In which a space crystal mad scientist crashes somewhere, and has to deal with the results. On the plus side, there are new things to explore!
Crystalline Stars
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Intro
You are a Crystalline, part of a race of very curious, voidborne crystal beings. Most beings in the galaxy would consider you a bad omen if you arrived uninvited, but thats not important yet. What is, is that imminent asteroid impact you can see headed straight for you. Which primary cluster is being struck though?
[] Prime Crystal - The First, The One, The Solar Imitator, The Ruiner of Grand Captain Abra-Hazabra's Doom Swarm, That Fucking Rock, and many other titles that would take too long to list, Prime is the largest Crystalline Cluster and is what others think of when asked about your race: As an entire race of Mad Scientist Crystals. This is as good and as bad as it sounds, and you're all proud of that.
[] Secundus Crystal - One part armed diplomancy, one part exiles from other clusters, one part Crystalline who were really into biomedical instead of regular medical knowledge, Secundus Crystal is a bit weird by Crystalline standards. But they are also the second largest by size (partially due to needing to keep lethally-rival factions of exiles physically partitioned away from each other), so other clusters just have to deal with their oddities in exchange for Secundus Crystal being the cleanup crew for the...grandiose kind of messes Prime can on occasion leave in their wake. The kind that would get a cluster not armed to the slivers with knowledge on how exactly to draw things out slowly and painfully if you didn't at least try to talk it out first shot out of other races' space without a warning shot. They even had a flag attached to one pole these days, to make sure others know they have arrived.
[] Tertius Crystal - Life was, in a word, explosions. Not the literal kind, of course. Those only happened occasionally, and to others, like space pirates. Or asteroids. The occasional rude guest. What explosions really meant was the metaphorical kind. Of Power, Of Science, Of Learning What Other Clusters Know. Sometimes explosions of Magic! There are many kinds, and it is your job to learn as much as possible about all of them. Oh, and make it back to report on them too I guess. Its hard to decipher broken fragments after all.
And what is our specialty? (Start with a +1 to that skill)
[][Skill] SCIENCE - Experimental designs, complex machinations, designs that only make sense to you and possibly other crystalline, your skill at commanding minions who aren't Lesser Crystalline. Sometimes, grand results. Other times you blow up half your space allowance and have to pay someone else's minions for repair work and make up an excuse. Always in full caps to distinguish from regular science, you are Part Of The Problem to outsiders, but since when has that stopped anyone before?
[][Skill] Shardcraft - You solve problems. Some are practical, like 'how best to improve this design'. Some are argumentative, like the daft aliens who insist their welded-together pile of scrap metal counts as a voidcraft and not a science project. And sometimes, the problems are magical, and fight you. Others may laugh at getting in a literal fight with a book, but others have not had to deal with books too old for their own good!
[][Skill] Runic - There is power in lines Drawn. In Shapes Formed. In the sparkle of an overcharged crystal about to explode. In flows aligned along precise designs. You have some of these as engravings, and they show your achievements to others. There are also voices. Some from the deep void. Some from deep within the crystals, their exact layer lost to memory. They speak to you and other runists. Usually they help, though there is often confusion about the why or the when they mean. Occasionally excessively pious aliens try to exorcise Runist Crystalline, to both your and the voices grand confusion when nothing actually happens.
Now, where did we impact?
[][Land] Ruinos - Certain to crash into some ancient ruin. There is a chance it may still be active, and possibly scavengers. Or archaeologists. Or explorers. Or all four.
-Upside, its Ruinos from the previous quest, with all its assorted nonsense of ancient and less ancient ruins, broken tech, glitched spells, floating islands, and so forth.
-Downside, Its Ruinos. Re-read the upside.
[][Land] Breadkar - Agriworld, as far as you know. You'll cause some sort of grain-based conflagration on impact, but is that really a bad thing? Not like fire hurts you, and they literally have an entire planet of spare foodstuff to make up for it.
-Upside, peaceful planet full of farming and minimal chance of getting killed by ancient technology or magic. Or, a perfect spot to cause havoc with minimal (immediate) trouble.
-Downside, you'd have to go searching pretty far for adventure if you aren't the cause of it, there is exactly one starport and a scattering of cities to hold the non-farming population. And there will be authorities coming down to you if you mess up too much of bread planet.
[][Land] Rock - Homeworld to a race that are Newbies to general space civilization, as in, they don't seem to have realized there is any out here yet. You've been in their system for a few days and their audibly unencrypted communications consider you just an unusual comet; they also are planning on sending a ship to a quarantine system for a local space dragon gone bad (which they do not know of and are expecting no trouble because of that).
-Upside, Crystalline get to be their First Contact, and thus they'll have no idea how others normally react to you.
-Downside, you don't know what the place is like other than being new and at least having spaceworthy craft, because you're a bit busy spinning and falling to distinguish between all their planetary noise.
[][Land] Telloros - Formerly a planet, the space region now known as Telloros was sundered into portal-linked shards by a mishandled ancient device. It remains inhabited, in a way, by the heavily armored wizard armies and their anxiously supportive clans of survivors of said earth-shattering kaboom.
Upside, the portals sometimes connect to wheres/whens that were not actually part of Telloros or its past, so who knows what you could get out of sporadic time travelling portals.
Downside, outside of the forcibly stabilized open 'border' portals maintained by the clans, there is no guarantee a portal will stay put between two fragments of spacetime for extended periods, and the military wizards who guard the stable ones won't be/are not/have not been fond of outsiders. Or anyone outside the arcane-military complex really, they'd much prefer you weren't never there to spot and might move to make that have already been so if it looks like you'll be too much future trouble for one of the Scryer-In-Chiefs.
