hexarchate_rpg | Chapter 3.4: Breaking down the base

As the meeting ends, the team members move to their assigned tasks.

Dar, Deyna, Seyli and Sulen collect some heavy-duty servitors and begin transferring supplies to the Cantata.

Alaric, Reshad, Shess, and the Cantata's drone prepare to remove the harness from Ankat's moth, The Sedulous Eel.

Back on the Cantata, Sasha goes to her office and starts remotely wiping memory nodes on the base's grid. Jedao is in the Communications/Gunnery room, controlling the weapons. Xiulan acts as his backup. Remi has been instructed to look for patterns or causes of the missing interstellar signals.

Meanwhile, Hana and Eddox look after the mothlings, perhaps joined by Mafyyil, who for some reason has not received clear instructions. Gerae and Ione divide their attention between the mothlings and the nest of pseudo-dragons.

[Welcome to a new move!

I know that things are stressful and uncertain for all of us right now. Please don't fret if you suddenly find yourself with less or more free time than usual--we will adjust! If you would like to give your character a node of peace where they drink tea and admire baby aliens for the next while, this can be arranged. Conversely, if you want a plotty distraction, we will bring you one!

My own focus is unreliable of late, but I'll work on a recap of the previous move as I can.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Cantata's answering hum, even before the grid translation, is more discordant than usual. "No--all the numbers are the same except for Remi being gone. There weren't extra humans or moths."

"Can you detect rifts?" Maybe moth senses? Maybe Norai sensors? But if a Nirai were to attack those very sensors-

"And can you run diagnostics? Is everything working all right?"

With someone else investigating the actual area of Remi's disappearance, Reshad busies herself warning the other two moth crews that the visitors from Cantata are slightly delayed, and would they please run the beginning preparations now. She copies this crew on the fact that she's done so.

[

slybrarian, any thoughts on methods for detecting rifts? Some kind of gravitational ripple or trace radiation, maybe?]

"I can sometimes tell the big rifts are there, but the little ones are barely noticeable," Cantata replies. "Mostly I only know they're there when something goes in or out and the masses change."

Sasha checks the base grid for any evidence of other objects suddenly disappearing, or for tampering by someone other than her or Remi.

She also writes to Ankat and Kaliyan:

remi has gone missing. keep an eye on your people. ~S.

No evidence of other objects suddenly disappearing.

However, there's evidence of slightly anomalous environental air flow in the corridor where Remi vanished, around the time he did so, a drop in pressure so slight and so temporary that the grid decided it was a sensor malfunction rather than an actual emergency.

Reshad queries the error logs, looking for evidence of any similar malfunctions.

There was a brief possible blip in the same corridor about two hours before Remi's disappearance, of the same nature and duration; that time, too, the system decided it was probably a sensor malfunction.

[Alaric could verify, if he had time to do a sensor check, that the grid is not wrong that some of the base's sensors are janky as hell...]

[Is there any evidence that Remi was aware of the earlier blip?]

[Now that Sasha looks for it, that information did get routed to Remi's slate at the time it happened, and it looks like there are traces of some kind of watchdog in the environmental systems earlier, now erased.]

Sasha checks for signs of when this watchdog was created: was it present before the team arrived, and if Remi installed it, did he do so before or after the party?

The watchdog appears to have been slipped onto the base's grid when the team first arrived, before the party.

[Does it look like Remi's work?]

[Circumstantially yes, and if that's the case, it reveals that Remi was rather more proficient at hacking/etc. than he was letting on earlier.]

[He did a perfectly serviceable job of hacking the station cameras back in Chapter 1, a fact that Sasha has been bearing in mind!]

Edited (moves vs. chapters) 2020-03-30 00:37 (UTC)

Once is chance, twice is coincidence - unless you're a fox, in which case proper caution recommends you don't wait for three.

Reshad appends the results of the query and sends it to Sasha and Alaric with a note: "something may be up in this corridor; recommend extreme caution." She requests the grid send the same to anyone in the adjacent area.

Sasha replies:

remi started hunting anomalies when we arrived on station. disappearance likely deliberate.

Fucking feckless child of no parents. He does not understand the danger he is in.

She checks the duration of the blip in pressure: how quickly would something have to move, to go through the rift and come back again?

The hypothetical something would have had to move pretty quickly, but it's within the range of, say, someone sprinting.

The timing is more consistent with something going through and not coming back, of course.

Chapter 3.4: Breaking down the base

Re: an unexpected development (paging Reshad and Sulen)

Re: an unexpected development (paging Reshad and Sulen)

Re: an unexpected development (now paging Alaric)

Re: an unexpected development (paging Reshad and Sulen)

Re: an unexpected development (paging Reshad and Sulen)

Re: an unexpected development (paging Reshad and Sulen)

Re: an unexpected development (paging Reshad and Sulen)

Re: an unexpected development (paging Reshad and Sulen)

Re: an unexpected development (paging Reshad and Sulen)

Re: an unexpected development (paging Reshad and Sulen)

Re: an unexpected development (paging Reshad and Sulen)

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Re: an unexpected development (paging Reshad and Sulen, literally paging Sasha, Alaric, Seyli and Da

Re: an unexpected development (literally paging Sulen, Reshad, Deyna, and Alaric)

Re: an unexpected development (literally paging Sulen, Reshad, Deyna, and Alaric)