- Location
- Spain
-
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The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up
- Thread starter Durin
- Start date
- Location
- madison
pretty much the same thing.
- Location
- Back in Cali
Yep what I'm hoping for is that we eventually take over Toroq's Domain and Demogoye Princedom as well. By the time we have taken them I think we should be in good enough relations with Dragon's Nest to merge, or at least strong enough to take down the Tugozak's Domain together. Even with that there are still plenty of systems in between all that space that can't fully be exploited. If we can get a way settle those systems then we can grow even stronger with out breaking the response time. I think that is about as far as we can spread out with our current speed.
Edit:
So I looked through the Neighboring Region numbers and cutting out the two Daemon worlds, and the Necrons there are a total of 426 worlds in the 200 LY range. That counts ourselves, the Dragon's Nest, Tugozak's Domain, the assorted minors, and the two remaining Chaos Domains. If we could gain the ability to patrol and response in that size of an area we would match The United Sectors of Amir-Ka in worlds, and The Princedom of Assour in power at least. That would leave only Urkozz's Domain as a power to match us in this Region. If we could exploit the systems between these habitual worlds then we could probably take any of the other regional powers.
Last edited:
Killing Spiders
- Location
- Australia
Written by @PoptartProdigy
@Durin
-----------
"Are you ready?"
Ophelia Jameson glances up at the voice and and makes eye contact with one of the Eldar seers. She blinks. "Sorry, what?"
The eldar takes a moment to conspicuously not sigh in annoyance. It's very impressive, actually; Ophelia briefly wishes that she knew how to be that condescending. With obvious patience, the seer says, "I said, are you ready? We are about to begin the ritual."
Ophelia nods. "I am."
The eldar nods. "Very well. I'll leave you to your duties, then." He then turns and heads back over to his own people.
Ophelia returns to her own work, then, but only for a moment. In seconds, she feels a brush of telepathy from her mother. 'Any troubles from him?'
Ophelia shakes her head. 'Just making sure that I'm ready. Took the time to be really obvious patient with me, but I can handle that.'
'Hmph. He should stay on his side, if that's the best use of his time.'
Ophelia rolls her eyes, looking over at her mother. Tamia Jameson is sitting a fair distance away, attending to her own preparations, but she looks irritated, for those who know how to tell. It's all in the set of her shoulders; they go all square when she's feeling offended.
Ophelia snorts. 'Thanks for the advocacy, Mother.'
'I can tell when you're sassing me, young lady,' remarks Tamia, casting a baleful look at her daughter.
'I wouldn't dream of it,' demurs Ophelia, turning her gaze back to her work.
'I didn't raise you just so some prissy, pointy-eared fop could sneer down at you while you're in the middle of your work!'
Ophelia sighs. 'He's an eldar, Mother. It's expected. I'm sure they're snickering behind their hands at all of us.'
'They'd better not be. They owe us.'
'Still wish you'd tell me why that is,' says Ophelia.
'And I keep telling you, I can't. It's classified.'
'I know it had something to do with Grandpa Munstrum,' replies Ophelia, glancing up at her Mother. 'Which means it was a divination. And a bigone. Now, I'm sure I could figure it out-'
'Stop yourself right there,' snaps Tamia. 'I told you, it's classified, and there is a good reason for that. Get it out of your head. Better that way.'
Ophelia scowls. 'Mother, I'm a grown woman. Don't talk like that to me.'
'I will talk to you that way when you're asking after something that you should really leave unsaid,' rejoins Tamia. 'Now drop it. It's for your own good, and just trust me on that.'
With an aggrieved grunt, Ophelia cuts the line, looking away from her mother and back to her own work.
The assembled psykers of the Trust and the Eldar have set up camp in a cathedral, and the space around them is correspondingly huge. The far corners of the room swallow the light, and voices echo into each other whenever anybody needs to speak aloud. That said, the echoes don't get much chance to start; nobody is talking. Everybody is bent over their own gear, preparing for what is soon to come. What conversation does happen, tends to happen in the participants' minds. For most, it would be intimidating to see thousands upon thousands of people, all fit into a single room and set to a single task, working in utter silence.
For Ophelia, though, this is normal. She's lived much of her life around people who don't need words to speak. And this is an Imperial cathedral. You'd need at least a hundred thousand people to even start making a dent in the space available. Ophelia has been in this kind of building regularly for her entire life, and this kind of focused silence is the same kind of silence that tends to consume her home at regular intervals. For her, it seems roomy, and the utter silence bears with it the comfort of familiarity.
It's with that comfort in the back of her mind that she returns to her preparations.
First, clothing check. Ophelia's clothes don't in particular have anything terribly mystical about them. They're just standard psyker dress; none of her mother's displays of fashion or her father's preferred martial mode of dress. They're just clothes; yet even that is important enough. Something as big as she and the others are about to do requires the utmost concentration, and if there's something that Avernite psykers have mastered over the past several centuries, it's in preparing clothing that does its job with the absolute minimum of distraction to the wearer. On a planet like Avernus, even a heartbeat's hesitation or distraction can lead to death. For psykers, it can mean damnation. There's no factor too small to ignore, even something that most would dismiss, like an unwanted pinch or a quiet rustle from imperfectly fitted clothing. Centuries later, they have their clothing down. Ophelia only needs to check her clothes out of habit, in order to visually confirm that she's even wearing anything at all. God-Emperor knows, she wouldn't feel the difference if she left it behind.
Then come her various focuses. Ophelia is powerful enough on her own -- more than! -- and has enough control to be rightly proud, but living on Avernus, you pick up the lesson that there's no such thing as, "enough," fairly quick. She's always made sure to keep her gear in top-notch condition. Everything she has is her own work. Personal wards that can turn bolter rounds or give a telepath an ear-bleeding migraine, woven into a sash she wraps around her waist. A ring that helps to channel and focus half again her power. A staff meant to serve as the final focus for many of her directed techniques, giving them shape and structure beyond her own abilities..
Then there's the bevy of more...personal possessions. Good luck charms, to the uninitiated. None of them are proper focuses...not properly. What they are is sentimental. Little notes, built up over a lifetime and containing scraps of words in which Ophelia took some meaning. Prayers, woven into little scraps of fabric. Shiny rocks, picked up by a riverbed when she was twelve and treasured ever since.