Lastly, who even are we?
[][Name] Write-in
[] Prime Crystal - The First, The One, The Solar Imitator, The Ruiner of Grand Captain Abra-Hazabra's Doom Swarm, That Fucking Rock, and many other titles that would take too long to list, Prime is the largest Crystalline Cluster and is what others think of when asked about your race: As an entire race of Mad Scientist Crystals. This is as good and as bad as it sounds, and you're all proud of that.
[] Secundus Crystal - One part armed diplomancy, one part exiles from other clusters, one part Crystalline who were really into biomedical instead of regular medical knowledge, Secundus Crystal is a bit weird by Crystalline standards. But they are also the second largest by size (partially due to needing to keep lethally-rival factions of exiles physically partitioned away from each other), so other clusters just have to deal with their oddities in exchange for Secundus Crystal being the cleanup crew for the...grandiose kind of messes Prime can on occasion leave in their wake. The kind that would get a cluster not armed to the slivers with knowledge on how exactly to draw things out slowly and painfully if you didn't at least try to talk it out first shot out of other races' space without a warning shot. They even had a flag attached to one pole these days, to make sure others know they have arrived.
[] Tertius Crystal - Life was, in a word, explosions. Not the literal kind, of course. Those only happened occasionally, and to others, like space pirates. Or asteroids. The occasional rude guest. What explosions really meant was the metaphorical kind. Of Power, Of Science, Of Learning What Other Clusters Know. Sometimes explosions of Magic! There are many kinds, and it is your job to learn as much as possible about all of them. Oh, and make it back to report on them too I guess. Its hard to decipher broken fragments after all.
And what is our specialty? (Start with a +1 to that skill)
[][Skill] SCIENCE - Experimental designs, complex machinations, designs that only make sense to you and possibly other crystalline, your skill at commanding minions who aren't Lesser Crystalline. Sometimes, grand results. Other times you blow up half your space allowance and have to pay someone else's minions for repair work and make up an excuse. Always in full caps to distinguish from regular science, you are Part Of The Problem to outsiders, but since when has that stopped anyone before?
[][Skill] Shardcraft - You solve problems. Some are practical, like 'how best to improve this design'. Some are argumentative, like the daft aliens who insist their welded-together pile of scrap metal counts as a voidcraft and not a science project. And sometimes, the problems are magical, and fight you. Others may laugh at getting in a literal fight with a book, but others have not had to deal with books too old for their own good!
[][Skill] Runic - There is power in lines Drawn. In Shapes Formed. In the sparkle of an overcharged crystal about to explode. In flows aligned along precise designs. You have some of these as engravings, and they show your achievements to others. There are also voices. Some from the deep void. Some from deep within the crystals, their exact layer lost to memory. They speak to you and other runists. Usually they help, though there is often confusion about the why or the when they mean. Occasionally excessively pious aliens try to exorcise Runist Crystalline, to both your and the voices grand confusion when nothing actually happens.
Now, where did we impact?
[][Land] Ruinos - Certain to crash into some ancient ruin. There is a chance it may still be active, and possibly scavengers. Or archaeologists. Or explorers. Or all four.
-Upside, its Ruinos from the previous quest, with all its assorted nonsense of ancient and less ancient ruins, broken tech, glitched spells, floating islands, and so forth.
-Downside, Its Ruinos. Re-read the upside.
[][Land] Breadkar - Agriworld, as far as you know. You'll cause some sort of grain-based conflagration on impact, but is that really a bad thing? Not like fire hurts you, and they literally have an entire planet of spare foodstuff to make up for it.
-Upside, peaceful planet full of farming and minimal chance of getting killed by ancient technology or magic. Or, a perfect spot to cause havoc with minimal (immediate) trouble.
-Downside, you'd have to go searching pretty far for adventure if you aren't the cause of it, there is exactly one starport and a scattering of cities to hold the non-farming population. And there will be authorities coming down to you if you mess up too much of bread planet.
[][Land] Rock - Homeworld to a race that are Newbies to general space civilization, as in, they don't seem to have realized there is any out here yet. You've been in their system for a few days and their audibly unencrypted communications consider you just an unusual comet; they also are planning on sending a ship to a quarantine system for a local space dragon gone bad (which they do not know of and are expecting no trouble because of that).
-Upside, Crystalline get to be their First Contact, and thus they'll have no idea how others normally react to you.
-Downside, you don't know what the place is like other than being new and at least having spaceworthy craft, because you're a bit busy spinning and falling to distinguish between all their planetary noise.
[][Land] Telloros - Formerly a planet, the space region now known as Telloros was sundered into portal-linked shards by a mishandled ancient device. It remains inhabited, in a way, by the heavily armored wizard armies and their anxiously supportive clans of survivors of said earth-shattering kaboom.
Upside, the portals sometimes connect to wheres/whens that were not actually part of Telloros or its past, so who knows what you could get out of sporadic time travelling portals.
Downside, outside of the forcibly stabilized open 'border' portals maintained by the clans, there is no guarantee a portal will stay put between two fragments of spacetime for extended periods, and the military wizards who guard the stable ones won't be/are not/have not been fond of outsiders. Or anyone outside the arcane-military complex really, they'd much prefer you weren't never there to spot and might move to make that have already been so if it looks like you'll be too much future trouble for one of the Scryer-In-Chiefs.
Lastly, who even are we?
