[X] Write-in: Lie to the people you care about. Pretend to be the cold clinical little monster the Technocracy would have made you into. Abandon everyone you love. All to trick the Technocracy into leaving them alone and so save their lives.
-> [X] You have Mind 4. You won't cry for lost adoptive family and lost love and lost children until you're out of here. But you will cry then.
[X] LouCypher52 (1 pt) - he's a remote handler for what she's doing, and he's not someone linked to her. Having an ally from far away do this sort of thing is exactly what a cold-blooded professional would do, if the Technocracy finds out she has help. And she's going to have to dart around, preparing phone messages and releasing them together and getting to certain areas useful for ghost-summoning and he can facilitate that.
[X] Knights of Radymanthys (2 pts): - pickup and extraction. It's a one-person recovery mission, and something they've done before, with well-established mission parameters. She's notifying them early so she has time to do what she needs, and again, use of professionals like this is a very well-drilled Operative thing to do.
[X] Write in - Deliberately spoil 1pt worth of favours to make the abandonment look more convincing. This point represents favours from local people which Alice could have used, but instead she's making them believe that she's just abandoning people as part of a long-standing plan.
Yeah, I think those are good choices, and the logic here is sound. Deliberately spoiling a favor kind of runs against the grain, but if it facilitates the goal, it isn't really wasted.
Vote for favors edited.
[X] LouCypher52 (1 pt)
[X] Knights of Radymanthys (2 pts)
[X] Write in - Deliberately spoil 1pt worth of favours to make the abandonment look more convincing. This point represents favours from local people which Alice could have used, but instead she's making them believe that she's just abandoning people as part of a long-standing plan.
[X] Write-in: Lie to the people you care about. Pretend to be the cold clinical little monster the Technocracy would have made you into. Abandon everyone you love. All to trick the Technocracy into leaving them alone and so save their lives.
-> [X] You have Mind 4. You won't cry for lost adoptive family and lost love and lost children until you're out of here. But you will cry then.
[X] LouCypher52 (1 pt) - he's a remote handler for what she's doing, and he's not someone linked to her. Having an ally from far away do this sort of thing is exactly what a cold-blooded professional would do, if the Technocracy finds out she has help. And she's going to have to dart around, preparing phone messages and releasing them together and getting to certain areas useful for ghost-summoning and he can facilitate that.
[X] Knights of Radymanthys (2 pts): - pickup and extraction. It's a one-person recovery mission, and something they've done before, with well-established mission parameters. She's notifying them early so she has time to do what she needs, and again, use of professionals like this is a very well-drilled Operative thing to do.
[X] Write in - Deliberately spoil 1pt worth of favours to make the abandonment look more convincing. This point represents favours from local people which Alice could have used, but instead she's making them believe that she's just abandoning people as part of a long-standing plan.
This... seems for the best. She survives, but by sacrificing her reputation she inclines things so others might also live.
Hm, though, would have wanted the Chorister available to help protect them... but that's probably not compatible with this given limited resources. Hopefully this will be enough.
[X] Write-in: Lie to the people you care about. Pretend to be the cold clinical little monster the Technocracy would have made you into. Abandon everyone you love. All to trick the Technocracy into leaving them alone and so save their lives.
-> [X] You have Mind 4. You won't cry for lost adoptive family and lost love and lost children until you're out of here. But you will cry then.
[X] LouCypher52 (1 pt) - he's a remote handler for what she's doing, and he's not someone linked to her. Having an ally from far away do this sort of thing is exactly what a cold-blooded professional would do, if the Technocracy finds out she has help. And she's going to have to dart around, preparing phone messages and releasing them together and getting to certain areas useful for ghost-summoning and he can facilitate that.
[X] Knights of Radymanthys (2 pts): - pickup and extraction. It's a one-person recovery mission, and something they've done before, with well-established mission parameters. She's notifying them early so she has time to do what she needs, and again, use of professionals like this is a very well-drilled Operative thing to do.
[X] Write in - Deliberately spoil 1pt worth of favors to make the abandonment look more convincing. This point represents favors from local people which Alice could have used, but instead she's making them believe that she's just abandoning people as part of a long-standing plan.
Wat Do?
[X] Plan Lie a lot and cry later. (aka ES's write-in)
Because I can't think of anything that would be more likely to save the people Alice cares about, without involving C5 - which is also something I can't see her going for due to massive collateral damage.
Halping!:
[X] LouCypher52 (1 pt) - remote overwatch is a good thing.
[X] Knights of Radymanthys (2 pts): - pickup and extraction. And they are probably good at Not Being Found, which will be essential.
