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- Joined
- Aug 5, 2009
- Messages
- 9,867
Lack Of C'tan wanting to nom souls would indicate these are not *truly* old school.
But I don't mind them being retconned
3A
Nevill
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2009
- Messages
- 11,211
Nevill 3B
Jaedar 2A
tuluse 2B
Azira 3B
Darth Roxor 1A
lightbane 1A
Grimgravy 3A
Elfberserker 3B
asxetos 3A
Excommunicator 2B
Kz3r0 3A
hello friend 3A
Reject_666_6 3A
Storyfag 3A
oscar 3B
Baltika9 4B
archaen 3A
Jester 3B
GreyViper 3A
Jick Magger 3A
Flunklesnarkin 3A
1A - 2
2A - 1
2B - 2
3A - 10
3B - 5
4B - 1
Jaedar 2A
tuluse 2B
Azira 3B
Darth Roxor 1A
lightbane 1A
Grimgravy 3A
Elfberserker 3B
asxetos 3A
Excommunicator 2B
Kz3r0 3A
hello friend 3A
Reject_666_6 3A
Storyfag 3A
oscar 3B
Baltika9 4B
archaen 3A
Jester 3B
GreyViper 3A
Jick Magger 3A
Flunklesnarkin 3A
1A - 2
2A - 1
2B - 2
3A - 10
3B - 5
4B - 1
Last edited:
Problem is it would have spoiled a lot at the start, thus the option to repair archival database and slowly get the hints whats going on. And in that root did a great job, I didn't see the necron part coming.Lack Of C'tan wanting to nom souls would indicate these are not *truly* old school.
But I don't mind them being retconned
3A
I didn't think quite so many people would agree with me but 3A was my first thought after reading it.
I didn't think quite so many people would agree with me but 3A was my first thought after reading it.
Holy Cow
Guest
[wide beam loop/clearance mclear received @rho_71.1441.4729.3530 relayed @node_7741.1441.4480.9821.]
+ + +ORIGINATOR < NODE 7741> THROUGH <RHO 71> DESTINATION < NODE 7741>+ + +
+ + +DATE <GT 61> FRAME <SOL> AS PER <PARENT NODE 7700> DIRECTIVE+ + +
+ + +DATE LOCAL <1>+ + +
+ + +REF <UNDEFINED REFERENCE TO #X/#Y>+ + +
+ + +CLEARANCE <MCLEAR>+ + +
+ + +SUBJECT <REDACTED >+ + +
+++ 35774866724386821 521918772254139235 [REPEATED UNTIL RHO71 BANDWITH FOR TRANSMISSION EXHAUSTED]+++
You look at the read-out. Unable to directly attack you through the node commweb, Flenser has instead shut you off from external contact. Relay Hub Orbital 71 has been rendered essentially inoperative until whatever Overintelligence in charge of its maintenance gets around to fixing the issue. No CCC protocols forthcoming any time soon. You do not process Flenser’s repeating message, immediately shunting it into a secondary memory core that’s set up to purge itself every picosecond.
Two days, Sol Standard, have passed since you started bringing back online the orbital facilities and expanding the tunnel network towards First Crescent. Two days receiving the same message from RHO71 incessantly. The hum of more and more generators coming back online has been steadily increasing all the while. If CI3 survived, the OTP encryption carried by your skimmer should be arriving in a few hundred seconds from now. That should allow you to excavate and build your way through the prepared tunnels considerably faster. Still, there has been…resistance. Some of your scuttler drones have simply disappeared, stopped reporting and pinging back their location. Others seem to be unable to work in certain directions, contained by something you cannot sense. You have run diagnostics, indeed you still are, and can find no fault in their programming or their logic engines. It’s as though there was some sort of invisible presence pushing down upon you, trying to disrupt your work, penning you in. To an intelligence such as yours, this is cause of a somewhat remote distress and it will require further, thorough investigation. 20 seconds until CI3, should it still exist, is accepted into the node commweb.
