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nextnightmods) wrote2020-04-20 11:03 pm
nextnightmods) wrote2020-04-20 11:03 pm
EXPLORATION.
EXPLORATION
Explorations are currently OPEN. They will close again when we run out of active exploration slots.
β’β’β’
The forest engulfing Beacon is dense and uncharted, but that just means there's never a shortage of cool stuff to discover lurking off the beaten path. There's always new locations, plot clues, or extra resources to be found, so although venturing into the woods is always dangerous, the rewards may just outweigh the risks.
Once you come up with a plan, please fill out and submit the form below. We'll respond in one of two ways, depending on the nature of your exploration:
- In most cases, we'll respond with a single write-up detailing the outcome of your exploration. For example, characters venturing out into unknown areas may discover a new location! In that case, you'll receive a full description of that new location, along with any other details worth noting, such as forest spirit encounters or difficulties along the way. If your group would then like to react to any of this or explore that location after its discovery, you can then respond with your own write-up of everything your group would investigate, and we'll let you know what happens as a result. And that's it! Then the exploration is wrapped, the location becomes available to the GPSL at large, and you're welcome to thread out any details of the exploration if you like.
- In limited cases, an exploration request will open a dialogue between the players and mods to determine the outcome of your exploration. For example, characters attempting to interact with forest spirits may get the chance to play out that encounter, whether it be a pleasant conversation or, uh, the forest spirit trying to kill you, since that happens sometimes. Explorations of this nature will not always result in a response like this, as it'll depend on our availability as mods. If you're interested in doing an exploration like this and don't want to leave it up to chance, PM us! We'll work with you to schedule an encounter.
Regardless of which type of exploration you end up with, what you do during an exploration is entirely up to you, so feel free to get creative! We always try to reward creativity in some way, even if it's not a success in the way that you hoped for.
Before you embark on your quest, here's everything you need to know about explorations:
- Exploring uncharted territory is intended to be dangerous, and there is always a risk of failure, injury, and other setbacks. If you're not on board with these risks, exploration may not be in the cards for you.
- That said, the exploration form includes an opt-in for serious injury and death. If you aren't interested in having your character(s) at risk for that stuff at this time, you can let us know upfront. Please keep in mind that opting out of serious injury/death does not mean you're opting out of the above risks of failure, injury, and other setbacks. Those risks are always in play during explorations. In addition, while opting out of serious risks doesn't mean you'll get a watered down exploration, some discoveries lurking out in the forest are reserved for risk-taking characters. For example, opting out of serious risks eliminates the chance of running into the hostile green-eyed spirits, so characters interested in pursuing green-eyed spirit plot threads will have to put themselves on the line to do so.
- If you choose to opt into the risks of serious injury and death, your character's safety is forfeit and you give the mods the right to maim accordingly (though, of course, we'll check permissions posts in doing so). This does not mean that groups opting into these risks will always be tormented and killed! It's just helpful for us to know your preferences and expectations upfront. Please keep in mind that opting into the risk of serious injury or death applies to the whole group, not just individual characters.
- Explorations into the area of Beacon currently occupied by the Parade will always be extra dangerous. Characters will run the risk of encountering the Parade itself, but besides that, the Parade's presence gets all the forest spirits in the area extra revved up, increasing their hostility. We'll give you the "danger zone warning" at the top of the exploration if you're about to head into Parade-infested territory, as characters may be seriously injured or killed at any point during an exploration within the parade route. You can check the Parade's schedule on the calendar page.
- Chance of success will be left up to a mix of mod discretion and RNG. We'll typically use a RNG to determine what you find, if anything, but we'll also take player/character ingenuity into account. In short: If you have a solid, creative plan, you're more likely to be rewarded for that. Aimlessly wandering won't always get you nothing, but it's less likely to earn you something neat for your trouble. (However, please do be encouraged to follow the dumb idea that's in your character's heart. We will reward for IC idiocy, too.)
- Having torches from the bonfire with you will also increase your chance of success, though be careful: If you lose the torches while exploring, someone will have to recover them or they're lost forever. Additionally, you must request torches through the item request page in order to take them on explorations. Torches not logged through the item requests page are not considered game canon.
- Once you receive a mod response to your exploration, you will have one week to tag us back. If that week timer runs out, we'll consider that exploration closed, and mod responses will stop. You're welcome to handwave your own IC conclusion to the exploration at that point. To be extra clear: the time it takes for us mods to respond to your exploration is not included in that time limit. The timer starts fresh each time we tag you back.
