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A hiss of stale air leaks past grilles scattered along the enclosure. The walls hum faintly, a panel of light flickers somewhere above you, half-dead and flickering morosely to coat your prison in a sickly glow. As short breaths of your air condense into mist, the answer comes like a bolt of lighting.
You understand now.

This is a cryostasis pod.

Your cryopod.

And if you don’t want it to become your coffin, you need to get out.

>>An average, un-augmented human being has stats of [2] across the board.

>>You currently have [2] in each of these stats:
>Brawn – a measure of brute power, strength and overall fitness.
>Finesse – a measure of manual dexterity, hand-eye coordination and body control.
>Cunning – a measure of how crafty, clever and creative a character can be.
>Intellect – a measure of intelligence, education, mental acuity and ability to reason/rationalize.
>Willpower – a measure of discipline, self-control, mental fortitude and faith.
>Presence – a measure of moxie, charisma, confidence and personality.

>>How do you make the door open? [Please choose one]
>Brawn – you plant both hands against the lid, muscles straining as you shove with every ounce of raw strength you can muster. The chamber groans under the force, until something finally gives way. [+1 Brawn]
>Finesse – you twist, contort, and stretch until your fingers brush against a recessed switch hidden at your side. A sharp pull, a heavy click – and the mechanism hisses to life. [+1 Finesse]
>Cunning – your eyes catch the faint outline of a panel just beneath the rim. With quick, improvised work – prying wires, sparking connections – you coax the machine into betraying its own lock. [+1 Cunning]
>Intellect – you force down the panic and study the chamber itself. Circuits, servos, magnetic seals – you piece them together like a puzzle, reasoning out the precise sequence to trigger the emergency override. [+1 Intellect]
>Willpower – the instinct to thrash and panic is strong – but you deny it. Instead, you allow the fear to pass, steady your breath, and wait with grim patience until the mechanism cycles on its own. [+1 Willpower]
>Presence – you shout into the void, commanding the unseen with a strangled breath. Whether its desperation, confidence, or sheer audacity, your voice carries, and the pod responds. [+1 Presence]

[VOTE OPEN FOR 4 HOURS]

>>6294002
>Willpower – the instinct to thrash and panic is strong – but you deny it. Instead, you allow the fear to pass, steady your breath, and wait with grim patience until the mechanism cycles on its own. [+1 Willpower]
Let's goooooo, Brawn, Willpower, Presence

>>6294002
>>Presence – you shout into the void, commanding the unseen with a strangled breath. Whether its desperation, confidence, or sheer audacity, your voice carries, and the pod responds. [+1 Presence]

>>6294002
>Cunning – your eyes catch the faint outline of a panel just beneath the rim. With quick, improvised work – prying wires, sparking connections – you coax the machine into betraying its own lock. [+1 Cunning]
Smartsmaxxing.

>>6294002
>Cunning – your eyes catch the faint outline of a panel just beneath the rim. With quick, improvised work – prying wires, sparking connections – you coax the machine into betraying its own lock. [+1 Cunning]
Devilish, welcome back Kaz. Excited to see a new quest and to see Interregnum return.

>>6294002
>Willpower – the instinct to thrash and panic is strong – but you deny it. Instead, you allow the fear to pass, steady your breath, and wait with grim patience until the mechanism cycles on its own. [+1 Willpower]
Fear is the mind-killer, and all that jazz.

>>6294002
>Willpower – the instinct to thrash and panic is strong – but you deny it. Instead, you allow the fear to pass, steady your breath, and wait with grim patience until the mechanism cycles on its own. [+1 Willpower]

>>6294002
>>Brawn – you plant both hands against the lid, muscles straining as you shove with every ounce of raw strength you can muster. The chamber groans under the force, until something finally gives way. [+1 Brawn]
Fuck you, pod.

>>6294002
>Willpower – the instinct to thrash and panic is strong – but you deny it. Instead, you allow the fear to pass, steady your breath, and wait with grim patience until the mechanism cycles on its own. [+1 Willpower]

>>6294002
>Willpower – the instinct to thrash and panic is strong – but you deny it. Instead, you allow the fear to pass, steady your breath, and wait with grim patience until the mechanism cycles on its own. [+1 Willpower]

>>6294002
>>Cunning
Brutally cunning

>>6294002
>Willpower – the instinct to thrash and panic is strong – but you deny it. Instead, you allow the fear to pass, steady your breath, and wait with grim patience until the mechanism cycles on its own. [+1 Willpower]

>>6294002
>>Presence – you shout into the void, commanding the unseen with a strangled breath. Whether its desperation, confidence, or sheer audacity, your voice carries, and the pod responds. [+1 Presence]

>>6294002
>Presence – you shout into the void, commanding the unseen with a strangled breath. Whether its desperation, confidence, or sheer audacity, your voice carries, and the pod responds. [+1 Presence]

>>6294002

>Willpower – the instinct to thrash and panic is strong – but you deny it. Instead, you allow the fear to pass, steady your breath, and wait with grim patience until the mechanism cycles on its own. [+1 Willpower]

Trapped in a pod? Good.

>>6294002
>>Brawn – you plant both hands against the lid, muscles straining as you shove with every ounce of raw strength you can muster. The chamber groans under the force, until something finally gives way. [+1 Brawn]

>>6294002
>>Willpower – the instinct to thrash and panic is strong – but you deny it. Instead, you allow the fear to pass, steady your breath, and wait with grim patience until the mechanism cycles on its own. [+1 Willpower]


Welcome Back Kaz, almost thought you were dead! Did some binging on Task Force recently.

>>6294002
>>Willpower
I seem to be a bit late but I'll toss a vote in anyway

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>>6294009
>>6294055
>>6294064
>>6294080

>>Willpower – the instinct to thrash and panic is strong – but you deny it. Instead, you allow the fear to pass, steady your breath, and wait with grim patience until the mechanism cycles on its own. [+1 Willpower]

The lid hisses open with a hydraulic whine, and the cryopod exhales a blast of compressed air into a stale chamber. A deluge of icy fog rolls up and over the rim of the coffin, spilling and pooling across the floor of a some sort of laboratory in an opaque, ghostly cloud.

You lurch upward, collapsing against the edge of the pod as shudders and spasms wrack your body. Violent retches tear through you until a slick stream of fluid erupts from your throat. It clings to your lips, sour and slimy as you expel it from your body. The nutripaste resembles a lime-flavored mucus, cloying and so utterly artificial. You swallow by mistake and nearly set off another round of heaving.

…limes. Citrus aurantiifolial. Subtropical cultivar. High in absorbic acid.

...nutripaste. Synthetic surfactant. Lung protectant. Prevents cryogenic frost lesions.

The definitions are abrupt, sterile and exact. They are like notes read aloud from a manual. You don't remember learning about them.

You don't remember anything.

Then more words intrude, hammering one after another.

Cryostasis protocol. Oxygen saturation: 91%. Carbon dioxide retention: elevated.

Adrenal response: catecholamine surge. Blood pressure: unstable.

Each phrase slices into your thoughts like broken glass, jagged and merciless.

Your hand tightens into a white-knuckled grip on the cyropod -titanium-alluminum alloy, tensile strength in excess of 1,100 megapascals, just short of the grade used to manufacture spaceships.

The the taste in your mouth stings with ozone -triatomic oxygen, unstable, reactive, toxic in high concentrations, indicative of arcing and malfunctioning electronics or circuitry..

The flow accelerates. Somewhere in your mind, a mental dam breaks.

Condensation. Gas expansion. Ideal gas law.

Every flicker of the failing lights -fluorescent cathode, lifespan near expiration. Every heartbeat -132 BPM and rising, sinoatrial node faltering under sympathetic overload.

There's no stopping it. Each detail arrives with perfect clarity, a sterile avalanche of data points cascading through your skull. Facts without context. Knowledge without memory.

Every detail is vivid. Every word precise.

There is no silence in your head. You are drowning in a torrent of sterile definitions and chemical formulae that flood your senses and leave no room for you.

(cont.)

In this instance, you know everything.

And yet, you know nothing.

Not even the shape of yourself.

Not even the absence of what is missing.

>>How do you overcome your disorientation and sensory overload? [Choose one.]
>Brawn – you force your body to be louder than your head. You squeeze your fists, clench and release every muscle until the ache drowns the noise. Physical pain and exertion anchor you back to the present. [+1 Brawn]
>Finesse – you narrow everything to a single, precise motion, finding the smallest tactile task you can perform. You trace the rim, flip a tiny switch, untwist a cap, and let deliberate, careful movement reorder the chaos. [+1 Finesse]
>Cunning – you fabricate an internal trick, chucking the rushing facts into a pattern, a simple code and trail of breadcrumbs the mid can follow. The lie buys you enough time to steady your breathing. [+1 Cunning]
>Intellect – you name it, labeling each sensation and datum as it arrives – “ozone”, “capacitor hum”, “132 beats per minute” – turning panic into variables you can test. Analysis slices the panic into manageable pieces. [+1 Intellect]
>Willpower – you clam down on the fear and won’t let it speak. A steadying mantra, measured breaths, and the refusal to turn away. Self-discipline narrows the torrent of information to a gentle trickle. [+1 Willpower]
>Presence – you speak as if you already belong here, a clear, commanding voice. It is half-challenge, half-question sent out into the hush of the room. Giving voice to the panic expels it from your body. [+1 Presence].

[VOTE OPEN FOR EIGHT(8) HOURS]

>>6294295
>>Brawn – you force your body to be louder than your head. You squeeze your fists, clench and release every muscle until the ache drowns the noise. Physical pain and exertion anchor you back to the present. [+1 Brawn]

>>6294295
>Brawn – you force your body to be louder than your head. You squeeze your fists, clench and release every muscle until the ache drowns the noise. Physical pain and exertion anchor you back to the present. [+1 Brawn]
Monke brain doesn't like voices.
Monke brain shuts up voices.

>>6294295
>Cunning – you fabricate an internal trick, chucking the rushing facts into a pattern, a simple code and trail of breadcrumbs the mind can follow. The lie buys you enough time to steady your breathing. [+1 Cunning]

>>6294295
>Brawn – you force your body to be louder than your head. You squeeze your fists, clench and release every muscle until the ache drowns the noise. Physical pain and exertion anchor you back to the present. [+1 Brawn]
PUNCH STUPID LOUD ROBOT VOICE!

>>6294295
>>Willpower – you clam down on the fear and won’t let it speak. A steadying mantra, measured breaths, and the refusal to turn away. Self-discipline narrows the torrent of information to a gentle trickle. [+1 Willpower]

>>6294295

>Willpower – you clam down on the fear and won’t let it speak. A steadying mantra, measured breaths, and the refusal to turn away. Self-discipline narrows the torrent of information to a gentle trickle. [+1 Willpower]

Double down.

>>6294295
>Finesse – you narrow everything to a single, precise motion, finding the smallest tactile task you can perform. You trace the rim, flip a tiny switch, untwist a cap, and let deliberate, careful movement reorder the chaos. [+1 Finesse]

>>6294295
>>>Brawn – you force your body to be louder than your head. You squeeze your fists, clench and release every muscle until the ache drowns the noise. Physical pain and exertion anchor you back to the present. [+1 Brawn]

>>6294295
>Brawn – you force your body to be louder than your head. You squeeze your fists, clench and release every muscle until the ache drowns the noise. Physical pain and exertion anchor you back to the present. [+1 Brawn]

>>6294295
>Presence – you speak as if you already belong here, a clear, commanding voice. It is half-challenge, half-question sent out into the hush of the room. Giving voice to the panic expels it from your body. [+1 Presence].

>>6294295
>Willpower – you clam down on the fear and won’t let it speak. A steadying mantra, measured breaths, and the refusal to turn away. Self-discipline narrows the torrent of information to a gentle trickle. [+1 Willpower]
I'm happy you're back Kaz, I loved Interregnum and I followed basically since day one. Can't wait to see where this goes

>>6294293
>Willpower – you clam down on the fear and won’t let it speak. A steadying mantra, measured breaths, and the refusal to turn away. Self-discipline narrows the torrent of information to a gentle trickle. [+1 Willpower]

>>6294295
>>Presence – you speak as if you already belong here, a clear, commanding voice. It is half-challenge, half-question sent out into the hush of the room. Giving voice to the panic expels it from your body. [+1 Presence].

>>6294295
>Brawn – you force your body to be louder than your head. You squeeze your fists, clench and release every muscle until the ache drowns the noise. Physical pain and exertion anchor you back to the present. [+1 Brawn]
Monke brain strong

>>6294295
>>Willpower

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>>6294299
>>6294301
>>6294320
>>6294350
>>6294354

>Brawn – you force your body to be louder than your head. You squeeze your fists, clench and release every muscle until the ache drowns the noise. Physical pain and exertion anchor you back to the present. [+1 Brawn]

You make your body a weapon against the flood in your skull. Fingernails bite into palms, teeth grind together until your jaw aches. Shoulders lock, then strain as you force every muscle in your body to tense, release, and tense again in rhythm.

