Union HQ, mid morning

“Say again?” asked the Captain.

“Intercept shows the attack on Builder as a no-go, same as Owner.  Asset could not find target.”

The Captain pursed his lips, furrowed his brow.  He’d been prepared for success, expected it.  He’d been dreading a possible failure, scaring himself by imagining ways that their preparations might have been insufficient.

But this…

“Any elaboration on that?” he asks the SPARTACUS system.  “Did the insurgents’ command network ask for any further details?”

“Negative,” comes the smooth, electronic voice.  “All information has been conveyed.”

He chewed his lip for a moment.

There could be a hundred innocent explanations, a thousand.  The bungling of their local partners was a constant thorn in his side, and the Lair was probably the most hostile operating theatre in the world.

But still…

“System, get me authorization on an immediate ping on our intel networks, get the spooks to cooperate if possible.  I want to know why those two didn’t get hit, and what’s going on today.”

“Processing…” said the computer.

The Captain sat in silence, resigned to the time required.  He’d spent influence making that call, resources and collateral that a man in his station accumulated over time.  The intelligence branch would want their own favors in return, and he would have to grant them.

But he hadn’t made his rank by ignoring his hunches, and something about this stunk.  Blender was a creature of habit.  Her minions should have been in place this morning for the attack.  One might have deviated, but both was a stretch too far.  Something was going on.

He just had to find out what.

 

Ar Harbour, late afternoon

“You couldn’t stop them?” asked King Arthur.

The Union soldier shook her head, unshed tears shading her eyes.

“By the time we realized they were on the move it was too late.  They could get here any second.”

The sound of flesh striking flesh echoed in the room like a gunshot.

Arthur regretted the slap the instant she carried it out, but she’d never been able to fully control her temper.

“Damn it!” she hissed, “You promised me an intercept!  I wanted to evacuate weeks ago, but you swore that we’d be good through one more cycle.”

The operative slowly turned her head back to face her assailant straight on.

“I have relayed the instructions of my superiors.  If you’d like to continue wasting time with me I don’t have any objections, but I think we both know that there’s something else you could be doing.”

Arthur gave a muffled curse and bolted out of the room, already calling for her guards.

“Get her up!” she shouted back over her shoulder, “I don’t care what you have to pump into her.  Get her up and in this fight or we are fucked!”

 

Ar Harbour, Dusk

“That’s it, that’s all, you are the last,” she said, slumping down upon the bench.

The Retinue didn’t cheer or chant, simply stood before their leader, every soul raising a hand in salute.

She barely acknowledged it, weariness bone deep showing in every gesture.

“There comes a time,” she said, her voice diminished by the afternoon’s expenditures, “For every nation, every country, every city.  There comes a time when fascists try and take over and kill everyone.  That’s today for us.  If we don’t win, our children will become slaves, and we will become cold bodies.”

They rushed off, brave men and women, their forms swollen with power to match the greatness of their spirit by her own gift, now utterly exhausted.

“It looks like you’ll have the numerical edge,” said the outsider, who had stood idly by during her efforts.

“No thanks to your masters,” said Arthur, bitterness curdling her tone.  “But I suppose I shouldn’t blame you for that.  Thanks for everything you’ve done up till now.”

The girl from the Union shook her head, mask swaying back and forth.  “Up till now?  We aren’t going anywhere.”

“Your bosses aren’t cutting us lose?” asked Arthur.  “We didn’t get either of those Ultras that they care about, and they made it plain that…”

A raised hand shushed her.

“They are here.  Ten to one, more.  My boss activated some of our own assets, and they can’t be found back in the city.  The targets will be on the field, and we’ll be sweeping them up.”

Arthur didn’t think anyone could possibly be dumb enough to deploy those 2 to a hot zone, but didn’t bother to argue the point.  Arguing the Union out of lending her aid in her time of need would be just about the worst blunder imaginable.

“Just thank your lucky stars,” the squad leader said.  “You’ve got a Union team backing you up.  You just might win this.”

Dusk, Front Truck

Blender peered through the windshield, glaring at the makeshift barricades ahead.

Would Prevailer mind that the downtown had been hastily walled off?  She shouldn’t right?  Fuck.

No one moved inside any of the windows, no one breathed in the streets they’d crashed through.  Give King Arthur this.  Given the choice, the woman had cleared the civilians out of the way.

Blender was profoundly grateful.  Their fate if caught in the midst of an Ultra conflict would have been grisly in the extreme.  It had been a narrow contest between the thought of reenacting the massacre of her home village, this time in the heavy’s role, and the thought of perishing in a Union drone strike which had been the more terrifying.

But neither had occurred.  Maybe her worries had been overblown.  Maybe they’d caught their enemies napping.  Either way, she’d delivered her whole force to the enemies door.  It only remained to kick it in.

She looked back at the In Your Face squad, at Smasher.  This was the time when a war movie would have a big speech or something.

Mia doubted She would tolerate that.

“Force rules the world!” she said.  “Let’s kill them.”

 

The Situation:

Blender is in Truck #1 along with Second Squad.

Smasher is in Truck #2 along with First Squad.

Fourth Squad are in Truck #3.

Third Squad, Blender and Owner are in Truck #4.

The trucks are currently idling in a column, 1 2 3 4.  In front of Truck #1 is a section of road that has been hastily blocked off, telephone poles and piles of rubble thrown across it.

In her opinion the Trucks could drive right through.

No one is visible in the road behind the barrier, but there are large intact commercial buildings on either side of the road, which are very likely to hold enemies.

The section of Ar Harbour that Prevailer is concerned with are the 3 blocks immediately behind this barrier, conspicuous and easily discernable by their basically repaired nature.

The area behind/around the trucks is urban wilderness, decayed buildings and such.  Blender is pretty sure she saw someone ducking back into a window just a second ago, so it is possible that there are enemy immediately around you, lurking inside of ruined structures.

Night is just falling, and the only lights currently on are the 4 truck’s headlights.  Vision isn’t a huge problem now, but as time goes on it might start to be.

The Plan

1. All 4 squads will turn on their truck’s smoke machine and then disembark.
2. Third squad will spread out to all 4 trucks and man the giant rifles and lasers, firing at anyone who comes into line of sight and isn’t in one of the protected buildings.
3. Smasher disembarks along side squads 1,2 and 4. Owner and Builder hang out in Truck Four, with Builder peering out the front window in the hopes of seeing the enemy’s rumored Union Tank and using her gift on it.
4. When the enemy sends troops at us we will fight them, with Smasher & Blender taking on enemy champions, Third squad going after any ghosts and fourth squad staying at range.

Worries that Blender has at this time

1. Line of sight from the back 3 trucks isn’t great, will get a bit worse once we start spraying haze around. Most important (and worst of all) is the line of sight from the back truck, where Builder is.
2. Prevailer is probably anxious to get the fighting started. I don’t know if I can afford to wait for them to approach.
3. Don’t know where enemy’s main concentration is. Almost certainly some in target buildings ahead, some in ruined buildings around, but hard to know which side has the most.
4. Still don’t know if invisible enemies are a thing in this fight. Nerve wracking.
5. The darkness could be more of a concern as we go along.

 

For this week’s contribution please indicate any changes that you want to make to the plan, or vote for letting it continue unaltered.  Please note that changes to Blender’s actions are free, but if you want any other party to act in a different way from the plan you have to include how Blender tells them their new orders.

I can follow plans of a pretty arbitrary complexity, and I’ll use the character’s established personality to fill in any gaps, so feel free to use as many forks and branches as you like in telling me what she’ll do.  I’ll ask you if anything is unclear.

I wished, with all my heart, that I could make myself believe that Haunter had been making it all up.

I could get most of the way there.  She had a huge host of collaborators, and she could call upon really good actors to drive her form.  Regardless of the plausibility of something, Haunter could sell herself as sincerely believing it.

So it was possible.  She could have seen Nirav/Condemner’s bizarre behavior and leapt to take advantage, painting a picture of a dark future where everything she wanted came about and my gift was taken away.  It would have been an effective lever to use to control me.

But if I posited that flavor of Jane, there were a lot of other levers lying around.  She could have invented a prophecy from Answerer, or a way to tattle to Her on me.  A Haunter without scruples could have come up with something a lot more plausible than this tale of weird reality bending creatures as the source of our gifts.

Not that I was letting her pull the ‘it is so implausible it must be true!’ trick on me.  I knew that evidence against couldn’t become evidence for or you could reason yourself into anything.  But it was a supporting thing, a bit of weight for the idea that she was sincere.

So I maybe believed her, I kinda believed her.  If I had to put it at a number it would be like nine out of ten she believe it herself, three out of ten Condemner was telling the truth.  I still thought it wasn’t the most likely thing, but it was likely enough for me to take precautions.

“She’s almost ready,” said Ouro.

I contented myself with a nod in reply.

I’d been the go between for our group and the Grand Host’s leadership ever since the beginning.  The reason I’d given for it was that my gift likely protected me from her foresight, but of course that wasn’t the primary reason.  The main purpose of positioning myself like this was simply politics.

If I wanted to be part of the Leadership Council after all of this, then I had to gain the respect of these women, and that meant interacting with them, doing the sordid work, day in and day out.

It wasn’t a natural fit for my skillset.  I was most comfortable alone, or surrounded only by my inferiors.  I wasn’t the best at sucking up.

But I wasn’t the worst, either, and it wasn’t like the Brides had been selected for their political acumen.  By my own reckoning I’d done very well since my arrival, made the best I could of these fleeting weeks of travel and battle.

The glances that came my way from the rest of the Brides, up here on the leadership’s platform, were no longer envious or scornful.  Indulger had proven our worth by killing off Manus, and he’d proven our value by scouting out Union ambushes and speeding our journey.  Jane’s own contribution with the scouts was also something that most people had heard of vaguely, and would be another point in our favor.

I let my gaze wander around, looking past the Brides to the remnants of the old leadership, to Zilla and Legion’s cronies.  Arena, Lotus, all those girls.  They had become our staunchest supporters, clinging to us as a sane counterweight to Vampire’s arbitrary fancies.

I looked at the woman in line ahead of me, cringing before Vampire as she stuttered out some plea or other.  A front liner, maybe an old Overseer, no doubt asking for protection from the bullying of the Brides.  She’d be leaving disappointed, if she didn’t just disappear entirely.

That could happen, of course.  I’d seen it.  Vampire’s gift was awe inspiringly powerful.  She could teleport anything that lay in shadow, bringing it back into the world anywhere but inside another person.

At this time of night that meant that she could warp anyone and anything.  The woman taking up her time could suddenly find herself in deep space.  Ultra toughness might delay the effect, but not for very long.

Whispers put her as the third or fourth strongest in the Pantheon, a woman who only Zeus and Prevailer stood conclusively above, and who would contest the second of those statements.

With her patronage, my future would be assured, but only if Haunter was wrong.

If Haunter was right, however, then very soon her influence would simply be that of one young woman, not terribly bright.  She’d be irrelevant, a refugee or the victim of a drone strike, depending on fortune’s decisions.

What Jane didn’t seem to get was that the same was true of me.

If Ultra gifts were going to go away, if the Union were fated to seize back control of the world, then where would I end up?  Where could I?

Jane’s path, leaping to the Union for a safe landing, or to wage her solo mission, that couldn’t be mine.

Everybody knew that the Union knew everything.  My time in the Regime, as a leading light in Shington, would be utterly damning.  I’d be marched up against a wall and shot.

Jane had made noises about herself and her shades testifying on my behalf, assuming that her scheme with giving her shades bodies and thus keeping them once gifts went away even worked, but that was immensely dubious.

Another quick set of odds.  If this all happened, and gifts vanished, and Jane survived, call it five out of ten, and her shadows survived in their new forms, call that another five out of ten, then what were the odds that they wouldn’t betray me?  What were the odds that the Union would listen to their testimony, and allow ex Regimer-ers to tell them what other ex Regimer-ers they could or could not execute?

How many gates, and none of them very far in my favor?  Sum them all up and the possibility was vanishingly small.

I’d make a gesture, a motion in her direction.  Maybe it would save my life.  But for the most part I still had to place my faith in Ultra gifts.

Maybe they had had these doomsayers back in the old world.  People waving signs or shouting from corners that the end was coming.  Presumably they’d ignored them then just about as much as I was ignoring Jane now.  What else could you do?  How could it be rational to bet on the apocalypse?

The woman before me bowed her head and wandered off, leaving me to step up and face Vampire.

I took a second to marvel at how well rested and relaxed she looked.  She was leading an army into enemy territory, on the verge of what she thought would be a huge battle.  She’d broken the Intervention Groups, pushed into the Union proper and was about to sack one of their cities.

She just looked bored.  No lines under her eyes, no dirt on her skin.  Dull, narrow eyes squinted at me as she picked her nose.

“Vampire,” I said.  “Can we get some privacy?”

This had come to be something of a calling card for us.  Very few others bothered with it, putting their faith in the shield, but Fourth Fist invariably attempted to use what countermeasures we could.

“Ok,” she said.

I liked to think that it added to our mystique.  It certainly meant that I didn’t have to let people watch me cringe before her like the last woman had.

Without the slightest sign or gesture a steel square appeared around us, four great walls wrenched from some house somewhere, leaning against one another.  A split second later a roof appeared, then dirt and grime to clog up the intersections.

All told it took about two seconds, maybe less, for her to entomb us, leave us in utter darkness.

“I want to talk about the upcoming battle,” I said.  “Are you up for that?”

“Sure,” she said.

I’d come around to believe that her laconic manner was something of a front.  She was aware that she wasn’t the smartest, so she didn’t talk much, just kind of loomed menacingly and let other people dance around her temper.

The important thing was that she could tell the difference between people trying to help and people trying to bullshit her, or at least she thought she could.  I’d always been careful to be as sincere and helpful as I could, trying to stay on the right side of that divide.

“What do you think is going to happen?” I asked her, carefully.

I was spending our social capital on this, turning her usual method around and making her talk first.  She wouldn’t tolerate it from most, but I was betting that here, with no bystanders, she’d level with me.

“The Union are finally going to fight here,” she said.  “No more of this picking at us from a distance.  We’ll take on their big defending army and break it.”

I knew that Jane had broached this topic with her back when we first joined the Host, but I didn’t have the details on exactly how that had gone.  I had to be careful.

“I don’t…” I said, choosing my words carefully, “think that they will do that.  It doesn’t fit with what I understand of their mindset.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

There was no hostility in her tone, which was no guarantee of course, but was at least an encouraging sign.

“The Union doesn’t think like us,” I explained, “I mean their leaders.  They don’t understand about glory, don’t know how shameful it is for an enemy to take one of their cities.  They are like the idiots in the world that died, and they war like it.  They won’t defend a city, they’ll defend its people.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” she asked.

I shook my head, which was of course useless in the blackness, but I expected she could sense my position through her gift.

“The people can move.  We’ve been marching towards this place for two weeks now, ever since your victory over the Intervention Groups.  I think they’ve likely evacuated the city by now, it will just be like the areas we’ve been trudging through, maybe with more traps.”

“Bullshit,” she said.  “They having no gift that can do that!”

“Remember that they are different,” I cautioned.  “They don’t rely on gifts.  Remember all those little flying things that they attacked with.  They could use those to carry their people away.  Why wouldn’t they do that?  If you were in their shoes, you’d do that, right?”

She didn’t say anything then, but I could feel her suspicion and skepticism like living things in the darkness.  I heard a sound that might have been a fist striking a wall.

“Think of it this way,” I said, “They haven’t tried a big fight since the one you won, right?  So they must prefer to pick away at us.  If that’s the case, why would they change that now?  If they move the people they can keep right on picking at us, even though we may be in one of their cities.  They can just rebuild it later.”

“Then how can we make them fight!” she snarled.  “How do we fulfill Zeus’ orders if these heathen weaklings keep on hiding?”

“I don’t know,” I told her.  “But I think the way we are trying isn’t going to do it.  We can’t sneak up on them with the shield on us, and they are much faster than Indulger’s top rock moving speed with their little ships, so I don’t think we can catch their units even if we race straight at them.”

“There HAS to be a way!” she insisted, more naked emotion in her tone than I’d ever heard before.

She wouldn’t have spoken that way in public, and it indicated, to me, that she at least mostly believed what I’d told her about the plausible evacuation.  It added up to me having become something of a confidant, so that was a private victory, but this still needed to be managed very carefully.

“Sacking a Union city is something,” I said.  “Just because they don’t have the wit to know their shame doesn’t mean Zeus won’t see it.  We can probably just smash everything and then move on from here, the main host will catch up with us in a few months, right?  Maybe we can make it to another city.”

From my understanding of our rate of attrition we could weather that time pretty well.  We were losing a few Ultras a day and killing less than that with the current situation.  We might be able to make some progress in stopping their raids, too, so that number had some room to improve.”

“I’m not looking for ‘something’!” she snarled.  “I’m looking for glory, I’m looking to put those other bitches in their places, make myself Zeus’s true partner, fuck Isis.  I want to kill these Union assholes by thousands, by thousands of thousands!”

“They aren’t going to attack you,” I told her, plainly.  “There is no way they haven’t found out what your gift does by now, with how spied on our column is.  Some of the people who disappeared in the first fight must have been snatched away, they would talk, they won’t cluster up for you to get them.”

“Then we attack them!” she said.  “Fuck the shield, rush them down, break them!”

“I don’t think that’ll work,” I said.

I didn’t think she was actually serious about abandoning the shield and charging across the countryside, this was more of a reaction or a test kind of thing.

“They will see us coming with their drones, fly away from anyone who isn’t fast enough to catch them, mob anyone who does manage to catch up once they break away from the rest.  The shield is a huge help, we can’t just abandon it.”

“There must be a way to get them,” she insisted.  “What do you suggest?”

“They will defend their people,” I said.  “If they can’t get them away in time the army will come and put itself in the way of the ones who can’t fight.”

She was quiet once again.

“Remember it is all backwards there,” I said.  “They don’t fight for their leader’s glory, they fight because they get money from all the ones who don’t have to fight, or something like that.  The bottom line is that if we can get to a city that isn’t evacuating, their army will fly over to rescue them.”

“But Istanbul is probably empty?” she said.

“I’ll bet on it,” I said, “if you like.  Nothing but some bombs or other inventive traps.  Maybe poison.”

“Do you think they have emptied their other cities?” she asked.

I shook my head, marveling at how well Jane had anticipated this line of conversation.

“I do not,” I said.  “They’ll only evacuate a place we are drawing near to.  They can’t, or they wouldn’t, just do it for everywhere.”

“I’m getting an idea…” she said.

“I think I had the same idea, I said, we strike another one of their cities!” I said.  “I think Berlin is probably the best-“

This was my gesture to Jane, a suggestion that she’d carefully considered, and one that she’d leaked to the Union a week and a half ago.  I doubted it would actually buy me anything from a victorious Union, but covering my bases was probably worth it.

“Why just one?”

Results from Previous round votes:

2 Votes plan CCC

*************************************************************************************

Winning Plan:

[Morning] Train the warband in combat with Mist around their feet

 

[Afternoon] Practice with Builder (see below)

 

[Owner] Purchase street maps of Ar Harbour, and the area between here and there. Her street maps won’t be perfectly accurate in this world, due to not showing roads that are no longer in repair, but they should still prevent us from getting totally lost en route.

 

[Builder] Practice the combat uses of her skill. I get hold of a bunch of balls (the polystyrene “particles” used in that museum should do) and throw them at her; while her job is to use her Gift to stop them after I let go but before they hit, largely by making them grow ‘sails’ or other bits in mid-air.

 

The aim here is for her to practice using her Gift on small, moving targets while under time constraints. This will be a useful skill under both a union ambush or an attack by the Tank.

 

[Smasher] Afternoon: Train the warband in combat.

