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A long time ago I was king of the Net. There was nowhere I couldn't go, nothing I couldn't do.

Then I fell in with the wrong crowd.

Wendy.

I thought I could help her.

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But Wendy's gone now, and a machine in my head makes me do whatever Julia Rose tells me to do.

They don't let me dive anymore. I think she still has my rig. I tried to build another one, but it's hard to concentrate on anything except my job.

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Right now my job is gofer work, ferrying black-market circuitry to her shareholders in the New American Republic. She loves dangling me like this. Extended punishment for the sin of crossing her. Not like I'm mad at her. It's not her fault she's a sociopath.

They pat BB down, but neither of us is packing. BB's arms could probably rip one of these greenshirts apart, but on the surface they look like meat and the NAR doesn't dole out subdermal imagers to thugs like these.

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The cowboy in chief pops it open and scans the bar codes affixed to the row of unopened plastic cases, then grunts and snaps it closed again.

"Good enough," he drawls.

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I feel an empty space where the barrel of a machine pistol was digging into my back as the others turn in unison.

"Tell Julia Rose to send some prettier girls out to meet us next time," he says to me, but then an icepick in my brain makes the world lose all definition for a second and I reel forward as my legs give out.

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What the -

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BB rubs his head but his training doesn't let him waste breath asking what just happened when the afterimage is splayed all over the plastic floor.

Then my phone rings and it's a voice I shouldn't be able to hear.

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"Hi Jack. Miss me?"

Wendy.


What now, Jack?

>>31898966
Wendy, you bitch! You owe me five bucks!

Rolled 7

>>31898966
Man, I never finished reading BLOCKOUT, so this'll be fun.

"How did you get this number?"

>>31898966

No point sticking around.

Grab the goods, walk out now. Keep talking.

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>>31899009
>>31899043
>>31899097

"We're supposed to be friends, Jack!" She says this like she didn't threaten to shoot me at least once. Everything that's happened to me since Friskie's is because of her. But she's supposed to be dead.

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I motion for BB to grab the case. He grabs a heater on his own, inspects it for a moment and reloads it with a sneer. "Cheap NAR knockoffs," he says, more to the cowboy in chief than to me.

"Where are you? How did you get this n-" I start to ask before the voice cuts me off. "There's no time, Jack. They've got you on a schedule. They're expecting you soon and if they find you now it will all be over, but it had to be now. Just get somewhere where you can't hurt yourself."

The phone goes dead in my hand.

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The neighborhood they picked for this meeting is one of the worst parts of the blight. Dropping some atom bombs on the place would only raise the property values around here, but BB knows this area and it's full of ratholes for people who don't want to be seen.

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A tingling at the base of my spine sends a Pavlovian sensation of puking through my body, as I crash backward against the crumbling brick wall. I dig my feet in but I can barely keep myself propped up.

My leash. Can't think. Julia Rose...

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He's almost on top of me before my brain registers what I'm looking at. It's a Zaldimar cultist, a memetic zombie caught up in a spiral of ritualized murder! He senses my weakness - the machine pistol in my hand hangs like a dumbbell as the knife gleams in the glare of a passing ad-sat.

Roll a d12 and link to this post for whatever you do, Jack!

Rolled 7

>>31899884
pew pew!

Rolled 12

>>31899884
Stab him with his own knife.

Rolled 5

>>31899884
Full auto

>>31899931
Fuck yeah

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The harsh BRAAAAAP of the machine pistol cuts the dirty air but he throws himself to the side like a cat and it barely buys me time to think about how I'm going to die.

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But it's enough.

The thing in front of me makes a confused noise and a thin trail of drool catches the light as it tumbles down the butcher's apron, unable to process why I'm not dead.

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So I cut him a break.

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Then something inside me sags and comes loose, and I keep going.

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By the time BB gets the knife away from me the thing in front of me doesn't even look human anymore and my muscles are screaming for ATP and I suddenly realize that I don't know how long I was at it.

"What was that?" he asks.

>>31900596
That was the result of being a Six Million Dollar Man. Also, that bitch stuck me in all kinds of shit again. And she STILL owes me five bucks.

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I don't know what to tell him.
What now, Jack?

>>31900596
How long was I gone, man? My head. My poor head.

>>31900648
Did we have a schedule like Wendy said? Where are we meant to be?

She also said to go somewhere where we can't hurt ourselves. A shady bar would work, since I'm sure liver damage doesn't count.

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>>31900705
>>31900749

BB talks as he winds us through the blight and onto a street that hasn't been repaired since the first hovercars. "I thought you were behind me, then I heard your gun. You did not seem to hear me."

There's no sign, but from inside I can hear music from cheap speakers and the smell of vomit is a little stronger than the surrounding neighborhood. For a moment I wonder if it's dark enough to hide the blood, but then I realize the crowd probably doesn't care about black-tie protocol.

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BB's spent so much of his life dealing with the lizard brain that Nestle saddled him with, for which I am eternally grateful, since it lets me spend all my concentration tamping down the spider at the base of my spine trying to shut me down, yelling that I'm not following Julia Rose's orders. We're supposed to be on a bus heading for our squat until she calls on us again.

By now someone in the NAR knows their cowboys never made it back to the ranch, which means Julia Rose probably knows as well. Faced with the prospect of having to explain why I killed her collaborators, the decision to get blotted on carcinogenic synthehol is easy.

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Inside it's dark, which is all we can ask for.

"I will get us something to drink. Wait here," BB mutters as we pass a flickering stand-up monitor that's almost as lotek as a stone-tipped spear.

>>31901198
>>31901368
>>31901767
I'm waiting for a 'we don't serve their kind here' and for both of the.... cyborgs? Cyborgs. Waiting for both of the cyborgs to get kicked out.

