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

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Oh man this is just going to be one huge clusterfuck, isn't it.


Oh, and Beelicio is super adorable when he's trying to be all deep and philosophical and shit. Of course, next thing you know the beep boop meat robot is going to ask if he's got a soul and it's just going to go downhill from there.
 
Ok so it seems Li knows something may be coming, Mrs. Clock thinks Panopticon is still trying to be sneaky, and Alicia (if she is being serious) is anticipating a fair amount of shooting so trying to be sneaky is probably not going to work, likewise from the Alice bits it appears that what ever happens is probably going to at night.

This means Cavalier's plan to make everything look like a Sabat raid seems good to go as far as I can tell with the Lucards being a distraction while we get Alice out of dodge via flying squid (though where we take her too still needs to be determined), while trusting to the pre-exsisting rampant Sabbat presence, Paniopticon's desire to keep everything quite (making it unlikely for them to push for an extensive investigation), and Serafina's current position to be enough to keep Serafina out of serious trouble.

Vote Change
[X] Project LUCARD
[X] X-410 'Xiaolian' Heavy Combat Bioroids
-Though as a note we will want to be careful not to lose these as covering up the loss of some Lucard's is one thing covering up the loss of top notch very expensive Hitmark equivalents at the same time would be a far more difficult task.
 
[X] Project LUCARD
[X] X-410 'Xiaolian' Heavy Combat Bioroids
[X] X-PROG-311 Combat Powered Exoskeleton Cephalopod Gunship

I could be convinced to swap the bioroids for [ ]Nothing, with some decent reasoning. After all, having Seelicia ride herd on the Xiaolians comes with its own risks.

As for what Donald is doing, I think contacting Jamelia is the best course of action right now.

EDIT: As for Jamelia... well, I had an idea for a rote to ascertain the identity of Donald and Serafina (via codewords she'd told them after telling them about Threat Null, just in case,) but then I realized she only has Mind 2. Anybody have any other ideas?

EDITx2: Nevermind on those votes.
 
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EarthScorpion said:
"What you're doing is critical. We have projections that a Red-5 hostile may be attempting to exfiltrate or aid DIDO. I'm sending you the data we have on FIERY ANGEL. Suffice to say, they're a master memeticist, expert in the life sciences and biological shapeshifter with extensive cognitive augmentation and superhuman emotional intelligence. They're a Reality Terrorist with possible Virtual Adept connections, but who also uses Progenitor enlightened science. We've lost track of them in Los Angeles where they were either exfiltrated by rogue enhanciles or - more worryingly - subverted the enhanciles themselves."
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I think people are forgetting this paragraph. That is to say, Ms. Clock not only has perfectly described Serafina's path so far, she's also perfectly guessed Serafina's plan. How did she manage this? Well, she has Time and Mind and Entropy. She can literally read the mission report she wrote, in the future, about what Serafina did, and then respond to it perfectly. Paradigmically she can't do this, but she can get the effect.

This means that she is paying attention, and that if Serafina goes in with actors who are not particularly independent like brainchipped vampires or the X-series, we are going to be entirely dependent on her bluffing her own subordinates, which doesn't seem to make sense. On a metagaming perspective, you know that one of her assets, at least, is a Special Agent, who is: 1. Capable of being in multiple places at once, 2. A superhuman trickster-spirit, 3. Capable of running some incredibly corkscrewy plans with contingency beyond contingency beyond contingency.

Any plan to fight the Agency does not start from "assume things don't go wrong." Any plan to fight the Agency starts with "assume things go wrong in the most immense, rapid way possible and try to fight yourself out from there." Soldiers who can be taken out of the game rapidly via Sleeper methods like the LUCARD hemophages are dangerous to you. Soldiers with no initiative are dangerous because they mean more focus on the leaders, and if you don't think there's headhunters, you're kidding yourself. Most notably, Yinzheng herself, if she should take to the field personally, is definitely capable of killing a Vanessa from ambush, and thus she can shut down your elite assets.

