Icarian Dreams

I deserve to take the brunt of the blame here. Sorry for dropping on you two, I shouldn't have committed when I didn't really have the capacity to

It feels to me like that would probably be different on a frame to frame basis. For this one in particular, I think we need @WickedCadrach to chime in

Cassandra narrowed her eyes. Adjusted herself in her cockpit and leaned in, following what was just a moment ago but a sliver of motion barely caught out the corner of her eye. A kaiju? No... but the movement signature didn't match any known threat she was taught about either. And while at first she dismissed the sensors failing to track it as just another malfunction of the frame's systems, right next to the unresponsive comms, she was starting to suspect that maybe it wasn't as much her gear failing as it was this anomalous entity managing to conceal itself in some way? She bit her lip. In other circumstances, this would have been... somewhat exciting, even. A part of her always found facing the unknown thrilling. That's why she enjoyed kaiju hunting so much, even though it was mostly in controlled environments. But here, alone, without the safety net of allied forces, or even a friendly ear she could consult this with? The entire situation just felt anxiety-inducing. Alright. Cassandra swallowed and put her game face on. She's been in bad operational situations before. She needed to guide herself through this. Whatever it was shifting through the terrain, given its speed and size it probably didn't pose much a threat to her frame by itself. But it sure as hell could if it had friends. At which point, as good a vantage point as she had, the mountainside also made her Frame into a sitting duck. She slid back down into the valley. She needed more information... but she couldn't be careless either. If this entity was moving towards the outpost, she had a good chance of intercepting it from where she was, especially if she caught it by surprise. If it was going elsewhere, then... well, it sure as hell wasn't anything Hive-aligned, so not engaging might have been the preferred course of action. For now, it felt best to stay out of sight while keeping her own eyes peeled. Figuring out what she was dealing with was the priority.

Yup yup, I'll try to get you a reply tomorrow. Probably won't be a particularly lengthy one.

Bah, I really wish the plans admins had a while back for letting us create separate character profiles to use in club RPs actually went somewhere. Pinging characters would be great for sure, as would be the possibility of immediatwly putting a face to a character. @WritesNaughtyStories Am I right to assume I should wait after @WickedCadrach to post? Also in general, would you rather maintain a strict posting order or have people replying when they can between GM posts? Also; someone picked up on my use of stars as separators ;p

Thank you, I needed the positive reinforcement Sometimes you just end up staring at a thing for too long and it starts looking all janky, y'know?

I posted something. Been sitting on it for the past three days or so. It's sprawling, ugly, disjointed, filled with unnecessary purple prose, and I really don't like it, but at this rate I wasn't going to post at all, so it's probably better to just let it exist and tweak anything that needs tweaking at a later date. Hopefully it's workable and doesn't tread onto any established fiction. Cassandra Magnusson. Daughter of a prominent Frame weapons/equipment manufacturer and a senior officer in the Hive armed forces. Dropped into the scene under the excuse of an emergency support request, only to end up with alone, with no allies, and seemingly malfunctioning comms. Right now blissfully unaware of the whole media action going on. How do we get her working with the Union? Well, she's alone with few promising prospects, wants to get some answers that the Hive is not giving her, though while that might get her working temporarily alongside the Union (or at least follow them without shooting), I feel like there should be some major betrayal moment that would make her flip completely. Maybe there actually is a bomb strapped to her frame and the Union rescues her. Maybe she sees the Hive broadcasting what they're claiming is her tragic death to the public, making it clear she is not expected to come out alive from her situation. If we were to put some name to the threat, we could place an assassin with ties to some of the Hive organizations as a hook for her to chase. Anyway, I'm using this for the character sheet, hoping to fill it in as the fiction progresses. Lmk if the post is alright. Right now I'm headed off for the night.

