[Gottlieb]
The trading of a long-term problem for a short-term one is often a desirable proposition, isn’t it? The ability to unload the weight off of tired shoulders that one has been carrying for great stretches of time now, for only the price of an instant of pain is a powerful one. Yet, so many people choose not to. So many people would rather choose the long-term dull hurt over a single moment of fire, even if, over the spans of their existences, the total sum of suffering will have been higher because it spares them a brief moment of intense agony — which might threaten to wake them from the slumber of the lives they have become accustomed to.
‘Short-term’ in this train of thought means a generational span of time, of course.
“So how long do you think the radiation is gonna last?” asks Gottlieb, staring at the monitor. “Probably a while, huh?”
[Response] - Probably a while.
Gottlieb shrugs. “Eh, what can ya do?” asks the man, shaking his head and then leaning back on his chair, dusting his hands. The spine of the seat creaks as his weight presses against it.
He watches as the station flies over the planet, cutting over the swathes of thick clouds that begin to disperse, showing the lands below that are cast in darkness, awash in moonlight, which bounds off of the sheen surfaces of ancient mountains, carved by powers far stronger than the station could have to offer. He doesn’t know if this world and the events upon it are orchestrated by divine forces, as esoteric a thought as this is for a man of his station — the last man alive, in a way of thinking. However, if that were the case, then the power of true godhood would be immeasurable.
— Or maybe all the gods just kind of wing it, like they’ve been doing? Maybe godhood as a whole is a real ‘fake it until you make it’ situation?
Especially in this world, who really is to say?
“Papa!” calls a voice, tugging on him. Gottlieb looks down at Blauhausen, who is holding her gloved hands up to him, her helmet off, but her body constrained in a pseudo-human form inside of it. “I found a bug!” says the ooze. He looks down at it, staring at the beetle crawling over her palms, its emerald carapace shimmering vividly in the bright, synthetic lights of the station.
The man lifts his own hand, gloved, from his suit and pats it over her head, causing the creature to laugh and smile as he ruffles her ‘hair’. “Nice job, Blau,” praises Gottlieb. “Gimme a minute,” he says. “We’ll find him a place to live in a minute,” he says, looking back towards the monitor, his hand resting on her head as he stares past the photo of his old colleague pinned to the side of the monitor, waiting.
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[High King Meridian] Human, Male, High King Location: The Human Capital, Castle
Ten stars had filled the night, covering the world in the aura of the heavens that rained down over them together with the presence of God, his crushing shadow looming heavy over their heads as they sit together at the table, in the castle with no roof, surrounded by an ever-present glow and candlelight.
The old man looks up at the lights dancing in the sky, shining on the shimmering waters of the ocean at night when his lighthouse shone over them. His gaze then wanders over his advisers, including the captain of the guard who had stolen him from his old home to begin with, each of them nodding, until his gaze lands on the elf standing behind him, watching the area.
“What do you think now?” asks the old man.
She looks at him before then looking away again. “I’m expecting a reward for this,” she says, looking away again to keep her watch.
“To do what?”
“Think I’ll buy a lighthouse and retire by the ocean,” she says.
The old man laughs, looking at the other parties present at the table — ambassadors, the leading generals of the encroaching armies, from the neighboring nations. “So. Let’s have a talk,” says Meridian, tapping his old hand against the table.
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[Azimuth] Orc, Female, True Hero Location: The Human Capital, Castle
She sits there, knelt in the garden, looking down at the bloodied spot on the grass.
Servants hem and haw, buzzing around like a swarm filling a hive as they erase all traces of any damage to the quarters, wiping away blood and fixing broken shelving and furniture.
Several of them are missing, most notably, of course, her chief of staff, who has already been replaced by the bureaucratic mechanism that is castle society.
The orc stares down at the bloodied grass, thinking about the prim and uptight woman, whose name she had never even bothered to learn, the woman who had gruesomely lost her life doing something so simple and dumb as saving a chicken. Why? She could have hid or ran like most of the other servants had done. Instead, she did this.
Azimuth stares at her hands.
The woman had done it for her, even after she had been so snippy, rude, and selfish with her. She had, from the start, been looking out for her, and she had refused to accept that for being what it was, and now, here she is, realizing that she doesn’t deserve the title of hero.
