Respect Your Elders v2 - Galactic Boogaloo [Warhammer Lizardmen Quest]
- Thread starter Xantalos
- Start date
- Sci-Fi Fantasy
-
- Tags
- warhammer warhammer 40k fantasy sci-fi science fantasy science-fantasy kitchen sink space fantasy isha kroak (warhammer fantasy) mazdamundi (warhammer fantasy) magic empire quest actions have consequences dinosaurs ia ia kroak fhtagn lasers lizardmen qm likes speculation and questions slann what could possibly go wrong?
Hmmm, time to start seriously thinking about what Skink Priest to unlock next. We've got four left-and of those four, I put Hysh lowest on the list of urgent aquisitions. It's all about enlightenment, banishing demons, mental healing-most of these are things we don't have an urgent need for. Shyish is also...kind of escoteric and weird. Orks don't fear death, really. So we're left with Aqashy and Ulgu, both of which, I am told, are *very* popular with warmbloods on this forum right now. Aqashy is a go-to battlemagic, so if we're going to go loud against the Orks, we'll want it, but Ulgu is better for deniable actions, and will synergize well with Chameleon Skinks. So our choice depends on whether we intend to go loud against the orks, or speak softly and use remote actions to tie them up.
It might be worth considering altering the base mechanics of the quest: instead of making full turn plans and then you writing them up one by one, we could select them sequentially too.
As in
"you have X gen 3 Slann, Y gen 4 Slann, and Mazdamundi's action left before this turn ends. What action are you taking and what labor pool is assigned to it?"
"the winning vote is '[] Coatl gardening' with '-[] assign all remaining Slann' "
"-EPIC GARDENING STORIES-"
"You've spent all of your labor pool so this is the end of the current turn"
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Hmm. Just to throw in my two cents now that we've got our fancy godseed, it might be worthwhile to consider how to best a Death/Sleep aspect to our advantage. Lizardmen generate more of themselves via the spawning pools, so why don't we tie our deathgod to a respawn mechanic 
Because one of the big advantages of the faction is that the older you get the more powerful you are, so recycling our best heroes when they unexpectedly bite it seems like a good idea. To further tie in to Lizardmen thematics, make the afterlife a place of restful contemplation as our venerable dead await rebirth in the spawning pools.
Because one of the big advantages of the faction is that the older you get the more powerful you are, so recycling our best heroes when they unexpectedly bite it seems like a good idea. To further tie in to Lizardmen thematics, make the afterlife a place of restful contemplation as our venerable dead await rebirth in the spawning pools.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
...Mallus existed before the Old Ones showed up. Like, for a really long time too. Dragon Ogres predate them (also Dragons might, not too sure on that one).See, you say that as a joke, but I can definitely imagine that, in a primordial Mallus, where realspace and the warp were intertwined on an atomic level, The Old Ones and their creations literally solidified the planet into physicality.
Hmm.
Continuing on this line of conjecture, if we consider Primordial Mallus to be such an environment, then it's possible the Slann weren't originally the fat toads they are now, but rather became that way because they were originally designed for the high warp-realspace density pressure environment, and required modification on the fly as their work cleared out and restructured the world into a material world. Like reality warping supercomputer angel blobfish.
EDIT: On additional reflection I think it was an icebound world filled with megafauna that mostly died off since the Old Ones repositioned it to be closer to it's sun.
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- Location
- Australia
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Fezzes
Knight of King Stannis Baratheon
- Location
- Sydney, Australia
I know it'd be inefficient as fuck and would only happen if we actively had a planned use for it, but I'm imagining having one or two of these saved up for some kind of 'delete this solar system pls' superspell. It'd be the sort of thing you'd find in a Lizardmen 40K codex.
- Location
- United states of america
Proceeds to perform drifts and other impossible aerial stunts
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
I probably could figure out a decent way to make that work, but that style of updates relies on me actually being able to put out content on a consistent, quick basis. This update kinda gave the illusion of that since I stretched it out over two weeks, but I still wrote it over a period of six months - well, a three-month period where I didn't write jack squat because I was trying to manually reprogram my mind to disable some functions I don't intend to use and that was taking up all my mental energy, and then I wrote the update in the other three months. Still, not fast by anyone's standards (except Avalanche who runs that battle action anime whatsit quest, from what I've heard). And even though I've been sticking to my pledge to write something every day fairly well, I don't really know if I could manage that style of update with enough speed to keep people actually engaged. I am working on the speed thing though, so who knows.
The first of many apocalypses that poor planet endured.
No matter what anyone says, I'm definitely not an Old One using an extremely roundabout method to guide my lost tools to my prison in order to free me from my bonds.Hmmm- careful Xantalos, your own Slann generation is showing!
You'll be able to use similar concentrations of warp energy for conceptual attacks on a wide scale in the future. Proper godseeds will pretty much always be harvested from entities that are both powerful enough - tier 3 and up daemons could theoretically do it - and have the narrative significance to spawn one. Mass destruction realspace attacks are what mag 7+ astromantic rituals are for. Kinda how like the ork codex talks a big deal about them going on their periodic Waaagh!!! crusades, I imagine the lizardmen codex would mention the few times the slann got pissed enough that they just flat-out erased a set of systems that were troubling them.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
They'd be at 3, I just forgot to change the pop caps over. Thanks for catching that!
Thebigpieman
I've got this, I think.
- Location
- United States
If you never expect updates you'll always be pleasantly surprised when it does.
- Pronouns
- Exist
@FunkyEntropy, why use godseed for dirty with both Death and Sleep? Currently speaking there is no association between the Lizardmen and death of sleep. In fact compared to the younger races... Lizardmen don't die of old age. And now neither do our dinos.
There is only one current way in which Lizardmen die, and that is in battle.
There is only one current way in which Lizardmen die, and that is in battle.
Professor Vesca
Good News Everyone!
I have no idea why creatures who dont normally die have a god of death.
- Pronouns
- Exist
Because according to Xan, it's an alternate state of existence, mainly one in the Warp. So a Death God gives us a safe space in the Warp especially for our other groups who are outside the Geomantic Web.
NHO
Dumb is a state of existence
- Location
- ᓚᘏᗢ
Lord Kroak and other Relic Priests expressed desire for an additional safety module around their continued existence.
Or for someone to moderate their gossip.
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- Location
- Europa
Yeah I was thinking, that after we expand beyond our system and when we start getting in conflict with Chaos, that we may need something to safeguard the souls of lizards outside the geomantic net when we send out our first fleets and such. Kinda like Morr is in the Old World. Because after we figure out the Slann spawning, as long we have a sort of safe holding area for our deads souls, all lizards basically are defacto immortal. Because if some lizards die we then only have to wait for their souls to arrive in the dream (the safespace) and we recycle those souls for the next batch that spawns instead of crafting new ones.
This gives me a really nice idea how we could link our goodseed with mist, death, dreams and sleep. Basically because lizards practically never sleep, when they die, they sleep and dream in the Dream (like really getting Bloodborne vibes) until they are called again.
The god would then basically be the Moon that safeguards those sleeping.
@Xantalos would such a mechanic even be possible?
Edit: Typos
This gives me a really nice idea how we could link our goodseed with mist, death, dreams and sleep. Basically because lizards practically never sleep, when they die, they sleep and dream in the Dream (like really getting Bloodborne vibes) until they are called again.
The god would then basically be the Moon that safeguards those sleeping.
@Xantalos would such a mechanic even be possible?
Edit: Typos
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Worlds and Warmbloods - Kaboomatic
Kaboomatic
Where the Wild Things Are
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Gahreegig'ax
When the mind fog hit, the slann tried everything they could to stave off its effects. Some slann had choked down foul concoctions of herbs and stones with wakeful properties, while some had their skink attendants massage numbing salves into their scalps to ease the headaches. Some had refused to leave their star chambers for hundreds of years at a time, believing that a lack of contact with the tainted outside air would alleviate their symptoms. Still others attempted magical remedies, or meditated in the tombs of their dead brethren, or spent much of their lucid time destroying the enemies of the lizardmen in errant attempts to stoke the battle fervor that saurus spoke of within themselves. None of these had truly worked, and whatever the slann tried, the fugue inevitably claimed them again and again.
After seeing the failures of his fellow slann, Gahreegig'ax tried something else. He put the entirety of his mind towards one near-impossible task, reasoning that a clarity of purpose might create a clarity of mind. The next decade he was awake, he focused fully on creating a comprehensive compendium of every living being on Mallus.
Alas, his efforts were in vain, for if the mind fog could be defeated by mere clarity of purpose no slann would have ever succumbed to its effects. But during that 8decade, the fourth generation slann felt something awaken within him.
A desire to continue this work.
And so, for centuries, whenever Gahreegig'ax escaped the grip of the mind fog, he set about his research and chronicling with a great fervor.
He astrally projected to all corners of Mallus, spending years in each location, observing the populace, their habits and culture, the lives of their soldiers and noncombatants, figuratively dissecting each place, each people he visited, until he had learned every piece of relevant information about the culture and martial forces of every group, major, minor, and insignificant, on mallus.
He summoned the oldest of the saurus oldbloods to his side, questioning them about the armies they had fought, their makeup, their strengths and weaknesses, and what tactics worked best against which foes. By the end of it, Gahreegig'ax had as much tactical skill as a saurus scar-veteran, and was the most strategically capable of his generation.
After 6 decades of wakefulness, and another 14 decades of slumber, Gahreegig'ax had finished the section of the compendium focused on sapient beings, both their culture and their tactics.
Now it was time for everything else.
The archives of the slann held records of a similar project done aeons ago, at the behest of the old ones. Most of the information within was defunct, as nearly every creature from that time period had evolved and changed enough that their portrayals were useless, or had been exterminated by the slann. Fortunately, the records on minerals, metals and other inorganic objects were still relevant
Next, the beasts of Mallus. As all living things do, these had changed extensively since the project undertaken by the slann all those millennia ago. An update was long overdue. And so, over the course of a decade, the beasts of Mallus were chronicled, from the humble pig to the mighty dragons.
The flora of Mallus, magical and nonmagical, orkoid and regular, all were added after Gahreegig'ax awoke from his slumber.
Finally, his compendium was complete, and Gahreegig'ax went on to his next, more difficult task; quantifying the abilities and powers of everything written in the compendium.
Over the course of 3 long centuries, Gahreegig'ax worked near constantly, the mind fog barely gripping his thoughts by the grace of the old ones. During this time, he ran near constant simulations, viewing illusionary creatures fighting, building, living, and dying, using the data he gathered to assign numerical values to the attributes of individual creatures, small groups, and entire civilizations alike, until finally, he was done with phase two of his masterwork, having created a codex that perfectly reduced every being, group, and civilization on Mallus into a series of numbers.
Now, it was time for phase three.
Gahreegig'ax began creating a set of illusions, illusions that would model everything written in his codex. Using the numerical values in his codex, as well as experience gained from centuries of observation, Gahreegig'ax was able to accurately model the characteristics and traits of every facet of Mallus, as well as their strength and ability in relation to everything else.
This series of illusions was the final, and most difficult, portion of his work, both for the magical skill involved in creating programmable illusions, and the time it took to translate his entire codex into said illusions.
But, merely 3 decades before the deliverance, Gahreegig'ax had finally finished his great work, an incredibly in depth series of illusions that could accurately model everything on mallus. And he went to sleep with a smile on his face.
When the deliverance was casted, Gahreegig'ax awoke abruptly from his slumber, and as the lizardmen were transported to Mochianta, the entire sublime communion could hear him talking about something called 'DLC'.
A/N: Bolded bits are stolen from xantalos
When the mind fog hit, the slann tried everything they could to stave off its effects. Some slann had choked down foul concoctions of herbs and stones with wakeful properties, while some had their skink attendants massage numbing salves into their scalps to ease the headaches. Some had refused to leave their star chambers for hundreds of years at a time, believing that a lack of contact with the tainted outside air would alleviate their symptoms. Still others attempted magical remedies, or meditated in the tombs of their dead brethren, or spent much of their lucid time destroying the enemies of the lizardmen in errant attempts to stoke the battle fervor that saurus spoke of within themselves. None of these had truly worked, and whatever the slann tried, the fugue inevitably claimed them again and again.
After seeing the failures of his fellow slann, Gahreegig'ax tried something else. He put the entirety of his mind towards one near-impossible task, reasoning that a clarity of purpose might create a clarity of mind. The next decade he was awake, he focused fully on creating a comprehensive compendium of every living being on Mallus.
Alas, his efforts were in vain, for if the mind fog could be defeated by mere clarity of purpose no slann would have ever succumbed to its effects. But during that 8decade, the fourth generation slann felt something awaken within him.
A desire to continue this work.
And so, for centuries, whenever Gahreegig'ax escaped the grip of the mind fog, he set about his research and chronicling with a great fervor.
He astrally projected to all corners of Mallus, spending years in each location, observing the populace, their habits and culture, the lives of their soldiers and noncombatants, figuratively dissecting each place, each people he visited, until he had learned every piece of relevant information about the culture and martial forces of every group, major, minor, and insignificant, on mallus.
He summoned the oldest of the saurus oldbloods to his side, questioning them about the armies they had fought, their makeup, their strengths and weaknesses, and what tactics worked best against which foes. By the end of it, Gahreegig'ax had as much tactical skill as a saurus scar-veteran, and was the most strategically capable of his generation.
After 6 decades of wakefulness, and another 14 decades of slumber, Gahreegig'ax had finished the section of the compendium focused on sapient beings, both their culture and their tactics.
Now it was time for everything else.
The archives of the slann held records of a similar project done aeons ago, at the behest of the old ones. Most of the information within was defunct, as nearly every creature from that time period had evolved and changed enough that their portrayals were useless, or had been exterminated by the slann. Fortunately, the records on minerals, metals and other inorganic objects were still relevant
Next, the beasts of Mallus. As all living things do, these had changed extensively since the project undertaken by the slann all those millennia ago. An update was long overdue. And so, over the course of a decade, the beasts of Mallus were chronicled, from the humble pig to the mighty dragons.
The flora of Mallus, magical and nonmagical, orkoid and regular, all were added after Gahreegig'ax awoke from his slumber.
Finally, his compendium was complete, and Gahreegig'ax went on to his next, more difficult task; quantifying the abilities and powers of everything written in the compendium.
Over the course of 3 long centuries, Gahreegig'ax worked near constantly, the mind fog barely gripping his thoughts by the grace of the old ones. During this time, he ran near constant simulations, viewing illusionary creatures fighting, building, living, and dying, using the data he gathered to assign numerical values to the attributes of individual creatures, small groups, and entire civilizations alike, until finally, he was done with phase two of his masterwork, having created a codex that perfectly reduced every being, group, and civilization on Mallus into a series of numbers.
Now, it was time for phase three.
Gahreegig'ax began creating a set of illusions, illusions that would model everything written in his codex. Using the numerical values in his codex, as well as experience gained from centuries of observation, Gahreegig'ax was able to accurately model the characteristics and traits of every facet of Mallus, as well as their strength and ability in relation to everything else.
This series of illusions was the final, and most difficult, portion of his work, both for the magical skill involved in creating programmable illusions, and the time it took to translate his entire codex into said illusions.
But, merely 3 decades before the deliverance, Gahreegig'ax had finally finished his great work, an incredibly in depth series of illusions that could accurately model everything on mallus. And he went to sleep with a smile on his face.
When the deliverance was casted, Gahreegig'ax awoke abruptly from his slumber, and as the lizardmen were transported to Mochianta, the entire sublime communion could hear him talking about something called 'DLC'.
