Post by Theloria Shadecloak on Dec 10, 2019 13:18:10 GMT -5
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[break][attr="class","nikki101"]WE’LL RECLAIM OUR DESTINY
[break][attr="class","nikki102"]WE’LL SET OUR FUTURE FREE
[attr="class","nikki109"]January 1st [break][break]
2200hrs [break][break]
26 AV [break][break]
The airship itself was a variant that was thankfully pretty well suited for these types of missions. It was by sheer luck that this variant was in Mistral when the emergency message finally reached the Council, but it was good luck nevertheless. Sailing membranes lined the front, sides, and back of the ship and flapped like wings to help propel the vessel forward along with a powerful propeller in the back. This variant lacked the large ventral pod that characterized many Mistralian ships, but in Grimm infested territory having multiple propellers that were only partially attached to the ship exchanged safety for speed. This variant was slower, but much more resistant to attacks due to the many ship membrane fins that decorated the ship. Even if half of them got ripped apart, the ship could still function. Redundancy was the name of the game when dealing with Grimm, and this ship was specially armored up for this mission as well in a way that would further increase durability at the cost of speed. [break][break]
The weather was freezing cold, and it was snowing throughout most of Mistral. The airship was a type of transport that had a lot of size and space at the cost of speed. It wasn’t slow, really, but it only went roughly the speed of a car and certainly not as fast as a smaller and more mobile aircraft. The snow itself tended to pile up on the decks of the ship, and some fire dust had to be routed through to the wing membranes every so often to avoid them icing up enough to lock. [break][break]
Six marksmen from the Mistral Police Department toted top of the line rifles in support of this mission, taking turns patrolling the deck with Professor Shadecloak who was in rare form that day. Contrary to her usual three-piece suits that she wore on campus, Shade was in a much more ruggedly practical attire this go around. A green cloak with its hood down covered most of her form, including partially the leather pauldrons on both of her shoulders. Brown trousers and boots alongside a dark leather jerkin over a green undershirt completed the ensemble alongside dark green metal gauntlets that ended in claw-like tips. Her weapon was a jet-black western style longbow as tall as she was, currently strung and slung across her back. She had two visible closed quivers on both sides of her hips with the tip of the arrow at the top of each quiver. The ship carried over a thousand arrows strewn around in various compartments over the ship, and she always carried two quivers on her person with a larger emergency one on her back when they encountered a lot of resistance. [break][break]
And they did encounter a lot of resistance. Within communications range, it was unusual to be attacked more than once in one trip from one place to another by airship or train. In the past two hours, however, they were attacked four times by different Grimm that ranged from normal lancers to ravagers to normal nevermores who combined to be dozens of monsters trying to chip away at the ship itself. For many of the trainees on this trip, this may have been the largest and worst infestation they had ever seen. For the safety of everyone involved, everyone took a mild to moderate strength emotion dampening pill to ensure that nobody freaked the fuck out immediately. Everyone else except for Shade would take a second dose at the twelve-hour mark to ensure their initial entry into the village would not be emotion spiked. The reason why Shade didn’t have one was firstly because she was a licensed huntress expected to be able to control her emotions, and secondly part of the strategy was for someone on the ship to generate a lot of negative emotions while leaving in order to pull away some of the Grimm from the city and get them to wander in the other direction. That became much harder when on emotion dampening drugs, but not impossible. [break][break]
However, anyone who looked down in the past hour would see that even a hundred Grimm being drawn away would be a drop in the bucket. Infestations of dozens of Grimm congregating in one area were numbered in the dozens in visual range, combining for easily several hundred over just the area that they flew over. The actual amount of Grimm in the area that could participate in an attack, then, might well be over a thousand. There were very few people who saw that many Grimm and lived, and the emotion dampeners were put in place so nobody freaked the fuck out and brought them to the village that would then be destroyed immediately. Anyone who was not fully aware of just how fucked this village was before certainly was now… or they simply hid in the lower levels trying to sleep and avoided all the fighting entirely for some reason. [break][break]
Something else was really weird, though, especially as they approached the village itself. Well, a lot of things were odd but the biggest was the fact that there appeared to be a small mountain that appeared to have… well, moved. There was a long track that it left, almost like a glacier that was wildly out of place. Once they got within the village walls, however, and touched down it was very clear that there was a disturbing silence and apathy that swallowed up almost the entire village. While some amount of panic, surprise, and hope was expected when the airship touched down… really there was almost none of that from the village populace. Their eyes were largely glazed over and the only ones who looked like they were self-aware were the three remaining village elders who came out to chat with Shadecloak in the ship. There was little protest, and those that did react at all did so weakly in a way that was almost disturbingly passive. [break][break]
