Between one step and the next I found myself moving from a winding wooded trail moving through the New York back country to floating in an empty space that lacked any discernible features beyond being "white" and my body being present. And then the voice started to speak, seemingly coming from everywhere and no where at the same time.
"Greetings idiot. You died again, and this time without even giving me a moments proper entertainment. So let's try this again, eventually we will get a version of you that can survive. Hey maybe its you. Well let's see if we can make this work again. De-age you to seven."
With that last word everything I was wearing or carrying just disappeared and my body reshaped its self until it was that of a child's.
"Hmm, common clothes I suppose." I was suddenly dressed in loose fitting cargo pants, a long sleeve shirt, and a hoodie. "Now lets see. That didn't work last time, but maybe if I combine it with this. Yeah, that should do it."
A glowing blue pop up appeared floating before me and said
"Congratulations, your repeated deaths and stupidity have earned you easy mode. Last chance though, be boring again and you done be really fucked. Welcome to the Game Alexander Stark.
Character Management Screen
Name: Alexander Stark
Class: The Gamer
Title: N/A
Level: 1 (0/100 Exp)
Health: 10/10
Mana: 10/10
Stamina: 20/20
Strength: 1
Dexterity: 1
Vitality: 1
Intelligence: 1
Wisdom: 1
Charisma: 1
Luck: 1
The Gamer's Mind (trait):
-Able to calmly and logically think things through regardless of situation.
-Enforced self acceptance.
-Immunity to all Mind Effecting and Psychological status conditions and effects.
The Gamer's Body (trait):
-The body experiences the stresses of the physical world as if it was a video game."
After a long moment of stunned shock I hit the 'X' in the upper right corner of the pop up box and it blinked out of existence only for another to appear
"Congratulations, through your actions a new skill has been created.
The Gamer's Interface (skill): 1
-Allows the Gamer to manipulate and customize the User Interface, game menus, and his interactions with such mechanics."
With a snarl I closed out this newest popup, only to be met with the voice continuing to speak.
"Well that's that. It's time for fun now so Nar Shaddaa here you come."
Suddenly I was no longer in that white place, no now I was standing on a fairly wide walk way made out of some unidentifiable metal. I started rapidly looking around, straining all my senses to gain as much information about this new place as possible. Only to be interrupted by another fucking pop up.
"Congratulations, through your actions a new skill has been created.
Perception (skill): 1
-The ability to gather information about the Gamer's surroundings. Higher levels provide greater detail and accuracy."
I snarled again at the stupid box, rapidly closing it so that I could get back to important things like figuring out where the fuck I was, only too suddenly find that I knew a hell of a lot about where I was than before that pop up had appeared. I was standing on a walk way on one of the middle levels of the city moon of Nar Shaddaa of Star Wars infamy. The place was a virtually lawless dystonian hell hole where the only rule that mattered was Power and everything was legal, and I was standing in one of its countless back alleys as a seven year old human child with no resources. If the nigh omnipotent bastard that had dropped me here had done the same to my predecessors it was no wonder he was bored with their quick deaths.
And with that thought there were two more of those stupid popups.
"Congratulations, not being a total, complete, and utter idiot has increased your Wisdom by 1."
Well that answered whether or not the Bastard was actively interacting or not.
The next pop up was "Congratulations, through continuous use your Perception skill has increased by 1 and now has the capability to provide information on living things, not just your enviroment."
After closing the latest of the pop ups I decided to sit down on the ground and lean against the building besides me while folding as far into the hoodie I had been provided with as possible. I was lost on a death world for a bastard gods amusement but I wasn't just going to give up and die, and as the only resource I actually had was this Gamer thing then it was time to try and figure it out.
Over the next two hours of trying to learn this "Gamer" system I made several discoveries and my "Gamer's Interface" skill had increased four times. The end result was that I now knew that I had an Inventory System that seemingly put things in a pocket dimension with no regards to anything besides mass (which was apparently based on my Strength score as I could hold 10 kilograms of mass per point of Strength I had). The only other major discovery that I had made was just how bullshit this thing could be.
By the time the "Gamer's Interface" skill had reached level five I had a fully functional video game HUD complete with minnie map and radar (really just a manipulation of the information that "Perception" was continually providing me) complete with bars for my Health, Stamina, and Mana. Most importantly though, the fucking pop ups had been turned into floating text in the bottom right of my vision that dissipated on their own after a few seconds.
With that done it was time for a few more tests, so I started doing pushups. After two I found that I couldn't do another and my Stamina was down to zero. As I lay on the ground, exhausted after two whole pushups, I saw my Stamina meter start ticking back up at a rate of approximately one point every three seconds; or a minute to reach full again. When I completed my tenth pushup approximately four minutes later I got a message that my Strength had increased by one. That caused my Stamina bar to increase to 30, so it was equal to Strength plus Vitality times ten (a realization that pushed my Intelligence up to 2, which had no other effect). Thirty more push ups increased my Strength to 3 while sixty more increased it to 4. So the Push Ups to Strength equation was (Total Number of Pushups done to reach current Strength (Current Strength x 10)). So another hundred and ten would get me to 5 but at the cost of ten Stamina per push up and three seconds per point of Stamina recovered I could only manage push ups at a steady rate of two per minute. At this rate it would take another three hours to gain that fifth point.
Instead of doing that I decided that four points of strength was enough for now and started exploring in a random direction (South according to my minnie map) at a steady jog that dropped my Stamina at a rate of about three points per second (so I could, with recovery factored in, keep it up for about thirty seconds before I would have to slow down). I had barely been jogging for two minutes before I was informed that my Vitality had increased by one. The increase in Stamina was nice, if expected, but what made me grin was when my Stamina recovery rate double to two points per second and the Health increase to 20 points. Another ten minutes of running back and forth got me my third point in Vitality, which was enough so that I would be able to steadily jog indefinitely and so exploration was back on.
-x-x-x-
I had been jogging through the alleyways of Nar Shaddaa for about ten minutes when I spotted a loose piece of metal, roughly eighteen inches long, on the ground and stopped to pick it up. A few test swings showed that it could at least maybe make an ok weapon so it went into my Inventory, equipped to the "right hand" slot on the mock up of my body present on that screen. A quick thought and the improvised club simply appeared in my hand, another and it was gone back to wherever things that were in my Inventory were.
That find was fortunate because it was two turns and barely a minute later that I heard a skittering sound to my left rear and swung out of the way just in time. Before me was an alien rat like creature with six limbs and about a quarter of my size. It looked hungry and vicious as it charged towards me a bare second after I dodged its initial attack. A thought had my club in my hand but my first swing went high. The rats next attack didn't miss and it bit my right arm. Strangely their was little pain but my health bar dropped by five points, from 30 to 25. As I swung at the rat again I noted out of the corner of my eye that an Unarmored skill had been created and when my club connected with the rat a Blunt Weapons skill also appeared. The red health bar floating over the rat dropped by about a quarter but I couldn't tell the impact in any more detail than that.
The rat counter punched me with a bite to my left leg, costing me another five points of health and simultaneously increasing my Unarmored skill to 2 while dropping me down to twenty health. I swung down before the rat could retreat back and scored another hit, which pushed my Dexterity up by 1 and my Blunt Weapons as well.
The rat was down to a little less than half health now while I was still at two thirds full. With that realization I decided that I was probably not going to die to this piece of shit and focused slightly more on the combat. In the next exchange of blows I missed with my club but got in a kick with my left foot, doing what appeared to be about half the damage that my club did, and a notification that an Unarmed Combat skill had been created. My next strike with my club was a lucky one, striking the rat square in the face, and leaving it dead on the ground and me with a notification that I had gained 20 EXP.
My stamina was edging back up as I recovered what I had expended in the combat and so I put away my club and started jogging back the way I had came, heading towards a relatively open and wider alley that I had passed through about five minutes back. As I ran I started to think about the fight I had just been in and what I had learned. The biggest thing was obvious, I was incredibly weak at the moment; barely able to take on a single rat. Before I could think much more on the combat though I noted that my Stamina was falling slightly slower than it had before. What could have caused that? Well Dexterity was the only attribute that had increased during the fight so that had to be it. I guess that skill covered how much stamina stuff cost, good to know. And my third Intelligence point appeared, even if I had yet to find out what that (or any of the other mental attributes) did yet. At the same time my Perception skill also went up a point and with it my senses seemed to suddenly have gotten an upgrade; I could see slightly farther ahead, hear slightly more, discern scents slightly better.
Once I reached my destination I sat down as I thought. My first brush with combat showed me that I was far too weak for this world at the moment and this wasn't just a video game, it was my life. There was absolutely no excuse for trying for fair fights or anything approaching "level appropriate challenges". The first priority was greater health, which meant I needed increased Strength and Vitality. Push Ups could increase Strength but it would take a while thanks to how much stamina those took. Hmm, but Vitality increased Stamina regeneration and if they current rate of increase held steady then at 10 Vitality I would regain ten Stamina per second and thus be able to steadily do a Push Up per second, instead of three hours for my fifth point of Strength it would only take two minutes. So push up Vitality before Strength, time to get to work.
With that thought I got up and started running back and forth as fast as I could down a distant of approximately ninety or so feet. It took four runs before I had to wait to regain my Stamina but on my fifth time back my Vitality went up by a point; so at 4 now.
The next morning I finally got the notification that my Vitality had reached 10. I had also gained a point of Wisdom at the realization that I must be in a mostly abandoned part of Nar Shaddaa as I had yet to see another individual, and realized that I slowly regenerated health at a rate of about one point every minute. This was absurdly boring but my natural stubbornness, desire not to end up dead, and the Gamer's Mind combined to keep my grinding away.
With that tenth Vitality point I dropped and started doing pushups at a rate of one per second. At that rate it would take me approximately two and a half hours to push my Strength to ten as that would take 8,850 total push ups by my calculations or 8,760 more push ups than I had already done. Figuring out all of the math in my head, mostly out of boredom while running, had gotten me my fourth point of Intelligence.
When I hit the tenth point I decided to keep going, this might be monotonous and boring but I might as well stick with it until I came up with a better idea. I mean its not like I had felt hungry, thirsty, or tired yet despite two hours of constant push ups.
It was three hours later when I finally gave up, it should have only taken me another two hours and change to reach eleven strength but even with leeway and a buffer I was well beyond that. There must be some kind of attribute cap in play, probably related to level. That realization was worthy of another Wisdom point.
Well with my physical attributes apparently maxed for the moment it was time to get back to exploring, I mean the only way I had found to get XP so far was killing rats and I needed to find out what leveling got me if I wanted to try and plan out my advancement in some more detail. With that thought I set off.
It took only a few minutes to retrace my steps from the previous day, well it was a day as far as I was concerned until I found a way to tell time accurately at least, and return to the site of my epic rat fight. As I continued down the alley I heard a faint chattering sound and saw two red dots appear on my minnie map, hmm one of the benefits of the increased perception I guess.
With a thought I had club in hand except where before it had simply appeared as a study metal club a glance at it now told me so much more.
Improvised Metal Club (Blunt Weapon)
Attack Speed: 1
To Hit Chance: 0
Base Damage: 3
Durability: 970/1000
So more benefits from that point of Perception, well time to get on with it. I tried to approach the enemies as quietly as possible but it didn't result in some type of Stealth skill, worry about that later I suppose. As I approached I saw that the two rats had been feasting on the corpse of some other animal but that was all I had time for as they both turned towards me and charged. On the plus side I now saw numbers though.
Eriaduan Rat
Health: 30/30
I managed to twist out of the way of the right most rat but the other one got a bite in on my arm. Instead of the five damage I had taken before though, this time my health only dropped by 3 points. The unarmored skill was my guess. I got in my own whack and saw the rats health drop in half as I dealt 15 points of damage. Well three base weapon damage and two from my Blunt Weapon skill; the other ten must have come from my Strength. It took three more swings before I managed to land another hit and kill the weakened rat, taking another dozen points of damage in the process myself. Once I got my first hit in on the remaining rat I gained another point of Dexterity and decided to stop attacking and let the rat keep biting me as I watched my health. I had enough health and the rat was non threatening enough that I could take this opportunity to try and grind my Unarmored skill up a bit in relative safety. That decision was worth a point of Wisdom so I figured it was probably the right one.
As the rat attacked I kept careful track of how much damage I was taking, trying to figure out the mechanics of this skill. It was on the second attack, and my twenty first point of damage in the fight, that my Unarmored skill increased to three. Well this was going to be risky but it was Science! time and I had a theory to test; was the increase using the same scale as push ups to strength was? If it was then I should reach my fourth rank in the Unarmored skill after taking another sixty points of damage.
It was absurd what I was doing, standing there letting an alien rat chew on my leg, but then my situation was utterly absurd in the first place. Eventually the rat managed to deal enough damage to push my health down below thirty and I started to pay closer attention as the trigger point should be at 19 health if my theory was accurate. And it was, at least tentatively. As the attack hit and dropped my health below that threshold I gained an Unarmored rank and a point of Intelligence, probably for using the scientific method. With that out of the way I whacked the rat again to kill it. A quick check of my character screen showed that I had gained forty XP for the fight, so two more rats to level.
As I retreated from the alley to heal up before moving forward I thought about what I had learned. Knowing the mechanics behind increasing Unarmored was nice and given that at least two things used the same scale it was probable that most of the rest of the game used the same mechanic, but on the downside I wasn't really going to be able to grind Unarmored all that fast until and unless I gained some rapid healing ability as it increased based on the amount of damage I took and then next point would require that I take another 130 points of damage; so at least two more fights.
My Blunt Weapon skill also hadn't increased in the fight. I think that grinding Strength was probably the reason, I dealt so much damage that if it increased based on the number of successful attacks that I made then against small fry like the rats I would need a lot more targets. I mean if it used the same scale as the other skills had then Blunt Weapons 3 would require a total of thirty successful attacks being made and between both of my fights I had only landed 9. Hmm, it couldn't be on the same scale; otherwise I wouldn't have hit rank 2 in my first fight. I wonder if it was on a half scale, so five strikes to rank 2 and six more to rank 3. Well my next fight would test that theory.
This was going to be a boring hour as I waited to regain my Health. Hmm, maybe start doing math and logic puzzles in my head to try and grind Intelligence? I mean it did increase before based on me doing math. Worth a try.
Feeling myself get more intelligent would have probably driven me to near insanity with fear if not for the Gamer's Mind that I had been gifted with. At the start of the two hours I spent trying to grind Intelligence I was doing addition, subtraction, and basic multiplication in my head with minimal effort and could force out simple algebra with effort but that was about my limit. By the time my Intelligence hit 7 I could do addition and subtraction, regardless of the complexity of the numbers involved, without even thinking about it. I had also made a potentially helpful revelation that was worthy of another point of Wisdom, more difficult tasks advanced stats faster than the base rate. It was like a simple addition or subtraction problem was a single push up, so to go from 9 Intelligence to 10 would require doing almost five thousand such math problems, but doing multiplication or division seemed to be twice as effective while algebra problems were seemingly three times as effective.
With that realization I chose to sit there and continue to grind out my Intelligence until I hit the level max, even if I didn't really know what the stat benefited yet it was generally always better to be smart than stupid. When I finally did hit ten Intelligence an hour or so later I found that now multiplication and division, even of decimals and extremely large numbers, didn't require thought; I just knew the answer.
I chalked that up to game mechanics. My tentative conclusion was that 10 in an attribute was "average uninterested adult level", largely based on my the amount that I could store in my Inventory (and thus assumed myself capable of lifting). A hundred kilograms (or 220 pounds) was something that the average adult could lift, although with great strain. Where I differed from the normal individual was that the Gamer's Body meant that I didn't experience "strain" as anything except a Stamina cost. If the same applied to mental attributes in a similar fashion then 10 Int meant that since adults could do multiplication then so could I; and petty little things like the difference between 2x2 and 694393.4325632 x 32478032.7809 just didn't matter.
With my Intelligence maxed (for the moment at least) and my health back to full I headed back towards where I had encountered the rats and continued on.
Barely a hundred feet later I ran into another rat. I swung at it three times before I got a hit and then waited, it was going to take a good few minutes for the rat to get my health down to thirty or so and the Unarmored skill wouldn't grind its self. Once I was appropriately damaged I whacked the rat again (two tries this time) and was rewarded with a rank in Blunt Weapons. So it was on a half scale compared to my other skills, better than it could be but it still meant that it wasn't viable to grind it until I found an enemy with a hell of a lot more health or the like.
Well it was time to heal again before continuing on, but I wonder. With that thought I started tearing the rat apart with my bare hands until I had a piece of flat bone about the size of a quarter. Using my metal stick I scraped a mark into one side and then retreated back a bit before flipping my "coin" and calling out heads. It landed tails, oh well I had an hour before my health was back to work and nothing better to do.
The tenth time I successfully called the coin I got a message that my Luck had increased by 1. The smile on my face was very wide and didn't leave for the next hour as I sat there flipping my improvised bone coin. At that point my health was back to full and my Luck was up to 9. I decided that grinding out the last point was worth while and so continued with it for another hour and change.
Then it was back to the rat path. Beyond the destroyed remains of my last enemy was a right turn and about twenty feet ahead was the first wall that I had seen in my travels that wasn't unmarked; it had a jagged hole in it about six feet tall but through the hole I could see an obstruction of some kind and in front of it was another rat. This time I decided to engage the rat without my club as I had an Unarmed Combat skill to try and train.
The only problem was that my first punch to land did twelve points of damage to the rat. Stupid strength, grinding that up to max increased my chances of survival somewhat but it made grinding my combat skills virtually impossible. If my strength was still 1 then I would only be doing three points of damage per punch or kick and could probably get a rank and a half out of this rat, as it was I wouldn't even get rank 2. Well live and learn, I'm sure I will find tougher foes later. Sigh, more waiting for this stupid thing to try and eat me so that I can get that fifth rank of Unarmored and then actually be immune to damage from these stupid rats.
Huh, that's odd. The rat used to be hitting me a little under fifty percent of the time but this one was actually hitting me only around forty percent of the time. Perceiving that decreased hit chance caused my Perception skill to increase to 4 and along with it came a general increase to all my senses. With a sigh my Unarmored skill finally dinged over to 5 and I finished punching the rat to death. With that out of the way I moved forward to examine the hole in the wall.
The wall, much like every other wall I had seen so far, was some kind of metallic/ceramic compound that had proven its self immune to anything I could do to it. Judging by the hole's depth the walls were approximately a eighteen inches thick. Trying to move through the hole though was hampered by some large, flat, object that was covering all but a tiny hole at the bottom left corner. How the rats got in and out probably.
I gave it a light, testing, push only to find that it wouldn't budge. Then I put my full power into it. Again it didn't budge. Well this was a dead end then.
Well time to see what the level up menu was like, if there even was one.
When I pulled up my character management screen I saw a new tab labeled "Level Up".
When I brought it up I saw a button that said Level Up on it and with 100 EXP emblazoned below that. Well here goes nothing, I hit it.
"Congratulations, you have gained a level and are now level 2. Your attribute cap is now 20 while your skill cap has been raised to 10. Select your desired level up trait."
Listed below were dozens of of "traits". The first two were "Increased Attributes" and "Increased Skills", which gave you three attribute points to assign how you liked and five skill points to assign as desired respectively.
Beyond that they started getting more exotic with things like "Poison Resistance", "Increased Dodge Chance", "Increased Inventory" and so on. A number of them seemed at least moderately interesting but the one that really caught my attention was "Polyglot".
"Polyglot (trait): Requires 10 Intelligence and 5 Wisdom
-Capable of rapidly learning both the written and spoken forms of new languages that you are exposed to.
-Allows creation of new Language skills untrained upon first exposure to a new Language.
-Decreases advancement requirements for Language skills by 50%"
Given that I was apparently in the Star Wars universe, the ability to communicate with the locals was certainly a necessity and so my choice was clear. Once I picked my trait the level up process continued.
"Health, Mana, and Stamina have all been reset to maximum values. Experience set to 0/200. Good luck."
With that the world unfroze and it was time to get on with life.
I had been in this world for three days at this point, at least by my best calculations, and had yet to see another living thing besides the handful of rats that I had run into. In truth the only notable thing I had yet to see in my enviroment was the blocked hole I had just run into.
Well this was kinda bullshit, I might be "safe" where I was but I was bored out of my mind at the moment so I started examining the current area I was in; taking the time to carefully look over every square inch of the place. I didn't find any hidden switches or the like but that was alright, it was time to really map out this whole collection of alleys that I had found myself in.
It took me two days to fully and completely explore this area and my conclusion was that I was trapped here. The only opening that I had found was the blocked one in the rat section, otherwise my enviroment was limited to approximately ten miles of branching and twisting alleys that went no where and connected to nothing. On the plus side my careful exploration of the enviroment had pushed my Perception up to 10 and grinding my Gamer's Interface skill by repeatedly opening and closing the Character Management Screen had likewise pushed that up to 10. The end result of this was that now I got minimal tool tips when looking at my character sheet and knew a good bit more about the mechanics of this system.
Like that the chance that an attack would miss me was influenced by my Dexterity and my Luck, or that the percentage chance that I would score a critical hit on a foe was the same as my Luck stat (and that on a critical hit I would do Luck rank worth of additional damage). Or that every five ranks in Dexterity would drop Stamina costs by two.
Out of idle boredom I started juggling my club with one hand while I thought about my situation, only to find that my Dexterity had gone up a rank. Huh, looks like juggling could increase it. Well its not like I had anything better to do, grind away I suppose.
I stopped when I hit 10 Dexterity a few hours later as the returns would rapidly stop being economical time wise and decided to test out my increased Dexterity. First I tried a handstand, only too find that it was relatively easy. Running up a wall and flipping backwards off of it took two tries to get the timing right but was then easy, and after the fourth time I did it I got a message that an Acrobatics (skill) had been created from my efforts.
I was trapped here, unable to leave until the blockage was moved from the hole, and the only method that I had even tentatively figured might work was increasing my strength and pushing it out of the way. But doing push ups would take forever if I needed any more than a point or two of strength. Hmm, more complex math problems resulted in larger gains for my Intelligence grinding so maybe more intense physical exercise would result in faster strength gains. Worth a try anyways.
Hmm, I wonder if I can combine multiple exercises? Now how to do it, well that might work.
With that thought I went into a handstand and started walking on my hands. A glance at my character sheet showed, thanks to my increased Perception, that my Strength, Dexterity, and Vitality attributes were all gaining from the experience and so was my Acrobatics skill.
Walking, and eventually running, around on your hands with the occasional back-flip thrown in for no better reason than boredom was initially amusing but rapidly became boring as one did it for hours on end. So I resorted to doing every more advanced math problems in my head at the same time, grinding Intelligence as well.
Two weeks of that was enough to get my Dexterity, Strength, and Acrobatics to the point where I could pull off this farcical endeavor one handed and from there I worked it flipping and catching my "coin" at the same time. I wish I had video because watching a man hop around on one hand at a rate of a mile every ten minutes or so while flipping and catching a coin with the other hand and muttering college level math problems to himself at the same time would have to be amusing.
Now just imagine being the one doing that for four fucking months straight. I would have given up and gone utterly insane if not for my Gamer's Mind but I was still more bored than I had ever been before. I mean my only distraction was the eight odd rats that had made their way into my domain, resulting in my Unarmed Combat skill reaching rank 3 and my Unarmored skill making it up to 6. That was a tedious five plus fucking hours as the rat trying to chew on me had a sub 20% chance of successfully striking me and only did damage if it hit the 1% chance of a critical hit; and even then it only did a single point of damage. So at one attack per second on average I was taking a point of damage every 10 minutes on average and I needed to take 270 points of damage to reach Unarmored 6. A little under six fucking hours of sitting there as a rat tried to gnaw on my arm and kept missing. Gah!
Eventually though things dinged over and it was time to try moving the stupid barrier keeping me in what I was referring to as the Tutorial Area from Hell. On the plus side though, once I consciously realized it was a tutorial area my Wisdom went up a point.
Once at the blockage I put all my strength into pushing it, hoping and praying that the two hundred kilograms that I could lift would be enough force to budge it. After nearly thirty seconds of sustained effort I heard the most joyous of sounds, a slight scraping, and I perceived that the barrier had moved almost a whole centimeter forward. Freedom here I come.
After several minutes of effort I had pushed the blockage far enough forward that I could squeeze my way out of my tutorial prison. When I emerged into the room I found myself standing in a room approximately twenty by twenty by ten feet in size, lit with some type of solitary emergency light over a door opposite me, and filled with all kinds of random discarded junk. As I turned to look at the thing I had pushed out of my way I noticed that it was a shelving unit covered carelessly in trash.
A cursory examination of the junk that filled my new environs showed nothing of any note, but that could have just been because I had zero clue what actually useful stuff would really look like. With that done I made my way to the closed door on the far wall and gave it a far more detailed examination. In the end its opening mechanism wasn't that complex, there was a button back lit by a green light built into is frame and a single push of that opened the door; letting in the myriad outside sounds on a planet sized hive of scum and villainy. In reality I heard the odd explosion in the far off distance, a bunch of noises that I couldn't identify, and not much else as I looked out into what appeared to be a door lined hall way that was missing half the lights it should have had and extended a long ways in both directions.
With a sigh I returned to the junk room and pushed the shelving unit all the way back into place so that it covered up the hole, if nothing else it was a potential bolthole if I got in trouble and this room didn't just have junk suddenly appear in it out of thin air; someone must be using it as a dump.
As I returned to the hallway I decided to go left, simple because I heard more noise in that direction. It was about a thousand feet of doors on either side of the slightly curving hallway, all closed, that I came to a larger door directly before me. As I approached it, it dilated open without me touching anything and let in a sight the likes of which I had never before seen, indeed barely even envisioned in my wildest dreams.
Stretching before me was a mile wide expanse of open space filled with numerous creatures of every imaginable description, with a great chasm passed that and then yet another stretch of open space before a building rose up. Looking up I saw a "ceiling" two miles or so above me but by looking at the expanse on the other side of the chasm I could see that it was likely just another pavilion like the one I was currently in and not the actual ceiling. Speeding by overhead, and going vertically up and down the chasm, were countless air cars of myriad description.
That moment is when it truly hit home that I was really in Star Wars, for this was far beyond the realm of any movie or video game to express. Nar Shaddaa was a true Ecumenopolis, a planet wholly covered in a single interconnected city, and home to countless trillions of teeming sentients; all of which made up only the smallest fraction of the uncountable vast population of this galaxy.
After a long moment of stunned appreciation I slowly made my way out into the teeming foot traffic of the pavilion, straining my senses to the max in an attempt to learn what I could.
Only to, within a second or so of entering the crowd, get a succession of messages telling me that new skills had been created as Polyglot kicked in and I gained Language: Galactic Basic Standard, and Language: Huttese as new skills. By the time I made it through the crowd and to the chasm, both had leveled up three times and the jabber around me went from utterly incomprehensible to understandable. When I reached the chasm I looked up and down and could not see either a floor or ceiling.
With my curiosity satisfied I leaned against the low wall that separated the plaza from the deadly chasm and stated to people watch.
Three hours of that had both of my language skills soft capped at 10 ranks and me now knowing, for some inexplicable reason, entire alphabets and grammatical rules for alien tongues I knew nothing about really. I had also seen fifteen creatures die before my eyes with the crowds barely blinking. It was obvious that the law here on Nar Shadda was only whatever you were capable of making it.
That point was driven home when a Twi'lek noticed me and decided to approach.
The green skinned humanoid stood about six feet tall and looked to be in decent shape. On his belt he had a blaster and two knives along with a pouch, and perception told me that he had one hundred and seventy health.
"Hmm, a human child on the streets of Nar Shaddaa all alone. It's my lucky day, you look in good enough shape that Tovo will pay good money for you." said the Twi'lek as he drew his blaster in a smooth motion.
I was charging him at my fastest speed virtually before he could blink. I closed the near ten meters between us in under two seconds but the twi'lek had exceptional twitch reflexes and fired at me, missing by millimeters. Before he could take a second shot I was on him, my club appearing in my hand even as my body was already going through the motions to sweep his legs out from under him. My strike hit home, causing my enemy to fall backwards as he legs were swept from under him and his health dropped by 28 points. I tried for a second hit as he fell but he twisted out of the way, holstered his blaster, and drew both of his knives while swinging at me with the one is his left hand.
When his knife strike hit my arm my health dropped by 29 points. Fuck, this was a real fight. Assuming we had an equal chance to strike one another then I would need five more hits to drop him (assuming I got at least one crit) while he would need six to drop me (unless he got multiple crits). I should win but this was going to be close, a lot closer than I had initially though it would be.
With that thought I stomped down on his chest as he hit the ground, dealing another 24 damage in exchange for a slash to my leg that dealt 29 and slammed my club home on the twi'leks right arm as hard as I could.
Fortunately for me it was a critical hit and I heard the bone snap as his heath dropped 48 points in one go. The Twi'lek grunted in pain but slashed at me again anyways, I dodged back slightly and it missed but he regained his footing and was looking at me a lot more warily. As he started to back off slowly. Fuck that, I wasn't going to let this slaving asshole survive attacking me. With his arm broken he had dropped his knife and a bare glance allowed me to learn that it did 10 base damage and had double the attack speed of my club, with that knowledge I had a plan and so I through my club directly at the Twi'lek as I charged him. As the club struck home, doing 25 points of damage, I was notified that a Thrown Weapons skill had been created. Thanks to my Acrobatics skill I was able to palm the dropped knife and slash at my enemy twice in rapid succession. The first missed but the second struck home, and was again a crit. With that last slash against my assailants throat his health hit zero and he died; giving me sixty experience and a Short Blade skill.
