RE: Quick Dirty Bastards: I've got a plan and it starts with 'g'
09-03-2013, 08:11 AM
RECAP THE DEUX
Show Content
SpoilerExterior. Windswept wastes. A frightening sky in the throes of a violent manastorm. A lone ork on her freshly-repaired moped, making tracks for a green smudge of life on the horizon.
Harvestine thumbs the accelerator; grins with satisfaction at the gentle creak of the chassis underneath. A nice change from the ominous creak it was giving off whenever she accelerated, and indicative of a solid bit of mechanical repair work. I might actually pay him for this, Harvestine thinks to herself.
Magdalene's strapped to the moped's flank; a duffel bag full of grenades (freshly topped up, thanks TNT) slouches across her back like an old cat, companionable only to her and a hot bag of hurt for anyone else. The moped screams, a territorial cry to whatever beasts dwell in the desert.
A totalled van, a lonely shack, and a tree with a katana mark the spot indicated by Caraway. Harvestine considers calling the Bastards, but realises she's out of a commlink. Fuck.
The van's the first thing she drives into, so Harv gives it a once-over. Pack of molemen, in bad shape. Some other guy who's not as important. Harvestine, the sewerfolk queen, Messiah of the Mire, lets the magic flow. The mole people come to, healed.
Harvestine comes to, a conclusion. The shitstain in the back seat is sentient, albeit currently unconscious. JJ. According to her acolytes, JJ was trying to help them gather manashrooms before Harvestine showed up, only to have some other fuckers claim the stash was theirs.
With zero understanding of whatever political forces may be at play here, Harvestine assures the molemen that these are their mushrooms, and she's going to go beat the fuck out of anyone who claims otherwise. She ties up JJ with loose wires, ganks his commlink, tosses him over the shoulder not carrying the grenades and accessories, and bids her molepeople head back toward the city.
---
Shodan, meanwhile, is Shodan. I was going to suggest she was exasperated or annoyed or even bored with the situation, but Shodan's an emotional state in of herself. She's probably reflecting about how things could've gone better, trying to extrapolate which little twists of life got her stuck in an underground bunker with these particular chucklefucks. Peter may or may not be having some kind of magic-induced super-slowed down shutting down of his vital functions after being fried by manalightning, Lydia would love to help him with that problem but doesn't know how, Damien's still asleep in the trunk, and Guy is just typically contemptible.
Oh well, she thinks, at least JJ's probably dead. Her commlink buzzes. It's JJ!
Harvestine tolerates about twenty seconds of misdirected abuse before explaining that she's just rocked up, what are these guys doing out in this storm, she found JJ's useless sack of flesh in a van out yonder so she thought she'd bring him along. Do you guys know where I could find some manashrooms, or some dudes who stole some manashrooms?
Lydia sees a golden opportunity and joins the conference call, asking Harvestine to pass the commlink over so she can "redistribute" the 70,000 Nuyen JJ's been stealing off various folk. The ork howls a "hell no" and claims that she's got no reason to trust some tartbot she's literally met once, and they can get Guy and his sprite entourage to do it. Lydia's cooperative about this, a rare trait for a Quick Dirty Bastard. They let Harvestine into the shack and the concrete bunker underneath the shack.
Harvestine tries to Heal, then to Mindlink with a comatose Peter, but she's too bad at magic to do that. She hops onto the now-available astral plane instead and finds a very suave, well-groomed, and loquacious astral avatar of Peter, while hers is an inexperienced bratty little plant goddess-in-the-making. The two sense a disturbance down one end of the bunker, and Astral Peter is a knowledgeable smug ass about it.
Shodan finds a quiet corner to lament her life choices and to bake a rhubarb pie. The bunker yields very suspect substitutes for essential pie ingredients, but some Shodan-style "persuasion" fuses them into something edible. Her "coercion" of the lighter-powered hotplate is less successful, making it incapable of more than a pittance of heat and an order up of one really really slow-cooked pie.
