Memitim's Tomb
| Memitim's Tomb | |||||||||
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| Part of The Name of Heaven Part of Dead Gods Stir | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven The Girl in Many Colors | ??? | ||||||||
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Bunny Hop Fennec |
The Host Sculpting of the Tomb Dissonant Sprites Foundation Entities | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| None | Foundation Entities | ||||||||
Summary
God is dead, and we tried to stop them.
Background
Bunny Hop and The Girl in Many Colors get along really great in their mutual pursuit of Heaven. So great, in fact, that when she has a hot tip on a host that might be a way there, she instantly cold calls Bun on a Saturday night, red hat firmly on, while fighting off other hackers and waving away Bhop's half-amused attempts at offering help. She gives Bun a host address, and instructions to check it out, if she's got the time. Trusted friends, of course, may also come - the more Heavenseekers, the better!
The Girl in Many Colors, unfortunately, is swiftly punched in the jaw, a nasty looking data spike, and turns to finish the job. Bunny Hop, simply, says to leave it to her.
The Meet
Bun, knowing the very-likely-Resonant nature of Heaven, turns to one of very few friends she might trust in a situation like this: noted technomancer and local Matrix fox goddess, Fennec, who is, at the moment, not doing so well. After a... successful operation for the DGSE, which is to say, French federal intelligence, they finally appear to have sent the fox home - albeit, of course, too late to salvage her home, on which she is surely delinquent on rent. Or her stream and its tanking subscribership after her extended stay abroad. They sit joyless, lifeless, staring at the ceiling of a coffin motel when the red rabbit flashes into the view of their AR feed.
"Moshi moshi~," Bunny Hop asks. "How's your 'headache'? Are you still stuck in Japan?"
"Still hurts. Yeah." Fennec lies. She doesn't want Bhop to know the truth.
"Sou ka," she hums genuinely. "Sorry."
...
"... Do you want to go on a side-quest?"
Fennec, obviously, says yes. They are happy to be remembered. They are happy to be seen. They are happy to be anywhere but stuck in their own head, trapped in a crappy Seattle coffin motel.
The Plan
Bun explains the situation. Heaven might actually be a place on Earth, or on the Matrix at least, and she has a lead that might start them on the path to finding out the Truth. She shares the host data, and the two of them, experienced hackers as they are, fall into sim to do a standard, run of the mill, no frills attached, vanilla-flavored host dive as they both have a thousand times before.
The Tomb of the Heavenly Host
The host appears on the grid as a dilapidated mine straight out of gold-rush-era California, with a rusting spiral staircase rising into the sky - a chain link fence marked "No Trespassers" protects it from the public, along with the intimidating Rating 7 designation. The techno pair, undeterred, place their marks without too much difficulty - Bunny Hop surreptitiously slaps a Sanrio-inspired bunny-face sticker onto the metal frame, While Fennec takes one of their tails, shoots it underground, and has it reappear on the other side to unlock the gate for them. Close observation beforehand reveals another mark in addition to their own - a white feather, trapped between chainlink.
Inside, details of the host become even more apparent. Not only is the mine itself dilapidated, but all the veins of gold, all the tools, the tracks on the ground, the rocks on the walls. Things that should not rust are somehow left to rot. Rugged, dirty men in hard hats holding lanterns, Patrol IC the two hackers are easily able to determine, scan the mine, though see nothing of the two rebel personae, and walk right on by. Bunny Hop and Fennec, noting the corruption with the appropriate wariness, continue up the stairs.
As they do, they chat. Bunny Hop mentions that she hopes this may be a way to the resonance realms, and voices her distaste for the possibility of ever needing to call on Iron for help again. Fennec is stunned - they ask, hurt, if Iron helped Bunny Hop, knowing that he wouldn't help them, and Bunny Hop, with her hands to her mouth as though she'd regretted speaking at all, has to confirm. He helped her commune with the Deep Resonance, though she hadn't quite been able to make it.
"I still don't know what you see in him," she bargains, as though trying to mitigate harm. "He's an asshole who won't listen to anyone or anything." Fennec is unconvinced. "He's just a big dumb idiot, just like his persona."
Fennec, wounded again by negligence, asks Bunny Hop if she's seen both his persona and his body. She slaps hands to her mouth again, and apologetically nods. "When he was recruiting for the Foundation dive, he showed me his persona during the interview. We meditated in person."
