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The Secrets' Crusade

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Vortex279 said:
The information that the void crystal from way back when being an Uninvolved action towards possibly better than First Secret Drives is one thing that really gets my interest. Given what we know currently about the first secret war fleet drives of the Ship Lords, I can't help but wonder just what the drives referenced by the Uninvolved would be capable of. Their plug about:
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Um, I think you may have misinterpreted here. They're offering one FTL drive that could get you to the systems much, much faster than even a War Fleet drive. But that's all they can do, and it'll require the Void Crystal to act as the drive's core.
 
Oh. I thought it was more of a research path with the void crystal. Not a single instance. My bad.
 
[x] Infodump to Sidra under accelerated perception in order to get a recording, then get some bloody sleep.
//
And when we wake up, have a breakfast and then talk to all people that need to know. That includes the current president.
 
Snowfire said:
"Someone that you can contact, of course." That made sense, but something was missing. "But even the closest of those systems would take months or years to reach with our own limited drives. And you've already said that you cannot supply us with new ones," and you stopped quite suddenly, as your host raised a single, ephemeral hand.

"That," the wrappings of calm around their voice frayed as they spoke, "is not quite the case."
"Pardon me?"

"The crystal you created with your sistersoul, during your youth," Tahkel explained, speaking quickly. "There is a reason that your attempts to understand it have continued to fail, more than simple luck. Simply put, it is a creation of two worlds. Yours, and ours. Just like you are capable of working power like we can without detection, that creation could allow us to act in your world without setting off the grid."
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YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*shakes fist*

VOTE
[X] Explain things to Sidra.
Explain to Sidra. Share your memories.
Then talk to Mary.

While you dont want to make decisions while you're tired, you DO want to recount experiences while they're fresh.
As fresh as possible.
 
edofthesquid said:
[X] Explain things to Sidra and Mary, together.
Let's tell them everything while it's fresh
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Chaossama said:
[X] Explain things to Sidra and Mary, together.
Because we can record what happened but impressions and such will start to fade and distort if we go back to sleep.
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We talk to Sidra mind-to-mind, and have combat accelerated perception to do so.
We have to talk to Mary verbally using the relatively low-bandwith process of our voice, or pushing her to use her neural implants.
There is little gained by talking to them together, and it artificially bottlenecks the process here.

Talking to Sidra alone gives her time to get her head around what just happened.
And a headsup on talking to the rest of the 223's Unison partners.

When we're done talking to Sidra, THEN we should wake up Mary and talk to her.
In the meantime, let her sleep.
TheEyes said:
[x] Infodump to Sidra under accelerated perception in order to get a recording, then get some bloody sleep.

Making species altering decisions while tired is a terrible idea. That said, just going back to sleep risks forgetting something important. So, make a record first, then make sure you're mentally competent to do something productive with it.
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Making a report, not a decision. It benefits from the memory being fresh.
While we will have the aid of Insight-focused Practice users to confirm our memories, there is significant
And I am strongly in favor of distributing records of this meeting as quickly as possible.

Just in case there is another string to the Shiplord bow, another element to their defenses, that we were unaware of.
 
Where did the Black Crystal come from anyways? I recall it popped up during a vote, and given a pretty vague backstory. Do we know how or why Amanda made such a thing? Before she became President, she spent decades as a wandering Mender -- she made it during this period of her life I think. This raises the question of why the Uninvolved chose to get involved making such an inscrutable artifact for Amanda before she became super-famous. Did they know?

Maybe Amanda isn't the only potential they've reached out to, how many other Uninvolved-touched artifacts are floating around?

The crystal is giving serious MacGuffin/One Ring vibes. Minus all that evil and corruption of course.

If @Snowfire is still doing those Amanda Q&A sessions, I'd like to ask her if she remembers the context surrounding the creation of the crystal.
 
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Sinned Valentine said:
[] Explain things to Sidra and Mary, together.

Humanity's greatest scientist and a mind that can literally look through Amanda's memories should be able to piece together a better idea of everything Amanda's gotten from Tahkel than individually.
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Can someone remind me whether Sidra can/does manifest a human-analogue avatar that can participate meaningfully in human conversations?

[x] Infodump to Sidra under accelerated perception in order to get a recording, then get some bloody sleep.

I agree with @Coda . This isn't something it's esnsible to think over without sleep, inasmuch as Amanda still has a biological need for it (hard for me to be sure, sometimes, just how posthuman she is)
 
Himmelhand said:
Is that how the crystal was set up from the start? Could Amanda have accidentally opened some sort of door for the Uninvolved way back when we were messing with the crystal in the previous quest?
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Not quite. There were various ways it could have gone, had you ever succeeded in your research checks. As you didn't, I got to do this. I think this is more fun - but I could be biased.

Eastern Calculus said:
Where did the Black Crystal come from anyways? I recall it popped up during a vote, and given a pretty vague backstory. Do we know how or why Amanda made such a thing? Before she became President, she spent decades as a wandering Mender -- she made it during this period of her life I think. This raises the question of why the Uninvolved chose to get involved making such an inscrutable artifact for Amanda before she became super-famous. Did they know?

Maybe Amanda isn't the only potential they've reached out to, how many other Uninvolved-touched artifacts are floating around?

The crystal is giving serious MacGuffin/One Ring vibes. Minus all that evil and corruption of course.

If @Snowfire is still doing those Amanda Q&A sessions, I'd like to ask her if she remembers the context surrounding the creation of the crystal.
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Let me just head this off here.

