Epic Phail?

Flarelight drew back around the corner of the hallway and deactivated her invisibility device. the fragile-looking hodge-podge of small pieces and button batteries sputtered and sparked, then went quiescent, the slight background hum disappearing with Flarelight's reappearance. “I've not seen dem before, and someone yelling “Nemesis”? You think dese guys what they talkin' 'bout?” Her english was a confusing flow from Spanish to German to Portugese accenting seemingly at random. The other three women waiting for her though, had enough experience talking with the hot-tempered hero to understand what the was talking about.

One woman took a longstep to the edge of the corner, and did a quick pee-and-back around the corner. Her red hair fluttering in the wind raised by her large angelic-looking wings as she used them to balance her movements. Her Katana and Wakizashi held at the ready she spun to face the corner in case there she had been spotted, then relaxed as no cries of warning were raised. They were still undiscovered. “They look like a marching band from hayall” she said quietly to the others behind her. Atlas Angel smiled at the giggles her description brought from the other women, but never relaxed her vigilance. She had found out early that the more ridiculous and fantastic something looked, the more it was likely to be dangerous, and these men looked VERY ridiculous in their red uniforms and gold marching band hats. The large, odd-shaped rifles that were carried seemed archaic and menacing at the same time.

“Y'all ready?” Atlas Angel glanced over her shoulder at the other three women. Flarelight nodded tersely and there was a slight pop and hint of ozone, then the object on her waist began emitting a low hum, and she disappeared from sight. The tall woman next to the now-invisible Flarelight nodded her head and said quietly, “Ready.” The last woman pulled a Katana similar to Atlas Angel's own, but gripped it in a balanced two-handed style the spoke of powerful cuts. Morgnan Keira nodded and stepped around the corner and started to charge.

Unfortunately, the opponents were alert and the girls quiet talk had been heard, so instead of rushing into a group of surprised men unaware of their presence, the quartet stepped into a hail of lead and gas. Flarelight coughed and saw the red soldiers had formed two ranks, front kneeling, rear standing. The hellish fusillade drove the women back around the corner confused and choking from the caustic gas grenades that had been thrown their direction. Flarelight turned to drop a trip mine, and had just placed it prior to arming it, when a foo came down on top of the mine. She looked up at a rifle butt that smashed her in the face.

The dim hum of the emergency transporter whisked her away to the hospital, along with the others. A few minutes later, all four had been revived and healed by the emergency room meta-healers. Atlas sat down on the bench outside, being the first one revived. As the red-haired white-winged woman waited for the others, she tried to figure out what she could do to close ground on an enemy waiting for them. Flarelight came out next and stood next to Atlas Angel for a moment, her dark black and white suit a close match and proclaimed both members of Next Gen, Inc. “Those locos blew holes in my uniform Heaths, now I gotta get another one? I think I want take der Koste offa diesen hides.” “Wayall, ya wanna do that sis, ya have ta catch 'em first”, Atlas said with a smile. The two women waited for the other two and then sped off in a group back the office building in Perez Park.

Once inside the women carefully sped to the location where the “marching band from hell”, as Atlas Angel had so succinctly put it, had devastated them. Flarelight turned on her invisibility device, which sputtered momentarily before settling into a slight hum, and she disappeared from view. A quick step around the corner brought her a fusillade from the archaic weapons, and the strange ammunition spread a choking, acidic gas which shorted out her device's light-bending capability. The battle was immediately joined as the three women rushed to aid their fourth. Screams and the metallic clash of metal-on-metal echoed in the hallway, and a final volley dropped the heroes, and the emergency teleporter once again deposited them in the immediate emergency room for meta-humans.

