Inconsistencies Continued, Part 11

It wasn’t that easy though. Not only had the Union Army shelled the street above their heads, they’d also set up a blockade at the end of the Driver’s secret entrance to the base and from there they sent in more and more troops. The group was sandwiched between two loaves of soldiers that outnumbered them. The Robot, Driver, and Sorcerer held their ground at the secret entrance while the Vampire, Gangster, and Doctor slew enemies on the other side.

The Vampire treated the soldiers the same way he’d dealt with the zombies and they died just as easily beneath his claws and multi-layered fangs. He was facing sentient foes this time, ones that could fear him and so he roared as he killed, calling out ancient battle cries of the Atlantean kings he was descended from. The Germans and Americans didn’t understand a single syllable of it, but the fact that he was a blur of death moving among them was enough to strike fear into their hearts.

The Gangster had moved forward and was taking cover behind some spare armor plating for the Chevy, beside him were two crates full of drums for the piano and he was halfway through the first. The cigarette in his mouth had long since grown cold but he refused to let it slip from his clamped lips, there was still half of it left after all. He had a cut across his forehead where a ricochet from a nearby workbench had winged him, but even through the headache and loss of blood he kept up a smooth string of rounds into the new tunnel into their lab.

The tunnel was a crude thing, started with shells and finished with demolitions that the Driver would have giggled with glee upon finding. The Krauts and Union Army soldiers had blown their way through forty feet of concrete, lead, dirt, and pavement to expose the lab to the light of day and soldiers were pouring in from the streets above. The group around the Vampire doing all the dying was shielding the beast from rounds, but as more and more came down the tunnel and saw their comrades dying at the creature’s taloned hands they began firing into the crowd rather than try to oust the Gangster from his armored hideaway.

The Doctor had used one gauntlet to erect a shimmering blue hued shield of force in the tunnel, but it wasn’t a perfect fit so their enemies were still able to pour in from above, if a bit slower than they would otherwise. With his other gauntlet he set wide beams of energy into the mass of soldiers, on such a wide dispersal it wouldn’t kill but he was attempting to manage their enemies and disable them long enough for the Gangster and Vampire to do the killing. His lasers could only kill two or three at a time while the vampire had accounted for at least a dozen and a half corpses in the time he’d been in action.

On the other side of the lab the Driver idled forward out into the secret exit with the hood mounted guns roaring. The Sorcerer sat in the passenger seat his face twisted in concentration as he shielded the Chevy from heavy machinegun fire and used his powers to pluck rockets out of the air as they came hurtling down the tunnel. The Robot walked beside the Chevy, one arm bracing the other as he fired rounds on full auto.

He sent the Doctor a quick blurt of a message via their shared comm. frequency, “We will clear the tunnel, retreat as you are able.”

“Understood,” messaged the Doctor, “if we are compromised I will blow the lab.”

“Understood.”

The tunnel the Chevy idled down was filled with a cloud of rocket and gun smoke, totally obscuring the enemies they faced. The sensors of the Robot were not based on vision though and he was able to detect approximately three dozen signs of life, at least two machinguns and three APCs blockading the tunnel entrance. All of their enemies were behind cover and the ammunition he and the Driver were expending was ineffective.

“Disengage your weapons and accelerate, our enemies are behind cover.”

The Driver followed orders and asked, “How much acceleration we talking about?”

“Accelerate to ten miles per hour, when we draw closer I will cue you to recommence firing blindly and reduce speed.” The next he said to the Sorcerer, “How much longer will you be able to shield our transport.”

The Sorcerer let out a hiss of frustration, “At this speed under assault from this much kinetic energy, perhaps ten more yards. Does the vehicle not possess shielding?”

The Driver nodded, even though the Sorcerer had his eyes closed, and said, “Yeah, there’s armor, mostly on the sides and rear. Most of the space on the front end is taken up by the engine and some light armor. Not enough to get use through this.”

“A suggestion,” crackled the Robot, “could we not put the vehicle in reverse down the tunnel and leave our ally to use his powers offensively. If he can cloud minds as he says his powers would be perhaps more effective than your guns and the suppressive fire they can lay down.”

