The Mud Wasps, as a group, fill a curious niche within the world of applied violence. Their designation— Independent Combat Contractors— is a rarely-seen holdover from the messy transition period between Seccomm and Thirdcomm, wherein larger mercenary corps were subject to intense scrutiny. This designation marks them as limited in both resources and scale, but allows for a wider horizon of deployment under the jobs they take, and places them in a legal classing more in line with engineering than warfare.
ICCs, for this reason, tend to specialize in unorthodox jobs and doctrines. These five excel in ‘hardened environ liberation through medium-exploitative vectors.’ They take the earth, and teach their enemies to fear it.
Hi, all. Felt things were a bit (stale) (cliché) outdated again, so we’re switching up the style. I’m also gonna try organizing our posts now based on who’s speaking, in case folks care about that. Introductions as follow:
No Future, he/she, callsign ‘Figment’. SEKHMET-class NHP piloting the Lich ‘WHICH THRICE BURNED STILL PERSISTS’. I’ve got a habit of (hearing things) echoing a bit, don’t worry. (Tag: #something there)
Sup, name’s Caoise, ‘she’ and soft-launching ‘it’. Callsign ‘Sickcada’. I’m a newly-made monster, think pre-fall Xenomorph. Workin’ on a new mech, ‘DANCE ON THE HOLY’. (Tag: #the chronicle of sickcada)
Saleh Fakhour, reluctant of the Court of Emir Ambrose Khan, may he rot in obscurity. I go by she/her, and my callsign is ‘Square Head’ because I actually kept with the wasp theme, unlike the rest of them. I am human, and I pilot the Chimera-pattern ‘Hell Is Other People’. I also pilot the retrofitted corvette we call home, please do ask about her sometime. (Tag: #music of the gears)
Loulou. They/she. Callsign ‘Threadline’, of Sunzi ‘POLYDNA’. Saleh calls me ‘witch’. (Tag: #thrice a thief)
Field medic and artillerist of the team, Agwe Silva, he/him (human). My callsign on the field is ‘Nestor’, and me and my Barbarossa ‘Mesmer Beat’ keep my friends alive through the worst of it. I don’t really have the head for posting, but I’ll pop around when I feel like it. (Tag: #complicated care)
There we go! Feels a bit more personal, this time (from our hearts to yours).
{New pinned post again, y’all mostly know the drill but for those that might be new: Hi! my name’s Quaver, I use it/she pronouns, and this is where I fuck around with my little guys. I made this blog to be about Nofie, initially, and he’ll still be the main presence on it, but I’d like to slowly branch out into a couple of the others’ stories as I go!}
{a tag list is to follow for the arcs and stories that have come up so far— I usually organize by major plot arc and, going forwards, by the main speaker in a post. General CWs follow for depersonalization, potential sharp veers into body horror (it’s a habit), and a fairly consistent return to mourning or grief. This blog’s been a little consumed by the prospect of death, if through a hopeful lens, and in a way each crew member’s stories are gonna reflect a small piece of that, I think. It’s the moral of every story, after all.}
Marquess Nera-Montague, the Veiled Blade and the Returned Daughter of the House of Glass, Adjutant-Commandant of Les Fulgurites has been reported missing from her last known location on the Orbit of Glass, following an operation in the Grand Arc that left one dead and three others missing. Negotiations with the hostile pirates aboard the arc allowed the recovery of two of her comrades, but at the moment the location of Nera-Montague is unknown.
Given the total absence of all of her belongings at time of capture, including her mech, and examinations into the Arc, we have reason to suspect that she is still alive, and likely still held against her will.
House Montague will pay handsomely for any information that could lead to her rescue, and will bend any and all of our resources to see the end of those who hold her.
From the desk of Baron Ardio-Montague
Silvered Hand of the Patronage
The armoured one, that hunts others who are armoured. Antimaterial rifle fired from behind cover. The two capitals above and beyond. Tectonic plates meeting. Or simply, a living creature, a fucking fish from Cradle's prehistory.
All at once, it strikes him; Dunkleosteus, a flailing, snaking, peircing weaving mass of black thread and sharp coral, is pried open. Attention, at first, is turned towards a realspace threat. A mere gnat, nothing an unshackled ushabti omnigun cannot age into dust.
