Chose your own adventure: Ranger’s Battle

Tech clutches the talisman in her hand.

She looks up as you approach and puts it away in her pocket. She’s put away most of her gear and is still working on some of the take out that Bruiser had brought to the camp earlier in the night.

Ranger’s rifle is sitting beside her on the ground. The barrel of the rifle looks like it had been melted after being fired so many times during the fight up from the fissure.

“They’re all so stupid,” Tech says. “Look at the way they treat their weapons, like they’re just tools!”

She pulls out an impressive looking multitool and thrusts it into your hand. She looks at you and then down at the tool, and then back at you.

“Do you know what that is?”

You shake your head unsure what to say.

“It’s what has kept me alive this entire time,” says Tech grabbing it out of your hand. “This multitool is the only thing I had manage to hide from the demons when they captured me. It’s not a rifle, it’s not an axe, and it’s not an oversized pair of swords. It’s not a laser blaster or a sniper rifle, but a tool for mending and creating.”

She flips it around in her hand and pulls out an array of tools. They seem to fade in and out from the small rectangular platform. It’s almost impossible the number of tools that are seemingly inside of the little device.

She takes one of the tools and places it inside of the barrel of the rifle.

“We’re under a lot of pressure in the academy to learn how to fix things on the fly and how to work with the materials we have on the battlefield,” Tech says. “We’re told that if a rifle is damaged or a sword is broken that we should throw it away and simply make another one.”

She flicks her hand open and holds it out in front of her. A small light appears in her palm and a it beings to grow. In a few moments the light has transformed into a rifle that’s an almost exact replica of Ranger’s.

“Ostensibly, it’s the same rifle,” she says hefting it. “I doubt Ranger would want it though. She could feel a different power signature in it. Mine.”

The rifle lights up and disappears.

The device inside of the barrel buzzes and tech pulls it out. The rifle is fixed and Tech puts it down on the ground beside her before picking up one of Warrior’s swords, but struggles to get it into her lap.

“I can recreate them too,” she says motioning over to the others. “I can make pretty much anything using my powers, but it just wouldn’t be the same. I can recreate their bodies and their weapons, but not their minds or experiences. It would be like bringing them back down to level one.”

She places a hand over a chipped section of the sword and brushes a finger against it. Her multitool changes again and the chip is repaired.

“I’ve been given the power to create life,” she says with a chuckle. “It would have been so easy to have just recreated Soldier inside of my cell and gotten him to rip through the door, but he wouldn’t be the same. He’d be just a tool without thought or memory or a predilection to like cute cat videos.”

As if on cue, Solider chuckles somewhere in the distance. Tech takes out the talisman from her pocket and holds it in her hand.

“We were so close to losing him,” she says. She pats you on the arm. “Let’s keep making good decisions, eh?”

You continue to talk late into the night before deciding to get some sleep.

Get some rest

— Page 32 —

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