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

[yhlee]

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.

Comments

the rebellion is basically engineering school, right?

[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?"

Current plan

[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?]

Re: Current plan

[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."

Re: Current plan

[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.

Re: Current plan

[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!]

progress bar

[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.

Mishka is a spy

[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.]

Re: Mishka is a spy

[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.]

Re: Mishka is a spy

[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.]

Re: Mishka is a spy

[yhlee]

[Ahahaha, thank you for the clarification. I was wondering just how epic the sideways was going to get! XD ]

Re: Mishka is a spy

[slybrarian]

[Wait, when did the moth become a PvP zone!?!]

Re: Mishka is a spy

[yhlee]

[*looks innocent*]

Re: Mishka is a spy

[zuhrovet]

[Taking down a potential Shuos assassin with subdual damage is a terrible idea, so if you're going to try it, you definitely need to sneak attack.

Seriously, though, I'm expecting Iawa to intervene any moment here. vass, let me know if you need Sasha to leave herself open?]

Re: Mishka is a spy

[pengwern]

Mikodez yanks Sasha's ankle and pulls as he bounds to his feet, twisting it to the side.

sparring, sparring

[zuhrovet]

"Fucking fox." Sasha punches Mishka in the nose.

Re: sparring, sparring

[vass]

When Sasha unexpectedly kicks Avrayen in the face, Iawa initially freezes like a beetle in a spiderweb. No, wrong analogy, Sasha hasn't bitten her. She's just staring, taking in the data. Avrayen fights back, in clear and obvious self-defense, and Sasha starts yelling insults about his signifier (Iawa doesn't know what Avrayen's signifier is, but she'd already figured it was Ninefox Something.)

Thoughts are whirring through her head. Some of them she'd immediately dismiss as unrealistic even for a drama plot, but this whole situation had already left realistic behind some time ago. Avrayen's augment contained a virus that infected Sasha's mind, triggering a killing rage? Sasha just discovered that she's yet another long-lost sibling of Avrayen's, and this naturally occasioned more violence?

As the fight continues, Iawa gets her limbs back under control. She steps back, out of the range of fighting and observation, and quickly takes two sedative patches out of her first aid kit. The second is in case Avrayen keeps fighting after Sasha goes down.

She realises this is the point where she needs to commit to either grabbing Avrayen and trying to escape the Wasp with him (hoping he won't take her for a foe too and try to kill her), or trust that things are not as absolutely insane as they appear and that both Sasha and Avrayen will get a fair hearing and Iawa herself won't be harmed for intervening.

And, well, she still doesn't have a plan for successfully leaving. So she plunges into the fray and aims for the nearest patch of bare skin on both opponents.

Re: sparring, sparring

[zuhrovet]

Sasha's twisting as Iawa approaches, getting ready for another strike, because she wants to grab Mishka's arm and that means he needs to let go of her. She's not sure what happens next, but she's abruptly certain that she can't maintain her balance, so she hugs Mishka and falls over.

Eight hells. Something's really wrong. She manages to say, "Grid, contingency blue local." She's not tracking well enough to direct foam.

The room's sprinkler system starts blasting water from the ceiling.

Re: sparring, sparring

[pengwern]

Mikodez puts a vicious elbow in somewhere and lunges forward to headbutt Sasha. At last, a good use for his height, but it makes very little difference now that they're on the ground.

"What do you have against this face--?" He only gets out half a sentence before the sprinklers start, but he uses the opportunity to get clear and try to shut his augment down again, colliding into the table on the way. There's no especial need for him to survive, of course. Augment sabotage is annoying and frequently drawn out.

Re: sparring, sparring

[vass]

The elbow gets Iawa right in the solar plexus. She folds over and staggers forward, which puts her just near enough to catch and patch Avrayen when he bumps into the table.

Wheezing, she watches him drop to the ground, too winded to try to break his fall.

Once she's more or less got her breath back, she calls Ashari on her lokki. "I'm in Sasha's room. How soon can you get here? Interrogation got way out of hand. I've sedated her and Avrayen. They'll wake up in about five minutes. [Out of seven. She lost two catching her breath.]

While she talks, she gets a large folded cotton square out of her first aid kit, the sort that can be adapted to be a sling or a bandage or padding or a wad for stanching blood. She snips a few inches in the centre of one side and then rips it in half. She uses the two rectangles to bind up Sasha and Avrayen's hands as best she can.

[Once they regain consciousness, Iawa's best effort at restraints ought to hold either of those two, oh... seconds. And that's assuming neither of them has sedative resistance Iawa didn't allow for. Which does sound like a thing the Shuos might do.]

