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A Shrouded Dawn (Warhammer/Stellaris)
- Thread starter Leon12431
- Start date
Anatol: The Chosen One
- Location
- USA
Age: 4 months
Birth Date: 01/01/40,000 (month/day/year)
Mind: Fully formed, beyond Primarch level
Body: Teenager (15 years, Psionic acceleration)
Personal Action Limit
Base: 5 + 10 (Robust)
Currently gaining 2 per month for 5 months
Roll Bonuses for usual usage
Research: 40 (erudite) + 40 (genius)
Psionic Research: 40 (erudite) + 40 (genius) + 80 (Chosen One)
Roll Bonuses for very rare cases
Combat: 80 (Chosen One) + 5 (Strong) + 5 (Dexterous) + 40 (Robust)
Psionic Combat: 80 (Chosen One)
Government: 160 (Chosen One)
Interaction: 160 (Chosen One)
- Ecclesiarchy: Modifier of 2x from Beacon of Light Perk
- Human: Modifier of 2x from Beacon of Light Perk
Tactics: 160 (Chosen One) + 40 (genius) + 40 (erudite)
Appearance
Currently your physical form is that of a idealized Human being with piercing purple eyes and almost radiant golden hair, with alabaster skin.
Narrative Perks
Reader of Echos - echos drift around you, faded yet seen from the corner of your eyes. shinning with soul light even in the darkest reaches of reality, you perceive them and from them gleam secrets. (Anatol can spend Personal Actions to Read the Echos of a place, revealing hidden information and secrets, able to read any language used in the region from any point in time passively)
Shroud Domain - might unmatched lays at your fingertips only waiting for the call to answer your demand. the might of a God made real is no little thing to wield within the mortal realm, but it can change the course of worlds if used properly. (Anatol can spend all of his Actions to complete a Miracle once per century. A Miracle is a completely Freeform action that can be as precise or as generalized as you desire, it has only Five Limits. 1) It can Not give Understanding of technology, 2) it can not reverse time or otherwise affect time's passing, 3) it can not affect the warp, 4) It can only affect a world at most, 5) Narrative Individuals Severely reduce the effectiveness of Miracles regardless of intent)
The Unending March - never can you rest, nor can you stop the march for progress, your duty compels you to move forward and create works of wonder. (Anatol can Overspend actions per turn. He can spend up to 5 extra actions per turn. These actions can not be used for anything but Building/Researching, each overspent action inflicts a narrative malus to next turn, can not be used twice in a row)
The Unmatched Intellect - a million thoughts considered in a second, a billion ideas discard in mere moments. There is none alive today that could match the intellect of Anatol and so he stands above them all. (Anatol gains an Extra Research Action for every multiple of 3 actions he spends on research per turn. For ever research project he adds 1 extra action per multiple of 3 he spends on research, All Intelligence bonuses are Doubled when facing off against Narrative Individuals)
The Chosen One - power beyond power courses through Anatol's body without end, enough power to allow one to emulate a god of a primitive world without issue, enough power to bend the whims of reality to one's side. (Anatol can spend all of his actions to Invoke a Boon of the Shroud upon himself and all psions in the galaxy. The Boons are going to be the Stellaris ones with maybe a few original ones thrown in that give modifiers to roll bonuses, gains the actions Explore the Shroud, Contact the Shroud Gods)
The Unbowed - Anatol looked upon the Gods of the Shroud in their full form and stood unbowed by their might, he listened to their offers and declined them all. Never would he bend the knee to a God, never would he turn aside from the course of his Duty to Humanity, for he is the Champion of the One upon the Golden Throne. (Anatol's very presence upon a world shutters the doorway between the mundane the realm of gods. All creatures born of Gods suffer in his presence. The spawn of Gods are Unmade by his Hand, those that bend the Knee are made to bend the knee to Him. The Gods themselves find themselves Vulnerable to Anatol's Will.)
Birth Date: 01/01/40,000 (month/day/year)
Mind: Fully formed, beyond Primarch level
Body: Teenager (15 years, Psionic acceleration)
Personal Action Limit
Base: 5 + 10 (Robust)
Currently gaining 2 per month for 5 months
Roll Bonuses for usual usage
Research: 40 (erudite) + 40 (genius)
Psionic Research: 40 (erudite) + 40 (genius) + 80 (Chosen One)
Roll Bonuses for very rare cases
Combat: 80 (Chosen One) + 5 (Strong) + 5 (Dexterous) + 40 (Robust)
Psionic Combat: 80 (Chosen One)
Government: 160 (Chosen One)
Interaction: 160 (Chosen One)
- Ecclesiarchy: Modifier of 2x from Beacon of Light Perk
- Human: Modifier of 2x from Beacon of Light Perk
Tactics: 160 (Chosen One) + 40 (genius) + 40 (erudite)
Appearance
Currently your physical form is that of a idealized Human being with piercing purple eyes and almost radiant golden hair, with alabaster skin.
Narrative Perks
Reader of Echos - echos drift around you, faded yet seen from the corner of your eyes. shinning with soul light even in the darkest reaches of reality, you perceive them and from them gleam secrets. (Anatol can spend Personal Actions to Read the Echos of a place, revealing hidden information and secrets, able to read any language used in the region from any point in time passively)
Shroud Domain - might unmatched lays at your fingertips only waiting for the call to answer your demand. the might of a God made real is no little thing to wield within the mortal realm, but it can change the course of worlds if used properly. (Anatol can spend all of his Actions to complete a Miracle once per century. A Miracle is a completely Freeform action that can be as precise or as generalized as you desire, it has only Five Limits. 1) It can Not give Understanding of technology, 2) it can not reverse time or otherwise affect time's passing, 3) it can not affect the warp, 4) It can only affect a world at most, 5) Narrative Individuals Severely reduce the effectiveness of Miracles regardless of intent)
The Unending March - never can you rest, nor can you stop the march for progress, your duty compels you to move forward and create works of wonder. (Anatol can Overspend actions per turn. He can spend up to 5 extra actions per turn. These actions can not be used for anything but Building/Researching, each overspent action inflicts a narrative malus to next turn, can not be used twice in a row)
The Unmatched Intellect - a million thoughts considered in a second, a billion ideas discard in mere moments. There is none alive today that could match the intellect of Anatol and so he stands above them all. (Anatol gains an Extra Research Action for every multiple of 3 actions he spends on research per turn. For ever research project he adds 1 extra action per multiple of 3 he spends on research, All Intelligence bonuses are Doubled when facing off against Narrative Individuals)
The Chosen One - power beyond power courses through Anatol's body without end, enough power to allow one to emulate a god of a primitive world without issue, enough power to bend the whims of reality to one's side. (Anatol can spend all of his actions to Invoke a Boon of the Shroud upon himself and all psions in the galaxy. The Boons are going to be the Stellaris ones with maybe a few original ones thrown in that give modifiers to roll bonuses, gains the actions Explore the Shroud, Contact the Shroud Gods)
The Unbowed - Anatol looked upon the Gods of the Shroud in their full form and stood unbowed by their might, he listened to their offers and declined them all. Never would he bend the knee to a God, never would he turn aside from the course of his Duty to Humanity, for he is the Champion of the One upon the Golden Throne. (Anatol's very presence upon a world shutters the doorway between the mundane the realm of gods. All creatures born of Gods suffer in his presence. The spawn of Gods are Unmade by his Hand, those that bend the Knee are made to bend the knee to Him. The Gods themselves find themselves Vulnerable to Anatol's Will.)
Age: 1 month
Birth Date: 01/01/40,000 (month/day/year)
Mind: Fully formed, beyond Primarch level
Body: Teenager (15 years, Psionic acceleration)
Traits: those marked with a (P) are personal while (S) mean species
Erudite (P)
Robust (P)
Chosen One (P)
Strong (S)
Adaptable (S)
Dexterous (S)
Illumination (P)
Perks
Beacon of Light (Tier 2) - 2x bonus to interaction rolls with Humans and their religion, can Convert with time Xenos to the Light
Furious March (Tier 8) - Once per decade you Can Force the Instant Completion of a Single Technology that is 2 Tiers Below your highest Completed. (This Perk works for Repaired level knowledge, IE if you learn how to Repair a Tier 10 technology you can use this Perk to auto complete the Repair amount for a Tier 8)
Dark Age Technical Understanding (Tier 1) - you can with a minor amount of effort understand the technical language that your distant ancestors used on Olynn. This allows you to repair/reinitialize Dark Age systems that have been locked due to lack of language comprehension on Olynn.
Salvaged Secrets (Tier 2) - when researching technology options gained from examples the lowest possible roll is 50
Master Researcher (Tier 1) - Can stop work on research without losing progress.
Appearance
Currently your physical form is that of a idealized Human being with piercing purple eyes and almost radiant golden hair, with alabaster skin.
Roll Bonuses
Combat: 80 (Chosen One) + 5 (Strong) + 5 (Dexterous) + 40 (Robust)
Psionic Combat: 80 (Chosen One)
Government: 160 (Chosen One)
Interaction: 160 (Chosen One)
- Ecclesiarchy: Modifier of 2x from Beacon of Light Perk
- Human: Modifier of 2x from Beacon of Light Perk
Tactics: 160 (Chosen One) + 40 (genius) + 40 (erudite)
Research: 40 (erudite) + 40 (genius)
Survival: 40 (Robust) + 80 (Chosen One)
Wound Count
Base: 4 + 10 (Robust)
Personal Action Limit
Base: 5 + 10 (Robust)
Currently gaining 2 per month for 5 months
Birth Date: 01/01/40,000 (month/day/year)
Mind: Fully formed, beyond Primarch level
Body: Teenager (15 years, Psionic acceleration)
Traits: those marked with a (P) are personal while (S) mean species
Erudite (P)
Robust (P)
Chosen One (P)
Strong (S)
Adaptable (S)
Dexterous (S)
Illumination (P)
Perks
Beacon of Light (Tier 2) - 2x bonus to interaction rolls with Humans and their religion, can Convert with time Xenos to the Light
Furious March (Tier 8) - Once per decade you Can Force the Instant Completion of a Single Technology that is 2 Tiers Below your highest Completed. (This Perk works for Repaired level knowledge, IE if you learn how to Repair a Tier 10 technology you can use this Perk to auto complete the Repair amount for a Tier 8)
Dark Age Technical Understanding (Tier 1) - you can with a minor amount of effort understand the technical language that your distant ancestors used on Olynn. This allows you to repair/reinitialize Dark Age systems that have been locked due to lack of language comprehension on Olynn.
Salvaged Secrets (Tier 2) - when researching technology options gained from examples the lowest possible roll is 50
Master Researcher (Tier 1) - Can stop work on research without losing progress.
Appearance
Currently your physical form is that of a idealized Human being with piercing purple eyes and almost radiant golden hair, with alabaster skin.
Roll Bonuses
Combat: 80 (Chosen One) + 5 (Strong) + 5 (Dexterous) + 40 (Robust)
Psionic Combat: 80 (Chosen One)
Government: 160 (Chosen One)
Interaction: 160 (Chosen One)
- Ecclesiarchy: Modifier of 2x from Beacon of Light Perk
- Human: Modifier of 2x from Beacon of Light Perk
Tactics: 160 (Chosen One) + 40 (genius) + 40 (erudite)
Research: 40 (erudite) + 40 (genius)
Survival: 40 (Robust) + 80 (Chosen One)
Wound Count
Base: 4 + 10 (Robust)
Personal Action Limit
Base: 5 + 10 (Robust)
Currently gaining 2 per month for 5 months
Last edited:
Your Awakening: Turn 1
- Location
- USA
As you sat in the throne of gold and marble, looking at the four beings of power that had offered their might to you. You knew that this choice was a choice that would shape all of your life to follow suit, there would be no redoing this moment, there would be no alteration this would define in part your life to come.
Thus, as you turned your prodigious mind upon the offers, you found that the Eater of Worlds offered nothing to support for you. You were simply not a warrior born, you were no Angel of Death, you were no grand general, you were no mythical commander of armies. You instead were created for a different purpose.
Your soul had been crafted and infused with the knowledge you knew, to rebuild the Imperium into that which the God Emperor wished to see. You were to be His servant in the perfection of His Imperium. He already had a billion servants guiding his armies and navies across the galaxy, but you were meant to take upon the mantle of the builder.
Thus, you turned to the Eater and with a flex of your will, banished the avatar it had sent from your Demi-realm. You rejected it forevermore, it would never be accepted in your heart, it was forever gone from your future. Its choice blazed with war and that was not your purpose in His grand design.
As the Eater faded away with a scowl upon its face, you turned to the others and thought upon them. Neither Whispers nor the Instrument would serve you will, their offers too weak and restrictive in turn to interest you today. But, they did offer greater things than the Eater could ever hope and so you spoke once more, but not in Their forms but in your own, "Beings of the Shroud, I reject your boons as offered today. In time to come I may accept a boon from you, but the boons offered are not for me." Your voice echoed across your realm as the wraiths of soldiers turned towards the castle as their creator spoke his first proclamation.
"Future/time to be set/certain, choice/decision/outcome known/understood/accepted." The echoing voice of the Whispers in the Void returned as it faded away to return to whence it came.
"Oh Chosen One, your choice rings forth across the sea of time and light. I wish that in time to come you may yet find harmony among the eddies of our essence. Desire chosen, form seen, so it shall be for all of time to come." The song of the Instrument of Desire spoke as it slithered away into the depths of the Shroud, the merry chime of bells and musical instruments of a million worlds fading into silence as it left.
Lastly, your focus turned upon the final of the four, the Composer of Strands. It offered the best for you, but in the end it was still lesser than you would seek from a Boon of such magnitude. "I too reject your offer, Composer. Yet, you are the closest to which I cleave." It made no response for what is there to respond too in such a rejection and instead it simply oozed out of your realm. As it left, your realm quieted down as there was no intrusion to be had and you could think and ponder what you were for the first time.
As the echoes of the four great presences faded, you turned towards what you knew of your physical form. As you looked upon yourself, you realized just how different your two sides were. In the mortal realm, you were but an infant with an active mind, lacking in understanding and nuance. Yet, in your dreams you were a near god that was several steps removed from humanity.
Perhaps, if you had taken a Boon, you would accept this divergence, but such would only weaken you now and here. Thus, you brought to the fore all of your prodigious might and forced unification upon yourself. The melding of mortal and immortal to give rise to a new mind. The awareness of the Shroud mixing with the limited view of the mortal, to give rise to new perspectives.
Your very core changed as you forged yourself anew. Losing the pure fanaticism of your mortal mind, but gaining a vastly expanded viewpoint in turn. Losing a surety of purpose in turn for a guarantee of cause, you lost but gained in equal measure from this working and so you smiled.
Across your realm, the flickering realm stabilized as its lord and master, became whole at last. The ghostly wraiths turning into images of the Angels of Death gleamed from your inferences of the people of your home and their few recollections of the times where a Chapter would harvest the young of Olynn for their numbers. The champions that guard your castle, becoming exalted Angels of light and noble bearing, while within your throne room, out of flickering gold came grand statesman and governors.
