FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Maybe with prompt asking if he wants to sell while high, y/n, with selling triggering the effect and converting the value of the stock into Prime Energy?
Panopticon: A Game of Posthumans, Perniciousness, Paranoia, Politics, and Plasmaguns
Sirrocco
Pedantic
Tactically, the problem with this one is that he potentially has to fiddle with his phone to trigger it while in a situation that's desperate enough that he really needs the quint.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
What would he be doing in combat that's more important than messing with his phone? Nothing so far has indicated that he's any better than a random sleeper off the street in a fight. Honestly maintaining everyone's Quintessence reserves and providing other buffs is one of the best things he can do.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Hmm, good point. Although couldn't you say the same about any Device, really? You need to fiddle with it to work?
And I had another idea based around using Primal Utility to get more quint, just a wee bit more Vulgar (maybe?) and with 1000x more body/existential horror.
This one's for Rose, and it uses Dimensional Science (and Life?) to scavenge alternate dimensions for variant yous that you steal value from.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
1) You can't get Quintessence from nothing, and 2) Rose doesn't have the sphere's to steal Prime from other hers. Getting to alternate dimensions requires Dsci 3, Entropy 4, and Corr 3, IIRC. Sending spells to alternate dimensions would probably only require Corr 2. So that would require several rounds of Rose spending xp.
Also, taking things from alternate dimensions gets you paradox like changing the past does. So this would probably result in Rose getting crippled by obscene amounts of permanent dox, until she becomes unable to continue to exist on earth. Minor details.
- Location
- in the trash
Something that acts as a focus to do things with Donald's Spirit sphere?
- Location
- in the trash
Well, also as a way to let Donald do things that his paradigm of EDE contracts would normally not allow him to do, like using Spirit to teleport into the Umbra or phaser things.
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Sirrocco
Pedantic
Spirit cannot phaser things. Spirit is not DSci.
Throwing out a few ideas:
Time 4/Time 4, as it were. "Stops time" for him at just the right moment, essentially giving him as much time as he needs to think and cast mental effects.
Time 2/Spirit ?: "I totally bound this spirit in advance. Totally. Nevermind how it'd only really be useful in this situation and that doing that binding in a TU Construct is really dangerous."
Time 4/Time 4, as it were. "Stops time" for him at just the right moment, essentially giving him as much time as he needs to think and cast mental effects.
Time 2/Spirit ?: "I totally bound this spirit in advance. Totally. Nevermind how it'd only really be useful in this situation and that doing that binding in a TU Construct is really dangerous."
- Location
- in the trash
Well, at least some way for Donald to jump to the Umbra if we need to run away from the Exalt.
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Okay, since I've been banned from coming up with the third Device, here's some tips for people
Devices are basically for three things - getting capabilities you don't have natively, getting perma-on effects, and having Devices which take the 'Dox rather than you (this is often a laser gun clause).
If you can easily do the thing you want to do with your native spheres, you don't want it as a Device. For example, most enlightened Technocrats aren't going to want a full spectrum EM vision goggle Device, because most people interested in this can just get Forces 1. Instead, they'll buy similar hardware which doesn't have the user-friendly optimisation to allow non-specialists to use it without the training and use that as a focus. If you can do things natively, you can... just do them. When party members make things for each other, they'll tend to be like this because most people don't all have the same spheres.
As for perma-on effects... well, that's obvious enough. Jamelia's knife, for example, has its Entropy 4 effect so all the stabs are all... uh, stabby. The biosuit write-in I did was so Donald can get a perma-concealed bit of armour. Rose's necklace has a few permanent effects woven in, with the balancing factor that they're quite... quirky in their triggering circumstances and the Mind defence doesn't do shit to protect her from someone mind controlling her to kill vampires [1].
Finally, the "having the Device take the Dox" is a specific advantage that Technocratic things are pretty good at. Plasma Cannon Devices, for example, will tend to be of the kind which take the 'Dox, rather than the firer, as the plasma cannon overheats and once the battle is over needs to be repaired and stripped down by someone trained. Effects you take as Devices of this kind tend to be vulgar, and used fairly often - like firing the aforementioned plasma cannon. You essentially use the Device as an ablative 'Dox soak, and lose it when it shuts down. This is very common for armour and weapons, but less common with more abstract things.
Probably best to keep these guidelines in mind.
[1] Reina: "Feature, not bug. Do not fix."
Devices are basically for three things - getting capabilities you don't have natively, getting perma-on effects, and having Devices which take the 'Dox rather than you (this is often a laser gun clause).
If you can easily do the thing you want to do with your native spheres, you don't want it as a Device. For example, most enlightened Technocrats aren't going to want a full spectrum EM vision goggle Device, because most people interested in this can just get Forces 1. Instead, they'll buy similar hardware which doesn't have the user-friendly optimisation to allow non-specialists to use it without the training and use that as a focus. If you can do things natively, you can... just do them. When party members make things for each other, they'll tend to be like this because most people don't all have the same spheres.
As for perma-on effects... well, that's obvious enough. Jamelia's knife, for example, has its Entropy 4 effect so all the stabs are all... uh, stabby. The biosuit write-in I did was so Donald can get a perma-concealed bit of armour. Rose's necklace has a few permanent effects woven in, with the balancing factor that they're quite... quirky in their triggering circumstances and the Mind defence doesn't do shit to protect her from someone mind controlling her to kill vampires [1].
