| [Gottlieb] |
A week has passed.
A heavy, pulsating hum buzzes out around them, whining with feverish intensity as the coils of the heavy particle cannon sing their usual chorus of metallic hissing.
“Line ‘em up for me, Kai,” says Gottlieb, narrowing his eyes as he stares at the monitor, zooming and panning around the landscape, following what looks like a horde of wild, feral hogs. There are thousands of them, ravaging an open meadow like a swarm of ants. He’s been watching them for a few days now.
They’re moving westward and, given their numbers, eating through anything and everything. Thousands of wild boards are lined up in a swarm kilometers long, and they constantly move, day and night, eating grasses, trees, animals — everything.
They’re insanely fertile too. He saw one boar give birth to a litter of ten. Five days later, those had grown insanely fast into a larger body and were apparently already old enough to pair themselves, and pair themselves they did. That litter of ten made another litter of six to ten new sows each.
— And there are hundreds and thousands of them at this point. It’s insane. They’re moving closer and closer towards civilization, so he decided that it was time to do something about them. Nature be damned.
He has to look out for his own, after all.
— Gottlieb hits the trigger.
The monitor fills with a burst of radiance as the particle beam shoots towards the surface.
| (Gottlieb) has used: [Extended Charge] |
| Extends the duration of the currently fired beam by 50% |
He had gotten so many level-ups from blasting away those thousands of skeletons the week before and then all manner of other critters in the meantime, that he’s simply started taking all sorts of abilities.
The boars on the monitor vanish, being engulfed in a vivid shine — the world he was viewing turns white, as if it were simply covered in snow.
Gottlieb pulls the control stick upward, moving the beam along their lines.
Meat and fur fly everywhere, leaving a deep scar of blackened ash cutting through the land. The boars scatter and run; those who can escape the blast do so.
After a minute, the cannon is shot empty.
Gottlieb watches. Thousands of them are dead.
— The boars, grunting and snorting, thousands of them having escaped, slowly search around for more food, their animal fear already forgotten as they continue to move. All of the meat and carcasses that rain down onto the smoldering ground are gnawed and torn apart; the wounded are eaten alive as the swarm continues its movements once more, their hardened legs stepping over smoldering, glassed land.
| (Gottlieb) has used: [Instant Reload] |
| Cooldown: 23:59:59 |
| Instantly reloads the heavy particle cannon once a day. |
“Let’s hit ‘em again, Kai,” says the man.
— He presses the trigger.
| You got [42000/42000] EXP ! You got [48000/48000] EXP ! You got [59000/59000] EXP ! You got [70000/70000] EXP ! |
| *+~- [LEVEL UP!] -~+* |
| You are now level 47! |
| You got [41882/82500] EXP ! |
| [You have {04} attribute points to apply] |
| [You have {02} ability points to apply] |
| GOTTLIEB | |
| Level: 47 | Experience: 41882/82500 |
| Class: Orbital Gunner | Sub-class: None |
| Race: Human | Home: The orbital-weapons platform [Currently moving to continent {04}] |
| STRENGTH: 49[+] | DEXTERITY: (24) [+] |
| INTELLIGENCE: 24 [+] | WISDOM: (24) [+] |
| LOVE: (24) [+] | LUCK: 24 [+] |
| [Raised STRENGTH + 04](To 53) |
| {0 Attribute Points remaining} |
| GOTTLIEB | |
| Level: 47 | Experience: 41882/82500 |
| Class: Orbital Gunner | Sub-class: None |
| Race: Human | Home: The orbital-weapons platform [Currently moving to continent {04}] |
| STRENGTH: 53 | DEXTERITY: 26 (+13) |
| INTELLIGENCE: 26 (+12) | WISDOM: 26 (+13) |
| LOVE: 26 (+13) | LUCK: 26 (+12) |
Gottlieb’s muscles bulge, breaking far past where they were before, his physique tightening and widening at the same time, to move closer towards a state of physical human perfection.
— Even the elastic, baggy material of the spacesuit is starting to become a little snug.
But he has to leave it on, or he’ll spend all day watching himself in his reflection. God knows he wishes the others were here, so he could flex on them and their weak, flabby, pale office-worker bodies.
But they’re all dead.
Gottlieb leans back on his chair, staring at the monitor.
| [Note] - Given increased workplace performance and a maintenance of stable work-ethic, Orbital Gunner Gottlieb has been allotted thirty seconds of water usage per day. |
Gottlieb lifts an eyebrow. “Thanks, Kai,” says the man, looking at the blue light. Kai and him have really been putting their old differences aside lately.
