Comic 1059 - Cage Hope
Posted on 4th Jun 2018, 2:02 AM
in Hope
Average Rating: 5 (6 votes) /
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Author Notes:
Hope continues to yell, beating against the inside of his meat cell, but it does no good. You and your group reach the stage and you ascend the stairs, approaching Grizwald. Michelle picks up Hodges' heavy pistol, and everyone takes to keeping watch with weapons ready.
"So what's the plan?," Fuse asks.
"I can prob'ly walk," Grizwald says, his voice slightly muffled by... well, meat.
"Might not be a good idea," Michelle says. "Wouldn't put it past Thale to snipe you just to spite us."
"We could carry tha whole damn meat pod out," Caius says. "Or you could... I dunno, grow it legs or somethin'."
You use your raven to check outside, and on the hummer. ...Oddly enough, no police have arrived yet. Everything looks fine.
You grow an eye on the meat slab covering the audio/video room window in the hope of getting a better look inside.
You do.
Just as whatever the hell Thale was working on squeezes its way through the door.
You barely manage to warn the others. The thing charges forward, plunging a ridiculously large claw straight through the window and into your meat wall, halfway injuring itself in the process. Blood dribbles out and bones audibly grind as its wrist... spins, like some kind of horrible drill, shredding through your wall faster than you can regenerate it. As soon as the monster has enough space, it dives through the window--tearing its own hide on broken glass and dislodging joints on the narrow frame.
It lands in the sanctuary below with a dull thud, bones breaking as malformed legs hit stairs.
"Fuggen..." Caius pauses, shaking his head. "You really let 'em do this to ya, scarface?"
It takes barely a second for the creature's bones to reform, and for its legs to reshape enough for it to run.
...And run it does. It begins barreling down the stairs, charging the length of the sanctuary straight toward you and the stage. It has a lot of ground to cover, however--it is a very big sanctuary.
While one of Knox's limbs is a massive (and apparently spinnable) claw, the other is... longer, thinner, almost cord-like and dragging behind the running monster. You think you've seen a similar appendage before on one of Thale's creatures.
Everyone else, start shooting everything, AP with minigun first, the bone on its chest looks dense focus on the thinner limb, that has longer range.
We start shooting the syringe gun too
While all that is happening, let's get Griz out of the cage and use that cage somehow. Akasha suggested on the discord to turn THAT cage into our own monstrosity
Give it some sharp ribs for pincers and wheel-like legs because that will be faster to make and easier to control than normal legs
ALL THE BONE SPIKES
ALL OF THEM
EDIT: also sync everyone with Michelle when we start shooting
2nd also, use the golden bullet with the scoped gun, level Michelle if she needs to calm down.
Aim for the chest
But reserve the Golden Bullet for the moment the Monster is close enough. If we can Kill that thing before it is close enough to be dangerous, is better to not waste the King of the Bullets XD.
I agreed with the idea on Discord, but already had way too much actions on my own comment to suggest it
When she decides there is no air then is there no air for example.
Therefore it would basically be an instakill.
However... If it's in there, it might be able to see OUT of the blood portals we make whenever we pull matter out of the red. Or even throw bone bombs out. Or catch a glimpse of Bunker A, which he is currently completely convinced we haven't yet discovered. Plus the bone armor ritual pulls from Mine's red; he'd get to see how it works from the inside.
Basically, throwing the Knox monster into the red sounds... far less lethal than explosive minigun bombardment, and gives Thale an extradimensional spy.
I like it. No frills, no resources, just a plain old middle finger to Thale, who doesn't have a red.
If we have him in The Red, where we can theoretically do anything... maybe it's not impossible to turn him back into regular Knox.
Or maybe it is, but, we could try?
If his mind has been oversynched by Thale, it might even be possible to restore it by synching with MacLand, who knows him best. This would require getting Nil out of MacLand's head first.
A looot of effort for someone we don't even really like, but... still probably the right thing to do.
Assuming we can drag him through a portal to the Red first.
Eldritch enough?
Thale will keep pumping meat into that thing and regenerate it until it's "dead." We need to find where its brain is and try out our magic bullet (we can always trade up for another).
Slowing it down is our best bet for Michelle to blast away with the minigun to find the weak point before shooting the scoped pistol. It looks like it's designed to easily break through barriers with that drill hand but I'm willing to bet those big ol' feet and bulky frame would be slowed tremendously if we can soupify the ground. Maybe if we can make a blood bog or something with the consistency of quicksand. Can we use the limited blood portaling technique we used to remove the meat walls to draw that thing's legs down? Even if Thale just literally rips the legs out, that's flesh he has to waste on repairs and slows him down at the same time.
I'm assuming Thale has defenses to keep us from blooding his monster but if we get the chance might as well give it a try (at the very least try to find that brain we need to hit).
If we need to slow the thing down, maybe Mine could shoot a syringe at the floor in front of the monster and pop a meatwall in its path. Or a bone bomb if we'd rather try hurting it instead.
My other concern is Thale knows we know his weakness which is to aim for the brain. With that in mind, that monster's brain may or may not still be in its head. The brain may still be in the monster's head, it may be in that heavily armored chest cavity, or Thale might have moved it to somewhere less suspicious entirely.
If both of those are correct (and they may not), any damage we do should be focused on either slowing down the monster or finding its brain to kill it zombie-style (and of course basic defense as necessary); any other damage being superficial.
EDIT: Just to throw a guess out there - I think the brain is in the shoulder of the drill arm. The head is the most obvious place and looks unarmored, pretty sure that's a bait. The chest would be the next obvious place being right underneath the head and looking invincible. If I was Thale right now, I'd want to hedge my bets about the annoying group of miracle workers who took down my other "invincible" monster already. The drill arm already has some armor to protect it and the front of the arm is likely to get damaged/blown off simply over the course of combat. The shoulder offers relative safety and allows the monster to be regenerated in case the body gets completely blown away (with the idea of ejecting the arm from the body if it comes to that). Otherwise if the arm is threatened the brain can be migrated to the chest from the shoulder.
If I were to gamble on a blind shot that's my guess.
It's supposed to force him to release someone he's snagged with it, since we don't appear to have a shotgun to shred it this time. He can grow a new one, but he won't be able to drill his target to pieces just yet.
Also, open enough of the cage for Hope that he can see the monstrosity that’s fighting for “god.”
We could make a little keratin window in Hope's cage so he can see out of it without Thale being able to get to him and add him to his meat monster.
Edit: Also, maybe try some poison as well.
This is not going to be easy.
She probably went something natural for convenience and speed's sake.
Michelle should keep in mind that its brain probably *isn't* in its head anymore, if it comes down to using The Bullet.