[Herr D]

The Show Must Go Off–part twenty
\FORMATMAINT \MARKBEGIN \LOCPREP
MCL-BeltMiner#C485640624

I was noting with amusement that their response time had improved when they arrived. I recognized KF2 and saw the rookie when they arrived. A team of three more waited a noticeable hundred feet away. KF2 was tense but still professional. “Enforcer 4967KF2 on site partnered and with backup team. Interrogation likely.” He hung back, though, and waved the rookie to go ahead. I personally think of that as a mistake . . .
The rookie landed from less than a twelve-foot jump with a complete lack of poise and tried to make up for it by talking tough with me. “Enforcer 2054LC4. Open your palms and put your hands on your head, I.D. out!”
I blandly hung my satchel on my toolclip and complied. She scanned me and nodded. “O. H. M., aka ‘Q,’ BuMPS number C485640624. Where are you headed, miner?”
“Arena Row. L-C?” I GameFaced restrained amusement.
“LC4 is my common, miner; what of it?”
“It rhymes with Elsie, an archaic woman’s name.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What are you saying?” Oh, good; over wary. I didn’t need GameFace to put on a quizzical look, but I used it anyway to keep any nervousness out.
“It’s a coincidence. Your call signs are chosen randomly, correct?” For her, this was a complete non-sequitur.
“Can the small talk. You have been in contact with a known hacker, missing in action with a large balance to settle.”
“Which hacker do you mean?”
She actually aimed her shoulder cannon at me. I GameFaced mild surprise and for the first time, my ice-cold fearless exterior began to bother her. She hid it well. “Are you denying it?”
I actually managed to pause a moment, drawing out the quizzical psychotic calm. I was good at cons BEFORE my implants. “By WHICH,” I said, as if talking to a slightly deaf moronic child, “I mean which hacker–I know more than one.”
That made a big dent in the chip on her shoulder. She knew she’d sounded stupid but it was in front of a witness to me cooperating. She reddened a bit. It was cute. “Their names?” Not a bad recovery!
I nodded. “I only know screen names, but if I have access to old news ‘zines I could probably find–“
“Screen names will DO, miner!” She was going to be a screamer.
I nodded again, irritatingly slow. “Your Worst Nightmare, The Shade, The Surgeon, Rack, and Epi.” There, I’d said it. A list of Enforcers’ worst fears. That group of mysteriously missing Beltminers that killed nearly five hundred people on Earth, and only slowed down after finding ice, iron, iodine, and religion before they went AWOP. Payments for their utilities, claim rent, etc. Absent without payout was no longer a ‘shoot-on-sight,’ but for these guys they’d make an exception. The other members of their band were off-gridders, non-Luddites, but hated the net and everything it represented. One wonders how they ever did get along.

[Herr D]

At the same time that I was ‘chatting’ with my virtual contact and pretending to not get involved, I goosed an Enforcer sub-routine to find another chatbox. One I’d deliberately seeded to include chat between virtual acquaintances Y.W.N. and The Shade. They discussed the possibility of framing the Enforcers for the quake, fixing a door, etc., and that all three suspects lived in one of the two hallways-worth of dead. I made the chatbox appear to have been opened in the jumper landing bay we’d just been seen leaving. The cameras recorded us leaving, then looped around to show the whole two-shift day yesterday and right up to us leaving again. The hook I left was an Enforcer Utility Bot, or EUBIE, as they called them in those days, marching up to the kiosk. In reality it had never moved–with the clean lines of a EUBIE, it was easy to fake video and add shadow, etc.
Most successful criminals avoid panicking the authorities. I needed to divert them if they were going to skip monitoring a hundred droids without asking questions. Most of the hackware I wrote that day was about not getting noticed. I actually automated digital footage serial number replacement so I could have one droid go back over it’s own tracks in footage, pretending to do the work of five without getting noticed. This routine would only last from my twenty-third day to maybe my twenty-sixth if I was lucky. The panic was well underway when I left Jenko’s, claiming I was going to see Chugger. I got less than ten paces out the door before the shakedown commenced.

