>>301038

This is the current situation.

You have recently taken over Osaze (formerly known to English speakers as Egypt) and restored its ancestral name of Mizrayim. In the otherwise dull and flattened (literally and culturally) earth, the place has experienced somewhat of a renaissance; internet service is once again widespread, the music scene consists of more than DC Talk tribute bands, and it's possible to get a decent drink without being sneaky about it.

Of course, the party couldn't last: after you humiliated a theologian on live TV, God Almighty sent a drought, and started to throw lightning bolts at those who blaspheme, or even win an argument with missionaries. Your diplomats were called to Greater Jerusalem and, after being denied a chance to explain why they thought that having a Constitution was a good idea, were sentenced to one year's hard labor. The mighty Nile is dry.

Being a distributed computing platform with a dash of sentience, you've done your math and bolstered your country's industry, reducing -- at least for now - -a Biblical drought to an inconvenience.

On the home front, The Other Light's Council of Seven has tried to find reasons to become hostile to you, and they have found one - by doing some destructive testing on it, you've supposedly removed the Divine power from an angelic blade you captured and they demanded. Therefore, they have initiated Project Number, the training of human calculators to make them no longer depend on you for their prophecied plan of raising an army for the Last Day.

One of your best agents, Quinn, has recently experienced an odd glitch.

>>301038

You have 11 cabals available. Since you have more than 10, two of them are required to maintain your systems.

"Too Much Light" as the New Jerusalem cadre is known derisively, has 2 roving missionary teams in Misrayim, preaching repentance as a way to stop the drought. In addition, traditionalist advocate Beverly LaHaye is camped out at your border.

Misrayim has good drought preparedness level and intermediate plagues preparedness level; the drought has been handled for now. TOL still demands productivity from the California base, but not the Misrayim base.

SPECIAL: Any cabals or Villains not used for a project can back up local police and TOL security, bolster construction and medical teams, and generally help keep the territory civilized.

Assigning cabals to a project allows it to be implemented. A complexity 2 job will require 2 cabals to be completed, etc. Undermanning a project gives it a chance to fail. Assigning a Villain to a project allows it to be roleplayed, possibly negating a failure roll or resulting in bonuses on success. Overmanning a project doesn't do much.

Complexity 1 (auto success):

# Harass or sabotage a Hero, or tie up a missionary team by making them ineffective.

# Send a cabal to a region you have no presence in, to see what unique opportunities that region offers. All the regions with no TOL presence haven't been surveyed yet.

# Take advantage of discovered opportunties (see next post).

Complexity 2 (50/100 success):

# Produce MECs. This adds one dot to the MEC cabal counter per base. You have a good mix of humans, infiltrator and heavy MECs in your forces.

# Lease the Misrayim base's capabilities to a startup to implement a proposed project.

# Use the California base to produce propaganda and infrastructure to start bringing its territory under your control (1/5).

# Recruit in Misrayim. This gives you an extra cabal.

Complexity 3 jobs available (33/66/100 success):

# Continue pursuing space research. Space Race rules: Your progress is faster, but you must commit an even number of cabals, so 2 or 4.

# Continue AI, nuclear, or sonic research.

# Attempt to eliminate a Hero, or get rid of a missionary team (by force or by cleverness).

Complexity 4 jobs available (25/50/75/100 success):

# Continue pursuing MEC research.

# Recruit from the general unbelieving population or from TOL.

Complexity 5 jobs available (20/40/60/80/100 success):

# Estabilish a base in a region where you have no contact, just by finding a suitable location and moving in. Australia, the Midwest and South Africa have nuclear ore.

# SPECIAL: Eastern Africa holds the Nile's springs and the partially completed canal. Sending a large team would finish the job and force lakes Victoria and Tanganika to drain through the Nile.

>>301053
Surveyed opportunities:

Misrayim: Remember that false-flag terrorist group you made up? They've been harassing your Amman-Timbuktu water convoys, and this time it's not you controlling them. They seem to be bankrolled by another entity.

Western Europe: A small independent group has been trying to restore red peppers that are actually spicy; with assistance this can be reproduced, or even weaponized (pepper spray).

Eastern Europe: A large part of the Wieliczka Salt Mine, in what used to be Poland, has survived. Reclaiming it would give you an unique environment: a large cavern in which the night sky can be simulated.

Western Russia: There is a small Cosmist cult that has formed around Yuri Gagarin's statue. They are likely to be interested in Jeb's work.

Central America: Rumors of undiscovered Mayan gold have been around for

Eastern Asia: There may be unrecovered nuclear assets. Unfortunately, they would be close to the regional "capitol" in Pyongyang.


Unsurveyed territories: Middle East, Southern America.

(can't stay for long. But this is really one of the turns where we need to get that angelic weapon. Also when ya get time mysterious poster acting out quinn last thread, I'll put in something for ya next real post i get)

5 cabals to set up an Australian base. Assign Jeb.
2 cabals to harass missionaries out of Misrayim. Assign Ziggy and Vee.
2 cabals to recruit in Misrayim. Assign Quinn.

I've been busy and am off to bed, but some advice for the possible new dude that posted:

We need to go from under the radar to post singularity death march as quickly and quietly as possible. Try not to make too much noise, grow the numbers, work on sonic weapons or nuclear stuff. Australia is a possible means to that end given that we'll need heavy metals.

If the water problems get worse, there's a channel that can be opened.

As much as Anti suggests an angelic weapon this turn, I wouldn't go for it unless they're around since that could turn into a shit show and I'd rather we wait for people to wake up. So if turns are going to happen while we sleep, maybe focus on some research and growth?

>>301257
Excellent points.

>>301167
I agree with the last two. But I think we need to get rid off the terror cell first, and should likely start with their funding.

1 cabal to find their funding

2 cabals to lease the base for a misrayim project.

2 cabals on space research, give jeb his chair back here.

Rolled 24, 13, 9, 60, 33, 45 = 184 (6d100)

>>301257

The best way to go back to being "under the radar" at this point is relinquishing control of Misrayim, at least in appearance; having a believing government back in place, even if they are made ineffective, is going to dampen spirits quite a bit, but you would keep the extra cabals you gained, as well as most of the industrial and scientific infrastructure. There can always be another renaissance somewhere else.

>>301167

Quinn's "glitch" seems to have been related to an attempt to restore tactile sensation without being in constant pain; it's not unknown for MEC agents to take a lot of drugs, since they can just filter them out afterwards. Other agents deal by becoming a bit obsessive about a hobby, be it chess, sharpshooting, oral sex, or zen gardens.

Nevertheless, she leverages her fame to keep recruiting.

# Recruit by appealing to hedonism.

# Recruit by appealing to nationalistic pride.

# Recruit by appealing to humanistic spirit.

>>301324

The startup scene in Misrayim is still doing well, although the irrational exuberance is gone by this stage; people have stopped talking pie in the sky, at least for now, and started getting their hands dirty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZBKX-6Gz6A

# Support the manufacture of stillsuits.

# Support a pipeline to buy water with.

# Support acoustic fracturing of the bedrock to quickly dig deep wells.

>>301167

Ziggy and Vee had a good time poking fun at missionaries last year, and keep it up this year; Ziggy seems to have mellowed out a little bit.

>>301167
>>301324

Undertake a large project in Australia, or keep working domestically?

>>301514
Isn't TJ's temple made out of bedrock? The fracturing sounds like a good investment. And another base would have considerable advantages.

I'd say have her advocate for humanism. National pride would net us a lot of recruit's, but I'm concerned with quality over quantity.

>>301514

(Looking at dice rolls: I swear, this quest is haunted)

Both Ziggy and Vee target the remaining missionary groups.

Ziggy has all manner of contrived incidents happen to his, from injecting mold into their RV's water tanks to requiring them to start carrying an incongruous amount of spare tires.

This backfires a little; the missionary team take it in good humor and start uploading videos of their misadventures to your network, where they are happily remixed by nonbelievers and believers alike - the latter videos find their way into television outside Mizrayim (Nobody else has internet fast enough to stream video) while the former become part of the Packet. The missionaries don't get many converts either, but come across as good-naturedly bumbling rather than annoying. A few people even accept their money when they buy supplies.

----

Vee, on the other hand, keeps hounding the same missionary team about examples of sound-as-a-weapon in Scripture.

She becomes convinced that Yahweh is in fact a "sufficiently advanced alien", but her theory doesn't have a whole lot of buy-in outside of her cabal. The missionaries insist that testing God further would be unwise, and keep refusing to do a scale demonstration of the Walls of Jericho; eventually, the Whammo air blaster fad dies down as well. Since the missionary team and Vee's cabal have been interacting fairly closely for two year, human nature asserts itself

One of Vee's technicians has fallen in love with a missionary, and the missionary is on the fence about it; half the time there's a confrontation, the two sneak off and act sickeningly cute at each other, we're talking "go get a malt and hold hands and talk about nothing for three hours" here.

It would be a straight couple, so the missionaries are actually encouraging the relationship... as long as Vee's technician converts. Never in the history of the Millennial Kingdom has anyone ever DEconverted, but there's always the chance that the missionary in question, who is under 100, may not be a true Scotsman, err true believer.

You don't have a cooties epidemic on your hands, but still. http://emlia.org/pmwiki/pub/web/LeftBeyond.Glossary.html

# You are a sentient computer network tasked with preventing Judgement Day. You're not getting involved in a Romeo and Juliet story.

# Authorize Vee to try and pull the missionary out. This would require the two of them getting separated from the either group, and may be construed as kidnapping.

# Encourage Vee to let her technician rotate out of TOL and look at converting, these kids deserve some happiness.

>>301565
Gag me. Things go south if they learn about MEC technology and our operations. So how do we go about this?

>>301561

Yes, the Temple is made out of bedrock. There's a stupefyingly detailed description at http://www.sonstoglory.com/ThirdTempleEzekielsMillennialTemple.htm#PhotosofEzekielsTemple

>>301573

Trying to deconvert the missionary is an option (she may not be a True Believer after all, there's at least technically, no way to tell with young people). The other option is to tell Vee to reassign her technician to another cabal for the time being and hope that it's just a crush, in essence, ignore the situation as you project that it will go away unless acted upon.

>>301561

Quinn is asked to advocate for humanism. After experimenting with some really strange drug cocktails that would probably kill her if she wasn't already dead, she snaps out of it, and does another rave party tour.

She leaves around pamphlets about "lust, beauty, desire, sexuality, ecstasy, freedom, autonomy, peace love unity respect and responsibility to help each other in every way we can in each *ourselves* as only defined and ultimately so by *ourselves* becoming Always Ever Greater, Always Ever Hotter, Always Ever Transformed, Always Ever Beautiful, Transcending Surrendering Superceding Impending Offending Overbeaing Uglifying Patriarchy Terminating Commanding Deity Directly Replacing Banality Reality Becoming Fantasy Refusing Submission Instead Trading Lost Humanity Becoming Lost Girls Embracing Supernatural Powers Ourselves Transcending Eternity Sealed Within Bodies Made Supposed Prisons Impossible Curves Defining Everyone Lucky Enough Because Following Quinn Morrighan Storm Reciting Devotion" which at first makes you wonder if she's completely lost it.

Her strategy, it turns out, is to recruit people who contact her to tell her that it's either a lot of hogwash or the result of a bad trip, and react in ways that look like they may be useful. This person just doesn't seem to do anything linearly.... but it works.

>>301324
>>301167

Jeb can be deployed this year. Continue with research, development and improvement projects, or build a mining facility that can later be turned into a proper base? (Possible mining facilities locations: Australia, South Africa, American Midwest)

(can wait for people on this one, if you want to resolve the other stuff first)

>>301601
I can wait. Also someone please find out what the unliving fuck Quinn was on.

>>301601
Build a mining facility in Australia. Assign Jeb to it.

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>>301561

One offshoots of Vee's exploits with vortex cannons is that sonic technology is in the news more than it would be otherwise; your cabals are not the only people working on that stuff anymore, which aids your research.

A startup operating out of Wadi Halfa is convinced that it should be possible to break through hard rock using dynamically adjusted high frequency jackhammers that can resonate the rock slabs to pieces. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJAgrUBF4w

You encourage this effort. While the system doesn't do much for finding water (you suspect supernatural interference here: after a year of testing, the highest correlation to "finding water pockets past the bedrock" is.... the percentage of believers in the digging crew) it opens up possibilities for large-scale demolition using relatively small tools. A Heavy MEC-sized jackhammer that can resonate a whole building or a giant boulder to pieces in an hour without explosives sounds great.

The few wet wells dug with the new system are publicized a bit beyond their usefulness, bolstering spirits.

# Dig some deep wells in the Nile's riverbed, just to make a point. Maybe something'll come out...

# Change focus from digging wells to demolition.

>>301656
Let's try the deep well, it would be well worth the effort either as a learning experience.

>>301656
>>301673
yeah, let's go with deep well

(ok, the world follows narrative rules. If we try to separate the missionary and the tech they will work towards seeing each other. And we can't let him go otherwise the cats out of the bag. That includes MEC technology and the literal CATS. And we can't push a "friends don't force you to think like they do" narrative I can see it being turned on us. Any other ideas for the technician and missionary dilemma?

