#technofae tag

“Hey, Morgan, actually read this,” Emrys passed the letter back up to her. She forced her attention back into the present and took it, and began to read it out loud.

“To whom it may concern. If you received this letter, it is out of an abundance of concern for you and the child you came into possession of in the years 2051, 56, or 61. It is important that you read this letter carefully and take it to heart. You have been lied to. The Tau Research Group lied about what these children were born for, and what they are being raised for. 

“You may have thought that by volunteering to raise one of these children, you were performing noble and valuable services in the name of science. This was a lie. You may have come to believe that these children are vital to our future as a human race. This was a lie. These children were bred as lambs to slaughter at the altar of scientific hubris. Each and every one of them is destined to die a horrific, painful death. They were not created to serve the greater good. They were born with a timer on their heads, ticking down and ever down to their eventual, inevitable unmaking.

“The documents I have enclosed detail exactly the scope to which the Tau Research Group is perpetuating a fraud. It is with a genuinely heavy heart that I must say, at the time of writing this, I’m not sure there is anything to be done to save your child from this fate, and if you have received this letter, it means I have passed on without finding a shred of hope to leave you with. 

so I hit up TA the other day, right, cause I was thinking

we've basically fleshed out what kind of sound the MTVs have, right, like what kind of music they make

BUT we've also got these characters, Null and Void, which were originally TAs characters, not ones we made together, and Null and Void are also sort of a band on the side, just kind of a hobby, and I couldn't remember if we'd really fleshed that out

so we're talking, and we're going back and forth, and we knew it would be some kind of electronic something but that's as far as we got

so we talked some more and looked some shit up and I've yet to be able to find a good example of it but I'm sure there's some weirdo out there who makes this sort of music but we dubbed it Electric Klezmer and it is. my white whale of music rn

WHY am I putting so much effort into figuring out what kind of music these people make and/or listen to? I mean. is there an easier way to capture a personality?

more on Null and Void under the cut

@kickflipkidd

BOY OH BOY IM SO GLAD YOU ASKED :D

lmao anyway so this book is the result of a Shadowrun 1E Game That Never Happened, my mom was gonna run a game for me and @taciturnaccordionist so its sort of low fantasy/cyberpunk-y. so we built these characters, right, and then that spiraled into fleshing out the organization they belong to and then how that organization fits into the world at large and then all the fun sociopolitics that would bring it about, etc etc etc

the organization is called the TechnoFae and they specialize in helping people digitally disappear. sort of a renegade witpro and all the coded language is based on fae folklore and Arthuriana and shit, its very cool

but once it was clear the game was never getting off the ground, TA and I just started. going nuts. making characters and places and so on until I was like. fuck it im gonna write a book.

so the book follows the leader of the TechnoFae (Morgan) and a kid who gets wrapped up in some Unethical Science/Magic (essentially the same in this universe, we came up with our own magic system mostly so we wouldnt get sued but also bc the setting doesnt actually work without magic) who wants Out

and its gonna have like, heavy themes of digital surveillance and tech ethics and disability activism blended in with folklore and esoterica and its so cool dude im so excited abt this project

they're a CRT-head music duo a la Daft Punk. they're EXTREMELY underground. they play small gigs weekly at one of three bars, and every week they perform completely new music in wildly varying genres under different names, but always as a dichotomy (Analog & Digital, Strange & Charm, Summer & Winter, you get the idea). they aren't actually called The MTVs, that is a name used exclusively by fans of their work to talk about them on forums online. once, when going by Analog & Digital, they performed a song called Trans Wrongs that earned them the secondary nickname The HRT Monitors.

they have no online presence and they've never actually released an album. fans of their work take video or audio recordings of them and upload them online. they will, occasionally, take those audios and burn their own unlabeled CDs to sell at shows. they never make more than 10 at a time and they're completely random; you and a friend might buy two CDs and get two completely different selections.

but the funniest bit of this is actually the guy their fans have dubbed The MTVs Stage Manager.

the venue they play at on any given week is completely random. no one's ever been able to find a pattern. and their set is never announced anywhere ahead of time. one guy camped out in front of one of their usual venues for a month and never saw them.

but. there is one guy that people have noticed has been at every single show. he doesn't seem to be a fan, he's just. there. inexplicably, at every single one. no one knows who he is, and fans have taken a real Batman's Ass approach to trying to identify him. he's a cryptid. a ghost. a myth. a fucking legend. no one's ever been able to talk to him. the band doesn't know who he is (but when asked, they also act like they're brand new, never played anywhere before, completely deflect if you try to ask them abt their older music).

the one consistent fact is that the Stage Manager ALWAYS gets to the venue about twenty minutes before the MTVs play, so people will try to take pictures of Random Dudes that Might Be The Right Guy and have a shocking ~67% success rate finding where the MTVs are gonna play. that percentage goes up the shittier the picture is. a decently clear, torso-up shot of a Random Guy whose face is obscured by something is probably not the guy, less than 50% chance that The MTVs will be there, 46% at best if that's the only picture anyone puts up. an Extremely Blurry picture of Some Guy's Shoes and the image isn't even loading for like half the people trying to look at it? 90% chance The MTVs will be wherever that guy is.

