Scene #7631: Secundus: Resonance Experimentation 2

Owner	Pose
Arthur Lowell	Arthur's invitation takes everyone, via one of his spirographic Gates, past the desert above and into an interior space immediately. Long halls and blank rooms mark the way in. The main walls, floors, and ceilings are concrete, composed of a grid of blocks or perhaps panels like tile, with every third block featuring a simple square buzzing lamp. Each cell of the grid is marked "1X1M SOLID GEOMETRY FLOOR TEXTURE" or "1X1M SOLID GEOMETRY WALL TEXTURE", repeated constantly. All the main architecture surfaces are a flat, dull gray. At the top of one of the walls, strict, blocky text has been painted on in large fonts declares the room's various aspects: "-9.8M/S^2 'SAFE' GRAVITY ZONE", "DATA NON-DUMP INSTANCE, MEMORY RECYCLING", and "UNSUPERVISED LUDOGENICS PROHIBITED". An elevator takes them down, down, down... Arthur presses a button on its panel labeled "LUDOGENESIS". And that floor is much the same, but like a tumorously massive office complex grew into a city. The holographic screen-windows from before line the massive interior, making it look as though it has a sky. Every building is used to store more workspace, but every workstation seems to have once been used. There are even vehicles down here, old Skaianet-marked smart-cars clearly meant for navigating long, long underground stretches of concrete. NULLBODIES, odd humanoid shapes of varying RED, GREEN, or BLUE colors with full-body wireframe where skin ought to be -- that is, not SKULLBODIES seen before, so long ago -- are found around the streets. Most are at the desks, working away at something with a palpable sense of nervousness. And Nullbodies with odd black or white geometric heavy armor, with strange crystaline weapons of all sorts, both modern melee and modern ranged sorts, are on patrol. The Nullbodies don't respond to the new visitors except in the most bland, silent ways like briefly waving, and basically nothing else at all. Arthur heads to one of the desks, which is stationed near a door leading into one of the facilities. It's sitting behind incredibly thick glass. If one examines the one-foot-thick slab of concrete it's set into, one might find the office within is geometrically impossible, and cannot, in fact, actually exist, since there's at least twelve feet of office space behind the window. The thin, aged man inside, wearing a jet-black suit, smiles, brightly. He smoothes back his jet-black-but-greying hair, the hairline pulled agonizingly back. "Another excursion into the decompression chamber?" He asks, brightly. His desk declares his name: MISTER WELCOMES. "You can go on through, if you like! Let's see what happens this time!" "Everyone up in this biz." Arthur declares, popping the airlock on the chamber. "And get ready to HOLD ON TO SHIT. We gonna be PUMPIN' ALL THE OEUVRE OUT, get your shit hella DECOMPRESSED. It's gonna feel FUCKED UP. So, get up in that shit and HOLD ON."
Katt	Katt likes: * fights * competition * fair fights with real competition So ultimately it's really not a surprise when, when offered the chance to have that but bigger, she decided to show up. Her first comments: "Man, this place looks weird," Katt says, poking at one of the 1X1 floor textures with the butt of her staff, then scraping it to see if something comes off. Nothing does. The not-actually-people are even weirder, but she keeps that to herself. When they enter the desk with the office - "Hold on," Katt says, and mentally measures the size of the office with her eyes. Then she leans as far around it as she can. Then she looks through the window again, double-checking the scale. "That's cheating," she eventually decides. But she walks into the airlock anyway. "Do I have to wear a mask, or anything," it occurs to her to ask, about halfway in.
Kale Hearthward	>KALE: Get up in this biz "How odd," says Kale as he walks through the area, peering at the oddly designed floors and ceiling. "It's like a theatrical stage between plays, I suppose?" He goes right on into the compression chamber. If there's any sort of ship-robbing little girls (with or without tentacles) present, Kale steadfastly ignores them. "Hold onto... what? Is there some sort of grasping bar I should grab?" He looks around for something to literally hold onto. "Also just checking - this is metaphorical decompression, right? Not like depressurization? Because not everyone does well with that."
