hexarchate_rpg | Move 21 [fixed numbering error] (at long last) (chapter 1.21)

yhlee posting in

Move 21

[GM note: PROFUSE apologies for how late this move is. The month of May got eaten by non-negotiable writing commitments and then health issues. So sorry!]

For easy reference:
- Move 20 Recap [wiki]
- the escape plan [wiki];
- Station Moongray timeline [wiki].

(Thanks to

zuhrovet for keeping this stuff updated for everyone's convenience.)

Year 361, Month Three, Day Seventeen (Monday), ~07:25

Confrontation at Administrator Nirai Paerani Shan's Office
Sulen and Virmad are facing off against Administrator Shan, having dumped a (friendly!) baby mothling (Crowned-With-Eyes) and faked evidence of Remi's "heresy" onto her desk, as per this thread from Move 19.

Shan makes a brief show of checking the faked datacube for the evidence, but she's clearly feeling pressured with two Rahal standing right there and it doesn't appear she finds anything out of order in the "evidence." "All right," Shan says. She pulls up an appropriate form on one of her data slates and signs over Remi and the mothlings to Sulen and Virmad's custody, then outputs it to a data cube and hands it to them. "Do you require assistance locating Nirai Remi? Or would you prefer to handle that yourselves?" Her expression is resigned.

On the "Bumblebee"

- Mikodez is in Sasha's bedroom, following this thread from Move 19. He is currently alone, trapped, and recuperating, apparently having dozed off.

- Sasha and Iawa have made preparations to talk to Mikodez (see above) as per this thread from Move 19. They have agreed to meet outside Sasha's bedroom and confront Mikodez together.

- Alaric is still currently closeted with Gerae (and Fluffy), continuing this thread from Move 19. Gerae looks abashed at Alaric's critique of heptarchate social control methods and says, "You're obviously very knowledgeable about us and our methods. Are you a scholar? I hadn't realized your team did research." (He's clearly fishing for more information about the Merry Crew he has fallen in with.) Meanwhile, Fluffy curls up on his forearm and appears to doze.

NPCs:
- Ashari is in their office.

- Kaliyan is still manning the cockpit in preparation for escape.

- Yehan graciously thanks Sasha for the box of Remy's journals and begins scanning them into the grid for further analysis; this is a process that can largely be automated so she has set the grid up to alert her if anything looks like it requires her immediate attention, and goes to get some more tea.

- Ankat is keeping an eye on Istradez, who is still woozy and concussed, as per this thread from Move 19. He is available if anyone needs an extra pair of hands.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

zuhrovet

"Not yet. Ashari's monitoring the situation. I get to explain the ways you have fucked up. So. Starting with the things that would be childish and irresponsible if you were a twelve-year-old and this were a fucking scavenger hunt. First. The station called, because they caught you trying to hack into their systems, and you couldn't be bothered to cover your tracks. Second. You were wandering around with a conventional firearm, in blatant violation of the station rules, but without any fucking ammunition. Because you didn't coordinate with the team. Third. You let station security catch you hanging around Remi's lab. Fourth. You stole his journals and didn't report you had them. Five. You stole a baby alien."

Sasha pauses for a moment. She's speaking too fast, and too loud, and she hasn't gotten to the truly awful parts yet.

From:

pengwern

Mikodez asks encouragingly, "Should I try to put it back?"

From:

zuhrovet

Sasha hisses.

She explains the next part carefully and quietly. "Six. Imsayed met you, and explained that he's your little brother. You panicked and attacked him. He passed out. You didn't notify the ship. Seven. You moved your brother to the visitors' quarters and left him there, for hours, until someone from the station happened to find him. His brain could have been swelling, Mishka. He could have died. Or permanently lost vision, or self-control, or the ability to speak: Iawa can give you the list. And we don't know yet, if he will recover. So. Either you are criminally negligent, or you meant to kill him. Which one is it?"

From:

pengwern

“I wouldn’t attack my younger siblings.” Mikodez doesn't manage to hide his grimace. There's no good way to explain he thought this was a simulation, or the kind of dream that ends with him slotting Shuos eyes through ranks of winnower scars. Sasha clearly wants to see a reaction, so he hunches smaller and turns to Iawa.

Did it mean anything that the Kel weren't with them? He may as well play along with Sasha's assumptions.

"What can I fix? I won't let the mothling go back for experiments. But...you're right, I shouldn't have baited security at Remi's lab. Although if you read his journals, he uses a different dating system from the high calendar. That's not something that anyone should have in their possession, ever."

