Sense surrounding spirits,
And send the fire somewhere where it won't have any fuel
|Looking inside you for the fire you find it, deep in your chest, burning you. You try to grab it, to move it, but all it can do is making it burn more, and more!
| You stop before the fire grows too much, but that thing is dangerous, very dangerous. You will need better than this.
Ask why we were asleep in those tubes
|” and what can you tell us about the tubes The tubes in which we got awake?why were we there?”
“
They were for protection. You couldn’t have survived without them, neither would I have survived without the sphere. Yes, they were designed for protection from the weapon we had to use… but memories from the days, weeks before I was sealed in are blurry, I can’t remember much. The only thing I know is that whatever it was, I wouldn’t have survived without my protection, and you all couldn’t have gone past it alive, in any way. I saw you before you got killed , strapped into strange machines, then you fell down lifeless. That is the last thing I remember, after that memory is too damaged to try to make sense. Probably, you got put in these tubes and you were reanimated now. But that is just guessing. I can’t help more than that, sorry.Hellhound speaks “ I forgot about it, but I have the diary of a person who worked here. At the beginning it looked damaged but now I see that only borders are worn and that most of it is readable. Maybe we could find some more information in the last pages.”
Celebrate New Year.
Oh, and help someone.
| “worth trying”
“
yes, that is important enough to be written, unless the owner spent all her time writing about some guy he loves or things like that. Seems like female writing to me.“ She was a scientist, working on the what seems to be the monolith, according to her text and your story. She was kidnapped from the military together with all her team and equipment and probably never saw light again. I doubt you will see much about boyfriends and such."
You suddenly stop moving pages
“ I think there is something interesting here. Listen.”
17th/7/1874
Dear diary, today is the last day of the month, and this may be the last year for our race, ever, shall we not succeed in what we are doing. Yesterday evening we received a message telling us that we were allowed to write some last words before extraction is started, without any restriction; this means that I’ll finally be able to write everything and openly, no more hiding. Of course, they weren’t too happy when they discovered I kept a diary all the time, but they know the war is lost and now nothing matters. But at least, there is hope. Whoever is reading this may or may not ( probably not) know about the research of Lotami about the brain. By careful observations of the brains of the races of the continent and the few invaders we could capture he noticed that all sentient species shared few similar patterns in their brains , patterns linked to sentience; he also noticed that the patterns are present in different , non sentient, species in incomplete/unevolved forms, granting different grades of self-consciousness and awareness- a forest monkey had these parts much more developed than the average bug that walks on house floors. Furthermore, he thought that the patterns would, while being similar, be unique for each specie but research stopped because of the war -at least that is what I think it happened-.
After that, I believe, military took interest in him and decided to give him a lab and funds, unlimited funds( not that it was any problem: as far as I can gather, as I wrote already, people gave up on having an economy ), to work on a project . Of course it was secret, but recently had to be made public among most of the population, all the people they could find. Radios were forbidden to avoid giving the enemy an idea of what was going to happen. I feel sorry for the ones who lived too far away or in places too hard to reach, but regret won’t be mine. Basically, Lotami and many other were working on a device that could selectively destroy these patterns in the brain that cause sentience, dropping the target specie either dead or stupid, by means of an EMP. I won’t explain further details about that because how would it work is beyond me, but sometime after the beginning of the project it was clear that to target the invaders , and only them, extensive studies on their brains was needed and war has the bad habit of not waiting till you are ready. If the device was to be sued, it would have killed all sentient beings on the planet and even some animals. A victory, but also a suicide.
But some of the studies that lead to the machine also served the purpose to complete another , older branch of neuro-science: the possibility to upload brains into machines and store people in computers , keeping them alive no matter what happened to the body or the brain. Also, death and resurrection could be made as trivial and switching on and off a machine. This was the most interesting quality of mind-uploading at the time: if the people were uploaded into the machines, then turned off, they could, theoretically, survive the ultimate weapon and then be downloaded into new bodies later. Building of machines capable of storing minds began and not much time ago people started to be gathered . This had the immediate bonus of being able to protect, feed, heal them and also meant that if war was definitely lost, we could use the mind-breaking weapon. Do you remember the noises I often spoke about at the beginning? They were building a room for the memory banks.. Recently, we had horrible news: the caves of the golems were annihilated, the only survivor being a golem sent here to find a way to preserve their race from destruction [“it is speaking about you here” “
yes, I KNOW. Now keep reading.]. Being inorganic we couldn’t upload their minds like we did with our own, but we are trying to build a sealed container capable of saving him. Golems are much tougher than us and can stay without food or air for decades if needed. We hope it will be enough, if he dies the golem race will never rise again.
