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.

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

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.

Values:

* Eikran (GADGETEER)

Player: Elandra

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

Values:

* 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

* 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


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:

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:


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:

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 this 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: The entire crew of this ship - over a million inhabitants - are encased in ancient cryosleep, the controls for their pods seemingly disabled.

(Based on: Kandra asks 'What's the door leading out of the airlock, and what do you find immediately beyond?' and draws: SUICIDES)

Other Discoveries:

Reflections:

Spotlighted Values:


5. Who are these sleepers?

Narrator: BunnyHugger

Characters: Jachro and Eikran

Scene: After determining that the residents of this place are all in a very deep and ancient slumber, they find an access terminal that connects to the ship's computer. It uses an obsolete -- by our House's standards -- touchscreen system, but Eikran is able to divine some of its functions. It appears to still be running, and to invite input. It requires no password or code to access at least some basic information. Perhaps the residents of this ship left it that way intentionally, as a record of their civilization.

Answer: Stasis bound members of the House of Seeds, locked in some kind of loop.

You say, "Menus cascade. Little personal details like names and histories of each of these people, Eikran. A million souls. It isn't an encoding of your house, no. But it isn't unfamiliar either: You recognize the UI of a House of Seeds system."
You say, "And despite the stasis, a section of it is updating constantly."
Elandra mrrs, "Eikran lets out a quiet murmur, "This is all Seeds - all of them. They're churning, some of them are updating, even now. I don't understand what we're looking at, yet, but I need to.""

Other Discovers:

Reflections:


6. What do the results of Alectrya's self-exam say?

Narrator: Lepus

Characters: Alectrya

Scene: Alectrya is in her lab on the ship, a place that's half medical bay half bio engineering lab. Cables hang down and vats of bio-active substances like jungle vines and pools along with all her decorations. It's a warm spot of color on the station that wouldn't be out of keeping in a set for a production of The Magic Flute, perhaps a contrast to how Era keeps her nearby lab. Alectrya is naked and detaching herself from sensor cables and instruments, and wiping off warm gel with a fluffy towel as she watches the results of her self-examination flow into being in midair in a project display.

Answer: The dreams are not just her imagination: Her brain is more active than it should be during stasis, especially in the subcortex. The rest of her body appears to be normal for deep stasis sleep and she can detect no internal stimulus to explain the phenomenon.

Other Discoveries:

Reflections:


7. Are the cryo-tube inhabitants also affected by the Red Bird Dream, and if so are they affected differently from us?

Narrator: Sora

Characters: Alectrya and Eikran

Scene: The pair arrive on the ship. The other two crew members are either back on our own vessel, or exploring some other aspect of the place unimportant to the scene. Bringing Alectrya to the seemingly infinite chamber of cryo tubes, the pair can begin to survey (randomly?) some of the inhabits to figure out what's going on. They may also learn other things along the way, but the question is most important right now.

Answer: They appear to be having SOME kind of dream. And oddly it seems to have a similar pattern/signature repeated across all the million dreamers, but it's not confirmed that it's the Red Bird Dream.

Other Discoveries:

Reflections:

Values: Lepus advances the dilemma by threatening WE PRESERVE as one of the threatened values. This is tonal foreshadowing: We don't know yet how it'll manifest or even what our Dilemma is, but we have a strong feeling that one choice will be motivated by this Value and the other would betray it.


8. What is hidden on this ship?

Narrator: Elandra

Characters: All

Scene: We have just returned to the vast, cavernous space where we first found the cryotubes but the mission here is somewhat different: There is a network of chambers that have somehow evaded our sensors up until we took the network and mapped it. Thusly armed with the knowledge of where these chambers might be, we are heading towards a place where the flow of information breaches what we think to be an featureless wall of this space.

Answer: The walls hide a vast network of vines that are possibly carrying information to/from the sleeping inhabitants of the pods.

Other Details:

Reflections:

Values:


9. Why have these people not unthawed?

Narrator: Kandra

Characters: Alectreya and Eikran

Scene: The scene is Alectreya and Eikran as they venture on foot into the heretofore unknown parts of the station. Other members of the party have perhaps taken a different direction or gone back to our ship for supplies. It's warmer here than it was out in the cryo chamber, by a matter of some degrees; the environment is visually overwhelming in its complexity, with plant life everywhere, and the floor, which probably used to be metal once, is covered by a thin accumulation of fallen leaves and matter. The two of them have just found a stairwell that appears to lead downwards, towards an area that would be underneath the stasis hall we were in earlier.

Answer: The people are being used as the templates for some kind of plant-based cloning project.

Other Discoveries:

Reflections:


10. Where are these plant clones hidden and what are they up to?

Narrator: Lepus

Characters: Eikran and Jachro

Scene: The scene is Eikran and Jachro who are in Eikran's lab. It's a clutter of projects half-assembled, half-dissassembled or abandoned across centuries of life. Monitors and sensor controls have been hastily rerouted, providing access to scan the solar system, the giant ship next to us, etc. Not as vast as the cartography room and more cramped, it's nonetheless flexible. When we open, you're discussing where to look and what to look for.

Answer: A dropped probe reveals clone colonies hidden under the moon's shallow busy digging inwards into the continental shelf.

Other Discoveries:

Reflections:


11. What is this Seed offshoot's actual goal here?

Narrator: Sora (DRIVING)

Characters: Eikran, Jachro

Scene: Eikran is busy pouring over what the probe and sensors have sent back. He's got to understand what's really going on down there. All his screens light up with data from potentially an extra probe or two, and the full power of the ship's built-in sensors. Eikran can investigate effectively anything at a macro and semi-micro level. So what does he look for first?

Answer: The moon is being set-up as a kind of rocky seedpod - once it's ready the ship will instigate an explosion, sending fragments full of hibernating, infectious clones through the galaxy

Other Discoveries:

Reflections:

Dilemma:

[OOC] Lepus says, "Rather than seeding barren ones." [OOC] Lepus says, "Because otherwise we don't have a strong motivation to stop them other than 'we don't like them.' And that's not good enough." [OOC] Lepus says, "But if it takes over existing worlds, then yes: We blow up the ship BECAUSE 'we preserve'."}}}


=== 12.