Post by Vi-Poi on Apr 3, 2015 19:30:41 GMT
(Heavy Weights On)
(This is Vi-Poi’s discovery of an ancient Tuffle technology that will eventually be incorporated into his framework. This will be considered mechanically a training, since it is a solo post.)
(PL Training, Day 6/7: Training 3/5) + (Learning Lock-On/3D Scan-Mode Upgrade [S2], Invisible Eye Blast [V2] & Lock-On Buster [UV3])
None had known a battle like this in the millennia since this world had been crippled, Vi-Poi was sure. All around him was ruin, the jumbled heap of a billions deaths that accumulated into one massive doom which echoed across eternity. He’d fought creatures whom were stronger than most Saiyan he’d met, reach this point, and he was certain it was only the beginning.
He’d begun his search at the center of the old Tuffle Capitol, judging by the impressive heights and mass of the time-scarred buildings around him. A black wind howled through the streets with the sighing moans of a phantom, whipping about his body like a tempest. It was an incredibly noxious fume, some sort of synthetic gas. The poisonous miasma was omnipresent in the deep gouges that scarred this old dead heart, and the megalopolis network of ribbon-like tributary cities that spun off it like veins. It hung thickest in the valleys and the crags, the deep wounds, and mingled with the industrial soup of toxic green fog that hung in a constant cloud over the Capitol’s megastructure.
Though it was night, the entire city was cast in a strange green half-light from the bubbling and vaporous auras that roamed its crumpled streets.
Vi-Poi was moving towards one rather powerful radiation signature, beneath what could only have been the civilization’s technological department, by the amount of ghost signals Vi-Poi’s built-in scouter was reflecting. The echoes of his footsteps lingered like the hauntings of a heavy rain, the clatter resounding a thousand times off of warped and melted metal and slumped glass. The quiet was loud, in a way. Puffs of the noxious gas rose up with each step of his boot along the cragged and ragged ground.
The science complex was a low dome that was half cracked like an egg by some long-ago violence. The wind picked up as Vi-Poi’s clacking footfalls neared it, and an eerie and inexplicable screech resounded in the distance. Vi-Poi rose his eyebrows at the sound. He wondered if it was more of those saiba-creatures he’d scanned from a distance during his flight over, or one of Planet Vegeta’s larger predators.
The large double doors to the complex burst open with an arcing kiai sent from his body. The hinges had verdigrised to rust long ago, and a fine spray of it clouded the air as he stepped into the murky maw. The high amounts of radiation here would not chronically degrade him like a biological construct might be degraded, but it would cause depolarization in his magnetic endpoints. He was already feeling the effects, a slight blurring and rarefaction of his Heads Up Display and visual input. It was effecting his auditory rangers too, but these weren’t as sensitive as his visuals, and so he could compensate for the changes more easily.
Vi-Poi made a new alignment in his photon receptor domains, expanding his visual to be able to account for the entire electromagnetic spectrum. It took slightly more of his processing power to do so, but it gave him input on everything from radio to microwave, infrared, and even x-ray and gamma emissions.
(Lock-On/3D Scan Mode [SU2] upgrade learned)
There were some of those up ahead, ultra-high frequency photons pounding through the floor and the walls. He walked down the dark hall, boots splashing in sinusoidal puddles of greasy liquid of oil mixed with myriad wastes. Vegeta’s version of rats, armored, vaguely insectoid looking creatures, splashed alongside him, scurrying out of his way. They were some of the hardiest life found on this terrestrial sphere.
A deep shadow flickered in the yawning darkness ahead of him. His built-in scouter fluttered. There was nothing to lock on, though. Whatever had moved, it was too fast for Vi-Poi to see. He lit a blue lantern of ki above one finger, directing the shining ball of spirit energy forward slowly, letting it illuminate the blackness.
Vi-Poi followed the light to a well of stairs at the back of the hall. He activated his Night Capture programming as he descended into the inky void. Though it was pitch black, he could easily make out the area of the subfloor. There was nothing here. Whatever had created the flicker across his vision had departed.
