Background: Hans grew up in a small Dwarven village. As he grew up, Hans quickly showed an aptitude for all things mechanical, and for doing things with them that could only be described as magical, One day when Hans was busy working in his workshop, the Hammers, an armored mercenary company, came through the village and sold Hans on the excitement of being a mercenary.
Once he had spent a few weeks with the Hammers, Hans started to notice some behaviors that he did not like. The company members were taking liberties with the ladies that were not offered in the villages that they stopped for supplies. Hans started keeping to himself, hiding amongst all of the repairs that were needed. He knew that he wouldn't fit in back in his old village, and had to find somewhere else to call home. Over the months, he withdrew even more, doing the minimum that he was paid to do, and driving everybody away with his sullen behavior. The only reason they kept him on was that he could fix things that nobody else could, and faster than they believed he should be able to.
Eventually, he heard of Castle Refuge, and one night when they were a couple days walk from the castle, he made his way to the castle. When he got to the castle, however, he started to wonder if they would take him in. He started talking to the recruiters for the Black Company and found a place that more suited his temperament.
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Hans had been planning this for weeks now. This was the perfect time… and he couldn’t take it anymore.
The Hammers were a mechanized mercenary group; known for their robot vehicles. They were very skilled and knowledgeable. Over his time with them, however, he had discovered that their… lets call it customer relations and community outreach… was less than stellar. In fact, it was deplorable. They stole from towns that they encountered along the way, they betrayed their employers if offered enough credits, and they found entertainment with unwilling participants. Hans himself had never participated in any of it. He never spent time with the others in the company; instead choosing to surround himself with the machines, but now, he could no longer turn a blind eye to their activities. He had found an impressionable DB. Alecto, their newest recruit. A blank slate. She needed to be taken away from this place before they corrupted her. Castle Refuge was only a short distance away. They may not accept him due to his connections with the Hammers, but Alecto needed to be taken away from them.
Knowing which machines would be put on watch tonight, he had scheduled some maintenance on their sensor suite. The others, well, he introduced some technical difficulties into their control systems. If they tried to get the robots to walk tonight, they would just sit down and would take hours to get moving again. The Hammers had gotten used to Hans’s meticulous work, and had gotten into the habit of depending on their robots for everything. They no longer used unembarked watchmen to assist the robot pilots in guard duty.
Hans grabbed Alecto on the way. They had discussed the possibility of this escape over the last couple days. Her questions revealed that she was not happy with the Hammers, but Hans knew that they wouldn’t let her just quit. For that matter, he knew that he would never be allowed to quit. They would hunt down any “Deserters”. Disabling the robots was the only way to escape. Hopefully a couple others who were not happy with the Hammers would take the opportunity to leave too. Activating his Quantum Resonance Translocator, they were able to get past a good distance away before they were even discovered to be missing.
Quickly, they discovered the work he did on the sensors of the robots on guard duty. They fired up the TR-001’s. Their BIG guns. They were out for blood. The floodlights came on as it stood up. When the pilots tried to get it to walk in order to get in range to blow them out of existence, the robots just sat down and froze in position. Their loudspeakers then kicked in at full volume with Hans’s final message to them.
“You are an armored company. You have just pissed off your BEST technician and repairman. Now you just tried to send out the same robots that he has been maintaining for you after him. It would take a special type of STUPID for him to not make sure that those same robots could not be sent after him. It should take Gregory most of the night to get the first of the robots working again, and by then we should be long gone. If I see you again, I will get creative with what I will do to your precious robots and leave them so that there is no way that Gregory will every get them working again. You don’t know all of my tricks. You don’t want to.”
Off in the distance, Hans smirking at Alecto indicated a direction. “In that way is Castle Refuge. They will take us in and help us. The Hammers won’t be bothering us for a while, but when they do find us again, I want to have some friends at our backs. Lets go.”
Victory.
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Hans thought of how much things have changed in the last couple years...
He had been with the Hammers for a few months now, and he was now starting to see holes in their stories and sales pitch to get him to join them. “Join us for a life of excitement, good pay, and a chance to see more of the world than just your little village.”
Sure he got to see more of the world than his village, and there were periods of excitement even in the maintenance department. The pay was good too, but it seemed that they had just recently sold out their most recent employer to the people they were supposed to be protecting them from. Also, while they were “protecting” the town, he had heard stories of some of the mercenaries taking advantage of women in the town, with the officers just laughing about it.
This was not what he wanted to be associated with. There was a problem; nobody was allowed to leave the Hammers, except as a corpse. Even those who were too injured to help were put into a cyborg body with a kill switch and thrown back into combat. They had even done this to a couple psychics and a mage. They also aggressively hunted down any deserters and killed them.
It would take planning, the right time, and luck on his side to leave the Hammers and survive. If he could find another like-minded member of the company, it would help things, but if he tried to recruit the wrong person, he could find himself beaten as an example, turned into a cyborg, or even put in front of a firing squad as an example. Maybe it would be best to just watch, wait, and plan for when a good opportunity came to him to go and escape by himself.
