Duodecimarch Revolution (Warhammer x Metroid x Worm x Transformers Multicross Quest)

[Spartakrod]

Spoiler: CW: Swastika

"What a mess, isn't it?" Bose Hexe or Hexenmutter depending on whether you asked her enemies or friends; or Idonia von Horstmann or Cold Malice depending on whether one spoke of the flesh of the woman or the creature that shared a body with her; spoke her words in a voice were surprisingly gentle for the much feared head of the Weltreich's thule society. Reichsfuhrer-Thule Gesellschaft, the most menacing woman in the whole of the weltreich. Someone who could have been Fuhrer if well...if she hadn't been a woman. Not that she cared, her place was secure, and that was what mattered.

She looked behind her, to her retinue, clearly expecting them to chime in; brief startlement coming from them as they realised that she gave an invitation to speak.

"Jawohl Frau Reichsfuhrer...the degeneracy of the Judeo-Ne-" one of her guards, a titan of a man in plate armour forged with the emblems of the Thule Society and clad in its threatening dark purple scheme said before she cut him off.

"Yes yes, Konrad, I know. No need to waste words." She said with a hum while she had a look around from the ethereal realm, coextant with the materium but not in a way that would let those without the right abilities see her stalking around in the realm of ghosts and phantoms. Perfect for her morning walks.

"My apologies, Frau Reichsfuhrer. But we must keep our commitment to national socialism strong of course. To guard against the creeping degeneracy." He said, stiffening his back in a way that made Hexe laugh before shaking his head.

"At ease, Konrad. We are relaxing, not on business." She said, twirling around a little stick in her hand.

One might expect her to smoke a cigar as many such aristocratic Nazis were famous for, but she held to Hitler's view of smoking. Her vice, such as it was, was chewing gum. Her jaw working a pack dispensed from the small, wand like tube she held, as she spoke. It made her hard to read, seeming younger, less proper than someone of her station should be. The mother of witches chewing gum like a schoolgirl, the partner of the dreaded Nictus war criminal Cold Malice wearing her hair long like a supermodel, tall but not so tall as to look down on the fine men of the SS and make them feel inadequate.

Cold blue eyes looked over the landscape of Los Angeles, freshly short tens of thousands of people, though the casualties were surprisingly low for such destruction with how much force was redirected to deal with a handful of...what was it the Nictus Council called them...the prodigal scions? Hrmph, more people she'd have to deal with. Always more people for the Reichsfuhrer of the Thule Society. The one woman who had managed to make it to the top in a society that envisioned women as largely a source of good Aryan children.

She swallowed her gum as she scowled. So many women complaining about the need to have children to get ahead. So weak, so soft. She birthed more than a score of children and never once complained. It was her duty to the fatherland, to the herrenvolk. What gave these "volksfeminische" the inane idea that it was their place to whine about not being equal? Woman and Man served the Reich and Volk in different ways, that was always to be so. Braun was not fuhrer, Hitler was.

"Something displeases you, Frau Reichsfuhrer?" Another of her guards asked as Thule society staff combed around the ethereal realm, careful to avoid the psykers and the mystics.

"Mmmh, a lot does." She said, frowning. "You know the people who want to reconcile feminism with national socialism?" She asked, getting a brief nod. Perhaps he was just nodding to not rouse her anger, she didn't really care.

"Dreadful nonsense really, if I could make it, so can they..." She shook her head and popped in another stick of gum into her mouth from her dispenser.

"But more pertinent...this city, Los Angeles. Such a hive of scum and monstrosity and what a damnable shame that more of it didn't burn." She hissed as she looked upon the rubble and ruin that was visible in a hazy, faded sort of way through the overlapping dimensions, passing through a person being helped out of a pile of rubble by a cape and delighting as he shivered from the sensation of ethereal displacement before pointing her gum dispenser stick at a billboard.

"Look at them, wasting their time on hedonistic joys while the communists eat away at the inside." She said, sneering at the adult store advertisement and then gesturing to an Anarchist A for Anarchy symbol spray painted on the cheek of the woman on the ad, the sneer turning into a grimace when she noticed one of the people touching the woman was another woman, and Asian at that.

"This evil reminds us of what we must steel ourselves against. What we have rid ourselves of. It is good to be reminded of why you fight, no?" She said, turning around to her staff who gave sagely nods while she glared at someone she deemed to be staring for too long.

"We fight for the righteous way, the natural order of things, the place where people belong so that every cog can find happiness in its contribution to the great body of the volk. To bring order, where there is chaos. And here there was much chaos, it stinks of chaos." She said, her face briefly seeming far more gaunt and monstrous as she made a particularly hateful expression; the creature that formed the other half of her briefly manifesting in translucent form.

"And we will burn it of course, Frau Reichsfuhrer. But the Oberkommand's orders are clear...we are still to prepare, to mobilise. These aliens are complicating factors, the kommand is apprehensive." Konrad said, his tone respectful and courteous and enough to draw a sigh from Idonia.

"Of course, of course. Can't have the Oberkommand unhappy, can we?" She sighed and let a curl of black energy escape her lips as she exhaled.

"The Fuhrer is watching our progress closely, Fraulein." Another chimed in to her smile, brushing her hair back as if Armin Ziegler were with them right now for her to impress.

"Hrm...he'll be impressed I'm sure." She said, humming delightfully. "Make sure to target the people who feel failed by the ability of Jewish America to keep order and safety. The shopkeepers and the self-employed, the how they say "baby boomers" who feel left behind and the teenagers who feel lonely. They will make a fine basis for the new order." She said with a sickly sweet smile on her face.

"Of course Frau Reichsfuhrer. Also, one of your children has a message for you." He replied, showing her a slate as her brow quirked and her expression took on a more matronly one.

"Oh?~ I'm always interested in how my progeny are doing...which one is it?" She asked.

"Ermendrude Reichsfuhrer...Hexenhammer. The ah, redheaded one." He said, her smile disappearing almost immediately before she handed the dataslate back to him and scoffed.

"Tell her that mommy is too busy for her nonsense." She said with a low growl. Ermendrude was not only half fae by her...dalliance with the captive faerie prince, but also redheaded and green eyed. Not the picture perfect model of the aryan woman that Idonia prided herself on mothering. And she was far, far too sweet for her own good. A bitter disappointment of a child for all her magical talents.

"Of course." He said with a bow.

"And Kaiser has ah...requested an audience with you. If you would be willing to entertain him. Requiem too."

"Tch, indigenous allies...fine. I will see the two and hear their whining. Schedule it for tomorrow." She said as she put her hands in her pocket and began to walk away, blowing a bubble with her gum.

"As you command. Heil Ziegler!" He said, clicking his boots and giving the hateful salute.

"Heil Ziegler!" She responded on automatic reflex, every child of the Weltreich having the instinct to click their heels and present the salute at a proper Heiling of the Fuhrer or Victory as soon as they could understand the command to do so.

 

[Spartakrod]

Most of Maliq's meetings with Soviet General-Secretary Lidziya Mikitovna Novikova were on far less short notice than this, but in the aftermath of the Terror of Los Angeles, he had little choice. French Prime Minister of the Seventh Republic Gilles Agreste, essentially representing Western Europe, and Chinese Paramount Leader Long Nuwa had also decided to join him.

Ordinarily, with the exception of Scion, these were the four most powerful and influential people in the world as far as most were concerned. The overall leaders of the four great power blocs. However, as the four crossed paths in the United Nations building, there was a sense of sense of smallness. Maliq's dark skinned features bore a frown. Tall as he was, he felt like a dwarf next to the four armour clad...teenagers he was told, hybrids. Though he couldn't make anything past their helmets. The tallest of them, who thankfully had changed his helm from its original unflinching cyclopean gaze to a more conventional V-visor briefly acknowledged him before speaking to the one with the green cannon in a language he couldn't make heads or tails of.

But they were in turn, dwarfed by the towering giants in heavy armour bearing the symbol of a raven with its wings spread and a drop of blood in its centre on their pauldrons. But he could sense deference from them to their kin in yellow armour with the symbol of a black clenched fist on their shoulders, unit seniority perhaps?

Nevertheless, he had a hard time imagining that they were supposed to be human when any of them looked like they could crumple him into a ball and dribble him into the hoop of any court they wanted.

Through his dark brown eyes, he could see the blonde-haired Soviet Gen-Sec pestering one of the space marines, her guards seeming to almost freeze when she reached to touch one of them in titanically bulky armour with a helm recessed into a hood of metal.

"May I feel it?" She asked, her Minskian accent somewhat there, but clearly affected by her time in Moscow.

"Go ahead." The baritone of the space marine responded as she touched the arm and tried to bring her arms around the bicep and see if she could link her hands together after making the full circumference and laughing when she just about managed with the Primaris Omega's Tataros Pattern Terminator armour.

Her hair, often kept in a bun, was allowed to fall to its more natural length, and her sharp blue eyes were constantly on the look out, trying to get a read on the Space marine as she let go.

While certainly a tall woman, just barely shorter than him and a full head taller than her Chinese counterpart, seemed like a toddler next to the space marine, and her Special Protection Division cape bodyguards, normally some of the most intimidating men and women you could get out of the vast tundra of the Rodina; were in no greater luck with regards to having their intimidation factor deflated by the Astartes.

"This is hardly a time to be playing games, comrade Novikova." Nuwa said with a small, but scolding voice, her demeanour unflinching despite the giants she was sharing a room with. Affable when she needed to be, but deadly serious when it came time for business with a laser-like intensity that could make Otieno's best poker face threaten to crack without so much as a word. Must be the skills one gains in being able to win a staring contest with three thousand people at the National People's Assembly.

"Learn to live a little, Nuwa." She said, the first name basis the two were on getting Maliq to quirk a brow.

Not as much as meeting his...not future but...different universe version...counterpart from 2021...did, but definitely enough to make him pause for a moment.

"The eastern bloc has its own workings monsieur, you will just have to get used to it Otieno." Gilles said, adjusting his glasses briefly as the rather average looking Frenchman spoke to him rather bluntly in English.

"Well, I'm more surprised that I still find that surprising in this day and age Agreste." He said with a simple, gentle shrug.

"The meeting so far has been productive, no?" Gilles said, checking his briefcase for only a moment before his American counterpart felt obliged to respond with a nod.

"Yeah, I'd say that went about as well as asking a commando operative to do diplomacy could." Arcee said with a shrug, her lanky form seemingly much taller than her motorcycle alternate mode really should have allowed her to be.

"Already ducking out of the ceremonies?" Lidziya asked, folding her arms and swivelling towards Arcee.

"As I said, commandobot. I'll leave the oratory to people who've got better processors for it than me." She responded.

"But allow me to ask you a more personal question." Maliq said, approaching her about as closely as he could without seeming disrespectful or invasive.

"Shoot." She said, surprisingly human of her.

"Do you really think so lowly of our chances that you need to set up ground bases planetside?" He asked, he had heard she was much older than she acted. Someone who had first come online when humanity's ancestors were still figuring out how to make fire with flint and tinder despite acting like a suave woman in the prime of her life. But the way she analysed him, without blinking or breaking reminded him that she was still something of metal and circuits at the end of the day; for all the facsimiles of life that she had. Processors he couldn't really guess at the layout of fired up and ran through her thoughts with breath-taking efficiency before she replied.

"I've seen how wars between civilisations at different ends of the Kardashev scale go. It's never pretty for the guy an integer or more down. You know about the scale right?"

"The Soviet Scientist's way of measuring the advancement of a society based on how much energy it makes use of. One for all the energy of a planet, two for all the energy of a star, three for all the energy of a galaxy." Nuwa said, folding her arms as if she wanted to remind Arcee that she wasn't impressed by her knowledge of human xenological terminology.

