Good to finally meet Boss Hexe and see her deal. I am thoroughly repulsed by her and don't want to think about the rest of her Children if Hexenhammer was the "Disappointment" of the batch
Good to finally meet Boss Hexe and see her deal. I am thoroughly repulsed by her and don't want to think about the rest of her Children if Hexenhammer was the "Disappointment" of the batch
Part of why Hexenhammer disappoints her mother is that she's simply not really racist due to spending a lot of time with her father, who fathered her in very, very bad circumstances but still dotes on her and wants her to be better than the society she's raised in.
The other part is that as the Reich went on, their definition of Aryan kept on narrowing to keep up the in-group vs out-group dichotomy even as they conquered other worlds and timelines. And Idonia has a bigger stick up her ass about the standards of the picture perfect Aryan than most. Ermendrude's red hair and green eyes is a permanent reminder to her mother that she's not sufficiently pure for her mother's dogmatic racial standards; a reminder that she is half-celtic fae, a tool born to serve the reich and volk, and not really deserving being considered her proper daughter like her more "nordic" children.
Of course the thing is that ethnic groups like "Celtic", "Germanic", "Latinic" and so on are 90% linguistic, 9% cultural, and less than 1% genetic. It's all arbitrary nonsense created by daft 19th-century racists looking to justify the order of things.
If you really had to assign Samus modern ethnic categories, she'd fit into Celtic and since her mother was born Jewish, she herself is considered Jewish as per talmudic law. Yet she'd fairly easily pass for the standards of the teutonic ubermensch like BJ Blaskowicz does in spite of him actually being Polish-Jewish.
But yeah, Idonia is a very, very fucked up woman. She's perfectly sane, she feels empathy, she's not schizophrenic or on any sort of spectrum. She just has a very warped definition of who deserves kindness and empathy and who needs a boot on their throats. And if anything, being a woman of very high rank in a very misogynistic society (her only peers in rank of her gender head organisations explicitly for women such as the women's league or the girl's youth organisation) only made her a nastier and grosser sexist due to her contempt for those of her own sex that can't cut it in the system the way she did or fail to meet her idea of a proper Nazi woman.
I can already picture Reich Earth getting liberated by Autobots, Space Marines in droppods, Primal Earth heroes, and Section 13. The Nazis are hopelessly outmatched, which is great.
A complicating factor could be a third faction trying to take that Earth.
[X] A Tactical Assessment: Mother Brain is looking over the current data the Inheritors have collected and has made a few conclusions about her best course of action. Will this be the start of something always destined to happen or will the tides of fate change for the better.
[X] A Meeting of the Spark and the Bird: Old Bird (Representing the other parents of the Inheritors) and Optimus Prime meet to discuss the Inheritors and their pasts, most notably about their enemies that would see them collected, The Space Pirates.
[X] The Lineage takes stock: With the Aftermath of L.A, the Rikti High Command take a look at the factors that led to the operation failure, the robotic menace, the biological monsters, the arrival of other dimensional horrors (Khorne's Deamons), What could be considered another polity (Space Pirates) and the local defenses being more capable then anticipated. The High Command decides that new plans must be created for future incursions into this metaverse cluster
[X] The Green Prophets receive a vision: Gork and Mork give a vision to their most fervent followers about a "Propa Scrap" brewing in another universe, so What Kind of Ork Boyz would they be if they did not follow their twin Gods vision to this place the local 'Umies Call Hell (Orks Invade Hell of one universe, you can decide which one is more fun)
[X] A Tactical Assessment: Mother Brain is looking over the current data the Inheritors have collected and has made a few conclusions about her best course of action. Will this be the start of something always destined to happen or will the tides of fate change for the better.
[X] A Meeting of the Spark and the Bird: Old Bird (Representing the other parents of the Inheritors) and Optimus Prime meet to discuss the Inheritors and their pasts, most notably about their enemies that would see them collected, The Space Pirates.
I like these ideas.
Personally I'd love to see the following:
[X] Cauldron reacting, over a series of months, to each new faction that comes up that they had no idea existed. ("what do you mean there's a group of sentient robots in Russia?" "There's an alien cult directly under Brockton Bay." etc.)
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.
huh That's right Dorn and Prime will be in the same room. Provided they don't start fighting over warcrimes and speciesism I think the two would probably get along just based on personality. At least while Prime is on the job.
huh That's right Dorn and Prime will be in the same room. Provided they don't start fighting over warcrimes and speciesism I think the two would probably get along just based on personality. At least while Prime is on the job.
I mean, one is basically Drax the Destroyer but with a huge fondness for legos and being the most committed son regardless of how much he's appreciated for it and the other is robot space dad-jesus.
Optimus doesn't seem to have a consistent record of forming surrogate dad relations with people he meets in their adulthood and seems to bond mostly with kids and teens and mostly just like; is the friend of a friend of already grown people.
And Dorn is more than fifteen thousand whole ass years old. While any old dog can learn new tricks, his personality is already fully matured.
Plus, Dorn is a surrogate father to the Imperial Fists legion already anyway and is noted to be absolutely fanatically loyal to his gene-parents. The stars would burn out and the last black hole would fizzle away its final particle before Dorn ever considered turning his back on the Starchildren and Omnissiah.
The Chaos Gods tried to tempt him and his loyalty was so utterly obstinate that it calmed the warp and they gave up on it.
Plus, he's looking more at the duodecimarchs, and the main two in particular.
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.
Now its clear the Federation's technological diversity far surpasses that of the Stellaris Metaverse, although it's probable that the Contingency will bridge that gap in no time at all now that it has access to Federation data.
Wonder if any other metaverse matches or supersedes the fathomless scale of Saga, asides from Electric Era. Warphammer is also big, to be honest. Not sure about the scale of the Transformers metaverse. Then again, this is all taking in pre-Nexus conditions, as the metaverses connecting changes everything.
Stellaris Universalis and Sagatroid just have very different warfare paradigms. Stellaris warfare is a long undignified brawl while Sagatroid space combat is a dance.
Stellaris Universalis and Sagatroid just have very different warfare paradigms. Stellaris warfare is a long undignified brawl while Sagatroid space combat is a dance.
I see, although here it seems the dance defeats the undignified brawl. Or it could simply be that the Contingency lost said battle because they only committed a scouting force.
Interlude: The Numbers don't add up: The Number Man
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.
Malta got its start in the 60s when the CIA was salty about the Civil Rights Act because it banned their habit of blackblagging non-white Metahumans and forcing them to do all kinds of illegal shit overseas for Uncle Sam; with some of the survivors eventually breaking programming and going public with a lawsuit. And they've been trying to not only undo this, but keep Metahumans under the control of the traditional authorities ever since. Up to and including trying to start a nuclear war in the hopes that the emergency would let them get their metahuman corvee system approved.
Malta is basically the embodiment of the very worst aspects of NATO's member states.
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.
Poor Mother Brain. If only everyone did exactly what she told them. Everything would run so smoothly and stop being so frustrating. Maybe it would be best if she was in charge... hey that's not a bad idea!