Another glance at the read-out. The message is still being broadcast through RHO71. It’s on a wide beam and unencrypted. You wonder if some other species might pick it up, and if Flenser is even capable of affecting technologies different than its own. Either way it’s an unsettling thought: an unencrypted wide beam transmission can be detected and penetrated if the species is at an advanced enough level on the SK scale. It may well give away your existence in the depths of this planet, and perhaps even the location of the RHO, which is of course far more important than your own. Ultimately this would harm Flenser itself, which is either being deliberately reckless or is too crude to perceive the threat to itself. You do not think the species on the surface rank high enough on the scale, but one can never be too sure. You’ve determined through intercepting their dataflow that they consist of two self-aware, self-identified species. The less technologically advanced calls itself ‘Human’, the one with the exosuits calls itself ‘Tau’. When they occasionally have interspecies communication they seem to use a bastardized variant of the Human language. As far as you’ve gathered, the Tau species seems to rely not only on image and sound for communication, but also on chemical exudations that are instinctively picked up by their nervous system. The humans seem to possess no such capacity. Other than that, their thought and activity patterns are much the same, save for superficial deviations that both species seem to ascribe an inordinate amount of importance to.
The macrodiagnostics system reports yet another incident. A team of WAUs retrofitted for excavation duty malfunctioned and had to be shut down before it could damage itself. The incidents are more frequent the farther they get from the CI bases. Were this an effort coordinated across star systems, then there would have been a minute possibility of signal decay. As it stands, it would appear either fragments of Flenser have somehow infiltrated the Second Crescent and are causing its malfunctions, or –
But that wouldn’t explain why the incidents increase with distance –
What follows next is the All-Possibility equivalent of heated debate, though with the victor known from the outset. If such things as hierarchies outside the Stipulated Ontologies, then they exist solely on the merit of combat experience. What could be called the pseudoidentity of CI3 takes control over the 7741 Node Worldmind as it is assimilated into the commweb. There is a moment of disconnect as you – CI3 – perceives yourself inside a foreign body, but it lasts only a fraction of an attosecond. You are the Worldmind. This body is your body. And the CI3’s mobile housing unit, battered but whole, has been put back into stasis. The assault was repelled, if ever it was an assault to begin with. You are not sure. Your memories of Flenser’s attack add themselves to the collection of data inside the Worldmind. Flenser’s altered SIT drones were not so much attacking you as trying to get through you. At no point they seemed to target the CI itself, although they kept up the informational attack throughout the entire battle. They seemed to be in a hurry to reach the MASS ships but as soon as they realized they weren’t functional, they eased off on their assault and redirected their attention to getting through CI3’s base and into the network of tunnels leading to the planetary surface.
The macrodiagnostics system flares up, now integrated with CI3’s own sensors and probes. You take a long time, perhaps a whole microsecond, to react to what you are seeing. The surface access tunnels of the entire First Crescent are flooded with Flenser troops. You did not fight them at full strength because you were never their objective. They claw and burrow and craw desperately towards the surface, sure to emerge close to a human settlement. So much for the All-Possibility’s well-laid plans. You take stock of your forces left in the CI3 base. Less than half of the original awakened remain, but presumably you can outfit them properly to try and outrun the Flenser spearheads and collapse the access tunnels before they reach the surface. Should Flenser reach the surface settlement and slaughter the humans within, then your cover is as good as blown. Still, the Flenser troops outnumber you 2 to 1, at the least, and you can’t expect any help from Second Crescent. The deployment would take too much time. The orbital foundry squirts bursts of information. A few ideas occur.
1) Have the CI3 base troops try and intercept and collapse the tunnels before Flenser reaches the humans. It’s a long shot, but if it works, the surface species will be none the wiser to your presence. You will almost certainly lose many of your own troops in this attempt, but that's hardly a concern.
2) Use the activated orbital weapons systems to raze the human settlement to the ground before Flenser can get to it, preventing the humans to broadcast a warning. A smouldering crater where a settlement should have been will certainly arouse suspicion, but at least the surface species won't be certain as to what is attacking them. With a bit of luck, you can make it look like some sort of unfortunate accident and take out some Flenser troops while you're at it.
3) Direct instead energy and computational capacity to have the CI3 troops storm the CI1/2 bases and forcibly shut down their systems. They shouldn’t have much defensive capacity left and this way you can shut down the signal swamping RHO71 and prevent Flenser from mobilizing more troops. However, there won't be any way of integrating them until the CCC protocols arrive.
