It was a fantastic history lesson, a tech lesson and one of the saddest stories I had heard. If Primus had been a better storyteller, this would have been a classic, full of mystery, betrayal, Princesses to save and heroes giving their lives for their Princess and Empire. I finally understood Dance's reference, Save the Cheerleader, Save the World; he didn’t mean cheerleader; he meant Princess. I binge-watched Heroes with my mum on one of her holidays. She liked it when she was younger, and it seemed to have several correlations with our current situation.
One thing is sure: we would create waves when we returned. Most of what he told me was lost in time and surrounded by myth and mystery, locked away by those who didn't want the truth known and guessed at by seekers of that truth.
This is their story as it should have been told, and I had to piece it together with the help of Solace. Primas was boring.
As the Emperor was informally called, Rax had one child, his daughter, Princess Raechina Avidan Janar. Her mother was one of Rax's many concubines, as he had never married. She was never really mentioned in history except to note her great beauty. This tragic story starts when Raechina was of an age to marry. Many said she was too old, but what was an age when she had near immortality in her Tier 5 body? Time seemed meaningless before her as an imperial progeny.
She was 22 years old and had become Rax's obsession. She was to be perfect, a perfect Imperial Princess. His Imperial Princess. As all doting fathers did, he had denied all suitors and focused on giving her whatever she wanted. She also rejected all suitors, content to be free to pursue her destiny. She was an Imperial Princess who was beautiful and intelligent and had many rejected suitors. Raechina was not at all interested in marriage or running the Empire. She was a warrior, having trained with the Legion and been informally adopted by them, much to her father's displeasure. The Legion loved her, and she had become somewhat of an unofficial mascot.
The Emperor, Rax, was one of the most powerful beings alive. This was an undisputed fact. His willpower, sense of justice, commitment to the good of the people, and prodigious energy fields fed off his conviction. He single-handedly kept peace and prosperity across the Empire. He had risen to power during the long war with the Karass Collective. Using the creation of an AI and the System that encoded and simplified the learning of powers led to a new age of power, and he was the culmination of it. A near-perfect man at the peak of power. An uneasy stalemate between the empires began after a Karass agent stole a prototype of the AI. With many skirmishes but no decisive victory for either, Rax started negotiations with the Karass Warlord. The Crow, the son of the Karass Warlord, was to wed his daughter, formalise relations, and end tensions. They had both felt that marriage, with the Crown Prince and the Princess inheriting their positions of rulership, could bridge the divide. This would bring peace to the galaxy. Unfortunately, there are always those who benefit from war, discord, and chaos, especially in a warrior culture like the Karass.
The Crow and Princess were to meet and formalise the arrangement. However, she never turned up; she went missing. Rumour had it that the Princess didn't want to marry a stranger and had run away. Other rumours were that she had defected or been kidnapped. Others said that she had already met her true love and had run off to marry him. None of the rumours were close to the truth. The negotiations were a trap. She had been kidnapped and banished to one of the border chaos realms.
In a god-like rage, the Emperor led a quest to recover his beloved daughter. He asked for volunteers on this mission, and the First Cohort stepped up for their Princess. Soon after they started their mission, they disappeared, too.
This last bit was put together with the help of Solace, from her Empire histories and her reading of Sunny W’s guide to Imperial history.
In the ensuing chaos, the Imperial Senate posted a considerable reward for any individual or group to find and return the Emperor or the Princess.
Mercenary groups surged at the chance to claim the purse. An age of exploration, questing and growth led to more tensions for the border and fringe regions. Piracy, bandits and local warlords started popping up as the Empire lost stability as many of the more influential individuals were seemingly distracted by a fool's mission. Soon, saving the Princess was used as a term for impossible tasks and a fool’s quests. The Legion sent cohort after cohort to chase rumours and leads. Nothing was found, and many did not return.
Primus told us how The Emperor followed the trail to a significant chaos incursion on a border fringe world, with faint life trails from his daughter. The expense and favours from within and outside the Empire.
With the First Cohort, they cleared the incursion, but before destroying it, they managed to subvert the portal stone and used it to travel through the stone's transition point. They battled through hordes of beasts and monsters in the chaotic realms. Such was the power and rage of the Emperor and the First Legion that they eventually tracked the Karass agents who had the Princess in a stasis pod. A bitter and dangerous rescue mission saw the Crown Prince's death at the Emperor's hands. Sadly, the death of The Crow ensured that the war with Karass would never end.
The rescuing of the Princess was at a considerable cost. She had been kidnapped and placed in a stasis, a temporal lock box that they could not bypass, and they dared not try due to the nature of the poisons used in her kidnapping. It was also how they had masked her bio-signatures during the abduction. Behind enemy lines, the Emperor despaired with a weakened and reduced force when Primus fell in battle.
