Cursing as JD falls to Sharu, Mallura turns her full ire back on the Azlanti commander.
Jarix will continue to target the cadet.
In a desperate attempt to distract the commander from JD, Verne moves in up close and strikes out with his tactical baton.
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Firing from the ground, Jarix catches the cadet with the assault rifle completely off-guard, leaving him reeling. Mallura stabs squarely into a crease in the Azlanti commander's armour, triggering a high-pitched grunt. Lieutenant Sharu dodges Mallura's backhand slash, as well as Verne's baton.
She then swings her cruel blade at Mallura in a furious slash and spits in heavily-accented Common.
"Welcome to Inevitable Downfall! That is the name of this means of your end!"
"And your android slave as well!" She re-directs the second slash at Verne as the captain falls.
The cadet drops the empty assault rifle, picks up their pacification rifle, and fires at Jarix on the ground.
Mallura manages to give the cadet a parting slash before Sharu turns her blade on the captain of the Brilliance and strikes her down.
As Mal likes unconscious and bleeding on the floor of the ancient Azlanti vessel, her mind wanders back in time to an old job before she went straight. She remembers there being a lot of blood and pain then too, but little else. She survived that time, though, and is determined to stick it out this time too!
"Right where I want you." He fires back at the cadet.
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"Right where I want you." He fires back at the cadet.
[dice=Trick Attack]1d20+10+1 [dice=Damage]1d4
[dice=Semi-Auto Pistol]1d20+6 [dice=Pierce Damage]1d6
Mallura cuts down the cadet as she herself gets cut down. Jarix’s pistol cracks, and Lieutenant Sharu sees him firing at her from the ground. She growls.
JD stirs in the harness of the drone and recalls with a wild, wide eyed fright the gravity of his situation. He immediately pilots the drone back 5 feet from the Atlanti officer and levels a last desperate volley. His hand shakes as he struggles to lift the pistol and squeeze off a shot.
"From Hell's heart, I stab at thee" he weakly mutters.
Verne defends himself in an attempt to place himself between Sharu and his comerades.
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JD and Sh-Ux churn back to life, firing close to the lieutenant, but not hitting the mark. Verne braces himself for the incoming blade.
"တပ်မှူး၊ ဒီရက်စက်ကြမ်းကြုတ်သောတိရစ္ဆာန်များမှမောင်းနှင်လာသည့်အခါငါတို့မှာစကားလုံးမျာ းရှိလိမ့်မည်။"
In a completely brash move, Lt Sharu stalks around the other active combatants on the battlefield to attack the prone Jarix.
Lt Sharu cleaves down on the operative, nearly severing his firearm arm from his shoulder.
Use my last resolve to stabilize.
Mallura spends the last of her will to fight to wake herself again. Just as she's coming to, she looks around and sees that Jarix and JD are both down. Standing right above her, between herself and the fallen form of JD, she sees the lieutenant, and her mind fills with fear.
The captain slowly stands and turns to flee!
JD hits the harness release buckle and falls weakly from the drone's frame to stand beside his oldest friend. Seeing the captain turn to flee from the bridge, he levels his pistol again in an uncharacteristically selfless act. someone's gotta live...run like hell, Mal he thinks to himself, and fires at the Azlanti leader.
gotta keep it's attention off everyone else.. JD reaches to his wrist mounted custom rig and sends Sh-Ux a command.
The drone's iris turns from combat black, back to red. It begins to blink rapidly. In it's booming Azlanti voice, it calls out.
ဖျက်ဆီး sequence ကိုစတင်ခဲ့သည်
The drone levels his laser pistol and fires a blast as well.
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Mallura spends her remaining resolve to come back to consciousness. She rises from the floor, her survival knife in hand, and takes a final desperate swing at the lieutenant.
Verne snarls as he is filled with uncharacteristic rage. He flings a nearby piece of debris at Sharu.
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The android flings a rock at the lieutenant, catching her in the helm.
At Sh-Ux's announcement, Lieutenant Sharu barks.
"မင်းတို့သတ္တ ၀ ါကျေးကျွန်တွေကနေပလ္လင်တော်ရဲ့စွမ်းအားကိုပိုကောင်းအောင်လုပ်နိုင်မယ်လို့ထင်နေ တာလား။?"
She then springs at Sh-Ux, carving at the mech droid with fury.
The weirdly-flexible sword slashes through Sh-Ux's chassis, sparks flying. The drone, amazingly, remains intact.
Seeing a chance to get the Azlanti officer in a compromised position, Mallura takes a step back and fires at Sharu with her laser pistol.
JD stumbles back and fires wildly at Sharu.