Day 27 Log :

7 AP at start of day (6 at end of last day +1 for half night’s sleep)

-2 Train warband with smoke machine (5 AP)

Roll 9, +1 for success (6 AP)

-2 Practice with Builder (4 AP)

Roll 3, +1 for success (due to Builder’s roll), (5 AP)

Builder Train for combat use of her skill

Roll 10, success

Owner: Purchase Street Maps

Roll 9, success

Smasher: Train the Warband in combat

Roll 6, success

End of day, 5 AP

*************************************************************************************

Train the warband in smoke impaired circumstances:

A single month’s training, or not even that, would never have been considered enough in the old world.  Expertise took ten thousand hours, or something similar, and even a simulacrum thereof wouldn’t come quickly.

I knew this, I did.

But it was still easy to look over the warband and think about how far we’d come.  Their ability to follow directions, their fighting spirit, and even their ability to integrate the exotic tactics and stratagems we’d planned felt like it had come leagues and bounds.

I had to remind myself that the proof was in the pudding.  I’d never seen them kill en masse before, and this new training had never been truly put to the test.  I’d given them a few weeks of discipline and instruction.  I probably hadn’t truly changed them.

But damn it felt like we had.  They had no trouble with the smoke machines, running through all of their drills while the ‘haze’ settings output pooled around their feat.  They dodged imaginary gunfire, kept track of sight lines, engaged imaginary enemies and performed as well as I could’ve imagined.

Thinking that, however, put another chill up my spine.

As well as I could’ve imagined.

If they had little to no experience in group fighting, how much less did I have in orchestrating it?  I’d never led a group of 50 Ultras into battle against an equivalent force on prepared ground.  I’d barely even spoken to someone who had.

Should I have spent more time with Subtracter?  The woman was a vicious brute, she’d stolen my life away, but if I put all that to the side could I have gotten more out of her experience?  She was one of the few living who’d done what I was about to do.

Long practice kicked in and I stopped second guessing myself, pushed instead of second guess the second guessing.  I had asked her things, had gotten minimally useful replies, and a loathsome task.  Her experience would have hinged on her gifts, which I lacked entirely.  Advice from her would have taken the form ‘fly rapidly around kicking everyone’s heads off until She appears, then lick her boots.’

Nonetheless, it was easy to fall into such patterns.  I’d had a month.  Looking at my warband, I thought I’d done pretty well, but had I done well enough?  Was there ways I could have done better?  Would it be sufficient?

Tomorrow, King Arthur would tell me the answer.

*************************************************************************************

Work with Builder on training her gift in combat:

“This isn’t working,” I told her.

Builder didn’t say anything, but the brand new black eye made her agreement more than obvious.

“What’s going wrong?” I asked.  “Balls only fly because they are shaped for flying.  If you can just make them have protrusions that are a different shape they should miss.”

“You are throwing the balls too fast,” she complained, in a monotone voice, “Like I told you at the start, and again after the first hour!”

“No one is going to gently toss weapons at you,” I retorted, heatedly, “They are actually going to try and kill you.  We are talking about arrows, bullets, or at the very least slings and thrown rocks.  I’m not exactly a trained pitcher, here.  If these are too fast for you then you aren’t going to stop anyone who is trying seriously!”

She held up both hands in a congratulatory gesture.

“Ex-act-ly!”  she said,  “I’m not a combat Ultra.  I made that clear to you when I joined up!  My conjuration isn’t like Adder’s, it takes time for things to manifest.  Even a brisk walk makes it hard for me to put something on someone.  Something at any kind of pace? Forget it!”

I scowled at her, trying to figure out how to motivate her.

“And shouldn’t your gift be protecting me?” she complained.  “That hurt a lot, and I know Ultra strength doesn’t go along with projectiles.”

“I made you bulletproof,” I told her.  “That has nothing to do with thrown objects.”

She pulled a face.

“That’s dumb.”

I shrugged.

“It’s how my gift…”

Ok, yeah, I got the irony.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not pressing you because I enjoy it.  Or because I’m trying to emphasize how you much you depend on us or anything.  You know me well enough to know I’m not about that.  I’m trying to save your life.  We are going into battle.  Tomorrow you will live, or you will die.”

She looked up at me.

“Throw again,” she said.

I grabbed the museum prop, took aim.

Life wasn’t a movie.  You didn’t suddenly get better at something just because you needed to.  I drew my hand back to throw, already sick with the certainty that the ball would fly unhindered, would slam once again into my friend’s form.

I threw it.

Or, at least, I tried to.

But something had joined my hand to my waste, and something else had grown rapidly across my eyes, a sort of stone visor.

“Shit!” I snarled, moving a hand up to push the visor aside.

Builder had moved, while I’d been distracted, and was now hunkered comfortably down behind the couch.

“That wasn’t the drill!” I objected.

“You said to stop the objects, well, they move too fucking fast.  So I stopped the stationary target.  Best I could do.”

I chuckled, dropping the prop down to the ground alongside the powdery stone she’d built up on me.

Life wasn’t a movie.  But movies were made by people, people drawing on their life experiences.  Desperation wasn’t magical, didn’t give you new capabilities that you’d never had before.  But it was certainly inspirational, and, on the right day, if you were lucky, it might let you make better use of the abilities you already had.

*************************************************************************************

Debrief Posse:

“You already know how my part went!” said Builder, cheerfully.

Owner shot me a dark look from where she knelt at her side, a cold cloth pressed to the bruise around her face.

It was possible, I’d allow, that I’d thrown the props a bit too hard.

“And yours, Owner?” I asked.

“I didn’t beat up any of our friends, if that’s what you are asking!” she fired back.

I looked over to Smasher, finally invited to a briefing, letting Builder settle Owner down a bit.

“Training’s going well,” said Smasher.  “They were all talking about your morning thing, so I put them through their paces, tired them out.  Stuff went pretty good.”

I grinned.  I could tell that things had gone well because Smasher had arrived without her characteristic haze of alcohol.  I had no idea how long her straight edge my last, but we’d been lucky enough that it got her to the edge of the battle.  If it went one more day she’d actually fight alongside us.

“I got your maps!” interrupted Owner.  “They are great.  And I didn’t just get the ones of the Old world either?”

I looked over dubiously.

“I also bought maps based on what the situation might be if, say, there’d been a few decades of decay and urban war.  It didn’t cost me anything to try, and my gift came through!”

I still figured the maps of the old world, or at least of Owner’s version of it, would be more useful, but there might be something of worth in these.  Worth a look, anyway.

“I’ll check them over,” I said, “Now get some rest.  Tomorrow is a big day.”

*************************************************************************************

Walter Note: The battle will be more than one update long.  You are deciding on your initial approach in this week’s response.

 

The Plan:

– We attack on the 28th. The only person who finds out about this early is Prevailer, who gets to discover this on the 25th. On the 26th, those members of our Posse that we can trust not to blab find out.

-On the 28th, Smasher and the warband find out. Preferably while being herded into the trucks.

– Merlin’s invisible troops are, of course, invisible. They are also carrying Knight equipment. Picker’s assassins carried Knight equipment. Hmmm. But what the Knights are asking for in exchange for the use of their equipment is morally completely reprehensible. I can’t countenance that, and would lose my Resistance contact if I did. (I would deserve to lose my Resistance contact if I did that. I would be truly a monster.)

– I need to bear in mind that Merlin and Arthur might have empowered the same people. That is to say, some of Merlin’s invisible assassins might have Ultra Strength, or Speed, or Toughness. They’re already hitting above their weight – on top of that, they may actually have some weight to hit on top of.

– Another option for dealing with Merlin is to take advantage of KEM. I know where she lives, what she can do and who she cares for; leaving that report on Merlin in the right place should be enough to get her killed outright. However, I shouldn’t use KEM on more than one person. Merlin is a greater threat than Guinevere.

– Third option – use Owner to demolish Merlin’s house in the middle of the night (buying and demolishing the property).

– Fourth option – take advantage of Builder’s stuff-stretching ability to ensure that our confrontation happens in an ankle-deep flood. Even invisible people can be seen walking through ankle-deep water – if nothing else, by the foot-shaped hollows in the water.

– We hope the KEM managed to take out Merlin, and we further hope that doing so reversed her Power’s effects. However, if not, we have a multipronged strategy against those invisible troops. Firstly, Merlin herself is killed quickly – sniper bullet, if necessary (no showboating here). Second, a smoke machine may make invisible people visible, and a laser can blind their spotters, effectively making them ineffective on the field.

– Guinevere is easily handled. I need merely imbue my Posse with fireproof; after that, Smasher can take her out easily. (Ankle-deep water should mess with her, too, by extinguishing a lot of fires).

– Lancelot and Arthur are unlikely to be trouble in the final confrontation.

– That giant Union tank, on the other hand, is a problem (and not a small one). But Builder should be able to deal with it; her power works at any range. She can close off any gun barrels by extending the barrel material _inwards_, she can mess up the engine by making the internals just grow crazy spikes everywhere, and so on. Once she can see it, she can ruin it utterly – and probably without even leaving any external sign of her sabotage, so it can all be blamed on the Union being idiots.

– Builder is our go-to person for ranged anti-Union-tech operations. No machine can long survive her vengeful gaze, once she’s decided to smash it. And if the Union gets wise to the point of limiting our visibility (say, with smoke), the Smasher can just smash the smoke…

– If the Ar Harbour team don’t want to come out and fight, we can draw them out by taking hostages. from the people they care for. This strategy is unpleasant and distasteful, but it will work, and will draw them away from buildings. Moreover, I don’t actually need to permanently harm the hostages, not if I’m threatening enough.

-Talking of Smasher, if she can smash *fire*, then Guinevere doesn’t stand a hope.

*************************************************************************************

 

Day 28:

Days remaining: 0- Go time!

AP available: Not tracked in crisis situation

Prestige: 3

Timeslots available: Not tracked due to crisis, you will be assumed following the plan unless votes contradict

Posse: 3 or 3 out of 3 slots filled

Force size: 45

Condition: Healthy

[spoiler=Ultras]

 

(Ultra format: Role, Ultra Strength/Speed/Toughness, other gift description)

Posse:

Builder — 0/0/0, a woman who can alter objects for miles around into other things, blessed with a ‘Bulletproof’ blend

Owner – housemate, 0/0/1 operates an imaginary firm, with real effects on the world,

Smasher — 3/0/1, a woman who is billed as the strongest Ultra fighter of all time

Ultra Allies:

Maker- Friend, and protégé of Snitcher, 0/0/1, can summon the spirit of things

Clawer – Ultra fighter 2/0/1, melee combatant, deadly hooks for hands

Stopper – partner of Clawer, 0/0/0, steals form’s velocity by looking at them

Sticker – Did dentistry for her brother, 0/0/2, Creates slime, can choose its stickiness

Grower – 0/*0/1, an outside Ultra I sponsored into the Lair, has a bullet blend from me, can rapidly increase the size and mass of objects

Joker — 0/2/0, a woman who can change what other people/herself look like

Replayer — 1/2/0, she can ‘step back in time’ to undo damage that she takes

Ultra Enemies:

Masher- Enemy, and fellow protégé of Subtracter, 3*/0/3*, trades off strength and durability as she moves or stays still

Picker – First Fist protégé, 0/1/0, ‘selects the outcome of things’

Ultra Acquaintances:

Tracker – Running buddy, 1/0/1, Creates tracks, and can move things on them

Shower – Adder’s protégé, 1*/0/1*, gains strength and durability from witnesses

Echoer – Singer I am a fan of, 1/1/1, can duplicate any action that she sees

Bubbler – Operates Ultra clinic 0/0/?, traps things in bubbles that heal and move them

Sucker — Ultra entertainer, ?/?/?, pulls objects/people towards her at incredible rate

Gunner — 0/0/1, she shoots tracking Ultra Blasts at roughly Ultra Strength One

Chiller — 1/0/1, can freeze any object she touches, leaving them brittle and easily broken

Cutter — 1/1/1, she is a brutal front line combatant

Swimmer — 1/0/1, she can ‘swim’ through solid surfaces

Burner — 0/0/1, she can summon Ultra fire from anywhere that she can see

Maxxer — 0/0/0, she can augment the gifts of other Ultras, pushing their gifts

Puncher — 1/0/1, her strength and speed both go up when she repeats her movements

[/spoiler]

 

[spoiler=Crisis]

Travel Arrangements:  We are traveling to Ar Harbour by truck/buses.  How many trucks has Builder crafted for us?  The minimum is 2, in order to fit the whole Warband.  The maximum is 6, just based on how many people we have who can drive.  Please indicate in your Travel Arrangements vote how many trucks you want to take, the order they will travel in, and where each member of the Posse (including Blender) will be riding, as well as where the 4 squads of your warband are going.  Owner and Blender are 2 of the six drivers, along with 4 Warband members.

Travel Route:

Blender has worked out 3 routes to get to Ar Harbour.  The Direct route is the fastest, and will see you reach the area at the very end of afternoon.  She used it when she was a troubleshooter, and isn’t a hundred percent sure it will easily accommodate the buses, and it is also what anyone who works out that you are driving here on this day will take.  The Indirect Route is the safest, sticking to main roads that will definitely take the trucks, but it will take a little longer, seeing you arrive at dusk, which assumes a degree of patience that She might not show.  The Circuitous Route is better for the vehicles than the Direct Route, but not so good as the indirect, and you’ll arrive solidly in the night.  Its saving grace is that it sticks to back roads, and renders it incredibly unlikely that the Union will be able to launch a strike on you before you arrive in Ar Harbour.

For ‘Travel Route’, vote for one of those 3 choices, please.  Your secrecy screens you off from leaving earlier, since the Warband won’t assemble until dawn.

Attack Distance:

You’ve worked out a few possible places to start the attack.  Outside Town sees you stop the buses from beyond where you hope the people of Ar Harbour will see them, then launch an attack on foot, charging into the city and taking out the enemy as they come.  Inside Town sees you drive the buses into Ar Harbour and pull them to a stop immediately outside of the downtown storefront area you are supposed to preserve, whereupon you will launch the aforementioned infantry attack.  DownTown will see you drive the buses right into the center of town before you disembark, delivering your Ultras to the center of Ar Harbour’s population.

If you’d like to propose an option other than those 3, please comment on this post or in the SV thread, and I’ll give it a yay or nay as a vote choice.

Ultra Equipment:

Specify how many (if any) warband members you would like do anything other than fight using their Ultra gifts (remember the patterns that you’ve had Builder memorize during the quest .  Note that if you set them to use the truck’s smoke machines, lasers, or large guns they will have to stay with the trucks for as long as they do so.

Warband/Posse Tactics:

Your warband is split into 4 squads, and can’t be commanded at any smaller levels than that.  Broadly speaking, its basic behavior is to engage and defeat any enemy forces it can.  But the details can be quite important.

First squad is the largest, and has the best close range fighters.  Second squad is another close range squad, just less good than first.  Third squad is about as good at fighting as second squad, but did the best on all of the ‘oddball’ drills, the smoke stuff, laser stuff, etc.  They are also a close range unit, but Smasher thinks they would be best for anything strange that comes up.  Fourth Squad are the Ultras with ranged gifts.

You believe, at this point, that Arthur has Ultras, Knights (that is, beneficiaries of her gift), humans with guns, and Ghosts (that is, beneficiaries of Merlin’s gift), their Union tank and the Round Table members themselves.  You can assign any squad or Posse member any particular target priority you’d like.  This can’t be incredibly detailed for a squad, but Posse members/Blender can manage strategies of arbitrary complexity.

Note that due to setting KEM to action and not getting their report you aren’t sure that Merlin/Ghosts are still going to be factors in this battle.  It is also possible that there will be other forces you didn’t manage to discover.  Future votes will allow you to react to developments on the field, but anticipating them now will be more effective.

Another note to keep in mind is that your command and control technology is yelling.  If you send a squad away from Blender it will follow orders/its own judgement until and unless you link back up with it.

As a last note, and the most important, consider that She will be watching through Blender’s eyes.

Please give a response for each category, votes will be tallied as a whole.  (Given our quest’s particular participation pattern, it is likely that any vote slate which is seconded will carry the day.  I encourage you to question one another before you place your support, work together to come up with something you believe in.  You’ve put months of effort into this, don’t falter at the finish.)

[/spoiler]

 

 

Haunter, Indulger and I finally got together on the last day before we were to reach Istanbul.

I was actually surprised.  At first I’d been expecting Jane to call me up on the carpet basically the minute we started working with the Pantheon in earnest.  When she let it slide I figured that whatever was going down with the healers was her endgame, and she’d let us do as we liked forever.

Split the difference, as it turned out.

“Should we invite the other two?” asked Dale, looking nervously around.

I shrugged, shot a quick look to Jane.

She shook her head.

“They don’t care,” I told Dale.  “Fisher is ok with whatever as long as she gets to moon around Nirav, and he’s so weird nowadays I have no idea what his take on things will be.  Easier to hash things out ourselves, then put it to them as a thing we all three agree on.”

“If we can reach agreement,” temporized Haunter.

“Sure,” said Dale, and he gave an unnecessary ‘scooping’ motion.

His gift kicked in a moment later, and it was as unsettling as always.  No matter how many times the world had collapsed away beneath me, I’d never be quite used to it.  We were hardwired to fear the darkness and the deeps.  It made me think of graves.

It made us all think of graves, I suspect.

But morbid thoughts couldn’t cancel out the obvious privacy advantage of conducting our meetings inside of Dale’s gifts.  We’d simply have to put up with it.

“How have things been going with your plan?” I asked, seizing the opportunity to speak first as the cave subsided.

I didn’t really think that it was possible to put Jane in a better or worse mood, she listened mostly to her inner voices, but if we were going to have to have a fight it would be best to have it after we got all the useful information out.

“Excellent,” she said.  “The gifts work together like Andy suspected they would.  I’ve embodied several hundred scouts for our hosts, with more to come.”

“Monster bodies?” I asked.

“Some,” she allowed.  “Monsters based on animals and old stories on the outside, with their inner parts made up to be as human as possible.  They don’t know anything about biology, fortunately, so they have to make every form human on the inside, it’s the only way their creations stay alive.”

“Some?” asked Dale.  “What are the rest?”

Even through the darkness I could sense Haunter’s smile.

“Dogs,” she said, “And people.  Things that can blend in and bring back useful information from the Union refugees.”

Zero points for guessing whether any of them had done so, or would be doing so.  Jane’s passengers had worked hard to bring this about, and I didn’t begrudge as many of them as wanted to take it their precious escape hatch.  Her capacities didn’t really change if she had a dozen shades or a few thousand, it wasn’t like anyone under us was going to be counting them.

“Congratulations, “ I said.  “I know you’ve been working for this for a long time.  There must have been days where it seemed like it would never happen.”

“That describes your own ambitions as well,” she responded.  “Have you enjoyed your time atop the Pantheon?  I know you wanted to be a part of their peacetime leadership, but I hope that the present situation is an adequate substitute.”

“It is amazing!” I told her, deliberately acting as enthusiastic as I could, “The Goddesses here have gifts I never could have imagined, back in Shington.  This is the center of the world, here with the Brides.  We are at the fulcrum, the core of it all.  The decisions that we make here will shape everything.”

“Except Her,” said Dale, his dour tone an instant antidote to my own energy.

“Even Her,” I insisted.  “She’ll react to what we are doing here.  We are creating reality, Zeus and Prevailer will own what comes next, but our choices right now set the stage that they’ll act on.  Will they come forth to a Union dominated by Ultrahumans, by Zeus’ Brides, or to yet another Union victory?”

“I know which one you’d prefer,” said Jane.  “I’ve heard things, even closeted with the healers.  You’ve been giving genuine advice to their warriors, helping them out as much as you could.”

