route666rp | APRIL EVENT LOG

APRIL EVENT LOG

The grassland gives way to rougher terrain, green fading to cracked red earth with scraggly sharp-edged plants dotting the landscape. With no trees, the sky overhead feels massive, and almost oppressive with how the sun and moon shine down. It’s entirely at odds with the biting wind that often whips across the flatlands. The ground occasionally breaks open into crevasses or rolls along in arid hills, but it remains stark thorn brush for as far as the eye can see… Save for one strange, ominous tower on the horizon.

01:TOWER OF TRANSFORMATION

The tower looks like a giant fang, trying to bite the sky. A strange pressure emits from it and rests on the skin. Drifters can get closer to the tower, but the terrain is covered with puncturing spikes and sharp thorn brush. It will take a TOUGH vehicle to get close without getting cut. Anyone who bleeds within sight of the tower discovers their cuts are transformed; a monster’s form waits under their skin, and transforms them one injury at a time.

It takes several days to get close to the tower via Convoy, with how the road snakes and winds towards it. Drifters won’t be able to reach it without offroad vehicles until April 15th. Getting close to the tower reveals that it is formed out of a strange metal much like the Husks… And that numerous creatures have been melded into the tower’s surface. A strange red ichor seeps out from these forms. Coming into contact with it heals wounds and can revert one transformation.

Drifters can take some of the fluid with them, if they have means to carry it… But only one extra dose; any more makes the fluid unstable and neutralizes the effect entirely.

01-A: TWISTED MONSTERS

The land here is still littered with Husks, ready to break open to fight… But these monsters are more twisted than usual, and seem to be composed of multiple organisms. Prowling cat-centaur esque brutes called panthera protectors, ungainly catoblepas, reptile energy draining bloodhound dogs, and flying lion-bird anzu are all ready to attack with tooth and claw, to make Drifters all the more like them.

Given the influence of the tower, Drifters can feel their forms twisting, the more wounds they take, and the more the moon begins to form into something almost whole. By April 15th the wounds and moon are almost impossible to resist without either vials or message mementos. And those wounds are determined to drag a change out of Drifters. (Of note, Drifters who took on Harpy or Naga traits last month will find those changes can come back to them unnervingly easily, and blend with other creature changes to become a true chimera.)

These changes grow worse until the moon glow and shards reach their absolute peak on April 20th. At this point Twisted Land occurs.

02: ROAD ATTACK 

A week into the thorn brush, chaos starts at sunset. The first warning is a metallic howl echoing down from the hills, followed by a rumble that could almost be thunder… If not for the fact that the sunset stained sky is completely clear. A swarm of metal sweeps over the hills, heading straight at the Convoy.

Running at the lead are more of those canine robots. The Convoy database again identifies them as ‘chromehounds’ and these are clearly in better repair; their fangs and claws are all razor sharp, and they are swiftly closing the distance. Close behind the hounds is a scattered assortment of scrap metal vehicles. The creatures driving aren’t quite human but also aren’t quite monsters; instead they are mechanical forms with just a few remnants of flesh on them. Robot riders and raiders, determined to harry the Convoy.

The goal of the raiders is to crash their vehicles into the Convoy, to slow or halt them. Drifters will need to either fight at a distance… Or hope that their monster side is tough enough for close and bloody combat!

02-A: ATTACK AND AFTERMATH

The attack patterns of the raiders depends on who they are targeting and how transformed the Drifters are. More monstrous Drifters earn full fury, and the vehicles blare with static and a patchy message: “…Purge… Corruption… By steel.” The raiders are determined to kill monsters, even at the cost of their own lives.

By contrast, less transformed Drifters may be overlooked, or only looked at suspicion. But if examined long enough, the raiders will eventually conclude less changed Drifters as still corrupt and attack them, especially if they are associated with the more monstrous!

Afterwards, mechanical salvage can be found to bolster the Convoy vehicles. The machines display a moon stabbed by a sword. It is the same as the symbols on the trap cars from February. Several raiders also carry odd talismans that resemble a rosary formed of tiny computer screens. Many of the screens are broken, but a few carry flickering text: “Your charge: To hunt the Warped. To purify the broken land, purge all sickness that twists us. Only then can Nirvana be opened, and the world reborn without corruption.”

03: OASIS

Just off the road are scattered oases, shining like blue gems in a red wasteland. The waters run surprisingly deep, with monstrous statues submerged in the depths. These statues resemble all 13 types of monsters, some of them even coloring the water depths into shades of green, purple, and red.