A/N: Bolded bits are stolen from xantalos
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hmm. Just to throw in my two cents now that we've got our fancy godseed, it might be worthwhile to consider how to best a Death/Sleep aspect to our advantage. Lizardmen generate more of themselves via the spawning pools, so why don't we tie our deathgod to a respawn mechanic
Because one of the big advantages of the faction is that the older you get the more powerful you are, so recycling our best heroes when they unexpectedly bite it seems like a good idea. To further tie in to Lizardmen thematics, make the afterlife a place of restful contemplation as our venerable dead await rebirth in the spawning pools.
These are both things which have gotten traction in the thread before so you'll probably see something like them.Yeah I was thinking, that after we expand beyond our system and when we start getting in conflict with Chaos, that we may need something to safeguard the souls of lizards outside the geomantic net when we send out our first fleets and such. Kinda like Morr is in the Old World. Because after we figure out the Slann spawning, as long we have a sort of safe holding area for our deads souls, all lizards basically are defacto immortal. Because if some lizards die we then only have to wait for their souls to arrive in the dream (the safespace) and we recycle those souls for the next batch that spawns instead of crafting new ones.
This gives me a really nice idea how we could link our goodseed with mist, death, dreams and sleep. Basically because lizards practically never sleep, when they die, they sleep and dream in the Dream (like really getting Bloodborne vibes) until they are called again.
The god would then basically be the Moon that safeguards those sleeping.
@Xantalos would such a mechanic even be possible?
Edit: Typos
Shyish also has such fun things as the Purple Sun of Xereus, which is basically a giant globe of Fuck That Thing In Particular. Shyish has a lot of fun "and then a fuck load of people died" Battle Magic.
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Turn 8 Results
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
[X] Plan Ancient Minds Ascertaining
---
AN: This is the collated version, posted so as to not have a billion threadmarks cluttering things up. If you want to read the discussion concerning each section, click here and follow the links at the bottom of each post for the subsequent parts.
---
Reconstitution: 3 3rd Gen, 15 5th Gen
The gaze of the slann - all the slann, freed from the grip of the mind fog for the first time since its wretched birth - bore down upon the tiny daemon that remained of their tormentor with titanic force. It quailed under their attention, its instincts knowing nothing but fear after so long spent as an entity too large for thought. Now that it had been culled to the brink of dissolution by the wrath of the Sublime Communion, it was small enough to comprehend experiences as an individual, and its first experience was overwhelming terror at the psychic might before it. Filled with the terror of oblivion the slann had beaten into it, the daemon was frozen under the force of their scrutiny, with no capacity to run or hide or do anything save plea for mercy.
After a time, the most luminescent of the slann came forth - Mazdamundi, his soul outshining hundreds of his brethren in the murk of the Warp. His eyes shone like caged stars and his voice boomed out in a grand thunderclap as he pronounced the verdict of the mage-lords.
"Daemon. You will be made useful.
Be undone."
His pronouncement finished, Mazdamundi's spiritual form wavered and vanished, along with most of his brethren. Eighteen slann were left behind, and the daemon that had been the Mind Fog shivered at the look in their eyes.
For many years the Warp echoed in silent agony as the fog creature was flayed clean by the slann. They purged its essence, tracing over every bit of its existence with adamantium thought and will. They searched through its frayed carcass for anything with the slightest hint of Chaotic origin, and when they did, they severed it from existence with colorless flame.
Much of the creature died during that time - near everything it had done, which formed many of its countless limbs, was erased for the sin of furthering its cancerous concept. The slann tore the taint of Chaos it had been born with out and burned it to ash, cauterizing its identity with raw magical force.
They dug deep into the center of its being, stripping away layers of useless soul-flesh like dry leaves as they did, and pulled out the creature's core - the part of it that was as vital and intrinsic to it as a soul was to a mortal being. With the lightest of touches they unwound it as though it were a spool of string, stretching what it was out to an imperceptible thinness that stretched far into the sky.
The slann contemplated their necessary design for a time, their thoughts forming a multidimensional diagram in the Warp that shifted and shimmered with manifold complexity. Once they were satisfied, they fed the distilled essence of what had been the mind fog into the diagram.
The entity gasped as it was reborn, before settling into a deep slumber.
They rewove it around itself, the pattern of essence they had designed reshaping what the creature was, had been, and could be. Some faint remnants of the creature's former identity remembered the shape it had taken before, which would allow it to more easily assume the form of certain varieties of gods, but as it was the slann had created a godseed - a construct that could be selectively molded into a variety of spiritual creations by the psychic emanations of lizardmen belief.
They wrapped it in the most potent abjurations they could muster, weaving a shining cloak of magic around it that would keep it inert and sealed until the appointed time, and embedded it deep within the flowing nexus of Itza's geomantic energies. There it would dream itself away in prenatal suspension until it was awoken by those it had once enslaved, to forever serve its role in their immortal designs.
The Mind Fog of Chaos has been converted into a Godseed! Godseeds are nuggets of concentrated psychic energy created from a great amount of essence. They can be used for many things, most notably jump-starting the gestation of a diety! For more information, see the State of the Realm threadmark, where any godseeds you may have in the future will be noted. Godseeds may be stored for any amount of time before they are used.
--
Examine the Cosmos: 25 5th Gen
As the slann floated free of the chains on their minds, a portion of their attention was directed towards the outer reaches of the Warp. They had dealt with the enemy within themselves, and it would be remiss of them to not determine if the Great Enemy had taken notice.
A clade of young slann set their thoughts in a divination matrix and cast their gaze into the Immaterium beyond Mochantia's gravity well, using each other's eyes as recursive focusing lenses to direct their vision across the astronomical distance.
What they saw was a far less dire situation than the lizardmen had faced in times past.
The endless world-bodies of the Ruinous Powers hung heavy over the Warp as they always had. The weight and breadth of their conceptual cancer crushed and twisted infinite iotas of potential into squealing daemons by the instant, and snuffed just as many out with the sheer force of their existence. But one among their number was missing, and the more the slann looked, the more evidence they found that the state of the Warp was very different from what they were used to.
Slaanesh did not seem to exist. Its weight on the fabric of unreality was absent, and its daemons did not soar with foul grace across the currents of the aether anywhere within the sight of the slann. The many palaces and estates belonging to it that had stretched across the Immaterium, holding every imaginable temptation and depravity, were gone.
Indeed, the Warp was significantly calmer than it had ever been on Mallus save for the times before the Great Catastrophe. With only three endless orders of daemons opposed to each other, the constant warring and struggle between the great leviathans of the Immaterium was lessened, and the turbulent currents generated by their clashes were less intense, mostly confined to the deep reaches where mortals did not tread.
Not all was well, of course - there were still three Chaos Gods writhing in existence, and the laughter of daemonkind preying on mortal souls, while far reduced in frequency, still rang out across the stars.
As the slann looked further and further away from the relatively calm area surrounding Mochantia, they saw more and more signs of something stirring in the sea of souls.
There were storms of psychic energy brewing with a slowness and surety that suggested they had been accumulating for millennia. Eddies of spiritual force beginning to spiral in on themselves in a characteristic, self-sustaining pattern. Currently they were not big enough to overtly influence the wider state of the Immaterium, but the slann knew upon seeing them that it would not be long before they hit a tipping point in size and intensity where they would begin to befoul the Warp's layers that drew closer to the material world. Even as they were, they held more nascent energy within them than whole cabals of Greater daemons, and loomed ominously in the far reaches of space.
Seeking more knowledge, the slann drew up contingencies to draw their spirits back into their bodies in case of emergency, and ventured a ways out into the Warp in order to better see the source of this turbulence. Freed of the lensing effect of Mochantia's gravity well, their eyes pierced deep into the sea of souls and saw veritable clouds of daemons belonging to all three chaos gods flocking around what appeared to be the epicenter of the disturbances. The veil there was thin and taut, and a steady chorus of screaming echoed out from realspace, growing steadily louder the longer the slann listened.
They returned to their temples after some time, unwilling to risk attracting daemonic attention by attempting to reach out to the rising storm. Whatever it was, the Ruinous Powers had the majority of their attention focused upon it.
The team of slann assigned to observing the Warp beyond Mochantia's gravity well have reported 4 primary observations:
- The Chaos God Slaanesh does not currently exist. The means by which this occurred are unknown.
- The general condition of the Warp is calmer than it was on Mallus - the immaterial currents are less intense, the veil protecting the real world is notably thicker, and daemonic activity seems to be both less frequent and less intense.
- In the far-off reaches of the Warp, there is a rising storm of self-perpetuating energy that is slowly growing stronger. More study will be required to be certain, but it may grow to a size capable of significantly disrupting the Immaterium within a time period of centuries to millennia.
-The Ruinous Powers are devoting a large amount of attention to the epicenter of these storms. It is likely there is something happening in realspace to cause both of these.
While the growing perturbations in the Warp will likely be an issue in the future, for the moment it is unlikely that any daemonic eyes look toward Mochantia, nor will they unless something momentous occurs in local space.
--
Chasing the Storm: 1 4th Gen
The wall of sound that was a Thunder Lizard's trumpeting carried over the Mochantian trees, bending boughs backward and rustling foliage for miles as the force of the creature's call buoyed it out across the vast jungle.
For Qo'tanguur of the Fourth Spawning, the noise carried memories to his ears. During the scant days he had been lucid on Mallus, he had thrice had to have been evacuated from the city he had been living in when a Thunder Lizard's path drew it near. Unable to spare the effort needed to turn the colossal beast aside, instead he had watched from atop an abandoned temple some miles away as the titanic reptilian thundered through. Each time it had been merely a precaution, and the Thunder Lizard's path led it away from the temple-city. But their earth-shaking calls had been a feature in his warp-induced fever dreams for many years afterwards, the palpable vibration of their steps never far from his mind.
Now his spirit soared over the Mochantian skyline in search of the creatures, for with the lifting of the fog came the insight that the creatures would be of more use to the lizardmen than merely an occasional reminder of the potency of the skill of the Old Ones. The first step in such a process was in tracking their locations, both to ensure that they did not trample anything the slann needed standing and so that none of them would be killed by some improbable mishap.
Qo'taangur found twenty two of the creatures making steady tracks across Mochantia, save for one which had taken a liking to the taste of the creatures of the southern ocean, and spent nearly the entire decade taking periodic month-long swimming trips offshore to feast on miles-wide shoals of unfortunate squid-snakes. Each was heralded by a fleeing cascade of lesser creatures, miniature exoduses caused by the bottomless appetite of a Thunder Lizard.
He spent many months with each titanic saurian, weaving a bevy of tracking spells into their hides like harpoons. The sheer weight and durability of the creatures' spirits caused much of his spellwork to degrade with time - any ordinary enchantment would have worn off in the space of a few days, but Qo'taangur was able to circumvent this effect by embedding shards of geomantic pylons from various cities into the flesh of the Thunder Lizards in magically receptive patterns, and then using those as the foundation for his tracking enchantments.
From sea to Mochantian sea the Thunder Lizards marched, and now the lizardmen knew where. Iluikatl, Yolitzli, Chimak-Amat and more, all creatures that had seen timescales matched only by the oldest of the lizardmen.
Thunder Lizard locations pinpointed - their wanderings will continue to be tracked as time goes on.
--
Assign Slann Rulers: 7 3rd Generation to all cities other than Hexoatl
The slann Bo'ombomp'au had not stirred since the completion of his decades-long investiture of Hysh into himself. He had permeated his flesh with such large quantities of magic that his flesh had become half-real, a translucent image projected by the white flame of his soul. Even while suppressed by the Mind Fog, his luminous thoughts seeped out of his mind and bleached the world around them in alabaster white.
As the fog lifted, Bo'ombomp'au's lungs filled with air and he exhaled purest light. A mantle of white cascaded out from his flesh and into his cadre of skink attendants, turning their scales to shining diamond and their eyes to brilliant stars.
"My hypothesis has prevailed, but the work yet continues," the slann sang. His voice was accompanied by a melodious choir of echoes that billowed upwards in octave, filling his meditation chamber with harmonious sound. "Collect my belongings and prepare them for transport. We go to the Luminous City."
So saying, he mustered his energies, his soul shining so brightly through his breast that the entire interior of the chamber was transmuted to pure marble, and spoke the true intonation of Yenehectua's name aloud. At the utterance his form erupted with light, and he streamed at superluminal speeds to the City of Light as a blazing stream of photons.
Yenehectua was a city that never went dark - not only did the torches mounted upon wall sconces and gates eternally burn white, suffused by the Hysh in the air, the city was so imbued with light magic that the stones gave off a soft glow at all hours, illuminating their surroundings with light that did not seem to have any particular source. Its network of mirrors shifted subtly as the lizardmen used them to convey messages without having to cross the breadth of the city.
Bo'ombomp'au's power flooded into the leylines of the city, and Yenehectua went from a torch amidst the darkened jungle to a spotlight that, for a brief moment, dazzled the eyes of every creature in a hundred miles.
The crystals embedded in the city walls bled light into the stones surrounding them, turning them momentarily to crystal themselves. The network of light shining through the mirrors intensified, forming a mandala of killing beams dozens of kilometers across. From the pinnacle of every temple, a roving spotlight coursed outward, illuminating sections of the city here and there as they flitted back and forth.
3rd generation slann have been installed as the authorized masters of each temple city's magical functions (save for Hexoatl, where Mazdamundi already reigns). If their city is attacked, they will be able to harness the magical energy channeled through the city into the Geomantic Web to inflict great harm upon the attacking forces.
--
Found New City: Southwest of Chalkaro City. Awanabil'tat, 1 Yenehectua Actions, 2 Qotpetl Actions. Improve to Level 2: 2 Chalkaro Actions.
Purge the Parasite: New City/Kroq-Gar and 1 Yenehectua Action.
With not one, but two major factions of greenskins upon the supercontinent, war was coming to Mochantia on a scale not seen since the End Times. The orks would grow on competition and the Ayacmanik would escalate until eventually something would come for the temple-cities that could not be shrugged off by mere patrols and fortifications.
Awanabil'tat had spent his life struggling to preserve his home against inexhaustible threats, and he realized better than any other that with the reactivation of the spawning pools it was expansion, not caution, that was needed before the inevitable storm hit. The more cities there were, the more lizardmen would be spawned, and they would be in a better situation when one of their enemies turned eyes towards them.
He issued commands and the populations of Yenehectua, Qotlpetl, and Chalkaro - all of whom arguably owed their existences to him, as the architect of their spawning grounds - moved to obey, streaming southwest from the City of Gold and Ash in great herds, sheperded by Kroq-Gar and his armies of saurus.
They punched their way through the jungle, fighting off foliage and fauna alike, until they reached the unerringly straight coast. Here the winds were cold and the rain colder. The dominant species of tree were often covered in a thick layer of frost, having adapted to leech the warmth out of everything the slender fibres covering them touched. They used this to fuel their own growth, along with the decomposing corpses of unfortunate creatures that had sheltered underneath their boughs.
The lizardmen built a city upon that icy ground, tearing into packed soil with obsinite picks and shovels, laying down magically-sculpted stone in their wake. Kroq-Gar scoured the land, chasing away dangerous predators and searching for any Ayacmanik presence within a hundred miles of the walls. He found none, the parasite seemingly having vacated this stretch of jungle. Even magical portents cast by skink priests indicated that there was naught more than the occasional observational organism in the area - the Ayacmanik had clearly relocated en masse before the lizardmen had even arrived.
The new city was built to the level of any in the growing empire. Its temples became hothouses, fog rolling out of their entrances as it condensed upon contact with the cool air. Plants of all shapes and colors were cultivated on its rooftops, along its avenues and within gargantuan garden plazas, from delicate Lustrian flowers that secreted a single droplet that could counteract any poison once every century to a hardy, fast-growing maize that supplied much of the lizardmen's food. The city was named Aztlan, and though the land around it was cold, upon completion there was a surge of growth around it.
Aztlan, Garden of Vitality has been founded! See front page for details.