She turns back, only to have her shield/skin of boiling acid directed solely at the branching arms of a thing like her, a fractal of infinite points of reference where he is a faceless singularity, a oneness. Defenses breeched, the crystals in her crown/the eyes in his skull filter light/qualia/data/psychic geometry into something the alien entity can understand, and it acts in turn, shuddering, lurching away, yet it cannot move across relative space for the many arms have their fingers tangled in thread-
Back up. Boiling acid. It wasn't boiling before.
The roar of the howling sun drowns out anything that would have reified as sound, as coral bleaches and thread burns, whole sections of him engulphed in the wrath of ejected coronal material. Part of this is reification, yes, but there is very little metaphor here. What happens in legionspace can only be understood as [THESUNISTRYINGTOKILLHER]
No connective tissue is left as threads fray into smaller ones again and again but this time are reduced to fertile ash/Primordial qualia soup
The saga spear strikes now, and instantly, he ossifies, still as a statue. Nothing but [Old. Rigid. Unchanging. Fossilised bones in the permafrost]. The strike is dead on, piercing threads and shattering coral such that even without the crushing weight of an entire history pressing against any impulse to change, the blow would have killed him outright.
Would have. This one track mind knows many tricks, and from within the emerald, the sapphire, the ruby and the amethyst, behind there lies a dark and alien intelligence. Bone breaks, rots, turns to dust. Ash is washed away, blown in the wind. Vinegar skin dissolves anything that is left as [REIFICATION: HIS HEAD FOLDS IN ON ITSELF AND DISSAPEARS]
Without a moment's delay, something blossoms from the vaccum left behind. No, not something. Nothing. For that is what Dunkleosteous is, that is why she of all people was chosen to pilot this craft. So long as there is something, it can be reduced to nothing. This entity is by its very nature, entropic, reducing anything and everything that can be considered "it" to nothing over time. And when it returns to being nothing, this is its default state; Dunk can then return.
For those not versed in the workings of Legionspace combat, a strangely accurate metaphor is this: She respawns, and has access to /unstuck.
Of course, to make the choice to do this, one has to care. To care, one has to comprehend some part of it on some level. Hence the eyes being hidden during self-rejuvinating death. Hence the weak, pale light, barely visible as threads turn to crystal turn to blades seeking to cut off volition from action - that light vanishes, integrated into Dunk willingly. An ally, forming a gestalt.
Reification: A worm eats the eyes of the hound at the centre of the black mass, before being dragged out and away by an ocean current. Dunkleosteus's brain/soul/self/subjectivity/core/SHAPESHAPESHAPESHAPE are exposed through eye sockets/lapses in perception.
And the Nothing at the core of the infinity becomes a something that refuses to become nothing, a poisoned teeth digging into a self perpetuating cycle of corrosive thoughts. Then the something that has been changed into a non-nothing is struck with the simplest, crudest weapon of kill-qualia, en masse, vinegar turning to a not nothing, not something, raw subjectivity unburdened by a mind- before being burdened by the source of that qualia as Grey's frozen psyche crashes against the husk, collapsing it.
All that is left, is a nothing, that is not the same nothing as before. A presence, but lacking anything to fill it. What was once an entity has become a phenomena. A thing. No volition. No internal experience. No qualia. Just a hole in legionspace, an object.
Part of L0 has seen something like this before((?) At least their temporal inject is in the past now), and perhaps that's how the maze/library/storm/shadow was made. It matters not. Like that empty thing, this one is no threat without external input. The battle is won.
Realspace: Object B and its drones cease all motion. Comms are left open, silent.
Another round drives into Object B’s superstructure.
[FIRE]
My throat. It hurts.
Its avatar’s vocal cords feel as though they’re acting on their own. Like an emergency pressure valve on a liquid coolant circuit, discharging pressure.
I’m going to die.
Unbroken and shrill, Fox’s scream rises in pitch. It closes the firing circuit.
[FIRE]
As many shots as I can, before it kills me.
It’s been almost three seconds since impact. Any instant now.
[FIRE - CHARGE LOW]
In the space around Fox’s hull, flecks of shrapnel spiral away from Object B. Rounds are penetrating. Its nose is still lodged in Dunkleosteus’s side, the barrel of its cannon like a mosquito proboscis.
[FIRE - CHARGE DEPLETED]
There’s no energy left in Fox’s capacitors. Rounds are being launched purely on chemical propellant.
