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

[Cavalier]

Donald was pretty clearly groomed as Jamelia's second-in-command as the only vaguely reliable member of the Construct at the start; Serafina took over that role to a large extent later on, but Donald was still very important for all the infrastructure and practical stuff going on behind the scenes. Serafina has pretty much left the team now and there's no real good way to get her back on it, so that means Donald still has a narrative role as Jamelia's second-in-command. A role which has only been reinforced by his "git gud" experience in the Spy's Demise and subsequent operations spent searching for Serafina while Jamelia puts the pieces in place for the full-on, Quest endgame.

 

[Sirrocco]

Huh... and now I'm seeing something of a reverse of our earlier processes - our people departing to other places because they'll do more important work there. Sera moves on to Progenitor Politics, and might (or might not) take Rose with her. Donald gets picked up by Aleph. Kessler gets pulled into the Ragnarok leadership role that he'd assiduously avoided until now... and so forth.

 

[Katreus]

Secondly... why do you think I've been pushing for Rose to get those memories back? Those memories include the bit around her Seeking, with Serafina's tearful confession that she "sold out" Rose and let her be turned into a weapon rather than pushing for demilitarisation when she wasn't sure if she could get it.

The entire scene is being constructed for a flaming row between the two of them, fed by Masochist on Rose's part and Serafina's realisation that with Leader rather than Dabbler, she probably could have got the demilitarisation.

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OK, that setup would make sense. It still feels really passive on Rose's part with the lampshading of Rose being an object to get out of the way (even if Henriette misread Sera's intention). The part with her just accepting that keeping the memories from her was OK was...

"We had good reasons, but they weren't right," Serafina says. "And... no. No, that's for later." She massages her temples. "I wish I could be your mother right now, but I don't have time. The most vital thing is getting that information into you and giving you back your memories. You'll know what you need to tell Alex."

"So you trust me now?" Rose asks. Henriette winces at that.

"Yes! Yes, I do!"

"That's good!" Rose says brightly.

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This is the part where I winced along with Henriette and then just threw my hands up.

Rose not reacting to the combination of patronization and dismissiveness from Serafina was ridiculous. Maybe this scene would read better from Rose's perspective, rather than Henriette's, where we can determine what Rose thinks of this conversation. I presume that Serafina called this meeting because I don't see any reason Henriette and Rose would. There's a detachment to the proceedings that makes the scene play straight, which makes Rose the patsy as usual. It's exacerbated since I think most of this arc has been wasted (as it relates to Rose).

Is "so you trust me now?" intended to be a subtle needling by Rose to Serafina? We're almost never in Rose's headspace so it's hard to tell when she's being innocent and dumb or actually sarcastic.

Uh... Jamelia already had made contact with the VEs when we left her, because she was speaking directly with them. Like, face to face, "I know lots of shit" contact. That's why Wufan went off with DonRoseHenri - he wasn't there to keep an eye on Jamelia any more.

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No. I definitely did not get this impression. Jamelia fed a lie to the VEs. A much closer lie than what she previously let on, but still a lie. She did not make the leap to evil space ghost Technocracy to the VE, and it seemed very deliberate that she didn't.

Jamelia goes as slowly as possible, knowing that her hesitation is necessary to sell the story to him. If she acts like she's not just pieced it together-he might notice, and might decide to probe harder. If the Void Engineers realize she's figured out their secret-that would lead to a problem. Worse if they realize how many pieces of the puzzle the NWO have, and all it'd take is some clever Ivory Tower intern thinking outside the box to piece together the hypothesis. The Void Engineers in this are their own worst enemy. So she slowly explains how Moscow gave her the first suspicions that the Computer might be hostile to mankind. She emphasizes how the enemy targeted Iteration X assets preferentially to hijack, how the enemy units were similar to the DSS-a joint Iteration X/Progenitor project-but somewhat more advanced. How the enemy commander had a high-end combat chassis with technology similar to HITMarks. She mentions the alien mothership she encountered in the Void, and how it was also related to the Moscow invaders, but clearly had some inspiration from Iteration X's design. She mentions the well-known disaster of the Autochthonia recontact mission, and how the Computer, although not a formal member of Control-was something Iterators would listen to as if it was, and possibly preferentially to Control itself, just like in Chile with Cybersyn.

