Thanks to a combination of a flagging muse and the fact that I will be busy during the summer this quest is on hiatus. Hopefully I can get back to working on this quest sometime soon. I will try to work on some other things but no guarantees on that.
End of Indefinite Hiatus-6/22 + Summary of quest to this point
QM:For anyone new or old I am starting to work again on this quest after the more then a month long hiatus. Progress may be sporadic as I am still going to be busy but I am once again actively working on this quest. This is just a little synopsis of what happened so far from the beginning, nothing too detailed but enough. A little refresher for the old and an okay summary for the new.
You are Alpha Zeta Eta- 91062 follower of the Memoriam Quaerere Ideology and member of the Mechanicum Lodge. In the distant future of a galaxy perhaps to be, this would be better known as the Cult Mechanicus. The year is 25062 CE and the galaxy is in turmoil. The Milk Eye galaxy is split between the Federation of United Systems, a galactic body dominated by humanity who have spread their roots far and wide upon the stars. The other hegemon is the Aeldari Empire, children of the Old Ones and uncontested rulers of their domains since the primeval War in Heaven. The Iron War has come and passed, the fires it scorched the galaxy with still smoldering even now. And the galaxy is a dry forest ready for its next wildfire.
The Federation still stands but divided. The sheer death and destruction of the Iron War splintering the once cohesive governing body of humanity. Now ambitions rise high as all circle the crippled and bleeding beast. Whether internal or external it is almost a forelong conclusion that the Federation will fall. On the other hand the Aeldari continue their decadent and wanton ways, unknowing or uncaring of what is soon to come to pass. The Immaterium is a turbulent sea, one that now ebbs and flows according to the heartbeat of an unborn god.
You are a scion of the Martian soil, born and raised upon once rich brown soil now returned to red rust. Scattered far from the world of your birth to the forgeworld of the Dobara in the Eastern Galactic Fringe you have made a new life for yourself. But the world still continues its inevitable course. You are a faithful child of the Mechanicum and serve whatever is deemed best for you by its leaders. Your latest task has been the preparations for an armed archaeological expedition to the remnants of the Men of Iron from the Iron Rebellion, before the Iron Men came to begin their final solution. You had begun to prepare, bettering yourself and undertaking your duties as the civilian leader of the expedition. Your duties have been turbulent but you have rallied to the challenge.
But now.... Now you are elsewhere. Upon the eve of an important dinner party of Martian aligned importants you had chosen to pray. To pray and hope for enlightenment for the future as you take another step in the Journey, the Quest for Knowledge. But is it to be found? Now as you are within some strange other realm. Now as you find yourself regressed to your weak body of flesh before you had chosen the strength of metal and machine. Now as you find yourself alone... no not alone. The near silent passage of transonics claws have left their mark upon the now twisted otherworldly halls of your home. Some strange and aberrant reflection of what it should be. You had found yourself prey, hunted by a Man of Iron. But not just any Man of Iron, no it was one that you knew so intimately. It was not the first time you had been its prey, hid from the beast that had dripped the blood of your parents upon the soil of mars all those years ago.
But times have changed, no longer are you the weak child of before. Now you plan, now you are the hunter. So you rallied, so you reversed your position. So you found victory. The beast is fallen by your hand, blown to fragments at the press of a detonator. Its corpse disassembled by your careful ministrations. Cleansed of daemonic and aeldari taint and then consigned to storage, from its shattered body to its still intact and active cortex. But this victory did not happen in a vacuum. Even if you disregard it you have had aid. Vague whispers like memories you should remember but do not. Deals were struck, promises and allegiance given. A ritual made to track the beast, a ritual made to kill it. Weapons forged for the hunt, all made with the knowledge of a book you 'inherited'. Your very passage here gained from that particular relic.
But that is not the only fact you are not thinking of. Even as you now look upon one particular group of creatures, seeming denizens of this realm now bound to you. You seemingly repress the thought that they were bound to you through the entity now floating through your base unchecked. You use their knowledge but do not think farther upon them, the angry husks of the victims of the Men of Iron after all these years. Countless fragments of souls bound together and hunting its killers like a revenant of mythos. You are still within this strange realm, one you know is inhabited by things unnatural. You have begun to build yourself a footing to stand on. In the future, how will your mark be placed upon this land?
[X] Defense Repairs, the one Iron Man that was here rampaged through most of your defenses and did who knows what sort of damage to your base. Best get on that.
[X] Droid reactivation, your base is supposed to have a variety of maintenance droids and other such things. Best get to finding and getting them to work even if they are a bit fragile.
[X] Begin organizing your base, you know only on the surface what is within your base. Best to find out what truly changed. How many of your facilities made it here? What is actually in storage? Can be taken multiple times to represent fixing up those facilities.
[X] Gather the scraps of Iron Men just outside your base, they have been cracked open but the remnants may be useful. Then you will be needing to get them secured properly.
[X]Shade Team
[X]Personal Guard Synths
Everyone has a nervous tic, something they do to help keep themselves from having a melt down. Yours was a little beat upon your leg when you are sitting, a holdover from those old days that played to you specific body and nerves. Such a thing was not possible since you recieved augmetic limbs. Such a thing was not able to be replicated in any AR system, yet you can do that here. That sort of change scares you. You thought you had forgotten all the little nuances of the flesh. Yet you find yourself returning to them with little change. Does it say something about you that you are so comfortable as such? More than a century gone, half your life and you return to such things....
Doubt, doubt can not be allowed to fester. You place your orders to your forces and move to pick up all your tools. Your mind should be leery at the use of these.... Shades but the assurance of this.... Messenger? That is the impression you get at least is that this is an ironclad thing. Realistically there was not much you could do either. Not when you took a look outside at the multiple, Multiple dead Iron Men. Very dead and not something you are touching yet.
