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Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

Docking Procedures
Orbit
Malbrathian Voidspace


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMDOL1uduxc

Antsy and cooped up from their enforced time in a confined, rumbly flying box, the scrunts eagerly fix on Velothenes as a focus for their ire.

Interestingly, and coincidentally, following repeated and increasingly desperate hails, the His Everlasting Radiant Fist has chosen their rumbly flying box as a focus for their anti-boarding point defence missiles. Apparently they're a bit paranoid about their secret arms deals.

Radar picks up a cloud of spiralling rockets heading towards the Aquila on an intercept vector. Mung is halfway through his attempts to subvert the voidcraft's systems by this point, and with an almighty FACK, gives in to his innermost piloting instincts. Yanking the control stick with all of his impressively mechanically-augmented might, he snaps it off awkwardly; thankfully he is jacked into the control port, and controlling the vessel via mind-impulse; his sudden spear of panic does what hours of fiddling could not, and Mung cores out the central processing routines of the Aquila, replacing them with the imprint of a panicked scrunt.

Scrunts, cargo and unsecured chaff tumble around the cargo bays and crew compartments as the flier finally snaps from its preprogrammed course and corkscrews out of the path of most of the missiles; a few detonate close enough to the vessel to scratch the paint.

Battered, bruised, but unbroken, the scrunts take stock. About a dozen different alerts are flashing in the cockpit, and minature respirator packs - void-capable, good for about five minutes breathing - spiral and tumble from overhead compartments. The Aquila's pointed in vaguely the right direction to hit the lab deck, but it's sort of drifting - the engines are stuttering and not firing full throttle. Those missiles are arcing back on the flyer; from what Mung can determine, various transmitters and transceivers within the airframe of the Aquila appear to be broadcasting information both to the missiles and the ship about trajectories, velocities, all that stuff. Anything that could conceivably be wrong with a void vessel appears to be the case, as previously automated systems have shut down; practically anything the scrunts do would be an improvement.

Time to get cracking.

---

so let's get going.

mung (fully healed by a good medicae roll, incidentally) does a Pilot test to wrench the ship out of its flight path, with p dece success. the controlled crash begins! the alerts aren't just because you did a barrel roll, by the way, it's the act of breaking the ship out of its preprogrammed course that's making it rebel. also some of the alerts are probably "holy poo poo no fuel!"

:siren: you other scrunts don't get to sit back and watch - you need to help!

roll skill tests that you think might be useful in loving up/unfucking up a spacecraft from the inside; Athletics (Strength) to bash the airlocks around, for example, Tech Use to mess with its flight controls, or just randomly lascut things. if you've got a particularly powerful deathwish or void-sealed capabilities you can grab an O2 mask, pop a hatch, expose yourself to the void, and shoot at the interception torpedoes. the engines need attention, you can do basically whatever you like to those - maybe there's a spare scrunt stuck in them that needs to be lasered out, maybe there's a bit of rebar needs wrenching. maybe you want to boost the aquila somehow to make it go faster.

we're looking for extremes here - high DoS or high DoF will be equally useful - so go for stuff you're either really really good at or really really bad at.

this will dictate how favourable your starting position is on the lab deck, and what sort of situation you find yourself in. go get something in before the 19th, if you can

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Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

Spasmodic
Orbit
Malbrathian Voidspace


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C00w_xcL2V0

With characteristic verve and vigor, the scrunts do very, very little in the face of impending doom - the hull of their craft begins to shake as point defence weapons begin to impact on it.

Mung seems quite animated, at least; he wants nothing to do with the onrushing missiles, and attempts to jam their guidance system. The acoustic element of the scrunty-go-round won't work through the void, but by wrenching out a few of the cockpit radio cables he's able to at least partially obscure their trace. He's not entirely successful in stopping the missiles, but a good couple of handfuls spiral off and, in the absence of anything else to do, start latching onto point-defence flak turrets and counter-boarding torpedos as the Aquila corkscrews into range. The hull of the craft therefore takes a bit less of a pounding than it otherwise would.

A lucky barrage of flak shells does scrape across the passenger compartment airlock, though, sending sparks and spalling ricocheting through the compartment. To the scrunts' horror, the locking mechanism is torn off the door by a high-calibre shell, and sound is drowned out as the craft's pressurised interior begins venting atmosphere at an alarming clip. Drekk, hurtling through the air like a particularly noisome spitball, is on hand to wrench the door closed with gnarled and twisted arms, though; straining mightily, he hauls several hundred kilos of bulkhead-on-railings back against the whistling flow, and after a few moments he even manages to he swiftly jam a bit of broken handle into the busted mechanism to keep the door from flying open again. The venting appears to have stabilised the spin of the vessel slightly.

Groin does absolutely nothing; he just loudly announces that he is helping, as he hovers gently on his converted cargolifter.

Grug has found his way into the pilot's compartment in an attempt to make himself useful; holding his cap onto his head with one hand, he jams frantically at the biggest button he can find.

"MAIN ENGINE PURGE SELECTED, PLEASE CONFI-" jab
"MAIN ENGINE PURGE INITIATED, PLEASE H-" jab
"MAIN ENGINE PURGE IN PROGRESS, PL-" jab
"WARNING, MAIN ENGINE PURGE ALR-" jab
"WARNING, OVERLOAD-" jab

With a sickening crack, the tortured vector engines wrench themselves from under the struts of the Aquila and, spiralling madly, rocket back into the pursuing cloud of missiles; heat-locked flak emplacements and point defence lasers alike follow them, buying the scrunts a previous few moments. Their craft is now entirely at the mercy of physics and their steering rockets, but by this point it's probably too late to consider the Aquila - venting gas, trailing debris - as voidworthy in any real sense.

