Plot Post for January 28th!

[theearth]

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.

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• The meeting regarding the plan of attack on the farmhouse serving as the alien’s hideout on the evening of January 25th was crashed and derailed when five six of David Proud’s animated snake statues barged their way into the meeting place - the house of Elian Price (wastingtime). Further crisis was averted when a group exploited the statues’ directive to protect Proud by capturing the artist and bringing him from the house to a relatively open space within which the statues could detonate, and through use of the intangibility of Danny Fenton (gogoghostpowers) and the firepower of Marisa Kirisame (not_good_not_wicked) and Reimu Hakurei (paradiseshrinemaiden), the threat of the statues was removed - in a massive explosion in which Proud was caught. David Proud is now dead - and with the stopping of his alien-technology-run mechanical heart, whatever power enabled the animation of and powered his statues has been shut down. Any snakes out there that didn’t crash the so-to-speak party will have stopped in their tracks on patrol underground - no longer giving Echoes, producing buzzing, or at risk of exploding.


• However, the slab of snake skin Proud was using to make the statues is still down there, and without patrolling statues, it ought to be a lot easier to reach. Should the will or any cause to head down to where Proud was originally hiding strike, follow the buzzing into a maintenance tunnel, and follow another peculiarly open tunnel excavated through its side a ways, and find a vein of something a familiar shade of pink embedded in the wall. Contact with this piece of Wise Snake will grant an Echo if the following two qualifications are met: that the character 1) did not receive an Echo off a subway snake after 11/23, and 2) did not receive an Echo from the snake attack on 1/25 at Elian’s house during the farmhouse meeting. Chunks of it can be broken off, but it’s a large piece of material well-lodged in the earth, and cannot be removed wholesale.


• At the request of Krystal, we’ve made a (very simple) map of Locke City. It is here and can be edited by anyone with the link. Player-established locations can be placed by their creators. This is optional. If you’d rather leave the location of your establishment vague, that is perfectly fine, too.

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Events occurring currently:

• Blood Key gang activity is down. Their numbers have been reduced and violent incidents are less frequent, but they’re still active in the area surrounding the Dead District. They are twice as strong and fast as an ordinary human, and their senses are supernaturally keen. In addition, they’re heavily armed and well supplied.


• Arrests by the corrupt police are still possible. An arrest will have one of three results: your character can either cooperate, offer Sherman names/information about other reincarnates and be released but kept under police surveillance; be broken out by reincarnates or discuss another escape method with the mods; or disappear under mysterious circumstances. In the second circumstance, your character will need to go into hiding unless they can successfully conceal their identity from Detective Sherman. Hiding is not necessarily permanent, but it may be long-term, depending on later actions from PCs.

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Events occurring in the immediate future:

• On Feb. 2nd, Thunder Corp will announce the completion of their construction in the Dead District. The building is shaped like a pentagon. It will not, however, be open to the public.

Coincidentally, by Feb. 4th, the Blood Keys will no longer be prowling the Dead District – or anywhere for that matter.


PC Blood Keys: Your orders will be to lie low until further notice.



• The alien at the farmhouse has yet to be confronted. A plan is being drafted with participants being drawn from the IC volunteers list. The list is formed of characters who volunteered at the 1/25 meeting, ergo if they were not at the meeting, there is a very low chance of them being called upon to participate.

Please remember that this is an IC plan. We will do our best to include as many interested parties as possible while also keeping ICness in mind.

We’re shooting to confront the alien around mid-to-late February. Please weigh in!
A note on fighting the alien: you will be able to defeat it – but you will need to bring your best. It will be a challenge. Victory cannot be achieved by sheer firepower alone (though it’ll certainly help a lot.)




• Involvement in Wise Snake’s emergence, however, is not reliant on IC participation, limits, etc. Just place your character in the vicinity of the business district and voila – you’ll be faced with a very large and very angry snake of stone.

Wise Snake’s emergence will happen after the alien is defeated - probably sometime in March.

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Potential Echo Opportunities

• Encountering a cybernetically-altered member of the Blood Keys for the first time grants one Echo. NOTE: from Feb. 4th and onwards, NPC Blood Key encounters will, by default, be in passing only - they will not be instigating anything.

• Visiting the shed skin of Wise Snake deep in the abandoned subways where Proud had been located if the character hadn’t received an Echo from a snake statue since 11/23 and didn’t receive an Echo from the snake statues at the meeting on 1/25 will grant one Echo.

• As always, canon recurrences grant related Echoes!


Please direct questions regarding these plot points to the thread below and not the post in general.

Comments

GENERAL QUESTIONS

[theearth]

[originaloddcouple]

How might it be possible for people not at the IC meeting to join the farmhouse fight? Am I right in assuming that people could just contact buddies, explain the plan, and invite them? Are there outside opportunities outside of these IC discussions?

