Eclipse Phase: Breaking Light

[General Havoc]

Due to similar insanities on my end, I'm liable to be late as well. Apologies for the late notice.

[Hotfoot]

That's great and all guys, but just for clarification, today is Mage, next week is Eclipse Phase.

It's cool, I get it, they're both on Mars and involve CT being horribly tortured and terrible horrors from beyond, but still.

[rhoenix]

yeah, I did mix the two up - my bad. But yes - hopefully I will be finished soon.

[Hotfoot]

Well guys, I hate to spring this on you on such short notice, but I'm going to postpone our regularly scheduled cyberpunking to next week on account of something coming up on my social calendar. Sorry to disappoint you all, but this should give you some extra time to formulate your plans to assault Olympus.

[Hotfoot]

I don't often make strong recommendations for supplement books, because most are "nice to have" rather than "necessary to play". That said, the latest Eclipse Phase Book Transhuman is about as close to a must have for the game as you're likely to get. Obviously the character creation stuff is largely irrelevant at this point in time, but the chapter on game advice is absolute fucking gold, as it covers tips for combat, covert operations, hacking, dealing with the weirdness of the setting, and uses for skills that might not seem that useful to start with.

Plus there are a variety of new perks and flaws that can be taken (or given), including one for automatic hardening (which means you can avoid taking stress damage from the chosen source).

There's of course new gear, new morphs, custom morph creation rules, modifications, and so on. The new package character creation system offers a phenomenally easier way of making a new character than the core version, though obviously it gives you less fine tuned control. The lifepath system is a fun addition, as I always enjoyed rolling on the lifepaths from the R.Tal games. Expect me to make an automated version soon.

[Hotfoot]

No game tonight.

[Hotfoot]

As a reminder, any and all characters must be updated before game so I am looking at current sheets. If you have questions about that, please talk to me. Remember, CT, you cannot spend Rez right now.

[Hotfoot]

I'm going to have to insist that everyone stop using the nice-looking style sheets and input their characters via raw text effective immediately. I know that's something of a pain in the ass, but it needs to be done.

[Cynical Cat]

I'm going to have to insist that everyone stop using the nice-looking style sheets and input their characters via raw text effective immediately. I know that's something of a pain in the ass, but it needs to be done.

Well, at least I'm ahead of the curve on this one.

[White Haven]

Uh...o...kay? What's wrong with the sheet we've been using?

[Cynical Cat]

Uh...o...kay? What's wrong with the sheet we've been using?

Remembering edits. So Hotfoot can roll back your xp to the last time you backed when you die.

[Hotfoot]

Yeah, up until this point, I had ASSUMED that the dynamic character sheets had kept data in a way I could easily compare two versions, but that's not really the case. Now it's entirely possible that they do remember, but they do not show that when I look at them. I had to do a full audit on one character sheet last night and when I tried to run a comparison with another character, I was unable to do so due to the issue with the Dynamic sheets.

Upside, you all now have more space to write out your implanted, carried, and owned gear.

[Lys]

So I'm joining this game. However, while it's possible I might finish my character sheet by Monday, I wouldn't bet on it. Given that, I've decided to provide a highly compressed version. I could tell you all how Blackjack will be a suave operator operating operationally while trying to deal with being a burned Jovian Agent, having way too many false identities, and a general knack for waltzing into trouble with only half of a plan then waltzing out of it after massively bullshitting the other half. I could do all that, sure, but I think it's more fun if instead I provide pictures!




BLACKJACK IS THIS





PLUS THIS





AND THIS

[Hotfoot]

Lys has demonstrated the proper art of buttering up the GM. Everyone should be taking notes.

Everyone.

Also, I will need everyone to provide on their character sheets their total and spent Rez values. Right now it's a chaotic mess, and some of my records on the matter have been lost.

[White Haven]

...Blackjacqueline? Hmm...

[Hotfoot]

Hey, Robots! Fix your sheets! Don't let the organics be better than you in, like, every way.

[Hotfoot]

Who says you need horrors from beyond to make the party suffer for their sins?

[frigidmagi]

Flash Mobs son.

Also Havoc is a 90 day wonder in all senses of the term.

[Lys]

[Incoming Message Received, 26 Attachments.]
[Dated: 2nd November, AF 8. Source: Unknown]
[Quantum Analysis: No Interception Detected]
[Decryption Complete]


\\ Blackjack, as requested here’s Castle’s original report as sent to me. //


Alright, there’s been a lot of questions, speculation, and accusations going around about the events in Jupiter these last couple of weeks and my role in them. I know you all want a damn good explanation, so here it is. I won't mince words, it was an expensive clusterfuck, but I expect you will find that the circumstances left me with little choice. Fortunately, there some potential medium and long term gains that could be salvaged from this affair. We’re all very busy people so I’ll try to be brief, but there’s a lot to digest here. I’ve attached additional documentation, including full debriefing transcripts, in-depth after action reports, plus my own commentaries and speculation, but the gist of it is below.

