#xrumon things

[trolloled]

I really don'╪ see ╪he poin╪ in /\/\aking a logo.

/\/\ean we're supposed ╪o be secre╪, /\/\ore or less. Secre╪ ╪hings don'╪ have gian╪ ass logos wi╪h which ╪o iden╪ify ╪he/\/\.

Bu╪ Garsad was insis╪en╪ his design would 'boos╪ /\/\orale' and '/\/\ake s╪aff feel a sense of belonging'. Wha╪ever ╪ha╪ shi╪ /\/\eans.

S╪ill feels kind of o/\/\inous, ╪hough.

Where ╪he hell are we going ╪o pu╪ ╪his design? On Alpha's back?

[trolloled]

Nearer to Thee

These events take place shortly following @cloudbattrolls Repentance storyline.

Toyhou.se version here.

"Every day now, I find myself in the same place."

"I walk along the old corridor. The air is thick with rot. I can see their faces looking up at from below. Broken bones, chemical burns, most with their flesh melted right from the skull."

"They reach for me as I march, splintered fingers clutching at my boots as they try to pull me through."

"The exit leads to a forest, one that I never recognize. Then I meet it, the blackened creature that waits for me. Every day, I never get close enough to reach it. Its blank head turns towards me, and I wake up."

"Today, however, something new happened."

"Today, it tilted towards me, then it smiled, though it lacked any mouth to do so with. I merely felt it smile. No. That is not correct."

"I smiled. I felt happy. A sense of relief passed through me as joy filled my heart."

"I awoke still feeling that joy, and now I copy that feeling here before it passes."

Platar set the pen down on his desk, running a hand through his moderately shaggy head of hair. It had been perigees now that these dreams had continued, but this new development was a big problem.

He had not yet managed to track any information on what exactly the thing was that had marked him so long ago. All he had was a small sample of the rot that it had left him with.

He turned in his chair, checking the computer monitoring the quarantine. It showed a room locked behind thick metal doors, a glass case on a pedestal in the center. Inside of it was the carcass of a desert rat he had retrieved. Its body was decomposing at a rapid rate, already half skeletal despite only being dead a night.

What remained of its flesh was marked by a softly pulsating series of black bands, almost resembling severe burns. The rot had to be fed to stay alive, and his experiments had shown it held no interest in being fed old plants.

He looked back at his journal, chewing the inside of his mouth. This was not possible to conclude on alone. The world was getting worse. A city simply obliterated by... something. Just gone. No matter how hard he tried, he could not make a difference, even with his strange abilities. That one group had ignored him, but...

He had been hearing rumors lately, of some sort of machine-hunter...

=====

The stranger wove between the other trolls delicately, robes fluttering about their heels. The only sound in the room were the muffled cries of the persons struggling to try and rise from their chairs. Though nothing visibly bound them to the seats they were in, sweat poured off of each as they tried to stand, to move even one muscle that wasn't restricted to their faces.

The stranger wore a timid smile, the only part of their face visible beneath their hood, as they pushed the chairs into a circle, with each troll facing inward. They paused beside a brownblood, who had tears trickling down his cheeks.

"No tears, please," they whispered, whisking the wetness from his cheeks with a flick of their sleeve. "It's a waste."

The troll's eyes shook wildly as they looked at the stranger, who returned their look with that same smile as they proceeded to the center of the circle. The living room of this hive had been cleared of everything but for a chair in the middle and the trolls arranged in a wide circle on the edges. A few sleeping bags were still wadded up in the corner of the room. Through the blackout curtains on the windows, the rays of the setting sun could still be seen.

The six trolls here were lowbloods in all, ranging from red to yellow. The stranger sat down on the chair in the center, drawing a hand to their throat. "Thank you for the invitation, we will gladly accept your assistance," they whispered.

Their hand sharply plunged towards their own throat, flesh bubbling and beginning to melt.

======

"Which brings us to this kind of fucked up thing that turned up recently," Garsad said, clicking his remote and moving the slideshow to the next slide.

The slide was a picture of a rather mediocre looking hive, the only standout thing about it were the only slightly ominous looking stains on the interiors of the front facing windows.