[theearth]

Short answer: no.

Long answer: if the characters can be volunteered (with their IC permission (also assuming OOC interest)) through characters who did attend the meeting, then the answer is probably yes. But please add them to SHEET 2 of the list by the end of today.

[pianistofraielin]

Could you link that from the main post?

Re: GENERAL QUESTIONS

[hollowleg]

I'm just coming off hiatus; is it possible for Shiro to still be involved with the alien thing if he knows someone who went to the meeting?

Re: GENERAL QUESTIONS

[theearth]

Provided he gives the okay and his willingness to be involved is communicated within a reasonable amount of time from now, he can be included in the plan, yes!

[neonnerd]

So Benjamin has his Cybertronian EMP blaster back (in tiny human-sized form) that theoretically able to work on both human and alien technology! Is there a possibility of it working on any of the alien's defensive tech, when it comes time for the confrontation?

[theearth]

Yep!

[centurian]

So, would fighting the alien not grant an echo? It's not a big deal either way, I'm just curious for REASONS.

[theearth]

It shall!

[hawaiianheir]

So, say a certain someone had the ability to turn into wind for short bursts that allowed him to get into and out of places quickly (though obviously long distance travel in this form is still a no-go.) If say, this someone desired to scope out the Thunder Corp building, is there any areas where he could sneak in as the wind and sneak out quickly?

[theearth]

He will find himself hitting an invisible barrier. It feels like jello.

If he attempts to circle the building to find an opening, he will find none, but he may realize the shape of the barrier as a very simple five-petal flower.

[idealofhope]

Would it have been possible to volunteer for the farmhouse at the 1/25 meeting after the snakes showed up? In the interest of disclosure, I ask 'cause Calvin here didn't really have any abilities to speak of (besides a whole lot of money, I guess) until the snakes crashed the party, at which point he echoed back something.

[theearth]

Provided he contacts someone about it, sure! Add him to sheet 2 and include in the notes that he volunteered himself after the meeting because he got an ability then.

There are a lot of spoilers for an anime from 1995 in this comment

[soulsborderline]

So for the snake fight, I'm looking at using a Tier 2 Echo to get Asuka's Evangelion back (and I think Shinji and Rei and maybe Kaworu were looking at something similar. I need to get everyone together on plurk again I guess. In fact you may have already talked to Gingey about this but I am a flaketastic failure and can't see if you did.)

Important facts about this:
-An Evangelion is a fucking huge cybernetic mecha. The show's scale is wonky but I usually throw out 40 meters or 120-130 feet as an approximation
-Most Evas rely on external power sources of a size that don't really exist in Locke City without jury-rigging something directly into the city power grid. Under combat conditions, an Evangelion can run for exactly five minutes on battery power before shutting down. External generators - even basic emergency ones - can be used to recharge these batteries, but it takes several hours.
-There's also a few other logistical concerns besides size and power, such as the unique breathable liquid the pilots sit in while piloting, LCL. It tends to get dirty with people sweating and crying and screaming and whatnot, and there's not really a way to replace it in this universe. Filtration is probably doable though.
-Unit 02 (Asuka's) contains at least part of a human soul, Unit 01 (Shinji's) contains a whole one, and Unit 00 (Rei's) is heavily implied to also contain one although canon is unclear on whose it is. I have no idea about Mark 06 or Unit 13, which are the only other ones applicable to our current cast. These are extremely important to the pilot interface since an Evangelion is normally a soulless cloned monster with mechanical bits stuck in and is less than enthusiastic about a human pilot. I...really don't know how this affects normal Echo rules, although if it helps I don't honestly think there's enough canon information to app the people whose souls are in there (Shinji's mom, Asuka's mom, and probably either Naoko Akagi or the original Rei Ayanami).

Anyway, just wanted to make sure you had the logistical concerns on hand well before I asked for an Evangelion as an Echo. The machine's actual capabilities are in Asuka's application.

I just realized this wasn't really in the form of a question, although I guess "given all the information, can I Echo Request an Eva and what will be the consequences" is a very good one.

tl;dr in response to your tl;dr

[reapsthewind]

So okay.

Chris Starsky & Benjamin Ratchet have the know-how to create energon, a highly compressed form of energy which is used to power Transformers. This MIGHT be usable to power an Evangelion. However, at the moment, we can't create very much of it -- Chris can basically make enough on a daily basis to keep her cybernetic parts functioning normally. She keeps a stockpile of it because running her weapons or flight powers takes exponentially more energy, to the point that she can't quite fly fully and not for long periods (it's more like rocket jumping with controlled falling right now) and she can't use her guns while using her rockets.

