Difference between revisions of "In The Face Of Evil"

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(Created page with "{{Infobox military conflict | conflict = | width = | partof = | image = | caption = | date = hasDate::2080-18-09 | gm = ha...")
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| image      =  
| image      =  
| caption    =  
| caption    =  
| date        =  [[hasDate::2080-18-09]]
| date        =  [[hasDate::2080-11-12]]
| gm          =  [[hasGM::DrBurst]]
| gm          =  [[hasGM::Purkinje]]
| place      = Seattle, the Resonance Realms
| place      = Seattle, Shattered Haven, New Haven
| coordinates =  
| coordinates =  
| map_type    =  
| map_type    =  
Line 18: Line 18:
| map_label  =  
| map_label  =  
| territory  =  
| territory  =  
| result      =  Purkinje submerged, documents proving a flaw in the Governor's system were made public.
| result      =  Night Claws reassembled an entropic sprite and learned Overclocker.
| status      =  
| status      =  
| combatants_header = Factions Involved
| combatants_header = Factions Involved
| combatant1  = [[Purkinje]]
| combatant1  = [[Night Claws - John Holis]]<br>
| combatant2  = [[Horizon]]<br>
Night King<br>
x_X_Troll_U_4_Days_X_x
Night Knight
| casualties1 = AESTHETIC the companion sprite disrupted, may they rest in peace
| combatant2  = Shattered Haven
| casualties2 = 1 heavily injured dissonant technomancer
| casualties1 = Night King (1.0) sacrificed in reassembly.
| casualties2 = 3 entropic fault sprites
| notes      =   
| notes      =   
| campaignbox =  
| campaignbox =  
}}
}}
==Background==
==Background==
The election of Technocrat Potter to the office of Seattle Governor was an upset for the establishment and promised use of matrix polling and analysis to increase decision-making times and extend democracy to the people. Any backlash against the administration's reactionary policies was met with criticism on the basis the policies were supported by the public.
Seeking to expand his power, Night Claws looks for a submersion task to learn the secrets of the Overclocker echo.
 
Purkinje felt something about this was off and was determined to access the resonance realms for the first time in order to find data that could be used to investigate the Governor's policies.
==Meet==
==Meet==
After communing with 01 on the Neo-Tokyo grid, Purkinje contacted her infobroker [[Ashabel]] to ask for where she could find a resonance rift. In exchange for a copy of Purkinje's file on Project Pyro's Seattle integration plan, Ashabel pointed to a rift tucked away in a scarcely-used host nested within the destination host for Horizon in Menlo Park. After getting her fixer to set her up with a bed in Deireadh An Tuarthell hospital, Purkinje headed off to the host.
Night Claws knew that time passes strangely in the resonance realms and called his fixer to arrange a hospital bed so his body could be taken care of while he was away. She got him a spot in a hospital in Tacoma that didn't ask questions, and as soon as he showed his SIN, he was in. They hooked him up to an IV, and he drifted off into the matrix. As he searched for the door to the resonance realms, he spent hours looking at nodes and icons until he found an icon of a door that led somewhere it should not have. Inside was a dungeon, stone and lit with flickering torches. Sprites wandered the halls, and one led him to a ritual chamber with a powerful lich sprite. The sprite analyzed Night Claws' code and told him he had a bug where he couldn't handle the task load as he was trying to prioritize it. He wanted to save everyone, but his processor would only allow him to do so much. The lich opened a portal and told him to seek out a sprite in need.
==Run==
==Run==
The host proved difficult to get into, with Purkinje spending nearly a full day trying to crack it with the help of a registered crack sprite before giving up and deciding it would be easier to scam the host's spider. This proved a much easier solution, as her experience in con artistry combined with her ability to thread Resonance Veil made it simple to pose as a new employee who hadn't been granted access to the host she wanted into.
After entering the portal, Night Claws found himself in Shattered Haven, the remnants of the once-shining city that welcomed all visitors to the resonance realms. Night King told him he had once lived there, and knew where he was supposed to go. Sneaking through streets full of entropic sprite patrols, the two found their way to an apartment building in which a sprite similar to Night King was hiding. Night King explained this was his "brother," which he struggled to explain meant they were part of the same generation of sprites created by a celestial machine learning algorithm to produce better and better fault sprites. Night Claws took a look at Night Knight and saw that its code was infected with dissonance, soon to take it over. Night Knight was aware of its disease and told Night Claws they needed to head for the citadel in the center of the city to find its source code for reassembly.