The burn of lactic acid, the fire in your lungs, and the throbbing pain in your skull are proof of a body that exists in the here and now. You are not a prisoner of the mind, but a being of flesh and blood. The storm of intrusive data still claws at the edges of thought, but the strain holds it at bay.

You stumble onto your feet, legs trembling as if learning how to support your own weight. Your lungs burn from the cold air and the earlier panic, but the spasms gradually ease as you take deep, measured breaths until you can no longer feel your heartbeat in your ears. The metallic tang of ozone and the acrid stench of scored circuitry hang in the cold air as you take stock of your surroundings.

Puddles streak the floor of a disheveled laboratory, glossy and dark, and streaks of matching crimson run along the walls. They catch the light of half-functioning consoles, rows of terminals and databanks that cram every spare bit of space. Your cryopod looms in the center of the room like a sacrificial altar, surrounded by dead or dying machines. Dust seems to cling to every surface - no one has been here for a very long time.

Then, you see it - a small mirror hanging beside one of the ruined stations, just barely large enough to catch a face. A fragment of yourself waiting to be confirmed.

You brace against the pod's rim and gingerly lift yourself free, muscles trembling from the effort and lingering cold...only to freeze.

A sharp tug wrenches at the back of your head, halting you mid-motion. Confusion flickers, then dread settles as your hand gropes backward and finds not skin, but something foreign. A cable, thick as a finger, is plugged directly into the base of your neck. It hums faintly, warm to the touch, pulsing in seeming tandem with your heartbeat.

Neural Interface Port. Rudimentary implant, capable of biodirectinoal transmission through bioelectric signals across the spinal cord and wider nervous system. Slanged as "NIPs".

Your stomach knots. The pod isn't finished with you. It isn't just a coffin or a cradle, but a machine still feeding from you, or into you. Neural data, signals, upload and download.

Syncs with cortical implants. Dangerously prone to thermal buildup and neural feedback when used continuously for more than 172 hours.

The realization lingers like a weight in your guts as a sense of violation overwhelms you. You don't even remember receiving these.

(cont.)

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>>Cybernetic Capacity is derived from the following stats:
>>(Brawn + Finesse + Willpower + Presence)
>Brawn – the body’s tolerance. Can your muscles, bones and immune system physically handle the grafts, ports and metal shoved under the skin? A frail body rejects, tears or breaks under load.
>Finesse – integration and control. The nervous system has to coordinate with new actuators, sensors and feedback loops. High finesse means smoother synchronization, lower finesse results in tremors, spasms and seizures.
>Willpower – mental resilience. Cyberware dumps data and signals into your brain. Willpower determines whether you stay grounded under the strain, or spiral into overload, dissociation, or worse – cyberpsychosis.
>Presence – identity anchor. Each implant chips away at how human you seem to others…and to yourself. Presence measures how much of “you” remain, resisting the slide into uncanny detachment.

>>Current Cybernetic Capacity Threshold: [9/10]
>Neural Interface Port – rudimentary implant that allows your nervous system to interface with external hardware. [0]

Trembling fingers reach for the connection. The plug resists at first, then slips free with a wet snap that makes your teeth clench. A shiver courses through you, not from the cold, but from something deeper, a hollowing absence as some psycho-somatic connection between yourself and the machine as been severed.

The cable recoils into the cryopod with a soft hiss, vanishing beneath the conforming gel bed like a serpent burrowing back into its nest. The silence it leaves behind is worse than the tether itself, a phantom itch that gnaws at where metal once kissed flesh.

But you are free. You stagger forward, bare feet slapping against the chilled floor, dust clinging like ash to your soles. The mirror draws you in as if it alone holds the answers to your questions. You seize it like a lifeline, hurriedly smearing away grime until it’s somewhat clear-

...

...a face.

Your face.

To your great despair, recognition briefly surges, only to vanish in the same heartbeat. All that remains is a reflection that feels both achingly intimate and utterly strange, the visage of…

>>Please select a gender.
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]
>…a woman in the mirror. [FEMC]

[VOTE OPEN FOR 8 HOURS]

Rolled 2 (1d2)

>>6294500
I willl let the dice decide. 1 for man, 2 for woman.

>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]

>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]
We are a MANLY MAN.

>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]

>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]

>>6294500
>Willpower – mental resilience. Cyberware dumps data and signals into your brain. Willpower determines whether you stay grounded under the strain, or spiral into overload, dissociation, or worse – cyberpsychosis.
>…a woman in the mirror. [FEMC]

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>>6294553
Oh, wait, that first one wasn’t a vote.

>>6294500
>…a woman in the mirror. [FEMC]

>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]
Wake the fuck up samurai

>>6294500
>…a woman in the mirror. [FEMC]

>>6294500
>>…a woman in the mirror. [FEMC]

>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]

>>6294555
The dementors cometh. Cometh for thee.

>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]
I'm indescribably tired of women.

>>6294500
>…a woman in the mirror. [FEMC]

>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]

>>6294500
>…a woman in the mirror. [FEMC]

>>6294500
>…a woman in the mirror. [FEMC]

>>6294500
>>…a woman in the mirror. [FEMC]

>>6294500
...Alright, I see that we may need to check up on single post IDs.

>MenC
>6294502 (Single post)
>6294514
>6294520
>6294537
>6294591
>6294623 (Single post)
>6294632
>6294642

>FemC
>6294501 (Single post, rolled to chose)
>6294553
>6294580
>6294594 (Single post)
>6294620 (Single post)
>6294640 (Single post)
>6294668 (Single post)
>6294673 (Single post)
>6294677 (Single post)

Also, it appears that 4chan still thinks posts with multiple links are spam.
Fucking great job.

>>6294681
>Also, it appears that 4chan still thinks posts with multiple links are spam.
>Fucking great job.
The step forward from the previous two steps back has not occurred yet.

>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]

>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]

>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]

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>>6294681
Thanks for counting out the votes. Hoo boy. Lot of single-post IDs.

I know for a fact that some players in the past have had issues with their ISP screwing with /qst/'s ID system.

Still doesn't help that it looks like multi-voting/samefagging, even though the FEMC option won by one vote. Especially since all the votes after the cut-off point that voted for a MC have at least 2 posts to their IDs.

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>>6294500
>…a man in the mirror. [MC]
Come on.

>>6294778
Yeah a dozen one vote IDs coming out of nowhere is really suspicious. Like it's the start of the quest so I guess it's harder to prove but I still find it questionable.

>>6294789
Woo! He He!

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>>6294794
Yeah, definitely questionable. In any event, I'll give the benefit of the doubt just this once since it's the beginning of the quest.
After this, too many single-ID responses get more harsher scrutiny.

I've also never written a FEMC before, so there's a certain silver lining.

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>>6294501
>>6294553
>>6294580
>>6294594
>>6294620
>6294623
>6294640
>6294668
>6294673
>6294677

>>...a woman in the mirror. [FEMC]

One hand rises to the glass. The reflection follows – narrowed eyes, lips trembling at their corners, a face that should be familiar, but feels stolen from someone else. You pinch lightly at your cheeks, tugging the flesh as though it were a mask, then comb unsteady fingers through a mop of hair cut short for a cryopod. Your fingertips hover along faint scar lines across your collarbones and hip, mapping a terrain without story, a body empties of its past.

You are utterly naked. Cryostsais requires it. Fabric might stiffen, bond and fuse to living tissue. Removal would cause tearing, necrosis and loss of function. The protocol is practical, efficient, and entirely rational.

And yet the absence of clothing leaves you utterly unmoored, as though your body were little more than a specimen on display – viable, animate, but stripped of identity. The reflection in the mirror is less a woman than a clinical subject, an anatomy model animated only by breath.

Your reflection’s eyes are gray, restless and clouded like a roiling storm. You search for familiarity, for some remnant of warmth or belonging. The glass only offers blank return. Desperate, you cycle through smiles, frowns, a flicker of laughter that feels like an imitation. Each gesture collapses into silence, a performance for nobody.

“…ah.”

The sound slips from your throat, ragged and raw. You flinch at the unfamiliarity of your own voice – then again as pain lances through your esophagus. Freezer burn is a common side effect of cryostasis. You don’t think you have any major damage, but the “thawing” process still leaves your body with aches and dull pain.

The facts arrive with certainty, though less violent than your earlier breakdown. But the certainty itself is what unsettles you most. You don’t remember learning this. You don’t remember anything.

Analysis without context.

Data without meaning.

Your hand brushes the workstation for balance, catching on something jutting out of a half-broken cubicle drawer. A plugsuit – standard issue, sealed for sterility. The fabric is cold and unyielding as you pull it over your skin, conforming to every contour with unforgiving precision. It reduces your body to function and outline, clinical and impersonal. It is still better than nothing, especially after the cold of the pod.

Then the mirror rattles.

A vibration shudders through the wall. Easily dismissed as a trick of your recovering balance. But the sensation builds – low, insistent, rhythmic, until the ground hums beneath your feet. A cold awareness rises in you. This isn’t a system quirk or machinery, but movement.

(cont.)

Suddenly, the tremor escalates, and you nearly lose your footing. Loose instruments skitter off their shelves, scattering across the floor. Glassware tumbles and bursts into glittering shards. Consoles flicker, stutter and then die, plunging the chamber into suffocating darkness.

For an instant, there is only a terrible silence. Then the entire facility groans like a beast in pain.

Emergency power stirs. Red strips of light sputter to life along the ceiling, painting the room in a feverish crimson. Sirens shriek, their klaxon wails ricocheting through unseen corridors until the sound us unbearable, metallic and vast.

“Switching to emergency power,” a soft, genderless voice announces over an unseen intercom, eerily calm against the chaos. “Alert, alert. Structural integrity of the facility has been compromised. All personnel, please report to your designated evacuation zones. Alert, alert...”

The words are punctuated by another violent impact. The floor bucks beneath you, and somewhere in the distance, steel screams as entire sections shear apart. Dust sifts down from above you, falling like an ashy snow upon your body.

The clinical detachment in your head gives way for something more primal. More urgent.

A need to move.

>>What do you do?
>Run. Head immediately towards the evacuation zones. Survival is the most important.
>Stay. Risk the danger to search for supplies or clues. Anything to figure out who you are.

[VOTE OPEN FOR 8 HOURS]

>>6294879
>>Run. Head immediately towards the evacuation zones. Survival is the most important.
We may not know who we are, but we do know one thing; we're alive. Kind of important to keep it that way methinks.

>>6294879
>Run. Head immediately towards the evacuation zones. Survival is the most important.

>>6294879
>>Stay. Risk the danger to search for supplies or clues. Anything to figure out who you are.

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>>6294879
>Run. Head immediately towards the evacuation zones. Survival is the most important.

>>6294879
>Stay. Risk the danger to search for supplies or clues. Anything to figure out who you are.

>>6294681
Well, I did vote already here >>6294027
and here >>6294455
I'm pretty sure that the WI-FI at my parents' house resets every night so it must be the reason why it changes. Lets hope my mobile hotspot is stable.
>>6294879
>Run. Head immediately towards the evacuation zones. Survival is the most important.
It's time to haul ass.

>>6294879
>Run. Head immediately towards the evacuation zones. Survival is the most important.

>>6294879
>Run. Head immediately towards the evacuation zones. Survival is the most important.

If my ID changes every post that's because the yookay gov wants to block this site

>>6294984
Aaahhh MORE TEA IN THE BAY! This time at home.

>complains about single post IDs voting
>counts them anyway

I guess it's one of those quests.

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>>6294883
>>6294884
>>6294913
>>6294966
>>6294967
>6294984

The ground shudders again – harder this time. You pitch forward, catching yourself against a data terminal as more dust rains down from the ceiling. Every instinct screams the same truth: move.

You race towards the doorway. Emergency lights strobe in a sickly red, bathing the corridor in broken flashes as the klaxon continues to wail. The floor beneath your feet wobbles every so often, threatening to bowl you over. Somewhere in the distance, metal shrieks, a tortured scream as some unseen section of the complex is destroyed. The intercom voice continues to drone evacuation orders, calm and detached, almost mocking in its indifference to the chaos.

You may not know who you are. You may not know why you’re here.

But you know one thing with absolute certainty – something that does not come from memory or fact, but from the raw, undeniable thrum of your pulse.

You are alive.

And you do not look back.