--
Purge the Parasite: Xlanhuapec - Chakax and Tik'taq'to.
Tiktaq'to darted through the Mochantian jungle on Zwup's back like a master weaver passed needle through cloth. The Terradon banked and turned on razor-thin angles, zooming by trees with only centimeters to spare, exerting tremendous g-forces as he rocketed through the foliage.
Tiktaq'to risked a glance behind him. A distended set of jaws wrenched away a hanging screen of vines, revealing a great rope of coiled grey muscle with prehensile spines dotted along its length. It let out a multi-tonal hiss before springing off its tree with tremendous strength, sending it rocketing towards Zwup. The terradon folded his wings and dropped as the image flashed across his bond with his master, but the creature was a hair too fast and its teeth snagged at Zwup's tail, jolting the terradon out of his dive and sending the airborne duo into a momentary free-fall.
Zwup unfurled his wings and took off once more, but the creature was above them now, and it accelerated faster than Zwup. It coiled in on itself and leapt once again, its jaws looming wide enough that it looked fit to swallow TIktaq'to whole, along with his mount.
A sharp crack echoed through the forest as a bullet ripped into the creature's underbelly. It screeched in pain, and turned to look where the echoing report had come from.
A scaled hand grasped the creature's tail with iron-wrought strength and pulled. The spine-snake squawked as Chakax yanked it down to the tree branch where he had been waiting. It flashed its teeth in anger and snapped towards the Eternity Warden with whip-like quickness, but Chakax was quicker. One claw darted out and grabbed the creature by the throat just underneath its maw, his talons punching through its rippling skin. The other hand reared back and punched through the roof of the creature's mouth, grabbing and shredding the brain tissue it found there.
Tiktaq'to landed as Chakax tossed the corpse aside and picked his rifle up, examining it for any signs of damage. "This was the first spring-serpent in many days," the skink warleader said. "They are leaving."
The Eternity Warden rumbled and cast his gaze around, vigilant for any sign that the Ayacmanik may have been pursuing the duo. "Ork war growing," he growled. "They move to fight."
Tiktaq'to nodded, acceding to the saurus' innate intuition. "Whatever their reason, it benefits us," he said. "I will find my flight and return to the Misty City. They will have need of us."
Chakax and Tiktaq'to have made headway in clearing the Ayacmanik from around Xlanhuapec. Their population has shrunk to Small from the combination of their ambush tactics and the parasite sending more of its bodies to battle the orks.
--
The Spellforges: 6 3rd Gen Slann, 40 4th Generation Slann, 100 5th Generation Slann
The temple-cities of the lizardmen had filled out quite a bit in recent years; the empty districts and half-functional infrastructure of years past had been replaced with bustling forges and hazardous arcs of energy. The obsinite pits glowed nearly nonstop as the kroxigor smiths worked to make up the equipment deficit suffered by their saurus garrisons. The steady rhythm of their tongs and hammers beating stone and metal into shape became a universal feature of life in a temple-city; one could no more escape it than fail to notice the sanctums of the slann drawing arcane energy towards themselves through the city's stones, manifesting as nodal stones in the buildings glowing with tremendous brilliance. It was not uncommon for sections of the pyramids to begin to levitate when the slann were in the midst of a project, buoyed along on the river of geomantic power the mage-priests drew to themselves.
The Tablets of the Old Ones, however, spoke of further improvements that should be made. There was more than enough energy in each city's network to power all of their current functions - even should a slann need to harness the power of a city, their reserves were deep enough to retain full functionality while doing so. This excess power was thus, in a sense, wasted, sitting idle for no gain.
The Web was grasped and its power infused into specialized arrays built to call up a dizzying variety of magical effects on command. In Aztlan this took the form of ethereally-receptive crystals that had been shaped and polished in such a way as to filter the energy of the Web in a specific manner, like a prism that blocked all wavelengths of light save for one. In most of the cities, this technique was supplemented by the use of power stones, created by the slann by carefully taking individual strands of specific magical energies and layering them around each other until they took material form in a self-sustaining matrix reminiscent of warpstone. This task was far more time-intensive than using pre-existing crystals, but yielded greater dividends - the power stones not only channeled the power of the Web when set in their arrays, but supplemented it, allowing for more complex effects to be called forth with less effort. The arrays in Itza were made up almost entirely of power stones of all the Winds, thanks to its far more advanced infrastructure.
The infusion lattices were installed in buildings specially designed to optimally channel their power - it was not uncommon for them to be placed directly above an existing forge, letting the energy of the magma columns below heat the floor to a pleasing radiance. The spellforges had numerous alcoves spaced around their floor-space, designed so that objects of various sizes could be placed within, where the arrays would work their magic.
These alcoves were made with a special property that had taken much contemplation before being extracted from the Tablets - when activated, they would induce a vacuum both material and magical within themselves, evicting all stray molecular particles, background radiation, and magical traces so that the enchantments worked within would have no background interference. This allowed for a far greater degree of precision in the spellbinding process - the skink operators would be able to fit far more specific and finely-calibrated enhancements to the objects they empowered than if they were attempting to perform the process unshielded.
Some of the slann grew curious about the potential effect of this isolation process on their meditations, and attempted it after preparing their bodies to withstand the lack of sustenance and atmosphere. A scant year later they emerged from their sanctums, having been greatly refreshed by the experience. The function was soon built into every slann's Star Chamber, allowing for much greater depth of focus in their meditative trances. There was some speculation about what further applications such a spell could have, which were shelved for the time being as the first Spellforges came online and enchanted weaponry started making its way into the hands of the Saurus.
Spellforges activated in any city that has forging districts! These complexes use a variety of power sources in combination with a vacuum-inducing enchantment to layer very finely-tuned spellwork into a weapon or object. For the moment, they are focused on spreading baseline enhancements into the lizardmen's tools and weaponry, but this opens up the possibility of more complex, wide-scale enchantment in the future. Additionally, the potential of the vacuum spell was noted by many of the slann, who have taken to using it as an isolation tank for greater concentration. Options unlocked.
--
Consult 30 5th Gen Relic Priests on Technology: 1 4th Gen, 10 5th Gen
Time flowed differently in the Relic Vaults.
Many skinks had ventured down into them in recent years at the command of the slann. The mages had communed with their dead brethren and been shown the location of a relic - a weapon from times past that had been resting in the vaults for thousands of years. But though the slann had been shown where it was, the dimensions of the vaults were bizarre and convoluted even to their minds, and for them alone to search for the correct path would eat up too much time that could be used for divining the artifact's purpose.
So it was that hundreds of lizardmen had been sent into the Vaults of the four cities that had come from Mallus, and made to search their winding halls for what the Relic Priests had spoken of.
They wandered, and the deeper into the vaults they delved, the stranger they became. The vaults were a dark, confined mass of hallways that went on for indeterminable lengths, turning into and out of themselves at angles that should intersect each other but did not. It was possible to walk for a year down one stretch of hallway and wind up at the same intersection as another path which took but a few minutes to traverse.
Thus it was that when the last of the skinks that had been sent down to find the artifact emerged in Tlaxtlan (though they had entered in Itza), they had been within the Vaults for merely two years, but had aged more than a century.
The device they carried with them was taken by the oldest azyr and chamon skink priests in the city and borne into the largest of the city's newly designed spellforges, where it was pored over by specialists of every field and subjected to careful testing with methods both material and magical until its purpose was at last divined.
It was a humble sphere of bronze, marked all over with glyphs that had had several varieties of magically receptive gemstones ground up and sprinkled into the grooves. The glyphs were divided into eight distinct sections, which were quickly recognized as being characteristic of a certain wind of magic, and around the middle was a band of unadorned gold.
The artifact's function was not derived until some years after it had been found, when it was cautiously infused with an equal amount of all eight winds of magic. Upon infusion, the symbols on the sphere lit up with their wind's color, and began to bleed gently through into the gold band around the middle. A chamon skink priest was made to take hold of it and attempt to access the thing's reserve of the golden wind, with his slann master X'romjekn standing by in case a dangerous effect was triggered.
Fortunately, X'romjekn was able to disable the artifact when he sensed what it was doing - the skink priest's interaction with it had triggered what was in effect a pre-made spell, one that would induce potential fault lines in any material nearby it to explosively materialize through the use of chamon, essentially shattering everything in its radius.
Further testing with different subjects, ranging from all four varieties of skink priest to saurus warriors to the slann themselves, revealed the truth of the artifact. It was a bomb of sorts, a sphere capable of absorbing magic and channeling it in an area around itself in accordance with the input of its user, mostly in a bluntly destructive manner. It could blind those in its radius with hysh, incinerate them with aqshy, blast them with celestial lightning or steal the life from its targets with shyish. It was even possible to blend multiple winds together if the input was correctly modulated, allowing for a more varied range of effects.
Artifact Found - Glyph Sphere! This bronze orb, ringed by gold and carved with gem-laden glyphs, can store moderate amounts of magical energy and release it around itself in various pre-configured, destructive ways - essentially functioning like a magical grenade. It is possible to conjure a large variety of effects with correct input and sufficient charge to the device, which will require extensive training but render it a potent, versatile weapon of war. Options unlocked!
--
Dinosaur Spawning, Exotic Edition: 10 3rd Generation Slann, 40 4th Generation Slann
The integration of the lizardmen's lesser warbeasts into the spawning network had gone smoothly, and data collected by skink administrators over the past decade had showed a notable reduction of overall effort invested to ensure the spawned dinosaurs and the lizardmen operating them were coordinated compared to the old methods of natural breeding. It was thus unanimously agreed to go forward with the initiative of tying their more powerful and exotic beasts to the pools.
The lizardmen had gathered a healthy appreciation for the amount of carnage an angry Troglodon, Carnosaur, or Dread Saurian could inflict if provoked, let alone a Coatl's strange whims, it was decided that the slann would inspect a number of their eggs to decipher their physical code rather than bring in adult specimens. This was borne out as a sensible policy that simplified matters a great deal - even with the various esoteric properties contained within the venom of the Troglodons, the instincts of the Carnosaurs, and the souls of the Dread Saurians, it was simple to puzzle out the majority of their biological makeup from examination of their eggs.
The one interruption in the process came when it was time to collect the eggs of the Coatl - teams of skinks were dispatched to the known resting grounds of several Coatl outside Yenehectua, only for them to find no evidence of any eggs in the immaculate gardens the creatures maintained as their homes. This news was passed up to the slann administrators, and an expedition was sent into the archives of the Third Generation Ibriel, who had extensively catalogued the behavioral habits of all Lustrian fauna. Months later, they emerged, having found no trace of any writings on how exactly the Coatl reproduced.
While their slann masters sunk into deep deliberation over this revelation, consulting the rest of the Sublime Communion and every engraved record of every battle and notable event the Coatl had ever participated in to lizardmen knowledge in hopes of finding some clue as to how such a basic bit of information was misplaced, the skink chiefs took a simpler approach. Sending out unused workers and some chameleon skinks, they set watch parties on every garden the Coatl nested in, waiting for whatever instincts the creatures possessed to kick in and a youngling to be produced.
They watched the creatures, such as they could, for years before any incidents of breeding occurred, and it did not happen in the way it was expected.
Each Coatl, it seemed, desired its own sanctum - a garden of exquisite and unique beauty built and maintained by its strange powers, that it would often rest in when it was not coiling through the air on an erratic circuit around its territory. These gardens hosted a large variety of rare Lustrian and Mochantian flowers, often planted and grown in complex patterns, intersecting with brooks and rock formations the Coatl had moved with its abilities. In some of the older gardens, their geometry was no longer wholly euclidean, and the ability to move through them, or even enter into them, seemed to rest wholly on the will of the flying serpent that lived there.
Some gardens hosted pairs of the creatures, initially thought to be mated pairs. This assumption was corrected late in the decade when one of these pairs near Itza split, one of the feathered serpents making its way into an unoccupied stretch of jungle. There it wove itself ceaselessly above and around the space it had claimed for many days, causing the stretch of land to shimmer and warp as the Coatl's powers worked.
First the area was sealed off, made that so any fauna or motile flora within could not move into the area no matter where they went, only outward. Then it began to make further changes, spatially displacing the majority of the jungle plants within its new garden elsewhere, rearranging the landscape over a period of weeks into a pattern that was both aesthetically pleasing and likely magically significant. Rare plants the Coatl had previously been seen observing seemingly materialized in great quantities. Lustrian bell blossoms that sounded out swooping tones when blown by the wind bloomed alongside Mochantian star grass, a tall wheat-like species with bioluminescent nodules on its head that it would touch to a neighbor during the night to generate an amplified source of light for their secondary leaves.
At last, after a period of many months, during which a skink priest had been persuaded to observe the process, the Coatl had finished. It made one last circuit around its garden, the air rippling behind it, and it let out a cry that was as piercing and clear as the sky. It echoed through the garden for minutes without losing volume, and the skink priest's eyes snapped to a blazing glow as the attentions of the slann were drawn to the call.
The air opened up as the sound faded, and another Coatl swam into existence. The two creatures circled each other briefly, then parted to examine different parts of the garden, letting out occasional trills that made the air shimmer.
The mindspace of the Sublime Communion was abuzz with the news for many years thereafter, the notion that a sacred creation of the Old One Tepok would be so vain that they would sing more of themselves into reality simply to showcase their gardens becoming a subject of much bemusement amongst their councils.
Exotic Dinosaurs have been successfully integrated into the spawning pools, save for the Coatl, which naturally reproduce by creating geomantically aligned gardens and calling other Coatl from potential realities to come admire them. Since this process is tied into the geomantic web, population growth will be abstracted the same as the others.
--
Skink Priests of Different Winds, Ghyran: 150 5th Gen
The birth of the first Ghyran priests took place in Aztlan, the new city's up-swelling of life energy deemed to be synergistic with the endeavor by the slann committee heading it. As the energy of the city flowed into the newly-etched spawning inscriptions, the accumulation of magic made its presence known. A small forest of plants adapted for wildly different biomes grew alongside each other to unusual size outside of the spawning pools, entangling the legs of any who attempted to enter and lashing out with venomous thorns when weapons were brought too near.
As the time of spawning grew closer, these plants began to exhibit outright supernatural attributes. Flowers bloomed from vines in minutes that ordinarily took years to unfurl. Fruit that could grant those who ate it warpsight grew from trees that did not even bear fruit, and Lustrian hummingbirds, which were in truth tiny proto-spirits formed in environments with a great deal of environmental magic and ecological complexity, could be seen darting between budding growths. Their whirring wings left diaphanous trails of twinkling light and sound wherever they went.
At last the accumulation of power came to its peak and the first Ghyran-wielding skink climbed forth from the pools. It was a stout, hardy specimen, with algae-green scales and thick, trunk-like limbs. Its fingers were tipped in blunt claws caked in a layer of dirt, its eyes were large, dark, and sparkled like a still pool of water, and it had a faint halo of what appeared to be hair around its head, which turned out to be various species of grass growing in between its scales upon closer inspection.
Though it was freshly born, it regarded the skink administrators who came to examine it with the gaze of a being that had seen many winters pass. The world around it pulsed with life, a miniature ecosystem surrounding the newborn skink wherever it went. Magical vines snaked up from the stones at its feet, glowing spores of pollen drifted through the air only to fade from existence once they drifted far away enough, and it could seemingly manipulate the biological state of any creature as it pleased with some concentration. Something normally used to heal wounds, but rarely used offensively, such as to make an enraged predator's teeth fall out, or snap bones by overriding control of their muscles.
Ghyran Skink Priests gained! Certain research projects have been reduced in difficulty.