With a similarly sickening crack, Grumb's nose breaks as his comrade slams his head into the armorplas porthole; it's not enough to knock the gunner out cold, though, so his companion has to keep bashing his head against the floor to ensure unconsciousness takes hold. Murdelia supervises, and as Barrius the servitor watches, the scene burns into his neocortex like a thermal lance. The neural locks that clamp down on his dead-and-resuscitated mind frizzle and fray as they attempt to hold back the tide; most servitors see dozens of things they don't understand per hour, but normally these get handwaved through the decision tree as "too complicated". This is the first instance of an Imperial servitor being forced to witness something "too stupid".

Something small and important breaks within the subroutines of what passes for the gunner's mind. Abruptly, it becomes necessary to the mechanical creature to disable its locator beacon; the vast majority of the pursuing missiles suddenly lose their lock, as a wisp of malign intelligence glimmers in the otherwise vacant sockets of what remains of Barrius...

...before the Aquila begins grazing the hull of the Heavenly Fist, exchanging speed for heat, noise, and bowel-wrenching terror...

---

Giant Leap
Orbit
Heavenly Fist


Well, that was bracing.

The Aquila grazed along the side of the Heavenly Fist's hull in a gruelling cheesegrater of a journey, but the ablative shielding held out in the end. The vessel's totally hosed, though - if the scrunts ever want to get off this voidship, they'll need to arrange alternative transport.

Ramming into a protuding nacelle appears to have successfully stopped the Aquila, and the Radiant Fist hurtles along the void with it stuck to its armoured skin like a burr. As the ship's venting atmosphere at an alarming clip, the scrunts piled into the nearest airlock they could find. It's a rickety, improvised affair by the looks of it - it has DECK 34 - NOT FOR HABITATION stencilled on the wall, and appends what appears to be one of the main ventilation conduits for the city-sized voidcraft.



It's wet, poorly-maintained, and full of weird fungal growths. The enormous fan is currently spinning at a lazy, lazy clip; just enough to keep air circulating. It gives a pleasant, effluent-scented breeze, and brings with it the lowing and snarling of... grox?

The doorway is just - just - big enough to get power armour, hoverbikes, and anti-grav cargo pallets carrying missile parts through it into the main ventilation tunnel. The tunnel itself is probably going to run the length of the ship, but will have access to other areas if the scrunts look for long enough. Failing that, it'll probably be in enough disrepair that they can force their way into conduits between sections of the ship. There'll probably be armsmen along soon to investigate, though, and should the scrunts be discovered - i.e. if they're too noisy - they will likely have to run-and-gun their way to safety before getting overwhelmed with hordes of angry shipdwellers. Mung's musicbox is probably ok here, but if he starts moving to more populated areas of the ship he may need to turn it off lest he draw unnecessary attention.

Atmosphere's whistling and crystallising into the void behind the scrunts; it's time for them to get their poo poo together and get moving, if they want to live.

----
so

mung gets his war-ham-signal-jam on; it is a minimal success before bonuses, adding 3DoS to the pile (TU +10, circumstance)

drekk gets his wrench on; 5 DoS on the athletics check! total scrunt influence is now 8 degrees.

grug offers 4DoF to the pile; total scrunt influence is now 12 degrees!

grumb gets it; 6DoF on the strength test, 7 on the Deceive (TN 1, naturally). 25 degrees of scrunting. he can take an action from one of the non-posters.

murdelia assists with 3DoF; unnatural strength would have added 2DoS to any success, but oh well. 28 degrees of scrunting!

loosely this translates to "You're Not Totally hosed When You Board, But It's Not That Great Either". 0-10 degrees would have been "ambush"; 10-20 would have been "escape"; 20-30 is "find stuff to do"; 30+ would have been "hey, score".

what do next?? basically if you still wanna go check out the lab, great, go do that; follow the corridor for a bit and look for a way in, we'll do a bit of dungeoneering and you get to find horrible scrunt experiments. if you fancy something else, it's a big ship - just tell me what you want to get up to, but the exploration bit is on you.

grumb: well, your nose has stopped bleeding. barry the servitor will now respond to verbal commands having had his head broke (i.e. can do non-skill-requiring Orders like "hold that door" or "press that button"). you don't have any specialist knowledge about this ship in particular but you're pretty sure the gunnery decks will have most of the crew on them; an "abandoned" deck like this probably won't have voidsmen as its primary thread.
grimply: with your heightened sight you can see this vent shaft basically runs for ages - there's three, four more fans that you can make out. you probably don't want to hang out in this vent forever. on the other hand, you've got magboots and this entire ship is made of metal (or ceramite); something to remember. you guys can move vertically if needed, but Murdelia + Mung will not be able to climb your grapnel. if there's other scrunts on this ship, maybe they could do with rescuing - it makes sense they wouldn't be stored near the grox that you can hear, because, well, why put scrunts in with something you might one day eat?
groin: well, you can definitely fly your hoverboard down this corridor. if you don't fancy that, maybe you could sneak through some vents somewhere, get somewhere restricted? you are a Hotshot Pilot which means you can technically fly this ship with a suitable crew, and if you can fly something you can understand how it works - given a bit of time and vague map access, you can lead the squad roughly in the direction of any major ship landmark you care to pick.
grug: you can definitely hear grox! you just need to follow the lowing, and can easily lead the squad to the big herd of cow-lizards that's nearby. quite why it's here, you've no idea!
chuggo: SMELL. SMELL CHEMICALS. DOWN, UNDERDECK. (you can lead the scrunts to a chemical silo nearby by following your quivering pink nose, should you want to get out of the tunnel. fairly benign chemicals, if they're heaped up in large amounts. smells like ammonia.)
drekk: you ain't got any voidcraft skills and you haven't got any particular abilities for finding out what's going on, but it strikes you that if you're gonna get attacked by overwhelming hordes of armsmen - this ship is very large, and you've heard about the ones that picked up the yeestealer corpse way back when - it's probably a good idea to get into some twistier tunnels. easier to lose pursuit, too!
mung: as designated technoscrunt, you're aware that space vessels are so old and so appallingly complicated that there's no way you'd be able to get an overview of all ship systems from one place - except the command nexus on the bridge, following a lengthy obsequience service to get all the myriad machine spirits working in lockstep. this works both ways though, and you can probably feel comfortable loving around with any local systems that you find without alerting the entire ship to your location.
yurik: you can definitely feel a tiny core of sentience in grumb's new servitor buddy. you'd have to touch it to be certain of its provenance, though
murdelia: what would be nice would be to find a power port to charge up your power armour. you don't know how long you'll be on this ship. you can just find a big power cable and have one of the technoscrunts (Mung, Groin) splice in a connection, but maybe this ship has some of the power packs this thing runs off. anywhere where there is machinery might have a pack! presumably the place near the grox has some sort of machinery nearby - if it's a slaughterhouse, they'd need fridges etc.

