Party To Treason 2: Valdragon's Coup

[TenOfSwords13]

thank frickin' heck... could i also take the names of the operations that weren't selected? just so we have that info.

operation time!

for this plan... yeah, we're not starting at point one. i have a plan! (crazy, right?)

4: about that Independence Front. if there's anything i know about revolutionaries and rebels, it's that there's infighting galore. it shouldn't be all that hard to manipulate their politics through connections with radicals and troublemakers in their ranks, and next thing we know we've got one less problem, some radical soldiers, and an excuse.

1: ah, the door. nothing that some plastic explosives won't break open, right? the cameras aren't as big as a problem, given that i personally won't be on the ground, but rather assuming an... unofficial advisor/contractor role for the Independence Front under a pseudonym.

2: *gestures towards the several armed soldiers* kidnapping? i think kidnapping would work. make sure that the Independence Front holds them hostage, and they'll have the wrath of the Alliance to contend with. but that won't be my problem, will it?

3: as the proud leader of the PWFIVORBC, it shouldn't be that hard for me to get hold of some... unusual toxic compounds. chemical warfare should do just fine here. after the guards are dealt with, i'll have the Independence Front take crucial components and deposit them at a dead drop site, ready for our side to pick them up when needed.

[PointMaid]

Yes, if we can learn anything from those... interesting... names, we should

[Florien]

Cpt. Frankenstein (MoL)'s plan

• They now know you're coming, but you're not allowed past the first room of the complex. Too important says the captain, to not allow someone uncleared inside. As a result, you're forced to go with the backup plan, disguising yourself as someone being transferred. The disguise is not too difficult to put together. The fake credentials, however, are. You end up having to spend a lot on ones plausible enough to get you inside.
  
• You try to give Captain Usanako a disease. This proves fairly difficult. Viruses don't do well in hot drinks, drinks being the most obvious vector of transmission, and figuring out a way to get Usanako infected beyond that is extremely difficult. Eventually, you manage to smear some on the captain's computer keyboard. Hopefully that's enough to down them in a day or two for a few weeks...
  
• Setting up a system to repeatedly dump bird food works fine for a bit. The arrays are interfered with, at least, their range reduced and their transmissions a lot noisier. However, the issues don't really render the post entirely inoperable, they just reduce its efficiency. A valiant effort though.
  
• Bringing up the specter of past defeats and traps does prevent the independence front from marching in force. The few who do come are shot by the guards almost immediately. The post is mostly safe.
  

Maj. Harrier's plan

• Step four first? Quite the turn. You manage to get together a splinter group willing to work with you to attack Kirachi Beach, with the help of your well-connected and mildly treasonous friends.
  
• Your name isn't on the plan, you're not even there, and they launch their attack, blowing the door open.
  
• The kidnapping part goes rather less well, as while they do capture the Captain alive with several losses, they set up explosives in the building on the way out, and smash up a bunch of equipment inside the post. You didn't order them to do that, but the opportunity to shut down Kirachi Beach is too good to pass up for rebels. You end up having to go on the ground to disarm the explosives yourself, later. You're fairly sure they destroyed too much for any potential recordings of you to be useful... but you never know.
  
• Your rebel group slaughters the guards with poisonous gas and the likes. It's a gruesome scene. Hazmat clad rebels then strip the array down. You get most of the parts delivered to where you want them, but there's a few missing... did the rebels sell them? They might have sold them to finance their cause. You can't trust anyone these days. It's going to be a huge pain to get the post back up and running now, but at least it's down.
  

[Mr. Lee Hammer]

Very good. It's about time we saw some success.

GWC's plan

The first thing I shall do is hire a hacker. Someone who can break into the cameras so they can stop watching the areas. Change the signals, cause them to blackout. Whatever it takes to have them stop watching the door for a time. As for anyone watching the door, I'll make sure to shove anyone down before they have a chance to see me as I make my way in.