\END TEXTBURST \ROBOTARM:ADDON:LOC314

[Herr D]

A mage was faced with about 12 archers. He dove into some tall grass. He knew the cover wouldn’t last, tossed his shield up onto his back and curled under it. He plucked a mageroot bloom, broke it into 3 pieces, pulled off his right sandal, fished a feather out of a pocket, and opened his lantern. He touched one bloom piece to each ingredient. Player rolls with the following chart and stats.

i1-i3: lantern

---

feather

---

sandal
A1-3: burns

---

small

---

crushes what it touches
A4-6: portable

---

quick

---

hard
A7-9: oil-powered—-breath-directed–smells of feet
B1-3: tips over

---

white

---

flammable
B4-6: black

---

soft

---

runs from enemy
B7-9: metal

---

fragile

---

leather
Casting Weight Tier: 1 pound<3.5 lbs total ingredients; Memory (mm): 17; Magery: 15; Player rolled a 9.

So, the mage made his magery roll–but wait–18 traits to keep track of with a 17 mm and an insufficient casting weight.
The roll made means the spell worked. The GM chooses ‘portable’ as a trait that the result lost. As a random effect, the result is invisible (Reasonable, because the only colors chosen were colors NOT to be.)
Yikes. The result is an invisible thing that can’t be held. It is made of hardened fire which burns and crushes. The mage, not yet realizing the problem, blows on it. It doesn’t run from the enemy, so it ‘kicks’ and sets fire to the nearest archer and flutters randomly downwind like a feather, ‘kicking’ and setting fire to the next archer. They would roll for fire damage. In this example they die quickly.
The third archer makes an intelligence roll and starts huffing and puffing. The others do also and so catch on. The field catches fire and kills the mage. The forest catches fire and burns the village the mage was protecting. The smell of feet becomes overpowering. 3 hours later the 7 surviving archers escape, having taken turns huffing and puffing over each other and fanning vigorously. The lantern had only had 3 hours of oil in it. A field hand found it a month later and turned it in — an invisible lantern? They caged it for study. The point of this system is that creativity, thoughtfulness, and good choices make the difference.

[Herr D]

With a memory (mm) of 8, there is just enough for a two-ingredient result. Rolling a 17 on the d20 with a 16 in Magery means only 7 traits come true. Players are allowed to repeat traits as ‘sacrificials’ to better their odds. The GM may choose random traits not specified or ‘lost’ by bad roll.
All results will weigh a total of ingredients, so deliberately having too much of a ‘non-whole’ ingredient like sand or water will simply cause the leftovers to stay ‘unmixed.’ Having a 5-lb turtle as an ingredient with a 3-lb Casting Weight will either cancel the spell or cause random effects.
I’ve generally decided a player will know whether weight will be a problem.
A bad spell to come later. This lunch is over.

[Herr D]

So, chart, as above, with ingredients being i1, i2, i3, etc. Traits you want being A1,A2,A3; traits you don’t want being B1,B2,B3.
With 2 ingredients:
—-i1—-i2
—-A1—A2
—-A3—A4
—-B1—B2
—-B3—B4
Trait totals will always be double the square of ingredients. More later when there’s time.

[Herr D]

mmm–this is an old format that I’m used to, putting the chart to the left and a ‘text box’ to the right.
It dates back to DOS and the old BBS system (pre-net.) I’ll expound and see if that’s clearer. As for the grammar, I was casual, but I’m wondering if the text box was what was confusing instead?

Magery would be an attribute like strength but in magic. Roll lower with a d20 to make it.
Memory would be a capacity score. A Magery roll too high subtracts from the quantity of details you can manage.
In this system, details are traits that your result will have.
Casting Weight is the maximum weight your result can have, and is therefore one of the limits of what you can make and / or use as ingredients.
Every mage would pick up a bloom of mageroot per spell, break it into pieces (one piece per ingredient,) and touch a piece to each ingredient. The mageroot bloom then disappears, and the result of all combined ingredients appears at the intended place (within area of ingredients touched.)
Ingredients * ingredients * 2 = traits. Half you want, and half you don’t.
Gotta go–lunch over.