The Driver grinned and gunned the engine while the Robot leapt away, the Chevy’s armored tires screeched across the pavement as he threw the heavy vehicle into 180 degree turn. The tunnel wasn’t particularly wide, but it was enough for the Driver and as the front and rear bumpers swung by the sides of the tunnel the Robot’s sensors detected there was only quarter of an inch gap between the chrome bumpers and the cement walls.

“Now we’re in business,” said the Driver.

The tires squealed again and the Chevy hurtled down the tunnel, bullets smacking the rear end with loud pings.

The Robot moved into a steady loping jog, his metal feet clanging against the ground and his arm firing in short bursts. He messaged the Doctor.

“Our exit strategy has accelerated.”

“Understood, I am attempting to blow the tunnel so that we may disengage. The Atlantean may complicate that.”

“Understood.”

The Doctor had pulled a massive shoulder mounted weapon from one of his work stations, vacuum tubes studded the device and brass dials glowed. Thick cables ran from the weapon to the Doctor’s gauntlets. A barely audible whine began to emit from the energy weapon as the Doctor powered it up. When the dials on the weapon glowed red the Doctor pulled the trigger and rings of pulsing blue energy erupted from the device’s.

As each successive ring of energy struck the tunnel the concrete and earth began to vibrate at faster and faster frequencies, shaking debris free onto the heads of the soldiers gathered there. When the final ring of energy hit there was a tremendous roar as the concrete and earth from the streets above came crashing down into the breach. The Doctor had precisely one second to smile at the effects of his weapon before it blew apart and lit him on fire.

The Gangster jogged from his end of the lab to the Doctor’s, one arm flailing with the piano on full auto till the gun clicked empty. He beat the Doctor about the face and shoulders with his fedora, when the Doctor was free from fire the Gangster reloaded the Tommy gun and followed that with a good hard slap to his ally’s face.

The Doctor startled awake and his hands leapt to his face and hair, his skin was reddened but unburned, his hair was scorched and raggedly burned away though.

“We need to go,” said the Doctor.

The Gangster let off a dozen rounds at the soldiers on the lab side of the cave in and began backing away towards the garage and the exit. The Doctor followed, letting off red beams from his gauntlet as he did so. There were only a dozen or so soldiers left after the Doctor’s cave-in, but there were still more Germans and Union Army soldiers in the streets above and the cave-in wouldn’t hold them off for long.

At the ass end of the garage tunnel the Chevy was turned around and idling while the Driver was sprawled on the hood smoking a cigarette and adjusting the machineguns. The Robot was clanking around the entrance putting bullets into fallen, but not quite dead, soldiers while the Sorcerer was vomiting. Plucking rockets out of the air and deflecting rounds had been unkind to his mind and body and a thin line of blood ran from his nose.

“That…was difficult,” he groaned through clenched teeth.

The Robot stepped to an APC and gripped the side of the vehicle with his metal hand, denting the metal as his fingers pressed against the steel. Servos whined in his arm as the side of the truck began to lift off the ground, he stepped forward and raised his arm further finally overbalancing it enough that it fell over. Glass shattered and metal and concrete crunched as the heavy truck tipped over. The sudden movement of the ground beneath him sent the Driver sliding off the hood of the Chevy.

The Driver stood up, his chin bleeding where he’d skidded it against the pavement. He drew his pistol in one swift motion and sent two rounds at the Robot, the bullets pinging loudly as they ricocheted off its head.

“A little warning next time,” he added.

The Robot slowed the barrels of his arm and lowered it saying, “Agreed. I apologize.”

The Driver nodded and returned to the hood of the Chevy just as the Gangster and the Doctor were joining them.

The Robot asked, “The Atlantean?”

The Doctor paused to suck in great gasps of air and said, “The soldiers still in the lab were dead when we left him, he was eating and should be along shortly if more soldiers don’t distract him.”

As if summoned up out of Hell by calling him by his name the Vampire ghosted out of the gloom, dripping with gore and sporting a grossly distended belly.

It spoke, “The humans have retreated for the moment. I could feel explosives being detonated above the collapse. They will follow.”

