Battle Not With Monsters

Battle Not With Monsters
Part of The Name of Heaven
Date 2085-05-18 GM jit Location Matrix (EvoGrid) Status Threat Level: High
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven	The World Tree Trio	The Holy Order of Beast Hunters	Cathode and Their Beasts
Caliban	Br34ker chiTIN b0z0	Foundation Entities	Foundation Entities
Casualties and losses
N/A	The Host of the World Tree Trio Has Been Destroyed, and b0z0 Has Been Touched by Dissonance (RIP b0z0)	Caliban Has Ended the World	Cathode Has Refused the Preservation of Their History, and Caliban Has Ended the World

Summary

"Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin." -Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

"They were trying to run, trying to hide. But the rock would not hide them; the dead tree gave no shelter." -Stephen King, Carrie

Background

Cecelia Cross, like many technomancers, is keeping tabs on Heaven. Unlike many technomancers, however, she does not hold delusions like "utopia" so dear. Heaven is a curiosity to be tracked and manipulated, and its Heavenseekers the whetstone by which promising tools might become sharp.

And Caliban is a very promising tool.

The Meet

Cecelia Cross invites Caliban in for a chat at one of her personal hosts. "Invites," however, is a bit of a misnomer - Cecelia instructs Caliban to meet her at one of her personal hosts, and forces her to find her own way in. Caliban busts down the large wooden doors of the woman's gothic castle, and as she does, Cecelia pauses a large, floating, digital clock just beside her. It is the time, in minutes and seconds, between her invitation and Caliban's arrival.

She tells Caliban that she can do better.

The job is simple. There is a host, and she would like its data destroyed. She provides a location - a Rating Five host on the EvoGrid - and instructions to clear the archive and destroy the host if she would like. Caliban does not press too deeply for details, though learns that the host's entrance is a beneath a wide and shady tree in a public park on the grid.

As Cecelia's fractured tool leaves her host, the timer clicks, resets, and begins counting up once again.

The Plan

Caliban smokes a lot of red mescaline, like an irresponsible amount, pours herself an ice bath for her body to lie in while she is gone, and descends into the depths of the EvoGrid. From the inside of a world-sized dodecahedron, she navigates toward the public park, strips bark and bench to the quick of their code by sight alone, and determines that a host is running silent. Its entrance - a rabbit's burrow, tucked beneath a tree. The fractured beast steps forward, and to the general anxiety and fright of those who might be enjoying the sculpting at this late hour, she begins to dig.

She gains her MARK by tearing it apart. Her clawed hands plunge into moist earth and pile its cool flesh to the side, until that hole is wide enough, and deep enough, for her to slip into the void beyond - she falls, so much like Alice, into a nightmarish wonderland.

The Host of the World Tree Trio

The fields are vast and green and rolling with gentle breeze, flat save for a vast, mountainous oak at the very center of the host. Its trunk is carved into a massive, spiraling staircase marching ever upward toward its peak, where its living wood grows naturally into an intricate belltower, as one might find on a church.

Two personas chat casually at the base of the stairway - a bugman, chromatically chitinous, whose carapace gleams in rainbow hues, and a bright and colorful harlequinn jester, face painted and outfit devilishly dapper. A comically cartoonish ladybug perches on the bugman chiTIN's shoulder. The two of them wonder where their companion br34ker might be, and discuss aloud their leads toward finding the Matrix's own legendary Heaven.

Caliban does not know or care what they're talking about. Sharp eyes catch a glint of the underpinnings of the host, datatrails leading somewhere deeper, darker, and ever more sinister than this lying facade. Her broken steps trudge carefully past the two of them to ascend the stairway to the belltower, and after a lengthy climb, she finds herself in a casual lounge. Bookshelves line the walls, and wide windows the ceiling and upper rafters. She peruses the stac, running a grating hand along all the books' even little spines, and finally touches one that screams at her presence.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame. She pulls, and the bookcase swings open to reveal a hallway, and an elevator, and a single button pointing down.

She descends, as she has so often before, into the belly of the beast.

The Foundation, and Blood Born of Lies

Caliban awakens as a Hunter. Gritty cobblestone and distant flame and the smell of fresh blood fill her senses. A body, freshly maimed, lies just a few yards to her side, gutted and spilled and gently pooling through the crevices of the alley. Screams and clashing blades and hideous, crunchy, bestial 8-bit cries.

Emerging from the alley and gauging her surroundings, she comes to a crossroads where a small squadron of hardy men and women in combat leathers intersect her path. They greet her from mounted horseback, ask of her name, and question her presence without a partner. She informs them that they were maimed and dead, and they console her for her loss.

