Re: DEATHGAME 9000 [S!3] Round One: Gamexus X99
03-06-2012, 12:17 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Jacquerel.
Gomorrah City was quite an interesting sight from the air. While the mash of various fictional architectural styles was often difficult to notice on ground level, apart from the sudden shift in the ethnicity and (perhaps more notably) level of general undead-ness of the citizens, the boundaries where buildings and locales from different game environments had been placed together were fairly visible from amongst the clouds though they were blurring together over time as Gomorrah occasionally switched streets and buildings around to better accommodate its plans. This was compounded by the fact that some of the buildings were never meant to be viewed from the air as their protagonists didn't gain any form of aerial exploration abilities, so you even had the occasional large and impressive structure that entirely lacked a roof or back walls (or rather, there were solid boxes there that kept out very confused birds and the even more confused rainclouds that covered odd patches of the city (neatly sliced into rectangular shapes by their hijacking from other areas and only slowly returning to a more natural shape) while not providing any form of privacy.
Also more than a few of the houses were wreathed in flames, though it was impossible to tell whether they were real, virtual or ethereal, and indeed perhaps meaningless to specify because at least two of the three would probably burn all the same, perhaps all of them depending on who we're talking about here. It would perhaps make the most sense to refer all of this to ERIC but alas, he once again wasn't really paying attention.
You'd think perhaps an ambulance robot would be fairly familiar with cities as they are where ambulances most commonly operate, but Eric was an emergency ambulance robot and thus only used to operating in areas of conflict or other disaster. As far as his experience held, it was pretty normal for a city to be full of holes, smoke and flames (except for when it was thigh-deep in water or, on one particularly memorable occasion, eels) and so he paid the somewhat peculiar appearance of the one he was now entering little heed. After all, he was on a mission.
He'd found the map in the dismantled wreckage of the ape's car, with still no evidence of any driver, and so had been forced to conclude that whoever had been in control of the vehicle had teleported themselves to safety. Based on this sound logic (because obviously apes still couldn't drive cars) he had originally assumed that the small metallic disk he had found underneath one of the seats had been said teleportation device and had rolled there after its owner departed (due to the way Khral interdimensional technology worked, a teleporter could not go through another teleporter unless it simulated a vastly smaller connecting dimension than the one it was travelling through or turned off, else it would overload the memory of the original device with fairly catastrophic results, and thus obviously could not therefore travel through itself) but it was far thinner and smaller than any he had ever seen, almost to the extent of being entirely two-dimensional.
It also had little pictures moving across its surface (something not usually featured by teleportation devices) and when he put it to his eye to get a better look at them he found out that the animated side was coated in a fairly powerful adhesive. The map's baffling lack of thickness and his own lack of fingers or fingernails for prying meant that he was rather stuck with regards to means for removing it again so there it remained, glued to the top corner of his right eye. Eric didn't really have the capacity to be annoyed about this but it was fairly peculiar, though at least it let him see the images clearly. Robot vision was less affected by things such as proximity than those of humans, and obviously also didn't react quite as badly to having things glued to it as an eyeball would.
As far as he could tell, the object he'd found was actually some form of GPS-aided map. He could see himself and the road he was on, leading to a city in the distance (which, oddly, didn't seem to be able to decide what it was called. The name label flickered and changed every couple of seconds). Seven yellow arrows were pointing in different directions around the edge of the circle, three of them off into the East, three to somewhere ahead in the city and the last to its centre. These marked objectives gave him fond memories of HazardNet and the days when he'd had something to do other than wander aimlessly through crumbling towns and watching plants take over the roads.
So, in another incredibly sound leap of logic, he decided that what he had found actually was a working link to the actual old HazardNet satellite AI and it was telling him to go save some lives. The problem must have been on his end not, as he had previously assumed, on the end of the floating eyes in the sky. This was an unfortunate misinterpretation, as the dislodged minimap was actually trying to point him towards his current objective as minimaps are wont to do, that being the people whose lives he was supposed to end, but as a gaming abstraction it wasn't actually sapient or able to communicate his error to him in any way.
