Untoward Mustering
Content warning: Described in generalities, the party discovers the extent of Dien's biological subversion.
Nearly two weeks had passed since Princess-Regent Allria had discovered the first great contagion. As she stared through Letrizia's vidscreen at the crowds milling peaceably below, Aeira wondered if there were any humans left in the Republic still free and un-contaminated. This was Jovien, the sector capital of the Republic industrial heartland, a planet which to all outward appearances seemed entirely unchanged.
Human minds habituated quickly to the rhythms of their environment. Novel stimuli, no matter how strange or surprising, quickly found themselves relegated to the confines of normality. Normality was the ever-present and inescapable state of humanity, the homeostatic baseline to which their sentiments invariably converged.
But normality was also a trap; for in binding one's fundament to a schedule of repeated events, it was all too easy to disregard the unknown, the unseen, or even the merely uncommon. And the rarity of an event had little correlation to its importance.
Today the world turned as it always did, as it always had for the last ten, twenty, or three hundred million years. Tomorrow, an extinction-level meteorite might render your entire species extinct. Or the ash cloud of a super-volcano might displace the cycle of day or night, dooming all your people to smog-choked starvation!
Or magi-technological hyperviruses might infect and puppeteer your entire civilization, spreading with a speed and subtlety that would leave any outside observer unknowing; the actions of your people apparently unchanged even as they stewed within a thousand billion biological prisons helpless to voice any quantum of alarm or dissent. Helpless to so much as place a single finger out of line, betrayed by even your autonomic systems.
Condemned to enact the unceasing clockwork of your unknown master's perfect facade, all to achieve a marginal advantage within a conflict you would never understand, much less support or appreciate.
"Theirs was not to question why," indeed. Aeira sighed.
This was why it paid to be prepared.
Having known the Foremost once existed; having known of even the location of some of their slumbering shards, was this level of laxity truly unforgivable, or was Aeira simply being unfair? She more than anyone knew you couldn't plan for every outside context problem, but the Armaments of the Republic were themselves tools capable of potentially forestalling such an assault - had the Republic possessed the foresight and executive capacity simply to
plan. Likely there had been short-term priorities that seemed critically urgent at the time.
There always were. But excuses mattered nothing in the face of brute reality.
Regardless of whether your people held you to account, the world always would, once the power to insulate yourself from consequence was spent.
They had fought through much to reach here, rampaging Astrals supported by swarms of variant monstrosities. Shadow-wreathed Verschlengorge and brilliant Novakhron were hammer and anvil, steadily but slowly working their way through the abominable tide. Luckily the Princess-Regent was far more competent than the Republic Council, but against this foe she had tended towards an excess of caution, comprehensively pre-empting many vectors of esoteric attack even at the cost of time. Was it wise, to ensure they could not be used as hostages against the King, or foolish, to place so much faith in his powers of advancement alone?
"Penny for your thoughts?" Letrizia asked. The Duchess was frowning - a frequent occurrence these days - but not unkindly. Aeira smiled brightly in response.
"Feeling sorry for this Republic system," she said. "So many unfortunate people, condemned by inept leadership. Their new ruler seems far more capable, though I doubt they will enjoy the spoils of that ability."
"Hmph," Letrizia said. "That's what comes of allowing the masses to choose their leaders. Say what you will of Attramemnar, he would never have allowed his pilot, or his pilot's holdings, to be caught flat-footed like this."
Aeira hummed noncommittally. They had heard of the Empire's alliance with an entity known as the Shogun, and their subsequent policy of total isolation. Letrizia had been quite relieved to hear of her homeland's relative security. Was she unaware of the Princess-Regent's hand in those events? It was unlike Gisena Allria not to take credit, though they had all tread lightly around the Duchess since her father's demise.
"Perhaps," she finally replied. "Though I wonder how much say the masses actually had, given their government's soft control over all forms of data distribution. It seems much more an oligarchy than any form of democracy by ideals."
