spacedragons | JUNE-JULY OOC POST.

A BEGINNING.

Hello, everyone! This is Last Eden's first (ha ha) ever monthly plotting post. Here you can find information on characters' arrival, some admin, and the plot scheduled for June through July. Feel free to comment to this post with your plans for the month, comment around, and plot with others.

TIMELINE.
Characters will ICly arrive on July 1st. However, feel free to forward-date threads!

The Moon celebrates the Midsummer's Feast on July 15th. Every faction will host festivities, and mingling with the native characters during this occasion is encouraged. There will be a log.

Check-in will tentatively be from July 25th to 31st.

ARRIVALS.
For our first batch of characters, they will appear inside the Sanctum hall while asleep. The Queen's envoy has frozen all the foreigners in said sleep until the nations have reached an agreement on what to do with them, which is to accept them into their ranks (for now). The enchantment will be released for every character at the same time, and they will have time to get themselves oriented before venturing out into the Moon.

With regards to IC faction choice, your character can either be picked by their faction representative, or volunteer themselves to said representative. This can be threaded out by commenting to the NPC toplevel in the monthly mingle. You can also handwave it if you wish.

The starter pack for this month includes:
- Paper map of the Moon
- Faction-specific communication device, if any
- Some money, enough to last them a week
- Keys to housing. Most of them will be enchanted, except for those from the Light faction.

SETTING INTERACTION.
As each character's actions in the setting will have a definite impact on the plot, there is a system in which you can 'turn in' descriptions of what they will be doing and receive a mod reply on the outcome. You can then choose to whether thread out the activity - encouraged, but not compulsory. Turning in these will allow mods to be updated on the effect that characters have on the setting.

This is different from AC as it covers only actions of plot significance. It is not necessary to submit things that are slice-of-life, for example. Feel free to turn in multiple interactions, there is no limit.

There are some examples of how to use the turn-in form on the appropriate toplevel below.

FACTION NEWS.

Overall, there doesn't seem to be much happening. The news of people from other worlds is not actively broadcasted across the Moon, so it is not difficult to blend in on the streets if one pays attention.

LIGHT.
It's currently the school holidays. While the small size of the population means that the number of schoolchildren is less than four hundred, they are not holed up in their classrooms anymore and will be present on the streets. Characters will find more opportunities to interact with kids across the board.

Elections are also coming up in a few months. The Prime Minister will be running for office again, so the gossip is all about his potential opponents. Some guess that there may be a no-show this time from the Council, but there are two strong contenders. Listening to rumours will reveal that one of them lost the final vote last round, while the other is new to the political scene. They have yet to publicise their stands, however the older candidate did previously advocate for the separation of church from the government.

Speaking of the government, it seems as if the most popular research topic this year is effective energy transmission.

BLOOD.
The yearly Sun Ritual has just been completed on the Summer Solstice. It's the biggest mass ceremony held in the Blood faction, where all the citizens gather and pay tribute to their Sun goddess. She's the most powerful of their pantheon, so every person is highly encouraged to offer up something. Under the Queen's orders, there have been no human sacrifices, only animal ones. It seemed to go without a hitch, but due to the (real) Sun not being visible from the Moon, it's hard to tell if there's any changes.

It seems like a sort of affliction has been running through the chicken farms in particular. Chicks are being born with crooked wings or three legs. Some say it's a curse, but the farmowners have not yet been able to find out whether they've displeased some god or if there's foul play at hand.

But hey, the beach has been cleaned. There are some sharks inside there, but they've been sated with offerings of fish, so maybe you might want to try swimming with one?

SPRING.
The Spring faction produces most of the Moon's food, so preparations for the Midsummer's Feast is well under way. Crops that ripen in summer are being harvested, and animals are being brought in from Blood territory in preparation for slaughter. (It's painless, of course, given that spirits will help put them to sleep first.) Each village has their own way of celebrating the occasion, ranging from poem recitals at dusk to displays of bonsai trees cultivated to glow like fireflies. Festivals are also the only occasions where singing and dancing are actively encouraged, so feel free to try and impress the locals with your skill.

The Empress is making her rounds across her territory again. She will not be within the imperial palace and can be met on the road, if you're lucky. Feel free to submit a setting interaction if your character seeks her out.

ICE.
The Ice faction is so small that there isn't anything notable happening across the board. Mostly, the members are continuing their duties as dragon keepers and delivery workers. For the PCs, they will be introduced to their dragons within two to three days. Then, they are free to do what they wish after that.

The Wintersmith will be evaluating faction characters' performance at the end of this month, ICly during the check-in. They will need to report to him what they have done, and he will evaluate their bond with their partners.

ADMIN.

As this month is our 'beta testing' month, feel free to give suggestions or feedback regarding how the game is run. You can use the toplevel provided below, or contact the mods directly via discord/plurk. We'd love to hear your ideas and how you'd think the game could be made more fun. o/

Secondly, a gentle reminder to fill in the directory for your character, if you haven't done so yet. Tags for this game will be (canon) character name, all in small letters.

Updates to the bounty board will be performed on July 1st as well as July 15th. Feel free to post your own bounties as well.

We also have a plurk emote!