4) Do nothing. All options carry unacceptable risks of detection. You’ve no idea if you can intercept Flenser’s surface-targetted troops, nor if the orbital weapons systems will remain concealed after a targeted strike. And you cannot be sure, either, that CI3’s remaining forces will be enough to overtake the Rogue CI bases. Flenser is sure to already arouse suspicion: why contribute to it?
+ + +ORIGINATOR < NODE 7741> THROUGH <RHO 71> DESTINATION < NODE 7741>+ + +
+ + +DATE <GT 61> FRAME <SOL> AS PER <PARENT NODE 7700> DIRECTIVE+ + +
+ + +DATE LOCAL <1>+ + +
+ + +REF <UNDEFINED REFERENCE TO #X/#Y>+ + +
+ + +CLEARANCE <MCLEAR>+ + +
+ + +SUBJECT <REDACTED >+ + +
+++ 35774866724386821 521918772254139235 [REPEATED UNTIL RHO71 BANDWITH FOR TRANSMISSION EXHAUSTED]+++
You look at the read-out. Unable to directly attack you through the node commweb, Flenser has instead shut you off from external contact. Relay Hub Orbital 71 has been rendered essentially inoperative until whatever Overintelligence in charge of its maintenance gets around to fixing the issue. No CCC protocols forthcoming any time soon. You do not process Flenser’s repeating message, immediately shunting it into a secondary memory core that’s set up to purge itself every picosecond.
Two days, Sol Standard, have passed since you started bringing back online the orbital facilities and expanding the tunnel network towards First Crescent. Two days receiving the same message from RHO71 incessantly. The hum of more and more generators coming back online has been steadily increasing all the while. If CI3 survived, the OTP encryption carried by your skimmer should be arriving in a few hundred seconds from now. That should allow you to excavate and build your way through the prepared tunnels considerably faster. Still, there has been…resistance. Some of your scuttler drones have simply disappeared, stopped reporting and pinging back their location. Others seem to be unable to work in certain directions, contained by something you cannot sense. You have run diagnostics, indeed you still are, and can find no fault in their programming or their logic engines. It’s as though there was some sort of invisible presence pushing down upon you, trying to disrupt your work, penning you in. To an intelligence such as yours, this is cause of a somewhat remote distress and it will require further, thorough investigation. 20 seconds until CI3, should it still exist, is accepted into the node commweb.
Another glance at the read-out. The message is still being broadcast through RHO71. It’s on a wide beam and unencrypted. You wonder if some other species might pick it up, and if Flenser is even capable of affecting technologies different than its own. Either way it’s an unsettling thought: an unencrypted wide beam transmission can be detected and penetrated if the species is at an advanced enough level on the SK scale. It may well give away your existence in the depths of this planet, and perhaps even the location of the RHO, which is of course far more important than your own. Ultimately this would harm Flenser itself, which is either being deliberately reckless or is too crude to perceive the threat to itself. You do not think the species on the surface rank high enough on the scale, but one can never be too sure. You’ve determined through intercepting their dataflow that they consist of two self-aware, self-identified species. The less technologically advanced calls itself ‘Human’, the one with the exosuits calls itself ‘Tau’. When they occasionally have interspecies communication they seem to use a bastardized variant of the Human language. As far as you’ve gathered, the Tau species seems to rely not only on image and sound for communication, but also on chemical exudations that are instinctively picked up by their nervous system. The humans seem to possess no such capacity. Other than that, their thought and activity patterns are much the same, save for superficial deviations that both species seem to ascribe an inordinate amount of importance to.
