♪ We Are Giants ft Dia Frampton - Lindsey Stirling
YSS Ryujo, Crew Cabin D3-C10
Santo Hei Amatsukaze Noa was hard at work in the middle of her cabin, the 8" tall information warfare expert nearly buried in piles of cables and data disks that littered the floor around her in a semi-circle. She had been working on this pet project for weeks in her off-duty time, ever since she had found out about the new VCE game Figments of Fantasia that promised to take the realism up to a new level! There was only only BIG problem -- they didn't make a headset rig for mini-neko sized players at all! But Noa just
had to play it... and she wasn't going to wait eons for the next iteration of the product line that could take
forever. So, in true techie fashion, she decided she was going to hack together her own homebrew interface device, using her trusty miniaturized
EM-G13 "Kuromegane" Communications Visor as a base. Many, many hours of experimentation later she had finally managed to code an emulator software layer that seemed to get 95% efficiency with the latest drivers installed. This was also teamed with the challenge of getting a secure, hard to detect data connection back home from the distant southeast frontiers where the ship currently was operating.
But all that hard work was behind her, and now, it was time for the final test! The tan-skinned Noa gave a grin as she disconnected the visor from the mass of cables that had been flashing its internal firmware to her new, custom spec, and proceeded to float lazily onto the gigantic bed in the crew cabin, snapping the amber-tinted device over her cerise eyes. There was static at first, and then line and lines of code whizzed by... the handshakes completed successfully, and at long last the TITLE SCREEN appeared in all its glory, if slightly pixelated by her interpolation routines on the Kuromegane's modified resolution display. But it didn't matter... she was in at last
! "Now I'll show those game devs not to underestimate the little guy again," Noa thought with a mischievous smirk as she reached for the '
Giant' race button...
........
And suddenly... the world became a lot smaller.
........
Tavern
Rhuna Agmundr roared a mighty battle-cry, as the 12ft tall giantess slammed her spiked club into the tavern with a mighty swing, ripping apart the human-sized structure's beams like they were mere matchsticks scattering in the wind before her. This attack, however powerful, was also obviously unfocused... she caused more collateral damage than trying to outright kill the inhabitants inside. The spike the human rider was driving into her neck was the source of it, the burning sensation and trickle of sanguine blood amidst her fiery red hair speaking of the cruelty of her enslavement as a living war machine.
She was not sure how long her once proud people had suffered like this at the hands of the Imperial men, but Rhuna surely could never forgive them for what they did to her father. He and her brothers and sisters fought to their deaths to protect their nomadic way of life in the secluded northern isles, but in the end all they earned was this miserable fate of being enslaved to their numerically superior conquerors. Even now she could also feel the dark magic within the iron shackles she bore on her arms and legs that blocked the ability to access the raw powers of the Elements... this was a force that for some reason the Imperials and their sinister allies feared even more than the strength of the Giants, much like the magic of the elves and druids. Without them, though, she could do nothing but be led around like a dog.
The human rider was displeased with her first attack and ordered a second with another painful jab, as Rhuna began to feel the pain and rage welling up again that would swamp her reason once more and make her inflict dozens more casualties than before. As she rose up her warclub toward the gutted tavern's scattering denizens, the arrow from Branwyn's bow struck the human upon her back square and sent him to the ground. There was a moment of realization in her green eyes when she felt her loathsome burden removed, and that stony gaze slowly glanced down at the Imperial rider bleeding out from his chest at her feet, gasping for air as he tried in vain to remove the arrow...
"Now Rhuna makes YOU feel PAIN!" Needless to say, he -- and everything immediately around him -- was soon flattened with a satisfying
CRACK . The look in the titaness' chiseled face as she murdered a deserving foe was hopefully enough to prove Velatha's suspicions accurate about the creature's true, if brutal, nature.