This thread will be the OOC. Simply all question mechanics ect may be placed here from now on.

Basic run down.

We have 10 players, 4 Starting locations and allot of work ahead of us. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to The Last Stand.

Clamp (Ears) - Street Doc - Detroit
Brick (Tarantala) - Brick - Detroit
Easy (cndblank) - Mage - Detroit

Viper (Glyph) - Mage - Seattle
Weaver (Oneone) - TM – Seattle
Abe (Intro) - Wilderness Adept - Seattle

Granny (crizh) - TM - Hong Kong
Vice (DMC) - Investigator - Hong Kong

Malloc.I (BlackHat) - AI - Tokyo
Jane Rxn (Scope_47) - Face/Vehicles - Tokyo

I will be placing several IC posts over the next few hours, there will be a main posting, and then 1 for each city and spoilers for each character.

Have fun everyone!

I think you might have gone over this once before, but will you be telling us how we know one another, or should we work out the details of that, ourselves, OOC beforehand? I just ask because I have some questions for Scope about what Malloc.I might know about Jane, and probably some suggestions for what she might know about Malloc.I - but if you were planning to introduce us IC, we can just work in out in character.

If we've known each other or a while, though, it might be worth hashing out how well we know one another, what we know, etc.

I will give you the basics of how you know each other and why, but from there you can fill in any more extended amounts, I will say that each of you will know your "roomies" for at least 1 year before this point.

okay, I'll wait for the first IC post before barraging Scope with questions.

Hey, do you think it would be cool to create a separate IC thread for each city?

We can do that, how about we have a posting for each city, and as you move from place to place you move threads. Would be a neat concept. You only post on the thread that you are currently active in. Would possibly be a bit more work, and we would be reviving threads that might take months to come back to sometimes, but im not really against it. What do you guys think?

PS: I am currently writing the main plot overview right now, the cities are coming next, so lets try and decide on multiple IC threads or one quickly if possible =)

That's potentially a lot of clutter during the initial posts, but it might keep the flow of events happening in one city. If the plan is to eventually have everyone in roughly the same place, this seems fine - otherwise, I would say that a single IC thread would make it easier to keep timelines and such in synch (especially if some people don't keep current on what's going in the cities their character isn't in).

For the sake of ease of play I am going to try and keep everyone int eh same city eventually, though I will never LIMIT you to a city, if you all choose to split for any reason thats fine as well. I dont mind either way.

Hmm but would the only posting in the thread you're in count virtually and astrally? Because Mages and Matrix characters can zip across the world in no time at all!

While it sounds like a good idea in theory I suspect keeping it all in one place might be best.

Edit - Oh and I might be a bit slow with my first IC post. Because I have an offline game tonight and don't get home untill 11/12pm GMT (about five hours from now). Which combined with my early mornings means I might not have enough time to actually type up a suitable post.

@Intro Any thoughts on how you want to know each other? Weaver and Viper both have partying to bond over, but that's a bit unlikely for a wilderness type character.

I suspect so too, but you never know.

First IC post is done, this is the broad version, each city will have a IC posting as well with the characters in that city placed. I will be working on those throughout the day, right now, im freaking hungry and going to lunch! I will be posting more when I get back =)

Astral, Matrix etc might make it a bit complex to decide which thread to post in. Perhaps not my best idea ever.

Oooooooo prophetic!

The Last Knight of the Crying Spire will get a clip round his remaining ear if I catch sight of him....



Same goes for The Laughing Man...

Nice start. Can I just ask, I always intended to go into Granny's background and dislike of IE's and magicians and to place her DOB in the fifth world, has she always had these dreams?

@Gremish - Out of interest how're you wanting to handle perception checks and suchlike? (And things like data searches or the Sprite information gathering powers. Basically anything where number of hits lets us know the degree of information we've got.)

Do we just tell you we're doing one? Roll it up ourselves and spoiler tag it? Roll it up ourselves, spoiler tag it and then you'll do GMly stuff with the numbers and give us the result? (Because each option has benefits and it's probably more a point of GM preference as to which we run on.)

Oh and I know you said we'd get some licenses covered, but I wanted to double check, would the sensors Weaver has fit under her PI license? As they're mostly restricted but could be justifyable as job related tools. I just want to know which (if any) she'd be safe walking around with on the street.

Once a year, at the same time, every year...

