Hellraiser
Arcane
1.6 Meeting new friendly faces
It is morning, the few rays of sunlight shinning on your face through the mostly covered windows seem to imply that. The RMG’s built in clock also suggests it is morning, around 10 a.m. Something seems to be wrong, the calendar says it is Quadrium but when you arrived here it was Duonium. You realize what has happened, you took too much of that painkiller and slept for over a day. Next time you will take just one shot rather than two no matter how bad it hurts. At least the wound on your left arm seems to be healing and there is no sign of infection.
Hungry and thirsty you eat some of the canned food in the store and drink some water. Opening the cans gives you a few problems, eventually you ended up opening them with an adaptable drill. Whilst consuming breakfast you take a closer look at the issues of “The New Port Herald” and “The Truth” you found. The newspaper contains some information on the plague, it seems to kill by causing massive interior hemorrhaging about 24-48 hours after infection. Furthermore once the host is dead the virus dies out extremely rapidly leaving almost no trace behind in the dead body. It is as if somebody did not want anyone to study it and develop a countermeasure. It could have been the product of Atlantean genetic engineering but the freakish chimeras do not seem like anything that could have been developed legally in Atlantis. And they are definitely not natural.
“The Truth” is filled with absolute nonsense for most of the part. Big hairy humanoids in Arkansas, what a truly silly concept. Barely industrialized pre-atomic nations successfully reverse-engineering alien anti-gravity spacecraft propulsion. How preposterous even if it was Germany that was supposed to do that! Alien life more complex than bacteria has not been discovered on any planet in a 100 LY radius around Atlantis. Alien rift signatures could be detected from as far as Betelguese yet none have been detected so far. And anti-gravity? Even Atlantis is a century if not more away from developing such technology. Assuming it is at all possible considering the advanced physics involved, which is far more demanding than that behind gravity manipulation used in rift tech. Atomics used 3000 years ago? Atlantis didn’t develop any until a thousand years ago and it was the first civilization in the mutiverse to split the atom! Vimanas? Chariots of the alien gods visiting earth millennia ago? More fairy tales like strange lights and other drug-induced savage hallucination. Nonsense all of it. Except for one article…
…it accurately describes the chimera you saw when you arrived. Furthermore it describes men commanding a group of those. Both dressed in typical savage casual wear, very muscular with an almost titanic constitution and odd eerily “perfect” eyes. Two different stories from two different sides of the globe clearly describing the same creatures and similar “beast masters” months before the plague began. At any rate you should be careful, there is no telling how many beasts, looters and helicopters are still around.
You quickly scan the outside of the store, it is empty. After taking as much food and water as you can fit in the suitcase you leave the store and head towards the city center. You can see the skyline of the city center, it is different lacking a few of the buildings present in the other New Port City. In particular it lacks the “Goliath Tower Troika” formed by the three towers housing the HQs of the Goliath Corporate Group. No Goliath News in this parallel? As if the reptilian chimeras and helicopters alone weren’t making this parallel unpleasant enough alone.
The two hours of the journey are mostly uneventful, no humans or chimeras around, alive ones that is, just some abandoned vehicles and stores. You only noticed one corpse along the way just on the southern edge of the city center, it was a man dressed in casual attire, armed with a military knife and carrying a now broken and useless tablet device with a logo showing the letter “Z” surrounded by a plus and minus sing inside a circle. It appears he was killed with firearms, he could have been a looter running away from a helicopter or a survivor killed by looters. There are no weapons or useful items on him other than the knife as far as you could tell. You take the knife with you just in case and put it in your coat. You could use a can opener after all.
Your blissful stroll through the city was finally interrupted by one of those sounds you recently began to hate. A helicopter is nearby. Quickly you run into one of the back alleys between the buildings and hide. The aircraft flying above you is different from the one you crashed. It is larger and bears the “united states marine corps” insignia on its side. Furthermore it does not appear to be a helicopter but an airplane-helicopter hybrid. At any rate the machine is moving too fast and high to notice you, it was heading in the direction of the port.
