- Location
- California
I apologize for my previous comments. I really enjoy your raynare quest, and I doubt you'll do poorly on this one. Forgive me.
But Not Forgotten: A Destiny Quest
- Thread starter Magery
- Start date
Wobulator
Within 1 AU of you!
- Location
- Mars
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Also, yes.
You can switch classes fairly easily, canonically, and a gun is just a gun.
- Location
- Australia
Although note that our character sheet doesn't currently have the other subclasses unlocked. I wonder if this means that we managed to achieve Valor: Champion (hinting rather strongly that this is the Guardian that participated in the storyline of D1&D2 which involved killing gods) solely as Nightstalker.
Dark Abstraction
Infrequent Participant
- Location
- United States
This looks fantastic. I stopped playing mid-Taken King, so I have no knowledge of Destiny 2 (Arcstrider? Arcstaff? What did they do to my beautiful Bladedancer subclass?!), so this will likely be enlightening as well as extremely entertaining.
Vaguely sad that I missed the vote, but the options seem entertaining enough, even if it looks like the character is not known for the glory of erupting into an actinic maelstrom and blinking through combat like a murderous dance, brandishing a knife nearly as sharp as their smile.
Looks like this is not caught up on numeric recording for the character sheet, too, which is fantastic. A lot of quests hurt themselves doing that, so it's a pleasure to see that it's much more narratively driven here. My expectations of the quality standards I look for in Magery's work are validated once more.
Can't wait for the update!
Vaguely sad that I missed the vote, but the options seem entertaining enough, even if it looks like the character is not known for the glory of erupting into an actinic maelstrom and blinking through combat like a murderous dance, brandishing a knife nearly as sharp as their smile.
Looks like this is not caught up on numeric recording for the character sheet, too, which is fantastic. A lot of quests hurt themselves doing that, so it's a pleasure to see that it's much more narratively driven here. My expectations of the quality standards I look for in Magery's work are validated once more.
Can't wait for the update!
2: Six Dreg Pride
Magery
Life blooms like a flower, far away or by the road
- Location
- Australia
Enough ruminating.
It's time to kill.
There was a time, once, when you weren't so blase about it. When you still knew what fear tasted like—fumbling, blood-slick fingers, the agonising howls of rotting starfire, broken bone and shattered stone—and thought every death would be your last. Those days are long gone, now. The starless ocean of your soul is too deep for fear. The Void will swallow everything if you let it, and you've touched it closer than most.
(You still don't understand the Void. It waits on the edge of the universe and the corner of your eye, in the rattling dirge of a dying breath and the wry edge of your smile. It is the final mercy and the first curse. You can describe it only in riddles because what other way can you talk about nothing at all? Solar Light makes sense—it's just fire writ large. Arc Light is idealised lightning, the memory of the spark that split the universe. Void Light, though? You've only met one person you've ever thought might know.
It's no coincidence that you find her utterly fucking terrifying).
On your radar, the Fallen are circling. Their feet slap against rock and lichen and rustle through grass until their every movement is a symphony you could conduct with your eyes closed. The low, humming charge-fire cycle of the Vandal's wire rifles—long and thin scaled-down railguns—matches the rhythm of your breath. They're trying to keep you pinned down so they can flank you, pinch you between the snipers and the ragged savagery of two Captains in close quarters.
Honestly.
It's almost like they don't know who you are.
A nod to your Ghost has him disappear into… well, he calls it your backpack, but it's really some quasi-dimensional space attached to your soul. The point is that he's no longer there to get shot at.
You will never allow him to be somewhere he can get shot at.
Your Light oozes down your arm, cold and slow like the last days of winter, and a smoke bomb coalesces in your hand. It's time to blow this joint.
You toss it at the junction of the two fire-red standing stones that mark the only entry to your cover, and it detonates with a sickly hiss. To you, it smells like juniper and lime—to anyone else, it smells like oh fuck oh fuck why is my tongue melting? The smoke drifts ever outward, lingering like ash on the air; the Fallen won't dare step through it until it's gone and they no longer risk haemorrhaging their lungs out even through their rebreathers.
That gives you plenty of time to take a step sideways to reality and disappear. Other Guardians, blessed by the Light with senses beyond sight, would see you as a rippling silhouette of liquid glass—the Fallen see nothing at all as you vault the rocky outcrop you were hiding behind and slip past a Dreg to break their encirclement before it begins. A couple of careful leaps, stepping off the ground and then the air, take you into the leafy bowers off a thick-trunked tree. You press yourself flat against the rich, maroon wood of a branch, your cloak settling across your back, and watch.
The Dregs continue to chitter, looking around warily, their four eyes glowing even beneath the midday sun. One Vandal cuffs a particularly loud Dreg around the head with a three-fingered hand, and you stifle a chuckle. This is why you like the Fallen the most—a strange thing to say about your enemies, but true. At the end of the day, they're just people who want an answer for why their god left them; it's a motive you can understand. Maybe even sympathise with.
Doesn't mean you're not going to kill them.
Just that you won't hate them when you do.
The wind sighs through the tree, rustling the cherry-red leaves and the purple scraps of the Captain's cloaks. Your smoke bomb has dissipated, finally, and they've discovered that you're no longer there—one shouts what must be a series of orders to the other Fallen, who immediately spread out into cover, ducking behind the limestone slabs and exposed roots that are scattered across the earthy surface of Nessus. The centaur—a small, once-icy planetoid long since terraformed to something far more livable—isn't somewhere you visit that often these days, but duty called.
Just below you, one Dreg has decided to conceal himself in the hollow between a pair of boulders. None of the others can see him. Perfect.
You slip your handcannon back into its leather holster, draw a knife, and drop.
The last thing the Dreg sees is the black-plated coffin of your fingers as you wrench his head up and rip steel across his jugular. Ether smokes out of the hole; it tastes like wine and moondust. The corpse drops in a graceless tangle of limbs, thudding into the blood-bright grass beneath your feet. It is small in death.
One down, seventeen to go.
You wipe the knife clean on the soft fabric of the Dreg's scarf and slip it back into a sheath. The Fallen aren't scattered enough for bladework—you'll get caught in the crossfire if you try. No, it's time for your usual solution to your problems: shooting them really hard in the fucking head.
You draw your handcannon in a motion worn smooth by practice, spinning it in your fingers out of habit before it settles in your grip. It's a very simple thing—a long-barrelled revolver, thick and chunky, black steel crowned with chrome and a wooden grip. There's an elegance in that simplicity, but no beauty. No art.
Of course there isn't.
It's your gun, after all, forged specifically for you by the Last City's greatest gunsmith.
He called it the First Curse, and that is exactly what it does.
You take three steps to the left, draw a bead on the Vandal poking his arrow-sharp head out from behind a rock, and pull the trigger. The recoil kicks the gun back like it's flinching in agony. The shot is a sharp bite of thunder, as if firing it cracked open the sky. You could track the bullet by the line of white fire it cuts across the empty air between you and your target, but you don't need to.
The Vandal is already dead.
