EXPLORATION.

[nextnightmods]

EXPLORATION

ACTIVE EXPLORATION SLOTS: 1/4

Explorations are currently OPEN. They will close again when we run out of active exploration slots.


•••
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!

To EMBARK ON AN EXPLORATION, please fill out the form below:

<b>player name(s):</b> (please list ALL PLAYERS involved with the exploration!) <b>character(s):</b> (please list ALL CHARACTERS involved with the exploration!) <b>area of exploration:</b> (please be as specific as possible! we need to know where your character is/is trying to go.) <b>date(s) of exploration:</b> (you may forward or back date by up to two weeks from the current date.) <b>plan:</b> (what, specifically, are you doing? this is the place to detail the plan in full, so be sure to include all of the relevant details so that we can factor it all into our response. consider questions like: what's the goal? are you bringing supplies or torches? does anyone have experience or training that could assist with your plan? is anyone already injured or impaired? tell us what your plan is! AS A REMINDER, EXPLORATIONS WILL TYPICALLY ONLY RECEIVE ONE RESPONSE TO DETAIL THE RESULT, so it's important to be clear about your intentions and plans!) <b>is your group willing to accept risk of serious injury/death?</b> (a simple yes/no is all we need, and please only give ONE ANSWER for the whole group. a "yes" here doesn't automatically mean you'll all die horribly, and a "no" doesn't mean you won't get anything cool. we'll check permissions posts before injuring/killing characters.)

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Comments

[paletteswap]

Oh good, some fun reading about Rosinante's sea foam clone. He'll tuck that away to investigate the Seasonante later and rejoins the group.

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.

[nextnightmods]

It seems simple, indeed - perhaps because to the user, it was a simple matter. Kuai opens Spectrum and finds himself looking at three rows of vibrating lines along a graph measured in nanometers. Buttons labeled "isolate" and "identify" are accompanied by other tools for marking peaks and troughs in the spectra, as well as other buttons whose functions are more obscure at a glance. Fiddling might yield results, for it stands to reason that these three spectra are representative of the three people in the room, but proceeding blindly might somehow connect the wrong person to Minimus' lantern, or extinguish his lantern entirely, and so Kuai decides not to immediately start clicking things and finding out how it works through trial and error.

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.

[paletteswap]

Well everything seems to be working computer-wise so that's reassuring. Someone smarter than Kuai can figure this out because he doesn't want to accidentally swap Minimus and Matt's bodies or maybe ignite the lantern or any of the other worst case scenarios he can imagine. (And he can imagine a lot).

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?

[nextnightmods]

Kuai sits down in front of a monitor and has a look. Unfortunately the computer looks to be completely frozen, with about a dozen error messages in the event log on the screen - fatal exception this, unrecognized event that, and hopefully the experiment log was able to save itself to a file somewhere because it looks like there's nothing to be done here but reboot. It starts back up quickly, and Kuai finds that while this computer is on the same server as the last (and presumably all or most here) it also has several other drives attached which hold experimental results, a program called AMUSE, the "bridges" program Dr. Solis had mentioned before, and quite a lot of other tools for statistical analyses, quantum physics simulation, and more. Since "bridges" had been mentioned as useful, he opens that one and finds both monitors suddenly full of windows.

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.

[catholicisms]

oh dear that does NOT look good, 0 is very far from 98, which is the discussed good number.

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!