hexarchate_rpg | toasting and debriefing

Sasha curls her fingers on "angry telekinetics," instructing the grid to mark that phrase for later. "So Jedao is terrified of this contact whose name he didn't give us," she summarizes. "Sulen, Virmad, Gerae--does that match your reading?"

“Yes,” Virmad says, glancing at Sulen and Gerae for confirmation. “His signifiers indicated some uncertainty about our intentions — understandably, I think — but few about his own: he seems to be earnestly and surprisingly honestly committed to ending the -archate. He was fluctuating between a few signifiers; only the Immolation Fox worries me, but we knew already that he had...unpredictable tendencies. And it was...”

He pauses and looks at Sulen again, not sure if he should offer such wild speculation. But then, what’s the worst that can happen? Sasha already thinks he’s an unreliable flake who gets distracted by every pretty face he sees, and maybe Sulen and Gerae will back him up. “He didn’t say so explicitly, but reading between the lines — and reading his signifiers — what he said suggested that this ‘co-conspirator’ who’s blackmailing him may be the one responsible for what happened — happens — will happen — well, won’t happen now, I suppose — at Hellspin Fortress. Or, rather, that Jedao did what he did on his co-conspirator’s orders. Not exactly a strong character recommendation, but if it’s true it would alleviate some of our concerns about Jedao’s reliability.”

"I want to know if that drug we gave him affected his emotional stability," Gerae says unexpectedly. "It was subtle, but he seemed to have a hand tremor that he was trying to disguise."

"Stability? No," says its designer, "just lability, and only during the first hour or so - wait, what?" Sorry, Reshad, about this interpretation. And Gerae, if you're trying to be subtle, because Ione is actually really concerned about the chemistry and now very confused. "No, if anything it would treat a hand tremor."

"Grid, could you play back the images of Jedao's hands on Screen Two, please?" Sasha asks. "Starting when Gerae enters his room."

Reshad has stood quiet until now, sampling her arak and then peering at the mostly-full glass.

"That's not a tremor," she says, as the recording begins. "It's Shuos sign language."

She gives it a beat for the implications to sink in. "That was 'heptarch's orders?'If you turn the camera to me, you can spot the other half of the conversation. I thought it would be useful to approach the interrogation on multiple levels."

"Grid, please show us Reshad's hands during the same time period, on Screen Three. Reshad, could you summarize your conversation with Jedao, for the rest of us?" Sasha asks.

This must be what Reshad wanted to ask about, earlier. Did Sulen not brief Gerae, or did Reshad not consult with Sulen? It hasn't been that long since Reshad left Sasha's office, so Sasha only needs to enter a couple of commands on her tablet to establish that Reshad went directly to the room where Jedao is held, without talking to Sulen or sending a message through the grid. But why in all the hells would she have a problem with Sulen? It makes no sense.

"It was short, and parallel to the spoken conversation. He asked me if I was there on heptarch's orders, and wanted to know my era of origin. I told him, and mentioned 'hexarchs' just before the Rahal did so." A nod to Sulen, with respect. "It could barely have gone better."

"Ah- and he mentioned that his co-conspirator is Nirai."

"In the last - there." She gestures at the screen "He said, 'my life is in your hands.' I took it as surrender."

How she wants to show emotion at that. Instead, she focuses on the subtle differences between his sign language and hers, shown clearly by Cantata's expert surveillance.

With Ione's revelation of- what sort of ability is that, anyway? Certainly nothing she's heard of- it seems even feeling strongly may be dangerous.

Edited (Forgot an important bit) 2019-05-29 03:58 (UTC)

In our hands, or in yours, Reshad? If the heptarchate could keep 'you' and 'thou' distinct, it would save so much trouble. Sasha will have to go over the silent conversation again later, with Aymad and one of the Rahal.

"Thank you. I believe I mentioned, Jedao has been corresponding with an anonymous Nirai. There is a draft of a message protesting the collateral damage from an experimental weapon design, but he never sent it. We'll want confirmation, but I expect Jedao's correspondent and this co-conspirator are identical."

Sasha folds her hands together. If this were a Naxorian strategy session, she'd toast again to signal a shift in topic, but half the room is still cradling glasses of arak as if they came from Ashari, and uneven rounds are the opposite of auspicious. "One question that arises: are our adversaries cooperating with each other? We know that Jedao's co-conspirator--let's call him Comet--was interested in the rifts, and that Jedao believes he is undying. We know that Quill wanted to eliminate Jedao, or at very least keep him from all knowledge of the rifts. Might these be related? What evidence would we need to confirm or disprove this hypothesis?"

"Do we know how this co-conspirator is undying?" Alaric asks, slowly turning his empty glass between his fingers. "I'm assuming from context it's not just some simple biological trick to prevent senescence. Anagathic drugs or medical micro-machines are a dime a dozen, but methods of stopping violent death - reliably - is a lot harder and usually involves some sort of exotic effect."

"Jedao says he killed him, and it didn't stick," Sasha explains. "Remi thought it was an exotic effect, too. I think he had some ideas about how to get there, from the calendar in his time. Is there information Jedao could give us, or data we could gather about the high calendar, that would help you pinpoint the specific effect?"