You don't even see the way its head explodes in a spray of moon-bright, smokey ether—you're too busy replacing two Dreg's hearts with bullets and slipping under the sparking trail of a wire rifle all in the same lazy twist. You exhale entropy into the palm of your hand and hurl it at the Captain rushing you from behind; a black hole opens beneath his feet and the Void seethes out of it. You can feel its cackling joy as it unmakes his shield, his legs, his liver, his eyes. There's no scream. No sound. Just avarice.
Five down.
A sudden skid takes you under a couple of crackling, thumb-sized sparks—the Dreg is still staring dumbly at its shock pistol as the First Curse speaks, and then it's staring at nothing at all. This close, the cloying perfume of its too-sweet skin washes through your rebreather. Wonderful. You step over the body and past one of the other Captain's swords; the lean strength of her arms make each cut murderously swift, just not swift enough. You allow her the courtesy of a stab with her second sword—the blade, arcing with lightning like the barrier that surrounds her, splits the space you used to be as you leap over her head.
You twist in the air, concentrated fire from three Dregs splattering your shields—the cocoon of Light around your body that wards against harm—with the snap of static electricity. It tickles. They snarl at you, rusted-needle teeth bared in fear and fury both. Those teeth splinter around your bullets the same way their skulls do.
Landing with a somersault, you come up to find yourself staring at the barrel of a wire rifle, the Vandal's four ocean-bright eyes tight with glee. How cute. He thinks you're trapped here with him. Your Light floods through your bones like smoke, and as the Vandal fires it is smoke you become—a blurred shadow that slips around the lance of lightning and makes ruin of his throat to violent applause. Ether splatters across your visor like you've just run headfirst into a cloud, and you wipe it off with the back of your palm.
Twenty seconds have passed and you have already killed half of what stood against you.
There are Hunters who fight like they're performing—like the whole world is an audience and they the star of the show. They make art of murder and call it good. Others fight like the ocean; slow and subtle, ebbing back and forth until you relax one moment too long and the tsunami smiles its cataclysm smile. They make inevitability of victory and call it right.
You, though?
You fight like you're in love.
The beat of your trigger is the beat of your heart, loud and pulsing in your chest. Your Light is a blush beneath your skin, filling your cheeks to brimming. Every step you take is as eager as a kiss—playful, affectionate, pressed against the earth and sky in the hope to stay just a little longer. You wear your armour as easily as an embrace, tight to your waist and loose on your shoulders. Your knife lingers in your fingers like a smile on Sunday morning, each cut a promise just for two.
And beneath it all, the hunger.
The terrible, jealous hunger.
You empty your last bullet in another Dreg's eye-socket, and when you see the puff of ether and bone-dust, when you hear it tumble off the ledge and its shoulders crunch against the stone beneath, all you think is that it's not enough. You want more. You want the moment to last forever—to balance on the perfect, cliff-edge chaos of the space between the shot and the kill until the stars burn out.
It never does.
You have made disappointment of death, and you don't care to call it anything at all.
A flick of your wrist empties the First Curse's chamber, and you replace it with a spare from your belt. The bullets click home as you twirl the gun to settle it back in your hand. It's a flourish your old mentor taught you, back when he thought you might have been the type.
You're not.
You still do it anyway.
Naturally, the distraction means the remaining Captain is already halfway to gutting you—the angle of the sun loses you entirely in her towering shadow, and the 'cat ears' of her wedge-shaped helmet seem a lot more like horns from here. Their edges look as though they've caught fire. There's a sharp crack as she stamps a three-clawed foot into the ground to accelerate her lunge and a pebble splits beneath her weight; it doesn't unbalance her in the slightest. Her sword never wavers, the blade spitting sparks like somebody's forged steel from a storm.
But all the storms in the world can't rage against what isn't there, and that is what you are—your Light ripples through your veins and your flesh ripples in turn, shifting to a shadow the deep purple of a sunset. You flow around the Captain's sword, casually insouciant, and return the First Curse to your hip. Her shield, a raging cage of arc energy, means you'll need to spend a couple more bullets than you'd like to break it and her in turn.
Thankfully, you have other options.
Snatching your shotgun from your back, you unload twice into her back. It bucks eagerly in your hands, two short blasts of sunfire shattering the stillness. The first shreds the Captain's barriers as fire shreds grass—the second disintegrates her entirely until all that's left of the once-mighty Fallen is the sizzle of her ashes. You feel vaguely like stopping for a barbeque when you get back to the Last City.
Absently, you spin and annihilate another Dreg. One moment there's a thin, vaguely chitinous lizard-person, the stubs of its bottom two arms hanging uselessly by its side, and the next there is nothing but shifting embers and the stench of sublimated flesh. The Ikelos shotgun—sleek, grey, vaguely futuristic-looking even for the 28th century—was a gift from an old… well, you're not sure you'd call him a friend, but he's a friend of a friend at least, and like everything else related to him, it does its job with brutal efficiency.
Collapsing the shotgun onto your back, you draw the First Curse once more. It took you an embarrassingly long time to learn how to flourish it without accidentally discharging it in the process, but now it feels unnatural not to do. A quick glance over the battlefield notes the rocks scattered everywhere like the aftermath of a landslide, the one, towering tree you hid in before that conceals the sea-green sky from view, and no Fallen to be seen.
You cock your head to the side, listening. The soft whisper of a breeze, the shifting susurrations of the tree's crimson leaves, the gentle hiss of your rebreather, the rustle of the grass. Nothing else. The rest of the Fallen have fled without a Captain to command them. This, more than anything, makes you feel sorry for Variks. Your old friend—actually a friend this time—has long sought to restore the Fallen to respectability, except without actually killing everyone else in the way. To bring back the days when they were noble and mighty, not feckless scavengers who break before one woman and a couple of guns.
You're not brave. You've merely forgotten the fear of death.
Shrugging off the memory, you stow the First Curse and stretch, arching first to the left and then the right, hands over your head. A gunfight always gets your blood up, and you need to relax a little. Now that the coast is clear, your Ghost pops back into reality and looks around, sunlight glinting off the bone-white metal shards that surround his glowing eye.
"Well, that was silly of you," he says, dryly amused.
You snort. You just wanted to taunt them into a fight with a couple of funky dance moves. The Fallen are rarely so coordinated that they can stagger their fire to shatter your shields and kill you straight afterward. Today, they were. It's a lesson well-learned—and one that will promptly be forgotten by tomorrow.
"...you're going to do it again, aren't you?"
Behind your helmet, you smirk.
Of course you are.
You relax from your stretch, and snap your fingers. There's a strange fizzling sound, like someone's uncorked a bottle of too-shaken soda, and your Sparrow appears. The modern equivalent of a motorbike, a Sparrow is… look, it's not quite a jet engine attached to a pair of handlebars, it just doesn't try very hard not to be. Yours is bright, shiny, and chrome, with two curved front prongs; it was constructed according to specifications left behind in the Golden Age, back when the Traveler was still awake and the Sol System was an ever-growing utopia. Back before the Darkness came.
