Scum and Villainy in-character (IC) thread.

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Smith said:
Kal's least favourite aspect of any job, physical labour, he reluctantly pitches in.

OOC: Do we still have anyone on watch whilst we focus on this?
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OOC: Your call. You could schedule a roster to keep an eye on the surveillance equipment.
 
Nobby-W said:
OOC: Your call. You could schedule a roster to keep an eye on the surveillance equipment.
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OOC: If possible, Kal would draft something up that just so happens to mean he's on watch that coincides with the worst of the labour :tongue:
 
Once he's confident that electronic surveillance is set up as well as can be under the circumstances, Steevo goes and helps with the rubble clearance. Let the others play guard, Steevo is not above getting his hands dirty. He's not particularly physical but he can carry rocks and operate a winch.
 
Smith Smith, Séadna Séadna, Bunch Bunch, Stan Stan

Smith Smith - You set up a roster of shifts monitoring the surveillance gear and manage to roster yourself on when most of the heavy lifting is taking place.

The sonic hammers are quite precise for breaking up larger rocks. The first clearance is getting the rocks out of the cave mouth. This process takes several days and goes with out incident.

Séadna Séadna During the initial clearance you feel some minor stirrings within the fabric. Occasionally something brushes across your consciousness lightly but there's no contact. Reaching out and searching you can feel the nebulous presence but fail to grasp it and get the image you got before.

Once the rocks are cleared the team does a photogrammetric image (generates a high-res computer model of the cave mouth) before beginning to clear the rubble from the antechamber. This process is much slower as each rock has to be examined to see whether it has any decorated surface on it.

Monitoring the surveillance equipment is kinda tedious.

Séadna Séadna - as the work continues you get a couple of more coherent flashes. The first is completely garbled - little more than static. The second is still highly distorted but seems vaguely familiar. You finally recognise it as maybe a highly convoluted analog to one of the symbols on the freeze on the walls of the antechamber.

The team starts to assemble bits of the wall material on the floor across the antechamber. They have parts of the wall from where the collapse took place.

Much of the pigment is eroded away but there are symbols carved in bas-relief along a frieze near the top of the walls in the antechamber. They look like they may be ideographic. Okon explains that there are tentative translations for a few of the symbols but nothing completely agreed on.
 
Twitch is enjoying a little mindless time. He's following around doing pretty much what's asked if him at a pondering pace but without complaint or inspiration.
 
Bunch said:
Twitch is enjoying a little mindless time. He's following around doing pretty much what's asked if him at a pondering pace but without complaint or inspiration.
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You get dragged into helping move rocks quite often but spend some time quietly contemplating life. Unfortunately this doesn't bring you to any profound conclusions.
 
Smith Smith, Séadna Séadna, Bunch Bunch, Stan Stan -

Clearing the inner fall continues with more and more of the wall and ceiling being pieced together on the floor of the antechamber.

Séadna Séadna - You get more garbled flashes and recognize some of what you're seeing as distorted versions of some of the ideographs in the reliefs on the wall.
 
OOC: Despite being distorted is my vision "complete" compared to the reconstructions the team have done so far?
 
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Séadna said:
OOC: Despite being distorted is my vision a "complete" compared to the reconstructions the team have done so far?
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You're getting flashes of individual glyphs. Some are so distorted they're meaningless squiggles and noise. You think you recognise some as - still distorted - versions of glyphs on the wall.

You fancy that as time goes on they're getting less distorted and more coherent and recognisable. You also notice a slight discomfort in your head when you get the flashes.
 
Smith Smith, Séadna Séadna, Bunch Bunch, Stan Stan -

After about a week, the rubble is cleared and the remains of the friezes pieced together, laid out like jigsaw puzzle pieces on the floor. Okon's team begin a photogrammetric analysis and cataloguing of the remains of the friezes. After a bit of frigging on a portable workstation they manage to piece the friezes together with the intact ones on the walls and reconstruct a reasonable model of the room's original structure.

With the rocks removed they can push the door into the statue room open wide enough to set up the sensor equipment in that room. There is also another door off the side of the main chamber which the depth imager indicates there is a void behind with some debris on the floor.

At the far end of the statue room there is another doorway. The depth imager indicates that it is nearly 1m thick and has some sort of metal reinforcement. It indicates a void behind the door but no details through the door.

