You Are A Dragon

[Packrat]

@Thyreus To clarify the Benefaction Mission's current capabilities, they do actually have more advanced magic than any humans on the surface and their technology is fully capable of killing juvenile dragons reliably though the odd exceptionally capable, prepared or lucky juvenile will hurt them back in the process (see Jandeiss who is probably the best living dragon mage in his age bracket, who took out an orbital weapons platform via burning magic from his hoard). If the battle recently had been just their corvette against the four juveniles in a straight fight without stored magic as a factor? It would probably have killed all of them or driven them fleeing with grievous injuries, without being harmed in the process.

The issue is that dragons can cheat by 1) Knowing magical techniques that took centuries or millennia to develop and are far more efficient than those developed by humans over the course of a few decades 2) Drawing upon stored magic to do things that would be otherwise impossible and 3) Just plain cheating, like with Sulqeum and her hatchling dragon piloted magitech fighters. That was basically like somebody showing up in late WW1 with a squadron of Apache gunships to have their back.

The way I am modelling it is that juvenile dragons mostly have a single pick from the positive traits that you chose from in character generation, but some do not, some have no positive picks and also a negative one because they kind of suck for a dragon and barely made it to (young) adulthood. They are still dragons who survived 1,400 years of activity though and will have something going for them along with plans and ambitions of their own plus a keen survival instinct. Adult dragons such as yourself will always have at least one positive pick and will have as much as possible for me to work out, been clever with it.

Etorix has his godhood and human manipulation, Sulqeum has (had) absolutely ridiculous wealth but perhaps more importantly she is very very good at obtaining wealth. Her personal empire is in fact extremely well managed and she has been indirectly ruling it for centuries, with an inhumanly expert balance between economic growth and dragon hoarding. The fact she has had to parcel off cities and regions to vassal juvenile dragons has been spoiling this somewhat of course and she is balancing a snake (dragon?) pit of internal politics because there are over a dozen juveniles any three of whom could probably kill her in a direct fight. The four she brought to meet with you were the male dragons most infatuated with her who she could rely upon to not want to kill her.

The youngest and weakest 'Ancient' is a dragon who has gotten to Etorix or Sulqeum's current state, then survived a millennia of activity during an era of magic with a sufficiently large hoard to live through to the next. They are not actually any bigger, Etorix is fully grown, but very few dragons do make it through the threshold winnowing process and so they tend to be the meanest, most capable and with the keenest self preservation instincts. More importantly they learn things, secrets, powers, tricks, additionally it is a well known fact that a dragon who successfully does dragon things like being ludicrously wealthy, being in utter control and power, knowing no peers, etc will become more durable and stronger over time even without a being a god. Bones grow denser, scales harden, one's internal fire grows hotter.

So any ancient will be supremely dangerous and capable but they also accumulate ludicrously huge hoards, it would not be unknown for an ancient to both waken 'early' (for an ancient) and still have a hundred or more stored magic if they have been successfully avaricious, magic that they could likely spend almost as well as you can in your divine portfolio fields on literally anything. Or just as well, if they are an ancient who is good with magic.

Which has gotten way off the original topic. Basically even an ancient will die if the Benefaction Mission manage to find their hibernation spot then hammer it with a really large antimatter bomb but right now any adult dragon such as yourself who is willing to expend a whole lot of magic could just teleport into the ark and ruin them. An 'average' dragon might have to spend 3-4 magic rather than the 2 you did, due to not being a god, but they could do that right from awakening if they kept a reserve. If the Benefaction Mission tried to hit you with an antimatter missile then you are paranoid and powerful enough to have constantly running 'danger sense' magic and would be able to teleport out before it hit but would spend magic doing so and that would not help if they decided to destroy the entire planet. The same can probably be said of any awake and active fully adult dragon and certainly of any ancient. (Though the ancient might be paranoid enough to have a cave on a moon they can hide in or something similarly ludicrous).

