Comic 1051 - Poison the body
Posted on 27th May 2018, 9:32 PM
in Hope
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Author Notes:
You fly your bug over to the guard's corpse. It's time to put that practice and training to use; most saxitoxin that's affected humans has been ingested, known infamously as shellfish poisoning. You know that the monster beyond that bay door--the huge one that dwells beneath the church--eats people.
You form your bug a stinger... and you have it start pumping your custom toxin into the body.
A lot of it. Like, a ridiculous amount of poison. You generate it straight into the bug, then have the bug force it straight into the corpse's veins. You have to give it some power, and inject it at multiple sites, since the blood isn't flowing on its own anymore.
It seems like the only thing keeping that monster from dragging this body away is the bay door... so when the time comes and you're ready to strike, all you need to do is push the button to lift the door and let the monster take care of the rest.
You could possibly even have the bug ride the body out, letting you produce more matter inside the monster if necessary.
Another thought occurs to you, as well. You can move mass between eggs, including the bug. You can add mass to the bug... and theoretically, to the eggs. You could probably create walls of meat and bone, not unlike the kind you faced at the hospital and in Bunker X. They... wouldn't be very clean, not even in comparison, as you'd be rushing the job a bit. ...But you could do it, and possibly block guards from moving around the church, or interfering with your attempt to save Grizwald.
Like feeding the corpse to the monster, you'd want to do this sometime before you make your move, but not too long before you get there.
Michelle, Dr. Finch, and Elizabeth return.
"So, here's what we got," Michelle begins. "For the minigun OR any of our handguns, we got explodin' rounds for juicy stuff, we got armor piercin' rounds for non-juicy stuff, and we got tracer rounds 'cuz... whatever, y'never know. The minigun's still a pain in the ass to reload, so for that we need to know what we're gonna need ahead o' time--switchin' ammo in the field ain't really a thing. For the handguns, it's... well, you've reloaded a handgun before. It's no big deal, so go nuts. I also bought some exotic shotgun shells--concussive flash ammo and incendiary shells, mostly."
Dr. Finch smiles. "Despite the warrant out for her arrest, it was... very difficult to keep Michelle out of the gun shop."
"Like a damn candy store," Michelle says. "They were tellin' me what the place had, and I could barely stay in my seat."
"I also acquired those translation guides you requested," Dr. Finch adds.
We don't want a paper language guide.
Something like
1-3 regular bullets
1 Armor piercing bullet
1-3 regular bullets
1 tracer round
1-3 regular bullets
1 explosive bullet
And repeat...
Regular bullets make the bulk so using on normal targets is not "wasteful" choosing the number of filler rounds changes how hard hits on harder targets are. I think getting a quick burst to match a cycle is best. If a trigger squeeze is 12 rounds, then 1 filler. Obviously it wont be perfect unless there is a burst fire setting to work with.
Tracers are so we can see our bullet path, and to ignite stuff.
Armor Piercing will be effective on hardened targets
Explosive will devastate softt targets, but following AP will also potentially do more damage to hardened targets in sustained fire.
As for handguns load up magazines with different types and swap if needed.
It is a shame we don't have a couple extra magazines for this thing.
For the pistols, we won't need AP unless we split up because Michelle already has AP on the mini. Let's load up with tracers by default and have a few mags of exploders handy, I guess just also keep a small amount of AP on person
Depending on the kind of shotgun, it might take a while to reload, so we load it up first with concussives, incendiaries as backup. Putting something on fire (even from inside) isn't as useful as temporarily staggering them.
HOWEVER if the monster is still alive when we get there, we'll need to deal with that so exploders on mini, as well as pistols, and incendiaries on shotgun
carry the other ammo types as backup by that point
After that, a bunch of normal ammunition.
Continue with some bone armors/weapons.
And while someone does all of this, practice growing a wall of meat XD.
EDIT: We have a LOT of handguns, so we can simply give everyone one with every type of ammo XD.