[][Name] Write-in
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Mechanics
As a Crystalline, you have three Facets, one for each skill in the introduction. There are others that may come up, but for now three, and each Facet has a skill related to it.
SCIENCE: Experiment - Attempt to combine two (or more) things together at once to make something you don't have a blueprint for. Things can also include ideas or abstracts that we could quickly patch together a prototype for. Roll 1d10 per inclusion, plus a d10+SCIENCE.
Each 1 is a Critical Flaw, 6+ are successes, and 2-5 are Flaws. 10s will cancel out a flaw each.
The more regular Flaws, the less reliable the result is, and if you roll more Critical Flaws than successes your experiment immediately explodes instead of the intended result, and all components are lost.
If zero successes, the experiment fails but can be salvaged.
If, somehow, you manage to get a majority of 10s and zero Flaws, It will only work once, but will do so Too Well, and a lesser, more durable version of the perfected design will be added to the blueprints list. Minimum of five dice for this to happen.
Shardcraft: Fieldwork - Two choices: A. Build a non-crystalline blueprint we don't have the right parts for out of just Energy, but double the energy cost. Roll 1d10>5 to see if it works or not. Non-functional Fieldworks can be tried again with a stacking -1 per attempt or dissolved back into 75% of the energy spent.
B. Refine an Experimental thing. Roll 1d10+Shardcraft per point of Energy spent here, each 6 or higher will fix one Flaw. Critical Flaws require a 10 to solve. 1s or 2s will add more Flaws.
Runic: Meditate - Have a quiet think about your surroundings and relax, and if a Runist, ask the voices for advice on anything you think is important. Roll 1d20 per point of Runic and state your topic(s).
Try not to get 5 or under anywhere.
Others may try to use this time to make extra energy, though it's unlikely. 1d10>8 per point of runic, nothing happens unless there is a success.
---
Energy, while important, is also limited. If you were still in the cluster you would be able to do whatever you pleased within the Standard Sliver, plus a fraction of any grants given to your layer and sector in particular, plus any extra amount you could pay for in motes.
Here in this weird non-cluster place, you have a tiny amount hardly even worth mention. Basic energy crystals are foundations, not infrastructure, and you hardly would consider them a realistic long-term main power source. But they are what you have, and with enough of them you might even build up enough output to need to specify what to use it for again!
(Energy will have mechanics, primarily in building things and probably research, but as of this post I'm not sure what kind and trying to pin down some that would work for a quest was hold up posting anything. For now, you have a very small, narrative amount of it, which will probably get used to make more energy crystals or poke at weird things on the ground. If you have an idea, go ahead and suggest it.)
Construction blueprints list:
Various small bits of Crystalline infrastructure (basic energy crystal, regular storage crystal, communicator crystal, crystal for building rooms with, etc)
Assorted pure minerals, and with a Crystal Forge, various refined metals
Crystal Forge (requires high-powered cooling system in an atmosphere)
SCIENCE: Experiment - Attempt to combine two (or more) things together at once to make something you don't have a blueprint for. Things can also include ideas or abstracts that we could quickly patch together a prototype for. Roll 1d10 per inclusion, plus a d10+SCIENCE.
Each 1 is a Critical Flaw, 6+ are successes, and 2-5 are Flaws. 10s will cancel out a flaw each.
The more regular Flaws, the less reliable the result is, and if you roll more Critical Flaws than successes your experiment immediately explodes instead of the intended result, and all components are lost.
If zero successes, the experiment fails but can be salvaged.
If, somehow, you manage to get a majority of 10s and zero Flaws, It will only work once, but will do so Too Well, and a lesser, more durable version of the perfected design will be added to the blueprints list. Minimum of five dice for this to happen.
Shardcraft: Fieldwork - Two choices: A. Build a non-crystalline blueprint we don't have the right parts for out of just Energy, but double the energy cost. Roll 1d10>5 to see if it works or not. Non-functional Fieldworks can be tried again with a stacking -1 per attempt or dissolved back into 75% of the energy spent.
B. Refine an Experimental thing. Roll 1d10+Shardcraft per point of Energy spent here, each 6 or higher will fix one Flaw. Critical Flaws require a 10 to solve. 1s or 2s will add more Flaws.
Runic: Meditate - Have a quiet think about your surroundings and relax, and if a Runist, ask the voices for advice on anything you think is important. Roll 1d20 per point of Runic and state your topic(s).
Try not to get 5 or under anywhere.
Others may try to use this time to make extra energy, though it's unlikely. 1d10>8 per point of runic, nothing happens unless there is a success.
---
Energy, while important, is also limited. If you were still in the cluster you would be able to do whatever you pleased within the Standard Sliver, plus a fraction of any grants given to your layer and sector in particular, plus any extra amount you could pay for in motes.
Here in this weird non-cluster place, you have a tiny amount hardly even worth mention. Basic energy crystals are foundations, not infrastructure, and you hardly would consider them a realistic long-term main power source. But they are what you have, and with enough of them you might even build up enough output to need to specify what to use it for again!
(Energy will have mechanics, primarily in building things and probably research, but as of this post I'm not sure what kind and trying to pin down some that would work for a quest was hold up posting anything. For now, you have a very small, narrative amount of it, which will probably get used to make more energy crystals or poke at weird things on the ground. If you have an idea, go ahead and suggest it.)
Construction blueprints list:
Various small bits of Crystalline infrastructure (basic energy crystal, regular storage crystal, communicator crystal, crystal for building rooms with, etc)
Assorted pure minerals, and with a Crystal Forge, various refined metals
Crystal Forge (requires high-powered cooling system in an atmosphere)
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Cycle 0 - A Destructive Entrance!