The radiation source was closer, now. His stealth taps in the Vegeta network had shown that the Tuffle’s most potent tech was here. What wonders would he find, in this forgotten cradle of progress?
There was more than gamma down here. A pulsing visible light hissed beneath the floor, leaking through cracks in the timeworn concrete ground. His scouter was chirping with confused excitement. Something big was down here, but in all the interference, Vi-Poi couldn’t read it. He impatiently blew a hole in the floor with a wave of ki.
Light sprung from the jagged opening, bathing the room in white light. The intensity of it caused Vi-Poi to step back in shock. There was an extreme energy source down there! He leapt into the light, tuning his photon receptors to restrict the incoming wave count to better see the source. It was as small as a game marble, spheroid, and incased in a highly pressurized liquid-filled capsule. It gave off a brightness like the sun.
Clicks in his built-in scouter confirmed that this was the source of the intense gamma radiation in this sector.
Then the sphere turned dark, and everywhere snapped into obscurity. Whatever it was, it was pulsing, cycling in increments.
Just as he was adjusting his visual sensors back into Night Capture, something hard hit him from behind. The force of the impact hurtled him forward, toppling him end over end until he smashed into a wall ahead of him. The force of the impact caused a great shudder to moan through the building. “Eeeaahhh!” Vi-Poi yelled as his social algorithms grew dizzy with shock at the sudden attack, his cry echoing across the blasted cityscape.
The entire building rumpled and fell upon him. He struggled, swimming up through the rubble until he finally burst into the fetid air. A dark and frothing lance of ki charged on his left hand, thrumming at his palm with a red energy. He peered around, attempting to scan for a target.
A massive something burst out of the rubble behind him, wrapping Vi-Poi’s small body in its grip. Thick metal cabling wrapped around his arms, sealing them tightly against his torso. He tried to burst out in flight, tried to wriggle away, but the grip was too strong. The cables slowly revolved his body, turning him towards his captor.
It was a strange thing; large, humanoid, cloaked in writhing cabling, with a multitude of scoping lenses where its face should have been. It wore a rusted metallic skin, but Vi-Poi could detect the telltale carbonic signatures of a biologic underneath that shell. A cyborg, possibly.
Vi-Poi flipped his photon receptors and blasted the creature with his eye lasers, aiming for its ocular complex. A semi-transparent black shield of some kind blocked the attack. Vi-Poi activated his scouter. The relay beam reflected off the shield. He hmphed. So that’s why he didn’t detect the shadow. The shield was interfering with his scanning as well. With great strain, Vi-Poi managed to wrangle his forearm upward and raise his palm. The dark and frothing ki tightened into an orb, one with a pulsing red center. “Final Extinction Bullet!!!” He yelled, and the attack rocketed into the creature at point-blank range. The explosive force of the detonation caused the cabling tentacles to unravel in a jumbled mess, and knocked Vi-Poi backwards a good kilometer before he slammed into a building. He lay in the dent of concrete a moment, regaining his senses as his HUD slowly shifted back into alignment.
The creature was still functioning. In fact, from the spherical glow around it, it appeared its shield had absorbed the power of the Bullet’s detonation entirely. It hurtled towards Vi-Poi at a tremendous speed. Vi-Poi raised his arm from the rubble and fired a shower of tight blue ki blasts in its direction, but they all burst against the shell of its shield harmlessly. When the creature came close, his activated his afterimage and burst behind it, delivering a sharp kick at its torso. His sweeping leg and shin-greave bounced off the barrier. The creature whipped around and slammed and cable into Vi-Poi’s face, causing him to dart downwards quickly, before catching him by the throat with another, snagging him in place and jerking him back upward.
Its heavy curled cables snapped into his torso like fists, their hardened arcs lancing across his body, jarring his ki-infusion. He could feel his micromotor repair gels moving already to assess and contain the damage as the pummeling turned into a torrent of whips and pounds across his body.