Inexplicable Humblebrag fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Dec 30, 2016

Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

Jonahs of the Fortieth Millenium
Orbit
Heavenly Fist


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV2yLjmvMvE

Encountering a new, feculent, fetid, poorly-lit environment to gently caress around in, the scrunts disperse with glee.

Chuggo slams himself into the nearest vent, oozing with unpleasant boneless rhythms as he yanks and pulls at sheet metal in an attempt to widen the gap. Brushing aside some ribcages that someone left there, he does indeed force a gap into the sprawling, terrifyingly complex vent system that underpins this deck - it's too small for anyone larger than himself, though. Grug and Grumb, stocky as they are, will probably struggle to fit easily, and Murdelia has no chance unless she abandons her armour. Groin's grav-hauler won't fit, nor will the pallets of missile components that hover gently behind the scrunts. Still, it could be a good conduit for a scouting run, or a stealth raid... and Chuggo is confident - CHUGGO! - very confident that he can simply follow his nose.

Drekk, on the other hand, has a bit more success with his perennial search for barnyard animals to interfere with. A few hundred yards from the scrunt's current position is a great, gaping hole in the floor of a side-tunnel. It seems to drop down about six, seven metres - judging from the length of that femur - into a dimly-lit factory farm of lowing, braying grox.



The scrunts are reasonably sure they could lower themselves down gently using their grav-lifters, although getting back up might be somewhat of a pain and require some jury-rigging and overcharging. It's tricky to judge how big the farm is, but Grug reckons there must be hundreds of grox in sight alone. Maybe they're a food source, but if so, why aren't they already slaughtered, rendered, and frozen? Seems like an unnecessary overhead to have live animals on board...

Murdelia, in her quest for power, is aware that the large fans lining this corridor must have some form of power supply. Then again, maybe the machinery that tends the grox also has some. poo poo, maybe the chemical storeroom has some processed your- yure- uranium, or something. Crunching a nearby skull under her armoured boot, she shifts impatiently.

Grimply ghosts up and down the corridor, making not a sound - he checks a few hundred metres either way down the shaft while the scrunts bicker and squabble, and finds... well, this is a fairly abandoned deck. There's no indication of human habitation - he runs into a servitor repeatedly bumping into a wall in one of the maintenance cubbyholes, but it's missing an arm and covered in raw-looking bite marks and doesn't have a great deal to say to him. There's not a huge amount of particular interest, as this appears to mostly be a central ventilation tunnel. There's some wall sockets for recharging of tools, but they're incredibly low-power when compared to Murdelia's needs. On the plus side, as the scrunt-scout recharges a spare powercell while munching on a small lizardlike creature he snagged with his rusty, filthy knife, there's definitely power on this deck.

Grimply is just returning as Groin cracks under the pressure and blasts his new hover-bike at breakneck speed down the shaft, screaming at the top of his lungs and undoing all of the scout's efforts to be stealthy. Groin barrels up and down with horrifying speed, blazing through the remnants of a Tarantula security checkpoint a kilometre or so north that tracks him with the whining clicks of empty heavy bolters. Jinking off at whiplash speed, he does pass an extremely fortified and welded-shut lift complex, surrounded by yet more empty Tarantulas. It appears that at one point, the crew wanted to ensure with some certainty that this deck remained sealed off. This is somewhat at odds with the huge automated grox farm beneath a great gaping hole near the scrunts' entry point.

Groin, following his joy bus hell ride, is pretty certain he can hear chittering from the walls, the vents, the floors. Grug, being slightly more situationally aware, if not more mentally stable, will allow that following the yelling spree he certainly thinks he heard some shifting from nearby. Maybe it's just more of those tasty little lizards.

Grumb has a think about where to keep power conduits suitable for interface with advanced military technology. He looks at the lights, he looks at the big fans, he looks at a neatly stacked pile of what look like vertebrae with mould growing on them, and then he looks at his multimelta. If he can find a big enough cable, surely one of the technical scrunts can figure out how to jam it into Murdelia's aperture? He blushes, for some reason.

In the meantime, Yurik attempts to jam his mind-tentacles into Barry's brain, with little success. Oh, there's lots of flashing lights, and an unearthly screaming that is suddenly cut off, but the scrunts just take that as it comes. The unfortunate ex-PDF trooper has been dead a while, and his servitor wiring has pretty much overwritten whatever remains of the man's soul. Only faint traces remain, a ghost in the machine, a sense of anger at the betrayal following his debriefing, disbelief at what he has learned of the coming plans for the Ophidius Genestealer takeover of Aeolia, the capital city, and a hatred of scrunts. Nothing really useful; the scrunt hatred can probably be taken as read, and- wait, genestealers?

