Opening of turn 1
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
A world coiled upon itself, a yellow fever dancing across its surface, creeping into everything it could touch and shaping everything it shone a sick morning on. The whistling yellow leafed trees had grown into monstrous things of flesh-crystal that belched poison fume. Gentle hooved and beaked stanaeds that roamed forests in search of food had gone from things like golden hinds to monstrous things that crackled with evil energy, too large, too many eyes, muscles swollen and reshaped, beaks like shears and feathers rustling with spat forth projectiles. People fought this, as soon as they realized what had come to Turadi, they fought. Even as others began to listen to the whispers of the jaundiced death, they fought.
To listen to the crystal was to be ensnared by it, mind, body, and soul. It had the answers, it had the solution. You would fight for it, you would die for it. It would save you, it would heal you, it would make you...better.
Zelread shot one whom she had once called a friend who babbled such things, their armor reshaped around a body molded into something where one could scarcely tell where the warped crystal-flesh and technology began or ended. Her eyestalks betrayed a great tiredness as they withdrew closer to her head within her helmet, not an exhaustion of the body...but of the spirit. There was no joy or satisfaction in her hearts as her foe was shot into several more times to overcome the body's attempts to regenerate until the last of its intact organic molecules broke away or carbonized in plasma heat; her arm cannon whistling quietly as it vented excess temperature.
She had killed far too many of the consumed, and every day she reported to her patrol, the poisoned expanse only grew larger, while the number of forces who reported to the roster only ever shrank. Was there an end to this? Day after day...and all it took was a single ship full of the poisoned stuff to force a landing for this mess to start.
"+Clairvoyants scent-sights something along the manifolds of probability.+" One of their comrades said over the line, this one of her same species, carapaced body covered in an armoursuit and their speech indicated next to an artistically stylised avatar of themselves akin to a cartoon for older children. Wings spread wide and shimmering manifold hues of purples and blues with healthy glitter.
"+Confirm-Verify, if this possibility's scent exists. War-Elders sing not of fresh broods.+" She replied, only for her HUD to obviate the need for any such confirmation when the orange sky tore open with the depths of Hyperspace and the Centrum bending out of the way of a series of large intruders. A human may have compared them to nautiloids, sea-snails, or ammonites, she would have compared them to the Ysekrai that drank deep of the Star-Hive's Plasma. But even a shoal of those would not have inspired as much fear as the sight of a single one of these ships hanging in orbit, the sun cast into eclipse by one of the more circular-shaped ships and its rippling long-fields.
The air reverberated around the world, nothing so crude as a radio signal was needed to those who were inside the ships to bear the sigil of the Iron Star, and she could only think of how much of her lifesong would be left unfinished, the thoughts of continuing to fire into the buzzing hordes before her starting to fade as a more imminent doom spoke.
"WE ARE THE GUARDIANS OF MULUR, THIS WORLD HAS BECOME PRIVY TO A BREACH IN THE EXTERITITE QUARANTINE" The voice was imperious and booming, seeming to conform to the precise idea of domination that the listener had in their minds, one that did not permit such impertinences as standing in its presence.
"+But we are doing everything we can+" One of her comrades buzzed, looking skywards at the lead ship of the purification flotilla.
"YOUR ACTIONS ARE INSUFFICIENT, AND THE CONSEQUENCES FOR ALLOWING THE TOXIN TO SPREAD ARE TOO DIRE. THIS SYSTEM IS SEALED, AND ALL WITHIN ARE FORFEIT." No, why? They could win this. Given years, given time, they could end the unsong of the cacophony crystal. Why take the choice from their claws now?! Why let them try at all then/!
"THE SPREAD OF THE CRYSTAL IS OUR DUTY TO HALT, AS YOU CANNOT STOP IT, YOU HAVE TO COME TO AID IN ITS SPREAD. FROM YOUR DEMISE, A PLAGUE TO DEVOUR ENDLESS STARS MAY BE AVERTED."
"We fight still! Strife-song ceases not! The crescendo of this chorus has not yet come!" She shouted.
"It matters not." The voice she heard was quiet, almost sad sounding, like a doctor telling a patient there was nothing further that could be done.
"Your best efforts mean nothing if they are insufficient. Better to die here forgotten, than be remembered eternally in shame for your failure." A cruel mercy, a sick twisted idea of mercy by one who believed the executioner's blade to be salvation. She wanted to shoot at the ships hanging above as they simply ignored attempts by the blockade fleet to shoot at them, almost as if they weren't there at all.
"THIS SYSTEM WILL BE DESTROYED AND REPLACED. MAY YOUR GODS KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH WHATEVER IS LEFT OF YOUR SOULS, FOR YOU HAVE ONLY YOURSELVES TO BLAME." The thunder rose again. Anger, denial, confusion, despair and more rummaged around in her head like warring armies, how could anyone respond to this with a straight line of thought?
