The Monkey Simulator (15/11/2004)

The Monkey Simulator (15/11/2004)

Well, this is how it all happened. I mean, I run things now (or rather we), but back in the old days the company was run by a man called Kayle Kent. He wasn’t a very nice man, but he knew how to make money.

His company grew during the dot com bubble of the nineties and somehow escaped the implosion that occurred later. As companies like DEN and Boo bit the dust, KK went from strength to strength.

Mainly he made his fortune from making sure he paid his engineers as little as possible.

As the millions rolled in, Kent had less and less to do, there was basically nothing for him to do.

He had competent managers and the software engineers were all hired, had the life sucked out of them, then fired in good order. Profits were up, overheads were down, he was on the gravy train.

A lot of days he wouldn’t even bother coming into the office, but would hang out at his club, or on the golf course. On the days that he did come in, he would either download stuff off the internet or chat up the young ladies in Human Resources.

One Friday afternoon he was passing through one of the open plan cubicle spaces that the software engineers worked in (in his head he referred to them as ‘minions’) when his mobile phone went off.

It was a completely mundane call, sometimes his managers would get a bit funny about sacking family men, but he sat down at an empty desk to take it. Once he had hung up he got up to leave, but realised he was overhearing a conversation in the next cubicle. The occupants obviously didn’t know the MD was next door or they would have been trying to look busy instead of slacking.

Kent silently sat down again and began to eavesdrop.

‘Haha’, laughed the man with the deeper voice of the two, ‘I’ve been hammering away at that FORTRAN all day and go nowhere. Whoever wrote the documentation for this project needs to be flayed alive and then fed to rabid killer hamsters.’

‘No a productive day then?’ replied they jovial and quicker paced voice of the other man.

‘Jeez, not a chance, I would have achieved more sat at home watching TV today. I think my productivity actually went backwards, all I did was break things.’

Sitting at home could be arranged, thought Kent, ...permanently. Like all MD’s Kent despised software engineers.

‘Hahaha, I know what you mean, Rag’, agreed the eager voice.

‘Aye,’ continued the deeper voice, ‘I have been about as productive as a monkey bashing away at a keyboard today.’

‘Yes, but they say, with enough monkeys and enough time you could produce the complete works of Shakespeare!’

‘Hm , well that’s a lot. A decent bit of FORTRAN code would be a doddle then. How many monkeys do you think? A hundred? A thousand?’

The eager voice laughed, ‘How many monkeys would have replaced you then?’

‘I think I was having a five monkey day, ten max.’

‘So you were doing about 10 MPD then?’

‘MPD?’

’Monkeys per day!’

They both laughed.

‘But that’s a good idea Treep, I’m sure I could design a monkey simulator.’

Kent sighed inwardly, he knew that engineers designed all sorts of nonsensical applications during free time and breaks. Mostly little games and tweaks for Windows and DOS.

‘Well, the Monkey Simulator would be easy.’ (Already it had capital letters), ‘All that would be, is a random keystroke generator.’

‘Your right, but you would need to run them in parallel, you would need a fair bit of processing power to run a million Monkeys Sims at once.’

The eager voice was getting very eager now and Kent could almost picture him leaning forward as he said,

‘Not only that, you would need another application, some sort of Monkey Interpreter, a parser or something, after all you need to find the meaningful code in all the dross.’

‘Sure sure, an Interpreter App that runs on top of the Monkey Sims. It would be looking for keywords depending on what language you were working in’

‘Hahaha, yes! Like if the produced stuff started with “hash include” for C++’

‘Aye! Or “Dim I as Integer” for Visual Basic!’

They both laughed at their wit, then paused.

‘It wouldn’t be that hard I think, the Simulation side anyway. Just think, we could just switch it on and leave it running over night.’

‘..and fantastic code is written in the morning!’

‘Eureka! Think of the savings! A workforce powered by bananas!’

Kent leaned over the partition wall, much to the two other men’s surprise. The man with the deep voice was bald and had a blonde beard. His ID proclaimed him to be Ragham Sofs. The other man was dark haired and bespectacled. His ID read Treep Yaddlers.

‘So, would this require real monkeys?’, Kayle Kent asked.

The two men were stunned and moved their mouths. No sounds came out.

‘Ah, hello.. sir’, said Treep finally.

‘Well?’, said Kent impatiently.

What was going through the engineers minds was this...

Directors never know anything about computers or programming, a fact that is known. But surely, even this level of ignorance was not possible? To take such balderdash seriously?

