hexarchate_rpg | Chapter 2.2

yhlee posting in

[Sorry I didn't get this out earlier, y'all. Happy summer/winter holidays!]

The Cantata emerges from the rift on an approach to the Lanterner stronghold called Autumn Pyre. The Cantata hums very quietly to reassure the mothlings, then falls silent; it's been impressed on the Cantata that discretion will be necessary. For their part, the mothlings have free run of an enclosure with Fluffy the Vraselian pseudo-dragon, and both mothlings and dragonet seem to be entertaining each other with games of tag and hide-and-seek. They are happy to play with any humans who stop by, as well.

Scan reveals that Autumn Pyre is heavily fortified by the standards of the day, mostly with invariant weapons like railguns and missiles. A few dozen moths are already docked there, and several more are patrolling the area. Two small Lanterner patrol moths, nearly identical, veer lazily toward the Cantata.

Patrol moth #1 hails the Cantata in several different languages, including the high language. For its part, it transmits the Lanterner emblem--a stylized yellow lantern against a blue background--and the speaker is requesting that you halt and identify yourselves. "This is the Lanterner Federacy in the year 852," the speaker goes on, "under the benevolent rule of the Honorable Aramis kae Pharon. Are you human? What are your hospitality requirements?"

[Feel free to take advantage of the between-moves planning post if you need to, and to make whatever preparations, including rearranging the Cantata's variable layout, you deem necessary.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

zuhrovet

Sasha instructs the pilot to halt, as requested. [

slybrarian, I have a feeling that right now Alaric and Remi are the closest thing we have to qualified moth pilots. Do you want to drive, or let Remi do it?]

Through the grid, she tells Reshad, "Go ahead and hail them when you're ready. You can tell them we're looking for Vel Vissen." [We need another fake ship name, this one slightly piratical! Hornet Waltz? Shard of Swarms? Something to do with the fact that wasps drum on their bodies when they locate food? We can start another column on the table of pseudonyms once we pick something.]

Sasha herself starts analyzing the web of signals between moths and the stronghold. She checks her access to the local lattice, and starts downloading news and entertainments, along with a list of moths in port if she can get one.

From:

yhlee

Most of the local news is in a mix of Lanterner languages, with high language subtitles or dub tracks, and vice versa. A lot of signal traffic recently appears to be devoted to discussing the rifts and their implications for Lanterner security and the local balance of power, with flamewars occurring even as we speak on discussion boards (Space Reddit, basically). The local Lanterner communications department has a designated representative who chimes in now and then, and encourages free debate, which is...different from what h*archate practice would be.

There's also a popular e-sports channel featuring a multiplayer strategy game called Prison & Pangolins Online; a long-running melodrama about Lanterner aristocrats, their political maneuverings, and their fashion choices; and an extremely well-regarded "safaris around the galaxy" show featuring Teveris kae Rapha, who in this time period seems to be a stout-hearted interplanetary traveler who records their encounters with wildlife on many worlds.

Sasha can get a list of visiting moths in port and their names; the Catastrophe Axe is among them, along with six other moths that will be named if/when they become relevant. For now, they're Flute's Swarm #2-7 (Catastrophe Axe is #1). The station is being coy about the exact identities of the Lanterner military moths in port, presumably for security reasons.

From:

zuhrovet

Sasha messages Iawa, including a link to the message boards:

take a look at the local chatter, theres lots of stuff about rifts. check if anyone seems 2 knowledgeable/sounds like active military

She messages Sulen:

FYI, Flute & her ships are at the stronghold. I will message her in a few minutes. Not planning to make a good impression.

She starts sharing files of her own, mostly mods and avatars for Prisons & Pangolins Online in a range of styles, some consciously retro, some from later in the ninth century. She checks on what styles of fitness trackers are currently popular (are they separate devices? embedded in jewelry? installed as an app?) and surveys the gyms, bars, and brothels near the docks.

From:

yhlee

[Fitness trackers: currently jewelry versions are all the rage. The Lanterners have a whole set of mystical associations with different gemstones, which are highly divergent from the default heptarchate versions (largely aligned with faction colors); this can sometimes lead to hilarious cultural missteps and innuendo.

