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saveyourselves2013-12-03 11:29 pm
theearth) wrote in saveyourselves2013-12-03 11:29 pm
Entry tags:
Plot Post for December 3rd!
This format of plot post is designed for players to ask questions and find ways to influence the plot. Be bold and ask what you can or can't do; the worst that can happen is that we will say no. As plots in Save the Earth are not self resolving nor on a time limit, they can evolve in many ways. Although some potential outcomes are given, they are little more than suggestion and can be changed by character action. What role you take is up to you.
The post is also open for players to plot and coordinate between one another.
State of current events:
• EARTHQUAKE. That’s right, one of the worst quakes ever to hit Locke City, a 5.5, struck this Tuesday afternoon, thanks to Brooke and Danny’s investigation. It affected half the east coast, with its epicenter at Tuning Towers and Locke City’s business district. Damage is most severe there: though none of the larger buildings have collapsed completely, many have warped structures, cracked foundations, and shattered windows. Cracks have also opened in the earth around Tuning Towers, though none of them stretch deep enough to reach the vein of pink rock. Since this was a very busy area, the death toll is reported at over a hundred, with more injured. The buzzing, mercifully, has stopped.
• Thunder Corp has put the word out: they are hiring! Hiring construction workers, that is. They have put on public presentations explaining that they intend to turn the Dead District into -- well, they haven’t specified exactly what it is. It’s a big project, though, and they’re throwing around all kinds of words like economic boost and cutting-edge; the PR is excellent. At any rate, it’s common knowledge that anyone who applies to work on Thunder Corp’s Dead DIstrict renovation will have the opportunity to work with state-of-the-art engineering equipment. It seems to be a big hit: citizens are signing up in droves, but for some reason, during the presentations, they look very blank-eyed...
• Organized crime is on the rise in Locke City, and the gang name on everybody’s lips is the Blood Keys! They operate around the perimeter of the Dead District. With their ample weapon supply, deadly reflexes, trendy sunglasses, and uncanny instinct for avoiding the police, all they have to do is open their shirts to reveal the key-shaped tattoo on their breastbone and most anyone will hand over his or her valuables. Everyone who has so far stood up to the Blood Keys has been killed. The police have filed the reports and promise they are taking action in the area, but those living near the Dead District hold out little hope of official assistance and have seen no more patrol cars than usual. Your best option? Hide your valuables and hope the Blood Keys don’t look too hard. They do all wear sunglasses, though there are no other obvious signs.
• There are moving snake statues on the loose again, numbers club: this time, in an old, disused subway tunnel. As detailed here, a team of reincarnates found a crazy ol’ sculptor skulking around. He’s made quite a few of those snake statues, and while many are animate, you’re not sure how many animate ones are roaming around the subway lines. In addition, that defunct subway line runs directly below a very populous neighborhood. Take care.
Events occurring in the immediate future:
• Detective Jason Sherman has gotten his hands on a couple of the reincarnates. He’s intending to turn as many traitor as he can, to make allies among the numbers club. Anyone who is arrested will either have to break out or convince him of your loyalty and give him the identities of other reincarnates. Arrests will be made, although you as a player may opt out if approached by a mod.
• Thunder Corp wasn’t lying about their state-of-the-art technology: construction in the Dead District will proceed remarkably quickly, with a very large, single building taking shape. It’s still too early to tell what the structure is for, but it doesn’t look like neighborhoods, shops, or offices.
Potential Echo opportunities:
Visiting Tuning Towers will no longer grant an Echo. However, encountering animate snakes in the subway tunnels will grant one Echo (only one, not one per snake). Encountering a member of the Blood Keys will also grant one Echo (likewise, only your first encounter with a gang member will grant an Echo).
Please direct questions regarding these plot points to the General Questions thread below and not the post in general.
In addition, plot posts will now also be accompanied by a What You Know thread, under which players are free and encouraged to OOCly recap, corroborate, and discuss information already ICly known/available on plot points at large. To get the ball rolling, an example sub-thread will be posted to this post's main thread.
The post is also open for players to plot and coordinate between one another.
State of current events:
• EARTHQUAKE. That’s right, one of the worst quakes ever to hit Locke City, a 5.5, struck this Tuesday afternoon, thanks to Brooke and Danny’s investigation. It affected half the east coast, with its epicenter at Tuning Towers and Locke City’s business district. Damage is most severe there: though none of the larger buildings have collapsed completely, many have warped structures, cracked foundations, and shattered windows. Cracks have also opened in the earth around Tuning Towers, though none of them stretch deep enough to reach the vein of pink rock. Since this was a very busy area, the death toll is reported at over a hundred, with more injured. The buzzing, mercifully, has stopped.