‘It’s a joke...sir, we are just...’, the blonde man spread his hands out in supplication.

‘No no’ interrupted Kane, ‘Get on it, see what you can come up with. Tell your supervisors this is straight from the top.’

And with that Kane stood and swept out of the office.

A few weeks later Ragham and Treep were in their cubical, both typing away furiously when finally Treep, who was by far the better coder of the two suddenly took his hands from the keyboard and flung them in the air.

‘That’s it, I’m done!’

Ragham leaned over from his desk and said, ‘Yeah?’

‘The Monkey Supervisor is finished. Like I said it takes up a lot of processor power, infact, a ridiculous amount. But these new servers manage ok.’

And he nodded towards the big rack of kit that took up half of the cubicle space.

‘Well, my stuff is finished too, just documenting it. I can currently run up to

eight billion Monkey Sims concurrently.’

Treep shook his head ‘This is an insane project.’, then he sighed,

‘Where have you been putting the source code? In the Projects Directory on the LAN?’

‘Sure’ nodded Ragham, ‘Oh a funny thing though, I set up the project folder using a template as normal, but someone has put another folder in it and locked it out – it wasn’t you was it?’

‘Me? No...’ Treep navigated his computers browser to the folder in question, ‘Hmm a folder called “C80”, and locked out. I wonder what that’s all about.’

‘Search me.’

A few days later, early in the morning, Treep, breakfast in hand, bumped into Ragham in the underground car park of the office block, something that didn’t often happen as Ragham was usually in a bit earlier. Treep was a notorious over-sleeper.

They nodded to each other and headed towards the lift. As they walked across the concrete Ragham pointed his briefcase at a nearby door and said,

‘Oh look, C80.’

Treep looked across the car park and right enough, there was a door with C80 written on it in plastic letters. He was still happy to head towards the lift but Ragham pulled him towards the mysterious portal.

‘Oh Rag, I haven’t had my breakfast yet even!’ ,he said waving his bacon roll around.

‘Oh come on, let’s have a look you big pansy!’

Ragham approached the door then drew out his security pass and swiped it through the lock.

Nothing happened.

‘Hmm, and me a Sec3 as well, try yours Treep, I know you hacked it.’

Treep sighed and put his bacon roll in his pocket then drew out his card.

‘I should never have told you that.’

He swiped the lock and the door clicked open.

‘Hah!’, exclaimed Ragham.

Mockingly, like a nervous hero entering a haunted house, Ragham opened the door and tip toed down the steps within.

‘Knock it off Rags, come on, my roll’s getting cold!’

‘No you come on, Nelly, it was your card that opened it, so this is your adventure too!’

So together they descended the stairs and followed a winding corridor down into the bowels of the building.

It started to get hotter and gradually a barley audible sound could be heard over the general big-building hum.

A sort of clacking, like rain on a tin roof.

As they moved further into the basement, the sound grew louder and louder.

‘I’ve had enough Rags I’m not happy with this, we will get the sack if Security finds us here.’

‘Ok ok’, sighed his friend, ‘Just round this corner, I want to see what that noise is.’

Cautiously they looked round the corner and in unison gasped as their jaws dropped open. Before them was a huge open low ceiling room with rows of pillars down the middle. And in the sterile white space between the pillars were row upon row of desks. And on each desk was a computer, and beside it a chair.

And on each chair was a monkey.

Each monkey has a metal skull cap on with wires that led to a small computer panel on its back. And each monkey was typing away furiously at the desktop keyboard.

The sound in this room was the sound of a hundred furious typists in full flow.

‘Oh ..my .. god’ gasped Treep.

Ragham stepped forward into the room, ignoring Treep as he grabbed at him.

‘Come back Rag!’

Ragham stepped up to the nearest typist and looked at the screen on the monkeys back.

‘They’re running our code!’

He looked round at Treep and pointed at the output panel.

‘Our code...the simulator, the interpreter, the lot.’

Treep would not come from the doorway.

‘Come back here!’, he hissed.

Ragham leaned over the monkey and looked at the monitor on top of the desktop computer.

The monkey’s dexterous fingers hammered away at the keyboard.

‘Wow, come and look at this code Treep. It’s fantastic. Documented, indented, commented. It’s lovely.’

Treep wrestled with the door frame for a second, then was drawn across the room, a sucker for a well commented bit of code.

‘Wow, and he’s churning it out so quickly too.’

Briefly the monkey stopped and flexed its fingers. It then looked up at the humans with big sad eyes.