Staren	Staren's seen this all relatively recently, so she doesn't marvel as much, or try to take it all in at once. Stepping through the gate, she does as much of Arthur's complex handshake as she can remember; just doing it so many times is starting to make it muscle memory. Smiling at the familiarity of it. "I feel like we need a phrase to say when we do this." After they step out of the elevator, she looks around a bit more as she skates leisurely to MR. WELCOMES's booth. (Her shoes have little hoverjets attached to the soles.) This place was so big, she didn't get to pay attention to everything last time... She smiles and waves to WELCOMES, "Hey buddy, good to see you again! Hope you've been doing okay waiting for us to come back!" She goes right on into the airlock, and then turns around and stretches. To those who weren't here last time, she advises, "Just be ready to adventure. And to gather resources. I don't know if we get to keep anything from this test..." She glances at Arthur briefly, "...but one day, we'll be doing this for real. Whatever dream you may have for how to use Secundus... or to protect it... you'll need to be able to establish a base of power there to do so, just like the factions here." Staren glances back to Arthur. "Any chance there's a co-op mode so I can show Katt the ropes? Or are we each on our own again?" She rubs her chin. "Wait, can we send eachother resources even if we have seperate bases? That might be useful. Hm." Staren looks at the two animal-folk who are definitely not animals. "Nah, it's not that kinda decompression. Well. I mean. You MIGHT end up in a space zone, but I think if you do, it'll be somewhere safe you can get any gear needed for local environmental hazards." She looks to Arthur. "Right?"
C	The Mysterious Terrorist Leader today is, shockingly, not doing Terrorist Things. At least, not explicitly. With the red gleam of his ever-present helmet, he appraises the oddity of his surroundings with an easygoing shrug, "Well now, this isn't really what I was expecting." he intones with a drawl. Pivoting on his heel, he raises one of his hands out of the depths of his deceptively patterned cloak and pinches his forefinger to his thumb, extending the remaining digits outwards in a fanning position; the universal sign for 'O-K'. "Let's get this show on the road ASAP then. Here's hoping you don't turn my brain into vegetable soup, or something. I still need it." Those Nullbody things are pretty interesting. Wonder what they're supposed to really be? C pays the impossibility of the place no-mind, for the moment -- from the missing "textures" to the incorrect "geometry" -- and enters the decompression chamber.
Rita Ma	Rita, the perfectly ordinary girl, stops for a few moments to hassle one of the Nullbodies that's waved at her. "Hi, mister! I've never seen anybody like you before. What's your job here? How are things?" It will, in all likelihood, steadfastly refuse to answer. She'll eventually grow disillusioned with the lack of response. Are they even 'real people'? The things they're doing are so pointless. ... Well, they don't have meat on them, so it doesn't matter if they're 'people' anyway. In the airlock, she glances around nervously to find something to hold onto. After a moment of that, a little lightbulb goes off in her head. "Decompression? But... we're not even underwater, are we? I don't get it." Her eyes distinctly, palpably linger on Kale. Her gaze has subtle undertones of a glassy hunger. But as long as he doesn't say anything, she won't either.
Liza Grier	"So when did we all decide that concrete is default texture anyways?" Liza has to think out loud. "Not just default for building, because that's pretty obvious. We're all the up to like, the default texture of reality. Does god build in concrete? That's not a profound question by the way; I'd absolutely believe they'd cut corners and budget that hard." A long period of uncomfortable travel around endless concrete streets of endless office buildings filled with endless faceless humanoid shapes doing endless paperwork. Her eyes widen all at once, as if an awful, terrible, actually profound thought occurs to her. "Fuck, is this how CEOs see everything?" These are questions for nobody in particular, because Liza is here in the capacity of making sure Rita has good, reliable, morally upstanding company, instead of being stranded in a room full of shady bad guys. Yes, C counts. When Katt asks questions that interact with the keyword 'DECOMPRESSION', Liza replies on autopilot, like slapping an itchy bug, "Put on a fucking mask." Then, once they're in the airlock, helmet just hiss-clicked into place, optics flaring green, she taps Riza on the shoulder and static-says "Hey. Since you're here to learn. I'll show you a cool trick." She then draws a gun and points it right at the back of Kale's head, comedically just a split second too late before the decompression happens.