As you fall away from where you would rather be instead, you spot what looks like your Languaginator and pull it over to you in a burst of energy along with the fragments of connector crystal floating nearby. It quickly reconnects as you fiddle with reforging lost bits of connectors, and a quick scan, more to distract you from the fall than anything, confirms that its still intact. Good. Unlike what most of your fellows expected, it isn't an oversized auto-translator. Those are boring, common, and easy to find.
The Languaginator consumes language in sound wave, text, or digital form, looks for context in what it ate, and repeats it back to you in real words. It also has a sizable library of alien languages and a reverse switch, for when you need to talk to something and don't know what they speak in, so just output all of them and see how they respond! It perhaps still needs calibration on the output volume, as it once accidentally fractured a room you tested it in, concussed your guest, and crashed their computer, but that won't be a problem in what looks like wide open space! Probably a farm or something, minimally dangerous for you to build up in to prepare to be their first alien contact.
However, the wide open space quickly transforms into a very, very dense forest of trees and rock pillars, and several bumps and bangs later, you bounce off something that roars piercingly loud from your perspective. Shortly after, you roll to a stop against a pillar, but before you even have time to orient yourself in your new position, the roar blasts forth again, followed by a nearly as loud crashing noise as the pillar crumbles and something massive punches straight through it and all the nearby trees to tackle the screeching thing and roll several meters, followed by many tiny creatures in comparison to the other two. And then, because clearly you pissed off some form of higher stellar power, two more gigantic beasts appear, one flying because it has wings and one flying because its been bodily flung through the air! As its about to crush one of the many tiny-in-comparison creatures, you see what looks vaguely like a rune flash into existence for a fraction of a second, and instead of the expected crushing noise, the beast smashes into them and attempts to get up as soon as possible as the other tiny ones attack it with all manner of strange implements. The one that was landed on just stands up like they were not just supposed to be paste a moment ago and makes what you assume is a pain noise as it staggers towards its pack, who are chasing after the landscape-flattening war-in-progress between the four beasts you want to actively get further away from now, because if they can all casually ignore shards of unknown rock, entire trees, and getting crushed by things four times their size, then you in your basically-unarmed state would be just as irrelevant.
By your count, there is now around a dozen weird organic beings (two giant land beasts, two giant flying beasts, approximately six small heavily armed beings) making an incredibly loud racket around what you hoped would just be a clear crash site. And all of them seem to be fighting each other. Trees are collapsing, rock pillars are shattering, the largest of the tiny ones is carrying two goddamn glowing anti-fighter cannons in its four hands, and you just try to look as unimportant as possible.
The fighting lasts for about a twelfth of a cycle before you hear that painfully loud roar again but even louder (how the hell is it doing this), and you spot within the former maelstrom of fighting what you assume is the same creature you bounced off of. It has fallen over and stopped moving, and the war pack lead by the dual-wielding four-armed one appear to be taking it apart and making victorious-looking actions. The other three avatars of deforestation either flew off some time ago looking significantly wounded, or have continued to brawl but slowly drifted away from the screechbeast vs many smalls fight in the process and hopefully are not going to come back soon.
Having gotten to watch the whole event, you had three main questions: First, what kind of runes are those. You are pretty sure now they have some form of rune or formation-based magic now, as five out of six of them are still alive despite actively fighting multiple things several times larger than them.
Second, why don't all of them use the cannons? They are clearly effective, and assuming these are the ones who can also make use of space, they shouldn't be short on manufacturing capabilities. Yet the rest of them were all fighting in melee!
Thirdly, where were you going. One of them had easily wedged you out of the ground after spotting you, babbled something you didn't risk activating the Languaginator for in case you needed to save up energy to blast them with later, and then placed you in a large, empty sack and started moving from the crash site like it was no huge deal to have kidnapped a Crystalline!
We're going to be out of the bag eventually, what do we do then?
[] Write-in
---
Sometimes you're the First Contact, and sometimes the First Contact unknowingly kidnaps you and takes you to their hunting base.
As for what else might've happened to start:
I already had an outline of how the Ruinos landing would've gone, since I'd done that the last two times. This time you would've landed directly on a different, but relatively close floating island.
Breadkar would have been the least surprising start, just like it sounded. There would be fire, and then you'd have to figure out what to do next.
Telloros would be about as much a mess as it sounds to navigate, but plenty of weird things to run into and interesting times if you encountered one of the wizards militant early.
The Languaginator consumes language in sound wave, text, or digital form, looks for context in what it ate, and repeats it back to you in real words. It also has a sizable library of alien languages and a reverse switch, for when you need to talk to something and don't know what they speak in, so just output all of them and see how they respond! It perhaps still needs calibration on the output volume, as it once accidentally fractured a room you tested it in, concussed your guest, and crashed their computer, but that won't be a problem in what looks like wide open space! Probably a farm or something, minimally dangerous for you to build up in to prepare to be their first alien contact.