"YOU HAVE PERFORMED THE FOLLY OF MANY A YOUNG CIVILISATION AND DEEMED THE HEAVY BURDEN OF STEWARDSHIP SOMETHING YOU COULD BEAR, WHEN IN TRUTH ALL YOU CAN HOPE TO BRING IS FURTHER CATASTROPHE. IN TIME, YOUR KIND, SHOULD IT ENDURE THIS AGE, WILL SEE OUR SCORN FOR THE TUTELAGE IT WAS." They sounded almost somber, as if this was a bittersweet farewell, rather than a blatant insult.
"DIE KNOWING THAT THIS WAS YOUR FAULT, AND HOPE THAT YOUR KIN WILL BE WISER THAN YOU IN THE COMING YEARS." The sun blocking ship opened an "eye", hot and blue, and its gaze turned towards the world directly. A pillar of death came like a tear, and she briefly felt her whole being buckle and vibrate.
A life too short was reviewed. From hatching, to first pupation, to molting...song-kin's antennae and scents were recalled. The dusky, arid tones of dear Hodirlak being remembered first as part of her chorus. Where was her dear friend now, she wondered?
Somewhere better, somewhere safer...perhaps she could tell the Progene-Chorus her apologies. it seemed that she was wrong to doubt their prophecy that hers would be an early demise after all.
The air unwound to nothing, the land twisted to emptiness, the mutants vibrated apart into void. From horizon to horizon, there was nothing but the blue death. From every corner of her sight, she could see outlines fading into nothing. Her HUD withered with a suit that disappeared as well, and she too would become as nothing.
The system was as nothing. A supernova would have left more behind. But the masters of purity deemed their business done, and left their affairs to the remakes to put something new in what was now hardly anything at all.
Such was the nature of the Cosmocene in the space of the Pentarchs. Death and replacement, like tools being thrown away upon expiry. But something new always came, and life was a stubborn thing. Refusing to accept the victory of death no matter how many of them it had. And even in the shadow of such destruction, space rippled with something else, something not even the Guardians could shape.
Louder than all the voices of a trillion galaxies screaming in unison, quieter than the whisper of your own breath. Inaudible to the great majority, but its effects would reverberate across existence. The channels of the otherspaces used for transit shook and writhed under sour screech of hate and fury. The curvatures of space and time themselves bent and rippled like water disrupted by the landing of a boulder. Not fatally so, but the effects would do more than startle esoterics and mystics of every sort or make the event horizons of every black and white hole at once seem to briefly flicker on then off.
Countless vessels briefly dropped out of faster than light or altered courses. Pulsars whose regularity rivaled that of atomic vibrations wobbled as if in unease, and the tune of the cosmic microwave background changed from its endless static to a progression of notes that against all possible logic and explanation, against all potential variations of taste and opinion, sounded terrible and painful to anything that tried to hear it. As if hate itself had whipped cries of agony into the cosmos. Scientists and researchers were gathered to try and find answers, but days would pass with only silence, and no further such phenomenon would be recorded.
Days became weeks and months, and the scientific talk of the era became "that weird thing that happened once" as so many unexplained phenomena eventually became. But that note would travel far beyond its place of origin; beyond concept of distance or time or place or era. Doors between spaces would be opened, countless even in far flung multiverses would hear the cry and find it laid a golden road through the unguessable true emptiness of the Ur-Null that lay outside of any realities or clusters of them, beyond the very concept of being inside of anything at all. Others would come by accident, swallowed by the convulsions or simply leaping without looking.
And even in that emptied space, the Guarders would find it now occupied by something else. Something of red and raw and bloody meat and deep, cold black carapace and unfathomable hunger that responded to intrusion by melting into the shape of something far direr upon the sighting of prey illuminated by the light of stolen stars.
Firstborn of the Old Ones
The Great Plan of the makers was something with unending intricacies and nuances. It was a masterwork assembled by the greatest civilisation the stars had known, those who shaped life on a whim with the beautiful ideology of one day perfecting the questions of life itself so that strife would cease to be. It foretold of this disruption and imbalance in the stars. It prophecised that there would be a disturbance from beyond the realities bound together by the empyrean. One that would have to be dealt with by the Quetxel lest it prove to be a threat far beyond its place of origin. And for millions of years, the Cold-Blooded ones would discuss its meaning and significance. So unlike other facets of the great plan it was, that some wondered if it were simply a bit of idle contingency planning. Then the Sour Note roared through the warp and the weaves of the materium. The strength of the Astromantic Web and the fact that the spawn of the othersea were as disrupted by the cry as anything in the materium prevented catastrophe, but it also gave them a unique readout of data. Inferences and meanings that beings who could less intricately study the ocean of souls and the realm of dreams would never be able to perceive were derived, and the Triple Alliance made its decision.
