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A War Story

Started by ArtDrake, January 13, 2012, 10:34:16 PM

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bugfartboy

Lure mother into your bedroom.

Steelfist

Uh . . . let me put this delicately: You could have phrased that less . . . creepily.

ArtDrake

You pick up the scattered homework and return it to your bedroom, where you left your baseball bat.

(Steelfist: I know you like to be unconventional, but the mattress isn't a convenient hiding place; the skeletons would see you. Also, I can tell you that it is incredibly difficult and complicated to lure skeletons through two portals, so I'm trying not to let one single person do anything that conflicts with what someone else is doing, if that makes sense. Plus, I don't want the worlds to mingle much. And baseball bats aren't really effective against armed guards)

(Ert: there's only so much I can say in-game, but I can tell you a few things in parentheses. The guards are suspicious and will be hostile if they see you with a weapon. However, one of the skeletons is well-placed for smashing it over the head with a baseball bat through the portal. The skeletons don't have swords, so as long as you can keep them at range, you should be fine)

(Bugfartboy: bad things would happen if your mother discovered the portal.

Ertxiem

(I was wondering if the baseball bat would be enough to defeat the skeletons but I feared that even if I was able to defeat one of them I wouldn't have the time to defend myself from the other 2, but I'll try your strategy right after the following command...)

Read homework.

After that, carefully
look to the cockpit portal
If a skeleton is near, then smash it with the baseball bat using all the hero's strength and quickly close the closet doors.

(I also thought about going downstairs to talk with the hero's mother about the father's job - why does he have a ceremonial sword at home?)
Ert, the Dead Cow.
With 2 small Mandelbrot sets as the spots.

ArtDrake

You take your English homework, an essay assignment on Lord of the Flies, and read a bit of it:

"...change when the people change their fears from which the society is wrought.
Using characterization, Golding implies that orderly society is born out of fear, comforting the fearful. First, Jack reacts angrily when he finds out that there is no adult presence on the island, fearing being stranded again after his hopes of immediate rescue. This is because Jack fears the prospect of the adults in his life being unable to help him. He asks, "Where is the man with the trumpet?" believing that the authority conveyed by the sound of the conch shell..."

You again take a peek into the portal leading to the cockpit of the airship, and you see that the skeletons are still standing where they were before: standing guard, evenly spaced around the room, one right in front of you -- you almost touch it by mistake.

You turn around and pick up your baseball bat. Then, you open your closet door all the way, raise the baseball bat above your head, and bring it down with a crash on the skeleton's head through the portal. Ancient bone shatters underneath aluminium, and through the portal you can see the outline of the head cave in, tiny splinters of bone flying back through the portal. The collarbone snaps. Then, you take back your bat and slam the door shut, keeping it closed from the other side. The remaining two skeletons, however, have figured out where the portal is, and they run through it (I sense potential for a pun. Skeletons in your closet, anyone?). You hear a lot of clattering behind you as you lean back on the door at first, but then the skeletons start to push on the door.

Ertxiem

(Let's be a bit bold. Assuming that the closet door is locked and it will hold a bit.)
Pick up a bed sheet with one hand and hold the bat in the other hand. (Perhaps we should turn the radio on to mask the noise...)

Open the closet door and throw the bed sheet at one skeleton in a way to cover it (let's make a ghost! :P ). Assuming that one skeleton will be temporarily tangled, attack the other skeleton with the bat. Finally, finish the covered skeleton. (The bed will be uncomfortable tonight with all those spiky little bones in the bedsheets. :) )

(And hope that the hero's mother doesn't rush in the bedroom due to all the noise...
She may end up calling us and if she asks what we're doing, we just calmly say "I was just smashing some living skeletons, but it's solved now" as if it was the most natural thing in the world, so that she doesn't believe us... or perhaps that may not be a good idea...)
Ert, the Dead Cow.
With 2 small Mandelbrot sets as the spots.

ArtDrake

As you pull a sheet off your bed and hold your baseball bat in another, the lock on the closet rattles violently, but still holds. Then, you twist the lock with your batting hand. The door flies open under the next blow from the skeletons, leaving nothing between you and them. Quickly, you thrust the sheet over one skeleton, freeing your other arm, and you grasp the bat two-handed.

