The Whole Can of Worms. (open)

[HorusRe/Bila'reu]

The soldiers head was buzzing, a pressure building with intensity, such that it felt like a combination of a headache and a fever. There was a particular sensory overload going on in his brain, a mass of inputs trying to filter through a haze of endorphins and his animal-panic impulses. He never heard her whisper, as the ringing in his ears was blocking the audio input from his suits radio/audio system, but he could sense the silence when it dropped like a sledge hammer.

He was the trapped predator, he was the wolf backed into a corner, and his humanity was quickly slipping away from him as the situations played more and more to baser animal instincts. The build up of tension, of primal anxiety, of the deep-rooted sense of being fairly low on the food chain, was overpowering to a man that lived his whole life as a beast of instinct. Chance never did greatly rationalize his behaviors, not in the thick of the flying fur-ball at any rate, as he was a creature of reaction and action. He might consider his actions after the fact, when there was time and leisure opportunity for such meaningless reflections, but he never gave his actions a second thought when he was in the moment. He knew survival, he knew base instinct, and it had never failed him. In fact the military had done nothing but refine those instincts. They hardened them into a weapon, tempered them in the fires of team reliance and determination. So when the area went quiet he knew it was only the eye of the hurricane... and the animal within him didn't like not knowing what was coming next.

The silence didn't last long, of course, just long enough to stir his anxiety to a maximum, and then there was a rumbling that grew menacingly closer. Something large was coming, something that shook the very ground.

Chance wasn't thinking rational, he wasn't thinking anything really, as he was just a cornered animal, threatened with pain and death. He howled, his scream of primal rage and horror as inhuman as anything that Pandora could throw at the pair of aliens, and opened fire in the direction of the charge. His HMG thrummed and didn't stop, the rapid fire discharge filling the night with artificial thunder and splitting the darkness with flashing plumes of explosive light. As he held down the trigger he continued to scream his rage at the unseen threat, though his vocalization couldn't be heard over the deafening noise of his heavy weapon.

He didn't think about aiming. This was not the response of a rational being. He simply reacted to a threat with the only option the animal that is Chance Goldmen was prone to employ. He was a predator, not a prey, and predators rarely backed down from a fight. He planted his feet and attacked. Set in his place, machine gun belching rapid fire death, he awaited whatever came of the moment. For the beast didn't live in anything but the moment.

[fuzzydude]

The sharp thunder of weapons fire cracked in a continuous, long stream that, for the briefest moment, seemed to lock everything in place - senses and emotions both - as if someone had simply taken a photo of the scene. Even faceless in his suit, everything in how Chance stood and in the way he fired screamed fury, like he was going to charge out there and beat everything that had put him in the situation to a pulp with his bare hands as soon as he got through the formality of emptying his weapon into it.

Nia ducked behind Chance, looking into the darkness with conflicting emotions of hope that whatever was out there would die, just die, die, die, so she would be safe, and a terror fueled by her pessimistic practical side, usually reserved for responding to project time estimates, knew it couldn't be that easy and was telling her that, right now, Chance was probably just really pissing it off.

She began to see again past the noise. In the rapid flashes of the gun, she saw, almost in slow motion, only the details. Chips of wood and leaves flying in all directions. Shadows shifting wildly like a legion of demons dancing through the trees. Small patches of dirt exploding under the hail of bullets like rain drops on water, almost beautiful.

The next detail she noticed was a large, sleek, dark shape exploding out of the darkness with a surreal sense of momentum and power behind it, not the least bit slowed by the barrage of bullets. Heavily corded muscles rippled in its shoulders and haunches, teeth as long as her fingers and sharp as knives glistened. And something was just wrong in the way its mad eyes looked, like all the rules of the world had suddenly fled.

And then the huge body of the thanator flew right over their heads and slammed into a solid, ancient tree behind them with a sickening crack of meat and bone. Nia stared as it crashed into the ground. There was a long series of slashes across one side of it, so deep it looked like it had nearly cut it in two. It twitched sickeningly and gurgled a whimper.