With him raising his strength, his other stats have also increased, thanks to the ‘strongman’ ability, which has really been his saving grace. His increased intelligence and wisdom has really let him come to see a lot of things.
The man grabs a nutri-bar from his stack, one of ten. Ever since getting this big, he has to eat a lot more. He’s essentially hungry all day, every day.
— But as for his new insights, it’s simply this.
He is alone up here. There’s no way for him to ever leave the station. There’s no way any of the others are ever coming back from the dead. He’s stuck here. He’ll survive here, and he’ll die here, eventually. That’s all there is for him.
Gottlieb watches the monitor hover over a human city, where people are running around, living their lives. Families are wandering the streets with droves of excited children in tow. Lovers wander through parks. Adventurers make their way towards the dungeon of the city to earn their daily bread.
— But there is more for them.
He can’t live the life that they’re all living. But he’s not supposed to. He’s a soldier, after all. Sure, this is fun for him and all. But that’s not the priority, he was just too stupid to see that this whole time because of his low stats, making him forget what he does. His job isn’t to have fun.
His job is to keep his people safe. It was in the old world, and, as far as he can tell, his contract never specified that it would be void if he shifted to another dimension — So he’s still legally obligated, if nothing else, to continue his work to keep his people safe.
Gottlieb turns his head to look at Grunheide, who is laying sideways over her chair, her neck and legs dangling downward as she sleeps in what would appear to be a highly uncomfortable position, but she doesn’t seem to care.
The question arises; who are his people, exactly?
The humans, sure; but what about orcs? What about elves? Okay, why not? They seem close enough to people to count as ‘his’ people.
— But what about goblins?
From what he’s seen, it appears that they can not co-exist with the collection of species who he simply titles under the umbrella of ‘humanity’. Goblins are wild, aggressive things. They may be intelligent, but they’re too intelligent for their own good. They’re dangerous for his people.
And yet.
The man rubs his chin, looking at Grunheide as she lays there, twitching and drooling in her sleep.
They’re not cruel. They’re just… a result of their environment. He bets that if they, the goblins, were allowed into civilization, they would thrive just as all of the other races have. But this doesn’t seem likely to ever happen.
Gottlieb looks back towards the monitor, watching as it zooms over distant and vast landscapes.
— The metal shaft in the corner of the room rattles.
The man stares at it, and then he rises to his feet.
“Kai. Pull me the blueprints for the cryo-capsules and for the suit,” says Gottlieb, pulling on the fabric of his space suit as he walks out of the gunner’s bay.
Gottlieb stands in cryo, his hands behind his back, as he looks over his very own capsule that he had slept in during the shift to this other dimension, world, or whatever it is.
— A dead-dead skeleton lies at his feet. The wild monster had spawned in here, and he crushed it to bits because it was in the way.
The man’s eyes stare in through the glass window of the cryo-capsule, looking into the frozen over visage of a creature, trapped inside of the ice.
Lifting a small glass beaker that he had stolen from the lab on the way, Gottlieb presses the emergency open button on the capsule.
Its metal lid slides off, and the dethawing process begins on the ooze.
Before it can return to wakefulness, he scrapes a piece of its gelatinous body off and into the glass beaker and then grabs the lid of the capsule, closing it back up and refreezing it.
He looks down at the goo in his hands, swirling it around in the glass, before returning to the eyes that are looking his way.
The man walks back to the lab, spinning the little vial around. He places it in the centrifuge.
“Kai, when it’s done dethawing, give it a spin,” says Gottlieb. “There’s something I want to test.”
The blue light above his head blinks to confirm.
Gottlieb stands in the corridor, looking down the way at something that is crawling around, curiously clicking with its mouth and tilting its head as it examines everything. It looks like a pale, sickly thin human. But its body is covered in brightly colored red feathers that span out to two large wings. It has long, bird-like chicken legs and sharp talons.
— A harpy?
He saw these the other day, when Grunheide blasted them away.
The monster clicks with her mouth, pecking her face against a reflective pipe and then squawking in offended anger as her nose bonks against the polished metal.
“Hey!” barks Gottlieb down the corridor.
The harpy hisses, her head snapping his way. She immediately assumes a tight stance, holding her wings out wide in an attempt to make herself look larger and more threatening than she is.
He points at her. “Cut the shit,” says the man. “Leave that alone. I’m not mopping up here if you break that pipe.”
