RP: Terraforming Ake [Terraforming Ake] P1 - Dust Bowl Children

"Don't bother Sapph!" Alice shouted at the young girl. "You are just wasting ammo. Only ones who do something to that ships are our cats." Alice took the small pack of extra filters from her belt and attached it to her rifle. Rifle should not get wet either. With that the doctor moved forward.

Yori reached the lake with the others and then paused a moment. "I can fly across, and maybe carry some equipment or a person." Though she said that she didn't sound too confident. She could see the ships now and was getting nervous, on the other side of the lake there was undoubtedly combat she might have to fight if she crossed the lake. Her suit had minor weapons, and she did know how to use guns and such, but she had never actually been in a real shoot out or anything.

Sapphire finally got the weapon reloaded with fresh clip. She bundled up her filters, ammo and weapon to cross the lake. She waded in with the stuff over her head to keep dry as she waded after the rest of them.

"Well shit!" Mako grumbled and brought her SYLPH down for a landing as best she could before either power failed, or whatever bug was in her system forced the flight controls to drive her into the ground. Whatever this was, it was getting into her head, probably through her mini-SPINE connection with the SYLPH's computer system. This was not good.

As she hit the ground, Mako triggered her emergency jettison, which popped open the chest piece and her small pilot pod, allowing Mako to tumble out onto the Brownie surface. She grabbed for a mini emergency mask and pulled it on so she could breath, then drew her mini NSP.

"You okay, Akemi?" she asked her fellow neko soldier. "I got hit by some computer attack, disabled my SYLPH"

"Yeah! Same here, but I'm alright!" Akemi shouted back as she shot off to rescue Daziel from whatever foul fate had befallen him in her newly acquired mode of transport, liking how it was fittingly of Origin make. "I dunno what everyone else is doing, but I'm going to go fuck some bitches up as long as the ships ain't shooting us. Maybe I'll capture someone important!" She really didn't see any way that they could win against all these pirates and their overwhelming firepower but she doubted surrendering would do them much good given their recent encounter with a well done Elysian corpse. Hopefully these brigands fancied themselves as fairy-tale swashbucklers and would appreciate her bravery and resolve, thus deciding to let them go instead of slowly torturing them to death for resisting. What could she really do? Well, besides pretending to be a Neko supremacist for a while. Hopefully no one would decide to be captain buzzkill and take issue with that assuming they ended up having the luxury of gabbing about it and weren't racing to clean a space poop deck in the near future.

Seiji stopped dead at the edge of the makeshift lake. The insanity of them all rushing at guns was bad enough, but the idea of wading through such a vile looking lake to do so seemed like insult to sprinkle on top of stupidly cake.

His eyes darted to Sapphire , who seemed content to rattle off shots and tell the world where they where. Seiji himself was no tactician but he understood being loud was a bad thing. He pulled out his pistol, looking it over as if it where the alien thing it truly was to him. He took a deep breath , steadied himself for everything that could come

Then walked around the lip of the lake, leaning up beside it in a small indent, looking to make himself as small of a target as possible, at least until the first hellstorm passed. He put his scanner down beside him as if it where at the ready. Perhaps maybe, just maybe, there would be something for him to scan or some science to do to pull them out of this.

It seemed that no one wanted her assistance so Yori decided just to float herself up just barely above the water, leaning forward like she was flying, the last thing she wanted to do was make herself a big target for anyone at the site. 'I hope they're okay..."

Despite the fatal design flaw of the Geshrin Light Freighter exposed Aether Ventilation Port, the ship did not buckle against the bursts of energy that spattered it from Sapphire's Fatboy. Such vulnerabilities were the type usually exploited by more devastating weapons like Anti-Starship Torpedos or Mass Driver Cannons. On the bright side, this imperceptibly useless attack went entirely unnoticed, and so they were all able to cross the lake unmolested-- even the low-flying Yori. In fact, they pulled into the camp around the same time that Mako and Akemi were riding in from the other side on the newly repurposed GP-ORV.