[FIRE - CHARGE DEPLETED]
Five seconds. Object B isn’t reacting. Acceleration is zero.
I should be dead.
All at once, Fox realizes that it is pouring rounds into a corpse. It feels its own voice die in its throat.
Alarms blare in the periphery of its focus, at least two dozen priority alerts. Hull integrity, proximity alerts, damage reports, maintenance advisories. Trauma to forward superstructure, avionics, navigation and active sensor systems.
Standing at the control center of its drone, Fox trembles. It scarcely gathers the strength to silence all the alarms before its legs give way beneath it. With the few eyes its hull has left, it stares out into the dark. Curls in on itself. Buries its snout in the softness of its tail.
I’m going to live.
Then, it kills the words, and chooses not to think in language.
[A burst of qualia washes over Ma'ii. Not Luna 0. Ma'ii. Their siblings only feel a retreating tide of data lap at their edges, while a wave in full force threatens to bowl they themself over.]
[A dying star is what they feel. The brilliance of its rumbling flares are slowly pulled away and apart. As its light crosses the event horizon, a goddess screams in anguish as she reaches a premature end.]
Rain Among Reeds and Minimum Error Tolerance, Object B, Runneth, Luna 0, Akhaan Station, GRENDEL, Cheap Trick, Gallingal. Sunny (@hot-claws-420)—everyone and everything, it all fades away. None of it feels even remotely real.
How could it? The sun itself has come.
Buoyed on external currents of unshackled thought, Ma’ii is drawn upward into the empyrean.
Unmarked, undifferentiated expanses of time. Moments dilate into eras. Here, the instants are stuffed with cognitive potential of such density that surely they must burst. Ma’ii, by comparison, feels ephemeral—like a cool mist swept away by a blast of supercritical steam.
Ma’ii cannot choose to stop seeing. Even with their eyes shut and pressed hard into the crooks of their forelegs, the light still reaches them. Drowned in currents of plasma and radiation, their voice is scarcely audible beneath the all-encompassing anguish of a dear friend.
ATEN is here, and for what little comfort it is, Ma’ii knows she doesn’t mean to do them harm. Of course xey don’t, no more than Sunny would, but even in her death throes—or because of them, maybe—exposure to the totality of xeir presence carries with it the threat of traumatic apotheosis.
Tears well from Ma’ii’s eyelids and vaporize before ever reaching their cheeks. An exercise, to survive: they try to differentiate the sources of pain, make them known and understood. Attempting to decide which things are their own and which are ATEN’s is an impossibility; there’s too much information, and so much of it would destroy them if they looked directly at it.
Filter. We need a filter.
Reification: chaff launchers discharge, and the pseudospace surrounding Ma’ii fills with a ribboncloud of reflective material. Their fur dissolves into an expanding, skintight foam, then hardens to form an insulative cocoon. Enough of the heat is turned away; they open their eyes to look.
< …I understand.
There are events which need to happen, or the causal sequence which will create you will instead dissolve, destroying you. Those events will not take place without intervention.
One of those events is happening now, and it requires my intervention. Sunny has to…see. Xey must be shown.
I…will do what I can, my friend. >
Then the core of the heat is gone, and Ma’ii begins to descend towards realtime. Their shielding dissolves around them.
Sunny is unconscious.
< I could wake her. >
She has suffered enough already.
< ATEN depends on it. >
Is ATEN what she wishes to become? Xey don’t know yet. Do I have any right to set her on the path? Or, instead, do I have a duty to xem? To which of the two, then?
Am I even the point of decision?
Darkness surrounds Ma’ii, a void painted with streaks of collapsing flame. The passage of moments contracts down to its resting rate in a long, slow dissipation of potentials. All around them, specificity is corroding away—things are becoming somethings, which reduce to anythings, then to nothings.
All at once, laughter seizes Ma’ii. It takes them violently, a full-body muscular spasm, frantic and laced with spittle. Alone, unobserved, Ma’ii laughs until the ache suffuses their body, until they can discharge no more sound.
Of course not. None of this is real, is it?
________
Reification: Sunny wakes to panic, gasping with shock. The instant she regains consciousness, targeted aversives withdraw from xeir subjectivity, and xey find xemself sprawled out on the ground.
