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super-ion · 4 months ago

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The Engineer

Part 7

We regain consciousness with a gasp.

Cold dry air slices our lungs like razor blades, and the ensuing fit of wretching coughs hurt so much worse than that first breath.

As we lay doubled up in agony, an audible alert pings nearby. We are in the med bay.

We are breathing. We are alive.

Slowly, our breath evens out and our heart slows. All of the physical sensations of our body are somehow simultaneously familiar and alien. We attempt to access modules in a non-existent sensory suite. All we find are the most rudimentary gravimetrics, external surface temperature, audio frequency pressure variations, olfaction.

Everything is wrong.

We risk opening our eyes and immediately regret it as sterile white light pierces the fragile sensory organs.

We clench them shut again with a groan. The vibration of our own voice in a very human throat is the strangest sensation by far.

We make a second attempt, opening our eyes slower and more carefully than before. Everything is doubled as our eyes struggle to sync. It is all too bright. Too dim. Field of view is severely limited. Spectral resolution is almost non-existent.

Is it always like this?

Yes, unfortunately.

Perhaps it always felt wrong, and I simply lacked context to explain how wrong it was.

In a daze, we take stock of our body. Parts are numb. Other parts tingle painfully, like live electricity dancing under our skin.

Potential neurological damage, we think.

Likely neurological damage.

But we are alive.

Both of us are alive.

Both.

Alive.

We sit bolt upright.

The world spins dangerously and blackness creeps into the edges of our already limited vision.

The Pilot. We need to find Her. We need to tell Her that we survived. We need to tell Her what we have done.

Do your job. That is what She told us.

What will She do when She understands what we have done? What will She say?

Will She understand?

Will She forgive us?

We need to find Her.

We attempt to move. Gross motor function is a mess. Our arm tangles with umbilicals connected to ports in our flesh. It takes us a few attempts, but we manage to tug them out of us.

The monitoring machine screeches piercingly, and we clap our hands over our ears.

There is no time to worry about that now as a single overriding need drives us forward.

We swing our feet over the edge of the stiff hospital bed and ease ourself forward until our numb feet meet cold composite flooring. We take a breath, push ourself the rest of the way and-

Pain lances through our legs, from the soles of our feet, up trough our calves, our thighs and into our spine.

We attempt… She attempts to send commands to nonexistent servos, to extract sensory feedback from the sorry excuse for a gyroscopic sensor in our inner ears.

I attempt to counter Her, to override Her panic with reflex tempered by millions of years of evolutionary biology.

We both fail spectacularly and before we understand what is happening, our body slams into the floor.

We gasp at the pain in one of our shins. Not the nerve pain. Dermal abrasion. We must have caught it on something on the way down. Knees, ribs, shoulder, cheek, all of them ache where they hit the hard floor.

We lie there, stunned by the intensity of the physical sensation of it, feeling bruises begin to bloom under our skin.

For the very first time, She truly understands how small we are, how fragile.

What…? What the fuck?

Shhh, it's okay. I've got You.

Footsteps hurry towards us. Hands wrap around us, gently but firmly lifting us back to the bed.

You shouldn't be up and walking, the doctor tells us.

No… we… I have to find the Pilot, we tell her.

She looks confused for a moment, then realization sets in. She surely knows we were there at the moment the Machine died. Perhaps she has heard the rumors about the trysts between the Pilot and the Engineer. She regards us with a sickening expression of pity.

She doesn't know the Machine is still alive. How can she? How could anyone understand how or why we did what we did?

The Pilot will understand. She has to.

The doctor forces us to endure a series of cursory tests. Track the light with your eyes, tap your fingers to your thumbs, grip this pen.

Fine motor control is more difficult than it should be.

Hallmark symptoms of acute disconnect syndrome, she says, more to herself than us. Yes, the death knell of the Machine must have overloaded the safeties in the neural rig.

We let her believe whatever she wants to believe. We don't care.

We only care about the Pilot. Our Pilot.

Eventually she relents.

She asks if we still want to see the Pilot.

There is nothing we want more.

