meadowlark | @nathan.drake

what do you already know?

i know nothing, by the way, just curious

Edited 2020-04-21 19:54 (UTC)

mostly just confirmation on what i assumed from the beginning: there's multiple organizations, and they're all in extremely deep pockets

huh.

what were the expeditions?

two unofficial, two "official" - some of us planned to go to mount everest, and some to oslo, to dig for information.

cairo and rio were separate expeditions, though they were involuntary. a bunch of displaced were picked up by a mercenary group calling itself global spiral and army-marched out to look for whatever we were looking for, just in different locales.

[ Someone very rich is invested in knowing what they found. ]

wow, this place is crazier than i thought

understatement of the fucking century.

A Morningstar agent sent some information to me. Was it the same source for you, then?

initials g.h.?

That's the one. I'll forward my information in a moment.
Where's your interest in the mercenaries lie?

[ Nate forwards his own. ]

i have a lot of experience dealing with mercenaries, so it seemed like a good subject to stick my fingers in.
you?

[ now that im not phonetagging, cheris can also forward hers, making it public to anyone in the chat. ]

I saw how they were treated in New Rio. I don't want that coming back on us.

Let me know what you find out. I'm not sure everyone's gonna be so into the idea of protecting our reputation.

[Or anyone else, for that matter.]

i heard a few things. what was the extent of the damage?

[ ...asks the man who absolutely killed the mercenary trailing the Everest team. ]

Hm.
Did you know that a few months ago, the UNA was easily able to blame the death of one of their soldiers on Morningstar, and simultaneously make a target of anyone who glows blue in the chest? I'd say it was a pretty bad blow. So, imagine that, but with a whole host of mercenaries instead.

We killed them. The ones that I was able to hide away are dead too. They knew enough about our lives and movements to target us, as you'll see in the information I received. All too easy to link their torture and deaths to us, I guess. The extent of the damage is currently hypothetical, but a threat I want to handle. Immediately.

must have been before i showed up. or right after.

[ He was just trying to get his bearings at the time. ]

the info that was forwarded to you makes it sound like we've got a mole.

I don't disagree with you. Somehow, someone was able to acquire our IDs. Everything is linked to them, so the rest of the information is unsurprising. That they've been compiled into a list - a very specific one - means someone knows enough to be able to pick us out of a database.

El creates the IDs, if I remember correctly. Gaby knows of us, too.

[ WOW, THAT'S COLD ]

Look at you, always thinking ahead.

Just a few steps.
If we can spin the narrative to our advantage? Hey, all the better.

Kriff knows we need to.

You’ll be wanting to see this, too.

[He forwards another message, now that he’s sure these have the same source as the one he received.]

It always had to be someone powerful. Hiring armed men, it takes coin. What they did once they were hired, more coin.

[To him, this world’s corporations are like tradesmen... but it’s clear that a lot of power resides with them, more so than with anything like noble houses.]

I think they wanted those gates open. Why?

[The convenience of them is clear, but he thinks that whoever organized this must have had something specific in mind.]

Edited 2020-04-23 07:23 (UTC)

Oh yeah, definitely. Mercenaries need to be paid and we know of at least three corporate entities that're real keen on throwing their weight around. Maybe figuring out which one of them hired our particular gang of mercenaries will inform us, like, who's most interested in the bigger picture. Your information definitely suggests that, at the very least.

I don't know. Fast travel is their immediate use for us, at the least - maybe they go to other planets, as well?

-- you weren't harmed, were you? When they moved us around like board pieces.

No harm has come to me. I was always going to Everest, and that’s where I went. But it might be that it’s where they wanted me, so they didn’t try to get in my way. Someone from my world was taken to New Rio, though. If they want us to be able to move fast, there could be more than one reason: - The one behind all this has power in each of those cities. Couldn’t that be any of them? - They want us to be able to carry something from place to place for them, or they want it to be easier for us to live outside of New Amsterdam. If it’s that, maybe they don’t want all of us to be trapped there if the city is besieged, but they want those of us who live in other places in the world to be able to return there quickly if need be.[That would make sense to him: it’s not far removed from the reason why the Watch once had so many castles manned along the Wall.] - Or they can use the gates themselves, but could not open them without our aid. Other worlds, that’s not something I think about much. I know they can touch them from this one, but where I come from, we keep our feet on the earth. Most of us. But walking from Everest to New Rio or New Amsterdam in a moment, that’s not much stranger than stepping through a door and finding yourself on the moon. Or finding yourself here.

Edited 2020-04-24 07:48 (UTC)

[ oh, you are clever as ever, jon snow. really, you are. ]

Huh. Benevolence and-or self-interest, sounds about right.
We started looking at the gates because someone dropped information on their existence to us, maybe that's the party involved in making sure they know who we are, where to find us and how to mobilize us to get whatever it is they want.
Whoever did this, they knew a lot more about how to get the gates working than we did. Enough to organize us to accomplish that task. Which means a relationship to the gates' history. Maybe knowledge of what they really are, why they were built, what more they can do other than fast travel.