"I don't blame you for keeping this under wraps." Jamelia finishes. "Given how much of an accusation it is to level, and how much it scares me that we might be facing some kind of godlike AI which thinks of something like this, or Moscow, as a minor expenditure of materiel. It's taken me quite a while to piece this together." She sees Barret's hand twitch, tensed next to his holster. She tenses as much as she can, looking for how to survive the situation.

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What her side-arc seemed to be about was that she was going to slowly gain the VEs trust with her work with the Etherites and then, get them used to the idea that there are allies in the Technocracy who have cottoned onto this version of the lie and are willing to work with the VEs. As the VEs accepted this, she'd introduce them to IBM / Ragnorak. And slowly, it would come out as the VEs became less trigger-happy that the allies knew the full truth.

If the VEs knew that Belltower and Co. knew the full truth already (she figured out everything and she has allies), sending her off to do this seems like an absolute waste and contradicts what we were told she told them in the first place.

There is no cover, at least from the top level. He's hardly announcing this out of the blue. It's not like we can cram the cat back in the bag [1].

Plus, Wufan knows that Donald and the Tyrants ran into an Agent in Los Angeles, on top of that.

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No, that wasn't clear either. Wufan was sent on a bus out of the area (to never be seen again) prior to the Agent meeting. And even then, it seemed that the NWO kept rephrasing this as some sort of Muscovite EDE to the VEs, not that they're evil space ghost Operatives. I thought it was deliberate that the party just kept avoiding the VEs to avoid contradicting this story much and being pulled in for questioning.

(I had thought Wufan was aggressively questioning the NWO as to where his nominal 'team' were since he had gotten ditched, and he was currently in a Kafka-esque bureaucratic horror where the NWO just kept giving bullshit excuses and forms for him to do.)

 

[EarthScorpion]

This is the part where I winced along with Henriette and then just threw my hands up.

Rose not reacting to the combination of patronization and dismissiveness from Serafina was ridiculous. Maybe this scene would read better from Rose's perspective, rather than Henriette's, where we can determine what Rose thinks of this conversation. I presume that Serafina called this meeting because I don't see any reason Henriette and Rose would. There's a detachment to the proceedings that makes the scene play straight, which makes Rose the patsy as usual. It's exacerbated since I think most of this arc has been wasted (as it relates to Rose).

Is "so you trust me now?" intended to be a subtle needling by Rose to Serafina? We're almost never in Rose's headspace so it's hard to tell when she's being innocent and dumb or actually sarcastic.

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So, you remember that bit when I said that write-in was flat and I hated it?

Yeah. It was flat and I hated it. I just had to write it out because hardly anyone else was doing anything.

But yes, it's another one of those very... passive-aggressive comments Rose has been making throughout this whole arc.

(Likewise, when she stares at her own reflection, she's having a head-argument with Thorn)

... also, wait, there was a bunch of Rose headspace stuff in this arc, especially in LA.

 

[Katreus]

So, you remember that bit when I said that write-in was flat and I hated it?

Yeah. It was flat and I hated it. I just had to write it out because hardly anyone else was doing anything.

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Well, it did start a discussion. So well done?

But yes, it's another one of those very... passive-aggressive comments Rose has been making throughout this whole arc.

(Likewise, when she stares at her own reflection, she's having a head-argument with Thorn)

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Hrm. That makes it slightly better. But Rose is still too passive... How about the other way around? This is clearly a Serafina meeting when it should be a Rose meeting.

