Sometimes, I really wonder how many of these notes get viewed by the 4th Wall or not. I suppose it's all gonna be down to how plot relevant they are to the shitshow of my second life or not-- or is it my third life, if I count the decapitation? Anyways, in preparation for ranging further out after Doll finally kicks V's teeth in and then half beats her to death with her own skull (which because regeneration is actually feasible to do… maybe I'll see if I can make that RVB reference IRL now)... might be too traumatizing for JNV though… maybe another Outpost's MD squad? Find someone who's actually an asshole, sever their head, and then cave their skull in once it regenerates using the old head, and then they'll have to explain to their teammates how exactly I beat them to death with their own skull. Eh, an idea for another time.
Anyways, Outpost 1 basically died with the MD Planetfall, so I'm skipping that one for now, which brings me up to my notes on Outpost 2. Turns out that Copper 9 did have a sizeable Russian community. Not in Minerall in any sizeable numbers (I've heard Russian here and there in school but on the regular, Doll and Yeva are the only drones I've heard talking in it that I regularly interact with), but it turns out that the city above Outpost 2, Norickle (I bet Nori thought the city was named after her rather than someone butchering the Russian city of Norilsk with the English word nickel), was the aforementioned sizeable Russian community before the Core Collapse. Hence, they had a lot (but not all) of the local drones programmed with Russian as their primary language.
Practically, this doesn't really mean anything besides me hearing a lot more auto-translated Russian if I head up there, but hey! It's lore! LOOOOOOOOOORE!!! WORLDBUILDING!!! THANK FREAKING GOD BECAUSE IT FEELS LIKE LIAM WAS ALLERGIC TO THAT SHIT!!! Ahem… I regret absolutely nothing, and anyone on the other side of the 4th Wall who thinks my notes are cringe can kiss my shiny metal ass!
The Local DD team there, from what I've seen from media in Outpost 2, is in the upper levels of worker killing effectiveness, but still lags well behind JNV. One of them is also purportedly a real sadist, although he doesn't get creative with his kills like V, and rather is just excessively violent with them. Might be worth taking a trip up there first. From what I've read, Norickle is pretty big, so there's a lot of spots to isolate the MDs there and set up ambushes. A lot of urban sprawl, so guerilla tactics on the locals will probably go really well.
The other contender for a first trip is Outpost 4. The team there has two prolific killers, and if what I've seen and read on footage from one of them is true, they might have a Murder Drone who's essentially V but the mask isn't actually a mask. Absolute psychopath and sadist, from the very few accounts of those fortunate enough to escape while she was murdering their fellows. But the third member of the squad isn't seen often, which leads me to wonder what the heck is going on there. Outpost 4 also has all that weather and celestial monitoring equipment, and I'd wanna see if it's feasible to put a bug on it and occasionally hijack it for checking space. Given that the local DD team hasn't smashed up that infrastructure, it also hints towards them possibly being less intelligent than average.
Basically, heading for Outpost 2 first promises to give us better opportunities to hit the local MD team, who seem to be moderately less dangerous than the two major threats at Outpost 4, and Outpost 4 has two members who seem more of a threat than the whole team at Outpost 2, a third I don't know the threat level of, but they might also be dumber and I'm vaguely interested in checking the surface infrastructure of Outpost 4.
It's a tough choice to make, because whichever one we go to first will probably mean the other one isn't gonna be visited for a couple months while we focus efforts on the choice we make. Maybe I'll ask Uzi for her own thoughts when the time comes to actually make a decision.
And while I'm definitely not gonna be crossing the frozen oceans to visit it for a while, Outpost 9 has also drawn my curiosity…
Actually, assuming that 4th Wall shit hasn't bothered to show off previous entries on the geography of Copper 9, lemme do a quick recap of where all the Outposts are. If you lot are already aware of it, feel free to skip this paragraph. Basically, the continent Outpost 3 is on is the biggest one on Copper 9, and is home to Outpost 1 (which is dead as fuck, RIP Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen) out on the junction of three peninsulas that jut off the east side of the continent, Neo New Falun on a different peninsula to its southwest, Outposts 2 and 4 on the northern reaches of the landmass, Cabin Fever Labs towards the middle of the continent, and my at-this-point-not-so newfound home in Outpost 3 being towards the southwestern end of the continent. On a much smaller continent across a straight to the south, Outpost 11 is actually geographically the closest Outpost to Outpost 3, though Outpost 4 isn't that much further on a straight-line distance. Outpost 12 is on the other end of that continent, and they've suffered a partial breach by their Murder Drones, who I have not heard nice things about. I'll do more research into them when I start planning expeditions in that direction, though. To our west are two more continents. The first, larger one, has Outposts 5-8, five having had its upper levels breached by their Murder Drones before some plucky workers used mining charges to collapse several chokepoints to isolate the lower levels of the Outpost and save more than half their population in the process, and Outpost 8 having been a graveyard for a couple years, now. Outposts 6 and 7 are untouched by the Solver's vanguard. The last continent of Copper 9 is primarily an Australia-sized landmass housing Outpost 10, but it has several notable and sizable islands separate from it, and a narrow straight separates it another landmass roughly the size of Japan, which houses Outpost 9.
And Outpost 9 is… interesting. According to the leadership of Outpost 9, which includes veterans who survived a failed drone uprising in Copper 9's past (put down by JCJenson, because of course it was) before going to ground, they've been fighting back against their local Murder Drones since the day they made planetfall, regularly launching military expeditions to the surface to fight them. None of them have… gone well, to say the least, but I was not expecting Copper 9 to house a faction of highly militarized Worker Drones, that's for sure. Like, they have a straight up standing, professional army and are basically using Soviet tactics to try and robot-wave offensive their Murder Drones. Unfortunately, that's not gonna work when the MDs can use casualties to heal. The local squad is probably one of the top performers on the planet, come to think of it, since the local workers just throw themselves at them in attempts to kill them with numbers and mass-produced firearms. They apparently even rebuilt a drone factory down there to mass-produce soldiers rather than wait for UNNs to grow up. Which, uh… I have ethical concerns about that shit…
…among concerns about other things in Outpost 9 that are leading me to believe that it might be a good thing that the local MD team is so effective at suppressing them. My foremost concern is that there is zero internet usage from anyone in Outpost 9 outside their leadership. I have no sources of knowledge to tell me what the fuck is going on down there besides what their leadership says is what's going on there. And that just screams "totalitarian, possibly borderline robo-fascist regime" to me. Like, what's coming out from Outpost 9 is just straight-up state propaganda, and from what I have seen of their rhetoric, they hate humans more than the Murder Drones, which as a former meatbag, leaves me rightly concerned, and that level of xenophobia doesn't really help them beat the fascism allegations I'm starting to put on them in the privacy of my thoughts and notes. Something wrong is going on with Outpost 9, and I'm starting to think that I might be the first person on Copper 9 to have noticed that. I'm honestly thinking that they might be my first destination off the continent, to investigate what the hell is going on down there, if nothing else. But that's gonna be after I got a lot of firepower and possibly some DDs turned to go investigating it.
But those are thoughts for another day. Today, I'm more wondering if memories concerning a few small bits of Kali's interview from Integration will bother uncorrupting themselves or if I'll have to wait for something else to nearly kill me to get it back.
Take care, 4th Wall.