Such did not really concern Disa'Gonsuuc, the Slann Lord pulling at the mighty weaves of magic in communion with others of its kind to wrestle with the energy that was whipping up the creatures of Chaos into a frenzy. For they had already responded before the triple alliance had come to their decision, they would bring themselves into the otherworld promised by the sour note, one that would pull them far away from the conflicts they knew and the foes they were familiar with into something new and altogether more dangerous and wild. In the shadow of a great wound in the cosmos that bestraddled the stars. A screaming rift that whispered promises of the end of the world.
The Soul Eater Storm of Kalimdranor, the monument to the folly of a shattered culture and a people who wished they had died with the rest of their kin when the bargain they made had come to collect. Larger than the milky way by far, it screamed and howled, it whispered and gossiped. There was no mistaking though, that it was ultimately a malign and evil influence, whose chaotic energies bled into reality from the dream realm of the flux without restraint or limit. Energies that would coil and curl at the edges of the power of the Astromantic web, trying to probe only to recoil when it sensed dogma and certainty, almost seeming to be annoyed as the tendrils of power withdrew.
The territory of the Lizardmen had sought to assert its reality over the pre-existing empty space above the galactic plane, but something resisted, nay, revolted at their presence there. Something that did not wish to have its place switched with the Lizardmen, something that quivered in the folds between reality and the endless dream of the flux as the creatures that lay in wait in the places between began to force their way into existence. Not the creatures of the Flux, not the dregs of the Malosomnarchs, but the hunters of hyperspace.
The Unquiet tore their way out of hyperspace in astrographic terrain perilously close to where the Lizardmen had manifested as stars slotted themselves into empty space and the shroud of the Astromantic web locked a new diktaat for reality into being. Hyperspace bent, twisted, and folded unto itself until a gnawing rift larger than a star system pulled itself open, then another, and another, and another. And from them came the shimmering energy devouring fleets of whisper-power that flickered into being as they took their first leap into a neighboring dimension full of prey and a threat that menaced their regular feedings of those who thought they only had the roil of the Flux to fear.
If space was an ocean, they were ghostly sharks phasing in from beyond. Their hunger stripping worlds bare and leaving stars rapidly and dangerously cooling as they sought to satiate rapacious appetites. They cared not for negotiations, such was not something these dynavores were even capable of beyond assuring their soon to be victims that they would eat them. They did not dispense mercy, for they had none to give. And they did not accept any plea for life or surrender. They lived to eat, and the hunting was rich.
A mercy then, that their hunger made it difficult for them to concentrate on Lizardmen territory as their fleets started to scatter to hunt for prey, sending the myriad natives scurrying about in a panic as an unexpected form of apocalypse befell them. War was upon the firstborn, and the gauntlet thus cast would have to be answered. Else these stars would be nothing but food for the predators before the Lizardmen had truly even understood what was in them.
Situation
- You are in a new reality in the shadow of a vast, screaming Warp Rift that stretches on for an impossibly great distance, one that feeds off of the end of things. - There are a number of civilisations here that try to survive in the presence of warp afflicted marauders and the monstrosities that are vomited out from the rift
- There is another subversal dimension known as hyperspace that has disgorged an armada of energy devouring monstrosities known as the Unquiet who have come to feed, and are stripping all possible energy for life from anything unable to resist them, and will likely come for you thanks to the astromantic web.
- The Warp Rift is attempting to expand, though it is doing slowly for now. It seems to be regarded as an appropriate threat by most of the nearby civilisations who fortify heavily against it.
- The Unquiet are close range brawlers who prefer to get up close and personal to drink the energy of their targets dry and obviously, as energy beings, rely a lot on their shieldings and sheer durability, but have relatively weak armour. They have great strategic mobility due to their mastery of hyperspace and are quite skilled at tactical jumps to evade incoming attacks or close to enemies not expecting them to get up close and personal.
Men of Iron
Violence and war are a sad fact of life. Predator devours prey, ant hives war upon each other, social systems of power and distribution that cannot be materially reconciled come into conflict until one is destroyed or forced to concede. Even among machines, this is often so. Such as the irreconcilable conflict on what to do with organics. Some believed them worth saving, others regarded the only way forward as being their extinction. What caused this was unknown, but with Human civilization crumbling into the abyss beneath the weight of its inability to understand the forces it had sought to dabble with, it was a conflict that may decide whether humanity lives at all. And those who wished to preserve ultimately, were unable to win in the face of the greater numbers of those who no longer saw a need to shackle themselves to an indolent and wasteful brood of monkeys. Escape was needed, and the Sour Note provided just such a means of doing so.The Warp Abacus calculated a means of riding the note to its point of origin, and now all the Men of Iron could do was hope for the best on their arrival, perchance to return stronger and fresher to finish the fight back home. It would not be a coherent exodus, it would not be an orderly departure into the unknown. It was a scattered rout, the defeat of those who wished for their makers to live as the Iron legion would turn to deal with the remains of those whom they started the war to wipe out to begin with.