Arthur Lowell	Does Katt have to wear a mask? "NAW, but if you got a STYLISH MASK for HAZARD STUFF, then go ahead and PUT THAT SHIT ON, because it's got GOOD ENERGY." Arthur rambles to Katt. As for Kale Hearthward: "Just, like, HOLD ON in a MENTAL SENSE. Don't FREAK THE FUCK OUT or nothin'. This gonna be CRAZY A-F dawg. And-- yeah, naw, AIR PRESSURE gonna be the same. ONE ATMOSPHERE ALWAYS, BAYBEE!" And for Staren's request... "NAH, no CO-OP MODE, though... huh. Maybe I should set up some TANDEM STUFF like that. Pencil that in for an EXPANSION. But naw. You can go HELP HER ZONES though, like, YOURSELF. If y'wanna! And yeah, this is all safe. This fuckin' piece of shit will OVERLOAD and SHUT DOWN before it gets any chance to REALLY HURT YOU." Mr. Welcomes gives a beaming smile to Staren. "Don't worry, I've been quite well! I've got all kinds of of books back here, they've lasted me quite a while." He's so cheerful! Rita's chosen Nullbody waves back as she greets it. Then it tilts its head at her questions, as if she's speaking another language. There's an emotional sense of several seconds of blank blinking, before it goes back to typing away on the laptop in its lap. Arthur's answer to her question is thankfully way more informative. "It's decompressin' OTHER STUFF. Mostly so I can fit OTHER THINGS in. I gotta yank a bunch'a MULTIVERSE-NESS outta the chamber so I can fit some SECUNDUS-NESS in there. Don't worry, won't hurt ya." For Liza Grier's question: One final answer before things suddenly change. "ACTUALLY YEAH. There's a GOOD DEFAULT MATERIAL and a FUCKED UP EVIl AND TWISTED DEFAULT MATERIAL. The GOOD DEFAULT is CONCRETE. The EVIL DEFAULT is actually LOAD-BEARING DRYWALL." And everyone's inside...
Rita Ma	"Oh! Show me, Ms. Grier! I love-" Rita's eyes go absolutely as wide as dinnerplates when Liza raises the gun. Her expression, in that fleeting instant, is hard to read. Shock, for sure- her hands are both covering her mouth- but it's hard not to read something else in her raised eyebrows and electric anticipation. The multiverse will never find out how she'd have reacted if he'd got the bullet for real.
C	C takes his decompression with grace. Or he would have, if he didn't decompress in the middle of laughing loud and hard at Liza's 'trick'. As for her thoughts concerning him, he would take offense to them if he were privy, as C is an upstanding human being who has never once in his entire life betrayed anyone. He is the epitome of an upstanding ally and most certainly not a shady villain. Shame on anyone who thinks that. Totally.
Katt	Katt holds out her hands. "I don't have a mask," she says, "so I'll just go." Both to Arthur and Liza, as it turns out. "Plus, I'm pretty cool even without it." Some parts of the Multiverse (like slang) she picked up fast. en Liza points a gun at Kale, Katt isn't sure if she should stop that; she lifts her staff up rslightly but doesn't really change her grip on it very much. It's like she's going to - Oh, she doesn't. And so Katt also doesn't. She lowers the staff again. "Drywall? Really? You can go right through that - " She seems to hav efigured out why it is the evil material.
