Sim Hell

Stylish early 20th century Me

I’m going to start this by assuming you know what the Foundation is. If not, go ask a Decker like Lightspeed or Neon and they’ll explain it to you (even if that explanation is ‘blah blah blah blah blah nerd stuff’) then come back.

So now that we all know what it is, let’s give you some background. We’d discovered that Pierce was a crazy digital murder god, and we discovered that he had some crazy long term plan. We didn’t know the full details of said plan, however, only bits of it. Added to that, we had no idea where Pierce was hiding, which meant that if we ‘killed’ him in the Matrix, he’d just run off to his safe haven to recompile. Above all else, to this, Pierce himself had deleted all the data we needed on his creation and function down to the point of destroying the research facility host.

The good news was that in theory it survived in the Foundation of the research facility where he was ‘born’. Added to that, Neon had been able to drop an anchor into that Foundation’s Portal Node, which mean that in theory she could get into it again. Unfortunately, we could only do it by jacking in through a friendly host’s foundation and then jumping across from there. The upside is that we know somebody who runs their own data store that we could use. And so Lightspeed joined us on this crazy little trip, which proved to be very useful.

In the end, our team consisted of Me, Freddie, Abby, Captain Cancer, Neon and Lightspeed. Even though we were in theory staging from a secure location, Wraith stayed behind to watch our collective backs just in case. This is a good plan.

So we jacked in as a group (Don’t ask me how, I don’t understand the mechanics of it) and wound up in Lightspeed’s Host. From there, she was able to take us into its Foundation which, and I’m not going to lie, was actually pretty damned awesome. It was this crazy spherical zero-g nightclub that was a riot of colours with people dancing everywhere because there was no gravity to tell them not too. Oh, and the whole place was surrounded by a star field. And everyone’s clothes had neon patterns on them, as well as their hair and skin. I don’t mind saying that I looked totally fragging awesome there, and I wish I had a picture of it.

Sadly, this wasn’t the foundation that we were actually after. So we left the awesome zero-g goldfish bowl space dance club and leaped across to the research center foundation that we were actually headed to. And boy, did the mood change. For starters, everything was in black and white with a patchy, grainy feel like it was an old film. Also, like with the awesome club, our clothes and stuff had changed to reflect the new look, which was early 20th century. (Likewise, my tats had disappeared, because apparently that was not a done thing for a sensible young lady back then). Amusingly enough, I was still an Elf (And Freddie was still an Ork), so maybe that’s a thing of personal self image versus the paradigm of the Foundation or the like. Also, I’m beginning to sound like Lightspeed again.

Oh, and we’d also been separated, which wasn’t good. Apparently that’s also a thing that can happen when you fall into a hostile Foundation. This meant that we not only had to find the data we were after, but also that we needed to find each other. Oh, and the data could take the form of anything in the foundation and only somebody who knew anything about computers (ie Lightspeed or Neon or at a stretch Freddie) could recognize it. So yeah, we were really in the dark.

Me and Captain Cancer wound up at a creepy tavern in what we assumed to be a gloomy town in Eastern Europe. The bartender served us (and I must admit, the imaginary roast beef tasted fantastic!) And suggested that creepy things were going on in the town, specifically that young women (eg, myself) were going missing. Fortunately, we were quickly reunited with Abbey and Freddie, who had arrived in a Taxicab and found Neon’s anchor in there, which meant that we’d at least identified the Portal Node. One point to team us.

On the other hand, we also realized that none of us had any magic or cyberware or the like, so we were just down to ourselves and our natural abilities. Bad for Captain Cancer, not so bad for me and Abbey.

After a quick conversation (Which included Captain Cancer managing to cause a degree of variance by dropping jokes and contemporary references with the Bartender. Real smart there) we decided that we were in an old-timey monster movie and that sooner or later one of us would be attacked. And so when a malformed hunchback broke into my room later that night (Actually it was only a brief scene transition later. The logic in this place is nuts), I was ready and stabbed him with a steak knife.

We subdued him and beat some information out of him (With Captain Cancer inducing even more Variance. Seriously!) Which revealed that he was working for his “master”, and that the “master” was a good man who was being forced to do something awful against his will. We took him with us on his getaway vehicle (an elaborate horse-drawn hears, of course) to check out the town, which revealed two more points of interest, but nothing that immediately clued us in on the locations or identities of the nodes

Spooky gothic manor in a creepy Eastern European town. It's
safe to assume that the bad guy lives here

The first was a large manor that was home to the town’s Lord or something. It was your pretty standard spooky Gothic manor that you get in old-timey horror films, so we figured that it had to be something important. The first thing we noticed when we got there, however, was the statue out the front. It was a very lifelike one of a woman releasing a dove into flight, but the thing was that there was nothing holding the dome up. The word “Elizabeth” was carved into its base multiple times, and there was something just plain wrong about it that we couldn’t put our fingers on, weird sculpting aside.

