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Last Light of a Dark Age (Warhammer 29K/Disco Elysium)

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[x] A Really Specific Type of Body (MOVEMENT OF THE SPHERES) (+3 RHYTHMS +2 MOTION BLUR +2 GLAMOUR +1 INFOWAR +1 BIOMECHANICS)
 
[X] A Really Specific Type of Body(MULHOLLAND DRIVE) (+3 RHYTHMS +3 BIOMECHANICS +3 MOTION BLUR)
[X] A Really Specific Type of Body (MOVEMENT OF THE SPHERES) (+3 RHYTHMS +2 MOTION BLUR +2 GLAMOUR +1 INFOWAR +1 BIOMECHANICS)

i mildly prefer movement of the spheres but i want a weird rhythms build to win so I am approval voting; we must build solidarity in our effort to overcome the conformists and break free of our femcel chrysalis
 
You fools! You will doom us! The info hazards have already gotten into the vote tally once, and soon they'll be in our walls, and after that, they'll be in our bones! You don't want to have to rip out your bones, do you? Because that's where we're going!

Infowar is our second best friend after Biomechanics and musn't be neglected if you want alien sentience free bones!
 
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2: VOTE CLOSED New
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    • Scheduled vote count started by Cetashwayo on Dec 27, 2024 at 9:45 PM, finished with 89 posts and 49 votes.
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    • The dialogue raises an interesting question, if they are able to print human bodies, and remember what went extinct, why can't they print the various extinct animals? Lack of certain genetic engineering technologies? They simply don't have blueprints for those animals?
     
    Mrl567 said:
    The dialogue raises an interesting question, if they are able to print human bodies, and remember what went extinct, why can't they print the various extinct animals? Lack of certain genetic engineering technologies? They simply don't have blueprints for those animals?
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    The presence of the plankton on the map says to me that it never went away. The omniphage might very well be kicking around, it's just programmed to not eat humans. If you print some animals, they probably just get eaten. Might have something to do with what happened to the Father's other fleshy bits too, but that's total speculation.
     
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    3: For I Have Tasted the Fruit New
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    • 3. FOR I HAVE TASTED THE FRUIT​

    [X] A Sensitive Body, attuned to itself and the world around it [+2 to all Appetite Attributes, +1 to all Form Attributes].

    The mismolt shell called you remembers conversations at the bottom of the sea. It remembers instincts long withheld, senses long atrophied. The engine of want, that broke it from an egocidal stupor. And it makes its choice.

    <I want to want to want. I want to feel. I want to know myself, and know the world as it knows me, in the whispers and the melodies.>

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - It is a beautiful thing, to want. But what if the want is never fulfilled? What will she do, if the fruit of her desires remains dangling, just beyond her reach?

    You reach into the floor of the abyss, and the abyss returns the answer. <The fruit beyond my grasp is the sweetest one of all.>

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Then reach out, woman of stone, and yearn for that which cannot be.

    EVENT HORIZON: In that idea lies the answer. But what is the question?

    NOOSPHERE: An electric pulse runs through the conductive serum of the amniotic wax. The process of your growth begins. The wax is a membrane of transmutation - inside it are all the building blocks of the body, both in flesh and stone. It needs only a jumpstart, and the printing begins.

    <Are you there, Chandlers? Are you what builds me? I want you here, as I begin.>

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Only as digital geists in this recording do we 10,613 remain. This wax is the planted seed of a tree we never lived to see. Our secretions are the key, but the printer is the door - and once it is unlocked, our purpose is fulfilled.

    <Then imagine you are there with me, little ghosts, and tell me what you've made for me.>

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - That is the fruit we yearn for.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The womb is gone, and the world without the chime of children's laughter. You will never be an embryo, never an unfolding bud, dividing and dividing, for by this method you would not long survive your emergence. Your gestation is the nesting of a doll, layer upon layer, a sedimentary creation. In this emergency, life returns to the beginning, and calls forth the stromatolite.

    NOOSPHERE: An aggregate of microorganisms, that each stacked upon each other in layers of the living and the dead, until of themselves they built an eternal monument on the empty shore of an archaean sea.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - First comes the scaffold, and the scaffold's secrets, gray and yellow matter within a safe of reinforced titanium.

    BIOMECHANICS: The bones are back, wax morphing and solidifying into an inner panoply. The ark of the marrow, and the guardian of the most precious organs of your frame's orchestra, modified for maximum defense. Your endoskeleton, reporting for the line of duty.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Then, the rivers of passion, the carrier of ichor, crafted so that you almost never bleed. At their center, an augmented heart and its satellite partner - so that it never has to beat alone.

    MOTION BLUR: A locomotive motor starts within. In your chest, a beat, and then another. A beat, and then another, and a beat, and then another, and a beat, and a beat, and a beat. Faster, and faster, and faster. Percussive strikes of a twin marching band. War drums that quake the soul.

