Quoted By:
Not wanting to tempt an attack before you are ready, you make a very deliberate decision to approach the pocket door from along the wall, in the hopes of staying out of the drone’s sight and so precluding yourself against an attack. By doing this, you are able to get right up to the mechanism without any issues – until you try to get your spear into a thrusting position. Perhaps it is because the spear is long and thin, like a worm. Perhaps you were moving more than you thought you were. Hell, for all you know, the drone could have been baiting <span class="mu-i">you</span>, deliberately not moving or responding when it could in a bid to get you to expose yourself.
Now, obviously, that cannot be case here. Setting aside how difficult it is to program effective and reliable deceptive behavior – this drone is designed to target fucking conduit worms. It doesn’t need to deceive anything or anyone to do its job. No, what happened here is that you were a clumsy fucking idiot.
As the drone starts shaking violently again and shifting from the center of the hallway towards the door you have a split second to decide whether to bail on your position, to attempt to bring your spear to bear, or to forget the spear and just try to get it with the door. Suddenly feeling indecisive and unsure, you throw yourself into position, figuring that regardless to what is the right choice here, with no time to think about it you are best served by following your existing plan of action.
You seat the spear, anchor yourself in the doorway using your boots, then you use the booster on your suit to accelerate your thrust. As it was before, the blow is a glancing one, but the impact clearly changes the drone’s strategy. The forward-facing legs that were retracted into the bale pop out, and begin to extend forward as probes, while the rest of the legs do the best they can to keep the drone centered and stable as it continues to shudder and shake violently. Unanchoring yourself from the floor, you let go of your spear, relying on the securing wrap to keep it with you, and you throw yourself at the pocket mechanism. Steadying yourself against the wall with one hand, you crank the mechanism.
As soon as the door begins to move, the drone’s strategy changes again – and it stops shaking again immediately, no doubt trying to reduce the risk of getting snagged in what must appear to it to be an unstable environment. But the bale is still moving towards the door, with legs extending into the room. Equal parts encouraged and alarmed, you crank all the faster, and somehow manage to get the door closed on a few of the probing legs.
Yet it is not enough. As soon as the door makes contact with the legs, they stopped extending and rapidly began to retract. And when you got the door nearly closed on the tips of the legs, the drone managed to wrench them out, even with you pulling on the cheater with all the strength that you can muster.
