[Vidi] Human, Male, (Lancer + Priest Advanced Class) - Dragonslayer Location: The Scorched Wastes
A metal gauntlet shoots out of the soft sands of the wastes as the man reaches out, unburying himself after having been crushed down into the soil by the weight of the sky falling down on him. Sand and ash both leak out of his armor, having filled it with a terrifying weight that felt as if it were holding him buried beneath the sands.
His head pops out and he hacks and coughs, spitting out lungfuls of extremely fine particulate that fills his nose, mouth — and other such things. Dazed, the man looks around himself and sees only darkness.
It’s as if it were the middle of the night.
Seeing another arm, flopped out of the sands, he pulls himself out and runs to dig out his party-members.
What the hell was that?
His eyes wander the wastes, not being able to see much. But what he can see is that not a single collection of bones remains standing. They liter the world in heaps and jumbles, broken and fractured.
— Something strikes against his helmet from above and he stumbles, falling down in front of his party-member, who is still in a delirious daze of sorts. Looking behind himself, he sees a skull rolling down the hill, having fallen onto his head from the sky.
Vidi lifts his gaze and watches as teeth, fingers and brittle fragments of shattered ribs rain down from above.
Pulling up his cloak, he drags everyone together as best as he can and covers them as a dry downpour casts itself down all around them.
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[Gottlieb]
Gottlieb floats.
He’s put on the space-suit and tumbles around the exterior body of the gun, admiring its craftsmanship. It isn’t his job to maintain it, but he does know a few things here and there. After all, it’s his pride and joy.
[SEAL INTACT] Oxygen: 26:56
It’s about time to look the old girl over, to make sure that she isn’t in any trouble. He should have done an inspection right after the cosmic event, but honestly, his mind just hasn’t been in the right place.
— He grabs a spanner from the toolkit. It’s magnetically attached to the box, like all of the other contents, to stop it from flying off into the void. The man begins unscrewing a small panel on the side of its body.
It seems that, upon shifting into this world, his body had changed to fit to the stats he had been given. He had been dumbed down a bit and gotten a lot stronger. Everything seems to have worked out, more or less. But there’s a lot that needs to be taken care of now that he starts to think about it.
Without any maintenance, it’s a wonder that the station has been running so smoothly, honestly. It’s a delicate operation. The station itself isn’t so much a heavy, clunking chunk of indestructible metal, floating like a dead asteroid around the world. Rather, it’s an elegant, dancing entity that floats just always on the edge of catastrophe, spinning in a perfect orbit around the planet, only seconds away from disaster at all times in either opposite directions of perfection.
He undoes the panel, looking inside.
Some of the smaller auxiliary wires are fried through and need to be replaced.
Gottlieb looks up towards the planet, the world that they are circling.
The impact of the gun on a place like this, on primitive civilizations like these, is monumental. Its strikes are clearly capable of influencing the annals of history in this world. Perhaps he shouldn’t be so hasty in its use?
Gottlieb sucks his teeth, looking back up the length of the gun. It’s a beautiful thing.
…Too beautiful to keep from the world.
Sure, him blasting away thousands of monsters and forests is probably causing some trouble for them, but that also sounds like a severe ‘them problem’, which is decisively less of a thing to worry about than any problems that might be his own.
He lovingly rubs a hand along the base of the gun, pulling out some replacement cables as he sets to work.
But maybe a little work on the station for a day or two would be good to settle things down and keep things working. Kai must have been running overtime to keep everything going. No wonder the AI was such a snippy jackass, working triple shifts will do that to you.
(Gottlieb) Repaired: [Auxiliary Geospatial Control Signaling Mechanism]
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The man whistles to himself, walking down the corridor, back inside of the station a moment later. He’s left the suit on. It looks good and the thing is so stretchy and form-fitting that it solves his problem of simply being too much man to wear a uniform.
It’s interesting, the fact that the prior crew not only died during the cosmic event, but that they were then turned into undead. He supposes that the rules of this universe really affect everything and everyone, from himself, to the station, to Kai, to even the dead corpses of those who weren’t as smart as he was.
“Buncha nerds…” mutters Gottlieb under his breath, stopping in by hydro to clean up the area. There was the knocked-over, gnawed on bot here that needed some work and a few of the basins had been torn apart by himself and by Grunheide.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
— Not that he knows how to fix a broken robot. He isn’t that smart. But he can at least set it back upright and then ask Kai for some step by step instructions on how to get the old thing going again.
(Gottlieb) Repaired: [Hydroponics Maintenance and Tender Unit]{1/3}
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Grunheide yelps as Gottlieb throws a bundle of things at her. A space blanket and some nutri-bars.
“We’re having a sleepover,” says Gottlieb. “It’s been a hell of a day.” She looks down at the items that he’s given her and sets the blankets to the side, starting to gnaw on one of the bars. But this time, she takes the wrapper off first. “Kai,” says Gottlieb. “Do me a solid please and write up some instructions on how to fix the bot in hydro.”
[Answer]
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- Affirmative
He raises an eyebrow, looking at the blue light in suspicion. That was… easy. Gottlieb shakes his head and sits down on his chair. “I’m calling it a day. Don’t do anything that I wouldn’t do.”
[Remark]
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- I have videos of the things that you would do.
The man leans back, kicking his feet up and grabbing the blanket he stole from the locker of some dude whose name he doesn’t remember. “Yeah. If human-resources didn’t turn into zombies, we’d have a chat about that.” He throws it over himself, yawning. “Kill the lights.”
The lights hum, dying out as he settles in for the night. Grunheide snarls in surprise, but then, seeing as this was a planned event and not another undead ambush, seems content to follow his example and nest. But she, instead of staying on her chair, instead crawls down under the u-shaped console and huddles together in a ball in the space-blanket.
