#cardinal ventures

[piermanwalter]

Even with just a braincase, 10 kilograms of Godiva nanomachines, and a rusting waterlogged cyborg skeleton, an experienced user can assemble a functional body that at first glance is indistinguishable from a normal unaugmented person.

[piermanwalter]

Basically there’s this cyborg lady except she’s got huge boobs. Some serious nanitties. A real set of black-market-megatons. Massive electrolyticbrainmachinebazongas. Big ol’ UmbraOS-sense-simulators. What happens next? Evil corporate cyborg shows up with even bigger tungsten-carbides. Humongous heat-retaining-refractory-composites. You can't spell Fortitudo without "tit".

[piermanwalter]

Bayonetta MGR Crossover: Fortitudo and Temperantia

Given that Platinum Games recycles the same character archetypes for all their games, it’s pretty easy to redesign Bayonetta angels as Metal Gear Rising cyborgs just by shuffling existing design elements around. Executing these redesigns is the issue and I finally smashed this image out half a year after I said I would.

As a grizzled and scarred old military man in a stupidly revealing outfit trying to enact the will of his dead commander while lacking the insight to truly understand her goals, while coping with being useless and persecuted in a world that no longer needs soldiers like him, Fortitudo is as Metal Gear as it’s possible to be. 

Aside from a few bomb threats and assassination attempts in the office building he works at, Temperantia has rarely been in a life-threatening combat situation, let alone a real war. Although he has the physical strength and GPS targeting satellite access to throw cars at people 3 kilometers away, he mostly spends his time managing HR complaints and organising his vast collection of enamel pins.

Ithavoll Group, the giant conglomerate that employs/owns them, orders Fortitudo and Temperantia to go out and capture Bayonetta, who has been killing Ithavoll cyborgs to sell their parts on the black market.

[piermanwalter]

More Thoughts on the Bayonetta MGR Crossover AU

I’m going to call it Cardinal Ventures from now on. Aside from being a terrible pun, it makes thematic sense. Instead of supposedly embodying heavenly virtues, the Cardinals have been bought out by venture capitalists. 

I don’t know what kind of galaxy brained insight I was on while comparing heaven and hell to Big Tech and virus-ridden shareware.

This setting is very tragic because all the combat cyborgs know they are obsolete in this peaceful new world, sinking more and more into debt and disrepair no matter how hard they struggle, and their spectacular fights are nothing more than flashy disposal of old weapons, like celebrating nuclear disarmament by detonating them all in space to watch the fireworks.

All the events in Metal Gear happened in the past, and the Bayonetta events are happening now. Metal Gear Rising happened about 70 years ago, and cyborg tech has advanced since then. As you may remember, MGR cyborgs are harshly mechanical with obvious armor plating, but as material engineering improved, the new design philosophy was to recreate human anatomy. 

Statuesque idealised human-like figures of combat cyborgs were associated with mass destruction sustained during the Second American Civil War, so the newest design philosophy is to be more abstract and obviously inhuman.

High frequency bladed weapons continue to be effective against cyborgs, but there have been many safeguards developed against them. The cheapest and easiest way is to download a script that allows you to vibrate at the same frequency as the weapon, reducing much of its damage. Among experienced combat cyborgs, this is known as “going to Purgatory” since it drags fights out because nobody can meaningfully hurt each other. 

Cardinal Ventures invented and patented “Angel Skin”, a type of flexible armor with up to 90% tiny artificial diamonds specially shaped to allow normal movement. Upon cutting into Angel Skin, high frequency blades are dulled by grinding their own edge down. Much of Cardinal’s terrifying reputation comes from their ability to destroy weapons upon contact. After Cardinal Ventures was purchased by Ithavoll Group, Angel Skin as started appearing on cyborgs working for its many other subsidiaries. 

Nanomachines, son. I’m thinking that the magic hair from Bayonetta is some type of nanomachine I’m calling Godiva for obvious reasons, usually stored under the skin, and is released through the pores to form armor and extra limbs. Unskilled users look like they are getting eaten alive by worms like the cursed boar from Princess Mononoke, but skilled users can manipulate Godiva nanos to look like hair and fabric. 

Halos were originally a cryptocurrency, but after it was discovered they could be mined from cyborg BMI arrays, the cyborg BMI arrays themselves became a regular fiat currency based on how many Halos they could generate per kilowatt hour. Both the cryptocurrency and BMI arrays are considered Halos, but Inferno prefers to trade in physical parts as direct indication of how many cyborgs you are able to hunt, as opposed to cryptocurrency you could have farmed from XBoxes. 

Fortitudo is a scarred and tormented old man failing to live up to the legacy of a deceased military leader. Also he isn’t technically naked but he might as well be. This is the essence of Metal Gear. 

In Bayonetta when witches make a contract with their patron Madama, they get to summon her limbs in combat. I’m thinking in this AU, Bayonetta needs to ask Madama Butterfly to replace her own cybernetic limbs with better ones in exchange for the best parts from everyone she killed with them.

It’s an incredible power move to treat being stripped and taken apart for cyborg surgery as a cheeky burlesque show. I’m thinking Bayonetta does this to cope with her body literally being a collection of objects on loan. 

The typical cycle of violence in Metal Gear is perpetuated when traumatised soldiers are unable to return to normal society, so they try to make a place for themselves by destabilising Africa or converting the United States into the War Economy or establishing Outer Heaven or something like that, causing even more violence and trauma, alienating the next generation of soldiers who do it all over again.

But now wars are fought with cyborgs, whose bodies and programming prevent them from being traumatised the same way as normal soldiers. Society is now very accepting of cyborgs, and it is much easier for them to integrate with normal society.

