AP: Luxor - I'm surprised we're still alive

Ok, somewhere around here is a bit of AP that Parthenia wrote, but damned if I can find it. [Edit: found it - home sweet holding] So to re-cap:

Rose, the hardholder who was the maestro 'd (played by Parthenia), is holding together a very delicate truce between the Do the gang-boss, Wensdy the food-bar producer, and Clarion the head of the home-owner's association. The new set-up is still reaaaaaly dicey.
Amanual the savvyhead (played by Elizabeth) is still up on the space-ship(!!!) that is VoE. She also just sent  a whole mess of refugees our way.
Mox the angel (played by me) is trying to figure out what the hell to do with all the crazy pregnant ladies, including Exit, the sister of Rose's new slave Mil. He's feeling some pressure, and a bit out of his league with the baby-stuff.
Keeler the gunlugger (played by me) is just glad to have made it back to the holding alive after rescuing the refugees from VoE's last attack, right before Amanual figured out how to hack VoE.

First off, Parthenia totally blows the hardholder's opening roll, so Rose's holding is in serious want: idle, diseased, starving, and savage all come into play! Boy does Vx grin at that. He starts listing out the badness, giving us just a few minutes of action between each new hit:
"Do and his crew are on one of the middle floors, with a balcony? They start throwing their weapons over the edge. They're singing and stuff."
Keeler sends her crew 'round to scoop those up right quick, and sets up a guard post outside the party room. This can't go well.

Amanual tries to talk to Rose using VoE. Rose winds up bleeding from every opening in his pretty head, and "There's all kinds of fucking going on with Do and company. Oh, and there's a riot down below because Wensdy's stopped releasing food-bars and has barricaded himself in the sub-basement. There's bodies piling up in the halls down there as people try to get through."

Mox starts getting injured in a steady stream, and Rose sends Mil to get Mox. I blow a roll, and Mox can go fix Rose and lose Daf and three other people, or stay here and fix them, but Rose will get worse fast. Mox tells Mil to get Rose the fuck down here instead, what the hell, it's no time for house-calls and "Do's crew have started throwing bodies off the balcony" Keeler radios Rose re: Do "I think we should just let them eat each other, Rose. Takes care of us doing it later." Rose is somehow not all for this. Weird.

Amanual rolls super-well on a move to manipulate VoE, and VoE acknowledges Amanual as a new root-user. Amanual starts learning all kinds of useful shit, like how VoE has been running an extermination sub-routine due to out-of-date quarantine protocols. Amanual has VoE stop the extermination sub-routine - "The sound of wailing fills the air as all the pregnant women miscarry at once." Mox runs to see what's up, fails to keep his cool, and wigs out back to Rose, who is patched up but still pretty messed up. Rose gets a creepy look in his eye (he has been known to use whatever meat he can find), and Mox steels his spine and goes back to the sobbing women. Rose radios Keeler to bring Do up to him.

"Ford (NPC) sends word that stews (laundry, baths, etc) have just exploded." More wounded are on the way to Mox. Rose comes to see what can be done for the women, and between them, Mox and Rose save Exit's nearly-full term baby, and that only because Rose has Healing Touch (although he doesn't know it yet!), and Amanual successfully doesn't let VoE turn the extermination sub-routine back on. Amanual rolls very well, downloads VoE's controls and communications to her super-savvyhead watch, gets a landing jet, and comes back just in time for the stews to blow up.

All's quiet now with Do. Keeler sends a scout team to drill and scope from the room above - it's awash with blood, and there are some people fucking, and it's just a mess. Keeler pounds on the door; eventually it opens. "Do! Rose wants you." Do pushed whoever was on him off and runs for the door (Do was formerly seduced by Rose, and would like seconds). Keeler blocks him and asks what the fuck with the killing, and Do goes from eager mania to stone-sober despair in 2 seconds flat. Keeler goes from professionally confrontational to utterly sympathetic in the same 2 seconds, as she's been there, done that, hated it. "Ok, Do, we'll get you cleaned up. It'll be alright."