Finally, the "having the Device take the Dox" is a specific advantage that Technocratic things are pretty good at. Plasma Cannon Devices, for example, will tend to be of the kind which take the 'Dox, rather than the firer, as the plasma cannon overheats and once the battle is over needs to be repaired and stripped down by someone trained. Effects you take as Devices of this kind tend to be vulgar, and used fairly often - like firing the aforementioned plasma cannon. You essentially use the Device as an ablative 'Dox soak, and lose it when it shuts down. This is very common for armour and weapons, but less common with more abstract things.
Probably best to keep these guidelines in mind.
[1] Reina: "Feature, not bug. Do not fix."
Kerrus
Fractal Insanity
Why not make Rose a timestop knife. Basically prime 2, entropy 1, time 4, does aggravated pattern damage against all targets, lowers difficulties to attack by 3, and has an activated effect that can be used to make an attack with the knife outside the normal constraints of the flow of time (ie: freeze time and attack).
Such an attack obviously cannot be responded to unless the entity you're attacking also has time or some level of temporal manipulation ability, but even without that just a basic ergnomic easier to use knife that does agg damage can be very useful. You could also put extra temporal converters in the grip to allow limited temporal reversion (using time 3 to rewind time 1 round).
Another very useful device using time might be a Temporal Intercept Chip , or TIC for short. The TIC is a useful if uncommon addition to any technocrat compatible phone or communications device that contains a temporal lensing system. Using this system, the TIC is capable of retrieving any incoming data stream to the phone from up to 30 minutes into the future and displaying it. Often paired with a data analysis and forecasting algorithm to filter out unimportant results (entropy 1), the TIC can be the only thing that stands between your agent and a very bad no good terrible day.
(This is really just a basic time 2, entropy 1 foresight effect, very useful for unit commanders and the like, because you can use it for stuff like ordering an assault on a construct and- oh shit it was a clusterfuck- and you get that info with time enough to call off the attack. But also stuff like a buddy sends you a last minute warning a couple seconds before the commandos breach your penthouse through the skylight... except because of the TIC, you got that warning half an hour earlier).
Such an attack obviously cannot be responded to unless the entity you're attacking also has time or some level of temporal manipulation ability, but even without that just a basic ergnomic easier to use knife that does agg damage can be very useful. You could also put extra temporal converters in the grip to allow limited temporal reversion (using time 3 to rewind time 1 round).
Another very useful device using time might be a Temporal Intercept Chip , or TIC for short. The TIC is a useful if uncommon addition to any technocrat compatible phone or communications device that contains a temporal lensing system. Using this system, the TIC is capable of retrieving any incoming data stream to the phone from up to 30 minutes into the future and displaying it. Often paired with a data analysis and forecasting algorithm to filter out unimportant results (entropy 1), the TIC can be the only thing that stands between your agent and a very bad no good terrible day.
(This is really just a basic time 2, entropy 1 foresight effect, very useful for unit commanders and the like, because you can use it for stuff like ordering an assault on a construct and- oh shit it was a clusterfuck- and you get that info with time enough to call off the attack. But also stuff like a buddy sends you a last minute warning a couple seconds before the commandos breach your penthouse through the skylight... except because of the TIC, you got that warning half an hour earlier).
Update CXXXV: Ghosts in the Shadows
JB CXXXV: Ghosts in the Shadows
A few minutes of quiet debate is all that it takes for the Tyrants to decide to infiltrate the Construct, leaving Bacon and Beauchene here to assist Jamelia's personnel. It's the most sensible distribution of forces, Jaron thinks. Jacqueline is more than capable of taking charge should it become necessary in his stead, and he trusts her. Something people outside of the NWO wouldn't understand. They'd think that everyone was paranoid about everyone all the time. There's a grain of truth in that statement, but all it means is that the few people you can trust-those relationships are more precious than any other. More precious than brotherhood, more precious than love.
He trusts Jacqueline to do what she can to keep the Enlightened personnel at the construct safe, much as Bastion trusts him to unearth what's going on here-why there seems to be some sort of conspiracy in the Technocracy that the New World Order can't keep tabs on, and didn't even know existed. One that seems to be resource-strapped enough to be reactivating old facilities like LPF-4 but one that's also flush enough in assets that they can deploy a half-dozen (admittedly reliable) heavy assault units here to cut a bloody swathe through hemophage and EDE alike. Unless these are two separate conspiracies. Which is always possible. Reality has a habit of being complicated like that.
"Beauchene." Jaron says, as a finalization of the plan. "You and Bacon stay here with the Spectre. Your job is to keep the Enlightened personnel alive and keep our egress intact. You are then to extract them and anyone who knows we were there. Use the corpses to distract the maybe-Unionists running the spidertank. Belltower-beta, I technically shouldn't be giving you orders but you're to assist Beauchene and Bacon however you can."
"I'm not actually Director Belltower." The beta-level insists. "So order me around however you want."
"I think she's coming onto you, boss." Juliet Baxter says, causing most of the Tyrants to laugh and rewarding her with a vicious glare from the HITMark hosting Jamelia's simulated psyche. Unfortunately for the HITMark, it lacked the necessary ocular weapons to cause Baxter to burst into flames at the glare, and she was mission critical anyhow.
