Enre looks at what happened to the others than at the thing that was formed before him he growls than says "You really need to know you messed with the wrong people." He than places his massive sword before his face once again and this time it seems to bleed black light. He than unleasshes an assault at the thing.
Accurate Strike (Ex): The magus can expend 2 points from his arcane pool as a swift action to resolve all of his melee weapon attacks until the end of his turn as melee touch attacks. The magus must be at least 9th level before selecting this arcana.
Ryuzo is barely snared by the net! He goes ethereal and it falls to the floor...
Krays steps to the side before the hatch falls away...he throws a fireball through the doorway into the room with all the bits, hoping to incinerate them before they can coelesce any further...
@Soli and @Aananda: While examining your respective systems, you come across an odd negatively-charged anomaly; electron shunts are being put in place, reprogramming parts of your gear at the most fundamental subatomic level possible, and your internal repair systems are themselves being reprogrammed to assist in the reprogramming/hijacking of everything else.
In other words, to hell with machine-language, your stuff is being hacked by submolecular crackers.
Ryuzo is barely snared by the net! He goes ethereal and it falls to the floor...
Amazingly, Ryuzo is actually caught. He realizes that the tendrils that make up the net are the same ones that were "examining" him in his incorporeal form earlier and they appear to have adapted to his abilities.
Gimme a DC35 Fort save to overcome what's going on inside you/your systems, or you crash to the ground and gain the equivalent of the Pinned condition. If you fail the save, you must make two consecutive DC22 Will saves to regain control of your systems, at which point you may again attempt the DC35 Fort save to expunge whatever evil thing is inside you.
OR! If you don't want to play along, then feel free to handwave or whatever and make it all go away. Whatever's most fun for you! :-)
Everyone in Sub-Basement 13: Krays's incinerates all the moving parts in the entryway, melting them to slag and/or carbon. A couple pieces get flung aside by the explosion, bouncing off the walls and stairs, and some of the gunk splats against intakes and cables just inside the door, and makes a big stain on the door to the Operators' office.
Meanwhile the magically-enhanced Enre hacks the bejeezus out of the Operator-thing, cutting it down in an eyeblink with his magicked blade before it can even react. As its parts slide to the floor and then through a trapdoor and down into the Safety Chamber below, more alarms start going off on the two boilers that seem to be overheating or something. You all know that a VRD down here, with no operator to dump the boiler into the Safety Vat, could easily nuke half the school.
The zombies all appear to be mashed or burned or otherwise destroyed, inferior opponents as they were to the likes of you. Now Ryuzo needs freeing and someone really should do something about those boilers...
Jim, fighting for every movement, takes yet another device from his waist, attaching it to his head, and flipping the switch.
@Jim Rivets: Feeling all the energy in your body being weirdly re-routed and blocked and shunted, you take one last desperate action to regain control of your internals, and it works! You feel energy pouring through you, allowing you to make repairs and begin working to get rid of this...thing, or things or whatever the heck is going on.
"You don't have me!" Jim shouts at the entity in his consciousness.
A tentacle with a big phillips screwdriver head at one end lashes out at Michael while a sticky web of some kind of netting shoots out at Ryuzo.
Michael cries out as the screwdriver rips a huge gash in his arm. Out of a reflex that isn't his, Michael places a hand on the gash and starts stitching it back together, seeing the injury in his mind and pulling the edges back together.
"Kitty!" He gasps. "Run!"
Asch easily avoids the open doors rolling to his feet just as Enre destroys the creature. "Someone please tell me they know how to fix these things right?" Asch says as he looks over the controls and sees if he can figure it out
@Asch: While many of the dials and keypads and displays of the Operators' controls may as well be written in some foreign tongue for all you can understand them, the emergency bypass switches are plain as day. With a lightning-quick dash, you tuck-and-roll into the Operators' office and crank down the panic levers.
All the emergency drop-traps pull up, but unfortunately the alarms keep sounding; looking over at the boilers themselves you quickly grok why; some external bit of machinery has been attached to the boiler, itself bypassing all panic switches. This must have been what the zombified operator-thing was working on when Ryuzo interrupted it.
You need a technician, and you need one now.
"…Damn it we need a tech to get this I understand guns and stuff this is far beyond me!" Asch calls out from the office. "I have an idea. Aandanda we have a problem in sub-basement 13 the boilers are about to go boom. Something screwed with the saftey bypass and is causeing it to over heat!" He calls over on hin comlink.
