#that ended in a war and COULD have ended in the purging or several hundred innocent people in the kirkwall circle.

[spectral-snippets-and-drabbles]

Death Warrant!Au

When the rejuvenating, life-extending effects of ectoplasm to the dead and dying was discovered by planets across the stars, it triggered mass conflicts that left several systems obliterated beyond repair. Hundreds of Billions had migrated to the Realms in numbers that were never seen before by the residence of the dead. They had various forms of damage and disfigurement on their new forms as a result of the ectoplasm being weaponized and used on them. Their very beings were corrupted beyond repair with their minds significantly altered with highly specified obsessions.

• Peoples from the destroyed worlds being so afraid that they lashed out, ripping anything that saw them to pieces out of fear of being attacked.

A serpentine creature of the Realms eagerly stalking them and fed upon their cores to grow stronger.

• Soldiers of these races were hell-bent on continuing to fight and proceeded to attempt subjugate this dimension that was new to them. Their rage guiding them blindly as they left paths of destruction throughout the realm.

A beast, wrongly slaughtered in the early madness of an delicate fledgling world that happened to be rich with ectoplasm followed the warpath and basked in the rage.

Eventually, more creatures like them came to prominence as a result of these strange new victims. Being aspects of emotion that were born from the masses in the war.

The Ghost King during this time period could not sit idly by and watch these newly born ghosts run rampant and terrorize his kingdom. With a heavy heart and a weapon in hand, a call to arms was called and the purge of these beings began. It tooks thousands of years, but when the last corrupted ghost was destroyed, the King took to the realm of living and wiped away all traces of the Realms from the minds of the survivors with all recollections of this terrible war for ectoplasm erased from history.

As his rested his eyes one final time, before the Tyrant would cowardly claim his life, made a major, sacred declaration that all citizens was made:

• If any hostile, mutant ghosts were to be found, they were to captured and examined by the king's council to await judgement. If they are too dangerous to restrain and seek bloody violence, they are to be destroyed.

• Any scientists trying to use ectoplasm for endangering life were to be have their memories erased and put to the sword for their crimes.

• Anyone foolish enough to Defy Death using ectoplasm, the greatest violation of the laws in the infinite Realms, they were to be put to death as and immediately given their Second End.

~•~ ~•~ ~•~ ~•~ ~•~

When Pariah Dark, the Cowardly Tyrant King, is defeated and Danny fianlly takes the throne after a few centuries of training, the Observers hand him a compiled a list of names who violated these sacred laws.

They have him start with Earth and Danny's jaw hits the floor with what the charges he was seeing. He can already hear the chaos in the meeting room.

• Amanda Waller, Vandal Savage, Darkseid, Granny Goodness, a court of owls(?)...the list is long, and that's just Earth alone!

• Jack "The Goddamn Joker" Napier and a few of the more violent Rouges of Gotham are charged with Veil Destabilization.

Even Jason Peter Todd Wayne...the Red Hood!? Danny can probably work something with Jason, force him into therapy sessions (along with the whole damn family) with Jazz and a couple cleansing sessions and supplements from Frostbite...the others had to go...

The continued slaughter of the innocent, combined with the suffering they endured and the misery felt by Shades who couldn't move on was making the veil deteriorate at dangerous speeds. New pits would form across the city eventually as a result.

Lady Gotham has done everything she can to keep the madness from happening but she can't hold it back any longer. Her core is ready to shatter under the stress and is constantly in agony, but she won't abandon her knights, despite Danny's pleas to save herself.

There's a certain brigade of furry's who may or may not like this news but said brigade had no choice but to take it on the chin. They have children who Defied Death in their ranks and the Realms are not afraid to destroy anyone foolish enough to stop them.

• Lex Luther is charged with crimes against humanity. And several other violations in regards to unethical experimentation.

One sticks out to Danny.

Lex used Danny's stolen DNA from a stray core shard from the Guys in White, who he was was funding in secret, even after they were disbanded, to create a clone comprised of the Earth's resident Kryptonian, the bald bastard, and himself to kill and replace said Kryptonian...the guy who literally helps save the earth time and time again from doom.

...Yeah, Lex is undoubtedly, fucked beyond total comprehension. Anyone defending him was risking all-out war with the Infinite Realms.

But hey, at least Danny was finally having child of his own! The little tyke is only a few years old in the tube, Ellie's visits are far and in-between and Danny's status as a Halfa made him sterile and develop an embarrassingly strong case of baby fever.

He's sure the ghosts from Krypton would love to help out in raising Conner in case Kal-El wasn't really planning on being around the boy. After all, being cloned himself, Danny knows the emotional baggage that comes with being violated to this degree by your enemy.

He just hopes the guy can come around and accept the little guy...

#dp x dc #dc x dp #dp x dc prompt #dp x dc crossover #justice league #danny phantom #my prompts #Death Warrant!Au #I've seen fics were Danny Time Travels to fix things #I've also read were he gains amnesia so he accidentally lives in the past until he remembers who he is #Lex Luthor is a bitch with a very slappable bald head that Danny is gonna smack the soul out of #Danny is gonna hook up Jason with therapy from Jazz and cleansing sessions with Frostbite #When Damien is finally born and with Bruce is the day everyone in the League of Assassins is gonna get wiped off the face the fucking Earth #You don't fuck with the abyss because it'll do more than simply look back #Eldritch Mama Bear!Danny #Conner is gonna be spoiled rotten #If Damien is also partially Danny's kid he wont wait and waste the League the second he can grab him #Being the 'Demon's Head' doesn't mean jackshit when the ectoplasm youve been uskng is the equivalent of used toilet water #Bruce Wayne x Danny Fenton x Clark Kent #Clark was worried his many times great grandfather was hitting on him #But Danny told him that he helped save krytpon and found the house kf El so there no blood relation #Due to amnesia inflicted during his time traveling Danny accidently created the embodiments lf Emotion from each Lantern Corps #Danny's first anniversary gift is bringing Bruce and Clark's parents to Earth to spend tkme with them #Bruce is afraid this will be the last time he gets to see them but Danny tells him he and Clark can tag along for Jason's treatment #Alfred is happy for his boy and is happy to see Thomas and Martha #Conner and Clark bonding with Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van about Krypton culture

[ninapi]

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- ̥۪͙۪˚┊❛ Re:Born ❜┊˚ ̥۪͙۪◌

Premise: In a world dominated by androids, the few remaining humans had to fight for survival. Your boyfriend Suguru, wanted to destroy them all and regain supremacy of the lost world, yet things don't always go as planned. A love once lost, solidifies. An opportunity to go back into the arms of a man that has always loved you since the beginning of time.

Word Count: 4024

Note: This is a romance Sci-fi AU, a bit different to what I normally write lol, but hope you like it anyways! It will be a two part story~

Chapter 1: The lost world

Life has changed a lot during the last couple hundred years, after the great war, human nature ended up destroying itself as it commonly does.

Science had been developing at a faster rate when more and more weapons were needed, androids becoming the new soldiers as humans kept dying like swamp rats, one after the other.

Androids were strong, they could be fixed, modified, artificial intelligence was at its peak and adding it to the ‘robot soldiers’ as they were called, was just the easiest call, you didn’t need to program them if they could think for themselves, if they could fix themselves, if they could make their own decisions and save humanity.

At first, it was a great idea, it gave humanity a chance to survive, though the damage had been done. Majority of men died in the intense battles scattered throughout the globe and all there was left were women and children, safe for the injured men with severe trauma and injuries.

And so, humanity couldn’t come back from that.

Giving artificial intelligence to soldiers was far from a great idea, it gave power to those better than men, to those stronger than men, and now that they didn’t need humans for their own preservation, they weren’t needed anymore.

The great war had evolved once more and instead of humans hunting their equals, now they were being hunted by their own creations.

Not many could survive the purge and those who could were caught and gathered in factories to elaborate new parts for their now masters. Of course, as soon as they learned how to make them themselves, the rest of human population was eradicated completely in what is now called ‘Doom day’, also known as ‘Liberation day’ the only holiday celebrated now a days after the creation of the new nation.

No countries were needed anymore, they were one mass now, all helped each other, no need for wars anymore, a perfect functioning society, an elite one at that, yet, humans were not part of said of world.

Some managed to escape before the explosion, mostly children, and those are the only ones who remained, camps with survivors were rarely found and if found by the wrong source, they were annihilated in the spot, though, some of the elite of the old world, those with money and connections managed to save themselves and their offspring, in hopes of returning one day to their rightful place.

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R001-59 was a prototype created to document the past. It was an unnecessary thing to do, majority of them thought, though, you can learn from the past, avoid making the same mistakes, maintain order by following old rules and modifying those that didn’t work as intended.

Recording history was his task, sharing details with those in need of information, his occupation.

Though this android was one of a kind, having to be so immersed in human culture, he developed some sort of interest, an obsession even, with the processing of emotions and why androids weren’t able to feel them.

The leaders said emotions were not necessary, they brought chaos, and that’s what got them eradicated from this planet. But to R001-59, humans were fascinating.

He would spend his time off browsing the data base for old movies and series, things that could get him to understand better the nature of the thing called love, the one called pain and those strange things called hormones.

They were all such fascinating concepts, and even if the theory was there, understanding something you can’t experience isn’t always as satisfying as others are.

There were records about an artifact found on a district far north, in a place desolated, only trash would go there, the living pods and buildings were far away in places where war hadn’t destroyed the beauty of nature and those that they managed to fix over time, but the northern peninsula was designated as a giant trash bin, all the toxic wastes were dumped there, all the broken parts would be left there to rust if they weren’t able to refurbish them.

But this artifact was used to clean teeth, according to the records.

And androids don’t have teeth.

That meant that in that desolated plain of destruction, there was a slim chance of finding a human camp.

Keeping this information to himself would certainly be considered treason. Could get him dismantled and discontinued for this, but curiosity was embedded in his chip, he was made this way in order to promote finding information needed for the community, it couldn’t be helped, if having a dream was possible for an android, his dream was to meet a human, at least once, so it wasn’t surprising to see him hiding in the shadows of tall buildings and crawling in the sewers until the desired destination was reached.

The camp was indeed there, as far as possible from the toxic river, past the mountains of scraps, hidden inside of a mountain range carved from the inside and turned into living quarters. It was unbelievable, all his years of research were proving useful as he was able to open locks, sneak inside the complex and even gave him time to analyze discarded cans of beverages, the drops of the content’s chemical construction not even registered in any database, amazing.

 “Who’s there?” a shaky breath could be heard behind the android, a flashlight shining under its feet.

“My name is R001-59, human. Is a pleasure to meet you, please don’t let my presence cause you any sort of distress, I mean no harm.” the terrified look in your eyes made him continue with his reassuring speech, “I was designed to storage human culture, behaviors and past in a data base, always wanted to meet one alive. That’s how I ended up here, after many years searching for your species. I wouldn’t do anything that could harm you.”

You still looked scared, shocked even. How was it possible for a droid to get through the mine field and all the booby traps in place, they were designed to fool androids, only humans could figure them out, that was a fact tested by the previous generation.

“Human woman, what is it that you’re called? I would like to record my findings. Also, what is this dark liquid in this container? I’m intrigued by its content, never seen anything like it before.” that’s all it took to break through your barrier, making you giggle at his question, “It’s called coffee. And I’m (Y/N). I don’t think you’ll be welcomed here, buddy. You’re lucky I’m the one that found you and not Yaga.”

The android waddled to your side, leaving the can of coffee behind, a steel cold hand now holding your face up for inspection. “Why do you have hair on your eyes? I always wondered about that. Your eye hair is also very pretty, didn’t know that was possible, I thought they were all the same.”

“They’re called eyelashes, and thank you, I guess. They are supposed to stop dust and things from getting in your eyes.” you could see lights blinking in his eyes as he inputted the gained information into his data base, your face was fascinating. “How about top eye hair? What’s that for?”

“You mean the eyebrows? Honestly, I always wondered about that too, I guess they’re an extra layer of security for the eyes. Eyes are very delicate they need to be well protected. Though, if you ask me, we would all look better without them.” your light chuckles made his lights turn pink, this was an unknown reaction, his manual didn’t say anything about pink being an option.

Though the pretty lights got your attention, “So blue means recording information, right? What about pink? What does that mean?” it was only fair to share information with you, you were kind enough to reply to all his questions yourself.

“Correct. Blue means recording, green means searching, red means dead battery. Pink has never shown up before.” green intermittent sparkles followed after your question. So there were things not even androids knew about themselves, interesting, they weren’t as different from humans as you had thought.

“(Y/N)? Sweetling why are you here this late?” Gojo Satoru, your childhood friend, could be seen coming from his room, a look of anger taking over his handsome features as his blue eyes darted on the metal scrap by your side.

“What the fuck? How did that get in here? Get away from her immediately if you want to function ever again.” his booming voice alerted the android, stepping away from you as a sign of understanding.

“Satoru, don’t. He hasn’t done anything to me, he’s just a curious android who seems to know more about humanity than we do.” you would never be on their side, they killed your mother, your own boyfriend was now on a surgical table because of them, why were you this calm?

“Must I remind you Suguru is pretty much dead because of them now???” losing his best friend was still a touchy subject for him, it was a recent happening and one that must be fixed with urgency.

“Suguru himself is the only reason he is the way he is right now. Of course it hurts, but it’s not this android’s fault. He is just curious, wants to know about us, has questions about coffee and eyelashes, not about traps and weapons. If he wanted to hurt me, I would be dead already.” R001-59 has never been defended in his entire life, the rest always mocked him for his obsession with the human pest, but seems like the records were accurate, there were different types of humans, you were in the kind and lovable bunch, it appears like.

“They’re dangerous, (Y/N) and why are you calling it a he? It’s a machine, not a man, don’t forget that.”

“Are you jealous of an android, Satoru?” your teasing tone of voice made him blush and stutter, coming closer to look at the uninvited guest closer. “S-shut up. So what do you want here, metal pile?”

“My name is R001-59, It’s a pleasure to meet you. I came here to study real life humans as part of my task of recording human nature, culture and past. Can I ask why are your eyes this colorful? They seem different.”

“What? My eyes? Ugh, I don’t know, man. They’re like this for everyone in my clan.”

“Oh, so that’s what inherited traits mean. I see. I didn’t know eyes could be this beautiful, they look like what is called ‘a galaxy’, even if I haven’t seen one either, but reference says that’s what it should look like.” his blushing just intensified, what a wild experience.

“See? He’s a good boy, aren’t you buddy.” you were petting his head lovingly, amused by Satoru’s reaction.

“It’s not a dog, (Y/N).”

“I know he’s not a dog, but he’s so cute. Can we keep him?” the conversation felt too intimate somehow, even if you were his best friend’s girlfriend, he’s always had a crush on you since you were both young children playing in the toxic pits.

“Well that depends, are you asking me as your future husband, wanting to raise a baby puppy droid? Because if that’s the case I might consider it to make my lovely wife happy.” you couldn’t avoid chuckling at his antics, it’s always been this way, flirting with you was his second nature.

“Are human couples always this tender with each other? In the material I’ve gathered they always seemed to be rough with each other, angry and in the middle of fights.” you were right, this android was cute.

“We aren’t a human couple. Just friends.” your rosy cheeks were a bit misleading, confusing the android.

 “In my database, friends pull pranks on each other and be there for you when you cry. I didn’t know flirting was in constitution of such term as well, I’ve learned so much already and I’ve been here for such a short time. This is beyond amazing.” his definition wasn’t wrong, you’ve always known things with Satoru weren’t quite normal, but Suguru was always there to keep him at bay.

“Buddy, come into my room, Yaga should be doing his rounds around the premise soon, he’ll kill you on the spot if he sees you.” you were holding his hand gently, bringing him over to your quarters, followed by an irritated Satoru.

This would get messy.

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Suguru and you have been a thing for years, since your sixteenth birthday to be exact.

Before that date, everyone thought you and Satoru would end up together.

He, being the heir to the most powerful clan of the whole compound, was the only one allowed to do whatever he wanted, even if the remaining activists from the other generation opposed to his reckless behavior quite often.

But Suguru’s kind hearted nature won you over.

He was always the sweetest friend there is, and even sweeter as a boyfriend. Always caring, making you nice things out of scraps, always there to hold you throughout the uncertainty of the world you lived in.

But things started going south when the attack on the east compound hit.

They were your neighboring human camp, and weren’t as prepared as you were. Unlike you, you had Yaga who was always on top of the max security of the place, older than you, the first child born out of the previous generation, always leading the youngsters around, always invested in adding extra layers of security to your quarters. They on the other hand had an elderly leader, he was awful beyond words, not at all willing to invest in their security. Kids would constantly run away from his tyrant ruling, having them killed within hours by the droid army.

Suguru would travel there from time to time to share rations with the youngsters, that’s when he realized all the young children were missing.

They were found by some of the ‘cult droids,’ as you call them, worse than the army, those who had deficient chips and loved to hurt humans, they had a strange belief system almost like a religion of their own. The children were kept in cages for their amusement, and they would kill them once per day in the most awful of ways.

Suguru’s gentle nature ended up being his demise.

He tracked them down and ended up dismantling every single one of the droids enjoying such a horrid entertainment.

After returning the children to their parents, he went back home, only to realize something was wrong with him.

In the process of destroying the evil machines, one of them had implanted something behind his ear. He felt the pinch but was preoccupied trying not to get killed and finish the others, he didn’t really think anything of it.

Yet, he ended up collapsing not long after arriving back home. His other wounds were nothing to worry about, but he wasn’t responding, as if he had been turned off. His vitals kept going down as time went by and it was said you should be prepared for his last breath to come any time soon.

Your father was the only trained physician in the facilities. You came from an elite family of doctors, that’s why they were spared and saved from the world’s end. And even if he was quite fond of head trauma, they just didn’t have the tools to look into his brain properly and see what the problem actually was.

He was just not responding, something was interfering with the brain’s proper functioning, but opening him up like that would end up killing him.

“R-chan, do you perhaps have any medicine knowledge?” it was worth trying. He’s been staying with you for weeks now and it’s been quite the task to keep him away from wondering around or others finding him, he was like a toddler, everything amazed him and was difficult to contain, without Satoru it would have been impossible to achieve.

“I do, what seems to be the issue? Are you unwell?” lasers scanned you from head to toe, causing you to giggle at his concern, he was adorable, pretty much part of your family already.

“Not really, I’m fine, don’t worry. Is just…well I’m sure you’ve heard from Satoru that my boyfriend is ill, we don’t know what’s wrong with him, just know something is wrong with his brain, I was wondering if your database had some information we didn’t in the subject…” his searching lights turned on, a little paper printing out from his behind, startling you. That was a new function you didn’t know existed.

“I printed the major causes of brain damage for you to see. Though, I could also scan him and see what the cause is.” getting him to Suguru would be a difficult task, but maybe he could be saved by it, you had to try it his signs had been debilitating further this past week.

Taking him to the doctor’s facilities was complex, you even had to involve young Megumi and Yuuji, even your old friend Nanami helped creating diversions for you to sneak out without others finding what was going on.

Your father was scandalized by the fact that you had been keeping a droid in your room, one did kill your pregnant mother, the love of his life, resentment towards his kind was out of this world, yet you seemed to think fondly of this one, if he could help save Suguru, he would have to suck it up just this once.

Scanning him brought more than one answer, none of them pretty.