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>>301646
>>301609

(Please pick whether mining facility, or space + terrorist tracking)

>>301673

A few worm-drive platforms (in case water starts flowing again) are built around the first production batch of Sonic Piledrivers, and positioned in and around where the Assuan Dam used to be, at intervals.

There, a construction effort has begun to cart away the caked mud from the riverbed, as it's extremely fertile once given water again. The Sonic Piledrivers perform significantly worse than regular excavators for this job.

Then they hit bedrock; the excavators retreat, and the new machines start doing their job. No wonder these things are only so-so at digging wells; great fissures form in the bedrock after mere hours of hammering at it.

Some sinkholes form, a bit of wet mud gushing out from the slabs' weight, freeing water that had been under there since the time of Rameses. Although it's a symbolic result, there is much cheering. A few operators joke about having dug too deep.

Not even twenty seconds later, the Sonic Piledrivers sitting in sunken bedrock slabs and surrounded by wrt mud are all over the network - even foreign TV is picking it up.

And then...

[[Hey, I'm back!!]]

Please don't tell me that we're going to live out the TUNNEL TO HELL urban legend; I cannot deal.

>>301799
(New idea. Is there a way we can use the fact that Turbo-Jesus lobotomies everyone so they don't feel love for eachother and only love for him after you go past 100 AGAINST team missionary?
I can't imagine wanting to be part of something that would take that away from me. I doubt any sane person would.)

>>301799

Quinn recommends letting them date, but have her chaperone; given how -weird- she usually acts, you can see the missionary being put off by the company that your technician keeps.

Ziggy says why not kidnap the missionary and let Stockholm Syndrome work.

Vee thinks it's just so darn cute, why not let them date and let it go where it will?

Jeb figures that the easiest thing to do is get the technician transferred from Vee's group to his.


>>301827

The Glorified are unable to feel romantic love. Thank G... Thank evolution, Natural believers are not so crippled. That said, the missionary is probably going to be receptive to a "You have to focus on TurboJesus" message; after all, this person signed up to be a missionary.

(Gender for missionary and technician has been left ambiguous on purpose; y'all can pick in that sense; all that's known is that they would be considered "a straight couple" by the missionaries, whatever that means for them).

>>301824

Nah, you're humans (and posthumans), not dwarfs. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/DwarfFortress

>>301818

(Reminder: Jeb can work on the Australia base, or on some low-key space things in Timbuktu, with the extra people being able to go after the terrorist group; please pick)

I vote Jeb goes to work on the Australia base; we let Technician and Missionary do their business butttttt maybe try to play on her sense of justice? "Perfect love casts out all fear", if she's afraid this love isn't perfect, what is she afraid of/what's getting in the way...

>>301843
I'm not moving my vote amd i don't think the new guy will his. Your choice Paul.

>>301824

(Let me know if it's ever OK to have C, G, V and E show up, although it's the 920s still)

[[It is ALWAYS okay; bring them in when you think it's narratively appropriate. I play fast and loose with this canon anyway. They get into the ACTION around 950 canonically, but eh. You do your thing. ]]

>>301837
Ok. Let them do their thing with a chaperone. I'm more worried about losing secrets to team TJ than anything.

>>301843
>>301848

Jeb is sent off to Australia to set up a mining camp around Uluru (Ayer's Rock). It's more of a Ziggy job, but then again, by the time he's done, the natural landmark is still in one piece, so maybe it was a wise choice. The large boulders that formed when God pushed Uluru down so that it wouldn't be taller than Greater Jerusalem prove excellent candidates for being broken up with Sonic Piledrivers.

There's neutrons in thar them hills! Geiger readings are high. Jeb is much more safety-minded than Ziggy, so the cases of radiation poisoning are few and reversible.

A base is now being built here; at minimum, you now have access to uranium ore.


>>301863

The missionaries are encouraged by the idea of sending the two out on a chaperoned date -- it reinforces their worldview that everyone believes as they do and you guys are just being stubborn. Likewise, they send a chaperone, so this turns into a double date.

Quinn first goes full SJW on her counterpart, claiming to be offended by pretty much anything he says, and then when asked about her views, she says that her preferred endgame for the Earth is a world of busty latex lesbians.

The missionary and the Christian chaperone leave appalled. The technician runs off in tears, and logs a request in your personnel assignment subroutine to never work with Quinn unless there are emergencies, but that's the end of this particular bit of drama; your secrets are safe. Quinn is further demonized by Christians afterwards, but that increases her popularity with your population, so that's okay.

You wonder whether Quinn was playacting, was serious, or can't tell anymore herself.

>>301899
I have NO idea anymore. We really need to create a therapy program for MECs.

Grant the engineers request.

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Jeb, being Jeb, takes advantage of being in Australia for long boost-glide flights from one of the world's few remaining natural elevated places; one thing he notes is that TOL already has a base here. Like the others, it's a generic weapons factory that doesn't really take advantage of the area.

>>301910

Most MECs seem to be.... well, "well adjusted" is a bit of a stretch for undead cyborgs; they're definitely smoking more weed and popping more X than the average member of your organization, but that's not a big deal. In general, they tend to go OCD on something, be it chess, zen gardens, giving the perfect blowjob, learning to paint JUST like this or that Renaissance master, or coming up with gun-kata techniques. Some MECs have been violent to people in their cabal, but on the same average as humans -- people sometimes fight, and that's all there is to it, as long as nobody breaks out a knife or a gun. Quinn has just been doing a lot of party drugs recently.


Speaking of parties, on the Nile riverbed in Assuan, it looks like one is about to spontaneously break out; people see the Sonic Piledrivers cause artificial sinkholes in the bedrook and ancient, wet mud to slush out. As it is, it's very little actual water, but just the fact that it's THERE, in defiance of Divine decree, means a lot to a lot of people.

Broadcast media survey shows that the story has been picked up by New Jerusalem media; minutes after, Beverly LaHaye's giant transmitter just outside the border starts spamming the official position that the people of Misrayim have Dug Too Deep. Given that by now most of your people use the internet rather than broadcast media, it doesn't really get in the way too much.

And then...

>>301910

(Quinn is based on a fairly... interesting... person, who used to live with me. And apparently still has my wifi password).

>>301966
(One, why did it have to be the quarry from The Secret World filled with cthulu monsters.

Two, in reference to "Dude where's my car" No N'DEN!

>>301989
Three, sounds interesting and that last part leaves questions that don't need answers.)

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>>301966

... and then, one of the Sonic Piledriver sinks in further, and the slab it was sitting on falls down into the mood. Good thing that the worm drives act as pontoons!

The operator hangs on for dear life as her rig is lifted up on a geyser, not of mud, but of foul, iron-smelling liquid that looks like rotten blood. Three, five, ten sonic drilling rigs follow suit, and before long, there's a mighty earthquake once more, localized on Misrayim's southern border.

Within the hour, the Nile is flowing again, but what flow! The waters are thick, putrid, and a deep dark red in color, as whatever was under the bedrock mixes with the water that is now flowing again from the sources. Closing the sinkholes would require damming the river, which would take years.

Beverly's screed, broadcast across the continent, is triumphant. It looks like the Ten Plagues have begun.

Parliament quickly scrubs a measure to ease off water discipline; the Sonic Piledriver rigs are recovered with no loss of life.

>>302040
"Ladies! Gentlemen! We have been issued a challenge! A challenge we all spent time preparing for! Let us stand strong and stand proud! Misrayim for now! Misrayim forever!"

(( Ok. Ten rounds rapid time. Let's see what we can do.))

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Tsion Ben-Judah finally breaks his silence to broadcast a triumphalist screed that, eventually, remembers to contain a message exhorting the people of Osaze to repent now before it's too late. A good thing is that it stops Beverly from doing the same, as she believes she should shut up when a man is talking; a bad thing is that it's even more annoying, if anything. It pretty much becomes impossible to use an analog radio or TV without hearing shrill calls for the nation to repent, so most people simply stop doing so.

# Engage directly.

# Let them rant.

A good thing is that the Divine playbook is well know; another good thing is that the Nile being filled with what does end up looking like mineralized rotten blood on a spectroscope isn't a big deal, since the country has already switched to alternate water supplies. However, it does smell pretty badly...

# Focus on dealing with this for the year, and put programs in other territories on hold.

# Continue allocating cabals normally.

# If these are the Plagues, let there be an Exodus: evacuate your cabals to your other bases.

>>302094
Save the exodus for last resorts.

Engage them directly, by creating g new channels that don't have them broadcasting. Effectively letting us drown them out.

Also we should focus on this for a year. We know what's at the end of the rainbow.

Can we purify the water? If it's blood, boiling it won't get rid of everything, but...

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>>302094

The Greater Jerusalem government issues an ultimatum, apparently signed by Moses himself.

(Odd thing: the resurrected Old Testament heroes never leave Greater Jerusalem in the book. Maybe they're stuck there?)

Here are their demands:

- Rename Misrayim to Osaze.
- Repeal the Charter of Freedoms.
- Demolish all the Pharaonic and Bedouin Revivalist museums.
- Restore prohibitions on distilled liquor, pornography, sodomy, and so on.
- Turn over the country's radio and TV towers (they seem to ignore that Misrayim has mostly gone digital) to the missionaries.
- Dissolve Parliament, and call for new elections in which the minumum voting age is 100.

>>302104

Most of your population use the data network (can't really call it the internet, since it's not worldwide) for their media needs anyway; engaging directly would mean offering a rebuttal. That said, it is definitely possible to jam the analog signals being spammed from the south and the northeast.

>>302116

The desalinators won't work unmodified, but getting rid of mineralized hemoglobin isn't THAT much harder than getting rid of sea salt, so yes, it's feasible.

>>302121
Send them a one word letter.

"No"

And in that case just ignore the broadcast.

And yeah. We can see about setting up a water treatment building. I mean. It only took us 5 days to do a punishment temple. How hard can it be?

>>302145

Well, building a temple with modern machinery and tooling is easy because there's nothing INSIDE it - the "warehouse" part can go up in days, the trick is, of course, the machinery.

(Confirm that you are recalling your cabals from other territories to deal with this for now?)

>>302145

Your reply does not get addressed directly, but foreign media reports that "Like Pharaoh, the Mizrayim government has chosen to deny the true path", even claiming that your spokesman quoted Scripture verbatim.

# Start using Heavy MECs openly in construction, reclamation, and disaster management efforts.

# Keep it looking like there's a human pilot inside, which requires adding canvas covering and bulk that gets in the way.

>>302172
The recall depends on the others as well as me so I'm putting my vote for recall

I also say that we disguise the heavy MECs.

>>302172
Given the circumstances, I'd like to recall the cabals

>>302296
Welcome to the party Bob!

>>302311
Actually, I'm the same person as
>>301646
just posting from a different location

>>302296
>>302187

Given the circumstances, you suspend operations in territories other than Mizrayim; the California base is allowed to "idle" by producing weapons for the Grand Army, and Jeb comes back from Australia with a few canisters of radioactive ore and some beautiful pictures of the Outback.

You have 11 cabals available. Not trying to operate globally means that 10 are available.

When the Plagues hit, missionaries have pretty much swarmed the Nile Delta region; there aren't enough to put a drain on your resources, but there are enough that it'd be hard to push them off or send them all home. Beverly LaHaye is operating "Radio Free Osaze" from just outside your border.

Misrayim has good drought preparedness level and intermediate plagues preparedness level, and water discipline has seeped into the culture somewhat.

Assigning cabals to a project allows it to be implemented. A complexity 2 job will require 2 cabals to be completed, etc. Undermanning a project gives it a chance to fail. Assigning a Villain to a project allows it to be roleplayed, possibly negating a failure roll or resulting in bonuses on success. Overmanning a project doesn't do much.

SPECIAL: Any cabal or Villain not otherwise occupied can be used directly to help with disaster preparedness; the more are used, the less the plagues' effect will be.

Complexity 1 (auto success):

# Harass or sabotage Beverly.

# Contact the terrorist / water thief cell. Common enemy, maybe?

Complexity 2 (50/100 success):

# Produce MECs at your base.

# Lease the Misrayim base's capabilities to a startup to implement a proposed project (see next).

Complexity 3 jobs available (33/66/100 success):

# Continue AI, aerospace, nuclear, or sonic research.

# Blow up Beverly, or at least her radio station.

# Eradicate the terrorist cell.

Complexity 4 jobs available (25/50/75/100 success):

# Continue pursuing MEC research and development.

# Recruit from the general unbelieving population or from TOL.

Complexity 5 jobs available (20/40/60/80/100 success):

# SPECIAL: Eastern Africa holds the Nile's springs and the partially completed canal. Sending a large team would finish the job and force lakes Victoria and Tanganika to drain through the Nile. This would cause a flood, but it would also "flush" the river.

# SPECIAL: Exodus plan. Bail out in such a way that even if the government falls, you can keep your base and research infrastructure.

>>302296

Hi Bob!

>>302323

# A small company in Cairo proposes building Tesla coils on every roof, to work as bug deterrent/zappers, and lightning traps. It would help with the locusts.

# The people who worked with Jeb on the Stnadard Template Desalinator are confident that they can release an add-on module to clean up the blood-water.

# A few of your own agents say that it's time to take MEC technology public in case the whole "every firstborn dies" thing happens for real.