However, the wide open space quickly transforms into a very, very dense forest of trees and rock pillars, and several bumps and bangs later, you bounce off something that roars piercingly loud from your perspective. Shortly after, you roll to a stop against a pillar, but before you even have time to orient yourself in your new position, the roar blasts forth again, followed by a nearly as loud crashing noise as the pillar crumbles and something massive punches straight through it and all the nearby trees to tackle the screeching thing and roll several meters, followed by many tiny creatures in comparison to the other two. And then, because clearly you pissed off some form of higher stellar power, two more gigantic beasts appear, one flying because it has wings and one flying because its been bodily flung through the air! As its about to crush one of the many tiny-in-comparison creatures, you see what looks vaguely like a rune flash into existence for a fraction of a second, and instead of the expected crushing noise, the beast smashes into them and attempts to get up as soon as possible as the other tiny ones attack it with all manner of strange implements. The one that was landed on just stands up like they were not just supposed to be paste a moment ago and makes what you assume is a pain noise as it staggers towards its pack, who are chasing after the landscape-flattening war-in-progress between the four beasts you want to actively get further away from now, because if they can all casually ignore shards of unknown rock, entire trees, and getting crushed by things four times their size, then you in your basically-unarmed state would be just as irrelevant.
By your count, there is now around a dozen weird organic beings (two giant land beasts, two giant flying beasts, approximately six small heavily armed beings) making an incredibly loud racket around what you hoped would just be a clear crash site. And all of them seem to be fighting each other. Trees are collapsing, rock pillars are shattering, the largest of the tiny ones is carrying two goddamn glowing anti-fighter cannons in its four hands, and you just try to look as unimportant as possible.
The fighting lasts for about a twelfth of a cycle before you hear that painfully loud roar again but even louder (how the hell is it doing this), and you spot within the former maelstrom of fighting what you assume is the same creature you bounced off of. It has fallen over and stopped moving, and the war pack lead by the dual-wielding four-armed one appear to be taking it apart and making victorious-looking actions. The other three avatars of deforestation either flew off some time ago looking significantly wounded, or have continued to brawl but slowly drifted away from the screechbeast vs many smalls fight in the process and hopefully are not going to come back soon.
Having gotten to watch the whole event, you had three main questions: First, what kind of runes are those. You are pretty sure now they have some form of rune or formation-based magic now, as five out of six of them are still alive despite actively fighting multiple things several times larger than them.
Second, why don't all of them use the cannons? They are clearly effective, and assuming these are the ones who can also make use of space, they shouldn't be short on manufacturing capabilities. Yet the rest of them were all fighting in melee!
Thirdly, where were you going. One of them had easily wedged you out of the ground after spotting you, babbled something you didn't risk activating the Languaginator for in case you needed to save up energy to blast them with later, and then placed you in a large, empty sack and started moving from the crash site like it was no huge deal to have kidnapped a Crystalline!
We're going to be out of the bag eventually, what do we do then?
[] Write-in
Bob, Tertius Crystal, SCIENCE Division
SCIENCE: 2
Shardcraft: 1
Runic: 1
Current Energy: A Tiny Amount
Attached constructions:
Languaginator v0.9
A handful of basic energy crystals
SCIENCE: 2
Shardcraft: 1
Runic: 1
Current Energy: A Tiny Amount
Attached constructions:
Languaginator v0.9
A handful of basic energy crystals
---
Sometimes you're the First Contact, and sometimes the First Contact unknowingly kidnaps you and takes you to their hunting base.
As for what else might've happened to start:
I already had an outline of how the Ruinos landing would've gone, since I'd done that the last two times. This time you would've landed directly on a different, but relatively close floating island.
Breadkar would have been the least surprising start, just like it sounded. There would be fire, and then you'd have to figure out what to do next.
Telloros would be about as much a mess as it sounds to navigate, but plenty of weird things to run into and interesting times if you encountered one of the wizards militant early.
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Cycle 1 - Opportunity
Surprisingly, there is a minimum of shaking and jangling from the bag, despite the almost certainly rough terrain.
Unsurprisingly, it is extremely boring to sit in the bag.
You give up on preparing to laser something a few minutes after its clear they just collected you as a bonus, as you end up buried underneath a vast quantity of plants, monster bits, and after having discovered this bag also has pockets by being banged into from one, what seem to be spent heat sinks by the looks of things. You'd pulsed a tiny scan through the bag out of boredom, and saw they were fairly small, round things covered to the exclusion of all else in scorch marks. A few of them even seem to have begun to melt, as you can feel their residual heat seeping through the pocket's wall. You also start up the Languaginator and let it have a go at the running conversation. It takes quite awhile (compared to its usual near-instant state) for it to not give you gibberish, but it succeeds.
"Are you really sure its a good idea to just let that fight happen? Four monster brawls do not happen accidentally."
"It wasn't a four monster brawl you idiot. It was our hunt, and a separate fight between the Rathion and the Kuras, that ended up mixing together. These things happen all the time. The forest might be big, but so are they. You're lucky you weren't Tim." A collection of agreements and regrets for Tim follow.
"What did we need the Legis parts for anyway? Its not the Heat Time, and the fridge works just fine."
"Experiment."
"Examination"
"Construction, of course"
There is a lengthy pause before the next thing to come up, as if everyone had been planning on using the parts for something different and now wasn't sure if they would get the ones they wanted first. "So what was with the big crystal? You usually just chip enough off and leave it be, Faru."
"Looks like pure Stellar Amethyst. We could make a fucking huge amount of cash if we found the right lapidary. One that doesn't worry too much about how, technically...neither we or they actually own it under that stupid new law." You aren't sure if "Faru" was the one to say that or not, because one of the reasons your Languaginator doesn't have a full version number yet is the problems with multiple speakers it has. Up to this point all the output has been in the same mish-mash of voice tones you can vaguely make out beyond the pile of junk on top of you.
"And then what? Slowly spend it on fancier hunting tools? Buy Meg more than a month of ammo at a time? You know our asshole of a governor keeps track of taxes like it is personally his money and not there to only be spent supporting the town and its careful warding away of the bigger, dangerouser monsters."
