milliways_bar | (no subject)

"Fine by me," Andrea says feeling the glow of a successful mission even if not much action happened. "I think I could use some water myself."

Edited 2013-02-25 21:38 (UTC)

Ellen nods. Her mun will be more than happy to handle this as two or more separate threads, the better to deal with different tagging schedules on everyone's parts. "All right," she says, and signals to one of the waitrats. "Where do you want me to start?"

"Well, to be honest, I'm not too sure. If you do go back there, I'd love to help. The thing is I got something to take care of back home that may prevent my availability," she says taking a drink of water. "How about we go with the assumption I'd be available. What is a Behemoth? On my world, that could several different things, assuming magic has gotten involved."

Ellen nods. "If you're available, we'd be glad to have you along," she says. "As far as the Behemoth, we should start with 'what's a supermutant' first. The Great War I told you about, the nuclear one- that was just the culmination of decades of conventional war. One of the weapons developed during the earlier years was a virus, Forced Evolutionary Virus. I don't know what they were trying to do with it originally, but humans who're infected with it and don't die horribly or get fused with other organisms wind up looking like this."

She reaches into Karkat's storage deck and produces an oversized Polaroid-type photo of ten feet of muscle crammed into eight or nine feet of skin.

"Which wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that in two hundred years of FEV infection, a grand total of two supermutants have appeared in the Capitol area who weren't rage-driven, almost blindly instinctual homicidal man-eaters..."

"Holy shit, they weaponized the Hulk."

"The what, now?" says Ellen. "Anyway, supermutants are immune to pretty much any disease you can name and very resistant to radiation. And they don't die of old age. If it weren't for the homicidal mania and the fact that their brains seem to degenerate with the savagery and the fact that they're all completely sterile, they'd probably be a really successful separate species... but the thing is that they keep growing, too. Even if they'd reached full adult height before being infected with FEV, as long as there's food, they grow- most of them, anyway. Fawkes, my friend who's one of the civilized ones, is two hundred years old and he's only about eight and a half feet tall- but the thing the raiders in Evergreen Mills have penned up is a good eighteen feet high at the very least."

"So that means he could be over a thousand years old? Assuming a foot of growth per century? Do they get stronger the older they are or is it tied to their mass?"

Ellen shakes her head. "At the most, it's two hundred years old," she says. "Forced Evolutionary Virus didn't exist before then. Behemoths are a lot stronger than normal mutants- Fawkes is as old as any of the Behemoths are likely to be, but he's still pretty normal, other than the being civilized and decent thing. There might be some kind of chemical or environmental factor involved in becoming one of those things, I don't know. Fawkes routinely runs around with several hundred pounds of load on his back and doesn't have any problems with it, but a Behemoth can pick up and throw cars and attack people with lengths of pre-War sewer pipe without batting an eye."

"Okay, so they're feeding it well. What else, you mentioned mini-nukes aren't effective?"

"They're tough," Ellen says. "The mutagenic process tends to make what used to be ordinary human skin into a really tough, really thick hide, and it's only thicker in the Behemoths. They'll eventually go down if you deal out enough damage to them, but most of the time they don't even notice pain until you've seriously threatened some body part's structural integrity. The mini-nukes hurt them with the explosion, but the radiation doesn't affect them at all. It's possible to kill one by snapping its spine, but you have to be something on the order of a super-powered Amazon warrior to do it, and even she had trouble with the one we fought in the Capitol Building."

"What's the blast radius of these mini-nukes? We don't have anything like them in my world."

Ellen rubs at her neck a moment, thinking; then she cites a number. ~~Fallout 3 distances have never been the player's forte.~~ "It's... really not a good idea to use one if you're not in power armor. And you should probably take Rad-X to block radiation absorption before you go into a battle where one is likely."

Andrea holds up her hands.

"Oh no, I like boom as much as the next girl but I hold the line at nuclear. I was just trying to gauge how tough these bastards are. They bullet proof?"

"More just... bullet-resistant," Ellen says. "As if they had natural body armor. I've fought a couple of them in the past and tend to hang back and use my Gauss rifle on their legs- it takes a lot of shots, but it's still easier than trying to hit the heart, and at least it puts them on the ground instead of running around."

"Do you know if their brains function like ours? Is their bone mass tougher?" Andrea asks thinking of kill shots. The medulla oblongata can be a great target if you can get to it. "What about breathing, that something they still need to do?"

"They still need to breathe," Ellen says, "but their bones are a lot thicker, and their neck musculature is kind of huge and spread out compared to a human's, so it's a lot harder to get through to the brain stem, I know that much..."

"Damn. I bet they can hold their breath a long time too." There goes the napalm-in-the-face idea.

"Possibly," Ellen agrees. "I honestly don't know. They're extremely rare, and when the Brotherhood hears about them we usually take the heavy artillery and attack from a distance to wear them down, if we can."

"Think this is something they're going to deal with?"

"I... actually, I was going to contact some people I know here," Ellen admits. "And ask for volunteers. I could go back to the Citadel and get a bunch of soldiers, but aside from the Behemoth there's a lot of raiders holed up in that valley, and a bunch of slaves and other prisoners. Some of the people here have powers and abilities way beyond anything the Brotherhood can do, and they've helped me before, or I've helped them, or both. It might be easier to hit the area with a Milliways force first- they won't be able to prepare for it or know what they're dealing with."

"Well as I said, I'd be glad to help if I was available though against what we're talking about, I don't know that I could be much help. I could be good for taking care of the Raiders while someone else took care fo the Behemoth though."