Thankfully, the cybernetic creature wasn’t as potent offensively as it was defensively, or the android would have surely been disassembled. After one last slap of its metallic cord across Vi-Poi’s face, it threw him down headfirst into the rubble of the destroyed science complex. Vi-Poi’s problem solving algorithms groaned inwardly. There had to be a way to circumvent the shield. He turned, thinking. Perhaps… getting an idea from his recent widening of his Scan Mode, Vi-Poi switched the photon receptors in his eye lasers to the invisible X-Ray range. He turned around, laying in the heap of stone as the metallic monster relentlessly came down towards him.
He flipped his photon receptors and let this new blast of ki channeled through a higher frequency conduit erupt. His irises shone briefly, but the wave was amazingly invisible to the normal spectrum, and the attack exploded against the metal skin of the cyborg.
(Invisible Eye Blast [V2] Learned)
It halted in shock at this development, and let out a great howl of anguish and confusion, a clawed hand reaching up to grab at the burn-strewn wound that had been made across its shoulder. Vi-Poi gave a triumphant smirk. “Not so invincible, are you?” He asked.
The machine gave out a bestial growl, and Vi-Poi sprung up to meet it. The two clashed, Vi-Poi’s punches and kicks still bouncing against its dark shield. Though it did no perceptible damage, he could see his attacks were knocking the creature back, and coupled with its unaccustomed wounding, the bionic beast was becoming flustered. It’s attacks with its cabling was becoming more predictable. Still, it was a formidable fighter, and Vi-Poi had to press all of his honed combat mechanics to even eke out a stalemate in the dark sky above the Tuffle town.
They fought for several minutes before Vi-Poi finally managed to gain the advantage, delivering a powerful punch that thrummed against its shielding and sent it careening down into the streets below. He followed, delivering another invisible blast of his eye lasers. The creature writhed and gave another howl. The lasers were damaging it, degrading it, but it was still operating. The monster was obviously panicking now, and used the momentum of its fall to bounce off the pavement and begin a flight away from Vi-Poi.
It was trying to escape.
Vi-Poi went after it, chasing it through the gridlike streets of the fallen Capitol, at several points managing to lick it with his invisible beams but never getting a clear enough shot to destroy it. Bulbs of fire blossomed throughout the city’s corpse during this supersonic hunt, points of red light in an endless gloom. The attacks were not enough. It was still alive. Vi-Poi was determined to destroy it, letting it escape could lead to it simply ambushing him again, but couldn’t figure out how to deliver enough clandestine energy that could pass its visual-trigger barrier to do so. As it turned one corner, its tentacle cabling shot out once more, blocking his way like a wall. Vi-Poi’s flight spun to a stop, but not quickly enough. He slapped into the arms like a fly in a spider’s web, and the closed around him with a snap. Great torrents of ki blasted against him, and the creature used him as the head of a great hammer in between the ki dousing, smashing him this way and that, slamming his body against the ground or dragging him through a ruined building.
Vi-Poi tried to twist so that he could face the cyborg and deliver another blast of invisible lasers, but the cyborg was cleverly keeping his front turned away. He tried to detach his head and swivel it around, but a cable wrapped around his head like a crown and jammed it back into his neck before slamming him down through the ground and into a sewer substructure, landing on Vi-Poi’s back with its clawed feet. Vi-Poi oomfed in exasperation and dragged himself upward.
The black miasma was thicker here. He could see up ahead, deeper in the catacomb network, its inky substance coiling and convalescing. An idea sparked. He began to run towards the miasma, dragging the cabled monster behind him. Reaching the gaseous substance, his suspicions were confirmed. The creature writhed and screamed in anguish, its grip loosening. Vi-Poi spun on his heels in a great twister and turned his way loose of the sagging grib of the cabling, spurring away into the heavy cloud of black miasma. The being’s wounds were now glowing black, and it was scurrying about with a maddened, insectoid fear.
Its impermeable shield was fluttering in its confusion.