Jaron ignores the jibe. "The rest of us are going to be infiltrating the construct. Remember, some of these enemies are RNE-puppeted corpses, and the rest are hemophages. Yes, there is in fact a difference, as Juliet assures us. The former don't have psychotic breaks in the middle of combat if exposed to stressful stimuli, for one, and aren't as vulnerable to high-spec UV lasers. Not that we have them anyways. Our presence has to be absolutely deniable. Which is why you're going to set your infiltration gear to blend in with the hemophages and your external temperature to ambient." Jaron explains, already doing so with the armored smart cloth he wears. "They're not us. They don't have the C4ISR integration that we do. We're just reinforcements. That limits our weapons choices. Nothing that you wouldn't see in the hands of the hemophages. You're all trained Operatives, you know how through Union forensics can get. Let's not give them anything to suspect our involvement." He grabs a M4 carbine from one of the armory racks in the Spectre as an example. He knows that it's not going to be particularly effective against anyone without headshots, but Jaron is a high end enhancile. He supplements it with a combat knife-not a high end one, but there's a discreet disposable phasic field generator in the hilt-and a handful of flash and concussion grenades.
The team arms themselves as they're best able, and start their infiltration. It's not hard. As expected, the unknown RNEs have turned the conflict into a gigantic clusterfuck with large-scale breakdowns in command. It looks like the RNEs should have been losing-they're not much, if any, better than the hemophages in combat and they're outnumbered drastically. However, he can see Juliet's vision on TacNet and how hordes of intangible RNEs are aiding the assault, causing weapons to jam and misfire, causing people to slip, and other clever poltergeist tricks.
Jaron orders them to join in on the combat, firing to see how tough the enemy is, doing so in short bursts to not attract more attention than anyone else. Preferably doing so in ways which draw attention to v-addicts or hemophages, he thinks. He evaluates the results from his probing attacks. The RNE-possessees are tougher than human, but not nearly as tough as HITMarks. Their flesh is strangely durable and they feel no pain and suffer little incapacitation from bullet holes, but they're not armored. And-yes, he thinks, as he fires a couple of shots into the head of a soldier wearing WWII-style green fatigues and the soldier falls, his Thompson chattering and firing wildly even as he collapses-they're still vulnerable to being shot in the head, like most zombies. Of course, that's fairly inconsistent. He sees one jerk back from a sniper shot to the head, and then get back up as if it was just a love-tap.
[It's a RNE thing.] Juliet sends. [They might not breathe, but they still need something to be thinking with. Without the structure of the brain, it's just meat and not nearly as easy to manipulate. Which doesn't mean they can't do it.]
Jaron lets her explain what she knows about RNE possessees as they creep towards the lobby. As Jaron enters it, he takes in the carnage. His trained eye and combat experience lets him reconstruct what happened. He looks at the destroyed reception desk, the remnants of a humanoid combat chassis sprawled there.The receptionist, a HITMark in disguise, engaged the initial assault as they went in. There's a half-dozen bloodstains where 20mm chaingun shells made a mockery of police or military body armor, and the armored vehicle they crashed through the front doors has multiple holes through the engine block, and its armored windows are shattered. She took out several of the hemophages, but was eventually engaged and terminated by heavy weapons being brought to bear-grenade launchers and other anti-armor weapons. It explains the shrapnel damage to the floor and the shattered windows. Her chaingun's ammunition feed has been stripped of its contents, Jaron notices. The hemophages had time to clear the premises, then. Then the hemophages started moving upwards and downwards. The ones moving upwards were there to kill the owners of this construct-but it's the ones which were going down that concerns him.
They might just be there to cut power and steal anything that the hemophages can't build but might find useful-a Construct's equipment, even a relatively small one like this, would be a treasure trove to any hemophage lord. Cyberwarfare technology far beyond what they'd have access to, better weapons and armor, surveillance equipment, and, most importantly, information. It makes sense, and it'd be an obvious course of action, but something about it makes Jaron leery of trusting that assertion. Some combination of subconscious intuition and neural augmentation tells him that it's the wrong assumption to make. It takes him a moment to realize why. It's the other corpses, the hemophages who were cut down from behind by RNE-possessees, the possessed corpses that show that the hemophages tried to turn into the ambush.
[Looks like our prize is down in the basement.] Jaron sends over Tacnet. Unlike Iteration X tacnet, it's multiple-encrypted and less efficient, but it also gives the Tyrants a method of communications that isn't vulnerable to taps. Whoever arranged this-Jaron respects them. They'll probably be able to deduce something suspicious if they give any evidence at all. So he doesn't. He talks about how he's going to "put a bullet in the head of the first kine he sees" and other machismo, meaningless swagger to sound in-character. He uses his body's sensors to see deep down, passive sensors only, seeing what might be leaking through the breached Primium TEMPEST shielding of the basement. [Multiple hostiles in Cryo. Ambient temp, so not alive. Don't know if they're RNE augs or hemophages. Several hostiles, human body temp, near the quarters.]
[Let's go then. I'm curious as to what they're doing.] Juliet says.
[Let's.] Jaron agrees. [Brown. Bautista. Move up stealthily. Recon cryo and see what's going on before we move in. We're going to check Belltower's quarters first.]
The two stealth operatives disappear from view and sound, creeping down into the bowels of the besieged facility. He and the other two operatives in the Tyrants follow them, from a good distance away. The stairs are... bloodless and strangely sterile, even though there are corpses around. Unbleeding corpses of things that were never alive in the first place. Whether hemophage or RNE-possessed, it doesn't matter. None of them bleed. Jaron leads Briony and Baxter to Jamelia's quarters, coming up from behind on a squad of RNE-hosts fighting hemophages. Their weapons fire in synchronized barks, and the RNE-hosts go down eventually after a few magazines are emptied into them.
