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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) zdashamber's collected the memorable quotes from the first few episodes of this season: =======Episode 2.01 "Giving Up the Ghost", aired Oct. 8, 2004======= I think this was just a one-off "But there are a lot of not-nice people out there..." - Carlos "It doesn't mean we should go back in time to destroy them." - Max Discussing how Iffy can get out of any contracts with Roche "From a legal standpoint, I guess if you can prove you were dead when you signed it..." - Max Discussing how Iffy can call out from the interview with Roche "But remember, the phone's up here." - Ifurita, gesturing to her head "Is it on vibrate?" - Cynthia "Wouldn't you like to know?" - Ifurita, ooc "vm—it's better for zombies than emacs!" - Heather "It's even better than H-1Bs..." - Bill "It's H-1Zs!" - Heather "The dead are taking our jobs!" - Heather "Cubicle farm! Zombie cubicle farm!" - Bill "Aw, man, cubicle necropolis." - Liz "Perhaps, Victor, you'd like to explain this." - Drake "These zombies are terrible programmers!" - Victor Roche =======Episode 2.02 "Kali, The Power of Time", aired Oct. 22, 2004======= "It's not a job, it's a cult—with stock options." - Bill "In most companies, when you saw your CEO speaking to no one, you'd assume..." - Cynthia "She was on her cell phone." - Madeline and John "So you're just our eccentric facilities manager who can only be reached by email." - Roberta "How is that remotely unusual?" - Shannon "Anton." - Roberta "Roberta!" - Agent Levier "I assume you're aware of the situation in Palo Alto? The mass grave?" - Roberta "Yes. Oh, no..." - Agent Levier "Ironic—CEO of a social networking firm, and I can't meet anyone..." - Roberta "Mrs. Hargrove, get behind me!" - Ifurita "She looks panicked, and ducks into the pantry." - GM "That's good, too!" - Ifurita =======Episode 2.03 "Reality-Based", aired Nov. 6, 2004======= "It's like there was a rapture of coolness, and we weren't taken up!" - Carlos "I'll just log on and download the software update that says it's alright if Chip chases skirt, or chases slacks, or chases..." - Ifurita "Well, I was all dramatic when I thought we were going to die..." - Chip "Hello, she believed you..." - Roberta "So if we stepped out, we might disappear!" - Chip "Given the way you just crashed and burned, that might not be a bad thing." - Kat "Because who knows if we can get Max back, and I don't want to lose you, too... Um..." - Carlos "Chip is blushing." - Liz "Carlos is probably blushing, too." - Madeline "Max! The coffeehouse!" - Chip, remembering things "Your breakups: both of them." - GM "Aa!" - Chip
At the end of the previous episode, Drake beheaded Anthony Tran, the ninja sent by the linen-suited "Mr. Cool" to steal the Amulet of Lothos.
Tran told the Vampster gang that Drake became a hazard when he got hold of the artifact. Drake's not human, and the amulet would help him become what he was, and a threat to human-kind.
The magic-using vampire who was behind various inanimate items animating helped Drake and Tiffany escape from Roberta's garage.
Chip, Max, and Dot take Tran's head to the Buddist Temple in Mountain View where Max brings the head back to life. Tran's head tells them that it's now their karma to get the amulet from Drake. He also gives them a clue about Drake's rescuer.
Meanwhile, Drake's new friend tells reveals himself.
Mr. X is René Monteroy. He lived in France, England and Switzerland during the 16th Century. He is an alchemist, scientist and magician.
He explains his origins thus:
"While I was a mortal, I became acquainted with the writings of John Calvin, who realized two things: God chooses the elect. And once you are chosen, His grace is irresistible."
"I also obtained a manuscript, the Chimergical Almanac. And that book offered what one might call an 'end run' around the problem of transforming base metals. The solution to one's problem is to use a demon, and this book shows you how to summon a Demon of Form, a spirit that will transform the shape of anything you command it."
"The problem with the book is that the preparation of the summoning spell takes a very long time. Several lifetimes."
"I was getting older, and I was not going to finish that spell, nor had God extended his grace to me. I would die, both a failure, and doomed to separation from God."
"I will never be able to put off my damnation, but I can forstall Death until God's return."
"Becoming a vampire was the reasonable thing to do."
"But the drawbacks, no sunlight, the stakes, and I learned, those Slayers! If I did not take precautions, I'd be facing God's Judgement much sooner than I had planned. So I used my time wisely. I did not live the excessive life that many vampires have, I spent my years preparing the summoning spell."