Time to back to repairing the TR-001’s from the damage they received from the last coalition patrol they had encountered.
...Now back in the present, Hans realized the irony. He stood accused of doing the very sort of activities that he left the Hammers for doing. Now wasn't that a kick in the pants!
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Hans spends most of an hour Riding the Group Mind with his Quantum Resonance Re-Harmonizer, trying to find the booster. He does find signs of the booster with the antenna sticking out of the cliff wall, a couple hundred feet up. After a couple minutes scouting through the cliff wall, Hans finds the booster unit and the control room, manned by a couple of technicians.
After a quick planning session with Watson, Hans teleports them up to the room, surprising the technicians, and putting them to sleep with his Subharmonic Slumber Inducer before they even notice the intruders. After frying the locks on the heavy security doors while not setting off any alarms, Hans watches the cameras to warn them of any response, while Watson sits down and starts into the computer system. A couple minutes later, before a response from any of Geist’s forces, Watson declares them done. After quickly disabling the computer interface that would allow someone to override Watson’s work, Hans teleports himself, Watson, and the technicians down to the ground at the base of the cliff. Now all there was to do was to meld into the crowd and make their way back to the others.
It was a textbook perfect operation. No casualties, no alarms. In a few minutes the technicians would wake up, but even they would have no idea how they came to be at the base of the cliff. Just another strange and mysterious adventure in the city of Gloom.
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"As I recently said to a Black Cat Demon , 'You want Legendary, you should see my Father and what he does'."
**About 30 Years ago in a mountain pass in Shaintar not far from Charr**
Looking down from the wall at the pass he and his clansmen were guarding, Zaemon Greuber could only hope for a miracle. The pass was filled with creatures of Flame as far as the eye could see. There were even a few Gargoyles flying above, only kept back by crossbow fire and the occasional shot from the special Grapeshot Cannons he had devised to shoot them down. Even if EVERY single bolt they had in their inventory KILLED one of those creatures, they would still have to deal with over half of the creatures.
Fortunately, the Dwarven made wall they were guarding could take a lot of punishment. It was made from the hardest stone from deep within the mountains. It was designed and built to withstand anything and everything that creatures like this could throw at it. Unfortunately, it was not designed to withstand THIS MANY. They would smash themselves against it, dying by the scores, by the hundreds, by the thousands. Eventually they would build a ramp of their own corpses and crest over the wall and force the by then tired Dwarves, maybe a couple hundred in number, to fight the remaining demons of which there was sure to be over a thousand left. It would take a miracle to drive off the demons and other creatures. Thankfully their leader had been overconfident and as laid up due to a sniper's crossbow bolt at the start of the battle. Without that bit of luck, not even a miracle would save them.
Thankfully Zaemon Greuber had a secret weapon. It was his wife and love, Greteel, a Dwarven High Priestess. Their hope was that the energy from her Faith could be channelled through a device that he had made that would banish any Demons or any other nearby Creatures of Flame from this plane of existence and back to that which spawned their type. It was of an untried device, but it was their best chance. The trouble was that in it did not have the longest range. In order for it to work well enough to throw back the assault, their foes had to be right among them. That meant holding back the creatures as his clansmen made an orderly withdrawal back to the device to have the best chance of it working well enough for them to defeat the horde. Only then would they be sure that the rest of their clansmen back in the mountains would be safe from this invasion. It would cost lives, many Dwarven lives for them to slowly draw the remaining foes close enough to the device to send them away. Their sacrifice, however, should... no WOULD insure the survival of their clan.
The battle want as Zaemon predicted. Demon after demon, creature after creature. They all kept on pushing forward. If their leader was healthy, he would have had a better plan, but left on their own, the creatures kept pushing forward... smothering and killing their cohorts... then the were in turned pushed and smothered.... until slowly the pile of corpses started to climb up the wall.
The Dwarves chose their shots wisely. They shot any creatures that seemed smarter and were calling out any orders other than to push forward. Soon these smarter ones realized that it would be smarter not to call attention to themselves and instead hang back as much as they could so as not to be crushed and instead do the crushing and perhaps even be one of the ones to climb onto the wall and engage the Dwarves... though better not to be one of that first wave either. Even these smart minions could not see anything except crushing the Dwarves with wave upon wave upon wave of foes until at last they were buried under bodies and defeated.
The Dwarves were stoic, and held the line even as the wall was crested. The last bolts available were shot from the crossbows, taking down the first wave. There were yet more waves. The Dwarves held their line as they slowly gave ground to draw the creatures in... closer and closer to Zaemon's device. One by one, Dwarves fell under the onslaught, but they held their line as the orderly withdrew back to the device. Finally Zaemon and Greteel activated the device.
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"As you all know, the Dwarven Lands were saved that day. Everyone thought that Zaemon Greuber and his fellow Dwarves had perished to the last. I am Zaemon's son, and I am 26 years old. I can tell you they survived. What all happened to Zaemon Greuber and the rest... well that will be a tale for another day."