/deep breath

Even in the TF canon, it takes a shitting fuckton of energy to make enough energon to feed Transformers, apparently! The Great War was violent and horrible enough that it actually drained their planet entirely of natural resources with which to make it (and apparently solar power was just not going to cut it, or maybe their sun blew up, we don't know). On Earth, there's lots of energy resources, but pretty much every damned episode was about the Decepticons attacking some large energy source to try to get enough power to start the war again, with the Autobots going HEY DON'T DO THAT, DICKS. This includes stuff like attacking hydroelectric power plants, solar plants, oil refineries, weird macguffiny energy sources like magic rubies (???) and at one point draining the core of the planet which for some reason caused mass climate change (??????)

However, the Decepticons were still able to get enough energy that they were able to function normally. So... I guess what i'm saying is that if we can find a power source, we might be able to get enough juice for like... fifteen minutes of operation or something.

Re: There are a lot of spoilers for an anime from 1995 in this comment

[theearth]

An Eva would be its own tier 2 Echo. The soul would be an additional tier 1. What you could do is have the Eva appear around Asuka such that she's automatically in the entry plug, which could then prompt a canon recurrence Echo (either tier 1 or tier 2, keeping in mind that Wise Snake grants its own tier 2 in addition to that month's tier 2) wherein she receives the unit's soul (and something else related to piloting if it's a tier 2). We're following the logic that the soul is necessary to pilot the Eva, thus being in the entry plug is enough of a canon recurrence to Echo back the soul.

For the future, you could Echo back batteries (if there's more than one used in canon for that unit) as their own tier 2s. If the batteries are shared, then you could make a case for Echoing them back while keeping in mind that characters cannot Echo back multiple copies of a single thing. So if Shinji and Asuka both used battery A and Asuka Echoes it back, then Shinji cannot regain battery A.

[drama8om8]

While Ellie isn't seen as Thunder Corp's best and brightest employee since the whole pink-goop-getting-stolen incident, she's been a good girl ever since! Would she be likely to get any access to/be assigned to guard the new building at any point? IF SO: anything worthy of note?

(If not that's obvs fine I'm just checking on the off-chance and stuff)

[theearth]

She can be assigned to guard the new building! At the beginning of each shift, security guards will be given a single flower-shaped gummy. They'll need to eat it to get past the invisible jello-like barrier encompassing the compound. It will last them the duration of their shift plus ten minutes. If they fail to leave the compound before the effects of the gummy wear off, their immunity to the jello barrier will fail. They'll get stuck and suffocate.

Not much is accessible to the security guards. They'll see white, mechanical doors with keypads on them, though.

EDIT: Also there are some areas that smell like roses.

[pianistofraielin]

What is the blast radius on the snakes?

I'm trying to figure out the best way to avoid totaling Ravi's car because AS HILARIOUS AS THAT MIGHT BE I'd rather the Proudnapping aftermath actually focus on Proud's death and not Ravi's shitty crisis priorities.

[theearth]

Apologies for the late reply! Three of the snakes were able to level enough of the Dead District for Thunder Corp to build their compound (with the damage described as "entire blocks of buildings"), so if all six snakes are present and explode, you're looking at double the amount of damage plus the damage from Marisa's Master Spark.

This can be avoided by Proud dying immediately after Master Spark hits. Once Proud is dead, the statues will deactivate; they will not explode.

[detectivetroll]

...so wow this is definitely a question I should have thought to ask earlier, but if a modified cop gets himself checked out by a medical professional (vitals, blood tests, x-rays, etc., just to cover all the bases), would anything unusual show up? In the same vein, if he got magically healed, would there be any noticeable differences to the healer?

[theearth]

That depends on the modification. In Nick's case, since his modification didn't alter any of his physiology, nothing unusual will show up.

[unelven]

I have, because of this muse being haughty and all that jazz, an idea. Please feel free to shoot it down mods, because if it can't work I have a fallback.

Really this is mostly directed to the mods, but if anyone else has ideas please, feel free to jump in.

Teagan runs an environmentally sustainable urban planning firm. He's unhappy that Thundercorp bought out the dead district when he couldn't. He's considering approaching them to propose a joint venture between companies. He's new to the Numbers Club so he doesn't quite get HOW DANGEROUS THEY ARE TO HIM YET. this could end super super fucking badly and be a great echo opportunity.

Can anything be done with this? If not, Gabriel can dissuade him from trying (that would be the fallback).

[theearth]

Short answer: potentially yes!

Long answer: after some thought, we think Teagan's joint venture with Thunder Corp would be most interesting after Wise Snake has awakened. Many buildings will be destroyed; entire blocks will likely need to be rebuilt. That would be a very good time for Teagan to extend the offer.