You bat aside a reaching arm from the uncovered skeleton, shattering many of the bones in its right hand and wrist. At this point, you realize that the skeleton you covered can still see you and is unimpaired in its movement, as if the forces that compelled it to move pierced through fabric. It slashes at you in a sweeping motion from its left, and gives you a hefty bruise on the right side of your rib cage. You scramble backwards onto your large bed and counterstrike with a thrust of the arm to the covered skeleton's chest; you crack several of its vertebrae. Finally, in hasty retreat, you roll back and to your right, ending up standing next to your bedside table. The door is directly in front of you, closed and only about six feet away, while the two skeletons are now at your left (across the bed) and at about 10 o'clock (mostly to your left, a little bit forward).

You think that you could probably make a dash for it and fend off the weakened, covered skeleton as you opened the door, which could serve as a strategic bottleneck, or stick and fight, now that you have a good stance and the skeletons can surprise you no further.

Ertxiem

(The bat seems effective against the skeletons.
I wonder if there is anything useful in the bedside table or if it's in a position that we can push it with a foot blocking one skeleton...)

Take a quick look at the bedside table

(I'll assume there isn't anything very useful, so I'll go for)

Stick and fight. (The hero should try to move in a way that one skeleton or the furniture blocks the other skeleton, while keeping his movement options as wide as possible. Ideally, having access to the door and/or the cockpit portal allows an escape route in case we need it.)
Ert, the Dead Cow.
With 2 small Mandelbrot sets as the spots.

ArtDrake

You take a quick look at the bedside table, seeing only a broken lamp that you haven't gotten around to replacing, a pile of textbooks (which might do some damage if you threw one at a skeleton; they're quite heavy), and your alarm clock.

By this time, the skeleton across the bed has crossed it and is making a lunge at you. Instinctively, you make a viscious, two-handed swing to your right with the bat, splitting neck vertebrae into several pieces and putting a heavy crack in the jaw. More importantly, crucial vertebrae having been shattered, the head of the skeleton falls off from its shoulders, bouncing once on the bed and landing on the floor. However, the skeleton seems only staggered; it flails to recover its balance as at tilts dangerously to the right.

The other skeleton is now coming directly towards you, having rounded the corner of your bed and now blocking the path to your door. With one off-balanced skeleton directly in front of you and to your left and the other closing in from your right, you seem cornered. Maybe you could take advantage of the imbalance of the skeleton to your left to push past it and over the bed.

(The key I'm using is that theoretically usable items are in bold, reccomended or otherwise useful actions are in bold italics, and important variables or states of objects are occasionally in plain italics if they're worth noticing.

(Also, I've decided that once I've let one player start a given coherent action sequence, like fighting skeletons, I won't let another player interrupt them too much unless they have similar ideas but want to take a different path with it.

(EX: Ert decides he wants to sneak along behind a guard in order to see the other parts of the prison complex. He does so for a while, occasionally examining the cells, but Bugfartboy decides that he would rather open the jail cells, an action which would accidentally blow the cover of the main character. I won't let Bugfartboy do that, even if it would lead to an interesting combat sequence or an interesting death. That's not the way Ert was intending to go. However, if Steelfist comes along and decides that, at the end of the row of cells, when the guard is opening the door to other areas, he wants to stealthfully kill the guard with a knife to the heart or kidneys, that's fine. The guard is slightly more dead than planned, but the action sequence is otherwise unchanged.

(Oh, and I know I'm starting pairs of parentheses and not finishing them, but if you're got multiple paragraphs in a row in parentheses, just like in quotation marks, you leave off the closing parenthesis on all but the last one.)

Steelfist

Throw the pile of textbooks at the skeleton to your right to temporarily fend it off, push the skeleton on the left over the bed then kill the skeleton to your right with the bat. Then proceed to smash the skull of the downed skeleton. If the mother comes to ask what's going on, claim that you were tidying your textbooks away and dropped them.

Assuming this is successful, move the bones back into the cockpit to get them out of your room.

ArtDrake

You turn to your left and attempt to pick up the pile of textbooks, but it is too heavy for you to lift, especially with one hand. Unsuccessful, you shoulder your way through the recovered skeleton on your left, just as the one on the right lunges for you. You manage to get across the bed, but at the cost of two parallel scrapes on your back where the skeleton you just pushed past grabbed at you, and one single similar wound on your calf from the one closer to the door. This causes your landing on the left side of the bed to be a bit clumsy -- you fall to the floor -- and it takes you a couple of seconds to get back up.