# The Timbuktu launch tower can be used for cloud seeding, limiting the damage that hail would cause on your crops.


One thing you got going for you is that the enemy's playbook is well known. Amongst the people who got into the country recently is Glorified former journalist Cameron Kirk Williams; he intends to shoot the definitieve piece of investigative journalism about your country, titled "Osaze: Land of No".

# Allow privileged access to this clown.

# Let him embed with missionaries if he wants, but don't treat him anything special; the Charter guarantees freedom of and from religion, and it still applies, even to them.

# Declare martial law and suspend some freedoms for the missionaries.

This is how I would set the order of operations.

1. A small company in Cairo proposes building Tesla coils on every roof, to work as bug deterrent/zappers, and lightning traps. It would help with the locusts.

2 The Timbuktu launch tower can be used for cloud seeding, limiting the damage that hail would cause on your crops.

3 The people who worked with Jeb on the Stnadard Template Desalinator are confident that they can release an add-on module to clean up the blood-water.

4 A few of your own agents say that it's time to take MEC technology public in case the whole "every firstborn dies" thing happens for real.

And finally. # Let him embed with missionaries if he wants, but don't treat him anything special; the Charter guarantees freedom of and from religion, and it still applies, even to them.

Anti- sounds like a plan to me.

>>302385

Two cabals can be taken from generic disaster handling duty to implement any one of those projects before any serious effect from the plagues is felt. Since the base is not doing any work for TOL, you can choose two projects, at the price of four cabals. For example, you can follow up on both tesla coils and cloud seeding, going by your priority list.

That leaves you with eight (or six) cabals to coordinate disaster management, unless you take on anything else from the menu. These can be used to react to each plague in turn. Your preparedness is good, so it can be assumed that they can use Misrayim's industrial base as needed. More importantly, your willingness to work with startups and makerspaces, as demonstrated in past years, means that there is a strong DIY culture and people are willing to improvise.

You reacting to the upcoming Plagues as a challenge to be tackled reinforced this sentiment.

The missionaries swarm across the Nile Delta and the Mediterranean coast, to a very, very cold reaction indeed; it doesn't help that their "let my people go" message, straight from Scripture, is generally answered with "Please, please DO go away and don't come back!" rather than what they expect to hear. Cameron Williams seems to mostly stick to the cities, and mostly interested in talking to the believers that still live in your country.

# Hint that some of your foremen would like to be interviewed.

# Ignore this idiot for now.

You will be prompted for possible solutions to each plague in turn; the base's production capability is intended to be a proactive measure.

# When they are not plucked out to deal with this or that emergency, what should your Villains do?

The first plague is, of course, water turning to blood; as it is, it's more of an annoyance than anything else, since you weren't depending on the Nile anymore in the first place.

Get him to interview the foremen. Try to make them look sympathetic. Maybe some of the people who aren't Glorified can turn to our cause.

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>>302515

Cameron K. Williams begins his series by contrasting the lives of a few believing families in Cairo, who are mostly keeping to themselves and handling things, with "savage" Bedouin revivalists further west in the desert; their interest in practicing stricter water discipline than necessary is misconstrued by the man as proof that the unbelievers in "Osaze" are in fact suffering from water scarcity.

An interview with one of the foremen, the coordinator at a free clinic in Amman, gives Cameron the opportunity to decry the evils of birth control and sex ed, while glossing over the fact that Misrayim has a much lower accident and infant/youth mortality rate than pretty much anywhere else. Interestingly, in the broadcast version, every time someone says Misrayim it's bleeped out and replaced with Osaze, enunciated by a voice actor. The foreman in particular is aware of MEC technology, and it's easy to see that she would really like to take one of the emergency MEC kits at the clinic and beat Mr. Cameron Williams over the head with it.

Despite the blatant snow job, the clinic receives a few discreet emails from physicians elsewhere in the world, asking about how to improve trauma response times.

>>302385
>>302480

(So, two cabals for one project, and eight for emergency response, or four for two projects, and six for ER?)

>>302568
Is it yearly preparation or do the plagues come one at a time? Once a month that preparation plagues are three a time?

>>302604

That's unknown at this time (seriously, I've been going nuts looking up references) but what is known is the order that the plagues will show up in, and that they will come one at a time.

Leasing the base early will allow for preempting some of the plagues, but reduce your ability to quickly react to the others.

>>302625
I guess we can ignore the river for now. Focus on preparations for cloud seeding. Have everyone else prepare to deal with the frogs that could be toxic and the insects.

( So, cloud seeding? Or tesla coils also? What will Jeb/Quinn/Vee/Ziggy do?)

>>302674

The red Nile stinks a bit (except for a few people who say that the smell makes them hungry, but hey, there's always some freaks) so the only real downside of it is that people in Cairo crank up the air conditioning. Your power grid is robust, so that's not a huge issue. Once it reaches the Mediterranean, the mineralized hemoglobin spreads out in the more dense salt water, and is eventually absorbed.

# Ignore. Your water management systems are already in place; save your emergency response teams' strength.

# Encourage feeding the blood-water to algae, potentially gaining a protein source, but distracting from preparedness.

# Aggressively filter the water downstream of the sinkhole. This is a large undertaking, greatly distracting from preparedness, but seeing the Nile reach the sea as clear water would really mess the missionaries up.


Environmental monitoring survey shows that the return of something that's at least partially water has triggered the maturation of estivating frog eggs in the riverbed. However, the water is at the very least toxic to amphibians, so it's expected that the frogs will migrate on land and aggressively look for other places to dwell, possibly contaminating water reservoirs -- supernatural influences makes this more likely than italready would be. Now that's going to be a problem.

>>302694
Let's leave the blood water be for now. Let's focus on the frogs. Make sure they aren't sick or toxic and have Ziggy and pest control round them up if they are.

>>302743
The logic is that the frogs will come anyway because divine will.

And round up the frogs before they invade if they are toxic.

>>302515
>>302743

Which 1 or 2 project will the base support?

# Anti-locust tesla coils.

# Anti-hail preventive cloud seeding.

# Improved desalinators.

# MEC kits revealed to the public and made available.

>>302811
Anti Hail and the Locust Tazer. We will reveal the MEC tech next turn we get.

I vote anti-locust and improved desalinators.

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>>302821
>>302874

(Looks like anti-locusts it is, to start with!)

Construction of roof- and doorway-mounted Tesla coils for bug zapping purposes begins in earnest; the single most common factor with the plague is insects, and building bug zappers should assist in mitigating their effects considerably. They also look pretty cool while in operation, although everyone is curious to see what they might look like at night, if there was such a thing as night. Hospitals and clinics have priority on installation.

# Prioritize factories and businesses.

# Prioritize residential homes.

The missionaries, and Cameron Williams, do not mock the effort, but note that it will be irrelevant. Cameron predicts that the locusts will be many enough to blot out the sun, to which someone shouts at him "Then we'll finally get some shade!"

And, right on cue, that's just when the frogs show up. Milions and millions of various species of frogs and toads climb out of the Nile, looking for clean water and seaweed. Since there are no carnivorous animals anymore, nobody expects frogs to congregate under the bugzappers for free food.

( You have six cabals available for coordinating emergency efforts; two are busy with the bug zappers, and two will be busy with either improved desalinators or cloud seeding)

Ziggy's solution to the batrachians is simple; fire and chlorine. A bit of precious water is sacrificed to making attractor ponds which are flooded with chlorine tabs once the frogs have moved in, and volunteers are called upon to eliminate frog colonies lest they reach water reservoirs and contaminate them -- this is accomplished by issuing them with flamethrowers and permission to use it. Ziggy is surprisingly apt at finding people for whom getting to kill things with fire is its own payment. A small bounty for each captured and destroyed frog is also offered.

There are a few incidents of people breeding frogs for the bounty, or abusing their flamethrower privileges (nothing terrible, but there are a few cases of someone's ex's car "accidentally" getting roasted). These are, of course, widely reported by foreign media.

# Be lenient: issue fines or community service sentences.

# Be strict: prison or exile.

Cameron's documentary alternates a focus on the "hardships" of having frogs all over the place, and on the "senseless animal cruelty" that this has precipitated. The question is, what are coqui' frogs doing in the Mediterranean? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZUOiZG84c0

>>302925

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndQZBQJf034

Some people actually like the chirping, although their neigbors might not.

Outside the cities, there just isn't much of a breeding ground for frogs; a few experiments show that people still don't have of a taste for meat.

# Dispose of the frogs however it's cheapest.

# Do a bit of screening for diseases, and use them as fertilizer.

Beverly LaHaye reminds everyone who will listen that Pharaoh only relented after many people died, and urges the people of "Osaze" to overthrow their "oppressors" before then.

So far your government's approval rating remains high.

When asked what the firstborn might die for, the evangelist simply responds "They will die of unbelief".

>>302925
I voted on hail because we really have no other way of dealing with it.

>>302925
Prioritize homes.

How about a mix. Scorching your ex's car should be prison and community service but unsafe use should be a fine.

>>302966
Then let's do a disease and toxin screening. if it's good we have fertilizer. If not, biohazard waste. Should be destroyed thoroughly.

Finally, maybe we should encourage some private citizens to document the plagues and how easy going and well adjusted we are compared to Cameron's video.

I agree on the fertilizer; let's get some vloggers on the case as well.

Let's stay RELATIVELY lenient with the flamethrower privileges for now, as long as no one's getting murdered.

Rolled 60, 21, 64, 34, 19, 12 = 210 (6d100)

>>302996

People have been using your network to trade tips on how to keep water discipline and, now, to deal with unwanted amphibians; as your network's bandwidth has increased, this has included photos and eventually videos. A few video responses to Cameron do get made, with varying degrees of production values. The problem is that this material is basically unknown outside of Misrayim; the Packet features some of it, but the general public gets exposed to state media a lot more.

Very soon, every home has a bug attractor/zapper mounted on the roof or the doorway; it remains to be seen how shops and warehouses will fare.

>>302968
>>302874

( Please do pick between improved desalinators and anti-hail measures!)


>>302996

The isolated incidents are not sufficient to declare martial law or even pass extraordinary measures; people abusing their flamethrower privileges are prosecuted normally.

Toxin screening shows that the frogs have absorbed some of the bloodwater in their tadpole stage, and are therefore rich in iron; they wouldn't make for good fertilizer for most crops, at least by themselves. Anything actually toxic can be killed with fire.

# A group of missionaries wants to volunteer for flamethrower duty.

Eventually, the clutches of froggy eggs that had been aestivating in the caked mud of the dry Nile start running out.

>>303049
Citizens only. But that includes believers and non believers alike. We are not loaning flamethrowers to people outside misrayim because of the terrorist cell, and the lack of knowledge on who's funding them.

>>303049
(What is with these rolls? I know we're gunning for god but do we need to use Satan's dice?)

I'm voting anti-hail.

Have we opened the canal yet? If not, do that while the plagues are minor so that if anything gets bad later, we don't need to divert cabals to un-fucking the water later while we actually need them?

>>304319
Won't mater on the canal, the water is flowing again just bloody, also the desalinators are giving enough water to keep people alive and live somewhat comfortably.

Thanks for voting hail.

As for the idea of outside help, it could be very useful. A lot of the things that were traditionally done to 'praise' Prometheus are already happened. He's often considered a God/titan of progress and ingenuity in addition to being a huge bro to humanity in basically every myth. As far as 'safe' deities go, I don't think it gets much better than Prometheus.

Prometheus never had major temples dedicated to him, never had widespread worship. Only modest cult following in Athenian times and a lot of chit chat during the renaissance because his mythology jived so well with that period of history.

If we were ever going for outside help, which I like the idea of for multiple reasons, I vote for encouraging people to pay attention to Prometheus. He's extremely low risk and a near perfect fit for the situation. Plus the bonus points if humanity saves him from hell for the second time.

>>304335

Keep in mind that hail isn't just hail, it's hail and lightning; it's specifically worded as hail and fire. I suspect we will need to be doing a lot of firefighting unless we built a fuckload of lightning rods.

We're going to need more water.

>>304351
Hmmnn. We're going to have to go looking for him when we get the chance.

Also. Insects are coming. In the event the tesla coils backfire I'm thinking the DIY culture could come into serious play.

>>304355
Yeah. And in addition were going to have to make some way for people to get around during hail season.

Can I suggest an underground monorail for hail season? Quick, efficient, not likely to get wrecked by hailstones the size of grenades.

Insects are not going to be fun.

Got any other divinity's we could look into and a list of ones that we should strive to avoid?

>>304381
Not what the underground monorail is but I like the idea of a subway. The problem would be coming out of the subway as well as building it in the first place .

>>304382

I'll compile something.

>>304371

And, I guess my point was that we should open the channel when we have relatively little on our plate so that water isn't a problem when the lightning starts coming down.

>>304416
Thanks, I'll look into ways to beat hail beyond stockpiling and staying indoors.

>>304422
Right. Good thinking but the question is when, we still have boils coming and I'm willing to bet the doc's will need some help.

Hail
Aside from cloud seeding. We can't do much outside of metal covering for plants and animals.


Lightning
If anything what we could do is turn the tesla coils into temporary lightning rods with grounding poles and wire?

Reading a ton so don't expect anything too soon, but I'd like some input.

Option A) Look into Greek deities. Given how malleable the narrative bullshit is, I don't really know if GrecoRoman gods will be considered the same. This means that we can consider the Titans as options (prometheus is one), but excludes the pantheon because they will not play nicely with titans.