Even though the Benefaction Mission has had over 60 years to deal with the return of magic they do not have the population to really improve upon or maintain their own tech base, they are an expedition from a much larger society with the billions of humans needed to actually advance a near plateau level of tech. They rely upon (extremely good) designs produced by that home culture that they then essentially 3-D print. Whilst they do have a population of a few tens of millions all with superb education that is mostly required to maintain and give slight tweaks at their level of advancement, even with extensive automation.

Being a dragon who has lived through (and helped uplift to) a near peak civilisation you basically have in your head all pertinent information of plateau level technology along with knowing exactly how to fully incorporate magic to best effect, you can also eloquently explain this or even telepathically push it into people's heads (carefully).

They cannot just start turning out something as good at Sulqeum's magitech fighters on a production line but if you train their mages and update their designs then they can likely start manufacturing something a generation less sophisticated with only a few years of build up. Of course those things are freakishly dangerous, if all six of the G75 had been focused on you in the battle then you would have been forced to flee or die, at this level of ambient magic at least (they can only operate right now with dragon pilots).

 

[Packrat]

Voting is pretty solidly for:

[x] Let The Council Decide. Yes you are very, very influential, but let them vote and follow that decision as to your next course of action, cementing their trust.


You consider the council members then, including those who have not spoken up, then give a slightly dramatic shrug. "I am here as a member of this council for only the second time, I shall follow your decision as to how best my knowledge and abilities can help advance the mission."

That seems to be met with universal pleasant surprise, even the admiral is not unhappy though he fails to look particularly pleased when the vote results come in and the consensus is very much that the Benefaction Mission needs their own uplift.

You do not concentrate entirely upon this of course, you collaborate with Edelmira Hanes on broadcasts to be sent to the surface and to your priests, holographic messages to be displayed during sermons, direct from Etorix himself. You record these mostly in your full draconic form which has difficulty fitting into one of the ark's translucent sapphire observation domes, leaving you rather cramped even if the backdrop of high orbit is suitably dramatic.

Your first order of business has to be magic of course, you can advance their technology but fundamental integration of magic can even at this level of ambient mana make quite dramatic changes. You hear that the top mages of the Khangai colony are being sent to the ark but right now you are teaching them.

They are surprisingly capable, Benefaction Mission implants allow them to have an inhuman degree of focus and memory not to mention the subjective slow down of time. Their magical theory is still crude though, the implementation simplistic. They can feel it as well, though you wear human form you are not at all shy about being a god and with no attempt at veiling your own power they can feel themselves like guttering candles before an open blast furnace.

"First of all, you cannot directly emulate me. As a dragon I draw in surrounding magic and focus it, refine it, intensify it by burning the mana to fuel the fire that is my soul. Added to this my godhood ensures I have a constant flow of power from my worshippers. I do of course also require a dense mana level to exist, if I was not a god then I would still be hibernating and inactive."

You continue your lecture. "As humans you can exist regardless of ambient magic or even in its absence but as mages you can take advantage of it. Thus far you have been using mana in its raw, diffuse form though, what I am going to teach you is how to refine it within your own spark of soul, store that power over time, then unleash it as you carry out acts of magic for a dozen to ten times the potency. The quantity you can hold in your own body is limited but still a significant advantage, later we will cover ritual collection and storage and the binding of these into artefacts."

There are several hundred of the Ark's most magically gifted individuals in attendance physically present rather than attending remote, given you need to be able to personally supervise their magical development. Damien Stockton the Ark Administrator is one of them and probably in the top five for talent, paying rapt attention even though you know he is still far from your proponent – you did kill quite a few people when you visited the first time after all.

Still he is as good an example as any to begin with and you call him to the front. He approaches, somewhat warily, you smile disarmingly. "So to begin with you need to manifest this mental structure in side of yourself, use flows of spirit at minimal intensity to begin with, as weak as you can whilst still visualising the structure clearly." You sketch the intricate structure in the air, your finger leaving a faintly glowing golden trail in its wake. This is so boring, facts about the universe that are as obvious to a newly hatched dragon as gravity is to one of them, yet they cannot work them out on themselves without it taking centuries.

