Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

[Siege]

Here's a thought:

If the Oversoul was already on its way toward major instability near the end of Earthreign (due to age, top-heaviness in terms of stored vs. living memory, increasing rewrites leading to hagiography and whole 'sections' of the Oversoul being essentially closed down with who knows what taking up residence in these abandoned memory-areas), perhaps the Cataclysm was what pushed the whole thing over the edge.

The psionic sledgehammer of Reignfall may have caused a collective PTSD flashback for the Apexai, in which they re-experienced the awful truth of the Titanomachy. The trauma was so severe it caused species-wide dissociation, collapses in the Oversoul and loss of containment on some of the nastier stuff hidden down there, which in turn reinforced the painful incapacitation of the Apexai. Only a handful, the most powerful amongst those who had been tasked with maintaining their species' collective mind-palace, were able to stave off the worst of the effects, and it fell to them to restore their species to a vaguely working state. But they were only a handful, and the damage was enormous - it was like a few dozen people trying to clean up and restore a nation wrecked by hurricanes and earthquakes.

So for most of the early Fracture the Apexai were in a zombie-like state, in complete isolation from the rest of the galaxy, and it was up to a literal handful of functioning Apexai to keep their race safe. They used their warsaucers and the enormous technological sophistication of their worlds' defenses to scare away any newcomers. That worked well enough on the Fractured humans, and maybe they were some ways to restoring a semblance of order amongst their kind - but then, well, Byzon happened.

Maybe he figured it out or maybe it was dumb blind luck, but the Imperator called their bluff and three undercrewed warsaucers can't be everywhere, not when they face ten thousand paleocruisers, and the rest is history.

The Apexai who escaped to the Sovereignty were the handful who were functioning when the Bragulans struck, the oldest and most powerful minds amongst their kind. And for them, the destruction of much of their species has been both a blessing and a curse. A curse, because maintaining the Oversoul is now impossible, and wilderness has basically overtaken it. But also a blessing because it allows them to start with a clean slate, and in the collapse all the deadly psychobarriers on forbidden sections of the Oversoul have failed so they can do anything they like.

The Apexai as a species have never been in more peril, but they have also not been so completely free and unrestrained as they are now. Because those who yet live have faced all the horrors and trauma of millions of years of their civilization and come through not unscathed, not undamaged, but alive. The Apexai that are still around are deeply scarred and traumatized, extremely powerful, and more than a little insane even by the lofty standards of their own species.

Perhaps that is also why they help the Sovereignty with its hybrid program: they want to reinforce their number, and use their batches of clone bodies to reincarnate ancient Apexai sorcerers ghosts who haunt the abandoned Oversoul.

[Shroom Man 777]

I do like that idea (and kind of - in essence or in character - connects with Vic's SPACE HELL that is the Babylos Infall).

I guess the sheer scale of the Cataclysm means that it's gotta have more effects on others - particularly psionically-reliant types like the Apexai - beyond the human sphere? Beyond the Fracture? Though I wonder... would it just be the Apexai who'd get really destabilized by the Cataclysm? It was like their kryptonite? The Samtic Nexus, Gorok Phalanges and other powers that were less psionically-reliant don't get as messed up?

It would make me feel better if the Reignfall was the latest in a string of things eroding the Apexai Oversoul. I can't imagine what other cataclysms occurred beforehand that would have such an impact though... the growth of the Karlacks? Maybe centuries ago the K-Zone was bigger and the current-Karlack border used to belong to another bunch of species that got eaten... and that also messed up the Apexai psychostrata (and probably required some degree of Oversoul usage to prevent the Karlacks from spilling over?)? Would the hijinks of the Samtics (particularly the early Samtics and the Overlords and the Phyrron) and the Sajit/Bounty and the Myrran be of sufficient scale to affect the Apexai?

This might explain how they ended up becoming total aloof condescending asses... and in a way "grand (invisible) structure of a bountiful empire is degraded by the misfortunes and tragedies around it" is also commentary I think.