@kickflipkidd

so in order to explain the Story™️, I gotta establish the setting and magic system

so this is set in Future(+alternate history) Seattle, and its basically a streamlined version of the world we actually live in, so you have five big Megacorporations that control Media, Medicine, Tech, Security, and Consumer Goods, and those corps have subsidiaries upon subsidiaries and there are all sorts of vigilante/renegade groups that target or directly oppose specific corps

so the TechnoFae specialize in undermining Cold Iron Security, a subsidiary of the Security and Tech corps. mostly what the TechnoFae do is remove real people from the system. in the simplest cases, this means faking a death. sometimes it means creating a new digital history for someone and the old history is used as a Glamour for TechnoFae operatives. sometimes it means wiping every trace of a person out of the information superhighway. yknow how anything on the internet is there forever? these people can find it and erase it. you never existed.

then the magic system. Magic and Science are intrinsically linked, in that scientific principles are magical and vice versa. so there are three basic principles: Stasis, Entropy, and Force. Stasis + Force creates The Machine, all the way from simple levers and ramps to supercomputers and AI. Entropy + Force creates Magic, the Anathema, things that work but have no material explanation. Stasis + Entropy + Force is organic life, the Animus. but Stasis + Entropy is a great big question mark, a theoretically infinite energy source; its never been been discovered, but harnessing the theoretical power could fuel the entire world until the heat death of the universe. Harnessing that combination would basically make someone a god.

decades of experimentation trying to combine Entropy and Stasis yield... nothing. you cant distill those principles out of anything, let alone combine them with the other. oil and water, they dont want to mix. then one day, some genius has the idea of subtraction; take a living thing and remove their Force, see what happens.

trials start small, bacteria and single-cell organisms. it takes a massive amount of power to pull the Force from even those, and that barely generates enough electricity to make the hairs stand up on your arms. but as energy breakthroughs are made, it becomes feasible to remove Force from bigger and more complex lives, flies and mice and frogs and so on. they start growing basically test tube babies to become experiment fodder. once you can rip the Force from a fly, its only a matter of time to be able to pull it from a Person and create a limitless battery, so they grow people to use specifically for this cause.

one of those people, our plucky child protagonist, figures out what their purpose is supposed to be. their """father""" is (conveniently lmao) the CEO of Cold Iron Security and (out of love, or at least concern) gets them in touch with Morgan, bc even he has a personal code of ethics and this is Fucked Up.

so Child Protagonist (code name Mordred) wants to be wiped out of the system. would be easy enough, except they have like 10x the regular amount of data stored abt them and its all Suspiciously Centralized, so the TechnoFae end up digging in deeper than they usually do and find out 1: this experiment is Fucked Up and 2: Mordred isnt the only potential sacrifice

"Why do you walk with a cane?" the kid asks as Morgan slides into the other side of the booth.

She sighs. Bigger fish right now, kid, she thinks. "Bad hip. now-"

"Well, why not just get it fixed? They make all sorts of-"

Morgan holds up her hand to stop them, quickly losing patience. This is going to take longer than she'd like. The kid stops, embarrassed, and hides their face behind their cup.

"Look... Do you actually know who I am? What I do?" she asks, resting her elbows on the table between them. The kid just shakes their head. "I- we break people out of the system. Wipe them out of the internet of things, so to speak. Do you know what makes that really, really hard?"

"Huh uh."

"These." Morgan flips her eyepatch up, blinking a few times as her cybernetic eye whirs to life in the light. "Artificial parts. Handy, don't get me wrong. Highly sophisticated nowadays. And every single one of them is connected to Eidolon Inc. on a... dubiously secure network."

"And that's bad?"

"Can be," Morgan lets her eyepatch fall back into place and leans back in the booth. "You ever forget a password for an important account? Get locked out for a while?"

"Sure."

"Think you wouldn't forget the account that controls your vision?"