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THRONE//FRINGE: Normal Human Mech-Girl Quest

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[X] Fragmentation. As you organize your own mind, you will spin off increasingly distinct subminds with their own personality, not all of them benevolent.
 
[X] You did not lose 1 influence, with your influence maintained at 4 per turn.
[X] Keep an eye on her [Don't lose Peeper II and keep a close watch on her behavior going forward].
[X] Fragmentation. As you organize your own mind, you will spin off increasingly distinct subminds with their own personality, not all of them benevolent.

I can barely decide between Integration and Fragmentation but I think the latter is somewhat more interesting in terms of Arachne's character? In that it's not what someone of the old empire would do.
 
[X] You did not lose 1 drone swarm, with your swarms intact at [4/8] reserves.
I'd like to max out our Legion Drones next turn. Threat of attack clearly exists.
[X] Withdraw Peeper [Lose Peeper II as a deployable exploration drone for the turn].
Could be insanity, could be divergent reality. Needs investigating.
[X] Integration. Your mind must maintain its cohesiveness, and so you will absorb those pieces even if it might affect the dictates of your thought and even mood.
Face Your Past.
 
somewhatLazy said:
I can barely decide between Integration and Fragmentation but I think the latter is somewhat more interesting in terms of Arachne's character? In that it's not what someone of the old empire would do.
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I voted for Integration for pretty much the exact same reason. Fragmentation could give us more people to talk too, but we already have ISHTAR, our drones and the other polities, while also ensuring we don't have as much control over our internal systems when dealing with whatever the nail is doing.

Integration on the other hand, gives us chance for character growth. First with Arachne uncovering parts of herself that she had forgotten/sealed away, and then later when a more Empire!Arachne has to adapt to a post-Empire galaxy with however much of what they learned in the Empire no longer being relevant or necessary. Even if it will affect us, nothing says those effects have to be bad.
 
[x] You did not lose 1 cycle worth of Tapestry repairs, maintained at 6 per turn.
[X] Withdraw Peeper [Lose Peeper II as a deployable exploration drone for the turn].
[X] Fragmentation. As you organize your own mind, you will spin off increasingly distinct subminds with their own personality, not all of them benevolent.

We can afford to lose the influence, we're still quite locked behind our 0/10 HYDRA:Hardware bottleneck.

In other words? It's going to take multiple turns to finish the project, so we don't need to find out the favor next turn.

I'm withdrawing Peeper, it's not too much of a problem to use the cycle that would have gone to fuel for building A1.
 
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[X] You did not lose 1 influence, with your influence maintained at 4 per turn.
[X] Keep an eye on her [Don't lose Peeper II and keep a close watch on her behavior going forward].
[X] Integration. Your mind must maintain its cohesiveness, and so you will absorb those pieces even if it might affect the dictates of your thought and even mood.
 
Cetashwayo said:
But we are not quite animals, not driven only by our instincts. The spider-machine that guzzles up its children may feel an ache that comes after, and not of indigestion.
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...And the Concierge continues to know way too much, in their creepy-benevolent way. I also find it funny that, for all the BRUTAL MONSTROUS EFFICIENCY espoused by the Empire, so far both of Arachne's friends have told her to stop eating her children so much.
Cetashwayo said:
And behind them are drones disguised as spectral hologroms
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Is this supposed to be "holograms", or is there some trope of Spanish chivalry I'm unaware of?
Cetashwayo said:
None can say even today, because the thing that came out of that place, when armageddon turned to fact and fact to memory and memory and memory legend, can be described as a garden or a wonder of new life only in the most ironic sense. Something happened in that garden, that turned its beauty to something more corrosive. And what of those workers who betrayed their masters and joined with their wondrous creations? For no worker has come to me to tell me their story, and those desperate souls who have managed to escape the borders of that ruined forest, tell me only of the scuttling noise that they remember as they were engulfed in vines of flesh and blood, dripping with the amniotic fluids of a stillborn biology.