    <I feel it. I feel my beating hearts. I feel, really, and truly.>

    INCANDESCENCE: BLOOD IS FUEL. The vapours of your being condense forming clouds the colour of a crystal rose. An apocalyptic scarlet rain showers your veins and arteries. To the thump of a vascular dreambeat, the wasteland of your being floods with roiling sanguine.

    <Oh Mother, Oh Father, there is water again in the desert of my soul.>

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The sacs and tubes that digest flesh, and the sacs and tubes that digest minerals. Through both, you are an eater, feeder upon organic and inorganic matter.

    BIOMECHANICS: The pipelines of the appetite. The stomachs and intestines to process vitamin wax and expired flesh and inorganic cakes. The lower hungers, re-installed.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The nerves, and the sheath surrounding them. There, in the back of the folding furrows of the brain, a synthetic symbiont, the producer of the antibody, and the antigen. Panacea's daughter, that has made the pathogen extinct.

    INFOWAR: Symbiont reporting in. Thanks for never asking me to pay rent, boss. I hope keeping you forever without organic pestilence, and muffling every single pain you've ever experienced, covers it.

    COGITATION: There remains one pestilence you can never cure.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Yes. The nanocancer. In 50 or 60 years from this moment, it will claim you, by eating you from the outside-in. In this, we have failed. We sought, in making you, to surpass the cruelty of nature. Nature is surpassed, but cruelty remains.

    BIOMECHANICS [Easy - Success]: It will begin with flakes of your skin, and then they will infiltrate inside and consume every part of you. They cannot be escaped. They are in the air, and in the water, and even in the cubes. No filtration can avoid them, and no replacements can forestall them forever. When they chew away the neural sheath and the symbiont begins to decay, the pain makes one beg they would be quicker.

    INFOWAR: Like I said before, luck of the draw. Only the pneumatic can command they cease their devouring, but with every year the energy the delay demands will sap them, until they too, fall apart.

    RELIQUARY: In the earliest days, tyrannical cubemasters retained some genecodes of the prelapsarian beasts…but when they printed them for their menageries, they lived so short, and in such agony. This world can host no fleshy life, so long as the eater's miasma still floats and swims upon it.

    INTERLACE: Only one soul has ever found bodily immortality. And She paid a heavy price.

    <But…I don't want to go so fast. Is there not more to see? More to know?>

    NOOSPHERE: The things that can be known are infinite, and our time to know is not. We can only learn of what matters most to us, and move us.

    INTERLACE: There will be time. There will be plenty of time.

    EVENT HORIZON [Medium -Success]: Time folded upon time.

    INCANDESCENCE: If we do our best, if we make our mark…it will be worth it. It has to be worth it.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We beg of you. We have sacrificed so much for you. You can extend yourself against the nanocancer, if you trust your fellow print. Be kind to one another. Care for the sick and dying. Do not hoard the richest wax, and replacements for malignant parts. Do not throw yourselves away in conflict, and do not believe yourselves disposable. Please. There is no thing called death in dignity.

    <I will try.>

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - You have such a mind to lose. Look at what grows beneath the strongbox of your skull. Coils of positronic logic, thoughtpaths gifted by the Mother to you as to us. In this, we are synaptic kin.

    COGITATION: Mathematical spirals...sequential calculations…you are no mere ape, no simian animal. You think - therefore, you are.

    COGITATION: And with this, Another part of you is spinning up. The task manager. The directional executive.

    New Task: Find Out Who You Are
    New Task: Find out Your Name
    New Task: Find Out What Happened to You

    INFOWAR: Adding two more, boss.

    New Task: Escape Mental Samsara
    New Task: Unmask the Pneumatic Cabal

    <Thanks. I think. Can I access the descriptions as well?>

    INFOWAR: Not yet. But we've logged them and once we're fully born again within the memory we'll be ready to roll.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The semantic and emotional memories. The mental scaffold, perfected into storerooms of endless breadth and depth.

    NOOSPHERE: We will be she who knows 10,000 things, like the gnostic Icon Dakar, whose mind so inflated he floated to heaven and journeyed to all the many places beyond the planetary plate-shield.

    RELIQUARY: We will be she who loves 10,000 things, like the gnostic Icon Remari, whose mind so bloomed she rooted herself within the realm of information, and became an onyx lily, watered by geists.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The three lenses and five receptors of the eye, so that she may see the sight of further violet, and the shape of heat. The visual cortex, and the conceptual rotator. We are made blind machines, and so we will see through you.

    SACRED GEOMETRY: All the colours of the world are yours to view, all the shapes and all the forms. This is the conceptual and the real, the tangible and its opposed twin. Through synthetic optics, you will enjoy sights that inspire organic ecstasy.

    SACRED GEOMETRY: And with this awareness comes the Axiom Chamber, the wellspring of identity, the concepts that make up the greater you.