I prefer to have you do the rolls, spoiler it and let me handle the result.

As far as the sensors goes for weaver I will give you licenses for them, weapons are a different story, but its pretty fair considering the day job that she would have the sensors with her. I am not going to bog down on you for that.

Since before 2011?!....


Cool. What date? Did I miss that in the IC post?

Is it ok to post a preview in IC? Sort of go back a week or so and do a sort of mood-setting prequel post?

Feel free.

The Date is July 7th every year since your existence started.

Cool, all done.

Bet you didn't think I could type that fast?

I assume that Malloc.I experiences these "dreams" during his reallocation process (analogous to sleep)? or does his lack of a body, or of essence/aura/magic/resonance/whatever interfere with his receiving of these visions?

Its sort of funny that this would have only been his second one. The first might have even gone by without special notice (assuming computers do dream of electric sheep) - as might the parts that were different in this second one. All in all, I think his interpretation of the images might be quite a bit different than everyone else's. Lots of potential, here.

In the most recent dream, where everyone saw the faces of the other 10 people - what sort of a face did they see for Malloc.I? His icon? For the technomancers, do we see their faces, or their icons?

Each person flashs whatever they are precieved as, if you have a icon, it flashs, a alternate personality, same deal ect.

I was thinking of the AI as i was writing, its simple, you shut down. Completely. But you know when it is coming so its something you can prepare for.

The other 9 full recognize your icon and what you are, same deal for the techies.

Yes, normally during the realignment process, an AI is effectively "shut down" so that should be fine.

Well, it probably won't be as much of a bond, since Abe's only in town a fraction of the time.
Possibilities for an initial connection:

Smuggling: Could have met any time anytime you needed something from outside the city, or needed to get something out of the city.
Produce: Grows his own fruits and vegetables. Could sell/share them on occasion, if he has excess and is going to be heading out on a run soon. (Wasn't there someone who likes fresh veggies?)

I'd have assumed the TM's show up as people, after all the mages don't show up in astral forms. Unless you mean how they show up to Malloc.I? In which case I guess yeah they'd show up as icons to him because that's his native existence.

@Gremish - Cool. I picked up an actual license for her gun and concealed carry for it (Although not for the modifications on it. So I best not have her fire it when anyone who asked for her permits are around. Because being a PI does not usually mean you're allowed a silenced handgun....)

Edit

@Intro - If he can get real good quality coffee Weaver would be interested. Erm she's not awesome at /paying/ for things however. So it could be a barter exchange, where she does some minor matrix thing for him in return.

Yeah, Viper likes the fresh veggies, and she also has a shameful weakness for Tir wines, so she could have met Abe in both his gardening and smuggling roles.

So, alternate personalities huh... so who would they see Jane as in the dream? Julianne, Jane, Enigma, or Julia? If they see her as Julianne, it might make things easier for us all to find each other, since Julianne has a famous face.

@Blackhat
So I've known Malloc.I for a year, huh... what do I know about him other than that he is an AI who visits my house's node sometimes?

Ok, my IC post is up. I assumed that doing art in a digital medium was Artisan skill + Edit program. I hope that's correct.

I fear I may have taken dramatic liberty with the opening scene with enigma, but I wanted to show an insight into Julianne's special brand of madness - and it shows a nice contrast between that persona and Julianne herself.

If your dramatic liberties were over the line, then you're not the only one who crossed it. I doubt anyone has a problem with a little poetic license in the opening five minutes of the story when every character gets their establishing shots.

Dang, girl, she's crazier than a sack full of monkeys on acid.

Love her.

This was the sort of things I was getting at earlier. Working on my own IC introduction (unless Gremish beats me too it) but answering some of my quesitons below would help. I'm pretty open to any ideas at this point.

Things to consider about Malloc.I: He is shy, and not usually seen in the physical or digital worlds (except, apparently, in visions)- even when traveling in a vehicle or drone, he isn't "jumped into" it. It isn't his body, but he's watching the world through its eyes. He also tends to hop around a lot when there are a lot of nodes to visit. He makes his presence known when it needs to be, but otherwise prefers to observe. He switches his commcodes a lot - at least daily, so contacting him is not always easy. The best way is to drop him an encrypted private message on any one of a number of forums, with a commcode or access ID where he can contact you. In particular, he will have pointed you to a Tokyo Wifi Hotspot, that also serves as an ananomizing proxy service. Public account access allows you to post in the forums (which, in addition to the usual ass-hat-ery that comes with anonymous people posting online, a good number of conversations revolve around malware, exploits, hacks, etc) or to use the proxy server service (through the satellite link) to browse the matrix in anonymity - which might be important for a Hollywood star like Jullia or a shadowrunner like Jane. There a daily maintenence period where all users are required to log off for a few hours, the node goes offline, and Malloc.I rests and recalibrates. He probably visits Jane through her home node (or cyberware, perhaps) - whether her security-spiders like it, or not.