“Next tahm sis, make sure'n they cain't hear you either” Atlas Angel said to Flarelight with a touch of dry humor. Morgana Keira, nodded, and added “we should also maybe study them more before taking them out?” “Yeah right, like I'm gonna study anyone when they shoot at me” said Flarelight irritably. “I'm serious about that” said the white-skinned black-haired woman. “We need to know what they are and why they are here.” “I'm agreeing with Morgana, we should be checking things out before going in” said Dark-Stryke. “We check out as we shoot... recon by fire” said Flarelight, who was clearly angry about being shot.

To Be Continued....

EEEEEEEKK!

We are having LOTS of rain, and if you look at the weather satellite, you can see it is a part of hurricane Ike, which is down in the gulf right now and appearing to be drawing a bullseye on Houston, Texas. The people that owned the house before us put in all sorts of small gardens around the house, and a small cement retaining wall to border the gardens. This landscaping was done without any effort at all to make sure water flows away from the house, nor were any of the downspouts extended beyond the wall. The result is that water drains towards the house and we have 4-6" of water standing against the foundation. The sump pump is working overtime to drain, flipping on every 30 seconds or so. Lloyd is beside himself trying to move furniture to 'high ground' in case the pump gives out. He is frustrated too, that he didn't recognize these problems sooner. The thing is, we haven't had rain like this ever before, so I can't say either of us were cognizant of the problems until they became apparent with this heavy, heavy rain. I'm crossing my fingers the sump pump holds out, that's the only thing between us and a waist-high flood in the lower port of this split-level place.

Mocha

The beginnings

Equilibrium? In nature? Forget it. The only “thing” that ever is in equilibrium is nothing. I can't point definitively to our world heating up due to anthropomorphic changes, changes like this have happened in the past. But to give you a feel of how things “happened”, we have to look at global warming, and we have to look off-planet for the reason.



The following are excerpts from a hand-printed manuscript found thirty years ago, and what were written approximately fifty years ago, just prior to the upheaval that changed our world....

A word of warning people, I am not a straight thinker, I am shotgun and all over, so bear that in mind as you follow this. We have a number of interlocking causes, and while you may be comfortable trying to delineate one cause and then the next in nice neat descriptions and chapters, it ain't a gonna happen here. Each reinforces the other and we'll be bouncing back and for hither and yon as we look at them and the causes of our society's crash. Nothing ever happens in a straight line. So hang onto your butts, let's ride.


- According to our government, there was one cause for all our problems, global wamring caused by man spewing millions of tons of Carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a 'greenhouse gas', one that traps energy radiating from the earth and doesn't allow it to dissipate into space. So the earth warmed up, and the ice caps melted and we flooded ourselves out of house and home. But that's only part of the story.

Global warming did happen, and we did flood out of house and home anything that was below two hundred feet or less above mean sea level of 1980. We lost a LOT of land, approximately 4% of our land surface, that doesn't sound like much, but most of that was prime farming grounds and major seaports. We lost two states too, Louisiana and Florida, both are now mostly one hundred feet under water, with only a bare section of each still dry.... relatively. The coasts moved inland up to two hundred miles in the case of the Mississippi river, and Dallas is now a near-coastal town.

Everything happened a lot faster than people thought, and that's because of positive feedback. Watch an ice cube melt some time. At first it barely looks to be affected, but as the ice melts there is less of it to maintain itself and it falls apart ever faster until it finally disappears. Same thing happened to the ice caps, once they reach a certain point, that was all she wrote and in twenty years they were gone.

Temperature at this time rose about ten degrees on the average in the area beyond sixty degrees north and south latitude. Temperature increases were lower closer to the equator, about three to four degrees celsius, but that's simply because they were already warm, and heat affects the coldest spots the most. This change created the huge superstorms that devastated much of Europe and Asia, causing food shortages in a world already populated beyond what the earth could sustain.

Wars broke out over food, and the world population thinned itself some that way. This disruption in people caused further troubles as it gave disease a foothold, and we had a tremendous series of pandemics that swept over the world, illnesses that did not respond to the antibiotics available. The first pandemic, “Milton's plague”, killed four percent of the world population in eight months, a testament to the virulent airborne pathogen. It's extreme mutability was mankind's savior, as it disappeared as quickly as it appeared, evolving back into a virus that affected only birds. However the high death rate in some areas allowed 'old friends' like cholera to reappear and rage in pockets of humanity.