Suddenly, a ghost! Lydia has no experience with the paranormal so she just tries to find the contact details of a more experienced group in such matters. (Who's she gonna call?????) The manastorm is wreaking havoc with connections to Seattle, so Lydia only manages (through all the static) to ask a friend to watch out for toast. Harvestine attempts to astral suplex the ghost, which resolves itself into the very sexy form of Envy, the Chick From The Noir Episode. It dissipates and reforms as Magus Margery, much to Harvestine's confusion. Peter's no help, he's busy brooding and writing things down in his handy dandy astral projected notebook. Shodan violences the ghost on the physical plane while Harvestine yells at Peter for an explanation on the astral. Guy is either wrestling raw data or his own demons/sprites in the matrix in an attempt to crack the contents of JJ's commlink.
Peter is still writing some allegory for his life and all its fuckups or something. Fucking lit majors. While Harvestine attempts an amateur astral beatdown on an entity she fails to realise is Shodan, the spectral Magus Margery shifts again, this time into Peter. Harvestine would know for sure this was a doppleganger, if, well, she knew what a doppelganger was. It looks more like the Peter we all know and love from the noir session, the dishevelled uninitiated mess still struggling with mescaline withdrawl and random advances from women way out of his league. Harvestine tackles Doppelpeter and punches him in the face.
Peter, you can fucking stop writing already and start helping oh no wait you're writing in reverse your development into a competent human being over your last couple weeks with the Bastards. Ok. You do that. Harvestine is surrounded by more Peters, then another Peter still on the mescaline, a college kid, a child no older than Harvestine's astral avatar.
Peter (the real one, the noir-protagonist-esque author insert astral badass Peter) pauses his scrawlses. Then begins writing from the top. An astral litany, a systematic retcon of his life's fuckups, resolving them into a powerful not-spell with the power to bring him closure, let him shed his mistakes and emerge perfect and divine-
Harv ain't got time for this shit. "KISS HIM," Harvestine roars to Lydia, apparently loud enough to carry across the astral plane and into the ears of our resident AI. She leaps across the bunker and plants a surprisingly competent kiss (which isn't that surprising considering she's in the chassis of a sexbot).
Peter wakes up. The ghosts dissipate. Somewhere else in the bunker, an egg timer goes "ding!". Shodan's travesty of a rhubarb pie is done, unlike Peter's ritual. Peter makes choked noises and starts scrambling for the door, aiming to get hit with another strike from the manastorm. He's still got a chance!
Lydia collars Peter to prevent him doing anything dangerous, which stops him pretty securely. Dude's a twig, after all. That, and the storm's fading. Peter's too emotionally compromised to cry or, god forbid, rage at this development, and just kind of crumples.
Harv saunters back from the astral plane, feeling pretty pleased with herself because she slayed some ghosts or somesuch. "So, are we all done here?" The answer is no, no we're not, because you're the one that needed manashrooms. Everyone's eventually caught up on the fact that Magus Margery also needed the crop, and that presently nobody has it because when they get out to the field (Harv on her moped, Guy and Shodan in the front, Damien asleep, Lydia tending to Peter in the back, JJ unconscious in the boot), there's nothing but tire tracks.
Somehow, despite nobody having appreciable skills to survive anywhere outside a city, the team manages to track the tracks. Guy's comm-cracking efforts yield very little money and quite a few receipts for high-end van porn, also some audio clips of some minion of Ben Bernanke's? If they were paying real attention they might've noticed their Seattle-wide shenanigans were (completely unintentionally) foiling the Federal Ghost Wolf's plans at every turn.
An Aztech building appears on the horizon, flanked by trucks and peppered with guards. Shodan starts getting a closer look through the scope of a sniper rifle, while Lydia, Guy, and the sprites orchestrate a distraction by hacking the trucks and trying to make them drive off. Some Aztech goons floor the brakes, so Shodan and Harvestine floor them in turn with a sniper bullet through the windscreen and a grenade through what's left of the windscreen. The trucks begin to move, and something big and green and pissed-off crashes out the back of one.
