Shards of a Broken Sun [Deprecated; see link in final post for remake]
- Thread starter Baughn
- Start date
- Crossover Sci-Fi
Highwind
To Rise From The Ashes
- Location
- Brazil
It's why I haven't posted anything yet, this is a minefield that I have no idea how to navigate
This is shaping up to be one of those "make things up as we go along and hope nothing goes wrong" things.
This situation is just too complex and no one really knows what we should... holy shit I just realized this must be exactly how Mato is feeling right now.
Some times one has to just step on a few mines I guess. Worrying ones mother just a little is perhaps in some ways advantageous as well. It could help discuss the matter of Mato's new employment in the future afterward.
There might be some pain and problems along the way, no one is perfectly soothed, but perhaps a start towards recovery can be made.
There might be some pain and problems along the way, no one is perfectly soothed, but perhaps a start towards recovery can be made.
Hmm... To write a (joke) write-in worthy of the Joker or not...
Highwind
To Rise From The Ashes
- Location
- Brazil
Ok. not sure if its actually worthy of the Joker, but it kind of reminds me of his brand of crazy.
[jk] *Grin happily* "Well of course its all your fault. I mean you went and summoned a demon of all things, what were your expecting to happen? Hmm? But don't worry, you're amongst friends... well, a friend. I mean I nearly shot off my brother's face this morning and right now I kind of just want to go around and kill everything I see." *Swing an arm around the girl and sweep her up into a half-hug* "So, come, turn that frown upside down. We can can go out for a night on the town and everything to get your mind off of it." *Turns around and remembers her audience* "Oh, yeah, forgot about you guys... and mom. Well, only one joke I know that can fix this" *Summons her cannon* "Everyone ready to have a blast?"
Like I said, probably not actual Joker territory, but it reminded me of his particular brand of crazy, and directly inspired the last line.
Highwind
To Rise From The Ashes
- Location
- Brazil
The noclip trick would just scare her further, and her mental state is just too fragile to guilt trip her. Also, mom wouldn't like that.
We need to calm her down enough for her to get out of the covers so we can apply hugs and reassurances more effectively. The poor girl is thinking any sort of contact with her is dangerous to other people.
She's a traumatized ten year old, even younger than Mato and she just saw a huge bull thing that came out of her phone kill two other children right in front of her.
We need to be understanding, reassure her she won't hurt anyone and that it wasn't her fault.
That's the most important part, really.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] "Yui-chan... it's okay, no one is going to get hurt and you won't hurt anyone. What happened there wasn't your fault, the Demon was the one who hurt them, not you. And... if anything you saved me and my brother, Yui-chan. If it weren't for you beating that Bull Demon up I wouldn't be here. So please, come out from under that blanket and talk to us."
Going with this for now.
Going with this for now.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
[X] "Yui-chan... it's okay, no one is going to get hurt and you won't hurt anyone. What happened there wasn't your fault, the Demon was the one who hurt them, not you. And... if anything you saved me and my brother, Yui-chan. If it weren't for you beating that Bull Demon up I wouldn't be here. So please, come out from under that blanket and talk to us."
It's not the best, but I can't come up with something I'm happy with either
It's not the best, but I can't come up with something I'm happy with either
Some days the first impulse isn't the good one
[X] "Yui-chan... it's okay, no one is going to get hurt and you won't hurt anyone. What happened there wasn't your fault, the Demon was the one who hurt them, not you. And... if anything you saved me and my brother, Yui-chan. If it weren't for you beating that Bull Demon up I wouldn't be here. So please, come out from under that blanket and talk to us."
Interlude: ?
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
A/N: So, I'd like to say "oops". I had a lot of thinking to do, starting with whether or not I really wanted to keep writing this story, but although by this point I look back at the storyline and cringe... I decided that, in the end, it will be more fun to keep on with Amu's story than to abandon it.
That's my final decision; in the end, I enjoy writing this story, more than I'd enjoy starting something new. It might be different if I had plans to become a professional author, but I don't.
And then I found a lot of other stuff to do, and didn't notice that I'd never gotten the quorum alert. Because there was only ever one vote for the last section, and I should really have prodded you a little. Somehow three months passed.
So. Oops.
That being the case, I can't very well write the next section, and I'm going to have to ask you guys to please go back and write some votes, if you're still interested in continuing the story. I'm talking about Amu's half of it, of course; there are enough of them for Mato, but I can't actually continue hers right now. Timeline issues. I may also decide to stop offering votes on her end of things, just to simplify it; it'll fit well with my general desire to have a non-quest I'm working on.
(There's A Song in the Fog, of course, but that's mostly Einsig's baby even if I'm helping.)