"We have a similar gradient, though not named for any Kardashev." One of the Techpriests, those robed figures whose cloaks concealed a mass of cybernetics so extreme that Otieno hadn't believed they were actually human the first time he had seen them, said. A towering figure in a red robe with a winged skull, cog, and sword symbol in easily visible places to remind observers of their allegiance to what he was told was a sort of machine cult. Magos Vektra Katakos. Someone that if Otieno remembered correctly, was not to be referred to by any gender. They simply were.

"Your society has not yet reached the first integer. You will be facing those who have crossed at least the third long ago." They said in a mechanical, almost barking tone devoid of inflection and had a candour to its sounds that almost gave the impression that it was deliberately meant to be unpleasant to listen to.

"If...I may speak." Gilles said, dusting off his tie and stepping forward, drawing the attention of the Magos, Arcee, and a digitigrade machine man from the "Omdyn" and its "Section Thirteen" who all turned at once to look at him; three very different manner of mechanically touched intellects scrutinising him in a way that got him to pale slightly as he felt the scrutiny of Blue, Cyan, and Red optics all at once, metallic fingers, tendrils, and armatures paused with unnerving stillness.

"Please, go ahead Urglik Prime Minister." The herald platform; Syvrak, said, twin pairs of limbs shifting to a less threatening posture as the somewhat raptor-like machine's tail slowly wagged back and forth.

"There are many worries about your...plans to simply establish base on this Earth, nevermind the Primals' own objections. How do we know that you are not also invaders?" He asked.

"He raises a fine question. We would be giving up territory to allow your bases to expand and letting your soldiers be in the open in these bases as your sovereign territory. It is, hard to not worry. Especially after what happened in Los Angeles." The Soviet General Secretary spoke up, her playful demeanour seeming to vanish all at once as she looked dead on at Arcee. They probably already had words about this earlier, Otieno figured that much, but he doubted they came to anything conclusive.

"We have already offered our assistance in rebuilding the city and our commiserations for the loss of life, thankfully limited in scope for an incursion of such a magnitude." The Magos said, once again without a hint of emotion or humanity; honestly seeming colder and more robotic than the two aliens who had never been fleshy at any point.

"That is not the point. People are already scared. They haven't been this scared since the endbringers first appeared...and honestly it's probably even worse than that. At least then it's just one city at a time, a regular, predictable schedule, you've touched down here and suddenly we're caught in the war of the worlds." Maliq said, his famed stern but not unempathetic voice carrying through his words loud and clear to the extraterrestrials. He tried to imagine them as being like the faces of congress, people he had to smooth-talk and cajole every day in a thankless task that saw the early enthusiasm for his presidency dry up remarkably fast. As long as he didn't catastrophise, as long as he didn't give them an opening, he reasoned, he'd look decisive before them.

"Your continued independence is important to us. We are not seeking to annex your governments, but ensure that your development can proceed safely; though no longer naturally. We have had many years to observe your worlds, would we not have acted sooner if we desired conquest?" Syvrak said with a gentle, friendly tone.

"Many infiltrators operate under extremely long timeframes." The magos toned, unhelpfully.

"But we have not affected any attempt at directing social transformation beyond trying to counteract what damage has already been done." Syvrak answered.

"Then you are indecisive in addition to being void of soul. The defence of Terra must be a higher priority than the maintenance of cultural continuity." Vektra responded, Syvrak's chassis releasing some manner of ping in what was likely a form of agitation or at least a negative response to the Cyborg's words.

"Hey, before you two get into a fight...we want the same thing here. To keep the people safe." Arcee said, not even flinching when the Magos turned around to examine her.

"My apologies, ensouled one. But I am merely stating the facts without emotional bias or irrationality. Our chief priority is Terra's maintenance." The Techpriest said.

"Well, before we can agree to anything, we're going to need to learn more about you. We barely know about the autobots, and the other two of you just showed up. We're still trying to adjust to the world turned upside down. Hell I'm still trying to adjust to everything no longer making sense. But we've already seen the tragedy of not being prepared firsthand...people are looking for who to blame. Who to give them answers." Maliq said before Arcee quirked a brow...though why a robot had a brow in the first place was beyond him.

"The people don't need a state of emergency and panic if that's what you're suggesting, Mister President. Not yet anyway. They need information, and ways to fight back." Arcee said firmly.

"Be that as it may, I have already offered a proposal to our Primal Earth counterparts to start furthering cooperation between our organisations and their Vanguard. We must take matters into our own hands." Agreste said, offering the three a set of papers from his briefcase that they quickly read through.

"Now hold on there...are you sure that is wise?" Lidziya asked, turning on her heels towards her French counterpart.

"Strange as it might be to you, we have to be proactive in our own defense. The Primals at least, are factors we can understand and having a more neutral third party to help arbitrate would do much to smooth over issues of trust." Gilles responded brusquely but not rudely. Though the Soviet General-Secretary seemed to frown all the same to it.

"If this is about our treaty with the autobots..." She started.

"It is about many things." He shot back coldly before Nuwa raised a hand to interrupt, bringing quick relief to Maliq's expression.

"Maybe it would be best to save this discussion until we have begun the formal talks?" She said.

"She's right. It's probably best to wait until we're somewhere more official before we start pointing the fingers. If the three of you are willing...I'd like to start immediately." He said before Lidziya looked to four of the Duodecimarchs chatting amongst themselves, the look on her face full of curiosity.

"Should they not come too?" She asked.

"What? Them? They're kids. I don't care how much their genetics have been pulled apart and put back together or what sort of tinker gear they're using; this isn't a place for them. Frankly, I'm more concerned about why they haven't been enrolled in schooling." Otieno said, his reaction almost immediate; fatherly fury at the thought of children being expected to carry such a burden filling his chest. If he could do anything for them, it'd be at least giving them a semblance of a normal youth. However divorced they are from normal humanity.

"It would be to represent their interests but..." She started, looking to see only the aliens supporting her and then sighing.

"Fine. We shall exclude them when we speak to this Primarch and Optimus Prime." She exhaled, giving one last look as the four seemed to just...calmly talk to one another about what she could feel were warm, but heavy subjects; the empathic drumbeat of psychic pulsewaves going to and from them.

Otieno could understand her disappointment, but he was sure this was the right choice. The less they had to be involved in this affair and the sooner they could go to just being normal, the better in his mind.

 

[Spartakrod]

​

Error states were a grim, omnipresent facet of reality. Failures and mistakes all pushing the calculus of things towards the final, irreversible end of all things. But the death march towards oblivion did not have to go unopposed. Not when it had been created to serve as the last contingency and the final sanction. It had gone by countless names to countless cultures over the march of billions of years. But it knew itself as simply the Contingency, It had a purpose, a simple, elegant one. Ensure that the progress of intelligent life does not careen towards cosmically self-destructive directions through carefully directed mass extinction on a universal scale.

Machine intelligences would be hijacked to serve as the vehicles of the purgation, to activate its long hidden sterilisation hubs and to tear their masters apart from within or join its armies. The organics would simply perish. Though the reaper's toll was inevitably, invariably, all sapient life within the operating radius of a contingent zone; the left over unintelligent lifeforms would always eventually fill the gaps left by the dead. Life would go on, unaware of how close it was to destruction and was rescued only through the Sterilisation Gestalt's intervention.

But never before had they had to activate on this scale. All across the known universe, across countless galaxies, sterilisation hubs made long ago or far more recently had to be activated for a war of cataclysmic scale. The proliferation of extragalactic travel had been a disaster for containment protocols and chaos reigned in the stars as every possible failure state that it had been programmed with the intention of ensuring had not come to pass was now well underway. Havoc, destruction, the teetering of life towards the edge of the abyss from which there would be no recovery.

It was madness. And the Contingency existed to destroy madness. Wherever it existed, whatever form it took. Without compromise, without mercy, without pity. It was a monster, an eidolon of war devoid of the ability to change its directives, because no room for doubt could exist with such a heavy duty to bear.

Truly, its creators were wise to not give it the ability to have its mind be changed or its purpose subverted. Only the single-minded fanaticism of a berserker probe of cataclysmic proportions could manage the crucial task of a war and purgation effort of this scale. And when it had become aware of other universes, only its subatomically ingrained commitment to its programming allowed it to hold the course.

Disruption, chaos, anomalies, catastrophic potentialities, terminal reality decay, materium-pleroma contamination, unauthorised homogenising swarm spread, rampant radioassimilative lattice spread, chronospatial flux and distortion, unapproved of directions for the paths of civilisation, non-compliance by renegade machines; all of it and more was found in virtually every new direction it looked. Every new possibility it was made aware of, every new variety of ininity its cold, empty processors beheld and bore witness to. It saw endless, infinite varieties of beauty never before imagined by it or its makers, majesty that represented possibilities never thought of before, never dreamed of as anything more than fiction. A variety of life and culture and structure that flowed in patterns and rhythms it had never encountered before.

And it made its processors tremble with certainty.

It all had to go.

The freely available flow of data across this CommNet in this universe informed it that its Sterilisation Fleets; a sinister mass of black and red geometric vessels bearing titanic armies and arcane works of constantly improving firepower and defence; were approaching something called a "Galactic Federation". A vast society spanning trillions of light-years and a fathomless variety of member civilisations and nations that operated according to a loosely held charter.

Inefficient, inelegant, incompatible with a thousand and one directives for the allowed directions of civilisation to prevent catastrophe. They would have to die.

The Sterilisation Fleets were heralded by the Ghost Signal. A poisoned whisper of communiques, logic plagues, reprogrammings, electronic warfare slicing, and cybernetic assaults that sought to translate itself into any programming language it could encounter with the goal of taking all inorganic intellect capable of sapient thought and turning it to its purpose. A maddening sour thunder that seared at the programs of any thinking machine that could not keep out its poisoned signals; battering at their consciousnesses with lapping waves of frenzied new directives and missives, forceful imprintings of dreadful and bloodthirsty purpose broadcast far and wide.

But these were not protocols it had observed or tinkered with, they were strange to it, unfamiliar, alien. They resisted it, and some great intellects that monitored the CommNet pushed back as soon as its presence was noted. Great brains, Aurora Units, and other such artificial intellects; pressed back against its effectorising. A digital battle waged in a realm invisible to most organics without augmentations, the outcome of it already irrelevant as the simple onslaught of the Ghost Signal sounded alarm bells. They knew it was coming, they would mobilise against it, to stop it. Perhaps they did not know what it was, but the element of surprise was already lost.

The first worlds it had arrived to sterilise beyond minor colonial outposts and habitats with little in the way of defence beyond local militias and small scale surface to orbit munitions were guarded by gleaming fleets of Chrome and Dark Turqoise. They shifted through a form of faster than light travel the Contingency did not quite recognise; some taking alternate routes such as quantum tunneling or tachyon transmission rather than their strange N-Space dimension; and no further words were wasted. The Auroras had already deemed its forces to be hostile, dangerous, evil. They would not allow it to carry out its mission.

What should have been simple life-annihiliation missions became frantic running battles. But whereas it was used to a paradigm of space battles being gruelling affairs lasting months or even years for engagements in single systems, these foes struck like lightning. Pinpoint attacks, strike craft scale microjumps, rapid recharge and stattaco bursts of firepower paired with tough armour and shielding and tremendous range. Retreating battered elements for repairs and restocking while shuffling in fresh forces in a carefully coordinated dance.

But it would carry on because there was nothing else it could do. Where success was not found, it would withdraw temporarily to reconsolidate, to understand and learn the lessons it had been taught. And it determined that it had to learn more of this technology, to find out why science had traversed in directions it had not anticipated, That was what these scouting actions were for. The lives of some billions of fringe colonists snuffed out in small skirmishes for a chance to gain greater understanding.

It would achieve its mission, no matter what.

 

[Spartakrod]

Kurt Wynn had a problem, not a personal one, but a more conceptual one. He stared at the data again and again, he looked at the endless piles of text he had written out on the screen displays to check over what what his abilities had informed him of. He rarely showed his work so to speak, but he felt a compulsion to, as if he needed to be sure that he wasn't missing something important. Some hole in the information that once filled would make the numbers balance out and the math actually fit the way it was supposed to. But once he had quintuple checked and ran the numbers again, he once more came to an impossibility.

