Fall of Prime, Part Deux (whoops, it's kinda long)

[Slar]

So, looking at some previous discussions about how and why Prime Base fell, and how the wake up failed...

There seems to be a great deal of consensus that it makes no sense for Prime to have started Pahute Place. Not their job, and risks the whole Project. Senseless.

Another point of seeming consensus is that teams in the area around Prime Base would be there to act as a buffer. The teams know that they are protecting something, but not exactly what, or exactly where.

A third point of near consensus is that the Project would have a hard time recruiting only friendless, widowed orphans with no close personal ties, but who were still stable enough to be in the Project. So, family members would either need to be frozen, or be dispersed to other teams.

Secundus/Standby Base/Prime 2 also failed. How? Not much consensus on this one, but bear with me.

So, we have Prime. It rides out the war, and starts to do its job. Meanwhile, a group of survivors finds a water source nearby, and starts squatting. One of the roving Recon teams finds the squatters, and sees that they are in need of help, but not threatening. They make contact, and start working on building a community. They have no idea how close they are to Prime Base, due to previously mentioned reasons.

Another group of survivors hears about the new settlement. They happen to be in contact with a separate, Idaho-based Recon unit. As they move toward this new settlement, Pahute Place, their Recon team friends follow up. Surprise, there's a team there already, and things are progressing. Eventually, a MARS team shows up to provide security, and a science team starts building up the agriculture base of these primitive screwheads.

Prime is watching this whole thing, unable to shoo off the survivors/Project personnel for fear of revealing themselves. They watch as the place gets bigger every week. Meanwhile, Morrow Project assets at Pahute Place put out a call, looking for specific types of survivors, with specific knowledge, as well as requesting Medical and Agriculture team support and etc. Within a few months, hundreds of refugees and a half-dozen Morrow teams are at Pahute Place, and word is getting around that it exists.

Krell's organization (who/what ever that is) starts hearing rumors about the community, and sends in some guys to infiltrate. They are surprised by the heavy Project presence, and send word back that something must be done. Some higher-up sends a unit to hide among the refugees and start shit. Sabotage, whisper campaigns, and suggestions of Project skullduggery start to interfere with the success of Pahute Place. The dream is dying.

Krell's boys (and maybe girls) are issued a bioweapon, a modified Universal Antibody that kills about 80% of the hosts, unless they are treated with normal UA, in which case mortality is 100%. The idea is to spread disease from the camp, outward, undermining the Project's efforts, and possibly allowing the Krell operatives to figure out where all these Morrow guys are coming from.

As the illness spreads, Krell operatives use the ensuing confusion to take hostages. Several Morrow personnel are captured, and are being tortured for info (which they sadly do not even have). Back at Prime, arguments are happening, with some personnel wanting to stage a rescue, but Prime's commander knowing how stupid that would be.

Until he hears his daughter's name.

Seems that the Krell operatives have his daughter, who was a member of a Recon team out of Montana, and who followed the rumors to Pahute Place. Suddenly, the idea of a rescue sounds very attractive. Plans, such as they are, are drawn up...

Back at the ranch, so to speak, Krell's operatives are at a loss. These Morrows are not from any specific installation. They are from half a dozen separate teams. And the plague is starting to get bad. A backup plan, to keep the plague from spreading, is enacted by a lower-level field commander. He authorizes the release of an undetonated warhead, with hopes to wipe out both the Morrows, their little settlements, and the damned plague that those other idiots turned loose.

As the nuke is being moved, secretly, into position, the rescue op shows up. Chaos ensues, Prime's personnel are infected, and the choppers head for home. The second group of Krell, realizing that this thing could get loose into the wild, set off their nuke, which is out of place, but big enough to destroy Pahute Place anyway. Sadly, Prime's sending array is destroyed in the blast, an unfortunate casualty due to it's remoteness from the actual base.

Survivors from the rescue operation arrive at the entrance to Prime, and are rushed inside after decon. They are injured, irradiated, and burned. The commander's daughter survives, barely, but has brought death with her. When people start getting sick, and the symptoms match no know disease organism, Universal Antibody is issued to all personnel. Before anyone knows it, everyone in Prime Base has sealed their fates.

As they start dying off, they try to communicate their predicament to the outside world. Whoops, there are no antennas for the transmitter. Prime's personnel also are unaware that the Krell didn't know they were Prime Base. So begins the "Great Deception." Totally unneeded, but no one knew that.

Meanwhile, at Standby Base, the signal that keeps the personnel from waking turns off. If it is not received again for 1 week, Standby goes live, and the crew awakens. Somewhere in Kentucky, the Security Chief for Studabaker Investment Group sees that the Prime signal has gone down. He knows that the secondary base will awaken in a week, and he also knows that he and the others who are running things, while half the Counsel of Tomorrow sleep peacefully in their cryo tubes, have wandered pretty far off the reservation.

Faced with this dilemma, he consults with the other council members who run what is slowly shaping up to become the Free State of Kentucky. All agree, something must be done. And so, the recorded signal that keeps Standby in their tubes is sent from transmitters owned by the "Rich Five." All is not lost, however...

Standby has a backup. If the signal is interrupted, and no abort signal is received, the Automated Signal Sender begins waking teams, one at a time, at the rate of several dozen a day, starting with Recon, and awaiting an all-clear notification before moving to Science and Specialty teams. The Project will rise!

Except...

The A.S.S. is designed to send activation codes to any/every team, in case both Prime and Standby are destroyed/out of communication. The problem? An errant warhead lands somehwere no one thnought would be effective. For the most part, the A.S.S. is intact. But that momentary glitch? All of the codes for A.S.S. are wiped from memory.

The system cannot use the codes, because it no longer has the codes. And so, it does what it can. It begins sending random number strings. Able to generate multiple wakeup signals per second, it takes almost 100 years for the system to finally get up to the 13 digit strings needed to activate teams.

Sadly, these strings are not consecutive, so wakeup seems random and unpredictable. More teams are awakened purely by accident, ranging from bolt hole compromise to tube system failure, than are awakened by reception of a proper wake up signal. Still, as the computer generates strings, more and more Project assets will come on line.

Finally, the Sleeper awakes...

[nduffy]

I like this arc,, great food for thought... and campaign ideas..

[Slar]

That idea has been kicking around in my game since the '90s. It also ties in to Damocles. See, Damocles can hear the A.S.S. sending out those signals. An d it doesn't take long for him to figure out, from awakened teams trying to contact Prime, how the seemingly-random activation codes are actually meaningful.

Each code contains a unit designation, and also, a bolthole location. Using the location and designation of the team that finds him, he reverse-engineers their wakeup code. When he sends it, their bolthole computer, re-powered by some of his units, reacts. Success! He now has a basic understanding of how Project Wake-Up signals work.

Using information from the AutoNav, he plots the grid the Project uses to identify sites, and constructs codes for every section of that grid. Of course, more than 90% of these locations hold no teams, but that doesn't matter. If he can get hooked up to a decent transmitter, he can just spam codes until he gets hits, same as the A.S.S., but smarter.

Then he realizes... There's hostile movement heading in his general direction. Radio chatter indicates that the "Krell," a group he's heard of in the past, are heading east, killing and pillaging along the way. Well, better not wake any teams up in their path, huh? Oh, but there's that intact warhead in Wisconsin... He should probably keep that away from the Krell.

So, using his new technique, he starts spamming areas near enough to the nuke site, but outside of the Krell's advance area. And so you get the plot to Operation: Lucifer.