When you come up above the bed again, you see that one skelly is crawling across the bed towards you, while the other is going around the bed again. You're losing some blood, and if the battle goes on for much longer, your mother will certainly notice. You bring the bat above your head again and down for a finishing stroke on the skeleton on the bed. The skull recieves a hefty dent, and its owner ceases to move. Now you have one skeleton (with fractured back vertebrae from when you threw the cloth on it and whacked it; it has since removed the sheet) bearing towards you again.

Steelfist

Smash the damned skeleton, then sweep the bones under the bed. If there is a first aid kit say, in the bathroom, obtain it and treat your injuries. Make sure to avoid encountering the mother while getting it, as the injuries would be difficult to explain.

Either way, re-enter the airship portal, then look around (if there is no first aid kit in the house, keep an eye out for one).

Ertxiem

#72
(Just to add that since the hero is currently at his home, he should know where the first aid kit is without the need to look for it. Before going into the portal, it may or may not be a good idea to go to the kitchen and eat/drink something to get some strength back but there is the risk of our mother finding us and asking what happened. And on the airship there may be more skeletons, so be sure to take the bat. Eventually at some point we may need to clean the bones under the bed, but I see absolutely no rush in doing it - I'm a real pig! :D .)

(@SteelFist Duckling did exactly what you asked: you said to throw the entire pile of textbooks, throwing only one textbook would be wiser and it was hinted.)
Ert, the Dead Cow.
With 2 small Mandelbrot sets as the spots.

ArtDrake

(Silly me, I forgot that the head of one of the skeletons was on the floor, and thus could not be smashed. No matter. Either way, the smash to its spine while it crawled across the bed towards you would have incapacitated it.

(Since everyone seems to want the combat to be over, I'll just finish it up)

One of the skeletons being defeated, you turn to the other one, which is once again coming straight at you. You wait for it to reach out to grab you, and then bring down your bat on its arms, which both snap in two under the blow. Quickly, you follow your first hit with a second, and manage to knock the skeleton's head off of its shoulders. The skull flies into a tall bookcase, cracking and falling to the floor. The skeleton has not moved, as each blow gives the animation magic a large amount of static feedback. Finally, you make a second thrust with the bat to the skeleton's midsection, and the bones in its back give way completely; the skeleton is now in two parts. Both skeletons have been defeated.

You make your way to the upstairs bathroom and from under the sink take the first aid kit, and you put bandages on your hand and legs of the appropriate size. Then, you head downstairs to take some bananas and pears from the fruit bowl and a protein bar from the cupboard up to your bedroom. Your mother's home office is in a different room, so she doesn't see your wounds. (The only reason she stopped you before is that you were taking a baseball bat up to your room -- rather strange. However, boys (I'm further deciding that this character is a boy -- I rather like boys when they're not being jerks or sleazeballs, present company excepted -- and he's staying a boy unless someone has an objection) eat a lot when they're growing, so she doesn't question it.)

You peel and eat a couple of bananas once you're back in your room, which generally makes you feel better, pick up your baseball bat, and venture back into the portal.

Once there, you notice a few things. First, that the ship is once again pointed dangerously downward again, losing the altitude it gained when you first pulled the joystick back; second, that the open bridge doors both lead into a first-class dining compartment; and third, you notice the bed spring that got stuck in the eye socket of one of the skeletons on the floor.

Ertxiem

(Though fight! I'm a bit worried that the skeletons may become animated again, even with the shattered bones... but we have to take care of that later. For now...)

Briefly look around in the cockpit and through the door just to check there are no more skeletons or other enemies nearby.

Assuming that nothing special is seen (it's a quick look around, so we may miss some relevant stuff, like a portal to the underworld or something like that :) ), go to the controls, look at the graphical command interface and pull the joystick following the instructions. Try to leave the controls in such a way that the altitude is maintained, even after we release the joystick - something like an auto-pilot. While we're doing this, we should look around to avoid being surprised by someone.

(I assume that the alarm should sound again for unauthorized use of the ship controls... Since nobody came the last time, I guess we may have the time to take a look at the security footage that was available the last time we were on the cockpit.)
Ert, the Dead Cow.
With 2 small Mandelbrot sets as the spots.