201-113 aka "Tollie" (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
singsongsoldier) wrote2012-12-20 03:18 pm
singsongsoldier) wrote2012-12-20 03:18 pm
App: Haven
Name: Mica
Contact Info: AIM: failmica |![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
micabean
Other Characters Played: none
Preferred Apartment: The highest-from-the-ground apartment possible
Character Name: 201-113, “Tollie”
“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.”
~William Shakespear
Background/History: Approximately a quarter-decade ago, in the heat of humanity’s battle through space against the alien Calched, a human bio-weapon project known as the Azurian Project produced and cloned its two-hundred and first attempted Enforcer-class generation of supersoldiers. Like many that came before it, the vast majority among hundreds proved unviable, and died in gestation, as a result of azurine infusion, or during decanting, in training, or during the surgeries that augmented their bodies and completed their transformations from Adapt and clone into a fully developed and trained Azurian Enforcer. Of the one-thousand and thirty-five “201”s that were created, there were less than thirty adult survivors, each numbered according to their place in line when their genetically identical zygote had been piped into their artificial womb and left to the best efforts of their caretakers and the capricious whims of the god of statistics, and luck.
The one-hundred thirteenth such cloned embryo was nicknamed “Tollie.”
When Tollie was a year in age, she was half-again as large as an ordinary human toddler, and much stronger. Already imbued at decanting, at birth, with size and strength, she only increased in power as she aged, and did so quickly. As a child, she experienced a relatively normal upbringing for an Azurian; every night was spent sleeping in manufactured monitoring beds that reordered her thought-patterns according to specific templates, mantras and readings with a practically religious fervor about it all. She lived her young life wholly isolated from anyone not either Azurian themselves or one of the trainers.
She emerged from training at nineteen, a fully Conditioned and ready shock trooper of enormous size, strength and capability, imbued by her upbringing into a zealous advocate of human supremacy, made and molded to be exactly the kind of sociopath most capable of entering into the field of war, witnessing and causing its atrocities, and emerging from it always willing to go back for more. At the threshold of her official deployment into the general Azurian forces, they led her into a specifically prepared room, and through a series of carefully coded words and phrases, completed a process known as “formal integration” imprinting upon her mind the importance, loyalty and familial love of her two assigned squadmates, Thomas Carps and James Granier. What followed were the final decades of the First Contact wars— together, Tollie and “her boys” would be deployed on small-squad missions and security duties, including both recon and combat roles, with a statistically significant emphasis on high risk, high reward “search and destroy” type engagements. To her, their association with them was instantaneous, as if a switch had been flipped from “indifference” to “ultimate trust.” To them, it was tenure; a lifelong assurance of being assigned to both command and control, protect and be protected by one of the most elite units in the United Terran Sphere. But part and parcel with that came the unavoidable closeness, the way that they were required, day in and day out to live in close quarters and associate with someone who was, at the end of the day, more than just some leashed war machine. She was a person, someone who they eventually came to like, and then love, like a sister or a daughter and when the Adapt Protection Act was passed at the end of the Calched conflict, they were given a choice. Well, Tollie was given a choice.
To leave the service that had defined her entire existence, that had been a cage and a family and an entire world all rolled into one entity...or to stay, and for the rest of her life be ruled by the heavy hand of a command bureaucracy that had from the very beginning made a mockery of the dubious claim she had to free will. Tollie chose to stay.