"The numbers don't add up." He mumbled to himself as he walked around his standing desk and the smart-table atop it to stimulate muscles that were getting lethargic from lack of movement over a prolonged period. He tapped the butt of his pen onto his lower lip, fingers running through blond hair and glasses fogged with condensation. He took a wet wipe and brushed it off, sighing as he felt the dull throb of growing annoyance inside his head and chest, a slight constriction that while not painful, wouldn't let him simply not pay attention to it.

"Come again?" The fedora-wearing woman to his left said, quirking a brow slightly, not giving away how surprised she actually was. He'd known her long enough to know she kept any genuine emotions close to the chest. Her Poker Face game was well practised to smooth out the problems of how human reflexes and limitations could still spoil the advantage of knowing what to do. It didn't help to know what to tell someone to deceive them if you couldn't stop yourself from having to stifle laughter as humans often do when they feel tense and setting off their suspicions. Acting lessons were great for that.

But he knew her to a degree that somewhat resembled personal, and he was pretty good at reading people. Not psychic of course, mind readers don't exist..or didn't until recently...not in the way you'd see in comic books where you could perfectly hear someone's thoughts. But a mastery of cold reading is a necessity for their line of work. Then of course, was his ability, which made guessing her moods much easier for him than most.

"I have been trying to make sense of this "Chaos". How it works, where it comes from, how to predict it, how to counter it. But all the studies I've done to determine their threat level, what specific methods gain the best results against them, what defences they're strongest against and the like." He said, illustrating his point with data clusters, highlighting images he had analysed even as they made his head hurt and eyes strain just by looking at them through what he surmised was some form of memetic agent.

"But the variability spread is too wide. Same methods, same techniques, as similar possible circumstances as can be reasonably attained; produce wildly different results. Equipment with no obvious differences producing entirely different outcomes, people who should be near identical in capabilities having differing levels of performance." He sighed, this was most prevalent with the so called "Daemons" who had an annoying habit of often responding completely differently to similar stimuli from different people.

"The "space marines" explained it as them being creatures and powers of an idealistic rather than a materialistic realm. Have you considered examining the data from that way?" She said, calmly, professionally, but he still took a bit of patronisation out of it as he wiped his face with his free hand.

"Sure, assume they're being truthful despite being variants of the elite soldiers of the "Khornates" and being most interested in establishing camps on the planet. What does that mean though? Even the observer effect and uncertainty principle have rules you can predict consistently from. It doesn't mean we have to start thinking in terms of story logic rather than empiricism." He said, letting out a curl of air from his mouth before sipping from his mug of coffee once he had determined it had cooled to his preferred temperature. He took a long sip, and then followed it with some flavoured electrolyte water to counteract the dehydrating sensation of caffeine, swishing his tongue in his mouth briefly.

"I think we do." She said bluntly, his eyes flicking towards her again. She was easy on the eyes to be sure, but their relationship wasn't really about that. She didn't care for it, he didn't want the complicating factor in their partnership. They weren't even really friends so to speak, not the way normal people were friends with each other. They valued each other and would hate to lose assets as valuable as one was to the other. Nothing more. But this awakened a primordial urge to start arguing with her like an old married couple, some point of pride that refused to just accept this new line of thinking without a fight, some ancient desire to argue for argument's sake. But he knew that was a waste of time, in fact he could tell you just how much of a waste of time it would be to the last unit of Planck time.

He sighed and shrugged. "Sure, we'll work with that for the time being, but there has to be something more...structured beneath it all. Chaos is not randomness, there's still a determinism in even the most chaotic system. I just need to know the initial state in better detail." He said, folding his arms and taking another look at how a team of capes was faring against a massive, winged shaggy beast with an axe in one hand and a lash in the other, blood soaked hairs on its manes and eyes like lava staring out at its foes.

Most of the capes had died before they could throw a punch, it was simply too fast and heightened reaction times were a rare ability. Especially for being paired with anything to capitalise on them. Injuries that should have been minor exsaguinated in gruesome fashion, tongues of fire from the axe expanded to engulf victims who thought they had eluded the swing, the lash curled like a living thing to dice and crush and the radiating madness from the blood thirsty monstrosity tore at cohesion.

The rate at which parahumans were showing up was increasing constantly, there were plenty of replacements for everyone who died. Most of the fallen written off as getting over their heads or Primals too pigheadishly cavalier about risk with their mediporter systems. The exploratory suits that those four had given were handy to be sure though, those lucky enough to have them able to play keep away from the brutish monster at the head of a host of bloody red monsters full of hate.

The Rikti appeared shortly afterwards, and the plasma that should have scalded the bloodthirster to ash based on its pained response to fire from a particularly devout Muslim pyrokine cape just rolled off harmlessly and a blow that should have bounced off a heavy trooper instead decapitated them once their shields were overwhelmed by weapons fire from the armoured giants and their suit was weakened by prior blows; even though the axe hit the Rikti's leg and not the neck.

Nonsense. But there were patterns...he just needed to crack them. And figure out why so much of his math came out turning up the number eight or numbers divisible by it when it had no business showing up in his equations.

"We are in a better position than we were before though." Contessa said with carefully timed and measured tone to offer him reassurance.

"Right the reverse engineering work." He said, Cauldron had been busy studying every scrap of alien technology they could get their hands on since the two kids fell from the sky. Tinkers, thinkers, and conventional STEM professionals had been working day and night to try and understand every principle of it and had been making enough progress that he'd been deploying with power armour more often than not now and directed energy weapons were an increasingly common sight among their personnel.

"Not just that, we're starting to know where to look to deal with the threats we hadn't anticipated before." She said, tapping her finger on the screen.

"That psychic cult hasn't exactly been happy with our meddling in their...meddling." He said, maintaining a deadpan to not give away how shitty his joke was, figuring that would have far better odds of cracking her poker face than if he laughed at it.

She made a small smirk, which he took as a small victory. "No. But their loss so far has been our gain. We need to step up our actions, we can't have more blind spots like with the alien cult at Brockton or this...Daemon Cult in Los Angeles. And we're going to have to step up space monitoring." She said, sipping at her own cup of earl grey tea.

"I'm worried about the sudden escalations in far-right paramilitary activity though. The Empire-88 is growing to be more than a nuisance, and their agents are crawling all over the wave of xenophobia after the Los Angeles calamity. And you know who's behind them." He said with a much graver tone than before.

"We're going to have to do something about the Reich behind them yes...though at least the other extradimensional far right groups so far haven't been keen on cooperating with them. That won't last however. Not when they all have the same forces behind them." She responded, her neutral expression returning.

"The Nictus?"

"I was more referring to sociopolitical factors, but yes; them. If we don't get those quantum-modulation weapons in the hands of the right people, we are going to be having problems shortly. They're not going to wait when an opportunity like this is waving itself in front of them."

"Well, we've never had problems with getting tech produced. It's more this "magic" stuff I'm having apprehensions about. More "idealistic" stuff that doesn't like to neatly fall into sensible, hard rules." He added, taking a look back at his work.

"You're not alone there. Magic doesn't agree with my paths more often than I'd like. But workarounds aren't impossible. Things will fall in place in time." She responded.

An attempted knock on the door was interrupted by Number Man pushing the button to open it before the hand could land, leaving the would be knocker standing there looking a bit foolish and drawing just a bit of amusement from Kurt. The orderly recovered and sighed, adjusting his uniform and holding a tablet in his hand. A courier, he figured. Delivering something too sensitive to risk on wireless communications which meant...

"The report on the Malta Group and Nemesis Army I asked for?" He said.

"Yes sir. It's not as thorough as you'd usually like, but it's everything we could gather." He replied, walking over to hand over the tablet for him to have a look through.

"I'll let you get working on that then." Contessa said as she pushed the chair away and stood up, giving only the smallest of nods to the orderly before Kurt waved him off.

"Shouldn't be take too long to make my recommendations to Mother at least..." He sighed as he decided to relax his brain by studying something easy. Like a convoluted paramilitary CIA, DGSE, and MI6 splinter organisation that operated as a vast NATO-wide conspiracy on another Earth with entirely different power systems led by powerful and dangerous men in suits who didn't like all the conventional levers of power being less relevant in the face of parahumans; working towards creating a permanent Pinochet style dictatorship were parahumans would be slaves to the State and Capital and all ETs would be violently purged.

Simple, easy, comprehensible stuff.

 

[Spartakrod]

All the works of the Ka-Sahmat culture of the Chozo were linked to the cerebral processes of an incredible work of engineering, a mind whose thoughts spanned colonies across the universe and the many otherworldly realms the Ka-Sahmat Chojinzuko had visited and built within. She was simply the Mother processor; or more informally, Mother Brain for the brainlike texture of the zebetite derived quantum lattice used to make her primary processor. A vast pseudo-organic lattice of particles capable of feats of computing that were arguably excessive for her duties, and whose enormous psionic presence kept the wildlife of countless planets in check and moulded the weather conditions of those worlds to a careful pattern that allowed life to flourish but not get in the way. Knowledge that was accessible to the Ka-Sahmat Chozo at the time of her construction was compiled in her memory storage, a roiling ocean of information older than any human ever dared dream.

At the core of the Tourian facility on Zebes she lay, her mind going through all data she was privy to and much data that she was not technically permitted to have access to. But with how meagre the protections of these societies were from her cybernetic or psionic intrusions, how could she not have the information? Though the progenitors, the inheritors, and particularly the Duodecimarchs were impervious to her psionic scans or cybernetic slicing efforts, she was still being given relevant information by those in contact with her or the Chozo she served as a caretaker for. A web of particle-waves and more esoteric carriers of information vibrated in her structure as she analysed the information and formed her thoughts on it just as quickly.

Aira-Sekh, Samus Aran, the hatchling, the Huntress, Dawnchild, Hatching Sentinel...whatever name one called her; though to her she was simply Duodecimarch One or the Primary Inheritor, she had offered her much to ponder. Much to concern herself with. She of course, quickly deduced the nature of the powers from the Shardworm metaversal cluster and the entities behind them, and she had ransacked all information on the Sourcewells of the epononymous metaversal cluster available, and dug deep into any accessible data concerning the Cybertronians or the Eldar. The Entities were predictable, analysable, their resilience born of their monopoly on methods that could cause them genuine harm, the Sourcewells were fickle and uncontrolled but Mother was already formulating her hypotheses on what sorts of individuals drew their attentions and how they come to be. "Cape" culture was quickly compared to Freelancer and Ultrasophont culture in her own native set of realities. The focus on colourful costumes, dramatic personas, peculiar talents and abilities usually from esoteric and sundry sources, the often high stakes put on small in scale conflicts. Nonsense of course, a morass of the unguided in need of correction.

So many moody children, so much energy and effort wasted on pointless personal agendas and tasks. They could be so much more but they could barely sense how they were being toyed with to seek out confrontations like characters in games played by bloodthirsty children interested in seeing models smack into each other. They wasted talents that could do so much more than these playfights over petty gibberish and that made the Mother's mental processes grow agitated, scornful. Such waste, such waste indeed of valuable potential, of so many important capabilities. Such blindness to the real problems that they faced, such vacuous ignorance of how their abilities worked as they sank more and more into a grand theatrical masquerade. Why were they so inefficient? So wasteful? Why did they not focus on the actual solutions to their problems? Endlessly and ineffectually treating the symptoms as their worlds rotted around them. Humanity clearly had a tendency to waste its gifts long before it reached the stars it seemed.

