+You taste that in the rain, tonight, listeners?
That’s the taste of shit.
Shit. Shit, and nothing but shit.
That’s the taste of quiet war spiraling out of control.
First, there was what went down at Nu-Scarrowbur and Mazza’s Junction. A real full-on throwdown between some Highflame and Stormtree cadres. We’re probably going to be seeing the mem-rips of that mess edited together and sold as an immersive experience within the next couple of days.
The problem doesn’t end there, though. A little fox down the Warrens told me that Abrel Greatling–that’s right, Greatling–got picked up by the Paladins at the end of that mess, but Council Elder Mwaba D’Rongo is also under official custody–snatched right out of the Fire’s Height while the FATED where having their little get together about destroying the world the last time.
For those of you that are new, this doesn’t happen.
I’ve followed Paladin Samir Naeko’s career since before he made chief, and trust me, the guy’s supposed to be a fossil and a dud. Old enough to still remember Jaus, and just hopeless enough to let the ball keep rolling. A real designated downgrade since the brief tenure of Chief Paladin Siahm Ansaulgh, who unfortunately met her final cessation when she ended up encountering a rogue Fallwalker.
A rogue Fallwalker of abnormally high spherage and grafted with some very Omnitech-seeming ontologics. The mystery remains.
Anyway though, back to our consang Naeko. He’s got a few centuries on him. Knew Jaus before he went off to see the Big Nothing. Fought in the Low Apocalypse after the Godsfall, and nearly every Guild War after. Served with Ashthrone for a while before they had to burn his skein for just walking off the job and playing three-hundred consecutive hours of Stormjumpers instead of reporting in for the Fourth Guild War.
[Pause. Snorting laugh]
You’re a true legend, Naeko. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Anyway, point I’m getting at here is our buddy Samir suddenly found some burn in him that wasn’t there before. Now ain’t that strange. Ain’t that curious? And ain’t that dangerous, being a proactive Paladin and all.
And now, an Oversec got hit by what the Nether is theorizing to be a Silver attempted breakout for the Elder, and Stormtree and Highflame are getting real square with each other up in Light’s End.
Something’s going down. Something big.
If there was a time to keep your eyes open and heads down, this is it. And to get you in the mood, this is “Before the Gun” by Cas eld’Canduir.+
-Cala Marlowe, The FATELESS Thoughtcast
14-3
Know Your Enemy (I)
[Phantasmic downloaded from locus. Skimmer. Interesting. Radiates perception. Makes things around it easier to notice. Lingers too. Seems designed to burn through Incogs. Impressive. Will need to avoid this using shadows if we can.]
[Shifting shadows. This group should have higher mem-clearance. More walls opening for us. Two miles away from loci-cluster designated as operational nexus.]
[Yes. We should also change our pants.]
[Why? Not really our body. We can just dive into another one. Feces don’t hurt us. We’re also leaving the droppings in shadows. Planes of darkness. No one will ever find them.]
[Feels dirty.]
[We’ve eaten worse.]
[Still feels dirty.]
[We’ve been inside Chambers’ mind.]
[Hm. Good argument.]
“Perhaps we can have the mule hide the filth deeper within itself?” the Woundshaper suggested.
“Perhaps you can find a substance that better embodies your structure,” the Galeslither shot back.
The world within Avo was a vortex of noise but none of the chaos distracted him.
His subminds debated while his Heavens bickered. All the while he used the totality of his abilities in tandem. Walls unveiled themselves as he flashed Benhata’s sequences to once forbidden pathways while he swam through shadows to avoid winnowing scythes cast by external perception.
His Sanguinity supplemented his DeepNav’s functions as he groped through the labyrinth comprising the Javelin’s demiplanar bowels, through such means he slipped by patrolling Skimmers and personnel with comparative ease.
The strangest thing about the building’s layout was its altered dimensionality. Sometimes, straight wasn’t straight. Sometimes, if you wanted to go straight, you needed to put your foot against the wall and start walking up.
Once his weight was set, geometry adapted to the vectors from where his feet were pointed, making it all but impossible for someone to truly fall in this place.
A pulsing resonance ebbed from a massive cylinder of interconnected techno-thaumic reactors, each running its own distinct Heaven. Channeling Benhata’s memories, he knew that each of them was a mile apart but also connected by a scaffolded arc-shaped pathway that was only accessible to specific Ori-Thaum Godclads for Essence-infusion purposes.
The Rendsinks, meanwhile, trailed back up two hundred floors past the water’s reflection into their own specific planar pockets meant to contain the fallout should they rupture.
A far safer build compared to the Fallen Heaven located in Burner’s Way, but seeing as that had a cycler and Hell built into it as well, Avo suspected that its destabilization might have been the result of a Godclad taking a tumble into the reactor during the war somehow.
Walking the abodes of a Guild while wearing the flesh of one of their ranking members also gave him insight into their culture and ethics. Most working here moved in packs of four to six. It appeared they kept to the habit of forming cells in the real as much as they did in the Nether.
