KARMA - EDITED 11-8-2018
There was no response from the Captain. He just stood there. The Marine that had opened the hatch was a Private. He kept shifting his feet, obviously uncomfortable with the situation as it stood.
“Captain?” I asked again. There was no “light” behind his eyes, almost as if he was dead. His position was in my mini-map as green, so he was alive, but something strange was happening here.
“Private? Do you know what is happening with the Captain?”
“Well, Ma’am, I’m not sure how to say this, but the Captain had duty. He left about an hour ago.” He was unplugged. It would be 14 hours before he was back online. In the middle of an operation, he logged out for duty in the real. Worse, he decided to come on a mission when he knew that he would have to be in the real within the next few days.
“Well, Private, have any medkits?” I asked, pointing to the holes in me. “As I said, the coast is clear back to the main force of survivors, if you’d like to come along.”
I then started gathering equipment from the dead. I concentrated mostly on magazines for the Taishi Ci and clips for the Thompson .50. I did make one exception when I came across a mono-blade and decided to take one from the dead. The Private watched me stripping equipment and then joined me. After a few moments of “field acquisition”, there wasn’t anything else worth grabbing. One of the dead had a hull repair kit on him. I used what I could to patch my ship suit and was happy to see that when all was done, I had regained integrity.
I stood around for several minutes debating what to do with the Captain. In theory, he was still alive. The problem was that he was also not in the game to be able to take care of himself. After several more minutes, I used the Captain's own combat pistol to get him back onto the ship. It was a lot less gut-wrenching to kill a sitting duck than I thought it would be.
“Come, Private. We have the main force to meet up with.” I turned and started to walk back to the ladder well, placing the Captain's pistol onto an empty attachment point on my chest where an armor plate had been.
The deck was silent, and that worried me more than if there were alarms and alerts. We arrived at the ladder well, and I had my few remaining Monkeys set up with tethers leading the two decks down. The climb down was much harder thanks to the foreign matter inside of me.
Once back on the deck I started on, I led the Private back to the compartment where I left Janssens and the rest of the Marines.
I stepped around the frame for the hatch to the compartment with the Marines and started calling out. “Jansse…” was all I was able to get out before my vision went black, and a message in front of me counting down Respawn in 3….2….1… and I was in my berth on Ark-5.
“What the actual fuck?” I pulled up my Avatar Logs to see what happened.
You have died
Helmet destroyed
Received damage from depleted uranium round. Hit location: Head.
Lance Corporal Goldstein opens fire using modified Focke Wolfe Anti-Materiel Cannon
Well, that answers that. Apparently, the heavy had excellent aim, or I was extremely unlucky. Maybe both. Time to see what sort of damage had been done. My ship suit was back to the standard issue, but I had my Taishi Ci, nine magazines, two Thompson .50 Combat Pistols with half a dozen clips, two mono-blades, and then items such as my basic engineers kit.
I reported into Mother and informed them that I had been killed by friendly fire, then discussed the situation as I had left it. I even included the part where I had shot the Captain as he was unresponsive. That earned me an appointment to medical to see a shrink to ensure my head was on straight.
I was also informed that the missions second attempt would not begin until tomorrow. I immediately jumped into the EXP store and recreated my ship suit and helmet I also bought a standard weapons harness and holsters to hold the two pistols and some sheaths for the mono-blades.
I then decided to rebuild my Engineering Kit. I used a non-ferrous steel aluminum alloy to recreate the wrench and pliers and adjusted the pliers to have wire-cutters installed on them near the hinge. I then tore apart the scanning kit to see if there was anything I could use from it. I had my helmet after all. In the end, I replaced it with a bio-scanner. As for the plasma torch, I merely updated the power source on it to provide a better range of control.
Last, I purchased Depleted Uranium rounds for each weapon and completed emptied and refilled my magazines and clips. From there, I decided to check my terminal and see if there were any updates, messages, or orders.
DAILY QUEST COMPLETED
Follow daily orders
Exp Rewards
18,871
Other Rewards
Unknown Crystalline Structure
EXP Breakdown
Friendly Fire
-250
Dead
-25
Rescue of Marines (15)
1500
Unknown Alien Killed (26)
6500
Unknown Alien Killed (1)
500
Improvised Oxygen Recycler
10,000
Survival Time 4:06
246
M1K33 Communications Drone Schematic
100
M1K33 Construction Drone Schematic
100
M1K33 Heavy Weapons Drone
100
M1K33 Sensor Relay Drone Schematic
100
I was sitting on a shit ton of EXP for the day, so I decided to upgrade some more. I bought a new level, and I was now a level 2 WO-1. This gave me a better understanding of ways to route power systems for small and hand-held devices allowing for better cooling with less thermal issues from the modified power flow. I also decided to buy a new arm and start working on it as well. By the time I was done with my initial scans for my arm, I had decided sleep would be good. A lot had happened today.
