piper90 | Entries tagged with setsuna higashi

Alright, locking this because if the guys in the other rooms are being anything like us there's messes we don't need the corps seeing us fuckin' making, or worse, but whatever, point is:

[ South holds up a colour printout of all the current Hires faces, with all the teens and younger circled, but numerous others' faces crossed through with Xs:

Guts
Kevin Armstrong
Breq Mianaai
Ronald McDonald
Alia
Dan Sagittarius
Agent Washington
Agent New York
Agent South Dakota
Sarah Kerrigan
Aiden Price
Lavernius Tucker
Carolina
Agent North Dakota
Nora Valkyree
Sam Winchester
Brandon Saint John
Rune Saint John
Garviel Loken
Mackenzie Haynes
Rogue ]

We found a fuckin' doozy. Gonna guess the crosses mean we specifically weren't what this thing was fuckin' looking for in a target for copying.

Like we said earlier, we also found Santa's sack in the shower like the thing was trying to wash it out and a whole lot of candy it probably dumped from it. The closet in here was missing a medium uniform and the locks in here are all fucked, but like... carefully fucked. And... that's it? [ she looks over at Kerrigan as if to confirm, then back at the camera ] So far, anyway.

What the fuck's everyone else found? Assuming we haven't been the only team actually getting shit done.

piper90npcs

[That horrible alert sound goes off on all their communicators, and after three minutes, Richard Washburn shows up on the screen. He clearly hasn’t sleep, although he’s just as clearly doing his best to hide that fact.]

Good early morning, hires. Unfortunately, it seems like there’s been very little forward progress on identifying which of you is the shapeshifter, and just as little progress finding the body of whomever it’s impersonating. We’ve spoken with some of our foremost scientists and they believe with a significant degree of certainty that this Stuff creature can only impersonate child-friendly figures.

Some of you have petitioned me and have made compelling cases that no child would ever want anything to do with you, and as such I’m clearing you for release for an internal mission to find the body of the person who was replaced by the impersonator. The following people are cleared to leave…Mr. Price, Mr. Winchester, Agent South Dakota, Agent Washington, Ms. Burnham, Ms. Kerrigan, Alia, Agent Tucker, Mr. Loken, Ms. Haynes, Guts, and…Mr. McDonald.

Hopefully they’ll be alive still.

For the rest of you, it’s been pointed out to me that there are ways you may be able to examine each other and determine who among you is a shapeshifter, and that you may need to demonstrate powers or look at each other in person. As such, while the living quarters as a whole remain locked, you are all released from your dorms and may mingle with each other.

The higher-ups have gotten impatient with this entire thing, so if you haven’t identified the imposter in the next…[he checks his watch]…two hours, my hand may be forced and I may need to utilize your collars to see if we can use discomfort to force the creature to reveal itself.

Please continue to keep me updated.

heterochrocatic

Oh for ████'s sake.

[ Catra is usually kinda grumpy, but this post is extra grumpy. ]

I go through all that ████ and I still get dropped back here. ████ you, you ███holes.

[ Catra does not look much physically changed, oddly, but there's been a shift in her bearing and the way she holds herself. Kinda subtle, but it's there. ]

piper90npcs

[In the middle of the night, when even the night watch shifts should be pacing through the dorm area, there’s a peal of noise from the communicators impossible to ignore or sleep through. It’s clearly an alarm of some sort, like tornado alerts back on Earth. It goes on for solid three minutes, long enough for everyone to move on from being woken by it to loathing it, before a message shows up on the communicators-

-and the doorways out of each of the dorms are sealed with a semi-translucent forcefield.

On the communicator screen, Richard Washburn shows up and straightens his tie.]

Hello, employees. Believe me, I’m not any happier about this midnight interruption than you are, but we’re currently in a state of – mild – emergency. I don’t want anyone to get overly excited, but until the situation is resolved, you will remain in your dorms. Depending on how long this takes, all activities scheduled for tomorrow morning have been suspended.

The reason for this is that we have an intruder in your living quarters. We have this footage from a few weeks ago.

[A new image shows up on the communicator: a security camera video of a Santa Claus with a line of the highest executive-level parents and their small children waiting to tell him their wishlist. A little girl in pigtails and a sparkly t-shirt of a Christmas tree hops up onto his lap.

“Ho, ho, ho!” Santa says, and he boops her nose. “Aren’t you a peach? Tell me, little one. What would you like for Christmas?”

“I want a big plastic spider!” the girl says excitedly.

“A creepy little child, aren’t you? Well, that’s just swell, because that’s my favorite flavor,” Santa says, and then – blurry on the security camera footage – transforms into a mass of black goo, latching onto the little girl’s face and suctioning to stay on. The child’s mother screams and yanks her daughter away, and the footage shows pure pandemonium as some parents lunge forward to help the mother with her daughter while other parents snatch their own children and start running. In all the chaos, the black goo vanishes.

Washburn flicks the footage away and reappears on the screen.]

