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Panopticon: A Game of Posthumans, Perniciousness, Paranoia, Politics, and Plasmaguns

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Aleph said:
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?
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It comes to mind that a), Ms. Clock probably considers Choi highly expendable - possibly to the point where she's actively trying to expend him - and b) that Alice would want information about why the Technocracy's decided to hunt her down personally and has the skills to try to extract it from a ghost is not a surprise.

I suspect we don't want Alice near him long enough to try anything clever.

Alas, that Tradwiki article doesn't have any posts by Alice, so she probably hasn't read that bit about White Tower units - and how trying the usual anti-vampire measures against Choi won't end well.

@EarthScorpion, I think you've mentioned before that if you were dealing with an ENE who needed a host, you'd try to give it one you'd prepped with Conditioning in order to better control it - I assume similar things could be done with RNEs in a host body?

And what are the odds Choi's got more than just Conditioning in him - like, say, suicide charges against the possibility he goes rogue?
 
notanautomaton said:
Can we use magic without them noticing? Like getting Choi to rant, then manipulating the ghosts to attack him?
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Yes. Each +1 diff you take on the magic roll is a +1 diff to their Awareness roll. You just need to tell me what your wager is.

Strypgia said:
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.
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He doesn't need to come ready. He is a very very powerful ghost who might well just be able to go "fuck you I'm your boss and the ghost will be like 'sorry but I don't have much choice.'"

Moreover Alice hasn't had time to check if he's borrowed a battalion of Marines to hide in the Shadowlands and ventilate anything that shows up there.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
He doesn't need to come ready. He is a very very powerful ghost who might well just be able to go "fuck you I'm your boss and the ghost will be like 'sorry but I don't have much choice.'"

Moreover Alice hasn't had time to check if he's borrowed a battalion of Marines to hide in the Shadowlands and ventilate anything that shows up there.
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So either way, trying to pull ghost shenanigans on Choi is probably going to end really badly. Let's think of something else.
 
Also, people should remember that the old Choi you met 16 years ago is dead (ha ha get it). The new Choi is madder, more powerful, and a lot better at negotiating. He's not Ms. Clock's creature. He's a powerful ally who knows Ms. Clock wants to kill him for being a RD and plans to be useful until he resolves all his fetters at which point he really doesn't give a shit.

Ms. Clock can't control him, she can just use him, like she is now. Which is good for Alice because if he was the next vote would be how vaporized Alice becomes.

Choi wants Alice to suffer, and maybe regret hard enough she leaves a wraith, which he can then torture and turn into a pillow. Clock just wants Alice dead.
 
Okay, if we kill Choi here, what's going to probably happen is that Ms Clock will just order Yinzheng to nuke the house from the air. Any plan we make should exploit his desire to murder Alice slowly if we don't want to be turned into vaporised ash, because that's the only thing that's keeping us alive right now.
 
[X] (1.5x) Listen to him ramble but use it to sneakily prepare an escape plan.

He wants to monologue, we want a little bit of time to prep something to help with escaping... we both win. Until the losing starts. On one side or another. (Or both! That's entirely possible, too.)

Although we don't want to take too much time, because while stalling also gives our backup time to realize Alice needs help and get there, it also gives Panopticon time to zero in on the location.

Now comes how to get out of this. I like ES's idea of taking advantage of her past involvement with Project Crysaor, and taking over the Victors, because she needs firepower. And she's good at it, given her Mind spec of Control. Then, psychically charging the Victors' ammunition with Death, to allow them to hurt ghosts as well as Choi's physical body. That should make a good distraction while she runs away a lot.
 
Lightwhispers said:
[X] (1.5x) Listen to him ramble but use it to sneakily prepare an escape plan.

He wants to monologue, we want a little bit of time to prep something to help with escaping... we both win. Until the losing starts. On one side or another. (Or both! That's entirely possible, too.)

Although we don't want to take too much time, because while stalling also gives our backup time to realize Alice needs help and get there, it also gives Panopticon time to zero in on the location.

Now comes how to get out of this. I like ES's idea of taking advantage of her past involvement with Project Crysaor, and taking over the Victors, because she needs firepower. And she's good at it, given her Mind spec of Control. Then, psychically charging the Victors' ammunition with Death, to allow them to hurt ghosts as well as Choi's physical body. That should make a good distraction while she runs away a lot.
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Dunno about having the Victors shoot Choi with anti-ghost ammunition. Remember he's the only thing keeping us from eating a cruise missile right now. I think we could order the Victors to dogpile and restrain him physically (and shoot the White Towers, of course), which should keep him from coming after us.
 