Your throne shifted from the purple marble and gold to a simpler affair of solid steel and titanium, spartan in design, function over form for this new throne. The greater throne room shifted around you as you sat upon your now mundane throne into a more proper seating form. As the grand dias upon which you had placed your throne moved from under you to the far end of the chamber upon which a grand throne of gold and wondrous technology formed, in which from the drifting waves of energy a representation of Him formed in solid radiant light.
With a sound that had no sound, the Chosen One and the human named Anatol became one. The clarity of which suffered every inch of your soul and heart, for you had no time to waste and from the Shroud did you gleam the secrets to make your purpose manifest.
You were no mere mortal child, nor were you bound by such limits and so you reached forth and into the realm of your physical body did you reach and you took your form in your astral hands and twisted. Flesh and Bone bent to your will, neurons shifted and grew, the body of an infant grew. Years, seemingly pilled onto your young form, as you tossed aside the weakness of years of growth to begin your work immediately.
You would have no patience to suffer the body of a child for longer than needed and you had no need to wait for nature to give you your finished form. You released your control as your body entered its first decade of age and the process slowed to a crawl from your perspective, yet even so your physical form grew at a stupendous rate that would have made any that had watched declare you a mutant on sight.
But, your conscious was clear for the dictates of the God Emperor said that only genetic and spiritual purity was to be mandated. You were already partially dammed for being born with mutation, so you would willingly take upon further taint to aid yourself in completing the duty for which you were crafted. If you were meant to wait you would soon find yourself rebuked by Him.
As the station's power systems began to cycle signaling another day breaking, you let go of your physical form grown in a flash to the age of fifteen. Now a man fully grown, with strong muscles and hardened flesh covering bones wrought by your own hands. You were not as fragile as the vast majority of humanity, but you still were one of His people.
Now, with your body grown and your mind combined, you were ready and so you stepped forth off of your astral throne and into the material realm once more. As you open your eyes in the material, you notice the lack of strain instantly and smile as you take a look around. Your eyes and newly gleamed knowledge from the Shroud and your own soul, whisper to you secrets of the station, echoes of the past reverberate through its superstructure.
As your eyes trace over the hidden systems within the wall, you know that even with your perception more is hidden from your sight, but you gleam much from just what you see. With a simple effort of will, your father's glasses are brought to you and when you place them on your nose, the world explodes once more. Runes dance along your sight as the glasses calibrate to your senses and your mind begins to work on the language drifting across your sight.
Within only mere seconds, you have connected the runes to the writing system that you knew from the papers that litter your home. Reverse engineering the pimples from what you know to that which you don't, over twenty thousand years of divergence crunched and given shape in a mere moment as your brain tears through the simple codes of the language. Aided vastly by the surprising lack of divergence in truth, due you believe to the general plenty of such relics.
Perhaps, on another world you wouldn't be so lucky, but on Olynn you know that your father and mother could be trusted to know at least a few words from the relics of the past. As the runes drift into comprehension, you choke back a laugh at just what you are wearing and how different it stands to what your memories say should be.
The glasses are no such thing, instead they are a complex system built into transparent Adamantium, with circuitry formed from specially treated gold and iron molded at the atomic level to ensure a proper bonding with the outer-casing. All of this was in order to give the wearer, the ability to control the magnification and diagnostic systems integrated into the headset by eye movements. With the cogitator core being inserted in the bridge of the nose.
This single item, was something you simply weren't prepared to encounter. It could do basically anything you could think of in a handheld scanner and do it better than you thought possible. As you flicked through the systems it offered, noting with some surprise the total lack of machine spirit interference, you found that it had somehow gotten stuck on the absolute most basic diagnostic runtime.
It took less than five more minutes to unlock its systems and to be able to actually begin to properly use the system and the moment it did. Errors invaded your sight. Everything you turned to see was riddled with errors, nothing was in proper state, everything was broken to it. Blazing runes traced line after line across your eyes as its systems came alive and you could only stare at the sheer amount of things wrong with the station.
The strain of metal under weight drew you from your stupor at the sheer amount of issues that the visor could find in this smallish room alone. "Well, seems that Lysa got her wish. Although, in the worst possible way for her." Your father spoke from the doorway as he looked at you, with quirked lips.
As you turned towards him, not sure of what to do, he spoke again, "Its pretty clear that you are my son, after all your color palette is non standard. I knew full well when I got roped into this project of her's that you would be a powerful psyker if everything went to plan." He rubbed his eyes as he spoke, "It seems that it did, based on your accelerated growth. Now, I was never sure of what I was going to do as a parent and I highly doubt that you particularly need a parent as an infant does.
So, lets do something a bit more useful of our time. You can keep the visor for now, Emperor knows that I know basically everything they have to say." He said as he stomped over to the wall, where a small glass of water rested.
You were not sure of what to do in this moment, but you figured that a response of some form was correct. "The visor is an Architectural Structural Diagnostic Cogitator. Primarily designed to function in extreme locations for the construction of habitation systems in such environments.
It had ended up locked into basic diagnostic mode. I unlocked it and reset it to the manufactorum setting." You were expecting a moment of surprise, your father instead nearly fell to the floor in shock, only saved from such as you lifted his body with your psychic power.
"You managed to unlock the visors? I never thought I would live to see the day in which someone could fix it. We have records of thousands of years and the visor is commonly mentioned as being the key item in the survival of Olynn, but I never could figure out how they were so useful.
The visor for me was only useful for finding gaps in the walls, the records though speak as if they could find the smallest flaw in the smallest compartment of the station from afar. The records are incomplete but the few we have from that time talk of the loss of the visor as a death sentence.
How, how did you recover something lost for eons?" His voice was broken with emotion as he stared at you as if he had never seen you before, which on reflection you considered that might be true in a sense. But as he spoke, his voice only became ever more confused and stressed as he stared at you, coming near a breaking point.
"By His will, I am more than a normal human. To me the letters that the visors presented were easy enough to decode from our written language, which in turn came from our spoken language.
With that I was able to partially learn the rituals needed to unlock the visors once more." You speak once more and you find that the act of speaking is unpleasant in a way, its cumbersome and inelegant compared to what you just know telepathy would be.
Your father, just stared at you before falling into laughter. He rolled on the floor laughing as he banged into the chairs and tables, before you managed to pick him up. "Decades of effort to learn a single of their words, and you decode it all in less than an hour." Seizing your neck in a grip at odds with his seemingly fragile body he hissed.
"Son, Anatol, whatever you do, don't tell the Adeptus Mechanicus about this. They will claim the visor in an instant if they knew what it was. Hide what you know from anyone that you don't know to be trustworthy." Using your body as a lever he pulled himself up to stare at your face and smiled a broken smile.
"I never wanted to be a father, but now that I am, I wish that you needed a father. Son, we might not be able to have a true familial bond, but I will be by your side if you will let me. I might not be your equal in any field, but I am the best worker on Olynn that isnt of the Adeptus Mechanicus."
You found the sight of your father, so broken by the heights to which you have soared in such a short time to be remarkably unpleasant, you don't understand why he thinks he can't be family to you. You don't understand why he is so unsteady, he seemed so solid yesterday when he fought your mother for your right to life. Now, he seems like a broken shell of that man, you just don't understand why.
Reaching out towards him with your powers, you could feel something there, a bright spark of bouncing energy that lived over his shoulder. You knew that it was his soul and mind, but it was both beyond your reach and within your grasp. Yet, you couldn't reach for it, there was a shell of unbreakable force guarding it from your touch, but you knew that it had a chance of helping him if you could touch it.
"Son, please talk to me, by the Emperor, I am tired. Nine months of suffering Lysa's insanity and now being rejected by my own son. Why? Emperor, is this my punishment for taking part in her project." His voice broke even more as he whispered under his breath recriminations against himself, you knew that he was not a particularly faithful man to the particulars, willing to let any live provided they weren't too far gone, giving aid to the mutant even those that bore major deformities brought about by random genetic mutation.
But, this was wrong to you, you wished to understand him and wanted to comfort him, but you were too far from his understanding, your confusion was taken as a rejection of him. You reached once more towards his soul and found that in this moment the shell protecting it had fallen. You could feel that something was nearing it on the other side and so acted with haste, you tore it free and reached into your shroud realm where the glittering jewel of your father's soul came to rest.
In a moment your mind expanded forth and connected to his. A torrent of emotion lashed outward as you felt his sheer exhaustion, the effort that he had to spend protecting the people of the station from Lysa's mood swings, his ever present sense of defeat as the station comes ever closer to annihilation. A normal man would have stumbled under the sheer amount of despair that your father had held for decades, yet he bore it and thrived in a sense.
You could feel his happiness buried under decades of despair and hopelessness at having a family, you could finally understand people on a personal level. A smile formed on your perfect face as you found holes in your knowledge patched by his.
"No. Father, I might have aged my physical body to its physical peak, but I lack general understanding. I lack much in truth, we might not be a normal family, but we can be a family." You said as you hugged his crying form to your chest, letting him finally relaxed after decades of holding in his emotions. You knew that he was glad for the chance to let go of his weight and that was enough for you to continue to hold him.
Hours later, the two of you were sitting at the table, relaxed for once, his soul shinning in your Demi-realm safe and sound behind the legions of noble astartes. "What do we need to worry about" You asked your father deferring to him for his sheer skill with Olynn's systems was more than enough to make up any lack on his end in intelligence.
"We need to fix the station as the primary goal. With the visor repaired it should be easy enough to determine the issues at hand, however, the larger issue is the supplies that repairs will cost.
Furthermore, the Adeptus Mechanicus, will be a constant nuisance once they realize what is going on which is certain due to needing to buy highly complex parts from forge worlds. We might have to give away a few of our less useful items to buy what we need.
As for the station itself, I personally believe that the conversion systems are the most critical to repair first due to them being the primary method for stabilizing the greater station's temperature. However, Lysa is correct in that power will be an issue, so we need a better power source than the current set of small Starcell reactors that currently power everything"
As he finished speaking you leaned back in your chair to consider his statements. On one hand you had to weigh the chance of bias to be affecting his decision making process, but in the end everything he said would have to be done anyway. So bias wouldn't matter in the end, so then it came down to figuring out what to focus on repairing first and getting the resources in order to do so.
"If we do end up requiring resources, how do you plan on buying them? Also, isnt there a fairly good chance that the parts would be archeotech in and of themselves?" You question him, but with the release of stress he simply smiled.
"The turn of the decade is coming within this year, if we need any small complex Plasada part, we will have plenty soon this year. Our concern needs to be on the larger bulk material that we don't have the room to grow in sufficient amounts.
"Adamantium for one is a highly limited metal and most of it is used in patching the various holes that form in the hull on a near daily basis now. Other than adamantium, the most precious is Plastitan, which we have an even smaller supply of than adamantium. Basically, our supply issues aren't in the complex, but in the bulk materials that simply aren't something our local Metallum Gramen can grow in sufficient amounts.
"Expanding the Metallum Gramen might be a worthwhile investment if we can figure out how to expand the growth medium. Of course everything hinges on the visor being usable again to what my ancestors claim it could do. Without them, I am not sure even with your innate abilities we would be able to do anything of note." Your father stared down at the table as he considered what he had said and you did the same as you thought things through and came to a decision.
Month Long Turn (you have a total of 5 actions to spend on any set of options)
Stellaris Research - Can choose up to 3 things, Locks them until completed (research)
Note that any research that would use exotic materials in its construction will require the methods of their creation as a prerequisite
Station Examination (research/other)
-[] construct basic station map
-[] identify the weakest systems
-[] identify station power situation
People Interaction (interaction)
-[] Eliza
-[] Lysa
-[] Astein
-[] Just wander around with your father for a bit, maybe you will find some interesting people
Shroud exploration (psionic)
-[] try to figure out what you did to your father's soul
-[] see if your shroud realm is useful for anything in the material realm
-[] try to understand the nature of the shroud
Thus, as you turned your prodigious mind upon the offers, you found that the Eater of Worlds offered nothing to support for you. You were simply not a warrior born, you were no Angel of Death, you were no grand general, you were no mythical commander of armies. You instead were created for a different purpose.
Your soul had been crafted and infused with the knowledge you knew, to rebuild the Imperium into that which the God Emperor wished to see. You were to be His servant in the perfection of His Imperium. He already had a billion servants guiding his armies and navies across the galaxy, but you were meant to take upon the mantle of the builder.
Thus, you turned to the Eater and with a flex of your will, banished the avatar it had sent from your Demi-realm. You rejected it forevermore, it would never be accepted in your heart, it was forever gone from your future. Its choice blazed with war and that was not your purpose in His grand design.
As the Eater faded away with a scowl upon its face, you turned to the others and thought upon them. Neither Whispers nor the Instrument would serve you will, their offers too weak and restrictive in turn to interest you today. But, they did offer greater things than the Eater could ever hope and so you spoke once more, but not in Their forms but in your own, "Beings of the Shroud, I reject your boons as offered today. In time to come I may accept a boon from you, but the boons offered are not for me." Your voice echoed across your realm as the wraiths of soldiers turned towards the castle as their creator spoke his first proclamation.
"Future/time to be set/certain, choice/decision/outcome known/understood/accepted." The echoing voice of the Whispers in the Void returned as it faded away to return to whence it came.
"Oh Chosen One, your choice rings forth across the sea of time and light. I wish that in time to come you may yet find harmony among the eddies of our essence. Desire chosen, form seen, so it shall be for all of time to come." The song of the Instrument of Desire spoke as it slithered away into the depths of the Shroud, the merry chime of bells and musical instruments of a million worlds fading into silence as it left.
Lastly, your focus turned upon the final of the four, the Composer of Strands. It offered the best for you, but in the end it was still lesser than you would seek from a Boon of such magnitude. "I too reject your offer, Composer. Yet, you are the closest to which I cleave." It made no response for what is there to respond too in such a rejection and instead it simply oozed out of your realm. As it left, your realm quieted down as there was no intrusion to be had and you could think and ponder what you were for the first time.
As the echoes of the four great presences faded, you turned towards what you knew of your physical form. As you looked upon yourself, you realized just how different your two sides were. In the mortal realm, you were but an infant with an active mind, lacking in understanding and nuance. Yet, in your dreams you were a near god that was several steps removed from humanity.
Perhaps, if you had taken a Boon, you would accept this divergence, but such would only weaken you now and here. Thus, you brought to the fore all of your prodigious might and forced unification upon yourself. The melding of mortal and immortal to give rise to a new mind. The awareness of the Shroud mixing with the limited view of the mortal, to give rise to new perspectives.
Your very core changed as you forged yourself anew. Losing the pure fanaticism of your mortal mind, but gaining a vastly expanded viewpoint in turn. Losing a surety of purpose in turn for a guarantee of cause, you lost but gained in equal measure from this working and so you smiled.
