SOTF: U - The Third Announcement

[Shiola]

October 20th, 2022
NRV Frontier
07:54

Amber blinked sleep out of her eyes, struggling to safely get a sip of her second mug of coffee down as technicians and scientists bolted to and fro throughout the Frontier’s narrow hallways. Working mostly on the personnel side of the Project, there were few reasons for her to be in a rush to go anywhere. At worst, the work was mostly tedious.

Her actual job, however, demanded that she be keyed into exactly what was going on, who was involved, and why everyone was in such a rush. Involve herself where it made sense, and keep watch at a distance if she couldn’t. The whole time, make it look like she wasn’t as concerned as the rest of them.

It had taken years to get to this point. Janus-Hayes wasn’t exactly an enemy of the state, and political pressure had rebuffed her department several times. Still, she’d done the legwork and built up enough of a case on their activities that she couldn’t be ignored any longer. The fact that they’d immediately sent her into deep cover as a mid-level bureaucrat felt like something of a rebuttal, but she’d sat on her pride. Eventually it’d pay off, she kept telling herself.

Corruption was her guess. Something boring, like arms deals with people they weren’t supposed to be working with. Ethics violations. Something to explain the black hole that billions of dollars in research funding was falling into. The last thing she expected was extensive institutional infiltration, mass kidnapping, and monsters. The worst part of it was how through it all, she could see the logic in everything that Janus-Hayes’ leadership had done. Not that it made any of it excusable, but it was hard to imagine her real employers doing any better if they were sitting on a similar discovery.

She adjusted her belt, careful not to jostle the buckle too much. The small recording device embedded in it wasn’t fragile, but she had to be careful all the same. There were no replacements out here, and her handlers had made it abundantly clear just how little support she had. If they caught her, she couldn’t expect extraction. Janus-Hayes was too important to officially investigate, given how many pockets they lined. They’d kill her, and no one would ever find the body. From what she’d been able to learn so far, she wouldn’t be the first. She’d seen firsthand how expertly they’d crafted cover stories for the Participants - it was clearly a practiced technique.

Much as she hated to see it, she was thankful for the spate of breakdowns and stress that had seemed to erupt on board. A day to themselves had clearly been too much for many of the staff, most of whom hid from their consciences in their work. They had a tendency to spill their feelings to one another, though always out of earshot of any of the higher-ups. It made it easy to gather intel on different pieces of the project, angles she hadn’t been able to personally work.

For the most part, they wrestled with what they were doing, but not why they were doing it. Most of the ones she’d spoken to were entirely convinced that this was the most important work they could possibly be doing, and knowing what they knew made it impossible to consider working on anything else. Amber wasn’t entirely sure she disagreed, and certainly felt the same about her own efforts. She wasn’t sure she could go back to the comparatively mundane work of surveilling philandering Senators and trolling white supremacist imageboards after all of this.

Bracing herself against a wall as the ship pitched slightly, she made her way towards the Mess Hall. It was on the way to the control room, and bringing Dr. Finch a cup of coffee had become something of a ritual the last couple of days. Their working relationship was as fabricated as their names, but Amber still felt a genuine degree of sympathy for her. Not only did she seem to genuinely care about her subordinates, she made little effort to excuse her role in the worst elements of this so-called experiment. Amber had to often remind herself that wasn’t an admirable trait, and it probably made her altogether more ruthless; still, Amber lived in a world so ridden with lies it was hard not to appreciate a bit of honesty from time to time.

The mess hall wasn’t nearly as empty as she expected, and in fact had been rearranged to play host to what looked like a de facto meeting of Dr. Sycamore’s team. They sat in rapt attention in front of Dr. Sycamore, who stood alone in front of the group save for a young woman seated next to him. She paid little attention to the group, and busied herself with pouring a coffee for Dr. Finch - very, very slowly.

She might’ve brushed it off as more of his theatrics. Team-building exercises designed to engineer loyalty in his staff. His clout as the chief theoretician behind Survival of the Fittest, and a certain degree of natural charisma, meant that his group were prone to an unsettling sort of fanaticism. Even at their lowest, Amber heard countless refrains of I’m sure Iain knows what he’s doing, and we just have to trust Dr. Sycamore.

Even before his tenure with Janus-Hayes, he was a known quantity to the intelligence community. A member of it himself, at several points. To his peers, Dr. Sidney Cameron was always considered a better lecturer and administrator than a theoretician, well-suited to organizing teams of other academics and engineering complex solutions to problems no one else felt capable of solving. When it came to his original work, he was completely overshadowed by his former colleague. That he’d convinced his people that he stood on equal footing with Dr. Fournier was only more evidence of a megalomaniacal streak that stretched back many, many years.