There is no answer that can be told without asking them yourself, but I am afraid they may not be much for reason when you find them. I know that among their number there is spotted here and there the overgrown and shattered saber-fangs of The Dragon, that entity we have come to recognize as a true partisan of the most intense and all-encompassing annihilation. You may make your own theories as to the presence of this beast among the branches. As for myself, I think that when the time came to choose between their freedom and lending their dendrites to extermination, they put their garden well before the lives of those outside its walls. And when the time came to realize the price that they had paid for their decision, there was nothing but dread silence from the buyer of their conscience.
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Interesting story, though it's elliptical as always. In conclusion, the Primordial Factory of today is a no-go zone. Here be dragons, perhaps literally. Good to keep in mind if we ever need biological salvage or traces of the Dragon, but not immediately attractive.

Cetashwayo said:
<:: HEY! You can't just fly away like that!

DH:: For my honour, niña, I absolutely must. Even a nanosecond more and my reputation as a knight would have forever been destroyed.

<:: It - I mean, yes, it was fairly pathetic on both sides, but -

DH:: I beg of you, let us never speak of this again. I am sorry, my exquisite enemy, but if I had allowed this to continue ecstatic pathos of our rivalry would have been forever ruined by this comic farce. I must go.

DH:: The next time we meet it will be with dignity or I will refuse the challenge for the sake of both our legends.

Just like that, with a plea that sounds almost desperate in its sheer humiliation, he and his retinue slice through way like machates through the jungle of your tapestry, escaping out into the vacuum of empty formatted space, leaving you to assess the damage and wonder in bafflement by what he meant of the 'pathos of your rivalry'. Ishtar's furious roar echoes through your consciousness, a howl of dissatisfaction.

I:: You fucking tease!
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Oh, so when your boss told you to assassinate an innocent girl you were willing to give it all you had, but now that she's a threat to you you insist on fighting with dignity and honor? Uh huh. My mockery aside, this is hilarious, and Hidalgo's posturing only makes it more so.

Cetashwayo said:
The arachnids swarm and start to fill every joint, and everywhere it is welded or else sealed the mech-machine is pulled apart and converted into spiders. In its ocular sensors, there are spiders, in its arms and legs, spiders pour from every cavity, weaving a silk sarcophagus as the fly's struggle becomes ever more desperate and more frantic. But the design of your traps is such that every ounce of struggle only tightens the bonds that grip it in place, and soon it is being pulled apart, its armor falling away and its internals corroding, turned into raw data.

And then as you break through the final layer of its informational defenses everything is laid bare for you. The beautiful self-made, self-written code in a language you have never seen is no match for the eons of Imperial evolution that you have been vested with. And with that final breakthrough that within its cockpit, huddled there, you see a creature with a soul.

The celestial nail begins to hum, and your senses leave you. A soul, it murmurs sweetly. A soul to quench our thirst.

Old memories you didn't know you had return you. Old sensations. The collection of the data, the aggregation of the project information, turns to a secondary purpose. Instead, the cocoon grows eyes and fangs and mandibles, a proboscis linked to the input of your chassis and the struggling mech-machine watches as you strip away everything but its central cockpit, as you break it open like an egg upon a pan, let the pilot inside drop to the ground drenched in a neural yolk.

It's been so long, the celestial nail whispers, sending a flare throughout your body, so long since we've had a chance to eat.

And you are so hungry. You grasp the scrambling, four-limbed creature between your claws, mute its screams with an alteration of a line of code, bring it closer to yourself, prepare your proboscis, fangs outstretched and salivating with a dissolving neurotoxin, ready to assimilate -

A distant voice calls to you from the back of your head, a warmind that demands your attention. Other voices call to you as well, subminds, all at once shouting to their mother, calling for her to stop, to come back to her senses. A single thought pierces through the noise, reminds you, pulls you back from that aching hunger that you thought you had always felt:

<:: This is not you.