There are separate gyms for Lanterners and visitors due to some kind of notion of ritual purity that gets triggered by exercise but, strangely, not by brothels. Bars and brothels near the docks are open to anyone who has station clearance. One of the bars appears to cater to...that can't be right. Non-humans?

As for the brothels, Lanterner attitudes toward sex work are pretty similar to the heptarchate's: it's legal, but they tax it for the revenue and regulate it for health and safety reasons. The brothels are doing a roaring business right now because exploring different time periods'/places' sexual kinks and customs is all the rage right now. There's even an underground newsletter about it.]

From:

zuhrovet

One of the perks of rank is that, though Sasha has turned a brilliant wedding-dress red by acquiring too much information about cultural differences, she's in an office by herself and nobody can see her. You would think fucking modesty was a reasonable custom, and yet, somehow, it never gets mentioned.

She checks the definition of "non-human"; she'd like to think this means aliens, but in her experience it usually means ordinary people with shitty legal representation. Then she goes back to digging up information about fitness-tracker jewelry. She's interested in the software for the most common brands. She also looks for bars, brothels, or Lanterner gyms with an obvious military clientele; she's willing to spend a little bit of advertising money for more information on customer profiles.

From:

yhlee

"Non-human" appears to include ordinary people with shitty legal representation and "special environmental needs" sentients, some of whom may have human ancestry but have been modded to survive, say, underwater or in otherwise hostile-to-baseline-human environments.

The dominant software for fitness trackers is actually open source.

There's one brothel that caters particularly to the military, called The Knife Hand. Also a gym, which is inspiringly called Training Hall #3, and two bars, The Blessings of Beer and The Well-Earned Hangover. The former seems to attract officer types, the latter the grunts.

From:

zuhrovet

[What sorts of social options do the fitness trackers have? Can you have fitness buddies? Is there a central forum where people can challenge each other, post fitness goals and high scores, etc.?]

From:

yhlee

[Can I defer the technical fitness tracker bits to you or any other players who want to chime in? The problem is that while I have now owned a fitness tracker for a few weeks, I literally do not use its networked functions and don't know how they work, let alone security/privacy implications. I use mine as a step counter and watch; that's it.]

From:

zuhrovet

[Sure--just tell me if you want to complicate things. I'm riffing on the thing where Runkeeper enabled mapping of secret military bases, for what that's worth.]

Sasha creates a fitness-buddy bot, in the persona of a tavernkeeper from Prisons & Pangolins Online. If you friend this bot, it will analyze your workout routines, tell you what character class you are most suited for (the wizard option is one of the most challenging, as it requires good hand-eye coordination and very delicate timing), and congratulate you as you "level up". Like human fitness friends who might wish to join you at the gym, the bot also gains access to your location. She pays to advertise the bot to people visiting the military gyms she has identified, and embeds a few ads in the mods she's already sharing. She'll also straight-up add it as a friend on some people's accounts, if she can identify a vulnerability in the tracker code that lets her do that. After enough people have friended her bot, it will be a popular friend that's recommended to others organically.

From:

yhlee

[This will work well enough; no complications at this time, other than the fact that someone comes up with a bot that has a very similar "misspelling" name and is using it to advertise one of the brothels.]

From:

zuhrovet

This was inevitable; the heptarchate thinks sex is one of the Seven Noble Exercises, and there's no reason Sasha should have expected the Lanterners to be more discreet. She makes a copy of the copy to advertise another brothel, since if everyone's going to try this she might as well have the advantage of her own tracking code, and tries very hard not to look at any of the associated images.

From:

venndaai

Sulen messages back,

are you in your office? i can be there for information on this time period/a second pair of eyes, if that would be of use

From:

zuhrovet

Sasha responds, "I am. Will call if I need you."

From:

hoardingpearls

Research first, and then Reshad spends some time trying to fab something appropriate to a visitor. Her intended set of signals is a bit of a mashup: she has stones visible in a fitness tracker wristband and on the contacts of a flashy, but out of date, headset; she asks Sasha to insert a location tracker into both of those in anticipation of face-to-face work, and invites her to use them as vectors for other, less savory software if such things are needed.