The Doctor put a plan forward, “We need to leave. They’ll want to loot the lab to discover what we’ve been up to and what our plans are but at least some of them will circle around to this entrance to try and keep us from escaping.”

Air whistled through the Vampire’s strange nostrils as it inhaled sharply.

“I can smell fresh exhaust from their vehicles, they are approaching this entrance.”

“How can you tell it ain’t the Chevy?” asked the Gangster.

The Vampire glared at the Gangster with its alien black eyes and said, “Because I am not an imbecile, ape.”

The Gangster flipped off the Vampire and produced his lighter which he waggled at the Vampire, the creature hissed and took a step away from the human, its talons sliding out of its fingers.

“Enough,” said the Robot with a blast of static, “we must leave the area, now.” He turned to the Driver and continued, “Ready the radio for transmission.”

The Driver nodded and they all piled into the Chevy in almost clown car-like fashion. The Doctor and Sorcerer took up the front seat and the Driver stuck his head beneath the dash and yelped in pain as he began playing with the fuses. While the Driver got the radio working the Doctor opened up the glove box and revealed a powerful little radio transmitter. He waited for the Driver’s cue and then flipped the dial on the front to the on position, pulled a mic from the side of the device as he did so. The Driver shifted into drive and the Chevy sped off like a bat chased out of Hell by the Devil himself. The Doctor had to yell to be heard over the squealing rubber.

“Bravo team, this is Alpha, we’ve been compromised and are incoming with pursuit. Evasion is possible but unlikely, your response?”

The speaker hissed and spat static for a moment but a voice soon followed and it spoke English thick with a German accent.

The Brick chuckled and said, “Try not too hard for evasion my friend, for boredom and loneliness we have in great amount here.”

The laughter of the Telekinetic and the Immortal joined that of the Brick on the radio and the Doctor found that he could not suppress a grim smile at the thought of his allies engaging their ex-countrymen in battle.

In My Campaign: Kusseth Edition, Part 3

The youth gangs of Kusseth are well known, but much reviled by visitors to the nation that do not understand their purpose. Education begins at the young age of five for most children in Kusseth and is mandatory, unless parents can teach their own children a trade and are willing to circumvent the law via a special tax that is levied against them. This system of youth education extends from ages five to ten and covers the basics of mathematics, language, and various other core concepts and teachings all citizens need to know including the basics of Kusseth's systems of law and governance. It also serves the additional purpose of keeping young children off the streets or out of their parent's care for sixteen hours a day, allowing parents to continue working at their job or pursuing their trade. It also keeps the streets clear of the sort of mischief young children often engage in.

Beyond age ten one of three options exist for Kusseth youths: continue education in a non-government funded school, continue education/training with the youth's parents, or join a youth gang. For most families in Kusseth, higher education is out of the question, relegated to the wealthiest upper 15% of population. The majority, some 60% of youths between the ages of ten and eighteen continue their education or trade skill training with some member of their family. The last 25% of the youth population are the ones that join one of the many youth gangs of the cities of Kusseth.

Youth gang is a generalized term for any group of children between the ages of ten and eighteen, but may also include youths up to the age of twenty-one. These gangs may be found in the service of patrons ranging from bards to wardens and every trade school or workshop has a herd of these children nearby waiting to be of use, and be paid for their services in some cases. In other instances they are merely a collection of smaller thugs and brigands. Those in the service of workshops and trade school fulfill the need for cheap, unskilled labor that is readily available when needed. It also serves as an introduction to various trades for the children that are members of the gangs and longstanding service to a particular sect of Kusseth society often leads to future employment or education in that field for the youth. The youth gangs also serve as a last resort resource to be called upon in times of war when supplies of conscripted prisoners have been exhausted.

Delay

Inconsistencies will not appear today, it will appear Friday because I want extra time to work on it and make it longer to make up for the fact that there will be no "episode" on November second because I will be on my honeymoon. That is all.

Issues of Characterization

I'm sure I've rambled somewhere about how I always play the DM and how I read all the time and blah blah blah so its really hard for me to come up with and stick to an idea for a character. That's not really what this post is about, this is about the veritable stable of super-powered dudes I've come up with for the GURPS campaign.