Internalizing his newly harvested memories, he knew this to be an act of deliberate socialization on the part of the Ori. To counter their clandestine methods of procedure and the immense vulnerability that came with being such a phantasmally attuned power, they often grouped the young in cross-clan “circles” to engender a fixed dynamic of extra-familial bonding.
To put it simply, it was a way to counterbalance the loyalty one felt to their immediate kin with another designated family, and hence build bonds brokered by the nature of their state.
Benhata had been proud to be part of such a thing. Many of the passing Ori did as well, walking in tight clusters with their minds knotted together in knots of unceasing dialogue while remaining quiet in the real.
More than once he caught members of the same clan glaring at each other silently from within their groups. Their conditioned protectiveness towards those joined to them in the social covenant was of a stronger tissue than that bred from the blood of the womb.
And then there were those who were marked “classified” personnel. Benhata qualified among the lower rungs of such esteemed company and had specific sequences capable of censoring his person when gazed upon by minds lacking the necessary clearance rating.
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Ori-Thaum made placing people in informational silos an art form. Even with all this knowledge leeched, he could barely decipher how the command structure here was connected. If he was solid of thought and without his Heavens?
Nulling a few Incubi might’ve been the ceiling of his accomplishments,
[Desired. Ori-Thaum’s Elder Council doesn’t want any of the clans to get too powerful. Taught from past mistakes. Caused years of war between the chains. Learned the real enemy was beyond the islands after the First War and that they had more in common than apart from the outsiders.]
Nothing quite makes a family tighter than mutual xenophobia.
[Don’t seem to make much noise in the real either. High emphasis on etiquette to “outsiders” from their circle. Like deliberate distance.]
He further observed additional instances of etiquette in action as he watched social circles Benhata noted be junior give way to those with greater esteem. Protocol laid clear rules in place for when two groups were on a trajectory for collision. The lessers would give ground and step upon the wall deemed leftward–or lower themselves if such a thing was unachievable.
Eye contact was also strictly codified, with inferiors responding with the briefest glances while keeping their heads pointed toward the ground while their superior counterparts had the privilege to look freely.
From this, a strange dance unfolded before Avo as there was a constant shift leftward, with people stepping from floor to wall to floor again.
As the corners of the room were lined with thin crevices projecting the shine of natural sunlight, stepping over such a threshold was meant to symbolize an act of self-purification. A leftover tradition from the long distant past told in the tales of ancient Glaives stepping free from the concealment of the foliage cast by their groves to stand revealed beneath the gaze of sunlight.
His consumption of Benhata hadn’t just been a feast of knowledge, but one of cultural flavor as well.
Compared to the familial-individualistic martial supremacist attitude oozing from Abrel–and likely Highflame as a broader whole–there was far more give in the social anatomy of the Silvers.
Still, as he hitched himself to the passing shadows of various personnel, he caught samplings of their true thoughts and knew this was a place where people wore smiles but hid implanted daggers between their nails. Most here would see the ascent of their circle before the others, and even their schemes took on a team dynamic.
Complexity wove into complexity, and Avo soon found himself teased by far too many social vulnerabilities awaiting his exploitation.
It took much from him not to lash out and devour all these delicious minds ripe with new epiphanies, but despite all the bounty they offered, they were decisively the lesser meal.
He had bigger goals for being here, and if he was to see his desired outcome bear fruit without betraying his presence among his enemies, he would need to tread carefully.
The path ahead grew bright and heavy with increased scrutiny. From the periodic surveillance checkpoints that lined the conjunctive arteries of the various offices and workstations, he found his current carrier bringing him close to an In-Sec jack-pool, where all the Ori-Thaum Necros in charge of internal monitoring were clamped around their jack-stations and diving, shuttling their ghosts back and forth through the inner organs of the Javelin.
Benhata remembered this was just one of two hundred pools active on this floor alone. Burning through them would compromise him immediately and almost certainly result in the deployment of rapid response assets along with focus-vector Thoughtwave Disruptions.
As it turned out, internal subterfuge was quite common when your factional ethos placed heavy emphasis on “ruling” the Nether.
[We can also remember there were golems to consider.]
[Can remember what they are though.]
[Memories redacted from Benhata too. Only remember when the golems are deployed.]
[Should have N-Def capabilities. Wouldn’t think about it otherwise. Maybe something like our Haemokinesis.]
Somehow, Avo doubted that. Nether-defense usually held the advantage in sequences and ghosts, so their primary objective wasn’t to engage the enemy but isolate and eradicate. The Woundshaper augmented Avo’s stealth and speed immensely, but he was ultimately still a single unit inflicting destabilization along sequences or within specific memories.
His ruinous potential had grown substantially since his recent changes, but the point still stood.
The group he was tied to took a turn and walked up the rightmost wall as the ceiling unfurled into an open pathway leading directly upward. The bamboo flooring beneath them began shifting forward as well, carrying them with further haste as one of their circle interfaced with nearby loci.