It takes a little more digging, but it seems there's enough of those weird tunneling yee-ing tentacle beast things on Malbrathia that their influence has spread pretty far. They do, after all, seem to be intelligent, and they can dominate the minds of humans that they infect. They're planning to move against the capital city's throne; as per the mystery box thing the scrunts watched on the flight over, should they manage to off the current governor and seat someone of their own choice, it's legally binding.

Yurik also has a mull over what he's learned about Imperial ships. He can't think of much about the Heavenly Fist specifically, but he's aware that ships tend to have sealed decks occasionally, when they have... problems that they can't solve by drydocking and void-venting. It's normally the older ones that have the worse issues. Older ships means older, better tech; maybe even Dark Age stuff. But, equally, it comes with Dark Age problems. If there's gonna be anything interesting on this deck, it won't be in the ventilation conduits - it will be towards the core of the deck, towards the centre of the ship. That is kinda in the direction of the shuttle bays that the scrunts imagine to be on the other side of the ship, though, so it works out nicely.

Mung barely needs to begin hurting his captive, although he does so anyway, just to be sure. Specialist Slaughter is jittery as all hell now that he's seen what's stencilled in the airlock.

"W-we need to get off this deck! Quickly! Now! I don't care if you kill me first, just so long as they don't get me!" He points, horrified, at a small collection of fingerbones hung up in cobwebs like a dreamcatcher, over a nearby vent opening.

He is not particularly forthcoming with additional info - all he has is shipboard legends of "grey walkers" and "fangs" and "koboldkin" and "giant loving monsters". Yurik knows enough about how legends form - for some reason - that he can see that the man's words have some grains of truth in them. As for what grains, he has no idea without additional evidence.

Interestingly - almost as interesting as that rustling sound - he seems to have no idea who Inquisitor Velothenes is.

---

fyi this is actually set a thousand years before the current day in 40k, as per the datestamp on the very first post in this thread!! little bit of scruntlore for you there

chuggo finds a route to chemicals. it is not a route that allows for chubbies, or cargo, so maybe consider splitting the party if you have a need to do so. last bit is important; splitting it for shits and giggles will slow the game needlessly.

drekk and grug find a huge number of cows

people gently caress around with stealth to various degrees

yurik, mung use Special Measures to extract info

so your options:

  • drop into cowhole, go from there
  • go to lift complex, force the doors
  • take to the vents, abandoning bulky stuff. but hey, chemicals! maybe there's another route round?
  • just move laterally through the ship, melting/demolishing as needed. you can keep trudging the tunnels if you want, and this place seems uninhabited.

Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

Groxhole
Orbit
Heavenly Fist


The bones are starting to get to the scrunts a bit, and faced with the choice of an unknown fortified position, or a big stinking shed full of angry animals, there's really no choice at all.

Rappelling down, or hitching a ride on the hovering turbocharged cargo-shifter piloted by Groin, or hitching a rather faster and terrifying, screeching ride on the hovering missile-component crates, the scrunts descend into darkness...

---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2_EJxvP5nE&t=600s



Actually, it's not that bad down here.

Sure, the grox seem close to panic at the sight of bipeds, but most animals flinch away from a scrunt anyway, so this isn't that unexpected. And yes, it's really gloomy, lit only by those lightstrips that somehow haven't burned out after years of neglect, but hey, that means there's power!

The scrunts have descended into a high-ceilinged hall that seems to stretch off into the distance forever, although it's probably only a few dozen acres in size all told. It's packed with processing areas - holding pens for angry grox seem interspersed with hydroponic myco-growth stations to generate feed for them, servitor-driven slaughterhouses for when the grox come of age. The hydroponics seem in fairly constant use - the slaughterhouses seem unstaffed, broken down, unused. There's no areas staffed by servitors wielding a big turkey baster and rubber gloves, thankfully - all four sexes of grox are intermingled to breed as the Emperor intended, and also to gore and murder each other with casual abandon.

The squad has come down in the centre of what seems to be an administrative area for this section of the breeding deck. There is a colossal pile of rotting mycoprotein feed in the south-west corner - the auto-feeder appears broken, and the grox in that quadrant look worryingly emaciated. Computer consoles in the north-eastern and north-western corners are hooked up by extremely large cables to the fences and cattle grids to the east and west, and the glimmer of lights and chitter of embedded skulls indicates that they're still getting juice. A further console stands to the north, connected up to an auto-packaging facility that stands empty. Great cogs, crushers and eye-watering bladed implements stand idle.

Holes into the underdeck seem rife in this area - an ingress into the labyrinth of service ducts and tunnels that underpin the area. The exit to the north is blocked off - a huge section of deck has partially collapsed, meaning anyone that wanted to go that way would have to muscle their way through several hundred metres of densely-packed grox. The exit to the west would take the scrunts back the way they came - south into parts unknown, and east would be towards the core of the ship.

Splinters of bone are really quite profuse around here. The scrunts are practically scuffing them out of the way of their boots with every step. There's something in the air apart from grox flatulence, and it's got them spooked. Retreat, or stand your ground?



---

grox win - fatality

so, like, it's pretty clearly gonna be a fight soon, but you've got two rounds in which to "just so happen" to prepare, lay mines, go into overwatch, expose yourself to grox etc. plot out where you are - anywhere on the middle square.