Vi-Poi engaged his Lock On, white crosshair’s intersecting in his Heads Up Display. A white circle formed around the creature. The shield decay was enough for him to get a target now. It was trying to find an escape, but Vi-Poi was able to easily track it, now.
In a moment of creative inspiration, Vi-Poi channeled all of his infused ki up through his inversed photon lenses. A line of sparks appeared between the fleeing monster and himself. The invisible ray shot out faster than light, and a great fireball erupted, sending evaporating flames hundreds of meters in all directions. Vi-Poi was knocked back by the force of his own attack, but otherwise unscathed. As the bright flash of light dimmed to normal, Vi-Poi scanned the crater. There was still something there, but it was very faint.
(Lock-On Buster [UV3] learned)
Vi-Poi frowned and folded his arms. This thing was tougher than he thought. It came at him with the same tenacity it did before. Its shell was almost completely blown away, torn into ribbons in some places, exposing contorted pink musculature webbed with cybernetics beneath. Most of its cabling was blown away and scorched into frayed stumps now. Its face was gruesome where it appeared in the gaps of its lens-covered face, but Vi-Poi could still recognize the characteristics of a primate-based humanoid. It must have been a Tuffle, at one point. Perhaps it had lived as a scavenger here, out in the doomed ruins, maddened and reduced to a savage state by the long stretch of years.
Vi-Poi would have pitied it, had he the social algorithms for that sort of thing. As the thing sped towards him in a blur, Vi-Poi disengaged his left forearm, letting it drop to expose the wide open ki-conduit within his limb. A sharp wine of electricity rose in the air. Right before the creature got within striking distance, a cloud of bright blue ki exploded out from Vi-Poi’s opened wrist, the force of the fiery azure wave knocking the cyborg clear across the two blocks of the city and slamming Vi-Poi back against a nearby building. The wounded machine squealed in a strange metallic howl as its body frothed in the stream of spirit energy, his metallic flesh bubbling and blackening before his inner organs and flesh popped with a sickening burst of grease. Its blackened and infinitesimal remains drifted in the dense smog before slowly swaying to the ground.
Vi-Poi blew out the wafting steam of his conduit like the heroes extinguished the smoking barrels of their guns in the movies, then reassembled his arm back into its proper place. His Supa Bazooka had ultimately disintegrated the creature, which was a middling disappointment. Its remains could have been a great study for the Science Corp’s Site A Android Research Group.
He dug out the collapse of the science complex with a few dozen precisely placed waves of ki. Sinking into the depths, he found his prize. It was the orb, the small marble-sized stone, gleaming like a diamond in the rough. It glittered with promise, but no longer gave off the blinding light it once did. The cycling, the android quickly determined, had been to reactor output inefficiencies. The little pebble of energy was an engine a very peculiar one. His built-in scouter analyzed that it had no energy pumps or wiring, only a strange matrix of interlocking spheres that made little sense to his analytics. One thing was certain – its energy potential was several times larger than his current heart reactor. Vi-Poi knelt, and carefully took the miniature machine in his palm. It felt cool and smooth to the touch, like a pearl just snatched from the ocean. Vi-Poi opened up his arm and secreted it inside of him. It might be inactive and unable to interface with his systems now, but he was eager to get this discovery back to Earth, where an incorporation design might be found.
(Tuffle Core found, but not yet activated)
Vi-Poi flew to the outskirts of the demised district, and summoned a shuttle. He had taken a part of the city’s silence with him, and made little in words to the Blue Banner response team that came to pick him up, save for instructing him to relay him directly to Big Blu. They would be departing Vegeta, shortly, whence all of KAOS was back aboard and the crew was ready.
The foray into the Saiyan homeworld had been an interesting one. It’d shown Vi-Poi the dangers that the species held, but also their potential. If they could be made to shape their own greatness in less destructive ways, it could prove a great benefit for the Galaxy and all who lived within it.