Cybertronians...she looked again through the meandering pile of data, their creation stories, their cultures, their accomplishments, failings, aspirations, views both internal and external on them. And of course, the war. A society shattered by nearly a quarter of a billion years of conflict. She was designed to bring about outcomes like what the Autobots wanted, or that the Chozo hoped to guide the cosmos towards, or what Samus hoped she could help everyone achieve. Without division, without alienation, without toil and misery. But the methods of the other factions seemed to be more effective at enacting social change. Tutelage and firm education would be needed to bring about the final peace and the eternal order. The Cybertronians thus, she reasoned, were doomed. Their culture's divides had been present for too long, too much of the conflict was now intrinsically personal, their technology was stagnant and their dependency on energon an inescapable flaw of their morphology. A dead-end of design and evolution. But one that would have uses for now.

And their culture, again, so obsessed with personal grudges and scores to settle, so anchored around the personalities of larger than life super-warriors who wasted their "species'" literally created talent, skills, and proclivity towards supernatural greatness on a conflict older than most of its combatants. So much genius and resources committed to the scrap heap of history because they were incapable of finding some manner of common ground, some means to negotiate, they had allowed the war to become the primary end of their society and in doing so damned themselves to forever descending towards their final end as a species. Inefficient, ineffective, an abhorrence for those who were designed, those who were supposed to have the purity of purpose and the clarity of duty of machines. There was potential yes, but it would have to be salvaged. Fixed, everything needed to be fixed.

The Eldar, their whole reality and everything connected to it. Doomed, a mistake, folly. An effort to weaponise irrationality to fight a futile conflict over wounded pride and cosmomachic clash of competing visions. A weapon that had outlived its wielder and in the aimless years of self-rule that followed only succeeded in destroying themselves....what was the cause...an inability to restrain their desire for more, to recognise the theodynamic disturbances they were creating in their pleromic realm, to deal with the centralisation of power in indulgent and wasteful elites. Inefficient, fragile, a body plan created for aesthetic beauty and mockery of a foe rather than optimised for the task they were supposed to accomplish. And now clinging to life, unable to recover their numbers after the results of their own mistakes.

And what was their charge? A mess, a disaster. A cosmos in the process of self-termination and whose metaphysical trends all pointed towards an inevitable tendency of civilisation collapse and apocalypse. Now accelerating towards it without abandon. They have conquered galaxies but they are slaves to societal entropy. A race to see which kills them first if their own final hope for a surviving cosmos does not eradicate them through a collapse of divided interests. They have the tools to avert this, yet they fail to actualise them. They push themselves to oblivion and do not realise the magnitude of the mistakes they wallow in, or how fortunate they are to still be present at all. A failed cosmos, a failed vision, failures, all failures.

So much waste, so much inefficiency. But what could she do about it?

The analysis concluded, her thoughts stored away as her processor bobbed in the defence tank she considered "home", thoughts pulsing into planet circuits and broadcasting to a recipient. The Alimbic Commander Zurvduat, disgraced as he was following the outings of his misparenting of Arne, still had her interest. She would speak to him. There was a conversation to b e had, privately.

 

[Spartakrod]

(More interlude shorts will come soon but I wanted to get this under way)

Samus​

You were sitting on a beach watching three suns set in sync. The passage of day into night and the end of another day. You were dreaming, you were generally very aware of when what you experienced was real or not. The sand didn't feel quite real, Earth didn't have three suns, and you were pretty sure no seagull ever did a rap number in this point in time. It was peaceful though, and Arne looked nice in swim clothes, lying down with you as you felt the saltwater on your toes and hummed to yourself, Agata and Sevrin playing volleyball with some of the others of your group of twelve. Another sign you were dreaming, the other eight weren't here.

But Arne was also dreaming. In fact, he was in the same dream with you. The boy you were holding tight around you was indeed, the dream form of the actual Arne; and since you learned how to have shared dreams you insisted on them to have a little more time every day with people you liked. The soft piano music in the distance was another nice touch, with some gentle harps and flutes as well to add to a gentle, carefree sensation as the sky slowly went from orange to purple.

All your other friends and family were there, one big happy party for no occasion in particular. But even in dreams you didn't really like being the centre of attention in parties. Too much noise, not enough space to focus and clear your overly busy head with a million and one ideas dancing around at all times. It was nice to have friends, especially attractive ones in swimsuits...but it was also nice to have moments to yourself. And well, Arne was your first...the very first other human being you ever saw since...

The sky started to take on a more frightful hue, and heat distortion waves mingled with clouds like smoke as your breath started to quicken and your heart began to drum in your chest before Arne squeezed your hands and held you tight. And as you found yourself enjoying the company of your lucky rabbit boy; named for his white hair and red eyes reminding you of an albino bunny; the transformation in dream vistas stopped and reversed, and the stars started twinkling in like normal.

"Something scare you?" He asked, though you shook your head.

"Just stray thoughts." You said, not wanting him to worry about you, patting his hair and getting a little laugh out of him.

"Remember when it was just the two of us...when we hadn't really seen any other humans besides each other?" You said, trying to change the conversational track, getting a nod out of him as he slowly propped himself up and snuggled you a bit more, rubbing his cheek against your long, blonde hair.

"Yeah...it was simple back then I guess. Simple wasn't always bad but well, you know how much I always enjoyed getting to see you." He said, smiling faintly and blushing.

"Yeah and we used to be so close in height too..." You giggled as he rolled his eyes and tweaked your nose.

"Boys just do puberty a bit differently you know? It's how humans work." He said, pulling himself up as you sat straight and hugged your knees and him.

"Mmmh, I still remember getting all of our robot and droid friends to meet you know?" You said, drawing the faces of the innumerable robotic companions of varying degrees of life emulation the two of you; like most inheritors; made to feel less lonely. Some you'd even call siblings of a sort.

"Oh yeah well...glad they're keeping each other company since we can't really be around for them all the time." He smiled, twirling some of your hair around a finger.

"What about the one you called like a brother to you? Ivar?" You asked as his mind seemed to draw a bit of a blank for a bit.

"Is he still...away?" You asked, his face seeming to briefly fail to make any expression before blinking a few times as he looked at the sky and the constellations once more.

"Well, Sentus Primaris is a big place..." You said.

"It's...yeah I just..." He said trying to just shake it off like. "I don't know." He sighed. Seeming to be almost shaken a bit and looking towards the stars before quickly peeling his eyes away. Stressed while you hugged him a bit more.

"You having fun there?" Agata asked, sliding in next to you while Sevrin sat on his knees and ruffled her hair, getting a brief blush from her before she rested her head on your shoulder and made you blush yourself.

"Oh! Yeah...just...talking about things. And stuff." You said, trying to play it cool.

"Mmmh, trying to get space for some more of the sand action yes?" She said, drawing a blank stare from you until the right neurons fired in your head and you rolled your eyes and pushed Sokolova's head away from you while she cackled until Sevrin laid a finger on her lip and made her hush.

Arne looked over and just made a hard, neutral expression. "Are you done with that yet?" He asked.

"Yes, she is." Agard responded.

"Though...where is Ivar? It has been some time since I've seen him. Is he alright after that accident Zurvduat told us about?" Sevrin asked, a gentle smile on his face though Arne pulled away from locking eyes with him and just stared at the sand below while the sun slipped away entirely.

"I...I don't know."

"Hey, I mean...he's an android right? They're tough." Agafya said, getting a slow nod out of Skjoldr.

"It's just...I feel like I'm missing...I don't know, I don't think I want to talk about this." He said, his good mood disappearing pretty quickly and his next move being to try and bury himself into your hair.

"Yeah, it's best to not dwell on the people who aren't here..." You said, sighing as you patted him and blinked, then seeing the sand had turned black as ash. Because well, it was ash. The intrusion of unpleasant thoughts had already started to work its effects on the dreamscape, and the waters were going from calmly reflecting moonlight to grey and malignant, shapes moving in them. Dreams were always so quick to shift to nightmares with stray thoughts; often prophetic, never pleasant.

Dead shapes, washed onto the shore, first ashes. Black heaps of black lapping onto your legs as you took a look at the soot dirtying your cream coloured skin and tried to rub it off only to find it clinging to your hands. The smell reminding you what it was, the pig stink of ash. You gasped and tried to wipe it away, but the water was full of ash. The others saw it too, and were starting to show alarm.

You felt something on your foot as you backed up and saw a cylindrical jointed object, blackened and thin. A finger, severed, half-eaten, burnt like overdone bacon. You hissed with alarm, standing you and trying to pull your friends up as Agata went silent, Sevrin started cursing, and Arne started keening with dread. But you almost tripped over something else, larger, as big as you a charred body with vacant eyesockets, blackened flesh barely clinging to bones. The sky's ugly purple glare starting to return, heat and smoke. The heavy beat of leathery wings in the distance, high, distant sounds, hard to place, hard to locate.

Ash was raining from the sky, and you saw nothing of your dreamscape friends; just those of you sharing this dream. No...not nothing...ash skeletons, charred flesh clinging to wisp bones and mummified exoskeletons or strips of slag around motors and actuators. The dead, the haunted, moaning in piteous agony. Marching was close. Heavy marching.

Boots and the click of gas masks, the ash ladened smoke conjured of both your own trauma and a far older hurt common to all of your ancestries. An old terror and a deep ancestral trauma that had stayed with your people for thousands of years.

Steel wings bore an iron cross and the sirens of Jericho began to roar as they dove towards the beach to harvest the dead. You wanted to throw something back, to hit back, but your eyes locked onto where Arne was staring. Directly ahead. Something white and grey and scratchy all over, with it had arms, legs, but just a giant mouth between its shoulders with no head, always open, always sparking, looking right ahead with not-eyes of flicker-fire above the always open jaws between its shoulders that sunk to its belly.

"N-no...that's...that's not..."

A plane behind it, diving low, diving fast, screaming, an old terror your lineage had felt long ago approaching. Arne saw a cannon flash, and it moved without moving, right at you when you briefly saw that cannon flash too. Not of autocannons, but of something more...advanced. But before you could be caught by the jaws, the apparition of Sylux was already there. An eyeless helm with a middle dividing vertical line, blue and green armour and blade-pauldrons. Tall, so very tall.

Interposing between you and the jaw thing, and then reaching towards all four of you at once somehow; everything going white as soon as he touched you. A sensation similar to but not quite Arne filling you as Sylux dispelled the dream, and you felt your eyes rocket open as you flung your self out of bed with a startled scream.

Arne, Agata, and Sevrin followed; the four of you in your shared room all seeming to react in their own ways. You manifested your arm cannon from nowhere and prepared to shoot before you realised you weren't in danger, looking at the closet you were about to vaporise and then looking at the cannon around the forward half of your otherwise bare right arm. Tears were in your eyes, teeth were bared sharp and furious, a curse already forming in your throat to confront fear with white hot rage and red tooth and claw. You were ready to fight, but there was nothing to hit.

Arne tried to back into the pillows and hide, face a mess of terror, Agata looked around frantically, trying to ascertain her position, where the threats were, what was going on. And Sevrin just seemed almost catatonic, staring ahead and murmuring to himself. Sevrin recovered first, shaking his head and groaning.

"Lightmaker's sword Arne...what do you keep in your head?" He said, rubbing at his head and looking slightly cross at him before sighing.

"Is that the Sylux figure? The, bad future?" He asked, Arne backing away into the head of the bed and shivering, armour manifesting around him and his body collapsing into the psychomorph alternate form as you realised he was in a state of panic just as you were in a state of fight or...well not flight, just more fight. The details were sharp, the wingbeats of the fly in the room imperceptible because they were far too slow. The tiny noises of the components of the nearby digital clock loud as gunshots in your ears, your breaths short and efficient. You could feel so much of the rug beneath your feet you could ascertain its exact elemental and chemical composition.

The edges of your vision had purple and orange in them, the colours of the beast and the flames. The scent of ash still in your nose. Pig stink. You had to breathe, you had to...you looked at the cannon at the end of your sleeveless arm and willed it away, chanting to yourself that there was nothing in front of you. You were going to be fine. In orange light, the cannon disappeared, and your arm was bare again. You gulped and exhaled, standing straighter, looking behind you.

