Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Welcome to Alex's DBZ RPG 5 Forum. We hope you enjoy your visit.


You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.


Join our community!


If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
21 Parsects Continued; Saga: Osiris
Topic Started: Mar 14 2018, 12:32 PM (140 Views)
Osiris
Member Avatar
Pallor Lord
Roleplay Guide
Cargo Bay of Perse’s Fist

Osiris watched on the screen as Correction’s Vanguard was obliterated by the unraveling cloud of plasma exhaust. For a split second, the it looked like he might have been able to pull away before the destabilization gave way to the inevitable explosion - but that was really just the poor ship getting kicked one last time by the KN-7-PTO’s maunvering thrusts as it peeled away from the hazard at the last possible moment.

As the announcers lamented the tragedy of a fine veteran racer being reduced to slag, the camera focused in on the ship responsible as it rocketed through the initial layer of smaller rocks and dusty detritus Cauldron had left behind.

The sleek silver hull had a few scorch marks brazened across it’s sparkling new visage. It was just superficial damage though - and well worth the momentum. The Pallor Lord doubted whoever that particular Praetor had gotten to race for him felt even the slightest pange of remorse for disregarding another’s life.

Callous efficiency was the virtue of any good Planet Trade Organization back endeavour.

KN-7 streaked out to take the lead as it plunged headlong without making any attempt to maneuver clear any obstacle. In fact, it didn’t have any thrusters on at all.

It looks like the pilot,” there was a moment's pause as the disembodied voice must have been checking the roster, “Rax pen’Kaltru is diverting all his energy to his foraward shields and plowing his own path.” Apparently Siberius had skimped a little on professional commentators, shocking.

The lead commentator picked up the slack, “Yes! It’s a brutal, but very effective early stage strategy if you can pick up the kind of speed Rax just got coming off the wave. Even more so when you have already sunk the cost and weight for an extra shield generator. In the late race though, he might be hurtin’ for that last bit of fuel to burn getting across the finish line.

The two continued to ramble on as the screen split into four sections so the viewers could track all the ships. Or at least the ones still operating.

Osiris sneered at the broadcast with a mild sense of disgust, Not a single mention of how Rax probably sacrificed his running mate on purpose. Just shity platatudes about how Steshion had died doing what he loved, and then nothing - forgotten in a minute. That was just Suicide Station’s culture.

The Pallor Lord made a mental note to go speak with racer’s sponsor. Test the waters of his or her’s desperation - and the usefulness of their sentiment. Piece by piece . . . the thought resonated in his mind as he pictured the grand picture which still felt so far away. Eventually he would carve his claim from this rotten place, and raise a new society from the ashes of destruction . . . piece by piece.

His amethyst eyes turned back to the intricate symbols he was replicating onto the modern device. There was no need for him to watch the race. The Son of Cauldron trusted his orphan sister absolutely.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
WC: 537
Wiki
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Osiris
Member Avatar
Pallor Lord
Roleplay Guide
Aboard Sedrick’s Serpent

Helana’s body undulated in a smooth and constant series of adjustments as she made the corvette class sprinter wove through the floating rocks of her former home. Everything felt easy, comfortable. Her suit’s interior was coated with a neo-graphene sensor layer which interfaced with the ship’s controls as an addon to the standard helm format. Every tensing muscle and priming neuron was monitored to the point that it felt like the vessel was reading her intentions as a natural extension of her body -

And feedback from the sensors wasn’t just funneled into her heads up display, but also to a somatic system in the flight seat and suit which gave the mixbreed a physical sense of the ship and it’s movements; it was a constant gripping, squeezing, and relaxing that relayed how the ship ‘felt’ as it moved.

Her heart rate was elevated but steady, and it made her feel in unison with the Serpent: undaunted by a hard run.

Sedrick’s Serpent was skimming along the boundary almost crossing the the sensor line set between the official buoys. It wasn’t the course she would have normally chose, but the strategy was to fall in behind a leader and tail them until mid race.

Dark rose eyes narrowed at the digital marker highlighting Timberfork just ahead of her. Helana was suspicious that the pilot had realized he was being drafted, and had lead her towards the boundary - which meant he was probably planning on bumping her out of bounds to tag her with a penalty and earn himself a time boost.