(BBA are now leaving Vegeta, due back home at Earth circa 2:30 in the afternoon US CT time)
(This is Vi-Poi’s discovery of an ancient Tuffle technology that will eventually be incorporated into his framework. This will be considered mechanically a training, since it is a solo post.)
(PL Training, Day 6/7: Training 3/5) + (Learning Lock-On/3D Scan-Mode Upgrade [S2], Invisible Eye Blast [V2] & Lock-On Buster [UV3])
None had known a battle like this in the millennia since this world had been crippled, Vi-Poi was sure. All around him was ruin, the jumbled heap of a billions deaths that accumulated into one massive doom which echoed across eternity. He’d fought creatures whom were stronger than most Saiyan he’d met, reach this point, and he was certain it was only the beginning.
He’d begun his search at the center of the old Tuffle Capitol, judging by the impressive heights and mass of the time-scarred buildings around him. A black wind howled through the streets with the sighing moans of a phantom, whipping about his body like a tempest. It was an incredibly noxious fume, some sort of synthetic gas. The poisonous miasma was omnipresent in the deep gouges that scarred this old dead heart, and the megalopolis network of ribbon-like tributary cities that spun off it like veins. It hung thickest in the valleys and the crags, the deep wounds, and mingled with the industrial soup of toxic green fog that hung in a constant cloud over the Capitol’s megastructure.
Though it was night, the entire city was cast in a strange green half-light from the bubbling and vaporous auras that roamed its crumpled streets.
Vi-Poi was moving towards one rather powerful radiation signature, beneath what could only have been the civilization’s technological department, by the amount of ghost signals Vi-Poi’s built-in scouter was reflecting. The echoes of his footsteps lingered like the hauntings of a heavy rain, the clatter resounding a thousand times off of warped and melted metal and slumped glass. The quiet was loud, in a way. Puffs of the noxious gas rose up with each step of his boot along the cragged and ragged ground.
The science complex was a low dome that was half cracked like an egg by some long-ago violence. The wind picked up as Vi-Poi’s clacking footfalls neared it, and an eerie and inexplicable screech resounded in the distance. Vi-Poi rose his eyebrows at the sound. He wondered if it was more of those saiba-creatures he’d scanned from a distance during his flight over, or one of Planet Vegeta’s larger predators.
The large double doors to the complex burst open with an arcing kiai sent from his body. The hinges had verdigrised to rust long ago, and a fine spray of it clouded the air as he stepped into the murky maw. The high amounts of radiation here would not chronically degrade him like a biological construct might be degraded, but it would cause depolarization in his magnetic endpoints. He was already feeling the effects, a slight blurring and rarefaction of his Heads Up Display and visual input. It was effecting his auditory rangers too, but these weren’t as sensitive as his visuals, and so he could compensate for the changes more easily.
Vi-Poi made a new alignment in his photon receptor domains, expanding his visual to be able to account for the entire electromagnetic spectrum. It took slightly more of his processing power to do so, but it gave him input on everything from radio to microwave, infrared, and even x-ray and gamma emissions.
(Lock-On/3D Scan Mode [SU2] upgrade learned)
There were some of those up ahead, ultra-high frequency photons pounding through the floor and the walls. He walked down the dark hall, boots splashing in sinusoidal puddles of greasy liquid of oil mixed with myriad wastes. Vegeta’s version of rats, armored, vaguely insectoid looking creatures, splashed alongside him, scurrying out of his way. They were some of the hardiest life found on this terrestrial sphere.
A deep shadow flickered in the yawning darkness ahead of him. His built-in scouter fluttered. There was nothing to lock on, though. Whatever had moved, it was too fast for Vi-Poi to see. He lit a blue lantern of ki above one finger, directing the shining ball of spirit energy forward slowly, letting it illuminate the blackness.
Vi-Poi followed the light to a well of stairs at the back of the hall. He activated his Night Capture programming as he descended into the inky void. Though it was pitch black, he could easily make out the area of the subfloor. There was nothing here. Whatever had created the flicker across his vision had departed.