Takeover!

Hi, the next few posts are going to be Lloyd. He made a statement about a future that sees a retrograde development of technology, and will be putting up some posts here on the climactic and industrial changes that created the situation.

Stay tuned.....

Statesman Total Freakout

Back about 3-4 weeks ago, Sedated Alice had a really ambitious idea to explain a change she wanted to use to explain an evolution in her character Aestas. the idea was to put together a statesman task force with her friends and see what would happen. She had a goal in mind and the hopes that as the team leader, she could develop the story within and along the task force storyline.

It lasted about 10 seconds, as when E.VAC and Fyre Hex showed up, it was anger and accusation directed at Kill Favored's character Masonry. The bickering and anger spilled over to the rest of us and killed a good idea and turned it into a test of will, and a 'death-march' that left all of us upset, pointing fingers, and hurt. I got upset that Fyre and E both blasted the chance for a story by sabotaging it with IC angst and anger. In turn both of them were upset at what they felt was IC stuff that became for them, direct attacks upon themselves.

Aestas suffered the most, for it was her idea that was blown apart and the chance for a neat story flushed away. The TF went forward at a reasonable pace but the tension between people and their attitudes, mine included continued to fray and reduced the fun to a epehmeral thing that would die as soon as it appeared. StarWyng (my character) hit 50, and I've never felt closer to deleting a character than I did those moments before she reached that magic milestone. There was no camraderie, no feeling of something precious shared with others. Everyone was wrapped tight in their own REAL angst and misery by that time, and I am certain that friendships have been permanently strained, if not broken completely.

Why? Each one of us was selfish, and didn't look to the big picture. I've read everyone's post (except for Cryocasm), and see the same 'oh I know this was stupid, poor me, I'm the true victim' in each of the posts. I have to brush myself there too as I was selfish afterwards and hurt that people would not try to put aside things and actually TRY to build an IC reason to help each other. That does NOT show good RP skills, that just shows selfishness and a 'me I've got to have the spotlight diva' mentality.

I really wish Aestas could have had the mission she wanted. I think it was a good idea and the team was reasonably put together. We may not have won, but at least we would have had fun, and not be still feeling hurt.

58-3

Well, the polls are in, and with 58 'chapters' down and 3 (count'em 3) comments, I can safely say that there was little to no interest in the story. I realize it was a very rough draft from National Novel Writing month, but the idea was to see if there was any interest at all in the style of the story, the characters, and the setting. If there is, I didn't see it, so I have to conclude that things suck. Either the rough draft was too rough for comfortable reading, or the writer really needs to quit, or drastically sharpen her skills. I really hope it's the former, but with the way I've been 180 on everything all the time, I just don't know.

The 180

It's well known to my friends by now that A) I'm neurotic like a bad Woody Allen movie, and B) beating a dead horse is a way of life. That being said, the 180 is the glue gthat holds them together.

The 180 is my singular ability to suffer through angst and uncertainty, and when I do need to talk, everything shifts 180 to what is was before, and I'm moaning about nothing, or something completely different. That's happened a lot lately, and I'm wondering maybe if it isn't some kind of judgemnet from a Higher power trying to tell me to shut up and live with it, or talk about things sooner than I do?

Hell if I know. All it seems to do is screw up my friends and I'm sure no on wants to hear me whine. read maybe, but certainly not hear. That and the fact compunded like we are all drifting apart. One friend is hardly on, on has got three other friends and they play togehter all the time, and I'm left wondering where everyone went to.

Anyways, I'd like to RP and do mission with them, but neurotic doesn't do RP well, or if I ever did. I know some people's opinion already. You like someone you find a way to include them, that's the bottom line.