1484/Automated Assassin V

Automated Assassin V
Date of Scene:	03 February 2015
Location:	Land of Spires and Frogs
Synopsis:	Arthur is targeted by the fifth of the Collective's mysterious assassins.
Cast of Characters:	Arthur Lowell, 596

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Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Arthur Lowell's house is, frankly, kind of absurd.

    A traditional suburban home, copypasted into expansion hundreds of times, Sims-style, forms its basic foundation and shape, making up the core of its aesthetic. However, someone's added a distinctly skull-themed aesthetic that goes so far as to have a floor or two of the structure be entirely shaped like a skull. The titanic structure which shouldn't ever be able to hold itself up as high as it does sits atop a spire that similarly shouldn't be able to hold itself up at all. The tallest spire on the Land of Spires and Frogs has what seems like a normal suburban lawn on it, though there's several strange explosive magma traps on the lawn and the lawn itself hasn't been cut for a year and a half.

    Most of this is an easy matter to avoid and to bypass with basic flight. Those seeking Arthur would be able to find himself in his bedroom on the second floor of the massive building. Something has shaken him badly, emotionally speaking, in the last 24 hours. So he's just sort of slumped on his bed occasionally barking some quip into the radio while he's just sort of lying down on top of his covers. The room's furnishings don't need to be discussed in detail, as I'm sure they'll be broken shortly.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    Unfortunately for Arthur, the thing that graces his lovely home today is possessed of a little more than just basic flight. The magma traps on the obscenely overgrown front lawn go undisturbed, as does his front door, and the interior of his house overall. Instead, something has risen all the way to his bedroom window on its own power, bobbing quietly just beyond the glass. It's almost impossible to see, being little more than a super ball sized orb of matte black metal with a series of glassy studs, but Arthur's senses for celestial events will easily pick up the brief, low powered gamma ray burst that cases his room. In fact, he'll likely pick up dozens of them from all over his house, fired from beyond other windows into other rooms.

    The intensity is such that they manage to phase through a couple of walls each, mapping out a roughly spherical area of several rooms each, linked together to form a shallow perimeter around the bulk of his house. There seems to be no immediate need to move in further however, as he has been located immediately. The floating orb zips away from the window, upwards into the sky.

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    There's a long delay as Arthur mentally processes the sensation of the radiation bursts all around his home. The spheres will find it's got a haphazard layout, chaotically assembled by a large group with a videogame interface and thus not built in any space-efficient fashion. His head rises just barely as he turns to look at the window just in time to see the sphere dart out of sight. His awful, stupid angst is weighing him down and making him feel horribly unmotivated, but...

    He does manage to get out of bed, moving like a zombie. He wanders to the window, opening it and sticking his head out to look up, just to make sure he saw what he thought he saw. What in the world is going on outside here? Arthur, for his part, isn't the paranoid type, and so the strange scout hasn't gotten him on the defensive.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    Staring upwards, Arthur will find a much larger sphere standing out against the air, just as midnight black as the rest of them, this one roughly as tall as a fridge. A cluster of tiny dots swarm around it, whirling like angry bees for some inscrutable purpose, before finding individual hardpoints on the larger unit's chassis and slotting themselves back in again, creating a strangely bumpy appearance. Whatever means of flight the thing is using, it's completely silent, and yet gives off no gravitational signature. Not even an anti-gravitational one. Just none.

    More importantly, as soon as he sticks his head out of the window, an overpowering reek of blood hits him full on in the face, wafting up from the lawn below. Should he make the unfortunate decision to look down next, he'll be privy to a sight that even the most daring artists would think twice about painting even for the sole purpose of trying to be edgy. His front yard is littered in corpses. Perhaps drowned would be a better word. Against all reason, an enormous number of dead human bodies appear to have been hauled in from somewhere else and dumped straight on the grass, filling it with sticky red ooze that pools all the way to the fence. Each and every one of them has been badly and grotesquely mangled, with severed limbs, protruding bones, missing entrails, and loosely attached organs jumbling together to form a distingusting, grisly hellscape of carnage from the front door to the edge of the spire. I seems surreal in how little sense it makes. There should be doubts that anything like that was even possible, but it definitely /seems/ real.

