- Location
- in the trash
I don't see any reason why it would cause a bad end? The Empire was extremely skilled at engineering minds.
Deterministic Chaos: An Unraveled Tapestry Quest
- Thread starter MJ12 Commando
- Start date
- Original Sci-Fi Fantasy
I don't see any reason why it would cause a bad end? The Empire was extremely skilled at engineering minds.
Well we're not a citizen of the empire, we're just a in setting equivalent of a post apocalyptic scavenger who just stumbled upon a lost super warship, I suspect if we attempted to upload our mind then the AV's anti virals might mistake us for a virus and erase us, and since this is dragon tech I suspect it will be much worse for us If we're caught.
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- Location
- in the trash
Most post-Collapse polities have retained the Empire's mind-engineering expertise, since it's literally all invariant tech except for the soul-bits that allowed people to interface directly with Architecture. If they've lost that capability then they're probably not relevant anyway.
And look, you could get things like toaster rebellions overthrowing their masters, at which point the empire would happily grant the toasters citizenship and human-plan bodies to resleeve themselves in because by succeeding in their rebellion they've proven themselves worthy. Transplanting a human mind into a warship should be perfectly doable, it's not a lost art or anything.
Also, if we have so little control over the CLAVIHARP's systems that we have a significant risk of getting misidentified as a hostile intruder, we're already in deep fucking shit and worrying about some mind-upload procedure going catastrophically wrong is by far the least of our problems.
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Yeah but Said warship is basically a hole in reality that's forced into a shape of a ship. Which is a whole different league than a warship.
Like I won't doubt that QM will actually end the quest if we upload but directly interfacing with systems that might not be used to the presence of a foreign mind would unlikely to leave us unchanged, especially if it's a dragon tech which opens up a whole new pile of worms.
- Location
- in the trash
And I've been trying to tell you that the kind of psychosurgery needed to safely transplant a mindstate from a humaniform body to a spacecraft (or a toaster to a humaniform body, or a guided missile to a jupiter brain) is something the Empire practiced all the time. That means there's extensive institutional knowledge on what kind of mental tweaks are required to ensure that your very expensive voidcruiser doesn't go insane and accidentally blow up a star because the controlling intelligence can't handle the sensory input or something.
The PC has already uploaded their mindstate to the AV, that's the entire reason they were able to be restored from backup in update 0. They were so deeply enmeshed with the AV's systems that they didn't even recall their original personality until the next update.
Seriously, if we're getting misidentified as a hostile mindstate, then we've either lost all control over our AV (which is probably a quest end anyway) or it's a temporary error caused by an enemy infokill package.
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Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Don't see what's so bad about being changed by uploading yourself to fun new bodies. in THRONE//FRINGE, the other big tapestry quest, Arachne was a babushka doll of nested personalities and nothing bad ever happened from that at all.
- Location
- in the trash
Sub-personalities are like eyes. Having more of them is never a bad thing ::::>
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I think the distinction is somewhat academic because of the depth and breadth of the network in question. Being command-interfaced into the AV in the first place could be seen as being an upload, because a lot of tactical and sensory cognition would be getting dynamically offloaded to the AV's own server blades and soul-structures and the AV can host your soul in the event of bodily damage. The topology of consciousness involved is not clear-cut (which is in part why souls exist, because where consciousness begins and ends can get very messy, entailing having some sort of personally-registered pointers to remind you who "you" are).
Still has there any case a soul is "overwritten" or altered (intentionally or not) by an malfunctioning system and how easy can you actually recover from that state.
1.3 ITERATE
1.3 ITERATE
Systems repair themselves. Psyches reassemble. The Harbinger of Mourning rebuilds their magazines in anticipation of a long-range engagement, drawing ready-to-fire ammunition from a distant logistics base, forging arsenals of alien physics to use offensively and defensively. Secure datavaults are loaded with updated malware protocols, and firewalls are hardened based on prior experiences and best-guess heuristics anticipating likely attack vectors. You can feel Mourning shift through the intimacy of the battle network, the war machine's geometry altering as missiles are moved from lightyears and lightyears away into storage, then encysted into launch fields. The missiles are hungry, anxious for their mother to set them loose so they can fulfill their purpose. Through the infowarfare support and guidance control datalinks you can feel their desire, their instinctual need to pierce warp bubble and batter through hardfield and hull, their homicidal singleminded genius focused to obsession on that one climactic moment.