Tossing your leg over the saddle, you mount your Sparrow and gun the accelerator. The world narrows to speed—the howling rush of wind over your armour, the high-pitched whine of your engine, the blur of grass-rock-grass beneath you. Your Ghost has disappeared back into the ether, but you don't need a map to get where you're going. Nessus is dominated by the ruins of the Exodus Black, a colony ship launched five hundred years ago that crashed into the centaur. All you have to do is trace a path along its rotted-metal corpse until you're back at the transmat pad for your own ship.
First, though, you're going to visit Failsafe.
The governing artificial intelligence of the Exodus Black, and also its only survivor, she's been alone for a very, very long time, and is a little kooky as a result. You're fresh off saving her from a Fallen raid on the colony ship—they came close to destroying most of her vital systems and making off with more Golden Age technology than anyone would like the Fallen to have. Luckily, she called the Vanguard—the current leaders of the three orders of Guardians—and the Vanguard called you.
They don't call you for much, these days.
So off you went, and off went the Fallen's heads until there was no longer anyone nosing around in your friend's artificial guts. You want to make sure she's okay, though, and that means a personal visit. Strictly speaking, through your Ghost you could contact her from anywhere on the planet, but that doesn't sit right with you. Failsafe doesn't exactly have a face, per se—she has a room that's close enough, and that's where you'll speak to her from.
You dismount your sparrow in the rainwater pool just outside the bridge of the Exodus Black, where Failsafe's mainframe resides. It disappears, the transmat—another fancy word for a teleporter—returning it to storage in your ship as your boots splash down in the brackish water. As per usual, there are a few Dregs and a single Vandal skulking around outside the repurposed atmospheric shield that blocks Failsafe off from the rest of the world.
The First Curse offers four short arguments as to why they should allow you to pass.
There are no objections.
Dropping the handcannon into its holster, you climb past the abandoned crates, up the dull metal stairs, and knock politely on the wall at the side of the thrumming barrier that separates you from Failsafe. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. Your Ghost reappears of his own volition and speaks.
"Failsafe? You in there?"
The barrier snaps off, and you step through, your Ghost hovering over your shoulder.
"Of course I am in here, friendly Ghost!" Failsafe says, eerily cheerily—and then comes the monotone. "Everyone I've ever known is dead, and their bones are dust. Where would I go?"
Failsafe has a split personality: sometimes she's joyous and happy no matter what she's saying, and others she's tired and apathetic. Doesn't sound all that strange—because who isn't like that?—except for the fact she switches between them from one sentence to the next. Even her voice changes, as if two different people are speaking in one kilometre-long body. It was disconcerting at first, but now it's just one of her quirks. It's not like you're some paragon of mental stability yourself.
Your feet stamp across the steel gangways that lead you to her mainframe, loud enough to be polite, and you settle into a loose mockery of parade rest, hands locked behind your back. The room she 'lives' in is cavernous, each wall and roof lined with dozens of oblate hexahedrons whose purpose probably relates to some vagary of ship design you're not aware of. Her 'face' is a grey metal octagon backed by another larger, rounded blue metal octagon, which is itself backed by some strange array of tubes and heat sinks and things you cannot name—the only real notable thing about it is that it glows yellow when Failsafe is 'happy' and red when she's 'sad'.
Currently, it's yellow.
You expect it will switch back and forth a dozen times in the forthcoming conversation, like it has in all the ones you've had before.
The circle—with three pairs of twin pulsing electric-blue lines stretching from the centre to the circumference—at the centre of the first octagon, which you've come to think of as her eye, even if it can't see anything at all, rotates slowly.
"Captain!" Somehow, over the course of your adventures together, she's come to adopt you as the next Captain of the Exodus Black. You feel the weight of six hundred slaughtered souls—the sum total of the colony ship's lost crew—on your shoulders every time she says the word. You'll never live up to their memories. You're just a girl who knows how to kill. You don't know how to care.
Failsafe doesn't seem to mind.
"How are you holding up, Failsafe?" your Ghost asks. "Need any help with the repairs?"
"No need to worry, friendly Ghost," she says, "I have already requisitioned other Guardians to assist."
Behind her, the lights shift to bloody.
"You two are, like, way too good at the whole blowy-uppy thing for me to want you to fix me."
"Well I never!" your Ghost says. "I'll have you know that I have mastered seven forms of architecture, including two that are only possible on the Ascendant Plane!"
It's funny what you learn, killing gods.
Failsafe's not wrong, though, so you wave your Ghost down and stare pointedly not at her eye, but at the cameras on either side of her face she actually uses to see. The Fallen tore up the sanctuary-shrine of her body and almost stole the spark that catalyses her electric soul. It was a close call even by your standards. That would rattle anyone, five-hundred-year-old artificial intelligence or otherwise.
"Come on Cap, don't look at me like that." Her voice shifts an octave higher. "I will be fine! I was very angry about that brute tearing up my ship, but watching you shove a machine gun down his throat was very cathartic!"
"Wait," your Ghost says, floating closer to Failsafe, irises opening and closing as if he's blinking in surprise, "how were you watching?"
"Your communication protocols are not very secure, friendly Ghost!" A quiet whirr in the background. "You should get him looked at, Cap. He might be defective."
If your Ghost had fingers, you know he'd be pointing them angrily at Failsafe. "Defective? I'll show you defective, you lethargic Golden-Age lump! I've been places whose very nature is inimical to lower-dimensional lifeforms and laughed!"
You refrain from pointing out that's not really an argument against being defective, smiling quietly behind your narrow helmet. It's good to see he's having fun, whether he'd admit it or not. Instead you rock back and forth on your heels, not so much bored as just… restless, the strange, transient impatience of not having anywhere to be but wanting to go there anyway. Failsafe's fine—you know what she looks like when she's breaking down, and this isn't it.
"Oh, Captain!" Failsafe chimes, totally ignoring your Ghost, "I received a message from Ikora Rey while you were busy fighting off the Fallen. She would like to see you when you return to the Tower." A flash of red. "The Cayde-unit talked about her a lot, y'know. Said she had resting wiseface. I'm surprised he knew what wis—"
She cuts herself off, and you unclench your fist. "Sorry, Cap."
You shrug. It's fine.
He always was a bit of an idiot.
"Well," your Ghost says, a little awkwardly, "it was nice seeing you, Failsafe, but if Ikora wants to see us, we'd best be going."
"Goodbye, Captain!"
You turn and walk out of the Exodus Black's bridge, your Ghost fading back into your soul—Failsafe has let the barrier down, and the Fallen haven't replenished their scouts in front of it yet, so you're left to wander the short distance to the landing pad for your ship. You cross the pool again, leap over a couple of boulders, shuffle a surprised Dreg off his mortal coil with a well-placed knife, and clamber up a sandstone cliff. At the top is a blinking beacon that looks sort of like a microphone, marking a safe place for Guardians to set down on Nessus.