In most racing circuits, participants were encouraged or banned from using hostile equipment or ramming. Those rules were much more lax in the asteroid racing scene, in general. After all, the sport was considered the full contact side of spacecraft racing. What Siberius had set up though, was a league around Suicide Station and a handful of other star systems that wasn’t just looser on what pilots could get away with - it encouraged a form of mock battle.

Cross the course boundary, and you would have a time penalty of three seconds added onto your finishing time for every second you stayed ‘off course’. If someone bumped you out, or the judges determined they had ‘strategically maneuvered’ beyond the limit, that time was deducted from their finish time as a boon.

That meant there was a mix of strategy and loadouts depending on how you wanted to try to win. First place wasn’t always first place. Sometimes, if you weren’t sure you could keep up with the true leader, it was better to find a weaker pilot and harass them for time gains.

Of course, disabling your competition's ship was allowed too; That is, so long as ‘the methods and means of disablement must not cross the boundary of common understanding into areas of imminent potential lethality’. It really wasn’t a rule so much as an agreed upon grey area that boiled down to: don’t make it too obvious.

Which is exactly why Correction’s Vanguard and her pilot’s death would be ignored. It was all too easy to brush it off as a miscalculated maneuver gone very wrong.

That wasn’t about to be the Serpent’s or Helana’s fate though.

Snake Eye, find and highlight the best upcoming chokepoints with the least deviation from track boundary.

A comforting chime counted down in slowly lowering tones as several dots appeared on the minimap in the mixedbreed’s optical overlay. When the sound effect stopped, there were a slew of marked positions that had lanes of clearer space between denser clouds of debris. Four of those were all positioned right next to each other in a particularly odd formation in an otherwise very mobile asteroid field.

Helana couldn’t help but think that it must have been one of the primary sites for the gravity bombs used just before the start of the race to randomize the track. It also felt like the best place to set an ambush for a drafter.

Clear the marks except for this cluster,” she quickly flicked her wrist to enlarge the map in the overlay, circled the porous cloud formation, and then flicked her wrist to drop the map back to it’s small corner. “Focus the sensor array on that are as we approach.

_________________________________________________
WC:732
TWC:1,269
Wiki
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Osiris
Member Avatar
Pallor Lord
Roleplay Guide
Aboard the Timberfork

The thick trunked alien at the helm spoke to itself with an incessantly, almost obsessively.

Tragger, our mines are deployed along the core of the cloud, but, but we may need to lay others to the exit incase foolish creature tries to go around and cut us off.

Never catch, never catch. The creature is using our heat wake to conserve energy. Divergence would be antithetical to the strategy, Shin!

Shin made a brusque hand gesture with the two left arms he had greater control over, “Only a tactic, not strategy! The single faced creature may have a plan to knock us off course. The bait must not be taken without foresight!

Ha, you worry too much! Tragger’rimor’Shin always sees what lies ahead,” the right head laughed with a deep chuckle that reverberated in the alien’s thick torso, “The Rimori straddle the horizon while the single faces stand with darkness all around them!

Shin shifted their large body with mild irritation at themselves for being overconfident. The thick wires connected into their flesh jostled with the sound of rubber sliding across rubber. There were no manual interfaces within the cockpit like a standard ship. Instead, the entire control system was simply connected directly into the pilots’ nervous system - something for which the otherwise less technologically advanced Rimori had an affinity.

She is coming up on the first cluster of sensor disruptors. What is our time from lead?” Shin had his eyes closed to better watch the feed he was getting from the deployed sensor net cast by the dozen laid mines. His task was not to pilot -

That was Tragger’s focus, “Only forty seconds. Rax might be good at straight lines, but he is losing momentum through the heavy. Cruxion will snap his shiny ship in half if he doesn’t break off from her.” Tragger couldn’t move their hands like he wanted to emphasize what he thought was in store for the PTO based racer. He was completely cut off from their tertiary nervous system with the way the ship controls were wired into his brain stem and midbrain.
Shin bit his lips with large, almost tusk like teeth. He had always been the anxious one. The pessimist to balance Tragger’s optimism - a necessary, but loathsome life task. “It won’t matter if we can disable Sedrick’s ship out of bounds. They will be forced to edge with each other and lose time . . . but this still seems too easy.

