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<<TableOfContents(2-3)>> <<TableOfContents(2,3)>>

HOUSE OF THE PERPETUAL - Episode One

A well-known but relatively small House dedicated to preservation, keeping the peace, etc. Some see us as the guardian angels of the sky. Others as meddlers imposing our will.

<<TableOfContents: execution failed [Too many arguments] (see also the log)>>

House Values

  1. We preserve
  2. We will always remain human
  3. The past never lies
  4. We always honor our word

Others in our Galaxy

  • Ally: A powerful, but more passive sister-House, The House of Pages, that collects stories, dramas, theater, etc.

  • Opponent: The rival House of Seeds with the purpose of 'We nurture new life.'

  • Mystery: People are dreaming during stasis sleep, which shouldn't be possible. The dreams vary but it seems there's always a red bird in it.

Episode Archivist: Lepus

Table order: Lepus - Sora - Elandra - Kandra - BunnyHugger - Lepus


Characters and Values

* Jachro (CATALOGER)

Player: Sora

A fuzzy lizard fellow with an obsession for making neat taxonomies.

  • Sora says "Basically, he tries to understand what type of thing we are preserving, and by giving it a sort of category, I figure he can use knowledge of previous, similar situations to know how to continue preserving it."

Values:

  • Jachro will never accept Chaos
  • Jachro always trusts in his bonds with others

* Eikran (GADGETEER)

Player: Elandra

A snow-white shaggy-furred wolf of a thing with a love for tinkering and devices

  • He revels in innovation and believes every single bit of new idea out there is worth preserving.

Values:

  • Eikran never attacks first
  • Eikran will never leave anybody behind

* Era (CYBERNETICIST)

Player: Kandra

An elven woman with golden eyes and silver lines and circles on her skin with a somewhat cynical attitude on people and civilizations

Values

  • Era never trusts civilization
  • Era always values works over lives

* Alectrya (DOCTOR)

Player: BunnyHugger

A doctor of neurology with a strong streak of compassion. Mostly human appearing but with some spots with feathers where her hair would be, particularly on her head which sports iridescent plumage

Values

  • Alectrya always protects conscious life
  • Alectrya always pays her debts


Scene List

Each scene revolves a question that advances the next thing we learn about the plot or the characters.

Each scene has a narrator who sets the scene, says which characters are in it and what they're doing and picks the question. Anyone can contribute details to the scene, ask a question and draw from the trove, and call Cut! when they think the question has been answered (or at least thoroughly explored).

At the end of each scene, players take turns reflecting on it briefly in the form of saying what they wonder about or describing what their character is feeling. This may seed questions for further scenes.

Players can also spotlight values during reflection, a way to indicate that they think a particular value has good potential for the eventual crisis.


1. WHAT STAR SYSTEM SHALL WE VISIT NEXT? AND WHY?

Narrator: Lepus

Characters: All

Scene: After a long cryo sleep and a brief thaw along with each of your personal, favorite post-fugue beverage, you gather together in the ship's map room, the biggest room in the vessel located at the very top of your hull. It's a cavernous and dark space, a 3D map of surroundng space. You stand suspended in darkness amidst lonely grains of sand sparkling with vast distances between them. Logarithmic in its rendering, you're always in the center, but each step you take zooms in impossible strides, magnifying in on new stars and planets.

Answer:

( Era silently flags another star on the chart -- a gas giant, red and old and dim.  It is a hundred and two light-years distant.  "I'd been communicating with an old colleague who studies history these days," she says with quiet lack of affect.  Her attention isn't all here; vestiges of a strange dream trouble her.  "He'd been trying to locate traces in early records of when and where some developments significant to our modern implementation of cryosleep first appeared.  He says he's found scattered references to this system that intrigue and confuse him." )
The planet flagged by Era's colleague is a gas giant orbiting a red dwarf, one that likely has existed since near the creation of the universe.

Why?

Chosen because of interest for cryo tech (Eikran) Alectrya privately always favors destinations with the possibility of adding to her knowledge of the life sciences. And she has been getting some odd reports of cryosleep disturbance Jachro is eager to help Era in her task, especially since it may help categorize cryosleep technology better.