Your Ghost reappears, running the autopilot to bring your orbiting ship back in close enough for transmat. Once it arrives, you'll be setting out for the Tower. The Last City is, as the name suggests, humanity's sole remaining haven in the solar system, and the Tower is where its Guardians live. Technically it's not a tower anymore, though—the old one was destroyed in the Red War, which is something you'd rather not think about right now, and the new Tower was built beneath its ruins as a reminder that your defeat had been avenged but not forgotten.
You're curious as to why Ikora wants to talk to you. You're a Hunter, not a Warlock; a scout, not a warrior-poet. What, then, does the Warlock Vanguard, master of their order and the sort of woman who probably has to think at quarter-speed to talk to anyone who isn't her, want with you? You doubt it's a friendly visit—you like Ikora, she's the idol you can't admit to because what self-respecting Hunter wants to be like a Warlock, and you know she likes you too, but she wouldn't have called you back to the Tower just for a chat.
Hopefully it's something personal. You've done your official Vanguard business for the month.
Speaking of personal, though, once you've finished with Ikora, what else are you going to do at the Tower while you're there?
For this vote, select your top three (3) options of those provided—the three options with the most number of votes when it closes will win.
[ ] Visit Banshee-44. The Tower's premier gunsmith, he taught you everything you know about caring for and modifying your weapons. It's been some time since you last properly oiled your gear, and you could use the company.
[ ] Visit Lakshmi-2. The leader of the Future War Cult, a political faction in the city that believes a war with the Darkness is inevitable and that anything but preparing for it is folly, you find every conversation with her an interesting mix of philosophy and practical advice.
[ ] Visit the Colonel. He's a rooster. Not your rooster, either. But both the men who've owned him are dead—one you failed, one you killed—and he gets lonely sometimes.
[ ] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[ ] Visit Hawthorne. The Last City's liaison between the Guardians and their mortal allies, you worked with her in the early days of the Red War, and she always has plenty of tales to tell about what life's like out in the wild when you can only die once.
[ ] Visit Ikora Rey. Again. This time as a friend.
[ ] Visit the Drifter. He has a Ghost, and he wields the Light—but he's definitely not a Guardian. You honestly don't know what he is, except a whole lot of trouble. And a damn good storyteller, of the vicious, bloody kind. Your favourite.
This update contains the first gunfight I've ever written, so any feedback on what it did and didn't do well would be appreciated!
(The Colonel is not actually a rooster; she's a chicken. You have sort of... never noticed).
It's time to kill.
There was a time, once, when you weren't so blase about it. When you still knew what fear tasted like—fumbling, blood-slick fingers, the agonising howls of rotting starfire, broken bone and shattered stone—and thought every death would be your last. Those days are long gone, now. The starless ocean of your soul is too deep for fear. The Void will swallow everything if you let it, and you've touched it closer than most.
(You still don't understand the Void. It waits on the edge of the universe and the corner of your eye, in the rattling dirge of a dying breath and the wry edge of your smile. It is the final mercy and the first curse. You can describe it only in riddles because what other way can you talk about nothing at all? Solar Light makes sense—it's just fire writ large. Arc Light is idealised lightning, the memory of the spark that split the universe. Void Light, though? You've only met one person you've ever thought might know.
It's no coincidence that you find her utterly fucking terrifying).
On your radar, the Fallen are circling. Their feet slap against rock and lichen and rustle through grass until their every movement is a symphony you could conduct with your eyes closed. The low, humming charge-fire cycle of the Vandal's wire rifles—long and thin scaled-down railguns—matches the rhythm of your breath. They're trying to keep you pinned down so they can flank you, pinch you between the snipers and the ragged savagery of two Captains in close quarters.
Honestly.
It's almost like they don't know who you are.
A nod to your Ghost has him disappear into… well, he calls it your backpack, but it's really some quasi-dimensional space attached to your soul. The point is that he's no longer there to get shot at.
You will never allow him to be somewhere he can get shot at.
Your Light oozes down your arm, cold and slow like the last days of winter, and a smoke bomb coalesces in your hand. It's time to blow this joint.
You toss it at the junction of the two fire-red standing stones that mark the only entry to your cover, and it detonates with a sickly hiss. To you, it smells like juniper and lime—to anyone else, it smells like oh fuck oh fuck why is my tongue melting? The smoke drifts ever outward, lingering like ash on the air; the Fallen won't dare step through it until it's gone and they no longer risk haemorrhaging their lungs out even through their rebreathers.
That gives you plenty of time to take a step sideways to reality and disappear. Other Guardians, blessed by the Light with senses beyond sight, would see you as a rippling silhouette of liquid glass—the Fallen see nothing at all as you vault the rocky outcrop you were hiding behind and slip past a Dreg to break their encirclement before it begins. A couple of careful leaps, stepping off the ground and then the air, take you into the leafy bowers off a thick-trunked tree. You press yourself flat against the rich, maroon wood of a branch, your cloak settling across your back, and watch.
The Dregs continue to chitter, looking around warily, their four eyes glowing even beneath the midday sun. One Vandal cuffs a particularly loud Dreg around the head with a three-fingered hand, and you stifle a chuckle. This is why you like the Fallen the most—a strange thing to say about your enemies, but true. At the end of the day, they're just people who want an answer for why their god left them; it's a motive you can understand. Maybe even sympathise with.
Doesn't mean you're not going to kill them.
Just that you won't hate them when you do.
The wind sighs through the tree, rustling the cherry-red leaves and the purple scraps of the Captain's cloaks. Your smoke bomb has dissipated, finally, and they've discovered that you're no longer there—one shouts what must be a series of orders to the other Fallen, who immediately spread out into cover, ducking behind the limestone slabs and exposed roots that are scattered across the earthy surface of Nessus. The centaur—a small, once-icy planetoid long since terraformed to something far more livable—isn't somewhere you visit that often these days, but duty called.
Just below you, one Dreg has decided to conceal himself in the hollow between a pair of boulders. None of the others can see him. Perfect.
You slip your handcannon back into its leather holster, draw a knife, and drop.
The last thing the Dreg sees is the black-plated coffin of your fingers as you wrench his head up and rip steel across his jugular. Ether smokes out of the hole; it tastes like wine and moondust. The corpse drops in a graceless tangle of limbs, thudding into the blood-bright grass beneath your feet. It is small in death.
One down, seventeen to go.
You wipe the knife clean on the soft fabric of the Dreg's scarf and slip it back into a sheath. The Fallen aren't scattered enough for bladework—you'll get caught in the crossfire if you try. No, it's time for your usual solution to your problems: shooting them really hard in the fucking head.
You draw your handcannon in a motion worn smooth by practice, spinning it in your fingers out of habit before it settles in your grip. It's a very simple thing—a long-barrelled revolver, thick and chunky, black steel crowned with chrome and a wooden grip. There's an elegance in that simplicity, but no beauty. No art.
Of course there isn't.
It's your gun, after all, forged specifically for you by the Last City's greatest gunsmith.
He called it the First Curse, and that is exactly what it does.
You take three steps to the left, draw a bead on the Vandal poking his arrow-sharp head out from behind a rock, and pull the trigger. The recoil kicks the gun back like it's flinching in agony. The shot is a sharp bite of thunder, as if firing it cracked open the sky. You could track the bullet by the line of white fire it cuts across the empty air between you and your target, but you don't need to.