He, along with Xrumon and Avanti, were crammed into the too-small back room of the cheapest storefront they could have afforded for their meager little group. The wallpaper was peeling, there were some mild cracks in the foundation, and if the sole lamp in the room was on, it probably would have been flickering. There were some shelves with nothing on them pushed to the sides of the room, with the middle being taken up by a cart with a computer and a projector on it. The other two trolls were just in front of it and off to the sides on their own chairs. A single, ancient landline phone sat on the wall.

"Moreso than the entire city that up and left?" Xrumon groused, chafing in the uncomfortable folding chair he was forced to use.

"Well yeah, I mean. What do we even do about that? That's like. An ant trying to worry about a lawnmower," Garsad replied, shrugging. "Besides, your boss made it out, right?"

"Feh. Not much of a boss now since the factory went-" the teal snapped his fingers, grumbling. "Anyway, forget it."

"Did you send Alpha to check it out already?" Avanti asked.

"There's nothing to check. Whole place is cordoned off by the navy, I'm not sending those twitchy bastards something fucked up like our science project to shoot at."

Garsad cleared his throat, pressing the remote again. The next slide showed the interior of the hive, specifically the living room. Xrumon winced, feeling his stomach churn slightly.

Avanti, as well, pursed her lips and leaned forward in her seat, looking slightly more pale.

"Not a fan of censorship? Is this why we're doing this before breakfast?" Xrumon complained.

"Yeah, actually," Garsad nodded. "You need the raw details, man! Plus, I mean, look. There's actually important stuff here besides the guy's int-"

"Skip to the relevant parts, please," Avanti chimed in.

The brownblood picked up a laser pointer and gestured with it over the slide. The laser danced across the photo of the room in a distinct pattern, matching the whorls of blood seen in it.

"See this here? It's a little pattern I saw. Patterns are like, big shit in the supernatural world. From what I've learned anyway," he began. Xrumon wryly noted he appeared to also be avoiding looking too much at the scene pictured. "But this one? I haven't seen any like this in what I can get my hands on. But it's definitely deliberate."

He clicked to the next slide, a photograph of the same room from another angle, and his laser danced about again.

"See? Same pattern, bigger. In circles, over and over around the whole room."

"You sure it's not the workings of your average blitzed out subjug?" Xrumon asked, only mildly joking.

"Nah nah, they try to paint with their shit. Always looks terrible, probably since they're mad doped off their sopor pies and shit soda. This is delicate and precise, which, uh, hides pretty well behind everything else."

"So what do you think it is? Any theories?" Avanti asked.

"I think... I think it's some kind of message. You can, you know, call things, I think, if you write the right message. Usually it's names, like how you write a letter and put my name on it?" the mechanic tried to explain, stumbling only slightly as his brain tried to reach all memories needed. "This, I think, is like that. Like a.... a.... hailing?"

"A beacon," Xrumon said, earning a nod.

"Yeah, that! You know bloody mary and all? Say her name three times? Well this pattern, I think, is like that. So I think it's supposed to represent something. And, you know. Call it. Message it?"

"Well what the hell kind of shape is it? I can barely make it out past the viscera and your stupid laser pointer!"

Garsad clicked to the next slide, a photograph taken from the ceiling's point of view.

"...Is that an eye?" Xrumon asked. Something inside him went deathly chill at the sight of it.

======

Corelo pinched the bridge of his nose, drumming the fingers of his other hand on his desk.

When the highbloods had started acting nicer, that had been worrying. When everyone started clearing off the streets, that had been concerning.

When the navy destroyers appeared on the horizon and the city seemed to begin to twist and mutate, that had been catastrophic.

Fortunately, most of the mob's people had been able to escape. His hand moved from his nose to the beeper laying still in front of him, next to his notepad. It paid to have backup communications available, and doubly so to have escape routes, bugout bags, and tunnels ready.

He could still easily recall the strained silence as his group had sped out of the city, explosions and lasers lighting up the darkness behind them in the sky. Then the blinding flash as the city decided it had no business being here and simply vanished, like a god had scooped it right from the ground with a cosmic melon baller.

Now, back at his office, he was trying to figure out what to even do. Membership loss had been minimal, but any inroads he had been making into the city were obviously vaporized. That was a substantial loss of revenue, even if there had been nothing he could have done to prevent it. Nobody at all knew what the hell had happened, and if the empire knew, it certainly wasn't about to tell people how it had failed.

