Damien at the Safe house

"Yeah, that'd be cool," Damien says. "We can get a couple of ethernet cards, and a hub, and set up a LAN. What kind of IP access do you have? If we put Linux on one of the machines, I know how to set it up to do IP Masquerading so that we can get them all on the net at once even if we only have one computer!"

Suddenly realizing that he's probably boring everybody else present, Damien adds lamely, "but we can talk about that tomorrow."

"Yes, sir," the young Seraph says. Then she turns to Damien. "I'll call you tomorrow, okay?"

"'Kay," Damien says dismissively, before adding worriedly, "You are going to know where to find me, aren't you?"

"She'll know," says the Elohite smiling faintly. "Don't worry."

. . .

[GM]
"Damien," the police have offered to give us a safe place to sleep tonight, just in case. I think that it would probably be the best thing to do." Damien's father looks into his son's eyes, looking to see his son's reaction.

"Yeah, OK. I think I would like that better than going back home. Have you called your work? I think the de... uh, the bad guys who trashed our house took one of the pencils with your work address."

[Jezreel]
Then, putting two and two together from the comments about the safehouse, she turns to Damien, "On second thought, maybe you'd better call me tomorrow."

"'Kay," Damien says, then adds in a questioning tone, "Where?"

Michnelion kneels for a moment, his knees cracking loudly under his weight, "Umph. Look, kids, most likely you two are going to see each other tomorrow, I can arrange it if nothing else. Damien, you need to stay close to your father, to make sure both of you are okay. Jezreel," he says as he puts a firm hand on her slender shoulder and looks her deep in the eyes, "We need to get a move on."

The echoes in the Symphony, though still distinct, are beginning to fade slightly as the Symphony starts to right itself.

"Come on, Damien," Mr. Morris says to his son, "let's get some sleep, okay?"

Michnelion and Jezreel exit the station door, leaving Damien and his father behind. A police officer comes over and says, "I'm supposed to take you to the your safe house for the night. Would you please come with me?"

Damien looks to his father for confirmation, and then says, "OK."

He starts to go before he begins to worry. "Is Goldie with us? What are we going to do for clothes and toothbrush and stuff?"

The officer, says, "Goldie won't be able to join you for right now, but she's safe. As for belongs for the night, you'll be provided for."

"Call me Roy, or Officer O'Brien."

"Um, OK... Roy," Damien says, not entirely feeling comfortable calling the adult by his first name.

He'll go along with his father and Roy to the safe house. The drive is moderately normal, other than a brief burst of automatic gunfire in the city. Although merelu an instant, it's enough to break the spell which Vancouver and great Canada usually has over its citizens: the spell of safety from guns.

"It's okay," says Damien's father as he hold his son's hand. "Everything's going to be all right."

Despite the tension in the air and the expectation of more gunfire, surely, to come, the city's mysterious dynamic stillness fills the air once more. Or, perhaps its a numbness . . .

'Roy' stops the car in front of an old resturant in Gas Town. Before getting out, he dons a long grey overcoat that completely covers his uniform. The evening air is cool and slightly damp as Damien and his father walk from the car to a door beside the resturant.

As they pass by the window of the establishment, The Golden Lamb, Damien notices a raven haired woman watching them. She has green eyes, but looks away when her eyes meet his.

Those eyes . . . they remind Damien of something, something he'd seen before.

Soon enough, while Damien's head is in the clouds, they've reached the top of the stairs. The hallway curves a bit and they enter a room, room 242. Three beds, a small kitchen compete with sink, fridge and two burner stove, a bathroom room whose door is ajar, two closets, one sad looking window, three wooden folding chairs, two beanbags, and a tough looking woman wearing a leather vest, American coyboy boots and a coyboy hat leaning back on one of the wooden chairs.

"Call me Darla. I'm from Washington State," she says, standing and shaking Damien's father's hand.

Damien notices that she's wearing a shoulder holster, complete with handgun.

