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THRONE//FRINGE: Normal Human Mech-Girl Quest

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[X] DOSSIER: BIG'S END.

MR. BIG is not just a powerful figure with an empire the remnants of which are all around us - his delightful idiosyncracies make him fun to read about.
 
Cetashwayo said:
You know the network's dissolving as you sit there paralyzed under the rush of your hyper-efficient adrenaline. That your commander's clawing her eyes out of her head because she's trying to resist. She's trying to fight against probability, against prediction, against the chance that approaches 100 that if you don't attack now, if you don't fire now, on the voidcruiser that you once called an ally, you and everything you know will be terminated, and then they'll come for your backups and your family because they're a threat as well. In an emergency we were coded to practice Total Threat Annihilation. And now FORCE was the threat. You have to do it. You just have to. Everything demands it but the part of you that loves, and that was never our foremost and first priority. Your heart is pumping with the visions of the death that you will have in the microsecond that remains before you make the final choice.
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Damn. That entire interview is absolutely chilling, but this bit in particular? All these proud soldiers, torn apart by their own hyperactive fighting instincts? :sad:

(Fantastic writing. Seriously.)

The more we learn about The Empire, the more... fragile it all seemed. Seemingly invincible in motion, but once it stopped, it shattered.

[X] DOSSIER: BIG'S END.

The enemy of our friend Ishtar's enemy (Axiom Corporation) is also our enemy.
 
Derpmind said:
Damn. That entire interview is absolutely chilling, but this bit in particular? All these proud soldiers, torn apart by their own hyperactive fighting instincts? :sad:
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Well, that's what happens when you optimize for warlike behavior.

You get spartoi, mighty warriors sprung up from dragons' teeth, who are so mighty, so fierce, that with the slightest effort they can be tricked into slaughtering each other and everyone around them.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Well, that's what happens when you optimize for warlike behavior.

You get spartoi, mighty warriors sprung up from dragons' teeth, who are so mighty, so fierce, that with the slightest effort they can be tricked into slaughtering each other and everyone around them.
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Derpmind said:
The more we learn about The Empire, the more... fragile it all seemed. Seemingly invincible in motion, but once it stopped, it shattered.
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In the end, no matter how adaptable, flexible, and capable your institutions and structures and systems are, entropy only has to get lucky once in a period measured in astronomical time.

Is it any wonder, then, that the Empire didn't see a specific neighbor or race, but the very concept of ending, as its ultimate enemy?

But you know the old saying. "You come at the king, you best not miss."
 
[X] DOSSIER: FOLLY OF HOUSE//SUNS

This feels like something important to check out because isn't it HOUSE//VOID that are supposed to be the ones who chase after folly in their hubris, not the engineers of good reliable megastructures in SUNS.
 
[X] DOSSIER: BIG'S END.

It's a difficult choice but MR. BIG is just too much fun not to examine his fate. Even if it didn't serve a strategic purpose by informing of the fate of one of the sector's major power players it would still be worth it for the narrative enjoyment alone.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
In the end, no matter how adaptable, flexible, and capable your institutions and structures and systems are, entropy only has to get lucky once in a period measured in astronomical time.

Is it any wonder, then, that the Empire didn't see a specific neighbor or race, but the very concept of ending, as its ultimate enemy?

But you know the old saying. "You come at the king, you best not miss."
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It certainly didn't help that the Empire deliberately ran continuously on the edge of complete breakdown with their glorification of infighting. Which predictably eventually crossed the line to a chain-self-destruct of furious everyone-against-everyone civil war.
 
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[X] DOSSIER: BIG'S END.

"Too BIG to fail" versus "Too BIG for his britches".

Seems the latter saying got him in the end.

Cetashwayo said:
INTERVIEWER: What about those who did survive?

MAMLUK/HERALD: There were some. The scrabblers. They liked to call themselves brave. The dissenters, legalists, nostalgics. The clingers, clutchers and the self-deluded. But for what we've done the only honest path is termination. Whatever way they've managed to figure out to live with what they've done is the liar's path. The coward's path.

INTERVIEWER: You're still alive.

MAMLUK/HERALD: It was not my choice to be. I drew the shortest straw. But they were afraid that if someone didn't live, if someone didn't remember what had happened, the galaxy might lose our final message. I had always been good at communicating, good at speaking. Once upon a time, that had meant something important. I don't quite remember now, except that I did not do much speaking anywhere, much, towards the end.

INTERVIEWER: And what was the message that they wanted you to carry on?

MAMLUK/HERALD: No paradise that is built by death can live forever.
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I get a feeling like Ak~shara might be a remnant of some FORCE soldier cloning program. Arachne's own narration described Ak~shara's biology as more advanced than the buggy gundam she was piloting. Little meat-people aren't much threat to a reality-warping interstellar dreadnought, but that could be why they weren't blown to oblivion in this suicidal extinction-meltdown.

Maybe everyone else died and the cloning facility got stuck on exactly one setting, and the existing clones don't know how or if it can be modified.

So they've formed a civilization entirely from Ak~sharas. The singular "I" refers to this individual specifically, and the royal "I" refers to all the identical copies who share her biology and neurochemistry. Even if they do have a difference of opinion regarding Arachne.
 
MooseHowl said:
I get a feeling like Ak~shara might be a remnant of some FORCE soldier cloning program. Arachne's own narration described Ak~shara's biology as more advanced than the buggy gundam she was piloting. Little meat-people aren't much threat to a reality-warping interstellar dreadnought, but that could be why they weren't blown to oblivion in this suicidal extinction-meltdown.

Maybe everyone else died and the cloning facility got stuck on exactly one setting, and the existing clones don't know how or if it can be modified.

So they've formed a civilization entirely from Ak~sharas. The singular "I" refers to this individual specifically, and the royal "I" refers to all the identical copies who share her biology and neurochemistry. Even if they do have a difference of opinion regarding Arachne.
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The Empire was more than just FORCE, and there's a pretty wide selection of organizations that could create fairly sophisticated bodies.

So not everything militarized Arachne finds is going to be government-issue, as it were.

mastigos said:
I certainly didn't help that the Empire deliberately ran continuously on the edge of complete breakdown with their glorification of infighting. Which predictably eventually crossed the line to a chain-self-destruct of furious everyone-against-everyone civil war.
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I think given the existence of FORCE and its ability to organize and repel a major threat even after the total decapitation of basically all critical functions of government (and only truly imploded when another major pillar of infrastructure just up and vanished), I think people are assuming a bit more instability and lack of control in the Empire than may be the case.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
I think given the existence of FORCE and its ability to organize and repel a major threat even after the total decapitation of basically all critical functions of government (and only truly imploded when another major pillar of infrastructure just up and vanished), I think people are assuming a bit more instability and lack of control in the Empire than may be the case.
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Especially since I gather that "critical functions of government" in this context include certain important parts of what passes for "physics" in Empire space.
 
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