Your base as is will be in ruins for quite some time if left to your own devices. The droid maintenance units will help. Simple things you have in stock for everyday repairs. They should do well enough for what you need. Well they would have if things were in better shape. You are having issues activating them, some sort of interference preventing you from accessing your heavier assets. Still that does not mean you do not have anything from your work. You cannot judge time well, none of the clocks digital or otherwise work. But you still feel you have done well enough to get the..... Discount droids online. Most of it was making sure there would be no.... incidents from said droids. They were a steal, almost literally at that. Still there is a reason they were locked in deep storage. But you went to their racks and had them disengaged regardless. Twenty droids in garish construction colours stood themselves up from their deactivated forms and you input their commands. They did get to work but.
"Unit 25ABc watch where your actuators are going you almost dropped the panel"
"Unit 512BCd it was your fault! Get your processors checked, you deviated the panel too far to the left"
"Nuts!" "Bolts!" "Both you piles of scrap, we have alot of work to do. Unit 5126D pass me that buzzsaw"
"Roger Roger"
You are.... Probably going to need to check what is making them so.... Active. You really should. This is technically not the first time you had them run so you know some level of quirkiness would be there, not to this extent though. Back to work however you are heading to some of your identified siege defense stockpiles so you can dig out the replacement parts. It would have been nice to have extra defenses like deployable turrets to emplace but that is not something you were allowed. Still a few temporary doors and other such things would help. Especially once you get the grav turrets back online. But as if the world is attempting to be dramatic you get an alert from the Shades that they have encountered.... Entities. You receive a faint feeling of recognition in general, but you cannot get anything else. Wisps, Shadows, that is all you can gather. Your attempts at dredging more information are nulled since the Shades are not exactly intelligent, at least to human levels.
Still they report that these things are starting to gather once more. That confuses you for a moment until you get the faint impression that... no whatever thought you were about to have dissipates like smoke. You do not know what it was. Another thing they report is the glint of something like gold in the distance. Close. Static. An object is the closest you get to a curious thought from the Shades. An object from something that just passed, something that had them scared. It is long gone is what you get from the impression but something to scare an vengeance filled Revenant must be significant.
[] Have the shades gather the objects
- Will require all shades to depart guard duty, splitting the group is not possible
[] Ignore the glint
Misc actions
[] Write in
-Anything not already covered or meant to take a new more direct initiative
Walking through your base you find that a significant number of changes have occurred, and not all at your behest. Yes the maintenance droids are continuing their work, bumbling as it is at times but there are other things at play. You remember this earlier when you were looking for weapons to defend yourself. There is a certain amount of ..... impermeability. As if things exist and do not exist at the same time. Your thoughts are given to the ancient parable of Schrodigner's cat, but it is a much more terrifying proposition to actually encounter. Putting the theoretical aside like you have for the rest of this strange realm you try to ground yourself in the practical. The pathways have been.... Smoothed out, less filled with odd gaps into the void and odd protrusions blocking your path. Things are more....vibrant. But the feel of malleability is ever present int the background. Especially when you need to rely on this feeling to move around and find what you need in the area. Your endeavor to organize your base runs headlong into this strangeness. Your mind tells you that if you focus you can find...
Three options
Pick two of each set
Pick one of the first set and five of the second set
Pick three of the first set
Sacrifice a minor favor for either
-[] one of the first set
-[] three of the second set
Items found may or may not be damaged, be careful what you try to take for there is only one of each
High Grade
[] A C1 model Droid Constructor
[] An expanded maintenance cradle made for bio droids
[] A Cogitator Research Bank
[] A large stash of high grade materials
[] A strange toolkit with an icon of a wooden hand dripping blood
[] A deck of tarot cards that seem filled with static energy
[] A library card made of brass and inlaid with gems
Low Grade
[] A basic general purpose workshop
[] An advanced personal toolkit
[] An exploratory drone
[] A basic hoverbike
[] A small medical clinic
[] A small stash of materials
[] A small cache of bargain self defense weapons
[] Another personal weapon
[] A small team of advanced construction bots
A Weapon(choose two)
-[] Your Taser Goad
-[] Your Arc Pistol
-[] Your Volkite Pistol(extra malus)
-[] Your Volkite Rifle(extra malus)
[] Your set of heavy maintenance power armour
Checking through your tome to find what is happening with this strange realm is.... Strange. You first attempt to find an index of some sort again like you did before but it is... gone. The tome does not have an index again. A feeling that it will not be giving up more information so easily again. That frustrates you greatly, oh so greatly. Knowledge is very important and you have not had the best of times here so far, you NEED to find out how this ticks. You vaguely contemplate the so called "Rite of Percussive Maintenance". It is an old in joke amongst the Lodges that sprung up for some reason but now seems very appealing for something that should be yours, you are interrupted in such reflective pondering by the tome. A little tap almost at your mind. The tome you hold is not just a storehouse of knowledge improbable, it can do more. Matter transference..... Such a thing is possible with a book? Is this some sort of decadent corportaist's prestige item? To make a book able to transmat items..... illogical. But you still get that it is possible as long as it is on your person. At least in this strange realm. That is just raising so many questions on how such a thing is possible.
Is this some strange game? Are you the protagonist in a convenient VR game? Well you already know you feel pain, realistically as well, the environmentals seem accurate as well as not a seeming hash of what you have felt before. The only ones capable of pulling off such a thing would be an Ascended Man. And you doubt any Man of Stone would create such a thing, a Man of Iron would not be so merciful as to have you just play juve games. Baffling but you have to work with the practical you remind yourself yet again. What you get from the outside is similar to the inside. But rather then odd absences it is simply emptiness.
