warmind au / there's a reason why rocket's boss title is the skysplitter, and keylime often gets to view this reason when beating up wormlegion strongholds
I found @nagunkgunk has a warmind au, I couldn’t help myself to draw Bismarck as an exo with the aesthetic of that au. This is just a concept without any other ideas, so this is what I thought of first. Def will change stuff when I get other ideas! (Exo with sharp teefs and horns tho Blush Blush Blush)
Nokris, Ir Haluk and Ir Anûk are basically the Krill Techeun chaotic dumbass mad scientist trio. Their ideas range from normal-ish to flat-out "wat," but hey, it somehow works despite what happens. They tend to be the ones responsible for making a good chunk of exotic Krill gear. Crota, for the most part, sometimes wishes he had normal siblings, but loves them all the same. Also, Nokris has social anxiety.
Omnigul has the singing voice of an opera singer that can shatter glass.
Hashladûn has a much better relationship with her dad than in canon. Also, she's far, FAR stronger than she looks, despite being a Techeun. Magic powers are cool and all, but sometimes she just prefers to hit things.
Warmind!Au Destiny story inspired by and tying in with @hdreaper 's own story just posted. Please enjoy!
Fear was something of an old hat to Winter. Memory skips left her anxious, quarantine duty made her anxious, being cut off from Rexy, her frames and the network made her anxious, the anxiety making the memory skips worse made her anxious...
But the fear she'd been living with for the last month blew all of that out of the water.
Ra-1, the fist of Rasputin, the Dragon Ascendant, had personally sent her a message to say that if she didn't start doing exactly what he told her, he'd activate the code-black killcodes built into her Rasputin Exo body, and blow her Exomind into electronic spaghetti. After all, she was wired into the Charlemagne network, and had a documented set of fears he could abuse. She'd gather confidential data for him, she'd send him warnings of Charlemagne's actions, and she'd allow his scientists to try and duplicate Rexy, and the fear of final death would keep her in line.
But.
But but but.
Rasputin's records of her had been accurate...once. Yes, she was still afraid, but her body was no longer a Rasputin model. It couldn't be; that whole area was considered an infohazard now, and her last body was never coming home. And without that final threat, she'd found the courage to do something...stupid.
So here she was, on Ra's flagship in deep space with Charlemagne's blessing. She'd met up with lance troops a few times for debriefs, but recently she'd been allowed to spend time on the flagship itself, ready for Ra to send her where he wanted her. But that same set of interface skills that had allowed her access to Charli's files had also granted access to just a few of Ra's.
Winter paced back and forth in the tiny cabin she’d been assigned. She wasn’t sure if it was some kind of power conservation action, but the light down here barely cut through the shadows. She could have headed up to one of the main decks where things were a bit less claustrophobic, but Ra’s soldiers were everywhere there, and being the only blue-lit Exo on the entire ship guaranteed her the kind of attention that, if things went wrong today, could get her killed. She checked the ship’s clock fruitlessly. Somewhere out there, right now, Ra himself was boots-down on Riis. The data scraps she’d found didn’t say why, or for how long, but there was no question that he was just a little vulnerable right now.
Just a little would have to be enough; her Guardian contacts, who she’d affectionately nicknamed Fireteam Fuzzy, had cut their way through all kinds of monsters since she’d met them, and she’d made damn sure they knew exactly how dangerous he would be. She’d helped Fuzzy find their targets and coordinated some bounties for them down in the Quarantine zone, and when she’d outlined her proposal, they’d agreed to pass it on without question. It could have been typical guardian bravado, but she knew they’d lost friends to Ghostbuster rounds in the attack on the farm a while back. Maybe they actually trusted her.
Maybe that trust was going to get them killed.
Pushing that thought away and herself to her feet, Winter shoved her way past the door and started striding away towards the lifts. One way or another, with the Ira Terra still out in the styx, any news of the strike would take time to arrive, if her information had even been good in the first place. If she was going to stew in uncertainty, she may as well do it somewhere that felt less like a prison cell. Ra may have been a terrifying, merciless, wannabe-tyrant, but the facilities he provided for his troops were actually first rate. She’d find a sim-station no-one was using and throw herself into some story until the guillotine had, one way or another, dropped.
She had made it to the first brightly lit corridor of the barracks floor when her whole body exploded into pain.
Protocols cut in, protecting her mind from the overwhelming agony, partitioning and quarantining it. The feeling of burning alive dipped, sank, then seemed to drain from her whole body into solely her left forearm. When she could see again, she was crumpled against the wall of the corridor, chest heaving, digital heart still pumping on overdrive. It felt unpleasantly like the worst of the memory blips-she was in pain, alone, with no idea why or what to defend against. She cast her eyes down and to her left, and just like with the blips, her circumstances slotted into place. Set into the casing of her arm, where her network interface and uplink were supposed to be, were a smoking ruin of burned and self-destructing circuits. Her only remaining Rasputin hardware, her connection to her frames, to Rexy, to the ship’s system.
Ra-1 had just tried to kill her.