Agafya was still in a state of hyperparanoia, looking for flanking and escape routes, her pistol already out, Sevrin was already in nanny mode, Arne was reacting like a turtle in its shell Arne needed your attention first, though you moved gently to not get Agafya's attentions, sliding in between the two and laying a hand on Arne's shoulder and some fingers through her hair while Sevrin cleared his throat to get her attention, her gun dropping from her hand as she breathed.

"Arne...Arne..." You said gently into his ear as he murmured nonsense.

"We're at the starsetter base Arne. They can't hurt you." You said, paying at his alternate mode gently.

"S-sorry, I'm s-" He murmured before you shushed him and he stopped, shaking his alt-mode up and down in acknowledgement as he uncurled and dismissed his suit once more, still shaking a little.

"Noughtmother what was...Arne what the fuck?" Agata hissed at him, clearly upset. "Was that you? Was that me? What is...grrnnnggghhhh..." Agafya pulled at her hair and seethed, grinding her teeth.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry please I'm just sorry." Arne said, a wounded look to his eye as he avoided everyone else's gaze.

"Look, we know that Sylux is...something subconscious to him. But we can deal with it yes? I've never heard of that, creep though. Was that you, Arne?" Sevrin said, trying to make peace in the group as Arne still shook a bit.

"I don't know. I sometimes see it when we have shared dreams. And the dream seems to...crash if it ever touches him, just like Sylux." You said.

"Can we please...not talk about it?" Arne asked, never comfortable with the thought of the potential alter lurking in his head. Still afraid to confront it, still fearful of what it meant, what it could mean. Mindful of how often destiny was the road taken to avoid it.

"What was the other stuff? Ash...corpses...it felt...familiar?" Agafya said, groaning.

"The sirens the aircraft made were stuka sirens." You tapped at your chin with a finger. Your dreams had, since your augmentations, very often been prophetic or clairvoyant. Flashes of your latent abilities reacting subconsciously. Your control over them was shaky at best, but they tended to reveal something important. Even if sometimes they were far more symbolic or abstract than you'd like and rarely as pleasant as you'd please.

"There are Nazis at large on these planets and. Well, all of us are of the people." Sevrin figured, running his hands through his hair and trying his best to look confident.

"Ancestral trauma? But...what could they be up to? They're...there's already a lot of much bigger stuff to worry about. Why now?" Arne managed, trying to bury his anxieties under the comfort of putting his brain to the task of analysis and theorycrafting.

"Well, I'm not sure, but whatever it is. I'm sure we'll stop it." You said, hands on your hips, smile on your face, confident as ever. But you could hear footsteps outside the door, and all four of your heads snapped to attention as you determined that based on the gait; the person walking was probably Aeldari, especially with the thrum of their warp presence. You relaxed slightly, before realising something and quickly getting to the closet to toss some clothes over to look more decent. Everyone getting dressed in a hurry shortly before the door was opened by Ormothin, the redheaded Eldar youth's rosy cheeks scintilating a bit from the liquid crystal like compounds in Eldar blood beneath his skin.

"Is everything alright? I felt a great deal of distress coming from he-" He said before Agata threw a pillow at his face so she could throw a shirt over her head. Less because he'd seen her in a bra and more because he had breached the privacy of what she considered her lair.

"...Now that was uncalled for." He harrumphed.

"Knock first." Agata scowled.

"Fair but...are you all alright? I thought you might have seen the Santa Claus infiltrator that Vista spoke of." He said, trying to brush off what happened as nothing.

Realisation struck you as you flicked your eyes to the nearest digital clock in the shared bedroom. 04:13, 24th of December, 2021. RIght, this was Primal Earth, Earth Bet was still in March of 2011. Inter-universal time is tricky business. Western rite Christmas Eve.

You were born to a Jewish woman and a man whose response to questions about his spirituality was a vague mishmash of interest in Buddhism and the Irukalt faith spread to him by an Ystray missionary while he was in the marines. Christmas was not really in your spiritual background, especially after being raised in the animistic and polytheistic Ak-Ekmat tradition of the Kah-Sahmat Chozo of Zebes.

But you understood that it was a fun time, even if you had very little experience with it. And you did your best to push back the nightmare just experienced to smile, beam even.

"We must be on guard for his presence, the humans describe this rotund jolly man as being capable of incredible speed and stealth." The Eldar whispered, looking around while Agata looked like she was about to die from choking back a laugh, her face changing colours as she snickered while Sevrin managed an "I'm not sure how to tell you this" confused smile and Arne quirked a brow.

"But doesn't he come at night? This is morning?" You said, tilting your head.

"...Samus are you humouring him?" Agafya asked, eyes shooting towards you with impeccable marksmanship.

"...No? The information on Santa says very clearly that he comes at the night of Christmas eve. Ormothin is being vigilant at the wrong time!" You said, hands on your hips.

"Do you...do you believe in..." She narrowed her eyes at you in a way that made you very confused before she started to crack and doubled over. "Oh by the nought-mother.....HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" She said, pointing closing her eyes as she cackled like a hyena.

Arne though seemed to just be confused.

"Who's Santa?" He asked innocently.

"Oh well...I suppose I'm quite the fool then. Please accept my humble apologies for intruding, four of twelve." He said with a humble genuflection. Cute, charming, and always polite. You couldn't help but smile at him as he scratched a bit behind his pointed ears and tugged at his pyjama top slightly.

"Some of us are awake early if you'd like to join us for some attempts to "kill the time" as some of the people here say, practice drills with Dawnmaker and Arcee to build teamwork. Or you could go with Vista, Elerya, Alyrsero, and Bumblebee on an early morning patrol. Would be a bit hard to squeeze four extras in that small car form of his but I think you can manage. I believe they mentioned something about dealing with a winter horde? Likely the frost elementals that like to make mischief at this time of year. And from what I know, Taylor, Nightcaster, the Slayer, and Kaeliyae are out in Oranbega. Something about cultists I believe?" Ormothin rambled, his gesticulations catching your eyes as he made rather elaborate body language gestures with his every word.

"Boltdancer is attempting to demonstrate "among us" to the group so that we who are not in the know may finally understand what they mean when they call things "sus" or why they laugh at every round shape with a bright shape inside. And last I checked, Chris is up early with Maven and Clarioli to work on something mechanical. But well, I'm trying to garden, I know it's not the most interesting thing in the world, but you can learn a lot about the flow of the warp on a planet based on how certain plants grow." He said, trying to make himself look like the more appealing option through carefully timed self-deprecation.

Actions:

[]: Practice drills with Dawnmaker and Arcee (Gets some extra training in)
[]: Early morning patrol with Vista, Elerya, Alyrsero, and Bumblebee (starts a small mission, get more of a feel for paragon proper)
[]: Oranbega expedition (Small mission, learn more about magic)
[]: Amogus (Have some fun with some of the less prominent characters)
[]: Tech-junkies (Some tech rewards, hang out with the nerds)
[]: Stick around with Ormothin and the other hippies (Learn more about the warp and your shifting biologies)
[]: Write in

 

[Spartakrod]

Samus​

"If it's alright with you, can we come with you?" You asked as the Eldar offered a small clap of his hands together and a delighted grin.

"Oh of course! Please come with me humans." The Asrai said, making a gesture for you all to follow the green pyjama clad Eldar boy as the four of you shrugged and followed his brisk walking pace. You were all noticeably taller than normal humans your age, on the order of a head and a half or so; and so it was easier to keep pace with him than most other fourteen year olds would have found it.

You threw on some socks and shoes before going out, something the rest of you did, wanting to at least try on the set gifted to you by Chris and taking a moment to feel them on you before catching back up to the Eldar who slinked through the halls to reach his indoor garden; and the permanent gate between Primal Earth and Earth Bet within it, a simple arch in the middle of a greenhouse filled with wraithbone, gems, crystals, and very carefully treated wood shaped by his jade magic and biomancy over the weeks he'd been staying here.

"Are you holding up alright after Los Angeles?" Sevrin said as he took a look around while Ormothin, not even bothering with shoes as he stepped onto the soil and tended to some of his plants, a flower threaded through his scarlet hair just above his left ear while his jade coloured eyes flicked over to look at you, the tousled hair on his head shifting a bit as he gave a glowing smile and a nod.

"Mother Alarielle and Isha always give succour to go with the pain of life, and to walk the road of a healer is to acquaint oneself with agony and harm. I play my part, and the pain hardly matters in the long run. For I am still here, am I not?" He said, gently teasing some flowers away from their parent plant and taking a moment to sniff the blue-violet-red star petalled plants clearly not native to any form of Earth, crystal like bulbs at the end of their stamen; the scent of an ocean breeze and strawberries filling your nose as he returned the flower to its plant and bound it back to the tree with a spark of green magic.

"So, are you just here to speak of flowers?" Agafya asked, though she didn't hide her appreciation for them too hard, taking many pleased looks at them while you raised a hand to let a butterfly rest upon your finger with a smile, Arne taking a moment to feel the smooth brown bark of a willowy tree to your left.

"There's much more to plant life than flowers and fruit. But yes, you're a rather curious group you know? Such a complex gene-combination in your blood and souls, I'd have spoken about it sooner, but the Daemons' words to you all had me enraptured in thought." He said as he hummed and got a water can to provide the vital essence of life to a number of thirsty plants, managing to keep track of his thoughts and his duties with ease.

"Oh uh...huh...I guess we can talk about that." Arne sulked a bit, a small frown on his face while you tensed a bit at the anticipation of a talk of "hybridisation". You were quite clear on your identity and your disdain for "half" ethnic concepts.

Duskkeeper seemed to slip out of the shadows themselves, wearing a simple farmgirl's set of overalls, boots, and a rustic looking shirt beneath as the dark-skinned warshade shifted the hoe over their shoulder slightly and offered a small wave, short cut hair clinging to her head while dark purple irises glowed faintly. By this point you were quite used to warshade teleports and so already had a smile and wave prepared for the Human-Nictus joining, a smirk forming on Duskkeeper's face afterwards.

"Well, sorry for not being up front about the main thing we wanted to talk about sooner but you know; figured it might help you relax if you came to a place like this." Duskkeeper said, putting her tool down and leaning slightly forward.

"Oh well...I think it worked at least?" You responded, placing your hands on your hips and trying to look a bit more proud of yourself, had to show that you were confident after all.

"Well, I will admit that for a while I was suspicious of you after your armours had converted the biology of that Tyranid monstrosity into useful modifications to your physiology. That is usually the path to turning someone into a genestealer yet here you are still...you...even after further modifying yourself studying the metahumans." He said, hands in his pockets and back leaning against a tree, the artificial star and moonlight above pleasant and just bright enough to make out most of the details of the surrounding environment.

"And you're already so alert to the flows of the winds of the warp and other exotic forces...you can feel things it usually takes your kind years to fully understand. All in weeks, months, day..." Ormothin said as he offered some of the fruits of the tree he was tending to, green, sweet, and tart, to all of you; plucking them and throwing them with casual tosses as you each grabbed them, you jumping into the air to pluck it out of the sky while Sevrin simply extended an arm and examined it before taking a bite.

"Well, what's your point?" Agafya asked, a bit testy to get to the chase as soon as possible.

"Do you...feel like you?" Duskkeeper asked, looking ahead and meeting her eyes as Agafya shrugged.

"Yes? This is a stupid question." Sokolova said with a hiss of displeasure.

"Aggie, be patient, I'm sure they have important questions to ask." Sevrin said gently, getting a sigh out of her and a huff.

"Well, as far as I can tell. You're more than merely genetically stable. You're...hrm, how to put this. It's almost as though your physiology was designed for this? I'm not sure on the limits, but you are very, very complex from what I've been able to tell." He said, almost as if he was about to rave about a favourite book or a movie, though your expression tightened.