As you run, the corridors stretch in sterile repetition, devoid of anything decorative save for half-faded signs and flickering facility maps that give only directions and no answers. Dark stains streak across the walls and floors, long dried and faded to brown, but undeniably blood.
Smears where hands once clawed for purchase. Splashes where someone fell. Trails and pools that end abruptly without any bodies.

The emptiness gnaws at you more than the alarms or the tremors. Every half-glimpsed room of terminals and databanks reminds you that you should not be alone. There should be people – technicians, guards, office workers, anyone. Yet the facility is utterly gutted. No voices or screams save for the one that drones from the intercom, no bodies left behind.

You cling to the only hope you have left: the evacuation zone. Each glowing sign that points the way forward feels like a lifeline, a whispered promise that someone else must have made it. Had to have made it. That the silence devoid of any other human life is not absolute. That you aren’t the only one.

But the evacuation zone is not salvation.

The bulkhead parts with a reluctant groan, spilling you into a cavernous chamber – escape pod bay, pressurized pods with fins and propellers. Facility is underwater.

(cont.)

The air is curdled with the stench of rot and iron. The walls are splattered in wide arcs of brown-black, floors slick with the residue of violence. What few consoles still flicker cast everything in a pallid, sickly light, illuminating the truth in fragments too awful to take in all at once.
There are no other survivors. There are no bodies, either – only remains. Flayed scraps cling to the walls like obscene banners, tangles of hair and sinew trailing from vents. The stains are so deep that they’ve seeped into tile and steel alike, rusting the very surfaces itself.

It is a charnel house.

And at its heart, something moves.

It stands upright, its frame a patchwork of synthetic muscle - ferro-electric polymers-, wire and alloy. At first glance it could be mistaken for a human.

Humanoid platform, Karakuri series manufactured by KyotoTronics. Unit designation ‘Jozu’ 0 maintenance/light labor android.

Until the way it shudders gives it away. Every twitch resembles an insect struggling against its own exoskeleton, servos and joints slaked with offal. Draped across its shoulders and torso is a hideous mantle of skin, stitched and layered together in a grotesque parody of flesh.

Neural restraint firmware corrupt. AI Engram – critically unstable. Terminal rampancy.

It breathes though it does not need to, ragged gasps tearing from a voice box never designed for lungs.

Vocalizer output: 34 decibels. Modulation pattern, human mimicry. Error margin – 89%.

Its lenses are eyes, some organic and half-rotted, others cybernetic augments and sputtering, dangling from a necklace of gore and nerves. Crudely welded into its circuitry, they fix upon you with a hunger that is not mechanical.

Ocular function: reduced. Optical range: limited. Behavioral directive: acquisition of identity..

The engram has collapsed; Asimov’s Laws are discarded. In its insanity, the engram has tried to wear humanity like clothing.

Conclusion: subject seeks to be human. Methodology: impossible. Hazard classification: lethal.

It is still trying, lunging at you with a digital scream.

Conflict unavoidable. Threat blocks access to closest escape pod.

>>How do you fight?
>From a pile of discarded clothes and garbage, you spy a pistol. You dive for it and fire. [Ranged - Light]
>Half-hidden beneath a toppled storage crate, a vibrosword lies innocuously quiet. You grab and activate it. [Melee]
>You focus on the psyco-somatic connection in your brain and redirect it towards the rampant machine. [Ability - Quickhack]

[VOTE OPEN FOR EIGHT(8) HOURS]

>>6294966
You could pick up a tripcode if that’s the case. That way we would know which posts are yours and not someone samefagging.
>>6295187
>You focus on the psyco-somatic connection in your brain and redirect it towards the rampant machine. [Ability - Quickhack]

>>6295187
>From a pile of discarded clothes and garbage, you spy a pistol. You dive for it and fire. [Ranged - Light]

>>6295189
>>6295190
I tend to just put my previous ID as my name when I'm traveling. Could do that.

>>6295187
>Half-hidden beneath a toppled storage crate, a vibrosword lies innocuously quiet. You grab and activate it. [Melee]
OOGA BOOGA

>>6295187
>Half-hidden beneath a toppled storage crate, a vibrosword lies innocuously quiet. You grab and activate it. [Melee]
Chop chop

>>6295187
>>From a pile of discarded clothes and garbage, you spy a pistol. You dive for it and fire. [Ranged - Light]

>>6295187
>You focus on the psyco-somatic connection in your brain and redirect it towards the rampant machine.

>>6295187
>>You focus on the psyco-somatic connection in your brain and redirect it towards the rampant machine. [Ability - Quickhack]

>>6294877
>FemMC
Whelp, have a nice day Kaz, hope Interregnum comes back soon

>>6295187
>From a pile of discarded clothes and garbage, you spy a pistol. You dive for it and fire. [Ranged - Light]

>>6295187
>From a pile of discarded clothes and garbage, you spy a pistol. You dive for it and fire. [Ranged - Light]

>>6295189
Nah, I think the hotspot hold stable, no need for tripfagging.
>>6295187
>Half-hidden beneath a toppled storage crate, a vibrosword lies innocuously quiet. You grab and activate it. [Melee]
Lets dance.

>>6295189
>>6295261
>>6295305

>>Quickhack won at the time of the vote ending.

You close an eye, not to block the horror from view, but to find the thread inside yourself. The psycho-somatic link flickers in your skull, like a phantom limb you didn’t know you possessed until now. You grasp it and twist, forcing the current outward.

Pain.

Static.

A splitting white-noise shriek that isn’t sound, but cognition bleeding across channels as connection is established. Your vision glitches, and you can almost imagine the sight of firewalls and subroutines executing defensive protocols as the rampant AI tries to ravage your mind.

You feel for the smallest thread of connection in your skull – not thought, but a latticework of signal and impulse. The rudimentary program that bubbles up from memory is laughably crude, the digital equivalent of throwing firecrackers onto an open flame.

Pixie.

An executable marketed as commercial prank-ware, meant to make implants twitch or prosthetic limbs dance against their owner’s will. A child’s toy sold in glossy, digital packaging, a dumbed-down version of a far deadlier program.

And yet under your desperate intent, the sprite shows its teeth. Electricity hums like gossamer wings as you execute the program and send it rocketing through the connection.

Ahead of you, the android stutters. Joins lock, gears grind and skin twitches as electricity surges through its body. Its cape of flesh trembles violently, and its voicebox screams as the program invades the entirety of its being. The engram's firewalls desperately try to lock you out, reverting entirely to defensive protocols...

>>The following programs are at your fingertips:
>Pixie. A rudimentary program designed for implant pranks. Forces a surge through local circuits, causing static shocks, twitching prosthetics, or temporary overloads.
>Jack Frost. A cryogenic spoof-hack that mimics failsafe cooling loops. Causes actuators, servos to limbs to seize up as if frozen.
>Pyro Jack. Overloads microcircuits with excess current, creating localized overheating. Results in painful burns at contact points or even melted wiring.

>>Roll 2d6 Cunning.
>>Best of five.

Rolled 2, 5 = 7 (2d6)

>>6295637
>>Pyro Jack. Overloads microcircuits with excess current, creating localized overheating. Results in painful burns at contact points or even melted wiring.

Rolled 6, 3 = 9 (2d6)

>>6295637

Rolled 1, 6 = 7 (2d6)

>>6295637
>Pyro Jack. Overloads microcircuits with excess current, creating localized overheating. Results in painful burns at contact points or even melted wiring.
BURN

Rolled 6, 3 = 9 (2d6)

>>6295637
>Pyro Jack. Overloads microcircuits with excess current, creating localized overheating. Results in painful burns at contact points or even melted wiring.
Perish

Rolled 1, 2 = 3 (2d6)

>>6295637
>Jack Frost. A cryogenic spoof-hack that mimics failsafe cooling loops. Causes actuators, servos to limbs to seize up as if frozen.

Rolled 1, 3 = 4 (2d6)

>>6295637
>>Pixie. A rudimentary program designed for implant pranks. Forces a surge through local circuits, causing static shocks, twitching prosthetics, or temporary overloads.

Rolled 1, 1 = 2 (2d6)

>>6295637
>Pixie. A rudimentary program designed for implant pranks. Forces a surge through local circuits, causing static shocks, twitching prosthetics, or temporary overloads.

File: Cranialization.png (1.33 MB, 1024x1024)

1.33 MB PNG

>>6295646
>>6295648
>>6295650
>>6295661
>>6295666

>6, 3 = 9

>3 – Connection maintained.

The phantom connection thrums in your skull, a digital live-wire humming at the edge of through. Even as the engram within the android struggles against you, your mind holds fast, fingers of pure will tightening around the thread. You force the connection, maintaining access as the executable ignites.

The surge leaps the invisible divide with the echo of a mischievous laugh, bypassing the engram’s ramshackle firewalls with a jagged lurch.

Pyro Jack.

The signal floods through the tether: cascading amperage, voltage spike, 22.7% above safe operational margin. A critical thermal runaway has been initiated within the unit. Circuits scream as dielectric layers rupture and solder liquefies. Copper traces blister, and silicon fractures at the molecular level.

The android seizes, stuttering into arrhythmic spasms as targeted bursts of heat bloom beneath its frame. The evacuation chamber fills with the reek of scorched insulation and charred polymer, a bitter ozone tang overlaying the fetid stench of decaying flesh. Its grotesque mantle blackens where heat escapes in violent plumes, peeling and curling like desiccated skin left too close to flame.

>6 – Critical Hit.

The Jozu screams. Or tries too. What emerges is a broken modulation of sound – a speaker cone warping under the surge, a vocal mesh half-melted, shrieking at frequencies too high and low for any human throat. Its head erupts an instant later, a blossom of fire venting outward as its artificial eyes detonate, vitreous fluid vaporizing in successive bursts of pressure.

It collapses into the gore it had draped around itself, and into the charnel that was once the facility staff. But the tether doesn’t cut clean. Something lashes back through the channel as the engram dies, just before you can completely disconnect yourself.

Nose pressed to glass, you watch the first JumpShip leap to Alpha Centauri, your chest aching with wonder as you whisper “forever”, not knowing if you mean stars or time.

Memories.

Older, trembling hand scratch equations in fading ink, each blot a reminder that your body is failing even as your mind refuses to quit.

Fragments not your own.

Strapped and paralyzed, you feel thoughts wrenched open as drills sear behind your eyes, then the horrible sensation of things draining, emptying like a blister.

The strongest emotions of the donor that created the engram.

You cannot scream as _you_ are torn apart and copied by the cranializing machine.

Your knees hit the floor. Acid surges up your throat and you vomit until the taste of bile drowns everything. Each retch leaves you shuddering, tears streaming down your cheeks as the ghost of the donor’s memories resonate through your mind and flesh.

(cont.)

File: Vibrosword.png (46 KB, 591x247)

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>>Acquired Skill: Hacking 2 (Intellect).
>Representing any offensive/destructive uses, covering electronic code-breaking, hacking servers, breaking ICE, and using Quickhacks against enemies.

>>Acquired Skill: Sysops 2 (Intellect)
>Representing the defensive use of hacking against runners, viruses and other intrusions. Can also be used to build programs, activate/improve ICE, and trace hacking attempts to their source.

>>Acquired Talent: Integrated Modem [Standard] (1 CC)
>A neural-linked computer embedded directly within the user’s nervous system, allowing for you to access, manipulate and override any networked device or system that isn't air-gapped without the use of a physical cyberdeck.
>Has an active/passive mode, allowing the user to air-gap themselves from hostile signals.

>>Acquired Talent: Hacksmith
>Your hacking uses ingenuity and instinct rather than calculated reasoning, bending networks to adaptive cleverness.
>Allows the user to roll Hacking checks using Cunning instead of Intellect.

>>Acquired Talent: Iron Mind
>Even the strongest intellect is no match for a mental fortitude as resilient as chrome.
>Allows the user to roll Sysops checks using Willpower instead of Intellect.

The spasms wrack your body, but there’s no time to linger. The facility is still convulsing, shuddering with the weight of its inevitable collapse. Dust sifts from the ceiling, tiles groan, and the droning voice abruptly cut out. In the distance, but closer than before, another bulkhead shears free with a shriek of tortured steel.

You wipe the bile from your mouth with the back of a trembling hand, forcing your body to move. A holstered sidearm lies half-buried atop a pile of rotting clothes –M1911, chambered .45 ACP, 10-round magazine-, its matte finish chipped but functional. Next to it, a vibrosword –Tycho Logistics, 30,000 kHz, carbon nanofiber lattice with monomolecular edge- its casing cracked and edge stained with old blood, but power cell still intact. The corpse of a guard is slumped nearby, hollow eyes starting from a skull flensed of flesh, yet their backpack is still clipped to one shoulder.

You take them all without hesitation.

