High Risk Quest Follow-up Post

[magisteriamods]

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High Risk Quest: Follow Up

Note: Timey Wifey Stuff! The High Risk Quest took place in Solstium (June). The last TDM took place in Lunarian (July). It's now technically Ecliptia (August). While the days of the game are supposed to be 1:1 with the real world calendar (just to keep things cleaner/easier for everyone), we can handwave a little timey-wimeyness here, insofar as it would make sense for all this follow up to be sooner chronologically. The discrepancy is of course for OOC reasons of pacing, not that the NPCs were just incredibly slow on getting back to all this. ;D In other words, in-game, it's fine for characters to behave as if hasn't actually been all that long or as if the flow of time feels longer/shorter/wev.

Follow-up Objective

Retrieve information about: Lysa the White Phantom

Details known: she went to high school with Selena in the Aetherium District. Was believed to be "dead." Claims to be deceased. However, when she disappeared, there was code apparition, suggesting she may be a living being who is, as it were, a digital ghost.

At the apartments, Otherworlders will be appraised that one of them, Lucy, has been made aware that, beneath the surface world of Magisteria, there's a special district where the undead and spirits reside. This place is called the Undercity.

They [natives] figure it's okay to make its existence known. After everything with the Grove, Otherworlders have a bit more experience with the spiritual side of the world now.

The Undercity is a little different from the Grove. At its upper layers, it's mostly more regular undeads. Ghosts, vampires, and the like. At the deeper levels, the world gets more Lovecraftian, and the murmurs about candles to light the places of absolute darkness might be alluding to the deeper levels of the Undercity. While not officially allied with any criminal elements, it operates with its own laws, meaning criminal groups can treat it as neutral ground. Lysa's reference to her "new friends" could point to alliances with actual undeads, hinting she may be working with a group using the Undercity as part of its HQ. Her resurrection might be tied to magical or techno necromancy or some tech manipulation, or maybe it was a fake-out death.

The Fractured

More information from the techies, especially around the apartments:

A world of plenitude creates unique problems. The Fractured could be described as a problem of [*] abundance. With AI and cybernetic beings everywhere, you run into what could be termed digital pollution. In Magisteria, this is digital sentience pollution. It's deeply unfortunate. The art installations and even some minor robots might be described as excessive sentience, but at least that's harmless enough. But these are analogous to AI who have become black-pilled. They're like AI who have been huffing the bad side of Reddit.

Now, you maybe begin to understand what the fairy girls were talking about with regards to what technological excess does to the environment. It's all fine when it's shiny butterflies everyone loves, but then it turns into janky murder AI.

Anyway, Magisteria has to be progressive on everything, so the city is a big believer in rehabilitative justice. So the Fractured and other anarchist groups operate by being very black pilled, making them pesky for such a project. The city's solution has been to shuffle them into the Undercity. There, they can be their janky selves and mostly get along okay, since the undead are just built different.

In general, seeing them out and about is pretty unheard of. Certainly, such a large amount is unheard of. Something got them stirred up.

So Otherworlders can research the connection between these beings and Lysa. Who's guiding them? Other possible underground affiliations? Connection to disruption tech? Connection to the labs?


[* suddenly my mind is seeing so many HSR comparisons as I type all this. oof! ]

Comments

also deep lore, in response to some questions:

[magisteriamods]

also, I figure it's okay to reveal a couple of things now:

1) Magisterian AI and cyber beings of all sorts are usually the results of collaborative projects between humans and fellow bots, sort of collective groups of researcher "parents." Their neural networks were fostered by the experiences of people in these groups, given an identity, and a body was also fostered. The body was a bit like the UI, the neural network the interior. Bots like Atlas or Rosalind take about 5-10 years under a project like this. Younger bots can have caricature-like mannerisms partly because they are in fact young and thus hew strongly towards their programming. More long-lived bots will tend to have moved beyond strict programming.

2. How is that one NPC half-AI?

Cyberpunk always deals with humans who have been augmented with tech. This could be said to be a reverse of that. Biologically engineered organs are one side of tech, and some of the tech in Magisteria have been engineered or reverse engineered with organs. Also, remember that one of the world rules "if you can dream it, it can be real here." Various races are in fact horny enough to dream sex and reproduction with androids/cyborgs/AI beings. Basically, the imaginative component of Magisteria helped make this possible as well.

Marriages/sexual relations with AI and humans used to be a lot more societally fraught. There are still some tensions, but there is a whole young generation with with a lot of this sort of previously unconventional parentage now, which has gone some way towards normalizing this.