I'm going to give you an interlude, as way of an apology. Sort of. I suspect it's mostly going to confuse you.
— — — — —
Interlude: ?
Space burned.
A leviathan, dead, passed by. Rapidly dissolving into quantum foam, it retained enough material inertia for the fading flickers of its warp-fields to sustain a hundred cruisers. Their commanding mind, distributed and as yet ignorant of death, had chosen to attempt a deep strike on the enemy. It had been a moon-sized, independent unit of the fleet; now, scarce a tenth of a tenth of a percent remained.
Zoom out.
The leviathan was a pinprick on a map, part of a line of a million others. That line contracted, slightly, compensating for its loss.
Zoom out.
The line bent, forming a structure which could never be called three-dimensional but which nevertheless approximated a globe. Warp-fields struggled with the enemy, fighting uncontrollable topological shifts that could only be slowed, not stopped. A solar mass of generators burned themselves to ruin every second. One on one, the units of the fleet could defeat their enemies, but combat was rarely ever one on one, and never in their favor. Their warp-equipped military had once been the pride of the nation, proof that it could never be defeated; now, a technology they had believed fully their own was being turned against them.
And that enemy?
A darkness. An absence of information. It could be crushed, but only temporarily, and only by destroying the very fabric of reality, burning it down to the bedrock quantum graphs. A place so destroyed could never again be inhabited.
Worse, perhaps, was the fate of those who failed to fight; those who could have resisted, but who chose to believe its heralds. A half-dozen independent kingdoms had burned, destroyed from within and through internecine conflict, until alliance had been called in understanding of what must be. Three more died to cauterize the rot, and two were left exposed, their populations hastily evacuated.
They called it Omega, for fear that it would be their end.
"Fleet losses have passed twenty percent. Sir, we should retreat."
The Dissenter's tone was perfunctory at best. Performing its function, but understanding that its voice would not be heeded. Having been acknowledged, it fell silent; as Dissenter to the Admiral, there was precious little purpose left to its existence.
A nightmare in waking.
No thoughts showed on its carapace, but the Dissenter knew what was coming. It wasn't a Cogitator, but it wasn't blind, and it was aware that their situation was precarious at best. Avi Cluster was its home, its and that of all others on the battlestation, and for all that the station out-massed their home by orders of magnitude—and that its loss would, by any objective measure, be worse than that of their home—it could not help but feel melancholy.
It had never expected to be in this position. Dying, yes; a hundred times over, some of which it could even remember; but watching the death of its home, while powerless to help? No. Never that. Omega had struck with guile, at the weakest points in their alliance, and they had expected a quick victory once it came to military action…
No. They did not yet know what corrupted nation they were fighting, what near-magical powers of science allowed it to use space itself as a bludgeon, but it had proven as capable in physical combat as it had been on the diplomatic scene. There were unsettling rumors; rumors that it had chosen its first targets because of their expertise in cognitive science, and though the Dissenter did not know what that might mean, surely it was nothing good.
However, Omega was the sort of enemy against which every stratagem was met with a counter-ploy, and if you thought five levels deep, it would have thought seven. Surely, then, any answer a lowly Dissenter could devise would be false, when even the Queen's Cogitators were stumped.
Which left it with nothing to do. Perhaps…
The bridge shook, alarms blaring around it. Here, beyond light-seconds of shielding, how—
"Topological fault. New emergence! Sir, they're pushing through our lines."
Space twisted strangely, connecting the outer darkness to Avi Cluster below, and the colony changed. Warp-field generators stuttered, then failed—explosively in some cases, the final failsafes of a system that knew it was being compromised—yet most of them survived, absurdly—impossibly—enduring the harsh environment of the frontier without protective fields.
The Dissenter looked at his own view of the topology, and saw that it was those same generators that had formed a bridge through their lines, acting as a lightning rod for the vastly more capable, unseen powers beyond.
The Admiral was hesitating. Indecisive.
"Sir—"
There was no choice but to say it itself. This was its final role.
"Reserve forces, charge the colony," the Dissenter ordered. "Destroy it, starting with perimeter stabilization. Do not allow Omega to fully come across."
There was a frozen moment as everyone in the space considered this command. It was in accordance with tradition—a Dissenter was allowed any one order, at peril of obligatory court-martial—yet the order it had made was, in fact, for a horrible form of genocide.
The Commander of the Reserves looked to the screen, where the colony was, for lack of a better word, bubbling. Anyone there was dead, or worse than dead. Automatic information filters had cut in to prevent any possible memetic tampering.
The reserves fired moments later, cauterizing the wound.
The battle of Avi Cluster was a tactical loss, but one of the major strategic victories in the early parts of the Larn—Omega conflict prior to the formation of the Grand Alliance, as well as a vindication of their military command system.
