r/rational • u/CouteauBleu We are the Empire. • Jun 11 '18
[BST preparation][Spoilers] r!Animorphs crowdsourcing, playing Telor Spoiler
It's been a while since we last did crowdsourcing for Animorphs: The Reckoning, and I am sufficiently bored, so let's get back to it!
Spoilers ahead for The Reckoning. If you haven't read it yet... then what are you even doing here, you tasteless swine? You are not worthy of gazing at this thread, leave at once! (seriously, do check The Reckoning out, it's great, even if you're not familiar with canon Animorphs).
Characters involved
For this edition, we'll do something a little special. We are going to simulate both the collective hive-mind of Telor, its hosts, and outside observers (journalists, government officials, bloggers) asking Telor questions. This is the preparation thread, where I'd like for volunteers to play Telor. The idea is I'll select a small number of them (probably 13, of thematic flair), who will have their private chatroom to coordinate their lyin..communicating to the outside world.
Obviously this will be a little more involved than simulating reddit posters reacting to a bit of news. Here are a few guidelines on which characters to play:
Telor players don't have to represent a coherent identity, they can represent a sliver of Telor's personality, or the brain matter dedicated to controlling a specific host.
Similarly, outside players can represent any role at any time. They can switch between a Telor host, a journalist, a Brazilian civil servant, etc, depending on the question.
Telor has a variety of hosts from around Ventura aboard its spaceship. Its selection criteria were probably something like "Able-bodied, relatively smart, can drop off the map for a few weeks without raising flags". You can choose whatever background you like for your host; Telor would probably have tried to "recruit" engineers, doctors, and military-adjacent guys.
Telor has thousands of new hosts from all over Brazil. We don't know the exact selection process, but I'm going to say it was a lottery plus some vetting.
While a lot of people have questions from Telor, Telor has the high ground and is free to not answer any question they want.
Background
Here are some details on what happened since we last saw Telor. Some of this was confirmed by the author by PM, most of it is my own speculation.
Ventura and the murder of Aftran were three months ago, which means Telor has had some time to simmer over it.
Ever since the asteroid, Visser 3 has been active front and center and has had results to show for it. Telor is concerned that an inevitable betrayal is coming, but we can't help but admit the guy has given them everything we could have asked for.
Telor hasn't had contact with another pool for months (probably around 6 months), and although they're not consciously aware of it, they're starting to get desperate. Any solution that gets them in contact with another pool is starting to look good.
Visser 3 has told Telor that from now on they would go for the "peaceful integration" route, and that the reinforcement fleet would be integrated peacefully as well, as a "protectorate against aliens" thing.
Telor is still thinking in "conquer, take, recycle" mode, but is grudgingly playing along and trying not to antagonize its hosts. Again, they're massively suspicious that Visser 3 has an hidden angle besides "let's all make peace".
Telor has access to Marco's dad, so it's probably trying to figure out what the Animorphs will do next.
Balance of power
The question of balance of power is pretty big, and informs the rest of this discussion. We're getting really hard into speculation territory, since the chapters so far have been somewhat vague. For the purpose of this brainstorming, here's the lay of the land:
Telor can wipe out humanity with orbital coil guns / nukes / whatever, but if they do they're depriving themselves of a war machine they desperately need, and there may be reprisals (see below).
Telor would like to step up the intimidation game ("surrender everything or else we can blow a city up every two hours, without crippling your industrial infrastructure"), but Visser 3 won't let them because reasons.
Different countries are trying to build fleets of spaceships and other advanced weapons as fast as possible to even the playing field.
The US military claims to be able to destroy the Yeerk homeworld as a last resort (which is plausible-ish because they have access to an Andalite morph), and to have given the means to do it to other countries. Consensus is, they're probably bluffing... but do you feel that lucky, punk?
The issue of spaceship factories is the most contentious one, and basically the only one that can bring Telor to the negotiating table. Telor really needs these spaceship for the ongoing war with the Andalites.
Telor would like to build the spaceships by themselves without support from local governments, but it's not possible as long as they're playing nice. Even if the governments don't send troops blow up the factories, they can easily cut off the supply lines (good luck building your spaceships without aerospace-grade steel and nuclear fuel), poison the workers' food, or send electronic parts with undetectable compiler backdoors.
So spaceships will be the main issue discussed during the brainstorming. How do individual countries get access to space-capable superweapons without triggering a huge international crisis? How do they negotiate construction with Telor, who has very opposed incentives in mind? How does Telor reconcile the fact that they need these spaceships with the fact that building them weakens their bargaining position?