  • go to monitors and tech-use them to see what they do
  • sewage mycoprotein heap is certainly flammable and possibly explosive.
  • pipeline leading from the heap is clogged, and behaves the same. likewise the tanks
  • grox are not penned in by walls - they have fences that impede movement but can be seen and shot through. given enough provocation the grox will break these fences and cause stampede damage to anything they touch
  • grox will retreat from heavy damage, charge into light damage. 10 points of unsoaked damage will clear a square and turn it red (for "dead grox"). this will provide some cover if desired
  • holes. don't move onto the holes. you can't go scampering through the underdecks because they're about a metre high

tell me where you are and what you're doing in your preptime. also tell me what happened to your prisoner

Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

which grox quadrant have you shown your dick to

why is this a question that i need to ask

Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

paranoia is off the charts. it's spooky

in terms of tangible benefits, that will come if anything tries surprising you

Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

Metal Groxes
Orbit
Heavenly Fist


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eGAF2_00eM

The grox-noises reach a crescendo, and it's probably not entirely to do with Drekk exposing himself at the poor animals. Yurik feverishly distributes defensive munitions, being apparently the only scrunt with a sense of foreboding - "overwatch" being a foreign concept to the creatures. He manages to get everything deployed with the aid of Hack, but there's no time to cover them with grox-poo poo before everything kicks off - he'll have to hope that darkness performs the job of concealment. Mung pokes at the console in front of him, discovering that it controls the electrical fences running north-south that keep the grox penned in; it could probably be overcharged. Judging by the network links, the console to the north must control the nearby threshing machinery.

The pervasive sense of dread gets stronger, stronger, until with a baffling sense of dislocation, jerky and disjointed movement can be seen. Torchbeams from the nervous scrunts project out as far as they can mangage; gleams of metal interspersed with clotted groxblood are the result. To the north and south, a trio of beclawed, armoured monsters haul themselves from the pits, jerking themselves upright like marionettes as they collect themselves. Their claws seem like they could sheer through the metal deck with no apparent effort. To the west, a thrumming cloud of smaller metal creatures coalesces out of nooks and crannies, chittering and sparking.

The grox react with horror. They fall over themselves in an attempt to get out of line-of-sight from the bipedal metal creatures, although the smaller buzzy ones don't seem to cause them much concern. The grox recently flashed by Drekk appear ready to charge, although whether this is out of hatred or lust is uncertain.





----

scrint

so, some flayed ones have shown up from the depths of this idiot hellship. they haven't surprised you because, well, it's pretty fuckin' obvious something was gonna happen, but you also don't get to shoot at them as they claw their way out from the underdecks because no-one went on overwatch. they're out of charge range for this first round, fyi - i don't think that's much of a spoiler, you can see how quickly the things move. those of you with relevant Lore skills (e.g. Imperial Guard, War) can do a Free Action test to see if you can guess what they are, and approximately how tough they are.

scarabs are +20 to hit due to swarm size

mung console commandos; he can Tech-Use as half action, it's a +20 roll and the more DoS you get the more power you route to the fences.

you can shoot through fences but if you shoot through grox and you don't have a height advantage (i.e. you're not on top of something), it's -20, any misses hit the groxes.

also it's -20 to hit any non-illuminated creatures. currently only the scarabs are illuminated, but it's a safe bet that the flayed ones - given that they don't have any kind of ranged weapons - are looking to close the distance. so if you are after them in init order, they will probably be within range of your own torch.

big stack of boxes in the centre is your missile parts. if they take too much damage, your slam sector plans may be in trouble.

(groin's paranoia is why he's top of the init list again, woo)

Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

ain't no darkness penalty on a Spray weapon

Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

anything aflame shows up nicely in darkness, yes

Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

Flaying it Safe
Orbit
Heavenly Fist


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVorNWS4AaA

Groin idles casually, awaiting the approach of the hide-swaddled metallic creatures. He revs his ersatz gravbike a few times.

Yurik gibbers and yees to himself absently - he doesn't have direct line of sight on a lit-up assailant, and, lazy scrunt that he is, he's used to using his minds eye to do most of his seeing. He doesn't sense any hostile minds coming towards him, so he occupies his time picking idly at the lumps on his nose.

Drekk, taciturn, frowns and adjusts his posture, palming an aggressively red incendiary device. He judges the progress of the encroaching insectoid swarm, tossing the grenade idly from hand to hand as he does so.

Murdelia is the first scrunt to crack and open fire, a shattering DAK-KA ringing out over the nervous lowing of grox. The metallic skeletons to the north are busy clambering over the powered-down threshing machinery of the auto-packaging plant, and even through the gloom she is able to send a whistling bolt shell in between the armour plating of its hip. The round detonates solidly, blowing a spray of silvery shards back into the pit from whence it came; the creature appears rocked, and now visibly favours one leg, but does not give any visible indication of pain.

The northern creatures scuttle and clank over the threshing machinery, hissing and moaning. They stay out of the flickering torchbeams of the scrunts, continuing to slink in shadow.

Grug juggles his weapons with practised ease, and waits for the southern quarry to come into range...

Chuggo swats the air and tugs at his nose a little. He seems agitated, and confused.

Grumb, swathed in filth as he is, is happier than the rest of the scruntherd. He is almost cheerful as he powers up his multimelta, ready to blaze off a shot once the southern skelemonsters scuttle into range...

...which they do so with alacrity. Unlike their northern brethren, the southern bunch skitter forward with janky, jerky movements. With a flash of their claws, they are practically upon the scrunts!

Naturally, the squad are having none of that. Grug yees frantically and opens up at point blank on the hosed-up skeleton rearing in front of him, clipping off a pair of energy bolts into centre mass which detonate with a roaring KLAM. The creature sparks and whirrs; its torso is mostly melted, and blinky lights can be seen on the inside. It's in a very bad way. Grumb, not to be outdone, gets the jump on the skeleton currently squaring up to Drekk. A hyperpowered burst of microwave radiation takes the creature full in the chest, melting away its body within fractions of a second. The reek of burnt electronics, hair and leather fills the air, along with what sounds like the screaming of the Emperor's own kettle; as the twitching limbs drop to the ground, they slowly appear to fade from view.