Her ‘specialists’ are two skilled gentlemen by the name of Lt. Colonel James Granier and Major Thomas Carps, both scouted from various portions of the regular fighting forces, carefully selected and trained for their personalities, records, and psychology as much as their cunning and skill. James Granier is a senior officer typically taking a command role in his squad, a generalist who if he could be said to specialize in anything, specializes in long-range and tactical skillsets. He’s a hard man to please, solid and prone to gallows humor, the kind of man who might join the army knowing he could bear up under any burden a man could take. Indeed, he had borne far more than anticipated, and with admirable skill and forbearance that had set him aside from his peers. At first, it was this stoic, soldierly comfort he offered his new “charge” when assigned as the nominal commander in her Pod, but her disposition and the ever-clearer circumstances of her life soon endeared her to him and Tollie considers him one of her closest, dearest friends, as much like an older brother as a father-figure, and regards him with a fiercely protective streak that is returned in kind. Carps is another figure entirely: he’s a brash, effortlessly skilled front-liner, who’s rank and reputation were made by risky, high reward operations that happened by luck or no small skill to end in good circumstances. He’s a true fighting officer, someone who won every step of his accolades by one sensation or another; young for his rank, full of piss and vinegar, bad jokes, and a mouthy attitude that in any sane war would have caught up to and eventually doomed his career. Against the Calched, the powers that be were willing to overlook any character flaw for the sake of victory, and Carps not-inconsiderable ability as a killer of aliens eventually saw him offered a place in the Azurian Project, where he was assigned to Tollie’s Pod. To her he is a brother, someone who, unlike Granier, is often right in the thick of things with her. He’s a quick wit and a methodical sweep, prone to arguments and pranks and bad ideas. He’s full of sentiment to counterpoint James’ quiet competence and stone-firm attitudes.
They have been inseparable from the beginning to the end. Or rather, until Carps was forced to separate from them on a mission gone horribly wrong. Azurians, being considerably more valuable and durable than their smaller, more human Podmates are Conditioned with contingencies for that difference in skill and speed in mind; because Thomas Carps had been introduced to her through those specific protocols, his seeming death and the confirmation of that death by James triggered them in reverse. After all, those in the leadership couldn’t have tactically valuable Azurians dying in unwinnable circumstances to save the lives of their much less valuable but much beloved teammates. A person made to live a selfless life will act in a particular way, but let us not forget who it is that’s God, here. Months passed, and healing came to Jimmy— an Uplift canine joined the team, and things seemed to be getting back to, if not normal, then a value for which normal could be substituted. But then, although he was initially considered dead, a very much not-dead Carps limped a nearly nonfunctional shuttle back into Terran space nearly thirteen months after he’d been considered MIA— and was reinstated into the Pod with little fanfare. Even in the final waves of the Calched Wars, the UTS could hardly spare such highly skilled and well-trained personnel. This would mark the first time on record that someone had been considered dead and then re-introduced through the Conditioning of an adult Azurian, and the psychological instability that resulted from it would haunt Tollie for the rest of her life, coming to a head months later, long after the point in her story at which she is being taken to the world of Haven.
For the purposes of this game and Tollie’s history within it, she will be taken from before Carps’ missing year, and will exhibit the psychology and stability common to an ordinary Azurian. For more information on this world and the events in it, feel free to click here and read more on the topic.
“An unbroken horse erects his mane, paws the ground and starts back impetuously at the sight of the bridle;
while one which is properly trained suffers patiently even whip and spur.”
~Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Personality: Tollie is, particularly among Azurians, a sweet-tempered spaniel of a girl. As both a product of her easy adaptation to the Azurian lifestyle and in response the lackadaisical professionalism of her Pod, she presents an easygoing front to the world, so long as it fits within the narrow boundaries she considers “safe”. Having spent most of her life in either closely controlled environments or cramped spacecraft, she views her professional obligations as a general-purpose diplomatic “big stick” and alien-destroyer as a mode of freedom unparallelled by anything else in this world. She’s the kind of girl who’ll talk about ripping an intelligent being in half, and consider the story to be funny— who’ll share battlefield footage with her fellows in the manner of schoolchildren trading collectible cards or comparing high scores on their personal copy of Angry Birds. Her perspective on war and killing is that of someone dancing or playing a game— a vigorous activity, stretching her skills, but ultimately done for the purposes of good and to her own enjoyment. The horrors and suffering of war come down hardest after her work is done, and Tollie’s experience of them is therefore limited; she is still in many ways ignorant of her own effects, a naive perspective.