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Arthur squints at the strange orb floating in the air, before the smell hits him. Immediately there's a wave of nausea strong enough to make him double over and tear up slightly, and then when he sees the corpses, he immediately shouts in a panic, slams the window shut, retreats back into his room, doubles over on the ground, and due to an intense combination of debilitating emotional distress and intense revulsion, disgust-vomits in a way we won't spend long describing. The point is, he doesn't like these corpses one bit and the intense reaction against them has set him completely out of kilter.

    Wiping his mouth with a sleeve and trembling a bit, he quietly starts swearing under his breath. How DOES one react to something like this?! Should he report this to the Syndicate authorities? "Hey, somene dumped a mess of corpses on my lawn, this is probably a hate crime"??? He sets about composing something something on his sunglasses. He also unsteadily attempts to stumble out of his room and up the stairs, and if not interrupted, will be heading to get on the same level as that black sphere, at which he'll shout from a window. While keeping it mostly closed, and NOT looking down.

    "H-HEY! You... SPHERICAL FUCKER! What's the... What's the BIG IDEA, shithead ORB? That's my LAWN, get your shit OUTTA HERE. You DO THAT to THESE PEOPLE? FUCK! I'll..." He tries to summon up his usual bravado. with emphatic words and energetic projection, but can't do it. It's all hollow and faltering and right now he just wants to LEAVE IMMEDIATELY. He can barely keep himself from getting inhcoherent with disgust again, or hyperventilating out of overreaction. This is a guy with a very down-to-earth reaction to dead bodies.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    Said reaction to dead bodies is a well calculated fact. Arthur had been the one showing by far the greatest aversion to them the very first time anyone had stumbled upon the Collective's automated military machine, and his intense dislike of the subject had been noted by well over a dozen, tiny little Whisper drones along the way. If it weren't already obvious before that someone was specifically targeting personal weaknesses demonstrated in combat against Arma before, it is now abundantly so. At least, to everyone but Arthur. He has managed to miss the previous assassination attempts while stranded in the Book of Heaven, so this is likely all pretty new to him.

    The fact that the assailants thusfar always seem to give their target the opportunity to notice them first is also new, so it might be a little surprising when the seemingly non-hostile orb abruptly rotates on the spot and fixes Arthur with a triple beam from one of a set of much larger trackballs embedded in its outside, of which there number approximately eight. The triangular targeting laser sweeps through the glass of his window and settles on his forehead, whereupon all eight of the embedded spheres suddenly pop outwards on the end of long, flexible tracks, now giving the floating ball the appearance of some kind of fantasy eyeball monster. Lock acquired, it wastes no time firing a trio of raiser bolts straight through the window and into Arthur's face should he be too slow, applying a medium level of explosive fit to incinerate most of a small room.

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Arthur's severe revulsion response has dulled his reflexes and his magical capacity. He doesn't have time to dodge, only time to swear softly one more time under his breath. The raiser bolts slam square onto his face. Only the Echeladder of Sburb manages to save him from a decapitation, granting him the resilience necessary to sustain the mid-range combat shot square between the eyes. The incineration tears through the contained room, blistering skin to add a little extra damage. The force of the strike blasts Arthur to the next room entirely, through the wall, and in the meantime shatters his sweet sunglasses.

