Basically threatening to kill our father isn't much different.

Were there the option I'd lean towards dropping him and falling back on the cot laughing hysterically. Because of course we get the shit hand, we always do. It's just a great cosmic joke, ain't it.

Thing is though, at this point actually cooperating and being a good boy has gotten us approximately no answers. We've been open as MJ12 suggested, and who knows, the other options might not have done any better. We've been a good boy and not tried to break out and etc, etc and it's gotten us locked in a box as they biopsy us to figure out what the fuck is up with us, feeling alone and scared and without our loved ones or family.

Quiet clearly, asking nicely isn't actually getting us anything, so lifting our father up by the collar and shaking him might.

Like, we took the most 'cooperate' option and it got us here. We've been lied to since the day we've been born. Wanting answers is in character, and expecting to get them just by smiling real wide and promising to be a good boy might have been in character in the past, but was wrong and stupid and so...well.

I mean, this could all be a trap and every option except saying nothing leads to us killing our Dad, but...
 
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I think that'd be the "Say Nothing" option. Certainly that could be "falling back on the cot laughing hysterically."
But we are saying something there! It's more of a monologe than anything else, but it gives our father a chance to react to it rather than being sullen.

If we are a reincarnation of Indrajit we could do the same thing he did to Ravana, in which he first threatened and then apologized, falling back to be the good son. Would straight up channeling the Ramayana be out of character though (in so much that while doing it we wouldn't be ourselves)?

Thing is though, at this point actually cooperating and being a good boy has gotten us approximately no answers. We've been open as MJ12 suggested, and who knows, the other options might not have done any better. We've been a good boy and not tried to break out and etc, etc and it's gotten us locked in a box as they biopsy us to figure out what the fuck is up with us, feeling alone and scared and without our loved ones or family.

Quiet clearly, asking nicely isn't actually getting us anything, so lifting our father up by the collar and shaking him might.

Like, we took the most 'cooperate' option and it got us here. We've been lied to since the day we've been born. Wanting answers is in character, and expecting to get them just by smiling real wide and promising to be a good boy might have been in character in the past, but was wrong and stupid and so...well.
Which I've already gave my reasons for why we're locked in here, and how lashing out won't help. But I'm also a pure IC player so I can fully empathize with lashing out. I do think there's a middle ground here though, especially if we are said reincarnation.
 
But we are saying something there! It's more of a monologe than anything else, but it gives our father a chance to react to it rather than being sullen.

If we are a reincarnation of Indrajit we could do the same thing he did to Ravana, in which he first threatened and then apologized, falling back to be the good son. Would straight up channeling the Ramayana be out of character though (in so much that while doing it we wouldn't be ourselves)?


Which I've already gave my reasons for why we're locked in here, and how lashing out won't help. But I'm also a pure IC player so I can fully empathize with lashing out. I do think there's a middle ground here though, especially if we are said reincarnation.

I think the 'Say Nothing' option is the 'You're Dead to me, go away.'

Not forever, of course. It'd be stupid to give it that much power, but it'd be us being totally unwilling to engage with our Dad, possibly because we're that betrayed, possibly because we're so pissed we can't trust ourselves to talk to him, possibly for other reasons.

That's why I don't see it as a good option either.

Which leaves trying to escape (bad idea) and getting more question (ding ding ding! by default).
 
Like, I know Meg maybe sorta kinda possibly has some connection to the Week of Nightmares, but all I really know about that is the non weeaboo Mega Asian Vampire progenitor arose, starting causing a ruckus, got into a fight with three Not-So-Impressively-Mega-But-Still-Pretty-Mega-Indian-Chinese-Vampires. The Not-So-Impressively-Mega-But-Still-Pretty-Mega-Indian-Chinese-Vampires created a storm to blok out the sun, which stopped the Technocracy from just blowing the non weeaboo Mega Asian Vampire progenitor up with sunlight directing space mirrors. And it all ended with a Magic Nuke getting launched at India which took out the Vamp in the end. :V

So I can't really say what other stuff might of been going down at the time, but it seems like weird to just brush whatever's going on with mum under the rug as recessive genes, unless Meg's situation is... Not exactly common but not unheard of in Mage?