--
Egg of the Quango: Mazdamundi, 1 3rd Gen, 20 4th Gen, 30 5th Gen
The egg of the Quango was one of a very few artifacts that the lizardmen knew for certain had been personally made by an Old One, and thus it was never taken out of the sealed temple-complex in Itza that it was entombed in. Even the slann could not order the Temple Guard who stood watch over the egg to remove it from its protection, and so they traveled to it, the protective guards of fifty-one slann merging together into a grand procession of obsinite, scales, and teeth that escorted the toad-mages to the holding temple.
The slann provided the necessary entrance codes and authorizations to the temple's guard, a process that took up an entire month, and many heavy slabs of stone were unsealed from the entrance and shifted slightly to the side to allow the mage-priests entrance. Their own guards, save for each slann's eternity wardens, were not allowed entrance into the temple, and the doors were sealed behind them once they had entered, to be opened in ten year's time and not a moment before.
The egg of the Quango was massive - it stood twenty feet high and nearly as wide around the base, and to all outside appearances seemed to be made out of a material resembling flawless marble. It was imprinted with a wide range of hues and colors that slowly shifted and moved about on its surface, strands of color twining themselves together in twisting chains across its surface. To the eyes of the slann, it gleamed with the weight of a million and one protective enchantments that the Communion had, in the past, laid upon the egg, a promise of swift annihilation for any who dared to touch an artifact of the Old Ones.
Their first task was the removal of these spells, for their presence would impede full study of the egg's properties. Mazdamundi led his brethren in a symphony of unweaving - crafting an interlocking weave of spellwork that transcribed thousands of individual effects onto the fabric of reality, each one precisely calibrated to equalize and cancel out one of the protective spells upon the egg. They opened their throats and spoke it into existence around the egg, laying it down in such a pattern that none of the security measures triggered any others, as they had been engineered to do. The curtain of spellwork fell away, mystical locks unbolting, chains unraveling. With their presence fading, another replaced it - a luminescence coming from within the egg, bright and cold in the extreme, but still, as though a sunbeam had been frozen in mid-flight.
It was the radiance of the unborn Quango's soul, and its sheer intensity indicated that whatever the creature was, it was meant to be powerful. But the complete absence of any sort of fluctuation in its immaterial state was an oddity - even in the most rigid of saurus, the soul gently reshaped itself from minute to minute in response to bodily and mental input. Here there was nothing, as though the creature's very soul was paralyzed.
The next nine years were a period of uninterrupted study for the slann. Mazdamundi and his underlings of the fifth generation bent their minds towards examining the magic they could feel coursing through the egg's shell, while those of the fourth spawning looked upon the Quango's soul.
A non-exhaustive survey of the facets of the creature's spirit was enough to confirm something that gave a partial explanation why it had not been hatched for countless years - the section of its soul that would grant it the lizardmen properties of agelessness and increasing strength with time were heavily damaged, as though they had been corroded. It was evident to the slann that if the Quango had not remained unborn, it would have succumbed to the curse of old age millennia ago.
The reason as to why the creature had not perished in its unborn state came from their examination of the shell - with the help of his fifth generation underlings, Mazdamundi had been able to painstakingly replicate the ancient spell woven through the Quango's shell and into Itza's geomantic grid - casting it in miniature, he found that it was a spell of stasis, that froze a prescribed area in time itself by forcibly shunting away the flow of cause and effect. It was a sublime work, and though it had clearly been hurried and lacked many of the subtleties and fail-safes they had seen before, the slann knew it to be a spell crafted personally by an Old One.
Whatever reason their creators had originally sealed the Quango within its egg for was unclear, but it was evident that they could not simply break the stasis enchantment - if they were to do so, even if they were able to immediately imbue the Quango with immortality and thus ensure it could even be born without immediately crumpling to dust, the accumulated weight of the time it had spent in stasis would catch up to it before the effects of their soul modification could fully set in. Should it be born, the Quango would live no more than a few hours before shriveling into nothing.
The remainder of the slann's time within the Quango's chamber was spent brainstorming possible ways to bypass the inevitable reassertion of existence upon its form. Grand designs were drawn up for massive infusion rituals of rejuvenation energy to be poured into the egg over a period of decades, then captured and compressed by a retrocausal funnel of magic so that the entirety of its effect could be applied to the creature at once. They hypothesized vast drag-nets of spirit stuff to be woven around the location of the creature once its body perished that would capture and sustain its soul before it could dissolve into the Warp, and allow the slann to grow a new body for it with sufficient study. It was even suggested that simply cataloging everything about the Quango and manually creating a newborn example would be the most practical course of action.
None of their plans were drawn to enough fruition to be executed by the end of the decade, but the amount of data they had generated through their debate was sufficient that the problem no longer seemed nearly so insurmountable as it had at the start. With but a little more effort, the creature that had been hand-crafted by the Old Ones would be born.
Research completed to 343/450!
The Quango's egg is a massive specimen that had a stasis enchantment woven through its shell by an Old One long ago. Their exact reasoning for doing so is unclear, but likely related to the damage sustained to the Quango's soul, perhaps while it was being crafted. If the stasis is broken without something to deal with the immense amount of time the Quango has existed reasserting itself on its form, it will age to dust in a few hours at maximum. Multiple plans have been drawn up in an attempt to circumvent this, and while none of them are wholly viable, they provide a good well of data to draw on in the future.
Whatever the Quango is, its soul exudes cold, and it has an immense luminosity to its spirit, comparable only to the Thunder Lizards.
--
Scry and Spy, Ork vs Ork, Both Orks: 1 4th Gen, 5 5th Gen
Observation of the hordes of the two warbosses as they sprung into war with each other, the Ayacmanik, the jungle, and the ocean - whichever was closest at the time - revealed a concerning trend. Most creatures, were they trapped in a land where everything, including the foliage, hunted them, and they had to constantly fight off a rival tribe that was out for their blood, all while struggling against an impossibly coordinated planetary hivemind of specimens that showcased the malicious imagination of natural selection, would suffer attrition after any appreciable length of time. Their numbers would dwindle, withered by disease and injury and starvation. Their morale would flag, and they would flee or die.
The orks were instead growing stronger.
More of Mekboss Orkfred's flash boyz had arrived, and though his numbers on the continent were still overshadowed by Grungrok Ironfist's horde, their powerful lightning guns and vehicular attachments allowed them to mow through swathes of Ironfist's comparatively under-equipped boyz.
The two armies of orks clashed explosively, battles erupting like boils over a front stretching hundreds of miles. The Ayacmanik pushed against both factions heavily, tens of millions of combat hosts throwing themselves at the orks in a litany of ambushes, sneak attacks, and pitched, brutal fights that trampled the jungle into mud.
With each fight, more spores were sown. As the battles escalated, more and more orks clambered out of the ground, eager for conflict from the moment of their birth. The numbers of the orks swelled as they fought against a veritable buffet of foes, and the war chants of their reinforcements as they sailed across the northern sea grew ever louder.
Grungrok's senior commanders had been 'educated' in matters of cunning via the medium of repeated concussions, and managed the battles well enough, but their warboss was not there. Early in the decade, using one of the transports Orkfred's misplaced reinforcements had brought to him, he had sailed back across the seas with a boatload of kommandos and hijacked one of the Mekboss' factories, using its mechanisms to produce a host of war machines which he used to attack the rest of his rival's back lines. The mobs of orks still waiting for transport across the sea flocked to the newly opened front, eager to taste proper combat. As the decade passed, Ironfist was able to seize another factory, leaving three in the hands of his rival.
For his part, the Mekboss seemed untroubled by the loss of some of his production facilities. Instead he spent all hours of the day and night laboring away in his workshop, churning out a steady stream of disastrously malfunctioning prototypes. As the years went on, they became more sophisticated, going from trukks with downward-pointing rokkit launchers to giant bullet-shaped vehicles with a plethora of rockets mounted on the back to a single gargantuan engine with rickety, clanking wings bolted onto it.
At the close of the decade, the first Dakkajet rose above Orkfred's settlement of Mekkillakrash. The raucous noise of its jet engine echoing over the spore forests as it rose to meet the clouds, only to stall several hundred meters off the ground and crash back down to earth in a massive fireball.
Full-blown warfare has erupted between Grungrok Ironfist and Orkfred Nobell, even as the Ayacmanik continue to press both factions heavily. Orkfred's forces are making gains against Grungrok's mobs in the absence of the enemy Warboss, and the Mekboss has invented aircraft, which will begin mass production and deployment next turn. Meanwhile, Grungrok has stolen two out of Orkfred's five factories, and is currently attacking the rest of them in a bid to seize his enemy's production capabilities. This has caused Orkfred's reinforcements from the northern continent to slow, as they pivot to combat the rival Warboss.
--
Scry and Spy, North Continent: 5 5th Gen
The ruin of Mochantia's northern polar mountain had long held interest for a number of the slann - not so much for the structure itself, but the traces of exotic materials that had been detected beneath the rubble. It was not unprecedented for asteroid impacts to bring strange metals from the depths of space, but even sheets that had clearly been shaped by sapient hands were different.
Five slann were dispatched to investigate, their spirits drifting along the currents of the northern continent's blizzards as they descended towards the ancient ruin. They were very small amidst the vast shards of splintered rock that were piled on top of each other in jagged configurations. It was as though a city-sized fist had broken the landscape long ago, and the skeins of snow falling upon the exposed bones of the mountain was the settling dust of the ancient impact.
This far from their bodies and the power resource of the geomantic web, the slann were not able to use their magic to shift the vast slabs of rock. So they gathered close together, and materialized a sphere of pure water, one of them holding it steady while the other slann channeled their power into it, rapidly spawning a small contingent of kroxigors, along with a few skinks to direct them. With the aid of some transmutation, the slann equipped their new underlings with obsinite mining equipment, and directed them to excavate what they could from the colossal wreckage.
It took several years to yield any significant results, during which more kroxigors were spawned and a small base was built for their habitation, no more than a walled-off encampment with stone halls to ward off the wind and to grow food in, which was aided with the addition of a Ghyran skink priest late in the decade.
The kroxigors excavated their way into the ruin of the mountain, hauling away unstable rock and constructing supports as they went. The slann had shown them the distribution of the metal sheets scattered throughout the ruin, and the intuitive calculations of the kroxigors directed them downwards, into the core of the ruin on a trajectory that yielded more and more traces of otherworldly metal.
In the sixth year, three kroxigors hit an empty pocket while mining away and fell into a small cavern below them. In the time between the floor's collapse and their brethren coming to help them, they explored this new space and found that not only was it made entirely of metal, it quite resembled the interior of many lizardmen buildings. Its edges were regular, its floors smooth, and the exits they found were rectangular arches, sized for creatures not much larger than a skink.
They had found a structure buried in the rock - something cold and ancient and metal.
For the next four years, the lizardmen focused their excavation efforts on the rock surrounding their find, doing what they could to free it of the wreckage without collapsing the rock on top of it. Skink teams explored what they could of its interior, though much of the place was blocked off, sealed by thick metal doors or twisted piles of wreckage. There they found much that was of interest to them - metal plinths with twisted intricacies of thin metal strands and glass twining around in their interiors, seats with nearby apertures that appeared to be for placing limbs inside, a vast interior space where several shredded piles of rubble that vaguely resembled the oceanborne ships of the Orks lay resting.
The structure seemed to go on forever, stretching for hundreds of meters in any direction. It was in their ninth year of exploration that a team of kroxigors finally found an end to the thing, burrowing their way to a nest of gargantuan pipes extending out from the end of the structure. It was lost on the lizardmen what the purpose of such an arrangement could be, until the slann saw through the eyes of their brethren what the orks of the middle continent had done. As that connection snapped into place, the formerly disparate clues of what the structure was came together into a cohesive whole.
Built to unimaginable scale, entombed deep under billions of tons of rock and ice, buried so long it was like an antediluvian fossil, the lizardmen had found a ship.
There is a ship of colossal size buried under the ruin of whatever collapsed the northern mountain. A small lizardmen garrison has been spawned there, and will automatically continue to excavate what they can from the wreckage - however, concerted effort will be needed to make any changes quickly due to the sheer size of the vessel.
--
Scry and Spy, South Continent, The Mountain: 15 5th Gen
Scry and Spy, South Continent, The Crystal Plain: 10 5th Gen
The slann that projected themselves across the southern sea to examine the crystalline continent and the spindle-like mountain at its heart went with some degree of caution as they moved. Whatever had created the continent-wide layer of material, it was not anything that the slann had seen before, and they were unwilling to risk activating any potential security measures.
They began by dispatching themselves to twenty-five equidistant spots around the crystal continent and slowly extruding the smallest wisp of their mental projections into the dormant energy infused throughout the crystal. They did this over a period of two years in order to avoid causing any ripples in the psychic energy of the substance that would give their presence away.
Thus assured that they could proceed, the slann spent four years carefully examining everything they could about the properties of the crystal, the energy it seemed to be suffused in, and how it related to the energy source that had previously been sensed within the core of the southern mountain.
The crystal itself was eventually found to be somewhat related to warpstone, albeit in a far less destructive, corrupting manner. It was a solidified lattice of warp energy that had been somehow brought into realspace, its crystalline structure allowing it to be self-supporting, both embodying and containing the raw warp it would otherwise dissolve into. The structure of this lattice was quite well-designed, even by slann standards. By their estimations, it could be shaped by souls that could emit the correct aethyric frequencies into virtually any shape, and adopt a wide variety of properties according to the will of its shaper - the form it had currently taken was something along the lines of a dormant state. Even so, its toughness was comparable to that of obsinite, and due to its nature as a magical matrix it could both channel power through it and withstand heavy damage.
The mountain at the center of the continent was made almost entirely out of the stuff, from what the slann could sense. The concentration of psychic energy within the mountain's material was much higher than inside the plain, lending it strength and allowing it to maintain the flawless shape it held, jutting thirty kilometers into the sky without so much as a wobble.
This close to the shining beacon inside the mountain's core, the slann could palpate the energy emanating from it, and through simple osmosis and communication with their brethren who were working on other projects, they realized something - the source was a soul. A being lay at the center of the mountain, shielded by the insulation of its crystalline lair. Without gaining entry to the interior of the mountain itself, the slann could not determine much about the entity, only that it was in some form of inactive state - whether it slumbered or was simply placid was unknown.
Their last years of study were spent further evaluating the properties of the crystalline structure and extrapolating possible measures that would allow further study. By the end of the decade, they had drawn up plans for a form of spatial manipulation spell that should allow for an exploration team of lizardmen to pass into the interior of the spire without alerting its occupant.
The crystal that covers the southern continent and makes up the majority of the spire at its center is a form of psychoactive crystalline lattice made up of channeled Warp energy. Like warpstone, its structure is self-reinforcing, allowing it to maintain a presence in realspace without continually drawing on the immaterium, and it has the dual properties of being able to channel energy through itself and shield anything it surrounds from wayward magical energies.
It appears to be connected in some way to the energy source at the core of the spire, revealed to be a being of great magical potency that is currently assumed to be slumbering. Based on the study of the slann, it should be possible to send an expedition within the mountain to discern the state of this entity, and whether or not it will present a threat to the lizardmen. Options unlocked.
--
Ascertain Their Usefulness, 6 3rd Gen
The Well of Mirrored Fates was a temple often used before Tlaxtlan went to war. It was among the tallest in the city, rivaling the height of the star chambers of the slann. The base of the temple itself was plain, a fortified pyramid used by the saurus for habitation and training, but at its peak was an open plaza fifty feet wide, at the center of which stood a circular stone pool.
Most days the Well stood empty, but on moonlit nights when the skink priests performed the correct rituals, the pool's magic activated, invisible lenses springing into existence above the temple, filtering the incoming radiance over and over until the pool was filled with liquid moonlight. Saurus warleaders would quaff an offered jug of the substance and speak their intended course of action, and the magic of the moonlight would project a clue as to what lay in the future on the vapor of their breath.