The Vandal is already dead.
You don't even see the way its head explodes in a spray of moon-bright, smokey ether—you're too busy replacing two Dreg's hearts with bullets and slipping under the sparking trail of a wire rifle all in the same lazy twist. You exhale entropy into the palm of your hand and hurl it at the Captain rushing you from behind; a black hole opens beneath his feet and the Void seethes out of it. You can feel its cackling joy as it unmakes his shield, his legs, his liver, his eyes. There's no scream. No sound. Just avarice.
Five down.
A sudden skid takes you under a couple of crackling, thumb-sized sparks—the Dreg is still staring dumbly at its shock pistol as the First Curse speaks, and then it's staring at nothing at all. This close, the cloying perfume of its too-sweet skin washes through your rebreather. Wonderful. You step over the body and past one of the other Captain's swords; the lean strength of her arms make each cut murderously swift, just not swift enough. You allow her the courtesy of a stab with her second sword—the blade, arcing with lightning like the barrier that surrounds her, splits the space you used to be as you leap over her head.
You twist in the air, concentrated fire from three Dregs splattering your shields—the cocoon of Light around your body that wards against harm—with the snap of static electricity. It tickles. They snarl at you, rusted-needle teeth bared in fear and fury both. Those teeth splinter around your bullets the same way their skulls do.
Landing with a somersault, you come up to find yourself staring at the barrel of a wire rifle, the Vandal's four ocean-bright eyes tight with glee. How cute. He thinks you're trapped here with him. Your Light floods through your bones like smoke, and as the Vandal fires it is smoke you become—a blurred shadow that slips around the lance of lightning and makes ruin of his throat to violent applause. Ether splatters across your visor like you've just run headfirst into a cloud, and you wipe it off with the back of your palm.
Twenty seconds have passed and you have already killed half of what stood against you.
There are Hunters who fight like they're performing—like the whole world is an audience and they the star of the show. They make art of murder and call it good. Others fight like the ocean; slow and subtle, ebbing back and forth until you relax one moment too long and the tsunami smiles its cataclysm smile. They make inevitability of victory and call it right.
You, though?
You fight like you're in love.
The beat of your trigger is the beat of your heart, loud and pulsing in your chest. Your Light is a blush beneath your skin, filling your cheeks to brimming. Every step you take is as eager as a kiss—playful, affectionate, pressed against the earth and sky in the hope to stay just a little longer. You wear your armour as easily as an embrace, tight to your waist and loose on your shoulders. Your knife lingers in your fingers like a smile on Sunday morning, each cut a promise just for two.
And beneath it all, the hunger.
The terrible, jealous hunger.
You empty your last bullet in another Dreg's eye-socket, and when you see the puff of ether and bone-dust, when you hear it tumble off the ledge and its shoulders crunch against the stone beneath, all you think is that it's not enough. You want more. You want the moment to last forever—to balance on the perfect, cliff-edge chaos of the space between the shot and the kill until the stars burn out.
It never does.
You have made disappointment of death, and you don't care to call it anything at all.
A flick of your wrist empties the First Curse's chamber, and you replace it with a spare from your belt. The bullets click home as you twirl the gun to settle it back in your hand. It's a flourish your old mentor taught you, back when he thought you might have been the type.
You're not.
You still do it anyway.
Naturally, the distraction means the remaining Captain is already halfway to gutting you—the angle of the sun loses you entirely in her towering shadow, and the 'cat ears' of her wedge-shaped helmet seem a lot more like horns from here. Their edges look as though they've caught fire. There's a sharp crack as she stamps a three-clawed foot into the ground to accelerate her lunge and a pebble splits beneath her weight; it doesn't unbalance her in the slightest. Her sword never wavers, the blade spitting sparks like somebody's forged steel from a storm.
But all the storms in the world can't rage against what isn't there, and that is what you are—your Light ripples through your veins and your flesh ripples in turn, shifting to a shadow the deep purple of a sunset. You flow around the Captain's sword, casually insouciant, and return the First Curse to your hip. Her shield, a raging cage of arc energy, means you'll need to spend a couple more bullets than you'd like to break it and her in turn.
Thankfully, you have other options.
Snatching your shotgun from your back, you unload twice into her back. It bucks eagerly in your hands, two short blasts of sunfire shattering the stillness. The first shreds the Captain's barriers as fire shreds grass—the second disintegrates her entirely until all that's left of the once-mighty Fallen is the sizzle of her ashes. You feel vaguely like stopping for a barbeque when you get back to the Last City.
Absently, you spin and annihilate another Dreg. One moment there's a thin, vaguely chitinous lizard-person, the stubs of its bottom two arms hanging uselessly by its side, and the next there is nothing but shifting embers and the stench of sublimated flesh. The Ikelos shotgun—sleek, grey, vaguely futuristic-looking even for the 28th century—was a gift from an old… well, you're not sure you'd call him a friend, but he's a friend of a friend at least, and like everything else related to him, it does its job with brutal efficiency.
Collapsing the shotgun onto your back, you draw the First Curse once more. It took you an embarrassingly long time to learn how to flourish it without accidentally discharging it in the process, but now it feels unnatural not to do. A quick glance over the battlefield notes the rocks scattered everywhere like the aftermath of a landslide, the one, towering tree you hid in before that conceals the sea-green sky from view, and no Fallen to be seen.
You cock your head to the side, listening. The soft whisper of a breeze, the shifting susurrations of the tree's crimson leaves, the gentle hiss of your rebreather, the rustle of the grass. Nothing else. The rest of the Fallen have fled without a Captain to command them. This, more than anything, makes you feel sorry for Variks. Your old friend—actually a friend this time—has long sought to restore the Fallen to respectability, except without actually killing everyone else in the way. To bring back the days when they were noble and mighty, not feckless scavengers who break before one woman and a couple of guns.
You're not brave. You've merely forgotten the fear of death.
Shrugging off the memory, you stow the First Curse and stretch, arching first to the left and then the right, hands over your head. A gunfight always gets your blood up, and you need to relax a little. Now that the coast is clear, your Ghost pops back into reality and looks around, sunlight glinting off the bone-white metal shards that surround his glowing eye.
"Well, that was silly of you," he says, dryly amused.
You snort. You just wanted to taunt them into a fight with a couple of funky dance moves. The Fallen are rarely so coordinated that they can stagger their fire to shatter your shields and kill you straight afterward. Today, they were. It's a lesson well-learned—and one that will promptly be forgotten by tomorrow.
"...you're going to do it again, aren't you?"
Behind your helmet, you smirk.
Of course you are.
You relax from your stretch, and snap your fingers. There's a strange fizzling sound, like someone's uncorked a bottle of too-shaken soda, and your Sparrow appears. The modern equivalent of a motorbike, a Sparrow is… look, it's not quite a jet engine attached to a pair of handlebars, it just doesn't try very hard not to be. Yours is bright, shiny, and chrome, with two curved front prongs; it was constructed according to specifications left behind in the Golden Age, back when the Traveler was still awake and the Sol System was an ever-growing utopia. Back before the Darkness came.