Since it is probably going to come up soon, is there anything you'd like me to consider about Malloc.I and Jane's knowledge of one another? For example, you've mentioned that nobody meets Julianne anymore, they only meet the character. So, maybe Malloc.I has only met one character? or perhaps he's met all three? If I'm not mistaken, Julia can control when she changes (AFAIK, you didn't even take it as a negative quality), so keeping her condition a secret shouldn't be hard if that's what you would like. It could be the case that only one of these figures (Jane?) knows Malloc.I, and how to contact him - and she maintains that persona while interacting with him. As far as him having met all three characters, AFAIK, Jane can't spoof her access ID, so it is unlikely that Malloc.I would not notice that all three people use the same commlink to contact him - or that they all have the same cyberware (down to the registration numbers) when he's within signal range.

Would you prefer that he believe (as Jane does) that Jane Reaction is real? or would you think it would be more fun if he saw her, objectively, for what she is or that it would simply be too difficult to maintain the illusion when he's around without sacrificing the ability to pull out one of the other two characters? Maybe both. Maybe he has seen her go from one character to another, and understands that Jane Reaction, Enigma, and Julia are all the same person - but suspects that this will be the shocking revelation at the end of Season 2!

If they have known one another for a year: Has Malloc.I been to Jane's place (digitally) or are they just virtual contacts? Have they gone on a mission together? Was the mission real, or staged by Horizon? Has she offered up any of her gear for his use, or requested that he stay out of any of it? Would you have any objection (OOC) to Malloc.I having some back doors in place, either at her place, on her gear, or both? I promise (OOC) not to be a total asshole about it, but it would be in character for Malloc.I to explore your network, and see whatever interesting things there are to see there. I imagine that a globally famous bat-shit crazy sim starlet has quite a few things worth seeing.

Okay,pretty much all set with my initial post - but it would help to know if Malloc.I would recognize Jane (Does he see Julianne, but only known Jane, etc).

Your solid =) Just got done reading it and it looks all good.

Thats up to her for you bud, I dont know how far she wants to allow you inter her relationship with her personalities.

For everyone else they see the famous version of her int eh vision.

Now how tempting is it to have Granny getting out of Vice's shower....

Admittedly, it would make things awkward for a long time afterwards, but I hadn't even considered that angle.

Well you know old TM's need loving too!

Edit below

@Gremish

@Blackhat

Alrighty... Jane and Malloc.I have known each other for a year... so, I think it is reasonable to figure that they met through a run... probably she was Jane when you met her the first time, but she'd have likely used the Julia persona during a run (usually, she just implies to people that it is an adopted persona for face-duties rather than an alternate personality). She only lets Enigma out when she is either too emotional to keep him from taking control (essentially, out of the four personalities, Enigma is the most powerful - but the rest of the personalities pretty much hate Enigma and try to keep him from 'driving the bus' so to speak) or needs to be amoral in order to complete a run. So it is very likely that you know of the different personas - whether you know of the mental disorder (I didn't take the neg-quality because hers is more unique than the neg quality allows - more like delusional schitzophrenia than MPD) or not is somewhat up to debate...

Assuming that Jane and Malloc.I became friends, she'd have asked some things like "What is your life like?" - as she is very interested in what makes one 'human' or 'not human' and other existential sorts of queries etc... If Malloc.I was friendly and shared info about himself (where he was 'born' - stuff like that), she'd have probably eventually confided to him her actual identity (perhaps asking for help spoofing her commlink and such - as she only knows the script-kiddie method of commlinks)... and a while after that she'd admit that, to her, those alternate personalities are real (Julianne herself is a mental construct, but she - and her alternate personas - believes that she is the original... the basic idea is that due to all the mental trauma she's been through, her personality fractured into several characters each representing a certain aspect of herself) - and they talk to her... Jane and Julia are her dear friends, but all of them are scared of Enigma. She'd of course have asked him to keep this secret...