    His normally overwhelming willpower is at an all-time low. It's gonna be a short while before Arthur can get back onto his feet again! He's got a panicked tone, almost pathetic in a way, while he swears more. His face is battered and bruised and blistered by the strike, but thankfully he's not dead. His combat response is slowed due to the persisting disgust, but he does do it; his COMBAT BROOM is suddenly in his hands, swept bristles-back so he can rush forward and try to slam it into the horrible eyebot with intense force. Of course, it's still lacking in the combat edge due to Arthur trembling and faltering in many of his motions, but it should at least give Arthur an idea of what level of firepower he's dealing with.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    The one and only Type-5 Anti-Spatium model Arma hovers down to the breached wall, smoothly swerving in as if set on a railed track. It directly blocks the exit ahead of Arthur, remaining fixed in space as it swivels along its three axis several times in quick succession, apparently to 'paint' the floors above and below with more gamma topography scanning. It doesn't even move when Arthur mounts his counter offensive, staying put through the entire length of his headlong charge into it, where he immediately slams face first into a simulated physical barrier that flickers as if an especially clear pane of glass had just shivered slightly, repulsing him on impact. The type of energy shielding is immediately recognizeable, such that Arthur should immediately have some kind of idea of what is attacking him, even if not whom or for what purpose.

    Shortly after he collides with the shield, one of the machine's pseudopods reaches behind him, as if it grab him by the collar. Alarmingly, it seems to do exactly that, fixing him in what he can immediately detect as a gravitational anomaly that physically lifts him into the air. From there, the Arma begins simply throwing him against the scenery, attempting to smash him into the walls, ceiling, floor and any furniture unfortunate enough to be in the way, passing him from tendril to tendril as if juggling. It continues a short ways down the hall while doing this, until it finally elects to simply hurl him down the nearest flight of stairs.

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Arthur remembers what he's seeing here as the shield appears, his eyes going a bit wide and panicky as he rolls away from the shield's space. The blown-open wall lets in the fresh stench of corpses and weakens him again, getting him trembling and averse once again.

    This means he can't productively counteract the gravitational effects that slam him up and down, bashing him into the environment roughly. His vastly intelligent mind is trying to process an appropriate counterattack vector, but it's overwhelmed by disgust. In the end, he winds up getting tossed down the flight of stairs again, falling down, down, down... It goes for a very long while, this place is designed a bit danerously. When he does finally come to a fitful, bruised rest at the bottom of the stairs, he tries to take advantage of the entity's more slow, ponderous kind of movement to get a moment to himself.

    Okay. First thing's first. Need to GET AWAY FROM THE CORPSES. Arthur Lowell decides this is the highest priority at the moment. Closing his eyes and holding his breath, he crashes his way out his own front door and then LAUNCHES off with his broom's rocket from the other side of the home, heading upwards, trying to ignore the new lawn ornaments as best he can and ascend out of range of seeing them as quickly as possible. He's still going to be off-balance because of the disgust, but at least he might not have to do with the constantly added feelings. This isn't especially tactical, it's also just how instinct works. As usual for this situation, he continues trembling and swearing, of course, all the while.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    To Arthur's credit, he is definitely much faster than the Type-5 following him. There was essentially no real configuration of parts that would lead to a unit capable of outspeeding the rocket powered jerk while still being able to fight him, especially if he had decided to stay in his own home. For that reason, he is left momentarily untroubled as he ascends out of sight (and smell) of the front yard. His pursuit however, has certainly not lost him, as it is only moments after he has achieved his new elevation before a trio of bottle sized missiles come streaking out out of the clouds on his tail, closely mirroring the trail left by his broom to follow him on an essentially blind trajectory before hitting visual range, where they immediately and sharply bank in three separate directions, and then rapidly close in on him from each separate angle of approach.

    The Arma is only just barely visible by the time he's finished either evading the missiles, or having recovered from being hit by them, still cutting towards him on that strange, silent, signature-less method of propulsion. He likely has the advantage in the open air in terms of maneuverability, but it seems the designer was well aware of that, as the machine's eight tendrils give it perfect omnidirectional coverage no matter which angle he may try to attack from.

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Arthur glances from side to side as he does his ascent, still breathing heavily and quickly and trying to get out of this vague almost panic attack. The missiles catch up with him on their parallel paths, and banking hard. He's trying to slip between two of the rockets, but one winds up clipping him and detonating. The other two are mostly evaded, but Arthur finds himself shaking and freshly burnt anew as his path wavers and his rocket sputters from the impact.

