Content updates

blog/2023-11-03-Fei88.md

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+---
+slug: fei880
+title: "Introducing: Fei 880"
+authors:
+    name: Zoey
+    title: Local Transhuman
+tags: [fei, character introduction, jupiter, mars, backstory]
+hide_table_of_contents: false
+---
+
+## Earth & Jupiter (BF 35 - AF 2) 
+There is a lengthy and taxing epic to be written about the lives and narratives that collided and unfolded in the time leading up to the conception of Fei 880. Perhaps it could be taught in Jovian secondary schools, but I imagine the latter details might scandalize the youth far beyond the educational and patriotic elements that appear earlier in the story. For our purposes… we’re going to scrap it. It’s tired, boring, and riddled with clichés. All that you need to know is that when it first woke up in that Nine-Lives body shop on Legba it was very convinced that it was an ascending member of the Junta’s political machine named Formosus (ha!), it was very convinced that it had lost its “eternal soul” (double ha!), and it was shocked, terrified, and hurting beyond belief. 
+
+Sure, there’s other important stuff that happened. Possibly a brilliant and much-decorated career as a member of the Space Force and military chaplain. Perhaps a forknapping by a violent criminal gang on behalf of Consortium interests. Maybe even a series of simulspace hell-worlds, psychosurgeries, and interrogations of a confused and battered ego. Who can say really? Who would want to? BORING. It’s already time to move on if you ask me. There’ll be plenty of time later on for us to cover the life and times of Formosus Pius Seijiro Tanaka. This document is for a far more interesting figure: Fei Gozen aka Fei 880, the baddest space samurai on this side of the Jovian Trojans. 
+
+## Legba (AF 2 - AF 4) 
+Anyways… Fei-rmosus woke up in a Nine-Lives Body Shop in AF 2, the collateral of a paramilitary probe into the defenses of the Jovian Republic by criminal elements operating at the behest of high-level Consortium interests. Sure, that’s totally true. The Nine-Lives Gang, having poked and prodded her ego over the last couple of months of captivity had decided that it would be fun to embody it in a hot and heavily modded bouncer morph and throw it in a pit with their other favorite forks to see which one would break first. Fei had her wits about her, sort of, so usually it was the other one. Sometimes though, she ate it. It was never anything a little time back in the body shop couldn’t fix and after a while she learned not to sweat it. Or wait… no, no, no she contracted a substrain of Watts-McLeod that really warped her perception of things for awhile. Yeah, that’s the ticket… 
+
+So anyways, one day in the pit, she was beating back a gaggle of neotenics with a crowbar and all of a sudden… woah. Things just seemed to slow down a little bit. Little child-like limbs were still flailing; their teeth were still gnashing… but Fei was really able to witness it, almost like it was playing back for her ahead of time. Their inertia, trajectories, collision paths all fell into place. That day she beat five of those little fuckers to a pulp and didn’t look back. She probably should have cause the sixth bastard caught her from behind and she had to spend another week in the vats. Later she realized more things
+
+about herself: how to use new tools to efficiently rend flesh, how to keep fighting on in spite of her own wounds, and how to armor herself when she felt the tug of someone something like her. This became a major focus: camouflaging and armoring herself from these powers she still didn’t understand. 
+
+On a personal level, Fei grew by leaps and bounds on Legba. Sure, her identity, gender, race, religion, morality, metaphysics, and sense of purpose had been shattered to nothing but… well isn’t that just liberating? It’s sooo nice to not have a concrete sense of self or real meaning, isn’t it? She didn’t think so actually… Fei spent most of her recovery time between bouts ruminating once, twice, thrice-over every single element of who she thought she was. Finding there wasn’t much to hang on to, and that what did remain had greatly been complicated by the overlapping experiences of forking, sex-swapping, bloodsport, and the nagging feeling that she was, in fact, a large isopod trapped in a transhuman body… she decided to start over. 
+Her life was too confusing to stick to the absolutism of her inherited self. She abandoned it, and Formosus, entirely. She would approach the “horrors” of transhumanity with an open mind. From that point on she took the name Fei 880. If pressed she’d say that 880 is when she stopped counting, but no one would ever get the context of what she might have been counting to begin with. 
+
+## Elysium (AF 4 - AF 5) 