The device placed within him by the other droid was slowly turning off his brain, its electromagnetic waves and their damage was irreversible, the only way to stop them from killing him would be removing his brain, or part of it at least, but that was clearly not a viable option.

In the middle of the second scanning however, a bright red light began to shine, coming from your friend, paralyzing his work.

“R-chan…red means battery, I remember that. How do we charge you? Do you have like a plug or something?” your hands kept running through every single port on his body, looking for anything that looked like a charging cable, but your friend didn’t reply right away, worrying you.

“R-chan…?”

“We don’t use plugs to charge, but pods. We must go into our sleeping pod and charge for days when red turns on.”

“Your sleeping pod…is that not in your house…?” he just nodded, silence following your question.

“R-chan…how long does it take to get to your house from here…?”

“It took me two months…”

“And how long will your battery last when it starts glowing red…” tears were running down your face, your hands reaching for one of his.

“About eleven hours…” your knees gave in, collapsing onto the cold tiles of the surgical room. He’s become such an important part of your life, the only light you had in it since the demise of your boyfriend, it even strengthened your lost bond with Satoru, something you wanted to do for the longest time but wasn’t to Suguru’s liking.

“Pumpkin get up, you’re gonna catch a cold.” Satoru’s gentle embrace pulled you back together, your face burying onto his chest, sobbing uncontrollably, one of his hands rubbing your back with affection, feeling just as devastated as you were, the droid did become one of you, losing him would be like losing another friend.

“Father, do we have a way of charging him?”

“We do not, dear. They require very high end technology; we don’t have such a powerful source here…”

“But he…he’s going to die if we don’t do something!” you looked into Satoru’s beautiful eyes looking for an answer in them, like they were some sort of database. He just rested his forehead on yours, heaving a deep sigh and closing his eyes, “I don’t know how to help him, baby girl. I’m not some crazy scientist…” it broke his heart to pieces seeing you so desperate, he wished he could do something, not just for you but for his wired friend as well.

“There’s something you could do. It could save your friend, but it has only a 10% of a success rate according to the simulation I just ran.”

Your father intervened, it was a goal of his to bring Suguru back, he was a very important asset in the community and the one promised to his daughter for the continuation of the species, even if another strong candidate had comeback from the dark. “What is it? Give me the details.”

“If you replace the damaged part of his brain with mine, it would make him a cyborg but if programed successfully, it would save his life. His memories would also stay with him as that part of his brain still remains intact.”

“But that would wipe you out, R-chan…”

“Not entirely. He would have everything stored in my current database, though, he wouldn’t be able to use my search features, meaning he wouldn’t be able to learn anything new.” that didn’t sound like a bad deal, he was already a grown man, knew everything he needed to know by that age, plus would have a bunch of knowledge that could help your community to grow in the right direction. Suguru’s dream was to end the droid regime, that was entrusted by his parents and strengthened as time went by and the killings started. Having a droid within him didn’t sound like something he would like, but it could save him…

“Would he have your memories too then…?”

“(Y/N) there’s no time for sentimentalism. We must act now if we are to save any of them. Suguru’s blood pressure has been dropping at an alarming rate today and your friend here has less than half a day to make this work. If we are going to do it, we need to start right away.” This could get you to lose both of them at once, it was definitely not an ideal situation.

“Please don’t talk to her like that, doctor. I understand the circumstances, but your daughter is unwell right now…” Satoru gathered you in his arms, lifting you up gently and stopping in front of your friend. “I guess this is a goodbye, buddy. I really hope this works…” his words just made you cry even harder, not wanting to think of this as the last time you’d see each other.

“Just in case the 90% wins, I wanted to thank you both for letting me stay with you and share all your knowledge and love with me. I think I can understand better what love is thanks to you. I hope we get to see each other again soon.” without letting you answer, he started printing the information on how to preform such a difficult procedure for your father to begin to work, Satoru bringing you outside with him.

“It’s ok, love. Everything will be just fine…” he sat down outside the main doors to the operating room on the floor, bringing you to sit on his lap facing him. You stayed there for hours, falling asleep on his chest while the odds were at play.

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No one was sure if the surgery actually worked.

Suguru’s vitals had been getting better, but he hasn’t regained consciousness. The remaining parts of the droid were stashed away safely in case they were needed at a later time.

Living without your friend around brought darkness back into your life, but also brought Satoru even closer. He would now stay in your room at night, your nightmares wouldn’t stop hunting you and having him by your side helped you calm down afterwards. It became a norm for you to be together, it became normal to use pet names between the two of you, it became a routine of some sorts to wake up in his arms, to have him pressed against your back every night, to feel safe and even happy in his presence.

Things had changed quite a lot around the compound, just as Suguru’s fingers started moving in a separate cold room in the medicine ward.

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Masterlist Next Chapter

#jjk #jjk fanfic #jjk x reader #jjk fluff #jujutsu kaisen #jujutsu kaisen x reader #jujutsu kaisen suguru #jujutsu x reader #jujutsu gojo #jujutsu geto #jujutsu sorcerer #gojo satoru #jjk gojo #gojo x reader #gojo saturo #gojo x you #getou suguru x reader #geto x reader #fluff #angst #slow burn #scifi #jjk au #love triangle #jujutsu satoru #jujutsu kaisen x you #jujutsu kaisen x female reader #jujutsu fanfic #jujutsu fluff

[rosymorns]

my only engagement w the da subreddit is getting into arguments w random people about how c*llen sucks.

#so much of why i dont like him is really just how the game wants you to feel about him. #if he faced a single consequence? if he was actually invested in atoning for what he did TO THE PEOPLE HE HURT? #i think he'd be genuinely fantastic. id love him. #but he doesnt. he isnt! the game wants to make the mage/templar conflict ~morally gray~ instead of oppressed/oppressor #and in order to make it morally gray they have to make the templars less flat out evil. so they make your templar advocate #this bland nice guy that you can never question or criticize for his failure to perform the duties of the last leadership position #that ended in a war and COULD have ended in the purging or several hundred innocent people in the kirkwall circle. #he CANT face any sort of consequences for what he did. because he's supposed to be the moral representative of the templars. #he's supposed to be the best of them. he's supposed to be what they could be if you gave them a chance. #so you cant even let the player know (if theyre coming to dai new) what he did and what he let happen. #and then all the most boring denominator of women fell for thos blandly attractive man bc they couldnt handle a real man like blackwall /hj #carly.txt

[impalalord]

You know, it's the littlest things that can change the course of life. The smallest action could topple a building, or start the construction of one instead. For us, and for the galaxy at large, humans were that change.

After they made first contact with another species, humans did what they do best and immediately got themselves wrapped up in a war with a species that had far more firepower than they did. Of course, being a fledgling species who could barely grasp warfare in the void of deep space, much less the use of common technology that would have taken them centuries to develop themselves, it ended poorly for them.

The Humans turned out to be Idealists, with individuals and small ships volunteering themselves to help in a war effort to defend their outermost colonies because their own governments would not. That was another oddity about these Humans, they did not enter the galactic fray as a single unified group. Instead, they were a loosely collected group of governments and nation states held together with treaties and deals.

At first they lost volunteer soldiers and emissaries, then they began to lose ships and outposts. Instead of demoralizing them, this seemed to fill them with rage and cause them to lash out in anger. This too ended poorly, as they fought an overwhelming force with nothing but kinetic weapons and solid-fuel engines, the galactic equivalent of sticks and pebbles.

Their losses were staggering, as the Dryzal swept into Human territory and pillaged whatever they deemed fit. Worlds were lost and razed, endless voices were silenced as the horde marched forward. But this destruction did not satisfy the Dryzal, so they took more from the young species.

The eventual destruction of their homeworld, the razing of the very cradle from which their species was raised, caused Humanity to become a drifting species among the stars. They became intergalactic wanderers with no start or end of their journey to speak of. Their birthplace was nothing more than radioactive dust, and the fire of rage seemed to have died from their eyes. Anyone who went through a spaceport most likely saw a few solo humans wandering throughout the interior, with their gaunt, sunken faces and disillusioned cold eyes. Any sane being gave them a wide berth, afraid that they would be sucked into their cold, soulless depression, unable to escape.

Humans travelled from world to world, working on any ship that was willing to take them without too many questions. They weren't strong, and they weren't fast, but they could learn quickly and had no problem doing any job as long as they got paid. They spread across the galaxy and learned the inner workings of every species

In truth, humanity had not lost their rage, or their hope. The destruction of their homeworld cooled that fiery, liquid rage in their eyes and hearts into a icey hard steel that was sharpened further with every passing day. They bided their time, licking their wounds and learning their lesson. Lashing out would get them nowhere without a solid plan.

So they spread themselves across the dominion, unseen by the populace due to their reputations as wraiths. Barely living beings that lived in the shadows and dregs of society. Learning everything they could about each species, quietly recruiting others who had earned similar fates. Humanity no longer had an army of soldiers and starships, instead, they had an army of workers. Castaways, the dregs and refuse of intergalactic society, banded together, working behind the scenes as janitors, mechanics, cooks and repairmen. Quietly building and growing until the time finally came.

Their uprising came on a seemingly normal day; transportation stopped, communications jammed, power lines cut and food stores emptied. Militaries scrambled to try and find the source of the unrest, but everywhere they went the answer seemed to be ‘everyone.’ A random janitor was just as likely to be part of the chaos as a militant roaming the streets.

After several hours of the chaos, a single signal passed through all of the VidNet. A single live video of a young male human sitting at a desk. His dark hair disheveled, his clothes dirty and tattered, his average face covered in bruises and cuts. His voice was calm and collected, but also cold and firm as he began to speak to the universe.

“My name,” he began, “is Tim. I was nine years old when the war with the Dryzal began. My parents were not soldiers. They were farmers and pacifists. They believed in the good of the universe and taught me to look for the good in all people, of all species. It is your fault I have broken that pacifism. My parents were killed in front of me on my tenth birthday. Our colony was razed and I was dragged, screaming and crying, onto a ship by a neighbor who was lucky enough to survive the purge. We set out for Earth, the homeworld of our species, hoping that someone would respond to our distress calls.”

The human paused for a moment, and sighed. “We didn’t just send distress calls to our own kind. We sent them out across the entirety of the Dominion, using every language we could find in our database. Only a single species came to help us in our time of need, the Ruvol. Much like us, the Ruvol had lost everything without any assistance from the Dominion. All they had left were a ragtag fleet of merchant ships, barely able to fly, much less fight. Yet they were the ones who came to us when we needed it the most.”

“The Ruvol did not care that they might die, or that the last remnants of their culture would be lost forever. They saw us struggling, and they gave us their hand. In the end they saved about two dozen colonies from destruction before they were all killed above Trelnax V. By then I was eleven, and I had volunteered to help the Ruvol in their evacuation plans. Once again, I watched everything I put my life towards destroyed in front of me, before being dragged back to Earth. The Dominion refused to respond to our communications.”

“I was twelve when the Dryzal finally reached Earth, their slow warpath finally reaching its destination. I was on an outbound shuttle to help with relief efforts on another destroyed colony when they came into the system. They didn’t even bother to try and conquer the planet. They just unloaded a barrage of nuclear warheads and turned everything we held dear to radioactive dust. Yet the Dominion stood by and did nothing but watch.”

“Now, exactly eight years after you stood by and watched, you beg us to help you. Our friends and allies fill your streets with fire and chaos, your communications cut and transportation is gone. Why should we, the same beings that you threw to the street, help you? There are many among our cause who have similar stories, species we pulled from the fire ourselves because you would not.”

“The Kenek at Oaphus, twelve thousand nine hundred and sixty three humans died protecting their world, zero Dominion forces present. The Grocon at Laphus, eight thousand six hundred and seventy one humans dead, zero Dominion forces present. The Swaans at Bleu, seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirteen humans dead, zero Dominion soldiers present. A pattern began to emerge in our favor, each time we gave our lives to save these species, they vowed to fight with us in our cause. Each time their worlds were attacked, they cried out for help. You never answered, so we did.”

“Entire species filled with rage and hate for your inability to lift a finger are finally coming out, their feelings boiling over the edge of the pot. You have committed the grave sin of sloth, and now you are paying the price. This universe is no longer yours to control. You all had your chance to rule over everyone, and you ruined it. You were happy to sit peacefully in your ivory towers as worlds burned below your feet.”

“Now your Ivory Towers become your prisons instead, as control slips out of your grasp and falls firmly into ours. We vow to never make the same mistakes you have. Goodbye and good luck.”

After that transmission everything changed. The Humans lifted us out of an era of stagnation and into an era of expansion and growth. Though it was not a peaceful era, it was a better one, and for that we can never truly repay them. That is why on this day every year, we remember. We remember the worlds and species wiped away by the Dominions inability to give others aid, in hopes that we may never repeat their failures.

-Transcription of Dr. Cassien Agnaits’ Remembrance day lecture at the University of Tylon IV, Standard Galactic Date 110864

#humans are space orcs #humans are space australians #humans are weird #humans are space oddities #earth is space australia #space australia #earth is a deathworld

[iidigestive-readerii]

The Mandalorian and the Mandalorian

*

A long silence stretched between them as they walked down the halls from the landing bay. It could have been awkward, but the Jedi master beside him was so at ease with himself that it made it difficult to be quiet for long. There was something about him that made everyone want to tell him everything.

Maybe that was some Force thing. 

"Rebuilding going well?"

Luke shrugged, tucking his arms behind his back. "As well as it can, given how much damage the Empire did…" he shook his head, giving a small laugh.

"You're not just talking politics?"

"It didn't even twenty years for thousands of years and history to be wiped out. It's astonishing, how manipulative the Empire was, and not to just the Jedi. Piecing together of what was with what remains… it feels like a near impossible task sometimes."

"People like Lady Tano and Bo-Katan Kryze are still alive," Din pointed out. He found himself briefly touching against the Dark Saber attached to his belt. It was still a strange sensation. "Surely they are a wealth of information."

"Oh they are...though some of them associated are a pain in the ass," Luke added under his breath. 

Din raised his eyebrows, looking out the window of the Coruscant traffic before leaning against the wall. He was antsy for his son's class to end to go see him, but this conversation was... enlightening. "How many Jedi survived the purge?"

"...there were ten-thousand Jedi living in the Temple alone before the Clone Wars… the Clone Wars depleted about three-fourths of the population…" Luke tapped his fingers, thinking. "I would say a few thousand survived the purge, and several more Force sensitives across the Galaxy went into hiding."

"There are Jedi Temples besides here on Coruscant?"

"Yep."

"... incredible."

Luke looked at him, his expression softening for the first time since they'd met at the landing dock. "Grogu is doing really well Din. I'm not surprised, considering how he did live in this Temple in his early childhood. His classmates love him, and he loves them as well."

Din made a noise at the back of his throat, not responding immediately. He had his helmet off and tucked under his arm, which was an incredible feat in itself, but he trusted the man that taught his son. "Good...he deserves to be around those of his own kind."

Luke chuckled, glancing down the hall and frowning. A moment later, a few children ran past them, bowing their heads quickly before scurrying away. His blue eyes glimmered with the light coming through the windows. "Mandalorians and Jedi have a long and intricate interwoven history. I'm sure you've realized that."

"That's an elegant way of putting things," a Coruscanti lilted voice sounded while footsteps approached.

Shoving his helmet back on, Din whirled around at the newcomer. 

He failed to miss Luke rolling his eyes. 

The stranger before them was tall and slim, dressed in black and red Mandalorian armor. A Jedi robe covered the armor...with a lightsaber attached to his belt. The sun hit his ginger hair, highlighting the bits of blond sprinkled through his head and well trimmed beard. 

But his eyes were far more unsettling than Luke's ever were. 

Like they knew everything, had seen everything. So incredibly sad, but so hopeful for the future. Wanting the best for everyone while knowing that happiness was never for him, not for long. 

"Hello there," the newcomer said wryly. He smiled, and it made Din want to both punch him and invite him for tea. "Din, I'm glad we're finally on planet together. I've heard quite a bit about you."

"How do you know my name? And why are you wearing Mandalorian armor?"

"...Korkie."

Din looked between the two men. It didn't take a Jedi to feel the tension between them. 

Luke gave a small sigh, composing himself. "Din Djarin, meet - "

"Prince Kladius Robert Kryze-Kenobi," the newcomer said with a sweeping bow. 

"Kryze?" Din echoed. "Lady Bo-Katan is the last of her line."

Korkie snickered. "Oh she's saying that now? Well," he looked at himself dramatically, patting his forelimbs. "I'm alive, despite the Empire's best efforts. As is a good chunk of my clan. I'm her nephew."

"You're next in line or something to lead your clan?"

"I lead my clan - and most of Mandalore, in her absence." Korkie leaned against the nearest pillar, crossing his arms while he glanced at Luke. "Am I interrupting something?"

"Not at all, Your Grace," Luke muttered sarcastically. The smallest of a bemused smile was on his face.

"No one rules Mandalore. It's a hellscape."

"Ever been to the system?" Korkie snapped. His eyes narrowed to the Dark Saber on Din's belt. "It takes more than the saber that killed my mother to rule it."

"Pardon?" 

"I'm gonna leave you two be - " Luke began before being stopped by both men. He stepped back, raising his hands in surrender. 

"I won this blade in combat. Your aunt agreed the Mandalorians would not accept a false ruler."

Korkie barked out a harsh laugh. Energy crackled off of him, a fierce energy that came from someone bred and raised to rule, to protect his people with whatever means necessary. "Mandalore goes through rulers every ten years. We're a warring batch, it's what we do...but one of us is the son of Duchess Satine and Obi-Wan Kenobi. One of us stands a chance with it's politics on the intergalactic stage."

Din cocked his head, then stepped forward. He kept his voice low. It was habit, despite the fact he knew that both men with him could kill him without batting an eye. 

And he knew that only one of them would not feel guilty, and it certainly would not be Luke. 

"Mandalore is a way of life. I chose to become a Mandalorian. You were born into it."

Korkie smiled sadly. "And yet we both had our parents killed and our childhoods ripped away. There's no point comparing how Mandalorian we are. It takes more than a saber to rule. My mother knew that...my aunt has yet to learn that."

Somewhere in the Temple, an old fashioned school bell rang several times. 

"Classes are done for the day," Like interrupted passively. "If you two are not done, I suggest finding a conference room before a few hundred people flood these halls - half of them children. There should be one available on the fourth floor, second wing from the lifts."

"Don't care to mediate Skywalker?" Korkie asked, a smile curving on his face. "Or is a Sith assassin calling your name?"

"I'd like to spar with my wife without being mentally exhausted from your negotiating, Kenobi."

"Funny - say hi to Mara for me."

Luke gave a two-fingered salute, getting a laugh from the prince. He walked away, joined by an ancient Kiffar. The men were seen laughing, and the Kiffar turned around to wave enthusiastically at Korkie, who waved back with delight. 

"Who was that?" Din asked lightly. 

"Quinlan Vos? Oh, one of my dad's best friends. He survived the purge and came back to teach at Skywalker's request."

One thing that Din had realized into his introduction into Jedi culture...everyone knew everyone. It was a family. 

...a family that he would never be apart of, no matter that Grogu and him were a clan of two.

...and Grogu would outlive him, probably wouldn't even remember him, probably would live for nearly 900 more years if the rumors of Yoda and Yaddle were true. 

There would always be a connection to both worlds, Jedi and Mandalorian, he would not understand. 