Getting rid of Usanako permanently might be the best option if they're that much of a liability against the coup. Which is where I'll bring a syringe with me which has some pretty potent poison. I'll watch for them until they get distracted. I'll sneak by and give the captain a small little prick. Maybe they'll think it's nothing more than a bug bite. And after a moment, the captain will have a massive heart attack and die. And everyone will think Usanako will have died of natural causes rather than foul play. And if that doesn't fool them by any chance, I have a backup plan for that which I'll detail a little later.

Once again, I shall make do with the hacker I hired. The hacker will overload the signals with transmissions until they get too much to handle. Eventually it will fry the circuits of everything inside, shutting it down. But once it's time to get it operational again, it should be easy enough. Get some electrical workers to come in and it should be ready for us again when we establish the coup.


I think a little talking and a little rearranging can take care of the Front real fast. I'll plant some "evidence" that shows how the front are planning to assassinate Sendri and other high-ranking Alliance leaders. Some weapons, maps, whereabouts, times. And if Sendri isn't fooled over Usanako's death, I'll make sure to plant to murder weapon inside one of their concealed areas and arrange it to make them look like they're responsible for Usanako's murder. That will surely get Sendri's attention. And I'll make sure all of the evidence is convincing. Clean up any evidence that suggests I was the one responsible for the Captain's death. Then I shall alert the Alliance guards and let them know about the "plans" I discovered. And how they're "responsible" for Usanako's death. They'll investigate and upon finding the "proof" they need, they'll swoop in and execute the front. As this will be one less obstacle for Alliance rule.

[Kennifer]

Juniper's Plan

* The first problem with the post is, annoyingly, the door. You're not actually authorized to go inside, and there's only one entrance into the post itself, and it's monitored by multiple cameras. You'll need to figure out a way to get the door open (or get it opened for you) to get into the post itself.

Juniper will sneak in, wearing as nondescript clothing as possible, and spray black paint over the cameras, and hope she can get the door open and get in before whoever is monitoring the camera feed comes to see why it's gone black.

* The second problem is the Regional Director of Internal Security, Captain Usanako. They've thwarted dozens of coup plots before, and they'll continue thwarting them if they're not restrained somehow. They're unshakably loyal, and they need to be gotten rid of. They don't necessarily need to be killed, they just need to be out of the way until the coup has actually happened. A few weeks without contact with the government minimum, or at least without being taken seriously. If they must die today, it needs to be relatively unsuspicious, Sendri trusts the Captain and will investigate their death if they should end up dead in an obviously suspicious manner. So how are you going handle them?

Juniper feels putting them out of commission would be best if she doesn't have to kill them. Some sort of injury, possibly multiple broken bones. And best to make it look like an accident; a loosened handrail and floorboards that could lead to a fall. If they do happen to die rather than be injured, well, hopefully any investigations will be into building construction and whatever this place's version of OSHA is.


* The third problem is the post itself. It's constantly receiving signals and updates from around the region, and it's heavily guarded, and more to the point, the guards are very loyal and very skilled. Shutting down the arrays temporarily will be tricky, but there must be a way to damage the post such that it can easily be repaired while still buying us a few weeks of it being inactive. How shall you do that?

Juniper will bribe whoever is in charge of the landfills and other waste disposal to dump in a bunch of garbage from above. This will make a big mess and take some time to clean and sanitize, hopefully gunking up the arrays in the process but not causing irreparable damage.

* The fourth problem is the Independence Front of the Outer Sector. They've been opposed to Alliance rule for years, and if they see weakness at Kirachi Beach, they'll swoop in and destroy the listening post utterly. You're going to have to prevent them from destroying it further than you already have. So what's the battle plan?

Spread rumors and mistrust, possibly conflicting ones, that will sew confusion and paranoia. Anonymousl or using several different pseudonyms, so it can't easily be backtracked to her. Hopefully this will get the members of the Independence Front questioning one another instead of concerning themselves with the listening post.

[PointMaid]

...Okay, that didn't go exactly as I had hoped. Hopefully it did the job well enough..

[Caret]

WarioWare: Hack It!

1. "WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Me and my friends... I mean junior political officers CODE for a living! I'll have them develop a devastating cyberweapon that'll help me crack this post open, and make the cyberattack seem like it came from another country. Once the cyberweapon is deployed, it'll replace the camera feed with fake footage, allowing me to burst in with my WARIO STRENGTH!"

