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Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2006 1:53 am
Tomias hopped about, away from Gwyn as she skipped around him. He tried to keep her in his sight, whirling around as she moved in scrabbling movements, his hooves slipping on the floor and making a brilliant sound too.
He appeared to be hyperventilating as he twisted and turned, glossy tail slicing through the air and equipment hitting against his sides. Eventually he gave up and reared his front legs up, picking his knees up and swiping out with the left hoof in an attempt to scare off what he deemed to be his attacker, not to maim or hurt - just to scare.
As he reared his front end up and balanced somewhat akwardly on his hind legs, hooves stepping and sliding across the floor to keep his balance, his arms shot out to the side to balance himself. The human part to his body bent at the middle, his chest almost upright.
He gave a snort at the woman, the man all but forgotten now as be balanced on two legs.
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Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2006 5:10 am
Deimos dropped his hand and sighed. "Gwyn..." he chided. "Gwyn! Leave him alone."
The look on Gwyn's face was the epitome of heart-wrenching tragedy, but Deimos simply gave her a stern look, and she desisted, slumping back to where he was standing, with an angry, betrayed look.
"I'm sorry about that," Deimos bowed slightly.
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Flynn MacCumhaill Captain
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Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2006 11:39 am
Tomias dropped his front legs, hooves making a nice clop as they hit the ground simultaneously. He continued to give the woman disignated 'Gwyn' a rather wide-eyed look, fluffy ears pricked and alert.
After a long while his eyes travelled up to the man and his expression shifted slightly from plain shocked to wary. "T-T... Tomias." Tomias atammered, realising that he had probably been waiting for his name. He gave a half hearted bow, a foreleg lifting slightly, but the action was swift and his eyes were watching Gwyn once more every time she moved a centimetre.
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Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2006 2:17 pm
"So! Any more questions?" was what ended the stacato monologue ....
Snap vowed never again to ask this Y'karrhr any question unless he abolutely positivelly needed to, and even then he would think twice about it. Hmmm, name sounded sort of familiar, like that barbarian turned politician, Y'nnvar'r maybe? And twice as anoying to listen too as well.
At least he didn't loose the answer he was waiting for. Though the answer wasnt exactly all that helpful. Anyone who couldn't explain how something worked usually was someone who didn't understand the thing all that well in the first place OR wasnt one well suited to words. This person seemed to be nothing but words though.
Snap noted a clatter of hooves coming from around the corner behind the group, but the lack of screams and arms fire boded that all was well. Relativelly speaking, considering the hyper-acute-paranoia evinced by the centaur and his fondness for gadgets and firearms.
So as to avoid encouraging the mouth with no end Snap just stood there waiting patiently for him to get on with the demonstartion. Hopefully everyone else in the group clued in and asked very specific and limited questions. Y'karrhr did not seem to have very accute deductive reasoning skills. Either that or he purposely misinterpreted the direct question to his last statement as an excuse to babble on. Inwardlly Snaps juvenile enthusiasm just took a cold shower. This was not good. Not good at all.
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Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2006 9:20 am
Oh, so that was what he was like in person. Shorter than the kid had expected, but he didn't come across much differently: hyperactive, reckless perhaps. Hewitt recalled his earlier conversation with Y'karrhr and Andre; Y'karrhr would be head of the mechanical side tech here. Of course, this was explained for him a moment later as a second deluge of words told the group not only this, but a bunch of other stuff which was certainly humorous but not completely useful or desired information. And he didn't explain about the boards or srars.
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Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2006 4:17 am
"Shall we head down, then?" Y'karrhr grinned.
He led them from the training-halls back to the lift. Once all were inside, he hit one of the smooth rivet-like buttons about a third of the way down the ranks, and the lift began to descend.
"We're heading down to the main hangars -- that's not where you came in, these ones are bigger. There are several smaller hangars built in at intervals in case there is some problem occuring with or in the main one, of course, but when someone tells youto go to the hangar, this will be the one you head to."
The lift smoothly decelerated, and the doors shot open.
The new recruits were greeted with a vast, not terribly well-lit open space. Some distance in front of them on their right, the wall simply stopped at about the half-way point of that curving side, giving way to the Evinian sky. A light breeze stirred their hair and clothing.
In the space inside, there was arranged a great array of forms of transportation. The left-hand wall was lined three-deep in places with the flashy-looking racers -- the srars. In between them were racks of what appeared to be something like snowboards folded in half. The main body of the hangar was scattered with more of the racers and many (car-like) speeders, several of which were in various states of disassembly. Machinery fitted itself into all possible intercies, and people -- often grease-smeared, goodness knows why -- buzzed about, replacing, reassembling, and just occasionally throwing a spanner at something.
An interesting feature of the hangar, only noticed once they stepped out of the lift onto the main floor, was that it slanted just slightly to the right: away from the open wall.
--- --- ---
"Pleased to meet you, Tomias." Deimos smiled warmly -- it was not an expression he was much used to, and Gwyn thought it looked odd on his usually darkly serious and brooding face.