"အကျွန်ုပ်သည်ကျွန်မဟုတ်ပါ ငါ့ကိုဖျက်ဆီးလျှင်ငါအသက်ရှင်လိမ့်မည်။ မင်းရဲ့အုပ်ချုပ်မှုအောက်မှာထက်ငါနဲ့အတူရှိနေတဲ့ကြယ်တွေကြားမှာမင်းအဖေနဲ့အတူနေ ပြီးရှင်သန်နေထိုင်နိုင်မှာသေချာတယ်။"
Sh-Ux attempts a last ditch effort to bring it's firing arm down onto the Azlanti leader.
Verne continues to furiously lob debris at the lieutenant.
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Verne wildly flings trash around the chamber.
The lieutenant speaks in careful but heavily-accented Common.
"I will kill all of you, starting with your metal slaves."
She swings down at Sh-Ux.
Sharu carves Sh-Ux into a jumble of mechanical parts. The drone shorts out as the confident Azlanti officer strides past JD, positioning herself at Verne's far side.
"You are next." Her blade points at the android.
Mal takes a swing at Sharu with her knife then carefully steps away!
"If I die defending my crew, then this is indeed a good day to die." Verne says, cooly meeting Sharu's gaze.
He goes in with his baton.
The flashing red iris on Sh-Ux goes dormant as it's lumbering hulk is cleft in twain. JD curses. He knew his diversion would buy them precious little time, but he's not sure it will be enough now to save Verne.
He looks over to where Jarix fell and moves around the room to his fallen comrade, then raises his pistol and fires at Sharu.
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Mallura slashes with her knife, scoring a slash across the lieutenant's face-plate. The lower half of the mask comes off, revealing a nasty wound in the lower half of a cruel-appearing pale face. Verne clocks the lieutenant over the crown, dashing the upper half of the mask to the floor and revealing the pained-looking face of the Azlanti soldier, Sharu!
She sneers with furious disparagement at the android.
"You will never know life, machine-man." She whips her blade over her head.
JD's bullet punches out the left eye of Sharu's face. The Azlanti leader shakes her head briefly, as if to try to shake herself awake, then turns to stare in JD's direction.
Sharu collapses to the metal floor of the bridge, her sword clattering to the ground at her side, and DIES.
Mallura breathes a heavy sigh of relief as Sharu finally falls, then immediately turns and kneels down to check on Jarix.
She finds her pilot is still breathing and stands back up, a look of relief in her eyes.
"Well that was horrifying," she breathes. "JD, Verne, the two of you alright?"
JD lowers his pistol and weakly sways back and forth a bit before responding. "I need a drink"
He unloads the magazine and checks to see how many rounds he had left, counting only 3. "That was a little too close for comfort."
Once it is confirmed that Jarix is stable, he will move to the remains of Sh-Ux and collect the old modified phaser and memory chip from the debris. Then move around the room searching the Azlanti soldiers, throwing any weapons, ammunition and anything of value into a heap for the crew of the Brilliance to sort through.
Jarix realizes that he is alive because being dead could not hurt this much. He keeps his eyes closed trying to sense what's going on around him. Once he determines it is safe, he still keeps his eyes closed as he takes stock of himself. Slowly Jarix rolls to the side and sits up. "One way or the other, I'm done here."
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The two dead cadets have eight longarm rounds between them in addition to the ubiquitous survival knives, troop ceremonial plate, and imperial pacification rifles. You find Lieutenant Sharu's AG assault rifle along with the cadet who unloaded it at you all, but there's no ammunition for it. The lieutenant has much more interesting gear.
She wears enhanced AG trooper battle dress armor with two upgrades: a targeting computer and a clear spindle aeon stone. She carries a motion detection badge (you've seen these before) and her funky sword. She also carries two data pads. One of the data pads seems to be much more modern than the other, but the older data pad seems much more complex and robust, despite being archaic. JD notices that the older data pad has a permanently-slotted aeon stone in its construction. He estimates that this aeon stone cannot be removed without destroying both it and the archaic data pad.
The exterior of the bridge of the Royal Venture has sustained very little actual damage for a planetary crash, but you estimate that the crew didn't survive as well as the ship. A few long-lasting personal effects scattered around the room — belt buckles, cracked chronometers, and rune-carved pendants — show where crew members died. The workstations around the room are all ornate but durable. It appears that Sharu had been carefully and methodically deconstructing the main computer here on the bridge; parts are laid out in sequences and labeled, though the recent melee has disrupted some of this work.
JD recovers his battered hunting rifle that he discarded during the skirmish and loads 4 of the 8 longarm rounds into it. As he scavenges around he inspects and wipes the dirt from an ancient Azlanti belt buckle before sliding it into his coveralls and moving on.
"Can anybody make heads or tails of this thing?" he asks, handing the datapad off to the others who are more gifted in the mystical. "I'm going to see if I can figure out what Sharu had planned for this computer."
He eases his beaten and battered body to the floor with some grunts and groans.
Jarix will Aid JD if he can.
