On a Furious Tide

On a Furious Tide
Version 1.0
By Savestate

—

An alien megastructure has collided with your world. Good news, the overwhelming majority of it resides in dimensions beyond our own. Good news, you’ve found an entrance, and ~cool alien artifacts~ that are willing to respond to you, and there’s definitely more treasure in there. We can assess the consequences for the world later.

There’s all sorts of neat stuff in there. Tough alien composites in vast quantities, mostly structural, advanced alien technology, mostly broken or non-responsive, lots of, uh, degraded organic matter. But there’s gold in the wiring, and some of the machinery is willing to respond, and wherever you go you can find the universal technological upgrade components we’re calling Chips.

Chips are a combination processor, memory bank, transceiver, energy source, battery, structural element, microfabrication head, multi-chamber material storage cell, and dimensional manipulator. Self-regenerative under a certain level of damage given quite a while, and fueled by enough plutonium to make any government agency very concerned. They interlock with and upgrade other pieces of alien technology, or compensate for damage, and though they’re a bit bulky and quite heavy and not the most efficient, the nature of the techbase makes them quite wonderful to have.

Simply put, the megastructure’s builders were capable of exploiting additional spatial dimensions that are normally inaccessible. A bunch of them, at least six or seven. Waste heat shunted off into exponentially greater volumes, bulked-up mechanical cludges hidden outside of normal space, megastructures whose expanse is quite difficult to map or measure, those are basic. If you look in the right direction, in one of those dimensions, there lies the Sea. A theoretically infinite mass of exotic matter roiling beneath the surface of everything. Enough to drown us. Difficult to extract energy from without advanced alien machinery the size of buildings, always yearning to return to the Sea, but nonetheless useful. The Waters can be given shape, charged with a self-repulsing force to resist the Sea’s attraction for a time, functioning more-or-less as classic sci-fi energy constructs. The raw particulate substance of the Waters can be used as reaction mass, and if you’re built sturdy enough to endure the currents, there’s very little that can find something submerged in the Sea.

Right now, you’ve got a physically-traversable entrance to the megastructure nobody else knows about, a couple of technological artifacts that work for you, and about a dozen Chips. More artifacts like what you’ve found are a highly unlikely find, and you haven’t yet found a way to remove Chips from your gear or reallocate them.

What Two things did you get?


Blaster Cannon
A big, fancy-looking alien gun. Unupgraded, you can rapidly shoot off pellets more dangerous than common rifle rounds, a few hundred before you need to recharge. With sufficient Chips, its firepower can be increased exponentially and myriad new energy projection capabilities can be unlocked. Lasers, bombs, charged attacks, curving beams, guided missiles, and more exotic methods of interfering with the structure of matter. Yes, you can develop an ice beam.

Critical Fusion Components
The necessary systems to peform efficient energy-positive fusion at the personal scale. Slightly heavy, like a loaded backpack. Output scales non-linearly as you provide more Chips; each one provides more to your energy supply than the last. Unupgraded, it takes your passive battery recharge timer from over a week to a few minutes. Capable of elemental synthesis with sufficient upgrades.

Alien Space Armor
Right now, just a rig that fits over your chest, with a big module in the middle. Unupgraded, can over the course of half an hour construct an invisible barrier as tough as thin sheet metal over your entire body, which will persist until it’s severely degraded and collapses or the batteries run dry. In addition to upgrading its capacity to construct, deploy, and maintain high-stability Waters constructs, including at increasing distances from the projector, every Chip you add to it contributes a few square inches of exceedingly dense and durable plating. Multiple Chips can overlap the same segment to upgrade durability further with a very high limit, and as the armor grows more complete its capacity for fun things like impact dissipation, powered joint actuation, and active environmental regulation improves.

Maybe a Medical System?
A big weird machine you can’t easily lug around. You can fit inside it with a little bit of a squeeze. While inside, you can spend Chips to recover from injuries and to upgrade your body, by the same method for each. Ageless immortality, organ reconstruction, an enhanced physique to the point of not only biological but physical implausibility, direct mental integration with an expanding alien supercomputer attached directly to your brain, and extensive physical alterations up to the point of integrating the Waters in semi-permanent exotic features are well within the scope of possible upgrades. Notably, people other than you can be modified with this rig, and it only takes a handful of Chips to severely mitigate aging, resolve a serious disease, or gain a significant deal of control over the metabolism.

