Plot, version 2
OKAY SO
I have a somewhat better gauge of who is interested in this, so I'm updating the post with 1. a more concrete timeline! And 2. Some other stuff I'm going to need. This is all drafty and I'd like very much to work with people to make this epic and not a total clusterfuck.
So.
the TOTAL time frame for this event is TWO WEEKS.
PART 1: BUILDUP - Timeline - appx three days of in-game time
SHODAN will be convincing Sarah Connor that “Janice Polito” needs to get into Hypatia's primary data loop (System Shock speak for her main processor). Sarah will, presumably, find a spot in one of the residential zones that she can get “Polito” too. Upon arriving, SHODAN will hook herself into that and upload herself into the system, spreading like a virus.
Since I get the impression that Hypatia has redundant systems, ridiculous security, and other fun security measures, SHODAN will only infect ONE RESIDENTIAL ZONE (or possibly even only one sector of one zone). That said, she will gain control over everything in it - automated systems, holography, lighting, the works. I leave it up to the mods to decide what zone you want to give me.
Upon integrating herself into the system, she'll do the following things:
1. Invite the other AI in. This means any AI that signs up for these shenanigans that she actually likes. So... all the crazy ones. Each AI will be allowed to take a part of the district as their own personal playground. They can also pick out administrative duties they want.
2. Lock down the zone so nobody gets in or out without her permission. She'll rewire the teleporters so that you cannot get into or out of the zone without a personal authorization from one of the AI that she's put in charge. She'll also take over the security systems to set up patrols of both robots and holograms on the outer perimeter. Characters can obviously still break in, but it won't be easy! Furthermore, if you die within the area, you will be ress'd outside the zone, regardless of which teleporters you've used (this applies even if you are a victim)
3. Re-skin her own personal section of the station using holography to look a bit more like the inside of her home
4. The other AI will be allowed to manage their own domains as they see fit, and to use the systems inside however they please.
PART 2 - HIDEOUSNESS BEGINS - Four days of in-game time
SHODAN will begin the process of developing a lab. With station drones at her disposal, this probably won't take her very long. She'll be needing a lot of equipment for both robotics and advanced cloning / gene splicing.
She'll then be trying to gather test subjects. A few people already volunteered:
Sollux Captor: So in on this project you don't even
Grid: Pretty sure Vic gave me the OK
Red and Virgil: also pretty sure Mouse gave me the OK?
Vriska Serket: pretty sure
Terezi Pyrope: pretty sure
There will be an official signup post once this is approved for people to volunteer. I imagine there will be a LOT. The other AI will also be running their own fun experiments, so they, too, will want to come up with ideas for what they want to do and ask for volunteers.
Once SHODAN has test subjects, she'll be quickly trying to engineer a servant race. Her plan is as follows:
1. Create a race of mutant cyborg hybrids to serve her
2. Use these to overtake the rest of the station
3. Once she has the station, figure out some way to use the Singularity and/or Sacrosanct's terraforming capabilities to become a god. Somehow.
She will only get as far as Phase 1, because player characters (and possibly NPCs) will stop her.
The kidnappees will serve as SHODAN's test subjects. Horrible, horrible things will be done to them. You can look at the mutant-cyborg list for some ideas, but I'm also welcome to suggestions and if you want your character to have a specific horrible thing happen to them, let me know. :D
Other AI will create their own experiments / games / terrible things at their discretion. For example, I imagine GlaDOS will be creating a death trap obstacle course so she can run people around with the Hand Held Portal Device. You can sign up for those instead if you don't want hideous mutations and just want trauma.
Now, mutant-cyborg monstrosities! YAY.
Parasite Worms: - Her first creations will be worm-like cyborg creatures based on a fusion of a number of different DNA sets, but in this case primarily Xenomorph, Troll, and human DNA, symbiotic with Borg-like nanites. The worms are parasites that attach to a host and begin a slow mutation. The first changes are physical, giving increased strength, speed, regenerative capabilities, as well as hideous tumors, a change in blood color (your choice as to what delightful flavor you get!), graying of the skin, and orange horn growths. The mutation takes about a day to progress. After the first day, the nanites take over, overriding free will and connecting the victim to a hive mind that eventually links back to SHODAN. Characters can overcome that part with the help of a VERY talented hacker / goodguy AI, their own innate psychic powers (if they have any), or sheer force of will... though the latter two are quite unreliable. Even with the nanites overriden, the victim will be in extreme pain from the mutations, possibly to the point of madness.
Parasite worms are two feet long and have about the same body strength as your average constrictor snake. They can jump three feet in the air from a standstill and sport a pair of powerful, hagfish-like jaws. They attack by biting and burrowing quickly into the body, whereupon they wrap around the spine of the victim.
