The Demiurge Confederacy : Machinist Privateerism (Heavy RP)

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B ILKS WDKKD GPLW TN
KLSABK UVUP QUUJQ SL STPK LTS PBGAS
B ILKS WDKKD GPLW TN

(( :O thats a hawt piccy ))

The Demiurge Confederacy: Not based on the bad guys from any other piece of media.

See above.

Just a handful of nighthawks getting coffee at the diner.

“Y’uh won’ believe this,” Ooidal spat, a grin hanging limply from his gnarled teeth. “Th’call’s comin’ from Eh-reh-won.” The words leaked from his lips like soured milk.

Erehwon was a shining example of Zion’s former ambition, a settlement founded just after the war had come to a close, under the principle that the machines would never expect a second colony to be able to sustain life. The entire city reeked of sulfur, sweat, and hand-rolled cigarettes. Even now, its inhabitants closed their eyes believing full well that Zion would prevail: not the radical conviction of a few young revolutionaries, but the faith that comes from a life of fighting hard for a cause.

They did not like strangers.

“What do you think?” asked Domino, her voice unwavering, and her dull, dead eyes glued to the controls splayed akimbo in front of her. An arm darted between the buttons and levers expertly as she waited for an answer.

“Non lo gradisco,” Systemic startled both of them, leaning comfortably on the corrugated side of a tiny hatch that led to an unseen blackness. “It’s not a good idea at all. Erehwon é pericoloso.” Her thick accent gave the words a warm, trustworthy appeal that made it seem like she was always telling the truth.

“I t’ing we’re headin’ t’uh pick ‘dis kid’dup.” Ooidal shot Domino a commanding nod, and glanced toward the brat, her ratty red hair like a sunflower stemming from the long metal spike in the back of her skull. Eleuterophobia was in the simulation, headed to some *CENSORED*-poor kitchen in Chinatown on a call. She would live to regret it.

“Out of the frying pan,” Domino almost smiled, the most emotion she had shown since they had rescued her from New Antigone, “and into the fire.”

Augustus has not spoken for five years. Morpheus, that scum, sent his wife to her death looking for another savior. “Third time’s the charm,” she had said with a withering smile before he had rammed the spike into her cranial jack. It had been raining, evidently, and three agents in an old black sedan had little trouble running their car off the side of a bridge.

He had watched in horror as the trio of mathematically perfect men hammered rounds into the sinking vehicle, hitting the fuel-line and sending explosive, fatal bubbles rippling through the river.

Morpheus accepted it with a sheepish, tired shrug, and fell asleep morning the bruise on his ego. Augustus was jailed for treason after breaking three of the man’s ribs, and doing a number on his jaw. After that, there never seemed to be anything worth talking about.

Two years later, in the prison’s mess hall, he had silently raised his hand when a call was made for volunteers to pioneer Erehwon’s settlement. Along with the most hardened, monstrous, terrible people Zion could find, he was shipped to the foreboding boonies, handed a shovel, and told to dig.

What choice did he have? He dug.

The dawn cracked hard like always: the halogen sunlight sparking and fizzling to life, dimming any other power draw within the half-mile of city that made up Erehwon. Augustus’ quarters sat at the west end of the building, partially ensconced by the cavern in which it was built, but exposed enough to allow the generator’s whining telltales to jolt him from sleep each morning, proudly flashing a bright red that screamed “Hey everybody, you’ve just tripled your power consumption!”

After this long, he had almost gotten used to that. After this long he had almost gotten used to a lot of things. The regulation overalls and pillowy coat that kept your arms hanging six inches out from his sides when he walked. The acrid stink of sulfur and construction that never seemed to go away. The fights between different work groups about ration tickets. The filtration masks that did nothing but protect your eyes from the cold and take away your face. It was home.

He spent a few lingering moments with a bowl of creamy breakfast goo and a cigarette he had rolled himself, thinking about the rumors going around about a barge planted only a few miles away. In a fleeting moment of optimism, he hoped that he would be picked to join the inevitable raid on the ship. But as his door slid into its concrete holster, he watched a band of giant men with giant handcannons marching out of the city proper in an organized line.