Her personality is marked by a series of abrupt switch-offs, trades in personality and compulsion that Tollie herself finds completely natural and expected, but which might take an onlooker by surprise. She moves from being ready to eviscerate with her hands to mussing up a teammate’s hair with hardly a beat in between. In those moments when she is truly the Azurian, the deadly machine-person, she is almost like an animal, silent and seeming to act and react on instinctive signals not visible to those around her. When she is not, which can be as sudden a transition as the blink of an eye, she enjoys singing and teasing her friends about their ‘softy’ civilian food and clothing. Her conversations when not actively engaged in killing, even in the field, are playful and teasing in a cadence that her Pod-mates have grown well used to, but which startles people not of the Azurian Project in their bipolar nature— cold, formal one moment, teasing and playful the next, then suddenly murderous, punctuated by a mild misunderstanding about a cultural reference or a backfired sexual joke.
As an Azurian, she falls somewhere north of average, her psychology shaped by a life that began in brain-washing and manipulation and continued by taking part in what amounts to a gestalt mind, a mutual subconscious awash in, for her, musical metaphors for thought, emotion, and intention. This is the kind of woman who was made, quite literally, for a life devoid of self. The only possessions she’s ever owned have been her armor, because it has always been specifically tailored to her exact measurements, and all else stands standard. She’s barely ever eaten a cooked meal, and indeed has something of a glass stomach due to her adherence to bland military rations. All the same, ever given a choice, she would never choose to leave this life; although that, too, is a result of careful engineering. But what seems like a prison to others is, to her, merely Life. It’s traces against which she can pull, not bars with which to struggle; and though the trials are difficult and the personal affronts terrible indeed, they are all, in her mind, mitigated by the love of her family, and glorious shining joy inherent in the telepathic bond she shares with all her fellow Azurians.
Ten feet tall, built powerfully, but with the relatively undefined musculature of someone who got that way more by using their body and developing with an eye towards strength and flexibility more than appearance or definition. High, small breasts, square hips, and strong cheekbones. Freckled, brown-eyed, with orange hair and a tendency towards staring, she carries herself with an easy smoothness, as if unaware that her size were anything unusual. In casual clothing she tends towards kittenishness in the same habit as that of a greyhound— all sleep and little enough bark, sprawling comfortably over any surface with no consideration for propriety. In armor and at work, she moves with a slightly terrifying suddenness, like a machine thing, a creature of alien worlds, making a decision and action all in one fluid motion.
But she is a sweet girl, under all the conditioning and training and clone-upbringing and child soldier attitude. She loves to joke and play around and sings any song she can at any opportunity, occasionally drawing even her stoic commanding officer into impromptu little games. She’s got her mission and she’s got her boys...what else could a girl ask for?
Abilities/Powers: Tollie is, for most considerations, human. Technological assistance aside, she is just as vulnerable to being shot, eviscerated, and burned as anyone else might be. She bleeds when her skin is punctured, and is neither more nor less susceptible to poisoning than someone her weight might be. That being said:
Tollie is, of course a cyborg space marine supersoldier from the far-flung space future. Her abilities and behavior are going to portray her as someone used to a completely different way of thinking than an ordinary person and she will often casually do things that most people would consider a use of superpowers. That being said:
Also, she sings. Constantly. No one would call her voice bad, but it’s not the kind of thing one wants to hear at five in the morning when even the sun is barely up, let alone the rest of the world.
“Reaching too deep into something not meant for you is full of pain. Figure out what you can have and work on that”
― Lalita Tademy
Items/Weapons:
Contact Info: AIM: failmica |
Other Characters Played: none
Preferred Apartment: The highest-from-the-ground apartment possible
Character Name: 201-113, “Tollie”
~William Shakespear
Background/History: Approximately a quarter-decade ago, in the heat of humanity’s battle through space against the alien Calched, a human bio-weapon project known as the Azurian Project produced and cloned its two-hundred and first attempted Enforcer-class generation of supersoldiers. Like many that came before it, the vast majority among hundreds proved unviable, and died in gestation, as a result of azurine infusion, or during decanting, in training, or during the surgeries that augmented their bodies and completed their transformations from Adapt and clone into a fully developed and trained Azurian Enforcer. Of the one-thousand and thirty-five “201”s that were created, there were less than thirty adult survivors, each numbered according to their place in line when their genetically identical zygote had been piped into their artificial womb and left to the best efforts of their caretakers and the capricious whims of the god of statistics, and luck.
