A deus ex machina saves you from a sadistic enemy. Do you take revenge, or leave peacefully?

Today’s thread is a sequel to this one from earlier in the week. Last time, you and 39 comrades are in a remote settlement besieged by an enemy intent on killing, cooking, and eating you, unfortunately not in that order; said enemy has already killed two-thirds of the settlement’s original population, including your best friend. Tthe 40 survivors were presented with the option sof fighting on valiantly or suiciding relatively painlessly. Butin this iteration, you are suddenly given the means to either extricate yourself and your companions from the plight without killing anybody, or to do so in a ruthless and bloody fashion. Whch do you choose?

That should be enough for the TLDR folks. People who insist on details should scroll down a little.

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Just as you’re about to make your decision whether to go Valkyrie or Kevorkian, you hear a familiar beeping. Your hyperspace cell phone – which you had thought irreparably damaged early in the siege – was in fact in self-repair mode all this time. The nanites have just finished their work–meaning you now can call for help from Rhymer Enterprises, that ethically ambiguous band of technomages and mercenaries whose CEO is, happily, fond of Dopers. Telling your comrades not to do anything rash, you grab the phone, hit the panic button, and are quickly connected to Dream Girl, formerly of the Legion of Super-Heroes, painting her fingernails while naked as she often does.

“Hi there, DoperName!” Dreamy says. “You seem to be in a spot of trouble.”

“You should know!” you reply. “My friends and I are about to be killed and eaten. Tell Skald to get over here and save our asses!”

“In the first place, the Boss does not do rescue mission himself, and even if he did, he is busy hunting humpback whales right now. Those things aren’t going to go extinct all by themselves, you know. And in the second place, I believe your enemies intend to eat you alive. Be precise okay?.”

“What the–you already know?”

“Of course I know, idiot. I’m a fucking precog. I previsioned this call two weeks ago. Unfortunately I had to wait for the call to actually happen before I could intervene, or it would have caused a paradox that would’ve ended up killing you, specifically. If you’d just popped for the bulletproof phone case so you could have called at the first sign of trouble, things would have been different. Anyway, I did have a fortnight to get ready. I’ve prepared something to enable you to save your own damn elf.”

With that Dreamy presses a button, and suddenly small metallic object6s begin flying at your body. Before you can blink twice you are wearing a suit of powered armor [del]designed by a brainwashed and weeping Tony Stark[/del] purchased at a fair price from Stark Enterprises.

“Alrighty then,” Dream Girl says once you’re suited up. “The onboard AI is set to allow you to use the armor for the next 24 hours, which should be plenty of time to extricate yourself from your current predicament. Now I’ve analyzed your tactical situation, and the bad guys have got nothing that can stand up to you. So you could just emit a ultrasonic whine that’ll knock out the freaks without killing them; that’ll leave them disabled for about six hours., during which time you can load your companions into their transports and escort them to safety. On the other hand, you’ve got repulsor rays and super-strength and rocket boots and mini-missiles and all that shit, so if you feel like avenging the 80 aid workers the bad guys already barbecued and ate, get to it.”

“What should I do?” you ask them.

“Like I care,” Dreamy replies. “Just remember that the armor will disassemble itself and return here in 24 hours. Anyway, my shift’s over, and I’m hitting the mall. Toodles!”

With that she signs off.

So what do you do? Get yourself and yours out as peacefully as possible? Go on a killing spree to avenge your buddies? Or something in between?

What, no recipes? I thought you were fighting cannibals!

Anyhoo, I voted “get out peacefully”. I can thereby preserve my self-respect and humanistic values. Besides Rhymer Enterprises will take merciless revenge anyway no matter what I do. So it’s a win-win.

Regards,
Shodan

On the assumption that this band of unmerry men, having seen my unbullet-able armor, my super sonic tech, my godly friends in high places, and my penchant for run on sentences, does not lay down their weapons and say “boy howdy, I didn’t realize there were people out there stronger than us. This changes the whole game boys. We’re joining a Shaolin temple, taking up farming, and never ever hurting another living soul so long as we all shall live,” I’m going to have to kill them so they don’t do this Reaver imitation on the next group to wander by.