It's a snapdragon. A giant, pissed-off flower with vines and thorns and a fire-spitting attack. The guards immediately open fire on it, so Harv buffs it with Shape Plant and takes out a couple of its aggressors with a well-placed grenade. The snapdragon screams with bloodlust and raw power etc, so Harv attempts to Mindlink with it. Trogdor/Lord Snapdragon/S is for Sucks is pleased at her assistance, but furious that these foolish mortals continue their meddlesome science on it, so thank god Harv didn't go to med school instead. It's also furious that his kinsplants are still trapped in the other trucks, so Harv yells at Guy and Lydia to get on that shit and leaps into the fray, Shodan covering her rash ass with the sniper rifle.
Harvestine, Shodan, and Lord Snapdragon down more guards, and Harv uses Shape Plant on another group of the escapees, who are dancing with joy at their newfound freedom. The Shaped ones dance right on up to an Aztech goon and strangle him with vines. D'awwww. Guy begins to scramble the security in the Aztech building by deleting essential files and causing severe system slowdown by way of COPIOUS GIGABYTES OF FINEST VAN PORN.
Peter, meanwhile, snaps out of something and joins Guy, Lydia, and Shodan. He begins to charge a ridiculously large fireball spell, the first in what seems like an eternity of non-lethal magic, drawing even more power from his fetish and through DREAD MAGYKKS UNKNOWN. At least, that's what we can assume he's doing by writing DISCO INFERNO on his arm. Harvestine is not blind to the fuckoff huge gathering of magic up on the ridge where she ditched those other dudes, and tells Lord Snapdragon to gather his underlings around Harv so she can make cover.
The Physical Barrier barely holds. Peter fires one Fireball. Just one. Everything outside the Barrier is reduced to ash. The words on Peter's arm cut into the flesh, drawing blood as payment for the magical influx. Peter heads back into the boot to think about what he's done, where it turns out JJ's coming to.
Harvestine is DELIGHTED to meet a plant. And like, a sentient one, too! She asks if there's anything else she can do for Lord Snapdragon, who mind-roars that he's looking for soil on magically-charged land to settle with his tribe. Harvestine reckons a murderous garden/sentient plants for next door neighbours sounds awesome, and invites them back to the Crones' high school. She then heads back to the van, plants still dancing around her feet, to the sound of several Bastards arguing what to do with JJ. The consensus is to kill him, especially when he's being his usual dickbag self upon interrogation. Harv lifts him by the throat and has a better offer.
JJ can go live with the mole people! Which was what he was doing already, but Harv doesn't actually realise that. The Bastards can keep him political prisoner down there, which means that his commlink, funds, and general identity are at the Bastards' disposal. Harvestine reckons the mole people can be trusted to take care of him without giving him free reign, and it sure beats rotting in a ditch somewhere choking on his own severed genitalia, right?
The deal is sealed with a Hello Kitty commlink which Guy had on his person for reasons unknown, locked down tight with parental controls. Lydia is about to interrogate him on the audio files they've been extracting from his commlink, but Harvestine punches him a little too quickly into unconsciousness. Oops.
The Bastards ride back towards Seattle, with several sprite-piloted trucks full of manashrooms and Lord Snapdragon's troops. The trip's mostly silent, because Damien's still snoring, Shodan's driving and insociable as ever, Peter's in a funk, Lydia's worried about Peter, and Guy is staring out the window with a very uncharacteristic expression at Harvestine on her moped.
The moped squeals to a halt with the city barely in sight. Shodan frowns, hits the brakes, and sticks her head out the window. JJ's commlink begins to air the final voice memo. He's got to hurry. Got to warn them. He's got to warn Margery that it was Bernanke, it was all Bernanke-
The manastorm passed. Passed the farm, marched straight on to Seattle.
Seattle is burning.
Harvestine thumbs the accelerator; grins with satisfaction at the gentle creak of the chassis underneath. A nice change from the ominous creak it was giving off whenever she accelerated, and indicative of a solid bit of mechanical repair work. I might actually pay him for this, Harvestine thinks to herself.
