★ WEEK TWO: FORWARD MOVEMENT ★

[modaphor]

[A lot has happened in a few short days.

Arche has grown a great deal from her interactions with the assembled agents of the facility; thanks to their influence, her chamber has taken on a few new additions, including a rapidly filling curio cabinet and, more recently, an orange and black Maine Coon kitten has come to stay in the facility as well. Thanks to Ginti's advice, he is no longer confined to his transparent tank in Arche's Chamber; in fact, you may see him wandering around during the week. Please be kind to the local wildlife!

On a more serious note, Arche has located one of her missing memory cores, which comes with some...vaguely unsettling information surrounding it. But, since the general consensus seemed to be "yes, we'll help", she is now hard at work securing the gateway to the pocket dimension; if asked, she will approximate that it will take her until late Thursday night to get everything up to scratch.

In the meantime, she's helpfully provided some recommendations for people to work on this week, in preparation for this week. If you need something to think about, you might try working on one of those?

Otherwise, the facility is still available to you, as is Arche. Have a good week, everyone!]


SUNDAY | MONDAY | TUESDAY | WEDNESDAY | THURSDAY

[OOC: As with last week, if you want to talk to Arche, please use the subheadered comments! Also, we had some agents looking around for clues last week, so as a way of encouraging and streamlining that —

If you intend to look for clues, please explicitly mention what sort of thing you're looking for and approximately where you are looking, and consider asking for mod attention in the comment header so I can find it easier! Thanks, everybody!]

Comments

[modaphor]

[A quick check to the blue-bound spine indicates that it is a book on golems.]

[nullorvoid]

[...What the shit.

Okay, so he's got no idea what that's supposed to imply, and besides, the paper's more interesting. Flipping the book open, then...is it just a placeholder, or is the paper itself actually a thing?]

[modaphor]

[Well, it is serving as a placeholder; the page he's turned to is discussing the uses of golems as servants, with a little overview of some of the legends that have involved golems.

That said, there's some numbers handwritten on the scrap of paper. Four or five digits each, with a decimal in every one.]

[nullorvoid]

[...Hm. Well, he'll be taking the book with him, that's for sure. If someone who was here found it interesting at some point, it might as well be worth a look, and he's...probably going to be very weirded out by the subject matter when he looks at it a bit more indepth.

That said, the numbers...

...There doesn't happen to be an index for the books this place has in here, is there?]

[modaphor]

[Dewey decimal? Do we ever!

There's a label on the spine of the book he's carrying with similar (though not identical) numbers on it, and every row of shelves has a range of numbers on its side for easy reference.]

[nullorvoid]

[Aw yeah, sometimes it pays to be surrounded by people who are really anal about everything needing to be in its proper place. Casta'd either be proud of him or facepalming about the fact that he's looking so damn vindicated over this.

So let's go see what one of these numbers corresponds to if anything, yeah?]

[modaphor]

[There are three numbers! Which does he want to investigate first from the list: first, second, or third?]

[nullorvoid]

[Let's go with the first. Since we're being all organized and shit today, might as well be sequential, too.]

[modaphor]

[Following along with the numbers, he's eventually led to a book on simulacrums. There doesn't seem to be anything in this one, though depending on how closely he's looking, he might notice it's slightly (like, literal millimeters slightly) out of line with the other books around it.]

[nullorvoid]

[Hey, will you look at that, he's got no fucking idea what that word means! He'll just be taking that too, if no one mi-

...hang on.

...Okay, after a brief interval where he finds that damn bag the machine gave him, because like hell if he's going to be hauling books everywhere, he will be sticking that thing in it. The golem thing's been shoved in there too. Apparently somebody found these things interesting and worth looking into, and even if he doesn't have any idea what he's looking at, maybe Akane will. Akane knows a lot about a lot of things, after all.

Okay. Second number on the list, he supposes?]

[modaphor]

[FUN FACT, IF THE GAMERUNNER WEREN'T HALF-ASSING THEIR JOB, THE CORRECT PLURAL WOULD'VE BEEN SIMULACRA. Good thing Ginti didn't know the difference.

Second number on the list takes him to another shelf a little distance away, and a book about familiars.

Interesting.]

[nullorvoid]

[FORTUNATELY FOR THE GAMERUNNER, GINTI IS DUMB AS HELL. NO HARM, NO FOUL.

...Familiars? Like...witchy-type familiars and shit?

That's. Uh.

Was someone trying to create servants or something? Either that or somebody was lonely as hell, which is also...possible maybe? And makes the whole thing a little less creepy.

Is there anything in particular going on with this book? He's going to kind of flip through it a little just to verify that we are in fact dealing with witch shit, but otherwise?]

[modaphor]

[How fast is he flipping through it? Single page by single page, opening it at random, fanning quickly through the pages?]

[nullorvoid]

[He is using the tried and true method of "open it at random and kind of idly page through it to try to get some idea of what he's looking at."]

[modaphor]

[Funny thing, when you open a book at random — it'll often open to a given page that's been visited over and over again, if one such page does exist.

And in this case, it does! Seems like somebody was spending a lot of time looking into text and commentary about the relationship between a familiar and its master.]

[nullorvoid]

[Well, damn. Somebody needed a life-

...Wait.

Okay, just let him get that other book out for a sec. The one about the Simulacrap. Does it do the same thing?]

[modaphor]

[Simulacrap seems to be a little more vague on that one, but he's seeing the phrase artificial construct a lot, which would imply that there's a somebody on the other end doing the constructing, too.]

[nullorvoid]

[...You know, if everyone here turns out to be clones Ginti's gonna be pissed as hell, just saying.

Okay. So we've got some vague simulacrap, familiars, someone who wants to make servants out of shit, and generally it looks like somebody's either really bored, really lonely, so fucking lazy it comes back around and makes them overly productive, or they just want to go A GOD AM I BEHOLD MY CREATIONS. Sure. Whatever. Let's shove the books back in the bag and check out that third number, and hope it's less balls-to-the-wall creepy.]

[modaphor]

[Off he goes! To a book that turns out to be abou—

...Wait, this book isn't about anything, it doesn't look like. There are no words on the spine, and also no numbers; it's sitting where that last number should be, but it doesn't seem to fit in correctly with the rest. It's a lot shorter than the other books, and almost journal-like?

The surrounding books are about ducklings, coincidentally.]

[nullorvoid]

[...Wh...

O...kay, that's new. He'll just be taking that, then; since it's journal-like - and this is kind of a long shot - it doesn't have a name on the cover of it like theirs do, does it?]

[modaphor]

[It does not, unfortunately. However, it does look remarkably similar to the ones with people's names on them; maybe someone just didn't put a name on this one?]

[nullorvoid]

[Maybe...hm.

Might as well open it, then - he'll actually be a bit more careful with this one because he's got no idea what he's looking at, fullstop, so might as well start from the beginning and start paging through.]

[modaphor]

[Good thing he did, too, because there are two things he'll immediately notice:

One is that there's a handwritten dedication on the inside of the front cover.

The other is that nearly all of the pages have been ripped out, and the ones that are left are blank.]

[nullorvoid]

[Oh my god.

If you don't want people reading your damn notes just get rid of the book, don't shove it in somewhere in the middle of other books about ducks, who fucking does that...

Okay, what's this dedication thingo written on the front cover?]

[modaphor]

[Written in sweeping handwriting, the message reads:

META,

REMEMBER! DON'T WRITE WRONGS, RIGHT WRONGS!

It's signed at the bottom with the letter G with a heart drawn around it.]