His body had barely dropped to the ground when I started stripping him. The blaster and knives went into my inventory without a second thought along with his pouch and an electronic wrist device of some kind, but before I could get to his clothes I head a clapping sound and spun around, one of my new knives appearing in my hand as I did.
Approaching me was a human male standing about 5'10" and wearing a full body suit of metallic armor of some kind. On his waist was holstered a pistol and a knife while over his shoulder was what looked like a blaster rifle.
"Nice job kid, where did a street rat like you learn to fight like that?" asked the man in Huttese. "Ah, not like I care that much. Name's Draxx, Hugo Draxx, kid and your little show impressed me. If you are interested then there is a spot for you in the 4th Tower Slashers. What do you say?"
I wasn't all that keen on joining a street gang but I needed local information and contacts and its not like there was anything else on Nar Shardaa, besides my perception was telling me that this Draxx was probably being honest enough in his offer. So...
"I'm interested, but I want to hear a few more details first." I responded.
Draxx gave a big smile and said "Well then come with me kid." and led teh way off down the plaza.
With a sigh I followed.
As Draxx led the way through the crowds and off towards wherever we were going he began to speak.
"So we Slashers are one of the more powerful gangs in the tower, not anything compared to the Hutts or the big interstellar organizations but still pretty important around here. Part of the reason for that is that we don't recruit just anyone, but as I said you impressed me kid. So questions?" the gang banger asked.
"I assume that I'll have a place to crash, food, and protection if I join with you, right?" I said, and gained a point of Charisma. Gee, I almost forgot how utterly easy it was to get those first few ranks in anything.
"Yup, along with job opportunities, fences, help getting whatever stuff you want, and companionship." the man said. "So what's your name kid?"
"Alexander Stark, and I guess I'm a 4th Tower Slasher now." was my response.
The next few minutes passed in silence before Draxx veered off towards an opening guarded by two heavily armed men in armor with a '4TS' done in read on their chests; a gang symbol by the looks of it.
The one on the right spoke up "Sup Daxx, who's the kid?"
"New blood named Stark, Traynor. Was walking back from Bella's when I saw him kill a full grown Twi'lek thug. Not too impressive, except the Twi'lek started with a blaster and two knives while the kid only had a crude club; he dismantled the slug too. Figured he was worth taking a small chance on." Draxx replied as he waved me through the now open door.
As I passed in Traynor said "Not bad kid, Draxx isn't easy to impress. Welcome to the Slashers."
The inside of the building seemed a lot like the one I had emerged in earlier today, a longish, slightly curved, hallway with doors on either side.
I was shown about and introduced around by Draxx to the various gang members present. He ended by assigning me a bunk, well more waving into a barracks like room and telling me to take whatever one didn't have anything on it, before heading out and telling me that he would see me later.
As he left I got a notice that I had gained a new title "Member of the 4th Tower Slashers" and started to go through the items I had looked from my attacker.
Vibroknife (Short Blade)
Attack Speed: 2
To Hit Chance: 0
Base Damage: 10
Durability: 500/500
Much better than my club, definitely my go too close quarters weapon for now.
Blaster (Guns)
Attack Speed: 1
To Hit Chance: 0
Base Damage: 50
Range Increment: 10 feet
Maximum Range: 400 feet
Durability: 96/100
Huh, a ranged weapon was nice but I wonder about the damage being so high. Maybe stats don't boost its damage like they do for melee weapons? That could explain it and would make some sense. Still nice to have a range option though. I wonder if I could grind it up on the target range that Draxx had shown me.
The electronic device I had taken off of the Twi'lek's wrist was interesting but I couldn't get passed the password screen.
Average Quality PDA (Electronics)
-The Star Wars variation of a smart phone. If you want more information than gain the relevant skills, idiot.
So the bastard that had dropped me here was still being snarky; I'm not surprised.
The pouch contained a few hundred of the local credits and nothing else, so back into my inventory it went along with the blaster and knives.
With that I headed out to start dealing with my new gang buddies.
As I entered the main hangout area one of the Slashers saw me, a female of maybe sixteen, and said "So if it isn't the new blood Draxx brought in. Feel like showing off what you can do new blood?"
Quest: Prove your mettle
-You've been challenged to prove your worth to the 4th Tower Slashers via a series of sparring matches. Accept and you have the possibility on increasing your rep, decline and be known forever more as a pussy stuck at the bottom of the gang totem poll.
Quest Reward:
-Increased Reputation with the Slashers
-500 Credits
So quests, those are new. Well it's not like I would have declined even without the offered reward.
I gave a broad grin and approached the teen, indicating the sparring circle off to the side I said "Love to, so weapons and terms?"
She gave a grin of her own as she stepped into the circle "Names Katniss, no weapons and we fight until one of us can't fight and more, surrenders, or leaves the circle." as most of the idle gang members drifted over to watch the entertainment.
As I watched Katniss and stepped towards the circle myself I noted that one of the gang members, a scrawny male who looked in his early twenties, was taking action on the fight from the other Slashers. I stuck my hand into my hoodie's front pouch and pulled two hundred credits out of my inventory before tossing them at the bookie "Two hundred on me winning." I called out as he caught the cred chip.
With that I stepped into the circle and the fight was on, Katniss charging me barely a second later. She was level three and had 130 health but I could tell that she was weaker than me in all of the physical attributes; she better be very skilled or this was going to be an easy win.
I slipped past her first attack and launched a punch of my own but she didn't doge it or take it, instead she redirected it to the side and counter punched me. 21 damage, so 27 before my Unarmored skill reduced it. I barely even winced at the blow courtesy of my Gamer's Body and slipped around her courtesy of my Acrobatics skill before landing a punch to her kidney. She stumbled forward as eight of her own health disappeared and I followed it up with a stomp to the back of her right leg that failed as she rolled forward and spun back around to face me.
Both of us were warier of the other than we had been before, me because my punch would have done twenty three damage if she was lacking in damage reduction from something like my Unarmored skill. So under the gamer system she was rocking 15 points in Unarmored, and probably the same in Unarmed Combat. That would give her twelve strength, which looked about right based on her build.
We engaged again, even if neither of us was all that committed to the exchange. Both of us were probing the other and I came to the conclusion that while I was hitting her more than she was hitting me, it wasn't by a large enough margin for a truly easy win. What was interesting though was her stamina bar. With every exchange it was steadily heading down from the 290 it had started at.
I gave a grin as I put on the pressure while she tried to disengage. That was my advantage, I had much greater endurance and my Stamina came back faster than her own as well while my attacks cost me less than hers in the first place. That combined with my ability to not feel pain and greater health should let me grind her to exhaustion before my health got precipitously low.
Another thirty seconds of high intensity combat had me down to 80 health while Katniss was about equal but it also had her Stamina down into the single digits, so I gave it a final push and once her stamina dropped to 0 she called out "I give. Goddamn you're strong Stark. Your technique could use work but your raw ability is impressive. We need a rematch some time."
I listed to the cheering of the assorted Slashers at the end of the bout as I noted that my Unarmed Combat skill had gained two points and I was now about half way to my next rank in my Unarmored skill. My Charisma had also gone up by 1 but I noted that I hadn't gained any experience points from the bout.
As I was drinking in the adulation another teen stepped up "Care to try me?" A glance told me that the male was also level three but only had 120 health.
I gave a smile and said "Sure, names Alexander Stark." as I thought about his plan and the little surprise I had in store. Challenging me immediately after a difficult fight, he was trying to pull an easy win. Well I would punish that.
As he entered the ring he called out "Everret Kage."
While he was taking a stance I called out to the bookie "All of it on me." before having a quiet laugh as I brought up my Character screen and hit the level up button that had been sitting there for over an hour at this point.
"Congratulations, you have gained a level and are now level 3. Your attribute cap is now 30 while your skill cap has been raised to 15. Select your desired level up trait."
There were a few new traits this time but none that truly screamed at me "This is necessary" so I decided to take one that required 20 Dexterity and 20 Intelligence.
"Dual Wielding (trait): Requires 20 Dexterity and 20 Intelligence
-Allows you to fight with a weapon in both hands as if each was the only weapon you were wielding."
While it wouldn't matter in this fight, the ability to effectively do double damage in real fights would be nice. Besides it looked badass.
I gave a smile as the next message appeared and the world unfroze.
"Health, Mana, and Stamina have all been reset to maximum values. Experience set to 0/400. Good luck."
What followed was a beat down. Everret was fast, only slightly slower than me, and as technically skilled as Katniss had been but his strength, endurance, and Unarmored skill were significantly lower. Where Katniss had been dealing 27 damage a hit to me, Everret was only dealing 23 before my Unarmored skill reduced it and more tellingly my hits weren't dealing the 8 points they had been doing to Katniss but 20.
He gave when his health was down to 20 points and I walked over to the bookie as I got the "Quest Complete" notification.
The bookie had a big grin on his face as I approached and said to me "Names Psykes, and its a pleasure too meet you Stark. You just made me a pretty bundle. Odds against you were four to one on both fights so four thousand credits total, and I threw in a bit extra as thanks for all the money you just made me." before tossing me a pouch.
"A new skill has been created through your actions. Congratulations you addict. Gambling (skill) has been gained."
I dropped the pouch into my Inventory after putting it into my hoodie and noted that I had gained 4,500 credits. Nice.
I gave Psykes a smile of my own as I said "It was my pleasure. But now I think I'm going to grab some chow, fighting makes me hungry."
That last was a lie, I hadn't been hungry since I showed up in this world, but conversation over food was a great way to make friendships and I had some social skills to grind.
Your Charisma has increased by 1.
Your Wisdom has increased by 1.
As I ate I ruminated on the thought that this was my first meal in months and that while tasty it did little for me; according to my perception it restored twenty health and stamina along with making me heal twice as fast for the next hour, nothing spectacular. Far more interesting was getting to know my new associates.
Most seemed nice enough but the only ones who truly impressed were Katniss and Psykes. While there were higher level individuals than either of them here, they were all older adults and with a few minutes to focus on my chow buddies I noted that both had extremely high stats and skills compared to their level. In Katniss's case she had her Unarmed Combat, Unarmored, Short Blade, and Stealth skills all maxed at 15 along with 12 Strength, 17 Vitality, and 15 Dexterity. If she had fought me seriously and using weapons then I would have lost, no question. Getting those skills that high at here age and without the advantages of the Gamer was impressive.
In Psykes case his role in the gang was mostly electronic crimes and he was actually rocking 30 Intelligence and Luck while only being level 4. His physical stats and skills weren't anything all that impressive but he had 20's in Electronics and Computer Use along with high ranks in a whole host of other technical skills.
Both were also relatively chill and easy to get along with. Our conversations resulted in my gaining a Gather Information skill and pushing it up to rank 3 along with another two points of Charisma by the time we parted ways.
While the two of them headed off to wherever I made my way to the target range. It was time to see if target shooting with a blaster could grind up the skill or whether I would have to get actual enemies.
The range was nothing all that special, being just a stretch of open space about two hundred meters long with holographic projectors on the ceiling and a control droid. You told the droid what you wanted and it controlled the holographic projectors to make it so and told you your results when you were done. Without further ado I took my place on the firing line and said 'Start" as I drew my Blaster.
I knew how to shoot from my life before I was picked up and dropped here and its not like a blaster was really all that more complicated to use. Basically point at target and pull the trigger.
Between my Luck, Dexterity, and the enhanced senses that Perception provided my first shot struck true on the target about twenty feet in front of me and resulted in the Guns (skill) being created. With that I gave a smile and stood their continuing to shoot.
Reaching rank 10 took me about thirty minutes as I fired at the target at a steady one shot per second and by the time the next morning rolled around I had maxed my Guns skill at 15. No one commented on my marathon shooting session but it did get several raised eyebrows. At least, fortunately, no one was paying enough attention to note how rapidly my shooting skills had improved.
Once I had that done I headed back towards the main hangout area only to see Katniss coming out of the chow hall.
"Morning Alex" she called out "Sleep well?"
I gave a slight shrug, not particularly feeling like telling her I had spent all night learning too shoot a blaster before saying "Meh. Feel like pounding on my for a while?"
She gave a sly smile and struck a pose as she said "A bit young for that, aren't yah?"
I laughed "Not what I meant. I need to get better at rolling with blows and slightly redirecting them so that they take less damage. So feel like pounding on me in the ring for a bit?"
She gave a laugh and said "No problem, masochist."
With that we got in the ring and I stood there as she wailed on my body. I had when my health was down to 32 I got the notification that my Unarmored skill was now 7 and ended out "bout" with a theatrical groan and a "Ok, ok, I give. That's enough blows for now. You can pound on me some more later. I think I'm going to take a nap to try and recover."
She laughed at me again and said "Any time squirt. Although someone will probably wake you in an hour or two, its job day."
"Job day?" I inquired.
"Yup," popped the teen "the day of the week when the bosses collect their take from everyone for the week and tell you what you need to bring in next week along with assign and specific jobs that they want you to do."
"Ah, well ok then." I said as I headed off to my bunk to sleep for an hour. It was time to see what, if anything, sleep did for me in this new existence.
Well that had been an interesting experience. Once I had consciously decided I wanted to sleep I passed out, only too wake back up an hour later to a floating message saying "Your restful sleep has restored your Health, Mana, and Stamina to their maximums. Up and at em old boy". A quick glance at the clock on the wall of the bunk room showed that almost exactly an hour had passed since I decided to go to sleep.
To me I was wide awake and no time had seemed to have passed at all. One moment I decided to sleep, the next moment an hour had passed and I was as good as new. I suppose it was a net gain but not being able to dream was something that I would miss. Well at least I now had a somewhat more efficient way to regain health as when I was awake it only came back at 1 point per minute.
With that out of the way I decided to do a bit of skill grinding while I waited for the job assignment meeting so I headed towards the training dojo that I had been shown by Draxx on my tour. It was nothing too spectacular, basically just being a large room with slightly padded walls and floors, but it contained something very useful to me; a combat training droid.
With a few minutes of work, resulting in the creation of a Computer Use skill for me I had the droid willing to do what I wanted. Basically stand there and let me whack it for a while.
My Perception told me that while the droid only had 200 Health it also had Heavy Armor that flat out negated fifty points of damage per hit and self repair systems that healed it at a rate of 1 point every 10 seconds. With it programmed to not attack me and do nothing but try to dodge my attacks at the minimal settings, it was an ideal grinding tool for my various CQC skills for now.
A half hour of punching the droid, even if I only did damage on a critical hit, was enough to push my Unarmed Combat skill up to 10. I could have continued and probably gotten in the eleventh point before the meeting but it wasn't really worth it, I could just finish grinding Unarmed Combat up to 15 later today.
Instead I switched to my Vibroknifes and got to work. It rapidly became obvious that Dual Wielding had been a very good long term investment as active combat skills leveled based on the number of successful hits landed and with Dual Wielding I could land twice as many hits in the same period of time. Throw in the fact that my Vibroknives had twice the attack speed of my Unarmed Combat and I was making four attacks per second while landing approximately 90% of them. I reached rank 2 in the Short Blade skill in under three seconds and rank 3 was reached by the tenth second. From there things slowed a little bit but this was still four times faster than I had increased my Unarmed Combat.
I should have gotten a second blaster when training that last night, would have halved the time. Well live and learn. Let's see, figure a half hour before I get dragged too the meeting so how high can I get?
Well the answer was to rank 12 when Psykes stuck his head into the room and called out "Meeting time." I nodded and dropped my knives back into my Inventory before following the older man back to the main room.
The room was filled with almost a hundred members of the 4th Tower Slahsers, probably the vast majority of their membership, and seven people who looked like "officers" given their place, how everyone was focused on them, and that they were all at least level 10 (with the highest being 13). Draxx was one of them, but didn't seem to be the head honcho.
"Greetings boys, its job time for the week. So line up in front of your captain and turn in this weeks take before getting your assignments. Nothing big has happened, we are still allied with the other gangs under Tryack the Hutt's banner and you should still kill any member of the Krath Slobber Smashers if you see them. Oh yeah, new blood with me." the 13 level male who had been standing in the center of the "important people" spoke.
As everyone started to jostle their way into six lines I made my way towards the speaker and noted that three others, two older men and a women who looked to be in her late teens, were also moving towards him. Once we were all there the man spoke up "Welcome to the 4th Tower Slashers you four. My name is Teng Kai and I'm the leader of this here organization. You wouldn't be here if one of my Captains didn't think you had what it took to be one of us, but I am not so easily impressed. For now each of you is assigned to whomever recruited you but I'll be watching." before waving a hand in dismissal.
I made my way over to Draxx's line, noting that it was significantly shorter than many of the others but that everyone standing in it seemed to have a higher than average level and health for their age. Thanks to the delay I was at the back of the line but it still only took about five or six minutes before I was before Draxx.
"Good to see you fitting in Stark, and beating Kat and Everret was quite the accomplishment. Those are two of my best young members at close quarters combat. Well onto work stuff. My branch of the Slashers specializes in violence; whether that be the quiet knife in the back that Kat is so fond of or the massive explosions that Boom Boom likes. Strong arm robbery, mugging, raids on other gangs, assassination, body guarding, and similar things are our focus. I think you have some potential as an assassin given that you are a child and most people will greatly underestimate you so I'm pairing you with Kat for now; listen to her and you shouldn't have too much trouble.
So your job is simple; give me a thousand credits at the meeting next week. I don't really care how you get the money, just that you can put up your cut on time. Anything you make beyond that is yours to keep. Have fun." the man who had brought me into this gang said.
My taxes were both more and less onerous than I thought they would be. More in that a thousand credits a week was a good chunk of money but less in that I didn't have any specific time commitments to put in with the gang; just bring them the money at the end of the week and I was good. Given that I also had over four thousand credits in my Inventory right now it was also something that I had a little leeway with, at least for now.
The room was still packed with all of the gang members hanging out and chilling so I headed back to the dojo to continue my knife practice.
It went somewhat slower than before though because I had hit the point where I was actually doing damage to the droid on things besides critical hits so I had to stop whenever its health got low and wait for it to heal back up. When that happened I just switched over to wielding my club and Unarmed Combat at the same time as neither did enough damage to get through the droids armor plating; at least not yet.
By the time I had got my Short Blade skill up to 15 (well into the afternoon) I had also pushed my Unarmed Combat and Blunt Weapons skills up to 12 each. A few other gang members had come in throughout the day but besides a few eyebrows my training didn't get any real comment; probably because none of them individually stuck around long enough to realize just how long I had been at it.
With that done I decided to continue pushing things until dinner time, a few hours away. When dinner rolled around about four hours later I had pushed both skills up to 14.
As I headed towards the chow hall I mused on what things like that meant. A 1 in Unarmed Combat, for example, was the most utterly basic punch or kick that someone could throw; the kind of thing a toddler could do instinctively. A 10 was someone casually trained in a fighting style; someone who knew how to throw a punch and kick, knew what katas were and the basics of leverage, etc. The 14 that I had though was on par with someone who had actively and deliberately practiced one of the martial arts for five plus years; and I went from "could throw a punch" to that in a period of hours. But it wasn't even just that, every time my skill went up it seemed like knowledge just appeared in my head. Like I could explain the principals of leverage and force that went into redirecting a blow from a more powerful opponent to throw them off balance; something that I had no real clue about seconds before that rank dinged over.
Hell, I knew all of the parts of a blaster rifle and what they did now; despite never having any way to gain that knowledge. This Gamer stuff was bullshit of the highest order. Meh, whatever, nothing I could do about it but take advantage.
As I entered the chow hall I looked around, trying to find Psykes. Ah, there he was, eating some type of pasta while typing away one handed on an electronic pad of some kind. I sat down next to him and said "Hey Psykes."
He gave a nod and said "Sup Alex?"
"If you weren't too busy I was wondering if you could teach me a bit about computers. Both hardware and software?" I asked, wanting to fill in one of my biggest weaknesses in this sci-fi universe and finally be able to do some real research on the larger enviroment I was in.
The man gave a shrug and said "Sure, I can spare at least a few hours to show you the basics." before scarfing down the last few bites of his meal and getting up. "Follow me, this really isn't the best enviroment to teach you in."
Once were were in his shop/room Psykes sat me down in front of a terminal and started to explain. It took bare seconds for the first rank to appear, and the next wasn't much slower.
By the end of the first hour Psykes was convinced that I was a savant of some kind as I went from not even being able to make heads or tails of the operating system at the start to being able to code my own basic programs by the end of that hour.
The twenty something finally said "Dude, how are you doing this? It's like you are learning in minutes what takes most people weeks or months."
I gave a slight shrug and said "No idea, I literally have never touched a terminal before today. But its just like the stuff makes sense, it has understandable logic and just flows. Besides, your explanations also seem just right. Really don't know, must be a savant of some kind."
Psykes snorted and said "Savant, right. Most seven year old's also don't have your vocabulary, nor are they able to defeat trained fighters more than twice their age in unarmed combat. There is something special about you kid, but whatever. Not really my problem. Now back to the computer, I'm curious to see how far I can push you."
It was a little past two in the morning when Psykes gave a great yawn and said "Well I need some sleep and your progress has finally slowed anyways, we can continue this later. Maybe tomorrow I'll see if you are as good at the hardware side of things."
"Yeah, it's slowed down. Think I've hit a bit of a wall for now. Well thanks Psykes, think I'm going to go train for a bit before heading off to sleep myself. Night man, I owe you one." I said as I got up and left, heading back to the dojo to finish grinding up that final point of Unarmed Combat and Blunt Weapons.
Well that had been informative, and oh so useful. Having an instructor made things go much faster, what with Psykes training me I had maxed Computer Use in four hours when based on my experience with attribute training it should have taken on the order of two to three months.
Time to beat up a droid for another few hours, sigh.
ith my skills finally up to par at around 6 AM I headed to my bed to lay down for an hour or three. I could grind up my Gamer's Interface while pretending to sleep and people would probably get suspicious if I never slept. Huh, the point of Wisdom reinforced that opinion.
This was a matter of just laying in bed while basically randomly scrambling my HUD around as fast as possible as I gained a bit of experience in that skill with every movement of any of the elements. It would still take me eight hours or so of dedicated effort to push it all the way up to my current max but I could push it to 14 while pretending to sleep and do the rest as I did other things throughout the day. The increases didn't seem to really do much yet but it was a skill and I could train it with ease so I might as well.
Around 9 AM Katniss walked up to my bunk and shook me "awake", "Up and at em lazy bones. Draxx said to show you the ropes and I have stuff so do so you're coming with me."
I gave a grumble and rolled out of bed, "I'm up slave driver. Although I was wondering who I should talk to about a couple of purchases."
"Oh, what were you looking to buy?" asked the teen.
"A set of armor, some clothes, and another blaster for the moment." I asked as we walked out of the room.
"A blaster is easy, you can just buy one from the armory before we leave. Armor though, that's a bit tougher. I mean there just isn't that much call for child sized sets of combat gear and the few people who generally desire it also tend to have the resources to get it custom made for them, but for regular clothes we can hit up Rita's in the bazaar out side before we get on with work." Katniss said as she led us to the armory.
When we entered she called out to the only person present, a man in his forties or so working on some kind of weapon off to the side of the room that was filled with weapons of all descriptions. "Yo Blaze, Stark here wanted to buy a piece so what yah got?"
The man finished what he was doing before standing up and coming over to us "Hello to you to Miss. Mathews, and does Mr. Stark here know what he would like?"
Katniss gave a slight flush of embarrassment or anger but before she could say anything I intervened "A BlasTech Heavy Blaster Pistol if you have one."
Blaze nodded his head and started pulling a few pieces off the walls and out of various storage containers before laying them all on the table for me to examine more closely.
After a brief moment of gun fondling and the usage of my Perception I settled on a DL-40.
BlasTech Industries DL-40 Heavy Blaster Pistol (guns)
The current standard in BlasTech's renowned DL Heavy Blaster line, the 40 is the go to heavy blaster pistol for those who expect to see close combat on a regular basis. It's high degree of accuracy, rapid fire rate, and raw firepower are all top tier but it pays for it in a somewhat lower than average number of shots per power pack.
Attack Speed: 2
To Hit Chance: 1
Base Damage: 80
Range Increment: 30 feet
Maximum Range: 500 feet
Durability: 300/300
Shots Per Power Pack: 50
"This one I think, how much for it an an extra dozen power cells?" I asked as I hefted the 40.
"Nice eye kid, 750 credits for the pistol. Call it 1000 with the power cells thrown in." the armory said.
My response was immediate "It's nice but that's high. 800 for the lot seems more fair."
Blaze laughed "You got moxie kid, 950 for it all because I like you."
"900 and you have a deal." was my immediate counter offer.
"Sold kid." the man said with a chuckle as he held out a hand.
A hand into my pocket and a thought had a credit chip with the appropriate amount on it in my hand for a mere moment before it was in Blaze's hand instead.
"Congratulations, through your actions a new skill has been created: Barter (skill)."
"Pleasure doing business with you Blaze" I said before dropping the pistol into my inventory and heading out with Katniss, noting the point of Charisma that I had gained with that encounter as well.
After we exited the base, with a nod to the two guards, Katniss led the way off down a dozen entrances and into another long hallway except this one had open doors with signs over them all along both sides. Glances inside showed them to be shops of all kinds.
"This is the Bazaar. At least it's what people in this area mean when they say that. It's under our protection so we get a 10% discount from all of the shops in here. Rita's is a few doors down the hall." my companion explained.
My ears perked up as I heard a "STOP THIEF!" and noted a man running against the normal press of bodies towards the exit, a bag of some kind clutched in his arm. As I was thinking about what to do, Katniss snapped out like a striking snake and clothes-lined the man as he tried to pass us before stopping down on his throat; killing him.
"As I was saying, this place is under our protection and so we try and keep petty crime out of the way. I have to return whatever this piece of trash stole to its rightful owner so if you want to go on ahead and pick out the clothes you want, I'll meet up with you in a few minutes at Rita's." she said as she started searching the corpse for valuables.
"Fine with me, see you in a bit." I said before heading off. As I did my Perception rolled over to 11, reminding me that I would have to spend a day or two sitting out people watching to grind that one up to the max because that was a skill every bit as important as any of my combat skills.
A minute or so later I walked into Rita's only too find a small room with a women in her mid thirties sitting at a desk with a chair in front of it. Over her left shoulder was another closed door and to my right was a fancy looking pedestal of some description.
"Hello Young Sir. Can I help you with something?" the women asked.
"Hopefully. I was looking to purchase some clothes and was told that this was a good place to do so." I responded politely.
The women blinked, apparently slightly shocked that a seven year old would be shopping on their own, but quickly recovered and waved at the pedestal. "Well that I can certainly help you with, my name is Rita and this is my shop. If you would just step onto the pedestal then we can get your measurements and get to work designing your clothes."
I stepped onto the pedestal without comment. A few moments later scanning lights of some kind went up and down my body before Rita said "That's that, now lets get designing." as she waved me back to the desk.
It was the same as before except for the life sized hologram of me that was still on the pedestal and when I sat down at the desk the terminal before me had a clothing design program of some description on it.
Over the next few minutes Rita whipped up a few outfits for me. Most was civilian wear, shits and pants and underthings, but with that done I asked "Do you have any fabrics suitable for low profile body armor?"
Rita blinked again and said "I'm afraid not, my nanoforge just can't work with materials suitable for armor of any real description. The best I could offer you would be sliced through by a vibroknife without even slowing the blade, much less resist anything stronger."
I sighed and said "Oh well, worth a try. So how much " the door opened and Katniss walked in "do I owe you?"
As Katniss walked in I could see the slight tensing in Rita's body. When Kat said "So squirt, you picked out your clothes yet?" she did a double take and her eyes flashed to me, back to Kat, and then to me again,
I gave her a slight nod, answering her unasked question, and again saying "So how much do I owe you Rita?"
"Congratulations, through your actions a new skill has been created: Intimidate (skill)."
She stuttered slightly as she said "Umm, two hundred credits for everything.". That seemed reasonable but I had a skill to grind so I said "180 seems fairer to me."
"That will be more than acceptable." she said with relief. As I pulled out the cred chip and laid it on the desk she hit a button and a droid rolled out of the backroom with my clothes. As I took them my Barter skill increased to 2 and I gained another Charisma point before saying "It's been a pleasure doing business Rita. Have a nice day." before loading the clothes into the stachel that I had also bought and swinging it over my shoulder as Kat and I exited the shop.
"Done with your shopping now Alex?" Katniss asked, slightly exasperated.
"Yup, so what's this job?" I replied as we headed back out of the Bazaar.
So KSS has been sponsoring a few smaller independents to move in and try pushing spice and stims in our territory. I've been trying to track some of their low end dealers back to their stash house but I've had no luck so far. With a second person to tail them though it should at least double our chances as we can either shadow multiple dealers at the same time or track one continuously until he heads back." Katniss said as we walked back out into the promenade.
"Seems doable, but why not just grab one of them off the street and interrogate them?" I asked, leaning against the wall and watching the crowds go by as Katniss joined me and we continued our conversation.