The oasis waters can’t fix or restore physical transformations. But it can cure any heat exhaustion with just a few sips, and restore lost strength. Red water can heal wounds, green restores magic fatigue, and purple can stabilize mental exhaustion and strain.

The statues also create a strange resonance on Drifters’ Sigil marks, particularly when Drifters submerge in the water. The statue resonance can’t completely revert transformations but they CAN spread out the transformation between two Drifters and lessen the potency.

04: MONSTER SHIFT, CHIMERA

Peculiar flowers bloom along some of the thorn brush. Drifters who bleed from the thorns will find that their cuts turn into Traits belonging to either Chimera or Unicorns. Chimeras typically appear from red flowered plants, and become increasingly tougher as they gain more traits. The following is also available:
+Tower focus: if growing extra eyes or heads, vision becomes disorienting. Focusing on the tower will help sharpen vision and provide clarity.
+Thermal flight on new wings, as the hot air coming off the ground helps them soar.
+Territorial hunter vs other fully shifted monsters/enemies.
+Blood taste/frenzy: becomes more savage as blood is shed, whether that is their own or others. If it is their own or an enemy, more aggressive; if it is an ally, more protective.
+An increasingly carnivorous and voracious appetite. Plus a craving for raw meat, and a drive to go hunt it personally; the fresher, the better.
+Tough hide. As 3 or more Chimera traits become active, the skin becomes increasingly tougher and harder for cuts and new transformations to occur.
+A sudden roar that cuts into words, easy for conversations to turn into a shouting match.

04: MONSTER SHIFT, UNICORN

As with Chimera, getting cut and bled by flower bearing thorns will impart unicorn traits on Drifters. This typically comes from thorn plants with white flowers. Unicorns have a knack for stabilizing the more violent changes… And perhaps even stopping transformations from bleeding. The following is also available:
+Horn Resonance, a ringing in the horn or forehead the closer one gets to the tower. Can result in either disorientation, or a boost in healing.
+Shift Healing: At the cost of taking on another unicorn/current monster trait, may heal another Drifter of one active trait. This can only be used once per character.
+An increasingly vegetarian diet, including the flowers off various thorn bushes.
+Increased pain or disorientation in the forehead as horn grows in. May also experience pain in feet (hooves) or back (wings or tail) though healing magic can alleviate pain.
+A compulsion to heal the injured or protect those who can. Similarly, a compulsion to protect the virtuous and aid them.
+Fight or Flight response: more likely to bolt at the sign of trouble with increased speed. If fleeing is not possible (or others are in danger) ready to fight to the death in desperate frenzy.
+Urge to run and be outdoors, gains an almost euphoric sensation when running at full speed.

05: TWISTED LAND

Finally the Convoy draws close to the tower and the moon glows balefully overhead, signaling an imminent Moon Warp. Shards of the tower fall away, exposing something encased in the surface. A chimera monster is pierced and pinned to the tower by swords. Elemental blood streams down, glowing in reaction to the Drifters, and causing the blades to glow in turn.

If Drifters make contact with the swords, they explode in a hail of shards, causing more wounds and damaging the tower. The shed blood twists the landscape. Deserts, forests, and swamps all shift together. With them come the hazards of those environments; quicksand, falling trees or strangling vines, terrible draining heat, all blending and switching without pattern. Such twisting weakens the tower. Further fragments break off and turn into monsters, aggressive and ready to fight. The Convoy braces against the twisting, but warning screens say that the shields are low on power. The shields occasionally waver, letting in the Moon Warp and monsters.

With the damage Drifters inflict in their battles, the environment twisting, and the sword shards, the tower crumbles away. It emits a burst of energy that disperses the land twisting, and ends the bloodshed transformations.

06: SALVE

In the aftermath of the warp, the tower has cracked and broken. A column of wavering light takes its place, reaching thin tendrils up towards the moon.

The red ichor leaks out of the tower in rivers, and any Husk it comes in contact with breaks open without transforming into a monster, instead releasing another glowing shard that travels upwards. Drifters can still harness this ichor to undo one change, though the limits still apply. Submerging in the ichor does not undo more than one change… Though it will stain Drifters with red.

The ichor can also heal wounds, and repair those quite thoroughly, acting as a good salve to mend Drifters from past battles.

MICRO ENCOUNTERS:

PLEASE NOTE! These are small bits of set dressing for players to include in threads if they wish, rather than full fledged prompts or events. You may handwave your exploration of these areas, or thread them out.