2. "This is no challenge for Wario! I'll just punch the cranky captain's and the guards' noggins until they all pass out! After that, I'll carefully rearrange the crime scene to make it look like one one the guards did it! Genius, am I right? (By the way, my employees at WarioWare will NEVER revolt against me! I swear!)

3. "Remember the cyberweapon I used to get into this stinky base? It's time for its magic to REALLY SHINE! According to my loyal aide Dr. Crygor, it'll "use advanced cryptography techniques to scramble
all data and critical OS files, effectively rendering the post's computers unusable until valid biometrical data is provided." PHEW, that's a lot of technobabble! Point is, this post's going down thanks to the power of the INTERNET! WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

4. "SURPRISE! Wario has more connections with the intergalactic community than you might think! Using these connections, I'll spread COMPLETELY FAKE rumors of a dangerous bioweapon being stored on a planet in the middle of nowhere, along with rumors of Alliance traitors inside the front, so they'll kill each other instead of the Alliance! They can't attack the post if they don't know who to trust!"

[Florien]

Cpt. Columbo's Plan

• Hacking! Great idea. Now, how do you propose to do that? The Alliance is corrupt, yes, but their important things are still airgapped. You can't turn off the cameras with hacking, because they're airgapped from the rest of the system. You do manage to fry everything connected to the monitoring network, but the camera servers remain stubbornly isolated by way of two inches of air and no cables. You end up having to force by a soldier outside.
  
• You poison the captain after brute-forcing your way through, and as they drop, you realize that injection marks are easily visible and poison is eminently traceable, and also you're definitely here illegally and this is a known fact. Hope your backup plan works.
  
• Hackers are actually very useful for this sort of thing though, as Stuxnet showed back in 2010. A properly deployed and designed virus can easily break sensitive equipment, and the monitoring tools simply can't be airgapped. The problem is, replacing it will be a pain, those components you broke don't come cheap.
  
• You accuse the front of plotting to kill Captain Usanako and Sendri too, after carefully planting evidence and hiding your poison tools and cleaning up the things you did. You even delete the security footage. However, you clearly aren't supposed to be in the listening post, and the guard who you had to push by to get in outside remembers you. The guards draw their guns... and... You don't remember much of what they did to you in the basement of the listening post, nor do you remember how you got back to the station alive, but two of your fingers are missing now, you're malnourished, and there's a bullet lodged in your hip that wasn't there before. If you survive long enough to sleep again, you will have nightmares for decades to come.
  

Congratulations, Lieutenant Columbo, on your speedy recovery. I should have left you to die there, but I can't afford losses at the moment. Wear your new rank with shame.

Acting Cpt. Bank's Plan

• Spraying the cameras is a low-tech solution, but effective. Forcing the door proves a little more difficult, but smashing it repeatedly with a rock eventually gets it open and you inside.
  
• Dressed as a maintenance tech, you manage to turn Usanako's office into a death trap. Now it's just a matter of hoping they get unlucky. You don't stick around to find out, there are more important things to deal with right now.
  
• The bribery does lead to this small act of treason, improperly dumped waste. This makes the arrays less useful, and they have to operate at lower power to avoid starting a fire. It's eminently cleanable though.
  
• You try to spread rumors of betrayal and things within the ranks of the local rebellion. This does not buy the time you thought it would, but it turns out not to matter, as the listening post is close enough to fully operational to repel their attack anyway.
  

Cpt. Wario's Plan

• Air gaps are a problem for this too. You end up using your Wario Strength to break the cameras before you break the door. This is not optimal.
  
• You attempt to beat several highly trained Alliance soldiers, some of the finest the Alliance has to offer, defending one of the most important listening posts, in a fistfight. Usanako catches your first punch in their sticky frog-like grasp, and breaks your arm with their knee, without a second thought. How, exactly, did you think this would end? Escape proves difficult, but you do make it. Usanako knows who you are though, and you are likely to be in very deep trouble unless this coup gets going soon.
  

• Ransomware is far superior to a Stuxnet method! Good job, you've thoroughly locked the base's computer system up, and have a bypass of your own.
  