[X] Spoiling the favors could be seen as a deliberate sacrifice, part of a larger sacrifical ritual (taking the blame for abandoning her friends/students/etc, sacrificing her reputation) aimed at Cutting Ties - making it seem that her connection to them is less than it seemed. Maybe? (Not all magic is Magic...)
I don't suppose you can use the knowledge you learned from Defictionalization: A Shadow Ministry Guide to Finding Truth From Fiction (Analyst William "Bill" Johnson) to analyze a popular science fiction show suspiciously similar to EtherQuest: The Endeavor's True Adventures (Captain Jessica Talia Kirkland) and when you learn the truth behind the lies get the same bonuses as you would from watching the original?
EarthScorpion makes a pretty good argument. changing vote
[X] LouCypher52 (1 pt)
[X] Knights of Radymanthys (2 pts)
[X] Write in - Deliberately spoil 1pt worth of favours to make the abandonment look more convincing. This point represents favours from local people which Alice could have used, but instead she's making them believe that she's just abandoning people as part of a long-standing plan.
[X] Write-in: Lie to the people you care about. Pretend to be the cold clinical little monster the Technocracy would have made you into. Abandon everyone you love. All to trick the Technocracy into leaving them alone and so save their lives.
-> [X] You have Mind 4. You won't cry for lost adoptive family and lost love and lost children until you're out of here. But you will cry then.
[X] LouCypher52 (1 pt) - he's a remote handler for what she's doing, and he's not someone linked to her. Having an ally from far away do this sort of thing is exactly what a cold-blooded professional would do, if the Technocracy finds out she has help. And she's going to have to dart around, preparing phone messages and releasing them together and getting to certain areas useful for ghost-summoning and he can facilitate that.
[X] Knights of Radymanthys (2 pts): - pickup and extraction. It's a one-person recovery mission, and something they've done before, with well-established mission parameters. She's notifying them early so she has time to do what she needs, and again, use of professionals like this is a very well-drilled Operative thing to do.
[X] Write in - Deliberately spoil 1pt worth of favors to make the abandonment look more convincing. This point represents favors from local people which Alice could have used, but instead she's making them believe that she's just abandoning people as part of a long-standing plan.
My initial suggestion was to get information and then get out, but I don't really have a problem with skipping to part 2, and EarthScorpion's plan sounds like it has a good chance of working. Vote changed to:
[X] Write-in: Lie to the people you care about. Pretend to be the cold clinical little monster the Technocracy would have made you into. Abandon everyone you love. All to trick the Technocracy into leaving them alone and so save their lives.
-> [X] You have Mind 4. You won't cry for lost adoptive family and lost love and lost children until you're out of here. But you will cry then.
[X] Write-in: Lie to the people you care about. Pretend to be the cold clinical little monster the Technocracy would have made you into. Abandon everyone you love. All to trick the Technocracy into leaving them alone and so save their lives.
-> [X] You have Mind 4. You won't cry for lost adoptive family and lost love and lost children until you're out of here. But you will cry then.
[X] LouCypher52 (1 pt) - he's a remote handler for what she's doing, and he's not someone linked to her. Having an ally from far away do this sort of thing is exactly what a cold-blooded professional would do, if the Technocracy finds out she has help. And she's going to have to dart around, preparing phone messages and releasing them together and getting to certain areas useful for ghost-summoning and he can facilitate that.
[X] Knights of Radymanthys (2 pts): - pickup and extraction. It's a one-person recovery mission, and something they've done before, with well-established mission parameters. She's notifying them early so she has time to do what she needs, and again, use of professionals like this is a very well-drilled Operative thing to do.
[X] Write in - Deliberately spoil 1pt worth of favors to make the abandonment look more convincing. This point represents favors from local people which Alice could have used, but instead she's making them believe that she's just abandoning people as part of a long-standing plan.
[X] LouCypher52 (1 pt) - he's a remote handler for what she's doing, and he's not someone linked to her. Having an ally from far away do this sort of thing is exactly what a cold-blooded professional would do, if the Technocracy finds out she has help. And she's going to have to dart around, preparing phone messages and releasing them together and getting to certain areas useful for ghost-summoning and he can facilitate that.
[X] Knights of Radymanthys (2 pts): - pickup and extraction. It's a one-person recovery mission, and something they've done before, with well-established mission parameters. She's notifying them early so she has time to do what she needs, and again, use of professionals like this is a very well-drilled Operative thing to do.