The leader, a man who describes himself as a captain of the Holy Order, tells Caliban that it is dangerous to be out alone, and to follow them back to the tower at the center of this city to regroup and rest and tell her story. The Cardinal will be speaking as well, and it will be nourishment for body and soul alike. She reluctantly agrees, for the sake of not yet breaking the paradigm before it can be reckoned. For a pittance, the group does grant her a small boon - each and every guard themselves represents the security node.

They are led through bloody cobblestone streets to the center of the city, a tower of Babel yet incomplete, and built atop the massive stump of a long dead tree. In the sky above, another Yggdrasil, opposite and verdant, hangs upside down. The great walls beyond the city block all other view of the sky.

The guard captain explains that the tyranny of the Great Tree had been quelled by the ingenuity of Man, but that its children have lashed out ever since. The distorted cries of the beasts these hunters are tasked to defeat come from broken and half-dead electronics cased in bone and vine and ambulant decay. The Cardinal Strith will speak on speak on the matter, as he frequently does, to boost morale, to assure his followers that all is well and that the tower, soon to be completed, will topple the great tree above and rob the creatures of any strength they may yet have.

As they step across a steady foot bridge, across the great stump, and into the gothic cathedral that is the base of this tower of Babel, they enter in the midst of the Cardinal's sermon. Caliban parts ways with the broader group, and as his sermon ends and his congregation rises, she steps to his altar, and as he descends and brushes the hands of those crowded near before passing by, she feigns reverence to join them. She expects the Master Node, her gateway to the Foundation.

It is, instead, the Slave.

The nature of this world becomes a little more clear to her. She ascends the spiral stairwell all the way to the skyward tip of this pillar, and descends into its library. Again, she finds no node that may be useful, but instead the history of this world as told by the man who would be God. The great Yggdrasil once sprouted from the Earth, and its mirror the sky above. The two met betwixt those disparate worlds to bind them as one, their branches twirled as double-helix. In this world, humanity lived under tyranny, shaded from the light above. Its creatures, its birds and squirrels and others, might ascend above and beyond the shaded bough, and mankind was denied the full breadth of such divine light, oppressed and left meager scraps that fall between the leaves.

They cut the tree, and built their city atop its corpse, and built their walls to protect from the tempestuous and dying world beyond. As its corpse decays, so too did the sky run red and streets run black. Creatures, once vibrant, fell to earth, shut down, and decayed, and rose once again entangled with wire and leaf. The wrath of a false divine in its death throes, assures the text. The job, unfinished, yet needs kill the great tree of the sky as well, Yggdrasil's hideous mirror. Cardinal Strith's divine imperative will ensure humanity's place among the clouds.

She is unimpressed.

Caliban descends and encounters several Hunters on her way, and after brief conversation, she gleans that they are to leave on patrol, and requests to join them. Brief conversation reveals a known cesspool from which the hybrid creatures emerge, a paved over entrance to the ancient underground embedded in the city walls. With the intent to split away and investigate further, she embarks unto the night.

The Foundation, and Beasts Born of Grief

They are beset in the bloody night by monsters. Horrific skeletons of wolves whose vocalizations warp and pop from ancient speakers bound in place by plant matter, or inhuman raptors whose wings are stitched closed by woven grass. The other hunters drop, one-by-one, as their expedition finds intelligent and coordinated packs ambushing them at every turn of their journey. Caliban, ascending a wall to find access to the rooftops away from such creatures, nonetheless must contend with those beasts above, and brings them without mercy to the Earth with her blade.

By the time she finds the city's border, its insurmountable wall, she is all that remains.

She sets about untangling the thick and heavy chains keeping this entryway boarded and shut - she is a skilled hacker not just in strength but in elegance and diligence, and slips her code effortlessly through each and every tumbler she must pick.

As the last one clicks, and as her focus on her project is at its peak, a voice calls to her from behind.

"You're not br34ker."

The words pop with static. She turns, and finds a great and chitinous beast, hollow were it not filled to dripping with mulch, regarding her poorly. A harlequinn jester leans casually against a bit of masonry.

They have words, and the duo find, to their surprise, that she is like them, though writing and enflamed and agonized, and they, reluctantly, agree to take her to see Cathode.

Cathode is, by their word, a keeper of an ancient and natural good. He is guard, protector, and mentor to those like them, whose code slips more deeply into the Matrix than most - at least while they are in this world. b0z0 takes such reverence more seriously than the bug man, who only regards her coldly. However, with a soft spot for his friend, he acquiesces.

