#kill john green or whichever one this is with hammers

[francisforever2014]

getting exposed to two of my least favorite things at work . crash course and the study of abnormal psych

[mechagalaxy]

Bandersnatch

Jungle Moon of Rizpah was known for many terrible things.  Pirates made it a haven for murder and bloodshed.  Snavurm were infinitly worse, attempting to have suicidal sexual relations with your mecha, jamming things you didn’t want to see, places they shouldn’t go, until they got squished and/or electrocuted, leaving your mecha smelling like it had been marinaded in the same outhouse that someone chose to drown a dozen angry skunks in.

 We were there for the pirates, the Snavurm were more or less just the cost of doing business.  In our case, we actually tended to make money on Rizpah as Bolverk came up with a solvent that could actually remove the smell of Snavurm from your skin, mecha armour, and most version of tactical armour. If it got into your mecha upholstery, or any of your air venting though, you are on your own.  Burning off the surface metal makes it less intense, but short of complete destruction, it will always linger.

 The drill for catching pirates was simple, you know where the gates are, you come in through whichever of the legitimate gates you fancy, then hit the jungle and get lost for a while. Once everyone has forgotten that not all the Clan mecha passing through actually left, you sneak your way towards the known pirate gate locations, and see who you can ambush.  It’s a cool game, made even cooler by the fact that different pirate groups also like to ambush each other, so you never really know who is hunting who until you get near one of the pirate gates.

Normally. This time things went off the rail pretty quickly.

 We had used Mariea Lindley as our stalking horse, she came through, chased some random AFF trooper she thought might have some decent loot on him, shot him to doll rags and left. I the gateway close enough after her emergence that there was no noticeable flare, and while she was busy shooting up the AFF squad, so no one was looking our way.

 Her fast exit through the same gate wiped out any lingering traces of our jump, so we were away into the jungle with no one the wiser.  We began to work our way towards the pirate jump gates when the sounds of combat filled the forest.

 Snavurm, bless their horny little hearts, came from all directions to the sound of the guns, their camouflage flaring from the jungle concealment to sexual display as they descended on the fighting mecha to turn their private war from an orgy of destruction, into a straight out orgy, with Snavurm humping anything with an energy signature.

 Our formation shattered. I mean, discipline goes right out the window when the leaky green freakies start slithering out of the jungle. My men and women will face Leviathan without flinching, will laugh at Warlock, and moon the Misfit Toys, but you show them a few hundred horny snavurm intent on doing unmentionable (and generally suicidal for the snavurm) things to your mecha, and the bravest of our pilots chooses to see how fast they can run away today.  You don’t have to outrun the snavurm, just the slowest of your line mates…..

 We really screwed up, we had been pushing forward towards the fighting, not having really got a read on how far away it was, and then we scattered when the snavurm all you can hump buffet threatened to open right there in the jungle with us.  The answer to where the battle was turned out to be all around us.  We hadn’t found the battle, we had run right down the middle of it. I had a pirate Aspis line leader and a pair of Dread mobile artillery platforms pop out right in front of me.  I turned Dead Fexty towards the first Dread and cut loose with a Triplex Matrix, the green beams flashing like the mating display of the wild snavurm as I worked my overcharge capacitors until the jade beam hammered home for five thousand plus damage……which the tiny little Dread basically shrugged off and fed me an AH1 missile that left a big enough hole in the ground beside me to serve as a bunker should I need one.

Gods damn but the pirates make those machines as close to unkillable as you can get.  I cut loose with my left arm cannons, this time my Cherekov cannon harness the power of the jump drives to emit light exceeding the speed of light itself.  Cut through the Dread like a hot knife through butter.  Critical kill.

 The second Dread was knocked over by an apparition, it looked a bit like an Ogun, but it was twisted and deformed like the Banshee with the organic armour, weapon dendrites and horn like shield emitters that made it look half like a war machine, and half like some sort of demon.

 The Aspis and I exchanged laser fire as the Dread lost first a leg, and then its life to the strange mecha.  It was a brutal, almost frenzied attack, almost a fear response.  Random chance favoured me as a swarming Snavurm stuck a body part, and yes, that would the one you are thinking of, into the Aspis Trislager just as it was targeting me.  The resultant explosion vaporized the Snavurm, and collapsed the shields that usually protected the big machine. One Blue Dragon later, and the Aspis was legless, being swarmed under by love crazy snavurm.  I decided to skip looting, because nothing gets the smell all the way out, and went to round up my scattered mecha.

 One mecha was literally pinned face down where it had fallen, with Snavurm doing unspeakable things to everything from shoulder joints to weapon ports, driven by the power fields of an active niode engine to swarm.  Stepping my Triplex Matrix down to lowest levels, I began to boil the snavurm off the machine one by one.

 I was trying to guess which of my machines was going to be at the bottom of this Snavurm orgy when the first details became clear…..son of a snavurm!  It’s the strange mecha!!

 Staggering to its feet, it loomed over me, I guessed it about 105tons, like a Banshee mated with an Ogun, and the offspring went giant.

 [ I don’t like this place.  Will you take me out of here?  I will be a good mecha, just please don’t leave me here! ]

 It is a weakness of the Bunny clans in general that we let odd things, pilots, artificial intelligence, and sometimes even mecha, follow us home for adoption. How could I say no?   “You are a wee fiendish little beastie aren’t you?  Fierce enough to hunt the jub-jub bird, strong enough to face the Jabberwocky, but too dim not to get rogered crosseyed by a horde of snavurm.  I shall call you Bandersnatch, and you will be coming home with me.” Something is stirring in Mecha Galaxy, I don’t know whether it is Unification, Xeon, or some other group from that poor desolated alternate universe, but between the Unifcation Hatorade that popped up in our commissary, and wee Bandersnatch here, there are way too many signs an incursion from the Other Side is imminent.

 John T Mainer 28840