They were completely surrounded by Grimm, and an airship came to save them. You would think that there would be more of an emotional response, but there just wasn’t. From the way the village elders were acting and what the trainees knew, it was pretty obvious that they were under either a lesser dose of the emotion dampeners or none whatsoever. The team leaders of each group were allowed to be present during Shade’s interaction with the elders, which she alternatively cajoled and threatened them until they came to a consensus on how the evacuation procedure would take place. One elder would depart on each of the first two trips, while the third one would depart on a trip of his choice so long as it was the third or later. [break][break]
The elder who was last was obviously pissed about the entire situation and haggled the other two down from their original strategy of eldest evacuated first into at least conceding to evacuating the elderly and the injured during the first trips. The first eighty people evacuated were thus the highest-ranking village elder, a good chunk of the elderly in the village, and some of the injured who took up more space with their sick beds. The lowest ranking elder was the only one to dissent, and he was so piss angry that Shade forced him to take emotion dampening pills himself before she’d agree to evacuate anyone. When the elders announced their decision and broke away after justifying the order by appealing to the years of hard work that the elders had given the village, it looked like each of them had at least one advisor type that seemed to be much more themselves than the general villager who seemed more zombie than human. It was fucking weird. [break][break]
Each trainee was allotted four doses of dust for this mission, with one of those slots potentially having Hard Light Dust due to the perceived difficulty of this mission. Colton, for example, came in with two lightning dust to go along with one fire dust and one hard light dust dose. Each trainee was given enough emotion dampening tablets to last them a week, with a resupply if needed coming in five days. Each dose of two tablets lasted for twelve hours, creating a chemical calmness but not producing any of the zombie-like symptoms that the villagers seemed to be experiencing. Something was very, very wrong. [break][break]
Either way, with the most elderly and the most infirm loaded up on the airship it went up and away in a flash. One thing that might have stuck out to the trainees is the complete lack of care given to them by the elders or the villagers at this point, and the fact that they were left almost entirely to their own devices to start off this mission. If they were expecting any sort of praise, recognition, or guidance from the people they were tasked with protecting they were simply shit out of luck. It looked like they would have to rely on themselves and themselves alone for this one, for better or for worse. [break][break]
The weather would have been suitably freezing for a winter day, with roughly a meter of snow having fallen with only the laziest attempts to clear footpaths for individuals being obvious. The water in the dock was partially frozen, but the water still ebbed and flowed with chunks of ice being shot up on the docks and on the shore semi-frequently in ways that were obvious from the airship. All in all shoveling snow was probably added to the list of duties that the trainees would have to do every day, whether they liked it or not.
[break]2200hrs [break][break]
26 AV [break][break]
The airship itself was a variant that was thankfully pretty well suited for these types of missions. It was by sheer luck that this variant was in Mistral when the emergency message finally reached the Council, but it was good luck nevertheless. Sailing membranes lined the front, sides, and back of the ship and flapped like wings to help propel the vessel forward along with a powerful propeller in the back. This variant lacked the large ventral pod that characterized many Mistralian ships, but in Grimm infested territory having multiple propellers that were only partially attached to the ship exchanged safety for speed. This variant was slower, but much more resistant to attacks due to the many ship membrane fins that decorated the ship. Even if half of them got ripped apart, the ship could still function. Redundancy was the name of the game when dealing with Grimm, and this ship was specially armored up for this mission as well in a way that would further increase durability at the cost of speed. [break][break]
The weather was freezing cold, and it was snowing throughout most of Mistral. The airship was a type of transport that had a lot of size and space at the cost of speed. It wasn’t slow, really, but it only went roughly the speed of a car and certainly not as fast as a smaller and more mobile aircraft. The snow itself tended to pile up on the decks of the ship, and some fire dust had to be routed through to the wing membranes every so often to avoid them icing up enough to lock. [break][break]
Six marksmen from the Mistral Police Department toted top of the line rifles in support of this mission, taking turns patrolling the deck with Professor Shadecloak who was in rare form that day. Contrary to her usual three-piece suits that she wore on campus, Shade was in a much more ruggedly practical attire this go around. A green cloak with its hood down covered most of her form, including partially the leather pauldrons on both of her shoulders. Brown trousers and boots alongside a dark leather jerkin over a green undershirt completed the ensemble alongside dark green metal gauntlets that ended in claw-like tips. Her weapon was a jet-black western style longbow as tall as she was, currently strung and slung across her back. She had two visible closed quivers on both sides of her hips with the tip of the arrow at the top of each quiver. The ship carried over a thousand arrows strewn around in various compartments over the ship, and she always carried two quivers on her person with a larger emergency one on her back when they encountered a lot of resistance. [break][break]
