1/14/2017

1/23/2023 7:18 AM

1281

1

2 wins / 5 losses

Sage

The Devourer

The Devourer

The Devourer is a story revolving around the first 48 hours after the discovery of a wild colony of resource extracting nanites in a post-global warming 2040s setting. It explores the possibilities of a Grey Goo scenario. Endings (and certain story options) are path dependent on the basis of your choices.

The Devourer is my entry for the January New Frontier contest

Core Gameplay mechanic: Hope Vs. Despair
Endings: There are two non-standard endings early on for story reasons, six epilogue grade endings, and one special ending
The kaleidoscope of text color and fonts have gameplay reasons

Sci-Fi type: Adventure
Moh's Sci-Fi scale: Between a hard and medium SF 
Length: 20,999 words (around 50 A4 pages)

Things I'll change later
Find a way to add 1/2 px stroke effect around the active voice text
Reconsider a couple of the character names

Special thanks to:
TharaApples / Plelb / mizal / Seto

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AsimovsThreeKindsOfScienceFiction
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness

My query was more of, in the story, who's asking for this vote and how are they doing that? Since Mizal proposed 'outing' people who didn't vote for an immediate rescue party, someone in the story has to know everyone's votes / there's probably be a method of voting, otherwise outing wouldn't be an option to consider. And if everyone's telepathically voting (technically including Steve and the members of the away team who if we're being 'in the story' here technically wouldn't be able to vote), then that's weird. I guess this is an art vs author issue unique to the format, but since Mizal's brought up exploiting the information, it's an important question.

Levity and sarcasm, in case you didn't get the memo.

Hmm. Fair point, @Bucky, Mizal raises an interesting question. Who's taking this vote? Is everyone on their own side just talking to their group, or is someone like Lily calling everyone for their opinions since the commander is in the field? Who's assigned for Communications/Command/Control (C3)? As of the third hour, everyone is in their own place, so I have no idea how this choice is being done in the narrative, and from Mizal's OUT THE TRAITORZ train of thought, the votes and voting appear to carry narrative weight. If you're being serious that every time something goes wrong, particularly with the forward teams expected to see something go wrong, then there's no expedition here. In that case, we're just burning matches, waiting for one to go out before throwing the rest out to find them. Unfortunately no one was kept on standby from the settler group for contingencies, or this would have been an easy decision, to send them out. The waterways survey team knows the job they took (they also took the best people for that task), and rushing out after them in the earliest stages of the expedition isn't giving them credit for their abilities. Rushing out to them would only make sense if you do indeed have meta-knowledge or have strong reason to doubt their ability, as of now the story from our characters' eyes offers neither. Also, sure, let's drop everything we're doing every second a radio fails to report in, I'm sure that'll get a lot done. Let's also immediately shout out that THIS PERSON WANTED YOU DEAD! for the drama on their arrival, because that's clearly the best way to run a trusting community, with generous helpings of drama and lots of intentional mistrust and doubt. A drama sitcom or a web forum, surely. An off-earth lone settler colony, not so much. @Bucky, if Mizal's character seriously goes for this approach in narrative, and the idea isn't shot down/called out on it, I wouldn't you sending mind my character walking off into the horizon alone in protest and disgust. Good luck making honest decisions in an extreme situation if you have to factor your survival based on the politics of your answer (linking back to my point last post, this is why the Soviets were brutally honest in their conversations, they had no other choice, no luxury to stroke other peoples egos or in making critical decisions). Oh no, on the contrary, I'm acutely aware of the need to hurry, and that's informing my choice. From the previous stage, we already suspect there are aliens on the planet who may be competent enough to have jammed the probe's signals, and in that light making early defenses becomes a no-brainer, no meta-knowledge of the attack on the boat needed there. There is a very clear and present hurry to get things set up, and in that choices with trade-offs have to be made. If you land on an island with a possibility of a (alien) storm hitting soon, you bunker down and fortify as soon as you can. Right now the colony is in it's absolute most vulnerable state, with the ship out of juice, no defenses, and no knowledge about the nearby area. If you honestly recommend sending a search party immediately from the existing crew, pulling the existing teams off their current tasks, and without giving the the waterways team the benefit of the doubt, you're trading off on long term security heavily if the worst comes to pass. The only team not doing immediately time critical work is the bio-medical team, and knowing their importance to the colony, I'd never send them out alone for the rescue operation, given the difficulty to replace their skill set means we probably don't have many even among the colonists still on the ship. If say this was day 3, I'd have gone with A in a heartbeat, since we'd already have most basic facilities and systems up and running, so we aren't vulnerable and can easily afford to reassign the teams. This is Hour 3, and we don't even know what we don't know, such as are the radios just faulty in general. With that context, at this stage in the colony, the right choice is for everyone to do what they're doing while waiting for updates.