2. WHICH VALUE CAUSES TROUBLE BEFORE WE LEAVE?

Narrator: Sora

Characters: Era and Alectrya

Scene: Era and Alectrya are in hibernation chamber 2, where their pods wait to be reset for the upcoming journey. As each pod is unique to the occupant and there is a two-person rule when working around the equipment, both must be in the room doing the prep work. As expected, there are contol panels, some valves, chemicals to be checked, fluid lines to be replaced, and fabrics to be prepped. We know we're going to a place potentially with civilization, and there's always that possibility our sensors are wrong, especially with the gas giant. There might be life there. What will these two do if they find an advanced, living civilization that needs help staying afloat? That might be on the tip of their tongues as they work....

Answer: After a polite but slightly awkward conversation between Era and Alectrya (who is still not talking about her dreams). Whether or not people in cryo sleep have experiences... or even count as human people.

Other discoveries:

  • Era has spent most of her jumping only between the House's two Home stations and this trip is unusually far for her.
  • Lepus asks 'Why might Era's old colleague need help?' and draws: BRILLIANT

    • [OOC] Lepus says, "I'm going to interpet that trove word as Era's old colleague having a brilliant mind -- but one that is degrading with each jump through Cryosleep."
      [OOC] Lepus says, "He's trying to hide it and understand it, and she's one of the only people who knows."

  • The House of Seeds has been busy as of late. Reports read after coming out of sleep show they've been agressively seeking out worlds that have even the possibility of life and jumpstarting them. Even worse, they are known to find worlds that are not yet fully mature in their civilization and give them knowledge and help to acquire space travel and beyond - utterly changing what was already there in the process.

Reflections:

Sora feels we'll need to be more assertive about our values (house and personal), otherwise our mission is in jeopardy before it starts.
Kandra liked the 'what if we find people long-frozen in cryosleep?' question Sora posted, but didn't get a chance for it to come into actual play.
You say, "My reflection is: ''I wonder if Era's colleague has a reason to highlight this world in particular.'' And I'm going to spotlight the value of 'We will always remain human'."
BunnyHugger says, "My reflection is, 'I wonder if our strange cryosleep dreams have the same cause as the decline of Era's colleague.'"

Spotlighted Values:

  • Lepus: The past never lies (because we're going to a very old place)
  • Lepus: We will always remain human (because of what the Trove draw said about Era's colleague's condition)


3. WHAT MYSTERY DO WE FIND WHEN WE ARRIVE?

Narrator: Elandra

Characters: All

Scene: The hundred and some years in the sleep of travel come and go in a moment, and the cold light of the cryo bay blinks to life as the sleep leaves you again. The ship's computers have done as they are programmed to do, and on waking, we again return to the map room. We are now greeted by a map of the solar system: there is the old, unblinking star, long in the tooth and slowly dying. There is the great marbled sphere of a gas giant in its strange, alluring colors, and the moons dancing around it like pearls. Finally, there are sensor echos: things that might be or could be metallic, moonlets or beacons or asteroids all alike. So, then, we must ask ourselves: What mystery do we find when we arrive?

Answer: The nearest is a tangled, cold forest of a world with low rivers and lakes instead of oceans. It's a nice, quiet place - and there's an old, metallic thing hung in low, stable orbit: It's large (enough for one or two cities) and doesn't match anything in our archives. Era observes that someone went to a good deal of trouble to keep something of that size orbiting that stably for as long as it has.

Other Discoveries:

  • Sora epics, "The gas giant has storms larger than some continents raging over it, revealing it to be a turbulant place supposedly hostile to life such as ours."
  • BunnyHugger says, "Alectrya is troubled. She is almost certain she had a dream during her cold sleep, which should not happen."

    • After drawing BIORIGGING from the Trove, BunnyHugger interprets her draw as Alectrya deciding not to mention the dreams till she can run a full study on herself.

Reflections:

Sora says, "Jachro is concerned the ship may actually not be so inactive after all, and that we may be underprepared in dealing with it or its occupants."
You say, "My reflection is: I wonder whether that's a natural forest."
BunnyHugger says, "I wonder if the ship we've found will contain the technology we're interested in."
Kandra says, "My reflection is: I keep thinking about the planet and wondering what it would be like if you could fly within its turbulent atmosphere."
Elandra mrrs, "Eikran and his coffee wonder what marvel we find: are the storms, the forest, and the ship all connected?"


4. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO WHOEVER OR WHATEVER BUILT THE STATION?

(Inspired by drawing SURVIVAL from the Trove) Narrator: Kandra

Characters: Jachro and Eikran on a shuttle closing on the large ship.

Scene: We drift towards the moon we've scanned while the AI tries to make sense of the gas giant and readings from further off in the system. There's still no sign of any civilization or higher life,--at least, not any that notices our presence and deigns to make itself known. Close up, we can see the station's shape--asymmetrical and abstruse, built seemingly from a jumble of uneven flat blue-silver faces and projections, all either 3- or 8-gons. The sensors pick up a tangled internal structure full of acute angles.

Answer: (Based on: Kandra asks 'What's the door leading out of the airlock, and what do you find immediately beyond?' and draws: SUICIDES)
Beyond this docking bay you'll find a long passage, going slightly up and to the right. The door's been left open. All the doors have been left open. There are bay doors that would have blocked your coming here so easily--but they've been left open. There's no atmosphere anymore. Eventually after several switchbacks at strange angles, including one uncomfortably steep and long one, you come to an eight-walled nexus of sorts with eight doors, and taking a path at random, after a while longer of walking in the dark (Era cuts in remotely to say she's found some interference patterns to cancel and her view is clearer, and it looks like there's power in the station systems but only a bare whisper of it) you emerge in a long hall lit dull, dim blue from below. For a moment it's like stepping into a nightmare vision of the cryosleep bay on the ship: The hall is lined with pods down each side, three deep, stretching away into the distance. The surface of each pod is transparent but rimed with frost so thick that you can only see the vaguest dim suggestion of a body inside. There are controls, at about waist level, in the form of displays with eight pushbutton switches along each side, but the displays are dark and when you push the buttons there's no response.

Other Discoveries:

  • The ship's weapons power up and try to fire on the approaching shuttle (Based on Lepus drawing PUGNACIOUS from the Trove). This makes Jachro worried, especially with the lack of a hail. He turns on cloaking and performs evasive maneuvers.
  • No response from the shuttle's hails.
  • BunnyHugger intimates: Jachro and Eikran have both used this shuttle or ones like it many times, and the familiarity is comforting as they rely on its defensive abilities.

  • Kandra says, "Strangely enough, the weapons never actually fire. Maybe they're out of ammunition. Maybe the cloaking device was enough to confuse them into thinking you didn't exist. Maybe they're not weapons at all but something less straightforward..."
  • Elandra epics: The ship is massive and ancient - the two quantities are magnified as we dock. There's equipment old enough to barely be recognizable, and the scale is large enough that we could almost dock the nose of our ship here, in this shuttle bay!
  • You say, "Your interfacing with the ship's systems does provide Eikran with some diagnostic data. Much of it doesn't make sense or is in a format your computer can't deduce. But one bit that you do pick up is that there are over a million life signals aboard. But only two marked as 'active'."
  • Eikran and Jachro suspect that given the ship's style and its position over the unnaturally(?) forested moon, it may be a terraforming facility. But then why is the moon uninhabited?
  • The pods only resemble the cryosleep hardware we'd know today in general layout--they might remind you of more-primitive versions of the same technology if you study history.

Reflections:

  • Lepus says, "I know mine is: "I wonder what this ship was shooting or aiming at?""
  • Sora says, "Jachro is excited that there are /working/ cryo systems here, and wonders what other ancient technology we will get to learn about."
  • BunnyHugger says, "I wonder if the residents of this system disabled the controls intentionally to prevent ever being awakened."

  • Elandra mrrs, "Eikran needs to know the why and the how, and the what - too many questions to feel much other than urgency!"
  • Kandra says, "Mine is, I wonder if the cryo systems _are_ working, and I suspect we'll find them to not be that enlightening so far as the greater mystery goes on their own."

Spotlighted Values:

  • Kandra spotlights 'Eikran will never leave anybody behind'.
  • BunnyHugger says, "I spotlight 'We preserve.'"

  • Sora spots 'The past never lies'
  • Lepus says, "Which reminds me that 'Alecrya always protects conscious life could be interesting here too."

ArchivesOfTheSky/EpisodeOne (last edited 2019-02-03 18:50:26 by Lepus)