So that was how Eric came to be five hundred feet above Gomorrah City, riding the twin streams of superheated air from the tubes sticking out of his back. His stubby little legs obviously weren't going to get him anywhere fast, especially considering his... generous frame, and what use is a slow ambulance?
The arrows had all been the same colour and HazardNet had colour-coded everything for severity, so as they were all equally life-threatening he had decided to just head for the nearest one first. Yellow actually wasn't incredibly urgent but as there weren't any higher priority arrows on his new friend, he didn't see any need to hang around. He had temporarily considered waking his patient up again to inform him that after his several hundred years of wandering he'd found some form of civilisation, but you probably wouldn't be surprised to learn how low on the list of programmed priorities for ambulances his designers had decided to put “show patients new and interesting scenery”.
It's lower than investigating possible sites of injury, if you hadn't guessed.
The mugger bolted down the street as soon as Weaver let go of his arm, pausing only to take terrified backwards glances to make sure that he was not being followed. Why Weaver would have pursued him he did not know, he'd already got everything that he had wanted out of the man and he'd even come out of it up one knife. It was hardly the most effective of weapons considering that the current situation (as far as he'd been told was an eight-way battle to the death and he would have preferred something with much more range (if only there'd been a spare firearm in the back of the stolen truck) but it was better than nothing and at least it would be much easier to conceal than a rifle, though the city's inhabitants had paid curiously little attention to him thus far, considering he wasn't even making an attempt to hide his outlandish appearance.
Or at least... it would have been easy to conceal if he had any pockets, one of the few advantages to actually wearing clothes. With the absence of anywhere more pleasant to stick it, he pushed the blade back into the already sealed wound on his chest, it wasn't a particularly good hiding place but someone who's been stabbed would perhaps generate less negative attention than someone holding a knife, and it wasn't like it was doing any damage in there, and then set off to follow his would-be-assailant's directions.
It was always possible that this would just lead into some kind of trap (he had clearly been a thief after all) or just a dead end, after all information taken from the coerced isn't the most reliable source, but he hadn't sounded like he was lying and it wasn't like Weaver had any other-
WHAM!
As previously noted, Eric was and is a crisis ambulance designed to operate in places that did not have roads, runways or convenient places to land. Or wheels, for that matter. Theoretically, given enough of a landing strip, he could use his spherical shape to roll to a halt but even in those circumstances he probably wouldn't bother because his general method of landing was simply to drop. It wasn't like additional property damage would be much of an issue in the places he was supposed to be working, as long as he didn't cause any civilian casualties.
So that's what he did.
The shock of impact shattered several nearby car windows, set off a respectable number of alarms and sent the helmeted ape previously perched on his shoulder flying off into the air, though it managed to catch itself on a conveniently placed lamppost before it could come to any harm.
The sudden arrival of something so utterly out of place was fairly difficult for some of the ethereal inhabitants to deal with, especially as they were already trying to rationalise a guy covered in Tron Lines wandering about with a knife stuck in his chest. Some of them simply ignored it, a few more just stopped and stood there staring, a fair amount ran away and one was so shocked that he forgot which ghost he was supposed to be and swapped places with a woman on the other side of town. Gommorah was a fairly adaptable being though and it didn't take it long to set things to rights.
Ok, things didn't fall out of the sky and then get up and peer at the citizens most days but “new” and “different” were qualities that were very easy to twist into hatred. Given enough time, a mob would probably even start to form without needing to be pushed.
Weaver on the other hand was a bit harder to surprise, though this certainly hadn't been something he was expecting to happen. The somewhat eccentric man who had introduced the contestants had called this one a warbot, though Eric was a slightly odd name to give a warrior.
He didn't have enough evidence to decide one way or another whether to trust the advice he'd been given before being sent here but The Incompetent's credibility was certainly on the shaky side. His information on Weaver had been somewhat questionable to start with, though it was plausible that what he'd said was the spin the media had been putting on his escape at the time of his capture, and also this didn't really look much like a maze and he'd never mentioned the fact that Eric could apparently fly.