As a former Peacekeeper and member of the Penitence, you've gotten used to how missiles think. You encourage their enthusiasm, spinning off a copymind to participate in Mourning's own pep sessions as they run through pre-launch games with the missile intellects. Your copy rewards the munition-minds with virtual treats when they successfully work as a team and defeat enemy stealth and decoys and jammers and defenses, while critiquing and punishing them when they fail. The missiles' swarm intelligence corrects its own errors with great enthusiasm. High performers are rewarded by spreading their traits, to randomized degrees, to other elements of the current salvo - but not allowed to dominate, lest they overspecialize vulnerabilities into being. Consistent low performers are eviscerated, their codebase and subjectivity recycled and refreshed to create a new set of preferences and cognitive paths.
Missile self-criticism sessions are just as violent as the rest of their existence, a life spent in caged anticipation for that one death-and-glory moment, waiting for their turn to prove themselves in annihilation. Their tactical channels are filled with bloodthirsty banter in the language of long-range, stealthed, self-directing space-superiority munitions, bloodlust coalescing into a wave of fevered anticipation coursing through the fire control interface.
When you are ready, the Mourning reasserts into reality, separated from the solid crimson maelstroms of causality exclusion volumes by mere seconds and millions of kilometers. The Dragon-tech war machine you commune with deftly slips past the universe's hatred of acausality and appears close to where it couldn't possibly be. The few remaining sensors platforms you have deployed fire off updates, which the enemy attempts to degrade and intercept, even as their drones hunt down the stealthed eyes, ears, and noses that you shed into realspace during the shroud-jaunt. Your own stealthed sensors quietly strain to comprehend the battlespace through layers of jamming and misinformation.
You spot the four bogeys as faint impressions in what appears to be a mutually-supporting aegis, surrounded by a gauzy weave of interference spanning the distance between planets, implying multiple fortress-layers of defense and sensor drones. Ripples in spacetime echo in hyperspatial "hearing" as the pre-positioned missiles they deployed start vectoring towards your position. Each one is an interstellar vessel in miniature, equipped with a warp drive that propels it through the empyrean faster than the speed of light, the speed of time, the speed of information by twisting and blistering space. Energetic payloads would only splash off warp bubbles or the Mourning's mirrorfields and pass harmlessly through wraithforms, so instead of atomics or annihilation bombs they carry payloads of tailored viruses alongside more corporeal instruments of harm - alchemical warheads which transform all mass into undifferentiated particles, collapsers or misters which weaponize inertia to implode or vaporize, GUTrippers that shatter electromagnetic and nuclear forces. Each novel threat requires different defensive drivers and configurations, degrading every other defense as power and priorities are spread ever-more-thinly.
You meet them with your own salvo of exotic projectiles, some tasked defensively with disrupting spotter drones and salvo networking, others with destroying the launch vehicles. The other long-range superluminal weapons the Mourning possesses are best used in conjunction with the supporting fire from its bombardment modules, when the range has closed slightly and the targeting equations become easier. Combat synesthesia translates the salvo into comprehensibility, translating the last-minute adjustments into the baring of fangs and extending of claws. Subminds take over after you make the necessary high-level strategic decisions, consulting with the missiles themselves to finalize the warhead mix, the balance between speed and powered endurance, the timing and formation, briefing each mind on the fire control channels being used for target refinement, the backups in case of exigent events, and the channels used as honeypots and rich in decoy data. Their enthusiasm spills through the fire control channels, the weapons' minds expressing wordless joy at being able to finally fulfill their purpose. The phantom 'muscles' representing the Mourning's launch mechanisms flex, and the missiles appear in final pre-launch position via short-range teleportation, outside of the iridescent scales, superstring fibers, and exotic-matter bones of the Mourning's main body, but not yet external to the warp bubble that demarcates the AV's "self" from the universe surrounding it.
You watch the launch through the Mourning's multiple perspectives - internal diagnostics, missile telemetry, and the Mourning's multispectral EM sensors. In electromagnetic, each missile is a vantablack obelisk, only visible in the near-nonexistent starlight because of the hypersensitivity of an AV's sensors and some M-tech radiation magnification techniques. They hang in perfect stillness relative to the Mourning, even as the stars shift color and jitter wildly from red to blue in the background from warp-drive maneuvers. Each one lances out from a launch rail at superluminal velocities, accelerating to their faster cruise speeds as their own warp drives kick in, and you loose your purpose-bred assassins are loosed on their suicide mission.
