Hunters Hunted in the East Wood Part Two - RPLOG
Participants
Date
15/8/2013
Log
Delve looks to Smokie, a pleased expression on her canine face. Even the one bad eye seems to rally, almost pointing the same direction as the good eye. Almost. Brushing a lock of her ruler-straight, jet-black hair out of her face, she calls over, "You've got a scent? Good enough to track? Right on! All right, boys n' girls," the coyote woman says in a more businesslike tone as she puts away her sampling tools, re-shoulders her backpack and nanite collector, then rises. "There's not much wind, but try to be aware of even the slightest breeze, and watch your step. Don't want to give the sonofabitch any warning." Drawing her combat knife, she gestures with the blade in a broad fan-shape, although carefully so as not to hit anyone. "Scent trackers, on the mark with Smokie and I. Others, fan out and look for conventional sign, or just follow us and keep your eyes, ears, and noses out. Time to hunt this fucker down."
Angus nods, looking over to Arimia and eyeing her sword. "When we encounter it, I think Arimia and I should take it head on while everyone flanks us. Any objections?" He really didn't want to put to many people in harms way on this, and he didn't mind a few bullets in his back along with claws raking at his front if he could take it down fast. He frowns, holding his hammer at the ready in both hands as he fans out. His eyes open, nose flaring and his ears swiveling at the slightest sound as he trys to remain alert.
Alkain hmms at Delve and nods at that, "Understood." as he looks around catiously while getting his Mauser out of it's holster, he follows after the others and looks to Angus with a shake of his head, "No problems here."
Smokie pursues the scent as far as she can, as fast as she can. Even clothed so modestly, she moves like an animal in the woods. Who said anything about not being used to the woods? She IS a little slower due to her pregnancy, but only people who have worked with her before can tell. Her paws leave only shallow tracks in the grass, earth, and moss, as, hunched over, her nose greedily takes in the scents of the forest
Arimia takes a deep breath to catch the scent as well, but lets Smokie lead the way, slithering along behind the coyote with her sword out. As she goes she mutter, "No, I said. I don't want the infection forming a helmet with a HUD and radar. It would make my snakes uncomfortable, and I'm attached to the little buggers. Next time I should just ignore that."
"Finally got a scent? Good!" Now finally away from the body, Dio gives his shotgun one more check, knowing that he'll probably be needing to use it in the near future. "Are you sure about that, sir? Engaging the thing in melee combat may not bring optimal results. And I do have a spread shot weapon... I may have to get closer and give it a good flank." The lion waves his shotgun around for emphasis and soon follows after Smokie and the bunch, choosing to spread out a bit.
Delve, too, moves with remarkable silence and grace through the dense, deeply-shaded undergrowth, although with more of a practiced than primal ease. She does her best to remain protectively ahead of the others, as if feeling responsible for their safety. To judge by her frequent glances and ear-flicks she is keeping close attention on where each member of the group is at any given moment while still devoting most of her attention to following the scent and watching the woods ahead. It's a lot of multi-tasking, and there's a slight edginess to her motions, as if she is less skilled at this sort of group behavior.
This is one of the densest, darkest parts of the East Woods, but the sensitive noses of the scent-trackers aren't hindered by such petty problems as lack of light. Once the scent is discovered, it's very easy to follow, simply due to its uniqueness. Not avian -or- reptilian, it has a subtle flavor of both, blended with an almost humanlike signature, but with a weird overtone like nothing any of the trackers have ever smelled before. Those who have encountered dinosaur mutants will recognize that part of the unusual scent is dinosaurian in nature, at least, but it is still something new... and unknown.
The density of the wood becomes an advantage in some ways, as conventional trackers quickly begin to notice subtle signs of the passage of other beings along the scent trail. A broken twig here, a tiny crushed mushroom there. Arimia is the one who spots the footprint first, however. In a spot where the hardpacked soil scattered with woodland debris gives way to a deeper layer of duff, and here, a two-toed, saurian footprint is clearly visible. Oddly, it appears to have been left by a bipedal creature slightly -smaller- than human size.