The harpy ruffles her feathers, swaying her head and body in a circle as she hisses in feverish excitement. A moment later she squawks at him, awkwardly charging forward and hopping towards him in what looks like an attempt to take flight.
— However, her natural instincts are hardly compatible with the environment that they’re in and she jumps, immediately striking her head against another pipe up high, before flopping down onto her back down on the floor.
The harpy lays there, squawking and flailing, as a jumble of loose feathers fall down from above to cover her swelling face.
Gottlieb sighs.
The man hovers down the shaft into the gunner’s bay, holding a twitchy bird monster over his shoulder.
“Kai. We have a new geo-spatial coordinator,” says Gottlieb.
The harpy squawks, clicking angrily and trying to gnaw through the rubber seal around his neck.
Grunheide spins around on her chair, looking his way. “That’s a harpy,” she says.
“Good eyes,” replies Gottlieb, walking up a staircase to a geo-spatial station.
He hoists the dazed harpy down, planting her onto one of the rolly office chairs there, her wings pressing back against it.
— She leans in forward, hoisting her sharp talons into the air and fluffing up the feathers around her neck threateningly.
Gottlieb leans in towards her and then roars, flexing his arms at her.
The harpy shrieks in terror, scrambling back. The chair rolls as she scrambles away from him, her back pressing against the console behind her as she warily watches him, hissing the entire time.
“Good talk,” says Gottlieb, waving her off as he walks down the staircase, leaving her there as he returns to his station. Feeling Grunheide watching him, he looks at her as he sits down. “What?” asks Gottlieb. The goblin points with her thumb at the colorful jumble of feathers that is sitting down in the corner of the elevated platform in the back, watching them, her long talons wrapped around the metal bars of the railing. “What can I say, I’m getting soft,” says the man, turning back to the monitor. “Auxiliary Gunner Grunheide,” says Gottlieb. “Meet Geo-spatial Coordinator Rotwald,” says Gottlieb. “Play nice.”
The harpy has climbed up onto the railing of the geo-spatial platform, holding her wings out wide as she sways around, continuing her threatening dance.
“— We’ll work on her people skills a little,” says Gottlieb, grabbing the control-stick to get back to work.
Razmatazz
- - - - - -
| [Gottlieb] |
A week has passed.
A heavy, pulsating hum buzzes out around them, whining with feverish intensity as the coils of the heavy particle cannon sing their usual chorus of metallic hissing.
“Line ‘em up for me, Kai,” says Gottlieb, narrowing his eyes as he stares at the monitor, zooming and panning around the landscape, following what looks like a horde of wild, feral hogs. There are thousands of them, ravaging an open meadow like a swarm of ants. He’s been watching them for a few days now.
They’re moving westward and, given their numbers, eating through anything and everything. Thousands of wild boards are lined up in a swarm kilometers long, and they constantly move, day and night, eating grasses, trees, animals — everything.
They’re insanely fertile too. He saw one boar give birth to a litter of ten. Five days later, those had grown insanely fast into a larger body and were apparently already old enough to pair themselves, and pair themselves they did. That litter of ten made another litter of six to ten new sows each.
— And there are hundreds and thousands of them at this point. It’s insane. They’re moving closer and closer towards civilization, so he decided that it was time to do something about them. Nature be damned.
He has to look out for his own, after all.
— Gottlieb hits the trigger.
The monitor fills with a burst of radiance as the particle beam shoots towards the surface.
| (Gottlieb) has used: [Extended Charge] |
| Extends the duration of the currently fired beam by 50% |
He had gotten so many level-ups from blasting away those thousands of skeletons the week before and then all manner of other critters in the meantime, that he’s simply started taking all sorts of abilities.
The boars on the monitor vanish, being engulfed in a vivid shine — the world he was viewing turns white, as if it were simply covered in snow.
Gottlieb pulls the control stick upward, moving the beam along their lines.
Meat and fur fly everywhere, leaving a deep scar of blackened ash cutting through the land. The boars scatter and run; those who can escape the blast do so.
After a minute, the cannon is shot empty.
Gottlieb watches. Thousands of them are dead.
— The boars, grunting and snorting, thousands of them having escaped, slowly search around for more food, their animal fear already forgotten as they continue to move. All of the meat and carcasses that rain down onto the smoldering ground are gnawed and torn apart; the wounded are eaten alive as the swarm continues its movements once more, their hardened legs stepping over smoldering, glassed land.
| (Gottlieb) has used: [Instant Reload] |
| Cooldown: 23:59:59 |
| Instantly reloads the heavy particle cannon once a day. |
“Let’s hit ‘em again, Kai,” says the man.
