USH'S MATRIX GAME 2006 FOURTH ASSIGNMENT (COMBAT)- 'The Real'

"Holy crap," responds Hawk. "So are you."

Once he gets up out of the hatch he helps Fire up.

"What happened to the Shez? And where are we?"

"Ship's fine," says Dallas.

A supporting strut falls down behind him making an almighty noise.

"Kinda."

"How 'kinda'?" He looks at their surroundings.

You were trapped in the galley. Which had kinda merged into the canteen. Like... a ganteen.

Ship doesn't look good.

"She'll hold," says Dallas. he looks tired, and rubs his eyes. "You'd better come and help out."

"A shame, really," Melis says, maneuvering past the scrapmetal Sentinels that surround the ship. "Percy was a good ship. Too bad I didn't serve on it longer..."

"Right. You found anyone else?"

"Oh hey," says Dallas, "it's all one big party back here."

He leads you back to the broadcast area, where all yuo can hear is a loud sawing noise. Dallas is liming severaly, and one of his arms is not moving.

Sequel, using a tool, is trying to cut through another column, upon which Burn is impaled through the midriff

"You know, I'm not really sure this is actually going to make him any better," says Sequel.

"Yeah, well," says Dallas. He turns to Fire.

"Err... get to the Operator's desk, would you? See if you can raise the others."

"Oh, holy shit..." Hawk gasps sharply at the sight of Burn and fights the urge to vomit.

"What can I do, Captain?"

I am not continuing Melis' experiences at this point because I am afraid we have a serious issue.

Team Percy, sadly, did not submit a finalised plan. And there was a severe communications breakdown between Cloud and Lana on what we had.

I am afraid- as far as I can possibly interpret the rules- this leaves them both dead.

...

Gah...what?

No way of rectifying this?

Well, what can I say? I did give a lot of time for people to submit final plans. What we ended up getting from the Percy is more or less useless. And we can't go back in time.

The situation absolutely says that the broadcast area was left undefended. But the Philo path cannot pay for your errors- Combat Path players have to die instead.

Percy was in the most dire of situations after several notable mistakes; there are only so many I can let go.

Damn...

Melis still wants to at least find their bodies and find Marduk.

Well, that's the other thing- tragic as it would be, I would kill Marduk as part of the failure and spare the players. But there's absolutely no way he could have been there to face the music because no-one else can fly and it was specified he should keep on doing so.

All because I didn't notice one thing and didn't spell out everything to the letter and put down precisely what was in my mind, and wasn't even aware until about 10 minutes ago that there was uncertainty about the plan.

Well, I've got nothing else to say. Have fun, guys.

I'm sorry, Lana. I'd take your place if I could.

So...what now?

Ahh, I dunno.

Lemme think it over, Killing characters is never wanted except if set-up in a dramatic fashion, but on the other hand of the rules of fighting in a specified high-risk scenario have no bite, you kinda render part of the point of the game irrelevant.

I'll think about it.

Think hard. San and Cloud rarely slip up...

I take it that Ares isn't waking up any time soon?

Well, unfortunately, slip-ups were made.

There should not be anyone singled out on this, btw. The whole Percy crew had a collective responsibility for things.