"We'd have been goners if you didn't get here in time." A young National Guardsman says. "Those things are tough." He, like many of the soldiers there securing Jamelia's quarters, looks to be human, unaugmented, uncorrupted by Reality Deviance. It's a tragedy that they all have to die. "We've been trying to break into the quarters," he gestures to a pair of men wielding welding torches, "but no luck so far." It explains why there's only v-addicts and baselines here. The bright flash of the welding torch would set hemophages off, he recalls. Drive them berserk. The hemophages were probably somewhere else on these floors, with the armory and the Mat-Trans and all the other equipment. Most Construct directors wouldn't have kept their personal belongings here. They'd have found someplace less austere. Jaron knows that just because you can make do with a lack of amenities doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy them when you have the opportunity to-but Jamelia Belltower was Jamelia Belltower.
Jaron checks that the hallways are secure, ensures that the recording and security equipment is offline, and gives a very brief nod to the two Tyrants alongside him. They scythe down the soldiers here-innocent and guilty alike-simply because they're there. It takes barely ten seconds, as they execute all the soldiers coldly and dispassionately. Jaron steps over a cooling corpse as he enters Bastion's override codes into the keypad. It means he's going to have to destroy the keypad later. That's not a problem. The soldiers had quite a bit of demolitions gear on them, he'll be able to use that to cover his tracks. The hemophages got frustrated at the armored door and walls, so they blew the room up and everything inside of it.
Inside Jamelia's quarters is a very spartan sight. There's a well-made bed in one corner of the room, a small bathroom with a shower, and a closet full of black suits. There's a few cabinets, a desk with a Union terminal on it, and a table with a chair, possibly for a guest. The table is the only thing that looks like it might have been personalized-everything else is just standard modular construction.
Juliet takes a knife from on top of one of them. "Wouldn't do to leave this in the hands of the hemophages." She says, admiring the Barnes-Sykes. Jaron agrees. Something as rare and valuable as that shouldn't be left in the hands of blood-sucking parasites.
"Good idea. Strip this room of any equipment you can get." Jaron orders. He reaches under the pillow and finds an Iteration X smart pistol. He wonders how Jamelia got her hands on it-especially considering how bare the rest of the room is of usable equipment. There's a X-6 SMG taped underneath the table, and a couple of grenades stashed-but they're all conventional. Julianna looks slightly disappointed at the sheer lack of Q Division gadgets.
"You'd think that Q Division hated her guts or something." Julianna says. "There's an X-5 in one of the desk drawers as well-but that's literally it. No exploding buttons, no taser cufflinks or laser watches... what kind of agent is she?"
"A very unique one." Jaron answers reflexively. He's booted up her terminal and is checking what he can access-which isn't much. The servers are down, probably because they've been physically destroyed, and there's no hard copy here that he doesn't suspect is merely just lies intended to mislead people onto the wrong path. "We're done here. Let's move."
They get halfway to cryogenics-noticing the slumped bodies, some with blood, others strangely clean, before Brown reports in. [Looks like they're RNE hosts in Cryo. One, with what looks like four bodyguards. Killed the hemophages in the way. Sending video and audio your way-you have to hear this guy, he sounds angry. I've seen furries who were more calm than he sounds.] Jaron watches as he stalks down the stairs. There's one man, in a creased and rumpled suit. He might have been beautiful once, but his face is covered in horrific burns. Blackened spots dot his hands and exposed flesh. One of his eyes is milky white and dead. His hair has been cut unevenly, possibly because it's been burned. Jaron knows immediately that this is the leader. His four guards are silent, covering the doorway with weapons forged of alien metal. There's something about their bodies which makes the Operative think Victors, or maybe the B-type, Brutus clones-but the alertness in their eyes and the way they move is far far different from the kind of braintaping that Victors get. It's tactical expertise from experience, rather than rote skill downloads.
"...and it's all your fault. And the fault of your clone for trying to double-cross me with this hemophage nonsense." The burned man rants at Jamelia Belltower's body. Whenever he says something, he emphasizes it with a punch. The armored glass of the cryotube is spiderwebbed with cracks from immense, unnatural strength. "This is for your daughter and what she did to me." Another punch, another crack. "This is for your entire stupid mission and how I hope it fails and how everything you wanted to protect dies. Everything."
Jaron thinks he's insane. He knows Jamelia didn't have a daughter. He had a wife, and children-but that was before his change of career. The NWO and Bastion carefully faked his death, but arranged their lives to make sure they'd be comfortably well-off and safe. It wouldn't do exposing people he loved to his career. It'd be careless and selfish-and if there's one thing Jamelia Belltower isn't, Jaron thinks, it's selfish. [Julianna, what do you think about him?] He asks his pysch and infiltration specialist.
[One hundred percent certifiable, and also with some serious anger management problems.] The psychological warfare expert replies, listening to him scream about how Jamelia used him and then threw him away like... some sort of tool and how it was clearly in her genes because that's how everyone based off of her does things. [Doesn't mean there isn't a grain of truth to his assertions but...]
"Don't worry, Belltower." An-Jin Choi whispers. "Don't worry. I learned a lot from you. I learned from you how to take everything away. And now you're going to be where I was after your interference. Left with nothing, in a broken world. Left without a body, without any resources-well, I hope you enjoy surviving that." He sounds happier as he says it. "I'm going to make your unlife a living hell."