[Siege]

Perhaps some elements (or... shall we say... ASPECTS) of the Karlack hivemind infiltrated areas of the Oversoul. Not so much an invasion as an percolation of other-ness that the Apexai recognized as not-them, forcing sanitation of certain regions of the Oversoul. But that seems like a relatively minor issue, frankly: it may have happened many times in the past that particularly potent entities accidentally 'break in' and imprint aspects of themselves on the Oversoul. But the collective mind-palace is so staggeringly robust, ancient and vast that they cannot possibly have a meaningful impact on all of it, and in the end even the most powerful just get embedded somewhere, whilst the Apexai work around them (or maybe it self-heals in some infathomably psycho-alien way) and slap a proverbial warning sticker on their respective thought-hall.

I think the Apexai get so badly messed up by the Cataclysm because of the similarities between Reignfall and the Titanomachy. There's a sort of mental trigger effect there that breaks down the Apexai mental seals and sends the whole race careening into a painful flashback. They saw plenty of shit go down before, but that never reminded them of who they really were back when the titans strode the galaxy, so it didn't affect them in the same way.

That doesn't mean the Oversoul didn't already have its fair share of problems before that, but at the same time I'd think they'd have built it to withstand incursions by lesser beings. So if it was tobbly-wobbly, I'd argue that it must've been so because the Apexai themselves had been messing with it.

[Shroom Man 777]

Alarm over such Titanomach-ic tyranny, the cataclysm's sheer psychic impact and the ramifications of all the suffering - that broke down their dams and barriers of aloofness (that may have been an Oversoul function?!) - and just overwhelmed them in not only the spectrum of the Oversoul psychostrata but also... the Oversoul is a result of all their mental powers combined... so the effect on the Oversoul was also the effect on their souls as individuals? There's shock, horror, maybe even guilt at allowing such a thing to happen?

It broke their amnesia-measures, their mentallic-revisionism to absolve their guilt over their collaboration with the titans! (This revisionism is something Vic and I pondered...)

Apexai overwhelmed and throwing themselves off balconies or fetching smelling salts or crystalizing themselves in penance!

Countless in shame just withered...

In a way Byzon's arrival - despite enormous losses inflicted by like three warsaucers as you said - was akin to Europeans discovering an already-depopulated Americas!

BYZON ENTERED HEAVEN ONLY TO FIND ITS THRONES EMPTY AND BLACKENED!

[Invictus]

It would make me feel better if the Reignfall was the latest in a string of things eroding the Apexai Oversoul. I can't imagine what other cataclysms occurred beforehand that would have such an impact though... the growth of the Karlacks? Maybe centuries ago the K-Zone was bigger and the current-Karlack border used to belong to another bunch of species that got eaten... and that also messed up the Apexai psychostrata (and probably required some degree of Oversoul usage to prevent the Karlacks from spilling over?)? Would the hijinks of the Samtics (particularly the early Samtics and the Overlords and the Phyrron) and the Sajit/Bounty and the Myrran be of sufficient scale to affect the Apexai?

Speaking of Apexai-Samtic relations and what a less cynical, more vigorous Apexaia could have done to keep the peace of their Invisible Empire, I did synthesize this bit of backstory:

The Pyrrhons are questionably sapient techno-barbarians who get in everyone's grill because they were scattered from their ancestral homeworlds by some past attempt to wipe them out. Their development into a starfaring civilization in the first place is implied to be the work of another branch of Overlords, who like with the Samtics were reawakened when their Xenotomb was disturbed, and who like with the Samtics Gou'ald'd their native benefactors for their trouble. (Never mind that these Overlords were more senile and decrepit and uplifted the Pyrrhons...wrong.)

Shroom posited that the combined Overlords + Pyrrhonic war machine posed enough of a threat that the Apexai went for a direct, Cataclysm-like soul nuking, annihilating the Pyrrhons' sapience and their platonic potential for it, and also blew up the Overlords so hard that they were driven into the Pyrrhons' very genes (which is why Pyrrhons today occasionally manifest instinctual technical knowledge).

