From Spiders

Crow's behind-the-scenes planning, in chronological order.

Contents 1 The Anathema Chicks Plot 1.1 What I Did on My Vacation, by Nameless C., age 57 1.2 The Last Temptation of Crow 1.3 Crow Vadis 2 Gathering and Repairing the Bots 2.1 This One Hurt to Write 2.2 A Similar Plan Resulted in His Being Banned from the Departmental Bake Sale 2.3 With Teamwork, Everybody Wins! 3 Crow Decides to be Proactive 3.1 Org Chart Reshuffling 3.2 Honeypot 3.3 Exit Interviews 3.4 At Least It Wasn't Adultery 3.5 Everyone Wins with Vertical Integration! 3.6 Ceiling Crow is Watching You Master Fate 3.7 Org Chart Reshuffling 2: Electric Boogaloo 3.8 Crowbot 3.9 Those are Totally Words Than Mean Something! 3.10 Sunshine

The Anathema Chicks Plot

What I Did on My Vacation, by Nameless C., age 57

I have a couple of projects I'd like to reify during the five-year hiatus:

1. Not being content just with introducting PowerPoint to this universe, I'd like to also introduce the concept of a commercial jingle. I'd like to come up with short, catchy phrases like, Let's purge the world of Anathema in accordance with the principles of capitalist self-determination! (it sounds better in Flametongue), and set them to short, catchy fragments of music. I'd then like to have town criers and so forth run through the cities of the South, or as much as I can manage, and spread the meme.

2. I'd also like to start a band. I'd like to find excellent musicians of sound moral character (i.e., doctrinaire) and start a rock band. Dragon-blooded would probably work best in that capacity, but I'm fine with random mortal NPCs (using Impose Motivation and keeping the Essence committed for the duration if necessary) or even party members amenable to the idea, provided they have sufficient Performance skills and won't interfere. I'd then like to tour the South (or, again, as near as I can get) and spread the gospel of subservience to Heaven, the crushing of the Anathema, and the glory of capitalism. The goal is that these songs should be catchy enough and the performances captivating enough to start adding intimacies to Nameless Crow's goals and opinions. I'm thinking of something like Rage Against the Machine, but with Richard Nixon as its lead singer. I'll get the prayer-strip charm in Performance at some point during the hiatus; among other effects, it gives everyone in the audience an intimacy towards me. The band's name will be "Manifold Soul," because I feel guilty about all the PowerPoint and want to balance that out with an obscure math joke.

3. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I'd also like to start a 60s-style hippie band. (N.B. Nameless Crow assumes that everyone hates hippies as much as he does; this may not actually be the case.) The idea is pretty much the same as above, just with less catchy songs and with lyrics about joining with the Solars to roll over the fascist capitalist lackeys with the glorious people's tractors of unity and strength. During the concerts, I plan to use Avoiding the Truth Technique to make the band seem like ridiculous and give the crowd an intimacy against their ostensible politics.

The Last Temptation of Crow

I've been trying to come up with a suitable sacrifice for Nameless Crow. The problem is that anything he cares about enough to qualify as a sacrifice is something that he cares about too much to sacrifice. (In addition, I don't want to cut off game possibilities by, for example, renouncing his membership in the Bronze Faction; this should generate more plot instead of deleting pre-existing plot.)

I want to sacrifice Crow's separation from creation. That is, I don't want him to wake up one morning and decide to start a hospital for sick puppies in Chiaroscuro, to move into one of Grandmother Bright's apartments instead of his time-travelling, city-sized house, or to forswear gratuitously murdering and brainwashing hapless mortals. Instead, I want to him to no longer be able to disentangle himself from creation and the people in it. Groupies will spend years stalking him and happily spend a point of willpower every day to remember him. Star-blooded children he never realized he had will pop up and become bothersome. People he encountered while invoking Harmonic Completion will flock to him and try to form a cult around him. In short, humanity will do its best to remember him and badger him into solving their own individual, minor plots.

