RP: Cirrus Station [Episode 3] Sunny Day on Prilisa Four

The muscles in her arm shifted, expanded, as her grip tightened on her pistol, keeping it aimed down the throat of the nearest neko. Words flowed by her in an incomprehensible stream as she slowly, it seemed, took aim at the charging women.

Her finger was inching down on the trigger, steadily, until Dream's message screamed into her helmet and made her finger back off, and all the world return to full speed.

No fire? Great.

Keziah dropped into a defensive stance, holding her cybernetic arm in front of her, dropping her pistol hand away, lowering herself into a crouch. Waiting.

Lorcan shifted and then his head snapped around to the two Nekos as they leapt off the roof. He frowned and was about to warn Deacon when the hyena...thing... threw his helmet to the door and then went on a literal stripping spree and then acted like a dog. Lorcan stared, wondering what the hell Deacon was up to... and if he planned on getting shot/mauled by these... kitty eared... things. His attention flowed back to the two Nekos, training his gun on them.

He got Dream's message but continued to track the two quietly, if they touched the shuttle they were dead. He wasn't going to put off his chances of leaving the planet that easily. Though he figured he'd have to do something stupid and heroic and end up being tried for treason rather than getting a metal. So for the moment he sat, contemplating screwing these particular two Nekos, over. After a minute when someone piped up a question about how many there were Lorcan gave an automatic answer.

"We've got two prowling around out here checking out the shuttle... They haven't touched it yet..." And then for the first time in Lorcan history, well at least on his assignment to Cirrus, he asked politely for something. "Since Mrs. Montreal seems to be more insane than Dream.... Permission to fire if these two try anything with the shuttle?"

The two nekos who had been inspecting the shuttle froze as Deacon's feral visage came into view. They both looked on, silently and still, at least until they hyena-man started growling. Almost immediately, the smaller of the two nekos yelped in fear and scrambled back on all fours, returning to the supposed safety of the spaceports rooftop. The other neko, however, didn't seem as intimidated.

Instead, this cat-eared woman assumed a crouched position and placed a single palm on the ground and her other arm raised, her form insinuating a sort of attack position. Her expression was firm, and her eyes didn't leave Deacon's as he paced back and forth.

"...Na," she said, simply, the single blurt indecipherable, but ultimately unmistakable as a warning.

The smaller neko peeked her head out from the rooftop's arch and, visibly surprised by her companions actions, began to shout.

"Nya na! Nya na! Na nah nyaa NA!"

Understanding what they were saying was near impossible, but the emotion and tone was enough to hint at either shouts of encouragement, or a plea for speedy retreat. It would be up to Deacon and Lorcan to figure out which.

---

Back inside, the single moment of hesitation cost the rest of the group as each of the four nekos launched at Dream, Tweak, Keziah and Serra. They flew with arms and legs spread eagle-wide and attempted full-on tackles, hugging their arms and legs around the body in a makeshift attempt at submission. Meanwhile, more and more of the amazon-esque cat women poured from that single hallway. Two of them had noticed George and Lenny's escape and attempted to follow, both of them tugging harshly at the door (which was no doubt being held closed by the enormous ID-SOL, Lenny) with no avail. In but a few seconds, the others would soon be overwhelmed by numbers alone.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), Cassefin was long-gone by the time the first nekos made their entrance. Their sudden appearance quickly broke through that seemingly stolid determination she was displaying, replacing it with the urge to move, at incredibly surprising pace, down the opposite hallway into the Reception Hallway, her slip-on shoes pattering in quick succession as she made her escape, shoving Cyril out of her way as she did so.

Tweak got Dream's message mere moments before she would have pulled the trigger on the neko that was flying toward her. Meanwhile self-preservation routines threatened to overwhelm her conscious movements and throw her into a berserker mode while her TOS was flashing a single line over and over: Remove the head, destroy the chest. Remove the head, destroy the chest. Remove the head, destroy the chest... But she retained her control and dropped her gun, then took the incoming hostile by the wrists and threw her full-force against the wall behind Tweak. The swing turned into a kick that sent Tweak's heel flying toward the face of the neko projectile that had locked onto Dream.

"I don't know, they aren't the same as what I know!" Tweak said, keying a private channel to Dream, but trying to be careful not to give herself away. "If they have anything similar, though, they'll have plugs on the back of their necks, as well as internal radio receivers on..." -- She accessed her radio functions and checked the frequency...then noticed that it kept changing. This might be harder than Dream thought. "See what you can make of this: It's a frequency selection, but it keeps changing. There's gotta be a way to match it, but once again, I don't know if they have the same one!" Tweak began listing off the frequencies as they changed, and at the same time she continued to melee the nekos away from herself, taking them off of her squadmates and tossing the closer of her team out of the fray while trying to keep the nekos focused on her. She could keep some of them occupied, but she was already starting to feel herself getting warm. The uniform wasn't helping, since it covered her heat dispersion vents...