She didn’t make it sound like an accusation, but of course it was.

“Yeah,” said Dale.  “I have.”

The darkness hid my shock.  I’d been prepared to answer that directly, been expecting a two on one situation.  I’d never seriously considered that Dale might take my side.

“May I ask why?” asked Haunter, her voice cold and formal.

“Well,” said Dale, “I got to know the Pantheon people.  They are just people, you know?  Like, all the talk about Gods or whatever is just talk, these are people.  I like them, so I’m helping them.”

“These ‘people’,” said Haunter, “intend to bring ruin and war to a civilization, Dale.  They will kill the Union citizens wholesale, conjure rape and ruin in the midst of the last bastions of human culture left in the world.”

“I get that they are fighting some other people,” said Dale.  “And I get that you want to be on the other people’s side, but I guess I don’t really get why you want that.  Like, the time we were with the Union we just had Fisher do her mind control stuff on them.  Why do you like the people from back when we were in the embassy and not the people who are marching with us?”

I felt my lips curl up in a smile.  I could never, in my wildest dreams, have imagined such a reversal.  Watching Haunter defend her nonsense against Dale’s questioning was something I’d have cashed in serious favors to experience.

“It isn’t about ‘liking’, Dale,” said Haunter, exasperated, “Its about choosing between barbarism and reason, between a culture which reveres a God King and a pluralistic democracy.”

“Ok,” said Dale, “So why do you like one of those better than the other?  Like, what’s so great about democracy?”

“It’s fair, Dale,” she responded, “It lets us avoid corrupt maniacs abusing their power, and the people are governed by the policies that their chosen representatives enact.  Quality of life improves under it, no one is forced to worship a false God.  There are less rapes and murders!”

I controlled a chuckle.  Haunter could be far more articulate, of course, but it looked as though she’d been taken as off guard by this as I was, and she’d defaulted to a sort of ‘open mic’ state, where her shades just kind of rattled off facts without organizing them into a centralized argument.  It was rare, but we’d seen it a few times.

“Ok,” said Dale, “But wasn’t Fidel a maniac who abused his power?  And, like, I feel like the Brides are under the policies that they choose to be under, because they are so powerful that no one could tell them what to do.”

“Fidel was…”

She trailed off.

“Fidel was not representative,” I allowed.  “Guys like him are going to happen in any system, I don’t think he is a good place to look for the overall character of Union leadership.”

“Thank you, Preventer,” said Haunter, obviously distrusting me but unable to rebut a generous concession without looking like an utter asshole.  “The point is that he was an outlier.  Vampire is not.  She is the point of their system, a powerful Goddess who thinks the world belongs to her.”

“Doesn’t it though?” asked Dale.

“What?”

“Well, like, what’s going to be better about pretending that she isn’t in charge?  There are two people in the world who are more powerful than her.  You want to give her one vote among millions and see if that makes things better?  How is a lie going to make things better?”

“The idea of ‘powerful’ being defined by Ultra powers is inherently toxic,” snapped Jane.  “In the old world we didn’t have weight lifting competitions to pick who decided public policy.  It is just as easy for assholes to get strong, or, in this case, fortunate in the Process, as it is for virtuous people.  The point of reasoned debate is that the only ones who can win it are the ones who are correct.  Logic is a blade that only the righteous can wield.  Both sides can agree on letting the one who turns out to be correct win, and you can decide major social issues without enormous bloodbaths.”

“So you should be fine with this,” I interrupted.  “We are picking what to do by talking about it, no fighting or anything like that.  Just like you like, right?  And at the end of this, if Dale and I say ‘Pantheon’, and you say ‘Union’ you’ll let yourself be bound by majority rule?”

I kept the sneer out of my voice with effort.

“That’s not..” said Jane, before stopping her sentence to compose herself, “You aren’t debating in good faith.  Your positions were determined before you began, and no matter how good my points are you aren’t about to shift them.”

Was this actually the real persona of Haunter at last?  I couldn’t imagine that that line had come from her mass mind, it was a gross mistake on at least two levels.  The only thing I could think was that I’d offended her so much that her people were giving her the reins, letting her run wild for a bit so that they wouldn’t snap off entirely.

“Jane,” said Dale, hurt obvious in his voice, “That doesn’t make sense.  I used to agree with you and now I’m on the other side.  How can you say that I don’t change my mind?  I think you are the one who can’t change their mind.”

My hands flapped gleefully before me, and I did nothing to quiet them.  How long had I waited for someone else to have to answer this sort of nonsense?  How sweet was it to be in the clique that got to win in our little Fist?  After so many times where Haunter had gotten her way?

“Dale,” she said, desperation coloring her voice, “I answered hastily, accepted false pretenses, the majority would have to be calculated with all of my passengers, in order for this to be truly democratic, and I was referring to Preventer as the one whose interests were fixed.  I know that you’ve swung recently, and I was hoping to talk to you about why that might be.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, disregarding the nonsense about her gift giving her the final say in our conversation.  “About Dale I mean.”

“Yeah,” he echoed.  “What did you want to ask about?  We could use some talk that isn’t fighting, let us all cool down a bit.”

“Ok,” said Haunter.  “How many of Lotus’ potions have you used today, so far?  My shades have reported you drinking a lot more of them than-“

“You are spying on me?” he asked, the hurt returning to his tone.

“I’m concerned about you,” she said, which I thought was a solid dodge, “I know that your gift heals you up when you touch the ground, but I don’t think it affects these potions.  I’m worried that you might be changing, becoming more like Lotus and less like the rest of us.”

“You don’t like me smarter?” he asked.  “I guess maybe I would have been okay with that before, but it kind of feels insulting.”

“Its-“

Dale cut her off.

“No, sorry, let me work through this.  It isn’t that you don’t like when I’m smart, being smart lets me understand that.  What you have a problem with is that I’m choosing my own things now, not just doing what you say.  That’s really…I hate that.”

“Dale, you don’t-“ said Haunter.

This time he didn’t cut her off by speaking, but with his gift.  The cave rose up beneath him, bearing him back out into the camp.

I stood in the darkness for a few seconds, not trusting myself to say anything, for fear of laughter unbalancing my tone.

“This,” she said after a moment, “This is bad for both of us.  You understand that, right?  Dale’s subversion can’t possibly be any use in either of our endgames.”

“I don’t think he’s subverted,” I said, “I think he’s become a different person, but I think he is still the boss of him.”

“It’s the same thing,” she insisted.  “Like someone with a drinking habit or an addiction to a dangerous drug.  The new person he’s becoming is one midwifed by Lotus.  Her gift is carving new grooves into his soul.  She doesn’t need to control him explicitly in order to wield tremendous influence over him.”

“Like Blisser,” I said.

“Who?” she asked.

“Back in Shington there’s an Ultra who just makes people super happy.  It doesn’t do mind control or anything, she just makes you happy.  But people get addicted to her, hang around, do favors and stuff.”

“Then yes,” she answered, “Just like that.  Dale is clinging to Lotus’ gift, he likes what it brings him, and it is making him do things he wouldn’t otherwise.”

“Alright,” I said, “But what if I like the new Indulger better than the old one?”

“Excuse me?”

“Nobody forced him, right?” I asked.  “He chose to get smarter, and now he agrees with me that the Pantheon is the way forward.  Why should I want him to go back?  What’s so great about dumb Dale’s old decision?  Isn’t it ok to change your mind?”

“Think about what you are saying!” she snapped.  “He isn’t ‘changing his mind’ in the sense of making a different decision, he is literally ‘changing his mind’.  He is embracing a despotic and cruel culture despite the kindness of his nature, entirely because he couldn’t stand to lose his augmentations!”

“What’s your evidence of that?” I asked.

I didn’t particularly care, mind.  I wasn’t infected by Jane’s particular mania for everything following some unwritten set of rules.  But I was interested, and as long as we were down in a hole I figured we might as well get some talking in.

“What else could it be?” she asked.

I shrugged, which was a wasted gesture in the darkness.

“Dale’s gotten some experience now with Pantheon culture, at the fort and now with the Host.  What if he finds it to his liking, entirely aside from whatever the drinks are doing to him?”

She scoffed.

“Constant jockeying for leadership?  A perpetual war?  Life and death struggles every week?  What could anyone find appealing about this?”

“Comradery?” I suggested, “Other people looking up to him, a context for where his gift makes him a figure of power and influence, rather than a humble builder of roads?  Remember that he was an Ultra Fight-er before.”

“That’s not Dale,” she said, certainty rock solid in her voice, “He chose to build roads instead of working for Her for most of his life.  He chooses to leave his opponents alive, when possible.  He is the furthest thing from these people.”

“Was,” I corrected her.

She was quiet for a long moment after that.

“Jane,” I said, “What would it hurt, for us to back the Pantheon?  You are intelligent.  You have to understand that whatever happens with this attack, the Union is doomed.  Zeus is coming, along with the rest of the Brides.  The Union will follow the old world into ruin, and from it will rise a renewed Pantheon.  We have a chance to be part of that.”

She was silent again, and I was about to keep talking when she spoke up.

“I’ll have to share something with you,” she said.  “Something I hadn’t planned to.  I’d always nursed the fantasy of letting you get your happy ending, letting reality do the rug pulling there.  In a perfect world you get torn apart by the women you had raped in your Gardens.  But I shouldn’t let poetic justice obstruct the real thing.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.  “You shouldn’t be stupid enough to think a threat from you matters to someone who is invincible.”

“Reality,” she said.  “I’m going to have to give you a broader picture, bring you inside a secret that almost no one else knows about.”

“As tricks go, this is a pretty shitty one.” I told her.

I could sense her shaking her head.

“Your argument for the Pantheon, for Ultra dominance, it is entirely based on the rule by the strongest, right?  We shouldn’t fight fate, it wouldn’t work.  Since Zeus will win we should be on his side, regardless of which side would be better for the future.”

“Force rules the world,” I agreed, not sure where she was going with this.

“Well,” she said.  “Condemner let me in on some truths about Force, and about the World, and you aren’t backing a winner.  The Pantheon is doomed, and so is the Regime.  The only thing that’s left is trying to make sure Humanity doesn’t go down with them.”

“Come again?” I asked.

“Condemner, all gifts really, are extradimensional entities, they provide their benefits in exchange for our experiences.  It’s a game for them, and the most important thing is that that game is about to be over.”

“What?”

“Let me explain in more detail…”

Results from Previous round votes:

1 Vote plan CCC (More than one voter is a luxury!  The best quests are…uh…really small and unpopular?  I’m not very good at this…)

*************************************************************************************

Winning Plan:

Plan:

[Morning] Mess around with the smoke machine settings. Try to find something that makes a light mist – easy enough to fight in, nothing that’ll block anyone’s view – especially nothing that’ll block my view, and by extension Prevailer’s view through my eyes – but enough to outline invisible, tangible people.

 

(If I run out of smoke canisters, Builder should have no trouble refilling them from the drops left at the end).

 

[Afternoon] Ask around, finding survivors of previous Ar Harbour expeditions. I want to know where they met their Union ambush on the way; so that I’m ready if the Union is lazy enough to repeat their ambush at the same approximate location.

 

Posse:

 

[Owner]: Get hold of some fire extinguishers. We might not need them but, you know, better safe than sorry. And we will have at least one pyromaniac Ultra to deal with, so…

 

[Builder]: Memorise pattern: Fire extinguisher. It’s basically a cylinder of pressurised gas; we might well appreciate having some *big* fire extinguishers handy on the day.

 

[Smasher, afternoon]: Train the warband in anti firearm maneuvers, while using the smoke machine. This keeps her sober, reinforces the bond she is forming with the warband, and ensures that they are used to working in smoke.

Day 26 Log :

6 AP at start of day (5 at end of last day +1 for half night’s sleep)

-2 Experiment with smoke machine (4 AP)

Roll 10, +1 for success, +1 for Crit (6 AP)

-2 Seek Target Information (survivors) (4 AP)

Roll 10, +1 for success, +1 for Crit (6 AP)

Builder Memorize pattern, Fire Extinguisher

Roll 6, success

Owner: Get Fire Extinguishers

Roll 6, success

Smasher: Train the Warband

Roll 5, success

End of day, 6 AP

*************************************************************************************

Work with Smoke Machine:

There were a few settings on the smoke machine, helpfully labeled ‘smoke’, ‘mist’ and ‘haze’.  I messed around with all of them.

The smoke setting was the first thing I tried.  It was thick, heavy stuff, caused some minor coughing in the less durable Ultras and reduced the visible range.  It billowed out pretty fast, at least, and people moving around in its produced visible eddies and whirls in it.

Obviously I didn’t have any invisible people to test on, so I was making due by testing with the Parkers and trying to pretend that I couldn’t see their actual forms.  I couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t fooling myself, but I was on guard for the possibility at least.

The ‘mist’ setting produced smoke that clung low to the ground, down around feet/ankle level.  It was much less thick and then the first level I tested, pooling mostly around corners and obstacles.

It didn’t hinder vision at all, and I could still see the effects of people walking around in it well enough.  On the other hand it was much less obvious, much easier to miss people’s ‘wakes’, in it, and it came out quite slowly.  If I used this I’d need to figure out a way to deploy it well before my troops moved in.

The last setting, ‘haze’, was also interesting.  It was much more subtle than the other two, just kind of adding a bit of a twinge to the air.  It didn’t cling to the ground, and we could see through it just fine.  It deployed rapidly and spread wildly.

The problem was that I couldn’t really see any wakes in it.  I tried to tell myself that they were there, but the truth was that if I couldn’t see a person the haze wasn’t really distinct enough to make out where they were, particularly if they weren’t moving all that fast.

I also messed around with the lasers in conjunction with the mist, remembering concert experiences from a world long gone by.

The haze was definitely the winner there.  That was, in fact, its principle purpose.  The lasers were visible in their entirety within the haze, flickering lines cast from their generators to their targets.  The mist worked well with the lasers too, except of course for the fact that it was a much lower bank to begin with.  The smoke didn’t really play well with them at all, blocking and diffusing them like it did the rest of the visible spectrum.

I think there are two viable alternatives.

The first is to do a smoke assault, accept the limited sightlines in exchange for seeing invisible antagonists and just rush them under the gas’s cover.  This will outline their invisible troops, hinder their ranged attackers and can easily be achieved by just giving people smoke grenades to hurl as we go.  I thought it was likely that She would tolerate my limited vision as long as I was up front and in the thick of things, but this might well annoy her.

The second is the haze/laser assault, where we’d go in with the light mist and a grid of lasers effects.  This wouldn’t hinder their ranged attackers, unless we blinded them with the lasers, but it would outline their invisible warriors and we wouldn’t have any coordination problems.  It would confine our battle to the zone around the trucks, however, as the lasers/haze machines weren’t portable.

*************************************************************************************

Seek Target Information (Ambush Location):

“You were with Burier?” I asked.

Massacrer nodded.

“Yeah, that whole fucking trip.  I stayed the whole time.  Not like that Defamer bitch, I know she talks some shit about how she was with the Warlord, but take it from me, its just talk.”

“I know,” I told her.  “That’s why I’m talking to you.”

I didn’t bother to tell her that I’d already spoken to Defamer, and that I was checking both their stories against one another.

So far as I could tell, the actual situation had been that Burier was with both of them, but neither knew about the other.  They’d both gone on the attack, and both bailed out at some point.  Defamer first, when she found out about her rival, and Massacrer second, after the ambush.

“We got ambushed,” she said, warming to an old gripe.

I nodded sympathetically, sliding another one of Owner’s beers across the table.

“We’d just bedded down, shit, day like any other, you know?  No one was watching out or anything.  We had our minds on getting some sack time, get an early start the next day.  Burier was starting to worry that we might not make it by when She said we should be there.”

“Where had you actually got to?” I asked, casually, not letting on that this was the whole point of our interview.

“We were, shit, we’d just crossed over a river, we were by the coast…”

I drummed my fingers, impatiently.

I’d brought her into the Lair for the interrogation, figuring it would help her understand that disappointing me was a bad idea.  We’d met up my usual Company Facility, taken a booth.

“We’d just stopped following 295, started going along the coast.  We’d had to go back a day, make sure that we didn’t miss it.”

So they’d been lost.  That made a lot of sense.  The old maps were probably pretty inaccurate nowadays.

“Maybe Swick?” she guessed.

I shook my head.

“That’s Union territory.  You wouldn’t have entered there without a fight.”

“Oh, right,” she said.  “Now I remember, we had to go around Swick, we were up past it, a way inland.”

“Can you remember any markings?” I asked.  “Any signs or anything like that?  Did any of the locals that you hit up for supplies say anything about it?”

“On the last day?” she asked.

I nodded, impatiently.

“I remember a lot about the battle,” she said.  “We were-“

I waved a hand, cut her off.

“They came out of nowhere, you never saw it coming, you wouldn’t have fled except you knew we needed to be warned…that about it?”

She subsided a bit.

I pushed subtlety to the side for a second.

“I’ve heard about the ambush.  I know how it happened.  I know you ran.  I don’t care about that, not at all.  The only thing I want to hear from you is where it happened.  Exactly where.”

She was quiet for a very long moment.

I reached out towards her, a friendly gesture, like I was going to put a reassuring hand on her shoulders.

She shrank away from my hand, gazing at it like her life hung from it.

Which, of course, it did.

“Gusta!” she finally blurted out.

“What?” I asked, thinking of the famous city down south.

“We’d just crossed the river at Gusta, we were going almost straight towards dawn, we’d stopped for the night in, like, a big building.  I think it was an old store or something.”

I pulled my hand back.

Close to Ar Harbor, near Gusta, almost due west, a ruined building.  That should be enough for my purposes.  I wasn’t planning on camping anywhere near Ar Harbor, but if I had to, for whatever reason, I’d make sure that I wasn’t in the last place the Union had struck.

*************************************************************************************

Debrief Posse:

“You guys get the fire extinguishers?” I asked.

Owner and Builder nodded, wordlessly.

“And you can make more?” I asked again.

They nodded again.

It was nice that sometimes things weren’t huge, dramatic productions.  Their gifts should let them do this, and, hey look, they did.

“How’d things go for Smasher?” I asked.  “With the training?”

Owner chuckled.

“She tried to teach them how to smash bullets,” Builder explained.  “And it kind of came about that, you know, being Ultra tough she hadn’t really got any idea how to avoid getting shot.”

“She just, I guess, gets shot?” I asked.  “Like, doesn’t really try to dodge?”

It kind of made sense.  Smasher didn’t really value her own life.  I couldn’t see her really putting any thought into it.

“Worse yet,” said Builder.  “No one has ever tried shooting at her.  Apparently her gift got well known pretty quick, and from then on all her fighting was with Ultras.”

I rolled my eyes.

“It wasn’t a total loss, though,” Builder continued.  “Some of the other Ultras had good advice on the topic, they shared it around the Warband.  I don’t really know much about how to stay out of rifle sights myself, but it seemed like Smasher was confident that they’d gotten better at it.”

Hierarchy continued to be the worst, news at eleven.  It was a good thing I’d encouraged my followers to share their experiences with each other, apparently that was still paying off.

“They should be ready, I think,” said Owner, “For the attack at the end of the week.”

I looked down for a moment.

There’d been no going back ever since I confirmed it with Her, of course, but it was still somehow sobering to say it out loud.

“About that,” I cautioned.

They both looked over, concern and surprise on their faces.

“We go the 28^th,” I said.  “We’ll set out in the morning, before the dawn, and hit them just as the sun is going down.”

“What the-“ said Owner, before Builder interrupted her.

“That’s the day after tomorrow!”

*************************************************************************************

The Plan:

– We attack on the 28th. The only person who finds out about this early is Prevailer, who gets to discover this on the 25th. On the 26th, those members of our Posse that we can trust not to blab find out.

