In The Face Of Evil

In The Face Of Evil
Date 2080-11-12 GM Purkinje Location Seattle, 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