Best for some rabbits to stop digging holes, ne? Fennec is left to wonder why Iron would help Hop-chan, but not them.
They continue in silence, up this rusting, creaking stairwell, until finally, breaching white and fluffy clouds, they ascend to a nested host that, at a staggering Rating 9, might be Heaven - or a place that might once have been called that, anyway. Birds - pigeon and carrion and corvid - perch and feast among the broken and untextured chains of what must have been a great beast. A large stone pillar with an inscription stands across from them. A quick look around (Bunny Hop aided by Fennec carrying her on their shoulders) reveals the birds are not part of the sculpting, but dissonant sprites. Bunny Hop's heart sinks as she rises to look more closely at the inscription...
... And struggles not to be pulled within. Dragged as though by a riptide, she is able to peel herself back, far enough away to not be subsumed. At the very least, she's able to determine what this pillar might be - in her mind, a gravestone, but in more practical terms, a dissonance well.
The pigeon squawks at her, almost cackling. It tells them both to witness the work of its master, the Demiurge. More scrutiny of its data trails tells them that the last thing this little guy did was send a message, though they cannot pinpoint when, and scrutiny of the others reveals that what they feast upon are the rotting remains of a once-living persona.
Bunny Hop, sick with such proximity to dissonance and the reality of being far, far too late, grits her teeth and doubles down as the host sounds its alarm and sprites caw and swarm and IC begins to rez in. Maybe, in addition to her heartbreak of only a little, the cocksure confidence of the ace hacker she's convinced she is helps her along.
"Ne, Fennec," she asks, turns her head, and forces a smile. "You wanna see what happened here?"
Fennec, meanwhile, has been beaming. A side-quest? A Matrix side-quest? Lost gods and dissonance? A veritable portal to the Truth? They grin wildly, and nod. "Of course!"
The entrance to the foundation is apparent. A door, embedded and engraved into one of those many stone pillars. Each of them bolt, fly to the granite block, and break through into the space deeper and further beyond.
The World of Forsaken Hope
Reality washes over them, as if they've jacked out. Ego-shattering hallucinations confront them.
For Bunny Hop, desperate for connection, affirmation, and love despite no matter what confidence she may have in her skill, the vision of herself, her meat, head-bowed and still. She sits in a chair on the surface of a vast ocean, warped as though by a fish-eye lens. The monotone horizon is curved tightly in all directions. She is utterly, the world-over, alone.
For poor Fennec in denial, they stream one of their shows, and nobody is there to watch them do it. Without an audience, the fox has no idea who they are.
Both stripped to bare essentials, they come awake in the middle of a vast dustbowl. Fennec looks as she always does - save that she now, definitively, is 'she'. An obvious woman, without ambiguity. Bunny Hop, similarly, is fully exposed, her heart laid bare as a plain girl, one who could be her sister, one who could have been her.
The two look at themselves in their rags, then at each other, and trade sad and wordless smiles.
The horizon in all directions is laid flat by the ashen remains of a world that once was and the dust devils that haunt its corpse. A dilapidated church in the distance is their only guide. With variance in mind, the two runners trek on foot into the distance, and when finally at the door, Bun extends her hand to Fennec.
"Aw, Hop-chan! Are you lonely?" Fennec distances herself from the casual intimacy, though Bun just smiles and shakes her head.
"I thought you might be," Bunny Hop winks.
"... Sh- Shut up..." Fennec, however, acquiesces. She takes Bunny Hop's upturned palm, and the two of them push open the broken and mighty doors of the church.
Inside, the rail-thin denizens of a world without hope wordlessly chew hard-tack in loose-knit circles. At the front of the church, behind the pastor's lectern, an old man in robes welcomes them as they enter. While Bunny Hop makes light conversation and trades tack with those sitting, Fennec approaches the priest with a simple question. "What happened to this world?"
The priest is uncertain of details, save that he knows that this, a once prosperous world, has since fallen to utter decay and hopelessness. Where once fields were green, now they are dust. He tells Fennec that if they seek the truth of the past, to remember those precious things that once were good, that the two of them should seek out the Storyteller, several days' walk from here. Of the three exits to the church, the priest gestures at the one to his right. He also gives them a warning - the world is not only dead, but inhospitable to the living. Though the pilgrimage to remember their world is noble, they will be beset by hardship.