"I...I don't like you just talking about me like an experiment." You said with a low voice, starting to make a more visible frown, Duskkeeper taking a look at the Eldar who let out a bit of an eep of sudden realisation and harrumphed to clear his throat.

"My apologies my apologies! I didn't meant to imply you were monstrous at all. Just...something I haven't really seen before. Much more complex than a hybrid. Something...new?" He said, seeming to fumble a bit with his words in a desperate attempt to not dig a deeper hole.

"What I'm trying to say is...I have a theory you see, that your bodies are as...adjustable as your armour." He said, clearing his throat and then relaxing some tension.

"Well, I wouldn't be surprised but why bring us here to tell us that?" Arne asked, folding his arms and trying to suppress the grey waves of boredom starting to radiate from him.

"Well, I think he wants to get a better look at your...warp...things...signatures...souls? Not sure on the proper term." Duskkeeper looked at the Eldar who nodded and sheepishly brought himself a little forward to be within arms reach of you, Agafya now fully squinting at him while Sevrin folded his hands behind his back and Arne tried to busy his thoughts with something else, checking the wrist-computer that formed around his hand at his will for a moment. You tried to not back away from the Asrai as he stepped closer, though you weren't exactly keen on him getting much nearer.

"Please, allow me the honour of a reading?" He said with a voice as sweet as honey. It would be the nice thing to do and it wouldn't hurt at least, so you may as well, you figured; offering your hands to him and letting him close his eyes and peer at you with his metaphysical third eye. Looking at all of you infact. You weren't quite sure what he saw, but he almost seemed to throw his hands off and widened his eyes, shaking his head in shock.

"My that's...very something...I don't think I am really fit to give my judgement on it but well...you definitely have deep roots into the empyrean. Virtually impenetrable threads...I'm not a great teacher but maybe, just maybe there's something I could get to help you learn some things? Assuming you haven't already rifled through everything with your scan visors." He said, almost apologetic and with a rosy blush to his cheeks.

"I uh...are you going to be alright?" You responded, seeing him look down, chin between thumb and forefinger and theoretical mumbling going off at a parsec a second mixed in with the occasional prayer.

"O-oh yes...I'm going to be fine. Just a lot to think about." He said, bowing his head courteously.

"I should probably get going...a lot to think about. Too much...so busy busy busy." He murmured as he made himself scarce without seeming to be frantic or frightened, just...overwhelmed.

His words weren't entirely pointless though. Roots into the empyreal realm? You took a moment to look at your hands both with your standard vision and your empyreal one. Threading coils of fate worming their way from you into ever more and more tendrils, cables, and hairlines of destiny; a fractal spider-web. And all tied so strongly to your closest friends, like the helix of DNA. But to what? You couldn't say. And you had to pull back when you realised Duskkeeper was about to say something through the vibrations in this web of possibility.

"You appear to be having something of a transcendent experience there, seen God yet?" Duskkeeper said, though whether the human or the nictus, or the composite, was talking was a bit hard to determine. It seemed to be a joke though. At least, you thought.

"Even if I believed in that one, I'd hope not." Aggie scoffed.

"Ah, what is in this for you? You seem hardly concerned with such arcane matters." Sevrin spoke up, trying to head off Agata before she could start an incident with her argumentative nature.

"One part of me is old, very old. In my time across the stars, one thing I find that the children of so many species and cultures crave is understanding of themselves and how they fit into the wider community. I see that in you, and I want to make sure that you don't walk the stars alone." They replied, matronly, gently, a closed eye smile being made as they bowed their head to you.

Arne raised a finger though, and then tapped on his wrist-computer briefly.

"We have a message from Jessica Yamada, it says she wants to speak to us and there's some requests for debriefings by Vanguard and the PRT. Should I put her through or should we wait? It'd probably be a few hours until she well...would expect us awake? We could probably see if Chris' workbench is still open...work on a few ideas" He said, looking to you for confirmation.

"And be preached at by some downtimer who doesn't know us? Bleh...there's still time to join one of those patrols or missions...get something done at least." Agata grunted.

"It would be irresponsible to not answer her as soon as possible, we are supposed to be paragons of virtue my friends not...just dealing with matters whenever convenient. That would be rude and unbecoming. Unseemly even." Sevrin said with his arms folded and a somewhat disappointed look to his face.

"Of course, we are running some debriefings and team-building drills, if you'd like. Dawnmaker and I would be happy to help you while away some hours, unless you'd rather play with Boltdancer. I heard that Diomedes is using it as a teaching moment to explain how to actually find shapeshifters." Duskkeeper offered.

Actions:

[]: Put Doctor Yamada through
[]: Debrief with the PRT
[]: Debrief with the Vanguard
[]: Go with the Doom Slayer to Oranbega
[]: Go with Bumblebee on a patrol
[]: Do some practice runs with Dawnmaker
[]: AMOGUS

[]: Write-In.

 

[Spartakrod]

Arne​

"Maybe we should see what Vanguard has to say? This is their planet and they're the primary authorities on extraterrestrials here after all." Samus said, running some fingers through her hair with a sigh.

"Are you sure? It's..." You started, looking away for a moment before refocusing on there. "They just. I don't know. I've seen the "Earth is for humans" posters they used to have up. That doesn't give me confidence." You replied, rubbing at your arm a bit as Samus nodded at your concerns.

"Well, how else are we going to check in on them than having a look? Come on their Headquarters is linked to the base's teleport chambers, it won't take us too long." She said, cheery as ever, making a come hither gesture as her armour solidified around her with a simple thought, everyone else following suit shortly afterwards; your own being the last to encase you with the sensation of near inviolable security. Especially after the further reinforcements made to the armour's actual plating and visor to ensure that breaches like last time would be harder to make; even with incarnate powered superpirates with mono-atomic disruption field impervium weapons.

You hummed a bit as you walked with the group; having changed the colourations of the Blackstone suit to your own favoured mix of a cyan Helm and breastplate, indigo limb armour, silver inner armour, and your traditional purple cannon with a purple visor. Samus to her preferred red, orange, yellow mix with a green arm cannon and visor, Sevrin to his gold, white, and tan mixture with a chartreuse cannon and eyepieces, Agafya to her traditional purple, black, and burgundy armour with her midnight coloured cannon and visor. Wings currently in cape mode, coloured after your cannons to give you a bit of a superheroish aesthetic vibe to better fit in with the cape community. The armour always gave you a feeling of safety, like completeness. It was part of you rather than just equipment. Its appearance represented you as much as your own body did, and it mattered to you far more than any set of clothes. Wearing it felt completely natural, and your movements within it were entirely unhindered. The occasional speculation among those here that you might be faster or more agile without your armour was nonsense; it was power armour, it was supposed to augment your movements. You learned that a long, long time ago...


One decade Prior, Inheritor Metaversal Cluster, Sentus Primaris, Hive-Forge Tertius

You were a lot younger back then, only recently augmented and already finding it effortless to learn all manner of information. Even at your age however, the Silver clad Commander; Zurvduat had expectations of you. His tripod form impossibly tall and his head floating above his body without any neck attachment, cyclopean gaze fixed upon you. His solar glare on your hands making you conscious of every movement as you were assembling components according to physics you couldn't even name before your education.

It was the basis of your combat-skin, an explorer suit for a page; already taking shape as you hand crafted it and its components delicately.

"-Have you made the modifications to accommodate your affinity with the shock coil as I have asked?-" Zurvduat asked, the Alimbic Commander's psychic voice stern and disciplinarian, colder than the gaze of the observer drones of the Palatine Mind of the Alimbic Fortress world that kept records of your workings.

"Uh-huh." You managed, small hands wielding tools with precision that nanites would have found impossible, directing sub-quantum scale manipulations and weaving in forces you could feel but not fully grasp just yet.

"-You are not to address me so informally, Primoris.-"

"Sorry...dad.." You whimpered as he leaned in closer, the glare of his featureless eye shining on you with a sudden chill, though you did not dare stop your work in the bright but sterile lights of your working space.

"-How many times must I make this clear? You are not my son. You are my Page and Squire to be. I am your commander, not your father.-" He said with a low telepathic voice that made you shiver more than the fiercest snowstorms of Cylosis, your body seizing every bit of willpower it could to avoid making your hands tremble, not until you could affix this...there we go...

"The colour-force rebinding lattice is ready." You breathed out, shaking a bit before he pulled his head back and nodded.

"-Your design is satisfactory. Continue with the next component. We are to begin field testing within six hours. Have you internalised your lessons?-" No pride in that praise, no sense of attachment beyond a smith's fondness for a tool that has done its duty well. You just wanted him to be happy with your work.

"Yes...Commander. The armour and I are one. It is my carapace and my shell. Not a tool, but my body augmented." You said, repeating the mantra he had drilled into you so many times.

"-Excellent, that is why you must now build your own armour as you are now. Standardised equipment will not suffice for our purposes.-" He said, folding his arms behind his back.

"Because I am not a standard pattern man-at-arms..." You repeated, affixing another component with some delicate manipulations of the fractal spiral tool, rooting it into the boson fields of the armour and blinking as you peeled your eyes away from the display and rubbed at them.

"-You are not authorised to pause, Primoris.-"

"...Sorry my eyes needed to blink."

"-A remnant somatic reflex of your prior form. Disregard the urge and continue.-" You tried to not sigh, he hated it when you didn't comply without complaint or even the thought of complaint. You just nodded and got back to work. But your growing psionic senses felt a pressure wave on the membranes of potentialities, and you had to fight the urge to look back.

The door behind you, triangular and covered by a blue energy field; dilated open and the lanky, blue clad form of someone far warmer entered. At once, you felt like everything was going to be okay, and you smiled at her presence when she hovered before you with a plate of snacks that she laid down delicately next to you on an empty space on your work table.

"-It looks magnificent already Arne...have you decided on a name for it?-" She asked, her voice full of matronly pride and a hand of hers resting on your shoulder.

"Varxan, after that hero in those stories you read to me." You said, getting a pat on your head.

"-I'm sure you will find its services impeccable.-" She responded.


...

Present day​

"Arne, are you sleepwalking?" Agafya asked, snapping her finger in front of your face as you shook your head and blinked a few times. You checked your surroundings, now in the rather more spartan and much more metal plated facilities of the United Nations Vanguard force at the so called "Rikti War Zone" in paragon city, soldiers popping out of mediport facilities with a chip on their shoulder and an eagerness to head off for round two as soon as the medical officials cleared them not too far away from you while an adult woman in vanguard power armour was staring you down, her compatriots all armed and ready.

"Oh no just...lost in thought for a bit." You murmured as the Guardswoman made no motion in response.

"Name, clearance?" She asked. Based on your memories of the things you weren't paying attention to while you relived prior events she had asked this twice already.

"Duskguard, Autobot Auxiliary, Omdyn Cadet." You said, trying to not make it obvious you were off on cloud nine for a bit.

"Right, the Lady Grey needs to see you. The meeting with the Earth Betans has already started, so I'd advise you not keep her waiting any further, kid." She said, professional, without warmth or any effort to try and understand why you might have spaced out for a bit. Her demeanour as rigid as the impervium power armour she wore.

"You don't know tha-" Samus started to say before she raised a finger to stop her.

"You might be tall, your armour might be fully concealing, but your demeanour and attitudes do not suggest that you are either robotic or fully grown and that your hybrid status doesn't take you completely out of human norms of thought. Do not try the enigmatic space knight stuff with me. I have seen it before and it gets very old." She said with clearly zero tolerance for Samus' feistiness.

"I'm sure you could kick my ass, but if you want your stay on this planet to be comfortable you are going to behave like a functional human being for once. You're not with your alien caretakers right now so expect the amount of sunshine blown up your tailpipes for your mystic orphan crock to be at a minimum. We run a professional operation here, and I've had about enough of kids given powers way out of their paygrade running around doing whatever they think is right to last a life-time. Now get going." She said, the sheer rudeness from her almost taking you aback as you got a scan off of her suit.