I think there's only two valid choices. The first one is to go with independent-minded, high-power combat assets that you can secure from enemy infiltration, and prepare to rip your way out of the jaws of the trap via sheer brute force. The second one is to take [X] Nothing [X] Nothing [X] Nothing and try to hope that your actions are so likely to fail that Ms. Clock can't actually consciously spare the time to set up more of a trap for you.

If you're voting for things because you want a clean alibi, you might as well vote for [X] Nothing and be done with it.
 
Smartphone said:
Cavalier made some very good points about the Lucards and the Xiaolians. However before I change my vote I would like to know just how severe the mental problems for the Lucards are, as I am still worried that they preclude subtly and that they might go berserk and ignore orders and/or worse yet attack some of our people, due to being insane vampire clones.
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Well, the Lucards are bioroids where someone fucked up the rolls when making them. That means all of them have at least one botch-related Paradox Flaw. Some have more. Some of them will have Life-based physical deformities, others will have Mind-based mental deformities, and the more valuable ones (like the Rotcivs and the Yrams) will tend to have worse issues because they're more expensive and thus they have to be more fucked up to not be worth trying to patch up.

The Bobs, of course, are just like "Okay, we botched one roll, stick 'em with the Lucards, it'd be more expensive to try to fix anything but the most simple of physical deformities". So the Bobs will in fact tend to be the healthiest and most sane (by Bob standards) of the vampires, because they have the lowest threshold for discarding.
 
I am all for just grabbing Alice and running if possible. But the same update made it very clear that Ms. Clock doesn't view Alice as important enough a priority to send any reinforcements. Using the most distinctively Technocratic options to provide the most firepower is, on the other hand, an open invitation to a lot of scrutiny. And if Mind/Time/Entropy means the plan is already blown, well fuck it we obviously can't win anyway. At least as described FIERY ANGEL could be a Tzimisce Methuselah as readily as a Mage.

EDIT: Using the Reptile Hybrids and Charlie Team is de facto an admission that "Serafina was here." The reptile hybrids are a special Amalgam-391 asset and Charlie Team can ask questions as well as answer them. If hiding our involvement is so impossible and only using the heaviest combat assets available will allow survival, at the cost of Serafina being labelled a traitor, why shouldn't we just burn Yingzheng's construct to the ground? You can only be hung for treason once.
 
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What is the chance that the strange Spirit/Alien thing Alice mentioned is the Agent, and that the worst case scenario MJ12 brought up is likely to occur?
 
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Looking back on the last update with more thoroughness, I think we made a mistake by falling for a very cleverly baited trap. Serafina taking over Amalgam-391 has not yet delayed Panopticon in the slightest. It hasn't interfered in their plans. It hasn't really helped Alice, either. We could have focused on just finding Alice and getting the hell out, but we demurred in favor of getting more resources for when we were prepared to move. We did get intelligence, and access to requisitions, but here's where the trap stings;

All that delay means that Ms. Clock has become aware that Serafina might interfere. I'm not entirely sure if she just sanitized the report of FIERY ANGEL for Yingzheng or just didn't work out the implications of FIERY ANGEL likely being Alice's accomplice in escaping Damien. Either way, they are now warned of our presence. They are aware there is an outside factor at work in the situation and so will be looking for one.

And those resources we gathered? We can't use them without exposing ourselves after the fact. Oh, I think we probably could convince Yingzheng that "it was a Haemophage elder all along," but if Clock really is aware that Serafina is in Mexico City we probably can't actually pull of blaming the Sabbat. And openly using the heavy assets linked to Amalgam-391 would invite an open Technocratic investigation. Serafina might have an alibi thanks to Clock's flash-clone but I suspect this is somewhere we can be screwed pretty easily. And we've already past the time where a discreet intervention could have bypassed the hyperstrategy forecasting window.

The only even remotely positive news is that it looks like Alicia might be in contact with Alice. Also I suppose you could make a case the Spirit-EDE is a Resident instead of an Agent, based on the description of its HUNGER and promiscuous investment of Spirit Endowments and description as an "oily" presence. I doubt it, but it would probably be better if we were dealing with as-Saud instead of Agent Tinker.

