NOVEL NEXT Turn 89: Collecting The Pods And Blaster Upgrades
Turn 89: Collecting The Pods And Blaster Upgrades
--- Maya Williams ---
Given how her planned asskicking of the guy who put a slaver effect on her brother was right around the corner -(Just need to wait for my COMP to recharge)- she had a great number of plans for upgrading her arsenal in such a way as to equip her metaphorical asskicking boots.
(Note to self create actual asskicking boots at some point.)
(Noted.)
(With glee!)
That said, before she could actually get into upgrading said arsenal, she first had to take care of a couple of small chores around the library. Namely collecting the fodder that she'd left growing for just long enough to provide an extra bountiful harvest for her future biology projects.
(Not that we really do anything with biology.)
"Yeah, but we're going to have to start getting a pipeline going soon if we want to sell healing herbs and other Chems to the various Hunter groups." She pointed out. "Maybe build like a greenhouse or something to grow things en masse rather than just using one little bio-pod at a time."
(Well we do have plenty of space after clearing out that Creep infestation.) Her inner logic admitted. (Though given the nature of a greenhouse, we'd probably want to set it on the rooftop.)
(Given how we grow everything in little omnivorous stomachs we can build a greenhouse underground if we wanted to.)
"Eh, we'll figure it out when we figure it out. For now let's just get the LCM's lunch together. Mama's babies are hungry."
Scene Consequences
-Collections:
-Fodder (x2)
--Overgrown Bonus: Yield doubled. (There's usually only one roll on this dice.)
--Yield: 4D6=16 Organics. (Currently: 25)
---
With her chore of collecting the contents of the bio-pod and setting its next growth cycle to begin over with, Maya was now free to get to work on upgrading her arsenal. The first part of which would involve expanding it by unlocking an additional elemental attribute for her various programs to work with.
"You know given how ice is like one of the most basic elements out there, I'm kind of surprised it took us this long to unlock this." She admitted to herself as she… more or less just breezed through programming out the equations that would allow her to simulate a build up of frost and ice by rapidly moving the heat of a target space to a different space.
(Preferably a larger one that won't cause us to accidentally set something on fire with the sudden thermal transfer.) Her inner logic suggested.
(Yeah, purposely causing freezer-burn is going to be a tier two upgrade for our Blaster Protocols.) Her inner madness agreed. (Also, it took this long because you've got like two hundred voices in here.)
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That made her pause with a concerned, "What?"
(Eh, don't worry.) Her inner insanity told her, easily dismissing her concerns. (Like ninety-nine percent of these guys are lurkers just sitting in the back of your mind watching everything you do while silently judging you and your every action because you will never know a moment of true privacy in your life.)
"That… that had to be the worst way you could've worded that." She frowned at herself.
(It was.) Her inner reason confirmed. (Truthfully most of those voices aren't even aware unless you're actively doing M.A.D. things, or hero things.)
(Or slice of life things. They're like seriously into that stuff.)
She took a deep breath before deciding. "I'm just… going to ignore these last few minutes. For my sanity's sake."
(Since when do you need that shit?)
Scene Consequences
-You have unlocked the [Cryo] energy type, which deals [Ice] damage while equipped and applies [Frost] on crit.
*Frost: Deal 1 Ice damage per stack, then half stacks. Reduce Turn AP by stacks/Endurance, rounded down.
---
With the new addition of [Cryo] as a sort of anti-Heat energy, Maya realized that it was about time to compress and rework her Blaster Protocols() figuring that with the new elements she'd added to her arsenal over time as well as the handful of upgrades she'd given her Hand Cannons the program was long due an overhaul.
The protocols themselves were rather straightforward, being a quick, easy, and most importantly modular means of conducting her various energy types through whatever hardware she created with the output necessary to focus it into more than a simple elemental burst. And from there they'd been upgraded with a handful of accuracy based modifications that would provide a sort of aim-assist for anything she created via a mix of aiming reticles on her Headset and slightly self-adjusting flex pieces she could build into her weapon's projection points.
All in all, despite being one of her simpler programs, the sheer amount of things it was hooked into as well as the variety of things it could do gave her a fair amount of flexibility in what she could do by reworking the program. Trimming down on redundancies, and streamlining certain functions to better run based on how everything connected.
The simplest of these was to simply improve the aim-assist built into her protocols even further, now accounting for the various other things her new sensors and scanning equipment could pick up to further improve the things the aim-bot could account for.
(Really helpful if we plan on going full on sniper at some point.)
Alternatively she could also clear out some of the early unaccounted flaws her weapons had when shifting between their various elemental outputs, thus allowing her to more easily flip through them without having to wait until her reload to switch around the active projection pieces. A safety redundancy she'd originally installed due to adding the elemental projectors over time instead of being an initial part of her hardware and not wanting anything to overload. And something she felt she could trust herself to be able to work around when adding said projectors on future projects.
(Conserving our resources would allow us to fight more prolonged battles, even if it would offer no grand new function to our equipment.)
On the note of new functions it was also possible to remove some similar redundancies and safety features that she'd needed early on to keep everything stable, but now had practical data on how it would all play out. Which she could push in one of two ways depending on how she did things.
First would be to modify some of the restrictions her Blaster Protocols had on elemental projection to make things more controlled, thus allowing her to take further advantage of said elements and the various influences they had on things.
(A controlled burn or electrical shock would allow us to do more sustained damage without having to worry about it all going too far.)
In the completely opposite direction of control she could also dial back those safety protocols to launch everything her weapons carried in one massive overclocked blast that would be down right catastrophic to anything it hit… Though she would have to account for a sort of 'cooldown' period if she didn't want to melt whatever hardware she was using.
(It won't matter if we blow them all to hell!)
They all sounded like valuable upgrades, and part of her wished she could work them all into her Blaster Protocols but…
She checked the time and grimaced seeing she didn't have much left if she wanted to go meet the Hunter Team she'd somehow talked into giving her a meeting.
(But I can still fit one in…)