Oh, if she had thought she’d been afraid before, it paled in comparison to the terror that swallowed her now. It felt like her heart was going to burst out through her chest. There was no way her guardians would have told him she was responsible, right? They knew she was undercover, and even in the heat of the fight, he could have sent the kill codes at any time. They’d keep her secret...
...until their dying breaths.
There was a crackling noise that initially failed to cut through the panic, until it resolved unto the familiar voice of the great warlord, and even as the announcement rang out the ship’s engines powered into life and rumbled the flagship into thunderous motion.
“Attention, warriors of the Broken Lance. A guardian strike team has just made an attempt on my life, using information given to them by a traitor within our ranks, Winter-1. The guardians have been dealt with, and I have already ensured she has been rewarded as a traitor deserves. However, an example must still be made. Have her remains gathered and waiting for me upon my return to the Terra. Her masters shall have her broken husk returned to them. A commendation to the squad who has her corpse in my office upon my arrival. Ra out.”
Oh.
Hmm.
Ah, ok.
Winter was pretty sure she’d just lost a minute or two by the time her awareness came back to her. She still felt like she was about to die (fully independent of the hundreds of trained and eager killers probably now closing in on her position) but the freeze instinct was graduating to flight. She had an exit strategy, at Charlemagne’s insistence. It wasn’t a good strategy, but the warmind had explicitly ordered her to try. She reached out with her interface to the subroutine she’d left running on the ship’s server, and-
Ah. Her eyes once again turned to the sparking, melted mess where her interface was supposed to sit. It felt like one of her senses had been scooped out; a huge, gaping wound where the network was supposed to be. Nevermind just the escape protocol, without the access codes built into it, ninety five percent of the systems in the ship would no longer recognise her as a person, including the ones required to log into any network access point on the ship. She knew where her escape protocol was located, and could theoretically trigger it if she could reach an unsecured terminal.
But right now she could already hear tramping boots approaching from the barracks and she had no choice but to run.
She lost count of how many times she blipped as she led a desperate game of cat and mouse through the guts of the ship. The Ira Terra was bigger than the Stultorum had been, back when she’d served upon it, but if the ship ran about the same, the cargo deck mid-flight would be on skeleton crew with nobody caring if an unsecured terminal was technically a security violation. So she kept heading down and back, focusing on that one thought to the exclusion of all else. When she blipped in this time, she was halfway down a corridor created by two shipping containers, moving towards the illuminated sign of a shift breakroom. She took the next step and immediately fell nearly to the floor, sprawling gracelessly and nearly braining herself on the container. Oh-she’d been shot. That explained why her right side and upper leg were one big mess of static and pins-and-needles. She supported herself on the side of the crate and limped forward, conscious of the shouts and stomping boots echoing from somewhere in the distance behind her. She made it to the door, shouldering it open, almost collapsing with relief when her flickering vision was met with the friendly glow of an open terminal. She immediately dragged herself to it, closing the chat and shipwide alert windows to immediately start digging for her protocol.
She must have been five seconds in when she heard the shatter of breaking crockery behind her.
Slowly turning to face the noise, Winter looked into the eyes of the exo washing the dishes in the kitchenette, set into the corner of the breakroom. For a moment, both were still, surprised, the other Exo’s hand still in the air where it had been holding the coffee mug a moment ago. Then his eyes flicked to the screen of the terminal, where a moment ago had been the bounty on the only blue-lit Exo on the ship.
She didn’t even question trying to engage him. She whirled back to the screen, fingers flying as she desperately raced to run the command. The man had no weapons, probably no combat training, but he crashed into her from behind and her leg went out from under her, skull bouncing off the frame of the screen as he tried to wrap his arms around hers, voice bellowing that he’d found her. She was so close it burned, even more intense than the pain. She gripped one of her hands with the other and shoved it over her shoulder as hard as she could, outstretched thumb punching into his optic and causing a very human scream that no amount of mechanical upgrades would prevent. His grip slackened, and she pulled herself out of his arms and high enough to see the screen.
There were shouts behind her, the sounds of guns being brought to attention, the exo at her feet was tightening his grip again, and her vision was fading into black on the edges.
She hit the last key on the screen.
Everything went white, then black, silent and cold.
It was maybe ten seconds before the first ship thundered across her line of sight in the perfect silence of vacuum, the many supporting ships of Ra's fleet rushing to keep up with the flagship as it finished positioning itself for the jump. Even its coasting speed had brought it far enough away from Winter to render it a tiny dot in the distance, before there was a flash of light and the ships were gone.
Her transmat had been a random distance in a random direction, untraceable, and searching for her would delay the ship's travel to pick up Ra. She'd be left behind in the void, passing beyond its signal jamming, allowing the beacon hidden in her circuits to finally begin transmitting. A waiting friendly vessel would be on route to pick her up, provided the fleet hadn't shot it out of the sky.
Which left Winter here, curled in a ball as the moisture on her clothes crystallised. In theory, Exos were built to be vacuum-resistant, but she had a feeling that resistance didn't account for there being two bleeding holes in her dermis.
The thought drifted through her brain as her senses shut down one by one:
Who would claim her first: the cold, the bleeding, or her rescue?