And they did encounter a lot of resistance. Within communications range, it was unusual to be attacked more than once in one trip from one place to another by airship or train. In the past two hours, however, they were attacked four times by different Grimm that ranged from normal lancers to ravagers to normal nevermores who combined to be dozens of monsters trying to chip away at the ship itself. For many of the trainees on this trip, this may have been the largest and worst infestation they had ever seen. For the safety of everyone involved, everyone took a mild to moderate strength emotion dampening pill to ensure that nobody freaked the fuck out immediately. Everyone else except for Shade would take a second dose at the twelve-hour mark to ensure their initial entry into the village would not be emotion spiked. The reason why Shade didn’t have one was firstly because she was a licensed huntress expected to be able to control her emotions, and secondly part of the strategy was for someone on the ship to generate a lot of negative emotions while leaving in order to pull away some of the Grimm from the city and get them to wander in the other direction. That became much harder when on emotion dampening drugs, but not impossible. [break][break]
However, anyone who looked down in the past hour would see that even a hundred Grimm being drawn away would be a drop in the bucket. Infestations of dozens of Grimm congregating in one area were numbered in the dozens in visual range, combining for easily several hundred over just the area that they flew over. The actual amount of Grimm in the area that could participate in an attack, then, might well be over a thousand. There were very few people who saw that many Grimm and lived, and the emotion dampeners were put in place so nobody freaked the fuck out and brought them to the village that would then be destroyed immediately. Anyone who was not fully aware of just how fucked this village was before certainly was now… or they simply hid in the lower levels trying to sleep and avoided all the fighting entirely for some reason. [break][break]
Something else was really weird, though, especially as they approached the village itself. Well, a lot of things were odd but the biggest was the fact that there appeared to be a small mountain that appeared to have… well, moved. There was a long track that it left, almost like a glacier that was wildly out of place. Once they got within the village walls, however, and touched down it was very clear that there was a disturbing silence and apathy that swallowed up almost the entire village. While some amount of panic, surprise, and hope was expected when the airship touched down… really there was almost none of that from the village populace. Their eyes were largely glazed over and the only ones who looked like they were self-aware were the three remaining village elders who came out to chat with Shadecloak in the ship. There was little protest, and those that did react at all did so weakly in a way that was almost disturbingly passive. [break][break]
They were completely surrounded by Grimm, and an airship came to save them. You would think that there would be more of an emotional response, but there just wasn’t. From the way the village elders were acting and what the trainees knew, it was pretty obvious that they were under either a lesser dose of the emotion dampeners or none whatsoever. The team leaders of each group were allowed to be present during Shade’s interaction with the elders, which she alternatively cajoled and threatened them until they came to a consensus on how the evacuation procedure would take place. One elder would depart on each of the first two trips, while the third one would depart on a trip of his choice so long as it was the third or later. [break][break]
The elder who was last was obviously pissed about the entire situation and haggled the other two down from their original strategy of eldest evacuated first into at least conceding to evacuating the elderly and the injured during the first trips. The first eighty people evacuated were thus the highest-ranking village elder, a good chunk of the elderly in the village, and some of the injured who took up more space with their sick beds. The lowest ranking elder was the only one to dissent, and he was so piss angry that Shade forced him to take emotion dampening pills himself before she’d agree to evacuate anyone. When the elders announced their decision and broke away after justifying the order by appealing to the years of hard work that the elders had given the village, it looked like each of them had at least one advisor type that seemed to be much more themselves than the general villager who seemed more zombie than human. It was fucking weird. [break][break]
Each trainee was allotted four doses of dust for this mission, with one of those slots potentially having Hard Light Dust due to the perceived difficulty of this mission. Colton, for example, came in with two lightning dust to go along with one fire dust and one hard light dust dose. Each trainee was given enough emotion dampening tablets to last them a week, with a resupply if needed coming in five days. Each dose of two tablets lasted for twelve hours, creating a chemical calmness but not producing any of the zombie-like symptoms that the villagers seemed to be experiencing. Something was very, very wrong. [break][break]
Either way, with the most elderly and the most infirm loaded up on the airship it went up and away in a flash. One thing that might have stuck out to the trainees is the complete lack of care given to them by the elders or the villagers at this point, and the fact that they were left almost entirely to their own devices to start off this mission. If they were expecting any sort of praise, recognition, or guidance from the people they were tasked with protecting they were simply shit out of luck. It looked like they would have to rely on themselves and themselves alone for this one, for better or for worse. [break][break]
The weather would have been suitably freezing for a winter day, with roughly a meter of snow having fallen with only the laziest attempts to clear footpaths for individuals being obvious. The water in the dock was partially frozen, but the water still ebbed and flowed with chunks of ice being shot up on the docks and on the shore semi-frequently in ways that were obvious from the airship. All in all shoveling snow was probably added to the list of duties that the trainees would have to do every day, whether they liked it or not.
[attr="class","nikki103"]1601 words | [attr="class","nikki103"]EVENT | [attr="class","nikki103"]1601 TOTAL WORDS |
NOTES
Notes herePHARAOH LEAP CREATES
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