Manhattan Knights, Act 6 Part 2

Welcome to the continuing story of Three Storm Knights in the game of Torg Eternity, the backgrounds of the heroes can be found HERE, and the very first post in the Series can be found HERE. More information about the game can be found HERE.

Recap Last Week:

The group reported into HQ… they were startled to discover they had only spent 2 weeks in the jungle, when it felt like months. The Hardpoint at the HQ had solidified into an impressive base and the number of survivors were still growing. After making their report the Storm Knights were given a new mission, their new prime mission was to strengthen ties to various allies, find new allies, and to route all survivors back to the HQ in Brooklyn.

After only a single day of rest the Storm Knights head back into Manhattan. They managed to avoid one entanglement with dinos that were more interested in killing one another. But they unfortunately ran into another encounter that killed a new friend and nearly killed Sasha.

Saddened by the lose of their new friend the Storm Knights manage to get their truck working enough to arrive back at the Domes where they will take a day of mourning and check on the progress with their plan to Clone the Cat King.

Scene 3 The Dome:

The Storm Knights return to the dome. The outer doors have been repaired like new, the broken gun emplacement is functioning again and the Gun tracks the truck as they pull up to the scanner and keypad. The doors open for them before they even come to a stop and they drive into the Dome.

The party is too distressed to pay much attention to the hab dome or even the central dome as they return the truck to the parking lot and they return to the central labs to check on the progress of their clone.

The storm knights are greeted by Dr. Lom right at the door, he is excited to see them and despite the extreme high social skills of his race, he barely notices their mood. Paradoxically, his joy at their appearance and his general excitement does affect them and they shake off their mood. Dr. Lom is still in his servitor body, the lower half is a mechanical spider and the upper half of his body is more machine than flesh. But he looks healthier and all of his machinery is cleaned and oiled and overall, he looks, fresh, new.

Welcome Back:

Lom: “We still need four more days to finish growing the clone… it is quite fascinating, but there are some concerns. The others wish to speak with you.”

Kimiko: “When will you have your old body back?”

Lom: “Several of us opted to put our clones on hold to prioritize your needs. My clone will be ready in a week or so of your time.”

Clone Meeting:

Lom ushers the Storm Knights into a room where Dr. Klein and a servitor they don’t remember are waiting. They are introduced to Dr. Hardy who is a master in cloning and who also practices more esoteric practices. Such as using their latent psionic talents to implant skills and education into a clone.

Klein: “So the clone is growing at an accelerated rate and looks to be extremely healthy and well fleshed. Now normally we would use neurotherapy to implant a basic education into the clone, but that would mean teaching it our language and our culture. We don’t know how it’s people would react to it coming back with all of the Dome history and technology jammed into their King. But Hardy has a theory.” Klein gives the other doctor a bit of side eye.

Hardy ignores the look from Klein: “These cat people are extremely front lobe efficient, as much as ourselves—”

Klein interrupts; “That means highly psychic.”

Hardy ignores the clarification; “Besides the front lobe, the body has a strange energy within it. We can’t quite analyze it with our equipment, but we can measure it. We don’t quite know it’s purpose, but it is affecting the neuropathways.”

Klein sighs; “Basically the body might already have racial memories of some sort, but we want permission to at least download basic math and sciences into the body. We’ll omit our history and cultural data, other than the basic concepts that any child would need for a foundation. After all of that you would have an extremely athletic child in an adult’s body with the possibility that this energy might also unlock racial memories, perhaps even the memories of the person who supplied the blood.”

Hardy: “We could also load the body with combat training… say Kimiko’s combat skills?”

Montage Scene:

[this was handled in a bunch of cut scenes in the game but we do cover about 2-3 days of time very quickly, I’ll try to capture that feel here.]

It was quickly explained to Kimiko that they could record her body motions as she goes through various fighting and weapon forms and then download those moves into the clone. They could then encode the moves directly into the twitch-muscle memory.

So, before going into two days of Mo-Cap recording Kimiko gifts Sasha the Bio-Armor Unit [aka the Guyver device] and then she goes into a room with Hardy. For two days she goes through Aikido forms and Kenjutsu forms. Every move and every muscle in her frame are analyzed and then downloaded into the clone, who absorbs it like a sponge on water.

The fighting scenes are interspaced with scenes of Sasha bonding with the bio-armor and then moving among the humans living in the Dome. She tells them stories about overcoming the Edeinos and fighting back against Baruk and the other invading cosms. She notes the number of them who are full humans and the handful which have turned to the Cosm of the Dome.

The scenes intercut and back and forth between the story-telling bringing hope to the people, Kimiko fighting skills, and the clone in the vat.

Aside with Carlisle:

While the women are busy in their cutscenes, their montage, Carlisle wanders around the labs and talks with many of the doctors. He is sitting in a lab with Dr Klein, the leader of the servitors.

He is currently working on finishing his own clone body and Carlisle looks back and forth from the normal-looking (albeit with 3 eyes) man in the vat and the half cyborg doctor beside him.

Carlisle: “Doc… what would stop you guys from constantly cloning yourselves… being effectively immortal?”

Science!

Klein: “Social contract. Our world could only sustain so many lives in the Domes so we kept the population at a steady constant. Some people would be cloned to keep their talents and skills, and births would be kept to a minimum. But now… well nothing keeps us from surviving forever… except that my race is highly social and 6 of us are not enough. We will begin cloning other members of our race from whatever via DNA we can gather from the dead of the Dome. But really Carlisle, constantly making new clones is inefficient. We have instead conjured aging and merely created cells that can replicate to nigh infinity.”

Carlisle comes from a cosm that is still locked in a tech level equivalent to 1880 Earth. So much of what Klein is telling him makes little sense. He understands that they can make a new body from blood or bones of the dead, but doesn’t understand cell replication.