Tossing your leg over the saddle, you mount your Sparrow and gun the accelerator. The world narrows to speed—the howling rush of wind over your armour, the high-pitched whine of your engine, the blur of grass-rock-grass beneath you. Your Ghost has disappeared back into the ether, but you don't need a map to get where you're going. Nessus is dominated by the ruins of the Exodus Black, a colony ship launched five hundred years ago that crashed into the centaur. All you have to do is trace a path along its rotted-metal corpse until you're back at the transmat pad for your own ship.
First, though, you're going to visit Failsafe.
The governing artificial intelligence of the Exodus Black, and also its only survivor, she's been alone for a very, very long time, and is a little kooky as a result. You're fresh off saving her from a Fallen raid on the colony ship—they came close to destroying most of her vital systems and making off with more Golden Age technology than anyone would like the Fallen to have. Luckily, she called the Vanguard—the current leaders of the three orders of Guardians—and the Vanguard called you.
They don't call you for much, these days.
So off you went, and off went the Fallen's heads until there was no longer anyone nosing around in your friend's artificial guts. You want to make sure she's okay, though, and that means a personal visit. Strictly speaking, through your Ghost you could contact her from anywhere on the planet, but that doesn't sit right with you. Failsafe doesn't exactly have a face, per se—she has a room that's close enough, and that's where you'll speak to her from.
You dismount your sparrow in the rainwater pool just outside the bridge of the Exodus Black, where Failsafe's mainframe resides. It disappears, the transmat—another fancy word for a teleporter—returning it to storage in your ship as your boots splash down in the brackish water. As per usual, there are a few Dregs and a single Vandal skulking around outside the repurposed atmospheric shield that blocks Failsafe off from the rest of the world.
The First Curse offers four short arguments as to why they should allow you to pass.
There are no objections.
Dropping the handcannon into its holster, you climb past the abandoned crates, up the dull metal stairs, and knock politely on the wall at the side of the thrumming barrier that separates you from Failsafe. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. Your Ghost reappears of his own volition and speaks.
"Failsafe? You in there?"
The barrier snaps off, and you step through, your Ghost hovering over your shoulder.
"Of course I am in here, friendly Ghost!" Failsafe says, eerily cheerily—and then comes the monotone. "Everyone I've ever known is dead, and their bones are dust. Where would I go?"
Failsafe has a split personality: sometimes she's joyous and happy no matter what she's saying, and others she's tired and apathetic. Doesn't sound all that strange—because who isn't like that?—except for the fact she switches between them from one sentence to the next. Even her voice changes, as if two different people are speaking in one kilometre-long body. It was disconcerting at first, but now it's just one of her quirks. It's not like you're some paragon of mental stability yourself.
Your feet stamp across the steel gangways that lead you to her mainframe, loud enough to be polite, and you settle into a loose mockery of parade rest, hands locked behind your back. The room she 'lives' in is cavernous, each wall and roof lined with dozens of oblate hexahedrons whose purpose probably relates to some vagary of ship design you're not aware of. Her 'face' is a grey metal octagon backed by another larger, rounded blue metal octagon, which is itself backed by some strange array of tubes and heat sinks and things you cannot name—the only real notable thing about it is that it glows yellow when Failsafe is 'happy' and red when she's 'sad'.
Currently, it's yellow.
You expect it will switch back and forth a dozen times in the forthcoming conversation, like it has in all the ones you've had before.
The circle—with three pairs of twin pulsing electric-blue lines stretching from the centre to the circumference—at the centre of the first octagon, which you've come to think of as her eye, even if it can't see anything at all, rotates slowly.
"Captain!" Somehow, over the course of your adventures together, she's come to adopt you as the next Captain of the Exodus Black. You feel the weight of six hundred slaughtered souls—the sum total of the colony ship's lost crew—on your shoulders every time she says the word. You'll never live up to their memories. You're just a girl who knows how to kill. You don't know how to care.
Failsafe doesn't seem to mind.
"How are you holding up, Failsafe?" your Ghost asks. "Need any help with the repairs?"
"No need to worry, friendly Ghost," she says, "I have already requisitioned other Guardians to assist."
Behind her, the lights shift to bloody.
"You two are, like, way too good at the whole blowy-uppy thing for me to want you to fix me."
"Well I never!" your Ghost says. "I'll have you know that I have mastered seven forms of architecture, including two that are only possible on the Ascendant Plane!"
It's funny what you learn, killing gods.
Failsafe's not wrong, though, so you wave your Ghost down and stare pointedly not at her eye, but at the cameras on either side of her face she actually uses to see. The Fallen tore up the sanctuary-shrine of her body and almost stole the spark that catalyses her electric soul. It was a close call even by your standards. That would rattle anyone, five-hundred-year-old artificial intelligence or otherwise.
"Come on Cap, don't look at me like that." Her voice shifts an octave higher. "I will be fine! I was very angry about that brute tearing up my ship, but watching you shove a machine gun down his throat was very cathartic!"
"Wait," your Ghost says, floating closer to Failsafe, irises opening and closing as if he's blinking in surprise, "how were you watching?"
"Your communication protocols are not very secure, friendly Ghost!" A quiet whirr in the background. "You should get him looked at, Cap. He might be defective."
If your Ghost had fingers, you know he'd be pointing them angrily at Failsafe. "Defective? I'll show you defective, you lethargic Golden-Age lump! I've been places whose very nature is inimical to lower-dimensional lifeforms and laughed!"
You refrain from pointing out that's not really an argument against being defective, smiling quietly behind your narrow helmet. It's good to see he's having fun, whether he'd admit it or not. Instead you rock back and forth on your heels, not so much bored as just… restless, the strange, transient impatience of not having anywhere to be but wanting to go there anyway. Failsafe's fine—you know what she looks like when she's breaking down, and this isn't it.
"Oh, Captain!" Failsafe chimes, totally ignoring your Ghost, "I received a message from Ikora Rey while you were busy fighting off the Fallen. She would like to see you when you return to the Tower." A flash of red. "The Cayde-unit talked about her a lot, y'know. Said she had resting wiseface. I'm surprised he knew what wis—"
She cuts herself off, and you unclench your fist. "Sorry, Cap."
You shrug. It's fine.
He always was a bit of an idiot.
"Well," your Ghost says, a little awkwardly, "it was nice seeing you, Failsafe, but if Ikora wants to see us, we'd best be going."
"Goodbye, Captain!"
You turn and walk out of the Exodus Black's bridge, your Ghost fading back into your soul—Failsafe has let the barrier down, and the Fallen haven't replenished their scouts in front of it yet, so you're left to wander the short distance to the landing pad for your ship. You cross the pool again, leap over a couple of boulders, shuffle a surprised Dreg off his mortal coil with a well-placed knife, and clamber up a sandstone cliff. At the top is a blinking beacon that looks sort of like a microphone, marking a safe place for Guardians to set down on Nessus.
