Thread: Hidden Planet RPG

--Ithika Uli--

Uli sat on the edge of the plateau, a little behind the ship. A mature turtle-back plant hid him from the crowd directly in front of the smoking module but he could see along the edge of the cliff. Elpenor jumped off. Falling to his doom yet again. But after a while, his shade resurrected from Trench Into Hades, carrying a sort of baptismal font on his shoulder. Probably full of the black sacrificial blood he needed for re-animation. The shade of Elpenor seemed bewitched by a small goddess who was certainly Circe in disguise. Not enchanted back into pigs!

Hunger and thirst threatened to overwhelm him. A man of his disposition needed fairly constant ingestion, to float steady. Beside him, small fruits budded from the bottom of the mother plant and he picked one. The egg sized bud had a small milk-ish blossom at one end and a thin black root dangled like an umbilical. His bag laid backrest for him and he struggled to turn and extract a knife-ish shard. When he sliced the fruit, greenish juice dripped out into his hand. He touched his tongue to it with the delicacy of a fawn prancing in lupine. It didn't taste like much, a bit acidic, a bit sweet, like an unripe citron, the kind they used for bergamot. With a vague carrion bouquet. Uli looked himself over carefully, the parts he could see, and found a small cut above his knee. He squeezed it a bit to get flow and rubbed a couple drops of blood on the cut fruit. No reaction that he could see, in the growing gloom. All for one and one for all, your captain does this for you my swinish crew. Mighty Odysseus has found and preserved the Moly herb. Uli ate the bud and picked a few more. He suffered no immediate injury.

The fat old gnome sat there in his wildly restitched uniform. Across his lap he held the rifle of the fallen guard. In his heart, Uli knew the man was still alive. In his heart, Uli knew someone should look to saving the man. If nothing else, he'd know things which the prisoners would take precious time finding out the hard way. Weren't they all in the same boat? Uli knew himself to be too weak and much too deluded to save anybody. The gun in his lap was some sort of standard weapon which used expanding gas from explosives to accelerate small projectiles. Noisier than a javelin.

Uli pointed the weapon out over the abyss and pulled the trigger until it stopped making loud noises. Then he threw it as far as he could.

--Kamisama--

Kobito placed her hand on her chest: "Maddy", she said. Well now he knew her name and could stop refering to her as "small person". He also was glad that at least one of them had a name easily pronunciable.

As Maddy went to put her hand on Kami's chest, he had a very slight, almost unnoticeable movement backwards, as physical contacts between two strangers were not a usual occurrence in his culture, but it's not like she seemed about to strangle him or anything, so he let her do it.

"Who are you?"
"Kamisama Ryuutarou". Kami just spat it out at normal speed out of reflexes. He had a very strong name, meaning "God, Son of the Big Dragon", and thus Kami had a big pride in it. But as Maddy looked at him with question marks all over her face, he decided to put the pride aside and start easy... for now.

"Kami", he rectified. Then the gun shots started. He had no idea who was shooting or where. He didn't even know someone had a gun. Kami disliked guns a lot. In his opinion, guns were for cowards. Just aim grossly at the target, empty the gun, and you're bound to hit it with at least one bullet. He always thought there were no skill required, although since he never shot one himself, he couldn't make that a justified assumption.

His first reaction was to bruskly pull Maddy behind him, so she was between him and the ship in relative safety. No way he was letting the only person that dared talk to him get hurt (some would argue the guy that threw him out the ship talked to him, but Kami didn't consider his yelling as "talking"). Then he tried to pinpoint the sounds' provenance, but without much success. He knew the general area, but because of the echo, he couldn't say for sure. In any case, he rapidly evaluated that in a fight between a gun and aikido, the gun would kick his sorry rear, so he looked at the only one that might be able to do something against a gun; Ono, the big dude with the axe. After all, "axe" equals "some leadership", right ?

Note
Ono (斧) means "axe". It's Gabriel's Japanese nickname for now.

Maddy

Maddy didn’t notice him moving back. "Kamisama Ryuutarou." She looked somewhat puzzled as it was not a name she had ever heard before. She had more or less gotten the first name, but the last name sounded impossibly complicated. He seemed to have read her confusion as he simplified his name. "Kami". She smiled as it was kind of him to do. Daisy had always told her that names were important and should always be respected especially when dealing with another shadow. Maddy had decided that as Kamisama was clearly not a daywalker he had to be a shadow as that was the only other option. Very slowly she spoke to him as she tried to pronounce his name in the same way he had done. “Ka…mi..sa…ma”

The shots startled her as it always meant danger to her. Daywalkers were the only ones who owned guns and sometimes some of them shot at the shadows with it. Violence always did startle Maddy as she had always been very poor at defending herself despite the fact that she had grown up on the streets. Hiding had always been her preferred option. It also startled her that Kamisama pulled her behind him, but when she realized he did it to keep her safe she felt grateful. She stayed where he put her and waited for what would happen next.