Teleporter Control System
A little hand-held device resembling a gun with an oversized screen on the back. Has administrative access to the teleporter stations scattered throughout the megastructure, capable of activating, deactivating, and restricting access. (As a matter of technicalities, these “teleporters” simply wrap their cargo in a protective membrane, shift it dimensionally to preempt collisions, and fling it at extreme speed to a receiving teleporter that catches it like a net and brings it back into normal space.) With enough Chips, you can extract the essential components of a teleporter and deploy it almost anywhere else in the world, and with a few upgrades, the device itself can launch you to a designated teleporter or displace targets similarly. You don’t need to give your enemies a destination.


Your equipment can pick up upgrades even outside of its core functionality, just from the raw capabilities of the Chips. An alien hypertech cell phone is well within your options.

—

About how many accessible Chips are in the local region of the megastructure (a few cubic kilometers of territory)? Well, how dangerous is it?

If none of these are active, your Chip Luck is 10%. Options cannot be taken multiple times.


Lesser Environmental Hazard (+10% Chip Luck)
Maybe there’s a total lack of artificial light. Maybe the environment is severely osha non-compliant, with missing railings over high falls, moving machinery ready to crush or crumple someone who stumbles at the wrong time, and even a few pools of hazardous substance you’d have to jump from platform to platform to cross. It could also be extremely gross, slick with degrading organic matter, utterly foul and a health risk to anyone even indirectly exposed. You can make up your own hazard.

Greater Environmental Hazard (+20% Chip Luck)
Maybe the entire place is flooded with murky water and rife with fast-moving currents. Maybe the air is both severely caustic and full of deadly poison. Maybe the ambient temperature is high enough, or cold enough, to kill in minutes and degrade even otherwise-solid materials. You can make up your own hazard.

Mutants (+10% Chip Luck)
Mishappen organic lifeforms, some frail and of limited threat, some deadlier than any earthly animal. Generally more of a “big monster” threat than a “tiny poisonous bug you’ll never see” threat, but some of those monsters can shoot energy blasts. Some places are more dangerous than others, and you can figure out the signs of a hive’s presence or an alpha’s territory with experience. More hostile than your average wild animal, but not limitlessly so.

Robots (+20% Chip Luck)
Machines meant to keep intruders out of the megastructure. Some simple cleaning and maintenance bots that will try to wack you, some actually armed. They are more coordinated than any animal could be, with access to cameras and environmental controls, and capable of using the machinery of the megastructure as deadly traps. They are not *limitlessly* coordinated, broken up into thousands of micro-networks within even a single cubic kilometer of megastructure. Below human tactical ability; inflexible.

—

How bad was the collision again? Like, what happened with that anyway?

Bonus Chips increase your starting total.


Nothing Broke / Some Things Broke / Everything Broke (+0/+20/+70 Bonus Chips)
At the first level, the megastructure didn’t cause any immediate problems when it collided with the Earth.
At the second level, its impact was equivalent to a dozen serious natural disasters. At least one city was devastated.
At the third level, it was not quite an apocalypse. Not quite. No stable nation truly collapsed.

You’re Unique / You’re Special / Almost Common (+0/+15/+50 Bonus Chips)
At the first level, you’re the only person with fancy upgradeable alien gadgets listening to you. You’ll remain as such for at least a decade, and possibly forever.
At the second level, there are between a dozen and a hundred people like you, and one or two more each year. These gadgets bind to a person’s life signature, at least, so they can’t be stolen even with murder. You’re better understood.
At the third level, there are tens of thousands of people with alien gadgets, and they’re actively escaping the megastructure to look for new bearers at a rate of tens of thousand per year. You’ll be well understood. Chips are a commodity, however expensive of one that may be.

Twins / National Assets / Too Fucking Many (+0/+15/+50 Bonus Chips)
At the first level, there are exactly two entrances known to humanity, and one is known only to you.
At the second level, most major nations have control of at least one megastructure entrance, and some have a small handful.
At the third level, there are hundreds of thousands of entrances to the megastructure. They cannot be firmly regulated.