Across your realm, the flickering realm stabilized as its lord and master, became whole at last. The ghostly wraiths turning into images of the Angels of Death gleamed from your inferences of the people of your home and their few recollections of the times where a Chapter would harvest the young of Olynn for their numbers. The champions that guard your castle, becoming exalted Angels of light and noble bearing, while within your throne room, out of flickering gold came grand statesman and governors.
Your throne shifted from the purple marble and gold to a simpler affair of solid steel and titanium, spartan in design, function over form for this new throne. The greater throne room shifted around you as you sat upon your now mundane throne into a more proper seating form. As the grand dias upon which you had placed your throne moved from under you to the far end of the chamber upon which a grand throne of gold and wondrous technology formed, in which from the drifting waves of energy a representation of Him formed in solid radiant light.
With a sound that had no sound, the Chosen One and the human named Anatol became one. The clarity of which suffered every inch of your soul and heart, for you had no time to waste and from the Shroud did you gleam the secrets to make your purpose manifest.
You were no mere mortal child, nor were you bound by such limits and so you reached forth and into the realm of your physical body did you reach and you took your form in your astral hands and twisted. Flesh and Bone bent to your will, neurons shifted and grew, the body of an infant grew. Years, seemingly pilled onto your young form, as you tossed aside the weakness of years of growth to begin your work immediately.
You would have no patience to suffer the body of a child for longer than needed and you had no need to wait for nature to give you your finished form. You released your control as your body entered its first decade of age and the process slowed to a crawl from your perspective, yet even so your physical form grew at a stupendous rate that would have made any that had watched declare you a mutant on sight.
But, your conscious was clear for the dictates of the God Emperor said that only genetic and spiritual purity was to be mandated. You were already partially dammed for being born with mutation, so you would willingly take upon further taint to aid yourself in completing the duty for which you were crafted. If you were meant to wait you would soon find yourself rebuked by Him.
As the station's power systems began to cycle signaling another day breaking, you let go of your physical form grown in a flash to the age of fifteen. Now a man fully grown, with strong muscles and hardened flesh covering bones wrought by your own hands. You were not as fragile as the vast majority of humanity, but you still were one of His people.
Now, with your body grown and your mind combined, you were ready and so you stepped forth off of your astral throne and into the material realm once more. As you open your eyes in the material, you notice the lack of strain instantly and smile as you take a look around. Your eyes and newly gleamed knowledge from the Shroud and your own soul, whisper to you secrets of the station, echoes of the past reverberate through its superstructure.
As your eyes trace over the hidden systems within the wall, you know that even with your perception more is hidden from your sight, but you gleam much from just what you see. With a simple effort of will, your father's glasses are brought to you and when you place them on your nose, the world explodes once more. Runes dance along your sight as the glasses calibrate to your senses and your mind begins to work on the language drifting across your sight.
Within only mere seconds, you have connected the runes to the writing system that you knew from the papers that litter your home. Reverse engineering the pimples from what you know to that which you don't, over twenty thousand years of divergence crunched and given shape in a mere moment as your brain tears through the simple codes of the language. Aided vastly by the surprising lack of divergence in truth, due you believe to the general plenty of such relics.
Perhaps, on another world you wouldn't be so lucky, but on Olynn you know that your father and mother could be trusted to know at least a few words from the relics of the past. As the runes drift into comprehension, you choke back a laugh at just what you are wearing and how different it stands to what your memories say should be.
The glasses are no such thing, instead they are a complex system built into transparent Adamantium, with circuitry formed from specially treated gold and iron molded at the atomic level to ensure a proper bonding with the outer-casing. All of this was in order to give the wearer, the ability to control the magnification and diagnostic systems integrated into the headset by eye movements. With the cogitator core being inserted in the bridge of the nose.
This single item, was something you simply weren't prepared to encounter. It could do basically anything you could think of in a handheld scanner and do it better than you thought possible. As you flicked through the systems it offered, noting with some surprise the total lack of machine spirit interference, you found that it had somehow gotten stuck on the absolute most basic diagnostic runtime.
It took less than five more minutes to unlock its systems and to be able to actually begin to properly use the system and the moment it did. Errors invaded your sight. Everything you turned to see was riddled with errors, nothing was in proper state, everything was broken to it. Blazing runes traced line after line across your eyes as its systems came alive and you could only stare at the sheer amount of things wrong with the station.
The strain of metal under weight drew you from your stupor at the sheer amount of issues that the visor could find in this smallish room alone. "Well, seems that Lysa got her wish. Although, in the worst possible way for her." Your father spoke from the doorway as he looked at you, with quirked lips.
As you turned towards him, not sure of what to do, he spoke again, "Its pretty clear that you are my son, after all your color palette is non standard. I knew full well when I got roped into this project of her's that you would be a powerful psyker if everything went to plan." He rubbed his eyes as he spoke, "It seems that it did, based on your accelerated growth. Now, I was never sure of what I was going to do as a parent and I highly doubt that you particularly need a parent as an infant does.
So, lets do something a bit more useful of our time. You can keep the visor for now, Emperor knows that I know basically everything they have to say." He said as he stomped over to the wall, where a small glass of water rested.
You were not sure of what to do in this moment, but you figured that a response of some form was correct. "The visor is an Architectural Structural Diagnostic Cogitator. Primarily designed to function in extreme locations for the construction of habitation systems in such environments.
It had ended up locked into basic diagnostic mode. I unlocked it and reset it to the manufactorum setting." You were expecting a moment of surprise, your father instead nearly fell to the floor in shock, only saved from such as you lifted his body with your psychic power.
"You managed to unlock the visors? I never thought I would live to see the day in which someone could fix it. We have records of thousands of years and the visor is commonly mentioned as being the key item in the survival of Olynn, but I never could figure out how they were so useful.
The visor for me was only useful for finding gaps in the walls, the records though speak as if they could find the smallest flaw in the smallest compartment of the station from afar. The records are incomplete but the few we have from that time talk of the loss of the visor as a death sentence.
How, how did you recover something lost for eons?" His voice was broken with emotion as he stared at you as if he had never seen you before, which on reflection you considered that might be true in a sense. But as he spoke, his voice only became ever more confused and stressed as he stared at you, coming near a breaking point.
"By His will, I am more than a normal human. To me the letters that the visors presented were easy enough to decode from our written language, which in turn came from our spoken language.
With that I was able to partially learn the rituals needed to unlock the visors once more." You speak once more and you find that the act of speaking is unpleasant in a way, its cumbersome and inelegant compared to what you just know telepathy would be.
Your father, just stared at you before falling into laughter. He rolled on the floor laughing as he banged into the chairs and tables, before you managed to pick him up. "Decades of effort to learn a single of their words, and you decode it all in less than an hour." Seizing your neck in a grip at odds with his seemingly fragile body he hissed.
"Son, Anatol, whatever you do, don't tell the Adeptus Mechanicus about this. They will claim the visor in an instant if they knew what it was. Hide what you know from anyone that you don't know to be trustworthy." Using your body as a lever he pulled himself up to stare at your face and smiled a broken smile.
"I never wanted to be a father, but now that I am, I wish that you needed a father. Son, we might not be able to have a true familial bond, but I will be by your side if you will let me. I might not be your equal in any field, but I am the best worker on Olynn that isnt of the Adeptus Mechanicus."
You found the sight of your father, so broken by the heights to which you have soared in such a short time to be remarkably unpleasant, you don't understand why he thinks he can't be family to you. You don't understand why he is so unsteady, he seemed so solid yesterday when he fought your mother for your right to life. Now, he seems like a broken shell of that man, you just don't understand why.
Reaching out towards him with your powers, you could feel something there, a bright spark of bouncing energy that lived over his shoulder. You knew that it was his soul and mind, but it was both beyond your reach and within your grasp. Yet, you couldn't reach for it, there was a shell of unbreakable force guarding it from your touch, but you knew that it had a chance of helping him if you could touch it.
"Son, please talk to me, by the Emperor, I am tired. Nine months of suffering Lysa's insanity and now being rejected by my own son. Why? Emperor, is this my punishment for taking part in her project." His voice broke even more as he whispered under his breath recriminations against himself, you knew that he was not a particularly faithful man to the particulars, willing to let any live provided they weren't too far gone, giving aid to the mutant even those that bore major deformities brought about by random genetic mutation.
But, this was wrong to you, you wished to understand him and wanted to comfort him, but you were too far from his understanding, your confusion was taken as a rejection of him. You reached once more towards his soul and found that in this moment the shell protecting it had fallen. You could feel that something was nearing it on the other side and so acted with haste, you tore it free and reached into your shroud realm where the glittering jewel of your father's soul came to rest.
In a moment your mind expanded forth and connected to his. A torrent of emotion lashed outward as you felt his sheer exhaustion, the effort that he had to spend protecting the people of the station from Lysa's mood swings, his ever present sense of defeat as the station comes ever closer to annihilation. A normal man would have stumbled under the sheer amount of despair that your father had held for decades, yet he bore it and thrived in a sense.
You could feel his happiness buried under decades of despair and hopelessness at having a family, you could finally understand people on a personal level. A smile formed on your perfect face as you found holes in your knowledge patched by his.
"No. Father, I might have aged my physical body to its physical peak, but I lack general understanding. I lack much in truth, we might not be a normal family, but we can be a family." You said as you hugged his crying form to your chest, letting him finally relaxed after decades of holding in his emotions. You knew that he was glad for the chance to let go of his weight and that was enough for you to continue to hold him.
Hours later, the two of you were sitting at the table, relaxed for once, his soul shinning in your Demi-realm safe and sound behind the legions of noble astartes. "What do we need to worry about" You asked your father deferring to him for his sheer skill with Olynn's systems was more than enough to make up any lack on his end in intelligence.
"We need to fix the station as the primary goal. With the visor repaired it should be easy enough to determine the issues at hand, however, the larger issue is the supplies that repairs will cost.
Furthermore, the Adeptus Mechanicus, will be a constant nuisance once they realize what is going on which is certain due to needing to buy highly complex parts from forge worlds. We might have to give away a few of our less useful items to buy what we need.
As for the station itself, I personally believe that the conversion systems are the most critical to repair first due to them being the primary method for stabilizing the greater station's temperature. However, Lysa is correct in that power will be an issue, so we need a better power source than the current set of small Starcell reactors that currently power everything"
As he finished speaking you leaned back in your chair to consider his statements. On one hand you had to weigh the chance of bias to be affecting his decision making process, but in the end everything he said would have to be done anyway. So bias wouldn't matter in the end, so then it came down to figuring out what to focus on repairing first and getting the resources in order to do so.
"If we do end up requiring resources, how do you plan on buying them? Also, isnt there a fairly good chance that the parts would be archeotech in and of themselves?" You question him, but with the release of stress he simply smiled.
"The turn of the decade is coming within this year, if we need any small complex Plasada part, we will have plenty soon this year. Our concern needs to be on the larger bulk material that we don't have the room to grow in sufficient amounts.
"Adamantium for one is a highly limited metal and most of it is used in patching the various holes that form in the hull on a near daily basis now. Other than adamantium, the most precious is Plastitan, which we have an even smaller supply of than adamantium. Basically, our supply issues aren't in the complex, but in the bulk materials that simply aren't something our local Metallum Gramen can grow in sufficient amounts.
"Expanding the Metallum Gramen might be a worthwhile investment if we can figure out how to expand the growth medium. Of course everything hinges on the visor being usable again to what my ancestors claim it could do. Without them, I am not sure even with your innate abilities we would be able to do anything of note." Your father stared down at the table as he considered what he had said and you did the same as you thought things through and came to a decision.
Month Long Turn (you have a total of 5 actions to spend on any set of options)
Stellaris Research - Can choose up to 3 things, Locks them until completed (research)
Note that any research that would use exotic materials in its construction will require the methods of their creation as a prerequisite
-[] Blue Lasers (T1)
-[] Fusion Power (T1)
-[] Improved Reactors (T1)
-[] Hyperspace Discovery (T5)
-[] Field Modulation (T1)
-[] Global Energy Management (T1)
-[] Deflectors (T0 250 cost)
-[] Active Countermeasures (T0)
-[] Scientific Method (T5)
-[] Gravtic Sensors (T2)
-[] Volatile Material Plants (T2)
-[] Bio-reactor (T2)
-[] Fusion Power (T1)
-[] Improved Reactors (T1)
-[] Hyperspace Discovery (T5)
-[] Field Modulation (T1)
-[] Global Energy Management (T1)
-[] Deflectors (T0 250 cost)
-[] Active Countermeasures (T0)
-[] Scientific Method (T5)
-[] Gravtic Sensors (T2)
-[] Volatile Material Plants (T2)
-[] Bio-reactor (T2)
-[] Hydroponics (example exists on Olynn, T0)
-[] Gene Crops (example exists on Olynn, T2)
-[] Genetic Mapping (example exists on Olynn T0)
-[] Gene Tailoring (example exists on Olynn T3)
-[] Psionic Theory (Anatol exists, T4)
-[] Gene Crops (example exists on Olynn, T2)
-[] Genetic Mapping (example exists on Olynn T0)
-[] Gene Tailoring (example exists on Olynn T3)
-[] Psionic Theory (Anatol exists, T4)
-[] Industrial Base (T5)
-[] Unanchored Construction (T3)
-[] Weather Control Systems (T2)
-[] Nanocomposite materials (T0)
-[] Flak Battery (T0)
-[] Afterburners (T1)
-[] Ion Thrusters (T2)
-[] Unanchored Construction (T3)
-[] Weather Control Systems (T2)
-[] Nanocomposite materials (T0)
-[] Flak Battery (T0)
-[] Afterburners (T1)
-[] Ion Thrusters (T2)
Station Examination (research/other)
-[] construct basic station map
-[] identify the weakest systems
-[] identify station power situation
People Interaction (interaction)
-[] Eliza
-[] Lysa
-[] Astein
-[] Just wander around with your father for a bit, maybe you will find some interesting people
Shroud exploration (psionic)
-[] try to figure out what you did to your father's soul
-[] see if your shroud realm is useful for anything in the material realm
-[] try to understand the nature of the shroud
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Becoming More
- Location
- USA
Your first month of life was interesting for you on several levels. You quickly learned from your father on the rather strange norms that most humans lived under, for one you could not truly understand their need for eight to ten hours of sleep per twenty four hour cycle which was apparently the standard Imperium time system. In some moments of confusion you pondered what that system would do to a world that had a rather different rotational speed, from Holy Terra.
Regardless of strange questions of imperial oddities, you focused mostly on figuring out what was wrong with Olynn and your father along with the ASDC both aided your mission on this front. The ASDC more so than your father, due to their archeotech secrets that could peer through the very hull of the station to illuminate the rooms barred to your passage through various means. As you worked to create a map of the station, the more you filled in the more your father grumbled at what was revealed.