-On the 28th, Smasher and the warband find out. Preferably while being herded into the trucks.

– Merlin’s invisible troops are, of course, invisible. They are also carrying Knight equipment. Picker’s assassins carried Knight equipment. Hmmm. But what the Knights are asking for in exchange for the use of their equipment is morally completely reprehensible. I can’t countenance that, and would lose my Resistance contact if I did. (I would deserve to lose my Resistance contact if I did that. I would be truly a monster.)

– I need to bear in mind that Merlin and Arthur might have empowered the same people. That is to say, some of Merlin’s invisible assassins might have Ultra Strength, or Speed, or Toughness. They’re already hitting above their weight – on top of that, they may actually have some weight to hit on top of.

– Another option for dealing with Merlin is to take advantage of KEM. I know where she lives, what she can do and who she cares for; leaving that report on Merlin in the right place should be enough to get her killed outright. However, I shouldn’t use KEM on more than one person. Merlin is a greater threat than Guinevere.

– Third option – use Owner to demolish Merlin’s house in the middle of the night (buying and demolishing the property).

– Fourth option – take advantage of Builder’s stuff-stretching ability to ensure that our confrontation happens in an ankle-deep flood. Even invisible people can be seen walking through ankle-deep water – if nothing else, by the foot-shaped hollows in the water.

– We hope the KEM managed to take out Merlin, and we further hope that doing so reversed her Power’s effects. However, if not, we have a multipronged strategy against those invisible troops. Firstly, Merlin herself is killed quickly – sniper bullet, if necessary (no showboating here). Second, a smoke machine may make invisible people visible, and a laser can blind their spotters, effectively making them ineffective on the field.

– Guinevere is easily handled. I need merely imbue my Posse with fireproof; after that, Smasher can take her out easily. (Ankle-deep water should mess with her, too, by extinguishing a lot of fires).

– Lancelot and Arthur are unlikely to be trouble in the final confrontation.

– That giant Union tank, on the other hand, is a problem (and not a small one). But Builder should be able to deal with it; her power works at any range. She can close off any gun barrels by extending the barrel material _inwards_, she can mess up the engine by making the internals just grow crazy spikes everywhere, and so on. Once she can see it, she can ruin it utterly – and probably without even leaving any external sign of her sabotage, so it can all be blamed on the Union being idiots.

– Builder is our go-to person for ranged anti-Union-tech operations. No machine can long survive her vengeful gaze, once she’s decided to smash it. And if the Union gets wise to the point of limiting our visibility (say, with smoke), the Smasher can just smash the smoke…

– If the Ar Harbour team don’t want to come out and fight, we can draw them out by taking hostages. from the people they care for. This strategy is unpleasant and distasteful, but it will work, and will draw them away from buildings. Moreover, I don’t actually need to permanently harm the hostages, not if I’m threatening enough.

-Talking of Smasher, if she can smash *fire*, then Guinevere doesn’t stand a hope.

*************************************************************************************

 

Day 27:

Days remaining: 2!!

AP available: (6 at end of day + 1 for 6 hours sleep) = 7/10

Non AP Action: Swap in a new plan.  You write in a new plan, I’ll give you Mia’s assessment of it.  If you don’t do this then the existing one will be executed.  The plan that is in force when its execution date arrives will be used for the actual battle, though there may be mid battle votes that could alter it in process.

Non AP Action: Make clear whether Smoke Grenade Attack or Haze/Laser Trucks is your plan.  If you don’t specify either we’ll proceed with Haze/Laser Trucks

Prestige: 3

Timeslots available: 2, morning and afternoon

Builder Timeslot Available: 2, morning and afternoon

Owner Timeslot Available: 2, morning and afternoon

Smasher : Timeslot Available: morning or afternoon, but not both

Posse: 3 or 3 out of 3 slots filled

Force size: 45

Condition: Healthy

[spoiler=Ultras]

 

(Ultra format: Role, Ultra Strength/Speed/Toughness, other gift description)

Posse:

Builder — 0/0/0, a woman who can alter objects for miles around into other things, blessed with a ‘Bulletproof’ blend

Owner – housemate, 0/0/1 operates an imaginary firm, with real effects on the world,

Smasher — 3/0/1, a woman who is billed as the strongest Ultra fighter of all time

Ultra Allies:

Maker- Friend, and protégé of Snitcher, 0/0/1, can summon the spirit of things

Clawer – Ultra fighter 2/0/1, melee combatant, deadly hooks for hands

Stopper – partner of Clawer, 0/0/0, steals form’s velocity by looking at them

Sticker – Did dentistry for her brother, 0/0/2, Creates slime, can choose its stickiness

Grower – 0/*0/1, an outside Ultra I sponsored into the Lair, has a bullet blend from me, can rapidly increase the size and mass of objects

Joker — 0/2/0, a woman who can change what other people/herself look like

Replayer — 1/2/0, she can ‘step back in time’ to undo damage that she takes

Ultra Enemies:

Masher- Enemy, and fellow protégé of Subtracter, 3*/0/3*, trades off strength and durability as she moves or stays still

Picker – First Fist protégé, 0/1/0, ‘selects the outcome of things’

Ultra Acquaintances:

Tracker – Running buddy, 1/0/1, Creates tracks, and can move things on them

Shower – Adder’s protégé, 1*/0/1*, gains strength and durability from witnesses

Echoer – Singer I am a fan of, 1/1/1, can duplicate any action that she sees

Bubbler – Operates Ultra clinic 0/0/?, traps things in bubbles that heal and move them

Sucker — Ultra entertainer, ?/?/?, pulls objects/people towards her at incredible rate

Gunner — 0/0/1, she shoots tracking Ultra Blasts at roughly Ultra Strength One

Chiller — 1/0/1, can freeze any object she touches, leaving them brittle and easily broken

Cutter — 1/1/1, she is a brutal front line combatant

Swimmer — 1/0/1, she can ‘swim’ through solid surfaces

Burner — 0/0/1, she can summon Ultra fire from anywhere that she can see

Maxxer — 0/0/0, she can augment the gifts of other Ultras, pushing their gifts

Puncher — 1/0/1, her strength and speed both go up when she repeats her movements

[/spoiler]

 

[spoiler=Actions]

Actions:

[ ] Seek Transportation

-[ ] Scavenge (Timeslot cost: 2; AP cost 4, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: My current transportation sufficed for me in my troubleshooter role, but I will likely require a larger vehicle, or several vehicles, in order to bring everyone to Ar Harbor. I can seek to find something in the suburbs and surrounding towns.

Concerns: Leaving Shington could be dangerous, and I am far from guaranteed to find a bus or truck suitable to my needs, as the area has already been heavily scavenged.

-[ ] Trade with existing owners (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: As above, but instead of fixing up ruined vehicles I’ll negotiate to get them from their current owners.

Concerns: Snitcher may disapprove of a warlord being civil

-[ ] Seize by force (Timeslot cost: 2; AP cost 4, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: As above, but instead of asking my contacts for vehicles I’ll just take what I want. My role as warlord and my Tally should minimize resistance

Concerns: People like their vehicles, and won’t like the one who takes them. I will make enemies.

-[ ] Seek Transportation [Adder + Company] (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: As above, but Adder can use his gift to make something for my purposes, and the Company can duplicate it and make it permanent.

Concerns: Adder and I are not close, he may decline to aid me, owing to his rivalry with my sponsor, Subtracter.

 

[ ] Seek Target Information

-[ ] Company (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: The Company logs every Ultra they create. Their Ar Harbor records would be useful information

Concerns: Ultras migrate and conceal their gifts, this information would be incomplete

-[ ] Subtracter (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: Subtracter is the military leader of the Regime, she will have information on this target

Concerns: Subtracter is stupid and violent, I don’t like to be around her

-[ ] Survivors (Timeslot cost:1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: There have been 2 other attempts at Ar Harbor. I can seek out and question survivors in the outer city.

Concerns: I may be unable to find any survivors, and I may be misled by liars.

 

[ ] Seek Posse Members

-[ ] wander & gossip, (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 1, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: There are dozens of powerful Ultras in the Lair. I know only the barest fraction of them. I can learn the basics on 1-6 of them in a few hours of socializing and gossiping, opening up in depth investigation options on them and adding them to my list of acquaintances.

Concerns: None

-[ ] At Ultra Fights, (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 1, refunds 1 on success)

Constraint: Only available in the afternoon or night on days divisible by 4 (day 4, 8, etc)

Motive: There are dozens of powerful Ultras in the Lair. I know only the barest fraction of them. I can learn the basics on 3-12 of them in a few hours of socializing and gossiping at this kind of event.

Concerns: Ultras associated with the Fights are more likely than most to be melee combatants.

 

[ ] Seek Warband Members

-[ ] At the Yard, (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: The Lair is surrounded by hundreds of Regime Ultras. The strongest come to the Yard to show their power and appeal to those like me, who would give them purpose. I should be able to gather between 5 and 20 Ultras of such caliber.

Concerns: I will need to provide housing and direction to these Ultras, or risk them wandering off. I can expect to spend at least an action a day on them, and training them might well eat up more. Ideally a Posse member will be tasked with this.

-[ ] [Gang name] From a Gang, (Timeslot cost: 2; AP cost 5, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: The Ultras that surround Shington are organized into Gangs dozens strong. If I can recruit such a force I might have my whole Warband right there.

Concerns: These Ultras likely already have patrons in the Lair, who I would need to negotiate with. Their leader would also likely want a place in my Posse, and she would be the primary locus of their loyalty until I’d had time to win them over.

 

[ ] Investigate Acquaintance:

-[ ] [Name], (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success, 2 if we become allies)

Motive: I can spend some serious one on one time with an Ultra I’ve chosen, evaluating the capability of their gift, the alignment of their values with mine, and their basic  competence. If all checks out, I might move them into my Ultra Allies column.

Concerns: None

 

[ ] Invite Ally into Posse:

-[ ] [Name], (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: If I want to bring an ally into my posse, get them to take actions on my behalf and rise or fall with me, this is the way to do it. I will only take this action on those I’ve already made allies, and once this has been taken it is difficult to undo.

Concerns: Posse members are most of the way into my circle of trust, and will operate on my behalf, representing me to stranger. A mistake here would be dangerous and damaging. I should be careful before taking this step, potentially investigating a prospect several times.

 

[ ] Seek Information on Snitcher’s patterns

-[ ] Passive listening (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 1, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: Snitcher can ride my senses at any moment, and bring Her along. If I am ever to contact my KEM allies, my resistance allies, or show any kindness or weakness whatsoever, I need to understand when this is likely to take place. Gossip can hint at this, particularly if I carefully steer conversations. This action would be mostly undetectable, even if he was riding me when I took it.

Concerns: None

-[ ] Active interrogation of Snitches (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 2 on success)

Motive: As above, but rather than listen for random gossip I will seek out other linked individuals and directly ask them how often he rides their senses, and what actions he has reacted to in the past.

Concerns: More likely Snitcher notices this, unknown consequences of that.

-[ ] Confront Snitcher Directly (Timeslot cost:1; AP cost 4, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: As above, but take the simplest possible route. Go to Snitcher and ask him for the deal.

Concerns: I am sponsored by Subtracter, not Snitcher, he may not wish to aid me. He may demand favors or other services in exchange for the information.

 

[ ] Seek Information on Regime military operations

-[ ] Ask Subtracter (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: My life depends on doing this right. I need to get a basic understanding of what She is expecting from my attack on Ar Harbor. Do I need to seize the Company Facility? Kill all the enemies? Are there any constraints on how I go about it? Subtracter is the leader of the Regime’s military, and my sponsor, she will know these answers.

Concerns: Subtracter is stupid and brutal, and she killed my neighbors, I hate spending time with her.

-[ ] Ask Around (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: As above, but ask survivors of previous missions instead of my evil boss.

Concerns: My predecessors may not have told them everything, their views of their missions may omit certain command level details that I need to worry about.

 

[ ] Relax and Recuperate

-[ ] By visiting Blisser (Timeslot cost: X (slots spent until AP reaches max), AP cost 0, returns 3 per time period. DANGER, this action may cause addiction)

-[ ]By lounging around, (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 0, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: I could do with some rest.

Concerns: None

-[ ]By patronizing entertainment areas (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 1, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: I could do with some rest, and I might learn some things by socializing

Concerns: None

-[ ]By using my gift to repair the city (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 2, refunds 5 on success)

Motive: It needs to be done.

Concerns: This is not becoming behavior of a warlord, Snitcher may take notice, and people may talk

-[ ]By using my gift to heal people (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 1, refunds 5 on success)

Motive: This is why I have my gift.

Concerns: This is not becoming behavior of a warlord, Snitcher may take notice, and people may talk

 

[ ] Organize Armory [Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 2, returns 2 on success)

Motive: I carry, in my backpack and on my person, various items to blend with if the need arises. I am overdue to look through my setup and take an inventory, once that is done I could seek out new objects if I am missing anything useful.

 

Concerns: None

 

[ ] Action: Direct the Warband (Timeslot cost 0, AP cost 1, returns 1 if successful)

Motive: If I need to set my warband in motion, give them a project or whatever, it is as simple as telling them to jump.  My will is their command.

-[ ] Let [Posse Member] Supervise, takes up the Posse Member’s action, modifies success chance based on which Posse member it is, and which action

 

[ ] Action: Train the Warband (Timeslot cost 0, AP cost 1, returns 1 if successful) [Requires a timeslot from the teacher, who should probably be an Ultra combatant]

Motive: Yard Ultras are fierce, but undisciplined.  They are warriors, not soldiers.  I can get better outcomes if I teach them some basics.

-[ ] In Ultra Combat (Gives bonuses on their battle rolls)

-[ ] In anti firearm maneuvers (Makes them suffer less casualties under fire)

-[ ] In obedience (makes them more likely to obey my orders)

 

[ ] Action: Other (Timeslot cost: x, returns x if successful)

 

KEM Actions:

[ ] Assign Assassination mission [Timeslot cost 1, AP cost 3, returns 1 on success, can only be done in the morning, uncertain Snitcher risk]

 

Description: KEM are the only humans who fight back on a consistent, day to day basis.  We’ve come up together, they and I, and pointing them at my foes is only common sense.  If I give them a target, then I trust them to make a good faith effort to put that Ultra down.  Their odds of success, of course, vary wildly depending on how much info I can provide, and the gifts of the Ultra in question.

 

Resistance Actions:

[ ] Assign Information Gathering Mission [Timeslot cost 1, AP cost 2, returns 1 on success, can only be done in the morning, uncertain Snitcher risk]

Description: The humans are the ocean in which the Ultras swim, the saying goes.  The Resistance’s capacity to gather information about Ultras is unsurpassed.  If I give them a target, then they will give me every bit of public information on the target, and often times a little bit more.  Ultras are people, after all.  I believe this with all my heart.  And people trust other people, even those that they ultimately shouldn’t.  I can assign as many targets as I wish, but the more I assign the less details I will probably get, and the longer it might take.

 

[ ] Debrief Information Gathering Mission [Timeslot cost 1, AP cost 0, returns 1 on success, can only be done in the morning, uncertain Snitcher risk]

Description: The information that the Resistance gathers is worthless if I never regain it.  Using protocols I’ve worked out ahead of time, and my recent discovery of Snitcher’s habits, it should be possible for me to take the Resistance’s reports with minimal risk.  I expect I should give them a day or two for local targets, and possibly as much as four for targets in Ar Harbor or further afield.

Smasher Actions:

[ ] Recuperate [Timeslot cost All]

Description: Smasher hangs on the edge of death.  Her body and gift will try to knit her back together each day.

 

Owner Actions:

[ ] Acquire Funds [Timeslot cost 1]

Description: Owner takes action to get more and more valuable assets within our world, increasing her overall funding, hopefully permitting her gift’s actions to be swifter and larger in impact. (Requires Write In clarification on how to do this)

[ ] Change Company [ Timeslot cost 1]

Description: Owner presently runs a package store, located in downtown Washington.  She has, as near as I can estimate, a low six figures saved up.  With this action I can direct her to acquire licenses, expand locations, purchase other businesses, or perform similar deeds, all based around changing the operation and activities of her imaginary franchise. (Requires Write In clarification on how to do this)

[ ] Company Action [ Timeslot cost 2]

Description: This is a catchall action for anything I might think of that could let Owner impact the main battle in Ar Harbor.  Buying up local real estate and demolishing it on a certain date seems like the obvious course of action, but there are a lot of other fringe ideas that I’ve been entertaining. [Requires Write In clarification on how to do this.  The first Action spent on this is about Owner doing tests to make sure this effort will work, the second actually kicks off whatever changes I want in the imaginary world.]

Builder Actions:

[ ] Repair Structure [Timeslot cost 1]

Description: Builder can repair most any structure any structure in just a few hours, spreading broken portions back into place and generating new matter as needed.

 

[ ] Construct Known Structure [ Timeslot cost 1]

 

Description: Builder can construct any easily described structure with the same ease that she repairs them.  Her present education limits this to extremely primitive structures, but that might well be changeable.

 

[ ] Construct Known Items [Timeslot cost 1]

 

Description: Builder’s gits aren’t limited to buildings.  If she can get a perfect understanding of an objects, and samples for every component, then she can form any items that I might desire.  The easiest way to accomplish this, of course, would be to provide her with a sample.

 

[ ] Memorize Patterns [ Timeslot cost 1]

 

Description: Builder’s gifts are heavily limited by her imperfect education.  The more patterns I can get her to learn, the more she can construct from any given material.  If I provide her with patterns or specimens I’m pretty sure she can memorize them and add them to her arsenal.

[/spoiler]

 

 

“You got this, man,” said Ragnarok.

I nodded at him, then at Lotus, and stepped out from between them, walking out onto the platform like it was nothing at all.

The Brides had been watching us approach, of course, but they would never admit that, so it was only now that they ‘noticed me’.  Ouroboros and Vampire were chief among them, but I’d learned enough about their pecking order over the past three days to know that the others around here were pretty high up there.

This was the Grand Host’s leadership, or almost all of it.

“Regimer,” said Vampire.  “What do you want?  We are pretty fucking busy.”

I rolled my head around on my neck, apparently just cracking it.  Really it was a move that was about bringing to their attention how swole I was, how deep my head was set between my shoulders.  This was a real dangerous talk, so I needed to take every little bit of good stuff I could get out of my look and vibe.

“I know,” I said.  “That’s why I didn’t come before.  But I figured maybe you could make time for me now, and maybe I could help you out a bit.”

The night before, as we sheltered down in our cave, I’d felt the camp erupt in turmoil.  Gifts had scoured and shattered the ground, bodies had fallen upon it, and there had basically been a big uproar.  Everyone had run every which way without anything like a plan.

It had been a lot like the shield was a big bowl and the Gods were ants trapped under it. They’d been fighting and struggling for what seemed like the whole of the world, while their enemy watched from outside and above.

I made a mental note to maybe tone down the Green a little in my daily.  That last thought had been kind of like someone else thinking.

“Help us,” said Oro, frowning at me like she didn’t believe me.  “I feel like we heard about that before, from another finger of your little Fist.  She was going to help us with scouting, so that we didn’t get ambushed.  How’s that going?”

I gave a big shrug, trying to get across that I could make them wait for my answers without actually making them wait for my answers.

“I think fine?” I said, making it a question.  “I haven’t been hanging with Haunter too much lately, but I know she’s been working with Goddesses, so I imagine y’all are in charge of whatever is going on there.”

That was actually true.  She’d been distant with the rest of us ever since we got to the Grand Host, staying closeted up with the healers.  I could get it, to be honest, she’d been trying to do the whole ‘give her shades bodies’ thing for a long time, and conveniently Lotus could do the same ‘wise advice giver’ thing  that Jane did.