Séadna Séadna - you sense that whatever the presence is, it is behind that door.
 
OOC: How is the morale of the overall team, alongside our supplies?
 
Smith Smith, Séadna Séadna, Bunch Bunch, Stan Stan -

The team are using some depth imaging equipment and can map out a complex, baroque mechanical locking mechanism in the door. However, there is no external actuator. Okon has had an idea. He asks Ida whether the mechanism is designed to be operated telekinetically.

The are also puzzling about the side door in the antechamber. It isn't as thick but seems to have a similar - if simpler mechanism embedded in the stone.
 
Ida will reach out with her mind to get a sense for the door and any Way mechanisms within it. She'll also try to get a read on the presence beyond.

OOC: ATTUNE. Best dice was 4
 
Séadna said:
Ida will reach out with her mind to get a sense for the door and any Way mechanisms within it. She'll also try to get a read on the presence beyond.

OOC: ATTUNE. Best dice was 4
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Ooh. This is complicated. Okon's guess was almost certainly right, as you find things that you can manipulate in the door mechanism. It seems to be a sort of combination lock puzzle and will take a while to get right.

You also drift your consciousness over the presence and get a flash of the same alien consciousness as before. This isn't distorted so it's not a purely psychic artifact. It seems to be some sort of projection - maybe the same mechanism as the apparition? The flash drops you out of your meditative state, and seems to have excited it as you get a stream of distorted shapes projected into your consciousness. The discomfort accompanying the images gets significantly more intense before you nearly lose consciousness and the images stop abruptly.

One thing you notice is that the images are getting less and less distorted, like it's learning how your mind works. Most of them are recognisable now. After this stream of images you come away with one distinct impression.

It's trying to communicate with you.
 
Smith Smith, Séadna Séadna, Bunch Bunch, Stan Stan -

While you're helping the team set up the photogrammetry equipment in the statue chamber you see Ida collapse to the ground in front of the door and look stunned and groggy.
 
Steevo rushes over and starts dragging Ida towards the entrance. "Let's get you some fresh air away from these mean statues. Can you talk? What happened?"
 
Stan said:
Steevo rushes over and starts dragging Ida towards the entrance. "Let's get you some fresh air away from these mean statues. Can you talk? What happened?"
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OOC: If you cite the player when you post something that affects them (e.g. Séadna Séadna) they'll get an alert.

Séadna Séadna - ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
 
Smith Smith, Séadna Séadna, Bunch Bunch, Stan Stan -

Several white knights from the team help Steevo help Ida out to the ledge, possibly somewhat to her annoyance. Okon and Steevo, in particular, are keen to hear what just happened.

Séadna Séadna - you're feeling slightly disoriented and various folks are in your face asking if you're OK and wanting to know what happened. Currently you're surrounded by so many white knights you're starting to feel like a refugee from a chess board factory.
 
Ida's eyes bolt open.

"A...an alien presence. Behind that door. Trying to speak to me through the Way. Not sure if it's hostile"
 
Séadna said:
Ida's eyes bolt open.

"A...an alien presence. Behind that door. Trying to speak to me through the Way. Not sure if it's hostile"
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Lar and Okon prick up at this. Lar asks "Do you think this is the Apparition?"
 
"Not certain but probably I'd guess. Regardless it's something odd. I wonder does it have a physical form or is it a purely Way being" Ida says drifting off, absorbed in the implications.
 
Séadna said:
"Not certain but probably I'd guess. Regardless it's something odd. I wonder does it have a physical form or is it a purely Way being" Ida says drifting off, absorbed in the implications.
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Okon discusses something with Lar and then asks if you think it's related to your examination of the door.

OOC: The original image of the thing you saw wasn't distorted so it wasn't psychic in nature. It was probably a physical imprint in the fabric (in as much as these manifestations can be characterised as physical). It was something that you perceived, not something that was communicated to you. A ghost, if you will.
 
Smith Smith, Séadna Séadna, Bunch Bunch, Stan Stan -

The team finishes the photogrammetric analysis of the statue room in a couple of days time and starts to set up the lifting and packing equipment to remove the statues. The packing equipment seems to consist of an additive fabber on a robot arm that grows scaffolding around the statues. There is a little app that designs the box and packing, and another additive fabber that prints a crate to size.

