Darsk grunts as he pulls himself up off of the floor
#HuntingTime – September 10, 2013
Iressa steps away from her balancing hold of the wall, reaching down to feebily lift up the krogan's weight as he struggles back to his feet, the gesture more symbolic than really helpful considering the asari's strength.
Renala remains standing with the support of the wall, caughing between exhausted breaths. "You okay, Steve?" she says with a glance towards the human.
Iressa returns the gesture, minding his wounds as she attempts to guide him toward the others in the tunnel.
Steve watches Renala distantly. The ringing in his ears drowns out the asari's words. "What happened...?" he groans, his own words barely louder than a whisper to himself.
Renala | "If I am to guess," she says, "they threw the bomb right back to where it came from." A few coughs follow, before she adds, "or maybe the thing had a greater range that we assumed it had. I don't know."
Steve rubs at his head. The ringing begins to lower, allowing him to hear enough of Renala to get the gist of what she said. "We have to-..." he breaks into a long coughing fit before continuing, "...Have to keep moving... Can't give them a chance to corner us."
Darsk can now hear well enough to speak to the others as he reaches the door to the tunnel. "There's one more door we haven't tried".
Renala lets go of the wall. "Let's hope the rest of our gear's behind that one, then," she says. "We won't stand a chance up there without it."
"It is locked, but I'm hoping Renala can fix that. Otherwise...I've still got a few more packs of explosives left" He chuckles bitterly
Renala | "If it's anything like the last door, I can fix that without a problem," she says and bobs her head towards the tunnel they came from. "And we just saw how well these tunnels handles explosives."
Steve cringes upon hearing mention of explosives. "Take a crack at it, Ren... If we have to resort to blowing it, make sure we're all well clear of the door this time." he says, glaring at Darsk.
Steve glances at the wreckage in the central chamber and gestures towards it with one hand. "That was clear? Really? You do realize that clear means OUT of the blast radius, right?"
Renala begins walking, following Darsk. While the pain in her leg is gone thanks to the medi-gel, she is still limping slightly.
Steve remains behind for a moment after the others have left, running a hand over his many cuts and contusions. He leans heavily against the wall and cringes as another wave of sharp pain shoots through his head. Taking a deep breath, he slowly makes his way into the central chamber, joining the rest of the group.
Renala approaches the door while her omni-tool comes to life. She enables the same hacking program she used on the last door, and attempts to connect and breach through the door's security systems.
Iressa again keeps a decent distance between her and action before they know just what's on the other side of this door.
Renala smiles satisfied, and hits the button on the interface to open the door. A biotic shimmer forms around her person, in case there's a surprise behind it..
Tyranniac| The door slides open, revealing a hollowed out room containing several basic bunks as well as chamber pots. There is no one in the room.
Renala enters the room afterwards, looking it over briefly; the biotic shimmer around her persisting.
Tyranniac| There is nothing of interest in the room. Not much at all aside from the aforementioned items.
Steve lowers his weapon with a heavy sigh. "Fuck!" he shouts, kicking at nothing in particular, "Where is our fucking gear!?"
Iressa remains close the doorway, a little less verbal with her disappointment. Instead, she lets out a quiet sigh, half heartedly looking over the room.
Renala sighs. "I think we're out of options here," she says. "For all we know, every gun in this fucking place might be pointing at that hatch up that ladder."
Steve steps back into the main chamber and stares towards the top of the ladder. "We don't have much of a choice. If we wanna get out of here... Up is the only option left." He glances at Darsk, "How about it, big guy? Not afraid of a few slavers, are you?"
Are you crazy? That's suicide! Without weapons and armor, at any rate. I'll gladly charge up a ladder into a hail of gunfire, but not without my Graal.
Steve sighs. "Well... That's gonna be a problem." he says, pointing towards the hatch in the ceiling, "Because your Graal is up there."
Renala follows after Steve. "We don't know how many guns are aimed at that hatch," she says, "and they've had all the time in the world to prepare up there." She pauses. "Not that I've got a better idea."
Darsk growls. "We've still got one more charge, but we can't just throw it up there. There's no telling what that would do"
Steve rests his hands on his hips and continues to stare at the ceiling. "I'm not sure that's such a good idea... Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like we have many other options. Worst case scenario, we bring down the ceiling and trap ourselves." he stops, glancing at the others for a moment, allowing his gaze to linger on Renala for a second longer, "At least we bring some of them with us, right?"
Renala thinks for a moment, glancing up. "If we just go up there, we'll go down for sure," she says grimly. "I don't like either option, but it's the better one."
Steve nods towards the ceiling. "Plant the charge on the hatch." he says, "We'll try to raise them on the comms. Tell them we're willing to negotiate. Whether they take it seriously or not, they'll most likely see it as a sign of weakness, and I'm sure they'll jump at the chance to take advantage of it. Hopefully it'll get a nice concentration of them up there. The second that hatch opens?" He looks towards Darsk and takes a deep breath, "Boom. If anyone has a better plan, I'd love to hear it, because I feel like I'm planning my own funeral here."
If it's too cowardly for you, you're free to climb that ladder and show them just how brave you are, big guy. Just leave the detonator behind so we have options when your corpse hits the ground.
Iressa growls lowly, clearly fed up. "That's enough. Your comments do us no good, place the charges before we lose our window."
Renala takes a step back towards the tunnel to the prison cells. "I take it the rest of us will be staying in the cell room?"