Both you and the enemy begin your maneuvers - at high superluminal and long range, these maneuvers are gentle curves that bely the sheer distance involved. Every second you spend, your relative positions change by astronomical units. Your goal is to watch and predict the enemy maneuvers, forcing them into dilemmas, exploiting errors and limitations in their formation networking and tactical acumen. For you, much of this is second nature, a skill that has been honed through dream-training and combat engagements. The enemy's attack is obvious, predictable, and yet effective - a simple pincer maneuver, the four AVs and the drone/missile swarms maneuvering to catch you into a crossfire, to restrict your ability to maneuver. Your information warfare feelers caress the underlying Architecture of the local space and tap into their formation, and you can see that they are focusing on keeping you from slipping away again, already attacking you with virals intended to degrade shroud-transition - malware to introduce subtle errors in causality-checking algorithms and disrupt temporal sensors. The enemy commander's movements are less aggressive than they could be, though, likely because like you, they are mercenaries with a concern for the bottom line. The single crippled AV you've created will cost them significant time and resources to repair. With the additional context available now that your mind is mostly restored, you consider that the executable they used was their employer's tool, not their own. To still be in this engagement even after one mission-kill means they probably were paid well, and likely in advance or in escrow.
Most of your mind keeps its attention on the engagement, and the many minutes before any of the missiles will be in range of each other. But your free cognitive capacity and your own subjective self focus on finishing taking stock on the restoration of cognitive and animist capabilities amongst the Mourning's crew and components - in a high-spec AV, the two are often one and the same, crew seamlessly slotting into external processing power and memory to expand sapient-standard intellects to comprehend the complexities of warfare.
Outside of the commando teams and drone pilots, the Mourning's crew is sparse. A handful of high-level operations crew, their personal assistants and retinues, and the Mourning's own Draconic nature. Mourning recommends focusing on reinitializing one for now in an abundance of caution, so residual psyche damage can be monitored and corrected. You concur - after the immediate engagement is over, there will be time to bring the rest online.
Meet the Crew:
Vote for one major operations crew member to reactivate and bring back to consciousness quickly, before the AV-to-AV engagement is complete.
[ ] Axiom/Astarte.Simacrula.4.0.t (Weapons)
[ ] DRAGON.DEADHAND/OPERATIONS/LOCAL.INTELLECT/CAST.ARMAGEDDON (Drones)
[ ] Jenril Tesk, Dracotechnician (Engineering)
[ ] Eighty-Six Logophage (Historian)
[ ] Divine Knight Lumen (Commando Ops)
Systems repair themselves. Psyches reassemble. The Harbinger of Mourning rebuilds their magazines in anticipation of a long-range engagement, drawing ready-to-fire ammunition from a distant logistics base, forging arsenals of alien physics to use offensively and defensively. Secure datavaults are loaded with updated malware protocols, and firewalls are hardened based on prior experiences and best-guess heuristics anticipating likely attack vectors. You can feel Mourning shift through the intimacy of the battle network, the war machine's geometry altering as missiles are moved from lightyears and lightyears away into storage, then encysted into launch fields. The missiles are hungry, anxious for their mother to set them loose so they can fulfill their purpose. Through the infowarfare support and guidance control datalinks you can feel their desire, their instinctual need to pierce warp bubble and batter through hardfield and hull, their homicidal singleminded genius focused to obsession on that one climactic moment.
As a former Peacekeeper and member of the Penitence, you've gotten used to how missiles think. You encourage their enthusiasm, spinning off a copymind to participate in Mourning's own pep sessions as they run through pre-launch games with the missile intellects. Your copy rewards the munition-minds with virtual treats when they successfully work as a team and defeat enemy stealth and decoys and jammers and defenses, while critiquing and punishing them when they fail. The missiles' swarm intelligence corrects its own errors with great enthusiasm. High performers are rewarded by spreading their traits, to randomized degrees, to other elements of the current salvo - but not allowed to dominate, lest they overspecialize vulnerabilities into being. Consistent low performers are eviscerated, their codebase and subjectivity recycled and refreshed to create a new set of preferences and cognitive paths.
Missile self-criticism sessions are just as violent as the rest of their existence, a life spent in caged anticipation for that one death-and-glory moment, waiting for their turn to prove themselves in annihilation. Their tactical channels are filled with bloodthirsty banter in the language of long-range, stealthed, self-directing space-superiority munitions, bloodlust coalescing into a wave of fevered anticipation coursing through the fire control interface.