“that is horrible! “ “ are you really the last one?” “
yes. I had time to get over that before being closed in that sphere. It was sad losing everybody I knew – no offense meant to you little people, but you are not golems: I have friends among you but it is not the same- but one golem is still enough to rebuild the whole race. If I know my brothers well enough, in our ancient caves there will be , somewhere, engravings or metal books with all our knowledge. My bet goes to Urist cave, that place is so full of magic that I doubt it will ever be destroyed. I’ll stay with you till we awaken all the other people who were uploaded, then I’ll go in the old caves and start building new golems. Try to go few days ahead, maybe it speaks about you too.”
“yes, I think here is something”
[…]The cloning vats were prepared, ready to create new bodies for the stored minds. The batteries will last 15 years, but the new bodies will be created, and the minds uploaded, after 2 years from the last recorded invader activity, assuming all the radar/radio stations stay active. The vats are programmed to download the minds before batteries run out of power, should something go wrong with the plan. This will give them a chance to fuel the secondary reactor and recharge batteries, to upload their minds again if the times are not good enough or, if instead the planet is safe , fuel the nuclear reactor and awaken all the other. There are huge deposits of organic materials for the vats to use. Now I can’t write more, it is almost my turn. I leave this diary on my bed, hoping that either one of the people in the vats or whoever else may come here in the future can read it.
“that is the last part. There is nothing more”
“wow… that .. that is sad. We have our whole specie on our shoulders.”
“and they may be still out there as far as we know! Don’t you remember what we heard out of the vats? Out of power. I wish I knew what happened”.
“
we won’t know anything more if we stay here . Where are the other? use TK to blast boxes of me...
| There is only one thing you can think of now: getting rid of these crates above you. You try to push them away with your hands but they are too heavy! As your efforts increase, however, you feel something strange: old memories are coming back to surface again and a force is flowing through your arms, out of your hands. Suddenly, the crates above you are shot quickly into the ceiling, smashing and bouncing off all around you, while the crates around you gets smashed into the ground, creating holes into it. At the end, you are free and surprisingly uninjured. Now, you think you can control that power, but you have to be careful. There isn’t much left intact in the room now.
First: Force my hallucinations to stop.
Second: Force my body to heal my damaged knees and ankles.
|shiiiny yellow and black stars are dancing on the ceiling and on the walls… no, wait: it must be an hallucination! It can’t be, the pain from the wounds must be doing that.Obviously that can’t be…. Why would there be walls and a ceiling, covering your beautiful view of the candy mountains and chocolate lake? You feel perfectly fine as if you were sleeping… maybe you are?
Open that door I saw.
|sounds easy, isn’t it? Well, the door is closed. And jammed. And quite heavy. You will need some big help with that.
Background roll : 4 well, there isn’t much more really. After 22 turns in just 6 rooms, what else did you think to find?
STATUS
Location: Vat room, unknown building
Equipment: XClothesX , flashlight(5/20, off), bandage kit (19/20), pain killer(gel, 18/20)
Health: unharmed
Abilities:thermal magic
Special Status:spiritual fire (3/6)
Location: Sphere room, unknown building
Equipment: Clothes ,flashlight(0/20),needlegun,diary
Health:
Abilities: .
Special Status: stone arms
Location: storage room, unknown building
Equipment: Clothes, crowbar, flashlight(0/20)
Health: unknown hand health, sprained elbow(3/6)
Abilities: steel hand fighting . Telekinesis
Special Status:hulk hand
Location: Sphere room, unknown building
Equipment: Clothes ,2 fuel tanks
Health: Unharmed
Abilities: none
Special Status:suicide bomber
Location: Generator room, unknown building
Equipment: Clothes , flashlight (0/20), flashlight (1/20), cup, rough steel mabàli harpoon
Health: sprained knees and ankles (5/6)
Abilities: .