Everyone met in the center of the camp, at the base of humming and whirring APS which acted as the little town fountain. What greeted them from various angles was mainly bodies. Of their own, there was Niel. The man certainly wasn't dead for as much twitching and moving about as he was getting up to down on the ground. However, there was quite the generous amount of blood seeping from his upper body. Not to mention the unpleasantness regarding his newly-missing ear. They could also take in the sight of two men being assaulted mercilessly by a donkey who'd been too stubborn to come along like the cows who were now boredly floating upwards in the grasp of a narrow Combined Field System stream. Scattered around the camp were a total of six bodies belonging to enemy combatants. This was indicated by the fact that they were all clad in thick, black armor. Plates gleaming in the harsh Ake sun, their smooth surfaces covered in blood.

In the very center of it all, right in front of the APS, there was Crazy Jane-- sawing away at Daziel's very elven ear with her dildo-handled cleaver. She wasn't even a quarter of the way into his cartilage when all the ruckus finally annoyed her to the point of turning away from her work with a quick kick to the executive's stupid secretly Neko face. A pair of submachineguns seemed to slide into her hands from behind her before with sudden, almost impossible energy she jumped. Many would say that she was Like Mike, for the jump was a springboard leap that took her soaring up with spray of bullets coming down below her in a wide arc that nipped at the ground a kicked up dirt at every pair of feet on the ground. A few of the corpses got an extra dose of pepper. Jane's clearly technologically aided ascent brought her to a platform at the top of the APS where she could take cover and rain down fire with impunity.

Also, if anyone had been paying attention, a cargo ramp on the blackened pirate ship slid open politely and silently.

Being hyper attentive on account of wanting to finally shoot some more people, Akemi did notice the the scurvy spacedog ship opening, but she'd get to that later. First she aimed a scalar shot at the head of each poor pirate struggling with the loyal new terraforming team mascot. "Let go of Don dirtbags!" she shouted, letting them know the brave animal they were trying to capture wasn't just any old livestock now, this guy was Don the donkey. If the goons had helmets she'd instead fire at their noggins with the heavy lethal mode.

Then the Neko spun around to address whatever was coming down the ramp. That was of course after taking whatever cover she could hide her truck behind so Jane didn't blow her head off. She thought about trying to subdue whoever came out without killing them but suddenly a much easier and more satisfying idea came to her. Regretting that she might lose out on the opportunity to take more prisoners, Akemi fired her Gauss rifle into the opening of the ship, hoping to hit something important. Naturally she'd hold her fire until anything actually emerged if there appeared to be an active one way shield. "How about you try to sneak up on that pirate chick later and yell in her ear or shoot her with your NSP to distract her?" she sent to Mako.

Sapphire back pedaled as the rounds peppered into the grounds before her. Her sense of survivability kicked in. Dropping the extra filters to the ground, she dove back over the berm into the lake with a splash. Pushing up to clear the water quickly before it had a chance to render her filters useless. But unfortunately her weapon got pushed into the mud at the bottom of the lake, rendering it totally useless till cleaned by an expert.

She softly swore a she huddled behind the berm, half in the water, shivering with fear finally catching up to her. Seeing the bloody bodies laying all over the place made her curl up with wrenching dry-heaves. Muttering between the heaves, "oh sacred being.... I dunna want.... die!"

Tears fell freely as she slowly recovered from her bout of crippling fear induced nausea. She curled up there behind the berm, obsess with being someplace else as this adventure turned into a nightmare of the worse proportion. A living nightmare, more potent that most well crafted horror movie.

Oh boy here we go again. Alice was a bit surprised by how calm she felt, while someone was firing at her. It was not that she was not afraid, because she was, but she did not feel a need to let the fear control herself. She saw worse than this after all. This was just some crazy lady firing SMGs. It was not an abomination or anything. That said this time, Alice did not wear Power Armour, she just had a duster and wet boots. Not exactly material good at deflecting bullets.

The medic saw Sapphire fall down at the edge of the lake. Without giving it much thought, Alice grabbed the young girl by a collar and started dragging her into some cover on the dry land. "Don't just bloody stop moving girl! Sitting ducks get shot. Got to get into proper cover." The doctor said to Sapphire.

"Yori, if that fancy suit of yours is any kind of bullet proof grab attention of that bitch." Alice shouted as she moved for cover with Sapphir in tow. "Franklin, I need to get to Neil and fast. He seems to be bleeding!"