[Herr D]

This is a monster page. First, the Van der Waal creature known as The Tangle:
http://i1067.photobucket.com/albums/u438/jamais5/hm3/HerrD-TheTangle.jpg
This one you have to think about before you’d know how scary it is. The speed of movement and growth and ‘budding.’ The decentralization of vitality. The main thing I’m unhappy about is I don’t think I depicted the ‘twisting’ motion the upper half of the building made in the air after it was bit off.
Next, aliens play cards, too. The ‘earthling’ game. They’ll bet us as poker chips or–whatever.
http://i1067.photobucket.com/albums/u438/jamais5/hm3/HerrD-cards.jpg
Last, muppet-inspired, the Escapee From Lab J eats rubber bands coated with Windex. No one knows what he might do, so we don’t let him — HEY, HE’S LOOSE!
http://i1067.photobucket.com/albums/u438/jamais5/hm3/HerrD-EscapeeFromLabJ.jpg

[Herr D]

I opened a chatbox with a period in the field for ‘Send to.’ As you’d expect, the BMPS system closed it. I did it a second time. Second time closed. I did it a third time. Third time closed. “What ARE you doing?” said Crunch, looking even more confused.
“Waiting,” I said. Thirty-seven seconds later (Though I’d planned for thirty-nine,) a chatbox opened between myself and my virtual acquaintance, The Surgeon. It had taken some doing to get the system to accept his infamous serial killer nickname. BMPS had originally been supposed to prevent that. By the time Jenko was out of the shower, he saw the chatbox looked like this:
The Surgeon: Alert symbol change–2 choices past.*Q: noted
The Surgeon: New business or old?**************Q: new, sorry
The Surgeon: Debt increase or aligned motive?****Q: aligned
The Surgeon: Proceed.************************Q: Protect my life. New threaht. Income potential.
The Surgeon: Agreed. Continue.****************Q: Sorry for typo, sir. Cause of D 23 fail & Quake?
The Surgeon: Clarify purpose for questions & gains.*Q: Rumor mill can be dangerous, sir. Paranoia.
The Surgeon: This does explain questions. Income?Q: Extortion or selling of information.
The Surgeon: Y.W.N. already involved. Stay out.***Q: May I purchase his findings?
The Surgeon: You may. Free: 3 suspects remain.**Q: Thank you, sir. Terms?
The Surgeon: Later. The Surgeon exits.**********Q: Thank you, sir.

Crunch was re-reading it. “Why did you thank him after he exited?” He finally said.
“Because he cares about that sort of thing. He IS more dangerous than I am.” I looked up at Jenko, who was standing there looking like he’d seen a ghost. “You okay?”
“Yes!” he snapped, “What are you involved in, boy?” I was startled. I’d never seen him lie before. He was GOOD at it.
“The Surgeon is obviously good at hacking. The Enforcers haven’t caught him in what, six years?” Crunch was memorizing this chatbox. At least I already knew who he’d be typing it out for later. I smiled my insanely calm smile at Jenko, completely ignoring Crunch. “I never understood why he gave himself up. He’d been doing those so-called ‘medical experiments’ and ducking the cops for nearly a decade–Oh, I’m sorry, Jenko. They’ll figure it out. I may not buy even if I can afford it. The problem is practically solved.” Crunch and Jenko looked doubtful. Well, they WERE right, after all . . .

