[TQY] Spring

Adam

Remember to draw all your answers on the map.

The cards of Spring will ask us a lot of questions, which will establish more about the landscape and the inner workings of our community. We should use Spring to become familiar with the mechanics and structure of the game. There won’t necessarily be a lot of tension or conflict during Spring, and this is fine.

Adam

Week 1 - ♥10

There's another community on the map. Where are they? What sets them apart from you?
About a six-hour hike North of the Old Colony, on the opposite side of the SSV-05, in the valley of Pleiades, is a smaller colony of scientists, and high-ranking settlement officials who refused to stay down-wind of the ship, for fear of a reactor leak. They are intelligent, and generally keep to themselves — but their conflict with the Jackals left them in even smaller numbers than us.

Work - No Active Projects

So nothing counts down.

Action - Start a Project

Our war with the Jackals is over, and we can finally start rebuilding what's left of our little settlement. The few of us remaining have had trouble conceiving for some time now, and power in the settlement has been intermittent at best. Unfortunately, we won't be able to do much of anything without a steady source of power, and we're not technically savvy enough to solve the mystery of why our women can't get pregnant. What we can do, however, is collect the solar arrays off the ship, for use in our power grid — with any luck, we'll be able to integrate them here, and use the power as tool for negotiation with the scientists in the valley.

Starting Project: Salvage solar panels from the SSV-05. Duration: 2 weeks

Mischa

Week 2 - ♥6

Are there children in the community? If there are, what is their role in the community?
There are children, a very few. Less than a quarter of the community is under the age of puberty. They are kept secure and never travel alone. If kids need to go outside, there is at least one adult per child to attend to any dangers, needs, or emergencies. Education and protection of the children is one of the most important things behind basic needs like food and shelter.
The community has a fenced-off area for the kids to be relatively free at play, even though they remain under careful watch.

Work - Solar panels

Counts down from 2 to 1.

Action - Start a Project

We know the area outside the settlement has resources we could use. Maybe we'll find a lost artifact from the original ship, or reclaim a weapon from the war with the Jackals. We'd also like to make sure that there are no nearby dangers in the neighborhood.

Starting Project: Scout the area. Duration: 6 weeks

Adam

Week 3 - ♥7

Where does everyone sleep? Who is unhappy with this arrangement, and why?
Because space is at a premium, there are a number of places people sleep in The Village. Most people sleep in the longhouse at the western edge of the village. It's a huge open hall where parties are thrown, weddings are had, meals are prepared, and (of course) people sleep. There are also some more private tents and the like for couples looking for some privacy. People who are trying to conceive get priority use of the tents, but they're not exactly romantic, given the climate of the planet.

Families with young children are treated quite well — the village always comes together and builds any pregnant women, and their partner, a cabin to raise their new family. Raising a cabin doesn't take overly long, but because there's so much preparatory work to do (cutting and preparing logs, cutting stone, collecting and fabricating insulating materials) it was deemed unnecessary to build every person a home.

This arrangement has led to some ruffled feathers amongst LGBTQ couples, infertile couples, the perpetually single, and people who just flat-out don't want children. The person most vocal against this arrangement is a woman named Teegan – she was a graduate student assigned to one of the scientists on board. She refuses to disclose her reasoning for not having kids, citing her right to privacy.

Work - Projects tick down

Reclaiming the ship's Solar Array [COMPLETE] – The trip out to the SSV-05 was largely uneventful. The scars of battle still mark the path from the SSV-05 to our village. Fortunately it was a quiet walk, for the first time in anyone's memory. The ship's array was designed for compactification, and transport, so disassembling the solar panels was quick and easy work. What took the most time was determining which solar panels were still functional, worth repairing, and transporting them back to the village. We did manage to get a handful that should address our power needs, once we get them connected to the grid.

Scout the area [IN PROGRESS] – 5/6 weeks remaining.

Action - Start A Discussion

Question: Should women be forced to try for children, in the interest of keeping the colony alive?

Mischa

Qasim, an architect-scientist who left the Pleiades colony to live in the Village, speaks his mind.

"It may seem inhumane, but we must think of the survival of our species over the needs of the individual! Does one person's choice dominate over actual extinction?"