"You don't feel welcome by either of your cultures, do you?" Din asked, the thought dawning on him as the information processed. 

Korkie didn't turn from looking out the window, but he cracked a small smile. "I'm the son of a Mandalorian pacifist and a Jedi that wanted to be a warrior no matter what he said. One doesn't get to where I am without struggling."

"How come I never knew you existed? You rule our people."

"Did Luke mention that the Empire erased decades and centuries of history?" Korkie finally looked at him, his eyes glistening. "I teach the history of Jedi and Mandalorian interactions across the Galaxy. I'm trying to fill in the blanks that were destroyed. That's why you haven't heard of me. This Galaxy is fractured."

"Sounds like a big job for a one man. Poor bastard."

"It isn't so bad. I have two whole communities to help me." Korkie pushed himself off the pillar, dusting imaginary dust off himself. "You're welcome in either community, Din...you have to remember that."

"I just can't rule?" 

Korkie smirked, a glint in his eyes that could be called mischievous. "You rule your own clan, Mandalorian."

Din jumped when he felt something tugging his cloak, and glanced down to find his son looking up at him. "Hey kid," he muttered, squatting down to be eye-level. "Miss me?"

He heard the prince walking away, footsteps growing quieter. 

Grogu had on a small knapsack, and shrugged it off before reaching his arms up. His smile was wide while Din picked him up, holding him close. 

Clan of Two...that sounded good.

"Wanna show me your room?" 

#The Mandalorian #din djarin #korkie kryze #korkie kenobi #Korkie is a Kenobi #Luke Skywalker #Mara Jade #grogu #fanfiction #I take canon and throw it out the window #because I can #:D

[niqhtlord01]

Humans are weird: Cults

(  Don’t forget to come see my on my new patreon and support me for early access to stories and personal story requests :D https://www.patreon.com/NiqhtLord  )

An extract from "The dark places humans go" by Volbus Ghahoun.

Throughout human history there have been several hundred different forms of religion across their tiny speck of a world ranging from the belief of a single all powerful being who created the universe, to a pantheon of beings human like in nature but with otherworldly powers, to even a collection of dried wheat strands dipped in sauce and meatballs that could fly.

Since their expansion into the stars this rate of worship appears to have multiplied with each passing cycle as human culture comes into contact with other species and their deities.

Most religions, such as the order of the five suns, have been adamant that no human will ever be admitted to their ranks while others, as in the case with the Sect of the Golden Martyr, have opened their arms wide to admit as many humans as possible and not only increase their influence but also their coffers with generous human donations.

While the human element within the major galactic faiths has been somewhat chaotic in nature, what has truly been concerning is the new found religious practices and groups that have remained outside of the public eye. These organizations are known in the human tongue as "cults".

These groups, often centered around a single world or cluster of planets, worship in ways that are often frowned upon by the galactic community if not straight forwardly made illegal. Normally making such forms of worship out right banned in such a manner has never been dreamt of until humanity began expanding into the stars. Generally humans were regarded as the latest gutter trash to have made their way into the stars and came to be regarded as such. Most civilizations containing them to the more run down quarters of their worlds and keeping them at an arms length. This treatment incidentally made the establishment of subset religions and cults easier as the unwarranted persecution and harassments drove countless humans to form groups that would at some level treat themselves better than the society that had condemned them.

On countless worlds all across the galaxy bands of humans settled. Some in densely populated worlds such as Necros IV, and others as desolate ice world of Walvi; humans would ban together and form societies within societies. These groups often focused around one of three structures in organization that were either based around a charismatic figure, a deity like being, or a way of thinking that was drastically alien to the society that surrounded them.

The first interpretation of the first group were often formed around a human of exceptional charisma and charm. They had the ability to interact with the varying different groups of society and win them over; making them feel as if they were family regardless of species. They practice what is known in human language as "Cult of personality" in which they make themselves out to be both larger than life itself while at the same time humble and one of the people.

These individuals would as they rose in power begin attracting more and more followers to their side. Often starting with the downtrodden humans on alien worlds they would quickly amass a loyal following. From here they would seek to expand and attract other species to their side as they began to preach against not only the social injustices done against the humans, but also against the other lower classes of a world as well.

From here these cults would end in one of two ways. The first and most frequent would be that the ruling class of the world would silence the charismatic human. This was the case with the so called Prophet of the Divine on the world of Habie Gamma. This had the opposite effect the rulers had intended as rather than feel sorrow at the loss of their leader the Prophets cult following had raised them to the status of holy martyr and openly rebelled against the governing classes. This triggered a  civil war that is still ongoing despite some ten cycles passing.

The next outcome would be the established class would attempt to incorporate the charismatic leader into their governing structure to placate them. This in turn often only emboldened the leader to gather more and more followers as now the governing bodies had recognized them as legitimate, wither they wanted to or not. Within a few years the cult leader would be in such a position of power that their word became that of law itself. This was the case on Necros IV when the female human after several years of integration in the ruling class overthrew the government overnight after she claimed to her followers that the leaders had been corrupted by greed and could no longer be saved. After the violent coup she was installed as the planets first ever queen to which she still rules to this day.

The next kind of human cult and possibly the more fanatical of the two would be the religious cults often formed by humans worshipping something as a god like being.

On the water world of Hydro Prime a isolated group of human settlers began to worship the native aquatic animals as their divine protectors; in particular the massive tentacle beast part of the Amphibia family group but referred to as the  "Mouth of god." No doubt named as such by the humans for the massive gaping mouth the amphibia could stretch to when consuming prey.

Isolated on their tropical island with no means of travel after a crash landing the humans began to treat the creature as the islands protector. In actuality the amphibia were highly territorial and had no doubt marked the island as part of their hunting grounds but to the humans the sensible idea of reasoning must never come across them.

When the amphibia was off hunting elsewhere other predators of the world would wander from the seas on to the island and attack the human survivors. As such the humans began making offerings of food to the amphibia to keep the creature close to the island at all times for protection. To the horror of the galactic community it was discovered that when not enough food could be gathered from fishing, hunting, or gathering on the island the humans would offer one of their own number to the beast.

The madness that would drive a species to turn on their own in such a manner must only lay within the black hearts of humanity.

The final cult is no doubt the most extreme and dangerous of the cult classifications. These individuals gather together not in praise of an individual or seemingly god like being, but in shared unity of an ideal.

This ideal can range from social structure to revenge to an end goal of horrific proportions; this group often contains the most dangerous and unstable individuals found within society.

When the Order of the Five Suns discovered that there was a human collective practicing their rights on Galvan VI they sent several dozen of their military faithful to the world and stormed the human compound. Several dozen humans escaped as the order's forces began ruthlessly slaughtering the humans and burning the skin from their muscles and leaving them to rot in the open sun of the world.

The survivors of the purge gathered together in the wilderness and made a dark pact with each other. For the unwarranted murder of their kin the group swore an oath of destruction  against the Order of the Five Suns and from the ashes of their home formed the House of Burning.

From here members of the House of Burning split up across the galaxy and went to ever world that was allowed to worship the Order of the Five Suns peacefully. They started murdering practitioners and members of the order in the streets and dark alleyways of their worlds and displayed their charred bodies in the street for others to find. Some of the house's members were naturally caught and tried as criminals by the planets ruling bodies, but many more slipped through the authorities grasp and continued their bloody work of revenge.

As the murders continued members of the Order began to hide their symbols of devotion were once they had proudly proclaimed them. They traveled in packs to and rarely went out at night all the while petitioning the Order to send their military arms to defend them.

For the most faithful of the order the high council dispatched their forces who acted as both bodyguards and fear mongers. Not only were they there to protect the faithful but to remind those that cross the order why they should fear them.

The military arms quickly began clashing with the local populace trying to find the members of the house of burning but in so doing they drove more of the populace to seek out the house and join them. The hatred for the order spreading day by day as more and more disgruntled peoples sought out protection of their own from the order.

Soon were once had been murders in back alleys now became open clashes of arms in broad daylight as the house of burning established their own paramilitary force.

Within three cycles every world that held a bastion of the Order of Five Suns became a religious battleground littered with corpses. The violence only feeding into hatred the house of burning held towards the order as they continued their war, stating that they would not stop until the order was torn down and cast into the ashes of their own flames.

#HUMANS ARE WEIRD #humans are insane #humans are space orcs #humans are space oddities #scifi #cults

[doctorslippery]

(Knowledge) Ancient tomes of sacred lore begin fading away.

(Life) All healing magic now comes at a cost to the casters own health.

(Light) The sky is darkened to a permanent twilight.

(Nature) Large swathes of wilderness are infected by a strange rot.

(Tempest) Droughts spread across the land as rain doesn’t fall as often.

(Trickery) People with normally good humor become cold and bitter.

(War) Morale is decreased and soldiers begin to mutiny against their officers.

(Death/Grave) Undead creatures have a chance to randomly rise from graves without a spell cast by a necromancer.

(Forge) The knowledge of forging mithral and adamantine armor and weapons is lost.

Nothing. Once the god is the creator of it’s own domain, but it is able to maintain itself in its absence

(Arcana) All spells now have a chance to go wild.

(Fire) The world becomes cold as it goes into a long winter

(Air) The air becomes polluted and difficult to breath. Many people die of lung related issues.

(Water) Rivers and oceans go stagnant and unmoving.

(Earth) The land becomes infertile and unusable.

(Time) Time rifts start appearing everywhere causing things from the past and the future to come into the present.

(Dragons) All dragons, dragonborn, and kobolds turn to dust

(Darkness) The world becomes filled with endless light and a never ending day

(Love) Family and friends start to hate one another and form grudges over the smallest things

(Order) Revolutions happen everywhere and anarchy reigns supreme

(Good) Empathy and altruism are no more as people are looking out for themselves

(Evil) Angels descend from the heavens to purge the world now knowing that there is no evil god to protect the wicked

(Nature) The forests run amok. Animals and plants invade cities, as every natural order accelerates out of control.

(Nature) Conversely, the forests and fields begin to die. Animals grow sickly and lethargic.

(Nature) The seasons begin to spin out of control. A day dawns with blazing heat, but snow covers the ground to a foot by lunch, and a monsoon rages that night.

(Death) Nothing may die. Nothing. Not the cattle, not the sickly, not the old, not those grievously wounded. Souls are bound to their bodies, and may never set off on their journey. Chop someone into bits, and every tiny piece still twitches in agony.

(Any) As the gods ‘body’ decomposes their essence (what they were the god of) infects the land affecting all who lived below their realm eg if the goddess of nature dies – nature explodes over the area (eventually after hundreds of years the natural green will die and become the land will become barren after the body completes decomposing). If it was the god of war or anger – every person and animal in the realm becomes driven by anger/easily angered, and plants become more dangerous, etc

(Nature) nature becomes twisted and more and more aberration like.

(Nature) herbivores turn predatory and hunt for meat

(Forge) weapons turn weak, Metal is prone to bending and it tarnishes easily.

(Weather) drought spreads across the land

(Weather) destructive “sunder storms” where lightning falls like rain destroy the landscape.

(Weather) winter never ends.

(Any) Angels, demons, fey, other gods, and spirits start competing for that gods power and worship to fill the vacuum

(Any) If the god who dies has worshippers still his corpse enters an odd undead state. He’s too week to be an actual god again or become truly alive again. However his remaining worshippers keep him from truly dying.

(Any) desecration of the area in which it died.

(Any) the nature and landscape where it died twisting to reflect the gods domain

(Any) people in the area also changing to reflect the gods domain

(Any) powerful magic soaks into the land creating powerful items. Things like spiders whose venom can only be cured by other god touched magic. Plants whose berries heal you and their juice can even raise the dead, etc.

(Knowledge) every self aware creature must succeed on a DC 10 Int saving throw or take 1D4 psychic damage and lose as many memories as the DM decides while also losing 1d4 Ing Stat.

(Any) The heavens begin to fall to earth/fuse with the material plane

(Any) Paladins will be in a huge pickle during their conquests.

(Protection) Warding and shielding spells no longer work.

(Protection) The ancient wards that kept the Elder Evils, horrible beings whose power even the gods fear, at bay fall.

(Any) People realize the gods are not immortal, and in reaction, faith in all of the gods begins to falter.

(Tempest) The entire world becomes still: no wind, no waves, not even clouds, like the world is perfectly smooth.

(Trickery) Nobody remembers that they can lie. Everyone either states the truth or is silent, ruining the world’s governments by disabling political maneuvering.

(Forge) Metal no longer melts, making all previously forged weapons exponentially more valuable, even an old rusty sword.

(Any) All of the people that were sacrificed to the gods come back (betrayed heroes, betrayed family members etc), but all of the things that gods has given to us fade away.

(Any) Outsiders from other worlds reveal themselves as the liberators, freeing us from our oppressors by killing the gods.

(Any) The god is replaced by another god that does a terrible (or better) job as the dead god temporary replacement.

(Any) The god was slain, the being that slew the god gains the gods power or becomes the god

(Any) Nothing. The god may have been responsible for creating or shaping it’s aspect, but once it was created it doesn’t need the god to maintain it.

(Any) The gods power leaks from its remains. Any magic of the gods aspect is greatly amplified for several years. The closer to the remains the greater the power is amplified

(Death) Everything that dies rises as a zombie.

(Death) Spirits of the dead are unable to move on. Everything that dies becomes a ghost.

(Death) Spirits of the dead start coming back to the living world

(Knowledge) people begin to forget things. (Names, places, history, how to do things, what they were doing, etc.)

(Life) every living thing becomes sterile (animals are unable to have children / plants cant produce seeds)

(Nature) microorganisms reproduce at an accelerated rate & every other living thing gets wiped out

(Nature) plants and animals become withered anemic versions of themselves

(Nature) plants and animals begin to die off (decay / rot / slowly crumble to dust / slowly turn to ash)

(Nature) plants and animals begin to mutate into monstrous versions of themselves

(Nature) plants experience explosive growth and begin to take over everything

(War) People begin to become more violent and warlike.

(War) People begin to become too apathetic to fight each other. Eventually, people become too apathetic to do much of anything. They just stand around in a daze until the die of starvation or thirst.

(Any) All clerics suddenly overload on divine power (as if the gods power has been divided between them). And they all start to slowly go mad, and start to lose control.

(Light) a massive and well known constellation vanishes and leaves a dark patch right in the middle of the night sky

(War) A vanquished war-god drops his enormous miles-long sword, which falls to Earth and pierces deep into the planet’s mantle

(Death) The god’s followers begin killing at random, hoping the power of their faith will resurrect him

(Light) Random people all over the realm begin to go blind

(Tempest) A whirling hurricane forms in the middle of the Ocean… and doesn’t stop growing

(Forge) The followers of this deceased god begin a pilgrimage to destroy every craft ever created and stamped with his symbol

(Arcana) The god’s death leaves a hole in the weave. Something… unwanted fills in the gap with Its body.

(Nature) The wood of the deity’s patron plant (oak) begins to disintegrate into dust all over the world. Buildings topple.

(Life) This god’s followers have a crisis at the oxymoron of their god dying. They are slowly driven insane

(Grave) The god itself rises as an undead, an anathema to its own mission

(Arcana) People start forgetting spells. (As a spell is cast, roll to see if that is the last time it is cast)

(Arcana) Everyone gains a cantrip. Now this minor power is just something everyone does, like breathing or eating.

(Any) Suddenly there is a war in the cosmos. Minor deities, greatly powerful beings like Warlock Patrons, and other generally unknown greater powers are vying for the position.

(Any) Upon the god’s death, their body is split into thousands and thousands of pieces. These rain down like meteorites but instead of being falling rock bits, it’s a new people recently awoken. Who are these newcomers and what is their memory of or connection to this lost god?

(Tempest) Ocean currents fluctuate wildly

(Earth) Widespread tremors and volcanic activity

(Tempest) Unpredictable squalls

(Light) Continuous winter sets in

(Order) Ubiquitous revolutionary sentiment arises

(Music) Instruments quickly go out of tune, and singers forget words and have their voices crack more often

(Magic) All casters and magic items are treated as one level lower

(Nature) Animals behave erratically and crops fail

(Fate) Prominent heroes begin to meet ignominious ends

(Luck) Coin tosses and dice rolls result in predictable patterns (Heads tails, heads, tails/1,2,3,4,5,6,1 etc.)

(Luck) Randomness begins to fade. The first to go are critical successes and critical fails, but very rapidly all rolls end up as 10.5’s.

(Any) Their power returns to its source where anyone could take it for themselves

(Any) When trees and plants are cut down, instead of sap, blood starts to weep from the cuts.

(Winter) Animals that hibernate don’t wake. Plants and trees stay in their winter state. Even if the weather gets warmer things affected by season act like it never ended.

(Knowledge) every creature’s INT ticks down steadily as their memories slowly disappear until all life is reduced to animalistic intelligence.

(Death) no one can die anymore. HP can’t be dropped below 0 and no one can die of old age, accumulating age bonuses and penalties until all physical stats are reduced to 0.

(Light/sun) the sun and stars go out. The temperature continuously drops until the entire world is frozen over.

(Magic) all spells, enchantments, supernatural and spell-like abilities, etc. get progressively weaker until the entire world is basically in a null-magic zone.

(Nature) plants and animals become incapable of reproducing.

(Life) healing magic no longer works. Natural healing progressively weakens until it too is no longer possible.

(Trickery) it becomes impossible for anyone to lie or mislead

(Forge) a small mountain range of metals and the occasional gem crashes into the planet in 3… 2… 1…

(Knowledge) everyone receives random revelations rather simultaneously.

(Trickery) some guy shows up three days later, wondering what all the hubbub’s about.

(Life) Every wound healed by their clerics starts to rot, and everyone reanimated becomes undead.

(Trickery) Their holy texts go blank, holy symbols turn to dust, and all knowledge of the god is ripped from mortal minds, the god is dead and forgotten in all ways. While most people feel like they’ve forgotten something, the most devout worshippers to the lost god go mad from the hole in their mind and soul.

(Trickery) The gods secrets are spread throughout the world, the common-folk learn of their rulers corruption, people discover their spouses cheating, children learn their beloved dog didn’t go to a farm, all secrets good and bad are made known and will rip families, kingdoms, and even other faiths apart.

(Any) A shockwave of power blasts through the realms, knocking everything unconscious for d10 hours

(Arcana) Spellcasters and magic items begin to “glitch”, causing them to either be completely unable to cast spells/activate items or the spells go wild.

(Any) People and clerics begin to notice that something is…missing…

(Nature) Many two headed animals are born the following day.

(Any) The god(s) start to slip away out of people’s mind, and they start questioning if they were ever thing to begin with.

#d20 #rpg #dnd #dungeons and dragons #fantasy #sword and sorcery #campaigns #fairy tale #mythology #fable #dungeon master #dm #game master #gm #hackmaster #magic item #magic weapon #magic ring #spell book #d12 #d10 #d8 #d6 #d4 #d100 #dice

[arcticdementor]

By now, the spectacle that is South Africa’s insurrection has been dominating the attentions of just about every political junkie on twitter, drawing the best minds from every corner of the world to bear witness to the fall of the rainbow nation into a predictable quagmire of irresolvable chaos. At home, the pessimism comes in many flavours, and the denialism in many, many more.