Amanual is greeted with deference by the populous, and offered food, which is insanely scarce. Amanual figures out that VoE is now relaying her words, and the power is mighty. She directs the populous to put out the fires and fix the stews. She also chooses not to challenge Rose for hardholder (we'll see how long that lasts). Rose sends Keeler to deal with the food issue, and Keeler rolls well, clears out the rabble, reassures Wensdy, and gets food flowing again.

So at the end of the night, we've got a healthy baby girl named Pumpkin, VoE under Amanual's control, Do totally shaken out of his position, the stews and the food back to function, and the only person we cared about who died was Ford. Pretty damn miraculous, if you ask me.

Hot damn. I feel like I've been running the kiddy version of Apocalypse World.

Rose gets a creepy look in his eye (he has been known to use whatever meat he can find

No need to mince words. Rose is, as Vincent put it, an enthusiastic cannibal. He probably learned how to cook people as part of his training as a prostitute chef. So he can make people taste really delicious. Perhaps he hadn't really done it much when he owned the Garden, but after he killed and cooked Kettle, he remembered how yummy human meat is, and his taste for it was revived. But he is an enthusiastic cannibal with a heart of gold, dammit. Mox had no need to punch him just because he had a creepy look in his eye. Maybe that look was, "well, there's a way to feed all these people, and Oh [Rose's protege and the new owner of the Garden] and I can make it taste delicious."

Also Vonk the Sculptor, Exit's husband, died. Exit is baby Pumpkin's mother, and Mill's (Rose's slave) sister. Rose figured out he could tap into the psychic maelstrom and heal people when he saved baby Pumpkin. Opportunistic enthusiastic cannibal with Healing Touch that he is, he seduced Exit into agreeing to let him take care of her and the baby. A few sessions back, Rose's girlfriend Lafferty (PC played by Elizabeth) and his son Topher (NPC) were murdered and he poisoned his mother. I think he just wants a family, and he apparently has a connection to the child. Btw, Rose has a +1 Hard, a +3 Hot, and now a +2 Weird. Rose changed gender by way of some manipulation of the psychic maelstrom, he and Ammanual communicated through the psychic maelstrom when she was on the space station, and now Rose saved Pumpkin by manipulating the psychic maelstrom. Who needs Hard?

Of course Rose promised that Exit and the baby (and Mill for that matter) are free to leave whenever they choose. I mean, where's the fun in slavery if it's not consensual? But I wonder if his opportunism will let him keep his promise.

Also, Vincent looked a bit too happy when he let us know that the baby was most certainly a new threat.

So we have some intense scary action in our game. We also have some really amazing character dynamics. Keeler and Rose are the only two PC's left who were created at the beginning of the game. We established that they were close as adolescents. Early on in the game, they were obviously old buddies, but in the course of our story, their friendship's been really tested. Keeler went crazy and killed Rose's younger brother Pallor. Rose's mother Mom put a hit on Keeler, and in order to keep Keeler safe, Rose kept his distance from her. I think she took that to mean that he dumped her in her time of need. Then when Topher and Lafferty died, Rose asked Keeler to comfort him (in the best way he knows how to comfort someone). She refused him, and he didn't understand why. They've been working their way back to friendship for the whole story. Their Hx with each other has gone up and down and reset a couple of times. In play, in character when they have even small scenes together, I get this really bittersweet feeling towards Keeler, his childhood friend, and their sisterhood is possibly the only thing Rose misses about being female.

Then there's Mox. Mox is probably a little bit older than Rose (who apparently tells people he's 5 years younger than he is, but I think I know why). Mox is an ex-Chopper turned Angel. I think Rose expects that Mox has seen some scary shit, and he's sometimes surprised at Mox's reaction to the pressure and problems of the holding (and of Rose's own depravity). It's fun to watch their relationship unfold.