You are now about 20 minutes away from the library, an old building built in a style inspired by that of the ancient Greek temples. The streets are empty but suddenly you notice something moving on one of the walls of a nearby office building. By Zeus’s thunder! Not that thing again! It is clearly one of those chimeras, apparently their gecko-like legs weren’t just for show. The creature rushes downwards while you grab your gun. When it is only 10 meters above the ground it jumps to the ground and charges in your direction. You fire 10 shots aiming for its mouth, legs and unarmored underside. Most bullets miss and some are deflected by the scales on its head but one hits it in one of its eyes. Luck is on your side as it looks like their eyeballs aren’t as bulletproof as their other exposed body parts. The beast is dead.
After reloading your gun’s half-empty magazine you go further north. As you walk past the local art museum you hear something. When you look around you notice it is not just one chimera, it is at least a two dozen of those. Surprisingly they walk slowly towards you in some sort of organized formation. This is odd but you soon realize why they are behaving so much unlike the other chimeras you met so far. A tall muscular man runs from behind the corner of the museum. You have never seen anyone run as fast, not even during the Olympic Games in Galathea.The beasts step aside allowing him to run through easily. This must be a “beast master”, whether he is alien or human you do not care, you try to shoot him. Most shots miss him, a few hit him in the shoulder and the arms. He bleeds a little, far less than he should from those shots, but the titan seems mostly unfazed. Your gun is empty and there is no time to reload. It is clearly time to pull out the stun rod.
You barely dodge his first blow and counterattack with the stun rod, while it did appear to have an effect he is still standing. As you strike again he dodges and punches you right in the face with a force unlike anything you felt before. Dazed you fall to the ground barely aware of what is going on. You drop the stun rod to the ground. It appears that this “titan” picked you up with one hand and your suitcase with the other and he is carrying you somewhere. After a while he stopped, you can see that you are in a hall, it looks like the museum. The titan throws you to the ground. You can see his eerie eyes staring at you as if they noticed something unexpected.
“Who are you?!” – he asks with rage and an odd accent, one that you have never heard before. Naturally you remain silent. “You have the stench of deuterium-tritium on you, I could smell it from a distance. Who are you?! What are you doing here?!” – he asks again clearly furious at your silence. Again you ignore his questions. He punches you in the gut, it hurts like a bitch as the locals would say. “Who are you?! What are you doing here?! Who do you work for?! Where did you get this?!” – he screams right into your face while showing you your stun rod.
Finally he seems to have given up, he throws the stun rod to the ground and pulls out an odd long device out of his shirt, one resembling a green spike. “This will take longer but it will tell me all I need to know. It will also make you suffer for your silence.” – he tells you as he slowly moves his hand holding the device near your head. The pointy tip of the spike starts “unraveling” into several flat “petals” with an odd flesh-like underside. “The human mind is evolution’s greatest achievement, one just has to know how to gaze into its content.” – he says with a smug smirk on his face, while his odd eyes are staring at you most menacingly.
It is clear that whatever the device does it is better you do not find out firsthand. You need to do something fast before you will most likely get mind raped, lobotomized or worse. There are several options you are considering.
You will distract the “titan”...
A)… by telling him a lie. Start bluffing him with how you know everything about his little alien invasion plan and that your position and vital signs are being broadcast to your friends using a tracking device.
B)… by telling him the truth. Tell him that you are a riftwalker from Atlantis and that you have rift technology that might interest him.
C)… by trying to intimidate him. You will tell him that you have a ship in orbit that will nuke this city the second your brain patterns alter thanks to a chip inside your brain that monitors those.
D)… by boasting that you are “a true gangsta from the hood and your homie tomcat will cap his ass”.
E)… you won’t distract him. Just strike at the first chance you have, the time for words is over.
You will strike at the “titan”…
1)... using the knife. He bleeds less than he should but if you open up enough arteries he should run out of blood eventually.
2)… by quickly grabbing the stun rod and trying to shock him. If you can hit him more than twice he should fall down. At least you hope he will.
3)… with your bare hands. He looks human, odds are he has a solar plexus or some other nerve cluster you can use against him with a quick punch. Your father named you Heracles for a reason.
4)… or maybe you won’t. Instead you will run like hell the moment you know you can get away.
Vote now.
Out of the nine possible scenarios this is the only one where this guy would be able to attempt to mind rape Heracles. Not saying that there wasn’t a lot of fun in the other possible encounters or that he wouldn’t appear in one or two of the others. Still I can’t blame you for the choice because you never had a chance to learn from anyone not hostile that most of the chimeras were sighted in the city center. That and the scary tunnels and another potential vehicular crash weren’t that appealing especially after just crashing a chopper.