They're not proper focuses, not at all. To another psyker, they wouldn't mean anything. You could spend days, weeks studying them, trying to find even a scrap of proof to call them Warp-touched in some manner. Ophelia has. There's nothing to be found.
But, just as undeniably, Ophelia is better when she's holding these. That too, people have tested, for weeks. Anything that impacts the performance of an Alpha psyker gets the spotlight treatment, and the spotlight turned up that she improves when she has her trinkets. Must be something to do just with her. She sweeps them all up and tucks them into her pocket.
"Got your gear?"
Ophelia flinches at the sudden voice, whirling to see Xavier standing there, Mittens stalks past him and settles down next to her.
"Don't startle me like that, Father," says Ophelia, turning away and absently stroking Mittens's fur.
"Habit," he replies, shrugging. He settles down next to her. "Just making sure that you're ready. You have everything?"
Ophelia rolls her eyes. "I do."
"Focuses?"
"Yes."
"Your trinkets?"
"Yes."
"Nothing out of place-?"
Ophelia glares at him. "Father. I am over a hundred years old. I have been in battle before. I don't need your supervision."
He falls silent for a moment, looking at her with a blank expression. "...we'll always worry, Ophelia."
She looks away. "Spend your worry somewhere else. I'm a veteran. I don't need it."
Mittens gets up and wanders off. Xavier takes a breath. "Right. I know. But still, we're your parents."
"I can perform my duties," snaps Ophelia. "I don't just go into combat, I lead people. I don't need your reassurance."
Xavier leans back. "I certainly wasn't questioning that." He stands, shaking his head. "We're always going to be worried, even if you're going to battle with the Emperor at your back."
Ophelia sighs. "It's not necessary. I'm not a child anymore."
"Children aren't the only people battle kills," says Xavier. He squeezes her shoulder as he walks past. Then there's a click from his pocket, and they both look down. He pulls a timepiece from his pocket and sighs. "Time's up. We need to get moving." He looks around the cavernous room and raises his voice. "Alright! The Chaos fleet is entering extreme range! Focus up, folks!" He then steps away from Ophelia and walks over to Tamia. The two join hands at the center of their respective teams, closing their eyes in focus.
Ophelia folds her hands in her lap, closes her eyes, and stops focusing so much on keeping her feet on the ground. As her power tosses her hair about like a storm and she rises into the air, she casts out her consciousness and, in her mind's eye, flies up and away from Asgard entirely. In her mind's eye, she flies to space.
* * *
I am not here.
This ritual, aside from the given dangerous of working with the Warp in the first place, is not especially dangerous. There's a lot of power bound up in it, but everybody involved knows what they're doing, the Warp is calm today, and it's a fairly straightforward task.
There is nothing here.
The danger, again aside from the obvious, is in those sorcerers who may be with the fleet. It's Chaos, after all; even if it's Dark Mechanicus, they might have some technological horror with a talent. Even if it's as simple as somebody having an unrecognized or uncultivated talent, it's still something.
And anybody with the slightest bit of Warp-sense could feel Ophelia Jameson drifting by outside.
I am a void.
The dangerous part, then, is remaining hidden from sight, and here Ophelia finds her greatest challenge. She is strong, she is powerful, yes -- but those are liabilities, in hiding, not strengths. This is her father's field, not hers.
But he did help to raise her.
On Avernus, everything is dangerous, but some things are only dangerous to things that aren't you. The key to stealth on a death world is to blend in with those things. Nobody can pay attention to every single thing in their environment; they filter. Make your way through that filter, and your target will be too busy watching what they do think is dangerous to take note of you.
While things elsewhere aren't quite so wantonly dangerous, the same principles hold true, and so Ophelia Jameson draws on a thousand stories her father shared with her, as she grew up.
I am not a phase-tiger in the grass. I'm just more grass.
Closer, closer...there. She floats to a halt before her target.
Ophelia cannot sense her father. He might as well not exist. Yet even so, in reality he's sitting less than a hundred feet from her in the same room, and she hears him say, "Launching. Shroud."
She whispers it too, and in the ghostly Materium, hears thousands of lips carry the message along.
Ophelia reaches out and blinds the sensors of the ships before her.
She likens it, in her mind, to the act of pulling a sheet over a scared child's head. The blink spiders can't get you if you can't see them, after all. If you can just block the world away, nothing will go wrong.
You will not see the escort ships screaming forward to bury their teeth in your throats.
You will not see cloud of torpedoes, more torpedoes than there are ships to kill with them, hurtling across the gap between ships.
And that makes you safe.
Right?
Ophelia extends her shroud to cover more ships as most of hers blow up.
There aren't any torpedoes. There aren't any frigates at knife-fighting range. Wouldn't you rather watch all of those big ships back there? Yes, those big ships, all the way in back. Aren't they threatening? Oh, you'd better keep a close eye on those ones.
Ophelia idly notes the battle line, as it crosses to within medium range of the Chaos fleet.
Ooh, look at them sit all the way in back.
Of course, this is just for the sensors. The fleets crews will know, now, that they can't trust what's on their sensors. But hopefully, by wiping all of the lighter ships off the screen, and then merely misrepresenting the heavier ones, Ophelia can make them complacent for a few seconds-
Oh dear, that's the vanguard.
-well. That worked.
Shattered and blinded, the last remnants of the Chaos fleet turn to run. A third of them don't make it. Ophelia smirks. The temptation to drop her concealment, now that she's won, is strong. To let it drop, cast aside her shields, scream her triumph to the stars and dare the fleet to come and try again-
She idly slaps the Lord of Change's claws away from her soul and keeps her shields right where they belong, thank you.
Must have gotten a little sloppy, at the end, she muses, sticking her hand in her pocket and touching her trinkets to center herself. She opens her eyes and awakens to find herself bouncing against the cathedral's ceiling. Reasserting herself, Ophelia spins back upright and drifts floorwards. Still, they weren't too subtle, either.
She the pile of river stones in her pocket, smiling to herself with eyes closed. I'm safe, she sighs, I'm safe.
I know, because I actually kill the spiders.
