- Location
- Illinois
A good starting point would be a vision. Lorelei is pretty taken with the idea of showing up her parents, but seems to have little direction beyond that, which being me I would say had ought to change given her status and the state of the world -- but that is not in-quest.
Regardless. One major problem is that the world of Abrogation is populated. All territory is desired and contested. All resources are viewed as territory. Any shmuck Inspired could probably build a loyal von Neumann army given time and space, but none of the neighbors (and there are neighbors everywhere) would ever allow it.
Indeed, we'll face similar issues if we set up shop, and we'll face them pretty much regardless of where we do it.
Which sucks. We'll want to do x y or z and we'll be stuck building shitty cogbots to head off the neighbors' shitty cogbots.
But, we've got a few things the average Inspired doesn't.
First off, Skybreaker. Built from an inanely overcharged surge, it is, as Vebyast describes, an armykiller. It's also man-portable.
Second, we're a girl. This is relevant because of this:
Third, we currently have no meaningful ties to anyone, anything, or anywhere. This is relevant because unlike people who do have those ties, there is nowhere we have to be.
Given that all future issues can be solved with sufficient application of GENIUS so long as we have access to resources, surges, workspace, and time, our biggest problems are, in order:
Obtaining resources to do work with.
Finding somewhere safe to get work done.
Firing off more surges.
Now, the convenient thing is that none of those problems require us to hold territory permanently.
If we were male, there would be two key differences: we would need to hold on to people permanently in order to get anything done, and we would only be able to expend resources during a surge (and therefore in proximity to people). Our time, workspace, resource, and surge needs would be one big intertwined mess, resulting in something which the world of Abrogation has generally begun to refer to as a fiefdom -- we would need to spend lots of time in a resource-rich workspace filled with people in order to get anything done.
But we don't have that problem.
We can have our workspace separate from our surges as long as we have access to whatever is necessary to begin a project when and where we surge. This opens up the possibility of trading some amount of convenience in exchange for vast quantities of time. We can utilize our resources whenever we want, not merely during surges. This opens up the possibility of surging away from our workspace and without consuming the bulk of the resources we may intend to expend on a project.
In other words, what our problems really boil down to is that we need the following, in no specific spatial or temporal proximity, nor any large degree of continuity (excepting the fourth item):
Access to people in order to surge.
The ability to obtain resources to spend on projects.
Time.
Access to a workspace.
Now, the number-one biggest item which is not on that list is territory.
So, here's conclusion one of this essay: we don't need land and we shouldn't bother obtaining it, because holding it is a waste of time and resources.
This invokes some further problems, of course. For one, if we don't hold territory then we'll need to semi-regularly go to the trouble of accessing large numbers of people in an area with some amount of resources so that we can surge. Fortunately, Skybreaker has made this almost a non-issue, because it's not just an armykiller but also a fortresskiller. I suppose we might actually be meaningfully limited in how many Inspired fiefdoms we can sack before some sort of coordinated response would be mounted (although I rather doubt it), but if we wanted a surge we could find ourselves a nice fief, Skybreak the local Inspired and/or his fortress, army, or other defensive mechanism/s, and have a nice surge with the locals' help, using the wreckage as resources for the surge. The point is?
Conclusion two: We don't need an army to temporarily grab people and resources. In fact, we don't need to do anything that would particularly provide any forewarning to an opponent in order to destroy their works and temporarily seize their stuff (stuff being the proper term for "people and resources"). On top of that, retaliation against us is extremely difficult due to the fractured nature of the world of Abrogation and our lack of obvious holdings to strike at.
With that, we've provided for access to surges without a fiefdom.
Conclusion three should have been obvious at this point, but following from conclusion two: in order to avoid the hassle of holding territory, and to take advantage of our ability to surge without holding territory, our workspace should be kept away from the reach of other Inspired. Most Inspired have rivals. This setup would provide us with targets instead of rivals. Most Inspired can't afford such a thing, because of the logistics involved in keeping people alive (farming, water, etcetera) and their need to be in constant proximity to people.
But how shall we keep our workspace from being assailable? Keeping it somewhere hidden and remote won't work, because it wouldn't be difficult to simply track us there. No, we need something different, something which retains our advantage of not being tied to any location... and yet it must also provide sufficient space with which to work, and to live (since we will want to stay away from most populated locales once we are doing obviously-Inspired things). It can be small for the near future, but it should be something we'll be able to expand.
With this we reach conclusion four, the penultimate of this essay. Simply, that nothing we could construct which would be tied down to the Earth beneath our feet would suffice to meet our needs.
But could we put something into the sky that would?
It would probably need to be the product of a single surge. This would heavily constrain us as to what we could build -- but if we thought small at first, perhaps we could get off the ground. A small, personal flier.
A project. One that we could then pursue whenever we wanted... and that would let us go where we pleased.
We would need large quantities of resources to move from that small a starting point to something more approximating what we've laid out as desirable. But with it, would acquiring them be hard? Unlike other Inspired, we have a man-portable armykiller. And with a flier, we'd have a fast-aircraft-portable armykiller.
No, at that point we could, for example, ambush caravans for iron -- and if we needed something more complex, we could just go raid another fiefdom, potentially one much too far away from anywhere we've been for it to have any warning of us.
Would it be difficult to achieve first liftoff? Of course. We'd probably have to sack a fiefdom, entering on foot and planning on leaving by air. But could it be done...? Obviously. Actually, we might even be able to get the resources we'd need by knocking over the two incompetents whose "armies" we saw earlier.
And once it was done... Well, at that point we'd be nearly home-free. A flier to expand would give us nigh-arbitrary potential constrained by resources. We'd need more projects, but any time we wanted to start one we could drop in on someone unexpected. And from there...
Conclusion five: we're going to build a flying fortress.
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