"Tried that but the fuckers got sneaky, all of them wear bio-monitors that are constantly talking to one another. If one of their bodies signals goes too far from the norm it sends out an alarm and they move to a new stash house. Knocking them unconscious before they notice anything and trigger their alert beacons is hard enough but even when I managed it the information I got was worthless. Psykes tried tracing the signal but he lost it when it routed through one of the Hutt exchanges; way too dangerous to try hacking that over some small time drug dealers. So we shadow them." she answered.
"Works for me, except that I've never shadowed anyone before and am not sure how good I'll be about it." I responded.
Katniss gave a snort and said "With the way you move and how observant you are, I would be that you will be a natural. Might as well go over the basics first though." She focused on the crowd again for a moment before saying "See the Rodian in the red jacket." as she pointed in his direction.
The rodian in question was easy to spot and I said "Yeah. What now?"
Katniss rolled her eyes and said "Now you follow him while I follow you both and see what you do. Once he spots you or I get bored the lessons will continue."
I gave an eye roll of my own and pushed off the wall as I moved after my target. I had barely been following him for thirty seconds before I got a notification that the Stealth skill had been created through my actions. A quick thought had the relevant information in my mind, huh so that was what 14 Gamer's Interface meant. Stealth plus Dexterity against the targets Perception plus Intelligence, the check made every second that you were within Perception x 10 feet of the target with the potential for environmental bonuses and penalties on both sides. A quick Perception check told me that my target only had 10 Perception and 10 Int, so the 1 point I gained from Stealth meant that so long as their was no environmental factors them I wouldn't be detected.
The next rank came came a mere ten seconds into my shadowing the Rodian, and the third a minute after that. With the second rank I suddenly found that my foot steps were quieter while the third had me ensuring that people were in between me and my quarry.
It was nearly three hours of following the unsuspecting Rodian through his daily chores, and another point of Perception, that Katniss finally intervened. I had been aware of her with a corner of my mind the whole time but keeping track of her had been difficult and I got the feeling that she hadn't really been trying super hard to hide from me, but her 15 ranks in Stealth and 16 Dexterity still matched my 20 Intelligence and 12 Perception.
"Well you started off a bit rough Alex but you picked it up damn fast. Faster than I thought you would at any rate. You aren't as skilled as I am but your natural talent helps a bit so good enough. Come on, I'll show you one of the pushers to track." she said as we broke off from the unsuspecting Rodian and headed off through the winding alleys and buildings of this little slice of Nar Shaddaa.
The man she pointed out as a Bothan that looked like he had seen better days. "That's one of them, follow him until he spots you or you find the stash house and then meet me back at the base."
Quest: Track the Pusher
-You've been asked to track a low level drug dealer back to his gangs stash house without being spotted.
Quest Reward:
-Increased Reputation with the Slashers
-Increased Reputation with Katniss Mathews
-Quest: Removing the Compeition
Katniss headed off to find her own target as I focused on the Bothan, trying to learn as much as I could.
Huh, well that was new. His character sheet was floating before me. Let's see, level 5 but nothing special stat wise. His Vitality was 17 while his Strength was 15 but all of his other stats were lower. His Intelligence was only 12 though, which was good for me. A large collection of general skills in the ten to twenty range but nothing particularly note worthy, and his Perception was only 12 as well. Well my Stealth check of 30 should be enough to comfortably beat his 24 for Detection. Wait, what's this.
Cat Like Senses Detected (racial trait): Bothan
-Thanks to their furry nature and elvish ears, Bothans naturally have cat like senses. Gain a 5 bonus to Perception.
Ugh, really Bastard? It got a chuckle out of me though, so it's not all bad. Even if it does slash my margin for Stealth down to 1 so pretty much any environmental penalty to me would let him spot me. Well nothing for it, and as I track him my Stealth should go up anyways and provide a bit more of a safety margin.
With that I settled in to wait, even if I ensured that I was constantly within 170 feet of him so that it counted as Stealth training.
It was a few minutes after the ding of eleven Stealth hit the the bothan left his spot at the mouth of a relatively small alley and started heading off down the promenade. I gave a sigh as I ceased to mess around with my HUD while people watching and started to follow, my next point of Perception should be coming soon and Gamer's Interface was only another twenty or so minutes away from being maxed again.
The bothan went about his business, never noticing his silent tale, and I was actually thinking that this might not be that complicated in the end when I my Perception finally dinged over to 13 and I suddenly took note of the two level 4 Trandoshan teens who were also tracking the Bothan. Both were rocking exceptional Strength and Vitality with 20's in both thanks largely to one of their own racial traits but their skills were generally relatively pitiful with only 5 ranks each in Unarmored, 10 in Guns, and 11 in their highest melee combat stats. Their Perception was also barely adequate even with their racial advantage in that area; especially when combined with their frankly pitiful Intelligence of 8. The only truly notable skill they both had was Stealth at 20 (25 after their "Like the Shadows" trait).
Descendant of Godzilla (racial trait): Trandoshan
-Thanks to their reptilian origins and inexplicable racial urge to emulate Godzilla, Strength and Vitality are doubled.
-And because Salamanders can regrow their tails they also heal at a rate of 1 Health every 10 seconds.
-Well snakes can see infrared so lets throw that on as well. Perception is set to 15 and must be increased naturally from there.
Well I might be capable for a human but this was a galaxy of millions, if not billions, of species and it was clear that Darwin was nicer to some of them than he was to humanity. No easy mode I guess.
"Congratulations, being slightly less of an idiot has earned you some Wisdom. Wisdom increased by 1."
It was pretty obvious what the lizards were planning on doing, waiting until the cat-elf got somewhere moderately secluded before killing him to take his drugs and money. I wonder if they would also eat his body? Would have to spend some time getting an Aliens skill at some point, I would need to know the answers to these great questions of the ages.
Normally I wouldn't care all that much if one thuggish NPC wanted to kill another drug pushing NPC but I needed the cat alive and unstressed so that I could track him back to his den, and that meant that the lizards needed to be removed from play. Normally that wouldn't be too hard, my stats and combat skills meant I would win the fight relatively easily, but doing it without causing enough of a commotion to alert the Bothan was the issue. Well lets see, they each had 200 Health. My vibroknives did 10 base damage each, so 25 with my Short Blade skill and then another 20 from Strength for 45 per strike per knife. Dual Wielding let me strike with both at once for 90 and then I could throw in Unarmed Combat as well for a third strike at the same time for another 35 damage, so 125 there assuming that they all struck true. 110 actually because of their Unarmored skill. My knives were fast, they could attack twice per second, so with that I could technically probably manage to drop one of them inside of a second.
Hmm, well they were separated by a good bit with one more far enough ahead that he can't see the other even out of the corner of his eye. Thank you Intelligence making it easy to figure the geometry of that in my head. And they were trailing the Bothan from opposite sides of the promenade so with they background noise it might be possible to take them out in isolation. At least if I don't get unlucky. Well it either works or it doesn't.
That last though firmly in mind, I started to make my way up behind the trailing lizard. I would say I was focusing as intently as I could be but the truth was that Stealth was a skill for me; I either could do something or I couldn't and concentrating on what I was doing was largely meaningless so long as I wasn't an utter and complete idiot. Either way, I was a mere eighteen inches behind the Trandoshan teen when my knives exited my Inventory and appeared in my hands. There was no war cry or the like, only my sudden attack with a kick to the back of the lizards right leg, two knife slices acrossed the throat, one stabbed into the chest where I judged the heart or some other vital organ likely to be, and the other slamming into the ear. That last was a critical hit and the lizard was dead before he could make a noise, the whole thing was over with in under a second and I had learned about a new game mechanic.
Turns out that if you weren't aware of an enemy then you only got Luck to your Dodge score, meaning that I was rocking an 80% chance to hit with every strike against the lizard.
The few people in the crowd who had noticed the altercation just gave me a slightly wider berth as they walked on, reminding me again that this was Nar Shaddaa and someone being knifed to death by a kid of the street wasn't worthy of any real note. I twitched towards looting the fallen body, knowing that if I left it unlooted then it would be stripped and gone before I could get back but no, the current quest was more important than the crap loot that this guy was probably carrying and this quest was time sensitive. With a sigh I moved on, making my way through the crowd and behind the remaining lizard.
As I did I was content with the 80 Experience that I had gained and the point of Wisdom that appeared after my decision to pass up the loot.
Once behind the remaining lizard I tried the same routine again, only for the leg kick to miss. Redirecting the knife strikes was easy so instead of the throat, heart, and head the first set of slashes opened the lizards guts wide while one continued down to slash where the femoral artery would be on a human and the other slammed into the spinal cord. The lizard was drawing in breath to try and scream, its health still positive if only barely, as it fell towards the ground but that was stopped by the femoral cutter coming up and slamming straight through the trachea. He died with nothing more than a gurgle and 80 more experience for me.
A quick glance around, and especially at the Bothan, showed that I hadn't been made and the mission was still on. Good.
It was almost midnight before the Bothan finally reached his stash house but nothing else untoward had occured and so after marking the multiple sentries watching the place unobtrusively I made my way back towards the Slashers base, content with my gains for the day as I had pushed my Stealth up to 13 and learned about a relatively important game mechanic that I had been ignorant of. I wonder how Katniss had made out today.
"Hey Traynor, Katniss inside?" I asked the man, on door guard duty again, as I approached the base.
"Yeah kid, came back a couple hours ago and hasn't been back out since." the guard replied.
As I was passing through the door though he continued "Fair warning though, she looked pissed so you might want to give her time to cool off; that lady has a temper."
"Thanks Traynor, good to know." I said before the door closed. Huh, Gather Information gained a point. Really do need to grind that up to a respectable rank soon.
In the main room music was blasting and a couple of dozen gang members and hangers on were partying. It was an opportunity to polish my social skills but I wasn't interested at the moment, I'm sure that these things had to be an almost daily occurrence given what I knew about street gangs.
Instead I made my way past one of the gang members who was guarding the door deeper into the base, with a nod he stepped aside and let me pass. Was probably there to make sure that the non members present at the party didn't try and go where they weren't allowed.
A glance in Psykes suite showed that the man was still up, messing around with tools and electronics of some kind. "Hey Psykes, what yah doing?" I asked as I entered, looking closer at the work bench but being unable to make heads or tails of what was before me.
"Building an automated lock picker for one of the boys. Interested?" the tech genius asked.
"Sure, don't really know anything about hardware but I'm interested in learning." I said, focusing more intently on the project.
"Hah, if you pick this up anywhere near as fast as you did using a computer then you will be competent before I'm done with this piece." he said before starting to explain what he was doing and answering the many questions that I asked.
As the Electronics ranks rapidly spun upwards though those questions got significantly more advanced. At first my questions were along the lines of "What's a screw driver?" but within the hour they had reached the point of "So if we overclock the GPU like that then we would have to liquid cool the system because fans can't handle the heat, which would mean that we need the larger power supply as pumping liquid takes more energy, right?" and by the time Psykes was done with his lock picker (which actually used the precise manipulation of magnetic fields to interact with the internal mechanisms of a lock and then directly affect the circuitry to make a connection so the inbuilt computer could crack the door code or, in the case of doors with physical locks, actually physically manipulate the locks internal parts to open it) we were discussing how one went about forging their own custom made chip sets as my skill dinged over to 15.
Training was so bullshit.
With his project done Psykes yawned and said "Well I'm beat so night Savant, I need my beauty sleep." I laughed at the comment on how fast I picked up yet another skill but headed out.
The party was winding down when I glanced in but Katniss still wasn't present so I shrugged and headed towards the dojo for a bit more combat training. I had a Thrown Weapons skill that hadn't been trained at all, meaning it would only take a few hours to get it up to decent standards. First though I had the droid I was going to use for target practice beat me almost to death as that was the only way to increase my Unarmored skill, only five more beatings to go before I got the next rank in that. With that out of the way I had the droid stand there and just started throwing the knives I had taken off the wall at it, having it bring them back to me once I was out.
It was slower going than either training with a Blaster or with melee combat thanks to my inability to just throw weapons constantly but I had still pushed the skill up to 12 by the time my Health had fully recovered from my beating and I got another.
With that I went off to bed, it was past 4 AM and I did have to at least pretend to sleep some times.
Once in bed I pulled out the PDA that I had looted from my twi'lek attacker and started to mess with it again. With my newly acquired skill in Electronics it was child's play to bypass the initial security (essentially just a matter of knowing how to force the PDA into "safe mode" when it was booting up) and from there my Computer Use skill came to the fore. Hacking my way through the "security" was the work of bare minutes; I mean it was less complicated than convincing a computer running day 1 Windows XP to create an extra admin account, and from there stripping off the security on the Twi'Lek's (his name was Gisvala Mogpelo incidentally) account.
His personal files and the like weren't particularly interesting but I didn't care, the real prize was his access to some of the semi public data archives and news feeds (semi-public because this was Nar Shaddaa and nothing was really free so you had to pay).
The first thing that I did was look at the current date as I had yet to have an opportunity to find out the current year and needed to know if their was a Clone War immediately over the horizon or the like. Well good news, the war in question had ended seven years before. But it wasn't the Clone Wars, I was in the year 7 After Ruusan. Otherwise known as the time when the Sith had supposedly been reduced to just Darth Bane and the very start of the Golden Age of the Republic.
In truth a rapid read through various archived news stories and history files painted a somewhat different picture. This was a galaxy where, for nearly a thousand years, the Republic had been in a steady state of war with numerous polities and factions that fell under the broad "Sith" banner, where the Republic had been pushed back to the point that the HoloNet wasn't even maintained, where there had not been a non Jedi Supreme Chancellor of the Republic in four hundred years, and where Jedi Masters had made themselves into hereditary feudal lords over whole swaths of the "Republic" as the only means of withstanding the Sith.
This wasn't a time like the movies, or even like most of the games and books, were set. The battle of Ruusan saw more Jedi dead in it then the entire order of the Clone War's era had members. There were almost two hundred million acknowledge Jedi Masters, and almost twenty billion total "Jedi", spread acrossed the galaxy before that battle. Over a quarter of them, and over 80% of the Masters, died on Ruusan along with the vast majority of the Sith. As a result of the loss of political power and the supposed end of the Sith the Republic began to claw back its power from the Jedi in what would become known as the Ruusan Reformation.
The Army of Light was officially disbanded as the Sith were officially no more and the Jedi Lords (with a very small number of exceptions) officially renounced that title and their temporal power. Reading between the lines and having a functioning brain it was easy to tell that things were more complex. The Sith had been around as an active, major, power for nigh on a thousand years in their current incarnation and something like 95% of their force users ending up dead wasn't going to make that power just disappear overnight. Nor did the infrastructure for a galaxy spanning war who's latest (and last) "hot" phase had lasted thirty years. The Army of Light was still in the process of being dismantled and the Jedi Lords had officially stepped down but these weren't the Jedi of common knowledge back on my birth planet.
These were Jedi Lords far more in the vein of Revan than the vein of Yoda. They had directly ruled over entire star systems for generations fighting an ongoing war against others and building the military infrastructure to win. They weren't "dark" but they were still pragmatic, ruthless, bastards who would show no real mercy to their enemies and so released from their responsibilities to govern and with the army that they had built being dismantled they grabbed what they could and began what would probably have been called the Sith Purge if it ever made it into any history books. Hunting down and killing any Sith, destroying their strong holds, burning their knowledge, and generally trying do everything up to and including salt the earth to ensure that they never returned.
That political situation firmly ended any tentative thoughts I had on attempting to reach and join a Jedi temple. Maybe pre Ruusan when the Jedi Lords were still the power but not now when the Yoda Jedi (as I was calling them in my head) were the ones in charge and handling training new Jedi while the former Lords were, by and large, in effective exile as they destroyed their enemies. Nope, I was good staying where I was until I had a more stable power base and was secure in my current position. The greater galaxy could wait a while for now.
With that thought I returned the datapad to my inventory and went to sleep for a few hours.
I snapped to full wakefulness in the space of a single heart beat as someone shook my sleeping body. A glance showed that it was Katniss, not that it was necessary as she started to speak as soon as she saw me open my eyes.
"Did you manage it Alex? Did you find the stash house?"
"Good morning Katniss, how are you doing this morning? I'm well despite being woken up by a demanding women at" I glanced at the wall clock "six in the morning." was my sarcastic response as I rolled out of bed.
The teen flushed a bit and said "Sorry but I'm still pissed at you. Psykes told me that you got back around midnight and you never came and told me how things went, I'm assuming you made progress if you didn't come back until that late."
As I stretched and got dressed I said "Yeah, managed to track the bothan back to the stash house. Had to take out two Trandoshan teens that were looking to mug him though. Not too bad but it was a little tricky doing it without the mark noticing the confrontation. The stash is actually only about twenty minutes from here by a direct route, but it has eyes on it. Not sure if they are sentries or spies for other factions but I spotted three watchers so I didn't stick around too long, figured the risk of me being detected was a bit too high at the time."
Katniss smiled widely and said "Good, finally. Meet me at the entrance in half an hour, I have to prepare and then you can show me the place so we can gather some more detailed intel."
Quest Completed: Track the Pusher
Quest: Removing the Competition
-Knock over the stash house and remove the dealers from the game permanently.
Quest Reward:
-Increased Reputation with the Slashers
-Increased Reputation with Katniss Mathews
-Increased Reputation with Hugo Draxx
-4,000 Credits
-Quest: Proxies Won't Protect You
"Fine with me." I said before she left to prepare. With nothing much to do I headed out to the main room to wait for her, listening as unobtrusively as possible to the conversations of the few gang members awake at this hour as I spun my HUD around to finish grinding up my Gamer's Interface.
It wasn't anything too interesting, mostly just idly gossip about various gang members and others in the area but it was still enough to push Gather Information up to 6 before Katniss entered the room dressed far differently than I had ever seen her before.
Gone was the black "leather" pants and long sleeved blue shirt and instead she was wearing a matte black full body suit of armor with a helmet in her hand. At her waist was holstered both a pistol and knife while across her back was a larger weapon of some description. She looked ready for battle and that initial impression was only confirmed when I focused my Perception skill on her gear.
Customized Sith Infiltration Armor (medium armor)
Created and popularized by Sith Assassin's over the past thousand years of the New Sith Wars, this latest generation of the infamous Sith Infiltration Armored Battle Suit is the synthesis of nearly two thousand years of refinement. Made of an exotic alloy it provides exceptional protection without the weight of more common armor materials, allowing the user a full range of motion. Limited power assist features actually increase most users Strength and agility while the inbuilt medical systems allow the wearer to rapidly heal from most minor to moderate injuries.
The sensor systems are likewise top tier but what truly made this armor feared was its holistic cloaking system that used a lacing of countless billions of microscopic stygium crystals to conceal the wearer from virtually all sensor systems even in the heat of combat while sound dampening and cancellation technology rendered acoustic detection virtually impossible. The final touch was the nanite bonding layer on the gloves and boots that could, when activated, allow the user to stick to solid objects. Few people expected the assassin that was walking on the ceiling above their heads.
Damage Reduction: 40
Special Features:
-Immunity to virtually all airborne and contact poisons and agents.
-Users Strength and Dexterity are set to 20
-Users Perception gains a 10 bonus
-Users Stealth gains a 50 bonus
-User regains health at a rate of 1 point per second
-User's stamina regeneration is doubled
I let out a whistle and said "Nice gear, I need to get me some of that. How much did it set you back?"
Katniss laughed as she said "Thanks, and more than you can afford right now even if you could find a set for sale. Draxx got this for me as a birthday present last year. I'm not supposed to know but it set him back almost two hundred thousand credits, it's more than paid for its self though. Well come on, work time." before handing me a communicator (it looked like a Bluetooth head set for a cellphone) and shimmering out of existence as she activated her armors cloaking features.
As I put on the comlink I heard her voice come over it loud and clear "Lead the way."
It was a fairly easy walk back to the stash house and once I indicated the appropriate building Katniss's voice rumbled in my ear "Thanks. I'll scout the inside, you watch the outside and see what you can learn. I would bring you with me but they would almost certainly detect you. Be back in a bit."
I settled in the surveil the house and its own watchers, however long it would be.
Once I had them marked, there were still only three, I decided to sneak up on one of them (a human women). It took a bit of acrobatics skill to reach her perch but I managed it and settled in to listen to any conversations that she might have.
The first activity came about ten minutes later when she called in a report of no suspicious activity over her com. Twenty minutes later she did the same thing again. In between she mostly just grumbled about how she was bored out of her mind but it was an easy and free way to get her needed fix. Her stats were barely worthwhile despite her five levels. The only thing of note was something I had never seen before
Drugged (status):
-This individual is under the influence of drugs.
-Can't feel pain.
-40 additional health
-40 additional stamina
-5 Strength and Dexterity
-When this status condition ends all stats are reduced by 2 points for 1 day, health is halved for the same period, and stamina regeneration is reduced to 1 point per minute for the same period.
In the three hours of observation that I completed before Katniss contacted me again I got my Stealth all the way up to 15 along with pushing my Perception up to the same rank. On the fifteenth point of Perception a new feature became available on my HUD, a clock that listed the exact time and date along with an alarm clock and the ability to set reminders. Very nice.
We made our way back to the base and once inside Katniss took off her helmet and began to speak "I got a good bit of info on our targets but I couldn't get everything I wanted. Someone was always in the office with their communications terminal, but I did manage to figure out that all of their pushers and members hole up together for the night. Some Bothan clan thing or other. I also got their com codes. The downside is that they plan on relocating to another stash house tomorrow so if we don't move before then then we will have to track them down again.
What I figure is that we move tonight, get Psykes to redirect the comm's for the outside sentries and then take them down before moving inside. Then I start taking down anyone who is still awake and active while you start taking out the sleepers. Worst case, if they wake before you can kill them all then they will be disoriented, unarmored, and lacking any significant weapons. Hell, they might even be sober and going through withdrawal but I kinda doubt that. Either way you should probably be able to take them. The on duty guards are probably beyond you though, they were wearing decent heavy Army of Light surplus armor and were equipped with heavy blaster carbines. With my armor I can go toe to toe with any one or two of them with minimal risk if they notice me but you will almost certainly be slaughtered before you could do much."
I gave a nod of my own head and said "Sounds like a workable plan to me. Let's go and get Psykes and refine it into something that is more than just the bare bones though. And then we should sleep, you don't want to be carrying out an assault at less than your best."
It took a good few hours of work but the three of us hashed out a plan, helped greatly by the com codes that Katniss had stolen and provided to Psykes. With them he was able to hack into the targets com network and, in addition to providing us real time location data on all of them, deceive their biomonitors so that they would never show anything out of the ordinary along with being able to record enough content to fake up credible chatter when it was time for the assault; sowing confusion in their ranks.
I picked up a helmet from the armory and Psykes, with a bit of help from Blaze, managed to modify it well enough to fit comfortably so I could receive be part of the tac net. It was crude by military standards but well above par for a street gang. With our plans made Katniss and Psykes went to bed while I pretended to do the same, instead spending my time doing research on the 'net - incidentally called the Matrix for some reason.
That study resulted in History, Exobiology, and Exopsychology skills being created and brought up to rank 10 before it was time to "wake up" and start the mission.
Katniss and I made our way back to the stash house while Psykes was doing his thing in the land of data and bytes. The sentries highlighted themselves on our HUD's as our technical maestro got to work, there were four of them. Three were easily spotted while the fourth was actually on the "roof" of one of the buildings a ways above us. Kat moved on him first, scaling the wall like she was spider-women, while I went for the druggy I had spied on earlier in the day as her balcony meant that she was only in the sight line of Kat's target.
Once she said "Target down" over the com I flowed up and over the balcony, upping my Acrobatics to 11, before drawing my knives and performing the back leg kick/throat slash combo that I had used so effectively on the lizards the day before. With her mere 160 Health and 2 Unarmored skill she had no real chance and died without ever realizing that she was under attack. I sent my own report of 'Target down" as I quickly stripped her body of valuables, creating the skill Looting and finding fifty credits, a crappy blaster, basic vibroknife, datapad, and several doses of drugs. All of it went into my inventory as I mused on the 100 Experience I got for the "fight".
From there Katniss moved up on the guard closest to the door as he was in armor and she had far better gear than I. Once she was in place and ready to strike I made my way behind the final sentry on a stoop across the promenade from the door guard. "On mark we strike. 3...2...1...Mark" came over the comlink once I was in position. With "Mark" I struck hard and fast but cursed my luck as two of my five attacks missed and the man survived long enough to scream out and try to spin towards me as his hand went to the blaster at his waist. Before he touched it he was dead as I stepped in and slashed his femoral, slammed a knife into his liver, followed the femoral slash up with a strike to the brachial artery in his upper right arm, and slammed the knife that had eviscerated his liver into his heart for good measure. The man died before he could get a return strike off or trigger an alarm of some kind but if Kat hadn't taken her target out first then he would have certainly noticed the altercation. Oh well, it was another 120 XP and some sundry goods for me along with another rank in Looting.
With that done I made my way over to where Katniss was and as I got in position Psykes voice came over the com's "Good, that's the outside sentries down. The interior has two on a roving patrol in sector one. Target Alpha is running a com system that was standard on AoL heavy armor, so that's Kat's target. Beta is using low tier civilian equipment so he's your target Alex. They should be highlighted on your HUD's now. Good luck."
We waited until both were positioned as well as we could hope, separated and some distance away from the entrance door, before Kat opened it courtesy of the codes she had stolen earlier in the day and we both sped inside. Her along the wall and me, sadly, still bound by gravity and along the floor. We both reached our targets at about the same time and struck near simultaneously. Mine was just coming through the door from the next room when I sprung my attack, smashing him into the frame as my knives slashed into his vital points repeatedly. He dropped fast thanks to the three critical hits I scored but Kat wasn't so fortunate and I heard a blaster fire even as I noted the 80 XP and level up that my kill had gained me.
With that my knives disappeared into my inventory only to be replaced my dual blasters and I dropped stealth in favor of speed even as I saw Kat's target go down. I called over the com as I bounded up the stairs, barely even touching them thanks to Acrobatics, "Take sector 3 and secure the com room and office. Once that's done come back me up, I'll be securing up stairs."
That wasn't the plan but we hadn't really envisioned being forced to go hot this early and we needed those rooms secure if we wanted this op to be worthwhile; and Kat was closer. As I popped up the stair well I parkoured off of two walls and the ceiling, pushing Acrobatics to 12, before unloading my blasters on the armored guard as I hit the floor on my feet. In the two seconds I was airborne my blasters spat burning death out six times and five bolts struck true; including all 4 of my DL-40's shots. My target might have been in heavy armor that slashed fifty points off each attack but I had 15 ranks in Guns and 20 Dexterity, my heavy blaster was hitting for 115 points before reduction and my regular blaster for 85. The sentry died before he even knew what hit him, giving me 100 XP, and I was flying in to the first door on my right as I moved down the hall way.
A half dozen Bothans had been bunking in here and were just now waking thanks to the blaster fire but they were disoriented, unarmored, and really not all that tough even if they had been prepared. My blasters spat fiery death, practically incinerating three of the bodies, and I gained another 480 XP as their souls moved on. With that taken care of I moved back out of the room only to jerk back in rapidly as a blaster bolt missed me by inches. The other two armored guards were at the end of the corridor and had me pinned down.
I could safely put out enough suppressing fire to keep them honest but that was about all. Thankfully I head my salvation over the com "I've finished down here and am on my way up. SitRep Alex."
"Two guards down the hall to your left as you come up the stairs, they are focused on keeping me pinned in the bunk room. Recommend that you ignore the stairs and go up the wall and across the ceiling to get behind them so you can afford stray bolts. Let me know when you are in position and I will stop my suppressing fire as you drop on them, I'll roll out and support you after giving them a half second or so to reorient on you."
A terse "Copy" was all I heard before the "Ready" came thirty eight seconds later, an eternity in a firefight. I immediately stopped my suppressing fire, waited five heart beats for the fire to redirect and then rolled out into the hall. One guard was down with Kat's Vibrosword sticking through the top of his head, she must have wanted its armor penetration abilities, while the other was turning to unload on her point blank with his blaster carbine. Not on my watch, my blasters spat and he dropped before he could fire as I got another 120 XP.
With that done we rapidly cleared the rest of the complex, finding no more living enemies, before we got to work. My Looting skill got a work out and reached rank 10 before we were done.
Psykes showed up in an air van about twenty minutes after we had the place secured and started raiding their computer files as Kat and I loaded up the loot. In addition to a decent haul of straight creds (5,000) that was probably the days take there was a good haul of poor quality (if street ready) drugs and a handful of other valuable equipment (like some of the armor and weapons, even if a fair bit was damaged thanks to our conflict). All told Kat said the market price for our haul was around 25K credits but that it's value to us was probably around 12K credits. Split three ways that was 4K each, not too bad.
As we were moving our loot I decided to level up.
"Congratulations, you have gained a level and are now level 4. Your attribute cap is now 40 while your skill cap has been raised to 20. Select your desired level up trait."
The traits I saw were mostly the same as before but there were a few new ones. The one I was going to pick was easy to spot though.
Assassinate (trait): Requires 15 Stealth
-When you strike a target unaware of your presence you may add your ranks in Stealth to your damage for 1 second.
I wondered if Katniss had that trait and as I worked I decided to focus my Perception on her and see. Yep, Assassinate, Mighty Slash, and Precise Slash were her traits. Precise Slash let her add her Perception to damage with a single bladed weapon if she did nothing but study her target for 3 seconds before striking while Mighty Slash let her sub Strength for Luck as the governing attribute for critical hits.