Grimply, ensconced behind a small heap of filth, plays with his dangerously explosive globes, as is his wont. He readies himself to fling a grenade at the encroaching metal insects...

...which drift closer, hovering eerily, jerking around with erratic flicks of their wings...

...but Drekk beats him to it, hoiking his promethium canister through the air in a perfect arc, timing the airburst so it drenches the entire swarm with flaming gel. A few of the devices fall from the air, twitching, but most of them simply shrug off the flames, and keep on hovering towards the squad. More and more of them appear to be suffering, and eventually, unless the flames are extinguished the swarm will certainly shrivel and die.

Grimply's grenade lands in front of the swarm with a faint plop. It detonates normally, but most of the swarm are merely buffeted by the explosion, shrapnel pinging off their metallic hides.

Mung bides his time, heightened reflexes screaming for action - his mentally slaved rats fail to bypass the console in front of him, and he unleashes his frustration in a torrent of abuse and volatile fuel-air mixture. The three skeletal forms to the north are drenched in a fine mist of jetfuel, and when the detonation laser crackles through the cloud a fraction of a second later, they are all suddenly at the centre of a raging inferno. Their metal skin buckles and flows under the sudden ferocious heat, and their hide drapings begin to catch, char, and burn; one skeleton is blown clean off its feet by the blast; it thrashes, ineffectually but with horrible speed.

With so much flame being thrown around the place, the Grox naturally go absolutely apeshit. They are terrified of the metal creatures currently attacking the scrunts, and they are not fans of the naked flame, so their reaction to flaming metal skeletons is far from measures. The herd convulses like a drunk's stomach, and animals attempt to get as far away from the flaming skeletons first, regular flames second, regular skeletons third, and the scrunts a distant fourth. For many of the squad, this is the first time they have been the least objectionable thing in a given room, and it is a peculiar feeling.

To the north-west, grox are forced against the fencing surrounding the pit to the lower-decks. South-western grox press up against the electric fence there, too; lowing and crackling fills the air, and it buckles under the weight of angry animals. Eastern grox spill onto the walkway, feet uncertain on the anti-grox grilles. They come perilously close to Yurik's booby traps and, possibly more to the point, close off the squad's preferred avenue of escape.





---

scrunt

groin and yurik do not post

mung rockets to nearly the top of the initiative list. except i forgot about this, and discovered it at the end of the post.

thing is, the necrons were barely out of range of your flamer initially, so this actually kinda shoots yourself in the foot. because Murdelia hit anyway, and you failed to do the fences properly, i will instead take your actions for this round as "delay until necrons are in range, fire flamer, and have some technorats do the hacking" because it works out the same and does not waste your time. alternatively you might wanna just take back the fatepoint; up to you.

drekk is the first scrunt to actually do a thing; i will assume you are happy tossing the 'nade at long range, otherwise you've wasted a turn

murdelia shoots! i will assume it's a single shot as flayed ones are currently in darkness and you want to maximise your chances of hitting, but i don't see any Comrade orders so you're firing on your own for this. roll of 49 vs TN of 45 (BS) + 10 (SS) + 10 (aim) -20 (darkness) + 10 (short range) means you actually connect. 1d10+7 pen 4 tearing damage, +2 for Mighty Shot; naturally it's a righteous fury, doing 19 pen 4 damage before soak + 3 Crit to the leg; that's 13 AG damage, so it drops a movement band.

flayed ones to the north fail the regen test; they stumble forward, Full Move, 8m/6m respectively, but still out of the light. no obvious grox reaction.

grug, grumb overwatch; chuggo thrashes around aimlessly.

south necrons Run forwards; they are in charge range now. they trigger overwatch from Grug and Grumb.

  • grug gets 62 VS TN 60 - 20 (Run) + 30 (Point Blank) for a total 3DoS, or two hits. he does very solid damage, 14 and 15 with pen 7; the skelly he hits is near destruction
  • grumb gets a shot off; i will give you the benefit of Surprise for this round, because compost is not normally lethal. 57 vs TN 60 + 10 (Short Range) +10 (SS) - 20 (Run) + 30 (surprise) = a hit. can't get two, i'm afraid. regardless, the thing is totally slagged; no Regen roll next round for this one, it's hosed.

grimply plays with his ball; i'm not going to wait until you get into normal range, as that's 4m.

scarabs hover closer. yee.

drekk and grimply loose their balls. TN is BS + 10 (size) - 10 (range); Drekk, despite having no BS, actually connects directly; Grimply, amazingly, also connects.

drekk does 8 damage pre-soak. they're aflame. being Machines, though, they don't care; they take damage as normal, can put themselves out if they choose to take the AG test, and have a chance of setting melee targets alight now. have fun!!

grimply does 10 damage pre-soak.

mung does his first-last flameblast; none of the flayed ones evade. they all have real poo poo agility and no Dodge trained, but Unnatural AG to let them actually move at a reasonable clip. obviously he righteous furies on two hits (14 damage pre-soak), but the third, already-damage necron just gets 10 damage pre-soak. none of them avoid catching on fire.

righteous fury is 2 and 1 on the body, respectively. i am upgrading the 1 to a 2 because "air is knocked from the body" doesn't make sense for necrons and gently caress you i'm not reskinning it. first necron is unscathed, the other (upgraded) is knocked Prone.

scrunts that did not act have a Delayed half action to spend prior to their next turn

Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

Thriller, But With Robots
Orbit
Heavenly Fist


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN5YntoTFKw

Groin once again does absolutely gently caress all, his metal arm swinging around of its own volition. Presumably rooting for the oncoming robots, it swiftly thumps the scrunt in the testicles, causing him to shriek and wince in pain - if he doesn't get moving soon, his arm will doubtless seek to cause even more damage.

