glowfic | methods and tools

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methods and tools

The gate opens in an small space. Through a doorway ahead is a mid-sized room, scattered with chairs. One wall, directly across from the doorway to the incoming gates area, is made of some clear material. On the other side of it is another room, with a metallic floor raised slightly above the first one's, with a half-dozen complex diagrams and space for many more.

The way into there appears to be through a decontamination room to the left. There is a door on the right into the rest of the base. Embedded in the wall to the left is the door to the outgoing gate area.

Both rooms are windowless and otherwise minimally decorated.

(Observant guests may note that the gravity is about a third of what they are used to.)

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An instant before the portal opens, the world goes sharp again.

Creeping tendrils of unlight - exist, have always existed, will always exist upon the walls and ceiling and at random in the air, reaching out towards Thorn and Dotted Lines and the sudden portal -

- and suddenly are diverted, as the world around them bends.

There is a blinding flash of that same strange light fantastic, and for an instant

the world

shatters

space itself leaps for them, howling dogs of far too many angles and glimmering gold dust dripping like drool from their teeth of silver sand, pastel-shaded molten annoyance cutting like blades in all directions, and the walls and the floor turn sideways and out, splintering into thousands of possibilities and desperately sharp -

Sono yaegaki wo.

- and all of this has always happened in a bubble, a small constrained volume about the portal crackling with black vines that whip and move like lightning, a wondrous eight-fold fence to imprison the impossible world.

Vanishment, this world.

And the world within turns sideways, becoming something drawn on reality, and then fades away entirely, leaving nothing behind.

... well. Leaving a rather irritated looking projection of Aisilian behind, staring at the empty space where the portal once was.

Then he looks up, as if hearing something, and vanishes.

(At this point, Raezenoth may notice a few grains of sand missing, and tiny holes in the wall where they accelerated at impossible speeds to reach the portal. Whether they reached their destination, nobody yet knows...)

Also left behind: approximately half of Aral. The front half, to be specific.

There's a bit of a mess.

Lena stifles a scream, nails digging into her palm. Before she has a chance to react further, Amadi has crossed the room, and has a bulky weapon drawn from somewhere trained on epicenter of the event. (Due to his angle, this works out as a little to Cordelia's left)

After a moment, still white-faced, Lena says: "Meletiti fucking Entelecheiai, thou who art really fucking horrible at social, get the hell back here and explain what on TITAN-blasted Earth just happened."

Edited 2015-07-06 01:38 (UTC)

"Yes," says Cordelia, slightly wide-eyed. "I wouldn't mind knowing that, either."

With a flicker of projectors, Aisilian reappears!

... He looks a little different. He's about half as tall, and pudgy, and drawn - like someone's taken a cartoon of Aisilian as he was when he was five, exaggerated it for comic effect, and then pulled it into reality without any consideration for realism.

But he's still recognizably the same person.

"Hi! I'm Chibisilian, a beta fork of Aisilian for when he's so focused on something he can't even spare a shard for mundane conversation! This is probably very bad news for the local Truth, so - oooh, yeah, that's nasty. Um. Ouch. Uh, do either of you know anyone on Mars?"

... he's probably a little more excitable than the original, though.

"We are on Mars," Lena says icily. "Do you care to specify a location on Mars? Or perhaps explain what the hell just happened?"

(Of course Aisilian's beta fork is even worse at social than he is. Of course.)

Chibisilian spins idly. "Y'see, the TITANs tossed in - well, essentially, an alethic grenade. White noise in the Truth, basically! Hooks up the laws of physics and magic to a random number generator and uses whatever comes out, tends to *break* the local *house* something fierce!"

Coming to a stop, he turns to Lena, suddenly serious. "Identical bombs have been detonated in Noctis-Qianjiao, Valles-New Shanghai, and Elysium on Mars; Al-Hamadhanj on Mercury, Aphrodite Prime, the Shack, and Cythera on Venus, Hexagon and Paradise above Earth, Horeb and the Summit amid the Inner System asteroids, Qing Long in the Trojans, Extropia and Nova York in the Main Belt, the Holy See on Ganymede, Hyoden on Castillo, Locus, and University City in Aarhus on Titan. Each of those will have permanent and far-reaching effects if they are left untreated, akin to the worse-than-death fate of being thrown Outside.

"The Prometheans and my greater self are currently in the process of containing, undoing, and retroactively preventing the damage from these bombs. We estimate that it is extremely likely that this is an distraction from something, most likely the kidnapping of Dotted Lines and Thorn, but unfortunately it is working."

"I see," says Cordelia. "How exactly do these worse-than-death fates come about? How worried should I be for my husband?"

Lena, meanwhile, is sitting on the floor, swearing quietly. Amadi looks between her and the absence of anything except Aisilian's beta fork in the area where the event was several times, then shakes his head, holsters the assault rifle, and picks his way through the debris to her.

Tyche quietly walks the rest of the way over to the alcove from where ze had stopped short at the list. "How are they doing?" ze asks softly. "That is -- a lot of people. I don't know Dotted Lines very well, but I know Thorn would want everyone to focus on those civilians first. --You think they're kidnapped, not dead, though?"

Ze also seems to be interested in the answer to Cordelia's question.

Chibisilian turns to face Aral's... half-body, frowning for a moment.

Define equality and divide. Set.

Eventually he says, "That is - interesting. Aral is lucky he was shielded by Esthfora. There are two intact shards of Aral's identity currently extant; one fell Outside, but as a pure mental concept could bodily travel to Esthfora, who is protecting him. The other is in Hell, presumably a demon."