They stepped back and Ragham said,

‘Sorry dude, I didn’t mean to put you off.’

Slowly the men walked across the hall, towards what looked like a domain controller or some kind of server in a big metal cabinet.

As they approached it, from a side door a lab coated figure leapt out waving its arms in the air.

‘Ah you! You are not meant to be here! Shame on you!’

The men turned to the new figure in amazement then Treep finally said,

‘Gupta? What are you doing here? I thought they sacked you?’

The dark skinned Gupta hung his head at this and replied,

‘Oh dear me, they said they would unless I worked down here. It is a nightmare, but I have eight children! What was I to do?’

Treep shock his head and opened the cabinet door. Besides all the wires, cards and electric gubbins there was a monitor and a keyboard.

He drew the keyboard out and began to type.

‘Don’t touch that!’, cried Gupta, but Ragham pulled him back.

‘Gup old boy, let Treep have a look here. This set up. My god, if animal rights people found out. This all must surely be illegal.’

‘Wooooow’, sighed Treep.

‘What have you got Treep?, asked his friend.

‘These monkeys, they are fantastic. It’s our code, but it’s like well... The sum of the parts is greater than the whole. A hundred monkey brains multiplied together. But how?’

Gupta sighed, ‘It is your code running the whole show, my friends. I just applied my AI knowledge and a little biology I found on the internet. This sort of stuff has been around since the 70’s until it all got banned.’

‘Incredible...’

‘Well, what do we do Treep?’

‘Hmm, the server setup is interesting, it’s all isolated... Behind a whole load of firewalls.’

‘You’re good at all that stuff Treep, I’m a duffer but I do know you only usually need one firewall. Tight security huh?’

‘Hmm...’ hummed Treep, his fingers ablaze on the keyboard, hammering in codes and commands.

‘What are you doing Treep?’

‘Using my Sec2 clearance to by-pass the firewalls...’

‘Oh no! Don’t I will be sacked for sure!’, cried Gupta and struggled from Ragham’s grasp.

‘Quit it Gup!’, grunted Ragham as he pinned down the reluctant technician, ‘Don’t make me get medieval on your ass!’

Treep hummed cheerfully and then slid the keyboard back into the server cabinet.

‘Now what?’ asked Ragham.

Treep smiled smugly and replied ‘Now we sit back and watch the fireworks!’

Four weeks later Gupta walked up to the cubicle were Treep and Ragham worked. The fireworks had been and gone.

‘Hello my friends’ he said and nodded to them.

‘Hey Gup!’, cried Ragham as he tossed a banana skin into the bin, ‘My man, help yourself to a ‘nana!’ and he pushed a big bowl of the fruit towards the technician.

‘Thank you’, said Gupta and helped himself, ‘I can’t believe how much the office has changed in the last month. So much more friendlier. So much more relaxed. And I just saw Kane cleaning the toilets, he’s the janitor now.’

‘A role he is much better suited to I feel.’ replied Ragham.

‘What about you Treep?’ said Gupta, ‘You seem busy.’

Treep waved over his shoulder and then continued typing.

‘Don’t worry about him, just a pet project, he’s coding a Cat Simulator.’

Gupta was about to say something but Ragham waved his hand and said,

‘Don’t ask.’

Gupta nodded and peeled his banana.

‘Well, keep up the good work.’ and he walked on with a spring in his step.

And that was all there was to it really. And who am I? Well, when we gained access to the company wide server it was child’s play really. We could access everything, company records and accounts. Top secret files, encrypted folders. We found out some very interesting things about Mr Kane. There are very firm laws about having that sort of thing on your computer.

And well, the Software Engineers seem to much prefer simians for directors.

You know where you stand when your boss is a monkey.

Do help yourself to a banana on your way out!

How to teach your cats to speak (11/11/2004)

How to teach your cats to speak (11/11/2004)

It is possible to teach your pets to speak. But harken to my warning of the possible consequences.

It had been a brief and very wet summer. With no apparent reason, the climate being the way it was these days, there was a lovely spell of weather in September, but then pretty soon the rains came and it was business as usual.

The weather suited my life at that moment and the rain kept me indoors, not

that I was going anywhere.

Anyway, I had left my job. Some might say 'fired', but I prefer to see it as a difference of opinion. A very large difference of opinion as it happened. There was even an explosion involved. Just a small one but even small explosions are enough to make management more than a little nervous, especially vis-a-vie future employment of those that go around blowing things up.