Mung, servos whining, manages to readjust and slam off another pyroclastic blast from his flamer with alarming speed. Unfortunately for the scrunt, he may be fast but he can't beat electrons; two of the robotic creatures to the north have already reconfigured their approach and the leftmost one ducks below the flame blast, flattening itself to the deck like a crab before rearing back up to their full height. The second is already on its back, but seems to be having some trouble standing. The third attempts the same, but is too heavily damaged to react in time; superheated, it drops to the ground, twitching and smoking. While spraying fuel downrange, the technoscrunt's servo arm is busy gesticulating at the rats to interface faster with the console in front of him; successfully powering it up, they diverts juice to the electric fences. They crackle and whine as enough current to severely discourage a grox begins to run through them.

Yurik, brain racing with abhorrently scrunty thoughts, hammers down another barrier between his will and reality and projects a coruscating anti-technology at the hovering swarm of insectoid robots to the west. They fall from the air like blossom, raining down on the deck, wings sparking and twitching. They're moving incredibly slowly - but they're still moving.

Drekk, apparently forgetting that he excels in melee, whips out his autogun and attempts to hose down the nearest necron with a gun unlikely to scratch its paintwork. None of his shots find their mark.

Murdelia has the creatures in front of her dead to rights - planting her feet firmly, she squeezes off another volley of shots just as the electric fence comes online and frazzles the poo poo out of a nearby grox. Having an incredibly loud bellow in her ear - even after autosense correction - is enough to startle the scrunt medic, sending her shots hurtling off into the distance without so much as glancing off the robots.

The northern creatures stumble forwards through the flames. The leftmost one, wounded and aflame, dashes past the firing line of scrunts into the central area, seeking relief from the constant gouts of fire blasted at it by red-robed maniacs. The middle one rises to its feet and stamps onwards. The rightmost one, the dead one... rises to its feet once more, and stumbles onwards. The flames continue to wreck havoc on their wiring and general motor ability, but for now they're still moving.

Grug slams a salvo of blue bolts into the torso and face of the nearest robot, melting most of its superstructure in the process. It drops to the floor; its molten chassis bending and twisting in curious ways...

Chuggo blazes away merrily before bounding into combat like a particularly enthusiastic and scabrous dog; the sort that tries to gently caress your regular, normal dog when you're out walking it, and you have to chase it off with a stick, only then it steals the stick from you and starts slobbering all over it and thinks that now you're playing a game, and then it gets underfoot accidentally and you trip on it, and you step down heavily by accident and then you're just stomping, stomping, stomping and there's all this barking and wet cracks and screaming and then you have to run home and hide in the shed. Anyway, he misses with his attack.

Grumb, cursing, now has his shot obscured by the quivering pink nose of the Scruntgeant. Still, he's dealt with worse conditions before, and he snaps off a crisp beam of microwave radiation, slaying Chuggo's assailant.

The southern creatures are mostly engaged in the business of crackling, twitching and melting at this point. All three of them go completely offline.

Grimply, seemingly out of confusion, swaps out his powerful laser weapon for a janky scrunt autorifle, and blasts off a few rounds at the scarab swarm. Bullets plink and spang off their armoured carapaces, but he manages to scrap a few of them as they scurry on the ground.

The insectoid creatures, unable to move with any speed, can only creep forward in an attempt to get out of the EMP field summoned around them by Yurik. The flames clinging to their shells put paid to another few of their number.

The Grox, scared shitless by the flames and explosions, press away from the now-electrified fence with a chorus of bellows. The manacled prisoner is less lucky; leaning against it as he is, he shudders and screams as the current courses through him. Smoke begins to rise from his clothing, causing more consternation among the nearby grox.

But if they think that's scary, the worst is yet to come. Descending and emerging out of the gloom, toting a huge weapons system that glows in an eerie greeny-yellow light, a hovering robot emerges - an oversized humanoid torso, planted on an anti-gravity platform the size of a dozen scrunts. The grox, previously unaware of this silently-hovering apparition, begin to lose their poo poo even more so; they can't press against the fence, so they come dangerously close to spilling out over the cattle grid. Two of them are unfortunate enough to be caught in Yurik's mantraps, adding to the general air of thrashing pandemonium - their honks and screeches of distress seem apt to provoke a stampede.

Then again, looking at the size of that cannon, perhaps a grox stampede's not the worst possibly outcome here.



drekk and grimply should have gunfire on this map but, well, autoguns are small, and weedy

----

scrunt!

groin ticks on the deathclock once more

mung flames, machines. the flayed ones get incredible rolls - interestingly, i think being prone has no impact on the Ag test to avoid the flames - but the most wounded one doesn't dodge in time and eats a righteous fury. he dead. i say he dead. the leftmost necron is within the bounds of the machinery that mung's just activated, and, having used up its dodge for the round, is swiftly snared and pulled apart with no opportunity for regeneration.

yurik haywires; the scarabs have their base move reduced by 3, cannot hover, and cannot regenerate.

drekk makes a curious tactical choice and misses

murdelia manages a fearsome 91 on the to-hit roll; not enough to jam, but not enough to hit

north necrons move; the one that's got a full action uses it to run into the centre, the prone one gets up and walks, the dead one does a Regen test and comes back to life; it takes a half-action to walk. the damage from flames then kicks in, meaning even the barest scrap of damage on Righty will knock him into insane critical levels.

grug can't attack twice in one turn; you only get one shot a round. second shot counts as an Aim for next round. you only barely killed it with some truly abysmal damage rolls.

chuggo FAILS

grumb murders - MURDERS!! - the necron that attacked chuggo. i didn't notice you had target selection so i was going to assume you went for the northern one instead, but eh.

south flayed ones gently caress up their regen tests badly; all of them expire.