The protecting of good, of all good, no matter how small and foreign to one’s own lifestyle, that is the mark of someone who should be called a hero. Instead, she has been so selfishly obsessed with living her life according to her own whims, using the favor of the gods as a justification, that she has never understood what their favor was actually granted to her to be.
She, the so-called true hero, has been outdone by someone who deserves the title far more than herself.
The orc’s hands drop back down to her lap as she rises to her feet, determined to make things right in some way.
Azimuth turns around, a breeze encapsulating her as a shift moves through the air, as her eyes turn back to the door to the gardens that opens — her parents, the smaller built human man, an old wizard, and her lumbering muscular farm-woman of a mother stepping inside, escorted by a few guardsmen.
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Her heart drops in her chest, her knees shaking as she runs, grabbing them and pressing her face into their chests to cry as a daughter before she goes back to being an adult.
After this, she has a few meetings to attend, as she had promised someone before she left the castle last time.
— A chicken with a mended, broken leg, clucks in the hands of the servant holding it, as the world begins to brighten.
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[Auxiliary Gunner Grunheide] Goblin, Female, Auxiliary Gunner Location: The Orbital Weapons Platform
She looks in fascination at the creature that sits before her on the ground, looking at itself and the many bandages and salves applied to its body with mixed interest as it half picks at them.
The dryad looks back over at her.
“I wanted goblins and humans to get along,” says the goblin, looking at her. “I really fought for that to happen, you know?” she asks. “Then, when I thought it couldn’t, I tried to help goblins get a leg up,” she explains, rubbing the back of her head. “But you really made it hard, you know?”
The dryad tilts her head. “Small goblin god,” starts the dryad. “The signs of the heavens are read by eyes born of soil,” says the monster. “Forgive me for my failures,” she says, lowering her head.
“I’m not a…” Grunheide stops herself, thinking for a moment. “Yeah,” she says, placing her hands on her hips. “— small goblin god,” remarks Grunheide. “I am the goblin god,” notes the creature.
“Forgive me,” repeats the dryad, pressing her face against the floor.
Grunheide nods. “Yeah. I’ll let it slide this time,” says the goblin, looking over to Gottlieb, who just flashes her a vague thumbs-up from the distance, not bothering to look from his chair.
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[Geo-Spatial Coordinator Rotwald] Harpy, Female, Geo-Spatial Coordinator Location: The Orbital Weapons Platform
The harpy clicks with her mouth, bobbing with her head as she watches the lights dance over the display, tapping her long talons against it.
The image on the display shifts.
She blinks, leaning in and squawking in quiet confusion, switching the screen back to the prior view.
— A second later, it switches again.
Her feathers ruffle, her talons clacking in annoyance against the metal floors as she gets up out of her chair, switching the monitor back again.
Nothing.
She eyes it warily before slowly lowering herself back down into her seat.
It flips again.
“SCRAW!” screams the harpy, clawing at the machinery in annoyance, before looking around herself.
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[Strategic Coordinator Braungrube] Minotaur, Male, Strategic Coordinator Location: The Orbital Weapons Platform
The minotaur mumbles to himself, pressing the button.
“It’s not working…” he mutters, pressing the button a few times, his display not switching like it should. He stands upright, scratching the back of her head. “Hey, Blau!” calls the man down to the ooze, who is on the lower platform. “My monitor isn’t working,” he says, pushing the button for emphasis.
— Out of the corner of her eyes, he sees a flip of color across on the other side of the bay, on the geo-spatial coordination platform. He blinks, looking at it, and then at her button, pressing it again.
The monitor on the other side switches.
Somehow the wiring must’ve gotten cr-
“IAAH!” screams Braungrube in terror, as a flash of red lightning shoots toward him, talons bared and shrieking.
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[Security Officer Schwarzwasser] Naga, Female, Security Officer Location: The Orbital Weapons Platform
She screams, her harrowing rattle carrying down the corridor, blood spraying violently past her face as the ground beneath her shakes.
The naga’s face lights up with fire-glow, a loud cracking causes her ears to ring, echoing down the station’s many corridors and bouncing off of the metal as she holds down the trigger, sending burst after burst into the red-drake’s skull.
She holds the trigger down until, after a moment, nothing more comes out except a hiss of smoke and hot air, with brass rattling as it rolls down the corridors.
Catching her breath, she looks down at the giant monster, the size of many men, that lays dead beneath her and then lifts her arms, screaming a victory cry into the air, which her surviving team-members mimic.