"Whatever you are going to do, do it fast, Dream, I can't keep this up much longer!"

Deacon watched with a small bit of satisfaction as the smaller neko skittered away, but his face remained totally stoic as he turned back to the larger and braver of the two. Canting his head to the side at the raised palm and obvious warning pace, the Kohanian began to process this. Being a warrior, and not a monk like most of his brothers and sisters, he didn't know much of the history of his people, the roots that tied them to the beliefs they currently held. What he did know, was how to understand and read a situation like this.

With slow, deliberate movements, Deacon would shift his shoulders back, straightening the curve of his spine, to just balance on his digitigrade paws. Raising his handpaws slowly to be in front of his chest, he opened the fingers, showing them to be empty. With the same slow movements, he would lean back further into a crab like pose, and raised his feet, showing the toeclaws, but that they held no weapons. Then he rotated back forwards and began to slowly walk down the ramp of the shuttle, each step taken, then a stop to see what the neko would do. Calm breaths of warm stale air entered and exited his lungs, until finally he was down on the tarmac with his newest aquaintance, where he would sit back down like a feral dog, and just...waited, eyes flicking to Lorcan, then to the roof, then back to the neko mere feet in front of him...Slow and steady, slow and steady.

The neko screamed and filled her entire field of view as she leapt into the air. Racing down at her, arms and legs spread.

All of that ended as Keziah sprang up, her fist driving into the neko's face. She felt bone splinter under the impact, and the cat-woman flipped up, over her shoulder, landing in a heap on the floor.

But there was already another one coming at her, and she dropped her pistol, sliding around slamming the side of her foot into the neko. A third, but then Tweak had it. And a fourth, a hammerfist to the throat, and Keziah was steadily trying to keep them at bay, too preoccupied with her own defense to worry about anyone else.

A jab, a spin, a whirl. She felt a heavy weight on her back, sending her off-balance. Fingers clawing at the top of her helmet. She hissed, ignored it, and slammed her fist into another of the crazed women, sending her pirouetting to the floor.

Just as she started to find some balance again, one of the neko's, broken off of Tweak's steadily growing pack, blindsided her, crashing her to the ground with two of them on top of her. The impact dazed her, and she grabbed at the throat of one of the neko's, trying to throw her even as more of them noticed she was down.

Dream didn't even put up a struggle. She was physically underwhelming, anyway, and trying to get rid of the nekos through brute force would only result in a broken arm, leg or neck for her anyway.
She really had to convert to a type-Four robotic body sooner or later.

Instead, Dream focused all her concentration on her neural interface. Like all Freespacers, she had a built-in radio transmitter as part of her Polysentience connection suite.

And those tribal Nekos clearly didn't use their internal radios, since they were apparently relying on verbal communication. Almost certainly, they weren't trained in its use. Maybe didn't even know they had internal radios at all.
This was gonna surprise them.

Changing frequencies? She thought. That was a fairly advanced algorithm they used there. Nothing quite on the level of Freespacer Communication Warfare Protocols, but still pretty good.

If she had access to the full extent of Polysentience's computational power, she could decrypt that stupid algorithm in less than two seconds. But, thanks to Headmaster Real's ridiculous restrictions, Polysentience interface was limited.

"Brute force always works."

Concentrating all of her neural resources, she emitted a quick burst of jamming radio noise on the whole frequency range that Tweak had given her.

That was gonna burn a lot of fuel from her generator, but it's not like she had much choice.
Well, she had: she did have a plan B, afterall... But she didn't want to try that yet.

She removed the "hold your fire" signal from everyone's field of view.
The nekos were clearly hostile and unreasonable. And her duty was to protect her team-mates. At any cost.

Even stunning them for a moment would be enough.

Seeing that she wasn't being attacked first, Claire's eyes moved to the one that she could see was in the most trouble: Dream. She raised her rifle, but didn't fire in fear of accidently hitting her teammate. She completely ignored the two going after the door to her previous two companions.

She ran up to the neko on top of Dream and swung the butt of her rifle around and struck it in the face as hard as she could. She wasn't sure if the rifle was designed to witstand that kind of melee, but she didn't care. She was rewarded with the neko being knocked away with a crunching sound as her rifle connected with it's face. On top of that, she fired a short burst from her rifle (Normal fire) at the neko she had just struck.