ALL the monsters here are on the same nanite network.
Shamblers: - This is the basic mutant, what you get when you have creature + parasite worm. SHODAN will be making a few of these as shambler drones just by cloning people and shoving parasites in them. There will be LOTS of these, but they will be VERY STUPID as they'll be controlled entirely by their nanite clouds and thus, well, about as smart as your printer. Not even your phone. Your printer. Basically, big, fast, weird looking zombies.
If a Shambler is created from a PC, they retain all memories, abilities, and talents of the individual, but are 1. insane, 2. in monstrous pain and 3. brainwashed to think that SHODAN is the mother-goddess and they must server her.
Alterniamorphs - These are Alien/Troll hybrids. They look mostly like xenomorphs, but with red-orange bone growths and highlights. They no longer have acid-colored blood, instead sporting random colored blood that's mostly just sticky and gross; otherwise, they have all the abilities of xenomorphs. They spit parasite worms.
Alterniahuggers - Facehugger / Troll hybrids. These are just like facehuggers, except they produce Alterniamorphs rather than standard xenomorphs. Yaaay?
Ogres - Ten foot tall gray horned tumorous monstrosities, these are SHODAN's shock troops. They are big and ugly and nasty, but not terribly smart. These are created by fusing multiple shamblers together using nanites. If this fate befalls a PC, they are considered dead for purposes of getting revived.
Neural Reavers - These will be floating gas bags with brains and tentacles suspended from them. They are capable of creating holographic projections and psionic attacks. The brains themselves are extremely weak, but their attacks are quite powerful, and they use holograms to disguise their position. Unlike the other mutants, these all have yellow blood, and a collection of twelve eyes - six red, six blue.
Neural Reavers are created when characters with psionics are implanted with yellow parasite worms. Note that yellow worms (again, identifiable by their yellow color and red and blue eyes) specifically seek out psionic characters!
PART 3 - BIG DAMN HEROES - 1 week of in-game time.
Eventually, somebody will decide that enough is enough. From the outside, I imagine a crack team of a Halolz/Homestuck/Mass Effect/TRON alliance will be forged and they will bust the fuck in like the space marines/superpowered thireen year olds/computer programs??? they are, guns blazing for the win. It will be like System Shock or your other favorite shooter game with zombies, only even better! People can sign up for this too and it'll be awesome.
From the inside, maybe somebody breaks out of GlaDOS happy fun time games, or escapes Prism's laz0rz, or throws off SHODAN's conditioning and starts a revolution from the inside. They can meet up with the outside team halfway in and start to wreck shit.
What happens to the other AI guys is up to them. I would like it VERY MUCH if SHODAN were somehow killed, contained, or otherwise taken the fuck down.
My intent is for this to be in an epic boss battle. In the games themselves, this usually takes place in cyberspace; here, I still have to come up with something fun, but it'll likely involve people fighting off guard zombies while slick hacker types sit at terminals and start deleting her files while she screams curses at them.
Once she's disabled, control will go right back over to Hypatia.
OH GOD MY CHARACTER GOT MUTATED WAT DO
You have a few options:
OPTION ONE: A CURE!
1. Get a high level hacker to hack your nanites so you are no longer brainwashed by SHODAN. Now you are merely mutated and in pain!
2. Use magical future space station medicine to remove the worst of your mutation and take the worm out of your spine.
3. IF THE MODS APPROVE, THERE CAN BE SOME PERMANENT SIDE EFFECTS FROM THIS, either from the Xenomorph side, the Troll side, or the Cyborg side, or all three. Anything (even if it's terribly debilitating) must be mod approved. Examples include weirdly colored blood that clots quickly, mildly acidic blood, weird metal growths, increased healing speed, yellow eyes, horns, a creepy secondary mouth, voices in your head, stockholm syndrome for SHODAN, whatever.
OPTION TWO: DIE.
If you die and you haven't teleported since you got your horrifying mutation, you'll respawn from your last imprint - mutation free, with no memories and no problems. This is probably the easier solution.
OPTION THREE: DON'T GET MUTATED
All of this stuff is opt-in anyway, so if you don't want your character to be a horrifying monstrosity, don't sign them up to be a horrifying monstrosity.
Holy shit, these logs are taking forever.
Ideally, I'd like to figure out everything in advance. For example: who takes down SHODAN in the end? What do they do with/to her? Who gets mutated, and how? And so on. That way, after the two weeks are up, we can definitively go "Everything is normal now, here's what happened!" while we wait for logs to finish up.
QUESTIONS. COMMENTS. PRELIMINARY PLANNING. SUGGESTIONS. GO GO GO.