The machine prints the scaffolding and then a plastic membrane is fitted over the statue and shrunk into place. It seems to be made of some nanomotile material as it almost flows snugly around the statues. Idly perusing the label on the bottles it comes in suggests that it's in the same family as P-GUBA (Para-glyco urethryl benzoic acid, the active ingredient in Goober gun foam).

The scaffold is then fitted and glued together, then the crate is placed over the top and filled with a packing foam. A G-lifter allows the crate to come off the floor where its base can be placed under it.

Over the course of the next week or so, the statues are recorded, crated and moved to the crawlers.

Séadna Séadna - over the course of the week you examine both of the doors, and get a perodic series of flashes from the entity. The symbols are getting progressively less noisy and distorted; towards the end of the week you can recognise pretty much all of the symbols. Okon shows you some articles about some other inscriptions found using these symbols. They are not the standard writing and only a handful of texts have been found that incorporate them.

One of the articles includes tentative translations of a few of the symbols from the context of other speculative translations. From the symbols you've had flashed to you, you recognise the following concepts from the translation: Age, light, captivity.

Okon asks you to look at the side door on the antechamber and see if you can get that open.
 
Stan Stan - You've got security monitoring duty when you pick up a reading on the network at the canyon mouth. Looking at the camera footage, you can see someone on a scrambler riding past the valley mouth. The image looks like he might be wearing gang paraphenalia.
 
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Smith Smith, Séadna Séadna, Bunch Bunch, Stan Stan -

Okon gathers the party together and says he's been monitoring a mailbox for news and has read a couple of disturbing items. One of his sources says Zawi has gotten his CG and drone fleet and expects to have them in operation within the next few days. The other item is that Hubba has put out a substantial reward for information on your whereabouts and a lot of people have started actively looking for you.

Correia is adamant that we can't leave the doors unopened, especially the one in the statue room. He wants Ida to try and open the doors again, as quickly as possible.
 
Steevo gets on the communicator to everyone. "Heads up, we have possibly unfriendlies on light vehicles at the canyon mouth." If there are people not in their gang physically nearby, he tells them the same thing face to face.
 
Twitch is itching to get in a vehicle and do something!
 
Kal rushes over to Stan to look over the footage. "Damn, they are some ugly mothers."
 
Smith Smith, Séadna Séadna, Bunch Bunch, Stan Stan -

The person rides the scrambler into the valley mouth and disturbs the psychodactyls which start aggressively dive-bombing him. He pulls back a bit until they lose interest. Even with the zoom on the camera it's not easy to see what he's doing. He gets off the scrambler and, takes some stuff out of the pannier on the back and starts frigging with it.

Then you see something take off from the ground, presumably a UAV. A little while later the camera watching the valley mouth picks up a flurry of activity amongst the psychodactyls and you manage to catch something falling out of the sky onto the ground. Watching the man on the scrambler you can see him banging his fist on the pannier and then he appears to get onto a communicator and discuss something. A short while later he packs the equipment back up in the pannier, gets back on the scrambler and rides off up the valley.

Okon is looking over your shoulder and curses under his breath. He says "We need to get into those doors now."
 
Twitch's excitement fades when he realizes the big activity for today is opening a door.
 
OOC: Can we tell if it indeed was gang outfits? Or was he part of the local gendarme?
 
Smith said:
OOC: Can we tell if it indeed was gang outfits? Or was he part of the local gendarme?
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You couldn't positively identify him but the colours on the patch on the back of his jacket matched the Apex Predator's. It definitely wasn't a gendarme's uniform.
 
"Well, whilst work on the door continues we have to be mindful of more people coming a-pokin'. We could ambush this guy elsewhere to try and shift the scent?"
 
Smith said:
"Well, whilst work on the door continues we have to be mindful of more people coming a-pokin'. We could ambush this guy elsewhere to try and shift the scent?"
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Okon and Janek like the idea of a diversionary expedition, perhaps to set up a dummy camp site or a trail leading off somewhere else. They're all for the rest of the party taking one of the crawlers and putting up some sort of decoy while Ida works on the locks.
 
Kal tries to gauge Ida's attitude to see if she's okay with being left with this ragtag group alone.
 
Ida says it's no problem and gets to work on opening the doors, searching the Way as stringently as she can to unwind the mystical lock mechanisms.

OOC: ATTUNE highest result was 5
 
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