Special Status: Drowsy, caffeine(2/20), unconscious
Location: Control room, unknown building
Equipment: Clothes, funnel, flashlight(1/20),string, Odd device(Fun)
Health: Broken nose
Abilities: .
Special Status:cheater
NPCs
Location: Kashyyk’s mind
Equipment: Clothes, 2 coffee cups
Health: Unharmed
Abilities: none
Special Status:caffeine powered, asleep
LOCATIONS
The building in which you started
Vat room : the room you started in. it has several vats and machinery connected to them. Only your ones are empty, the other have dead and rotten corpses in them. On the ground there are some flashlights, -1 to moving until removed.
Corridor : a corridor leading from a door in the Vat room toward the exit, it has 4 doors on the sides, one of which open
exit stairs: some stairs at the end of the corridor which go upward to the exit. At the end of them there is a sturdy steel door, few centimeters open but blocked. There is some light coming from the door
Storage room: a largish room with several crates in it. It looks like it was meant to hold more than that
Lounge: it is some kind of a lounge, that was probably also used as dining room. It has some tables, chairs, a TV, some computers in the opposite wall, probably for personal use, and a coffee selling machine in a corner.
Generator room: a big room with a ceiling higher than that of the other rooms you have seen till now. There are cables everywhere on the floor, there are shelves, tools, the floor is dirty but the first thing you see is the machine that fills the room from the center to the back. It is made of turbines and graphite chambers, it is a nuclear power plant, very small actually. there is a smaller generator in the room, that should be able to partially power the building. there are 4 fuel tanks on the floor. Some wires are exposed and the room is covered by fuel.
bedroom: There are 6 beds on each side of the room, for a total of 24 beds, everything in perfect order: blankets, pillows… for whatever reason they abandoned this place, it was planned. Or somebody wanted to cancel any proof or fight… there is no way to know. The air is moist, there is some water on the floor. The people who lived there probably had a way to humidify the air underground, and during the years a pipe must have broken, releasing some water; the piping must be broken in some other places since it didn’t flood the place: probably the pumps stopped working, or the water tanks evaporated. Why would people live here? This place must have been either very secret or very important to force workers to live in their workplace, possibly using work shifts to keep people working all the day and night, or were they prisoners? You can only guess what this place was, but maybe people left something behind them that could help you to understand. there is a diary on a bed, damaged by the (years?) and moist air
Control room: A big room with computers on all the sides, maps on the walls, blueprints, desks, notes and chairs ,paper bins that were never emptied, even some chewing gum on the floor(maybe RAM would like it?) a control room of some kind. There are 4 doors, including the one you entered from.
On a wall, the map of the building
Monolith dissection: At the center there is a … thing, a black, extremely flat, non-reflective cuboid whose dimensions are in the precise ratio 1:4:9. On its side it has a surprisingly neat and clean hole, much better than anything you could do with standard methods on standard materials. Inside, there is a great mass of electronic devices, the functions of most of them unknown not only by even the brightest minds on this world. It is put on some kind of huge operatory table, with wires connecting both inside and outside the black monolith. There are many computers on the wall, but all powered down, of course. Above the hole in the monolith, magnifying lenses, robotic arms with various tools and several other measuring instruments can be seen, used in the past to examine the monolith’s interiors, in an attempt to reduce danger of humans damaging something, despite it having shown to be nearly indestructible when needed.
sphere room You See, at the center of this room, a big steel sphere, raised by 4 steel pillars. There is a line in the middle, as if it was 2 hemispheres just pushed together. There is strange machinery on the sides, computer near the walls and wires everywhere. The computers are active.
The sphere was opened in turn 19, leaving many broken wires and bending the metal. Inside of it, a golem was found
Poll
1 (20%)
Author
Topic: Rebirth RTD Chapter 2- turn 3: Ready to go (Read 54273 times)