-Lana-

A deep, masculine voice replied to her suggestion. “Then we should go now.”

Lana turned to look at the male prisoner that was speaking; he was tall, with dark hair, and a coldness to his blue eyes that made Lana aware of her own guardedness. She nodded silently at his words, and he turned to look at the other assembled prisoners. “Who’s coming?”

“I’ll come with,” Lee said from beside her, wiping at the cut on her head. “We might be able to find medical supplies for the injured, if there is anything left to find.”

“Only one way to find out,” Lana shrugged, glancing round at the others. No one else seemed about to volunteer; Pixie seemed to have enlisted aid bringing some of the injured out of the ship, while various others were milling around. Lana looked back to Lee and Blue-eyes. “Looks like it’s just us. Might as well get going.”

Gabriel's head snapped up as a volley of shots were fired from somewhere near the top of the downed ship. Without thinking, he threw his body across the prone form of the injured woman in front of him. When no bullets ripped into his body, he grabbed his fire axe and stood back up, looking around quickly. Automatically his legs began to move and he found himself quickly approaching the small woman who wanted to heal and an oriental looking man. He eyed the man with mild curiousity before his face turned back to concern,

"Do you two know where the shots came from?" he asked, his eyes looking around the wreckage for a suitible vantage point for a man with a firearm.

--Kamisama--

Kami watched Ono come their way.

"Do you two know where the shots came from?", he asked. Looking at his eyes, Kami observed he was looking around with a concerned look on his face, so he concluded he was searching for the shooter. As he wasn't sure exactly where the shots came from, he couldn't point in a precise direction, but he could at least narrow the search area. So he picked up a small steel object and used it as a kind of pen to draw on the ground.

He drew an horizontal line first. To the left of it, he made a circle, then pointed a relatively big rock about 25 meters away. To the right of the line, he drew two vertical lines with a circle on top, then pointed to a tree about 20 meters away, about 50 meters from the previously pointed rock. Then he circled the area in-between and looked at Maddy for verbal confirmation, but he was pretty sure of his directions, them being so vague.

Maddy

"Do you two know where the shots came from?" Maddy wasn’t sure what to say as the man with the axe spoke. Clearly she had understood the question, but she really had no idea where the shots had come from. She had been too startled to be very observant.

Maddy listened as Kamisama tried to explain. Clearly he had understood the question. She turned to the man with the axe “He doesn’t understand English, but I do think he got your question.” Maddy felt her hand shaking as she spoke and unaware of it she moved a bit further behind Kamisama. For some reason she feared the man with the axe more than any of the others, maybe it was the axe or the sheer size of him. He seemed like a really strong sort of daywalker, the kind that could really hurt her bad if he wanted to, although granted so far he hadn’t acted like he had wanted to hurt her at all.

She looked at the drawing Kamisama had made. “From what I can tell that circle is where he thinks the shots came from”. She moved forward a bit again as that was the only way that she could point at the circle that Kamisama had drawn.

Gabriel frowned a little at the hesitation that the woman showed him before stopping a little and rubbing the back of his head as he searched his brain for the small phrases he'd learnt in Japanese,

"Watashi ha ...... arigatoukotowo kangae ru." he stopped with a sheepish expression, "I think that's the one..."

He shrugged and little and nodded his head to both the small man and the woman. With a serious expression quickly dawning on his face, Gabriel cautiously began to move towards where the other man had gestured. He thought for a second before sighing,

"Hey!" he frowned a little at his own stupidity but continued, "Who fired the gun?"

--Ithika Uli--

Uli had been pretty much continuously cud-grazing the smaller turtle-backs. It seemed to him that whatever watery star had back-illuminated the gray sheet which formed this planet's sky was going out quickly. A circle of darkness enveloped everything outside the light coming from a few sputtering flames around the ship. Seems like a week, since Zeus' bang-stick spoke.

In the intervening time, however long it had been to those of whole, and sober, mind, Uli had been inventorying the materials he'd salvaged. The fabric of the webbing reacted to the mature fruit pulp similarly to his sheet, making elastic bonds which seemed permanent. He'd fashioned a sort of samurai girdle harness. As he attached the salvaged control line to it, a challenging shout rang out. Uli laid back to see around the mound and peered out from the shadows. He made out the form of a powerful warrior. Achilles, by Neptune, risen from beyond the Styx. Remember the vanity of fame, my comrade, in the depths of Hades. He ached to return to the cohort before Troy, but, much as the looming ship resembled its blackened walls, some instinct in the old convict held him back.