+After over a year of spectator bloodsport, Fei was purchased by the scion of some Consortium oligarch and shipped off-world. Registered as an indenture under the false identity of Fei Gozen, she became the legal property of one Yoshi Sakamoto. The whelp was wealthy beyond measure, extremely into Bouncer XPorn, and was influential on a number of VolCel circles on the mesh. That may sound pretty terrible, but for Fei that just meant that he shelled out the cash to have her entire body shipped physically to Elysium, on Mars, and that her indenture amounted to financially dominating a pathetic and mesh-addicted fail-son that nobody paid much attention to. He mostly wanted her around to look at and keep as a trophy, but that left her plenty of time to freelance and earn some credits on the side. Or it would have if she hadn’t gotten sick. 
+Weeks after landing on Mars, she came down with multiple co-occurring infections of some severity. Yoshi protected his investment, popped her into a med-vat and got all the necessary testing and analysis done. It turned out that Nine-Lives had shoved her into a defective morph- susceptible to all kinds of disease. Still, he didn’t want her in a new body and she wasn’t quite sure that she wanted that either- the concept of an eternal soul still had some grasp on her mind. Once recovered, Fei was out of the healing Vat and into a VacSuit.
+
+Now, with a permanent, protective membrane between herself and the big bad Martian world Fei was ready to fully immerse herself. She accompanied Yoshi on his XP streams and the rare occasions that he would make public appearances, but outside of those obligations had plenty of free time. She began freelancing, first in more boring, legal avenues and then in more interesting… less-than-legal courses of work. Contract work for Barsoomian separatists, fencing objects of value offered by Zone Stalkers, running security for shadowy corporate entities, or even diving into underground pit-fighting as a voluntary participant were all jobs that Fei took on for the thrill and the coin. After a while, she grew sick of the return to the Sakamoto compound, of taking up her mantle as a trophy once more. Utilizing help from both criminal and Barsoomian contacts, she had her cortical stack removed and then left behind after a particularly zealous Barsoomian cell bombed administrative facilities of the Sakamoto corporation, owned by Yoshi’s grandfather. If Yoshi still wanted her, he’d keep a pruned and mollified fork of her, but the actual Fei 880 was free to go. 
+
+## Olympus Mons (AF 5 - AF 9) 
+Fei left Elysium quickly and struck out with some Zone Stalking colleagues that she’d had fair dealings with previously. Living out of a buggy and constantly on the move, she grew accustomed to a life moving between Quarantine Zone ruins and the smugglers’ base of operations at the edge of Olympus Mons. Fei did not replace her cortical stack; she found some appeal to coming face-to-face with exsurgents or the defenses at the edge of the zone and risking true death. Of course, her combat and psi abilities instilled in her a confidence that perhaps it would never really come. 
+Her experiences with forking now: in her creation, in her flight from Yoshi Sakamoto, instill in her a curiosity. While living with the smugglers, she did it… again… and developed an informorph-muse out of her own fork. The two of them get along well enough and the informorph, called Phalanx to avoid confusion, became a good conversation partner that helps Fei talk through big ideas. It lives in the ecto of her VacSuit and she takes great care not to damage it in her work. 
+Aimlessly risking her life, putzing about with Zone Stalkers, and shooting the shit with Phalanx is not a bad life but it is… particularly unmoored. She lived this way for over two years, until the smugglers find themselves a new neighbor in AF 7. 
+A man called only Yasuke begins teaching acolytes his Neo-Bushido philosophy at the caldera of the great mountain. After a couple of unwitting Uplifts stumble into the smugglers’ den, Fei travels herself to the summit to see what the hubbub is about. There, she falls in love with the philosophy. Since her birth, she had struggled with meaning and purpose and the Shugyōsha provided each in spades. She began training alongside uplifts and AGIs and recontextualized her own fork-humanity in light of her new comrades.
+
+The importance of a biochauvinist soul recedes from her mind. Neo-Bushido moored Fei to herself and to the world in a way nothing had been able to for the past five years. She trained hard and well, and practiced the precepts of her teacher and his philosophy. In that pursuit, she also made fast friends with the others training under Yasuke. As they grew more confident and capable in their abilities they would descend the mountain and travel Mars in order to test their skills and their commitment to Neo-Bushido. For the first time, while traveling the planet and assisting its people, Fei truly began to feel like a Martian. 
+
+## Outer System (AF 9 - Present) 
+Nothing lasts forever, of course, and eventually it became time for Fei to embark on her own musha shugyō. With the blessing of Yasuke and the well-wishes of her fellow acolytes, she set out to travel the broader system. Adventures and escapades abounded, but the specifics thereof are stories for another day. She is still on her warrior’s journey now that she’s found her way into the ranks of Firewall on Enceladus, but she’s settling for a moment. What better place is there to test her mettle and her resolve than against transhumanity’s greatest threats?

