Good morning, or maybe evening. Time zones are weird. (It’s morning for me right now, despite the sun having gone down hours ago)

Anyway, time to pull back the curtain a little bit, on how I have been handling one of the main themes. Namely how nothing works perfectly 100% of the time.

And that’s by having made the slightly silly decision to allow a percentage dice to help me with things.

Basically, every time Eris procures an item for Ellis, the dice gets rolled. If it’s under the opps threshold, which starts at a 80, then the item is fine. Every fine item drops the threshold by 10, a minor opps raises it by 10, and a major resets it.

Once a roll hits the opps territory, I then go and roll a D5. 1 is a major negative opps, 2 is a minor negative, 3 is neutral, 4 is minor positive, and 5 is a major positive.

Then a D3 is rolled for all but the major oops, with them having a D4 rolled instead. This determines the type of opps, out of function, quirk, looks, and for the majors, class. If it lands on class, a D10 gets rolled to see how far up, or down it goes in its class number.

Items that go up or down in class don’t have their points cost adjusted, as the opps occurs after they have been purchased, but before they arrive at Ellis.

So far there have been 4 oopsies in the story so far, so the numbers might end up changing. Depends on how many more we get in a short period of time.

The only negative so far, is a minor one in the Lib-VRRRT-tea. It is now effectively the G11 on all of the performance enhancement drugs, firing 20 rounds for each single round it is meant to, in every firing mode. It’s also dropping the sound suppression side of the Hush Puppy from class 1 to class 0.

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In the neutral zone, we have the Mad Minute. Not only does it store ammunition via dimensional shunting, but it has also picked up a quirk, allowing it to store a minute's worth of momentum. (Have an internet cookie, the person who guessed it.) However, once the minute is stored, you have to experience the full minute in one go, before you can start storing again.

The minor positive is on the Deep Breath, where it gained two additional view modes as a function, via a side grade to the space variant of the helmet. In addition to having a regular view, it gained the wireframe radar view that Ellis is familiar with, and an IR viewing mode. It’s been stuck on the wireframe mode since Ellis didn’t have any Aug’s to control it

Lastly, the major positive is the Ghost-rider. It rolled a class on the D4.

It then proceeded to roll a 9 for the number of classes that it increased.

This thing has just pulled a plot point out of the roughly midpoint of the story, into the first 10 chapters.

I don’t even fully know what this thing can do, considering that ANTIMATTER starts cropping up in CLASS 3 in the SCS main lore!

It’s gone from a vehicle, to a maguffin that trolls the people that are assigned to guard it. (Seriously if you have any ideas on what this thing might be capable of, feel free to leave it below.)

Now then, on to some behind the scenes facts about the factory “fight”.

The dice were involved here as well. Namely which shelter had the broken door, how much ammunition it had for its defensive system, and the fate of one Model Four.

After I had rolled to see which shelter had the broken doors, I rolled to see how well the 4 Model Four's that were going to be on the 25th floor level of the factory had done at getting into their ambush positions, before Ellis arrived.

With the regular Deep Breath, they did generally well enough that they would have gotten 2 ambushes off on Ellis. Even with the wireframe Deep Breath, there should have been an ambush as she entered the 25th floor proper, as she never checked the ceiling before entering the floor.

Unfortunately, that Model Four, the dice decided to have conduct a 25 story drop test, on the impact survivability of the Model Four.

It didn’t survive.

There was also a chance of fighting the Model Six, however the shelter had enough ammunition to kill it, before she got there.

Right, that’s it from me for this Interlude, time for the story to resume.