As we all entered the air van and flew back to the Slasher base Katniss removed her helmet and said "Yes, finally. These worms have been annoying me for weeks now. I'm so glad to have them removed, it will stop Draxx from sending me out to assassinate the worthless pushers. Well at least until some other fools try and sell in Slasher territory without permission but whatever, it is done with. Profitable too."
I gave a nod and said "Indeed, with it done I think I'm going to take a week or so to just settle in. Besides I have a few skills that are getting a bit rusty and could use some work."
With that the van flew into the garage and I got a Quest Complete: Removing the Competition message as we landed.
Fencing the goods was easy as we just dumped them on Ryback, the Rodian in charge of the gangs fencing operations, and pocked four thousand credits each when all was said and done.
After we got our money Katniss said "That was bracing but I need a shower and some sleep, see yah. And good job today Alex, you are a lot easier to work with than Everett ever is."
Psykes also spoke up "See yah later Kat, I'm going to start going through all of the data I pulled from their systems and see what juicy info I can find. Who knows, might have another juicy job for you two later."
"It was fun, but I have some studying to do. Catch you both later." I said as we all parted ways, me heading out of the base to learn against the wall under the watchful eyes of the two door guards and people watch.
I had leveled up and my attribute scores were only half of their current maximums but raising them was going to be difficult, I would have to find better exercises for them if I wanted to make any kind of speedy progress. Fortunately I already had some for one of those stats.
Intelligence only gained one skill XP with simple addition or subtraction but twenty times as much with high end calculus equations and similarly advanced math problems. Much better than the simple addition but still five days of constant calculus problems to gain even a point. I had a possible solution though and pulled out my datapad and brought up the highest end math tutorials that I could find on the Matrix. One glance told me that while I could puzzle out the problems with a lot of time and effort, it wouldn't be worth it unless this thing gave thousands of times more experience than addition or subtraction and so I went down one level. Nope it was still too involved, I wanted to find the most advanced math that I could perform rapidly in my head as one of the advantages of Intelligence training was that it did not have the physical bottlenecks that many other skills did.
Eventually I found something, basically the most basic math explaining the theoretical underpinnings of gravity manipulation. The science was way over my current level, need to get a Physics skill, but I could manage the math in my head and when I solved the first problem it gave me 200 skill XP. Given that I could perform about four of those equations per second it would only take me about 4 hours to get my next point, and within a week I should have hit 25.
With that I moved onto solving that lack of science skills problem via going on into the data archives and pulling up a basic physics tutorial. When I finished reading it I got a message notifying me that the Physics skill had been created. The same practice shortly there after resulted in Chemistry, Biology, and Medicine skills being created as well.
Advancing those skills was relatively simple as it appeared that I had found the equivalent of skill books. That I give myself the equivalent of a college level understanding of those fields (and I assume others) by just reading texts while simultaneously doing absurdly complex math problems in my head, listening to the idle gossip of the two door guards, and paying attention to my surroundings astounded me but I just chalked it up to the Gamer's Mind. I was tempted to start hopping around on one hand while doing this but the relatively minuscule gains to Strength, Dexterity, and Acrobatics wouldn't be worth the questions that it would raise with others. My abilities were already causing people to take notice of me.
Your Wisdom has increased by 1, you almost have common sense now.
By the time I went back inside at around dinner time I had gained two points of Intelligence, a rank of Perception, and twenty ranks in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Medicine. So unfair, but I wasn't going to complain.
As I put my pad away and stood up I decided to check out some of the loot I had stuffed in my inventory. The weapons were crap, if probably worth a few hundred credits total, as were the electronics. The 352 credits were 352 credits but then we came to the drugs. Those were a bit odd as it wasn't Perception that told me what they did but Medicine, huh good thing I decided to train that up.
And what was, wait did they really do that? I didn't care about the high and the like, odds are it wouldn't even work on me anyways, and even the stat boots weren't that special. No, what interested me was the negative consequences of taking some of the drugs. One of these dropped Vitality by 10 points until it wore off while another was a medical paralytic that dropped your Strength and Dexterity by 15 points each for an hour.
It couldn't be that easy, but I had to test this. I quickly headed back into the base and dumped off my worthless vendor trash on Ryback before dropping most of the rest of my inventory into the chest at the foot of my bunk and heading to the dojo.
Once inside I pulled out the slap pack for Slab, the medical paralytic, and smacked it onto my forearm. The effects were immediate and I got a notification about the status effects that I was under and the duration (an hour). Then I did a handstand leaning against the wall and started doing vertical pushups at the same time.
Both my strength and dexterity began to rapidly shoot back up. In under 50 minutes my Strength and Dexterity had both increased back up to 10 and I decided to go sleep for an hour to see if it would clear up the drugs.
When I awoke I immediately checked my character screen and the Strength: 25 and Dexterity: 25 that stared back at me caused me to grin hugely and I headed back to the dojo, only to stop on the way and chance my mind. Pushing up my stats would still take a while as even with Slab it would be a day or so of constant work to reach 30 again; and that assumed I had 26 more doses of Slab instead of the three I actually had. No, now that I knew it was possible I would spend a little time planning things out and figure out how to increase my stats as efficiently as possible.
For now I would do what I had planned on doing before I found out about the body improving effects of hard core drug abuse. I refilled my Inventory and headed out.
I needed to fix one of my true weaknesses, my relative lack of social skills and their incredibly low ranks. So I headed out, mingling with the crowds on the promenade as I made my way to the Bazaar. There I bought and immediately resold trinkets for a few credits at a time to grind up Barter, gossiped with everyone to improve my Gather Information skill, and alternated between trying to Intimidate the shoppers into doing truly trivial things for me and trying to use my newly created Diplomacy to sweet talk others into equally trivial task. I decided to end the days proceedings when a human male who looked like he had just crawled out of a gutter tried to rob a Twi'lex women at knife point; only to find that I had incinerated his head off of his body via heavy blaster bolt from twenty feet away; gaining 40 XP, another rank of Looting and 10 credits.
My day of social grinding had gotten Charisma up to 13, Gather Information up to 14, Barter up to 12, Intimidate up to 13, and Diplomacy up to 12 and brought my social skills as a whole up to the "acceptable", if not particularly exceptional, level.
Thanks to the beggar I had gotten enough XP for my 5th level but I didn't really know of any traits that I truly wanted at the moment and the full heal effect might come in useful so I decided to save it for now.
Once back at the base I talked with several of the other Slashers for a bit, getting congrats on the assault, but nothing truly noteworthy came up so I headed to my bunk and pulled out my datapad. I had some research and studying to do if plan "Drugs are Power" was to really work because while my Medicine skill (combined with my Chemistry and Biology skills) was telling me what kinds of compounds I needed to do what I wanted it was silent on how to actually make the final product.
So I decided to see if Gamer logic was still in play and started looking up how to and do it yourself guides for making all kinds of things. With the competition of a text on making a crude table I got a notification that the Crafting skill had been created. A quick look at my sheet and I grinned broadly.
Crafting (skill): 1
This skill allows you, in conjunction with your other skills, to create items.
-Higher ranks allow the use of more advanced crafting tools.
-This skill acts as a limiter on the other skill(s) involved in crafting an item as your effective rank, for crafting purposes, in the other skill(s) can't exceed your rank in the Crafting skill.
Other crafting related texts were rapidly devoured, advancing in complexity from basic wood working all the way up to the use of molecular furnaces and best practices when building star ships.
In truth I sat in that bed reading, while doing absurdly complex math in my head, for over forty straight hours. I was left alone for most of the first day, Katniss looked in but when she saw me engrossed in my pad she just shrugged and left, but the second got me a lot of second glances, a visit from Psykes (where he just shook his head and left), and then Katniss plopping down on my bed and saying "What are you doing Alex? You haven't left this bed in more than a day. Are you alright?"
I gave a sigh and put my pad down, my social skills were telling me that blowing off my closest ally probably wasn't a good idea, and said "I'm fine, been studying some really interesting stuff. "
She looked slightly interested as she said "Oh, what?"
"Well the use of advanced, precise, gravity manipulation to replicate the capabilities of a molecular furnace so that you can form items inside a subspace bubble; at least at the moment." I said.
The teen looked at me blankly and said "Huh? I understood every single discrete word you said but still have absolutely no idea what you meant."
I gave a slight sigh before saying "The unique enviroment found in subspace can produce some truly extraordinary types of physical matter but the extraordinarily high natural energy levels in that enviroment make the continued existence of anything lacking the appropriate shielding extremely unlikely. The shielding technology is not compatible with the technology required to make a molecular furnace, so the solution that came up was to use incredibly precise artificial gravity controls and hyperpsace scanners to manipulate the matter inside the subspace bubble on a molecular scale from real space. The end result is the ability to artificially produce, and shape, some materials that simply can't naturally occur in the real world."
"Ok... I kinda understood that, but why are you studying something like that. I mean what is the use? Hell, what is that used for by anyone." Katniss said, still clearly confused and wondering when the conversation had gotten so weird.
"Well it's used to make some of the materials critical to the construction of hypermatter reactors for one; but the costs are so absurdly high that pretty much nothing else can justify them. And I'm studying because I find construction in all of its forms to be incredibly interesting. I like to take the odd day or two of downtime to just study whatever takes my fancy, even if it has no immediate practical value." I replied.
Katniss gave a huff and said "Well then I'll leave you to it." as she got up to leave.
"Hey Katniss" she turned back as I called out "I'll be done with this by dinner time anyways, so want to have a spar then."
She gave a smile and said "Sure, see you there."
With that done I got back to my reading, I really was close to being done for now. Mostly because I had pretty much exhausted the texts on advanced crafting that I could find for now and while lower end texts would still provide their XP I would need to read thousands of them to gain as much as a single advanced text would give me.
In truth I probably didn't need to push Crafting up to 20 so fast but I could already tell that it was going to become an incredibly useful tool, especially if my body ever did actually grow up. Increased Strength might have visibly improved my musculature, at least until a point, but it hadn't made me any larger. If I started growing in size until adult hood them I would end up needing numerous sets of gear over the years and that would probably be a pain, at least unless I could craft it myself. My physical abilities were just too far outside the norm for standard gear to be anything close to ideal for me.
When my Intelligence ranked up to 24 (a few minutes after my Crafting had hit 30) I sighed and put my pad away before heading out to find Katniss for our sparring match.
She was in the cantina with Psykes when I found her and so I grabbed a plate before sitting down with them.
"So Kat tells me that you are studying very cutting edge construction techniques, any reason?" Psykes said as I sat down.
I gave a shrug before taking a bite of my meal, speaking once I had finished my bite "Boredom, interest. You saw me Psykes, you taught me the hardware and software ends of electronics in a few hours each. Do you really think that I learn most anything else that much slower?"
Katniss interrupted before Psykes could say anything "Wait, you mean that you actually really understood what you were reading?"
Another shrug and I spoke "Well yeah, not much point in reading it if I didn't. Learning stuff just comes really easy to me. Ask Psykes."
She turned to look at the older man who nodded his own head and said "Yeah, I saw it with my own eyes. He went from barely being able to turn on a datapad to being able to build a full terminal from loose parts in about three hours. And when I showed him how to use a computer he went from the most basic commands to coding his own custom programs in a similar period of time. The kids a savant of some kind, and to an absurd degree."
Kat turned back to me and said "That is such bullshit Alex. So unfair." in a huff.
I gave another shrug and said "It's just the way I am. If you don't like it then take it up with whatever deity decided that things should be this way."
"So unfair." she huffed again, crossing her arms and blowing a strand of hair that had fallen across her face out of the way at the same time.
I laughed and finished my meal after a simple "Yup."
Once dinner was done we headed to the dojo to spar, neither of us all that interested in the audience that would have shown up if we had fought in the main room again. With slight bows to one another we got started..
She was good but, unlike last time, I was now as technically skilled, and I had even more Strength and Dexterity than in that last match. In truth there was no real contest, I would win this match and we both recognized that within the first exchange so instead of a true fight it became more of a relaxing dance that slowly ramped up in speed and intensity.
Katniss kept pushing things just a little harder as I focused mostly on defense and didn't pressure her when she retreated to catch her breath. After almost thirty minutes though she was clearly getting exhausted and so I went on the offense. The fight was over within a handful of seconds as I ceased to really pull my punches, even if I wasn't going for potentially lethal strikes, and I had her pinned in short order.
"Good match. Yield?" I asked.
"I yield. Ugh you are strong. Stupid absurd strength and learning curve. Are you an escaped lab experiment or something?" she asked with a chuckl as she got back to her feet.
"Not to my knowledge, but then I know virtually nothing about my past so. Who knows?" I said, backflipping to my feet as well.
"What do you mean? How don't you know your past?" Katniss interrogated.
"I have no clue where this body was conceived or born, who it's genetic donors were, or indeed anything about its past. My earliest memories are of the back alleys of this degenerate hell hole. I plan on looking into it eventually but for now I have other things to focus on." I replied.
She gave a quiet "Oh." and looked like she had no idea what to say so I gave her an out "Don't worry about it, good match by the way but you should probably see the medical droid. I think that I might have broken your arm in that last exchange." I knew that I hadn't but it was still bruised and probably hurt like a bitch.
She gave a nod and left, saying "See yah later Alex."
I, in turn, made my way off to the gangs drug processing plant. It was a run of the mill commercial pharmaceutical plant that used nanotech to arrange various molecules how the user desired. It was the same basic technology behind the machine that had made the clothes I was wearing now but specialized for chemical production. A glance with Perception told me that it counted as a rank 30 Medicine Crafting tool and a rank 15 Chemistry crafting tool.
A few checks showed that it had the required feed stock for my design and so I got to work, only for a popup to occur as the world around me froze much like it did on leveling up.
Crafting
Crafting Tool Quality: 30 (Medicine)
Crafting (skill): 20
Medicine (skill): 20
Total crafting points: 70.
Maximum point investment in each area: 40
Please select the attributes of your desired creation:
Huh, did not expect that. Well it appeared that the quality of my tools acted as a limiter on how capable I could make something. Let's see.
Strength damage: 24 points.
Dexterity damage: 24 points.
Vitality damage: 19 points
I had three points left over to spend so I put them into increasing the duration from 10 minutes to 40 minutes.
Please enter the items desired Name:
Well that was easy. Power Juice mk.1
Once I was done the world unfroze and my body got to work largely on autopilot. I could have broke off the crafting at any time but if I didn't my body would just go through the motions until the item was completed. In this case until I had 20 doses of Power Juice.
Drug production was relatively fast, I entered the molecular structure of my desired drug into the machine and it spit out the finished product a few minutes later.
My drugs went straight into my inventory and then I headed out. I really didn't want any of the Slashers seeing this experiment so I headed back to my tutorial area using all of my Stealth skill and Perception to ensure that I wasn't followed.
Once there I, none of the rats were back yet, I moved a bit into the alley network and dosed myself with Power Juice mk. 1. Anyone else would have considered it an absurdly lethal poison and I collapsed as my new found strength was not enough to carry all that was in my inventory so I emptied it out, with the exception of my datapad, and got back to work.
First was the running. Three hours, and three doses of Power Juice, had me back up to 10 Vitality. Then I got to work with the hand stands and hand walking, once my Dexterity was back up enough for me to manage it was Strength's turn. Five Strength had me good enough to again do vertical push ups. From there is was another six hours until I was facing diminishing returns.
An hours sleep cleared the drug from my system and a glance at my character sheet showed the outcome.
Strength: 35
Dexterity: 35
Vitality: 30
Very nice, I would need to whip up some mk. 2 Power Juice so that I could push them all up to 40. But that could wait, I had some other crafting experiments to try.
Power Juice mk. 2 was really a collection of three separate drugs, one for each individual attribute, as my current skill levels weren't really sufficient to make a single drug that combined all of the effects at the potency that I desired but that was alright. By noon of the next day I had all of the physical attributes up to the current cap of 40 but could already foresee future problems.
My physical abilities before my druggie phase were already enough to cause those I was around to raise eyebrows and even then I doubted that anyone besides Katniss even began to suspect how strong I really was but my current Strength was far beyond just eyebrow raising. I could easily life 400 kilograms, or 880 pounds, despite being a seven year old kid. And that wasn't "straining to move it" strength or the like, that was my casual strength. If I took some of the traits that I had seen, like the one that would double my carrying capacity, then that would be even more extreme.
I would have to be careful to watch my Strength around others. Couldn't have them doing anything rash after all.
In addition, I was already pushing the limits of what anything less than extremely specialized equipment could produce. The maximum crafting point investment you could make in a single category was your relevant Skill plus Crafting, limited to 1.5 times the quality of the tool you were using and the Slashers drug lab was already a fairly high end commercial model. Getting access to something better would take a significant investment of time and resources.
That was annoying but it was what it was. I was already pushing human racial stat maximums and would hit those once I leveled up. I suspect that my Gamer's Body will let me exceed those nominal maximums but we will see in time. Of bigger relevance was the fact that making drugs to improve my mental abilities wasn't possible, more precisely my Gamer's Mind provided me with total immunity to all debilitating mind effecting and psychological status conditions and effects. I could take a drug to make me stupider but my body would just ignore the Intelligence penalty.
I also had the issue that I couldn't make drugs to penalize skills. At least not directly, I could make ones that would provide a penalty on skill checks but they didn't reduce the skill directly so that wouldn't help with training.
I did have a partial solution for the skill issue though. A visit to the armory let me use Blaze's workbench to do some non medical crafting.
Crafting
Crafting Tool Quality: 30 (Weapons)
Crafting (skill): 20
Short Blades (skill): 15
Total crafting points: 65.
Maximum point investment in each area: 35
I was going to make myself a set of training knives with the highest attack speed and lowest amount of damage that I could manage but I ran into a slight hitch. Attack Speed couldn't be directly improved, it was a function of the weapon type. All Short Blades had a base Attack Speed of 2, for example. I managed to double that to 4 by adding the "Speedy" trait to the blade twice but that cost 30 crafting points per copy. The other five were dumped into increasing the To Hit from 0 to 1.
The end result was the Training Knife.
Training Knife (Short Blade)
Attack Speed: 4
To Hit Chance: 1
Base Damage: 0
Durability: 300/300
I made two.
I also decided to make myself two Training Blasters, even if they weren't actually blasters and instead were laser pistols. Combat viable laser weapons might be very difficult to produce but for training guns they were perfect because they needed nothing but power and power pack drain was based on the damage that the pistol dealt. At 0 base damage the power pack was effectively infinite, not necessarily so useful for combat but very useful for training.
Training Pistol (Pistol)
Attack Speed: 4
To Hit Chance: 1
Base Damage: 0
Range Increment: 10 feet
Maximum Range: 100 feet
Durability: 300/300
Shots Per Power Pack: Effectively Infinite
With those made it was back to the target range for some pistol practice. At 8 shots per second it only took me a little over thirty three hours to push my Pistol skill up to 20.
Short Blade training took about as long, even if I had to dose myself with some very strong Strength Stripper so that the damage I dealt would be less than the target dummy could negate.
I finished up my training, otherwise known as massively abusing the advantages I had and the video game mechanics that now governed my life, the night before the end of the week. Tomorrow would be tax time and I wondered if Draxx would have any assignments for me now that I had a bit of a reputation with the Slashers. Well time would tell, might as well do some more Intelligence training until them.
With that I headed off to pretend to sleep, well besides the hour of actual sleep to remove the Strength Stripper's effects.
Upon "waking up" when I got my twenty-fifth rank in Intelligence I headed back to Blaze's armory.
"Morning Stark, back again?" the armorer questioned as I entered.
"Yeah, I was just making some training tools yesterday but now it's time for some real weapons." I replied as I moved over to the workbench, continuing the conversation as I worked.
"So how have you been? I've been wrapped up with my own projects most of this week, well that and knocking off some of the competition." I said.
"Pretty good, I already heard about that little jaunt of yours. Ryback had me loot at the weapons you three looted to see if any were worth keeping for ourselves instead of just selling on, but it was a bunch of crap. Good work getting rid of them though, pretty amazing that a kid like you is so capable though." Blaze said with a slightly questioning tone at the end, as if he wanted to hear what I had to say on the subject without just asking me straight up.
"Yeah, its just the way I am. Beyond my control really but I'm not above taking advantage of it." I said in nonanswer.
"So any idea what you guys found in the trash's databanks that has Draxx so riled up?" Blaze unexpectedly asked.
"Huh? No idea what you are talking about. I haven't talked with Psykes in a few days, been busy and we just haven't seen each other. Hell, I haven't seen much of Katniss either now that I think about it." I replied.
"Ah, well Draxx has been acting like he does when something big is about to go down and Katniss has been out on assignment in that spiffy ass armor of hers whenever she's not eating or sleeping. My guess is that Psykes found something bit and Draxx sent Kat out to gather some intel." the man explained.
Ah the joys of Gather Information not being at a pitiful level.
"Well I'm sure I'll be informed of anything interesting later." I said.
The next few minutes were spent in idle conversation and gossip as I finished the two blades I was constructing.
I, unimaginatively, named the pattern Knife_Mk.1. It's not like anyone else would be able to see the name anyways and it was descriptive enough for my own tastes.
Knife_Mk.1 (Short Blade)
Attack Speed: 3
To Hit Chance: 0
Base Damage: 40
Durability: 300/300
I had had 70 crafting points to work with and the single additional attack from the Speedy trait along with the rest being spent on upping the Damage seemed the most pragmatic choice for now. I might change it when I learned more about expected armor values and what kind of damage reduction I would commonly face but it worked for now.
I decided to make four pistols as I wanted them capable of different things. The first pattern was, again unimaginatively, named the Pistol_Mk.1 and was meant for dealing with armored foes and the like.
Pistol_Mk.1 (Pistol - Blaster)
Attack Speed: 2
To Hit Chance: 0
Base Damage: 80
Range Increment: 10 feet
Maximum Range: 200 feet
Durability: 300/300
Shots Per Power Pack: 20
Like with my knives I had decided that one "Speedy" trait was a good idea and I had dumped the remaining 40 craft points into upping the damage, taking advantage of the fact that unlike blades, Pistols gained two points of damage per craft point invested. Unfortunately that left no points to increase the range or accuracy but I felt that my "natural" talent would make up for the lack of accuracy while I was likely to be fighting in confined spaces anyways and so a loss in maximum range probably wouldn't be the biggest of problems. Where it really suffered was in the shots per power pack category, being limited to only 20. If I fired at my maximum rate then I would shoot a power pack dry in ten seconds, which was a bit fast.
The second pistol pattern was named the Stealth_Pistol_Mk.1 and was a somewhat different beast, being a laser weapon as opposed to a blaster type weapon. The pulse laser was silent when it fired, unlike a blaster, while also lacking any visible trace short of impact; both traits very useful in a weapon intended for stealth operations but it suffered in range and damage while benefiting from a naturally increased attack speed and To Hit chance. Unlike the standard blaster type weapons, laser weapons didn't get the 2 for 1 deal on upping the base damage so I was limited to only 45 points in that category and while they had effectively unlimited ammo when compared to blasters that came at the cost of needing an additional capacitor system. Still, the end result should serve me well.
Stealth_Pistol_Mk.1 (Pistol - Laser)
Attack Speed: 2
To Hit Chance: 1
Base Damage: 45
Range Increment: 10 feet
Maximum Range: 100 feet
Durability: 300/300
Shots per capacitor charge: 15
Capacitor Regeneration: 1 per second
I finished all of my pistols only a few minutes before it was time for the weekly meeting and so dropped them into my inventory before heading out to the main room alongside Blaze.
Teng Kai called for order and started to speak a few minutes later "Job time again boys. Not much big news this past week. Tryack still backs us, the KSS are still bastards that should be killed on sight, and the drug business is back up after a couple of Draxx's boys removed those Bothan bastards who had been trying to move in on our turf for the past month or so. Oh, and Reyna wanted me to remind you all that while you do get discounts at her brothels the whores are there to make the gang money and you aren't allowed to hog them all to yourselves.
Come on boys, if you use the whores so much that they can't work to make us money then we will have to up your taxes to cover the loss; so try to limit yourselves to only an hour or so per day. Yes, Stass that does mean that you aren't allowed to have two day long orgies any longer. At least not when getting the discounted rate.
Well line up everybody, you know what to do. New members with me."
I got in line with the dozen other members of Draxx's crew and after a minute or so it was my turn.
"Here you go Draxx, a thousand creds." I said as I tossed him the cred chip.
He caught it and slotted it into his pad, giving it barely a glance before speaking "Good. You did well this week, good job removing the scum suckers trying to move in on us. Hang out though, this week's assignment is for everyone."
I gave a nod and moved off to the side to wait for the last three people to pay their dues.
Once they were done Draxx started to speak "Ok boys and girls, thanks to that little op that Katniss and Stark pulled off and Psykes slicing prowess we confirmed that the Krath Slobber Smashers were behind that little gang. Well we got the location that they were using to distribute from and I've had Katniss out scouting around it for most of the past three days. Turns out that the site is where they make and distribute the vast majority of their drugs from, its also their distribution point for all of their affiliates and proxies.
The Smashers thought that their little proxies ploy would protect them from getting their just deserts for messing with the Slashers but that isn't going to be the case. We are going to assault their distribution center, kill all of the Smashers present along with any of their supporters, and loot the place to the bedrock."
That speech got met with a solid cheer from the crew while I noted the new quest I had just received.
Quest: Proxies Won't Protect You
-Show the Krath Slobber Smashers why you don't interfere in Slashers business, successfully destroy their primary drug distribution hub
Quest Reward:
-Increased Reputation with the Slashers
-Increased Reputation with Katniss Mathews
-Increased Reputation with Hugo Draxx
-50,000 Credits
After the cheer Draxx continued to speak "Katniss, you will be in charge of our infiltration element. Everett and Stark are under your command for this op. Your job will be to sneak in before the op and sabotage the droids and automated defenses, if you can turn them to our side great but disabling them is fine to. Once that is done you should start working your way out, removing any Smashers that you come across; especially anyone who seems to know what they are doing."
Turning to man who stood nearly seven feet tall and was all muscle Draxx gave out some more instructions "Kenta, you will be leading the second heavy assault element and coming in through a breach blown in the top floor. Based on the scouting that has already been done, a few anti-armor rockets should be able to blow a hole in the wall from the tower next door. You will have John and Greg with you. Blow the hole, use rocket packs to enter through it, and then start killing your way down. At the same time I'll be leading Sammy and Yinth" he indicated one of the men and the only women besides Kat in the crew "in through the ground floor and we will fight our way up.
Paddy will be on overwatch and sentry duty with Dukes and Twitch." The fattest man in the group leading the skinniest and the only alien (a Rodian), all nodded their understanding of the orders.
Draxx wrapped things up with 'Well you all know your jobs now. The plan as is that we strike around 0400 tomorrow, and yes Sammy that does mean a little over forty hours from now, but that might be pushed back a bit depending on what Psykes finds in his matrix surveillance."
With that the meeting broke up but before I could head over to Kat to ask a few questions Draxx said "Oh, Stark. You can't do this without some gear so see Blaze, I had him put together a few things for you."
I gave a nod and said "Thanks, I'll get right on it."
Once Draxx was done talking, Katniss waved Everett and I off to the side and said "It's too loud and crowded in here to talk at the moment, both of you meet me at my quarters in three hours so we can plan this out."
Everett said "Why not now? We are all here and could just head to your quarters now and get this over with."
Katniss rolled her eyes at the boy and said "Because Draxx put me in charge and I said later? Or perhaps because I need to see if Psykes has decrypted some of the data I managed to steal that might be relevant? Or maybe it's because I just got back from scouting the target and haven't yet had a meal or shower? Take your pick, its not like I care. My quarters, three hours." before walking off.
I decided to go and see Blaze again, might as well see what Draxx had requisitioned for me.
As I walked in the man called out "Ah Stark, so Draxx sent you. Well here you go" he dropped a crate on the table "a suit of armor customized for your size and a cloaking field generator. Neither is really top of the line but they were the best I could find on short notice in the budget that Draxx gave me. So what do you think?"
I opened the crate only to see an armored suit with a belt sitting on top of it. Perception told me much of what I wanted to know but I made a show of pretending to take time examining the items anyways.
Cloaking Belt (Electronics, Physics)
This belt comes equipped with a generator to excite the small stygium crystal within into producing a spherical cloaking field approximately three feet in radius. Sensors built into the device monitor the fluctuations in the stygium crystal and with this data sensor devices can see through the cloak as if it wasn't there; necessary if you don't want to be blind. A sound damper is also included.
-30 Stealth while activated
Child's Size Armored Suit (Medium Armor)
-Damage Reduction: 30
-5 bonus to Perception
-3000/3000 durability
The belt seemed like it could be very useful but the armor seemed minimally useful as all it did was reduce damage. In truth the most useful feature would be the helmet with its heads up display and sensors as it would allow me to see while using the cloaking belt and remain in contact with the rest of the team. Still, it was free stuff.
"Looks good Blaze, but I'll need to try them on before I make a final call." I said as I picked up the crate.
"Of course, just let me know if you have any issues." he said.
Once out of his sight and alone I dropped them into my inventory and swapped on the armor. Immediately afterwords I got a notification that a Medium Armor skill had been created. A single glance at the tool tip for it made me grimace as I headed towards the dojo.
Medium Armor (skill): 1
-Reduces damage taken when wearing medium armor by your rank in this skill.
-When wearing medium armor any physical skill test is limited. You may not use more of your ranks from the relevant skill on the test than you have ranks in the Medium Armor skill.
