The Crash
It’s The Big Day!!!!!
The Seventh Tower Consortium has sent out an invitation to all persons and organizations of any note within Duskwall. The nobility has been invited. Law enforcement has been invited. Major members of the academic establishment, diplomatic figures, socialites, and industrialists have been invited.
The place? The Newly-Established Palisade Avenue Luxury Suites!
The event? An Extravaganza of Delights from Across the Empire!
The occasion? The unveiling of a Revolutionary New Way of Living!
No dice. No other commitments. All of their eggs are in this basket.
Gather Info
Linmer has been cooped up for quite some time, keeping his head down to maintain the illusion that the Nameless are still short on manpower. Now, though, he slips out of the crew’s lair and slinks across rooftops, heading to a canal.
Canals crisscross the city. Sit by one long enough, and you are bound to see something floating by.
He follows the web to the site of the new construction. He watches to see who and what goes in. He looks for an opportunity to slip inside and take a look around after hours. While he waits, he listens in for shouts and grumbles, any sign of things going wrong.
The luxury apartments all look like typical small-scale amenity-heavy upper-class living options . . . except at the heart of each of them, there is a large room with a humming Sparkcraft device about the size of a two-story building. It hums, pulses, sparks, and whirrs at different occasions, and appears to be constantly issuing paper with numbers and letters on it. It is under HEAVY guard.
Sizzle observes engineers associated with the Seventh Tower laying in lines across the city. Some of them look like they’re just in common junctions hooked up to areas within Charterhall and portions of Six Towers that still have electroplasm.
However, there are some lines being laid . . . Into Nightmarket? And Charterhall? They don’t look like the other conventional lines. These non-electroplasmic lines appear to link up with telegraphic transmission lines (by no means in common use, but extant within the empire) going out of Charterhall and Gaddoc Rail Station. These are communication lines between the machines, a major seat of government administration, and one of the choke points between Duskwall and the rest of the Empire.
As Cruncho examines the guards going in, he notes that every single one of them has been enhanced in some way. Some show signs of Sparkcraft additions. Some show signs of biological modifications. And all of them have a ghost field signature that is markedly similar to Blighter.
When asked, Blighter informs Cruncho that an increasing number of Seventh Tower footsoldiers are currently playing host to an instance of herself, including the soldier Cruncho had gotten her off of. Doubtless the enhancements are the product of these other Blighter instances working on modifying their hosts. Every Seventh Tower footsoldier will be a formidable threat on their own.
Blighter (Cruncho’s Blighter, anyway) is not concerned by the existential implications of there being multiple consciousnesses identical to her own out there, as she is supremely confident that she is the superior Blighter.
Sandro does his damndest to gather intel about the party by claiming to be the personal assistant for a Very Important noble. He finds the internal VIP list (being the people that the Seventh Tower really wants to impress) includes:
- The Mayor
- Representatives of the local noble houses, including the Pendryns
- Various private bankers
- Ironclad owners
- Non-noble industrialists
- University leadership
Notable by their absence are diplomats, artistic institutions, any kind of entertainment luminaries, and certainly nobody with any supernatural connections.
Arkin, posing as Sparkwright engineer Viktor, learns that the party is less of a soirée than the Deckherd Hall incident and more explicitly geared towards presentation. There are booths being prepared with different luxury goods, products from trade partners/vassals of the Empire, and experiential offers suggesting taste, class, and luxury . . . But those aren’t the central focus.
In fact, the central focus reveals itself to be a scaled-down version of one of those same mechanical heart devices, apparently rigged up on stage for a grand reveal. It’s got one line connected to one of the larger devices in the lower portions of the apartments, and is also spitting out paper with numbers and letters. The numbers tend to be in 3-letter codes. The numbers are generally decimalized (x.yz) and are positive or negative. The stream never stops.
This mechanical heart is going to be the central focus of the presentation, as well as, presumably, the proffered “new way of living”.