She spared Dream a quick glance, "Are you alright, dear?"

Cyril hadn't even waited for Dream to rescind the 'no fire' order. As soon as the nekos charged the four women, he opened up. Fliping the selector over to burst fire, he managed to squeeze off around fifteen rounds into the damned things while the tide hit the women. The last burst took a neko trying to pounce on him in the throat, largely by accident, and dropped what felt like seventy kilos of twitching catgirl right on top of him.

By the time he managed to roll the corpse off of himself, he was in the middle of the melee. He took a moment while he was unnoticed by the nekos to size up the situation. Tweak was holding her own against the nekos, while Winters was already on Dream. Keziah, however, had two nekos on top of her and more noticing.

Pushing himself up with his tail and rifle, he charged at the amazons swarming over his friend. Shifting his grip up to the end of the barrel and swapping his other hand from the trigger to the magazine he swung at the neko Keziah wasn't strangling, using the hand on the mag as a pivot to wrench the butt of the rifle into the nekos skull. As the neko reeled from the blow he shifted his grip again to a two handed hold on the barrel of the rifle.

"Finagle take the lot of you!" He yelled, swinging two handed at another charging amazon as he wrapped his tail around the neck of the neko he had smacked earier

Not one for classically trained combat, or even basic weapons, Serra was woefully under skilled for this current problem, those she compensated it for being probably the third strongest person in the room. When the neko's launched their pounce attacks, Serra lacked the autonomic response to draw and ready her weapon, in fact she drew it wrong, holding it similarly to a large club instead of by it's grip.

Regaining her gaze to the flying neko who's now a scant few feet from her face, Serra took one, very heavy, step forward and swung her gun/club with all the force she could muster. The resulting reaction was largely very graphic. The gun was swung with so much force that it bent out of shape upon impact, And the neko she hit was sent directly to the ground with a sickening crunch/thud sounding combination.

Not taking pause for a second to realize what she did, Serra raised her damaged rifle and began to swing any any other neko that decided to even look at her.

Fitz Felroy was losing his nerve at the sight of encroaching cat-woman and slowly pulled his rifle from his back, and turned of the safety while readying the weapon to fire by aiming at the cats near the ship. "Ma'am what are your..." he was going to ask but then noticed she wasn't there anymore. It only made him even more nervous, he pulled up his gun to aim at the closest one and slowly approached it to get a good shot. Most of the world was narrowing on his one target, like a state of zen of fear. His finger itching on the trigger as sweat fell from his head within the helmet.

As nekos flew left and right, it appeared that Security Team 35 might have been able to hold their own against the teeming tide. This thought was, however, quickly stamped out as each and every cat-eared amazon immediately sprung back to life as they were struck, shot, beaten and broken. Even the one Cyril has unloaded his rifle into twitched for a moment, then rolled around on her back as she cradled her chest area, breathing harshly through her teeth. As each neko leaped up, their canary-eating grins renewed into expressions of growing determination. Apparently, there was a limit to how non-physical they were willing to be.

It wasn't difficult to see, however, that Security Team 35 was becoming overwhelmed. Skilled combatants or just plain lucky, it wouldn't matter for much longer as the room was filling with the last remnants of the cat-eared amazon horde, a deafening roar of inane gibberish spewing from their mouths.

---

Tweak became the first obvious focus of attention as she was quickly surrounded by five of the cat-women. They barely gave her any time to breath before launching a counter-attack, one of them behind her quickly cutting Tweak's legs out from under her while another (wearing a tastefully folded sweater across her chest) jumped forward and tucked her knees to her chest, planting her bare feet onto the faceplate of Tweak's helmet. As the Spacer Neko fell to her back, Sweater-Chest shot her legs out like a spring-loaded board, slamming Tweak's helmet (as well as her head) against the tiled floor, the stress instantly cracking the helmet and completely shattering the visor as the neko playfully bounced off with the momentum with a simple "Nya~".

---

One of the cat-eared women bounded forward in front of Fitz, but stopped short when she caught sight of what he was holding. The amazon-esque woman seemed to lose all interest in attacking Mr. Felroy, instead becoming fascinated by the deadly weapon pointed at her, inspecting it visually with a tilted head from but a foot or two away.

---

The others weren't faring any better. Each of the CSS members whom were using their CSS Variable Weapons were quickly notified of one of the weapons flaws...frailty, to be precise. The butt of Cyril's gun snapped off completely in a shower of spark, while Serra's already bent and battered weapon fell apart as it struck a last wayward neko on the side of the head ("Nah!").

