Well then:
The pod comes up over the walls and you can see out over the complex, the side of the mountain and the park beyond. You can see that the crowd that was at the front of the building is now pushing its way into the building, and the military types are letting them through. As you watch, the two humanoid morphs move off to one side, make sure they are clear of the crowd and shake hands. One says something to the big flying robot ball morph, but you obviously cant tell what from where you are. The the guards heads suddenly vanish in a flash of light, leaving behind a mist of blood and a frantically pumping jugular. The ball rises slowly a few meters off the ground, and you see a variety of high end weapons emerge from its gleaming surface. It turns away from the complex, facing out towards the park.
Looking up, you see why.
Not far away and getting closer all the time are hundreds, maybe thousands of large drones that all look similar to the thing that chased you across the bridge back in DC. They vary in size and exact shape, and seem to be coming from every direction. Although you cant hear the buzzing noise they must be making, your imaginations are more than making up for it. Beyond them, the horizon looks like a selection of apocalypses. In one direction you can see distant blooms of light that you assume to be large detonations, probably nuclear. In another direction is what looks like a large purple storm-cloud, moving against the direction of the clouds around it. There is a fire somewhere to the north that makes it look like a displaced sunset, and in a number of directions you can see distant groups of flying vehicles. They are too far away to make out in any detail.
The drones reach the perimeter of the complex just before you reach the clouds, and you have a brief view of the ball morph wrecking several of them before the view is obscured. Above the clouds, everything looks remarkably peaceful, occasional distant flashes and unusual weather patterns aside. After a while the sky around you starts to darken and gravity weakens. The final few hours before you reach the orbital platform pass without incident, although after not very long you all head upstairs to get away from the smell below. Zbrny never wakes up. Between you its possible to move him up too if you want.
When you reach the orbital, all hell breaks loose. Its utter bedlam up there, with the place rammed full of refugees and apparently no one in charge. Its quite a while (weeks, months even) before thing get significantly better. But hey, you are all alive and apparently not about to turn into many tentacled monsters or anything. You never know though. Give it time.
You loose track of Zbrny shortly after you arrive, and later find out that he was actually recovered by himself. He had apparently egocast out months ago, when he first saw signs that something might be up on Earth. He later becomes a prominent hypercorp CEO. God knows what happened to his wifes remains, or the "baby".
So, that's it! You survived the fall of earth with much less damage than I thought you would. Oh, you are possibly wondering what happened to your companion, TSDs character Kurt. Here is what happened to him after you left him with the guy running the egocasting station, edited from the PMs we used to play out that bit:
Joose wrote:OK then! The others have scarpered. If you want to try and fob Tex off with just an expenses account, you'll need a Deception roll please!
TSD wrote:Deception: 45
Roll(2d10)+0:
4,4,+0
so a success... Just
Tex wrote:Just lie down there. Anything you I need to know about? Unusual psycosurgery, implants, trauma, that kinda thing?
Kurt wrote:Not as far as I know, but things are still a bit scrambled after that simulation everyone seems to be trapped in.
Tex, checking over connections and displays wrote:Yeah, I've heard about that. You get the apartment or the field sim?
Kurt wrote:The guys you saw me with, we all got the Apartment job. Psychotic killer robot, swarms of insects eating your flesh, erm, figuratively, fire, flood, crushing.
All sorts of weird shit. What's happened on the field one?
Tex wrote:Oh, you do not want to know. From what I hear, you got it easy. You know, relatively. Right, im all set here, just need a destination. You heading straight up?
Kurt wrote:From what you said, seems the best bet, they're on to receive and the insurance is paid for a reason
Tex wrote:Okey-dokey then. Hold on to your butt.
Joose wrote:The clear lid of the pod closes down over you with a gentle hiss, and you are aware of a brief electrical hum before everything quietly fades to black. There is a pause. You have egocasted before a couple of times, being a big business type, and although it all feels fairly familiar so far you have never experienced a delay this long before. Normally, even if there is a transmission delay, you are not aware of the passage of time. Eventually you start to see again.
You are in a bright white room, sat in a comfortable chair. Across from you is a virtual display, currently showing a sort of "station off air" signal. Floating across the top of your vision is this message:
Code: Select all
Due to high demand, we are unable to complete your Ego transfer at this time. Your transmission will complete shortly. During this time, we have transferred you to our Essen Data Centre, and provided a courtesy virtual environment for your business needs. Virtual Environment Controls can be found to your left. Your current position in the queue is 153298. Estimated Transmission Time is 272mins. Thank you for your patience.
TSD wrote:So, what do the controls let me do?
Joose wrote:There's stuff for changing the décor, a dial for apparent temperature, drop down menu for music selection and a dial marked Time Dilation. It's a dial, currently set at 100%. Basically, it changes your perception of the passage of time, making it go either faster or slower, depending on which way you turn it.
TSD wrote:So lets try it at 125%, give it 30 mins (by my perception, with a few good music tracks) and see how long has actually passed.
Joose wrote:You turn it up to 125% (and stick on some tunes). You don't feel any different, but the timer on the floating text now says you are position 132132 in the queue, and you have 234 mins left to wait.
TSD wrote:Lets set it to maximum then.
Joose wrote:Turning the dial all the way up turns the numbers into an ever decreasing blur. In what seems to you like barely a second they are gone, and everything fades to black again. This time it feels much more like you remember, with no awareness of the passage of any time between everything going black and you coming to.
You wake on a leather sofa, in front of a television. It looks like there was a hell of a party last night; there are discarded plastic cups and mostly empty bowls of stale snack food everywhere. The television is showing nothing but static, and is muted. You also have no recent memories and feel slightly stunned, but are unhurt. You can hear a rhythmic chopping noise from somewhere in the house behind you.
So, yeah. His egocast signal was intercepted and back in the horror-groundhog day sim he went. Poor man. Still, could have been worse; One of the options for the egocasting ending I could have randomly selected for him was an ego-kidnapping by criminal gangs who would then re-sleeve him in a female sex slave pod morph. well, not sure if that's worse exactly. Still pretty bad either way.
With the obvious exception of TSD, feel free to keep your characters for if we play further games. Or rather, keep the character themselves, but not the stats. They were built with much lower skills, stats and equipment than a normal starting EP character to reflect the fact that they were average Joes, not people who stand out enough to be of interest to Firewall. However, the main game of EP is set quite a few years after the fall, so if you have become attached to your characters you could make new starting characters based on them to reflect how they might have changed and grown in the intervening years, and I will give you some small bonus for having completed this game.
Any questions about what happened? Obviously I wont necessarily be able to answer all of them, as some of it is intentionally mysterious GM only knowledge to keep it freaky. If you have any feedback or pointers on how it could have been improved for you lot, that would also be good. Apart from the obvious time issues