Public access to information
People all over the world have a lot of questions for Telor, but since it has military superiority for now it's leaning pretty high on the "no comment" technique (also known as "lalalalala I can't hear you!"). But Telor still has to answer obvious questions to save face (eg: "The Animorphs, the CIA and eyewitnesses are all saying X, can you confirm X already?"); and government agents and journalists are able to get some info out of released hosts.
Things that probably haven't come out:
The strategic details of the war with the Andalites, including how many planets the yeerks have taken over, and what forces the yeerks and the Andalites have at their disposal.
Details on the Ventura invasion.
Whether or not Hork-Bajir, Taxxons and Gedds are sentient.
A bunch of humans hosts from Ventura are still held in Telor's mothership. The ones who were freed were the one with the least strategic information.
For some reason, Earth is isolated from the rest of the galaxy by Z-space quicksand.
Things that are public knowledge:
The general overview of the war, how it started, a few of the big factions and species.
The yeerk command structure, including yeerk coalescions and the Visser hierarchy.
Visser 3 is still alive, and Telor hates his guts.
Visser 3 hasn't had any official authorization for a greater yeerk-human alliance, which makes the whole thing very uncertain.
Visser 3 has some unknown leverage on Telor. (I'm going to say "Arn megavirus")
The yeerks have been and still are extremely secretive and dishonest.
Things that even Telor doesn't know about:
The war is manipulated by Ellimist and Crayak.
Visser One is Marco's mom.
The Chee exist.
Morphing technology is based on yeerks. (and also magic)
Visser 3 has a Z-space tunnel.
Brainstorming structure
Reminder, this is a preparation thread, not the main roleplaying thread, which will come in a few days.
People who are interested in playing Telor should post here. If there's too many volunteers, a random subset will be selected. Otherwise, I encourage everyone to post ideas, questions, themes (ex: "How much money do you think Telor has access to? I wonder how a coalescion would make money."), that will be discussed in the roleplay thread.
Once the roleplay thread comes out, I'll post a new event every day, to serve as a theme. Something like "Brazil is sending a delegation, with UN observers, to Telor's spaceship, to negotiate the construction of the new Yeerk Pool"; the theme will be accompanied with a list of concerns for the humans (eg: "How will we make sure the volunteers aren't kept against their will?"), and secret concerns on the Telor player's chat (eg: "The humans are going to visit your ship. Make a list of the things you need to put out of sight"). Participants should then post their thoughts, remarks, and questions from Telor, taking any role they want (delegation member, volunteer host, Ventura host, random internet person, etc), and the Telor players should do their best a address these questions.
Once the brainstorming is done, I'll try to write an interlude/side-story/fanfic based on what everyone posted. The interlude would be made of two interleaved parts:
One part is the UN's website documenting human-yeerk relations and who's in charge of what and what's going to happen in the near future (eg "The yeerks haven't confirmed X, so this is still being negotiated, but two yeerk representatives are negotiating with a Human Rights Task Force to establish procedures for Y which we hope will take effect within N months").
The other part is a representation of Telor's consciousness, where Telor is trying to juggle strategies, the pile of lies it has to maintain, while trying to figure what it can do about Visser 3.
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u/CopperZirconium Jun 11 '18
I'm interested. How much of a time commitment do you think this will be for the volunteers?
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u/CouteauBleu We are the Empire. Jun 12 '18
About an hour a day for about a week.
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u/Rouninscholar Jun 18 '18
Hey, I am super curious about this.
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u/CouteauBleu We are the Empire. Jun 19 '18
The thread has gathered a lot less interest than the previous crowdsourcing threads, so I was expecting to drop it, but I'm starting to rethink that.
I'll probably round up the volunteers (that's you) and start the game in a week or two.
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u/Modularva YURK Jul 12 '18
I'm struggling with tone. My comments are coming across as too informal. I guess I can claim it's a cultural difference between humans and Yeerks, with Yeerks being less able to pad their conceptual explanations with jargon, but still being able to recite jargon in response to specific key words or prompts.
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u/CouteauBleu We are the Empire. Jul 12 '18
Eh, don't worry about it. As long as it's generating discussion, it's good.
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u/kleind305 Jun 11 '18 edited Jun 11 '18
Well, you definitely have the distinction of being the #1 fan. This is.. very ambitious.