• Thunder Corp has put the word out: they are hiring! Hiring construction workers, that is. They have put on public presentations explaining that they intend to turn the Dead District into -- well, they haven’t specified exactly what it is. It’s a big project, though, and they’re throwing around all kinds of words like economic boost and cutting-edge; the PR is excellent. At any rate, it’s common knowledge that anyone who applies to work on Thunder Corp’s Dead DIstrict renovation will have the opportunity to work with state-of-the-art engineering equipment. It seems to be a big hit: citizens are signing up in droves, but for some reason, during the presentations, they look very blank-eyed...
• Organized crime is on the rise in Locke City, and the gang name on everybody’s lips is the Blood Keys! They operate around the perimeter of the Dead District. With their ample weapon supply, deadly reflexes, trendy sunglasses, and uncanny instinct for avoiding the police, all they have to do is open their shirts to reveal the key-shaped tattoo on their breastbone and most anyone will hand over his or her valuables. Everyone who has so far stood up to the Blood Keys has been killed. The police have filed the reports and promise they are taking action in the area, but those living near the Dead District hold out little hope of official assistance and have seen no more patrol cars than usual. Your best option? Hide your valuables and hope the Blood Keys don’t look too hard. They do all wear sunglasses, though there are no other obvious signs.
• There are moving snake statues on the loose again, numbers club: this time, in an old, disused subway tunnel. As detailed here, a team of reincarnates found a crazy ol’ sculptor skulking around. He’s made quite a few of those snake statues, and while many are animate, you’re not sure how many animate ones are roaming around the subway lines. In addition, that defunct subway line runs directly below a very populous neighborhood. Take care.
Events occurring in the immediate future:
• Detective Jason Sherman has gotten his hands on a couple of the reincarnates. He’s intending to turn as many traitor as he can, to make allies among the numbers club. Anyone who is arrested will either have to break out or convince him of your loyalty and give him the identities of other reincarnates. Arrests will be made, although you as a player may opt out if approached by a mod.
• Thunder Corp wasn’t lying about their state-of-the-art technology: construction in the Dead District will proceed remarkably quickly, with a very large, single building taking shape. It’s still too early to tell what the structure is for, but it doesn’t look like neighborhoods, shops, or offices.
Potential Echo opportunities:
Visiting Tuning Towers will no longer grant an Echo. However, encountering animate snakes in the subway tunnels will grant one Echo (only one, not one per snake). Encountering a member of the Blood Keys will also grant one Echo (likewise, only your first encounter with a gang member will grant an Echo).
Please direct questions regarding these plot points to the General Questions thread below and not the post in general.
In addition, plot posts will now also be accompanied by a What You Know thread, under which players are free and encouraged to OOCly recap, corroborate, and discuss information already ICly known/available on plot points at large. To get the ball rolling, an example sub-thread will be posted to this post's main thread.
no subject
Sure thing! Gonna take this point by point:
- Nick knows that cops and animals are being genetically modified. The cops are being given subtle animal qualities, while the animals are being given qualities of other animals. These modified animals can detect Network-connected people. These modifications happen in the old farmhouse outside of town, where Sherman says E.T. is. About a third of the police force has been modified, and it has given them superpowers. Sherman himself has been modified, but he's kept tight-lipped about what he can do.
- Sherman knows that the Network folks have superpowers, but not that the Network exists. He knows that each individual has a different set of powers. He considers them disorganized, divided, weak, and figures that as long as he can keep picking them off and turning them traitor, he'll get them.
- Sherman is also an asshole who acts like the rules don't apply to him, and really only reports to the Sheriff. The Sheriff is the top of the chain of command and is definitely in on it, but if Nick talks to him, the Sheriff will express more discomfort with their methods than anyone else has. Does Nick ask why he goes along with it? As for anything higher, no one outside of Locke City knows what's going on. The corrupt cops generally feel one of a few things: that their work against the vigilantes is important for maintaining the peace, that they're following orders and doing their job, or that their modifications are great and they're expecting a reward at the end of this.
- The arrangement with the corrupt cops is this: the cops are responsible for keeping legal repercussions off of Thunder Corp while Thunder Corp looks for something very important underground. They say it's a giant monster, and that the alien is here to destroy it. Blow it up. Once that monster's gone, more aliens can show up and start taking over the world. So, anyone on the aliens' side is going to be on the winning side, because alien technology is so advanced it looks like magic. They can do anything, Sherman says.