It was apparently somehow worse than he had ever expected, several systems were all but gone and one of the most critical was the Heat Conversion Field system. This was quite clearly the reason for around seventy percent of the station being unlivable due to temperatures in high thousands. The system was apparently tied into the internal sensor arrays and as it detected malfunctions growing in scale over the eons, had slowly reduced its coverage until it only covered the places where humans were still living. Both a testament to the wonders of the Ancients, but also an example of the flawed nature of Abominable Intelligence for it had done nothing to attempt to slow the core degradation which was the true issue, the emitters were in functioning order. The core on the other hand was being overstressed due to the loss of propulsion from the anchor plates or the back up thruster arrays.
From what you could piece together, the entirety of Olynn station was an interconnected network that had no true primary node that managed everything, instead it was an interconnected mess. It was in your father's words; "Designed by a moron that expected everything to go perfectly. By the God Emperor, I hope the fool is suffering now." Although you are not sure that is a reasonable stance to take given the sheer lifespan of the station before any of these issues cropped up, it is true insofar as it goes in regards to repairing the station.
Thankfully, your father did manage to dig out what he promptly labeled the Primary Core Systems. That was both a worthy lesson of any proper Emperor fearing man, for even you were bested by a mortal man with nothing but a mind and experience. This event although a sting to your forming pride was a good reminder of why humanity was the proper ruler of the galaxy.
The Primary Core Systems as your father named them were the systems that were effectively required for the station to be functional, if only barely. The single most critical of them all were the Heat Conversion Fields, due to the risk that any more damage could see the entire station burn to a crisp. Yet, after them came the primary power supply channel, that was a puzzle for both of you. You at least got the general concept of the power core, but the implementation was bizarre, your father although a genius by any standards was not your equal in all fields and couldn't make heads or tails of the baseline idea of the reactor core, which was concerning.
Although, as you threw together rough schematics of the primary power core, you couldn't help but wonder why the Ancients would bother to use what could only be described as Annihilation reactors. The concepts and the base line ideas that gave the information behind the idea were sound from your few hours of effort on outlining their efforts, but what stumped you was why. You could see no reason that they couldn't have simply expanded the Starcell Reactors tenfold to reach the same general energy production. The only plausible reason you could find, was that the Annihilation Reactors were less obvious than their counterparts, which was true considering they wouldn't produce heat if properly shield with heat conversion fields. Which only lead back into the greater issue of the station at hand, everything was interconnected.
The Heat Conversion system shielded the primary power core by converting the energy release into proper electricity with near to no loss. That was then funneled through the Heat Conversion system's integrated batteries to power the Kinetic conversion fields that served as a nearly unbreakable shield against incoming damage and also provided another major supply of energy. That in turn feed into the Starcell Reactors to maintain their energy output, which then got joined into a single power stream to power the rest of Olynn. In the end nearly every single system that could produce power helped power the station.
At least your father finally realized just why Olynn was built where it was, during this time. He told you during one of the many hours you were working that he wondered just what the Ancients had been thinking when they decided to build Olynn inside a near brown dwarf star. When your models showed just why, he stopped working and then declared he had a headache before leaving to sleep some.
Even though it was a good thing to figure out how the station got its power, it was still an absolute pain to actually map the station. With seventy percent of the station by volume, either collapsed, fully exposed to near stellar fusion temperatures or some combination of the two it was an absolute miracle by the God Emperor that you managed to get anything akin to a map over the course of a solid month.
In the end you did find that the station was roughly cubic in nature although not perfectly. Olynn as a whole was built as a group of connected yet free floating cubes. The main one, where you lived was the largest by far, but surrounded by twenty other cubes of varying size. However, although useful, it wasn't particularly useful save for the fact that you learned that there were human enclaves in some cubes that had long since been considered to be dead.
A smile creeps over your face as you remember your father dancing with joy at that news, that there were people to save. For you it was a somber realization of just how far the God Emperor's realm had fallen, and how much you had to do to rebuild it to a fitting level. Yet, if it was easy, He wouldn't have created you. In the end, it neatly explained just why the Heat Conversion system was so overtaxed, as it unlike the Kinetic system wasn't able to maintain a full spherical shell anymore and instead was making much smaller shells that were simply less efficient for the cost. Perhaps, you mused if you could repair the primary power core the Heat system could remanifest a proper sphere and by extension reduce the strain on the system.
Yet, before any such plans could be made, you had to first deal with the simple issues that the scale of Olynn presented. By your measurements, Olynn as a whole covered some one billion cubic kilometers, with roughly sixty percent of that space open rooms, of that sixty percent, seventy percent was unreachable due to various issues. Leaving a grand total of only one hundred fifty cubic kilometers of free room within the station towards the tops of the various cubes. Which was plenty of space for the five hundred odd million people that called Olynn home, but it also cast a pall over the station as everyone knew why they had so little room compared to the bulk of the station.
Which lead into the greatest reason that you were currently desperately to try to find something to do. Although, unlike most worlds, Olynn lacked a hard and fast government, being more free form there were still laws that were harshly enforced. The most pressing of which was the unstated law that no one was to bring in a child due to the station falling to its doom in only a few decades. No one on the station lacked the needed knowledge to willingly bring a new life that would inevitably fall into the God Emperor's embrace far too early. Your parents were oddities for much the same reason, their parents had gotten permission from the community to have children in the hope that their children would halt the descent. From that hope the best of the best gave birth to two children. The best Speakers and the best Workers had one child apiece, Lysa and Orsion respectively. They then had you for much the same reason, at least that was the official stance. You knew that unofficially there were a good number of children living in the lower less seen areas of the station being raised by parents that had entered exile due to their choice to have children.
The issue at hand and you were desperately trying to avoid was that your father, knew about this and fully supported them. Yet, due to their unofficial status they weren't checked for mutation at birth. You were afraid that you would have to burn children to ash if you met them face to face. Currently, hiding in your room as you were you could ignore the possibly of there being mutants in the depths that needed the touch of His fire to purge. But if you were there you wouldn't be able to stand back and not enforce His decrees upon them.
Your door slid open as your father entered the room, before placing a hand on your shoulder, "Son, I understand your fear. It took me a long time to come to understand why I act as I do. I don't understand why He declared that all mutants were to be killed and half the time I don't believe that those were His orders.
I have found over my life that its more important to know how a person acts, than how close they cleave to the genetic baseline. I know people that are on the very edge of summary purging and yet they are some of the kindest people I know. All I ask is that you keep your views to yourself and make no rash judgments.
To me the question is what is true Humanity? Perhaps, its a sin of mine that the God Emperor will strike me down when I die, but I can't take a single number as proof of a lack of humanity. Perhaps its a sin, that I will one day be burned for, but all the same, I view all as human until they prove me otherwise." His voice was somber as memories drifted across his soul in your vision of people bearing visible mutation giving gifts to others, letting their own belongings be given away checked for any taint and finding none as they died willingly to place less strain on the station as a whole.
Your conviction of His Truth did not waver, but you had to ask yourself, just what was true Humanity. You had seen actions of horrors that your father had shared with you of past events, the glorified blood sports that the Angels of Death forced Olynn to preform when they came. Children killing each other under the gaze of transhuman warriors, tearing their own peers apart with bear hands to prove themselves worthy. Was that any more human than a person born with an extra limb or organ? What made the atrocities that the Imperium committed more human than a person born mutated.
Where did the line between Humanity and Inhumanity lie, where did the divide fall. Your mind raced with the questions as you pondered the topic even as you stared at the wall. You could not, would not throw away His teachings, but what were His and what were His preachers version of them. You knew that there was no possible way for His words to remain whole and undefiled after ten thousand years of Him being entombed upon Holy Terra, but where did that line fall.
Were you willing to possibly step over that line? With a shake of your head you dismissed those thoughts for now. You would follow what his preachers preached for theirs was one of the oldest continuations of history in the Imperium, their work would be by default cleave the closest to His desires. As you put down your drawings and maps, you let your father pull you from the room and into the light of the station's atrium.
It was always a glorious sight, a massive room with windows of transparent adamantium that gave a view of the swirling gases of the world of Olynn. The dance of the infinite storm that the station hovered within was spectacular at the moment, clouds of gases all the colors of the rainbow dancing in winds thousands of kilometers per hour. Bolts of lightning the size of entire worlds flashing through out the distant clouds, the ambient glow of the sheer heat of Olynn silhouetting all in a light orange. It was a sight that could never fail to show just how far the Ancients had ascended if they had managed to tame even this world for life within its atmosphere.
But, it was also a harsh reminder of just how hostile the world outside the walls was. There was no safety upon Olynn that wasn't built long ago. If the station failed there was no recourse, that simple fact turned this room from a place of relaxation and complementation of the wonders of the past, into a room that served as the unofficial temple to the God Emperor. Yet, the prayers spoken in this room, were of a different type than in the more typical chapels for within this room, everyone prayed for more time to live before the collapse of Olynn would happen.
Shaking the thoughts from your mind, you follow your father downward into the deeper bowls of the station. Leaving the sight of the world beyond, for the moment to instead learn of how those in the under levels lived in these times. As you descended, you could feel the temperature spiking, for a normal human it would be unnoticeable but for you, it was as clear as the storms beyond the walls. The heat conversion system was preparing to collapse to an even smaller amount and it would soon. Yet, you knew that it had little more to drop and those that were inside of the to be lost zones would burn to death in an instant.
A fate that was the worst of both worlds. They would die too fast for their sins to be purged by the fire if they had any that would be purged in such a way, but for those that didn't need the touch of the flames they would die all the same. Innocent or guilty all would burn to ash in a moment, leaving both unrewarded with their just reward. The guilty would avoid the proper punishment for their crimes against Him, while the innocent would die before their time. Yet, you knew that the odds of being able to repair the Heat Conversion system before it was too late were slim to none even for yourself.
You could feel your father's stress rising as he lead you through a maze of corridors that seemed to never end. For a normal human it would have been nearly impossible to track their location, but for you it was impossible to lose direction. You could feel the magnetic field of the world, you could sense the gravitational gradients of the emitters all around you, you could feel the spark of life that gave you direction and even more esoteric senses that effectively made it impossible for you to lose track of your path.
For an hour you walked, until you reached a massive door that slid open at the touch of your father. Beyond, you saw for the first time the life of those that lived in exile lived. Above, Olynn was pristine, the floors were completely immaculate, the people you knew and saw were clean just the same. But beyond these doors it was a different realm, the people were caked in filth, dust and grime tarnished the works of the Ancients. Yet, for all of their lost cleanliness, you could feel that the majority was unconcerned about such lack, even with the depths of their thoughts barred to you, enough leaked through that you knew that they considered the grime a fine cost for the ability to have families.
As you slipped through the door, you saw for the first time in your life, children running through the grime caked room. You knew intellectually that you were most likely the one that had lived for the shortest time, but you couldn't equate that with the difference between you and a normal child. You could feel thousands of sparks of minds that had a sense of energy and change that others lacked, you easily determined that that was the difference between a child and a grown man. Their minds radiated a sense of energy that was lacking in the older minds, from the sparks of energy you knew that there was a grand total of six thousand one hundred and seventy children between the ages of one and fourteen within this single region of Olynn station.
As you walked after your father through the grime filled halls, with filth caking everything in sight, you let your mind reach out to him. 'Why is this part of the station not clean.' You received a sigh from him in reply, 'Mostly due to Lysa's work, she is the closest thing we have to a ruler on this station. Her word is second only to that of Eliza, yet the problem is that Eliza never commands or uses her God Emperor given power to take power for herself. She is fully concerned with the spiritual health of us, but she has no wish to hold secular power over the station.
'This leaves Lysa as the only voice of true influence within the station. She ran the numbers and decided that children were too much of a resource drain to produce for what they would provide in exchange to the station. After she had reached that conclusion, she ordered her personal apothecaries to introduce anti fertility drugs into Olynn's growing vats and water systems.
'The drugs weren't properly tested nor approved by Astein, so instead of preventing any more children from being conceived, they did that and turned any growing fetus into biological sludge that permanently removed any hope of having children from anyone that was with child at the time. Her only defense was that it was the expedient and only correct method by which to extend the length of time we had.' His mind speech echoed with suppressed emotion as rage built in his mind as his hands clenched into fists.
'If she was anyone else, she would have been torn limb from limb, but since she was and is, the only person that can possibly restore the station. She just became even more hated.' Your father snapped in his mind as he slammed a fist into the metal of the wall. It was clear that you had underestimated the sheer depths of his hatred for Lysa.
'Why did she create such a drug?' You prod him, for it was odd indeed for you knew your mother could easily create a much more friendly drug for the same purpose.
"Entirely, for her absolutely STUPID ideology. She Hates and Loathes the very concept of Human life! It took me close to a Decade to figure that out, but she truly one hundred percent loathes the very concept of human life. There is no Doubt in my Mind that if she could, she would eliminate all humans in the galaxy, with the single exception of the God Emperor.
"She doesn't know, but I have heard her speak in times when she thinks she isn't being observed and it is terrifying on a fundamental level. I know that I am possibly a heretic for caring of mutants and seeking to defend people's right to have their children even if they happen to have mutations.
"Lysa on the other hand, she glories in every chance to kill a human possible. I have seen her talk to herself about how to convince Astein and Eliza that the only allowed or proper divergence is one tenth of a percent from human baseline. A level that would effectively see almost every single person condemned to death at birth. She sees no purpose in life save to protect technology, she doesn't follow the ideals of the Adeptus Mechanicus, nor the ideals of the past as much as we can tell. She instead believes that technology, the fundamental idea of technology is supreme and that only a machine has the right to grant life to anything.
"She has tried several times in her life to buy the methods of servitor making from the few times the Tech Priests come to us. Entirely to turn her most trusted subordinates into lobotomized robots, as a reward for their service to her.
"That is why I am convinced that she took hidden glee in permanently sterilizing over five million women in a single day and another few million over the course of a year." Your father's voice roared as he slammed his fists into the nearby wall as he spoke. The rage and fury at the concepts your questions had dragged to the surface more than apparent.
Growling, with a face locked into a deep scowl, your father threw a hand at a wall, and a burst of purple energy erupted from his palm. As the energy surged you could feel the shroud responding and with that a question was answered, but more were gained.
"Orsion is here." A jubilant cheer drew your focus from your father over to a group of small children that had somehow snuck up on you. "Ah there you are, you little rascals." You turned to see your father among the group of small children, playing with them as he let them crawl over his body, careless of getting his clothes dirty.
It was strange. Laughter in such a dreary place, but the happiness of your father couldn't be missed as he bounced the children around on his arms, or let them crawl up his legs for a bit. All the while smiling as the cloud of anger that your questions had brought upon him drifted away as if it had never been.
As you turned to look upon the children, you began to pick out mutations on their forms. None of them bore large mutations, but all of them were divergent. One of the five had small scales growing on her arms, pearlescent and light blue. While one of the boys had claws on the tips of his fingers. All of the five had such mutations and you considered turning them to cinders for they were obviously further than only five percent divergent from the norm, which would place them more than certainly into being a mutant by His law and thus to be executed by any of His proper servants.