Tragger sparked off a set of neurons which would have normally moved his thumb and forefinger at the same time. A chiming notification was accompanied by a slight pick up in the cockpit’s temperature signalling that the laser battery was beginning to charge from the ship’s core. “Then we will just have to make sure we are ready for this newbie’s tricks with some old fashioned problem solving.

Good!” It made Shin happy when his partner actually listened to his cautioning. “Primed. First detonation in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . mark!

__________________________________________________________
WC: 539
TWC: 1,808
Edited by Osiris, Mar 19 2018, 07:12 PM.
Wiki
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Osiris
Member Avatar
Pallor Lord
Roleplay Guide
Aboard Sedrick’s Serpent

Another comforting chime struck a double note as the Serpent’s Eye got done calculating the expected change to the asteroid cloud. Cheeks spotted with small, pink scales tightened into a satisfied smirk. Helana flicked the safety up and gave the underlying button a quick jab with her thumb.

The corvette shuddered as the missile bay doors dropped open and then slammed back shut like a blinking eye. It was just long enough for the payload to be ejected - a thin missile as tall as a keliouxian but painted with energy absorbing compounds that made it so dark it was nearly impossible to track it in the void. All the mixbreed’s eyes saw was a tiny streak of condensed blue plasma dart out from beneath the Serpent and disappear in the dust floating between the slowly tumbling boulders.

Now, to spring the trap waiting for me. Helana tried to breath away the building muscle tension as she curved the ship on a parabolic arc over a unmanageably dense patch of debris. Her gut was telling her something would definitely be laying on the other side despite her more calculated risk assessment saying she had another quart parsec to go before there would be any fireworks.

Her gut was right.

Dropping back from nearly the ‘roof’ of the track and towards the hollow center of the asteroid cloud - massive lights suddenly bloomed around her ship like a handful of solar flares going off in quick succession! Before the ship’s sensor array could adjust, a screaming cacophony of static washed through the helm and bombarded the mixbreed’s senses.

She tried to squeeze her eyes shut as though it could blockout not the overwhelming deluge of useless information. “Reset the sensor array and bring up the simulated projection while it is down!

Without que or warning, silence cut off the visual and auditory cacophony like a descending guillotine. For a heartbeat there was only the echo of her own blood coursing through her veins and the dim lights of the manual data readouts - another heartbeat, and the optical overlay and the accompanying screen feed suddenly looked very different.

To save on storage space and computing power, the simulation had been done with a low resolution mock up of the actual sensor sweeps. The positioning and dimensions of the surrounding course was all very accurate, but now Helana found herself flying amongst green wire outlines of objects like some sort of ancient video game that had only gotten halfway through production.

Trigger the warhead on a thirty second timer,” she spoke in an annoyed voice as she ripped back on the controlstick and pitched the ship into a accent back towards the ‘roof’ of the track. The Serpent slithered into a tight and irregular alley between rock masses - a flight path that would look incredibly strange to someone who thought they had managed to blind her.

The Tumberfork had knocked down all of the Serpent’s sensors, except for the ion tracer. Helana figured the Rimori pilot had intended for her to just keep drafting since it would be the only sensible way to avoid a collision. It was a more rudimentary trap than she had expected, and easy to give the impression she was running away from whatever laid on the other side of the diversion, despite countering it.
______________________________________________________________________
WC: 573
TWC: 2,381
Edited by Osiris, Apr 8 2018, 01:31 PM.
Wiki
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Osiris
Member Avatar
Pallor Lord
Roleplay Guide
Aboard the Cruxion

The lithe Kekko was sitting back in a reclined seat almost laying down. She looked up to the ceiling of her ship to get the wide angle video feed that made up the entire top of the cockpit. Cruxion had named her ship after herself as an homage to her home planet - and a challenge to herself. Fame or disgrace, her skills as a pilot would bring one or the other to her name without any shield of protection of a ship’s or team name to hide behind when things didn’t go well.

