Cloud is Dead (Final Fantasy VII CYOA)

[Baltika9]

C, let's take them by surprise.

 

[a bear named spigot]

B

no one suspects the direct approach.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Flopping to C. It's probably quicker.

 

[Random]

Flopping to C. It's probably quicker.

I didn't explicitly elaborate on this in the post, but in terms of speed the order goes:

Emergency staircase -> the normal stairs -> the elevator shaft emergency ladder

 

[Zero Credibility]

Ladder is slowest? I understand it could be slower than a direct staircase, but slower than the normal staircase "located in different places from floor to floor"?

Or is it the slowest because of our burns?

 

[Random]

Ladder is slowest? I understand it could be slower than a direct staircase, but slower than the normal staircase "located in different places from floor to floor"?

Or is it the slowest because of our burns?

Well, I would assume that the ladder is the slowest no matter what since you can still sprint across each floor and jump up multiple steps at a time with the normal stairs even if they aren't a direct staircase and are scattered around. You're stuck at a snail's pace with the ladder. This is just a guesstimation.

Flesh wounds won't impede or hinder you in any way, just be an irritant that causes your character to lose focus.

 

[GreyViper]

A for me. Would be ironic to reach the floor only to be gunned down.

 

[Zero Credibility]

Well, I would assume that the ladder is the slowest no matter what since you can still sprint across each floor and jump up multiple steps at a time with the normal stairs even if they aren't a direct staircase and are scattered around. You're stuck at a snail's pace with the ladder. This is just a guesstimation.

Well, I can't say I wouldn't guessed otherwise - you only need to climb a few meters to cross a single floor, and any healthy person can climb reasonably quickly. You shouldn't need more than 10 to 15 seconds to clear a floor, and possibly significantly less with some training. That's why I asked if a hand injury is a problem - that could make climbing a very long vertical ladder at any reasonable speed just too risky. Oh well.

 

[Random]

Well, I can't say I wouldn't guessed otherwise - you only need to climb a few meters to cross a single floor, and any healthy person can climb reasonably quickly. You shouldn't need more than 10 to 15 seconds to clear a floor, and possibly significantly less with some training. That's why I asked if a hand injury is a problem - that could make climbing a very long vertical ladder at any reasonable speed just too risky. Oh well.

I'll meet you in the middle and have the ladder and the stairs take the same amount of time. Thirty minutes till I update, at any rate.

 

[Zero Credibility]

Eh, doesn't matter since we are going on the emergency staircase anyway (that's not going to end well). But you really should give people more time to put their votes and get some discuss going once if we clear the prologue. With updates this quick there is a risk of people missing out on this LP.

 

[Night Goat]

Seeing as how one of them is missing an arm and another has an implausibly huge sword, I doubt they'll be taking the ladder. So, I vote for C.

Edit: switching mine to D.

 

[Zero Credibility]

Of course, what we should have voted is to take the emergency stairs to quickly cover the first 30 or 40-something floors that we know are safe and then switch to another route if necessary to bypass them.

Ok, voting for this one if it's not too late already - take the emergency stairs first, later switch to ladder or normal stairs.

 

[Jester]

vote C

Of course, what we should have voted is to take the emergency stairs to quickly cover the first 30 or 40-something floors that we know are safe and then switch to another route if necessary to bypass them.

Good point lets make it D.

Vote D

 

[oscar]

D

 

[Random]

Well in light of the recent influx of votes and ideas, I'll give you another hour to settle in. As it is, the As have it with four votes. D has three votes. C has three votes. B has one vote. Poor B.

I do want to give everyone a chance to participate, but I also want to keep things moving at a steady pace.

 

[Random Word]

D

 

[Random]

There is a tie, so I'll break it with a coin toss. It landed in favor of D, so that's the winning option.