Fortitudo could very easily become a Big Boss type figure, but his Lumen software and natural world-weariness makes him disinclined to rock the boat, and other cyborgs are unlikely to join him if he does. This is the first generation where old soldiers gave up on finding or creating a place for themselves.

[piermanwalter]

Data from many infamous dead military cyborgs leaked into the black market. Downloading Matryona Saltikovna’s memories will instantly grant compatible cyborgs her fighting skills. Since Matryona’s memories are one of the cheapest and most accessible combat script packages, some individuals and small criminal organisations are able to achieve rapid success. 

However, over-reliance on Matryona without developing your own skills and learning from your own experiences will lead to aspects of her personality overtaking your own, such as a fondness for purple clothes and a tendency to throw down your weapons and start punching. This includes falling in love with her husband and handler, Sergey. Even photos and recordings of Sergey can cause your sense of self to erode. Since Sergey has no interest in being involved with Inferno cyborg underworld bullshit and doesn’t want to force other people to get overwritten by his dead wife, for the most part, this is not an issue for Matryona users.

If Matryona users get too powerful, influential, or common, someone will find Sergey and haul him out of a quiet civilian life in like Dagestan or Azerbaijan or Burgaz or someplace like that. Sergey has a lifetime of military service and gang wars, but is a full-body civilian-grade cyborg with no nanomachine capacity, which means he totally fucking sucks by Inferno’s unachievable high standards. His sole value to Inferno is severely disrupting Matryona-reliant organisations just by being known to them. Once he’s done with being a cognitohazard haunted by his dead wife, he escapes and vanishes until someone finds him years later.

Sergey’s influence extends beyond Matryona users. Acting like your identity is being consumed by Matryona gives you an excuse to betray, abandon, or kill anyone. His ability to escape Inferno and Matryona users who wholeheartedly believe he is their husband and build a new life out of nothing makes him extremely desirable those who want to disappear like he does. Also some people just think he’s cool.

As a trash-tier Infernal who has come to terms with his wife’s death and only wants to live an uneventful life without constantly being reminded of her, Sergey is basically the opposite of Balder. 

[piermanwalter]

One may question the ethics of cybernetic implants that use the human brain as hardware to run AI functions, but this process creates cyborgs that absolutely refuse to die. 

The original plan was to quickly and cleanly take out Fortitudo’s organic head and sell the whole pristine cyborg body for a massive price on the black market. This extremely did not work. Fortunately, the price-gouging amounts of damage done to Fortitudo to finally stop him did not affect the final payoff to the surviving Inferno contractors: the profits were split in a tontine and most of the participants died because Fortitudo killed them with his teeth. 

[piermanwalter]

A massive underworld organisation formed by combat cyborgs disenfranchised after mass world demilitarisation, Inferno grows by trapping desperate people into debt and killing existing cyborgs for parts. Contractors are low-level Inferno members with civilian-grade implants, overlooked by most security systems. Contractors repay their massive debts by infiltrating areas inaccessible by legit Inferno members to find and lure other cyborgs into areas where Inferno can prey upon them. A majority of contractors act as spies, thieves, and informants, but some of them actively go out and hunt cyborgs personally for a bigger payoff.

Through extreme cost-cutting measures like using pink Godiva nanomachines and having no facial prosthetics, Little King Zero is one of the few Inferno contractors with enough personal power and influence to operate his own gang separate from Inferno as a whole.

It’s unclear how much of Zero’s body is mechanical, but he moves at lighting speed with the reaction acuity of a dragonfly at the cost of being even more fragile than a regular human. If he is mostly human, it’s amazing how he survived this long. If he is mostly mechanical, it means he chose to have a cyborg body shaped like a potbellied old man, which is a huge flex.

Zero’s gang, the Little Devils, is mostly composed of child brains Zero rescued from the black market. Zero is the only official Inferno contractor in the gang. If he spent all the money he made as a contractor on himself, he would soon be free of debt and have the means to upgrade himself into a legit Inferno member, but he chooses to spend it on his gang instead. This is widely regarded as weakness.

The Little Devils don’t engage in serious Inferno gang wars, and serve as a discrete delivery service for small objects, like ammunition. Being kidnapped, cut to pieces, reassembled, and put into work in a smuggling gang is a terrible fate for anyone, but it’s a far better deal than where most disembodied brains end up on the black market. Although they have little respect, they also don’t have any mortal enemies in Inferno. Some Little Devils become Inferno contractors, but most of them find accounting and logistics roles in better gangs.

[piermanwalter]

Once Fortitudo is reverse-engineered, the technology that allows him to reach 3000 degrees celsius and kill anyone if he grabs them for more than 2 seconds is discovered to be incredibly difficult to integrate into other cyborg bodies for many reasons.

Expensive as Fuck (heat-resistant tungsten, osmium, and other rare refractory metals)

Heavy as Fuck (same reason)

No internal nanomachines (they will melt)

No remote nanomachines (see 6)

If you must have nanomachines, they must be external and physically attached to the main body, and would only be practical if they were designed to die

Terrible wireless networking in general (magnets stop working at high temperatures)

If you use conventional liquid joint lubricants, you will explode. You need tungsten bisulfite powder.

Cyborg fights with superhuman reaction times can get resolved in 0.2 seconds so the ability to melt someone in 2 seconds can be overcome

Glass fiber optics melt into liquid, and you can’t do anything using those parts until they solidify (includes going blind and comatose to prevent the human brain from overheating)

You need to hold still at extremely precise temperatures for hours in order to temper the glass fiber optics as they cool and solidify so they don’t shatter when you move

If you are severely injured at high temperatures, you will literally bleed your molten glass fiber optics out

You can’t use repair nanopastes until you cool down

You can see why all the users of this body have put more and more control into the AI system until he eats their egoes.