Aananda curses as the entire security system goes dead. It was good that it worked as planned, all of the nanites self-destructing rather than allowing their protocols to be changed, but she realized that she'd become too relient on them. And it was going to take hours of constant work to bring the security system back on line after they got this problem solved..
And then things got even worse. At least the commlinks were run on a different system, but it was only a matter of time before that got infected too.
::On my way. Commlinks are about to fail. Use telepathy going forward if you can,:: she thought to Asch before she dived through the stone floor, heading for the sub basement by the most direct route possible.
Kitty screamed as she fell through the hole in the floor, and then came to a sudden stop as someone caught her.
"You know, for a ninja, you really need some work on your reflexes. That's the second time today that I've had to save you from falling through a hole in the floor."
::Infection detected. Purged from system. Antivirus protocols active. Shutting down all outgoing and incoming system links. Master link is secure. Suggested action: Destroy Infection and Corrupted Components.::
Solivala repels whatever was attempting to influence him and his systems. He then unleashes another swarm storm in the area to get rid of the corruption. He floats over to Jim who seems to be fighting it off.
"Are you infected?"
"No, I've purged it. Wasn't sure I was gonna make it, though. It was definitely touch-and-go when it first hit me. I got the little buggers, though, and I don't think they'll be back for more any time soon. "
Remembering the sounds he heard just before his systems went haywire, he turns to the locker-room door. "We should help these students. It's very likely they don't stand a chance against these things, just as the ones we passed before were going to fail."
Having said this, Jim enters, coming to the rescue of any students located inside.
@Aananda: Having cleared the systems, you head to the basement, arriving in time to note that two of the boilers are getting awfully close to going through Very Rapid Disassembly. It's obvious to you immediately that the same crude but brutally effective technique that was used on your security systems has been employed here as well; electron shunts at the subatomic level, built quickly and cleverly. Once you know this, it is a small matter to remove them and spin down the boilers to normal operating temps.
The alarms stop.
In addition to the normal hissing and shooshing of Sub-Basement 13, there is now also the steady drip of weird oily fluids and blood. But at least things appear to be safe again.
@Jim and @Soli (I assume): You crash into the locker room, where dozens of very young girls are cornered by what appears to be a cluster of two dozen lurching biomech zombies. One of the girls has made a force shield of some sort and is holding them off, but she is obviously tiring from the effort. The zombies bang and thud against the barrier, trying to cut it open with primitive melee weapons and getting nowhere.
All around the school, kids are collecting and burning or force-warping or teleporting the zombies into oblivion. Things are rapidly returning to normal, such as it is.
@Fei: The droid-thing in front of you suddenly stops, spins around twice, and falls into several dozen pieces, each piece melting disgustingly before your eyes.
I take a Device from my Belt, and create a Wall of Force around the girls. After this barrier is up, I charge into combat, destroying Zombies left and right .
Jim cleans up the last cluster of these strange zombies, crushing them to bits, careful this time not to let tiny parts escape the melee. The little kids are grateful, if curious just who the heck Jim is...
"I'm just here to help. I heard you girls screaming, and decided to help out. This thing," tapping the WoF,"will go away in about a minute and 22.5 seconds. Then you'll be free to go where you wish. I suggest going down the hall, and down to the Auditorium. I wiped all of the ones that were that way on my way down the hall."
"It's about time somebody showed up to help," she snapped, slumping down, exhausted. This had been a very long day and she wasn't sure how much more she could manage mass forcefields like that. And this bunch of idiot girls had been less help than a basket of kittens. Well, she admitted grudgingly, at least their incessant screaming had gotten someone's attention.
"Er...thanks."
Solivala floats silently behind Jim. Some notice that his dark cloud is "eating" whats left of the strange creatures. Some of the girls give him a strange look.
"No point in letting the matter go to waste. It is being analyzed."
Solivala did not like this filth. He would be sure to destroy the one who was responsible, such insulting work.
"Well, you lot seem to be fine now. If you don't mind, I'm going to go try and find the source of these... things."
Begins to contort to slip out...
Escape artist:
"You know, for a ninja, you really need some work on your reflexes. That's the second time today that I've had to save you from falling through a hole in the floor."