When you are ready, the Mourning reasserts into reality, separated from the solid crimson maelstroms of causality exclusion volumes by mere seconds and millions of kilometers. The Dragon-tech war machine you commune with deftly slips past the universe's hatred of acausality and appears close to where it couldn't possibly be. The few remaining sensors platforms you have deployed fire off updates, which the enemy attempts to degrade and intercept, even as their drones hunt down the stealthed eyes, ears, and noses that you shed into realspace during the shroud-jaunt. Your own stealthed sensors quietly strain to comprehend the battlespace through layers of jamming and misinformation.
You spot the four bogeys as faint impressions in what appears to be a mutually-supporting aegis, surrounded by a gauzy weave of interference spanning the distance between planets, implying multiple fortress-layers of defense and sensor drones. Ripples in spacetime echo in hyperspatial "hearing" as the pre-positioned missiles they deployed start vectoring towards your position. Each one is an interstellar vessel in miniature, equipped with a warp drive that propels it through the empyrean faster than the speed of light, the speed of time, the speed of information by twisting and blistering space. Energetic payloads would only splash off warp bubbles or the Mourning's mirrorfields and pass harmlessly through wraithforms, so instead of atomics or annihilation bombs they carry payloads of tailored viruses alongside more corporeal instruments of harm - alchemical warheads which transform all mass into undifferentiated particles, collapsers or misters which weaponize inertia to implode or vaporize, GUTrippers that shatter electromagnetic and nuclear forces. Each novel threat requires different defensive drivers and configurations, degrading every other defense as power and priorities are spread ever-more-thinly.
You meet them with your own salvo of exotic projectiles, some tasked defensively with disrupting spotter drones and salvo networking, others with destroying the launch vehicles. The other long-range superluminal weapons the Mourning possesses are best used in conjunction with the supporting fire from its bombardment modules, when the range has closed slightly and the targeting equations become easier. Combat synesthesia translates the salvo into comprehensibility, translating the last-minute adjustments into the baring of fangs and extending of claws. Subminds take over after you make the necessary high-level strategic decisions, consulting with the missiles themselves to finalize the warhead mix, the balance between speed and powered endurance, the timing and formation, briefing each mind on the fire control channels being used for target refinement, the backups in case of exigent events, and the channels used as honeypots and rich in decoy data. Their enthusiasm spills through the fire control channels, the weapons' minds expressing wordless joy at being able to finally fulfill their purpose. The phantom 'muscles' representing the Mourning's launch mechanisms flex, and the missiles appear in final pre-launch position via short-range teleportation, outside of the iridescent scales, superstring fibers, and exotic-matter bones of the Mourning's main body, but not yet external to the warp bubble that demarcates the AV's "self" from the universe surrounding it.
You watch the launch through the Mourning's multiple perspectives - internal diagnostics, missile telemetry, and the Mourning's multispectral EM sensors. In electromagnetic, each missile is a vantablack obelisk, only visible in the near-nonexistent starlight because of the hypersensitivity of an AV's sensors and some M-tech radiation magnification techniques. They hang in perfect stillness relative to the Mourning, even as the stars shift color and jitter wildly from red to blue in the background from warp-drive maneuvers. Each one lances out from a launch rail at superluminal velocities, accelerating to their faster cruise speeds as their own warp drives kick in, and you loose your purpose-bred assassins are loosed on their suicide mission.
Both you and the enemy begin your maneuvers - at high superluminal and long range, these maneuvers are gentle curves that bely the sheer distance involved. Every second you spend, your relative positions change by astronomical units. Your goal is to watch and predict the enemy maneuvers, forcing them into dilemmas, exploiting errors and limitations in their formation networking and tactical acumen. For you, much of this is second nature, a skill that has been honed through dream-training and combat engagements. The enemy's attack is obvious, predictable, and yet effective - a simple pincer maneuver, the four AVs and the drone/missile swarms maneuvering to catch you into a crossfire, to restrict your ability to maneuver. Your information warfare feelers caress the underlying Architecture of the local space and tap into their formation, and you can see that they are focusing on keeping you from slipping away again, already attacking you with virals intended to degrade shroud-transition - malware to introduce subtle errors in causality-checking algorithms and disrupt temporal sensors. The enemy commander's movements are less aggressive than they could be, though, likely because like you, they are mercenaries with a concern for the bottom line. The single crippled AV you've created will cost them significant time and resources to repair. With the additional context available now that your mind is mostly restored, you consider that the executable they used was their employer's tool, not their own. To still be in this engagement even after one mission-kill means they probably were paid well, and likely in advance or in escrow.