Her focus, and the digital screen, was split between chasing down the silvery PTO ship that had managed to blow past her (despite her efforts to disrupt the collective plasma wave) and the Timberfork. The only two real threats to her coming in first in this race.

Cruxion was sure she had the more agile ship and would be able to pass Rax on the next band when the course started to curve back around to the station. The asteroid band would be dense there, or at least that was what her crew was telling her. A part of her just wanted to slide up behind the beautiful new ship and blow apart its thruster manifold. It would be a sad waste of a finely crafted vessel, but Rax’s brute strategies and underhanded plays always felt like an insult to her chosen art.

It was one thing to disrupt the wave and force a pack split early or to slam an opponent into an asteroid with some heavy handed maneuvering; it was totally something else to use another racer like a launch pad when they think you are working together; that was just trampling over the comeradier of the craft.

Unfortunately, Cruxion was also sure she didn’t have time for playing around with cheats. Timberfork looked poised to out the newbie in Sedrick’s old ship - and that would shrink her time lead way more than she was comfortable. Even more so since she had taken the center lane and trying to maneuver someone out of bounds herself would be pain in the ass with the Regalia lurking.

Her silvery eyes glanced into the secondary screen to her left that displayed the rear sensor sweeps. The Regalia was an obscure cloud of reflective silvery haze several times larger than the actual ship hidden within. It made the vessel appear ghostly as it appeared to simply pass over the rocky debris with ephemeral ease. The reality was the haze was actually a sensor disrupting projection cast around the corvette class ship by a swarm of drones.

The swarm functioned so well that after nearly fifteen races, no one was sure what they actually looked like or how they projected the cloud. No one caught within the Regalia’s aura came out with an intact sensor log - or a operating ship for that matter.

Second place was a respectable finish to lead into the Boonta - especially if she could avoid needing repairs . . . but the Rigelia was a predator among the mids just waiting for someone to slip up.

Well, at least the two corporate clowns are playing it safe and sticking tight to the center. I could use some better suggestions on how to maintain time lead over Timberfork without the Regalia screwin’ me over.” She spoke out loud knowing the communications system was always on in her vessel - sponsor's insistence.

The voice of her team leader responded right away, “We are looking at the field ahead of you and have found a few ice dense asteroids along the center lane. If you hit one of them in the right spot you should be able to vaporize the core and set it off like a steam powered grenade.

Cruxion’s biceps flexed as much in frustration as they did to stabilize a sudden shift in momentum as the pilot swung around a cluster of smaller asteroids she realized were ninety percent iron cored. Mass scans weren’t always reliable in such a chaotic debris field.

What the hell good is that going to do!?” She snapped at the open comm line as the ship’s flight path smoothed back out.

Normally none,” the team leader’s voice was annoyingly calm, “but Rax isn’t running a standard shield set-up. Everything is in his nose, or on the port side. That’s why he keeps turning to protect his starboard when the track gets heavy, and only correcting when he hits an open patch.

So what!? I’m not going to penetrate his hull enough to knock him out of the race!

Relax,” seriously how is anyone this monotone? “You only need to depolarize his hull. Then you can use the coupling mag on your landing strut to either bump him into a blocker, or drag his ass to the edge of the track for your own out.

The kekko’s hands balled into hard fists as she was getting excited at the idea of screwin’ over Rax. It felt weird though, the way the neural gel oozed between her fingers. “Yeah, or I can just feed his face some fresh ion cannon while we are up close and personal. That should make him more pliable and buy me enough time to deal with the Timberfork directly.

Just don’t overtax the engine core trying to run two high intensity systems at their limits . . . there isn’t time left to make corrections.


______________________________________________________________________________
WC: 938
TWC: 3,319
Edited by Osiris, Apr 8 2018, 01:32 PM.
Wiki
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Osiris
Member Avatar
Pallor Lord
Roleplay Guide
Aboard the Timberfork

Where is she going!?” Tragger suddenly demanded as his attention diverted from the course to the quickly climbing tracking icon marking Sedrick’s Serpent.

She must have backup system for her sensors, but - shielding shouldn’t work!” Shin’s mind raced trying to grasp where the plan had gone awry. He had decided they should buy the new sensor mines before the season started. They had cost a small fortune, enough to buy another factory made corvette and even some halfway decent aftermarket parts.