She casually omitted millions of years between those two shags, aka a lot of mutant intermediaries getting it on. Seems like a sad omission. It's like saying one day an immigrant was born, and then someone became the president. Misses out a lot of the spicy in-between. Also, I'm really not sure that teacher should ever take sex ed, her knowledge seems to be... inaccurate.

Well this article claims that you only need 160 to 80 for a viable colony. That said, I'm not for throwing any lives away on this expedition on principle, just saying that inbreeding won't be one of the problems we face any time soon. (Unless Bucky nukes the ship, in which case our future is screwed)(unintentional pun). Oh and before someone asks, polygamy doesn't help (there's a separate article somewhere addressing that).

I get that setting up a rescue team will take time, then they have to find a way to travel (I didn't hear of a second powered boat) and then actually travel. But dropping everything we're doing at the first sign of a radio call being missed seems a little feisty, in absence of contingency protocols stating that. If Bucky'd given smaller intervals, such as two hours, I'd have taken that instead, basically give the team a little bit more time to report back in (say in the off chance they were in a region where High Frequency Radio waves weren't working) before we go into emergency mode. Again, a lot of groundwork needs to be done right now. E.g. if we pull off the med team from setting up their station, in case one of the survivors needs attention those facilities won't be up and running in time to help them. (Side note, radio technology and how it works is really fun. Since we haven't heard anything about relays yet I'm wondering which version we're using - modern earth analogues or space-walky talkies which don't get affected by the mountains' presence/interference).

There are thousands of colonists in reserve on the Whale, still in cryo-sleep. Getting a foothold on the planet will be a problem but inbreeding shouldn't be a worry.

Alright, this was a downright fantastic follow up, a bit of everything. Solid sci-fi, exploration, humor, and human elements taking place here, even an alliance. The attention to detail on the plants and trees was solid, loved reading that part. It'd be hilarious if down the road, when everything's going to all hell, the cuckoolander Fred turned out to somehow reveal himself as an incredibly capable scientist or something when everyone's pretty much lost hope (the aliens turn out to be allergic to his illegal pickle-wine experiments - that he's going to be doing no matter what anyone tells him to - perhaps?). It'd been nice if you'd told us how long it'd take for the watchtowers to come up, that'd influence my decision of time to rescue. Also, I'm surprised no one thought of (and shared) contingency protocols in case anyone didn't report back, or something like an alien sighting happened. My recommendation: B: Wait three hours. A lot of critical prep work has to happen right now, and foundational groundwork has to be laid. Perhaps something will be discovered that'll help the rescue team (super solid wood seemed promising). Furthermore, the waterways team has some of the best combat/survival candidates from the expedition, I have faith that they'll be able to hold out for a little bit (otherwise we're all doomed), but we shouldn't wait too long either. My logic is that if we can get fortifications up and running within three hours, before sending out the search party, there's a fallback location from where we can defend, in case it becomes a shooting war. Six hours seems a bit too long, considering they were already two hours travel away from camp, with a powered boat mind you, when it all started. e: Also wouldn't mind a bit of an update on our resource situation, sounds like wood logs from Earth are rare already.

Have we crossed the Godzilla Threshold? If we have, it may well be time to summon 3J (I hear you had his email) Worst case, Berka's place would be the better choice

What happens when an evil mastermind is running a global empire of evil fronted through diners and bakeries for money laundering, and eventually accidentally ends up earning more through his legitimate business than his darker dealings, and converts to an outright honest baker.