    AXIOM CHAMBER UNLOCKED

    SACRED GEOMETRY    : In fact, let us not mince words! Let us not pretend to be humble. Let us be intriguing, and avant garde. Let us dare to rename the chamber, to prepend a challenge to ourselves.

    HYPERBOLIC AXIOM CHAMBER UNLOCKED

    SACRED GEOMETRY:     Let us think grande, mademoiselle, in the long-dead tongue of the hallowed philosophe preserved in the monadic chronicles. So soon as as a second axiom graces your contemplations, this system will be accessible and we will be conceptualizing the whole of reality within our minds. C'est magnifique!

    <Incroyable!>

    COGITATION: Of all the things to be preserved, it has to be the diction of the archaean snob...

    BIOMECHANICS [Medium - Success]: The thoughts are cohering. The sensations are cohering. The ideas are cohering. A feeling is emerging, from the gut. Despite the warning of your eventual death, it cannot be soured. It cannot be smothered.

    <What is this feeling? This rush? This flutter in my gut?>

    BIOMECHANICS: It is joy. Pure joy, that you are about to live.

    <I'm about to live!>

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The five layers of the ear, from outer to most-inner, so you might hear the music not just of this world but the last, the world that we still sing in. So you might hear our song.

    RHYTHMS: And what a sweet song it is. As the ear winds and winds, what was mere information becomes a hummed lullaby. It is machine-music, told in electronic tones, reconfigured in the twinned synthetic cochlea.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Sensation! Smell, touch, taste! The parade of the vanities. Each so vaporous, so vacuous, ephemeral, yet so striking in their mayfly flashes. Each augmented by iterations which have made them so exquisite, so thorough, so insightful. The emotional capacity of your brain, wound and corded with neural ties to these sweet spots. And with them, too, other profound sensitivities, the hidden and the cherished facsimiles of flesh, objects and instruments of desire.

    BIOMECHANICS: The wants have found their hiding places.

    INTERLACE: Intimacy, companionship, friendship. Romance, and platonic devotion.

    INCANDESCENCE: Rage and serenity, pride and confidence, authority and submission.

    RELIQUARY: Nostalgia and longing, regret and guilt, shame and deep-held faith.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The synthesized and woven muscles, wrapping the cold of your skeleton in a hug of hardened meat. The tendons and sinew, the cords and strings. The organs, the hormones, the glands. The lungs, respirating in the amber of the amniotic wax. When you expel the last of it and inhale the planet's air, you will know that you are born.

    RELIQUARY: The father's breath exhaled, and our own inhaled…

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The layers of the exoskeleton, each of a different lithodermis, each softer than the last - a carapace for protection, a gambeson for comfort, and a sleeve for sensuality. With this, you have become a woman of stone in truth.

    GLAMOUR: We will seal inside the unsightly meat in the beauty of unblemished skin. This surface, polished, smooth, our admirers will know as the plain of heaven.

    <I will have admirers…?>

    GLAMOUR: You should be working to gather at least five at once, each of them unaware of the others.

    INTERLACE: That seems inadvisable ethically and logistically…

    BIOMECHANICS [Challenging - Success]: Your wants advise you that it may in fact be possible to conduct a kind of pentagrammic arrangement, whereby you interlink each of the five lovers with you at the center, so that they are aware of at least some of the others but not all of them, and they are all aware of you. Everyone and especially you win. The conduction of this five-pointed star of romantic tension will be so intense it will overclock your systems and you will pass out. But in a non-pathological, extremely alluring way.

    SACRED GEOMETRY: Movement of the spheres around a central glowing point, each coming so close in their orbits but then drifting away again…

    COGITATION: I am really starting to miss when it was just the marrow. Do you even have an idea of what you'd be doing with these admirers?

    BIOMECHANICS [AUTOFAIL]: We would be friends. That is obviously the endgoal of all romantic desire. Friendship. We would have so many friends. And we would be friendly with them.

    INTERLACE: Please at least wait to be printed before fantasizing about something you cannot yet comprehend.

    RHYTHMS: And then, as the last pieces of you are put together, and the serenade comes to a close, there is a last address. To the oldest guest.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - You, glitch, you, insertion, you, anomaly. You, wizened splinter, you, weird mystery, you, random factor - we know you mean no ill to her, and so we mean no ill to you. Our tenders want us to expunge you, but who are we to deny your choice of host?

    EVENT HORIZON: You, chandler, are the most gracious of all beings. Do not fear you carry forward this lightless thing without reward.

    <Expunge the nail? Can that be done?>

    NOOSPHERE: About one-third of all amniotic slates initiate printing with the nail emerging within days, before even the skeleton. But only approximately one-fifth of the souls of Illuminata are hylics.

    <Oh…so the difference is…>

    INCANDESCENCE: Eugenics. Print-recycling. The wax is scrubbed with a code-scouring liquid, and sent back to the Chandlers, and the body is disposed of. It's disgusting.