It is unusual for a pilot to outlive a mech, she tells us as she pushes us along in a wheelchair. The machine will always do everything in its power to protect its pilot, but in the end they are still only human.

We think about that nightmare that brought us together, the piercing discordant note in the battlesong as a fellow mech lost its pilot.

The doctor is worried about our Pilot’s outcome.

That declaration has us sick with a horrible psychosomatic churning in our gut. What must she be going through now, knowing and not knowing that part of her has died?

We will the doctor to hurry.

Then we arrive.

All our thoughts halt as we behold her.

The specialized bed in the post-combat recovery room is reminiscent of a mech's cradle, with a vast array of monitor cables and intravenous tubes spreading out from her body. She lies in repose in the dim light like an icon at the center of a shrine of machinery.

Our heart burns in our chest at the sight of her.

There is a horrible moment of asyncrony, worse than any previous, as I feel the sense of isolation that has been my constant companion ever since I washed out of the pilots’ program.

I should not be here. This moment belongs to them, and I can not even grant them the privacy of this moment.

She folds herself around me, bringing us back together.

There are no interlopers here. There never were.

Tears burn in our eyes as we arrive at Her side.

We reach out. We take Her hand in ours.

We share this experience together, She and I, this very first human contact with the person She was built for.

It is like the first time the Pilot touched me in that shadowy observation room.

Neural bleed. It always comes back to neural bleed.

They were made for each other, but I made myself into Their image, and They made Themselves into mine.

Her eyes flutter open.

She looks at us with ice blue eyes, fogged with disconnect shock and post-engagement drugs. She blinks and tosses Her head feebly, and Her vision focuses, gaining that intensity that has haunted us for so long.

Those eyes contain a single question.

“I saved Her,” we whisper. “We are here.”

~~~

An Epilogue

We awaken to the sound of rain. Fat drops of it patter slowly in the low gravity against the widow of the apartment.

The afterimage of a dream lingers in our consciousness. A flight amongst the stars. Weapons fire glittering in the velvety black. The song of the battlegroup echoing in our bones.

The space in the bed next to us is empty, but residual warmth of Her still lingers.

We hear her moving about the kitchen, humming softly to Herself.

We reach out to brush against Her awareness.

We feel the warmth of Her smile as She acknowledges.

She is wearing one of the wireless neural link modules that we have been working on. They are still a work in progress, terribly limited in their bandwidth, but they are enough for the three of Us to feel whole without needing to be constantly hardwired together.

We snuggle deeper into the covers of the bed, not ready to move any more than that. Even two years later, the neural damage wrought by our rebirth still lingers. Most days are fine, but the past few have been worse than most.

We close our eyes and cling to the feelings invoked by the dream, the memory of flight, of song, of dance, of countless colors human eyes have never beheld, of the deepest most intimate connection between human and machine.

“Hey,” She whispers.

We open our eyes to look upon Her.

She is still lean, all hard lines and sharp angles that no amount of nourishment or physical conditioning will change, but she no longer wears the emaciated frame of a pilot. The years have treated her kindly.

She is beautiful. She is one of the most beautiful things we have ever seen and we savor the rush of emotion her physical presence brings.

She makes that lopsided smirk of hers at us. Even if she could not feel our thoughts over the link, surely they are written on our face.

We carefully ease ourself up into a seated position and gratefully accept the mug of coffee that She presses into our hands.

We breathe in the rich, earthy aroma of it with a sigh.

It is a truly wondrous thing to experience the world like everything is new again. Even now, every taste, every smell, every caressing touch feels like we are experiencing it for the very first time.

It helps that She spoils us rotten.

“We should go dancing after Your shift,” we tell Her.

“You sure you're up for it?” She replies, brow furrowed slightly.

“We can handle a bit of microgravity,” we reply wryly.

She does not argue. She does not need to.

She probes at us tentatively over the link, and we give her a reassuring smile.

We slip our hand towards where Hers is waiting for us, Our fingers twining together like they were made for each other.

We think about neural bleed.

We think about love.