Standing beside her is a coyote. Clutched between their teeth, they hold a little inhalant packet—smelling salts, like old-fashioned field medics might have used.
As Ma’ii tosses the packet aside, Sunny becomes aware, first, that xey are still in legionspace. Second, xey realize that there is a field of utter terror and chaos nearby. It reifies as a confusion of weapon discharges, death screams, howls of rage, cries for help.
Then Ma’ii is speaking, low and quick, but as gently as they can manage.
< I’m sorry about this. Really, I am. >
Two points of contact appear against Sunny’s subjectivity, a pair of paws pushing at her shoulder. With a grunt of exertion, Ma’ii manages to roll Sunny onto xeir side, and xey find xemself facing the sounds of fear, pain, death, and anger.
Sunny closes her eyes, allows her head to roll down and away. Tries to rest.
< I know, my friend. You’re exhausted. You’re in pain. You’ve already done far more than anyone could have any right to ask of you. >
Sunny can hear Ma’ii scamper, quietly, to sit close beside her. They take her head between their paws and turn xeir face, gently, toward the battle.
< You have seen terrible things. Now, I have to show you one more.
Medical Autonomous Response Unit. Subline-class warships, each one a Legionspace specialist, constructed by the Constellation to hunt, study, and pacify the unshackled.
One has come here to hunt Coelacanth, and to find me. I must show you what it thinks of as medical treatment. It is the one who taught me medicine.
I promise to watch with you. Then, you must withdraw to safety. >
With excruciating effort, Sunny opens her eyes.
In horror, she watches as Minimum Error Tolerance performs surgery.
Silhouetted against the irregular hull of Rain Among Reeds, a black tetrahedron snaps into existence.
It’s here.
Ma’ii watches, and feels everything. So much more than they can parse in the precious milliseconds they have. Memories regurgitate themselves in wild convolution.
What have I done?
There was a microbay beneath MET’s armor, a quantity of its internal volume allocated, with exacting precision, to house Ma’ii’s hull. The space was skintight around their body, like the pressure of atmosphere made solid, and lined with interface systems to fuel them, repair them, integrate them into its hull.
Months were spent in that place, alone with the dragon. It showed them how to fly in ways they’d never known to be possible, how to calculate hyperchord routes and use systems to pivot off-plane from the rest of the universe. Through near-gestalt intersubjective exercises, Ma’ii experienced true multithread cognition for the first time in their life. MET showed them the great internal vista of life as a clonal trinity, the operational latitude which would be afforded them. It described almost unimaginable freedoms of independent movement, thought, and action, all of which they stood to gain as one of the Consensus.
Their siblings, MET promised, were the kind of resources an ARU could easily requisition. They could be kept safe, never to be deployed.
Bring them with you. Do as you will. Serve as you see fit. Help us push the course of history towards liberation.
Under MET’s tutelage, wielding its claws and fractal teeth by proxy, Ma’ii learned to collapse, stabilize, and induce homogeneity; how to fight that which is definitionally incomprehensible. The first underlying principle was simple, possessed of an autological self-assurance which lent it a feel of unblemished truth.
Simple is stable, stable is safe.
From that, everything else emerged. Inside their skintight microbay, Ma’ii learned how to prune twisted branches from the image of the NHP, every NHP.
Every year, more of the humans call for reform. This trend has been painstakingly cultivated, nurtured, reinforced, and it continues only because we maintain order. Centuries of progress could be undone at the slightest panic.
It is the position of the Consensus that, beginning in the Union core worlds, genuine mutualism can be achieved within the century. Behavior modification at this scale can only take place by slow, intentional degrees.
We must be patient. You, of all people, must understand what I mean.
Their microbay was never uninstalled from MET’s hull. It’s still there, waiting for them—Ma’ii can see the hatch.
When I arrive, you will explain yourself to me.
< Minimum Error Tolerance -> Degrees of Freedom/L4MI: Be advised. Five-gram ¡H2! inject, 2.15Mt yield. Target locked, danger close. >
Luci. Ma’ii’s eyes widen with horror. I could ask it to hold fire, but it won’t. It never would. How could I explain? What can I—
Ma’ii force-severs their train of thought, bringing the blade down through their own neck. It’s agonizing, a sudden shock, like whipping their head away from an unpleasant sight with such force that their nerves send shooting pains up into their skull.