Michael appears at Keme's side and helps pull Kitty up with his good arm, Saffire climbing up his arm as well.
"Thanks." He says to Keme. "I owe you."
"Are you okay, Kitty?"
Begins to contort to slip out...
Escape artist: 1d20+32
Effortlessly hops to his feet after getting out of the net. He looks around...
Perception:
"Hey! Are they done? Did we get em?"
@Solivala: Most of the matter you analyze is as you guessed; just dead cells. What's curious is that the machinery is built from the tiniest possible constituent parts and the dead flesh is not animated by any kind of necromancy or other known arcane energy form.
"I don't see anymore of those things...Enre killed the operator."
What's left of the zombies in Sub-Basement 13 has all melted away into an indistinct glop and promptly slid through the floor grates to fall down into the alchemical safety vat below, spitting and hissing and cracking as it collides with the neutralizing mixture.
"We should probably all get out of here..."
"Yeah, it's over..."
Krays and Ryuzo escort everyone from the basement, unless they wish to remain to examine the vat.
"You know, for a ninja, you really need some work on your reflexes. That's the second time today that I've had to save you from falling through a hole in the floor."Michael appears at Keme's side and helps pull Kitty up with his good arm, Saffire climbing up his arm as well.
"Thanks." He says to Keme. "I owe you."
"Are you okay, Kitty?"
"Yeah," she said, clinging closely to Michael. "I'm so sorry. I just froze up. That's just unexcusable for a ninja," she said, blinking back tears.
"Thank you, Keme."
"I'm just sorry I didn't get here in time to deal with any of the creepy-crawlies. Let me know the next time you decide to wander into trouble, okay? I hate missing the fun," he said with his customary cocky grin.
Aananda sighed as she started to sort through the destruction.
"If anyone sees Fei, tell him to start doing jumping jacks or something, anything, to charge up those cuffs. We don't have enough residual power stored to make it for the length of time it's going to take to fix the systems."
::Solivala, my security system is down, so you're responsible for the school's security until I get it back up and running. If there are any more of those creatures, take care of them. And if you happen to have any extra time, I could use a hand repairing the power generators. I'm thinking of taking the boilers offline altogether and putting in power cells similar to what is used on startships. I could use your feedback on the practicality of that plan though.::
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Aananda sighed as she started to sort through the destruction.
"If anyone sees Fei, tell him to start doing jumping jacks or something, anything, to charge up those cuffs. We don't have enough residual power stored to make it for the length of time it's going to take to fix the systems."
Aananda sighed as she started to sort through the destruction.
"If anyone sees Fei, tell him to start doing jumping jacks or something, anything, to charge up those cuffs. We don't have enough residual power stored to make it for the length of time it's going to take to fix the systems."
Vai can hear the scream around the school and looks at Ephebe. "Is that normal?
Ephebe frowns. "No, that is definitely not normal. Umm....Vai, I don't want to put you in danger, but I really need to go see what's going on."
@Fei: The droid-thing in front of you suddenly stops, spins around twice, and falls into several dozen pieces, each piece melting disgustingly before your eyes.
Fei cautiously circles the liquefying mass, making sure none of it continues to move. He then checks the 'bio ball' to confirm the same and makes sure nothing else is on the roof. That done, he races for the edge and leaps off the building, landing on the green in front of the Cafeteria. Should anybody be around, they notice that he lands very softly, with no apparent sign of contact with the ground...
He heads back inside the school to find somebody who knows what is going on...this time. (^.^)
Ephebe frowns. "No, that is definitely not normal. Umm....Vai, I don't want to put you in danger, but I really need to go see what's going on."
"Is it okay if I come with you?" Vai is playing with her hair anxiously.
Ephebe frowns. "No, that is definitely not normal. Umm....Vai, I don't want to put you in danger, but I really need to go see what's going on.""Is it okay if I come with you?" Vai is playing with her hair anxiously.
Ephebe nods. "Sure, of course it is."
She grabbed Vai's hand so that she wouldn't accidentally outrun the other girl and headed for here the noise was coming from.
"Yeah," she said, clinging closely to Michael. "I'm so sorry. I just froze up. That's just unexcusable for a ninja," she said, blinking back tears.
"Maybe you should just be Kitty then." He replies as he leads her out of the basement. "Then you wouldn't have to worry about what is excusable or not."