The Nation of Larn remains one of the lynchpins in the ongoing containment effort, though it has been reduced to a bare fraction of its original power.
That's my final decision; in the end, I enjoy writing this story, more than I'd enjoy starting something new. It might be different if I had plans to become a professional author, but I don't.
And then I found a lot of other stuff to do, and didn't notice that I'd never gotten the quorum alert. Because there was only ever one vote for the last section, and I should really have prodded you a little. Somehow three months passed.
So. Oops.
That being the case, I can't very well write the next section, and I'm going to have to ask you guys to please go back and write some votes, if you're still interested in continuing the story. I'm talking about Amu's half of it, of course; there are enough of them for Mato, but I can't actually continue hers right now. Timeline issues. I may also decide to stop offering votes on her end of things, just to simplify it; it'll fit well with my general desire to have a non-quest I'm working on.
(There's A Song in the Fog, of course, but that's mostly Einsig's baby even if I'm helping.)
I'm going to give you an interlude, as way of an apology. Sort of. I suspect it's mostly going to confuse you.
— — — — —
Interlude: ?
Space burned.
A leviathan, dead, passed by. Rapidly dissolving into quantum foam, it retained enough material inertia for the fading flickers of its warp-fields to sustain a hundred cruisers. Their commanding mind, distributed and as yet ignorant of death, had chosen to attempt a deep strike on the enemy. It had been a moon-sized, independent unit of the fleet; now, scarce a tenth of a tenth of a percent remained.
Zoom out.
The leviathan was a pinprick on a map, part of a line of a million others. That line contracted, slightly, compensating for its loss.
Zoom out.
The line bent, forming a structure which could never be called three-dimensional but which nevertheless approximated a globe. Warp-fields struggled with the enemy, fighting uncontrollable topological shifts that could only be slowed, not stopped. A solar mass of generators burned themselves to ruin every second. One on one, the units of the fleet could defeat their enemies, but combat was rarely ever one on one, and never in their favor. Their warp-equipped military had once been the pride of the nation, proof that it could never be defeated; now, a technology they had believed fully their own was being turned against them.
And that enemy?
A darkness. An absence of information. It could be crushed, but only temporarily, and only by destroying the very fabric of reality, burning it down to the bedrock quantum graphs. A place so destroyed could never again be inhabited.
Worse, perhaps, was the fate of those who failed to fight; those who could have resisted, but who chose to believe its heralds. A half-dozen independent kingdoms had burned, destroyed from within and through internecine conflict, until alliance had been called in understanding of what must be. Three more died to cauterize the rot, and two were left exposed, their populations hastily evacuated.
They called it Omega, for fear that it would be their end.
— — —
"Fleet losses have passed twenty percent. Sir, we should retreat."
The Dissenter's tone was perfunctory at best. Performing its function, but understanding that its voice would not be heeded. Having been acknowledged, it fell silent; as Dissenter to the Admiral, there was precious little purpose left to its existence.
A nightmare in waking.
No thoughts showed on its carapace, but the Dissenter knew what was coming. It wasn't a Cogitator, but it wasn't blind, and it was aware that their situation was precarious at best. Avi Cluster was its home, its and that of all others on the battlestation, and for all that the station out-massed their home by orders of magnitude—and that its loss would, by any objective measure, be worse than that of their home—it could not help but feel melancholy.
It had never expected to be in this position. Dying, yes; a hundred times over, some of which it could even remember; but watching the death of its home, while powerless to help? No. Never that. Omega had struck with guile, at the weakest points in their alliance, and they had expected a quick victory once it came to military action…
No. They did not yet know what corrupted nation they were fighting, what near-magical powers of science allowed it to use space itself as a bludgeon, but it had proven as capable in physical combat as it had been on the diplomatic scene. There were unsettling rumors; rumors that it had chosen its first targets because of their expertise in cognitive science, and though the Dissenter did not know what that might mean, surely it was nothing good.
However, Omega was the sort of enemy against which every stratagem was met with a counter-ploy, and if you thought five levels deep, it would have thought seven. Surely, then, any answer a lowly Dissenter could devise would be false, when even the Queen's Cogitators were stumped.
Which left it with nothing to do. Perhaps…
The bridge shook, alarms blaring around it. Here, beyond light-seconds of shielding, how—
"Topological fault. New emergence! Sir, they're pushing through our lines."
Space twisted strangely, connecting the outer darkness to Avi Cluster below, and the colony changed. Warp-field generators stuttered, then failed—explosively in some cases, the final failsafes of a system that knew it was being compromised—yet most of them survived, absurdly—impossibly—enduring the harsh environment of the frontier without protective fields.