To Angus, before the footprint is discovered, Delve nods and agrees quietly, "Just make sure you don't kill it unless you have to. And if you do, make sure there's enough left for this baby to do its job," she adds, patting her nanite collector fondly.
The Coyote smiles, giving a nod in understanding. "I'll do my best, but I can't make any promises sadly." Turning to Dio he eyes his shotgun, and cringes a little. "Alright, good point. I'll not go throwing myself at it just yet." Angus pulls the strap of his hammer back over his head and moves it behind him, before he draws his Revolver he didn't give to Smokie. And pulls his Tomahawk to wield in his other hand.
Alkain hmms? at Dio and sighs with a nod, "True..." he then peers at the tracks once they are spotted and shakes his head again, "You said it was a taur right?" he looks to Delve curiously as he ponders a bit, "Looks bipedal, here..."
Smokie sails right on by the footprint, still following the scent. She overshoots the group some, and doesn't notice she'd almost out of view of them until she hears that their pawprints have stopped. She frowns, turning back to look at them, drawing out her mate's revolver just in case. "What's up?" she says, a little wary.
Arimia pauses by the footprint and looks it over, using her hand to guage the rough size of it. She pokes around at the ground to see about finding more, before looking around at the trees and saying, "Smells like those things from the museum, almost. The dinosaurs. The print reminds of that as well. Too small for any of those, though."
Dio begins remembering the times he went hunting in his youth, picking up the trail and using the aid of his sharp leonine nose. He looks down at the large footprint along with some of the others, trying to see if he could recognize it. "You're right, ma'am," he comments at Arimia. "It does remind me a little bit of those museum mutants." The lion brings his shotgun to his other hand as well, now wielding it with both hands. "We must be getting quite close."
Delve is with Smokie and also misses the print until called back to it. Peering down at the print curiously, Delve kneels, removes her pack, and gets out an L-ruler and a small digital camera. As she places the L-ruler carefully beside the print, then lines up a photograph, Delve replies to Alkain, "I tried to describe it before, but the thing is damn hard to describe. It seems biologically impossible, to be honest. Another reason I want the fucker alive if we can manage it. It's like one of those meat eater dinos, the two-leg ones... but a taur version."
Angus looks around, the hammer on his gun coming back with an audible click. "Good, lets find this thing and take care of it." His ears flicked as he takes a big whiff to see if he can catch any scents as he takes a few steps away from the group. "I'm really thinking it's going to be hard to capture this thing alive. Especially since it's a predator of predators."
Alkain points to the prints at Somie's question and hmms at Arimia, "I haven't been there, so I'll take your word for it..." he looks to Dio and nods at that before he starts looking around more, "Sounds like it..." he comments to Delve and nods to Angus in agreement
The blue-jacketed Coyote Woman doesn't move any closer to the group. In fact, she's focusing on trying not to lose the scent trail. She finds herself peering into the foliage, and takes a step forward...
Arimia studies the print for a few moments longer before shifting her coils to start back on the trail. "We'll see. For now let's just keep moving. I would rather get the jump on it than stand here waiting for it to find us."
"Perhaps some sort of Raptor-taur?" Without seeing it himself, it's one of the few guesses he had in mind. With a shrug, he continues following the group as the rest seem to have a good tracking on the scent. For now, Dio kept his sharp ears open for any strange sounds he could pick up.
Unbeknownst to the agents clustered curiously around the footprint in the duff, they were not the only ones peering with cold evaluation down at something. As Delve begins to reply to Angus, saying, "Well, alive is a relative term. So long as it can regenerate eventually, it's okay to..." At that moment, Smokie catches an incongruous drift of scent, fresh and strong, from a direction that makes no sense - above. Even as she reacts to this perception, a figure leaps off its perch on a branch high up in the trees and hurtles down at Smokie in near-perfect silence!