Still pending actual approval.
I have a somewhat better gauge of who is interested in this, so I'm updating the post with 1. a more concrete timeline! And 2. Some other stuff I'm going to need. This is all drafty and I'd like very much to work with people to make this epic and not a total clusterfuck.
So.
the TOTAL time frame for this event is TWO WEEKS.
PART 1: BUILDUP - Timeline - appx three days of in-game time
SHODAN will be convincing Sarah Connor that “Janice Polito” needs to get into Hypatia's primary data loop (System Shock speak for her main processor). Sarah will, presumably, find a spot in one of the residential zones that she can get “Polito” too. Upon arriving, SHODAN will hook herself into that and upload herself into the system, spreading like a virus.
Since I get the impression that Hypatia has redundant systems, ridiculous security, and other fun security measures, SHODAN will only infect ONE RESIDENTIAL ZONE (or possibly even only one sector of one zone). That said, she will gain control over everything in it - automated systems, holography, lighting, the works. I leave it up to the mods to decide what zone you want to give me.
Upon integrating herself into the system, she'll do the following things:
1. Invite the other AI in. This means any AI that signs up for these shenanigans that she actually likes. So... all the crazy ones. Each AI will be allowed to take a part of the district as their own personal playground. They can also pick out administrative duties they want.
2. Lock down the zone so nobody gets in or out without her permission. She'll rewire the teleporters so that you cannot get into or out of the zone without a personal authorization from one of the AI that she's put in charge. She'll also take over the security systems to set up patrols of both robots and holograms on the outer perimeter. Characters can obviously still break in, but it won't be easy! Furthermore, if you die within the area, you will be ress'd outside the zone, regardless of which teleporters you've used (this applies even if you are a victim)
3. Re-skin her own personal section of the station using holography to look a bit more like the inside of her home
4. The other AI will be allowed to manage their own domains as they see fit, and to use the systems inside however they please.
PART 2 - HIDEOUSNESS BEGINS - Four days of in-game time
SHODAN will begin the process of developing a lab. With station drones at her disposal, this probably won't take her very long. She'll be needing a lot of equipment for both robotics and advanced cloning / gene splicing.
She'll then be trying to gather test subjects. A few people already volunteered:
Sollux Captor: So in on this project you don't even
Grid: Pretty sure Vic gave me the OK
Red and Virgil: also pretty sure Mouse gave me the OK?
Vriska Serket: pretty sure
Terezi Pyrope: pretty sure
There will be an official signup post once this is approved for people to volunteer. I imagine there will be a LOT. The other AI will also be running their own fun experiments, so they, too, will want to come up with ideas for what they want to do and ask for volunteers.
Once SHODAN has test subjects, she'll be quickly trying to engineer a servant race. Her plan is as follows:
1. Create a race of mutant cyborg hybrids to serve her
2. Use these to overtake the rest of the station
3. Once she has the station, figure out some way to use the Singularity and/or Sacrosanct's terraforming capabilities to become a god. Somehow.
She will only get as far as Phase 1, because player characters (and possibly NPCs) will stop her.
The kidnappees will serve as SHODAN's test subjects. Horrible, horrible things will be done to them. You can look at the mutant-cyborg list for some ideas, but I'm also welcome to suggestions and if you want your character to have a specific horrible thing happen to them, let me know. :D
Other AI will create their own experiments / games / terrible things at their discretion. For example, I imagine GlaDOS will be creating a death trap obstacle course so she can run people around with the Hand Held Portal Device. You can sign up for those instead if you don't want hideous mutations and just want trauma.
Now, mutant-cyborg monstrosities! YAY.
Parasite Worms: - Her first creations will be worm-like cyborg creatures based on a fusion of a number of different DNA sets, but in this case primarily Xenomorph, Troll, and human DNA, symbiotic with Borg-like nanites. The worms are parasites that attach to a host and begin a slow mutation. The first changes are physical, giving increased strength, speed, regenerative capabilities, as well as hideous tumors, a change in blood color (your choice as to what delightful flavor you get!), graying of the skin, and orange horn growths. The mutation takes about a day to progress. After the first day, the nanites take over, overriding free will and connecting the victim to a hive mind that eventually links back to SHODAN. Characters can overcome that part with the help of a VERY talented hacker / goodguy AI, their own innate psychic powers (if they have any), or sheer force of will... though the latter two are quite unreliable. Even with the nanites overriden, the victim will be in extreme pain from the mutations, possibly to the point of madness.
Parasite worms are two feet long and have about the same body strength as your average constrictor snake. They can jump three feet in the air from a standstill and sport a pair of powerful, hagfish-like jaws. They attack by biting and burrowing quickly into the body, whereupon they wrap around the spine of the victim.