For example, one row might look like:
SNB +1.54
ECT -0.03
Session Recap
The infant Duskvol Palisade Avenue stock exchange was blown up and subsequently mashed through thanks to a superhuman Black Knight vs. half-possessed warlock vs. brick shithouse pit-fighter brawl (s/o Cruncho and Spud).
-The proposed gala celebrating its unveiling became a nightmare riot courtesy of our gang, the Shmeek, explosions, and shouting “fire” in a crowded room (tandem work from Arkin, Linmer, and Sandro).
-Sizzle has captured Joseph Woodward aka the Man in the Hat and (temporarily) severed him from the ghost field.
-The entire narrative has been spread to the newspapers courtesy of Sandro’s media acumen: free market venture capitalism is a fraud, Seventh Tower are hucksters of the highest order, and law enforcement is investigating them (now headed up by Nat Marseilles).
-Chuck Morgenstern may be dead, or seriously injured
-Linmer has distilled and caused the capture of another Blighter iteration
-Y’all stole some fur coats from coat check.
-Bhed the Wolf “lives” in Cruncho’s skeleton now.
Footsteps
Somewhere deep below ground
”Mikh?”
”<Grumble>”
”Mikh, you still upset about the dog?”
”<Grumble> ‘m fine <Grumble>”
”Ya want me ta fix it or ya want me ta listen?”
”<Grumble> <Grumble> . . . ‘M good. <Grumble>”
”. . . Arright. I’m goin’ out ta see Scurlock. Ya wanna come?”
”<Grumble> . . . Nah.”
”Oooookay. Love you.”
”. . . Love you too.”
Footsteps recede. After a moment, there is a sound of falling masonry, as though someone very strong had petulantly kicked a stone wall down.
Somewhere in an undisclosed location
”Nat?”
”<Grumble>”
”Nat, you still upset about the Nameless?”
”<Grumble> Fuckin RATFUCK <Grumble>”
”Ya wanna set ‘Em up for catastrophic failure?”
”<Grumble> <Grumble> . . . I GUESS. <Grumble>”
”. . . Arright. I’m goin’ out ta see Veldren. He’s got somethin’ new for us. Ya wanna come?”
”<Grumble> . . . Sure.”
Footsteps recede.
In the Pendryn Manor
”. . . Jeremy?”
”GgggrrrraaaaAAAAGGHGHHH”
”Jeremy, it’s dinner. Are you still doing . . . Whatever this is?”
”I AM ELECTRIFIED MEAT AND THE CALCIUM OF MY BONES IS BOLSTERED BY THE SINS THAT DREW MY LINEAGE TOGETHER AND I AM NOT I BUT I AM I, I AM AN EYE BEHOLDING A TUNNEL THROUGH TIME-“
”<Sigh> Will you be joining us for dinner, Jeremy?”
”I AM BEING DIGESTED BY COGNITION I AM KNOWN AND IN KNOWING EXIST AND IN EXISTING DIE-“
”FINE, Jeremy. Come down when you’re ready to be social.”
”GGGGGAAAAAH”
Footsteps recede.
Downtime
Cruncho
Cruncho taking all that time to heal from fuckin’ spending himself. And then paying out of his own coffers to fund some pro bono plumbing work; with all this bananas-crazy stuff happening, Cruncho uses this simple & straightforward work as a way to ground himself. To remind himself where he came from. That before there was Cruncho, there was Vilhelm. With the recent introduction of new minds into his head, he needed this time to recenter himself.
Sizzle
Before Woodward wakes up, Sizzle sequesters him in the Nameless’s vault, loots whatever was in his pockets, and gets some biosamples (hair, blood, and the like – she asks Valanthe to give her a hand with the needles) with the intent to study the nature of his connection with the ghost field – since it seems unlikely he’ll stick around after Linmer’s concoction wears off.
She leaves a copy of Sandro’s newspaper article on top of him, places a nice plush chair outside the holding cell, curls up with a copy of “Munitions Monthly”, and waits for him to come to.
For the first time in her life, she is comfortable.