"So that my work is not a waste, you will retrieve the alchemical vessel I had the Jew build for me."
"Then we shall deal with those who have hounded you."
"Meanwhile, Tiffany will be your security and bond."
Drake goes to find Ben David and set a trap to capture Ifurita.
While Drake plots, FBI Special Agent in Charge Anton Levier has interviewed Lainey, the last known person to see Anthony Tran alive, and now has a warrant for Max and Dot's arrest for his murder.
Ben David calls Dot, telling her that Drake's holding him against his will at his home in Palo Alto. Drake wants to talk to Dot in person. Dot, Chip and Max leave the Vampster offices with the police in hot pursuit. Dot loses the cops, they steal a car and make it to Palo Alto. Chip calls Ifurita, asking her to come and comfort him as he goes out a hero (and play an iTunes playlist.) Ifurita objects to being treated like an iPod, but comes out to look out for them.
Anton confronts Roberta. Roberta tells him that they don't want Dot and Max, Drake's the one who killed Tran.
The police and SWAT units surround Ben David's house. Ifurita distracts the police.
Up in the City, Tiffany's been locked up by Monteroy's henchmen. She's jonesing for a fix, and Monteroy's people are happy to give her one. But when she subcumbs, and a henchman opens the door, she gets a chance to escape. But she's soon in the custody of the SFPD and facing an angry Special Agent Levier, until Drake's lawyer shows up with tear gas.
Back at Ben David's, Dot quickly clues in on Ben David and Drake's plan to try and exploit a 'back door' that would let Drake enslave Ifurita. Drake talks her out of irreparably huring Ben David, and that Monteroy is the Big Bad.
Ifurita flies them out of Palo Alto to one of Drake's redoubts: the abandoned construction site of a mansion in Los Altos Hills.
To be continued...
Ob. Disclaimer, not a real news story, an in-game one.
Anthony Tran, a former Special Forces officer turned peace activist vanished while attending protests commemorating the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq over the past weekend.
Witnesses last saw Tran, 38, on Monday evening outside Coffee Society in the Oaks Shopping Center in Cupertino. Tran was in the company of Elaine Leibowitz, 23, director of marketing for Vampster, a social networking company.
Tran had been a featured speaker at a rally opposing the Iraq War on Saturday. Tran, an officer in the Special Forces, resigned his commission after the first Iraq war, and had devoted his life to non-violence. He came to the United States in 1975 with his family who fled Vietnam as the Communist forces took power. He joined the army as a young man in order to fight the Communists, but during his service became disenchanted with the Cold War and the first post-Communist conflicts, re-embraced his Buddhist faith and left the military.
Since then, Tran has traveled the country speaking at anti-war and anti-military events.
Spokespersons for International A.N.S.W.E.R., one of the organizers of the Saturday march and rally, said they are disturbed by the disappearance of a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq.
Special Agent Anton Levier of the FBI's San Jose office said they are taking the case seriously and ask that anyone with any information contact the FBI's office at (408) 555-1212.
It's been a crazy few weeks here at Vampster, and I've hit the point where if I don't take some vacation time, I'm going to crash and burn in a very not pretty way. My thanks to all of you for your efforts during the great server overload and the recent reorganization, and of course, for making the Friday the 13th pre V-day party such a success. I'm enclosing some gift cheques for you all to use as you see fit; have fun! I'm going to go run off to Maui for a couple of weeks and I'm booked in a hotel very far away from the wired world so that I can really decompress (Hana is the boonies). I'll be able to make some infrequent trips into Central Maui for shopping and checking in online, but I don't figure that that's going to happen more than once a week. If you absolutely positively need to get in touch with me, I can be reached through the hotel at 808-555-4563. I'll be back in town on the 25th.
INT. VAMPSTER OFFICE KEN SMITH carries large stack of BOOKS towards his cube. A cup of COFFEE is balanced on top of the stack. He does not see CHIP, deep in conversation with LANEY, crossing his path. They collide sending BOOKS and COFFEE flying. CHIP
Dude, I'm so sorry. I should get you a coffee.
LANEY
I need some of that, we can go to Starbucks, work on the special guest list, and bring KEN back a cup.
CHIP
(examining KEN's books on floor)
Wow, so this is what a top engineer reads? Java in 24 Hours, Enterprise Software for Dummies, and SQL for Mere Mortals?