The brute facts are now well-known. After dodging prosecution for extreme corruption for over a decade, the former president Jacob Zuma was finally arrested for the relatively minor charge of contempt of court, for not appearing when summoned. While he held out for several days as his supporters (who comprise about half the ruling party including several senior cabinet ministers) picketed outside his palatial compound (bought with the UK foreign aid budget of 2017) and blocked police from entering, he eventually handed himself in. So concluded a long factional battle between Ramaphosa and Zuma that claimed hundreds of lives in burned freight trucks, assassinated councillors, and billions of Rands in legal fees, patronage and PR. Or so it appeared.

On the 8th of July, the president disbanded the Umkhonto weSizwe Veterans Association, essentially the continuation of the old military wing of the ANC, and fiercely loyal to Jacob Zuma. The next day, together with assistance from elements within state intel and security, they deployed to major transport routes, food depots, retail outlets, police stations, power stations, water treatment plants, and ports, to shut down and burn what they could, crippling the Johannesburg-Durban trade artery that carries 65% of our trade volume and half our economic capacity.

After encouraging looting targeting white-owned businesses or “white monopoly capital”, the MK vets could watch as riots burst out to take advantage of the chaos and everything was stripped to the bone by opportunistic looters. In the shadows, organised and disorganised elements blurred together, as even the wealthiest elements of black society got in on the fun of looting, packing luxury sportscars with groceries and appliances before watching the flames tear down the shops and factories.

The police and the military did nothing, and the president was silent, paralysed. Soon the violence spread to the suburbs, and residents cobbled together militia to guard their homes. Proof of address was required to buy groceries. This received wails of agony from the press class and black social media. Slogans calling for the slaughter of Indians (who form a large minority in Durban) and whites became common, and soon the newspapers were joining in on the scapegoating, accusing the citizens’ militia of racism.

…

Everyone here saw this coming, but for decades now, it has been an unacceptable thing to do, to remark upon the inevitable future we find ourselves in. Why it came to all this, and why it matters to Americans and Europeans, is the point of this essay. It will be uneasy to stomach, but it must be swallowed. We live on the brink of barbarism, and the West is following us every step of the way.

A nation may have a lot of ruin in it, but a poor nation has less ruin in it than a wealthy one. When a state collapses or undergoes revolution in the distant reaches of Africa or Asia, there is a certain social distance which prevents Westerners directly apprehending the significance of the social dynamics, the closeness of the dangers, the universality of the lessons, the pain and the tragedy of the loss.

But South Africa is different. South Africa is at once Western and alien to Westerners. Our constitution is Western. Our revolutionaries and our reactionaries and our racial cosmology is Western. Our highest aspiration is that of the West at large – a universal state which recognises no difference of class, race, or creed. And that is why when we observe South Africa, we stare into the abyss of Western civilisation and its global future. Each Westerner sees himself reflected in that void, from the national-socialist, to the anarcho-communist, to the black-nationalist and the bleeding-heart liberal.

And they are right to.

…

Watching any graph of any indicator in South Africa sees every resource drying up, every indicator of health taking a nosedive, and the population booming beyond control, kept in check only by the enormous and perennial pandemic of AIDS and tuberculosis that take many times the number of victims supposedly taken by the SARS-CoV2 virus, every year. We are the rape capital of the world, have seen over half a million homicides since 1994, and the state has not replaced any of the infrastructure built by the Afrikaner nationalist government. The graphs just spell doom in their trend lines, and have for years now, as the Centre for Risk Analysis’s I-told-you-so’s often repeat.

When they came to power, the ruling party was a coalition of communists, black nationalists, organised criminals and common thugs. However, their patrons in the Soviet Union were disbanded, and the Western state apparatus was still composed of law-abiding institutions and competent civil servants. So they purged the minorities, and placed party members at all key posts throughout, to ensure ideological and partisan loyalty – this was called cadre deployment. This crippled the institutions. When the last of the old guard experts were ushered into the wilderness in 1998, they made several systematic departmental reports, which declared the need for replacing infrastructure immediately, to cope with the increased dependent population. This was ignored, largely because the experts were white.

…

While many see the doom as setting in after 1994, it in fact began much sooner. The means by which the ANC gained power was not through civil disobedience, but through a long and sustained campaign of totalitarian violence called the Peoples War, which raged from 1979 until 1993. Black wage increases increased faster than white until this period (51.3% vs 3.8% since 1970), economic growth was over 5%, inequality was falling and blacks enjoyed the highest standard of living of any black population on the continent.

The addiction to cheap black labour meant that industry was irritated with state policies, and in the end, it was the local plutocrats like Harry Oppenheimer and the old secret societies like the Afrikaner Broederbond who opened secret negotiation to end apartheid. And while SA may have had a robust economy once, nothing survived the People’s War. It aimed to “make the country ungovernable”, and largely succeeded. Controlling migration from the black homelands became impossible, and maintaining law and order as the bodies piled up became harder and harder.

…

But the liberal establishment could not bring themselves to believe there were systemic reasons for this state of affairs beyond “corruption” or “inequality”, and the struggle to blame the status quo on the previous regime became ever harder. So they blamed Zuma. The lost decade, they called it. So when Cyril Ramaphosa, a man largely blamed for the Marikana massacre, finally took the party leadership in 2017, after a long, expensive battle of assassination, bribery and skulduggery, he billed himself as a liberal reformer and anti-corruption campaigner, and the international community fell for it hook line and sinker, and local liberals worshipped him like the coming of a new Mandela. He promised the 4th Industrial Revolution. He promised the reigning in of BEE. The Economist endorsed him over the liberal DA.

But he was lying.

…

There are only three sources for non-socialist print media coverage of politics in South Africa. Politicsweb, where all the old senior analysts go when they become persona non grata, the Institute of Race Relations (a venerable old classic-liberal institute with a daily paper, the Daily Friend, and a consulting business, Centre for Risk Analysis), and Maroela Media, an Afrikaans-language publication run by Afriforum, the civil rights activist organisation which sprung from the Afrikaner-national Solidariteit movement.

Aside from this, every other publication leans further to the left than a man with his left leg blown off, and due to a hangover of apartheid-era Cold War politics, “left and right”, terms only applicable among the educated classes, roughly align with a black-vs-white friend-enemy distinction. The Mail & Guardian, for instance (indirectly owned by the Open Society Foundation), has refused to cover any rural homicide committed against a white victim in nearly a decade, despite a global magnifying glass being placed on the barbaric torture and murder spree that has slowly been smouldering across our rural hinterlands. When a white person commits a crime, it is milked dry every day until the journalists get carpal tunnel. But against the ocean of violent depravity committed by the racial majority, which has taken half a million lives since the fall of apartheid, we receive virtual silence. Swaziland, seeing the same kind of violent uprising as KwaZulu Natal is, is treated as a democratic revolution against a tyrannical absolute monarch, despite the opposition being mainly violent communists receiving support from South African parties like the EFF.

…

I was a communist when I was at university. I was delivered a faithful belief in progressivism, nonracialism, revolution and universal democracy, through the national curriculum in South Africa.  I was introduced to Marx and Mill as an A Level student in the UK, and when I returned to my native country, I was exposed once more to the poverty and desperation and racial tensions. I assumed all the positions one would expect. More democracy, more repudiation of Christianity and white people, more redistribution, more socialism. But the political waters were calm in those days, and this was mere posturing. Then in 2015 my friends began a campaign to topple the statue of Cecil Rhodes overlooking Cape Town from the university his will founded.

#RhodesMustFall mushroomed rapidly, and became the romantic darling of not only us horny little revolutionaries, but leftists worldwide, who exported the new iconoclasm to Oxford and South Carolina. It is now remembered as #FeesMustFall, a campaign to make tertiary education free (for blacks). But I watched it grow from the inside, and partook in the occupation of admin buildings, touring other college protests in the Cape out of solidarity. But it became clear that it was first and foremost about racial hatred and the purging of Western influence, under their holy trinity of Steve Biko, Franz Fanon and Kimberlé Crenshaw – segregation, national-socialism and a metaphysical racial hierarchy, in new nation called Azania, synonymous with the basketcase fictional nation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief.

This movement, while it began as nonracialist, soon became openly genocidal. Student leaders who called for genocide went unpunished, even praised by the VC of the University of Cape Town. This movement spread to every single university in the country, and despite prominent student leaders praising Adolf Hitler and calling for whites to be swept into the sea, singing genocidal songs at every protest, white students still offered themselves as human shields before police. Dining halls were segregated, classes were violently shut down, nonparticipants in some universities were beaten in their dormitories, staff were chased with buckwhips, buses were burned, paintings were burned, even security guards were burned, and more recently, so was the continent’s largest library. But no big newspaper offered moral criticism, just worries about whether the tactics were effective.

These young people defined a new era, and a new consensus – all struggles are one, and all are about black vs white, and whites must hand over everything and beg for their lives. The only lecturer in the entire country who stood up in public against this cultural revolution was the antinatalist philosopher David Benatar. All others kept their heads down, dithered, or joined the fray, calling for the heads of their less enthusiastic colleagues. Now the Fallists’ ideology is the official pedagogy of the entire university system. But this agitation had been the nature of political life at the poorer “bush colleges” for years now, just without the presence of minority students to trigger resentment or the ideas to build ideology: shut down every exam season to extract more lenient standards and increases in student grants.

And much like the explosion of violence seen at the national level today, South Africa’s poorer areas have been an unremitting hell for all those living in it below a certain class divide. 15% of all women are prostitutes, and the homicide rate is among the highest in the world, and some areas experience permanent civil war level violence. The old apartheid era town planning meant that black areas and minority areas were clearly separated, and this has meant a geographical buffer, where violent protest, which is again among the highest in the world, has largely left the middle classes out of it, even while it occasionally diverts traffic. Protests flare up constantly, as rival factions of the ANC, hamstrung by a corrupt internal promotions process and forbidden from dragging out dirty laundry in public, instead mobilise violent protests to contest wards and civil service posts, often burning down public infrastructure while the mob on the ground chants for “service delivery”.

…

Whatever else Nick Land writes, the lasting impact he had on me was in the very first essay at the opening of Fanged Noumena. He wrote it in 1989, when nobody beneath the highest reaches and darkest recesses of the Atlantic power structure had any awareness that South Africa was about to change forever.

Apartheid still seemed undefeatable to outsiders. The NP had recently smashed the heart of the ANC’s military campaign, creating a bloody hurting stalemate that observers at the time had no expectation would result in any pleasant outcome. Tens of thousands had already been massacred in the Peoples War to give the ANC a monopoly over the black liberation movements, but they seemed to be running out of steam. And so did Pretoria – influx from the Bantustans was unstaunchable, dependence on black labour was firm, and confidence in local cultural hegemony collapsed in 1976.

Nick Land, watching this, noticed something peculiar.

For the purposes of understanding the complex network of race, gender, and class oppressions that constitute our global modernity it is very rewarding to attend to the evolution of the apartheid policies of the South African regime, since apartheid is directed towards the construction of a microcosm of the neo-colonial order; a recapitulation of the world in miniature. The most basic aspiration of the Boer state is the dissociation of politics from economic relations, so that by means of 'Bantustans' or 'homelands' the black African population can be suspended in a condition of simultaneous political distance and economic proximity vis-a-vis the white metropolis. […] My contention in this paper is that the Third World as a whole is the product of a successful - although piecemeal and largely unconscious - 'Bantustan' policy on the part of the global Kapital metropolis.

…

When the British seized the Boer republics in 1900, they drew up the limits of control of the native African tribes where they already lived, and displaced a few thousand of them to tidy up the borders. These eventually became the Bantustans. Immediately, a long slow trickle of immigration was encouraged, not just from the Bantustans, but from British possessions in Asia. The migrant labour created a dense network of diffident ethnicities who demanded fences between them and their neighbours, while attempting to pursue economic exchange.

Black men, who could achieve far greater material wealth from working in the white economy than raising cattle and sorghum in the homelands, flowed steadily into white farmland areas and mining towns. In 1922, the South African Communist Party launched a general strike to demand the enforcement of a colour bar – “CPSA for a white South Africa!”. They were put down in a hail of gunfire by Jan Smuts, the architect of the unitary constitution, which allowed no devolved powers for regional self-governance.

Smuts was a member of Cecil Rhodes’s Round Table club, and shared Rhodes’s ambition to create a grand state where all literate English-speaking men and women south of the Zambezi would have the vote regardless of colour, and all the resources would belong to one grand cartel controlled by a British-American elite of enlightened natural aristocrats. Rhodes used money from his diamond empire and loans from Nathan Rothschild to fund the Jameson Raid and other means to instigate war with the Boer republics, which eventually resulted in the second Boer War and the creation of the Union of South Africa.

…

Smuts, architect of the Union of South Africa, also had a grand philosophy not unlike Nick Land’s – Land treats all matter and life as being ontologically the same, driven by “machinic desires” – all tendencies to motion and behaviour, whether in living or non-living material being fundamentally the same. All matter seeks more complex and integrated forms over time as a result of the force of entropy. Smuts’s grand philosophy, of which he wrote at length in Holism and Evolution, envisaged a means of looking at the world in which all of nature and society could be apprehended and governed as a single holistic system – all organisms, all cultures, all individuals, were destined to evolve into a greater whole, in which each part had its natural place, and that the common teleology of all matter and spirit was the global state, embodied in the League of Nations, the constitution of which he penned himself.  Together with his extensive biological knowledge, Smuts and his London interlocutor Arthur Tansley gave birth to the modern systems theory of ecology, and hoped to see a central global technocracy overseeing a holistic ecological management system.

The aims of the United States since the Second World War have some remarkable similarities in approach. The post-war order saw the US employing a philosophy of “defence in depth,” controlling a defensive frontier from the China Sea in the East to the very edge of the Warsaw Pact countries, to ensure freedom of trade throughout this entire region. But this extended beyond military control. The use of embedded CIA operatives meant that those democratic representatives who resisted the grand plans of Atlanticism were swiftly dealt with under insidious operations like Gladio.

…

As these ideas bled into the old left, who were increasingly disillusioned from the failures of the Soviet Union. They turned, as Laclou and Mouffe did, to the notion of using sectional grievances to deconstruct the nation state, leading to the birth of intersectionalism under Kimberlé Crenshaw. The very foundations of nationhood and capitalist Christian civilisation could be toppled if only we united our struggles by leveraging our historical grievances, creating acrimonious divisions in the body politic on the basis of sex, sexuality, race and religion. Thus, the universal loyalties of the nation state that supposedly upheld capitalism would fall, and revolution would arise. This fell right into the plans of the American ruling class.

However, when the social morality of the postwar American colonial project in Europe met the plans of the military and the Malthusian tendencies of the RAND corporation, everything took on a far more ambitious character, with the help of a concept called “environmental security”. The first reference to ES in the sense of protecting the natural environment comes from the US EPA Technical Committee in 1971, as part of an ambitious attempt to quantitatively measure total social wellbeing. This EPA committee was the first to make environmental regulation part of a comprehensive plan for social wellbeing, driven by Holism and cybernetic ecology. They were exceeded in scope by the UN’s 1972 Stockholm Conference, where the idea of “comprehensive” (today, “human”) security emerged, and further, the Palme, Brundtland and Brandt Reports.

…

Under these new umbrella concepts came “human security” and environmental security, the Social Sciences Department of UNESCO and the SSRC found the unifying principles and programs they had sought since the 1950s, and pushed a proselytising program grounded in cross-discipline application of avant-garde ideas to seek “new ways of knowing”, promoting not scientific objectivity, but a synthesis of diverse perspectives. A wholesale transformation of the rules and discipline of social sciences followed, in service of global governance (see the works of Perrin Selcer).

UNESCO even deliberately set about creating a new world religion, in the words of its founder Julian Huxley, and formed the United Religions Initiative, to mould the world’s spiritual beliefs in line with international Anglo progressivism. Feminism and sexual libertinism formed a crowbar against the community cohesion that couldn’t be attacked by means of anti-nationalism, and into this soup of value inversions (erosion of disciplinary distinction, inter-subjectivity [i.e., truth-by-consensus over objectivity], and utopian welfare ideals like “freedom from fear”; “freedom from want”), dropped three wonder pills: Poststructuralism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Global Warming. Now the great power-narratives of the Atlantic empire were consolidated – Malthus-by-proxy, anti-traditionalism, international diversity-and-inclusion, and the free-trade, open-borders paradigm of the 90’s.

In the same moment as de Klerk gave up on apartheid, the West gave up on the nation state, and handed control to the internationalists, under hegemony of the Atlantic community. A new empire was being consolidated from the territories captured by the Allies in WWII. Thirty years later it is becoming transparent –  the new centralised global tax regime has cemented it. Just as the ANC funds the influx of black voters into urban minority areas to build shacks on squatted land, the West welcomes mass migration from the third world, total open-borders, to transform the electoral system against the interests of the native population who might have their own desires, against the grain of global empire. Every corporation and state in the Western world discriminated against whites in hiring. The CIA peddles Critical Race Theory and actively recruits sexual minorities. Colour revolutions can be spotted whenever the rainbow flag or black fist makes an appearance.

Today, the Democratic Party in the US openly looks to South Africa for inspiration in dealing with what Yarvin called the “outer party” – all conservatives are being purged from every institution, in a vast cadre deployment program to ensure the core of the establishment becomes forever untouchable. On the streets they have even begun to use the same tactics for control – deploying huge mobs to destabilise cities when election season is approaching.

Minimum wage rises funnel employment into companies in public-private partnerships with the state, like Amazon, who is part of the Enduring Security Framework partnership of the CIA (which includes Facebook and Google). The analogies between their experimental management strategies and collectivised central-planning are no accident – any company that aims for a total retail monopoly through state-subsidised negative-profit growth is merely another route to total control.

And as the nation and the state are decoupled, the liberal-democratic institutions are being geared toward the concentration of power and wealth, and a strategy of divide-and-rule, to create a cannibal economy. Only a few, like Denmark, have realised what they have gotten themselves into.

…

Much as Aristotle said, a democracy can only function beneficially when steered by the middle class, as it was in Rhodesia and the old Cape, which restricted the vote to property-owners of all races. The middle class’s needs are the core of the productive community, and as Marx observed, they are loyal to the requirements of productive industry and local trade. With the combination of the proliferation of the welfare state and globalisation, the middle class has been whittled away in the West, just as it has here in southern Africa.

Reliance on the state for services means they can’t be sacrificed – in the UK, the NHS has become essentially a religious cult, feeding the civil service, medical contractors, immigrants and the poor alike, in a financially unsustainable way, for decreasing returns. As Philip Bagus observed, the democratic pressures to maintain institutional support via this sort of patronage forces modern western states to take on ever more debt and expand taxation to the limits. This then must be offset by QE, which must be guaranteed by the central state at a rate that benefits the most fragile provinces of any empire so that the whole system does not collapse.

…

What Robert Mugabe did was pursue the universal extension of a first-world welfare state to every peasant in the hinterland, praised by the global left. This required taking on an enormous amount of national debt. Once the IMF tried to impose austerity, Mugabe found this politically unsustainable – his support depended on the handouts, corrupt and legitimate, that he was delivering. So he had to switch to printing money to pay the debts. When inflation became too much to handle, they replaced the core of the economy with dollars, and only elites could survive, much like Venezuela today. As the national treasury ran dry, the military and the civil service became restless. To placate them, they were fed the farms and businesses of the remaining white minority, as well as many areas formerly occupied by black peasants. The state had to cannibalise itself to sustain the predatory ruling class.