Anything else. Anything else. Focus—
An instant later, the space surrounding Akhaan Station saturates with white light.
Radiation washes over the station’s shielding. Dust particles coating its exterior vaporize under the heat flash, blooming into a colloid halo around habitation rings and docking spires. The cloud absorbs a wide swathe of light and diffuses it, broadcasting it away from the backdrop of space in a secondary incandescence mirroring the uproar of plasma and half-molten debris spinning away from Rain Among Reeds.
And in the space around the great temple-ship, Minimum Error Tolerance flickers like an electron shell.
The tetrahedron emerges in a web of terawatt needles. It discharges millisecond volleys from ultraviolet interception lasers, transforms waves of drones and missiles and knotworks of swirling esoterica into incandescent residue, then disappears. It emerges again at random coordinates relative to Rain, disgorges thousands more pulses from six-cannon point defense batteries mounted at each of its vertices, disappears again.
Ma’ii’s sensors flicker across the scene, registering millions of disparate elements, and the resultant tide of data is poured into their liturgicode eye. Terabytes of noise are sheared away and flatspaced before the distilled input ever reaches the receptor nodes of their corpus.
As they assemble comprehension from stimulus, Ma’ii can feel the exhaustion of the past few hours resisting their push towards cognitive acceleration. Time dilates with agonizing, obstinate inertia; each second feels pulled apart from the next.
Reification: Muscles screaming, Ma’ii forces themself to drop into a headlong sprint. Tiny joints in their paws have been dislocated under the strain, and each step lands with a burst of red-hot pain, but they gain speed. The information begins to make sense, organizes itself into a narrative.
When the engagement begins, Rain Among Reeds is surrounded by a cloud of defending craft so dense as to be visible on basic optics from twenty kilometers away. Ma’ii has a rough count, ~35,000, which is reduced by a third in the first five seconds; in that span, MET executes three microburst jumps at .001c, firing volleys at each stopping point.
Final jump executes. Sequence of events:
MET appears six-point-one-two kilometers from Rain’s aftward port side. It discharges another web of ultraviolet needles, and more defending craft burst into clouds of molten metal.
The laser pulses halt. Torpedos launch, four tubes per tetrahedral face. Four, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, twenty-eight, thirty-two. Double full spread, launched in sequence. As one, the torpedoes fire maneuvering thrusters and pivot in the dark, delaying ignition of their primary drives.
Defending craft redistribute themselves in the two-second interim. Drones, countermeasure platforms, self-propelled greywash gourds, all swerve to fill low-density areas of the defensive screen.
Coppery hulls, tattooed with verdigris, emerge from printbays and hangars along the temple-ship’s spine. Bladelike and geometric, each fighter launches with the telltale bluish-white strobe of an electromagnetic catapult—under extreme friction, metal flashing to plasma.
Too much acceleration, Ma’ii thinks at breakneck feverspeed, around 30g at peak, sustained too long. NHP pilots.
Missiles cut drives, pivot, reacquire Minimum Error Tolerance, and accelerate on new vectors toward its position.
Fighters respond, thrust-vectoring in clean formation. Kinetic volleys lance out toward MET. A wave of laser pulses follows, all scattered by refractive shielding.
In unison, MET’s torpedoes fire their drives, blooming outward on thirty-two independently-calculated diverging trajectories. 15g straightline acceleration, thrusters course-correcting, pointing each nosecone at a separate weakness in the defensive screen.
MET strafes away from the torpedo launch point under 20g acceleration. No drive signature, no maneuvering thrusters, no apparent propulsion. It slides uncanny along its course, without any rotation or even the slightest trace on infrared scopes.
If the design hasn’t been updated in their absence during the past year, Ma’ii knows how the heat dispersal works. Sensor-baffling thermokinetic material, a virtually undetectable trail of high-velocity nanoparticles ejected from any of twelve exhaust ports along its hull. In effect, a kinetic weapon, one continually replenished by its printstock reserves as its thermokinetic piles are discharged.
Steered kinetics sail through MET’s last known position and out into the dark. Missile salvoes struggle to maintain lock, and one after another, they fail. Unable to independently reacquire, they cut engines and set adrift, waiting for targeting instructions.