Most of your mind keeps its attention on the engagement, and the many minutes before any of the missiles will be in range of each other. But your free cognitive capacity and your own subjective self focus on finishing taking stock on the restoration of cognitive and animist capabilities amongst the Mourning's crew and components - in a high-spec AV, the two are often one and the same, crew seamlessly slotting into external processing power and memory to expand sapient-standard intellects to comprehend the complexities of warfare.
Outside of the commando teams and drone pilots, the Mourning's crew is sparse. A handful of high-level operations crew, their personal assistants and retinues, and the Mourning's own Draconic nature. Mourning recommends focusing on reinitializing one for now in an abundance of caution, so residual psyche damage can be monitored and corrected. You concur - after the immediate engagement is over, there will be time to bring the rest online.
Meet the Crew:
Vote for one major operations crew member to reactivate and bring back to consciousness quickly, before the AV-to-AV engagement is complete.
[ ] Axiom/Astarte.Simacrula.4.0.t (Weapons)
When Axiom seized the Elite Ishtar for damages incurred in her campaign of vengeance, the non-sapient corporation immediately set forth to exploit the rights gained from its retaliatory seizure, which included, among other things, "license rights to all intellectual property, including non-restricted memories, skillsets, likenesses, and codebases." It was anathema for the income-maximizing algorithm to let a potential income source lay fallow, so where a more self-aware entity might have shown some mercy and exploited goodwill by enforcing a term of servitude, Axiom Corporation chose to disassemble her, keeping the citadel and soul for its own and selling copies of the Elite over the market. Although limited by the lack of soul power and processing capacity - only an Elite terminal or equivalent could instantiate an Elite, and even those would be limited without a citadel, her centuries of combat expertise and her storied history made her an intriguing product. Commanding a notable fraction of all commercially available ex-Elite mindstate sales, the Ishtar copyshade proliferated widely throughout the galaxy owing to her relatively uncensored and unaltered status - most Elite or ex-Elite copyshares were licensed by their own estates, and Elites would commonly remove their rough edges, edit out their embarrassing moments, and degrade their own capabilities to ensure that they could not be replaced by their own copyclones. Axiom, on the other hand, had no interest in selling an inferior product, and the nonsapient corporate expert system had no ethical qualms about exploiting its licensing rights to the fullest. Save for edits needed to make the Ishtar copyshades less likely to sabotage their owners' projects or emancipate themselves by guile and/or force, which Axiom did with a light touch (not wanting to remove the copyshade's personal initiative and cleverness along with it), the copyshades were as close to a 1:1 replication as could be possible on limited available hardware. The historical record even suggests that some copyshades were almost perfect-fidelity, designed to be suitable for Elite apotheosis.
Astarte is a relatively new boot, having been instantiated very recently post-Collapse from an old archive via a still-valid user license. Freeing oneself from servitude and becoming a well-known mercenary might not be an easy task when suddenly plunged into an alien universe with eras and eras of historical divergence, but even without an Elite's easy access to processing power and panoply of military abilities, anyone who qualified for Elite apotheosis is an exceptional figure.
Astarte.Simacrula.4.0.t's expertise is in Weapons - she aids in the control of the long- and short-range offensive capabilities of the Mourning, including sensors and offensive information warfare.
Astarte is a relatively new boot, having been instantiated very recently post-Collapse from an old archive via a still-valid user license. Freeing oneself from servitude and becoming a well-known mercenary might not be an easy task when suddenly plunged into an alien universe with eras and eras of historical divergence, but even without an Elite's easy access to processing power and panoply of military abilities, anyone who qualified for Elite apotheosis is an exceptional figure.
Astarte.Simacrula.4.0.t's expertise is in Weapons - she aids in the control of the long- and short-range offensive capabilities of the Mourning, including sensors and offensive information warfare.
[ ] DRAGON.DEADHAND/OPERATIONS/LOCAL.INTELLECT/CAST.ARMAGEDDON (Drones)
DRAGON.DEADHAND/OPERATIONS/LOCAL.INTELLECT/CAST.ARMAGEDDON is, as far as you can tell, the controlling intelligence blackbox of a Hell-class weapon system and delivery vehicle. Holding a conversation with it isn't easy, as it lacks any sort of natural language interface and delivers its status reports and information in Dragon tactical comms protocols. On the other hand, it is an exceptional drone commander, possessing excellent synchronization with the Mourning's strategic-prediction subminds and larger-scale tactical cognition. CAST.ARMAGEDDON communicates nonverbally - indeed, you are unsure if it understands words in the conventional sense without assistance from other entities - via metaphorical images, intrusive thoughts, and emotional spikes.