The one-hundred thirteenth such cloned embryo was nicknamed “Tollie.”
When Tollie was a year in age, she was half-again as large as an ordinary human toddler, and much stronger. Already imbued at decanting, at birth, with size and strength, she only increased in power as she aged, and did so quickly. As a child, she experienced a relatively normal upbringing for an Azurian; every night was spent sleeping in manufactured monitoring beds that reordered her thought-patterns according to specific templates, mantras and readings with a practically religious fervor about it all. She lived her young life wholly isolated from anyone not either Azurian themselves or one of the trainers.
She emerged from training at nineteen, a fully Conditioned and ready shock trooper of enormous size, strength and capability, imbued by her upbringing into a zealous advocate of human supremacy, made and molded to be exactly the kind of sociopath most capable of entering into the field of war, witnessing and causing its atrocities, and emerging from it always willing to go back for more. At the threshold of her official deployment into the general Azurian forces, they led her into a specifically prepared room, and through a series of carefully coded words and phrases, completed a process known as “formal integration” imprinting upon her mind the importance, loyalty and familial love of her two assigned squadmates, Thomas Carps and James Granier. What followed were the final decades of the First Contact wars— together, Tollie and “her boys” would be deployed on small-squad missions and security duties, including both recon and combat roles, with a statistically significant emphasis on high risk, high reward “search and destroy” type engagements. To her, their association with them was instantaneous, as if a switch had been flipped from “indifference” to “ultimate trust.” To them, it was tenure; a lifelong assurance of being assigned to both command and control, protect and be protected by one of the most elite units in the United Terran Sphere. But part and parcel with that came the unavoidable closeness, the way that they were required, day in and day out to live in close quarters and associate with someone who was, at the end of the day, more than just some leashed war machine. She was a person, someone who they eventually came to like, and then love, like a sister or a daughter and when the Adapt Protection Act was passed at the end of the Calched conflict, they were given a choice. Well, Tollie was given a choice.
To leave the service that had defined her entire existence, that had been a cage and a family and an entire world all rolled into one entity...or to stay, and for the rest of her life be ruled by the heavy hand of a command bureaucracy that had from the very beginning made a mockery of the dubious claim she had to free will. Tollie chose to stay.
Her ‘specialists’ are two skilled gentlemen by the name of Lt. Colonel James Granier and Major Thomas Carps, both scouted from various portions of the regular fighting forces, carefully selected and trained for their personalities, records, and psychology as much as their cunning and skill. James Granier is a senior officer typically taking a command role in his squad, a generalist who if he could be said to specialize in anything, specializes in long-range and tactical skillsets. He’s a hard man to please, solid and prone to gallows humor, the kind of man who might join the army knowing he could bear up under any burden a man could take. Indeed, he had borne far more than anticipated, and with admirable skill and forbearance that had set him aside from his peers. At first, it was this stoic, soldierly comfort he offered his new “charge” when assigned as the nominal commander in her Pod, but her disposition and the ever-clearer circumstances of her life soon endeared her to him and Tollie considers him one of her closest, dearest friends, as much like an older brother as a father-figure, and regards him with a fiercely protective streak that is returned in kind. Carps is another figure entirely: he’s a brash, effortlessly skilled front-liner, who’s rank and reputation were made by risky, high reward operations that happened by luck or no small skill to end in good circumstances. He’s a true fighting officer, someone who won every step of his accolades by one sensation or another; young for his rank, full of piss and vinegar, bad jokes, and a mouthy attitude that in any sane war would have caught up to and eventually doomed his career. Against the Calched, the powers that be were willing to overlook any character flaw for the sake of victory, and Carps not-inconsiderable ability as a killer of aliens eventually saw him offered a place in the Azurian Project, where he was assigned to Tollie’s Pod. To her he is a brother, someone who, unlike Granier, is often right in the thick of things with her. He’s a quick wit and a methodical sweep, prone to arguments and pranks and bad ideas. He’s full of sentiment to counterpoint James’ quiet competence and stone-firm attitudes.
