Spine Stitch: Overview

A highly experimental sniper rifle that fires 12cm long Aeroprene thread needles, each one about the diameter a blood draw needle. The primary idea behind the weapon is to allow assassins to annihilate a target with all the power of an Aeroprene thread weapon, yet with utter silence and a thread of plasmatic matter so thin it borders on invisible.

Aeroprene weapons are cool, but the Spine Stitch scares the shit out of me. I love you Acris, but you come up with some horrifying shit at far too regular of a pace for my liking.
_{Because detonating someone’s skull with an explosive PTT round is so much more civil? – Dr. Baddarick}

Think of this gun as a sniper rifle, optics and all, except it shoots small tungsten darts that leave a thread of plasmatic matter in their wake. If I think of the ballistic properties of a needle, and how you can get it to fly so far with so little weight behind it, my skull itches. I don’t even want to ask the team behind it how it works since I value my time, and being forced to look at a lightboard as they draw on it for ten hours isn’t in my schedule. Gets weirder because the plasmatic matter of the needle is extremely dense, yet it doesn’t activate until it’s near the target so that the shooter’s position isn’t given away.
Fuckin’ tiny needle and it’s one of the most complex projectiles we’ve got.

The only saving grace for the victim is that the Spine Stitch user has to be within visual range of them, that way they can control the needles with their Nerve Harness. Where that’s a downside is that anyone who’s using a Spine Stitch has access to advanced optics on top of knowing how to enhance their vision via Chaff manipulation.
To be honest, we really cannot put down an effective range for this weapon because of how variable it is. It could be 300m, it could be 3km, it could be goddamn 50km for all we know because it all depends on the equipment and skills of the user. Though I can say that the most common range it’s used at is something like 800m, while the furthest we’ve seen in actual combat is 5km.

The Spine Stitch is also one of those guns with the dictionary sized manual for how to store and maintain it, meaning anyone that comes to draw one from the armory gets to wait two hours while I sign a bunch of “I didn’t fuck this up” forms before handing it over. _{I can almost guarantee none of our newer legionnaires have seen a printed dictionary. – Dr. Baddarick}

Here’s why the Spine Stitch scares me.
Imagine if you were standing watch somewhere, and suddenly felt a tiny pinch on your leg. You look down and see a tiny, incredibly thin thread of plasmatic matter going right into your body.
Then suddenly a needle punctures out the other side, does an immediate turn, and goes back in before dragging the plasmatic thread through with it.
The needles then stiches throughout your entire body all the way up to your face in a matter of milliseconds, and then pulls the plasmatic threads taunt, cutting straight through your entire body and turning you into a pile of smoldering gore.
That all happens in the span of milliseconds, is 100% silent, and you never even heard a gunshot.

The shooter was 10km away, and you never had a single chance as there’s no way to detect it, no way to defend against it, and you’ll never be able to pick out the sound of a tiny needle zipping through the air towards you.
I was told that during testing they tried it against all types of body armor, and found that while it struggles against super heavy plating (like a walking tank type deal) there’s always some unarmored joint or patch of exposed fabric for the needles to enter from. At one point, they found it could puncture through the target’s boot, enter through the toe, and shred its way up towards the skull before stitching the brain directly.

During a few expeditions I’ve seen Aeroprene thread weapons used against fuckoff huge entities and Chaff Wraiths, and the Spine Stich was one of them. I love watching shit get eviscerated with a swarm of Aeroprene threads by those Intelligence Legion spooky boys, but I honestly have some healthy paranoia about ensuring these guns are alwaysaccounted for.

If these didn’t require a Nerve Harness to use, on top of the Gray Conduits within the weapon being impossible to maintain without our facilities, I’d destroy these damn guns if I ever found them.
I absolutely do not want to exist in a world where a Spine Stich can be used against us, because I cannot think of a way to keep my boys and girls safe from it outside of portable Soul Rend armor. Or locking them in an underground vault made of Zephatun.
_{There’s a few ways that I’ve come up with, I’ll send you my notes in a few minutes. – Ye-Jun}

Eugh, I like using Spine Stiches, absolute hate thinking about being on the receiving end.

-FrW Nahli Lok-Riveria