So the setup would be:

- Serafina's running full bore Leader so she's avoiding meeting with Rose and Henriette. There's a bunch of reasons she could be feeding herself for why, but part of it is probably she feels guilty about what she did to Rose and doesn't want to deal with it. And TBH, I'm not sure why Rose needs to know right now for this current setup anyway other than Serafina assuaging her guilt in another way.

- Rose is the one who attempts to track down Serafina when she experiences some breakdown in the memory erasure. Hand-wave: it was intended to be a short-term memory erasure for the Tribunal only, and they didn't expect for it to be active this long nor for Rose to end up in the hell dimension bar under siege where she had to utilize a lot of Reina, who also ended up breaking a lot of her conditioning / other mind stuff

- Rose finds A because that's the only contact she has (and the Drs. Rosarios are not in any way a helpful contact for Rose), and A, although not willing to let Rose meet Serafina (because Sera doesn't want to meet her), does end up giving Rose the tape or whatever for her to regain her memories (because she thinks Sera should have done that)

- Rose is angry but hides it from A. A, like Sera, has her biases and preconceptions of Rose so A underestimates her. Sera and by extension, A, does not expect hell-dimension survivor Rose, who's gotten a lot sharper / has more spheres to play with. So Rose can somehow track Sera through A and does so successfully.

- Rose forces the confrontation. This part can be fudged. Maybe Rose just shows up and is like meet me at some other place or we're doing it right here at your current location or she sends a note to the same effect.

- This gets to the same point at the end (Rose with her memories and an explosive confrontation with Serafina) but with a much more active Rose rather than the passive-aggressive object she is here.

... also, wait, there was a bunch of Rose headspace stuff in this arc, especially in LA.

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It didn't feel very useful, if that makes any sense. It's her brooding while following through on someone else's plan.

Point of order: Isobel is dead. She was hunted down by the Technocracy and killed, or maybe she killed herself.

But she's almost certainly dead unless I'm remembering things very wrongly.

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Well, her body was destroyed, but that's... not really an issue for most people in this quest apparently. She is a hive-mind Progenitor who's super intelligent and knew the other DC team was coming after her. She planned that confrontation. It doesn't seem like an issue for her to have prepared brain tape back ups or to be in contact with the hive mind at the time of her death.

 

[uju32]

Point of order: Isobel is dead. She was hunted down by the Technocracy and killed, or maybe she killed herself.
But she's almost certainly dead unless I'm remembering things very wrongly.

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Her body, or at least a body that seemed to be hers, was recovered.
Whether she is actually dead is unconfirmed; Progenitor/Transhumans are very good with biology, so far all we know that was a decoy.

And then there was the Sleeper she recruited whose foster parents she killed, and who survived the Technocracy assault.

 

[Kerrus]

Her body, or at least a body that seemed to be hers, was recovered.
Whether she is actually dead is unconfirmed; Progenitor/Transhumans are very good with biology, so far all we know that was a decoy.

And then there was the Sleeper she recruited whose foster parents she killed, and who survived the Technocracy assault.

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Also as a construct who was disassociated with the hive mind for long enough that she started developing independent thoughts, feelings, and desires- even if she is actually dead, and hasn't just gone native, it's possible she left an RNE behind. And we do have a lot of spirit and dsci users on the team.

 

[Renu]

Also as a construct who was disassociated with the hive mind for long enough that she started developing independent thoughts, feelings, and desires- even if she is actually dead, and hasn't just gone native, it's possible she left an RNE behind. And we do have a lot of spirit and dsci users on the team.

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Didn't she take care of a child and probably left some of her in the child/took over?

 

[Sirrocco]

The real question with Isobel is how far she got on converting her thrall to a high-end combat construct. She would have had some assimilation tools built-in, and a fair amount of time, but her probable focuses being what they are, she'll have difficulty bootstrapping up from nothing.

She's still likely more or less "alive" - hivemind is hivemind - but there's a good chance that she lost a *lot* of effectiveness.

 

[EarthScorpion]

Hrm. That makes it slightly better. But Rose is still too passive... How about the other way around? This is clearly a Serafina meeting when it should be a Rose meeting.