Magdalene's strapped to the moped's flank; a duffel bag full of grenades (freshly topped up, thanks TNT) slouches across her back like an old cat, companionable only to her and a hot bag of hurt for anyone else. The moped screams, a territorial cry to whatever beasts dwell in the desert.
A totalled van, a lonely shack, and a tree with a katana mark the spot indicated by Caraway. Harvestine considers calling the Bastards, but realises she's out of a commlink. Fuck.
The van's the first thing she drives into, so Harv gives it a once-over. Pack of molemen, in bad shape. Some other guy who's not as important. Harvestine, the sewerfolk queen, Messiah of the Mire, lets the magic flow. The mole people come to, healed.
Harvestine comes to, a conclusion. The shitstain in the back seat is sentient, albeit currently unconscious. JJ. According to her acolytes, JJ was trying to help them gather manashrooms before Harvestine showed up, only to have some other fuckers claim the stash was theirs.
With zero understanding of whatever political forces may be at play here, Harvestine assures the molemen that these are their mushrooms, and she's going to go beat the fuck out of anyone who claims otherwise. She ties up JJ with loose wires, ganks his commlink, tosses him over the shoulder not carrying the grenades and accessories, and bids her molepeople head back toward the city.
---
Shodan, meanwhile, is Shodan. I was going to suggest she was exasperated or annoyed or even bored with the situation, but Shodan's an emotional state in of herself. She's probably reflecting about how things could've gone better, trying to extrapolate which little twists of life got her stuck in an underground bunker with these particular chucklefucks. Peter may or may not be having some kind of magic-induced super-slowed down shutting down of his vital functions after being fried by manalightning, Lydia would love to help him with that problem but doesn't know how, Damien's still asleep in the trunk, and Guy is just typically contemptible.
Oh well, she thinks, at least JJ's probably dead. Her commlink buzzes. It's JJ!
Harvestine tolerates about twenty seconds of misdirected abuse before explaining that she's just rocked up, what are these guys doing out in this storm, she found JJ's useless sack of flesh in a van out yonder so she thought she'd bring him along. Do you guys know where I could find some manashrooms, or some dudes who stole some manashrooms?
Lydia sees a golden opportunity and joins the conference call, asking Harvestine to pass the commlink over so she can "redistribute" the 70,000 Nuyen JJ's been stealing off various folk. The ork howls a "hell no" and claims that she's got no reason to trust some tartbot she's literally met once, and they can get Guy and his sprite entourage to do it. Lydia's cooperative about this, a rare trait for a Quick Dirty Bastard. They let Harvestine into the shack and the concrete bunker underneath the shack.
Harvestine tries to Heal, then to Mindlink with a comatose Peter, but she's too bad at magic to do that. She hops onto the now-available astral plane instead and finds a very suave, well-groomed, and loquacious astral avatar of Peter, while hers is an inexperienced bratty little plant goddess-in-the-making. The two sense a disturbance down one end of the bunker, and Astral Peter is a knowledgeable smug ass about it.
Shodan finds a quiet corner to lament her life choices and to bake a rhubarb pie. The bunker yields very suspect substitutes for essential pie ingredients, but some Shodan-style "persuasion" fuses them into something edible. Her "coercion" of the lighter-powered hotplate is less successful, making it incapable of more than a pittance of heat and an order up of one really really slow-cooked pie.
Suddenly, a ghost! Lydia has no experience with the paranormal so she just tries to find the contact details of a more experienced group in such matters. (Who's she gonna call?????) The manastorm is wreaking havoc with connections to Seattle, so Lydia only manages (through all the static) to ask a friend to watch out for toast. Harvestine attempts to astral suplex the ghost, which resolves itself into the very sexy form of Envy, the Chick From The Noir Episode. It dissipates and reforms as Magus Margery, much to Harvestine's confusion. Peter's no help, he's busy brooding and writing things down in his handy dandy astral projected notebook. Shodan violences the ghost on the physical plane while Harvestine yells at Peter for an explanation on the astral. Guy is either wrestling raw data or his own demons/sprites in the matrix in an attempt to crack the contents of JJ's commlink.