@Durin
-----------
Killing Spiders
"Are you ready?"
Ophelia Jameson glances up at the voice and and makes eye contact with one of the Eldar seers. She blinks. "Sorry, what?"
The eldar takes a moment to conspicuously not sigh in annoyance. It's very impressive, actually; Ophelia briefly wishes that she knew how to be that condescending. With obvious patience, the seer says, "I said, are you ready? We are about to begin the ritual."
Ophelia nods. "I am."
The eldar nods. "Very well. I'll leave you to your duties, then." He then turns and heads back over to his own people.
Ophelia returns to her own work, then, but only for a moment. In seconds, she feels a brush of telepathy from her mother. 'Any troubles from him?'
Ophelia shakes her head. 'Just making sure that I'm ready. Took the time to be really obvious patient with me, but I can handle that.'
'Hmph. He should stay on his side, if that's the best use of his time.'
Ophelia rolls her eyes, looking over at her mother. Tamia Jameson is sitting a fair distance away, attending to her own preparations, but she looks irritated, for those who know how to tell. It's all in the set of her shoulders; they go all square when she's feeling offended.
Ophelia snorts. 'Thanks for the advocacy, Mother.'
'I can tell when you're sassing me, young lady,' remarks Tamia, casting a baleful look at her daughter.
'I wouldn't dream of it,' demurs Ophelia, turning her gaze back to her work.
'I didn't raise you just so some prissy, pointy-eared fop could sneer down at you while you're in the middle of your work!'
Ophelia sighs. 'He's an eldar, Mother. It's expected. I'm sure they're snickering behind their hands at all of us.'
'They'd better not be. They owe us.'
'Still wish you'd tell me why that is,' says Ophelia.
'And I keep telling you, I can't. It's classified.'
'I know it had something to do with Grandpa Munstrum,' replies Ophelia, glancing up at her Mother. 'Which means it was a divination. And a bigone. Now, I'm sure I could figure it out-'
'Stop yourself right there,' snaps Tamia. 'I told you, it's classified, and there is a good reason for that. Get it out of your head. Better that way.'
Ophelia scowls. 'Mother, I'm a grown woman. Don't talk like that to me.'
'I will talk to you that way when you're asking after something that you should really leave unsaid,' rejoins Tamia. 'Now drop it. It's for your own good, and just trust me on that.'
With an aggrieved grunt, Ophelia cuts the line, looking away from her mother and back to her own work.
The assembled psykers of the Trust and the Eldar have set up camp in a cathedral, and the space around them is correspondingly huge. The far corners of the room swallow the light, and voices echo into each other whenever anybody needs to speak aloud. That said, the echoes don't get much chance to start; nobody is talking. Everybody is bent over their own gear, preparing for what is soon to come. What conversation does happen, tends to happen in the participants' minds. For most, it would be intimidating to see thousands upon thousands of people, all fit into a single room and set to a single task, working in utter silence.
For Ophelia, though, this is normal. She's lived much of her life around people who don't need words to speak. And this is an Imperial cathedral. You'd need at least a hundred thousand people to even start making a dent in the space available. Ophelia has been in this kind of building regularly for her entire life, and this kind of focused silence is the same kind of silence that tends to consume her home at regular intervals. For her, it seems roomy, and the utter silence bears with it the comfort of familiarity.
It's with that comfort in the back of her mind that she returns to her preparations.
First, clothing check. Ophelia's clothes don't in particular have anything terribly mystical about them. They're just standard psyker dress; none of her mother's displays of fashion or her father's preferred martial mode of dress. They're just clothes; yet even that is important enough. Something as big as she and the others are about to do requires the utmost concentration, and if there's something that Avernite psykers have mastered over the past several centuries, it's in preparing clothing that does its job with the absolute minimum of distraction to the wearer. On a planet like Avernus, even a heartbeat's hesitation or distraction can lead to death. For psykers, it can mean damnation. There's no factor too small to ignore, even something that most would dismiss, like an unwanted pinch or a quiet rustle from imperfectly fitted clothing. Centuries later, they have their clothing down. Ophelia only needs to check her clothes out of habit, in order to visually confirm that she's even wearing anything at all. God-Emperor knows, she wouldn't feel the difference if she left it behind.
Then come her various focuses. Ophelia is powerful enough on her own -- more than! -- and has enough control to be rightly proud, but living on Avernus, you pick up the lesson that there's no such thing as, "enough," fairly quick. She's always made sure to keep her gear in top-notch condition. Everything she has is her own work. Personal wards that can turn bolter rounds or give a telepath an ear-bleeding migraine, woven into a sash she wraps around her waist. A ring that helps to channel and focus half again her power. A staff meant to serve as the final focus for many of her directed techniques, giving them shape and structure beyond her own abilities..
Then there's the bevy of more...personal possessions. Good luck charms, to the uninitiated. None of them are proper focuses...not properly. What they are is sentimental. Little notes, built up over a lifetime and containing scraps of words in which Ophelia took some meaning. Prayers, woven into little scraps of fabric. Shiny rocks, picked up by a riverbed when she was twelve and treasured ever since.
They're not proper focuses, not at all. To another psyker, they wouldn't mean anything. You could spend days, weeks studying them, trying to find even a scrap of proof to call them Warp-touched in some manner. Ophelia has. There's nothing to be found.
But, just as undeniably, Ophelia is better when she's holding these. That too, people have tested, for weeks. Anything that impacts the performance of an Alpha psyker gets the spotlight treatment, and the spotlight turned up that she improves when she has her trinkets. Must be something to do just with her. She sweeps them all up and tucks them into her pocket.
"Got your gear?"
Ophelia flinches at the sudden voice, whirling to see Xavier standing there, Mittens stalks past him and settles down next to her.
"Don't startle me like that, Father," says Ophelia, turning away and absently stroking Mittens's fur.
"Habit," he replies, shrugging. He settles down next to her. "Just making sure that you're ready. You have everything?"
Ophelia rolls her eyes. "I do."
"Focuses?"
"Yes."
"Your trinkets?"
"Yes."
"Nothing out of place-?"
Ophelia glares at him. "Father. I am over a hundred years old. I have been in battle before. I don't need your supervision."