From:

zuhrovet

Sasha asks gently, as if Mikodez were a very stupid tutor, "Is that so? The journals were so dangerous that you put them underneath your brother's float chair, and let Iawa escort them through security?"

She sits at the desk and opens a terminal. Reconfiguring the room should be straightforward--yes, that's the right set of commands. She tells the grid to retract the bed into the wall, slowly. [Does Mikodez get to keep a blanket and pillow, or does everything disappear?]

She spins the chair back, facing Mikodez again. "And you haven't answered my question yet. Why did you hide the fact that Imsayed was hurt?"

From:

yhlee

[He gets to keep the blanket and pillow, although I don't imagine they're going to save him from Sasha of all people!]

From:

pengwern

Mikodez hops off the bed to perch on the side table as soon as he feels movement, leaving pillows and blankets blithely scattered. "To be honest, I was hoping for protocols or observations on hatchling habits, but it turned out to be some kind of handwritten book," he says.

Then he catches sight of the space granola bar Sasha left out earlier, and fidgets with the wrapper. He asks, unsmiling, "Did everyone's first missions include complimentary implausible clone twins, or am I just special?"

[Does Sasha want a white pseudo-dragon to hold in her lap]

From:

zuhrovet

"I got an entire fucking ship full of people who think I'm lawful property. At least Strashik's friendly. Or did you think he was going to steal your identity, somehow? Is that why you tried to kill him?"

Sasha makes the side table sink into the floor, and erases the closet doors for good measure.

From:

pengwern

"Blow it up?" Mikodez offers automatically, then winces. Sasha's hardly an academy acquaintance.

He mouths 'Strashik' to himself as he eyes Iawa for any reaction while sinking right into the ground. "I'm okay with him stealing my identity so long as I get to watch." Maybe the table will drop him on top of a ravenous Fluffy or a moth, and it will melt his eyes out, and he will get to flee this conversation.

"What kind of connotation does 'Strashik' have, anyway? How did he have the time to arrange for a tryst already?" Mikodez had read a little about Naxor after identifying Zuhrovet Sikandaret's origins, but he clearly had not paid enough attention to the language.

[I'm going to say he looked up the Kirrish and Naxor after overhearing Sasha swearing.]

From:

zuhrovet

"I'm not sleeping with your brother, Mishka. I'll thank you not to use that language again."

The shower disappears next, though Mishka probably can't see it: the door melds right back into a wall. "You still haven't explained why you didn't report that your brother was injured. You've got a finite number of chances. Ashari won't be as patient, and you'll find waiting for them very boring... Oh. You've got an augment, haven't you? I should do something about that. This should be an interesting exercise."

Sasha looks at Iawa and adds, "It might take me a little while, to get around the safeties. You don't have to wait, if you don't want to."

From:

vass

Iawa startles a little at being addressed. She has been watching with focused attention, attempting to fade into the background, a skill honed during long and repetitive liturgical chants.

"I don't mind staying. What safeties do you need to disable for what you're going to do?"

Up until now Iawa had started to hope this would simply be a stern discussion. Is Sasha about to attempt brain surgery? Or otherwise do something that could damage Avrayen's mind? She's not very clear on the specifics of augments, but this sounds bad. [

yhlee, how long have augments been commonplace in the H*archate? Is Iawa unclear because most non-Nirai didn't have them yet in her time, or because understanding the medical and/or torture implications of augment tech is a specialisation she didn't take?]

Perhaps Sasha just means to modify the room to make his augment non-functional without interfering with its software or hardware directly? A what's-it-called [Faraday in our world] cage?

[Yes, I know that wouldn't work. But a) Iawa doesn't know that, they're a philosophy nerd not a science nerd and do not have ~~Wikipedia~~ their own augment to check; and b) fiction! Sasha can make him an augment-disabling tinfoil hat if she wants to! Or perhaps a tinfoil cone of shame, under the circumstances.]

That would be fine if Avrayen doesn't have a medical reason to need the augment. If he has epilepsy or something and it's stopping him from having seizures... That happened in one episode of her father's favourite magistrate drama. The murderer was a thief trying to steal the victim's necklace, which it turned out to be medical equipment [~~and then his head fell off~~] and he died without it.

Avrayen -- why does Sasha call him Mishka? -- would surely say if disabling the augment might endanger his health, but would Sasha believe him? Iawa isn't sure she would either.

At any rate, her best option right now seems to be to keep Sasha talking.

From:

yhlee

[Augments started to be used regularly sometime during the hexarchate--they're very definitely after Jedao's actually-living lifetime--so they postdate Iawa and she may very well not be familiar with the specifics of how they work unless she's made a particular effort to read up on them since joining the rebellion.]