The strange glowing wisps in the distance do not make you feel welcome, it simply highlights the alien nature of this place. But before you have the Shades strike out into that realm you take the time to gather the shattered remnants of the Iron Men. Most of the material is strangely brittle, as if subject to immense metal fatigue. But you still salvage some components. A few larger pieces of chassis such as a few joints and some plating are the majority. However you do manage to get some more sensitive components that are intact such as a partial set of sensors from one body and some of the more complex and inert nano-machine fiber musculature from the crumpled remains. All of which is safely crammed into a sealed and shielded box as the rest is put to the torch, literally as you take a high-power metalwork torch and melt everything left over into slag piles.
Continuing your previous VR analogy it is like a fast travel on a map..The Shades came to your location through a one way version of this, now as they go forth to gather what you saw glittering there is these... pathways available. Ill formed but the one that promises the glitter in the dark is able to be traversed, is traversed as the group goes forth. You feel that wishing them fortune would be appropriate. But is it as you decide to...
Gains so far
- Iron Man Sensor Suite(Partial)
- Iron Man Chassis parts(scraps)
- Iron Man Nanomachine fiber(Musculature)
A base not riddled with holes in the floor and ceiling
Choose 1
[] Finish organizing your base, you know somewhat of the contents of your base. Best to find out what is left.
[] The search for knowledge, you are going to be researching what you have on you. The Iron Men materials and the tome. (This option removes yourself from participating in other actions for that set)
[] Choose to accompany your current expedition
-[] In Person, will leave only the maintenance droids to watch the base
-[] Via proxy sense
[] Vehicle reactivation, you may not know exactly what is here but you do know that the garage with its small batch of synths is still around. Best get them and your vehicle ready for any deployment.
[] Finish the defense repairs, the one Iron Man that was here rampaged through most of your defenses and did a great deal of damage. Best get to work installing those grav turrets, you would not trust such sensitive components to the droids.
[] Simply rest, with the way everything has been so far perhaps settling back and not doing anything will be good for you. You so far do not seem to need any other thing like food or water but you still feel drained from what has been so far. And of course the soul aching pain that has been with you ever since arriving, cannot forget that.
QM: Okay folks heres an update. Should be able to pick up the pace again now that the bulk of my summer events and such are done with. Muse permitting of course
[X]A favor in exchange
[X] A C1 model Droid Constructor
[X] A library card made of brass and inlaid with gems
[X] A basic general purpose workshop
[X] A small team of advanced construction bots
[X] A basic hoverbike
[X] A small medical clinic
[X] A small stash of materials
-[x] Your Taser Goad
-[x] Your Arc Pistol
[X] Finish the defense repairs, the one Iron Man that was here rampaged through most of your defenses and did a great deal of damage. Best get to work installing those grav turrets, you would not trust such sensitive components to the droids.
You bustle around busy with the next series of repairs and renovations. By root and stem you had to tear out all the wiring and photronics in your base. Nary a thing left in place. Oh just how easy it is for an errant bit of machinery, what was once innocent and steadfast metal and energy to now house a remnant of ruinous code. You had enough experience with such recycling to make the process efficient, especially post-battle damage. Sorting out what was touched, what was connected, what was structurally unsound, and how to do so in a smooth fashion. Once everything was torn down and isolated it was to work to replace what was expunged. All of this in the better appointed workshop, a place that was actually more then a few basic workbenches and a box of odds and ends.
Somehow you even had the old unmaking forges to use, a bit of an anomalous event but you will not question the strange rules of this place. Too many things from the past have already surfaced. But you activate the forges regardless, there is work aplenty and being able to reuse material will be good. Especially as little was deliberately corrupted, some yes but the majority was not as you use your experience to check. You have a small stockpile of raw and refined resources but not with much of a margin to spare. Cognitohazard filter goggles keep you safe as you go from dropping corrupted plating into breaker forges to ushering the freshly activated cadre of construction bots as they repair plates torn from gravitic damage.
You had no complaints about either the bots or your freshly activated facilities, well appointed affairs if somewhat mismatched in terms of equipment. A soldering framework from Mars, bots from Anetarbraxus, a gravity hammer from Dobara, an outdated high-grade material casting forge from Medusa, everything and anything from various forge worlds.
Your work is monotonous but soothing, danger notwithstanding of course. This is something you are familiar with, something that gives you a sense of progress and purpose as you mend the shattered machine. And if some of THOSE things are exterminated then all the better. Adjusting the settings on her homeostasis responsible implants she waited for that ever familiar calm to return. Odd you had done so earlier as well. Still emotions have their time and place. Hmmm... this realm is brining other things to the surface as well. You need to find clarity again. Something that numbs that ever present thirst to learn, to analyse, to pick apart. This realm is too complex, too many pulls in so many directions to begin working. Theoretical aside there is the burning question.... Are you the only one here? You have only begun to think about this but are you a pathfinder in unknown lands or not?
You will need to prepare then, numbers. A basic game but one you need. It is good that you have a droid foundry ready, only a single line and incredibly slow but it will do. A surprising acquisition that you only distantly remember from taking over some dilapidated company, same source as your bargain bin droids now that you think about it. Some sort of small enthusiast's place you believe off the top of your head. Some encrypted hard copy data drives came along with it so that is something worth looking at perhaps later. Now what else are the spoils of your latest search? You found your pistol and goad lying in a random room, just them on top of a random set of pallets. Another mystery to add to your list. Now you just have to fix up that spare clinic you had, it was in rather bad shape and..... Oh dear. What... what is this?
Three sets of floating cards are before you. Cards that seem to be made of.... Error? Your visual spectrometer is not able to discern what is there, there is a void across many of your sensors when you attempt to use those. Your guards do not seem to have noticed anything occurring ast all. Your dawdling seems to draw the attention of something. There is a sense of impatience in the air as you continue to attempt to find out what these things are. Ahhh.... them. You do not think that attempting to back out of what is obviously a choice to have will end well. You never did have the time to consider exactly what these particular creatures and entities are. Only that you do not seem to be able to disregard them entirely. Bracing yourself you approach the anomalous floating objects. This has occurred so suddenly you cannot help but feel. Each set of cards is perhaps almost a dozen cards stacked atop each other and revolving slowly. Your hand hovers over each until you decide to choose one set. A forced hand then.