He falls silent for a moment, looking at her with a blank expression. "...we'll always worry, Ophelia."
She looks away. "Spend your worry somewhere else. I'm a veteran. I don't need it."
Mittens gets up and wanders off. Xavier takes a breath. "Right. I know. But still, we're your parents."
"I can perform my duties," snaps Ophelia. "I don't just go into combat, I lead people. I don't need your reassurance."
Xavier leans back. "I certainly wasn't questioning that." He stands, shaking his head. "We're always going to be worried, even if you're going to battle with the Emperor at your back."
Ophelia sighs. "It's not necessary. I'm not a child anymore."
"Children aren't the only people battle kills," says Xavier. He squeezes her shoulder as he walks past. Then there's a click from his pocket, and they both look down. He pulls a timepiece from his pocket and sighs. "Time's up. We need to get moving." He looks around the cavernous room and raises his voice. "Alright! The Chaos fleet is entering extreme range! Focus up, folks!" He then steps away from Ophelia and walks over to Tamia. The two join hands at the center of their respective teams, closing their eyes in focus.
Ophelia folds her hands in her lap, closes her eyes, and stops focusing so much on keeping her feet on the ground. As her power tosses her hair about like a storm and she rises into the air, she casts out her consciousness and, in her mind's eye, flies up and away from Asgard entirely. In her mind's eye, she flies to space.
* * *
I am not here.
This ritual, aside from the given dangerous of working with the Warp in the first place, is not especially dangerous. There's a lot of power bound up in it, but everybody involved knows what they're doing, the Warp is calm today, and it's a fairly straightforward task.
There is nothing here.
The danger, again aside from the obvious, is in those sorcerers who may be with the fleet. It's Chaos, after all; even if it's Dark Mechanicus, they might have some technological horror with a talent. Even if it's as simple as somebody having an unrecognized or uncultivated talent, it's still something.
And anybody with the slightest bit of Warp-sense could feel Ophelia Jameson drifting by outside.
I am a void.
The dangerous part, then, is remaining hidden from sight, and here Ophelia finds her greatest challenge. She is strong, she is powerful, yes -- but those are liabilities, in hiding, not strengths. This is her father's field, not hers.
But he did help to raise her.
On Avernus, everything is dangerous, but some things are only dangerous to things that aren't you. The key to stealth on a death world is to blend in with those things. Nobody can pay attention to every single thing in their environment; they filter. Make your way through that filter, and your target will be too busy watching what they do think is dangerous to take note of you.
While things elsewhere aren't quite so wantonly dangerous, the same principles hold true, and so Ophelia Jameson draws on a thousand stories her father shared with her, as she grew up.
I am not a phase-tiger in the grass. I'm just more grass.
Closer, closer...there. She floats to a halt before her target.
Ophelia cannot sense her father. He might as well not exist. Yet even so, in reality he's sitting less than a hundred feet from her in the same room, and she hears him say, "Launching. Shroud."
She whispers it too, and in the ghostly Materium, hears thousands of lips carry the message along.
Ophelia reaches out and blinds the sensors of the ships before her.
She likens it, in her mind, to the act of pulling a sheet over a scared child's head. The blink spiders can't get you if you can't see them, after all. If you can just block the world away, nothing will go wrong.
You will not see the escort ships screaming forward to bury their teeth in your throats.
You will not see cloud of torpedoes, more torpedoes than there are ships to kill with them, hurtling across the gap between ships.
And that makes you safe.
Right?
Ophelia extends her shroud to cover more ships as most of hers blow up.
There aren't any torpedoes. There aren't any frigates at knife-fighting range. Wouldn't you rather watch all of those big ships back there? Yes, those big ships, all the way in back. Aren't they threatening? Oh, you'd better keep a close eye on those ones.
Ophelia idly notes the battle line, as it crosses to within medium range of the Chaos fleet.
Ooh, look at them sit all the way in back.
Of course, this is just for the sensors. The fleets crews will know, now, that they can't trust what's on their sensors. But hopefully, by wiping all of the lighter ships off the screen, and then merely misrepresenting the heavier ones, Ophelia can make them complacent for a few seconds-
Oh dear, that's the vanguard.
-well. That worked.
Shattered and blinded, the last remnants of the Chaos fleet turn to run. A third of them don't make it. Ophelia smirks. The temptation to drop her concealment, now that she's won, is strong. To let it drop, cast aside her shields, scream her triumph to the stars and dare the fleet to come and try again-
She idly slaps the Lord of Change's claws away from her soul and keeps her shields right where they belong, thank you.
Must have gotten a little sloppy, at the end, she muses, sticking her hand in her pocket and touching her trinkets to center herself. She opens her eyes and awakens to find herself bouncing against the cathedral's ceiling. Reasserting herself, Ophelia spins back upright and drifts floorwards. Still, they weren't too subtle, either.
She the pile of river stones in her pocket, smiling to herself with eyes closed. I'm safe, she sighs, I'm safe.
I know, because I actually kill the spiders.
- Location
- Australia
Addio's omake of Ophelia happened when she was like 20. She's 150 now and in that time has been in the front lines of the bloodiest war in the history of the Trust throughout its entirety. Tamia seems fine to me.
- Location
- To the left. No, not there, the other left.
@Durin
1. Why our Nova Cannons can only be mounted on heavy/battlecruisers+ while Imperial ones can be mounted on regular cruisers? Is it because ours use high-tech gravitic launchers?
2. Would developing a smaller version of Nova Cannon meant for use in cruisers be possible?
I'm asking because Nova Canons seem to be the second best ways to deal with hulks (after Ragnarok Cannon) and being to field them in greater numbers would be a great boon.
1. Why our Nova Cannons can only be mounted on heavy/battlecruisers+ while Imperial ones can be mounted on regular cruisers? Is it because ours use high-tech gravitic launchers?
2. Would developing a smaller version of Nova Cannon meant for use in cruisers be possible?
I'm asking because Nova Canons seem to be the second best ways to deal with hulks (after Ragnarok Cannon) and being to field them in greater numbers would be a great boon.