They have been inseparable from the beginning to the end. Or rather, until Carps was forced to separate from them on a mission gone horribly wrong. Azurians, being considerably more valuable and durable than their smaller, more human Podmates are Conditioned with contingencies for that difference in skill and speed in mind; because Thomas Carps had been introduced to her through those specific protocols, his seeming death and the confirmation of that death by James triggered them in reverse. After all, those in the leadership couldn’t have tactically valuable Azurians dying in unwinnable circumstances to save the lives of their much less valuable but much beloved teammates. A person made to live a selfless life will act in a particular way, but let us not forget who it is that’s God, here. Months passed, and healing came to Jimmy— an Uplift canine joined the team, and things seemed to be getting back to, if not normal, then a value for which normal could be substituted. But then, although he was initially considered dead, a very much not-dead Carps limped a nearly nonfunctional shuttle back into Terran space nearly thirteen months after he’d been considered MIA— and was reinstated into the Pod with little fanfare. Even in the final waves of the Calched Wars, the UTS could hardly spare such highly skilled and well-trained personnel. This would mark the first time on record that someone had been considered dead and then re-introduced through the Conditioning of an adult Azurian, and the psychological instability that resulted from it would haunt Tollie for the rest of her life, coming to a head months later, long after the point in her story at which she is being taken to the world of Haven.
For the purposes of this game and Tollie’s history within it, she will be taken from before Carps’ missing year, and will exhibit the psychology and stability common to an ordinary Azurian. For more information on this world and the events in it, feel free to click here and read more on the topic.
while one which is properly trained suffers patiently even whip and spur.”
~Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Personality: Tollie is, particularly among Azurians, a sweet-tempered spaniel of a girl. As both a product of her easy adaptation to the Azurian lifestyle and in response the lackadaisical professionalism of her Pod, she presents an easygoing front to the world, so long as it fits within the narrow boundaries she considers “safe”. Having spent most of her life in either closely controlled environments or cramped spacecraft, she views her professional obligations as a general-purpose diplomatic “big stick” and alien-destroyer as a mode of freedom unparallelled by anything else in this world. She’s the kind of girl who’ll talk about ripping an intelligent being in half, and consider the story to be funny— who’ll share battlefield footage with her fellows in the manner of schoolchildren trading collectible cards or comparing high scores on their personal copy of Angry Birds. Her perspective on war and killing is that of someone dancing or playing a game— a vigorous activity, stretching her skills, but ultimately done for the purposes of good and to her own enjoyment. The horrors and suffering of war come down hardest after her work is done, and Tollie’s experience of them is therefore limited; she is still in many ways ignorant of her own effects, a naive perspective.
Her personality is marked by a series of abrupt switch-offs, trades in personality and compulsion that Tollie herself finds completely natural and expected, but which might take an onlooker by surprise. She moves from being ready to eviscerate with her hands to mussing up a teammate’s hair with hardly a beat in between. In those moments when she is truly the Azurian, the deadly machine-person, she is almost like an animal, silent and seeming to act and react on instinctive signals not visible to those around her. When she is not, which can be as sudden a transition as the blink of an eye, she enjoys singing and teasing her friends about their ‘softy’ civilian food and clothing. Her conversations when not actively engaged in killing, even in the field, are playful and teasing in a cadence that her Pod-mates have grown well used to, but which startles people not of the Azurian Project in their bipolar nature— cold, formal one moment, teasing and playful the next, then suddenly murderous, punctuated by a mild misunderstanding about a cultural reference or a backfired sexual joke.