[X] Write in - Deliberately spoil 1pt worth of favors to make the abandonment look more convincing. This point represents favors from local people which Alice could have used, but instead she's making them believe that she's just abandoning people as part of a long-standing plan.
Iteration X Statistician Deshi Liu runs the predicted evasion patterns again and takes a swig of his BLACK AND BLUEBERRY flavored Erg Cola to keep his mind in shape. His biomonitor was noting an elevated level of fatigue toxins, and Erg Cola works almost as well as KeepAwake as a stimulant, as long as you were trying to stay awake for maybe 3 or 4 days max instead of getting 4 hours of sleep per month. He doesn't like the liaison for this joint operation. She's younger than he is, a Chinese Operative born and raised in China. Worst is that she can easily monitor the small talk he does with the other Statisticians, meaning that he can't goof off while working and has to concentrate, or at least pretend to concentrate, on the complex web of relationships that he's monitoring.
He's good at it, better than any human can be. He has an ADEI, of course, but it interfaces with a multicore supercomputer that replaces a good chunk of his skull and has thoroughly infiltrated much of his bone structure with nano-bred computing elements. He's no tougher or stronger than a normal human being, but he can think and react in a way that most of the wired-up cybersoldiers can't. He can see dozens of possibilities at once, evaluate complex systems as easily as normal humans breathe, and in the command post here it doesn't matter that he doesn't have the strength and durability to wield a plasma cannon without breaking his wrists. The Shock Corps would be lost without men and women like him. He's proud of it and displays it openly. Like many high-end cognitive enhanciles, he wears an artificial mohawk, the Statistician Crest, a complex artificial headpiece of cooling microfilaments that keeps his body temperature under control. It makes him look absurd when he has to work around Sleepers-this gangly Chinese man with a tall spiked mohawk of black hair-but in the Union, at least, it's a sign of respect and trust.
He's analyzing patterns in the target's previous movements. Surveillance footage from a thousand different cameras, incredibly brief glimpses. She is annoyingly hard to find and target, but she shows up enough to let him create a model with the partial data, narrowing down the search. The Technocracy's assets aren't limitless. Targeting is necessary to find anything. And eventually, he does. There's a hit. A call to one of her acquaintances that might be important. It's a phone number that's not seemingly related to the target at all. But that doesn't mean anything. It'd be child's play for a RD to sneak into someone's house, or make a call by remote.
"I have a hit. She's talking to several of her contacts. Talking about having to leave for a few days. But... you said that the HVT has been trained at Damian, right? Passed most of an accelerated Operative course?" Liu asks, eyes narrowed. He's not a spy, but he's seen enough spy movies and read enough Operative AARs that he thinks he can at least sort of think like a spy, and his heavily augmented cognition is telling him that the HVT's actions are... odd. If she was really going to disappear, why would she make excuses? Why wouldn't she just disappear while the Union was wild goose chasing, canvassing her acquaintances for clues that wouldn't come, because her entire existence here is a double life. He doesn't trust it.
***
Yinzheng Li is slightly uncomfortable with this operation. It goes against a lot of what Director Belltower did before-but maybe, she thinks, as she reflexively and unnecessarily smooths her suit down, reflex from when she had to wear standard armor-weave suits instead of no-crease high-end smartfabric like some sort of Syndicate executive, maybe there's a method to her madness. Director Belltower asked her to oversee this operation as a sign of trust, after all, and she's not going to let Panopticon down. Not after they decided she was the best fit, alongside so many talented individuals.
The assassination target doesn't seem to rate the level of firepower they're bringing, but she's too young and inexperienced to really establish any of those facts. A traitor and an active Traditions mage, who is suspected of becoming a potential high-level threat in the near future to the Technocracy (she's seen the prediction printouts, they're true as far as she knows) might rate more than the firepower they'd normally bring out. The actions Belltower has taken to draw her out seem to be a little too vicious, as well, but Director Belltower herself explained them. "If all goes well, and you follow the plan, not that many people have to die. She'll just show herself and the operation will be clean and surgical," Belltower said. But something about it still doesn't sit right.
She's distracted from the worries about the strangeness of the mission (but weren't most of Belltower's missions strange in and of themselves? An elite Operative as part of Panopticon wouldn't get the straightforward ones. Didn't she have decades of experience to draw from?) by one of the analysts speaking up.
"I have a hit. She's talking to several of her contacts. Talking about having to leave for a few days." A Chinese man in a rumpled aloha shirt with a mohawk says. "But... you said the HVT was trained at Damian, right? Passed most of an accelerated Operative course?"
"Yes." Yinzheng responds. "Is that relevant?"