Now Rose is just downright afraid of Lafferty, and I think that fear was established in their first scene together. First, she's popping in and out of his head, and every time he does something for her (and invokes the Maestro D's sex move, which invokes the other character's sex move, in this case a Savvyhead) she's asking about how she can "fix" him. And she seems to know thing about him that he's never told anyone. Like about Rose's brother Amethyst, and how one day Amethyst ceased to be, and Rose became a man. And her recklessness disturbs him, and there's not much in the world that disturbs an enthusiastic opportunistic cannibal with a heart of gold. She was all gung ho about flying in the helicopter where he died (and was revived), she's too cozy with the Voice of EOS, and now that association threatens his leadership of the holding and she doesn't even fucking realize it. And how is she able to transmit her voice into his head? Ammanual is possibly the first person Rose has ever encountered that he could say with confidence that he would never sleep with.

Other players, how do you see the character relationships?

Mox has totally seen some shit, but he's still not totally used to being responsible for the clean-up side of things. Figuring out you've got a knack for patching people back up kind of puts breaking them in a different light, y'know? Also, before he'd just ride out when it got too personal and messy, so figuring out actual relationships to other people is still a bit new to him. Mox sees Rose as a guy with issues, but who generally is holding his shit together. He's got 'boss-man' written next to Rose's name, and that's about that. Mox is happy to have steady food and a safe place to sleep, and he's pretty uncomplicated, really. Keeler coulda been in his old gang, so he gets her, and Amanual and Mox haven't really had screen-time together yet, so that's an open question. She's a cute red-head, though, so that's nice.

Keeler wouldn't sleep with Rose because she knew he'd never want what she wants, and that would just break her heart, so better to steer clear. Also, yeah, the ditching her when she was down bit, but she'll get over that in time. Keeler fully supports Rose as hardholder, because hell no she didn't want the job, and at least Rose knows what's what around here. She sees Mox as welcome relief, also he's an older man and I think she's got some daddy issues somewhere, but I don't think we'll ever see that, since I'm playing both PCs. Amanaual is a bit of a question mark still, but thank goodness she cracked VoE. Now it's time to sit back and keep watch for a bit.

I love playing loose cannons, and Amanuel is a kind of lose cannon I haven't played before. I am LOVING. IT.

I was telling Shreyas that I've noticed with Apocalypse World— and only Apocalypse World— I tend to make characters that have barriers to real interpersonal connection hardcoded into their concept. Damson was nuts, Lafferty was repressed, and Amanuel kind of toes an Aspie line; when I first start playing a new character, I look for a pop culture reference for one personality quirk that I can hang my hat on. With Amanuel it's Brennan from the TV show Bones— Amanuel doesn't really get how to interact with people, she looks at everyone and everything as really complex, interesting machinery.

The first time Rose hooked Amanuel up with some food, Amanuel's sex move went off, and she used "Things Speak" on Rose. The question "What's wrong with him and how can I fix it?" revealed to Amanuel that Rose used to be a woman, along with ideas on how to (as Amanuel put it in trying to convince Rose to let her do it) "restore Rose to factory specifications." Amanuel kept insisting until Rose basically told her, "Look kid, it's a feature, not a bug."

Amanuel's also completely oblivious to the power she now wields in the holding, since most of the people left are a giant fucking cult that follows the spaceship's every command— and those commands are now all about listening to Amanuel. She's got no interest in power in the holding, she just wants to play with her toys. It's interesting because she's at a split right now where she could either shift into becoming a Hocus or becoming a Brainer; she's totally going the Brainer route because she's not a people person.

But shit. Just thinking about Amanuel approaching people the way she approaches pieces of tech? That creeps me right the fuck out.

Amanuel [....] could either shift into becoming a Hocus or becoming a Brainer; she's totally going the Brainer route because she's not a people person. But shit. Just thinking about Amanuel approaching people the way she approaches pieces of tech? That creeps me right the fuck out.

But maybe she could become a Hocus thinking of all the people as parts of a machine.  Right now it's not a very efficient machine because the people aren't fitting together just right, but a little fixing here and there, and something wonderful could be made of them. A machine for making people happy, and gathering more pieces for the happiness machine. People like being happy. It would be a good machine.