Move 11 (Chapter 1.11)

[yhlee]

Year 361, Month Three, Day Sixteen (Sunday), evening
Station Moongray

On the Station, at The Bar on Level Three: Virmad

[lleullawgyffes, it's up to you whether you want to say that Virmad gets caught up with Teo and/or matters on station overnight, or whether he will take care of matters with Teo quickly enough to join the others at the "Bumblebee" below.]

Per this thread, Teo has just greeted Virmad in the bar. To recap for your convenience:

The Bar on Level Three really is on Level Three. There are helpful directories pointing the way, but the fact that a number of people are heading there, and the cheerful clamor of people talking, and music, would have made it easy to find regardless.

The bartender is a trim woman with her hair hanging about her face in fantastic coils; the combs and hairpins look like they're about to escape. She's pouring a drink for a slouching Nirai technician when Virmad arrives. "You're new here," she says. "What can I get you?"

Kel Teo is sitting at a seat where he has a clear view of all exits. (Very Kel.) He's had a chance to change out of his uniform; he's wearing a sleek suit in shades of deep brown, and he's also embellished himself with gold-and-amber jewelry. He waves when he spots Virmad, smiling.

Teo adds that he's happy to pay for Virmad's drink--the first one, anyway, and some of the local grub. "I recommend the fried pork fritters with barbecue sauce," Teo says, "But maybe that's not ascetic enough fare for a Rahal?" (He's teasing.)


On the Station, on the "Bumblebee": Sulen, Sasha, Iawa, Alaric
Also probably: Ashari?, Mikodez?

Recap:
Remi has explained, at Sasha's insistence, that the baby moths were hatched in captivity from eggs stolen from the parents by a heptarchate expedition, and that the parents are likely dead. He claims that this all happened before he himself arrived on the station, and that he's been advocating for humane treatment of the baby moths.

Alaric has just explained that he discovered the Wasp's "moth" is a sentient starfaring being and has been communicating with it using pictures [Move 10].

Moving on:
Remi's response to this is to stare at Alaric in horror. "Do you seriously want me to believe that you were using a living being as your spaceship and didn't even check for sapience? I thought that was basic protocol...unless," and his expression sours, "it was convenient for people to hush it up?" He stares at Alaric. "Well, I can't blame it for wanting to adopt the young of its kind, but that's a high-security enclosure..."

[Remi might well be responsive to helping them kidnap the baby moths, assuming the whole conversation doesn't blow up in a completely different direction, but he's not going to offer unless someone else brings it up. There's plenty of opportunity for people to opine on what should be done about the baby moths, whether Alaric has been behaving appropriately, who Sasha should have notified, etc. If you need help brainstorming on your action, please let me know and I'll get back to you when I can; others players might also have thoughts.]


[GM suggests that Ashari and Mikodez could either have returned to the ship for the meeting with Remi, or else could teleconference in.

smokedetective: Ashari probably wants to be present in some form for the discussion, not least for possible/likely pending confrontation with Sasha per zuhrovet's notes. If teleconferencing, Istradez will be happy to cover for them with any pesky people.

pengwern: If Mikodez prefers not to be involved in this discussion, he could plausibly be investigating the nonresponsiveness of the Kel at the moment after they helped Sulen stow Gerae, or assigned to keep an eye on Gerae, who might be feeling confessional while everyone else is occupied.]

---

Active in Move 10: Sulen, Virmad, Sasha, Iawa, Alaric, Mikodez, Ashari

Inactive: Yehan, Ankat, Kaliyan

Comments

Re: Plotting Escape - possibly constructive criticism - Ashari’s back on their bullshit

[smokedetective]

[If it was mentioned in their presence or in a report, they’re aware of it, otherwise they have no clue what’s up.]

“And we’d still need a good excuse to get to the wormhole, whether it’s of a more diplomatic nature, say offering a demonstration of how something or other works, or a more violent distraction, say setting the station on fire or, ah, drugging key individuals?”

paging GM

[venndaai]

Sulen coughs. "There's really no need for that. If you need a distraction, Virmad and I can get you one. Without violence."

They turn to Remi and say, carefully, "These creatures... are they calendrically null?"

[So, the later calendar is designed to assist the mothdrive, right (or at least everyone thinks that), so that means moths aren't null, right? And Sulen knows that. Pls correct me if I'm wrong!]

Re: paging GM

[slybrarian]

"As far as I can tell, the moths themselves are," says Alaric, who's never heard a question directed at someone else that he wouldn't feel free to answer instead. "The key to the mothdrive, once you get past all the parts involved with bringing the ship along, seems to be keeping it from flying off wherever it wants or murdering everyone."