>>31901825

I hate to be a putz, but I think I'm gonna have to pause the game for the night. I thought I was all right, but my energy level crashed about an hour ago and no amount of caffeine is bringing it back, and I feel bad for taking so long between posts.

If this thread is around tomorrow, I am super-excited to continue this game once I get some idea where the heck this storyline is going!

Or continuing with SX3, whatever people want.

>>31901921
Go! Sleep! And May the Fourth be with you!

>>31901921
Blockout! Blockout!

>>31901921
Live, thread!
I want to see where this is going!

LIVE DAMMIT

>>31907550
You and me both.

>>31910015
Feeling better?

>>31910632
I'll feel better once June gets here and I can stop pretending to be a morning person for a few months.

>>31910743
Teacher or student?

>>31910987
Teacher.

All right, I have a couple hours before I need to be somewhere else, (but then I might be back tonight?) so this is going to be the most disjointed episode ever.

Here we go!

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>>31901767

BB pays our rent for the next hour with the codes for the last of his time-shares, committed to lotek organic muscle memory to evade Julia Rose's snoopers. I trust his palate to pick something that won't give us bone cancer.

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I'm trying to keep my front out of public view just in case someone gets the idea that a man covered in blood might be worth telling people about, but what's really on my mind is the lotek standup monitor we passed on the way in.

They took away my rig, but even if I can't dive I can still make use of the Net. The voice that I don't want to call Wendy told us to lie low, but if the voice is the reason why I turned into an offline spree killer I need to know what's going on.

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The instant he touches me hardwired supernerves fire and the machine pistol is in my hand, but that's all me and so far I'm still in control and he's still in fewer than ten pieces.

The old freeger reeks like piss and vomit and asks for Frankbucks, one hand on my shoulder and the other digging around in his pants for what I hope to Buddha is a cardreader.

What will you do, Jack?

Rolled 4

>>31912657
Judo CHOP

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>>31912744
(sorry, had to restart my computer)

I fling one hand at him to try and knock him away, but he's quicker than I expect, and stronger too. I have just enough time to consider that maybe he's running a virtual amphetamine program before he slams me backward into the standup monitor launching a barrage of spittle at me all the while.

Roll a d12 and link to this post for whatever you do, Jack!

Rolled 10

>>31913058
Poke him in the eyes! If you can find them.

Rolled 3

>>31913058
>Piss off old man
Large, violent movements aimed more to scare than injure. Maybe a kick in the crotch

Rolled 12

>>31913058
No, no; JUDO chop!

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I think I saw this in an old 2-D once. Wherever it's from it works and the freeger launches himself backward-

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>>31913221

This one's all me.

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What now?

Rolled 8

>>31913584
Drink up, have a look at the net
Who's going to care about some drunk asshole

Rolled 4

>>31913584
Find Wendy

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>>31913760
>>31913849

The old freeger rolls around on the floor a little more and manages to find a corner to curl up in.

BB stands guard while I prop a broken chair upright and stable enough to keep my beer from spilling, and start wading through the Net.

Roll a d12 and link to this post, Jack!

Rolled 9

>>31913973

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>>31914025

"What are you looking for?" BB asks as he finishes his bottle and eyes mine. I haven't touched it but it's not like drinking them is a requirement for being here.

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I don't want to do it but I flick the screen to a different corner of the Net before BB has a chance to scan what it says. "Just thought I could find out if those cowboys made the news", I say and hate myself for lying to the only guy in the world I can count on, but I can't tell him that I just confirmed what I already know.

About a decade ago the first memetic zombies started showing up. Turned out their release was a pure accident - they had been reprogrammed in a black-ops lab that ceased to exist when the country it was housed in was bombed out of existence. The test subjects were supposedly all killed, but enough found their way onto the world market that soon after every eight-bit dictator in the world thought it was a great idea to have an army of loyal puppets. Anybody with circuitry in their head was a possible carrier.

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Unfortunately human brains aren't set up to accept code the way the houdou was laid down, and so the meme starts mutating, driven by what was already present in the meatbrain. Most of them burn out, but one strain was a roaring success. It turned its hosts into unwilling superpredators, smart enough to avoid getting caught and grouping together with other infecteds just long enough to spread the word. Corpsec claimed that they had come up with enough bleach to eliminate every pocket of outbreak, but anyone who lives in the blight knows that's a lie.

Zaldimar.

And now I've got it.

This is without a doubt the most poorly-timed episode of Lego Quest I've ever run, but at least now I have something to grab onto!

Thanks to everyone who put up with me - I love playing with you folks!

>>31914694

Thanks for running this OP, Lego Quest is really fun to read.

>>31914737
Well, then it was all worthwhile!

>>31914595
Well shit.
>>31914694
Thanks for running it. And I'm glad that we got to judo chop someone.

OH FUCK I MISSED LEGO QUEST

>>31913584
I love how BB always manages to look both pissed off and wondering how the fuck we get into so much trouble all the time whenever he's in scene.

>>31914694
Thanks for running LQ! It was fun and I really love your style for BLOCKOUT. You make the world seem so deep.
I'll be here next time, just be sure to post on the twitter in advance so I can be ready for it!

Rolled 2

LEGO QUEST FUCK YEAAAHoh it's all over. :'(

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>>31916527
That's right, I should mention that Lego Quest has a Twitter account now, so you can always be sure to hear when the next episode appears:

@EndmanOfFuturon

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>>31916527
>Thanks for running LQ! It was fun and I really love your style for BLOCKOUT. You make the world seem so deep.
I'm glad you had fun. It was pretty hard transitioning from pulp spacesassin to this setting, especially since I haven't ran BLOCKOUT since
>checks archive
>June 2012

Jesus Christ in a bucket.

>>31916742
>>31915687
Don't worry anons, I always come back sooner or later!