Twisted Creatures: Local fauna (flying rabbits, jackalopes, gorgons wandering in from the grasslands, etc) gets caught in the thorn bushes and begins bleeding, and turning into a monster. The process is slow and painful, giving Drifters enough time to get away from the scrub brush and the monster if they wish; or enough time to try and dispatch the creature.

Thorn brush: Clumps of thorn brush line the road. A time or two they even grow over the road and need to be hacked through, in order for the Convoy to proceed. The brush is almost like razor wire, with how sharp the thorns are, and how ready they are to slice up skin.

Watering Hole: Rarely, one can find a small oasis in the bleached land. Unfortunately, many of the twisted creatures want a drink from this place as well; it’s a task to grab water and avoid getting on their bad side.

NAVIGATION

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

With some effort Donnie clambers onto the top of the tank, bracing himself against the taxi cab that crowns it. He'd dish out more firepower but he doesn't want to catch Akechi in the middle of it, so for the moment he plays support, picking off chromehounds with his rifle.

At least up here he has a better view all around in case anyone tries to come circling about, not to mention it feels strangely more comfortable in general. He looks out and fixes his attention on the noisy Raider vehicles coming after Akechi.

A blazing rocket barrage flies over the motorcyclist's head to take one of them out.

"Hahaha... Burn in hell, you miserable peices of scrapmetal!"

He'll let Donatello get a few more shots in as he continues swerving and wrangling the Raiders and their mutts. Once he's satisfied with the numbers on his trail, he peers over his shoulder. "Now, Hereward... Allow us to demonstrate our true power!"

Bear with him, Donnie. When he gets excited in battle, he cackles like a supervillain. It's a quirk.

At any rate, that big, magical, and purple-tinted explosion swells over the Raiders and Chromehounds, thankfully avoiding the Turtle Tank and Donatello. No friendly fire here, folks!

"Whoa...."

Whatever odd look Donnie might have been making as Akechi starts cackling, shifts into something of awe as that explosion is unleashed. Bonus points for the color.

"Haha! That's one way to clear a field!"

"It's one of our most efficient techniques." He smirks, pleased at the reaction, although... "It's just a shame that it's so taxing to use."

Still, it seems the explosion cut through quite a few of their pursuers. With luck, it'll have sent a message not to trifle with them.

Any stragglers are wide open to shots from Donnie's rifle.

"That seems to be the way of things," Donnie replies with a mild smirk.

He brings up his rifle to pick off the remnants, which at this point seems almost too easy that it might be mean, but he's not about to hesitate about it when the guys clearly had tried to kill them earlier.

Once the final stragglers meet their end, Akechi coasts his motorcycle to a stop. Now seems like a good time to investigate the corpses and their belongings for anything useful.

He may be approaching those bodies a bit too nonchalantly, given the circumstances.

Donnie takes a good look around just to make sure nothing else is coming before he finally makes his own way down from the top of the tank. He seems to be keeping on his toes- literally- carefully picking his way around bodies and broken branches of thorns. Here and there he uses his staff to nudge something aside for a better look.

He does look a bit more hesitant in checking bodies, but it's something soon dismissed as the dead look more mechanical than anything alive. That's so much more easier to deal with.

"So were these the guys you mentioned before?" he asks as he stoops down to have a better look at one of the cyborgs.

"So it would seem. This was our first encounter with them directly, however."

Hmm... Cybernetics, and quite a bit of them. He kicks a nearby body, turning it face-down. "It's almost all machine. I wonder how much 'humanity' even remains within their lot." It'd be interesting to tear off the mechanical limbs, see how they function, but he's no mechanic.

However, their nearby vehicles look rather promising, so he moves toward one of the scorched trucks for a closer look.

"Wait, really?"

Donnie tilts his head at that, his attention drifting back to the bodies. "Who knows? Then again, maybe that concept's gotten just as twisted as the rest of this place," he mutters, tugging at a ragged jacket to look at the limbs it covered. "Seriously though, they are like, eighty to ninety percent metal."

There might be some useful parts to this. "How morbid would it be to come back with a load of arms and legs..." he considers, mostly to himself.

"Well, for what it's worth, I won't judge. I believe that understanding their technology would serve us well in the long run." Which is why he's prying the door open and peeking inside. "If there's room in your tank, we may be able to scavenge the most interesting looking pieces for further inspection."