She's obviously Hindu Boss.

Would that make us Hindu Demon Big Boss?

I've got a confession to make. The only MG game I've played was Phantom Pain.
 
My own guess on the 'what is mom' is that she's just a plain goddess.

The Rakshasha were created via the 'breath' of a God. Breath is life, and so a pretty decent symbolic way of looking at it is that we're the afterthought, the thing that happened just by things happening.

A demi-goddess and her demonic shadow brother. In breathing out to create Lakshmi, we also got made. Whoops.

But, don't believe me. Let's consult ancient Chinese wisdom!

 
Yes, and that implies that joining the Technocracy, as bad as it might be, is considered less awful than death.
I don't think "for at least 50% of my children this will be a fate better than being left to the Black Spiral Dancers" is quite the ringing endorsement you believe it to be.


Yes, and he still said that they'd end up together again and he'd explain everything then. Either he's lying on the Technocracy's behalf-because he certainly didn't need to say that-or things escalated from here.
He was lying because he hoped he'd be able to smuggle Meg out of there at some point, as opposed panicking him into running off and getting hunted down by the cyberwerewolves that were right there. What was he supposed to tell his kids?

"Daddy's a super-accountant for The Man, and he's got good news and bad news. The good news is, Lakshmi's not going to be vivisected! Hurray! The bad news, and Meg you're gonna want to brace yourself for this one-"

I genuinely don't see how you can possibly come to the conclusions way you are without an active misreading.

If you're given the lines "Your dad tells you things will be alright. He doesn't meet your eyes." and then shit turns out to be not alright, the natural conclusion here isn't "oh man dad totally thought it'd be alright but he was upset about ideologically betraying our mother".

If you have characters repeatedly point out all the trouble your father has gone to in keeping you out of the Technocracy's line of sight, and he's super nervous about you being found by them, and then he bursts in to your cell and tells you that you're a crazy magic science experiment, the natural conclusion is not "oh man dad totally didn't know we were fucked up and the Technocracy told him everything".

If we're fed human flesh and start going crazy for the first time in our life, and they keep force-feeding us human flesh while we're drugged up, the natural conclusion is not "oh man I bet it's a lack of human flesh that makes us go crazy, we must be a compulsive cannibal".

As of Revised? Yes. People switch sides. It happens when the sides are more "unfriendly business rivals" than "actual opposing ideologies in a war." Iteration X is infamously a revolving door leading to the Virtual Adepts and the Virtual Adepts are a revolving door leading to Iteration X. He's the kind of guy who could walk away, has the resources to walk away, and if they're locking Meg up that means they're so scared of us that this is like, not high on their priorities list.
Again, when could he have done that? At some point in between the werewolves kicking our door down and the other werewolves kicking our door down? The guy is clearly a committed Technocrat who is also aware that if his bosses find out his kid is some kind of part-demon mix they will at best regard them as an excellent addition to the armoury. That's not a depiction that involves pandering to or demonizing the Technocracy, because that's literally what they do. You run a Technocracy quest where roughly 100% of the action has revolved around "cleaning up all the horrible shit the Technocracy does", for god's sake. You know they're not even close to clean. Why are you trying to whitewash their torture and incarceration of a child?

I guess we're going to be assuming that the Technocracy are just the 1E Technocracy and are stupid evil and do everything for bad reasons, and everything should be read in the most damaging light possible, right?
Is Guantanamo Bay unconscionable, and if so does that mean that
a) Obama is Satan and America is an irredeemable evil to be plunged into the abyss of judgement by the mighty hand of Enkalal'tuk the Cosmic Arbiter?
b) It's a horrible and tangled situation created by a variety of factors and prolonged by convenience and organizational apathy?

And, for extra credit, should the reaction of someone wrongfully imprisoned there change depending on whether a) or b) is true?

Remember to answer in-character, and do not assume they have access to all the details.