So I think there is a good chance EarthScorpion took advantage of our conservative votes and desire for more resources to put us in a very bad situation. At this point I'm somewhat wondering if the best option isn't just to kick over the table, burn as much of Panopticon and Amalgam-391 as Serafina can, and then have her defect to the Traditions alongside Alice. Or flee to the Void Engineers, at this point it's probably all the same thing.
 
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Cavalier said:
Looking back on the last update with more thoroughness, I think we made a mistake by falling for a very cleverly baited trap. Serafina taking over Amalgam-391 has not yet delayed Panopticon in the slightest. It hasn't interfered in their plans. It hasn't really helped Alice, either. We could have focused on just finding Alice and getting the hell out, but we demurred in favor of getting more resources for when we were prepared to move. We did get intelligence, and access to requisitions, but here's where the trap stings;

All that delay means that Ms. Clock has become aware that Serafina might interfere. I'm not entirely sure if she just sanitized the report of FIERY ANGEL for Yingzheng or just didn't work out the implications of FIERY ANGEL likely being Alice's accomplice in escaping Damien. Either way, they are now warned of our presence. They are aware there is an outside factor at work in the situation and so will be looking for one.
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If I'm understanding what MJ12 said, I think Clock was always going to learn what we were up to because Clock has the spheres to see what we're going to do and Serafina don't have the spheres to stop it.

Cavalier said:
So I think there is a good chance EarthScorpion took advantage of our conservative votes and desire for more resources to put us in a very bad situation. At this point I'm somewhat wondering if the best option isn't just to kick over the table, burn as much of Panopticon and Amalgam-391 as Serafina can, and then have her defect to the Traditions alongside Alice. Or flee to the Void Engineers, at this point it's probably all the same thing.
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I am kinda leaning towards the idea of creating as much chaos as possible and running for the Void Engineers. We're approaching the endgame here; Panopticon is more or less openly trying to murder us and there's not a whole lot we can do about it by ourselves.

Running to the Traditions isn't going to help, I think, because Panopticon has zero problems with killing them too and that just makes it easier for them to brand us a traitor and sweep it all under the rug. OTOH the biggest risk with running to the VE is, aside from them shooting us because we Know Too Much, they might turn us over to Panopticon because they don't think we're worth getting into a fight over.

But if we do decide to flip the table I think we should try to avoid doing damage to the non-Panopticon elements of the Technocratic forces as much as possible because that'll make it easier for us to make the case that we're still upstanding members of the TU.
 
Reunited:
So Jamelia, Kessler, Harlan, Elsa, and Wufan are on Earth. Talking to Serafina and Donald. In the LX-4. How mysterious, right? Do they...
[X] Write-In: Carefully probe them with checked responses for the most recent memories - the ones least likely to be on any braintape.]
-> [X] Jamelia can also check them to see if their bodies are the ages they "should" be.

Jamelia seemingly accidentally brushes her fingers along Kessler's hand. He's got enough hardware in his head that he should remember the old 80s hand ItX combat gesture for 'be suspicious'.

He yawns. Good enough. He's telling her she's boring him. Sneaky.

Kessler is Kessler. He's the big guy. Not so bright, but damn amiable. Easygoing in the way that some shock troopers are, because he knows he's the most lethal man in the room and thus doesn't have much to prove. Especially since he apparently now killed a dragon or the dragon or something - Jamelia still doesn't quite understand what happened there and she hasn't been able to find a way to isolate him so the two of them can have a little talk about certain things.

Look, basically, she underestimates him which means she's pretty damn sure that everyone else will too. And he was the last one to see them. If they're missing memories they should have, that's a sign something up.

"So," Kessler says cheerfully, "Donald. Did the Vees give you any problem with the arrangements at the base?"

