Myrmidon's Ascension (Xianxia/cultivation)

I was kinda in a hurry to get those character sheets out before bedtime, so I left some things unexplained. For one, how XP works. The standard is, you will get 10 per day of study in the subject. Factors such as one-on-one tutoring, high quality/rare drugs (the usual XP rate assumes you regularly use standard mass produced drugs), and such will increase this daily XP gain. One-off events that drive you to push yourself in an area or provide a fortuitous insight (the rarest kind of event) can also give you some extra XP. I suppose omakes can also give Cu extra XP if anyone actually cared to make one.

You won't have to worry too much about arts and standard resources since the hive'll provide them. However, rare/special resources will still be valuable and you'll have opportunities to gather them for use in your crafts. I'll only be tracking rare resources by the way. Likewise, money'll be abstracted; you won't have to worry about standard expenses, but you'll have a limited number of abstract money units (which I'll update the sheet with later) to spend on especially expensive things, and this limited resource will be shared among your team. Still, you're far more affluent than Ling Qi. Such is the power of having a group backing you.

It might seem odd that a group this communist would use money, and really they simply don't in their daily affairs. However, they do keep some money on hand for dealing with outsiders.

As for essence, you might notice that each of the character sheets only have 2. That's because this number represents how many significant expenses of essence you can perform before needing to recover. If you spend a point of essence, it'll have a big impact. Most of the arts and stuff don't have a specific use provided for this, but at any time you may spend 1 essence to greatly enhance your use of the art. A formation with 1 essence invested into it is also more powerful.

As the team leader, Cu can generally give her teammates orders and they'll follow them. However, you won't have direct control over their actions or what they'll cultivate. And it's considered bad form to give others orders over how or what to cultivate because of the inherently individualized and personal nature of the endeavor, though providing suggestions is fine. If omake XP or whatever gets given to the other teammates, they'll decide how to use it.

The first thing Cu did was review the information file she'd been given about the school. Rose Fields was founded by the Greenmoon Alliance after quarrels over where an alliance wide school would be located. Specifically, it was built atop the Rose Abyss, a chasm in the fabric of the universe full of monstrous creatures and beings but also many precious resources and treasures. The abyss had no claims on it, so it was viewed as a good place to situate a school meant to bring together students from all the alliance factions. Using materials supplied by all the alliance members and looted from the abyss, the void station that would become the school was built.

The school's core policy was to encourage both competition and cooperation. It provided a place for alliance factions to display their young cultivators' prowess through assorted simulations and missions, both combat and noncombat. Those that won competitions would receive valuable prizes for themselves and prestige for their factions. However, there were also many cooperative scenarios that required students from different factions to work together. Thus this policy allowed the factions to show off but also encouraged cooperation between them. As a direct consequence, conflict outside the competitive scenarios was greatly discouraged, though it wasn't uncommon for teams to prank each other.

The school reflected the composition of the alliance, so Cu could expect to deal with plenty of humans, as well as Syrans, Dancers, Eternals, X!eng, and assorted minority species. She could also expect to be away from the hive for about four years.

Cu closed the file and glanced at her teammates, who all had their displays open. Out of curiosity, she looked at what they were doing. Gam was doing a review to make sure his knowledge of alien etiquettes was firm in his mind. Null had two files open, one on Alliance robots and one on the creatures of the Rose Abyss. And Smile... was watching a X!eng comedy show. Cu wasn't sure what she got out of it, as the jokes and routines performed with many wigglings of the X!eng's tentacles were completely incomprehensible to her, but judging from the way Smile's antennae twitched, she found them hilarious.

"Excuse me. Could we talk? As hivemates." Cu said to Smile. She had decided it was best to get to know the trickster, since it would hopefully let her get a better idea of what to expect from the unpredictable person.

"Decided to get to know the trickster better, huh? Sure thing." Smile put her show on pause, closing her display.

"Yes. I knew from your dossier you were into alien comedy shows. But I didn't know they could get that..." Cu paused, trying to think of a polite phrasing.

"Weird? Incomprehensible? Yeah, different expectations, different ways to subvert those expectations." Smile popped her display back up and issued a command to jump back in the video. "See this part here? About the X!eng who names all her hatchlings? To them it's absurd because they can't do that when they have countless mothers each lying thousands of eggs in a single go. They usually just dump the eggs in the wilderness and move on. The ones that survive long enough have a chance to get adopted. Only then do they get named. So naming the hatchlings right after they hatch's way too premature."

Cu's antennae curled. "Yes, I'm aware of that, but thinking about it is..."

"Tragic, right? But it's the way they do things out of necessity. Really, this section is kind of black humor." Smile jumped ahead in the video. "We'll skip this bit that's hard to translate wordplay. Okay, here's a joke about the X!eng that came back from the dead and..."

After discussing alien humor for a while, Cu said, "You really know a lot about this stuff. And I feel like I get a few of those jokes now."

"Yeah, I got into it at first because it was weird and didn't make sense? And I found that enjoyable? But then I started making more of a study of it and learned a lot about alien culture and such... Which got me assigned to this team, I guess."

"Or at least on the list I had to pick from."

"Decided a trickster would be useful, huh? Looking at some of what we'll be doing, I can see that. Glad to be of use to the hive."

It was then that Harmony announced they were about to arrive, as an screen appeared showing the nearing flower (identified by her display as a rose) shaped station.

---

Humans were even more strange looking close up, Cu mused as she watched the approaching black haired male human in a flowing red robe with rose shaped motifs picked out in delicate lines of golden thread. The official uniform of the school, from what she'd read. He looked over her and the others then spoke, "Greetings, Cuddle Earth of Great Heavenly Void, I am Pan Liang, Head Dean of the Rose Fields school. It's a honor to have you here."