During this time, Mugabe attempted to control every aspect of the environment and economy through price and capital controls, suffocating every aspect of social life with red tape. It only accelerated the process. While the vast global network of UN subsidiaries extract compliance from the US client states

In South Africa today, the state coffers are empty. Even the ruling party is feeling it, as their headquarters Luthuli House was attached by the court to pay for a crooked PR contract they refused to deliver on. We have since taken out an IMF bailout, which is being poured into infrastructure, mostly Durban’s port, which is now choked by smoke and looting. Our president’s advisors are pushing for land reform, and remarkably, one of them, Ruth Hall, was advising Robert Mugabe how to liquidate his pale kulaks back in 2002. Other advisors, like Thembeka Ngcukaitobi, call for the fulfilment of the genocidal prophecy of Makhanda, and have whites deprived of all land and all moveable and liquid assets. This is deliberate Zimbabwefication.

The same economic dynamics are present in the world at large – the share of GDP spent on welfare keep increasing, as does the debt-GDP ratio. Capital formation has been falling for decades, and chronic inflation is treated as a static phenomenon, which nobody dares reign in, because the entire system is dependent on low interest rates to keep the constant corrosive consolidation of the global market going full steam ahead. This arrangement results in the inflation of property prices as along term hedge against inflation which, when the plebs followed suit resulted in the 2008 bubble, when they tried to play the elites’ asset accumulation game with borrowed money.

…

What has America been doing these past 18 months? It has been printing money so fast that it has kept pace with the plummenting Rand, and allowed Cyril Ramaphosa to tell investors that his economy is relatively strong – the Rand has “stabilised”. Error of parallax. Nor is it even just America printing money. While they certainly can afford to, as the holders of the world’s reserve currency, China is attempting to do the same, only they are directly funnelling the cash into commodities, rather than spreading it around a financial elite over which they have minimal control.

And yet their leverage is far worse than America’s – Kyle Bass, who has been shorting the Chinese market for years now, insists that the historically unprecedented levels of leverage in the Chinese economy are unsustainable, and that they cannot, even under miracle conditions, correct their shrinking population trends sufficiently to turn this ship around. But what many forsee in dreams of revolution and revolt, the breakups of massive crumbling empires, is not going to happen as they hope.

Instead, the state will protect the stability of the ruling class and its control over the levers of power at the core, bleeding everyone dry and terrorising them into submission. What happened to Zimbabwe is a warning, but it only happened the way it did because half the population could leave and send home remittances. The iron fist of a “democratic” government capable of rigging its elections and gagging the press and the courts is only as tyrannical as the cost of a bus ticket to the next country. After 900-member Zoom calls and election “fortification”, I shouldn’t need to gild the lily any more.

As many observers of China remark, an economic collapse of a country of its nature will not result in a breakup or a massive reform, but in the shrink-wrap tyranny of North Korea, an eternal sclerotic stagnation, fed by government dependency, held in place by state security. The West is losing control of its ability to provide the kind of total state security required for this however, and has been reaching for a far more sinister method of control – the financial system.

And this is where all analogies break down, because what is about to happen here is unprecedented. The international Bank of Settlements has recently announced that they intend to use Central Bank Digital Currency to control the spending of all global citizens, and have the tech and the power to control each and every expenditure, and to shut anybody out of the ability to feed themselves if they so choose. But this movement to kick away the ladder and consolidate total control follows the same logic as Zimbabwe’s – the poor can only be fed for so long, but the ruling elite must be fed forever, or else the whole house comes down.

…

The twin systems of China and Atlantis are both attempting to consolidate total control over their economic and social environment. And in order to achieve the kind of reforms that he wishes to, Ramaphosa has reached for the help of both power blocs. China has colonised our northernmost province, and receives special treatment from law enforcement that must learn Mandarin. Chinese are registered as black, to benefit from the racial privileges blacks enjoy under Black Economic Empowerment. While the government’s reports usually look like a dog’s breakfast, their reports on the UN sustainable development goals are always crisp, professional, and detailed. SDG 10 justifies the expropriation of property, according to their logic.

…

The erosion of the middle class, the working class, the institutions of law and order and even the substance of the informal economy was dry tinder to the Zuma-faction’s firebrands. To fulfil his mandate to end corruption, Ramaphosa had begun prosecutions proceedings into the Zuma faction – tentatively of course, since any too-wide-ranging investigation would unearth the corruption of all. But lawfare isn’t enough. They were cut out of party patronage systems as big figures like Ace Magashule were expelled from the party. Judges ruled that the state would not cover their defence costs anymore.

When the Umkhonto we Sizwe veterans association was disbanded and cut off from “pension” money, they finally put into action something that they would have had up their sleeve for months. Police armaments caches had been going missing for months. Firearms training for youths had been going on at the local branches for years. Every storage depot and major highway was targeted, petrol stations, power stations, water treatment plants were hit. They needed to make the country ungovernable, and they did. But this time they didn’t have the support of the Swedish, the Russians or anybody else.

Complicit elements are even inside the SSA, our central intelligence agency. What it will take for Ramaphosa to clear the state and party of seditious elements will give him the power of a modern dictator, cheered on my the press and everybody else, who despises Zuma and his people for what they’ve wreaked upon us. But with three months left of military deployment, all of the military capacity in one province, and the president fearing wielding lethal force on black mobs for fear of his Marikana ghosts coming back to haunt him, the rebels have three months to decide whether to act.

That leaves three months to see whether we become a black-nationalist disctatorship, or a new Yugoslavia. The Zulu, who form the backbone of the rebellion, have cheered for Zulu independence before, though their forces are split – the Zulu nationalist/traditionalist party the IFP have stood firmly against this chaos. Zuma’s people are still pushing black identity over tribal. Zuma may have been a traditionalist, a defender of the Swazi royal house when in crisis, an expander of chieftains’ rights, but his time in head of the ANC death squads in Zululand in the 1990s makes Zulu solidarity impossible.

So chaos it is.

#robert duigan #substack #read the whole thing #south africa

[jedimordsith]

You mentioned that you've come to have more empathy for Yoday but still wouldn't recommend him as a direct master for anyone. What were/are your biggest issues with him? There are several I could guess, and probably some I agree with, but I don't want to assume.

Ahahahaha. I’m in a ranty mood this week, so it’s a great time to tackle this ask! Here’s more than anyone ever wanted to know about my Yoda Feels. 

My problems with Yoda come down to a couple things. 

We have entirely different learning/teaching styles. 

I have zero tolerance for cryptic shavit when there’s *actual communication* that needs to happen. 

A lot of Yoda’s behaviors make sense when viewed in the context of the PT but I formed most of my opinions based on the OT before the PT was a Thing. 

I don’t agree with the approach Yoda took in swanning off to Dagobah post RotS. AT ALL. 

Different Learning/Teaching Styles

(In ESB) Yoda very much follows the Greek and Buddhist styles of teaching where masters ask questions that don’t necessarily have solid answers. This is a valid style and something @atamascolily consistently captures gorgeously in her fics. It also absolutely makes me want to stab people. 

I’m like Mara Jade: a task-oriented learner. I want to know what I’m supposed to learning/mastering, why, how I’ll demonstrate success, and what the checkpoints are along the way. Meandering philosophical debates as part of an ill-defined training process are maddening. As noted, as I get older I am more accepting of this as a legit style and just not for me; this makes Yoda more sympathetic as a character but not any less annoying. 

Also, when Luke asks honest and reasonable questions in ESB (like “why”) Yoda shuts him down flat and I’m extremely not okay with that. Luke is being genuine and respectful despite his own frustrations and as someone who is committing his life to the Jedi path he has both a right and a need to know things. Demanding blind faith when there are or should be reasonable answers of some kind is Not Okay. 

Just Communicate Dammit!

With Ben Kenobi and Bail Organa gone, Yoda was the only person around holding a lot of key information. Did he share that information? Nope. He wandered around being a cryptic little troll “because Luke wasn’t ready” despite knowing full well that his health was failing. He gave Luke none of the information he actually needed to make informed decisions and didn’t even freaking write anything down!!  

From a Doylist perspective, this is obviously largely because George Lucas et al hadn’t figured out any of the backstory yet. From a Watsonian perspective, this is unforgivable. 

If your time is short (as his time with Luke was destined to be no matter how things went), it is critically important to be clear and use your time well. Yoda just didn’t. 

Obnoxious Troll vs Grandpa Frog

The PT very much sets Yoda up as Grandpa Frog, a beloved grandfather figure who teaches the younglings regularly and who everyone understands as mischievous but loving. Viewed in that sense, a lot of how he treats Luke in ESB makes sense… but it doesn’t make it okay. 

The younglings at the Temple literally grew up around the Force and Yoda. Luke did not. Luke didn’t even know WTF the Force was until he was almost 20. He got like 24 hours of introduction to it before Ben died. Compliments of Palpatine and the Purge and the war, there is almost no information available to him between ANH and ESB except what he figures out himself. Yet Yoda treats him like a disappointment and a failure for not understanding the scope of the Force and having doubts about its power. 

Guess what? If Luke had grown up in the Temple, yeah, he’d be all about raising X-wings out of swamps. But he didn’t. He grew on repressed for his own safety on a farm in the middle of nowhere without a hint of a clue. 

Now, through the lens of the PT, I can see Luke being a frustrating student for Yoda. He’s used to getting younglings who have been exposed to and trained in the Force by a range of other Jedi. Starting with an older student suffering from a ton of trauma and without any of the basics that he has to train in less than a fraction of the time shaping a Jedi would normally take is a massive undertaking and he’s old and tired besides. The whole family history with Vader wouldn’t make it any easier. 

But you know what? Luke is young. He left his found family in the middle of a war and is undergoing hugely stressful training in the middle of a swamp so that he can shoulder even bigger burdens. Yoda has had 20 years of (mostly) downtime to deal with his own trauma and at least several hundred years of practice being a teacher and a leader. He’s the one in a position to improve things and accommodate and he doesn’t. I’m not okay with that. 

Let’s Talk About That Downtime BTW

Again, from a Doylist perspective, I get why Yoda was hanging out on Dagobah, why he used things like visions to communicate with people like Kanan, Ezra, etc. periodically, and why he was Luke’s mentor in ESB/RotJ. 

From a Watsonian view, though, I’m not freaking impressed. He was the Grandmaster. He was heartbroken over the Jedi and Padawans he couldn’t save. But what did he do for the remaining ones spread across the galaxy? Shavit, that’s what. Kanan, Cal Kestis, Feris Olan, all the Jedi/Padawans who got kidnapped and twisted into Inquisitors — they were on their freaking own while Yoda swanned off to Dagobah. 

Oh, sure, he’d pop up in a vision here or there or whatever, but he had a safe place. And, apparently, the ability to reach at least some of them some of the time (see: visions and his connections to people like Bail Organa). Do I think any of those people probably wanted to live on Dagobah? Not particularly. But I think they’d have appreciated the safety and the chance to reconnect with what remained of their Jedi family, even if only briefly. 

But no. Yoda hangs out, waiting for the day the twins are old enough to take on the responsibility to kill Vader/Palpatine and then… does nothing?! He just keeps hanging out even after both Luke and Leia have lost everything, lets them get all settled into the Rebellion without a word, and THEN has the nerve to be cranky and disgruntled when he actually does get one of them to train!! 

YOU MADE CHOICES YOU LITTLE FROG TROLL. DON’T TAKE THEM OUT ON THE PEOPLE YOU DENIED CHOICES FOR 20 YEARS. 

I’m Not Entirely Without Compassion, I Swear

*sigh* I have seen a lot of Yoda meta in recent years that makes me appreciate Yoda for what he was during the PT. He really *was* everybody’s loving Grandpa who worked for centuries to love on the Jedi, protect them, and take care of them well. He legit wanted all of them to be happy and safe… and his suffering when the Purge happened must have been unimaginable. Like Luke and Leia, he lost everything. 

Unlike the twins, he didn’t get to rebuild or find a new family. While I believe what we have in the EU suggests he found peace and solace and a new home of Dagobah that was genuinely soothing to his wounded soul, he was alone and (whether he was or not) he did feel mostly helpless to do anything for his few scattered Jedi grandchildren who remained and suffered across the galaxy. He did face decisions in which there *weren’t* good, clear-cut answers. 

I think if I’d met him first in the PT or meta I might have liked him better. But I still wouldn’t ever recc him as a Master for any character I like because I can’t imagine learning under him being an experience I would ever wish on anyone simply based on my own vehement loathing for his personal teaching style. I know there are people in the world who would thrive on that approach and I like to think I’ve got a good imagination, but I simply can’t conceptualize it as a positive, productive experience. 

*As an end note, if you DO like Yoda or want to like him better please go read @atamascolily‘s fics, seriously. You’ll love them!

[chaoticly-shy-dragon]

Today was the day.

Today was the day, they were going to execute him.

Today was the day Darth Vader would finally meet the fate, he sentenced so many to.

He, of course, had been on trial, even if it was a closed and discreet one, specifically requested by the Alliance hero and Jedi - Luke Skywalker.

The Dark Lord’s fate was publicly announced on the Holonet approximately a day before the execution.

At first, the early reactions to the sentence were good and happily accepted. Those were the reactions from the high society in the Core.

The backlash that happened during the Coruscant night was massive and utterly unexpected.

Alliance’s posts were brutally attacked on some of the Outer Rim planets, many of the Imperial forces, who had been standing down, were arming up and thousands upon thousands of troopers were preparing to storm the city-planet.

Hundreds of planets started passive measurements against the notion - many planets, from Wobani to Cato Neimoidia, had stopped their trade with the Core.

The still vulnerable Senate was shocked and confused by the whole situation. When the people of Coruscant, started protesting in front of the Senate and the regulation posts that were installed on the planet, many senators didn’t know what to make from it.

The Senate was truly bewildered. Didn’t the people of the Galaxy know what atrocities the man had committed?

No matter what the public thought, in order not to sentence themselves to another war, the Senate agreed to delay or utterly change the sentence.

Once again Darth Vader had to stand a trial, but this time publicly.

The media jumped at the opportunity. Many reporters were sent to different parts of the galaxy to get answers.

The information they found was a bucket of cold water, spilled over the Alliance leaders.

Many articles popped out and with every one of them, the new government grew more and more bewildered.

Stories of Vader allying himself with local rebels to overthrow the Moff in charge of the planet, of him helping the flooded Akiva and other planets having a crisis due to some natural disaster.

Vader was even found responsible for the final liberation of Ryloth, and the death of more than several dozens of warlords from the Hutt clan.

One really fearless reporter even went to Mustafar and got access to Vader’s mission reports. But the real gold found there was an old videotape from around the creation of the Empire. Unfortunately, parts of the video were destroyed (after all Sidious couldn’t allow his apprentice to see Kenobi and his very-much-alive wife escaping the hellish planet), but the reporter still managed to acquire one spectacular Jedi fight (even if they couldn’t see what it had to do with Vader, anything connecting the Jedi was finally allowed once again).

All these articles were slow blows to the government and the idea that they protected.

The final blow came when the public required a meeting with Darth Vader.

At first, the idea seemed fine, after all, what else could possibly go wrong.

They had forgotten the request put in by Luke Skywalker after it came to light that Vader might live. The request for extra medical attention.

The man that they led into the studio had little visual connection to the imposing Dragon of the Empire. The only similarities were the built and the height.

His face was half-covered in a clear mask, showing on full display his scars.

And there were scars. Every visible inch of his skin was covered in scar tissue and was so very pale, that it was whiter than the stormtrooper’s new armor.

The interviewer, the screen directors and staff were starting for quite some time, brought back by the insistent cough of Luke Skywalker who was the one guarding the ex-Sith.

The live broadcast started with easy questions with not so easy answers:

“Are you really Lord Vader?”

“If that’s not your real name, what is it?”

“Why are you in the state of requiring life support suit?”

Then it came down to the hard ones:

“Why were you sentenced to execution in the first place if you haven’t actually done anything of the things they accused you of?”

Darth Vader’s real name was apparently Anakin Skywalker. He had been Jedi for more than ten years and a General in the Clone Wars for three.

He described his life as a Jedi, his inability to fit in because of his past. He explained the non-attachment rule of the Jedi, about the age at which people were accepted into the Order. Anakin told them that the Jedi couldn’t have strong relationships with their birth families and non-Jedi (a fact which surprised the Jedi in the room as much as it surprised the staff). He told them about their decision that a nine years old was too old to become a Jedi (the statement was met with denial and outrage).

He explained that during his years as a Jedi, the Order was mistrustful of him and because of it he grew closer to his friend in the Senate - the Chancellor.

Anakin started talking about the Clone Wars, about the horrors, the atrocities. He told them about the planets ruined because of the inability of the galaxy to listen.

The ex-Sith told them about the clones, his men, who were bred to die and never even complained about it. He told them stories about heroism far beyond the capability of anyone else. He told them about their lack of rights. He told the galaxy how his men fought for the Republic, killed for the Republic, sacrificed their lives for the Republic and the same Republic never gave them citizenship but treated them as objects, possessions.

Almost every member of the crew was moved by his words.

Anakin continued telling them that even if many tried to stop it, the war continued. He told them about how he fell in love, right at the beginning of the war. How he and his angel agreed that they could not live without one another. He told them about the little secret wedding on a Mid-Rim world.

If there had been someone who hadn't been crying, now they were.

Anakin was breathing hard, silent tears running down his cheeks.

He explained the strain the war put on people, who then put the blame on the Jedi. He told them how The Senate ordered the Order around, how they were forced to follow their orders so the Jedi could keep the little favor of the public.

He told them about the propaganda, about the campaigns, about the millions of people dying because there was no more food. About the greedy corporations and clans that spend all their money on more droids and clones, feeding the war machine more and more.

They had called him The Hero With No Fear. He and his Jedi Master became The Team - The Hero and The Negotiator. Unbeatable.

But ironically they were. They were beaten more than once. He had been constantly afraid -for his men, for his wife, for his student, for his brother.

A sob cut off his speech allowing, letting the silence settle.

Finally, they had the courage to ask him how old he had been during the war.

The man, the war veteran left with almost nothing to show for his accomplishments, answered “I was 19 when they sent me on the front. I was 20 when I became a General. My padawan, my apprentice was 14 when they sent her on the front. My men were 10 years old. For those of you, who had read about the war from your pads or in school, let me tell you how old was the youngest Commander- 11. There were teens on the front fighting, getting shot, being tortured for information, and nobody then, found it strange and unnatural,” the man was stopped by a hard pat on his shoulder. Luke Skywalker was looking forward, not seeing anything with a glassy look over his eyes.

The silence was like a heavy blanket over the people. There was horror, anger and sadness, oh so much sadness, in the air, drowning the inhabitants.

Anakin started talking once again. He told the galaxy about Count Yan Dooku of Sereno, once a Jedi Master and a Sith Apprentice, Master of Makashi. He told them about Asajj Ventress, once Jedi Padawan and a Sith Apprentice. He told them about the terror bringing Jedi Killer General Grievous. He told the galaxy their stories, their tragedies. He told them about their deaths.

Anakin was breathing hard, mind somewhere else. He took one much-needed pause and spoke about the rise of the Empire.

He told them about his wife's pregnancy, he told them about his mother’s death. He told them about the sleepless night and the pressure of both sides - the Senate and the Jedi.

The Dark Lord told them about Sidious, about the Grand puppeteer, the master manipulator, the Sith Master behind the war.