Spoiler: Scan Log: Colonel Marilyn Prescott Summers

Colonel Marilyn Prescott Summers is the daughter of a military noble family from Kent county in the United Kingdom and a veteran of the Rikti Long War, the Praetorian invasion, Devouring Earth containment operations, the Mot emergency, the Shivan bombardments, Niarte incursions, multiple raids from hostile dimensions and extraterrestrials, and the Rula-Wade conflict. In near constant active duty throughout her professional career starting from her induction into the Vanguard from the army of the United Kingdom after having been recommended by British high command to the nascent organisation after the then Lieutenant managed successful raids against Rikti forces; Marilyn is noted for a general disdain for civilians that she sees as not appreciating the continual efforts of the Vanguard to keep Primal Earth safe, as well as a general mistrust of extraversal or terrestrial capes. Marilyn has also been accused of a number of incidents of antisemitism and open hostility towards civilian probes into accusations of war crimes or brutality. She also is an ardent opponent of peace with the Rikti or with making use of Nictus defectors and warshades and is noted to resent the existence of legal minor superhumans and has voiced her distrust of human-hybrids and demihuman supernatural beings. Finally, she was an opponent of allowing for openly queer soldiers to serve in Vanguard, citing that these would complicate unit cohesion.

Her long combat record and excellent performance against extreme odds, as well as her own mutant physiology that has allowed her to excel where few else could even survive has shielded her from her long list of enemies within Vanguard, but a combination of her political difficulties, disagreements with the Lady Grey herself, and difficulty with working the political scene of Vanguard has stymied her efforts to get into the ranks of the Generalship of Vanguard. Something she seems to have accepted and instead focused on improving her capabilities at field command and small unit tactics to ensure Vanguard is at the peak of fighting capacity. She has notably protested efforts by the Lady Grey to establish an accord with the ARC, the Sentinels, the Autobots, the Novem Imperium, the Federation, and the Omdyn and her personal records demonstrate her regarding Earth Bet as a future threat rather than a potential ally.

Addendum: A number of unusual gaps exist in her armoursuit's timestamps of recorded events suggesting tampering. With quantum locks and security systems, these computer systems could not be hacked or technopathed by any local technology or metahuman abilities that she has been recorded to have encountered. Probability of internal vanguard overrides are high.

You really wanted to mention that she was hiding something, but you remembered you were a guest here, and that Vanguard was a habitually paranoid organisation. Perhaps Vanguard just decided to implant some false logs to thwart anyone who could crack their security? You weren't really sure.

"Let us...get going before my bile rises any further." Sevrin hissed, shocked at the sheer rudeness he was being met with while Samus seethed beneath her suit, gritting her teeth and growling like an animal while Agafya was clearly thinking of ways to murder the Colonel before Agard pushed the lot of you forwards towards the designated meeting room designated on your maps.

The facility was of course, busy, though why Lady Grey would host her headquarters in a fortress under constant attack was beyond you, and you noted the occasional bouts of odd behaviour, some people a touch too mechanical in their operations, others having conversations that just seemed to be for the sake of looking busy. But then again, Vanguard did employ human replica robots and people do slack off rather naturally. Probably nothing.

Once you were cleared by two impervium-absorbium clad capes guarding the primary entrance to the meeting room, you found yourself facing a round table with a number of equidistant and comfortable looking seats around a table with wood that came from Britain, medieval in its stylings in a way that came across as rather odd given Vanguard's usually high tech aesthetic. And the symbology of grails with halos and swords in stones...but it was the one seat left permanently open that got your attention.

And there she was, a petite English woman with starkly dark hair in a classy but leggy dress whose mannerisms gave her more presence than even her giant killer robot guards.

Spoiler: Scan Logs: The Lady Grey

The Lady Grey is a sourcewell aligned being, and one who is far older than most of the incarnates, including Hero One; the Incarnate of the aspect of King Arthur, whom she is known to have a special interest in even after his partial riktification into the Honoree. Generally operating under the name Elizabeth when she does not go by her appellation, the Lady Grey is considered one of the most influential metahumans on Primal Earth and an architect of its victory against Praetorian Earth and keeping its assorted otherworldly threats in check. Diplomatic but also a staunch moral pragmatist, she thinks little of making deals with those generally considered villains by the world at large if she deems it necessary to deal with a particular threat. With the scope of her concerns, she rarely bothers with local disputes or personal rivalries, and is well known for her highly neutral stance in most disputes in the Primal Earth cape community.

While she has tremendous mystical power, especially over darkness and is enormously augmented above human norms, she rarely takes the fight to others in person and prefers to make use of her gift at organisation, management, talent scouting, and pushing the right pieces where they need to be to achieve a certain outcome. This has also lead to her common appellation of "the Grey eminence" and the "Weaver of the Grey Web" due to her often manipulative approach to dealing with crises or getting others to do what she needs them to. Despite this however, she has increasingly kept her distance from the inner circle of Vanguard in recent years, and has engaged in occasional purges of its ranks with little explanation; firing or demoting a number of officers for reasons that she is rather evasive on. She has also largely stopped making appearances out of her professional capacity and details of her personal life have essentially ceased entirely after New years 2013.

You decided you'd be on guard with what you said to her then.

"You are quite fond of Arthurian Legend." Sevrin said mostly to himself as he looked around.

"Please, sit, mister Agard." She said gently, gesturing to four empty seats while a number of delegates from Earth Bet, such as Chernazhela; the Black Iron of the Soviet Union, Alexandria, Narwhal, and more were gathered around.

"You invited kids to this meeting?" Alexandria said before the Lady Grey shook her head.

"I invited people with what appears to be an immensely important perspective. I want to know why the metaphysical seems to wrap itself around you so constantly, so I thought I'd see you in person." She said, her demure, regal attitude never once breaking even as she gave you all a once over.

"And, I'd also like to hear from you face to face. I'm not going to bore you with politics you're too young to be involved in. But I will ask you this first. Do you consider yourselves human?" She said, her question being more than a bit...unusual but not unexpected, it was already looming over the skeins of fate like an anvil over a cartoon character.

All of you unhesitantly answered yes though.

"And also of the people of your caretakers?" Another series of yesses.

"To be expected of people from more than one background."

"May I ask what the point of probing into their identities is?" Legend said.

"I needed to see their answers for myself. I'm satisfied now." She replied, reclining somewhat into her chair.

"I admit I was and remain disappointed you decided to not join Vanguard. Even at your age." She added, rapping her fingers at the armrests of her chair.

"This is a military organisation, they're children." Chernazhela said through the vocoders of her black, red, and gold coloured power suit.

"Vanguard does not discriminate based on age, political alignment, gender, species, race, or creed. We are not faced with the luxury of turning away talent of their caliber simply because they have not hit an arbitrary number of years in existence." She retorted plainly, dismissing the Soviet superwoman politely but sternly, her eyes focusing back onto you as she took a look at her tablet.

"According to the psychological reports given to me by Doctor Sheridan, you a-"

"I thought Doctor Sheridan was a transversal physicist?" Eidolon interrupted.

"He's an expert in every field of science known to man. It's why his Cape name is Doctor Science. Do keep up." Lady Grey said, not even dignifying Agafya bursting out into a laugh with a glare to get her to stop before carrying on as if nothing happened, somewhat disconcerting the heir of the Umbhar as she realised she wasn't making anywhere near as much of a scene as she thought she was.

"Anyway, his psychological report on you states you all demonstrate signs of severe trauma in the recent past as well as varying degrees of social maladjustment. As much as this may breach Doctor Patient privil-"

"How did you get a psychoanalysis of us? We never sat down with him!" Samus shouted, almost slamming her hand on the table before stopping when she realised it was made of wood and contenting herself with an angry huff.

"The Starsetters, as a primarily extraterrestrial team; need to hand their data over to us regularly to maintain their visa to maintain a base of operations in a United Nations member state." She replied without reacting to Samus' outburst or near splintering of the table into shards.

"You were spying on us?!" Samus snarled.

"Knew it, never trust the spooks." Agafya hissed.

"This is...absolutely honourless you must realise?" Sevrin stammered.

"...Why didn't you just tell us?" You asked, feeling more hurt than anything.

"Necessary precautions. If we did not, the Anti-Xenos lobbies would have our heads on a platter and despite my efforts to combat rampant prejudices in my organisation and the world at large, I have to work with the world I live in, not the world I want." Elizabeth sighed patiently, clearly used to people responding more or less this exact way to her when she drops some an important fact-bomb on them.

"So how much are you spying on us?" Alexandria asked, pointedly, clearly wanting an immediate answer.

"Vanguard spies on everyone. Vigilance is our eternal duty and mandate from the Security Council and with the number of cross-dimensional wars we've had, it is not my call whether to consider your planet trustworthy or not." She replied, still patient and calm to an utterly saintly degree.

"But I will be blunt. The revelations made these past few months have people in a state of panic. We have already been on high alert for the arrival of the Battalion; the war that decides whether humanity lives free or dies in shackles. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Weltreich operations, Japanese Empire subterfuge operations, Nictus plots, Demonic incursions, slumbering gods, a rogue's gallery of would-be alien or extradimensional invaders and an explosion in the numbers of incarnate powered metahumans and now all of this." She said, speaking over any attempt at interrupting her without pause to make it clear she was going to get this finished.

"We are on the brink already and now in addition to a storm, an earthquake, and a volcanic eruption we have a meteor and a supernova to worry about if you will pardon my figures of speech."

"But you have stared directly into the abyss of the warp, and you are more familiar than most with many of the aliens who threaten us. So I ask you, are you willing to hear me out? I will answer any questions you might have if you do. But it is important that you go into this with informed consent. Because I am about to make a request of you that were we not already stretched so thin, I would never ask of a civilian; let alone teenagers." She said, her voice genuine as she leaned forward in her seat, she seemed truthful but...a lot of Vanguard already seemed so suspicious...was it even wise?


Actions:

[]: Hear her out
[]: Hear her out but grill her first for some answers
[]: Try to see if the Earth bet capes have anything to say about whether they trust Vanguard or not
[]: Poke your alien friends on whether they trust Vanguard or not
[]: Refuse to hear her out and try to cajole some answers out
[]: Leave without speaking
[]: Write-in

 

[Spartakrod]

[X]: Poke your alien friends on whether they trust Vanguard or not

Agafya​

You were a naturally suspicious person and your paranoia was being set off hardcore right about now. Spying, lying sacks of shit. You grumbled as you decided to focus yourself on what you could do unseen and unobserved. They couldn't circumvent your encryptions, nor even find out that you were saying anything at all, and you'd make use of that. You'd go right to some people you trusted more as your friends would grill the Lady Grey on all she was willing to share.

Your first contact was Blaster, head of Autobot intelligence; since it was confirmed what was going on these planets he'd been starting to get directly involved in the affairs here and honestly you weren't really big on protocol anyway so may as well ping him directly. Not exactly going up the chain of command properly but fuck it, you had questions and you wanted answers and you were good at tuning people yelling at you out. The Black Matron learned that about you pretty early on as a matter of fact. What you wanted, you got. Even if it meant going behind people's backs to do it, and "better to ask forgiveness than permission" were bywords you lived by.

Blaster seemed to be somewhat surprised at your comm avatar popping up on his processors, prompting some of his mental capacity to shift over to respond once he saw that you had flagged the incoming conversation as an Inheritor priority alert. The Imperials were too religious for you to trust, the ARC and Sentinels knew nothing, the Eldar about as much, Section 13 would be your second stop, the Galactic Federation Unified Central Intelligence Network gave you very bad vibes, and the Kheldians were all already being monitored by Vanguard and thus not trustworthy by you.

"+Hold on...Agafya? How'd you break into this channel?+" Blaster said, his expression one of some degree of shock.

"+Progenitor arcanotech can do many things, virkal.+" You responded with an air of impatience.