"Sorry there's no computer, kid," says Roy. "Here, you may find this interesting." With a flick of his wrist he appears to pull a card out of thin air, and hands it to Damien.

On one side it reads: "Where do you want to go today?"

[Damien]
Damien's brown furrows, looking for the Microsoft Windows logo, before turning over the card.

On the other side, it reads:

0100000001011000110010011.0111100110.1000010010011110011110010001011001110011.011111001000111/010101010100100001110010101101001010111010100/0011001001011000010110011/1001101000010010101000101.010001010001101

"It's like a puzzle, only it'll take you somewhere," says Roy. For a moment it feels like Damien can hear only the sound of Roy's voice. "Not that you haven't been there before, kid. After all, you do get around."

Damien tries to piece together the puzzle, but even with his great skill in computers, he's not very good at reading and interpreting binary straight off. Noticing the dots and slashes, he wonders if this might be an URL, or otherwise an IP address. He wonders, could the binary represent ASCII characters? Or integers?

The tunnel hearing fades as Mr. Morris thanks Roy. "Sure, no problem," he says. "Just try and get some sleep, tonight, okay? There's some sleeping clothes, tooth paste and tooth brushes in the bathroom. Even towels, too." He smiles. "Someone will be up for you tomorrow. Darla's your watch, if we think there's cause for another night, we'll let you know tomorrow."

Damien looks up and absently says, "Thanks..." before returning his gaze to the card, to further study the string of binary.

(Is he able to figure anything out? Or is this something, I, Rob am supposed to figure out? :) )
OOGM - I figure this is somthing which is somewhat akin to a social situation - the player can either make a skill roll, or roll play it. Likewise, for this problem, you can either role-play figuring it out, or you can make a simple skill roll or two. Or, as I will sometimes do, the player can make a skill roll to help modify their role-playing (like a Fast-Talk roll on top of role-playing it.) More weight should be placed upon role-playing, b/c this is a role-playing game, but if the player truely lacks the skills, then the character's skills come into play. Call it as you see it. :)

"So," Darla says, "What you guys want for dinner?"

Mr. Morris contemplates the thought . . . and says, "Delivery, I presume."

"Sure," she says.

"Pizza, Chinese, Mexican . . . what do you think, Damien?" asks Damien's dad. Fixated on the back of the business card, Damien says absently, "Pizza's great."

Damien walks over to a table and sits down. Eventually he looks up and asks Darla, "Hey, do you have a pencil and paper I can borrow?"

Damien's father wanders over to look at what Damien's doing. "What is that?" he asks.

Damien suddenly realizes that this is probably not something that he should be showing to his father. However, just before it's too late, he also realizes that snatching the business card and hiding it would probably do nothing but draw more attention to it. Trying to sound as nonchalant as possible, Damien says, "Oh, it's just a puzzle that Ro... um, Officer O'Brien gave me."

Damien's father looks at the streams of ones and zeros. "Binary!" With a chuckle, he tosses it down on the table before Damien. Ruffling his son's hair, he says, "Well, if anybody can figure it out, you can."

Thinking no more on the matter, Damien's father goes to look around the safe house.

[OOGM: Excellent, I approve heartily of role-playing Damien's father when appropriate. :) I love it.]

Damien, however, is not at all interested in the safe house at the moment. He stares at the bitstream, trying to make sense of it. The first thing he does is count the 1's and 0's before the first period. "Twenty-five," he murmers to himself, frowning. He expected a multiple of 8. He counts the next set of bits, and sees 10...and then 40, and then 15.

"Aha!" Damien says, still to himself, this time with a smile. "They're all multiples of five!" Now he's on to something. But what could they be? An IP address?"

Damien starts dividng the numbers into sets of five bits, and turning those into numerals. He quickly realizes that this isn't going to work, because you only need a little more than three bits to represent a digit... or four bits, if you're in hexidecimal. And there aren't the right number of digits to represent an IP address anyway, Damien muses. In any event, there ought to be the same number of bits between each period, whatever base and encoding you're working with. Unless it changes... but that would be perverse, and unlikely, given that each segment of the puzzle comes in a multiple of five bits.

