You can't be sure. She was cloaked and she turned to you as you approached.
So she could have come from any direction.

Is the handprint approximately where Jawsey saw Invictus?

What about the olive oil scent? Does that seem to be near Invictus' previous location or is it concentrated somewhere else?

Yes and yes. Those are firm indicators of Invictus' position.
And from a meta perspective, it's also a clue about a unique ability of Invictus.

@Jack
Would Mato understand/interpret the scent of cordite to suggest that the shot was taken inside of the greenhouse? I'm not sure if Mato's picking up just a whiff (like the residue that might be present on the remains of a round) or if he's getting a strong burst of it, like what would originate from the firearm itself.

@Beta
I took the handprint in the flowerbed to be the result of Invictus being shot and placing a hand on the ground after being knocked down / in pain. Not sure if there's a way to confirm that assumption.

The smell was sharp and encompassing, suggesting that the shot was fired inside the greenhouse
And yes, that interpretation fits what you have seen.

Not sure who we are waiting on.

A coupe things from the IC thread:
- Mato trying to track the cordite and olive oil scents to see if there's any trace of them elsewhere (e.g. if the shooter moved around, etc.)
- Mato looking for alternate ways off the roof other than the route that the team came
- Mato will go do the Blight audit
- Mato asked AM if she has access to any records about household weapons being fired

Still operating under the assumption that a drone did it, but - in a Sherlock Holmes fashion - Mato will try to eliminate any alternative possibilities or explanations.

Sorry, I was waiting for gilga to do a matrix search before continuing.
Getting the post up now

Sorry for the silence the past few days. I should know by now that when my son gets to exam time, some sort of drama will ensue. Not quite up to being creative yet tonight but will try to reply over the weekend.

Any luck with either of these? Is there a way down off the roof other than the way that the team took going up?

Nope, no more smells
There are climbing jumping and flying - with sufficient tech/magic/cyber you can accomplish that any way you want. But you find no signs for that

Anything needed from me?
Must admit that I am out of ideas.

Mato had asked about whether AM has any access to records that would record any gunshots from household weapons.

Separately, do we know if Van Der Bloom's drone has any weapon mounts? I'm wondering about the possibility of Van Der Bloom's drone being hacked, especially while he was asleep/KO'd with the allergy medicine. That could potentially explain the perimeter camera being shot, but not necessarily Invictus being shot (unless Van Der Bloom is asleep again). Might be worth double-checking on Van Der Bloom.

Van der Bloom's drone is too small to mount anything but a single shot.
Doing a sound analysis would be a Computer+Int roll.

Gilga, you want to do the honors on that?

Otherwise we might be down to patrolling and maybe catching some sleep.

computer + intuiton +hot sim: 17d6t5 5

Mato had some of these ideas:

For Jawsey:
<<We know Invictus was waiting for someone or something. Jawsey, how to spirits arrange for their rendezvous? I presume they can't use commlinks like the rest of us. Would there be any record of that anywhere, in the astral realm or elsewhere? Was Invictus assigned any quarters that we could search?>>

More for AM:
<<We know Igor and Invictus left early. Perhaps an alibi? Do we have any information on Igor's whereabouts since then?>>

Although presumably both with require Jack's input.

@Jack If you really do intend for everyone to go to sleep, just let us know so we don't bang our heads against the wall to the point where we just grind to a halt.

AM is not going to sleep, I'll have her take a long haul or something, unlikely the paranoid elf would sleep after a guest was assualted, and knowing that losing the job will be very bad.

Me as a player, am struggling to keep the kind of attention that this kind of story deserves.
Who is Igor?

Igor is the russian mob guy. You can find the list of NPCs on page 1 of this thread

@Tecumseh
You don't have to go to sleep - there is just nothing going to go on until the morning. Taking Long Haul certainly is an option.
Van der Bloom is still sleepy from the wine and the antihistamines.
And be also aware, that so far you only suspect that Invictus was disrupted

Invictus has a room - although staff can tell you that he doesn't actually use it in any corporeal fashion.

If AM can pull the location of Invictus's room, Jawsey and/or Trouble can see if they can get in there or not.

No idea why AM is needed when we all have a map. But fine:-)

You can - and you find - as described - nothing of interest.

Wait, but in the IC it said: "But [AM] also recognizes an echo of Invictus - and his violent disruption." (This is back in post 235.)

@Gilga
Dang, AM has a sharp tongue! Giving Van Der Bloom the business!

Mato can go fish Igor out of the spa, but if he's downing a bottle of wine he might not be much of a hacker at the moment. Unless "Drunken Hacking" is a particular style. (Alternatively, what is a single bottle of wine to a Russian?)

@Jack
A few posts ago Mato had asked the chasseurs if they knew anyone carrying Savalette.