"Oh come on," Letrizia rolled her eyes. "You're not one of those 'democracy has never been tried' folks, are you? Without the Armaments to keep their territories in line the Republic would have fallen apart long ago. Whereas your breakaway state kept to Imperial traditions even as it severed ties politically! What does that tell you?"
Hunger still sometimes looked askance at them when they made such comments, as if deriding the idea of popular rule was in some way a faux pas. The Earth of his time had been somewhat democratic, she'd gathered, or at least the nation in which he'd resided. What little he had mentioned evoked a primitive, but less-sclerotic version of the modern Republic. That the rest of them hailed from states governed by an aristocracy or absolute monarchy, did not often come up.
As for Aeira herself, she was more than clear on the disadvantages of rule by a hereditary nobility - exploitation and abuse of power, lack of social mobility, inconsistent accountability, with one poor leader capable of ruining the entire nation - but did not have enough experience to say whether something like democracy would be more effective overall. It was, she supposed, a moot point given that even Princess-Regent Allria's power could suffice to create a philosopher-queen without peer, much less the unlimited Progression available to the King himself.
The only rule she would live to see, given how intimately her fate was tied to theirs, would be the invincible benevolent autocracy of King Hunger or King Hunger's agent, in practice if not in name. They would prevail or die, and she would play her part to the best of her abilities. It was comforting, in a way, though she understood why Aobaru found it smothering.
Aeira shrugged. "The Elixir leadership did what was most comfortable for them. And what is normal is often comfortable."
It was easy for simple comfort to take precedence over near-every priority. For example, Letrizia had never asked why Aeira did not use contractions (a fact that Aeira greatly appreciated). And now that they had known each other for several months, it was simply too awkward to broach the topic spontaneously. That would not stop the likes of the Princess-Regent, but it would certainly give Letrizia pause. It was one fortunate event of many in Aeira's life.
How would the Sovereignty have fared, she wondered, if the outside-context problem that stumbled upon them was not Lord Hunger but his opposite? An actual conquering tyrant, cruel and capricious rather than their brooding champion the Reckoner of Rotspawn? Would the surgecrafters have marshaled any meaningful resistance, or simply fallen in disarray?
The greatest upheaval of her life had been a positive thing. If the valence of that event had been negative, would she have been sufficiently prepared? Lord Hunger was not invincible the day he chanced upon them. Before he slew the Rotbeast, in theory he could have been repelled.
It was cramped in Verschlengorge's cockpit. Strings and blankets of her Element were strewn and woven around her, a soft cocoon of cushioning that ablated the impacts of the Armament's movement. Foremost technology did the rest, she assumed, even though a pilot in Totality had no need of g-force mitigation to survive maneuver at combat speeds. The Foremost had been prepared for the possibility of passengers in the pilot's compartment - or perhaps had simply wanted to ensure the survival of the pilot's accoutrements.
What system of governance had they employed, she wondered? How had they arranged their affairs, they who once dominated the cosmos and whose departure left it a diminished ruin? Had they, too, been caught flat-footed by some outside-context problem of incomprehensible immensity? Had they stirred the ire of some trans-comic being as far above them as they were above ordinary humanity?
It was exciting, and truly foreboding, that she might one day actually know the answers to such questions.
They were all caught within King Hunger's wake, and his outrageous rate of ascent showed no signs of slowing. Impossible as it was to conceive, one day she, Aeira Shadowcord, an impromptu mercenary without so much as a bachelor's degree, might scale such heights of power as to rival the Foremost themselves! Already her personal prowess was beyond that of any Armor Prototype, a side effect of King Hunger's magic that ensured his 'companions' held a level of Rank only moderately below his own.
To Hunger it was an incidental advancement, one stone of many in the redoubt of his power; acquired mostly for Gisena and Letrizia's sake but conveniently extended to Aeira and Aobaru as well.