On a dimmed monitor to his left, Gottlieb watches the world go by beneath them, so very far away.
Yawning, he lifts a finger, pressing it against the screen, touching it, if only to reaffirm the tangibility of such a place existing.
Magic, huh?
That’s pretty wild.
Gottlieb falls asleep and, at least for the duration of this night, nobody gets eaten.
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Gottlieb looks at the rifle, refilling the magazine with the non-lethal bullets he and Gruneheide had taken from security the other day. With Kai playing nice again, it’s hard to say if he’ll need these. But it’s best to stay prepared, just in case. After all, Kai had admitted than many of the monsters that are spawning aboard the orbital station are doing so by themselves.
It isn’t unlikely that another zombie-scenario might happen, with some other type of creature.
His eyes wander up to the monitor, watching the world go by for a second, before he returns to his work. After this, he’s going to go fix up the bot in hydro with the simplified instructions that Kai had made for him.
The man wonders if establishing communications with the world in some manner would be a wise idea? While they don’t have radios of any kind, maybe he could… blast a message into a mountain?
No, that’s probably a bad idea. And even that, what exactly does he have to say?
Not much, honestly. There aren’t many points of collective communication. Assuming that, through some magical means, there was a way to get him down from here and down onto the world, would he even want to go?
Gottlieb slides the magazine back into the rifle, checking that the safety is on. It had been off for this entire time.
— No. Probably not.
The station is, in all of its assiniess, his home. Besides, what would he even do down there? Kill slimes with a stick? Open some kind of item shop outside of a dungeon? Build a tower in the sand?
It’s better to just stay up here, where he belongs. The station needs him, Kai needs him, probably.
“Hey, Kai, do you need me?” asks Gottlieb.
[Answer]
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- Nobody has ever required Orbital Gunner Gottlieb’s presence.
“Thanks, bud,” says the man, rising to his feet and heading to hydro.
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He sits hunched over, kneeling in pools of old water, as he fiddles with the bot’s circuity. Perhaps this is a poor environment to be doing electrical work in?
Gottlieb stares down at the machine.
It’s pretty heavy.
He stares for a while.
The man rises to his feet, hoisting the broken bot up into the air in both arms as if it were his bride to be. Gotta put those new muscles to use, right?
He looks up smugly towards the blue-light above the door, wanting Kai to see him. But it’s still taped over.
Damn…
Gottlieb sets the bot down and then jogs over, untaping the light, before returning back to the thing and lifting it up a second time, making sure to not look bothered or strained in the least as he heroically walks out of hydro and brings the bot outside in the corridor, to fix it there.
(Gottlieb) Repaired: [Hydroponics Maintenance and Tender Unit]{2/3}
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Grunheide hisses, snarling her teeth as she sees the bot that she had chewed through.
“Don’t be a drama-queen,” says Gottlieb. He nods to the gnawed-on wiring. “We need this guy, he makes our food,” explains the man, nodding to the stack of nutri-bars on the console.
Grunheide doesn’t seem convinced, but she carefully watches him as he works.
“Kai. What the hell is this?” asks Gottlieb, pointing at a small, nobbly component.
[Answer]
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- A fuse.
“Oh, huh…” says Gottlieb. “It looks different than the fuses on the gun.”
[Answer]
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- Duh.
“Smart-ass,” mutters the man beneath his breath. He looks over to the side, looking around himself. There’s a wire that needs to be reconnected, but bridging it is a little tricky as both ends seem to be stuck into what he assumes is a battery. Isn’t this thing still electrified? He doesn’t know if it has any juice left inside of it. But he assumes that a bot like this carries a pretty significant hot load that lasts for a while.
— The man snorts, catching his own line.
“Hey, Grunheide. Get over here,” he says. The goblin is electricity-proof, right? He has no idea why. It must be some monster quirk. But if it works, it works.
She jumps down from her chair and walks over to him.
“Hold these two wires together,” says the man. “Try to fiddle them into one piece again.” He reaches to the side, into a toolbox and pulls out a roll of electrical tape to seal them with, once the connection is live.
“Okay,” says Grunheide, grabbing the two wires and then pressing them together. Several sparks fly out, popping loudly. She flinches, letting out a frightened cry, but doesn’t let go of them. The bot hums to life. Gottlieb, doing his best to not die as the machine starts to move, crudely wraps a glob of tape around the wires.
The two of them step back and the bot rises up to its wheeled legs. It’s custom made to work in hydroponics exclusively, so it’s a bit lost here.
(Gottlieb) Repaired: [Hydroponics Maintenance and Tender Unit]{3/3}
“Nice,” says Gottlieb, happy with the results of his work.
He lifts the bot up the rest of the way, straightening it out and it looks around, scanning the room. Seeing that it isn’t where it ought to be, it simply does nothing.
“Guess I gotta carry it back,” says Gottlieb. There’s only the shaft and the staircase to get out of the gunner’s bay. There’s no way that the bot can make that trip by itself. He knocks on the side of it. “Kai. Shut it down.”
— The bot pulls its legs together into a tight spindle, closing off a few small hatches and grooves. The machine hums down as it enters into a passive state.
Gottlieb hoists it up as before, the slender frame drooping oddly dramatically in his arms this time. He looks at it in confusion, noticing the light of its eye has turned blue. Kai.
“…Really?” asks Gottlieb dryly, lifting an eyebrow. It seems that the station’s AI has ‘possessed’ the farming bot, for a lack of a better term.
[Answer]
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- Be gentle. This is my first time having a body.
Gottlieb sighs, shaking his head as he walks off, carrying the swooning machine in his arms.
Sharing the station with such a childish, irresponsible entity is really very troublesome.