Saturday12

Max is going to Valhalla.

• Hoenir knows the truth about Alfadir, but has been sworn to secrecy. Other than that, he will share all he knows about the Mercury Incident. He also shares how Bilskirnir (the royals’ space station) was destroyed by McLean’s experiment, and how he was not on board at the time.
• The royals refer to the heart trees as "Yggdrasil."
• Vadril’s body was destroyed, taken by the Void, with just his soul shunted into Eddie. However, Cassenti learned how to draw certain things out of the Void (see below). She can recover Vadril’s body – except that she has more important things on her hands. However, Cail and Aben assisted with those experiments. If either live, they can help extract Vadril’s consciousness from Eddie.
• Meanwhile, inside Eddie, Vadril is in awe of the structure, and how Eddie’s halfling soul interacts with the machine. It inspires him: Eddie could form the core of the Deus Ex Machina.
• Until Vadril can be successfully extracted, he is able to use Eddie’s comm systems to send digital messages from Eddie with his signature. (In other words, he can still talk to everyone.)

Adana’s Void theory:

• Things put into the void have a spacetime vector that’s perpendicular to ours
• Which means they appear (and are) frozen to us, but in actuality are merely traveling through time in another dimension that we are incapable of experiencing
• Thus, she theorizes that if the Void eats everything, then effectively nothing will have changed; she posits that the Void causes "total spatio-temporal inversion"
• She has no plan yet, but is still working on it; she is even more against the Caretaker’s plan now, since the Void does not necessarily entail destruction

In anger stage, DEE attacks Pax Artificium and the Lunar Great Forest.

• His apparent goal is to destroy the elves.
• His actual goal is to torture the Caretaker, since he values his consciousness to be more on its level than that of the humanoid creatures.
• He is accomplishing the goal by harming Luna, who he knows is the major thing the Caretaker currently cares about.
• DEE would have taken Cain to use as a weapon (since Cain’s body is invulnerable), but he was concerned about Cain’s backlash being used against him (making miller2 more difficult), so he ordered the droid to jettison Cain along with everything else.

Techniques:

• Start with information warfare: screw with information in Pax Artificium, resulting in a riot:
  • An anti-Magitech (anti-mystic) protest is imminent, and DEE, being an opportunist, forged communications to rile up anti-mystic sentiment to encourage more people to attend
  • He also starts rumors that the protest is going to turn violent among the police force and Magitech
  • Magitech responds overly harshly, sending in androids and even some robotic tanks
  • DEE hacks the androids and the tanks and starts blowing shit up
• Meanwhile, he is also using miller2 to steal antimatter from the city’s reactor to fuel his assault. The city is suffering from power failures while under attack.
• DEE begins using miller2 to transport nuclear devices into Displacement-warded areas, killing Anat Cassenti while she is giving a press conference.
• Of course, the entire time he is using phasing, cloaking and shields to protect himself from weapons fire and other countermeasures.
• He stages an assault on the Magitech HQ building as a diversion, while actually targeting the heart tree.

Results:

• The Magitech HQ building is destroyed.
  • The werewolf "Meera" is killed – at least for now; the cycle of the moon could dictate her regeneration.
  • Mordred is awakened.
• Sartus Morningdew and Benek Tolorin continued to protect Adana and Evan for many years, but grew weaker over the years until one day, they simply ceased to be. But does any of them remain?
• Aben, Cail and Adana learn that DEE has destroyed the ships they sent after him, and killed Seth.
• Adana alone guesses DEE’s true purpose and teleports herself to the tree, to stop him. He nails her to the tree with rail guns (wielded by androids he has hacked), and is going to impale her himself with his particle lance, but she disappears at the last moment. He does, however, impale the tree pretty good.
• Is Adana Cassenti killed? Or do Benek and Sartus save her with the last of their strength, by shunting her into cyberspace? Yes, and only Brice can recover her. Benek and Sartus contact Brice with a message, imploring him to help her, since he is the only one left who can do what they could do (step into and out of cyberspace).

How can DEE be stopped?

• Zuul could transfer her consciousness there, sacrificing herself to stop him.
• They could cut off DEE’s antimatter supply so that he runs out of power.
• He could succeed in crippling Luna by destroying the Heart Tree. But in so doing, the Caretaker is able to communicate with him (since his particle lance is embedded in the tree), on a level that overwhelms even DEE, pushing him into the next stage, jealousy.

Other notes:

• If Matt takes lethal damage, the nanites start using trapped souls to heal his wounds. This is a defense mechanism Zuul programmed into them. So Ivan’s soul will be destroyed before Matt dies.

'’Kelsey adds:’’ Other ways to stop DEE could involve ramifications of awakening Mordred or killing "Meera." It seems a shame to just kill Meera off, because she could be an interesting character. Perhaps she won’t stay dead, but come back to life according to the cycle of the moon. Of course, it’s not like we need more plot threads going on.

Another possibility is that Luna could be given and use the Miller 2 algorithm herself, but that would also give her a way to fight back against being merged with Cain. Of course, Cain’s presence fucks with the algorithm, so she probably wouldn’t be able to fight the ritual off completely, but it would change how things unfold.

Cutting off DEE’s antimatter supply (perhaps through the use of destruction magic, Magitech technologies, or some sort of controlled core breach) would be a very good option. Zuul might be able to hack in and sacrifice herself as mentioned, but unless the ramifications of that choice are known or there’s some way for the characters to help and a possibility of failure, then that choice isn’t much fun for the players.

Another possibility, glancing at the plot page, is that Josef Derrota could somehow be involved in a plot to fuck the spacetime around Luna in a way that unphases DEE and makes him vulnerable to retribution. You know, since Josef is kind of made of backlash.

Or, it could be that Magitech has caught Josef and confined him in one of their basement levels. Destroying the Magitech HQ could free Mordred, but reduce Josef to an atomic spray, which causes a cloud where mystic energy causes backlash and also makes DEE vulnerable to getting pwned. The party, of course, will have to aid in the pwning.

'’Curtis’s note: Josef is no longer made of backlash, but I am leaving these raw ideas here, since DEE could be affected by backlash from some other source, conceivably.’’

Then, of course, there’s the very real possibility that the party will have some ideas about how to deal with this. Is there a non-Miller way to phase? Or a non-Miller way to prevent DEE from phasing itself or other things back into the Luna region, effectively trapping it phased so that DEE is rendered impotent?

I’d concentrate on throwing these ideas out to the Saturday group and letting them decide what to do, then rolling with it depending on what they choose. The worst case scenario is that DEE manages to destroy the heart tree on Luna, crippling her, and then his assault kind of peters out, and he goes off to bigger and worse things.