First some background, most of you remember the Tarshish Incident in the Jupiter Trojans. To recap: The Tarshish hab had a particularly nasty Exurgent outbreak. A Sentinel squad went in to investigate, determined they could not contain the situation, called in an Erasure squad, followed by an Erasure platoon, followed by a madcap scramble to stay alive long enough to ensure containment. They barely managed to keep anything from leaving the hab for the two days it took a Jovian missile to vaporize the whole place. Yeah, that bad.

The only survivors were one Sentinel of the original team, three from the Erasure unit, and Lieutenant Colonel Luis Guillermo Falcón Torrealba, the Security Council Intelligence officer who called in the missile strike. He was actually first on the scene, and had thrown in with the Sentinels once things started to spiral out of control. They deliberately lead the Erasure team to believe that Colonel Falcón was with Firewall, lest they erase him too.

This breach in operational security was not discovered until much later, by which point events were already in motion. It is unclear how much the SCI knew of Firewall before Colonel Falcón’s debriefing after Tarshish, but from at least that juncture their higher echelons have had a fair grasp of the basics of our mission and capabilities, if not our extent and organization.

That could have been the end of it, but several months later Dawn, the sole surviving Sentinel of the Incident, was operating in Jovian space with her team when they fell in deep trouble. Running out of options, she made a desperate and successful bid to contact Colonel Falcón and persuade him to bail them out. It would make a nice story to say that she sold him on Firewall’s mission and ideals, but it’s more like she sold him a load of classified information including all the particulars of her team’s ongoing mission.

They stayed in contact after, sharing information in an uneasy alliance of sorts, the full extent of which they neglected to share with their superiors and fellow operatives, even as they each expanded their network of contacts in the other’s faction. It was not until the mess at Ecologene’s Tenodera labs that Colonel Falcón fully briefed the SCI, mostly on account of Ozma’s barging in, razing the whole place to the ground, and then levelling the ruins. The Lt. Colonel’s report outlined his findings that Firewall is an entity distinct from Project Ozma, operating with a decentralized structure, and beholden to no factional interests save its own. It also observed that our primarily focus of dealing with x-threats, is aligned with the Republic’s own interests.

Right here is where things started to get complicated, but before I continue we need to go over more background. This goes way back to waning days of The Fall and the founding of the Jovian Republic. In the mess of confusion, plotting, and shifting allegiances that gave birth to the Republic there was a shortage of reliable, trustworthy operatives. Enter the Phoenix project: An effort by the National Information Center - a Chilean think tank - to create a cadre of highly skilled and thoroughly loyal agents who could be entrusted with the blackest of black ops.

Candidates with suitable traits were carefully chosen from among the infogees arriving to Jupiter. NIC psychosurgeons then stripped the selected egos of all memories irrelevant to their skills, and carefully pruned the remainder of context and identifying features that would give them any link to their past. The successful results were bereft of everything that defines a person save for their particular skillset and the basic framework of a personality; a gamma fork with all the functional capacity of an alpha. I imagine unsuccessful results were as broken and insane as gammas tend to be, and that the process had a high attrition rate.

The pruned egos were instantiated into heavily augmented, top of the line splicers, and immediately recruited into the NIC. The new agents then underwent an intense accelerated simulspace training regime to re-develop a full personality and the knowledge necessary to function in society. They signed on willingly, but they had no other choice. The agents had no past, no ties, no beliefs or ideologies, no knowledge of their own likes and dislikes, nothing at all to give them purpose, direction, or even a name. The NIC got its perfectly loyal operatives by creating people bereft of any links save Phoenix and the Jovian Republic, leaving them nothing else to hold on to.

The NIC would soon after merge into the Terrestrial Ancestral Heritage Institute, and the Phoenix agents formed the cadre upon which TAHI’s operational arm is built. We can surmise that entire project was a considerable resource outlay requiring the coordination of agencies and assets beyond the NIC, and indeed it may have been the primary catalyst driving its consolidation with other groups into TAHI. To the best of our knowledge the effort has not been repeated, but the expenditure clearly paid considerable dividends for the Security Council over the subsequent years.