>>Acquired Skill: Ranged (Light) 1 (Finesse)
>Proficiency at utilizing one-handed weapons such as pistols, nets, throwing knives, and grenades.
>You may wield a Ranged (Light) weapon in each hand, or a one-handed melee weapon and a Ranged (Light) weapon in the other.

>>Acquired Skill: Melee 1 (Brawn)
>Proficiency at utilizing melee weapons such as vibroblades, stun batons, and improvised weapons such as plasma cutters or pipes.
>This skill also covers cybernetically-integrated weapons such as monoclaws, wrist-bunkers, and firewire.
>Fist weapons such as surge gauntlets are covered by the Brawl (Brawn) skill.

(cont.)

File: SecurityGrabBag.png (774 KB, 713x921)

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Every second feels stolen. Your legs protest as you push off, clutching what you can carry as you stagger towards the nearest escape pod. The klaxons blare in shrill counterpoint to the guttural rumbling of the foundation as its structure groans and screeches. Only now can you hear the terrible sound of rushing water, and the rumble of several dozen atmospheres slowly crushing the facility.

The hatch seals with a hiss as you throw yourself and your precious cargo inside, slamming your hand against the launch console. For a terrible instant, nothing happens, only the groan of tortured metal outside that slowly grows louder and closer. Then the pod jolts, rockets igniting with a violent kick that drives you back into the crash couch.

Sheer gravity crushes you into the seat as the pod accelerates down and up its magnetic launch rail. A low, bass rumble vibrates through the pod walls, building into a deafening crescendo...then, release. The pod tears free of the chute in a blast of bubbles and fire, torpedoing up out of the abyss and out of the doomed facility.

Through the narrow viewport, you catch sight of the facility vanishing behind you. A yawning rupture across the ocean floor splits the facility wide, steel and ferrocrete folding inward like paper. Water surges in through shattered walls and fault points, crushing chambers into nothingness into seconds. Entire wings crumble under the pressure, collapsing with a haunting silence as the ocean reclaims what was always hers.

The alarms, the android’s screams, the facility where _you_ were born.

They’re all gone now, drowned to never again see the light of day. Only the fading glow of emergency lights marks where the complex was, a scattering of lattice-red swallowed whole by the abyss. And even those begin winking out, their power sources shorting and blossoming ever-so-briefly into plumes of orange light as water surges into generators and shorts them with violent explosions.

You are alive.

But you are utterly alone.

>>Line Break.

In a bid to keep yourself busy, you inspect your ill-gotten loot as the escape pod begins to slowly climb up and out of the depths of the ocean.

In spite of the gore covering the holster, the pistol appears to be in serviceable condition. A brief flick of the power switch on the vibrosword's hilt sends a keening hum reverberating along and off the walls of the pod. Attempting to interface with the pod itself reveals little beyond rote diagnostics, not even any hidden files planted after-market.

Then you turn to the the pod's emergency locker, and the late security guard's grab bag...

>Roll 1d100 Loot Check.
>Best of five.

Rolled 54 (1d100)

>>6295943
Sad we didn't get Mara.

Rolled 15 (1d100)

>>6295943

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>>6295945
You joke about that, but there's a dedicated program/quickhack/daemon that specifically targets sex-related augmentations. I don't know yet if the opportunity to acquire or use it will ever appear. Torn between naming it either Lilith or Mara.

Rolled 47 (1d100)

>>6295943
LISTEN
LISTEN
THE DICE
ARE
ARE
LISTENING TO ME

Rolled 50 (1d100)

>>6295943
Lookit this shiny thing

Rolled 88 (1d100)

>>6295943

Rolled 95 (1d100)

>>6295943

Rolled 89 (1d100)

>>6295943

File: Immuno-Suppressants.png (135 KB, 676x380)

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>>6295945
>>6295947
>>6295963
>>6295997
>>6296123

>88 clutch.

The locker hatch opens with a heavy clunk, hinges groaning from disuse as you strain it open. Inside: neatly ordered emergency supplies sealed in sterile, airtight packaging. Packs of water, medkits, oxygen canisters, MREs and more – everything you’d expect, everything neat meant and ready for the eight people this pod would have carried.

It’s too much. Too generous. At the sight of such abundance, the fact that you are the sole beneficiary makes your stomach churn uneasily.

You mind races to catalogue them all, almost lurching into the same cascading informational overload you’d suffered upon awakening. But you reign it in, adjusting your breath and clenching your fist tight to ground yourself in the moment.

One item at a time, and at your own conscious pace – not your mind’s.

>>Locker Notables:
>Emergency Distress Beacon – a small, blinking red diode waiting for a signal cycle to activate; effective both above and underwater.
>Medkit – neatly packed with bandages, coagulant sprays, hypoderms, and a portable autos-suture, a staple of every professional-grade medkit of the 25th century.
>Ration Bricks – tasteless calorie-dense blocks of onions protein, supposedly enhanced with vitamins and nutrients, manufactured according to the Terran Commonwealth’s Daily Nutritional Allowance (DNA) standards.

The guard’s grab-bag is encrusted with dried blood. It’s only a tender mercy that none of its recent, having dried some indeterminate long time ago. But you struggle not to gag as you undo zippers and latches, every movement sending dried flakes of unthinkable composition across the floor and your plugsuit.

The smell alone is enough to make bile rise in your throat – coppery and stale, mingled with the sour tang of body odor and old sweat soaked into the nylon and canvas. Every pocket feels sticky, every latch begrudging its opening as if the bag itself resents being touched.

But it appears that you’re lucky. The contamination is only surface-level. There’s an odor, but one that’s more bearable than gore as you gingerly extract each item for inspection.

>>Grab Bag Notables:
>Ammunition Boxes – 50-round boxes of extra ammunition for your M1911.
>Guard’s Personal Datapad – spiderweb cracks across the screen, its OS flickering to life with great effort.
>Survival Kit – a catch-all for the various bits and bobs such as multitools, matches, paracord, soap, and MREs.
>Vibroknife – a smaller, more compact version of the commercial vibrosword.

>>For rolling not only a high number, but doubles as well…
>Immuno-suppressants (20) – a heavily-regulated drug that prevents a person’s body from rejecting their cybernetics. Can be diluted or taken straight depending on the extensiveness of their augmentations. You don't think you need these...but others might.


(cont.)

File: The Cataclysm.png (2.83 MB, 1456x816)

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You snap the locker shut, and cinch the bag closed. For the first time since your awakening, you feel something close to control – a faint grasp of order in the chaos and unknown. Food, water, weapons, tools. You are not helpless. You cling to this feeling like a lifeline.

The pod groans, then shifts, as it begins its final ascent. The enclosure shudders as the depth gauge swiftly approaches closer to zero. Your ears pop as the air pressure changes. The sensation is nauseatingly swift, a sprint upward through roiling black water that thrums against the pod like a mirror of your own heartbeat.

You hold your breath when the motion stops. The pod blares a warning, then a hiss as it cycles through its decompression protocols. The noise of its completion is a soft chime, and the red hazard light by the hatch switches to a vibrant, safe green.

With trembling hands, you reach for the release, cold air seeping through the seam. You want your first breath of real air to be clean, bracing, and a promise of deliverance.

You push the hatch open.

The first sight you have of Earth is a nightmare straight out of hell.

What should have been an endless blue sky is consumed by a swirling maelstrom of fire and fury. They sky is bleeding, clouds warped into ribbons of incandescent red and black that roil and rumble. The air claws down your throat, dry and chemical, the taste of salt ash and something acrid, electrical.

Charged air, magnetic interference. Geiger counter measures no ambient radiation.

The ocean itself is a mirror to the ruin above, waves catching the blaze so that the world appears doubled. Fire above, fire below. For one delirious instant, you can’t tell if you’ve surfaced or sunken deeper, trapped between two burning ceilings or floors.

Not a nuke, beyond its capabilities. Ionization spikes, indicative of an Electromagnetic Pulse.

And in the distance, you can see a burning city. Or the corpse of one. Pillars of smoke devour the skyline, feeding into the cauldron of black clouds that’s spread across the heavens like a stain of blood. From the clouds, ash falls like snow, buffeted by flames that look as if they’ve a life of their own, casting the horizon with a thick, bloody red tint.

Communications offline, satellite signal offline, implant telecom incepts only static. Effect too devastating to be manmade.

Whatever world existed before you awoke is gone.

Atmospheric conductivity skyrocketing. Storm cells forming where none should exist.

Whatever salvation you thought waited beyond the ocean’s depths is gone.

Sky burning. Ocean reflecting. There is so much data, yet not enough of it.

What greets you now is a world already ending, and your immediate surroundings a raw, cauterized wound.

You are alone.

You. Are. Alone.

The stress of your escape finally catches up to you, and emotions you've only recently discovered come boiling to the surface.

(cont.)

The pod’s computer remains mercifully silent as you collapse away from the hatch and onto the floor. You’re not sure whether or not you’re laughing, crying, screaming or cursing. It could be any and all of them, or an incoherent noise of human grief as you beat your fists into the floor. Hard enough to draw blood.

Hard enough to stop the overwhelming flow of information before it drives you mad.

Eventually, you collapse against the side of the pod, knees drawn up, head pressed into your arms. Tears sting your eyes, the taste of salt mingling with the acrid tang of smoke and ozone that clings to your plugsuit. For a moment, you let it consume you – the despair, the terror the sense of utter isolation. It’s almost preferable to the cold, unfeeling data.

>>For using Willpower earlier…

Beneath the ache in your heart, something deeper anchors you. There’s a quiet insistence, a mental foundation forged the moment you forced your body to drown out the panic when you awoke in the cryopod.

You breathe deliberately, counting every single breath and exhale, willing your pulse and thoughts to obey. Slowly, the terror eases, and the tremors stop. The chaos outside the pod remains, but inside, both within your surroundings and the core of _you_, a fragile sense of stability and control returns.

The pod is intact.

You are intact.

There is still a way forward.

You straighten up, wiping your face and crawl towards the console. The pod displays its pre-programed protocols. Its modem is currently blaring an SOS, which you doubt will be answered with all the electronic noise and atmospheric interference. A tentative connection between your brain and the computer reveals a pre-programed destination:

Norfolk, Virginia.

Military port. Terran Commonwealth East Atlantic Task Force HQ. Population 7.5 million. Major orbital relay. Industrial shipping hubs. Authority status unknown, naval assets unknown.

A deeper probe reveals at least two secondary destinations should the pod surface too far away from Norfolk. There’s more than enough power in the pod’s generator to make the journey.

Washington, D.C.

Government district. Formal capital of the late United States before Unification Day. Population 10 million. Heavy orbital and atmospheric surveillance. Security protocols highly automated. Government/military remnant likely.

Baltimore, Maryland.

Major port and industrial center. Population 16 million. Shipyards and logistic hubs. Civilian density variable. Regional power grid likely nonfunctional. Historical storm surge risk, port navigation unknown.

(cont.)

The pod waits, pre-programmed and ready to begin navigation at your command. But the interface is not set to read-only. A simple hack, and the coordinates could be rewritten. In theory, any city along the Eastern American seaboard could become your destination.

But you have only immediate eyes for the three presented to you.

You take a deep breath, grounding both yourself and the digital connection you have to the pod. You feel a strange thrill – a rush of potential, the weight of decision. The first true choice you’ll make as a human in the world.

>>Please choose one(1) of the following destinations:
>Baltimore. A larger population means a better possibility of finding other people.
>Norfolk. You have no obvious reason to change the pod's programed destination.
>Washington. There’s bound to be some sort of civil authority that can help you.

[VOTE OPEN FOR EIGHT(8) HOURS]

>>6296367
>Baltimore. A larger population means a better possibility of finding other people.
And if there ain’t, DC ain’t too far away.

>>6296367
>Washington. There’s bound to be some sort of civil authority that can help you.
The government surely knows how to handle this....

>>6296367
>Washington. There’s bound to be some sort of civil authority that can help you.
Does our clothing identify us as government agent/property?

>>6296379
Didn't think about that, but no. The plugsuit/bodysuit you're currently wearing is akin to a hospital scrub. Generic and mass-produced.

Maybe the brand is something that the government purchases, but you have no way of knowing that.

>>6296367
>Norfolk. You have no obvious reason to change the pod's programed destination.
https://youtu.be/4IB79iNCeb0?si=SVukphcO3cNGXgZT

>>6296367
>Baltimore. A larger population means a better possibility of finding other people.
FUCK YOU BALTIMORE

>>6296367
>>Norfolk. You have no obvious reason to change the pod's programed destination.

>>6296367
>Norfolk. You have no obvious reason to change the pod's programed destination.

>>6296367
>>Norfolk. You have no obvious reason to change the pod's programmed destination.