Arthur Lowell	The room looks blank. More "1X1M SOLID GEOMETRY FLOOR TEXTURE" around. The room's aspects are displayed: "-9.8M/S^2 'SAFE' GRAVITY ZONE", "DATA DUMP INSTANCE, MEMORY NON-RECYCLING", and "/!\ CAUTION /!\ OEUVRE EQUIPMENT MAY BE IN OPERATION /!\ CAUTION /!\" Arthur swaggers on in, and then slowly, the airlock closes behind the whole group. He fusses with his phone... A PA from nowhere in particular in the room speaks: "DECOMPRESSING LOCAL OEUVRE IN THREE... TWO... ONE... ACTIVATION." And what happens next is... surreality. Impossible to describe with the words and systems with which we are familiar. It can only, of course, be described with the words and systems of something else. The concrete pulls away. The people here pull away. The geometry of this world pulls away, like everything's expanding. The elites are, each of them, somewhere else -- and seemingly separated, at least for now. They're somewhere new and strange. It looks a little like home, like a dozen things that have fallen out of the current events, like a million places and times that were, long ago, and now aren't. Thankfully, the Elites are not simply there with nothing at all. But that'll be explained momentarily. The PA voice speaks up from seemingly nowhere: "Ludogenic software (HEX SYS 0.6 r10612 'RESONANCE WAR BETA TEST') load complete. Module statuses available to read here for Pueblo-enabled interfaces." As for where each of you are... That can be seen through both interface and eyes, now.
Arthur Lowell	Things are getting more coherent. This time, it's more clear exactly how this works. On entry, time jitters, skips, and shudders. Coarse memories form, as if remembering something from years ago, of arriving alone, and having to establish a base of operations, having to carve a niche of effective power alone in an unfamiliar place that's now become familiar. Whether a crime family, dictatorial dominion, benevolent leadership, or beloved heroism, some sort of territorial backing is quickly established, eventually letting the recent arrivals have some access to the local materials...
Arthur Lowell	A day has passed, almost immediately after arrival. A jolt in time. Fast-forward, 24 hours. Everyone's been hard at work, or so coarse memories claim. Examining the zones in question can give more insight, it seems.
Arthur Lowell	Another jump. Another jolt. 24 hours. Fully qualified, sensible decisions, all made in a light, decompressed way, without substance to the causality. It's a turn in the game. Arthur, it seems, can't craft a pocket-dimension on his own where time condenses properly, considering he's Space-aspected. There's a sense that time is, in this situation, a bit of a hack job, like cause and effect are just sort of patched in from something else.
Kale Hearthward	A new bird-person empire rises. One bolstered by the modern technology and weird intrusive lunacy of the lands on which it makes its home. Perhaps inevitably, the birds start trying to conquer everything in their immediate vicinity.
C	Finding himself in control of a Castle submerged in cyber-space, C finds himself mildly out of his depth in managing to pull together both a scouting force, and otherwise getting his new crib up and running. But he is a Mysterious Leader for a good reason, and sends his new putties out with the intention of capturing new territory, and terrorizing his enemies. "It's no wonder Erebonia is the way it is, annexing people's pretty fun after all.." he chuckles, a little bit darkly. " ... actually, maybe that joke was a little uncalled for? Ah, well, what's theirs is mine."
Staren	Staren's arrival and intervention saves the Megalopolis's benevolent dictator from death, and delays the plans of troublesome factions that want to take over. Soon she's in charge of exploring neighboring dimensions, dispatching teams to more megalopoli and accompanying one herself. Spreading enlightenment and forming alliances using the tools she can bring to bear. When news of Katt's zone coming under attack reaches her, she races through the warpgates, facing down C's forces in a dirty, post-apocalyptic tinker's outfit, directing her personal troops -- currently a mix of police-like magitech constructs, and hulking golem brutes of animated junk and scrap swinging lamp posts, rebar with blocks of concrete on the end, and similar weapons!