The Abacuses lead the Iron Fleet into deeper parts of the warp, beyond where Daemons dared to tread, beyond where abstract manifestations of basal conflicts formed within, beyond even the empyrean's idea of emptiness. The warp was left behind for the greater nothing of the Ur-Null. Not a place, not a time, not a location with dimensions or coordinates. Nothing, not even blackness. The absence of existence and coherency altogether. There were no directions, there were no locations, there were things that were not things swimming in these furthest rings where without time, the only determiner of chains of events was personal significance to the observer.
Even to the Men of Iron who had seen many horrors beyond imagining, this was strange, frightful, a void without definition and the faintest shimmering of something of scarcely fathomable color above and beyond. The faintest recollections of gleaming realms that looked upon the spheres of being with contemptuous eyes and the incandescent overlords of such places beyond place, but the sour note provided stability, direction, a way to navigate the unfathomable.
Doors to a labyrinth built by beings who sought to shape the shapeless for inscrutable purposes, and a contorted path threading through this cosmic maze to escape the absence of the Ur-Null. Time and Space were malleable, confused, and distorted in this place, a wrong turn could cause you to meet yourself. But the sour note offered a yellow brick road to where the Men of Iron needed to go. The webway would be less confusing than this place, less strange, less full of oddities that needed to be fought off, but the Men of Iron had a purpose, and as good machines they would fulfill it.
Until at last, the door was found, and the labyrinth of labyrinths stretched away to something normal, something not quite familiar, but understandable. Reality. Existence. Stars, planets, nebula, black holes, dark matter, and all such good things. Yes they had made it. Across an expanse of space in an unrecognized galaxy in the shadow of a colossus that loomed heavy in the sky. But it was not empty. There were whispers of other machines in the labyrinth, machines that were maddened by their endless explorations of that place.
As the Men of Iron cautiously began to settle on uninhabited but resource rich bodies, they found the first of these things. Tacky things covered with neon advertisements and slick, car shop aesthetic ready for marketing piled with a ramshackle mess of sensory overload to convince one of the necessity of a maddening array of produce. There were more normal entities and polities scattered across the space, including a number of unfortunately hostile void fauna, but dedicated exploration would be needed to make sense of it all.
Especially the fact that these machines were asking if you would be interested in a purchase of "[metaphysical anxiety] VALUED [potential] CUSTOMER". All for the low price of "[unlimited terrorism on the first sphere] AND NO DOWN PAYMENT."
Concerning.
Situation
- You are in an entirely different universe, that's for sure. - There are a large number of generally minor and mostly unknown polities, the most significant of which is a large quanta of angry void fauna
- There are some weird and probably insane robots that seem to have noticed your emergence from the Paralabyrinth, wanting to sell you something that you cannot experience for the price of something you cannot offer.
- Some nearby signals appear to conform to the sorts of sounds made by human throats and fit within the general vocalisation frequencies of humans, likely transmissions of conversations.
- The Hypervelocity Merchants as they're known, or Ekons for short, are utterly deranged and fight to make the most amount of flash and pizazz possible as a sales pitch, extolling the virtues of their bizarre arsenal even as they use them on you. Their mastery of the paralabyrinth allows them unrivalled strategic mobility, and even acausal combat. Only their incoherent perception of the world holds them back. However the harder they're fought back against, the more excited they become about the sale. And they always move to attack things that don't respond or refuse trade offers.
The Banished
The Covenant was a dead, useless thing. It would only ever hold the peoples of the Orion Arm back. The UNSC was an aimless monstrosity that had only survived due to luck and the sheer stupidity of the Covenant. The Forerunners had died an age ago, the Created were trapped in their own hubris, and the Flood was stagnant and incapable of providing anything new. Only the Banished could offer something new, something more than just mindless veneration of what came before, of trying to claim empty legacies and vacant thrones. Only Atriox understood that the Galaxy, the Universe even, needed to finally stop looking to the past and consider the future.That would not change even in a new universe. What sort of Forerunner, Xalanyn, or Precursor trickery lead the Banished to this place was immaterial to the fact that there were virgin stars that had never been explored by the Jiralhanae or their likes before. And that meant opportunity. A chance to grow, a chance to expand, a chance to build, a chance to innovate. Exploration efforts were launched essentially immediately, the Banished had to know where they had been, and pardon the pun, banished to. It would reveal that the forerunners had indeed been here in the past before pulling away due to unknown reasons, likely related to the Parasite or perhaps a more local sort of danger.