Ignoring the viewers' shock, which resonated through the Force, he told them about Order 66, about the Jedi Purge and his own involvement. He told them about the round of applause, Palpatine received when he took control over the galaxy as a whole.

Anakin took a deep breath and told them about Mustafar “I was sent there to kill the Separatist Council. On my way back I met my wife, my angel. She begged me to come with her, to help her raise our baby together, to be happy. She only wanted from me, to come back to her.”

There was something that was utterly broken in Anakin’s gaze, “I didn’t accept, instead I called her a liar and... I tried to kill her.” His voice started trembling from emotions too intense to be understood. “My Jedi Master, Obi-Wan engaged me in a duel to keep me away from her. To keep the galaxy safe from me. We fought as we have never fought before, and in the end, he won - he cut off my three remaining limbs and left me to burn on the shore.”

The broken man ignored the sharp intakes of breaths, the gasps and the sinking feeling of horror that was filling the room.

After a tense pause, Anakin continued “I was found by the Emperor who saved my life and put me in that torture device he called life-support. When I woke, the first thing I did was ask for Padmè, only to be answered that I had killed her.” His voice became more and more emotionless as he kept talking, “Later I found out I had had a psychotic break caused by the stress and lack of sleep. In my weak state, Sidious had managed to influence me even more than before. You asked me why I allowed them to accuse me of crimes I haven’t committed? Because even if I had been manipulated, influenced and lied to, I am still the person who took those choices. I am the horrible human being that helped a man commit a genocide, helped a man create a dictatorship and I am a man who deserves nothing else than the same sentence I sent so many others to.”

The silence that followed was heavy, pregnant and absolutely no one had an idea how to break it.

Finally, a movement caught their attention, and the staff all turned their heads to follow the path of the war veteran and the Jedi Knight out of the room.

Right before they made their exit, Anakin Skywalker turned and said “I did the good things in her name. In the name of Padmè Amidala Skywalker, who supported democracy until her dying breath. I did it in the name of Shmi Skywalker who let her son be taken away, while she was left in slavery. I did it for my son and daughter who could have grown in a better galaxy if it weren’t for me. I did it for the bright-eyed free boy who wanted to free all the slaves.” He took one last calming breath, “I did it because the galaxy needs more people ready to help each other.”

A quiet laugh broke through the grave silence, and for the first time today, the Jedi Knight spoke, “Come on, Father. You promised to show me that restaurant.”

The father and son left, leaving the reporter and his crew gaping like fish.

Finally, someone managed to say, “We can't edit any of this. This was live.”

Nobody answered, letting the silence fill the room once again.

...Or an idea, continuing my Sidious is Sympathetic! Fic. There was more but it got deleted... again. I think I went a bit overboard so, sorry.

In addition, I started series connected to this AU on ao3. If you want, you can check it out here.

#star wars au #starwars #star wars #darth sidious #darth vader #luke skywalker #anakin skywalker #sw crack #crack #sympathizing!sidious

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 6.11

173 – Marcomannic Wars: The Roman army in Moravia is encircled by the Quadi, who have broken the peace treaty (171). In a violent thunderstorm emperor Marcus Aurelius defeats and subdues them in the so-called "miracle of the rain". 631 – Emperor Taizong of Tang sends envoys to the Xueyantuo bearing gold and silk in order to seek the release of Chinese prisoners captured during the transition from Sui to Tang. 786 – A Hasanid Alid uprising in Mecca is crushed by the Abbasids at the Battle of Fakhkh. 980 – Vladimir the Great consolidates the Kievan realm from Ukraine to the Baltic Sea. He is proclaimed ruler (knyaz) of all Kievan Rus'. 1011 – Lombard Revolt: Greek citizens of Bari rise up against the Lombard rebels led by Melus and deliver the city to Basil Mesardonites, Byzantine governor (catepan) of the Catepanate of Italy. 1118 – Roger of Salerno, Prince of Antioch, captures Azaz from the Seljuk Turks. 1157 – Albert I of Brandenburg, also called The Bear (Ger: Albrecht der Bär), becomes the founder of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, Germany and the first margrave. 1345 – The megas doux Alexios Apokaukos, chief minister of the Byzantine Empire, is lynched by political prisoners. 1429 – Hundred Years' War: Start of the Battle of Jargeau. 1488 – Battle of Sauchieburn: Fought between rebel Lords and James III of Scotland, resulting in the death of the king. 1509 – Henry VIII of England marries Catherine of Aragon. 1594 – Philip II recognizes the rights and privileges of the local nobles and chieftains in the Philippines, which paved way to the stabilization of the rule of the Principalía (an elite ruling class of native nobility in Spanish Philippines). 1748 – Denmark adopts the characteristic Nordic Cross flag later taken up by all other Scandinavian countries. 1770 – British explorer Captain James Cook runs aground on the Great Barrier Reef. 1775 – The American Revolutionary War's first naval engagement, the Battle of Machias, results in the capture of a small British naval vessel. 1776 – The Continental Congress appoints Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston to the Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence. 1788 – Russian explorer Gerasim Izmailov reaches Alaska. 1805 – A fire consumes large portions of Detroit in the Michigan Territory. 1825 – The first cornerstone is laid for Fort Hamilton in New York City. 1837 – The Broad Street Riot occurs in Boston, fueled by ethnic tensions between Yankees and Irish. 1865 – The Naval Battle of the Riachuelo is fought on the rivulet Riachuelo (Argentina), between the Paraguayan Navy on one side and the Brazilian Navy on the other. The Brazilian victory was crucial for the later success of the Triple Alliance (Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina) in the Paraguayan War. 1892 – The Limelight Department, one of the world's first film studios, is officially established in Melbourne, Australia. 1895 – Paris–Bordeaux–Paris, sometimes called the first automobile race in history or the "first motor race", takes place. 1898 – The Hundred Days' Reform, a planned movement to reform social, political, and educational institutions in China, is started by the Guangxu Emperor, but is suspended by Empress Dowager Cixi after 104 days. (The failed reform led to the abolition of the Imperial examination in 1905.) 1901 – The boundaries of the Colony of New Zealand are extended by the UK to include the Cook Islands. 1903 – A group of Serbian officers stormed the royal palace and assassinated King Alexander Obrenović and his wife, Queen Draga. 1917 – King Alexander assumes the throne of Greece after his father, Constantine I, abdicates under pressure from allied armies occupying Athens. 1919 – Sir Barton wins the Belmont Stakes, becoming the first horse to win the U.S. Triple Crown. 1920 – During the U.S. Republican National Convention in Chicago, U.S. Republican Party leaders gathered in a room at the Blackstone Hotel to come to a consensus on their candidate for the U.S. presidential election, leading the Associated Press to coin the political phrase "smoke-filled room". 1935 – Inventor Edwin Armstrong gives the first public demonstration of FM broadcasting in the United States at Alpine, New Jersey. 1936 – The London International Surrealist Exhibition opens. 1937 – Great Purge: The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin executes eight army leaders. 1938 – Second Sino-Japanese War: The Battle of Wuhan starts. 1940 – World War II: The Siege of Malta begins with a series of Italian air raids. 1942 – World War II: The United States agrees to send Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union. 1942 – Free French Forces retreat from Bir Hakeim after having successfully delayed the Axis advance. 1944 – USS Missouri, the last battleship built by the United States Navy and future site of the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, is commissioned. 1955 – Eighty-three spectators are killed and at least 100 are injured after an Austin-Healey and a Mercedes-Benz collide at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the deadliest ever accident in motorsports. 1956 – Start of Gal Oya riots, the first reported ethnic riots that target minority Sri Lankan Tamils in the Eastern Province. The total number of deaths is reportedly 150. 1962 – Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin allegedly become the only prisoners to escape from the prison on Alcatraz Island. 1963 – American Civil Rights Movement: Governor of Alabama George Wallace defiantly stands at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in an attempt to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending that school. Later in the day, accompanied by federalized National Guard troops, they are able to register. 1963 – Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burns himself with gasoline in a busy Saigon intersection to protest the lack of religious freedom in South Vietnam. 1963 – John F. Kennedy addresses Americans from the Oval Office proposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would revolutionize American society by guaranteeing equal access to public facilities, ending segregation in education, and guaranteeing federal protection for voting rights. 1964 – World War II veteran Walter Seifert attacks an elementary school in Cologne, Germany, killing at least eight children and two teachers and seriously injuring several more with a home-made flamethrower and a lance. 1968 – Lloyd J. Old identified the first cell surface antigens that could differentiate among different cell types. 1970 – After being appointed on May 15, Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington officially receive their ranks as U.S. Army Generals, becoming the first women to do so. 1971 – The U.S. Government forcibly removes the last holdouts to the Native American Occupation of Alcatraz, ending 19 months of control. 1978 – Altaf Hussain founds the student political movement All Pakistan Muhajir Students Organisation (APMSO) in Karachi University. 1981 – A magnitude 6.9 earthquake at Golbaf, Iran, kills at least 2,000. 1987 – Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Bernie Grant are elected as the first black MPs in Great Britain. 1998 – Compaq Computer pays US$9 billion for Digital Equipment Corporation in the largest high-tech acquisition. 2001 – Timothy McVeigh is executed for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing. 2002 – Antonio Meucci is acknowledged as the first inventor of the telephone by the United States Congress. 2004 – Cassini–Huygens makes its closest flyby of the Saturn moon Phoebe. 2007 – Mudslides in Chittagong, Bangladesh, kill 130 people. 2008 – Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper makes a historic official apology to Canada's First Nations in regard to abuses at a Canadian Indian residential school. 2008 – The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is launched into orbit. 2010 – The first African FIFA World Cup kicks off in South Africa. 2012 – More than 80 people die in a landslide triggered by two earthquakes in Afghanistan; an entire village is buried. 2013 – Greece's public broadcaster ERT is shut down by then-prime minister Antonis Samaras. It would open exactly two years later by then-prime minister Alexis Tsipras.

#Events

[irrfahrer]

Wookiepedia on Force Drain and Dark Healing

Read the Original Text Here!

Force drain referred to a spectrum of offensive and defensive Force powers, tied to the same concept, which used the dark side of the Force to tap into the strengths of an organic target. Mastery of each technique could scale the area of effect, sometimes dramatically, or exhaust the victims almost instantaneously.

Known Applications Force abilities such as drain life and dark healing, siphoned vitality to sometimes offer an equivalent effect of Force healing, the difference being that the regenerative processes in the user was fueled draining the targets. Other techniques like Drain Force rekindled Force energy in the user, offensively draining the Force energy from those whom the power was turned upon. Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Bane was able to create a spherical deadly field of pure dark side energy around himself that instantly withered away anyone unlucky enough to be caught within its radius.However, this ability was extremely exhausting, to the point where it was highly impractical for Bane to use it unaided. Another application was Force Diminish, which is a Force power that enabled the user to cause damage to an opponent's health and vitality. With enough concentration, the user was able to weaken an opponent's body and mind to the point of death. Some wielders of the Force were known to be able to drain life energy and force energy simultaneously, like the Dark Lord Darth Malak did in the last battle of the Jedi Civil War as he dueled his former Sith Master Revan. He used Force drain to draw upon the power of captive Jedi who had fallen in the attack on Dantooine.

Revan himself learned of the technique from the teachings of Zelashiel the Blasphemer, which he recorded in his Holocron. As detrimental as the teachings of the dark side were said to be to the very flesh of their practitioners, Force drain could be more dangerous still, if one relied on the technique or did not contain its full measure of power. During the First Jedi Purge, in his hunger for power, the Sith Lord Darth Nihilus honed a pernicious means of feeding upon the Force, which eventually enslaved him. The arcane practice was known to the ancient Sith and came into use at some point after the Hundred-Year Darkness. Supposedly, the technique was pioneered by a mysterious individual known only as Zelashiel, or Zelashiel the Blasphemer. It was lost over time, however, as the Lords of the Sith abandoned Republic space and their strongholds were deserted. According to Kreia, the technique itself could not be taught but only be gained through instinct, through experiencing its effects first-hand, which was possibly an irreversible process as the absence left in the victim turned into hunger, eventually compelling them to feed themselves.

The only other known individual with the potential to use this variant of Force drain was Meetra Surik, who was similar to Nihilus in that she was also a living Force Wound. However, whereas Nihilus had been forced to use the technique as a matter of survival on Malachor V, Surik never consciously utilized the ability, and as such never became dependent on it. She could however, subconsciously use her condition to feed off the deaths of people around her. She ended up incidentally using this ability to accelerate the restoration of her ability to use the Force after she severed her connection to it at the conclusion of the Battle of Malachor V. Kreia described this ability as a means of destroying connections between life around oneself, drawing upon them until they were drained completely and the exhausted life died. Connections, however, could also obstruct the use of this ability; for example, Darth Sidious discovered that it was very difficult to use Force drain on close family members. Nihilus supposedly took this practice to unmatched levels; wiping out entire planets, he became something of a hole in the Force, his mere presence killing all around him, slowly, feeding him. Wounds in the Force located in places such as the dark side world of Malachor V were said to bear a similar behavior. Near the end of the Mandalorian Wars, Revan learned within the Trayus Academy how to take advantage of such places, and how to make them, in order to break the will of Jedi and turn them to the dark side.

A sizable part of the Sith Triumvirate, under Darth Traya, Darth Sion and Nihilus himself, was made to have some measure of proficiency in Force drain. Specifically, a sect of Sith assassins, once of Revan's elite Jedi hunter squads, were subject to what Kreia referred to as "special teachings." They came to use the technique to track Jedi more efficiently, and to grow stronger the closer they came to Force-sensitives, so that the stronger one was in the Force the more assassins would feel their presence, and the deadlier they would be in combat. On Dxun, during the Second Battle of Onderon, the Sith tried to bolster their forces on Onderon by feeding on a Force nexus located in the Tomb of Freedon Nadd. On Dantooine, Kreia consumed the Jedi High Council in the persons of Jedi Masters Vrook Lamar, Kavar, and Zez-Kai Ell, who were assembled in the ruins of the Jedi Enclave by Meetra Surik to answer the Sith threat. One of the most grandiose displays of Force drain was given by Nihilus when he consumed Katarr, a Miraluka world in the Mid Rim. However, unchecked use of his talent took the form of addiction, and would have ultimately cost his life had he not been slain by Surik. The hunger that possessed him would have kept growing, along with his power and his reach in the Force, posing a threat to all life. Another such large scale example was when the Sith Emperor Vitiate performed a complex magical ritual in which he drained the life force of all living things on the world of Nathema, thus obtaining immortality for himself. Other examples are Exar Kun, the Dark Lord in the time of the Great Sith War, who harnessed Sith and Jedi artifacts on Yavin 4 to enhance his power and drain the entire Massassi species, so that his spirit could endure for more than four thousands of years in the Great Temple; and Galactic Emperor Palpatine, who fed off the inhabitants of his retreat world of Byss collectively with his Dark Side Adepts, although those unfortunates were drained slowly, over a long period of time, rather than consuming the whole world at once. During the Disciples of Ragnos crisis, some of the New Reborn were able to use Force drain as well.

#inspiration #Ziv knows the concept of force drain #as in 'using the energy from another beeings (for example a plants) cells to boost the healing process of another beeings cells' #which her master explained to her and then did not went into more detail #and ziv did not thought about it anymore #because ignorance is not a bliss and as a Healer Zivs master thought she should know what is possible to not tab intothings she cannothandle #she does use force drain regulary to heal in her Dark Jedi verse

[gothamdetected-a]

an idiots guide to gotham.

sim, i hear you say, what the hell are you doing? it’s gotham. everyone knows gotham. batman’s hometown. arkham asylum. what more is there to know?

surprisingly, a lot. 

for example, did you know that the it has been described as "Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November." which i think is one of the coolest descriptions of an aesthetic ever. thanks dennis. anyway, there’s a lot more to this city and it’s mad confusing history than first meets the eye, so in true sim fashion, i’m here to whoop dc into shape and attempt to make sense of it all. in the immortal words of coldplay “oh take me back to the start.”

as a geography nerd, i’d like to begin way way back. like continent forming era. star wars’ a long long time ago has got nothing on this. because really, why is gotham so plagued with crime and corruption? why is it perpetually cloudy and gloomy and dark? why is this tiny patch of american coastline continually the stage for insane events while everywhere else around it seems perfectly fine and chilling. 

it’s because of cthulu. 

well, kind of. seriously. apparently trapped beneath the actual earth of gotham is a lovecraftian-esque being who’s been chilling for 40,000 years. yeah, bet you didn’t know that. it even takes to calling itself “doctor gotham” after long enough, but that might just be a writer taking the piss out of dr manhattan, which honestly, im here for. so there’s some ancient slumbering god just poisoning what will become gotham, with it’s “evil essence” or whatever. there is a native american tribe who lives in the area - the miagani. in a croatoan-like fashion, they mysteriously disappear one day: no one knows exactly what happened to them, but there’s speculation of black magic and an insane shaman who goes all caesar on them and tries to develop a tyrannical rule, but they seal him in a cave and flee only to be slaughtered by a neighbouring tribe/a mysterious natural disaster. already this place is giving off the Not Good Vibes.    

some time later a bunch of colonists arrive, one of whom is named hiriam arkham. he tries to build a chapel, but it ends up being the site of a murder and so that idea is abandoned. the colonists later accidentally open the cave and release Deacon Blackfire (nasty shaman man), who is fairly immortal, definitely a shithead, and also becomes a batman adversary and a black lantern corp member/zombie in a few hundred years. fun. the colonists are never seen again. wonder what happened there.   

so the ground keeps being corrupted and drawing the nasties to it. one of these nasties is a norwegian mercenary, captain jon logerquist, who lands there circa 1635 with his crew, feels the heeby jeebies vibe and goes ah yes. this is where i shall settle. utter weirdo. so suddenly we have a city being formed - you guessed it, gotham city, also known simply as gotham. and everything is fairly chill for a while. the city is known to be a hideout for ruffians and smugglers, has a fairly higher proportion of stabbings and burglaries, but other than it being a bit of a lawless wasteland, it’s not, you know, any stranger than other pre-civil war american towns. at some point war for independence ( 1775–1783 ) rolls through, and there’s a fairly large battle that is long and bloody and doesn’t look like is going to be won so the founding fathers decide to do something extra stupid, and summon a bat-demon. yes, literally, a bat-demon. that they think will help them turn the tides of the battle. instead they realise it can’t be controlled, panic a bit, and end up trapping it beneath gotham, nice and snuggled next to fucking cthulu’s cousin. so gotham is now especially Cursed, and also starts gathering a large number of bat colonies in it’s underground cave system, because they’re all coming to worship this demon thing or w/e. 

next step is the civil war ( 1861-1865 ), and this is the first time we get a cobblepot in town - colonel nathan cobblepot to be precise. a couple of generations happen, and the town is growing into a city - at this point five of the families truly “found” gotham as a metropolitan and industrial hub, building bridges to connect the islands and forging the path to gotham as it is today. these five families are the cobblepots, the elliots, the crownes, the kanes and the waynes. these eventually become known as gotham’s oldest lineages, and it’s wealthiest, forming the future of gotham high society. however the cobblepots eventually end with penguin, and thomas elliot gets salty and becomes hush ,and the kanes and waynes decide to start dressing up as bats so it’s more like a cautionary tale than anything. 