Then he didn’t.

The sunlight disappeared, and was replaced by an ear-shattering blast and concentrated heat that washed over Augustus and knocked him onto his stomach. Then the light came back in a blinding spray of white and shriveled to the yellowish, unreliable illumination of a very big fire.

Augustus ignored the spiderweb crack in his mask and a pulsating pain in his gut, and clambered to his feet. Instantly, he noticed a large shadow striding quickly away from the fire, more quickly than any innocent person would walk after an explosion. He got to the man, a big, egg-shaped, pale-skinned, balding man with a dead-behind-the-eyes look, and struck him in the cheek with clamped knuckles.

A moment later, a handful of other natives had their slugthrowers drawn on the duo’s skirmish. “What the hell did you do?” erupted from the improvised leader, more of a demand than a question. The world seemed to hesitate, and Augustus attempted to find words to explain himself.

Maybe he wanted them to blame him. Maybe he wanted to be responsible for something so huge. Maybe after so long, he had forgotten how to use his tongue, but when he opened his mouth, all that came out were coughs and sputters, and a frightening, otherworldly noise like a strained engine in the middle of the woods. The natives gave both a collective grimace and surrounded them, bludgeoning both on the head with the butts of their weapons.

---

Even bad people have prisons. And in a holding cell a short stride from the Equinox, a small buzzer chirped, and the two sets of electronic locks were released from their cement cocoons. Ooidal wasted no time, turning to the twice-treasonous mute sharing his cell and his blame. He pulled the man to his feet and bolted through the now loose door to freedom, venturing to guess that the rioting had gotten worse, and the guards had decided to evacuate rather than martyr themselves for a cause they did not believe in.

Sure enough, he filed in behind some half-baked grunt with sunken-in features and three teeth to bust into the frigid, fresh cavern air. There were already fights breaking out among former friend amidst the riots that had consumed the city after the power station had gone up in flames just hours earlier. Like the prison, the only buildings with any light, warmth were those with ancient, gasoline powered backup generators in the basement. If they weren’t two stories into the ground, Ooidal solemnly mused, they would have been stolen already.

He strode cautiously through the last stand of civilization in Erehwon, keeping his face half-scrunched in false anger. Men, those that were not looting or brawling with each other, carried torches in one hand and slug-throwers in the other, and they marched out of the city proper. Chatter among those still clinging to sanity gave up that the teams out to raid the 4085 had found some group of firefly bandits now blamed for the cataclysm. Ooidal cursed the sudden deadline, and prayed that the crew of the Equinox could get their act together and keep the warriors out of their own living room, at least for a little while. He, along with the silent barbarian that continued to follow him, joined the thinning group of brutish nomads heading toward the smoking, twisted neosteel giant in the distance. It was already peppered with a half-dozen fires on its close side, and pieces of it lit up now and again in terrific gunfire. There was still much to do.

The architect of Erehwon’s demise straddled a cold railing in the too-tight bridge of her bruised ship, the Equinox. Flexing the seams of her dusted and worn black pants, she swung her legs off of the catwalk and into the metallic chasm below. She found her way to a double handful of crates, her yellowish eyes widening, yelling, “Found it!” to unseen allies above. Something nearby exploded, punctuating the statement. Ooidal has said that they were to be opened only in a “sh!t-storm in hell” situation. He had also just taken a hose to a very angry hornet’s nest and done nothing but make its inhabitants angry and alert.

She pulled a greyish crowbar from the canvas of her belt and jammed its flat end under the stenciled word “Caution” and a trinity of symbols synonymous with death. The crated whined and spat as Fara leaned her weight against that of the toothy nails keeping the box’s jaw shut.