Your Ghost reappears, running the autopilot to bring your orbiting ship back in close enough for transmat. Once it arrives, you'll be setting out for the Tower. The Last City is, as the name suggests, humanity's sole remaining haven in the solar system, and the Tower is where its Guardians live. Technically it's not a tower anymore, though—the old one was destroyed in the Red War, which is something you'd rather not think about right now, and the new Tower was built beneath its ruins as a reminder that your defeat had been avenged but not forgotten.
You're curious as to why Ikora wants to talk to you. You're a Hunter, not a Warlock; a scout, not a warrior-poet. What, then, does the Warlock Vanguard, master of their order and the sort of woman who probably has to think at quarter-speed to talk to anyone who isn't her, want with you? You doubt it's a friendly visit—you like Ikora, she's the idol you can't admit to because what self-respecting Hunter wants to be like a Warlock, and you know she likes you too, but she wouldn't have called you back to the Tower just for a chat.
Hopefully it's something personal. You've done your official Vanguard business for the month.
Speaking of personal, though, once you've finished with Ikora, what else are you going to do at the Tower while you're there?
For this vote, select your top three (3) options of those provided—the three options with the most number of votes when it closes will win.
[ ] Visit Banshee-44. The Tower's premier gunsmith, he taught you everything you know about caring for and modifying your weapons. It's been some time since you last properly oiled your gear, and you could use the company.
[ ] Visit Lakshmi-2. The leader of the Future War Cult, a political faction in the city that believes a war with the Darkness is inevitable and that anything but preparing for it is folly, you find every conversation with her an interesting mix of philosophy and practical advice.
[ ] Visit the Colonel. He's a rooster. Not your rooster, either. But both the men who've owned him are dead—one you failed, one you killed—and he gets lonely sometimes.
[ ] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[ ] Visit Hawthorne. The Last City's liaison between the Guardians and their mortal allies, you worked with her in the early days of the Red War, and she always has plenty of tales to tell about what life's like out in the wild when you can only die once.
[ ] Visit Ikora Rey. Again. This time as a friend.
[ ] Visit the Drifter. He has a Ghost, and he wields the Light—but he's definitely not a Guardian. You honestly don't know what he is, except a whole lot of trouble. And a damn good storyteller, of the vicious, bloody kind. Your favourite.
This update contains the first gunfight I've ever written, so any feedback on what it did and didn't do well would be appreciated!
(The Colonel is not actually a rooster; she's a chicken. You have sort of... never noticed).
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Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Oooo.
[X] Visit Lakshmi-2. The leader of the Future War Cult, a political faction in the city that believes a war with the Darkness is inevitable and that anything but preparing for it is folly, you find every conversation with her an interesting mix of philosophy and practical advice.
Who can pass up the chance of philosophy and furious arguments? She can tell us all is doomed, and we can tell her to get fucked and smile more!
[X] Visit Hawthorne. The Last City's liaison between the Guardians and their mortal allies, you worked with her in the early days of the Red War, and she always has plenty of tales to tell about what life's like out in the wild when you can only die once.
Liasing with the normies; always important. We would be a poor representative if we lacked a good understanding of our constituents!
[X] Visit the Drifter. He has a Ghost, and he wields the Light—but he's definitely not a Guardian. You honestly don't know what he is, except a whole lot of trouble. And a damn good storyteller, of the vicious, bloody kind. Your favourite.
Freaky mysteries that we get thrown out of bars with and put under joint restraining orders alongside are always a good decision!
I may be swayed from Lakshmi-2 to Colonel KFC by a sufficiently peppy argument.
[X] Visit Lakshmi-2. The leader of the Future War Cult, a political faction in the city that believes a war with the Darkness is inevitable and that anything but preparing for it is folly, you find every conversation with her an interesting mix of philosophy and practical advice.
Who can pass up the chance of philosophy and furious arguments? She can tell us all is doomed, and we can tell her to get fucked and smile more!
[X] Visit Hawthorne. The Last City's liaison between the Guardians and their mortal allies, you worked with her in the early days of the Red War, and she always has plenty of tales to tell about what life's like out in the wild when you can only die once.
Liasing with the normies; always important. We would be a poor representative if we lacked a good understanding of our constituents!
[X] Visit the Drifter. He has a Ghost, and he wields the Light—but he's definitely not a Guardian. You honestly don't know what he is, except a whole lot of trouble. And a damn good storyteller, of the vicious, bloody kind. Your favourite.
Freaky mysteries that we get thrown out of bars with and put under joint restraining orders alongside are always a good decision!
I may be swayed from Lakshmi-2 to Colonel KFC by a sufficiently peppy argument.
Lexica
Persevere
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Visit Ikora Rey. Again. This time as a friend.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[X] Visit Hawthorne. The Last City's liaison between the Guardians and their mortal allies, you worked with her in the early days of the Red War, and she always has plenty of tales to tell about what life's like out in the wild when you can only die once.
I don't have too much to say about my choices. All three of them are pretty cool characters who I would like to see, but I wouldn't be unhappy with any of the other options either.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[X] Visit Hawthorne. The Last City's liaison between the Guardians and their mortal allies, you worked with her in the early days of the Red War, and she always has plenty of tales to tell about what life's like out in the wild when you can only die once.
I don't have too much to say about my choices. All three of them are pretty cool characters who I would like to see, but I wouldn't be unhappy with any of the other options either.
- Location
- USA
[X] Visit Banshee-44. The Tower's premier gunsmith, he taught you everything you know about caring for and modifying your weapons. It's been some time since you last properly oiled your gear, and you could use the company.
[X] Visit the Colonel. He's a rooster. Not your rooster, either. But both the men who've owned him are dead—one you failed, one you killed—and he gets lonely sometimes.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[X] Visit the Colonel. He's a rooster. Not your rooster, either. But both the men who've owned him are dead—one you failed, one you killed—and he gets lonely sometimes.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
Lord Shaxx is the best.
Lord Shaxx is the best.
- Location
- DFW
[X] Visit the Colonel. He's a rooster. Not your rooster, either. But both the men who've owned him are dead—one you failed, one you killed—and he gets lonely sometimes.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[X] Visit Hawthorne. The Last City's liaison between the Guardians and their mortal allies, you worked with her in the early days of the Red War, and she always has plenty of tales to tell about what life's like out in the wild when you can only die once.
kinda disappointing that you had the ghost do all the talking, tbh he's very annoying (and i typically like nolan north voiced characters) like, we the audience get to know what she's feeling but it would be nice for them to vocalize how they feel to other characters.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[X] Visit Hawthorne. The Last City's liaison between the Guardians and their mortal allies, you worked with her in the early days of the Red War, and she always has plenty of tales to tell about what life's like out in the wild when you can only die once.
kinda disappointing that you had the ghost do all the talking, tbh he's very annoying (and i typically like nolan north voiced characters) like, we the audience get to know what she's feeling but it would be nice for them to vocalize how they feel to other characters.