"If I was a superspy," Deshi Liu starts, "and I know that there's people listening in, why would I be making a call about where I'm going to people, unless I'm trying to trick anyone listening in?"
"She might have gotten sloppy." Yinzheng mentions absentmindedly. But the realization hit her. Belltower has talked about layers upon layers of plots. What if she's pretending to be sloppy? What if her goal is to pretend to be sloppy, like an Operative might, solely so they waste resources taking out her so-called friends instead of chasing her? Or is she pretending to pretend to be sloppy so people avoid targeting people she doesn't want hurt? Yinzheng doesn't want to hurt them either, but she needs to force a conflict. For the good of humanity. She considers attacking one of the target's acquaintances as a show of force. It hurts her to have to do it, but Yinzheng believes in the Union, and believes in its righteousness. She'll feel bad about it, but if it draws her out and prevents more bloodshed, it'll be worth it.
She takes a breath to hide her nervousness, and makes a decision with a voice of command she doesn't feel. "All right, we're going to coordinate with the government. Put out a terrorist watchlist alert for Alice Aristide. Claim she's working with Da'esh. That'll get the attention of government agents. I want the FBI, local PDs, everyone, canvassing for her. Tell them she is extremely dangerous and to take great care in engaging until special units can be sent in." A risk, she thinks. If she's going to try to kill the police when she makes a run for it, it means a lot of casualties. SWAT isn't going to stop a trained Operative with RD psychic abilities, nor is the FBI. "Refit the HITMark Vs for subdimensional incursion duties. I want phase disruption generators, magazine loadout should be a third plasmic disruptors, a third standard energized explosive, and a third Prymite core hollowpoints to counter kinesis and probability manipulation. For enhancement submodules, I need enhanced mobility and boosted sensors packages. Doll them up like some sort of paramilitary response team and load them with anti-RD shielding generators."
"What variant of shielding?" the logistics officer asks. He's another Iterator with a buzz cut and military fatigues, probably military in his previous life, manipulating empty air in front of him. Yinzheng knows that if she blinks in just the right way, she can see the AR sigils and menus, but she trusts him to do his work without her micromanaging.
"Something to protect against entropic attacks and thermal/electromagnetic effects." Yinzheng says. "That covers most of her psychic modes of attack. Aim for cost-efficiency rather than individual unit survival." The Primium endoskeletons should provide enough protection beyond that.
"Yes, ma'am!" the quartermaster says, and goes back to manipulating the AR interface he has to follow her orders.
"I need agents integrated with the Feds and the PD. Insert fake IDs into the system, I want our Low Observability Variant Robotics integrated in tight with patrols. If she's still pretending to be a good person she'll probably try to use nonlethals at least at first, until we show that we're not buying it." The LOV series of cyborgs weren't nearly as popular as HITMarks, but they could do the job. Combat-synth equivalent bodies and limited primium bone lacing, they could probably only tear a person's arms from their sockets if they tried really hard and they didn't have integrated weapons, but they were tough enough to shrug off pistol fire and stealthier than HITMarks, especially the ones which ran on cloned human brain tissue rather than processors. Belltower likes them, Yinzheng thinks. She says they've got all the loyalty of constructs but are clever like humans, especially if you let them learn instead of throwing them away. She likes them almost as much as Vanessas or other mid to high end Progenitor constructs. "We'll trust them to make the kill."
"While we're at it, keep the show of force up. We want the ARCs and the Jorogumo on standby. If the HVT tries to get out on a vehicle, try to paint the vehicle and hit it with a SLAM-ER from a Jorogumo VLS." Yinzheng says. "Just keep it professional and we'll be done with this op in no time with no losses." She sounds so confident she almost believes herself.
***
Alice Aristide understands how surreal she probably looks at this point, running on foot through nighttime Miami, listening to an invisible friend. Probably almost as surreal as her time at Damian with another invisible friend of someone else's. "Lady, you are in some incredibly deep shit." A male voice says in her ear. "Whose kid did you kidnap and torture to death?" LouCypher52 has an abrasive, blunt way of asking questions, but he's right. This is the kind of stuff the Technocracy today only uses for revenge killings. Shows of force that show wiseguys who turn the friends and loved ones of Technocrats into hostages that they're only willing to negotiate to a point, and when that point is crossed you simply don't fuck with them.