Crow Vadis

When news of Crow's audit inevitably reaches Chejop Kejap, I'd like for Crow to passionately defend himself. He'll stress to Chejop that he used his salary entirely within the legal guidelines and only to further the interests of his divison and his faction, and that he actually lives quite modestly in Heaven. Crow's wives don't have mink coats, but they do have respectable Sidereal cloth coats. He did buy one thing in Creation with his salary: a little kitten he named "Checkers." He loved the kitten, and he's not going to give it back. Besides, Crow can't get his security deposit back, so it's probably a net financial gain for Heaven anyway.

Now, Crow doesn't pay taxes, but he's heard that some people in Creation do, and he'd like to make sure that his will be quite low if the day ever comes when Heaven enacts an income tax.

One of Crow's RDs is Argent Wombat, an accountant for the Bureau of Secrets responsible for funding and hiding the funding of covert missions. He has Resources greater than 1--- no one trusts a poor banker--- so I'll have to do this part of the plan mostly in Heaven. Our secret compound in Chiaroscuro is expensive; it's not just rent itself, but bribes, salaries for the people administering the bribes, salaries for the people disbursing the salaries for the people administering the bribes, etc. Unfortunately, it's no longer fiscally sound for five Sidereals (or twenty, counting RDs) to live in such an expensive building.

I'd like to reduce costs by moving one Sidereal chosen deliberately at random to a slightly less expensive facility. Argent Wombat will reassign Azure Rose to a special compound a bit outside Chiaroscuro, which is unfortunately in the hottest part of the desert. There's no air-conditioning (say, water elementals used judiciously) there, but there is a heating system (say, fire elementals used judiciously). As a cost-cutting measure, the residents of the compound can't adjust the system themselves; they'd just waste resources. As a compromise, the heating system is turned on full blast throughout the day. There are three other residents, all of whom share a space roughly the size of the room in which you run Spiders:

Rotten Herring: The god of rotting fish. He's like the King Midas of putrescent trout; almost everything he touches sprouts bits of semi-solid fish matter. As such, every single piece of furniture, paper, and person in the area is continually covered in liquid herring.

King Hippo: Hippos were important in Chiaroscuro (which I'm assuming is Egyptian-flavored for these purposes) a while back, but have become less important in modern times. King Hippo is the local god of hippopotamuses. He's desperately afraid of becoming completely obsolete, and is therefore extremely territorial about his office. Incidentally, hippos mark their territory by defecating while whirling their tails around like propellers to disperse the ejectamenta over the area. (Seriously.)

Fred: As far the Bureau of Secrets have been able to determine, Fred was the high priest of a nightmarish chthonian hell-god. Unfortunately, he got a bit too close to the summoning circle and went insane. Fred now screams insane gibberish nonstop at any people, furniture, or air particles in the vicinity. As a fun bonus, Fred also screams nonstop in his sleep.

Please note that billets cannot be transferred, sold, or waived. If Azure Rose moves out of the office, or acquires another office, she will be responsible for paying the Resources 5 cost for her current position's rent. (The rent is probably not Resources 5, but most of the nice ones are 4 and 5, and the Bureaucracy finds it easier just to assume that all such rents are Resources 5. Like the defense department and $600 hammers.) I'll check in periodically with Efficient Secretary. In short, if she's not spending n hours per week in the office when on assignment in Chiaroscuro, she'll be assessed a Resources 5 fine and run the risk of being accused of deserting her post.

Argent Wombat would like to help out Azure Rose by having her office immediately emptied and delivered to her new workplace. (She might want to hose the boxes off before opening them.) He'd also like to put in a work request for tearing down the wall between Crow's office and hers and turning the latter into a library. It will be filled with nothing but Ayn Rand.

Gathering and Repairing the Bots

This One Hurt to Write

To the Hon. Chejop Kejap, Chairman of the Fate-Planning Committee and Permanent Secretary for the Bureau of Secrets,

It has recently come to my attention, in my continuing inquiries both as a representative of the current version of our Bureau implementization of the prevailing recommendations for knowledge process outsourcing and in pursuing my own continuing personal development and training goals, that there exists an improper, intimate trade relationship between the citizens of Malfeas and those Celestial Exalts falling within the bailiwick of our particular organization. Due to the large potential impact and urgency of this situation, I urge the Chairman in the strongest possible terms to immediately consider preparing a report on the feasibility of implementing a process to reify our common objectives.