There was a cold in the air. Not that Cassandra could feel it — the sensations coming from outside the frame were always carefully tuned and filtered by arrays upon arrays of sophisticated tech not to impact the pilot's performance, nor distract from the goals they fought for on the battlefield. The entire system was constructed so she would not feel the pain of a fresh combat wound on her Bio-Frame, the soreness of its exerted muscles, nor — indeed — the impact of high or low temperatures on the exposed organic parts of the unit. A heads-up display informed her of everything she needed to know, when she needed to know it, and a loud alert system would pipe off the moment any of the values shot past their expected boundaries so she could react accordingly. A system tighter than a well-made watch. And yet, it was cold. Despite the on-board displays showing nothing outside the range of normalcy and the in-cockpit atmosphere being strictly regulated by a steady whir of fans and heaters. It must have been a nightmare to install AC into what was essentially a living creature, but the Hive had some of the brightest minds to ever be put into the field of Bio-Frame augmentation. Many of which were even employed under the company bearing her own family's name. Cassandra grimaced. A living creature. A frame. The kaiju that lent its biological functions for this weapon of precise destruction was "alive" in only a very rudimentary sense. Steering it was little more than applying correct impulses to the correct parts of the tissue that you wanted to move. Not at all different from a remotely-controlled robot. But Cassandra felt it reacting to the cold breeze outside. Reacting in a way that no other Frame she had steered before reacted, and to what was, ultimately, parameters that should have been well within expected configuration. The subtle hesitance in the relaxation of the muscles. A delay, slight inaccuracy in her inputs. A behavior in no way similar to those of any of her hunting Frames back home, nor like the giant Heracles-class she was given back at the northern front just a few years ago. A unique behavior, specific to this one, particular unit. A quirk, a sliver of personality, as some would call it. If she heard anyone from her unit do so, she'd have them disciplined within the hour. But thoughts, especially her own, were a little harder to police. And there was something that made it hard for her to think about a being shivering from cold the same way she'd think of a lifeless metal construct... ☆☆☆ A quiet breath escaped the woman's lips, carrying a note of resignation that rested in a foggy mist on the lower part of her translucent full-face visor. She reached towards the communicator for what must have been the dozenth time in the recent history. Thumb pressed down in a familiar motion the transmission button. A just-as-familiar buzz signaled she was on air. "This is Major Cassandra Magnusson of the 23rd B-Frame Company; Command, please come in. Over." The communicator accepted her plea with an emotionless "beeeep," then fell silent again. Just like it did some eleven times before. Cassandra sighed once more. No matter how long she waited, there was no response. This was not right. Nothing about this was right. At first, she had speculated that the relay station must have got hit. It would have explained why her comms went dark and why no-one reacted to that kaiju strike earlier. But it didn't explain why she got ignored on the local frequencies when the reaction forces actually did arrive, and got into that skirmish with the Union not far from here. Or why the everpresent cameras kept on broadcasting her (and not only her) every move to some unknown audience as if it was some strange reality show. It didn't really make sense. In all honesty, she should have expected foul play ever since she got the order to divert her course and arrive here instead. The call was sudden, uncalled for, and the fact that she got summoned here alone, without her subordinates, should have raised her eyebrow from the get-go. She wasn't even officially on duty when the call arrived. But she wasn't in the habit of questioning her orders and it wouldn't have been the first time a kaiju strike or some Union shenanigans pulled her unit into action when she least expected it. Never like this, but often similar enough for this not to seem too out of ordinary. But that mattered little now. Now she was stranded, in a frame she barely knew, and with no allies to call for after the dropship that got her here left her sensor range. The outpost didn't even have a proper garrison, so she spent last night cuddled in the cockpit, keeping her signature low as to not attract the kaiju. And between her broken comms, the disproportion between supplies at her disposal and the apparent hostile activity in the area, locals who knew seemingly as much about the situation as she did, and that strange behavior of the patrol just fleeing the scene after the skirmish... she was half-expecting to learn there was a bomb with a "thank you for your service" note rigged somewhere to her undercarriage. It had not exploded quite yet, but Cassandra wasn't convinced it wasn't just waiting for a particularly dramatic moment. ☆☆☆ The jump-jets of the Lion-class she was riding roared with blue-ish flame, getting the frame higher into the mountainside. The terrain below showed remnants of a recent attack — the one stopped by the Union and not her Hive allies... allies who did not even check on the outpost, which, she was pretty sure, was the only real resource the Hive had in the area. If not for it, then why were they here? And why was she here? Cassandra ordered a full scan. Maybe someone was still in the area. Anyone, really, who had a better sense on what was going here than she was... // Notice Roll [+, , -, +] + 3 = +4

And it's just as horny, if not more. Love it, though might be a hard pitch to my regular group :p

To be fair, that's still like almost five times a human height :p The first post in this thread mentions most frames being ~10m tall, but Scyllia being just 2m shorter doesn't seem like it would track with her being significantly smaller. I should probably figure out my skills...

