Ghostlight/docs/aetheria/call-of-the-void-brainstorm.md

Call Of The Void Brainstorm

Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YWn5RWsciBxuaQ4l5TN2lAEz4okaQes-aiyx1E9NAxA/edit?tab=t.0

This is a local plaintext import of the scattered Call of the Void brainstorming doc. Treat it as raw source material, not canon. The current compact design note remains E:\Projects\AetheriaLore\Aetheria\Game Design\Call of the Void.md.

Current Canon Correction

This brainstorm predates a major Aetheria timeline migration.

The old version assumes a colony fleet or exploratory force was shunted into Elysium and slowly discovers that nobody is going home. That is no longer the live premise.

Current canon, summarized in E:\Projects\AetheriaLore\Aetheria\Worldbuilding\Pre-Elysium\From Sol to Elysium.md, is that the FTL trigger sequestered the whole Solar system, with its fleets, institutions, corporate blocs, uploaded minds, labor systems, histories, and unresolved social machinery. Elysium is not a remote elsewhere that a fleet cannot leave. It is the sealed domain into which Sol itself was displaced.

So the useful dramatic pressure is not "can the expedition return home?" because home came with them. The better pressure is:

• there is no clean outside to return to
• the systems people hoped to escape are trapped in Elysium too
• the old order can no longer rely on the old universe remaining stable around it
• every faction is trying to define what survival, legitimacy, personhood, and ownership mean now that Sol's whole inheritance has been exported into the sealed domain
• Cat's story should turn on the realization that starting over is not escape when the machinery you fled arrived in the same disaster

The raw notes below remain useful for cases, characters, tones, and comic cruelty. Treat their old "return home" twist as obsolete pressure, not active continuity.

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Potential ideas here, feel free to discuss/deplore/detour in comments.

Protagonist: Catastrophe “Cat” Marrigan, an out of work private investigator, driving a particularly failure-prone space taxi to make ends meet

Overarching plot: Episodic PI cases/random space taxi fares which lead, somewhat circuitously, towards the discovery/revelation that the “exploratory force” had better get used to being “locals”, because the universe is not offering return tickets, and all that follows from that.

What’s Cat’s role in this? And are we going to have alternate endings based on choices made? Ideas, in no particular order:

• She's the original founder/inspiration for the frontier renegades who reject corporate rule and live low-tech and tiny to avoid being crushed.
• The more noir-esque ending, where the disillusioned protagonist sees the way things are going and kills themselves/goes out in a blaze of explosive glory in a futile attempt to change the course of society.
• The out-for-what-you-can-get ending, where she allies with an up and coming power to become a behind the scenes force in future aetheria.
• The really unsatisfying but realistic ending, where the corps take over and life just goes on.
• I sort of like the idea of heading towards a “you can’t win against the capitalist machine, but it’s worth fighting anyway” theme. Thoughts?

case/fares/conversations that exemplify the different ways people react to the point of no return, so to speak, ie: denial, determination to find a way to get back, culty doomsdays types, the “we’re all doomed so let’s party” people, the ones who see great opportunity without old earth holding them back, the people who are determined to do things better this time around (in the ‘we royally screwed up earth, let’s not do it again” sense), etc.

Accidental AI ship whose buggy programming makes them the worst autopilot ever orrrrr…the inciting incident is that in one of her cases/fares gone wrong Cat gets mind-melded with said slightly buggy AI, and that’s how she finds out all those juicy government secrets. Some of them may be inaccurate (see: bad code/failsafes/sabotage), but there’s no way of knowing which without going digging. Plus AI is a one of a kind experimental prototype, which sets all kinds of interesting people on their tail. Also could give us some fun things to do with ship control and actual gameplay quests. Over the course of the story, one way to show people’s reactions to events could be to have some dialogued characters talking about what they plan to do when they get back home, then use it as a major stress point once the truth is revealed.