Thankfully, there were no fatalities in this incident, and after we couldn’t find any evidence of the attacker, we assumed that it was a freak incident of the Stuff. However, there was recently another unsuccessful attack on a teenager by this same creature posing as one of the tutors on the Rig, and then again on another thankfully unharmed child disguised as another child, and then on another child under the guise of a children’s television show host named “Mr. Rogers”, and tonight-

[He takes a deep breath, annoyed, as if this is somehow the Hires’ faults.]

-tonight we found a security breach to your floor, and we have good reason to believe that the shapeshifter is posing as one of you.

We know this: we know it poses as figures appealing to children, so for obvious reasons, you won’t be allowed anywhere near any Jorgmund staff whatsoever until this is resolved. We know that its ability to disguise itself is relatively seamless. And we know that it preys on minors.

If you can determine who among you isn’t at all appealing to children, we can consider releasing you from your dorm and discussing next steps to search out whoever’s been replaced.

If this starts taking long enough that it jeopardizes the Jorgmund’s mission, we may start taking more drastic measures to ensure that we aren’t harboring any imposters.

I’ll keep you updated if you keep me updated.

tarnishedavenger

So, we've got a load of new people, and that means it's time for me to do the only thing it feels like I get on these comms to do anymore: AMAs.

For you new people, I find it helps when we get together and explain a little bit about ourselves, any powers we have, and our skillsets. That way we know what we're starting with and what we can build off of. So, please, come and introduce yourselves and be willing to answer questions.

morebetter

[ooc: Mac's opt-out post, as this thread will undoubtedly contain misogyny, alcoholism, homophobia, etc, is here.]

So it’s come to this. Some of you have reached out to me, and I don’t blame you, for dating advice. I am, after all, very experienced in scoring with women, and they usually find me pretty irresistible as well, as the walk-in clinic can attest.

Anyways. I used to have a system called the “M.A.C.”, a.k.a. “Move in After Completion”, where I’d help my buddy seduce a chick by pretending to be the booksmart friend and then when he ghosted her, I’d go comfort-bang her, but it turns out that that got really old after a while because they’d like, cry all the time, and women are already gross and whiny enough before they’re crying, and also she’s expect you to read her poetry or something and that’s really gay. So I dropped that one. I guess I recommend it if you’re really into getting snot all over your shoulder and pretending you give a ████, but that’s a weird kink, bro.

There’s also one I’m pretty sure works, which is breaking and entering into someone’s house to make sure they know that you’ve scoped out the weaknesses in their security system and thus, are a more securer person than whatever idiot originally installed it. That demonstrates your mastery of protecting them. If you do it in the middle of the night, and you don’t wake them up, you can use that time in the morning to do some pushups or practice your karate or something so that when they come downstairs and see you, their first thought is holy ████, that dude is RIPPED, and I’m going to let him into my body’s ████ areas immediately.

Finally, the best dating advice I can give is to lie. Lie about everything. The more you lie, the more mysterious you are. If you lie, for example, about being a secret agent fighting the KGB, and they start to ask you what that’s like, you can look at them very seriously and go [putting on a serious, dark, movie-style voice] “I could tell you but I’d have to kill you” and they’ll just swoon in mystery. You don’t even have to lie about cool stuff. You can pretend you have a car and then say [putting on a serious, dark, movie-style voice again] “I could tell you but I’d have to kill you” and they’re going to assume you drive a flying Lambo for the mob that goes to space or something, and there is nothing, nothing, nothing sexier than having sex with someone you don’t trust and know nothing about who says he’s gonna kill you.

Anyway, apply literally any of these, and you losers will be swimming in ████ by sundown.

( I’ve made a visual aid for the illiterates. )

zerofield

Hello. I've been working on this in my spare time, and I think it's finally suitable for limited public consumption. This is a game we came up with while testing network connections at home. I've found I miss it, so I've replicated it here.

[ There's a download for a file: pomparty.exe. ]

Instructions are available from the title screen. It's intended for two players, but I've added the ability to have the computer act as your second if nobody is available. There's a difficulty adjustment with a sliding scale from "worse than Chief Roberts" to "better than me," so I think most people will be able to find something suitable within that range.

Please let me know if you find any bugs. I've tested on my own, but if there's one thing I have faith in, it's the ability of a user to do things with software that the programmers never imagined, let alone intended.

[ Congratulations, Rig, you now have a robust two player Puyo Pop at your disposal. Enjoy. ]

pasthole

[ Someone makes a post. It's deleted again too quickly to read, but it was definitely riddled with redactions courtesy of the network's filter (which seems to be working today.) A few minutes pass. It happens again, the post is longer and strangely grey, but it's similarly mangled and it's already gone. A third attempt is made, much the same, then... nothing.

Several more minutes tick by. Measured. Thoughtful. Ominous. Will the OP try one more time?

Then it appears: a monstrosity of grey capslock lurches onto the network and this one sticks. The poster's name is apparently Karkat Vantas, and his profile picture fails to yield a face, only a symbol. ]

A lot of unbelievable garbage has happened to me in the last twelve hours, but this? This is it. That anguished sound you hear is the cry of the long-suffering humpbeast that is my patience, its back brutally broken at last by the weight of this final desiccated plant stalk!