The radiation source was closer, now. His stealth taps in the Vegeta network had shown that the Tuffle’s most potent tech was here. What wonders would he find, in this forgotten cradle of progress?
There was more than gamma down here. A pulsing visible light hissed beneath the floor, leaking through cracks in the timeworn concrete ground. His scouter was chirping with confused excitement. Something big was down here, but in all the interference, Vi-Poi couldn’t read it. He impatiently blew a hole in the floor with a wave of ki.
Light sprung from the jagged opening, bathing the room in white light. The intensity of it caused Vi-Poi to step back in shock. There was an extreme energy source down there! He leapt into the light, tuning his photon receptors to restrict the incoming wave count to better see the source. It was as small as a game marble, spheroid, and incased in a highly pressurized liquid-filled capsule. It gave off a brightness like the sun.
Clicks in his built-in scouter confirmed that this was the source of the intense gamma radiation in this sector.
Then the sphere turned dark, and everywhere snapped into obscurity. Whatever it was, it was pulsing, cycling in increments.
Just as he was adjusting his visual sensors back into Night Capture, something hard hit him from behind. The force of the impact hurtled him forward, toppling him end over end until he smashed into a wall ahead of him. The force of the impact caused a great shudder to moan through the building. “Eeeaahhh!” Vi-Poi yelled as his social algorithms grew dizzy with shock at the sudden attack, his cry echoing across the blasted cityscape.
The entire building rumpled and fell upon him. He struggled, swimming up through the rubble until he finally burst into the fetid air. A dark and frothing lance of ki charged on his left hand, thrumming at his palm with a red energy. He peered around, attempting to scan for a target.
A massive something burst out of the rubble behind him, wrapping Vi-Poi’s small body in its grip. Thick metal cabling wrapped around his arms, sealing them tightly against his torso. He tried to burst out in flight, tried to wriggle away, but the grip was too strong. The cables slowly revolved his body, turning him towards his captor.
It was a strange thing; large, humanoid, cloaked in writhing cabling, with a multitude of scoping lenses where its face should have been. It wore a rusted metallic skin, but Vi-Poi could detect the telltale carbonic signatures of a biologic underneath that shell. A cyborg, possibly.
Vi-Poi flipped his photon receptors and blasted the creature with his eye lasers, aiming for its ocular complex. A semi-transparent black shield of some kind blocked the attack. Vi-Poi activated his scouter. The relay beam reflected off the shield. He hmphed. So that’s why he didn’t detect the shadow. The shield was interfering with his scanning as well. With great strain, Vi-Poi managed to wrangle his forearm upward and raise his palm. The dark and frothing ki tightened into an orb, one with a pulsing red center. “Final Extinction Bullet!!!” He yelled, and the attack rocketed into the creature at point-blank range. The explosive force of the detonation caused the cabling tentacles to unravel in a jumbled mess, and knocked Vi-Poi backwards a good kilometer before he slammed into a building. He lay in the dent of concrete a moment, regaining his senses as his HUD slowly shifted back into alignment.
The creature was still functioning. In fact, from the spherical glow around it, it appeared its shield had absorbed the power of the Bullet’s detonation entirely. It hurtled towards Vi-Poi at a tremendous speed. Vi-Poi raised his arm from the rubble and fired a shower of tight blue ki blasts in its direction, but they all burst against the shell of its shield harmlessly. When the creature came close, his activated his afterimage and burst behind it, delivering a sharp kick at its torso. His sweeping leg and shin-greave bounced off the barrier. The creature whipped around and slammed and cable into Vi-Poi’s face, causing him to dart downwards quickly, before catching him by the throat with another, snagging him in place and jerking him back upward.
Its heavy curled cables snapped into his torso like fists, their hardened arcs lancing across his body, jarring his ki-infusion. He could feel his micromotor repair gels moving already to assess and contain the damage as the pummeling turned into a torrent of whips and pounds across his body.