All around her, mechanisms groaned and sputtered, refusing to come to life. Some electronic brain decided to stroke at the worst possible moment. The Italian woman cursed from immediately above, demanding more ammunition. A moment later, the clatter of a dozen superheated iron bolts, probably former parts of the ship, spilling across the gangway echoed loudly, joining the unintelligible babble of the ship’s warring instruments.

The box’s top finally snapped, and at first glance, Fara did not know what to make of its contents.

Flames, white as ash, danced across the hull of the giant scarab, bursting akimbo into tympani rolls that echoed through the cavern’s hungry mouth.  A double-handful of faceless savages in greyed clothing descend upon the beast, feeding the fires with molotov appetizers.

Somewhere a hatch broke loose, and crashed into the accepting earth with a terrific bang.  The crowd exploded, salivating with greed and bloodlust, cheering incoherently at the hovercraft’s broken jaw.  To Ooidal, it sounded like the principal’s waiting room.  You could hear a muffled, angry sort of resounding clamor from behind the door, and it would make your skin crawl with apprehension.  But as much as you tried, you could not make out a single word.

An older man pushed to the front of the swarm, the fire from his torch only poorly imitating the inferno dancing around his eyes.  His face held deep chasms, the kind that gave him the aesthetics of wisdom beyond his years.  And his hair was pulled back tightly into a short tail, with thick grey stripes along the sides; though still more black than grey.  He opened his mouth, revealing baked-bean teeth in a sort of twisted grin.

“This is a gift, men,” he accented the words with slight pauses, his voice oozing with a subdued political fervor that would fit in perfectly with the Zion Council, or Tetragrammaton Public Relations.  “Just as the power interruption was a gift,” in true political fashion, he was already minimizing the issues for the sheeplike populace.  “Our angry, dynamo of a God has given us this sign,” he slapped the side of the ship a few times with both hands, “to show us.”  A pause, and a grin.  “To show us that we should not cower in the shadows any longer.  That we should rise up!  Rise up and show those damned machines what we’re made of!”

He began to stomp back and forth, the fire building up inside until Ooidal thought he was going to burst.  But he stopped, and ran a bony hand through the front of his hair, revealing its thinness.  “Now, men.  I think I have proven myself an evenhanded man, and I don’t consider myself cruel in any way.”  The crowd hooted and hollered; a few shot rounds into the towering granite sky.  “But this is neither the time nor the place for a level head and a steady hand.”  A mammoth hoverpad suddenly discharged sparkling blue spirits as the fire consumed it.  “This is our stake, men.  This is our claim!  Bring hell to anyone that says otherwi-“

Suddenly his tongue was inertly licking at a bleeding hole, his teeth and upper lip lost to a powerful metal slug and bits of his nose hanging loosely from malted tissue.  He fell forward, and rolled into a splayed lump at the bottom of the hatch, a smaller hole oozing ruddy ichor from the back of his head.

Ooidal donned a ravenous sneer and followed the headless-chicken mass that flooded the lower deck of the still burning 4085.  Gunfire ripped through the air like a fireworks display in a bathroom cubicle.  And there was 0taku, with a still-smoking pistol in his hand, and a cigarette roach burning at his lips.

tl;dr

Great crew, vury heavy in the RP. If you're looking for just an RP machine crew, this would be the one to goto.

(Thanks Zudrag!  Wait, he's putting pants on goats?)

You never alter
You’re always you
Everything’s breaking
But I don’t care
Smash the rest up
Burn it down
Put us in the corner ‘cus we’re into ideas

Take these edges
They’re inside out
No one will notice
They’re looking elsewhere
We can’t be honest
We call it off
We got the choice if it all goes wrong

We walk, we walk
We walk, we walk

You see the changes
In things that come
It’s how you deal with it
When switching off
Make a decision
A precondition
We got the choice if it all goes wrong

We walk, we walk
We walk, we walk

When nothing makes you feel good
Then nothing makes you feel good

A warm welcome to the Hovercraft Archivist.

Screw it, I'll find something better to do.

The fifth column.

THIS HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE DEMIURGE CONFEDERACY.