Jamelia sits back and lets him get to work. She's got her own little checkups to carry out. She's got chronons snarled up in her, Nichols said, and she's already been playing around with them. Just trying things out. Getting used to how things can shift them, and how that triggers her dimensional sensitivity. It's like she's got iron filing stuck in her, which means she reacts to magnetic fields. Only it's time here, not magnetism.

Oh, Allah. She doesn't have the words to explain what she's trying to do, exactly. It's like trying to feel... to do radiocarbon dating with the things trapped in her, only it's not quite like that. But she knows she can sense that Henriette is about twenty, for example, and she knows how old Donald should be - and maybe Serafina too, although her biological changes might throw her sense off - and if there's a real discrepancy, something has gone very, very wrong. She's certainly sure she could tell if they were fastclones less than a year old.

[Jamelia - Time 1, Life 1 - Whatever happened when she went back in time left chronons snarled in her waveform, and when combined with her own developing dimensional sensitivity... well, she's now got a weird sixth sense. Or possibly seventh sense. Either way, carefully she's going to eye up Donald and try to feel out how many chronons he's absorbed over the course of his life and read how old his body is. She's prioritising him because Serafina might give her false readings from self-augmentation, but Donald is mostly baseline and hasn't been injured in any major way. Enhanced by Perception + Alertness]

Of course, if they're the right age, that doesn't prove that someone didn't brainwash them. Or throw clone bodies in some kind of fasttime field. She can't prove they're safe this way, but she can certainly get a sense if they're not safe.
 
EarthScorpion said:
[Jamelia - Time 1, Life 1 - Whatever happened when she went back in time left chronons snarled in her waveform, and when combined with her own developing dimensional sensitivity... well, she's now got a weird sixth sense. Or possibly seventh sense. Either way, carefully she's going to eye up Donald and try to feel out how many chronons he's absorbed over the course of his life and read how old his body is. She's prioritising him because Serafina might give her false readings from self-augmentation, but Donald is mostly baseline and hasn't been injured in any major way. Enhanced by Perception + Alertness]

Of course, if they're the right age, that doesn't prove that someone didn't brainwash them. Or throw clone bodies in some kind of fasttime field. She can't prove they're safe this way, but she can certainly get a sense if they're not safe.
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Let us not forget wear and tear that years of hardcore drug and alcohol use can have upon a body. Of course, Progenitor science easily deals with those sorts of minor inconveniences but those treatment options have their own tells.

You just can't reproduce that sort of thing with a clone in a fasttime field.

Well, OK. You can. But it basically involves pickling the Clone in drugs and booze which plays all sorts of havoc with the cellular growth process under the fasttime field resulting in side effects such as disinhibition of normal social functioning, euphoria, ataxia, poor judgement, memory loss, and slurred speech.
 
[X] Write-In: Carefully probe them with checked responses for the most recent memories - the ones least likely to be on any braintape.]
-> [X] Jamelia can also check them to see if their bodies are the ages they "should" be.

I just remembered I didnt vote for this bit yet.
 
Oh yes, and meanwhile, for Kessler:

[Kessler - Mind 1, Spirit 1, Prime 1 - This old man knows the truth about the world. Enlightened science. Wizardry. Magery. All the same thing at heart. People like them ain't like normal people, and he can tell. He's Awakened and he's seen the light 'cause he's opened his eyes and is Enlightened. Same thing. Their spirits aren't the same as normal people's. Eying up Serafina - 'cause she is pretty easy on the eye - and Donald, he stares at their souls and checks out their most private parts to see if they're Enawakened Sciages. Enhanced by Perception + Awareness]

Honestly, I expect one of these methods to fail. If they are clones, they'll have a lot of defences against people noticing that they're fakes. But I figure that something obscure and off-skew like Jamelia's "how long ago were these bodies made?" which doesn't go through normal Technocratic skillsets and most people don't have the focuses to carry out without a lab full of diagnostic gear might have a chance of going through something that someone wasn't even sure they have to conceal. And the Kessler thing would require Spirit to fake, or lots of countermagic - and if there's lots of countermagic, that's a give-away something is up because those two aren't like Kessler with his primium skeleton and don't normally walk around like that.
 
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