Juliet presses herself against the wall and takes a quick look in. [I'd be very careful. He's dangerous. Crazy, maybe, but dangerous. What's our plan?] She asks.
The Rose/Donald things will come after this post, most likely.
Sic Semper Tyrannis, Part 3:
The Tyrants decide to...
[ ] (0.3x) Fight their way through the mysterious voice and his bodyguards and retrieve Jamelia's body.
[ ] Discretion is the better part of valor, and if they're recovering her mindstate she might be better served with an upgrade. Chuck a demolitions charge or five in, and run like hell.
[ ] Listen to what he says, and then get out of there as soon as they can sanitize the evidence by shooting Jamelia's comatose body in the head.
[ ] Pretend to be sent to parley from his mysterious allies.
[ ] Write-In.
A few minutes of quiet debate is all that it takes for the Tyrants to decide to infiltrate the Construct, leaving Bacon and Beauchene here to assist Jamelia's personnel. It's the most sensible distribution of forces, Jaron thinks. Jacqueline is more than capable of taking charge should it become necessary in his stead, and he trusts her. Something people outside of the NWO wouldn't understand. They'd think that everyone was paranoid about everyone all the time. There's a grain of truth in that statement, but all it means is that the few people you can trust-those relationships are more precious than any other. More precious than brotherhood, more precious than love.
He trusts Jacqueline to do what she can to keep the Enlightened personnel at the construct safe, much as Bastion trusts him to unearth what's going on here-why there seems to be some sort of conspiracy in the Technocracy that the New World Order can't keep tabs on, and didn't even know existed. One that seems to be resource-strapped enough to be reactivating old facilities like LPF-4 but one that's also flush enough in assets that they can deploy a half-dozen (admittedly reliable) heavy assault units here to cut a bloody swathe through hemophage and EDE alike. Unless these are two separate conspiracies. Which is always possible. Reality has a habit of being complicated like that.
"Beauchene." Jaron says, as a finalization of the plan. "You and Bacon stay here with the Spectre. Your job is to keep the Enlightened personnel alive and keep our egress intact. You are then to extract them and anyone who knows we were there. Use the corpses to distract the maybe-Unionists running the spidertank. Belltower-beta, I technically shouldn't be giving you orders but you're to assist Beauchene and Bacon however you can."
"I'm not actually Director Belltower." The beta-level insists. "So order me around however you want."
"I think she's coming onto you, boss." Juliet Baxter says, causing most of the Tyrants to laugh and rewarding her with a vicious glare from the HITMark hosting Jamelia's simulated psyche. Unfortunately for the HITMark, it lacked the necessary ocular weapons to cause Baxter to burst into flames at the glare, and she was mission critical anyhow.
Jaron ignores the jibe. "The rest of us are going to be infiltrating the construct. Remember, some of these enemies are RNE-puppeted corpses, and the rest are hemophages. Yes, there is in fact a difference, as Juliet assures us. The former don't have psychotic breaks in the middle of combat if exposed to stressful stimuli, for one, and aren't as vulnerable to high-spec UV lasers. Not that we have them anyways. Our presence has to be absolutely deniable. Which is why you're going to set your infiltration gear to blend in with the hemophages and your external temperature to ambient." Jaron explains, already doing so with the armored smart cloth he wears. "They're not us. They don't have the C4ISR integration that we do. We're just reinforcements. That limits our weapons choices. Nothing that you wouldn't see in the hands of the hemophages. You're all trained Operatives, you know how through Union forensics can get. Let's not give them anything to suspect our involvement." He grabs a M4 carbine from one of the armory racks in the Spectre as an example. He knows that it's not going to be particularly effective against anyone without headshots, but Jaron is a high end enhancile. He supplements it with a combat knife-not a high end one, but there's a discreet disposable phasic field generator in the hilt-and a handful of flash and concussion grenades.
The team arms themselves as they're best able, and start their infiltration. It's not hard. As expected, the unknown RNEs have turned the conflict into a gigantic clusterfuck with large-scale breakdowns in command. It looks like the RNEs should have been losing-they're not much, if any, better than the hemophages in combat and they're outnumbered drastically. However, he can see Juliet's vision on TacNet and how hordes of intangible RNEs are aiding the assault, causing weapons to jam and misfire, causing people to slip, and other clever poltergeist tricks.
Jaron orders them to join in on the combat, firing to see how tough the enemy is, doing so in short bursts to not attract more attention than anyone else. Preferably doing so in ways which draw attention to v-addicts or hemophages, he thinks. He evaluates the results from his probing attacks. The RNE-possessees are tougher than human, but not nearly as tough as HITMarks. Their flesh is strangely durable and they feel no pain and suffer little incapacitation from bullet holes, but they're not armored. And-yes, he thinks, as he fires a couple of shots into the head of a soldier wearing WWII-style green fatigues and the soldier falls, his Thompson chattering and firing wildly even as he collapses-they're still vulnerable to being shot in the head, like most zombies. Of course, that's fairly inconsistent. He sees one jerk back from a sniper shot to the head, and then get back up as if it was just a love-tap.
[It's a RNE thing.] Juliet sends. [They might not breathe, but they still need something to be thinking with. Without the structure of the brain, it's just meat and not nearly as easy to manipulate. Which doesn't mean they can't do it.]