    Arthur's mind races. It's clearing up. Not enough that he can access his deeper magics, but enough that he can think up a plan. Honed, sharp thoughts analyze the attacker's mode of approach. Gamma topography scanning gives it superior tactical awareness. Gravity manipulation means he can't bypass the shields with his own gravity powers. The main shields themselves are too much for him to take out in his weakened state. The eight tendrils mean he can't overwhelm it with superior mobility.

    It's a good thing none of Arthur's friends are around, otherwise they might think he's smart when he does what he does next. As the Arma circles around to see him, he circles as well, away from it, rocket-crashing back into one of his own house-spire windows and tumbling to the ground, and then getting into cover. The machine's attack seems to have four stages. An opening ranged Raiser or Missile attack, an approach, a gamma topology scan, and then a followup gravitational attack if it can get into short range. Arthur intends to take advantage of the strict protocols typically used by combat drones. And, coincidentally, videogame bosses.

    First, after blasting into his house, he takes cover and prepares to tank the first longer-range attack, trying to resist the first Raiser or possibly attack that will inevitably occur. Then he'll wait for the approach, and the topology scan that seems to be needed to analyze the environment before gravity-based attacks can be performed. And then as soon as he gets that moment between the topology scan and the initiation of the gravity attack, he intends to strike. Which is to say, he intends to rush in close to the bot and TRANSLOCATE both of them to an entirely new section of his home, to throw off its tactical awareness and, presumably, the incredibly high density of delicate calucations needed to properly execute a gravitational attack. Ideally, it'll be stunned or less effectual, hopefully even vulnerable to his followup assault he's planning for after.

    Of course, this may not work. But maybe it'll at least be informative, and let him know how to REALLY handle this thing?

Zwei (596) has posed:
    Fortunately for Arthur, it seems he's given his unknown enemy the same impression that he likes to give his friends. That of a complete, know-nothing punk. Whoever or whatever designed the Type-5 following him had been pretty obvious with the hard counters to his abilities it had put in place, likely assuming that Arthur would have to stumble blindly into each one in sequence through trial and error. The fact that he would immediately pick up on all of them with finely honed battlefield awareness hadn't factored into any plans at all. Second, a simple, airtight strategy was the baseline for most of the machine's combat programming. Use long distance firepower to deal with fast movement, stun until close, alter gravity before he can do it first, and thus render him helplessly subject to a savage beating, repeat. Though it isn't quite the same as a sort of boss-like attacking pattern such as Arthur expects, it's close enough that his counter plan works remarkably well.

    A little more gunfire follows Arthur as he makes for the tower this time, comprising three separate flexible turrets firing on him simultaneously for a grand total of nine convergent bolts at once. They're individually fairly powerful for the thing's size, and the fact that it doesn't follow up with another set immediately likely means that it juggles charging times between guns. Predictably, shortly after it blows up Arthur's cover, the machine makes its appearance in person, blasting the surrounding area with each of its embedded sensor drones, and then holding up a total of four tendrils for an assuredly much more vicious gravity based assault, before the translocation hits it.

    Further according to Arthur's calculations, the Arma is very briefly stunned by all of its locational data suddenly becoming invalid, prompting it to scan a second time, though much more quickly than before.

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Alright. Stun complete. Lots of bruising and damage from the exploding cover, but it worked. No more playing around. He continues charging in, forcefully trying to close the distance immediately.

    He can't muster a lot of magic. He can muster enough for one solid bolt of gravitational force. He can see the charging time on the Raisers. Photonic buildups. That has to be how the gravity manipulation method is being charged as well... Possibly. He means to expend all the available magic he can muster with his shaken mind in one go, forcing it to dig deep into the reserve of its charges to block the gravitational blast with its own manipulation. Then, swinging his broom around, the bristles roar into action. He's set it to a hell of a high setting, meant to concentrate all the defense he can in on one area. He knows most shields are omnidirectional, but that's just because of how they only have one emitter. It's not a field. Air passes through. It's still a SELECTIVE barrier.