ALL the monsters here are on the same nanite network.
Shamblers: - This is the basic mutant, what you get when you have creature + parasite worm. SHODAN will be making a few of these as shambler drones just by cloning people and shoving parasites in them. There will be LOTS of these, but they will be VERY STUPID as they'll be controlled entirely by their nanite clouds and thus, well, about as smart as your printer. Not even your phone. Your printer. Basically, big, fast, weird looking zombies.
If a Shambler is created from a PC, they retain all memories, abilities, and talents of the individual, but are 1. insane, 2. in monstrous pain and 3. brainwashed to think that SHODAN is the mother-goddess and they must server her.
Alterniamorphs - These are Alien/Troll hybrids. They look mostly like xenomorphs, but with red-orange bone growths and highlights. They no longer have acid-colored blood, instead sporting random colored blood that's mostly just sticky and gross; otherwise, they have all the abilities of xenomorphs. They spit parasite worms.
Alterniahuggers - Facehugger / Troll hybrids. These are just like facehuggers, except they produce Alterniamorphs rather than standard xenomorphs. Yaaay?
Ogres - Ten foot tall gray horned tumorous monstrosities, these are SHODAN's shock troops. They are big and ugly and nasty, but not terribly smart. These are created by fusing multiple shamblers together using nanites. If this fate befalls a PC, they are considered dead for purposes of getting revived.
Neural Reavers - These will be floating gas bags with brains and tentacles suspended from them. They are capable of creating holographic projections and psionic attacks. The brains themselves are extremely weak, but their attacks are quite powerful, and they use holograms to disguise their position. Unlike the other mutants, these all have yellow blood, and a collection of twelve eyes - six red, six blue.
Neural Reavers are created when characters with psionics are implanted with yellow parasite worms. Note that yellow worms (again, identifiable by their yellow color and red and blue eyes) specifically seek out psionic characters!
PART 3 - BIG DAMN HEROES - 1 week of in-game time.
Eventually, somebody will decide that enough is enough. From the outside, I imagine a crack team of a Halolz/Homestuck/Mass Effect/TRON alliance will be forged and they will bust the fuck in like the space marines/superpowered thireen year olds/computer programs??? they are, guns blazing for the win. It will be like System Shock or your other favorite shooter game with zombies, only even better! People can sign up for this too and it'll be awesome.
From the inside, maybe somebody breaks out of GlaDOS happy fun time games, or escapes Prism's laz0rz, or throws off SHODAN's conditioning and starts a revolution from the inside. They can meet up with the outside team halfway in and start to wreck shit.
What happens to the other AI guys is up to them. I would like it VERY MUCH if SHODAN were somehow killed, contained, or otherwise taken the fuck down.
My intent is for this to be in an epic boss battle. In the games themselves, this usually takes place in cyberspace; here, I still have to come up with something fun, but it'll likely involve people fighting off guard zombies while slick hacker types sit at terminals and start deleting her files while she screams curses at them.
Once she's disabled, control will go right back over to Hypatia.
OH GOD MY CHARACTER GOT MUTATED WAT DO
You have a few options:
OPTION ONE: A CURE!
1. Get a high level hacker to hack your nanites so you are no longer brainwashed by SHODAN. Now you are merely mutated and in pain!
2. Use magical future space station medicine to remove the worst of your mutation and take the worm out of your spine.
3. IF THE MODS APPROVE, THERE CAN BE SOME PERMANENT SIDE EFFECTS FROM THIS, either from the Xenomorph side, the Troll side, or the Cyborg side, or all three. Anything (even if it's terribly debilitating) must be mod approved. Examples include weirdly colored blood that clots quickly, mildly acidic blood, weird metal growths, increased healing speed, yellow eyes, horns, a creepy secondary mouth, voices in your head, stockholm syndrome for SHODAN, whatever.
OPTION TWO: DIE.
If you die and you haven't teleported since you got your horrifying mutation, you'll respawn from your last imprint - mutation free, with no memories and no problems. This is probably the easier solution.
OPTION THREE: DON'T GET MUTATED
All of this stuff is opt-in anyway, so if you don't want your character to be a horrifying monstrosity, don't sign them up to be a horrifying monstrosity.
Holy shit, these logs are taking forever.
Ideally, I'd like to figure out everything in advance. For example: who takes down SHODAN in the end? What do they do with/to her? Who gets mutated, and how? And so on. That way, after the two weeks are up, we can definitively go "Everything is normal now, here's what happened!" while we wait for logs to finish up.
QUESTIONS. COMMENTS. PRELIMINARY PLANNING. SUGGESTIONS. GO GO GO.
Still pending actual approval.