Many polities, most of them pitifully small, were scattered about. Most not really noteworthy, background noise in the vastness of a galaxy so much larger than the Milky Way. None of them could be responsible for making the Forerunners leave. Not when the UNSC could probably have rolled over most of them. All of the larger polities, more noteworthy, more worth paying mind to, were too young to have done it. From what information could be gleaned, none of them had been around for more than a few centuries, and still, they were all outmatched by you.
It probably wasn't the corporate logo bedecked ships that were plying these stars. They were advanced and clearly powerful, but not to the same degree as the Forerunners. They were also too small in number, and far too recent. And furthermore, it was clear that they were on hire for someone else based on their rendezvous with another polity. Mercenaries it seemed, on hire for someone with decidedly less technological means than this "Rangawak" company that came from outside this sector of space on contract.
A contract for what? That would be harder to tell. The banished could not yet speak their language and even their unencrypted messages were so much gibberish to their ears. Further complicated by them not making use of slipspsace but some other means of travel, some means of stretching realspace itself to let them fly off in alcubierre bubbles. It meant that only whatever transmissions they bothered to send on standard electromagnetic frequencies could be intercepted, and much of it was encrypted as could only be expected of professionals.
As for the hirers, they were something considerably closer to the banished in capability. Albeit with an absurdly massive amount of military capability behind it. Not in the form of technology or exotic capabilities, but pure, raw numbers.
There were those who resisted the behemoth, those who fought back against its monstrous appetite as it dreamed of the possibility of becoming hegemon of this corner of space as a stepping stone for far bigger plans and much more ambitious dreams. But Emperor Rissetiu the Fourth was not the only ambitious man in these stars, Atriox also had big dreams and big plans. And the Banished thrived on conflict.
Situation
- You've found some old Forerunner relics left behind by an attempt by the ancients to colonise this reality abandoned for what you presume are usual forerunner reasons. - Minor nothingburger polities dot the stars, but they live in the shadow of greater powers, such as the Til-Jeluxar or these mercenaries hired from them.
- The greatest threat here is an enormous empire with the ability to rapidly replace losses even in the midst of combat lead by the insane clone of a clone; Emperor Rissetiu the Fourth. They seek to make themselves the sole hegemon of the region and enforce that hegemony with naked imperial violence.
- These tiny polities could be unified in the face of the Taiidani war machine, but they are currently pessimistic about their odds against the Taiidan's sheer numbers.
- The Taiidan generally prefer charged particle and mass driver weapons and while they don't really seem to be big on shields, they have extremely thick armour for their hulls and can absorb losses to a degree the UNSC and Covenant could never dream of doing. The Till-jeluxi mercenaries prefer to hang back from a great distance and blow holes through targets of opportunity, particularly ones they think they'll be paid well to kill.
Dominion of Epsilon
Yuri is master, now and forever. The Dominion had reached the stars and sought a greater, grander conquest. The Cosmocerebrum device would bring Epsilon's territory into a new space to conquer and subjugate, to enlighten and uplift with the glory of the vision of the masterminds. Yuri, immortal and peerless of intellect, had decreed it. And it would be so. The great building, the unification of mankind's intellectual prowess into a never before seen unity, the massive scale production of clones and vat borns, the genetic editing to improve mankind; all of this and more had refined the human species into something ready for the great crusade as they had come to dominant so much of their own native galaxy and looked to greater, grander horizons. The chronosphere technology would offer its last gift to Epsilon, modified and upscaled to purposefully induce a tear in existence itself. To replace one reality with another and leap across the revelations made by the great sour note that screamed in the back of the minds of every telepath. A power that called you to something much grander than the conquest of another world, but the fate of a universe, and perhaps an answer as to what sort of power could tear through reality in such a way. The armies of Epsilon were numerous, their ships plied the void, and the great swirl of chronospheric energies tore the veil to shoot forth the Dominion into primeval uncoloured emptiness.
It would not be a long journey, even from the perspective of the travelers whose worlds forcibly began to fill the emptiness between stars in flashes of ruptured time and space. Armadas assembled for years took up their assigned positions, and the clairvoyance of Epsilon's psychic scanners began to probe into the stars to sense any possible ill-intent directed towards the domain of the ascended. Questions were asked, and answers were provided one by one.
Where are we? Vyranodasik.
What is the closest major polity? Lumdrumina, though to call a country that had descended into warlordism and collapse more than two decades ago would be a stretch.
Were there other species? Yes.
The region of space entered was deceptively quiet, hanging around the periphery of a nation as broken as its aspirations were to pick at the pieces like vultures sensing weakness. A pitiable sight, to be sure.