Is a really interesting idea XD. Even if a robot doesn't appear, that can be because "Carpenter is simply giving a bit of support, he isn't completely on their side. But he IS helping them against me". Meatwalls and Poison are enough evidence to get Thale to start thinking that XD.
(And only giving us basic things like walls and Poison would be more beliable. We wouldn't trust him enough to go with a robot that can change sides to Kill us in an instant XD. If we were to make a deal with Carpenter to work together, we'll request for things that aren't going to stab us in the back)
Does Caius still have Jury on the line? If her team can mobilize and strike tonight, we can open the shutter to feed the monster the poison (and bug) just before they deploy. Team Jane can storm the church aboveground at the same time, dividing Thale's and Hope's attention. Did Michelle and Finch remember to scope the neighbouring buildings for potential upper-floor entry points? ...Do we WANT to enter from the upper floor when Thale's most direct presence is up there?
Well, we just managed to get our bug to inject stuff via stinger. We could hypothetically do this with our blood. Silently bug-blooding the guards outside the door could grant us the chance to catch the secretary and Thale clone unawares, and blood them too. (If the main Thale is awake at the time, though, stuff will promptly get very, very real.)
Exploding - Many: We get something too potent we flat out won't we able to use it. The exploding rounds should be roughly anti-personnel either to blow out chunks of advancing tentacles or deal with Hope guards if absolutely necessary. These are probably what we'll load Michelle's minigun with.
Piercing - One: If for whatever reason nothing we can do can penetrate either Thale's monster or some defenses he's made, I think we should have a "golden bullet" capable of piercing the heavens on standby we can fire off if all else fails. With a hole made, ideally any defense in our way can then be penetrated with bugs or whatever else. If the bullet is powerful enough, we'll probably lose the gun that shoots it and possibly the shooter as well (necessitating a golem).
Tracer - Few: Unless I'm misunderstanding Michelle, tracer rounds are just standard rounds but with a significantly small (i.e. no damage benefit) incendiary component so the bullet can be seen. There's not going to be much if any benefit if we aim for a lot of ammo. Trading up a lot at once is going to give us the best benefit if any over just plain ammo.
Exotic Shotgun Shells - Few: This is mostly about putting all our eggs in one basket versus quality. In the shotgun's case, I'm thinking it'll be backup in case Thale throws out some surprises. Better to be able to pace ourselves in case we can't take care of a surprise all at once (like him converting those guards into monsters and sending them at us one at a time).
EDIT: I'd recommend trading up the Piercing bullets first for the reason of we may end up getting something like the syringe gun and instead of power get utility. If that's the case, we may end up just doing one ritual for each bullet type (which would save on magic strain).
Jane should continue to experiment with blood abilities. Maybe work on concentrating poison. Also consider trying to add burrowing features to the bugs (parasite-like features so the bugs can try and tunnel THROUGH Thale's monster to get to the brain(s) directly to poison).
A note: The primary purpose of Tracer ammunition is to make it significantly easier for a rapid fire weapon to stay on target, essentially it'll boost the accuracy of that weapon. It's not going to do much good in a handgun with only a dozen or so rounds in the clip -- those you'd be better off giving it a laser sight.
When loading a magazine with tracer rounds, roughly only one is needed for every 10 bullets for a rapid fire weapon, depending on the rate of fire. The rest can be whatever type we want.
Also, if there are rudimentary mouths present, they could be used to spew off some carpenter-quotes as well after they're done with their incantations. Not quite his MO, but who knows how paranoid Thale is by now, and how much he thinks we can actually do.
I'm not so sure how good we can convincingly fake that.
Simply playing music on the other hand should be easy and is as well within Carpenters MO.
If he thinks it's just us (b) – he'll want to kill us more.
If he thinks it's us working for Carpenter, he might want to kill us more, as in option (b), but also become more suspicious of Carpenter, which may lead to more infighting, as in option (a).
Either way, Thale wants us dead and we might end up with infighting. Right?
We should try getting a second magazine for the minigun too. Trade just empty magazines in the same quantity as we used handguns the first time.