Klein simplifies the aging process for Carlisle by explaining that the cells in a body can only copy themselves so many times before they start to die off and start making imperfect copies which is thus the aging process.

Epiphany:

Carlisle, who is 70 and feels it; “To bad you couldn’t reset the clock, huh?” He laughs.

Klein stares at him. “Of course we can. Gene therapy can strengthen and reinvigorate your cells and give you decades back and push off aging for maybe a century or longer. We offered you as much when you first came among us.”

Carlisle thinks back to the first encounter with the servitors [HERE] and the overwhelming paranoia (mostly from Sasha who went a little crazy with fear) that the Storm Knights had when Dr. Lom made his introduction and asked them to come down into the basement labs.

Carlisle: “How does this work?”

The Sales Pitch:

Klein: “We need to get you through the gene therapy, at least to stage 2. Stage 1 will fix any illness or immuno deficiencies, and then stage 2 will rework your genetics. Strengthening your cells, rolling back the aging process to whatever you consider peak, erasing tendon and bone issues and blood issues. Basically, we’d scrub away possible cancers and shore up genetic weaknesses. If you stayed in longer, stage 3 allows re-writing your genetic code. Eye color, hair color, racial features, and everything in between and down to a molecule.”

Carlisle sits there for a few minutes, thinking hard and feeling the pain in his aching knee. “How long would it take?”

Klein pauses in his work, the whole time he’d been speaking to Carlisle without actually looking at him, he’d been concentrating on his own clone. He finally turns to the old man. “30 hours to get you to the end of phase 2.”

Surprise:

End of day 106. Sasha is finishing one of her story sessions, the last two days have been an interesting time for her. Bonding with the alien armor and telling the stories to the people have both had a profound effect on her.

A very handsome man walks toward her. He has an interesting swagger to his step, almost familiar. He stops before her and she smiles up to the tall man, and her jaw drops as Carlisle’s voice comes out of the man.

“I guess it worked well if you didn’t recognize me until now.” Carlisle grins, it is the first time Sasha would ever use the word “boyish” with him.

“What the hell did you do?”

“Dr. Klein calls it unlocking the genetic potential, and gene therapy. I got my DNA washed and pressed back into peak shape. I feel like I’m thirty again.”

“What else could they do… like on a non-make-you-younger way?” Sasha is barely past 20.

“I didn’t ask but I guess a lot more, I don’t need my reading glasses anymore and I guess they could have loaded muscle memories into my like they are the clones, but I didn’t want them messing with my mind or muscles… though I do have to say my memories do seem sharper. He did mention changing things cosmetically, so I guess he could have put me in better shape.”

OFF the Rails:

[So the party was once terrified of the science in the Dome… but NOW it was suddenly super OP… so this is the point my game really goes LEFT turn]

Sasha and Carlisle run off to find Kimiko… she is still finishing her last session of Mo-Cap and is busy. So, they decide to tell her later about Carlisle’s magical transformation and the two of them run off back to Klein’s lab. They both jump into the vats, Carlisle born along by Sasha’s excitement. The young Russian woman has gone through a lot of hell in her left, been the victim too many times to tell. She tells the doctor to make her stronger.

Carlisle says now that he’s young he’ll take a dose of athlete on the side as well. The two go into the vats and have therapy to improve all of their perceived physical flaws.

Day 107

Kimiko is slightly upset with her companions until Carlisle comes out of the vat (he only needed a few hours to bulk up while Sasha has to go through phase 1 and 2 of the process, though for far less time than Carlisle as she doesn’t need to de-age). Kimiko stares at the man before her… in shock and immediately starts undressing to get into the vat.

Due to the amount of stress on his body Carlisle ends up having to sleep and recover for nearly a full day. So, while Carlisle is sleeping and the two women are in the vats, a call is picked up over the radio. While it should be impossible for a signal to reach the Dome through the Living Land Cosm it does sometimes happen.

One of the servitors records the garbled, static rich chatter. Loud blasts of gunfire are punctuated with screams and cries, the name “longshot” and “Texas” filter through the static.

“Get ‘em while they’re weak!” gunfire and screams… loud bang, high pitched squeal.

“Get that PIG!” long drawn out drawl, more gunfire and then hissing silence.

The recording is turned off and a note is made to give it to the Storm Knights when they wake.

Day 108

Kimiko was the last to go into the vat and as such she is the last to come out. She is fresh from a shower and wearing a fresh set of clothes when she joins the other two who have been back on their feet for hours or more. The clone of the king, called Primus Rex by the servitors is about to be released and woken.

Kimiko is still toweling her hair as the massive cat-man is rolled into the room in a wheel chair. He is groggy and out of sorts but he looks perfect. He slowly rises from the chair and looks at the arrayed faces, some recognition seems to flicker across his eyes. He stands nearly six and a half feet tall and is built like a linebacker.

Lom: “He is at the maximum of physical perfection for his race, as well as we could understand it and his mind is agile. We took pains to make sure he wouldn’t be too influenced by our ways, though we did implant memories of your faces, and ours to him.”

Final steps:

Primus doesn’t speak but he does grasp hands with the Storm Knights, welcoming them as old friends. He points to his mouth and then his stomach, clearly conveying his hunger. They bring him to the café and load him up with vegetables and vat grown protein. There is a level of misgivings about his lack of speech, but as he eats, he starts to form words. First in a strange language and then in the language of the Dome.

They are ready to take him home.

BUT that story will have to wait until next week…

Next week will see the end of Act 6… it will also be the stopping point of the Living Land Part of the Campaign. [it was NOT the planned stopping point… but you’ll see how things go… off-kilter, the Manhattan Knights are not done, they still have a little more to do.]