It is morning, the few rays of sunlight shinning on your face through the mostly covered windows seem to imply that. The RMG’s built in clock also suggests it is morning, around 10 a.m. Something seems to be wrong, the calendar says it is Quadrium but when you arrived here it was Duonium. You realize what has happened, you took too much of that painkiller and slept for over a day. Next time you will take just one shot rather than two no matter how bad it hurts. At least the wound on your left arm seems to be healing and there is no sign of infection.
Hungry and thirsty you eat some of the canned food in the store and drink some water. Opening the cans gives you a few problems, eventually you ended up opening them with an adaptable drill. Whilst consuming breakfast you take a closer look at the issues of “The New Port Herald” and “The Truth” you found. The newspaper contains some information on the plague, it seems to kill by causing massive interior hemorrhaging about 24-48 hours after infection. Furthermore once the host is dead the virus dies out extremely rapidly leaving almost no trace behind in the dead body. It is as if somebody did not want anyone to study it and develop a countermeasure. It could have been the product of Atlantean genetic engineering but the freakish chimeras do not seem like anything that could have been developed legally in Atlantis. And they are definitely not natural.
“The Truth” is filled with absolute nonsense for most of the part. Big hairy humanoids in Arkansas, what a truly silly concept. Barely industrialized pre-atomic nations successfully reverse-engineering alien anti-gravity spacecraft propulsion. How preposterous even if it was Germany that was supposed to do that! Alien life more complex than bacteria has not been discovered on any planet in a 100 LY radius around Atlantis. Alien rift signatures could be detected from as far as Betelguese yet none have been detected so far. And anti-gravity? Even Atlantis is a century if not more away from developing such technology. Assuming it is at all possible considering the advanced physics involved, which is far more demanding than that behind gravity manipulation used in rift tech. Atomics used 3000 years ago? Atlantis didn’t develop any until a thousand years ago and it was the first civilization in the mutiverse to split the atom! Vimanas? Chariots of the alien gods visiting earth millennia ago? More fairy tales like strange lights and other drug-induced savage hallucination. Nonsense all of it. Except for one article…
…it accurately describes the chimera you saw when you arrived. Furthermore it describes men commanding a group of those. Both dressed in typical savage casual wear, very muscular with an almost titanic constitution and odd eerily “perfect” eyes. Two different stories from two different sides of the globe clearly describing the same creatures and similar “beast masters” months before the plague began. At any rate you should be careful, there is no telling how many beasts, looters and helicopters are still around.
You quickly scan the outside of the store, it is empty. After taking as much food and water as you can fit in the suitcase you leave the store and head towards the city center. You can see the skyline of the city center, it is different lacking a few of the buildings present in the other New Port City. In particular it lacks the “Goliath Tower Troika” formed by the three towers housing the HQs of the Goliath Corporate Group. No Goliath News in this parallel? As if the reptilian chimeras and helicopters alone weren’t making this parallel unpleasant enough alone.
The two hours of the journey are mostly uneventful, no humans or chimeras around, alive ones that is, just some abandoned vehicles and stores. You only noticed one corpse along the way just on the southern edge of the city center, it was a man dressed in casual attire, armed with a military knife and carrying a now broken and useless tablet device with a logo showing the letter “Z” surrounded by a plus and minus sing inside a circle. It appears he was killed with firearms, he could have been a looter running away from a helicopter or a survivor killed by looters. There are no weapons or useful items on him other than the knife as far as you could tell. You take the knife with you just in case and put it in your coat. You could use a can opener after all.
Your blissful stroll through the city was finally interrupted by one of those sounds you recently began to hate. A helicopter is nearby. Quickly you run into one of the back alleys between the buildings and hide. The aircraft flying above you is different from the one you crashed. It is larger and bears the “united states marine corps” insignia on its side. Furthermore it does not appear to be a helicopter but an airplane-helicopter hybrid. At any rate the machine is moving too fast and high to notice you, it was heading in the direction of the port.
You are now about 20 minutes away from the library, an old building built in a style inspired by that of the ancient Greek temples. The streets are empty but suddenly you notice something moving on one of the walls of a nearby office building. By Zeus’s thunder! Not that thing again! It is clearly one of those chimeras, apparently their gecko-like legs weren’t just for show. The creature rushes downwards while you grab your gun. When it is only 10 meters above the ground it jumps to the ground and charges in your direction. You fire 10 shots aiming for its mouth, legs and unarmored underside. Most bullets miss and some are deflected by the scales on its head but one hits it in one of its eyes. Luck is on your side as it looks like their eyeballs aren’t as bulletproof as their other exposed body parts. The beast is dead.
