Jastes Verdan || 9.5 sweeps || Civitrecce || Present Night
Your claws change and harden into steel, allowing you to cut extremely thin, careful lines around the control panel. They’re hardly a millimeter deep; not enough to trigger its alarms. One day the factory might improve their security, but you’ve always kept a careful eye on their sensors; they’re surprisingly careless about so-called minor damages.
“Move it, pal.” says the voice in your earbug. “The others are plenty busy, but that’s going to be worthless if you don’t goddamn manage!”
Xineck only used one cussword, so you have at least five minutes.
You take out four small gray capsules, your breathing mask firmly in place. It’s technically a cocoon, but nobody likes to be reminded they’re wearing a bug in their nostrils.
You barely give it any thought as you turn your hand back to flesh slowly, precisely attach each of them in front of the four lines of the box shape you made around the panel and then quickly press sealant onto them. The quick-hardening adhesive will not only provide a temporary disguise, but will also seal in the degeneration agent from the capsules as they burst and ensure their acid eats away until it reaches the control box’s inner workings.
It’s a shoddy job. If you were grading someone else on this, you’d give them a four out of ten.
A stream of profanity issues from the earbug, but you’re already heading for your exit.
A great deal of shouting and thundering feet - the factory’s security - go by as you pass, then stop and turn around.
“Hey!”
You appear slightly apprehensive as they catch up to you.
“Yeah?”
“What’re you doing out of the column? It’s still your shift!”
“Oh.” You look vaguely surprised and pluck at the uniform that became yours as of tonight, and will leave your possession again very shortly. “Look, I...”
A burly bronze girl waves her hand irritably. “You know what? I don’t want to hear it. Let’s just write you up so the boss can deal with it.”
You make half-hearted noises of protest as she goes over you with a handheld scanner and registers your implanted ID chip in for disciplinary action the following night.
You feel sorry for the girl whose face and identity you’ve stolen for a bit. The worse crime is probably her slightly altered memories from a few quick slips into her wetware.
“Hey.” The bronze girl adds, even though the other guards have shuffled off. “I’m just doing my job, y’know? I’ll treat you tomorrow night. You like ice cream, right? I know a place.”
Your pumper skips a beat as you blink in surprise, but you figure that wouldn’t be out of character for this girl.
“That sounds cool.” You say, the hesitant new helm glad and wary to receive such sympathy from someone far higher-ranking.
She nods, and then walks off.
You continue to the front door and let yourself out, obediently typing in your clockout number. Then you go to her hive (its cameras are currently being fed a series of loops pieced together from old footage and its microphones’ ranges have been reduced), turn metal, rearrange your features, and return to your organic state again with your own face intact.
You’re just doing your nose when Xineck struts in and nearly gives you a pumper attack, not that you show it. He’d enjoy that way too much.
“Everything’s peachy.” He drawls. “Girl hasn’t got a clue what happened, and it looks exactly like a rival messing with their junk. You did such a shit job that they’ll have no problem pinning it on amateurs like GrubTech. ”
“I thought it was only sort of bad.” You say mildly. “She’s a kid; I thought I did pretty good as an amateur.”
The maroon snorts, elbowing you in your side. “You’d think we got our ideas from b-list movies. Did you really have to waste four capsules of that shit? It’s not cheap.”
“I had to look anxious and tryhard.” You say, delicately inflected to suggest the possibility that those are things he’s quite familiar with.
“I’m gonna cut you some night just for the hell of it. Will I throw up? Yeah. It’ll feel good later, though.”
You finally flush slightly yellow, and Xineck grins with as many sharp teeth as his lusus. Totally against the style for a burgundy, but he’d rather swallow live earwigs than file them or get surgery.
He’s the one troll who knows what you can do, and thus your weaknesses. A more pragmatic troll would have had him culled for that. Sometimes you wish you weren’t so sentimental.
The rest of the group knows you’re a psiionic, but many just assume you have illusion-based powers and access to expensive tools, or secretly prosthetic limbs under your skin.
You’re as flesh and blood as any troll; it just happens to be optional.
You look away.
“A guard was kind to her.”
“Big whoop.” He says idly, cleaning under his claws with a knife.
“She deserved to be there for that.”
“You going to go write down your feels, buddy? That guard would still shove her into a column with a whistle and a wave. Her kind are sellouts. Put your thinkpan back in your skull, the others’re getting the taxi and restoring the apartment’s stuff.”