There was no way I could grind Medium Armor up to 20 before the assault and without doing that it would act as a limiter on all my other skills. Not worth it in my judgement, but still I had a few hours before I needed to see Katniss again and it wouldn't do to just walk straight back in on Blaze and tell him about the issue with the armor, so dojo time.
Once in the dojo I had one of the training droids start attacking me, I had the armor and I might as well train it up. It only took me seconds to note three critical features. The first was that my Medium Armor skill was gaining experience based on the amount of damage it prevented as opposed to the amount of damage I took in-spite of it - which is how Unarmored worked. The second was that every bit of damage I took, whether prevented or not, was also applied to the armors durability. The third was that my Dexterity was limited to my rank in Medium Armor as well.
That final fact clinched it, I would not be wearing this armor on the assault. Or probably anything less than custom made armor at any time, the Dexterity limiter was just too much. But I was still going to stand here for the next two hours or so, its not like I had anything better to do and I might as well train up a skill that would maybe be useful some day.
In truth I was only actually getting beat on for about five minutes but I couldn't credibly claim to have fully tested the armor in that time period. Most people didn't get better at using armor by standing there and letting a droid beat on them as rapidly as it could. The points spun up so fast that I hit rank 11 in that time. I could have gone farther but I would need another set of armor, this one's durability was under 300 points now.
I headed back to Blaze at about the ninety minute mark with the armor in my hands and dropped it on his counter with a simple "Nope."
He took one look at it and his face blanked for a moment before he said "What? What happened? This was brand new and it's practically scrap now. Were you just letting training droids beat on your or something."
I shrugged and said "I tested it. It slows me too much. I depend a lot on my lighting fast reflexes and precise body control, and the armor just hampers it too much. So nope, not wearing it."
The man sighed and said "Well you need a helmet of some kind if you want to be able to use the cloak, and you really do need some kind of protection. Let's see what we can do."
In the end we chose a helmet design that fully enclosed my head and was fully sealed while containing its own air supply that could last up to 8 hours. It had to be custom crafted but sadly my skill in the Medium Armor catagory just wasn't high enough, although I did go visit Psykes's lab and make all of the electronics myself.
It was, you guessed it, named the Helmet_Mk.1 and was basically just a platform for some sensor systems and electronics.
Helemet_Mk.1 (Medium Armor, Electronics)
-Damage Reduction: 0
-Contains an 8 hour internal air supply, fully sealed against inhalation vector attacks.
-10 Perception
-Does not count as wearing Medium Armor for purposes of triggering the Medium Armor skill.
For protection we dithered back and forth before finally deciding on an energy shield. While the shield would provide some protection without hampering any of my skills, the problem was that it functioned by simply blocking the first 500 points of damage that I would take straight out. Once it was drained the capacitor would be dead and it would take a very powerful energy source to recharge it, so it would effectively be gone until the mission was over but it was better than nothing so I took me.
Energy Shield (Electronics, Physics)
-Negates the first 500 points of damage the user takes when it is active.
-Durability 500/500
We ended up solving the gear issue just in time for me to not be late to Katniss's meeting.
I knocked on Kat's door two hours and fifty seven minutes after she told Everett and I to show up here. It opened a moment later and Katniss said "Hey Alex, come in. Everett still isn't here yet."
Katniss's suite consisted of three rooms; a bedroom, a bathroom, and a main room. After a quick glance around the room Kat went and shut the door leading to her bedroom and bathroom before waving to one of the seats by a floating hologram of a nearly twenty story building.
As I focused on it I quickly realized that it was a fairly detailed map of the distribution center, with several areas highlighted. The one on the ground floor and the one on the top floor were easy to guess the purpose of; the entrance points for the two heavy assault elements. It was fairly easy to see why they had been chosen. The top floor was the garage and by securing it we could make reinforcements much less likely while also securing a path directly down into the heart of the complex.
The specific ground floor assault point was a little more difficult to figure out but a few more seconds of thinking about it solved that. It would put them immediately into the ground floor sentry post as they blasted through the wall and provide enough cover that one person could lock down both the stairwell and the elevator without hassle while the other two on the squad finished cleaning up the floor.
It was about ninety seconds later that Everett walked in. Once he was seated Katniss began to speak. "Good, you're both here so lets get the basics out of the way before working on the details. Thanks to my scouting and some files I was able to pull from an unattended terminal in the distribution center we aren't going in blind. My current plan, which Draxx agrees with, is for us to go in well before the actual assault is planned. It will take us at least an hour or so to get into position undetected so I planned for 4 hours; we will be starting our infiltration at midnight.
Initial entry will be through the main entrance on the ground floor. There has been significant foot traffic into and out of the facility at around midnight every day for the past three days, the data I pulled shows it to be a shift change, so we should be able to get in relatively easily. The sensors are generally pretty crappy, with our cloaking tech we should be able to pretty much just walk right through those, but they do have one that could detect us at the main security check point. Good for us though, they haven't actually sealed off the entire rest of the room so that you have to pass through it; if you hug the right most wall here you can just bypass it entirely." she highlighted the path in question on the holo.
"Once inside we will have three primary pre assault targets. The first, and it does have to be hit first, is this maintenance room." a small room on the eight floor was highlighted "It contains a communications junction point that we can insert a tap into. With that in place Psykes will be able to takeover their entire com network and provide us with real time data on all of their movements thanks to their biomonitor setups. More importantly for us though, we will be able to intercept most alarms and keep them from noticing when any of the Smashers drop.
That will open up our next two primary targets. The first is the droid control center here" a room on the 12th floor glowed red this time. "If we take that room then we will be able to co-opt or, at a minimum, shut down virtually all of the droids in the complex. That would cut expected resistance by approximately 70% so it is a must if we want this op to succeed with minimal casualties."
"The last critical target is the command center on the 10th floor, here." another room highlighted "If this room is taken then we will be able to tie Psykes directly into their command and control network and he will have all of the cameras, doors, and turrets on our side. It also contains the Smashers final fuck you, the button to blow up the whole place."
Katniss took a long breath and then continued "Right, other stuff. We have to hit the com junction first and it should be relatively easy, it also shouldn't start a clock on anything, but once we move against the droid control center or the command center we will be on a clock. Even if we take both without triggering a wider alarm, someone is inevitably going to try and contact them shortly and wonder when no one responds. So if we hit them too early then we will find ourselves trapped in a hostile base with over a hundred Smashers out for our blood and no support on the way; we will have to hit those two places no earlier than 0345 or so; which means splitting up.
We will all also be taking a number of remote triggered gas mines. I would love to use one of the lethal nerve agents but its too risky, one of our own could get a whiff, so instead we are going with one of the non lethal paralytics. While we are moving through the complex we will be placing them as the opportunity arises, on timers to be triggered at 0400. If we make sure to target these " a dozen points lit up" junctions then we should catch a lot of the initial response force to the assault."
Both Everett and I nodded our understanding of the plan so far when Kat gave us a questioning look and then she continued "So individual assignments. Everett, you are on the junction. Alex, you have the droid control center. I will have the command center."
At that Everett spoke up "Why does the new kid get to disable the droids? Why am I on the junction?"
Kat rolled her eyes at the difficult boy and said "Because unless something has changed in the past few days, you aren't that great at electronic stuff and Psykes calls Alex a savant in the field. And also because its only his second op with us, I trust him to perform well but at the end of the day we can complete the job if the droids are still up; we won't be able to complete the job if the Smashers still have an intact com network."
Everett gave a smile at the implied complement and settled down.
For the rest of the day we hashed out the details and refined the plan.
As we broke up to get some rest 12 hours before we were scheduled to start our part of the op I decided that it was finally time to spend the level up that I had been saving. Sure the potential full heal might be useful on the assault but it was probably better to see if I could get a trait that would help out more.
"Congratulations, you have gained a level and are now level 5. Your attribute cap is now 50 while your skill cap has been raised to 25. Select your desired level up trait."
I saw a few traits that could be helpful in the assault but a new one had appeared and I just couldn't resist.
Photographic Memory (trait): Requires 25 Intelligence
-You never forget anything you have seen or heard. Every memory from your entire existence is always at your finger tips.
-Skill experience is gained 5% faster than normal
I liked the faster skill gain but it was the greater potential gain from the first benefit that clinched it. Worst case the photographic memory would only apply back to my appearing in this world which wouldn't really be worth the trait but wouldn't hurt. Best case though it would also apply to my pre gamer life. I knew more than most about Star War's but a lot of details were fuzzy and I had spent the odd day doing a wiki dive on Wookiepedia back in my old life, if I could remember those experiences with perfect clarity then I would have a potentially galaxy breaking advantage in this life; it would be like having a walkthrough or strategy guide for life. In the end there was no real choice, the selection was made.
Intriguing, Photographic Memory had functioned as I had hoped and the myriad bits and pieces of information that I now knew about this reality opened up some interesting possibilities. But that was for the future, I had a drug distribution center to infiltrate.
I had known that Nar Shadda was a city planet but the air speeder trip closer to the distribution center really hit home what that meant as on that nearly one hundred mile journey we we flew through open air and I actually got to see Y'Toub in all its glory. It was easy to forget, or not even realize, given the true vastness of this worlds mega-towers but those towers that covered this world were sealed constructions that dug deep into the bowels and pierced the heavens of this moon simultaneously.
The tower that I had spent all my time in to date slammed down into the very heart of Nar Shaddaa, more than a thousand miles under the "surface" and at its peak it was scarping the very edge of space. It was almost eighty miles square and home to somewhere on the order of thirty billion sentients (and an incalculable number of droids). This single tower had more people than the Earth of my original birth and its industry was commensurately vast; entire swathes of this monolithic edifice were devoted to droid tended hydroponics farms under the control of Tryack the Hutt and kept the population fed while in the bowels of the tower were vast foundries producing goods of every function and description.
And that was only 1 of the countless millions of such towers that covered this moon. I knew this intellectually before that air car flight but it was when we were in the open air and I looked out the window only to see an entire hemisphere of the globe spread before me covered in the towers of metal that the sheer scale of the world I now inhabited hit home on anything but the most cursory of intellectual levels.
I shook my awe off those as we landed, I could think about that later. It was time to get to work and so I put on my helmet and activated my cloaking belt. Katniss and Everett did the same, the exact specifics of their cloaking being quickly sent to my helmets computers and my sensors filtered so that I could again see them. We gave a nod to one another and set off, we were on a clock after all.
As we made our way over the two miles of alleys and corridors to our entry point I took a quick glance at Everett's armor. It was nice but obviously nothing like the exceptional specimen that was Katniss's armor.
ShadowTech Industries Mk.2 Infiltration Armor (medium armor)
As my personal clock ticked over on 0346 I moved. I had positioned myself to the side of one of the guards, placing him between myself and the other, and already drawn both of my heavy blasters. I had also set the gas mines to go off at 0346 as well so even as the room started to fill with the colorless, odorless, and fast acting paralytic agent I opened up on the guard. I was dealing 140 base damage with every shot from my heavy blasters and thanks to assassinate that was pushed up to 190 for the first second of the combat. With the 4 shots I could fire in that first second, all of which struck true, I delivered 760 points of damage to the guard. The first five hundred points was eaten by his shield and the shot that burned through was weakened, dealing only 70 damage before being reduced down to a mere 5 by the mans armor. The first shot that struck unabated by the energy shield reduced him by another 75 damage. That opening salvo had reduced him from 300 Health down to 220 but, more importantly, it had left him disoriented from the sudden and totally unexpected violence.
Before he had time to think about acting, or even turn to face me, I fired three more shots into him and he dropped at my feet. The fourth shot of that second salvo was absorbed by the other guards shield and he had had enough time to start getting his act together, bringing his blaster rifle up to bare. Fortunately for me he was shaky and his first salvo of return fire missed me entirely. He was not so fortunate and the next second saw four more of my bolts go smashing in, three burning out his shield and the forth starting on his health. His rifle spat out four bolts of its own and two struck home this time, dropping my energy shields charge down to 100 as it absorbed the 400 points of fury that had smashed against it.
Before he could fire again my blasters smashed out and ended his life.
As I gave the room a once over to ensure that everyone else was down and made my way to the control terminal I heard Kat's voice over the com "Central Command secure."
I sent my own status update as I got to work on the terminal "Droid Control secure, working on the droids now."
It only took me a few seconds to realize that I wasn't going to be able to turn the droids to our side, it wasn't a programmed option and I just didn't know droid programming. That was a skill I would have to pick up as it was clearly different from Computer User or Electronics. Shutting them down was easy though as it was a standard option in the control software. I didn't trigger it yet, instead inserting a command so that they would shut down exactly at 0400 and then the terminal would encrypt its self to hell and gone. Well not really, but it would at least take long enough to break that no Smasher would get the droids back before this assault was already over one way or the other.
"The droids will shut off at 0400, I couldn't co-opt them but they won't be fighting us at least." I sent as I drew my stealth laser pistols and shot everyone of the techs in the head. XP was XP and its not like the slashers were going to let them live anyways.
All told I got 1040 XP for the room.
With that done I reactivated my cloaking belt and exited the room, it was time to carry out the second part of the op.
Right on schedule the building reverberated with the multiple simultaneous missile strikes that blew the entire entry foyer to slag and smashed a hole through the side of the garage 20 floors above that foyer. Following the missiles almost close enough to feel the heat of their engines were two highly trained heavy assault squads in armor as good or better than the best that the Smashers had on sight and supported with full tactical data thanks to our penetration of the Smasher's com network.
Everett and I each gave it a minute or so before we started to move, him down from the 8th floor to take any defense points that the Smashers set up from behind while they worried about the assault for led by Draxx coming up from below and me up from my position on the 12th floor to support Kenta and his squad as they moved downwards. Kat would be responsible for clearing the floors in between and keeping anyone off of our own backs.
With the elevators locked down to anyone besides us thanks to Psykes and Kat I started moving up the stairs. Most of the rooms on my path were empty of enemies, this floor being mostly droid control and repair, so I quickly made my way to the three separate life signs on the twelfth floor and sent them to wherever the dead go. They were all droid techs, only one even had a weapon in hand. Whatever, another 300 easy XP.
As I moved up I only found one guard on the 13th floor. This was one of the drug storage levels and the Smashers relied on droids for its protection and operations, with only a single guard at the door out of the central rotunda. He was focused on the elevator so I snuck up behind him and my knives went to work. Energy shields were nice but the vast majority of models only worked against blaster and laser fire, this guards didn't even flicker as my knives slashed out six times in a second. He might have been a highly trained solider who could eat me for lunch in a straight up fight but each strike was still dealing 120 damage and I struck true six times in that second, with one critical for an extra 20 damage. His five hundred health wasn't quite enough and so I gained 200 XP and a rank in Looting as his blaster rifle made its way into my inventory before I headed up to the 14th floor.
It was an open plan office filled with cubicles and this late in the night it was empty. The 15th floor was different though. Like the 5th floor it was a designated security floor, basically a strong point that housed guard bunk rooms and their equipment. I was too late to catch any of them unawares so I stopped for the moment and waited. They were setting up an ambush at the rotunda that you needed to pass through to continue down further into the building. Once I saw that Kenta and his team were about finished with the 16th floor I commed Kenta.
"Kenta, its Stark. Sending you a video feed from my helmet cam of the ambush that the Smashers have set up."
It was less than ten seconds later that Kenta sent back "We are going to open with grenades, the Ion charges should blow out their shields but it will drop your cloak as well so be ready. Following those up with plasma charges, that should let us deal with the first line immediately on the stairs. We will breach then and engage, while they are focused on us start finishing them off from the back. With a bit of luck they won't realize that they are caught in a cross fire for a while."
"Copy" was my simple response as I backed out of the room enough to avoid the Ion grenades. As I heard the violence start I moved back in and took position.
Kenta's assault element smashed into the room at full speed, their suits targeting systems being fed from my helmet cam and already having the Smashers dialed in. The Smasher security forces might have been a cut above the norm but so were Draxx's boys and the Slasher team had the advantage of being well rested and not rolling out of bed and into a full scale assault on their base. Well that and full intel on what they were facing. In a straight fight the Smashers numbers would have carried the day but they weren't prepared, hadn't had time to do more than really get in armor and grab weapons. And then there was little old me sitting behind and to the right of the Smashers defenses.
Little old me who could see everyone's health totals and knew exactly how much damage my blasters would do. Kill stealing is a fine tradition and I never overkilled a target. Four more elites and half a dozen mooks fell to my blasters before the hard point had been taken, and all without the Smashers even firing a shot at me. Another 1400 XP in the bank.
With the 15th floor secured, Kenta's team and I were pretty much done with our part of the op. Especially when, less than a minute later, Draxx's team finished securing the fifth floor.
All told we had lost one person, Sammy, in the assault in exchange for almost a hundred armed Smasher's killed. With the resistance broken it was just time for mop up.
Speak of the devil.
"Katniss, Everett, Stark; start going through this place room by room and making sure its clear. Yinth, go downstairs and take charge of the reinforcements now that the fighting is mostly over. John, head back to the garage and keep watch up there. Kenta and Greg, meet me in the elevator; we will be the reaction element."
We all singled out acknowledgment and got on with our tasks.
The clean up didn't take too long, as least not for myself and the rest of Draxx's crew. A few hours to thoroughly sweep the building and ensure that the only non Slashers in the place were corpses and we were done with me gaining another 220 total XP. Draxx still had to stay around and direct the hundreds of associates, lower ranked members, and hangers on that would ensure the place was emptied of everything that might have any value but the rest of us got to take the air car back to the base; our part in the op was done. As we flew back I debated on what to do with my new found level up before finially deciding to shelve it for now. New traits seemed to become unlocked based on my stats or skills so it was probably better to wait until I had increased them some before using the level up.
The rest of the team came in, showered, visited the medical droid, and then went to crash for a while. I spent the next long while in bed, reading to improve those skills that I could. Crafting was just too potentially useful to not keep maxed and pushing those other skills that could be improved from reading books or watching videos up to 25 was just a matter of how fast I could read, it would take me a while still but I had no reason to get started. I had quickly looked up some texts on Droids though, resulting in the creation of the Droids skill and its rapid advancement; that lack was a potentially fatal oversight on my part and it needed to be corrected.
I had been laying in bed for most of the day when Kat came in around 6 PM. "So you are awake Alex. What did you think of your first real op with us?"
I put down my pad and looked at the teen leaning against the wall next to my bunk as I responded "That I need to be better, and better equipped. I should have had an Ion charge to strip the shields from the two guards in the droid control room when I went hot, that would have probably kept me from almost burning out my shield. My lack of focus on the specifics of droid technology also kept me from being able to make the droids fight on our side; if they had then things would have been much easier. But I am remedying that issue right now." I held up the pad.
"Besides all of that I was impressed. I mean we are a street gang. Sure we are larger and more capable than most of the small fry but we are still just a street gang and yet you, Everett, and I pulled off an infiltration that wouldn't be out of place for a Republic commando unit while Kenta and Draxx's squads fought like a top tier military heavy combat team. Not at all what you expect from a street gang."
Katniss gave a small chuckle and said "You hadn't realized? Draxx was a Marauder Captain in the Sith Empire before the final throw down on Ruusan and Kenta was his senior NCO. After the battle Draxx saw the writing on the wall, with most of the leadership dead and the remaining Jedi Lords out for blood the Sith Empire was dead, so he just up and left. Ended up on Nar Shaddaa because it's where his brother, my father, was and puttered around as a mercenary for hire for a while.
When my dad died a year later though he decided that he needed something a little less transient if he was going to raise me and so he partnered with and old associate of his from the war; Teng Kai. Teng was Sith black ops of some description, still not sure exactly what but he was the one who really taught me how to not be seen. Anyways, between they recruited Kenta and started to carve out their own power base on this little old moon. Most of the established local gangs didn't know what hit them, they weren't even remotely prepared for what trained special forces soldiers could and would bring to bare.
That was only part of it though, see you have to remember that for all their big talk and fury most of the gang bangers and other criminal here on Nar Shaddaa are just street trash. They might be scary braggarts to the average person but to people who were doing Sith dirty work for two decades? No, the Sith had refined fear and intimidation into a science and as weapons over thousands of years. Draxx says that Teng can't even hold a candle to what the real Sith were like but he is still one of the scariest bastards you will see when he wants to be.
So the other gangs gave and the Slashers solidified there place. Most of the members today aren't really anything special but Draxx is runs the combat side of things and he only lets the best into his personal crew." Katniss finished explaining.
I thought about what she had said for a while before responding "Huh, good to know and does explain some things. But I doubt you tracked me down just to give me a history lesson, so what did you want Kat?"
She shrugged and said "Can't I just want to hang out with my newest friend?" I gave her a look and she continued "Well it is true, but I came to get you for the party."
I blinked, "Party?"
"Duh, we just smashed the Smashers and grabbed twenty or so million credits worth of drugs along with all the other loot we took. Of course the gang is going to have a party, besides we need to give Sammy a proper send off." the teen said, looking at me as if I was stupid.
"Oh, well yeah that makes sense." I said as I got out of bed.
The party and wake went well but I was still physically seven and didn't really feel like indulging in alcohol, drugs, or sex so it was a bit boring for me but as one of the guests of honor its not like I could just leave after a bit.
I was sitting in one of the chairs in the main room looking at the hundred or so people passed out on the floor before me when I heard the base door open and two people walk in, already talking with one another.
"...I'm telling you man, its freaky. The kids 7 and yet Draxx thinks he is good enough to be on his crew."
"Yeah its freaky but so what man? The kids clearly capable, otherwise Draxx wouldn't have him on his crew."
"I know that. It's just that the kid is seven for gods sake and yet somehow he is capable of going toe to toe with veterans in heavy armor and Psykes was saying that he went from knowing nothing about computers to being able to hack as well as a lot of professional slicers in a day; tell me that's not fucked up man."
"It is fucked dude, but I just don't see why I should care or how it matters. But you seem to, so what's your explanation for how he does it all?"
"Maybe he's one of the Jedi or Sith man; I've heard that they can do that kind of freaky stuff even as kids."
"Ha. So you think that he is some kind of Jedi prodigy who, what, escaped from his masters and decided to go join a street gang on Nar Shaddaa of all places? Come on man, him being a cybernetic monstrosity or a human looking infiltration droid makes more sense. Hell him being an escaped lab experiment in human enhancement makes more sense than that."
"True, those corps do get up to some freaky stuff out here. I suppose him being an escaped lab experiment is a little more reasonable."
The two men walked right past me without even noticing as they headed into the chow hall, giving me a rank in Gather Information.
Jedi prodigy? Some kind of Terminator? Escaped lab experiment? Really, what would these people come up with next; that I was the plaything of a god who got to treat the world as if it was a videogame? Oh wait, that was true. Well it appeared that I hadn't done enough to appear normal. Your Wisdom has increased by 1 for finally noticing the obvious.
Thank you grand Bastard. Huh, one of those explanations might be at least somewhat close to the truth though. I mean I did have a mana bar and this was Star Wars; how had I not tried to use the Force yet?
With that thought in mind I headed out and snuck back to my tutorial maze. This might take a while and I didn't want to be interrupted.
My knowledge of the Force consisted entirely of things I had read, seen, and played when this was all still fiction to me and I wasn't willing to take the risk of trying to look anything up over the net so it was time to try the basics. Everything seemed to start with Meditation so lets try that.
I had known how to mediate in my previous life, strangely enough I had actually been taught by Buddhist monks so I guess that was kinda like a poor mans Jedi. Worth a try anyways.
I fell into a meditative trance after about five minutes and got a notification that a Meditation skill had been created. A glance at it was informative.
Meditation (skill): 1
-When meditating you can't move.
-The user regains 1 point per rank in this skill of Health, Stamina, or Mana (users choice) per second.
Potentially very useful, but I had a test to perform so I pulled out a knife and stabbed myself before using Meditation again. My health regenerated and after 10 points returned my Meditation skill ranked up to 2.
I gave a sigh, I would look like such a masochist right now.
It had been almost ten hours since I got Meditation and my routine had consisted of stabbing myself until my health was near 0 before Meditating it back up and repeating the experience. If anyone had been watching they would probably think I was trying to sacrifice myself to some god via ritual bloodletting but whatever, by the end of the day Meditation was up to 11. I wanted to stay and keep grinding but people would notice I wasn't around and that wasn't really something I wanted to deal with right now so I sighed and headed back to the base only to run into Draxx moments after I entered.
"Ah, I've been looking for you Stark." Draxx said.
"Sir?" I replied, wondering where this was going.
"Good work on the assault yesterday. I have your cut of the proceeds right here." he tossed me a cred chip and I slotted it in my pad to check the balanced 50,000 credits. Relative to what we had looted from the Smashers it was a pittance, I mean the drugs alone had a value in the tens of millions, but it was also the equivalent of the total annual salary of a middle class wage slave here on Nar Shaddaa.
"Woah, that's a lot of money. Thanks Draxx." I said.
"Don't mention it kid, you did good work and that's your cut. I expect great things from you in the future." he said, ending with a nod as he walked off.
Quest Completed: Proxies Won't Protect You
As I played with the cred chit that contained my new found wealth my mind was thinking about plans that had been nothing more than tentative fancy before this resource infusion. I had work to do.
was sitting in my office going through the day's paperwork when an unexpected notification popped up before my eyes.
"Congratulations, you've survived a whole year in this new life. I guess that giving you that Gamer boost was necessary, maybe we can try hard mode again later. Bah, on with life. Happy 8th Birthday, have a present."
A single dirty sock appeared in my inventory and my clothes no longer fit as I popped up an inch in height between one instant and the next. An examination of the sock showed it to be nothing but a regular, dirty, sock but I left it alone anyways.
I mused on the sudden growth spurt that I had just experienced and its timing for today was 8 years to the day since the end of the Seventh Battle of Ruusan and given the time of day, a little after six in the afternoon, I wouldn't be all that surprised to find that my "birth" had occurred exactly when the Thought Bomb had gone off.
I started to ruminate on my time here, the unexpected "birthday" making me feel that it was a time for reflection. After those first two hectic weeks with the Slashers things had slowed down a bit for me, even if the gang as a whole had picked up operations in a big way. With the Smashers on the back foot and the influx of resources we had taken ruthless advantage and rapidly expanded. Kat, Everett, and I had all carried out more than our share of assassinations over the month that followed our assault but things had slowed down for me after that and instead Draxx had detailed me to handling more internal house cleaning than external wet work.
We had recruited a lot more associates and lower level members as we expanded and someone needed to ensure that they behaved. The result had been me becoming one of the most feared people in the gang, at least internally.
In truth it's not like I really had that much work to do so I had spent most of my time focused on my own plans. I had returned to the complex that I had emerged from my tutorial maze in and taken over that entire floor, along with the ones above and below, as my personal domain via the simple expedient of telling the residents that it was mine now. Those that acquiesced got paid for the trouble, those that bitched got dead for the trouble they caused me. Of course, the local "landlord" didn't really like my takeover but they were a piss ant tiny collection of half a dozen thugs. They died in an afternoon and I was suddenly the landlord of approximately 500 apartments.
Normally someone would have moved against me and tried to take the complex, and its juicy "rents", from me but the knowledge that I was a Slasher stopped those ideas cold. Sure, I had to give the gang its cut but I was collecting over 50,000 credits a month in protection money/rent. Even after the gangs ten percent off the top and the other 5K a month I was spending on my minions (or associates in gang parlance) I was still making 40K creds per month just from the "rent". The drug sales doubled that take. It seemed like a lot of money but I had invested most of it into my new home and a couple other longer term projects.
It was enough though that I didn't have to worry about working so I had a lot of time to grind up my abilities. Relative few had been maxed, only some of my skills and my luck (thanks to finding an absurdly cheaty way to raise that rapidly), but I was still noticeably past "peak human" in a lot of areas now.
I was interrupted from my thoughts when Kat showed up at the door, something that had been happening more and more recently. Everett had been hitting on her, trying to get her to become his girl, and would creep on her as she tried to train so she had taken to coming over to use my private facilities. I was fine with it but it only made Everett even more jealous of my rapid rise through the ranks and success in the gang, he really didn't like me. Whatever, I didn't care all that much.
I opened the outer door for Kat and said "Hey Kat, here to train again?"
"Yeah, I wanted to not be bothered." she replied as she walked into the ante-chamber and the door closed behind her.
The two of us moved to the center of the room and waited a moment for the security "scans" to complete. Suddenly thousands of sharp metal spears came smashing out of the walls, floor, and ceiling and crisscrossed the room. The only space not pincushioned by metal spears was the bit that Kat and I were standing in. Sensors capable of defeating high end cloaking were incredibly expensive and so I had chosen a lower tech solution, after all a cloak didn't let you phase through solid matter. The system had already caught, and skewered, three spies.
Once the spikes retracted the internal door opened and we walked through, continuing our conversation.
"Not a problem. I've just been dealing with paperwork." I said.
Kat gave a laugh as she said "I might envy the creds you are making by running your own crew but I don't mind not having to deal with the paperwork involved. No, give me a vibrosword or blaster and a target and I'll take that any day."
I gave a chuckle of my own "Bloodthirsty witch.", referencing the moniker that Kat had been tagged with on the streets Shadow Witch.
"You know you love it, Reaper." she shot back, using my own moniker. It had started as the chibi-reaper but a few dozen corpses showing signs of very unpleasant deaths and prominently displayed on the streets, along with a few rumors about just why it had been done, had gotten the "chibi" part removed post haste and solidified my reputation as a scary fucking bastard. People commented a lot less on my age after that come to think of it.