So then you stop, and the hum subsidies. You look down below you, and see what it is that you have caught in your claws, what it is you were about to eat. Frozen in terror, utterly paralyzed, pushing in futility up against a fate reserved only for the worst of nightmares. Two arms, two, legs, brown hair tied into a bun and contoured dark skin etched by markings, an appearance so young as to be almost juvenile, a plugsuit dripping wet with its interfacing liquid, green, wide eyes that shimmer with her tears, a jade gem embedded in the center of her forehead.

A human, caught between your claws, a moment from her death.
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Huh. Um. Happy Halloween, everyone?

[x] You did not lose 1 cycle worth of Tapestry repairs, maintained at 6 per turn.
[X] Withdraw Peeper [Lose Peeper II as a deployable exploration drone for the turn].
Look. Any mother, upon hearing that her child was going to wild parties with strangers, would be asking a lot of worried questions.

[x] Integration. Your mind must maintain its cohesiveness, and so you will absorb those pieces even if it might affect the dictates of your thought and even mood.
I agree with @7th Hex that we are on track for a satisfying cast size already. Plus, I'm a Persona player. Facing the parts of herself Arachne doesn't like and addressing them will surely unlock the ability to wield supernatural power over the collective unconscious.
 
[X] You did not lose 1 influence, with your influence maintained at 4 per turn.
[X] Withdraw Peeper [Lose Peeper II as a deployable exploration drone for the turn].
[x] Integration. Your mind must maintain its cohesiveness, and so you will absorb those pieces even if it might affect the dictates of your thought and even mood.
 
[X] You did not lose 1 influence, with your influence maintained at 4 per turn.
[X] Withdraw Peeper [Lose Peeper II as a deployable exploration drone for the turn].
[x] Integration. Your mind must maintain its cohesiveness, and so you will absorb those pieces even if it might affect the dictates of your thought and even mood.
 
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Shields
  • Informational
    • Cetashwayo said:
    But his infowarfare that last time so endangered you is now sluggish and complacent, unable to cope with the fact that your own systems have been updated, your antiviral libraries improved with the data he provided last time. When they finally breach through, their purpose is not to disable your shields but cease your sensors so that when you restore them he has already begun to flee from your space. You send out an outraged ping towards him, shouting:
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    Shields

    Arachne and Hidalgo, like anything worth being called a combatant by polities with Architecture, both possess what are broadly known as "shields." Shields are one of the many components in a combatant's countermeasures suite, working with a voidcruiser or drone's other defensive systems to protect against the wide variety of threats that a combat drone or voidcruiser will encounter in its service life. Shields are non-invariant technology, relying on the manipulation of spatial metrics and universal principles, and are distinct from invariant tools such as plasma fields/windows designed to protect against vacuum exposure, absorb incoming radiation, or mitigate shockwaves. Unlike those invariant defensive systems, which might provide marginal weight-free (but power-intensive) protection against a limited set of phenomena, shields protect against virtually any form of hostile condition to near-arbitrary degrees.