Now, it is certainly advantageous in some respects, in principle, to promote a flat hierarchical structure in which diverse ideas mix together and add value not only to our core competencies, but also in facilitating our partnering with entites with which me might not have liaisoned had we simply relied on present modalities instead of proceeding to the next level; but we also have a commitment and responsibility to act within our core values and provide solutions to our stakeholders that, at the end of the day, have a guarantee of performing mission-critical duties without jeopardizing or destabilizing, either through an actual disconnect between our stated goals and even our participation in next-generation advances, or simply by not having everyone on the same page, the crucial organic relationship we've cultivated between ourselves and our customers, both internal and external to our particular organization. Going forward, our challenge is to synergize this empowerment of individuals and their diverse viewpoints with the trust we've systemically gained by consistently providing best-in-class solutions, so that we can leverage the benefits from both without compromising our core values or core competencies. To that end, I've begun the process of looking into establishing a study group to consider the ramifications of forming a blue-ribbon committee, hereinafter designated as the Heavenly Committee on Un-Sidereal Activities (HCUA), to empower and facilitate our most respected and reliable world-class thought leaders to make the required executive decisions about which tasks can most benefit from this democratization of our process and which, due to, perhaps, falling within a short event horizon, require a top-down model in which senior officials flow down their asks to various subordinate divisions.

Before this commitee's official meetings, though, it is necessary to appoint an interim chairman in order to remain proactive, to ensure our competitive advnatage, and to provide a stabilizing chain of leadership and governance in this post-Usurpation world. As the officer most familiar with the current situation, I will therefore assume this position immediately and remain so until such time as there are sufficiently few high-priority issues before us to prepare a proper transition to a more inclusive and responsive committee. Even during this process, however, we must comply with all regulations and procedures to promote proper freedom and justice, even in dealing with wayward communists such as these entities. As the Chairman is certainly well aware, freedom is our most precious resource, and we must therefore carefully ration it out. I will thus appoint an ad litem legal representative for these particular Exalts and any other parties falling with the HCUA's jurisdiction. As the Sidereal with the highest Essence among this particular circle and its sole member with legal training, I shall therefore appoint myself to represent these Exalted's legal defenses and execute them, after studying the matter in the fullest detail.

While we are dealing adequately with the situation at the moment, and therefore do not require immediate intervention, any advice from the Chairman would be appreciated.

A Similar Plan Resulted in His Being Banned from the Departmental Bake Sale

At some point, Crow will succeed on his "not being a complete idiot" check and realize that there are Solars in the building. At some slightly later point, Crow would like to award one of the contractors the Jade Paperclip Award for Outstanding Achievement in Proactive Visioning. In addition to the usual commendations for adherence to Eight-Sigma (that's the secret to the Mountain Folk's craft prowess: two extra sigmas) and leaning the organization so that mission-critical asks can be vectored to and from all levels of management, Crow would like to casually mention that he thinks the synergy among us, the Solars, and the Mountain Folk is quite productive. It's win-win-win: we get a cheaper product and have to make fewer concessions to the Mountain Folk; the Solars get their due recognition as the peers of Mountain Folk in craft; and the Mountain Folk get to be team players and have their parts and craftsmanship integrated into a broader whole. Crow will also casually mention at some point that he's due to give another award to the Solar plant soon to commemorate their success in avoiding industrial accidents, which can be quite deadly. Crow will not casually mention that he likes the play "Othello."

With Teamwork, Everybody Wins!

There are still two Solars among the Mountain Folk. Crow would like to play good-cop/bad-cop with himself. When he gets back to their mountain, he would like to take a tour of the plant as Moist Chaffinch, a management consultant with some sound ideas for incorporating agile development processes into the production cycle. In particular, he'll start a mentoring system, in which each Mountain Folk worker is assigned a Solar to help them learn about Craft in general. They will be required to write down what they've learned each day in a Learning Journal. If that doesn't work, some sort of funny hat will be instituted. Crow will then reappear and make it subtly clear that, although Mr. Chaffinch himself is off-limits as a Sidereal, Crow might be amenable to helping them with their problem by having the Solars eliminated. In exchange, he only wants their friendship. But someday--- and that day may never come--- he'll call upon them to do a service for him.