"I don't know." Alice subvocalizes. "I really don't know. I need your help to keep me safe until I get to 98th Street. There's a haunted house there which I can use." Her voice is ragged from all the running and stress. "I haven't fucked with the 'Crats recently." She doesn't like how people are looking at her suspiciously, and she ducks into an empty alley to catch her breath. "I've only been targeting Pentex assets and that was minor monkeywrenching. Officially the Technocracy might respond to RDs doing it-"
"-but unofficially it turns out that somehow every one of their response forces are really, really bad shots if you just run away from them instead of trying to shoot back. Which is pretty much official policy-the only reason they even shoot at you is to keep their hardliners satisfied that something's being done." LouCypher says to her. "So. Shit. You're being chased by The Man, who seems to have it out for you personally, and you don't even know why."
She doesn't mind LouCypher's bluntness because of sentences like that, where he thinks of ideas that she wouldn't. Yes, Alice thinks. It feels like a personal grudge. She tries to sense the plans themselves, sense her past actions, sense the psychic imprints left in the actions-and she comes out with the feeling that LouCypher is possibly right. There's a few different flavors blending into the plan. There's four people she thinks are important. One of them, the predominant mind, is cold, professional, like the aura of so many Operatives who trained and tutored her in Damian. There's no emotion stronger than a mild personal distaste there. Whoever that mind is thinks of her as just a means to a larger end, no more important than a lever in a machine to be pulled. What's scarier is that there's something about that mind that's known to her. Something familiar. Is it one of her teachers? Is it one of her tutors? Something about it screams "I knew this person twenty years ago."
Shooting through the cold professional mind is a swirl of dark, inhuman loathing, something that can hate in a way that humans can't, a hate that has become an all consuming obsession more important than life, more important than breathing. But even then it's a hate-by-proxy, she's not the main target. Aside from that there's a side, a third mind, shining of diamond brilliance and inhuman complexity, a smug and coldly confident snake of a mind. The sheer self-assurance reminds her of a predatory cat. Something regal, confident, and absolutely vicious underneath. And then there's the last psychic impression she gets from the plan. The one closest, and yet least important. The executor, who is the most normal of them, with the honesty or idealism she's seen in the best of people, people like human rights lawyers and social workers who dedicate their entire lives to selflessly helping those who can't help themselves. But there's something out of place there underneath the sweetness, like finding a hot pepper in a spoonful of ice cream. There's a metallic edge of violence and pragmatism so similar to the cold professional which takes up the largest part of the psychic taste.
"Maybe." Alice concedes. "Someone has a grudge against me but the plan's not primarily personal."
"Did that person with a grudge say you're literally the spawn of Satan or something?" LouCypher asks. "Because it sounds like it, if the Technocracy's sending this much shit against you. Or are you not telling us about your ability to benchpress cars?"
"I assure you, Lou, dear," Alice whispers, "I cannot benchpress even a small car." Well, not with her arms. With her mind, that's a different story. The banter makes her feel a bit better, at least, and they crack jokes about the inadequacies of the Technocrats who sent this much force against her until she sneaks her way to 98th Street, through alleys which she swears probably didn't connect to each other, making use of sudden freak occurrences to hide from prying eyes or Technocratic stealth drones.
"That's your destination," Lou says, somehow seeing the boarded-up, decaying house. "Looks like a great place to stay," he mentions sarcastically. "A real fixer-upper. And it looks like your connection's breaking up here-I don't know how much help I can give you inside. Stay safe, I'll be keeping watch."
"You too." Alice mentions, and she strides towards the haunted house with her hands balled. It has a sordid history-the old man living there in the 80s killed his son, his daughter-in-law, and their children back in '84, and everyone who tried to live there had misfortune happen to them. The latest couple to live there killed their children and then themselves for no apparent reason. People started to avoid it. It was a place where the Dark Umbra impinged on the world, and unquiet dead could act freely. A place where the Technocracy's neat frameworks had no power. One of the few places she was safe in. Well, 'safe' in.
Alice opens the door carefully and steps in. The door shuts behind her with a gust of wind and locks, but she's not an innocent teenager in a horror movie. She's been in worse places before. Ominous whispers echo in the room but she's used to that. When she was young, that happened around her all the time, and she thought it was perfectly normal. It took until going to school to realize that normal people didn't hear evil ghosts all the time. She grabs some things from her purse, and starts to light candles in remembrance of little Reggie Williams, summoning him to do her a favor. She knows he'll help, he doesn't want anyone else to be killed like he is. He's a good kid, even if he's been dead 30 years. She puts down a Mars Bar to finish the summoning, and-
"Hi." Reggie says. He's short, has a gap-toothed smile, and his clothes hang loose on his frame. They hide where he was beaten to death by a hammer, mostly. She can still see the bruises reaching up to his neck. "Thanks, auntie Alice. I love these things."