@All
FYI, I'm going to be moving slowly over the next two weeks. I'm on full-time Dad Duty over the holidays and I won't have as much time to post as I do when I'm sitting at a computer all day for work.

It's pretty strong evidence - but it is possible to fake astral imprints. I'm saying this more on the grounds that Hamington likely won't call out an emergency based only on AM's impression of the astral.

Igor isn't a hacker though. You are confusing him with the German Thorbjörn Valez.

And sorry, I missed that. I'm ammending the answer now.

Ah, you're correct! My mistake.

Happy Holidays everyone 😊

Happy holidays!

I wrote half of a Merry Christmas message yesterday but lost it before being able to post it.

Happy Boxing Day to Beta, since he's a Canook.

Happy belated חֲנֻכָּה‎ to Gilga.

Thanks, and Merry Christmas!
3rd lockdown in Israel, but hopefully this time it is the last because of vaccines.

FYI, I'm still going to be slow for another week. I'm the point person on child care until school resumes in the new year.

No worries,

holidays make everything slower

1) I want to apologize for having closed down my SR tabs 'for a day or two' most of two weeks ago, and so having taken a rather long unannounced break. It was only after I disconnected from a bunch of things that I realized how burned out I'd become, and I just couldn't will myself to re-engage with everything for a while.
2) That said, I'm feeling loads more myself, able to sit down and focus on one thing for a while. So I'm good to carry on with this episode.
3) Belatedly sending my hopes that the various holidays in the last month have treated you all well, and that everyone has benefited from a bit of a break.

Well, I'm ready to go on when you are

Beta, don't feel bad. If it hadn't been you then it would have been me. I had less free time over the last two weeks than I can remember.

I have a very busy January ahead of me but I should be past the holiday crunch period at least.

There have been several prompts ICly about going to bed, so that may be our best bet. It's possible that this one will only become clearer with the passage of time.

Somehow it's quite fitting that we are reaching now the main plot of the story with a new year - sorry, when I planned this I didn't think it would take nearly that long to reach - goes to show that having loads of NPCs makes everything more unpredictable.

I'm running a different game right now and I thought that the current run was going to make sense as two short halves. But we just finished the first half and it took longer on its own than then our previous run did in its entirety, so I grossly underestimated the length of the entire mission too.

We do have a lot of NPCs but I did the same thing in my chapter with all the different gangs. I think it helped to have the dossiers up front (and then creating a wiki page for them), which has made referring back to them very easy.

We are at the 5-month mark for this run, which - if we're now reaching the main plot - is closer in length to other games I've run in the sense that one chapter/mission is usually about a year. I'll ignore the outlier mission (on Dumpshock, no less) that took four years because PC posts slowed down to 1x/month at the end.

Sorry, a bit distracted by events in the U.S. My mind is elsewhere at the moment.

Yeah, I can imagine.

I'm curious to hear any thoughts or perspectives that others care to share from their perspective outside the United States.

I would say the vast majority of the country is quite embarrassed at the moment. I am somewhat hopeful that a sense of unity and camaraderie can emerge from the insanity, especially from the lawmakers who were under siege, but only time will tell.

Well, seeing as we had idiots trying to storm the Reichstag a while ago too, I'm not surprised that it happened in the US too. I'd just have expected that American security would be better at preventing it.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1299765974598549506

Hopefully, the change in president will calm down the situation.

I'd say the event itself is embarrassing but meaningless, it could have been a disaster if your lawmakers were captured, harmed, or coerced to publically declare Trump as the winner, but all that actually happened was a bunch of lunatics making a mess in the capitol.

However, one cannot deny that many Americans will genuinely believe that the elections were stolen, and the supreme court is not helping establish public trust by refusing to investigate these allegations seriously. (or they did and my second-hand information is wrong - no my area). The thing is me if nobody seriously investigates these claims then the conspiracy goes on, and it will weaken the trust in the system for years to come.


Now I am depressed because I fear that some of the stuff I wrote can be said about Israel as well.

I think "shocked, but not surprised" sums up the feelings of the few people I've talked to about what happened at the Capitol building yesterday. The news here mostly reported on it without passing judgement (the news media here is not as heavily partisan as in the US, and it isn't our direct issue anyway). Of course in Canada in particular and the internet in general we are inundated with American news, so I think that for people who have been paying attention to the news this didn't come out of left field, it was kind of the logical result of what has been going on for quite a while now.

Personally, by today I'm feeling like it was almost the 'perfect' climax to the tea-party-->Trumpism growing right wing anger. A large group finally got mad enough to do something that was a real statement, but it really seemed more like a statement of anger than of anything else. Well, except in the negative, in that there was clearly not a clear plan or demand by the people who did it. They broke in, wrote some graffiti, trashed things, scared some people, but really didn't seem to know what to do once they broke in. It almost felt adolescent.