Smokie spots it first, but Dio, Angus and Arimia all hear or smell or just intuit the attack in time to look up and spot the drop-down strike. It looks like a therapod, yet not, but little more can be told about it due to the speed of its fall. Within moments, it is falling upon Smokie, all six taloned limbs outstretched! The attacker is almost the same general size as Smokie, but much more heavily built. Delve lets out a yelp of surprise, not having noticed the creature except belatedly responding to the others, and jerks to her feet, rushing to Smokie's defense, but out of range with her knife for the moment.
Of course it would play out like that. A whiff... Then she glances up. A shadow! She frowns for a moment, before she deftly works her paws on the dense, soft ground to move away. She kicks up the detritus as she does, and in a deft swing, she turns around. Holding the pistol in her right hand, she raises her left to her muzzle, and spews forth a gout of flame to consume her attacker. This gift, given to her, a piece of the fire that Coyote stole from the Fire People in the mountains.
An ambush! Not good, Angus turns as he sees it descending towards and lets loose. Single-actions aren't the greatest for spitting out rounds on the fly, but there was no need as he calmly walks towards it. His gun going off twice, aiming for its Tauric half just to gain its attention, as he gives it a menacing snarl. "Hey Taur ass over here!" He wanted to distract it, turn it towards him instead of Smokie and bring it into the line of fire of everyone else.
Alkain nods to Arimia in agreement, though it seems to be too late! He blinks at the sudden flare of fire and looks over, "Crap..." he grunts as he quickly turns to aim and growls at the thing.
Arimia looks over as things start happening near Smokie. She stares at the thing that attacked for a brief second then starts to move. She's slithering along the ground rapidly until she's close enough to spring at the thing, colliding with it, knocking it to the ground. Then something happens to Arimia, a blast of flame and force coming from a panel on one of her arms. The majority of that is directed toward the creature, but when the confusion clears a bit it's easy to see not all of it was, as the metal plating that covered that arm is bent, twisted and torn, and the arm hangs limply. Though the nanites have already started to slowly repair the damage.
Dio's ears twitch, hearing a strange sound drop upon the forest floor with amazing force. Immedietly, he places the shotgun's butt to his shoulder and aims at the strange creature, but decides not to fire immedietly after seeing it get body checked by the snake-robot. Firing off a spread weapon would be the best of ideas at the time.
Although determined to defend Smokie, heart in mouth, Delve is forced to drop and cover herself as an amazing explosion of defensive violence occurs. For its part, the attacker only has enough time to slash at Smokie, missing. Then Smokie dodges. Even as the thing lands on the floor, indeed tauric yet bipedal with its sturdy dromaeosaur-like taur-body, Smokie blasts it with coyote-flame. Barely a second later, a shot cracks out and blood sprays from the taur's rump, knocking it off-balance. Before it has a chance to recover, Arimia slams into it, knocking the both of them a good five or six feet off to the side, luckily not smacking into any of the closely-clustered trees. With a crunch of crushed bushes, the two land heavily. Then the robot medusa's explosive mutant power goes off with another flash of flame.
By the time Delve uncovers her head and looks around wildly, the thing is already out of commission, lying dead or unconscious beneath Arimia, utterly motionless and burnt to a crisp, with a bullet in the base of its tail. Delve sits up, drops her arms to her lap, looks around to take stock of the situation, then scratches her forehead and chuckles, "Goddamn! Y'all work together before? That was some top-notch response time. Whomever trained y'all deserves a fuckin' medal." To Smokie and Arimia, she calls, "You two okay? Is it down?"