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Guys, you might have to consider something important here.

If you're a powerful deathlord who controls ghosts, why would you arm the living mooks you have with weapons that can kill ghosts?
 
Arcus2611 said:
Dunno about having the Victors shoot Choi with anti-ghost ammunition. Remember he's the only thing keeping us from eating a cruise missile right now. I think we could order the Victors to dogpile and restrain him physically (and shoot the White Towers, of course), which should keep him from coming after us.
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Oh, I don't think it will kill him... but it has a chance to distract him enough for Alice to get away. And I don't think it's his presence keeping her from eating a cruise missile, as much as his influence in planning already did so. We don't know whether Choi told anyone else about finding Alice... Although he probably did. Sigh.

MJ12 Commando said:
Guys, you might have to consider something important here.

If you're a powerful deathlord who controls ghosts, why would you arm the living mooks you have with weapons that can kill ghosts?
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I expect that on their own, they can't. That's why, if she can ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL, she needs to fix that. If she can. My idea was to psychically charge the bullets with the readily-available Death essence here, so that they will hit the living and dead with equal force. (Or something like that.) Is Death 3 enough for that?
(And yes, that's two discrete effects, which is one more than I'd like, but I haven't thought of a better idea.)
 
Lightwhispers said:
Oh, I don't think it will kill him... but it has a chance to distract him enough for Alice to get away. And I don't think it's his presence keeping her from eating a cruise missile, as much as his influence in planning already did so. We don't know whether Choi told anyone else about finding Alice... Although he probably did. Sigh.
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If he dies, his influence is removed from the equation. Cue cruise missile.
 
Guys, guys, guys. We already know that getting the Victors to kill Choi is a losing proposition, thanks to MJ spelling it out for us because we're too goddamn stupid to pick up on it. But the phasic rounds they're carrying should tell us that Clock has no intention for Choi to survive past killing Alice.

Maybe--just maybe--we should point that out to Choi. He doesn't give a shit about dying after his fetters are resolved, but if we emphasize that his fetters won't be resolved here and now just by making Alice suffer in proxy (for someone she doesn't even know), we can stave off our death. Of course, we also need to point out that if he stalls for time too long, his Technocratic partners will have us both killed, which means, ironically enough, he'll have to work with us to escape and survive long enough to resolve his fetters.
 
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[X] (1.5x) Listen to him ramble but use it to sneakily prepare an escape plan.

[Alice - Death 3 - The potential to become a ghost - an RNE - lies in everyone. Even the Technocracy doesn't deny it - they just argue that ghosts are memory-impressions in psychoactive extradimensions, akin to an upload. Or at least they did that when they accepted "psychoactive dimensions". But to most people, anyone can leave a ghost. And in a creepy place like this, even sceptics find it hard to deny that ghosts might exist. Or that anyone you stumble across in here might be a ghost. Like, say, the creepy woman who hangs around such places and talks to dead things. What a twist! Of course, Alice knows she isn't a ghost, and would quite like to keep things this way, so she'll just partially phase out of reality and convert her substance into ectoplasm, thus becoming an immaterial spectral form. Enhanced by Wits + Occult]

Alice considers her options, all the while keeping her expression the panicked, jumpy look of someone who's just had their plan fall apart on them and doesn't have a fallback option. She needs to get out of here for certain, she thinks, preparing herself to let him talk. Technocratic communications don't work in here - hence why Lou can't talk to her - but the bastard in front of her might have told the 'Crats where he was going. There might be a bomb headed for her location right now with her name on it.

Solar flare the possibly-a-vampire? No. Photokinesis doesn't always work even against strong-willed vampires, and she's not entirely sure he is one. He's too... dead. Not undead. Dead. She needs another way out.

The basement is below her. It's got a nice solid concrete ceiling, so even if the Victors have wallhax implants running they'll have problems hitting her in such a tech-unfriendly environment. It'll also help her survive a bomb falling on the place, especially since her powers should give her enough warning of an incoming bomb to throw up a telekinetic field.

So she'll just need to drop down. Like a ghost. Which means that the ghosts can follow her, but the Victors can't. And that means she's suddenly got far fewer people shooting at her. Which is nice. If the ghosts follow her, it'll be down to three vs one - and she can scare off the normal ghosts. The pretty guy is more of a threat and she doesn't know what he can do, but the first thing she needs to do is even out the odds. Then she'll see where she stands on the whole flight or fight thing.

