[b]Exhibition:[/b] Okay, so this is when something genuinely hilarious happens. As you’re saying this, Eli gets tackled by a secret service lady who appears to have come out of like, fucking nowhere. He starts cackling laughter as he goes down. The lion backs away a step as the agent looks up at Red. There’s only one of them, then, and he’s made his priority target. “Ma’am, please back away.” “Rip his head off!” Eli screams encouragingly, and ironically the lion freezes like a deer. “Cops don’t need bodyguards, idiot! This is way funnier! Rip his head off!” It’s unclear who Eli is calling an idiot, but something idiotic is happening. [b]SES:[/b] Burn some Investigation points, describe how you’re planning on spending them, and I’ll give you some answers based on your approach. I’ll provide information for up to four spends here, distributed how you like. Going wide and going broad will be compensated in different ways. A reminder and reference: The layout of the Zeus headquarters opens with the Femur, which is mainly a tourist building, and then a bunch of separated bunker-buildings filled with smaller offices. Different sections have their own offices, meeting rooms, whatever. The place is deliberately kept dispersed with a wide open park in the spaces between, to limit vulnerability as much as possible. Official surveillance of the parklands is minimal, especially if you know the right routes to walk, while within the buildings it seems total and nearly unavoidable - how actively it’s monitored, though, is currently unknown. All the cameras might just be for show, only intended to have recordings pulled in hindsight when an incident is logged. One of your two point spends can also declare something usefully true about the campus for your purposes - For the moment, I’d request these spends only being true about [i]what[/i] and [i]how[/i] you’re investigating, and not [i]who[/i] (This only matters for people Knightly marked in red on the org chart. If they’re green or unaffiliated, declare anything you want about them.) [b]Dragon:[/b] The heads stare at you sleepily, and there’s an impression of a slow blink. “I remember you, Snake.” The eighth head says fondly. “There was… more of you, then.” It’s unclear if he means you used to be bigger, he remembers there being more personalities, or both. Likely both. “Rescue me? From what?” The eighth head looks to the seventh head, shakes ‘no’, then looks back at you. “They want to tell me what I was like. They forget how long it takes to talk.” The seven heads glare at the eighth, and the eighth continues, “It is more important to them than being rescued.” It is not because it is the ‘social’ head that makes it care about self-preservation more here - it’s what allows it to be Dragon’s social head. The others all just care about Being Dragon [i]more[/i]. [b]Blue[/b]: You can be this good sometimes. Spend 2 on Military Science and I will tell you everything that happened here, from what was made here. Thanq: Definitely, yeah [b]Blue[/b]: The others see the finished product and the factory and the story has two obvious parts, almost like a joke; setup and punchline. Something so obvious it doesn’t need more thought than that. You, though. You look through [i]time[/i], you can see the steps. You [i]could[/i] do this, and the surest way to prove that is to look at everything that needed to happen for everything else to happen and make sure you know for a fact you understand how everything was done. That there are no gaps in your knowledge. In commercials for high-tech products they show the final product exploding outwards into a scientific diagram of all the component pieces, but that’s not enough for your analysis. Yours needs to explode outwards into the fourth dimension as well. The factories are arranged into clusters, like city districts. One builds nets to collect asteroids, which feeds into the refineries and forges. Another builds the factories that build pieces for other factories. From that you can work out the pattern Dragon expanded in - it’s idiotic genius, he had the final layout planned from the beginning, for months there must have been huge gaps and chunks in production he just didn’t have the resources to finalize yet, slight delays of handmaking critical pieces just so he wouldn’t have to tamper with his perfect final layout. Inefficiencies in months to accommodate efficiencies of years. You’ve never seen a microfusion drive before, because this is the only one. Figure it out from the pieces in front of you. That forge makes electromagnets, that factory makes conductors, there must be the shielding, and that- Hold on. No. Your vision of this is wrong, start over. The forges were first, then the screws and rivets factories, those are the best to automate early because you need a lot of them and they’re easy to machine but awful to do manually, and then he used that to make- Your vision of this is wrong, start over. The forges were first, then the screws and rivets factories, and then… Blue, you have to be wrong about this. It doesn’t matter how many times you play this out in your head and get the same answer, it has to be because you’re missing something, failing to account for something, just projecting your worse way of doing it onto this perfect design. Because the alternative is this; Dragon needed the drive to power most of his operation here, and he built the shielding last. That was the only way he could have done this, tested this, run this, operated a thousand miles of tin-drop radiators, caught metals-rich asteroids and melted them. The solar power he built only runs enough to run the creation of the stellarator itself, now they’re just emergency systems. After the stellarator was built he needed to dump the power [i]into[/i] something to keep it running. Years, and years, and years of bombarding himself with an unshielded fusion chamber, because there is no way to take this perfect machine apart to keep working on its insides once the outsides are built, and the stellarator must have needed years of maintained upcycling before it reached its break-even point. No way to test or adjust it once those final layers are put on. It must be done once, and it must be done correctly, because that is the only way to do this. The drive works. If you can figure out how to control it, how to operate it, attach your pod to it, then it could get you back to Thrones easily. After that, it could get you anywhere in the universe - on a long enough time scale, anyway. It’s probably the only thing that could, the only thing that ever will. Goat could get this information because the project is still listed on Orochi’s logs. It’s not mothballed, buried, hidden, deleted. One day they’ll come and pick up their working fusion drive, they think, if they ever need it. But there’s no money in deep space exploration, it’s a scientific expedition that might not pay off for generations, and no government agency can afford what they’ve made here. So for now it’s simply… warehoused. There was no recognition for making the impossible, here, no glory, no accolades. Just a challenge. What most people don’t understand about the myth of Sisyphus is that he could have stopped himself at any time and walked away. Sisyphus would push that boulder for every day of eternity because he was told it was impossible, and because he was told he couldn’t do it. Dragon wasn’t controlled, he wasn’t pulled in to heel, he wasn’t punished. It’s impossible he didn’t know the consequences of spending so long next to one of the most powerful electromagnets ever made. But he was told to build something impossible, and he knew the only way he could do it. This kingdom of his greatness is made of his bones. You found him sleeping on the sword he fell upon. Dragon still lives. [i]Dragon [/i]is no more.