“He thinks fine,” said Vampire.

“Fine,” echoed Ouroboros.

I let that sit there a bit.  The pressure was on me to answer them, and ordinarily I would’ve, but something about how stuff was going made not saying anything seem like a power move, but one that I couldn’t get blamed for.  Like I was just believing them, so if anything was going to happen it was going to have to start with them saying that they’d been wrong.

“If things are so fine,” said Vampire, breaking the silence after a half minute or so, “why didn’t we get any warning about last night’s attacks?  She’s supposed to be all over this scouting thing, right?  So what’s the point if it doesn’t actually warn anyone!”

I pulled a mug look at her for a bit, eyes bulging and mouth agape.  Ultra Fight hadn’t taught me to do acting at all, like, drama was mostly not a thing in the old wrestling gradition.  But it had taught me overacting just fine, so I’d serve up some melodrama.

“Your girl Manus tried to kill us!” I protested.  “We’ve been super busy killing chumps.  How are we going to have time to help with your other stuff if we are busy helping with the discipline part?”

It would have been lame to openly boast about killing a Bride, but working it in while I talked about something else should be fine.

“It isn’t my job to protect your life,” said Vampire.

“Your value to us is dependent on what you bring along for the ride,” continued Oro, “And so far it is the ability to kill our own.  You can see why we might not put too high a value on that, after last night!”

We’d surmised that the Union hitters hadn’t done the majority of the bloody work last night.  It had been the confusion, the chaos, Pantheon Goddesses killing one another in the dark, paranoid at the shapes around them.

“Scouting wasn’t going to solve that one,” I pointed out.  “You get that they are all around us, right?”

“What do you mean?” asked one of the audience members, an older Bride with a shrewd cast to her face.

“Go more than a few miles in any direction, you run into a Union patrol or two, stealthy and fast, keeping an eye on what goes out.  They move way faster than a walking pace, with their skiffs and such, so they just keep a loose cordon around us.  How you going to scout in that situation?”

“I don’t know,” grated Oro, “maybe fight them?”

“That would kind of break the point of the whole ‘send out powerless scouts’ thing, right?” I said, “Like if they could beat Union troops we’d make them part of our army instead.  They are in stealth forms for blending in, but anyone we send out of the shield gets marked.”

“What’s Haunter’s plan to deal with this?” demanded Vampire.

I made a note in the ‘Vampire is smarter than she usually acts’ column in my mind.  It might be an obvious play, to turn the dilemma around on the one posing it, but it still would have been easy to miss, to sit there like an asshole just guessing how it might be done, letting me tell them they were wrong over and over.

“Me,” I told them, pointing a thumb at my own chest.

“What can you do?” asked Oro.  “The thing where you move the ground and speed us up is helpful, sure, but how are you gonna get the scouts out among the Union squads surrounding us without them seeing them go through the shield?”

I turned the thumb down, pointing to the soil beneath us.

“We go under it,” I told her.  “I’ve been pulsing the ground all around us ever since we joined this column, pushing waves out at the same times every day, different directions, different distances.  Playing havoc with their equipment.”

“Just false alarms,” said Oro, getting it, “But you are going to turn them real in a bit?”

I nodded curtly.

“Haunter is almost done with enough scouts for the first run.  Her ghosts stuck in animal bodies or Union looking bodies.  I’ll push them out through the ground tonight, pop them up out around where the Union probably is.  They can try and get rescued or whatever, and we’ll know where the surrounders are exactly by how fast each one gets picked up.”

If they asked how I’d track where each one got picked up I was prepared to lie about Haunter always knowing where her shades were, but it would be better not to.  The real play was that they had codes from the general, and would hopefully be able to establish communication with the Union, who could feed us some ‘scouting successes’.

“And maybe scouts isn’t all you can send out,” said Vampire.  “Maybe some Brides go along on one of these rides, jump these surrounding units, get a little payback!”

She was a vicious one.

“I don’t see why not,” I allowed.  “I love being helpful.”

“Do you?” asked Oro, dubiously.

“Sure,” I said.  “I’m a helper!  Ask anyone.”

They looked to one another, then to the others who’d come along with me.

This was actually a part of the reason I hadn’t brought any of the Fist along.  I was trying, very hard, to kind of nail into everyone’s mind that we had gone native, that we were basically Gods and Brides like the rest of them.  Rags and Lotus were the two Pantheon people I felt closest two, for opposite reasons, so they were the ones who’d come with.

“He helpful?” asked Oro, pointedly looking to Lotus.

“Sure,” she said, echoing my phrasing.  “Sometimes you wanted a man around, you know?”

She made an obscene gesture as she did so, drawing a small wave of chuckles from the crowd.

“Alright,” said Vampire, once that had died down, “Well if you are so helpful, do you think you could maybe lend us a bit of that help with the problem we are currently facing?”

I gave an amiable shrug, like they’d asked me to paint a fence.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“How did they get through the fence!” she responded, her tone making it more of an answer than an actual question that she was asking me.

“The shield Goddess says they didn’t come through?” I asked, figuring that there wasn’t much harm in restating the obvious.

“She does,” said Vampire, “And we’ve assured herself that she is telling the truth.”

There was a dark undertone to that sentence, which made me think that I didn’t exactly want to know how the Brides satisfied themselves that someone was being honest with them.  No normal army would torture one of their most crucial guys, of course, but I wouldn’t put much past this gang.

“So it was just the ones that hid in front of us then?” I asked, artlessly, without guile, keeping it all on the surface.

“What?!” asked nearly everyone at once.

I kept up the dumb show, only letting my face wrinkle just a bit, like I didn’t understand what they were so surprised at.

“What do you mean ‘hid in front of us’?” demanded Oro.  “Nobody came through the shield from the front either!  She can tell no matter what side they move through.”

“Sure,” I said, nodding along like I didn’t see what she was getting at, “If they move through.  But she probably isn’t all the time getting told by her gift that, like, another step of air has come through right?  Or that she walked another tree into it?”

I saw the moment, the spark as they got it, first one than the next, faces going from open and angry to closed and full of murder.

“So they just sat in front of us,” I rambled on, “Let the shield get carried past them, then got up and walked on in with none the wiser.  Simple, right?”

“Bullshit!” said Oro, instantly.  “We’d have seen them come in!”

Vampire had actually gotten it faster than her supposed minder, I’d noticed.  It seemed to me more and more like Oro was here for some weird trick of her gift, and that Vampire might be both the smart one and the strong one.

“I felt them,” I told her plainly.  “They just sat there like I said, then when we were close they just mixed on in.  You didn’t see them.”

The faces went back to angry on the drop of a dime.

Tough crowd.

“You felt them!” snarled Vampire.  “Your fucking dirt mover gift warned you?  And you didn’t think to tell anyone else about it?  Or do anything yourself?  Just sat on your fat-“

“It isn’t my job to protect your life.” I told her.

No expression on my face, not a hint of smugness.  I just let her own words ring out, stood tall and calm in the silence that followed.

This was the drinks, of course.  No way original flavor Dale could have baited out those words then set them back in her face.  But with Lotus’ upgrades it hadn’t even been hard.

There was a an instant of silence.  I could see the emotions playing out over the crowd, the instant desire to retaliate and shut me up, strangled by the knowledge that to do so would be to criticize Vampire’s stance.

“That’s…” said the one Bride from the crowd who’d spoken up before, but she fell silent as no one else joined in, wilting from the attention in a way that she hadn’t when she’d last drawn it.

At last, after what seemed like entire minutes but must have been really much shorter, Vampire gave a forced chuckle.

It wasn’t convincing at all, sounded nothing like genuine humor, but it didn’t really have to.  Everyone seized upon it, joined in with their own strained mirth, and the tension just kind of leaked away.

“Maybe it should be,” she said, when the fake chuckling had run its course.  “Maybe it fucking should be.”

I gave a shit eating grin, just totally honored to take her orders like the dumb male that I was.

“I’m so busy though,” I mock protested, “I don’t know when someone is going to need fighting, I might not do a good job…”

I trailed off at the end, making it clear that my refusal was sarcastic, the kind of cloying whining that only someone who wasn’t as cool as those of us who were here would bother to do.

“That’s done,” she said, now sounding like Her, the voice of someone who accustomed to stating orders as facts, “No one else will fuck with you.”

She looked over to the rest of them, brow just the slightest bit furrowed.

“Right?” she asked.

A general noise of approval and agreement came from the crowd, Brides all but falling over each other to agree with Vampire.

I let my tension lapse a bit.  I’d been prepared to go on a bit further, to point out that the way that the Union troops had infiltrated into the column after they got through the shield had probably been the same disguise stuff that Rags told me they’d used in the last fight, to offer Condemner’s aid alongside mine and other stuff like that.

It was nice that it hadn’t been necessary.  I could leave those points for future fights, trot them out if I needed anything else from Vampire.

We weren’t supposed to be with them long, after all.  We were three days into a 2 week trip, and any day could see the Union make a big play.  As soon as Haunter got her stuff taken care of we’d be out of here.

“Indulger,” said Vampire, pushing me out of my reverie.

I’d have to watch that.  The yellow and green seemed to encourage racing thoughts, where as soon as you relaxed you kind of fell into your own mind.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“From now on, you are with me.  We’ll burn the Union down together.”

To my surprise the smile that came to my lips was genuine.  It was nice to be wanted, after all.

“Sounds fun.”

Results from Previous round votes:

1 Vote plan CCC

*************************************************************************************

Winning Plan:

Plan:

[Morning] Train the Warband, in Ultra Combat

[Afternoon] Inform Prevailer about the proposed change in the date of the attack, on the grounds that “they already know we’re gonna hit them, so I kinda wanna mess with them before they’re ready for us”.

[Owner] Get hold of, if possible, a smoke machine and a high-power laser. She can claim that they’re for ‘a rave’, but really they’re mostly in case Merlin’s gift didn’t end with her death. (Smoke machine can outline invisible troops, and a laser can blind the otherwise untouchable spotters – though it’s possible that Smasher can smash them anyhow).

(On the side, she can have the rave in the imaginary world, as well; hire a DJ, start selling tickets, and raise some funds – perhaps in aid of an anti-kidnapping charity)

[Builder] Create a few trucks, and experiment with making them in different ways. Also have a few words with her on the subject of large, vehicle-mounted guns… and then just see what comes out of it.

[Smasher] [Afternoon] Train the warband, in Ultra Combat. They’re looking after her, let’s give her the chance to look after them.Day 24 Log :

7 AP at start of day (6 at end of last day +1 for half night’s sleep)

-2 Train the Warband (5 AP)

Roll 10, +1 for Crit Success success (6 AP)

-3 Inform Prevailer (entertainment) (3 AP)

Roll 8, +2 for success (5 AP)

Builder Experiment with truck guns

Roll 7, success(ish)

Owner: Buy rave stuff

Roll 10, Crit Success

Smasher: Train the Warband

Roll 8, success

End of day, 5 AP

*************************************************************************************

Train the Warband:

The real breakthrough came when I had them do the teaching.

It was probably the thing with Smasher that gave me the idea.  How they’d ended up helping her out, at least in the short term, rather than the other way around.  It got my mind into a different place, got me thinking of them as people, rather than an amorphous mob.

It might also have been about dispelling elitism, a bit.  I mean, I basically was one of them, only I’d made it to the top of the ladder.  That had left me with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, I now saw, thinking that because I’d been more successful than them it meant that I was better.

That was rubbish thinking, Regime thinking.  Even if I was better, it didn’t mean that I would be better at everything.  It didn’t mean that there was nothing I could learn from them.  I’d been walking past a gold mine, proud of how clean my hands were.

Looking at it with a cold, clear eye, being maximally dispassionate about it and all, who really gained from a lesson?  The teacher or the students?  Sure, teaching something let you really learn it, there was a lot to be said for that.  You knew you genuinely understood something when you could teach it to someone else, but put that aside for a sec.

At the start, the teacher knew a thing, the student didn’t.  At the end, they both knew the thing.  Obviously the students were the ones benefiting.  So why was I so proud about this relationship?  I was helping Regime warriors get more deadly, puffing myself up about how strong my warband was.  I ought to have been using them to make ME more powerful all along.

The only complication was that I couldn’t make it obvious that they were the ones providing value.  Regime posturing and all that.  I solved that by making it a contest.

I took the squad leaders Smasher had chosen, Jumper and the others, got them up in front of the crew and had them each give their best lesson, earning the right to be ‘first squad’ for the one who gave the tips I considered to have helped the rest out the most.

They might not have been, one on one, better combatants than I was, but everyone had figured out a little trick or two that I hadn’t necessarily set down.  Stuff about how important sight lines were, the times to use Ultra strength to swing or throw an object versus when you needed to get in there and hit directly, how a deathtouch opponent could be handled, the rough categories that projectile gifts fell into and how to tell them apart.

It was considerably more productive, I judged, than my own lecture would have been, and to top matters off I learned some things myself.  An excellent morning indeed.

*************************************************************************************

Inform Prevailer:

“She’ll see you now,” said Answerer, sliding out of the way so that I could get to the door.

I didn’t pay Her mascot much mind, letting her creep on past without moving forward.

We were in the old Treasury building, down on some sublevel.  I’d tried to keep the inner Lair geography straight in my head, but it was hard to think about anything else when you got this close to Her.

I gritted my teeth and walked up, pushed the door open.

The room beyond was a meeting room of some kind, nondescript and functional, black office chairs around a faded brown table.  There were probably a thousand like it within a few blocks.  The strangest thing about it, honestly, was that it wasn’t even a little crumbling.  It wouldn’t have been out of place, aside from some dust and mold, back when the building was still in use.

She was standing at the head of the table, looking over at me.

I forced myself to keep walking, not to break stride.  Everyone knew that She hated when people wasted Her time, that She hated suck ups almost as much as those who didn’t suck up enough.

She hated lots of things.

“Blender, right?” She asked.

“Yes,” I said.

I was right in front of Her now.  Right in front of the woman who’d ended the world.  I could reach out, if so inclined, just brush my fingers against Her and She’d be done.  Take away ‘living’, or ‘smart’, or some other crucial metadata.

Instead I dropped into the Posture, going down on my knees and crossing my wrists behind my head.  A lot of people had tried stuff just like that, and She was still here.  I wasn’t about to end Her story.

“You are going to take out those Ar Harbor punks, right?” She said.

I gave a wordless nod.

I was struggling to keep my mind away from how every second could be my last.  This was, undeniably, a more dangerous moment than anything King Arthur could throw at me.  The lunatic across from me had the blood of billions on Her hands.

“So?” she asked.

“So I wanted to tell you that I’m moving up the time table-“

I’d meant to end the sentence there, but I saw one of Her hands tense slightly where it rested against Her pants legs.

“-if that’s ok with You,” I finished.  “I’d like to go on the 28^th, instead of the 31^st.”

She dropped down to one knee, eyefucked me.

“When’s that?” She asked.  “What do you mean?”

Shit, why would She not know dates…uh, ok, maybe She just meant She didn’t bother with them.

“Get with Snitcher,” I suggested, “3 days from now.  I mean not today, not tomorrow, or the day after.  The 28^th is the one after the day after tomorrow.”

“The day after the day after tomorrow,” she echoed, slowly.  “Morning or evening?”

“Whichever You want!” I said, eagerly, while simultaneously hoping that She would pick the evening.  I was planning to drive out early on the 28^th, if She wanted a morning fight we’d need to leave the day before, do a night drive or spend the night out in the wilderness.

“Night works,” She said, standing back up.

I carefully died not breathe out a sigh of relief, remaining stationary for a few moments longer as She turned away.

I was nearly to the door when She spoke again.

“Keep the place looking nice,” She directed.  “I’m going to walk around for a bit after you finish up.  See all the shops and such.”

I gave a wordless nod.

I desperately wanted to ask Her if damage and repair would be ok, but all of my instincts were warning me that quibbling would only be bad for me.  I needed to be a glove, an instrument.  I would be spared if I was transparent, absent, nothing to think about or remark on.

She looked away again and I took the opportunity to leave.

*************************************************************************************

Debrief Posse:

“You didn’t want Smasher at the debrief?” asked Owner.

It was a fair question.  Only days ago I would have given quite a bit to get her to show up.

“No, this is just for the three of us.” I  told them.  “She told you how things worked out, right?”

“She said stuff was going great,” said Builder.  “They were all learning and working together, but she was ready to attend if you wanted her to.”

I smiled, gave a small nod.

“I didn’t want to take the risk,” I told them.

“Risk?” asked Owner.

“People don’t change,” I told her, a bit bluntly.  “Hardly ever.  They backslide, they relapse.  Call it what you want.  We all go back to what’s old and familiar.  Tonight is a very dangerous time for Smasher.”

Builder got it immediately, face lighting up.

“You think if she’s with the warband she’s less likely to get tore up!” she guessed.  “Cuz they were the ones who got her to fly straight in the first place.”

I gave a small nod.

Of course, what I’d just said applied to me as well.  An outside observer might have said that I was doing the same thing, putting the briefing back on its most familiar ground as I faced great risk.  I wouldn’t have denied it.

“How’d things go for you?” I asked Owner.

She grinned lazily.

“Nothing to it.  Buying stuff like that is probably pretty easy over there, I guess imaginary me just took a bunch of these cards down to the smoke store shop and carried it on back.”

More likely it had been an online order with expedited shipping, but I’d long ago stopped fighting with Owner’s interpretation of the world gone by.  I suspected that more than half of her mistakes were just ways to get under my skin, anyway.

“You got the smoke machine?” I asked.

“Yep,” she said, “And a bunch of these laser things too.  We might have got cheated though, I tried a few out and they didn’t even cut through a wall.”

That drew a chuckle from me.

“These aren’t Ultra lasers,” I told her.  “Not gifts or anything, they have to follow the real rules.  A laser that could cut through a wall wasn’t something you could actually make, not without a whole lot more power than the battery packs we ordered.”

She looked disgruntled.

“Laaaame!”, said Builder.

I looked over at her, rolling my eyes a bit.

“Where’d you put the trucks?” I asked her.

“Down the street a ways,” she said, vaguely.

That was probably good thinking.  If we left trucks lying around outside the Lair they’d have been stolen or scavenged immediately, but nobody in here was likely to bother.

It wasn’t that I trusted the people in here, mind, it was that they were already where they wanted to be, close to the seat of power.  Transportation wasn’t a priority for anyone except chumps who took the Warlord job.

“You get the guns on em?” I asked.

She pulled a face, grimacing a bit.

“I guess?” she said.  “I just made bigger regular guns, like, each part bigger.  I hope they won’t explode or whatever when we shoot them.  I’m not sure if that’s exactly what you meant.”

It hadn’t been, of course, but in retrospect she didn’t really know anything about tank turrets or vehicle mounted machine guns or anything.  ‘Giant Rifles’ was probably as good as this could have gone.

Honestly I didn’t know a huge deal about guns either.  Maybe a rifle that was twice as big actually shot twice as hard?  It probably couldn’t be that simple, but if nothing else they’d make the trucks look fiercer, more obviously Warlord gear.

Image was everything, after all.  A few post apoc looking war trucks in the background of the fight scene couldn’t hurt.

“Alright,” I said.  “Get some sleep, tomorrow is-“

“What’d you do?” asked Owner, poking a finger at me.

“Huh?”

“This afternoon.  What did you do?  I know you never waste time, and you’ve taken a good bit off lately.”

Despite myself I felt a bit of warmth in my chest, to know that she was checking up on me.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I told them.

 

*************************************************************************************

The Plan:

– We should attack on the 28th. We shouldn’t tell anyone about this until about the 25th. This will throw a spanner in the works of any trap they’re planning that requires that they have an idea of when we’re coming.