Crow Decides to be Proactive

Org Chart Reshuffling

[sent to Ariel and Kat]

It occurs to me that we're going to be assembling Voltron very soon. In this post-Usurpation world, i t's more important than ever that we lean our organization and calendar only those asks that leverage our core competencies and reinforce our core values. I therefore suggest that we form a blue-ribbon committee of thought-leaders to investigate whether our purple arachnid friend is necessary for the future success of our enterprise. Preliminary inquiries and existing quick-look papers suggest to me that while his expertise in combat skills are certainly beneficial in the short-run, it's been suggested in visioning retreats that the long-term, satellite-view action plan for our company requires that we consider the potentiality that having one piece of our matrix organization be a sentient, superpowered death-bot may negatively impact our bottom-line performance. I suggest we convene focus groups to brainstorm blue-sky ideas on downsizing our workforce to better prepare ourselves for the challenges ahead. Let's partner to spread our best-industry practices throughout the world!

Honeypot

[to Brian, immediately after the preceding email]

I'd like to use Distant Voices frequently over the upcoming in-game time to make sure that things are going according to plan. In particular, I'd like (suitably redacted) copies of any email they send between themselves or to the rest of the party about that plot or any other plotting--- hell, any other coversations--- involving Nameless Crow.

Exit Interviews

[to Kurgan, after the preceding two emails]

It looks like we're going to form Voltron soon. It occurs to me that in this post-Usurpation world, we have to lean our organization by proactively rightsizing our thought-leaders to prevent them from negatively impacting our performance metrics.

You probably know what I want from Voltron. I don't know what you want. Frankly, I don't care. My only concern is that Creation and the rest of the universe be within the guidelines of Fate under responsible authority; a spider-bot literally embodying the Fate of Endings certainly seems like such an authority.

I'm worried that if Mbelo Iblan and Azure Rose get any power, they would subordinate Heaven to Creation. I don't want to deal with mortals on fate-planning committees, hordes of Dragon-Blooded with permanent Walking Outside Fate charms, or a kingdom of artifact-laden Mountain Folk that's decided it's powerful enough to turn against Heaven. I don't care what your specific plans are for dealing with the world, as long as you're not planning to sell us all out to pursue your radical socialist agenda.

So, interested in a bit of ultraviolence? We do need their shards for the ritual; we don't need them to be willing and active participants. If we need perfunctory Journeys and Serenity Sidereals, I can find willing and discreet ones trivially.

At Least It Wasn't Adultery

As the legal counsel for the Division of Secrets, Nameless Crow is also the ex officio chairman of the Department of Compliance. It occurs to him that there's some a bunch of gods who have got too much freedom, and he wants to send out some policemen to beat them. Specifically, he wants to find some convenient god who's recently quit working for the Jade Pleasure Dome, detain him on some trumped-up charges of stealing sensitive information from the Dome, give him a vacation in one of the Division's Freedom Centers, and conduct an exit interview to obtain information about the Dome. (If we're going to shadowrun it, then a map might be useful, for example.) Now, the simplest information-extracting mechanism would just involve either a pipe wrench or Threefold Binding of the Heart. Crow, however, is a man of wealth and taste, and realizes that there's a certain artistry and finesse that's required in these scenarios. He also knows a place where he can rent horses with a very small security deposit. To reify his action plan, and to get bonus Conviction successes, he's come up with a four-stage approach for such negotiations:

1) Strap a cage full of rats to the god's head. Unfortunately, gods usually aren't scared of rats, even if they're dressed in miniature clown suits. (The rats, that is. And the gods too, for that matter.) It's a Resource 4 cage, though, and if the Deparment of Compliance doesn't use it, the Division of Secrets will reduce their budget next year.

2) The most common and severe phobia isn't death, but rather public speaking. Have the Friendship Corps Volunteer make an extemporaneous PowerPoint presentation on the importance of flowing down asks properly to promote a success culture. Crow isn't quite sure why most people find this torturous, but he practices results-based management.

3) You said you haven't watched Marathon Man, so recreational dentistry is right out. Instead, Crow will recreate Un Chien Andalou and engage in a bit of recreational optometry.