Alice smiles reflexively, even if she doesn't feel like smiling. "You're welcome. I'm sorry but I need your help."
"Sure thing! What's it for?"
"I need you to get a message to my friends in the homeless shelter. Tell them that the Technocracy is coming and I have to leave. They shouldn't expect any help from me. I don't want them to fight. It'll be pointless."
"But-" Reggie starts. He looks hurt, uncomprehending.
"Please." Alice sniffles. "I'm sorry but I just- I just don't want to die."
A ghost can sympathize with that, Alice thinks. And he does. He nods. "Fine. I'll do it." He doesn't sound happy but she doesn't need him to be. He vanishes, and she proceeds to ask more important questions. She throws chalk into the air, asking the haunted house as it falls. "Is everyone I know safe? Are they in danger?"
"THEY ARE ALMOST ALL SAFE. THEIR DEATHS COME FAR INTO THE FUTURE. BUT ONE IS IN DANGER. ONE MUST BE SAVED IMMEDIATELY."
"Who needs to be saved?" Alice asks. She starts thinking of plans, of people who might depend on her. Friends. Surrogate family. Allies. There are too many options.
"YOU. DON'T TURN AROUND." the chalk says. And Alice hears the echo of a rifle being taken off of safe. It's not a real weapon. It's a ghostly one. But that doesn't really matter.
"Why don't you ignore that little message, Miss Aristide." A voice behind her says. "And turn around." She does so, and looks at what she's seeing. There's a pale man in a fine bespoke suit, with beautiful lustrous shoulder-length black hair and fine Asian features, looking at her behind a pair of spectacles with fake lenses. He's flanked by two bodyguards, special forces types who have the deathmarks of having died in combat somewhere in the Middle East. One has fine lines where the shrapnel cut him apart. Another has a hole in his neck where he was shot. But that's not all that he's brought. He turns around and wrenches the door open, and four soldiers file in, their eyes blank. Victors, she thinks, looking at their mechanical, drilled movements.
She's made a mistake, Alice thinks. She never expected that the unknown poltergeist, the thing which was trying to bend fate against her, might be working with the Technocracy instead of just a third party which wanted her dead for unrelated reasons. "I'd kill you now, but I'd prefer for you to know why you're being killed." An-Jin Choi says. "A pity. It'd be so much easier to just have ordered a missile strike where you are. But that wouldn't be nearly as poignant, would it?" Choi says. "Preferable in some ways, certainly," he mentions, rambling slightly. "Much more efficient. No risk of last-minute escapes. But this is something very personal. It wouldn't do if you died and didn't know why you died. Miss Aristide. Or perhaps I should say, Miss Lancaster?" Choi asks.
A brief flash of memory. She's very young. There's a man with a crisp RP accent introducing her as his daughter. He's tall and handsome and strong but there's some darkness buried in him, she remembers. Something awful and nihilistic that threatens to consume him. "This is my daughter, Elissa Lancaster. Elissa, say hi to Dr. Hirsch."
There's something about that memory, something painful, as if the Technocracy had buried it for some reason. She can sense the touch of one of her father's friends there, Dr. Brown-but it's a sympathetic touch, a man trying to help as best he can. Alice backs away slowly from the deranged man. His skin is pale and deathly cold. She can sense that his life ended... 16 years ago, perhaps. Something along those lines. He seems like a vampire, but there's some subtle wrongness. There's no flash of fang as he grins at her, there's no literal blood-lust in his eyes. His psychic aura is muted, dead rather than corrupted in the way vampire ones are. And underneath it there is an all-consuming obsession.
Alice's Choices:
[ ] Run for it. Hope you don't catch more than a few bullets or knives from the Victors and wraiths.
[ ] The vampire? seems like the most dangerous problem. Victors are dumb without coordination, and those wraiths seem like they don't have any volition besides what he gives them. Maybe a simulated burst of sunlight and a mental compulsion might keep him from acting.
[ ] Listen to him ramble on and on. Keep leading him on and buy some time.
[ ] (1.5x) Listen to him ramble but use it to sneakily prepare an escape plan.
[ ] Write-in: What spell are you planning to cast?
[ ] Try to take him on. He's just a trumped-up vampire, what the hell can he do?
[ ] Write-In.