Prologue Redux Part V

You quickly decide to do a mix of the quickest option and the safest option. You'll climb the emergency staircase until the 34th floor and then hop into the elevator shaft for the rest. The question is if you can catch up with the enemy. Considering they have to fight, you have decent odds overall, you wager. You run to the emergency staircase entrance and start the long climb.

It's about five minutes later when you reach the 34th floor, sweating profusely and pretty tired already, and you enter it. You find that the enemy has already long since torn the whole place apart, and more of your comrades lay slaughtered. You sprint for the elevator, climbing into it and pushing open the access hatch to the shaft on top of the elevator. You climb through it and close it behind you, glancing upwards at the long climb to the 59th floor. It's hard to see if there's anything way up there. You hop onto the emergency ladder and just start climbing upwards as fast as you can safely go. The question remains of whether you have been fast enough. You'd like to climb faster, but you're already exhausted and you might slip if you try that.

As you climb up, you can hear gunshots and explosions getting louder. By your reckoning, you're getting closer to where the enemy is, and they don't sound like they're at the 59th floor yet. Soon enough the noise is so loud you can barely hear yourself, let alone anything else. The fighting seems to be climbing as well, but much more slowly than the rate you're going. You should be able to get to the top before they do. A few minutes of climbing later, you hear a clanging noise echo through the shaft, like someone struck metal against metal. It was barely loud enough to be audible against all of the sounds of battle. It came from above you. You glance upward and stop climbing, freezing. You can only pray that whatever that was, was either an ally, or you haven't been detected yet. When your eyes register what's there in the darkness, you almost let go right there. You're looking at the shapely rear of the brunette girl roughly five stories above you. She has one leg up and hooked over a rung, and her other leg is straight, her foot resting on the normal rung for her height. She is holding onto the ladder as if she's been waiting there a while. Of course, as you noted earlier, her choice in wardrobe for an extreme operation like this was bizarre - wearing a scandalously short miniskirt that highlights her... "assets". In this particular situation, with the compromising position she was in, it also gave you a bird's-eye view of what lay under it. White. Nice. Wait, no, now's not the time to be appreciating a lady. She's the enemy, too. Shame on you!

Luckily, it seems that all of the noise of the battle had covered up the noise of your own climbing, and she did not know you were there. She slams her armored elbow against the wall again. She's clearly upset about something. She's already at the top of the shaft, waiting beside the Floor 59 doors and glancing at her phone. It seems that the enemy party has a plan. You still hear the gunshots from beneath you. You briefly wonder what it is, but it's fairly obvious by this point. They split up to take different routes up, for a multi-pronged assault on floor 59. You bet the ex-SOLDIER guy is the one fighting his way up floor by floor, and the huge black guy with the gun arm might be using the emergency staircase. You're glad you didn't try those two routes. That means that this chick and the black guy might be planning to run one of the oldest tricks in the book, attacking the enemy from behind while they're focused on one particular angle of attack. By the way she was angrily pounding the buttons on the phone, there might be some sort of communication problem between her and the others. No service on Floor 59, you guess.

Your eyes linger on the lady for a while, both to warily watch her and hope she doesn't bother looking down where she'd easily spot you, and because it is hard not to. As fun as it is to oogle her ass, the nagging voice in the back of your head tells you that she's going to check below herself eventually and you'll be screwed. You have to figure out something to do here. Based on what you've seen, she's dangerous as hell in close range and she's got a fire materia for long range. Because of her position on the ladder, just pulling her off of it is not happening. Your odds don't seem great, but you have the surprise advantage. Surely there's something you can do?

What do you do?

A) [Stealth][Balls of Steel] Try to sneak up on her and hold her up with your pistol
B) [Bluff][Balls of Steel] Open up a conversation and tell her about the display vehicle keys you have. Tell her to surrender or toss the keys down the elevator shaft.
C) [Marksmanship][Coward][Cold-Blooded] Raise your pistol and shoot her without giving her a chance
D) [Hand-to-Hand][Balls of Steel] Use your nightstick to leverage her into an awkward position, hanging by just her knee, and when she's off balance, force her to surrender
E) [Observation][Stealth][Pervert] Sneak closer but don't do anything; enjoy the view
F) Other

I'm going to give this at least twelve hours and until 11 voters vote.