Because what the fuck, this... this thing has gone to all this length to get her - and she isn't even the primary target. It's only after her to hurt someone else. Her father? If he wasn't a complete bastard working for an amoral secret conspiracy who she never wanted to see again, she'd have words to say to him, no two ways about it.
 
So I've got a wacky thought or two...
- The ghost is going after her to get to someone else. This, she knows. If she lets it rant enough to tell her what it actually cares about (perhaps with some encouragement by Death-enabled Mind), she might be able to convince it that its best bet on revenge involves doing something other than killing her slowly. It might even be true. After all, there's a decent chance that she doesn't much *like* whoever it has this hate-on for. This fits in well with the "your boss is planning on killing you, leaving your revenge unfinished" argument.

- The technocracy has sicced both a hate-spectre and a "doing it because it's the right thing to do" idealist on her. There's a decent chance that whatever comes out of the hate-spectre's mouth is prime material for trying to turn (or at least demoralize) whoever the idealist is. Now, if she had the correspondence for it, this would be a lot easier, but she does have a friend with correspondence. Once she gets out of his dead zone, maybe he could do something with it. If she had some means of recording the rant, that could come in awfully handy.
 
Sirrocco said:
So I've got a wacky thought or two...
- The ghost is going after her to get to someone else. This, she knows. If she lets it rant enough to tell her what it actually cares about (perhaps with some encouragement by Death-enabled Mind), she might be able to convince it that its best bet on revenge involves doing something other than killing her slowly. It might even be true. After all, there's a decent chance that she doesn't much *like* whoever it has this hate-on for. This fits in well with the "your boss is planning on killing you, leaving your revenge unfinished" argument.

- The technocracy has sicced both a hate-spectre and a "doing it because it's the right thing to do" idealist on her. There's a decent chance that whatever comes out of the hate-spectre's mouth is prime material for trying to turn (or at least demoralize) whoever the idealist is. Now, if she had the correspondence for it, this would be a lot easier, but she does have a friend with correspondence. Once she gets out of his dead zone, maybe he could do something with it. If she had some means of recording the rant, that could come in awfully handy.
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By and large, even Jamelia does not try to flip people when they are actively trying to kill her.

(Siddharth was a special case, and even then that wasn't her primary plan)

When you are an untrustworthy Operative-trained RD, you are probably going to be assumed to be lying. Or playing games using the truth while not technically lying. And recordings are worth nothing considering how easy they are to fake, especially if you have a Virtual Adept helping you.

So, yes, take account of the fact that the Technocracy apparently has been giving an RD RNE control over Victors. Be willing to throw that in someone's face if you're ever cornered and might need to confuse them or buy some time. But trying to use that as a core element of 'trying to flip an operational commander, especially one who has a cold Operative killing streak in them mixed in with the idealism', is not a good basic plan.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
Clock just wants Alice dead.
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Do you mean normal dead, or made-a-spirit dead? If it's the former, what does clock they hope to accomplish by killing Alice?

Normally, I'd be worried that this is a plan to drive Alice into the hands of Threat Null, forcing her to flee into the Umbra or some place where threat null can get at her and subvert her, and then use her as a psychological weapon against Jamelia. But if it's just a standard kill order, no Void Adaptation involved, what does Clock hope to accomplish by killing her that's more valuable than subverting her?

I'm wondering a couple of things. One is that Alice may know something important. Clock might not want it to get out, or perhaps the other way around- she wants the Technocrats to do a brain trawl of Alice after killing her and reveal things to we would rather not get out to the technocracy at large. Clock is also probably trying to sculpt Yinzheng Li into something more ruthless, and more to her liking, and give Jamelia a reason to hate her, reducing the possibility that the real Jamelia will flip Li once Clock's presence is discovered. Actually, combine those two possibilities- maybe Clock wants Yinzheng Li to see Jamelia through Alice's memories, to manipulate her somehow, turn her against the real jamelia, lead her on a specific mental path, reveal the true nature of threat null somehow and create the chaos we're trying to prevent, or...I don't know.
 
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Azunth said:
Do you mean normal dead, or made-a-spirit dead? If it's the former, what does clock they hope to accomplish by killing Alice?
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Request Serafina as a high-level Progenitor to do the autopsy, thus throwing the death of a past friend who she feels a mess of guilt and shame over the defection of in her face, and use that as part of a hammer-blow to push her into backsliding to the suicidal state she was in just after Moscow.
 