[Herr D]

The Show Must Go Off–part nineteen
\FORMATMAINT \MARKBEGIN \LOCPREP
MCL-BeltMiner#C485640624
Some people talk about how manual labor can clear your head. Super-taskers like me, however, don’t Zen out. We plan, we plot, we prepare, and, in my case, I pillage. Ten seconds after Jenko spoke to me I had liberated Enforcer data enough to fake an internal report, including internal memos, change schedules, generate soft copies of anything within the system. Ten minutes later I had skimmed enough to realize that the Enforcers weren’t even investigating the rubble. They’d blocked it off, welded shut Emergency Doors 22 and 25, shut off power and closed utility valves, and sent maintenance droids to check everything around the area. AROUND the area?
I spent an entire minute verifying the location of every cleaning, maintenance, utility bot and every other piece of equipment I had capacity to hack. There was ONE cleaning bot unaccounted for. This was a problem. I examined the StayNeur ethos algorithms for a new angle: would I be obligated to tell the truth if I DID discover a conspiracy? I was the only one with access to my own head, and my StayNeur was only safe because I wasn’t safe from it myself without proper planning. It took half the ride home with a constantly grumpy ‘just let me drive’ expression to find the right set of rationalizations. It took till we dropped off our junk ore and requested new coordinates to mine to plan how to make money off my new problem. It took silently walking back to Jenko’s to put it in motion–I needed an airtight alibi. Text pre-composed and delivery timing calculated, I told Jenko to shower first. He’d see it all soon enough. Crunch, looking confused, sat down on Jenko’s bed beside me, nearly catching his ear in my hammock. “What are you doing?” he said. I couldn’t have been better off with any other audience.

[Herr D]

#174 Mister Magnet possible alternate names: Flux, Ferrous, Lev, E.M.F., Ellipse, Foci, Clank
physics references and the sound of objects being caught in his glove.

[Herr D]

If I am to believe the stories my father and two grandfathers used to tell me, I am of beyond mixed heritage–perhaps nearly pureed . . . I got to thinking about my Native American roots and–uh–

So I’ve invented this new concept. Native American medicine men were very practical. Bad dreams? Make something they get caught in. Bad dreams about drought and bad harvest? Maybe the feathers should be blue and green. Dreams of sickness–maybe add a white feather for purity. But what if your dreamcatcher gets so full of bad dreams it stops working?

1. Turn it around to empty it. 2. Play music through it with an air-powered instrument. Preferably music about tate-waci, or wind dancing, because flying dreams are usually very good ones. 3. Try to blow bad dreams out onto pumpkin seeds. Pumpkin seeds sleep too much and die too easy. They need to be more restless.
Like so:
http://i1067.photobucket.com/albums/u438/jamais5/hm3/HerrD-drmcatchercleaner.jpg
I haven’t tried it yet–have to wait for next Halloween.
Next up, a pic of ‘Native American things’ I have carved out of wood and actually SOLD.

http://i1067.photobucket.com/albums/u438/jamais5/hm3/totem4dys.jpg

And last, having met one of those relatives who never wasted anything. The concept of scalping led me to the runway; all the squaw divas will want one of these!
http://i1067.photobucket.com/albums/u438/jamais5/hm3/HerrD-headdress.jpg
Note the even tanning and stitching. Great workmanship!

[Herr D]

The Show Must Go Off–part eighteen
\FORMATMAINT \MARKBEGIN \LOCPREP
MCL-BeltMiner#C485640624