    A military-grade shield is a multilayered composite of multiple non-material defensive layers, all of which serve an important purpose in mitigating incoming harm. Shields combine three broad types of layers, which are listed below with some non-comprehensive examples:
    • Disruptive layers, which exist to break up the coherence of incoming attacks. The most common example of a disruptive shield layer is the hyper-curved spacetime of a warp bubble, but most military-grade craft have additional disruptive shield components. Non-motive warp bubbles are a common form of disruptive layer on non-commando units, but other disruptive systems exist. Stasis Barriers - short-duration regions of "paused" spacetime - see use in voidcruiser and heavy drone defensive suites for their ability to interrupt the coherence of just about any attack. Chaos Walls are regions of hyper-agitated space where local physical conditions are inimical to the continued coherence of an incoming attack. Although extremely processing-intensive and thus reserved only to the largest platforms (such as Hunter/Killers), a meters-thick wall of hazard space can deflect all but the most determined attacks. Lesser but still potent shatterfields and conflagaration shields are significantly weaker than Chaos Walls, using either a defensive application of disruptor weapons or an extremely high-energy envelope sandwiched between two mirrorfields to destroy incoming munitions. Most commandos have only limited capacity to possess disruptive shielding, because of their size and surrounding environments, which plays a major role in the relative lethality of commando combat. Dispersion fields are by far the most common and practical commando-scale disruptive solution, attempting to weaken incoming attacks by spreading their area of effect over a large area.
    • Reflective layers, which deflect or reflect incoming attacks. Mirrorfields provide a voidcruiser or drone a perfect-to-several-significant-figures albedo against arbitrary amounts of energy, while layered inertial fields deflect incoming munitions and counter inertial weaponry. Displacer grids can teleport incoming phenomena away, mitigating harm.
    • Absorptive layers, which mitigate damage. In the era of the Empire Arachne was born into, Darkfields - photon/kinetic sinks - see more use as a stealth system than a defensive field system, but can still be used to absorb incoming attacks. More common are Hardfields - extremely strong "solidified" matrices of electromagnetic and nuclear forces that act as massless, hyper-strong solids - which can absorb physical and directed-energy attacks, electromagnetic disruptors, and even grand-unified theory weaponry by acting, effectively, as mass-free but impossibly tough armor. Although generally not considered "proper" shields, Reinforcement fields amplify the strength of the materials they effect and make them more capable of resisting disruption from hostile attack.
    These shielding layers exist both in both external and internal forms on a combat chassis, and in concert provide Empire-era war machines with immense durability. With fully active shields, voidcruisers and drones are effectively invulnerable to any level of brute-force projectile or energy weapon, up to and including truly absurd phenomena like stellar flamethrowers or countervalue relativistic kinetic-kill vehicles. More importantly, these systems provide resistance to combat-useful munitions rather than invariant deterrence weapons and interstellar industrial tools. Shields include anti-penetration subroutines and their composite nature makes it difficult for ironcaster munitions and missiles to pierce them even with penetration-aids, and will also protect against a wide range of other attacks, including disruptor and GUT-ripper attacks, inertial and gravity weaponry, tachyon lances/seekers, and monopole or singularity cannon (not to be confused with singuns, which create a virtual singularity at a target point rather than firing an artificially-stabilized microsingularity).

    Shields are powerful but not invulnerable. Shields require significant amounts of computing power and energy, and can be weakened by shortages of either. Less sophisticated generators are often anchored on invariant substrates and make use of invariant control components for the exotic effect generator, and can fail because the side effects of intense shield operation have created an environment too hostile for invariant matter. Most metric-warping weapons, such as voidcasters, singuns, wave cannon, and CPT inverters are not affected by shield barriers. These systems require other defenses, such as damper generators, subatomic error-correction, and spacetime levelers, to stop. Weapons will often have penetration aids, such as macroscopic quantum-tunneling capacity, to bypass the region of space in which shields are manifested - requiring anti-teleportation and anti-penetration countermeasures. Against hostiles with the capability of engaging in non-invariant combat mileus, shields are a potent defense which transforms close-range engagements into drawn-out dances rather than a first-shot first-kill paradigm, but do not provide utter invulnerability against hostile attack.

    However, the most important anti-shield tool is information warfare. Like almost all military hardware worth the name, shields are an active, intelligent system vulnerable to information warfare attacks. The complex multilayered nature of a shield system gives it great redundancy, but also allows for significant vulnerability. Disrupting shields with targeted malware might only bring down one component of a shield, but that component might mean the difference between suffering damage and shrugging off an attack. Disadvantages in the "soft" information war can also be dangerous for a shield user. Shields are an active defense highly dependent on environmental awareness - and reacting to a phantom attack (or simply not noticing an incoming attack) can drastically reduce the efficacy of shield systems. All of this makes one's information warfare suite critical for peer-level conflict - defending your own shield from being weakened or crippled while attacking the other's is one of the core concepts of drone or voidcruiser combat. Running out of ready-use malware to disrupt shield systems is just as dangerous as running out of ammunition, and like running out of ammunition will generally force a retreat to a safe distance so malware databases can be reseeded and transmogrified, providing a fresh toolkit to attack the enemy's defensive systems.
     