Descent into the tunnels swiftly shifts away from the city's cobblestone masonry. Caliban finds old and defunct cabling strewn among the rafters, connecting what might once have been power to what might once have been lamps overhead. Several still flicker, the only light they have. chiTIN reaffirms that he believes this is a bad idea, though b0z0 is convinced she will understand once she sees.

As technology grows thicker and wild as underbrush, they find themselves in a large round chamber. Several halls spoke from this central point, and in its center, fretting over an old cathode-ray-tube monitor, is an androgynous figure in a thick red cloak caked in dust. They turn to Caliban, and they rise, and they smile, for she is one of them. A child of the world before.

Caliban says she is here to preserve their world. Cathode offers warmly to explain their entire history, as she is entitled to as one of them, and pulls a floppy disk from his robes. As Caliban touches it, she receives the true history of this place, and the knowledge that this simple little square is the Foundation's true Archive node.

The world before was utopian, where technolgoy flourished and information flew freely as rays of the sun. Creatures, ascended by such knowledge, lived alongside human beings. This place flourished with those like them, those shaman aligned and in-tune with Earth both refined and raw, to the great jealousy of those who might reject such things. They were slaughtered, their utopia dashed, and where those that did not build it sought to claim utopia for themselves, instead the world bled for want of its heart.

Caliban seeks to copy this information to her comm. She, as a mercy, seeks to spare this world its legacy before dashing it to nothing. And Cathode, perhaps rightfully, rips a cyberized hand to her wrist. Their expression, once kindly, rings hollow, and furious, upon understanding what may lay underneath.

This beautiful blond man tells her that she is a deceiver, that she herself has been deceived. That she wears their clothes and speaks their tongue but is not of them. She sides with oppressors. Devils. Villains. Evil itself. She sells away and slaughters all those she might call siblings.

As he grips her, she realizes she has found the true Master Node.

Caliban, shortly, tells Cathode that he spurns her kindness. At the very least, she says, she wonders if they would like their story to be told when they're gone, and as she does, the paradigm flips. What meager lights exist shut off, and each and every one of them, though they may have been broken before, return to life with a deep and imposing red hue. Caliban, unphased, wraps her terrible hands around Cathode's throat.

The host betrays her. Creatures lunge from shadows, vines move and seek to grip her ankles, mulch all around her erupts in flame as those power cables split and spark. The duo that had escorted her there blink briefly in disbelief as they too realize her intent, and swiftly lunge into action. chiTIN barrels through flame to beat futilely against her firewall, while b0z0 juggles knives and pitches them impotently at her back. She side-steps, or watches them shrug off of her leathers. The beasts clinging to her ankles, though painful, drawing blood and derezzing code, do not pose a strong enough threat. Cathode, reaching up to her eyes, tells her she is a traitor. The technomancers, helpless, shed tears and beg her mercy.

She spares only a moment to glare back at them. Through the flames, through the dimmed lights in her eyes, it is Human Malice that answers them. b0z0, so reverent, looks clearly beyond, sees the depths of Hell. His eyes shatter like glass.

And as though puppeteered, he slowly, horrifically, smiles.

The world slips away.

Aftermath

She is dumped without ceremony back into her flesh. Her ice bath, half-melted, stirs along with her as she awakens. She climbs weakly from its waters nursing her wounds, and finds her way to her comm. Via text, she tells Cecelia Cross that the job is done, and that the host is no more.

She replies with a trid of her stopwatch. She tells Caliban that she can still do better.

Great and terrible Caliban shatters the tiles of her walls with her fist. She bleeds, and she cries.

This run directly precedes RIP Bozo.

Rewards

Rewards for "Battle Not With Monsters" (High, 15 RVP)

• 14k Nuyen (7 RVP)
• 6 CDP (2 RVP + Base)
• 5 Karma (5 RVP)
• 1k Nuyen + 1 CDP (1 RVP)

Game Quotes

Amusing quote from game.

Player After Action Reports (AARs)

Caliban

Sycophants of a bl-blind God. Th-They g-got what they d-deserve, they sh-should be glad I r-raised them fr-from their ignorance, they sh-should be thankful that I pr-proved their w-ways folly.

I c-can't ... they d-didn't deserv-

<The screech of corrupted data is like nails on a chalkboard>

Cecilia. She p-put me up t-to this. Testing m-me like an animal, l-like a l-lab rat. She d-did this. It w-was her. I ...

...

N-No. I am a monster. Th-This is wh-what a monster is and this is wh-what a monster d-does. Don't h-hide. Don't r-regret.

Don't cr-cry.

Everything w-will be as it sh-should be. You w-will make it s-so. You h-have to.