Both of them were immediately set upon by more cat-amazons, one (wearing a blue tie around her forehead) was able to jump onto Cyril from behind, wrapping her supple legs around his arms and hugging onto his helmet with her free hands as the poor Security members teetered to and fro from the sudden weight increase.

Serra found herself beset by two neko's whom were intent on grabbing her wing-like appendages. As Serra turned to face and fight others, these two would turn with her, batting almost playfully at her wings (Nya nya~!).

Another neko flew forward and attempted to grab Claire by the ankles, while yet another came from her side and fixated her four-fingered hands onto Claire's wrist.

---

Dream's signal, although masterfully executed, had seemingly no effect on any of the cat-eared amazons in the room. She did, however, manage to draw the attention of one of the smaller cat-women, even smaller than Dream herself. The neko met her prey with a flying tackle to Dream's stomach.

---

The victims of Keziah's assaults were quick to get up and position themselves for another attempt. They seemed determined to grapple the security squad rather than throw punches or use weapons or strikes. Quick as lightening, one of the nekos before Keziah dove forward and turned, placing her hands on the ground in a squatting position with her voluptuous rear in front of the security member. This awkward position quickly blossomed into a painfully effective mule kick; the neko lifted both feet into the air and, using the momentum, planted the two fleshy soles directly into Keziah's abdomen.

---

Outside the spaceport interior, the brave neko remained stoic and ready as Deacon made his approach. It was difficult to tell what the cat-amazon was thinking...neko's couldn't sweat, and emitted no smell to give a sense of fear or anxiety. The only sounds came from the roof, where the smaller neko continued to wail and cry out to her companion.

The neko's hand wavered slightly as she narrowed her eyes onto Deacon's form as she spoke more gibberish to the hyena-man. "...nya nah. Na nya nyaaah?"

"Oh shi-" Claire stumbled and tripped as the neko grabbed her ankles. This however caused her to fall right on top of said neko, carrying the one attached to her wrist with her. She was effectively sandwiched between the two catgirls. (In a non-sexual way, mind you.) She dropped her rifle also as she lost her balance, it sliding acrost the floor out of her reach.

She managed to catch a glimpse of the other squadmates to see they weren't faring any better. Dream was tackled again as more and more nekos pour into the room. Despite having a catgirl squirming on top of her, she noticed something odd about the neko's attacks.

"Are they... playing with us??" It appeared so. It looked more like kittens play-fighting with their siblings than a vicious assault.

Slowly, Keziah was getting to her feet, hand wrapped tight around the neko's throat even as more closed in on her. Using the woman as a makeshift club, she swung around and struck two others before throwing her into the wall.

There were way too many of them. Blood stained her gauntlet, and was on the floor everywhere, but there were no dead nekos. All of them were still moving, still fighting, and none were on the ground. It perplexed her for a single, fatal moment.

She noticed the squatting neko too late, and the impact into her armor was incredible. Keziah buckled instantly, and crashed back to the ground, the front plates of her armor impacted and broken from the double-kick. She couldn't breathe, her vision novaing spectacularly as nekos swarmed over her body, pinning her to the floor.

His anxiety began to peak when it approached Fitz, and he could hear the pounding of his heart in his ears. Then the cat girl stopped in front of him, and Fitz thought was odd, considering the Neko's power a great civilization and this one looks like he's holding some toy in his hands without blinking, or he assumed capable of that at least.

Keeping tight grip on his weapon, he asked the thing loudly and slowly, "Hey, who are you? And why are you here?" He felt kinda weird talking to it, he felt he was asking a child a question rather than something intelligent.

Licking his lips, Deacon decided to try something interesting. He had noticed the way that the neko pair had inspected the shuttle, and remembered back to the Nether Reach on his home planet. Taking a deep breath, he would try to get what he was thinking, across to the feral amazons before him.

He very slowly sat back on his haunches in a crouch, and with keeping his hands open to show he was not reaching for a weapon until necessary to do otherwise, he would point to the neko on the roof, then to the one in front of him. He followed this motion with a point to his eyes, then towards the door of the shuttle. Basically, he was asking if the two nekos wanted to look inside the shuttle to satisfy their curiousity about it. As another idea came to his head he pointed to the door again, nodding his head slowly with a smile. Pointing alternately to each paw like hand while shaking his head no and frowning, then pointed to his eyes again with the happy smile and a nod. Looking is okay, but no touch. This was followed by a point to himself and a shrug, may I come too?

Finishing his little game of charades, he would point to the neko on the roof, then opened his left hand to her showing he wished to hold it while they explored the shuttle, while the right was offered in the same manner to the braver of the two. Things were going well, and he just hoped they would keep continuing down that same path, and that he could solve this whole situation without having to resort to violence, where he was not evenly matched against two of the living weapons.