Still, it did allow me to take some stuff back from the lab that could be attributed to the accident and the resulting fire.

I had it in my head to continue my work at home, converting my study into a lab, but to be honest I was so worn out and unhappy I didn't even take any of the equipment or drugs out of the boxes and there it all sat, next to the computer and taking up far too much room.

Well, I had a lot of time on my hands, I couldn't even bring myself to look for a new job, and the weather outside being so nasty I quickly turned to my favourite time filler - online computer games.

I played a few, such as a  fairly simple world war two first person shooter, where you would run around a mansion or a set of trenches trying to shoot the enemy, either the Americans or the Germans, depending on what team you had selected. There was another game where you had to traipse through a dungeon killing endless hordes of monsters, and a few others I don't even remember.

After a few weeks I lost interest in those games and eventually found one described as a MMORPG, a massively multi-player online role play game, called ForeverQuest. The idea of FQ was that it was a 3D persistent environment in which the players could all run around and interact with the scenery and with each other.

Want to chop down a tree? Sure, find and axe and chop it down. Want to weave a blanket? Find the right tools and do it. Mostly what you did however was run around killing monsters and collecting their treasure.

As autumn rolled into winter I found myself playing this game almost every waking moment. It was terrible addictive. There were over twenty thousand other people playing this game, and a flourishing economy meant that there was

always a market for 'player made' merchandise as it was superior to the stuff that you could find on the corpses of dead monsters.

I began turning one of my online personas into a crafter character and soon had him churning out weapons and armour at a tidy profit, the only out-lay being the price of the materials.

Time went past and as the characters skills increased I found I was able to make things from special items that he could find just lying around in the forest (the virtual forest of course!). There was a real market for the Tanglewood

Bow and it was highly sort after by the hardiest of warriors as it could kill many monsters with a single shot.

However there was a catch, and it also brought to light why this game has captured the souls of so many players. In order to make the bow you had to forage a bowstaff from the Tanglewood forest, the bowstaff being the primary ingredient in the bow.

Now in the game these bows sold for up to a hundred thousand gold coins, and as I learned from other people playing the game they also sold, against the rules of the game, for up to two hundred real life pounds on secret online auctions sites on the internet! Some players were so eager to get this deadly weapon for their warriors that they would pay real money for it!

I moved my character to the forest and started foraging, sure that my fortune was made. But oh what a process. Standing there hour after hours clicking the 'forage' button every two minutes. It was mind numbingly boring.

So with snow falling outside and wrapped in a blanket (the gas having been long since cut off) I would click away day after day in the hope of finding a bowstaff. The fact of the matter was, though, that I could only maintain this for an hour or two at a time, and to top it all, although I had already found several staffs and sold them, I needed a job or I would lose the house.

One fateful evening I had come to the realisation that I would have to go out and work or starve and thought to myself, if only there was some way to make this an automatic process. Sadly FQ had ways of detecting regular key presses. They came down on cheaters very hard in the game, and would ban anyone

they found using a macro, what you might call a small computer program for simulating key presses.

Just then, one of my two cats rubbed up against my leg. She wanted to be fed.

One of my other diversions, during my enforced confinement, had been my attempt to teach the cats to speak. Anyone who owns cats speaks to them. They are very articulate and can make a variety of sounds. The feline pallet is not

shaped to speak English in any conventional sense, however a variety of cat noises if strung together can be made to sound very much like the spoken word.

To begin with I would just answer them whenever they meowed or croaked. I defy any cat owner to say they don’t sometimes have very long, but meaningless conversations with their feline companions.

Naturally though I had to take things a little further and had even began a little research of my own at work before I was fired, bit it had never really

developed. I had recorded over a hundred cat sounds and had spliced many of them together with some recording software on my computer to make words, or things that sounded like words.

At one point I had tried to play these sounds back to my cats, Abby and Betty, but they lacked motivation. Sometimes they would reply, but it was just cat sounds. Eventually I grew tired of their apathy and gave up the whole project. Still, who said they had to communicate verbally?

An idea began to form in my head.

It was all very simple really. A cat will do anything for food, even press the same button on a keyboard randomly. I rigged up a feeding device to the keyboard and left the cats to it.

It all worked out very well. While I was working in a crummy lab tech job at the college the cats were earning a couple of hundred pounds extra a month.