I'd figure you for a Bruce Eckel guy when we interviewed you.
KEN
(nervously, with forced bravado)
You see, um, you have to go back to the classics, especially when you're slaying the vampryrs! LANEY and CHIP help gather KEN'S BOOKS and set them in his cube. They leave the office. INT. LANEY'S CAR - DAY CHIP
What's with him saying "slaying of the vampryrs" all day?
LANEY
It's annoying. Heaven help him if he found out that's what we really do around here. ( Roll Opening Credits )
The Vampster crew receives an email from Tsubasa:
You didn't hire a new guy, did you?
If you did, he's an idiot.
He was chasing after some girl in Tokyo, asking about a 'slayer of the vampryes,' and trying to act like an Englishman. That girl wasn't a slayer, but one of the best kendo students in Japan. She beat him silly with a bo, landing him in the hospital, and about to be deported.
But as the Immigration ministry was about to arrest him, a whole group of girls, my age, show up at the hospital, and take him away.
Very perverted, like he's Darien and they were the Sailors. Did I tell you I hate that show?
I heard he's back in America. Do me a favor and don't let him out of your country again.
[ Punchy, synthesizer theme music ] From the Frank Stanton Studios in Los Angeles, this is Marketplace, and I'm David Brown.
Suppose you're a young company going through a growth spurt. Growth is great, but building capacity is never easy, and in the post dot.com boom world, venture capital is harder to find.
On today's show, we'll look at how one firm faced that challenge.
( Details after the Numbers )
Roberta, I can tell you one thing from a technical perspective: our current configuration is unstable. Our hardware and bandwidth are maxed out, and everything is basically being held together with duct tape and improvised Perl scripts. I'm doing the best I can, but the next major event (hardware failure, slashdotting, etc) is going to bring us down hard. If that happens, even if we recovered relatively quickly we would still undoubtedly lose serious mindshare to "Demons, Demons, Demons" and be, for all practical purposes, finished as a company. The upshot is that, IMHO, we are going to need a cash infusion, one way or another. And given that we know we're going to have to bite the bullet and deal with VCs, the big question remaining is, how doomed are we? I guess I see two major axes here: good vs evil, and muggle vs clueful. The good vs evil axis is pretty self-explanatory, and of course we'll be hoping to get investors who are heavy on the good and light on the evil. But the more interesting axis seems to be muggle-hood. Do we have a chance in hell of dealing with a firm that realizes we're actually fighting vampires and demons and not just running a chat room for goths? Perhaps Wolfram and Hart might be able to recommend a VC firm that knows about our real "core competency". Do we still have any contacts there? I hate the idea of bringing in outsiders and relinquishing control of our operation, but the reality is that something has to happen, or we are toast. -Max
Vampster internal memo-Confidential!
=====
January 21, 2004
To: All Vampster staff
From: Roberta Martinez
Subject: Results of initial meetings with VCs
Considering we're such a small organization, I figured it would be useless to hide and extremely counterproductive to not let all of you know as soon as possible what I heard in my initial round of meetings with various venture capitalists.
What it boils down to is this:
If they pony up the money to allow us to expand our infrastructure to support more customers, they have a price. They want to put their own people in as CEO and CTO. Max has pointed out that we have primary goals and objectives that are not explicitly spelled out in our business plan (nor will they ever be! why would we tell the bad guys up front what we're planning?). My primary concern about bringing in new management staff is that they will not be supportive of our overall goals; frankly, I don't have a lot of emotional baggage tied up in my title, but I do worry a lot that we'll get sidetracked from the main fight. And of course, a new CTO will have hir own notions about what platforms we're going to use; a truly evil-minded CTO would probably sell our corporate soul to the Behemoth of Redmond and the Dark Lords of Santa Clara.
I can see several outcomes; the best one would be that we take the money, and the new management team gets aligned with our unwritten agenda. The worst one, of course, is tanking like i-BS. We can choose to remain independent for the nonce, and trust to luck and Max's skills that we can keep our systems up and running. We could take the money and try to run slayage as a black project that they don't know about with the risk that they find out and pull the rug out from under our feet. I know that we've gotten a lot of new interest in our services, especially after we appeared on the Yukino Miyazawa show; our systems are holding up to the increased load right now, but can they continue to do so?
I have a meeting with the VC folks early next week; I need to hear from you what you think about this deal by the end of this week, and of course, if you see things I've managed to miss, please do bring them to my attention.