One other thing, she'd have asked Malloc.I if he wondered what it was like to be human - if he said yes, she'd have invited him to 'ride-shotgun' in her implanted sim-rig if he wanted (perhaps that way experiencing things like going clubbing, having a date, etc) - afterall, with four people already in her head, what is one more?

From an objective point of view, Jane is essentially a fun-loving teenager with no real concept of her own mortality and a 'life is a movie' sort of attitude, Julia is the reserved adult of the group - often serving as their collective conscience, Julianne is a social chameleon - going through life basically borrowing whatever personality traits she needs to to fit in with those around her and always hiding how sad she is and the guilt she feels over her parents' deaths. Enigma is evil, but has certain rules - firmly believing that it and the women it shares a body with are all villains whose sole purpose in life is to create the hero that will destroy them all - it constantly reminds the others what they should feel guilty about and feeds on their pain and 'dark' emotions. While Julianne, Julia, and Jane could be linked to the Freudian concepts of Superego, Ego, and Id, Enigma's presence doesn't make so much sense.

So, in short, Malloc.I would probably see it as four 'programs' running on the same hardware instead of the single program like most metahumans.

As for her network - which once you gain her trust, you could see without her becoming upset, you'd find (encrypted of course) that she is constantly recording her simsense feed, and apparently transfers the files to datachits kept off the matrix before she sleeps each night. In addition, her four personalities keep separate diaries... complete with differing opinions on various men in their life, remarks on the others, etc... each of these diaries uses a different passkey - indicating that the different personalities are unaware of some of the thoughts of the others... Jane is resentful of Julia (teenager to parent relationship), Julianne and Jane are like close sisters... Julia sees herself as Julianne and Jane's big-sister who had to step in as a parental figure following the death of their parents. All of them hate Enigma - whom they see as simultaneously their protector and tormentor. Enigma doesn't see itself as metahuman, but rather as the personification of an idea... it is annoyed by the other personalities and would love nothing more than to destroy them, but knows it cannot do so without destroying itself... so instead it wants to corrupt them and make them just as evil and unhappy as it is.

Aside from that, undoubtedly her home's node is full of interesting things from pre-releases of movies to advance-products to massive amounts of fan mail (which she would more than happily let you help her answer if you were so inclined LOL)

Overall, Jane, Julia, and Julianne are very nice people - always trying to be there for their friends. Enigma is mean-spirited and generally unpleasant (he usually won't even use names, instead referring to people by their profession)... but fortunately he doesn't get to manifest very often.

It is very, very rare that more than one personality will vocalize at once - so until she let you in on her secret, it probably seemed like she was sane but changed personas as needed (like most shadowrunning disguise/social specialists).

No objections to backdoors... in fact, Julia may have asked Malloc.I to help her make sure that Enigma won't be allowed to 'go too far' should he be in control at some point and be about to do something that the rest of them would regret forever (Jane and Julianne aren't the sorts to ask for help like that). She'd have invited you to her home as well... especially when she's hosting parties. honestly, she is ultimately one of the loneliest people in the world in spite of constantly being surrounded by shallow socialites... and in spite of being with her 'sisters' constantly, because - counting Malloc.I - there are only three people in the world she can open up to and let them know that she isn't the only tennant in her head (she realizes that she is crazy and needs psychological help... but she can't seek it, because if she did then she'd lose everything she had ever worked for in one fell swoop of the media) - so she'd likely be very keen to have a non-judgemental friend she can trust not to blow the whistle on her.

As for jobs, if you want - you can have been the hacker mentioned in my opening post... the one Enigma thought was too good at his job

Sorry for the wall of text.

- Scope

I'd ask who's side you're on, but there really isn't much room for doubt.

Ok time is thin today and I apologize so here is the deal the people i havent writen a story for, I'm sorry, Im just going to give you your things and work on getting everything going, that way you dont have to wait on me since works is just being stupid insane right now, it hasnt been this busy in months and suddenly I start a SR game and blam, busy busy busy. Argh!

I will keep posting and updating though as we go... Sorry!

I am going to say its usable in the matrix but not NEARLY as powerful and sometimes it wont work at all there. The flesh world seems to be the best for it and the farther her real body is from the location the worse it gets on drain and the fuzzier everything is.