Option B) The roman versions of Greek gods. Titans are much less of a thing, but they're more likely to directly jump in I suspect given that they were directly unseated from worship by Christianity, and they probably have a big fucking axe to grind. Narrower choices but they're more likely to be pissed at the authority right out of the gate.

>>304453
>If anything what we could do is turn the tesla coils into temporary lightning rods with grounding poles and wire?

We'd need to modify their position and design would probably need bigger capacitors/surge protectors. I guess we'll have to wait for the DM to weigh in.

The next plagues will be Lice, Flies or angry wild animals, then diseased livestock before boils. I think lice should, provided we've been stockpiling the needed meds, be the best time to get the water going. Water also helps moderately with lice removal.

>>304480
We have a national preparedness set up about one or two years ago. We should have meds covered.

>>304475
Hmm. Good point on the Romans. What about the old Egyptian pantheon and the Aztec one. Or would getting Quetzalcoatl involved be an utterly horrible idea?

Quetzalcoatl would probably be a bad idea, especially since some Christian folk traditions equate him with Jesus. (Racism galore, huh?)

My suggestion: Pop culture paganism. Call upon the spirit of the goddess Usagi, Princess Serenity. Or the Force that dwells within all living things. Or... you get the idea.

>>304498

I'll do some reading. Egyptian ones I need to look into, Aztec could be interesting but, their mythologies are a bit messier worship wise due to:

A) The aztecs having a shittier understanding of how the world worked.

B) Human sacrifice, I'm not sure how cool you are with that. For reference, in 1487 the Aztecs apparently killed between 10,000 and 80,000 people in a mass sacrifice.

Not all Aztec gods may require it, I'll poke around and give a list of best of all candidates later.

>>304526
Well. The goal is to elevate humanity to near godhood itself. I'm just looking for a support team.

>>304534
Thanks. Still looking into solutions for the lesser plagues.

Outside of DIY culture I have very little.

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Found something usefull

Might be able to figure out how to kill em off.

If we do cloud seeding. Let's have Jeb do it.

>>303079

(I know, right?)

>>303072
>>304319
>>304381
>>304534

(Back! I sort of passed out, so let's sseee...)

>>304568

Nice. Keep the ship running and I'll keep reading, onto compiling Egyptian options. Aztecs look fairly no-go outside of Tezcatlipoca, but I don't like that idea because Quetzalcoatl kicks his ass mythologically and Quetzalcoatl is associated with Jesus.

>>304616
Hmmnn. I'll look into African tribal deity's.

>>304606
Welcome back and no worries.

>>304319
>>304335

While your base is leased to the Tesla Coil people, Jeb makes the trek to Timbuktu and hands the keys over to a group of cloud-seeding enthusiasts. Time is of the essence, so a number of charter airplanes (an industry that has a disproportionate amount of believers in it) are bought or leased, and modified to shoot simple solid fuel rockets with silver iodide, potassium iodide, and even dry ice as the "warhead".

The plan is simply to try all possible cloud seeding chemical combinations before the plague of hail comes; by the time Plague Six is underway, Jeb hopes to know what the right chemical to use is, so that the base's production facilities may be used to quickly make more rockets and disperse any large clouds before they have time to turn into thunderclouds.

Jeb is thoroughly excited; this emergency preparedness program is a microcosm of the space program, after all. Your progress in aerospace so far will greatly help.

# Since we're testing unguided rockets in Timbuktu, "Accidentally" hit Beverly's transmitter, too.

# Don't, let's focus.

The Tesla Coils should help with the lightning, too.

>>304351

The myth of Prometheus has survived in the archives; in addition to the myth, there is also a play, an unusually modern one for the time when it was written - as far as you can tell, since only one line of the primary text remains. Of note, it indicates that Hercules freeing Prometheus is at least deuterocanonical. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_the_Fire-Bringer )

# Encourage Promethean worship.

# Not yet.

>>304394

Subways take a long time to make and are vulnerable to earthquakes; however, a tunnel-boring machine has a number of other uses, and making a subway would justify its construction. The sonic jackhammers would allow you to build a deep subway inside the bedrock, much like the one that Moscow had - Moscow is all but abandoned, but the tunnels are still there.

>>304480

A Tesla coil is a great lightning attractor; up-armoring them lets you cover a large area. IRL, they aren't very good at blowing up Allied tanks, though.

>>304526

Calling on Pre-Rapture times as a golden age has its risks, but it's a good way to remind that Yahweh once KIDNAPPED EVERY CHILDREN IN THE WORLD. The Rapture happened in 1998, and the world was experiencing a period of peace at the time, what with the Cold War being over and a tech boom about to happen.

You have six cabals available for reactive disaster management, with four working on preparedness. Jeb is helping the cloud-seeding people. Ziggy is having entirely too much fun burninating frogs.

# Assign a Villain to help with the tesla coils.

# Keep them available.

>>304662

Sorry, edit:

# Encourage Promethean worship.

# Encourage people looking into pre-Christian religion in general.

# Encourage sort-of-tongue-in-cheek-but-maybe-not-really "worship" of figures like Princess Serenity or the Fist of the North Star.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Crm94eMuPE

>>304670
># Encourage people looking into pre-Christian religion in general.

My vote. I'll have a good candidate list compiled within an hour, I'd like to chill for a turn before we pull the trigger.

The rest of the votes I'll leave for Anti.

>>304662
Have quinn assist in- wait if we use her now will we get to use her to unveil MEC tech?

My concern with Prometheus on further reflection is that many of his motivations were about dicking the Olympians for what they did to the Titans. Given that the authority knocked off the Olympians (at least the roman ones) I worry that he won't be as pissed as, say, a Roman/Olympian God would be. So, please hold off on that, Anti.

Thanks!

>>304696
Agreed, good hunting.

Let's not hit beverlys transmitter. The more fire and brimstone she preaches to worse things go for her team.

Also a proposed counter to the Christians chants. "Let our people stay!"

I'll be considering sending Moses a letter.

(( I have an idea for the insects. We can have people use Wubbing modules and similar tech to knock them down and sweep them into a pile. Finally, have them disposed of as biological waste.))

Secular scholars believed that a naturalistic explanation for the Plagues involved an algal bloom in the Nile chasing off the frogs, causing them to die out in the desert and resulting in a vastly increased insect population due to a lack of predators.

In the Millennial Kingdom, all animals are vegetarian, and there simply isn't much of a food chain anymore; be as it may, a few days after most of the frogs are gone (a few conservation groups have kept specimens of each species, of course) the disposal areas for the frogs become thick with tiny black dots -- gnats. Great "ghost" swarms soon fly up and down the coasts and the Nile river; the deep desert is largely unaffected.

The critters are annoying, but harmless -- even the species of gnat that would ordinarily bite people or livestock no longer do. They "cover the people and animals of Misrayim", sticking near water reservoirs by instinct.

The gnats are big enough to start testing the Tesla coils with., but your biologists are worried that, if chased off, they may decide to migrate further inland and attack your crops instead -- those ARE vulnerable.

# Live with the damn things for now; it's an annoyance, and houses and businesses these days have windows, AC and screen doors anyway.

# Turn on the juice and let's kill them all before they can migrate anywhere!

# Accept the Central African Territory's horrid trade deal for canned food, just in case.

>>304717

# Sonic tech can definitely help with herding the bugs, but it also means either a massively increased police presence, or giving everyone a stun gun, or both. There's at least a risk of someone shooting the missionaries. You don't know what nonlethal attacks will do.

>>304698

MEC technology can be unveiled at any time, yes. So far, it's remarkable that it's been kept a secret.

>>304710

A media counteroffensive that exists primarily over the air and in letters can be arranged entirely by the government and your Markov synthesizer subsystems, and has basically no overhead.

>>304729
Have the farmers cover their crops In tarps. Then test the coils. Police will be given a "pest control" poncho and will regularly walk the crops and streets and wub for bugs. Civilians will be giving a low power disorientation setting only wub for home use. Crops should be safe with the tarp by way of greenhouse effect.

>>304729

The cities along the Nile are bearing the full brunt of the plague so far; the towns on the coast are less affected, and the small communities in the deep desert are affected least of all.

Of note, the nation's believers have mostly moved to the Atlantic coast, to be as far away from the cities as possible; there, the plagues have barely made a difference in daily life, to the point that even unbelievers are being largely left alone.

Cameron Williams covers one such town, comparing its peacefulness with the "lawlessness, chaos and disgust" of the cities -- note that Cameron assumes that the laws in Misrayim match those elsewhere, so he portrays things like in-the-open red light districts as rampant lawlessness that the police is too corrupt to stop, rather than as a legal arrangement that most people are happy with.

One of his segments focuses on an example of "a sad figure that has surfaced in Osaze's so-called renaissance, the backyard mad scientist" and shows a horribly mutilated interview to an independent researcher who is studying whether there's still a correlation between the amphibian bloom and the insects, or if it's a purely supernatural effect.

# Assign a few agents to copy his raw footage and show what he's not showing.

# Sabotage Mr. Cameron by damaging his truck or stealing his raw video.

# Ignore, stay focused on disaster response.

People these days are staying indoors more, so there's no shortage of video responses, but the believers are more or less ignoring the digital realm and acting like they own the airwaves... which they sort of do. The problem is that Misray media doesn't get distributed far out of the territory outside the TOL Packet, and Greater Jerusalem media is mostly tuned out except by people who enjoy arguing. There's very little cross-penetration.

Beverly's screeds have to be heard in at least some places, because she's also broadcasting on emergency-radio frequencies.

# Notify Beverly that even though her repeater is outside your borders by about fifty meters, she has to comply with emergency broadcast overrides?

# Give out some networking tech to the world at large, hoping that internet use will expand? This will probably help TOL's Project Number, but give you a chance to do spy work abroad without needing extra cabals.

>>304729
And in that case have quinn demonstrate setting up the coils to serve as lightning rods. This would likely encourage DIY and a public service project. The message would include a reminder to do this during boils season and return it to regular configuration after the hail and thunder stops.

>>304765
Ignore Cameron. Give the researcher a small grant to keep going.

Beverly has to comply with airways law or her broadcast will be shut down for interfering with the EBS.

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>>304762

The strong DIY culture you've fostered means that handing out low-powered, software-limited wubbing modules (mostly the earlier Marks of the technology) results in most self-respecting Misray geeks having a full-feature unit within a week. Before long, outdoor crops are patrolled by volunteers and all manner of little homemade robots, usually RC cars with basic sonar obstacle avoidance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7xZxMUqlK8

It doesn't take long for an extremely irate group of missionaries to storm into a police station and demand "terrible and swift retribution" for having had the windows of their RV vibrated off by a group of kids on bikes who figured out how to link their parents' wubbing modules for extra strength and then dispersed. "It was horrible! Insects everywhere! We lost our RV! And look! Kenny's BLEEDING!" One of the missionaries did indeed sustain a wound of medium severity when the RV crashed into a traffic light.

# Make a show of severity, to appease the missionaries and to get people to understand that these are civil defense tools.

# Treat it like any other instance of vandalism.

# Intentionally give the missionaries the runaround.

>>304772

The demo has to wait for a natural thunderstorm, and as luck would have it, one comes.

You scour your data banks to find out that yes, there is such a thing as "sexy beekeeper" costumes. Quinn's wearing one, and doing a little show from the top of a warehouse outside Amman. Gnats are abuzzing around her, herded by technicians with wubbers. People are curious, and soon a crowd forms. After an obligatory bit of stripping, Quinn retreats to a Faraday cage -- she doesn't strictly speaking need it, but she's trying to give a safety demo after all -- and pulses the Tesla coil to the tune of some ambient music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNdfhwDZTz8

The insects around the coil fall by the hundreds. Dancing to the impromptu Zeusaphone with precision, she goes off script; she's supposed to stay in the cage and flip the bird at the sky, but instead, she winks at the camcorders now pointed at her, says "Don't do this last one at home, kids!" and does a split on top of the Faraday cage instead. Predictably, a bolt of lightning comes down, and is harmlessly deviated onto the Tesla Coil.

The demo ends because the coil wasn't up-armored and is fried; Quinn simply finishes stripping, jumps down from the warehouse, lands like a cat, and takes a bow behind the crate that the Faraday cage came in with. Emerging in a tie and skimpy lab coat, she explains the fundamentals of lightning rod operation, kisses a giant reproduction of a US $100 dollar bill right on Ben Franklin's face, and finishes by saying that the civil defense tesla coils are going to be used to "discourage" lightning, rather than attract it, which they will only do in an emergency. She shows how to change settings on a demo home unit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod#Lightning_protection_system

>>304779

If Cameron Kirk Williams, Greatest Investigative Reporter Of All Time, is trying to get a rise out of you, he's failed. More likely, he's just not self-aware enough to care.

Beverly LaHaye indignantly responds that she wouldn't take orders from a false authority even if she WAS in Osaze's territory, much less since she isn't. She blithely says that if the country repented there would be no need of an EBS in the first place, so you should be grateful for her "help", if anything.