So it felt worth watching when she noted that the woman sitting next to Dr. Sycamore was sobbing softly, with a look on her face of abject disdain and shame. She faced the rest of her colleagues, but couldn’t seem to look up at any of them. Sycamore spoke, and they all listened.

“...so these concerns that Alex opted to share with the rest of you - they’re entirely rational. That the lives of those on the island have a value unto themselves, that the parameters of our work here are too fluid, that there is a certain dishonesty in all of this. I feel her conflict, and I’m sure you all do as well. It weighs on me, it truly does. No matter how often we tell ourselves it is necessary, that the cost of doing nothing is simply too high - that doesn’t make it go down any easier. We’re human, after all. We can’t do this work and lose sight of that.

Yet, none of this is new to us. None of this stood in the way when we were putting together plans for this project. These thoughts didn’t impede our steps, as we walked aboard this ship and began our work. The cost of our inaction was fresh in our minds, for that is where we’d focused our attention up until that point. It wasn’t until we had to face this harsh reality firsthand that it returned to the forefront.”

He placed his hand on her shoulder in a gesture of reassurance.

“Alex here was right beside all of you, the whole way. Her efforts to standardize our reporting and heuristic analysis has been vital, given how much work we have cut out for us. It hasn’t been lost on me that she’s been the go-to guide for many of you when it has come to interpreting Fournier’s Heuristics. We can’t fault Alex for struggling, or having second thoughts. Any of us would, but she’s been shouldering more than her fair share of the workload. I think you all understand that - and I think it would help Alex to hear it from you.”

Amber had just finished dropping a second sugar cube into a thermos, and couldn’t help but turn around to watch. One-by-one, the members of Sycamore’s team all regaled each other with their own stories of Alex. Some of them were genuine, honest accounts of their relationship. Others offered compliments, overflowing with praise for her commitment to their cause. A few anecdotes in, one of the group offered her a hug. Amber could only barely hear Alex mutter out an affirmation, completely cowed by the display. Before long, they were sharing in something of a group hug, sharing in tears and heartfelt gestures of care. Sycamore stood at a distance, though he displayed a frustratingly convincing air of compassion. If she didn’t know better, she’d have assumed he was starting to feel conflicted.

She did know better though, and quickly averted her gaze. Tightening the lid on the travel mug, she nudged her way past the crowd and towards the control room. Though they were several minutes late on their announcement, Sycamore didn’t follow. That he’d expend so much time on that little struggle session didn’t bode well. Amber shook off a shiver, and picked up her pace down the hallway.

The control room was aflutter with activity, although of an entirely different kind. Finch’s team were busy reviewing footage, though many of the screens in the room still showed static. Many of the feeds showed a large explosion and fire overtaking one of the buildings on the island. Another showed men in tactical gear attempting first aid on one of their own who was grievously injured, with another lying dead only feet away. The technicians barely noticed her entry, entirely occupied with mitigating what looked like a setback.

In the quietest part of her mind, full of other information that could get her killed, she offered a tiny cheer for the participants still alive on the island.

“Amber! Over here.”

Dr. Finch was pacing behind her station, hand clenched around the opposite fist. Underneath all of the anxiety, Amber could sense no small amount of rage.

“Yes ma’am?” She replied, setting the coffee down nearby.

“Where the hell is Sycamore? He was supposed to be in here twenty minutes ago. Have you seen the footage yet?” Finch gestured to one of the monitors, which displayed a small group of figures slowly lurching in unison through the snow with seemingly no care in the world. They held hands, and left a small trail of blood behind them.

I wish I hadn’t seen them, doc.

She attempted a response. “Well, I’m not strictly on the monitoring team, so I wouldn’t -”

Finch wasn’t really expecting a reply, and continued. She liked to talk through problems, which made Amber’s job a lot easier, all things considered.

“First, they blew up the Powerhouse. Blew it right the fuck up! Nearly killed the Chimera in the blast, though the station logged movement about a half hour later. The fire’s only just starting to go out now. How did they do this? Because fucking Janus-Hayes left it just - replete with aviation fuel. I was sure it was left over from the days when they tested weapons out here, but they promised us it was expired Soviet stock, not flammable and not worth pumping out.”

Finch’s vitriol continued. On a good day she had no love for Janus-Hayes, but today she had an acceptable reason to vent about it.

