Great Wall Of Silverwheel

Day 43, Evening

After what has mildly put been an eventful few days, this one is drawing to a quiet close, with soft rain drumming against the exterior of the various colony buildings. The previous arrivals, Scum and infugees both, are helping the new ones settle in, showing them around the place and explaining to them what wildlife not to antagonize and who not to accept drugs or narcalgorithms from. Sameera has also finished uploading her XP log to the colony council's private partition.

It's mostly her showing a remarkably cavalier attitude towards explosives in her close proximity and heartily "eyeballing" how much is needed to clear a given obstruction(and, once or twice, clearing obstructions that she could have squeezed aroundwith a bit of effort), but towards the end she arrives in a furnished section of the cave. One side is a bank of monitors, mostly displaying the exterior of the island as transmitted by various hidden cameras, but also a few long-range ones trained towards the coast to the west and northwest. Much of the furnishing is sparse, skeletal shelving filled with what look like an alien survivalist's stash, various forms of presumably edible items wrapped in foil, buried in wax or encased in plastic, a selection of tools and spare parts and even some alien objects that have the pointy and menacing aesthetics of weaponry.

At the far end, behind a partially closed door that Sameera amazingly enough chose not to force, is a dead alien creature, laid out on what's either a mortuary slab or a very uncomfortable, ascetic sort of bed. It appears to be mostly a confusion of tentacles, some as thick as human limbs, some as frail as human digits, some of them braided around each other like muscle fibers. The only thing that isn't a tentacle is a large, central body with a pair of what looks to once have been big eyes, widely spaced apart, tapering away from the rest. While the creature itself has resisted decomposition, whatever garment it once wore appears to have mostly rotted away into a few threadbare sections that look like they'd turn to dust if touched carelessly.

While the team reviews the XP logs and considers Kinkulon's scouting data, the rest of the colony is keeping busy as well. Arianhod's mother is filling the colony's social media feed with things like "when your adult daughter and her fork clones are too busy playing with their friends to talk to you when you get to meet her for the first time in six months. #justmotherthings." Arianhod's father, meanwhile, is grudgingly having his rep upvoted by the Scum since he managed to put up with them for several hours while interviewing colony residents without batting an eye or reacting to any of their bullshit.

Since no one's addressed it yet, the first wave of refugees are also continuing to petition for the colony to formally adopt a representative democracy. At this point, about 20% of the colony's members support the idea. Sameera is one of those who support the idea for the clearly stated reason that if you're a president, blowing things up is no longer an arrestable offense but instead simply declaring war on geography. Lime and Kinkulon remain a-political for the moment, and the Scum are staunchly opposed to any sort of formal government.

Arianhod

<@Phoenix: Y'all want democracy? Okay, first thing: Your morphs are ready to go, you need to pick out in which order you want to go in. I've at least tried to match sex to gender, and all of them have been genefixed. Further alterations can be scheduled with @Eerie. Sis, you got this? I think I need to handle the folks.>

<@Thanat Yeah, I can patch that exalt up, you will be beta-testing the Silverwheel mod. @Sameera that goes for you too. I highly recommend you get medichines installed. And if nothing else, the respiration augs will help with the cordite smoke.>

2x (Medichines 3rp+Enhanced Respiration 1rp)=4rp of resources.

That said, Arianhod goes to find her dad. "Ready to do the interview here? I know both colony council AND being your daughter are two huge sources of bias, but put that right up front." <@Mom, let me finish up with dad here and I'll be over in a bit, I got a surprise.>

Said surprise being the lager made with alien acid for a citrus equivalent taste. As it it'll probably melt the teeth of any biomorph without medichines, so she splits it into Silverwheel Special Raw %12.5 AVB, 2.2 Ph. And Silverwheel Special Brisk, with a more managable acid level and %9ish AVB. Once Pheonix is sleeved, she plans to have a celebration. After a month and a half of colonial bullshit, Arianhod needs to think of anything else but more colony stuff.

Arianhod is going to do her interview part with her dad for the Titanian whatever while assisting Eerie is she needs it.