– If we head over on the 30th, we can expect to ‘coincidentally’ meet a Union patrol partway there who will inflict some damage on us. We should prepare for this possibility, even at our earlier date.

– We attack on the 28th. The only person who finds out about this early is Prevailer, who gets to discover this on the 25th. On the 26th, those members of our Posse that we can trust not to blab find out.

-On the 28th, Smasher and the warband find out. Preferably while being herded into the trucks.

“This will minimize the opportunity for betrayal, and we might very well catch them with their pants down, planning some kind of preemptive strike on the 29^th.”

– Merlin’s invisible troops are, of course, invisible. They are also carrying Knight equipment. Picker’s assassins carried Knight equipment. Hmmm. But what the Knights are asking for in exchange for the use of their equipment is morally completely reprehensible. I can’t countenance that, and would lose my Resistance contact if I did. (I would deserve to lose my Resistance contact if I did that. I would be truly a monster.)

– I need to bear in mind that Merlin and Arthur might have empowered the same people. That is to say, some of Merlin’s invisible assassins might have Ultra Strength, or Speed, or Toughness. They’re already hitting above their weight – on top of that, they may actually have some weight to hit on top of.

– Another option for dealing with Merlin is to take advantage of KEM. I know where she lives, what she can do and who she cares for; leaving that report on Merlin in the right place should be enough to get her killed outright. However, I shouldn’t use KEM on more than one person. Merlin is a greater threat than Guinevere.

– Third option – use Owner to demolish Merlin’s house in the middle of the night (buying and demolishing the property).

– Fourth option – take advantage of Builder’s stuff-stretching ability to ensure that our confrontation happens in an ankle-deep flood. Even invisible people can be seen walking through ankle-deep water – if nothing else, by the foot-shaped hollows in the water.

– We hope the KEM managed to take out Merlin, and we further hope that doing so reversed her Power’s effects. However, if not, we have a multipronged strategy against those invisible troops. Firstly, Merlin herself is killed quickly – sniper bullet, if necessary (no showboating here). Second, a smoke machine may make invisible people visible, and a laser can blind their spotters, effectively making them ineffective on the field.

“Re: Sniping, Merlin will probably be hidden in a basement somewhere, if she’s alive when we strike.  I could try sending in a sniper ahead of time, hope to catch her just out and about living her life, but in a pitched battle she isn’t going to be standing around where we can shoot her.  I also, um, don’t have a sniper?  The Ultras will have rifles, and they’ve trained in anti firearm techniques (ducking behind stuff), but I haven’t really sought out and trained marksman to the point that I’d call any of my warband ‘snipers’, per se.”

“Re: Smoke machine, potential here, but I’d need to do a lot of testing to fine tune this.  Like, a thick smoke will blind and choke everyone.  I need sort of a mist deal.  Hopefully what Owner bought is what I need.  Might be worth spending some time messing around with.”

“Re: Lasers.  I don’t think trying to hit people in the eyes with lasers in a big fight is going to work.  The lasers might turn out to ‘hit’ the invisible people though, so they might be some use, but everyone carrying a laser is someone who isn’t fighting…I dunno, I don’t really like this idea.”

– Guinevere is easily handled. I need merely imbue my Posse with fireproof; after that, Smasher can take her out easily. (Ankle-deep water should mess with her, too, by extinguishing a lot of fires).

– Lancelot and Arthur are unlikely to be trouble in the final confrontation.

– That giant Union tank, on the other hand, is a problem (and not a small one). But Builder should be able to deal with it; her power works at any range. She can close off any gun barrels by extending the barrel material _inwards_, she can mess up the engine by making the internals just grow crazy spikes everywhere, and so on. Once she can see it, she can ruin it utterly – and probably without even leaving any external sign of her sabotage, so it can all be blamed on the Union being idiots.

– Builder is our go-to person for ranged anti-Union-tech operations. No machine can long survive her vengeful gaze, once she’s decided to smash it. And if the Union gets wise to the point of limiting our visibility (say, with smoke), the Smasher can just smash the smoke…

“I like this idea a lot.  Builder can rapidly ruin any tank she can see, although she can’t add stuff to the internals.  Nothing is going to keep running well once an enemy starts creatively adding stuff to it.”

– If the Ar Harbour team don’t want to come out and fight, we can draw them out by taking hostages. from the people they care for. This strategy is unpleasant and distasteful, but it will work, and will draw them away from buildings. Moreover, I don’t actually need to permanently harm the hostages, not if I’m threatening enough.

-Talking of Smasher, if she can smash *fire*, then Guinevere doesn’t stand a hope.

“I asked her about this, she can smash both fire and smoke, but apparently each fairly small part is separate, so she’d smash a 5 footish area of it each time, rather than the whole cloud/fire.”

 

*************************************************************************************

 

Day 26:

Days remaining: 3!

AP available: (5 at end of day + 1 for 6 hours sleep) = 6/10

Non AP Action: Swap in a new plan.  You write in a new plan, I’ll give you Mia’s assessment of it.  If you don’t do this then the existing one will be executed.  The plan that is in force when its execution date arrives will be used for the actual battle, though there may be mid battle votes that could alter it in process.

Prestige: 3

Timeslots available: 2, morning and afternoon

Builder Timeslot Available: afternoon

Owner Timeslot Available: afternoon

Smasher : Timeslot Available: morning or afternoon, but not both

Posse: 3 or 3 out of 3 slots filled

Force size: 45

Condition: Healthy

[spoiler=Ultras]

 

(Ultra format: Role, Ultra Strength/Speed/Toughness, other gift description)

Posse:

Builder — 0/0/0, a woman who can alter objects for miles around into other things, blessed with a ‘Bulletproof’ blend

Owner – housemate, 0/0/1 operates an imaginary firm, with real effects on the world,

Smasher — 3/0/1, a woman who is billed as the strongest Ultra fighter of all time

Ultra Allies:

Maker- Friend, and protégé of Snitcher, 0/0/1, can summon the spirit of things

Clawer – Ultra fighter 2/0/1, melee combatant, deadly hooks for hands

Stopper – partner of Clawer, 0/0/0, steals form’s velocity by looking at them

Sticker – Did dentistry for her brother, 0/0/2, Creates slime, can choose its stickiness

Grower – 0/*0/1, an outside Ultra I sponsored into the Lair, has a bullet blend from me, can rapidly increase the size and mass of objects

Joker — 0/2/0, a woman who can change what other people/herself look like

Replayer — 1/2/0, she can ‘step back in time’ to undo damage that she takes

Ultra Enemies:

Masher- Enemy, and fellow protégé of Subtracter, 3*/0/3*, trades off strength and durability as she moves or stays still

Picker – First Fist protégé, 0/1/0, ‘selects the outcome of things’

Ultra Acquaintances:

Tracker – Running buddy, 1/0/1, Creates tracks, and can move things on them

Shower – Adder’s protégé, 1*/0/1*, gains strength and durability from witnesses

Echoer – Singer I am a fan of, 1/1/1, can duplicate any action that she sees

Bubbler – Operates Ultra clinic 0/0/?, traps things in bubbles that heal and move them

Sucker — Ultra entertainer, ?/?/?, pulls objects/people towards her at incredible rate

Gunner — 0/0/1, she shoots tracking Ultra Blasts at roughly Ultra Strength One

Chiller — 1/0/1, can freeze any object she touches, leaving them brittle and easily broken

Cutter — 1/1/1, she is a brutal front line combatant

Swimmer — 1/0/1, she can ‘swim’ through solid surfaces

Burner — 0/0/1, she can summon Ultra fire from anywhere that she can see

Maxxer — 0/0/0, she can augment the gifts of other Ultras, pushing their gifts

Puncher — 1/0/1, her strength and speed both go up when she repeats her movements

[/spoiler]

 

[spoiler=Actions]

Actions:

[ ] Accept Refiner’s Bargain (Timeslot cost: 0, AP cost 4, auto succeed)

Motive: His blessed weapons and armor would be a massive force multiplier for our group.  He might also send along Knight backup.  He would be a powerful additional patron.

Concerns: I would be responsible for a massacre in the immediate aftermath, or be killed by Second Fist if I backed out.  Subtracter would also likely perceive this alliance as an attempt at weaseling out from under her command, so I’d have to tread very carefully to avoid offending her.

 

[ ] Seek Transportation

-[ ] Scavenge (Timeslot cost: 2; AP cost 4, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: My current transportation sufficed for me in my troubleshooter role, but I will likely require a larger vehicle, or several vehicles, in order to bring everyone to Ar Harbor. I can seek to find something in the suburbs and surrounding towns.

Concerns: Leaving Shington could be dangerous, and I am far from guaranteed to find a bus or truck suitable to my needs, as the area has already been heavily scavenged.

-[ ] Trade with existing owners (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: As above, but instead of fixing up ruined vehicles I’ll negotiate to get them from their current owners.

Concerns: Snitcher may disapprove of a warlord being civil

-[ ] Seize by force (Timeslot cost: 2; AP cost 4, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: As above, but instead of asking my contacts for vehicles I’ll just take what I want. My role as warlord and my Tally should minimize resistance

Concerns: People like their vehicles, and won’t like the one who takes them. I will make enemies.

-[ ] Seek Transportation [Adder + Company] (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: As above, but Adder can use his gift to make something for my purposes, and the Company can duplicate it and make it permanent.

Concerns: Adder and I are not close, he may decline to aid me, owing to his rivalry with my sponsor, Subtracter.

 

[ ] Seek Target Information

-[ ] Company (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: The Company logs every Ultra they create. Their Ar Harbor records would be useful information

Concerns: Ultras migrate and conceal their gifts, this information would be incomplete

-[ ] Subtracter (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: Subtracter is the military leader of the Regime, she will have information on this target

Concerns: Subtracter is stupid and violent, I don’t like to be around her

-[ ] Survivors (Timeslot cost:1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: There have been 2 other attempts at Ar Harbor. I can seek out and question survivors in the outer city.

Concerns: I may be unable to find any survivors, and I may be misled by liars.

 

[ ] Seek Posse Members

-[ ] wander & gossip, (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 1, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: There are dozens of powerful Ultras in the Lair. I know only the barest fraction of them. I can learn the basics on 1-6 of them in a few hours of socializing and gossiping, opening up in depth investigation options on them and adding them to my list of acquaintances.

Concerns: None

-[ ] At Ultra Fights, (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 1, refunds 1 on success)

Constraint: Only available in the afternoon or night on days divisible by 4 (day 4, 8, etc)

Motive: There are dozens of powerful Ultras in the Lair. I know only the barest fraction of them. I can learn the basics on 3-12 of them in a few hours of socializing and gossiping at this kind of event.

Concerns: Ultras associated with the Fights are more likely than most to be melee combatants.

 

[ ] Seek Warband Members

-[ ] At the Yard, (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: The Lair is surrounded by hundreds of Regime Ultras. The strongest come to the Yard to show their power and appeal to those like me, who would give them purpose. I should be able to gather between 5 and 20 Ultras of such caliber.

Concerns: I will need to provide housing and direction to these Ultras, or risk them wandering off. I can expect to spend at least an action a day on them, and training them might well eat up more. Ideally a Posse member will be tasked with this.

-[ ] [Gang name] From a Gang, (Timeslot cost: 2; AP cost 5, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: The Ultras that surround Shington are organized into Gangs dozens strong. If I can recruit such a force I might have my whole Warband right there.

Concerns: These Ultras likely already have patrons in the Lair, who I would need to negotiate with. Their leader would also likely want a place in my Posse, and she would be the primary locus of their loyalty until I’d had time to win them over.

 

[ ] Investigate Acquaintance:

-[ ] [Name], (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success, 2 if we become allies)

Motive: I can spend some serious one on one time with an Ultra I’ve chosen, evaluating the capability of their gift, the alignment of their values with mine, and their basic  competence. If all checks out, I might move them into my Ultra Allies column.

Concerns: None

 

[ ] Invite Ally into Posse:

-[ ] [Name], (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: If I want to bring an ally into my posse, get them to take actions on my behalf and rise or fall with me, this is the way to do it. I will only take this action on those I’ve already made allies, and once this has been taken it is difficult to undo.

Concerns: Posse members are most of the way into my circle of trust, and will operate on my behalf, representing me to stranger. A mistake here would be dangerous and damaging. I should be careful before taking this step, potentially investigating a prospect several times.

 

[ ] Seek Information on Snitcher’s patterns

-[ ] Passive listening (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 1, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: Snitcher can ride my senses at any moment, and bring Her along. If I am ever to contact my KEM allies, my resistance allies, or show any kindness or weakness whatsoever, I need to understand when this is likely to take place. Gossip can hint at this, particularly if I carefully steer conversations. This action would be mostly undetectable, even if he was riding me when I took it.

Concerns: None

-[ ] Active interrogation of Snitches (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 2 on success)

Motive: As above, but rather than listen for random gossip I will seek out other linked individuals and directly ask them how often he rides their senses, and what actions he has reacted to in the past.

Concerns: More likely Snitcher notices this, unknown consequences of that.

-[ ] Confront Snitcher Directly (Timeslot cost:1; AP cost 4, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: As above, but take the simplest possible route. Go to Snitcher and ask him for the deal.

Concerns: I am sponsored by Subtracter, not Snitcher, he may not wish to aid me. He may demand favors or other services in exchange for the information.

 

[ ] Seek Information on Regime military operations

-[ ] Ask Subtracter (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: My life depends on doing this right. I need to get a basic understanding of what She is expecting from my attack on Ar Harbor. Do I need to seize the Company Facility? Kill all the enemies? Are there any constraints on how I go about it? Subtracter is the leader of the Regime’s military, and my sponsor, she will know these answers.

Concerns: Subtracter is stupid and brutal, and she killed my neighbors, I hate spending time with her.

-[ ] Ask Around (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: As above, but ask survivors of previous missions instead of my evil boss.

Concerns: My predecessors may not have told them everything, their views of their missions may omit certain command level details that I need to worry about.

 

[ ] Relax and Recuperate

-[ ] By visiting Blisser (Timeslot cost: X (slots spent until AP reaches max), AP cost 0, returns 3 per time period. DANGER, this action may cause addiction)

-[ ]By lounging around, (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 0, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: I could do with some rest.

Concerns: None

-[ ]By patronizing entertainment areas (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 1, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: I could do with some rest, and I might learn some things by socializing

Concerns: None

-[ ]By using my gift to repair the city (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 2, refunds 5 on success)

Motive: It needs to be done.

Concerns: This is not becoming behavior of a warlord, Snitcher may take notice, and people may talk

-[ ]By using my gift to heal people (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 1, refunds 5 on success)

Motive: This is why I have my gift.

Concerns: This is not becoming behavior of a warlord, Snitcher may take notice, and people may talk

 

[ ] Organize Armory [Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 2, returns 2 on success)

Motive: I carry, in my backpack and on my person, various items to blend with if the need arises. I am overdue to look through my setup and take an inventory, once that is done I could seek out new objects if I am missing anything useful.

 

Concerns: None

 

[ ] Action: Direct the Warband (Timeslot cost 0, AP cost 1, returns 1 if successful)

Motive: If I need to set my warband in motion, give them a project or whatever, it is as simple as telling them to jump.  My will is their command.

-[ ] Let [Posse Member] Supervise, takes up the Posse Member’s action, modifies success chance based on which Posse member it is, and which action

 

[ ] Action: Train the Warband (Timeslot cost 0, AP cost 1, returns 1 if successful) [Requires a timeslot from the teacher, who should probably be an Ultra combatant]

Motive: Yard Ultras are fierce, but undisciplined.  They are warriors, not soldiers.  I can get better outcomes if I teach them some basics.

-[ ] In Ultra Combat (Gives bonuses on their battle rolls)

-[ ] In anti firearm maneuvers (Makes them suffer less casualties under fire)

-[ ] In obedience (makes them more likely to obey my orders)

 

[ ] Action: Other (Timeslot cost: x, returns x if successful)

 

KEM Actions:

[ ] Assign Assassination mission [Timeslot cost 1, AP cost 3, returns 1 on success, can only be done in the morning, uncertain Snitcher risk]

 

Description: KEM are the only humans who fight back on a consistent, day to day basis.  We’ve come up together, they and I, and pointing them at my foes is only common sense.  If I give them a target, then I trust them to make a good faith effort to put that Ultra down.  Their odds of success, of course, vary wildly depending on how much info I can provide, and the gifts of the Ultra in question.

 

Resistance Actions:

[ ] Assign Information Gathering Mission [Timeslot cost 1, AP cost 2, returns 1 on success, can only be done in the morning, uncertain Snitcher risk]

Description: The humans are the ocean in which the Ultras swim, the saying goes.  The Resistance’s capacity to gather information about Ultras is unsurpassed.  If I give them a target, then they will give me every bit of public information on the target, and often times a little bit more.  Ultras are people, after all.  I believe this with all my heart.  And people trust other people, even those that they ultimately shouldn’t.  I can assign as many targets as I wish, but the more I assign the less details I will probably get, and the longer it might take.

 

[ ] Debrief Information Gathering Mission [Timeslot cost 1, AP cost 0, returns 1 on success, can only be done in the morning, uncertain Snitcher risk]

Description: The information that the Resistance gathers is worthless if I never regain it.  Using protocols I’ve worked out ahead of time, and my recent discovery of Snitcher’s habits, it should be possible for me to take the Resistance’s reports with minimal risk.  I expect I should give them a day or two for local targets, and possibly as much as four for targets in Ar Harbor or further afield.

Smasher Actions:

[ ] Recuperate [Timeslot cost All]

Description: Smasher hangs on the edge of death.  Her body and gift will try to knit her back together each day.

 

Owner Actions:

[ ] Acquire Funds [Timeslot cost 1]

Description: Owner takes action to get more and more valuable assets within our world, increasing her overall funding, hopefully permitting her gift’s actions to be swifter and larger in impact. (Requires Write In clarification on how to do this)

[ ] Change Company [ Timeslot cost 1]

Description: Owner presently runs a package store, located in downtown Washington.  She has, as near as I can estimate, a low six figures saved up.  With this action I can direct her to acquire licenses, expand locations, purchase other businesses, or perform similar deeds, all based around changing the operation and activities of her imaginary franchise. (Requires Write In clarification on how to do this)

[ ] Company Action [ Timeslot cost 2]

Description: This is a catchall action for anything I might think of that could let Owner impact the main battle in Ar Harbor.  Buying up local real estate and demolishing it on a certain date seems like the obvious course of action, but there are a lot of other fringe ideas that I’ve been entertaining. [Requires Write In clarification on how to do this.  The first Action spent on this is about Owner doing tests to make sure this effort will work, the second actually kicks off whatever changes I want in the imaginary world.]

Builder Actions:

[ ] Repair Structure [Timeslot cost 1]

Description: Builder can repair most any structure any structure in just a few hours, spreading broken portions back into place and generating new matter as needed.

 

[ ] Construct Known Structure [ Timeslot cost 1]

 

Description: Builder can construct any easily described structure with the same ease that she repairs them.  Her present education limits this to extremely primitive structures, but that might well be changeable.

 

[ ] Construct Known Items [Timeslot cost 1]

 

Description: Builder’s gits aren’t limited to buildings.  If she can get a perfect understanding of an objects, and samples for every component, then she can form any items that I might desire.  The easiest way to accomplish this, of course, would be to provide her with a sample.

 

[ ] Memorize Patterns [ Timeslot cost 1]

 

Description: Builder’s gifts are heavily limited by her imperfect education.  The more patterns I can get her to learn, the more she can construct from any given material.  If I provide her with patterns or specimens I’m pretty sure she can memorize them and add them to her arsenal.

[/spoiler]

 

 

This wasn’t going to be an Ultra Fight, I reminded myself.

