1452/Automated Assassin II

Automated Assassin II
Date of Scene:	30 January 2015
Location:	Void - Skyland
Synopsis:	Staren is targeted by the second of the Collective's mysterious assassins.
Cast of Characters:	Staren, 596

---

Staren has posed:
    Somewhere in Skyland is a world of floating islands. Well. There are many such worlds, but this one in particular is where things are about to happen.

    Staren stopped here, briefly, while showing a lost Galiandan the way back to their world. But now he's had a thought: What keeps the islands up? It's worth at least /asking/, right? From the warpgate, which seems to be set in some kind of park-like area, Staren's walked down the road to a densely populated settlement partially built into the side of the small mountain in the center of this little island. Already, there are interesting clues to culture: People dress like it's the 15th or 16th century, or at least like an anime set then... He spies in the airship dock what looks like a ship held aloft by a great balloon above it, but there are a lot of pipes and gears and things. Steam-powered propulsion, maybe? He sees some people with flintlock pistols holstered at their side, and yet as he walks down the street taking it in he stops to look in the window of what looks like an electronics store full of mid 20th century technology. Is it from here or is it imported? Then he realizes that what he thought were clotheslines crisscrossing the town don't actually have clothes on them. Is that power transmission infrastructure? Man, where do you even begin with something like this?

    "Excuse me," Staren stops a random person on the street. "Can you tell me where the library is?"

Zwei (596) has posed:
    Unbeknownst to Staren, there is a far more incongruous piece of technology present in his surroundings than power cables mixed in with steam pipes. From the warpgate onwards, something has been following him. Cloaked in several forms of active camouflage, this dedicated stealth unit has deliberately tailed him from the open park into the heart of a bustling city, making no effort to pull him away or intercept him before others would come into the picture. Precisely calculated destructive resonance in the air and ground muffles its footsteps as a carefully managed negative refractive index bends light through the space around it. It's of noone's fault in particular that it manages to stalk him all the way up to the first person he stops to ask a question of.

    Said person sees it before Staren does, having the ability to look over his shoulder as it decloaks. Rather than simply attempting to take him out invisibly, the type-2 anti-deebee Arma deliberately makes a show of its appearance, cowing the poor man into a state of wide eyed, open mouthed shock, before he turns tail and runs. All Staren gets to see is the sight of a shadow slightly larger than his own suddenly being cast on the ground in front of him, before three hundred pounds of metal leaps onto his back; slamming into him with several, blunt tipped, multi jointed legs. If he turns around fast enough, he'll be able to catch a glimpse of massive, armour piercing needles.

Staren has posed:
    "Geeze, it's not--" Staren starts as the person STARES at him, then he realizes the person's looking BEHIND him and starts to turn. He can't even exclaim before he's pounced to the ground -- "OW!" he is, at least, able to keep a cool enough head to telekinetically activate his armor -- it forms over any exposed parts of his body, but anything touching him blocks it from forming there until it moves away.

    He struggles to try and roll out from under it, but it probably won't let him. So he draws his pistol, then telekinetically aims it behind him, firing clumsily and blindly. He directs Dawn to start radioing what he saw home, and if he still has time, commands some tiny drones to get out of his bag and get him a better view of the situation for his tactical HUD.

    He's not sure what this thing is. Is it a local threat? Is it specifically after him? Is it a person, or a mindless machine? Not worth wasting time thinking about -- right now, he has to fight it off, or at least get into a position where he can better defend himself!

Zwei (596) has posed:
    The street is immediately filled with screams as the Arma makes its presence known, as well as the sounds of pounding footsteps as some turn and flee, while others less sensible only back up just enough to watch. The thing on top of Staren's back is roughly the size of a tiger, though nowhere near similar in shape. It's a strange design involving five vaguely insectoid legs interspersed around a flat, beetle-like body, with a pair of pedipalps like that of a spider instead fixed with what appear to be complex arrays of either sensor spines or anti-armour spikes. A rolling trackball supporting three glowing dots that are probably eyes is embedded in both its top and bottom faces, twitching and jerking to follow Staren's every movement with a sibiliant chorus of digitized whirrs and chirrups. It isn't entirely clear how something that large had maneuvered through dense streets like that, but the bystanders at least seem to be giving it a wide berth.