But, you couldn't bring yourself to do so. You could feel your father's happiness as he played with the young children and ignored the sight of their mutations, after the conversation you couldn't bring yourself to do the proper thing, the right thing. You could feel the Shroud at your back ready to lend you the power to burn the mutants into cinders, but you couldn't call upon the power at the moment. You were paralyzed in choice between two extremes, on one side lay His priests and their Holy words written by His hand and fulfilled by His desire, on the other a mere human that saw creatures that were only one step removed from the alien as human.
In the light of logic the choice was clear, for as much as your father was important to you, he was in the grand scheme of things but a human. What could a human do that would compare to the light of the God Emperor, by all rights you should burn this wretched hive of mutation to cinders and then purge your father for the crime of aiding and abetting the mutants.
But, you couldn't see the horror inside the children. You knew what to expect for a mutant; a slobbering beast little more than an animal of countless limbs and bestial thoughts, unable to pass as a human. You knew that mutants were horrors, that bore no resemblance to humanity, they were condemned to death for the crime of not being human. They were to be animals pure and simple, things that were deviations. Horrors of mutation that could only come from a human parent due to unrestricted genetic tampering or even worst methods.
You knew that you yourself was a mutant by definition, but you never truly accepted that stance. For you were young, but also because it was simple coloration. You were no mutant, you bore no extra limbs, no extra organs, no malformed flesh, no twisted thoughts. You were human and thus not a mutant. But, these children that are laughing as they play with your father in grime caked hallways are labeled as mutants, but all of them bear no sign of mutation to your eyes now that you look upon them in truth.
You were blinded by your preconceived notions of what a mutant was. You were expecting to find a horde of beasts, that your father cared for as one might a pet, instead you found people like yourself, divergent from the grand template of humanity but still quintessential human. As you reach forth to their souls, you find that their souls drifting in the astral plane free of anything that would mark them as other.
'Father, what is a mutant?' You ask as you look upon their souls, you hope for a clear answer for you were simply not prepared to see children that you could so easily have been one of, if He had chosen differently.
'A mutant, is a human that is born with a divergent genetic code. Nothing more or less. I am sorry, I should have asked you before we came down here, what you knew of mutants. You have read all of the horror stories of mutants didn't you?' Your father's mental voice was strangely calm instead of being emotion filled as was his norm, but you simply affirmed his expectations.
'No wonder you were so agitated when I brought you down here. Listen, the vast majority of mutants are like you or like the five you see before me. Maybe there is one in ten thousand births that bear an extra limb or organ of any note. The true mutants are often killed by their own parents in the early days of their lives, leaving what you see before you. Near human children that bear only the faintest of marks.' As he answered you processed this new information into what you already knew and came to a realization of sorts.
You drew upon the Shroud, blazing with psionic might as you unleash your fury into the mortal realm for the first time. The timeline unfolds before your very eyes, the past and present and future converge in your sight and yet more is shown to you. You look upon your actions modeling the effects of each with the most you know for you could not see the future echoes of the children in front of you. Through the corridors of time you flash, through a million temporal jaunts do you take to see how time might unfold from your choices, yet even imperfect as your working, you see enough.
Thus, time resets as you push yourself free from the ground, blazing with ethereal light. Tendrils of flame spark to life in your hands, as in your mind sigils of power burn bright, for you are the Chosen One and now you take upon the mantle of the power fully. The tendrils of spectral flame, burn into great conflagrations, you hear your father screaming in your mind but you silence him with but a thought. The now massive orb of spectral flame, orbiting around you and then you unleashed it bound to your will.
Fire exploded forth without bound, tendrils of flame burning into the walls engravings of power that would anchor your might. Through the hallways of the station does your fire race, grime and filth burning away in the golden radiance of the new dawn you bring to bear. Your flames race forth consuming all that is unclean in their path, you feel souls burn in your radiance as filth that had layered itself upon their souls burn away even as several more souls joined your father's in your Shroud realm, ripped forth by your burning will to see His Will be done.
As the flames fade away as the last of the station was burned clean of filth, you let yourself drop to the ground with a huff of exertion. The five children were huddling with your father's arms around them. "Anatol, you better have a very good reason for that." You flinched at the menace, as your father's words almost felt as if they should strip the flesh from your bones. Before you could begin to scramble for an answer, one of the children spoke up, "That was amazing! Syra can't do that." One of the young boys chirped as the last of your flames faded away before grabbing your hand and dragging you deeper into the network of hallways. To your surprise the child guided you through the maze with no issue you could note, even though all of the walls were identical even to your sight and only via your esoteric senses did you know where you were.
"How do you know the path?" You ask the young child dragging you along, only for him to stare at you with an expression of total disbelief on his young face, "Crossing five, with side run seven, over eight, under three. Duh. Perhaps you aren't a Saint, a Saint would know."
You turn and begin to think on what the child had said, crossing five could relate easily enough to crossing the glowing lines in the floor and how they snaked between differing points. If you used those as points, then side run would be moving alongside the lines, while over eight would then inform you that you go over the primary line for eight sets of intersections and then under three intersections of the primary.
A cumbersome, but workable system of navigation. Impressive for a child of six to understand and obviously be competent in its use. As you pondered on the source of the rather strange mapping method, your guide came to a stop releasing your hand even as he knocked at a door.
"Syra open up. Someone better than you is here." The door slide open with a groan of metal as a young face peered outward. "Go away. No magic for you." The girl snapped at the boy before turning to close the door, before the boy slipped a foot between door and frame, "Nope, we found a better magic person. So you are useless." You twitched uncomfortably as you were not sure what to do in this event and you knew your father was glaring at you still so you had no idea of what to do.
"Yes? I don't care. Leave me alone!." At the last word, you could feel something twisting into real space, it was not the Shroud. It was something much much worse, it tore apart the barriers between realms, it let through energies that should not be. You could feel filth caking itself back onto the newly pristine walls as the energy sought to ravage the world, no the universe.
You would not let it, blazing with prismatic radiance you slammed the door shut. Layers of Shroud energy lacing itself tightly across the wound newly torn into the fabric of reality. Syra flinched as your work came to completion, falling backward from the door as she screamed in pain as spectral flames raced through her body. You could feel her body ripping itself apart and you stepped forward once more and tore her soul free of the Warp and placed it into the Shroud as the barrier around her soul had fallen.
The moment the exchange occurred her form stabilized, flesh repairing itself. "Quiet. Silent, peaceful." Syra whispered under her breath as she slumped on the floor with no sign of moving soon.
"Well, son. I think you might have just saved us from a future true mutant. Good job, although-" Your father spoke before slamming a hand into the back of your head, "you terrified me when you started conjuring fire. The children might not realize it, but fire has certain themes when associated with the mutant." The last was whispered into your ear even as he grinned over your shoulder at the six children.
Regardless of strange questions of imperial oddities, you focused mostly on figuring out what was wrong with Olynn and your father along with the ASDC both aided your mission on this front. The ASDC more so than your father, due to their archeotech secrets that could peer through the very hull of the station to illuminate the rooms barred to your passage through various means. As you worked to create a map of the station, the more you filled in the more your father grumbled at what was revealed.
It was apparently somehow worse than he had ever expected, several systems were all but gone and one of the most critical was the Heat Conversion Field system. This was quite clearly the reason for around seventy percent of the station being unlivable due to temperatures in high thousands. The system was apparently tied into the internal sensor arrays and as it detected malfunctions growing in scale over the eons, had slowly reduced its coverage until it only covered the places where humans were still living. Both a testament to the wonders of the Ancients, but also an example of the flawed nature of Abominable Intelligence for it had done nothing to attempt to slow the core degradation which was the true issue, the emitters were in functioning order. The core on the other hand was being overstressed due to the loss of propulsion from the anchor plates or the back up thruster arrays.
From what you could piece together, the entirety of Olynn station was an interconnected network that had no true primary node that managed everything, instead it was an interconnected mess. It was in your father's words; "Designed by a moron that expected everything to go perfectly. By the God Emperor, I hope the fool is suffering now." Although you are not sure that is a reasonable stance to take given the sheer lifespan of the station before any of these issues cropped up, it is true insofar as it goes in regards to repairing the station.
Thankfully, your father did manage to dig out what he promptly labeled the Primary Core Systems. That was both a worthy lesson of any proper Emperor fearing man, for even you were bested by a mortal man with nothing but a mind and experience. This event although a sting to your forming pride was a good reminder of why humanity was the proper ruler of the galaxy.
The Primary Core Systems as your father named them were the systems that were effectively required for the station to be functional, if only barely. The single most critical of them all were the Heat Conversion Fields, due to the risk that any more damage could see the entire station burn to a crisp. Yet, after them came the primary power supply channel, that was a puzzle for both of you. You at least got the general concept of the power core, but the implementation was bizarre, your father although a genius by any standards was not your equal in all fields and couldn't make heads or tails of the baseline idea of the reactor core, which was concerning.
Although, as you threw together rough schematics of the primary power core, you couldn't help but wonder why the Ancients would bother to use what could only be described as Annihilation reactors. The concepts and the base line ideas that gave the information behind the idea were sound from your few hours of effort on outlining their efforts, but what stumped you was why. You could see no reason that they couldn't have simply expanded the Starcell Reactors tenfold to reach the same general energy production. The only plausible reason you could find, was that the Annihilation Reactors were less obvious than their counterparts, which was true considering they wouldn't produce heat if properly shield with heat conversion fields. Which only lead back into the greater issue of the station at hand, everything was interconnected.
The Heat Conversion system shielded the primary power core by converting the energy release into proper electricity with near to no loss. That was then funneled through the Heat Conversion system's integrated batteries to power the Kinetic conversion fields that served as a nearly unbreakable shield against incoming damage and also provided another major supply of energy. That in turn feed into the Starcell Reactors to maintain their energy output, which then got joined into a single power stream to power the rest of Olynn. In the end nearly every single system that could produce power helped power the station.
At least your father finally realized just why Olynn was built where it was, during this time. He told you during one of the many hours you were working that he wondered just what the Ancients had been thinking when they decided to build Olynn inside a near brown dwarf star. When your models showed just why, he stopped working and then declared he had a headache before leaving to sleep some.
Even though it was a good thing to figure out how the station got its power, it was still an absolute pain to actually map the station. With seventy percent of the station by volume, either collapsed, fully exposed to near stellar fusion temperatures or some combination of the two it was an absolute miracle by the God Emperor that you managed to get anything akin to a map over the course of a solid month.
In the end you did find that the station was roughly cubic in nature although not perfectly. Olynn as a whole was built as a group of connected yet free floating cubes. The main one, where you lived was the largest by far, but surrounded by twenty other cubes of varying size. However, although useful, it wasn't particularly useful save for the fact that you learned that there were human enclaves in some cubes that had long since been considered to be dead.
A smile creeps over your face as you remember your father dancing with joy at that news, that there were people to save. For you it was a somber realization of just how far the God Emperor's realm had fallen, and how much you had to do to rebuild it to a fitting level. Yet, if it was easy, He wouldn't have created you. In the end, it neatly explained just why the Heat Conversion system was so overtaxed, as it unlike the Kinetic system wasn't able to maintain a full spherical shell anymore and instead was making much smaller shells that were simply less efficient for the cost. Perhaps, you mused if you could repair the primary power core the Heat system could remanifest a proper sphere and by extension reduce the strain on the system.
Yet, before any such plans could be made, you had to first deal with the simple issues that the scale of Olynn presented. By your measurements, Olynn as a whole covered some one billion cubic kilometers, with roughly sixty percent of that space open rooms, of that sixty percent, seventy percent was unreachable due to various issues. Leaving a grand total of only one hundred fifty cubic kilometers of free room within the station towards the tops of the various cubes. Which was plenty of space for the five hundred odd million people that called Olynn home, but it also cast a pall over the station as everyone knew why they had so little room compared to the bulk of the station.
Which lead into the greatest reason that you were currently desperately to try to find something to do. Although, unlike most worlds, Olynn lacked a hard and fast government, being more free form there were still laws that were harshly enforced. The most pressing of which was the unstated law that no one was to bring in a child due to the station falling to its doom in only a few decades. No one on the station lacked the needed knowledge to willingly bring a new life that would inevitably fall into the God Emperor's embrace far too early. Your parents were oddities for much the same reason, their parents had gotten permission from the community to have children in the hope that their children would halt the descent. From that hope the best of the best gave birth to two children. The best Speakers and the best Workers had one child apiece, Lysa and Orsion respectively. They then had you for much the same reason, at least that was the official stance. You knew that unofficially there were a good number of children living in the lower less seen areas of the station being raised by parents that had entered exile due to their choice to have children.
The issue at hand and you were desperately trying to avoid was that your father, knew about this and fully supported them. Yet, due to their unofficial status they weren't checked for mutation at birth. You were afraid that you would have to burn children to ash if you met them face to face. Currently, hiding in your room as you were you could ignore the possibly of there being mutants in the depths that needed the touch of His fire to purge. But if you were there you wouldn't be able to stand back and not enforce His decrees upon them.
Your door slid open as your father entered the room, before placing a hand on your shoulder, "Son, I understand your fear. It took me a long time to come to understand why I act as I do. I don't understand why He declared that all mutants were to be killed and half the time I don't believe that those were His orders.
I have found over my life that its more important to know how a person acts, than how close they cleave to the genetic baseline. I know people that are on the very edge of summary purging and yet they are some of the kindest people I know. All I ask is that you keep your views to yourself and make no rash judgments.
To me the question is what is true Humanity? Perhaps, its a sin of mine that the God Emperor will strike me down when I die, but I can't take a single number as proof of a lack of humanity. Perhaps its a sin, that I will one day be burned for, but all the same, I view all as human until they prove me otherwise." His voice was somber as memories drifted across his soul in your vision of people bearing visible mutation giving gifts to others, letting their own belongings be given away checked for any taint and finding none as they died willingly to place less strain on the station as a whole.
Your conviction of His Truth did not waver, but you had to ask yourself, just what was true Humanity. You had seen actions of horrors that your father had shared with you of past events, the glorified blood sports that the Angels of Death forced Olynn to preform when they came. Children killing each other under the gaze of transhuman warriors, tearing their own peers apart with bear hands to prove themselves worthy. Was that any more human than a person born with an extra limb or organ? What made the atrocities that the Imperium committed more human than a person born mutated.
Where did the line between Humanity and Inhumanity lie, where did the divide fall. Your mind raced with the questions as you pondered the topic even as you stared at the wall. You could not, would not throw away His teachings, but what were His and what were His preachers version of them. You knew that there was no possible way for His words to remain whole and undefiled after ten thousand years of Him being entombed upon Holy Terra, but where did that line fall.