Peter is still writing some allegory for his life and all its fuckups or something. Fucking lit majors. While Harvestine attempts an amateur astral beatdown on an entity she fails to realise is Shodan, the spectral Magus Margery shifts again, this time into Peter. Harvestine would know for sure this was a doppleganger, if, well, she knew what a doppelganger was. It looks more like the Peter we all know and love from the noir session, the dishevelled uninitiated mess still struggling with mescaline withdrawl and random advances from women way out of his league. Harvestine tackles Doppelpeter and punches him in the face.
Peter, you can fucking stop writing already and start helping oh no wait you're writing in reverse your development into a competent human being over your last couple weeks with the Bastards. Ok. You do that. Harvestine is surrounded by more Peters, then another Peter still on the mescaline, a college kid, a child no older than Harvestine's astral avatar.
Peter (the real one, the noir-protagonist-esque author insert astral badass Peter) pauses his scrawlses. Then begins writing from the top. An astral litany, a systematic retcon of his life's fuckups, resolving them into a powerful not-spell with the power to bring him closure, let him shed his mistakes and emerge perfect and divine-
Harv ain't got time for this shit. "KISS HIM," Harvestine roars to Lydia, apparently loud enough to carry across the astral plane and into the ears of our resident AI. She leaps across the bunker and plants a surprisingly competent kiss (which isn't that surprising considering she's in the chassis of a sexbot).
Peter wakes up. The ghosts dissipate. Somewhere else in the bunker, an egg timer goes "ding!". Shodan's travesty of a rhubarb pie is done, unlike Peter's ritual. Peter makes choked noises and starts scrambling for the door, aiming to get hit with another strike from the manastorm. He's still got a chance!
Lydia collars Peter to prevent him doing anything dangerous, which stops him pretty securely. Dude's a twig, after all. That, and the storm's fading. Peter's too emotionally compromised to cry or, god forbid, rage at this development, and just kind of crumples.
Harv saunters back from the astral plane, feeling pretty pleased with herself because she slayed some ghosts or somesuch. "So, are we all done here?" The answer is no, no we're not, because you're the one that needed manashrooms. Everyone's eventually caught up on the fact that Magus Margery also needed the crop, and that presently nobody has it because when they get out to the field (Harv on her moped, Guy and Shodan in the front, Damien asleep, Lydia tending to Peter in the back, JJ unconscious in the boot), there's nothing but tire tracks.
Somehow, despite nobody having appreciable skills to survive anywhere outside a city, the team manages to track the tracks. Guy's comm-cracking efforts yield very little money and quite a few receipts for high-end van porn, also some audio clips of some minion of Ben Bernanke's? If they were paying real attention they might've noticed their Seattle-wide shenanigans were (completely unintentionally) foiling the Federal Ghost Wolf's plans at every turn.
An Aztech building appears on the horizon, flanked by trucks and peppered with guards. Shodan starts getting a closer look through the scope of a sniper rifle, while Lydia, Guy, and the sprites orchestrate a distraction by hacking the trucks and trying to make them drive off. Some Aztech goons floor the brakes, so Shodan and Harvestine floor them in turn with a sniper bullet through the windscreen and a grenade through what's left of the windscreen. The trucks begin to move, and something big and green and pissed-off crashes out the back of one.
It's a snapdragon. A giant, pissed-off flower with vines and thorns and a fire-spitting attack. The guards immediately open fire on it, so Harv buffs it with Shape Plant and takes out a couple of its aggressors with a well-placed grenade. The snapdragon screams with bloodlust and raw power etc, so Harv attempts to Mindlink with it. Trogdor/Lord Snapdragon/S is for Sucks is pleased at her assistance, but furious that these foolish mortals continue their meddlesome science on it, so thank god Harv didn't go to med school instead. It's also furious that his kinsplants are still trapped in the other trucks, so Harv yells at Guy and Lydia to get on that shit and leaps into the fray, Shodan covering her rash ass with the sniper rifle.