— He presses the trigger.
| You got [42000/42000] EXP ! You got [48000/48000] EXP ! You got [59000/59000] EXP ! You got [70000/70000] EXP ! |
| *+~- [LEVEL UP!] -~+* |
| You are now level 47! |
| You got [41882/82500] EXP ! |
| [You have {04} attribute points to apply] |
| [You have {02} ability points to apply] |
| GOTTLIEB | |
| Level: 47 | Experience: 41882/82500 |
| Class: Orbital Gunner | Sub-class: None |
| Race: Human | Home: The orbital-weapons platform [Currently moving to continent {04}] |
| STRENGTH: 49[+] | DEXTERITY: (24) [+] |
| INTELLIGENCE: 24 [+] | WISDOM: (24) [+] |
| LOVE: (24) [+] | LUCK: 24 [+] |
| [Raised STRENGTH + 04](To 53) |
| {0 Attribute Points remaining} |
| GOTTLIEB | |
| Level: 47 | Experience: 41882/82500 |
| Class: Orbital Gunner | Sub-class: None |
| Race: Human | Home: The orbital-weapons platform [Currently moving to continent {04}] |
| STRENGTH: 53 | DEXTERITY: 26 (+13) |
| INTELLIGENCE: 26 (+12) | WISDOM: 26 (+13) |
| LOVE: 26 (+13) | LUCK: 26 (+12) |
Gottlieb’s muscles bulge, breaking far past where they were before, his physique tightening and widening at the same time, to move closer towards a state of physical human perfection.
— Even the elastic, baggy material of the spacesuit is starting to become a little snug.
But he has to leave it on, or he’ll spend all day watching himself in his reflection. God knows he wishes the others were here, so he could flex on them and their weak, flabby, pale office-worker bodies.
But they’re all dead.
Gottlieb leans back on his chair, staring at the monitor.
| [Note] - Given increased workplace performance and a maintenance of stable work-ethic, Orbital Gunner Gottlieb has been allotted thirty seconds of water usage per day. |
Gottlieb lifts an eyebrow. “Thanks, Kai,” says the man, looking at the blue light. Kai and him have really been putting their old differences aside lately.
With him raising his strength, his other stats have also increased, thanks to the ‘strongman’ ability, which has really been his saving grace. His increased intelligence and wisdom has really let him come to see a lot of things.
The man grabs a nutri-bar from his stack, one of ten. Ever since getting this big, he has to eat a lot more. He’s essentially hungry all day, every day.
— But as for his new insights, it’s simply this.
He is alone up here. There’s no way for him to ever leave the station. There’s no way any of the others are ever coming back from the dead. He’s stuck here. He’ll survive here, and he’ll die here, eventually. That’s all there is for him.
Gottlieb watches the monitor hover over a human city, where people are running around, living their lives. Families are wandering the streets with droves of excited children in tow. Lovers wander through parks. Adventurers make their way towards the dungeon of the city to earn their daily bread.
— But there is more for them.
He can’t live the life that they’re all living. But he’s not supposed to. He’s a soldier, after all. Sure, this is fun for him and all. But that’s not the priority, he was just too stupid to see that this whole time because of his low stats, making him forget what he does. His job isn’t to have fun.
His job is to keep his people safe. It was in the old world, and, as far as he can tell, his contract never specified that it would be void if he shifted to another dimension — So he’s still legally obligated, if nothing else, to continue his work to keep his people safe.
Gottlieb turns his head to look at Grunheide, who is laying sideways over her chair, her neck and legs dangling downward as she sleeps in what would appear to be a highly uncomfortable position, but she doesn’t seem to care.
The question arises; who are his people, exactly?
The humans, sure; but what about orcs? What about elves? Okay, why not? They seem close enough to people to count as ‘his’ people.
— But what about goblins?
From what he’s seen, it appears that they can not co-exist with the collection of species who he simply titles under the umbrella of ‘humanity’. Goblins are wild, aggressive things. They may be intelligent, but they’re too intelligent for their own good. They’re dangerous for his people.
And yet.
The man rubs his chin, looking at Grunheide as she lays there, twitching and drooling in her sleep.
They’re not cruel. They’re just… a result of their environment. He bets that if they, the goblins, were allowed into civilization, they would thrive just as all of the other races have. But this doesn’t seem likely to ever happen.