To Aeira, it had been the greatest and most stupefying elevation of her life. The mightiest surgecrafters of the Sovereignty would struggle their entire lives to claw towards enough power to rival a Republic super-dreadnought. Aeira could slaughter such via the indifferent emission of her Pressure, a capability that she had not ever even trained to use! She could stand careless and undaunted before the maw of its main guns and be confident its fearsome cannonade would not so much as stir a hair.
Entire nations, entire
planets would yield before her Rank, armies of billions as helpless as babes before the supernova glare of that Astral incandescence. It was truly peculiar, to wield such power simply because Hunger had one day decided it would be more convenient if his retinue could all defend themselves.
It was absurd. It was comical. It was pure fantasy, pure escapist impossibility beyond even the realm of daydream. Only her paradoxical lack of agency despite such outrageous power lent a tinge of the real, of credibility, to the situation. Had she told her senior-year self, even with incontrovertible proof the younger Aeira would have struggled to believe it. And yet this was the experience of her life today.
It was a dangerous thing, normality. The systems of one's world could crumble in an instant, and who presided above the ruins would only be the fortunate - and the prepared.
---
Faster.
Wheresoever he turned, it seemed, the enemy was ahead of him. Every planetoid, every platform, every colony, every star, the mark of Dien Bravo was plainly apparent for those with eyes to see. That something had been off about even the superficially ordinary worlds they ventured to became clear very swiftly: Hunger himself could find no physical abnormality, but the Ring of Blood spoke of their warped and futile passions, the screams of a populace caged in body, spirit and mind.
Adorie was beside herself searching for a way to rescue them, but for all their raw power neither of the two possessed the specific conjunction of abilities necessary even to attempt such a thing. These people were parasitized from the Astral down to the sub-cellular levels. The luckiest were wholly unwitting, people whose neurology had 'merely' been restructured such that they were, on a sub-conscious level, utterly incapable of disobeying Dien's agents or acting against his interests.
But there were plenty of strains exhibiting various degrees of control or manipulation, from fanatical Dien-devotion to full-on locked-in puppetry. Absent any superior interventions, Hunger had done his best to pretend that the 'oblivious' strains were the best at fooling him, lest the Republic's populace would become wholly expendable in the eyes of that Foremost shard.
Sheer overwhelming Rank sufficed to protect those in their immediate presence, but that was less than a sliver, not even a drop in the ocean of silent calamity that Dien had proliferated upon the populace.
He had committed to tracking down the source, the monstrosity who had unleashed this plague upon the Republic's trillions. But it was difficult to find a trail to follow when evidence sprang up in every direction he turned. No matter which system he ventured to, he could hardly step forward without bumping into some scheme or abomination of Dien's. The enemy was everywhere, which meant its originator might as well be nowhere for all the good it did Hunger.
Which meant only that he would have to search faster.
It was clear that the systems Dien subjugated were of unequal importance. Hunger theorized that the star-spanning ringworlds were the most critical of his enemy's assets, though their exact function beyond findross-harvesting was still unclear. He had destroyed dozens of such worlds and their incubator-stars, enough to have provoked a military response from Dien's forces, which otherwise preferred wholly to avoid him. That he had crushed easily enough, but the remaining ringworlds were spread distantly in remote systems, fed by Republic populations transported with uncanny swiftness.
Thankfully the worst of it seemed confined to Republic space, with other Foremost awakening and partnering with the Empire and Association for mutual defense. But it was entirely possible for Dien to have simply spread in the direction of least resistance, outwards from the Human Sphere.
Hunger had never thought he would oppose an enemy more terrible than the Tyrant - greater in power, certainly, but never as pitiless, as omnipresent and relentless, as skillful and cruel as the Forebear's get. Naive, perhaps, but now that he wielded Progression he had assumed that no opponent would drive him to such lengths of desperation as he had felt against his original foe. But this was a war of unprecedented scope, whose unspoken atrocities were horrifying even to contemplate. Dien Bravo was giving the Tyrant a run for his money, but that man's calculating brutality was almost preferable to the Foremost's total indifference towards suffering.
