Comic 1158 - Turn Ilworth's power back on
Posted on 2nd Jan 2019, 10:04 PM
in Like a Bullet from Behind
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Author Notes:
You consider sending blobs to investigate the new bunkers--however, as you're still recovering, you're not sure even that much of a drain is a good idea.
You decide to get Ilworth's power up and running. You send a message to Caius to gather up everyone from Mars, as they may be able to help get everything going. You also ask him to bring some tools to work on the wires and such with.
Fuse and Dr. Finch begin figuring out what all's necessary; most of the station was for generating power, not necessarily for redistributing it. The sections that route power to the city are the only components that need to function, as the power proper will be siphoned from the bunker system.
You also confirm that--past the webs in the main hallway, which were brought down during your group's storming of the station to 'save you'--is another door, with a staircase leading to the bottom of the chamber once occupied by the silkworm.
It takes the rest of the day to get everything back up and running--even just focusing on the most important parts, the damage that the silkworm did was... prolific.
While everyone works on repairing wires, sealing pipes, and just determining what all goes where, you ask Caius about how he stays so determined.
"I dunno," he says with a bit of a shrug and a smile. "I jus' don't think about it, I guess? I know stuff's dangerous, I just... kinda blow off how dangerous, and go at it like I'd go at anything else. I don't even like knowin' what tha odds are half tha time, I just dive in there."
You also stop and ask Pierce about repairing the mind, after... uh... having part of your ghost eaten.
"That..." he pauses, "is slightly outside my expertise, I'm afraid. Most of my experience with astral projection is... theoretical. I haven't done as much practicing as I have reading, and I've certainly never dealt with losing any significant portion of my astral form. If... I had to guess, perhaps centering yourself, collecting your thoughts, and refocusing on who you are could help."
You also ask Pierce about the potential of singing as a form of magic.
"There is precedent," Pierce states. "Not explicitly in the books I've read, but I've seen it referenced, and a few of the other cultists spoke of ritual work along those lines. More personal rituals often involve... aligning oneself with the mindset of the invoked, if that makes sense--getting on their wavelength, becoming closer, briefly, to what they are. It makes it easier to cooperate with the entity when one is seeing things from their perspective, and appropriate music often aids that. The same idea holds true for rituals that demand multiple casters--song can get everyone... well, synced up, and on the same page."
He thinks about it for a moment before speaking up again. "There's also--supposedly--songs that, themselves, have arcane properties, though that may just be superstition. Even among those that practice actual magic, there's many urban legends about what gods exist, and what spells can actually accomplish. At the very least, music has the potential for bringing people together on a deep, spiritual level."
You help out some with the repairs--what you can manage to do yourself, anyway, with little mechanical know-how outside of syncing--before getting out of the way and taking Pierce's advice. You do some meditating, focusing on collecting yourself, realigning your idea of who you are, and... basically putting yourself back together.
You're not sure how long you're out for, but you're snapped out of it when the building suddenly shakes. You do feel less drained than you did before, though, at the very least.
You make your way to the massive chamber where the worm was. The huge machine at its core is now active--parts of it spinning, sparks sometimes leaping off the metal surface.
"We did it," Fuse says, sounding equal parts relieved and exhausted.
"Yes we did," agrees Dr. Finch. "There should be functioning power throughout Ilworth now... well, not accounting for any wiring in the individual homes that may have worn down over the years--"
"Don't," Fuse mutters, shaking his head and giving a weary smile. "We'll... worry about that shit later. There's gotta be a house somewhere in town that's still got everything working, right?"
Michelle speaks up. "I'll help the Mars gang look at some places, figure out what's livable... you guys go get some rest. It's gotta be night time back home by now."
Fuse and Dr. Finch nod, and start making their way out of the power station.
Michelle shakes her head, watching the giant machine do its thing. There's a handful of new cables sticking out of it, running into the walls and back toward the bunker. "Weird to think we got our own town now. I mean, like... we had our own town, but now it can do town stuff."
We usually form the red into something and then pull it out - blood, meat, whatever. But what if we opened up a portal and pulled out the red as is? The concept of the formless, infinite red, just draw it out of a portal to where we're standing.
Is it possible? If it works - are we in complete control of the red-space occupying real space?