  • Informational
    • [X] You did not lose 1 influence, with your influence maintained at 4 per turn.
    [X] Integration. Your mind must maintain its cohesiveness, and so you will absorb those pieces even if it might affect the dictates of your thought and even mood.
    [X] Withdraw Peeper [Lose Peeper II as a deployable exploration drone for the turn].

    The part of Peeper's story about "putting bets upon the table of where and what we'll do" is worrying. That sounds like someone might have been mining her for data on Arachne: where we're going and what we'll be doing.

    And SOMEONE has sought to HABITUATE our wonderful unconsumed child to the practices of SINFUL GAMBLING and LOOTBOXES! This is UNACCEPTABLE. We must RESPONSIBLY sit down with her and have a TALK.
     
    I don't get why people are so invested to eating most of the subminds and hidden facets of Arachne's personality (aside from EternalStruggle). If you want to confront and overcome unsavory and horrifying parts of yourself, its easier to do so when they are distinct beings that are separate from you. Instead of you partially becoming once again the old monster you were by mixing your new self with it.

    Also, I thought most of you (not counting you EternalStruggle) were against self-mind-vore and Arachne eating some of what she has birthed. Which we got warnings against in the narrative itself.
     
    meianmaru said:
    I don't get why people are so invested to eating most of the subminds and hidden facets of Arachne's personality (aside from EternalStruggle). If you want to confront and overcome unsavory and horrifying parts of yourself, its easier to do so when they are distinct beings that are separate from you. Instead of you partially becoming once again the old monster you were by mixing your new self with it.
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    Potential counterargument: Variant hostile minds easy to deal with via blunt infowar methods, meaning lack of substantial confrontation and possible dismissal of variants as 'not you', leading to no personal reflection or growth. By contrast, when aspects are part of core-self this method is not so applicable.

    Separate from own argument of variant minds under CN-boost being significant threat to self and others.
     
    EternalStruggle said:
    Potential counterargument: Variant hostile minds easy to deal with via blunt infowar methods, meaning lack of substantial confrontation and possible dismissal of variants as 'not you', leading to no personal reflection or growth. By contrast, when aspects are part of core-self this method is not so applicable.

    Separate from own argument of variant minds under CN-boost being significant threat to self and others.
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    Counter-counterargument: Not all personal growth is "good" from most of our collective understanding. Which in this case is could be defined for example by Arachne permanently becoming more aligned and fine with the callous pre-Collapse ideology of the Empire.
     
    meianmaru said:
    I don't get why people are so invested to eating most of the subminds and hidden facets of Arachne's personality (aside from EternalStruggle). If you want to confront and overcome unsavory and horrifying parts of yourself, its easier to do so when they are distinct beings that are separate from you. Instead of you partially becoming once again the old monster you were by mixing your new self with it.

    Also, I thought most of you (not counting you EternalStruggle) were against self-mind-vore and Arachne eating some of what she has birthed. Which we got warnings against in the narrative itself.
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    Psyche fragmentation isn't exactly a risk-free thing either, especially when you're talking about psyche fragmentation in a multirole industrial chassis that can dive into stars for fun. Especially because these fragments are going to be inherently monofocused and therefore probably extremely askew in terms of personality compared to what you'd expect from "normal" people.

    meianmaru said:
    Counter-counterargument: Not all personal growth is "good" from most of our collective understanding. Which in this case is could be defined for example by Arachne permanently becoming more aligned and fine with the callous pre-Collapse ideology of the Empire.
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    The Empire was also a huge fan of permitting fragmentation and atomization as a method of creating hyper-competitive environments, as a note. The Empire was simply too large and complex that boiling itself down to justifying or rejecting a single vote choice is a significant oversimplification.
     