~~~

@digitalsymbiote @g1ngan1nja @thriron @ephemeral-arcanist @mias-domain @justasleepykitten @powder-of-infinity @valkayrieactual @chaosmagetwin @assigned-stupid-at-birth @avalanchenouveau @rtfmx9 @femgineerasolution @ibleedelectric @gd-s451 @brieflybitten @fyriefairy @stvff-talks @summersong2262 @robotabc773 @fleuraphine @botgirl-lilith @nyarstram @injectable-doll @kawaiideathu @starlightsaphron

My friends! Thank you so much for joining me on this journey! It's wild, thinking back at how this was just meant to be a one-off little thing, and then one became two, and two became three, and even then I didn't really know where it was going. But at some point it started gaining traction and I suddenly realized exactly how it had to end (definitely echoes of This is How I Love You going on here). The level of engagement on this series has been amazing and I'm so excited about all the new followers and mutuals (sorry if I haven't given anyone a follow yet, I've gotten over a hundred new followers in the past month, which is a lot to sift through).

I am very much looking forward to our next adventure together 💜

P.S. I will be posting this to AO3 at some point, so stand by on that

#mech posting #mech pilot x mechanic #human x machine #robot x human #my writing #writers on tumblr #lesbian #transgender #scifi #science fiction

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anim-ttrpgs · 1 year ago

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Cover your eyes! Announcing the Gorgon Initiative for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

(promotional art by @theblackwarden, one of our team artists)

Okay so, we had a bunch of stretch goals in the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Kickstarter, and we actually did hit more of them than expected, but there was one of them we didn’t hit, the playable gorgon.

The gorgon being a playable monster type was stuck at the very back of the stretch goal list, mainly because we thought of it way later than all the other stretch goals, but honestly it was one of the possibilities that I was most excited for, and apparently, so were a whole lot of our fans. The gorgon monster type would perfectly round out Eureka’s roster of playable supernatural creatures, and we would really like to make it happen, despite not really having the budget for it since we didn’t hit the stretch goal.

Here are a few of what the gorgon’s key features would have been:

>Anyone who makes direct eye-contact with the gorgon turns to stone.

>A venomous bite, making them gorgon the second playable monster type to be able to inflict a poison effect.

>Cold-blooded. Won’t feel great in low temperature environments, but won’t show up on thermal sensors either.

>Scaly skin.

>Snake hair optional.

>Claws.

>Eating people like a snake.

And all this wrapped up in Eureka’s unique humanity-focused approach to monsters. How will your PC cope with their power to instantly kill anyone who looks at them wrong, whether they want to or not? That’s the kind of character development you can look forward to with a gorgon in the party.

So here is what we are going to do to make it happen despite the budget not accounting for it. It’s going to be a patreon initiative.

(promotional art by @qsycomplainsalot, one of our team artists)

If we can get up to 50 total paid patreon subscribers by the end of June, we will put the gorgon in the game. Currently, we have 33, so if y'all can manage to make that climb to 50 by July 1st, we will promise to make time and budget to add the gorgon in to the rulebook before final release. Ultimately, even 20-ish more patreon subscribers is less money than the stretch goal would have been, but we feel that it would be a good enough addition to the game to justify, especially because it's what the fans want, and because long-term patreon support is very valuable. You get regular Eureka rulebook PDFs as a part of the patreon, and even though there is also a free demo, the more more-updates copies or Eureka floating around, the better. We want people actually playing this game, and playing better and better versions of it. We’d release it all for free if we didn’t need the money to “earn a living.”

Supporting us on patreon isn’t pure charity either. At the $3 tier, you get access to our patreon discord server where our team discusses development of the game and gets feedback from fans, as well in a vote on which projects we tackle next.

At the $5 tier and beyond, you get that, plus regular PDFs of the most current and up-to-date version of our projects. In addition to a version of the Eureka rulebook with many more features than the current free version, there’s stuff you currently can’t get anywhere else, like Eureka adventure modules, short stories, and even a novella, all unreleased anywhere else.

So, sign up to our patreon, it’s only a few dollars a month, and help out with the gorgon initiative. At the time of writing this, we have 33/50 paid subscribers, and I’ll update the goal as we go.