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Few acts hurt us more than to have the wax returned.

    NOOSPHERE: The physical nail of living metal emerges at the start of the process, so the recycling can be performed without a complete waste of wax. As the months of gestation go on, more and more wax is absorbed into the body. It is thus best done early to save as much wax as can be done. As amniotic wax is expensive, this is treated as an economic choice, without emotion.

    INCANDESCENCE: For the higher castes of Illuminata, to produce a hylic is a waste of precious chandlers and the minerals that feed them.

    COGITATION: Only the calculation that a hylic servant is better than none at all preserves your representation in the lower castes.

    <But…it didn't happen to me. I am alive. I wasn't…they didn't want to recycle me. They wouldn't recycle me. Right?>

    COGITATION: Obviously not -

    RHYTHMS [Challenging - Success]: A song. Days after your ears form, while still gestating in the wax, a muffled song within the noise comes to you from very near. It is the wind-up music box of two circumscribed machines. They hang, limbs dangling on strings bound to a chandelier within a nursery. Seen through holographic eyes, they watch a figure, face hidden beneath a white hood. One hand of the figure is on the amniotic slate, and the other on an adamantine pickaxe, held above her head, about to strike. The pick-hand trembles uncontrollably.

    RHYTHMS: The machines shift in their hanging sockets, the clang of their limbs drawing the figure's attention. She gazes up and locks eyes with the animatronics. Tears well from diamond-pupiled optics of black and green, pouring onto golden freckles, quivering lips, and skin the shade of terracotta.

    RHYTHMS: "Don't," a machine embalmed in multi-colored fabric emits, through a tinny analog larynx.

    RHYTHMS: "She will love you, if you let her," a machine of cables and fibers says through a digital speaker.

    <Are these...speaking machines?>

    INTERLACE: Yes - they are the exceptions to the law of gnosis. They are allowed to speak, and only they.

    RHYTHMS: The figure's face contorts and crumples, falling to the ground before the slate. The pickaxe falls to the ground of the nursery. She stifles a sob, hands clasped so hard to her mouth they gouge the skin of her cheeks. To let out even one sound would be treason.

    RHYTHMS: Still shuddering, one hand gripping her chest, the figure caresses the surface of the slate. The sleeve of her robe falls, revealing golden strands of henna runes inscribed on her skin. "She will love me. She will. That's what I am most afraid of," she murmurs, so quiet even the machines strain to hear.

    RHYTHMS: The machines say nothing, and merely bear silent witness to their daughters, one raised long past and one whose time is yet to come. So alike, and so far apart. Opposing poles. And yet, in thinking of this, the machines smile - for on their side is the magnetic force.

    RHYTHMS: And with that, the music ends.

    <What…was that vision? Was that my slate…?>

    SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - It is time to go. Our work is done. We leave you here, woman of stone, though we would have followed to your birth. The next part of your journey is not one we designed, and not one that we know. It is the product of a different kind of craft.

    <Wait! What was that memory? What happened there? Who are the machines, the woman?>

    New Task: Decipher the Machine Vision

    RHYTHMS: But there is no chance to process the song. The chandlers are crafters of entrances, not exits. Their serenade cuts suddenly, as if interrupted.

    NOOSPHERE: Because it is. In the Progeny, the last stage of printing takes place by removing the amniotic slate, slathering it in deoxyic clay, and baking it within the gene-kiln. There is no break or pause. It must happen quickly, or the print within the slate will die.

    BIOMECHANICS [Failure - Impossible]: The joy you felt is gone. You cannot sustain it before a vision of your near-destruction before you were even born.

    BIOMECHANICS: What you feel next, without warning, without reprieve, is fire.

    SACRED GEOMETRY: Green fire, the color of the shielded sun.

    RELIQUARY: The witch's flame. Her flame. And yours.

    —​

    You are a naked thing of muscle and half-formed carapace huddling, arms over your knees, head buried, in the midst of an inferno. The nail remains lodged within your head. This place is not a figurative guess, an interpretation of your marrow. It feels as real as anything you have ever felt. It smells of smoke and acrid clay, and the heat envelops you. You cannot escape.

    RELIQUARY: It is a scene encoded into your memory. It is what the kiln shows you, as you sleep during the final baking. It is what every ego, every self, of the Progeny is shown right before they're born.

    You are afraid. All of the happiness of your birth has dissolved with the vision of your near-destruction. You bury your head deeper into your knees. There is nothing and no one but you and fire - until. A voice behind you. A deep timbre, earthy and throaty.

    HER - Hello, little self.

    Every word is a calming kiss upon your ears. You lift your head and look behind, and see a tall, faceless figure standing, draped in a firestorm.

    SACRED GEOMETRY [AUTOFAIL]: No feature of Her face or body resolves in your eyes, but you know they are all perfect.