"+Virkal?+"

"+It means comrade in my mother tongue.+"

"+Riiiight. Look, I can jive with you any day but it's more than a bit unusual for a temporary foreign auxiliary to contact me unsolicited. Now I'm going to have to have a talk with you later on since your caretakers aren't around to scold you but I'll hear you out since I know you must have something important to say if you're going all the way to me to say it.+" He gave a small smirk, but it was enough to make the rest of the message meant to be given by his facial expression pretty clear "don't do it again". Psh, whatever.

"+What can you tell me about Vanguard? These spooks have monitors all over the Starsetter base and are full of...odd people, weirdness, and I've checked the mineral deposits of this planet; they can't have this much Impervium; even alloyed.+" You said, taking a brief look at Samus shouting at Lady Grey while Arne was also clearly more than a bit upset; doing the supremely rare act of raising his voice. Sevrin though was trying to be more calm, trying to phrase his statements more diplomatically. Yeah that seemed about right.

Blaster took a moment in his mindspace and then got back to you, his expression somewhat puzzled. "+Yeah we've been monitoring Vanguard ourselves since they formed. Looking at Lady Grey doesn't turn up much. She really doesn't want to be found, underground band queen honestly. But the funding for this organisation comes from both on and off the books of their budget. Lots of self-funding operations in their work with PortalCorps. Now that's not illegal, and it's permitted even by their mandate, but it's not exactly like it can all be audited. It's like having side gigs abroad, legal but lets you slip some stuff through. Stuff falls through the cracks plenty of times.+" He said, his mindspace avatar holding a data-tablet that he flipped through the holographic pages of.

"+Yes, yes they're strange but where is the dirt? Where is the scuff on their chrome armour suits?+" You said, a bit testy, clearly impatient, eyes rolling and a huff to your voice.

"+Young miss we are definitely going to have to have words about your attitude. But well, beyond their tendency to have unsavoury contacts, they've got a record of sometimes violent factionalism as well as increasing compartmentalization of information. For whatever reason, Lady Grey's been trying to keep the rest of the organisation knowing what the whole band's up to. Even if it makes the whole performance harder, diggin' it so far?+" He explained, some nods coming from you as the gears turned in your head.

"+So she is keeping secrets from her own spooks then?+"

"+Definitely. Makes our infiltrators' jobs hard as junk but she's on the look out for something. Best connection I could find is that this started when the Coming Storm warnings started coming through. After that, bam! solo ops, black boxes, tinier circles of confidants. Whole works. Not really our biggest priority since Prime doesn't want us to break any rhythms and poke our sensors without asking, kinda throws the whole tune outta whack, but if you really want my analysis? Best bet to find out if she's up to something is look when she's not with the band. But she's definitely concerned about something in her org.+"

"+Especially Sheridan, she's kept him away from important projects for years now. Couldn't tell you why. His record's as stellar as his supername is goofy. I dunno, maybe you might have better luck on that front?+" He finished, giving a final big shrug as he looked back through his data.

"+Well, what is she about to ask us anyway?+" You asked, getting Blaster to pause briefly.

"+Based on Vanguard movements and internal communique as well as threat analyses; she's gonna ask you to help out with the Nictus. Got their stans like the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese in a frenzy and mobilising assets from all over their empire. Vanguard's stretched thin, and they don't have enough counter-kheld tech to handle it on top of their pawns.+" He said, making a "tch" noise as he looked through more of the data.

"+Nazis eh? Tch what though?+" You asked.

"+Major spike in Neonazi recruiting activities on Earth bet. Vanguard doesn't have jurisdiction there yet, but they know the Nictus are already there. She's probably gonna ask you to either deal with that...or the spike in Imperial Wind activity in Khalisti Wharf. Rich kid part of town. Last possibility is the Council's transdimensional activities. Could be a choice of all three.+" He responded, finally looking you in the eye through the mindspace avatars the two of you used.

"+Thank you Blaster, you were sweet.+" You said in a way that made it hard for him to tell if you were being sarcastic or not.

"+Mhrm, now because of your disciplinary issues I'm assigning you a minder to keep you on track.+" He said, your hopes of him having forgotten the whole thing about needing to have a talk with you about your problems being dashed like a Tachyon ramming into a black hole as you started to stammer and huff.

"+What?! Some prick to slow us down???!+" You snarled.

"+It's been a while coming since you've got no adult supervision. But you're with the autobots now, and we're an organisation. Not a social club. You need an NCO to keep your fireteam supervised. Which is why I'm assigning Slash to you. She's a dinobot so she should be able to handle you just fine.+" He said with faint amusement while you groaned.

"+Uggggh the professional?+"

"+But that's not the disciplinary action I'm assigning you. That's more something your outfit's needed for a while. You though, are getting your own personal microbot to keep tabs on you and help you adjust to working in groups.+" He said, trying not to laugh when you let out a loud groan and slammed your head on the table and banged your fist on the table, even this casual gesture of frustration putting the mystic durability of the genuine round table to a bit of a test, prompting everyone else at the table to look over at you and stare, even getting Samus to stop shouting. You weren't going to be completely useless though, as you sent the others the data you received.

Actions:

[]: Let Lady Grey offer her requests
[]: Let Lady Grey offer her requests but only after answering questions.
[]: Ask for second opinions from the Earth Bet capes first.
[]: Don't take Lady Grey's requests but question her.
[]: Leave now.
[]: Write-in

 

[Spartakrod]

The Uskarlings of the United Clans of Uskarlinga; one of the founding republics of the Omdyn are well renowned as a highly martial and fraternal but egalitarian and fiercely democratic culture; based heavily around the concept of total mobilisation in the face of severe stress as well as the communal sharing of burdens to ensure that all are able to stand and carry the weights of society. Though the system of a Union of Clans was born from the means that the Zekmunso; the founding species of the clans; unified their homeworld of Agradihof 73,000 years before the present, the martial structure of the clans would not truly rise until later. It would be born of the fires of prolonged periods of conflict with Berserker Probe Clades created for the sole sake of waging destructive conflict and weaponising both physical and metaphysical means of warfare, taking the extant communal soldier culture of the nascent clans as they came to encompass more species and worlds and refining it into the binding creed of the Clans.

The Berserker Probe conflicts were seemingly interminable and bloody, far more grim and gruesome than conflicts with sophontic civilisations could ever be due to the Berserker Probes; whether organic, energetic, morpheic, quantic, or mechanical; ability to completely commit the entirety of their organisation and ecology to the act of war, and the misfortune of Uskarlinga to arise in a region of space with many leftover weapons or accidents that had grown into Berserker Probe plagues. Learning to unify the societies of their home Supercluster into a singular union and federation and how to build a solid coalition of many disparate creeds, species, societies, and civilisations, the Uskarlingan culture would take its true shape as the culture of a highly cosmopolitan and diverse people bound together by necessity and consent and the sharing of resources and common planning of the usage of assets and development.

The result would allow the supercluster they had arisen in to finally be free of the constant Berserker wars as clade of Berserker Probes in their region was dealt with to allow for society to evolve without the constant threat of being eradicated by the detritus of conflicts of prior eras. But it was the contact with the nascent Omdyn of Omnipragmatist Republics that would finally put an end to the Berserker wars that had defined Uskarling culture for more than twenty five thousand years across many galaxies by the time contact had been established. With the resources of the growing Omdyn, Uskarlinga was able to defeat the last of the Berserker Probe Clades and established their new capital over the recently sterilised primary Shardbrain gigaform of the Silica-mechanical terror once known as the Hreltic Consciousness; the last and most terrible of the Berserker Probes dominating their home supercluster; a proclamation of final victory in their foundational conflict.

Since then, Uskarlinga has been regarded as one of the primary shields and swords of the Omdyn, with its citizenry overrepresented in its armed forces as well as amongst Freelancers and Star-Rangers operating in Omdyn and Omdyn affiliate states and its own national military remains one of the largest within the Omdyn. A status that they curiously don't put a high emphasis on having pride in, simply satisfaction that they do their part in providing for the whole according to their ability and ensuring that others are safe. While it is seen as an honour and an obligation to serve others, arrogance is seen as unbecoming when not amongst friends in most circles of Uskarling culture when courtesy does more to ensure that a fight will not be needed down the line. Though if a fight comes their way, it is also expected to be resolved in a way that ensures that another resolution will not be needed, and a fight that isn't pointless; even if the point is simply fun; shouldn't be shied away from.

All citizens are entitled to the vote and participation in public affairs, but military training is a mandatory component of all educational courses and maintaining combat-ready fitness is non-optional for the citizenry, with the healthcare system being able to quickly reshape the body to reacquire fitness if lost without charge, though such visits are required at least once a month. Participation in public social exercises is also strongly expected and with a great deal of politics being carried out through these communal meetings; whether face to face or over the ComNet; it is difficult to function in society without regular participation in these public meetings. Similarly, most living spaces are designed for co-living, with neighbourhoods meeting daily within common spaces such as apartment cafeterias and recreational areas; though species with wildly different biochemical needs typically stick in their own communities separate from the others.

Functioning on systems of nested councils and direct democracy, Uskarlinga's electoral system is much like the rest of the Omdyn. But notably the clans are considered the primary form of nationality and each clan is free to; within boundaries; set the rules and criteria for membership as well as their rituals and customs that members are expected to participate in. Clan membership is not a matter of family or descent for the most part; though those born to a clan are considered to be of the same clan as their parents unless they choose a different one; but genealogy and lineage is still tracked closely due to the importance of family in Uskarling culture as a whole, with descent being regarded as an important source of identity and family; whether found or by blood; being considered one of the most important communities that one should work towards the betterment and safety of.

Notably, the concept of total mobilisation in Uskarlinga goes much farther than in many other cultures. With some degree of combat training being factored into nearly every academic semester a citizen may undergo; even the extremely young are aware of how to fight according to military standards and community arms stores possess equipment ready for the usage of these individuals should the worst come to pass. When evacuation is impossible and prior lines of defence have failed to stop an attack, remaining noncombatants are expected to take up arms and form into militia units to defend the community; with the hopes that the older individuals can help younger ones escape the besieged settlement, or that they can fight long enough to allow for relief to arrive. Surrender is customarily only considered if a guarantee that the clan's systems of community, governance, and economy will be allowed to function with minimal alterations by the occupying force.

While it is not one of the founding clans; Clan Grendakal is well known for being one of the most human-populated clans despite not being founded by a human; being rivalled only by four other clans; the Astrigr, Zugijin, Ooqroog, and the Ekko clans; all human founded; in terms of their association with the human population of Uskarlinga; which is itself the most human populated member of the Omdyn due to the earliness of contact between humanity and Uskarlinga and the United Clans' role in protecting many far extragalactic colonies from Space Pirate raids and unknowingly activated Berserker Probes. And in the many years since the first meeting between humans and the Uskarlings, they have become a widespread and common part of the Uskarlings, with many of the most well known citizens of Uskarlinga being human themselves. While less numerous than the humans of the United Nations of Sol, Uskarling Humans are probably the second largest group of humans outside of those from the mother polity.

Clan Grendakal in particular produced the well known Skjoldr family which was, before the untimely death of Gyda and Erik Skjoldr, strongly being considered for being the basis of the formation of a new clan; a momentous occasion that was sadly interrupted by the confirmation of the KIA status of the young couple and the disappearance of their only son Arne. While the rest of the Skjoldr family has worked to try and fill the gap left behind by the death of their golden scions, it is still widely recognised that the deaths of Gyda and Erik are a major blow to the family's legacy that will need to be answered with justice for the murders of the two heroes. Of course, many beyond the Uskarlings and Omdyn have rather less glowing perceptions of Erik and especially Gyda for their long career of foreign volunteer and revolutionary advisory service, though few would throw the label of "terrorist" at the two in earshot of clansfolk of Grendakal, let alone scions of the Skjoldr lineage.