Adam

Kalia, a prominent mother, and active leader in the parenting group, speaks next.

"I'm a big believer in personal choice, but I feel it should be said that if women here find themselves pregnant, that they will not be taking care of their children on their own — most of the families here would be happy to take on another child. We love, and care for, all children like they're our own. It would be a true shame if a child would be denied life if the mother felt it would not be loved."

Mischa

Raya, a botanist and a farmer, pushes forward.

"What about personal freedom for those women who don't want to have kids? Are we seriously talking about forced impregnation?"

Adam

"Forcing women to carry the burden of child-bearing against their will is morally indefensible, and logistically infeasible — especially when having children is so heavily incentivized to begin with. If you start stealing our rights to choose, our rights to sexual preference, our rights to our own identity, then you'll quickly find yourself short of anybody who doesn't want to have children, and that will be the end of this colony."

End of discussion.

Mischa

Week 4 - ♥2

There's a large body of water on the map. Where is it? What does it look like?
Snowmelt from nearby mountains trickles down into this huge lake in an ancient crater. There are indigenous organisms, both large and small, who make the lake their home. Even though the water is exceptionally clear and is transparent for at least 200 meters in places, the water must be processed before it can be safely drunk. We do not know how deep the lake is.

Work - Projects tick down

Scout the area [IN PROGRESS] – 4/6 weeks remaining.

Action - Discover Something New

The aposye beasts are migrating.

Adam

Week 5 - ♥K

A young boy starts digging in the ground, and finds something unexpected. What is it?
A young boy named Alister, who was prone to sneak away from the watchful eyes of the village, came across a small alcove, tucked into the walls of the crater lake. Deciding to make himself a little camp, he started digging down a small area to form the camp floor, and encountered something nobody in the colony had ever seen — a solid metal door, welded shut, with strange markings on it that he couldn't understand. Try as he might, there was no evidence of a way to open it.

Work - Projects tick down

Scout the area [IN PROGRESS] – 3/6 weeks remaining.

Action – Discover Something New

Emboldened by the discovery of the young man, a group of field-workers from the Pleiades colony make their way over to the lake in hopes of excavating the site. While they discover no way into the strange structure, they do manage to show that the strange structure is not of Human origin, and clearly burrowed its way into the side of the crater. Preliminary findings hint that the structure is millennia old, and that a section of it is visible at the bottom of the crater lake.

Mischa

Week 6 - ♥J

You see a good omen. What is it?
One warm afternoon, thousands of small critters, somewhere between a shrew and a gecko, swarm through the village. After initial panic, the critters pass through, damaging nothing. When followed, it is discovered that they are gathered in the wooden area, forming an imperfect but distinct ovals around some of the trees. After the other moons shift position, the critters seem to return to their animalistic behavior.
A few are caught for study. They are too small to really be a food source.

Work - Projects tick down

Scout the area [IN PROGRESS] — 3/6 weeks remaining.

Action - New Project - Interpret the tree omen

A couple from the Village want to examine the grove and see what they can glean.

Adam

Week 7 - ♥4

Where are you storing your food? Why is that a risky place?
The village stores a small amount of food in a small smoking hut on the outskirts of the new village — but they're constantly forced to rely the barely functioning refrigeration units back on the SSV-05. They're considered a core system, and as such have been operating on the nuclear core of the ship's drive — but the units have been running non-stop for generations, and are often just barely hanging on by a thread. The risk of their outright failure, and distance from the village proper, make relying on them extremely dangerous.

Work - Projects tick down

Scout the area [IN PROGRESS] — 2/6 weeks remaining.
Interpret the tree omen [COMPLETE] — It was found that a number of the trees in the grove – the ones the shews were found circling – were emitting a small amount of electromagnetic radiation, in discreet, repeated bursts — which is (of course) extremely odd for a biological organism to do.

A researcher in the group found one tree that had been struck by lightning, died, and started to rot away — and inside the core of the tree itself was a long antennae that seemed to have scorched the core of the tree when the lightning hit it. Curiously enough, the current pulses were found to be too weak to elicit any response from the captured shrews, but an amplified signal from one of the scientists' labs in the Pleiades colony drove it into a frenzy.

