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Ben Denso cursed as he climbed up the rusty ladders to the make-shift canteen. Although he was told to be as stealthy as possible, he was hungry and that order meant nothing to him when his stomach was grumbling. He sat down and thought about the failed password attempt:
"I'm such an idiot, That was a simple system, no encryption whatsoever. God...that's embarrassing."
"...What you moaning about now?" A blonde girl who appeared to be in her late teens inquired. She was wearing some FEISAR attire; a blue t-shirt and yellow tracksuit bottoms.
"You know Maria, I would never know what team you are here with!" Denso joked. She hit him playfully and stole a chip from his plate.
"So, any luck with the missiles?"
"Natta. I also found a EG-r device, tried to unlock it, got locked out. I felt the presence of someone behind me so I decided against bashing it off my head until it spat out it's secrets. What about the one you located?"
"I...uh, you see..." She looked down ashamed of herself "I left it there. I-I...it's not my field and.."
"It's okay...I get it. I'll go locate it and take care of it later, okay?" He gave her a reassuring smile.
She laughed awkwardly and opened a small rucksack, revealing some Ship fragments. "Anyway...I found these ship fragments."
Ben looked into the bag interested and pointed at the rucksack, talking with food in his mouth "That's experimental, and most importantly illegal craft material."
"Ugh, don't talk with your mouth open. Anyways , yeah I know." She stood up. "I'm going to do some tests and see if I can figure out who it belongs to, once again, all remnants of the team livery have dissolved...don't do anything stupid, Denso...Even if that small brain of yours thinks it's a good idea." She walked off as Ben waved.
Ben and Maria were childhood friends, ever since Ben was 9 and Maria was 5, they both aspired to be pilots but realized their skills were in the more dirty side of things. Being part of the AG world was enough for them.
"You'd think she was the older one." He continued to eat, unphased by the fact some agents could easily locate him.
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OOC: To keep this flowing I'm assuming that it's ok for me to guess the correct password and get in due to the hint...
Ge Liang Zhu breathed a sigh of relief as the eG-r PDA accepted his password of 龙, or Dragon.
"Talk about lack of security, blowing up ships due to paranoia is a bit useless if you leave such lax security systems..."
However, Ge soon realised why the security was so simple: It had no data on eG-r at all, in fact, it was simply a radar scanner that pinged for fellow eG-r pilots or members of the team. Weirdly, it was showing 1 dot at the far side of the mine.
"Did one eG-r pilot survive?! After 30 years?!"
-
(Ideally I would have wanted you to wait for me to finish it, but I'll let you off with a -5 modifier to your next skillcheck trackripper. Also, all OOC chatter in italics please.)
The device pinged slow and soft in rhythmic circles, highlighting a little dot. Without a touch from Ge, the screen began to unfold in a 3D grid of blue lines, the blood red dot flashing brightly about twenty metres deeper into the ground and a little further off to the side. Slowly though, more information began to filter onto the screen.
An icon showing the Black Box of eG-r ship 1 pinged towards the far side of the mine. Not surprising - Cheung had always been the better pilot as compared to Reece, so having the second pilot further towards the entrance of the mine wasn't a surprise. No black box icon was indicated for Reece's ship. Instead, another dot was pulsing near the second wrecked eG-r ship, close to where the Auricom logo was pulsing on Ge's PDA. As the Chinaman looked on at the pulsing red dot, a small information tag flickered up. Amongst a collection of vital signs, a few columns would appear to Ge's eyes clear as day.
'P. Cheung. Status - Hibernation.'
"Hey you!" Not that he had much time to reflect on it as a young Australian woman flashed a light in his face, the two Triakis guards having been attracted by the binging and the lights of the eG-r tracker. "What're you doing... Piranha boy?" she asked as her torch picked out the angry red fish face on his lapel. Her stun baton crackled to life with a blue flash. Her friend was calling for backup, and for an additional rocket to be saved for Piranha next race.
-
'Oh *BLEEP*!'
Ge ran, taking the PDA with him, thinking it would be of use as a map of the mines, but the Triakis guards obviously knew these tunnels better than he did, and right now, he didn't have time to think where he was going.
"Come on, come on..."
He entered a narrow section of the tunnel, just enough room for single file movement.
'This should give me a slight advantage here...'
He turned round with his stun baton already scything down from above his head, hoping to take out one of the Triakis guards before they became trouble and used numbers against him.
[skillcheck :cold]
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[trackripper Skillcheck - 7 (-5=2)]
The baton was caught on another crackling stave as the female guard from before brought her weapon up to deflect. If there was one thing Triakis had perfected (if not their shields) it was their stun batons. They'd begun selling them before the F9000 even began and by now they held a massive market share in it. Amelia Ervine was not equipped with some mall cop's stun stick, and she'd been trained how to use it.
The butt of the baton was jabbed into Ge's midsection - muffled by the jumpsuit he was wearing but enough to send him falling backwards. Ervine's boot came out to impact Ge's chest and he flew backwards, tumbling into a part of the mines not fully stable. Amelia swore and scrambled back as the piece of floor that Ge had collapsed onto began to crumble, and all at once the piece of red rock detached from the corridor and began to crumble away, tumbling into the distance. Ervine winced as she waited for the crushing sound... but only a deep splash resonated. She swore. The Piranha guy could still be alive down there, and closer to the buried ships. Assuming he could get out.
-
"..."
*passes out*
"...Huh? Where am I? Oh I feel dizzy..."
*passes out again*
"...ouch. OK, that was a bad idea."