After reloading your gun’s half-empty magazine you go further north. As you walk past the local art museum you hear something. When you look around you notice it is not just one chimera, it is at least a two dozen of those. Surprisingly they walk slowly towards you in some sort of organized formation. This is odd but you soon realize why they are behaving so much unlike the other chimeras you met so far. A tall muscular man runs from behind the corner of the museum. You have never seen anyone run as fast, not even during the Olympic Games in Galathea.The beasts step aside allowing him to run through easily. This must be a “beast master”, whether he is alien or human you do not care, you try to shoot him. Most shots miss him, a few hit him in the shoulder and the arms. He bleeds a little, far less than he should from those shots, but the titan seems mostly unfazed. Your gun is empty and there is no time to reload. It is clearly time to pull out the stun rod.
You barely dodge his first blow and counterattack with the stun rod, while it did appear to have an effect he is still standing. As you strike again he dodges and punches you right in the face with a force unlike anything you felt before. Dazed you fall to the ground barely aware of what is going on. You drop the stun rod to the ground. It appears that this “titan” picked you up with one hand and your suitcase with the other and he is carrying you somewhere. After a while he stopped, you can see that you are in a hall, it looks like the museum. The titan throws you to the ground. You can see his eerie eyes staring at you as if they noticed something unexpected.
“Who are you?!” – he asks with rage and an odd accent, one that you have never heard before. Naturally you remain silent. “You have the stench of deuterium-tritium on you, I could smell it from a distance. Who are you?! What are you doing here?!” – he asks again clearly furious at your silence. Again you ignore his questions. He punches you in the gut, it hurts like a bitch as the locals would say. “Who are you?! What are you doing here?! Who do you work for?! Where did you get this?!” – he screams right into your face while showing you your stun rod.
Finally he seems to have given up, he throws the stun rod to the ground and pulls out an odd long device out of his shirt, one resembling a green spike. “This will take longer but it will tell me all I need to know. It will also make you suffer for your silence.” – he tells you as he slowly moves his hand holding the device near your head. The pointy tip of the spike starts “unraveling” into several flat “petals” with an odd flesh-like underside. “The human mind is evolution’s greatest achievement, one just has to know how to gaze into its content.” – he says with a smug smirk on his face, while his odd eyes are staring at you most menacingly.
It is clear that whatever the device does it is better you do not find out firsthand. You need to do something fast before you will most likely get mind raped, lobotomized or worse. There are several options you are considering.
You will distract the “titan”...
A)… by telling him a lie. Start bluffing him with how you know everything about his little alien invasion plan and that your position and vital signs are being broadcast to your friends using a tracking device.
B)… by telling him the truth. Tell him that you are a riftwalker from Atlantis and that you have rift technology that might interest him.
C)… by trying to intimidate him. You will tell him that you have a ship in orbit that will nuke this city the second your brain patterns alter thanks to a chip inside your brain that monitors those.
D)… by boasting that you are “a true gangsta from the hood and your homie tomcat will cap his ass”.
E)… you won’t distract him. Just strike at the first chance you have, the time for words is over.
You will strike at the “titan”…
1)... using the knife. He bleeds less than he should but if you open up enough arteries he should run out of blood eventually.
2)… by quickly grabbing the stun rod and trying to shock him. If you can hit him more than twice he should fall down. At least you hope he will.
3)… with your bare hands. He looks human, odds are he has a solar plexus or some other nerve cluster you can use against him with a quick punch. Your father named you Heracles for a reason.
4)… or maybe you won’t. Instead you will run like hell the moment you know you can get away.
Vote now.
Out of the nine possible scenarios this is the only one where this guy would be able to attempt to mind rape Heracles. Not saying that there wasn’t a lot of fun in the other possible encounters or that he wouldn’t appear in one or two of the others. Still I can’t blame you for the choice because you never had a chance to learn from anyone not hostile that most of the chimeras were sighted in the city center. That and the scary tunnels and another potential vehicular crash weren’t that appealing especially after just crashing a chopper.