Were you willing to possibly step over that line? With a shake of your head you dismissed those thoughts for now. You would follow what his preachers preached for theirs was one of the oldest continuations of history in the Imperium, their work would be by default cleave the closest to His desires. As you put down your drawings and maps, you let your father pull you from the room and into the light of the station's atrium.
It was always a glorious sight, a massive room with windows of transparent adamantium that gave a view of the swirling gases of the world of Olynn. The dance of the infinite storm that the station hovered within was spectacular at the moment, clouds of gases all the colors of the rainbow dancing in winds thousands of kilometers per hour. Bolts of lightning the size of entire worlds flashing through out the distant clouds, the ambient glow of the sheer heat of Olynn silhouetting all in a light orange. It was a sight that could never fail to show just how far the Ancients had ascended if they had managed to tame even this world for life within its atmosphere.
But, it was also a harsh reminder of just how hostile the world outside the walls was. There was no safety upon Olynn that wasn't built long ago. If the station failed there was no recourse, that simple fact turned this room from a place of relaxation and complementation of the wonders of the past, into a room that served as the unofficial temple to the God Emperor. Yet, the prayers spoken in this room, were of a different type than in the more typical chapels for within this room, everyone prayed for more time to live before the collapse of Olynn would happen.
Shaking the thoughts from your mind, you follow your father downward into the deeper bowls of the station. Leaving the sight of the world beyond, for the moment to instead learn of how those in the under levels lived in these times. As you descended, you could feel the temperature spiking, for a normal human it would be unnoticeable but for you, it was as clear as the storms beyond the walls. The heat conversion system was preparing to collapse to an even smaller amount and it would soon. Yet, you knew that it had little more to drop and those that were inside of the to be lost zones would burn to death in an instant.
A fate that was the worst of both worlds. They would die too fast for their sins to be purged by the fire if they had any that would be purged in such a way, but for those that didn't need the touch of the flames they would die all the same. Innocent or guilty all would burn to ash in a moment, leaving both unrewarded with their just reward. The guilty would avoid the proper punishment for their crimes against Him, while the innocent would die before their time. Yet, you knew that the odds of being able to repair the Heat Conversion system before it was too late were slim to none even for yourself.
You could feel your father's stress rising as he lead you through a maze of corridors that seemed to never end. For a normal human it would have been nearly impossible to track their location, but for you it was impossible to lose direction. You could feel the magnetic field of the world, you could sense the gravitational gradients of the emitters all around you, you could feel the spark of life that gave you direction and even more esoteric senses that effectively made it impossible for you to lose track of your path.
For an hour you walked, until you reached a massive door that slid open at the touch of your father. Beyond, you saw for the first time the life of those that lived in exile lived. Above, Olynn was pristine, the floors were completely immaculate, the people you knew and saw were clean just the same. But beyond these doors it was a different realm, the people were caked in filth, dust and grime tarnished the works of the Ancients. Yet, for all of their lost cleanliness, you could feel that the majority was unconcerned about such lack, even with the depths of their thoughts barred to you, enough leaked through that you knew that they considered the grime a fine cost for the ability to have families.
As you slipped through the door, you saw for the first time in your life, children running through the grime caked room. You knew intellectually that you were most likely the one that had lived for the shortest time, but you couldn't equate that with the difference between you and a normal child. You could feel thousands of sparks of minds that had a sense of energy and change that others lacked, you easily determined that that was the difference between a child and a grown man. Their minds radiated a sense of energy that was lacking in the older minds, from the sparks of energy you knew that there was a grand total of six thousand one hundred and seventy children between the ages of one and fourteen within this single region of Olynn station.
As you walked after your father through the grime filled halls, with filth caking everything in sight, you let your mind reach out to him. 'Why is this part of the station not clean.' You received a sigh from him in reply, 'Mostly due to Lysa's work, she is the closest thing we have to a ruler on this station. Her word is second only to that of Eliza, yet the problem is that Eliza never commands or uses her God Emperor given power to take power for herself. She is fully concerned with the spiritual health of us, but she has no wish to hold secular power over the station.
'This leaves Lysa as the only voice of true influence within the station. She ran the numbers and decided that children were too much of a resource drain to produce for what they would provide in exchange to the station. After she had reached that conclusion, she ordered her personal apothecaries to introduce anti fertility drugs into Olynn's growing vats and water systems.
'The drugs weren't properly tested nor approved by Astein, so instead of preventing any more children from being conceived, they did that and turned any growing fetus into biological sludge that permanently removed any hope of having children from anyone that was with child at the time. Her only defense was that it was the expedient and only correct method by which to extend the length of time we had.' His mind speech echoed with suppressed emotion as rage built in his mind as his hands clenched into fists.
'If she was anyone else, she would have been torn limb from limb, but since she was and is, the only person that can possibly restore the station. She just became even more hated.' Your father snapped in his mind as he slammed a fist into the metal of the wall. It was clear that you had underestimated the sheer depths of his hatred for Lysa.
'Why did she create such a drug?' You prod him, for it was odd indeed for you knew your mother could easily create a much more friendly drug for the same purpose.
"Entirely, for her absolutely STUPID ideology. She Hates and Loathes the very concept of Human life! It took me close to a Decade to figure that out, but she truly one hundred percent loathes the very concept of human life. There is no Doubt in my Mind that if she could, she would eliminate all humans in the galaxy, with the single exception of the God Emperor.
"She doesn't know, but I have heard her speak in times when she thinks she isn't being observed and it is terrifying on a fundamental level. I know that I am possibly a heretic for caring of mutants and seeking to defend people's right to have their children even if they happen to have mutations.
"Lysa on the other hand, she glories in every chance to kill a human possible. I have seen her talk to herself about how to convince Astein and Eliza that the only allowed or proper divergence is one tenth of a percent from human baseline. A level that would effectively see almost every single person condemned to death at birth. She sees no purpose in life save to protect technology, she doesn't follow the ideals of the Adeptus Mechanicus, nor the ideals of the past as much as we can tell. She instead believes that technology, the fundamental idea of technology is supreme and that only a machine has the right to grant life to anything.
"She has tried several times in her life to buy the methods of servitor making from the few times the Tech Priests come to us. Entirely to turn her most trusted subordinates into lobotomized robots, as a reward for their service to her.
"That is why I am convinced that she took hidden glee in permanently sterilizing over five million women in a single day and another few million over the course of a year." Your father's voice roared as he slammed his fists into the nearby wall as he spoke. The rage and fury at the concepts your questions had dragged to the surface more than apparent.
Growling, with a face locked into a deep scowl, your father threw a hand at a wall, and a burst of purple energy erupted from his palm. As the energy surged you could feel the shroud responding and with that a question was answered, but more were gained.
"Orsion is here." A jubilant cheer drew your focus from your father over to a group of small children that had somehow snuck up on you. "Ah there you are, you little rascals." You turned to see your father among the group of small children, playing with them as he let them crawl over his body, careless of getting his clothes dirty.
It was strange. Laughter in such a dreary place, but the happiness of your father couldn't be missed as he bounced the children around on his arms, or let them crawl up his legs for a bit. All the while smiling as the cloud of anger that your questions had brought upon him drifted away as if it had never been.
As you turned to look upon the children, you began to pick out mutations on their forms. None of them bore large mutations, but all of them were divergent. One of the five had small scales growing on her arms, pearlescent and light blue. While one of the boys had claws on the tips of his fingers. All of the five had such mutations and you considered turning them to cinders for they were obviously further than only five percent divergent from the norm, which would place them more than certainly into being a mutant by His law and thus to be executed by any of His proper servants.
But, you couldn't bring yourself to do so. You could feel your father's happiness as he played with the young children and ignored the sight of their mutations, after the conversation you couldn't bring yourself to do the proper thing, the right thing. You could feel the Shroud at your back ready to lend you the power to burn the mutants into cinders, but you couldn't call upon the power at the moment. You were paralyzed in choice between two extremes, on one side lay His priests and their Holy words written by His hand and fulfilled by His desire, on the other a mere human that saw creatures that were only one step removed from the alien as human.
In the light of logic the choice was clear, for as much as your father was important to you, he was in the grand scheme of things but a human. What could a human do that would compare to the light of the God Emperor, by all rights you should burn this wretched hive of mutation to cinders and then purge your father for the crime of aiding and abetting the mutants.
But, you couldn't see the horror inside the children. You knew what to expect for a mutant; a slobbering beast little more than an animal of countless limbs and bestial thoughts, unable to pass as a human. You knew that mutants were horrors, that bore no resemblance to humanity, they were condemned to death for the crime of not being human. They were to be animals pure and simple, things that were deviations. Horrors of mutation that could only come from a human parent due to unrestricted genetic tampering or even worst methods.
You knew that you yourself was a mutant by definition, but you never truly accepted that stance. For you were young, but also because it was simple coloration. You were no mutant, you bore no extra limbs, no extra organs, no malformed flesh, no twisted thoughts. You were human and thus not a mutant. But, these children that are laughing as they play with your father in grime caked hallways are labeled as mutants, but all of them bear no sign of mutation to your eyes now that you look upon them in truth.
You were blinded by your preconceived notions of what a mutant was. You were expecting to find a horde of beasts, that your father cared for as one might a pet, instead you found people like yourself, divergent from the grand template of humanity but still quintessential human. As you reach forth to their souls, you find that their souls drifting in the astral plane free of anything that would mark them as other.
'Father, what is a mutant?' You ask as you look upon their souls, you hope for a clear answer for you were simply not prepared to see children that you could so easily have been one of, if He had chosen differently.
'A mutant, is a human that is born with a divergent genetic code. Nothing more or less. I am sorry, I should have asked you before we came down here, what you knew of mutants. You have read all of the horror stories of mutants didn't you?' Your father's mental voice was strangely calm instead of being emotion filled as was his norm, but you simply affirmed his expectations.
'No wonder you were so agitated when I brought you down here. Listen, the vast majority of mutants are like you or like the five you see before me. Maybe there is one in ten thousand births that bear an extra limb or organ of any note. The true mutants are often killed by their own parents in the early days of their lives, leaving what you see before you. Near human children that bear only the faintest of marks.' As he answered you processed this new information into what you already knew and came to a realization of sorts.
You drew upon the Shroud, blazing with psionic might as you unleash your fury into the mortal realm for the first time. The timeline unfolds before your very eyes, the past and present and future converge in your sight and yet more is shown to you. You look upon your actions modeling the effects of each with the most you know for you could not see the future echoes of the children in front of you. Through the corridors of time you flash, through a million temporal jaunts do you take to see how time might unfold from your choices, yet even imperfect as your working, you see enough.
Thus, time resets as you push yourself free from the ground, blazing with ethereal light. Tendrils of flame spark to life in your hands, as in your mind sigils of power burn bright, for you are the Chosen One and now you take upon the mantle of the power fully. The tendrils of spectral flame, burn into great conflagrations, you hear your father screaming in your mind but you silence him with but a thought. The now massive orb of spectral flame, orbiting around you and then you unleashed it bound to your will.
Fire exploded forth without bound, tendrils of flame burning into the walls engravings of power that would anchor your might. Through the hallways of the station does your fire race, grime and filth burning away in the golden radiance of the new dawn you bring to bear. Your flames race forth consuming all that is unclean in their path, you feel souls burn in your radiance as filth that had layered itself upon their souls burn away even as several more souls joined your father's in your Shroud realm, ripped forth by your burning will to see His Will be done.
As the flames fade away as the last of the station was burned clean of filth, you let yourself drop to the ground with a huff of exertion. The five children were huddling with your father's arms around them. "Anatol, you better have a very good reason for that." You flinched at the menace, as your father's words almost felt as if they should strip the flesh from your bones. Before you could begin to scramble for an answer, one of the children spoke up, "That was amazing! Syra can't do that." One of the young boys chirped as the last of your flames faded away before grabbing your hand and dragging you deeper into the network of hallways. To your surprise the child guided you through the maze with no issue you could note, even though all of the walls were identical even to your sight and only via your esoteric senses did you know where you were.
"How do you know the path?" You ask the young child dragging you along, only for him to stare at you with an expression of total disbelief on his young face, "Crossing five, with side run seven, over eight, under three. Duh. Perhaps you aren't a Saint, a Saint would know."
You turn and begin to think on what the child had said, crossing five could relate easily enough to crossing the glowing lines in the floor and how they snaked between differing points. If you used those as points, then side run would be moving alongside the lines, while over eight would then inform you that you go over the primary line for eight sets of intersections and then under three intersections of the primary.
A cumbersome, but workable system of navigation. Impressive for a child of six to understand and obviously be competent in its use. As you pondered on the source of the rather strange mapping method, your guide came to a stop releasing your hand even as he knocked at a door.
"Syra open up. Someone better than you is here." The door slide open with a groan of metal as a young face peered outward. "Go away. No magic for you." The girl snapped at the boy before turning to close the door, before the boy slipped a foot between door and frame, "Nope, we found a better magic person. So you are useless." You twitched uncomfortably as you were not sure what to do in this event and you knew your father was glaring at you still so you had no idea of what to do.
"Yes? I don't care. Leave me alone!." At the last word, you could feel something twisting into real space, it was not the Shroud. It was something much much worse, it tore apart the barriers between realms, it let through energies that should not be. You could feel filth caking itself back onto the newly pristine walls as the energy sought to ravage the world, no the universe.
You would not let it, blazing with prismatic radiance you slammed the door shut. Layers of Shroud energy lacing itself tightly across the wound newly torn into the fabric of reality. Syra flinched as your work came to completion, falling backward from the door as she screamed in pain as spectral flames raced through her body. You could feel her body ripping itself apart and you stepped forward once more and tore her soul free of the Warp and placed it into the Shroud as the barrier around her soul had fallen.
The moment the exchange occurred her form stabilized, flesh repairing itself. "Quiet. Silent, peaceful." Syra whispered under her breath as she slumped on the floor with no sign of moving soon.
"Well, son. I think you might have just saved us from a future true mutant. Good job, although-" Your father spoke before slamming a hand into the back of your head, "you terrified me when you started conjuring fire. The children might not realize it, but fire has certain themes when associated with the mutant." The last was whispered into your ear even as he grinned over your shoulder at the six children.
Turn 2: February of 40,000
- Location
- USA
You could feel your body becoming more solid as time passed, you had limited yourself for the first month vastly, to ensure that you would become better suited to this realm. Perhaps, your lower limits was the heights of humanity, but for you it was a vast reduction of capabilities. You knew full well that you could go without rest, without food or water for weeks at a time, you were nowhere so limited as the humans around you.
Perhaps, one of those that live in the depths of Olynn would be your equal through some flip of the cosmic dice, or by His will. But until you could find them, you would assume that you were the single most robust human on the station, although you turn to look upon the small body of Syra.
Her body was small for her age, only a little over a meter in height, with limited muscle mass for her size. She appeared much younger than her eight years of age would imply, but she hadn't moved for the last few hours once you moved her soul into your Demi-realm, save for speaking of peace and silence that disturbed you on some level.
