Forums of the Coast

November 17th:

Just as the sun sets over the horizon and a tired Shigeru, after overseeing the construction work today, returns to deal with matters within his own temporary workshop, he heard two hard knocks on his door. Before he even had time to react, the door swung open and someone unexpected rushed in with radiating enthusiasm.

---It was that cat woman again.

"Rise and be honored by the presence of my exalted----" the cat that sat on top of Hiiraga Tsunami's head didn't get a chance to finish before she smacked it, hand-chop style. "---Her exalted highness, here to aid the research of struggling lesser mortals!"

Hiiraga didn't say another thing as she walked straight to Shigeru's table and slapped down several sheets of coarse paper: a blueprint of some weapon, full of notes jotted in scrawny writing with question marks --- probably the results of her research. A moment later she took out a shiny, cylindrical weapon from the extradimensional space of her belt and put it on the table as well, about arm's length long and with a wide, rifled barrel and a latched breech on the back.

"Tougou had to get this for us, you insufferably useless errant-minion! Behold the sight of the real Tulip#1-B superior-breechloading-hand-culverin-cannon-" The cat gave another yelp and finally shut up as Hiiraga smacked it again. Her response however, came as simple as it gets:

"What he said."

With Shigeru's existing research, he already know all the existing problems with rifling, breechloaded firing, and percussion caps... a working model might accelerate what remains greatly, once he has time again.

Shigeru looked up from examining the latest musket to come off of his steampunk assembly line and had barely enough time to get it off the table before Hiiraga slapped down the blueprints.

His eyes went wide as he looked at the papers, and wider still when she pulled out the cannon. "Tougou got their hands on this? Did they get the some of the ammunition too?"

Shigeru starts making scribbles on how to infuse his explosive bombs with this strange black napalm he is considering for Rainer's flamethrower.

Shigeru quickly examines the explosive round, and dismisses it as underpowered compared to what he can make already. "Innovative, but weak. I could definitely upgrade that design into something that could put out some serious damage. Have a look at these," he says, pulling out several of his new rifle grenades. "Explosive, Incendiary, Force, and Water - for putting out fires, knocking people over, and knocking people out."
(Explosive is Standard Bomb, Incendiary is Explosive Bomb)

"Those metal cartridges are impressive though...combined with breechloading it speeds up reloading incredibly...And grapeshot rounds would be so much easier than carrying bags of pellets to hand-load blunderbusses...I wonder what they're using for percussion caps..." Shigeru starts examining the solid shot.

Hiiraga shrugged. "Maybe. But this is also just a mass production model. We'd have to see what she uses herself." She picks up a 'force' grenade anyways, looking quite intrigued by it, and more so than her voice reveals anyhow.

"Interested in the force grenades?" Shigeru asks. "They don't dish out as much damage as the others, but their ability to knock targets over proved quite useful against a bunch of oni recently."