Cu held her discomfort at the formality in check. From what Gam'd told her, this was their way of showing respect to her hive. She spoke the phrase he had instructed her to say. "Greetings, it is a honor to attend your renowned school."

"It is my pleasure. This student, Awesi, will give you a tour of our facilities, or if you need to rest, show you to your suite." He indicated the darker skinned girl in a similar red robe with white embroidering next to him. "Until we meet again."

With the Dean's departure, Awesi gave a curt nod. "C'mon, let's get this tour over with."

Cu didn't object, nor did the other Myrmidons. This was closer to how the hive did things. The tour through the winding rosy halls of the station came with brief explanations of each stop such as "Library," "Farms. Don't enter without permission," and "Best place to buy kebabs." Cu was certain that last one wasn't an official tour stop, especially since the cook in the food court stall looked rather like an older version of Awesi. Family? But she wasn't about to object since it was just the human showing loyalty to her family. Which Cu could understand. It was like hive loyalty.

"I'll be sure to buy some kebabs from here," Cu said, which got her a small smile in return. Harmony gave her a thumbs up.

The tour drew to a close as they entered the student residential section. "And here are the fancy rooms. This one's yours. All of you're really staying in the one suite?"

"That's what we're comfortable with," Null said.

The suite turned out too extravagantly furnished for the tastes of Cu and the others, so they wound up taking down unnecessary rose themed decor. Quickly, one room was designated as a workshop for Cu and anyone else who might need one, the room with the beds was designated as the sleeping space, and another as a general use room because they didn't know what to do with it.

"This is way too big," Smile said. No one voiced disagreement.

After settling in, Cu completed the student intake paperwork and indicating agreement with the school's rules, then left to wander a little on her terms. Eventually she reached a garden (at least it wasn't full of roses) with some other students mulling around.

---

Who did Cu talk to?

[ ] The squid-like blue speckled X!eng muttering to himself over a disassembled talisman.
[ ] The cat-like red furred Syran cleaning a very peculiar looking gun.
[ ] The tall lithe plant-like Dancer observing the garden while meditating.
[ ] The lizard-shaped voidbeast talking to a held miniature aquarium that felt far bigger than it looked.
[ ] Awesi who was loafing on a bench reading something on her display.

In this quest's era, the Internet and computing are ubiquitous. Even more so than in our world in fact, as mini-computer talismans and even implants are standard practice. Those talismans tap directly into the user's vision, displaying things in their visual field. In other words, augmented reality. As a safeguard, all such talismans, including the implants, can be deactivated physically by the user. So all the references to displays are to windows and the like displayed in the user's vision. Usually you can see that someone is accessing a display but their contents are private to the user alone. However, Myrmidons typically have their displays visible to every member of the same hive. Like most hives, Cu's hive follow the practice of implanting deactivated mini-computers into larvae since it's easier to do it before they grow exoskeletons. Then once they molt into adulthood, the implants are turned on.

The Internet exists, but interplanetary (I'll explain why it's interplanetary not interstellar in another info post) distances cause all sorts of difficulties. Those difficulties have mostly been solved or worked around, but so far no solution allowing continual real-time transmissions between planets, stations, and other such bodies have been found. Each internet infrastructure is hooked up to powerful relay points which beam and receive requested information in batches across the void. So for example, if you try to download a video that isn't available on the local infrastructure, that infrastructure will send the request on the next outward batches to nearby relay points. If the video isn't available on the nearest infrastructures, the requests'll travel outward on the next batches to the next infrastructures on the relay chain. This continues until the video is located, at which point it's sent back on returning batches until it finally reaches your infrastructure so that you can download it. Receiving multiple copies from different infrastructures isn't uncommon, but the infrastructures automatically smooth such things out. Overall, the speed of this process is decent (you would likely get your video in a few minutes at most, more often less than a minute), but it makes real-time streaming across the void and the like virtually impossible.

With the variety of species and cultures out there, language barriers could easily be quite significant. However, translation programs are standard fare on the mini-computer talismans, and they're quite good. They typically feed an understanding of what was just said or read into the user's mind, allowing for relatively seamless communication.

So. Cu's setting isn't exactly like ours. In fact, it has some very significant differences. One being the nature of the void. It's often said that the void is the origin and end of all things, and there's a great deal of truth in this. The void is potential unrealized, and such potential regularly realizes itself, resulting in the creation of voidbeasts, void spirits, and celestial bodies such as planets and stars. A star is born not from stellar matter but rather from potential condensing itself into existence. Planets follow the same pattern, and while most form around stars because of the stars' orderly influence on the nearby void, there're plenty of planets that form without the help of stars. Both stars and planets are living things in a sense, and when they die, they dissolve back into the void that formed them.

Each planet has its own essence, with many planets providing the conditions for life to appear and thrive. It's also not uncommon for planets nearby stars to leech off the star's stray emissions, which relieves the drain on the planet's essence but makes it more dependent on the star. For this reason, planets near stars are known as being more welcoming to life, as they have more essence to spare. Gravity does exist, but there're planets and stars that move against it. Many planets have moons which share the same relationship with the planet as the planet does with its nearby star.

Those with a void affinity are more easily able to move through the void, resulting in domination of the interplanetary transportation industries by them. If there's a pilot, it's someone with a void affinity. The Great Heavenly Void hive, as a result of being entirely void-affiliated, has a mighty fleet for its size, something which it's leveraged often in its history.