Blackjack is the name of one the many TAHI agents who are products of Phoenix, and her primary cover identity is one Lieutenant Colonel Luis Guillermo Falcón Torrealba. From the start of the liaison between Colonel Falcón and Sentinel Dawn, to the incident at the Tenodera labs, the both of them had kept the SCI and Firewall from knowing the depth and extent of the cooperation, in particular their exchange of sensitive information. So their superiors adopted a stance of careful observation. Blackjack had not kept anything from TAHI, but they were also willing to allow the liaison to continue in the hopes of learning more about Firewall. After all, they were not being exposed themselves.

TAHI is a government conspiracy, it’s in their nature to see government conspiracies everywhere, just like its ours to see the potential for ad-hoc conspiracies everywhere. They’ve spent years looking for who is pulling our strings. Like the SCI they at first thought we were related to Project Ozma, but after they realized that we don’t answer to anyone in the Consortium they likely tried to link us to every faction from Sol to Eris. It was Blackjack’s interactions with us that finally convinced TAHI that we don’t answer to any organization anywhere in the system, but they are still certain someone or something is behind Firewall, and they’re not going to give up until they find it.

The liaison would have provided an excellent opportunity for TAHI to get a look into Firewall from the inside, but like I said, things got complicated. Blackjack started to believe in Firewall and its goals, that against all the enemies arrayed against Jovia, they needed an ally in the shadows to deal with the worst. To TAHI this was ideological contamination, but like any covert agency it was prepared to deal with it, even allow it if it furthered its goals. What it was not prepared to deal with was Blackjack using the Lt. Colonel’s cover to spread those beliefs within sympathetic parts of the SCI. They regarded it as a deliberate intrusion and subversion effort by a foreign agency, and shut the whole thing down.

TAHI does not and cannot control the SCI. However, besides its agents within Intelligence, TAHI also counts many former spooks among its members. There are many strings they can pull quite effectively, but they must keep a light touch. In this case, however, TAHI pulled and pulled hard. Suspected Firewall sympathizers were removed, reassigned, reprimanded, or demoted, and Colonel Falcón transferred to another department. Blackjack was heavily reprimanded and given duties that would use other covers. They also attempted to capture Sentinel Dawn and her associates, but she was tipped off and escaped.

Nevertheless, Blackjack remained convinced that cooperation with Firewall was in the interest of the Jovian Republic, and so the very unwavering loyalty her handlers had instilled would lead her to betray them. TAHI agents are given considerable leeway and resources provided they keep their superiors fully informed, and while these had been curtailed, Blackjack still had enough to act independently. After some time she reestablished a liaison with Firewall, using some of the contacts she’d developed with Dawn’s help, and still under the guise of Colonel Falcón through his cover identities.

At this point I functionally became Colonel Falcón’s handler, though I did not make him a Sentinel and was circumspect about sharing information on Firewall operations. However, he was slowly gaining my trust and that of other Firewall operatives. We started building a network that would covertly supplement the Jovian’s own efforts against x-threats, and in conjunction with that effort, the Lt. Colonel also got to work in rebuilding a small pro-Firewall band within the SCI. Things were going well until TAHI crashed the party.

We are not certain when they found out, or how, but most likely through forking and interrogating Blackjack’s back-ups. Two weeks ago they made their move. Blackjack suddenly found all assets frozen, all clearances revoked, all official contacts severed, and all covers blown. Lieutenant Colonel Luis Guillermo Falcón Torrealbawas publicly disavowed by the SCI, declared an unreliable asset, and stripped of his citizenship. They’d burned him, all his alternate identities, and all of Blackjack’s. Worse, officially she doesn’t exist, and without any covers she’s a non-entity.

Simultaneous with the burn notice, TAHI moved to capture my agents, and began to purge all trace of Firewall sympathizers from SCI. The effort was swift, brutal, and heavy handed, calling in on the resources of multiple parts of the Jovian security apparatus. However, they made no direct moves on Blackjack herself. She speculates that they still considered her an asset too valuable to toss away, and were punishing her for her insubordination. The entire operation would have succeeded completely, were it not that when they once again yanked hard on the SCI’s strings, someone yanked back.

We don’t know who “Patriot” is, but they must be fairly high up the chain, possess sources within TAHI, and have enough authority to exercise a good amount of discretionary power without question. When TAHI was about to launch the purge, Patriot gave Blackjack just enough warning for her to delete all her back-ups, tip off her allies, and set alternate lines of communication. By the time the dragnet hit, most of my agents had gone to ground, and I was starting to mobilize resources to run damage control and extract our personnel were possible. At the same time the SCI gridlocked against itself, with parts attempting to carry out the purge, and other parts stonewalling and accusing them of baseless paranoia.

The Jovians were thrown off guard, but my people still had what seemed like damn near the entire internal security apparatus mobilizing against them, and they had all been under surveillance already. It was a herculean labour to get any of them out, and while I spared no effort in the task, I still lost too many. Blackjack mostly managed to take care of herself, and I imagine Patriot was also running whatever interference they could without compromising themselves.

