[Icelander]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Wow, he's really "off-type" for a Good Ole Boy.

Chase is self-consciously Broad-Minded. That is, ever since he was a little boy, Chase has taken pains to avoid the unthinking prejudices and parochialisms of Cory Earl Taylor, his small-time criminal, hard-drinking, meth-selling, bar-room brawling, lying, cheating bully of a father.

Because his father made racist remarks about them, Chase belligerently prefered black friends to white ones even as a middle schooler. By the time Chase was fourteen, Cory Earl finally took a hard bust and went away for a long time, but by that time, Chase already had more black friends than white ones. So it was kind of natural a few years on that his first girlfriend should be his best friend's younger sister, which was one Makayla Scott Hawkins, who just happened to have a lovely cafe au lait complexion.

Anybody who reminds Chase of the cheap floozies that Cory Earl used to hang around with is unlikely to appeal to him. For that matter, anybody who displays interest in Chase for qualities that he, consciously or subconsciously, is afraid that he shares with his father, is a huge turn-off.

Yes, that does mean that the women who are most subject to the positive reaction bonuses that Chase has* are pretty much off the table, whereas he's mostly interested in women with whom his Disadvantages and Quirks, like Social Stigma (Uneducated), Epitome (Southern Redneck) and Distinctive Speech (Alabama Drawl) are emphasised. Oh, and now Reputation and Social Stigma for his criminal record, too.

*Such as 4 levels of Stalker Talent that affects hunters and trackers, which would be the more tomboyish rural girls, and Classic Features (Good Ole' Boy), affecting all them loose women in them honky-tonks.

Originally Posted by evileeyore

You are way less suspicious than I am.

I suspect different things. For example, I don't believe that Dr. Cotton has been acting entirely alone. I just think that whoever have been helping him are not the same people as are behind Onyx Rain. Occam's Razor. The easiest explanation for why Cam Townsend almost got himself killed for no reason is that he had no idea about the danger.

If Townsend had been expecting anything of this kind, Taylor would almost certainly have noticed. Also, Townsend would probably have died before the events we are at in the story but for more-or-less random chance, i.e. Taylor managing to convince everybody to follow his lead and proving to be orders of magnitude more effective than anybody could reasonably expect for a former Green Beret who hasn't been training at all for almost six years.

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Also note: It's entirely possible for Onyx Rain* to not know what's going on (Warden Tyrrell going rogue) while still knowing what's going on (continued unethical research into Project Jade Serenity).

It would be possible, but breathtaking incompetence for them. It's already pretty incompetent for the DHS to have allowed things to progress to this point at an out-of-the-way mental hospital where funding has been drying up and everyone has been playing a game of musical chairs not to be responsible for any decisions having to do with it.

If somebody official knew that anything actually important was happening on Jewell Island, the neglect and total lack of effective oversight goes from stupid, but within the margins of believable bureaucratic behaviour (which can be pretty stupid), to so monumentally stupid that it would only work in a bad comic book.

Originally Posted by evileeyore

You've mentioned the possibility of factionalism within Onyx Rain, so... don't discount it.

Sure, but Col. Burr and Agents Banks and O'Toole are far more likely to represent somebody other than Director Gujarat.

Originally Posted by evileeyore

I mean Chase can discount it all day long and he seems the type to not even consider it, but as a Player and Research Assistant, I'd keep it in mind.

True. Chase Taylor has been pretty busy while new information has come to light and has pretty much defaulted to assuming that everyone personally unknown to him who is involved with Onyx Rain might have cynical motives, but he's pretty sure that Director Vani Gujarat is in earnest when she says she is giving the former Project Jade Serenity test subjects the best chance of survival and any kind of life they can get from Onyx Rain.

Taylor is far from naive, but he's fairly confident in his abilities to know when somebody is trying to play him or deceive him. Given that he has Empathy with Hypersensory and Body Language -21, Detect Lie -20 and Psychology -14 (add +2 or +3 when Empathy applies), he does tend to be right about that.

Only world-class actors, spies and deceivers have any realistic chance at tricking him about their motives and personalities. And even then, if they don't know that he can listen to their heart rates, smell their emotions, detect microexpressions, etc., they'll probably not bother to expend the effort it would take to come up with a world-class deception on somebody so obviously a dumb redneck.

Before agreeing to help Onyx Rain find former Project Jade Serenity subjects, Chase Taylor spoke with Director Vani Gujarat in person and only after all his insticts and experience told him the same things about her, did he decide to believe her. So Taylor considers it a fact that Director Gujarat was telling him the truth about her motives as regards his old comrades in arms, that she would prefer that they worked with her willingly and that if they did so, they might continue to have lives of only moderately restricted freedoms and rights.

Taylor did also get the sense that if the risks grew too great, Gujarat would not hesitate in the slightest to order every single test subject killed in order to protect her country and its instutions, so if he was unwilling to help her to get them to cooperate, the odds of all the test subjects simply being killed would go up.

Taylor is not quite this certain about Cam Townsend being personally loyal to Gujarat, but all the evidence does point to it. He's a personal assistant, not anybody's representative but hers, chosen by her primarily for his loyalty and trustworthiness. Taylor didn't get the feeling that she gave her trust very easily. If she trusts Townsend, it would be a truly shocking surprise to discover that she is mistaken in that trust.

Basically, he's about the least likely person we've met to represent any mysterious faction apart from Director Gujarat herself. Who, at the moment, seems to be leading 'mainstream' Onyx Rain.

Originally Posted by evileeyore

* Not even discounting that the various factions (Pro-Research/Anti-Research) might be keeping info from one another.

We've been taking it as given that they are. On the other hand, as a convenient short-hand, it makes sense to use the term 'Onyx Rain' for the faction with which we have the most direct contact, meaning Director Vani Gujarat, Cam Townsend and whoever are behind them. Anyone with radically different goals, even if they may happen to have a position or some contact with the task force using the codename 'Onyx Rain', will have to be referred to by some other term, which we'll come up with in-character once we identify some.