Harvestine, Shodan, and Lord Snapdragon down more guards, and Harv uses Shape Plant on another group of the escapees, who are dancing with joy at their newfound freedom. The Shaped ones dance right on up to an Aztech goon and strangle him with vines. D'awwww. Guy begins to scramble the security in the Aztech building by deleting essential files and causing severe system slowdown by way of COPIOUS GIGABYTES OF FINEST VAN PORN.
Peter, meanwhile, snaps out of something and joins Guy, Lydia, and Shodan. He begins to charge a ridiculously large fireball spell, the first in what seems like an eternity of non-lethal magic, drawing even more power from his fetish and through DREAD MAGYKKS UNKNOWN. At least, that's what we can assume he's doing by writing DISCO INFERNO on his arm. Harvestine is not blind to the fuckoff huge gathering of magic up on the ridge where she ditched those other dudes, and tells Lord Snapdragon to gather his underlings around Harv so she can make cover.
The Physical Barrier barely holds. Peter fires one Fireball. Just one. Everything outside the Barrier is reduced to ash. The words on Peter's arm cut into the flesh, drawing blood as payment for the magical influx. Peter heads back into the boot to think about what he's done, where it turns out JJ's coming to.
Harvestine is DELIGHTED to meet a plant. And like, a sentient one, too! She asks if there's anything else she can do for Lord Snapdragon, who mind-roars that he's looking for soil on magically-charged land to settle with his tribe. Harvestine reckons a murderous garden/sentient plants for next door neighbours sounds awesome, and invites them back to the Crones' high school. She then heads back to the van, plants still dancing around her feet, to the sound of several Bastards arguing what to do with JJ. The consensus is to kill him, especially when he's being his usual dickbag self upon interrogation. Harv lifts him by the throat and has a better offer.
JJ can go live with the mole people! Which was what he was doing already, but Harv doesn't actually realise that. The Bastards can keep him political prisoner down there, which means that his commlink, funds, and general identity are at the Bastards' disposal. Harvestine reckons the mole people can be trusted to take care of him without giving him free reign, and it sure beats rotting in a ditch somewhere choking on his own severed genitalia, right?
The deal is sealed with a Hello Kitty commlink which Guy had on his person for reasons unknown, locked down tight with parental controls. Lydia is about to interrogate him on the audio files they've been extracting from his commlink, but Harvestine punches him a little too quickly into unconsciousness. Oops.
The Bastards ride back towards Seattle, with several sprite-piloted trucks full of manashrooms and Lord Snapdragon's troops. The trip's mostly silent, because Damien's still snoring, Shodan's driving and insociable as ever, Peter's in a funk, Lydia's worried about Peter, and Guy is staring out the window with a very uncharacteristic expression at Harvestine on her moped.
The moped squeals to a halt with the city barely in sight. Shodan frowns, hits the brakes, and sticks her head out the window. JJ's commlink begins to air the final voice memo. He's got to hurry. Got to warn them. He's got to warn Margery that it was Bernanke, it was all Bernanke-
The manastorm passed. Passed the farm, marched straight on to Seattle.
Seattle is burning.
peace to the unsung peace to the martyrs | i'm johnny rotten appleseed
clouds is shaky love | broke as hell but i got a bunch of ringtones
eyes blood red bruise aubergine | Sue took something now Sue doesn't sleep | saint average, day in the life of
woke up in the noon smelling doom and death | out the house, great outdoors
staying warm in arctic blizzard | that's my battle 'til I get inanimate | still up in the same clothes living like a gameshow
clouds is shaky love | broke as hell but i got a bunch of ringtones
eyes blood red bruise aubergine | Sue took something now Sue doesn't sleep | saint average, day in the life of
woke up in the noon smelling doom and death | out the house, great outdoors
staying warm in arctic blizzard | that's my battle 'til I get inanimate | still up in the same clothes living like a gameshow