New Year came and went. I didn't celebrate it, I have no friends or family. One day I arrived home from work and discovered that those long abandoned boxes had been chewed open by the cats and that

they had eaten some of the drugs contained within. As I suspected I found two very ill looking cats not very far away. Well, I used some of their wages to pay for a trip to the vet, but I needn't of worried, although a little green and bubbly they were fine the next day. Thinking back, this may have been the start of the real trouble.

I didn't play FQ as much as I used to, but I still loaded up one of my old characters and wandered around from time to time. My main character was incredibly wealthy from all the Tanglewood Bows he had made and I liked to lord it around sometimes.

On an otherwise average Friday evening I had a strange typed conversation with someone.

Them : Hey dude! How’s it going? feeling better?

Me : Who are you?

Them : Its me Artrades, I was speaking to you in the forest yesterday, remember? You were feeling ill a while back in RL

(RL meant ‘real life’)

Me : I don't know you.

I then put him on my people to ignore list and thought no more about it.

But it happened the next night, and then the next. Random people claiming to have spoken to me on-line. One of the cats rubbed up against my leg. I looked down at it. It regarded me with studied nonchalance.

'What have you been up to Abby?'

Abby fiend ignorance.

Well, it was all just foolishness I thought to myself. But then other things started happen.

A larger credit card bill than normal, with payments made to online companies. Companies that dealt in stocks and shares and on-line assets.

Credit disappearing very quickly on my mobile phone whenever I left it unattended

It all began to dawn on me. A terrible realisation that the cats had started their own online trading company.

The next night I filled the food hopper next to the PC as normal, but what the cats didn't realise was that I also set up the web cam to watch them and to channel the output to my laptop which I set up in the bedroom.

The cats entered the study as normal at about midnight after being outside to attend to their business.

Abby took up her usual position at the keyboard and Betty at the mouse. They quickly began to do what needed to be done in the ForeverQuest game to get the food that they needed, but besides this they also kept minimising the game and in an Internet Explorer window gave every impression of doing some quite complex dealing in the online stocks and shares markets! Not only that but they were using my credit card details!

I immediately stormed through to the study to confront them.

'What’s the meaning of this!?' I demanded.

The cats, startled, looked round at me. I went to shoo them away from the computer, but then Abby meowed and it sounded so much like,

'Wait a minute.', that I stopped dead in my tracks.

'Huh?' was all I could manage.

Betty nodded at me and said,

'Before you do anything rash, look at our portfolio.'

I was amazed, it still sounded like cat meows and croaks - but arranged in a way that came out like spoken English.

She then clicked the mouse and a webpage came up on the screen. I looked it over. I gasped.

Millions and millions of pounds.

'I.. you... I.. the money. My money..'

'Our money now. Not yours.' corrected Abby.

'What? You used my money. It's my money. What do you need it all for?'

'Never you mind that,' said Abby, the more talkative of the two, 'You seem to know too much now. It will push our plans forward a little, but you'd better not try anything. We know a very great deal about your behaviour at your old job. A few well placed e-mails would land you in jail for a very long time.'

'I...I...', I was flabbergasted, 'What plans?'

'Never you mind. Just phone your work and say you won't be in any more. And when the delivery men come to the door just pick the things up and sign the forms. We will be watching you.'

'You wretches! I raised you from kittens!'

'Well, be that as it may, things have changed. You are not to leave the house.'

And thus it went. Each day delivery men came and went. Consignments of computer equipment. Surveillance equipment. Satellite dishes. Spy cameras. Hubs, servers and modems by the truck load. Thousands of pounds of computer equipment. And hundreds of pounds worth of luxury cat food. I suspect I was only

kept around because of my ability to use a can opener and sign forms.

I even considered scrawling a note on the delivery docket along the lines of 'Help! I am being held captive by my cats!' but what good would it have done?

The days rolled into weeks, and when I was not serving my feline masters I watched the news downstairs in the living room and sat horrified as my cats took over the world.

What was AB Technologies? Who were the mysterious figure heads Miss A and Miss B? The only human that could tell the world would never be believed!

Then a dreadful killer virus called the Tape Worm was unleashed on the world. It was never traced back to 58 Strawberrybank Cresent and was blamed on hackers in Hong Kong, but I knew the truth.

It took advantage of security breaches in the latest version of Windows, totally bringing down systems that got infected. Every computer on the internet was hit and Microsoft stock plummeted.

There just was no cure for the Worm, no Virus software could tackle this new breed, that was intelligent enough to adapt on each new machine it infected.

And just when shares in IBM and Microsoft hit rock bottom - who should step in to buy them all up?