Fair enough — I'll start writing, but I'll probably have the full thing done after I'm through with the whole "real life" shebang. I got two small questions myself, actually: 1. How much uniqueness/standarization is there to the Hive mechas? I read your little snippet in the IC thread, but I'm still a little unsure how much the individual frames would differ from each other. Considering we're meeting out Union heroes within Scyllia, I'm kinda inclined to put my character in a frame as well, it would feel weird to have this encounter outside of the outpost otherwise. Hope that's alright with everybody. 2. What would be a reasonable military rank for my gal to have? And as follow-up, worldbuilding question: would the upper ranks of the military ladder be exclusive to the Hive elites? Commissioned officer levels, I imagine.

Hey hey, sorry for the silence, real life has been getting in the way. I got a job interview tomorrow so I've been stressing over that instead of getting to do fun creative stuffs I'll try to write something up before I head off for the night. Is there anything I should take into account for my post?

Numb, dumb, same thing really Fair enough. Does that mean that public approval has some impact on policy, then? Or is there something secondary to warrant a propaganda piece? And they were clearly good ideas, given how I took them and decided to make them my own :p I know I should settle for one, but, to be honest, they also have about equal merit in my own eyes. Let's hold off on that detail for now until we have a better grasp on the starting circumstances altogether. Alrighty! I did miss the fact that there was that small Hive force involved. That gives me context to some earlier suggestions you made that I think I didn't quite understand. And with that information, I do agree with some of your earlier ideas that tying her to this reaction force somehow feels like it makes the most sense and I see how some of the ideas I have do not quite fit in. I feel like I have the missing pieces now. I'll take some time to try and figure out something. I think I didn't explain correctly the point I was trying to make. Whether it's "Fallen", "Disillusioned", "Promising", or else, I don't think really matters. The fact is that by the virtue of having "Hive Elite" (or Hive Cadet, Daughter of Hive X-rank person etc.) you end up basically having the trouble baked in because it comes from the juxtaposition of the character (Hive Elite) and the circumstances (having to live in the Union's conditions). This does not need to be externally highlighted because you can compel it by just compelling the "Hive Elite" aspect and letting the circumstances do the rest. This is a good thing, I don't think we want to change it. I think what we want to do is use this opportunity to have the trouble explain some other aspect of my character.

Oh, also, this: I think it's the best out of the ideas around this theme so far, but I am going to repeat my concerns that this will likely overlap with the high concept too much. We're ending up with two aspects that are essentially both saying that she had an "aristocratic" upbringing/roots. I'm pretty sure that whether we stick to the high concept you suggested or go with one of my ideas I gave in my last post, they are going to be invokable in very similar circumstances to this trouble, with very similar consequences. It's just different phrasing of the same idea.

Yeah, I get that, and there's no need to diverge if you don't want to. I'm mentioning hooks, but it's up to you to decide whether to follow up on them or not. Okay, I'll try to answer them sequentially: As mentioned before, probably to her death. Why is she supposed to die? My assumption would be to hurt or send a message to whomever she's related to — might be an attempt to swing the military funding vote by targeting a vocal opposition leader, might be something more personal, a long-standing vendetta between two Hive clans/factions. I don't quite see how this follows. It's hard to see a trap until you're caught in it, and I imagine getting stranded in the outpost surrounded by Kaiju could very easily be the moment she realises there's no way she can go back, especially if no-one's answering her calls for backup or escort back. It could be the mech not coming online, it could be issue with logistics, it could be that her frame got damaged when she was actually getting here first and is not operational. Or she just didn't have one, or was told she'd get one here but didn't. I really don't see why she would see the coverage. As far as I understand, the propaganda is likely targeted at the elites far from the action, because it makes no sense to show propaganda to emotionless masses, where propaganda literally relies on emotions to make an impact. It makes even less sense to show said propaganda to the group that's being sacrificed as part of that very propaganda piece. My assumption would be that she noticed the cameras, figures out something is fishy, but doesn't really know what exactly is being broadcasted. You lost me here. But Imma preface this by saying it could very well be so that communications got sabotaged and she doesn't have a direct way to contact command. Or it could be like you said, up to you. I don't follow the fragment about the reaction force. I assume by reaction force you mean the unit my character was leading/a part of? If we go the direction of her having arrived with a team to defend the outpost, which we haven't yet hard established. Was there a scrape with the Union? I was under the assumption that both sides have only been facing off against Kaiju so far. I'm also under the understanding that the "lost frame" is the one you mean was rescued in-game. How much do we know about that frame? Honestly, it might be helpful if you could give me a short rundown on what has happened in the story so far, chronologically — I've been reading through the main thread, but it's been honestly quite hard to follow at times. Okay, this part makes me think the reaction force is something else? Were there already other frames at the outposts? I was under the understanding the the outpost had no defenses? Help x.x