As an Azurian, she falls somewhere north of average, her psychology shaped by a life that began in brain-washing and manipulation and continued by taking part in what amounts to a gestalt mind, a mutual subconscious awash in, for her, musical metaphors for thought, emotion, and intention. This is the kind of woman who was made, quite literally, for a life devoid of self. The only possessions she’s ever owned have been her armor, because it has always been specifically tailored to her exact measurements, and all else stands standard. She’s barely ever eaten a cooked meal, and indeed has something of a glass stomach due to her adherence to bland military rations. All the same, ever given a choice, she would never choose to leave this life; although that, too, is a result of careful engineering. But what seems like a prison to others is, to her, merely Life. It’s traces against which she can pull, not bars with which to struggle; and though the trials are difficult and the personal affronts terrible indeed, they are all, in her mind, mitigated by the love of her family, and glorious shining joy inherent in the telepathic bond she shares with all her fellow Azurians.
Ten feet tall, built powerfully, but with the relatively undefined musculature of someone who got that way more by using their body and developing with an eye towards strength and flexibility more than appearance or definition. High, small breasts, square hips, and strong cheekbones. Freckled, brown-eyed, with orange hair and a tendency towards staring, she carries herself with an easy smoothness, as if unaware that her size were anything unusual. In casual clothing she tends towards kittenishness in the same habit as that of a greyhound— all sleep and little enough bark, sprawling comfortably over any surface with no consideration for propriety. In armor and at work, she moves with a slightly terrifying suddenness, like a machine thing, a creature of alien worlds, making a decision and action all in one fluid motion.
But she is a sweet girl, under all the conditioning and training and clone-upbringing and child soldier attitude. She loves to joke and play around and sings any song she can at any opportunity, occasionally drawing even her stoic commanding officer into impromptu little games. She’s got her mission and she’s got her boys...what else could a girl ask for?
Abilities/Powers: Tollie is, for most considerations, human. Technological assistance aside, she is just as vulnerable to being shot, eviscerated, and burned as anyone else might be. She bleeds when her skin is punctured, and is neither more nor less susceptible to poisoning than someone her weight might be. That being said:
- She is ten feet tall, and her genetically modified and surgically augmented musculo-skeletal structure supports a strength many times that of an ordinary human frame.
- She has incredible pain tolerance and a reaction time that, even outside her neural-interfacing armor, borders on miraculous.
- Tollie’s cybernetic augmentations mean that she is quite used to interfacing mentally with a short, but varied, list of compatible technologies and is likely adapt to further augmentations quickly.
- She is capable of handling, maintaining, and operating most types of firearm, has an in-depth working knowledge of parkour, and can eat almost nothing but chewy ration bars for weeks on end without negative effect.
Tollie is, of course a cyborg space marine supersoldier from the far-flung space future. Her abilities and behavior are going to portray her as someone used to a completely different way of thinking than an ordinary person and she will often casually do things that most people would consider a use of superpowers. That being said:
- She is ten feet tall, and that means that a lot of furniture and facilities just plain won’t be to her size. She’ll be likely to have an adjustment period for everything from too-low sinks and countertops to too-small cutlery and clothing.
- She has an incredible field of triggers that can lead to otherwise unnecessary physical altercations. Her mood-swings and Conditioning lead her to a particular sort of reactionary that mean that until both she and other adjust, there is likely to be unhappiness on both sides of the CR chart.
- Tollie’s cybernetic augmentations mean that she is quite used to interfacing mentally with a wide and varied number of other telepaths in the form of other Azurians. Being cut off like this will not initially be more than merely upsetting, but may prove a destabilizing factor after a significant period of time.
- She is, thanks to the pervasively bland and nutritionally balenced diet she has enjoyed all her life, expressly not going to enjoy being introduced to the kind of food she is likely to be provided with in Haven.
This is going to be fun. - Fighting Style:
Tollie's style of fighting is basically over-the-top video-game-cutscene-style parkour, except with guns and swords and lasers, basically because at one point I decided that that would be really really cool. Occasionally I begin to worry that the lack of realism might be something to address, but then I remember that over-the-top video-game-cutscene-style parkour is really really cool. I just can't help it.