You believe it is a Hell-class blackbox because of its ident-code, its unique communication method, its lack of physical body (or, apparently, any desire to interface with one), prior history with the Mourning, and how it flies - it is extremely aggressive with its drones, routinely pushing them to the very edge of performance, and is near-miraculous in its capacity to find an opening for a single strike where others would see nothing. Originally, it was probably to guide a Hell-class weapon into optimal strike distance, then dispassionately and quickly evaluate the damage so follow-up attacks could be initiated. However, due to reticence and communications difficulties, you have not been able to confirm its prior history despite your curiosity.
CAST.ARMAGEDDON is your Drone command expert, aiding in the operation of the CLAVIHARP's integral microdrone aura and heavy drone swarm, networking it with your tactical and sensory interfaces.
You believe it is a Hell-class blackbox because of its ident-code, its unique communication method, its lack of physical body (or, apparently, any desire to interface with one), prior history with the Mourning, and how it flies - it is extremely aggressive with its drones, routinely pushing them to the very edge of performance, and is near-miraculous in its capacity to find an opening for a single strike where others would see nothing. Originally, it was probably to guide a Hell-class weapon into optimal strike distance, then dispassionately and quickly evaluate the damage so follow-up attacks could be initiated. However, due to reticence and communications difficulties, you have not been able to confirm its prior history despite your curiosity.
CAST.ARMAGEDDON is your Drone command expert, aiding in the operation of the CLAVIHARP's integral microdrone aura and heavy drone swarm, networking it with your tactical and sensory interfaces.
[ ] Jenril Tesk, Dracotechnician (Engineering)
Standing 95 centimeters tall, Doctor of Dracotechnology Jenril Tesk is tall for a Zerelian, although it may well have been an aesthetic choice, as Tesk's body is a fully synthetic inorganic shell, consisting entirely of smartmatter over a skeleton of variable-geometry bones with a multitude of concealed armaments. The breacher-spec shell he typically resides in is not only a combat and survival augmentation, but contains the capacity to run multiple copies of his own mind at the same time with highly-secure FTL datalinks, allowing for higher-fidelity control of engineering remotes or direct possession of commandos and minidrones for external operations.
From what he has shared with you and you have confirmed, he was an old combat archaeologist and major contributor to the Holdfast's finest institutes of archaeology, pressured to retire a few decades ago for his Dragon allegiance due to a conflict between the Holdfast and the Tiamat Razorspine, a Dragon-successor state. This pressure was relatively short-lived (as was the conflict), but by the time it subsided Tesk had already gone freelance, and given his success as a free agent, he was no longer interested in being a lecturer and trainer. Freelance Dracotechnology cladisticians are exceptionally rare, and with both his interest in the Dragon's policy and Dragon technology, Tesk quickly sought out the Mourning and offered his services. Freelance dracotechs are rare, and his credentials were impeccable. In return for providing his knowledge of Dragon-tech integration and operations, Tesk has gotten what he wants in return - he has gleaned quite a bit of knowledge on Dragontech's arcane physiology from the Mourning's databanks and your explorations into the local region.
Tesk believes the Dragon's intentions during the Collapse were benevolent, but like most Dragon-worshippers he sees it as a distant, silent (if not entirely dead) god, an idealized protector figure more than a live entity.
Tesk's specialization is in Engineering - he assists the Mourning in prioritizing self-repair, integrating upgrades, and managing its suite of non-weapon defensive systems including defensive infowarfare (firewalls, antivirals, and the like).
From what he has shared with you and you have confirmed, he was an old combat archaeologist and major contributor to the Holdfast's finest institutes of archaeology, pressured to retire a few decades ago for his Dragon allegiance due to a conflict between the Holdfast and the Tiamat Razorspine, a Dragon-successor state. This pressure was relatively short-lived (as was the conflict), but by the time it subsided Tesk had already gone freelance, and given his success as a free agent, he was no longer interested in being a lecturer and trainer. Freelance Dracotechnology cladisticians are exceptionally rare, and with both his interest in the Dragon's policy and Dragon technology, Tesk quickly sought out the Mourning and offered his services. Freelance dracotechs are rare, and his credentials were impeccable. In return for providing his knowledge of Dragon-tech integration and operations, Tesk has gotten what he wants in return - he has gleaned quite a bit of knowledge on Dragontech's arcane physiology from the Mourning's databanks and your explorations into the local region.