There are also a couple of polls/discussions below that we'd like your input on. If there's anything else we can help with, do let us know!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

IC Date: 7/1
Characters involved: Add
What they will be doing: LabQuest2k17. How much bureaucracy does he have to endure to get to the research head and start wooing them with his fancy magitech robots powered by spacerocks? He's on his best behaviour for now so he'll actually try to be patient and polite about it, at least.

Add's niceness will get him some favour with the tech people, especially those who also do not enjoy talking to people and prefer to work on their machines. He will be given tools as long as he explains what he plans to do with it in detail, much like having to fill forms of requisition. It's also kind of obvious that this place is a stickler for rules.

There may also be a proposal for him to explain how his robots work and to reconstruct them. If he wants the Really Important Shit, he may have to do this.

Rules are dumb, but he can deal with having to explain every little thing he does for now I guess. He'll try to keep an eye out for any workers who might be a little more lenient on the rule-following, though. Y'know, for totally innocent reasons.

On a related note, he is also going to pester all these other tech people with questions if they humour him even a tiny bit. Even if the tech is a bit lower than what he's used to he still wants to know all about it, okay. He's especially interested in how they generate their power (since Nasod tech relies heavily on magic crystals basically) and how intelligent their programming is (not that he's going to find much there, most likely...)

As for that proposal, he wouldn't have too much of a problem with that. Obviously he'll be holding back on a few key details so no one can quite copy how his dynamos work, but he'd be fine with sharing the basics and showing how all the parts fit together. Notably, the internal composition of Dynamo is surprisingly minimal despite how versatile the devices are, and most of the parts inside are used for creating and firing large amounts of electricity. At the center of each of the drones is a crystal core about the size of a golf ball, which Add will explains acts as both the device's main battery and brain. The core's energy is recharged through exposure to sunlight and "absorbing El energy from the surrounding environment". He'd also mention that it can absorb and manipulate his own body's energy as an additional power source. If asked about how he controls them, he'd mention several implants in his body but would avoid going into any further detail than that if he can get away with it.

He'd be willing to temporarily take one or two of them apart for (supervised) examination, but since Nasods need proper cores to function he can't exactly build any new ones. But he could probably build them a cool lightning gun or something like that using Dynamo as a template if they want. He'd build them so many highly dangerous weapons if they enable him, ok, they don't even need to pay him or anything he does this stuff for fun.

if there's anything specific they might ask/want to know about or that'd be Relevant for whatever reason i can ramble endlessly about my dumb nasodtech headcanons on command

Edited (of course canadian spellcheck doesn't catch "eh". of course.) 2017-07-01 06:49 (UTC)

Add's thorough explanation will do well to get him favour with the engineers. The Light faction's technology is similar to what's available in the 2000s, which the caveat that they have a separate field of research into crystal technology. However, as the sole source of crystals perished along with the Old World, they have been forced to put their work on ice due to the lack of raw materials. Crystals are known to be an especially good source of energy that can be tapped in via both electrical and magical means, but that's all that is know about them at the moment. If Add asks one of the more relaxed employees, he might get the answer that it is classified information instead of being completely a mystery.

The sun-crystal is also some sort of crystal (or so they think), and it plays a very important role in environmental regulation. This is very evidently classified information.

The Nasod technology that Add brings is decades ahead of the Light faction's work, and bears a surprising similarity to old crystal research. With permission, the plans will be studied by their more important engineers. Since the likelihood of having a war right now is extremely low, they probably wouldn't build any weapons... but more efficient energy transmission will definitely be helpful.

Add will also get a sizeable amount of money. \o/

After that tidbit about crystal tech, he'd probably mention that his own world has a similar situation: Nasod technology and similar devices powered by El used to be extremely common a thousand or so years ago, but a disaster destroyed the main El Stone and the tech could no longer be sustained by limited resources.

He'll gladly let them examine any plans he makes... but only on the condition that they give him space for his own lab. A private lab. He'll even take a small one or an abandoned building or one where he actually has to pay rent. He can't work efficiently with too many people snooping around him, okay? A guy's gotta have his privacy.

Please imagine Add literally waving blueprints in front of their faces and holding it just slightly out of reach like he expects them to try to grab it out of his hands. They're not getting shit from him until he has an agreement in writing.

Most unfortunately for Add, the Light faction has a motto: If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.

Which means he can get a lab but he will have to send in proposals and all. And penalties for lying.

Add prefers to live by "you're not doing anything wrong if no one catches you" so.

He'll agree to those conditions as long as he can get a somewhat private space. He's still getting a feel for everything right now anyway, so it's not like he needs to do anything drastic yet, and that sun crystal seems like it might be important so it'd be good to stay in their favour for awhile to learn more if he can...

That said, are there any abandoned or unused buildings sitting around just asking to be broken into?

Let's see how long Add can last without being kicked out.

There are no abandoned buildings due to the Light faction regulating itself on a tight leash, but there are some unused laboratory buildings which are empty for the simple reason that they don't have enough scientists to populate it. Add will probably get a space that's next door, so he can go in... if he doesn't leave a trace.

JUNE-JULY OOC POST.

Re: SETTING INTERACTION TURN-IN

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