Also, she sings. Constantly. No one would call her voice bad, but it’s not the kind of thing one wants to hear at five in the morning when even the sun is barely up, let alone the rest of the world.
― Lalita Tademy
Items/Weapons:
- Heavy Armor Set Her armor is typically of a mixed muted color-pattern intended to break up her silhouette, and is lined with shielded ports than can be opened to expose light-emitting stripes that can provide area illumination. It is jointed and fully articulated with slightly paler high -friction grip-pads on the soles of the boots, top-front of the shins, interior thighs, and palms. Her helmet is basically expressionless with the exception of two shielded black lenses which can be opened to reveal an azurine blue glow, two round eyes in darkness. A helmet with an interior HUD and dedicated comm-line with Azurine-laced non-newtonian fluid baffling to enhance telepathic communications over long distances. ( however, she won't wake up with anything but the gauntlets and few individually useless pieces of the under-armor, if that's alright. we were gonna make she and Jimmy miserable for a bit first and have their armor somewhere in Haven North to trip over on one of their scavenging trips. C: )
2. UTS Enforcer-issue Longblade (retractable)
3. UTS Enforcer-issue laser-pistol (ten shots, rechargeable only with full suit assembly)
Sample Entry:
[ Voice/Open ]
[There's a certain amount of rustling as the entry starts, a crackling as if someone were using tinfoil to prop up their mobile.]
Alright, so. This place sucks. [A fine way of starting a conversation, isn't it? She doesn't seem mad, though. Birds fly, the sun rises, and Haven is terrible.] I was thinking, though, that if we're stuck here, why are we living in these run-down barracks?
[There's a baritone muttering, not quite audible.] What? [the sound repeats] Oh, apartments. Right.
The point is, this building is made of wishes and is gonna fall on all our heads as soon as something actually threatening shows up. So, why are we all living here? We should fortify something less dilapidated. I'm not suggesting we all evacuate, but...contingencies? Contingencies are good, people. You need them to live.
Tell me what you think.
[transmission ends.]
Sample Entry Two:
The mission began outside the walls.
It was a grey, dirty city of human design, made black by soot and twilight, and she could hear the sounds inside the walls, see the neon signage still wavering determinedly through the cooling haze. Rumbling vans and grumbling servos, machines operating in place of people, curfews and aliens colored the voice of the city. Disgusting. See there, there they were; the shadows of alien guards on the exterior vantage, rifles at the ready like ancient spears. Those were weapons of skill and fear, created for the purposes of cowing an already subjugated population, of granting authority to the spidery Calched holding it. She was a weapon of war, unlike that guard, meant to kill as many of the enemy as possible, as efficiently as possible, and in a little time as could be managed.
In her head, there was only the sound of her own breathing, the rattling steps clanking up through her armor with the impact of each footfall. Her lungs echoed an ache that was not there; a compound sensation from the dozen Azurians arranged around the city. She could feel their footfalls in unison with her own like a squadron of perfectly attuned robots; people in place of machines. The electric death buzzed green and bright in her vision, filtered through the armor's sensors in ugly pulses that said danger! The perimeter defence was live, armed and ready.
She felt clumsy and stiff, always did in this part, bulling forward across the empty no-man's land like a thousand pound linebacker. There was a moment here, too like a lull in the engagement, too like action for boredom. An anxiety, anticipation. The ping-backs from her Pod blipped across her vision like sonar from below and behind. Sneak in through the sewers. Infiltrate the towers. Shotgun and Sniper. Yes. Carps and Granier would have her six, the boys always did.
And then it was time.
With deceptive ease Tollie took the last fifteen meters in a series of lengthening hops, then launched herself into the air. The jump was disproportionate, a graceful arc over the high outer wall, the gap between and the lower retaining wall beyond it in one leap. Forty-seven meters her tracking scope informed her, scrolling out distance and velocity and altitude at a frantic rate that she paid no attention to. Far off to the west there rose a delighted skirl of notes, like a playful flute as one of the other Azurians relaxed their discipline a fraction and the dozen-fold synchronicity of their hive-mind perception momentarily deviated. Tollie sensed more than felt the disorientation as that one playfully somersaulted into the landing, but when the earth met them all it was with a drumbeat finality, and together, with the momentary lapse forgotten.