Avo stepped free from the shadow and stumbled back down to himself in the middle of the now-emptied hallway. Ahead, a transparent entrance lingered before him, the security locus spitting radiative waves of awareness to flood the halls and grind away at his Incog-protected thoughtform.
[We can withstand this for another twenty minutes at most before we reach cognitive destabilization.]
[Aborbed some mem-data from Skimmer. Locus might also be sequenced with focus-vectored Thoughtwave Disruptor. Will be distracting for most people. Probably fatal for us.]
[Wonder what happens if we die while sheathed in Benhata.]
[Resurrection. Probably. Fits material anchor. Will come back where he is.]
[What happens if we die while moving without a body?]
Silence reigned as his subminds filtered through his sea of memories to compile a proper answer. If he was unburdened by Rend, he doubted the annihilation of his mind alone would be enough to kill him for good. He wondered if he would be remanifested in reality at a location where he last had a “body” or if he could just emerge using a nearby catalyst related to his domains.
[Maybe we can eat the locus? Do what we did earlier?]
[No. Already had Necros scouting out what happened with the locus outside the office earlier. Their response was too fast. One lost locus is an irregularity. Strange. Maybe a sequencing problem that ended in fragmentation. Two is a pattern. Three is a Necro actively jacking through your network. And the one outside an N-Def internal security pool can’t be hidden. They’ll go on alert.]
[Can wait for someone to come by and dive deep using their shadows. Get in that way.]
[Maybe. Risk high. Estimating over 1243 Skimmers pulsing within the room alone. A single Skimmer is shaving twenty ghosts away from us. Going in directly with Incog active is like feeding ourselves through a grinder.]
Avo’s minds grew unified with a common growl of annoyance.
[Might be more useful to be stable mind right now. Hard to notice. Can hide in sequences.]
[Won’t have Benhata’s knowledge. Wouldn’t even know where to go or which systems to access.]
[Maybe we can kill ourselves and see if we can reset? It should be ideal form right now.]
A small part of Avo was tempted, but most of him still yearned to remain to retain his current enhancements. It didn’t take his subminds’ simulations to know that devolving from a free-moving thoughtform to being caged within a single body would feel more like imprisonment than reversion.
An old allegory leaked into his thoughts from one of his newly seized memories. Allegory of the cave. He has seen the light. He knew the edges of his limitations. He didn’t want to go back. Going back was hurt. Going back was self-harm and mutilation and capability-castration.
And going back didn’t ensure his access at all.
[Keep channeling Benhata. Maybe he can remember something else. Someone in the pool maybe?]
[Benhata’s not that useful right now. Was a Glaive. Barely passed as a diver. Just meat for a real Incubi. We need to exercise asymmetric thinking right now.]
With a thought, he shifted his mind to draw from the best sequences and constructs accumulated from the Incubi in his mental inventory. The softness of his focus sharpened. The width of socio-cultural considerations vanished behind the hard science of problems encountered and potential solutions.
His current goal was simple: to subsume and steal away the innermost knowledge flowing through Ori-Thaum’s systems. Another avenue of attack included the Nether itself–though such an act would be beyond loud with how many ghosts were welded to his mind and how many witnesses he would leave.
The cluster was a transit point that was unconnected from any Auto-Seance sessions or other means of direct access. All its mem-data were gathered from ghosts cast into outside loci that would be transferred in and intensely reviewed before being included with the information in the archives.
He could pour himself into a locus in transit, but that didn’t protect him from the Skimmers if he wanted to keep running his Incog.
No. The best way to access it was directly, but using his Woundshaper to open a path through the walls would leave too much evidence that an undetected Godclad was traipsing where they didn’t belong while his Galeslither’s wind currents were equally abnormal.
There was still something to be said about making an attempt by swimming across various stretches of shadow, but if he wished to know his path, he needed to expose his mind, and such would leave him shredded.
The eventual answer to his problem was simple.
He needed to engineer a situation where the Skimmers had to be diverted. Enough to grant him gaps or a way to access the cluster of loci festooned at the core of the room.
This required more planning–
Something rattled against his consciousness. Avo felt the eldritch fires of his Frame quaver the same way they did when he first faced another Godclad. Reflexively shifting back over to Benhata’s mind, sequences snapped back in place as a memetic ban on his memories was lifted.
Approximately twenty-three floors above him, he sensed an active Heaven slowly crawling down toward the bottom of the structure, moving uncannily like a snapping rubberband, parts of its presence reaching forward before snapping back.
CLASSIFICATION: SPHERE III [EST. 940 THAUM/c]
->SENTINEL OF THE WAVES UNSEEN
[Benhata knows this one. They were friends. Once. Andraga eld’Vanlein. Logistical Godclad. Domains of Electricity, Signals, and Speed.]
And just like that, the equation changed once more. He shifted his mind once more as a new objective filled his focus.
He wasn’t as he was before. There was no need to approach things so directly.
Not when he could possibly get someone else to do the work for him.