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No. I disagree there. Serafina is the hidden character who is operating off the grid and is paranoid about being compromised. Her only communications have been through high security narrowband. Moreover, she's not even really in the party at the moment. Just handing "Oh, Rose somehow found her" isn't real heat - it's trying to build up false heat. It's not something Rose has succeeded at - it's something handed to her. Basically, "finding Serafina" is a mini-plot in its own right, and so can't be handed to a character who's not even an investigation specialist to make her seem better.

But she can't securely transmit this data on the Transhumans which she thinks the party needs to know and she trusts them enough to pass Alexander what he needs to know, She knows things about what Transhuman upgrade tech can do to standard Technocracy constructs and she knows the technical specs on the Seraclones who are Transhuman units.

And that, incidentally, is something that Rose can do. In fact, it's something that only Rose can do.

Because Rose is a fully conversant and capable Progenitor researcher (and she's even more capable than she used to be with Mind 4, which can buff her skills) who also is a Damage Control operative. She can use the technical data better than Serafina can, she can explain the bits that Cross needs to know better than Serafina can because she has the technical skills and the combat skills to be able to combine things, and she's also Alex's imouto-chan so that means she can get the meeting to pass the information to him.

More generally, addressing one of your points - the thing is that, as I see it, we decided that Rose's story wasn't becoming a new Reina. So, no, that means she won't be taking leading roles. Just as, largely, Henriette doesn't take leading roles at a strategic scale (Henriette instead solves tactical problems). Indeed, Kessler is the one who took that story which at some point could have been Rose's - Kessler is the one who's the "heir to Lior", as the Iterator militant who hit E6 and now knows the truth and must lead.

So, yes, as @Cavalier said, Donald was the 2IC when the game started, and even though he shared the duties with Serafina when we picked her up, Donald was still the team manager. Donald is going to be making most of the team's high level decisions, because that's literally his job as a Support character. Yes, the decisions Rose makes are going to be lower-level. And yes, considering the nature of her character challenges and the fact that action is little threat for her; yes, she's going to have introspective character things. She has to work out who she is.

 

[Katreus]

My understanding was that Kessler was the one who basically made peace with his Shock Trooper past and moved on from being the Eternal Soldier to the Eternal General. He shied away from leadership in the past, but it's now just a realization he can still fight - just on a different level. I'm not sure why that makes him the heir to Reina unless every militant General like Starborn or Aleph are the heirs to her.

I thought that Rose was, in the end, going to be the trailblazer for Constructs, that just because they're vat-born, they're not inferior. That they have just as much basic rights as regular Enlightened including the ability to self-determine. I'm not sure why Hitmarks have to stay with ItX related groups or why MIBs with NWO or Constructs with the Progenitors. I was really intrigued by her suggestion that she was going to become a Syndicate Enforcer instead of working with Damage Control. Eventually, maybe she'd find that there are biases everywhere and she'd end up founding the 8th Convention of the Union, probably something based on Labor / People's Movements / the Unenlightened and Constructs / Those Left Behind, a more pan-Union Convention like Panopticon or Ragnorak.

If she wasn't to be Reina's heir, then why did she spend so much time as the military leader in the Demise arc? Where she took on Reina's mantle - and by the end, she was the one who chose to continue to be such instead of stepping down. The residents of the Demise looked to her leadership during combat. That she's regressed since then can be an understandable stress reaction to that, but it's not clear that this is a permanent state of affairs (unless it is written, I guess). I thought we had decided she wasn't going to be a Reina copy (i.e. subsume Rose for Reina) but Reina had to have imparted something to Rose, else that was a waste of a subplot and character. But you don't have to be someone to be the heir to their legacy.

Reina threw away her ties to the smaller people to wage endless war. Why not a Rose that learns from Reina's life and decides that the smaller people are important? That maybe each individual Construct helping to run an Amalgam may not have much power individually but together, they can create lasting change for the better? That winning the war only to lose the peace is a failure, that people have to prepare for peacetime, keep in mind that their high-level, intellectual policies affect real people in the world as well?