Thankfully, the cybernetic creature wasn’t as potent offensively as it was defensively, or the android would have surely been disassembled. After one last slap of its metallic cord across Vi-Poi’s face, it threw him down headfirst into the rubble of the destroyed science complex. Vi-Poi’s problem solving algorithms groaned inwardly. There had to be a way to circumvent the shield. He turned, thinking. Perhaps… getting an idea from his recent widening of his Scan Mode, Vi-Poi switched the photon receptors in his eye lasers to the invisible X-Ray range. He turned around, laying in the heap of stone as the metallic monster relentlessly came down towards him.
He flipped his photon receptors and let this new blast of ki channeled through a higher frequency conduit erupt. His irises shone briefly, but the wave was amazingly invisible to the normal spectrum, and the attack exploded against the metal skin of the cyborg.
(Invisible Eye Blast [V2] Learned)
It halted in shock at this development, and let out a great howl of anguish and confusion, a clawed hand reaching up to grab at the burn-strewn wound that had been made across its shoulder. Vi-Poi gave a triumphant smirk. “Not so invincible, are you?” He asked.
The machine gave out a bestial growl, and Vi-Poi sprung up to meet it. The two clashed, Vi-Poi’s punches and kicks still bouncing against its dark shield. Though it did no perceptible damage, he could see his attacks were knocking the creature back, and coupled with its unaccustomed wounding, the bionic beast was becoming flustered. It’s attacks with its cabling was becoming more predictable. Still, it was a formidable fighter, and Vi-Poi had to press all of his honed combat mechanics to even eke out a stalemate in the dark sky above the Tuffle town.
They fought for several minutes before Vi-Poi finally managed to gain the advantage, delivering a powerful punch that thrummed against its shielding and sent it careening down into the streets below. He followed, delivering another invisible blast of his eye lasers. The creature writhed and gave another howl. The lasers were damaging it, degrading it, but it was still operating. The monster was obviously panicking now, and used the momentum of its fall to bounce off the pavement and begin a flight away from Vi-Poi.
It was trying to escape.
Vi-Poi went after it, chasing it through the gridlike streets of the fallen Capitol, at several points managing to lick it with his invisible beams but never getting a clear enough shot to destroy it. Bulbs of fire blossomed throughout the city’s corpse during this supersonic hunt, points of red light in an endless gloom. The attacks were not enough. It was still alive. Vi-Poi was determined to destroy it, letting it escape could lead to it simply ambushing him again, but couldn’t figure out how to deliver enough clandestine energy that could pass its visual-trigger barrier to do so. As it turned one corner, its tentacle cabling shot out once more, blocking his way like a wall. Vi-Poi’s flight spun to a stop, but not quickly enough. He slapped into the arms like a fly in a spider’s web, and the closed around him with a snap. Great torrents of ki blasted against him, and the creature used him as the head of a great hammer in between the ki dousing, smashing him this way and that, slamming his body against the ground or dragging him through a ruined building.
Vi-Poi tried to twist so that he could face the cyborg and deliver another blast of invisible lasers, but the cyborg was cleverly keeping his front turned away. He tried to detach his head and swivel it around, but a cable wrapped around his head like a crown and jammed it back into his neck before slamming him down through the ground and into a sewer substructure, landing on Vi-Poi’s back with its clawed feet. Vi-Poi oomfed in exasperation and dragged himself upward.
The black miasma was thicker here. He could see up ahead, deeper in the catacomb network, its inky substance coiling and convalescing. An idea sparked. He began to run towards the miasma, dragging the cabled monster behind him. Reaching the gaseous substance, his suspicions were confirmed. The creature writhed and screamed in anguish, its grip loosening. Vi-Poi spun on his heels in a great twister and turned his way loose of the sagging grib of the cabling, spurring away into the heavy cloud of black miasma. The being’s wounds were now glowing black, and it was scurrying about with a maddened, insectoid fear.
Its impermeable shield was fluttering in its confusion.
