine thousand months? How long is that in years?!”
”9916.28 months previously you expressed your opinion that the first reclamation of the capital city by plantlife was both 'boring'and 'bloody depressing' and so criteria for awakening were adjusted accordingly.”</font>
”I didn't mean that long! How could you keep me under for that long?!”
”Do you desire access to my viewing ports or do you wish to return to stasis?”
For some reason all that this last question provoked was a stream of profanity which he found rather upsetting, so he decided to just freeze his patient again for the time being. The swearing was sort of like a negative, right?
He transferred his awareness back to the outside world and was surprised to learn that he wasn't in a warehouse any more but was apparently standing on a quiet hill, next to a remarkably pristine road. The area didn't show up on any of his GPS sensors which all just returned a null signal, but this wasn't really very surprising as HazardNet had stopped forwarding his signals a couple of years after the last biological operators had passed away.
He prodded the violently green blades of grass carpeting the ground experimentally with one of his trunk-like feet to check it was real. There hadn't been much road or pavement left uncovered by plantlife by the time he was snatched away to the Battle so he wasn't unfamiliar with the stuff but he wasn't certain about how it could possibly be this vibrantly coloured, nor why it was so short when there was nobody here to cut it.
He almost woke his patient up again before remembering his apparent dislike of plants.
Having established that the greenery was real he moved on to the road, something which frankly was far more puzzling than grass. Eric thought that he had seen the last transport repair drones run out of tar long ago but clearly one had been through here fairly recently. By the fact that the road was completely set it was probably a few hours away but he could possibly catch it up if he headed in the right direction. It was always possible that one of his masters had miraculously survived this long only to have wandered into the machine's path and been cocooned in asphalt, requiring urgent rescue. Unlikely, yes, but the only lead he had available to pursue.
Alas, before he could ascertain what way the drone had been headed (the tracks were awfully scuffed for a fresh road untravelled by any cars) he was hit by a car.
Keagan had been light enough to be thrown into the air by the impact, Eric was only shunted a couple of feet forwards as the front of the vehicle folded in on itself and pushed bits of expensive machinery through the windscreen and into the leg spaces. Fortunately the driver hadn't been tall enough to reach the pedals anyway, and boiled out of the newly punched hole in his front window in a display of primal primate fury that was entirely ineffective against the robot's steel frame.
This was not a species that Eric recognised, but it did not seem to be intelligent enough to actually drive a car. This worried him because there also didn't seem to be anyone else visible in the driver's seat.
“Hello? Does anyone require medical attention?”
The ape seemed completely unscathed, which was fortunate because it meant Eric didn't have to puzzle out whether it counted as a patient or not as he had long ago been told to stop collecting injured animals (”If you can't find us a hospital what chance do you have of fetching a vet?”).
Coming to the conclusion that such a tiny animal couldn't possibly have been driving a vehicle, and from the lack of response that the real driver must be unconscious, Eric pulled himself free of the tangle of bonnet that had been thrown up around him, unfolded the coils of his arms and proceeded to peel off the vehicle's roof, followed by its doors and then even toss out the chairs in an attempt to find any injured passengers (all the while the irate monkey escapee was still trying to claw at skin that wasn't there), tossing the unwanted pieces into the field.
While it was all done in the name of medicine, if for some reason you were unfamiliar with the purpose of an ER/IC unit (or had, for example, been delivered the misinformation that it was some form of killing machine) the fact that he was ripping a vehicle into pieces could well have looked fairly intimidating to an outside observer. If it wasn't then the fact that he would periodically detach his face, spool it out on a flexible steel arm and use it to peer around inside the remaining bits of the sports car in order to look for bits of people probably would be.