Edit: Wait, what's this about Henriette. I thought she was one of the people definitely on the track toward leadership. How exactly is all that stuff where she talked with Kessler and Clarent about the old days and that vow she made with that other ItX princess about finding a better way - how does that pay off without Henriette becoming an ItX leader? I thought her transitioning from the militant side of ItX to picking up the other, more civilian side - that that was (on a meta level) introducing her to all the sides of ItX so that when she makes a bid for leadership, she'd have support and reputation on both sides of the ItX divide and hopefully bridging / healing that divide.

 

[EarthScorpion]

If she wasn't to be Reina's heir, then why did she spend so much time as the military leader in the Demise arc? Where she took on Reina's mantle - and by the end, she was the one who chose to continue to be such instead of stepping down. The residents of the Demise looked to her leadership during combat.

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Yes. Exactly. That wasn't her Reina-ing; that was her being a Damage Control construct with Masochist. She wasn't commanding the overall defence. That was the cabal Donald was a part of, the people re-allocating resources, managing the overall defence, and trying to reprocess quintessence from destroyed foes. Rose was a living weapon, leading at a tactical level but not higher.

If she'd been the heir to Reina, she would have been Generaling, not being in the frontline of every combat as a living weapon, pushing herself so hard that she had to be coaxed to stop and eat and stop moving so people could repair her armour.

Rose has been doing tactical command and making appropriate tactical decisions all along. But EXEMPLAR tried to make her as Reina, make her a leader - and she's a failure at that. She's not a leader like Reina. She doesn't have the grand vision and she doesn't have the burning charisma.

And not everyone has to be a grand leader anyway. Henriette isn't right now, and if she ever does make it, it'll only be after a decade of growing up. Hell, Jamelia isn't temperamentally suited for high level command, and she knows it. She tried to dodge Director status for a long time, and she's too fond of taking the field to take being shut away in management. Serafina's story is about becoming a leader. Kessler's story is about becoming a general. Rose's? No, it's about her as a person - and the very fact that she's got Thorn back rather than Reina is a rejection of the "I am becoming Reina" path [1].

(Meanwhile, Kessler, as a soldier who also does have the charisma which makes a combat force willing to die for him and is now moving into being the General archetype, just as Reina was the Chair of Generals - deliberately channelling the archetype - really is her heir. He comes from the same background, and he's walking in her footsteps.)

[1] And I quite like the way it worked out, that Reina vanished at pretty much the same point as Christos died - the last of the cabal of her killers dying.

 

[Katreus]

Yes. Exactly. That wasn't her Reina-ing; that was her being a Damage Control construct with Masochist. She wasn't commanding the overall defence. That was the cabal Donald was a part of, the people re-allocating resources, managing the overall defence, and trying to reprocess quintessence from destroyed foes. Rose was a living weapon, leading at a tactical level but not higher.

If she'd been the heir to Reina, she would have been Generaling, not being in the frontline of every combat as a living weapon, pushing herself so hard that she had to be coaxed to stop and eat and stop moving so people could repair her armour.

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This would make more sense if Reina hadn't been portrayed to be exactly like this type of General, the one constantly on the front lines as the exemplar to her troops. But Reina has - so all of Rose's actions like that were exactly like what Reina had been portrayed to be. When the defenders were reacting to Kessler and Co. incoming, they looked to Rose first because she was the field general for the Demise's defenses.

Rose has been doing tactical command and making appropriate tactical decisions all along. But EXEMPLAR tried to make her as Reina, make her a leader - and she's a failure at that. She's not a leader like Reina. She doesn't have the grand vision and she doesn't have the burning charisma.