People who aren’t Xineck sound incredibly appealing right now, and you brighten up.
He laughs at you, but at least the job is done and you can, very slightly, relax.
The city of Civitrecce is a security nightmare. It crawls with mechanical or biomechanical detection devices for wrongdoing, legislacerators and policeradicators patrol the streets, and the punishments for lawbreaking are severe. Yet trolls with the right psi, keen wits, or sheer paranoia can manage to quietly sabotage the Empire’s stranglehold and keep their lives in the process.
Jastes Verdan’s group is made of small, scattered cells of trolls who specialize in cheating the cyberscape that controls so much of city life. They slip into the network and specialize in stealth jobs that help the lives of the city lowbloods.
If a shipment of food finds itself mysteriously redirected to those in dire need, or an infrastructure repair bot gets sent to a neighborhood that otherwise normally wouldn’t receive its services, their hand is felt.
They ensure that their crimes can either be pinned on scapegoats or not detected at all; put down to machine failure or troll error. Much of their work relies on gathering the appropriate information for their jobs, and placing the appropriate bribes and distractions to ensure that no one catches wind of them.
PECULIARITIES
Due to the nature of Civitrecce, some of the rebellion members have port technology in their bodies. In Civitrecce, ports are seen by many as not a symbol of helm enslavement but as a matter of convenience or a ticket to a better life. Jastes accepts trolls of all walks, even those fully integrated into columns if they are willing, but not all of the group feels the same way.
Nor is everyone enthusiastic about his willingness to work with the alien refugees that sometimes turn up in the city, or his insistence that highbloods can be worked with and relied upon.
A company run by Tetrao Coloth, a seadweller of 46.2 sweeps, who rose to his position of president of his own company at such a young age for a violet due to a combination of odd circumstances.
His company in Civitrecce produces various high-tech practical & luxury goods made right in the city’s own factories, but his real focus is on methods of technologically and chemically controlling and influencing trolls. He produces helmsman ports and implants, but also specializes in behavior modification chips and augmentations for midbloods, as part of a project called the Draco line.
Coloth proposes that due to their longer lifespans, greater durability, and lower frequency of psiionic powers, modified midbloods are ideal, low-danger attendants and even bodyguards, with the right biotech improvements. While controversial, his prototypes have worked well and he is entering the second stage of development.
He is also known for having Civitrecce’s largest helm generator.
possibly my favorite thing about Civitrecce is that it’s not an uncommon practice to grab the lusii of people who are culled if you can manage to keep them, which occasionally leads to gang leaders having status because they have all these fucking lusii from people they’ve killed.
Not everyone goes along with it, but there are definitely brutal trolls out there who do 100% serious awful things with their protective bundle of lusii around them. The guy threatening you for a protection racket can be and likely is attended by not only his own wallaby-dad, but also the giant dragonfly parent of somebody he shivved over a territory dispute, the aye-aye mom of someone from his own gang who got culled over hiding a mutation, and there’s probably a magpie lusus shuffling through your things and taking the shiny stuff and any food while you sweat.
Civitrecce, despite being an over-surveilled corporate hellscape, is actually pretty tightly regulated because whenever the companies start fighting each other shit gets bad quickly and it interrupts the empire’s production flow, so they tend to swat that shit pretty hard.
All the biggest corporations have to play nice with each other to some extent and pay for stuff together like the public transport system, or a few high-placed people will get offed to remind them that You Have To Fucking Cooperate, Fleet Needs Supplies.
There is a vastness to space no troll words can really do justice to. None of Alternia’s languages are equipped with the depth of feeling the darkness - with its tiny spots of light - can inspire in those who pass through it, flecks of feeling and wonder on an unfathomable tapestry of void.
Space was really fucking big and Egret was annoyed by that.
Not that anyone could see his snarling face, alone in the helmscolumn of his ship - rather, the ship that was him. Pink wire bound what was left of his flesh to the metal and plastic, the carbon-fiber and the organic compounds. One could not function without the other.
He could have put himself in stasis to while away the perigees of endless travel, the wiring in his thinkpan taking care of all the regulation automatically, though of course the captain could wake him up at any time. Probably would if she was bored.
Not that Temmie was there. For once, the ship was empty, anchored to a station in the distant reaches of the Empire where trolls spoke and looked strangely, hatched from mother grubs only distantly descended from the Alternian kind. Egret thought they looked like gross mutants, with their big eyes and long fingers. Better off dead if you asked him.