"Dangerouser? Really?"
"Its an accurate description and you can't tell me otherwise."
"You can't just use one more word and be sensible instead of making one up?"
"You write the reports, I speak the faster descriptions. I've read a couple of them, I'm sure you could manage to describe that double double fight in a way even a scaredy little girl could enjoy with your fake words like 'largesse' or 'immunomagery'."
"Dou-you did that one on purpose! And those are dictionary words! The thing you never read!" is shouted in response. The lack of non-bag noise stands out afterwards.
"Sounds like the answer is we just don't make the purchases here, really. Get it on something disposable, or just straight up coinage, and take it to say...Morkwind, perhaps? Somewhere where they don't mind if you pay in cash. Then just do not mention how much we did not spend elsewhere because we did not have it, and if anyone insists, it was a gift."
"Why is this piece o' rock even a problem? Space rocks is space rocks. Jus sell it."
"Because until the inevitable riot-causing screw up by StarCom gets them to void it, the answer the bureaucrats figured was good enough was that they own all of space now except the moons, and stuff from space is still part of it. And at the rates they give in exchange for materials you might as well just not bother to even admit you found it."
The rest of the conversation descends into muttering, whining, and threatening in relation to various presumably-political figures or groups. While you're sure it must be interesting to someone, that someone is not you, and instead you turn off your device and take a nap. You can still hear leaves crunching and branches branching, and if the forest is big enough for those gigantic things, you doubt they'll be home anytime soon.
---
You are woken up by a table. Not a work table, not a forge table, not even a dangerously shiny table. An ordinary one, upon which a pile of ordinary junk has been dumped. A scan reveals that no, the room isn't pitch dark, you just were not left out in the open, and instead have a small mountain of metal and metal-adjacent things on top of you. Most of it looks like scrap metal, with discarded heat sinks scattered around the pile. There do not seem to be any voices nearby, and both the table and the floor of this ground level room would be no challenge to break through if you wanted to dig your way out of here.
So now what?
[] Wait. They haven't threatened to melt you or anything, and it sounds like it will be a while before they find this 'lapidary'.
-[] Convert some of the metal in the mean time. You need more crystals more than they need to hide you.
[] Leave. You do not plan on being a commodity, even if you apparently resemble some form of good precious stone.
-[] But convert some of the metal first. You could use the extra crystals.
[] Write-in (Something else?)
If we are converting things but you don't specify what we want out of it, I'll just make some of it storage crystals and use those to hold the material. We have anything that would be considered basic infrastructure for a space crystal available, so (very basic) energy production, storage for holding things, energy, or just more bulk, one built for talking to non-Crystalline (seperate from the Languaginator, this one just outputs what you say vocally), things like that. Status is unchanged from last threadmark.
Unsurprisingly, it is extremely boring to sit in the bag.
You give up on preparing to laser something a few minutes after its clear they just collected you as a bonus, as you end up buried underneath a vast quantity of plants, monster bits, and after having discovered this bag also has pockets by being banged into from one, what seem to be spent heat sinks by the looks of things. You'd pulsed a tiny scan through the bag out of boredom, and saw they were fairly small, round things covered to the exclusion of all else in scorch marks. A few of them even seem to have begun to melt, as you can feel their residual heat seeping through the pocket's wall. You also start up the Languaginator and let it have a go at the running conversation. It takes quite awhile (compared to its usual near-instant state) for it to not give you gibberish, but it succeeds.
"Are you really sure its a good idea to just let that fight happen? Four monster brawls do not happen accidentally."
"It wasn't a four monster brawl you idiot. It was our hunt, and a separate fight between the Rathion and the Kuras, that ended up mixing together. These things happen all the time. The forest might be big, but so are they. You're lucky you weren't Tim." A collection of agreements and regrets for Tim follow.
"What did we need the Legis parts for anyway? Its not the Heat Time, and the fridge works just fine."
"Experiment."
"Examination"
"Construction, of course"
There is a lengthy pause before the next thing to come up, as if everyone had been planning on using the parts for something different and now wasn't sure if they would get the ones they wanted first. "So what was with the big crystal? You usually just chip enough off and leave it be, Faru."
"Looks like pure Stellar Amethyst. We could make a fucking huge amount of cash if we found the right lapidary. One that doesn't worry too much about how, technically...neither we or they actually own it under that stupid new law." You aren't sure if "Faru" was the one to say that or not, because one of the reasons your Languaginator doesn't have a full version number yet is the problems with multiple speakers it has. Up to this point all the output has been in the same mish-mash of voice tones you can vaguely make out beyond the pile of junk on top of you.
"And then what? Slowly spend it on fancier hunting tools? Buy Meg more than a month of ammo at a time? You know our asshole of a governor keeps track of taxes like it is personally his money and not there to only be spent supporting the town and its careful warding away of the bigger, dangerouser monsters."
"Dangerouser? Really?"
"Its an accurate description and you can't tell me otherwise."
"You can't just use one more word and be sensible instead of making one up?"
"You write the reports, I speak the faster descriptions. I've read a couple of them, I'm sure you could manage to describe that double double fight in a way even a scaredy little girl could enjoy with your fake words like 'largesse' or 'immunomagery'."
"Dou-you did that one on purpose! And those are dictionary words! The thing you never read!" is shouted in response. The lack of non-bag noise stands out afterwards.