Jaron lets her explain what she knows about RNE possessees as they creep towards the lobby. As Jaron enters it, he takes in the carnage. His trained eye and combat experience lets him reconstruct what happened. He looks at the destroyed reception desk, the remnants of a humanoid combat chassis sprawled there.The receptionist, a HITMark in disguise, engaged the initial assault as they went in. There's a half-dozen bloodstains where 20mm chaingun shells made a mockery of police or military body armor, and the armored vehicle they crashed through the front doors has multiple holes through the engine block, and its armored windows are shattered. She took out several of the hemophages, but was eventually engaged and terminated by heavy weapons being brought to bear-grenade launchers and other anti-armor weapons. It explains the shrapnel damage to the floor and the shattered windows. Her chaingun's ammunition feed has been stripped of its contents, Jaron notices. The hemophages had time to clear the premises, then. Then the hemophages started moving upwards and downwards. The ones moving upwards were there to kill the owners of this construct-but it's the ones which were going down that concerns him.
They might just be there to cut power and steal anything that the hemophages can't build but might find useful-a Construct's equipment, even a relatively small one like this, would be a treasure trove to any hemophage lord. Cyberwarfare technology far beyond what they'd have access to, better weapons and armor, surveillance equipment, and, most importantly, information. It makes sense, and it'd be an obvious course of action, but something about it makes Jaron leery of trusting that assertion. Some combination of subconscious intuition and neural augmentation tells him that it's the wrong assumption to make. It takes him a moment to realize why. It's the other corpses, the hemophages who were cut down from behind by RNE-possessees, the possessed corpses that show that the hemophages tried to turn into the ambush.
[Looks like our prize is down in the basement.] Jaron sends over Tacnet. Unlike Iteration X tacnet, it's multiple-encrypted and less efficient, but it also gives the Tyrants a method of communications that isn't vulnerable to taps. Whoever arranged this-Jaron respects them. They'll probably be able to deduce something suspicious if they give any evidence at all. So he doesn't. He talks about how he's going to "put a bullet in the head of the first kine he sees" and other machismo, meaningless swagger to sound in-character. He uses his body's sensors to see deep down, passive sensors only, seeing what might be leaking through the breached Primium TEMPEST shielding of the basement. [Multiple hostiles in Cryo. Ambient temp, so not alive. Don't know if they're RNE augs or hemophages. Several hostiles, human body temp, near the quarters.]
[Let's go then. I'm curious as to what they're doing.] Juliet says.
[Let's.] Jaron agrees. [Brown. Bautista. Move up stealthily. Recon cryo and see what's going on before we move in. We're going to check Belltower's quarters first.]
The two stealth operatives disappear from view and sound, creeping down into the bowels of the besieged facility. He and the other two operatives in the Tyrants follow them, from a good distance away. The stairs are... bloodless and strangely sterile, even though there are corpses around. Unbleeding corpses of things that were never alive in the first place. Whether hemophage or RNE-possessed, it doesn't matter. None of them bleed. Jaron leads Briony and Baxter to Jamelia's quarters, coming up from behind on a squad of RNE-hosts fighting hemophages. Their weapons fire in synchronized barks, and the RNE-hosts go down eventually after a few magazines are emptied into them.
"We'd have been goners if you didn't get here in time." A young National Guardsman says. "Those things are tough." He, like many of the soldiers there securing Jamelia's quarters, looks to be human, unaugmented, uncorrupted by Reality Deviance. It's a tragedy that they all have to die. "We've been trying to break into the quarters," he gestures to a pair of men wielding welding torches, "but no luck so far." It explains why there's only v-addicts and baselines here. The bright flash of the welding torch would set hemophages off, he recalls. Drive them berserk. The hemophages were probably somewhere else on these floors, with the armory and the Mat-Trans and all the other equipment. Most Construct directors wouldn't have kept their personal belongings here. They'd have found someplace less austere. Jaron knows that just because you can make do with a lack of amenities doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy them when you have the opportunity to-but Jamelia Belltower was Jamelia Belltower.
Jaron checks that the hallways are secure, ensures that the recording and security equipment is offline, and gives a very brief nod to the two Tyrants alongside him. They scythe down the soldiers here-innocent and guilty alike-simply because they're there. It takes barely ten seconds, as they execute all the soldiers coldly and dispassionately. Jaron steps over a cooling corpse as he enters Bastion's override codes into the keypad. It means he's going to have to destroy the keypad later. That's not a problem. The soldiers had quite a bit of demolitions gear on them, he'll be able to use that to cover his tracks. The hemophages got frustrated at the armored door and walls, so they blew the room up and everything inside of it.
Inside Jamelia's quarters is a very spartan sight. There's a well-made bed in one corner of the room, a small bathroom with a shower, and a closet full of black suits. There's a few cabinets, a desk with a Union terminal on it, and a table with a chair, possibly for a guest. The table is the only thing that looks like it might have been personalized-everything else is just standard modular construction.
Juliet takes a knife from on top of one of them. "Wouldn't do to leave this in the hands of the hemophages." She says, admiring the Barnes-Sykes. Jaron agrees. Something as rare and valuable as that shouldn't be left in the hands of blood-sucking parasites.
"Good idea. Strip this room of any equipment you can get." Jaron orders. He reaches under the pillow and finds an Iteration X smart pistol. He wonders how Jamelia got her hands on it-especially considering how bare the rest of the room is of usable equipment. There's a X-6 SMG taped underneath the table, and a couple of grenades stashed-but they're all conventional. Julianna looks slightly disappointed at the sheer lack of Q Division gadgets.
