11-05-2015, 01:21 PM
I think I've gotten far too used to secret tunnels and secret entrances, as I was completely unfazed by the obstacle course through the prison's rugged support systems. The vent that I had to get through barely big enough to fit my backpack through, let alone the rest of me, and the climb up a steel beam tower was done with the same mindless routine as most would going up stairs, and when I got to a dead end when the map said it would be the way out I instantly noticed the wall was on a hinge, and with a kick to the bottom corner the hidden door swung open into a small unseen alcove above a massive, extremely bright room. The only thing that was missing was a cache of ammo and a med pack waiting for me at the end. Instead I got punched in the everything by a wave of heat.
In contrast the winter horrorland I had just left, the fourth floor was a boiling sauna with that twangy metallic taste of copper in the air like the world's worse air freshener. The room was giant, a welcome change from the claustrophobic maze of the floor before, but it was completely sours when I looked over the side. A vast pool of molten metal took up the entire floor (I would be told it was originally filled with blood, but the Empire was more pragmatic than the original owners), and cells instead lined the walls and hung from the ceiling by massive chains, along with a few small individual ones that hung a few unfortunate prisoners or skeletons of previous dead. Rings of catwalks encircled each level of cells, although none of them reached high enough to the hole in the ceiling that was how prisoners were kicked down.
Did I mention how fucking unbearable the heat was? It was un-fucking-bearable. And as someone who's lived in a part of the US that gets to 120 degrees during the summer, that's a high hurdle to cross. Only about ten minutes ago I was freezing my ass off and then I felt like I was about to suffocate under the humidity and melt in the heat. I had sweat already pooled in my armor's padding and the areas of my body that had previously been numb from the cold now prickled as feeling came back; far worse was where I was cut from my clumsy entrance and my the chase through the icy halls by a serial killer's idea of a teddy bear. I glanced down at the pouch on my belt filled with stimm, and then thought better of it. What I had was annoying, but I could soldier through.
No pain no gain, and all that dreck.
I clambered out of the cubby hole, only a few feet above one of the wall mounted cells, and flattened myself out avoid the attention of a few red, heavily insulated stormtroopers. The metal cells were hot to the touch, like a car thats been out in the summer sun all day, and I got that nasty surprise when I pressed my armed against it to crawl to the edge. I just had to crawl on my elbows to avoid burning myself too badly, but getting down was to be the hard part.
Each cell was just car enough away from each other that a prisoner couldn't reach into another, at least without touching the metal bars. I just had to slide down the side of one column of cells until I reach the bottom, but it was a long drop and I couldn't afford to take my time.
"Why didn't I bring a grapnel? That would have been the smart thing to do." I cursed myself as I grabbed the edge hoped my gloves would be enough. To be fair to myself, I expected to just summon new equipment when I needed it and not be on a strict time limit.
I slid down in a barely controlled drop, friction ate chunks of fabric from my gloves, and prisoners whipped their heads in surprised when they saw a green blur zoom past their little cages. As I neared the bottom of one I had to let go and grab the next set of bars to keep my speed, my heart stopped for a moment each time I did that. And I had to do it twelve times. Imagine that: in the span of less that half a minute, I had to ladder slide on twelve different sets of extremely hot metal bars with a three foot gap between each one, a five story tall drop underneath me, and I had to jump out into free fall to not slam into the floor of each one and cause a massive racket. If I had missed one, I would have gone too fast to control myself and splat like a sack of cement onto tarmac
But it felt awesome when I got to the last cell, and I would do it over again in a heartbeat.
I finally let my boots hit solid ground, a much more sturdy support jutted out of the wall to help support the cells above, and heard the impact gel in my boots hissed in anger as it took most of the fall damage and I buckled to disperse the rest and finished with a crouch under the catwalk. It felt like someone just sent lightning through my shins and my feet would hurt for days afterwords, but it was a far better outcome than broken everything. The prisoners I landed next to jumped five feet into the air when they saw me, but thankfully they kept their cool long enough to realize that I wasn't a stormtrooper and pretended that I wasn't there. A hot second as I waited for alarms to go off lead to nothing as it seemed my stunt had gone unseen.
The exit would be far less quiet, I mused with a smile.
A peek over the edge revealed that I hadn't quite reached the bottom. Under the massive pool of molten metal, centered around a decommissioned wood burner that the plate laid balanced on, was a full-on refinery. Metal was melted by the reactor's run off heat, churned and shaped by massive machines manned by the prisoners held here. The Empire's iron fist laws created the slave labor that would also feed its war machine.