Waking the following morning, I checked for daily orders. There was one message informing me that I was off duty until I completed a psych eval. Strangely there were no orders for equipment mods. I supposed that everyone had them who wanted them for now, so I decided to take care of my arm before anything else. This replacement was going to be geared for combat operations. Having been in a battle yesterday, combat was fresh on my mind.
My current arm had a very utilitarian design. It was made to operate and turn a full 360 degrees at the wrist, elbow, and shoulder. That was good for working in tight spaces but wouldn’t make a difference during combat. The replacement I had bought was a blank. It contained the joints for the shoulder, elbow, and wrist, then a fully articulating hand, sized like my original. There were remaining pieces, such as a rod that would connect between the shoulder and elbow and another that would connect to the wrist, but I was ignoring those pieces for now.
I purchased a holographic display as well as another hand-held terminal. I then tore apart the hand-held and rigged it to work with the holographic display. Next was to get a sensor to read hand motions and to read input from a holographic touchpad. I was going to have to attach those to my ship suit and then have a connector on the inside that matches up. I used some magnets to get it all mounted. I bought miniature compressed gas tubes, some pipes, and springs, along with a motor geared to handle twice my body weight. Well, body weight plus leg and current arm plus some. I then had to work with the tether cable that could also handle the load. I ended up settling on an aluminum-magnesium alloy threaded with carbon fiber to add some additional strength while keeping both the weight low as well as my EXP costs.
I ended up having to set up a bay for the grapple launcher I had just created. The grapple itself was set up to have a collapsible barbed head as well as the compression mechanism for the gas release. With this assembled, the grapple would eject from a bay that would be in the bottom of my arm so I wouldn’t have to launch through the palm of my hand. That’s when I realized that none of this would work with my existing ship suit. I would have to recreate it to work with my arm as I was designing it. Which would also mess up the passthrough controls I had just made for the limb. Frustrated at myself I needed a break, so I headed to medical to set up an appointment with a doctor to clear me back for duty.
Four hours later I had returned to my quarters, cleared for duty. The Doctor was surprised that I had even considered NOT shooting the Marine Captain because of the potential risk that allowing him to live in an unsecured area in what was obviously hostile territory would have resulted in. We did have some laughs at the fact I was sent for an eval over this. I then went to Marine Country to use the firing range before returning to my quarters to check for messages and finish up my project.
Several adjustments later, my new arm had a built-in bio-scanner, a fully realized holographic display with holographic light sensing input, and a compressed-gas propelled grapple which had two different heads that could be switched out. One was a harpoon with a spring mounted, barbed tip and the other a standard “spider” that had collapsible arms that would grip onto a secure connector. Lastly, I had designed retractable mono-blades into the fingers on my hand. I doubted I would ever need to use them, but damn did they look cool.
My new ship suit design was fully configured to work with my new arm, the suit itself connected to a hard seal at my shoulder. I also created another set of Monkeys. With that, my EXP windfall was spent.
Custom Replacement Limb
Replacement Limb
Left Arm
Upgrade Slots
4
Slots Free
0
Slots Installed
4
Slot 1
Retractable Mono-blade Nails
Slot 2
Compressed Gas-Powered Grapple Launcher
Slot 3
Holographic Terminal Interface, Display, and Input
Slot 4
Bio-Scanner MK-II
My ship suit didn’t change too much. The loss of the armor on the arm did decrease my total ballistics resistance by nearly 500 points. I did build in some armor directly into the arm, but that didn’t show up on the specs for my ship suit.
Duty Uniform MK-II beta
Custom Built by Danni Jax
Vacuum Protection
Full
Armor
100%
Additional Air
180:00:00
Resistances
Ballistic
4,500
Blunt
800
Stabbing
250
Slashing
250
Energy
500
Concussive
Immune when sealed
Heat
500K
Cold
125K
Toxic
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
100% Sealed
Radiation
1,100 SV/hr.
I had a serious upgrade to the Sindri Foundries arm. Looking at my Avatar Sheet, I noticed it even had an additional strength increase.