Four lizardmen gathered around the Well at the crux of the decade, on a night when the moon shone brightly and the skies were clear by the will of the slann. There was the skink Inxi-Huinxi, Horned One rider and master of Hexoatl's skink militia. Standing across from him was the saurus Ven'teun, who had spent centuries guarding the ruin of Chaqua from the shadows. To their side was a kroxigor marked by the mage-priests as a protector of his smaller kin. His name was Gyrd, and his scales gleamed in the moonlight as he gazed at the lizardman across from him.
The slann Chuqa-Xi stared back at them all, the light behind his eyes casting strange shadows over the pool of moonlight.
"The Communion is undecided," he spoke, his voice thrumming through the air and pressing down upon the lizardmen's minds. "The Ayacmanik present possibility. We have studied their substance, and considered manifold courses of action. Now, we seek input."
The slann's words phased inside the skulls of the other lizardmen, filling their minds with an overwhelming deluge of detail that the slann had amassed about the many-souled creature over the decade. Magical theorums unknown to all save the slann strained their thoughts, potential courses of action that could be imposed upon the oversoul pushing at the limits of their mental capacity. It was a dizzying rush, and almost in unison they dropped to one or both knees as Chuqa-Xi cut off the flow of information.
The slann motioned, and three stone goblets floated forth, filling themselves with the liquid of the Well. "The minds of your subspecies function in ways fundamentally different to our own," Chuqa-Xi said. "Drink, and give your thoughts on the matter to the Communion."
Ven'teun stepped forth first, his black-ringed scales shivering as he drank the moonlight. He thought for a moment, then spoke, the harsh tones of saurus warspeak carried out of his throat by a soft cascade of light.
"Eliminate them," he said, and from his mouth came images of blood and death. Obsinite macuahuitl bit through animal flesh, serrated fangs ripped limb and gut and throat, and the raw certainty of flame burned the parasite where they nested, charring their larval forms to dust. "They are a threat, and will always be. If destruction is not practical..." He paused, shaping the new knowledge in his mind into something he could coherently express.
"Traumatization." The word called up a slew of images and sensations that flashed and blurred above the Well - the many souls of the Ayacmanik, faintly connected by the sameness that from another perspective unified them as one entity. The burning gazes of many slann, pronouncing doom upon an enemy. An animal, cowering in utter terror before a saurus.
As Ven'teun stepped back, the images fading, Inxi-Huinxi came forward. He too shuddered at the sensation of the moonlight crawling into his spirit, and took several moments to organize his thoughts before speaking. "The Ayacmanik are a threat, yes," he acknowledged. "But their potential use is far greater. I propose ... to control them."
The moonlight poured out of his mouth and shaped itself into an image of a slann sitting before an army of Ayacmanik that stretched out to the horizon. The slann's eyes flashed, and like a wave, an answering glow rippled out through the eyes of the parasite. They knelt before the slann, bowing their heads to their master. The moonlight shifted, showing other possibilities - the bodies of the Ayacmanik carrying stone, helping to build a temple-city. Packs of the creatures running beside saurus war hosts. The innumerable creatures of the jungle converging upon a temple-city under siege by Orks.
Gyrd was last to step forth and drink of the moonlight, and took the longest of the three to articulate his thoughts. The minds of kroxigors were built narrower even than those of the saurus, and many of the concepts and formulae that Chuqa-Xi had shoved into his brain meant little to him.
"I would talk with them about how they build," Gyrd said, and the moonbeam that wafted out between his teeth showed something strange - a kroxigor and an Ayacmanik host that shifted form from moment to moment, standing side by side and jointly examining an architectural schematic. Judging by their gestures, they almost seemed to be communicating.
The kroxigor shrugged at the questioning glances that Inxi-Huinxi and Ven'teun shot at him. He was not fully sure what the moonlight images meant, only that he had spoken his truth to the slann as he was bid.
Chuqa-Xi gazed at the moonlight image as it dispersed, then inclined his head slightly in a gesture of dismissal. He stayed there for many hours as the moon tracked its way across the sky, staring into the pool of silverine. In ages past, he had been the first of the slann to capture warmblooded prisoners and bring them to Tlaxtlan to be lobotomized, and serve the lizardmen as slaves. Now, in conjunction with his thoughts, the pool of moonlight shivered and began to move.
It formed itself into an image representing the Ayacmanik oversoul - a broad network of dull pebbles, connected to each other by invisible strands. As Chuqa-Xi watched, one of the nodes in the network brightened, suddenly glowing with the radiance of a true soul, capable of self-reflection. The light quickly spread among its fellows, and on even further, until the whole of the oversoul was lit up in light and thought and comprehension.
Then, Chuqa-Xi's design fell upon it, a clouded mirror formed from the godseed tucked inside the geomantic web. The Ayacmanik fell through it and were coated in its substance, swathed in murk and mist as the slann had been only a decade before. All the potential of a sapient Ayacmanik oversoul, harnessed and chained to the Sublime Communion's will by an inescapable curse. An unenviable fate for any thinking, feeling being, but their wishes were as nothing before the designs of the slann.
Chuqa-Xi's eyes burned as he looked upon what could be.
The slann have determined four possible courses of action to take with the Ayacmanik beyond exterminating them:
- Traumatize the Oversoul: Use the sheer power of the Sublime Communion to sear raw, animal terror deep into the Ayacmanik oversoul. This will cause the creatures to retreat from all lizardmen territory, shy away from any further expansions, and cease all attempts to infect a lizardman host. The least expensive of the options.
- Enslave the Creatures: The slann shall crush the will of the Ayacmanik into submission through root access to their oversoul. Allows the slann to mass-mind control any Ayacmanik they are near, effectively causing any Ayacmanik near lizardmen territory to assist the lizardmen in whatever they are doing. The rest of the species will behave as normal.
- Give Them Sophoncy: An unprecedented step, but possible. By engineering a skink template with no inherent lizardmen qualities save for agelessness and incorruptibility, then deliberately infecting it and placing it in confinement inside a temple-city, it is possible to grant the oversoul sophoncy and communicate with the creatures as people. The possible benefits to doing so are unknown.
- Chains of Mist (Godseed-enabled option): By granting the Ayacmanik sophoncy, their cognitive capacity and ability to effect their environment would increase manyfold. It would then be possible to use the essence of the Godseed to forge chains of mist and moonlight upon their minds and souls, mirroring the enforced slumber of the slann, but with the Communion holding the key to controlling the entire species. The most expensive option - the prospect of a sophontic Ayacmanik oversoul under the control of the lizardmen is a potent one indeed.
--
Forging Districts built in Hexoatl and Yenehectua.
Yenehectua improved to infrastructure level 3.
Qotlpetl improved to infrastructure level 3.
25,135 saurus, 50,277 skinks, and 5,278 kroxigor have been transferred to both Chalkaro and Aztlan from Itza.
--
City population growth:
Itza population growth: 50,000 Saurus, 100,000 Skinks, 10,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Xlanhuapec population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Tlaxtlan population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Yenehectua population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Qotlpetl population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Chalkaro population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Aztlan population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Ayacmanik infiltration attempts resulted in:
128 saurus, 281 skinks, and 56 kroxigors as casualties in Itza.
44 saurus, 146 skinks, and 20 kroxigors as casualties in Hexoatl.
121 saurus, 304 skinks, and 47 kroxigors as casualties in Xlanhuapec.
68 saurus, 175 skinks, and 42 kroxigors as casualties in Tlaxtlan.
146 saurus, 317 skinks, and 72 kroxigors as casualties in Yenehectua.
132 saurus, 282 skinks, and 54 kroxigors as casualties in Qotlpetl.
148 saurus, 297 skinks, and 63 kroxigors as casualties in Chalkaro.
24 saurus, 127 skinks, and 31 kroxigors as casualties in Aztlan.
Passive slann spawning:
Hexoatl: 7,640 saurus, 15,280 skinks, 1,528 kroxigor
Xlanhuapec: 7,960 saurus, 15,920 skinks, 1,592 kroxigor
Tlaxtlan: 7,140 saurus, 14,280 skinks, 1,428 kroxigor
Chalkaro: 5,310 saurus, 10,620 skinks, 1,062 kroxigor sent from Itza
Aztlan: 5,310 saurus, 10,620 skinks, 1,062 kroxigor sent from Itza
---
AN: This is the collated version, posted so as to not have a billion threadmarks cluttering things up. If you want to read the discussion concerning each section, click here and follow the links at the bottom of each post for the subsequent parts.
---
Reconstitution: 3 3rd Gen, 15 5th Gen
The gaze of the slann - all the slann, freed from the grip of the mind fog for the first time since its wretched birth - bore down upon the tiny daemon that remained of their tormentor with titanic force. It quailed under their attention, its instincts knowing nothing but fear after so long spent as an entity too large for thought. Now that it had been culled to the brink of dissolution by the wrath of the Sublime Communion, it was small enough to comprehend experiences as an individual, and its first experience was overwhelming terror at the psychic might before it. Filled with the terror of oblivion the slann had beaten into it, the daemon was frozen under the force of their scrutiny, with no capacity to run or hide or do anything save plea for mercy.
After a time, the most luminescent of the slann came forth - Mazdamundi, his soul outshining hundreds of his brethren in the murk of the Warp. His eyes shone like caged stars and his voice boomed out in a grand thunderclap as he pronounced the verdict of the mage-lords.
"Daemon. You will be made useful.
Be undone."
His pronouncement finished, Mazdamundi's spiritual form wavered and vanished, along with most of his brethren. Eighteen slann were left behind, and the daemon that had been the Mind Fog shivered at the look in their eyes.
For many years the Warp echoed in silent agony as the fog creature was flayed clean by the slann. They purged its essence, tracing over every bit of its existence with adamantium thought and will. They searched through its frayed carcass for anything with the slightest hint of Chaotic origin, and when they did, they severed it from existence with colorless flame.
Much of the creature died during that time - near everything it had done, which formed many of its countless limbs, was erased for the sin of furthering its cancerous concept. The slann tore the taint of Chaos it had been born with out and burned it to ash, cauterizing its identity with raw magical force.
They dug deep into the center of its being, stripping away layers of useless soul-flesh like dry leaves as they did, and pulled out the creature's core - the part of it that was as vital and intrinsic to it as a soul was to a mortal being. With the lightest of touches they unwound it as though it were a spool of string, stretching what it was out to an imperceptible thinness that stretched far into the sky.
The slann contemplated their necessary design for a time, their thoughts forming a multidimensional diagram in the Warp that shifted and shimmered with manifold complexity. Once they were satisfied, they fed the distilled essence of what had been the mind fog into the diagram.
The entity gasped as it was reborn, before settling into a deep slumber.
They rewove it around itself, the pattern of essence they had designed reshaping what the creature was, had been, and could be. Some faint remnants of the creature's former identity remembered the shape it had taken before, which would allow it to more easily assume the form of certain varieties of gods, but as it was the slann had created a godseed - a construct that could be selectively molded into a variety of spiritual creations by the psychic emanations of lizardmen belief.
They wrapped it in the most potent abjurations they could muster, weaving a shining cloak of magic around it that would keep it inert and sealed until the appointed time, and embedded it deep within the flowing nexus of Itza's geomantic energies. There it would dream itself away in prenatal suspension until it was awoken by those it had once enslaved, to forever serve its role in their immortal designs.
The Mind Fog of Chaos has been converted into a Godseed! Godseeds are nuggets of concentrated psychic energy created from a great amount of essence. They can be used for many things, most notably jump-starting the gestation of a diety! For more information, see the State of the Realm threadmark, where any godseeds you may have in the future will be noted. Godseeds may be stored for any amount of time before they are used.
--
Examine the Cosmos: 25 5th Gen
As the slann floated free of the chains on their minds, a portion of their attention was directed towards the outer reaches of the Warp. They had dealt with the enemy within themselves, and it would be remiss of them to not determine if the Great Enemy had taken notice.
A clade of young slann set their thoughts in a divination matrix and cast their gaze into the Immaterium beyond Mochantia's gravity well, using each other's eyes as recursive focusing lenses to direct their vision across the astronomical distance.
What they saw was a far less dire situation than the lizardmen had faced in times past.
The endless world-bodies of the Ruinous Powers hung heavy over the Warp as they always had. The weight and breadth of their conceptual cancer crushed and twisted infinite iotas of potential into squealing daemons by the instant, and snuffed just as many out with the sheer force of their existence. But one among their number was missing, and the more the slann looked, the more evidence they found that the state of the Warp was very different from what they were used to.
Slaanesh did not seem to exist. Its weight on the fabric of unreality was absent, and its daemons did not soar with foul grace across the currents of the aether anywhere within the sight of the slann. The many palaces and estates belonging to it that had stretched across the Immaterium, holding every imaginable temptation and depravity, were gone.
Indeed, the Warp was significantly calmer than it had ever been on Mallus save for the times before the Great Catastrophe. With only three endless orders of daemons opposed to each other, the constant warring and struggle between the great leviathans of the Immaterium was lessened, and the turbulent currents generated by their clashes were less intense, mostly confined to the deep reaches where mortals did not tread.
Not all was well, of course - there were still three Chaos Gods writhing in existence, and the laughter of daemonkind preying on mortal souls, while far reduced in frequency, still rang out across the stars.
As the slann looked further and further away from the relatively calm area surrounding Mochantia, they saw more and more signs of something stirring in the sea of souls.
There were storms of psychic energy brewing with a slowness and surety that suggested they had been accumulating for millennia. Eddies of spiritual force beginning to spiral in on themselves in a characteristic, self-sustaining pattern. Currently they were not big enough to overtly influence the wider state of the Immaterium, but the slann knew upon seeing them that it would not be long before they hit a tipping point in size and intensity where they would begin to befoul the Warp's layers that drew closer to the material world. Even as they were, they held more nascent energy within them than whole cabals of Greater daemons, and loomed ominously in the far reaches of space.
Seeking more knowledge, the slann drew up contingencies to draw their spirits back into their bodies in case of emergency, and ventured a ways out into the Warp in order to better see the source of this turbulence. Freed of the lensing effect of Mochantia's gravity well, their eyes pierced deep into the sea of souls and saw veritable clouds of daemons belonging to all three chaos gods flocking around what appeared to be the epicenter of the disturbances. The veil there was thin and taut, and a steady chorus of screaming echoed out from realspace, growing steadily louder the longer the slann listened.
They returned to their temples after some time, unwilling to risk attracting daemonic attention by attempting to reach out to the rising storm. Whatever it was, the Ruinous Powers had the majority of their attention focused upon it.
The team of slann assigned to observing the Warp beyond Mochantia's gravity well have reported 4 primary observations:
- The Chaos God Slaanesh does not currently exist. The means by which this occurred are unknown.
- The general condition of the Warp is calmer than it was on Mallus - the immaterial currents are less intense, the veil protecting the real world is notably thicker, and daemonic activity seems to be both less frequent and less intense.
- In the far-off reaches of the Warp, there is a rising storm of self-perpetuating energy that is slowly growing stronger. More study will be required to be certain, but it may grow to a size capable of significantly disrupting the Immaterium within a time period of centuries to millennia.
-The Ruinous Powers are devoting a large amount of attention to the epicenter of these storms. It is likely there is something happening in realspace to cause both of these.
While the growing perturbations in the Warp will likely be an issue in the future, for the moment it is unlikely that any daemonic eyes look toward Mochantia, nor will they unless something momentous occurs in local space.
--
Chasing the Storm: 1 4th Gen
The wall of sound that was a Thunder Lizard's trumpeting carried over the Mochantian trees, bending boughs backward and rustling foliage for miles as the force of the creature's call buoyed it out across the vast jungle.
