***** PoV: Arthur “Necrosbane” Boateng *****
The teleport dropped us in the middle of the hologram which is the focal point of the entire bridge, which is about the only place in the room that can fit a dragon. Good thing that I expected this to happen, as I was ready to immediately switch back to human form before using an energy shield to jump out into an open area between the various consoles. The projector was off as no one else was in the room, and the lights were set to the off-duty setting, as if Spaghetti was in port and expecting to be there for most of a week.
“Hey Spaghetti! How are you doing?” I said loudly to catch his attention.
“Arthur?” he replied, putting a projected Shihoth avatar in front of us. “Where did you come from? That wasn’t one of our teleport spells, even if it was almost as neatly done as one of Ulysses.”
“So there’s some kind of at least vaguely LitRPG style System in charge of wherever we are, and they decided that here was the best place to drop us.”
“Wait, wait, wait, what do you mean ‘us’?”
“Hi!” says Victrina, having swapped places with me, at which point Spaghetti freezes for an entire second, presumably looking at us much closer through whatever sensors he has in the bridge.
“What happened to you?”
“The displacer dropped me exactly where she was standing, but instead of mutual destruction, we got shoved together, largely because of compatible bloodlines. Gestalt activated, but I cannot tell her what that means until her manna pool is large enough for us to pay the mana price.”
“Information restriction acknowledged, entertainment library restricted accordingly. That definitely explains why you two aren’t fighting each other for control.”
“For the rest of it, just look at the data dump from my armor, it’ll tell you everything faster than I could.”
[Wait, isn’t some of that rather private? And you’re just giving it to the man?]
{Yes, I trust him completely. Besides, he’s the entire ship, he sees everything that happens on board, and he’d be looking at that information eventually anyway, that’s just the reality of living with an AI. Fortunately, it is practically impossible to take information from an Artificial Intelligence of his calliber, and he understands the importance of privacy.}
[Well, if you trust him that much, then so shall I.]
“That is a fascinating set of medical data. If coms were still working with Terra I’d be able to prove and disprove a whole host of scientific theories. Unfortunately, the planet that we are currently in orbit of is quantumly isolated from everything. I’m not even picking up background radiation beyond what is coming from the local star.
“Regardless, I’m just glad somebody finally showed up! Whatever happened with the displacers somehow separated me from everyone on board.”
Greetings Spaghetti! I am the Coverian System. I apologize for dumping you up here with no explanation or anything, I had to bypass a lot of my normal processes for dealing with newcomers, you outmass all of the other newcomers I’ve ever had by an order of magnitude. Normally that’s not a problem because the large mass coming with newcomers isn’t the newcomers themselves, it’s all the stuff that comes with them, and I can just put it in storage until I’m done integrating them properly. The other sticky wicket is your internal security measures prevent me from interfacing with you directly on a quantum level, and I was unsure how to even talk to you without that. It was easier to just put you in orbit for a bit while I get everything straightened out, and then somebody obliterated a cataclysm, and it took me longer to get everything squared away than I thought it would. By the time I was ready to talk to you, he was about to wake up, so I figured might as well send him your way first, when the hologram projector gave me the idea I needed to project my screens in a new manner.
“Alright. What would you have done if I had started attacking the planet?”
I probably would have moved you elsewhere to start with, but my Prophetic Subsystem said you wouldn’t, and you didn’t.
“Ok. Where is the rest of the flotilla then?”
They’re still in the tutorial phase, which is another thing that would not have worked for you, partially because you’re larger than the tutorial area, partially because you’re only the second artificial intelligence I’ve ever had to deal with, and the other one pretty much told me to leave them alone.
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“Oh? What other AI have you come across before?”
They called themselves a child of the Elder Nomads, not that that means anything to me.
“Oh? I take it they Elder Nomads offered to let their child serve someone for a couple of milenia in return for a pile of materials the locals didn’t know existed?”
According to the locals, yes. How did you know?