Maybe Cat works for a small, kind of terrible PI company, in which case we could get some of our quests from a dispatcher/boss/whatever. I think it’d be a little funny if in true noir fashion, boss was a hard-drinking dude in a trenchcoat, only he’s a really giggly drunk/can’t hold his liquor. First quest for PI company: find where the boss left a random object after drinking himself to the floor. Find out he left a whole-ass ship somewhere in his drunken stupor. Another PI quest: investigate the disappearing foodstuffs of a concerned homeowner and find out that a whole nother person was living in the crawlspace above their home and stealing their food. Decide how to deal with Mr Crawlspace. PI quest: Investigate “ghost” sightings in an old part of a station that’s been shut down. Find out a whole town’s worth of people are living there out of the station’s control slowly siphoning off resources so as not to be noticed. Get some slightly culty vibes from them. A short quest from an old lady who just wants to have someone over for tea. Turns out if you tolerate her long enough she’ll come in handy during a critical time. Could be she’s either rich or well-connected. A botanist looking for his daughter. Turns out instead of some sorta protomolecule conspiracy, she’s just wandered off and is being looked after by a kind lady who’s found her. Get a quest from a mysterious person who is only contacting Cat online, find out eventually the quest giver is some sort of AI who’s either seeking the sweet release of deletion, is looking to find another AI, or is trying to steal some sort of drone so it can go around freely. Possibly a character who we only see as a remote-controlled drone who helps out at times but we never see the person behind the drone because they use the drone as their public avatar or something. Could be someone who might not otherwise get the chance to go out and about in public because of reasons. This does give them a limited sphere of helpfulness since the drone has to be close enough to the controller to work effectively. Could have Cat mistake the drone for the character, believing it’s some sort of self-sufficient AI driven drone and be sad when it “dies” only to meet it again once it’s re-built and realise there’s a person behind it. Bit like the “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” bit, could call the drone “Oz”.

Cat is tasked with investigating a mysterious and aggressive band of pirates. Upon finding them it is revealed that they are actually a community of rogue AIs who have no option but to loot technology transports in order to keep themselves alive.

Cat stumbles into a friendship with a shady character, earning the attention of the even shadier Space CIA, which recruits her as a potential double agent with instructions to infiltrate the organization.

Cat is sent to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances of ships sent to mine a gas giant’s belt. Locals consider the place haunted. Turns out it is, by a sentient particle system which considers itself the embodied spirit of the planet.

DLC Area: Cat falls afoul of some sort of anomaly which sends her into a parallel universe with an alternative history. Somehow despite a very different timeline and political situation, everyone she meets is a bizarro mirror of the people she knows from her dimension, and somehow the exact same cast of characters are present despite having very different roles (listen, we can’t afford any extra actors so we’re just gonna use the cast we already have)

Finch is destructively scanning recently deceased human brains and then performing extensive virtual surgery on emulated instances of them in order to create and sell packaged “AI” servitors for specific tasks to compete on the market against AGI products from competitors. The Crew manages to rescue one of the program’s victims while still mostly human, before the process is complete, who [joins the party / is installed on Cat’s ship].

Character: Reginald Moneybags III, inheritor of a massive family fortune, is looking to become a patron of the arts in order to impress his old-money friends. Perhaps they’re the one giving the player their ship?

Might could explore some of Cat’s motivations for taking the ship to Elysium in the first place. Was it by choice? Who has she left behind, if anyone? It would put her in a more conflicted position regarding her role as a double-agent.

• Seems natural that she would be escaping a maze of debt and obligation, only to end up terrifyingly close to falling into the same trap again. I kinda like this idea of completely dumping her whole life and trying to start over somewhere completely different.
• She was caught committing some felony/is railroaded/scapegoated for same/investigated someone way too powerful and was given a choice between prison and joining the colonists.
• Or combine both and bring back the idea of debtor’s prisons/workhouses and have the ship to Elysium be offered as a way out
  • So, was she indentured when she arrived only to recently gain the freedom to make her own way, or has she been doing what she’s currently doing since arrival?

The faceless man: a guy? maybe. Wearing a spacesuit or some other obscuring disguise that pops up a little too often for random chance. Is he a red herring? Or is he 10 red herrings in a spacesuit pretending to be a guy? If he has any dialogue let it just be splashing noises.

