The cycles push off into blackness.

At once, the pressure compensators and heating units kick.  Even though they're dealing with the extreme environment perfectly at the moment, without a creak or a chill, there's a sense of psychological isolation that hits everyone almost immediately.  It's in the way that the powerful lights of the cycles are swallowed up almost immediately, with the nearby anomaly and the lamp of the TARDIS behind them likewise standing out as solitary lights in crushing blackness.  It's in the way the water is thick and resistant to the slightest movement, even if the cycles are pushing ahead gamely.  (Twelve kilometers and change through the anomaly and to the last signals of the SPOT is not so long a way, but pushing the cycles much beyond several KPH will start to stress them at this depth.)

As the conduit draws nearer, outlined in a coruscating pattern of blue and green, the only word for the experience is timeless.

OOC: I confess I'm fuzzy on the configuration of the vehicles and the suits.  Are the vehicles hard-shelled or soft?  I assume the suits at least have a pressure-support mode in case you need to be outside a hard shell of some kind, I didn't expect wet suits alone, but that's up to you.  I'd assume if the vehicles have an enclosed, rigid hull that that they also have some mechanism for getting outside of them.

In practical terms, they can have whatever parameters you all like, only I'd like for Trav, perhaps, to spell those out for consistency in further developments.

In reply to The Guardian (msg # 1):

OOC: Trav would have made the vehicles conventionally hard shelled with covers, with low-tech solenoid batteries that could be hand cranked, because all the weird magnetics and radiation.  The suits themselves are partially anti radiation hardsuits that are designed to resist heavy magnetics and gravitics that are powered off of ambient magnetic fields - designed off of RDF/REF-Southern Cross megadamage alloys - Stan, Sereth and Smoke Alarm should thank Louie Nichols and the dev teams at Monument City! These were adapted from Southern Cross Sea Squad armors. The helmets are so that we can see the actors pretty faces, and remember - Sereth has a big Draconian head. The wings of course are CGI fold out doo hickeys.




The elaborate armors are of course for the ATTT BBC approved toy line.
This message was last edited by the player at 04:56, Wed 27 May 2015.

Four aqua-cycles proceed into the maw of the conduit.

Now that they're in the midst of the thing, there's enough light to make out shapes of passing flotsam.  Stanley sees a thing like a short-spined urchin, and then sees its bristles writhe and shift to propel it out along the passageway.  There are definitely non-terrestrial life forms making the migration, though nothing that seems notably dangerous at the moment.

Piloting the aqua-cycles is fairly easy, given their advanced active stabilization systems.  However, the opposing current does give them a tendency to oversteer and fall off the beam.  On the approach to the aperture, this was not a hazard, as everyone had plenty of room to correct, but there is a bit of a needle to thread here....

OOC: It would be Coordination + Transport to steer through the conduit.  Plus I'll entertain other ideas for people to help get themselves through.  This is just a Normal difficulty roll.

With a soft wub-wub-wub-wub, Smoke Alarm motored her water-bike through the great pool, ever 'waring the hazards here, always outlooking around. Sometimes she saw shiny fishies and jellies and squiddies (not Daleks!), and other, stranger things. She couldn't say what was alien and what was not; all these things that lived at the bottom of the pool were alien to her. The shinier, funnier, and stranger of them brought smiles and looks of wonder to her face, but some were so weird and slimy she was grossed out, unbolded, and reminded uncomfortably of the qplotl.

Anything could be out here. The whole pool was lights-out, and even the lights they'd took with them didn't shine far through the murky water. And the pool was ginormous. It all made a Kang feel as small as a mouse, crawling through this endless lights-out, about to be chomped up by a shark.

Despite her lack of knowhow of riding the water-bike, Smoke Alarm did well enough to keep it outgoing in a straight line and not to oversteer. She only had to follow the others, mostly.


OOC: Should be a pass, unless you want to apply a penalty for not being trained in Transport.
19:11, Today: Smoke Alarm rolled 12 using 2d6+5 with rolls of 6,1. coordination(5) + transport(0).

Over the throat mikes: "Old fashioned might be best. There should be magnetic grapples in the kits attached to the bikes. We should form a line and proceed slowly, with lines attached between bikes, looped around the handles and tails. Does that sound good?"

OOC: +2 circumstancial bonus to transport rolls?