When you are physically there it works much better for you.

Cor, this is a big post, I'll break it up with spoilers.

First a bit of shopping on the warez servers with starting cash.



And then configure the CHN and slaved nodes with the upgrades.


(I don't know what the final ratings for the CHN are until you tell me what Rating the AI living in it is.)


Before she goes to sleep on the 6th she spends the day compiling and registering Sprites. She then Links them using some of the karma I saved from chargen.


(wow, scary biscuits, that first one did enough fading to outright kill her.)

Then thread up the Simrig CF and go to sleep.

No problem! That was all great stuff.


Malloc.I would have been very open about his state of being, if questioned (after all, information should be free) - but wouldn't have offered up the information. So, lets say they've both confided in one another. He would have been happy to help with her commlink - but he is much better at bypassing security than creating it. If you want those other diaries decrypted, or your alternate personalities' accounts upgraded to admin... Malloc.I's the guy to call. Spoofing, he can handle, though. And he would have probably reacted with puzzlement at the request to keep the information to himself - but won't have violated that trust.


Sounds like an experience. Malloc.I would be very interested in this. I love the idea of him being yet one more voice in her head (using the simrig's simmodule to create sounds or sights in her perception).


I like this analogy.


Malloc.I would probably decrypt (without too much trouble, I assume) the diaries, simsense feeds, etc and take innocent peeks. Assuming you've explained that you'd rather he not cause a lot of unnecessary trouble by informing the other personalities about the private thoguhts of hte others, Jane would have been greeted by the same confused responses, but would have obeyed. I can imagine Enigma constantly scheming and trying to trick or coerce Malloc.I into giving away some secrets about the others, or providing him/her with access to the others' files.


Respond to? No, sift through? Sounds like fun.


Sounds good. If the situation warrents it, I am pretty sure Malloc.I could get into Enigma's cyberware, and say, cut off her sensory perception to prevent her from doing something.


I like that idea, especially if we could have kept it from Enigma (and Horizon) that Malloc.I was doing the matrix-work. Instead, there's a "body-double" (the other guy who wasn't the adept) on scene who Enigma believed was the hacker for that movie... but it didn't require them arranging an ace-hacker at the last minute to pull off the job.

Malloc.I would not be particularly interested in staring in a new SimFlick. He'd probably stay invisible the entire run. So, this way, the "producer" arranges to have it make sense as to why the matrix-stuff was taken care of.

Wow.

It hadn't even occured to me it was possible to start out able to cause that much fading with a TM.

I obviously need to brush up on my TM chargen skills a bit more!

Just to make sure you realize, the runs she does are real... all that the Producer uses from the sim-sense recordings are the emotive tracks. Basically, acting doesn't get the same 'high' it used to, so she does real runs, the Producer takes the emotion-tracks out and trashes the sensory recording - then they do the acting and post-production the 'real-life run' emotive track into the sim-flick. So Jane/Julia/Enigma aren't ever actually in the sim-flicks (nor are any of the people they run with) - just their emotions, which are a lot edgier and generally better quality than can be had through acting. The physical by-the-script acting is done by Julianne (who never does the actual runs) later in the studio.

- Scope

Cries.



It took me hours to do that post. And I completely forgot the +2 she gets for operating in HotSim VR.


Snafnfnwnhshgrrrrr..!!!

Ahh, I thought some of the sensory information from the simrig would be used as well (thus, needing a third character in the scene).

Either way, I'm cool with it.

@Scope (or whoever is curious)

@Blackhat

That was amazing, a fantastic piece of prose, really got me into the characters head, so to speak.

Loved it.

More.

Please.

Thanks. I'll do my best, but, like a lot of the other initial posts, I had been working on it for a while. Later posts are bound to come more frequently, but be less good.

@Blackhat
That's probably the first time that Malloc has seen all four personalities manifest simultaneously - usually when it happens, its only two of them at the most.... so its obvious she has been very badly shaken.

@Gremish
Would like to start a data-search, if possible - running the portraits through facial recognition software, focusing on data coming out of those 4 cities. Not sure if the I have enough data to go on, but here are the rolls:

Also, let me know if agents/AIs/Sprites/etc get the +2 dice for always being in hot-sim VR... if so, you can add those to the above rolls if you like.