Looking over Balaur Taur, his body is covered in shaggy, densely layered, primitive feathers, with a longer 'mane' running down the spine. The limbs are not feathered below the elbow or knee, instead having pewter-hued, reptilian scales. Most of these primitive feathers have been crisped now, but enough remain for the observer to get an idea of their distribution and original coloration. Most of the remaining feathers are of a steely hue. The head and neck, when not recently set on fire, are pure, inky black, with a streak of black continuing down the spine to the hips. A splash of iridescent deep denim-blue blooms on the upper throat, just below and behind the jawline. Below the blue, and shading into it, is a gradient of indigo, violet, purple, crimson, then finally scarlet, like paint dripping down and mixing as it goes. This meandering streak flows down the throat, covers the chest, then blankets the rest of the creature's underside, stopping between the legs. Thin vertical streaks, bloody crimson mingled with vibrant rose, paint the sides of the neck and body, all the way to the end of the tail. All the feathers have a vivid mother of pearl finish that shimmers with rainbow hues in good lighting, giving Balaur Taur an especially exotic look. Even the intense fire damage hasn't entirely destroyed this iridescence. His head is long and low, with a blunt, heavy saurian muzzle full of dagger-sharp teeth. The big, forward-facing eyes have rippling silver sclera and round pupils, now glazed with an empty, mindless stare. The ears are nothing but small holes behind the jawline. His body is tauric. The lower parts are those of a Balaur dinosaur, complete with a pair of forelimbs placed where the animal would normally have them. A humanoid torso, having its own set of more humanlike arms, attaches where the animal's neck would normally be in a surprisingly natural-looking anatomical merger. The animal body is bipedal, but non-morphic, giving the Balaur Taur a bizarre look and stance compared to that of other taurs. By rights such a beast should not be biologically viable. And yet, here it is... The humanlike torso's arms are short and densely muscled, with thick heavy bones. The hands are more reptilian than humanlike in form, with only three heavy-clawed digits per talon, one of which is a thumb. The tauric torso's arms are identical to those of a true Balaur dinosaur. His legs are completely bestial, without a trace of human anatomy, forcing Balaur Taur's taur body into a more dinosaur-like forward-leaning stance, with the human torso leaning backward over it the way a rider might. These relatively short, thick-boned limbs bulge with well-developed muscles. The big saurian feet sport not one, but two 'saber' claws each, on the first and second toes. A long, tapering raptor's tail archs outward from Balaur Taur's powerful saurian buttocks, stiffened into a springy pole by supporting internal tendons so that its owner cannot allow it to drag, or even move it very much. It can be lahed from side to side, raised, and lowered, but that's all the movement this tail is capable of. A fringe of elegant feathers grows at the end, however, giving it a pheasanty flair, even with the feathers all singed and broken. Blood oozes from a bullet wound in the base of its tail.
Angus saw Smokie get out of the creature's way, so he knew that she was fine and he didn't have to baby her. He kept his gun on the creature, moving up to stand over it and offer Arimia a hand after he puts his Tomahawk away. "You okay?" He asks of her, his gaze locked on the creature that they came here for. Debating on if he should put a round in its head to make sure it stays down. "Thanks for the compliment Delve, but we just do what we are good at."
Alkain winces as the others take care of the mutant and frowns as he looks the charred creature over from where he is, shaking his head a little at the stench of burning flesh, "Well, it looks down..." as he nudges it with his foot to make sure
Smokie frowns, brushing some debris off her skirt. She uncocks the pistol and sighs heavily. "Fuck, guys, by Coyote, do you think you could have done any more? Like if that was a comic, it'd take ten pages. Damn. I sure hope they don't send you lot out to meet the Aliens when they come down, you'd start a Nuclear War."
Arimia pushes herself to her feet, ignoring the hand offered by Angus. "I'll be fine. I've done that before." She lifts her damaged arm with a wince, poking at the bent and twisted metal. She's in no hurry to pull herself off the creature, despite the sizzling that's coming from where she contacts it, as she sheathes her sword. Finally, though, she does move away from it.
"Well then," Dio chuckles, lowering his shotgun and approaching the creature, taking a fine glance at its form. "Well done. This is perhaps one of the more bizarre creatures I've seen. Certainly ranks pretty high up there." The lion aims his shotgun at the creature's mass, prepared to fire upon it with loads of lovely pellets if it decided to move again. "I don't know how long it'll be, but this thing will eventually be getting back up. Call for RSX and arrange a pick-up if you please. A mission well done."