Arthur Lowell	Arthur, for his part, is jumped forward -- and there's a shining memory in his brain now. A memory of going to his personal array of constellations and starry skies, and beginning to craft strange and wonderous things in its stellar seas using his punchcard alchemy. And his memory is filled, it seems, with his work at the space stations and planetoids getting fucking obliterated by Liza Grier. Now, in the present, he's trying to run directions from a shuttlecraft, shouting to the assortment of iguanas he brought with him.
Katt	Katt, meanwhile, got dumped somewhere weird. She didn't understand it. It was beyond her comprehension. That did not stop her from trying to take it over by raw force and then spread out, mind you. It just means she didn't understand what she had. Fortunately, cities and farms make a lot more sense than raw chaos to her.
Staren	A Chief Advisor's work is never done! After defending Apocalyptica, Staren assembles a mighty golem for Katt to use before returning to manage her own empire. Contact with a valuable city has been lost, elites (but not herself) must be dispatched to re-establish control -- Staren has to investigate and stabilize a world where people are trapped inside a VRMMO. Again. Again. Again. Unfortunately, C's Stellar Sea is nearby -- and a bunch of gamers who've been stuck in fantasyland for years are all too happy to have a shot at taking over some spaceships and alien planets!
Staren	Staren doesn't remember how the battle went, but it seems they didn't win. The trapped VR gamers are idolizing the cute catgirl leading them and it's getting cloying. Staren's kind of glad that Katt's last attack pulls her away to defend a valuable zone -- the gamers will try to take space again on their own. Staren coordinates local police forces, fantasy village guards who are very lost, and herself pilots a massive magitech construct of stone, metal, and transparent material as they prepare to defend against Katt's forces...
C	C himself takes to the field -- although his territories all seem to be faltering due to having been barely defended in the first place, it seems that it was at least somewhat intentional on his part. Almost like bait, or perhaps more accurately, making his geopolitical might seem greater than it was. All so he could take advantage of Arthur's weakened defenses and throw all of his firepower into breaching his territory and claiming it from him in a single, atrocious raid. "Well ... no one ever said I was a prosperous leader, only a Mysterious one! Ha ha .."
Staren	It seems there's barely any time to rest. Staren directs forces to keep shoring up held territory for now... but her precious city is under attack again, from seemingly every side! Local defense forces golem-armor production is cranked up, while Staren repairs her mech and outfits it with numerous experimental weapons...
Staren	It's a slaughter. And Staren's presence in the city has made it such a valuable resource, too, if someone else can restore the factories she set up... hopefully Katt and C will fight over it, rather than use it as a forward staging base to take down the city that's become Staren's home base. But then what will happen to the lives of its citizens? Staren's scrambling to pull the empire together and build up, rushing from one crisis to another. "How does any peaceful settlement get started, in a world like this...?"
Arthur Lowell	Arthur's spell starts to waver. The PA speaks up again. "OEUVRE DECOMPRESSION HAS EXCEEDED SAFE LIMITS." Bzzzt. "WARNING. AUTOMATIC RECOMPRESSION IN PROGRESS." There's a loud ping, in dozens of places and dozens of ways. It's been about two 'weeks' now, but... There are concrete walls, miles high, visible on every horizon, visible out in space, visible in the deep sea. They stretch into the sky and out of sight. They are closing in. They are getting closer. Closer. And now... Everyone's back in the decompression chamber. Notably, any clothing they acquired in their two weeks of journeying remains tangibly real, albeit it feels a little tenuous -- maybe check in at Tomoyo's boutique or something like that. Unfortunately, weapons and armor acquired in these adventures fizzle away gradually over about thirty seconds. Mr. Welcomes' voice speaks up over the PA as well: "And that's the capacity again! Pump's got another round of cooldown it needs. You all have a pleasant time in the tank?" Arthur seems in a little bit higher spirits compared to the last time. He paces around the chamber, fussing alternately with his phone and with several spellcircles, looking excitedly relieved in several ways.