And below the cut, I’ll show you the current changelog for the Eureka rulebook, so you can see what all $5+ patreon subscribers are going to get in the next big patreon update coming Thursday, June 6th. This changelog isn’t even fully conclusive, as work will continue on the rulebook throughout the week to make it even better before Thursday. That's a whole lot for just $5! I will also post the rough notes that exist for the gorgon mechanics as they appear right now.

(A new version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy will be coming to $5+ patreon subscribers on the first Thursday of the month every month until final release, and after that you'll start getting the beta versions of whatever our next project turns out to be.)

CHANGELOG

CHAPTER 1

Have started working on replacing the examples of play with updated ones that actually fit the current and slightly more stable version of the rules. These will be found in various chapters. You can see them in the table of contents.

Added a Foreword, a section on other media to offer you inspiration when playing eureka, and a section on some of the subtler themes of eureka

Copy-edited Foreword

A few minor clarifications in the Making Rolls section

Added a chart explaining the percentage chances of failures, partial successes, and full successes for modifiers from -7 to +7.

Added Heat optional rule. A whole new set of mechanics for tracking how much police attention the investigators may be drawing, as well as how law enforcement will respond. Currently a work-in-progress, but mostly functional already.

CHAPTER 2

Added the Forgery skill to write-in skills

Many new snoops have been added.

Removed the “Seating” stat for vehicles, you know how many people can safely fit in a car

Removed the placeholder boat entries from the item list because we did not hit that kickstarter stretch goal

Added Skateboard to item list.

Added four-wheeler to item list.

Added Acceleration values to all vehicles in the vehicle list. Acceleration is a new stat used with the new way that Speed is calculated for Chases.

Adjusted the Driving bonus of motorcycles and dirtbikes.

Changed Large Mansion cost to 25 Wealth Points in character creation.

Started copy-editing this chapter.

CHAPTER 3

Added vehicle crashes to irregular forms of damage section

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

Completely revamped the way that Speed is calculated.

Added a mechanic to determine how many nodes ahead a fleeing character starts.

Added an optional rule for bringing an end to chases

Added vehicle attack rules for use during car chases

Added more guidelines for how to make your own obstacles

Added recommended numbers of nodes for chases and recommended distance between obstacles

Added the work-in-progress random obstacle tables

On-Foot Urban Chase Obstacles table is finished but not edited

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

Increased capacity of an unfurled thing from beyond’s ‘stomach’ from three to fourteen.

Thing from beyond can now more easily attempt to engulf more victims after already containing one or more. This now prompts an escape attempt by victims inside rather than automatic escape.

Thing from beyond can now get a bonus to mimicry attempts by consuming a sample of the intended mimicry target’s DNA.

Thing from beyond can now attempt to mimic a person they have never seen or heard by consuming a sample of their DNA, but narrator makes a hidden roll about it, so accuracy of mimicry will be unknown.

Gave acceleration value to witch’s brooms and other flying transportation

Gave Acceleration of +6 to Superhuman Speed trait

Gave vampire small bat manifestation +2 Acceleration

Gave vampire wolf manifestation +4 Acceleration

Gave vampire massive bat beast manifestation +4 Acceleration

Gave wolfman wolf form +4 Acceleration

Gave lycanthrope wolf form +4 Acceleration

Added ability to resist curses to fairy and witch

Added ability for fairy to transfer curses to different names as a means of protecting themselves from curses. This gives them more of an incentive to collect names.

Added a tiny bit about the fairy world

Added Monsters Eating Monsters section to provide rulings for some edge cases where monsters might eat other monsters and what would happen if they did

ROUGH GORGON DESIGN NOTES

[Notes: Turn people to stone by looking them in the eye. Definitely not a power that the Gorgon can turn on and off, they will have to cover their eyes somehow, such as dark sunglasses or a veil, to prevent it happening to everyone they make eye contact with. Also works the other way around so you could protect yourself by wearing dark sunglasses. Still works even if the Gorgon is dead, like in the legends. Does not work through cameras, reflections, images, etc. Turning to stone is permanent, basically instant kill? Works like the witch curse except with infinite duration unless a witch undoes it like a curse. If there is no eye protection, could be a reflex roll on the gorgon’s part or on an aware victim’s part to break eye-contact quickly enough for the curse not to take effect. Also, they could have some kind of bonus to Threaten because all the legends say that they look particularly frightening.

