08.2 - DIGDUG and SINISTAR

Games Masks-616
,
1

Subject: DIGDUG and SINISTAR
File number: 74-27934
Admin Routing: D42-L7

So Mighty Joe Young has been seeing a shrink. This is good news. Don’t ask me how I know this - I’ll get into that in another memo. I’m just writing this to justify why I’m probing into his files.

Joey reported experiencing “deja vu” around the ruins in the museum. The probability is high that he encountered artifacts left behind by Kiln’s people. We know roughly where that happened, thanks to GIGADRILL (file number 74-23691). We have another sample here at the museum.

We know the temple is basically stone, or some kind of mineral. We know that the chemical makeup of minerals is a function of location and depth in the geologic column. So if we get a sample of a mineral, we can try to figure out where it came from. We can also speculate that similar culture means similar architecture - how you fit rocks together, what kind of binding material you use, frequently used shapes (e.g. the Golden Rectangle of Greek antiquity), and so on.

I wrote two programs. The first is called DIGDUG. Its purpose is to scrape public and private databases, including internal AEGIS data. It does the following:

  1. Perform image recognition on anything that looks like an old ruin or temple. If we have surveillance photos from anywhere in the world, or if a tourist took a picture and uploaded it to the cloud, or whatever, and any of those pictures feature this temple architecture, it’ll get flagged.
  2. Sample geological data, looking for places in the world where the building blocks of this temple could have come from. They had to quarry the stone somewhere, unless it all just got magicked into existence.

The catch is, for DIGDUG to work, I need real samples of the rock. That means I’m going to have to chisel something off the actual temple at the museum. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to go back so badly. It should be simple - get in, chip chip chip, get out.

Someone messed with the museum in order to drop four supervillains on us. Useless supervillains, sure, but still. That’s where SINISTAR comes in. It’s sifting for previous contacts with the Architects of Evil, and will flag any new contacts with other villains via those same channels. I don’t want to get caught by surprise again.

Alright, time to leave for the museum. We’ll be picking up some stealth tech along the way. As usual, if I don’t report back within 24 hours, this memo will be released via the usual channels, yadda yadda.

3 Likes
2

Alex wants to try and find other temple sites around the world, by using geology and image recognition. To do this, I’m proposing that they need a sample of the temple’s structure, which they’ll try to obtain during the second museum visit.

If “find more temple sites” isn’t interesting, then it’s just Alex being curious. But if we want to locate them, this is a way to do it.

2 Likes
3

“Find more temple sites” is arguably another piece in the magitech thread that links Kiln and Joe and Mette (and might as well hook everyone else in, too :grin:), so I’m cool with it. That doesn’t necessarily mean I see us as globetrotting science adventurers (cough), but if that happens, I know a guy … :monkey_face:

2 Likes
4

I’m totally down for finding more temple sites and stuff (though it is directly tied in with my character so it’s hard for me to complain). With the globetrotting question posed tonight and working it around with school. Plausible way for doing this is applying through Hellblazer for an independent study program, which probably would mean we have to regularly check in with one of the teachers. But I also feel like we should spend more time at the school given how many threads we have with classmates and stuff.

2 Likes
5

I feel like “Young Justice” did a good mix of stay-at-home and go-on-missions, and I agree that we should spend time at school and with our NPCs. I feel like there’s three ways forward there.

  1. Being physically present at the temples isn’t important for some reason. Maybe we just need to read an inscription - in which case Alex Fedexes a remote-operated drone to Nigeria or whatever. Or maybe it’s the pattern of them on the globe that matters, and just knowing where they are gives us everything we need.
  2. We use Mette’s Kirby-craft to zoom around the world on weekends, and go to school on weekdays. Basically Tomb Raider: the High School AU.
  3. The school arranges regular trips that align with temple locations we find (for whatever conspiratorial reason), and we take some NPC passengers along. This can lead to the ever-popular slumber party happening in the mountains above Tibet, or a group of high school students on the run from water golems in Venice, or whatever.
2 Likes
6

I would lean more for 2 or 3 personally. If only for the amusement of us having to show up to school after having gotten in from China at 3am but we have to be at school cause Hellblazer said we could only keep doing these trips if we didn’t let it interfere with our academics.

3 Likes
7

And we can ask him if he has another 250 grand to fund more class trips…

2 Likes
8

Current plot outlined here:

1 Like