Mundane:
Alice has been trained as an Operative and is quite gifted at it. Much like her real mother and father, she is at least okay at almost everything, although she's got some of her own eclectic knowledges and isn't quite as good at direct combat or social manipulation as Jamelia, mostly because she hasn't been enhanced with anything more than standard low-level Technocratic genetic tweaks (which are why she can easily look ten years younger than she actually is, seems to never get sick, and will probably live a very long natural life if she decides to get old normally like most mages don't). Willpower: 8/8 Health Levels: -0/-0/-1/-1/-2/-2/-4/Incapacitated
Mystical:
Alice has Arete 5. This is the same as Enlightenment 5. Her spheres are: Death 3
Dimensional Science 3
Forces 3
Life 3
Mind 4 (Control)
Time 3
Alice's paradigm is a mishmash of whatever-works combined with her psychic abilities. Much like any other Orphan, she has a fairly eclectic casting style for low level effects, although for any serious workings she generally ends up going back to the NWO psychic paradigm. She pays for the flexibility in being able to do "whatever works" paradigmically by not having a favored sphere.
Mundane:
LouCypher52 is an expert hacker, computer scientist, and a pretty good intelligence analyst. He is good at social engineering and regular old hard science engineering as well. His physical skills or lack thereof don't matter to Alice, because he's not throwing himself into Miami, so it doesn't matter if he's a 90 pound weakling or a 190 pound super-commando pro athlete. You do know at least that in video games he's pretty good with a gun and swords, but that's in video-games. Willpower: 7/7
Mystical:
LouCypher52 has Arete 4. His spheres are:
Correspondence 3 (f)
Forces 3
Matter 3
Mind 1
Prime 3
LouCypher52's paradigm is a standard Reality Hacker one-basically one part Matrix Operator, one part Matrix operative. He can read the underlying code of reality, which displays itself as complex arrays of symbols, and by manipulating that code directly, he can substantiate changes in reality. He can make things explode, counter other attempts to edit reality (i.e. countermagic/antimagic), create objects, and move them around. If you need a gun moved to your position, he's your man (Corr 2/Matter 2). If you need someone's car to brick or explode, he can do that as well (Corr 2/Forces 3 or Matter 2).
Knights of Radamanthys: They are currently a mystery.
Huh. Wasn't expecting Choi to show up in person. This is obviously not good for Alice in the immediate term, but in this case the fact that Choi is a revenge obsessed ghost is actually in our favor, since if Clock had been the one to find her, she might already be dead by now. It also gives her a chance to find out more about what's happening, and that's crucial.
So for now, my inclination is to go with:
[ ] (1.5x) Listen to him ramble but use it to sneakily prepare an escape plan.
Exploiting Choi's ghostly nature to keep him talking and get something out of him while simultaneously prioritizing Alice's safety is pretty appealing, since it accomplishes both our immediate and long term objectives, though I'll wait for people to suggest alternatives or specific spells before casting my vote.
Huh. So Choi got White Towered? Or the equivalent.
That means he's undead, and can be affected with Death as with Life 3. In his current state, he probably counts as a complex lifeform, so it's not actually much better than she can already do with her biokinesis. His ghost allies are mutable as if they were simple lifeforms.
She can also rip them all apart with DSci 3, I think maybe she can toss them individually through the Gauntlet and/or the Shroud, which would be neat insofar as they'd be in another dimension and might get attacked by werewolves or something.
Alternatively, she can conjure bees that turn into ghost bees when they die (Life 3/Death 3).
Probably will need to coincidentize that by tapping into her creepy psychic girl mythic thread. And the innate creepiness of being in a haunted house.
Huh. So Choi got White Towered? Or the equivalent.
That means he's undead, and can be affected with Death as with Life 3. In his current state, he probably counts as a complex lifeform, so it's not actually much better than she can already do with her biokinesis. His ghost allies are mutable as if they were simple lifeforms.
She can also rip them all apart with DSci 3, I think maybe she can toss them individually through the Gauntlet and/or the Shroud, which would be neat insofar as they'd be in another dimension and might get attacked by werewolves or something.
Um. I feel I should point something out at this juncture. This is one of Ms Clock's plans. You know, Ms Clock? Jamelia 1.1? Who plans like the main character of this quest? In that she ensures that the option you're most likely and most incentivised to pick is the one that is a massive lethal trap?
Consider carefully whether she would have failed to cover contingencies like "oh hey wait the person I'm trying to kill with an undead ally can manipulate dead people" before assuming that using said powers on the dead people she sent after Alice is a good idea and not in any way likely to backfire. She'll at the very least have warned Choi about it, because that's just common sense, and while he's crazy-obsessed, he is not stupid.
Bad idea. Choi is a very, very angry ghost who has survived nearly 20 years in the Dark Umbra in order to get revenge on Jamelia. He is not stupid. He'd have come ready for hostile RNEs and such. Whatever little local ghosts Alice can summon up are likely to be massacred by Choi and his Victors.