"You'd think that Q Division hated her guts or something." Julianna says. "There's an X-5 in one of the desk drawers as well-but that's literally it. No exploding buttons, no taser cufflinks or laser watches... what kind of agent is she?"
"A very unique one." Jaron answers reflexively. He's booted up her terminal and is checking what he can access-which isn't much. The servers are down, probably because they've been physically destroyed, and there's no hard copy here that he doesn't suspect is merely just lies intended to mislead people onto the wrong path. "We're done here. Let's move."
They get halfway to cryogenics-noticing the slumped bodies, some with blood, others strangely clean, before Brown reports in. [Looks like they're RNE hosts in Cryo. One, with what looks like four bodyguards. Killed the hemophages in the way. Sending video and audio your way-you have to hear this guy, he sounds angry. I've seen furries who were more calm than he sounds.] Jaron watches as he stalks down the stairs. There's one man, in a creased and rumpled suit. He might have been beautiful once, but his face is covered in horrific burns. Blackened spots dot his hands and exposed flesh. One of his eyes is milky white and dead. His hair has been cut unevenly, possibly because it's been burned. Jaron knows immediately that this is the leader. His four guards are silent, covering the doorway with weapons forged of alien metal. There's something about their bodies which makes the Operative think Victors, or maybe the B-type, Brutus clones-but the alertness in their eyes and the way they move is far far different from the kind of braintaping that Victors get. It's tactical expertise from experience, rather than rote skill downloads.
"...and it's all your fault. And the fault of your clone for trying to double-cross me with this hemophage nonsense." The burned man rants at Jamelia Belltower's body. Whenever he says something, he emphasizes it with a punch. The armored glass of the cryotube is spiderwebbed with cracks from immense, unnatural strength. "This is for your daughter and what she did to me." Another punch, another crack. "This is for your entire stupid mission and how I hope it fails and how everything you wanted to protect dies. Everything."
Jaron thinks he's insane. He knows Jamelia didn't have a daughter. He had a wife, and children-but that was before his change of career. The NWO and Bastion carefully faked his death, but arranged their lives to make sure they'd be comfortably well-off and safe. It wouldn't do exposing people he loved to his career. It'd be careless and selfish-and if there's one thing Jamelia Belltower isn't, Jaron thinks, it's selfish. [Julianna, what do you think about him?] He asks his pysch and infiltration specialist.
[One hundred percent certifiable, and also with some serious anger management problems.] The psychological warfare expert replies, listening to him scream about how Jamelia used him and then threw him away like... some sort of tool and how it was clearly in her genes because that's how everyone based off of her does things. [Doesn't mean there isn't a grain of truth to his assertions but...]
"Don't worry, Belltower." An-Jin Choi whispers. "Don't worry. I learned a lot from you. I learned from you how to take everything away. And now you're going to be where I was after your interference. Left with nothing, in a broken world. Left without a body, without any resources-well, I hope you enjoy surviving that." He sounds happier as he says it. "I'm going to make your unlife a living hell."
Juliet presses herself against the wall and takes a quick look in. [I'd be very careful. He's dangerous. Crazy, maybe, but dangerous. What's our plan?] She asks.
The Rose/Donald things will come after this post, most likely.
Sic Semper Tyrannis, Part 3:
The Tyrants decide to...
[ ] (0.3x) Fight their way through the mysterious voice and his bodyguards and retrieve Jamelia's body.
[ ] Discretion is the better part of valor, and if they're recovering her mindstate she might be better served with an upgrade. Chuck a demolitions charge or five in, and run like hell.
[ ] Listen to what he says, and then get out of there as soon as they can sanitize the evidence by shooting Jamelia's comatose body in the head.
[ ] Pretend to be sent to parley from his mysterious allies.
[ ] Write-In.
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Not sure if this is a typo or not, but -- was this supposed to be "there are" rather than "they are"? Or is it correct as is and I'm just confused?
The walking dead in cryo are RNE hosts, as your dear friend Choi demonstrates.
DarkLight140
Credit to Team
- Location
- Lost in my thoughts
One day, someone is going to mind control Jamelia into believing that she's a beta-level of herself just so that she starts treating herself as unimportant and expendable. She really pushes that.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
No. Look, we only have three Device slots. So what we want to use them on are:
a) Things we cannot do instantly or easily ourselves, or which we want permanently on.
b) Things that will be useful and combat our main weaknesses and the vectors along which we will be attacked.
Donald's main weakness is that he's squishy - the biosuit gives him armour and gives Rose a focus with which to use Life to patch him up. Rose's main weakness is that she's Conditioned - the necklace acts as a buffer against commands that would violate the spirit of the Order of Reason and gives her some Mind countermeasures.
Stop throwing random effects that they have the Spheres for at the wall because they'd be cool. Think tactically. Given that they're probably going to be attacked by Mr Autopoliton Kittycat, what is their largest remaining vulnerability that we can mitigate with a perma-hanging or Vulgar effect?
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Hmm. Using the advice helpfully provided by @EarthScorpion I'm going to take another stab at creating a Syndicate-style Device (any suggestions to fine tune this, or informing me of whether or not this would be a good idea, would be greatly appreciated). I apologize for the awful name, and all the terms I'm going to horrifically mangle, in advance. Also, haven't read the update yet - just hammering out this idea while I've got it.