That said, while he was not really the type to feel wary the way the other machine was looking at him (in the time he'd been thinking, its head had actually physically detached from its body and extended on a long, flexible steel limb to examine him more closely) was setting the survival senses he'd built up on the run over the past few years on edge.
The thick metal on the landed machine's chassis looked like it would be fairly difficult to damage with either his bare hands or a knife, but the tenuous connection that its face had with its body made for a fairly obvious weak point if it made any kind of aggressive move, though he couldn't actually make out any obvious weapons other than its many arms (not that those couldn't be dangerous, his had served him well and though they didn't appear to end in hands, Eric had more than he did and they were much longer).
Eric himself was slightly confused, he'd expected to arrive at the site of some small cataclysm but most of the damage here had been caused by his own landing. HazardNet was fairly insistent that this was the place, but as far as he could tell there was only one patient around.
Dealing with stab wounds was rarely his business but perhaps there'd just not been anyone else nearby, and it had been marked as low priority. The patient didn't even seem to be bleeding so it couldn't be hurt too badly, which surprised Eric less than you might think as his creators were naturally armoured in chitin.
What also confused him was that, as far as he could tell, it was just a bigger and differently coloured version of the ape he'd been carrying around with him. But if HazardNet told him that it was a sapient being then who was he to object? The idea that it was another robot didn't even cross his mind, because clearly robots wouldn't need to go to hospital and thus he never would have been asked to go and rescue one, that and... he wasn't really familiar enough with humans to realise that Weaver wasn't the same thing as the similarly shaped citizens milling about in an increasingly threatening manner in the background.
“Do not be alarmed!”, Eric said, as his torso rotated and then split in half across the middle, revealing a pulsing hole in space which regularly crackled with white and purple streaks of lightning.
As the top half of his torso levered back ninety degrees to expose the anomaly fully to the air, Eric's head appeared over the top of the void (still balancing on the end of an absurdly long and flexible neck) and twenty arms uncoiled in preparation to usher the beleaguered android into a completely unecessary trip to the hospital.
“This is for your own good.”
Gomorrah City was quite an interesting sight from the air. While the mash of various fictional architectural styles was often difficult to notice on ground level, apart from the sudden shift in the ethnicity and (perhaps more notably) level of general undead-ness of the citizens, the boundaries where buildings and locales from different game environments had been placed together were fairly visible from amongst the clouds though they were blurring together over time as Gomorrah occasionally switched streets and buildings around to better accommodate its plans. This was compounded by the fact that some of the buildings were never meant to be viewed from the air as their protagonists didn't gain any form of aerial exploration abilities, so you even had the occasional large and impressive structure that entirely lacked a roof or back walls (or rather, there were solid boxes there that kept out very confused birds and the even more confused rainclouds that covered odd patches of the city (neatly sliced into rectangular shapes by their hijacking from other areas and only slowly returning to a more natural shape) while not providing any form of privacy.
Also more than a few of the houses were wreathed in flames, though it was impossible to tell whether they were real, virtual or ethereal, and indeed perhaps meaningless to specify because at least two of the three would probably burn all the same, perhaps all of them depending on who we're talking about here. It would perhaps make the most sense to refer all of this to ERIC but alas, he once again wasn't really paying attention.
You'd think perhaps an ambulance robot would be fairly familiar with cities as they are where ambulances most commonly operate, but Eric was an emergency ambulance robot and thus only used to operating in areas of conflict or other disaster. As far as his experience held, it was pretty normal for a city to be full of holes, smoke and flames (except for when it was thigh-deep in water or, on one particularly memorable occasion, eels) and so he paid the somewhat peculiar appearance of the one he was now entering little heed. After all, he was on a mission.