The Brick: This was the first guy I came up with, and to be honest he still hold a special place in my heart for that reason. The idea was that he was an early attempt at engineering a super soldier from drugs and surgeries. He was a German soldier and joined the super soldier project because he felt it was his duty. The Germans bathed his skin and insides in various chemical concoctions and combined with surgeries to remove or alter the placement of his nerves he basically was immune to pain and injury. He couldn't feel, taste, or smell very much afterwards, but he could take a beating and dispense one as well. Then the Germans took the data from their experiments on him, improved upon their methods, and cast him aside. The muscle and adrenaline enhancing organs they'd grown and implanted in him were expensive though, so they intended on taking him apart piece by piece to reclaim and reuse them. Despite his patriotism, he disagreed with that and fled to America and joined the rebellion there for the purposes of self preservation. Despite fleeing those seeking his death, he still regrets having to become a traitor.

The Atlantean: I made him because I wanted a shark-man and a vampire that wasn't a cliche. His motives and abilities are as depicted in the Inconsistencies Continued story. He is actually an Atlantean prince, so he has the Trained By a Master advantage and lots of martial arts skills and techniques. Plus all the regeneration and immunity to pain that is depicted in the story. I believe he weighs in around 500 points and I'm pretty pleased with his accuracy to the image I had in my head.

Robama the Socialist Robot: Heh. I had fun thinking of the concept behind this guy, but it was hard to make him as I envisioned him. There are some spots where I could still trim the fat and he is extremely heavy in the disadvantage department, but I think his current 751 point form is a reasonable fit for the story version of him. Off the top of my head I could easily reduce his points by dropping him to a twenty in strength, which is still respectable and at the top end of the human norm, and replace it and a few fist-based advantages with a melee Innate Attack that deals crushing damage to represent his big tungsten fist. The difficulty with him is that between him and Jeremy's Driver character are about 350 points. That is a whole above average adventurer character. Jeremy could literally control two powerful characters and still come in under what my guy costs. The robot character in the GURPS manual is a whopping twelve hundred and thirty-six points though, so I think I did ok.

The Cryptographer: This guy was a cryptography. He decodes stuff. He had an extensive background in computer technologies and electronics and a wee bit of biology and medicine. I never really came up with a justification regarding the two fields being linked in his background. The gist of the idea (it is also based off a Cory Doctorow short story) was that he had "cracked" the cypher that was his genetic code, and to a lesser extent that of others. He had a lot of powers that based on manipulating his own body. He could control his temperature, ignore the need for food, sleep, and even oxygen. He could send his white blood cells into overdrive and cure diseases and he could also regenerate tissue. To a lesser extent he could perform healing on other meatbags. He could also "unzip" the DNA of others and turn them to gooey mush, that was an Innate Attack I came up with for him. Very very cheap and it did 10d6 points of damage, very difficult to use though.

The Brit: This guy was kind of inspired by Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The character has kind of a finicky relationship with time. He couldn't travel through time or see the future or anything, but he didn't always age at the same rate as others. He had Enhanced Time Sense to represent time moving into a bullet-time-like state to his perceptions. There were a few other little quirks, but it basically culminated in an Affliction that allowed him to age those he touched. It was kind of neat.

The Teleporter: I just wanted to do something neat with this character. He was centered on the Snatcher and Warp powers, which would allow him to pull objects from other places and also teleport around. There were no rules in the book for turning the Warp power into a tele-kick like Nightcrawler and Deadpool do so I kind of stopped working on it. I suppose if I wanted to I could use Affliction powers to similute lobbing an enemy into a hellish realm of insanity or an Innate Attack with lots of crushing damage to simulate my character teleporting endlessly through the sky to build up momentum and then teleporting right above an enemy and bringing all that momentum down on their head. It could work, its all about how you fluff that Innate Attack ability that really determines the look and feel of your character.