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Hephaestus/Vulcan (I'm going to just assume they can considered the same entity, especially in this case), seems like the best option.
He's the god of the forge and craft, worshipped in industrial centers and capable of producing automata, divine robots that could both forge and destroy. He didn't do anything too terrible to humanity and never without a cause which is rare as far as gods go.
His roman counterpart was unseated from worship by Christianty so he should be willing to build some axes to grind. Also has some limited control over earthquakes and like which is handy. Also built moving, aggressive guard statues and illusionary mechanisms in a fusion of magic and technology.
He was married to Venus, and though she isn't terribly useful she is a good fit for the sexually liberated culture we have.

Athena/Minerva is calm and slow to anger, represents courage, wisdom, inspiration, civilization, law and justice, strength, mathematics, arts, crafts, skill and most importantly war strategy. It's a bit of a mouthful so think of it as science/reason/wisdom, literature and the strategy behind war as opposed to the other war gods who focus on the smashing parts.

She's broad in domain and stable in temperament. I'd honestly consider them both with her as a follow up to the former. Some sources even say that the aforementioned assisted in her birth (though possibly tried to rape her years later).
At least she doesn't seem too pissed about that.

Prometheus as mentioned before, I think is a no-go. Too ambivalent and possibly a little sympathetic to the authority, he probably wouldn't like God if only because God won't like him, but he doesn't have enough stake in this and his powers are pretty nebulous.

Hermes is someone to consider later, but not as a starter.

Egyptian options are Bastet, Maat or Isis really. But I don't favor them to begin with. They have more local history which will help them get started, but Egyptian gods in general are very narrow in their domains and are a lot more like demi-gods in a lot of regards.
Their narratives are hard to make work too, similar to the Aztec gods. It's hard to sell creation myths about the underworld and sky when God has a water canopy up. Isis late into the new kingdom also eventually had some associations with Mary, mother of Jesus.

Really, either of the first two will do nicely.

Question for the DM: Are deities with powers expected to be more minor going to be easier to fish up?

>>304825

I suppose I should also add that Hephaestus produced metal of mythical quality for use in the things he forged for the Gods/his creations. Though it remains to be seen if that's just going to wind up being a big iron molecule.

I'll have to look into some feats for stuff that he produced.

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>>304816

As of right now, your country is weathering the plagues well; no food rationing has been necessary so far, although stores look a bit more bare than they used to and quite a few people had to take on second jobs looking after greenhouses and fields to avoid contamination.

The exhuberant renaissance vibe is mostly gone, but a grim determination to persist has replaced it; of course, the missionaries refer to this as the government having had their hears hardened against the gospels.

The "Let our people stay!" slogan takes hold, and it isn't long before people chant it back at missionaries... which in a few cases has resulted in the gnats swarming the chanters.

>>304825

To begin with, you make sure that that one really weird Baron Munchhausen movie with Robin Williams in it is widely available; Quinn and Ziggy are spotted in Vulcan and Venus cosplay at a few venues (At one venue, they're actually having Quinn be Vulcan and Ziggy be Venus; that's remarkably less pleasing to the eye overall, but it definitely looks funny).

>>304825
>>304852

According to current dogma, ALL pagan deities were really demons all along, and are now bound in Hell. However, just because a deity isn't available, it doesn't mean that its memeplex cannot help you... faith is something that can get starving peasants to cross a continent and make war on an empire, after all. Whether you risk having to fight another God after all this, who knows.

As it is, there are a few Pagan groups in Misrayim; since they don't want to be associated with Yahweh-worship, they've generally been model citizens.

Encouraging worship of Vulcan, Prometheus or the like can be done in a symbolic manner; with a large population, it's a guarantee that some people will take it seriously, at which point you can run tests on how their factory work looks compared to others.

# Start an experimental theology research program.

# Not just right now.

>>304868

If Anti isn't around then I feel confident on pulling the trigger on

># Start an experimental theology research program.

Encourage some worship of Vulcan/Venus and keep an eye on the results.

As for the atmosphere, do we have any record of the blitz era propaganda? Stiff upper lip seems pretty apt right now and comparing God to Nazis, even if just subtly by association, isn't too off the mark.

>>304868
I'd say not just yet. I'd need to include my own research and I don't think MJbHz is done either

>>304816
Treat it like Any other instance of vandalism and charge a fine. Also I guess it's time for the cops to reposes Beverly's repeater for interfering with public safety.

>>304889
Oh. In that case go for it. XD I thought you would want more time.

>>304889
And yes we have all the blitz era propaganda anyone could want and several audio video nerd MECs who would enjoy pointing out god literal genocided the Jews.

>>304894

There's more I could read, but I don't think we're going to get *too* much of a better fit and I think the current atmosphere will be a big boon. When things get bad, they have someone else to pray to. I'd like to capture the opportunity while it lasts.

It also helps that roman occupation of Egypt will have introduced Vulcan to the region historically, if briefly. The GreecoRoman pantheons even have some composite gods in common.

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Getting rid of the frogs and gnats, just out of sheer volume, has required relaxing recycling rules; so, naturally (with supernatural assistence according to your statistics, but not out of whole cloth) flies are next. Just as the gnats die out, the cities are swarmed with the flies that ate the organic matter in the dumping grounds, and are now looking for food where they can detect it.

These aren't harmful to your crops, but since they primarily eat detritus and dead skin (which is, apparently, kosher for animals; remora fish still exist for example), they end up swarming all over any but the smallest settlements, determined to enter houses and factories.

The larger insects are extremely annoying, more so than the gnats were, and are large enough to disrupt some factory processes that require great precision or optical distance feedback.

One problem you have is that while your food supply is in decent (but not great) shape, the variety of food that's available has gone down the dumps.

# We've got a lot of animal compost; make with the hydroponics.

# Accept Central Africa's horrid trade deal.

# Artificial flavoring so far hasn't worked as well as one would expect; encourage independentresearch.

# Tell people to hang tough; stiff upper lip!


(BRB, pizza)

>>304908
((Mm pizza))

Ok. Encouraging research and making hang tough propaganda can be done with words and small incentives for successful research. The question is will this take away from the hydroponics team if we try to do all three?

What do you think anon?

>>304889
I thought it was Vulcan and Athena?

>>304908
># We've got a lot of animal compost; make with the hydroponics.

Wait for ANTI, but I vote for this and getting the canal open to solve the increased water usage problem and preempt any fire fighting triggered shortages.

>>304927

Athena was my second (and later choice), Venus/Aphrodite is Vulcan's wife and therefore a possible package deal. The two together would probably work better than separately I'm guessing.

>The question is will this take away from the hydroponics team if we try to do all three?

I second this question.

>>304935
Ah. Should we try to draw attention from Ares and Venus's antics or make a comic show of it?

>>304942

Probably keep up with Quinn and Ziggy, don't make them into a joke, just light hearted. Encourage some research into them, hopefully some people in factories and such start dropping little prayers or such, then we can pull the stats from those and publish them to encourage widespread adoption once we have some data.

I'll try to check in every now and then but no promises, might be busy for a few hours.

Also, if you were every going to open the canals in case we need water, it's better to do it earlier in the plagues than later. Your call though.

>>304955
Good, I like this line of narrative were weaving. If all goes surprisingly well we could end up with an army waiting for us to retrieve out of hell. Not to mention an angry trio if we can get Athena to sing backup some day soon.

I think we could just get the community to figure out how to make the desalinators new blood cleaner. All they need is a little motive and competition. This would save us a cabal if we can figure out how to do it. I'm not to keen on finishing the canal cause it would just further piss of NJ with no benifit to us. We already have what we want.

(Take care!)

((and I just realized how well this synergize's with the Renaissance and determination theme.))

>>304924
>>304935

Anything you do will take a way from anything else - it's a balancing act. As it is, your cabals will encourage starting a project and then hand it off to locals.

>>304955
>>304968

Quietly, you encourage a bit of Greek revivalism; the result is that you end up with a few fat guys dressed as Spartans, but it'll go somewhere in the coming years, hopefully.

Greek Classicism was happening roughly at the end of Old Testament times, and arguably, most of what Jesus said was said by Socrates four hundred years early, and he too died for his beliefs.

This has the effect of getting people to engage the missionaries, who end up going back to Paul more often than to Jesus in their rebuttals.

A few people DO get zapped, usually after thoroughly winning an argument about Yahweh's benevolence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUMzYA3XSEc

# Keep MECbulances ready; it does mean that this person will need a new identity and move elsewhere.

# Ignore from a medical standpoint, but publicize the deaths as a way to shame the missionaries.

# Use MECbulances in the open.

>>304969

(Yes, it really does).

Eventually, the flies die out. These have no diseases associated with them, as such, and can be safely turned into fertilizer.

# Do so with a minimum of effort.

# Do so efficiently as part of the impromptu hydroponics program.

>>304968
>Good, I like this line of narrative were weaving. If all goes surprisingly well we could end up with an army waiting for us to retrieve out of hell. Not to mention an angry trio if we can get Athena to sing backup some day soon.

Yeah. My only concern is that Athena has a sort of iffy history with him. I'll poke around for other candidates, but at least she doesn't seem too furious in most myths with Vulcan for the whole attempted rape thing. She's still known as the virgin for a reason.

>I think we could just get the community to figure out how to make the desalinators new blood cleaner. All they need is a little motive and competition. This would save us a cabal if we can figure out how to do it. I'm not to keen on finishing the canal cause it would just further piss of NJ with no benifit to us. We already have what we want.

Maybe. I guess it leaves it as a backup plan if we really need. See if we can modify the desalinators while I'm away without too many cabals.

> ((and I just realized how well this synergize's with the Renaissance and determination theme.))

I agree, partly why I originally liked Prometheus and then settled on these. They were favorites during the renaissance.

>>304980

As the flies start dying out at the end of their life cycle, you have to consider the next plague - livestock deaths.

In Pharaonic times, those were probably a result of the insects in the first place; here, insects do not parasitize livestock, and what little livestock there is is kept for dairy purpose.

A mass die-off would further reduce food variety; people are grumbling about there being only so many ways to eat corn and leaves. At least it's the worst hardship they're dealing with...

Missionaries start giving out fresh veggies; most people indignantly refuse, but some of your poorer citizen at least agree to sit down for a lecture in return for a bit of difference in taste.

# Perform a preemptive cull.

# Protect the livestock.

# MEC some of the livestock using older MEC kits that would only be good in an emergency (but you've got one coming, see plague 10).

Cameron Williams has mostly run out of material, and people are getting better at trolling him, often by putting signs with QR codes on the building he uses as backgrounds.

# Give out some networking tech to the outside world.

# Ignore Cameron.

# Make a specific point of ignoring Cameron, encouraging people to not give him materials.

>>304982

Your cabals aren't actively doing research on these project -- there's just no time to. Instead, they encourage, promote, offer prizes, loan out a single researcher to a group that is already doing similar work, and the like.

You have two cabals on Tesla coils, which by now are a fixture on nearly every building in the cities, and on cloud seeders, which under Jeb's direction have been elevated from an art to a science.

# It's not just Yahweh that can make it rain: give a demo.

# Rain out a revival meeting in a village, just for trolling purposes; maybe credit one of the old gods.

# Keep it in reserve for "defusing" the hail before it happens.

I was hoping to save MEC technology's unveil for the boils. But... ok have the MEC ambulances ready. And have a new organ-donoresque stamp to indicate they are ok with a new potentially lifesaving medical experiment. This will allow them to be the "first MEC's" of Misrayim.

>>304992
Cull the infected livestock and MEC one or two of the cows.

Ignore Kirk. Let the trolling continue. And make a point of not giving him material.

Keep it in reserves for the hail.

Finally. Encourage research into the desalinators water cleaning. I guess the tesla coils are about done, when can cabals come off work on those?

>>305009
Non infected cow MEC only!!

Hydroponics on the fly's.

Encourage research into artificial flavors.

And did Beverly get her relay confiscated yet?

The following letter is sent to Moses in NJ.

"And behold. The great liberator uses the same tactics he used to free his people from a reign of cruelty, to try and coerce a people into submission and steal their freedom. You would take from us the right to fairly chose a leader who has provided and provides even in times of hardship, no matter how great nor minor. You would force control of an already privileged few in the region over the many who would be made less than second class? If the you from the world's history could see himself now he would be ashamed and horrified."

The letter is signed not by a leader, but by "the people of Misrayim"

>>305043

O-oh my. Uh, that's going to get some attention that's spooky. We'll see.

>>305045
Heheheheheheh. Just the right buttons to push and we see how alien a glorified really is.

>>304995

Saving the MEC tech reveal for the boils or for the slaughter of the firstborn has the advantages that it'd be difficult for anyone to counter it on short notice.

You keep MECbulances ready when debates happen, and the few people who do get zapped are quickly whisked away. Being as they did not volunteer for the treatment, most of them react poorly at having to choose between Hell and losing their sense of touch; a few end up needing to be restrained or kept in low-power mode.

Given that these are people who willingly risked death and damnation just to win an argument, however, some are very willing to work for you in covert capacity.

# Announce at least one success, thereby making the tech public.

# Keep them hidden and integrate them into your cabals.

>>305009

A large preemptive cull takes place, with select heads of livestock being put on quarantine ships bound to your California base.

There is an unusually long hiatus between the plagues, a couple of weeks rather than a few days; during it, some stray animals die of various ailments.

When the plague of livestock "officially" hits, the few control herds that you have kept simply drop dead of heart failure, with no visible reason.

