Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)
The very NPC-like Sinful and Suri didn’t need Shrike to tell them where the biggest threat was coming from, nor did they need Rapture to. That didn’t stop her, of course. “Sinful, Suri, on our unshielded side!”
With Grave and Burrito following suit, the absence of anyone killing bots behind Shrike’s shields meant two things. Firstly, the lack of anything killing bots was leaving her shield more taxed, and the constant but sporadic arrival of one or two more wasn’t helping things; if they could get moving before too long ,there shouldn’t be a problem, but if whatever was firing rockets kept them up too long…
The other thing was one that Shade noticed... eventually, after he was done mentally running through the nature of his opponents. Bot physiology was an interesting field to study, most of which was due to the influence the addbots caused. The rest was due to the strange way technological things seemed to react to bots – some things worked fine, others failed to perceive the bot, others just broke. Nothing in their physics compliant construction should have given them that ability, and trying to find out where it came from had been the subject of several scientific investigations. It wasn’t something totally physical; bot parts could be put onto normal robots, and the robot wouldn’t have the bot ability. It wasn’t something totally software-related, as a copy of bot programming in a normal machine’s processors wouldn’t give them the ability either. What Toonpimp was doing here – using addbot parts to repair damaged addbots – wasn’t the first experiment of its kind, though it was the first large-scale attempt to do so; only someone who had quite thoroughly researched the topic would know that, though. As the factory was showing, it seemed to work pretty well.
The influence addbots had on the design of all bots was an obvious one. Bots could feasibly be constructed in the same way as any normal machine; bipedal, quadrapedal, wheeled… the potential bot forms were near-limitless. And yet, every single bot after the addbots had mimicked their humanoid, skinned design. The reason was obvious – the addbots ruled the world, making them the most successful thing imaginable; why wouldn’t you want to make your bots in exactly the same way, if you wanted them to achieve that kind of success?
The answer: because addbots were designed to advertise. Sure, they took over the internet, but they weren’t made for it; they had several strategic flaws, and managed to win mostly by force of numbers. The speed-bot that had hunted them down earlier was a good indication of what a bot properly designed for combat could be.… but good luck trying to get a programmer to understand that, these days. It didn’t help that the advent of the addbots had seen most of the already-uncommon programmers and hackers die off, leaving only an uncreative few to continue the craft. By now, the humanoid-bot phenomenon was so prevalent that a good deal of people believed bots needed to be bipedal – to the constant frustration of invested historians.
It was about at this point that Shade would notice the unusually large number of bots outside the control room. There had been a few before, then the others had cut them down… and now there were several again. They were mostly pre-occupied shooting at something to the left of the exit, but it probably wouldn’t be too long before one of them changed target to the half-elf. The ULMFers had begun moving out, and if Shade didn’t get back, the swarming bots might just cut him off, without particularly much hope of being able to catch back up. Being trapped alone, in a self-destructing complex containing a small army of hostile bots… well, there were better ways to spend an afternoon.
Slightly through the wall to Shade’s left, in the space of a second, most of the squad had tried furiously to stop the mildly worrying possibility of being blown up. The first, quick but uncalculated shot of Sinful and Suri failed to hit a rocket; not unexpected given the difficulty of the shot. Host managed to only brush the side of a missile with his next shot, though it was enough to throw the missile off course and into a wall. Rapture’s hit was cleaner, and the second missile fell after the first. The last one got close enough that, when Grave’s dark shot destroyed it, the smoke-cloud was tickling Host’s nose.
-then there was the sound of rocket propellant igniting.
They might have been in trouble, if, (with a dramatically appropriate cry of fury,) Burrito hadn’t fired a line of blue light down the hall. It wasn’t exactly the powerful blast that his previous compatriots would remember him for, but it certainly blew up the oncoming missiles – and cleared the smoke, too.
Unfortunately, the three things that had been launching the missiles proved to be more sturdy… despite their appearance. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine the creatures that Burrito was running at could withstand a water-pistol, let alone beams of glowing death; they appeared to be made out of cardboard boxes, spray-painted sliver for that dashing faux-mechanical look… you can even occasionally see brown spots where the paintjob had been a bit thin. The only thing marring that image was the roaming, red blip on the “machine’s” head; even with that taken into consideration, it still looked like a ten-year-old’s attempt at making an original-series Cylon, with a pair of small doors in the machine’s chest. It was quite possible to imagine a child inside the handicraft creation, making robot noises… But any suspicions about Toonpimp using child soldiers were quickly dashed; as the squad’s former commander bull-rushed them, the nearest of the three things attacked him… by opening the ‘doors’, and unleashing a large number of black cords, which seemed to autononomously flail at the cyborg.
Not one to retreat, and not able to dodge the omni-present wires, burrito took them head on… and for his trouble, had enough electricity unloaded into his body that the cyborg’s charge was stopped flat. Like any good machine, Burrito’s body had been designed with fail-safes in place to prevent electrical surges; his physical systems simply shut down under the level of current these cords were putting out. Thankfully, the berserking cyborg’s systems righted themselves as soon as the flailing cords lost their connection… but still, getting close to the robots without suffering crippling levels of electric shock was going to be a problem.