Cat is sent to investigate an urban legend on one other stations--the simply and slightly erroneously historically named “Ripper Lee” who lives in the air vents and steals children. It actually turns out that the missing kids are just exploring the vents as children will and getting macheted by fans or getting stuck or getting pulled into the inertial compensator. [an act II continuation of this quest sees Cat investigating her suspicions that the kids didn’t necessarily go into the dangerous areas of their own impetus, but were lured there. The third act reveals an alien intelligence--though an animal one--a being of energy or something stranger who finds the particular pitch of childrens’ laughter unbearable. Maybe it destructively interferes with its phase, who knows]

The one perpetual drunk who always needs a lift to a different space bar. Cat can go on a bender with him as a quest, and then have to figure out exactly what the hell happened and why there’s a crash test dummy in the front seat of her taxi.

The person who jumps into Cat’s cab and yells “follow that ship!”. A high octane space chase follows, at the end of which it is revealed they’ve been following the wrong ship, and the Minister of such and such is very displeased that he missed his Very Important Meeting for what turns out to be not even an actual assassination attempt.

A carjacking with several different options for resolution

Something strange is going on in the mining operation on PXR 6937, and Cat is sent to find out what: suggestions: the drilling released a substance from the rock that causes hallucinations and paranoia in human brains. Someone is deliberately sabotaging the operation as an environmental protest/act of general rebellion/the mining operation killed someone they cared about and now everyone must feel the same misery

Cat is forced to navigate the pointless bureaucracy of space offices to uncover an embezzlement scheme that conceals something much bigger. What is it? Fuck if I know.

• A furniture selling operation that appears to cover some financial wizardry but turns out to be a human trafficking operation where the names of the items are actually those of missing children OW MY HEART
• A fiendish plan to utilize the combined computing power of thousands of office servers to...mine future bitcoin? Solve something the megas don’t want solved?

Cat’s taxi breaks down somewhere off the beaten path, so to speak, and she finds herself drawn into an ongoing and very brutal feud between two families.

Have a random cab passenger speak in Nemsk and never explain it.

An entire district of a certain station orbiting a strange ocean planet begin to complain of seeing people who could logically never be there. Cat is asked to do a cursory look into it and remains sceptical until one day she starts seeing a person shaped figure always walking just barely out of her line of sight. We could either go full Lem, or subvert this reference by having the reveal be that the air or water are contaminated with a hallucinogenic compound.

A Captain Nemo like figure who flies his rather unusual ship on the far edges of the system. His purpose is unclear, and his identity more so.

Silica storage ruptured, spilling into common area. Now we’re doing the obligatory beach episode! Sand got into the gears of the docking bay so now everyone has to sit back for an afternoon and do anime tropes while it's getting repaired.

What organization is Cat infiltrating?

• People who are trying to go home, even if it costs them the ship or other people’s lives
• Believe the Megas are withholding research on the return trip, trapping everyone in Elysium for profit
• Name ideas
  • Home (nice and simple; is it an acronym: H.O.M.E.?)
    • A nickname could be the “homies” lmao love it “wassup homie?”
  • Terra
  • The Terra-rists or Terrists (like a hick would say) Get out no.
    • Could be a media nickname (and everyone is really tired of explaining that “no, no, we’re the Alliance for Returning Swiftly Earthward, really” really? Butt jokes? I have never pretended to be above them. Neither have I.
  • The Earth-Bound
  • The Regressionists
  • The Returners (sounds like a ya novel title) true
  • The Retrograde Alliance
  • Earthers
  • The Genesis Project (Project Genesis? Sounds better.) Genesis Faction?
  • Alliance for Returning Swiftly Earthward
  • Gaia-ists possibly too many vowels
  • The Followers of Gaia? Get that good greek mythology I kind of like this one. The Gaia Cult lmao
    • Cult of Gaiains, but also yeah, the GaiaCult
  • Hades (if we’re going Greek mythology, normal people go to Hades while demigods go to Elysium) Erebus
    • Has the bonus “evil” connotation
    • Hadesians Perhaps? Like people from there...Hadesites?
    • Fits into the sentence “The CIA needs you to infiltrate Hades”
    • Though if we’re going for the greek theme, Odysseans might be more apropos with the whole ‘returning home’ I like this for greek references

How do we handle double agent shenanigans?

• Cat grows to sympathise with their goals and philosophy, ends up rejecting the CIA
  • Cat comes clean with her new friends, who begin reciting the typical cliche, only to have someone start to read a page that semi-describes events later in the story, like it's a script.