Darsk turns back towards the others. "Good idea. Stay as far away as possible. I'll join you as soon as I plant the charge"
Steve stares down Iressa as a smirk crosses his lips. He looks as though he's about to say something but his attention is pulled away by Darsk and Renala. "Yeah... Let's see if we can get these assholes on the comms."
Renala begins walking towards the tunnel to the cells. "Do you want to do the talking?" she asks. "Or should I?"
Renala nods. "Alright, I'll try making it believable." She rounds the corner and begins descending the stairs towards the cell room they occupied earlier.
Renala reaches the bottom of the staircase and enables her omni-tool, mentally trying to think of what to say.
Steve stands beside Renala. "If it's going to give you any trouble patching into their comms, the guards omni-tool was set and ready to go." he says, nodding towards the omni-tool beside the dead guard.
Renala nods and picks up the guard's omni-tool from the floor. "Might as well use it," she says. "I'll wait for the krogan to get back first, though." She enables the guard's omni-tool and locates the comm program, but doesn't run it.
Be aggressive. Overcompensate. Don't act weak. The very fact that we're reaching out to negotiate should be enough for them to assume we're out of options... If you lay it on too thick, they're gonna know somethings up.
Renala | "Good point," she says, "because laying it on too thich was just what I was about to do..."
Renala raises an eyebrow. "I... didn't quite get that," she says. "How could I agreesively put that I want to negotiate without... well, having anything worth negotiating with."
Steve smiles. "We have plenty to negotiate with. We've killed a good number of their staff and destroyed the bottom floor of their little pillow fort. They can't be too happy about that. Tell them we're getting tired of killing their men and breaking their toys. We're willing to end this peacefully for safe passage out of here."
Renala nods a few times, seeming to understand now. "You really seem to know how to do this," she says, "why can't you give them the message instead ending this crash course in an exam that might cost us our lives?"
Steve waits for a few moments before continuing. "We're getting pretty sick and tired of killing all your men. And if this keeps up, you're not gonna have much of an operation left. Now, we could spend all night shooting at each other, but in case you haven't noticed, all of us are still kickin'. Same can't be said about your own. The bottom line is, we either end this right here, or nobody wins. You let us walk out of here without incident, and we'll leave enough of you alive to keep your sick little business running."
Tyranniac| There is silence for a while, but eventually a voice breaks the silence over the comms: "Oh you're going to pay. Thing is, we don't mind waitin'. Food situation good down there? Laughter"
You'd be surprised what people are willing to eat when they're out of options. We've got plenty of meat down here.
Nice amount of mining equipment you've left out down here. Just remember... We gave you a way out of this. He nods to Darsk
Steve begins climbing the stairs, hunkering down close to the top and bracing himself in order to keep from being caught off guard by the blast.
That was the ultimatum. If they're happily willing to die to keep us down here, our only option is to give them exactly that. We need to move quickly once the blast detonates. We can't give them time to recover. Everyone understand?
Renala gets up, and nods to Steve once she appears in the doorway to the stairs. She gets up about halfway before getting to the ground in case the explosion would otherwise cause her to lose balance.
Did you see how much damage the last charges did? We'll worry about that when we see what the explosives bring down.
If the explosives bring down anything more than the ladder, we'll be even worse off. If this bomb goes off, we're just as dead as they are.
And if we don't, we'll all sit here for the next week and die of dehydration. Blow the fucking charge. At the very least, they have no idea how many charges we have. It might make them reconsider when we start collapsing half of their base.
I thought the plan was to threaten them, intimidate them into giving us what we want. I'm all for big explosions, but I'm not going to throw away our only ticket out of here!
Steve rotates in place and stares at Darsk, a confounded look on his face. "Did you not hear him? Our threats aren't working. They're willing to just wait us out. We don't have many options here. There's no countering indifference."
Iressa gets up, clearly protesting this action. "Now hold on, think about this rationally." She starts, ascending the stairs. "If you hint that we've got explosives planted under their shoes, they're going to be out of blast range in seconds. We can't risk tipping our hand." Her hand rests on krogan's arm, her expression reasonablly stern.
Darsk looks conflicted. "You're right. I didn't want to have to do this, but if we wait any longer, they'll just retreat to a higher position."
Steve nods. "The plan isn't to get what we want out of them, big guy. They were never going to give in. The goal is to kill as many of those fucks as we can so we can get to our gear."
Renala takes a few steps back down, sitting down against the wall that would give her cover from the blast.
Tyranniac| The sound of the explosion roars throughout the tunnels. Dust and debris fly past them up the stairs. The group is fairly well-protected from where they are. Sounds of groaning metal and falling stones are mixed with the explosion.
Renala waits a few seconds after hearing the explosion before she moves her hands off her ears. "Let's hope this worked," she says as she slowly gets to her feet.
Tyranniac| The main room floor is covered with debris from the ceiling along with some pieces of rock that have detached from the walls. The ladder is obliterated and the closest half of the ceiling is largely gone aside from some remnants along the wall. The other half of the ceiling has been beant upwards along the shredded edge by the explosion. The crates on the floor above have been hurled around, a few of them falling down - mostly blown apart. The door nearest the explosion appears to have taken heavy damage in the blast.
Steve travels down the hall and enters the main chamber, raising his Locust to aim towards the second floor.
Darsk looks around the main chamber for any potential path through the debris that might lead up to the second floor
Renala follows after the other two, looking over the crates to see if anyone is damaged enough to reveal the content.