"Your cell have your first mission tonight, right?"
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Flynn MacCumhaill Captain
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Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 2:57 am
Tomias peered at Deimos with an untrusting look, ready to prance away if he made any sudden movements. "I-I won't be going. W-with them I-I mean." he stammered, flicking his tail about nervously.
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Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 4:35 am
Deimos made a dismissive gesture. "Pfft, that just means that you get to hang out with Andre --Y'karrhr's arch-nemesis. Head of Tech: Systems. As you'd expect, he's extremely knowledgeable about anything from basic utility stuff right through to some pretty high-powered computing -- stuff I certainly don't understand." He paused to flick his dark hair out of his eyes.
Gwyn had trotted off at some point during this speech, and was now returning with a much shorter young woman, whose jet-black braid hung almost to her knees. Her over-large green eyes had an upward slant, and her small ears came to delicate points.
Almost instinctively, Deimos turned around. "Oh, no. Here comes trouble," he observed wryly, seeing the approaching ladies.
"Quite a day for introductions, I'm sure you've found," he observed with a half-smile. "Tomias, Kana. Leader of our cell, Phi-7. Kana, Tomias. One of the new cell -- Psi-8, right?" this last query was directed again to Tomias.
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Flynn MacCumhaill Captain
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Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 2:28 am
Tomias steadily took steps back away from the strange people with their loud voices. It was overwhelming, to say the least, before this day the most people he had been in the same room with was two at the very most, and it had been his own room and his mother and father.
His fluffy ears trained on Deimos and now Gwyn and Kana, he listened to the words that were spoken but didn't really take any of it in. He was more worried if they were going to stab him with a needle (you should see him at the doctor's) or try to pull him into a dark room and interrogate him. He just wanted to be put in a room with lots of junk metal, screws and wiring and build something. That would be heaven for Tomias.
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Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 7:49 pm
((sorry I was away for so long -- lots of work and then I took an extended weekend just now for GuruCon ... wheee ... Living Death with the masters))
Snap waited patiently for the mouth with no end to continue onwards with the tour and demonstration.
He noted the slope to the floor, just like the hangers back home. So they were prepared for monor accidents at least. Snap wondered if they had figured out some way of getting the centaur into the air. Even if the creature was so terrified that it most likely was a hazard to everyone including itself if it ever got into the air.
Now to just wait for the demonstartions to begin.
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Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 8:54 am
[ >.< I'm so terrible at getting on.]
Hewitt craned his neck around one of the others and leaned forward on his toes in order to get a better view of the vast space. The slope of the floor caused him a bit of confusion until he realized why his footing didn't seem quite right. In the size of the hangar, it hadn't been obvious to him visually.
He looked to Y'karrhr, waiting for further intruction.
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Posted: Fri Jul 28, 2006 10:03 pm
((Choosing to assume that Sayuri Kirie hasn't entirely given up on me...)) Y'karrhr moved quickly across to one of the units of shelves. The first board he pulled out, he tossed to Snap. The he climbed up to remove one from the very top of the unit. This he handed to Hewitt. He jumped down again, and removed another, which he handed to Arien. Finally he removed two more, and propped them against the shelves. There was no apparent order to what he did.
With that grin they were learning to hate plastered across his face, he began.
"If you haven't seen these before, these are HovBoards. However, the name is so shocking that if you call them that, someone is liable to hit you over the head with one. Thus they are simply called boards. I won't bore you with all the technical details about them, because you don't need to know. What you do need to know is that they work. Provided you don't do something especially stupid, you won't fall down into the endless abyss outside."
He picked one up and flipped it open. There were two loops on top of it -- footholds, of all things! -- and it kicked up slightly at the nose, but was otherwise essentially smooth and featureless black.
"Yep, a nice example of the Tower's cutting edge technology there," he grinned, referring to the footholds. "Typically, there's just electrostat-attract patches on the thing, but when people started making these things do things they're not designed to, we decided that that wasn't sufficient, and came to the conclusion that the safest and most effective modification would be to simply add the straps.
"As you can see, there's no evidence of controls, like there is on a racer or a scooter. Everythign is done by shifting your weight. It's all pretty intuitive -- except for ascending. If you just pull the nose up, you'll stop. If you want to go up, you have to flick the nose down and around, then.... Ugh, we'll show you."
He picked up the still-folded board. "Oi! Crash!"
A head popped up from somewhere among the machinery. It had a round face, a flat nose, almond-shaped eyes, and ... quills. Where he should have had hair, he had instead black, glossy quills, tied loosely at the back of his neck. "Yo?"
Y'karrhr tossed the board to him.
"We need to teach some newbies."
"Yessir!" he beamed, flipping the board open. He immediately ran to the hangar mouth, and, in a pose someone on Eath from the 1990's-2000's might or might not recognise as a "Christ air" -- the board in one hand, arms outstretched, and legs straight -- he launched himself out. He quickly disappeared from view, but re-appeared a few moments later, coming to rest at hangar-level, after completing a sweeping figure-of-eight curve.