Action - New Project

Integrating the Solar Panels into the village's power grid. Estimate: 1 week.

Mischa

Week 8 - ♥9

A charismatic young girl tries to tempt many into sinful or dangerous activity. Why does she do this? How does the community respond?
Rubi is convinced that the cycle of the aposye beasts' migration is a sign that the wildlife can be studied and domesticated. She gathers a few hopeful (and hungry) idealists to the path of the beasts, planning to trap some and bring them back to the village. Bringing the huge beasts under human control will be very dangerous, if they can be at all. But if they truly can be tamed, they represent a grand store of horsepower. And if they can be eaten, better still.
The community is cautiously hopeful, but they do not like the distraction for the able-bodied who have other, better, things to work on. There is a division of opinion, of course.

Work - Projects tick down

Scout the area [IN PROGRESS] — 1/6 weeks remaining.
Integrating the Solar Panels into the village's power grid [COMPLETE] — The panels from the SSV-05 are amazing tech, designed to gather the faintest whisper of starlight or the loudest roar from a blue supergiant. With little more than jumper cables and twine, we have a great source of reliable, pure power... when there's sunlight. It's simple to use a water-clock motor to turn the panels with the rotation of the suns, but we're in a use-it-or-lose it situation, with no batteries to help through nights, or clouds, or the erratic motion of the moons and the eclipses they bring.

Action - Start a Discussion

Question: Should we domesticate the local wildlife?

Adam

Teegan, the resident rights activist, and vegetarian, speaks up first, and with her usual passion. "We can't bring the sins of our forefathers into this new colony. It's bad enough that humanity has enslaved creatures since the dawn of our species, but to come to this new world, and perpetuate the same culture of murder would stand in the face of all we've accomplished, and the sacrifices we've made to get here. Hunting is bad enough!"

Mischa

John Lee, one of the farmers, rolls his eyes and sighs loudly. He repeats an old argument. "Do you want your children to grow up and be illiterate potato farmers? If we can find something like an ox or a horse, or even a goat or sheep, the entire human population will be better off." He scoffs. "We may not even be able to eat the ugly sumbitches."

Adam

Qasim stands up without hesitation as soon as John makes his comment about children being illiterate potato farmers. "With all due respect to Mr. Lee – being a potato farmer, and being literate, are not mutually exclusive things. The majority of safe advancements in crop yields, and hydroponics, come from advances in genetically engineering vegetation. If we work hard now, and educate our children correctly, they may make advances in the hydroponics basins we hand to them. They may end up building a better life than we could — with, or without, a domesticated fauna at our disposal."

Mischa

Kalia shifts her baby from one hip to another, looking at the old scientist. "Are you going to dig out the basin with your own two hands?" She is dubious in the extreme.

End of discussion.

Adam

Week 9 - ♥3

Someone new arrives, who?
A small group of people returning to the ship to collect some food from the refrigeration units when they ran across a young girl in her early twenties scavenging for food. She was fit, and (somewhat astonishingly) nearing the end of a full term pregnancy.

When brought back to the village, and fed, she reveals that her name is Prin. She refuses to disclose who the father of her child is, or who her parents were. There is something otherworldly about her, in spite of her friendly outward appearance. She keeps staring off into the distance, and is easily distracted by moving objects. It's almost as though she was feral; but she is clearly educated, and speaks the common tongue... She is a mystery to everyone, and perplexes even the Pleiades scientists as to her relative health, and education.

Projects — Work Continues

Scout the Area [COMPLETE] — Having spent a month and a half out in the bush, a tired scouting party returns home with a bounty of information about the surrounding lands the Jackals had previously kept them out of.

To the northwest, they found the Jackal camp, abandoned, and abundant. Decades of war spoils reclaimed, in various states of disrepair. The Jackals, a sentient robotic race, had adapted most of the technology of the SSV-05 for use in powering their systems. Much of that might be applicable here.

Who knows what other technology, goods, and information, the Jackals have in their camp?