He couldn't see the expiring guard, but the hatch area where he lay was lit by a smokily burning glob of insulation or something, oozing out partway up the wall above the horribly injured man. Imprecations on him. Death to Trojans! But ol 'chilles'll punder your armor first. And learn your secrets. As for sly Ulysses …

The thin wire circled the ancient turtle back and near's could be told, would hold secure. The running part disappeared into the ravine and the standing part attached to his harness. Both ran through a wrap of the webbing in Uli's hands, which worked as a brake. The bag of debris was arm-holed to his shoulder and the pipe staff poked through his girdle like a really long, really skinny, really dull, sword.

As Uli wiggle-slipped into the ravine, desperately needing to find a bit of standing ground, before he found the line's running end, he spotted two more figures behind Achilles. Bewitched Elpenor! And Circe, the sorceress. Ah, beloved. Descent was tricky for Uli, with his top heavy gut overbalancing his skinny old-man bum.

Maddy

Maddy couldn’t help but smile when the male with the axe tried to speak Japanese as it sounded that ridiculous. She stepped forward just a little more and she listened to his next question "Hey! Who fired the gun?" Maddy frowned as she really had no idea. She looked into the direction of which Kamisama had said that the shots had come from.

She noticed the older male who was descending towards them. It seemed most uncomfortable as he was more sliding down than anything else and it made her worry that the male could fall and hurt himself. She looked at the male with the axe and said “I think he fired the gun.” Maddy frowned as she wondered if the male still had the gun and if he did if that meant he would use it against them.

-- Vince --

"I'll come with. We might be able to find medical supplies for the injured,if there is anything left to find." The speaker was young...quite young in fact. Still in the transition from girl to woman. For that, though, she was holding up well; especially with the nasty gouge on her head. Her hair was blonde, and tied back. Vince nodded at her in silence, and another woman approached. He wasn’t sure if these two were petty criminals, or the more dangerous, like himself. But either way, he’d have to watch his back.

“Only one way to find out. Looks like it’s just us. Might as well get going.” She was a good height, standing a good bit taller than the younger hazel-eyed girl. She was also a little older...and harder. Her accent also marked her as European, like him.

“Right,” Vince turned and then ducked as a volley of shots sounded off. His head snapped in their direction as his anger flared. A moment later, he saw a fat man, holding the weapon and awkwardly climbing down the ravine. Vince reasoned that the man would have to die. They’d need every single round from that gun if they wanted to survive; and here an old man was target-practicing. Vince stood back up.

“Let’s go.” He said, walking in long strides toward the other half of the wreckage. He wondered if the three of them might be the only ones left once the old man got done down there. Gradually, his attention returned to the two women with him. He glanced back.

“What’d you two do to deserve time in a penal colony?”

Kamisama

"Watashi ha... arigatou koto wo kangaeru".

Kami slightly frowned at the words. They didn't make much sense. But seeing the sheepish face Ono made, he didn't feel the courage to correct him. Kami grasped the meaning, that was all that mattered.

He then got lost in thoughts. He wondered how many people were left that could speak his native language. In theory, not a lot, because the officials that caught him after he got out of the pod sure didn't bother looking for one. Or was that something overlooked so that he could be sent on the blasted ship? This thought sent shivers down Kami's spine. It was a scary thought that primary human rights were overlooked based on a language difference. Will it be the same here? Possibly... But then again, Ono obviously made an effort for communication. Life outside the Bubble was definitely confusing. It would require time to adjust, and he had to be careful, but Kami had to do his best so that he wouldn't alienate the others.

He came back from his day dreaming and noticed the shadows were getting alarmingly long. Night was falling.

"Sukai waito burakku chengi. Suriippu weaa ?", he asked Ono, not wanting to ask Maddy as he didn't want his only friend to get funny ideas and ditch him, putting him back to square one on the friend-gathering game board.

Sukai waito burakku chengi. Suriippu weaa

Gabriel looked at the other man for a few moments before helplessly shrugging his shoulders with an embaressed smile,

"I'm sorry but I don't speak your language well. I can only say a couple of sentences actually..." he looked around a bit more before he nodded a bit, "Well if you're saying we need a place of shelter for the night, and I think you are, then I agree."

"I'm sorry but I don't speak your language well. I can only say a couple of sentences actually... Well if you're saying we need a place of shelter for the night, and I think you are, then I agree."

Maddy looked from the male with the axe to Kamisama and back. She doubted if Kamisama had gotten what the man was trying to say as it was all verbal and well he wouldn't be able to understand that, would he. She forced herself to look the male with the axe in the eyes although he still scared her.

"If you could find that shelter," her voice shook a little "then I will look after the wounded. Is that okay?"

Gabriel frowned a little before shaking his head slowly,

"I knew this axe would make it look like I wanted to cut down freaky trees..." he muttered to himself.