Purkinje was sucked into the resonance rift once she entered the nested host. She woke up in a medieval fantasy tavern, suddenly feeling stronger, faster and more capable than she'd ever felt before. Her sprites were with her, and together they formed an adventuring party. A nearby mysterious old man in a hooded robe told her what she was looking for was to the west in an evil wizard's tower and that she could follow up on it in a shining, great library to the east.
Outside the apartment complex, there was a commotion in the street. A gang of entropic sprites was attempting to kill a small sprite. Night Claws threaded a powerful Resonance Veil to make it look like a small army of sprites was on his side, and he successfully intimidated the group of entropics into running away before they could kill it. The smaller sprite identified itself as a courier sprite from New Haven, the resonance realm formed by the sprite refugees who fled Shattered Haven when it fell to dissonance. It said that there were a number of spies throughout Shattered Haven, but they struggled to find anything. Night Claws had it pass along a message that he was in Shattered Haven, and it went home.


The party set out west and set eyes upon a dissonant realm that appeared to be full of poison fruits and guarded by twisted abominations. They managed to sneak by the guardians and break their way into the dizzyingly tall tower, where a foul miasma of toxic hatred surrounded them. They began to search, Purkinje bolstered by a form that gave her even greater resilience in this land of death.
Sneaking through the streets again, the team learned that the sprites of Shattered Haven had locked the city down into a sort of martial law. It was filled with color-coded sectors that needed keycards to access them. The outermost layer was protected by green keycards. Night Claws hid near a checkpoint and waited until a sprite attempted to enter. He snooped on its code, then made his own copy. He then sought out a checkpoint with only one guard, then threaded a Resonance Veil on the guard to make it look like his team were all dissonant. This ruse worked, and they were let into the green district.


As soon as Purkinje found the file, the evil wizard of the tower appeared. His name was x_X_Troll_U_4_Days_X_x, and he embodied all the hate that had coalesced here. With a powerful cast of Dissonance Spike, he nearly brought Purkinje to her knees; just then, Purkinje's companion sprite leapt in the way and took the hit, being destroyed instantly. The fading the dissonant technomancer took from threading crippled him, and between Purkinje's hyperthreaded diffusions and buffed firewall, he was unable to mount a successful attack. Purkinje didn't learn much about him, but she quietly took note of his resonance signature before escaping with her crack sprite and the file she was after.
The green district was overflowing with entropic sprites going about their inscrutable business in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic city. The checkpoints were harder to crack here, so Night Claws found a free sprite and attempted to negotiate with it. The sprite accepted his lie that he was a dissonant technomancer doing the work of someone deeper in the city, but then gave him an extensive form to fill out if he wanted his card upgraded to yellow clearance. He bribed the sprite by "providing the contact info for a technomancer," which was just himself. The sprite accepted this in trade for an immediate upgrade.


The trip to the great library was less eventful, but it was a welcome contrast to the chaos and despair of the dissonant realm. Purkinje had found the Archive, a place where all files that had been stored on the matrix were found. In exchange for providing a deep scan of the mural depicting the Night of Rage in the hospital, a sprite promised to help her search for the polling data she could cross-reference with the data from the Information Exchange Network she had pulled from the dissonant realm. It took her nine full hours, but eventually she found it.
In the yellow district, he saw that there was an orange-clearance district that would be required to get into the citadel, which itself required red-clearance. Growing tired of the bureaucracy, Night Claws found a public help terminal left over from the pre-war days. It was still functional. It gave him a map of the city, which confirmed his suspicions. He tried to get a map of the city's subterranean infrastructure, but it refused based on his clearance. He called forth his crack sprite to help him hack the terminal, succeeding handily. He tried to get information on the citadel's defenses as well, but the crack sprite was unable to do this. It managed not to set off an alarm, however. Night Claws chose not to push his luck and instead charted a path through the sewers that would lead into the citadel.