• The rebels immediately rush to grab the bioweapon you made up, and suffer heavy losses seeking nonexistent weapons in an unimportant settlement on the fringes of the Alliance. they then turn on each other, believing your rumors true, after all, how else could they have failed? They are rendered irrelevant, at least for now.
  

[Mr. Lee Hammer]

GWC is back, and is crying. He looks at his hand which now has two missing fingers.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Not to me. We all should have led the coup with pride. Not get tortured like this. Why? Why?

GWC calls in some food, managing to mutter out what he wants through his crying. Usually he'll want something more highbrow fitting his tastes. But now he's at the point where he doesn't care. He just wants something.

[Kennifer]

"That certainly could've gone worse," Juniper muses as she returns and notices Columbo.

[Whistle]

Formula One

1. Throw marinara on the security cameras, use the glass to pry open a door, and try to sneak in without being detected.
   
2. Try to reason with Usanako, tell them about how stressed they must be with the coup. Offer them a jam sandwich. Invite them to a beach vacation on the island you visited to make them relax, if only for one day. Then, after escaping, simply leave them there buried up to their neck in the sand while you sail back to the mainland.
   
3. Jam the signals. Literally. Throw your largest jar of jam at the antenna to try to break it, especially on the thin parts where it can be easily bent. The jam may contain a bit of mercury or another weak acid that will seep into the material and weaken it somehow.
   
4. Try to create smoke and fog with an array of campfires to confuse the ships. Meanwhile, throw jam or marinara from random areas to distract the ships and make them try to attack each other rather than the camp. If that fails, just throw some knives willy-nilly at the people on the deck.
   

[wingedcatgirl]

Lucky's plan, the best plan ever:

The first problem with the post is, annoyingly, the door...
Lucky knows the purrfect solution to this: scratch and scratch and meow and meow at the door until someone lets him in! And then, once he's inside, immediately turn around and WAIT SHIT NO BELAY THAT he needs to stay inside!

The second problem is the Regional Director of Internal Security, Captain Usanako...
This will require Lucky to invoke ancient cat law. He finds Usanako and curls up on their lap. They're trapped now. Nobody can disturb a sleeping cat. It's simply impossible.

Obviously, this won't last multiple weeks. But it won't need to.

The third problem is the post itself...
If Lucky was Florence Ambrose, he'd be able to sneak in, plug in a bootable memory stick to install spyware, and get a sneaky back door into their power cord. With that, Lucky can coordinate with a team back home to make sure the base sees only what the coup wants seen. Once the coup succeeds, the spyware can be remotely ordered to self-destruct and the power pwn can be removed.

Sadly, Lucky is an ordinary non-sapient non-anthropomorphic cat, and also currently occupied occupying Usanako, so his handler will have to do all that instead.

The fourth problem is the Independence Front of the Outer Sector...
The battle plan is for aforementioned hacking shenanigans to be subtle enough so that the Independence Front does not, in fact, see any weakness. ... but just in case that falls through, Lucky is prepared to CLAW AND BITE AND BITE AND BITE anyone that tries to invade.

[Florien]

Double Cpt. Beck's Plan

• Saucing the cameras does disrupt their capabilities, prying open the door with glass cuts up your hands and doesn't achieve much at all. Lucky you're explicitly kind of gloopy, and can recover from such things when it's convenient. You dash in when someone opens the door to check the cameras.
  
• Usanako is steadfastly loyal. They accept your sandwich, and forgive you for breaking in, but refuse to take a vacation, because "Evil never takes a vacation."
  
• You throw a jar of jam at the signal array. Considering your marinara stunt, it's fairly obvious it's you, but by the time you've snapped one of the main antennas, you're already well on your way to the next part of the problem. Hopefully this doesn't become a problem down the line and the coup can happen in time to protect you from the consequences.
  
• You produce a lot of smoke with your fires, using your chef skills to make very smokeful fires indeed. Your throwing arm, however, is not good enough to distract ships via jar-tossing. Knives, however, travel better. You kill a couple rebels as they approach the beach, and manage to escape before the guards realize it was you who threw jam at the array.
  