Oh yes, that one would get a reprimand, but not from Tollie. There was no denying that this part, it was fun; the delay here, where the plan called for a pause to wait for the guards to react, each in their own way, and then kill them. Ordinary soldiers couldn't vault the walls the way the Azurian shock troopers had; they would need time, and a distracted guard force. She held the crouch she had landed in and waited.
Nothing.
Silence.
Twenty degrees around the perimeter to her left, an Azurian with two years of experience on top of Tollie's age rolled a flash grenade between his fingers then flicked it idly over his back to blind a dozen guards, then cut them down before they had time to react. In the opposite direction, six more died in similar fashion. Damn, they'd all gone to either side and not seen her at all. That was just her luck.
Servos again, machines coming. No, not just machines— turrets! She was moving before they fired, skirting a broad arc, then darting the interior angle to dodge bright bolts of laser energy. It was a fantastically inefficient form of anti-intruder weaponry, and fantastically destructive to the pavement. She grinned under her mask and ran into the face of a gun more than twice her height, scaled the tower like a squirrel and sunk the clawed tips of her gauntlet into it with blind speed. It hissed and chirped like a live thing and two of the other Enforcers mimicked the chirp mockingly back in her head, a sensory-memory of their own experiences. The flute-voiced rookie with the fancy flip did it too, but inaccurately; he'd know now what to do if he ever encountered one of these all by himself.
The others dispatched their opponents and as one they paused, like a many-bodied animal, listening for the rustle of leaves in the underbrush. This city was a forest, and they were as attuned to the battleground as deer were to the trees.
Then they leapt, each bridging the gap between walls and skyscrapers as quickly as they could, and the call-ins from the more ordinary soldiers were giving little raindrop rushes of satisfaction and relief from every quarter as they reported successful infiltrations. One-by-one-by-one-by—
//This is AZ two-oh-one unit one reporting in.//
Jimmy was on mark, probably climbing to use the turret's tower that she'd just made available. He'd only report in if he had her right in scope, that was his way; Tollie put on a burst of speed and the angle sung deliciously correct along her bones. It was as natural as breathing to swing through and hide in the lee when she found grip on the underside of the bridge. Two units went dark in a splash of pain and surprise, the flash-memory of a Calched in a kind of power-armor with a wicked scorpion tail filtered through with a warning. Flute-voice died without a cry; snipers.
//This is AZ two-oh-one unit two reporting for duty!//
Thomas Carps never could agree to use the right protocol, but Tollie swung round and slid through an alley towards his ping anyways. That was both of them in and ready to go; Pod AZ 201-113 had only three members. A lone civilian hustled by below her as she crawled down the hidden face of the building and signaled Carps the green-for-go, but then the sirens started up.
//Jeez, Tollie, you starting the party without me?//
//Nah, That little one from the 297 series got stupid and a sniper took it out.// Only Tollie could call a man no less than eight feet tall ‘little,’ //I'd bet anything we get to fight a bunch of giant robot scorpions now.//
//Oh you know I'll take that bet.// Carps had never learned not to bet against Tollie, and probably never would. He got so happy when she let him win, but… //If they're bringing' robot scorpions, I'm out. I signed up to kill aliens, not robots.//
//Alright, Children. Focus please.// Jimmy, who could probably see the Calched unit in the robotic scorpion suit, often liked to see Thomas bright down a notch. Of course, he'd have Tollie's back in this… So long as the timing was right. The long-suffering sigh in his voice spoke volumes and she couldn't help the trumpet-trill of glee at the thought: I get to fight the robot scorpion!
The others snorted or grumbled or echoed her like a blood-on-teeth grin, disharmonious but genuine. Let the games begin.
//Oh, Bullshit! You knew about that thing beforehand!//;
And may the best girl win.