Name:
Jax,
Danni
Rank:
WO-1
Titles Available
Crewman; Engineer; Host
Equipped:
Crewman
Experience:
114
To Next:
4500
Level:
2
Rate:
Engineer
Modifications
Fully Custom Left Arm; Hephaestus Industries Right Leg
Enhancements
Advanced Neural Weave (Prototype)
Skillsets
Engineering; Rifleman; Sentry; Hidden; Hidden; Hidden; Hidden
Specialization
None
Strength
16 (11)
Stamina
12
Health
11
Agility
12 (8)
Manual Dexterity
13 (13)
Intelligence
15
Concentration
11
Learning
18
Equipment:
Recon Helmet MK-VI; Duty Uniform MK-II (beta); Cybernetics Kit MK-II
Engineering Kit MK-III; Breach Kit; Utility Belt; Mono-blade; Thompson .50 Combat Pistol (2)
Clips 6; (1) Rounds 6/7; (2) Rounds 7/7; Taishi Ci Battle Rifle**; Magazines, 9; Rounds 45/45; Ked Kit
M1K33 Weapons Platform Drones (2); M1K33 Communications Drones (5); M1K33 Construction Drones (3); M1K33 Sensors Relay Drones (5)
I rechecked my messages. There still was no news on re-deploying me to Escort. I did get my EXP for the new arm design as well as the redesign of the ship suit. With the ship suit being an altered schematic the EXP gains were lowered.
Crafting Experience Gained
Prototyping successfully created
Exp Rewards
55
Other Rewards
Schematics for Customized Cybernetic Arm (Left)
Design Type
Unique
Other Rewards
Schematics for Modified Duty Uniform MK-II
Design Classification
Beta
Then I realized something. Our troops on the other ship had most likely had nothing to eat or drink for the last few days. I doubt many took rations with them. I sent a request on this to Yama. Within seconds the reply came back that all Marines had been ordered to suicide so that a fully staffed and equipped mission could be launched properly.
I sat on my bunk, not sure what to do with my time until the mission relaunched, so, I started to read. The ship's library had textbooks for increasing proficiency with assigned rates. I began to study up on data transference and signal degradation while something itched at the back of my mind. Not from the port for once, but from an idea that I didn’t realize I was having. Then I remembered I had a piece of the crystalline construct from the ladder well controller. I jumped out of my bunk, grabbed the sample, and started to run towards Engineering to use the tech bay scanner.
KARMA - ORIGINAL
There was no response from the Captain. He just stood there. The Marine that had opened the hatch was a Private. He kept shifting his feet, obviously uncomfortable with the situation as it stood.
“Captain?” I asked again. There was no “light” behind his eyes, almost as if he was dead. His position was in my mini-map as green, so he was alive, but something strange was happening here.
“Private? Do you know what is happening with the Captain?”
“Well, Ma’am, I’m not sure how to say this, but the Captain had duty. He left about an hour ago.” He was unplugged. It would be 14 hours before he was back online. In the middle of an operation he logged out for duty in the real. Worse, he decided to come on a mission when he knew that he would have to be in the real within the next few days.
“Well, Private, have any med kits?” I asked, pointing to the holes in me. “As I said, the coast is clear back to the main force of survivors, if you’d like to come along.”
I then started gathering equipment from the dead. I concentrated mostly on magazines for the Taishi Ci and clips for the Thompson .50. I did make one exception when I came across a mono-blade and decide to take one from the dead. The Private watched me stripping equipment, and then joined suit. After a few moments of gathering equipment, there wasn’t anything else worth grabbing. One of the dead had a hull repair kit on him. I used what I could to patch my ship suit and was happy to see that when all was done I had regained integrity.
I stood around for several minutes debating what to do with the Captain. In theory he was still alive. The problem was that he was also not in the game to be able to take care of himself. After several more minutes, I used the Captains own combat pistol to get him back onto the ship. It was a lot less gut wrenching to kill a sitting duck than I thought it would be.
“Come, Private. We have the main force to meet up with.” I turned and started to walk back to the ladder well, placing the Captains pistol onto an empty attachment point on my chest where an armor plate had been.
The deck was silent, and that worried me more than if there were alarms and alerts. We arrived at the ladder well, and I had my few remaining Monkeys set up with tethers leading the two decks down. The climb down was much harder thanks to the foreign matter inside of me.
Once back on the deck I started on, I led the Private back to the compartment where I left Janssens and the rest of the Marines.
I stepped around the frame for the hatch to the compartment with the Marines and started calling out. “Jansse” was all I was able to get out before my vision went black, and a message in front of me counting down Respawn in 3….2….1… and I was in my berth on Ark-5.