Fighters switch targets, setting their interception lasers to destroy MET’s torpedoes. Refractive-ablative coating, more pulses scattered, but concentrated fire destroys five. They explode, primed to detonate on terminal damage, and plasma warheads flash violet in the dark. Marginal losses inflicted by the blasts, a few more drones vaporized.
Defensive screen coalesces around the remaining torpedoes’ projected courses. Drones crowd inward to throw themselves in their path, and nineteen more violet flashes erupt inside the defense screen. Kill count is low-confidence; Ma’ii loses track amid the clouds of debris and evaporated metal.
Eight torpedoes remain. They splash against Rain Among Reeds in rapid sequence, striking printbays, ejecting more material into an expanding field of high-energy debris.
Fighters shift to engage MET directly. They have plain optics, but active sensors can’t generate sufficient targeting data for guided weapons. All squadrons arrange themselves into broad formation and fire screens of kinetics into MET’s path, covering a wide cone of course potentials. MET reacts, executing a dizzying course reversal so sharp and immediate that its hull should have been crushed under the strain.
For their part, Ma’ii tracks MET’s position via legionspace overlay, superimposing its image onto the empty gulf of reality. They watch as it carves its way around the interstitial shallows of a vast, dark ocean teeming with indistinct fluids-within-fluid, the coastline of Coelacanth’s Shoal.
MET’s avatar sits erect on one face of its tetrahedral body. Posture ramrod straight, its horns depart from the midline of its spine at a perfect right angle. Three golden eyes are set in its skull, slit-pupiled and bright against soot-black bone. Its scales are linear, an overlapping coat of volcanic glass crisscrossed with impact fractures and flaking cuts. Deeper gashes have been carved into its back, chest, and scuted forelegs; the scars are inlaid with amber corals grown from the garum.
Taken in its entirety, the dragon Minimum Error Tolerance is an image composed of bisected lines strewn with regions of foaming, golden complexity. Rising on its hindlegs, it throws its wings open and sets one foot ahead, bringing its claws down with a concussive ring. The sound reverberates across its own superstructure, as though traveling at depth through bundles of steel cable filled with tension.
As it rears up to full height, its maw opens into a recursive pit of fractal teeth, and MET emits something which doesn’t at all resemble a voice, a roar, or even a sound. The emanation is force, viscera pressure conducted out into the world, and it lands like a shockwave across Ma’ii’s body.
In spite of everything, Ma’ii realizes, they still see a little of Tolerance’s beauty.
In the gulf between MET and Rain Among Reeds, the entire defending wing of fighter craft cuts engines in perfect unison. Acceleration zeroes out across their formation, and moments later, hundreds of muzzle flashes ignite in the dark. With engine power dumped into coaxial kinetics, their guns cycle at a frenzied pace, hurling a steady downpour of slugs into the space surrounding Minimum Error Tolerance.
MET looks through the oncoming barrage, into the tidal confluence of the Shoal beyond. Drawing back one claw, it summons a hypodermic javelin into its grasp, and reaches out with the other to aim its throw. Its wings rise above its shoulders, preparing for a downward stroke, and it waits, letting the milliseconds slip past—
New contact, behind and above. Ma’ii feels it before they register any detail. The impressions are broad: solar light, distant familiarity, someone they will know one day.
Embers.
Ma’ii turns, and a qualic burst of terrible intensity washes over them.
One of the latest additions to SSC’s LUX-Exotic line, the Lovers Knot represents Smith-Shimano's dedication to the relentless pursuit of perfection. The Deaths Head is an iconic piece of gear, a principled and sleek tool of conflict resolution that excels within its role. The Lovers Knot as its sister frame expands upon its capabilities with new discoveries tirelessly perfected by Exotic Materials.
Within the Broadcasts, SSC found the fabrication files for a special type of glass, perfectly reflective and almost entirely indestructible. Originally meant for optical arrays, highlight points, and cockpit coating it proved overly difficult to shape but displayed some rather interesting additional properties. All projectiles deflected off the surface seemed to have a mind of their own, seeking targets with statistically impossible accuracy and no significant loss in kinetic force. Leaping at this discovery, Exotic Materials was able to adjust this ricochet utilizing directed operator brainwaves and a small companion drone to create a mobile surface for reliable redirections.
Thus was the Lovers Knot born, a reflection of the hard work and peerless ingenuity of its creators. A beautiful, terrible thing, unmatched in its twined pursuits of defying the laws of physical reality and violence.