I assume their judgment is right until proven wrong because they have like, thousands of guys who are literally inhumanly smart and can also see the future and probabilities. I think it's a fairly decent position, all told, to trust the people who are literally smarter than you.
BIG BROTHER KNOWS BEST

You're absolutely right. Why do we even bother having debates or elections or human rights? Just take all the people who scored highest on a standardized IQ test and put them in charge. They'll never steer us wrong, because they're superior and know best. Lesser people can just switch off their brains - and if they happen to occasionally be tossed in a jail cell without a word of explanation and drugged and tortured, then they can rest easy in the knowledge that it was statistically likely to have been the right thing to do for someone, somewhere, from their point of view.

At this point you've given up on debating over morality on the basis that alien intelligences said they were right.

Ironically enough, this is quite literally "God made me do it".
 
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You run a Technocracy quest where roughly 100% of the action has revolved around "cleaning up all the horrible shit the Technocracy does", for god's sake. You know they're not even close to clean. Why are you trying to whitewash their torture and incarceration of a child?

Because "torture and incarceration of a child" is literally the awful 1E stuff I loathe come to life. The Technocracy isn't clean. It kills people extrajudicially, quite a few of whom didn't deserve to die, and some of whom literally weren't much of a threat at all. It's willing to conscience collateral damage when it probably shouldn't. Some of its enemies go in and come out as parts of war machines. It thinks it's in a war where human rights are more an aspiration than a law. But for all of that it's got some moral lines it's unwilling to cross. It thinks of itself as the good guy and for the most part does work to live up to that image, same as the Traditions. So I'm trying to whitewash it because "Meg gets coerced into being a child soldier for the Technocracy" is the kind of moral quandary I think works very well in its combination of pragmatism and ostensible "we're nice people, look we let him do what he wants (after we manipulate him into it)" as to what the Technocracy is and why it does the things it does, or "Meg is being exposed to intrusive surgical procedures against his will because the Technocracy wants him 'cured' no matter what" (like the Technocracy probably does to Changelings) but "Meg is being tortured and thrown in prison forever for no reason as a test subject" is kind of too far.

That is to say, it was a kneejerk response because I feel that the characterization going on of torture and permanent incarceration is questionable for the 2E Technocracy already (which might have been antagonistic and grey contrasted with the more heroic Traditions) and is incredibly OOC for the post-Revised Technocracy which has repudiated a lot of the questionable things its predecessors have gotten to.

Whatever. If this is going to just be the 1E EEEEEEVIL Technocracy in spirit I'll live with that.
 
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All I know is that Daddy-o came down to our luxury suite and promptly informed us that 'yer a horrible-demon-monster-thing, boyo'.

An' that's fucked.

Also we're living in a small, hardened box and are not watching the Netflix-for-actual-people and are instead on some hellish sub-Australian level of Netflix which is comprised of the hit new shows 'Whoops, Cannibalism' and 'I was a Teenage Rakshasa'.

This is also fucked.

There is also the nagging paranoia in the back of our minds that maybe this is all some manner of cunning ruse and as soon as we bust out of here in some Wolverine-esque escape sequence which is very impressive and likely given a good bit of budget, Robo-Lesnar is going to deep strike through the ceiling and give us the fabulous prize of an all-expenses paid trip to Suplex City.

That's proper fucked.

Nothing is good, everything is bad, The Man is Keeping Us Down (whether he is right to do so is another matter altogether and one I will not get into because i'm a big sissy coward), Dad is being a big dumb weirdo, our sister is enjoying life and we can't watch Stranger Things.

So we might as well do the classic sort of thing and ask the classic and storied question of all true thinkers of the world.

How is babby formed

wha happa daddo
 
Mind you, this is now the second quest Zerban has made where it turns out the MC unbeknownst to him/herself a monstrous maneater.

... Are you trying to tell us something, @ZerbanDaGreat ? You can go ahead, I promise we won't judge you.
 
Whatever. If this is going to just be the 1E EEEEEEVIL Technocracy in spirit I'll live with that.
I believe – like most people here, I think – that there's probably some middle ground?