Ge Liang Zhu knew he was lucky. Scratch that, he knew the chances of him landing at the bottom of that cavern without serious injury and without a piece of rock crushing him were nil. Well, virtually nil.
"OK, right arm good, left arm good, left leg good, right leg good, let's get u... AHH! Chest not so good..."
Turns out he had a bruise on his chest, probably from when the Triakis guard kicked him down. Damn they had hard boots! He took both his Piranha PDA and the eG-r one out to check if they worked: the eG-r one had survived the fall, however, the Piranha one was not so lucky, crushed under his body when he impacted with the ground.
He booted up the eG-r PDA to check his location, and found to his surprise that the mine collapse had done him some good. So he was nowhere closer to finding his teammate's body or his ship, but he was closer to the mystery with the eG-r pilot in hibernation.
Deciding that completing the primary Piranha objectives was down to dumb luck anyway, he slowly moved up into a sitting position and began digging and poking away at the debris with his baton, which had accompanied him when he fell. Freeing himself could take a while.
-
Ben Denso overhears what's going on below.
"Hmm, just what we need..." He gets up and returns back into the mine, where he can see Maria analyzing some fallen debris.
"Get sidetracked?"
Embarrassed she put down the debris. "Umm, no! I just thought I found some more...ship parts. Did you hear that?"
He nodded "Aye, think we better 'vamos' before our good Triakis Militant Friends get here, eh?" She looked at him and nodded intently.
"The missiles are only a bit away from here, well, they were." Ben had a quick scan around him, although he had the feeling there was someone following them.
"I'm getting too paranoid..."
"getting? Now there's ignorance." She chuckled in disbelief.
They arrived in a small isolated cabin that had a burnt out missile right in the centre.
"Here, there it is." She pointed
"Mmmmkay, let's see..." He took out a small 'Livency Detector' and scanned the missile
"Yup, still active...right, now I need to recall some Defusing skills I learned at the base..." He knelt down and began the process.
"Oh Boy..." Maria said weary.
[Skill-check!]
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Mark Anderson finds himself lost in the mines after his PDA's batteries are emptied from overuse.
"This sucks. The PDA is dead and I'm completely lost. There has to be some other way to find the mine's offices..."
Although Mark enjoyed exploring caves and coral reefs in the little spare time he had, his poor sense of direction frequently led him to getting sidetracked from his original path.
While that was no problem in his little nature expeditions, down in the mines, where one wrong step would mean bumping into a guard; or worse, getting crushed by a rock formation, Mark found himself at anything but ease.
Mark was certain that the offices were definitely far off from his location.
(Mark goes into deep thought for a few moments.)
As Mark stood still in his thoughts, a shadowy figure scuttled around the corner. Once Mark spotted the figure, Mark had the sudden impulse to simply walk up and ask whoever the figure might be.
"Excuse me..." Mark said quietly.
[Skill-check!]
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[Skillcheck UB3R~JKP - 12]
The missile lay there inert in Ben's hands as he ran his hands over the smooth surface, the yellow paint a little discoloured and faded after so many years, though not touched by rust or verdigris. The dimly flashing green light on the side of the missile that indicated that it was in its' active phase soon blinked to blue. FEISAR's colour coding for its' Super Missiles had been easy enough for everyone to understand - Green for Armed, Blue for Disarmed, Red for Active and Yellow for 'Error 404 - Explosives not found'.
With a deactivated missile now in his hands, Denso's only issue was trying to draw the two-metre long cylinder out of the entrance of the mines. And dodging the guards.
---
[Skillcheck XR_GTR - 17]
(I was unsure exactly what you were skillchecking for, so I decided to make it based on who you met down there and how harmless they were)
A bespectacled figure poked its' head round the corner, and let out a soft yelp at the sight of the young man in the navy blue jumpsuit.
"Ah! Goodness, what are you doing down here? Did Auricom get rights to these mines? I thought these were still Triakis property," the woman mumbled as she righted her massive orange-tinted goggles. The dusty white labcoat she was wearing indicated she'd been down here for a while. After a short pause, she approached Mark and offered a gloved hand.
"Maria Mowell - Research and Development. We were sent down here when the mine first opened to do some tracking down of the old mine offices. No luck so far on my half. What about yourself? What brings one of our rivals to the mines?" asked the scatterbrained scientist.
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"Yes! There's the blue-light...surprising it worked if I'm honest!" Ben Denso said proudly
"Nobody installs confidence quite like you Ben." She said sarcastically.
He picked it up and looked at it. "Man, you forget just how big these things are..."
"We ain't got a rucksack big enough for that, that's for sure..." Maria pondered "...and with with guards everywhere, how are we going to get it out!?"
He went into a strong thought train blanking out the mine around him...much to Maria's disdain, visible with a deep sigh and curse under her breath.
Suddenly his eyes lit up: "AHA! I know what we're gonna do, we're gonna use you as a distraction!"
"THAT'S YOUR BIG IDEA!? A DISTRACTION!?" Maria lambasted
Ben nodded not seeing the problem; "Look, you keep those guards busy and Ill sneak past through the rocks scattered around, I'll carry the rocket on my back, look!" He picked up some rope and attached it to his back;
"You likey?"
She agreed reluctantly. "Fine...but with any luck that thing will send you flying to another planet or something, I mean only an idiot would attach a Rocket to his back for crying out loud!"
Ben smirked "Hey, it's deactivated...I think, now...GO! I'll be following close behind, I don't care how you distract 'em , just do it, Aye?"
She puffed her hair out of her face and led the way
[Skill-Check!]