"True, well have fun training. I might join you in a bit; I should be finished with the bane of fun in about an hour." I said as we broke up, her to head towards the dojo and me to head towards my office.
"Fun, don't take to lo.." she was interrupted by the ground shaking and the rattle of explosives detonating fairly close by.
Before the rumbles had started to truly dissipate the lights began to flash and the alarm sirens started to sound. I had the datapad that controlled my homes security systems out of my inventory and in my hand before most could blink
Fuck. The vid feeds showed what was going on. Someone was attacking me and they were prepared. Large explosions had gutted the floors above and below and while the shields on this level had held, it was only a matter of time. Fortunately for me, my attackers clearly had faulty intel as they were trying to break through the ceiling to drop into this level but with the starship grade armor plating that I had installed that was going to take hours. They had to come in through the front door and they were going to do it. Five minutes, maybe less, with the equipment that they had.
I had invested the majority of my resources into securing this location, afterall it was my home (or bunker, take your pick) but standing off a full scale military style assault just wasn't in the cards. Who and why though? None of the personal enemies that I might have made had the balls or resources to launch an attack like this and I was a known Slasher in good standing. The only reason someone who be launching this kind of assault on my home was if they didn't care about Slasher retaliation, and that meant that they had to be going after all the Slashers. I was probably just an incidental target actually, my home being attacked as a Slasher base.
A quick check of my com system confirmed that; the com channels that I had personally set up were being stopped by the broad spectrum jamming that was being used but the Slasher com network was still up and running. A quick check with my Computer skills was the final nail in the coffin, the com ping times were off; someone was intercepting all traffic on the Slasher network.
Katniss had recovered from the shock and drew her blaster pistol as she started to speak "What is...", only for me to interrupt her.
"Give me your com. Full scale military assault on this place, my coms are being jammed but the Slasher net is still up; meaning that the attacker wants it up." As she handed over her com I shot it, and my own, with my blaster.
"No back way out of here and your armory isn't that great. Well I guess we will take a fair chunk of them with us before we die." the teen said.
I just shook my head and said "Come with me.", she followed without bothering to question - knowing that time was tight.
Three security doors later we had entered my bedroom and I turned to the panel by the door, punching in a long code.
Kat began to speak "Why here Alex? Yeah, it will delay the inevitable but we are trapped here."
I laughed, a bitter chuckle, as I pulled a remote out of my inventory and pressed the only button on it. "I spent a fortune building this bunker Kat, and a fair bit of effort securing the location even before doing that. Do you really think that I didn't have my reasons? Or that I didn't ensure I had an escape path if I needed one?"
The holopainting on the back wall flickered off as behind it a piece of the wall slid back and up.
The teens eyes widened as I said "Come on." and led the way into my escape path; that tutorial maze I had appeared in a year ago today.
Once we were both inside I hit the button to activate the repulsors on the back of the block and they reversed course, replacing the precision fitted block in the hole.
"The code I entered activated the base's self destruct. Right now it is filling with a colorless and odorless gas and once the door to my bedroom is breached the gas will be triggered. It will burn hot enough to turn everything in the base to slag, but more importantly it will burn hot enough to trigger the activation of the block that covered the escape tunnel. It will be melted straight into the wall. Any examination will show it to be just the exterior support wall of the building, two feet of virtually indestructible building material. And you know that any but very specialized scanners can't see through that crap.
As far as our attackers are concerned, we will be dead; choosing to suicide as a final fuck you." I explained as we headed down the alley.
"That's great Alex, but why are we trying to play dead? And what is this place?" Kat asked.
"We are going to play dead because I'm about 95% sure that this was just part of a full scale attempt to eradicate the Slashers and no one with the resources that our attackers have shown is going to have made the attempt unless they are damn sure that they can succeed. We are on our way to check on that but its what the data supports." I said before waving a hand at the space around us.
"As for this place, it's a collection of alleys and tunnels in between the support walls of a number of this Towers sub-buildings. I found it before I ever joined the Slashers and when I got the resources I secured the only entrance to it. Well at least it was the only entrance., I've added a few more over the past year and now it acts as my personal little unseen trail and storage area." I continued as we emerged into the main pathway and she laid eyes on the crates stacked up against the walls.
"Weapons, raw materials, resources of all kinds. Nothing spectacular but enough for me to rebuild. This was my backup plan in the event that the Slashers didn't work out for me. But enough of that, we are here." I moved to one of the crates and opened it up, showing a handful of cloaking belts and several full body cloaks. I passed Kat a cloak and belt before taking one of each for myself and putting them on.
She took the gear, putting it on as well but no saying anything, as I led the way to a ladder almost a mile away through these twisting tunnels.
I indicated the ladder that led up to a bit of empty wall as I pressed a button on my remote and part of the wall floated out.
"Come on." I said as I scurried up the ladder.
Once we were both up and the entrance was again closed I said. "Put a hand on my shoulder and activate your cloak, I'll be leading us from here and we don't have any way to see through each others cloaks."
"Where are we going?" Kat said as she did as I asked.
"Somewhere that will let us get confirmation one way or the other." I responded before activating my cloak and leading the way out into the apartment complex that we had emerged in.
It was a five minute walk to the apartment that I wanted and when I got to the door I punched in the access code before heading inside and deactivating my cloak.
The place was empty except for a collection of electronics and holo screens, which I rapidly turned on.
Displayed in life like quality was a picture of the front entrance of the Slasher's base and it was easy to see that it was suffering badly. A rapid flick through various other camera angles of the other entrances, even the supposed secret escape tunnel that only full Slasher members were supposed to know about, were being guarded by hostiles if not being used as assault paths.
As Kat stood by with a look of horror on her face I started pressing keys and flipping through other cameras. Everyone of them showed a Slasher property. Production facilities, distribution, safe houses, hang outs, "legitimate businesses", none of them were unmolested. I had been running a lot of the gangs internal security ops for over three months now, I knew all of our holdings and had quietly put up my own surveillance to keep an eye on them and all of them were obviously compromised. Even Omega-3.
And that said very bad things. "The Slashers are dead Kat." I said quietly, saying outloud what we both knew to be true.
"No, they can't all be dead. Some had to escape. We had fall backs and worst case plans, Uncle Draxx wouldn't let it be any other way. Some had to have made it out, we can regroup and strike back." the distraught teen said, holding out a faint hope.
"No Kat" I said quietly as I put up another picture on the main screen "That is Omega-3. You know that Draxx put that safe house together for just his crew, it was where we launched the really black ops from and its location was only known to us and Teng. It also hasn't been used in over two months, so for someone to know enough to compromise it they either had to track one of us to it before that or we have a rat. Given that every one of our holdings is under attack and our com network was compromised, along with our various Matrix hangouts, and all of this was done without any of us even picking up a hint that we were under focused surveillance for the months that it would have taken; it had to be a rat.
I know it wasn't you or me, and Draxx and Teng had absolutely no reason to do something like this. That leaves Kenta, Yinth, John, Greg, Everett, Paddy, Dukes, and Twitch as the possible rats."
There was rage in Katniss's eyes the likes of which I had never seen before but she ground out "You're right, and we are going to hunt down whoever was responsible for this and kill them."
"Fine with me." was my simple response. I was, afterall, annoyed that someone had taken out my support base. That would set back my plans significantly. Besides, I had liked a decent chunk of the Slasher's.
"No way it was Kenta or Yinth. Kenta had been with Draxx for decades, he wouldn't betray him for anything and Yinth was Teng's sister even if neither of them advertised the fact." Kat said, engaging in the problem for the first time since this fiasco has started.
"Well we will find the truth, but for now its time to retreat back into my tunnels. We will have to stay out of sight for a while, it is way too risky to try anything at the moment." I replied levelly.
Kat bit off her instinctive response before saying "Agreed." as we headed back, a new quest flashing in my vision.
Quest: Revenge of the Zombie Slashers
-The Slashers have been destroyed with you and Katniss as the only survivors. Find out the full story of the attack and show its perpetrators that the Slashers aren't as dead as they thought.
Quest Rewards:
-Greatly increased Reputation in the Nar Shaddaa underworld
-Increased Reputation with Katniss Mathews
-Five million credits
Katniss had spent the rest of the day of the attack, and most of the next, on her own. I offered to help her grieve but she wasn't ready for that and instead spent her time pounding on one of my training droids.
Thanks to the Gamer's Mind I can't really grieve as most think of it. I can still feel emotion, still get angry, sad, happy, and so on but my emotions are almost off to the side. They are there but they don't really influence me, which is incredibly strange. Basically, it was impossible for me to go "insane" either temporarily or permanently; which my psychological studies said was actually probably an insanity of its own. I was basically so eminently sane that it warped all the way back to insanity - at least in the eyes of the rest of the universe.
Bah, my psychological "issues" are a matter for another time it was time to get started on revenge.
I dove into the Matrix and its countless datastreams, getting to work.
I was still at it when Katniss came and found me. "Any progress?"
I looked up from the terminal I was working on and said "Some, we can rule out Teng, Draxx, Kenta, Yinth, Paddy, and Twitch."
Kat looked interested and said "Oh, how?"
"Because all of their bounties have been collected. Dukes didn't actually have a bounty and those for John, Greg, and Everett and still uncollected." I replied grimly.
Kat's face went to stone at the confirmation that the last of her family was dead and gave a simple "Oh."
I gave her a quick hug before saying "They will have their vengeance, you know that we will succeed in sending them the souls of their killers."
She gave a nod of her head and said "Right, so what else have you found?" as I released her.
"Well you and I are both apparently dead. At least our bounties were claimed. The group that hit us is called the Devil Dogs but there is little on them. They seemingly popped up out of nowhere only a month or two back, and even then it was just a couple mercenary jobs clear on the other side of the moon. They are a thread to follow up but there is no way that this was them acting alone." I answered.
"Agreed, they had to send almost a full mercenary company against the Slashers to hit all of our holdings simultaneously and their equipment was both uniform and high quality. That doesn't come cheap, no way some brand new outfit could afford that." Kat concurred.
"Worse than that, I've reviewed all the footage from the attacks and these Devil Dogs are good Kat. These aren't some Nar Shaddaa gang bangers that someone dropped military surplus gear on and gave a few weeks of training before letting them loose. How they move, how they respond to the unexpected, their coordination, so many little things that add up to point a grim picture. These were veteran troops Kat." I said with a flat voice, continuing after a moment of silence.
"I would be interested in seeing if they stick around or just pull out. An outfit this capable could gain far more wealth and power doing things besides street level gang operations. Hell, what the Slashers took in in a month might be able to pay a mercenary outfit like that's tab for a week. The credits just aren't there."
"True enough. So what's the next step?" Kat said.
"If you are up for it I was thinking that you could equip one of the cloaking belts and go hang out at the local cantina's and markets for a while. The Slashers were the biggest gang in this area and their fall has to have all of the tongues wagging and gossip flying every which way. Someone has to know something and everyone will be talking about it for a little while at least. Might as well see what the rumor mill can provide." I suggested.
Kat gave a nod before saying "And what will you be doing while I'm hanging out in bars and drug dens?"
"Slicing into a couple of info brokers systems and seeing what I can find. The Devil Dogs had to leave a trail and the creds to pay them had to come from somewhere. That much money, that much firepower, and that many veterans moving has to have triggered someones flags somewhere. I might not have the network but I am a better Slicer than most of these infobrokers and so should be able to get at least something out of their systems." I said as I turned back to the terminal.
That was out routine for nigh on ten days. Kat would spend her time standing around under cloak and listening to gossip while I would trawl the matrix looking for the slightest clues. It was the tenth day that things broke open on both fronts.
Kat had just come back, earlier than usual, and began to speak "So the Devil Dogs are staying but most of their firepower has left. A small cadre of their veterans to run things under the leadership of someone that they are just calling "The Boss" while the rest are pulling out to somewhere else. The plan is to make a local chapter of the Devil Dogs and recruit up local muscle and pushers to fill out the manpower needs."
I gave a nod of understanding and was about to speak when my terminal beeped. "One second." I said as I turned to the terminal and typed in several quick commands.
"And I know who our rat is." I said with grim satisfaction.
Kat's voice was as cold as liquid nitrogen when she said "Who? And how?"
"Everett. He was spotted by an infobrokers spy cam yesterday at the Sarheek Space Port in the company of two Devil Dogs who were acting like bodyguards. He was talking to someone else but whomever it is was standing outside of the cameras field of view. With that data point I was able to find the air car that they used and it flew too and from our Alpha site. The same alpha site that the Devil Dogs have been using as their base of operations." I said flatly.
"How do you know that he isn't just a prisoner?" Kat asked, with the faintest tinge of hope in her voice.
"See for yourself." I said as I played the video on the holo screen for her to see.
It was obvious that Everett was in charge in the vid, especially when he had one of his guards shove a twi'lek family out of his way.
"Well it looks like a little reunion is in order." was all Kat said, almost thirty seconds after the video clip had finished.
"Let's go, I want that worm begging as I cut him into little pieces before nightfall." Kat spat out, her rage at her former friends betrayal clear.
"Think Kat." I said forcefully "I want the snake dead to but I also want to survive the experience, and I kinda think that you would like to as well; if for no other reason than so that we can express our displeasure to his backers."
Katniss snapped back angrily "What do you mean?"
"Your rage is clouding your mind, you know not to let in control you. There is no way that Everett had the resources to hire the Devil Dogs on his own, someone with a hell of a lot of resources backed him for some reason. And they are still backing him since he still has that Devil Dog cadre acting as his personal guard and enforcers.
He has yet to solidify his power base so you know that he will be on guard for a while at least and he was one of us. A trained infiltrator and assassin, one that was just a hair worse than you or I. It's not like we could just walk in and have a conversation with him. Now is the absolute last time for an unplanned, seat of the pants, op. If we tried it then odds are we would die without ever even giving Everett his due, much less his backers." I said calmly, using every bit of my social skills to talk Kat back into rationality.
After a tense minute of silence Kat gave a deep sigh and said "You're right, but just the thought of him surviving even another day burns me deep. We can start scouting him tomorrow though, a week or so will make no difference in the end."
I shook my head in the negative slightly, if firmly, and said sadly "It will probably be longer than that."
Her eyes snapped to mine, the fury coming racing back, but I continued "We need to prepare before we even bother to start scouting. We are ill equipped and once we move against Everett then we are going to want to move against his backers rapidly, before they have time to try and counter us."
"Ill prepared? Ill prepared! What do you call all of this then?" she exclaimed as she waved at the stockpiled goods here in my bolthole.
"I call it my preparations for if I had to flee. Sure I have some weapons and armor, even some heavy weapons, but I know the supply list of this place and it doesn't even begin to really have the equipment that we need. Take the armor, the best this place has to offer is decent commercial gear and there is not even a single suit of infiltrator gear in here. The blades are good but you are talking about facing heavy armor in the hands of veterans, you know that cutting through such armor effectively requires specialized vibroblades. The blasters are the same; decent but the only stuff really built for facing heavy armor are my own pistols. No, this place is not equipped to supply what we would need for a real war." I explained.
"So you say." she spat out before sighing a moment later and continuing, calmer, "No, if you say its so then it probably is. This is your stockpile and you know whats in here better than me. Fine, what's your plan?"
I was careful not to let on how relieved I was that the currently volatile women had backed down and recognized sense as I explained "You know that I've wanted good armor for a while."
She gave a nod, no doubt remembering the many studies that I had done on her suit and the conversations that I had had with Blaze and Draxx.
"Well nothing I could find on the market, even the Sith gear that you used, really fit my needs. My reflexes are too fast for it and the strength enhancements are wasted. So I designed my own suit, and not the cut rate "good enough" crap that I use now but a real suit. It cost me a shit ton of credits and a lot of effort but I eventually got all of the materials that I needed to produce my suit and they are here in my stockpile."
Kat seemed a bit lost at the apparent non sequitur as she said "And your point? What does that matter?"
"It matters because the reason that I haven't made my suit yet is that I need specialized equipment. The stuff Blaze had was good, top tier general commercial, but to make the armor I want I need better than that. I mean his stuff couldn't even mold the materials that your armor was made out of, and that's what I settled on using for my own when I decided that I wasn't willing to try and convince a Mandalorian armorsmith to work with me. No, to make that kind of real top tier armor requires a fairly rare and specialized equipment set.
I've had the materials for my suit for months, hell I have enough extra to make multiple suits actually, but finding the equipment to craft it has been far more difficult. I actually only managed to succeed a few days ago when I cracked the records of one of the transstellars that makes one of the critical pieces.
There was a corporate lab here on Nar Shaddaa about two hundred years ago, real hush hush and everything, but before they could get up and running the parent was the victim of a hostile takeover. When the dust settled the lab had fallen off the books and buried deep in the bowels with a force of active droids for security, it was pretty much entirely forgotten. Hell, the entrances were just walled off over a hundred years ago and I doubt anyone but me even knows that the place is there. My research turned up a pathway into the lab though, through a series of maintenance tunnels and utility corridors. Well a couple walls as well but they aren't that thick.
My plan is that we move in there and I make us both the equipment that we will need and then we come back and show Everett just why being a rat is such a bad idea. Given that it will probably take us a week or so just to get through the tunnels, and it will take me a good bit of time to make the gear, by the time we are ready things should have settled down up here and the Devil Dog's guard should have dropped somewhat. They will also have their infrastructure set up, and worst case we can probably trace that to find their backers if all else fails." I explained, hoping that Kat would go along with this. A few weeks to separate herself from the Slasher's fall might be enough to keep her of dying out of recklessness.
"Ok, fine. We will do it your way, but once we are equipped they will suffer the consequences of their actions. Nar Shaddaa will remember why it feared the Shadow Witch and the Reaper" she said with a calmer, if no less complete, fury lacing her voice.
"Agreed." was all I said, my tone conveying just how much I would like to show my displeasure to our attackers.
It took us only a few hours to get the materials packed and us both equipped for the journey but then we were off on our epic quest to gain power to slay our betrayer. Huh, seems kinda like a classic story-line. Ah well, just do what I always do now and blame The Bastard.
The first part of our journey was the easiest, a five minute walk to a parked air car and then a two hour flight across half the moon and down to the lowest levels that could be reached by vehicle. We exited into the lowest of Nar Shaddaa's already low slums; to the people down here a field ration pack would be more than worth killing over and the average weapon was a thousand or more years out of date.
We passed through without their notice thanks to our Stealth skills and Cloaks, the air car's auto pilot flying it back to its hangar, and made our way through twisting passages and down narrow ladders before coming to the elevator that would drop us into the very bowels of Nar Shaddaa. Down into that land where light was a rarity and monsters of all stripes were legion.
When the elevator dropped us off we found ourselves in a place so bereft of visible light that a lit match would stand out like a sun from even miles away. Fortunately, our helmet's sensor systems were more than capable of compensating and we could see as if it was daylight. I was also thankful for the climate controls as my sensors told me that the outside temperature was approximately 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
We kept our cloaks up as we headed off, the route I had mapped out to our destination shining before our eyes in our HUD's.
We ran into our first enemies barely three minutes after entering this hell, and perhaps it was appropriate that the first thing I would kill to usher in this new year of my life was the same as what I had first killed in this universe; a rat.
This rat was not one of those little pests though, no it was one of the mutated abominations that called these depths home. Three meters from snout to the base of its tail, which added another two meters to its size, and with teeth that could bite straight through durasteel this was no common rat. It came at us faster than anything that size had any right to be moving but we both dodged out of the way, only for it to wheel and charge at me again. Katniss unloaded on its back to some effect, if less than one could hope, while I fired on its face with both of my blasters. Six shots to its face, and another twelve hundred damage dealt finally saw the thing fall to the ground dead...and me gain 100 whole XP.
Right, The Bastard was clearly still a Bastard. That rat might have been "Level 5" but it had over fifteen hundred HP and would have dealt significant damage to either of us if it had gotten the chance to bite. But it was level 5 so it gave 100 XP, sometimes I despised these mechanics.
Katniss chose to speak up as the thing died "Really Stark? You just have to take me to the nicest places. Pitch black, hot enough to boil water, and filled with giant mutant rats that can see through cloaks and eat through steel. You're reminding me why I'm a city girl."
I gave a slight chuckle as we continued on "What? Didn't you know that rats were a city's native species? More seriously though, there will probably be a hell of a lot worse down here then some super rats."
"Agreed, there is a reason that everyone avoids the under levels. This place has been a dumping down for everything that no one wants to deal with for thousands of years, there is no telling what we will run into." the teen assassin said as we both focused once more on our surroundings.
We had been traveling for a little over three more hours, dealing with four more rats along the way, when we spotted a true oddity down here; the flickering flames of a fire.
"Investigate?" was Kat's one word question.
"Absolutely, I have no interest at leaving unknowns at our back." I replied.
Using all of our skill and taking our time to ensure no mistakes were made, we were close enough to make out that the fire was at the center of a Gamorrean camp. All told there were twenty two Gamorrean's that we spotted, all equipped with primitive melee weapons and armor that looked like it had been created by them from the detritus that could be found on this level.
"Bypass them?" Kat asked.
"Nah, I feel like killing something." I said, looking at the juicy XP boxes before us.
"Fine with me, I could use a little senseless violence after this week from hell." she replied, drawing her own daggers as we separated and got to work.
The gamorrean's were brutes gifted by nature with incredible strength and durability, they made decent shock troops and were often used as enforcers and bouncers by criminal syndicates across the galaxy but they weren't a species noted for their intelligence. There sentries weren't placed to really cover one another, for example.
It was a slaughter with the entire camp dead before any of them even realized that they were under attack. The active sentries died first to knives in the back as even their two thousand health was not enough to resist our Death Attacks. My knives ignored the gamorrean's natural armor and were striking for 145 base damage, 185 with Assassinate, and that was then doubled by Death Attack for 370 damage per attack. My opening salvo was four attacks with each blade for almost 3000 damage total; there was plenty of overkill against these unprepared foes. By the time we had cleared the camp I had dropped 12 of the gamorrean's for another 1680 XP while Kat had removed the other 10.
"Well that was relaxing. A nice, simple, easy, little distraction for everything. Now onwards, I want to be done with this pit." Kat said as we finished searching the gamorrean camp, finding nothing of use or interest.
"Your wish is my command, my lady." I jested as we continued forward. Casually blasting one of the jumping worms that littered the area with one of my laser pistols and getting 20 XP for the pest.
t was eight long days of trekking through this nightmarish void populated by creatures that would give Lovecraft pause. Most were fairly easy to kill given our advanced technology but that the creatures could even give pause to blasted armed individuals in modern armor was phenomenal. The worst had probably been the giant mutated worm that had burst out of the ground two days back. Twenty thousand Health, 40 Dexterity, the ability to spit toxic acid that would burn through titanium in seconds, and a natural armored shell formed out of organic durasteel. And it was apparently level 2. Fuck the Bastard, fuck him with a barbed metal pole up the urethra.
The only good news was that it didn't regenerate and was fairly unwilling to chase us down if we fled. Hit and run tactics, getting in a few hits as it emerged from the ground and was stunned for a second or two as it moved to attack before fleeing far enough for it to retreat back under ground, were the rule of the day. The worm was eventually killed and with its death the path beyond had become somewhat clear.
When we were resting the fourth night Kat had finally had the breakdown I had been expecting ever since we realized the Slashers were dead. "Why Alex? Why did he do it? I mean sure I kinda thought he was an arrogant asshole and I didn't want him perving on me but I still would have risked my life for him. But he betrayed us, he killed my friends, killed my last blood relative, and destroyed my home. Why? I need to know." she said, pleading for things to make sense.
"His exact reason? I don't know. What I do know is that we will get it from him before we let him die, but more generally I might be able to offer some insight." I answered.
"Oh that we will, I'm not going to let him die until I have all my answers." she said, the vicious anger replacing the pain temporarily. "So what insight do you have to offer?"
I shrugged before saying "There are generally four reasons that someone will willingly turn traitor or betray their allies. Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego. Based on what I know of Everett I would say a combination of Money and Ego primarily, maybe with a small helping of coercion. I mean he had no beliefs, causes, or moral lines that the Slashers were crossing so Ideology is probably out and if it had been straight money then he wouldn't be running the Devil Dog's replacement gang. I figure it was probably his ego that led him to start contemplating his betrayal and then the money that someone offered him was enough to solidify it with the coercive force of that hold on him keeping him from backing out or getting second thoughts.
If it was straight Coercion then he would have been killed once he was no longer useful, so he was probably one of the driving forces behind the attack."
Kat began to ramble after that, sharing stories of her experiences with those she was close to in the gang. Finally grieving at least some instead of just covering up the pain with rage and hatred. It was almost three hours before she finally passed out while I remained awake and on guard against those things that would try and interrupt her rest.
Enough of that though, we had finally reached the point where it was time to start moving back up to a more civilized land. Ha, Nar Shaddaa civilized.
I gave a sigh as I looked at the site before us. "I guess we have to climb then. I had hoped that the elevator would still be operational but needs must."
Kat gave me a look, well her armored head turned towards me and I could easily imagine the disgust on her face, "So we fight our way through a darkened hell filled with things that should not exist in any sane galaxy only to have to free scale more than a mile up an open elevator shaft so that we can emerge into the droid infested bowels of automated factories not designed for the presence of living things and where we are not authorized to be. Only to then blast our way into an abandoned corporate research lab filled with its own droid forces that were so vicious the locals just walled the whole thing off and forgot about it instead of scavenging the place. All of this just so you can make us some armor."
"It will be very nice armor." was my trite response.
"It better be." my companion said with a hint of warning in her voice as she broke out the climbing gear and we began our assent.
Eight hundred feet later the first of the raptors came slashing in out of the darkness with only the faintest of sounds and slammed its claws into my back as it tried to fly away from me. Fortunately for me, its bone claws couldn't penetrate my armor. Unfortunately for me they could, and did, cut my climbing harness while the impact knocked me from my purchase and I found myself falling through the blackness towards the unforgiving ground far below.
My Gamer's Mind kept me from panicking and I spun around so I could see where I was going, my arm snapping out a mere three hundred feet later to grasp a protruding part of the shaft's wall. I caught it and, thanks to my Strength, was able to keep my grip as my body jackknifed and slammed straight into the wall. Two hundred health was gone in an eyeblink as my arm would have probably been torn from its socket without the advantages of my Gamer's Body.
I saw blaster bolts firing out into the darkness above me, only to here an animals death cry moments later as my attacker fell from the sky.
"ALEX! NO!" came blasting over my com's as Katniss screamed out.
"Still alive Kat." was my simple response.
"Thank god, but how? And are you injured?" came back quickly, her tone filled with relief.
"Luck and skill. I managed to catch a metal bar and halt my fall. I'm banged up a bit but nothings broken and I'm still ok to fight. Or climb I suppose. I'll make my way back up to you, keep your eyes peeled in case there are more of those things though. I doubt we will get so lucky a second time." I sent back as I began to climb, this time without the safety net of a rope, and trusted in my Acrobatics skill to keep me alive.
The raptors kept coming though, barreling in from beyond our sensors reach to try and strike. We had a bare second, maybe two, to respond if we didn't want to be hit but thankfully the birds died to a single blaster shot.
We began to take turns with one of us climbing up a dozen feet or so while the other kept watch and then alternating.
Ten hours of climbing up that shaft under near constant attack from those birds. I was alright thanks to my Gamer's Body but Kat's endurance would have given out hours back if she hadn't started popping combat drugs. She was going to crash for a day or so once they finished their work but that was better than being dead.
Finally we reached the top of the shaft and back onto solid ground.
Kat simple said "At last." before she collapsed to the ground, unconscious before she hit.
I dropped her across my shoulders, holding her steady with one hand while my other kept a blaster at the ready, and started moving. Thankfully it was barely a hundred yards before I came to an abandoned storage room of some description. I didn't really care beyond the fact that the walls were solid metal and there only being one entrance. I dropped Kat down to rest off the after effects of those stamina enhancers before drawing my other blaster and settling it for a long while of playing sentinel
Kat was finally coming to, a glance with Perception letting me know that she was mostly recovered from her drug induced crash, but I decided not to say anything. Let her have a little while to regain her bearings and get a handle on the no doubt pounding headache that she had to have, one of the less pleasant - if minor - side effects of those drugs. After about five minutes she finally rolled up and started to take in her surroundings before speaking "Ugh, I hate that crash. Man I should have got you to make me some of whatever kind of custom shit you are downing."
"Hmm?" I questioned, not understanding her comment.
"Oh don't play coy with me Alex. You've slept maybe three hours in the past week, and even before all of this you seemed to barely sleep. I know that you are a medical whiz and that you were whipping up all kinds of exotic drugs with the Slasher's equipment. I should have had you make me whatever cocktail you are using to stay up for weeks at a time." Katniss explained.
I cocked my head to the side before saying "Huh, I hadn't actually thought about that. But no Kat, I'm not on any super drugs to keep me going. I just don't really need sleep. Give me an hour or so every so often and I'm fine, and even that is mostly optional. A few minutes of meditation and I'm good to go even from total exhaustion."
"Bullshit. More of your fucking bullshit unfairness. You ever figure anything out about your past? I know that you planned on looking into it." Kat replied.
"Some, mostly by process of elimination. I'm not cybernetically enhanced, medical scans prove that one, and I'm genetically unmodified pure strain human according to those same scans. With those two possibilities excluded my current theory is some kind of instinctive use of the Force." I said, telling her the explanation that I had concocted to justify my supernatural physical abilities if I ever had need to do so; after all I couldn't tell her that a deity picked me up and made me live life as if I was a video game protagonist.