My traditional backstory was that the Samtics, revering the Overlords and their Tombs greatly at that point in their history, caught wind of the Pyrrhons' origins and launched the biggest crusade ever to destroy the heretics, track down the holy Third Tomb and maybe even bag themselves some living Overlords, their own creators having died out a long time ago. This crusade was a massive clusterfuck (as crusades generally are) and none of the above goals were achieved.

whynotboth.jpg

The Samtic crusade was stalemating against the Pyrrhon god-king legions - gigaton killowar not exactly being the Samtics' forte - when the Apexai investigated the situation and recognized that the SOUL FREQUENCIES of the Pyrrhons matched with the Overlords, whom they recognized because back then, the Overlords were scavengers who consumed dead Rhapsodite essences and went mad with power and hunger, becoming rampaging borg-maggot-galactuses that the post-Titanfall powers had to fight to contain. (Until they caught the universe's first cases of Theostigma and wasted away on their own)

At this sudden reminder of post-Titanfall memory, the Apexai Oversoul reacted...rashly. Which is to say the Apexai hurled a SPIRIT BOMB at the entire mess with similar effects to the Cataclysm, soul-nuking the Pyrrhons but also mind-wiping loads of Samtics caught in the blast-wave, and nobody remembers what they were doing or where anything is any more. Whatever could have held the knowledge of the location to the Third Tomb or any surviving Overlords was lost. This understandably made the Samtics very pissed off, which explains why two of the oldest civilizations in the setting barely have anything to do with each other.

And it also serves thematically that all of this has happened before. The Apexai suffering the fruits of their own self-deception is something that has happened more than once. The Earthreign is repeating past mistakes and the Samtics can tell. And everyone today is still being plagued by what are a lot of people's past mistakes.

[Invictus]

The reach of the Bragulan Star Empire extends far beyond its borders. Where the lumbering logistic-bound warfleets of the Imperator cannot reach, individual vessels of the People's Commission of Supra-Peripheral Excursionary Scientician-Coryphaeuses can – truly gargantuan supercruisers of often paleolithic provenance, bearing city-like crews of Bragule’s finest to explore the nine vectors of space, encounter new civilizations and plant among them the seeds of Byzonic Inhumanism. In practice…

Roll a six-sided dice (or just choose) to see what the oft-understated diversity of the Bragulan Star Empire actually casts forth into the wide universe:

The Captain is…

1. A Model of His Kind, the very exemplar of Byzonist leadership with an immaculately doctrinaire approach to the unpredictable business of alien contact, a youthful right hook and an Imperator’s quote ready for every conceivable situation.
2. A Grizzled Admiral, a veteran of battle whose posting is quite far indeed from the proper ladder of promotion of the Imperial Bragulan Navy. With nothing but contempt for his circumstances, it however cannot be said that he is downright disloyal to his mission.
3. A Soviet of Officers, held by certain quarters of the Empire to most properly manifest the Byzonic spirit which is the equal heritage of all bears. Command decisions are marked by the holding of perpetual plenums and vigorous politicking.
4. A Supreme Byzontron, several hundred imperial tons of cutting-edge nucleonic vacuum tube computing, upon which runs the mind-imprint of some bygone Byzonist luminary. Said imperishable and unbending personality may even have had captaining experience.
5. Hidden by Obscurocracy, where no-one seems to have the clearance to know who is actually giving the orders. There are pre-mission directives imprinted upon the crew. There are sealed envelopes in safes to be opened in sequence. That is all.
6. Overthrown by Mutiny, an admitted risk upon ships on active long-term missions, but generally because all the elaborate safeguards have failed. Whether said lawful authority has merely been sidelined, shoved into a spare cryo-tube or actually spaced depends on circumstance.