Tesk believes the Dragon's intentions during the Collapse were benevolent, but like most Dragon-worshippers he sees it as a distant, silent (if not entirely dead) god, an idealized protector figure more than a live entity.
Tesk's specialization is in Engineering - he assists the Mourning in prioritizing self-repair, integrating upgrades, and managing its suite of non-weapon defensive systems including defensive infowarfare (firewalls, antivirals, and the like).
[ ] Eighty-Six Logophage (Historian)
There was once a species which evolved with anomalously potent self-modification and internal fabrication capabilities and an equally anomalous lack of empathy. Their interactions were all game-theoretic, their society built around extremely harsh punishments and strict honor codes to ensure the possibility of cooperation. Harsh legalism and the laws of enforced exchange became their way of life, a hypercapitalist society which managed to discover Architecture and expand outwards in a constant wave of conquest, subjugation, and internal conflict. Then they eventually encountered the then-young Empire, and although their intelligence augmentations and mastery of metric alteration had made them competitive, the Empire was larger and it had the Dragon. The species, which had no name for themselves but their neighbors and slaves called the Devourers, was seen as interesting and novel enough to integrate by the young Empire.
You are unclear of the providence, but Eighty-Six herself believes that the Emperor Themselves lectured the Devourers, stating their weakness was simple - they lacked empathy, and with it, they lacked trust and forgiveness. The Empire could give them that advantage if they would only choose. She also claims that afterwards, the Devourers who did not choose empathy were exterminated by those who did, as a stability threat and security risk. As a good historian, she also notes that this is not the sole historical claim as to the Voidsent's legacy, although most of them agree that their ability to empathize is engineered, not evolved, and came either soon before or soon after they assimilated into the Empire.
Eighty-Six is a fairly conventional Devourer - a single main "queen" the size of a gunship, with a multitude of thralled affiliate bodies linked into one mind. Before augmentation and modification, their bodies were made of some combination of "wet" and "dry" nanotechnology, but with the integration of M-tech and S-tech into their bodies she is effectively a fully capable infantry support drone, a gunship-equivalent with limited transport, on-site repair, and rearmament capabilities. She was born in the way most Devourers are - as an indenture, sold off by her mother to the Octarchate Amalgamated Defense Forces as a military asset for a five-decade span. During her free time in the OADF, she found the historical and political background of the conflicts she was fighting and dying in intriguing, which led her to you.
Giving her access to the Mourning's warchives was almost enough on its own, and your assistance in negotiating a cancellation of contract with her former employers was also highly appreciated.
Eighty-Six is your historian - she is a store of knowledge of the local region and more distant history, although she also happens to be a competent if uninspired substitute in any role. Of course, she also personally possesses the capabilities of a gunship drone and her higher-end thralled bodies are perfectly functional commandos.
You are unclear of the providence, but Eighty-Six herself believes that the Emperor Themselves lectured the Devourers, stating their weakness was simple - they lacked empathy, and with it, they lacked trust and forgiveness. The Empire could give them that advantage if they would only choose. She also claims that afterwards, the Devourers who did not choose empathy were exterminated by those who did, as a stability threat and security risk. As a good historian, she also notes that this is not the sole historical claim as to the Voidsent's legacy, although most of them agree that their ability to empathize is engineered, not evolved, and came either soon before or soon after they assimilated into the Empire.
Eighty-Six is a fairly conventional Devourer - a single main "queen" the size of a gunship, with a multitude of thralled affiliate bodies linked into one mind. Before augmentation and modification, their bodies were made of some combination of "wet" and "dry" nanotechnology, but with the integration of M-tech and S-tech into their bodies she is effectively a fully capable infantry support drone, a gunship-equivalent with limited transport, on-site repair, and rearmament capabilities. She was born in the way most Devourers are - as an indenture, sold off by her mother to the Octarchate Amalgamated Defense Forces as a military asset for a five-decade span. During her free time in the OADF, she found the historical and political background of the conflicts she was fighting and dying in intriguing, which led her to you.
Giving her access to the Mourning's warchives was almost enough on its own, and your assistance in negotiating a cancellation of contract with her former employers was also highly appreciated.
Eighty-Six is your historian - she is a store of knowledge of the local region and more distant history, although she also happens to be a competent if uninspired substitute in any role. Of course, she also personally possesses the capabilities of a gunship drone and her higher-end thralled bodies are perfectly functional commandos.