She uses whatever time remains checking for head wounds and neck injuries.

guess we should turn the water off

[zuhrovet]

Sasha wakes up once on the floor by herself. Water's still pouring from the ceiling, and she probably doesn't want to drown, so she signs to the grid to cancel the sprinklers and, saint of vines, the grid registers the command.

When she wakes up again, Iawa's talking. Sasha's shirt is soaked and sticking to her body, and she's shivering. She has lost track of the cable ties she was holding, somewhere. She has more in her pocket, but she doesn't like losing things. Also, there's something wrong with her wrists.

Sasha opens her eyes. She still doesn't want to move her head very quickly, but Iawa's the only person standing. She asks, "Iawa, are you Shuos too?"

Fuck. That's not how you resist an interrogation. No need to bind Sasha into hell; she's halfway there on her own.

[Sasha has no particular resistance to this sedative, but the edge of the patch overlaps with the edge of her shirtsleeve, so she's not quite getting a full dose. Teasing out the relative influence of Iawa's aim and Sasha's exotic power on this state of affairs would presumably take some effort.]

Re: guess we should turn the water off

[vass]

"No, I'm not Shuos. I thought you were Nirai, not Shuos."

Iawa has occasionally been accused of being quick on the uptake, but only in theoretical settings. [She has also forgotten that Sasha's not Nirai either.]

"Wait, you mean Avrayen's a Shuos?" At this point she notices Sasha's condition. "Barb, you're freezing." [Iawa has not noticed this herself, since she hasn't had a lot of experience doing this and doesn't swear much anyway, but when she's in medic mode she swears like a Vidona.]

She gets a shock blanket out of the first aid kit [it'd be Mylar in our world, but Sasha can have one that's gently self-heating] and cautiously wraps it around Sasha without trying to get the wet clothes off. In the process, she sees what happened to the patch. Oops. Well, at least right now Sasha doesn't seem to be fighting.

"Avrayen's still sedated, but probably only for two or three more minutes. I've called Ashari. How are you feeling now?"

Re: guess we should turn the water off

[zuhrovet]

Sasha would tense when Iawa touches her, if she weren't already shuddering with her whole body. But Iawa neither tries to hurt her nor engages in the sort of possessive stroking favored by Ashari and Sasha's mother, which in her experience usually means pain later. And the warmth feels good. Maybe things aren't completely fucked.

"Yes, Mishka is Shuos. Current, not former. Need to restrain him better." Assuming whatever's wrapping Sasha's wrists is also around Mishka's, that is. "There are cable ties in the pocket by my knee. Could you get his ankles? And his wrists again?"

Re: guess we should turn the water off

[yhlee]

The room chooses this moment to admit Ashari, who is dressed to the nines. The door vanishes behind them. They look down their nose at Sasha, then at Mikodez, then at Iawa, then back at Sasha. "Well, well, well," Ashari says. "This is not how a well-conducted investigation goes. Please tell me we've learned something useful about the puppy?" ["Puppy" is clearly referring to Mikodez.]

There's a faint blue spark in their eyes. They're clearly ready to enthrall--someone--if things go even more south. And in case that's not enough, they're trimming their nails using a dagger with the ease of long practice.

[If anyone is taking anti-enthrallment precautions, let me know. Ashari will probably be very amused.]

Iawa only makes eye contact when she shouldn't

[vass]

Iawa unconsciously stands up straighter: she has certain reflex responses to an Andan with that look in their eyes.

"Thank you for coming so quickly," she says, meeting Ashari's gaze unflinchingly.

[Ashari doesn't have to enthrall Iawa -- Sasha or Mikodez would probably be both more plot-appropriate and funnier. But they can if they feel like it (thus generously offering Sasha and Mikodez an attack of opportunity?) and making ill-considered stands for poorly thought through reasons is kind of Iawa's thing.]

Sasha needs to stop having these conversations on the ground

[zuhrovet]

Sasha makes an effort to concentrate and sits up, keeping her hands underneath the blanket. She has to shut her eyes for a moment after that, but when she opens them nothing is spinning.

"I regret my failure and will pay what penalty you require of me," she tells Ashari, seriously. "About the foxling. Two things. First, I have control of his augment and am copying the data. The bulk of the storage is used by Shuos files. They're all encrypted, all the same size. Not the sort of thing Academy dropouts keep. My guess is they're recordings. So that's at least two spies, the kid and whoever prevented our side from checking his augment."

On the bright side, now that she's explained she read the augment data, she doesn't have to pretend she doesn't know Mishka's name. "Second thing. I'm sure you know Mikodez and his 'cousin' are brothers. But I don't think Mishka knew, until tonight. One of the things he did, when he was wandering the station on his own, is find a gene scanner and run some tests."