- Explorations over two weeks old will be wrapped in the next mod response. This is to prevent explorations from dragging on for too long, which will slow up our system, but more importantly, it'll make for awkward timing issues in the game! We don't want to leave players waiting on exploration outcomes to be able to engage with the rest of the GPSL.
- Characters may only embark on one exploration a month. This is to allow all characters to have equal opportunity to make an impact on the setting, as well as to foster more cooperation between characters! With only one explore a month, we implore you to collaborate with other individuals and complete explores as a group when possible.
- We will only accept a maximum of 4 active explorations at a time. If those 4 slots fill up, we'll close the queue to new submissions until we're able to wrap some of the active adventures. This number is based on mod availability, and we are looking to get comfortable with the system before we up the number in the future.
- Explorations will always be closed during events except under rare special circumstances. Similarly, explorations can't be forward- or back-dated to happen during an event. Go do event things instead!
- We have recently moved setting and building updates to the Setting Page. If you're interested in doing that, head on over that way!
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no subject
Minimus introduces himself and wants to know if there's more of her kind.
Kuai will politely wait for her to respond before he goes on his quest to make sure forest spirits aren't banging down the doors. She may be a robot, but it's her house. Well assuming Doctor Solis isn't coming back, which seems likely.
It's chatting time! They're making friends!
no subject
Once satisfied, she waves both arms in apparent joy. "Kuai Liang, Matthew Murdock, and Minimus Ambus! Welcome! I'm so excited you made it! I recognize all of you as friends! I am CLARA: la Ayudante RobΓ³tica version four point one, but you should just call me Clara! I believe I am the only one of my kind! I was never informed if there were more, and I have no others in my inventory list," she notes cheerfully. "How can I be of assistance?"
If Kuai leaves to investigate further, Clara does not seem troubled. Friends are friends, wherever in the house they are! Kuai makes his way to the door she came from, passes through a short earthen tunnel much like the one they took to arrive here, and finds himself at another keypad-locked door, but by now it's trivial to open these, and so he does. He emerges in what looks to be a study, with a desk surrounded by bookshelves. There are other rooms here - a bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen, at a glance - but he heads up the stairs first in his search for intruders, as nobody seems to be present in those rooms as he passes by them.
The ground-level floor of the house at the top of the stairs is awfully small - just a wood-floor entryway, really, with a writing desk, shelves of lanterns, and a few windows. On the floor is a torch, burning steadily as it casts its warm light around the little room and outside to the forest floor beyond. With still no sign of intruders, Kuai decides to check outside as that's where Clara had said she saw footprints and indeed, now outside the house, he sees where someone must have walked up, looked in the windows, and then walked back the way they came, through the woods.
no subject
Meanwhile Matt will also show his lantern when requested, whatever she needs to be put at ease. Which seems to work since now they're greeting each other as friends. It's a relief that they've made it here unscathed (for now) and have found her and the lab intact. Right now they're focused on Clara but soon they'll transition to the second part of their mission: how to revive someone via lantern.
Kuai will leave Matt and Minimus to chat while he goes off to investigate. It's a relief that it doesn't seem like anyone is around, he'd been half afraid that they'd get there and the Wild Hunt or forest spirits would be holding Clara hostage. She seems too friendly for her own good.
The house is clever, a tiny ground floor that isn't immediately visible from the outside, with most of the living area hidden and safe below ground. Of course he can't see into the woods beyond the halo of light from the torch, but he gives it a good look over anyway, just in case he spots any green-eyed spirits in there.
Whether he does or doesn't, he'll head back in and secure the door - if Clara intends to stay here alone since she seems to be tied to the place, then they need to make sure she's protected. For now he's going to take the torch out of the window so it's not as big of a beacon to whatever is in the woods, and he's going to investigate the row of lanterns. Any he'd recognize - like his brother's he'd carried around for a few days?
no subject
Once they've agreed that yes, we should look into this, Clara leads them back over to the machine at the north end of the room which takes up most of the wall, aside from the door and the stairway downward. Clara stands in front of it and looks expectantly at the two of them while pointing at it. "Here it is!"
Helpful. She points at the metal plate, though, and explains how a lantern can be placed onto it and how the dials probably do something because they make the plate move up and down. It becomes quickly obvious that while she has watched Dr. Solis do this many times, she does not herself know every detail of the machine's operation and functions. But, she insists, all of her new friends in town are so smart, surely they can work it out!