Re: paging GM

[yhlee]

"Yes, that aligns with my knowledge of the moths," Remi says, "and with my, ah, preliminary analysis of the coercive device that you call a 'mothdrive.'"

He frowns. "Do the moths have a history of running off or murdering people if left uncoerced? Or is that...unknown?"

Re: paging GM

[venndaai]

[Okay, I am now deeply confused about what the high calendar is actually for. Help?]

Re: paging GM

[yhlee]

[For clarity's sake, what do you/Sulen think the high calendar is For? Genuine question.]

Re: paging GM

[venndaai]

[Sorry, I'm pretty low on sleep. Um- in the books, I got the impression that it was necessary to keep the mothdrives working and make interstellar civilization possible, or that at least that was the justification Mikodez and Cheris had for supporting the Hexarchate. The other exotic technologies too but I thought the moth drive was the big one.]

Re: paging GM

[yhlee]

[There is an answer to this--I will expound tomorrow when I'm awake again. I'm trying desperately to come up with an explanation that will answer Sulen's questions while not...giving away a major plot point in Revenant Gun, which isn't even scheduled yet. Right now I'm brain-fried after having had to wait an hour and forty minutes to get dinner after we put in our order at the hotel restaurant. *facepalm* So sorry for the delay...]

Re: paging GM

[venndaai]

[Oh dear! If it helps, all I need to know is what Sulen thinks the connection is between the mothdrive and the high calendar? And no worries about the delay.]

[the high calendar and the mothdrive]

[yhlee]

[So the high calendar was present from the heptarchate's "founding"--say Year 1. At that point in time, it was mostly used for energy sources and the military, as Kel formations were a known thing. Additionally, all the factions except Shuos fought to have their faction technologies included in the calendar, Shuos being the exception since they don't have exotic powers. So once the high calendar was more or less established, there were social incentives to keep it in place. The mothdrive proper was not invented until a few centuries later, and it works as Alaric and Remi have described--the moths are an alien species that are capable of FTL, but the mothdrive harness is a coercive device that shuts down the moth's higher brain functions and drives it where you want it to go. The harness is one of the reasons for the high calendar in its later form. (There's another big reason but that's spoilery for Revenant Gun.) HOWEVER, most people who are NOT Nirai working specifically on mothdrive design aren't aware of the particulars, so it's very likely this is news to Sulen. Most people only know that the mothdrives are "exotic tech," without knowing exactly how the breakdown goes between invariant alien moth + exotic harness. Does this help?

If you have further questions, please don't hesitate to ask. I'm about to head out for lunch but I will be around later today.]

Re: [the high calendar and the mothdrive]

[venndaai]

[Thank you! Completely helpful.]

Re: [the high calendar and the mothdrive]

[zuhrovet]

[These threads are getting labyrinthine, but I continued the conversation a couple comments down.]

Re: paging GM

[slybrarian]

"Oh, I don't have a clue, to be honest," Alaric said. "I'm not even from around these parts, and I don't think the government tells people that sort of thing anyway. I'm just saying that if you hooked me up to something like this I'd be pretty cranky, and I'm not a monster from beyond conventional time and space. It's been surprisingly well-behaved all things considered."

rahal intervention - paging Sulen

[zuhrovet]

Sasha finds she is able to lift her cup. The tea is lukewarm, but the jam is delicious. "Yes, the moth seems very friendly. I wonder if we should tell them that Nirai Remi says hello?"

She continues, "But I think Dar Chresh may have a point about calendars. That is, I want to say, everyone knows faster-than-light is a sort of time travel. I'm not an expert here, but there's something about going outside the light-cone? It seems plausible that a high density of creatures capable of that kind of movement might affect spacetime, locally, and therefore the calendar. If the Rahal were to order our ship to leave suddenly, because of such concerns, we would certainly have to cooperate. Even if it later transpired those concerns were unfounded."

Sasha's less sanguine about the likelihood that Sulen can persuade the station to renounce moth research. She doesn't know a lot about Rahal, but if this is anything like the Houses and the judges back home, the Nirai will drag their feet and file a million appeals before actually dropping the program.

Re: rahal intervention - paging Sulen

[venndaai]

Sulen says, “Particularly if the moths actually were having catastrophic effects on the local calendar. Or it appeared that they were.”

(They’re grateful to Sasha for seeing what they were getting at and backing them up. She’s still on their shitlist, but they’re starting to see that it might be best to try and find a way to work with her despite their personality differences.)