Even if he succeeded in rooting out the foe, what degree of punishment could account for such crimes?
But justice was only the prerogative of victors. To have a hope of contemplating that problem, of presiding over the shattered Republic populace and the ruins of their core systems, he first had to move faster.
---
The winners were
[X] A Promising Lead and
[X] On the Trail.
Gisena's actions have lead her to a shard of the Foremost known as the Emissary, who has arranged a united front between Empire, Association, and the shards within their territory against the forces of the Surgeon. They are barely capable of repelling even his diffident attentions, and this unified resistance will make both polities more difficult to conquer in the future, but at least a humanitarian disaster has been mostly averted within Imperial and Association space. With this, the immediate annihilation of the Human Sphere is not as pressing of a threat, though the fate of the Republic's citizenry still hangs in the balance.
Through desperate training in the Praxis, Hunger has acquired the
Attainment of Quickness, allowing him to maintain +1 ISH Agility at all times. With such power, even Dien's greatest creations of the moment pose no personal threat to him, allowing Hunger to continue his sun-hunting campaign unabated and at great speed. But the chief priority remains finding the Surgeon himself, and despite the damage he's inflicted Hunger still lacks any concrete leads...
Hunger has suffered -Mental Stability from witnessing Dien's horrors.
Adorie has suffered ---Mental Stability from witnessing Dien's horrors.
Dien is no fool, of course. He has crafted countless layers of contingency to secure his person and obscure his location, efforts bolstered by his continually-growing Rank. Though Hunger has notably slowed his rate of ascent, ever-more Feeder Suns are coming online by the day. This state of affairs cannot continue.
[ ] Once United - Focus on reaching Gisena and the kids before the upcoming Realm of Evening proc, which will be occurring soon. Once within, you can both take measures to develop an effective answer to Dien's strategy. Dien and his Astral - allies? slaves? - will certainly do their utmost to stop you, but despite their strategic outflanking they cannot match Hunger or Novakhron in sheer tactical strength. It will take some time, but you are almost certain to re-convene with your party and enter the Realm of Evening safely.
[ ] Must Divide - Dien cannot be allowed to roam free even one day further. His exponentiating tide will consume the universe if unchecked, and who knows how long the less-advantaged Foremost can hold out. Though it will be taxing to do so, Hunger can split the Blade & Favor so that he may re-cast Closing the Fist on another set of Artifacts, potentially creating an object of power capable of countering Dien more directly. He can then exploit the Supreme Enclosure Sign to acquire as many picks as possible before the Astrals fully neutralize it.
*Desperate Times - Unlocks Ring & Blade merger, though the risks are high and the consequences even of success, dire. Hunger will also suffer -Mental Stability from dividing the Blade & Favor and re-casting Closing the Fist under such time constraints.
*Desperate Measures - Will almost certainly render Supreme Enclosure useless in the future.
[ ] Another Kingdom - The Voyaging Realm so far seems to have been spared Dien's attentions. Perhaps it holds defenses capable of repelling his agents, or is he wary of the Shards within? Regardless, falling back to Nilfel should retract Dien's Apocryphal support for a few days, and Hunger can now awaken and consult with the Arcanist by force, if necessary. From there, many possibilities arise - perhaps Hunger could attempt to unlock the Eighth Sign of the Empyrean, or see if the Throne Agent program has produced any relevant warriors, or open a dialogue between the Arcanist and Shogun. The Voyaging Realm is on the border of Empire and Republic space, so it wouldn't be a far journey for either, and as Makers they would have more in common than with Dien. Still, this would be ceding the initiative, if only for the moment, in exchange for greater options down the line. +Mental Stability, +Adorie, +Adorie Mental Stability
---
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