I was still upset by the time I woke up. But there wasn't much I could do about it. Herm had always been like this; it was infuriating. My thoughts were interrupted by a deep yawn. At least I knew why Pahhur was acting so strange. I picked out some bread and ate quietly. The sun had been up for a while, it was just about high enough that we could go into the city. I didn't see Pahhur in the campsite, but I was pretty sure she was around.
I was wrapping up packing when Pahhur stumbled back, bits of branch still clinging to her lips. She seemed to be either really upset or really pissed off. Then I remembered that she was probably feeling the effects of PMS for the first time. I decided to keep quiet, and let the hormonal girl do what she wanted.
The town was a ruined mess when we got there. Half buildings, streets that were busted open, cracks and cuts ran through half the place, the rest was crumbled masses of concrete. Suddenly Pahhur jumped in front of me, drawing her blade. A second later an enormous sword crashed into Pahhur's. The pressure from the blow threatened to knock me off my feet. Pahhur herself had sunk into the tar of the street. The man on the other end of the blade paused for a moment, looking us over. He was tall, with thick muscles. He had short pure white hair, despite his you face. He wore what I assumed used to be a shirt/jeans/jacket combination at one point. Now they looked more like rags. Then again we weren't much better off by now.
“You're not those armored things, are you?”
“No, we're trying to get rid of them.” Pahhur said quickly. The man backed away a bit, but didn't drop his blade.
“Well move along then, there's no more food or supplies here.”
“We're not looking for supplies.” I said quickly. “We're actually trying to get the people that are still out here to safety.” He stared at me for a while before finally responding.
“You mean to tell me, two young women are here to safe me?” He let out a healthy laugh. “I mean, this one has potential, but you don't even have a weapon.” I suddenly felt both very angry and very useless. I was a pretty good fighter, sure. I knew my way around weapons, but that didn't change the fact that I was currently unarmed. Not to mention I couldn't help but feel the weapons I could handle wouldn't help much. Unless I had a lot of daggers and some cover. While I was mulling this over, Pahhur started talking.
“She'd be pretty dangerous if we could find her a sword; or something. Besides right now shes navigating. How'd you think we found you?” I was nudged. I realized that Pahhur wanted me to pull out the orb.
“Well... This is useful.” The man said after looking the map over, he stood straight up and offered his hand to Pahhur. “Name's Raven. My daughter is up in those ruins, I'll go get us packed.” I took the opportunity to look over the orb again. There was another blue dot heading our way, but the current ring of Armors would surely get him by roughly nightfall. I pointed it out to Pahhur, and she nodded quietly. As Raven returned there was indeed a girl with him. She had long blond hair, a moderate bust, and despite how thin she looked, there seemed to be a hidden strength about her.
“You guys wouldn't happen to have any pads for women would you?” Pahhur asked suddenly. I felt the blood rush to my face and hit her across the back of the head, hard.
“What she should be talking about is, we're surrounded; and there is someone heading this way. They won't make it to us if we don't do something about the barricade.”
“Not a problem.” Raven said; redrawing his blade. “This is an old blade, built to fight anything. It initially was made to be a reflective shield. I learned recently it works just as well on bullets. I'll go clear 'em out.” Pahhur got up off the ground.
“I'll go too. Their bullets can't hurt me.” The two of them ran off, leaving me and the girl. I felt a light tugging on my arm. I looked down at her; she was holding out a package.
“We.. do have a few pads. I rescued them.” I placed the pack in my bag for now, and held out my hand.
“My name's Neko.” She took it hesitantly.
And we finally have two more characters here. Now I don't have to write tortuous dialogue between two upset and hormonal people. Now I have FOUR upset and hormonal people to toy with. MUAHAHAHAHA!
ReplyDeleteDon't go anywhere folks, rumor coming down the pipeline of a third character in Metudo's upcoming chapter as well. Even in the non-fan-fiction universe the cast list is a good dozen regular characters. Give or take a few deaths.
Anyway, been playing Borderlands surprisingly. I say surprisingly because I initially got it hearing it was good, played it for about an hour before I was directed to the skill page and had immediate violent flashbacks to World of Warcraft, a game I fairly recently got tired of. Then I started into the bulk of the game, and the minute I started having a quest log it was confirmed to me. Borderlands = World of Warcraft + FPS. Kinda killed my mood, and I put the game down for a long time.
Well, I've become bored lately, and have picked it back up. While the skill tree still bothers me, and the quests are starting to look more and more depressingly like World of Warcraft quests, there are a few things I can take simple joy in.
A) Being alone. Which is actually a major thing for me, since I played WoW for probably four years longer than I would have if I hadn't made friends there. This also removes the downsides of dealing with the less pleasant participants of online gaming.
B) The sound those little dog creatures make when I run them over with my car. It works well for me on so many levels.
C) (Intentional) The combat system. I ended up having a lot of issues with World of Warcraft when I started to realize that EVERY class in that game boiled down to a rotation, which boiled down to setting your keys correctly. I could literally queue up any class and key it so I was basically playing a very slight variation of the same game. Not to mention the having to target to attack, and most enemies taking a lot of hits to even see a difference in their health bars. All of that is compressed here. Point, click, dead. Or my personal favorite: Hold forward until you hear squish.
So yeah, I may get around to giving this game and World of Warcraft a full review shake down. I recall saying somewhere that me and Ted have plans for a review show, which might be a seasonal thing; considering the rest of the blog updates take so much of our time already. Still it doesn't hurt to put together scripts so that we can take advantage of filming times.
I think I've ranted enough today. See you all Thursday for a new chapter and another web comic sudo-review!