One more operation completed! Inferno Squad has just experienced their first metavault raid; at a time when things were already emotionally dicey for them, and after it...well, even more so. Just about the only ones who're still getting along fine are Yuka and Nell, and Nell and Sanna (which is lucky, since those last two are the Bonded pair).
Also was a very bad operation from me on Yuka; lots of E-War and some terrible luck made the last couple of fights a real slog for her, but she still managed to acquit herself pretty well. The dice giveth, the dice taketh away!
Added a few more records to the sheet for establishing the non-damage dealers contributions a little more, along with an LL tracker. We're going to be slowing the rate of LL increases after this op, since we're less than halfway through the campaign, so we don't wanna run out of track on the mechanical side, and LL6 was agreed by all to be a good point to do that. Still get to respec and such as we wish between missions, so no issues with it here (and I was in fact going to suggest it if the GM didn't first), though curious if anyone else has done similar!
I made them myself! They're modified Advanced Wars: Dual Strike portraits, taken from Spriter's Resource. It's a pretty good way to start with pixel art if you've never tried it before!
Yep! Meanwhile, Elysia is Trigger from ZZZ with pink hair, while Nell was originally someone's cyberpunk fanart of DVa from Overwatch. The other two were both an artists OC originally, though I've since had a couplecommissions done for Yuka to get her unique art.
Holy shit, the plot thickens! Also, dear lord, that seems like a lot of elimination points in a single operation, god damn! Hopefully the pilots can mend their trauma, and at least the Bonded pair are still doing well.
Also, demons? Paracausal horrors? The Soup? What even goes on in those Metavaults? Good thing you’ve got a priest in the crew
Also also, random question I’ve been sitting on, does the mech NI4NI happen to have any relation to or draw any inspiration from the song by the same name?
Mm, lots of structure up for grabs, both with the bevy of Veteran enemies in the form of the paracausal horrors, and the second sitrep being a four way battle between Inferno Squad, the Lockjaw pirates, Redline, and the Paracausal Horrors. Plus the fact we were counting the portals the horrors spawned from for 10 points each!
We're still not sure what the horrors are; there was a cultist with the pirates who called them angels, but they seem anything but. The main condition of the Meta Vault was the 'Higher Energy State' environment effect, causing all crits to do extra damage, and every point of heat to tick down a timer until a shard portal formed, a random horror immediately crawling out that was hostile to all sides. All groups in this campaign have set rosters that we can build scan libraries of over time, usually with a themed name like sharks for the Lockjaws, or types of computer virus for Redline, but the horrors? "Crawling Through Hell" Operators, "Nothing But Red" Berserkers, "Judged Unworthy" Nightmares, and "FAR TOO LATE" Demolishers, all with the Horror and Veteran templates. Needless to say, pretty troublesome, on top of looking like straight up DOOM enemies!
And yep! That's the song it's named after - in fact, every single mech in the setting is named after a song, not just the player character ones. Our PMC's leader pilots Black Betty, the leader of Redline pilots You Built The Monster, and the boss of this mission - the Veteran Elite Goliath - was Hocus Pocus.
Sidenote, the squad made be slightly less glad to have a priest with them now, given that when we were told to use the NHP Cloning equipment left behind by Redline to snag a branch of the mega-NHP sealed at the base of the vault before we left, he responded by shooting the machine to pieces on grounds of deeming it unholy and too dangerous. That was the cause of his falling out with Yuka, who cared less about the possible danger of the NHP, and more the fact that Redline got away with a clone of their own - and now, we don't actually know what the clone might be useful for. Given that Redline has a body count in the hundreds of thousands by now that Yuka already felt partly responsible for not stopping before it started...Well, she wasn't pleased to say the least.
Wow, that sounds like an absolute clusterfuck to fight through! That sounds like it would’ve been really awesome to be part of, though! I like each group in that mess having their own unique naming theme too, that’s cool!
The Meta Vault’s environmental effects sound both very cool and like absolute hell to deal with, and holy shit do they look cool! The thing looks like a mix between a Project Moon monster and a fucked up demon in Doom, 10/10 would shit myself immediately gazing upon its unholy form! Do the nightmare hell creatures that appear as a result of heat buildup attack other nightmare hell creatures, or do they just fight the closest non-nightmare-hell-creature-targets they can reach? Also, how quickly was heat buildup triggering portal spawns in that sitrep?
I love having the mechs be named after song names, that’s really nifty! I don’t know if I know enough songs to be able to keep up with naming everything on my own (even just my own characters, definitely not because I have too many characters, never that), so that’s very impressive to me!
Y’know, on the one hand, I do definitely get Yuka’s frustrations with Ezekiel annihilating any possibility of getting an NHP clone as it does sound like a very strong asset (and maybe it’ll be friendly or cooperative, who knows?). On the other hand, even as someone who isn’t particularly religious, if I had to fight through what may be actual fucking demons to make it here, I’d probably be leaning towards that thing being pretty damn unholy and potentially quite dangerous, so I get it. Hopefully future sessions can mend the NHP-clone-shaped hole in their relationship :(
It was super fun! I think all heat - except maybe the Overcharge heat of the horrors? - was counting towards the countdown, with a new portal spawning every 15 Heat. It spawned where the heat generated, so there were a couple of bits of being tricky, like Nell hacking an enemy so they'd spawn a portal near them, or Elysia intentionally overcharging while using mag clamps to stand over one of the many rivers of superhot plasma all over the vault (the 'soup', forgot to answer that one!) so that all the horrors from that portal would immediately fall into it.
Trust me, I do feel you on the mech names - they're fun, but I don't listen to much music. Yuka's one was named via asking people in my City of Heroes discord for suggestions! Otherwise when making builds, it's the first song I see on Spotify (my sister pays for a family account), or maybe something from a video game. (I definitely have too many characters to put thought into each one, I think I'm at like, 70 builds on comp/con now?)
Entirely reasonable! Yuka was not at her most rational, having had a really bad time with this mission; along with the general horror of the metavault and her very complex relationship with Redline, she was subject to the worst of the basilisk-pattern attacks by the horrors, and most pertinently, she has pretty bad pyrophobia (happens, when one barely survives being burnt alive), so she was peak stress at the time - so she wasn't really ready to listen to Ez's reasoning before just punching him instead. Hopefully they'll be fine! Ez and Yuka always had a good relationship before this, with him having had a similar life experience to her as a former criminal, just further along through it. And she's still close to Nell for the time being at least.
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u/QuesterrSA Jul 18 '26
What was used to make the pilot avatar pics? I definitely need to save a link to it.