He'd found the map in the dismantled wreckage of the ape's car, with still no evidence of any driver, and so had been forced to conclude that whoever had been in control of the vehicle had teleported themselves to safety. Based on this sound logic (because obviously apes still couldn't drive cars) he had originally assumed that the small metallic disk he had found underneath one of the seats had been said teleportation device and had rolled there after its owner departed (due to the way Khral interdimensional technology worked, a teleporter could not go through another teleporter unless it simulated a vastly smaller connecting dimension than the one it was travelling through or turned off, else it would overload the memory of the original device with fairly catastrophic results, and thus obviously could not therefore travel through itself) but it was far thinner and smaller than any he had ever seen, almost to the extent of being entirely two-dimensional.
It also had little pictures moving across its surface (something not usually featured by teleportation devices) and when he put it to his eye to get a better look at them he found out that the animated side was coated in a fairly powerful adhesive. The map's baffling lack of thickness and his own lack of fingers or fingernails for prying meant that he was rather stuck with regards to means for removing it again so there it remained, glued to the top corner of his right eye. Eric didn't really have the capacity to be annoyed about this but it was fairly peculiar, though at least it let him see the images clearly. Robot vision was less affected by things such as proximity than those of humans, and obviously also didn't react quite as badly to having things glued to it as an eyeball would.
As far as he could tell, the object he'd found was actually some form of GPS-aided map. He could see himself and the road he was on, leading to a city in the distance (which, oddly, didn't seem to be able to decide what it was called. The name label flickered and changed every couple of seconds). Seven yellow arrows were pointing in different directions around the edge of the circle, three of them off into the East, three to somewhere ahead in the city and the last to its centre. These marked objectives gave him fond memories of HazardNet and the days when he'd had something to do other than wander aimlessly through crumbling towns and watching plants take over the roads.
So, in another incredibly sound leap of logic, he decided that what he had found actually was a working link to the actual old HazardNet satellite AI and it was telling him to go save some lives. The problem must have been on his end not, as he had previously assumed, on the end of the floating eyes in the sky. This was an unfortunate misinterpretation, as the dislodged minimap was actually trying to point him towards his current objective as minimaps are wont to do, that being the people whose lives he was supposed to end, but as a gaming abstraction it wasn't actually sapient or able to communicate his error to him in any way.
So that was how Eric came to be five hundred feet above Gomorrah City, riding the twin streams of superheated air from the tubes sticking out of his back. His stubby little legs obviously weren't going to get him anywhere fast, especially considering his... generous frame, and what use is a slow ambulance?
The arrows had all been the same colour and HazardNet had colour-coded everything for severity, so as they were all equally life-threatening he had decided to just head for the nearest one first. Yellow actually wasn't incredibly urgent but as there weren't any higher priority arrows on his new friend, he didn't see any need to hang around. He had temporarily considered waking his patient up again to inform him that after his several hundred years of wandering he'd found some form of civilisation, but you probably wouldn't be surprised to learn how low on the list of programmed priorities for ambulances his designers had decided to put “show patients new and interesting scenery”.
It's lower than investigating possible sites of injury, if you hadn't guessed.
The mugger bolted down the street as soon as Weaver let go of his arm, pausing only to take terrified backwards glances to make sure that he was not being followed. Why Weaver would have pursued him he did not know, he'd already got everything that he had wanted out of the man and he'd even come out of it up one knife. It was hardly the most effective of weapons considering that the current situation (as far as he'd been told was an eight-way battle to the death and he would have preferred something with much more range (if only there'd been a spare firearm in the back of the stolen truck) but it was better than nothing and at least it would be much easier to conceal than a rifle, though the city's inhabitants had paid curiously little attention to him thus far, considering he wasn't even making an attempt to hide his outlandish appearance.
Or at least... it would have been easy to conceal if he had any pockets, one of the few advantages to actually wearing clothes. With the absence of anywhere more pleasant to stick it, he pushed the blade back into the already sealed wound on his chest, it wasn't a particularly good hiding place but someone who's been stabbed would perhaps generate less negative attention than someone holding a knife, and it wasn't like it was doing any damage in there, and then set off to follow his would-be-assailant's directions.
It was always possible that this would just lead into some kind of trap (he had clearly been a thief after all) or just a dead end, after all information taken from the coerced isn't the most reliable source, but he hadn't sounded like he was lying and it wasn't like Weaver had any other-
WHAM!
