LAST INVESTIGATION

[parasomniacs]

Week 8

Friday

Ten participants wake up in the participant staff rooms this morning. It's the first Friday in a while that there isn't a decrease in their numbers - though not without other costs: Two of the hostages have been lost. There's still that last motive hanging over their heads, an unconventional one. Can they handle the challenge?

It's quiet... too quiet...

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INTEREST AREA C: DEVICES & DOOHICKIES

[parasomniacs]

[If you do not go into the door leading to a morgue, this large garage style door is open. A ways ahead of the computer terminal. There are also some towers, about the height of a very tall person, standing side by side a wide distance apart from each other. There’s another box that seems to go to them, but a red light seems to indicate that it’s off - there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn it on.

Next to them are some pods of various sizes that don’t resemble the chambers used in the morgue, though some are certainly as large. They have a monitor screen and something to input controls on the outside. A large button says “PRINT.” ]

[devilsnight]

[...And...will you look at that, none of this is familiar. Why can't any of you be from the 90s, like God intended?

Okay. So. Those towers don't look promising, nor does the box. The pods are what's catching his interest, though, and as such he'll leave the weird tech alone for now in favor of checking those out; what do they...look like, exactly, given that he's noticed that at least some of them are most definitely large enough to contain corpses or something from the description.]

[parasomniacs]

[They are made of a semitransparent whitish plastic. There is a seam in the middle where you can snap them open like a clamshell glasses case. The top side is coated in a variety of jets and nozzles - it's rather heavy, like a big metal tin. The bottom side has a carpet type layer of thick soft supportive plastic.

They are almost all empty. However. The third smallest of the pods contains some pieces of paper resting on the bottom surface.]

[devilsnight]

[He'll get it open eventually, this is...interesting. Heavy as fuck, but he'll deal, and he wants to get at those bits of paper.

...So the sheep is a sentient program run by the patron saint of the plague. That's what he got out of this.

(Jesus Christ, as far as he can tell it's not Total Recall, it's actually fucking Brazil. He is so mad that he did not get to make that reference at the sheep, maybe she would have understood it a little better than he'd thought.)

Okay. So. All of this is creepy, he's not entirely sure what all the jets and nozzles do and he's not exactly in a hurry to find out, so...he'll close the pod he was looking at. He's not going to go far, though; he'll be looking at the monitor screen on the outside of it like he's trying to work out what to do with it before...well, he's been given a large button with a word on it and hell if that doesn't look like temptation.

>STUDY  >CALL YEAGER
>PRINT  >LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE

Buttonpressing is go, let's see what the fuck that does.]

[parasomniacs]

[One of the medium sized pods is suddenly filled with a thick white cloud such that the exact events inside are difficult to see. Then the smoke clears.

A white cat is sitting in the pod.]

[respring]

[ SUP CAPTAIN SHITSHOW you gained a small purple assistant. Who. Looks a little exasperated that he's just pushing random buttons but it's not like she expected otherwise, so.

And then--? ]

...a cat?

[ is it a friendly cat. can she touch it. ]

[parasomniacs]

[She can touch the cat. It feels like a cat.








Is any cat friendly?]

[respring]

[ FROM SOMEONE WHO HAS A CAT VYING FOR HER ATTENTION AS SHE TYPES THIS, YES, THEY CAN BE FRIENDLY!!!

She will try to pet the cat after giving it her hand to sniff, then....provided she does not get scratched she will just keep petting it while she looks around.

....it's cute, okay? ]

[parasomniacs]

[The cat does not scratch her. It leans into her gentle touch very slightly but does not meow.]

[respring]

[ Excellent. If kitty does not mind, she will pick it up and continue to pet it as she pokes around at the monitor controls.

Is there any way to change what prints in these things? ]

[simplism]

[...........AH. Ohhh noooo. He recognizes that cat!]

M-Murr?

[ANOTHER ONE???]

[parasomniacs]

[Yes, it looks like Murr.]

[devilsnight]

[.......................................

is

is it alive]

[parasomniacs]

[The cat looks at Top Dollar blankly. It appears to be breathing.]

[devilsnight]

[...he has created life and that is fucking terri- ...wait.]

...Oh, son of a bitch.

[He is going to go over to one of the other pods - the ones that seemed potentially person-sized from earlier.

>PRINT]

This had better be another goddamn cat in a stupidly big pod. Or maybe a huge fuckin' cat, I'd tolerate a huge fuckin' cat.

[parasomniacs]

[Smoke fills the pod again. The object resembles the silhouette of a beautiful woman... a beautiful woman with very thick legs... okay wait no now it's obvious--

It's a large ballgown.]

[devilsnight]

[...Oh. Hey, Beato's dress. That is so much better than it had potential to be.

So the description up there said that you can input commands on this as well. What sort of commands are we looking at, or do you have to manually type them in?]

[scythegun]

[WELL SINCE SOMEONE IS JUST AVOIDING THINGS... time to check out the towers!! What exactly are these things?]

[parasomniacs]

[They are tall. Taller than Yeager. If he stands between them with his arms spread eagle he will not quite touch the surface. The black plastic has no particular seam. On the outside it is just this imposing modern art chunk.

On the side of each spire is a label:
Macro
cosm
etic
Sys
tems

The "cosm" is in a particularly stylized chunky font.]

[scythegun]

[Huh. These are totally weird. There's no seam anywhere on them, though...? What happens if he knocks on one? Are they hollow?]

[parasomniacs]

[They are not hollow. In fact they are so heavy that when he knocks on one it doesn't really give enough - he can feel with his knuckles that a knock with enough force to move the tower at all would probably make it fall all the way over.]

[scythegun]

[....................

so how bad an idea is it to try to knock the tower over

it might not be possible at all but he's got the blastia which actually makes him stronger so...??]

[parasomniacs]

[He can do it pretty well if he tries. Imagine if you had like a free-standing full-length mirror, or you were a dad who decided to stand still and let his daughter pretend they have super strength. He might tap into his extra strength if he wanted to pick it up and give it a bear hug, but a solid shove will do the job fine.

At the exact moment that the tipping point is reached and the tower begins to freely fall over, there is a brief existential sense of an asymmetry in spacetime. Like when you are wearing two headphones, and you rip out one. Except kinaesthetically.

Having fallen, the tower just lies there on the ground. Looking at the exposed bottom, it appears that wires were not connecting it to the ground. The bottom has a sort of line across it and some visible little screws near the edges. Perhaps that is where you'd cram a screwdriver if you really wanted to open it. Overall the tower is intact.]

[scythegun]

[HE DID IT \o/

Also that was like. Really weird? Did anyone else feel that, um. Hmm.

But now that the tower has been successfully knocked over, time to check out the bottom. He doesn't have a screwdriver but he does have a pocketknife... can he use the blade to carefully undo the screws there?]

[parasomniacs]

[The blade is too big.]