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For the first time in history, the Emperor was beaten in battle. Fleeing with the First Cohort, they hid and dug in a fortified position far from anything, on an even more remote fringe border realm. With their Legion construction skills to camouflage and conceal their fort, they recouped and started to plan their escape back to Empire space. Unfortunately, they were discovered, and more of the Legion were killed. Enacting a daring and forbidden procedure using some unique Imperial skills and his intimate and complete knowledge of the System, the Emperor extracted the preserved engrams from the brain of his Primus. He merged it with his AI, creating a living avatar to lead his warriors. Impossibly weakened, the Emperor tied himself into the defence network and was able to maintain the fort's shields and recover. His energy recovered slowly at a minuscule fraction of his normal monstrous rate. This is devastating when your energy and mana pools are thousands of times larger than an average person's. It took years before he was able to maintain his high-tier existence.
The Karass who found them bought tamed incursion stones and activated the portal stones on surrounding hills. High-ranking Karass agents guided these to attack and contain the legion fort. Despite his weakened state, they knew they could not kill the Emperor, just contain him.
Slowly, over time, the First Cohort were slain. Primus spread his new awareness to take control of the slain organics, using his computing powers to drive them on in a horrific unlife, dying and reviving over and over again. Only the virtual resurrection of the First Cohort and the Emperor's tremendous energy reserves allowed them to survive.
After each battle, the Emperor personally recharged the shields and held them safe. The stalemate continued, with the Karass satisfied that they had contained him while they pillaged the galaxy. Rax knew that if he needed to, he could escape, but even the Emperor was not powerful enough to escape and recover his daughter, and he would never leave her. This scenario was replayed repeatedly. For close to 5000 years, they had repeated these dances with chaos and had all gone slowly mad.
Solace: Most of that is true. Be careful.
Shit. I feel sorry for them. 5000 Years.
Solace: Not precisely, possibly more or less. I am unsure if there is some time distortion here or if we are even in our timeline. More information is needed. Your entry here was sudden and disruptive, so we must be careful. Primus seems obsessed with protecting the Princess, and the Emperor's senses of duty and honour are not what they once were. I suspect he has become paranoid about betrayal. As much as it pains me, I am unsure of his commitment to the Empire.
Just what we need.
Solace: Primus has become odd. He is not insane, just stretched, emulating eighty Legionnaires and Auxiliary. He will be erratic during battles as his processing power becomes less. Still, when he can stand them down, we should get some sense from him. There is also something odd about him. Part of his AI is shielded from me and seems strange. It doesn’t help that his AI is ancient; once he returns to the Empire, he will be one of the oldest. I believe he has also gained true sapience. We must protect him at all costs. He is unique.
Can you keep an eye on him? What can we do? We have dinner with the Emperor, and he has some sort of plan. See what you can find out.
Solace: Listen to what he says; don't offer advice. Primus or the Emperor might take that as a challenge to the status quo. Also, being non-legion, they won't let you fight; it goes against all their regulations to let a civilian fight for them. Even though I would say that you could close an incursion with minimal support, they won't allow that. That would be a significant change, and the outcome would be unpredictable. I believe that Primus AI is fixated on maintaining this status quo.
Crap, Sol, what do we do? I'm out of my league here.
Solace: The intelligent thing to do would be to charge through these incursions. Make a run for it and get far enough away. We would need to build an energy collector. Like the one they have there. We would use that to punch through the veil between us. Open the portal and get back to our universe. We would need to contact the First Cohort and mount a rescue. We need to get the information back.
Fat chance of the intelligent thing happening. I want to throw some spells off the walls and develop some skills. Could I sneak out and close an incursion?
Solace: I would suggest that if the Imperial Family were not here. It would be risky, and if Primus found out, it may ruin our chances of them listening to you. Remember, they are an old Empire at war. We can't threaten their power balance without consideration. They have been doing this for a long time, and any change to the status quo could be seen as threatening, even if it is what they want and need. Any threat to the Princess, and I am sure they will destroy you. The Emperor could end this quickly, but I would conclude that the threat of danger to his daughter has forced him to make choices that are at odds with his sense of duty.
I can't just sit here, though. I can't just let the Princess lie there like she is dead. I don't even know her, but it is wrong. I feel this connection to her. There was something about her story. It is not just the damn Drakes and their mission. I couldn't imagine something like that happening to me. Solace, I don't know if I can just stand by. Save the Princess. Save the World. Damn, Dance. Fuck me, how much did he know? He knows we will give this a go. Remember the card, Dress to Impress an Empress. Fuck, that means they don't expect Rax to make it. Fuck Fuck. What do we do? Emperor or Princess?
Solace: You will have to save the Emperor. Remember, he is the Emperor.
In the end, I didn't care about the Emperor. It was the Princess I would save.
I was escorted to a barracks and given access to a cot until dinner time, and instead of waiting nervously for dinner, I unrolled the mat and sat with the turtle in front of me.
I spent the time meditating, hoping to find a solution.