    He knows that, up until now, anything intending to hunt and kill him must know he only ever uses his broom and his magic in combat, and NEVER anything else besides the very occasional headbutt. Denied both options to bypass the enemy's shield... He has to hope this feint works. This is an emergency. And he has to do something unexpected. Bracing one hand against the machine, he hopes to seem as though he's trying to lean in, and push the broom harder against the shield. He hopes his open hand, bearing no broom at all, will appear as a non-threat, like air, not worth diverting a hopefully strained bandwidth of shielding energy. After all, he's expended his magic and he's never done anything physical without a broom before. And then, all of a sudden, he reaches deep into his STRIFE PORTFOLIO and accesses something never seen before, kept in reserve for precisely a moment like this, an attack that absolutely must be /unexpected/. He reaches for the never-used FISTKIND ABSTRATA, enabling overwhelming hand-to-hand combat.

    There is something called the One-Inch Punch, an exercise wherein a trainee attacker uses an inch or less of space between himself and a surface to perform a high-power attack. It originates from many southern Chinese martial arts. If the confused robot can be made to concentrate its shield on the broom and regard the rest of the body the same way it regards particles of air... He will execute one, faster than thought, square against the surface of the machine with outrageous levels of physical force, attempting to plunge the arm into it up to the shoulder.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    Bracing to counteract the gravitational impulse is a move that saves Arthur from being the subject of a four point, double arc, shear force disturbance with him straight down the fault line, being the kind of thing that should rip giant armoured vehicles to pieces in seconds at that kind of concentration. The amount of energy required to generate the double waves of gravitonic force that crash down on him on both sides is enormous, especially for a design with a proportionally small reactor for its overall mass, and so after briefly fighting him in a standstill clash of gravitational manipulation, the Arma runs out of juice before he does, giving him a moment's space to counterattack while it recharges.

    Of course, that counterattack would be functionally useless normally due to the Arma's still healthy shielding, designed to absorb harm without degrading combat effectiveness. Normally. Another point in Arthur's favour for carefully concealed cleverness says otherwise. The typical reflex mode of a tripped shield is an all encompassing field, but against an attack that has been identified before impact or else a continuous one, such as the grinding of Arthur's battle broom, the shield contracts to a small point to save energy and thus defend more efficiently, which is exactly what the mage of space wants. His hand slips through the priming range of the energy shield completely unimpeded, leaving him up to the elbow within its field of exertion. Accelerating his fist well inside of this boundary does precisely what he had hoped, allowing his knuckles to smash into the light plating covering the sphere's exterior chassis, crumple it inwards, and then snap it in half completely, where his fist carries inwards past the elbow before striking something much more solid, and very, very hot.

    The resulting damage causes two of the Arma's tendrils to suddenly dangle lifelessly from its body, which lists momentarily before it restabilizes by diverting the fields of other gravity manipulation units, spreading their overall power thinner. Recognizing its situation as extremely dangerous, the Arma forfeits a measure of its battle plan and instead engages Arthur at point blank, pressing its gun pods up to his sides and back where it begins repeatedly firing at him with point blank raiser blasts. In order to preserve its own shield integrity, already swiftly dwindling from contact with the broom, it has elected to use bolts that are purely simulating kinetic energy, rather than thermal discharge, and so the lack of explosive firepower is another small concession to Arthur, even if he is being straight up hosed.

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Arthur is wounded. Bruised, beaten, burned, battered, and emotionally unsettled to the point where his magic is less effective. The skin on his knuckles blisters. His faltering willpower is made even more drained by the sudden point-blank attacks tearing into the side and back of his torso. He screams in desperate pain. He is running out of willpower and out of time. He can't summon up much more of a magical attack here, not in the traditional sense. The heavy wounding on his left side has worn the resilience on that end of his body down to the point where Arthur can't manage to even keep it together long.