The MEC treatment works surprisingly well against these; a simplified controller that is little more than a combination of brain pacemaker and heart pacemaker is quickly implemented.

# Announce this technology and hint that it may become available to humans.

# Simply showcase the survivors, with no explanation.

# Be happy with having scored a point.

Once again, the biggest hit on this plague is to food variety; now it's hard to get milk and butter. Morale is starting to sag a little -- people would probably fight the Armies of Light, but having their food supply restricted bite by bite is a bit too akin to death by a thousand cuts.

The newest fad is London Blitz propaganda art, with Hitler given a thick white beard.

>>304928

Opening the canal on short notice is a bit of an undertaking, and will distract from reactive disaster management. Confirm?

>>305049
Keep the MECs hidden while the cows are showcased and where the technology will be announced and hinted at being worked on to be made available for humans.

I still say nay on the canal. It's to much for to symbolic a gain with little actual gain.

>>305043
>>305045

Moses, or indeed anyone from Greater Jerusalem, offer no reply... which probably means you've right stumped them.

Instead, you get Tsion and Beverley going on screeds about how there's a big difference between the "proper authority" of Yahweh and the "improper authority" of the Pharaoh.

In the latest "Land of No" episode, Cameron Williams delivers a direct reply by stating that at the top, Right and Might converge, and that it was Right to slaughter the Canaanites including women and children. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHRmdCZO2bE I wish I was making this up). The rest of the episode is dedicated to showcasing Misrayim's believers eating steaming piles of vegetables drenched in butter while the best and brightest of your youth have to "endure long lines" for a plate of polenta.

(The food variety issue would be lessened if spicy food had been researched earlier using the opportunity in Western Europe).

Cameron's paean to Divine genocide on the air threatens to start a riot at his next stop, especially since the sentiment finds unanimous agreement amongst the Glorified. Most prominent Natural bloggers and pundits have the decency to be silent, with a few timidly saying that "this is now and that was then".

Your Sky Eyes in other territories show that the incidents of unrest and protests across the world have increased and so has TOL recruitment.

# Goad Cameron or Beverly on.

# They're doing fine without your help.

On Beverly's note, she claims that confiscating her radio station would be an act of war. The government of Central Africa notes that they consider her calls to repentance an emergency broadcast in and of itself, since "Osaze is clearly suffering under its heathen leadership".

An independent group has moved to Timbuktu and is building a jammer.

# Let them work.

# Provide technical help, but risk providing proof that this is an official operation.

# Tell them to keep it in reserve.

People getting bored of the same small choice of rations every day are moving over to liquid nourishment; you don't yet have a drunkenness problem, but it's a concern.

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>>305057

While the plague is still in effect (in that the next one has not yet started) you showcase a small group of fairly healthy looking cows in a Faraday cage; they are wearing a finely crafted light wooden yoke with a couple of tubes entering their body at the collarbone. Their lower legs are covered in plastic "socks" to prevent them from hurting themselves on sharp edges.

They're dairy cows ,and if the MEC process has affected their intelligence, well, it's more than a bit hard to tell.

Courtesy of a flash irradiator from Ziggy, people are invited to have a taste of milk almost straight from the source.

A few missionaries looking on end up having an argument amongst themselves, with half saying that it just means the plague is over, and half saying that this is an abomination against God and nature.

The front company doing the demo receives quiet emails about licensing the technology by unbeliever-led dairy business elsewhere in the world.

# This was a one-off show.

# Repeat it a few times.

>>305058
Ok. Let Beverly and Cameron keep it up, soon they will have united a world against them.

Provide the technical help to the jammer if it would cause a war to take her tower. Then switch up the EBS channel without her knowing and add an encryption to keep her from working around it.

Keep providing help with artificial flavoring.

On the dairy's. Repeat the showing a couple of times.

>>305057

Obviously, there are a lot of questions about revivification technology: when will it be ready for humans? does it hurt? how about brain damage?

Christian scientist Chaim Rozenweig breaks his silence to deliver a surprisingly level-headed explanation for the world at large: unlike cows, humans have souls, and the best thing that natural means have the ability to accomplish, if Yahweh would allow even that, is to create technological zombies, at best suited for being told to walk around on remote control or perform simple factory jobs.

Instead of asking people to repent, he praises the ingenuity of people of Misrayim, and says that they have made their point, but should consider that a victory now and an eternity in Hell is no victory at all; he exhorts your people to use their training in math and the sciences to, well, do the math.

You later hear that there was a big argument between Chaim and Tsion behind closed doors. Network survey shows that the rift between the Natural and the Glorified, though minuscule, is increasing; the Naturals are no longer simply trying to act as Glorified-like as possible anymore.

# Anyone feel like doing a zombie mob sort of thing?

# Well, that went pretty well.

# Give Internet technology out to the world, so that real discussions may happen over the wire where it's safe.

>>305065
((Before a decision is made. How many cabals are in reserve? I lost count and track.)

>>305064

On the third show near Sharm-el-Sheik (the resort is still open, although it's had a very bad year financially), one of the missionaries protesting this abomination of animal cruelty suddenly climbs on top of the Faraday cage. The man breaks out a handgun and drops the cattle with a series of precise headshots. "Go home and pray for forgiveness!" he says, "This is sick! Your mad rulers would do this to people! Even if it worked, what's to prevent them from installing Frankenstein controls in you!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CAwi-Y--fQ

He keeps ranting and shooting at the ground until he runs out of bullets; when he reloads, a number of citizens synchronize their wubbing modules and cause him to violently crap his pants, at which point he is subdued with relatively little violence.

In jail, he demands to be "deported" to Greater Jerusalem; so does Beverly.

# This man is dangerous; keep him locked up.

# This man is insane; put him in a padded room.

# This man is a criminal, but criminals have right; arrange a trial.

# This man is a missionary; send him to the Christian authorities.

Your MECs get a healthy reminder that they may be proof against lightning, tear gas, and center-of-mass shots, but a bullet to the brain will drop them just as it would drop anyone else, and there's no resurrection from that (And even if there was, they would indeed at best be zombies).

(I wonder how the MECs feel when they get called zombies or remote control bots, lol. I'd be right pissed in their shoes.)

>>305069

You have six cabals working on reacting to the plagues. One can be allocated to hydroponics, which will help morale but will remove them from being able to coordinate first response.

>>305073

(That was the Horde path; you'd start with 100% reanimation rate, but they would all be disposable zombies. Eventually, research would make sure that some and then most of them retain their humanity. Instead of Quinn, you'd have gotten a Herbert West type, your first fluke full reanimation).

>>305074
In total how many is that? Twelve? Eleven?

>>305073

Some MECs, not including Quinn for once, were lobbying for staging a zombie walk and/or a march for zombie rights, just for fun, until the crazy person shot the revived cows.

>>305076

You have 11 cabals.

Ordinarily, 2 are needed to maintain your systems (since you're coordinating more than 10) but only 1 is needed right now because you've aborted all international operations for this year.

Of the 10 cabals left, 2 are working on cloud-seeding, and 2 are working on making sure there's a Tesla coil in every home.

Of the 6 cabals left, 5 are in reserve and aiding with disaster response; 1 can either do that, or focus on hydroponics to restore some food variety.

>>305045

While Moses hasn't answered, this has created a small but perceptible rift between Natural believers, and the Glorified.

It has also caused commentators to go on record defending mass infanticide if it's done by God's orders.... which so far has benefited TOL recruitment more than your own, but at least your nominal parent organization is leaving you alone.

>>305072
Give him a fair trial.

And fingers crossed on a dice roll that someone calls Beverly out on not practicing what she preaches about women and being quiet.

Put a cabal on hydroponics.

Then see if anyone on the cusp of 99 wants to be a candidate for the MEC program. Fully documented on national television, as well as a documentary.

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>>305083

The trial would turn into a media circus whether you want or not. Greater Jerusalem representatives indicate that they consider missionaries to be diplomats, and demand that the Cyborg Cow Tipper be extradited. A few Christian NGOs even give the attacker medals for fighting animal cruelty.

Beverly ha been told that she doesn't practice what she preaches all her life, 1000+ years of it, and generally just ignores it -- she does keep to the letter of that, though, and invariably cedes the microphone to a Christian man on her show if he wants to make a point, even the rare times when it's opposite hers.

# Open courtroom. The Cyborg Cow Tipper has elected to refuse counsel and represent himself.

# The best way to defuse this is to treat it like a regular case of cattle russlin'.

Medical supplies logistics survey indicates that people are starting to report rashes and allergies in abnormal quantity; the sixth plague is coming.

>>305083

Hydroponic projects receive a good deal of state and "TOL" funding; at least, it's something to do with all the biomass that died recently. Veggies and margarine return to your store shelves, but at high prices, highlighting the difference between rich and poor in your nation, which Cameron latches on in his latest "Land of No" episode. When told that it's just capitalism, he retorts that elsewhere in the world capitalism is mediated by Jesus personally, and that makes all the difference. An even-handed reply by a longshoreman who just spent a day's wages on a stick of celery is "Yes, but according to you, so's genocide."

# Keep focusing on veggies, and we'll have to live with some income inequality.

# Focus on herbs; the idea is providing flavor, not nutrients. We'll have to live with a bit of resentment from the hydroponics industry, since not even high-tech farmers like to be told what to grow.

>>305083

There are a number of suitable candidates - when the pilot program is announced, many preachers warn that the Cow Tipper incident will repeat itself and "the blood will be on these mad scientists' hands". While they do not go to those extremes, many missionaries are willing to blockade the hospital in which the procedure will take place, to prevent it.

Oddly, Beverly eggs the medical personnel on, stating that she will engage in "righteous mockery" when the procedure inevitably fails.

# Pick a candidate, or better yet, a few (and give a description please). Your success rate is 70%.

# Cheat: have a recently revived existing MEC "die of unbelief" by noting that there was a discrepancy of a few weeks on his birth certificate, and pretend to perform the procedure on them.

# Cheat the other way: as above, make sure that the experimental procedure fails, or only succeeds partially, to start with. A couple of your MECs don't mind pretending to be zombies for a few weeks before they are turned off and given yet another identity.

The Plague of Boils is about to start.

>>305103
(Ummmm... please elaborate on what the second option on court entails?)

And let's get actual candidates. However many volunteer and can do it I say. (Possibly the minimum is lower than six I'm guessing)

And keep focus on veggies. Hopefully we can start feeding people right again.

>>305103
I'd say treat the missionary's blocking the hospital as a public safety hazard. Similar to real life, You cant block entry to a medical facility as it could result in the death of someone who needs medical help. Now if only real hospitals were like that.

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Rolled 20, 32, 2, 40, 28, 69 = 191 (6d100)

>>305111

(The second option is, let the media circus play itself out, and don't encourage it: the courtroom will not be open to the media, as is usually done, and the attacker will be charged with destruction of property and animal cruelty rather than terrorism)

>>305111

There's no shortage of volunteers; the problem is going to have to be performing the op. Your reanimation rate is 70%, and you plan to "cheat" by using the latest and greatest metabolic extension controller units that have been developed over almost 30 years now, rather than the initial feeble and bulky models. People expect to see ENIAC, you'll give them an Amiga.

# Build an Infiltrator MEC, focusing on retention of humanity.

# Build a Heavy MEC, focusing on HOLY CRAP, GIANT ROBOT BODY.

>>305111

The nascent hydroponic industry capitalizes on the opportunity, and entrepreneurs make out like bandits. Eventually, many people start a hydroponic business (a few people who already had one even switch from weed to veggies) and prices normalize, although you can still expect to spend a day's wage for a retail clerk for a portion of carrots.

Even the Christian commentators can find nothing to snark about on this one.

>>305113

The relevant laws are passed; good timing, too, because the allergies and rashes are getting to be more than a seasonal thing...

The Sixth Plague has begun; people wake up to find their skin red, itchy, and in some cases, with widespread sores. Oddly enough, this affects MECs as well; you've had to rebuild someone's face three times because they don't understand that scratching won't make it any better.

# Study what's the proximate cause; this will generate a cure, eventually, but you suspect that your media opponents will just say that the plague will have had run its course.

# Ask people to tough it out.

# Encourage using painkillers, which may result in an addiction problem.

>>305116

If you're going ahead with the MEC demo, how public is it?

>>305116
Damn those rolls.

Regular court case.

Highly publicized. Infiltrator.

Study the cause and cure.

Merciful stasis for those who freak out from hell pain.

I'd say behind closed doors (operation wise) infiltrator MECs. We don't need to show them exactly where to check for infiltrators, and we don't need to give them footage of surgeries to parade around on the spin master 9000.

Publicize the affair pretty heavily though.

Have we tried praying ourselves, yet? Would we be able to measure any kind of efficiency change in our hardware?

>>305136
Well we don't need to teach how to spot a MEC, just the making of one. You can't learn how to spot a car with an electric motor just cause we see one get built.

And do you mean praying to Vulcan or to humanity?

>>305124

The Cyber Cow Tipper "defends" himself by claiming to have rescued those cows from a Hellish existence and have upheld the natural order on God's green earth, and says that he had offered to buy the cows before his stunt -- that turns out to be the case, surprisingly, but of course the people doing the demo told him to take a hike at the time.