For Qo'tanguur of the Fourth Spawning, the noise carried memories to his ears. During the scant days he had been lucid on Mallus, he had thrice had to have been evacuated from the city he had been living in when a Thunder Lizard's path drew it near. Unable to spare the effort needed to turn the colossal beast aside, instead he had watched from atop an abandoned temple some miles away as the titanic reptilian thundered through. Each time it had been merely a precaution, and the Thunder Lizard's path led it away from the temple-city. But their earth-shaking calls had been a feature in his warp-induced fever dreams for many years afterwards, the palpable vibration of their steps never far from his mind.
Now his spirit soared over the Mochantian skyline in search of the creatures, for with the lifting of the fog came the insight that the creatures would be of more use to the lizardmen than merely an occasional reminder of the potency of the skill of the Old Ones. The first step in such a process was in tracking their locations, both to ensure that they did not trample anything the slann needed standing and so that none of them would be killed by some improbable mishap.
Qo'taangur found twenty two of the creatures making steady tracks across Mochantia, save for one which had taken a liking to the taste of the creatures of the southern ocean, and spent nearly the entire decade taking periodic month-long swimming trips offshore to feast on miles-wide shoals of unfortunate squid-snakes. Each was heralded by a fleeing cascade of lesser creatures, miniature exoduses caused by the bottomless appetite of a Thunder Lizard.
He spent many months with each titanic saurian, weaving a bevy of tracking spells into their hides like harpoons. The sheer weight and durability of the creatures' spirits caused much of his spellwork to degrade with time - any ordinary enchantment would have worn off in the space of a few days, but Qo'taangur was able to circumvent this effect by embedding shards of geomantic pylons from various cities into the flesh of the Thunder Lizards in magically receptive patterns, and then using those as the foundation for his tracking enchantments.
From sea to Mochantian sea the Thunder Lizards marched, and now the lizardmen knew where. Iluikatl, Yolitzli, Chimak-Amat and more, all creatures that had seen timescales matched only by the oldest of the lizardmen.
Thunder Lizard locations pinpointed - their wanderings will continue to be tracked as time goes on.
--
Assign Slann Rulers: 7 3rd Generation to all cities other than Hexoatl
The slann Bo'ombomp'au had not stirred since the completion of his decades-long investiture of Hysh into himself. He had permeated his flesh with such large quantities of magic that his flesh had become half-real, a translucent image projected by the white flame of his soul. Even while suppressed by the Mind Fog, his luminous thoughts seeped out of his mind and bleached the world around them in alabaster white.
As the fog lifted, Bo'ombomp'au's lungs filled with air and he exhaled purest light. A mantle of white cascaded out from his flesh and into his cadre of skink attendants, turning their scales to shining diamond and their eyes to brilliant stars.
"My hypothesis has prevailed, but the work yet continues," the slann sang. His voice was accompanied by a melodious choir of echoes that billowed upwards in octave, filling his meditation chamber with harmonious sound. "Collect my belongings and prepare them for transport. We go to the Luminous City."
So saying, he mustered his energies, his soul shining so brightly through his breast that the entire interior of the chamber was transmuted to pure marble, and spoke the true intonation of Yenehectua's name aloud. At the utterance his form erupted with light, and he streamed at superluminal speeds to the City of Light as a blazing stream of photons.
Yenehectua was a city that never went dark - not only did the torches mounted upon wall sconces and gates eternally burn white, suffused by the Hysh in the air, the city was so imbued with light magic that the stones gave off a soft glow at all hours, illuminating their surroundings with light that did not seem to have any particular source. Its network of mirrors shifted subtly as the lizardmen used them to convey messages without having to cross the breadth of the city.
Bo'ombomp'au's power flooded into the leylines of the city, and Yenehectua went from a torch amidst the darkened jungle to a spotlight that, for a brief moment, dazzled the eyes of every creature in a hundred miles.
The crystals embedded in the city walls bled light into the stones surrounding them, turning them momentarily to crystal themselves. The network of light shining through the mirrors intensified, forming a mandala of killing beams dozens of kilometers across. From the pinnacle of every temple, a roving spotlight coursed outward, illuminating sections of the city here and there as they flitted back and forth.
3rd generation slann have been installed as the authorized masters of each temple city's magical functions (save for Hexoatl, where Mazdamundi already reigns). If their city is attacked, they will be able to harness the magical energy channeled through the city into the Geomantic Web to inflict great harm upon the attacking forces.
--
Found New City: Southwest of Chalkaro City. Awanabil'tat, 1 Yenehectua Actions, 2 Qotpetl Actions. Improve to Level 2: 2 Chalkaro Actions.
Purge the Parasite: New City/Kroq-Gar and 1 Yenehectua Action.
With not one, but two major factions of greenskins upon the supercontinent, war was coming to Mochantia on a scale not seen since the End Times. The orks would grow on competition and the Ayacmanik would escalate until eventually something would come for the temple-cities that could not be shrugged off by mere patrols and fortifications.
Awanabil'tat had spent his life struggling to preserve his home against inexhaustible threats, and he realized better than any other that with the reactivation of the spawning pools it was expansion, not caution, that was needed before the inevitable storm hit. The more cities there were, the more lizardmen would be spawned, and they would be in a better situation when one of their enemies turned eyes towards them.
He issued commands and the populations of Yenehectua, Qotlpetl, and Chalkaro - all of whom arguably owed their existences to him, as the architect of their spawning grounds - moved to obey, streaming southwest from the City of Gold and Ash in great herds, sheperded by Kroq-Gar and his armies of saurus.
They punched their way through the jungle, fighting off foliage and fauna alike, until they reached the unerringly straight coast. Here the winds were cold and the rain colder. The dominant species of tree were often covered in a thick layer of frost, having adapted to leech the warmth out of everything the slender fibres covering them touched. They used this to fuel their own growth, along with the decomposing corpses of unfortunate creatures that had sheltered underneath their boughs.
The lizardmen built a city upon that icy ground, tearing into packed soil with obsinite picks and shovels, laying down magically-sculpted stone in their wake. Kroq-Gar scoured the land, chasing away dangerous predators and searching for any Ayacmanik presence within a hundred miles of the walls. He found none, the parasite seemingly having vacated this stretch of jungle. Even magical portents cast by skink priests indicated that there was naught more than the occasional observational organism in the area - the Ayacmanik had clearly relocated en masse before the lizardmen had even arrived.
The new city was built to the level of any in the growing empire. Its temples became hothouses, fog rolling out of their entrances as it condensed upon contact with the cool air. Plants of all shapes and colors were cultivated on its rooftops, along its avenues and within gargantuan garden plazas, from delicate Lustrian flowers that secreted a single droplet that could counteract any poison once every century to a hardy, fast-growing maize that supplied much of the lizardmen's food. The city was named Aztlan, and though the land around it was cold, upon completion there was a surge of growth around it.
Aztlan, Garden of Vitality has been founded! See front page for details.
--
Purge the Parasite: Xlanhuapec - Chakax and Tik'taq'to.
Tiktaq'to darted through the Mochantian jungle on Zwup's back like a master weaver passed needle through cloth. The Terradon banked and turned on razor-thin angles, zooming by trees with only centimeters to spare, exerting tremendous g-forces as he rocketed through the foliage.
Tiktaq'to risked a glance behind him. A distended set of jaws wrenched away a hanging screen of vines, revealing a great rope of coiled grey muscle with prehensile spines dotted along its length. It let out a multi-tonal hiss before springing off its tree with tremendous strength, sending it rocketing towards Zwup. The terradon folded his wings and dropped as the image flashed across his bond with his master, but the creature was a hair too fast and its teeth snagged at Zwup's tail, jolting the terradon out of his dive and sending the airborne duo into a momentary free-fall.
Zwup unfurled his wings and took off once more, but the creature was above them now, and it accelerated faster than Zwup. It coiled in on itself and leapt once again, its jaws looming wide enough that it looked fit to swallow TIktaq'to whole, along with his mount.
A sharp crack echoed through the forest as a bullet ripped into the creature's underbelly. It screeched in pain, and turned to look where the echoing report had come from.
A scaled hand grasped the creature's tail with iron-wrought strength and pulled. The spine-snake squawked as Chakax yanked it down to the tree branch where he had been waiting. It flashed its teeth in anger and snapped towards the Eternity Warden with whip-like quickness, but Chakax was quicker. One claw darted out and grabbed the creature by the throat just underneath its maw, his talons punching through its rippling skin. The other hand reared back and punched through the roof of the creature's mouth, grabbing and shredding the brain tissue it found there.
Tiktaq'to landed as Chakax tossed the corpse aside and picked his rifle up, examining it for any signs of damage. "This was the first spring-serpent in many days," the skink warleader said. "They are leaving."
The Eternity Warden rumbled and cast his gaze around, vigilant for any sign that the Ayacmanik may have been pursuing the duo. "Ork war growing," he growled. "They move to fight."
Tiktaq'to nodded, acceding to the saurus' innate intuition. "Whatever their reason, it benefits us," he said. "I will find my flight and return to the Misty City. They will have need of us."
Xlanhuapec:
403 Saurus
2109 Skinks
403 Saurus
2109 Skinks
Chakax and Tiktaq'to have made headway in clearing the Ayacmanik from around Xlanhuapec. Their population has shrunk to Small from the combination of their ambush tactics and the parasite sending more of its bodies to battle the orks.
--
The Spellforges: 6 3rd Gen Slann, 40 4th Generation Slann, 100 5th Generation Slann
The temple-cities of the lizardmen had filled out quite a bit in recent years; the empty districts and half-functional infrastructure of years past had been replaced with bustling forges and hazardous arcs of energy. The obsinite pits glowed nearly nonstop as the kroxigor smiths worked to make up the equipment deficit suffered by their saurus garrisons. The steady rhythm of their tongs and hammers beating stone and metal into shape became a universal feature of life in a temple-city; one could no more escape it than fail to notice the sanctums of the slann drawing arcane energy towards themselves through the city's stones, manifesting as nodal stones in the buildings glowing with tremendous brilliance. It was not uncommon for sections of the pyramids to begin to levitate when the slann were in the midst of a project, buoyed along on the river of geomantic power the mage-priests drew to themselves.
The Tablets of the Old Ones, however, spoke of further improvements that should be made. There was more than enough energy in each city's network to power all of their current functions - even should a slann need to harness the power of a city, their reserves were deep enough to retain full functionality while doing so. This excess power was thus, in a sense, wasted, sitting idle for no gain.
The Web was grasped and its power infused into specialized arrays built to call up a dizzying variety of magical effects on command. In Aztlan this took the form of ethereally-receptive crystals that had been shaped and polished in such a way as to filter the energy of the Web in a specific manner, like a prism that blocked all wavelengths of light save for one. In most of the cities, this technique was supplemented by the use of power stones, created by the slann by carefully taking individual strands of specific magical energies and layering them around each other until they took material form in a self-sustaining matrix reminiscent of warpstone. This task was far more time-intensive than using pre-existing crystals, but yielded greater dividends - the power stones not only channeled the power of the Web when set in their arrays, but supplemented it, allowing for more complex effects to be called forth with less effort. The arrays in Itza were made up almost entirely of power stones of all the Winds, thanks to its far more advanced infrastructure.
The infusion lattices were installed in buildings specially designed to optimally channel their power - it was not uncommon for them to be placed directly above an existing forge, letting the energy of the magma columns below heat the floor to a pleasing radiance. The spellforges had numerous alcoves spaced around their floor-space, designed so that objects of various sizes could be placed within, where the arrays would work their magic.
These alcoves were made with a special property that had taken much contemplation before being extracted from the Tablets - when activated, they would induce a vacuum both material and magical within themselves, evicting all stray molecular particles, background radiation, and magical traces so that the enchantments worked within would have no background interference. This allowed for a far greater degree of precision in the spellbinding process - the skink operators would be able to fit far more specific and finely-calibrated enhancements to the objects they empowered than if they were attempting to perform the process unshielded.
Some of the slann grew curious about the potential effect of this isolation process on their meditations, and attempted it after preparing their bodies to withstand the lack of sustenance and atmosphere. A scant year later they emerged from their sanctums, having been greatly refreshed by the experience. The function was soon built into every slann's Star Chamber, allowing for much greater depth of focus in their meditative trances. There was some speculation about what further applications such a spell could have, which were shelved for the time being as the first Spellforges came online and enchanted weaponry started making its way into the hands of the Saurus.
Spellforges activated in any city that has forging districts! These complexes use a variety of power sources in combination with a vacuum-inducing enchantment to layer very finely-tuned spellwork into a weapon or object. For the moment, they are focused on spreading baseline enhancements into the lizardmen's tools and weaponry, but this opens up the possibility of more complex, wide-scale enchantment in the future. Additionally, the potential of the vacuum spell was noted by many of the slann, who have taken to using it as an isolation tank for greater concentration. Options unlocked.
--
Consult 30 5th Gen Relic Priests on Technology: 1 4th Gen, 10 5th Gen
Time flowed differently in the Relic Vaults.
Many skinks had ventured down into them in recent years at the command of the slann. The mages had communed with their dead brethren and been shown the location of a relic - a weapon from times past that had been resting in the vaults for thousands of years. But though the slann had been shown where it was, the dimensions of the vaults were bizarre and convoluted even to their minds, and for them alone to search for the correct path would eat up too much time that could be used for divining the artifact's purpose.
So it was that hundreds of lizardmen had been sent into the Vaults of the four cities that had come from Mallus, and made to search their winding halls for what the Relic Priests had spoken of.
They wandered, and the deeper into the vaults they delved, the stranger they became. The vaults were a dark, confined mass of hallways that went on for indeterminable lengths, turning into and out of themselves at angles that should intersect each other but did not. It was possible to walk for a year down one stretch of hallway and wind up at the same intersection as another path which took but a few minutes to traverse.
Thus it was that when the last of the skinks that had been sent down to find the artifact emerged in Tlaxtlan (though they had entered in Itza), they had been within the Vaults for merely two years, but had aged more than a century.
The device they carried with them was taken by the oldest azyr and chamon skink priests in the city and borne into the largest of the city's newly designed spellforges, where it was pored over by specialists of every field and subjected to careful testing with methods both material and magical until its purpose was at last divined.
It was a humble sphere of bronze, marked all over with glyphs that had had several varieties of magically receptive gemstones ground up and sprinkled into the grooves. The glyphs were divided into eight distinct sections, which were quickly recognized as being characteristic of a certain wind of magic, and around the middle was a band of unadorned gold.
The artifact's function was not derived until some years after it had been found, when it was cautiously infused with an equal amount of all eight winds of magic. Upon infusion, the symbols on the sphere lit up with their wind's color, and began to bleed gently through into the gold band around the middle. A chamon skink priest was made to take hold of it and attempt to access the thing's reserve of the golden wind, with his slann master X'romjekn standing by in case a dangerous effect was triggered.
Fortunately, X'romjekn was able to disable the artifact when he sensed what it was doing - the skink priest's interaction with it had triggered what was in effect a pre-made spell, one that would induce potential fault lines in any material nearby it to explosively materialize through the use of chamon, essentially shattering everything in its radius.
Further testing with different subjects, ranging from all four varieties of skink priest to saurus warriors to the slann themselves, revealed the truth of the artifact. It was a bomb of sorts, a sphere capable of absorbing magic and channeling it in an area around itself in accordance with the input of its user, mostly in a bluntly destructive manner. It could blind those in its radius with hysh, incinerate them with aqshy, blast them with celestial lightning or steal the life from its targets with shyish. It was even possible to blend multiple winds together if the input was correctly modulated, allowing for a more varied range of effects.
Artifact Found - Glyph Sphere! This bronze orb, ringed by gold and carved with gem-laden glyphs, can store moderate amounts of magical energy and release it around itself in various pre-configured, destructive ways - essentially functioning like a magical grenade. It is possible to conjure a large variety of effects with correct input and sufficient charge to the device, which will require extensive training but render it a potent, versatile weapon of war. Options unlocked!