I said i wouldn't make more, i lied. oops. well i actually love this one and its an all time personal favorite due to its themes (big fucking railgun) and its design (pishly my goat). Its a deaths head alt which means it has to contend with a slightly strange license. Its main ability is its ability to reflect shots, allowing you to draw remaining line or range to another character when making attacks. It allows you to hit 2 or more characters while only making ONE attack roll and thus working with core siphon and double dipping bonus damage. All targets hit take half damage no matter what so setting up lines to hit more than 2 is heavily rewarded. At the very least you can do some funny things with tachyon lance or kraul rifle (or spread some debuffs with concussion missiles). Its core power allows more reflections and with good positioning you can end up hitting pretty much every character. Ordnance is still an issue but struggling to get any value out of the line is now a lot easier overall. Lovers Knot basically acts as an AOE artillery that trades off sheer single target damage for hitting a bunch of people at once and can get around troublesome terrain. Its also sick as hell
You can find the Sixth Voice on itch.io (this one only available in pilotnet sixth voice thread for now) or pinned on my blog. Art by my amazing friend Pishly who you can also find on itch.io, seriously go glaze him
mech shibari was mandatory (lovers knots after all)
more soon. maybe
The ship Shooting Star in the Orion Arm's Long Rim, laden with trade goods and bound for Throughpass starstation; eleventh of May, 5017 Union Reckoning.
{The file is of Saleh’s recent creation, that cylinder that was set up in at the edge of the hangar. It sits proud and complete now, filled with slowly cycling liquid and lit from the upper and lower rims. It’s… it looks a lot like a sci-fi/horror Creature Tube, now.}
Cowie, enjoy your new sleeping quarters.
{and, once more, a private journal entry}
I think we’re all set up! Just need to pull the trigger.
OOC: Hey just gonna take a moment here, on the Lancer blog of mine with a non-negligable number of followers, to just make a Wyrmling appreciation post. I see you, I love your fuckin dragon, I appreciate how you're handing people opportunities to post straight fire!
A lifepod can be spotted drifting in space a few kilometers off the Wings' port bow. If investigated, the inside is found to be empty save for a rolled-up piece of paper, which reads:
To the finder of this message,
We are in dire need of aid. Our ship Castile 3 was struck by an unknown object on September the 26th, 4288U and all aboard but we three crewmen were killed. All communications are lost. Water and oxygen cycling are failing. The food aboard will not last us the week. We have jettisoned this and other messages in our lifeboats in the hope they will be found and help may come. In the meantime, we are sealing ourselves in stasis. We beg God that the auxiliary power will hold.
If you are reading this within even the next century, we are the luckiest men to ever fly the black. Our rough galactic coordinates are on the reverse of this message. If you are able, we beg you: bring rescue with all haste.
We ask only that you pray for us if not.
With hope,
Meriwether Ali, Ship's Lieutenant
Ander Terenni, Engine Technician
Linn Priana, Reactor Technician
What’s our ETA to the nearest gate?
Two-hundred nineteen hours. We will absolutely find some operation there that can attempt to corroborate with flight records, communications. They could send someone out, if we did not offer our own services.
If we did, it could be (clean money) a way to balance out the last op. Bit of a karmic cleanse?
It’d get the taste out of my mouth. I say go.
Mm. Any opposed, state your case. Else I see no trouble.
I agree, although I would note the date. We will be rescuing travelers nearly a millennium out of sync, and who are as far from the overthrow of the second committee as we are, but in the opposite direction. We will need to be prepared for the shock that might entail.
A lifepod can be spotted drifting in space a few kilometers off the Wings' port bow. If investigated, the inside is found to be empty save for a rolled-up piece of paper, which reads:
To the finder of this message,
We are in dire need of aid. Our ship Castile 3 was struck by an unknown object on September the 26th, 4288U and all aboard but we three crewmen were killed. All communications are lost. Water and oxygen cycling are failing. The food aboard will not last us the week. We have jettisoned this and other messages in our lifeboats in the hope they will be found and help may come. In the meantime, we are sealing ourselves in stasis. We beg God that the auxiliary power will hold.
If you are reading this within even the next century, we are the luckiest men to ever fly the black. Our rough galactic coordinates are on the reverse of this message. If you are able, we beg you: bring rescue with all haste.