Beyond both Turoq and Demagoye being more than twice as far as Valinor was.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Doesn't seem right to me in contrast with every omake about them so far. Also psychic focuses will gather warp echoes from use and whatnot even if previously completely mundane. It's how normal stuff can become relics over extended use.
- Location
- Back in Cali
Maybe we could have but we would be dealing with more constant attacks most likely. Unless we could have convinced the neighboring Imperials to side with us I'm pretty sure we would have ended up fighting them. All would have wanted to be the top dog and some would not have taken kindly to our rise.
We had a benefit of a literal Saint speaking for us, so I don't think there would be much problems with uniting.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
We would also be seeing lots of Abomination attacks on us. OTOH, centuries to build up and become superOP.
Well we would have been in a lot better position than the rest of the region. With Saint Lin we could have easily united the sector and than build up. Dawm imagine how big a military we have after 1100 years and the tech we have spread around tens of thousands of worlds. We be able to keep the dark Imperium in check maybe save the iron hands. Or ( forlorn dream here) keep Abbadon from going through cadia.
- Location
- madison
without the warp storm, we would have been 100% death or glory. we'd have either pulled together a massive horrifically powerful polity or gotten mobbed by everyone. Absolute best case scenario would have been being able to send the resources and ships to the eye to buff it up to hold it shut, but i'm not sure that would have been viable given there are transcendents who would have wanted it open at that point. Would definitely have kept cadia round for a few more centuries at least though.
past that who the hell knows what the knock-on effects would be.
past that who the hell knows what the knock-on effects would be.
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Considering other big Imperial Remnants around, I think you way overestimate our abilities.
- Location
- madison
I'd say we would be in a better initial position than cadmus, assuming we found the DAOT core quickly.
- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
he would be
interesting idea. Not saying if it is correct or not but I hae decided what happened to Vlad Tepes, the Explorer
Sun Goddess Ilfeliare
- Location
- Australia
@Durin
-----------
Ilfeliare is a religious god spawned into existence by the worship of the Kingdom of Bel-Caerel, a human empire whose history dates back to the Great Crusade. Worshipped as the goddess of the sun and protector of the kingdom, Ilferiare managed to survive her gestation because her seed was hidden within the Warp reflection of her home star, which most Warp predators can't enter.
Ilfeliare often leaves her star to assist her kingdom when they fight the forces of Chaos, attacking daemons in Warp space to prevent Chaos sorcerers from summoning them.
Appearance
Ilfeliare takes the form of a golden, blazing mix between a dragon and a phoenix. When communicating to someone through dreams, she appears as a human woman whose eyes shine with the same colour and luminosity as the sun itself.
Powers
Like many minor gods, Ilfeliare has (almost) no divine servitors of her own. Instead, her power is primarily expressed by having her power channelled as miracles through very select members of her clergy.
As a sun god, her primary powers revolve around themes of light and fire, manifesting as powers that purge the unclean in holy flames, inspiring the faithful, causing fear in the wicked, improving a Navigator's vision in the Warp, and cursing sinners with sickness and death. (The latter arising from the baleful power of radiation released in large quantities by stars.)
She also has secondary powers benefiting from her role as protector and patron god of Bel-Caerel. She can heal broken or sickened flesh, protect the body and soul from harm, and provide general wisdom and insight.
Religion
Ilfeliare is worshipped through prayer, the sacrifice of food and special herbs, and animal sacrifice. She accepts all animal sacrifice from her people, but on holy days her priests will draw from specially-bred sacred herds to sacrifice to her. The sacrifice of humans and xenos is heretical to her cult, save for orks, whom Ilfeliare thinks of as animals. The sacrifice of tainted flesh, whether it be tainted by sickness, mutation, or Chaos corruption, is forbidden.
The sun goddess looks favourably on and is empowered by acts done in the name of her and Bel-Caerel.
Bel-Caerelians believe that the soul undergoes one of three fates after death. If the soul was wicked, it will be tossed into the void to be ravaged apart and tormented eternally by daemons. If the soul was extraordinarily pious and worthy, it will join with the holy radiance of Ilfeliare herself. If the soul was neither, it will reincarnate on the mortal plane.
C'tan and the Ruinous Powers are considered to be anathema by the Cult of Ilfeliare.
The Cult of Ilfeliare is monotheistic, encouraging its populace to worship only Ilfeliare and prohibiting its priests from worshipping any but Ilfeliare.
Kingdom of Bel-Caerel
Bel-Caerel survived the Imperium of Man because the warp routes into it were few, difficult to find, and difficult to traverse. It was but one of many human and xenos empires existing within the Imperium's borders that was mutually unaware of its existence. Following the Emperor's death and the Abomination's birth, the warp routes have shifted and now the Kingdom is open to the wider galaxy, though thousands of years of stable, prosperous growth and technological progress under a wise and benevolent god have prepared it well.
The Kingdom of Bel-Caerel is led by a king or queen who presides over all temporal aspects of the Kingdom. On the death of the monarch, a new monarch is selected from among the previous monarch's children by Ilfeliare herself. The children who volunteer for the position are led into a special chamber within Ilfeliare's greatest temple that holds an eternally burning Sacred Flame. The most worthy emerges alive and unharmed while the rest burn in agony. If she deems none of the volunteers worthy of kingship, they all burn in agony. If this were to happen, the Hierarch of her cult and each of the kingdom's planetary governors would each present a nominee - who may be themselves - and the judgement would begin again.
After Ilfeliare selects the monarch, three things change in the monarch. First, a distinctive divine mark unique to those selected as monarch appears somewhere on the monarch's body. Second, they gain Ilfeliare's Mien. Third, they gain the ability to call down miracles of their god if they hadn't already possessed the ability.
As the monarch honours the Goddess of the Sun and ensures the prosperity of Bel-Caerel, the monarch gains additional boons that make them better rulers. How these boons manifest varies based on both the monarch and the needs of the kingdom, though an extension of lifespan is common.
The Cult of Ilfeliare is the state religion of the Kingdom. Atheism is illegal in Bel-Caerel. Gods aside from Ilfeliare may be worshipped but only if Ilfeliare is also worshipped. Worship of enemies of Bel-Caerel and Ilfeliare, C'tan, and the Ruinous Powers is punished by death.
