Chris Ganale

When a conscious awareness of her surroundings returned to Chao, she initially believed herself to be dead. Opening her eyes, she found herself lying flat on her back on an endless white plain, with no discernible difference between any existing walls, ceiling, or floor. All that stood out was a single lamp post, the very same one that had been the centerpiece of her battle with the Garleans, projecting a lonely pillar of light that just barely reached her with the edge of its circle. Sitting up slowly, she checked herself over to find her injuries were gone, but that her armor was still in the sad state it had been in when she had fallen unconscious. It was this combination of factors, along with the surreal environment that she found herself in, that led her to believe that she was dreaming. "So clever, as always, would-be Reclaimer. You have all the answers, and yet you still know nothing." Scrambling to her feet, Chao spun to face the unknown voice, finding herself faced with a nebulous figure seemingly made of pure shadow. Its form shifted constantly into a number of silhouettes she found familiar, all matching individuals she knew, as though her very own subconscious could not decide who it wanted to confront her with. The figure's eyes, however, never changed; they were the very same sharp, mismatched eyes she saw whenever she looked in a mirror. "What is this place?" the fire mage demanded. "This? This is Phantasmagoria." It was then that she realized that the voice was not unknown; like the silhouettes its form wavered through, it was as though the voices of everyone whom she had ever known were speaking at once to her, blending together into the words of this shadowy being. "It is where your mind attempts to solve the challenge you have created for yourself by corroding your own soul with Magia Erebia." The shadowy creature reached across itself, drawing an equally-undefined shape that extended and twisted itself into the form of a sword. Chao recognized its shape as that of an Ironworks-made magitek sword, and knew of only one person in her network of contacts that wielded such a blade. The appearance of a feathered beret, however briefly, on the creature's head confirmed her assumption. "And it is here you must find the answers to Magia Erebia. For if you do not..." The creature charged her. It wasn't an instantaneous movement, the way she had half-expected, but still unsettlingly fast. It swung its blade as it reached her and she lifted her left arm in defense, but her forearm armor offered little resistance; the blade bored through the advanced metal and severed her arm halfway to the elbow. Hot crimson blood splashed to the ground, marring the pristine white field as her lost limb fell into the center of the pool with a wet smack, splashing her own blood onto her boots. She stared in shock, whether more from the fact that her armor did so little or from the screaming pain in her nerve endings, she honestly wasn't sure. The shadowy being left her no time to contemplate the matter, drawing its sword back and driving it to the hilt into Chao's chest, just below her crumpled torso armor. Blood fountained from her mouth, unhindered by the missing hand that she instinctively tried to lift to stem its flow. "...Then death will be the most merciful of outcomes." In the outside world, resting on a bed in the Vylbrand Academy's infirmary, her entire body convulsed in response to the lethal stroke, blood bursting forth from her mouth. Satomi, tending to both Chao and a separate victim of the Garleans' tender attentions while still nursing her own injuries, limped over and turned the miqo'te on her side to prevent her from drowning in her own blood. Rurujua, the local chief medic, quickly began applying restorative magic to shore up her vitality. It was the first death of Chao Lingshen.

Steel yourselves, Warriors of Light, for the secrets of ancient Allag and the most advanced of magitek weaponry in the realm will be forever out of your grasp unless you can prove yourselves worthy in the eyes of Team Science!

Interestingly enough, this sort of thing is almost exactly what Chao used for magic in the source manga I took her from. She had spell sigils tattooed all over her body that forced magic through her to allow her to cast, at the cost of it being an extreme strain on her system and causing her severe pain. And when overused in the midst of a magic duel with her ancestor trying to overpower one another's A-class spells, the sigils exploded violently and cost her the battle.

Ugh, too many, too soon. This has been a rotten stretch of time for beloved actors. May he find his peace in the Force.

Haha, my FC is engaged in a lively debate right now about its applicability to coil.

It'll be just like TOR! \o/

The rank and file are also conscripts, not actual Garleans. Putting game-changing technology in the hands of your glorified slaves is how you get an uprising.

I didn't say there were only three officers. But the thing about officers, is that the kind of officer that leads from the front? Usually winds up a dead officer. Not for nothing the officers we saw in End of An Era were hanging out back by a reaper, which was acting as artillery, and opened up on the Warrior when he left his brain at home and stopped in the middle of a friggen battlefield to lift his visor and stare up at the frelling moon. Short version is, you'll typically have one officer for every hundred or so mooks in a Roman-style formation like the Garleans seem to favor, and they'll be as far back from the front as possible directing their troops, so it stands to reason they won't commonly be seen in a massed battle. Unless you're the kind of dick (me) that goes hunting enemy officers.

The phone my authenticator token was on was destroyed, and they solved it through web chat real quick-like. However, I have a friend whose account was RMT hacked and was permabanned, and despite providing numerous pieces of identification, including his own IP, when they had the completely other side of the world IP that had sent all the RMTs, they deemed "insufficient evidence" to support his being hacked and won't give him his account back. Fortunately, he has another.

As has been stated before, the rank and file of the Garlean Empire does not have guns. It's reserved for what appears to be their officers and higher. Twin Adder Mook #295 doesn't have to deal with Garlean Mook #918 shooting him, he has to deal with that mook coming at him with a sword.

That may not be an F-16, but it is definitely a far sight better looking and more nimble than those Garlean flying sticks. Raven Squadron is ready.

