Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)
“I hit it? No no, it hit me - and now I must glare at it with maximum ferocity to re-establish dominance!” Host answers, blatantly giving a false answer before moving on to the real one. “Also, to look for secret doors while Rapture is away. I mean, what kind of roguish character would I be if I couldn’t do that much?” Satisfied that there was no door in the section of wall he was looking at, the lurker placed his hand on it. “Open… Pavlova” accompanied a push to the left, doing nothing as the wall held in place. Satisfied at the lack of a door, the demon moved further along. “The passages we’ve been walking through cut this section of wall off from everything else… and it seems like a shame to not do something with so much space, y’know. From an evil interior designer's perspective, if no one else’s, this place just screams for a secret room. Open… Lamington.” Again, nothing occurs as the demon attempts to push the wall aside.
The next bit of wall, further up the passage proved to have the slightest of creases before it ought to. Host spent a good few minutes looking it over, expecting a booby-trap of some kind, first looking at the place in normal and then x-ray vision. He found none, which only made him nervous, and he spent a few moments very carefully physically checking parts of the wall… until he remembered he was looking at one of Toonpimp’s installations, not his own. The door wasn’t so much secret as just incredibly difficult to spot, having no handle and nothing to differentiate it from the walls it attached to. When the demon pushed it with an “Open… Macadamia.”, it slid to the side without doing anything other than revealing the room beyond.
It was the chamber Host had seen… and contained the bots he had guessed at. Forced standing by cables attached to the pillars they clustered around were a little over three dozen of the machines. They were all exactly identical, hairless human males with an expression that looked like it had been trying for neutral, but had been kicked into the uncanny valley, and somehow ended up seeming like wide-eyed, straight faced terror instead. It was the face of the particular breed of bot the wraith had thrown at ULMF, and each one here was one of the very bots that the forum had defeated. Each had torn and damaged skin somewhere, showing off the mechanical pieces underneath, though none were actually all that badly mauled; presumably, they were all still capable of working. Thankfully, they were apparently all inactive.
“Oy… I hate being right.” The disgruntled demon declares. A contemplative look crosses his features, and he smirks. “…Well, sometimes.”
Entering with more caution than he showed, Host weaved his way through the fairly tight forest of robotic forms. “Bugger me… he could do some damage with these. …Or, well, maybe not - I suppose you have beaten them once already.”
Tucked away in a corner at the opposite side of the room, the demon managed to find a PC terminal, built into the wall, the computer already running and a program open on a green screen and in what looks like… well, DOS at best. Cracking his fingers and a smile, the demon took up the keyboard, scanning the program. “Looks like they don’t only dig their tools of war out of the garbage. Okay, it looks like a list of serials – probably bots – and some stats… mostly techie crud I couldn’t give a stuff about, but there’s a model name here too. And… ah, I think that one’s their current status.” The reptile down-arrows his way down what proves to be a rather long list. “Well, this has to be more than just this room, maybe all the bots he’s got. Twenty say PT, which I’ll assume means that they’re ParTying, or on a slightly less likely note, Patrolling, while the rest are all ‘IAct’. Probably about sixty, seventy total have “wraith” as the model description, but… I don’t think I saw any other model names on this list repeat once - and this is somewhere around two-hundred serials long.”
Host gets up from the terminal, his own expertise on the issue exhausted. “Well, if one of you knows how to hack into a… Commodore 64, or whatever the hell this is, now would be the time to speak up. Otherwise, I suppose we could always try random commands for shits and giggles, and see how long it takes to accidentally activate all the bots in this room…”
What in my hell? Half of these non-wraith ones I don’t even recognise, and some of the half I do were only ever active in areas hundreds of miles away from each other. And most of them absolute ages ago, at that…