"Sounds like the answer is we just don't make the purchases here, really. Get it on something disposable, or just straight up coinage, and take it to say...Morkwind, perhaps? Somewhere where they don't mind if you pay in cash. Then just do not mention how much we did not spend elsewhere because we did not have it, and if anyone insists, it was a gift."
"Why is this piece o' rock even a problem? Space rocks is space rocks. Jus sell it."
"Because until the inevitable riot-causing screw up by StarCom gets them to void it, the answer the bureaucrats figured was good enough was that they own all of space now except the moons, and stuff from space is still part of it. And at the rates they give in exchange for materials you might as well just not bother to even admit you found it."
The rest of the conversation descends into muttering, whining, and threatening in relation to various presumably-political figures or groups. While you're sure it must be interesting to someone, that someone is not you, and instead you turn off your device and take a nap. You can still hear leaves crunching and branches branching, and if the forest is big enough for those gigantic things, you doubt they'll be home anytime soon.
---
You are woken up by a table. Not a work table, not a forge table, not even a dangerously shiny table. An ordinary one, upon which a pile of ordinary junk has been dumped. A scan reveals that no, the room isn't pitch dark, you just were not left out in the open, and instead have a small mountain of metal and metal-adjacent things on top of you. Most of it looks like scrap metal, with discarded heat sinks scattered around the pile. There do not seem to be any voices nearby, and both the table and the floor of this ground level room would be no challenge to break through if you wanted to dig your way out of here.
So now what?
[] Wait. They haven't threatened to melt you or anything, and it sounds like it will be a while before they find this 'lapidary'.
-[] Convert some of the metal in the mean time. You need more crystals more than they need to hide you.
[] Leave. You do not plan on being a commodity, even if you apparently resemble some form of good precious stone.
-[] But convert some of the metal first. You could use the extra crystals.
[] Write-in (Something else?)
If we are converting things but you don't specify what we want out of it, I'll just make some of it storage crystals and use those to hold the material. We have anything that would be considered basic infrastructure for a space crystal available, so (very basic) energy production, storage for holding things, energy, or just more bulk, one built for talking to non-Crystalline (seperate from the Languaginator, this one just outputs what you say vocally), things like that. Status is unchanged from last threadmark.
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Cycle 2 - Mystery Signal
(Votes are pretty close and theres not many of them, so I'm gonna combine them: convert metal first, wait, and then leave if nothing happens)
Priorities were priorities, regardless of where you were or how many ginormous beasts were in alien walking distance. You started conversion from the bottom of the pile up, trying to cause as little clatter as possible in the process. The resulting glob of metal and crystal was turned into what would normally be considered barely a pocket of storage crystal. In your current state it was a fairly large amount and easily covered your whole core structure, and when you realized this you stopped converting and started absorbing instead. You could use these metal-filled storages as makeshift armor!
On the nearest wall to the table was an object that seemed out of fashion from what you remembered, but appeared to accomplish the same function as the many rectangular alien devices you'd seen brought aboard Tertius Crystal: A round clock. It had cycled four times by the time you were comfortable with both the amount of material you had stored as spare mass/potential trade good/armor, and having enough left on the table to look like nothing actually changed. Like many other places, it appeared their time could line up with twelfths of a cycle, which was convenient. What wasn't was the lack of happening.
You could see it was bright out, bright meant daytime meant they should be busy. It hadn't been bright out when they finally arrived here, but that had been after many subcycles of moving through forest. They had made it sound like you were a thing to get moved as soon as possible, which, unless something was different on Rock, meant you found someone who could pay and didn't ask for more details about whats in the storage cube within a cycle, made it their problem and moved on, much richer in resources that you could turn into what you actually wanted for your project. Taking too long meant you were either asking the wrong people or bad at looking like you had something for sale.
...Did these aliens even have that kind of network? Was their lack of attention to you for almost half a cycle because they had to actually go out and ask individual, suspicious-looking people instead of just looking for a suitably-shaded, minimally surveilled corner of the infinitely-cornered street that was a network marketplace and ask the first person to give you the right look? That would waste so much time your schedule would get laughed out of the room back home! But here was not home, so you could give them another clock rotation to make it an even half a cycle.
***
"Do you accept gemstones found in the north forest? There was a particularly unique-looking rock we found out there."
"No. You bring me the receipts and the stones and I will, later, give you the new receipts and the gems."
"Thank you for your time then, sir." said Ven as they left yet another jeweler's shop empty-handed. Why were they all so heavy-handed about rules? Who started the paper chain? This was getting nowhere and a waste of time. "Meg! Anywhere left?!"
Her friend, looking much smaller without the giant cannon today, pointed off to the south, towards the worst part of town. The part bordering the other, much more dangerous forest. Shit.
***
It had been long enough. There was things to do and Contact to be Made...later. It was mostly the former you were worried about as you rolled off the table, cracked the floor, and dug your way into a hole before covering up the top side of it and going down. You make it several minutes downwards before suddenly picking up on something.
Further down is not simply full of dirt, rock, and the remains of destroyed buildings. A sensor ping showed a very regular shape deep beneath this presumably-residential area, and one that is a very different shape to the buildings you'd seen while falling onto the planet. An echo of sorts also shows up, showing the same thing but in a way that could be easily dismissed as a glitch if you were relying on a device to do this. Then a third ping comes back while you are thinking about this, showing just ordinary dirt things. A fourth one also shows up right on the tail of the third, mangled into abstract noise but roughly the right waveform for breaking up a hypercom transmission.