    In the few moments of confused, chaotic, ground fighting, something taps against the back of Staren's proto armour, and then punches straight through it with the sound of an incendiary piston going off and a flash of heat so powerful that it burns his skin beneath it. It's difficult to tell whether or not a serious wound, or if a wound of any kind, has been inflicted, but even without the breach warnings going off, Staren can feel the crack of futuristic metals fracturing. For the brief period it takes the Arma to do this however, Staren is within the radius of its shields, and so his pistol scores direct shots against its looming bulk; scoring its matte black chassis with rents and pockmarks that issue brief bursts of flame. Hissing as if burned, it leaps back off of him, flipping over 180 degrees in the air and latching on to a steam pipe coming from a building to the side; skittering up it like a roach with alarming speed for its size.

Staren has posed:
    "Agh!" Staren cries out as he's burned. Man, stuff that goes through his armor seems to be getting alarmingly common these days -- He'll have to find a better solution for personal protection sometime.

    That it would hiss and leap away like a wounded animal is /exactly/ what he was hoping for -- He uses his arms and suddenly-manifested wings to push himself up and turn to face it -- reflexively, his arm armor changes shape to form a cannon and fires a volley of relatively slow-moving plasma shots at it, which it will probably dodge.

    "Get out of here!" he shouts, more to the bystanders than the machine as he takes to the air, trying to get at least a couple of stories above it to what he hopes is outside of its leaping range. Since his laser pistol is still cooling and his plasma cannon is frustratingly slow, as he flies up he pulls his seeker pistol from his bag and fires that -- the missiles are the same as the smaller ones in his other armor, designed to ram into targets and hopefully explode inside rather than to just burn a wide area to ash.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    It shouldn't be surprising that this particular enemy has a solution for cracking Staren's armour. After all, it has all the data collected by a particular Stalker unit from a couple of months back, and has been built deliberately to those specifications. He's correct in assuming that this particular enemy is a little too nimble for his plasma cannon. Each time he fires, it uses several of its legs to vault from one pipe to another, propelling itself through the air with movements that would be impossible for something that could experience g-forces in any substantial sense; much like the result of several 'if this insect were the size of a human-' extrapolations that may come to mind. It jumps well clear of each burst of steam and shower of molten metal globs, crawling all the way up to the roof before Staren manages to get ahead of it.

    Having run out of scenery to clamber on in three dimensions, the round from the seeker pistol finally strikes it directly, momentarily engulfing it in a flash of fire and smoke. The blast wave craters the building beneath it in a wide ring, leaving an untouched island at the very center where a familiar kind of shielding technology has stopped the energy of the detonation entirely. The Arma wheels on the source of the missile fire, leaping back in several, skittering motions before retracting its arms into its chassis and rotating out a second, entirely different pair; terminating in gun barrels rather than needles. It returns fire immediately, filling the air between it and the catboy with a shrieking tempest of hardened tungsten slivers; a relatively inexpensive and low tech approach for something built by the Collective.

    Regardless of how threatening the anti-personnel weapons are however, Staren has something more pressing to contend with. The moment the machine opens up on him, there is a precipitous drop in his suit's power output. The HUD begins to flicker, his seeker pistol's tracking software goes offline, and his connection with his drones becomes spotty at best.

Staren has posed:
    "Who are you? What do you want?!" Staren shouts after firing -- He 'drops' (TK holds) the seeker pistol and goes for his raiser pistol -- before he can aim and fire, though, slivers are hitting him and his shields have probably gone down.

    A virus?! Hostile nanotech in his suit??

    Fortunately, the tungsten slivers shouldn't be able to pierce his armor /immediately/... and Staren decides that, if something is /this/ focused on taking him down, running is probably the best option. His implants go into autistic mode and he flies straight for the gate! He considers trying to drop smoke bombs or something but why bother? His destination is obvious. Instead, he tucks the seeker and raiser pistols back in his bag and draws his magic staff, trying to haste himself...

Zwei (596) has posed:
    The Type-2 has no answers for Staren. Even if it had the ability to communicate, doing so wouldn't be part of its mission. Whatever that mission might be is difficult to understand. It had the ability to try and take him out the moment he left the gate, but it had deliberately waited, and deliberately given him a fighting chance. A chance it may be; however it doesn't seem to be a fair one, because as Staren takes off, the power to his suit's thrusters flatlines completely. The jets fail to respond entirely, not for having been shut down, but for lack of energy to actually work with.