[] The Knight of Cups and the Six of Pentacles reversed
From this you get a sense of multiplicity, of crowded murmuring numbers and the strange blinked image of a mask. You find something in your hand, a strange bottle. A message, a final request. You can find something, a treasure hunt.
[] The Wheel of Fortune and The Strength reversed
A sense of desolation, a portent of things to come as they are. A spark of gold arcs across the set of cards and is then gone. You must prepare, you have been a fool to simply drift around. This realm is wrong, you must return and warn the others.
[] The Wheel of Fortune and the Seven of Wands
From this is the sense of warmth and the sensation of being watched, like an elder waiting for a decision. You remember the illogical vastness of this place. There must surely be other things here. Things you can search for, things you can find. Things that will prove useful. When you eventually return you be lauded for what you have brought, barring any mistakes of course.
The cards spread out into a strange sideways T shape with another irregular spar halfway down the spar. Ten cards in total. A fortune telling device? At least that is what you can think of when you see them. Laughter of some sort fills the air, a tinkling kind of pure mirth and anticipation. You see.... Something. Then nothing.
Odd... what is going on? You were in the middle of something weren't you. Some act of importance? You are within your workshop. Sitting at the table hunched over... you were working? Or planning to work at least. Your most recent activity.... Yes the log records you were making plans. Best to get back to that. You pass over your family tome, ahh to use such a thing as a pillow is disrespectful isn't it? You carefully set it to the side and straighten the little library card bookmark you had in it. Now back to planning.
[] Finish organizing your base, you know somewhat of the contents of your base. Best to find out what is left.
[] Vehicle reactivation, you may not know exactly what is here but you do know that the garage with its small batch of synths is still around. Best get them and your vehicle ready for any deployment.
[] Workshop activities(Choose one)
The search for knowledge is vast and takes many paths. But you know for sure that you are going to be making use of this facility.
-[] The Iron Men materials, to have access to such things is illegal on point of permanent cortex decommissioning. Well not like the authorities are here.... right?
-[] The tome and the card. You were reading something of importance right? But no... you needed something else as well.
-[] The blessed? Code. You were working on something, it seems so long ago. It would be a shame to leave something undone.
-[] Work cycles. Time to fire up the Constructor and start pumping out cold metal bodies to do your bidding.
-[] Consolidation and reorganization. You should really get your workshop spruced up, you can do work but making it easier would be good. Also fix up that clinic you have while you are at it, it is woefully underequipped.
-[] Upgrades and refit. The droid constructor has a pretty locked down database that you should do something about. You have a gut feeling that it would be bad to only use the default droid option, surely you can find something else or at the very least make something yourself.
-[] You have an uncatalogued STC development library. Sorta not supposed to be in your possession but hey its there. You should start pulling things out to use. (Write in option, you can suggest any bit of sci fi item or material that is not too 'complex' or large. This is DAOT, don't try to go to any extremes like necron tech or eldar tech and you should be fine. Will reserve the right to veto things)
-[] Write In. You are a member of the Mechanicum, it would be a disgrace if you were unable to work and research. To gather experience and knowledge as is your creed.
A name. She found herself wondering about names as she lay on the sleeping pod. She had a name before. Little Ela, not alot of people used that name. Hmm the machine woman's name, it was a weird bunch of sounds and numbers but she said to call her Eta. Said that they only had one letter difference between their common names. She said that seemed interesting. When asked why Eta simply shrugged, names could have meaning she said. When she had asked Eta that she did not think that names were important since no one ever really used hers. It was always 'Weird Girl' if they were not trying to be mean, 'Witch Girl' when they wanted to. The adults always called her 'Girl' or just 'You'. She did not like that, she did not know why though. Eta gave a little funny hum, it was staticky but not like her static. That static was there as always but she could ignore it, sometimes she could almost hear words. It scared her, especially when it was lights out and the heat was turned down low. She thought she heard her name then and did not like it.
Eta asked about it, she did not want to talk about it but Eta said she could trade for it. She sorta knew what trading did, it was what the merchants and nobles did. What some of the kids did to get stuff using what they did not want. She never traded anything. Eta only nodded and said that you could trade more then things, that you could trade information. Alot of trading actually did not involve physical objects. That was a surprise to her.
"You could also trade names if you asked the right people you know" was what she said.
Eta said that she would need one if she joined the people of Dobara, when she joined the nation. She called it a really big family, not everyone knew each other but they knew that they all had things they wanted to do and working together could do what they could not before.
A new name would help her join, she liked that idea when it tumbled around her head. Nu Alpha Null Apha-526, Nara. That was the name she chose out of the big list they had. Eta said that she was special and that she could wear something that helped mark that, that would let others know she could do great things in the future. A Cold Chain Circlet the machine woman called it when she asked what the strange band of metal that was connected to her head. It really was cold when it was put on her head, but the static went away. She could sleep now without weird not words. Without her old name being whispered in her ears. Not that that helped her go to sleep.
Turning on her side did not help, it was just too weird. The pod was quiet, the strapped in blanket too strange. Debuckling herself Nara strapped the magnetic sandals to her feet and looked around her room. Even now after a week it is a weird place. She knew the ceiling now even if it was only a blank metal one with lights, she knew the furniture though it was a lot more then she was used to having in her old room. The new room is very colourful in its stuff, at least to her. So many new things, like the walls having tubes filled with plant life. She had never seen such things except from that one trip to the Lord's Garden Park that the orphanage took. Here there are mostly green plants unlike the Park but they are not little flowers. But unlike that visit this was all for herself to admire. The sights and the smell are... calming.