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Rose is a child. She's clearly not an adult emotionally, and she doesn't act like one. She barely acts like a teenager. I don't think Reina had grand vision and burning charisma either when she was 5 going on 17 or even a newly joined member of the Order. I feel like stomping down this line of character development, that the first sign of hesitation on Rose's part and that she doesn't know exactly what she wants to be right away while she's defining herself, diminishes Rose for no real reason. Rose is the youngest of our amalgam's members. The sky should be Rose's limit, and maybe she's been burned a bit by the flame but it's too soon and uncertain for her to permanently regress and be a diminished version of herself.

If all setbacks cut off people's character arcs, our team would all still be wrecks, but people get to struggle past their obstacles. I don't see why Rose should be any different. Rose's life has already been defined as failure from its start. Shouldn't she actually get a chance to redefine herself from failure and attempt to succeed for once? Or is her character arc going to be the perpetual victim?

[1] And I quite like the way it worked out, that Reina vanished at pretty much the same point as Christos died - the last of the cabal of her killers dying.

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I liked the part where Reina vanished after the Demise had been resolved ... but because I had interpreted it as Reina having exhausted all the guidance she could give Rose. That she had shown Rose the way, but then stepped back to allow Rose to choose herself whether to venture forth and forward into the future or to stay behind as she is, never striving to improve. The whole "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink" idea.

 

[FourthWall]

Well do you want Rose to stay moe? Because being moe is being the Eternal Victim.

We find things cute because they seem fragile and in need of protecting.

 

[notanautomaton]

Rose is a dual adept with Enlightenment 5 at five. By almost any measure she's an amazing success of a project, the EXEMPLAR folks just couldn't realize that. Once she matures a bit I fully expect her to end up heading the Progenitors alongside her mom and grandma.

 

[Katreus]

On a meta level, I'ma call bullshit if even in a fictional world, our heroes meet the glass ceiling and lose, and the only one who made it past to leadership level (or the C-level?) is the one who already started out with almost every advantage you can have among Unionists, compromised with incumbent leadership, and has seemingly settled for the adviser 2nd in command position. Meanwhile, apparently, all our idealists, hidden or not, either don't have the character, the temperament, the drive, or skill or something.

OK, I'm just going to be very sad.

 

[Quantumboost]

I... don't follow. Why is this the final arc?

I read it as "this is the endgame for this arc", just as, say, when we started the "wiping out the IBM" fakeout in Moscow was the endgame for the Moscow arc and we couldn't do any of the other sidequests for Moscow.

(Well, at least until we went back there much later and recycled one of them)

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Pretty much, yes. There are probably two locations and arcs coming after this. I say probably because things change.

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...Wait, really? Huh.

Okay, that makes some sense. Given that Gregor was literally summoning the primary antagonist to Earth, I took it as "this is the endgame for the entire quest" rather than just this one particular arc.

 

[notanautomaton]

Okay, that makes some sense. Given that Gregor was literally summoning the primary antagonist to Earth, I took it as "this is the endgame for the entire quest" rather than just this one particular arc.

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Yeah, same.

 

[linkhyrule5]

I didn't think that it was the endgame, but I didn't think it wasn't the endgame either - I was just confused and following along, honestly.

And I think I'm with @Katreus here - that I like the plot better where this is the forge that creates the next Inner Circle - maybe not literally, we've already pushed Serafina away from the reality Enlightenment and into the more practical leadership insights, but where the next generation of burning stars comes from. The people who will be leading the Union in twenty years, whether from the front or the shadows, will have started here, in this party.

And part of that is Rose growing into someone who can pull people into her wake - maybe not the same way that Reina did it, with charisma and vision and insight, but perhaps the way Henriette might - from the front, as a war hero whose voice matters politically even without an official rank or NWO-like jockeying for position. Maybe she'll always be a little bit hollow, running on borrowed ideals - or maybe she will find in herself a goal, an identity that provides her with a dream for the future, something she will push herself to create even over the voices of others.

