hexarchate_rpg | Move 11 (Chapter 1.11)

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moves: chapter 1

Move 11 (Chapter 1.11)

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.)

Edited 2017-10-29 16:11 (UTC)

"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.]

"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?"

Edited 2017-11-01 01:06 (UTC)

"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."

[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.]

[at least in the books the main way seems to be getting people to either skip a remembrance or celebrate a remembrance that somehow throws things out of whack — maybe we could fake Gerae's execution or something and throw off the remembrance calendar that way? idk, I'm drawing a blank too.

in any case it's going to depend how good the mothgrid is at calendrical math, because I don't think either Sulen or Virmad is going to be able to figure that out on their own, or maybe even together.]

[It seems that Alaric's calculator, which Sasha is currently eyeing with great envy, can handle the computations!

What sort of adjustment are y'all envisioning? One big dramatic gesture, or lots of subtle tweaks? Should the ensuing rot affect any particular function of the calendar?]

[Copied from response to Sulen: This thread (new) may be of help to you.

zuhrovet has put together a wiki page for escape brainstorming, and I've also commented with some of my own thoughts on possibilities for the group. Please let me know if there's anything else I can do to assist.

Also, agreed that Alaric is the go-to person for hinky calendrical math here.]

[

venndaai,

lleullawgyffes, I am definitely thinking of ways to help y'all out--I have to get some work done today and will respond later tonight. You can always handwave but I will try to see if I can come up with some more concrete suggestions for y'all to consider. Sorry for the delay, and thanks for being patient with me.]

[No worries! This thread (new) may be of help to you.

“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.”

Every star is a knot in Hell. "I thought the differentiating factor was formal rank, not self-confidence?" Sasha asks, in her best impressing-the-new-tutor voice.

She thought that Andan compulsions were a vid cliche, like noisy space explosions. If Ashari's serious now, they were probably serious about fucking with her earlier, too. Sasha cannot work like this.

Sulen has some opinions about the officials encountered so far, but will wait to see what Remi says.

They do explain their plan further. "Any disruption will be easy to pin on our other guest, and we can accuse Nirai Remi as well, and take him into custody- after using his expertise to collect the mothlings. Damion is correct that the rational response would be to destroy the mothlings, but I would guess the Nirai would be reluctant to destroy that which took a great deal of effort to acquire, and they seem... astonishingly suggestible on this station."

Sulen is still appalled at the trust Moongray has freely given to visitors from an alternate dimension. They would be offended if anyone called them paranoid- paranoia is a Shuos disease- but their blind trust is- or was- strictly reserved for their faction, and alternate timeline Rahal definitely would not count.

"Maybe our Rahal don't know if the mothlings are inherently heretical, whether it's something Remi is doing, or if it's the rift's fault?" Alaric suggests. "That would excuses packing everything up and hauling it off to somewhere that's not next to a hole in space-time, and by the time they realize we're flying back the way we came they won't be in a position to do anything."

"I'll contact the Captain and ask what a plausible course would look like," Sasha offers. She sends the appropriate lokki message.

[GM, can we arc by the rift while seemingly headed elsewhere? How much of a barrier do the other ships pose?]

[Sorry, catching up! Thanks for y'all's patience.

You can definitely arc by the rift while seemingly headed elsewhere. The Rosemallow probably won't be able to catch you. The Butterfly is closer, but it's not built for speed.]

It appears that Kaliyan's not talking to Sasha, but she does send a couple of potential course maps. Sasha displays them on the coffee table.

"The station administrator will protest any disruption to station routine," Remi says. "In particular, she really wants to keep her scientists happy, and scientists hate seeing research funding poured down the drain. Lieutenant Teo is close to her, but he will tend to defer to any really overt show of authority." [While we're a few centuries ahead of formation instinct, many Kel still trend authoritarian in outlook.] He thinks for a moment. "Pavn is fairly highly placed, but he's a little quixotic. I don't know what to expect from him. Vana is very attached to the idea of experimenting on mothlings, but she doesn't actually have much authority, she's just a grad student. Of the rest, I'd say the biggest threat is Andan Bokali. They may sound friendly, but I've always suspected that they're up to more than they're letting on."