4) The usual punishment for theft is chopping off the offender's hand. Crow will force the Fredom Corps Volunteer to do so with his (the Volunteer's) own hand, using a deli slicer. He will then rotate in his swivel chair, pet his fluffy white cat, and make a pun involving the phrase "finger sandwiches" to an attractive henchwoman with an unprintable name.

Everyone Wins with Vertical Integration!

Crow is currently in charge of the Subdepartment on Embarrassing Secrets in Creation. It's come to his attention that Victorious Resolution of Travel Reimbursements, a minor bureaucratic god in charge of authorizing payments to Creation for services rendered, has sired a pack of illegitimate children with a prominent Dragonblooded priestess and placed them in a local orphanage. That's appalling to Crow. Instead of the many for-profit orphanages available, Resolution chose a state-run,charity one. Pursuing radical socialist agendas in one's spare time is one thing, but attempting to indoctrinate children with communist agitprop is just wrong. Unfortunately, subversive, counter-counter-revolutionary thoughtcrimes aren't illegal in Heaven yet, but Crow was able to bring up Resolution on charges of incompetence.

As a gesture of goodwill and out of respect for the rule of law, Crow decided to give Resolution the best lawyer in Heaven, Nameless Crow. He also solicited the expert testimony of a well-respected doctor, Nameless Crow. He does have a degree in psychology, even if it's managerial psychology and a doctorate of philosophy rather than a doctorate of medicine. He did consult with an actual medical doctor, though, and Mercy's Razor voiced no objection. Although the judge for the case was in Creation trying to get his SECRET FINANCIAL INFORMATIONS back from a wealthy businessman, Crow managed to find someone with enough legal training to take over the trial: Nameless Crow. Resolution was stripped of his current position and posted as a watchman in the Gem Silver Mine, several miles below the surface of the earth. The Mine isn't actually fated to be dug out for another thousand years or so, but Crow believes in being proactive.

There's now a vacancy in the Department of Secrets' org chart. Crow drafted a memo to an acquaintance of his high up in the Mountain Folk hierarchy to inform him about the siutation. He authorized them to delay the project, hinting that he would soon be able to fill the position with someone who would authorize Crow to reward the Mountain Folk more lavishly for their efforts. (Crow did free them from the Serenity-Bot, after all.)

Ceiling Crow is Watching You Master Fate

I want to ally with the Primordials. The Unconquered Sun is a Solar-supporting asshole, and the Primordials are engaging in a laissez-faire, salutary-neglect style of leadership that Crow enthusiastically supports. His plan for dealing with the Primordials is to show them their common goals, give them a few gifts (Crowbot could easily weave a few fates to help keep their deception secret, for example) to show good faith, and arrive at a detente. He'll even put a few accents on "detente" to make it look classy. In short, make it clear that neither of us has anything to gain by attacking the other.

Org Chart Reshuffling 2: Electric Boogaloo

[sent to Ariel]

It's been brought to my attention that the finishing touches are being put on the various bots, and we're probably going to try to take them to the Loom shortly. This is pretty much our last chance to off Saturn-Bot; once it's in the Loom and tied directly into the Fate of Endings, we're not going to be able to do much to stop her. I know I've been rather unkind t= o you about the relative status of Journeys in the Heavenly hierarchy, but it's an unfortunate fact of Heavenly politics that Endings is the most powerful of us. We can move the pieces around on the gameboard; Saturn can remove them from the game.

I think that our visions for architecting the future are actually fairly close. One of the central traits of Journeys is commerce, and you won't find anyone more pro-business than me. I'm a big fan of law and order, which you'll need if you want to promote travel and trade. But we don't even know what Saturn wants; we have no idea how much of Mercy's Razor is left in her. I don't think we can afford to take the chance that she'll summarily unmake your trading companies or my universities, and we won't be able to do anything about it once she's in the loom.

We have a very unique opportunity now to reify a vision for the future that will make the Heaven and Creation better places. Let's deal with Mercy's Razor. Once he's out of the way, we can unite together as a party, free of freaky, murderous Death-Bots with their own inscrutable agendas, to face the most dire threat to Creation: Jane Fonda. Or, um, the situation between the gods and Primordials.