around this time (1870), ra’s al ghul builds wonder city beneath gotham’s old town, and around a naturally occurring lazarus pit under the city. wonder tower becomes a spectacle of the gotham skyline, their equivalent to the empire state or big ben. eventually the project is abandoned, especially after mysterious disappearances, rumours of madness and strange sounds of rioting emerging from the nearly completed project. also occurring in this decade is the conversion of arkham manor into the elizabeth arkham sanatorium (which would later become arkham asylum) under the then heir, amadeus arkham. elizabeth commits suicide, a serial killer murders the rest of the family, save amadeus, who then goes mad and begins dabbling in the occult and experimenting on patients, eventually becoming one himself. despite all this, arkham asylum remains open, setting the scene for this to be one of the most tragic and fucked up buildings in america. 

another generation goes by and the wayne family produces solomon wayne, who will eventually become an incredibly important figure to gotham, partly because he is a judge and has a courthouse named after him and all that, but mostly because solomon wayne is the man who hires cyrus pinkney. who? you ask. literally the man responsible for gotham’s fucked up architecture. solomon wayne commissions him to create what he calls “gotham style” around 1890, and pinkney, heavily influenced by both cubist/surrealist design and the gothic revival, is the bastard who ensures everything has a gargoyle slapped on it and that gotham cathedral could literally be home to dracula. every inch of the city is covered in hidden meanings and mysticism, because, if you haven’t already guessed, pinkney was a bit nuts, but solomon wayne seems mighty pleased by this and it does actually boost gotham’s industry and cause people to relocate to it from the surrounding area. pinkney’s final piece de resistance is the statue the lady of gotham (officially named Justice opens her eyes to the world ) in the gotham harbour, yet another new york parallel. 

however as a result of booming capitalism and continued gentrification, gotham develops extreme poverty, with several areas of the city, specifically around the docks, the bowery and the narrows, becoming slums. crime levels continue to rise, and many writers take inspiration from chicago and new york mobs in the 30′s and 40′s, drawing parallels and creating organised crime, mafias and gangs. families like the maronis, falcones and thornes begin to take over the city, shaking down businesses for “protection” developing protsitution and drug running rings, importing weapons etc. gotham becomes seen nationally as a dark foreboding metropolis, where the ultra-rich one percenters drink champagne in their ivory towers while the poor of the city suffer and die. city planners also take this opportunity to go absolutely nuts, and build bomb shelters, underground highways, crazy sewer systems, you name it. after all, no one cares right? it’s gotham. by the time the cold war comes to a head, the city is literally riddled with layers of alleys and tunnels and walkways, all over burdened by the watchful eyes of giant bronze statues and stone grotesques.

then, thomas and martha wayne appear, and really start trying to change the city. they develop philantrophic interests, help to create the monorail, encourage the other wealthy elite of the city to care about the rotting corpse of gotham. change is slow, but it happens. the city starts to brighten up, vaguely, and the waynes become heralded as gotham’s saviours, becoming more than a household name. of course, they get shot, in an alleyway, by joe chill, and that same night batman is born. it takes him like 20 years to actually appear in the city, but boy when he does appear, he goes ham. this isn’t a batman meta tho, so i’ll keep it light on his backstory and involvement. 

batman tackles corruption in the city, purging the gcpd, bringing criminals to justice etc, all while bruce wayne makes his lauded return and begins trying to change things in the same way that his parents did - investing in the city, creating public services, developing grass roots projects in the worst affected areas of gotham. however, this city is quite literally Cursed and it all goes very wrong very quickly. 

first, ra’s al ghul unleashes the clench (also known as Ebola Gulf A virus) into gotham high society, and through the contagion storyline, a LOT of gothamites die. i think it’s like 40% but don’t quote me on that. the whole city is quarantined, but batman manages to save the day! hooray! wrong. the second disaster happens in the cataclysm arc - a 7.6 richter earthquake (although in my professional opinion this should probably be measured using the mercalli scale because you have to take into account the density of population etc in the area, but whatever, dc don’t study earthquakes like i do :/). as a result of these two events happening literally within months of each other, the entire city is declared a “no man’s land” by the US government. most civilians are evacuated, it is cut off from the mainland by destroying bridges and creating a military blockade and left to literally rot. no central government is applicable, no services are available, and very quickly gangs take over, carving up the city between them. imagine the purge but never ending. that’s gotham. huntress and oracle and the remaining scraps of the gcpd try to keep some kind of order, while bruce fucks off to petition the government into not being dicks and fixing the city rather than abandoning it.  eventually, he comes back, batman battles a lot of people, luthor donates enough money to save the city and gotham is rebuilt and repatriated as part of the us. 

then the next big events include: 

• henri ducard as ra’s al ghul tries to cover the city in fear toxin after teaming up with scarecrow. the narrows is especially targeted. 

• steph accidentally starts a gang war after going through batman’s stuff unsupervised. for a while black mask rules gotham.

• hugo strange convinces the gotham city council to let him have old gotham, which he converts into arkham city. eventually wonder tower explodes and the “city” is shut down, cut off from the rest of gotham. 

• scarecrow successfully releases his fear toxin over gotham via the cloudburst system. most civilians have already been evacuated, but the city is thrown into ruin and chaos.   

these are just the biggest points though, and the ones which help to tie film, comics and games together. my favourite part of gotham i haven’t even talked about yet. but i’m gonna. here we go. 

gotham is chronologically removed. 

obviously time progresses there, but there is a immense sense of timelessness. gotham does not move on with the rest of the world. there’s a huge mash of different eras and styles. there are airships in the sky and maglev monorails on the ground, people use typewriters alongside touch screen laptops, buildings are either twisted gothic nightmares or glistening modern skyscrapers. the time frame that should be obvious from the setting is completely ambiguous. and it’s brilliant, because really it means that the time is not important. it could be set anywhere, anywhen. gotham looks almost the same in the 40s as it does in 2020, and it means that batman and these events can be slotted into pretty much any decade. batman can be born in 1939 or 1969 or 1999 and it still all works. it’s a mash up of modern expressionism and constructivism and art deco and gothic revival and surrealism and space-age futurism and industrialism and honest to god i could literally talk about this all day. but i mustnt so i shall stop now.  

basically the tldr here is that i have a fetish for urban decay, gotham was fucked from day 1 due to some bullshit evil god beneath it, and literally house prices must be so low, because who the hell would want to live there. 

#my metas get longer with every day #long post / #\system\directory\hidden.txt ›› META

[anneapocalypse]

A Chorus World Map

Note: This is not a definitive map! With the exception of two locations, this is not canon. This is just a working model I came up with based on environmental and contextual clues, to have a reference for writing fic.

If you're curious how I came up with this, keep reading!

Map description: A world map of Chorus built on the blue map base shown at the Temple of Arms. The Purge Temple is located on an island left of center, set between the three main continents but closes to the top left continent. Radio Jammer 1C is on a smaller island north and slightly east of the Purge. The rest of the locations are place on the planet's largest continent, taking up most of the right half of the map. Federal Army Outpost 37 is placed at the tip of a long peninsula extending from the northern side of the continent. Crash Site Alpha is on the coast at the northwest corner of the continent, with Crash Site Bravo to the southwest. The Temple of Trials is on the west coast about midway down. The Temple of Arms and Charon Research Complex C-2 are at the southern tip of the continent. Armonia is inland, north and a little east of the Temple of Arms. New Republic Headquarters is just west of the center of the continent, with the Abandoned Fueling station immediately to the northeast. Federal Army Outpost 22 is a ways north and east of New Republic HQ, a little east of the base of the peninsula. The Temple of the Key is inland on the eastern side of the continent. The Temple of Communications is to the south of the Temple of the Key.

Adventures in Cartography

I began by overlaying the two temple maps we're given in season 13. The first (blue) shows the coordinates Tucker is given at the Temple of Arms. These coordinates are where the True Warrior test takes place. I call it the Temple of Trials. (That's not canon, it's just easier to say and it sounds cool.)

The second (red) shows the coordinates given by Santa at the Temple of Trials. Based on his dialogue, it is slightly confusing whether he's talking about the location of the Purge or the Key:

Santa: (to Tucker) As its bearer, the Great Key will remain bonded to you and you alone, until the time of your death. If you believe the inhabitants of this planet are not ready for my creators' gifts, activating the Purge will cleanse them.

Carolina: And by "cleanse" you mean...?

Santa: All sentient life on Chorus will be exterminated.

Tucker: Dude. Buzzkill.

Epsilon: And... where exactly is this thing?

Santa: Here. (a red holographic map lights up with a dot pointing at the Purge's location, east of the Jungle Temple) I will also update all previously sent maps with temple locations.

I believe that map marker is the Key, because that is where everyone goes next. In particular, it's the map marker the mercs see at one of the other temples, right before they head for the Temple of the Key. It fits Carolina's description of "the mountains east of our location."

So these are our touchstones: the Temple of Trials and the Temple of the Key.

Biomes

The next thing I did was attempt to sort the Chorus locations into climate groups based on their environments.

Jungle/yellow sky

Crash Site Alpha

Crash Site Bravo (canyon)

Temple of Trials (on the water)

Temple of Gravity (near Crash Site Alpha and the Purge)

Remote Research Facility (established to study wildlife)

Tropical?

Radio Jammer Station 1C (island off the coast, sky half blue half stormy)

Desert

Abandoned Fueling Station

New Republic HQ (right on the edge of the jungle)

Temple of Communication (debatable, but rocky and not a lot of foliage)

Snowy/Mountainous

Federal Army Outpost 22 (on the edge of the mountains, not snowy)

Federal Army Outpost 37 (on the water, amid mountains but at sea level)

Temple of the Key (high in the mountains)

Grassy/Deciduous

Temple of Arms & Charon Excavation site (on the water, visible from Complex C-2)

Charon Research Complex C-2 (near the Temple of Arms, within visibility)

Unsettled Territory

Who Fucking Knows

Armonia (but it seems warm)

The Purge (red crystal hell)

Directionality

Armonia -> unsettled territory -> Temple of Trials

Armonia -> Fueling Station -> Crash Site Alpha

The Temple of Trials is a shorter trip from Armonia than Crash Site Alpha, thought probably not by more than an hour or so.

New Republic HQ -> Fueling Station -> Federal Army Outpost 37

Crash Site Alpha is relatively close to the Temple of the Purge.

The Communication Temple is to the east of Crash Site Bravo. It seem to be night at the Comm Temple while it is still daylight at Crash Site Alpha.

Why I put almost everything on one continent

The two canon locations are both on that continent, and while characters sometimes have access to air vehicles and teleportation grenades, in both seasons 12 and 13 there is a lot of ground travel happening. (Also, all the grenades detonate early in season 13 and all travel from there on has to be done the long way.) In particular:

Felix leads the Reds and Blues from Crash Site Bravo to New Republic Headquarters by ground, via caves.

Tucker, Grif, Simmons, and Caboose travel from New Republic Headquarters to Federal Army Outpost 37 by Warthog, stopping at the gas station in between.

Carolina and her away team travel from Armonia to the Temple of Trials by ground, passing through unsettled territory.

Kimball leads the troops from Armonia to Crash Site Alpha by ground, also through unsettled territory.

While many of the locations are located by water, we don't have any instances of characters crossing a large body of water.

We're already kind of handwaving how quickly characters can move across the continent in land vehicles, without adding intercontinental travel to the mix.

Doyle claims in season 12 that the rebels were given opportunity to move to a different part of the planet and build their own society. This suggests that a fair amount of Chorus still remains unsettled.

While we don't know the population of Chorus at the time of canon events, if we take a bit of Sarge's dialogue, he refers to "thousands." Even if we estimate generously and say this could be hundreds of thousands, we're still looking a severely contracted population. For comparison, 100,000 to 300,000 people is considered a medium-sized city in the US. With the population so depleted and the war still raging, it makes sense that the populated area of Chorus would have shrunk considerably even if it was once larger.

Keep in mind that this doesn't mean there is nothing of interest on the other continents. There might be more alien towers, settlements, other cities. For this map I’m only working with locations relevant to the Chorus Trilogy storyline, not the entire world.

Other Considerations

As this is a flattened map of a globe, it is not to scale and landmasses distort more the further they are toward the corners. It is probably best, therefore, not to get too hung up on distances. For visibility's sake the map markers are misleadingly large, and appear a lot closer to one another than they actually would be on the ground.

For my purposes I consider any Chorus canon post-season 13 to be entirely optional, but for what it's worth, the brief view we get of Chorus from space during the blockade lines up pretty well with this map, with that main continent being the one most clearly in view—and also the one at which the fleet have pointed their cannons. It is also worth nothing from this image that the bifurcated continent in the upper left corner of the map actually appears to come quite close to the central continent where it wraps around the globe. For that reason, while I'm thinking of this central continent in terms of north and south, it's probably a bit misleading to look at the whole map that way.

We can see where the sun strikes the planet in that image, but without knowing the planet's axial tilt or where the poles are, it's impossible to determine exactly where the equator is, so again, not getting hung up on it. I'm also taking the appearance of the land itself as a very general suggestion, as the area where the Temple of the Key would be doesn't show any snow. Nevertheless, we can see that central continent divided into three distinct regions: green, tan, and a darker brown. Or: jungle (with some grassy and deciduous area to the south), desert, and mountains.

It makes sense to me that the Temple of the Purge would be located somewhere remote and difficult to access, so I played it off the mainland, on an island.

It's hard to tell in the show, but the Halo map representing the radio jammer is an island, and I thought that made sense as somewhere Charon would place one. They wouldn't put the jammers too close to populated areas, in case the Chorusans got the bright idea to try to shoot them down.

Federal Outpost 37 (the outpost where Wash, Sarge, Donut, and Lopez are taken and where they meet Doyle) is snowy and cold, but it's also right on the water, at sea level, so the cold can't be due to elevation. It made sense to put it further north. According to the Fan Guide, this outpost became the Feds' primary base of ops after they pulled out of Armonia, and while highly defensible due to an "enormous frozen wall," it's also a difficult position from which to mount an offensive. For all these reasons it made sense to me to put it at the end of the northern peninsula.

I probably debated the most where to place Armonia, as it could go pretty much anywhere warm. The scene where Carolina goes out to the city limits is probably the most indicative of Armonia's climate, and I think it would most likely sit right on the edge between desert and the deciduous area south of the jungle, and that's where I've placed it. (I entertained the idea of putting it on that big south central island, but the channel separating it from the mainland would be a lot bigger than it looks on the map, and in the end it just didn't really fit.)

Though I didn't include it on this map, I like to think Chorus might have rebuilt their new capital near the Temple of Communication, in the bones of a city that survived the war abandoned but mostly intact.

I hope you enjoy this map, and perhaps find it useful! Please credit if using, as there is a whole lot of my own headcanon and analysis going into this. 

As with all meta, nothing is set in stone. I will almost certainly find something I don’t like about it five minutes after I hit “post.” :P But it’s a working model! which is more than we had before.

#chorus trilogy #red vs blue #rvb #avian dentistry #chorus world map #chorus worldbuilding #rvb reference

[aoskalskirata]

When Hell breaks loose, it's never pretty...

The humans have been at war for a long time now, roughly 5 standard years since first contact with a resurgent alien AI that managed to wipe out it's creators some decades ago, or so it thought. A few outlying colonies, one of them just lightyears from Terra, panicked and left their worlds, becoming nomadic until they found mankind, and asked for shelter in exchange for advanced technology to propel their new hosts into space. The aliens now reside on Mars, and accept their new designation that had been derived nearly a century ago.

After learning of a potential threat to their homeworld, the humans quickly developed warships to defend Terra and Mars, and then it came. Just a couple larger ships, but with a massive swarm of drone fighters. Around 10 Hoplite-class frigates were lost, along with 3 mobile refineries and 2 wings of fighters. All told, around 50 lives were lost in the first conflict, and the Martians believed that their allies would soon lose the impending war, as the AI units were always transferring information, then a new series of ships started production in the shipyards. Three new combat models started patrolling out as far as Jupiter orbit, each larger than the last. The smallest of the three also looked a little more specialized, with a pod on its port side. Another AI destroyer jumped in on the Jupiter fleet, and this time, only two of the missile frigates were lost; another 6 lives. The humans were making deadlier vessels, but how long would these designs last? Apparently not long, as another large fleet of AI jumped in right above Mars, and even some of the larger cruisers went down, each holding 10 crew. Once again, things weren't looking good, and things went dark once the AI started sending their fighters against the Martian colonies. An hour into the raids, and a new, much larger ship warped in, with just one word plastered on the side: Atlas. A true capital ship, with it's own fighters to boot.

Once again, the AI was beaten back, and once again, the humans were victorious, even if at a cost. Some months after the Mars defense, one of the Martian leaders had requested permission to enter the human admiral's quarters aboard the Curiosity, one of four Hephaestus-class mobile shipyards moving around the system, Curiosity currently sitting above Mars, acting as the command center of a survey mission concerning the AI wreckage.

"Admiral, it's been three years since you developed the Hoplite frigate, and now you have a ship that can possibly face one of their dreadnoughts. How is this possible?"

"Well, let's look back to our first world war. The first half was fought on horseback, as that was the fastest mode of viable combat transportation at the time. Around 1916, the first tanks were made, thus changing the way we waged war forever. The second world war rolled around, and now you have several nations developing multiple kinds of tanks for different purposes, specializing them, and even making artillery more mobile than before. As we progressed, so did our technology... and our sadism followed."

The admiral thought for a moment "wait... dreadnought, as in larger than what we've seen already?"

"Correct."

"... we will meet again soon." He quickly walked out, and the representative followed.

Another year passed, and more and more AI capital ships came to their deaths, bringing thousands of Sol's finest down with them...

Present Day---

Admiral Hackett and Senator 'Rocky', as he had been nicknamed, now were meeting in the bridge of the Atlas command ship, overlooking an unusually large frame, holding a slightly smaller ship superstructure within.

"Admiral, what is this that's been commissioned? Surely not another warship variant?"

"If what you said two years ago was true, then all that's left is to keep scaling our ships up until either we can't go bigger or the war ends."

"You humans are so twisted at times.."

"It'll get to the point where it's either us or them, just as it had with your civilization. Adaptation is what allows the strongest to survive"

"The last time my species adapted was when we first touched the stars..." Rocky thought aloud, absentmindedly.

"Exactly. Complacency is a very deadly thing, and never works in favor of those that are"

"... how many men will this monster require?" Referring to the ship being constructed I the gantry.

"Over a hundred"

"What is the classification?"

"Ares" a thought suddenly comes to Hackett, and slowly surfaces through his face as he turns to loom at Senator Rocky.

"What?"

"Ares and Mars are the names of the Greek and Roman gods of war, respectively. Their mythologies and cultures were largely the same, and in some aspects, Rome borrowed from Greece. I believe that some of your people are still wanting to fight, no?"

"I-... well, I guess it would seem fitting, given the new name of our civilization. I shall have word put out to my people, and will ask that you send over recruiters immediately. I will set up the appropriate facilities in the meantime."

"Of course, Senator." The two departed, Admiral Hackett taking a few more minutes before returning to his work.

Decades pass without conflict, and the AI are all but forgotten. The newly promoted Admiral is about to announce the mass demilitarization of the Sol Defense Fleet when reports start flooding his terminal. Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn fleets are all wiped out, along with the shipyards Warbound and Vulcanist. Hundreds of lives lost.