It is such a different environment down here. Thanks to the darkness and the heaviness of movement, Stanley feels very aware of the fact that there is a lot of water above him. They are deep enough that you couldn't swim to the surface if something went wrong. He isn't really worried though, he trusts the suit and aquacycle. The fact that the anomaly is giving off some light also helps. The oversteer makes keeping the aquacycle on course a bit tricky, but it is manageable.

"Well...it could also mean that if one us ends up in some strong current, all us will get dragged along." Stanley replies to Trav.

OOC:
20:01, Today: Stanley Newton rolled 14 using 2d6+5 with rolls of 4,5. Coordination(3) + Transport(2) .

Hearing Traveller's idea, Smoke tried to picturespout it in her mind, eyespying the hazards. She activated her talkiphone, replying 'Mayhaps turning corners would be tricky. If the leader turns, the last one swings out. Like a row of trolleys. We have to play keep-away with the con-do-it walls... Mayhaps we save grapples for rescues?'

OOC: I would go along with Smoke Alarm's assessment -- half of you have already done fine, and everyone is at least talented enough at this that a catastrophic failure is pretty unlikely.

(Out of the box, kind of my motivation for making a roll here in the first place was the chance that someone... well, given his history with the dice roller, probably Sereth ;) ...would score a "No, But" and a save by the others would be in order.  Tension, y'all!)

The Draconian muttered darkly the whole time. He'd do much better with both his feet on the ground, and found it quite hard-going.

OOC:Oy, what's that about my dice-rolling!

16:21, Today: Sereth rolled 10 using 2d6+5 with rolls of 3,2. Co-ordination + Transport.

"Lets leave it to Smoke Alarm, then. She's our girl who knows swing lines and physical mechanics because they're in her bones. Smoke, can you take point?"

Smoke Alarm, first into the conduit, feels a bit of a wobble, but is doing a reasonable job of keeping herself on a steady track, while Stanley, perhaps warned a bit by the Kang's example, threads a careful path around her wake: despite the depth, he's finding the cycle no harder to maneuver than a Sea-Doo.

However, Sereth, following them, catches the edge of Stanley's slipstream, and feels his aqua-cycle slewing to the side, the nose angling alarmingly toward the wall of the conduit.  Trav and Stanley notice him struggling for control.  (And perhaps thinking wistfully of being inside a nice, stable minisub.)



OOC: Yes, precisely.

"Sereth, do you need help?" Stanley asks over the comm. He doesn't realise that his it was his slipstream that caused this.

'They are?' Smoke Alarm wondered over the talkiphone about things in her bones. 'Okay.' she agreed to take point, though she wasn't sure she would be a very good leader for follow-the-leader. She eased up the accelerator, pushing the water-bike forward to the front of the line, overtaking Stanley and Traveller, feeling the currents pushing back at her. The water made everything a slow-poke zone, all wobbly and unpredictable. More, there had been a suck of water coming back from Stanley in front and from Traveller further in front, making her water-bike go faster but also harder to control.

'Mayhaps we can fly two-by-two? It'll make the slippy-stream less. More, we can eyespy friends and catch them.' she advised, not realising the very reason for that had just happened behind her.


OOC: Can we actually see the conduit? How wide is it? Would we even fit going in in two columns?
This message was last edited by the player at 03:22, Sun 31 May 2015.

OOC: From the last thread:

The Guardian:

Readings on the anomaly show that it is projected to reach a locally stable diameter of 21 meters.

The cycles aren't that big, so you could go two-by-two.  And you can see the walls: the light in the passage is coming from glowing patterns that outline it.

In the present circumstance, Trav still needs to make a roll, and then something needs to be done for Sereth to recover.  Whether this would be him making a second, slightly more difficult roll with supporting bonuses from others helping him, or someone else making their own roll, depends on what you all want to try.

Smoke and Stanley can make it through OK as they are.

OOC: For goodness sake, don't make me make another roll!

OOC: Sereth, don't forget the +2 bonus for lines.
16:52, Today: The Traveller rolled 18 using 2d6+10 with rolls of 2,6. 2d6+Coordination 4+Transport 4+Cable 2.

Trav is looking back nervously at Sereth. Can he handle it? She considers using her pistols to fire a kinetic shot to push Sereth's aquacycle back on course.

But then she hears Smoke's idea.  "Good plan." She comes up next to Sereth, ready to assist, and attaches a tow line with slack.

Do I need to make a roll to connect a line to Sereth's bike?
This message was last edited by the player at 15:22, Sun 31 May 2015.