Beyond her obvious lack of size, there was nothing wrong with her body to your sight. Her skin and scales were clean, although the feathers that were mixed into her hair were a bit crooked at the roots of their formation. With a flicker of power, you realign the roots of the feathers to allow them to properly grow into place, and a rough scan of her genetics shows a few inheritable issues for any children she might have and with a flicker of will they are removed and fixed as you do the same for the other five children around you.
Beyond those small issues, there was nothing wrong with the children beyond the general lack of nutrition they had been living with. Another simple thing to fix as you use your powers to collapse time for a moment to retroactively shift the past to ensure that the lower depths of the station would have had enough food to supply all inside. Another simple matter completed to your satisfaction as you nodded as their bodies shifted growing larger and thicker with flesh.
Perhaps someone might claim that altering the past might lead to issues in time, but you knew that such was a lie for the Shroud provides for you all the options you would need. For such a simple thing you drew upon a part of the shroud that touched all but lacked any concept of linear time, thus it was but a moment's effort to reach through the lens of the past to shift what you wished. Unfortunately, to your irritation the shard of the Shroud lacked the power enough to bend time backwards for more than a handful of years from the present, which made you unable to truly correct the problem at hand.
With the children now feed properly, you turned towards a different source of irritation that plagued you, namely your mother's actions in the past. Although part of you wished to restore what she had so cruelly removed, you knew enough about her that she would probably just redo the event once more with even greater pain for all involved. Before you would undo anything of hers, you would first force her to accept your right to do so and speak with her, for you knew enough to know that everyone is the hero of their own tale.
No human would ever make of themselves the villain, even the worst of the monsters would have a logic behind their actions that would make sense to themselves. Before you would act you would know her logic and by extension her mind and how she would react, you had been burned once already for not learning the full picture and you saw no reason to invite another such lesson so soon.
Beyond your mother and her attending issues, the Heat Conversion system was a bane on your efforts. You knew full well that the system could fail within the year and if it went fully offline there was little you could do to restore any level of functionally to it before the entire station burned to ash. It was a primary issue and as such would be started superseding all other possible considerations, it would be the primary focus of your efforts to come in the next eleven months of the year. In conjunction with it you would continue your research into fusion and how to properly contain the power source, already you could hypothesize methods by which you could repair fusion reactors, but the issue at hand was that none of the power systems of Olynn were pure fusion. The closest was the back up system that was a form of cold fusion, that bore similarities in the principles behind fusion itself, but was distinct in its own way as well and as such fusion would need to be completed first.
However, thankfully the Emperor smiled when He provided the ASDC to you and with them you could begin study of the conversion field systems in earnest now and not have to wait, however as your mind turned towards the map of the station you could see hidden echos of places in the walls, making you wonder if there was more to be found in the walls of Olynn.
Month Long Turn (you have a total of 7 actions to spend on any set of options, two actions are Locked)
Stellaris Research - Can choose up to 3 things, Locks them until completed (research)
Note that any research that would use exotic materials in its construction will require the methods of their creation as a prerequisite
Station Examination (research/other)
-[] Construct Complete Map of Olynn (DC 1000)
-[] Construct Advanced Map of Olynn (DC 300)
-[] Determine estimated costs to repair selected systems (2 systems per action) (Auto success due to ASDC)
-[] try to break down systems into sub components (DC 750)
People Interaction (interaction)
-[] Orsion
-[] Eliza
-[] Lysa
-[] Astein
-[] Syra
-[] Just wander around the station
Shroud exploration (psionic)
-[] see if your shroud realm is useful for anything in the material realm (DC 100/250/500/1000)
-[] try to figure out where the souls of others live (DC ????)
-[] try to understand the nature of the shroud (DC ????? Anatol expects this to be undoable)
-[] One time action - Bind your Realm to this Fulcrum. Become Awakened for this Purpose, Unchangeable, Unmutable, Greater Than Before. Awaken your True Might. Can be stored Until Desired to Use, Must be used In Conjunction with Another Action, Costs One Action slot to take in Addition to other action. Narrative Effects, Never Harmful.
4 hour time for discussion for plan formation
Perhaps, one of those that live in the depths of Olynn would be your equal through some flip of the cosmic dice, or by His will. But until you could find them, you would assume that you were the single most robust human on the station, although you turn to look upon the small body of Syra.
Her body was small for her age, only a little over a meter in height, with limited muscle mass for her size. She appeared much younger than her eight years of age would imply, but she hadn't moved for the last few hours once you moved her soul into your Demi-realm, save for speaking of peace and silence that disturbed you on some level.
Beyond her obvious lack of size, there was nothing wrong with her body to your sight. Her skin and scales were clean, although the feathers that were mixed into her hair were a bit crooked at the roots of their formation. With a flicker of power, you realign the roots of the feathers to allow them to properly grow into place, and a rough scan of her genetics shows a few inheritable issues for any children she might have and with a flicker of will they are removed and fixed as you do the same for the other five children around you.
Beyond those small issues, there was nothing wrong with the children beyond the general lack of nutrition they had been living with. Another simple thing to fix as you use your powers to collapse time for a moment to retroactively shift the past to ensure that the lower depths of the station would have had enough food to supply all inside. Another simple matter completed to your satisfaction as you nodded as their bodies shifted growing larger and thicker with flesh.
Perhaps someone might claim that altering the past might lead to issues in time, but you knew that such was a lie for the Shroud provides for you all the options you would need. For such a simple thing you drew upon a part of the shroud that touched all but lacked any concept of linear time, thus it was but a moment's effort to reach through the lens of the past to shift what you wished. Unfortunately, to your irritation the shard of the Shroud lacked the power enough to bend time backwards for more than a handful of years from the present, which made you unable to truly correct the problem at hand.
With the children now feed properly, you turned towards a different source of irritation that plagued you, namely your mother's actions in the past. Although part of you wished to restore what she had so cruelly removed, you knew enough about her that she would probably just redo the event once more with even greater pain for all involved. Before you would undo anything of hers, you would first force her to accept your right to do so and speak with her, for you knew enough to know that everyone is the hero of their own tale.
No human would ever make of themselves the villain, even the worst of the monsters would have a logic behind their actions that would make sense to themselves. Before you would act you would know her logic and by extension her mind and how she would react, you had been burned once already for not learning the full picture and you saw no reason to invite another such lesson so soon.
Beyond your mother and her attending issues, the Heat Conversion system was a bane on your efforts. You knew full well that the system could fail within the year and if it went fully offline there was little you could do to restore any level of functionally to it before the entire station burned to ash. It was a primary issue and as such would be started superseding all other possible considerations, it would be the primary focus of your efforts to come in the next eleven months of the year. In conjunction with it you would continue your research into fusion and how to properly contain the power source, already you could hypothesize methods by which you could repair fusion reactors, but the issue at hand was that none of the power systems of Olynn were pure fusion. The closest was the back up system that was a form of cold fusion, that bore similarities in the principles behind fusion itself, but was distinct in its own way as well and as such fusion would need to be completed first.
However, thankfully the Emperor smiled when He provided the ASDC to you and with them you could begin study of the conversion field systems in earnest now and not have to wait, however as your mind turned towards the map of the station you could see hidden echos of places in the walls, making you wonder if there was more to be found in the walls of Olynn.
Month Long Turn (you have a total of 7 actions to spend on any set of options, two actions are Locked)
Stellaris Research - Can choose up to 3 things, Locks them until completed (research)
Note that any research that would use exotic materials in its construction will require the methods of their creation as a prerequisite
-[] Blue Lasers (T1)
-[X] Fusion Power (T1) (Locked, 179/500 Repair possible)
-[] Improved Reactors (T1)
-[] Hyperspace Discovery (T5)
-[] Field Modulation (T1)
-[] Global Energy Management (T1)
-[] Deflectors (T0 250 cost)
-[] Active Countermeasures (T0)
-[] Scientific Method (T5)
-[] Gravtic Sensors (T2)
-[] Volatile Material Plants (T2)
-[] Bio-reactor (T2)
-[X] Fusion Power (T1) (Locked, 179/500 Repair possible)
-[] Improved Reactors (T1)
-[] Hyperspace Discovery (T5)
-[] Field Modulation (T1)
-[] Global Energy Management (T1)
-[] Deflectors (T0 250 cost)
-[] Active Countermeasures (T0)
-[] Scientific Method (T5)
-[] Gravtic Sensors (T2)
-[] Volatile Material Plants (T2)
-[] Bio-reactor (T2)
-[] Hydroponics (example exists on Olynn, T0)
-[] Gene Crops (example exists on Olynn, T2)
-[] Genetic Mapping (example exists on Olynn T0)
-[] Gene Tailoring (example exists on Olynn T3)
-[] Psionic Theory (Anatol exists, T4)
-[] Preliminary Astral Dimension Theory (T8, Shroud/Warp Interactions)
-[] Gene Crops (example exists on Olynn, T2)
-[] Genetic Mapping (example exists on Olynn T0)
-[] Gene Tailoring (example exists on Olynn T3)
-[] Psionic Theory (Anatol exists, T4)
-[] Preliminary Astral Dimension Theory (T8, Shroud/Warp Interactions)
-[] Industrial Base (T5)
-[] Unanchored Construction (T3)
-[] Weather Control Systems (T2)
-[] Nanocomposite materials (T0)
-[] Flak Battery (T0)
-[] Afterburners (T1)
-[] Ion Thrusters (T2)
-[] Unanchored Construction (T3)
-[] Weather Control Systems (T2)
-[] Nanocomposite materials (T0)
-[] Flak Battery (T0)
-[] Afterburners (T1)
-[] Ion Thrusters (T2)
-[X] Heat Conversion System (T7) (Locked by Anatol due to Criticality, 0/32000, Locked until 0/8000, Vote weight for extra Action set to 2)
-[] Kinetic Conversion System (T7)
-[] Kinetic Conversion System (T7)
Station Examination (research/other)
-[] Construct Complete Map of Olynn (DC 1000)
-[] Construct Advanced Map of Olynn (DC 300)
-[] Determine estimated costs to repair selected systems (2 systems per action) (Auto success due to ASDC)
-[] try to break down systems into sub components (DC 750)
People Interaction (interaction)
-[] Orsion
-[] Eliza
-[] Lysa
-[] Astein
-[] Syra
-[] Just wander around the station
Shroud exploration (psionic)
-[] see if your shroud realm is useful for anything in the material realm (DC 100/250/500/1000)
-[] try to figure out where the souls of others live (DC ????)
-[] try to understand the nature of the shroud (DC ????? Anatol expects this to be undoable)
-[] One time action - Bind your Realm to this Fulcrum. Become Awakened for this Purpose, Unchangeable, Unmutable, Greater Than Before. Awaken your True Might. Can be stored Until Desired to Use, Must be used In Conjunction with Another Action, Costs One Action slot to take in Addition to other action. Narrative Effects, Never Harmful.
4 hour time for discussion for plan formation
Vote closed
Turn 2: Research Info Dump, Month of February Completed
- Location
- USA
Your second month of life was different in tone than your first. Syra and the other children of the depths were given access to the higher levels and with the slight temporal rearrangement of existence to ensure the depths of the station had enough food they never went hungry now.
Although, your father seemed happier than before over the month as he got to know Syra closer and began to shift into being a proper father figure for her. The others of the station seemed to be disgusted by this for some reason, although you were not sure why they seemed to fume when they noticed her feathers and scales. They were just part of her biology, nothing more and nothing less, they were features and could actually be useful in her life.
Regardless of the strangeness of the behavior of those around you, you focused on figuring out how to fix the most critical of the systems. The Heat Conversion system namely, it was responsible for the creation and maintenance of a conversion field that turned pure heat into energy for the greater station. You were honestly confused about why there was two systems one for kinetic and one for heat when at the fundamental level, both of them are the same thing.
However, your fusion research payed off as it explained the difference in a sensible fashion. In short it was due to one being designed for gas and the other for solid. The HCS was meant to consume the heat and energy of any form of directed energy or otherwise ambient radiant energy to turn into more power for the station at large, the KCS was designed to sap the kinetic energy from impactors against the shield. Both were tuned in such a fashion as to only trigger when their own parameters were met, allowing it to deal with the two major threats separately thus increasing the relative integrity of both systems by reducing the load on them.
This insight into how the basic systems of the two parts of the station functioned, was enough to lead to some minor conclusions on how to possibly repair them in the future. But, there was still much unknown about the systems in question to the point where even your mind struggled to understand just what needed to be done at the moment.
Shelving the research that had been completed and the questions that remained unanswered you turned your focus towards, the other focus of your month of work. The study of the station and the improvement of the map that you had made previously.
Most of the station remained unchanged save for simply better diagrams and schematics of the hallways, leaving the depths less of a chaotic maze of tunnels and metal. Instead the interest came from the blank spots in the walls that you had noticed on the first go over, now with some minor tinkering of the ASDC you had managed to break through a level of encryption and managed to determine that the blank spots inside of the walls, were the locations of what the relic designated Reality Anchor Nodes.
Unlike, with other systems, it presented only the name and system integrity of the newly found systems with only a flashing message that burned your eyes. Beyond the reality anchor system, in the very bottom of the station you found yet another hidden system that was abjectly terrifying to you with your new understanding of gravity, fusion and the principles behind conversion fields.
There was a massive spherical gravitational wave conversion field built into the very core of the station. Everything in the station seemed to wrap around the center point and it was clearly designed such that no one would be able to tell that the center was occupied. Even though the viewing relic was resolute when it came to prohibiting your investigations into the secrets of the room, you were more than able to finagle ways around its safeties.
Thus, you discovered a stable black hole only a few meters wide, held in gravitational tension by the gravitational anchor systems and that the fluctuations in the station's gravity weren't due to the gravity system failing, but the black hole being moved creating waves in the very topography of reality.
It was very much clear that the annihilation reactors were in truth secondary power supply compared to the sheer amount of power that this system labeled in its entirely as a Penrose reactor could produce if the conversion field was working properly. It also brought with it new insights into just why the station was falling.
From your new calculations the station wasn't falling into Olynn, the world was coming towards the station as the gravitational systems began to fail to keep the gradients even, the station began to exert ever greater impetus towards the star that it was built within and thus it was indirectly causing the star to fall up to it.
You scowled down at the paper as you trace out the power formulas and principles you used, as you once more reaffirm your math and came to the conclusion that the exhibited systems of your home would drain less than a thousandth of a percent of the provided power from the Penrose reactor alone, leaving the other power generating systems absolutely superfluous.
The only reason the other power sources would be used is for backup options, but the Penrose reactor was fundamentally the best option for power generation if you had the ability to convert gravitational waves into electricity. It was completely silent, the conversion field would take the waves and simply not let them pass its boundaries, thus providing nearly invisible power gain from any external sensors possible. The only type of sensors that could perceive this kind of power source would be ones that would be able to look through other dimensions.
It was simply a fundamental fact as far as your research went, that only an internal sensor could hope to read the existence of the Penrose reactor and anything beyond would be consumed by either the star Olynn or one of the other conversion fields that surround the station.