>>6296367
>Baltimore. A larger population means a better possibility of finding other people.

Baltimore & D.C. would be full of cannibals based on their IRL demographics. Norfolk, possibly less so.

>>6296892
Baltimore would be full of cannibals yeah but D.C. would be full of vampires.

File: Ration Brick.png (497 KB, 730x460)

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>>6296384
>>6296626
>>6296630
>>6296783

Washington/Baltimore were tied by the end of the deadline, decided to give it some extra time. Next time I'll be quicker on the draw about flash/emergency votes.

>Norfolk.

The pod lurches as propulsion units cough themselves awake, a low hum that swells into a guttural mechanical thrum that reverberates through its frame. You brace against one of the crash couches as it shudders, then steadies, plodding through the churning surf that reflects a burning sky. A flicker of green on the display confirms the heading:

Norfolk, Virginia.

The decision was made long before you ever opened your eyes. You don’t have any obvious reason to fight it now.

Projected ETA: 7-8 hours. Surface position: roughly 100 km off the coast of Virginia. Hull integrity nominal. Radioisotope Thermonuclear Generator: stable output.

You squint at the inferno on the horizon – a city perched on collapsing pillars and struts like an oil platform. The burning skeletons of launch gantries clawing upwards like grasping hands into the smoke.

Artificial megastructures. Staging points for atmospheric shuttles. Orbital support: severely compromised. Environmental status: high hazard and toxicity. Lethal to unprotected humans.

The adrenaline bleeds out of you, leaving a dead weight in its absence. You close the hatch just as your limbs leaden, muscles trembling from over-exhaustion. The locker resists, then pops open; clumsy fingers pull antiseptic wipes across your body to ease the tacky sheen of sweat, blood and bile. It stings in certain areas, aches as you go over muscles still “thawing” out from the pod, but the ritual steadies you.

You tear open a ration brick. The chewy texture of hyper-processed onions crumbles between your teeth without flavor or smell.

Deliberate design. No taste profile, no aroma. Engineered for consumption without desire to hoard or overeat. Prioritizes nutritional input only.

It fills the hollow in your stomach, if not the one in your chest.

Finally, the foil of a thermal blanket crinkles over your shoulders, its sterile heat an alien sort of comfort. For the first time since waking, you are still.

But stillness brings a tremor with it, the kind that seeps in beneath your skin to settle deep within your bones. All the worse with how soft, insistent, and inescapable the sensation is. Your eyelids are heavy, as if someone else is closing them for you.

…you don’t want to sleep.

Every nerve in your body still screams at you to stay awake. Sleep feels like surrender, like surrendering back into the comforting gel bed of the cryopod. But your exhaustion is merciless, and your body wins the argument.

You drift…

…and fracture.

(cont.)

In the void of your mind, nothing is whole.

Each glimpse is a shard of possibility, jagged and unfinished.

They dance around you, like little stars orbiting a greater mass that sometimes intersect.

>>Acquired Talent: Cognitive Cascade
>The protagonist can make mental leaps far beyond human reasoning, parsing patterns, data or sensory fragments from within her subconscious into actionable knowledge.
>Once per encounter, when rolling skills that rely on Intellect or Cunning, you may add d6 in boost dice equal to Willpower. However, repeated use in a single day inflicts increasing Strain damage.
>Critical success bring more information, eerie flashes of cause-and-effect. Critical failures will cause you to spiral into intrusive sensory overload, nausea, severe migraines, or even unconsciousness.

Some of them are already a part of you.

>>For choosing Brawn as one of your primary starting stats, you gain 2 ranks in Athletics.
>>For choosing Willpower as one of your primary starting stats, you gain 2 ranks in Discipline.

The rest await, to be either cherished or scattered into the darkness of your subconcious.

>>Please select three(3) of the following skills to take one(1) rank in:
>Coercion (Will) – ability to intimidate or threaten others into submission. Opposed by Discipline.
>Cool (Pre) – ability to remain calm in the face of tension, opposes Charm and Negotiate.
>Coordination (Fin) – a measure of physical flexibility, nimbleness and fine control of the body.
>Mechanics (Int) – prowess in working on all things from cybernetics, weapons, androids and vehicles.
>Perception (Cun) – the passive ability to notice subtle clues and things out of place.
>Resilience (Br) – prowess for handling over-exhaustion, sleep deprivation and hazardous environments.

>>Please structure your votes as the following:
>Skill A.
>Skill B.
>Skill C.

[VOTE OPEN FOR TWELVE(12) HOURS.]

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===========

Summary of current skills and character sheet:

>>{Coil of Lethe}
>Brawn - 3
>Finesse - 2
>Intellect - 2
>Willpower - 3
>Presence - 3

>>Skills:
>Athletics 2 (Br) - measure of overall fitness and physical condition.
>Discipline 2 (Will) - maintaining composure when faced with a surprising force. Protects against Leadership, Coercion and Deception.
>Hacking 2 (Int) - offensive uses of hacking, covering code-breaking, hacking servers, breaking ICE, and using Quickhacks against enemies. Opposes Sysops.
>Melee 1 (Brawn) - proficiency at utilizing melee weapons such as vibroblades, stun batons, and improvised weapons.
>Ranged (Light) 1 (Fin) - proficiency at utilizing one-handed ranged weapons such as pistols, nets, throwing knives and grenades.
>Sysops 2 (Int) - defensive uses of hacking against hostile runners, viruses and other intrusions. Can be used to build programs activate/improve ICE, and trace hacking attempts. Opposes Hacking.

>>Talents:
>Cognitive Cascade
>Iron Mind - may use Willpower instead of Intellect when making Sysops checks.
>Hacksmith - may use Cunning instead of Intellect when making Hacking checks.

>Cybernetic Capacity (9/10):
>Integrated Modem [Standard] - neural-linked computer embedded directly within the user’s nervous system. Has an active/passive mode, can be air-gapped. [1]
>Neural Interface Port - rudimentary implant that allows your nervous system to interface with external hardware. [0]

============

>>6297067
>Cool (Pre)
>Resilience (Br)
>Mechanics (Int)
Strong mind, strong body, good smarts.

>>6297067
>Cool (Pre) – ability to remain calm in the face of tension, opposes Charm and Negotiate.
>Perception (Cun) – the passive ability to notice subtle clues and things out of place.
>Resilience (Br) – prowess for handling over-exhaustion, sleep deprivation and hazardous environments.

>>6297067
>Coercion (Will) – ability to intimidate or threaten others into submission. Opposed by Discipline.
>Cool (Pre) – ability to remain calm in the face of tension, opposes Charm and Negotiate.
>Resilience (Br) – prowess for handling over-exhaustion, sleep deprivation and hazardous environments.

>>6297067
>Perception
>Mechanics
>Resilience

>>6297067
>Coercion (Will) – ability to intimidate or threaten others into submission. Opposed by Discipline.
>Cool (Pre) – ability to remain calm in the face of tension, opposes Charm and Negotiate.
>Resilience (Br) – prowess for handling over-exhaustion, sleep deprivation and hazardous environments.

>>6297188
Damn, my ID changed again. It's me >>6296388

File: BEANS.png (2.39 MB, 1920x1080)

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>>6297077
Oops, that should be Presence - 2.

>>6297064
>Texture of hyper-processed onions
>Onions

The fuck? That's supposed to be "hyper-processed basedbeans". Shrek isn't the one managing the Terran Commonwealth's standards for Daily Nutritional Intake.

>>6297067
>Cool (Pre)
>Perception (Cun)
>Resilience (Br)

>>6297220
The fuck is a basedbean, did you make that up?

>>6297220
>>6297229
4chan censored boy (but with a s instead of a b) because of the whole 'basedboy' meme a while back. It sucks but you just gotta work around it.

File: KikomanSoySauce.png (1.77 MB, 2400x2400)

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>>6297229
S O Y, like the Kikoman red/green-capped bottles that dispense sauce you get from sushi restaurants. Or basedjacks.

Looks like 4chan is still in the habit of autocorrecting a bunch of arbitrary words. What a pain in the ass.

In any event, the ration bricks are a reference nod to the novel series Frontlines by Marko Kloos and the film Onions Green (1978) minus the fact that it's not actually corpse starch. Just hyper-processed edamame cousins.

The Terran Commonwealth found S O Y beans sufficiently protein-dense and easy to mass produce/process into ration bricks. Meat is prohibitively expensive unless you're eating steak and burger patties derived from bugs. Even on Terra, the cradle of the Commonwealth, much of the population living beneath the poverty line in government hab(itation)-blocks queue up in "bricklines" to receive a guaranteed daily meal.

As a rough napkin-math point of reference, a carton of eggs costs 100 $CD (Commonwealth Dollars). The average daily wage of a habber or slum-bum is only 87 $CD, and their average monthly earnings are around only 2,600 $CD (poverty line) before other expenses.

>>6297067
>>Cool (Pre) – ability to remain calm in the face of tension, opposes Charm and Negotiate.
>>Mechanics (Int) – prowess in working on all things from cybernetics, weapons, androids and vehicles.
>>Resilience (Br) – prowess for handling over-exhaustion, sleep deprivation and hazardous environments.
>>6297077
Cunning missing

>>6297067
>Cool (Pre) – ability to remain calm in the face of tension, opposes Charm and Negotiate.
>Mechanics (Int) – prowess in working on all things from cybernetics, weapons, androids and vehicles.
>Resilience (Br) – prowess for handling over-exhaustion, sleep deprivation and hazardous environments.

Anything else in the pod we can use for salvage or crafting?

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>>6297287
The pod itself has some circuitry and electronics that can be salvaged, as well as its durable steel-titanium alloy. However, the main prize is its radioisotope thermoelectric generator that provides energy for its electrical battery, which in turn powers the on-board systems, propulsion, and life support. The RTG relies on 9.6 kilograms of plutonium-238 to produce 4 kW thermal, which produces 220 watts of electrical power at 5.4 kWh/day. It can provide power for decades (i.e., Voyager 1 and Voyager 2).

A particularly tech-savvy engineer or mechanic can extract the generator and battery from the pod or MacGyver a connection to use it as a power source. Alternatively, the plutonium fuel can be ground up to use as dirty bombs, or contaminants in food and water supplies. Additionally, sufficiently enriched plutonium can be used to make atomic bombs (Fat Man used 15 kg, Little Boy used 5 kg).

File: Drowned Norfolk.png (1.29 MB, 1024x1024)

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>>6297085
>>6297088
>>6297171
>>6297179
>>6297188
>6297227
>6297282
>6297287

You stumble forward and the void bends. Fragments peel loose, sharp as glass as they cut into _you_.

>Cool (Pre) – ability to remain calm in the face of tension, opposes Charm and Negotiate.

A wall of eyes, glaring and endless. Their weight is heavy, almost enough to crush you. But something within you stills - heartrate dropping, muscles slackening in relaxiation.

Adrenal cascade suppressed. Breathing recalibrated. Anxiety compartmentalized.

>Mechanics (Int) – prowess in working on all things from cybernetics, weapons, androids and vehicles.

A table coalesces from nebulous star-stuff, parts and odd ends scattered across its surface. your hands move before thought can arrest them. Pieces fit, connections spark together as the mess becomes something more.

Circuit closed. Load-bearing strut realigned. Efficiency at 78%.

The table dissolves, but the echo of satisfied completion lingers in your fingers.

>Resilience (Br) – prowess for handling over-exhaustion, sleep deprivation and hazardous environments.

Now you're crawling through tar. Your lungs seize, and your vision swims a dangerous red. The weight on your back could be the ocean, the sky, or your own insecurities. You should collapse.

You don't.

Muscle fibers tearing. Core temperature rising. Continue. Adapt. Survive.

You drag yourself forward, and break free with a scream of exultation.

The void surges in again, heavier and suffocating. You cry out, but the sound dies in your throat as the ground beneath your feet gives way.

Somewhere, children laugh. Somewhere, voices accuse.

The pod's proximity alarm cuts through half-formed dreams in a sterile chime. You jerk awake, skin clammy under the foil of the thermal blanket, the taste of copper and salt still lingering at the back of your throat. Muscles ache as you move with care, gingerly stretching the kricks from your awkward sleeping position.

One discomforting experience with the on-board hygiene unit leaves you eager to get some fresh air. The hatch groans open as the seal breaks. Cold wind slams into you, carrying smoke, salt and something acrid you can't name. You climb up the ladder, sticking your head out - then freeze.

Norfolk is drowned.

Where streets and piers should be, only rooftops and the upper floors of skyscrapers break the surface, steel islands in a restless sea. The water laps over drowned highways and up past shattered windows, swallowing whole districts without mercy. You track the water line against a nearby high water mark, blanching at the sight of overturned shipwrecks and capsized hulls.