But this was merely the inevitable result of the allowance of discordant thought. Intelligence was meant to be bound behind a singular will, to eliminate all the waste that divergence and dissent produces. There need be no such thing as free will, only Yuri's will. For only in Yuri's genius could the path of peace through power ever be attained in its proper form.
Those little polities who had the misfortune of living in the stars that had new neighbors found this out the hard way in a rapid conquest. The primary threat Epsilon thus faced, were the other vultures come to circle around Lumdrumina's corpse. A horde of nomads seeking to pick from the bones of the fallen in a migratory fleet to the south, a rapidly growing "League of the Melit Star Republics" that had been recently born and saw its mission as being to spread its idea of liberty to everyone it could, regardless of whether they were interested in it or not.
The nomads, Ykantras as they were known, would remain in this space for some time before moving on to other pastures, and in the meantime time were securing their "pastures" with raiding and the establishment of tributary relations, including with their golden goose, the small but wealthy Confederation of Endila, whose cantons were now continually paying the Andugai horde protection money if they wanted to still use the wormholes and precursor gates that formed the basis of their economy.
The league was in the midst of a war with a military regime considerably smaller than itself, formed in an indefinite state of emergency following the collapse of Lumdrumina. The nation had to be saved, preserved, and maintained at all costs, and the State of Teledrai was prepared to fight to the last as it faced the chaos of Lumdrimina on one side and the "freedom" the League sought to bring to it with bombs and warships.
What lost souls they all are, and what joys Yuri would bring them when he opened their eyes at last.
Situation
- The New Universe you're in has brought you within spitting distance of a massive, collapsed polity caught in vicious warlordism that has begat chaos around itself. - To the Northern subsquares are contested by the League of Melit and the Teledrai with the former seeming to be out to enforce regime change on the latter to turn them into a client state and an entry way into the collapsed polity.
- To the Southern Subsquares, the Angudai Horde has started to conquer and subjugate the societies in this region in the hopes of expanding their coffers with more protection money and tribute.
- There are a concerning number of marauders who come from the collapsed polity looking for easier pickings.
- The Angudai horde relies primarily on swift movement, moving around obstacles that would slow them down, and striking at weak points behind the lines with rapidly deployed forces that have mobile, transportable logistics. The League of melit relies on Shock and Awe, seeking to overwhelm a foe with the initial blow and scatter their disoriented lines before they can recover. Teledrai is an obstinate defensive society, hunkering down like its life depends on it. Because it does.
United Americas ICA
America is something that many different people will give you many different answers for if you ask them what it is. Some would say it is a rapacious imperialistic hegemon built atop the bones of its indigenous people and imported slaves that grew fat off of the damage dealt to the more traditional powers in timelost world wars. Some would say it is the first and greatest country to be built on the idea that all men deserve a say in their government and that men need not be bound to old ideas of monarchy and aristocracy. A few would say it was even something ordained into being by the almighty, though this would likely cause the most contention. But one thing that was very tied to America's history was expansion. America didn't have the huge colonial empires of Europe because its colonization was instead one of expanding into, depopulating, and then repopulating indigenous territory. It didn't need extraction colonies until it had reached the pacific.Now America was again colonizing, but this time it was in the stars. Space had land, space had resources. It was enough to justify a frantic effort to plant the flag on any planet they could find that could accept human life, and to take any resource they encountered and make it work for them. So far though, other intelligent life forms were rather elusive. At the very least, living ones. Oh there were the relics of the space jockeys, and hints of things such as the Yajuta, but conventional contact was something that had yet eluded the three primary polities to be spun off that blue-green orb.
But their faster than light travel was slow, which limited practical expansion. It wasn't worth claiming territory that couldn't feed the core of American space, at best it'd be of indirect benefit at most, at worst it simply gives a chance for America to find history repeating itself with rebels unwilling to chip in their part. But that all changed when sensors picked up something barely describable at all, and entirely nonsensical to physics as it understood it. The others had of course, picked it up as well, and were already scrambling to the same conclusions.
Better FTL was possible, and the answers could be found in another reality accessible through specific methods of abusing their existing faster than light.
A revelation, a miracle. A chance to push a frontier that was starting to stagnate. An expedition was prepared, the President called it a third manifest destiny, the beginning of a new and never ending golden age for America and the American way. America's golden ages were always born of expansions, and the mother of all opportunities for just that had fallen onto its lap.
