A War Story

[ArtDrake]

(@Namelesskitty, you weren't in the Ballroom. You were in the hallway outside of the officers' quarters, which one accesses through the door at the far end of the Ballroom to the right. The oak tables came from the Ballroom; the skeletons were in the quarters. Y'see?)

[The Holy namelesskitty]

plz answer my questions, I'm dying to know.

[ArtDrake]

(I just did. Well, half of them. If you leave a skeleton animated, it'll try and wake up the others, or gnaw on your feet as you go by, or do something dastardly. Anyway, you know how injured and dying animals are more dangerous than the healthy, happy kind? It's true about skeletons, too.)

(Also, don't get so antsy. I was answering four other people's issues at the moment, and I still haven't fully addressed all of them. It's a multi-post reply, in case that was lost on you. I'll answer your questions in due time, but keep in mind that others asked theirs first. I just happen to be answering your questions for goodness-knows-what reason, but don't expect me to do so necessarily in the future when I'm not finished with others.)

[ArtDrake]

You then go up to the armoury, where the same equipment is present as was before, including rifles and machine-guns, runestones and catalysts, and large mobile anti-aircraft turrets (might could be useful for defending or clearing a hallway, once you had rescued and helped out the Warrant Officer. Probably good to keep in mind for later. You pick up a pack of four more runestones, bringing you up to ten, which really should probably be enough, along with three rifles and two machine-guns for attempting to enchant for different traits that could be of use to you in dealing with skeletons. That's as much as you can carry, and it's all that you need from the armoury for now, so you carry that load downstairs, too.

For what you're pretty sure is the last trip, you go to get the librarian's notebook for testing out enchantments -- all the sheets of paper will be useful when you're practising enchants you have no experience with. That seems to be everything you need. You take out your bucket of pink glop and paint the floor in front of the barricaded door with it, in order to hold off anything that might try and come through before you magically reinforce the barricade.

(I'll leave the story here so anyone that has any ideas can think of something we have to do before telling the Lieutenant that we're ready and sealing ourselves off in here.)

[bugfartboy]

Plot an emergency escape route just in case things go absolutely horribly wrong (which I think most of us are expecting them to end badly. Nothing's ever easy.)

[Kaseke]

Agreed. Also, I'd like to have something that could distract the skeletons... Maybe small smoke bombs or something? That shouldn't be too hard to find.

[ArtDrake]

You look around you for a way out of this hallway in the event that things should go south on you. On the ceiling at the very foremost section of the hallway, there is an air vent, about forty-five or fifty centimetres across -- big enough for you to climb into. However, it is higher than you can reach, and even if you could reach it and unscrew the grate, you see no good way of getting in; you're just not athletic enough to pull yourself up and into it. Maybe if you could find a horizontal opening into the shafts, you could use it as a way of getting between areas in the ship without alerting the Marines or skeletons.

However, you're just going to have to hope that nothing does go wrong, for the sake of the Warrant Officer. Realistically, if a horde of skeletons were to swarm this hallway, you could just walk into the Ballroom, thus saving the life of the Lieutenant by not having to kill scores of skeletons in a way that would surely attract the attention of the sorceress, but sacrificing your opportunity to help the WO.

As for a distraction, you don't know of anything on the ship that could help, but you know enough about runestones and how they work that you could probably improvise your own, perhaps a few for fire or just for sound. Your armor would save you from shrapnel in the event that you mess up a runestone while inscribing its runes, but the magical effects could hurt you. Of course, the same could be said about many weapons.

[Kaseke]

hmm.. How about getting some smaller plates (wooden preferably) and make them noise decoys with the runes. Or anything else that's flat, so you could carry many in a big pile without really taking much space, and so that they could maybe be tied to your backpack. Also the flat ones could be easily thrown for longer distances, if they are light enought

[ArtDrake]

You walk to the kitchens, and take a large stack of plates [only steel, it seems, so they won't shatter on impact or even activation, probably, unless you could find a smith aboard the ship who could turn the steel martensitic, leaving it more brittle, but you don't really even know enough about the runestone magics to be sure that that would be a good thing, and you doubt that airships have smithies].