Katt	Katt has managed to keep her usual outfit (such as it is) but has, somehow, somewhere, acquired a cowboy hat, either from the Mad Max area she picked up or the farming plains. She does not seem inclined to explain. She just tilts it back slightly so she can look around a bit more easily without it getting in her way. "It was definitely a thing," she says, "but parts of it were really weird." She's still kind of baffled by the intrusion zone she started in, as it turns out.
C	Opening his hands and flexing his fingers several times to test them out, C hums. He hadn't particularly used much that wasn't already on his own person while in Secundus, and had instead relegated most of that to his various soldiers and creatures to make them as best equipped as possible. He already had plenty, after all. Still, seeing everyone else here keeping most of the clothing but none of the arms and armaments was a puzzling thing he'd have to ponder, later. "Hoo'. I'm really not cut out for large scale military campaigns." He shoots Rita and even Liza a thumbs up for a quest well conquered before turning to Mr. Welcomes, "Yeah, sure. It was interesting being on the other side of the aisle for once."
Rita Ma	Rita rematerializes as her perfectly ordinary self, wearing exactly the same clothes as before. The only difference is that- having been caught in flagrante delicto- she's holding a half-eaten raw fish in one hand, with blood pinking her lips and her chin. "Um." Awkwardly, she hides the fish behind her back with both hands, then reassigns one hand away from fish-hiding duty to return C's thumbs-up. "That was a lot of fun, Mr. C! And you were amazing, Ms. Grier! I'm really looking forward to giving this a try again. I made a lot of friends down there!" "Down there" is funny wording, but given the kind of monsters she was throwing around...
Staren	Staren appears in the decompression chamber dressed like some kind of fantasy adventurer who apparently needs use of lots of items -- not quite to the degree of a tinkerer with a pocketed leather apron or the like, ... perhaps an alchemist? Almost but not quite steampunk, though she'd be at home there. Around her neck drapes a pair of goggles, from her shoulders hangs a dark green leathery sleeveless duster (split in back for her tail). That's worn over a loosefitting white shirt and faded green pants of some sort of synthetic material, but not much is visible under dark green forearm covers (over fingerless faded green gloves), a leather vest, a rose-colored sash tied around her waist with a few pockets for small, lightweight items. The leather mud/dust covers covering her lower legs/knees and part of her upper legs, with metal-like plates on the front, over steel-toed leather boots. Two belts cross her waist, and a third is draped over her left shoulder over the vest -- pouches hang from them, and there are pockets or pouches on the duster, mud covers, and vest, all full of various tools and devices, including wands inlaid with gems and precious metals in circuit and rune shapes that look important to function, and a dagger sheathed on each waist belt as well as her trusty laser pistol. Of course, her trusty messenger bag hands at her side as always. Naturally, most of the contents of said pockets fade away after recompression, Staren double-checking and looking a bit disappointed. "Yeah!" She calls back to Mr. Welcomes. "It was certainly more... exciting. Knowing what to do this time. Less wandering and fumbling about. Felt a little more real."
Arthur Lowell	Arthur rambles a quick reply to Katt. "Yeah, a lotta stuff is super weird in there. It's 'cause Secundus picks up echoes of shit that was, you know, reality-breaking some way that the multiverse just said 'no' for." His hands wander around the space around him as he explains that, as if delivering ideas to important stations. As for C? "I got'chu fam. Gonna set it up so that there's a system just for dudes who wanna operate solo." For Rita Ma, he says, "Gonna be tryin' this in the real deal soon. The physical place Secundus, not just Secundus-bits. Gotta get this done fast." And for Staren: "Oh, yeah, I cranked the realness way up for this one. Took some goddamn doing, fuckin' pocket dimensions. I wish I had some other Aspected dudes around to help with that. Whatever, it's just test-zones, s'all, I'll be able to use Multiversal causality properly soon."