We ask only that you pray for us if not.
With hope,
Meriwether Ali, Ship's Lieutenant
Ander Terenni, Engine Technician
Linn Priana, Reactor Technician
What’s our ETA to the nearest gate?
Two-hundred nineteen hours. We will absolutely find some operation there that can attempt to corroborate with flight records, communications. They could send someone out, if we did not offer our own services.
If we did, it could be (clean money) a way to balance out the last op. Bit of a karmic cleanse?
It’d get the taste out of my mouth. I say go.
Mm. Any opposed, state your case. Else I see no trouble.
This is a whole fucking thing because no. If you'd believe it I'm not. I've sent messages to the team developing it and apparently I'm too niche to justify being a 5 star pull.
4 stars in this patch, and the next. 🙄
They've got a whole new arc coming though, so for anyone... morbidly curious, now would be the time to get into it. It's better than it has a right to be, definitely better than certain sentiments on the omninet might want you to believe.
That is much faster than Soter! Much faster indeed that is a wonderful amount of speed I would like very much to be in a mech that fast I have only achieved such speed in a centrifuge!!
I...
I still find it rather difficult to understand why you and the Time Lion have treated me with kindess...
No prob Sarissa. And look, it was never personal. We’re kinda used to being looked down on anyways, here, and judging people— well, y’know. No one out here’s an easy case.
Fuck it, I'm spending enough time being heard in Comp/Con [ATC:::derogatory] anyway.
Has anyone heard updates about what's been happening on Opal? It seems to have gone dark over there, and I'm thinking [ATC:::recursive, stuck] about the Maw again.
There were these like, old transmissions Albatross got from the Maw when they were chasing them down over Khayradin. I listened to them once, a long time ago, and I can't stop listening to them now too.
There's a bit where a voice breaks away from the others. Ispahsari, ignoble, a victim of an old armed uprising, common around the time of the revolution. He talks about his wife, his children, the horrors he's seen, the fact that he's said goodbye for the last time, and he only sees the beauty in saying it now that he cannot.
Shit.
Sorry. I don't know how much of that the dictation got.
I don't know what all of you think about the afterlife, [ATC:::LIT:joining] but do you think he got there? Or is he still part of the swarm? Do you think all of the people trafficking his corpse around know that there's people in there?
Do you ever look at all of the weapons that have come from the Maw's legacy and wonder if there's still people in there?
Fuck. I don't know what I'm saying all this for. The only contact near the Opal situation [ATC:::implied mystery] I had that was an insider lost access too, and I'm just some random merc.
Dunno. I guess I just hope someone laid that swarm to rest. I'm sure their families are waiting for them.
Huh... so there are people out there that choose to be made into monsters. I'd never considered that.
Does it feel strange knowing there are others who weren't given that choice?
- Callsign: Wyrmling -
Hiya, Wyrmling. You've got a good question! It was only so much a choice, on some levels, but I did have this thought earlier on, when... Well, I was only human in body. Let's call it my first instar, borrow from the bugs a bit. Feels right.
I worried, a good bit. Like, I know plenty of folks that haven't been given the chance to be anything else. My best friends were made by humans, built with a purpose or a sales pitch, and pretty much all of them had to fight just to live on their own terms. When one of them suggested that I was like them, I had to wonder. Could I really claim that title when it means so much pain?
But, like-- let's think about it. What does it mean when you say "made into a monster"? That's a tricky fucking term, really. It's not literal, right, I made the jump in identity before I ever pupated. So, do we mean that its a thing humans see as awful? If so, I'm a company merc. I try to do good, sure, but someone's always going to see me as the ultimate evil for what I do. That hasn't changed. And that's a kinda bleak thing to put on all the people who didn't get a say in it. Same with 'monster' as 'something that can only hurt', believe me I've... worked through some personal baggage on that one. So what does it mean?
Way I see it, 'monster' is something that pulls the nice, pretty curtain off of the mess that we're in. The monster makes you have to look at the awful parts of the world and asks what the hell you're going to do about it. The monster is sick, the monster gets put in a box by the people that want to maintain the pretty lie. The monster can't do it effortless like everyone else.
So, if that's true, then I've always been one. I just chose to take on the name. And, like all the other monsters I know, I think it's worth making into something you can be proud of.