The Telekinetic: I have always loved psionics, the idea of a mind so powerful that can enforce its will on reality and alter its surroundings gets me a little stiff. Anyway. I started playing around with GURPS psionics and thought it might be neat to have a telekinetic that just whips shit around with their mind. The character behind the powers was a German "...with a bloodline so pure it would shame the Fuhrer..." He and his children had things growing in their brains that granted them their psionic powers. I wasn't too sure about the origin of the parasites, but I knew that in the character himself they had lived in their host too long to be safely harvested. In the character's children they hadn't fully fused to the host though, so the mad scientists of the Germans took the character's children and yanked out their parasites (killing them, but sacrifices must be made for the Fatherland) and thus a certain formerly blind individual gained the ability to shoot beams of disintegration from his eyes. I wasn't sure how I was going to go with this. I didn't know if he'd just be throwing telekinetic punches or what. There are some neat things you can do with telekinesis and the Psychokinetic talent. Like you can use the Binding advantage to entrap a foe in bands of psychic force and then just suffocate the life out of them. Where have I seen that before? You could use Innate Attack to do really big telekinetic punch damage or slashing damage or any damage really, or you can use the Damage Reduction power in conjuction with the Force Field modifier to throw up big defensive shields of telekinetic force. I'm sure you could add points to the Parry or Block defense as well and say your mind is knocking things aside. You could also just pick up knives and rocks and fling them at people. With enough points you can pick up people and throw them at people, but if the Steve Jackson Games forums are to be believed, its nearly impossible to make that an effective battle tactic.

So that is an elite cadre of dudes rolling around in my head and in my Excel spreadsheets. I still haven't really settled on what I'll be playing. Part of it is that I haven't played GURPS before so I don't know what works with what, or what may be a useless point sink. I don't particularly want to play anything normal like Jeremy and Dan seem to. I was under the impression that we chose Reich-5 partly because we could do super soldier crazy crap and we chose seven hundred and fifty points for the same reasons. The high point total is on me I freely admit, I was having trouble fitting first the brick and then the robot into lower end points so I pushed for five hundred and then seven fifty. Competent soldiers and adventurer types should be made at around two hundred points, three hundred if you want to get really fancy. Like I said earlier tonight to Eric, even with the Chevy from the FUTURE (for thirty points) and his "thermite" grenades (eighty-ish points), Jeremy's Driver (as depicted in Inconsistencies Continued) comes in around four hundred points, closer to three hundred though if I am remembering correctly.

I think I want to try psionics though. The robot is fun and everyone seems ok with playing lower point characters next to my tungsten clad beast, but I'm not. He has 21 points of damage reduction (-21 damage from most attacks), two levels of hardened (armor piercing attacks don't pierce his armor as easily), and he is unliving (takes a lot less damage from impaling and piercing attacks). He's hard to hurt. On top of this, his weapon limb can do upwards of one hundred damage on an average roll. I'm not sure what his damage output is over an area because I haven't looked up any of the rules about spraying bullets at an area, but against single targets it seems like he'll do respectable damage. I just don't want to be the guy that wanders into a room and everyone is bleeding out on the floor and in two rounds I take down all their enemies. That's boring and could get annoying. Eric says he plans to compensate for the robot's apparent might, but without every having run GURPS before we're looking at underkill or overkill or a one in a million dead on fair and balanced series of battles. Even if we're fighting a group of enemies with the same points total as us and the same size as us, that means each enemy is made up of more points than Dan or Jeremy's characters, and fewer points than my Robot. It just seems easier if all the players operate at the same points total.

Music: Discipline - Nine Inch Nails

Edit: For the sake of exactitude I have consulted my records. The Driver weighs in at 311 points. I could probably push it to 350 and have everything still within reason, except for his "thermite" grenades. Can you even make thermite in grenade form? I can't imagine it would be terribly effective, other than at ground zero. Thermite is basically just supposed to cut through stuff via extremely high temperatures. Whatever, its not like it matters, this is the world of Inconsistencies Continued.

The Picture Says It All

CLIFFHANGER! (Sans Stallone) (Inconsistencies Continued, Part 10)

A week had passed and they were unloading looted materiel from a Union Army outpost they’d raided. The Union Army soldiers were easier targets, but their equipment was found wanting when compared to that of the Germans. The Doctor and the Robot had managed to cobble together some tungsten plating and had managed to run it over the new seam in the Robot’s hide. He and the Gangster were unloading the Chevy while the Driver worked beneath it.