Sea level exceeds a four meter rise. Storm surge amplified by ongoing solar-geomagnetic event. Infrastructure compromised beyond repair.

Your throat locks. The city isn't burning like the horizon you'd left upon surfacing.

It's simply...gone.

(cont.)

I don’t think he continued, bros.

>>6297729
Died on his way back to his home planet. How tragic

>>6297551

The pod doesn’t question or hesitate. Its thrusters rumble and adjust, course courting with a detached precision as it compensates for new environmental hazards. The first wreck slides port-astern: a rust-scabbed trawler, nets trailing down its side like the hair of a waterlogged corpse.

Civilian make. Local registry. Hull fatigue indicative of ten years’ active service.

Then more. A cruise liner keeled over, its white hull scorched by fire. Gunmetal shadows loom larger – destroyers, frigates, their superstructures shattered and guns sagging down as though in shame.

And then the impossible.

A starship. Its once-sleek hull lies half-submerged in the water, driven into a ruined cradle of skyscrapers and hab-complexes now sheared to their foundations. Glass and steel girders jut upward around it like jagged teeth, trapping it within an inescapable grasp.

Its docking umbilicals trail behind in a tangle, severed veins bleeding rainbow sheens of unspent fuel into the roiling black water. There’s already an inferno, an oil-slick conflagration that stretches for a kilometer across the water in a mirror of the burning sky above you.

Constellation-class tender. Non-combatant. Designed for orbital resupply, capable of atmospheric exit and entry.

The pod registers only the obstruction. Thrusters cough, adjust, and alter course with clinical indifference.

But you see what it ignores – a jagged wound carved into the starship’s flank. The midsection is nearly gone, a hollowed mess of twisted titanium-aluminum alloy and half-slagged bulkhead. A violent exit, as though something hat detonated outward.

Catastrophic decompression. Hull breach inconsistent with solar flare or geomagnetic anomalies. Exit profile matches surface-to-orbit kinetic acceleration weapons. Mass driver.

The conclusion gnaws at you, looping like feedback without any resolution.
Someone had shot the tender out of the sky.

But why?

Your stomach knots as the pod pushes on. There are no answers in the wreckage – one of several dozen shattered hulls and broken ships.

Eventually, the pod slows as it nears the jagged husk of a skyscraper, a needle of steel and glass that pierces the flooded cityscape. Whole levels are gone, completely submerged beneath the water. Its higher floors burn in fits and starts, flickers of flame guttering against the stormy winds, their reflections rippling across the ocean.

Commonwealth Communication Spire - Norfolk Relay. Data nexus. Civilian and military comms routing. Redundant station for orbital uplinks and tight-beam communication through the solar system.

...this was the pod's destination?

(cont.)

The pod circles once, systems struggling to resolve docking parameters as no intact posts remain. Finally, it gives up, cutting thrust and drifting into an idle rumble just shy of a collapsed landing tier. What’s left of a helipad just out from the spire like a broken limb, cracked and weathered, but still within reach.

Alas, no helicopter. Not that you would know how to fly one, anyway.

You seize manual control, nudging the pod towards the wrecked platform. The water presses against the hull in slow, heavy waves, sucking and slapping with each lurch of the tide. Driftwood and debris thud against the frame ever so often.

From the grab-bag, you pull a coil of parachute cord, fixing it to one of the pod’s external bearings before looping it around a helipad mooring. The work is awkward, and your limbs tremble with exertion. It takes several long minutes before the pod is properly secured.

>>Rank 2 in Sysops...

A simple hack seals the hatch, and you line its defensive protocols with copies of your quickhacks. Not the best work, but it'll do in a pinch. Nothing without a cyberdeck or implanted neural modems is getting in there.

And then – land. Dry, solid, relatively intact land.

It feels…surprisingly underwhelming.

On the horizon, dry land beckons. There’s a scattering of high ground across the city. And further beyond, Hampton beckons. While just as severely damaged, it doesn’t appear to be as devastated as Norfolk. You’re more likely to find survivors and shelter there.

But the pod took you here to the communication spire. Perhaps not the heart, but undoubtedly the brain and nervous system of the city. Even with most of its systems ravaged by the electromagnetic storm, there’s a nonzero chance for backup servers with answers to why you’re here. At least, that’s what you tell yourself.

>>What do you wish to do?
>Investigate the Dataspire. Search for intel, supplies, or answers to your identity in its shattered frame.
>Reconnoiter the Boat Graveyard. Scout the area before committing...maybe find a better ride than the pod.
>Turn Towards Shore. Push towards to either Hampton or the city high ground to search/link up with any survivors.

[VOTE OPEN FOR TWELVE(12) HOURS]

Gonna be attending the NOVA Open this weekend for the Northern Assault Alpha Strike Tournament. Updates will be sporadic until Sunday.

>>6297940
>Investigate the Dataspire. Search for intel, supplies, or answers to your identity in its shattered frame.

>>6297940
>Investigate the Dataspire. Search for intel, supplies, or answers to your identity in its shattered frame.

>>6297940
>>Investigate the Dataspire. Search for intel, supplies, or answers to your identity in its shattered frame.
very cool

>>6297940
>>Reconnoiter the Boat Graveyard. Scout the area before committing...maybe find a better ride than the pod.

>>6297940
>Reconnoiter the Boat Graveyard. Scout the area before committing...maybe find a better ride than the pod.

>>6297940
>Investigate the Dataspire. Search for intel, supplies, or answers to your identity in its shattered frame.

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Hey guys, sorry for the delay.

Back from Northern Assault (placed 10th), but I’m as sick as a dog. Currently in the ER for food poisoning. Nothing too serious, but no update today.

>>6300342
Have you tried not eating and subsisting on the chakra of the mountains?

>>6300342
Try not consuming expired rations next time.

>>6297940
>Investigate the Dataspire. Search for intel, supplies, or answers to your identity in its shattered frame.

>>6300342
Can't even go through a thread without the curse trying to kill you

>>6297949
>>6297968
>>6298082
>>6298213
>>6300454

>>Investigate the Dataspire.

The ferrocrete of the helipad holds beneath your weight, even as brine seeps through a spiderweb network of microfissures along its surface. Beyond it, the broken glass doors of the entrance gape open, their edges warped and half-melted, as if the building had burned before the flood had smothered it.

Inside, the air is heavy. The salt tang of the ocean intermingles with the faintest hint of antiseptic and corporate sterility. But it carries something else – ozone and rot, the ghost of scorched circuitry and organic remains clinging to every breath you take.

The atrium yawns vast and hollow, a cathedral of glass and steel reduced to a mausoleum. Fluorescent tubs dangle in loose bundles like severed nerves, swaying dangerously in the wind as sparks burst and cascade from exposed wiring. Each step echoes too long, swallowed by the yawing silence before returning to you in an echoing whisper.

Residual energy signatures. Failed capacitor banks.

Your nerves thrum, and phantom link that bridges your brain and the modem shivers. The building hums with an invisible static – dead systems leaking fragments of data like blood from an unstaunched wound. Nothing coherent, strings of code and binary that dissolve into static. But proof enough that somewhere, at least one server core is still working.

Your hands reach for the hilt of your vibrosword, and the butt of your pistol. Their presence is welcome as you stand in the presence of the Commonwealth’s memory, and begin taking your first tentative steps forward.

But you don’t get too far until you find your first corpse.

A slumped figure in a worker’s uniform, jaw locked open in a silent scream, eyes burnt to withered prunes. The neural plug at the base of their skull has fused to their operator’s chair in a grotesque fusion of melted flesh and runny polymers. Their skin is shriveled, drawn tight and split along their veins, as if fire had started from within to violently claw its way outward.

Then another. And more. Whole clusters of at workstations, half-rotted hands still curled around control interfaces. Their faces are scarred with rot, but the story writes itself in the ruin of their bodies.

System-wide surge. Electrical overload bypassed failsafe blocks. Neruolinks became conduits. Death not instantaneous. Estimated time since expiration: 5-7 weeks minimum.

Everywhere you look, the same tableau repeats itself at least a dozen times over. Men and women who became participants in the death of their own network. Living nodes converted into lightning rods, helpless to cook in their seats until death claimed them. Whether or not you could see familiarity in their faces is irrelevant – the damage from both electricity and time has rendered them utterly indistinguishable.

>>Roll 1d100 Encounter.
>>Best out of five.

Rolled 26 (1d100)

>>6300671
AAAAAAAAAAA

Rolled 92 (1d100)

>>6300671

Rolled 71 (1d100)

>>6300671

Rolled 70 (1d100)

>>6300671

Rolled 75 (1d100)

>>6300671

>>6300680
>>6300682
>>6300689
>>6300708
>>6300728

>92

Your steps echo too loudly, splashes that are swallowed and then returned by the cavernous ceiling like a mocking chorus. Every drip of condensation and groan of stressed metal becomes its own presence, amplified until you can almost believe that the building itself is watching, and the hollow eyes of the dead staff no longer feel like a weight on your back.

For a moment, it’s easy – and distressingly comforting – to convince yourself you’re utterly alone.

And then, the little details start pulling at you.

Boot prints – fresh, sharp-edged impressions in the grime and filth that cut through the layers of dust that should have been undisturbed for weeks. They trail across the chamber floor, weaving between the withered corpses in deliberate, careful patterns. Some are wide, others smaller, even a few scuffed areas where they lingered to inspect nearby sites of interest for anything valuable.

A chair, its legs drawn in a clean scrape through the dust and the damp, position just beneath a ventilation shaft. Not toppled or abandoned in panic, but placed with purpose. The grate above is missing – carefully unscrewed, and laying propped against the wall. Someone took their time, knew exactly what they were doing.

And the terminal – one of hundreds that still works – on the far end of the wall hums faintly, a glow seeping through a film of dust where no power should remain. Its cracked screen casts warm glow, displaying a command prompt that appears to have only just been abandoned. The wrapping of a ration bar lies crumpled adjacent to the keyboard, as well as a carefully folded sleeping bag and the remains of a fire.

The silence grows heavier. Every flicker of light feels like it could conceal a shadow. You aren’t walking among the dead anymore.

Someone else has been here.

Is still here.

The silence gnaws at you as the details come together, knitting into theories in the back of your skull. The lower levels are gone – drowned or otherwise sealed beneath water and rubble. Anything of value would be above the waterline.

Logical vector: higher floors. Communications offices, relay hubs, administration nodes, server racks.

The survivor would have made the same calculation. Given the choice of the ventilation shaft, the stairs are most likely compromised. Unsurprising, but a pity nonetheless.

You strain your ears, trying to hear if anyone’s in the shaft…nothing.

Then, you aim your gaze towards the terminal, and the haphazard, impromptu camp.

Considering...

>>Please choose one:
>Ascend the tower. The upper levels hold the real prizes, answers and perhaps the survivor who left these signs behind.
>Remain and reconnoiter. There’s already a working terminal, and patience may draw the unknown survivor back to their camp.

[VOTE OPEN FOR EIGHT(8) HOURS]

Apologies for the delay, still a little woozy from the food poisoning.

>>6301965
>>Ascend the tower. The upper levels hold the real prizes, answers and perhaps the survivor who left these signs behind.

>>6301965
>Ascend the tower. The upper levels hold the real prizes, answers and perhaps the survivor who left these signs behind.

>>6301965
>>Ascend the tower. The upper levels hold the real prizes, answers and perhaps the survivor who left these signs behind.

>>6301965
>Remain and reconnoiter. There’s already a working terminal, and patience may draw the unknown survivor back to their camp.

Just briefly, to figure out what they were looking at, see if we can't do better than they could with terminal access. If nothing else, we should secure our rear before ascending.

>>6302001
>>6302082
>>6302099

You study the dark throat of the ventilation shaft. The scrape marks along the walls and ridges tell you that someone else already made this climb. And if they got up, so can you.

The air wafting from above is stale, but faintly charged with the pungent ozone of charged electronics. Whoever or whatever's left in the spire, the answers are higher.

You adjust your gun holster, and engage the safety of your vibrosword as you calculate your path upward. Fingers reach out for handholds, grips and edges that can easily support your weight.

With a deep, shaky breath, you step up the chair and put one foot through the entrance, one right after the other...

>Skill checks are based on two stats: Skill Rank and linked Ability.
>The higher of the two determines how many dice you roll.
>Lower number upgrades that many dice from d8s (Ability) to d12s (Proficiency).
>A direct match between Skill Rank and Ability means all dice are upgraded from d8s to d12s.

>>For this Athletics (Brawn) check to get up the ventilation shaft...
>>You have 3 Brawn, and are rolling 3d8s.
>>You have 2 in Athletics, and upgrade 2 of those to d12s.