I felt my teeth grind together as I wondered just how much damage these self serving bastards have done, rage threatened to boil over as parallels to evils that once plagued my own world formed in my head and I thought to break cover and strangle the nearest stormtrooper I could get my hands on. But I held it back and held the plastic explosives with glee of the destruction to come.
The ten foot drop down to the tallest machine I could reach was far easier than my previous trick, and it was a quick climb down the moving parts and various death traps until I was finally at same level as the workers and guards, all of them too busy trying to not lose a limb to a set of gears or a runaway flick of melted iron to notice the heavily armored human being move through the gaps in the machinery. My targets were in sight, windows in the wood burner revealed where the main reactor was, a massive arc generator that would go off nicely with a few misplaced blocks of C4. Two doors at opposite ends hid the two back ups, their own private furnaces in order to melt more precious metals.
The main one was heavily guarded, safer to set the other two with explosives first and then bull-rush through into the main reactor.
A locked door and a camera blocked my path. Although unguarded and sparsely secured, There was no way I could get in personally without someone noticing. The other way in was either to smash a window in or through the chute that carts full of ingots were driven through. It was obvious that there were sensors along the walls that would detect any lifeform that tried to escape through it. But I doubted they would be designed to detect something, like, say, a bundle of dets. If the Empire cut corners, and I was sure they did, then I just needed to toss it in and no one would be the wise.
Of course, throwing an explosive like it was a football was as obvious as, someone throwing explosives like it was football, and I needed the guards to be busy with something before I lived my middle school dream in being a quarterback.
It was easier than I thought I would be. Two prisoners, a man made entirely of rocks and a cat person, manned a wire cutter right next to me. A few fingers clicks caught their attention, rather mellow about the man in green armor and an entire arsonel on their back, and I tried to convey they they should fight with my two fists hitting each other. Rock man was slow on the uptake, but the cat took it immediately as he walked over to a third prisoner of no importance and decked them across the face.
As the fight grew into a crawl, I launched the bundle of (thankfully stable) C4 and rushed to the other side to doe the same thing. Stormtroopers came down on a the brawl quickly, but I still manage to lob the next payload into the second reactor room. That left the big one an,d despite that I could still hear the sound of blows and shock mauls rain down on the other side, the guards did their jobs with admiral professionalism as they stayed rooted to the ground.
Admiral, but I had to get through. And there's nothing in all of the multiverse, no wall or big guns, that could stop me if it got in my way. I pulled my shotgun from it's holster and charged into the open.
In contrast the winter horrorland I had just left, the fourth floor was a boiling sauna with that twangy metallic taste of copper in the air like the world's worse air freshener. The room was giant, a welcome change from the claustrophobic maze of the floor before, but it was completely sours when I looked over the side. A vast pool of molten metal took up the entire floor (I would be told it was originally filled with blood, but the Empire was more pragmatic than the original owners), and cells instead lined the walls and hung from the ceiling by massive chains, along with a few small individual ones that hung a few unfortunate prisoners or skeletons of previous dead. Rings of catwalks encircled each level of cells, although none of them reached high enough to the hole in the ceiling that was how prisoners were kicked down.
Did I mention how fucking unbearable the heat was? It was un-fucking-bearable. And as someone who's lived in a part of the US that gets to 120 degrees during the summer, that's a high hurdle to cross. Only about ten minutes ago I was freezing my ass off and then I felt like I was about to suffocate under the humidity and melt in the heat. I had sweat already pooled in my armor's padding and the areas of my body that had previously been numb from the cold now prickled as feeling came back; far worse was where I was cut from my clumsy entrance and my the chase through the icy halls by a serial killer's idea of a teddy bear. I glanced down at the pouch on my belt filled with stimm, and then thought better of it. What I had was annoying, but I could soldier through.
No pain no gain, and all that dreck.
I clambered out of the cubby hole, only a few feet above one of the wall mounted cells, and flattened myself out avoid the attention of a few red, heavily insulated stormtroopers. The metal cells were hot to the touch, like a car thats been out in the summer sun all day, and I got that nasty surprise when I pressed my armed against it to crawl to the edge. I just had to crawl on my elbows to avoid burning myself too badly, but getting down was to be the hard part.
Each cell was just car enough away from each other that a prisoner couldn't reach into another, at least without touching the metal bars. I just had to slide down the side of one column of cells until I reach the bottom, but it was a long drop and I couldn't afford to take my time.