With that in mind, Abbey and I decided to check the place out. She reported that there was only a single occupant (oh, and two giant scary dogs), the Lord who was writing in a giant ledger; she got a look at it and found a list of women’s names including mine and Neon’s, the latter of which had been crossed off. Waiting until he had retired for the night, the pair of us snuck in and checked the place out in what turned into a searching montage. No, really; we just jumped from one room to the next with no real explanation of how we got there. We didn’t find anything of note, and so headed back to the Hearse where Freddie and Captain Cancer were still ‘questioning’ the Hunchback (and CC was racking up the Variance there. Seriously, I can’t take him anywhere)

We decided that the next logical course of action was to go meet the Hunchback’s master, the “good doctor” who was being forced to do horrible things or whatever. Naturally, he lived in the tallest tower of a giant crumbling castle perched on top of a cliff. And that had lighting flashign behind it as we approached. (What the hell, Foundation? Why couldn’t this be the awesome zero-gee space hamster ball dance club one?) Busting in there, we headed to the tallest tower and found that, what do you know, there was a Mad Doctor in there in a lab full of science junk and with lots of slabs and a massive ledger. Oh, and Lightspeed chained to a wall. So that’s one less missing member of the team.

After we freed LS and ‘detained’ the doctor, we checked out the Ledger and found that it was actually full of computer code. Lightspeed was able to confirm that they were security controls and thus the Ledger was the Security Node. From there, we made a logical deduction that the other Nodes were in the form of written books we’d seen along the way; the Taxi’s ledger, the Barkeeps’ order book, the Manor Lord’s list of names and the word “Elizabeth” carved onto the fountain (Which Lightspeed suggested was the enigmatic Null node). So that’s one success.

Interrogation of the Doctor also revealed a little more of what was going on in Spookyville. The Lord’s beloved wife had died, and so he was forcing the Doctor to build him a new monster wife using girls that the hunchback was abducting. He did this by holding the Doctor’s fiancée, Elizabeth, prisoner in his dungeon. Putting things together, we  reached the conclusion that the Barkeep was providing the doctor with a list of all the new arrivals in town, which explained why I was attacked so fast. From there, we deduced that the Bartender’s notebook was the Archive Node based on its connection to the Security Node (Foundation nodes move in logical sequences. I remembered that much at least) and thus what we’d come to this sim hellhole for in the first place. We also deduced that if Neon was anywhere, she’d be at the lord’s manor, because narrative laws said so or something.

The team headed over to the tavern, figuring that it would be just a quick break and enter to get the book and retrieve the data. And it was, right up until the point that the bartender attacked us with his shotgun. Turned out that he had indeed been selling his patrons out to the Doctor, and was happy to murder us to keep his secret. Lightspeed took the book and headed off with Freddie in the Doctor’s borrowed car; the rest of us managed to geek the bartender and confiscate his shotgun which we figured would be useful.

The Retro-Chic Freddiemobile

Freddie in the meantime made a (relatively) high-speed getaway with the police in hot pursuit (probably every police car that existed in this country at the time) while Lightspeed worked to decode the data and find what we were after. Fortunately he managed to lose them - even without his rigger gear and driving a one hundred and fifty year old car, he’s that damned good - and looped back to pick the rest of us up. From there, all we needed to do was rescue Neon and then get the hell out of this monochrome nightmare.

And so we headed back to the manor. After a search of the lord’s bedroom, we found a secret entrance concealed behind a bookcase (of course!) Which headed down to his dungeon. The good news is that we found Neon and Elizabeth down there. The bad news is that there was also a chained up Frankenstein’s monster that the Lord then unleashed on us. Oh, and Neon looked like she was thirteen for whatever reason.

What the hell, Foundation?!

The only upside is that fighting Frankenstein was actually one of the things on my bucket list, so I was happy to throw myself at it as a distraction while Abbey freed the prisoners. The bad news is that it shrugged off the shotgun blasts and nearly killed me with its giant fists. Captain Cancer tried to restrain it to little avail, but he did manage to confuse it and provide a useful distraction. I missed much of what happened next, largely because you know, fighting for my life against a giant monster, but the monster turned on the lord and between them they managed to burn the manor down while we escaped in a scene change. Man, the Foundation is weird.

Farewell Spookyville Foundation. I hope I never see you again.

And so the Doctor and Elizabeth were reunited, we got the data and we were able to get the hell out of Spookyville in a Taxi via a quick stopover in the Zero-Gee Neon Hamsterball Space Disco. What we found was a whole pile of incredibly important information but right now I am too damned tired and headachy from trying to explain the whole mess. So I’ll save it for another post.

PS: I hate the Foundation