I believe it's entirely possible for circumstances to have led to Meg getting this horrendous treatment without making it standard practice for the Technocracy as a whole. Certainly, our dad still believed strongly enough in the Technocracy to stick with it, even while he clearly suspected that our particular nature would land us squarely in their crosshairs. However, I also believe that the fact that it's not standard practice makes it no less horrifying, and shouldn't affect Meg's in-character response in the least.

Similarly, someone dumped in Gitmo has every right to say "fuck America", even if they are aware that the torture and incarceration-without-trial they face there doesn't reflect on every American citizen or represent Western civilisation as a whole.

No doubt there are Technocrats other than our father who would object to our treatment. They're just not here right now, or have been overruled by the Hard Men Making Hard Decisions from the top, who would no doubt argue – just as you did – that Meg is a horrendous security risk, that he's an inherent danger to humanity, that it's best to learn as much about him as possible before so much as approaching him, that their increasing apprehension of his abilities justifies more secure holding facilities.

That's a valid argument, from certain perspectives. It doesn't mean they're right.

And it doesn't mean we should care.

Should we be worried about Rostam?
He's already proud to be a magus.

How much more of a monster could he be, realistically? :V
 
I believe – like most people here, I think – that there's probably some middle ground?

I believe it's entirely possible for circumstances to have led to Meg getting this horrendous treatment without making it standard practice for the Technocracy as a whole. Certainly, our dad still believed strongly enough in the Technocracy to stick with it, even while he clearly suspected that our particular nature would land us squarely in their crosshairs. However, I also believe that the fact that it's not standard practice makes it no less horrifying, and shouldn't affect Meg's in-character response in the least.

Fair enough.

E: The core issue I'm having is the fact that this seems to be going into the direction of Generic Teenage Urban Fantasy Story #999999.

If I wanted a story about a teenage boy who gets wrongfully oppressed and imprisoned by a villainous conspiracy that he has a familial relation to because of superpowers he didn't know about and goes to exact revenge on it there's probably like, literally a quarter of the entire young adult section dedicated to that. And of the rest, there's probably a good chunk which can't be summarized like that only because the gender of the protagonist is wrong. :V

So I'm hoping this is either anomalous or at the very least it turns out that the conspiracy kind of has a pretty good point as we become a horrible flesh-eating cannibal terrorist and it mostly can't be blamed on them.
 
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In regards to the reaction to our father. Voting for something where we are forcefull might lead to a bad overreaction considering what we associate with it and what is associated with out Legend. And that is if we assume that is our father and not just a test ~nwo~
 
E: The core issue I'm having is the fact that this seems to be going into the direction of Generic Teenage Urban Fantasy Story #999999.

If I wanted a story about a teenage boy who gets wrongfully oppressed and imprisoned by a villainous conspiracy that he has a familial relation to because of superpowers he didn't know about and goes to exact revenge on it there's probably like, literally a quarter of the entire young adult section dedicated to that. And of the rest, there's probably a good chunk which can't be summarized like that only because the gender of the protagonist is wrong. :V

So I'm hoping this is either anomalous or at the very least it turns out that the conspiracy kind of has a pretty good point as we become a horrible flesh-eating cannibal terrorist and it mostly can't be blamed on them.
Just speaking from an outside perspective, it might help to ask yourself how much of a history Zerban has with quests that are enough of a collaborative story that the players can change not just the course of the narrative through their characters actions, but the nature of the narrative itself and the motivations of other groups. I know that happens quite a bit in Panopticon Quest, but from my perspective that kind of collaborative authorship is something of an aberration. You might want to ask yourself how much control over the wider story is actually on the table, here, or whether Zerban's Technocracy (or at least, the part of the Technocracy that Meghanda is currently at the mercy of) being a villainous conspiracy is just... Completely out of your hands, y'know?
 
[X] Revlid

I'm feeling really good about the decision to narc on Mom to the nice men in suits.

Definitely the right call.
 
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