By the end of your first week of lessons you have the most capable mages able to refine and internally store mana though, something still beyond your students on the surface, their flawless memories and conscious control over their subconscious from the implants really rather effective.

Technological improvement is less straightforward. The Benefaction Mission's systems and designs are already very sophisticated after all even if they are not limited by the resolution of their molecular printers, you think they should ultimately be able to replicate almost anything there. Where you focus is on adjusting several hundred of their key design templates to allow fairly simple magical enhancement post manufacture.

Medical multitools adapted so that they have the basic structures for ritual amplification of healing magic, simply requiring enchantment, industrial drones established to that they can be empowered by enslaved sprites, which you demonstrate with a few examples. Railgun rounds redesigned to incorporate armour piercing and seeking enchantments.

Everything is still rather incremental and is going to be heavily reliant upon the throughput of their mages, which is likely to be minimal. Already as the implications become clear, as they really realize that right now ambient magic is still only at half and that so much more can be done with huge reserves properly channelled, the Mission's strategic planners are apparently concentrating on 'How do we get more magic?'. This is a question you are asked increasingly.

[] Tell Them To Wait. You are not going to clue the Benefaction Mission into ways to accumulate large quantities of magical power, at least not right now.
[] Tell Them To Recruit Mages. There are over fifty times as many people on the surface of Arafan as there are in the Ark and the mission's various colonies, get them to recruit mages from your priesthood. This would weaken your priesthood but could be spun as 'rapturing' or similar and concentrated on old priests who can then get life extension technology.
[] Tell Them About Soul Harvesting. Teach them ritual magic to allow soul harvesting, then as the full horrible implications of just how it works set in tell them this is what their arch enemies do, you are fairly certain this will cause them to recoil in horror and not bother you again.
[] Teach Them Mass Scale Mana Harvesting. They could set up huge scale orbital arrays to harvest ambient mana, with your help that is. This could gather magic on a scale significant for you as a terribly potent god and given you can use it vastly more efficiently than the mission you are sure you could get a share.

 

[Packrat]

[X] Tell Them To Recruit Mages. There are over fifty times as many people on the surface of Arafan as there are in the Ark and the mission's various colonies, get them to recruit mages from your priesthood. This would weaken your priesthood but could be spun as 'rapturing' or similar and concentrated on old priests who can then get life extension technology.


Ensuring that the Benefaction Mission has access to more magic will help you out a great deal, it will allow them to enchant their own items much more consistently without being reliant upon you and they do have a huge backlog of, well, stuff where magical integration will greatly assist them.

You do not want to give them too much of an edge however and whilst you consider helping them with the construction of large scale mana harvesting orbitals that has all sorts of further implications. First of all they would be less reliant upon you, secondly they would not doubt transmit this information back to their home system. Thirdly? That sort of infrastructure is both expensive, time consuming to build and very vulnerable, a single juvenile dragon could potentially wreck an installation taking months to produce, either out of spite or seeking to steal the stored magical power.

"You simply need more mages." You explain to Onita Runyan, meeting with her privately to discuss matters. "And no you cannot 'make' people into mages, it is an ability tied to the soul. It correlates fairly strongly with intelligence and willpower and your genetically engineered populace does have a high incidence of mages, but the proportion will only increase further as more magic returns to the world. Along with the abilities of those of you who already have the gift."

She hmms at this, steepling fingers, considering you with her artificial eyes. "You are saying that we have an issue with magical power that can only be fixed generationally then? No retro virus induction to turn everyone into a mage or similar?" She seems disappointed, though less than you might have expected. Then again she is already a mage herself.

You expound. "There are large scale infrastructure projects that could improve matters but they are vulnerable and beyond your current capabilities. You need to recruit from the surface, there will be culture shock yes, but there are at least forty times as many who are magically gifted on the surface as you have in all of your colonies and stations."