It appears that Sharu had been carefully and methodically deconstructing the main computer here on the bridge; parts are laid out in sequences and labeled, though the recent melee has disrupted some of this work.
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JD looks at the completely-deconstructed main ship computer and realises that there are days worth of work to attend to (following extensive notes both laid out aside the parts as well as referencing further notes that you assume are on Sharu’s data pad) in order to get it back to any recognisable structure restored.
The question is if we feel that we have the time. Are there more Azlanti nearby? When will the reinforcements get here?
Jarix will aid JD with the computers.
Verne turns over the datapad in his hands, but doesn't get a sense of any hidden power behind the aeon stone.
"We almost died," he says, contemplative. "Perhaps there are further mysteries to be unlocked in the ship's computer, but I fear we may not survive if reinforcements show up."
After JD removes his head from the bridge's computer core, he sighs with the exhaustion of a man who has been beaten to within 1 inch/hp if his life. "This isn't a today job anyway. I can see if I can unlock these datapads, but you're all right. We need to get outta here and lay low for awhile. See if Doc Ependell can patch us up a bit.
JD looks to see if opening the datapads is a quick job, starting with Sharu's pad incase she already studied everything here and the Cole's notes can be found there.
Mallura looks on and encourages JD as he works on accessing the datapads.
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Your ship was going to be worked on at Madelon's Landing by Aibretta and Jellik.
JD's fatigue fails to impair him at all as his finger fly over Sharu's data pad, cracking the basic security therein. Within the lieutenant's data pad, duplicate reports from Master-at-Arms Olaraja can be found (all in Azlanti).
In addition, JD discovers that Lt Sharu is a low-ranking member of the Azlanti nobility - part of the same house as this Sardat Ulivestra. Finally, the datapad reveals that Cedona and the rune drive were both taken to a prison moon called Gulta in the Azlanti Star Empire. The datapad includes a flight plan to the moon but notes a checkpoint along the journey where an Azlanti transponder code is required.
The ancient data pad is more tricky to crack, and just as he finagles his way inside it, JD notices a security feature that would curse someone less skilled. Fortunately, he saw it in time and avoided it.
The data pad itself is intriguing - a hardened tier 2 computer with security II modules and a clear spindle aeon stone built into is mainframe (the source of the potential curse). It is worth at least 1000 credits to the right collector.
The story of the Royal Venture can be found within the data pad: in pre-Gap times, an Azlanti noble named Ameondria had installed in her personal vessel a unique engine that the ancient documents called a rune drive. An experimental technomagical interstellar drive, the rune drive incorporated as part of its power source an aeon stone from the Aeon Throne itself. Its power? Drift travel in a time before the drift was in existence. In other words - interstellar travel without needing the Drift. The datapad describes the drive as a a cube approximately 3 feet on each side. The device’s casing was composed of a some strange adamantine-like alloy and was encrusted with tiny shards of the unique aeon stones.
Suddenly, each of your personal comm devices crackles to life, a voice full of static transmitting a dire message - it is Madelon Kesi.
“My friends, I apologise for interrupting you, but I have some serious news. We’ve been able to get our communications array partially working again here at BTEP-1, and we’ve picked up some chatter that reveals a large Azlanti ship approaching orbit. It’s the vessel — I believe it’s called the Barazad — that destroyed our comm station and deposited the small army that kept us under their thumb until your timely intervention. I’m afraid the ship will bombard our settlement from space and kill Aibretta and Jellik, not to mention destroy your own spaceship. Please, hurry, in the name of the Lawgiver! Intercept the Barazad if you can before it rains down death!”
Didn't we bring a vehicle to get here? Let's rush back to the ship.
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The crew of the Brilliance, blistered and knackered by their experience at the Royal Venture, summons all of their remaining vigour to extract themselves from the ruined archaic ship and fly with break-neck speed back to Madelon's Landing after hearing the warning from Madelon himself. Their arrival back finds Jellik and Aibretta hurriedly firing up the engines of the refurbished Brilliance - it would seem that the message of the impending airstrike had reached the former couple. Aibretta throws her hands up in annoyed joy as the quartet zoom into view.
"We ain't goin' down like that with no airstrike! Jellik an' I, we was gonna take the fight to 'im, but DAMN is it good you back! This ride is turbo-charged. We gonna hole up while you git 'em."
Aibretta then races off, dragging the silently-smiling Jellik with her. Jellik gives you finger-guns.
Your old ship, humming with energised engines, stands open, awaiting your embarkment. The lavender sky of Nakondis awaits your ascent. You have an idea of what awaits you in the ionosphere.
Jarix slides into the pilot's station. "They adjusted the height." He says with mild annoyance even as he hands work across the controls. "Looks like that pair has made some upgrades. I hope they hold up. Keep your bindings tight. Looks like we're going to stress test them starting... NOW!" Jarix punches the engines and, hopefully, they respond by launching the ship into the atmosphere and beyond.