Re: rahal intervention - paging Sulen

[zuhrovet]

"What would that look like?" Sasha asks. She's never gotten a clear explanation of what calendrical math entails, and she's genuinely curious.

[Sulen is more forbearing than Sasha deserves . . . Though if they can talk her down before a ransomeware attack, it would be a service to the cause.]

Re: rahal intervention - paging Sulen

[slybrarian]

"Technically it can cause a form of calendrical rot, although usually its fairly minor compared to actual heresy," Alaric says. "Normally the calendar is automatically calculated to account for time dilation from natural gravitational sources, and individual moths are ultimately just rounding errors compared to stellar sources and don't affect the absolute frame of reference imposed by the master clocks. It might be possible to make it look like an interaction between the mothlings and the rift is having an unaccounted for resonance effect, though."

Alaric pulls out a hand computer and starts doing some math, then pauses. "With that said, wouldn't heptarchate authorities usually react by just shooting the source of the problem, as opposed to letting them frolick away?"

Re: rahal intervention - paging Sulen

[zuhrovet]

"The authority is not clear, here," says Sasha. "We have to extract the mothlings first, definitely. But then our Rahal tell the station to jettison the mothling habitat, the station protests and tries to check our math, we counter-protest and ask them to blow up the habitat, and at that point with luck we're halfway to the rift. The big problem is what we do with Nirai Remi: they'll expect him to help with the initial protest, so we need to either sneak him out or make Rii look really persuasive about an excursion."

paging GM, Virmad

[venndaai]

[Confession time: I've been avoiding responding out of anxiety over coming up with ways to sabotage the calendar. No matter how many times the GM says we're free to make stuff up my anxiety will never believe it.... could I ask the GM to either help me out a bit or let me just handwave it?

Lleullawgyffes, if you've got any ideas pls tell me.]

[Also generally my brain is being pretty dumb lately and I'm having a hard time following/contributing to the plans, sorry about that.]

Re: excursion, more of Ashari’s bad ideas

[smokedetective]

“It’s risky,” says Ashari, “But if it comes to it, which one of the station official has the lowest self-image? Compulsions a tricky thing, but if we’re looking at all of our options, we might as well put all the cards on the table.”

[GM caution: relativity]

[yhlee]

[GM notes that the hexarchate completely handwaves/tap-dances around the FTL/time travel question--in fact, the high calendar explicitly violates special relativity--so GM advises not pushing real physics too hard. :p

(Yes, my husband is a gravitational astrophysicist and is theoretically available for consultation, but he can't actually fix the fact that the FTL in the hexarchate doesn't work.]

Re: [GM caution: relativity]

[zuhrovet]

[Sasha's knowledge of relativity is limited to special relativity and a bunch of documentaries about black holes, which is why she's being uncharacteristically tentative here. I'm assuming this is the heptarchate equivalent of having gotten good grades in Newtonian mechanics in high school, and everyone knows the real universe is more complicated!

. . . Though I am suddenly imagining a system where the high calendar is maintained by drones traveling at maximum faster-than-light speed between adjacent star systems, and has to be re-tuned every time the drives improve. Probably only hilarious if you've been forced to do a million word problems about the Twin Paradox.

I did take mathematical GR in grad school, but unless your GMly plan is to force me to compute the Ricci tensor of gravitational metrics in between posts as an anti-spam measure, I promise that will not become relevant.]

Re: Plotting Escape - possibly constructive criticis

[zuhrovet]

"I can trigger the station alarms at any time," Sasha says. "But that doesn't explain why we're taking Remi, or keep the other ships away."

[The conversation with Ankat is here, and I'm honestly not sure whether it happened as part of the pre-landing conference call or in a separate discussion with Ankat and Alaric. Sasha and Alaric have certainly not reported it, and the stuck drone is still an outstanding problem, but Ankat might have demonstrated more attention to chain of command. I guess I'll assume Sasha's nervous about the stuck drone, and leave reporting questions to you.]

paging Ankat, Ashari

[yhlee]

[I'll ping Ankat's player, but he's been absent for a while. If we don't hear back in the next few, I'm going to put down the foot of GM fiat and say Ankat did, in fact, report this to Ashari.]

Re: paging Ankat, Ashari

[zuhrovet]

[Thanks! That puts Sasha back a couple of pages in the ongoing competition for Who Would Get The Longest Writeup If We Had a Functional HR Department, but it does offer another potential option for retrieving the moths. Ashari can always retaliate later if Ankat contradicts.]