Overall, she wants to look like a foreigner, but one who isn't totally ignorant of Lanterner culture. She tries to signal the kind of overblown 'I Am Dangerous!' common to the less refined sort of mercenary.

She opens hailing with a casual posture, affecting an accent close to a good-natured yokel on the show about the Lanterner aristocrats, and asks for Vel Vissen.

From:

zuhrovet

If the patrol moths do not manifest sudden signs of hostility, Sasha sends a message to the Catastrophe Axe. The cleartext reads, simply, "Made it." The attachment, encrypted according to standard rebellion protocols, says:

zuhrovet sikandaret (vauri in this timeline) reporting on the wasp (symphony of bees in this timeline). sorry were late. whats going on.

From:

yhlee

Patrol moth #1 responds to Reshad: "Vel Vissen is an honored guest of the station," a Lanterner woman responds in the high language. "Please register with the station if you wish to join her in person." She also sends a list of rules that visitors to the station's vicinity are required to honor, fairly obvious stuff like "don't blow shit up unless you are cleared to blow shit up."

The patrol moths do not manifest sudden signs of hostility. The message does not appear to provoke any response.

After several moments, the Catastrophe Axe responds:

welcome vauri. were gathering intel on military forces in this region. brief you and your crew in person. you should dock.

From:

zuhrovet

Sasha responds, "will do," copying Reshad and Sulen, starts the station registration process [unless it falls into the category of "tedious paperwork" that Sulen has volunteered for], and instructs Alaric to head toward the station. She monitors message traffic between the other rebellion ships as well as she can at a distance.

[How long will it take to dock? Are we allowed to bring any sort of weapons onto the station?]

From:

yhlee

The station paperwork looks pretty routine and should not pose any great difficulty; it also optionally asks for allergies/medical notes and, non-optionally, for environmental considerations (in case one is a methane-breather and needs accommodations).

The rebellion ships are conferring at a low hum in standard rebellion encryption. Notably, nobody mentions Candle Arc, Jedao, or Hellspin unless they are doing so in some kind of code (not cipher).

[It should only take an hour or so to dock. The captain and their single designated lieutenant are allowed to bring on "reasonable" personal arms as a mark of their status, e.g. combat knife, sword, handgun; rocket-launchers, grenades, flamethrowers, not so much. No one else will be permitted to bring a weapon bigger than a spork. Note that the Lanterners have no way of checking who Sasha's "real" second-in-command is and are unlikely to care if she just designates someone who knows how to use a gun.]

From:

zuhrovet

Sasha reads up on station safety procedures while she's waiting for her fitness bot to make friends.

[Yeah, we're definitely designating Seyli as the lieutenant. If Reshad's combat skills are comparable to or better than Sasha's, we're also designating her as the captain as far as the Lanterners are concerned, and letting Sasha pose as a technical expert.]

From:

kese_seyli

[Seyli's is down for this role, would take their favorite gun with them. Are we doing a merc uniform of any kind or just doing a motley crew of pirates?]

Edited Date: 2018-12-27 05:11 pm (UTC)

From:

zuhrovet

[Well, Sasha's definitely not going to insist on uniforms for anyone, because that would entail having an opinion about fashion other than "it exists to oppress me". Others are welcome to intervene!]

From:

kese_seyli

[Seyli suggests one*, then, if we want to appear more organized and put together. But notes that if we don't, then whatever we want to wear would make us look more like pirates who play fast and loose.

*A non Andan blue (Navy?) and black, if that doesn't overlap with any of the Lanterner uniforms]]

From:

yhlee

[If you want navy blue and black, that's fine by me and shouldn't overlap with the Lanterner uniforms unless someone else suggests a complication.]

From:

zuhrovet

"I intend us to look like a fucking mess," Sasha tells Seyli. "My life will be a lot easier if Flute thinks we're useless. But there's no reason you shouldn't have a uniform, if you want one. You can poke around the military bars and see if anybody's talking."

[Navy and pewter gray would have better contrast, or at least, that's why it constitutes two-thirds of my wardrobe.]