hexarchate_rpg | toasting and debriefing

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moves: chapter 2

toasting and debriefing

Sasha has messaged the team, summoning them to a meeting in the common room. After sending the message, she heads there herself, and starts pouring shots of rosemary arak. She gives a glass to Sulen as they enter the room, holding it out formally, with both hands; she gives Reshad a similarly formal presentation, and an equally formal smile. Seyli gets a choice between arak and sparkling water, and a lopsided grin.

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"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."

"I wonder how he feels about small baby animals," Alaric said idly. "Not that I'd normally suggest handing one off to an infamous mass murderer, but a surprising number of those have soft spots for pets. Could be a good ice breaker to get his guard down."

[I nearly spit out my mouthful of Fresca, LOL!]

"The hells, Alaric. Do you mean Fluffy's eggs? Pseudo-dragons need socialization with each other and with humans. We're not locking a newborn away from its siblings just to test a hypothesis."

Of course, who is to be held where, and for how long, is the current debate. "How much longer will we be within range of station sensors?" They don't know the range on the Kel moths' capabilities, but this should be a good order-of-magnitude guide.

[Say half an hour, give or take.]

"If we're going to give him a pseudo-dragon, why don't we just give him access to the mothlings," Seyli says, voice dry as dust.

Gerae looks extremely upset at the thought of handing any of the critters over to Jedao, and shoots a grateful look at Seyli and Sasha.

"There's a lot of room between the extremes," Reshad points out. "Why not bring some of the pseudodragons in, supervised? That gives us a chance to work with him, also."

"The mothlings - are they Cantata's?" She's chasing down an idea, tapping a finger silently on her glass as she thinks.

"The mothlings are children," Sasha says, slowly and precisely. "We will not use them as counters in any sort of game."

[Somebody want to start a new thread?]

[new thread here, per request]

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toasting and debriefing

Re: can we count our enemies?

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[GM side comment]

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[GM reaction]

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station sensors

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let's fight about babies

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