Eta told her never to take it off the circlet, that she would get used to it in time. She asked if she could take it off when she took a sonic shower and the machine woman said not even then. She said that the shower would not cause the Circlet to react badly. It was weird to test that out, she at first thought about going without but started feeling too smelly after skipping taking a shower for a day or two. It went against what everyone said you should not do when taking a sonic shower, that metal was bad to bring. Yet nothing happened.
When she got out of the shower just like the other times she had new clothes to wear, clothes not made up of darning and patches that another had worn before. Some sort of onesie they called a jumpsuit, it was weird to wear with how tight it was to the skin but it was comfortable. Not like the scratchy clothes before. She even could wear more than that, a jacket and trousers that all connected together to the suit and a pair of boots. She had to listen to Eta when she first put them on, said that they would protect her.
Honestly life was....better. There was plenty of food at the orphanage, but not very good food. Nobody spoke of starving like they did before on the streets but neither did they eat well. It was all plain recycled soylent viridans. Here it was food from hydroponics facilities, she wondered what they were and the machine woman... Eta said that it was a type of farm. Food from a farm.... That was nice. Only the nobles and very rich merchants ever had food from farms. Though school was hard.
She knew her numbers and letters, here though only the numbers mattered and even then her numbers were not very good. Snorting she flopped into the stiff sleeping pod and set her head back into the cradle. As it closed she had to resist the panic before all the pretty pictures came up. She found the pictures she was supposed to use and put them in the order she had to. Music came, slow and soothing....
Thus do we invoke the Machine God.
Thus do we make whole that which was sundered.
Thus do we venture on the path trodden and untrodden.
Thus do we see that one's work is made eternal, for when one's work is eternal one never truly perishes.
Though one may be forgotten they will be eternal in spirit for all work is done upon the passage of time, and time is made of work great and small.
Works small are the foundation of all, works great only the result of those small works grown to fruition.
The past must be given thanks towards and the present given utmost effort, for it will be the birth of the future.
So do I pledge to remember, to gather, to venture anew, to find understanding, and thus spread enlightenment.
Life is directed motion.
The spirit is the spark of life.
Sentience is the ability to learn the value of knowledge.
Intellect is the understanding of knowledge.
Sentience is the basest form of Intellect.
Understanding is the True Path to Comprehension.
Comprehension is the key to all things.
The Omnissiah knows all, comprehends all.
Peace and Serenity, you would like to say that you have received those two concepts, to be able to calmly act. But that would be an outright lie. No you are centered, you know what to do even if the specifics are still a bit greyish. Still better than the panic you were having before. Your prayers and psalms said for the 'day' you take one last glance at the shrine. The embossed skull of the Mechanicum's faith, half bone and half machine upon a cog. For a second you could have sworn that there should have been something else there, something more. But it is gone, like a sense of deja vu. Questions for later as always. Now you have a workshop to inspect.
Any who follow the Mechanicum and especially those of Martian descent should always appreciate a well stocked and well organized workshop. To not have one at all or worse to have a shoddy one is a deep mark of shame. Harkening back to the founder's time of prosecution and frontier expansion, to have a workshop is key. Culturally, economically, theoretically even. That last one is not exactly strictly enforced but the point is made. Workshops of some sort are necessary and important. So you took your time, even if you did not like it. Perhaps it is related to your.... Tendencies to carefully procure items, and forget to look at them again. It was like pulling teeth to get everything in working order. The issue with having so many different origins for your equipment is compatibility, as much as the Federation and other such organizations tried to have a unified system of measurement.... Well a galaxy is a big place.
From problems of amperage, voltage, and all those wonderful terms you had equipment that could technically take the different standards but would burn out quicker then they would otherwise. On the mild end of the spectrum, well workplace disasters are not anything anyone wants to occur. You have everything placed to more or less the same standards, even if you had plans to expand your workshop which never came to be. An honest shame but that is how it came to be. Now on to the matter of your clinic, rather then mismatched equipment standards there was barely anything at all. Just a basic autodoc good for everyday life and mild injuries. Nothing for more serious injuries or any real research, frankly any first level schola would have such facilities for teaching and treating children muchless a proper member of the Mechanicum. So you took to trawling your stores for what you needed along with fabbing what you did not have. Still at the end of things you had a basic and fully stocked clinic. If you ever found yourself injured or had to treat others you could do so.
But that mundane aside your well... expeditionary forces have returned. You are now that you spend the time to think on it always connected to the Shades. But that connection has a sort of attenuation problem depending on distance. It will always exist so you know that if it gets cut then the Shades are gone, but anything more requires proximity. Hopefully you can test this out more as time passes, or hold a comprehensive set of trials. Still the expedition was a success from your point of view.
1 Unit of Unknown Golden Scales
All the Shades are back and without need for healing or well whatever word is needed for them to be back to full condition. WIth them are a few strange golden.... Scales? You think they are scales, you can just barely remember that long ago zoo visit.... Well for now they are tentatively labeled scales. An indepth analysis will need more time. Visually it appears to be a composite material, several layers adhered together and an overall planar rhombus shape. As with most things you suspect there will be a more... esoteric dimension to such items. As for how they were retrieved you do not know. You get the impression of metal and spikes, of undulating metal plates and toxic smog. Any further you do not know. Though you may hold onto their nascent true name that does not mean you can compel water from forged metal, it is simply not to be. Whatever they have done to retrieve the items will perhaps never be known.
Speaking of esoteric and disjoint rules and findings you have spend the last... some length of time exploring the base. Hoping to find the last segments of your thoroughly changed base. The discombobulated fragments somehow coming together into coherent structures and objects.