“If that shit was Russian bunker fuel, I wouldn’t have had to call our assets in the NOAA and DoD tell them hey fellas, you’d better be on the clock right now because we’ve got a plume of smoke a couple kilometers across that we need to make absolutely certain no one finds out about. Of course when our overlords find out about this, we’ll be the ones to blame.”

Amber remained silent, as did the rest of the team in the room. They’d no doubt been hearing about this the entire morning.

“Next, I get two messages on our intranet - one’s from Leander - he says he’s re-tasking the Revenants to go after a single Participant. No reason, no mind to protocol. I was about to ask him what the fuck he was doing, when I read the other message - from Gardner. The broken old jarhead we left out there got his hands on a sniper rifle and downed two of our tactical team. Gardner insisted he needed to speak to us right away, insinuating that if we didn’t respond, we were going to have something of a mutiny on our hands.”

“We?”

“When we spoke, he indicated it was his men that were the problem, but reading between the lines I’m pretty sure that any mutiny that happens, he’s going to be at the head of it.”

Taking a look around the room, Amber noted more than a few nervous glances in their direction. She took a sip of her coffee, and feigned ignorance.“That’s… bad?”

Finch stepped towards Amber, and lowered her voice.

“Yes. It’s very fucking bad. All of our samples are stored in that base, and most of our data storage. It wasn’t viable to broadcast everything to the Frontier, not to mention the security concerns. One closed network. We’re just talking to it here and watching the live feeds. It’s bad enough they’d have literal hostages with the team we left there - they’re also holding most of our data hostage.”

Evidence.

Amber straightened up, letting the real anxiety she felt reflect in her body language. For the moment, their aims converged. “So what are you going to do?”

Finch shrugged. “Let Leander’s puppets do their work, I guess. If that doesn’t work, I’ll see if the techs can’t rig us up a drone to kill the bastard. I know they built loitering munitions, we just didn’t end up deploying them. I don’t know.” Finch finally opened the travel mug, and took a sip of coffee. Space had been made now that she’d vented some of her frustration.

“Strictly speaking, that’s Sycamore’s call. Where - where is he, anyways?”

Once again, Amber looked towards the door. There was no sign of Dr. Sycamore, and she expected he’d be busy for a short while at least. Now that she understood the parade of calamities that had befallen the experiment in the last twenty-four hours, his actions started to make more sense.

“Uhh - he’s indisposed.”

“Tell me. Don’t leave anything out.”

“Do you know what love-bombing is?”

The assistant director’s gaze drifted off to the middle distance behind Amber. She sighed, and took another sip of her coffee. “...yes, unfortunately I do.”

“Should I continue?”

Finch shook her head, and quickly sat down at her station. “Later. I want every detail. He’s not coming right now?

“I couldn’t say. I don’t think so.”

“Alright then. Fuck it, I'll do it.” Finch cleared her throat, and called out to the rest of the room.

"Hey guys! Settle down, I'm recording the announcement."

00:46:55:31

[Shiola]

---

Severniy Norin
08:30


Half an hour later than expected, the announcement klaxon blared from the island’s PA system once again. Close to the ruins of the Powerhouse, the speakers sputtered out a broken, fragmented tone before burning out completely.

Green LED lights flashed on the PDAs of the surviving Participants:

20/10/22 ANNOUNCEMENT AVAILABLE

PLAY RECORDING?

[+] Y

An unfamiliar voice spoke from the PDA. Her tone was somewhat weary, and she spoke with little of the flair that had accompanied Dr. Sycamore’s previous announcements.

“Hi everyone. This is Dr. Erin Finch, the Assistant Director. I’m filling in for Dr. Sycamore this morning. It is now the fourth day of the experiment.

We provisioned you for far longer but it looks like things may be coming to a close sooner than we thought. Nine of you died yesterday. That said, there have still been a few successes.”

A pause. She sighed, and flipped through some papers.

“I know that’s not exactly comforting. Umm…”

Dr. Finch cleared her throat, forcing a more professional tone.

“The first to go on day three - quite early in the morning - was Adam Shackland. I’ll admit here we don’t have a clear picture of what happened, he just flatlined out in the wastes. Looks like it was probably exposure, though it’s not like anyone performed an autopsy just yet. If you needed a reminder that the cold is just as dangerous as anything else out there - well, there it is.

Darren Decker was next up, killed by the Chimera. It ran him down out in the open, and ripped him apart. There goes the local documentarian.”

The quip didn’t feel natural for her. A begrudging, insincere attempt to follow guidelines laid out in front of her, it seemed like.

“After that, Zandah Udall and Naomi Faith were both killed by the Revenants. Their group split when they were initially attacked, which made it easier for the Revenants to get the jump on them. However, this also led to our first dead Prototype. Congratulations to Evan Keane, who successfully shot one of them in the face. I think that puts the ratio at twelve to one, now.”