The Uninvolved did not involve themselves in the creations of Potentials. If they had, their actions would have been detected by the Shiplord detection web and humanity would be dead. I thought I was rather clear about this.

The Void Crystal was something that Amanda made in a Trance-trending-Miracle during her youth, on one of the breaks from Circle work and Mending that she took to work with Mary on the deeper mysteries of Practice. It was her trying to create something that could be used to make sense of how Potentials worked, to bridge the gap between a human mind and the power that a Potential could wield. It certainly succeeded in terms of the latter, though it took an Uninvolved to help Amanda realise how she'd actually succeeded. It's not 'Uninvolved-touched', nothing is. But it's something that an Uninvolved could use as a physical anchor for their power in reality. The scale of that working will be limited, but the offer they made is pretty clear. A First Secret drive that can fit into the Adamant's chassis, and that can shatter the traditional range limit.

The context of the creation of the Void Crystal will be coming up in later updates, when you end up talking with Adriana.

Simon_Jester said:
Can someone remind me whether Sidra can/does manifest a human-analogue avatar that can participate meaningfully in human conversations?
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Theoretically they could, but they choose not to. The Unison Intelligences rarely take avatar forms, and almost never on their own.
 
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If that drive does get made, to me the most obvious (and probably best) use is as a diplomatic vessel shuttling back and forth to the allies. I'm getting amused by trying to imagine then trying to explain it while keeping the Uninvolved involvment secret.
"So how did you make it, and how long until we can get the schematics to build our own?"
"Eh, it's a unique artifact built on top of a unique artifact, even we can't make another"
 
Lavaflow said:
If that drive does get made, to me the most obvious (and probably best) use is as a diplomatic vessel shuttling back and forth to the allies. I'm getting amused by trying to imagine then trying to explain it while keeping the Uninvolved involvment secret.
"So how did you make it, and how long until we can get the schematics to build our own?"
"Eh, it's a unique artifact built on top of a unique artifact, even we can't make another"
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The conditional attached to its creation is that you use it to go and find whatever the Shiplords have hidden from the galaxy. You also really do not need it as a diplomatic courier. You have interstellar lagless for that.
 
Snowfire said:
:lol::lol::lol:
*slurps tears*
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*shakes fist*
Simon_Jester said:
I agree with @Coda . This isn't something it's esnsible to think over without sleep, inasmuch as Amanda still has a biological need for it (hard for me to be sure, sometimes, just how posthuman she is)
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The impression I got is that we aren't thinking it over. Not yet.
Just giving as many people as possible an infodump while it's fresh before any more of our recollection is distorted by time or or enemy action.
Given how subjective a lot of this shit sometimes is, I would strongly advocate talking to as many people as we can before going to bed.

At least Mary, because Sif is too close to our own mindset and memory to be an outside observer.
Or indeed, not to be targeted if there is some sort of Shiplord mindwhammy effect to worry about.
 
@Snowfire - now that we know what the crystal does, would it be possible to create more anchors? Now that we can ask the Uninvolved for pointers from their side.
And having more physical world anchors wouldn't be bad, would it?
 
MTB said:
@Snowfire - now that we know what the crystal does, would it be possible to create more anchors? Now that we can ask the Uninvolved for pointers from their side.
And having more physical world anchors wouldn't be bad, would it?
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Amanda doesn't really know how she made it. On it's own it's proof of concept, yes, but it's not a blueprint. Especially when it was the result of a Trance/Miracle.

Next update is likely to be delayed by processing of the existential horror of what my country just did to itself.
 
If it's okay to do so, I'm going to do approval voting, because I see some options being distinctly better than others.

[x] Infodump to Sidra under accelerated perception in order to get a recording, then get some bloody sleep.
[] Explain things to Sidra.

(EDIT: revised to break tie)

Really, one is just a more specific description of the other, so maybe I shouldn't have done it as a write-in because that splits the vote... should have just put it as a description instead of the vote itself.
 
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[x] Infodump to Sidra under accelerated perception in order to get a recording, then get some bloody sleep.
[x] Explain things to Sidra.
 
[x] Infodump to Sidra under accelerated perception in order to get a recording, then get some bloody sleep.
[x] Explain things to Sidra.
 
Snowfire said:
Next update is likely to be delayed by processing of the existential horror of what my country just did to itself.
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Ah, if it's any comfort, history is basically a long series of fuck-ups, followed by trying to fix the fuck-ups, which in turn becomes a new series of fuck-ups? (The positive side is that we're on a net-positive trend! Yay!)

3227 No, really! We are! Learning from our mistakes and all that! If we're repeating history, we're just applying scientific principles and double-checking the result!
 
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Snowfire said:
They're highly advanced, ancient in a way only the Shiplords can match, benevolently (as far as you've seen) curious, and the Starhomes are home to at least 90% of the Uninvolved Remnants.
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@Snowfire what is the typical lifespan of a Remnant, and (as unlikely as it may be) are there any Remnants that existed longer than their Uninvolved counterparts? In general and contemporary to humanity, that is.

Snowfire said:
Next update is likely to be delayed by processing of the existential horror of what my country just did to itself.
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Context? Or at least - does anyone know where Snowfire lives?
Okay, going by what TheBiggerFish and Oshha said, it's UK politics.
I believe it refers to this, then:
en.wikipedia.org

2019 United Kingdom general election - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
In summary, Boris Johnson (and Conservative Party) went from 317 (out of 650) seats, to 365 seats in the House of Commons, a clear majority.
Meaning, from my layperson view, there's no longer anything preventing Boris Johnson from passing the Brexit-related decisions in-house, so to speak.
 
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