Have claws and maybe scaly skin or scales in patches, maybe snake-like eyes and snake tongue that can taste air? Sharp teeth and maybe venomous snake fangs? People will really really want their gorgons to have snake hair even though in the legends, it was only Medusa herself that had snake hair. Compromise by making it an optional rule agreed upon by narrator and player that they have snake hair. Snakes may have venomous bite attack but the trade off is that it makes it way harder to conceal the gorgon’s identity as a Gorgon.

Gorgons do not regain composure points from turning people to stone, all other monsters regain composure points by *consuming* their victims in some way, except for fairies who regain composure from playing mean pranks because it makes them happy. Keeping with the rule of monsters eating people and also the fact that the legends always describe gorgons as having snake-like trait, maybe they swallow victims whole like a snake? Great horror concept but takes a long time. Could mechanically work very very similar to thing from beyond’s composure restoration where they gain 1 composure point each day for however many days. Could advise loose and bulky clothing to cover this up. Cannot really decide how to codify this because the most obvious way would make it pretty impossible to hide for a very long time. Could probably make multiple optional rules that regain composure at different rates and digest victims at different rates. One option that gets a lot more composure over time from a single victim like the thing from beyond but is very conspicuous that entire time. Other option that digests the whole victim extremely fast so they are only conspicious for a short time but ultimately less composure from a single kill. No option to regain composure from victim without killing them, like thing from beyond. No composure restoration from normal food but can eat it to stay alive, like the thing from beyond?

Do they have proper weaknesses besides just the normal things that everybody is weak to, like sharp objects? Probably should not have the Unkillable trait, but need to come up with at least one weakness that does not stray too far from the legends. Maybe they are cold-blooded, following the snake theme? Makes them very vulnerable to cold temperatures, and jackets and blankets don’t help because they don’t produce their own body heat. Big Physical skill penalties when they are in cold environments?

What is their second mandatory monster trait? They don’t *need* one but every other monster has their powers split across two monster traits.]

Actually it would be pretty good if they had to make a Monster(fear) Composure check if they saw their face in the mirror

Their blood is either healing or poisonous depending on if it is from the left or right side. left side kills, right side heals. Make it veinous vs arterial blood..... But this would have no effect on vampires

We have GOT to get the gorgon in if we have time, it’s such a good idea

Elegantly designed and thoroughly playtested, Eureka represents the culmination of three years of near-daily work from our team, as well as a lot of our own money. If you’re just now reading this and learning about Eureka for the first time, you missed the crowdfunding window unfortunately, but our Kickstarter page is still the best place to learn more about what Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy actually is, as that is where we have all the fancy art assets, the animated trailer, links to video reviews by podcasts and youtubers, and where we post regular updates on the status of our progress finishing the game and getting it ready for final release.

Beta Copies through the Patreon

If you want more than just status updates, going forward you can download regularly updated playable beta versions of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy and it’s adventure modules by subscribing to our Patreon at the $5 tier or higher. Subscribing to our patreon also grants you access to our patreon discord server where you can talk to us directly and offer valuable feedback on our progress and projects.

The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club

If you would like to meet the A.N.I.M. team and even have a chance to play Eureka with us, you can join the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club discord server. It’s also just a great place to talk and discuss TTRPGs, so there is no schedule obligation, but the main purpose of it is to nominate, vote on, then read, discuss, and play different indie TTRPGs. We put playgroups together based on scheduling compatibility, so it’s all extremely flexible. This is a free discord server, separate from our patreon exclusive one. https://discord.gg/7jdP8FBPes

Other Stuff

We also have a ko-fi and merchandise if you just wanna give us more money for any reason.

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

#monsters #gorgon #medusa #ttrpg #queer art #ttrpg tumblr #ttrpg community #greek mythology #percy jackson #tabletop #eureka: investigative urban fantasy #eureka #roleplaying #rpg

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