Gottlieb looks back towards the monitor, watching as it zooms over distant and vast landscapes.
— The metal shaft in the corner of the room rattles.
The man stares at it, and then he rises to his feet.
“Kai. Pull me the blueprints for the cryo-capsules and for the suit,” says Gottlieb, pulling on the fabric of his space suit as he walks out of the gunner’s bay.
Gottlieb stands in cryo, his hands behind his back, as he looks over his very own capsule that he had slept in during the shift to this other dimension, world, or whatever it is.
— A dead-dead skeleton lies at his feet. The wild monster had spawned in here, and he crushed it to bits because it was in the way.
The man’s eyes stare in through the glass window of the cryo-capsule, looking into the frozen over visage of a creature, trapped inside of the ice.
Lifting a small glass beaker that he had stolen from the lab on the way, Gottlieb presses the emergency open button on the capsule.
Its metal lid slides off, and the dethawing process begins on the ooze.
Before it can return to wakefulness, he scrapes a piece of its gelatinous body off and into the glass beaker and then grabs the lid of the capsule, closing it back up and refreezing it.
He looks down at the goo in his hands, swirling it around in the glass, before returning to the eyes that are looking his way.
The man walks back to the lab, spinning the little vial around. He places it in the centrifuge.
“Kai, when it’s done dethawing, give it a spin,” says Gottlieb. “There’s something I want to test.”
The blue light above his head blinks to confirm.
Gottlieb stands in the corridor, looking down the way at something that is crawling around, curiously clicking with its mouth and tilting its head as it examines everything. It looks like a pale, sickly thin human. But its body is covered in brightly colored red feathers that span out to two large wings. It has long, bird-like chicken legs and sharp talons.
— A harpy?
He saw these the other day, when Grunheide blasted them away.
The monster clicks with her mouth, pecking her face against a reflective pipe and then squawking in offended anger as her nose bonks against the polished metal.
“Hey!” barks Gottlieb down the corridor.
The harpy hisses, her head snapping his way. She immediately assumes a tight stance, holding her wings out wide in an attempt to make herself look larger and more threatening than she is.
He points at her. “Cut the shit,” says the man. “Leave that alone. I’m not mopping up here if you break that pipe.”
The harpy ruffles her feathers, swaying her head and body in a circle as she hisses in feverish excitement. A moment later she squawks at him, awkwardly charging forward and hopping towards him in what looks like an attempt to take flight.
— However, her natural instincts are hardly compatible with the environment that they’re in and she jumps, immediately striking her head against another pipe up high, before flopping down onto her back down on the floor.
The harpy lays there, squawking and flailing, as a jumble of loose feathers fall down from above to cover her swelling face.
Gottlieb sighs.
The man hovers down the shaft into the gunner’s bay, holding a twitchy bird monster over his shoulder.
“Kai. We have a new geo-spatial coordinator,” says Gottlieb.
The harpy squawks, clicking angrily and trying to gnaw through the rubber seal around his neck.
Grunheide spins around on her chair, looking his way. “That’s a harpy,” she says.
“Good eyes,” replies Gottlieb, walking up a staircase to a geo-spatial station.
He hoists the dazed harpy down, planting her onto one of the rolly office chairs there, her wings pressing back against it.
— She leans in forward, hoisting her sharp talons into the air and fluffing up the feathers around her neck threateningly.
Gottlieb leans in towards her and then roars, flexing his arms at her.
The harpy shrieks in terror, scrambling back. The chair rolls as she scrambles away from him, her back pressing against the console behind her as she warily watches him, hissing the entire time.
“Good talk,” says Gottlieb, waving her off as he walks down the staircase, leaving her there as he returns to his station. Feeling Grunheide watching him, he looks at her as he sits down. “What?” asks Gottlieb. The goblin points with her thumb at the colorful jumble of feathers that is sitting down in the corner of the elevated platform in the back, watching them, her long talons wrapped around the metal bars of the railing. “What can I say, I’m getting soft,” says the man, turning back to the monitor. “Auxiliary Gunner Grunheide,” says Gottlieb. “Meet Geo-spatial Coordinator Rotwald,” says Gottlieb. “Play nice.”
The harpy has climbed up onto the railing of the geo-spatial platform, holding her wings out wide as she sways around, continuing her threatening dance.
“— We’ll work on her people skills a little,” says Gottlieb, grabbing the control-stick to get back to work.
Razmatazz
- - - - - -