I didn’t really need to.  Lotus’ juice was pounding away inside me, sharpening my mind like a grindstone, giving me the extra little bit that I need to be fully alive, fully aware of the moment.  But it was a good thing to remind myself of anyway.

I’d pulled my punches, back with the Pantheon at their fort.  I’d left my enemies alive, tried to turn them into friends.  I’d made limited progress, but I’d been doing my damnedest.

But that wasn’t going to be the case with the Brides.

I’d been ducking this fight for a day, and that was about as far as I could stretch it.  Manus and Nimbus had been shitting on our names, straight up heeling it up against us, making their own rep bigger by telling everyone how weak they found us.

Nothing that we did, not my own movement of the ground, which doubled the distance the column moved in a day, not Haunter’s work with their healers and scouts, none of it could make up for the fact that we weren’t Brides, and so couldn’t be respected.

The old Dale, or maybe I should say the unaltered one, would have just sat here and let it happen.  I’d have wallowed along, secure in my ways, and one day we’d have just been surrounded and lynched by bored kids.  It wasn’t naturally my way to be proactive.

But I was working with Lotus now, was pumped to the gills with her yellow juice, and experimenting with just a taste of the red and green drinks.  It was definitely changing how I thought, I could tell that.

I’d imagined, back before I met Lotus, that using stuff that changed who you were would be scary, that like the old you would still be back there behind your eyes, just getting madder and madder at what you were choosing, but it wasn’t like that at all.  I was still me, or at least I felt like it, but I was just much more awake and more of a heel now.

It had given me the self confidence to step up to the Brides before their bullying could get us killed.

“Say that again?” I dared Manus, looming up over her as well as I could without getting inside of touching range.

This wasn’t as hard as it might seem, since she was all of four feet tall, or maybe a bit shorter.  It was still weird how the Brides had members that were so young, who could straight up slaughter when they wanted to.

Preventer had told me that her name meant ‘hands’, so I wasn’t about to let her put them on me.  My working assumption was a death touch of some sort.

“Boy Brides weak,” she said, Pantheon accent strong in her speech, “You… more weak.  Lick boot.”

She was giving me a chance to back down, in a way.  She was in her rights to start fighting already, just from the fact that I’d stood up to her.  I could tell, somehow, that she didn’t want this, that she was under pressure of her own, was using us to deflect attention from her own position.

The people around us chuckled along with her line, sneering in at me in a way that felt distinctly dangerous.

This was the most dangerous time.  Nobody fought during the day, or not many people.  You’d fall behind the column, maybe get hit by Union forces.  It wasn’t worth it.  Almost nobody fought at night.  No audience.  But marching ended pretty early in the afternoon, and that left this little window, a few hours where there were a lot of bored Goddesses lurking around.

Nimbus, honestly, was the one that I ought to be fighting, from the talking perspective.  She’d been the main one who started all this shit with us.  But the problem was that there was no way I could beat her.  Her gift would take me out in a second.

“You not chosen,” I told Manus, the girl I could maybe take,  “Never chosen.  Never will be chosen.  Bride in name only.  Sleep alone.”

I’d been watching, taking notes.  So had everyone else.  Every culture had their own version of smack talk, and among the Brides these were apparently sick insults.

The flaring of her nostils, the widening of her eyes, they were all the warnings I got.  She swung a fist at me but I was already hurling myself aside as her gift manifested itself.

It was a good thing I’d used my gift, had it drag the ground under me, because I wouldn’t have dodged if I didn’t.  Her gift was swift, and given that she was a Bride, I had no doubt it would take me out if it hit.

The ‘hands’ in her name turned out to refer to the shape of her gifts, not to her actual hands.  She’d crafted a pair of energy fields, each shaped like a ten foot version of one of her hands.  They mirrored her actual hands movement, whirring through the world around her with the same swiftness that a person could do basic hand movements.

For now, they were cupped around her.  She had clasped them in front of her like she was holding an egg, and the gift hands clasped around her in the same way.  It lifted her up off the ground a little, which was worrisome.

“Kill You!” she yelled, and her cry was taken up by the crowd around us as a cheer and a taunt.  I’d seen variations of it a thousand times back in the Ultra Fight rings, but they were in deadly earnest here.

“Kill what?” I asked, putting my hands together before me in a mockery of hers.  “Kill time maybe?  I am still here!”

I was dimly aware that I should have been absolutely terrified.  There was death here.  I had no Link to bring me back, and they’d had the same time to find out stuff about us that we had about them.  She might easily know to keep my body off the ground if she got a shot in.  I might be living my last seconds.

Lotus’ drug didn’t let me care, though.  If I was living my last, then the emphasis was on living.  I had never felt so focused in my life.

She snarled and swung a fist, making sure it was the one that had previously been on top of her gesture.  The energy projection shot towards me, even as she stood safely on the top of the other one, standing on its palm as she mimed the punch.

This time there was no way to skid to the side.  She was watching, would simply adjust the angle of the swing.  I dropped instead, my gift opening a gap beneath me and sending me plummeting into the earth.  I heard the whirr of the wind as her ‘punch’ raced above me, and then I was cradled in the soil, stone and sand rasping about me as my gift carried sideways at an angle.

My thoughts raced along as I shot through the ground.

Not coming up would make me weak in the eyes of the crowd.  It would be a death sentence whenever I did come back up, a punch from behind from some cocky Bride and it would all be over for me.

If I came back to the surface, however, she would just swing again, and I’d be right back down here.  If I was lucky.

The ground surged around me, my gift making me aware of a great fissure being ripped through it.  She had even less patience than I’d expected.  I was launching myself back up before I could finish the thought.

If delay would be fatal, then obviously hiding would be twice as much so.  I couldn’t let peoples takeaway from this fight be that I was afraid of her, or that I couldn’t stand up to her.  Jane had told us over and over that in a group like this the appearance of strength was strength.  I couldn’t let her set the pace at all.

I burst out of the surface off to her right, already facing her.  I’d been able to tell from the way the furrow had been being dug what angle her ‘hand’ was at, which let me know about where she would be for that to be true.  I probably couldn’t have naturally done that kind of problem, but with the Yellow in my body it just happened automatically.

I hadn’t come up empty handed.  Even as she was spinning around to face me I whipped a rock at her head, throwing it overhand like a pitching player from a ball game.

I thought it would hit her, but at the last instant the hand she was riding on dropped down a few feet, let it shoot past her head.  She brought the other hand, the one that she’d been groping around by her feet with, back up in an uppercut gesture, and once again I had to fling myself to one side.

This time she’d been mad, had moved quickly, didn’t take the time to adjust for my dodge.  I got away much cleaner, skidding across the ground on one knee as her attacking fist rose into the sky.

I had a second, before the fist came back down.  A few seconds if it was a predictable smashing attack.  I tried to work out how I could survive this.

If I kept frustrating her she’d use 2 hands.  I knew this, bone deep.  She was someone who’d gotten everything she wanted all her recent life, who’d been set off to fight with a simple sentence.  She wouldn’t be used to frustration, to long fights.  She’d move to end things.

When she did that she’d drop to the ground.  I could shoot spikes into her, grind her with stones, but she was a Bride. No way she wasn’t at least Ultra tough one.  They would just bounce off, and she’d snatch herself up again, get back on the hand.

I needed to hit her.  Needed to be touching the ground when I did it.  Only my Ultra strength could harm her.  But moving towards her would see me splattered by her fists.  I had only dodged the previous two by the narrowest margins.  The one under her would come too fast from that close.

Things moved before I could think anymore.  Her hand stopped going up and started coming down, a fly swatting gesture.  I knew that if I had my gift shoot me sideways it wouldn’t work again.

I lifted my own fist up, then, and the ground mirrored the motion, rising up in pillars around me, like I was trying to hold the field up.  Most importantly, they blocked her view of me.

The drugs had saved me again, giving me the answer in a split second.  She’d instinctively tensed up her swing, pushing into the ‘down’ of it as I apparently raised a challenge, losing the flexibility to adjust to my slides.  This time I’d slid straight away, my motion initially hidden by the collapsing pillars, and by the time she saw me I’d already created a bit of distance.

I showboated a bit, hands folded behind my head, giving a big old wide yawn, like this was just so easy and I couldn’t be bothered.

Nothing could have been further form the truth, but I had to get her mad, get her careless, because I wasn’t going to survive much longer.  Whatever I was going to do, however I was going to get my hands on her, it needed to be now.

She pushed the ‘swatting’ hand at me with an actual growl, and my gift took me straight towards it, sliding to it as though I was going to try and meet her punch with my own form.

I wasn’t, of course.  The way the fists tore through the ground they were at least Ultra strong 2, and quite possibly a three. They would go through me like I was made of cloud, leave nothing left at all.

She did it again, tensing up into the push when it seemed like it was going to meet resistance, and I swerved at the last second, my gift dropping me down into the ground under the onrushing hand, not losing any velocity in the process, still shooting me towards her.

It took her the critical second to catch what was going on, to realize that I’d ducked under again, that she hadn’t splattered me.  She didn’t have the drugs, didn’t have the experience of a hundred Ultra fights.  Hadn’t fought real battles against strong opponents like I had.

I’d been lulling her, a bit.  Giving her separate opportunities to strike me, setting her up to reset after each strike, to see what I’d try next.  Tricking her into the Ultra Fight cadence, not the raw every-second-counts of a real life and death struggle.

It all combined to steal a second, leave her processing that her push had missed without alarm or worry, getting me away from the first strike as she automatically pulled it back, shooting towards her as that alarm finally triggered in her mind, as the primordial sight of a bodybuilder who towered above her charging in upon her pushed her into an instant panic.

It came then, the thrust I hadn’t figured out how to avoid, the shielding hand rising up in an instinctive, undodgeable shove, powered by all the ‘nope nope nope’ in her tiny body, arising from every person’s automatic answer to death closing in.

My body did it for me, solved the puzzle that I couldn’t figure out myself.

I’d palmed a stone when I put my hands behind my head, had carried it through the charge.  Even as her hand started the ruinous thrust I was hurling it, every ounce of my momentum and strength behind it.

If it missed I was dead, but I’d never been more alive.  It struck home exactly where I aimed, striking her hand just as she started to push it forwards.

The flinch was automatic, a reflex just like the shove had been.  I hadn’t given her time to think since she finished the original swat.  Ultra toughness wasn’t natural, and with her shields hers wouldn’t have been tested a lot.  When her hand took an impact she froze for a moment, bracing for a pain that wouldn’t come, and her gift froze with it, slave to the actual motions of her physical flesh.

I reached her, lashed out instantly, fist moving even as the chasing hand closed from behind me and the one that had frozen lurched into motion again.

I punched her in the head.

In the Ultra fights when you hit someone in the head there was always a sagging, a sort of hammy staggering, like they were fighting for consciousness, or waging some kind of inner war.  Or they just went limp, toppled like someone had switched off a light.

None of them were kids though.  And I’d never hit any of them nearly this hard.

My fist went ‘into’ the hit, in a way that I’d never felt before, Manus’s skull giving beneath my hand and her body catapulting sideways.

It saved my life, as her fists moved in faithful obedience to the hands that bound them, flying off to the side for the instant it took her gift to realize she was dead.

The red sang in my veins, filled me with energy as I stared wildly around at the onlookers, fist stained with a fluid I was trying very hard to force myself not to identify.

Most of me knew that I’d die if they stepped up, but another part of me, much larger than I’d realized, would relish the struggle.

Their cheers had been cut off, stilled like someone’d put a rope around their throats.  They regarded me with a dangerous light, a sea of sullen, angry stares.

“Way to go Indulger!” shouted a voice, off to my left, then another echoed it, offering similar sentiments.

I looked out of the corner of my eye.  Ragnarok and some of the others from the fort, swept up somehow to this time and place, their cheers legitimizing my win, making it acceptable that a Bride could fall.

One of the Brides moved up, and I tensed myself, but then she lurched sideways in an exaggerated manner, threw her hands out and screwed up her face in an exaggerated style.

Her colleagues joined in with her mirth, laughing at Manus’ death, taking childish glee in the fall of someone they’d always looked down upon.  I heard variations of ‘sleep alone’ and such amid their mirth, and the dangerous feeling ebbed away.

I looked around, the drugs roiling through me, singing their songs of life to me.  I could feel everything, could hear every voice, somehow see every face.  This was glory.  This was what it was to be alive.  I was at one with myself, a part of the sky and the ground, wholly a part of this moment in time.

I looked down at my hand, and I wiped the stain away.

“Did it help?” asked Lotus, somehow at my side already.  She must have been watching the whole thing.

“Needs more red,” I told her.

Results from Previous round votes:

1 Vote plan TalonOfAnathrax (wins tiebreaker roll….again)

1 Vote plan CCC

*************************************************************************************

Winning Plan:

Plan:

[X] Compromise plan

– [X] Seek Information on Snitcher’s Patterns : Active interrogation of Snitches (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 2 on success)

– [X] Relax and Recuperate by visiting entertainment areas (with Owner)

– [X] Smasher : Train the warband in obedience

– [X] Owner : R&R

– [X] Builder : Experiment with turning a (reasonably unconfined) puddle of liquid into a veritable flood. Then having parts of the flood burst up in splashes.

Day 24 Log :

7 AP at start of day (6 at end of last day +1 for half night’s sleep)

-3 Seek info on Snitcher’s patterns (4 AP)

Roll 7, +0 for failure (4 AP)

-1 Relax and Recuperate (entertainment) (3 AP)

Roll 5, +3 for success (6 AP)

Builder Experiment with water

Roll 5, failure

Smasher: Train the Warband

Roll 10, Crit success

End of day, 6 AP

*************************************************************************************

Seek info from Snitches:

I hadn’t thought this through all that well.

In my mind, this had been a simple plan.  Snitcher had a number of known snitches, gorgeous girls whose morning endeavors were what I was relying on to keep him distracted.  They should know, if anyone did, some stuff about how he generally operated.

The problem came in getting them to talk about it.  I’d originally been planning to go the eavesdrop route, just kind of idle nearby while they talked to one another and hope that the conversation would get around to their ever present voyeur.

But I had underestimated their celebrity, and what it would do to their behavior.  Girls chosen for their beauty, powerless but shielded by a mighty patron, of course they would be people of interest, fascination even.  I was far from the only Ultra who’d decided to stalk them today.

Their booth formed the center of an invisible ring, the tables immediately around conspicuously more occupied than the remainder of the Company Facility.  I’d taken my place in the ring, sent for food and settled in to eavesdrop.

The problem was simple.  They knew they were being overheard.  They were performing, self consciously selecting every word that passed their lips, every gesture that they made.

I didn’t envy them.  They would have no notion of privacy, no second that was wholly their own.  Leered at by those around them, their own senses spied upon, it must have been a miserable existence.

But one thing it did breed was discretion.

I listened for a few hours, enduring triviality after triviality.  They spoke of nothing of import, nothing whatsoever that might matter.  Their talk was entirely banal, an endless procession of nothings, seemingly calculated to encourage the appetites of their observers.

Eventually a cringing pimp made their way over to me, asking on Snitcher’s behalf if I’d come to engage the services of his girls.  I told him I’d mull it over and departed, still annoyed about the wasted time.

*************************************************************************************

Relax and Recuperate (with Owner):

“This is stupid,” I told her.

Owner just gave me a smug grin in response, gesturing back to the impromptu racetrack.

A trio of Ultras were waiting for us.  Grower, Maker and Clawer.  They’d scratched out a flat circle in front of our house, casually blocking traffic in order to mark out a disk approximately ten feet across.

“Did you encourage her?” I asked, suspiciously.

“Nope,” said Grower.  “This was all Owner’s doing.  She’s talked up your boy something big.”

I grimaced, looking down at the things they held in their hands.

Maker and Grower had both brought puppies, or really small dogs.  They hung docilely in their hands, looking without great interest at the world around them.

Clawer had a fox, which was struggling wildly in the hands of his human attendant, scratching him unmercifully.

“You think he’ll stick to the track?” I asked him.

He gave a me a shit eating grin, before tapping one of his claws against the other.

I could probably count that out.  It would be miracle if it was even visible to us a second after he let it go.

“We got this,” whispered Owner.

I looked back to her, frowning.  I had to admit, the competition didn’t exactly look stellar.  But there was one thing holding us back.

“You remember,” I told her carefully, “That Napoleon is a turtle?”

She frowned in response, putting a finger to either side of his head.

“Don’t listen to Blender,” she cautioned the tiny shell creature, “She’s not YOUR Warlord.”

I glared helplessly, though the others seemed to find that hilarious.

“Alright,” said Owner, ignoring my vast dissatisfaction, “Terms are simple.  If you win, I’ll forgive your tabs at my place.  When we win, you owe us a favor.  Everyone ok with that?”

Nods all around, though I didn’t bother, throwing up my hands instead.

They set up their racers, holding each one in place at what they’d just decided was the track’s ‘start’, and Owner started counting down.

“Hold on, hold on,”  I said.

They looked over.

“You don’t even have a finish line marked out!” I pointed out.  “How are you going to know which one wins?”

“I thought you weren’t interested?” asked Owner artlessly, “that you didn’t have any faith in our little guy here?”

“I’m, I mean…” I temporized, trying to figure out just the right way to make her understand.

“You really think it’ll be close enough to need a finish line?” asked Grower, dubiously.

I didn’t, not really, but it was the principle of the thing.  They should be prepared for the eventuality, just in case.  Not even setting one up ahead of time was just asking for a dispute after the fact.

“I’m just saying…” I said, and it was clear that I’d lost all control of this situation.

When all was said and done, Owner’d forgiven all of their tabs, Grower owed her a favor, I somehow owed her a favor, and I’d laughed more than I had since I took the Process.

*************************************************************************************

Debrief Posse:

I looked around the room carefully, one more time, reluctant to credit the evidence of my eyes.

Owner was there, conspiratorially feeding Napoleon some kind of race fixing celebratory leaf.

Builder was there, lounging alongside her on their bed, wistfully eyeing a beer can as though doing so would fill it back up.

And Smasher was indisputably there, sitting at my desk and looking out over the room with a serene expression on her face.

“Alright, so I know how Owner spent her day,” I began, “But I guess I still need to know how things went for you all.”

I carefully avoided the phrase ‘report’, and would continue to do so until I figured out Smasher’s mood.  Something was definitely going on there, and it wouldn’t do to set her off somehow.

“I couldn’t really think of anything new to try,” confessed Builder.  “I did mostly the same tests, got mostly the same results.  I add water like I add anything else, about a body’s worth of person at a time, expanding at a slow walking pace.”

“Like she leaves water behind her,” clarified Smasher, “Except it is not behind her and it doesn’t have to be water.”

Well, ‘clarified’ might have been a stretch.

“You couldn’t create great torrents?” I pressed.

She leaned her head to one side, widened her lips a bit in an ‘eh’ gesture.

“Not really,” she said.  “It makes a bit of a puddle, right enough, and I can put more of it in any given place that I can see, but that’s about it.  If there’s something transparent I can pop it, like those bottles and stuff.”

I gave a gruff nod.  I’d been worried about that, but it wasn’t entirely useless.

Nothing about her gift prevented her from making a lot of water, it was just that it would take a lot of time, maybe more than was practical during a fight.  Perhaps if I set it up ahead of time…

Smasher interrupted my musings.

“My stuff went great,” she said, unprompted.

“Oh?” I asked.  “You got the warband trained in obedience?”

She looked confused for a bit.

“Oh, yeah, that,” she said, which wasn’t super encouraging.

“Yeah, I’ve had that for a while now.  The big breakthrough today was that they all got together and talked to me, really let me know how concerned they were for me.”

What?

There were actually tears in the corner of her eyes as she proceeded.

“They’ve come to care about me, they said, and they’d hate for my habits to get the better of me.  They are going to work with me, help me stay sober!  I’m taking back my life.”