Jeez, are you being paid by the word or something? :smiley:

(I survived the spiders, nyah-nyah, uh-oh) :eek:

Everybody but me gets out immediately. Once they’re safely back home, I’m wiping out the baddies to prevent them from doing unto others ever again. Then I get myself to safety and use up the rest of the fuel for the power armor doing cool flying stunts and such.

I went with “can’t leave the cannibals to attack someone else later.” Seems straightforward to me. I don’t do revenge for the sake of revenge, but I don’t want them barbecuing alive some other bunch of unlucky people. Since I can put a stop to that without risk, I will.

Of course this. Otherwise I’m shirking my duty to humanity in the name of Kantian ethics. And even as far as The Philosopher goes, given that I was already prepared to kill as many of them as possible in my final moments, it’s not going against my principles to continue with that plan - I’m just better equipped now both to do more damage, and to survive its execution.

Simply killing for the sake of revenge seems pointless. My revenge fantasies always involve a fair amount of prolonged torture.

Why? You only got rescued because you’re a Doper and had the forethought to prepay for emergency rescues. Nobody’s paying RhE to kill cannibals. Admittedly, Dreamy, on her next day off, might call some of her former teammates to stomp the bad guys on general principles, but Ultra Boy, Inferno, et al don’t kill. Buncha pussies.

I don’t write for pay any,more, but short forms are harder than long (or at least medium). With long or medium you can just throw words at yor topic without much thought; with short you have to edit.

Anyway, the first goddamn paragraph had enough info to participate.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to release the Utahraptors.

This would push me over the edge and I would kill myself before watching another bad Voyager episode.

As to the poll, Rick Grimes convinced me to end the threat before they hurt others.

Fucking Utahraptors

Legolas is on his own! I’m saving MY self.

Can I truss up and tie all of the cannibals to a rotisserie in six-hours? I have a new item for Boston Market’s menu. The other prisoners can do as they wish but hopefully at least one of them will hang around to help me make the cole-slaw.

This rescue is sexist and exists only for male fap-fantasies.

To make this even, I demand the option to have the Tenth Doctor rescue me.

Also, BBQ sauce.

  1. The Doctor and Evil!Skald are enemies. He and I will have peace when one of us is hanging from a gibbet for the sport of his own crows.

  2. How is it sexist, apart from the Dream Girl bit?Damsels can wear Stark armor too, you know,

Put me in the anti-revenge camp, but still feeling that sadistic torturing cannibals must be dealt with harshly. I don’t know that much about the structure of their army from these posts, so I might be merciful to the grunts if I know that they conscript prisoners or kids or something. But at the very least, no one with a rank of Sergeant or higher is walking off that battlefield, and no one is leaving with weapons or armor of any kind.

I don’t need a Deus Ex Machina to save me.

Don’t like those Machine Gods anyway. They’re too mechanical and literal.

This. Thanks, Oakminster, for saving me all that typing.

Revenge is bad. But teaching a lesson is not. And I am ethically required to try and stop this threat from hurting others.

I might try to avoid killing, but the equipment provided doesn’t seem to make this much of an option. And I only have 24 hours, so I can’t wait and see if my lesson holds. My only choice is to kill in significant numbers, I think.

The only other option I can think of would require being able to create some sort of natural barrier they’d have to wait until they got much more intelligent to cross. And then warn people ahead of time. But I don’t see the equipment being good enough to do this.

Well, that changes things. Can I get in contact with these people? I was assuming that, from the OP, no one else from Skald Enterprises was going to intervene, and that there wasn’t any other force out there that could intervene–at least, not that I could get to handle the issue.

First rule of warfare - know when you’re outgunned and get out and regroup.

I’d take my men and skeedaddle out of there back to headquarters, at which point I’d get reinforcements, supplies, a whole can of weaponry whoop ass, and a new battle plan. Once all that is assembled, I’d head back out there and show those scrofulous sons of alien camels who’s boss.

Something else: I knock out the baddies with the whine, load them into conveniently located prison cells onboard my ship, then fly them to the Hague.

Yes, I know I’m an idealist.

ETA: If I missed something and these guys are aliens, some sort of Intergalactic Court of Justice Against Eating People Alive would be cool, too.