A friend had linked me to article a few days ago, posted by, IIRC, a rebel Republican senator. The broader article was all about why he was not going to support the challenge against the election results. But a specific point that he made jumped out at me. Roughly it was "Trump and his mouthpieces have made a lot of claims of electoral fraud in public, but their lawyers haven't made the same claims in in court in their varying law suits. Why? Because there is legal punishment for lying in court, but there isn't for lying to the public. In court they have produced no credible evidence, which is why all of their law suits have been thrown out by judges. If they had any real evidence, surely they would have produced it in court by now." But of course, the people who were at the Capitol building yesterday are not generally the people who are interested in hearing that sort of argument.

Sorry for the long response. Kind of organizing and purging my thoughts on the topic here.

.... and of course the shadowrun player in me was going "who manipulated the mob into breaking in, so that they could access one secure file during the chaos and make a few key edits?"

==========================
ETA (a couple of hours later): back to Shadowrun:
aura reading on Cunningham: 13d6t5 4
aura reading Pike: 13d6t5 6
aura reading the bride of many names: 13d6t5 2
astral perception at safe: 11d6t5 3
visual perception on safe: 7d6t5 1

@Beta I never really considered what you said. Interestingly, all that I read is either so biased against Trump that it is useless, or so biased in favor that it feels as if it is written by his spokesperson.

Broadly speaking, this is my take on things as well. Many people - including people I am aligned with, politically - are calling it a 'coup' but I think that gives it too much credit. The mob seemed like a dog chasing a car: they wouldn't know what to do with it if it caught it. But, on the flip side, I am grateful that they didn't get their hands on any political leaders, because mobs have a certain internal momentum that leads them to do illogical things. I wouldn't want to put their sense of restraint to the test when there are actual lives on the line.


Beta and the quote he cited hit pretty close to home on this one. Everything has been seriously investigated and everything has been thrown out because none of it is serious. The lack of credible evidence is damning, which is why all of court cases have been so swiftly dismissed. (And, as Beta notes, the lawyers say very different things under penalty of perjury than they do when they're in front of a bank of microphones speaking the press. All of it reeks as an epic scam to drum up money from the foolhardy to 'continue the fight'.)

What worries me most is the divergence of realities. If the public can't even agree on the facts anymore, let alone the interpretation of the facts, then how can we govern or be governed? How do you even work through that, to get people to acknowledge reality against their will?

@Beta, it was Cunningham that wants to keep Katya away, not Pike. And, from the dossiers, we know that Cunningham and Katya are "at odds" with each other.

Let's not let that piece about the True Name slip either.

@Jack Any luck with the sensors?

The sensors show no sign of tampering - as far as you can ascertain, no-one came through that door.

Yes, Cunningham has a problem with Katya or she with him.

The true name of a spirit is usually his formula and encoded in some physical object - asking Pike about this would be a good idea

Thanks for clearing that up.

Interesting developments ICly.

Perhaps some of these should be IC questions - I can certainly reframe them easily enough if that makes more sense - but I wanted to check OOCly first.

It sounds like Pike freed Invictus. (Pike was about 21 then and is 28 now, so that's 7 years ago). Invictus is no longer bound to the sword in the genie-in-a-bottle way so now it can strut around in his legionnaire garb at its pleasure.

Pike says, "He resented the fact I still kept the sword locked up." Do we know if Invictus resented the fact that Pike kept the sword locked up or that Pike kept the sword at all (as opposed to giving it to Invictus)? Because it seems like the false bottom of a safe in the house of a Lord would generally be a pretty good place to hide/protect a True Name. (Usually, at least. Not in this case evidently.)

We still need to figure out how the sword and the ring could leave the room. Or, indeed, if they have left the room. Although presumably Trouble could spot powerful magical artifacts like that even if they were hidden from mundane senses. (And I also presume that Mato's detectors would find them under normal circumstances.)

We need to re-read the story and see every time olive oil was mentioned - this is a place where Invictus' true name was a.k.a the sword. Unless I missed anything that was Jack trying to give us some rope to pull. The problem is limited time.

Feel free to put the following answers in your IC post:



Correct.



If you ask for clarification, he'll tell you that Invictus wanted the sword back.



As far as Trouble can tell, neither the blue admiral nor sword are inside the wards of the room.



I'll spare you the search - it was a long time after all:
The cook's assistant mentioned that they use olive oil in the spa and that invictus comes everyday to rub fresh oil in his hair.
I mentioned OOC that this was an important clue for something else about Invictus, too.

I'm not clear at what time Mato detected the figure in the space in the wall outside their room? And would where he detected the figure near where the safe is, or was the safe in a different part of the room?

Mato saw the figure around 0300h
The safe is in the adjacent room to the master bedroom