From:

zuhrovet

"Oh, augments tend to be really heavily firewalled, because if someone runs malicious code inside your brain, you're fucked. But the software's sensitive to calendrical calibration, like a lot of later hexarchate work. You can use that to get around the firewall, if you don't have ideological objections to feeding the augment fake times. The last team I was on, there was a finance analyst who kept stealing people's lunches. We made his augment play 'Andan in the Bathtub,' on a loop."

Sasha grins, and then falters when Iawa doesn't smile back.
There's probably a Vidona variation on that tactic. Eight hells. "Um. Like I said, getting into an augment usually takes a while. Should I make you a chair?"

From:

zuhrovet

Sasha starts coding. Last time she was trying to get into an augment, she was part of a team and her target was asleep. But this time she's got control of the Wasp's clock, which makes things easier.

[I'm thinking that Mikodez' augment might have a big block of encrypted Shuos code on it. When Sasha finds it, she can lose her temper and accuse him of spying. Sound good?]

From:

vass

[Iawa's still going to take some persuading that Sasha's not going to hurt him. Block of encrypted Shuos code sounds fine to me, but not my department.

pengwern?]

Iawa stays standing where she is and makes some placating hand gestures.

"Hold on a minute, Sasha. I'd like to know what you're going to do with his augment once you've bypassed the firewall." Oops, that sounded too emphatic. She doesn't want to escalate the situation by making Sasha defensive. "I mean, I'm sure there's a wide variety of things you can do once you have control of someone's augment. It might help if you could give me and Avrayen here an idea of what, um, range of things you have in mind, apart from... playing songs on repeat."

From:

zuhrovet

"I'm going to make a backup and then revert to factory standard. If I know Shuos wannabes, the storage is going to be more or less bulging with games. It's no good leaving Avrayen here to think about what he's done if he's just going to shut his eyes and start piloting a blimp or what-have-you."

Sasha might also change the date display, temporarily. She's still annoyed at Mishka for getting all self-righteous about other calendars.

From:

vass

"That sounds fair," Iawa allows.

[Who is more naive: Iawa for assuming that Sasha's telling the truth, or Sasha for believing she can make a person with ADHD sit and think about what he's done by removing all exogenous distractions? Mikodez's mind was wired to generate distractions long before he got his first augment!]

From:

zuhrovet

[Ouch! That was Naxorian cliché, actually. Sasha is intimately familiar with the ways this script can fail--it was unfair of her to attribute her own childhood tactic to the Shuos--but she's at a loss for a better one.]

Sasha keeps working. Ashari hasn't appeared, which might mean that she hasn't fucked this up yet, or that they're distracted by other events, or that they're waiting for a more dramatic moment. Sasha checks the stream of data from the station and sees that the Rahal are proceeding as planned; that means the first and third options are most likely.

Destabilizing Mishka's augment goes more quickly than Sasha had expected. It shuts down and starts up again twice, in rapid succession. Sasha doesn't have control yet, but she's learning a lot about the model.

From:

zuhrovet

[

pengwern approved the general plan, so I'm going ahead.]

That's the right timing: Sasha's got control. She takes her next stim in celebration, then starts the process of transferring files to the space she has prepared. Augments don't provide the fastest connection, but even so, Mishka's got more data than Sasha expected. She takes a peek, and there are bunches and bunches of files of the same size, all encrypted.

"Fucking hells," she says aloud. They're not even trying to hide it. That's a standard Shuos file type, and Sasha definitely doesn't have the power to break the encryption, not unless she can drop a gridlet into station orbit and come pick it up in five hundred years. So Mishka's not former Shuos; he's Shuos now. Thread her brainstem through the edges of the eighth hell, she should have known nobody was that destructive by accident.

She messages Ashari:

avrayens running shuos code, come asap, you have entrance privs

[

yhlee, can Sasha get the floor to generate restraints quickly? If not, she's going for the cable ties in her pocket.]

From:

yhlee

[The floor can generate restraints but not in an "insta BOOM you're chained up!" way, and Mikodez is a ferret anyway. The cable ties are a better bet.

zuhrovet,

pengwern,

vass, Ashari has gotten the message and will arrive shortly--I'm going to let at least one of you get in the next response before they show up.]

From:

zuhrovet

Sasha fishes the cable ties out of the pocket under her right knee, stands up, and kicks Mishka in the face.

[Let's definitely take a couple of responses for things to go sideways before Ashari shows up.]

Edited (not full-on numbered moves, necessarily!) Date: 2018-06-11 01:27 am (UTC)