The Kingdom of Bel-Caerel is constantly expanding its reach through conquest, alliance, and willing absorption of weaker human polities.
When the Kingdom locates an uncorrupted psyker, they're taken into special training facilities run by the Cult of Ilfeliare. There, unless already pure and faithful, their minds will be scrubbed entirely of their former lives so that they become perfect vessels for Ilfeliare's will. After sufficient training and tutelage, they will be inducted as priests of her cult and act as conduits of her power.
The name of the central star system of the Kingdom as well as the star itself is Bel-Caerel. The name of the capital world of the Kingdom is Caerel.
Bel-Caerel uses less skull imagery than the Imperium of Man but uses much more gold.
Life of Ilfeliare
Ilfeliare has survived for so long by returning to her home star whenever she's pursued by daemons powerful enough to defeat her outside of it. Unfortunately for her, however, this hasn't always been enough. Though low on the priority list of the Great Gods of Chaos and too tough in her home turf for most daemons to bother with, there has been the occasional Honoured Greater Daemon or sufficiently powerful fire-aligned daemon looking to kill her on mere principle. The problem is that, while a god, Ilfeliare is a mere minor god, and such daemons have been deadly threats to her existence. After the first attack, which nearly cost her her life despite being empowered by massive amounts of prayers and sacrifices after sending a distress call, she decided to rectify the situation as best she could.
In essence, while she did have options to ensure survival against an attack, it would leave her badly weakened or drained of power. It would work perhaps once or twice before another daemon realised her weakness in the aftermath of an attack and immediately followed up. She needed to avoid a fight entirely. Hiding wasn't an option, and any daemon powerful enough to kill her in her star would be fast enough to catch her if she fled. The only safe haven was the Materium. She could freely manifest herself inside her material star, but only temporarily, and not for long enough for a daemon to decide to leave of its own accord before she was forced to reenter Warpspace. She needed a more permanent solution, and with her and her priests working on it, she found one: an avatar.
It took a lot of time to perfect the ritual and create the artifact needed to make an avatar, time in which she was once more attacked, again only barely surviving, but the work was complete. The next time she was attacked by a daemon too strong for her to easily defeat even in her own star, she was ready. The then-queen of Bel-Caerel entered the sealed chamber containing the Sacred Flame for the second time in her life while all caster priests on the planet made their way just outside the chamber. There, the priests began praying, pooling their power and sending it to the queen. Then the queen received a vision from her god, a vision containing the god's True Name, that she and she alone would know. The already-prepared vessel became that much more accommodating and as the ritual was completed, Ilfeliare was incarnate upon the earth with the queen as her avatar.
While the god's ability to act across the entire breadth of her realm with her divine powers was mostly neutered, the kingdom was more than consoled by the fact that in its place it was now led in person by a literal incarnate god. As befitting her nature as patron of the kingdom, she rapidly made many beneficial improvements to the kingdom on every level, ushering in an age of prosperity matched only by the greatest of the empire's previous monarchs. When the god reached a plateau in what she could easily improve, she turned to one of the greatest contributors to her kingdom's continued survival and prosperity: technology.
Technology is a tricky thing for gods. Gods without a technology domain tend to struggle greatly when it comes to creating and working with technology due to its reliance on physical laws. While her domain would help in fields like astromancy, nuclear fusion, and plasmatics, it wouldn't be enough for her to advance those fields in any meaningful way, if at all. But what she could do was work on technologies that didn't rely entirely on physical laws, technologies that she as a higher being of the Immaterium could comprehend and push forward in ways beings of the Materium couldn't. That meant warptech and psytech.
Ilfeliare looked through the Kingdom and took every single technology that interacted with the Warp or psykers in some way and improved upon them in every way that mattered. She also invented new technologies wholesale, the most potent of which involve her domain. Such devices include astromantic divination engines, giant psyker-powered plasma- and fusion-based superweapons, and ship components that act as lanterns through the Warp. Her wargear, its purpose to channel the power of a god, is crafted to a masterful degree, and the plasma it uses, sourced directly from her own star where the barrier between the material and immaterial is thinnest, shines golden instead of blue. Her crown jewel was creating a much improved version of the original artifact that helped keep her bound to her avatar.
Of course, while Ilfeliare had very strong limits when it came to purely physical technologies, her people did not. Over the millennia she has invested enormous amounts of resources into technological growth, resulting in the Kingdom being rather advanced overall. Perhaps the most relevant to Ilfeliare herself would be the advances in biology, which allowed for the creation of a supersoldier bodyguard program. In this she gives personal aid to the program. After a future supersoldier is born, and before it's named, she creates a divine servitor no stronger than a nurgling. The baby is given the servitor's True Name as its own and then has the servitor bound to it, making it a spirithost. The baby is then given a new, false name and undergoes the supersoldier bodyguard program as normal.
Goals
Aside from the overarching long-term goal of survival and increasing the power and prosperity of both herself and her kingdom, Ilfeliare has several more specific long-term goals.
1. Improve Bel-Caerel's technology as much as possible. More technology is key to ensuring the safety of both herself and her people.
2. Improve interaction between her own power and technology. Intertwining technology and her own power to improve themselves has been immensely beneficial.
3. Have a giant mechanical avatar of herself constructed and built entirely (or as close to "entirely" as possible) with auramite. The intent of this project is to create a vessel for herself to inhabit that can travel freely through the Materium and Immaterium, granting her an unprecedented amount of influence and survivability for a minor god.
Ilfeliare considers Zahhak's alliance to be beneficial towards all three of those goals, with Sophont being especially relevant given the deity's domain.
***
Omakes
Gods of the Firmament Pantheon (Sun, Storm, Earth)
Sun Papyrus
Bel-Caerel War Assets
Kaerae Worlds
-----------
Sun Goddess Ilfeliare
Ilfeliare is a religious god spawned into existence by the worship of the Kingdom of Bel-Caerel, a human empire whose history dates back to the Great Crusade. Worshipped as the goddess of the sun and protector of the kingdom, Ilferiare managed to survive her gestation because her seed was hidden within the Warp reflection of her home star, which most Warp predators can't enter.
Ilfeliare often leaves her star to assist her kingdom when they fight the forces of Chaos, attacking daemons in Warp space to prevent Chaos sorcerers from summoning them.