Shaking your head, you turn from this thought and towards the next month that would start tomorrow. You had done little beyond just sit in your room and work, which although not something you found boring or otherwise detrimental to your mental stability, it did make your month boring with the lack of general interactions with others.
Flicking your eyes towards a tally on the wall, you frown as it came to you that you hadn't yet truly prayed to Him, in one of the many temples erected to His honor. Something that you hoped He would forgive due to the disasters that you were having to deal with.
Author Note
For any update where all Actions are poured into research or otherwise somewhat boring topics that I can't figure out good ways of dealing with. Will result in shorter and more summary type updates in the future.
There is no good way to make an update about a person sitting in a room for a month tinkering, fun to read or write and frankly after this I am not going to do it again.
So any purely Research updates will be much more abbreviated or done in a formate of Anatol speaking to someone else about his progress.
Although, your father seemed happier than before over the month as he got to know Syra closer and began to shift into being a proper father figure for her. The others of the station seemed to be disgusted by this for some reason, although you were not sure why they seemed to fume when they noticed her feathers and scales. They were just part of her biology, nothing more and nothing less, they were features and could actually be useful in her life.
Regardless of the strangeness of the behavior of those around you, you focused on figuring out how to fix the most critical of the systems. The Heat Conversion system namely, it was responsible for the creation and maintenance of a conversion field that turned pure heat into energy for the greater station. You were honestly confused about why there was two systems one for kinetic and one for heat when at the fundamental level, both of them are the same thing.
However, your fusion research payed off as it explained the difference in a sensible fashion. In short it was due to one being designed for gas and the other for solid. The HCS was meant to consume the heat and energy of any form of directed energy or otherwise ambient radiant energy to turn into more power for the station at large, the KCS was designed to sap the kinetic energy from impactors against the shield. Both were tuned in such a fashion as to only trigger when their own parameters were met, allowing it to deal with the two major threats separately thus increasing the relative integrity of both systems by reducing the load on them.
This insight into how the basic systems of the two parts of the station functioned, was enough to lead to some minor conclusions on how to possibly repair them in the future. But, there was still much unknown about the systems in question to the point where even your mind struggled to understand just what needed to be done at the moment.
Shelving the research that had been completed and the questions that remained unanswered you turned your focus towards, the other focus of your month of work. The study of the station and the improvement of the map that you had made previously.
Most of the station remained unchanged save for simply better diagrams and schematics of the hallways, leaving the depths less of a chaotic maze of tunnels and metal. Instead the interest came from the blank spots in the walls that you had noticed on the first go over, now with some minor tinkering of the ASDC you had managed to break through a level of encryption and managed to determine that the blank spots inside of the walls, were the locations of what the relic designated Reality Anchor Nodes.
Unlike, with other systems, it presented only the name and system integrity of the newly found systems with only a flashing message that burned your eyes. Beyond the reality anchor system, in the very bottom of the station you found yet another hidden system that was abjectly terrifying to you with your new understanding of gravity, fusion and the principles behind conversion fields.
There was a massive spherical gravitational wave conversion field built into the very core of the station. Everything in the station seemed to wrap around the center point and it was clearly designed such that no one would be able to tell that the center was occupied. Even though the viewing relic was resolute when it came to prohibiting your investigations into the secrets of the room, you were more than able to finagle ways around its safeties.
Thus, you discovered a stable black hole only a few meters wide, held in gravitational tension by the gravitational anchor systems and that the fluctuations in the station's gravity weren't due to the gravity system failing, but the black hole being moved creating waves in the very topography of reality.
It was very much clear that the annihilation reactors were in truth secondary power supply compared to the sheer amount of power that this system labeled in its entirely as a Penrose reactor could produce if the conversion field was working properly. It also brought with it new insights into just why the station was falling.
From your new calculations the station wasn't falling into Olynn, the world was coming towards the station as the gravitational systems began to fail to keep the gradients even, the station began to exert ever greater impetus towards the star that it was built within and thus it was indirectly causing the star to fall up to it.
You scowled down at the paper as you trace out the power formulas and principles you used, as you once more reaffirm your math and came to the conclusion that the exhibited systems of your home would drain less than a thousandth of a percent of the provided power from the Penrose reactor alone, leaving the other power generating systems absolutely superfluous.
The only reason the other power sources would be used is for backup options, but the Penrose reactor was fundamentally the best option for power generation if you had the ability to convert gravitational waves into electricity. It was completely silent, the conversion field would take the waves and simply not let them pass its boundaries, thus providing nearly invisible power gain from any external sensors possible. The only type of sensors that could perceive this kind of power source would be ones that would be able to look through other dimensions.
It was simply a fundamental fact as far as your research went, that only an internal sensor could hope to read the existence of the Penrose reactor and anything beyond would be consumed by either the star Olynn or one of the other conversion fields that surround the station.
Shaking your head, you turn from this thought and towards the next month that would start tomorrow. You had done little beyond just sit in your room and work, which although not something you found boring or otherwise detrimental to your mental stability, it did make your month boring with the lack of general interactions with others.
Flicking your eyes towards a tally on the wall, you frown as it came to you that you hadn't yet truly prayed to Him, in one of the many temples erected to His honor. Something that you hoped He would forgive due to the disasters that you were having to deal with.
Author Note
For any update where all Actions are poured into research or otherwise somewhat boring topics that I can't figure out good ways of dealing with. Will result in shorter and more summary type updates in the future.
There is no good way to make an update about a person sitting in a room for a month tinkering, fun to read or write and frankly after this I am not going to do it again.
So any purely Research updates will be much more abbreviated or done in a formate of Anatol speaking to someone else about his progress.
Turn 3: March of 40,000
- Location
- USA
The last month was boring but productive use of your time, as you completed learning how the principles of fusion functioned and could begin to move forward with regards to other more advanced forms of energy generation.
This was the first time that you felt safe enough in your own abilities and the surety of your body to begin working on the generators for the Annihilation Reactors. Before this month, you were prone to jitters of the body that could spell the doom of all on the station if your body failed you at the wrong moment, but now your arms are as steady as possible and your flesh is hardened against the wear and tear of life itself.
No longer do you feel the drag of sleep every hundred hours, now only once a week do you find the need to rest your mind for a handful of moments to become fully refreshed and ready to return to work. Thus, the new month came and you began to plan forth the next thirty days of your life and knew that if the progress of the last month continued, by the time the year passed Olynn would be well on the path to restoration.
With the healing of the depths and the purging of filth, the people you saw were more cheerful, although you did wonder why so many glared with barely hidden disgust and rage at young Syra. Most of the time when she was busy cleaning her feathers or scales, or just watching the light dance over the iridescent blue scales that covered her hands and forearms, those where when you saw the most disgust leveled at her. Which confused you, for why would your people be disgusted by a child being curious about the world around them?
Regardless of the general lack of sanity among the people that see your newly gather crowd of children that your father seems to have taken as his own, you are ready to continue your work in His name to rebuild the failing temple of His Imperium and make it shine anew. Olynn would be the first of the worlds of Man to shine once more across the stars.
As you stare upward in the atrium, letting your metallic hair glittering with the shine of gold dance in the shifting gravity waves, you could just barely make out the pin points of light that showed the stars of the galaxy that was your home and the true seat of your Duty. You might be far from the center, but in time you would make the journey forth and bring a new dawn to all of the Imperium.
But, shaking your head you turn once more to the countless sheets of metal engraved with ideas and thoughts on them floating around you even as you floated in defiance of gravity. What to do for this month of march?
Month Long Turn (you have a total of 9 actions to spend on any set of options, one action is Locked)
Stellaris Research - Can choose up to 3 things, Locks them until completed (research)
Note that any research that would use exotic materials in its construction will require the methods of their creation as a prerequisite
Station Examination (research/other)
-[] Construct Complete Map of Olynn (DC 2500, ASDC no longer gives bonuses)
-[] Determine estimated costs to repair selected systems (2 systems per action) (Auto success due to ASDC)
--[] write in systems to evaluate. DC of 1000 for Hidden Systems no ASDC bonus
-[] try to break down systems into sub components (DC 750, reveals secondary research options)
People Interaction (interaction)
-[] Orsion (your father and the best engineer on the station)
-[] Eliza (His Pontifex upon Olynn station)
-[] Lysa (your mother and the best researcher on Olynn bar yourself)
-[] Astein (the chief apothecary)
-[] Syra (young psion, former psyker)
-[] Just wander around the station (might find someone new of interest or nothing of note)
Shroud exploration (psionic)
-[] see if your shroud realm is useful for anything in the material realm (DC 100/250/500/1000)
-[] try to figure out where the souls of others live (DC ????)
-[] try to understand the nature of the shroud (DC ????? Anatol expects this to be undoable)
-[] One time action - Spend another action to attach this action to that action. This will immediately grant a sub vote for a Perk or Trait that is congruent to the action tied to this action. This, will however limit your flexibility from this point on out, Perks or Traits within the domain of the action taken will come easier and more often, but outside will be lesser and harder to find. It will NOT limit your abilities, but it will give a Flavor to them.
Time until Fabrication System produces armors: 2 Months
This was the first time that you felt safe enough in your own abilities and the surety of your body to begin working on the generators for the Annihilation Reactors. Before this month, you were prone to jitters of the body that could spell the doom of all on the station if your body failed you at the wrong moment, but now your arms are as steady as possible and your flesh is hardened against the wear and tear of life itself.
No longer do you feel the drag of sleep every hundred hours, now only once a week do you find the need to rest your mind for a handful of moments to become fully refreshed and ready to return to work. Thus, the new month came and you began to plan forth the next thirty days of your life and knew that if the progress of the last month continued, by the time the year passed Olynn would be well on the path to restoration.
With the healing of the depths and the purging of filth, the people you saw were more cheerful, although you did wonder why so many glared with barely hidden disgust and rage at young Syra. Most of the time when she was busy cleaning her feathers or scales, or just watching the light dance over the iridescent blue scales that covered her hands and forearms, those where when you saw the most disgust leveled at her. Which confused you, for why would your people be disgusted by a child being curious about the world around them?
Regardless of the general lack of sanity among the people that see your newly gather crowd of children that your father seems to have taken as his own, you are ready to continue your work in His name to rebuild the failing temple of His Imperium and make it shine anew. Olynn would be the first of the worlds of Man to shine once more across the stars.
As you stare upward in the atrium, letting your metallic hair glittering with the shine of gold dance in the shifting gravity waves, you could just barely make out the pin points of light that showed the stars of the galaxy that was your home and the true seat of your Duty. You might be far from the center, but in time you would make the journey forth and bring a new dawn to all of the Imperium.
But, shaking your head you turn once more to the countless sheets of metal engraved with ideas and thoughts on them floating around you even as you floated in defiance of gravity. What to do for this month of march?
Month Long Turn (you have a total of 9 actions to spend on any set of options, one action is Locked)
Stellaris Research - Can choose up to 3 things, Locks them until completed (research)
Note that any research that would use exotic materials in its construction will require the methods of their creation as a prerequisite
Fusion - Stellaris Physics (Tier 1), equivalent to Tier 3 Imperial Plasma Reactors
-[] Blue Lasers (T1)
-[] Cold Fusion Power (T2)
-[] Anti Matter Generators (T3)
-[] Improved Reactors (T1)
-[] Hyperspace Discovery (T5)
-[] Field Modulation (T1)
-[] Global Energy Management (T1)
-[] Deflectors (T0 250 cost)
-[] Active Countermeasures (T0)
-[] Scientific Method (T5)
-[] Gravtic Sensors (T2)
-[] Volatile Material Plants (T2)
-[] Bio-reactor (T2)
-[] Cold Fusion Power (T2)
-[] Anti Matter Generators (T3)
-[] Improved Reactors (T1)
-[] Hyperspace Discovery (T5)
-[] Field Modulation (T1)
-[] Global Energy Management (T1)
-[] Deflectors (T0 250 cost)
-[] Active Countermeasures (T0)
-[] Scientific Method (T5)
-[] Gravtic Sensors (T2)
-[] Volatile Material Plants (T2)
-[] Bio-reactor (T2)
-[] Hydroponics (example exists on Olynn, T0)
-[] Gene Crops (example exists on Olynn, T2)
-[] Genetic Mapping (example exists on Olynn T0)
-[] Gene Tailoring (example exists on Olynn T3)
-[] Psionic Theory (Anatol exists, T4)
-[] Preliminary Astral Dimension Theory (T8, Shroud/Warp Interactions)
-[] Gene Crops (example exists on Olynn, T2)
-[] Genetic Mapping (example exists on Olynn T0)
-[] Gene Tailoring (example exists on Olynn T3)
-[] Psionic Theory (Anatol exists, T4)
-[] Preliminary Astral Dimension Theory (T8, Shroud/Warp Interactions)
-[] Industrial Base (T5)
-[] Unanchored Construction (T3)
-[] Weather Control Systems (T2)
-[] Nanocomposite materials (T0)
-[] Flak Battery (T0)
-[] Afterburners (T1)
-[] Ion Thrusters (T2)
-[] Unanchored Construction (T3)
-[] Weather Control Systems (T2)
-[] Nanocomposite materials (T0)
-[] Flak Battery (T0)
-[] Afterburners (T1)
-[] Ion Thrusters (T2)
-[X] Heat Conversion System (T7) (Locked by Anatol due to Criticality, 1334/32000, Locked until 1334/8000, Vote weight for extra Action set to 2)
-[] Kinetic Conversion System (T7)
-[] Kinetic Conversion System (T7)
Station Examination (research/other)
-[] Construct Complete Map of Olynn (DC 2500, ASDC no longer gives bonuses)
-[] Determine estimated costs to repair selected systems (2 systems per action) (Auto success due to ASDC)
--[] write in systems to evaluate. DC of 1000 for Hidden Systems no ASDC bonus
-[] try to break down systems into sub components (DC 750, reveals secondary research options)
People Interaction (interaction)
-[] Orsion (your father and the best engineer on the station)
-[] Eliza (His Pontifex upon Olynn station)
-[] Lysa (your mother and the best researcher on Olynn bar yourself)
-[] Astein (the chief apothecary)
-[] Syra (young psion, former psyker)
-[] Just wander around the station (might find someone new of interest or nothing of note)
Shroud exploration (psionic)
-[] see if your shroud realm is useful for anything in the material realm (DC 100/250/500/1000)
-[] try to figure out where the souls of others live (DC ????)
-[] try to understand the nature of the shroud (DC ????? Anatol expects this to be undoable)
-[] One time action - Spend another action to attach this action to that action. This will immediately grant a sub vote for a Perk or Trait that is congruent to the action tied to this action. This, will however limit your flexibility from this point on out, Perks or Traits within the domain of the action taken will come easier and more often, but outside will be lesser and harder to find. It will NOT limit your abilities, but it will give a Flavor to them.
Time until Fabrication System produces armors: 2 Months
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