Kuai can claim the torch. Looking around, though, he doesn't see anything immediately in the forest surrounding the house. He can close the door, and it does have bolt and lock he can use to secure it if he wishes, and then has a look at the lanterns. They all look fairly old - there's a thin layer of dust on them and on the shelves around them, and none of these ones are anything he recognizes as belonging to anyone he knows personally, although a few are quite unique. They make for nice, if slightly morbid, decor considering their significance here in Beacon.
no subject
Matt will stick around to listen in, and given the opportunity to break into conversation, will ask if Dr. Solis left notes anywhere that they could look into, that might help them look into how the machine works, as well as if Clara knows what happened to her.
As for Kuai, he'd like to go check out the study, and see if there's anything he can find in there. He intends to find a good place to keep the torch after he's done snooping around.
no subject
Minimus can set his lantern onto the machine, meanwhile. Lights come on, it blinks, the plate bounces just a little, and the readout by the metal plate settles on the number 98, which Clara insists is a very good number! Wow! Sometimes if the number is very low, Dr. Solis would turn some of the knobs and could even add raw materials from storage to what looks like a large drawer in the machine.
She then turns to Matt and suggests that he look through Dr. Solis' research notes which can be accessed from her main server using the computer behind him near the whiteboard, as well as another computer downstairs. At the mention of downstairs, though, she turns a bit solemn and says that downstairs is where Dr. Solis disappeared from while testing the unapproved portal device. The results of that experiment should be logged on the downstairs computer as well as it records all data of her device tests.
Meanwhile, Kuai returns to the study, with the desk and all of its books. The desk itself has a copy of a book of poetry, titled Arras de Cristal by Clara Lair. It looks very worn, with a few pages marked with dog-eared corners. Pens and pencils are held in a cup on the desk next to a paper notepad, which is blank.
The books lining the walls include titles such as Matter and Molecules, Particle Physics Reference Library, Modern Classical Physics, The Philosophy of Computer Science, and many more - physics of the largest and smallest scales, chemistry, engineering, and mathematics are all well-represented here. Low on one shelf is a spiral-bound volume, one of the few whose title cannot be read on the spine. The highest shelf on the east wall of the room is occupied by several mismatched books, magazines, what look like plastic tubes, a few sheets of stacked glass-like but flexible material when he tries to lift one - and everything on this shelf is in a variety of different scripts, none of which he can recognize.
no subject
Kuai isn't real interested in the physics books, but they might be helpful to someone more sciency back in town. He doesn't know physics, he rips out spines and makes ice - so hopefully they don't need a fundamental understanding to make the lantern machine work because he's leaving all those books right where they are. Flexi-glass is interesting, but maybe for a different time. The spiral-bound notebook catches his eye and he grabs that to take a look as he heads back to rejoin the group with Clara. Gotta congratulate Minimus on that 98 Lantern.
Since Matt can't read the terminal he'll be continuing to chat with Clara about Dr. Solis and this machine. They're gonna take a look at getting this machine working before heading into the ominous sounding basement. After being filled in on what's going on, Kuai will head for the computer by the whiteboard
ugh, technologyand see if he can access these notes.Assuming he can get into her logs he'd read the instructions/relevant parts/whatever seems important out to Minimus who is keeping his lantern on the machine. He's at a 98, can they get him to 100? Bigger is better right?
They're not going to go downstairs yet, unless this computer isn't helpful with How To: Lantern. But that'll be their next step.
no subject
"Experimental verification of the quantum foam hypothesis. M. Solis, 1958."
At its two-inch thickness it's probably not a light bedtime story. But neither is what he finds on the computer. There are quite a few icons on the computer's desktop, mostly .exe files with names like AMUSE, bridges, ab initio, Lanterns, Spectrum, and others, as well as a few server folders such as ARCHIVE and LOG. Placed in the middle of the screen, however, is a text file which reads "Welcome." It's an obvious place to start.
The file is dated 25 April 2054.
no subject
Kuai will read the Doctor's message out loud so that Matt gets to hear it as well. It's very kind of her to leave notes like this, but also bittersweet because she certainly seemed to be onto something - something that would have helped them a whole lot. Hopefully the rest of the residents can use what they've found here to continue on her work. And hey! They're the best group so far, and that's a little reassuring anyway. Even though she may have written this before they lost half the town to a flood.
Since Kuai is at the computer and Minimus has his lantern on the machine might as well see if they can at least get the basics down. The jist seems simple - find Minimus' ID in the Spectrum program, then open the Lantern program and tell it the ID so it knows what it's connecting to.