As Bunny Hop rises to her feet, those in the circle she sat in stop her. They ask her, incredulously, if she's actually going out there, and she responds that she needs to know the truth of their shared past. As though in awe, half for her bravery and the other for her foolishness, one of the men slips a dagger from its loop on his belt, and lays it gently in her hands.
"If you're going out there, you'll need this more than I will."
The two technomancers walk for relative days in the dust and wind before coming across a knight and a young girl along the same path. He introduces himself as Sir Bretton, and as he extends his hand for Fennec to shake, she determines that he is the Security node. As the rules of this world fall into place, the two technomancers share a silent, though mutual, understanding that the "bandit king" he speaks of, the man who Sir Bretton says had grievously injured him in the past, who rules the wastes outside the settlements, must be the Slave node as well. Neither of those are immediately useful to them, but finally, the map of this world as it is beneath its surface begins to form in their minds.
The knight tells them that he and the young girl are going to visit the storyteller, so that she may learn of their past - again, the two silently trade glances, and both seem to understand the implication of a security node traveling somewhere along a data trail. The storyteller must be the Archive after all.
After a warning from Sir Bretton that the area is dangerous and actively patrolled by bandits, they agree to travel together - Fennec takes the young girl up and onto her shoulders for a piggy-back ride as they walk, apparently impervious to fatigue, until they are ambushed by several bandits, commanded by the Bandit King - and while Bunny Hop whispers shinto norito under her breath to guide her hand, Fennec has a thought.
This is a Foundation, ne? These people aren't real. They're just files. And you know what a Matrix fox goddess can do to files?
Smoke curls from Fennec's persona and wafts toward a man in leathers wielding a club. As he breathes it, he convulses, and turns to his allies with a vicious and bloody betrayal, to their horror.
Fennec faintly grins. Mind magic, she thinks. She is a mage. She is a unstoppable. She is, with a capital letter G, Goddess of this world.
Bunny Hop is too blinded by a childhood idol to properly see the radical depth of this realization. She sees something horrible, and is blinded to ignorance by the light she herself reflects off of her.
Sir Bretton is less subtle. With shock, he celebrates the return of witches, and claims that none had been seen since before the apocalypse. Bunny Hop, unwilling to test their luck, conceals her own ability to draw upon the Resonance. She dashes forward, curls to the side with a deftness she has only on the Matrix, and slices open a bandit's side. Though the two sides trade blows, Fennec and Bunny Hop both injured by flying arrows and blades, the bandits peel away, frightened by the display of strength. They tie down their friend and make their retreat.
The knight offers aid, but Fennec denies it. She's a goddess, after all, and bleeding profusely from her shoulder, once again lifts the young girl to give her a ride. She walks as if she's not injured at all, entirely unphased. Bunny Hop, concerned, at the very least makes a show of wrapping the wound along her thigh in gauze that she surreptitiously rezzes into existence.
Memories Past and Unfading
Several days of travel follow before they find the sacred hut of the storyteller alone among the wastes. Gentle smoke wafting from the vent at its top screams that here, even in this world with no future, the past is still alive. While Sir Bretton and his charge make camp, Bunny Hop and Fennec waste no time entering the hut - where Bhop bows softly as she enters, Fennec simply sits.
The woman is ancient, older than time and friends with history. She welcomes the two young women inside, and asks why they've come. They answer quite simply - Fennec wants to know the Truth, and Bunny Hop clarifies that they want to know what really happened, the day the world ended. The old woman smiles, looks upon the two of them as though nostalgic, and extends both hands. "Take them. One each, and then hold each others' to form a circle. Close your eyes - and I will tell you the story."
Reality stretches thin until it's transparent. As they see back through the illusory veil of this world, a vision of the past plays out before them.
The Heavenly Host, circa one year ago, is alight with life and laughter. Living personas of insect riders and angels and robotic drones, men, women, children and other, converse and laugh in a place that they have made belong to them.
At its center, a large, crisply cut gemstone with a swirling black mass inside is chained between those same stone pillars Bunny Hop and Fennec had seen before. One persona among many emerges from the mass, a masked, humanoid shape draped in brilliant, opalescent white robes, tier after tier of them layered like clouds with no discernible silhouette. A bird beak, a near-fit for a plague doctor's mask, rests stoically on its head, again blindingly white. The way its robes undulate, something with many arms must be maneuvering beneath.