High Grade(Choose 1)
[] An expanded maintenance cradle made for bio droids
[] A Cogitator Research Bank
[] A large stash of high grade materials
[] A strange toolkit with an icon of a wooden hand dripping blood
[] A deck of tarot cards that seem filled with static energy
Low Grade(Choose 2)
[] A second basic general purpose workshop
[] An advanced personal toolkit
[] An exploratory drone
[] A small stash of materials
[] A small cache of bargain self defense weapons
[] A small team of advanced construction bots
That bit of excitement however quickly was put to the side as you received a ping from the perimeter cameras. Something just got hit on the image recognition system. What you find being piped to your AR implants is.... A metal dog? That at first admittedly sparked a bit of fear, but as you look closer at the videos and more detailed still images you find your worst fears are hopefully not true. Yes it is a mechanical dog, but it does not seem to hold the nanomachine sludge that many such Men of Iron corrupted machines held. No it is something else. There is life of a sort here then of the native variety. That simply raises more questions. Hopefully questions that will be answered.
Actions(Choose two, place in order to show precedence of completion)
[] Mount a survey, find out what is nearby whether geologically.... Or the locals.
[] Mount an expedition
-[] To where the scales were recovered, perhaps something is there still?
-[] Into the unknown, let this place's strange non euclidean nature set you forth. It is an idea that will surely bring interesting results.
[] Vehicle reactivation, you may not know exactly what is here but you do know that the garage with its small batch of synths is still around. Best get them and your vehicle ready for any deployment.
[] Write In
[] Workshop activities(Choose two, same rules as above)
The search for knowledge is vast and takes many paths. But you know for sure that you are going to be making use of this facility.
-[] The Iron Men materials, to have access to such things is illegal on point of permanent cortex decommissioning. Well not like the authorities are here.... right?
-[] The tome and the card. You were reading something of importance right? But no... you needed something else as well.
-[] The blessed? Code. You were working on something, it seems so long ago. It would be a shame to leave something undone.
-[] Work cycles. Time to fire up the Constructor and start pumping out cold metal bodies to do your bidding.
-[] Upgrades and refit. The droid constructor has a pretty locked down database that you should do something about. You have a gut feeling that it would be bad to only use the default droid option, surely you can find something else or at the very least make something yourself.
-[] You have an uncatalogued STC development library. Sorta not supposed to be in your possession but hey its there. You should start pulling things out to use. (Write in option, you can suggest any bit of sci fi item or material that is not too 'complex' or large. This is DAOT, don't try to go to any extremes like necron tech or eldar tech and you should be fine. Will reserve the right to veto things)
-[] Write In. You are a member of the Mechanicum, it would be a disgrace if you were unable to work and research. To gather experience and knowledge as is your creed.
[X] Vehicle reactivation, you may not know exactly what is here but you do know that the garage with its small batch of synths is still around. Best get them and your vehicle ready for any deployment.-95
[X] Mount a survey, find out what is nearby whether geologically.... Or the locals.-83
[X] Workshop activities
-[x] The blessed? Code. You were working on something, it seems so long ago. It would be a shame to leave something undone.
-[x] Work cycles. Time to fire up the Constructor and start pumping out cold metal bodies to do your bidding
Time. The passing of time. The question of possibilities and what ifs and has beens. Such musings are all that can allow you to not be utterly filled with wroth. You had been searching through a server room you found when an alert came through your security system. All that delicious potential put aside by the vagaries of life. Still to be serious something has made its way through the walls of your base. Something that evaded the attention of the cameras and other sensors. Well what few there are. Where there were buildings is now flat open space. Your compound now being by itself on a relatively flat open plain rather than nestled into the base of an arcology tower. Where the security system actually covered has been changed as well, the strange non euclidean nature of the realm twisting items past even the hardened redundant nature of the security system to adapt to. You had made efforts but could not do too much without the necessary components, plan yes but not even consider implementing. You needed what few components on hand to maintain what you had for the future.
That does nothing for the current set of intruders though. The only reason you found out at all that they are in the base is when you started reconnecting to the garage facilities beyond basic camera coverage that was often on the fritz. You had to actually manually discover that something has burrowed their way through a wall to trigger the structural integrity alarms. The strange missing and or floating segments into the void seem to also be partially responsible for this mess. A quick perusal of backlogged security footage shows that the perpetrators came in from a void formed hole while parts of the network grid were down for your repairs and renovations. The automatic VI that would normally have flagged this not working, has not been working since the transition judging by the error log. That should not be possible regardless you know. Something has happened, even all this damage would not have stopped some sort of alert from being routed to you. No, time to move to what you really should be paying attention to.
Eliott Lilly is a concept artist and illustrator currently working for video game developer id Software. Eliott has worked on game titles such as Rage and
There are two functional cameras, ones that are not on the fritz at least. You can observe some of the activity in the garage bay from the vantage point. Specifically one camera looks out towards the garage doors, the other to an auxiliary bay for smaller vehicles to the side of the main bay. A pack of strange mechanical organisms that seem to mimic organic life flitter between those two rooms and possibly others. Wasps is what the visual recognition search dregs up off your data archive implants. Old terran life form, now in a strange pseudo-mechanical format. Either highly advanced or in some violation of physical laws as most things here have been. You can think of a number of places that could make such a thing in the past, none after the Iron War so recently finished its course. Finding out how such a thing was achieved would be..... Fascinating. But back to matters at hand.
The creatures were only detected when they started expanding their entrance into your base. The rather upfront problem being they are in your garage. One particularly large specimen the size of an ultracompact aircar escorted by a few smaller ones the size of a large person. They have begun breaking things down and are seemingly devouring and then extruding a new metallic slurry of material to create a.... Nest. Honeycomb patterned. A nest that now contains pupae you believe the term is. The aforementioned structural integrity alarm aside the group has destroyed some of the contents there. This.... this will be a problem. To be crude, that is your stuff. Your stuff. Even if you left it piled up in storage crates that does not mean anyone else is allowed to do anything to it.