On the twenty-third day, I was finishing up my minimum (I still hadn’t figured out how to meet workweek’s quota in less than two shifts) when Jenko suddenly loaned Crunch his spotter and told him to get some practice. That got my attention. Jenko didn’t think much of Crunch. Giving him a leg up, well . . . I watched him double check that Crunch wouldn’t kill himself or send debris flying everywhere and walk toward me while I pretended to chafe over how little ore I was getting out of my debris. At easy knife-throwing range I looked up as if I hadn’t noticed him coming, nodded, put the ChemCheck back on auto, double-checked my tether, and grimaced at him. He was using the tether we’d set up today, not even checking it as he walked. Even in near zero gravity he never bounced, though. Pretty graceful for a hunchback. I used my com till we touched suits to carry our voices. “You not getting anything either?”
He didn’t break stride, just kept coming. “Just the magnesium, but that’s about gone. This rock may have a nuclear core.”
That was a standard complaint of his. You know even in those days the miners had software for sizing an asteroid and making cagey guesses on what had metal and what was practically ice-filled pumice. But once in a while the law of averages didn’t pay off because rock would be concentrated unpredictably. We didn’t have the imagers and dark spectrometers; they came out later. It was a waste of fuel to lighten an asteroid too much, you know? And we’d whittled this one down pretty far.
“I think you and I need to talk.” Jenko was never one to waste words. Or like it when others did.
“Okay.”
“I won’t say anything, but I know you hack.” Mmmm.
“Okay?”
“That shift you were out here alone? Then you came back and reported the pirate attack?”
“Yes?”
“You didn’t strike me as a killer. Or as that fast.”
“Okay?”
“So I looked at your report form. You were at the same kiosk I was at when I was alone. But you weren’t home yet.” Ouch.
He continued with, “I don’t know where you really were, and I don’t care. There’s a problem coming, and I want you to handle it.”
“What problem?” I looked up. Crunch was doing pretty well, so we’d have a few more minutes.
“Chat rooms are getting encrypted. Rumors are spreading.”
“About?”
“Door 23.”
“The one that failed?”
“Yes.”
“What are they saying?”
“That an Enforcer rigged the door. That a bomb was planted in the trash deposits to cause the quake in the first place.”
“That’s absurd. Who would their target have been?”
“Doesn’t matter. There could be a really bad riot.” I thought about that. The life I saved might be my own, after all.
I nodded. “What do you think I could do?”
“Fake a report. Claim a dead prisoner did it. Suicide. We have a riot, or some fool starts digging through the trash deposits to prove it and causes another quake, lots of people could die and get us killed, too.”
I nodded again. “I’ll pass the word to handle the problem.” There–that was vague enough. I might just ‘know’ the hacker.
I pointed at Crunch. “You’d better tell Crunch to keep his knees bent. We don’t want his back ruined.”
Jenko grinned, nodded, and lazily spun on the tether. He headed back without another word.

\END TEXTBURST \ROBOTARM:ADDON:LOC314

[Herr D]

double-check top of contest–Jeff is pretty good about mentioning each time whether it’s one or five or unlimited.

[Herr D]

The Show Must Go Off–part seventeen
\FORMATMAINT \MARKBEGIN \LOCPREP
MCL-BeltMiner#C485640624
Jones was at home sleeping off a mining shift when the unthinkable happened. A quake. There had only been one other in the history of the Belt Mine Prison System. I don’t know how many other people were home then. What I do know is that with Emergency Door Number Twenty-three failing, more than a hundred prisoners total died. Two whole hallways opened to space. I wound up surprised to find Jones and a client who’d paid me late had willed me all they had. I shifted around and gave Chugger a ‘special rate’ on my third room, newly acquired, since his room was lost–he’d been entertaining in my first room at the time. Reparations for a lost room weren’t even enough for a sleep shift rental. I bought out Upclose’ room value at double–I was doing fine, why shouldn’t I stand up for a good employee?

\END TEXTBURST \ROBOTARM:ADDON:LOC314

[Herr D]

A thought on your assassin in frame #2. Here’s how she gets her name . . .
Cop #1: [looking at crime scene] Same M.O., right?
Cop #2: yeh–that’s your girl.
Cop #1: Reese.
Cop #2: [pulling notebook] you got a name already? I just got her picture?! Reese like Witherspoon?
[movement in background]
Cop #1: No, Reese as in these are Reese’s Pieces–[gestures around at body parts]
[SLASH]
Cop #2: Awwgh
Cop #1: I know, I kn-[SLASH]
Reese: [looking at 2 dead cops and dripping blades] I like Reese–that’s funny. [opens coat of Cop #2, pulls out her picture from surveillance camera, other evidence] Thanks, boys!

[Author]

Posts