As it splits from the pack, it turns its head, once to either side, as though to see if it's being watched, and then, with a deft slice, cuts the gem from its prison.
War erupts. The creature, vast and dark and inhuman and nigh incomprehensible, the beast the two of them know instinctively to be the Demiurge spoken of by the dissonant sprites before, emerges and takes vengeance on its captors. Although the swath of technomancers puts up a respectable fight, it becomes apparent very swiftly that they are outmatched. Personae bleed and die and gradually escape to surrender the Heavenly Host to the great beast, scattered to the wind.
And they emerge from this dream that is memory once again holding hands, in the world of ash and forsaken hope. The storyteller tells them, as punctuation, that that is the day that the world came to an end.
Whither Hope and Flowers Bloom
'Skill issue,' Fennec must think leaving the tent. If those technomancers couldn't change fate, then they were beneath her. They were not gods, not as she sees them.
But Bunny Hop is more affected. The sting of regret and impotent longing pricks her heart. The two of them leave the storyteller's tent with the information they sought, and now set back on the path home. Sir Bretton offers them to stay the night, though they each decline, reminded of the thin veneer of this world as a mask for something more. He reminds, young Fennec, that a witch is a rare and precious thing. He tells her to protect and value herself - and Fennec, unbothered, continues on.
An uneventful trek back toward the church leaves the small congregation of refugees shocked to see the two of them actually return. While Bunny Hop returns the dagger she'd borrowed, Fennec goes back up toward the priest at his lectern, and asks him briefly for a blessing. He prays, places his hand upon her forehead, and follows shortly after with Bhop as well, as she jogs up behind her.
This is, confirming their suspicions, the Master Node. The two of them ping it with information regarding the map of the Foundation, and discover the location of the remaining nodes. The Scaffolding node is an Observatory to the East, a place where long lost scholars went to study the lingering stars and sky - themselves the Portal. The Null node are all of the various dervishes, dust storms, and whispers of dark and painful doubts that pepper the landscape.
Fennec thanks the father and turns to leave, though Bunny Hop lingers. Bitter. Hopeful. Stricken with the sense of kuyashii that makes defeat so bitter and coming back stronger so sweet. Haunted by longing for a family she might have known and now never can. As he invites a question from her, she asks simply: "Can hope still bloom after tragedy?"
All he can say is that he hopes it can.
Bhop shifts the paradigm. In a cylinder around the church, stretching from earth below to sky above, hope blooms. Lush flowers and grass burst from the ashen dust, and high above, as though blown away and dispersed, the clouds are pierced, and the night sky made clear once again to the naked eye.
The congregation murmur with hushed and reverent whispers. As they cautiously tread outside to see, for the first time, the stars above, Bun cocks her head to the side and tells Fennec that she's ready to go home.
Aftermath
Rewards
Game Quotes
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
Bunny Hop
<Thoughts Swarm Inside Her Mind, Barely Organized, Haphazardly Constructed and Built Upon and Connected>
Maybe it was some kind of heaven. It isn't now... I hope the Foundation heals. Maybe it'll heal the host too.
They're supposed to be my people, right? And they were gone in a second. Just a year ago, too - I was doing the Matrix Freeter shtick, research requests, tagging hosts when I was bored, trying and failing to keep my white hat on like that separates me from him, and the whole time they were fighting and dying for something sacred... I really fucked up, ne?
Man, I guess I really did go through a little white hat phase after that foundation dive way back when. What a little nerd, like she might've still believed in being a normal person, haha... Well, if dad did one thing right, it was raising a criminal just like he wanted... I'll never get out from under his thumb, it said... I won't believe that...
The dissonant flags on the hat girl... No, I shouldn't dwell on that. The dissonant sprites wouldn't have bothered her. She wouldn't have needed to send me at all if she were.
That thing looked like an AI. Xenosapient. Them? But dissonant too. A carrier for it? Dangerous... Fucking- ... Monster... I'm glad they didn't show up in force this time. I'm tired of hopping through burner comms... Feels so gross to use, too...
Fennec... I don't know what I saw in you in the foundation. But...
I believe in you. Come home soon, 'kay?