Other notable figures on the bridge are…

1. The Diminutive Security Chief, who will not only bite the face off anyone who mocks his stature, but also the faces off entire enemy boarding teams. Uncannily familiar with the ship’s labyrinthine ventilation layouts, even given that his ability to fit into them is shared by few.
2. The Senior Commissar, wizened head of the shipborne commissariat and ultimately responsible for the crew’s ideo-spiritualogical wellbeing, master-crafted beating stick ever at the ready. He is a master at its application, capable of corrections both subtle and miraculous upon Bragulan skulls.
3. The Executive Officer is a non-Bragulan who enjoys some ship-wide acceptance, for is it not the privilege and responsibility of all peoples to fearlessly carry forward the banner of Byzonism? Nevertheless, it ill stands the ship’s typically Bragulan radiation-leaking environment.
4. The Chief Engineer was originally unfrozen from deep cryo to wrangle some equally venerable shipboard system. He has seen whole battlefleets go mad plunging into the psychic phantasmagoria of Apexaia’s fangs, and no weirdness on this expedition can faze him.
5. The Estheto-Synthesist is a polymath at the very edge of Byzonist theory, digesting all data the ship has collected beyond doctrine or orthodoxy and rendering them into an acceptable narrative through esoteric multi-cognition techniques.
6. The Telestron Guest, a slow tornado of metallic splinters that always seem to be wandering places, making conversation by way of humming cryptic aphorisms. Standing orders are that none are to bar its passage anywhere, or count the number of lights above its crown.

The Away Team is…

1. The Usual Composition of litho-engineers, savant-planeticians, ideologically quarantined xeno-linguists and –psychologists cryogenically frozen into optimal mixes before launch, supplemented by all the shore-sick ratings one can round up. How ho-num.
2. Revolutionary Vanguardists! consisting of the Captain and all the bridge officers he trusts. In following the Imperator’s example of always being at the forefront of the struggle he inspires his whole crew to further loyalty, and not because they’re all bumbling incompetents.
3. Extreme Contact Operations Away Teams of a diminutive Bragulan sub-breed, whose ferocity is only exceeded by their mastery in sneaking through unfamiliar terrain. Expect very thorough reconnaissance and inexplicable terror to spread through the native populace.
4. Drop Legions of fully equipped crack naval stormtroopers, trained to hold planetary beachheads and little else. Expect slightly less shooting than an actual warzone, but given standards Bragulan operating procedure in securing orbital landings, perhaps not much less.
5. Undertaken by Catgirls or some similarly charismatic subject species of the Empire, backed by considerable maskirovka resources. An ideologically controversial policy to say the least, but some aliens simply don’t take well to the Bragulan approach.
6. A Punishment Detail for the ideologically suspect, the politically impure and the plain disfavored in the ship’s own elaborate hierarchy, escorted by numerous commissars. Not a sign of mission dedication, but perhaps ship and crew have better rationales.

Ship-to-surface interface is generally accomplished by…

1. Flights of Shuttles of characteristically rugged and versatile Bragulan design, with bays suited for hauling bombs as much as passengers. A straightforward and reliable means of conveyance, as long as the clouds torn apart by fallout-scattering contrails spoil nothing.
2. Dropships of the Long March, ancient titans as subtle and aerodynamic as bricks, with many a story of them losing propulsion mid-descent and crash-landing to form perfectly intact fortresses. Very patriotic, but quite limited in their sphere of operations.
3. Skycranes lowered directly from the ship to ground level, super-strong cables that can drop and winch cargo with about as much discretion as Bragulans are capable of. The occasional overstressed cable snapping and gouging through mountains is the price to pay.
4. Vertical Exploration Capsules are simple unpowered drop pods on the descent, delivering their contents to the surface with point-accurate, vomit-inducing alacrity. That they re-ascend into orbit through megaton pulse explosives can be a perk as well.
5. Transport Torpedoes, in truth modified interplanetary weapons with most shielding and anti-counter-measures intact, compatible with the launch tubes of most Bragulan capital ships. Designed to smash through to the target with sheer kinetic force, these are a rough ride.
6. Transmat Beams simply teleport away teams between ship and surface through some Apexai space-warping sorcery, and are used with much paranoia. That the system’s jury-rigged targeting sensors can barely punch through the ship’s own radioactive interference is also an issue.