Not that anyone ever did.
Hello, Egret.
He bristled, shoulders moving what little they could under the constraints of biowire as his snarl became even more pronounced, sharp blue blood teeth prominent. His psion’s eyes sparked with hate and - his ears pinned - fear.
I’m so glad I finally found you.
She had to be dead. Maroons didn’t live long, especially scum rebels.
But there was no troll physically present, and he didn’t recognize the digital address messaging him. He couldn’t even trace it. He was a technopath.
And so, after she’d stolen his psi, was she.
Time to come hive.
His engines started against his will. He howled as his psi flared yellow, the ship zapping into the vast expanse of space, leaving nothing behind but a few sparks.
—
“Ma’am, your ship took off without warning. This will incur a fine.”
Temmie looked up blearily from the recuperacoon she was sharing with a dozing troll she’d had quite a few drinks with last night.
A troll in the uniform of the docking authorities was twitching his ears irritably at her, but he was only teal, so she bared her fangs back. How dare he disturb her? It was impossible for Egret to leave without her activating him.
“Did you activate it remotely, ma’am?”
The odious teal had taken out a notebook and wasn’t even looking at her. Temmie slipped out of the sopor, careful not to disturb her partner, and crossed her arms, glaring down at this short, weedy man who dared interrupt her for complete nonsense.
“Nooooo! This is stupid! Where’s your manager? Egret CAN’T have just skipped off! He’s mine! No one else has the key.”
The man blinked at her.
“Follow me, ma’am.”
Ten minutes later, washed and dressed, the cobalt gaped at the empty space where her ship had been.
“Whaaaaaat...”
“Stolen, maybe.” grunts the teal, scribbling more on his pad. Temmie glares at him, even more so that he doesn’t seem to care she’s doing it at all.
“Egret is a technapp - technopop - he controls machines! He’s literally unhackable, and he’s authorized to retaliate if someone tries to steal him. This is goofy!”
“Yes, ma’am.” Says the teal in that dry voice. “You still need to pay that fine.”
Growling, Temmie picks him up with a hand around his neck. His eyes merely roll in annoyance.
“Going to be a larger one if you cull me.” He says, despite the chokehold muffling his voice.
She drops him in disgust and the teal lands with a smack on the scuffed station floor, still seemingly unfazed.
She needs to call the boss, and oooh, he won’t be happy. He better not blame her. It’s the dockworkers’ fault for being so lazy!
Temmie Bobbin grits her fangs as she takes out her palmhusk, mentally rehearsing how she’s going to tell Anguil Volant he just lost his best helm.
Tetrao Coloth: 53 sweeps old. violet. business magnate. smarmy prick. dresses like a stripper in what he thinks is a power move. baseline, but has violet resilience & strength and multiple tech implants in his body.
Atarem Rouget: 13 sweeps old. maroon. helm. part of The Spine, Tetrao Coloth’s multiple-helm generator. wasn’t the most stable before being put into the column and certainly isn’t now. she can copy and keep the psi ability of anyone she touches, as long as they’re alive, though her low power rate ensures that her use of them isn’t as strong as the original.
Sombra Lyseli: 12 sweeps old. purple. bodyguard, debt collector, psychological experiment, and one of Tetrao’s “daughters.” he killed her lusus when she was too young to remember and raised her himself. ignorant by his design, vicious, hemoloyal, and brutal, but socially nervous and naive. her voodoos manifest unusually and allow her to control people’s bodies, but not their minds.
Saori: 14 sweeps old. alien. a status symbol for Tetrao and his other “daughter”, raised by him since infancy and kept for her species’s ability to use their psychic powers on any troll regardless of caste. her particular talent is emotional manipulation, honed to perfection by abusing Sombra (and any other victims Tetrao allowed her) throughout their entire lives.
now, what does this pack of dips each want to drive their story forward?
Blanca wants a real body instead of an android one. aside from that, she wants to practice bringing back the dead using cybernetics this time instead of necromancy, because she remains as swell of a gal as ever.
Tetrao wants his company to flourish, and to eliminate competitors and shut down that pesky resistance group. he also wants more fleet connections and control of the city, not so much because he enjoys power in of itself, but it makes things easier for his business and profits.
The Process wants to cut down any AI or troll with wetware who gains too much influence. Regular trolls might as well not exist to it, it has a hard time conceiving them, but it views all others as guests/trespassers in its kingdom to be policed as it pleases.