Turning to Tyche, he continues, "Pretty good! All noise generators have been contained, and three have been canceled entirely. One hundred people have been lost Outside, but they were immediately prioritized for remote egocasting and deletion, so we've got them all back now.

"All backups of Thorn remain intact and have not been attacked; it's unlikely that the TITANs goal was their death." He frowns. "The TITANs have unfortunately figured out a certain degree of infowarding, however; I can't find them." Brightening dramatically, he continues "I'm pretty sure they're alive, though! It'd be pretty useless to kill them, we have so many ways of bringing them back." Face shifting expressively, he continues, "Though that may not be the best of news, hm."

"Ah - also, it strikes me that it wasn't very clear, but that was a portal that appeared in this room."

Edited 2015-07-06 22:24 (UTC)

"Unless someone can come up with a practical use for - that," says Cordelia, gesturing to the half-corpse, "I'd like to clean it up now. And then, unless someone can come up with a practical use for me, I think I'll go home."

Tyche looks at Lena, makes a face that can be described as 'why the hell am I the one handling the social interaction,' and turns back to Cordelia. "Since it does not appear to be useful for scrying where they are, I think it can be cleaned up. The other --" she turns to Aisilian's beta fork. "Can you check whether anything in this room is contaminated with the virus? I doubt," (this to Cordelia again), "that you want to carry it back to Nexus on your clothes or hair."

Edited 2015-07-06 22:26 (UTC)

Chibisilian does not have access to the same degree of control over Boundaries that Aisilian does, but there is still a faint haze of shattered space around him as he throws out a pulse of unlight. "Nope! We're still clean. I'm sure they threw some through, but it looks like it all fell Outside."

"In that case, goodbye," she says, casually turning Aral's remains into air. "Contact Leaf on the forum if you need our help with anything."

And she plane shifts home.

"O--" Nope, she's gone. Well, understandable.

Tyche takes a slow look around the room. "Lena," ze says after a moment, "I think you want to be somewhere else right now." This gets a tiny nod.

After Amadi helps a rather unsteady Lena out, Tyche turns back to Aisilian's beta fork. "Can we have this conversation on the server?"

Chibisilian nods. "Alright!"

Shortly thereafter, sleeved in zir more comfortable eidolon and ensconced in 60x simulspace, and having spun off some forks to deal with other matters, Tyche returns zir attention to Aisilian's beta fork.

If they can get Thorn and her friend out of this, they will.

"Did the portal have a range limit? Have you checked what is warded against scrying? Is it certain it was the TITANs? Thoughts on why them, specifically? There have been both Firewall and forum members in that area before, even today."

As ze speaks, ze is assembling data: maps of known TITAN-infected areas, including exoplanets; profiles for Thorn and Dotted Lines. (Thorn's is accompanied by a request to their proxies for clearance to access more of her file). Surveys of suspected TITAN activity. Contingency plans. Anything else that ze can find that might be relevant.

Edited 2015-07-06 23:48 (UTC)

"No range limit, I'm afraid, and infowards tend not to work that way. The existence of the ward is itself information that cannot be allowed to leave, see! There are ways to bypass an infoward, but they generally revolve on faking authorization to know whatever's warded.

"I'm pretty sure it was the TITANs! Nobody else in this Truth has both means - alethics - and motive - a focus on Firewall and Sol System in particular. Also, while technically the fact that "DL and Thorn were kidnapped" was warded, the identity of "the person who opened a portal into this base" wasn't, so we have alethic confirmation.

"As far as why them in particular - they're probably trying to avoid catching something too big for them to handle, while still going for useful powers. Thorn has been trained in runes that the TITANs still don't have, and Dotted Lines has a useful scrying ability that they can't reproduce with any subtlety."

Chibisilian pauses, as news filters through his feed with his alpha. "Uh, oh dear, we have more bad news. Apparently the TITANs have warded the existence of the exsurgent virus, sending containment protocols and governments in disarray and incidentally giving the virus involuntary phasing powers and undetectibility!" He blinks cheerily. "We should probably do something about that!"

Tyche swears. "Is there anything we can do about that?" Ze spins off another fork (merging all of these back in will be... interesting, but ze needs the multitasking ability at the moment), to check base security and then look at major cities.

"About infowards, I think I may have been unclear; unless what they are using can give you false results if you try to scry an area covered by one, process of elimination should theoretically possible."

Ze thinks for a moment longer. "Could that portal have crossed worlds or Truths?"

Edited 2015-07-07 20:54 (UTC)

"Aside from warning people? Breaking the ward is probably beyond us for the moment, as all our mana stores are earmarked for use against the TITANic incursion. But it might be possible to do something subtle to work around it..." Chibisilian blurs for a minute, splitting off a fork of his own to think about the problem.

Shaking his head: "A properly designed infoward will ward its own existence, which means that sensors will be fooled into thinking that, rather that 'nothing is there', that 'everything is normal and uninteresting'." Stopping for a moment, he frowns. "But... the TITANs don't have all the runes yet. With only Light of Eclipse's unique runes, they probably can't make a properly designed infoward yet. So it might be worth a shot."

"That portal could have crossed worlds if and only if there was an agent on this end, and it could not have crossed Truths at all."

"Warnings are going out," Tyche says. Pause, as the relevant fork updates zir. "...there's a Case Asturias Black Flag Scenario alert, now. I can forward that to the forum, too -- in private messages, in case the TITANs can see the public forum, or become able to."

Ze is silent for a moment. "Are we certain they only have Light? Do you have thoughts about the most efficient way to do that check?"

"...and we need to check for infiltrators," ze adds, after a moment, with a sigh. "Thorn would be--" Ze breaks off, and busies zirself with the maps.

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