Goodies that the away team carries…

1. Portable Byzontrons are miracles of Bragulan miniaturization, (barely) bear-portable machines for aiding the analysis of any conceivable environment. Paw-held extension devices can emit a variety of patriotic radiations for scanning and self-defense purposes.
2. Terror Thralls are the fruit of Bragule’s pacification of the nine vectors, particularly monstrous aliens captured and indoctrinated to serve the Imperator and his away teams. Simple muscle, perhaps, but cannier captains can put them to more deniable uses.
3. Peace Crawlers are the ne plus ultra of environmental encounter suits, because they are actually towering mecha whose gait readily surmounts any terrain obstacle. However, they also shroud the Bragulan visage in something that’s frankly even more intimidating.
4. Atomic Imaging Charges can effectively map swathes of geography through measurements of blast waves and radiation penetration. No conundrums regarding quantum theory – that which is obliterated by the harsh light of Byzonist inquiry isn’t worth observing in the first place.
5. Prefab Broadcasters can be assembled on site and tower over the landscape, their isotopic batteries powering an overpowering transmission of patriotic messages and approved folk songs. Great for away team morale, and may also awaken early seeds of Byzonism among radio-canny natives.
6. Byzonic Spirit Instillation Devices Mk I, a classic Bragulan tool for high-impact ideological correction. For once, there are enough for every crewbear. If only they worked as well on other species, which are somehow cursed with both undue intransigence and overly fragile skulls…

The ship’s defensive systems include…

1. Explosive Reactive Armor, a standard feature on Bragulan starships of most sizes, designed to blunt the impact of incoming attack and also take out any attackers that get too close. In this case, some of the less vital hull sections allow for hasty retrofitting into the same.
2. A Very Passive-Aggressive Array, a network of deployable and disposable satellites that, together with an impressive feat of coordinated computation by Bragulan standards, massively extends the ship’s sensor horizon. The satellites can be refitted back into missiles.
3. Plutonium Punji Pits, active and sharpened nuclear fuel rods set in simple gravity traps. Hostile boarders who fall victim to these will find themselves simultaneously impaled, irradiated and incinerated. So will careless crew, though.
4. Hyperspace Flares, volleys of specialized bombs launched into higher dimensions by nuclear-thermal mortars to detonate in waves of pseudo-tachyonic hyper-radiation, blinding most forms of FTL communication and targeting.
5. Vacuum Tube Autoloaders supplement the inherent toughness of Bragulan shipbuilding by literally plugging (at extremely rapid rates) one of its weaknesses – exploding fuses for overloaded circuitry that tend to maim crew with sprays of deadly brag-glass.
6. The Revengeance Protocol, where the ship has been extensively retrofitted such that, when self-destructed in a planet’s orbit, it will scatter a layer of radioactive debris to set back spaceflight development for centuries. For this is the final vengeance: Bragule will take the sky from them!

Elements of the all-encompassing empire along for the ride…

1. A Psychohistorical Modeling Department, a working group of academic- apparatchiks that ever seem to take up more deck space with blackboards and tables full of miniature figures. They claim to be able to simulate the results of any landing expedition without having to do it.
2. Bearmpaths, uncanny Bragulans born to engineered population pressures in the deep coreworlds and harvested for Imperial service. Suspected but never demonstrated to possess heterodox psionic powers, their various talents are nevertheless useful.
3. Kosmoflott Kadets, hundreds of second-line trainer (but quite genuinely armed) snubfighters, each piloted by an excitable cub with the air of being on a field trip. Such may well describe the valuable experience they will receive, or may expose their tragic optimism…
4. The Bragulag Consignment is an entire deviant population expected to be dropped off somewhere suitably inhospitable to start a penal colony, currently pacified only by the strength of bulkheads and other shipwide systems. How much disruption can they cause in such a state?
5. A Propaganda Unit, semi-independently tasked to transform the ship’s journey in glourious propaganda to make benefit the spectacle-hungry masses back home. A captain must balance ill-advised decisions for better footage and political favor.
6. Agents of the IBGV, or the Imperial Bureau of Galactic Vigilance, whom everyone else hopes are merely hitching a ride into alien space and will be getting off as soon as possible and not investigating anyone for ideological faults real or imagined.