Kuai isn't a scientist, and has no real tech knowledge aside from having been a robot and knowing how to work a computer - so if this involves any amount of coding or complicated syntax he's not going to proceed. Getting this wrong he assumes will be all kinds of bad for Minimus.
What he wants to see is if he can do make the machine recognize Minimus' lantern. Basically run a diagnostic on it to see how this thing works. He's not gonna mess with it or try and do anything with the lantern beyond see it in the system.
After that they'll ask Clara to show them the portal room downstairs. They want to take a look around before heading back and letting everyone know what they found.
no subject
Opening Lanterns helps clarify things, for now Kuai can see which of the spectra shown in the previous program most obviously matches the one in the lantern already in the machine. Because the two are already linked, he can see an array of statistics on Minimus - basic information like name, height and weight and build, a whole lot of other details and charts and numbers, the 98 now rendered as "98.4516% synchronized", and several grayed-out buttons: "Print", "Capture," "Combine," "Repair", and "Calibrate".
So at least at a glance, that all seems to be in some sort of working order - as expected for someone who is standing right there, holding a conversation with the small robot who seems overjoyed to have someone to talk to.
Clara is happy to help, though, and does not mind the shift in topics! There is a slight hesitation in her stride as she turns to the stairway, and then leads the way down to the Device Testing room as was labeled on the map.
This room is enormous, spacious, and mostly empty. The open room has large concentric circles marked on the floor and ceiling, with numerical measurements labeled along a radius crossing through all of them. However, while the walls, ceiling, and floor all look like they ought to be smooth normally, the silvery metal lining all surfaces is horribly warped as if it was pulled like taffy toward the central point of the room itself before freezing in place. Metallic dust blankets everything, and a patch of strange corrosion lies in the center of the floor. Spots of brilliant pinpoints of light flash into view as they set foot at the base of the stairs - but these lights do not exist in the room itself; rather, they fire off at random in their own minds as if each of them is seeing stars - Matt included.
At the center of the corroded patch is a lantern, similarly warped and twisted and now fragmented into several pieces. Meanwhile, near the base of the stairway itself is a pair of computers hooked up to several monitors, all shielded behind a thick layer of glass.
no subject
Clara is the best, all happy and cheerful and -- well that sure is a potentially vaporized doctor. Everything about this area seems bad! The computer is a good place to start, get a sense of what notes Doctor Solis had. Kuai will go investigate that while Minimus and Matt check out the destruction of the room.
Meanwhile they have some questions for Clara: was she in the room when this happened? Has she seen anything like this before?
She isn't a puddle of twisted metal so probably not, but this is extremely not good! After poking around the computer Kuai is going to suggest taking the remains of the lantern upstairs and hooking it up to the machine.
Worth a try right?
no subject
Among them he finds an entry field for coordinates, a list of a variety of basic elements and compounds, a table that seems to scroll forever, and quite a few things he's not even sure of what he's looking at but that show all sorts of complex calculations and charts. There's an option to link the program to Spectrum, as well. The main window, however, seems to show a view of the room before him through the glass. Overlaid on the twisted metal is a grid, and probably something else is supposed to show up here, but below the "activate" button is an alert icon warning that the device is currently in need of calibration, that no targets have been selected, and a list of other warnings repeated from the error messages before.
Matt and Minimus poke around the room otherwise, but there's not a lot they can determine through physical examination. The warped metal is cool to the touch, sparks of light continue to flash in their eyes, and no, Clara says as she watches - she has not seen anything like this before! But she was present when it happened, safely behind the shield, and whatever happened took place so quickly that she can't easily elaborate on exactly what occurred. Dr. Solis was there one moment and placed an object she had called a "probe" in the center of the unapproved portal device, and was about to walk back to the computer when somehow the device was triggered and the room warped into the state it is currently in!
She seems to stick close to Kuai, or the lantern perhaps, as he carries the pieces of it up the stairs and sets it in the repair machine. The machine's dial reads a very unambiguous 0, and looking deeper in Spectrum shows it is in fact 0.000%. No additional light spectra are present in the program other than the three previously identified, but the program does read the lantern as belonging to a Maridel Solis and provides a log of previous modification and calibration dates, but without much experience reading what any of this means, it mostly just looks like a bunch of numbers that were fairly consistently in the 90s until the current point in time.
no subject
the fellas will take stock of the situation and decide it is time to bring in the big guns. big guns being, everybody else! they agree since there are footsteps outside that they should block the front door, just in case. and then they'll head back the way they came, making sure the tunnel door locks behind them.
and they will bring Clara along, so she will no longer be lonely!! come along, cutie bot!