Early on they’d suggested forming teams among the Participants. In the end, it seemed like they’d formed them in any case, with little dissent other than the two murders that had occurred on the first day. Finch still didn’t feel especially vindicated that her assumptions about the outcome were mostly correct. She continued to regale the rest of the grisly deaths with a cynical monotone.

“The remaining Revenants fled, and ran into Tahsin Demir. Well, butchered her is more like. What’s left of her is scattered outside of the Mine Shafts.

They continued their warpath by ambushing and killing Jarrett Bergman, who stepped outside to get some air. Looks like they… ate his face. Jesus.”

She took a sip of a coffee. Her disgust seemed out of place, regaling people who were by all rights her victims as much as they were those of the Prototypes.

“While that was going on, it seems like some of you had forgotten to keep track of Lucas Anholt. Unfortunately for him, he was found by Vermiculus. If you see him again - well, it isn’t him anymore.

“Lastly, Arthur Miles and Rachana Kumar had the bright idea to lure the Chimera into the Powerhouse and blow it up. Their plan worked a bit too well, hence the huge explosion you all heard late yesterday afternoon. While they are both very, very dead - the Chimera is sadly not there just yet.”

She wished she could tell them more. Give them more to try to fight it with. That the explosion at the Powerhouse hadn’t killed it was alarming. It didn’t call into question the contingency plan - she was certain the missiles were enough - but it didn’t bode well for the larger implications of their work. Fire had historically been effective at killing the specimens they needed to dispose of.

“That’s it. Adam, Darren, Zandah, Naomi, Jarrett, Lucas, Arthur, and Rachana. One Revenant dead, one Chimera badly injured. Quite the day.

With regards to the Powerhouse, I’m going to go ahead and advise you all to avoid the flaming ruins of the place. The fuel that’s still burning is toxic, and no part of that building is still structurally intact. We’re counting on some more snow in the next day or so to put it out. Know that we accounted for this in planning Survival of the Fittest - the smoke plume will not be picked up by anyone outside. Have no illusions - there is still only one way out.

As for the remaining Prototypes - Vermiculus has taken up residence in the Mines, as of today. It looks like it’s consolidating itself. Given what happened to Lucas, those of you still alive may want to start keeping more of a vigilant watch.

We're still awaiting confirmation of our latest findings, but it looks like some of you were able to dispatch all of the Revenants. Well done, although I'll still caution you to take this with a grain of salt until our next announcement can confirm their status.”

She took a moment, before proceeded carefully with the final bulletins. Her next words were read verbatim from a sheet, rather than improvised.

“The Chimera was last spotted heading for one of the warehouses at the Docks. I can say that today is probably your best chance to kill it. The longer you wait, the more time it has to adapt to your attempts to do so.

One more thing; the team at the monitoring station wants me to tell you to stop taking potshots at them. They’re now under orders to shoot anyone who even approaches on sight. So avoid the Airstrip.”

A lie. She hoped it would placate the mercenaries, for the time being.

“As for the weather conditions today - looks like the storm has just about passed, although you can expect it to keep snowing intermittently throughout the day. Temperatures are going to stay in the negatives. The Wastes and the Frozen Lake are still more or less impassable, as Adam found out. Today looks like a high of twenty two degrees Fahrenheit, with a low of zero. That’s negative five to negative seventeen, in Celsius.

You will hear from Dr. Sycamore or myself this time tomorrow. Take care.”

[+] N

Announcement - 19/10/22

Congratulations on making it to the fourth day. We’ve had a higher than expected casualty rate so far.

Should you be the lucky one to make it to the end, your journey will likely be shorter than you anticipated.

Some successful attempts to attack and destroy the Prototypes have been made, though at significant cost.

Learn from the mistakes of your peers. Keep fighting, and your efforts won’t be in vain. More is at stake here than you know.

See below for an important bulletin concerning the status of various locations on the island.

Casualty List:

P29 - Adam Shackland - Unknown.
P01 - Darren Decker - Blood loss, dismembered by X00 Chimera.
P06 - Zandah Udall - Blunt force trauma caused by X02 Revenant C.
P25 - Naomi Faith - Blood loss, severe burns caused by X02 Revenant B.
P20 - Tahsin “Tess” Demir - Dismembered by X02 Revenant A and X02 Revenant B.
P14 - Jarrett Bergman - Blood loss, blunt force trauma caused by X02 Revenant A and X02 Revenant B.
P02 - Lucas Anholt - Severe cranial trauma, subsumed by X01 Vermiculus.
P21 - Arthur "Art" Miles - Blast trauma, severe burns caused by detonation of fuel stores in the Powerhouse.
P05 - Rachana Kumar - Crushed by debris, severe burns caused by detonation of fuel stores in the Powerhouse.