[X] Visit Banshee-44. The Tower's premier gunsmith, he taught you everything you know about caring for and modifying your weapons. It's been some time since you last properly oiled your gear, and you could use the company.
[X] Visit the Colonel. He's a rooster. Not your rooster, either. But both the men who've owned him are dead—one you failed, one you killed—and he gets lonely sometimes.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[X] Visit the Colonel. He's a rooster. Not your rooster, either. But both the men who've owned him are dead—one you failed, one you killed—and he gets lonely sometimes.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
Wobulator
Within 1 AU of you!
- Location
- Mars
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[x] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[x] Visit Ikora Rey. Again. This time as a friend.
[x] Visit the Drifter. He has a Ghost, and he wields the Light—but he's definitely not a Guardian. You honestly don't know what he is, except a whole lot of trouble. And a damn good storyteller, of the vicious, bloody kind. Your favourite.
[x] Visit Ikora Rey. Again. This time as a friend.
[x] Visit the Drifter. He has a Ghost, and he wields the Light—but he's definitely not a Guardian. You honestly don't know what he is, except a whole lot of trouble. And a damn good storyteller, of the vicious, bloody kind. Your favourite.
DB_Explorer
Purveyor of alternate realities.
- Location
- San Diego, California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Visit Lakshmi-2. The leader of the Future War Cult, a political faction in the city that believes a war with the Darkness is inevitable and that anything but preparing for it is folly, you find every conversation with her an interesting mix of philosophy and practical advice.
[X] Visit Hawthorne. The Last City's liaison between the Guardians and their mortal allies, you worked with her in the early days of the Red War, and she always has plenty of tales to tell about what life's like out in the wild when you can only die once.
[X] Visit the Drifter. He has a Ghost, and he wields the Light—but he's definitely not a Guardian. You honestly don't know what he is, except a whole lot of trouble. And a damn good storyteller, of the vicious, bloody kind. Your favourite.
I HAVE NO IDEA WHATS GOING ON BTW
[X] Visit Hawthorne. The Last City's liaison between the Guardians and their mortal allies, you worked with her in the early days of the Red War, and she always has plenty of tales to tell about what life's like out in the wild when you can only die once.
[X] Visit the Drifter. He has a Ghost, and he wields the Light—but he's definitely not a Guardian. You honestly don't know what he is, except a whole lot of trouble. And a damn good storyteller, of the vicious, bloody kind. Your favourite.
I HAVE NO IDEA WHATS GOING ON BTW
Mother Nyx
Mother of Elpis
- Location
- The Kei Klub
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Visit Banshee-44. The Tower's premier gunsmith, he taught you everything you know about caring for and modifying your weapons. It's been some time since you last properly oiled your gear, and you could use the company.
[X] Visit Lakshmi-2. The leader of the Future War Cult, a political faction in the city that believes a war with the Darkness is inevitable and that anything but preparing for it is folly, you find every conversation with her an interesting mix of philosophy and practical advice.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[X] Visit Lakshmi-2. The leader of the Future War Cult, a political faction in the city that believes a war with the Darkness is inevitable and that anything but preparing for it is folly, you find every conversation with her an interesting mix of philosophy and practical advice.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
Lutris
Verified Moonman
- Location
- Tokyo
[x] Visit Banshee-44. The Tower's premier gunsmith, he taught you everything you know about caring for and modifying your weapons. It's been some time since you last properly oiled your gear, and you could use the company.
[x] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[x] Visit Ikora Rey. Again. This time as a friend.
As much as I advocated for some hawt Colonel action, I feel like we should go visit these three. Banshee, to talk about guns (even if he might not remember us), Shaxx (I really like the idea of our Guardian being in the running for the Unbroken title if that's possible in the Quest), and Ikora. Even discounting that she's the reason we're back here, she can teach us about Void Light down the line.
I mean, it always was weird to me that Voidlocks (and later Stormcallers) had Blink, but only Bladedancers ever got access to it. Elemental parity, let's go!
Edit: Forgot to X out the options.
[x] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's really like out there.
[x] Visit Ikora Rey. Again. This time as a friend.
As much as I advocated for some hawt Colonel action, I feel like we should go visit these three. Banshee, to talk about guns (even if he might not remember us), Shaxx (I really like the idea of our Guardian being in the running for the Unbroken title if that's possible in the Quest), and Ikora. Even discounting that she's the reason we're back here, she can teach us about Void Light down the line.
I mean, it always was weird to me that Voidlocks (and later Stormcallers) had Blink, but only Bladedancers ever got access to it. Elemental parity, let's go!
Edit: Forgot to X out the options.
Dark Abstraction
Infrequent Participant
- Location
- United States
[X] Visit Banshee-44. The Tower's premier gunsmith, he taught you everything you know about caring for and modifying your weapons. It's been some time since you last properly oiled your gear, and you could use the company.
[X] Visit Lakshmi-2. The leader of the Future War Cult, a political faction in the city that believes a war with the Darkness is inevitable and that anything but preparing for it is folly, you find every conversation with her an interesting mix of philosophy and practical advice.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's reallylike out there.
The gunsmith is always a pleasure to speak with, he's got a good head on his shoulders and a pleasant word for guardians of all stripes. Considering our character seems to thrive on being just this side of a state of turmoil, a confidante like Banshee-44 would definitely be nice to see counted among her more common contacts.
Lakshmi is worth talking to simply to get a bead on the current leanings of one of the lead non-vanguard guardian factions, and would be an opportunity to flesh out our guardian's politics a bit in the conversation that'll come up.
And Shaxx, because short of Saladin he's one of the wisest guardians we could foster a connection with, and getting a perspective on how things are going with the Crucible is always worth it since those locations are usually around contested areas; there's a reason a bunch of guardians on a combat-footing swarming around is considered an appealing prospect at the "arenas." So hearing updates in that regards would be of good use.
[X] Visit Lakshmi-2. The leader of the Future War Cult, a political faction in the city that believes a war with the Darkness is inevitable and that anything but preparing for it is folly, you find every conversation with her an interesting mix of philosophy and practical advice.
[X] Visit Lord Shaxx. Master of the Crucible—the live-fire arena where Guardians train against one another on battlefields all across the system—and a hero of the Battle of Six Fronts, he's always eager to talk about the latest batch of recruits with someone who knows what it's reallylike out there.
The gunsmith is always a pleasure to speak with, he's got a good head on his shoulders and a pleasant word for guardians of all stripes. Considering our character seems to thrive on being just this side of a state of turmoil, a confidante like Banshee-44 would definitely be nice to see counted among her more common contacts.
Lakshmi is worth talking to simply to get a bead on the current leanings of one of the lead non-vanguard guardian factions, and would be an opportunity to flesh out our guardian's politics a bit in the conversation that'll come up.
And Shaxx, because short of Saladin he's one of the wisest guardians we could foster a connection with, and getting a perspective on how things are going with the Crucible is always worth it since those locations are usually around contested areas; there's a reason a bunch of guardians on a combat-footing swarming around is considered an appealing prospect at the "arenas." So hearing updates in that regards would be of good use.
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