The Dissenter looked at his own view of the topology, and saw that it was those same generators that had formed a bridge through their lines, acting as a lightning rod for the vastly more capable, unseen powers beyond.
The Admiral was hesitating. Indecisive.
"Sir—"
There was no choice but to say it itself. This was its final role.
"Reserve forces, charge the colony," the Dissenter ordered. "Destroy it, starting with perimeter stabilization. Do not allow Omega to fully come across."
There was a frozen moment as everyone in the space considered this command. It was in accordance with tradition—a Dissenter was allowed any one order, at peril of obligatory court-martial—yet the order it had made was, in fact, for a horrible form of genocide.
The Commander of the Reserves looked to the screen, where the colony was, for lack of a better word, bubbling. Anyone there was dead, or worse than dead. Automatic information filters had cut in to prevent any possible memetic tampering.
The reserves fired moments later, cauterizing the wound.
— — —
The battle of Avi Cluster was a tactical loss, but one of the major strategic victories in the early parts of the Larn—Omega conflict prior to the formation of the Grand Alliance, as well as a vindication of their military command system.
The Nation of Larn remains one of the lynchpins in the ongoing containment effort, though it has been reduced to a bare fraction of its original power.
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I am indeed confused.
AZATHOTHoth
༼ つ ☀️_☀️ ༽つ
So Omega will be invading our reality soon?
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Naaah. I mean, probably not. It's a bit more than you can deal with.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Ughhh, I'm not nearly smart enough I feel to understand how tomake good progress.
Also, I notice I haven't voted either. Soooo...
[X] "I do have a few questions first. 'What's the Catalyst' being a big one, but I'm worried about my companions who came here with me too. Beyond that though, I'd like to know if you can tell me what the conditions of your seal are, and who imposed it in the first place"
That's the only thing that comes to mind. Basically options 1 and 3, plus if he can tell us who sealed him and why. Since he seems to be obligated to answer our questions now.
Also, I notice I haven't voted either. Soooo...
[X] "I do have a few questions first. 'What's the Catalyst' being a big one, but I'm worried about my companions who came here with me too. Beyond that though, I'd like to know if you can tell me what the conditions of your seal are, and who imposed it in the first place"
That's the only thing that comes to mind. Basically options 1 and 3, plus if he can tell us who sealed him and why. Since he seems to be obligated to answer our questions now.
Right, I kind of remember where we are, talking to the imprisoned god guy who makes Charas because he's trapped in the seal, or the seal enables him to do that, and he will bless almost literally anyone pursuing knowledge no matter the reason. In other words our greatest double-edged sword to date. Cause goddamn do we need some training time, which was implied we were going to get a shit-ton during/after this segment.
That being said, I'm bad at wordy segments since my brain just likes to break it down into simple concepts. So I'm going to go with Alectai because we need more specifics... also see if we can hit a sweet spot on peeling the seal back so he can't grant just anyone a blessing but he's freed a bit and can still make Charas. I think that's the optimal unsealing we want barring any new info/currently.
[] "I do have a few questions first. 'What's the Catalyst' being a big one, but I'm worried about my companions who came here with me too. Beyond that though, I'd like to know if you can tell me what the conditions of your seal are, and who imposed it in the first place"
I do have to wonder how many of our winning votes were made by Alectai originally, I feel kind of bad for going right back to this, but I don't even know where to start on my own and this does honestly sound good/important.
Also, no idea what the duck that interlude was about beyond what sounded like a civilization trapped in what sounds like the concept of The End.
That being said, I'm bad at wordy segments since my brain just likes to break it down into simple concepts. So I'm going to go with Alectai because we need more specifics... also see if we can hit a sweet spot on peeling the seal back so he can't grant just anyone a blessing but he's freed a bit and can still make Charas. I think that's the optimal unsealing we want barring any new info/currently.
[] "I do have a few questions first. 'What's the Catalyst' being a big one, but I'm worried about my companions who came here with me too. Beyond that though, I'd like to know if you can tell me what the conditions of your seal are, and who imposed it in the first place"
I do have to wonder how many of our winning votes were made by Alectai originally, I feel kind of bad for going right back to this, but I don't even know where to start on my own and this does honestly sound good/important.
Also, no idea what the duck that interlude was about beyond what sounded like a civilization trapped in what sounds like the concept of The End.
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Just a reminder as to the only other vote.
... So everything in Alectai's vote, plus some. Excluding our friends, but Alectai's isn't actually asking about them, just dropping a comment... Hmm...
[X] Skelm
So yeah Interlude... one can't help but wonder if that is in some how related to what happened to all the other Exalted.