Crowbot

At present, our Bots are being repaired by Mountain Folk engineers. Now, the Mountain Folk are not monolithic, at least not figuratively. They have their own factions and hierarchies and governments, and we're acting as Ugly Sidereals in our naive assumption that their internal dealings are irrelevant. I'd like to exacerbate those internal rivalries and start some low-key, bureaucratic internecine political plots to delay the bots' repair even further. I don't know how the Serenity-Bot-influenced lower ranks of the Mountain Folk feel about the Sidereals, but there are presumably rivalries among the upper tiers about whether Sidereals can be trusted, how much they should demand, whether they should sabotage the bots, and so on.

Being carved from rock, the Mountain Folk don't have much hair. That makes Crow suspicious of them. Hippies are easily identified in the wild by their long, luxurious hippie hair; anyone without any hair at all is overcompensating. I'd like to reciprocate that suspicion. As part of the Obsidian Shards of Infinity form, and I can punch someone and give them a mental illness. Paranoid schizophrenia seems appropriate for Crow. I'd like to instill a deep, irrational distrust of the Sidereals (er, even moreso than usual) among certain Mountain Folk privy to the repair projects and use my bureaucratic skills to spark rivalries about the vision for the project, exactly how good the final product, should be, and so on. As part of the effect, I'd also like to ensure that the Mountain Folk working on Tom Servo are completely insulated from this, although they'll continue to echo the same delays as the others when asked for status reports.

Those are Totally Words Than Mean Something!

I'd like to draft a series of memos mandatorially recommending best-in-class business practices to enlarge our sacerdotal mindshare. Specifically, I'd like to lean our Sidereal-controlled monastic orders and influence them to make produce more frequent and efficient prayers for the ostensible \"uber-gods of Heaven, thus significantly increasing the Primordials' quintessence yield. We'll form an assembly line of chanting monks, using the House of Quality to ensure that defective monks are replaced properly, as well reducing annual spend by ensuring that the durations of the prayers fall neatly within the takt time, thereby avoiding unproductive downtime.

Sunshine

I'd like to begin work on Project Sunshine. I don't know if it's geologically or chronologically feasible to finish Sunshine in the time allotted, even with bureaucratic and fate-manipulation mojo, but it seems like something worth starting.

Crow's ultimate goal is to shift power in Creation, Heaven, and everyone else in the universe from petty warlords to responsible, trained, democratic-cryptofascistly-elected officials. Power comes from the barrel of a gun; authority doesn't, and the world should be run by people who know the difference. Being able to punch someone really hard or having a huge daiklaive is a horrible reason for giving someone control over the world, and it's an even worse reason for taking it. Crow is ultimately a modernist, and he wants to take the world on a great leap forward. Having some warlord at the top is inevitable, but it can be a symbiotic relationship; the warlord needs someone to make sure that the trains run on time, and Crow needs someone to prevent people from prying into exactly where those trains are going.

So, Crow wants to drag Heaven and Creation into the century of the fruitbat. The first step is modernization, and it seems appropriate to start that by constructing an Internet in Heaven. It'll be a literal series of tubes dug between convenient buildings, allowing divisions to send documents and information in the pneumatic tubes to their coworkers faster and easier and more accurately, or at least faster. There's direct prayer, but it's difficult to transmit full documents with pictures that way, and 80% of all information is transferred through body movement, pictures, and PowerPoint presentations. There's always prayer, but you can't pray a PowerPoint presenatation to someone. Crow has tried. Of course, with all of the required security measures, building permits, and cross-caste cooperation, it'll be hard to get anything done.

The reason for that is that the bit above is a front for Project Sunshine. In reality, Crow plans (with judicious use of Bureaucracy and Fate-manipulation) to bore a few holes through the floor of Heaven for the purpose of orbital kinetic bombardment. The setup would be completed under the strictest secrecy, even by Division of Secrets standards, with only Crow having access to any nontrivial step in the launch process. On the other hand, it's really just dropping a very large rock down a very large hole. Now, Crow would never use this in any foreseeable situation, but there may come a day when we have to destroy Creation in order to save it. The problem with the Realm Defense Grid is that it's in the Realm, where Dragon-Blooded and other mortals can get their grubby hands on it.