blog/2023-11-03-maneu.md/index.md

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+---
+slug: maneau
+title: The Origins of Maneau
+authors: [ferris]
+tags: [facebook, hello, docusaurus]
+hide_table_of_contents: true
+---
+
+## A New Home (2 AF)
+On Saturn’s moon of Enceladus, a group of refugees land to build their community; their sanctuary amongst the chaos of The Fall.  This place to be settled is nestled within a valley surrounded by a huge fractured glacial ice field, active volcanoes which emit volatiles and condense into a dense lake of methane, carbon, ect. A constant ice storm spanning hundreds of miles across icy plains cuts them off from easily traversable terrain. And an aurora borealis lights the night sky every evening. 
+
+<!-- truncate -->
+
+The colony began by preparing a hydroponic bay and settling the children into a recreation area.  These buildings are climate controlled with stores of oxygen for life support and the colonists organized themselves into an egalitarian commune.  Power stations were constructed to harvest lightning from the constant ice storm and a group of lesbians prepared musical theatre and plays to boost morale.  An omen of good fortune, a leaf seen within the aurora was spotted the night before a strange hole appeared.  One of the children, Timmy, began exploring and discovered what appeared to be some old, deactivated technology, long metallic snakes were found wrapped up within the icy walls of the hole.  Once the power station was complete, the colonists began constructing a husky replication laboratory (now used to prepare new morphs).  This allowed every member to have a husky if they so desired.
+
+A meeting hall began construction alongside comfortable housing, and a medical/repair bay.  However, while these projects were being undergone, a faction of synths separated from the group.  They left and built shelter within the ice storm, frustrated that the bio-based colonists would not listen to their needs.  Meanwhile, the mysterious hole began expanding and huskies began disappearing nightly.  Over the next few months, a fuel depot was constructed, initially to prepare a weapons stockpile, but which was eventually directed to become a shipyard.  Additionally, strange synthetic ice crocodiles emerged from the hole, alongside a giant head with wires coming out of it.  Possibly TITAN technology, the crocodiles and head had secretly been controlling the colonists who began worshipping them, led by their spiritual leader Sylvan.  Timmy was also in on it and the first year ends with an enslaved population of pets for the ice crocodiles.  However, Timmy’s brother, Jimmy, began mustering support to prepare a terrorist cell and free the people from their crocodile overlords.
+
+## Maneau Today (10 AF)
+Today Maneau is a cluster of domed habitats, each connected either via subsurface tunnels or domed passageways.  Now the second largest settlement on Enceladus, it had a rocky start.  Just after the fall, a group of refugees settled the area only to find themselves taken hostage against newly awakened synthetic crocodiles.  Initially created as a secret military project, these early attempts at modifying and uplifting animals went horribly wrong.  The project was abandoned and all evidence was buried underneath the ice to (hopefully) never be found again.  Unfortunately, anomalous tectonic activity unearthed them and they were unleashed upon the unsuspecting refugees.  It took the heroic efforts of one of the enslaved children, Jimmy, and the military support of the Titanian commonwealth to free the people.
+
+Now, Maneau is a port city of about 1.5 million transhumans connecting the orbital habs of Saturn and the network of Bathysphere settlements scattered around Enceladus’ subsurface ocean.  It is part of the Titanian Commonwealth, a direct democracy which reinvests the profits of its microcorps into socialized services.  The colony’s economic output is that of a generalized cultural, industrial, and commercial hub; primarily harvesting and refining raw mineral resources and water-ice.  There is also a strong community of creatives focused on the old Earth practice of “theatre” and houses laboratory offices to microcorps developing new morphs.

docs/Game Mechanics/Skills.md

@@ -318,13 +318,13 @@ Know skills represent information your character has acquired, things they know.
 
 Points assigned for Active and Know skills are not interchangeable.  If you decided to take away points from a Know skill during character creation, you may only apply those extra points to another Know skill.
 
-# Know: [Field]
+### Know: [Field]
 ---
 **Type:** Know, Field
 
 Know skill represents your accumulated knowledge in a field of work, study, or interest.  Know skills are loosely grouped into four types: academics, arts, interests, and professional training.
 
-# Academics
+### Academics
 ---
 **Linked Aptitude:** Cognition
 
@@ -334,7 +334,7 @@ Academic fields cover all of the disciplines of scientific knowledge and advance
 
 **Specializations:** As appropriate to the field
 
-# Arts
+### Arts
 ---
 **Linked Aptitude:** Intuition
 
@@ -347,7 +347,7 @@ Note that Art fields should not be used in place of Active skills to directly de
 **Specializations:** As appropriate to the field
 
 
-# Interests
+### Interests
 ---
 **Linked Aptitude:** Cognition
 
@@ -357,7 +357,7 @@ Interest fields includes specialized knowledge in any topic that might be consid
 
 **Specializations:** As appropriate to the field
 
-# Professional Training
+### Professional Training
 ---
 **Linked Aptitude:** Cognition
 
@@ -371,7 +371,7 @@ Profession fields cover knowledge and training in the practices and procedures o
 ---
 
 
-### Using Know Skills
+## Using Know Skills
 It may seem like Know skills have fewer in-game applications than Active skills, but they should not be underestimated.  They have three major uses, the first of which is analyzing clues and solving mysteries.  Many *Eclipse Phase* scenarios are based around technological dangers, alien encounters, and scientific phenomenon, and so characters will need a good balance of Know skills to unravel the problem and find solutions.
 
 Just as importantly, Know skills are valuable in helping the characters -- and the players -- understand the world of *Eclipse Phase*.  In particular these skills can be used to assess a situation, identify strengths and weaknesses, make plans, evaluate worth, make comparisons, forecast probable outcomes, or understand the applicable science, socio-economic factors, or cultural or historical context.  In this regard, Know skills can be a valuable tool for GMs to assist the players, prompting for Know skill rolls to help flesh out details of the game setting that might otherwise be overlooked or not readily apparent.