Are we sure that they are trying to kill Alice? In terms of psychological warfare I would presume that capturing and Alice would prove the superior option. A brainwashed Alice seems like the perfect tool against Serafina or Jamelia. Even without the option of brainwashing capturing her still seems the superior option whether to use as leverage or to force her into a fate far worse than death.
 
Ct613hulu said:
Are we sure that they are trying to kill Alice?
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Sometimes (often, for the NWO at any rate) you're okay with 'alive and in custody' as the outcome for the reality deviant; but you don't throw these kinds of assets at one with this kind of strategy unless you're perfectly okay with 'dead' as an outcome. And 'dead' is usually a lot easier to arrange than 'alive and in custody'.
 
EarthScorpion said:
By and large, even Jamelia does not try to flip people when they are actively trying to kill her.

(Siddharth was a special case, and even then that wasn't her primary plan)

When you are an untrustworthy Operative-trained RD, you are probably going to be assumed to be lying. Or playing games using the truth while not technically lying. And recordings are worth nothing considering how easy they are to fake, especially if you have a Virtual Adept helping you.

So, yes, take account of the fact that the Technocracy apparently has been giving an RD RNE control over Victors. Be willing to throw that in someone's face if you're ever cornered and might need to confuse them or buy some time. But trying to use that as a core element of 'trying to flip an operational commander, especially one who has a cold Operative killing streak in them mixed in with the idealism', is not a good basic plan.
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The point about the clash was not so much "OMG, they gave Victors to a dead dude!" as it was "We have one guy going after us for intensely personal and yet at-one-remove reasons, and one who must have been convinced that it's for the good of the technocracy - and given how the technocracy operates, and our actual effects on the world as an individual, they were probably lying to the second one. Possibly the ranting of the first one will give us something we can use." (example: Ranting about how much he hates Jamelia and wants her dead. Not all that likely to begin with, but given his apparent emotional state, even Mind 2 should be enough to get some of that out of him, let alone Mind 4 (Control). He's dead, after all, which means that he's not a mage, which means that he can't countermagic for himself).

My original thought had actually been to try to giver her a real-time image of what was going on in the house (Death/Correspondence/maybe Forces rote to cause the surveillance they have on the place to suddenly work right for the important ranting and make its way to the ears that we'd like to have hear it most) but then I got home and realized that she didn't have the Correspondence to pull it off. No, I don't know how to present it in a fashion that wouldn't be immediately discarded - that's why I presented it as "hey, I have some wacky ideas. Maybe someone can do something with them."

It's true, I don't have a way to turn this into anything we can take advantage of right now. I don't even know how to effectively store it away as a resource to use later. I just thought it might be worth some thought to see if we could come up with such a way.
 
Ct613hulu said:
Are we sure that they are trying to kill Alice? In terms of psychological warfare I would presume that capturing and Alice would prove the superior option. A brainwashed Alice seems like the perfect tool against Serafina or Jamelia. Even without the option of brainwashing capturing her still seems the superior option whether to use as leverage or to force her into a fate far worse than death.
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Yeah, but, see, Ms Clock doesn't have full control here. That's important. Choi has been around in the Underworld for the better part of 15 years, he is not a ghost with which to fuck. This is much more like "uneasy allies" than him being one of her subordinates - he's insane and dangerously obsessed but he is not stupid. He knows damn well that Ms Clock is an Operative - remember, he used to be part of the Ivory Tower. He's probably laid his cards flat out to her and gone "you don't try to fuck me over, I don't try to fuck you over, I help you solve this problem which supports my goals, you don't waste your incredibly rare DSci-capable assets trying to kill me, everyone wins besides Jamelia Fucking Belltower."

Ms Clock probably would be fine with Series P-ing Alice, but Choi is her intelligence source and ally, Choi is not a patsy or a negligible threat, and Choi wants everything of Jamelia's broken and dead and wrecked and causing her as much misery and grief and pain as possible. And frankly, taking Alice alive just isn't worth it for Ms Clock, not when having her dead works just as well to destabilise Serafina and maybe even knock Jamelia off-balance, and trying to take her alive leaves an easy way to turn Choi against her.
 
Sirrocco said:
He's dead, after all, which means that he's not a mage, which means that he can't countermagic for himself).
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Sort of. If he has an applicable Arcanoi, he can use it as a counter at greatly reduced effectiveness (he halves the number of successes he rolls, flat-out). Furthermore he has perfectly mundane methods of countering effects, like using Willpower to resist. This means that subtle nudges are probably okay, but trying to smack him with mind-freems is probably not going to work.
 
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