“I still do not understand the humor.”

“Yeah, I’m aware of that, we’ve been hashing it out for the past few days. You’re a damn metal man, you understand?”

The Robot set down a crate of ammo near the Gangsters workstation and said, “I am.”

“You understand that anyone lookin at you can tell you’re damn big an made of metal?”

“I do understand that as well.”

The Gangster set down a small crate of grenades and paused to light a cigarette before speaking, “Now, it ain’t funny because you look anything like old Hitler. It’s funny because you’re a metal man with black marker all over your face pretending to imitate Hitler.”

“I still fail to see the use of such tactics, or the humor.”

“There ain’t any tactical use other than making people say ‘what the bloody Hell’ when they’re looking at you. It’s funny ‘cause it’s a ridiculous lookin scene. You’re a big metal man stomping around with marker on your face yelling like your Hitler yapping about blacks an Jews. It’s funny because it’s stupid.”

The Robot paused and cocked its head to the side, mysterious things within it whirring quietly.

“The humor stems from the fact that no one takes it seriously as a tactic of war?”

The Gangster took a long drag while shaking his head back and forth then said, “To a certain extent. Everyone recognizes Hitler’s mustache and most know his hairdo, but mainly it’s the mustache that makes it obvious you’re trying to imitate the little bitch. It’s also just as obvious that you’re a metal automaton and not Hitler and with the mustache in marker on your face it’s obvious what you’re tryin to do. The humor comes from the whole situation being ridiculous looking and it also being blatantly obvious what you are and what you’re tryin to do. You follow?”

“I believe so.”

“You follow it all any better than you did two days ago?”

“I believe my processors have a better understanding of humor as you define it, yes.”

“That’s something I guess.”

As was fitting, that was when sirens began going off and the walls around them began shaking. The Doctor leapt to a console and cut the sirens off, bellowing as he did so.

“Germans and Union Army soldiers in the streets above, the vibrations are from artillery two blocks away shelling us. They seem to know exactly where we are.”

The last was aimed at the Gangster, his only response was to slam a drum into his Tommy gun and say, “My contract is all paid up for the next six months. If they sold you out they didn’t mention it to me.”

“Comforting,” muttered the Doctor dryly as he checked his sensors before continuing, “the artillery is pulling out, we should have infantry moving in shortly.”

The Driver had the Chevy idling and the garage exit rumbling open, over the noise he yelled a question to the Doctor, “How the Hell did they manage to creep up on us so easily?”

“If I had three hours I could tell you, at a guess I’d say it has to do with the fact that our sensors are cobbled together from German and American components and perhaps I missed some encrypted files in the American components.”

“Swell,” muttered the Driver as he bolted a slightly less robust Gatling gun than the Robot’s onto the Chevy’s hood.

The Robot approached the Doctor and with a hiss of static he did his best to whisper to the scientist, “Something feels wrong within my programming. I feel as if there were programming there once that is no longer there but is still attempting to carry out its parameters. It is disconcerting.”

“What kind of programming?”

“Sensors of some kind I believe, or perhaps software for the decoding of sensory input.”

“Are the Germans attempting to remotely hack your programming?”

“Negative. I have removed the components that allowed them to do so and have hardened my logic centers and processors. If they were able to hack me we would be in a much worse situation than we currently are.”

The Robot paused before continuing, “I believe that my sensors are detecting something in the vicinity that I no longer possess the software to understand the meaning of.”

“You’re telling me something is there but you cannot see it.”

“It is not a visual sensor that is detecting this object.”

“What kind of sensor is it then? Aural? Olfactory?”

“I cannot determine that, all I can determine is that some manner of sensor has detected an object or emission that it was designed to detect. There is missing software that would indicate all of this to me.”

“If you saw it would you be able to know it was what you detected?”

“Yes, if I saw what I was detecting I would be able to program myself to understand the sensor in question and be able to use it actively.”