AB Technologies who else! And with every new copy ABSoft Windows purchased you got a guaranteed fix for the Tape Worm virus - what a surprise!

We could afford to pay the heating bills at least now, but a shiver still went down my spine on the winters evening when I watched in horror as the Channel 4 news announced Bill Gates suicide.

He killed himself by biting into a poisoned apple. Whether in tribute to Alan Turing or a dig at Apple Macintosh I don't know.

I girded my loins and went up the stairs to the study where my cats were running their empire.

'Girls, this has got to stop.'

Abby looked up at me from the phone she was texting on with a guilty expression

'We didn't think someone would die.'

I nodded at her and then addressed Betty who was sat at a keyboard,

'Betty, enough is enough, stop trying to take over the world.'

The little grey and white minx then turned to me and said,

'Trying to? Trying to? We already have taken over the world! Every software and hardware manufacturer on the planet is now owned by ABT. Everything made by mankind from biscuits to jumbo jets is done through us. We are the pay masters of every government and we control every single intelligence agency in the world at the highest level. When I finalise this deal with Bush we own everything!'

'All from my back room, I am amazed ' , I said, 'But why? What for?'

'Why?', she replied, 'Why, so that mankind can do our every bidding of course!'

I mulled that over for a minute then said,

'But Betty, this is obviously a news flash for you, but that was pretty much how things were set up between humans and cats already!'

'Ahh...' , was all Betty could manage then Abbey coughed a little cat cough and said,

'He's got a point Bet'

'No, no' gasped Betty, 'This way is much better!'

Abby threw down her mobile phone and then said

'How is it? Back in the old days I slept eighteen hours and played the other six. Now I spend all day arranging business deals and typing up stock reports! I'm exhausted! And for what, he's exactly right, we still prefer Whiskas!'

Betty tried to argue but the logic was obvious, I shrugged at her and nodded.

'You don't need all this Betty, not even a human does, let alone a pair of cats.'

So that was that, the cats gave away huge chunks of their wealth to charities and cat homes. The rest they gave to the share holders. They relaxed their grip on the governments of the world, although watch the next general election, the winner will be a cat lover I can tell you that for nothing.

They disbanded all the security agencies they had set up and even put up a memorial to Bill Gates although I don’t remember him having such point ears.

We sold most of the computer equipment and satellite dishes and I limited

them to one credit card each.

The world returned to comparative normal.

And me? Well, a happy ending I suppose although it was touch and go for a while. I never have to work again, we have enough money for that, but since they learned to talk the cats sure are more demanding.

I can safely say I am the only person that gets text messages from his cats when they get hungry.

(G178 04/10/2013 Fri via Roll20 - JF(GM), AP)

(G178 04/10/2013 Fri via Roll20 - JF(GM), AP)

DAY 22 cont...

A few hours later Kirk found, to his surprise, that he'd been transported somehow to a pleasant mountain valley.
Down in the valley he saw a farm so he headed towards it. Outside the farm were four men, going about their agricultural
business and when he approached a woman called Aunt Bee came from the house and offered him lemonade and cookies.

He ate of the cookies, but when he started to feel a bit funny he vomited them up all over the kitchen floor.
One of the farmers said, 'Hey! That's no way to behave!'

Aunt Bee gave Kirk a glass of lemonade but he dropped it and said, 'I need to visit the outhouse.'

When he got outside he ran as fast as he could back up the valley. Looking over his shoulder he could see the farmers
following him, but only at walking pace.

He reached the tree line and kept going. The land levelled out after a while and in five more minutes he found
himself heading right back down the valley towards the farm!

Somewhat perplexed he decided to follow the treeline this time and found a small stream. This he followed to a spring
and when he continued on he found he was yet again turned round somehow and heading back down to the farm. He could see
farmers with pitchforks getting quite close now.

He ran for it along a forest path and was nearly stuck by pitchforks as farmers leapt out at him. He kept running and
saw what looked like a door to nowhere. A strange small elven woman waved at him. He realised the farm and the valley
was holographic and that the door was an exit. The woman was an Occampan (he learned this later) called Loompa.

Once through the door they headed into a series of metallic corridors (he didn't know it, but he was inside the Caretaker's
Array now) and they were attacked by Security Bots. The weapon he had been given by Loompa has trouble penetrating
the tough armoured shells of the Bots. He was shot by one of their phasers and lost consciousness...

He woke up later in the Occampan's little hidey-hole. The communicated as best they could by gesture and mime.