It took over a week to complete extraction operations, and then several days to for initial debriefings and preliminary damage assessment. My network was completely dismantled, with considerable losses in invested time, resources, and personnel. Further assets had to be called in to conduct damage control and personnel extraction. We also lost our contacts within the SCI, and at present cannot ascertain how much damage was done to factions within the agency sympathetic with our goals.

However, it is not a total loss. TAHI’s influence within the SCI has been curtailed, and there appears to be a powerful individual or group within Jovian Intelligence willing to cooperate with our efforts. There may be an opportunity to establish a real working relationship on an unofficial basis with parts of the SCI in the near future. Patriot is powerful and independent to obstruct TAHI, and so there is reason to be optimistic that further liaisons will not be limited to a single entry point like it was with Colonel Falcón.

It was during the debriefing that Blackjack told me everything about herself that I have discussed here: her real name, project Phoenix, TAHI. I’m glad she did so, but something bothers me about it. I do not doubt that she is telling the truth, but I doubt why she would. She’s given needed context to recent events, but it’s a liability to her, as she gains little from telling me or Firewall. I’m not sure Blackjack knows herself why she talked, but she seemed relieved to so.

I was ready to recommend her induction as a full Sentinel immediately, but now I find myself hesitating. I strongly believe that she will be a strong addition to Firewall, but perhaps a thorough psychological evaluation would not be amiss beforehand.


\\ The terminology’s all nice and respectful just like you like, with not a single instance of your Junta being called what it is. Castle’s a real sweetie, isn’t he?

The edited version to be actually submitted to the other Proxies has been changed as follows:

-All references to Phoenix project removed.
-All references to your TAHI links removed.
-All references to the name Blackjack removed.
-Text added and edited to fill gaps in narrative and keep events self-consistent. You are Lt. Colonel Falcón throughout. Intel on TAHI's involvement in events is credited to the SCI grapevine and Patriot and presented accordingly.
-Your debriefing transcript and Castle's commentaries edited in line with all the above.
-Last two paragraphs of main body removed and replaced with glowing review of your performance.
-Final line reads, “Recommend that Luis Guillermo Falcón be immediately inducted into Firewall as a full Sentinel. New code name: Blackjack.”

Castle is not happy with it, but I persuaded him it’s for the best. This will spare you, and more importantly me, quite a few inconveniences. The next time you feel overwhelmed by the pathos of your dark and troubling history, please remember your Muse is a trained psychologist. I’m not, but if you’re lucky I could pretend to give a damn.

Congratulations on your promotion to Sentinel, by the way, and welcome to Firewall. Oh, and tell Dawn she's in deep shit and should lay low for a while.

--Pallas //

[Cynical Cat]

Lys, needs more triple crosses.

[Lys]

We can save the triple crosses for the actual game, wherein we actually get paid for them. There's a sheet up in Obsidian Portal. Now we have two faces, two people who can sneak, and one person who can do both.

[Hotfoot]

Next week will be Eclipse Phase, hopefully we'll be able to get most everyone together for it.

[Lys]

I've been editing my sheet around a bunch. The changes are mostly cosmetic. I decided that the "Morph" bonus should include everything my character has when stark naked, which includes implants, which had priorly been under "Gear" (which had priorly been named "Equip"). There was a bunch of gear and implants for which I hadn't listed their bonuses, which kinda needs to be there or else I'll forget about them, like the fact that you can use thermal vision to get +20 to Kinesics. I figured how to make the + signs work on the augmentations section without making everything become underlined, just needed to move cyberclaws to the top of the list. I don't know why but it worked. Also, I changed "Burned Jovian" to "Rogue Jovian" in the short description because frankly the fact that I have a second secret agent identity which hasn't been burned takes some of the sting out of the whole being burned thing. Whereas having the unholy combination of RAND, CIA, and OAS intent on capturing their rogue asset, which is to say after my ass, is a somewhat more pressing problem, as is the less than completely sane me-fork they have leading the chase.

In short, things may look a bit different but nothing has actually changed. Oh, well, except for my spending the last 500 cr on two Low cost implants, that's an actual change. The two are Vision Sense Filter, which I thought I had but didn't, and Electrical Sense which I'd managed to forget isn't useless to somebody with Hardware: Electronics.

Anyway, just wanted to be upfront about it and stuff. ^_^

[Hotfoot]

Thank you for the heads up.

[rhoenix]

I won't be able to make Monday's game, unfortunately. Friends are in from out of town, but I'll be on Skype when I get home.