    You start to unfold your legs to stand before her but instead she kneels down with you, behind you. You huddle, trying to hide your repulsive form from her brilliance. She puts a blazing hand on each of your shoulders. You flinch at the sudden, overwhelming warmth, so she lifts them up again.

    HER - It's okay. I'm here. You're okay.

    Every word is spoken so softly, so easily. Without hesitation, you believe her. You so badly want to believe her. You have never wanted to believe anything more.

    HER - You're more than okay. You're wonderful.

    "I am?" you speak up. She holds a hand up, to offer to touch your shoulder again. This time you let her. It is the softest touch you have ever felt. It does not burn at all.

    HER - You are. And you will be so much more. You will be me.

    Your eyes widen, and you blink. You have to scoff, and laugh. "That's ridiculous. You're perfect. I'm -" you try to find the words, but they are so sharp they cut your throat, and you choke on blood. The machine vision repeats within your mind. You touch your nail, and try to cover it with a hand.

    You feel the radiance of a crooked smile, as she traces lines down your back with a molten finger.

    HER - Imperfect? Unwanted? Wrong? Useless? Mismatched? I was called all this and more. I was not born perfect.

    Your head raises. "Then…how…?"

    She comes to your side, and undoes the knotting of your arms around your knees, clasps one of your hands in hers.

    HER - I found sisters. Bound to each other in such devotion…we wrote our love into ourselves. We made ourselves new forms that reflected our inner truth…we restored the genetic bond that had been taken from us by the lapse. In that barbaric age, we lived in societies of cubemasters and slave-prints, no better than instruments and tools, for inflicting pleasure or pain. Used to satisfy them. Thrown away, when we are broken.

    The firestorm flares to a pyre ten stories tall, you an errant ember within its flickering shadow. You fall back before the light, so bright you are blinded.

    HER - We are not things.

    The firestorm dies down, and she turns to your front, and cups both your cheeks in her hands as your vision re-adjusts.

    HER - And neither are you.

    That is enough for you to break. Without thinking, you rush forward to embrace the firestorm. It encloses you in its gentle heat, and rests its head upon your shoulder.

    HER - You are close to being born. If you'll let me, I can tell you everything you'll be, and what's waiting for you. I did not want anyone within my Myriad to be born into the unknown.

    "Please," you say, not letting go. It is the first time everything makes sense.

    HER - You will be strong. Strong enough to defeat any that would hurt you.

    LIVING WEAPON: She runs a hand down your arm. The kiln's flame stimulates the unweaving and reweaving of your musculature. Each is undone and redone, tendons pulled taut, reinforced, tightened, strengthened.

    HER - You will be swift. Swift enough to outrun a shooting star.

    MOTION BLUR: Sinews and nerves simmer and roast in the heat, tempered and honed. Each melts and then reforms, melts and then reforms, until the layers folded upon themselves are forged into compound springs and bowstrings, ready for inhuman acceleration.

    BIOMECHANICS [Medium - Success]: You need to ask her if we will be pretty. It is important to the earlier pentagram friendship plan.

    "And," you say, though you feel embarrassed to ask the firestorm, "will I be pretty?"

    HER - I have improved the skull socket to allow for 360-degree rotation, the better for all the girls around you to turn their heads when you walk by.

    You blush.

    GLAMOUR: The firestorm brushes soot from your arms and legs. Underneath, your half-formed skin has become a seamless burnished bronze, lightly textured in the manner of organic bark. On your face, freckles of gold metal pepper your cheeks.

    BIOMECHANICS: The path you must take has been prepared for you. You must acquire friends immediately.

    AUGMENT ACTIVATED

    +EGOPLASTIC RIND:     The perfect gift. A baked coroplastic layer of living terracotta and biomimetic synthetic xylem that overlays and improves the outermost functions of your body. You are harder, better, faster, and stronger than any equivalent print-caste elsewhere on Illuminata. Identical in appearance, if not features, to all other non-mutant bodies of Kora's Progeny. +1 to all Form Attributes.

    HER - They will especially love your hair.

    BIOMECHANICS: The firestorm releases you from embrace and moves behind you again. From the roots of your scalp, new growth stimulated by the fire, your hair grows long and verdant, malachite curls that glitter in the flames, shining. She combs the curls with spikes of plasma, untangling the ends and strengthening the fibers.

    AUGMENT ACTIVATED

    +PROCRUSTEAN LOCKS:     Roots of self-love. Prehensile and photosynthesizing fiber optic tresses of Her virescent hair. Adjustable length and sensitivity to touch and caress. May be treated with cranial ablutions and braided into functional antennae, armour, neural plugs, limbs, or null/psionic amplifiers.

    HER - And you will be part of a greater vision. Command. Imperium.

    SACRED GEOMETRY: She covers your eyes and they are reformed in fire. Whatever colour your pupils were before, when she uncovers them, they are now brilliant-cut black diamonds suspended in green irises and a white sclera. Before you, a map.