So are they like an ally, or like a king, or like a god? An ally works at your side for mutual goals. A king sends his bannermen to work in his name. A god might judge, or might push people around like markers on a map, depending what you believe. A god's interest might not be in your interest, even if they weren't a real god, just someone pretending. A king's — well, if they're a good king, they should be for their people, for the bannermen, and the maps help them make the right plans. An ally and a leader, but they should know they're not a god. We need to know which it is.

I received no mercenary intel, but I am still curious as to what yours said.

You never know what might cross-reference.

did you get something else?

big shocker: these people are being hired by the hysterically wealthy. guess i should have known that 26th century jeff bezos would be a problem.

No, no message. But I did have a strange dream that I am still trying to process.

Were there any names by any chance? The wealthy in this city are very interconnected, to each other and to the corporations and to the government.

that weird a dream, huh?

no names, unfortunately, but it's definition tied to big corporations. i haven't been here long enough to know who the major captains of industry are

Considering I am not even sure it was my own dream, yes. But shared, strange dreams are not uncommon for us as Displaced. Have you experienced it, or been told of it yet?

All the corporations are tied up in each other as well. Family names are often shared across their boards, and it has been that way for quite some time.

When did you arrive?

several months ago. the welcome pamphlet was simultaneously over and underwhelming.

haven't shared anyone's dreams yet and i'm hoping not to, it sounds a little too invasive for my tastes.

you got any idea of the general conglomerate structure? which big players tend to be the most in the public, and which the most private?

You might want to look into more control of the dreams in that case.

[ IT'S SO UNPLEASANT. ]

One of the candidates for the next New Amsterdam governor has a direct connection to Pulsar. Jovavich. But the wealth is pocketed at the top, naturally, so if anyone has money to hire mercenaries, they must be connected to politics or business. Probably both.

How as it tied to the corporations?

There's a group starting to gather in relation to our weirdo shared dreams, if group work is your thing.

[ SHE SENSES IT'S NOT, BUT HEY. ]

Might not help you immediately, but maybe having a few minds working on interpretation'll open a few doors for you. Personally, I'm a fan of making symbology do what I want it to, rather than figuring out what it wants to tell me.

I believe I saw them bringing attention to it. Another set of eyes, so to speak, cannot hurt.

[ group work! definitely not his thing! but he can recognize the usefulness of it. ]

I might like to bring it to as many of us as I can, as I think it relates to whatever facility we were held at prior to "waking up." Actual flashback or dream remains to be seen.

Nothing on our mercenaries, but extensive failed plans to explore the outer reaches of the galaxy courtesy of DAWN2080.insertyetmorenumbersIwillnotbereadinghere. It looks as if there were serious efforts being made to find more habitable planets, not including the ones closer to us.

Something else about the Goldilocks Zones.

Why have you dismissed the numbers as if they're unimportant?

If someone would like the remaining numbers, then I will forward the documents. What I won't be doing is standing and reading them aloud so to speak one by one. I do have better things.

Like most people here, you can utilize copy and paste.

Thank you, Goro, for the enlightening afterthought.

Being rather familiar with me again? Surprising.

As it is, I'm truly interested in that string of numbers, so if you could hurry it up ...

[ Well, he was kind of explicitly asking for mercenary information, but fine. ]

i have to imagine that a planet needs to be not too hot or too cold in order to sustain human life.

[ "Just right," isn't that what the storybook used to say? ]

how far did the plans in question get? past the moon far, or exploded in the stratosphere far?

What kind of intel are we talking?

seems like a few people got some disparate pieces of information about who's bankrolling the mercs who took a few of us on a captive march a little while ago, and escorted the rest of us while pretending to be civvies

i want to know if there's anything out there less vague than "some rich assholes pulled those strings," because i could have guessed that on my own

i'm nate, by the way, sorry. i don't think we've met.

Have you read about the first time we "showed up" here? Or did I tell you?

if i did, it was when i showed up and was still a little drugged.

[ Which is to say, he was somewhat more concerned with the present at the time. ]

[Understandable. Compared to then, there's a lot of information to absorb.]

The first group of us was being transferred somewhere in a large bus. Not so different from the transports now, but larger, and better armed. The bus got stopped by Morningstar agents, and a firefight ensued.

To be clear: "stopped" meant that they caused an accident and brought it down.

Both sides were pretty well trained and armed for the fight itself. I think it's probably safe to say that the ones guarding us were mercenaries.

you mean the mercenaries that kidnapped the others?

one and the same, yeah

HMMMMM offended i didn't get anything. if we get to punch anything please do let me know, it's getting a bit dull in the rings.

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