Thanat

<Alright @Arianhod, Thanathree will beta those mods, sure. Better one of us that some poor infugee, I guess? Oh hey, you should print them some safe food before they get sleeved into flesh again and start eating random crap lying around.>
Also, Thanat's exalt already has an enhanced respitrator, so we need only one for Sameera, but two medichines. So 7 RP total rather than 8.
He also pings Arianhod's parents that he's available, should they want to interview him (though to Arianhod's mother, there's an extra "anytime" after "available"). And then spends some more time socializing with the Scum he hasn't seen in more than a month which might as well be a thousand years to them, using his multi-tasking mind to do more useful stuff in the background. He also takes the time to set up some multiplayer city builder/political management game taking place on a depopulated old Earth, free of any building, with the help of Liz and Lahmia if they agree. He intends to steal ideas from what people will build in there maybe, and mostly see what kind of society they build, to see what they want. World of Realms of Lands of Dominions of Territories of Fighting can't be the only video game that's of interest to others. In exchange he offers to help Liz with her own entertainment if she wants, since a hundred forked AGIs running at high speed can get bored real fast.

Wanting to explore the edges of the world faster, he reworks the basic Gnat design to the best of his ability, allowing it a greater speed, range and a high frequency radio that should reach to London Falling from anywhere on Splinter. While he has no problems designing the mechanical parts, he bothers Lahmia and Liz for help in dealing with the ALI's programming and its handling of its slightly modified drone body. He'll recycle the previous four gnats to build new ones, even if he can only print two or three, if Kinkulon agrees to the sidegrade.

Thanat also starts working on designing a reinforced structure to house, and quarantine the gate. Wide and tall even on the inside, with turret hardpoints arranged all around the gate and hanging from the ceiling on the structure's supports. A thick giant dome with a skeleton he intends as unbreakable as possible, a GEV-sized gate leading outside and a human-sized airlock to quarantine. Thanat wants a gate house out of which nobody and nothing should be able to get out alive unless Silverwheel allows it. He will spend a lot of time making it possible to pump all air out of the giant room as fast as possible should invaders try to use gases, with specialized fabbers to break down the more dangerous ones into their constituent parts and then into feedstock. Adjacent to the gate room, he designs smaller buildings to house a staff that'd watch over the gate, maintain the installations, and a quarantined area for new visitors. He's liberally taking inspiration (read: he copies a lot, or at least from what he remembers) L&R's installations on Oberon, scaling it all down to fit except the gate room. On the plans he works on, open to the four original colonists, a ring around these few buildings is marked "no man's land" and extends some distance outward.
While on gate matters, he'll also re-design gate probes, from what he remembers of L&R. Tiny probes going through the smallest non-zero width wormhole possible and taking a quick snapshot of what's on the other side.
He doesn't actually start building anything just yet, that thing will be costly, and the automated defenses even more.

Since he doesn't want to be the only one who does anything approaching work, he tasks Buzz with making two copies of his ego and tweaking their personality a bit. Just adding random elements, removing others, changing things already present. All in the hope of making the two new egos somewhat different from himself immediately rather than wait years for them to have their own experiences. He intends to have Thanatwo sleeved into his spare takko, and Thanathree (made to like two-legged humanoid morphs rather than synth-squids) into the exalt. These are just temporary designations, they'll chose their own obnoxious personal names later, and they'll be free to re-use Thanat's birth name if they feel like it. Since he's Scum he doesn't bother with overly long and boring contracts, only interested in sharing undmodified XPs with each others for a month, and then only if they feel like it.

Arianhod

"Looks okay, Thanat, can we uh, hide the gun turrets behind drywall? Maybe enlarge the entrance room and quarantine room so it doesn't feel like they're walking into a prison. I'd like a skylight on the roof and it being the first thing people see as they enter. Keep in mind having enough space for a possible rail connection right up to the gate, as well as that water sales thing…maybe put a bar/waiting room area in somewhere as well. We can put an airport/railport in farther away…maybe put some grass in around the buffer zone."

Thanat

"Meh, why bother hiding the turrets? But yeah the dome can be transparent I guess, like a Martian dome on a smaller scale. The big gate should be large enough to let trains pass through, there'll just need to be tracks there, and an appropriately-sized airlock so we can sterilize everything going in or out. The bar and waiting room will be at the airport/railport rather than right here, less people so close in case of problems. The quarantine is empty because I'm not an interior decorator, I don't care what you put in there and we can always enbiggen it when there's more traffic. Oh hey, should be a second quarantine for outgoing, too. Unless of course we want to also exports extra-solar bacteria. I'm sure L&R handles it on their side too, but we can't be too prudent."

Arianhod

"Because I don't want the first thing people see here to be a gun pointed at their face and threatening them right off the bat. But yeah, gate port should have a shuttle and flying car port to a hamlet outside the free fire zone. The hamlet is where we'd put the airport and rail station. The quarantine station should be a full on clinic, as this is the logical place to get the Silverwheel aug package, or remove it, if they want to, but everything except the digestive mods works just as well in Sol as here."

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