24 hour maintenance is common for major content upgrades like this. TOR did it before the Hutt Cartel expansion, and if I remember correctly, 14 did it itself for 2.4 patch. That said, though, up at 4 AM Friday morning? Looks like it's ODST time after work on Thursday, then sleep at about 7:30 to be fully-rested and wake up in time to dive right in.

Yeah, I figured that sticking with XIV would be the better idea. I've not been proven wrong.

Many a tale of t2 BLM farming is echoed here.

And that's all fair. Finding and exploiting weaknesses is amusing. I simply don't want to have somebody move to engage Garon, Ghost, or Yuuna, find out that they use firearms, and then treat them as pushover jokes because of their choice of weapon.

I didn't say anyone was going to trivialize guns, I said there are implications that some people are thinking it, and it is of course very difficult to tell joke from serious reply on the internet. I'm also aware of some people with IC attitudes such that they would never consider technology of any kind to be any sort of threat to them. And to nitpick a bit, comparison of guns to THMs doesn't really hold water when a significant chunk of this thread has been "a mage will still wreck a fully-armored fighter but any plate better than steel will stop a bullet".

I think an interesting--and almost certainly inflammatory--point to consider is the exact opposite end of the spectrum: will it go to the extreme that people trivialize guns to the point that a toddler with a brick is considered a greater threat? I've already seen indications by browsing this thread that some people are implying exactly that.

I have no idea what you're on about, Kellach.

Nope, once it's placed you can move it, but can't reclaim it.

Erik, you're making me re-evaluate whether or not it'd be worth it to sacrifice close to 2m gil of Allagan furniture by taking Chao out of my current FC.

Dear petulant WHM in Keeper with a stupid name, I'm not entirely sure what you meant by "ADDDS dps", but given the ignorance you displayed after Einhander, I think you wanted me and the bard to kill the fuel tanks? You can't fucking do that, you ignorant twit, all you can do is knock them away from the boss, which I was doing, which any member of the party can do, and in which your sorry ass certainly wasn't. And then you vote dismiss on the grounds of offline both the bard and me? Bitch you're lucky I wasn't faster to get to the vote dismiss option once you kicked the bard, you and your cuntflap tank. Though I doubt anything will come of it, I hope a GM eats your ass for being a petulant twit. Signed, The Timesnatcher Addendum: Indeed, there must be something in the water.

[Follow-on to the RP battle from last Monday.] The scene outside of the Vylbrand Academy, no more than a hundred fulms from the building’s entrance, was nothing short of a massacre. Centered in a rough circle around a lamp post lay scattered half a dozen combatants. Closest to the Academy, a largely-intact Garlean Vanguard slumped in a smoking heap, arcs of electricity still sparking across its shell. A few paces away and to the left of the machine, a highlander in an imperial uniform sat slumped against a rock, positioned as though overlooking the carnage. Burns and explosive trauma on the body’s left side indicated the cause of his death, but the pattern of blood and drag marks across the cobbled path suggested that the explosion hadn’t immediately spelled his doom. The apparent epicenter of the explosion that had marked that man’s death was at the base of the lamp post in the area, signified not only by the warped and twisted metal of the post bent in half from the explosive force, but by a crater a fulm across and six ilms deep. Small, burnt chunks of flesh scattered about the area suggested that a body had been used to try and smother the blast, unsuccessfully, and the presence of a pair of Garlean-styled short simple blades in the grass nearby supported this observation. The presence of a Garlean lance, driven point-first into the ground, suggested a third aggressor, of which no other trace could be found. Further afield, the allied toll was equally harsh. Myu laid crumpled in a heap several fulms away from the blast point, her right arm severed from her body. If ever there had been any doubt as to the mechanical nature of her being, the wires trailing from her body and severed limb, as well as the clear fluid leaking from her injuries in place of blood would put those doubts to rest. Crumpled plating across her body indicated that she had taken the brunt of the blast, and smoke rising from her frame pointed to some sort of high-energy attack that had overloaded her systems. A dozen fulms past Myu, Satomi sprawled at the edge of the cobbled street. Blood leaked slowly from a puncture wound in her leg, but aside from some bruising and scorched clothes, she otherwise showed no external injuries. Situated between the two and off to the side, Chao laid with her legs tucked up beneath her in a pool of her own blood, though her left leg rested at an unnatural angle. Burns and tears permeated her battlesuit, the chest armoring caved in by some extreme force. A Garlean pistol rested just beyond her fingers, dropped when she’d lost consciousness. This had been the scene happened upon by Vylbrand Academy member Dryce Pearlfinder, the aftermath of another assassination attempt. Acting quickly, she and several others were quick to move their injured into the infirmary. Satomi, her injuries the lightest, was the first to recover, administering aid to herself before turning her attentions to Chao. The magitek prodigy’s broken ribs and leg were tended to quickly, and various antidotes and neutralizers were administered to stave off the debilitating effects of the ceruleum poisoning and flush it out of her system. The worst, it seemed, was over. Four bells later, however, the nightmare truly began.

A Tuesday before 9 EST I can definitely do. Th....sorry, just saw a gaggle of Y' folk standing around outside Horizon that distracted me. Tuesday before 9EST is good. The rest of the potentials would really have to be on a case-by-case basis.

Funny you should mention that. Chao's going to be developing Ember Celica for herself in the near future here.

I used 'real steel' as a colorful descriptor, I've no actual idea.