[Invictus]

BTW, my first rolls for the categories from top to bottom in order are 2,4,4,2,3,4,1, which gives us an absurdly congruous unsubtle behemoth of a Bragulan Enterprise led by a pair of old war dogs and also stuffed with paleomilitary hardware, which it can actually get away with not using.

[Shroom Man 777]

3 3 1 5 3 4 6

Could have been better. The commanders - 3 and 3 - are a clusterfuck and I guess that explains the presence of 6, the IBGV.

[Booted Vulture]

A Very Passive-Aggressive Array, a network of deployable and disposable satellites that, together with an impressive feat of coordinated computation by Bragulan standards, massively extends the ship’s sensor horizon. The satellites can be refitted back into missiles.

I do love this name.

[speaker-to-trolls]

6-1-6-2-3-2-2

May the Omega Point have mercy on whatever poor planet encounters this crew

[Steve]

So I've been commenting on this with Shroom, mostly, and Siege as well...

Speaker-to-trolls and Shroom have been reading my Undiscovered Frontier series, which is a homage to 90s-style plot arc sci-fi like DS9 and Babylon-5, and is based around interuniversal travel capability, a crew with a cool ship, and encountering various universes (Star Trek, Mass Effect, Stargate SG-1, Babylon-5, and BattleTech have all made appearances thus far). The story format is a written TV show, with an opening pilot/mini-series and seven seasons, with the pilot and first season now complete.n (They're in the Lit forum if you're curious... )

The reason I'm posting about this in here is that... I was going to make little call-outs to elements of this setting you've got here, specifically stuff I remember from the SDNW4 STGOD back in 2010-2011. Solaris has been name-dropped a few times so far, I've mentioned that a Zigonian joined the crew at the start of Season 2 (low level crew, so he won't play a role in any plans I have short of an amusing humor short/scene I've thought of), and in Season 2 there will be an episode where the crew in question visits Solaris and has a bit of an adventure there.

As I thought more on it, I had a growing conflict - I wanted to have, among many figures who will play roles in the major plot arcs, a Solarian businessmen of immense resources and Machiavellian ingenuity playing a role. I was going to name my own for a while, but it felt dishonest since in my head, it was blatantly Sidney Hank that I was thinking of. Siege has given me his blessing to use SIdney and, after some reconsideration and thoughts on going with an original character after all, I've decided to stick with that.

But now, due to talks with Shroom, I've found that some aspects of this setting also fit with my plans, especially the destruction of Earth.

So what I'm now asking is, does anyone have any objections to me utilizing some of SOTS in my storylines, or to me tweaking with the ideas in it to fit what my plot arc plans for (the cause of the destruction/disapperance of Earth is a big part of this), or even inserting worlds and groups that seem to fit the SOTS setting if I have an idea for them that can play a role in the stories of UF? I will, of course, give credit where credit is due (as it is I was going to remark on SOTS when I finally get to the aforementioned episode on Solaris).

[Shroom Man 777]

You have my reptile-pope blessings.

Also, reposting here what I sent you on FB PM, because this is thread-relevant (though we probably already discussed this!):

The Ziggies are built for all sorts of shamanistic sub-cultures. The Tsorra-Mahl (pronounced Tooramal by normal humans), which is the largest conventional state of the Ziggies, have MEDIATORS who are the shaman buddhist zen monks who meditate and shit and can impartially arbitrate disputes and conflicts in their rave-party communal orgy of a society, usually just through SPEECH CHECKS.

When shit gets real their conventional weapons are BIOMECHANICAL COLOSSAL CREATURES - they ride Gamera-Gundam Evangelions
that off-duty they animal-husbandry in garden-battle bases.

[Invictus]

The whims of the Raptured Lords are generally served by whole interstellar trade empires' worth of slaves, servants and employees, most of all with the Hirados on top, but there are also those known as the Hirad-Hands, whose servitude is marked by an...absent portion of their anatomy. It might be a perfectly circular hole through their torso, or a missing shoulder to which a disembodied arm is still attached, or some even more gross mutilation. Nevertheless, such absent parts are fully functional, merely hidden away by the dimensional science-sorcery of the Raptured Lords. Still, such marks a more personal connection between Hand and eldritch patron than mere chains of debt or duty, and they are seen as more special for that reason.