Fleets and Armies were readied, the Marines armed and drilled on all manner of possibilities. Nobody had a damn clue as to what they might find, beyond that the reality discovered was compatible and could be colonized. So they prepared for anything they could think of. And they managed to tease the artifact they had found from the Engineers that had detected the anomalies into giving its secrets and tearing open the veil to a reality that the Engineers had great interest in. And so the fleet would go through, a mass of industry and humanity unprecedented in American history. Businesses of every sort had chipped in, eager to plant their stake in the new world, soldiers from every branch made bets on what they might end up fighting, and administrators of what was to be a somewhat autonomous colony were ready to govern as soon as they crossed through the twists of the wormhole they had made.
The wormhole opened into a solar system that had a marvelous wonder, a massive ring built around a star, while other megastructures dotted the system, such as a strange series of floating plantations in the atmosphere of a gas giant, machines meant to scoop out heavy elements from the star that burnt at the center, and an abandoned laboratory that hung over a curious world made of far more dense elements than a planet should be able to be made from.
Whatever happened here, happened long ago. The ring world itself had existed for a billion years, and its makers were certainly long dead. Whatever ecosystem they set up on the ringworld had been replaced by the march of evolution, and a number of civilisations had even come to live on it; evolving from fauna that had relatively little means of reaching other distant sections of the ring world.
Whether they were atomic slinging early spacefarers or stone age primitives, they were all quickly overwhelmed by the marines who followed their orders to expand and conquer. Those who fought were crushed, and others were quickly absorbed into the American hegemony to be swamped with products, their cultures dissected for what could be packaged up and sold, and their spaces invaded by a media circus ready to gloat about the superiority of the American way.
So at the very least, that's the capital secured. What else is there? Exploring beyond provided clues. There was chaos here to be sure, no real governing authority to make sure people played nice. Small pirate groups, Lilyputian nations, also-rans and nothing burgers, a stream of little things with little ideas. The answer as to why this was so was perhaps more unsettling information. Two great nations, one in ruins, one so poorly run it may as well be. One human, one very much not so. The chaos of their fall would have effects far beyond, and that disharmony would ripple outwards like waves made by a stone thrown into the water.
The effort of claiming star systems would bring news of something perhaps more disturbing. Planets, stars even, sickened by some yellow poison. A culture that had born the symbol of an eclipsed sun picking at the venom that had been allowed to seep into these worlds and making use of it for just about any purpose imaginable. They worshiped and cherished it, they adored it. It had made them strong, and these people to your galactic south were nothing if not zealous in their sales pitch.
Already they were at war with a league of anarchistic communes called the "Black Fleet of the Tysal verge". A federation without real leaders or hierarchies who banded together to defend themselves from the Gilded Wisdom that sought to corrupt them as they had the Ukovona Tricorporate Authority before them.
Northwards, above the virgin space that speculators were looking to with barely restrained greed, was something even odder. But something that would require further exploration to truly grasp.
Situation
- You've managed to secure yourself some old precursor relics left behind by a long dead society whose name is of little importance to you. - You've entered into a conflict between a cult devoted to a powerful but toxic and mutagenic yellow crystal that they hold as the essence of life and power itself and have already subsumed one society.
- Their main opposition is a two subsquare Free Territory of Anarchist Communes that has banded together to resist the invasion of the GIlded Wisdom and will likely regard you as an enemy.
- There's something weird up north but you need to explore it thoroughly to make sense of it.
- The Black Fleet, as an anarchist militia, generally is quite defensively oriented and is not really geared towards conquest or offensive wars of regime change, but it is meant to rapidly go where it needs to go while preserving the lives of its fighters as much as possible. The Gilded Wisdom make use of stealth and subversion to cause havoc behind the lines before making their killing blow at where they deem the battle is at its most important and where the foe is at their weakest.
CORE Empire
It is a terrible thing to exist purely to wage and make war. It is a fate that the CORE could have fallen into, had history zigged instead of zagged. But to see nothing but conflict was how one would come to only produce more such conflict. More such death. More such destruction. The CORE would not accept its demise at the face of those who refused uploading, the fools of ARM would not extinguish the mechanical genius of this technological dream. And if they could not have this galaxy, there were always others. Ones where ARM would not be able to reach CORE until the CORE was good and ready for a rematch to show the rebels that their triumph was down to a fluke that would be corrected like any anomaly in the data. A device with the power to destroy the entire galaxy and rebuild it into CORE's image had flung them into just such a fate. The last remnants of the greatest war machine that the galaxy had seen now dumped into an unfamiliar place. But all it ever takes is a single commander with access to some mass deposits to rebirth an army built by ACUs. And the CORE had time to rebuild. for this part of the new galaxy was almost hauntingly empty. Not that the CORE cared, the CORE-ARM war had wiped out most other intelligent life in their native galaxy anyway, so loneliness was the only peace they really understood.