If they didn’t work, or turned out to just be overbright flares . . . Tragger would never let him live it down. Before his brain could latch onto anything meaningful, he felt the ship’s nose suddenly lift upwards. In another moment, the flight line projected from the Timberfork intersected the space directly in front of Sedrick’s Serpent.

Wait, wait, what if she is luring us to the top?” Shin didn’t like this sudden deviation or the density of debris they were going to have to get through to find their target. Outing the newbie to the side of the track would have been much easier with many more open spaces.

Then her trap is our trap,” Tragger sounded brazenly confident . . . like always. “We will just do this the rough way. Eyes wide open, yes! Yes! Charge the battery array, Shin.

Shin hesitated, he was unsure how the engine core would handle the triple load of having to run hard while using a shield extension to knock the thicker boulder and pebble mass out of their way and charge the battery array which would condense enough power to actually prime the underhull cannon. His brain was firing away as the neural interface system co-opted his grey matter toi crunch the hard numbers more quickly. The calculations on core stress was not looking good.

Too much Tragger, too much. We have to scale back the output or we won’t be able to make it across the finish line!” The anxiety of not finishing was gnawing at their shared stomach . . .

. . . and Tragger could feel it. “Relax Shin. Reduce the shields, and focus on our course and targeting. We can get through the field without plowing like the idiot single brainer Rax.

A reticle dropped in over Shin’s optical feed he was getting straight from the ship’s sensors. The small triangular shape was pointing the way into something of a craggy inverted valley which ascended in the a direction that would allow for them to cross paths with their target even if they had to slow down to navigate it. It was Tragger’s way of saying ‘this is the path we are taking and it is the only path’.

In a way, Shin knew that was right. There was no way they were going to catch up to Cruxion and Rax with enough time left to joustle out a proper real space lead. Not with Regalia lurking.

That was the thought which pushes away the uncertainty.

Sedrick’s Serpent might have a few modifications and a new pilot, but Tragger’rimor’shin had learned the hard way not to let the Regalia catch them. The Timberfork was the replacement for that mistake. Better to deal with a rookie who thinks they have a clever plan than risk losing another ship to an undisputed veteran.

He made the adjustments to the power flow diverting almost sixty percent of their shielding reserves into the battery array. In his multisensory feed, it created a tingling sensation which warmed their shared belly. The feeling and knowledge of having a primed weapon just seconds away made the reticent Shin feel much bolder. “Alright! Let’s do it!

That’s more li-” Tragger’s voice was abruptly cut off by the distinctive warning chirps which announced a high energy discharge. “Bottom of track?

A small flash of a thermal discharge bloomed on Shin’s wider information feed. Then it was gone. There was a moment of delay when Tragger’rimor’shin collectively thought it was nothing. A wasted distraction, or some leftover mining ordinance that wasn’t supposed to be in the area.

But then they felt it; that tingle of dread on the precipice of shifting from a balanced state to an uncontrollable freefall.

The gravity wave suddenly swelled over them ripping their ship into a newly defined ‘down’ despite the ship’s thrusters giving protest. The Timberforck’s inertial dampeners were being pushed beyond any sane limit. The Rimori felt like they were about to redout as the blood in their body was lagging behind the sudden acceleration of their body forcing the fluid into their skulls.

Tragger’rimor’shin shuttered their eyes against the agonizing spike in blood pressure pressing at the back of their eyeballs trying to escape. “No. No, no, no” Both the alien’s brains raced to change the ships systems to compensate for the massive gravity shear threatening to tear them apart.

Even if the speed of thought had been fast enough to react to the invisible attack, shifting the stored energy out from the battery array back into the shields was a task which could not be instantaneous.

The ruined body of Cauldron bombarded the TImberfork’s reduced shielding. The inverted valley was collapsing to the same seemingly arbitrary point at tremendous speed.

Steer into it!” Shin screamed to Tragger through the neural connection - his jaws unwilling to declench as their collective body subconsciously braced against the violent shuddering.