The Admiral was aboard the Atlas, orbiting Mars, and a massive fleet jumps in right on top of his. Over 10 destroyers, 5 battle cruisers, and 3 ships of a much larger size, the fabled dreadnoughts. Massive clouds of drones launch from the AI fleet, and are closing in quickly on Atlas and her escorts. The order to scramble fighters is given, and maybe all of 30 launch in response, but they go down the moment they enter range. Hoplite frigates, Styx cruisers, and Athena destroyers all move forward in response, and they don't even make a dent in the swarm, only the Athenas are holding. One of the dreadnoughts turns to the surface of Mars, and the front end starts glowing in its sinister green light. It looked almost ready to fire when the hull started buckling from explosions. From above, a massive human ship, maybe twice the size of the Purge-class dreadnought, fired upon the AI battle group. The rest of the larger ships turned to face the reinforcements, and the destroyers simply melted, battlecruisers fragmented, and another dreadnought buckled, and started falling to the Martian surface. The drones pulled off from what was left of the Mars defense group and converged on their last mothership.

The human dreadnought did something that no one had seen before. It reoriented itself to point straight down in relation to the Purge, which started charging what could only be it's superweapon. Not a single shot was exchanged for what seemed forever. The ball of energy on the front had stopped growing for 30 seconds, lost it's color from increasing brightness, a brief flash from the human ship, and the light in front of the Purge just goes out.

The Admiral starts looking down, fearing the worst, and light starts coming back to the AI dreadnought, this time orange, bringing his attention back to the fight. Just small points of orange, fading in and out all across the hull. It starts fragmenting, and he falls to his knees in relief, unable to speak.

'We did it. We beat them. Thank the Ares-class for this final victory...'

Wrong.

Another year passes, yet again without conflict since those first dreadnoughts, and this time the order to demilitarize the fleet is carried through. Occasionally a couple AI frigates would threaten the random convoy passing through the first asteroid belt, but those ambushes were quickly policed by the last remaining battle group of the SDF, said frigates thought to have been stragglers from the war.

Again, wrong.

Fast forward another 30 years, and the Martians are thriving once again, and they expand with the humans to their old worlds, looking to rebuild what was lost nearly a century ago, and ruins turn to vast cities once again.

And for a time, a long time, the AI were forgotten.

But oh, how complacency kills.

A decade into the expansion, and smaller colonies of what is now the Sol Empire begin going silent. Scout ships are sent to investigate, and they too end up going dark, until one comes back with data. Images of the previous scouts in sector D-623-a4, along with some dark shape being escorted by several dreadnoughts, along with a message file that snuck into one of the terminals aboard the scout ship.

The Admiral ordered for further investigation, and when confronted by press, stated that progress was being made with the investigation of the colony blackout, but nothing confirmed as of yet, as it was now vital that the people not be panicked by what's in the outer rim.

Months passed, and colonies kept going dark, scout ships kept getting lost, and the same message kept coming back: "I have waited a long time for this. I will carry out my directive."

The admiral turned to the helmsman of Atlas "captain, get me The Fleet"

"S-sir?" He replied, confused.

"The entire damned SDF. We need it back online immediately"

"But that won't be able to stop whatever we're dealing with here. We don't have enough shi-"

"What we have now is not the entire fleet, damnit! Computer, pull up the roster the the Sol Defense Fleet at it's peak"

The holoscreen flashed with several different blueprints, the Atlas, Curiosity, and the first Hoplite frigates among dozens upon dozens of other individual vessels. A disembodied voice replied "Virgil, if you'd be so kind, sir, and at peak, the SDF had well over a hundred ships under it's command, including nearly 200 fighters, some of which were wings full of ace pilots for their time. All battle groups currently reside in the Sol Military Museum, between Terra and Venus orbits. That's what I believe you were meaning for your initial request, sir."

A Martian started punching away at his terminal "Already plotting course, sir. I should also mention that I may or may not have been told stories of what's heading this way.."

"It better not be what I think it is, Navigation."

"We both know the response to that one, sir."

Months more pass, and the new Martian Councilor joins the next Admiral Hackett aboard the Atlas, overseeing the SDF revival project.

"I always thought that these were just oversized cargo vessels, Admiral. I mean, how would they not be freighters?"

"Nope. Dedicated warships from a time of war, and every soul to have ever stepped foot in them knew the risks, a good number of them paying that price. Even my father, the admiral before me, knew that. And now I stand where he stood, desperately hoping to find a solution to an extinction-level problem."

"Your father served? How long?"

"Since before you sought shelter from us. Long before"

"Is your entire family known for serving?"

"No, it's mostly been a thing for the males, going as far back as my great-grandfather, who retired roughly a century ago, and wound up deceased a couple years before my father was born."

"Is your family the only one to do this? To serve for generations?"

"Most certainly not, and some families are lucky enough to serve within the same unit as one another. Even females have been known to serve since my great-grandfather's time in the old Army. Some say it's a tradition, some cases dating back by hundreds of years or more"

"We digress. Do you think that we will be able to successfully bring these vessels back? Will they even work?"

"Technology has stagnated a little since the trade agreement between our races, I think we're able to pull out at least 75% of these mothballs out."

"And where will you get the manpower? Don't the frigates alone take dozens of people to operate?"

"3 people per frigate, we had to find a way to cut back on expenses somehow, so we slaved weapons systems to common guidance systems in banks. Of course, more weapon banks means more people, but that means that we can afford the extra crew space. It also makes it easier to mass produce even our larger ships."

"You humans are stranger than Senator Rocky had stated when he was in power, but for both of our sakes, I hope you're right about resurrecting the fleet."

Weeks pass still, and the fleet is slowly brought back into service, but it wasn't too long before the AI itself arrived, the flagship with it's Purge dreadnought escorts, around 20 of them. The flagship hailed the Atlas. "I have waited a long time for this, Kar'rastra. This time, I will be sure to carry out the task set by my creators, your ancestors. Humans, don't stand in my way this time, or your homeworld will be the first that I burn."

Admiral Hackett, stumbling over what the AI said, responded "run that last part by me again?"

"Your homeworld will be the first to burn if you keep these hostages under your custody-"

"Hold on just a minute... 'hostages'? We have done nothing wrong to them. In fact, they came to us seeking refuge from you! We were told that you were destroying their colonies and killing every last one of the Kar-rastra. We have been defending the last of their kind from you, and now you want us to stand by as you take them for slaughter once again? I cannot al-"

"I will stop you right there, as we may have had a century-long misunderstanding. I'm not eradicating anyone. I've been relocating them to a different galaxy, away from the real threat." The dreadnoughts reformed, making a ring between the flagships, and they all fired their spinal lasers into the center, and a different set of stars could be seen on the other side.

"Then why were they running from you? Besides, they haven't been attacked by anything else, so what makes you think that we can trust you?"

"You will soon regret thi-" the portal closes, and five of the dreadnoughts shatter in the void, another two falling victim to the resulting debris.

"All ships, this is MDS Endgame. Engage and fire at will" a massive hulk came flying through the AI formation, followed by three others, the last one taking light fire.

"MDS Revenge here, let's give it to them."

"MDS Oblivion here, opening up with alpha strike on following vector. Stay clear" another of these hulks comes up from the bottom, and fires directly up, slagging another 3 dreadnoughts at once. The AI flagship opens up with its main batteries, punching a few holes in her armor. "Oblivion taking moderate damage, pulling back before things get too messy. Batteries Bravo through Foxtrot are down, decks 3 and 5 are venting atmosphere. 3 bulkheads down."

"MDS Ares here, stay outside of the control ship's range, we don't want to-" another one takes two more dreadnoughts, but gets hit along the spine, taking out the bridge and all vital systems, and it soon vaporizes in it's own failed reactors. All hands lost.

"Endgame here. Focus all fire on the control ship. Without the core, the rest will stop functioning."

"Revenge. Solid copy."

"Oblivion copies"

"MDS Immortal here. Transmitting firing solutions now. Keep your spine out of reach if you can, we don't wanna end up like the Ares."

"Endgame launching fighters. Lost Boys, you reading Lima charlie?"

"Lost Leader, lima charlie. What's the weak spot on this beast?"

"Go for the engines, might be able to make a window for Catalyst to jump through."

"Roger. Lost Boys, form up and watch for those drone rockets."

"Lost Four here, there's a small trench line, looks unprotected."

"Lead copies and likes the idea. Double file in the trench. Double time."

"Endgame here. All units, deploy fighters, let's buy the Lost Boys some time. All wings, launch when ready."

"Revenge, launch all wings."

"Oblivion here, starboard hangar is hit, 5 fighters lost, the rest unreachable. Available wings flying now."

"Immortal wings taking flight, firing another alpha strike." Another massive salvo from the MDS Immortal, but some of the smaller rounds were stopped by a massive swarm of drones that had moved to shield their motherships. Some of the larger rounds got through, and still managed to down another dreadnought.

"They're down by 50%. Lost Lead, what's the ETA for your run?"

"Lost Lead here, this thing's fuck-off massive, it doesn't look like there's a back end at all. Will keep you updated, Endgame."

"Roger, we'll keep an eye on your six."

And the battle raged on, Admiral Hackett getting lost in the chatter and explosions all around. It wasn't long before what appeared to be a box executing an uncomfortably close flyby of the Atlas' aft bridge.

Hell has just arrived, and it's happy to join the fray.

"Catalyst reporting, sorry for showing up late, but I thought you liked having me and the boys at parties."

Hackett quickly got to his comms terminal. "Atlas here, and you know that you're only late if the party ends without you. Good to hear from ya."

"That makes two of us, dad. Lost Lead, your scans say anything about an interior?"

"Ah.. nothing so far, sir. Being honest, I don't even know whe- well, the exterior just finished, and it looks like we're a half hour out from making you an opening. Luckily, I haven't seen a single gun for the past 3, so hopefully we're far out enough to just roll out the red carpet here. 7 and 12, see if you can punch a hole. Everyone else, form up on me, y-axis circle."

"Sounds good, we'll form up on the carpet in 2" Catalyst's commander said as the fighter wing complied. The two Stinger-class fighters that broke off opened up with a small amount of missiles, and the result looked promising.

"Lost Lead hear, and the forecast is sunny with a chance of Medal of Honor." The ring of fighters opened up with a barrage of rockets and ballistic fire, cutting and blowing a Hephaestus sized hole into the hull of the almost endless drone flagship. The Catalyst, a Cloudscatter-class frigate, flies right through the ring and into the maw of buckled plating and ship dust.

"What do you think you are doing? Get out of my ship!" The AI exclaimed.

"Only if you agree to take what toys you have left and leave this galaxy" the commander aboard the Catalyst, Colbran Hackett, was in a bit of a sour mood, playing to the smartass nature that his father did when he was younger.

"Hey Lead, look at this" one of the other fighters flew closer to the hole, slowly.

"Is.. is that.. blood?"

"Dunno, sir. Conduct EVA to collect a sample?"

"Scanning... go ahead"

The pilot overrode the safety measures that sealed the cockpit, opened the hatch, and jumped onto the hull of the flagship, everything being suspended in free fall. He collects a stained shard of metal with a ziploc bag, seals the bag, and returns to his craft, and reverses the console work to repressurize the cockpit.

"Yeah, this looks like blood, sir, and there's more pouring out. Saving this for the Chaos Theory."

"Roger. Return to Endgame, wing. Our job here is done" the squadron flew back towards their mothership, and through the chaos of battle, docked with their Ares-class dreadnought.

"Catalyst to Atlas. Things don't look quite right here... I expected there to be a bit more space in a core ship of this size."

"What do you mean?"

"There's secondary structures all over the place. There's just so much unnecessary material here for an AI core. Lost Lead, are your scans completed yet?"

"Lost Lead here, one of my guys found out something rather interesting about this ship. We're about to take it to Chaos Theory for more details, maybe that'll help with the scans, and answer the question no one's asking."

"Chaos Theory here, preliminary research on the anomaly appears to be organic in nature. Most likely crew, but then that raises the question of why crew a one-man ship."

"See what you can do, Doc."

"If course sir. Chaos Theory out."

"Lost Lead here. Structure scans are picking up on the negative space in proximity to you. See if you can fly around and give us a bit more information."

"Roger. Launching fighters and shuttles to speed things up."

The scan time was halved, and soon the interior map finished rendering, and while that was being done, the strange sample was sent off to the defense fleet's research vessel, the Chaos Theory.

Another few minutes passed, along with more cruiser losses. The Athena-class destroyer, Monumental, was just destroyed. All 10 of her crew lost in a super beam from a Purge dreadnought.

"Atlas, Chaos Theory. Initial suspicions were correct, but not crew."

"What do you mean 'not crew'?"

"As in this fluid is the ship's blood in the most literal way. Notice how the flagship is still leaking."

"Catalyst. Plant boots. I wanna know what's inside the secondary structures ASAP."

"Roger. Marines, you heard him."

"5 steps ahead of ya, Cap. All pods loaded and awaiting drop order."

"Boots away."

"Boots away. Might want to send a group to cover our entrance. Wouldn't wanna get picked off by a drone."

"Cruiser Neverending here, rallying buttplug detail now. Restless, Lowborn, and Painted Ash, form up on me." Two Apollo frigates, a Styx cruiser, and an Athena destroyer regrouped on the super ship's opening, providing a point defense shield against the stray drone squadron. "Buttplug detail has arrived. Nothing's gonna get in, Chief."

"Catalyst here, please never call it that again."

"No promises-"

"Atlas here, please never call it that again."

"Copy."

The Catalyst drops her pods, and the marines start bounding towards the largest internal structure under the 5 inch thick hull plating, which was much thinner than it should've been for a ship of this magnitude.

"This thing looks just a bit.. fragile, wouldn't you say, sarn't?"

"Yeah. If anyone with a mind were to have built something to control an entirely automated fleet, then I would have gone as small as possible, so it'd be easier to hide it among asteroids or debris."

"Guess this machine's about as stupid as you get"

"Cut the chatter. See if you guys can find the main hub and enter it. Big wings wanna know what exactly we're dealing with, as they say that this isn't exactly... normal."

"If I may ask sir, what does that mean?"

"Being honest, we have no clue, hence your part of the mission. Give intel."

"Roger."

Another 5 minutes, and the marines spot a conjunction of the secondary structuring, larger than other crossings, somewhere amid ships.

"Sir, I think this is the central hub. Time to go boom?"

"Enough to get an eyeball inside. If this thing has crew, we grill 'em."

"I've got a bad feeling about this.."

The marines set a breach charge, lit it off, and entered the chamber. The NCO looked around with his crew, and saw a roughly organic figure situated in the center, mounted to a rather gruesome apparatus that was part machine, part organic material. Helmet lights came on and revealed a very disfigured, and very alive, Kar-rastra suspended by several pseudo-mechanical limbs, most of them pumping something through a series of fleshy tubes, and his body regularly pulses with that fluid.

Blood.

"Sir... you're not gonna believe this.. it's.. it's not an AI at all.."

"Say again?"

"See for yourself, sir.." The marines broadcast their suit cams to the CIC of the Catalyst, which was in turn broadcasting to the Atlas and Chaos Theory. Now all of command knew of this hellship.

Part 2 to come soon, post is getting long and phone being stupid. Hope yall enjoy my take on space orcs!

Edit: part 2 is out, and kinda short, but it was, imo, a nice end to the short.

#humans are space orcs

[askthepredator-blog]

Sabre Biography

Current Status - Young Blood (Unblooded)

Overview:

Tah’Dithell, colloquially known as “Sabre” to other species, is a Predator belonging to the War Hunter Clan on Yautcha Prime. He is the grandson of the Elite Hunter known as Wolf, who hundreds of years ago pursued and caused the death of the only known Predalien ever to plague the galaxy. Sabre is renowned for finding the strongest enemy on the battlefield and challenging them to a one on one fight to the death, rather than stalking around and ambushing unaware prey for quick kills. Making him well known to be highly honourable amongst the Elites and Leaders of him clan, who treat him with great respect despite being so young. Sabre is most famous for his use of his arm blades and combi-glaive over his plasma caster and other ranged weapons, so much so that he aspires to attain Elite status simply so he can specialise as a Brawler and wield two arm blades during a hunt as opposed to one.

Physical Appearance:

Sabre stands at 7 feet 9 inches, and weighs roughly 600 lbs (272 kgs) with his body armour on. His skin is a somewhat pale yellow, more similar to human skin than the regular vibrant yellow that most Yautcha are known to have. He possesses hair-like quills on his face and chest, and his dreadlocks are fashioned in the iconic style. 

Equipment:

Before reaching Blooded status, Sabre wielded a combi-glaive, an alternate version of the standard combi-stick, its main difference being the larger blade at one end, making it easier to fend off prey from a greater distance. along with that he utilised the iconic biomask, body armour, sat-com, shuriken, medicomp and cloak. However after taking his first Xenomorph as a trophy, he was permitted use of the full range of Yautcha weaponry, such as the netgun and highly lethal plasmacaster. Yet Sabre only deems it suitable to use if the unworthy get in his way, or if his life depends on its use. Being a War Hunter, his cloak is of a higher grade than most other clans. Considering that these types of Predators move through wars and battlefields frequently, it is entirely necessary that they remain undetectable, therefore when it is activated, Sabre’s cloak does not shimmer at all when he stands still, and barely gives blurs even when he sprints at full speed. His biomask and armour were inherited from is father, who perished to an Alien Queen during a trial to become Clan Leader. 

Clan Legacy:

The War Hunters have only recently rose in power amongst the caste system on Yautcha Prime, thanks mostly to their newest Clan Leader, Darkoh’Audtah, “Apex” to his prey, who led the Clan on a hundred year cleansing of as many Xenomorph hives as possible. Across this purge he personally slew hundreds of aliens, including Praetorians, Queens, Palatines, and even a Queen Mother with the aid of several Elite hunting parties. These trophies were brought back to their homeworld to the great surprise and respect of all other clans, even the Super Predators acknowledged the great feat of the War Hunters, gifting them several automatic plasmacasters as a token of their esteem. 

Typically a Clan member will go on a hunt in the middle of an active warzone, using the conflict to sneak in undetected, they then spend an extended amount of time stalking behind the lines of both sides, trying to find the most worthy of prey before catching them off guard and fighting to the death. 

Apex himself is known as one of the fiercest and most worthy Yautcha in recent millenia, not only being the Leader that brought his Clan to higher status, but being in possession of dozens of trophies from game not before observed in their universe. Yet upon the reviewing of his Biomask records, it was accepted that his hunts were honourable and legitimate, which leaves the question of where he acquired such illustrious prizes. 

Hunt Experience:

Sabre has killed many worthy opponents for being such a young Predator. Among them rank all manner of aliens, xenomorphs, humans and even a bad blood from the City Hunter clan.

After witnessing the footage of Sabre’s manhood trial, Apex summoned him to his sanctum. There the famous Leader bestowed a carved piece of Queen Mother bone to the newly Blooded Predator. Explaining that it was his key, evidence of his worthiness to use an ancient and highly secret gateway deep within Yautcha Prime. This gate led deep into the beyond, reaching realities containing the most lethal game any Predator could dream of. Yet only one Predator was given access to any of these various universes at any given time. Feeling immensely honoured, Sabre vowed that he would find the most dangerous, powerful creatures in the greatest warzone imaginable and bring back their skulls to honour not only himself, but his clan, and his race as a whole. 

#Muse #Predator #Yautcha #War Hunters #oc #lore #backstory