"If nothing else, they might have some useful components that can be utilized for other things," Donnie adds, conjuring up some tools to get to work. The high-pitched whine of a buzzsaw sounds shortly after.

"Should have plenty of space for that, yeah. Let me know if you find anything promising."

It takes a moment for Akechi to peek, poke, and prod around inside the vehicle. "Hmm... bullets. That should be useful. Some of the technology and machinery here seems about on par with a laptop as well. We could potentially sever it from the vehicle and bring it back to the Convoy to improve our personal networking."

Here, he'll hop out so Donnie can inspect it for himself. In the meantime... well, there's a discarded sword on the ground nearby that he wants to inspect.

"Well they sure won't be using those anymore." Just as well that there's ammo lying around since he'd promised someone he'd keep an eye out. Maybe they're not the same caliber as her guns but that can potentially be addressed. Once they're not being overrun by robot people.

"Ooh?" Two heavy metal limbs land on the floor, mystic-tech already fading away as Donnie abandons his dismembering duties to scuttle over to the vehicle and have a look.

"Wonder what they might have been patched into," he mutters, but he crawls into the vehicle once Akechi moves, clawed fingertips roving the dashboard as he figures out the best way to remove it.

"It's a good question. They seem rather... single-minded, so I have to question the complexity of their communications between one another." Hmm, but this vehicle looks fairly tough. Perhaps if he rips off some of its armor, he could repurpose it for his motorcycle?

Taking a chance, he grabs onto a piece, and...

Gritting his teeth, he starts tugging.

"Computer hivemind? They must have their own network or some kind of frequency," Donnie mutters as he pries open the cover panel with a screwdriver.

"What a mess! Look at this wiring job, how's anyone supposed to know where anything's connected when they're all the same color!" he complains from within the vehicle.

"The same color. Really now?" Ugh. That does sound annoyingly impractical. Then again, these raiders hardly seem bright to begin with.

With some effort, he peels off the first piece of plating. "Modifying this armor to suit a motorcycle may take some work. Still, it withstood my Megidolaons, so it'd be a shame not to put it to good use."

Donnie pokes his head out to see what all Akechi's doing. "I could probably make it work, if you need help with that. Shouldn't be too different from armoring up the Turtle Tank."

He looks back at the wiring mess, reaching in to see if he can just tug it loose or if he'll have to resort to snipping wires. He doesn't have all day to go through these!

"I'd appreciate it." A faint smirk takes form, and he gets back to work, examining the various seams between the plating. It's not unlike when he skinned that Bull Gorgon, really. "I wonder if it'd be worth making multiple trips. With so many wrecked vehicles, there's no shortage of material to salvage."

There's a spark of that perhaps by now familiar neon glow, an assortment of tools silently falling from midair to land beside Akechi. There's a crowbar and screwdrivers, and a power tool or two.

Donnie's ducked back into the cab to keep working on the computer system, grumbling as he pulls at a handful of wire.

"If we can manage it. Probably won't hurt to get whatever we can while we can."

Edited 2025-04-21 22:45 (UTC)

"Thank you." Yes, that'll make removing the pieces much simpler, with far less risk to damaging the materials. So, carefully, he gets to work, operating the tools with care and restraint, especially due to his talons.

"I'm sure others have room in their vehicles to stockpile anything we can't fit in the Convoy itself. Perhaps you'll even find kindred spirits to help assess the spoils."

"That'd be good. It'd be a lot to go through otherwise. I'm usually more picky about what I salvage but given time and circumstances, I guess that's something that'll have to wait until we're in a slightly calmer situation." At least sorting through things will be something to do, later.

Donnie falls silent again, save for more some muttering as he continues to work at freeing up things in the vehicle.

"Ohhhmybananapancakes, almost- you good out there?"

"I'm fine." However, Donnie's reaction raises some questions, so Akechi briefly sets aside his tools to move closer. "Is everything all right?"

"Fine! Terrific, even! If we hadn't already killed whoever was using this thing I would have done so for this horrific wiring job- There!"

Donnie yanks the mess free, nearly falling over into the passenger seat.

...Heh. So that's what it was.

A smirk slowly tugs at Akechi's lips. "One would think that cyborgs would be more competent with their wiring."

The turtle slowly extracts himself from the vehicle, dragging the systems he'd pulled along with him, wires trailing everywhere.

"Right? Maybe they just go by power readings instead of color coding or something," he mutters in consideration before shrugging. "Either way, I hope this is only a particular instance and not something that carries over with all of them."

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whoops! somehow missed this

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