- The Blood Keys gang is basically human -- they don't have an inhuman form -- but there's something mechanical about their eyes, hearts, endocrine systems, and spinal cords.
- Benjamin can totally attend suspicion-free and strike up a conversation with the presenter, but the presenter...actually seems to know very little about how the equipment works. Benjamin will get a lot of bluster and a lot of PR bullshit, but no real information about how it works.
no subject
About the animals detecting Network people - is there anything that can throw the animals off, like trying to cover up your scent? Nick's asking because he wants to make sure no one escapes from them, of course.
And Nick would ask why the Sheriff is going along with it!
no subject
As for why the Sheriff is going along with it, Nick gets a noncommittal answer: "Well, we've come this far. No one can stop it now, not you, or me. We've got a bad situation, Detective, and all we can do is make the best of it." It doesn't seem like he's telling you everything, though.
no subject
...and a couple more quick questions that've come from some tags on the info post! Would Nick know the exact location of the farmhouse, or just that it's in a farmhouse outside of town? (ie, would they be able to find it themselves without getting taken there by Sherman?) Is the farmhouse inside the range of the Tuning Towers?
And would Nick be able to put together a list of the cops he knows have been genetically modified, based on the ones he can "see" as having something not human about them?
Edit because crap someone just asked me this and I realized I'm not 100% sure on the answer: is the Sheriff referring to Police Chief Edwards, or at they separate characters?
no subject
And on your second question, there would be absolutely nothing to stop Nick from making a list of officers who he identifies as not-quite human.
Lastly, by the Sheriff we do indeed mean Edwards - with apologies for the terminological mix-up!
no subject
As far as the officers go: are they mostly beat cops and such, or are there higher ranking cops as well? If so, what're the highest ranks of cops who've been modified? ...and I guess also very important, would there be any other detectives in the homicide department that've been modified?
And one other thing that's come up in tags: would it be possible for Nick to have access to what information the corrupt cops have on those that were picked up by the drug bust at the high school? Specifically on Randolph Lyall and Akito Tanabe, and what, if anything, is going to be done about them.
...I think at this point I've asked more questions on this plot post than all my others combined ffff I'm sorry for the spamming!
no subject
It should be possible to find confidential information on Lyall and Akito both - all they've got on the latter is that he has been identified as a superhuman; on the former they've noted additionally that Lyall;s a potentially meddlesome one with a number of notes on him beginning with an instance of his dropping by the station after the murder of Paul Ben. No final action is recorded as planned on either of them - at least, not beyond capture and to be dealt with by Sherman.
Altered officers themselves meanwhile are in fact densest at higher ranks, beginning below Edwards - with lower-level modified officers in all cases answering to also-modified superiors.
Lastly, what will be found in the farmhouse is mostly defense - it is set up with traps and security, none of them particularly congruous with a farmhouse - in fact traces of such things as rather devices and sensors ought to be markedly suspicious once they catch notice. All internal defensive mechanisms are passive on their own - trip a sensor and off will go the generation of a wall or bubble of concentrated energy in the air - a force-field would be a good way to describe it, disarmable by breaking of the sensor - and they do not break easily!
Rooms on the main floor are white-tiled and for all intents and purposes empty, and rather dingy - shabby "sterile" rooms like the one Paul Ben was killed in. One us unenterable - it's closed with a mechanical door, white as opposed to any obvious metal, with a keypad installed into the original wooden baseboard.
There is also a cellar door on the outside and back of the house, locked and well-reinforced - the cellar's best-accessed from the inside of the house through a set of stairs at the corner of one of the sterile rooms. At the base of the staircase is a door, and behind the door is a hallway with doors leading to two chambers, both of them joined together from the inside on a third door.
Enter one of the rooms and those investigating will find mounted vats and pods - the vats containing clouds of chittering familiar tiny black creatures, and the pods varying in size from approximately three feet to twelve feet in height - full of pinkish liquid with something dark at the very center.
In the other room will be walls lined with cages, also varying in size, all of them containing animals - most of them common, wild urban birds, mice and rats, stray cats, domestic animals, and such - others mixes thereof. Working at the center will be a pair of robots - one human-sized and skeletally shaped, the other stocky and more formless. On the room being broken into, one of them will open one of the cages and release... what'll look very much like a feathery cheetah, spotted, catlike, with a couple of wings on its back and a beak to match. It can be killed, but it moves like a bullet and rips about as well!
Any reincarnate who sees or encounters anything unusual at the farmhouse will receive one plot Echo!
no subject