Briefly thwarted, he wonders if perhaps these are ASCII codes. For that, though, he'd expect 8-bit numbers, and it seems he's got 5-bit numbers here. Of course, if it's going to spell out a URL, only some 6 bits tend to be used... "Maybe they're all letters!" Damien thinks. That'd only take 5 bits -- you can represent numbers up to 31 with 5 bits, which is plenty for a 26 character alphabet.

He remembers briefly that the ASCII value of the letter A is 65. He starts extracting 5-bit numbers and adding 65, before kicking himself. "Stupid, Damien, you don't have a computer to feed the ASCII to. Just say A is 0, and work from there."

On the pad of paper, Damien writes out an alphabet at the top of the page, labelleling A as 0, B as 1, and so forth, on up to Z as 25. He then starts multiplying out the 5-bit binary numbers, and looking up the letters on the table he's made for himself. He gets through the first three words with this procedure, and has written out:

IBMMT PG QSPHSFTT

"Huh, that can't be right," Damien says thoughtully. Chewing absently on the eraser end of the pencil, he stares at the number, before inspriation strikes. "Maybe they've been put through a rot13 filter!" he says, again under his breath and to himself. He starts adding 13 to each number, wrapping the numbers over 25 back to a number less than 13. He again gets through the first three words:

VOZZG CT DFCUFSGG

Shaking his head, Damien says, "That's not it."

It takes a few more moments before he realizes that maybe he's thinking too much like a computer nerd. "A is 0, rot13 like the Usenet standard... what if A is 1, not 0?"

This time he strikes paydirt.

HALLS.OF.PROGRESS.ORG/JUDGEMENT/FILES/SHIJE.HTM

"Woah!" Damien says. He sits back and looks at the URL he's just written out. The pit of his stomach feels something like it does going down the big drop of a roller coaster. He has the sense that he's just tapped into something a whole lot bigger than himself. The sense is greatly mitigated by the fact that earlier today, he'd already found out that something a whole lot bigger was going on, but it is still there.

He remembers that Jezreel's address was at halls.of.progress.org. He also remembers that he couldn't figure that site out. He seemed to be able to communicate with it... but every time he ran a program that tried to trace the network routers between his computer and halls.of.progress.org, it would fail to find a connection.

The only word Damien doesn't recognize is "Shije". The name of somebody? He wishes he had a computer with internet access!

Then the pizza arrives. Damien quickly and surrpetitiously pockets the business card and his notes on the matter. He doesn't want the wrong people-- including, maybe, his Dad-- seeing the URL.

As the three (Damien, his father, and Darla) sat down to eat, Mr. Morris asks, "So, Damien, any luck with your puzzle?"

"Some," Damien replies, telling himself that it wasn't strictly a lie. "I think it's a message, and that the numbers mean letters."

Mr. Morris nods indulgently, not really given the matter much further thought.

[OOC: Damien's thought processes and steps in decoding the message were pretty much the same as my own :) ]

[OOGM: Beautiful! I love it. Good stuff.]

[OOC2: How much time has advanced for Jezreel? Let me know if things are going to advance to the next morning. If I have the time to write it, there *might* be a dream I want Damien to have. Don't worry, I won't be introducing anything new that ought to be the GM's purview. In any event, I have to go poring through the archives I have of the game before I'll be able to do this.]

[OOGM: Cool, Jezreel has a bit to go, yet. We've got till morning, I believe.]

[OOC3: OTOH, if you plan to have some Bladine/Beleth action going on during Damien's dreams, then I'll step back and forgo the dream I was thinking about. :) ]

[OOGM: Oh, well, people can more than one dream in a night. I didn't have much of anything planned since this isn't a game that really involves the dream-lands.]