 

[Kerrus]

Having given it some thought, I don't think Rose is in the position where the seeds of her future self has been planted at all- because while other characters have been growing into who they can be, Rose has been stripping away everything that forced her into being this or that specific predefined thing- all the bits and pieces that made her a failure of am Exemplar- which I remind you was never about 'being a prodigy of a mage', but rather about replicating the icons of the technocracy's past.

While most of the characters are in full swing, Rose is finally, almost, at the starting line. She's coming to the point where she can really decide who she is, who she wants to be.

I don't think a leadership role in the unformed future can be totally discounted, but it is here and now. We chose for her to reject the following Reina's path option, and instead becoming her own person. We chose- to an extent- that she would be full of insecurities and struggling in a world that is hostile within and without, and that she's suffered so much trauma but still keeps trudging onwards.

Everybody wants Rose and Serafina to make up. I get that. But I think they need a- as ES puts it 'a big flaming row' first. Because Rose has a lot of unresolved feelings about- everything- and she's been repressing them. There is no easy or soft fix to this, the only solution is more pain- in the short term- for long term healing to be possible.

I don't know that this is the right or wrong time for that, but I do see what ES is trying to do. I think that, ultimately, this represents a chance for Rose to grow. It's past time she get her memories back, and start to work her issues out- really work them out- while she has this chance. As far as she knows, this might be the last chance of that she'll get, if things go poorly, so I think even as much as she's been hiding her problems, a particularly thorny part of her will be pushing for a confrontation- to put everything out in the open and make a decision about how to go forward.

 

[changeling]

Ok, I admit that as a casual reader I also can't remember all the details and reasoning so.. I have a question too: why we can't use ritual/procedure to check exactly what has been done to Donald? We have tons of enlightenment scientists and Progenitor' facilities. Why we can't just identify it via throwing bucket of dice on this problem?

 

[king208]

Ok, I admit that as a casual reader I also can't remember all the details and reasoning so.. I have a question too: why we can't use ritual/procedure to check exactly what has been done to Donald? We have tons of ES and Progenitor facilities. Why we can't just identify it via throwing bucket of dice on this problem?

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My guess is that it's been so well hidden we won't have time for a full ritual before the assault. That or a scan both fast enough and deep enough would be extremely dangerous to the subject. Whatever was done was hidden by the best of the best.

 

[changeling]

My guess is that it's been so well hidden we won't have time for a full ritual before the assault. That or a scan both fast enough and deep enough would be extremely dangerous to the subject. Whatever was done was hidden by the best of the best.

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So he should be isolated. Letting someone (even potentially) comprised to take part into delicate and dangerous action is not SOP of any sane organization. Is there a narrative reason why DC would allow such transparent violation of procedures?

 

[beowolf]

So he should be isolated. Letting someone (even potentially) comprised to take part into delicate and dangerous action is not SOP of any sane organization. Is there a narrative reason why DC would allow such transparent violation of procedures?

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He is. He's been locked up in a safehouse that's had it's communications cut, and is being monitored so that he can be hit with sleeping gas if he tries to do anything anyway.
The issue is that Henriette is the one monitoring him, and she doesn't really get that he's capable of Reality Deviance if he's pushed far enough.

 

[Katreus]

Re: Jamelia doesn't have the temperament -

Temperament doesn't even make sense to me. Kessler didn't have the temperament until ... suddenly he did because he made a choice. She may not have had the full knowledge of herself but Jamelia already was leadership from the start of the quest. In the op-centric new NWO, being a senior agent and Director of her own team, she is one of the top 3 leaders of the NWO and she's already created policy for the NWO (restart of the psyschic program).

"I must confess, you're right too." Jamelia taps her fingers against her leg. "So. We are both... how to put it? Inner Circle candidates?"

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This line - and its choice of words - makes no sense to me just as 'oh hey, we're both E6.' There are other words that could have been chosen to represent E6. This entire scene appeared to be an acknowledgment that Kessler has become an equal to Jamelia (where he had been subordinate before), that they both intended to shape the future of the Technocracy as leaders within their respective spheres.