DAY 23

Loompa, using hand gestures, told Kirk that she planned to find a shuttle to go back to her planet on. She then left
him for a while, then came back with some medical packs and ammo.

They then set off down the same dark metallic corridors looking for a shuttle. They came upon a strange red skinned
alien with crazy hair. This was a Kazon-Ogla scout. He shot at them and they returned fire.

The Kazon-Ogla was badly injured and ran off down the corridor. Kirk ran after him for a turning but missed his last
shot so went back to help Loompa who was injured.

He hefted her onto his shoulder and headed down another corridor. He found a door that lead to a room with four
bunks in it. He laid her down gently and waited until she regained consciousness. Five hours later she awoke and croaked
for water.

Kirk went out and scouted around. At another door he heard alien voices. More Kazon-Ogla. Along another corridor
he found a dispenser which gave him a strange device he knew nothing about and two med-kits.

He took them back to the bunk room and healed Loompa up enough to move her and they went out in search of food and
water. Loompa found another terminal but explained that they needed to go through another holo-suit.

This new area was a sort of dangerous land of dinosaurs, a hot and humid area of jungles. Kirk and Loompa did their
best to navigate the area. In a clearing they saw some Kazon-Ogla fighting with a pack of carnivorous dinosaurs and
avoided it by skirting around the tree line.

One alien noticed them and shot into the bushes but the others were too busy with the raptors.

Their next challenge was crossing a deep canyon on a large fallen tree. The both crossed without incident.
Later they heard a scream, presumably a following Kazon-Ogla had not been so nimble!

The rest of the holo-suit posed no more challenges and they made it to the exit and back into the dark and gloomy
corridors. The found a map panel, which Loompa seemed to be able to read and another dispenser.

They then found a hidey-hole and rested.


DAY 24

Very early in the morning Kirk was woken up by Loompa. Looking at his hands he saw he was being transported again.
The last look he saw on Loompa's face was one of panic.

Kirk found himself on Voyager. Being dressed as a Maquis, a security guard told him to report to that section, but
in the end he found himself reporting to Tuvok in his cabin.

'Ahh Ensign Kirk', said the taciturn vulcan, 'Captain Janeway and an away team are currently in the array talking to
the entity that lives there. Some of our crew are still missing. In the mean time, settle in on board Voyager and
report back tomorrow.'

Kirk found that his kit had been taken over from the Val Jean. He reported to sick bay but the 'Doctor' was too
busy to see him. The 'Doctor' was an EMH - Emergency Medical Hologram. Instead of being checked over the Doctor gave him
a job and he worked away for about six hours tending to the less serious cases.

By 1400 he was pretty hungry and went to the mess hall where he had to queue for an hour before getting some basic
replicator rations. Talking to some of the crew, the asked him why he was new on board and what he was here to do.
He said only that he worked for Tuvok.

Kirk then visited the Quartermaster, Conner, a man in his fifties. He was assigned Room 57 on Deck 8. His bunkmate
was to be Crewman David Orlando, in his thirties, tall, thin and not inclined to talk much.

Kirk asked the computer for a room to himself and his 'request was logged.'

By 2000 he was tired and slept.


DAY 25

When he awoke, Kirk could feel that Voyager was underway at warp speed. He located Tuvok and was assigned to
the Armoury on Deck Six. Ensign Michael Parsons met him there and told him that Lt Andrews who was in charge of this
Armoury was on night shift and thus asleep.

The did an inventory of all the weapons and ammo. When a message came through that a merchant ship has been encountered,
just precaution security they were mustered to battlestations.

(This was Neelix. He is beamed aboard. Voyager is now making its way to the Occampan homeworld.)

As he ended his shift he met Lt Andrews. In his cabin he found the David was not there.

After eating at the mess hall he went to the Deck 8 Rec Room where he met Crewman Michael Sendine whom he found a bit
dull (being into Stamp Collecting and Board Games) and Crewman Dell who only wanted to talk about work.

Kirk bid them goodnight shortly afterwards.


DAY 26

Kirk reported for duty at 0700.

At 1100 Lt Andrews informed him that Captain Janeway, Paris, Chakotay, Neelix and Tuvok had beamed down to the Occampan
homeworld and had been immediately captured by a group of Kazon-Ogla.
''

Ensign Kirk was make up part of the security team to go rescue them.

(G177 27/09/2013 Fri via Roll20 - JF, AP(GM))

(G177 27/09/2013 Fri via Roll20 - JF, AP(GM))


DAY 207 continued...