    One of many things Arthur Lowell is capable of doing is turning his body into space-magic constructs. Normally he uses this for transportation, slipping around places as a godly wind of space-dust, or temporarily becoming a sun himself. Beginning to feel the kinetic Raiser bolts against his body chip all the way down to bone, though, he lets out one final, defiant sort of scream, with a stressed and hateful posture to it. His arm begins to glow a strange and terrible white as he converts its structure into a potent atomic time-bomb. And then one of those raiser shots tears through his back from the side and blows out the /entire/ shoulder in a spray of blood that gets all over both the machine and the mage, dismembering the boy and leaving his arm lodged from the upper arm down in the sphere's form.

    The limb will explode with TREMENDOUS magical force, a blasting wave that should carry through the entire body of the assassin. Arthur still has one arm, though, and the broom in it, still grinding away with its blender against the shield. Practically in tears from the sheer and overwhelming pain, he screams desperately, and puts his entire weight behind the attack, trying to crash through a shield weakened by the explosion and grind it up completely. It's likely fortunate that nobody's around to see the inevitable end product of what happens when Arthur uses his standard combat tactics and there's nobody around to actually /back up/ the squishy mage.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    Having capably represented himself as a thick headed idiot kid with a troublesome set of powers and little else to the currently unknown enemy who had designed the machine currently trying to kill him, basically everything Arthur is doing is well outside of his given psychological profile, and thus well outside of any of the thousands of battle strategies devised and uploaded into its computing core. With little else to go on and even less ability to properly improvise, all the Type-5 can do is hold fast to Arthur and attempt to blow him to pieces before he does the same to it.

    For a while, it looks as if it is going to succeed. Arthur's already used up his one-inch-punch tactic and his body is falling to pieces under the withering fusillade of gunfire pressed into him. When his arm comes off completely, the shooting from the six remaining tendrils stops as they instead move into position to enact a triple layered gravitational fault line, charging briefly to gather the energy needed to rip his battered frame to shreds. The next moment, his arm literally explodes inside of it, and several of them burst like overstimulated lightbulbs instead.

    The Arma's bulk is largely made up of sensitive equipment meant to be used for the purpose of counteracting Arthur's gravity and particle based powers, having relatively little in the form of armour and almost no redundant systems. As a result, the blast of magical energy rips it inside out, severing nearly all of its power conduits near simultaneously, blowing out its shield emitter, overloading most of its weapons, setting off the handful of missiles it still has on board, and ultimately turning it into a floor shattering fireball. By the time Arthur's broom grinds into it, he is mostly hitting the wrecked hull hidden behind the screen of smoke and flame, spitting and popping sparks and pieces of molten carbon as it begins to disintegrate.

    In fact, it really is /disintegrating/. Not melting or vapourizing or being shredded to pieces. In under a minute, the entire machine has become a trace amount of powdered toxic semimetals, blowing through Arthur's house and staining the ceiling on the upward convection currents of the dying flames.

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Arthur doesn't stop grinding at it and slamming his broom against its body and screaming his lungs out until there's just no more body left. The floor blows out under him and both go tumbling down, but Arthur lands on top, continuously plunging his broom in one-armed while his opposite stump's blood-spray slowly falters as he contains it with some gravity magic.

    Slam slam slam slam. Eventually when he's just slamming a pile of powder, he stops, breathing heavily and then pitching backwards off his feet and falling onto his back, on the ground. He's going to think about what happened to him later. For now, he's going to be lying there a while, before he eventually manages to fall down his stairs and then crawl his way to his healiing supplies in the alchemy room. The emotional and physical strain of all this is palpable, easy for any observer to see in his eyes and posture. It's an overwhelming, desperate sort of exhaustion. Fortunately, nobody's around to see it. The boy was miserable before but now it's just far, far worse.

    Time to go rub Vitality Gel all over his body.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    As one last thing, when Arthur eventually dares to venture to his window again, he will find a very pecular sight. His lawn is still bright red, slowly congealing and turning dark from exposure to air, but the jumbled pile of dismembered bodies is completely gone.