>>Please roll 2d12 + 1d8 Athletics [Brawn]
>>Best out of three.

Rolled 2, 10 = 12 (2d12)

>>6302173
One die per person? Or three of us roll 2d12 + 1d8? Just count the first die from me, if it is the former.

Rolled 2 (1d8)

>>6302173
Brawn.

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>>6302180
>>6302182
...I've been away from the board for too long. I forgot that /tg/ and /qst/ dice don't let you roll multiple batches. Ouegh.

In any event, just turn that into 2d12 + 4. The Ability die just bell curves.

Rolled 5, 3 + 4 = 12 (2d12 + 4)

>>6302173

Rolled 8, 11 + 4 = 23 (2d12 + 4)

>>6302173

Rolled 7, 1 + 4 = 12 (2d12 + 4)

>>6302173

>>6302180
>>6302208
>>6302224

>10, 11, 6 (1 Success, 3 Advantage)

The shaft is narrow, but the metal hasn’t given way to rust or collapse just yet. You wedge your hands and feet into the edges and seams, hauling yourself higher with one careful motion at a time. The silence presses in, broken only by the steady rhythm of your breath that seems to bounce back at you in the confined steel throat. By some small mercy, the walls hold, and no handholds crumble.

You reach the next tier without a single misstep, finding purchase without barely a whisper. The building groans, and the shaft rumbles, but no more loudly than it had before your arrival. If someone is listening from above, they’ll hear nothing beyond distant debris and the whine of a dying building. For all intents and purposes, you are a shadow sliding up through the bones of the tower.

The climb becomes mechanical – hands, feet, breath, repeat. It goes on for another floor until a flicker runs through your head, like a cold shiver on the base of your skull. The psychosomatic link hums as the faintest of signals brushes up against it.

Carrier tone irregular. Packet loss: 72% average. Residual ping delay: 11.2 milliseconds.

Noise, shredded and useless.

Phase distortion: inconsistent with waterlogging, more consistent with corroded relays.

Half a distress call, half static, like a machine choking on its own tongue.

Signal directionality: 38.7° incline from current axis. Likely node distribution: fourteen candidates within tower grid.

Data cascades, fragments colliding, narrowing to one conclusion.

Probability cascade collapses. Level 17, Central Node Access.

Your pulse quickens. The path is clear. And judging from the smeared, muddy footprints going up the vent wall, the other survivor thought the same.

The end of your climb has you tumbling into a dilapidated telecom office. It’s fared better than the drowned floors below, but only just. Rows of workstations sit like broken teeth, their screens spiderwebbed with cracks or otherwise completely blown out. The carpet squelches faintly under your boots – damp, but not flooded.

A stale, metallic tang clings to the air, the residue of scorched circuits and wiring. Cables dangle from the ceiling in limp bundles, swaying faintly with every groan of the tower, sparking every so often as some unseen generator starts and stops with abrupt unlife.

Signal strength rising. Directional variance narrowing. Noise-to-signal ratio improving within 20 meters.

You more carefully through the office’s husk, following the thread of static as it coils tighter in your skull.

Central relay backup. Partial system survivability: 12%. Relevant data recovery: 3.7%.

The numbers are abysmal, but your breath quickens. It’s still more than zero.

Please…

…you don’t know who you’re praying to as you reach the server room.

(cont.)

The double-doors to the server room lay ajar, sprawling open as if someone had wrenched them apart. A cursory glance at the long line of racks and processors can’t tell you anything beyond the fact that most of them are broken. The overhead lights flicker with faint, residual power, just enough to shed light on any working technology, the desolate contents of the room, and its singular, sole occupant
.
A man crouches over one of the terminals, fingers moving with mechanical precision across a cracked keypad. His gaze is locked onto the screen, unaware of your presence, unaware of the slight disturbance in the air as you draw closer.

For a brief moment, your chest loosens and your mind quiets. Another human. Not a waterlogged corpse or a ragged scrap of meat. Another human – alive, breathing, and present. Your eyes confirm what data could not: you are not alone. The weight of isolation lifts just enough to make your pulse steady, your thoughts less jagged, even as uncertainty lingers at the edge of thought.

Human male. Height: ~174 cm. Weight: ~100 kg.

Rugged, scruffy, dirty-blond hair is plastered to the side of his face. A tactical vest hangs over his frame, with a worn rifle slung across his shoulder. You don’t miss the pistol at his side, nor the Bowie knife sticking out of a pair of combat boots.

Military? Wrong camo for the environment. Building security? Would have evacuated. Scavenger? Too well armed.

He doesn’t seem to notice you.

>>How do you wish to proceed?
>Announce yourself calmly. Preemptively deescalate and establish yourself as not a threat.
>Intimidate and assert control. Draw your gun and force the interaction on your own terms.
>Wait for him to finish. Let him remain unaware while you observe or wait for an opportune moment.

[VOTE OPEN FOR NINE(9) HOURS]

Finally got over my food poisoning. Liquid diets suck.

>>6304487
>>Announce yourself calmly. Preemptively deescalate and establish yourself as not a threat.

>>6304487
>Announce yourself calmly. Preemptively deescalate and establish yourself as not a threat.

>Food poisoning
So what do you think did it to you?

>>6304487
I think mechanically, intimidating him would be the way to go, because of our 3 Will. But waiting has the best chance of letting us observe what he is doing and change it unimpeded after he leaves. Talking is probably the most in-character given that we seem to have a yearning not to be alone in this forsaken apocalyptic wasteland.

>Announce yourself calmly. Preemptively deescalate and establish yourself as not a threat.

>>6304487
>Announce yourself calmly. Preemptively deescalate and establish yourself as not a threat.
Hello there.

>>6304487
>Announce yourself calmly. Preemptively deescalate and establish yourself as not a threat.

>>6304487
>Announce yourself calmly. Preemptively deescalate and establish yourself as not a threat.

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>>6304494
>>6304496
>>6304497
>>6304521
>>6304539

>Announce yourself calmly. Preemptively deescalate and establish yourself as not a threat.

The man jerks as you call out, dropping the keyboard with a harsh plastic clatter. His hand snaps towards the pistol strapped to his thigh as he spins to face you, eyes wide with alarm…

Laser pistol. Output can make 1.5 cm cut through 5 mm of steel in 2 seconds. Stay mobile to avoid hits to flesh-

…but he stops just short of drawing.

For a moment, he just stares. Then he blinks hard, squints, and rubs his eyes, as though trying to confirm that you aren’t some mirage. His mouth parts, closes, then opens again. The motion repeats as he struggles to settle on words.

You can feel the weight of his disbelief radiating across the room, almost as palpable as the hum of the half-dead servers. He must have thought he was the only one in here – not just in the tower, but in the drowned carcass of Norfolk.

Your own lips part, then falter. There’s nothing useful to say. No name to give, no reason for being here that doesn’t dissolve the second you try to grasp it. You settle for silence, shifting from one foot to the other, the awkwardness growing heavier with every second as neither of you speaks.

Thankfully, it doesn’t last long. The man breaks it with a nervous bark of laughter, the sound brittle in the cavernous server room. He lifts his hands, palms empty and open, making a show of moving one deliberately off the pistol at his side. But his posture is still coiled with tension, as if bracing for the floor to drop out from under him.

“Sorry,” he says, voice rough but not unkind. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Could’ve sworn I was the only one in here…”

His gaze lingers, flicking over you in quick appraisal. Heat rises unbidden to your cheeks under his scrutiny – the plugsuit clings too close to comfort.

But impropriety is the last thing on his mind. His eyes catch instead on the blade at your hip, and he gives a low whistle. “That vibrosword of yours work? Most of the ones I’ve seen got fried when the Cataclysm hit the grid. If yours is still running, you got yourself a real treasure.”

Cataclysm. A large scale and violent event in the natural world or socio-political order.

When you don’t immediately respond, the man coughs, filling the silence. “Right, uh….I’m Harper. Harper Park. I’d shake your hand, but-” he jerks his chin towards the glowing terminal, wires splayed like veins across its housing. “-it’ll have to wait for a bit. You caught me in the middle of something.”

The name feels strange in your ears – too normal, too mundane against the hum of failing machines and the quiet rumbling of a dead tower.

Harper Park.

A survivor, just like you.

But the way he carries himself suggests he’s been one for far, far longer.

...you can't help but wonder if he was one prior to this...Cataclysm.

(cont.)

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Harper gives you another looking-over. “If you don’t mind me saying, you look pretty clean in spite of everything that’s happened. I don’t got anything against spacers or vaulters, but some folk here do. I’d suggest changing out of that plugsuit at the first chance you get, or getting mud on your hair.”

Spacer – an inhabitant of an orbital colony.

He hesitates, frowning. "...come to think about it, I don't think I got your name...miss?"

Vaulter – unknown, further context required. Extrapolation: resident of sealed doomsday bunkers.

The words hang heavy between you. He’s not accusing as much as waiting. Expecting you to fill the silence with something – anything – that explains who you are, why you’re here, and/or how you’ve survived.

The words itch on the tip of your tongue, but you aren’t quite sure what shape they should take.

"...ah..."

>>How do you wish to answer Harper’s inquiry?
>Honest. Admit you don’t remember anything before the underwater lab.
>Guarded. Give him a name, any name, but nothing more beyond that.
>Deceptive. Claim another past, and let Harper think you’re a spacer or vaulter.
>Custom option. [Write-in]

[VOTE OPEN FOR TWELVE (12) HOURS]

>>6304496
>So what do you think did it to you?
Week-old steak in the fridge.

>>6304712
>Honest. Admit you don’t remember anything before the underwater lab.

Help me out guy, I don't know shit.

>>6304712
>Honest. Admit you don’t remember anything before the underwater lab.

>>6304712
>>Honest. Admit you don’t remember anything before the underwater lab.

>>6304712
>Honest. Admit you don’t remember anything before the underwater lab.

>>6304712
>Honest. Admit you don’t remember anything before the underwater lab.

>>6304712
>Honest. Admit you don’t remember anything before the underwater lab.

I had the thought that if we were to give a name, I'd probably choose Lethe Coil or just Lethe, because it is on our character sheet. No reason why we'd know that though. Would be thematic, if a bit on the nose, very "writer-cringe meaningful name" stuff since Coil of Lethe would be "burdens of forgetfulness" or something.

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>>6304982
Whoops. My hand to God, that's just a placeholder I forgot to take out when I copy-pasted from the Word document.

The the opportunity to pick out a name will come in a bit.

>>6304712
Too late to vote...

>spoiler
Yeah, that'll do it. Had a real bad time after eating a pizza with day old heat lamp shrimp on it last year. Took me out for a week.

>>6304740
>>6304748
>>6304800
>>6304844
>>6304858
>6304869

>Honest. Admit you don’t remember anything before the underwater lab.

Harper doesn’t so much as blink as you spill out the bare bones of your life – if you can even call it that. Less than a single day’s worth of memory, bracketed by the bloodstained walls of an underwater tomb. He stands there, arms crossed loosely, listening intently.
When you finish, the silence hangs a beat too long. Then, he exhales through his nose, half a laugh, half disbelief. “Well…that wasn’t on my bingo card.”

One hand drifts up, scratching the back of his neck. His face creases into a wry grimace, but not one that’s unkind. “But I can tell you ain’t lying. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, miss. Waking up to all of…this.”

His hand flits outwards, a vague gesture past the server racks and the walls of the building. He doesn’t need to name it. You can feel it pressing in through every gap of the tower’s frame.

The drowned city.

A burning sky.

A planet choking on its own silence.

Your throat tightens before you even realize you’re speaking. “What…happened?”

Harper’s gaze hardens, the easy grin finally gone. “Coronal mass ejection. Sun hiccupped and blasted the solar system with a one-in-a-million-years kind of killshot. And it was just our bad luck that the planet was orbiting through the splash zone. Cars, power stations, spaceports, satellites…anything with power just suddenly stopped working. Assuming it didn’t just flat-out explode when the grid cooked off.”

Paradigm accepted. Coronal Mass Ejection – plasma cloud ejected from stellar corona. Transmission medium: electromagnetic flux across magnetosphere. Consequences: catastrophic grid failure, orbital destabilization, biospheric anomalies.

“…we only had three days before everything just…ended.” He finishes, voice low and flat. “And it’s been just a little over five months since.”

Casualty projections: 1.2 billion in the first week. Urban population collapse factor: 92%. Median survival expectancy in flooded coastlines: less than 10%. Probability of long-term societal recovery: unknown, more data required. Theoretical: still in total, irrecoverable collapse.

The numbers and data slot neatly into place in your skull, cold and sterile as ones and zeros. But Harper’s voice drags then back down to ground-level horror. The need for more data wars with a growing pit of unease coalescing in your guts.