In order to leave, Purkinje returned to the bed where she had woken up in the tavern. The old man was still there and congratulated her on completing her quest. He said something about how she'd be "recompiled" one day, but he vanished before she could ask what that meant.
Along the way through the sewers, Night Claws was jumped by a gang of ghoulish fault sprites. They were powerful and very nearly destroyed Night King and Night Knight, and they hurt Night Claws quite a bit as well. Ultimately, they pushed themselves instead of fighting defensively and destroyed the ghoul sprites. Night Claws took the time to rest and heal the sprites with Stitches. After they were ready, they surfaced inside the citadel through a grate in the floor. A giant, horrifying abomination patrolled the vaulted halls. Working together, they barely managed to evade its gaze as they searched for the source code. This lead them to a library in a room full of toxic gas. They took time to search it, fighting through the poison. It sapped them of their health, but ultimately, they were able to find a file that Night Knight recognized as the correct one. The giant abomination almost spotted them on the way out, but fate was on their side. Night Claws took a second to analyze it and found it was a Level 10 entropic fault sprite.
==Aftermath==
==Aftermath==
Purkinje edited a highlight reel of the run that would excise identifying information while explaining that technomancers were not inherently evil, but special people who could do great things for the world locked in a never-ending battle with the powers of dissonance. She attached the polling data and Information Exchange Network files and leaked the full file on popular matrix message boards so it couldn't be traced back to her. The files had secret information hidden for technomancers, directing them to NCL.
After safely exiting the city, Night Claws and the two sprites traveled to New Haven. They met a technoshaman and many sprites who clamored to know what they recovered. Inside was the code to apply Overclocker to Night Claws' living persona as well as the source code for Night King. Night Claws learned that to reassemble it and purify it of dissonance, one of his registered sprites would have to be lost permanently. Night King volunteered, explaining they were brothers, and it was only right to do so. The two sprites fused into an even greater sprite, fulfilling the directive of their machine learning algorithm to become a Level 8 fault sprite that retained the code from both of them. The new sprite explained that knowing its source code allowed Night Claws to find it any time, as well as register it. He chose to register it right away and thread Sprite Pet so that it would remain with him always like Night King had. He named it Night King as well. On the way out, the lich sprite stopped Night Claws for reassessment. It was satisfied with his progress, having increased his processing power and imparted knowledge of how hard it is to save even one person from the horrors of the matrix.
==Rewards==
==Rewards==
15 karma
==AAR==
=== Purkinje's Report ===
I finally made my way into the resonance realms, and it was more than I could have ever dreamed. It wasn't exactly like the Root or Façadebook I had theorized, but there was a land of dissonance that held all manner of toxic files shared on social media, and another where I felt such peace surrounded by the countless files that were there. The Archive.
My infobroker was nicer than I expected. She's always intimidated me, being so well-connected in the community and all. She pointed me to a resonance rift in a Horizon host that had been built on the architecture of old Facebook. Apparently time works differently there, so she advised me to get an IV. Briar was able to set me up with a hospital bed, and he wasn't too horny about it thankfully. The place was decrepit and understaffed. I can see those donations I made weren't nearly enough. Still though, it was a low-key place to keep my meat body while I was out.


The host Ashabel sent me to was an utter pain in the ass that I spent a whole day bashing my head against. That was my fault though, I should've played it smarter. It turns out spiders are not immune to my charms, and I fooled one into thinking I was an employee looking to get into the history host under the regional destination host. A little form to cover it up and bam, he was none the wiser.
*8 Karma
*8 Karma spent on a Level 8 sprite pet
*The source code for Night King 2.0


Once I got in, everything changed. I was superhuman there. I was strong and fast, and I could cast magic spells. I had an intuitive understanding of so many things. I snuck past guards, picked locks - it was amazing! That dissonant realm was something else, though. I could feel the evil and hatred in the air assaulting my body with every racial slur and hateful shout. But when I fought that dissonant? I was so powerful! I... I lost AESTHETIC, though. They jumped in the way of a big spike so I wouldn't get hurt. I know they're not dead, but... I kinda miss the smug little bastard. The Archive was totally different. Completely opposite. I felt like I could spend a lifetime there, but I had to get the file I was looking for and go.
==Player AAR==


I still don't know the implications of what I released to the public. I hope people get angry. Me, though? I just wanna go back to the resonance. I thought it would bring me peace, but this world feels more fake than ever. Gotta turn that hate outward though, find somewhere good to channel it.
<br />

Latest revision as of 22:11, 12 November 2019

In The Face Of Evil
Date2080-11-12
GMPurkinje
LocationSeattle, Shattered Haven, New Haven
Result Night Claws reassembled an entropic sprite and learned Overclocker.
Factions Involved

Night Claws - John Holis
Night King

Night Knight
Shattered Haven
Casualties and losses
Night King (1.0) sacrificed in reassembly. 3 entropic fault sprites

Background

Seeking to expand his power, Night Claws looks for a submersion task to learn the secrets of the Overclocker echo.

Meet

Night Claws knew that time passes strangely in the resonance realms and called his fixer to arrange a hospital bed so his body could be taken care of while he was away. She got him a spot in a hospital in Tacoma that didn't ask questions, and as soon as he showed his SIN, he was in. They hooked him up to an IV, and he drifted off into the matrix. As he searched for the door to the resonance realms, he spent hours looking at nodes and icons until he found an icon of a door that led somewhere it should not have. Inside was a dungeon, stone and lit with flickering torches. Sprites wandered the halls, and one led him to a ritual chamber with a powerful lich sprite. The sprite analyzed Night Claws' code and told him he had a bug where he couldn't handle the task load as he was trying to prioritize it. He wanted to save everyone, but his processor would only allow him to do so much. The lich opened a portal and told him to seek out a sprite in need.

