hexarchate_rpg | Move 17 (Chapter 1.17)

Year 361, Month Three, Day Seventeen (Monday), ~05:00

Mikodez finds himself treed by Alaric (bearing "sleep aids") in the corridor outside Medical. In whatever confrontation happens, the much-adorned mothling known (among other things) as Crowned-with-Eyes (henceforth CWE) wriggles free of the Andan cloth and flutters straight into one of the nearest examination rooms, humming joyously. Several medics can be heard exclaiming in fear and/or annoyance at the intruder. One of them squeaks, "Is that another of Magistrate Gerae's pets?"

(...pets?)

Alaric, EDIT: Iawa, and Sulen can take advantage of the distraction to get by Mikodez and into Medical. The triage nurse will recognize them as the recent visitors and direct them toward a pallet where "Imsayed" (Istradez) is lying; he is apparently now sleeping rather than knocked out, but has yet to wake from his ordeal.

Sasha is in the midst of oxygen recycler diagnostics and reading through the maintenance logs. Around this time, Yehan (running as NPC), who has actually gotten some sleep, stops in and asks if Sasha could use some breakfast and/or assistance.

Ashari is enjoying a restful sleep in preparation for what's to come. They can, if they choose to get up early, check in on the others, or determine what to do with Gerae of the mysteriously weaponizable lockpicks. [NOTE: If

smokedetective doesn't respond to this move, I'm going to put Ashari on inactive status and run as NPC as necessary to move forward.] Virmad is a likely candidate to either volunteer or be asked to look in on Gerae. Among other things, Gerae is still awake and is (if anyone checks on him, whether through camera surveillance or by persuading Sasha to open the room) scratching messages onto the wall with a stylus that was left in the room.

===

CURRENTLY INACTIVE, running as NPCs: Ankat, Kaliyan, Yehan, Istradez

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Is there anyone from the Dek'alekhes?" Sasha asks. It's a stupid question. Nobody really lives in the mountains; they have estates in the hills like her father, or they're part of a Kirrish band on the steppes.

[That's a Kirrish apostrophe!]

[Still running Yehan as NPC.]

Yehan's brow wrinkles. "Nothing I recognized," she says tactfully. "Steppes bands, yes, but not the mountains as such." She rubs her eyes. "Listen, I'm going to get some coffee before I report to Ashari. Have you really been up all this time? And is there anything in particular you want me to tell them?"

Well, Sasha had enough tutors that she sounds like a city person 96% of the time. An archaically formal city person, because this is the future. Not that she should be worrying about how the Rosemallow might treat her, or which of her alternate-universe great-nephews or nieces might be on board, when there are more pressing problems here.

She answers Yehan, "Yeah, Iawa gave me a stim. Tell Ashari I've got a ping on Avrayen's lokwor, and Alaric has gone to fetch him? And once you've talked to them, would you mind keeping an eye on comms? I need to take a look at the station recycling algorithms for one of Sulen's projects, and I'll have to deal with whatever the ship diagnostics spit out here, as well."

Edited 2018-02-01 02:11 (UTC)

Yehan nods; no doubt she's familiar with stim ab/use from her own past work as an analyst. "I'll let Ashari know," she says. "And I'd be happy to look over comms while you're busy elsewhere."

[Yehan will be as good as her word. Her breakfast and report will take about twenty-five minutes; presumably Ashari is quizzing her about other things as well.]

While she's waiting for the diagnostics to finish, Sasha inserts malicious versions of her memes into station chatter, with bonus Clowder Purring characters, and cautiously starts hunting for information on the garbage/recycling sorting algorithm.

[How long is this stimulant going to last, anyway? Eight hours? Thirteen? How terrible an idea would it be to take two in a row?]

[It's probably going to last eight hours. She could take two in a row; three is pushing it and hallucinations are going to be a known side-effect. This GM ruling brought to you by the time I was so sleep-deprived--I think it was travel-related--that I started hallucinating black cats everywhere.]

The infected memes are propagating nicely; and her choice of Clowder Purring characters is particularly adroit. Clowder Purring is superpopular with the grad student set, and since this is a Nirai station...

Garbage/recycling: there's a heavy emphasis on proper disposal of biological/medical/chemical waste, much less on detection of weapons, not helped by kludgy overrides due to a bunch of false alarms (pranks, mostly).

[I imagine that Space Recycling might use Space RFID Tags for some of the initial sorting. Would it be easier for Sasha to create such a tag, or to get into the main system and kludge another override?]

[Am I the only one who read the subject header and immediately had their mind go to bogosort but with jeng-zai cards?]

[Possibly, but now that you mention it, here is even more of a tangent! One can approximate a perfectly random shuffle of an n-card deck using 1.5 log₂ n riffle shuffles. For a 52-card deck, that works out to around 8 shuffles. Mathematically, splitting the deck and shuffling 8 times is equivalent to cutting into 8 piles and then recombining, which is why I used to have a probability textbook with an octopus shuffling cards on the cover.

For a 78-card Tarot or jeng-zai deck, you need approximately 9.428 shuffles for near-random mixing. Rounding up to ten, that means we want a decapod for our ideal shuffling: perhaps a crab, or a crayfish.]

[Is this that Dave Bayer & Persi Diaconis riffle shuffling paper? I read it like six years ago and don't remember any details, but it's on my HD somewhere. XD I'm all for h*archate crayfish!

Speaking of textbook cover illustrations, David Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics has, or had in the edition that Joe used back in undergrad, a live cat on the front cover and a dead cat on the back cover. Joe kept telling me that the cat was asleep, not dead, but that's not the version of Schrödinger's Cat I heard...>:[ ]

[Yes, definitely Bayer-Diaconis, though I knew the result from a textbook. (I met Bayer once, after he gave a memorable talk about consulting for A Beautiful Mind. He was moderately annoyingly star-struck.)

I was always annoyed that nobody counted the cat as an observer!]

[Sasha could easily slip in another tag--apparently they keep messing with the sorting system hoping to optimize it.]

[Would she need to add a new type of tag, or could she just give Sulen a sticker that would signal "child's toy, please crush" and call it good?]

["Child's toy, please crush" would do the trick nicely.]

Move 17 (Chapter 1.17)

Re: about the Rosemallow...

Re: about the Rosemallow...

Re: about the Rosemallow...

Re: about the Rosemallow...

Hacking, housekeeping

stimulants

Re: Hacking, housekeeping

garbage sorting methods

Re: garbage sorting methods

jeng-zai shuffles

Re: jeng-zai shuffles

Re: jeng-zai shuffles

Re: garbage sorting methods

Re: garbage sorting methods

Re: garbage sorting methods