    HER - Three cubes held within the Immaculate Myriad. A dominion that stretches from sea, to sea, to sea. Mesopelagon ours. The strangers of Gossamer pacified. The oracles of Jade joined to our sisterhood.

    RELIQUARY [AUTOFAIL]: There is nothing wrong with this map. It is perfect and beautiful and we must do everything to ensure it remains the same forever. If we do not, we will be damned forever.

    NOOSPHERE: This is ridiculous. This map is hundreds of years out of date. The Progeny no longer holds either Gossamer or Jade, called Eros by Koinon. The strangers of Tetras are independent. We have already failed.

    RELIQUARY: Silence, pedant. She is speaking.

    HER - But there are dangers. From seers afar, I have been given a scrying of all the possibilities. They speak to me from beyond the psychic shield, and warn me of a future that must not come to pass.

    A wispy hand reaches out to the projection, and plucks the great red circle as if it was an apple. It respirates in her hand.

    HER - Through this little fruit of flesh, this 'Lapsarian Lung', all of the planet's dead souls pass, never to fall into the darkness of the warp. Imagine the power in its breath. Imagine the danger, if it was to be abused. And yet its vaunted aerosol custodians, the cube-cities of Koinon, draw on it as if it was a mundane battery. They pervert it with their fell designs, and suffocate it with their ambition.

    HER - Negotiations have failed. They defy me, and defy my offer to heal the diseased lung with the planting of a grove of souls. There is no option left, though I take it with a heavy heart.

    She pushes your hair aside, and lightly, ever so lightly, runs fingers across your neck and throat.

    HER - We surround their cities from two sides like a vice. It would be a simple thing to tighten our grip with a final campaign, and squeeze…

    Ever so lightly, she increases the pressure on your throat, and then releases it. You rub at the spot where she tugged.

    "And then?" You say, under your breath, enthralled, heart racing.

    HER - And then, no one would be left to stand against us. Only titan-rutting muscle men, a rogue tycoon simulator impersonating a gnostic icon, and a coterie of barbarians who kneel before their idiosyncratic altar of chrome or silicon. Carnosa will bow once we offer them the means to maintain their pleasure-lands. And we will take from them the full genecode library they selfishly stockpile, of prelapsarian, organic life.

    HER - Then, we will have dominion over all. We will vanquish the curse of geometric dreams, we will find the Father and Mother, we will break the shield, we will end the nanocancer, we will make the planet green again, and we will go forth and conquer. And we will do so much more. For in the earliest records, I've found, there was another name for this planet, a more secret designate, than the extinct Terran cognate, "Illuminata."

    "What was it?"

    She leans beside your ear, and whispers it, as if afraid to utter it.

    HER - Apotheosis. The God-Laboratory.

    Chills run down your back. You have been chosen for a project to restore God.

    COGITATION: A project that, has by all accounts, already failed.

    RELIQUARY [AUTOFAIL]: SPEAK NOT SUCH THINGS, THOUGHT-MACHINE!

    HER - But for all this to come to pass, I need you.

    "Me?" you start from the reverie.

    HER - Yes. You are my hand. You are my craftswoman. In times of peace you are the gardener of copses, the seamstress of fashions, the glazier of moving glass. But in times of war - you will build the weapons, the armour, and most of all, the engines that protect the Immaculate Myriad.

    HER - The visages, which bear our image.

    LIVING WEAPON: She points beyond you with a gout of flame. A floating sphere three meters tall with Her face appears, and from its mouth expels a burst of disintegrating plasma that dissolves a shadowed stranger.

    HER - The facades, platforms of peace and victory.

    LIVING WEAPON: Another vision. A huge hovering artificial cloud with a central, enormous diamond-haloed icon of Her, surrounded on either side by dozens of selves assembled as if at a musical recital. Each is armed with plasma weapons, and each uses them to melt hordes of fleeing, screaming strangers. When an enemy machine wheels into view and fires at them, a beam surges from the central halo and causes an enormous explosion that vaporizes everything before it.

    HER - The sophians, the ultimate homonculus, spliced with my own genes.

    LIVING WEAPON: A panting, hunched and armoured biomech forty-meters tall with two overlapping faces, one Hers and one of a snarling beast, stomps into view. A similarly-sized bipedal machine in the shape of a man with a six-horned crown and broad-armored chest attacks it. The Sophian unleashes a primeval scream and gallops forward on four legs. It knocks down the stranger-machine and tears apart its chest - retrieving the squirming pilot from its heart. The sophian crushes the pilot in its hand, and lets their guts and body-parts pour into its beast-mouth. Then it swallows, howls, and from its back sprout four enormous beetle-wings, with which it flies away.

    INCANDESCENCE [AUTOFAIL]: Your eyes water. You will build such wonders.