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then checked the potted plant in the corner for the fiftieth time. It was still perfectly plastic and dead, as it should be. All plants were banned from the office after what had been witnessed happening in the stars above some perigees ago. Odd shit seemed to be happening at an increased pace. He grit his teeth.

He was tired of this, this feeling of lack of control, of always being on the backfoot. He would never rise up further in the ranks if he was always having his fronts lost to the void or his members being culled by some sort of psionic serial killer (though that, at least, seemed to have stopped), or rogue members going around attacking hospitals.

He paused. He'd had everyone pore over the information on that case. The doctor he'd kept tabs on. She was in some sort of caravan, doing medical work, followed around occasionally by some odd other troll he'd never been able to get anything on. Sure, he could probably order some form of reprisal on her, but that wouldn't gain anything, especially with how far she had moved from their operations.

But that wasn't what he was concerned about. Odd shit. There had been that one report of a bizarre robot that had arrived one night to see her.

His eyes darted to his rolodex. He flicked through the cards in it until he came to the one he wanted. He opened a drawer in his desk and picked out a phone at random, flipping it open and dialing the number as he retrieved a notebook from a different drawer.

"Hi, I've got a friend who's celebrating something soon," he said as soon as the call was answered. "I'm looking for gift ideas. Do you know anything about a..."

He flipped through the notebook for a few pages.

"Xrumon Arigah? I think he likes mechanical stuff, but I haven't been able to reach him."

There was silence on the other end for a few moments. Then: "We have a few options in stock. Would you prefer us to perform further research on what they may enjoy?"

"That would be wonderful, thank you. You can send a letter to my post box." Corelo replied, hanging up shortly after.

That robot had been odd. That doctor had been odd. But that teal had remained in the background until he'd been forced to come forward.

Well, maybe it was time to shed some light on his involvement, and on that machine.

[trolloled]

A community for collaborative character creation and trading, worldbuilding and roleplay.

You've been waiting too long, now remember

That your life is shit!

[trolloled]

Xrumon, to nobody's surprise, thinks the holinight is a joke. An obvious marketing ploy to get people to spend a bunch of money and do things on one specific night.

However, he is also willing to admit through ground teeth that yes, he also doesn't like it as a point of jealousy. See? He's so psychologically healthy now.

Platar meanwhile barely even notices what the date is, this sort of thing holds no relevance when it comes to being a true Alternian soldier.

[trolloled]

Xrumon stood in the bathroom of his respiteblock in the clinic, fluorescent light above buzzing slightly. The room was clean, nearly spotless even, not that the tealblood really noted this. Instead he stood in front of the mirror, checking the scars across his face. One across the lips, one chunk of his ear gone, a large gash across his cheek.

His eyes flicked to the warped and cracked skin covering his forehead. Permanent burn scars. He was lucky that his hair still grew thickly enough around it to hide the worst of it.

'Lucky'.

He snorted softly. To be sure, there were some people with far worse scars than him. People with faces nearly ripped off whole, victims of chemical attacks, or people with other massive disfiguring injuries that not even a hundred surgeries could repair. By the standards of "horrific attack" victims, he seemed to have gotten off lightly.

A finger traced the scars on his left hand, which still pulsed softly with pain. He refused to take most painkillers. To himself, and to others, he said it was because he didn't want to deal with liver failure from opiate addiction. He could still see it in his memory, the sight of the knives flashing against the buzzing factory lights.

He rolled the sleeve of his sweater up. Permanent bruise marks, stab scars, even grimly pale circles covered one side. He rolled the sleeve back down, then carefully removed the sweater entirely. He folded it up, placing it on the towel rack behind him.

His chest had the worst of it, he surmised. Even now, perigees later, he could still see his ribs poking through his skin when he breathed. More of the pale circles, fortunately only one or two, dotted his chest. He was glad he could not see what his back looked like. He pressed a hand to his heart and imagined he could feel the electronic rhythm of his pacemaker. There were more of the bruises here than anywhere else. He could cleanly recall the sound of it all. It was funny, in a grim way. When he thought about it, the cracking was the most clear memory. The faces were blurred, who had done what exactly, but he could remember the first crunch as clear as a bell, then the second, third, and so on.