    In those first few moments, the needle array had planted a cracking unit directly into the back of Staren's armour; interfacing manually with its power supply via wireless electron channel and using its power output to attempt to manipulate his hardware and software. The unit is taking quantum input from the Arma, most of which is nothing more than a computing unit to make up for the hideously inefficient method of hacking. Shutting down the wireless capabilities on his implants spares his medical nanomachines from being aggressively repurposed, but his armour is going to become so much dead weight on his body if he isn't quick to do something about it. His aggressor is trailing close behind him, leaping from rooftop to rooftop and wall to wall in a way that isn't even trying to be subtle, opening fire on him again the moment it sees him.

Staren has posed:
    Before shutting down the armor, the Arma might be able to tell that subtle movement of shoulder muscles seems to correspond to the control of the wings.

    Staren's armor suddenly goes dead. After the hacking, he practically expected that. Fortunately, his wings are a seperate protoabstractum and not actually part of his armor -- the armor's jump jets were assisting, but he can still fly without it. Having dead weight constraining his ability to move his body around is a problem, though! Telekinetically, he turns the physical control that makes it undeploy back into one of its compact forms, in this case a belt buckle.

    That leaves him free and hasted, but with very little defense. He dives low to the ground and casts a barrier spell to reinforce his forcefield -- hopefully he'll be able to withstand a few seconds of constant fire now if it comes to it.

    Whether it comes to it or not, the /next/ obvious step is to drink an invisibility potion from his bag.

    Which leaves him thinking about how to mask his wireless signal. His implants aren't broadcasting, but his pistols are still on smartlink and there's the tablet in his pocket. As he flies for the gate, he stuffs all that in his bag, hoping that will make the signals hard enough to pick up.

    How the hell did it hack him, he wonders... He'll have to figure it out later. Right now, escape!

Zwei (596) has posed:
    Whoever built this thing, if it was anyone at all, clearly thought things through. As far as all of the capabilities Staren had actually displayed, the Type-2's design seems to have come up with hard counters to all of them, immediately putting Staren on the defensive from the start. In his favour however, he had only used a relatively simple fireball spell before; something that is easily dealt with by energy shielding. More exotic spells such as haste and invisibility are outside his established portfolio of abilities, and so the Arma has to improvise.


    The twin trails of gunfire follow Staren with unerring accuracy, peppering the ground around him as the hail of hypersonic flechettes is deflected into the road, where it shatters cobblestone and concrete alike in a deep, grinding furrow. The Arma shoots repeatedly as the arc of each jump crosses over top of him, letting off short bursts in the engagement window where his movement is close to parallel with it. As he turns invisible, the machine pauses for the briefest fraction of an instant, before connecting all of its ammo belts together and simply hosing Staren's last known location, and several extrapolated paths of movement from there, cranking its rate of fire up to an insane level so as to swiftly puncture every square inch of ground with at least one dart.

    The cracking unit is meanwhile stored with his armour, relatively harmless for the time being, where it can be removed at a later time.

Staren has posed:
    Flechettes rain down on Staren, but only in brief bursts -- the shield can hold. One last volley hits his shield after he goes invisible -- fortunately, hitting such a wide area means not wearing it down with a continuous stream of fire -- Staren recasts the shield and flies into the warpgate.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    Judging by the direction of the split second it sees Staren's shield flare up in the process of turning invisible, the Arma makes the correct assumption that he'll make a break for it through the warpgate. Refocusing its fire, it dumps another few hundred rounds into an incredibly dense pair of streams that scythe across the ground in alternating zigzags, zeroing in on Staren's probable location as he gets closer to the gate and the number of places he could possibly be decreases. At the last second, it simply shears across the entire frontal surface of the portal, guaranteed to catch Staren with a few darts; potentially enough to crack his shield, and possibly even cause a couple of injuries, though the spray is too wildly aimed to actually hit anything vital.

    In fact, the Arma seems to be entirely content with squeezing out those last few seconds of fire control and reaction data from Staren rather than attempting to follow him through. As the warpgate flashes to show his traversal, the machine ceases firing and peels off, re-engaging its camo systems.