Appearance
Ilfeliare takes the form of a golden, blazing mix between a dragon and a phoenix. When communicating to someone through dreams, she appears as a human woman whose eyes shine with the same colour and luminosity as the sun itself.
Powers
Like many minor gods, Ilfeliare has (almost) no divine servitors of her own. Instead, her power is primarily expressed by having her power channelled as miracles through very select members of her clergy.
As a sun god, her primary powers revolve around themes of light and fire, manifesting as powers that purge the unclean in holy flames, inspiring the faithful, causing fear in the wicked, improving a Navigator's vision in the Warp, and cursing sinners with sickness and death. (The latter arising from the baleful power of radiation released in large quantities by stars.)
She also has secondary powers benefiting from her role as protector and patron god of Bel-Caerel. She can heal broken or sickened flesh, protect the body and soul from harm, and provide general wisdom and insight.
Religion
Ilfeliare is worshipped through prayer, the sacrifice of food and special herbs, and animal sacrifice. She accepts all animal sacrifice from her people, but on holy days her priests will draw from specially-bred sacred herds to sacrifice to her. The sacrifice of humans and xenos is heretical to her cult, save for orks, whom Ilfeliare thinks of as animals. The sacrifice of tainted flesh, whether it be tainted by sickness, mutation, or Chaos corruption, is forbidden.
The sun goddess looks favourably on and is empowered by acts done in the name of her and Bel-Caerel.
Bel-Caerelians believe that the soul undergoes one of three fates after death. If the soul was wicked, it will be tossed into the void to be ravaged apart and tormented eternally by daemons. If the soul was extraordinarily pious and worthy, it will join with the holy radiance of Ilfeliare herself. If the soul was neither, it will reincarnate on the mortal plane.
C'tan and the Ruinous Powers are considered to be anathema by the Cult of Ilfeliare.
The Cult of Ilfeliare is monotheistic, encouraging its populace to worship only Ilfeliare and prohibiting its priests from worshipping any but Ilfeliare.
Kingdom of Bel-Caerel
Bel-Caerel survived the Imperium of Man because the warp routes into it were few, difficult to find, and difficult to traverse. It was but one of many human and xenos empires existing within the Imperium's borders that was mutually unaware of its existence. Following the Emperor's death and the Abomination's birth, the warp routes have shifted and now the Kingdom is open to the wider galaxy, though thousands of years of stable, prosperous growth and technological progress under a wise and benevolent god have prepared it well.
The Kingdom of Bel-Caerel is led by a king or queen who presides over all temporal aspects of the Kingdom. On the death of the monarch, a new monarch is selected from among the previous monarch's children by Ilfeliare herself. The children who volunteer for the position are led into a special chamber within Ilfeliare's greatest temple that holds an eternally burning Sacred Flame. The most worthy emerges alive and unharmed while the rest burn in agony. If she deems none of the volunteers worthy of kingship, they all burn in agony. If this were to happen, the Hierarch of her cult and each of the kingdom's planetary governors would each present a nominee - who may be themselves - and the judgement would begin again.
After Ilfeliare selects the monarch, three things change in the monarch. First, a distinctive divine mark unique to those selected as monarch appears somewhere on the monarch's body. Second, they gain Ilfeliare's Mien. Third, they gain the ability to call down miracles of their god if they hadn't already possessed the ability.
As the monarch honours the Goddess of the Sun and ensures the prosperity of Bel-Caerel, the monarch gains additional boons that make them better rulers. How these boons manifest varies based on both the monarch and the needs of the kingdom, though an extension of lifespan is common.
The Cult of Ilfeliare is the state religion of the Kingdom. Atheism is illegal in Bel-Caerel. Gods aside from Ilfeliare may be worshipped but only if Ilfeliare is also worshipped. Worship of enemies of Bel-Caerel and Ilfeliare, C'tan, and the Ruinous Powers is punished by death.
The Kingdom of Bel-Caerel is constantly expanding its reach through conquest, alliance, and willing absorption of weaker human polities.
When the Kingdom locates an uncorrupted psyker, they're taken into special training facilities run by the Cult of Ilfeliare. There, unless already pure and faithful, their minds will be scrubbed entirely of their former lives so that they become perfect vessels for Ilfeliare's will. After sufficient training and tutelage, they will be inducted as priests of her cult and act as conduits of her power.
The name of the central star system of the Kingdom as well as the star itself is Bel-Caerel. The name of the capital world of the Kingdom is Caerel.
Bel-Caerel uses less skull imagery than the Imperium of Man but uses much more gold.
Life of Ilfeliare
Ilfeliare has survived for so long by returning to her home star whenever she's pursued by daemons powerful enough to defeat her outside of it. Unfortunately for her, however, this hasn't always been enough. Though low on the priority list of the Great Gods of Chaos and too tough in her home turf for most daemons to bother with, there has been the occasional Honoured Greater Daemon or sufficiently powerful fire-aligned daemon looking to kill her on mere principle. The problem is that, while a god, Ilfeliare is a mere minor god, and such daemons have been deadly threats to her existence. After the first attack, which nearly cost her her life despite being empowered by massive amounts of prayers and sacrifices after sending a distress call, she decided to rectify the situation as best she could.
In essence, while she did have options to ensure survival against an attack, it would leave her badly weakened or drained of power. It would work perhaps once or twice before another daemon realised her weakness in the aftermath of an attack and immediately followed up. She needed to avoid a fight entirely. Hiding wasn't an option, and any daemon powerful enough to kill her in her star would be fast enough to catch her if she fled. The only safe haven was the Materium. She could freely manifest herself inside her material star, but only temporarily, and not for long enough for a daemon to decide to leave of its own accord before she was forced to reenter Warpspace. She needed a more permanent solution, and with her and her priests working on it, she found one: an avatar.
It took a lot of time to perfect the ritual and create the artifact needed to make an avatar, time in which she was once more attacked, again only barely surviving, but the work was complete. The next time she was attacked by a daemon too strong for her to easily defeat even in her own star, she was ready. The then-queen of Bel-Caerel entered the sealed chamber containing the Sacred Flame for the second time in her life while all caster priests on the planet made their way just outside the chamber. There, the priests began praying, pooling their power and sending it to the queen. Then the queen received a vision from her god, a vision containing the god's True Name, that she and she alone would know. The already-prepared vessel became that much more accommodating and as the ritual was completed, Ilfeliare was incarnate upon the earth with the queen as her avatar.