He sighed through his nose, letting his hand drop. What was it that some people said? That people thought scars made you look dangerous and cool? He couldn't see it. Scars were a memory, a memory of failure and pain. They couldn't even teach you anything like a good failure could. Maybe a rakish and light scar, one of those absurd ones across the eye that doesn't blind the action hero, those would be appealing. All he saw here was a tapestry of suffering and a requirement for coddling.

Maybe some of the scars could be healed with surgery- No, he stopped his thoughts there. They were ugly, but they were part of him.

'Ugly'.

He squinted at the mirror. He saw his pale-skin, his now ashen-colored hair, his horns that looked like the life had been leeched out of them, the welts, craters, and crags of nearly being killed that covered his body.

A small, weak laugh left his mouth. Sure. He was a little ugly. That was fine. Maybe not the ugliest, but no beauty pageant winner. That was okay. He didn't want people thinking any different of him.

He put his sweater back on, wincing as his hands throbbed again. Could surgery fix the nerve pain? Was it even real pain, or just ghost pain? Phantom memories tricking his gullible grey-matter into thinking he still needed to suffer?

He washed his hands, drying them with a paper towel before leaving.

At least the pain reminded him that he was still alive.

[trolloled]

[trolloled]

I guess Deviex would be a bit obsessive and protective...?

I dunno, I don't really have characters that are very toxic quadrant-wise. Xrumon and Ullane would have been very toxic but wisely neither pursued it.

Even Platar could be surprisingly normal about romance. If he did romance. There's very little to no time for it.

[trolloled]

"I cannot fathom the full extent of whatever inane bullshit wizards and their supernatural ilk will devise to defend themselves. Already I have to determine how best to slay a dragon, a mythological creature with no notes on the proper hunting of aside from dubious fiction."

"With the removal of an organic pilot, however, new avenues for weaponry aside from sheer strength have opened up. A tank of flammable jelly can be installed safely within the interior, a hose running up one arm with a pilot light installed in the palm of the hand. A port for refueling will need to be added, but this can take the place of one of the old medicinal ports."

"Garsad always wanted 'finger pistols' or 'laser eyes'. The eyes are still out, creating 'lasers' requires so much energy that it is likely to drain the internal battery within a few uses and I don't see the use in doing so. I still doubt the use of the former item, it would be easier just to build a gun and hand it to the unit to use. But out of the sake of politeness will consider the feasibility."

"The other hand can be altered so each finger can separate to allow for a firing tube. A belt feed can be used to load bullets into the interior of the hand from deeper within the machine. The problem then becomes not only creating proper firearm barrels out of each finger, but also the disposal of spent casings and need for constant maintenance. A cursory review of firearms manuals showed that guns need to be constantly cleaned and maintained."

"It is at this point I am still flatly refusing the finger pistols project. I am not going to waste time trying to design a module to not only clean the inside of the suit constantly, but also have to replace each finger with proper firearm barrels and devise some method of ejection for each casing."

"Instead, I should seek out a proper gunsmith. The weapons the Legionnaires can wield should be much more powerful than standard weaponry used by most trolls. With the kinetic absorber system still in place, they are much more easily able to withstand the recoil of powerful weapons. The problem also becomes the likelihood of shattering typical firearms with their strength. Hopefully the NTPs will be able to get a firm grasp of their power, but crushing their weapons repeatedly would not be helpful regardless."

"Based on my early conversations with a cooperative magic user, it appears that the materials used in objects can have powerful effects on the supernatural and magically inclined. This gunsmith would ideally be able to produce specialized ammunition from these materials. It is much easier to prepare concealed storage space for replacement or alternative magazines of ammunition than to attempt the asinine finger pistols again."

"How does one even find a gunsmith? Do you just trawl the local lowblood venues and hope one of them doesn't throw you out for your insane requests. The leasing of personal bodyguards, along with the other funding from that... streamer... has somehow started to pay off. We're not wealthy, but we have means to begin producing prototype modifications at least. Maybe I should have subject alpha act as an escort while I really do 'hit the pavement' for someone to help us..."

Xrumon Arigah, Personal Log