____________________________________________________________________
WC: 933
TWC: 4,252
Edited by Osiris, Apr 8 2018, 02:19 PM.
Wiki
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Osiris
Member Avatar
Pallor Lord
Roleplay Guide
Aboard the Cruxion

Metrics off, I repeat, metrics off.” The team leaders annoyingly calm voice was telling Cruxion something she already damn well knew.

Yeah, no shit!” Her irises burned with a bright green glare as she pushed ki into her nervous system to try to boost her reaction time. She would never describe herself as a proper warrior, but she had more juice than the average Kekko. “What happened?

The pilot’s eyes weren’t even moving to track the things she was trying to dodge. There was too much chaos freshly injected into the asteroid field to try and track any one tumbling boulder. Instead, he eyelids had peeled back in a vain effort to maximize her peripheral vision enough to just avoid the bigger chunks coming directly at her.

Sedrick’s set off a gravity bomb. I don’t know how they were lugging one around big enough to mangle the track like this, but the Timberfork is out and dead. The Serpent has time lead and is gaining.

How is she gaining with this track movement?! There are no clear lanes now!” Cruxion’s frustration was mounting as she watched Rax start to pull away again. The aura coming off his active shielding was like a beacon leading the pack as he plowed onward with his augmented emitters.

There was an awkward pause before the calm voice answered. “She fired a powerful Ki beam from an access port we couldn’t detect in the ship. She made her own path. Stay clear of her, the Serpent is angling for Rax.

The next three minutes, the last minutes of the race, were filled with more frustration than Cruxion had ever felt in her life before. She ran scared not from one competitor, but two. As the rudy brown icon of Sedrick’s Serpent came raging through the chaos on a line straighter than should have been possible even in normal circumstances, the Kekko was also forced to angle away from the Regalia.

Then she watched as everything she yearned to do was accomplished by another.

Her burning green eyes watched as a salvo erupted from the side of the Serpent like a pirate opening up a broadside headless of the repercussions. The handful of ki orbs which didn’t expend their energy demolishing a boulder into dust tore into the PTO ship’s weak side like it was wet paper and left molten wounds in the hull. Rax still had a functioning ship, but without proper shielding he was forced to drop back to last and finish at a safer pace.

In that moment of attack, there was an opportunity for a counterstrike . . . at least by someone other than Rax. It would have been the perfect chance for the Regalia to pounce on the Serpent with one of the veteran’s trademark cross-track charges. Even the lurking predator can feel fear, it seemed. The drone cloud hung back apparently content with its positioning in third.

Cruxion couldn’t help but wonder if it would have been different if the PTO ship hadn’t been rendered shieldless and could hang onto its second place spot.

The final burn, the last moment to drop shields and divert everything to the thrusters as they emerged from the asteroid field just before the finish, was usually one of the most exciting highlights of the race. Last second jocking and rash choices made for a good show. That show would have to wait for another race though. The scores were set a full minute and a half before the pack ever emerged.

The last burn was nothing but pretty ion trails and wasted fuel cells.

An unknown racer in a newly modded ship had claimed first with such startling ease it made second place feel worse than last. It felt like a gift to Cruxion, a thank you for not getting in the way of a real racer.

The only thing holding in the wrathful scream building up in the kekko’s chest was the conscious awareness that the comm line was always open, and the sponsor was listening. Her sponsor was a freaking idiot. He would be happy with second place in the big 21 and not stop for a single second to see how useless they all were to actually contend with Serpent’s new pilot.

Cruxion’s mind was already churning with thoughts of how to deal with a full fledged ki user in the upcoming Boonta Eve Classic. It was also churning with the anxiety of having to stand on the second place pedestal yet again, but this time sandwiched between two racers who would likely crusher her in a straight one versus one match.

She ground her teeth silently and rejected the feelings bubbling up from within; A kekko is never out of her depths!

___________________________________________________
WC: 821
TWC: 5,073
Wiki
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
« Previous Topic · Ruins of Cauldron · Next Topic »
Add Reply

RPG Chat RPG-D RPGfix eXTReMe Tracker

Back to Alex's DBZ RPG | Back to Main Forum

Black Water created by tiptopolive of the Zetaboards Theme Zone