Then, it came. The roar was so loud it completely drowned out Chance's gun, sweeping past them like a physical, shattering blow. She couldn't hear anything for a few seconds after, but she could still see the tree - one that must have been growing there many times longer than she'd been alive - bowing. It toppled in their direction, crashing in a symphony of wooden splintering just short of them. And behind it was nothing but a dark, amorphous shape that seemed impossible to her senses. So impossible she couldn't make heads or tails whatever was in the shadows. And it didn't matter because she'd turned around, dropped her worthless makeshift weapon, and was running as fast as she could, Chance completely forgotten. All that filled her mind was the a frantic stream of, ohgodohgodohgodohgod....

[HorusRe/Bila'reu]

It was as if the soldier had become an automated gun turret. A motion sensitive apparatus that drew down fire on whatever simply blundered into the fire lane or the range of motion detection.

He really didn't "see" what came flying through the air at them, but he saw motion in their direction and the animal responded with a feral, savage, predictable reply. The shuddering light cannon turned, the man-on-automatic lifted the flame belching barrel upward and promptly blew chucks the size of a human fist out the opposite side of the sailing predatory threat. Chance didn't reason through the fact that Thanator's didn't leap in that flat of a trajectory, nor were they a flying species, he just locked onto the motion and pumped hell into the target.

So focused was he that the fact the beast collided, with a sickeningly limp 'crunch', was totally lost on the man. As the airborne animal passed he wheeled with it and kept his HMG spewing destruction into the Pandoran forest. If the Thanator HAD been alive, before it came whipping out of the darkness and trees, it wouldn't have gotten up the same way... as his HMG was more than sufficient to blast important bits into pulped, fleshy gelatin out the back side of the Pandoran "top predator". The automated soldier knew this, had seen the results of his weapon against even large Thanator before, so even though he had yet to identify his target he knew his weapon was up to the task. What didn't register within the Adrenalin addled brain was that the beast didn't need to be pulped, as it was a corpse when it came barreling out of the woods. Thus he did what he was trained to do, and he pumped a quarter belt into the creatures body, well after it fell to the ground behind Nia.

Nia...

Nia?!

That made something in his brain click, as he remembered just WHY he was out here, in the thick of a hostile alien environment, and not safe back at their new colonial home.

Escort duty.

For a colonial technician.

A deep recon mission, to defend the technician...

an avatar driver named Nia.

He snapped back to his senses, his brain and body still on red-alert, but his animal brain no longer totally running the show. He watched as she darted away, away from him, into the forest. For a split second he was annoyed. Frustrated with the fact that now he would be forced to haul ass and keep up with her, lest his whole mission fail because she lost him in the dense bio-luminescent forest. That irritation lasted not more than a tenth of a second, as he swiftly realized that his short range motion sensor was going ape-shit, and that Nia must be in panicked flight from something.

His instincts probably saved his life, as he obeyed the animal instinct to throw himself face first, as the rumble in the ground signaled the attack of something extremely large. A massive limb slashed the air just about level with where his head would have been, but the man wasn't there anymore. What was there was a length of his belt mechanism to the HMG.

That was enough of course. As the next thing Chance knew he was dizzy and totally disoriented... the result of being thrown like a rag doll through the night air. His belt ripped apart like tissue paper, several rounds cast about hap-hazardly as the HEAT soldier tumbled ass-over-teakettle in a low arc. A parabolic trajectory that sent him flying over the fleeing Nia and impacting the base of a tree not far ahead and to the tech's left hand side. He never saw more of the gargantuan attacker than a blur of indigo motion.

As luck would have it Chance landed in something that would have minced Nia, were their roles to have been reversed, and even though the Mine Pod patch that Chance landed in helped cushion his fall, the spring-loaded spines that popped out of the violet balls of Pandoran vegetation did a number on his armor. Penetrating his suit in several locations once more.

If he survived this duty someone would be spending a good deal of their time putting his HEAT armor back into proper working order. As it was, as of that very moment, it was virtually being held together by the auto-sealing coating and the good graces of the all-mighty himself.

[fuzzydude]

"-ance!"

Fear danced wildly behind Nia's eyes as she hovered over the soldier, carefully away from any remaining mine pods that might still go off. It looked as if at any moment, the drop of control she'd regained might evaporate in a raging inferno of terror, sending her sprinting off again, abandoning Chance completely.