“What the actual fuck?” I pulled up my Avatar Logs to see what happened.
You have died
Helmet destroyed
Received damage from depleted uranium round. Hit location: Head.
Lance Corporal Goldstein opens fire using modified Focke Wolfe Anti-Materiel Cannon
Well, that answers that. Apparently the heavy had excellent aim or I was extremely unlucky. Maybe both. Time to see what sort of damage had been done. My ship suit was back to standard issue, but I had my Taishi Ci, nine magazines, two Thompson .50 Combat Pistols with half a dozen clips, two mono-blades, and then items such as my basic engineers kit.
I reported in to Mother and informed them that I had been killed by friendly fire, then reported on the situation as I had left it. I even included the part where I killed the Captain as he was unresponsive. That earned me an appointment to medical to see a shrink to ensure my head was on straight.
I was also informed that the missions second attempt would not begin until tomorrow. I immediately jumped into the EXP store and recreated my ship suit and helmet I also bought a standard weapons harness and holsters to hold the two pistols and some sheaths for the mono-blades.
I then decided to rebuild my Engineering Kit. I used a non-ferrous steel aluminum alloy to recreate the wrench and pliers and adjusted the pliers to have wire-cutters installed on them near the hinge. I then tore apart the scanning kit to see if there was anything I could use from it. I had my helmet after all. In the end I replaced it with a bio-scanner. As for the plasma torch, I simply updated the power source on it to provide a better range of control.
Last, I purchased Depleted Uranium rounds for each weapon, and completed emptied and refilled my magazines and clips. From there, I decided to check my terminal and see if there were any updates, messages, or orders.
DAILY QUEST COMPLETED
Follow daily orders
Exp Rewards
18,871
Other Rewards
Unknown Crystalline Structure
EXP Breakdown
Friendly Fire
-250
Dead
-25
Rescue of Marines (15)
1500
Unknown Alien Killed (26)
6500
Unknown Alien Killed (1)
500
Improvised Oxygen Recycler
10,000
Survival Time 4:06
246
M1K33 Communications Drone Schematic
100
M1K33 Construction Drone Schematic
100
M1K33 Heavy Weapons Drone
100
M1K33 Sensor Relay Drone Schematic
100
I was sitting on a shit ton of EXP for the day, so I decided to upgrade some more. I bought a new level, and I was now a level 2 WO-1. This gave me a better understanding on ways to route power systems for small and hand-held devices allowing for better cooling with less thermal issues from the modified power flow. I also decided to buy a new arm and start working on it as well. By the time I was done with my initial scans for my arm, I decided sleep would be good as a lot had happened today.
Waking the following morning I checked for daily orders. There was one message informing me that I was off duty until I completed a psych eval. Strangely there were no orders for equipment mods. I supposed that everyone had them who wanted them for now, so I decided to take care of my arm before anything else. This replacement was going to be geared for combat operations. Having been in a battle yesterday, combat was fresh on my mind.
My current arm had a very utilitarian design. It was made to operate and turn a full 360 degrees at the wrist, elbow, and shoulder. That was good for working in tight spaces but wouldn’t make a difference during combat. The replacement I had bought was a blank. It contained the joints for the shoulder, elbow and wrist, then a fully articulating hand, sized like my original. There were remaining pieces, such as a rod that would connect between the shoulder and elbow as well as the elbow to wrist, but I was ignoring those pieces for now.
I purchased a holographic display as well as another hand-held terminal. I then tore apart the hand-held and rigged it to work with the holographic display. Next was to get a sensor to read hand motions and to read input from a holographic touch pad. I was going to have to attach those to my ship suit and then have a connector on the inside that matches up. I used some magnets to get it all mounted. I bought a miniature compressed gas tube, some pipes and springs, along with a motor geared to handle twice my body weight. Well, body weight plus leg and current arm plus some. I then had to work with the tether cable that could also handle the weight. I ended up settling on an aluminum magnesium allow threaded with a carbon fiber to add some additional strength while keeping both the weight low as well as my EXP costs.
I ended up having to set up a bay for the grapple launcher I had just created. The grapple itself was set up to have a collapsible barbed head as well as the compression mechanism for the gas release. With this assembled, the grapple would eject from a bay that would be in the bottom of my arm, so I wouldn’t have to launch through the palm of my hand. That’s when I realized that none of this would work with my existing ship suit. I would have to recreate it to work with my arm as I was designing it. Which would also mess up the passthrough controls I had just made for the arm. Frustrated at myself I needed a break, so I headed to medical to set up an appointment with a doctor to clear me back for duty.