I am no stranger to completely stupid communication tools, but this one? This one is truly something special. I am in awe! Do you know how long it took me to get some semblance of control over my text? Do you? I assure you from the bottom of my inflamed bile sponge that you do not!

I was lulled into a sense of false security, naively believing this could not possibly get any worse. I went to post a message! Wow what a moron I must be to have ever supposed that would be easy! Gather round everyone, time to initiate the latest rube to join the idiot carnival! He thinks he can speak his mind without a snotty line of code ripping out his teeth one by one and shoving them right back down his ignorance shaft, what fun we shall have!

Thank you, Jorgmund! Thank you so much for this useless trash, and for this insult to injury! I am so glad that not only have I been kidnapped by aliens, but now I can't even make contact with my fellow captives without first assuming the most deferential posture of insipidity so as not to *dare* offend the grub-soft gander bulbs of an audience of *presumably* fully-moulted adults! I am ecstatic to know that this is the priority here when this entire world is apparently in shambles!

There's no need to take any time out of your jam packed schedules of huffing each other's nooks just to punish my earlier misgivings! My confidence is so inspired I could just choke myself right here and now!

(( OOC: Feel free to use or not use the network's filter as you please, its wild inconsistency can be convenient and a way to drive Karkat up a wall!
Warnings (mostly that Karkat is a loud jerk) and a link to opt out of his capslock nonsense are in his permissions. ))

turntex

[The wall of text that springs up in the locked network is anonymous, the user just signed as "tg". It's probably obvious anyway to anyone who's talked to Dave a bit, even without his standard obnoxious custom font and shit, but give him a break. This is pure ulfiltered stream of consciousness.]

so ive been thinking
in theory this whole secret secure network is cool and all
like hell yeah got our shit on lockdown we are safe as fuck chatting away here
but im pretty sure most of us still have more reservations than an olive garden during the dinner rush
the waits an hour long and all we can do is sit in this shitty crowded lobby smelling that sweet knockoff italian grub
anyway the guy who put this whole thing together is probably cool and it doesnt seem like anyone code savvy has found anything to be concerned about but it still seems kinda unwise to put certain things in down in writing
like do we really wanna be leaving a metaphorical paper trail of revolutionary evidence just in case this whole program does get blown wide open somehow
and ive seen people stressing over the possibility of untrustworthy fuckers in our midst thatll sell us all out in a heartbeat for an extra pillow
ive been sitting here like shit man what can i even do to actually be useful right now and historically ive had a surplus of flighty broads constantly ready to answer that question
but its not like i can really be all that helpful if i cant even spell out exactly what i might be good for without basically drawing an arrow pointing directly at real life me
the point is maybe were better off talking some shit out in person where were arent leaving a written record and we can kick out anyone that seems sus
i heard the cameras in the training room dont work and it seems like solid info
we could probably orchestrate some stealth convos there or anywhere else that seems off the grid if anyones noticed anything
hell if we wanna get a whole bunch of people together we could probably just sit in a circle and if any staffers poke their heads in and ask about it we just say we put together our own lil group therapy thing
at least half of us are clearly in dire need of it so no one would question it
genius i know
anyway im just spitballing here in an attempt to feel at least a little productive
im open to other ideas just help me out

partiallysquirrelblood

Hey pals, Doreen here. I noticed a little confusion about some parts of the situation? Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of confusion to go around, but in this case, I think at least a few of us know what's going on? We just thought everyone else had figured it out by this point.

Sorry about that, but I'm going to try to make up for it.

[She picks up one of the paper plates.]

Pretend this is the world we're on.

[She puts the plate on the table, moving the camera around so it's facing it.]

Now, if anything we've told about this place is true, this is probably Earth.

Robbie and I? We're from Earth. [Another plate on the table.]

Sticky Ben? Yep, Earth. [Third plate on the table.]

Phosphophyllite, Armstrong, Kevin, Gadget? Earth, Earth, Earth, Earth. And another bunch of Earths for most of the rest of us, too. <[Plates just go all over the table.]

I know some of you are from other worlds. They're important, they're where you live, after all, but they're not super-relevant to my point right now. You might want to pay attention just in case, though.

Now, you're thinking, dang, Doreen, that's a lot of people from Earth. You might be wondering why I used so many plates if we're all from the same place.

The thing is while we might all be from Earth, we're not all from the same Earth. Hence all the plates.

See, everything, Earth, the sun, the stars, and other planets? They occupy a thing called the universe. But? There's more than one universe. Universes where life didn't develop, where it developed differently, where the laws of physics have ceased to make any sort of sense, where none of us have powers, where all of us have powers, where our moralities have been entirely flipped, where you decided not to have that donut last week...etcetera.

And in each of them, Earth, or whatever planet you're from, does or doesn't exist. This is what we call a multiverse. And in some cases, it's possible to visit or even be stuck in one of these alternate universes. Which is pretty much what happened here.

I hoped that cleared some things up. If it didn't, I'll try to answer any questions you have. Can't promise I'll be able to answer all of them, though. I'm not an expert in multiverse theory or anything, this is basically just stuff you pick up when you become a superhero.