grimply blasts scarabs. minimal damage.

scarab swarm creep forward

grox thrash about; prisoner suffers some mild electrocution

destroyer lord is here to say hello! his initiative gets rolled next round

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Inexplicable Humblebrag
Sep 20, 2003

Sundered Records
Orbit
Heavenly Fist
And beyond...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2CKmpO5jTs

Archivist posted:

It is at this point that records of the scrunts' sweep through the Heavenly Fist become fragmentary. It is certain that they wiped out the ambushing Necrons - an artefact of Inquisitor Velothenes' meddling with arcane xeno planeshifting technology - and certain that Velothenes himself was not heard of again in the Calixis sector thereafter. Whether the scrunts fully grasped the nature of their status as pseudo-psychic abominations, or whether they simply accepted this as an aspect of the scrunt condition, remains unknown. The fact remains that these curious creatures effected their escape from the Heavenly Fist by triggering a colossal stampede from within the bowels of the abandoned grox-breeding facility. Already on edge from the crude mating display of the one referred to in the text as "Drekk", and alarmed by the swift and brutal despatch of the steel demons that had previously preyed on them, the grox panic levels reached crisis point once one of the hanger-on creatures attempted to mate with a pack alpha.

The surging of thousands upon thousands of grox into the active plasma core engines of the Heavenly Fist crippled the starship, leaving it foundering in orbit around Malbrathia-3 and breaching the deck housing Velothenes' experiments. Swift and horrible death was unleashed on the vast majority of the ship's crew, either through biological horror or through the vacuum of space. By this point the scrunts had commandeered an escape capsule, inadvertently launching the entire starboard bank at the same time.

On making planetfall and joining up with other scrunt elements on the planet surface, records retrieved from the northern VIP bunker commandeered by the scrunts - corroborated by testimony from High Magos Surbarethiel, who successfully exfiltrated and rejoined his cell - indicate the group fell to bickering as to their next move. Some were in favour of assembling their SLAM low altitude missile and immediately irradiating the planet; others felt an assault on Aurelia in an attempt to take the throne was the way forward. Still others, possibly influenced by residual Orkoid behaviours from their inherited genome, were thrilled by the idea of making the loudest chant of "SLAM SECTOR" in recorded scrunt history, and wished to follow the ferrous tunnels to the southern acousto-resonator complex.

Naturally, the group chose to attempt all three plans.

What followed next is well known across the sector. The Aurelian assault was a startling, devastating success - the scrunts' sudden discovery that the "Throne of Aurelia" was a heavily modified Warhound Titan only seemed to add fuel to their fervour. Through deviousness and treachery, and through a lot of dead scrunts, the group brought down the governor, tore him from the cockpit and installed one of their own into the ruling interface.

Once news of this spread, Imperial forces took this as their cue to get offplanet with as much speed as possible, turning their fighting retreat into a full-blown rout. The pursuing Severan forces turned around and headed back for Aurelia, but by this point the scrunt forces, swollen by recent consolidation and heartily engaged in turning the once-great capital into as big a garbage pile as possible, had dug in. Most of the initial attacking armour was removed by bombardment from the Throne, and any infantry forces that reached the city were scrunted in short order. After the initial bloodied nose, Severan commanders instead besieged the city from afar, but the sighting of the SLAM missile roaring overhead, circumnavigating the globe and scattering irradiated material and apparently towing a gondola full of terrified scrunts, put paid to any further attempts to re-take the city.

Meanwhile, the pilgrimage to the southern complex attracted scattered scrunts from far and wide. Reports from mining colonies seem to indicate that a vast convoy of looted, repurposed mining equipment swept across the sparsely-populated badlands, eventually converging on the hidden resonator complex and purging the Cogitator-daemon that had taken up residence in the terraforming devices' central core. Consolidating themselves in their new home, the scrunts presumably begun experimenting with the mile-wide chamber at the heart of the complex, culminating in the Great Slam of anno 39.8722.

Long-range surveillence of the Tyranid hive-fleet Kraken splinter indicates that an enormous quantity of viscous fluid was vented from each ship at the moment of the Slam, when psycho-acoustic waves will have rippled out through the Warp; an analysis of the resultant fluidic planetoid indicates a similarity to human effluvial fluids. This behaviour has not yet been observed in any other Tyranid subfleets, but it coincided with the almost immediate redirection of the fleet, on a bearing towards the hive world of Caracatus Prime.

Any strategic value to the world of Malbrathia was, by this point, void. Both sides in the Severan rebellion had retreated from the planet; it no longer provided a lure for the oncoming Hive Fleet; it was an irradiated hellhole. Exterminatus being deemed too expensive in terms of battleship availability, the planet has been given over to its new masters, and scrubbed from official Imperial records.

Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in this grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods. It is now the forty-first millenium...

...and there are still, somehow, Scrunts.


        - Extract from the library of Inquisitor Alcabaides

----

scrunt...!

i'm calling it, guys; campaign is fin.

it's been phenomenal. thank you for playing to all players, juggalo baby coffin (née FirstPersonShitter), Who What Now, ThNextGreenLantern, Moola, Tin Tim, Ignite Memories, Phoon, Waroduce, Skellybones, Kai Tave, Beer4TheBeerGod briefly, DeathSandwich, Kaiju Cage Match, gender illusionist, Leperflesh, Viva Miriya, Liquid Dinosaur, and to anyone else who i've inadvertently missed out from this list and who i will add once i notice.

extra special thanks to the OG scrunts who stuck with this bizarre hellthread ever since its inception, two and a half years ago

i am leaving the thread open if you want to do scrunt epilogues - choose your ending! - but if you ain't a current player, then unless you're posting in-character as a scrunt, please keep it to the recruitment thread

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