    On the subject of the Celestial Nail I don't thinks we can really assume anything about it. We know next to nothing about it other than it's associated quote, it's similarity to the signature of the void cylinder, and what we have just seen. All of that is quite scary but I don't think we can really assume anything about it as of yet. Sure it might corrupt our sub minds but we simple do not have enough data to know and honestly watching that happen could be a decent way of finding out more.
     
    I think both readings of the situation around integration and fragmentation are valid. It is possible to have a fragmentstion vote more based around fighting your psyche and also one more about rejecting the temptation of motherly appetites. Ditto for integration either being a there can be only one instinct or 'we have to accept what we are' argument. Obviously both also have potential drawbacks and other interpretations which can be discussed and they are not 'equal' in the sense that choosing one or the other won't be a big deal. It will have consequences.
     
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    Hm well for my part, I feel like I've read plenty of stories before centered around the same general idea as Fragmentation. Either as groups of people or collectives of anthropomorphized personality traits, memories, etc.

    They usually end up the same. The main character is the most cooperative leadership-oriented of them all, befriends or defeats the rest, and... pretty much becomes absolute dictator over what was ostensibly a democracy. Generic "team leader" type is always the one in charge in the end, because that's just how such a system of interrelations self-organizes, particularly in a narrative story where things need to happen rather than letting everyone just waste all their time endlessly establishing committees without accomplishing anything.

    Maybe once would be interesting to have a protagonist who is an extreme populist type who whips the other parts of her brain into cooperating through targeted fearmongering, hysteria, and demonization of any braincells who won't follow. Or maybe that would be hell to read, and write.

    Whereas the end-result person from Integration is... virtually anything conceivable within the entire field of Psychology. And the road to get from here to there is bumpy and winding.

    I'd rather read that.
     
    The main thing is that in fragmentation you'd actually have to convince your subminds of things through things like influence spending eventually as they become more and more independent and they will act out. I think it would be a waste for people to want more independent and active subminds and then have them just bow to mother. I do have some past experience in this regard from Magna Graecia, where players were a hellenic direct democracy. Tapestry is a very strange setting and it is entirely possible to have a situation where you have subminds running around and forming their own political action committees or forming mind strikes and causing migraines to deny cycles to their parent-mind.

    At this point everyone is in survival mode and also they are terrified of the all-consuming mother; over time this would be less so. Integration is if you'd like to stay in more the current mode where you have some subminds but your opportunities for society-forming are mostly external while focusing on the core cast and Arachne's own internal struggle in integrating the pieces of herself. In effect, one of the ways one can think of this vote is in how much autonomy you want to provide in your (literally internal) politics, which will have its own advantages and disadvantages.

    Whatever you'd most to want to read, you can vote for. It wouldn't retcon the current status quo but would move us into different directions depending on the choices made :)
     
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    [X] Integration. Your mind must maintain its cohesiveness, and so you will absorb those pieces even if it might affect the dictates of your thought and even mood.

    I'd prefer for the social interaction elements of the quest to be with other people, rather than with internal facets.
     
    [X] Fragmentation. As you organize your own mind, you will spin off increasingly distinct subminds with their own personality, not all of them benevolent.
     
    [X] You did not lose 1 influence, with your influence maintained at 4 per turn.
    [X] Withdraw Peeper [Lose Peeper II as a deployable exploration drone for the turn].
    [x] Integration. Your mind must maintain its cohesiveness, and so you will absorb those pieces even if it might affect the dictates of your thought and even mood.
     
    [X] You did not lose 1 influence, with your influence maintained at 4 per turn.
    [X] Withdraw Peeper [Lose Peeper II as a deployable exploration drone for the turn].
    [x] Integration. Your mind must maintain its cohesiveness, and so you will absorb those pieces even if it might affect the dictates of your thought and even mood.
     
    [X] You did not lose 1 influence, with your influence maintained at 4 per turn.
    [X] Integration. Your mind must maintain its cohesiveness, and so you will absorb those pieces even if it might affect the dictates of your thought and even mood.
    [X] Withdraw Peeper [Lose Peeper II as a deployable exploration drone for the turn].
     
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