There is someone down there, and they do not want to be noticed. This bombardment of conflicting signals mixed with higher-dimensional white noise is probably foolproof against the race on the surface, and also reveals they know about how most places communicate at long-distance. The hypercom scattering is probably why the surface folk don't have it too, it would be rather hard to make one that works from scratch with someone quite literally undermining your efforts.
Do we go after the underfolk immediately?
[] Dig Deeper! They can't fool us.
[] Don't. Maybe its a trap.
We have a bunch of material. Should it we make something with it?
[] More energy crystal (Boost energy output)
[] More storage crystal (Make some space to hold more things without converting them immediately)
[] More general crystal (Just get more bulk between you and the world)
[] Something else (Write-in)
[] Keep all of it for now.
---
Sorry for the extended wait for a regular update, I'd been trying to work on this since the vote settled and past the outline it just...wasn't writing together in a way I wanted until recently. Ended up with a bunch of other partially written ideas. Maybe I'll find a use for them later. Lets just move on with it.
Priorities were priorities, regardless of where you were or how many ginormous beasts were in alien walking distance. You started conversion from the bottom of the pile up, trying to cause as little clatter as possible in the process. The resulting glob of metal and crystal was turned into what would normally be considered barely a pocket of storage crystal. In your current state it was a fairly large amount and easily covered your whole core structure, and when you realized this you stopped converting and started absorbing instead. You could use these metal-filled storages as makeshift armor!
On the nearest wall to the table was an object that seemed out of fashion from what you remembered, but appeared to accomplish the same function as the many rectangular alien devices you'd seen brought aboard Tertius Crystal: A round clock. It had cycled four times by the time you were comfortable with both the amount of material you had stored as spare mass/potential trade good/armor, and having enough left on the table to look like nothing actually changed. Like many other places, it appeared their time could line up with twelfths of a cycle, which was convenient. What wasn't was the lack of happening.
You could see it was bright out, bright meant daytime meant they should be busy. It hadn't been bright out when they finally arrived here, but that had been after many subcycles of moving through forest. They had made it sound like you were a thing to get moved as soon as possible, which, unless something was different on Rock, meant you found someone who could pay and didn't ask for more details about whats in the storage cube within a cycle, made it their problem and moved on, much richer in resources that you could turn into what you actually wanted for your project. Taking too long meant you were either asking the wrong people or bad at looking like you had something for sale.
...Did these aliens even have that kind of network? Was their lack of attention to you for almost half a cycle because they had to actually go out and ask individual, suspicious-looking people instead of just looking for a suitably-shaded, minimally surveilled corner of the infinitely-cornered street that was a network marketplace and ask the first person to give you the right look? That would waste so much time your schedule would get laughed out of the room back home! But here was not home, so you could give them another clock rotation to make it an even half a cycle.
***
"Do you accept gemstones found in the north forest? There was a particularly unique-looking rock we found out there."
"No. You bring me the receipts and the stones and I will, later, give you the new receipts and the gems."
"Thank you for your time then, sir." said Ven as they left yet another jeweler's shop empty-handed. Why were they all so heavy-handed about rules? Who started the paper chain? This was getting nowhere and a waste of time. "Meg! Anywhere left?!"
Her friend, looking much smaller without the giant cannon today, pointed off to the south, towards the worst part of town. The part bordering the other, much more dangerous forest. Shit.
***
It had been long enough. There was things to do and Contact to be Made...later. It was mostly the former you were worried about as you rolled off the table, cracked the floor, and dug your way into a hole before covering up the top side of it and going down. You make it several minutes downwards before suddenly picking up on something.
Further down is not simply full of dirt, rock, and the remains of destroyed buildings. A sensor ping showed a very regular shape deep beneath this presumably-residential area, and one that is a very different shape to the buildings you'd seen while falling onto the planet. An echo of sorts also shows up, showing the same thing but in a way that could be easily dismissed as a glitch if you were relying on a device to do this. Then a third ping comes back while you are thinking about this, showing just ordinary dirt things. A fourth one also shows up right on the tail of the third, mangled into abstract noise but roughly the right waveform for breaking up a hypercom transmission.
There is someone down there, and they do not want to be noticed. This bombardment of conflicting signals mixed with higher-dimensional white noise is probably foolproof against the race on the surface, and also reveals they know about how most places communicate at long-distance. The hypercom scattering is probably why the surface folk don't have it too, it would be rather hard to make one that works from scratch with someone quite literally undermining your efforts.
Do we go after the underfolk immediately?
[] Dig Deeper! They can't fool us.
[] Don't. Maybe its a trap.
We have a bunch of material. Should it we make something with it?
[] More energy crystal (Boost energy output)
[] More storage crystal (Make some space to hold more things without converting them immediately)
[] More general crystal (Just get more bulk between you and the world)
[] Something else (Write-in)
[] Keep all of it for now.
Bob, Tertius Crystal, SCIENCE Division
SCIENCE: 2
Shardcraft: 1
Runic: 1
Current Energy: A Tiny Amount
Core Armor: Assimilated Scrap Metal
Attached constructions:
Languaginator v0.9
A handful of basic energy crystals
Several filled storage crystals of scrap metal
SCIENCE: 2
Shardcraft: 1
Runic: 1
Current Energy: A Tiny Amount
Core Armor: Assimilated Scrap Metal
Attached constructions:
Languaginator v0.9
A handful of basic energy crystals
Several filled storage crystals of scrap metal
Sorry for the extended wait for a regular update, I'd been trying to work on this since the vote settled and past the outline it just...wasn't writing together in a way I wanted until recently. Ended up with a bunch of other partially written ideas. Maybe I'll find a use for them later. Lets just move on with it.