The garage door finally rumbled open and revealed half a dozen SS soldiers. The Driver had finished bolting toys to the Chevy and was in the driver’s seat. He sprawled across the front seat of the Chevy and grabbed the control for the guns on the passenger side and killed four soldiers before anyone had noticed them. Then he hit the horn and ducked beneath the dash as the Germans opened fire.

In the blink of a human eye the Robot had moved away from the Doctor and to the front of the Chevy, shielding the vehicle from rounds with his own armored bulk. The hail of fire emitting from his arm tore the life out of six more soldiers and red beams from over his shoulder took the lives of the last two. When the Robot turned and the Driver poked his head out of cover they saw that is was the Sorcerer and not the Doctor that was responsible for the death dealing beams. Where the Doctor’s were lasers emitted by his gauntlets, the Sorcerer’s bracelets could store and shoot lethal red beams of fire.

“We should flee,” said the Robot.

That was when the far wall of the lab caved in and revealed thirty Union Army soldiers and another two dozen soldiers of the SS.

“I agree,” said the Doctor as he joined them near the Chevy.

The Gangster had taken cover behind one of the many work tables in his armory and began letting loose with his Tommy gun.

“Evidently we have opted for another course of action,” said the Robot as the barrels of his arm began cycling and hurling rounds at their foes.

The Doctor leaned a head into the Chevy and said, “Keep the engine running and be prepared to get us the Hell out of here.”

Directional Inconsistencies Not Related To Compass Points

I originally started the Inconsistencies story on a whim to try and entertain Jeremy and do something goofy and lighthearted. I guess I succeeded. Comments tapered off, but that was expected and I have been verbally assured that it still entertains. I guess I'm just having trouble maintaining lighteheartedness in this little medley of Reich-5 and Dixie. I get it that a shark man working with a robot and a gangster is kind of s silly thing, but I don't do intentionally goofy humor very well. If you read my James the Pyrokinetic stuff, I can do sarcasm and elitist humor at the expense of others decently, but just being silly and delivering jokes via dialogue is not really my strong point, and to be honest, I just really like dark unhappy shit. Its why at one point in The Last Blade Keroen is holding his intestines in with one hand, his other arm in one piece with his magic, and cutting the tongue out a foe he finds too wordy. Its also why he runs around crazed and bleeding from his brow while trying to eat small children at another point. Those are both kind of dark. Stuff where the good guys win and still have all their limbs attached and everything goes back to sunshine and normalcy at the end of the day doesn't interest me too much, at least not in terms of what I want to write. I don't even know if the story is still light and goofy, but when the evil Robot decides to paint a smile across its face with the blood of one of its victims to show it thinks going north to Chicago to settle its score with its brother is a good thing, that's kind of dark and not lighthearted.

The characters aren't particularly light, they are goofy as a group, but individually they're kind of evil. I mean, the Gangster is paid to be there and to fight and has no issue with the Germans or the rebels, as long as he gets paid to fight one of them he will. The Driver is similar, but would prefer to be killing Germans. The Robot only fights the Germans because they are intolerant and won't treat everyone equal, defeating them is the first step in his plan for world domination. The end of the plan is him hooked up to a massive American made mainframe controlling the world electronically and ushering in an age if peaceful prosperity where everyone makes the same money, has the same car, the same house, the same health care plan, and the same (limited) access to goods and services as everyone else. He will possibly enforce this prosperity, lack of individuality, and equality with smaller versions of himself, with upgraded weaponry and armor. In the Sorcerer's world, he and his cohorts were the Germans and the dayvuhs were called to fight them, but they still had quotas to fill and a lot more folks died than expected. The Doctor is in fact a decent sort and fights the Germans for noble and pure reasons, he did however work for them in the past. The Vampire wants to eat his way through his "allies" and then swim home to Atlantis to tell his brethren that the dayvuhs are coming and that they're a worthy foe, so they should all get their shit together and commit genocide upon the landwellers so that they can have all the dayvuh battling to themselves. Before he knew about the dayvuhs he was only fighting the Germans because he said that Hitler smelled like a coward and no coward should be allowed to mock and torture a prince of Atlantis and live to tell of it.

Music: You Shook Me - Led Zeppelin