"I suspect Pavn thinks some of us can tell him about the culture of the other ship," Sasha admits. "It would be nice to leave before he decides to act on that."

Sulen seems confident the administrator will eventually obey Rahal instructions. And they're Ashari's pet, so all other things being equal, their plan is likely to win out. Sasha tells them, "Nirai Remi really has been talking to heretics-- us-- so it should be easy to make his files show a pattern of suspicious behavior. What sort of timeline were you envisioning?"

"How much time will you and Damion need to run calculations and create implicating evidence for me to take to Shan? I'd like to have something unsubtle but not too destructive to plug into the Rahal computers."

"Budget five hours for the two accounts, on my end. Most of that time is for erasing our tracks, so we can speed it up if you want to take a risk with station forensics. I have a couple of hours of chores to do tonight, and Damion should probably try to explain our plan to the moth, so they don't get bored and start singing the station lullabies. And are we requisitioning the mothling habitat? If not we need to retrofit a room with radiation shielding, and even if Anaz and the Captain handle construction, you'll want Damion to look at the specs."

Sasha has been working steadily since before the rift exit this morning, unless you think talking to Pavn is vacation. If Ashari says thank you or "maybe take a nap first" she's going to donate five hundred marks to the Kirrish Liberation Front.

"Sounds good," Sulen says. "Starting panic won't be effective while everyone's asleep, but if we can do it right before Shan starts work, I think that would be the most effective option." Conscientiously, "Thank you." Turning to Ashari,"Rii, does that work?"

They want to ask Sasha if there's any way they can help, even if just by making coffee, but they also really really want to consume alcohol, which is incompatible with that. Dilemma!

[We should introduce Sulen to the advanced technology known as Irish coffee!

Ashari probably has a pill for something much more effective than caffeine in their kit somewhere. Alas, Sasha's not taking meds from Ashari at the moment.]

"Yes, Rii, do please tell us where we're putting the mothlings," Sasha says, still in her sweetest impressing-the-tutor mode.

[Just how good are Sulen's interrogation skills? Because those "couple of hours of chores" . . . well, Sasha's not really expecting unsticking the drone to take more than an hour, if that.]

“What a lovely plan,” says Ashari. “And, I suppose, we’re putting the mothlings wherever there’s room. We don’t have much a choice on the matter, do we?”

Move 11 (Chapter 1.11)

Re: rahal intervention - paging Sulen

Re: rahal intervention - paging Sulen

Re: rahal intervention - paging Sulen

Re: rahal intervention - paging Sulen

paging GM, Virmad

Re: paging GM, Virmad

Re: paging GM, Virmad

Re: paging GM, Virmad

Re: paging GM, Virmad

Re: paging GM, Virmad

Re: excursion, more of Ashari’s bad ideas

Re: excursion, more of Ashari’s bad ideas [ hexarc

Re: excursion, more of Ashari’s bad ideas

Re: excursion, more of Ashari’s bad ideas

Re: excursion, more of Ashari’s bad ideas [ hexarc

Re: excursion, more of Ashari’s bad ideas [ hexarc

maps

Remi's opinions on station officials

Re: Remi's opinions on station officials - paging Sulen

Re: Remi's opinions on station officials - paging Sulen

Re: Remi's opinions on station officials - paging Sulen

Paging Ashari- approval of plan?

Re: Paging Ashari- approval of plan?

Re: Paging Ashari- approval of plan?

Re: Paging Ashari- approval of plan?

Re: Paging Ashari- approval of plan?

Re: Paging Ashari- approval of plan?

Re: Paging Ashari- approval of plan?