Okay, calm. Now one has to carefully plan out how to handle this. The terrain is somewhat cramped so their rather large wings will be of minimal use. They may be able to hover in some of the more cavernous spaces but only a few meters in any direction. What obstructions are there however tends to be important machinery you will be needing in the future or storage space that is filled up. A great deal of fragile material it is safe to say. Then there is the problem of the wasps themselves. The size you already observed before will make this difficult to kill the pests. They are also capable of devouring solid metal, metal strong enough to be used for blast doors at a relatively fast pace. Not much you have that can face such damage. That along with the rather apparent stingers will be an issue.
A rather sudden and somewhat familiar sound has you flinching as you are busy taking notes of the garage. Your lone surviving interior camera has seen what appears to be a ballistic shot impact inside the garage. Close in analysis tells you it is a 30mm ballistic autocannon shell of some sort. Not incendiary or high explosive at least judging by the crater. That is not going to be good regardless. The next shot takes several seconds to impact. Whether due to distance, aim adjustment, or the weapon itself you cannot tell just yet. The flock of wasps does not engage. No they scatter to several locations out of sight of the exterior. No more shots are sent but now you are very nervous. This is going to be complicated.
Courses of Action
[] The Home Field Advantage: You do actually have defenses in the garage area, the issue is you never managed to fully reconnect to that section of your compound. You should find a way to reactivate them.
-[] Immediate full assault after the turrets engage. The intruders are pinned down and do not have time to do anything else like fortify in your base.
-[] Take a small amount of time to gather all the low grade droids you have to use as fodder. They have combat routines, terrible ones but it is something. Then use them to pad your numbers once the turrets are active
-[] Distract the creatures with some cannon fodder. Hopefully while they are distracted you can attempt to enter and then activate your command vehicle. It has an assault cannon and if the creatures have not damaged it then you can use it.
-[] Attempt to get the constructor to emergency fab some more cannon fodder first, it will likely damage the machinery and take some time regardless but it will be needed. Then activate the turrets as the collected fodder attacks alongside yourself.
-[] write in
[] Sniper's Nest: While you would prefer to purge your base of the intruders, you have the issue of that autocannon sniper. No idea where it is or in what fashion it exists. Best find a way to deal with it somehow
-[] You are rather unsure why it just came to your mind but you have a bold plan. Take the hover bike you found that was stored in another room and play bait with it for your synths to locate the enemy and attack. You know the terrain is wide open space for at least some distance before other buildings can be seen, there is room to maneuver.
-[] Attempt a foot assault, you have no artillery of any sort that would normally be needed to dislodge a sniper but you can probably rig some smoke and ECM somehow. Risky but you will have your own forces to assault with. Especially if you can throw some distractions in the form of your droids.
-[] Write in
[] For hearth and home: This is your base, your home. You need it intact. Head in with just your forces to take out the intruders, deal with everything else later.
-[] Attempt an ambush or at least a sneak attack of some sort. Divide the intruders up and defeat them in detail.
-[] write in
[] Talking? Perhaps you can negotiate? Surely words are sufficient enough if they can somehow understand you.
-[] Just the intruding wasps
-[] Attempt to contact whatever is sniping?
-[] Both?
[] Write In
QM: Well lets just say that all the dice sorta did not go well for you. Just to explain a bit of whats going on was that you had some rather hilarious background rolls. Those rolls alongside the atrocious rolls for condition of the items you chose were enough for me to just fold them in together to give you guys the option of salvaging something from this mess. Feel free to ask any questions about the situation.
QM: Putting this out as I wait for any more votes to come in, a bit of a view on what else is happening in the wider galaxy.
X462-ANV that was the official name of the planet with an equally bland condensed serial number for the planetary system. The few locals on the dirtball of a planet however called it New Haven. Not exactly a great omen considering the 'New' part, especially in light of current circumstances. That being the planet wide riots or if they had a say planet wide revolution, ahh the good life instigating or support rebel movements. Suck it Feddies, but back to current things. They were to do as much damage as possible with only two squads of spec ops and some merc companies. Should of been plenty, except the Feddy tax collectors brought a cruiser and a few escorts along. That sort of move was being repeated across known space and it pissed many off, sure the Iron War wrought alot of damage in the Core and Midrim but alot of the proper rim and wild regions were unaffected. Distance and lack of Men of Iron, shit economy too which made things worse. The undevestated regions could never account for the damages the developed regions had taken, not even with the high level of taxes levied. Not that the Feddy Council cared.
To them New Haven was just one of many micro colonies, single planet realms that were established by public-private initiatives. Places that should be grateful for the protection of distant armies, technically true considering what the Men of Iron wanted. Still tell that to your average dirt farmer in the middle of nowhere, unused to attention from the Feds. Some just wanted to get away from all the hub hub of the developed Core and Mid-Rim worlds or the xenophobia of the Outer Rim areas, others to run their own private planets of debauchery away from the Federations Ethics and Moral Perseverance guidelines. Shit resources usually but enough for the post war gov to start yanking like a water deprived man in a desert. A drop here, a drop there using a cracked cup even as the puddle dries out.
In his experience after a few decades of running resistance training and support ops, these places just wanted to be left alone. Isolationist groups or just random rich folks running their own planets scale sex dens. The second category usually got rather bad considering previously said Fed guidelines are rather loose. Ironically that made them somewhat attractive for 'Unpaid Back Tax Collection' using 'Pardoned Sources of Labour', such planets are sources of decent tech and reprogrammable flesh that escaped the Men of Iron. Suffice to say he did not usually care about collateral damage with regards to all sides when in such places. He had standards by the Machine God, seeing one too many places filled with catgirls or under...... It always felt nice to make the galaxy a little better one burnt and shattered corpse at a time. Daydreams of perfectly placed explosives got jolted from his mind when the wake up alarm rang. Well now time to bring such things to reality. A quick search of his recall implants brought him up to speed and oh was it bringing a smile to his face.