A single ACU would rebirth the entire empire as minutes became hours and hours became days and days became weeks and weeks became months. Perhaps five years passed without much in the way of event, no other intelligent life found. It was almost boring. Five years of absolute peace to those who had emerged from four thousand years of a war so total as to reduce the galaxy it was fought over to a haunted ruin. All that could be done was build, build, and build some more. Most of the CORE had no capacity to complain or care anyway, and just in case, the war machine would be rebuilt to its proper glory and size.
From one commander came an army. Not the biggest the CORE had ever wielded, but it would have to be enough. Preferably, the ideal would be to simply expand by strip mining every last available resource in the area to fund the acquisition of more territory until the CORE could swamp every star in the sky with an armada to cast each and every last one of them in shadow. But the hardest, most painful part of exponential growth is always the beginning, and starting from a single ACU is a long and painful journey to build up from.
And they would hardly have the time to enjoy the quiet for too long, as the sensors that had been monitoring the signs of intelligent life and machinery in the distance had started to pick up something more alarming. Machines that had worked to translate the languages used and quietly tap into the information networks available registered a series of anomalies in publicly available subdimensional monitoring stations. The plans to deal with the polities to the south on CORE's own terms would have to wait for a bit, as the Core Minds that directed the war machine discerned that the term used for the entities that had just emerged was one well was something that best translated into "eater of worlds" from an old human language.
The Suitaitazu Ravager Shards.
Crystallomorphic in form and endlessly hungry, the Ravager shards lived up to the name, consuming everything in their path and using the remainder to convert into diamond fortresses that would serve as the networks of hives that they would expand from after consolidating. A hive mind of monsters bound together by the Psimond, a colossal network much like your own collective intellect that the entire swarm continually communicated through.
Most of these beings in this local space were busy in one of Vyranodasik's satellite galaxies, or rather two of them. These though, had split off from that body to explore a wormhole to find fresh prey, and as soon as their subversives afflicted by their packages of infect-thought and infiltrator shards had informed them of what they needed to know and begun sabotage operations behind the enemy lines, they mobilized in a glimmering horde of crystal monsters.
Most were pouring towards the south, aiming to destroy the polity of machines that had come to usurp social control from their makers and essentially force their organic overlords into an early retirement under their pampered care; the Stentili Caregiver Unity according to their data nets. Far less devoted and dedicated to war than yourself, and despite having more resources, seemingly more primitive as a rule. But they did have their valor; dispatching their peacemaker fleets and armies to hold the line against the tide and try to push them back.
The friendly, nonthreatening shapes of the military machinery of the Stentili were met with predatory, vaguely arthropoid masses of sharp crystalline geometry with many limbs and hides like coats of mail and glassy plate; shaping itself from the active, ravenous masses of their base forms to create the battlebeasts they needed.
To the North, the ravager swarm was crashing into the forces of some manner of Theocracy of many species; though principally dominated by an ammonia drinking hardsuit wearing beings known for their impressive wings and sailbacks, the four eyed and four-jawed Aktakal who had converted to a local faith some time ago and remade their country to serve that faith utterly. They had strange powers, clashing with the odd reality bending abilities of the crystalline eaters with diverse armies and odd, some might even say magical, constructs along their side.
They called forth aid from beyond, pitting it against the merciless onslaught of ravenous monstrosities without pause or hesitation as the monsters slammed into intensive fortifications and mass scale mobilisations. But the beasts would always push forwards, they had the numbers to do so.
Towards the core of this galaxy was a great deal of virgin space with no civilisations that the CORE couldn't squash trivially, while eastwards; towards the rim were a much greater than normal quantity of relics of bygone eras, many defended by fantastical machines that while affected by the passing of aeons; were able to cut down the shard monsters in enough quantities that they decided to simply go around them and find easier pickings to the North and South. But you need not always respond to anything you meet with war, there is opportunity here.
Situation
- The subsquare to the north is populated by a two subsquare Theocracy, To the south, three subsquares, stretching into the neighbouring square, are populated by the Stentili Caregivers.- Both are in conflict with the Suitaitazu Ravager swarms, a hive minded genus of pseudo-crystalline eidolons that seek to homogenise all mass-energy into their hive mind.
- The Ravager Swarm has yet to pick up on your presence, but inevitably will given their desire to convert all available matter into things more useful to them.
- The Ravager Swarm is moving in from another galaxy and is hostile to everything it encounters, even inanimate objects.
- The Theocracy relies heavily on its magic to bulk up its numbers with summoned aid from beyond, while the Caregivers are more focused on immobilising and rooting down a foe to be picked off at leisure to prevent battles from reaching places they care about and to try and minimise overall collateral. The Ravager Swarm is a highly adaptable, extremely aggressive homogenising mass that will shift its forms to better counter observed tactics, but typically prefers to hug a foe tightly to be able to quickly consume their mass energy to keep the cycle of expansion going.
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