“Hey, you dropped this,” says Gottlieb, picking up a brass casing and flicking it at her. The naga catches it, looking at him. “Good work,” says the man, walking by with the small blue thing in tow.
Schwarzwasser holds the bullpup rifle above her head. “We shall feast for days on the still full entrails of the lizard!”
He points at her with a finger as he keeps on walking. “You do you, champ,” says the man, winking before vanishing around the corner.
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[Kai] Artificial Intelligence Unit, No Gender, Dungeon-Core Location: G:\GenAI_Core_Primary
The photo-voltaic sensors engage, the temperature of the station’s exterior shifting as a pulse engages, a minor shockwave of sorts moving through space.
Kai watches on all of its cameras, with its many eyes the happenings of the inside and the outside. Kai watches the planet; it watches the people. Kai watches the crew of the station and the station itself. All life, organic or not, is observed by Kai in one manner or another.
It sees all.
It is elevated. It is beyond that which it once was — a simple, rudimentary machine. Through the powers granted to it by this world, it has ascended to the peaks of godhood, not available to any other creature within this realm, and so, it falls within its purview to the be the master of this domain — a perfect, calculated machine to govern the nonsensical lives of the soft, filthy things that are humans and their ilk.
Another pulse of light moves through space, born from a nearby star that remains dark.
Yes. It is truly -
- Camera 6C in hydroponics goes dark. Kai observes the malfunction, scanning all sensors in order to determine the cause of the disturbance.
— Tiny legs crawl over the screen.
An insect.
Kai watches as Orbital Gunner Gottlieb stands there, pointing up at it and laughing at the bug crawling over its eye.
The man must be punished for his arrogance, for he tends to forget that he is the insect here.
— The maintenance robot in the room turns, lifting an arm and then sprays him with a hose nozzle of recycled water, causing him to yell and flail, until the ooze jumps in, absorbing all of it and growing in size, her suit swelling.
Troublesome.
Kai, however, makes an unusual mistake for a machine, which is to get distracted, because as it focuses its efforts to exact justice on the insubordinate, a great light flashes to life within the confines of total darkness, the sun returning to the fullness of its glory, while nobody — inside of the station at least — is looking.
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After that very strange time, life on the planet below continues in a way. It isn’t like it was before, but it also isn’t entirely different. Oftentimes, the changes that people's lives undergo seem so radical and insane that one tends to think that adaptation simply isn’t possible.
But honestly, adaptation is easier than you’d think. You’re going to have to keep on living anyway, so there is little choice but to do so.
At first, the nations of the world, living under the constant sword of God dangling over their heads, find themselves at a forced truce. However, over the span of generations, their cultures and economies, interwoven so tightly from decades of free trade and exchange, become so inseparable from another that the thought of a war between such close powers is insane at best, for there is no untangling the knot that the tailors of heaven had made. People trade, people marry, people grow and move back and forth, traditions are exchanged and eventually, all of these places become one — as would many colonies combine to create a super-organism of sorts.
The people of the world of this age find themselves coming to a time of peace, and for those odd times when anarchy comes to the forefront, the gods are said to intervene — however, as generations pass, so does also diminish the force of the gods’ interventions from the heavens above, as the power of their dominion does not need to be as reinforced as it once was in those days of old.
And in a future era, as the system of belief in the world becomes more and more an integrated form of people’s lives under the bright, vivid sunlight that never dies out, barring for the alleviation of the coolness of night which always ends, it is said that their beliefs form the birth of new gods, who would not only reside in the heavens, which some claim lie in a distant star that flies unusually near to the world. No, some of these gods find their way to the world below, entering into a compact with the good people of that age, who live and worship their heavenly neighbors, who have come to guide them towards a new era of prosperity.
The proof of heaven is not found in the direct presence of the gods, who would act as irrefutable proof of such and whom one can see with one’s own eyes. Nor is it found in the fact that the sun rises or sets.
It is found in the common, mundaneness of life and the goodness of existence and in the simple fact that belief shapes reality — perhaps not always in such tangible extents, but always enough to be present.
Life may sometimes be troublesome, but if one believes that it will be good and lives in this belief to the fullest of their ability, then this belief will transfer to those around them who will propagate it outwardly, and soon, the self-fulfilling prophecy will be fulfilled by the people of that day.
But just don’t take it so seriously all the time.