I gave a weak grin.

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

“It must have been hard for you,” she went on, “Having to watch me take all those pills, all those drinks.  But no more!”

I kept my grin in place by sheer force of will.

“I’m ready to be the best Ultra I can be.  The Regime, and our girls, deserve no less!”

Fantastic.

 

*************************************************************************************

The Plan:

– We should attack on the 28th. We shouldn’t tell anyone about this until about the 25th. This will throw a spanner in the works of any trap they’re planning that requires that they have an idea of when we’re coming.

– If we head over on the 30th, we can expect to ‘coincidentally’ meet a Union patrol partway there who will inflict some damage on us. We should prepare for this possibility, even at our earlier date.

“I like the idea of attacking at a different date from when I tell the troops that we will.  I’m concerned that they may be able to get a signal to King Arthur and his Union buds after we tell them on the 25^th.  Maybe I should tell them the night before, or just the day of?”

– Merlin’s invisible troops are, of course, invisible. They are also carrying Knight equipment. Picker’s assassins carried Knight equipment. Hmmm. But what the Knights are asking for in exchange for the use of their equipment is morally completely reprehensible. I can’t countenance that, and would lose my Resistance contact if I did. (I would deserve to lose my Resistance contact if I did that. I would be truly a monster.)

“Yes, very true.  I don’t want to work with Refiner and his pets any more than I have to.”

– I need to bear in mind that Merlin and Arthur might have empowered the same people. That is to say, some of Merlin’s invisible assassins might have Ultra Strength, or Speed, or Toughness. They’re already hitting above their weight – on top of that, they may actually have some weight to hit on top of.

“Very worrying possibility.”

– Another option for dealing with Merlin is to take advantage of KEM. I know where she lives, what she can do and who she cares for; leaving that report on Merlin in the right place should be enough to get her killed outright. However, I shouldn’t use KEM on more than one person. Merlin is a greater threat than Guinevere.

“This is a good idea.  I tried to have KEM kill Merlin once already, hopefully there will be enough time to try again.  I really don’t think I can win the fight if they have invisible warriors.”

– Third option – use Owner to demolish Merlin’s house in the middle of the night (buying and demolishing the property).

“I’d rather use KEM, but this might be a ‘why not both’? situation.”

– Fourth option – take advantage of Builder’s stuff-stretching ability to ensure that our confrontation happens in an ankle-deep flood. Even invisible people can be seen walking through ankle-deep water – if nothing else, by the foot-shaped hollows in the water.

“I guess it couldn’t hurt, but when I remember my past fights and try and imagine looking at the ground constantly to see if footprints are getting closer my immediate reaction is that the person I’m fighting would take that opportunity to hit me.  We’ll try this in the worst case scenario, but I’m dubious.”

– Guinevere is easily handled. I need merely imbue my Posse with fireproof; after that, Smasher can take her out easily. (Ankle-deep water should mess with her, too, by extinguishing a lot of fires).

“My ability doesn’t really work that way, but I can see how I forgot that for a sec.  (out of character, this is a CCC plan, and the clarifications were on the board, not the blog).  My gift adjusts people’s ‘metadata’, a set of 3-4 keywords that define them.  Adding one in, like ‘fireproof’ risks the possibility that the one that falls off will be something like ‘sane’, or ‘mobile’.  I got lucky with Grower and Builder.  If I tried the same thing on 50 people I wouldn’t have fifty fireproof people when I was done, or 50 living people.”

– Lancelot and Arthur are unlikely to be trouble in the final confrontation.

– That giant Union tank, on the other hand, is a problem (and not a small one). But Builder should be able to deal with it; her power works at any range. She can close off any gun barrels by extending the barrel material _inwards_, she can mess up the engine by making the internals just grow crazy spikes everywhere, and so on. Once she can see it, she can ruin it utterly – and probably without even leaving any external sign of her sabotage, so it can all be blamed on the Union being idiots.

“Builder can wreck it very fast as soon as she can see it, though she can’t grow stuff on the internals unless she can see into it.  But adding stuff to the outside where she can see it will rapidly render the tank unusable.  I like this idea.”

– If the Ar Harbour team don’t want to come out and fight, we can draw them out by taking hostages. from the people they care for. This strategy is unpleasant and distasteful, but it will work, and will draw them away from buildings. Moreover, I don’t actually need to permanently harm the hostages, not if I’m threatening enough.

“It sounds like I am allowed to wreck the place as long as we fix it, and I’m also really not loving the idea of taking hostages.”

*************************************************************************************

 

Day 25:

Days remaining: 6

AP available: (6 at end of day + 1 for 6 hours sleep) = 7/10

Non AP Action: Swap in a new plan.  You write in a new plan, I’ll give you Mia’s assessment of it.  If you don’t do this then the existing one will be executed.  The plan that is in force when its execution date arrives will be used for the actual battle, though there may be mid battle votes that could alter it in process.

Walter Note: I’m leaving up Mia’s assessment from last round since the plan was not changed this round

Walter extra Note: If you do not change the plan this round you will tell your Posse today (the 25^th) about moving the attack to the 28^th.

Prestige: 3

Timeslots available: 2, morning and afternoon

Builder Timeslot Available: afternoon

Owner Timeslot Available: afternoon

Smasher : Timeslot Available: morning or afternoon, but not both

Posse: 3 or 3 out of 3 slots filled

Force size: 45

Condition: Healthy

[spoiler=Ultras]

 

(Ultra format: Role, Ultra Strength/Speed/Toughness, other gift description)

Posse:

Builder — 0/0/0, a woman who can alter objects for miles around into other things, blessed with a ‘Bulletproof’ blend

Owner – housemate, 0/0/1 operates an imaginary firm, with real effects on the world,

Smasher — 3/0/1, a woman who is billed as the strongest Ultra fighter of all time

Ultra Allies:

Maker- Friend, and protégé of Snitcher, 0/0/1, can summon the spirit of things

Clawer – Ultra fighter 2/0/1, melee combatant, deadly hooks for hands

Stopper – partner of Clawer, 0/0/0, steals form’s velocity by looking at them

Sticker – Did dentistry for her brother, 0/0/2, Creates slime, can choose its stickiness

Grower – 0/*0/1, an outside Ultra I sponsored into the Lair, has a bullet blend from me, can rapidly increase the size and mass of objects

Joker — 0/2/0, a woman who can change what other people/herself look like

Replayer — 1/2/0, she can ‘step back in time’ to undo damage that she takes

Ultra Enemies:

Masher- Enemy, and fellow protégé of Subtracter, 3*/0/3*, trades off strength and durability as she moves or stays still

Picker – First Fist protégé, 0/1/0, ‘selects the outcome of things’

Ultra Acquaintances:

Tracker – Running buddy, 1/0/1, Creates tracks, and can move things on them

Shower – Adder’s protégé, 1*/0/1*, gains strength and durability from witnesses

Echoer – Singer I am a fan of, 1/1/1, can duplicate any action that she sees

Bubbler – Operates Ultra clinic 0/0/?, traps things in bubbles that heal and move them

Sucker — Ultra entertainer, ?/?/?, pulls objects/people towards her at incredible rate

Gunner — 0/0/1, she shoots tracking Ultra Blasts at roughly Ultra Strength One

Chiller — 1/0/1, can freeze any object she touches, leaving them brittle and easily broken

Cutter — 1/1/1, she is a brutal front line combatant

Swimmer — 1/0/1, she can ‘swim’ through solid surfaces

Burner — 0/0/1, she can summon Ultra fire from anywhere that she can see

Maxxer — 0/0/0, she can augment the gifts of other Ultras, pushing their gifts

Puncher — 1/0/1, her strength and speed both go up when she repeats her movements

[/spoiler]

 

[spoiler=Actions]

Actions:

[ ] Accept Refiner’s Bargain (Timeslot cost: 0, AP cost 4, auto succeed)

Motive: His blessed weapons and armor would be a massive force multiplier for our group.  He might also send along Knight backup.  He would be a powerful additional patron.

Concerns: I would be responsible for a massacre in the immediate aftermath, or be killed by Second Fist if I backed out.  Subtracter would also likely perceive this alliance as an attempt at weaseling out from under her command, so I’d have to tread very carefully to avoid offending her.

 

[ ] Seek Transportation

-[ ] Scavenge (Timeslot cost: 2; AP cost 4, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: My current transportation sufficed for me in my troubleshooter role, but I will likely require a larger vehicle, or several vehicles, in order to bring everyone to Ar Harbor. I can seek to find something in the suburbs and surrounding towns.

Concerns: Leaving Shington could be dangerous, and I am far from guaranteed to find a bus or truck suitable to my needs, as the area has already been heavily scavenged.

-[ ] Trade with existing owners (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: As above, but instead of fixing up ruined vehicles I’ll negotiate to get them from their current owners.

Concerns: Snitcher may disapprove of a warlord being civil

-[ ] Seize by force (Timeslot cost: 2; AP cost 4, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: As above, but instead of asking my contacts for vehicles I’ll just take what I want. My role as warlord and my Tally should minimize resistance

Concerns: People like their vehicles, and won’t like the one who takes them. I will make enemies.

-[ ] Seek Transportation [Adder + Company] (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: As above, but Adder can use his gift to make something for my purposes, and the Company can duplicate it and make it permanent.

Concerns: Adder and I are not close, he may decline to aid me, owing to his rivalry with my sponsor, Subtracter.

 

[ ] Seek Target Information

-[ ] Company (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: The Company logs every Ultra they create. Their Ar Harbor records would be useful information

Concerns: Ultras migrate and conceal their gifts, this information would be incomplete

-[ ] Subtracter (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: Subtracter is the military leader of the Regime, she will have information on this target

Concerns: Subtracter is stupid and violent, I don’t like to be around her

-[ ] Survivors (Timeslot cost:1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: There have been 2 other attempts at Ar Harbor. I can seek out and question survivors in the outer city.

Concerns: I may be unable to find any survivors, and I may be misled by liars.

 

[ ] Seek Posse Members

-[ ] wander & gossip, (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 1, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: There are dozens of powerful Ultras in the Lair. I know only the barest fraction of them. I can learn the basics on 1-6 of them in a few hours of socializing and gossiping, opening up in depth investigation options on them and adding them to my list of acquaintances.

Concerns: None

-[ ] At Ultra Fights, (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 1, refunds 1 on success)

Constraint: Only available in the afternoon or night on days divisible by 4 (day 4, 8, etc)

Motive: There are dozens of powerful Ultras in the Lair. I know only the barest fraction of them. I can learn the basics on 3-12 of them in a few hours of socializing and gossiping at this kind of event.

Concerns: Ultras associated with the Fights are more likely than most to be melee combatants.

 

[ ] Seek Warband Members

-[ ] At the Yard, (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: The Lair is surrounded by hundreds of Regime Ultras. The strongest come to the Yard to show their power and appeal to those like me, who would give them purpose. I should be able to gather between 5 and 20 Ultras of such caliber.

Concerns: I will need to provide housing and direction to these Ultras, or risk them wandering off. I can expect to spend at least an action a day on them, and training them might well eat up more. Ideally a Posse member will be tasked with this.

-[ ] [Gang name] From a Gang, (Timeslot cost: 2; AP cost 5, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: The Ultras that surround Shington are organized into Gangs dozens strong. If I can recruit such a force I might have my whole Warband right there.

Concerns: These Ultras likely already have patrons in the Lair, who I would need to negotiate with. Their leader would also likely want a place in my Posse, and she would be the primary locus of their loyalty until I’d had time to win them over.

 

[ ] Investigate Acquaintance:

-[ ] [Name], (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success, 2 if we become allies)

Motive: I can spend some serious one on one time with an Ultra I’ve chosen, evaluating the capability of their gift, the alignment of their values with mine, and their basic  competence. If all checks out, I might move them into my Ultra Allies column.

Concerns: None

 

[ ] Invite Ally into Posse:

-[ ] [Name], (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: If I want to bring an ally into my posse, get them to take actions on my behalf and rise or fall with me, this is the way to do it. I will only take this action on those I’ve already made allies, and once this has been taken it is difficult to undo.

Concerns: Posse members are most of the way into my circle of trust, and will operate on my behalf, representing me to stranger. A mistake here would be dangerous and damaging. I should be careful before taking this step, potentially investigating a prospect several times.

 

[ ] Seek Information on Snitcher’s patterns

-[ ] Passive listening (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 1, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: Snitcher can ride my senses at any moment, and bring Her along. If I am ever to contact my KEM allies, my resistance allies, or show any kindness or weakness whatsoever, I need to understand when this is likely to take place. Gossip can hint at this, particularly if I carefully steer conversations. This action would be mostly undetectable, even if he was riding me when I took it.

Concerns: None

-[ ] Active interrogation of Snitches (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 2 on success)

Motive: As above, but rather than listen for random gossip I will seek out other linked individuals and directly ask them how often he rides their senses, and what actions he has reacted to in the past.

Concerns: More likely Snitcher notices this, unknown consequences of that.

-[ ] Confront Snitcher Directly (Timeslot cost:1; AP cost 4, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: As above, but take the simplest possible route. Go to Snitcher and ask him for the deal.

Concerns: I am sponsored by Subtracter, not Snitcher, he may not wish to aid me. He may demand favors or other services in exchange for the information.

 

[ ] Seek Information on Regime military operations

-[ ] Ask Subtracter (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 3, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: My life depends on doing this right. I need to get a basic understanding of what She is expecting from my attack on Ar Harbor. Do I need to seize the Company Facility? Kill all the enemies? Are there any constraints on how I go about it? Subtracter is the leader of the Regime’s military, and my sponsor, she will know these answers.

Concerns: Subtracter is stupid and brutal, and she killed my neighbors, I hate spending time with her.

-[ ] Ask Around (Timeslot cost: 1; AP cost 2, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: As above, but ask survivors of previous missions instead of my evil boss.

Concerns: My predecessors may not have told them everything, their views of their missions may omit certain command level details that I need to worry about.

 

[ ] Relax and Recuperate

-[ ] By visiting Blisser (Timeslot cost: X (slots spent until AP reaches max), AP cost 0, returns 3 per time period. DANGER, this action may cause addiction)

-[ ]By lounging around, (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 0, refunds 1 on success)

Motive: I could do with some rest.

Concerns: None

-[ ]By patronizing entertainment areas (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 1, refunds 3 on success)

Motive: I could do with some rest, and I might learn some things by socializing

Concerns: None

-[ ]By using my gift to repair the city (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 2, refunds 5 on success)

Motive: It needs to be done.

Concerns: This is not becoming behavior of a warlord, Snitcher may take notice, and people may talk

-[ ]By using my gift to heal people (Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 1, refunds 5 on success)

Motive: This is why I have my gift.

Concerns: This is not becoming behavior of a warlord, Snitcher may take notice, and people may talk

 

[ ] Organize Armory [Timeslot cost: 1, AP cost 2, returns 2 on success)

Motive: I carry, in my backpack and on my person, various items to blend with if the need arises. I am overdue to look through my setup and take an inventory, once that is done I could seek out new objects if I am missing anything useful.

 

Concerns: None

 

[ ] Action: Direct the Warband (Timeslot cost 0, AP cost 1, returns 1 if successful)

Motive: If I need to set my warband in motion, give them a project or whatever, it is as simple as telling them to jump.  My will is their command.

-[ ] Let [Posse Member] Supervise, takes up the Posse Member’s action, modifies success chance based on which Posse member it is, and which action

 

[ ] Action: Train the Warband (Timeslot cost 0, AP cost 1, returns 1 if successful) [Requires a timeslot from the teacher, who should probably be an Ultra combatant]

Motive: Yard Ultras are fierce, but undisciplined.  They are warriors, not soldiers.  I can get better outcomes if I teach them some basics.

-[ ] In Ultra Combat (Gives bonuses on their battle rolls)

-[ ] In anti firearm maneuvers (Makes them suffer less casualties under fire)

-[ ] In obedience (makes them more likely to obey my orders)

 

[ ] Action: Other (Timeslot cost: x, returns x if successful)

 

KEM Actions:

[ ] Assign Assassination mission [Timeslot cost 1, AP cost 3, returns 1 on success, can only be done in the morning, uncertain Snitcher risk]

 

Description: KEM are the only humans who fight back on a consistent, day to day basis.  We’ve come up together, they and I, and pointing them at my foes is only common sense.  If I give them a target, then I trust them to make a good faith effort to put that Ultra down.  Their odds of success, of course, vary wildly depending on how much info I can provide, and the gifts of the Ultra in question.

 

Resistance Actions:

[ ] Assign Information Gathering Mission [Timeslot cost 1, AP cost 2, returns 1 on success, can only be done in the morning, uncertain Snitcher risk]

Description: The humans are the ocean in which the Ultras swim, the saying goes.  The Resistance’s capacity to gather information about Ultras is unsurpassed.  If I give them a target, then they will give me every bit of public information on the target, and often times a little bit more.  Ultras are people, after all.  I believe this with all my heart.  And people trust other people, even those that they ultimately shouldn’t.  I can assign as many targets as I wish, but the more I assign the less details I will probably get, and the longer it might take.

 

[ ] Debrief Information Gathering Mission [Timeslot cost 1, AP cost 0, returns 1 on success, can only be done in the morning, uncertain Snitcher risk]

Description: The information that the Resistance gathers is worthless if I never regain it.  Using protocols I’ve worked out ahead of time, and my recent discovery of Snitcher’s habits, it should be possible for me to take the Resistance’s reports with minimal risk.  I expect I should give them a day or two for local targets, and possibly as much as four for targets in Ar Harbor or further afield.

Smasher Actions:

[ ] Recuperate [Timeslot cost All]

Description: Smasher hangs on the edge of death.  Her body and gift will try to knit her back together each day.

 

Owner Actions:

[ ] Acquire Funds [Timeslot cost 1]

Description: Owner takes action to get more and more valuable assets within our world, increasing her overall funding, hopefully permitting her gift’s actions to be swifter and larger in impact. (Requires Write In clarification on how to do this)

[ ] Change Company [ Timeslot cost 1]

Description: Owner presently runs a package store, located in downtown Washington.  She has, as near as I can estimate, a low six figures saved up.  With this action I can direct her to acquire licenses, expand locations, purchase other businesses, or perform similar deeds, all based around changing the operation and activities of her imaginary franchise. (Requires Write In clarification on how to do this)

[ ] Company Action [ Timeslot cost 2]

Description: This is a catchall action for anything I might think of that could let Owner impact the main battle in Ar Harbor.  Buying up local real estate and demolishing it on a certain date seems like the obvious course of action, but there are a lot of other fringe ideas that I’ve been entertaining. [Requires Write In clarification on how to do this.  The first Action spent on this is about Owner doing tests to make sure this effort will work, the second actually kicks off whatever changes I want in the imaginary world.]

Builder Actions:

[ ] Repair Structure [Timeslot cost 1]

Description: Builder can repair most any structure any structure in just a few hours, spreading broken portions back into place and generating new matter as needed.

 

[ ] Construct Known Structure [ Timeslot cost 1]

 

Description: Builder can construct any easily described structure with the same ease that she repairs them.  Her present education limits this to extremely primitive structures, but that might well be changeable.

 

[ ] Construct Known Items [Timeslot cost 1]

 

Description: Builder’s gits aren’t limited to buildings.  If she can get a perfect understanding of an objects, and samples for every component, then she can form any items that I might desire.  The easiest way to accomplish this, of course, would be to provide her with a sample.

 

[ ] Memorize Patterns [ Timeslot cost 1]

 

Description: Builder’s gifts are heavily limited by her imperfect education.  The more patterns I can get her to learn, the more she can construct from any given material.  If I provide her with patterns or specimens I’m pretty sure she can memorize them and add them to her arsenal.

[/spoiler]