Cat. Lucky's Plan

• You waltz up to the door you're not authorized to enter, and meow and scratch at it, jump off a nearby sand dune repeatedly to make noise outside, and generally make a nuisance of yourself. This does not work particularly well to get you let in. But because you need to be in for the rest of your plan to matter at all, eventually you manage to get in by waiting for a rainstorm to blow in, days later, and looking (and being) very sad and wet outside. You get dried off inside.
  
• This actually works remarkably well. Usanako tolerates your presence, for now, and you don't need to distract them that long before...
  
• your handler sneaks away and closes the airgap, utterly ruining the cybersecurity of the Kirachi Beach Listening post in a subtle way that effectively allows you to see what information they're sending and receive before they do, and edit that information as necessary.
  
• You are, in fact, correct. Usanako is alive, not indisposed, and the arrays are not visibly damaged, so the Independence Front doesn't even bother with an attack.
  

And we just need Lt. Mac Cumhaill's version of the operation, and we can move along with our lives. Well, not fully, we do need a replacement for Blixbo, who is about to die. But the point stands nonetheless.

[noodlesnook]

Forbuis Trá Caoiráitse // The Siege of Kirachi Beach

The first problem with the post is...
For a moment, Fionn considers smashing all the cameras, but he's learnt that's not exactly the best idea. But the only other option is... wait, that could work, actually!
An impossibly tall woman in uniform is seen walking up to the post's door.
"I'm here to inspect the cameras," she says, in an oddly deep voice.
The guards would never suspect she's actually Fionn. Or maybe they will, in which case he'll pull another Columbo and bribe them with some shiny stuff from the crane-bag.

The second problem…
Fionn is no stranger to people like these. He whips out Mac an Luin, ready to decapitate- oh, you said unsuspicious? Well. Then he supposes Usanako will have to be spared… for now.
Instead, he literally moves them out of the way, far into the ocean on a little boat he found by the docks. Hopefully, they'll be out there long enough for the coup to get underway.

The third problem…
Despite having been here for some time already, Fionn is still clueless about technology. After distracting the guards, he sneaks in and messes around with the arrays, hoping he'll accidentally press something to shut them down.

The fourth problem…
Convince the rebels that the listening post is crucial to their success, and destroying it will also destroy their chances of properly overthrowing the Alliance. If that doesn't work, hit them back with Mac an Luin.

[Florien]

Lt. Mac Cumhaill's Plan

• Camera Inspection? In drag? That's certainly a plan. Surprisingly, it works well enough and they actually let you delete the camera footage and turn them off.
  
• Using your powerful strength to push the Captain out to sea works, for a bit. But it's not going to be much of a delay, there's decent reception on the planet due to satellite usage, so they're able to call in help to get them back to shore, late, tired, and starburned.
  
• You mess with the controls, hoping that that resolves the problem. It does interfere with the array quite a bit, but it's nothing too hard to fix, and it's all pretty obviously been tampered with, so it's not like they'll just not notice.
  
• Your trickery does not work, the listening post is notorious. However, you are combat experienced, and an expert in the blade. (also you're at minimum nine feet tall, and probably a bit taller than that, which does give you a reach advantage.) You easily hold off the pitiful rebel attack.
  

Very well. Let's see what we have here... We're going to have a slight delay while I find someone to replace Blixbo, but for now, I think we can say it's a close-run thing here between Mac Cumhaill and Lucky. I'm going to have to choose the cat.

I can't believe you all let yourselves get outdone by a cat! You know what, I'm promoting the cat. Balance in all things, as there are two lieutenants, there are now two majors. You should all be ashamed of your poor performance.

Valdragon casually ignores that pretty much everyone actually did fulfill at least part of the objective in his shaming, but at this point, it's routine for him to find a reason to insult your performance, so as to manage expectations.

Congratulations on your promotion, Meowjer Lucky. You have the Valdragon points for the next vote, which will be postponed until we can get a replacement for Blixbo.

[wingedcatgirl]

Lucky preens regally. He has bafflingly received yet another purrmotion. How many will he acquire?