"Why didn't I bring a grapnel? That would have been the smart thing to do." I cursed myself as I grabbed the edge hoped my gloves would be enough. To be fair to myself, I expected to just summon new equipment when I needed it and not be on a strict time limit.
I slid down in a barely controlled drop, friction ate chunks of fabric from my gloves, and prisoners whipped their heads in surprised when they saw a green blur zoom past their little cages. As I neared the bottom of one I had to let go and grab the next set of bars to keep my speed, my heart stopped for a moment each time I did that. And I had to do it twelve times. Imagine that: in the span of less that half a minute, I had to ladder slide on twelve different sets of extremely hot metal bars with a three foot gap between each one, a five story tall drop underneath me, and I had to jump out into free fall to not slam into the floor of each one and cause a massive racket. If I had missed one, I would have gone too fast to control myself and splat like a sack of cement onto tarmac
But it felt awesome when I got to the last cell, and I would do it over again in a heartbeat.
I finally let my boots hit solid ground, a much more sturdy support jutted out of the wall to help support the cells above, and heard the impact gel in my boots hissed in anger as it took most of the fall damage and I buckled to disperse the rest and finished with a crouch under the catwalk. It felt like someone just sent lightning through my shins and my feet would hurt for days afterwords, but it was a far better outcome than broken everything. The prisoners I landed next to jumped five feet into the air when they saw me, but thankfully they kept their cool long enough to realize that I wasn't a stormtrooper and pretended that I wasn't there. A hot second as I waited for alarms to go off lead to nothing as it seemed my stunt had gone unseen.
The exit would be far less quiet, I mused with a smile.
A peek over the edge revealed that I hadn't quite reached the bottom. Under the massive pool of molten metal, centered around a decommissioned wood burner that the plate laid balanced on, was a full-on refinery. Metal was melted by the reactor's run off heat, churned and shaped by massive machines manned by the prisoners held here. The Empire's iron fist laws created the slave labor that would also feed its war machine.
I felt my teeth grind together as I wondered just how much damage these self serving bastards have done, rage threatened to boil over as parallels to evils that once plagued my own world formed in my head and I thought to break cover and strangle the nearest stormtrooper I could get my hands on. But I held it back and held the plastic explosives with glee of the destruction to come.
The ten foot drop down to the tallest machine I could reach was far easier than my previous trick, and it was a quick climb down the moving parts and various death traps until I was finally at same level as the workers and guards, all of them too busy trying to not lose a limb to a set of gears or a runaway flick of melted iron to notice the heavily armored human being move through the gaps in the machinery. My targets were in sight, windows in the wood burner revealed where the main reactor was, a massive arc generator that would go off nicely with a few misplaced blocks of C4. Two doors at opposite ends hid the two back ups, their own private furnaces in order to melt more precious metals.
The main one was heavily guarded, safer to set the other two with explosives first and then bull-rush through into the main reactor.
A locked door and a camera blocked my path. Although unguarded and sparsely secured, There was no way I could get in personally without someone noticing. The other way in was either to smash a window in or through the chute that carts full of ingots were driven through. It was obvious that there were sensors along the walls that would detect any lifeform that tried to escape through it. But I doubted they would be designed to detect something, like, say, a bundle of dets. If the Empire cut corners, and I was sure they did, then I just needed to toss it in and no one would be the wise.
Of course, throwing an explosive like it was a football was as obvious as, someone throwing explosives like it was football, and I needed the guards to be busy with something before I lived my middle school dream in being a quarterback.
It was easier than I thought I would be. Two prisoners, a man made entirely of rocks and a cat person, manned a wire cutter right next to me. A few fingers clicks caught their attention, rather mellow about the man in green armor and an entire arsonel on their back, and I tried to convey they they should fight with my two fists hitting each other. Rock man was slow on the uptake, but the cat took it immediately as he walked over to a third prisoner of no importance and decked them across the face.
As the fight grew into a crawl, I launched the bundle of (thankfully stable) C4 and rushed to the other side to doe the same thing. Stormtroopers came down on a the brawl quickly, but I still manage to lob the next payload into the second reactor room. That left the big one an,d despite that I could still hear the sound of blows and shock mauls rain down on the other side, the guards did their jobs with admiral professionalism as they stayed rooted to the ground.
Admiral, but I had to get through. And there's nothing in all of the multiverse, no wall or big guns, that could stop me if it got in my way. I pulled my shotgun from it's holster and charged into the open.
![[Image: oGzCtPC.png]](http://i.imgur.com/oGzCtPC.png)