While the god's ability to act across the entire breadth of her realm with her divine powers was mostly neutered, the kingdom was more than consoled by the fact that in its place it was now led in person by a literal incarnate god. As befitting her nature as patron of the kingdom, she rapidly made many beneficial improvements to the kingdom on every level, ushering in an age of prosperity matched only by the greatest of the empire's previous monarchs. When the god reached a plateau in what she could easily improve, she turned to one of the greatest contributors to her kingdom's continued survival and prosperity: technology.
Technology is a tricky thing for gods. Gods without a technology domain tend to struggle greatly when it comes to creating and working with technology due to its reliance on physical laws. While her domain would help in fields like astromancy, nuclear fusion, and plasmatics, it wouldn't be enough for her to advance those fields in any meaningful way, if at all. But what she could do was work on technologies that didn't rely entirely on physical laws, technologies that she as a higher being of the Immaterium could comprehend and push forward in ways beings of the Materium couldn't. That meant warptech and psytech.
Ilfeliare looked through the Kingdom and took every single technology that interacted with the Warp or psykers in some way and improved upon them in every way that mattered. She also invented new technologies wholesale, the most potent of which involve her domain. Such devices include astromantic divination engines, giant psyker-powered plasma- and fusion-based superweapons, and ship components that act as lanterns through the Warp. Her wargear, its purpose to channel the power of a god, is crafted to a masterful degree, and the plasma it uses, sourced directly from her own star where the barrier between the material and immaterial is thinnest, shines golden instead of blue. Her crown jewel was creating a much improved version of the original artifact that helped keep her bound to her avatar.
Of course, while Ilfeliare had very strong limits when it came to purely physical technologies, her people did not. Over the millennia she has invested enormous amounts of resources into technological growth, resulting in the Kingdom being rather advanced overall. Perhaps the most relevant to Ilfeliare herself would be the advances in biology, which allowed for the creation of a supersoldier bodyguard program. In this she gives personal aid to the program. After a future supersoldier is born, and before it's named, she creates a divine servitor no stronger than a nurgling. The baby is given the servitor's True Name as its own and then has the servitor bound to it, making it a spirithost. The baby is then given a new, false name and undergoes the supersoldier bodyguard program as normal.
Goals
Aside from the overarching long-term goal of survival and increasing the power and prosperity of both herself and her kingdom, Ilfeliare has several more specific long-term goals.
1. Improve Bel-Caerel's technology as much as possible. More technology is key to ensuring the safety of both herself and her people.
2. Improve interaction between her own power and technology. Intertwining technology and her own power to improve themselves has been immensely beneficial.
3. Have a giant mechanical avatar of herself constructed and built entirely (or as close to "entirely" as possible) with auramite. The intent of this project is to create a vessel for herself to inhabit that can travel freely through the Materium and Immaterium, granting her an unprecedented amount of influence and survivability for a minor god.
Ilfeliare considers Zahhak's alliance to be beneficial towards all three of those goals, with Sophont being especially relevant given the deity's domain.
***
Omakes
Gods of the Firmament Pantheon (Sun, Storm, Earth)
Sun Papyrus
Bel-Caerel War Assets
Kaerae Worlds
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- Location
- Australia
@Durin
1. Would an ascended god's physical body continue to exist following their ascension?
2. If so, what would be the difference between inhabiting their original body and inhabiting a clone body?
3. Let's say we have a person who seems like a Pi-level human, but he's actually a latent Zeta. For the purposes of prayer and sacrifice, does he count as a Pi or a Zeta?
1. Would an ascended god's physical body continue to exist following their ascension?
2. If so, what would be the difference between inhabiting their original body and inhabiting a clone body?
3. Let's say we have a person who seems like a Pi-level human, but he's actually a latent Zeta. For the purposes of prayer and sacrifice, does he count as a Pi or a Zeta?
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Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Because your regular elites cannot take on a super assassin, would and the machinery is fundamentally linked to a living brain, not a servo skull.
Its also cooler.
They can operate independently just fine. They can't write it doesn't mean they're stupid either. That being said you are right they are fire and forget, you just need to arm them and then you can forget about them until they bring back a corpse.
How many of them are going to be able to augment themselves to 40 combat (remember the knock offs are equal to our last hunters)? How many of them can you afford to spare from the front lines when you're in a war on two fronts? How many expensive Skittari are you willing to spend killing them, how much infrastructure can you loose in the cross fire?
The mid level abomination crusade had hundreds of assassins. How many do you think the most powerful abomination polity in the galaxy can deploy, to say nothing of of the Necrons.
They've got plenty of elites, how many of them are you willing to draw away from your two major fronts and hundreds of brush fire wars going on all the time to put down the super elite assassins all across your space when you can just drop one or two of your counter assassins on the planet and have it dealt with in as painless a manner possible.
- Location
- Australia
@Enjou @Nurgle, please include a Greater Divination of Zahak's alliance in your plan the next time a GD becomes available. Behold the following.
tl;dr: A polity whose history dates back to the Great Crusade has survived for over ten thousand years, all the while progressing in technology. While the polity as a whole is generally very advanced, its god herself has greatly advanced psytech and warptech. The most potent stuff she's invented includes but is not limited to divination engines, superweapons, and Warp lanterns for ships. The cherry on top is that it's all either made by humans or by a human god, so it would be close enough to sanctioned for us to get High Council approval. It would be immensely beneficial for us to make contact with the civilisation.
tl;dr: A polity whose history dates back to the Great Crusade has survived for over ten thousand years, all the while progressing in technology. While the polity as a whole is generally very advanced, its god herself has greatly advanced psytech and warptech. The most potent stuff she's invented includes but is not limited to divination engines, superweapons, and Warp lanterns for ships. The cherry on top is that it's all either made by humans or by a human god, so it would be close enough to sanctioned for us to get High Council approval. It would be immensely beneficial for us to make contact with the civilisation.
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