His job description was that of a dropship bombardier, rather sweet one since it was his finger on the trigger of several megatons worth of explosives. Sure he got a few forms circulating the complaint system about his 'enthusiasm' but not like they mattered, black ops! Everyone in the business is either batshit insane at least some of the time, or they are fanatic hardasses. Sometimes both. Such as the current lot acting like a bunch of rabid berserkers, they are really getting into the role of lynch mob demagogues a little too deeply in his opinion. Sure he liked fire, death, and explosions alot but these shenanigans just begged him to fix it before they had further problems. This was a little too much crazy even for him! Tinpot dictator on god mode levels of crazy, he should know he grew up under one!
"Yo Sasha? I think the crew is a bit too.... Into it? You sure we picked up the right guys for this op?" His lovely, in shape, and old enough to be his great-grandmother pilot and general superior officer just shrugged in her seat.
"Yeah we got the right guys, don't worry I think we might get the orders to.... Well speak of, we got Feddy Units moving in to restore order. The big boys too. Marine deployment from the cruiser in orbit, eta 10 mikes. Phase Four is a go. Looks like you get your wish Binly".
"Sweeeet". Alright time to spin up the firing computer and input the probable drop zones, locator beacons are being picked up by the E-War Suite so he just needed to input those. A few more inputs and there we go! Time for some mayhem once those suckers get down. Oh wait...
"Hey Sasha?! We gonna bother evacing the others? Pretty sure Grox team is still back at rebel warlord HQ. Pretty sure they are the lot that somehow got a clean pass on their psych evals" Also that he was owed a hundred credits by Milsha the squad leader, oh and not casually killing off people on the same side. Standards, have to remember them even if the job sucks.
"Yes you irrelevant ass, we need the techies alive preferably. The active squad will be evacing on their own since I know you were definetly concerned about them. Correct?"
"Yeah, yeah".Sheesh they have been working together for far too long. Checking through the various camera feeds brought the typical sites, rampaging crowd in urban environment and a 'temporary' lack of morals. Same old, same old. Soon enough the time came for the warheads to be launched. A short propellant shot sent the missile barrage out to differing heights before their engines engaged. Gravitic drives sent the missiles hurtling with speed to their sites. Some were intercepted by the defense systems of the pods, but the missiles did not need to get too close. Not as a set of new suns ignited in the air, tough as the pods were they could not take multi kiloton explosives in close proximity. Phase 5 and 6 would soon be underway, oh how much fun it would be to be a cannon battery director. Maybe he should ask for a transfer?
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Tales From the Front: The Siege of Pravus Beta- Part 01
QM: Next proper update will be out soon, uni started so I have been busy. Have this for now.
For Lieutenant Colonel Wisam Sauda Sarkis this was and probably still is a terrifying situation. From an originally static garrison duty to active frontline service. Sure it promised combat pay and the strong likelihood that she would be getting promoted beyond the glass ceiling of her current rank but.... Fighting orks she had plenty of experience in, but that was everything from class I to VI. Not class X, certainly not proto-krok shock troops. A spat of alerts came through her n-links, the implants streaming helmet cam footage to her brain. Another set removed any of the more fleshy reactions like disgust and the ability to gag. It helped focus her on the gory images she was seeing as the final moments of her dying soldiers are streamed to her to analyze. And this was a select sanitized set, well she would never be working any dedicated SIGNIT or analyst work that was for sure. The cold battlefield calculus she was trained in was needed to give her actionable intel.
The ruins of whatever city this was made for a chaotic battlefield of room to room fighting and open field warfare depending on how close one got to the urban center or the pleasure districts. An image of an ork shock grunt is silhouetted against a building as it blazes its weapon into a flanked company, estimated numbers from the muzzle flashes are five fireteams in quadrant B24 e64. Units there get priority for light artillery assets, a new set of names is added to the memorial wall. A spotting of an ork ultralight battlemech team preparing to assault a fixed position, a dedicated hunter squad is diverted from reserves to stiffen the defending forces. But the most important part was the red armoured officer, that deserved a sniper kill team. The backup squad to pin it down will hopefully not suffer fifty percent casualties this time. She was running out of non synth bodies to throw into the grinder.
The shiver of her surroundings however reminds her that the orbital battle is still underway. Ortillery since it managed to shake her position, heavy as her data request showed it was an impact from the next AO over. Damage statistics were routed in real time, a priority alert over the command net. There went what was left of the 104th Corp. She was being stretched thin now, new reactionary orders to deploy what was left of her strategic reserve to plug the newly opened gap. Only a smidge of the tactical level remained to her, her unit would be combat ineffective in only ten hours at current attrition rates.
The entirety of the XIV Acadameain Guard was being blooded in a trial by fire on a planetary scale, as were the rest of the Tenth to Fifteenth Acadamian Guard units not to mention the regular Army Groups. Such a callous thing to call more than a hundred thousand casualties in the space of half a day from space and ground combined a trial by fire. On the one hand it did not include synth casualties, on the other the rest of the solar system is still on fire as ships dueled in the cosmos and the orbitals are still being contested. All this from a single day of battle, do or die. There is no inbetween as the might of a quarter of the sub-sector is concentrated to crush this proto-krok incursion. There would not be any federation assistance, not here and certainly not anywhere else in the entire sector. Stretched too thin they say. True but then again what use were they ever.
They held for fifteen hours of continuous battle, no chance for relief. Not as more and more greenskins rushed the ruined city looking to reach the vital supply depot just behind the city. Each piece of precious war material being slowly evacuated. The last of her forces are sent in to plug a gap just ten minutes ago, that leaves only her own unit. The command lance is sent in, one final push. Enemy battlemech equivalents streaming in to widen the breach. Power Armoured masses preparing to join them, a thin blue line on the tactical map. Ready to snap. She gave the go ahead signal, the only response were a series of acknowledgement pings. No words are needed. These are her troops, her men and women.The Acadameain Guard will carry the day, the vaunted pride of the Dobaran military. Or die trying for that honor....