She found herself thinking that she didn't want to die again.
So, @nagunkgunk‘s Warmind AU is like my favorite thing ever and I had a little spark of inspiration that’s been burning away in my mind after seeing the mean beep and thinking about what it might be like for the Eliksni going from fighting nothing but Frames carrying very little intel to finally starting to encounter Warlords, so here’s a thing :)
Riksis hated caves. They were too dark and too narrow and the sounds echoed far too strangely. This series of chambers looked to have been started naturally, but there were clear signs of artificial expansion. Something was living down here.
A click that could have been footsteps or simply a water drop echoed either in front or behind him and he flinched, pressing himself into the wall and quickly glancing in both directions. No sounds followed and he shrugged the tension out of his shoulders, making a mental note to ask to never be sent into caves again.
He understood his mission was an important one – an investigative team had suddenly vanished and they needed any information on their fate they could get – but he wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
The sound of his own footsteps changed again and he could tell he was coming to another large room. Carefully, and with one eye on his radar, he rounded the corner.
“Oh…”
He’d found the team. Or what was left of them, anyway.
The three Guardians looked like they had gone down fighting. Their armor was damaged, the walls were splashed with energy burns, and they were surrounded by nearly a dozen of the spindly robots they kept encountering around the system. At a glance, each seemed to bear the same marking – the one their limited intel linked to the word “Rasputin.”
If he wasn’t nervous before, he certainly was now.
“Can we leave from here?”
If the ship is directly overhead, yes. It should be in position in a few minutes.
Riksis stepped to the nearest downed Guardian. His Ghost fizzled into existence and drifted down for a closer look.
“Projectile damage,” it replied, assessing the heavily damaged plating. “A powerful, close-range weapon. Possibly similar to a shrapnel launcher.”
“On one of those?” Riksis asked, with a small gesture toward one of the robots. They had only ever been seen with small caliber projectiles that were easily deflected by most Guardian armor. On rare occasions they had been seen with elemental weaponry, but never anything this powerful.
His Ghost gave him a side-eyed look but said nothing. Its eye swiveled around to the mechanical corpses.
“We should see if any have—“
Riksis snapped his head up and clenched one hand into a quick fist. His Ghost promptly vanished and in the silence left behind he could hear the sound that had startled him – footsteps. He quietly backed away from the entrances to the room, not sure which door to keep a closer eye on.
“How long?” His whisper was quick and quiet.
Another minute or so.
He readied his blades as quietly as possible and prayed he wasn’t about to meet the same fate as the Guardians at his feet. The blades wouldn’t be much help against whatever had shredded their armor, but his rifle was built for long range sniping and would be useless in these tight quarters.
The footsteps hesitated and Riksis froze. He heard a solid click that sounded like weaponry before another careful step. Movement came from the left door – the one he’d entered through – and part of him wondered if he’d ever been alone in here.
He expected to see another one of the thin robots like those littering the floor – one or two of those would be easy to handle while the ship finished flying in. What came through was definitely not one of the lanky machine warriors. It was taller, more solid, and far more heavily armored. It wore no helmet and Riksis could see a mechanical face with lights in its eyes and mouth. A cloak obscured most of the armor details, but he could see the same marking and the faint impression of multiple weapons.
It looked around the carnage, an odd, heavy weapon held slack in its hands. Riksis couldn’t read what it might be feeling, but it didn’t seem concerned in the slightest by his presence. Its bright eyes finally locked onto him and Riksis wasn’t sure he’d be able to move if he wanted to.
An eternity passed in the blink of an eye and the mechanical being said something. It was quiet and slow and Riksis didn’t understand a word of it.
Move!
He reacted without thinking and threw himself to the right. A deafening bang echoed through the room and he felt something tear into his hip. He landed hard on his shoulders and rolled, snarling in pain when the movement caused his weight to land on his wounded hip.
He hadn’t even noticed the weapon being brought to bear. A glance up and he saw the same weapon pointing down at him from across the chamber, no change or readable emotion reflected in the mechanical face behind it. He flinched and shut his eyes and his ears rang at the new explosive sound that cut off far too quickly. The remnants of impact threw him into something solid and his breath whooshed out of his chest.
He was dead. He had to be. But his ears still rang and his chest ached and his leg hurt. He cracked open one eye and then blinked in surprise with all four. The familiar dull bronze bulkheads of his ship hung overhead. A static shock in his leg marked the start of his Ghost repairing the damage and he chattered in nervous relief as he lay on the familiar floor.
A few minutes later and the bulk of the pain was gone, replaced by the dull tingling of Ghost aid. The ship had moved itself into a safe orbit and as he hauled himself into the pilot’s seat he set it on a course for the Vanguard, sending a request for communication along with it. The message chimed in and his Vanguard’s decorated helmet filled most of the screen.
“Riksis, did you find anything?”
“They’re gone,” he said, summing up the full report he would have to give with two heavy words.
“And I think…” He paused and looked to his Ghost where it hovered over his shoulder before looking back to his Vanguard. “I think whatever Rasputin is… it’s here.”