"I wonder if there's more than one way to be immortal?" Reshad muses. It's not as random a question as it appears.

"Jedao had come back a minimum of three times, in my era," she explains. "Real details are thin on the deck, but history shows him well past when he could have been kept alive. If he failed in a way that got him immortality..." She trails off, and sips her arak again, this time taking a substantial amount of it.

"It seems simpler to assume that the mechanism is the same, for both the future Jedao and his collaborator, but that the price of the bargain is too high."

Sasha had a tutor, once, who was preoccupied with the literary motif of contracts with the undying. She wrote four separate essays explaining that creatures made solely of air and fire were scientifically impossible. She's not sure what to make of the fact that that endless, ancient poetry reading is turning out to have been practical job training. She'll have to ask Alaric again, about his heart: both the protections and the mechanism seem suddenly relevant.

Alaric nods to Reshad. "There are a lot of ways. People have been trying to live forever since people became people. Good ways, that's the problem. It's like any other sort of exotic effect or even invariant engineering - it's easy to come up with ideas, hard to implement them without a lot of work, and the calendrical math often means that enabling one technique excludes others. Which makes me think that Sasha's right about them sharing a mechanism."

He adds to Sasha, "It would be useful to know anything else Jedao can tell us. Killed but it didn't stick is a good start, since it rules out things like making yourself physically immutable or, I don't know, a cloud of nanomachines."

Sasha nods. "You recommend, then, that for threat assessment, we engage Jedao in detailed conversation. Is there information that we need to keep from him, or control his access to, while we are doing so?"

"I don't think there's anything we could tell him that would be dangerous," Alaric replies. "The only secrets we really know are the nature of the moths, which he might already be aware of and any high-ranking Nirai collaborator definitely has, and our information on the rifts. That's the technical part, anyways, there's probably gobs of horrifically dangerous political and historical data just sitting around in our entertainment database, but I leave advice on that to other people."

[The thought of radioactively dangerous soap operas is making me laugh my head off right now.]

"I suppose it depends on what our strategy is," Reshad muses.

"We've already denied him to the Kel, and learned something about his blackmailer. We're in process of denying his death to Flute."

"If we mean to seek his collaboration, he needs the same information the rest of us have."

"How can we trust anything he says?" Seyli tries to keep the defensive tone from their voice. Tries. No one seems to be flagging him as a threat but them and it's distressing. They've spent most of this meeting counting their breath to keep from blowing up in outrage. This is so far beyond their nonexistent rank and it sounds like so much bullshit. "Do we really believe he's a useful tool in our goals?"

"Plasticized penthrite is useful, too, but we don't hand it out as modeling clay." Sasha shifts, remembering all her oldest lessons--sit up straight, control the space around you, green saint, do not look at Reshad's hands on that screen--and meets Seyli's eyes.

"There is no way for us to be safe. There cannot be, as long as Quill is coordinating with heptarchate or hexarchate agents. The only question is whether we move first, or react to our opponents. With Jedao, we must--the proverb I learned is, 'spin the web and watch for scissors'. We listen to what he tells us, and what he omits, and check everything we can. The judgment on what to do with him is not ours alone." Stars in hell, will Ashari have opinions. "But we have some time, on the way to Autumn Pyre, and I expect on the journey through the rift, as well. We can watch, and learn."

"I will certainly be watching him. I believe he meant it when he gave us his word, but I trust we won't be giving him free run of the ship." It's somewhere between a statement and a question.

Spheres of hell, next they're going to ask if Sasha plays jeng-zai with a loaded pistol as the stakes. "Of course not. We're going to agree on the maximum freedoms that we might permit him, both physically and in the sense of information, in the next few weeks. We'll set a checkpoint for before we enter the rift, and potentially a different one for after. And we'll approach those maximums gradually, and only if he continues to cooperate."

Reshad nods to Sasha's metaphor, and cants her head toward Seyli, as if nodding to their fear.

"Exactly so. I do not trust that Jedao has our best interests in mind. I trust that he'll be himself." Softer: "You're right to be wary, but if we treat him as an enemy, we are likely to make one where it isn't needed."

Sulen and Sasha turn the conversation to maximums, and she follows along. "Those limits likely depend on our strategy," she offers.

"We've already denied him to the heptarchs, assuming we aren't being pursued by Kel moths. We're denying his death to Flute." Firmly, brooking no argument. "I do believe he wants to see the -archate fall. I hope he decides to help us, but we probably have a hand in that, too."

"We need information. We need to know more about Jedao's mysterious collaborator, and what Quill wants. And we need to know more about the rifts themselves."

Because one possible outcome, having interfered, is that the Cantata and everyone they carry will end up lost as the Rosemallow ship was lost, in a future that is not their own.

"One thing I noticed," Sulen says. At what point is the alcohol actually drunk? They don't mind exercising patience as part of a ritual, of course, but it's helpful to know the schedule ahead of time. A mental visualization of a timeline, one point ticking over to the next; that's the appeal of ritual, condensing the chaos of life into a straight line. Also, it's good alcohol, and they would like to drink it. "He is lonely. And desperate. I do not think getting him to talk more will be difficult."

toasting and debriefing

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can we count our enemies?

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station sensors

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let's fight about babies

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