LAWMASTER 9000 - It is well known that the members of ITX have turned the bitter, bloody struggle of killing Reality Deviants into a game of sorts where points are awarded based on the nature and difficulty of the kill. High scores earn bragging rights. Naturally the Syndicate looked upon this system and were utterly appalled at what they saw.
Why, think of all the money these poor schmucks could have been making! All that value...wasted. Tragic, really. Because why kill Reality Deviants for fun when you can kill them for fun and profit? Enter the LAWMASTER 9000. Terrible name, but the Executive that devised this program knew his target market.
This simple program, designed to work with even the oldest ADEI or Smartphone, creates a custom ID for the user and registers them to the official Enforcer bounty board. The program then runs in the background as the user goes about their daily business. When the user makes a kill on a valid target the program simply uploads the data to the bounty board and the user receives compensation appropriate to the value of the target.
However, the program has another, more interesting feature - the program can also register the user with Life Futures Trading which, for a small fee, monitors and tracks the users Intrinsic Value using their proprietary hypereconomic predictive software. When the company detects a sudden dip in the customer's future value it sells a portion of the accumulated stock earned by the user through their bounties in order to bring the user back to market equilibrium.
Intended mechanical effect: when you kill Reality Deviants (or other high value targets) you get Prime Energy or Tass. "Secondary" feature converts that Prime Energy/Tass to Quintessence when you get low, or to absorb Paradox. (I think ideally it would function as a Device that stores Prime Energy gained from kills to act as a buffer against Paradox) Obviously does not grant anything for the killing of civilians or TU members in good standing.
Spheres: Primal Utility 3~4, Correspondence 3 (I think), Entropy 1, Time 4
LAWMASTER 9000 - It is well known that the members of ITX have turned the bitter, bloody struggle of killing Reality Deviants into a game of sorts where points are awarded based on the nature and difficulty of the kill. High scores earn bragging rights. Naturally the Syndicate looked upon this system and were utterly appalled at what they saw.
Why, think of all the money these poor schmucks could have been making! All that value...wasted. Tragic, really. Because why kill Reality Deviants for fun when you can kill them for fun and profit? Enter the LAWMASTER 9000. Terrible name, but the Executive that devised this program knew his target market.
This simple program, designed to work with even the oldest ADEI or Smartphone, creates a custom ID for the user and registers them to the official Enforcer bounty board. The program then runs in the background as the user goes about their daily business. When the user makes a kill on a valid target the program simply uploads the data to the bounty board and the user receives compensation appropriate to the value of the target.
However, the program has another, more interesting feature - the program can also register the user with Life Futures Trading which, for a small fee, monitors and tracks the users Intrinsic Value using their proprietary hypereconomic predictive software. When the company detects a sudden dip in the customer's future value it sells a portion of the accumulated stock earned by the user through their bounties in order to bring the user back to market equilibrium.
Intended mechanical effect: when you kill Reality Deviants (or other high value targets) you get Prime Energy or Tass. "Secondary" feature converts that Prime Energy/Tass to Quintessence when you get low, or to absorb Paradox. (I think ideally it would function as a Device that stores Prime Energy gained from kills to act as a buffer against Paradox) Obviously does not grant anything for the killing of civilians or TU members in good standing.
Spheres: Primal Utility 3~4, Correspondence 3 (I think), Entropy 1, Time 4
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Sirrocco
Pedantic
Various vulnerabilities...
- They're far too slow, hampering their ability to defensively react to its actions.
- They have little to no way to meaningfully hurt the thing - certainly no way to actually take it down. Generally taking out something like this requires a team of combat-specs, and losses are expected.
- They're likely inside a technocratic construct - which means that a lot less of its stuff is vulgar.
- It's largely made out of primium, and this has huge amounts of static antimagic
- They die if they are killed.
- They're in the vicinity of a raging murderbot.
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
Being anywhere near the Anathema. That means either teleporting (which I don't think anyone but Serafina has the Spheres for), or GTFOing through the Dimensional Anomaly (which I suspect it can follow). Could Rose have cooperated with Serafina to install that teleportation plasmid on Rose more permanently? Or something that could take passengers? Alternatively, Donald paid an EDE for "everyone out of the universe!" duty in advance.
Or maybe we set Jamelia Body up with defenses against possession, data extraction, and other shenanigans which can be Mind 2-ed away.
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- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Rose can teleport across the Anomaly using her EDE biology - she did so way back a the start of the quest - and Donald has decent Corr... hmm. Honestly, I think our biggest vulnerability against this thing is not knowing it's there. I mean, it's basically an Autopoliton cat. It fights like Keris, which is to say that the first you know of it attacking you is when its opening surprise attack hits you with a called shot to your eyes that is also poisoned. So we could probably use what is essentially a mechanical "surprise anticipator" that Donald can keep active 24/7 (to avoid unpleasant surprises like last time he had a nice dinner with the team), and possibly aid us in preparing for it ahead of time.
So obviously the solution to defeating it is to give it a map and see it get hopelessly lost. Unless it has inbuilt Corr 1 navigation. Damn you Autochthon! Damn you and your tricksy improvements!
Well, we can tell if it has this trait if it fails to actually show up to ambush Donald and Rose, and the Residents are forced to just improvise and send a werewolf pack after them.
Donald: "... please not be another ex, please not be another ex."