This has the potential to be stupid dangerous to the laws of physics and fabric of reality if we were to do it, normally, but... the Nil-Carpeter base seems to exist in it's own extra-dimensional space - I have a feeling that what happens there is contained there.
It may be the sort of thing we run past the Tradesmen first in the info ritual, just to ask if there are potential disastrous consequences from doing such a thing.
and +1ing the Tradesmen question first, though they may not know, so we should also ask BigRed
Make no mistake, I very much do NOT advocate trying this in our normal, home dimension. There are too many things it could screw up really badly.
What I'm concerned with is that we straight up spent a whole other day fixing the power plant and we've made small progress with astral stuff, at this point I think we may want to hit up Bunker X before we finally start moving against Nilpenter
Also if we wanna go down the determination rabbit whole we could try a force-sync with Caius if he's ok with that
And that was a long time ago.
Also probably consider getting a move on to attack Nilpenter. They could be done on the next couple of days.
and yes i used that term since lab meat sounds racist
I also believe we should let her bring it up on her own, when she wants to talk about it.
That said - whilst we're in the middle of trying to prep for a doomsday event is probably not a good time to add it into the mix. Maybe after.
first and most importantly, my quiet crusade against shipping.Between the constant life and death scenarios, the myriad number of other pressing concerns, and oodles of self discovery, there's the current leader-follower dynamic skewing things as well. As much as things may be going in that direction, it would be wise for all parties involved to wait until a new, non life threatening emotional normal is reached before further exploration into that territory.Is Mine able to control the newborn baby or not?
Now that they are out of the lower tiers is the newborn a mutant or not?
http://bloodismine.thecomicseries.com/comics/1133/
We may also want to briefly stop by the first residents of Illworth to see how they're getting along.
It is another country, but hopefully they’ll have some advice
As for a non-immediately actionable suggestion, I would be interested in coming back to the power plant in the future.
Getting the place running was good work on our team's part, but there is a difference between jury-rigging and a full repair.
(At the very least, cleaning the corrosion where we can and moving any remaining webbing to storage would be good.)
We're going to have to approach dealing with Nilpenter carefully as it has already expressed interest in taking over us and our red to further its own aims, so whatever we use for there From the red had better have a self-destruct capability in place lest they find a back door into their goal.
Tomorrow we need to prepare to take on Creepenter. I am really *really* hoping we can come up with SOME way of allowing our allies to help us attack Carpenter without putting themselves in too much danger-- if at all possible, we need to at least consider if we'll be able to get at least one remote control biomech set up.
If not, we're going to have to focus on making it so Jane is powerful enough that our allies won't be horribly murderkilled, and we may need to admit that we're gonna have to go in alone at least initially.
Things we can practice tomorrow after getting some good rest today:
1) Try astral projecting without doing the ritual. Incident F may have strengthened our imprint to the point that we can do this naturally now.
2) Practice changing our astral form. We can do this while astral projecting, and/or while force-syncing. First change our clothes as we had Red do, then try pulling items out of our pockets like syringes and bandages, then try summoning whole separate items like a chair. Someone suggested playing dress-up with the ghost girls in the Discord-- this could actually be a fun way to get in a bit of practice with this, if we join them in ghost form. See if we can dress up in a ghostly magical girl outfit, and summon a ghostly tea set.
3) Try changing the environment during a force sync. We know that changes we make during a force sync don't actually affect the person-- we have to change people's minds consciously, and can't change their minds subconsciously. So, if we can manage to alter the environment we find ourselves in during a force sync, that would be a good way of practicing extending our astral willpower against opposition (since the environment would naturally want to stay the way it is).
We also should get in touch with Jury and ask if she has any advice. She can't help us with Carpenter directly, perhaps, but she should at least be able to advise us on what we should be thinking about when it comes to breaking into a fortified location to extract a very powerful criminal from it.
Would Jury just maybe be able to label it as 'Yeah, a powerful alien, okay' and move on? Hmmm.
1. Upgrade Bunker A bunk beds, at least the futons. I do not think our groups wants to should move to the town just yet, not with things still needed to be done.
2. I do not know if came up before, but check what happened to Mine's eye back before Chapter 1? We really do not want Carpenter ,Thale or whoever keeping their hands on it. May be clear up blood on Mine's bed as well?