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Invaders Must Die! (XCOM Inspired)

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[X] The first glass baseball bat killing

This one, going through the Cartel or Police seems unwise with a potential street kid who may see us talking to them and conclude Ash and co are in cahoots with their enemies. This though, is weirder, closer to home potentially.

Warehouse I'm not sure of, but it might still be crawling with investigators so it might be best to avoid it so that we can get a meeting in a calmer situation.
 
[X] The first glass baseball bat killing

Case zero is more important, I think, in terms of getting a feel on finding the Vigilante with regards to 'where is he from'.
 
Vocalend said:
[X] The first glass baseball bat killing

Case zero is more important, I think, in terms of getting a feel on finding the Vigilante with regards to 'where is he from'.
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Yeah, it might give us insight into their personality and one of their Paths. "Who you were/where you come from" is a common one.

"Paths" Are a Scion character creation and character direction device that help establish the Scion's role in their Pantheon/godly family, for clarification.
 
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[X] The first glass baseball bat killing

The kick off event is the most significant and the most personal
 
That is absolutely not a baseball bat with glass bottle fragments stuck into it. It's a Macuahuitl aka wooden club with obsidian blades seated in it's edges.
 
Pyro Hawk said:
That is absolutely not a baseball bat with glass bottle fragments stuck into it. It's a Macuahuitl aka wooden club with obsidian blades seated in it's edges.
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Yes and no, it's probably a spirit/culture manifestation with wooden bat as anchor.

Though I do wonder if the Mexico kid is still themselves. Blood is not exactly a stabilizing culture element.
 
Academia Nut said:
Basically, if you interacted directly with any of the remains left by the aliens, you easily recognized that they were real and significant. The moment you were out of direct presence your brain slipped off the details. You probably remembered that they were important somehow, but the ability to process the thought 'This is alien equipment' was essentially impossible. If you returned to the equipment or corpses your memory righted itself, although you could still remember being unable to remember.

It got far freakier when it came to recordings though. Any pictures, notes, or instrumentation outputs were equally scrambled, depending on proximity. If you read the notes in the direct presence of something alien you were fine. If you had been in the direct presence of an artefact and went back to your notes or recordings, they wouldn't make sense. If you had never been in the presence of something alien, everything looked mundane and fake.

[...]

There were however two major exceptions. Everyone who had survived the encounter and had seen the aliens live could hold the 'correct' memories in their head for a period of time before the redacted versions slipped in. The second exception was Ash, who did not suffer from the memory redactions, and her presence actually partially countered the process. [...]

The explanation of "I'm pretty sure I have been chosen by the sacred spirits of the First Nations of Northern Ontario to oppose these creatures'' wasn't exactly one that landed with great efficiency, but the proposal that perhaps these aliens had visited the region in the past and produced some resistance did sort of work. The fact that the person who had the second best resistance - stupid, sexy, arrogant Master Corporal John Kent - was also First Nations leant significant credence to this theory.

It was wrong as far as Ash was concerned, but it was wrong in a useful way.
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Hmm, all these are reminding me very much of the ideas in Magic the Ascension, specifically the concept of Consensus Reality, Paradigm, and Paradox. Basically, the main hinge of the tabletop game is that every human being are reality warpers, just in varying degrees of activity. CR is the idea that the collective unconscious of humankind generates the 'basic' underpinning laws of reality – stuff like the laws of thermodynamics, the idea that 'space is a void', etc. The Awakened humans though, can circumvent this based on their Paradigms, their personal reality and justification why they can do what they do. An Awakened cleric might believe that blessed bullets can indeed drive out evil spirits, the same way that an Awakened gadgeteer can develop a ghost vacuum a la Ghostbusters to do the same. Essentially, all Paradigms are equal, which is the crux of what Uncle Denis elaborated at the end of the last arc.

However, all Paradigms are ultimately personal or at the largest scale, localized to a certain people and region and if normal people – Sleepers – catches Awakened Mages in an act of magic, it incurs Paradox: The concept of 'correcting reality'. At best, it just makes equipment not work – the ghost-busting equipment malfunctioning despite the very real 'spirit' that's there. At worst, the Awakened be redacted from reality because they are that much of an aberrant existence.

Oh hey, that's what's happening to the memories and cognition of everyone else. And that's weird for two reasons. That's not how it goes in MtAsc. Because based on the Paradigm – heh – above, what's happening here is that Consensus Reality is the one getting whacked by Paradox. Ash, meanwhile, can show her rifle around, wield it, and actually have it be means-tested without her getting fucked up by the 'Dox.

The second and more crucial thing is that in MtAsc, Consensus Reality is enforced by the Technocrats, the designated bad guy against the 90s Punk protagonists. They're The ManTM​, the multinational conspiracy blob who manipulates CR by advancing human science and advancement and stops people from throwing fireballs and lighting bolts everywhere. Yes, they are bad, genocidally so, but there's no rebuttal given to the fact that the 'Crats have indeed done good, ensuring that the things that goes bump in the night no longer does on a global scale.

...so the big questions are: Where are the 'Crats here? And what if they're not here then, what does maintain the Consensus Reality?
 
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