"Crash," Y'karrhr bellowed, "You're a total wanker, you idiot."
Crash grinned idiotically.
"And that is really just about as easy as he tries to make it look," Y'karrhr told the new cell.
Crash stuck his tongue out.
---
Kana regarded Tomias, her delicate eyebrows arched slightly in surprise. "You're right," she said to Gwyn. "How odd. And he's not from Dyrwyndd... Heh." She turned her attention to the very uneasy centaur. "There, it's alright," she smiled softly. "Gwyn, Deim, you might as well go back to whatever you were doing, right?"
They looked at each other and obeyed.
"Anyway," she continued, looking up at him, "As Deimos said, my name's Kana. Welcome to the tower and all that." She had a very soft, smooth voice, and spoke with a tranquil pace and tone. Indeed, in looking for an adjective to describe Kana, flowing comes very quickly to mind. "I was talking to Andre earlier," she went on. "He mentioned that you were up in his department for your assignment tonight, right?"
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Flynn MacCumhaill Captain
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Posted: Fri Aug 04, 2006 8:38 pm
Snapped inwardly groaned to himself. He knew there would be issues dealing with the motor mouth but this was getting to the point of sillyness.
Seeing the expressions ranging from shock to exasperation and various shades inbetween showing of the faces of his new team mates with a hint of impending hommicide comming from at least one, snap could only wonder at how an organization such as the tower could survive such characters.
Pushing his ruminations to the back of his mind Snap inspected the board more closely. There litterally was not much more to it than the mouth described.
Unfolding the board Snap held it a waist level and let go. The thing just sat there and ever so slowly began to drift with the slight breeze comming from the open hanger doors.
Looking around at everyone else to see if anyone else was foolhardy enough to try it based on the demonstartion and seeing nobody the slightest bit interested in giving it a try, Snap made a show of shrugging his shoulders before taking a standing highjump onto the boards surface and slipping his feet into the loops. The board obligged by sliding sideways slightly and ever so gently comming to rest on the hanger floor.
"I dont think that was supposed to happen" Snap said as he scrathed the top of his head in puzzlement. With a snap of his fingers and a "Oh, right. Max Load" Snap unbuckled his greaves and his arm braces. Pressing a button on their inner surface the slight bluish glow from their inner surfaces faded. They mad a quite solid and dull thunk where they dropped dead to the hanger floor. After he let them drop the boad rose slightly off the floor and began drifting towards the back wall with the rooms slight breeze.
Snap started to shift his weight on the board and within moments he was slidding around the area making wobbly circles around the team.
With what little altitude he had in the hanger Snap tried to gain small increments in height by trying the nose down and side cut upwards. He was still circling the team as he experimented and slowly gaining altitude.
Snap stopped abruptly and turned towards the mouth refered to as Y'karrhr. "Could your techs add a tether point or two to these things? These straps seem a bit ... uhm ... flimsy."
All the while the deck plates made tiny, inaudible, squeaks of protest where Snap had dropped his bracers.
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Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2006 4:17 am
As Snap offered his suggestin for improvement of the amazing technology of the straps, the lift doors slid open again. Orpheus stepped out, leading a fairly well-built young man of average height, wearing clothes that kept most of his skin covered.
"A late arrival," the auburn-haired man explained. "Psi-8, this is John Doe. John, Hewitt, Snap, and Arien. Tomias, the centaur is... probably with Andre. The monkey is Y'karrhr."
Y'karrhr looked like he was about to protest, but Orpheus simply continued. "Y'karrhr, he has been fully filled in, to save you the trouble. It's not fair to make you run through the whole rigmarole again."
"Thanks," he replied, although his heart wasn't in it.
Orpheus excused himself, and left again.
Y'karrhr immediately tossed John a board.
Quick run-down for Aurion Phoenix: Orpheus has collected you up from the docking platform you landed at, has explained to you about the Tower network -- the stuff in the intro, and in that long post by Caleb North on pg 6.
You have been issued with a communicator-visor (10th post on pg 9 for details), and briefed on your mission for today -- "You have about an hour before we throw you into the deep end with your first assignment. [...]
"Your task is not terribly arduous: you will be retrieving a colleague, James McCarthy, best known as 'Ferret', from a lower-level gang, 'the Tribe of the Black Hand'.
"Due to internal turmoil, the gang has essentially locked down its base, and none can enter or leave it. This is not a major issue, as the lower level gang members have an acute lack of resources, and are generally under-nourished. In essence, all you are doing is giving him a lift back up here." (further detail on page ten)
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Flynn MacCumhaill Captain
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Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2006 2:23 pm
"Uhm. Where is his department?" Tomias stammered, before shaking his head sharply, straightening himself whilst picking up his hooves in turn in a fidgeting motion, "I mean, well. Can you tell me where it is? His department. Could you tell me where his department is? I-I don't like getting lost."
{Small post, apolagies - also for my delay in posting. x_X}
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