--
Dinosaur Spawning, Exotic Edition: 10 3rd Generation Slann, 40 4th Generation Slann
The integration of the lizardmen's lesser warbeasts into the spawning network had gone smoothly, and data collected by skink administrators over the past decade had showed a notable reduction of overall effort invested to ensure the spawned dinosaurs and the lizardmen operating them were coordinated compared to the old methods of natural breeding. It was thus unanimously agreed to go forward with the initiative of tying their more powerful and exotic beasts to the pools.
The lizardmen had gathered a healthy appreciation for the amount of carnage an angry Troglodon, Carnosaur, or Dread Saurian could inflict if provoked, let alone a Coatl's strange whims, it was decided that the slann would inspect a number of their eggs to decipher their physical code rather than bring in adult specimens. This was borne out as a sensible policy that simplified matters a great deal - even with the various esoteric properties contained within the venom of the Troglodons, the instincts of the Carnosaurs, and the souls of the Dread Saurians, it was simple to puzzle out the majority of their biological makeup from examination of their eggs.
The one interruption in the process came when it was time to collect the eggs of the Coatl - teams of skinks were dispatched to the known resting grounds of several Coatl outside Yenehectua, only for them to find no evidence of any eggs in the immaculate gardens the creatures maintained as their homes. This news was passed up to the slann administrators, and an expedition was sent into the archives of the Third Generation Ibriel, who had extensively catalogued the behavioral habits of all Lustrian fauna. Months later, they emerged, having found no trace of any writings on how exactly the Coatl reproduced.
While their slann masters sunk into deep deliberation over this revelation, consulting the rest of the Sublime Communion and every engraved record of every battle and notable event the Coatl had ever participated in to lizardmen knowledge in hopes of finding some clue as to how such a basic bit of information was misplaced, the skink chiefs took a simpler approach. Sending out unused workers and some chameleon skinks, they set watch parties on every garden the Coatl nested in, waiting for whatever instincts the creatures possessed to kick in and a youngling to be produced.
They watched the creatures, such as they could, for years before any incidents of breeding occurred, and it did not happen in the way it was expected.
Each Coatl, it seemed, desired its own sanctum - a garden of exquisite and unique beauty built and maintained by its strange powers, that it would often rest in when it was not coiling through the air on an erratic circuit around its territory. These gardens hosted a large variety of rare Lustrian and Mochantian flowers, often planted and grown in complex patterns, intersecting with brooks and rock formations the Coatl had moved with its abilities. In some of the older gardens, their geometry was no longer wholly euclidean, and the ability to move through them, or even enter into them, seemed to rest wholly on the will of the flying serpent that lived there.
Some gardens hosted pairs of the creatures, initially thought to be mated pairs. This assumption was corrected late in the decade when one of these pairs near Itza split, one of the feathered serpents making its way into an unoccupied stretch of jungle. There it wove itself ceaselessly above and around the space it had claimed for many days, causing the stretch of land to shimmer and warp as the Coatl's powers worked.
First the area was sealed off, made that so any fauna or motile flora within could not move into the area no matter where they went, only outward. Then it began to make further changes, spatially displacing the majority of the jungle plants within its new garden elsewhere, rearranging the landscape over a period of weeks into a pattern that was both aesthetically pleasing and likely magically significant. Rare plants the Coatl had previously been seen observing seemingly materialized in great quantities. Lustrian bell blossoms that sounded out swooping tones when blown by the wind bloomed alongside Mochantian star grass, a tall wheat-like species with bioluminescent nodules on its head that it would touch to a neighbor during the night to generate an amplified source of light for their secondary leaves.
At last, after a period of many months, during which a skink priest had been persuaded to observe the process, the Coatl had finished. It made one last circuit around its garden, the air rippling behind it, and it let out a cry that was as piercing and clear as the sky. It echoed through the garden for minutes without losing volume, and the skink priest's eyes snapped to a blazing glow as the attentions of the slann were drawn to the call.
The air opened up as the sound faded, and another Coatl swam into existence. The two creatures circled each other briefly, then parted to examine different parts of the garden, letting out occasional trills that made the air shimmer.
The mindspace of the Sublime Communion was abuzz with the news for many years thereafter, the notion that a sacred creation of the Old One Tepok would be so vain that they would sing more of themselves into reality simply to showcase their gardens becoming a subject of much bemusement amongst their councils.
Exotic Dinosaurs have been successfully integrated into the spawning pools, save for the Coatl, which naturally reproduce by creating geomantically aligned gardens and calling other Coatl from potential realities to come admire them. Since this process is tied into the geomantic web, population growth will be abstracted the same as the others.
--
Skink Priests of Different Winds, Ghyran: 150 5th Gen
The birth of the first Ghyran priests took place in Aztlan, the new city's up-swelling of life energy deemed to be synergistic with the endeavor by the slann committee heading it. As the energy of the city flowed into the newly-etched spawning inscriptions, the accumulation of magic made its presence known. A small forest of plants adapted for wildly different biomes grew alongside each other to unusual size outside of the spawning pools, entangling the legs of any who attempted to enter and lashing out with venomous thorns when weapons were brought too near.
As the time of spawning grew closer, these plants began to exhibit outright supernatural attributes. Flowers bloomed from vines in minutes that ordinarily took years to unfurl. Fruit that could grant those who ate it warpsight grew from trees that did not even bear fruit, and Lustrian hummingbirds, which were in truth tiny proto-spirits formed in environments with a great deal of environmental magic and ecological complexity, could be seen darting between budding growths. Their whirring wings left diaphanous trails of twinkling light and sound wherever they went.
At last the accumulation of power came to its peak and the first Ghyran-wielding skink climbed forth from the pools. It was a stout, hardy specimen, with algae-green scales and thick, trunk-like limbs. Its fingers were tipped in blunt claws caked in a layer of dirt, its eyes were large, dark, and sparkled like a still pool of water, and it had a faint halo of what appeared to be hair around its head, which turned out to be various species of grass growing in between its scales upon closer inspection.
Though it was freshly born, it regarded the skink administrators who came to examine it with the gaze of a being that had seen many winters pass. The world around it pulsed with life, a miniature ecosystem surrounding the newborn skink wherever it went. Magical vines snaked up from the stones at its feet, glowing spores of pollen drifted through the air only to fade from existence once they drifted far away enough, and it could seemingly manipulate the biological state of any creature as it pleased with some concentration. Something normally used to heal wounds, but rarely used offensively, such as to make an enraged predator's teeth fall out, or snap bones by overriding control of their muscles.
Ghyran Skink Priests gained! Certain research projects have been reduced in difficulty.
--
Egg of the Quango: Mazdamundi, 1 3rd Gen, 20 4th Gen, 30 5th Gen
The egg of the Quango was one of a very few artifacts that the lizardmen knew for certain had been personally made by an Old One, and thus it was never taken out of the sealed temple-complex in Itza that it was entombed in. Even the slann could not order the Temple Guard who stood watch over the egg to remove it from its protection, and so they traveled to it, the protective guards of fifty-one slann merging together into a grand procession of obsinite, scales, and teeth that escorted the toad-mages to the holding temple.
The slann provided the necessary entrance codes and authorizations to the temple's guard, a process that took up an entire month, and many heavy slabs of stone were unsealed from the entrance and shifted slightly to the side to allow the mage-priests entrance. Their own guards, save for each slann's eternity wardens, were not allowed entrance into the temple, and the doors were sealed behind them once they had entered, to be opened in ten year's time and not a moment before.
The egg of the Quango was massive - it stood twenty feet high and nearly as wide around the base, and to all outside appearances seemed to be made out of a material resembling flawless marble. It was imprinted with a wide range of hues and colors that slowly shifted and moved about on its surface, strands of color twining themselves together in twisting chains across its surface. To the eyes of the slann, it gleamed with the weight of a million and one protective enchantments that the Communion had, in the past, laid upon the egg, a promise of swift annihilation for any who dared to touch an artifact of the Old Ones.
Their first task was the removal of these spells, for their presence would impede full study of the egg's properties. Mazdamundi led his brethren in a symphony of unweaving - crafting an interlocking weave of spellwork that transcribed thousands of individual effects onto the fabric of reality, each one precisely calibrated to equalize and cancel out one of the protective spells upon the egg. They opened their throats and spoke it into existence around the egg, laying it down in such a pattern that none of the security measures triggered any others, as they had been engineered to do. The curtain of spellwork fell away, mystical locks unbolting, chains unraveling. With their presence fading, another replaced it - a luminescence coming from within the egg, bright and cold in the extreme, but still, as though a sunbeam had been frozen in mid-flight.
It was the radiance of the unborn Quango's soul, and its sheer intensity indicated that whatever the creature was, it was meant to be powerful. But the complete absence of any sort of fluctuation in its immaterial state was an oddity - even in the most rigid of saurus, the soul gently reshaped itself from minute to minute in response to bodily and mental input. Here there was nothing, as though the creature's very soul was paralyzed.
The next nine years were a period of uninterrupted study for the slann. Mazdamundi and his underlings of the fifth generation bent their minds towards examining the magic they could feel coursing through the egg's shell, while those of the fourth spawning looked upon the Quango's soul.
A non-exhaustive survey of the facets of the creature's spirit was enough to confirm something that gave a partial explanation why it had not been hatched for countless years - the section of its soul that would grant it the lizardmen properties of agelessness and increasing strength with time were heavily damaged, as though they had been corroded. It was evident to the slann that if the Quango had not remained unborn, it would have succumbed to the curse of old age millennia ago.
The reason as to why the creature had not perished in its unborn state came from their examination of the shell - with the help of his fifth generation underlings, Mazdamundi had been able to painstakingly replicate the ancient spell woven through the Quango's shell and into Itza's geomantic grid - casting it in miniature, he found that it was a spell of stasis, that froze a prescribed area in time itself by forcibly shunting away the flow of cause and effect. It was a sublime work, and though it had clearly been hurried and lacked many of the subtleties and fail-safes they had seen before, the slann knew it to be a spell crafted personally by an Old One.
Whatever reason their creators had originally sealed the Quango within its egg for was unclear, but it was evident that they could not simply break the stasis enchantment - if they were to do so, even if they were able to immediately imbue the Quango with immortality and thus ensure it could even be born without immediately crumpling to dust, the accumulated weight of the time it had spent in stasis would catch up to it before the effects of their soul modification could fully set in. Should it be born, the Quango would live no more than a few hours before shriveling into nothing.
The remainder of the slann's time within the Quango's chamber was spent brainstorming possible ways to bypass the inevitable reassertion of existence upon its form. Grand designs were drawn up for massive infusion rituals of rejuvenation energy to be poured into the egg over a period of decades, then captured and compressed by a retrocausal funnel of magic so that the entirety of its effect could be applied to the creature at once. They hypothesized vast drag-nets of spirit stuff to be woven around the location of the creature once its body perished that would capture and sustain its soul before it could dissolve into the Warp, and allow the slann to grow a new body for it with sufficient study. It was even suggested that simply cataloging everything about the Quango and manually creating a newborn example would be the most practical course of action.
None of their plans were drawn to enough fruition to be executed by the end of the decade, but the amount of data they had generated through their debate was sufficient that the problem no longer seemed nearly so insurmountable as it had at the start. With but a little more effort, the creature that had been hand-crafted by the Old Ones would be born.
Research completed to 343/450!
The Quango's egg is a massive specimen that had a stasis enchantment woven through its shell by an Old One long ago. Their exact reasoning for doing so is unclear, but likely related to the damage sustained to the Quango's soul, perhaps while it was being crafted. If the stasis is broken without something to deal with the immense amount of time the Quango has existed reasserting itself on its form, it will age to dust in a few hours at maximum. Multiple plans have been drawn up in an attempt to circumvent this, and while none of them are wholly viable, they provide a good well of data to draw on in the future.
Whatever the Quango is, its soul exudes cold, and it has an immense luminosity to its spirit, comparable only to the Thunder Lizards.
--
Scry and Spy, Ork vs Ork, Both Orks: 1 4th Gen, 5 5th Gen
Observation of the hordes of the two warbosses as they sprung into war with each other, the Ayacmanik, the jungle, and the ocean - whichever was closest at the time - revealed a concerning trend. Most creatures, were they trapped in a land where everything, including the foliage, hunted them, and they had to constantly fight off a rival tribe that was out for their blood, all while struggling against an impossibly coordinated planetary hivemind of specimens that showcased the malicious imagination of natural selection, would suffer attrition after any appreciable length of time. Their numbers would dwindle, withered by disease and injury and starvation. Their morale would flag, and they would flee or die.
The orks were instead growing stronger.
More of Mekboss Orkfred's flash boyz had arrived, and though his numbers on the continent were still overshadowed by Grungrok Ironfist's horde, their powerful lightning guns and vehicular attachments allowed them to mow through swathes of Ironfist's comparatively under-equipped boyz.
The two armies of orks clashed explosively, battles erupting like boils over a front stretching hundreds of miles. The Ayacmanik pushed against both factions heavily, tens of millions of combat hosts throwing themselves at the orks in a litany of ambushes, sneak attacks, and pitched, brutal fights that trampled the jungle into mud.
With each fight, more spores were sown. As the battles escalated, more and more orks clambered out of the ground, eager for conflict from the moment of their birth. The numbers of the orks swelled as they fought against a veritable buffet of foes, and the war chants of their reinforcements as they sailed across the northern sea grew ever louder.
Grungrok's senior commanders had been 'educated' in matters of cunning via the medium of repeated concussions, and managed the battles well enough, but their warboss was not there. Early in the decade, using one of the transports Orkfred's misplaced reinforcements had brought to him, he had sailed back across the seas with a boatload of kommandos and hijacked one of the Mekboss' factories, using its mechanisms to produce a host of war machines which he used to attack the rest of his rival's back lines. The mobs of orks still waiting for transport across the sea flocked to the newly opened front, eager to taste proper combat. As the decade passed, Ironfist was able to seize another factory, leaving three in the hands of his rival.
For his part, the Mekboss seemed untroubled by the loss of some of his production facilities. Instead he spent all hours of the day and night laboring away in his workshop, churning out a steady stream of disastrously malfunctioning prototypes. As the years went on, they became more sophisticated, going from trukks with downward-pointing rokkit launchers to giant bullet-shaped vehicles with a plethora of rockets mounted on the back to a single gargantuan engine with rickety, clanking wings bolted onto it.
At the close of the decade, the first Dakkajet rose above Orkfred's settlement of Mekkillakrash. The raucous noise of its jet engine echoing over the spore forests as it rose to meet the clouds, only to stall several hundred meters off the ground and crash back down to earth in a massive fireball.
Full-blown warfare has erupted between Grungrok Ironfist and Orkfred Nobell, even as the Ayacmanik continue to press both factions heavily. Orkfred's forces are making gains against Grungrok's mobs in the absence of the enemy Warboss, and the Mekboss has invented aircraft, which will begin mass production and deployment next turn. Meanwhile, Grungrok has stolen two out of Orkfred's five factories, and is currently attacking the rest of them in a bid to seize his enemy's production capabilities. This has caused Orkfred's reinforcements from the northern continent to slow, as they pivot to combat the rival Warboss.
--
Scry and Spy, North Continent: 5 5th Gen
The ruin of Mochantia's northern polar mountain had long held interest for a number of the slann - not so much for the structure itself, but the traces of exotic materials that had been detected beneath the rubble. It was not unprecedented for asteroid impacts to bring strange metals from the depths of space, but even sheets that had clearly been shaped by sapient hands were different.
Five slann were dispatched to investigate, their spirits drifting along the currents of the northern continent's blizzards as they descended towards the ancient ruin. They were very small amidst the vast shards of splintered rock that were piled on top of each other in jagged configurations. It was as though a city-sized fist had broken the landscape long ago, and the skeins of snow falling upon the exposed bones of the mountain was the settling dust of the ancient impact.