Regards,
Roberta
check out www.urbandecay.com. I think there are some untapped possibilities for linking Vampster with goth fashion; especially the lip stain in sharpie format called "Bitten".
-R
(who is not so sure about Perversion nail polish which is PVC black)
Found this in today's SJ Mercury News (the business section):
from Mike Langberg's article quoting a panel of VCs:
"Still, the panel seemed to agree several categories are indeed getting
too much money, including nanotech, anti-spam software, and the new
social networking serives that link together people who share common
interests....Dyson got the biggest laugh by suggesting a business model
for Sunnyvale-based Friendster, the popular social-networking service
and a company that has yet to collect any revenue from its users.
Populated by lonely singles looking to line up dates, Friendster should
start a personal gift registry, Dyson said. The bottom line would be:
"If you want to date me, this is what you've got to buy me.""
====
I'd say that if we don't want to go the way of i-BS, our business model
had better not look like Dyson's or Friendster's.
comments?
-R
The latest person to make it to staff meetings gets to clean up after Sam-kitty.
The Eden Systems Angel rules provide rules for organizations. Very handy. I've gone through them and have worked out a build of Vampster.com.
The rules are written that the capacity of a group is inversely proportional to the degree of control the characters have in it. This is something for robertawhitehat to keep in mind when doing the venture capital dance (and why I cackled madly when mentioning the VC thing on the phone.)
jhkim: in a way this compliments the resourcefulness quality discussed this past fall.
Capacity
Currently the player characters are in control of Vampster.com. You get five points base, plus one for each player character in the company. Thus you have ten points to start with. I'm counting everyone but Drake and Kat as Vampster.com staff.
Clout
Groups have 'clout' in the crime, finance, government, and supernatural spheres.
Clout helps with 'getting things done' and 'influence' as a bonus to a roll when the group tries to do something.
Criminal: 0
Though they know Drake, they haven't interacted much with the criminal element, so I would say they have no pull in the criminal sphere.
Financial: 1
Since Vampster.com pays salaries and the checks don't bounce, they are 'holding their own'. You can raise up to 100,000 USD in an emergency.
Governmental: 1
Since you have been able to keep the FBI and DEA from vanishing you after the whole Drake business you are known. Your calls might be returned. But favors will be granted grudgingly and with an understood quid pro quo.
Supernatural: 2
You have some occult knowledge (reflected in your library, below.) You have some contacts with the supernatural world.
Sub Total: 4
Quarters
Location: Large
Vampster has it's own offices in a Sunnyvale office park.
A freebie since you have financial and goverment clout of one.
Essentially, you have room to grow into if needed. Right now you can play hide and seek in the empty cubes. Dot's living quarters are in an empty office. Chip's got a DJ setup in another office. Sam, the cat, has the run of the place. (Who has litter box duty?)
Physical Security: Standard
The building has locks, and alarms, but no security guards. However, dotslayer sleeps there. And maxw is there at all hours researching spells or tuning MySQL.
This costs one point.
Supernatural Security: Believers
Since Dot lives there, you're protected from vampires entering uninvited. Max has space for ritual magic.
This costs one point.
Sub Total: 2
Gear
Computers: Top of the Line
Everyone's got a Mac. (Why? Because I'm the referee and I say you all got Macs. Okay, Max will probably have a Linux box...)
You've also got server hardware in a cage somewhere, and spare computing power for researchy things. You can munge video, and do the bullet time buisness.
This would cost three.
Occult Archives:3
This is like the occult library quality from BtVS. But you get twice as many spells at each level and it's additive to the user's library.
This would cost three.
Weapons: Getting Medieval
You have, probably courtesy of Drake, a large quantity of pointy things. You don't have to look on Amazon.com for that flail.
This would cost one.
Sub Total: 7, no 4.
However, each level of clout you have is a discount on gear. So your bill is only four.
The Bill
If I did the math right, the total cost of Vampster.com is ten points, and you had ten points!
// Information Known to Vampster Staff //
San Jose Mercury News, Obituaries, 12 May 2003
Andrea Eight Cheung
Born: Sept. 15, 1983, in Stanford.
Died: May 6, 2003, in Los Altos Hills.
Survived by: Mother, Lauren Hargrove, MD of Palo Alto; Father, Robert X. Cheung, PhD of Stanford; brother, Lt. Henry Stewart Chenug, USN
Services: Have been held.
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stressed