Character Sheet

Spoiler

Name: Marcus "Maverick" Westford
Class: Ranger
Profession: First Lieutenant of the Shinra Peacekeeping Corps
Age: 23
Inner Nature: X
Dominant Inner Nature: Coward
Status: Flesh Wounds (minor electricity burns)

Characteristics:
Strength 4 Agility 7
Tenacity 4 Intelligence 7

Skills:
Marksmanship Lvl. 2
Hand-to-Hand Lvl. 1, Athletics Lvl. 1, Discipline Lvl. 1, Fieldcraft Lvl. 1, Bluff Lvl. 1, Stealth Lvl. 1, Academics Lvl. 1, Observation Lvl. 1, Electronics Lvl. 1, Computer Use Lvl. 1

Inventory: SM-20A3 Assault Rifle, three clips of 7.62mm ammunition, SM-3 Service Pistol, three clips of 9mm ammunition, Nightstick, Shinra Light Combat Armor Helmet, civilian casual clothes, Shinra Employee ID Card, Jupiter Energy Bar, Pocket Knife, Spearmint Gum, Portable Handheld System, Wallet w/ 20,000 Gil, keys to display vehicles

 

[Night Goat]

D. We have an impressive nightstick, let's put it to use.

 

[Kz3r0]

C) [Marksmanship][Coward][Cold-Blooded] Raise your pistol and shoot her without giving her a chance

 

[Baltika9]

E is so damn lulzy, but I'll go with B, we hold an advantage and something tells me she won't die just like that.

 

[Jester]

Not sure if we can get her in one go. Random how lethal are bullets in this setting? You roll with FF7 non lethal ones or RL ones?

 

[Gondolin]

We are level 2 in Marksmanship. Shoot her.

 

[Random]

Not sure if we can get her in one go. Random how lethal are bullets in this setting? You roll with FF7 non lethal ones or RL ones?

I figured this would probably come up. This is how I'm rolling:

In FFVII there is a very large gap between gameplay and story. In the gameplay, the first two enemies in the game, a pair of bottom tier Shinra grunts, fire a spray of bullets out of their submachine guns and deal about a 20th of Cloud's health in damage. As the game progresses, later Shinra grunts somehow, and for no discernible reason aside from the different color of their armor, deal thousands of points of damage despite using the same exact guns and still being ordinary humans.

In the story, it behaves like real life. A single well-placed bullet will kill just about any person, even a SOLDIER 1st Class. Getting shot in the head or the heart is game over even if you are genetically enhanced and Mako enhanced. Bullets were also mankind's first choice of defense against monsters. Basically, even despite supersoldiers, magic, and horrific monsters existing, bullets remain as deadly as ever and for good reason. That's why Barret and Vincent are relevant as members of the party. On the other hand, in the story, a SOLDIER is someone who, at the bare minimum, at their weakest, as a mere 3rd Class, can dodge and block a full stream of bullets from several enemies at once. Of course, this means that all canonically badass characters who aren't even SOLDIERs can be assumed to have ways of dealing with bullets, otherwise they would have died a long time ago.

Because this is a CYOA and not a PnP RPG, we're working on story logic, rather than having a sliding scale of derpitude with the gameplay logic. HP is an abstraction that doesn't work so well in pure story format. Therefore, bullets are still very viable as a weapon and deadly even against SOLDIERs. If you can make it stick, that is.

 

[Elfberserker]

D.
We have stealth skills and nice agility, I bet that we have decent chance to sneak up on her. If we succeed we have a prisoner, which gave us use something to use against ex-soldier and the big guy. Besides we have impressive nightstick, let's use it.

 

[Imperator]

C)