This far from their bodies and the power resource of the geomantic web, the slann were not able to use their magic to shift the vast slabs of rock. So they gathered close together, and materialized a sphere of pure water, one of them holding it steady while the other slann channeled their power into it, rapidly spawning a small contingent of kroxigors, along with a few skinks to direct them. With the aid of some transmutation, the slann equipped their new underlings with obsinite mining equipment, and directed them to excavate what they could from the colossal wreckage.
It took several years to yield any significant results, during which more kroxigors were spawned and a small base was built for their habitation, no more than a walled-off encampment with stone halls to ward off the wind and to grow food in, which was aided with the addition of a Ghyran skink priest late in the decade.
The kroxigors excavated their way into the ruin of the mountain, hauling away unstable rock and constructing supports as they went. The slann had shown them the distribution of the metal sheets scattered throughout the ruin, and the intuitive calculations of the kroxigors directed them downwards, into the core of the ruin on a trajectory that yielded more and more traces of otherworldly metal.
In the sixth year, three kroxigors hit an empty pocket while mining away and fell into a small cavern below them. In the time between the floor's collapse and their brethren coming to help them, they explored this new space and found that not only was it made entirely of metal, it quite resembled the interior of many lizardmen buildings. Its edges were regular, its floors smooth, and the exits they found were rectangular arches, sized for creatures not much larger than a skink.
They had found a structure buried in the rock - something cold and ancient and metal.
For the next four years, the lizardmen focused their excavation efforts on the rock surrounding their find, doing what they could to free it of the wreckage without collapsing the rock on top of it. Skink teams explored what they could of its interior, though much of the place was blocked off, sealed by thick metal doors or twisted piles of wreckage. There they found much that was of interest to them - metal plinths with twisted intricacies of thin metal strands and glass twining around in their interiors, seats with nearby apertures that appeared to be for placing limbs inside, a vast interior space where several shredded piles of rubble that vaguely resembled the oceanborne ships of the Orks lay resting.
The structure seemed to go on forever, stretching for hundreds of meters in any direction. It was in their ninth year of exploration that a team of kroxigors finally found an end to the thing, burrowing their way to a nest of gargantuan pipes extending out from the end of the structure. It was lost on the lizardmen what the purpose of such an arrangement could be, until the slann saw through the eyes of their brethren what the orks of the middle continent had done. As that connection snapped into place, the formerly disparate clues of what the structure was came together into a cohesive whole.
Built to unimaginable scale, entombed deep under billions of tons of rock and ice, buried so long it was like an antediluvian fossil, the lizardmen had found a ship.
There is a ship of colossal size buried under the ruin of whatever collapsed the northern mountain. A small lizardmen garrison has been spawned there, and will automatically continue to excavate what they can from the wreckage - however, concerted effort will be needed to make any changes quickly due to the sheer size of the vessel.
--
Scry and Spy, South Continent, The Mountain: 15 5th Gen
Scry and Spy, South Continent, The Crystal Plain: 10 5th Gen
The slann that projected themselves across the southern sea to examine the crystalline continent and the spindle-like mountain at its heart went with some degree of caution as they moved. Whatever had created the continent-wide layer of material, it was not anything that the slann had seen before, and they were unwilling to risk activating any potential security measures.
They began by dispatching themselves to twenty-five equidistant spots around the crystal continent and slowly extruding the smallest wisp of their mental projections into the dormant energy infused throughout the crystal. They did this over a period of two years in order to avoid causing any ripples in the psychic energy of the substance that would give their presence away.
Thus assured that they could proceed, the slann spent four years carefully examining everything they could about the properties of the crystal, the energy it seemed to be suffused in, and how it related to the energy source that had previously been sensed within the core of the southern mountain.
The crystal itself was eventually found to be somewhat related to warpstone, albeit in a far less destructive, corrupting manner. It was a solidified lattice of warp energy that had been somehow brought into realspace, its crystalline structure allowing it to be self-supporting, both embodying and containing the raw warp it would otherwise dissolve into. The structure of this lattice was quite well-designed, even by slann standards. By their estimations, it could be shaped by souls that could emit the correct aethyric frequencies into virtually any shape, and adopt a wide variety of properties according to the will of its shaper - the form it had currently taken was something along the lines of a dormant state. Even so, its toughness was comparable to that of obsinite, and due to its nature as a magical matrix it could both channel power through it and withstand heavy damage.
The mountain at the center of the continent was made almost entirely out of the stuff, from what the slann could sense. The concentration of psychic energy within the mountain's material was much higher than inside the plain, lending it strength and allowing it to maintain the flawless shape it held, jutting thirty kilometers into the sky without so much as a wobble.
This close to the shining beacon inside the mountain's core, the slann could palpate the energy emanating from it, and through simple osmosis and communication with their brethren who were working on other projects, they realized something - the source was a soul. A being lay at the center of the mountain, shielded by the insulation of its crystalline lair. Without gaining entry to the interior of the mountain itself, the slann could not determine much about the entity, only that it was in some form of inactive state - whether it slumbered or was simply placid was unknown.
Their last years of study were spent further evaluating the properties of the crystalline structure and extrapolating possible measures that would allow further study. By the end of the decade, they had drawn up plans for a form of spatial manipulation spell that should allow for an exploration team of lizardmen to pass into the interior of the spire without alerting its occupant.
The crystal that covers the southern continent and makes up the majority of the spire at its center is a form of psychoactive crystalline lattice made up of channeled Warp energy. Like warpstone, its structure is self-reinforcing, allowing it to maintain a presence in realspace without continually drawing on the immaterium, and it has the dual properties of being able to channel energy through itself and shield anything it surrounds from wayward magical energies.
It appears to be connected in some way to the energy source at the core of the spire, revealed to be a being of great magical potency that is currently assumed to be slumbering. Based on the study of the slann, it should be possible to send an expedition within the mountain to discern the state of this entity, and whether or not it will present a threat to the lizardmen. Options unlocked.
--
Ascertain Their Usefulness, 6 3rd Gen
The Well of Mirrored Fates was a temple often used before Tlaxtlan went to war. It was among the tallest in the city, rivaling the height of the star chambers of the slann. The base of the temple itself was plain, a fortified pyramid used by the saurus for habitation and training, but at its peak was an open plaza fifty feet wide, at the center of which stood a circular stone pool.
Most days the Well stood empty, but on moonlit nights when the skink priests performed the correct rituals, the pool's magic activated, invisible lenses springing into existence above the temple, filtering the incoming radiance over and over until the pool was filled with liquid moonlight. Saurus warleaders would quaff an offered jug of the substance and speak their intended course of action, and the magic of the moonlight would project a clue as to what lay in the future on the vapor of their breath.
Four lizardmen gathered around the Well at the crux of the decade, on a night when the moon shone brightly and the skies were clear by the will of the slann. There was the skink Inxi-Huinxi, Horned One rider and master of Hexoatl's skink militia. Standing across from him was the saurus Ven'teun, who had spent centuries guarding the ruin of Chaqua from the shadows. To their side was a kroxigor marked by the mage-priests as a protector of his smaller kin. His name was Gyrd, and his scales gleamed in the moonlight as he gazed at the lizardman across from him.
The slann Chuqa-Xi stared back at them all, the light behind his eyes casting strange shadows over the pool of moonlight.
"The Communion is undecided," he spoke, his voice thrumming through the air and pressing down upon the lizardmen's minds. "The Ayacmanik present possibility. We have studied their substance, and considered manifold courses of action. Now, we seek input."
The slann's words phased inside the skulls of the other lizardmen, filling their minds with an overwhelming deluge of detail that the slann had amassed about the many-souled creature over the decade. Magical theorums unknown to all save the slann strained their thoughts, potential courses of action that could be imposed upon the oversoul pushing at the limits of their mental capacity. It was a dizzying rush, and almost in unison they dropped to one or both knees as Chuqa-Xi cut off the flow of information.
The slann motioned, and three stone goblets floated forth, filling themselves with the liquid of the Well. "The minds of your subspecies function in ways fundamentally different to our own," Chuqa-Xi said. "Drink, and give your thoughts on the matter to the Communion."
Ven'teun stepped forth first, his black-ringed scales shivering as he drank the moonlight. He thought for a moment, then spoke, the harsh tones of saurus warspeak carried out of his throat by a soft cascade of light.
"Eliminate them," he said, and from his mouth came images of blood and death. Obsinite macuahuitl bit through animal flesh, serrated fangs ripped limb and gut and throat, and the raw certainty of flame burned the parasite where they nested, charring their larval forms to dust. "They are a threat, and will always be. If destruction is not practical..." He paused, shaping the new knowledge in his mind into something he could coherently express.
"Traumatization." The word called up a slew of images and sensations that flashed and blurred above the Well - the many souls of the Ayacmanik, faintly connected by the sameness that from another perspective unified them as one entity. The burning gazes of many slann, pronouncing doom upon an enemy. An animal, cowering in utter terror before a saurus.
As Ven'teun stepped back, the images fading, Inxi-Huinxi came forward. He too shuddered at the sensation of the moonlight crawling into his spirit, and took several moments to organize his thoughts before speaking. "The Ayacmanik are a threat, yes," he acknowledged. "But their potential use is far greater. I propose ... to control them."
The moonlight poured out of his mouth and shaped itself into an image of a slann sitting before an army of Ayacmanik that stretched out to the horizon. The slann's eyes flashed, and like a wave, an answering glow rippled out through the eyes of the parasite. They knelt before the slann, bowing their heads to their master. The moonlight shifted, showing other possibilities - the bodies of the Ayacmanik carrying stone, helping to build a temple-city. Packs of the creatures running beside saurus war hosts. The innumerable creatures of the jungle converging upon a temple-city under siege by Orks.
Gyrd was last to step forth and drink of the moonlight, and took the longest of the three to articulate his thoughts. The minds of kroxigors were built narrower even than those of the saurus, and many of the concepts and formulae that Chuqa-Xi had shoved into his brain meant little to him.
"I would talk with them about how they build," Gyrd said, and the moonbeam that wafted out between his teeth showed something strange - a kroxigor and an Ayacmanik host that shifted form from moment to moment, standing side by side and jointly examining an architectural schematic. Judging by their gestures, they almost seemed to be communicating.
The kroxigor shrugged at the questioning glances that Inxi-Huinxi and Ven'teun shot at him. He was not fully sure what the moonlight images meant, only that he had spoken his truth to the slann as he was bid.
Chuqa-Xi gazed at the moonlight image as it dispersed, then inclined his head slightly in a gesture of dismissal. He stayed there for many hours as the moon tracked its way across the sky, staring into the pool of silverine. In ages past, he had been the first of the slann to capture warmblooded prisoners and bring them to Tlaxtlan to be lobotomized, and serve the lizardmen as slaves. Now, in conjunction with his thoughts, the pool of moonlight shivered and began to move.
It formed itself into an image representing the Ayacmanik oversoul - a broad network of dull pebbles, connected to each other by invisible strands. As Chuqa-Xi watched, one of the nodes in the network brightened, suddenly glowing with the radiance of a true soul, capable of self-reflection. The light quickly spread among its fellows, and on even further, until the whole of the oversoul was lit up in light and thought and comprehension.
Then, Chuqa-Xi's design fell upon it, a clouded mirror formed from the godseed tucked inside the geomantic web. The Ayacmanik fell through it and were coated in its substance, swathed in murk and mist as the slann had been only a decade before. All the potential of a sapient Ayacmanik oversoul, harnessed and chained to the Sublime Communion's will by an inescapable curse. An unenviable fate for any thinking, feeling being, but their wishes were as nothing before the designs of the slann.
Chuqa-Xi's eyes burned as he looked upon what could be.
The slann have determined four possible courses of action to take with the Ayacmanik beyond exterminating them:
- Traumatize the Oversoul: Use the sheer power of the Sublime Communion to sear raw, animal terror deep into the Ayacmanik oversoul. This will cause the creatures to retreat from all lizardmen territory, shy away from any further expansions, and cease all attempts to infect a lizardman host. The least expensive of the options.
- Enslave the Creatures: The slann shall crush the will of the Ayacmanik into submission through root access to their oversoul. Allows the slann to mass-mind control any Ayacmanik they are near, effectively causing any Ayacmanik near lizardmen territory to assist the lizardmen in whatever they are doing. The rest of the species will behave as normal.
- Give Them Sophoncy: An unprecedented step, but possible. By engineering a skink template with no inherent lizardmen qualities save for agelessness and incorruptibility, then deliberately infecting it and placing it in confinement inside a temple-city, it is possible to grant the oversoul sophoncy and communicate with the creatures as people. The possible benefits to doing so are unknown.
- Chains of Mist (Godseed-enabled option): By granting the Ayacmanik sophoncy, their cognitive capacity and ability to effect their environment would increase manyfold. It would then be possible to use the essence of the Godseed to forge chains of mist and moonlight upon their minds and souls, mirroring the enforced slumber of the slann, but with the Communion holding the key to controlling the entire species. The most expensive option - the prospect of a sophontic Ayacmanik oversoul under the control of the lizardmen is a potent one indeed.
--
Forging Districts built in Hexoatl and Yenehectua.
Yenehectua improved to infrastructure level 3.
Qotlpetl improved to infrastructure level 3.
25,135 saurus, 50,277 skinks, and 5,278 kroxigor have been transferred to both Chalkaro and Aztlan from Itza.
--
City population growth:
Itza population growth: 50,000 Saurus, 100,000 Skinks, 10,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Xlanhuapec population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Tlaxtlan population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Yenehectua population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Qotlpetl population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Chalkaro population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Aztlan population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Ayacmanik infiltration attempts resulted in:
128 saurus, 281 skinks, and 56 kroxigors as casualties in Itza.
44 saurus, 146 skinks, and 20 kroxigors as casualties in Hexoatl.
121 saurus, 304 skinks, and 47 kroxigors as casualties in Xlanhuapec.
68 saurus, 175 skinks, and 42 kroxigors as casualties in Tlaxtlan.
146 saurus, 317 skinks, and 72 kroxigors as casualties in Yenehectua.
132 saurus, 282 skinks, and 54 kroxigors as casualties in Qotlpetl.
148 saurus, 297 skinks, and 63 kroxigors as casualties in Chalkaro.
24 saurus, 127 skinks, and 31 kroxigors as casualties in Aztlan.
Passive slann spawning:
Hexoatl: 7,640 saurus, 15,280 skinks, 1,528 kroxigor
Xlanhuapec: 7,960 saurus, 15,920 skinks, 1,592 kroxigor
Tlaxtlan: 7,140 saurus, 14,280 skinks, 1,428 kroxigor
Chalkaro: 5,310 saurus, 10,620 skinks, 1,062 kroxigor sent from Itza
Aztlan: 5,310 saurus, 10,620 skinks, 1,062 kroxigor sent from Itza
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Nix's Warden
Welcome to Hades
- Location
- United States
I dislike the process to be honest. We have to wait months for Xantalos to post an update, but atleast when the update is ready we actually get the entire thing, and not have bits and pieces fed to us over like 2 weeks. As for the Discussion? We have plenty of that. It just dies off because of the gap between updates which this breadcrumbs method really doesn't fix.
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
Aye, there's ups and downs to doing it this way. I think if I do this style of posting again I'll shorten it a little, only stretch it out over the course of a week rather than two. The fact does remain that it's just the long gaps between updates that temporarily kills the thread, and I can't fix that without actually writing faster, which I've a rather hard time with doing.
In any case, next turn post (and new Mochantia map thanks to @CuttleFish2.0) will be posted in the next few hours. Just making sure everything looks good with it and I haven't forgotten any options I said I was going to add (though I likely will have anyhow).
- Location
- Israel
Last of the Old Ones? Sleeping away like the Necrons?