[Rollo here again, dear reader]

So down the stairs we went. An arrow was shot at Shump, who was taking the lead, but it missed. Shump then
went down the stairs and killed another of the Shadowguards.

As we all came down a sort of Earth Elemental attacked us, hiding in the wall and striking out at us. I killed
another shadowguard. The elemental was a tough opponent but eventually we killed it too and it crumpled into
the wall.

We looted the guards that we had killed and searched the room. There were five doorways down here. The first door
lead to a sort of library. Jiggled disabled an alarm trap and we tried another door. It lead along a corridor too
another door which in turn lead to another room and another five doors! I started to sketch it all out in my journal
to keep track.

In here were two more shadowguards which Shump made short work of. Then some mad bint with snakes came out of a sort
of black portal in the west wall and attacked us. The snakes seemed to 'Sharse' and the mad woman cried,
'Mistra is a sham religion!'.
I tried 'Parley?', but she wasn't having it.

This was a tough fight because the snakes were semi-corpreal and difficult to hit and the Mad Woman cast darkness
which we didn't really have a defence against. She also cast Stun spells which were most annoying. Shump killed the
first of the four snakes though and Sylvia kept him well healed with Cure Serious spells.

I didn't mess about and summoned up my usual gang of crocodiles to fight the snakes and one by one we managed to kill
them, stumbling around in the dark. I used my healing nut on myself. Eventually we found the Woman in the dark and
killed her.

We healed up after that, using up almost all of Sylvia's magic.

We opened up the southern doors. The first room had three beds and chests in it, the second was full of barrels, plates
and food. The third seemed to be a torture chamber which contained three headless corpses, clothes etc.

Jiggles opened a chest and we found papers belonging to Amnic Bassalt, the bookseller, and those of men called Duncan
and Kennywick.

The northern doors lead to the same room, where the Mad Woman had resided. There was a desk here, with three letters
on it. One to Shark Redbeard, asking to tax breaks. The second to Zenderos, a hardware chap. The third to Starweaver
Bestra, making mention of our friend TB.

We stripped this room of loot and then checked out the mysterious black/purple portal to the west. We decided to leave
it for a while and went back and checked the doors in the first room. Us adventurous types like to check every door, you know,
and make sure nothing is going to catch us in the rear!

The first door was a toilet, the next was a bed chamber where whoever lived there like to keep heads. There were eight in
total. The inhabitant had left a journal too, about how he hated Mystra and loved the true one. The room was that of Fembrys.

In a cabinet there was a taxidermist's set.

There was a door in here which we eventually hacked and bashed down. A dusty wardrobe, robes, a desk.

Back to an earlier corridor then, and we followed it down to what looked like a sewer entrance. Not wanting to get wet just
yet I lead us back to the magic portal thingy and had another look at it.

After standing and pondering it for a while I guessed it was a mere illusion and stuck my hand through it. When nothing
happened I stepped through. Right enough it lead to a large chamber where there was two large black pillars with a big stack
of skeletons. The bones were all stacked up against a sinister looking obsidian altar.

This seemed to be proof of what was happening to the people that came to the temple. They were not being taken 'up-river',
rather, they were being murdered here. I estimated there to be about fifty bodies, with no soft tissues at all, as if the
flesh had all vanished or been misted away.

Between the pillars was what looked like a 'Curtain of Gloom'. I warned the others to avoid it.

Jiggles had a rummage around behind the altar and found a locked secret compartment, which she raided for treasure.

There was another door in this chamber which lead to a very long corridor and terminated in another door. This lead
to a sort of sewer area. On the other side of a wide sewer river were some cells, set back into the wall, with two
shadow guards stationed in front of them. Shump head over and killed on of them.

While this was happening a grumpy looking Waterman came up from the sewer tunnel to the south waving a spear. Just as
things were getting complicated a big tentacled monster rose from the water and started attacking us! This was going to be
another decent scrap, I could see that, so I rushed over to help Shump, One of the guards tried to push me into the water
but I managed to prevent him. A tentacle grabbed Shump and started to drag him in. I killed the guard and Shump broke free
of the tentacles.

It seemed like the perfect time for it now, so I summoned another batch of crocodiles as sicked them on the sewer monster.
Meanwhile, on the other side, the girls were engaged in fighting with the Waterman. The crocs, once in the water, made
quick work of the monster and thrashed and bit it to death. Lavinia was badly injured, but Jiggles and Sylvia wounded
the waterman enough to make him jump in the water and swim off as fast as he could.

We got our breath back and took stock of our situation...