The radio interference Dream sent out felt like a hot spike in Tweak's head. Tweak had left that function on, continuing to list off frequencies, so she was still vulnerable to it. But the pain only lasted a moment as her subconscious reactions shut the radio off by itself before serious problems appeared.

That moment of distraction was all the feral nekos needed to pull off their combo against Tweak. She found herself on her back with the remnants of her helmet around her head, and a neko flying up away from her face. Instinctively, Tweak augmented her momentum from the fall and helmet slam and continued to roll in a backward somersault until she was back on her feet, crouching.

Then she realized that despite the blood and gunfire she had been hearing in the brief seconds that the skirmish had lasted so far, none of the nekos were permanently down. But, then again, none of her team registered as being dead either. Tweak kept her guard up, but was slowly realizing what Claire had already noticed. These nekos weren't out to kill; in fact, hadn't the crew of this outpost been alive in that back room? If these nekos were out for blood, every one of the Cirrus security detail would already be dead.

"Cease fire!" she called out. Not that she really needed to. Everyone was either disarmed or already subdued.

Cyril bit off a snarled obscenity as the rifle snapped off in the neko's face. Not only did the stock crack completely off, but in the second he had to see it before it was wreched away by yet another one of the fucking amazons he could tell that the ever fucking plasma conduits had snapped off too. See if he was ever going to try and use that particular feature ever again.

Of course, that particular thought was quickly washed away by a yowling mass that wrapped itself around his torso, neatly trapping his arms to his side. He teetered for a moment with all the extra weight, and then decided run with the change to his center of balance, kicked out his legs and threw himself backwards.

Cyril wasn't really what you'd call a heavyweight, but the extra weight from the armor and the momentum from the fall was enough to at least daze the damned thing. It still kept it's grip on his arms, but he did at least get enough play to for for his pistol. He tried to bring it up and give one of the nekos bearing down on him some Serious Discouragement tm. But then the neko he was throating batted the damn thing away, even as it managed to peel the mechanical limb off of it's throat.

Without Serious Discouragement tm, the neko he had been gunning for planted itself on his legs. After a few moments of struggling, more to make himself feel better then out of any hope of disengaging any of the nekos, he heard Tweak call out a cease fire.

"Don't have much of a choice here." Cyril said by way of response. He had neko #1 holding his arms to his side, neko #2 pinning his legs and neko #3 wrestling his tail into submission. With his pistol off to the side somewhere and his piece of crap rifle in two separate pieces, he was officially out of ideas. Looking around, he could see that everyone else was in more or less the same predicament.

Dream, on her part, was totally out cold after being tackled. Easily the most physically fragile member of the team, it was no real surprise that her body had more or less shut down from the shock.

Of course, her mind was another thing altogether.

Upon being forced to cope with her own physical helplessness, Dream turned to whatever was left of Polysentience for support, while mentally cursing Cassefin for sealing so much of the irreplaceable Freespacer communication network.

"Ok. Those things use different frequencies from Tweak's. Probably another model." She reasoned calmly, consciousness drifting in her inner virtual space while her body was lying on the floor, unconscious.

Except she wasn't really calm. More like pissed off. "This is exactly why sensible people shouldn't live on planets."

Well, she still had her communications suite.


Message sent.

Now, what could she do? She sat (well, metaphorically) and thought.

She didn't have a robotic body capable to compete with theirs. And there were too many of them anyway.

So, what was plan B again? Oh, right.
It would've been more likely to work if this place was in the Free State than here, but still... worth a try.

She cleared her inner mind and let her virtual senses expand throughout the base, running through cables, radio waves and communication networks the same way blood flows through veins and arteries.

If she wasn't strong enough to defeat them, then she only had to hope that something strong enough to do so WAS around.

For a moment she toyed with the idea of seizing control of the shuttle, blasting the roof open, and killing every single neko with fire from above, but it was far too dangerous, while they had this many hostages.

Let's call it "plan C". No, wait, better "D".

Fitz calmed himself after getting very little action from his question and move his gun to the side, only to see the gaze of the cat girl follow. Curious, he moved it around to have it follow it. "You remind me of a puppy I once knew," he said to it, and pulled out an ammo clip. He then underhand tossed it so it would slide across the ground to see if it would chase it.

He looked around to see everyone in some case of conflict. Smiling at a couple of them he said on his radio, "Guys I don't think gals are dangerous at all, they could be children or somethin'." he couldn't help to think maybe if he had a drink it would help him notice it sooner.

Then he added, "Can anyone speak cat?"