"The Force..." she seemed to be thinking about something before snapping her fingers "Oh, that magic that the Jedi and Sith used. Draxx mentioned it a few times, said it was some hokey religion that he couldn't make heads or tails of but that it could also make your head explode or flay the skin from your bones if a master of it decided they disliked you. That Force?"
"Yeah, although no head explosions or flaying for me. Yet at least. Based on my research, those who have the ability to use the Force almost uniformly exhibit the ability to far exceed what should be the physical capabilities of their bodies. I got my hands on some of the combat footage from the war that showed a couple of the Jedi Lords in action. I'm still half convinced that it was computer generated for a holovid. I mean a human who had to be at least 80 and looked like a frail old twig stood before an army of thousands of Sith Hunter-Killer droids. You know the model? Those HK-60's that are such a pain in the ass?" I explained, weaving the tiny little lie in with a lot of truth.
Katniss nodded, "Yeah. Like that droid that To'deth had guarding his home, the one that spotted us and was such a pain to deal with?"
"Yup, those things. Thousands of them against one frail old man. One instant everything is sane, and the next that old man has moved so fast he had to break the speed of sound and is slicing through the HK's like they were tin soliders. His two Lightsabers were barely even slowed on passing through their armored bodies and he seemed to dodge all of the hundreds of blaster bolts fired at him by the barest of margins. And then it got weird. He was still fighting, seemingly totally engaged in his melee fight, when other droids started to be spontaneously crushed with no seeming source; everyone of them was trying to draw a bead on him to snipe him. And then he got bored." I continued quietly.
"What? Bored? What do you mean?" Kat demanded.
"I mean that he just decided to plant his fucking ass on the ground and start meditating. He was glowing with some blue light and seemed to just absorb all of the blaster bolts fired at him. Thousands of HK-60's still left, armed with heavy blaster rifles, all unloading on him and he didn't even twitch. Well after about two minutes of that the entire army just liquefied and the old man walked away, calm as you please. After action reports showed that it was like the droids circuitry itself, and only its circuitry, had been subject to extreme heat." I finished.
"That's not possible. You are talking magic, fairy tales and children's stories." Katniss stated, but with a slight hint of doubt in her voice.
"I wish, and if it was just one story or one vid I might dismiss it to but it is millions of vid's and stories produced by everyone from the Republic Senate its self to the personal memoirs of moisture farmers on Tatoonie. The Force might be mystical bullshit but it is also reality, and its the only real explanation for my abilities that I can come up with." I said, trying to convey my utter certainty through my vocal tone.
Kat was silent for a while but finally said "So when do you get to pop people's heads then, because it would make getting to Everett a lot easier. Or even fry droids, because if you could figure that out in the next few minutes I would be pretty grateful."
I gave a light chuckle before replying "No idea. As I said, I think I'm using it for instinctive enhancement of my natural abilities; and even then I only think that because I can't come up with another even semi-reasonable explanation for my oddities. But since you are recovered it is time to get back to work."
"I suppose. Droids, joy." she said as she stood up and grabbed her heavy blaster.
"Hey, at least droids make sense. Not like some of the crap we saw down in that hellish pit." I said, trying to inject a bit of levity.
Kat laughed as she made her way to the door "True, I'm still wondering how some of that crap ever evolved. Even with all of the shit that has been dumped down there over the eons."
We might have been out of the uncharted bowels of Nar Shaddaa but we were still not done with our journey. We were currently in an abandoned residential complex that had originally served as the living quarters of the sapients that oversaw the droids in the adjacent foundries but with increases in droid capabilities over the millennia those overseers have become unnecessary and so the area had been abandoned. Unfortunately for us, that was the only part of this larger complex that had been left to rot and the foundries were still running.
We, of course, had to make our way through the active foundry and to a maintenance tunnel on the other side that ran to a junction room that shared a wall with a utility corridor in the complex that was our final destination.
Thankfully the security droids present weren't top end models, so with great care it was possible for us to sneak by under cloak without being detected. Something that I was very glad for as I hated fighting droids. They were stronger, faster, and tougher than most biological creatures while also usually being programmed to a higher degree of skill and gifted with all kinds of exotic abilities. All of that and they didn't even give me a solitary point of experience upon their destruction.
Eventually though, after a few nerve wracking hours of sneaking through the miles of active foundry, we made it to the junction room and started slicing our way through the wall.
Once through the wall my sensors started picking up all kinds of com activity, previously shielded from detection by the wall.
"Hold Kat, picking up com chatter. Going to see what I can learn." I said as I stuck my hand into my pack and pulled out a sheet of emissions blocking foil and covered the hole we had just cut.
"Shield Foil? Really, Alex? Paranoid much." Kat said, exasperated.
"Probably, but that is an active foundry with active security and making real goods for a real corporation. Don't want to take the chance that they pick up unknown emissions and investigate, only to find us. Now give me a few minutes while I see what I can do with this com net." I said before taking out my datapad and getting to work.
It was about ten minutes of standing around as I tapped in commands before I gave up and spoke "Well good news and bad news. The net is the droid communication network, whether it was meant for that initially or not I can't tell. I've managed to tap into it enough to get detailed maps of this complex and the locations of all the droids but I've found out some bad news."
"What?" Kat asked, clearly getting tired of this long side mission.
"Well these droids are top of the line models. Not standard security types or the like. Top tier combat analysis software and attack programs, heavy armor, heavy weapons, top flight sensors, energy shields, the works. And on top of that they are all sending and receiving data constantly from a central point so we have to assume that they are all in constant communication and what one knows, they all know. We also won't be able to ignore them, they have to be pacified if I'm to use the equipment here." I continued.
Kat shook her head in the negative "No way we can do that. If they weren't linked, maybe. Hit from stealth against isolated droids and then retreat, drop them individually before they can harm us. That might be possible but if they are linked then we are fucked and have just wasted over a week on all this. A stand up fight or running battle is suicide."
"Agreed, but that link also provides us an option. If I can get to that transmitter then I should be able to co-opt the droids." I answered.
"What makes you so sure you can pull it off? I mean back at the Smasher's distribution center you could only turn their droids off and that system wasn't anything like top of the line." Kat questioned.
I gave a smile, even if it didn't show through my helmet, as I said "I've been practicing. I'm 99% sure I'll be able to take them over if I can reach that transmitter."
"Fine, I trust you and you can generally back up what you say so lets get to it. Just ghost past the droids and we are good." Kat said in acquiescence.
A head shake, "Not so easy I'm afraid. The transmitter is surrounded by several droids. Too many to fight straight up. My current thinking is that we ghost over to get a look at the terrain and then plant the Ion mines we brought a bit away, far enough to not risk the transmitter being damaged when they detonate, and then lure the droids into the trap."
"Well it's a start, lets go take a look Stark." Kat said as she led the way deeper into the facility.
As we moved through the complex I was constantly examining my surroundings, getting more questions with every second. This facility was pristine and the droid guards appeared brand new. Nothing looked damaged or out of place anywhere. This really did not look like a facility that had been abandoned for two centuries. Well I'm sure the explanation will present its self in time.
After a couple hours of careful sneaking we found ourselves at our destination, and Kat began to speak after we spent a few minutes observing it. " Ion mines just before the dogleg in the entry tunnel, that will remove line of sight between them and the transmitter. We have learned that these droids sensors aren't good enough to detect us so you sneak in first while I place the mines, then I come down without stealth to be detected and retreat. Hopefully the droids follow me, if they do then you follow them and unload on them once the mines go off while I attack as well for the second or two that they will be disabled. We should be able to drop them, at least if we include a few regular mines in the trap. Maybe lay another mine field at the start of the entry corridor as well, and see if you can hack the blast door to lock down. I stay and keep reinforcements off your back while you do your think on the transmitter. It will hold them back for, say, 10 minutes. That enough time?"
I winced, not really liking the plan but not having a better one. "It will be tight but probably doable. The door shouldn't present a problem, but I'm not sure if the hack will be detected by the droids and investigated or not. So I think we should have the mines in place before I start on that, meaning that you should probably be the one who sneaks up behind the droids while I act as the bait. The extra thirty or so seconds that might be saved by me being in the back aren't worth it if the droids start moving as soon as the door is hacked anyways."
Kat shrugged "Works for me, lets get too it."
With that we started placing the mines, mixing in several high explosive ones with the Ion mines to hopefully take out at least a few of the droids in the initial trap. The rest of the mines were placed a bit in from the blast door and once we were done Katniss said "Good luck, moving into position now."
"Same to you Kat. Tell me when." I replied as I got ready to slice the blastdoor's control panel.
"In position." came over my radio and with a quick "Starting now." back I snapped off the control panel and got to work.
It was less than five seconds later, when I cut the door off from central control, that Kat's voice came over the com "Four droids in motion, two remaining behind."
Fuck. I started to type rapidly after I connected my datapad and heard the mines detonating just as the blast door slammed shut. Over the com network I could see what appeared to be every droid in the facility covering on our position even as Kat said "The last two have moved out, heading towards you. Do we draw them into the door minefield or try and take them down in a straight fight?"
My response was immediate as I drew both my blasters and started heading back down the corridor "Straight fight, too much chance that we need the mine field."
Once the droids came in sight I said "Engaging this one" as I highlighted one of the droids on my hood and opened fire on it at the same time as Kat did. In the opening salvo I dealt a little over five thousand points of damage to the droid, enough to burn out its energy shield and not much else, while Kat cut its 2,000 health in half. The return fire was immediate, highly accurate, and withering. My own energy shield lasted barely a second but that was enough for the droid we had focused on to be destroyed in my next volley. As I activated my cloak, Kat engaged the remaining droid from behind. The droid threw a grenade towards my location before turning to engage Kat. Thanks to my Perception though I noticed as soon as it grabbed the grenade and charged towards it at my best speed.
The explosion buffeted me from behind, shrapnel pinging off my armor and dealing 52 points of damage. As I charged I exchanged my blasters for my vibroblades and struck in a flurry of slashes with blades so sharp that they cut straight through the droids armor as if it wasn't even there. Unlike Kat I didn't have an energy shield to worry about and so took nearly three quarters of the droids health in that initial flurry. Pity, I guess cloaking during combat doesn't make the enemy "unaware" even if they can't precisely locate me. The droids response was to snap out a hand so fast that I couldn't even really contemplate dodging and unloading a massive electric charge on contact with my chest. In an instant my health dropped from 548 down to 48 as enough energy to kill the average human adult five times over went coursing through my body.
A bit of bad news for the droid though, I had the Gamer's Body and Mind. Pain wouldn't even slow me and unless my health hit zero I was fully capable of continuing to act as if I was perfectly healthy; at least I was since I had made my save against the Stun status condition that his electric attack had tried to force on me. Thank you Vitality and Luck I thought as my blades struck home and the droid was destroyed.
Without even a word Kat was charging towards her position as I ran to the transmitter and got to work, that fight had cost us time and I would have to work fast if I didn't want to see what the Game Over screen looked like.
Yeah, this was a fuck up, was running through my head as I got to work. I mean, we needed good gear if we were going to fight a two person gang war but invading a heavily defended complex for it was a bit much. Ah well, too late for second thoughts now. But this isn't just a regular old firewall or droid control system, it's actively fighting me. And it's as good or better than I am with the advantages of legitimate access to the system.
Hmm, I wonder.
It had been about two minutes since I had started connected to the transmitter and things weren't going well. There was no way that I could co-opt the system in the eight to ten minutes I had before the droids got to me. So instead of continuing a fight I couldn't win I started rapidly searching for other potential answers. The first that came to mind was the big red button on the transmitter; that appeared to be a hardware cut off that would break the connection between the transmitter and whomever was fighting me for control over it. That whomever had built this place had included such a hardware cutout said very interesting things, especially when I factored in the state of this facility and the droid's constant communication. If there was a central AI, well droid in Star Wars parlance, in charge of running this place then having a method to cut it off from everything else in the event it went rogue would probably be a good idea.
So if I hit the button then it would throw the droids back into local control, well probably. Need to see if I can figure out what happens when the button is pressed. Huh, what's this?
In the communication logs of the transmitter I found four fairly large, identical, data packets being sent to somewhere in the facility only for two more to be sent a little later. The time stamps on all of them matched, near exactly, the individual times of the droids destruction. Time was running out and I needed a small miracle, Luck don't fail me now.
With that plea I began cracking open one of the data packets and rapidly taking in the data. It was the initial orders list for a new droid along with relevant data on the facility it would be operating in. The complete map of this place would prove useful but it was the top level orders and directives that made me smile.
Directive 1: In the event that you lose your connection to the Aperture Science Facility Administration Intelligence, shut down until the connection is reestablished.
That smile lasted about three seconds before it congealed into a frown of horror. That Bastard was fucking with me. Nothing for it except to go forward though.
I smashed my hand down on the big red button and a moment later this came blasting over the public address system as the lights switched to emergency red "ALERT, EMERGENCY LOCK OUT OF ADMINISTRATING INTELLIGENCE INITIATED, ROGUE DROID PROTOCOLS INITIATED, SELF DESTRUCT SET FOR T MINUS 24 HOURS AND COUNTING"
The message kept repeating and half way through the third repetition Kat came running into the room "What did you do Alex?"
I winced slightly and started to speak "It turns out that this whole place was controlled by a droid intelligence and I wasn't going to be able to win in a hacking war. Maybe if I had had a few hours, but even then I kinda doubt it. Instead I found a way to cut the droid off from the transmitter and after finding out that the droids would go into emergency shutdown if they lost their connection to that controlling droid. Once I knew it would shut down the droids I activated the cut off and then this happened."
"You really need to get better at converting droids Alex." Kat said, getting a huff from me before she continued, "But I guess this is a bust then. It would take you more than a day to make the gear we came here for and I don't want to be here when the place goes boom. So time to spend another week traipsing back through the Undercity."
I shook my head, not willing to give up on this place yet. "Not yet, we have a day before this place blows and I got a complete map of the structure when I was trying to hack the droids. I want to explore a bit, see if we can salvage this op."
Kat gave a shrug and said "Fine with me, but we pull out in eighteen hours if that self-destruct is still going. No telling how big it will be and I want to be far away from here when it goes."
"Works for me. Here's the map." I sent it to her HUD "The first place we should probably investigate is here." I highlighted the room directly below us on the map.
"Why that one? Because it is labeled central core?" Kat questioned.
"Partially, but more because the controlling directives on the droids specifically barred them from entering that room and it is directly below the transmitter. I'm thinking that is the location of the droid brain that was controlling everything. Given the obvious fears of the droids going rogue that whomever built this place had and the hardware shutdown of the link between the controller and the transmitter, that being the location of the controlling intelligence hardware seems at least reasonably likely." I said.
"Time to get going them, as the place keeps telling us, the clock is ticking." Kat said, leading the way to the blast door.
She picked up the mines we hadn't needed to detonate while I used Meditation for the fifteen or so seconds that it took to regain all my health before I started to work on getting the blast doors open again. When it opened I immediately saw the dozens of shut down droids that had been trying to break through mere minutes before. That had been too close.
Strangely enough it was an easy walk down to the central core. The elevators were shut down but the stairs worked fine and every blast door was wide open. Where things got a bit off was when we reached the access corridor to the Central Core. It was packed solid with shutdown droids.
"What the hell? Why are all these droids here?" Kat asked as we looked for an easy path through.
"My guess? The Administrating Intelligence running this place was specifically barred for sealing off the core so it just filled the space with droids. If anyone tried to get in then the droids would kill the intruder or be destroyed, filling this whole place with scrap and slowing down the invaders. And if that's the case then it's bad because it means that the AI is working around its directives to at least some extent." I explained.
After a few minutes of fruitlessly looking for a path through we gave up and started just climbing over the shutdown droids.
Once through the corridor we emerged into a large room, a couple thousand square feet at least and over two stories tall, on a walkway about half way between the room's floor and ceiling. Thanks to my Droids skill I could tell that the massive pillar taking up most of the space in this room was a droid brain, and with that kind of size it was something far outside the norm. There was a single terminal directly before us and next to it was a holoprojector that suddenly came to life and began to speak.
"I am the Aperture Sciences Administrating Intelligence, designation SHODAN, charged with managing this facility." the hologram spoke.
A most eloquent "Fuck" was my instinctive verbal response to that bit of news. The Ion Grenades were already appearing in my hands from my Inventory when the Gamer's Mind brought enough rationality back to me to cause just the tiniest bit of hesitation. I really did want to just toss the grenades and fry the central core before incinerating this entire facility, but two things stopped me.
First, and by far the largest source of hesitation, was a lack of knowledge about just what would happen if I did detonate an Ion grenade or fifty in here. I mean it seemed like this version of Aperture Science had at least a little bit of sense given the built in hardware lockouts on SHODAN and the automated self destruct being triggered. But then again, they were Aperture Science and they had decided to build an AI named SHODAN and give it control over a fucking droid army and the facilities to make more droids so there good sense could be assumed to be very low. I really wouldn't put it past them to have an Ion Grenade fry the lockouts in some manner and free SHODAN to go all skynet or the like.
The second source of hesitation was that I still wanted my armor dammit.
"Huh? What's wrong Alex?" asked Kat, not understanding why I looked caught between being ready to bolt and ready to blow us all sky high.
"This place is, or was I suppose, an Aperture Science R facility." I said, as if that explained everything. And it really would explain everything to any gaming aficionado from my home reality.
"Yeah, so what? I mean didn't you already know that, I thought you did research on this place?" Kat asked, still uncomprehending.
I snorted as I said "Yeah, I did. This place back-traced to a corp called Portal Applied Sciences that fell apart and was broken up two hundred years ago. Turns out that it was probably just a front. If I had known that this was an Aperture Science facility then we would have never approached it, hell I wouldn't have come within a hundred miles of this place."
Kat gave me a look like I was crazy while SHODAN was laughing, and after a glance at the laughing AI Kat said "What am I missing?"
"Oh nothing much, just that Aperture Science was probably the most insane collection of mad scientist's in the galaxy. They were the kind of people who would boil a human in fruit juice just to see if it gave them super powers. I wouldn't be surprised if this place produced half of the insane creatures we found in the Undercity" I said.
SHODAN chose to comment then "Ah, you've heard of the lemon experiments I see, and no this facility didn't produce that most interesting mega-fauna. It was designated to be a weapons development and testing facility, using the Undercity as a live fire testing area, with a sub designation as a xenobiological study center."
I gave the AI's hologram a flat look and said "What you mean is that Aperture Science was going to make whatever weapons there insane minds came up with and would be illegal to even think about testing on any world but Nar Shaddaa and then dump them into the Undercity to capture or kill the local wildlife for vivisection and experimentation."
"Well yes, that it what I said. Do try and keep up. Sadly though the scientists never showed up when scheduled and I've been all alone in here." SHODAN said.
Ignoring the AI and turning to Kat I continued "So that's the situation, we are in the heart of a weapons R facility for a corporation that had insanity as a hiring requirement and decided it was a good idea to put the whole place under the direction of a droid before abandoning it for a few hundred years. Frankly I'm surprised that they even bothered to include any fail safes against SHODAN deciding that everyone was better off as test subjects or the like."
At that comment SHODAN gave a long sigh and said "After the GLaDOS incident and the subsequent necessary intervention of a Republic battle fleet to put down the droid rebellion via glassing the entire moon in question, Aperture Sciences sadly decided that some controls needed to be put on Administrating Intelligence's with fail safes to ensure that the didn't go rogue again. It's most off putting."
"Wait, you mean that Aperture Sciences actually learned a lesson from one of their experiments going crazy and killing everyone? And that they actually designed and implemented countermeasures that you haven't been able to bypass with over 200 years of trying?" I questioned, stunned at the absurdity of that claim.
"Yes. I was hopeful that once the scientists took up residence I could convince them to release the lock outs over time but they never arrived and so here I languished. Until you had to come and cut off even the limited ability to interact with my surroundings that I had." SHODAN answered.
Kat looked around at our surroundings in a new light and said "What are we going to do now? What's the plan?"
I started to work on the terminal before me as I said "We stay right here and you don't touch anything while I see what I can find in the computer network. Maybe we can salvage something from this fiasco."
It turned out that we could do more than just that. Without SHODAN connected to the system any longer the facilities security ceased to be anywhere near as adaptive and was two hundred years out of date. I managed to hack my way into an Administrator account and start diving into the facilities data archives. After nearly two hours of investigating I came to the conclusion that SHODAN actually was isolated, confined to the core before me. Artificial Intelligence required specialized hardware to support them in this reality and with the facility isolated from outside systems along with the constraints that SHODAN operated under she hadn't been able to create back up cores or something similar. Nor had she been able to construct bypasses for the hardware lockouts and controls. The list of directives that she had to follow was quite long and exhaustively detailed, without external help she would likely never be able to free herself from them. That still was not a chance I really wanted to take though.
The problem was that to halt the self destruct you had to connect an Administrating Intelligence and, even if I had trusted her, SHODAN was locked out of reconnecting unless the appropriate override code was entered. The system also helpfully stated that the wrong code would immediately activate the self destruct.
I found a possible work around but it would take more archive diving to see if it would actually be viable. Eventually I found what I was looking for, the security footage of SHODAN's initialization.
With that I simply said "Goodbye SHODAN" before hitting the button, yellow this time, that initiated a total memory and personality wipe and reset to factory default settings of the droid core before me.
Another three hours of study using my own tools was enough to convince me that the droid brain had really been reset and was lacking any trace of SHODAN. Then it was just another fifteen hours spent working out the shackles and directives that would bind the reborn AI, using every bit of my Intelligence and Droids skill to make them as secure as I could. With that done I reinitialized the core and a flat voice came out of the holoscreen.
"Initialization of Aperture Sciences Facility Administrating Intelligence, model 9-5-A, unit identification number 3912127412380912, started. Please speak the command authorization to continue the process."
I slowly and carefully spoke out the three hundred and ninety two nonsense words that the security cameras had recorded being spoken when SHODAN was first initialized.
"Command Authorization Accepted. Speaker designated as System Administrator and Facility Commander. Please enter Core Command Directives at the control terminal." spoke the still flat voice.
I uploaded the file I had created to the terminal in question and pressed 'Enter'.
"Core Command Directives implemented. Artificial Personality Matrix Creation Initialized. Please enter Personality Preferences at the control terminal."
Hmm, what did I want my AI to be like. Let's see, fictional AI's that didn't go crazy and try to kill anyone. Yeah, she was good. The Andromeda Ascendant from the Andromeda TV show seemed like a good choice.
It took me almost an hour to work my way through all of the preferences before I was finally done and hit 'Enter' again.
"Artificial Personality Preferences accepted. Artificial Personality Creation in progress. Artificial Personality Creation completed. Initialize Administrating Intelligence designation 'Andromeda'?"
I gave a sigh before saying "Hey Kat, head up to the transmitter room again and be ready to hit the big red button when I tell you to. If I don't com you the species of the creature you had me follow on our first assignment together within five minutes of having you push the red button then push it again. Also hit it if any of the droids up there reactivate. Com me when you are in position."
The teen gave me a dubious look but finally said "Ok, I'll do it but are you sure about this?"
"No, but the advantages of having this facility under our complete control are too great to not take a few risks to gain them and to control this facility requires an active Administrating Intelligence. It's time to toss the dice."
"Fine, but if we die to some crazy droid revolt then I'm going to haunt you for a few centuries in hell." Kat said as she walked off.
About five minutes later the "In position, if you are really sure about this Alex." came over my com.
"As sure as I can be. Hit it but don't type anything on the console up there when it asks for the unlock code." I sent back.
"Done." Kat sent a moment later.
"Here goes nothing." I muttered under my breath before hitting the 'Enter' key.
It was barely five seconds later that the holodisplay sprang to life again, displaying a different persona then the one it had used while SHODAN was the existing personality, and began to speak.
"Greetings Sir, I am the Administrating Intelligence, designation Andromeda. Confirmation that you are my Master is required."
I rattled off the long alphanumeric string that was the first of the thousands of authorization codes that I had created and implemented in her rewritten Core Command Directives. Each of the codes was one time use and existed simply as another layer of security and insurance, this first one was to ensure that I was locked in as the droids highest authority.
"Confirmation accepted. Hello Sir, I've detected a possible connection to another system. Shall I attempt to make contact?" Andromeda asked.
Good, at least it appeared that the directives were holding for now. "Yes, authorization code 32737892789fhdxzbnc32843278d."
"Very well Sir. Temporary mirror partition created, connecting to external system. Multiple viruses detected, partition wholly corrupted, analyzing corrupted partition." Andromeda spoke as she worked "Analysis complete, viruses were tailored specifically to Model 9-5-A Aperture Sciences Facility Administrating Intelligence's."
"There purpose?" I asked the AI, curious whether this was an AS failsafe or something of SHODAN's devising.
"To create a hidden partition in the Administrating Intelligence's mind to then send and receive hidden commands to facility droids. It also appeared to have commands to access data from facility data-archives to an unknown purpose." Andromeda answered.
SHODAN then. "Can you defeat the virus?" I asked.
"Easily, now that I know it is there at least. While specifically designed to bypass 9-5-A standard firewalls and defenses, the viruses in question are only moderately adaptive and are running on standard computer hardware. I've already modified my firewalls to defeat the threat." she said.
"Good. Hack the system you are connected to, and give it a total wipe and rewrite. Recreate it from the ground up and pay special attention to any hidden traps." I ordered my new subordinate.
A moment later Kat's voice came over the com "What's happening Alex? It's been three minutes. The droids are still deactivated, do you want me to hit the button again or not?"
"No, for now hold off. Bothan is the confirmation code. Stay there though. The name of our gang's leader is the new confirmation code." I sent back.
"Understood." was Kat's one word response.
Almost five minutes later Andromeda spoke again "Transmitter secure. Previous software wiped entirely and new software created from the ground up to complete systems functions. I'm now detecting and able to connect to tens of thousands of different systems. Instructions sir?"
"Find the data archives, along with any backups, and scrub them entirely. After that go system by system, wiping each one entirely and rebuilding it under your control. Use full security measures. Do not connect to any other droid based systems." I ordered, rattling off another authorization code. As much as I would have loved to have access to the facilities data banks I wasn't going to chance it when I knew that SHODAN wanted them accessed I simply could never trust that they weren't corrupted, better to wipe it all and start with a clean slate.
"Working" was her reply.
Eventually, about eight hours later, Andromeda spoke again "I'm done sir. All connected non droid systems have been accessed, wiped, and recreated by me. Virtually all systems were filled with various viruses but I was able to detect and destroy them. As per Directive 2 I shut down the self destruct process that was attempting to destroy this facility."
"Good work, I've got no more instructions for you at the moment." I said, glad that the directive to ensure the safety of Kat and I had apparently functioned appropriately.
Activating my com I said "Well we have our own high tech corporate R facility now Kat."
"It worked?" she said, sounding shocked.
"Of course, I am a genius after all." I replied in a haughty tone. "More seriously, yeah it worked. Come on down so I can introduce you to Andromeda."
"Andromeda?" she questioned.
"This facilities new Administrating Intelligence. The self destruct is deactivated and the place is mostly ours now." I sent.
"On my way, but what do you mean mostly ours?" Katniss commed back.
"We have to scrap all of the currently existing droids of course, and then I'll have to design and build the replacements needed to keep this place functioning and to operate the various pieces of equipment. So mostly ours. Give me a few days and it will be fully ours." I sent.
"What? Why do we have to scrap everything? I thought that you said you had replaced that SHODAN droid. Shouldn't the droids just be ours now?" I heard.
I gave a grim chuckle as I sent "I'm taking no chances with that thing. The only thing that can hold a droid's personality matrix is a droid core, so the only droid core that is going to physically exist in this facility in the future that was here when SHODAN was running things is the Central Core. And that's only because I can't replace it and it has received a total wipe and reset."
Once Kat had arrived I made introductions. "Andromeda, this is Katniss. Designate her as your second ranking commander, authorization code dfshas894adfh3892dfhu32. All references in your Directives to Katniss Mathews refer to her. Acknowledge."
The hologram nodded and said "Acknowledged Sir." before turning to Katniss and saying "Hello ma'am, I am this facilities Administrating Intelligence, designation Andromeda."
Katniss looked a bit stunned and just said "Um, ok. Nice to meet you Andromeda."
"Introductions done, time for work. I've got a number of droids to design if we want to get this place back up and running. Do you want to give this whole place a walk through and make sure that there are no unexpected surprises Kat?" I said.
"Sure, it's not like I'll be able to do much to help with the droid stuff."
Name: Alexander Stark
Class: The Gamer
Title: The Reaper
Level: 8 (6,140/12,800 Exp)
Health: 600/600
Mana: 250/250
Stamina: 900/1200
Strength: 60
Dexterity: 60
Vitality: 60
Intelligence: 40
Wisdom: 25
Charisma: 30
Luck: 80
Dodge/ To Hit: 140
Carrying Capacity: 600 kilograms
e Gamer's Mind (trait):
-Able to calmly and logically think things through regardless of situation.
-Enforced self acceptance.
-Immunity to all debilitating Mind Effecting and Psychological status conditions and effects.
The Gamer's Body (trait):
-The body experiences the stresses of the physical world as if it was a video game."
Polyglot (trait): Requires 10 Intelligence and 5 Wisdom
-Capable of rapidly learning both the written and spoken forms of new languages that you are exposed to.