Re: Rose

I think there's two arguments being made.

1. This particular Sera-Rose scene in specific and its relation within the immediate character arc over the course of the quest
2. Some nebulous future for Rose (what's cut off, what's available to her)

The 2nd one is just theory crafting over a much longer period of time (probably outside of the scope of the quest beyond a mention in an eiplogue just like Henriette). If Rose is within her teenager phase where she moves toward defining herself as the adult Rose, there's a question about how strong should setbacks shape Rose's development. I don't think that any setbacks or hesitation - things generally viewed as obstacles to be overcome for other characters - should be treated as set-in-stone failures where Rose just can't ever hack it now and for the rest of her life. Kessler couldn't hack it until he could, Jamelia couldn't hack it until he could, Sera couldn't... This is exacerbated that Rose is in her teenage phase where she should be at her most wide open as to possibilities for the future.

I mean, everyone's apparently heard of this story where Luke ran away from Darth Vader on the Death Star and that was it. This setback defined his life - he failed and is always going to be a failure who couldn't hack it against Vader - and he never came back again. What?

I don't even want to get into that this (in theory) arc for Rose basically featured all her agency being stolen by Donald, and now, apparently, even her super special subplot got stolen by a guy who isn't even on screen and has never talked with or met (or perhaps even thought of) Reina in the first place. Assuming Rose is also a hero like the rest of the team, what kind of character arc is this? No one else on our team gets as a crappy of an arc riddled with failure and theft like this - and not even in their backstory but in the quest itself.

But that starts to verge into question 1. I get the idea of what is being aimed for, but I disagree on how to get to the point of an explosive confrontation with Sera.

First, I think the mumbo jumbo handwave as to why Sera thinks she has to meet with Rose - complete with the super patronizing reason - is just as ridiculous as apparently the other way around would be. Why is it necessary that Rose needs to know about evil space ghost progenitors? I don't know. It doesn't seem to match any of the built up themes. We haven't seen hide or tail of anyone like ISOBEL, and all anyone's talked about is apparently Blanc or Blake in an Exemplar meatsuit. (Why these two, I don't know either. But whatever.) All the Exemplar IV stuff seemed to be is a better Exemplar III, which both Sera and Rose are fully aware of in the first place, having worked on it. And for that matter, all the choices re: Exemplar IV seemed to verge more on EVA-stuff like Yinzheng.

Second, this is a very passive Rose when she should be an actor with agency. This was covered in several posts earlier so I'll leave it at that.

Third, this is a mirror of what Reina did, a perhaps well-meaning maternal figure (as representative of the Technocracy) upending Rose's character and forcing change down her throat. It means the Demise arc was a wasted one for Rose's character development because she didn't learn anything from Reina breaking her conditioning in the way she did. She didn't develop so it was apparently just gratuitous pain porn (for her). It means it's now been two arcs of watching Rose struggling to get out of a pool she's drowning in while her two mother figures kick her back down (possibly with a snide comment that this'll be good for her).

I feel a lot of dissonance in Rose's apparent arc. If she's the one who initiates this, it's a Rose who actively acts to better understand herself. That's a change! A development from the Demise arc deconditioning! That fits in with a teenager struggling to find herself!

A Rose who has the same thing happen to her again - ... that's... what is this? Someone who started out as a victim and failure, who's had bad things happen to her, and then never learns or develops from these struggles so it just continues to happen again against her will. It feels like an arc of someone who's breaking down into despair. It feels like the arc of an anti-hero or nihilist (Nephandus, I suppose, in WOD).

A person struggling to define herself with a side order of hero needs to have some victories and success of her own. They have to choose who they want to be, right? A never-ending string of losses and change forced upon her is ... not a compelling arc, and it's especially dismal in comparison to (almost) everyone else on our team who has been growing and overcoming their respective obstacles (and the one person who apparently hasn't changed at all character-wise had the standard 'became more badass' arc).