The relationship between a Hirado and a Hirad-Hand of course varies depending on the eccentricities of the Raptured Lord in question. Some are basically failed Hirados in some way, who lost the ineffable lottery that Hirados won and were rewarded with authority, but of a different nature. In other cases, they may be one and the same. For certain Hands, the location of their absence may be symbolic of the nature of their debt. At other times it may just be a pragmatic signifier that they bear other, potent hypertech on their persons.

What does everyone think about the idea?

[Shroom Man 777]

I like it!

Some of these Hirads' Hands are probably Hirados or Hirado-contenders who got shafted by other Hirados.

The name implies they serve under the Hirados though. That's the impression I got in our convo and the wordplay of the name. But this piece suggests that they might not be below the Hirados in the chain of command.

[Siege]

That's a great play on words. I like it. And it might be more of... parallel promotion tracks? Sort of like how the consiglieri and the hitman both serve the capo, but in different capacities? The Hirado being the public face and the Hirad Hand the dirty wetworkers, in a sort of Contact vs. Special Circumstances kind of way, with a dash of Faust?

[Shroom Man 777]

Yeah, I'd imagine they are the ones who'd provide muscle and getting their hands dirty as needed for the brainsy businessy empire-running focused Hirados, in charge of the corporeal affairs of the Raptured Lords. The heralds of the herald.

They could look like...



On the missing anatomical components are hovering symbols and sigils to show what has been Dealt unto them by the Raptured Lords.

[Invictus]

The more outrageous aspects of Byzon-worship among the ignorant and superstitious Bragulan proletariat can't entirely be attributed to the success of Imperial meme-engineering; research into paleo-Bragulan cultures show an immemorial tendency for the species to venerate a succession of hero-bogatyr demiurges who are attributed with most of advancements of Bragulan civilization, a tendency which the cult of Imperator Byzon exploited and monopolized. No wonder then, are the tales of the Imperator laying magna-track faster than any decadent track-laying machine by drawing upon the immeasurable strength of the proletariat; or facilitating the settlement of a planet by pushing it closer to its sun; or indeed holding the sun still in the sky until a humble and beleagued factory-soviet can complete their impossible work quota within the day-shift, so multifarious and readily accepted.

One particularly intriguing archeo-fable that still circulates in the Empire itself is how the Bragulan heroes of old slew the gods and received the people's adulation in their place. This links to Bragulan civilization's early mastery of the dread mineral verdigrite, which indicates the presence of massive native deposits located within their primordial territories. And given the much-speculated origin of verdigrite as the shed blood of the godlike beings known as Telestrons...

[Shroom Man 777]

Vic I'm wondering... we've forgotten that the Ygrd-Zel-Ruun need members in the Samtic Nexus so we can have non-human non-Exilate Nexus pilgrims.

Perhaps some Ruun, who later became more Ruun, actually shifted from individualism when they encountered some Daur and decided that civilization was cool? And other Ruun, due to their individualism, were fine with this and so the creation of various Ruun polities - from allies of the Nexus, trading associates of the Nexus and actual members of the Nexus - came about rather bloodlessly?

And so the less-individualistic Ruun would be the ones who are into the whole introspection of their meta-species' history and origins and all that shebang?

Presumably even individualistic Ruun would be curious and would work with other Ruun - since their individualism isn't really anti-social, it's just utter self-sufficiency due to super-biomecha-tech - so we've got these gnarly space-faring, FTL-capable, winged wormy pseudo-Mutualisks going all INDIANA JONES around all sorts of xenotombs and cosmocrypts across the galaxy!

Presumably the Ruun competition wouldn't just be GENE-SIMULATION poke-battles but other forms of constructively-competitive Darwinian exchanges for the evolutionary advancement of all sorts of things they value. Including SCIENCE!

[Invictus]

I agree with pretty much everything Shroom wrote.