"Chance!" she repeated before grabbing one of his armored arms. "C'mon!" she yelled, pulling him up with so much terror-fueled strength that she nearly ended up throwing him - power armor and all - up in the air and forward in the jungle. She was close behind him, running without even bothering to look back. The loud, crack that sounded just behind her sent her running even faster than she even knew she could go.

She felt her balance on her long, alien legs wavering, and fell sideways into a tree, which she scrambled around in a maneuver strangely similar to the one she'd used that morning in the hall at the colony to get past someone. Something big hit the other side, sending the entire thick trunk quivering with a resounding, deep thrum, and she flew away from it like a croquet ball on the receiving end of a particularly vindictive foot shot.

The world went into a blur of dark indigo and flashes of greens, then red. She felt the ground suddenly smash into her right side. Everything swam around as she tried to push the ground away from her and keep her legs moving. Disoriented, she had no idea where Chance was, or the creature, or if she was even going in the right direction anymore. She just kept trying to scramble forwards, ignoring all the grabbing vines and tearing thorns and branches.

[HorusRe/Bila'reu]

The sudden stop, from being tossed about like a rat from a dogs maw, knocked the soldier for a loop, and for a moment he struggled just to clear the swirling sense of nausea and dementia from his pain clouded mind. He was aware of being hefted up in the arms of the technician meat puppet, urged forward, and obeyed the animal instinct that was running the show while his head swam. Though he lumbered along, distantly aware that the way he slammed against that first tree had seriously done a number on his chest cavity. He could feel a sharp discomfort on each breath and each movement, a distant pain low in his chest along the left side, but he ignored that for the moment. He focused on moving, on staying alive.

As his head cleared he took stock of his situation.

Weapon: intact but non-functional.
Armor: dangerously compromised but functional.
Supplies: abandoned.
Health: dangerously jeopardized by numerous injuries.
Threat: unknown but obviously sizable and extremely dangerous.
Charge...

That was when Nia was thrown to the ground and one of the disgustingly huge Pandoran trees almost snapped. She was tossed into the air in a gentle spray of small, moist splinters, the side opposite the attacking animal virtually rupturing in an explosion of plant fibers. Whatever it was that was attacking them was strong enough to fell a fully grown Push Fruit Tree, with a trunk as large around as one of the 50'000 liter water tanks back in the colony. Powerful enough to shatter the wet and strong fibrous innards in a single blow.


Chance caught a clear view of the head of the gargantuan land animal as it recoiled from the impact with the foliage. Like many of the moons predators and large fauna this beast had a body covered in a natural armor, and this was particularly pronounced on the crescent shaped bone projection of the massive face that presented itself. The concave curve was jagged, like a steak knife, and definitely had the power to remind a human of a blade, as the edge flared out gently as if the inner curve was indeed some kind of biological blade. The crescent curve was vertical, bisected roughly in the middle by a mouth that was now opened and roaring with primal ferocity, a maw lined in razor sharp triangular teeth. Two eyes, on the one side of the head that Chance could see, darted around almost randomly. Chance guessed, from the fact the eyes were obviously located on the sides of the head (and thus would offer no clear binocular vision), it was not a visual predator. Perhaps flexing a matched pair to zero in on a target, and then attacking blindly, like a tiger beetle from Earth. Regardless, with a head that large, and fully covered in the moon-blade of hard bone, and so much bulk to drive that head, the unknown beast was a horrible danger. To him, to Nia, and to every being on the planet.

He checked. She ran. He girded his lions, ignored the ache that was spreading like a fire through his body, and forced himself to lumber after her. Still clutching his worthless weapon in his right hand as he stumbled and drug himself after the flight of the walking stick. His form no longer elegant and a model of military efficiency, but rather the broken form of a man that has endured enough damage to fell a lesser human being. He was slowed by pain and fatigue, but he pressed on in spite of that. He would not give up, as he would rather die than admit defeat.

Charge: monitored but in serious danger.
Mission...

Mission: secondary parameter failed, main parameter (defend Nia) status currently threatened.