Prototype Status:

X00 Chimera - Status Unknown- Severely injured in the destruction of the Powerhouse. Condition tentative.
X01 Vermiculus - Operational
X02 Revenant A - Status Unknown - Injuries sustained in failed attack on the Union Office. Condition unknown.
X02 Revenant B - Status Unknown - Multiple serious injuries. Condition unknown.
X02 Revenant C - Deceased - Cranial trauma. Killed by Evan Keane with a gunshot to the head.

Last Reported Locations - 20/10/22:

X00 Chimera - The Docks
X02 Revenant A/B - The School
X01 Vermiculus - The Mine Shafts

OFF LIMITS DUE TO EXTREME HAZARD - 20/10/22:

The Airstrip
The Monitoring Station
The Powerhouse
The Wastes
The Frozen Lake

Weather Report - 20/10/22:

High: 22F / -5.5C
Low: 0F / -17C

---

Low winds and light snow are expected throughout the day.

Exposure continues to be extremely hazardous. Seek well-fortified shelter.

The Chimera is badly wounded. Now is the time to kill it, if you are able to do so.

Don’t treat the Revenants like the other Participants. They won’t go down as easily as the rest of you.

Vermiculus is likely the most pressing threat right now. Exterminate it at all costs.

Do not approach the Airstrip under any circumstances. I cannot stress this enough.

Do not expect rescue. Your only path forward is to fight and survive. You have more than enough armaments and supplies to do so. Anything is possible.

- Dr. Erin Finch

---

Hi everyone!

Thanks for all of your patience the last few months. I know it’s been frustrating that we’ve been missing deadlines. My hope is that we can press on at a good pace towards Endgame, which will occur once we hit the final four.

The surviving Prototypes have been assigned their Day 4 flags in secret. As per the Rules, the amount of Endgame survivors will be set inversely by the remaining Prototypes on the Island, to a maximum of four. So get out there and hunt them down!

As we’ve been on a hiatus, I’m once again resetting the activity timer to this announcement. Consider this Day 0 as far as activity is concerned.

Now, on to the rolls!

1. P26 - Esther Ježek (Dr.Adjective)
2. P23 - Evan Keane (Shiola)

[+] Roll Log

Code: Select all

Shiola — Today at 12:23 PM
Updated Rolling List for SOTF: U https://sotfmini.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=44137#p44137
Namira — Today at 12:26 PM
o/
Shiola — Today at 12:26 PM
Test Roll # 1
Namira — Today at 12:27 PM
d11
Roll Bot 2.0
BOT
 — Today at 12:27 PM
 3  ⟵ [3] 1d11
Shiola — Today at 12:29 PM
excellent. Roll 1 of 2:
Namira — Today at 12:29 PM
Need to test roll again to make sure it's not doing funky stuff!
Shiola — Today at 12:29 PM
okie! test roll 2:
Namira — Today at 12:29 PM
d11
Roll Bot 2.0
BOT
 — Today at 12:29 PM
 10  ⟵ [10] 1d11
Namira — Today at 12:29 PM
That seems fine then
Shiola — Today at 12:29 PM
cool beans. Alright! Roll 1 of 2?
Namira — Today at 12:30 PM
Yep!
d11
Roll Bot 2.0
BOT
 — Today at 12:30 PM
 9  ⟵ [9] 1d11
Shiola — Today at 12:30 PM
P26 - Esther Ježek
Roll 2 of 2:
Namira — Today at 12:30 PM
d11
Roll Bot 2.0
BOT
 — Today at 12:30 PM
 8  ⟵ [8] 1d11
Shiola — Today at 12:30 PM
P23 - Evan Keane
Alright! That's it for rolls. Thanks @Namira :3
Namira — Today at 12:31 PM
No problem!

The two handlers rolled will have have five days to play cards and a death deadline of November 24th, 2023. Our next rolls will take place then, leading into the latter half of Day 4. Please PM Help_U with any questions.

Good luck!

[Shiola]

(I will not require any hero cards for Evan. Accepting death ideas. Thanks!)

[Dr Adjective]

If someone wants to hero out I’d be glad to stay, but I’ve had a plenty decent run if not. Happy to hear death ideas in the mean time but since Esther’s already at the school I certainly have some ideas of my own percolating in the old brain pan.