As previously noted, Eric was and is a crisis ambulance designed to operate in places that did not have roads, runways or convenient places to land. Or wheels, for that matter. Theoretically, given enough of a landing strip, he could use his spherical shape to roll to a halt but even in those circumstances he probably wouldn't bother because his general method of landing was simply to drop. It wasn't like additional property damage would be much of an issue in the places he was supposed to be working, as long as he didn't cause any civilian casualties.
So that's what he did.
The shock of impact shattered several nearby car windows, set off a respectable number of alarms and sent the helmeted ape previously perched on his shoulder flying off into the air, though it managed to catch itself on a conveniently placed lamppost before it could come to any harm.
The sudden arrival of something so utterly out of place was fairly difficult for some of the ethereal inhabitants to deal with, especially as they were already trying to rationalise a guy covered in Tron Lines wandering about with a knife stuck in his chest. Some of them simply ignored it, a few more just stopped and stood there staring, a fair amount ran away and one was so shocked that he forgot which ghost he was supposed to be and swapped places with a woman on the other side of town. Gommorah was a fairly adaptable being though and it didn't take it long to set things to rights.
Ok, things didn't fall out of the sky and then get up and peer at the citizens most days but “new” and “different” were qualities that were very easy to twist into hatred. Given enough time, a mob would probably even start to form without needing to be pushed.
Weaver on the other hand was a bit harder to surprise, though this certainly hadn't been something he was expecting to happen. The somewhat eccentric man who had introduced the contestants had called this one a warbot, though Eric was a slightly odd name to give a warrior.
He didn't have enough evidence to decide one way or another whether to trust the advice he'd been given before being sent here but The Incompetent's credibility was certainly on the shaky side. His information on Weaver had been somewhat questionable to start with, though it was plausible that what he'd said was the spin the media had been putting on his escape at the time of his capture, and also this didn't really look much like a maze and he'd never mentioned the fact that Eric could apparently fly.
That said, while he was not really the type to feel wary the way the other machine was looking at him (in the time he'd been thinking, its head had actually physically detached from its body and extended on a long, flexible steel limb to examine him more closely) was setting the survival senses he'd built up on the run over the past few years on edge.
The thick metal on the landed machine's chassis looked like it would be fairly difficult to damage with either his bare hands or a knife, but the tenuous connection that its face had with its body made for a fairly obvious weak point if it made any kind of aggressive move, though he couldn't actually make out any obvious weapons other than its many arms (not that those couldn't be dangerous, his had served him well and though they didn't appear to end in hands, Eric had more than he did and they were much longer).
Eric himself was slightly confused, he'd expected to arrive at the site of some small cataclysm but most of the damage here had been caused by his own landing. HazardNet was fairly insistent that this was the place, but as far as he could tell there was only one patient around.
Dealing with stab wounds was rarely his business but perhaps there'd just not been anyone else nearby, and it had been marked as low priority. The patient didn't even seem to be bleeding so it couldn't be hurt too badly, which surprised Eric less than you might think as his creators were naturally armoured in chitin.
What also confused him was that, as far as he could tell, it was just a bigger and differently coloured version of the ape he'd been carrying around with him. But if HazardNet told him that it was a sapient being then who was he to object? The idea that it was another robot didn't even cross his mind, because clearly robots wouldn't need to go to hospital and thus he never would have been asked to go and rescue one, that and... he wasn't really familiar enough with humans to realise that Weaver wasn't the same thing as the similarly shaped citizens milling about in an increasingly threatening manner in the background.
“Do not be alarmed!”, Eric said, as his torso rotated and then split in half across the middle, revealing a pulsing hole in space which regularly crackled with white and purple streaks of lightning.
As the top half of his torso levered back ninety degrees to expose the anomaly fully to the air, Eric's head appeared over the top of the void (still balancing on the end of an absurdly long and flexible neck) and twenty arms uncoiled in preparation to usher the beleaguered android into a completely unecessary trip to the hospital.
“This is for your own good.”
Spoiler