Action — Discover Something New

Prin, despite her pregnant state, offers to guide some of the survivors to the place she's been staying. It's another hatch, similar to the one found in the crater, nestled into the side of a cliff at the rim of the Pleiades valley, near the Jackal camp. The interior of her home requires a climb down via a ladder, and opens up into a small antechamber made of plastisteel, and filled with ancient, decaying tech. Some of it hums to life as Prin walks by it — a broken down food synthesizer, a space heater, a computer with strange, unreadable symbols on it. She pays it no notice. She's made a small living space near an enormous door that glows bright red as she approaches, a holographic symbol nobody recognizes appearing before the door that fills anyone who looks upon it with an immediate, and urgent sense of dread.

Perplexingly, the arduous hike did not seem to tire her, and when they arrive, she spends some time quickly collecting her things before climbing the ladder back out into the world, and insisting they start the hike back.

Mischa

Week 10 - ♥Q

What's the most beautiful thing in this area?
There is a huge crater valley nearby that takes more than a day to walk its rim. The ancient minerals in the valley are stirred up by the winds and combine with the natural oils in the moon's soil to make huge, opalescent marbles, endlessly rolling in the winds and tidal forces. When the sunlight strikes them, it's like gods moving over the face of the waters, ripples and shades of colors not seen anywhere else. It is a place of terrible serenity and deep tremors.
The rolling opals are largely white and iridescent, but several are translucent blue or deeper hues that are almost black, only showing the refracted colors when the pendulum-like patterns line up just so.

Work - Projects tick down

No active projects.

Action - Start a Project: Search the Jackal camp.

There is so much to be found here! Undoubtedly there will be many expeditions here to recover what has been taken. A group of people insist that we take the time to get the best, most obviously important things. 2 weeks.

Adam

Week 11 - ♥8

An old piece of machinery is discovered, broken but reparable. What is it? What would it be useful for?
With Prin's assistance, some researchers from the Pleiades colony have investigated her former home. They came across a room, only accessible through a hole in an access tunnel. Prin didn't fit through it anymore, but she guided the researchers to it. Once inside, the small room lit up, and revealed a glitchy hologram, in a vaguely humanoid shape — barely recognizable through the digital distortions struggling to render it.

The digital being motions to a pedestal in the middle of the room, with a metallic orb mounted to machinery, descending into the pedestal itself. One of the researchers, Selvin Yaacoob, approaches the device, and touches the orb. A surge of power fills the room, and the digital creature flickers in and out of existence for a moment before everything returns to normal. Selvin removes his hands, but is unable to remember his name, or where he was. When they exited the room, returning to the antechamber where Prin was waiting for them, she pointed directly at him, with a pleasantly surprised look on her face, and said, "You too! You touched the Opus! You shouldn't have done that... It's broken! Now you're like me. We need to fix it!"

Work - Projects tick down

Search the Jackal camp [IN PROGRESS] - 1/2 weeks left.

Action - Start a Project: Repair the Opus.

Prin and Selvin seem resolved to fix the Opus. Estimate: 4 weeks.

Mischa

Week 12 - ♥A

Are there distinct family units in the community? If so, what family structures are common?
The family structure is a little loose and nebulous, but centers around a fertile male-female pair. Often the adults will split off and have loose romantic or sexual relationships that are usually both monogamous and short term, but all support the mother and and children. Once a child is old enough, they move along to the child peer group for most of their day. They still have contact with their family, but they gradually start to sleep in the kid's area as they progress from early childhood to middle childhood.

The infertile adults usually pair up together for mutual support or stay with fertile siblings to support that group.

The elderly are lightly segregated like children, in the sense that they have their own area and rotating caretakers.

Work - Projects tick down

Repair the Opus [IN PROGRESS] — 3/4 weeks left.
Search the Jackal camp [COMPLETE] — On a makeshift sledge, the party has brought back a console from the SSV-05 that has been heavily modified and integrated with Jackal tech. It functions with some kind of self-contained power source, and the hope is that it will serve as a Rosetta Stone to help understand the Jackals and unlock further secrets. There are also thousands of small latticed crystal prisms, which appear to be some sort of memory storage for use with the console. One of the party loudly complains they should have fixed a vehicle instead.

Most amazingly, the party has found what appears to be a living Jackal infant. One of the childless women has brought it back to raise it among humans as her own.

Action - Discover something new

There is rising smoke in the distance. An impact? Work of the Jackals? An unlucky lightning strike?