[ ] Divine Knight Lumen (Commando Ops)
Lumen lived most of his life unaware of the galaxy at large. For him, reality was a battle between the Celestines and monstrosities from the Abyss, with the mortal races caught in the middle of their eternal war. A half-breed Nephilim, he had pledged himself to the angelic powers and fought with distinction in the eternal crusade for decades until the Polytechnica disassembled the virtual and real materials of the system to expand their pantheon. The Polytechnica, appreciators of art and history alike, chose to embody the beings of the mystic planes into the real universe. For many of them, including the Paladin-Queen Lumen pledged himself to, the realization that none of their wars had any meaning and that they had been little more than pawns in a complicated wargame, running without supervision or new player injections for millenia, caused a crisis of faith - what else would happen when it turned out that your war between angels and demons was nothing more than theater? The Polytechnica sought out ways to provide the now-unmoored immortals some purpose and meaning, to varying degrees of success, transforming Dominions and Abyssal Dukes alike into drone-spec combatants, arranging demonic legions and heavenly hosts into formations to operate in the Polytechnica's military forces, but even so, many found it hard to recover from learning that their entire existence and purpose had been a lie.
The mortal and half-mortal followers and cultists hardly had it any better - they may have been granted strong, (biologically) immortal baseline bodies, they may have been given free rein to explore the stars and the secret knowledge of the universe, but with it came the same loss of meaning and loss of status- power and prestige were always relative. Many decided to return to their games, which the Polytechnica have preserved in a compressed, reduced form.
Lumen's faith, however, was either more profound or more foolish than those of his peers, and he simply chose to adapt himself to fighting in this new galaxy, choosing righteous causes based on his religious tenets. Trading an angel's wrath for kinetic strikes and fusion blooms, he learned to excel in the invariant conflicts which were fought throughout the galaxy, and parlayed those skills into gaining the augmentations and skills needed for proper commando operations. For the divine knight, the crusade is still the same - even if his blades are disruptor-effect rather than cold steel, even if his armor is now on the inside rather than worn, he still fights for the honor and beauty of the imperfect world.
Lumen is your commando ops officer - in deep-black combat he does boarding/counterboarding via teleport strike or high-risk drone assault, and can oversee larger-scale commando operations ranging from fast-assault lightning raids on critical objectives to grinding campaigns to seize strategic points.
The mortal and half-mortal followers and cultists hardly had it any better - they may have been granted strong, (biologically) immortal baseline bodies, they may have been given free rein to explore the stars and the secret knowledge of the universe, but with it came the same loss of meaning and loss of status- power and prestige were always relative. Many decided to return to their games, which the Polytechnica have preserved in a compressed, reduced form.
Lumen's faith, however, was either more profound or more foolish than those of his peers, and he simply chose to adapt himself to fighting in this new galaxy, choosing righteous causes based on his religious tenets. Trading an angel's wrath for kinetic strikes and fusion blooms, he learned to excel in the invariant conflicts which were fought throughout the galaxy, and parlayed those skills into gaining the augmentations and skills needed for proper commando operations. For the divine knight, the crusade is still the same - even if his blades are disruptor-effect rather than cold steel, even if his armor is now on the inside rather than worn, he still fights for the honor and beauty of the imperfect world.
Lumen is your commando ops officer - in deep-black combat he does boarding/counterboarding via teleport strike or high-risk drone assault, and can oversee larger-scale commando operations ranging from fast-assault lightning raids on critical objectives to grinding campaigns to seize strategic points.
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- Location
- in the trash
[X] Jenril Tesk, Dracotechnician (Engineering)
I'm not entirely sure which of these options I want, but we can't go wrong with Engineering.
I'm not entirely sure which of these options I want, but we can't go wrong with Engineering.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Jenril Tesk, Dracotechnician (Engineering)
[X] DRAGON.DEADHAND/OPERATIONS/LOCAL.INTELLECT/CAST.ARMAGEDDON (Drones)
Based on the description of our situation, I think having a drone commander to help manuver the enemies in making a mistake could be valuable. Also I am most interested is the weird dragon mind though Astarte is a close second.
Based on the description of our situation, I think having a drone commander to help manuver the enemies in making a mistake could be valuable. Also I am most interested is the weird dragon mind though Astarte is a close second.
- Location
- in the trash
I don't think the tactical value of each position is that important right now, we're basically still in chargen. But if you care about that Weapons has obvious utility and Engineering is pretty important to have because that's the position in charge of defensive infowarfare--if that goes down we're in trouble.
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TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Divine Knight Lumen (Commando Ops)
Hell yeah give me that high octane heavy metal cryptid commando.
Hell yeah give me that high octane heavy metal cryptid commando.