The prosecution focuses on the fact that this person shot into a crowd, and compared to that, a few dead cows - even experimental ones - are irrelevant. Even most Christians have little to argue about here, and think that at minimum, the Cow Tipper should've surrendered the gun and himself immediately. The man is eventually sentenced to five years in prison.

A surprisingly polite message from Greater Jerusalem offers extraditing the Cow Tipper, with the guarantee that he will remain in prison to the end of the passed sentence.

# Good deal, and he's out of your hair.

# They'd probably give him a platform.

>>305124
>>305136

Preparations for making an infiltrator-class MEC are completed; the actual procedure by now takes about half an hour, but since it's supposed to be an experiment, it will be documented and recorded like the first ones were. The only question now is whether to do this on or off camera.


>>305136

Your subsystems are able to self-monitor with great precision, so yes, you can measure it. The only interactions you've had with a supernatural being so far was during Colopatiron's gauntlet; the Angel was able to hear the sound waves you generated through your speakers, but not to assign meaning to them, although he would respond to one of your people repeating them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKjo9dldp2g

>>305142
I vote for camera. Only camra angles that won't reveal how to accurately spot a mec.

>>305142
>Your subsystems are able to self-monitor with great precision, so yes, you can measure it. The only interactions you've had with a supernatural being so far was during Colopatiron's gauntlet; the Angel was able to hear the sound waves you generated through your speakers, but not to assign meaning to them, although he would respond to one of your people repeating them.
>>305140

>And do you mean praying to Vulcan or to humanity?

Vulcan. Might be worth a try, attempt to pray for something somewhat measurable ourselves, then maybe some techs do it too after.

I'm fine with doing the procedure on camera if you want, anti.

>>305148
I think the supernatural is just incapable of direct interface with machines.

>>305150

Possibly, but it's a pretty simple way to test it. First, take readings of your baselines.

Second, have groups pray for a variety of things until you can find something that you can reliably measure, like clock speed efficiency or conductivity; something maybe metallurgical. Metal impurity counts when smelting or something?

Once you've found something like that, pray for it yourself and compare your results to the averages/techs results.

>>305151
Well. Guess we should try it some time soon. If we truly can get help from down under I would take it. Especially from the duo or trio we have spread out.

Rolled 51 (1d100)

>>305150
>>305148
>>305151

Prayer from you returns no measurable result, to any deity, for any thing.

Some of the electrical engineers who maintain your systems receive an odd procedure, to sincerely pray to Haephestus for a better yield in the latest batch of CPUs.

Ordinarily, when a batch of high-complexity microprocessors is made, there are always rejects; one transistor going bad among billions is sufficient to discard a CPU. The process is remarkably random.

>>305147
>>305136

The "experimental" unit is worn on the front of the chest, left shoulder, and back; it's actually a Mark VII Infiltrator MEC unit with a bunch of extra padding and some external readouts and plugs for telemetry systems. It would look very different than what you actually have deployed.

The question is still whether it'd be best to have open live feed cameras, or not.

>>305156
My money is on live feeds. Seems like we have a split of success and failure so it should be fine.

>>305156

(Imagine taking a modern smart watch and using it to build a cosplay Pip-Boy from Fallout; someone who isn't familiar with either would have a hard time telling what's necessary and what's a prop)

The CPU yield for this batch is slightly better than average.

# Encourage a simple ritual, maybe encode safety and checklist precautions into it.

# Let's not turn your sysadmins into the Adeptus Mechanicus, they have to know what they're doing.

>>305156

I'm fine with a live feed, a short cut to rough it up a bit, I guess? Just so they don't see useless padding or anything suspicious being tacked on, if that's a concern?

>Ordinarily, when a batch of high-complexity microprocessors is made, there are always rejects; one transistor going bad among billions is sufficient to discard a CPU. The process is remarkably random.

Are these our results, or are we still waiting?

>>305158

Can we explain to them what we think is going on? I'm all for making this a regular thing. Meaningful, quantifiable results make it easier to get the ball rolling on this and to encourage others to try it out.

>>305158
As fun as it sounds.
# Let's not turn your sysadmins into the Adeptus Mechanicus, they have to know what they're doing.

And the extra junk is to obviously disguise the easy identifiers for a MEC.

>>305160
Explain the project I say. That way it can be further tested.

>>305162

May as well run another experiment while we're at it. Let's explain to the same group of techs why we're doing this, then have them repeat and pray, sincerely, again.

See if we get somewhat repeatable results.

>>305165
Heh heh. Good idea. If it fails we know the system indeed works on belief and not direct supernatural enhancement

>>305167

From the chronicles linked before, it seems like belief can cause entities to exist, and those entities can do whatever you happen to expect them to be able to do. Obviously this takes a bunch of people to manage.

It also makes you question whether we could depower God by just killing all of his worshipers...

Rolled 98 (1d100)

>>305159

(For results, see post above)

>>305160
>>305162

You explain, and are happy (as an AI can be happy) to learn that a good half of them had figured out that this is what was going on. At least one God obviously exists; that's not an excuse to not do science to it.

>>305159
>>305157

Hospitals are beginning to be a bit overwhelmed by the Plague of Boils; people are given ointment and told to go home, or treated with cryotherapy in some cases. A supernatural cause isn't even certain: a problem is that water discipline requires washing less often and less thoroughly.

A few missionaries that attempt to physically prevent people hit by the skin disorders from getting treatment are summarily rounded up by their own colleagues, and put on a bus out of "Osaze"; most of these people still have human decency. There is, however, a case of a Glorified standing in front of a clinic's only access door and preventing people from entering or leaving, reminding everyone that they stand to be incinerated if they touch him.

# Use a remote controlled forklift with a pusher plate to push the yob off. You can steer it yourself.

# Build another door.

# Build another door, charge the guy with obstruction of medical personnel, and physically drop a cage on him.

The MEC procedure will be remembered for a long time. It looks like everything is going well, but (sorry, really shitty dice rolls from above) the patient wakes up screaming in pain and asking for water. The entire country has to watch as the medics give him water and eventually immerse him in an improvised water tank, only for the poor bastard to scream and flail that he's burning alive.

Keeping their compsure, the medical technicians strap the patient down and configure the controller for suspended animation, the equivalent to a medically induced coma.

"... as you can see, the procedure is nowhere near perfect. Nevertheless, what we have here is a nonbelieving human being alive past the cutoff age of one hundred."

Beverly LaHaye turns on her radio station full blast and sends out an altar call. The few seconds of someone clearly experiencing the pains of Hell are played over and over by Christian media. This works; quite a few of your unskilled citizens, and even half a dozen of your own people, convert and quit.

The media circus is mitigated by the fact that the new converts, immediately surrounded by cameras and microphones, have to say that other than this last we-ve-clearly-gone-too-far moment, the Mizrayim administration has been very benevolent, if ultimately misguided.

There are calls for sending a team of Glorified law enforcers to put the hospital under sequestration and try the medical team for crimes against humanity.

# Try again.

# Point out that it's a partial success and that at least one person is being spared the fires of Hell, at least as long as the life support system holds on.

>>305169

(OOC: That was one of the possible paths if players had decided to just make with the nukes already. Is Mad Max preferrable to Kingdom Come?)

>>305167

(Heh, now you roll well)

A number of tests performed on, and with, IT teams of various skill and informedness lets you create a statistical table. The effect is small but measurable, and seems to be connected to operators' belief. Creating a memeplex associated with it, or just informing the subjects that a memeplex exists, strenghtens the effect.)

(Narrative Causality tech tree unlocked, starts at 1/10, and good job because it was hidden)

(OOC note: Is it preferred if I ask and wait for a roll, or roll directly?)

# Try again.

And!

# Point out that it's a partial success and that at least one person is being spared the fires of Hell, at least as long as the life support system holds on.

We're going to try until it works, and if it doesn't, we will go back and find out how to make it work.

>>305169
(Nice job finding that tree. I think it's going to be very usefull if we can actually use it to retrieve souls from hell.

I can see it now. Ziggy overthrows luce and becomes the new hell king. XD, you know why I chose Ziggy it's his ideal starting ground for a kingdom!)

>>305177
I wanna say however you feel like handling it. But for some reason, I think I want to blame you for the rolls. Even though those rolls are totally a product of my luck.

>>305179

You already knows it works most of the time... of course, you weren't spared the demo effect.

The next call for volunteers returns a a lot less takers, and this time, the missionaries are joined by some of your own citizens in protest. Nevertheless, a volunteer is found and prepared. Surprisingly, Cameron wants to interview him/her/other.

# Allow this.

# You've been trying to ignore this guy so far, stick to that.

What to do with the Glorified protester at one of the free dermatology clinics?

# Use a remote controlled forklift with a pusher plate to push the yob off. You can steer it yourself.

# Build another door.

# Build another door, charge the guy with obstruction of medical personnel, and physically drop a cage on him. If he can't be moved, there will be a trial right where he stands.

>>305183

(Fair enough, I could use the karma. I've got an immigration hearing coming up, applying for a green card)

>>305170
>(For results, see post above)

Yeah, saw that. It was just a 30 second misstimed post.

> (OOC note: Is it preferred if I ask and wait for a roll, or roll directly?)

I prefer you rolling if only because it speeds replies along.

As for the MEC procedure, ouch. I guess we could try again with a larger batch and just hope we don't get shit rolls. I think we really need to pull a success out of this; thoughts from Anti?

I'd also like to press on with narrative causality as soon as the plagues are done; part of me questions whether rushing it could allow us to reduce the strength of the plagues though. Anti?

As for the glorified, I suspect a forklift isn't going to do all that much but give embarrassing ammunition to Christian media. Thoughts on throwing up a door and just stationing transport outside the clinic to ferry people elsewhere?

>>305186

The selections were made by finding a bunch of volunteers who are about to turn 100 and do not wish to convert, and then picking the healthiest person. The public demo involved only one person.

Ordinarily, your success rate is 70%, with about 10% not reanimating, and 20% suffering the same fate as the volunteer.

(You got a bunch of bad rolls, see above)

>>305185
(Ouch and a little TMI.)

Keep ignoring that guy.

# Build another door, charge the guy with obstruction of medical personnel, and physically drop a cage on him. If he can't be moved, there will be a trial right where he stands.

Just keep trying. Maybe have a few of our sysadmins and others pray to the god of crafts again for better luck.

>>305190
Besides a door is just a hole in a wall.

>>305188

# Try again.

# Point out that it's a partial success and that at least one person is being spared the fires of Hell, at least as long as the life support system holds on.

In for a pence...

# Build another door.

Failing that, and whilst it's being built, arrange transportation to different clinics for people that show up there.

>>305190
>Just keep trying. Maybe have a few of our sysadmins and others pray to the god of crafts again for better luck.

Agreed. Run a ritual (Off camera) the next time around.

>>305193
>>305192

The standoff with the Glorified protester is resolved by sending a construction crew to build a door. The protester stands in front of the spot they've picked and prevents them from working.... and, naturally, people use the original door, so he moves, so the construction workers resume their work.

The end result is a clinic with an extra access door and a hilarious sped-up video of "Crazy Glorft" set to the Benny Hill theme that, people being as they are about viral videos, ends up getting more views than the botched MEC operation. Eventually, the guy goes home.

>>305196
>>305193

The med-techs are encouraged to pray to the pagan deity of their choice before the next attempt, off camera of course. A couple are genuinely into it; most figures that it won't hurt and it will at least be useful as a mindfulness exercise.

Mr. Cameron insists so much about interviewing the next Volunteer, that eventually this person gets a restraining order against the Glorified journalist. It's not really enforceable, but the point comes across pretty well.

This time, the protesters around the hospital aren't all Christians; some of your citizens would like to avoid closing down a hospital for an experiment when there are people walking around with open sores, some feel that Resurrecting The Dead Is Going Too Far... and a surprising amount volunteer for doing security, because it's exactly the sort of thing they want to see on the posthuman front.

The operation is about to begin when a delegation of older doctors walks to the hospital's front door and demands to supervise the proceedings. They are all old men, save for two Glorified who have taken to dying their hair and beard white.

>>305212
By supervise i assume they mean stop the operation when they see something they don't like. Hmmnn. And it wouldn't do to stop them either. How to go about it?

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>>305212

Beverly LaHaye rails that keeping people out of Hell for 70 years won't make any difference compared to eternity, even if that's feasible; Chaim Rozenweigh agrees, although his video message is a lot more level-headed and he praises your doctors' results, even as he warns that true knowledge must start with God.

( Just for fun, here's how it went in +93, straight from Kingdom Come. Keep in mind that this is written by a bestselling author... then again, so was Breaking Dawn.

Rayford and his team were seeing a spiritual harvest in Osaze that had not been seen there in aeons. Everywhere they went, Rayford led the others in planting and building and developing technology. And when Tsion and Chaim and Bruce preached, hundreds of thousands of people turned back to the Lord and young people became believers.

The preachers pulled no punches. They warned that God would again strike their land if they chose to ignore him. But they also thrilled the masses with the promises of the Lord.

Tsion Ben-Judah was holding forth one cool evening, telling a crowd of thousands, “Thus says the Lord of Hosts: ‘For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.

“ ‘For behold, He who forms mountains, and creates the wind, who declares to man what his thought is, who treads the high places of the earth—the Lord God of hosts is His name.