You look at the frost runes you have with you in your backpack for the arrangement of runes:

Primary rune on the front, with two smaller runes inside it, shattering on the left, activation on the right, with an even smaller rune for what you think is pressure to its right, based on what you saw when you used the runestones against the skeletons. Then again, it could have been a sonic rune. On the back, there's an inhibition rune, with a deactivation rune inside it, and a smaller heat rune to the right of the deactivation rune.

You think you can replicate the runes with some practice, so first you get to drawing them individually on paper. However, you soon remember that you have to know their names in order to enchant the plates with these runes! Back to the library, to look up information on the runes used in runestones.

[Kaseke]

(Well metal ones will do just as fine.. They make more noice and attract the skeletons better)

To the library we go then! I'd like to investigate some decoy runes. Maybe you could make some smoking plates that would attract the skeletons, or noice ones? And then some for attack as well, so you could throm them long distances without attracting any attention to you so the skeletons would follow the plate, and then just BOOM.

[Ertxiem]

Mmmm... I'm unsure if the runes itself will not be enough to disable the skeletons, like it happened to the skeleton on the other side of the door.
If this is the case, it may happen that instead of working as a decoy, the plates will disable the skeletons straight away. I think that in the beginning we only want to distract the skeletons to block them away from us.

To have a decoy, why not just a simple string attached to a few metal plates of even some large pans. We could even use a broom attached to that string as a fishing rod!
We can also use the legs of a table or a cabinet in case we want to drive the skeletons away from us. It would be even easier if we can get our hands on some pulleys.

[ArtDrake]

(I'm actually going to do some oon [out of narration] plotting with you guys for a bit, since this part is important to the plot and I want it to go the right way, but I want to make sure you guys don't mess yourselves up by setting up decoys that will just alert the skeletons to your location. I won't tell you anything that you couldn't already know [probably], but I'll propose ideas and say what I think about you guys'. That okay? Anyway, my "I'm just another player" text will be in braces)

{ Won't the string be a bit visible, especially if it's moving up and down as long strings do, when they're being pulled taut and slacked? I mean, skeletons are imperceptive, but they're not that imperceptive. Or maybe I don't really understand what you're suggesting... }

[Ertxiem]

OK. Point taken. In my mind, the skeletons were nearly blind. And I suppose it would take too long to create something hidden from sight that worked as intended.

Nevertheless, I still fear that the runes in the decoys may end up disabling the skeletons that approach it. The problem is that it may happen too soon.

And what about enchanting the rifles and the machine guns. Will a frost rune be effective or is it better to do some research on a better rune to use? A rune that help us aim would be great!

[ArtDrake]

You look in Børnheim's Compenium of Combative Enchants you have with you under firearm enchants, and find a rune for accuracy, called "trakhu" and drawn as below. You practice it a couple of times and, once you get the hang of the rune, fold up the piece of paper you drew it on into a paper airplane, and throw it at the far door. You're immediately surprised at how it keeps its trajectory so well, eventually crushing its nose against the door.

(A frost rune wouldn't be that effective on the gun [or, at least, the round would have to be in the gun for a while for it to really cool down a lot], but it would probably be quite effective on an individual rifle round; however, if you were to be doing sniping, you'd actually want a fire rune for greater distance, along with maybe a dual enchantment of accuracy on the round along with the fire, and at least a basic accuracy rune on the rifle. [Some historical context: in this universe, sniping has about three times the range it did in our universe at any given time, due to technological advances in step with arcane research.])

[Kaseke]

Nothing's been happening here either lately. Wanna start it off again? I need a little time to read through some of the lastest stuff so I remember where we left at least but... I think we should practise a little on the fire rune if we want to use it on the gun. Since you probably have to make it smaller to get two of them to fit, and accuracy too.