"Forty times as many primitives who are only one or two generations from medieval barbarism. Yes, we have your faith as a tool but we cannot just fly people up into space then put them on an enchantment production line. We will need screening, assimilation, a huge toll on our medical systems to allow them to function in our society.."

You shrug expansively at this point, reclining back a little. "But you have no other way to improve your 'magical throughput', also you have set the groundwork for this. We recruit elderly priests and other devote members of the faithful, who are mages of course, a 'reward' from Etorix who grants them a return to youth. We bring them into space, we rejuvenate them and teach them wonders."

She interjects at this point. "That massively limits our recruitment pool though Etorix. Perhaps one in five people would fit your definition of 'devout' if we are very generous about it, roughly five percent over sixty. If we managed to take everyone that would be less than a fifty percent increase in mages. But it would be a start and integration will take time."


What do you push for though?




[] Massive Scale Recruitment. Take volunteers from anywhere, anyone, provided they are mages. This will provide a huge influx of recruits and hugely accelerate your efforts but only a minority will be your loyal priests, infiltration is certainly possible.
[] Intensive Recruitment of The Faithful. Intensive targeted recruitment of mages who are part of your faith, regardless of age. This will weaken your priesthood noticeably upon the surface and delay your divine empowerment but provide a significant boost to both putting your priests in place within the Mission and to uplifting them.
[] Rapture the Elderly. Stick to the original plan of only uplifting the most elderly of the faithful, this will not harm the faith upon Arafan significantly, will get some of 'your people' emplaced in orbit, but will only improve their magical throughput by about fifty percent at best.

A pretty low impact and expositional update there, the weather here is horrendous and oppressive which is not helping me write! Also I fixed the threadmarks, I had repeating numbers for the updates somehow.

 

[Packrat]

[] Rapture the Elderly. Stick to the original plan of only uplifting the most elderly of the faithful, this will not harm the faith upon Arafan significantly, will get some of 'your people' emplaced in orbit, but will only improve their magical throughput by about fifty percent at best.

You are quite clear about your thoughts on the matter. "We do not have much choice. We stick to the original plan otherwise the disruption will set back the uplift program. For that matter starting slow will let you test out any kinks when it comes to integrating mages from the surface and giving them the medical treatment and implants to let them function in your society. I imagine there is a limit on how fast you can process arrivals anyway, we will not lose anything if we decide to expand the plan later."

Onita Runyan considers this for all of half a second before nodding in agreement. "Whilst we still get half again as many mages, once they are trained up we can accelerate the ritual collection of mana and working of enchantment into our infrastructure. " She does however then consider you, tapping her fingers on the edge of her desk, some dense grained hardwood originally grown around another star. "We need defenses though, you mentioned that another adult dragon could teleport as you did before, right inside the ark, if Sulqeum has more fighters than she showed before, she could frontally attack us."

You glance to the window and the curve of the habitat beyond. "I could ward the hull but this vessel is immense and even with the aid of your mages it would take months. Weapons able to defend the interior would also wreck it, that said most adult dragons would not be able to teleport inside the hull without expending ruinous quantities of magic, I am more capable than most of my peers in age. That would also draw from the exterior defences you mentioned."

"The corvettes." She apparently agrees. "We have them in close orbit to the ark now but we have seen out outmatched they are against potential enemies, though we have reason to believe they will fare perfectly well against unsupported dragons." Well that is not at all ominous. "They are our only true warships though and comprehensive overhaul would greatly improve our ability to intervene on the surface or defend here in space."

You do have a suggestion of your own to contribute at this point. "Or you could manufacture armour for me. It would pale before my own scales of course but a properly manufactured and enchanted armature could allow me to operate in space as well as protecting against hard radiation or overpressure from nuclear warheads when in atmosphere. I can assist in the design of course."
What do you push for though?