Vi-Poi engaged his Lock On, white crosshair’s intersecting in his Heads Up Display. A white circle formed around the creature. The shield decay was enough for him to get a target now. It was trying to find an escape, but Vi-Poi was able to easily track it, now.
In a moment of creative inspiration, Vi-Poi channeled all of his infused ki up through his inversed photon lenses. A line of sparks appeared between the fleeing monster and himself. The invisible ray shot out faster than light, and a great fireball erupted, sending evaporating flames hundreds of meters in all directions. Vi-Poi was knocked back by the force of his own attack, but otherwise unscathed. As the bright flash of light dimmed to normal, Vi-Poi scanned the crater. There was still something there, but it was very faint.
(Lock-On Buster [UV3] learned)
Vi-Poi frowned and folded his arms. This thing was tougher than he thought. It came at him with the same tenacity it did before. Its shell was almost completely blown away, torn into ribbons in some places, exposing contorted pink musculature webbed with cybernetics beneath. Most of its cabling was blown away and scorched into frayed stumps now. Its face was gruesome where it appeared in the gaps of its lens-covered face, but Vi-Poi could still recognize the characteristics of a primate-based humanoid. It must have been a Tuffle, at one point. Perhaps it had lived as a scavenger here, out in the doomed ruins, maddened and reduced to a savage state by the long stretch of years.
Vi-Poi would have pitied it, had he the social algorithms for that sort of thing. As the thing sped towards him in a blur, Vi-Poi disengaged his left forearm, letting it drop to expose the wide open ki-conduit within his limb. A sharp wine of electricity rose in the air. Right before the creature got within striking distance, a cloud of bright blue ki exploded out from Vi-Poi’s opened wrist, the force of the fiery azure wave knocking the cyborg clear across the two blocks of the city and slamming Vi-Poi back against a nearby building. The wounded machine squealed in a strange metallic howl as its body frothed in the stream of spirit energy, his metallic flesh bubbling and blackening before his inner organs and flesh popped with a sickening burst of grease. Its blackened and infinitesimal remains drifted in the dense smog before slowly swaying to the ground.
Vi-Poi blew out the wafting steam of his conduit like the heroes extinguished the smoking barrels of their guns in the movies, then reassembled his arm back into its proper place. His Supa Bazooka had ultimately disintegrated the creature, which was a middling disappointment. Its remains could have been a great study for the Science Corp’s Site A Android Research Group.
He dug out the collapse of the science complex with a few dozen precisely placed waves of ki. Sinking into the depths, he found his prize. It was the orb, the small marble-sized stone, gleaming like a diamond in the rough. It glittered with promise, but no longer gave off the blinding light it once did. The cycling, the android quickly determined, had been to reactor output inefficiencies. The little pebble of energy was an engine a very peculiar one. His built-in scouter analyzed that it had no energy pumps or wiring, only a strange matrix of interlocking spheres that made little sense to his analytics. One thing was certain – its energy potential was several times larger than his current heart reactor. Vi-Poi knelt, and carefully took the miniature machine in his palm. It felt cool and smooth to the touch, like a pearl just snatched from the ocean. Vi-Poi opened up his arm and secreted it inside of him. It might be inactive and unable to interface with his systems now, but he was eager to get this discovery back to Earth, where an incorporation design might be found.
(Tuffle Core found, but not yet activated)
Vi-Poi flew to the outskirts of the demised district, and summoned a shuttle. He had taken a part of the city’s silence with him, and made little in words to the Blue Banner response team that came to pick him up, save for instructing him to relay him directly to Big Blu. They would be departing Vegeta, shortly, whence all of KAOS was back aboard and the crew was ready.
The foray into the Saiyan homeworld had been an interesting one. It’d shown Vi-Poi the dangers that the species held, but also their potential. If they could be made to shape their own greatness in less destructive ways, it could prove a great benefit for the Galaxy and all who lived within it.
(BBA are now leaving Vegeta, due back home at Earth circa 2:30 in the afternoon US CT time)