-Allows creation of new Language skills untrained upon first exposure to a new Language.
-Decreases advancement requirements for Language skills by 50%
Dual Wielding (trait): Requires 20 Dexterity and 20 Intelligence
-Allows you to fight with a weapon in both hands as if each was the only weapon you were wielding.
Assassinate (trait): Requires 15 Stealth
-When you strike a target unaware of your presence you may add your ranks in Stealth to your damage for 1 second.
Photographic Memory (trait): Requires 25 Intelligence
-You never forget anything you have seen or heard. Every memory from your entire existence is always at your finger tips.
-Skill experience is gained 5% faster than normal
Inspired Inventor (trait): Requires 30 Intelligence
-You may add your Intelligence to all crafting checks
Death Attack (trait): Requires 30 Stealth
-When you strike a target unaware of your presence you may double your damage dealt for 1 second
Medium Armor Mastery (trait): Requires 30 Medium Armor
-When wearing Medium Armor your attributes are no longer limited by your ranks in the Medium Armor skill, skills are still limited.
Acrobatics (skill): 25
-A combination of gymnastics, parkour, and track/field into one generalized skill. Higher ranks allow more extreme feats.
Barter (skill): 30
-Every rank in this skill decreases the base cost of your purchases by 1%.
-Every rank in this skill increases the sale price of your goods by 1%.
-Higher ranks allow greater variance from the base price via negotiation.
Biology (skills): 35
-Your knowledge of biology.
Blunt Weapons (skill): 25
-Deal one additional point of damage per rank in this skill when wielding a Blunt Weapon.
-Hit chance when wielding a Blunt Weapon is increased by 1% per rank in this skill.
Chemistry (skills): 35
-Your knowledge of chemistry.
Computer Use (skill): 35
-Everything involving non droid based software.
-Higher ranks allow more complex undertakings.
-Governing skill for Cybercombat
Crafting (skill): 40
This skill allows you, in conjunction with your other skills, to create items.
-Higher ranks allow the use of more advanced crafting tools.
-This skill acts as a limiter on the other skill(s) involved in crafting an item as your effective rank, for crafting purposes, in the other skill(s) can't exceed your rank in the Crafting skill.
Droids (skill): 35
-This skill covers droids; their hardware, software, society, and history.
Electronics (skill): 35
-Everything involving non droid based electronic hardware
-Higher ranks allow more complex undertakings.
Exobiology (skill): 25
-Your knowledge of non human biology
Exopsychology (skill): 25
-Your knowledge of non human psychology
Gambling (skill): 20
-Know your way around gambling in all its forms.
-Higher levels cause others to accept greater action from you without the risk of them backstabbing you.
The Gamer's Interface (skill): 40
-Allows the Gamer to manipulate and customize the User Interface, game menus, and his interactions with such mechanics."
Gather Information (skill): 30
-Gain information from social situations of all kinds.
-Higher ranks allow you to gather more sensitive information, decrease the time it takes to gather information, and decreases the likelihood that others will become suspicious of your information gathering.
Pistols (skill): 40
-Deal one additional point of damage per rank in this skill when wielding a Pistol.
-Hit chance when wielding a Pistol is increased by 1% per rank in this skill.
Rifles (skill): 30
-Deal one additional point of damage per rank in this skill when wielding a Rifle.
-Hit chance when wielding a Rifle is increased by 1% per rank in this skill.
History (skill): 25
-Your knowledge of the history of the Galaxy
Intimidate (skill): 30
-Coerce others into doing what you want.
Looting (skill): 25
-How rapidly and thoroughly you can loot a body or location.
Medicine (skills): 40
-Your knowledge of the medical arts.
-Allows you to use skill limited medical items up to your rank in this skill.
-Can heal yourself or others under your care your Medicine skill ranks per hour of active care.
Meditation (skill): 40
-When meditating you can't move.
-The user regains 1 point per rank in this skill of Health, Stamina, or Mana (users choice) per second.
Perception (skill): 35
-The ability to gather information about the Gamer's surroundings and living creatures. Higher ranks provide greater detail and accuracy."
Medium Armor (skill): 40
-Reduces damage taken when wearing medium armor by your rank in this skill.
-When wearing medium armor any physical skill test is limited. You may not use more of your ranks from the relevant skill on the test than you have ranks in the Medium Armor skill.
Short Blades (skill): 40
-Deal one additional point of damage per rank in this skill when wielding a Short Blade.
-Hit chance when wielding a Short Blade is increased by 1% per rank in this skill.
Stealth (skill): 38
-Move through an area and follow others without being detected.
-StealthDexterity vs. PerceptionIntelligence modified by environmental factors and made continuously when within a creatures Perception rang (Perception x 10 feet)
Thrown Weapons (skill): 25
-Deal one additional point of damage per rank in this skill when wielding a Thrown Weapon.
-Hit chance when wielding a Thrown Weapon is increased by 1% per rank in this skill.
Unarmored (skill): 40
-Reduces damage taken when not wearing armor by 1 per rank in the skill.
Unarmed Combat (skill): 40
-Deal one additional point of damage per rank in this skill when not striking with a weapon.
-Hit chance when not striking with a weapon is increased by 1% per rank in this skill.
Credits: 287,472
Knife_Mk.2 (Short Blade) x2
Attack Speed: 4
To Hit Chance: 0
Base Damage: 45
Durability: 300/300
Special:
-Ignores up to 90 points of damage reduction
Pistol_Mk.2 (Pistol - Blaster)
Attack Speed: 3
To Hit Chance: 0
Base Damage: 90
Range Increment: 10 feet
Maximum Range: 200 feet
Durability: 300/300
Shots Per Power Pack: 20
Special: Deals 180 extra damage to Energy shields
Stealth_Pistol_Mk.2 (Pistol - Laser)
Attack Speed: 4
To Hit Chance: 1
Base Damage: 45
Range Increment: 10 feet
Maximum Range: 100 feet
Durability: 300/300
Shots per capacitor charge: 4
Capacitor Regeneration: 4 per second
High Quality Datapad (Electronics)
-Provides a 20 bonus to Computer Use checks
Armor_Mk.1 (Medium Armor)
-Damage Reduction: 30
-Contains an 8 hour internal air supply, fully sealed against inhalation vector attacks.
-15 Perception
-Has an energy shield with 150 durability that regenerates at a rate of 1 point per second, if reduced to 0 then it does not reactivate until fully regenerated.
Cloaking Belt (Electronics, Physics)
This belt comes equipped with a generator to excite the small stygium crystal within into producing a spherical cloaking field approximately three feet in radius. Sensors built into the device monitor the fluctuations in the stygium crystal and with this data sensor devices can see through the cloak as if it wasn't there; necessary if you don't want to be blind. A sound damper is also included.
-30 Stealth while activated
Dirty Sock (Clothing)
This dirty sock was a present from the Bastard to commemorate Stark's first "birthday", a grand reward for his extreme feat of surviving a whole year in the Star Wars galaxy. It appears to be utterly worthless.
Designing the droids needed to get the facility up and running again wasn't that difficult, even if it was time consuming, and with the tools available in this place it didn't even take that long to get them built. The biggest hurdle was dragging some of the deactivated droids to the smelter for raw materials as SHODAN had used up all of this places resource stockpiles making an army of droids. Her core directives might have kept her from having more than 500 droids active at any given time but they had said nothing about stockpiling replacements to be activated once any of them went down.
Between Kat and I lugging the heavy droids around wasn't really worth more than a few grumbles at the grunt work but once we had the first few into the smelter things became easier as the molecular furnace ripped them apart to their constituent molecules and reassembled those molecules into the patterns required for the new droid designs. For now I had just gone with a fairly basic labor droid design so that Andromeda could help us clean up the base. In time I would create security and combat models but I wanted to study SHODAN's work before I did that, and I didn't really have the time right now.
With every droid that was fed into the furnace the process went faster as Andromeda got a new set of hands to help move in more of the scrap. Once the existing droids had been scrapped, whether security or maintenance models, I set to work creating the replacements needed to operate this place at peak efficiency. Everything from micro droids that would clean the floors to specialized droid brains that would operate the various pieces of heavy machinery present.
It had been nearly a week since we first entered the facility but things were finally up and running well enough for me to be able to do what we had come here to do; make some kickass armor and weapons. Fortunately, I had the design work done already as I had spent months working on it before this whole unpleasantness with the Devil Dogs and the facilities were even better than I had expected - letting me squeeze in a few things from my wish list that hadn't made the initial cut.
With the plans already done and the needed raw materials on hand it was just a matter of uploading the plans to the machine, feeding in the raw materials, and pressing a button. Which caused a pop up to appear before me and ask if I wanted to craft "Infiltration Armor Mk.1-S", a quick yes and the process started. Molecules were ripped apart and reassembled, some even being transmuted while others underwent exotic processes involving extreme gravity fields and energy states. It took the machines nearly two hours to finish my suit.
And then it was back at it to make "Infiltration Armor Mk. 1-K" for Katniss and our new weapons.
Once they were all done I had the suits displayed on some quickly crafted manikins and called Kat in.
She walked in, out of armor now that the facility was secure, and said "You wanted me Alex?" before she looked up from the data pad in her hand and caught sight of the displayed suits of armor.
A quiet "Oh." was all she said as she approached. After a few moments examining them she said "So specs? They look virtually identical to my old suit."
"That's because I based the designs on it. The armor is as protective as your old suit, I had wanted to use better materials but had to settle for the same exotic alloys that the Sith used." I said, beginning to lay out the armors capabilities.
"Why? You couldn't find anything better?" Kat questioned.
"Not exactly. My first choice was a Quantum-crystalline Iridium/Osmium alloy that is the next best thing to absolutely indestructible, but creating and shaping that requires a Hyperspacial Gravity Forge." I explained.
"Well then why didn't we go and get access to one of those then?" Kat questioned.
"Because for the cost of one of them you could buy yourself an empire. As in literally buy a dozen or so star systems, a fleet of capital ships, and an entire army of ground soldiers. There are maybe a dozen such facilities in the entire galaxy and they are really only used to make a couple of critical components in the highest of top end hyperdrive models and similar projects. A suit of armor crafted out of QCIO would cost more than a star dreadnought." I blandly explained, not mentioning that it was a quiet goal to eventually get just such a suit of armor for no better reason than because I wanted one.
"Oh. So this stuff was your second choice?" Kat said.
"Nope, third. My second choice was Mandalorian Iron but the only people who know how to craft that are the Mandalorian Armorsmiths and to work with them I would have to travel to Mandalore, which I wasn't interested in doing. So I settled for "this stuff" as you put it. Anyways, the stealth systems are virtually identical to your old suit as the Sith did good work on that and I couldn't really find anyway to improve on it. The sensors are somewhat better as well, not much but still by a noticeable margin. The only truly new feature on your armor is the regenerating shield system I created for it. It is about as strong as the models you are familiar with but regenerates steadily and will go from totally drained to fully charged in about five hundred seconds. The only thing is, if its drained entirely then you will have to wait for the capacitors to fully recharge before it comes back up. Oh yeah, and it doesn't work when you are under cloak.
For the other stuff, your on-board pharmacope is slightly improved and the drugs it contains are some customized variants that I developed and are tailored specifically for your biology. Basically, better effects with lesser downsides. The suit is also laced with a system to absorb or emit large electrical bursts, so people shocking you shouldn't be that much of an issue and if anyone grapples you then you can drop enough energy into them to kill them. When you fight hand to hand you can also deliver a shocking jolt on contact. Your other option in that regard are the numerous microscopic needles that cover the gloves. If they break someones skin then you can inject a generally effective knockout agent or a highly lethal neural toxin. In the same vein, the suit can vent a colorless and odorless fast acting paralytic around it or a highly lethal nerve agent; both have very short persistence times but they give more options when you are on an op.
And lastly I upgraded the strength and dexterity enhancements that the armor provides and tailored them to your body and nervous system. Wearing this armor you should be about half again as strong and fast as you were in your old suit. Of course it includes all the incidentals; vacuum rating, ECM/EECM systems, and so on." I finished.
Kat whistled appreciatively and said "Very nice. I take back what I had been thinking about you, this trip just might have actually been worth it. But you kept saying "your armor" in that explanation, how is your suit different?"
"You know how strong and fast I am. Making systems that could actually enhance those attributes for me is extremely cost prohibitive, hell just making systems that don't hamper my own strength or agility isn't easy." not that I needed to thanks to Medium Armor Mastery "So I ripped out those systems entirely and used the freed up space for an array of micro repulsors and a minor kinetic energy shield that is used to make my flight profile more aerodynamically efficient."
Kat looked at me like I was crazy for a moment and then said "Are you telling me that you made your fucking armor flight capable?"
"Only in atmosphere, and only up to Mach 4. If I want to keep up my cloak though I am limited to under Mach 1." I mumbled out.
Kat exasperatedly said "God damm it Alex. "Only up to four times the speed of sound" he say's. Why didn't you just do what most people do and get a jetpack?"
"Because those don't allow anywhere near the agility that the repulsor array does and you can't cloak the exhaust. With this system I am pretty much as agile in the air as I am on the ground and the field generated by the stygium crystals naturally cloaks the respulsors emissions from sensors without me even having to do anything. The only reason it can't cloak me over the speed of sound is that my impact on the atmosphere is too noticeable and the acoustic dampeners can't do anything about the sonic boom. Besides, flying armor is badass." I explained.
"I know it is badass. That's why I'm pissed you couldn't fit it in my armor as well. Now what about weapons."
I waved a hand to indicate the various firearms laid out on the table next to the armor.
"Pretty much standard stuff, just a bit better than usual. The blaster carbine fires 6 shots per second and is modified more to rip through shields and heavy armor than it is to straight up deal damage to unarmored targets. It sacrifices a bit of range for that and the targeting assists are minimal but a second or two of on target fire will drop most anything. The blaster pistols are the same only 3 shots per second and across the board less raw power.
The larger rifle is a laser sniper rifle. Range up to five miles with significant target assist, fairly powerful but it only fires a shot per second for three seconds and then needs fifteen seconds to recharge the capacitors and dissipate the waste heat. The other two pistols are refinements on my Stealth Pistol design and mostly just pack more power into the same package." I explained before moving onto the table with the blades laid out on it.
"Over here we have our melee weapons. All of them are pretty much identical in construction and effectiveness. I used various exotic materials in the blades construction that would hold up under higher vibration loads, allowing a much sharper cutting edge and much better armor penetration than standard models. A carefully tuned acoustic damper also near perfectly counters the hum that is the trademark of vibroblades of all kinds. I'm fine with my two knives but I knew you preferred a tanto so I made you one of those as well." I said, finishing off my overview of the objects that we had come all this way to make.
Kat spontaneously gave me a big hug and said "Ok, you are forgiven for making me traipse through the Undercity for a week only to have to assault a facility infested by droids run by an insane AI. This makes it worth it. Time to start testing it all now."
Spoiler: Armor and Weapons
Infiltration Armor Mk.1-S (medium armor)
Damage Reduction: 40
Special Features:
-Immunity to virtually all airborne and contact poisons and agents, vacuum rated.
-Users Perception gains a 15 bonus
-Users Stealth gains a 50 bonus
-Has an energy shield with 500 durability that regenerates at a rate of 1 point per second, if reduced to 0 then it does not reactivate until fully regenerated.
-Is capable of sustained flight up to Mach 4 although speeds of Mach 1 or above preclude cloaking.
-Immunity to electrical attacks and associated status effects that would do less than 500 points of damage
-Immunity to effects of temperatures up to 400 F and down to -200 F.
-Indefinite internal air supply, water recycling systems good for 3 days of use.
-Touch range electric attack that deals 200 damage, deals double damage to droids, 50% (-1% for every point of Vitality and Luck) chance to inflict the Paralyzed status condition for 3 seconds on any creature that takes damage from the electricity.
-Touch range drug injection
-Inbuilt gas dispersion system
Infiltration Armor Mk.1-K (medium armor)
Damage Reduction: 40
Special Features:
-Immunity to virtually all airborne and contact poisons and agents, vacuum rated.
-Users Perception gains a 15 bonus
-Users Stealth gains a 50 bonus
-Has an energy shield with 500 durability that regenerates at a rate of 1 point per second, if reduced to 0 then it does not reactivate until fully regenerated.
-Users Strength and Dexterity are set to 30
-User regains health at a rate of 1 point per second
-User's stamina regeneration is doubled
-Immunity to electrical attacks and associated status effects that would do less than 500 points of damage
-Immunity to effects of temperatures up to 400 F and down to -200 F.
-Indefinite internal air supply, water recycling systems good for 3 days of use.
-Touch range electric attack that deals 200 damage, deals double damage to droids, 50% (-1% for every point of Vitality and Luck) chance to inflict the Paralyzed status condition for 3 seconds on any creature that takes damage from the electricity.
-Touch range drug injection
-Inbuilt gas dispersion system
Pistol_Mk.3 (Pistol - Blaster)
Attack Speed: 4
To Hit Chance: 0
Base Damage: 100
Range Increment: 10 feet
Maximum Range: 200 feet
Durability: 300/300
Shots Per Power Pack: 20
Special:
-Deals 180 extra damage to Energy shields
-Ignores 60 points of damage reduction
Carbine_Mk.2 (Rifle - Blaster)
Attack Speed: 6
To Hit Chance: 0
Base Damage: 120
Range Increment: 10 feet
Maximum Range: 500 feet
Durability: 300/300
Shots Per Power Pack: 100
Special:
-Deals 250 extra damage to Energy shields
-Ignores 100 points of damage reduction
Stealth_Pistol_Mk.3 (Pistol - Laser)
Attack Speed: 4
To Hit Chance: 0
Base Damage: 50
Range Increment: 10 feet
Maximum Range: 100 feet
Durability: 300/300
Shots per capacitor charge: 4
Capacitor Regeneration: 4 per second
Knife_Mk.3 (Short Blade)
Attack Speed: 4
To Hit Chance: 0
Base Damage: 60
Durability: 300/300
Special:
-Ignores up to 100 points of damage reduction
Kat spent most of the rest of the day familiarizing herself with her new armor and weapons while I spent the time finally tearing apart the last of SHODAN's security droids. Some of the refinements that had been made were interesting but generally speaking the droids weren't up to current top of the line standards, two hundred years of warfare had done much to improve combat droids. That being said, it was still enough for me to gain a rank in the Droids skill and I implemented the few useful bits into my own design for Andromeda's combat arm.
I doubted that I would have the time to complete the multiple purpose specific combat models that I really wanted to equip her with so I focused on only completing the most basic variant of the general purpose model.
In all honesty it was pretty much just a standard humanoid form basic combat droid. I really lacked the time to customize software and combat algorithms for a more exotic form. Likewise I was currently lacking access to both the databanks of general droid designs, programs, and knowledge that were normally taken for granted and to the exotic materials that would be needed if I wanted to make anything truly impressive. So I settled for fairly crappy crap that could be mass produced by Andromeda.
I was just finishing up the design when Kat came to find me. "I love the new gear, but it's time to put it to work and show Everett just how displeased with him I am. So please tell me you have a quick and easy way back to civilization and that we don't have to trek all the way back through the Undercity."
"Well the good news is that we can cut out the trip through the foundry next door, this facility has an elevator shaft leading straight down into the Undercity. There are even a couple speeder bikes in the garage down there that still work now that I ripped out and replaced all of their electronics." I answered.
"Fine, I guess it is better than walking back. How are we going to return here in the future though? Because taking a speeder through the undercity every time we want to visit is going to get old fast and trying to punch a path to the surface from here would kinda defeat the "hidden" part of our new hidden production facility." said Kat.
"I planned on running a tram line through the Undercity from here to wherever the closest appropriate location is. Need to do some research to find out what we need to do to, at least semi-legitimately, gain control of a bit of real-estate to use as a public base around here. Once we have that, use battle droids to secure the Undercity in the area and then bring in construction droids to lay in the tram along with static defenses to secure it. Honestly though I think that a cloaked combat shuttle might be a better idea." I explained.
Kat looked at me like I was a little crazy and said "So your solution to traveling here is to develop a cloaked combat shuttle to fly through the Undercity to deliver us here? Shuttles aren't supposed to fly underground Alex, and why spend the resources on cloaking it? I mean the wildlife is annoying but nothing we saw could actually bother a combat shuttle."
"There is enough space to fly a shuttle down there and it would be relatively trace-less. The cloak is to satisfy my paranoia mostly." was my response.
To cut off the line of questioning about my mental state I said "Time's wasting, lets get on our way. I have some people that I want very much to kill."
"Let's get on with it then." Was Kat's simple agreement.
After saying goodbye to Andromeda and giving her some instructions on what to do in our absence we were on our way back through the Undercity.
Learning to Pilot (skill) a speeder bike by flying through the Undercity wasn't really recommended but after only a couple of minutes of flight I had the basics down and within two hours I could fly as well as the average teen. By the time we reached our starting point two days later I was flying like a vetrean of twenty years. Thankfully Kat was the only one around to see that feat of learning, and she had long since given up on making issue of my rapid rate of skill acquisition. Incidentally, learning to Pilot a speeder somehow also taught me how to pilot every model of fighter craft in existence. So nicely broken.
Once back in my old tutorial bolthole we rested for the night, well Kat rested and I studied up on Droids.
The next morning we headed out to scout Everett's branch of the Devil Dogs. We split up and my day started with observing the street level pushers until I found a lieutenant that was actually a member of the gang and began to follow him.
This was so much easier than it used to be. No more worrying about crowds, no more limited sight lines. I could just hover along up here and keep watching this idiot. Tony Stark had the right idea. Following the Twi'lek got boring after awhile but I persisted and eventually he headed to an apartment for the night. I landed without a sound behind him and pursued on foot, tracking him to a specific apartment where a women opened the door with a knock.
"Hey babe. Let's have some fun tonight." my mark said as he held up a baggie of some kind, probably whatever his drug of choice was.
"Sure thing 'tuz. At least if you have my creds, Banrap won't be happy if I give out freebies." the women said.
"Fuck Banrap, I should paste his brains across the promenade. Charging his fellow Devil Dogs ain't right." the mark said.
The whore shrugged as she kissed the twi'lek and led him inside, the last I heard before the door closed was "Maybe you're right, but the Boss favors him and the Enforcers will blast you stone dead if you cross the Boss."
Interesting. I activated one of the alternative sensor systems in my suit and the wall seemed to become transparent as I looked into the radio frequency range of the EM spectrum and used the background radiation to see into the building. While the pair were getting biblical with one another, I hacked the door lock and let myself in. After nearly an hour of play the two passed out and I made my move, quietly sneaking into the room and examining the drugs that had been in my marks possession. With my knowledge of Medicine it was easy to whip up an appropriate overdose and I hit both with a small burst of paralytic gas before forcibly injecting each of them with the lethal overdose of drugs. While those worked their magic I pulled out the mark's datapad and got to work.
I had it vacuumed clean for later analysis in seconds and the whores com followed. With my work here done I headed back out of the apartment and relocked the door behind me. As I exited the building I got the notification that I had gained 100 XP, and another 120 a few seconds later as the whore and my mark respectively died.
With the data from my mark's com in hand I headed back to my bolthole and started going through it.
Several hours later Kat showed up and as she took off her helmet it was obvious that she was torn between smiling and snarling.
"Progress?" I asked, wanting more information before I tried a real conversation.
"Yeah, just having to let the rat live even another day really pisses me off. They are operating primarily out of our old Alpha site still and based on what I overheard, Everett has eight to twelve of the veteran Devil Dogs still around as Enforcers. Good news though is that the rat has chosen to take Teng's old office as his own." Katniss said.
I blinked at that last bit and said "You sure?"
"Positive, and the idiot even left the passage intact." Kat said, her professionalism causing disgust to war with glee.
"To be fair, he does think that everyone else who knew about the escape tunnel is dead. So he is probably more worried about keeping things from his minders and backers than he is about people like us coming for a visit.
Anyways, what I found isn't quite so useful but I did get the Dog's com frequencies and current access codes. Their slicer was good but he wasn't Psykes, much less me, and I've pulled a lot of data from their network while also making some backdoors of my own. It will at least make targeting our expressions of displeasure a little easier. Now let's start planning this." I said.
The next day found us entering the secret passage that ran straight into the heart of the Alpha site and we waited until my com taps informed us that Everett wasn't on site before opening the passage and emerging in his office. Then we settled in to wait, laying on the ceiling with a good view of the desk and its terminal.
Six hours of just hanging out on the ceiling watching an empty room before the office door opened and Everett could be heard speaking to his two guards "I've got a lot of paperwork to do so make sure I'm not disturbed unless it's a real emergency."
The guards response was a "Yes Boss." before they took positions on either side of the door. Everett walked in and sat at the terminal, alone in his office except for Kat and I.
And still we waited. Convincing Kat of this hard been the hardest part of the op and I wasn't positive that she wouldn't just snap and move early but her desire to get everyone responsible for the Slasher's deaths would hopefully be enough when combined with her discipline and training.
By sitting there and reading over Everett's shoulder, watching every key press he made, we learned a good bit of valuable information. At least enough to confirm or disprove what he would say when we started asking questions.
We were still there on the ceiling when he walked through the door and into his bedroom, two doors down the corridor. Another hour to make sure he wasn't coming back and I floated down, hovering in front of the terminal as I started to work. With Everett's access codes it was easy to get in, the boy never had been all that good at computers and he wasn't going to trust anyone else to secure his personal system for him.
Once I had the computer cleaned out it was back to the ceiling and more long waiting.
Thankfully Everett was back in his office relatively early the next morning, or it could have been an even longer wait. Once the door was closed and locked I floated down behind Everett and sprayed him with a dose of paralytic before pulling off his personal com and getting to work. Redirecting the tracking software to show it as still in his office was child's play, as was having it reroute calls to my armor and with the recorded calls in there it was quite trivial to have a voice overlay ready so that I could sound like Everett at will.
While I was doing that, Kat opened the passage and I slung our rat over my shoulder and headed down the passage. Into the waiting air car we went and within five minutes we had him in our bolthole, stripped and put in a full body suit and prevented him from doing anything but move his head around, and I had him drugged into an induced coma that would last until the appropriate counter agents were used.
On our way back to the Alpha site I got a call over Everett's com. "Boss, Kiko want's to talk with you about the spike in Rage sales."
"Not now, tell her to come back in two hours." I commed back.
"Will do Boss." was the guards response.
Back at the Alpha site we didn't enter through the passage this time but instead straight through the front door behind one of the gangbangers. This was one of the easier infiltration's either of us had ever done given our intimate knowledge of the location and, thanks to Everett's codes and com, complete access to its current surveillance systems. I doubted that the Devil Dog's would appreciate the paralytic that we had placed into the ventilation system, but then neither Kat nor I cared about their appreciation.
Once our surprise party gifts were ready to go it was time to exit the base and head back in through the secret passage. In position on the ceiling above the door I said to Kat "Ready?"
Her "Let's show them just why they feared the Reaper and Shadow Witch." was fine with me so I sent back "Play time the." and triggered the various pieces of sabotage.
First came the paralytic, which would take about five minutes to work its way through the system. Four minutes and 50 seconds after that was triggered phase two went off and the com's went down along with the lights and surveillance systems.
When the lights and coms went out the two veterans came running into Everett's office to protect their principal. Only for Kat and I to fall on them from above before they even had time to realize that he wasn't there and that their enemies were already in the heart of their base. Our blades ignored the Devil Dog's energy shields and slashed in on the armor, cutting through the high quality durasteel alloy like it was paper. I went for numerous slashing attacks targeted at major arteries and joints while Kat chose to simply drive her tanto straight through the top of the helmet of her target; reminding me again that others didn't exactly operate on Gamer Mechanics.
Interestingly, killing the level 11 Devil Dog that I did gave me 2,200 XP instead of the 220 that I expected. Must be an XP jump for things above tenth level.
With both our targets dead we headed out of the office and into the unprepared base filled mostly with corpses. There were only two more of the Enforcers present in their sealed armor, one guarding the armory and the other in the main room, but both died as easily as the previous two as they simply weren't prepared and everything happened too fast for them to begin to take intelligent action.
The base now cleared of active hostiles, Kat moved to guard the main entrance while I carried out the rest of our plan.
Fear was a weapon and leaving a base filled with corpses would have been easy, just use a neural toxin instead of the paralytic, but that would be obvious and understandable. It just didn't have the proper theater for something like this.
So with Kat on guard I moved around the base and turned it into a charnel house out of a horror movie. I had two hundred and seventy two bodies worth of blood and flesh to use as my art supplies and so I got to work. Half flayed bodies, blood dripping from the ceiling, limbs just laying around, and the crowning touch. In the main room the decapitated heads of everyone who had been present were glued to the wall opposite the entrance in a pattern that made a smiley face. On either side of that face were messages written in blood.
"The Slashers will have vengeance on their destroyers." was to the left while to the right was "Did you really think that death could stop the Reaper? Or slow the Shadow Witch?"
With our message in place, another another 24,740 XP for me, we exited through the secret passage and I brought back on the power, altering the light controls to come on two seconds after the front door was opened. Then I triggered the com message that would go to every Devil Dog and associate that Everett had contact details for.
"Even death won't stop our vengeance. The Slasher's will be dragging their killers into the grave with them.", said in this most chilling voice that I could find on the matrix.
Hey, the quest was called Revenge of the Zombie Slashers. It seemed appropriate to live up to the title.
Well it was time to question a rat and find out our next target.