Maybe she should stay here instead of going back. What did she have back home that was worth returning to anyway? Nah, running or hiding just does sit well with her.

Ellen nods. "I was hoping to get some help from a superhero or two for the Behemoth," she says. "Assuming I haven't used up my favors with them- I don't like being in somebody's debt, even metaphorically. But we'll probably need people on the ground to deal with the raiders, and there were slaves we're going to need to get out of there. And if you know anyone who's good at removing explosives let me know, because I can only disarm proximity mines so quickly, you know?"

"I can imagine," Andrea says thinking. "If we have the time I might be able to help with that. We had some training with explosives in the Academy but no one really uses them in the field as the magic waves make them too undependable for use. I'm a quick study though, so if we had a deactivated model to work with or some one who could train me. WHat about that Voodoo guy?"

"Voodoo's a Navy SEAL," Ellen says. "Different specialization- he doesn't work with unexploded ordnance. I had to learn how to deactivate mines almost as soon as I got out of the Vault. I can show you once I get hold of one and disarm it, though."

"Cool with me, too," Voodoo says, taking a seat on a barstool. "Bar, you got any water?"

Bar does.

Ellen smiles gratefully. "I'm sorry to have bothered you for this," she says. "I hate dragging people out for what turns out to be a quiet run in the end."

Edited 2013-02-25 22:00 (UTC)

Voodoo shakes his head. "Don't sweat it. The mission was recon and that's exactly what we did."

He takes a sip from his bottle of water.

"What've you got in mind for the assault?"

"We're going to need fliers, for starters," Ellen says. "Not just because of the mines, either. The only thing keeping that Behemoth locked up is a thirty-foot electrified fence. If we're trying to wipe the place clean, the first thing the raiders are likely to do is cut the power and retreat into the buildings while that monster does their work for them. It's fast, it's strong, and it doesn't notice when it's hurt until you start to cause serious structural integrity problems in its legs, but it still has to close to melee distance to fight. We're going to be much better off if I can get somebody like Invincible or Wonder Woman or Thor Odinson to come and help with that thing so we can worry about the psychopathic maniacs with disintegration weapons."

She runs both hands over her face.

"There can't be that many of them, one person can only carry so many of those things, but even just a few are a problem. Especially in a tight space full of all kinds of cover."

Voodoo thinks for a bit, sipping from his water bottle.

"We could initiate it from a distance," he says. "The assault, I mean. Have some people with a few long guns hole up in that office building, wait for the guys with the fuckin' alien zappers to go on patrol, then pick 'em off. The shots would be the signal for the fliers to swoop in and deal with Tall, Green, and Ugly, while we move in and take care of the grunts."

He takes another sip of water.

"Main thing I'm worried about are all those interior spaces. We start clearing it room by room, and we're on equal terms with them. If we can draw them out into the open, 'specially outta those mines, smoking 'em'll be a piece of cake."

Ellen nods. "For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure there are a few places along the upper parts of the gorge where a good rifleman or missile launcher could do an awful lot of damage too," she says. "They won't have as long of a line of sight as someone at the narrow end of the gorge, but the option is there as well. Getting down into the fighting after that would be the problem, for them."

Voodoo takes another sip. "It could be a two-pronged assault. Marksmen and support gunners provide overwatch from the upper parts of the gorge while the assaulters move in from the narrow end of the gorge."

He thinks some more.

"Or," he says, "we ring the gorge with both assaulters and support guys. Support opens up on the raiders to cover the assaulters rappelling down to the catwalks, and a blocking force in that office building prevents anyone from escaping."

"Um... I don't really know anyone other than you who can do rappelling," says Ellen. "I only know what it is because it was in an issue of Spy Smasher I found in the Hubris Comics ruins."

"Really? Hm."

More thinking.

"Well," he says, "in that case let's just keep it simple. Ring the gorge with an overwatch element, initiate with a coordinated takedown of the guys carrying disintegrators, and have the assaulters rush in from the narrow part of the gorge."

More thinking.

"'cept..."

He turns to Ellen. "That minefield you saw, what parts of the Mill didn't it cover?"

"It extends along either side of the railroad tracks for the entire narrow part of the gorge,' Ellen says. "The tripwire's in the middle of it. Once the gorge widens out and there's train cars to the left and the slave pens and guard house to the right, the mines stop. I guess the raiders don't much feel like tripping over explosives if they wander out at night to poke the slaves with sticks or throw some poor unfortunate soul to the Behemoth for fun."

"Fuck."

He ponders this for a few more seconds.

"Those train cars we saw - we could circle around on those nearby catwalks. Exposed as fuck, but we're dead if we take the tracks. Plus it's a killer flanking opportunity if there's a rear entrance to that bigass stone depot in the middle."

Ellen nods. "I can go back another time and find out, once things've died down a little," she says. "Or try to, anyway. The catwalks are probably our best bet at this point."

Voodoo nods. "Sure looks that way. See anyplace they could be keepin' that gunsmith friend of yours?"

"If he's not in the slave pens, they'd probably be keeping him in one of the buildings," Ellen says. "The smaller ones aren't all that secure, or at least didn't look that way from what I saw of them, but there's probably workshop space in the big one and enough opportunities for them to bring him in line if he tries sabotage or escape. And they wouldn't be keeping him in the railroad cars if they were using his skills. There's nothing there to work with."

Voodoo nods. "If he's in there, we'll bring him out."

[OOC: wrap there?]

[OOC: Sounds good to me!]