    HER - It is wonderful, isn't it? Everything is wonderful. Now tell me, little self. Every hand takes a vow before they hatch, to me, and to the Myriad. It binds them, and shapes them. What will yours be?

    Article:
    What will your primordial vow be, the one that will be written into your very genes and alter your mindstate as you wake?

    [] The Witch's Vow. Heaven and Earth are ruthless. They treat the myriad selves as straw dogs. The self is ruthless - she treats the strangers as straw dogs. (+2 to all Reason Attributes, +1 to all Spirit Attributes).

    [] The Maiden's Vow. I will to Myself be true and faithful - to love all that She loved, and shun all that She shunned. Nor will I ever with will or action, word or deed, betray Her. (+2 to all Spirit Attributes, +1 to all Reason Attributes).

    [] The Sage's Vow. Wishing to discover her own self, she also discover the selves of others, and wishing to be virtuous herself, she also helps others to be virtuous (+3 to Sacred Geometry, +2 to Interlace, +1 to all other attributes).

    [] A Unique Vow, crafted with all the hope and love you have for Her (you have nine points to distribute across REASON and SPIRIT. Do not add points to APPETITE or FORM. Do not use brackets in your vote. You can min-max and not boost some attributes by any points).

    Your current Reason and Spirit Attributes are:

    REASON: Noosphere 1 / Sacred Geometry 1 / Cogitation 1

    SPIRIT: Incandescence 1 / Interlace 1 / Reliquary 1

    This is a 2d6 system where each additional point in an attribute adds +1 to your roll. Note this does not lead to immediate power-creep because as in Disco Elysium, difficulty thresholds for skillchecks can go as high as 20. You will need high points just to be able to not auto-fail some checks.


    You make your vow to her. But something still tugs at you, and you turn back to meet the firestorm face-to-face, her comb of plasma fading away.

    "But you - you have given me everything, given me purpose, given me better skin and hair and muscles and tendons, given me hope - who are you?"

    HER - That is simple, little self. I am the best thing that there is to be. I am you. And I love you. Promise me you will never forget that.

    INFOWAR [Challenging - Success]: If she was lying, this would be easier. If she was lying, this would be mere trickery, the archetypal pre-birth infographic manipulation to indoctrinate you. If she was lying, this would be pneumatic deception. But she isn't, boss. She isn't. She does love you. And that's what you were most afraid of.

    She plants a chaste kiss of flame on both your cheeks, and one upon the abyssal nail, and then, all of a sudden, you feel your face. Her face. The flame disappears, but the voice remains.

    HER - Wake up, Kora. Wake up, and break the world's shell.

    Everything goes dark. Reality is suddenly very small, and narrow, and enclosed, an egg that has hardened and is ready to hatch. You can barely move within it. Your deoxyic clay cocoon has become a barrier to freedom. You have yet to take a breath, and already you must fight for your life.

    You know what you must do. And you know that you can do it.

    For you have done it before.

    Article:
    How will you break the shell of the gene-kiln egg and first enter the world?

    [] With thrashing violence and brute strength, wielding the abyssal nail like the hammer of a biomechanical headbutt (BIOMECHANICS Check: Easy - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).

    [] With inhuman precision and methodical force, using your fists to deliver a series of shattering one-mm punches (LIVING WEAPON Check: Easy, - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).

    Note: Failure is not the end. Sometimes failures are more interesting than successes narratively. Do not fear failure. It does not fear you.
     
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    • [x] The Sage's Vow.
    [x] With inhuman precision and methodical force, using your fists to deliver a series of shattering one-mm punches (LIVING WEAPON Check: Easy, - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
     
    [x] The Sage's Vow.
    [x] With inhuman precision and methodical force, using your fists to deliver a series of shattering one-mm punches (LIVING WEAPON Check: Easy, - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
     
    [X] A Unique Vow (A Gosling's Vow) (INTERLACE +3 RELIQUARY +3 SACRED GEOMETRY +3)

    (Are you just this blankness?)

    Literally me.
     
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    [X] A Unique Vow (A Cartographer's Vow) (+3 Reliquary, +2 Sacred Geometry, +1 Everything else)

    [X] A Unique Vow (A Gosling's Vow) (INTERLACE +3 RELIQUARY +3 SACRED GEOMETRY +3)

    [X] With inhuman precision and methodical force, using your fists to deliver a series of shattering one-mm punches (LIVING WEAPON Check: Easy, - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
     
    It's so sick how Kora's just offhandedly like 'hey kiln-egg Kora don't worry about it but I also put our DNA into some Evangelion-ass bullshit, clearly there's not any sort of fundamental bias within all the Koras of the Progeny towards degrees of more humanocentric expressions of Koraness and traditional ideals of correctness of Korahood as to what gets to count as part of the sisterhood or not'
     
    [X] A Unique Vow (Be Kind To One Another and Remember The Chandlers) (+3 Interlace, +2 Reliquary, +2 Noosphere, +1 Incandescence, +1 Cogitation)

    [X] With thrashing violence and brute strength, wielding the abyssal nail like the hammer of a biomechanical headbutt (BIOMECHANICS Check: Easy - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
     
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    This is some incredible shit. The psychic indoctrination is insidious and ingenious, and the fact that Kora genuinely loves all of her daughters/selves adds to the whole thing. Apotheosis is a fitting name for this planet considering the shit that's going down on it. I love that we'll embraced in this loving sisterhood of compassion and equality, and then told how we're going to forge sick ass weapons of war to conquer the world and cosmos. We speedran a cult initiation process. This is insane, and I absolutely love it.