[] Ward The Ark. Spend a few months of your time warding the ark against teleportation and scrying, leaving in a backdoor for your own efforts of course. This would advance the Benefaction Mission's own knowledge in this area but also make the Ark much less vulnerable.
[] Enhance The Corvettes. Spend a few months enchanting and augmenting the two surviving corvettes. This would let you build influence in the Ark's military, it would would also greatly increase both their military capabilities and knowledge of how to manufacture and enchant space armaments.
[] Dragon Armour. Spend a few months supervising the design and construction of a suit of powered armour for yourself. This would give you substantial additional protection and power when worn (Effective +1 Might) as well as letting you operate in space or hostile atmospheres. It would however teach the Benefaction Mission a lot about technology, magic and, most importantly, dragons, specifically one very shiny dragon.
[] Other Priorities. You have already spent some time training their mages and setting up the supply of priests from the surface, now you need to return to continue to further your faith and the uplift program.

I managed a quick update, will definitely need to download OpenOffice onto this machine though because no word processor plus a creaking half dead laptop is hell.

 

[Packrat]

[X] Ward The Ark. Spend a few months of your time warding the ark against teleportation and scrying, leaving in a backdoor for your own efforts of course. This would advance the Benefaction Mission's own knowledge in this area but also make the Ark much less vulnerable.


You are reluctant to advance the Benefaction Mission's military power any further, right now you have them in a sweet spot where they are a useful adjunct to you but still reliant upon you. You do not want this unique power base and source of influence too casually snuffed out by your rivals however and so more defensive techniques are another matter.

The following few months see you carrying out much of the work though as the most capable of the Mission's mages shadow you, picking up on your example then carefully trying out the simpler parts themselves as you introduce them to truly massive scale warding. Thousands of miles of glyphwork are applied to the outer hull of the Ark in pure silver, realigned and infused with magic, then sealed under protective cowling.

Obviously you leave an infinitely subtle flaw in the designs as they remain attuned to your own divine power but by the time you are done you are confident that nobody else will be able to teleport or view inside of the gigantic vessel without brute forcing through the rather formidable defences – something that would require a completely unfeasible quantity of magic for at least another half century and profligate expenditure even then.

Working in vaccum is an interesting experience, you are not so flush with magic as to simply sustain yourself in the void casually for long periods of time and so you wear your human form in a Mission supplied spacesuit, admiring the world moving below with the Ark's rotation, coveting it and the lights of orbital industry and commerce that surround the Mission's capital.

As you work the initial stages of the 'Rapture' program are carried out, with hundreds of the oldest of your magically gifted priests raised into orbit. You make sure that you greet each batch in person and in dragon and the swell of genuine worshipful awe is a tiny if tangible infusion of divine power that feels very gratifying. They do not all adapt well to life in space though, all are grateful of the life extension but many seem to have expected a more literal physical heaven where they could personally spend their second life with you in particular. The fact that most of the Mission personnel are not fanatically devout or are even wary of you is disquieting to them but you mostly smooth over such issues as you spend time attending to personal training of the mages in their abilities.

It is with the third batch that you spot the infiltrator. One elderly priestess from the desert regions of the Kelkir Directorate, a distinguished dark skinned woman who was flagged at being in the upper echelons of ability and for particular attention? She is not human. You are fairly certain that she is a dragon, a hatchling about sixty years of age but uncommonly good at pretending to be a human and particularly magically skilled given the efficiency of their concealment.

[] Eat Them. This is utter presumption, just eat them without fuss and absorb their flame. (Eat the spy, gain +3 magic)
[] Confront Them Publically. You are currently teaching them magic along with a few hundred human mages, who are all either members of the Benefaction Mission or your loyal priests, call them out on being a dragon and see how they respond.
[] Confront Them Quietly. Contact them after the lesson is done and they return to their accommodation, challenge them as to why they are here and who they are.
[] Watch Them Yourself. Do not tell anyone they are a spy, but keep a very close eye on their activities both magically and convnetionally.
[] Inform The Mission. The Benefaction Mission should know that they have a hatchling dragon aboard, let the council know so that they can watch her themselves. They have an almost panopticon level of surveillance aboard the Ark.