It makes sense for all Ruun to explore around and obtain new experiences to inspire their genetic simulations. As much as any single Ruun is designed to be able to re-manufacture the diversity of their entire species through randomizing their custom zygotes, their gene-pokemon will ultimately grow insular and degenerate if all they did was pageant-battle the same opponents over and over. So yeah, even the more individualistic Ruun should be pretty wide-ranging naturally, which means they would bump into elements of the Nexus eventually.

And by "elements" I mean the Daur - as space whale truckers they venture outside Nexus territories a lot, and actually aren't an uncommon sight around the Cascade and the Fracture (at least, around those bits of it where they are less likely to be mistaken for cosmozoans/Karlacks). It would be easy for the two biopunk spacerover species to find common ground and get along, and the next thing you know the Ruun are leveraging their bio-manufacturing prowess to run packages of bespoke bioloads for space money, as though Errance was also a flying factory and a mutalisk.

And we kind of wrap back to my private image of what made the Ruun so compelling in the first place, which is gribbly space mutalisks being hired by the Space UN to divebomb a planet with aid packages.

I'm not sure how a Nexus-affiliated Ruun polity would be organized, but I think we agree that the Ruun would be the ones actively forging connections into the xeno-pilgrimage circuit thing because they're the best-traveled, and I'd additionally make them the crucible of a more universal archeosophist ideology that *everyone's* ancient forgotten origins are worth revisiting. There's certainly enough FORBIDDEN HISTORY just with humans alone to dig up.

[Shroom Man 777]

I want there to be Indiana Jones-type of Ruun especially since unlike the Yggrd (and I don't know yet about the Zel) the Ruun - by originating from THE GANTRY, that space platform mess of biomechanical scaffolding - have the best reason to be perpetually curious about their origins and to suspect their nature as developed descendants of pan-galactic progenitors and their gene-sequencing pokemon-ways might also be instrumental in examining their potential past-incarnations, their ancestry, and figuring out who are their cousins (the Y-Z). This would have self-serving benefits too in that it would help the Ruun figure out how to enhance themselves more!

OTOH the Yggrd might've crawled out of vaults on their worlds and might've developed a "we had great ancestors who came before, we came from these sacred chambers!" religion - which is great - but they might be OK with creationism or intelligent design and perhaps unlike the Ruun wouldn't be as well positioned to discover their true pan-galactic ancient origins.

Yggrd don't come with organic FTL-drives placed in between their kidneys either.

[Invictus]

Ah yes, the Gantry. There can be similar space structures where Ruun can congregate and form societies, with battle arenas and biomass stockpiles and literal gene-pools and so on.

To be fair, the Ygrd sounded pretty active too - jokes about them turning their homeworld into the EXTREME SPORTS PLANET aside. It's the Zel that need working out (and can probably be done as Speaker is here) since we last left them they were like just robot-building slugs?

[Shroom Man 777]

Ah, but the Yggrd aren't born spacefarers and their sphere of influence is mostly to the Cascade and their neighbors, and so they're preoccupied with their B5-esque inhuman-Earth Alliance shebang. The Joining of Plurispeciestic Planets.

The Ruun due to their circumstances and by being high-biomechatech FTL-capable mutalisks... have more leeway to explore cosmic mysteries and are natural pilgrim-wanderers.

The Zel... we wanted the opposite extreme, yes? Super-sheltered guise with virtual feeds and manufactured servitors...

[Shroom Man 777]

Vic and I (mostly I..) have decided that the Zel, who are the sedentary caterpillar cyber-robo-maestro-artisans amongst the Ygrd-Zel-Ruun... will aside from being pudgy also be wrinkly...

Like centipedes + pugs.

Pugpedes.

[Invictus]

Pugpedes whose innumerable stumpy legs have stumpyfied to the point of uselessness, in fact, so they roll around in environmentally-sealed locomotion spheres. In other words, hamster balls!

[Shroom Man 777]

The BALLS (said LT. Ike Ong) would be filled with some non-Newtonian fluids too I guess with nano-rejuvenative and nutritive properties, liquid that they can breathe. So they're rolling in balls of bacta.