Run

After entering the portal, Night Claws found himself in Shattered Haven, the remnants of the once-shining city that welcomed all visitors to the resonance realms. Night King told him he had once lived there, and knew where he was supposed to go. Sneaking through streets full of entropic sprite patrols, the two found their way to an apartment building in which a sprite similar to Night King was hiding. Night King explained this was his "brother," which he struggled to explain meant they were part of the same generation of sprites created by a celestial machine learning algorithm to produce better and better fault sprites. Night Claws took a look at Night Knight and saw that its code was infected with dissonance, soon to take it over. Night Knight was aware of its disease and told Night Claws they needed to head for the citadel in the center of the city to find its source code for reassembly.

Outside the apartment complex, there was a commotion in the street. A gang of entropic sprites was attempting to kill a small sprite. Night Claws threaded a powerful Resonance Veil to make it look like a small army of sprites was on his side, and he successfully intimidated the group of entropics into running away before they could kill it. The smaller sprite identified itself as a courier sprite from New Haven, the resonance realm formed by the sprite refugees who fled Shattered Haven when it fell to dissonance. It said that there were a number of spies throughout Shattered Haven, but they struggled to find anything. Night Claws had it pass along a message that he was in Shattered Haven, and it went home.

Sneaking through the streets again, the team learned that the sprites of Shattered Haven had locked the city down into a sort of martial law. It was filled with color-coded sectors that needed keycards to access them. The outermost layer was protected by green keycards. Night Claws hid near a checkpoint and waited until a sprite attempted to enter. He snooped on its code, then made his own copy. He then sought out a checkpoint with only one guard, then threaded a Resonance Veil on the guard to make it look like his team were all dissonant. This ruse worked, and they were let into the green district.

The green district was overflowing with entropic sprites going about their inscrutable business in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic city. The checkpoints were harder to crack here, so Night Claws found a free sprite and attempted to negotiate with it. The sprite accepted his lie that he was a dissonant technomancer doing the work of someone deeper in the city, but then gave him an extensive form to fill out if he wanted his card upgraded to yellow clearance. He bribed the sprite by "providing the contact info for a technomancer," which was just himself. The sprite accepted this in trade for an immediate upgrade.

In the yellow district, he saw that there was an orange-clearance district that would be required to get into the citadel, which itself required red-clearance. Growing tired of the bureaucracy, Night Claws found a public help terminal left over from the pre-war days. It was still functional. It gave him a map of the city, which confirmed his suspicions. He tried to get a map of the city's subterranean infrastructure, but it refused based on his clearance. He called forth his crack sprite to help him hack the terminal, succeeding handily. He tried to get information on the citadel's defenses as well, but the crack sprite was unable to do this. It managed not to set off an alarm, however. Night Claws chose not to push his luck and instead charted a path through the sewers that would lead into the citadel.

Along the way through the sewers, Night Claws was jumped by a gang of ghoulish fault sprites. They were powerful and very nearly destroyed Night King and Night Knight, and they hurt Night Claws quite a bit as well. Ultimately, they pushed themselves instead of fighting defensively and destroyed the ghoul sprites. Night Claws took the time to rest and heal the sprites with Stitches. After they were ready, they surfaced inside the citadel through a grate in the floor. A giant, horrifying abomination patrolled the vaulted halls. Working together, they barely managed to evade its gaze as they searched for the source code. This lead them to a library in a room full of toxic gas. They took time to search it, fighting through the poison. It sapped them of their health, but ultimately, they were able to find a file that Night Knight recognized as the correct one. The giant abomination almost spotted them on the way out, but fate was on their side. Night Claws took a second to analyze it and found it was a Level 10 entropic fault sprite.

Aftermath

After safely exiting the city, Night Claws and the two sprites traveled to New Haven. They met a technoshaman and many sprites who clamored to know what they recovered. Inside was the code to apply Overclocker to Night Claws' living persona as well as the source code for Night King. Night Claws learned that to reassemble it and purify it of dissonance, one of his registered sprites would have to be lost permanently. Night King volunteered, explaining they were brothers, and it was only right to do so. The two sprites fused into an even greater sprite, fulfilling the directive of their machine learning algorithm to become a Level 8 fault sprite that retained the code from both of them. The new sprite explained that knowing its source code allowed Night Claws to find it any time, as well as register it. He chose to register it right away and thread Sprite Pet so that it would remain with him always like Night King had. He named it Night King as well. On the way out, the lich sprite stopped Night Claws for reassessment. It was satisfied with his progress, having increased his processing power and imparted knowledge of how hard it is to save even one person from the horrors of the matrix.

Rewards

  • 8 Karma
  • 8 Karma spent on a Level 8 sprite pet
  • The source code for Night King 2.0

Player AAR