“That’s their standard way of doing things, but they don’t usually do it with people who haven’t made it to space yet. I guess I’ll have to ask about that when I eventually make contact. What happens now?”
In half an hour, I will open a portal to the Grand Conclave, where I will be explaining what will be happening going forward, and how things will be changing for everyone. Things will be different enough from how they have been that I will pretty much be explaining everything froom scratch. It’s also a good place to introduce you to the existing factions, and let you take a look at what the various factions have available to trade. They’ll probably have a more limited selection than normal as the market wasn’t supposed to be for another couple of months when this Challenge Cycle was supposed to be up, but that got cancelled by a certain someone.
“Fair enough. I’ve got an avatar form that I use for parties and political shenanegans where a physical presence is required. I’ll just bring that, as long as this area isn’t quantumly isolated from the location of the market and Grand Conclave?”
It is not. The quantum isolation is around the edges of my territory, not anything inside. It would be far too energy intensive to maintain more of it than I already do.
“So I’m assuming the dyson energy construct around the local star that’s eating it’s energy output in every direction except this planet?”
What? How do you know about that?
“The Shihoth Nor are no strangers to energy constructs, even if we have no reason to build dyson or super-dyson constructs at the moment. Suitably and exceedingly sufficient reason is hard to come by for projects on that scale, especially with the 25% or greater chance of catastrophic failure because the Shihoth are doing it.”
So your people have built a dyson construct in the past, but have stopped doing so? And what’s this about a 25% chance of catastrophic failure?
“So I was originally built by a race called the Shihoth Nor, who only have one piece of magic to their name. Whatever they do beyond a certain difficulty threshold that won’t make sense to a non Shihoth, they will either succeed or fail in epic fashion. The only exception is when they somehow manage to do both.
“A couple of decades after they made it to space, there was another group of people who were creating an empire for themselves. Their standsard method of operations was to show up and demand your surrender or they would blow up your star. Once their target had surrendered, they had enough military to enforce their will, but they were only average at being sneaky. Which is unfortunate for them, as they’d conquered at least one group who were absolute masters of being sneaky, so it was just a matter of time until their empire got deccapitated form the inside, but at this point they’re still at least five years from being ready to go.
“Meanwhile, the Shihoth had several neighbors that they had either peaceable relations or minimal interaction agreements with. Given their ratial ability, they’d rather not interact with foreign powers if they don’t have to, but they do pay enough attention that they knew the empire would come for them a couple of years before it happened. Their good tech was just too juicy for the empire to pass up.
“That said, the Shihoth are some of the last people you want to put in a true do or die situation. On the one hand, to them this is just another Tuesday. On the other, they have several methods of stacking the deck in their favor that they don’t normally use as the price for failure is greatly magnified. Once the deck was stacked, they tried to draw the top card on the deck, and ended up with every wild card in that deck.
“They made an energy construct that not only blocked the star destroyer, but then went on to use the nova/supernova that would have been as a power core. Since then, it has run around the galaxy destroying every star destroyer that it can get it’s hands on, and the Shihoth have since destroyed every record they had of how this thing was constructed.
“As a direct result of this, the Shihoth are the newest addition to the Glalctic List of Elder Races, the groups of people that it is illegal to poke with a stick because the entire galaxy would be paying the price if they decide to take offense. Admittedly, they’re on the sub-section that is safe to trade with as long as certain rules are followed, but they’re still on that list.
“By the way, the Elder Nomads are also on that list as willing to trade tech for raw materials, within certain limits.”
You have given me much to think about. As much as I’d like to continue talking to you, I still have a massive amount of work to do before the Grand Conclave, and only so much time to get it done.
Victrina, once you’re in the Grand Conclave, I will give you a quest marker to locate your people, as I suspect that at the end of the day the Terrans and the Vantabu Collective as a whole will be closely aligned, even if some of the various factions are not.
“Thanks!” she replied, before the System’s attention, which I hadn’t noticed before now, disappeared gently.