Mm. True. It would work for baiting her into attacking "Technocratic assets" which might be an issue if it escalates something maybe. Or just making poor decisions that lead into other bad situations etc.
Thinking out loud...
I'm distrustful of the 'sunlight the pseudo-vampire', because we know that White Tower units aren't susceptible to sunlight or frenzying from it like vampires are (which deprives Alice of part of the expected focus, and paradigm/focus is a Big Deal in this quest). So that part seems like a poor choice framed as reasonable.
The ghosts cut off her escape route through the Shroud, because ghosts, and the Avatar Storm is an issue as usual. That leaves any 'escape' probably being best through the physical world.
...hm. So we may want to take a less-foreseen third option here. A modification/recombination of the existing options? Escaping, but simultaneously making them think that she's there listening to all this, at least long enough to be out of firing lines.
Victors are dumb and uncreative, they're almost trivially confused. The ghosts are also probably fairly dependent on Choi for discernment and initiative. So it'd only really be Choi we have to fool with any fidelity. Perhaps Alice could make a simulacrum of herself, like... a modification of the Virtual Adept rote that makes a projection? Something like Forces 2 (displace appearance)/Mind 3 (filling in the flaws with a mental illusion)/Death 2/Life 2? With the latter two mostly to fool any special ghost senses he has.
Time 3/Mind 3/Death 2: In this place, the world's memories are out-of-sync with reality. Things that happened decades ago resonate with and take precedence over the present. On a smaller scale, you force the world's memories of you to lag a minute behind reality like trying to play an online game with a bad internet connection, giving you the chance to escape without notice before the world catches up. Mind to keep Choi from questioning your possibly immobile/looping simulacrum; backed up by Int + Disguise.
Victors are dumb and uncreative, they're almost trivially confused. The ghosts are also probably fairly dependent on Choi for discernment and initiative. So it'd only really be Choi we have to fool with any fidelity. Perhaps Alice could make a simulacrum of herself, like... a modification of the Virtual Adept rote that makes a projection? Something like Forces 2 (displace appearance)/Mind 3 (filling in the flaws with a mental illusion)/Death 2/Life 2? With the latter two mostly to fool any special ghost senses he has.
Hmm. The question is whether the Victors' dumb uncreativity can be used. I'm almost certain the reason Choi was given the Victors is that they're too stupid to ask questions about why they're being ordered around by someone who doesn't have a pulse. Victors are also trivially commandable by someone with the right codes - they're made to be ordered around and not ask questions.
I wonder if she can - without him noticing - extract the auth-codes from the Victors psychically and give them orders using valid auth codes telepathically so they turn on the reality deviant RNE. And don't shoot her. That's also fairly important.
(After all, back in the day, Alice was involved in Project Crysaor, an experiment in controlling cloned supersoldiers telepathically. She was moved out of the project, partly due to the declining popularity of psychic powers and mostly because she couldn't manifest the remote-control required to control them when... uh, she was in a different room.)
Defictionalization: A Shadow Ministry Guide to Finding Truth From Fiction (Analyst William "Bill" Johnson): Defictionalization is a guide to one of the more unorthodox methods of gathering large-scale societal and strategic intelligence that the Shadow Ministry uses-the use of fictional works to spot trends in society. This grimoire teaches a reader familiar with literary analysis (Academics [Literature] 3+) how to see beneath the surface of the fictional work and understand the trends and political leanings it reflects, and whether or not they're reflective of society as a whole or a small subset of it. Although even some Etherites dismiss it as quackery, there is no doubt that Analyst Johnson is one of the finest Shadow Ministry intelligence analysts still alive and has correctly predicted many trends, including the evolution of Iteration X cyborg combatants, somehow. This grimoire teaches Time 2, Entropy 2, and Correspondence 2.
I wonder if she can - without him noticing - extract the auth-codes from the Victors psychically and give them orders using valid auth codes telepathically so they turn on the reality deviant RNE. And don't shoot her. That's also fairly important.
(After all, back in the day, Alice was involved in Project Crysaor, an experiment in controlling cloned supersoldiers telepathically. She was moved out of the project, partly due to the declining popularity of psychic powers and mostly because she couldn't manifest the remote-control required to control them when... uh, she was in a different room.)
If he's not aware of the codes being sourced from Alice, could this potentially twist Choi's Passion/Fetter to destroy Jamelia to include Clock, or create a new one in opposition to her?
(aka ES's write-in)