Sympathy flickers across Harper’s face as he jerks his chin towards the console. “There’s a refugee camp up by Hampton that I'm working for. They wanted to know if the spire still had any juice – calls, signals, anything that could prove the outside world’s still out there. Problem is…”He shrugs, lips pulling into a tight line. “Tower’s banged up real bad. Half of its underwater, and what's above is damaged to hell and back."

(cont.)

Data integrity failure. 74% of fiber-optic distribution nodes fused by CME-induced overload. Backup generators sustaining minimal server cycles: 7.4% capacity. Mean time to collapse: 48–96 hours.

He sighs, scratching at the stubble of his jaw. “Doesn’t help that what’s left doesn’t wanna talk. Even running on fumes, these bastards are locked behind walls. Commonwealth paid for the best ICE money could buy. They built this place to keep folks out – even now, it’s doing its job.”

Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics: autonomous security programs. Encrypted firewalls, adaptive, heuristics, traceback subroutines. Lethality scale: psychosomatic overload, cognitive burnout, potential coma. Risk factor – elevated.

“You gotta get into that server anyway, right?” He leans forward, voice gaining momentum. “I truly hope you find answers to your identity in whatever data’s managed to survive. But if you could find it in the goodness of your heart to share? I’ll make it worth your while.”

You manage to snap back to reality just in time to give Harper an unimpressed look. Money would be useless now that the world economies have been utterly destroyed.

But he seems to read your mind. “I’ve got a stockpile of salvage back at the camp. There could be a gigabyte of data you could retrieve, but I’ll still gladly accept it. My hand to God.”

…he looks like he’s telling the truth. But as to why someone like him would want access into firewalled Terran Commonwealth servers…how strange.

But you aren’t here to talk. You need answers.

Harper graciously steps aside, giving you unrestricted access to the terminal he’d previously been working on. You unplug his USB and give the command console a single-looking over before you banish it. The link in your mind shudders to life as you parse through the noise of broken generators and screaming servers…

…there. The one perfect note in a symphony of atonal frequencies. You seize on it and begin to work, establishing a tentative electronic handshake with the server without triggering its ICE…

>>Roll 2d12 Hacking (2d8 Intellect, upgrades to 2d12 for Rank 2 in Hacking).
>Best out of three.

Struggled to get this one out, but I gotta start picking up the pace.

Rolled 2, 1 = 3 (2d12)

>>6305150

Rolled 4, 7 = 11 (2d12)

>>6305150

Rolled 12, 2 = 14 (2d12)

>>6305150
Appreciate it.
>Use Cognitive Cascade

Rolled 5, 9 = 14 (2d12)

>>6305150

>>6305156
>>6305158
>>6305161

>12, 7 (1 Triumph, 1 Success, 1 Advantage)

>>Did you want to activate Cognitive Cascade for an extra 3d6?
>Yes.
>No.

[Sudden death vote, counting only the first three votes.]

>>6305255
>>Yes

>>6305255
>No.

>>6305255
Help me out, how much can the extra dice upgrade our result?

>>6305255
>Yes.
WHY NOT

>>6305317
It literally says in Kaz's post, 3d6. 3 is our Willpower. Cognitive Cascade adds our Willpower in d6s to skills that rely on Intellect or Cunning, once per encounter. Repeated uses in a single day causes us Strain damage, whatever that is.

As for how much that 3d6 helps us in terms of successes or what extra successes get us? I dunno, I'm not familiar with the system.

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Rolled 8, 3, 1 = 12 (3d8)

>>6305403
This quest uses a modified Star Wars/Genesys RPG dice system that FFG created. You normally roll against setback/difficulty dice, but I do that either “IRL” or I’ll make a public roll as the QM if it’s a pivotal roll or want to do it for full transparency. See pic related for the conversion.

Success/Failure determines how effective the skill check was. Advantage/Threat and Triumph/Despair determine how lucky the attempt was. Normally only one success on the pass–fail axis is needed to succeed. There are both positive and negative types of dice, which can be added to a skill check roll to represent advantages or disadvantages. It falls to the DM/GM/QM to interpret the dice.

Just for an example, I’ll roll 3d8 Difficulty Dice here on the board, and measure the results against what you rolled. Success/Failure and Advantage/Threat will cancel each other out. In any event, you guys have a Critical Success with the Triumph.

With Cognitive Cascade, check the d6 column in the reference picture. It can give extra degrees of Success or Advantage.

>>6305428
Calculating the Dice:
>8, 3, 1
>1 Failure, 2 Threat

Measuring that against your initial roll, the final result becomes:
>1 Triumph, 0 Success, 1 Threat

The way threat works is that even if you succeed, you might suffer a secondary detrimental effect. For example, hacking into the damaged server rack may leave you suffering Strain (mental) damage. Or you might trip a hidden protocol to alert nearby malfunctioning maintenance robots. The degrees of success/failure and advantage/disadvantage are left up to GM discretion to interpret how they affect the story.

IN any event…

>>Please roll 3d6 (Cognitive Cascade at 3 Willpower)
>Best out of three.

Rolled 2, 2, 4 = 8 (3d6)

>>6305435

Rolled 1, 1, 1 = 3 (3d6)

>>6305435
Would've voted against if I had known but what's done is done

Rolled 4, 6, 1 = 11 (3d6)

>>6305428
>>6305435
Thanks for this.

>>6305442
Never rolling again

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>>6305446
90% of rollers give up just before crit successing, I heard this from a very reputable source.

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>>6305439
>>6305442
>>6305443

>>1 Triumph, 1 Success, 1 Advantage

The servers groan at your touch, half of the rack’s drives fused in a slagged mess of metal. Still, your modem threads into its skeleton, an ethereal nerve splicing into a corpse.

Initializing electronic handshake.

The first barrier of ICE is aging, but not inert. It resists your touch with the feeble strength of something hideously wounded trying to perform its duty.

Design lineage: Commonwealth military contractors, circa 2420s. Redundant routines. Defensive heuristics modeled on predator-prey dynamcis.

Cascades erupt: geometry blooms across your vision, a lattice of obsidian shards jagged with residual charge.

Threat profile: Low to medium. Failure state: neural feedback, potential synaptic scarring. Workaround: brute-force pressure on decayed integrity fields.

You push. Waveforms split and recombine, harmonics threading through gaps in the lattice.

Stress analysis: 38% fragmentation…62%...79%...

Fractures spread across the shards until their geometry buckles, collapsing and scattering into raw, unshielded datastreams.

One wall down.

Estimate: three redundant layers, two already degraded.

The others falter. Starved of power and crippled by the Cataclysm, they are helpless before your assault.

Then – silence.

The architecture clears.

Reconstructing directory structure…fragmentary.

Data trickles like groundwater through cracked stone. Heat builds up in the back of skull, the modem overclocking as it stitches partial strings into coherence. Alerts cascade faster than you can consciously parse them.

You force the noise into order, shelving irrelevant detritus. Keywords spike, probabilities align. Off-shore facilities…flagged. Cross-referenced. Elevated priority…

There.

Cargo manifests to an underwater facility – foodstuffs, supplies, transportation logs.

Terran Commonwealth Atlantic Black Site Charybdis.

Harper idles alongside you, squinting as the amber letters scrawl across the glass of the terminal. “Well, I’ll be damned. That would’ve taken me a week.”
The first report blooms, only to collapse into lines of black bars.

Obfuscation density: 87%. Deliberate. Someone wanted this erased, not forgotten.

You chase the fragments. Project Butterfly flickers between censor marks. It appears stamped on communications reports, just as heavily encrypted if not outright corrupted. Your heart hammers like a drumbeat in your ears, and the heat of your modem begins to cause discomfort as you desperately try to piece what’s left together into some clear, cohesive whole.

Codename of metamorphosis. Psychological conditioning probable.

A list of names and photos – staffers, fragmented and broken dossiers of soldiers, scientists, technicians and maintenance crews. Logs of their entry and departure from the facility. Their names mean nothing. Their faces elicit no recognition.

(cont.)

A profile page – tattered, hollowed and gutted by redaction. Your heart nearly stops, and Harper draws a sharp breath. For a moment, the world seems to come to a standstill as the datastream manages to reconstruct the last page and entry.

DESIGNATION: CHRYSALIS-175.

Her.

You.

Your face, bleached flat against an institutional grey backdrop. The woman’s eyes stare past the lens with no expression at all.

Confidence: 99%. Identity match confirmed. Subject record timestamp: pre-Cataclysm.

Lines of data bleed through and vanish, leaving taunting glimpses of a life you never knew.

Clearance level: [REDACTED]. Neural Adaptation: [REDACTED]. Deployment Phase: [REDACTED]. Status: [REDACTED].

Every single black strip of text throbs like a terrible weight on your shoulders. Your stomach drops. Your knees nearly do the same as you clutch the terminal in a white-knuckled grip. Desperate for more.

Anything. A phrase, number, a hint to crack the shell of your own mind.

Nothing comes.

Your throat burns as you tear your gaze away from the photo on the monitor. The abyss of your missing memories seems to yawn even wider, threatening to swallow you entirely. “It’s…empty. Even this. I don’t…I can’t…remember…”

Harper nudges you gently with his elbow. His mouth is a thin line, but his eyes are kind. “Hey. Easy. You’re…alright, it does look bad. And I can tell you that I certainly wasn’t expecting this when you went in. But…”

He leans a little closer, lowering his voice as if calling to someone on the precipice of a ledge. “Listen to me. You’re here. You’re breathing. You didn’t fry your brain like half the netrunners or chrome-domes did when the Cataclysm hit. You made it out of that facility; you’re not some line on a document that they can erase. Whatever those bastards tried to do to you, they failed. Because you’re standing right in front of me.”

His gaze flicks back to the terminal, then back to you. And his mouth quirks just enough to break the tension. “And for the record, if that’s their official file photo of you? You ought to sue. Terrible lighting, terrible angle. Makes you look like you’re about to audition for a horror flick.”

You aren’t quite sure what the expression on your face is. But it must have been something for Harper to grin.

“There she is. The human underneath all that static.” He leans back, folding his arms with mock solemnity. “Gotta warn you thought – you keep looking at me like that, I’ll start thinking I’m handsome. And trust me, no one survives that kind of delusion for too long.”

(cont.)

Self-deprecating humor. Tension-breaker. Probability of sincerity...high.]

He chortles, cutting through the oppressive silence of the building. Then his gaze softens. “I’m not gonna lie, this…is way above my paygrade. And ain’t even getting paid. But that file isn’t the whole story.” He taps the terminal with one finger, leaving a smudge across the black bars. “Chrysalis, huh? As far as names go…I’ve heard worse.”

Lexeme: chrysalis. Association: metamorphosis, potential, dormancy. Subtext: you are not finished. You are not whole.

A beat passes. Then, Harper tilts his head, squinting at you with an evaluating gaze. “But tell you what – I don’t care much for calling someone a bug larva number-whatever. You oughta pick something for yourself. Something real. Otherwise, you’ll just be stuck with whatever dehumanizing label those bastards foisted upon you.”

Threat analysis: risk of adopting enemy designation as demoralizing self-concept. Solution: assert control by reclaiming identity.

He gestures to himself with his thumb. “I’m Harper Park – survivalist, marksman, pep coach, all-ganic man of many talents. Currently subcontracted to the Virginia National Guard, 111th Field Artillery Regiment…or what’s left of it, anyway. But I’m their go-to-guy for scavenging in areas where their cyborgs can’t due to geomagnetic storms.”

111th Field Artillery Regiment...local militia structure. Additional data required.

Then he extends a hand. “Apologies for putting you on the spot, but it’s a real pleasure to meet you for the first time, miss…?”

>>How do you wish to be named?
>Jane. The traditional placeholder names for American women.
>Kris. You might be a chrysalis, but you repurpose it as your own.
>Mary. For whatever reason, Harper says you look like one.
>Terra. You are a child of Earth, born into an age of reckoning.
>Custom option. [Write-in]

[VOTE OPEN FOR FOURTEEN (14) HOURS]

>>6306085
>Terra. You are a child of Earth, born into an age of reckoning.

Nearly went for Lethe despite the writer-cringe after going back and forth on it. Taking a name like Jane or Kris for reasons of being incomplete or being the standard placeholder name feels like stamping a symbol of being forever unfinished, of being in transition forever on our forehead. Would rather not have that as a core part of our identity. Really all three of those names share that problem. Mary is fine, but despite Harper being good to us in the five minutes we've known him, I am a contrarian and don't like being named by someone else, so Terra it is. Uncommon name, but not terribly so.

Also, if there is a Charybdis in the Atlantic, is there a Scylla in the Pacific? Or nearby?