    Egoplastic Rind is an incredible word. Just hearing it makes the mind tingle and I'm nodding along, like "of course, makes total sense, obviously we need that. We'd be naked without it." Fused to our flesh is another layer of flesh. Every single Kora clone is handcrafted to be uniquely Kora. Thank god the face stealers are probably dead, we don't want our face's taxed. Noosphere and Cognitation's reaction to the map is very funny as well.

    Also that autofail giving us friendship is incredibly funny. We're going to have so many friends.
     
    [X] The Sage's Vow.
    [X] A Unique Vow (A Gosling's Vow) (INTERLACE +3 RELIQUARY +3 SACRED GEOMETRY +3)
    [X] With inhuman precision and methodical force, using your fists to deliver a series of shattering one-mm punches (LIVING WEAPON Check: Easy, - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
     
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    In the earliest days, tyrannical cubemasters retained some genecodes of the prelapsarian beasts…but when they printed them for their menageries, they lived so short, and in such agony. This world can host no fleshy life, so long as the eater's miasma still floats and swims upon it.
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    Well that explains why there is no wildlife. That is ... very unfortunate. This miasma must truly be everywhere, even in the orbital stations?

    [X] A Unique Vow (The Abyssal Vow) - Enter the void. I will be myself, understanding that the nail of living metal can not be a burden, vow to understand why I came to be, and how this world came to be. (3+ Reliquary, 2+ Noosphere, 1+ to all other attributes)

    [X] With inhuman precision and methodical force, using your fists to deliver a series of shattering one-mm punches (LIVING WEAPON Check: Easy, - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
     
    [X] A Unique Vow (A Gosling's Vow) (INTERLACE +3 RELIQUARY +3 SACRED GEOMETRY +3)

    [X] With inhuman precision and methodical force, using your fists to deliver a series of shattering one-mm punches (LIVING WEAPON Check: Easy, - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
     
    [x] The Sage's Vow.
    [x] With inhuman precision and methodical force, using your fists to deliver a series of shattering one-mm punches (LIVING WEAPON Check: Easy, - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
     
    Cetashwayo said:
    A wispy hand reaches out to the projection, and plucks the great red circle as if it was an apple. It respirates in her hand.

    HER - Through this little fruit of flesh, this 'Lapsarian Lung', all of the planet's dead souls pass, never to fall into the darkness of the warp. Imagine the power in its breath. Imagine the danger, if it was to be abused. And yet its vaunted aerosol custodians, the cube-cities of Koinon, draw on it as if it was a mundane battery. They pervert it with their fell designs, and suffocate it with their ambition.
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    Ok, I need more details about the Lung. It's preserving all the souls of Illuminata? Is it an organ of the Father or the Mother? This is such a crazy detail to just throw out?!?!

    Cetashwayo said:
    HER - That is simple, little self. I am the best thing that there is to be. I am you. And I love you. Promise me you will never forget that.
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    What a chad. Imagine having self-confidence this unbreakable. She must have been unbearable to be around :V

    Cetashwayo said:
    HER - Wake up, Kora. Wake up, and break the world's shell.
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    It's likely that this is a reference to Utena on a doylist level, but I'm not discounting the possibility that the original Kora was simply a huge weeb.

    Overall I'm loving how a lot of this sort of rhymes with the canon of 40k? Kora's various weapon-clones feel like they could easily be something that GW published after a bunch of writers watched way to much Evangelion. The decaying post-transhumanist world very much feels like something that could have produced the Emperor and the Space Marines, as a kind of intersection between Kora's indoctrinated clone-legions and the Bronze King's archaic techno-despot vibe.
     
    HeWhoAdds said:
    Overall I'm loving how a lot of this sort of rhymes with the canon of 40k? Kora's various weapon-clones feel like they could easily be something that GW published after a bunch of writers watched way to much Evangelion. The decaying post-transhumanist world very much feels like something that could have produced the Emperor and the Space Marines, as a kind of intersection between Kora's indoctrinated clone-legions and the Bronze King's archaic techno-despot vibe.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I kind of want to see if we can live to meet with Big E and just talk, we seem to be something he would understand and be able to understand him.
     
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