Yori was quick to dive behind cover when Jane turned around and began firing on them. She was shaken up by how close those bullets had gotten to her, as this was the first time in her life anyone actually shot at her. However Alice was calling out for her to be a decoy and draw fire to her, this was not something she wanted to do, granted she was more durable than them with her suit as there was bullet proofing in it, but bullets were scary. Neil was in bad condition though and Alice probably would not get to him unless there was a distraction.

The engineer gulped and steeled herself as best she could, if she just flew around at top speed with her suit, maybe Jane wouldn't be able to keep up with her. Yori nodded to herself at this thought and then came out from cover firing a few shots in Jane's general direction, they were close as she knew the weapon well, but they were by no means a shot grouping of an experienced soldier. Either way before she gave Jane time to respond Yori activated her suit's inertial amplifier and took off flying, starting to circle the camp at a speed comparable to a military Neko.

Sapphire went with Alice, scrambling to her feet to assist as it was embarrassing enough that she had already lost her snack and being useful as a rock stopping a landslide while being part of it. Once moving, she went where ever Alice directed her. Closest she came to war was in the theater. Not taking part of one. She didn't know whether to throw away the useless weapon or just let it hang off of her, dripping mud.

"Oh I'd be more than happy to take out that pirate scum!" Mako replied to Akemi.

The tiny neko was already moving to sneak around and flank the pirate, Jane. She used her tiny tiny size to her advantage to keep herself unseen and attempt to zip around behind Jane and, if lucky, shoot her in the back of the head a few dozen times with her mini NSP.

There were many things in life Morimoto Seiji was not. He was not brave, handsome, or even a particularly good person. One thing that he did work well with, though, were facts. The facts at this moment told him that his previous hiding spot had suddenly become a lot less useful when their enemy took the high ground. The one good thing that came from this was that a lot of people with big guns were going to shoot at her now. Some of them were floating as well.

Seiji decided to make use of those distractions and head towards the only avenue he saw as being safe to him. He had to get into their ship. Simple enough, but at the same time it wouldn’t do him any good if he didn’t have a pilot. Even less good if that pilot was someone like Franklin, who did not seem to even have a vague understanding of self-preservation. Unfortunately that only seemed to leave Daziel, who was currently rather wounded and in the thick of things. Putting away his desperate grip on his weapon and keeping as low a profile as someone in a uniform could, Seiji scurried away from his hiding spot and, all the while taking care to appear as meek and unthreatening as possible, made his way down from his position towards his boss.

Cover was as much his constant companion as he could make it and many heroic and unnecessary dives took him from point to point. The constant sound of gunfire made him both terrified and feeling a little safer as it seemed directed between the parties that could actually fight. With the universal sign of shush – a finger to the lips – he made it the last few feet to Daziel and put his hands under the Neko’s armpits. Ever so slowly and as quietly as he could, he started to drag him towards their ship.

Between Yori and Mako, Jane was more than distracted. There was plenty of time for everyone else to run to their favored team-mate or shoot at whatever they'd decided to shoot at. Unfortunately for the two of them, Jane's focus was more than enough for both of them. She sprayed Yori with a quick burst as the technician popped around from behind the APS. Yori's power-suit took only grazes from the barrage, but some doodad or thrust-nozzle or scambulating kajigger was bent or outright broken. Immediately, a stream of fluid began to issue forth from Yori's left leg-plate; the nature of which eluded everyone except the technician herself. Simultaneously, Jane struck out with a quick bat towards Mako from her peripheral using the submachinegun as a clever club that knocked the tiny catgirl in a whirling corkscrew towards the wall of the APS where she was flattened by the impact. For all her manliness, Jane was certainly strong. In fact, she was textbook steroid-rage strong mixed in with a healthy dose of moody kaserine junky.

Franklin bridged the path with Alice and Sapphire, keeping himself between them and the ship with his Mancannons singing along to Akemi's tune. While the helmeted soldiers harassing Don the Donkey clutched uselessly at their faces, each was struck in the gut with unflinching Nepleslian bullets that didn't stop to ask for directions or the time.