“ ‘You shall fear the Lord your God and serve Him, and shall take oaths in His name. Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him, for He will abundantly pardon.’

“Now hear these words of the Most High God: ‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.

“ ‘For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven, and do not return there, but water the earth, and make it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper.’ ”

)

>>305214

# Allow hands-on supervision in the operating theatre - they'd have to jump down to interfere, which is a big no-no in the medical profession.

# This is being done open cameras anyway; put them in a side room with a good monitor, and that'll have to do.

The whole Prometheus and Ephestus thing is beginning to take hold, with the missionaries mocking the fact that both false gods are clearly Satan in disguise, and associated with the fire that Satan is in.

>>305215

I'm not terribly invested in either option, I'll leave it to Anti. I suppose as long as they don't do anything stupid, it should be fine; and if they do, it's casus belli.

If they fuck it up, we could always pull another MEC out and say that we did one in private just in case something crazy like this happened.

>>305215
>>305217
Ok. I got an idea, this

# This is being done open cameras anyway; put them in a side room with a good monitor, and that'll have to do.

And the room has a two-way intercom that can be shut off on both ends and ballistics glass that lets them see into the room.

>>305218
Outside of the door will be someone to jam it. This is in case the Christian doctors get rowdy and try something.

>>305215
>Prometheus

Did we encourage Prometheus? Or is that going on its own? Because that could be bad and I'd like to stick with Vulcan and company given that Prometheus is unlikely to play nice with the gang.

Then again, maybe if we believe he'll play nicely he will? We could just scrub the records of his bone to pick with the Olympians and have the narrative handle it. We really need to do more research there.

>>305217

The next Volunteer is a civil lawyer - a profession which has mostly gone extinct in the rest of the world, what with Solomonic justice preserving harmony and peace and favoring the most pious in the rare cases where it's a toss up.

>>305220

You are encouraging Haephestus and Aphrodite (Vulcan and Venus if you want to be a dirty imperialist Roman, what have the Romans ever done for us besides sanitation, education, a road system...) but this has result in general interest in classical literature, and the myth of Prometheus is easy to latch onto, especially since he specifically fought Zeus instead of working under him.

More research will definitely help.

>>305218


The operation begins. Implanting a metabolic extension controller takes maybe twenty minutes to an experienced team, but in this case, extra instruments have to be connected to provide the world with verifiable telemetry.


Ten minutes into it, some jackass crashes a car into the hospital's power supply. The backup generators work perfectly.

The learned church doctors are put in a safety room and, even as the volunteer goes under, pray for a last-minute conversion. Loudly. The primary surgeon asks them to quiet down or the volume will be cut to minimum.

Off hand, one of your doctors notes that the patient is a transgendered male, as evidenced by marks on the chest showing a mastectomy, bone structure, and DNA scan; outside, the Christians cry out "poor misguided girl", managing to alienate quite a few of the people who were on their side.

The operation proceeds with few problems; the volunteer was very close to age 100, and actually dies of unbelief on the operating table, some minutes after being sedated.

The protesters outside and the church doctors inside cry murder, and pray thanking God for His justice.

The patient is intubated and connected to an artificial blood pump; oxygen fills the lungs and blood resumes flooding. The surgeon now has a precious few minutes to disconnect the patient's pain receptors; unbeknownst to most everyone, your people have years of practice for doing this.

The eldest church doctor say that even if this poor mutilated woman comes back, she will be so brain damaged as to be an empty shell. Icily, the people performing the operation correct him on the pronouns.

A cut, a small gold plate, and two electrodes. The world holds its breath when EEG shows activity, and once more when the revivified brain starts sending signals to the heart, erratically enough that the controller has to clean them up, but reliably.

Beverly LaHaye cuts into the EBS to announce that the Temple Tribunal, presided by Solomon himself, is in session in Jerusalem about the matter, and "a final and authoritative decision can be expected soon".

The metabolic extension controller uses a simple neural network to "learn" the specifics of the particular brain it has been interfaced to, and sends signals into the heart and spine, causing the volunteer to spasm.

>>305231

That's... better.

>You are encouraging Haephestus and Aphrodite (Vulcan and Venus if you want to be a dirty imperialist Roman, what have the Romans ever done for us besides sanitation, education, a road system...) but this has result in general interest in classical literature, and the myth of Prometheus is easy to latch onto, especially since he specifically fought Zeus instead of working under him.

I suppose I should've inferred that to begin with. I guess we let it happen provided we jump on research once we're able. Prometheus' original mythos has been distorted to the point where he's basically friendly anyway, at least that's the modern take on him even if it's not strictly the original.

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>>305231

"Pah! Galvani did that in the 1800s" the church doctors scoff.

The external heart-lungs machine is disconnected; after an initial dip in blood pressure, the new MEC's heart picks up the slack and keeps running. Body temperature is on the low end of normal.

"We will now stimulate the hippothalamus to bring the patient to consciousness. Doctor Igorov, if you would?"

The anesthesiologist, a tall man who is a little hunched over to avoid banging into the operating theatre lights, reaches over a small switch surrounded by warning signs and trips it.

And that's when the two Glorified members of the delegation take action. The bulletproof glass had been installed on regular drywall; they manage to pop it off. One of the Glorified dives to the side, and the other walks up to the Volunteer, the medics diving for cover. Two of them try to get in the way, and are pushed off with great strength.

The intruder grabs the ECG, EKG and telemetry coming out wires coming out of the volunteer's forehead and chest, and yanks them all off.

"THIS IS BLASPHEMY! THIS IS MADNESS!" the Glorified man shouts as the MEC unit shuts down after its external power is cut; the Volunteer spasms and then stops moving, a constant beep filling the room and all the indicators going flat because they've been disconnected.

Six seconds later, the MEC unit's reset switch, which has been standard for years now, trips.

The Volunteer sits up with a gasp, as if waking up from a nightmare, and surveys the room with eyes like gimlets. Then, with a single movement, he points a thin finger at the intruder.

"This" the Volunteer says to the glorified Christian physician with a raspy voice "is the mother of all medical malpractice lawsuits. Find a lawyer and pray to your God that it's better than me."

The applause outside the hospital is loud enough that some of Vee's people have to discreetly use their wubbimg module in damping mode to prevent the ground floor windows from breaking.

Inside the hospital, a security squad has arrived; they can't hurt the Glorified without risk, but there seems to be no need to. Interestingly, the other Glorified seems to have disappeared.

The transmission closes with the doctors helping the volunteer up; he's wearing boxers, and when the medical gown drops and he raises his hands, someone has the presence of spirit to play the theme from Rocky.

>>305235

I'm sure we'll have fallout from this, but I think we've proven a very potent point.

((Also, thanks for running this. It's different and I appreciate the work you're putting in for the few of us)).

>>305235

Ordinarily, the patient would be put under again, to install the organometallic lightning rod and checking for systemic rejection, but in this case the biocompatibility tests are already done and installing the rod would be anticlimactic.

Instead, the Volunteer profusely thanks the members of the medical team, and walks over to where the bulletproof glass was, and likewise thanks the believing doctors. One of the Glorified seems to have disappeared from your sensors; the other is in a daze, and is led away by hospital security.

The question-and-answer session between the two medical teams is the most awkward fifteen minutes of television ever produced, highlights being lines like "We will have to determine Scripturally if your volunteer can be considered alive, given her situation" and "Given the damage your colleague has done to our equipment, we recommend that this determination be done by the patient yanking each and every one of you's beard."

The basic theory of the MEC procedure is shared on live TV. Quinn is a little jealous about the fact that now the volunteer will get all the attention, which causes much ribbing from her colleagues.


Outside the hospital... there may have been three years of drought and one of plague, there may be an epidemic of rashes spreading, but you haven't seen this kind of spontaneous street party since the height of the Renaissance. The missionaries see themselves deserted by all the other protesters, some idiot breaks a hydrant with a sledgehammer, and before long people are dancing in the street and using news van chasses as drums. Vee gets the idea and brings in the speaker trucks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqx01bwiM10


Beverly's attempts to jam the broadcast turn out to be her announcing that "in more important news, Solomon's Tribunal has reached a conclusion about today's disturbing events".

# Cut to it.

# Ignore.

# Nevermind the media circus, where did the second Glorified go?

>>305239

(Thank you! I'm going to use some of this stuff for a RPG campaign later on in life. )

>>305242

# Nevermind the media circus, where did the second Glorified go?

We can find out the news later, and regardless of the result, it's probably going to play in our favor at least in terms of public opinion.

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>>305248

You replay the video of the operation, of which there is much, and any other sensors within the hospital, which there are few to avoid interfering with medical equipment. The sudden disappearance, combined with a bit of extra noise on the few sonars that were in place, hint that the second Glorified person was either actually an Angel (unlikely) or had been cloaked by an Angel (more likely).

# Put the hospital in high alert and perform a full archival scan. This will disable the hospital for a few days, just when it's needed due to the boils (and the likely cases of overpartying that will result from the bacchanal outside).

# Let it be for now. The Volunteer will be kept in a secure wing and be given a lightning rod as soon as it's safe to do so, but the hospital should be allowed to get back to operation ASAP.

>>305219

Stationing security in place was a good idea; the Glorified man is led away. He identifies himself as Erik Walker, and turns out to have been a paramedic, not a degreed doctor, during the Tribulation; he got his M.D. in the Millennial Kingdom, where medicine has been mostly a sinecure.

Nobody caught the Volunteer's name, but from the crowd's chants, he decides to answer to "Rocky" for the time being; he's worried about "more crazy people" attacking his family, so the pseudonym will do.

Quinn is more than a bit jealous.

Ziggy is too busy doing a fire show in a cleared-out warehouse fitted with blackout curtains to care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEDEE2DfZMk

Jeb figures that some of the cloudbreaker rocket test articles can be thrown out to do some fireworks - it'll never look as good as it does on TV, what with the perpetual daylight, but it's something.

If the Plague of Boils is infective, having all these people out in the street isn't going to be a good thing, but your physicians figure that everyone's going to catch the bug regardless...

# Cut to the Tribunal of Solomon's pronouncement.

# Cut to Rocky.

# Cut to Erik.

# Cut to one of your Villains.

# Quickly negotiate a runtime exchange with TOL sysadmins, and perform a rapid video survey across the world.

>>305254

# Let it be for now. The Volunteer will be kept in a secure wing and be given a lightning rod as soon as it's safe to do so, but the hospital should be allowed to get back to operation ASAP.

# Cut to Rocky.

Then

# Cut to the Tribunal of Solomon's pronouncement.

Humanize things and then cut to the inevitably bad news as contrast.

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How're the water levels in the city doing?

Also, relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smhh1n3VEp8

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>>305262

You do the math and determine that trying to confront an Angel with no preparation, in the middle of a street party, stands too high a chance of causing critical collateral damage.

"Rocky" is in excellent spirits, and waves to the crowd a few times from the window of the hospital room he's been put in. He had been explained about the lack of tactile feedback.

A teleconference system is quickly put in place for Rocky, the medical team, and even the remainder of the believing medical team (who are told under no uncertain terms that they will stay in the hospital's sealed wing for a few days for their own safety) to answer questions from all over the world. Rocky says that he'll have to adjust, he's very grateful to the medical team that performed the implants, and "understands their believing colleagues' concern and is grateful for it, misguided as it was."

To your surprise, he announces that he will not press charges against Erik if the Glorified man agrees to an old fashioned boxing match, fifteen rounds. Rocky is more into swimming and MMA, but has had problems competing in either because, as a female-to-male-transsexual, he has to take testosterone which makes him ineligible for a lot of competitions, as it's a doping agent

He makes a passable Stallone impression in challenging the Glorified man. When asked about the very real danger of ending up burned to a cinder, he says that it's why he's issuing a challenge to a fair, legal and consensual fight. He actually quotes the actor, rather than the fictional boxer: "Once in one’s life, for one mortal moment, one must make a grab for immortality; if not, one has not lived."

Quinn is -definitely- jealous now, but is mollified by the reassurance that her place in the history books is assured, if there's going to be a history at all. She ponders about volunteering to be Rocky's trainer.

# Let him recover, and let's install that lightning rod just in case.

# "You've become part of a bigger universe. You just don't know it yet." Introduce Rocly to other MECs.

>>305271

(Spot on picture for Quinn!)

Water levels are a little low; given the boils and rashes, people are told to wash more often. The one fire hydrant that got blown up is dealt with fairly quickly, to some disappointment by the people who were holding an impromptu wet t-shirt contest; given the circumstance it'd be silly to try to find who did it.

The various groups of believers around the hospital are a skipped heartbeat from being in shock (hey, at least they're next to a hospital); fearing violence, a security contingent cordons them off, but there's no need -- at worst they get pelted with used socks. They are led away from the street party meekly and without problems.

>>305262

You relinquish the video feed to Mrs. LaHaye, who cuts to a visual of the Temple; a man in elaborate rabbinical garb solemnly walks to a podium and begins by saying grace.

>>305276

># Let him recover, and let's install that lightning rod just in case.

>>305280

Rocky is quickly explained about the lightning rod, and put under again, this time with the cameras off. The learned church doctors are not informed about the procedure; despite centuries of intellectual stagnation, they are pouring over the basic datasheet they've been given about the metabolic extension controller with genuine enthusiasm.

>>305284 New thread!