Four hours later I had returned to my quarters, cleared for duty. The Doctor was surprised that I had even considered NOT shooting the Marine Captain because of the potential risk that allowing him to live in an unsecured area in what was obviously hostile territory would have resulted in. We did have some laughs at the fact I was sent for an eval over this. I then went to Marine Country to use the firing range before returning to my quarters to check for messages and finish up my project.
Several adjustments later, my new arm had a built-in bio-scanner, a fully realized holographic display with holographic light sensing input, and a compressed-gas propelled grapple which had two different heads that could be switched out. One was a harpoon with a spring mounted barbed tip and the other a standard “spider” that had collapsible arms that would grip onto a secure connector. Lastly, I had designed retractable mono-blades into the fingers on my hand. I doubted I would ever need to use them, but damn did they look cool.
My new ship suit design was fully configured to work with my new arm, the suit itself connected to a hard seal at my shoulder. I also created another set of Monkeys. With that, my EXP windfall was spent.
Custom Replacement Limb
Replacement Limb
Left Arm
Upgrade Slots
4
Slots Free
0
Slots Installed
4
Slot 1
Retractable Mono-blade Nails
Slot 2
Compressed Gas-Powered Grapple Launcher
Slot 3
Holographic Terminal Interface, Display and Input
Slot 4
Bio-Scanner MK-II
My ship suit didn’t change too much. The loss of the armor on the arm did decrease my total ballistics resistance by nearly 500 points. I did build in some armor directly into the arm, but that didn’t show up on the specs for my ship suit.
Duty Uniform MK-II beta
Custom Built by Danni Jax
Vacuum Protection
Full
Armor
100%
Additional Air
180:00:00
Resistances
Ballistic
4,500
Blunt
800
Stabbing
250
Slashing
250
Energy
500
Concussive
Immune when sealed
Heat
500K
Cold
125K
Toxic
100% Sealed
Radiation
1,100 SV/hr
I had a serious upgrade to the Sindri Foundries arm. Looking at my Avatar Sheet I noticed it even had an additional strength increase.
Name:
Jax,
Danni
Rank:
WO-1
Titles Available
Crewman; Engineer; Host
Equipped:
Crewman
Experience:
114
To Next:
4500
Level:
2
Rate:
Engineer
Modifications
Fully Custom Left Arm; Haephestus Indrustries Right Leg
Enhancements
Advanced Neural Weave (Prototype)
Skillsets
Engineering; Rifleman; Sentry; Hidden; Hidden; Hidden; Hidden
Specialization
None
Strength
16 (11)
Stamina
12
Health
11
Agility
12 (8)
Manual Dexterity
13 (13)
Intelligence
15
Concentration
11
Learning
18
Equipment:
Recon Helmet MK-VI; Duty Uniform MK-II (beta); Cybernetics Kit MK-II
Engineering Kit MK-III; Breach Kit; Utility Belt; Mono-blade; Thompson .50 Combat Pistol (2)
Clips 6; (1) Rounds 6/7; (2) Rounds 7/7; Taishi Ci Battle Rifle**; Magazines, 9; Rounds 45/45; Ked Kit
M1K33 Weapons Platform Drones (2); M1K33 Communications Drones (5); M1K33 Construction Drones (3); M1K33 Sensors Relay Drones (5)
I checked my messages again. There still was no news on re-deploying me to Escort. I did get my EXP for the new arm design as well as the redesign of the ship suit. With the ship suit being an altered schematic the EXP gains were lowered.
Crafting Experience Gained
Prototyping successfully created
Exp Rewards
55
Other Rewards
Schematics for Customized Cybernetic Arm (Left)
Design Type
Unique
Other Rewards
Schematics for Modified Duty Uniform MK-II
Design Classification
Beta
Then I realized something. Our troops on the other ship had most likely had nothing to eat or drink for the last few days. I doubt many took rations with them. I sent a request on this to Yama. Within seconds the reply came back that all Marines had been ordered to suicide so that a fully staffed and equipped mission could be launched properly.
I sat on my bunk, not sure what to do with my time until the mission relaunched, so, I started to read. The ships library had textbooks for increasing proficiency with assigned rates. I started to study up on data transference and signal degradation while something itched at the back of my mind. Not from the port for once, but from an idea that I didn’t realize I was having. Then I remembered I had a piece of the crystalline construct from the ladder well controller. I jumped out of my bunk, grabbed the sample, and started to run towards Engineering to use the tech bay scanner.