The first of three pirates to emerge from the cargo ramp was instantly killed when a gauss round burned through his midsection thanks to Akemi's decision to pay attention to that particular event. Immediately, his two companions dove to either side of the cargo ramp and into the sand. One was making a break for the Elijah while the other was already invisible to her on the other side of the APS. Yori would see him cowering at the base of said spire on her next pass if she could peel her eyes off the jet of chemical ushering forth from her leg.

Meanwhile, Daziel stirred in Seiji's grasp as the two of them slid into the lower deck of Sister Sarah. Puffy, bleeding eyelids squinted up at the scientist. They'd made it into the ship unmolested, and the executive could at least grasp as much. He moaned to Seiji, "Chap... The Ionic Pul-" There was a bloody hacking cough so Seiji could have a nice little hemosynth spatter on his cheek, "Ionic Pulse... Cannons, old boy."

Well everyone paid well enough attention to others and very little attention to Alice. That was good. She jumped to her feet and sprinted to Neil, grabbing the man and quickly pulling him up and across her shoulders Fire-Fighter style. It would not help, but Alice was pretty sure she would be shot if she tried to treat him on the spot in the open. With the man on her back, turned and ran back to cover, pretty glad to be a minkan for once and being able to carry the large nepleslian. She was not in the clear yet, she still had to get back into cover and then treat the wounded man.

"Better idea for Mako, Yori and possibly Alice," Akemi sent in an unfocused telepathic pulse using encryption because surely they had all agreed on a code before beginning their mission proper given their professionalism and Origin's natural tendency to bring out the best in its chosen people. "How about Mako goes to Elijah and Yori to Joacim so you guys can shoot these punks with the ship guns and make sure they don't get inside and possibly do that to us? If they're only landing here I can hold them off with my big ass gun and the truck turret. If not, you can at least tell us. If either of you can't go Alice can or she can help Daziel get Sister Sara going."

While giving her advice Akemi attempted to gun down the pesky pustule mostly likely attempting to pilfer their science vessel before returning her focus to the ship entrance. "I seriously think you should either ditch Niel or carry him over to the Elijah so you can get him to the medbay and ensure we get the guns going," the Neko said without looking at the doctor. "Now Sapphire, if you want to feel safer you better get on this machinegun here and help me catch the little shits that are getting away."

Finished speaking to her crew Akemi directed her voice at their enemies. "Surrender now pirate pukes! You're messing with the Star Army of Yamatai and more importantly you're messing with me, Koga Akemi, pirate killer extraordinaire as of now! Fuck with me and I'll drop a moon on your homeworld and genocide whoever 's left! I hope you have a Freespacer! Don't think we don't torture, it's never torture when the winners do it!"

Feeling safer?! Of course she wanted to feel safe! Safety was a word she could relate to. It meant being able to live and enjoy life. Braving the danger of the short exposed run to the offered machine gun and safety. She gave Akemi a quick smile of gratitude.

Sapphire made the dash and climbed behind the machine gun. Lucky for Akemi, these type of machineguns were used in the movies and had a basic knowledge of how to at least fire it and reload it. Sapphire grabbed hold and sent a wild spray of bullets into the open maw of the hovering ship, before she could gain control of the weapon at hand.

She just pointed the weapon at anyone she didn't recognize as part of the terraforming teams and sent a burst of projectiles screaming their way. Knowing for a fact that she couldn't hit the side of a barn from the inside the way the machinegun jerked and bounced with each shot, so she compensated and sent a lot of bullet at them. Probably being more of a danger to the rest of the terra-formers than being helpful.

Yori managed to come out alive after her first pass around the tower, this was more than she expected, but she didn't get out clean. One of the fluid lines in her suit broke and was dripping fluid, her suit was electric though so there was only one real fluid line in the suit, the coolant, which wouldn't be that much of a problem if she wasn't running a system that used a rather complex and tasking system to it's capacity that ran through the entire suit. The more the coolant spilled the more she could feel the suit warming against her body.

She could not keep flying like this, not if she didn't want to be backed alive, and she didn't want to take more shots either way, so she lowered her altitude and shut off the inertia enhancement, as she came around the ASP. She soon spotted the man cowering under the spire and raised her gun setting it to stun and fired several shots the man's direction, hoping a few of them hit. If the man at least fell to the ground Yori would then head towards the Joacim as per Akemi's instructions, having no real combat experience of her own she was gonna listen to those who knew what they were doing.