Musketeers game
Referee: RooK
Background
You were both brutally murdered. Though this typically happens at the end of one of our stories, it is actually even more odd because it happened on a utopian planet with a strong government and virtually no contact with the wild and dangerous mainstream of the Known Galaxies (weapons are verboten, and combatants are almost non-existent). You were bludgeoned to death in your office by three mechanical assailants you had never seen before, and (judging from what you've gleaned during and since your deaths) in a manner seeming to lack much (if any) skill.
Before your deaths, you were partners in a small but thriving robotics business. Most of the work done on your home planet of Niobe is done by robots, while the small and affluent population generally have lives of relative luxury (assuming that they're not being murdered). But your company did not really do much in the way of crude workers; your niche was personal servants. Part of the popularity of your products was based on the artistic merit of the chassis you tended to create (typically in small batch runs only). Less quantifiable, but some would assert as being more important, was your combined talent for programming smart and intuitive personalities into the robots to suit your clients. You both were artists, technicians, and mathematicians of note, and somewhat rich because of it.
At the penultimate moment, though, it wasn't the wealth or the artistry that was important; it was the technical skill and your mathematician abilities. The assailants deadly intentions, and their probability of success was immediately obvious to both of you. So you both dumped all your memories into your company mainframe, along with live feeds of your murders (forgive the pun). And, in a finely-calculated wager using mathematics you can no longer comprehend, you shunted all your wealth and some instructions to one of the robots working for you: Jamdusan.
Jamdusan is one of your creations, but not owned by you. You actually considered Jamdusan to be one of your worst failures. Something about its fundamental programming collapsed in on itself, giving it a profound misanthropy and unpleasant demeanour making it completely unsalable. But it had such cunning and unshakable loyalty that you couldn't bring yourselves to scrap it. Instead it became a somewhat-accomplished technician in your employ, and served ancillary functions as a messenger.
Despite Jamdusan being able to present your memories to the authorities, no progress has been made in solving your murders. (Jamdusan asserts that this is a plain case of corruption, even though it is true that such data could be invented.) Worse, even though Jamdusan was capable of loading your memories into independent computer brains with a very high correlation of personality traits to your original selves, you were still not permitted to assume the assets of your company. It is to be auctioned off, piece by piece.
Characters
Before the auction, and using it's access to your facility, Jamdusan means to build you each a robotic body and load your ersatz-personalities into them. He's a second-stage technician and first-stage mathematician, allowing for you to derive beings from the custom being generator using 32 points. No flavours, no MBA, <vader vox>and no disintegrations</vox>.
You are nominally 0-skill. Jamdusan is able to download some bootleg occupations if you wish, but they are poor quality and will have only half-stats.
Your total combined wealth is 381872 credits.
BLOOOOOODY VENGENCE!!!
Question: Before we died, did we calculate any probabilities as to who might be responsible for our murders? Does Jamdusan have any theories?
So Lou, as this is a utopian planet with scant weaponry, it seems to make sense that hand to hand combat would be a good skill to have. Want to be a Guerrilla? We've got plenty of cash, so we may be able to find a martial arts trainer that can train you/us a stage of Guerrilla instead of downloading one.
Part of me is thinking that you could be the heavy combatant and I could try to be a sapper. I think we should both try to be sneaky.
On the other hand, we have access to a technician, so we could always make our own guns. If we were sneaky, we could probably keep the weapons or ourselves hidden from view.
Question 2: Is there anything in the action that we may want to bid on? Maybe a personal vehicle that we like, or something that's valuable but not obviously so?
--Dave 08:34, 17 February 2010 (MST)
Before you died, you compiled a list of suspects and assigned probabilities:
- Banebris Robotics - larger competitor of high-end robots - P=0.73
- Khodi Sisters - vindictive ex-clients - P=0.15
- Standrews - small competitor of specialty robots - P=0.05
- Other - everyone else on Niobe - P=0.07
Jamdusan agrees that Banebris Robotics is clearly the most-likely suspect according to the known factors. However, Jamdusan recalculates the probabilities of the contenders as 0.41/0.28/0.21/0.10 - mostly based on his perception of police/government corruption with respect to the seemingly non-existent investigation of your murders. Both the Khodi Sisters and Standrews have non-trivial political pull, while Banebris Robotics is more heavily scrutinized since Niobean law treats companies as having few of the rights of individuals.
There is nothing in the auction that is irreplaceable or of unexpected value in the auction. The primary things of value of your company really were you two (whatever your names were/are) and the robots you built. You're dead (or, at least your skills are) and the robots you built aren't company property any more.
RooK 21:52, 17 February 2010 (MST)