The macrodiagnostics system reports yet another incident. A team of WAUs retrofitted for excavation duty malfunctioned and had to be shut down before it could damage itself. The incidents are more frequent the farther they get from the CI bases. Were this an effort coordinated across star systems, then there would have been a minute possibility of signal decay. As it stands, it would appear either fragments of Flenser have somehow infiltrated the Second Crescent and are causing its malfunctions, or –
But that wouldn’t explain why the incidents increase with distance –
What follows next is the All-Possibility equivalent of heated debate, though with the victor known from the outset. If such things as hierarchies outside the Stipulated Ontologies, then they exist solely on the merit of combat experience. What could be called the pseudoidentity of CI3 takes control over the 7741 Node Worldmind as it is assimilated into the commweb. There is a moment of disconnect as you – CI3 – perceives yourself inside a foreign body, but it lasts only a fraction of an attosecond. You are the Worldmind. This body is your body. And the CI3’s mobile housing unit, battered but whole, has been put back into stasis. The assault was repelled, if ever it was an assault to begin with. You are not sure. Your memories of Flenser’s attack add themselves to the collection of data inside the Worldmind. Flenser’s altered SIT drones were not so much attacking you as trying to get through you. At no point they seemed to target the CI itself, although they kept up the informational attack throughout the entire battle. They seemed to be in a hurry to reach the MASS ships but as soon as they realized they weren’t functional, they eased off on their assault and redirected their attention to getting through CI3’s base and into the network of tunnels leading to the planetary surface.
The macrodiagnostics system flares up, now integrated with CI3’s own sensors and probes. You take a long time, perhaps a whole microsecond, to react to what you are seeing. The surface access tunnels of the entire First Crescent are flooded with Flenser troops. You did not fight them at full strength because you were never their objective. They claw and burrow and craw desperately towards the surface, sure to emerge close to a human settlement. So much for the All-Possibility’s well-laid plans. You take stock of your forces left in the CI3 base. Less than half of the original awakened remain, but presumably you can outfit them properly to try and outrun the Flenser spearheads and collapse the access tunnels before they reach the surface. Should Flenser reach the surface settlement and slaughter the humans within, then your cover is as good as blown. Still, the Flenser troops outnumber you 2 to 1, at the least, and you can’t expect any help from Second Crescent. The deployment would take too much time. The orbital foundry squirts bursts of information. A few ideas occur.
1) Have the CI3 base troops try and intercept and collapse the tunnels before Flenser reaches the humans. It’s a long shot, but if it works, the surface species will be none the wiser to your presence. You will almost certainly lose many of your own troops in this attempt, but that's hardly a concern.
2) Use the activated orbital weapons systems to raze the human settlement to the ground before Flenser can get to it, preventing the humans to broadcast a warning. A smouldering crater where a settlement should have been will certainly arouse suspicion, but at least the surface species won't be certain as to what is attacking them. With a bit of luck, you can make it look like some sort of unfortunate accident and take out some Flenser troops while you're at it.
3) Direct instead energy and computational capacity to have the CI3 troops storm the CI1/2 bases and forcibly shut down their systems. They shouldn’t have much defensive capacity left and this way you can shut down the signal swamping RHO71 and prevent Flenser from mobilizing more troops. However, there won't be any way of integrating them until the CCC protocols arrive.
4) Do nothing. All options carry unacceptable risks of detection. You’ve no idea if you can intercept Flenser’s surface-targetted troops, nor if the orbital weapons systems will remain concealed after a targeted strike. And you cannot be sure, either, that CI3’s remaining forces will be enough to overtake the Rogue CI bases. Flenser is sure to already arouse suspicion: why contribute to it?
Last edited by a moderator:
Nevill
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2009
- Messages
- 11,211
We must protect the humans! That's what Jesus would have done!
Or we could sit back, drink digital whiskey and watch the tigers fight for our amusement.
Or we could sit back, drink digital whiskey and watch the tigers fight for our amusement.
lightbane
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2008
- Messages
- 10,193
3. Let the Flenser-infected troops do part of our job of exterminating all life, but take advantage of the situation to restore our dominance over the CIs.
By the way, was the Flenser virus the one that was sabotaging our units, or some kind of psychic forcefield? I assume it's the latter.
By the way, was the Flenser virus the one that was sabotaging our units, or some kind of psychic forcefield? I assume it's the latter.
Baltika9
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2012
- Messages
- 9,611
I agree with this. Discovery is imminent and I want to consolidate all of our troops before shit hits the fan. We already have an exit through space, now we need actual 'personnel' to carry out of here.
3
Akshully, I'm beginning to suspect that the simplistic behavior of the Necrons, KILL ALL LIFE, is the effect of Flenser. The actual necontyr, at least in the context of root's LPs, have some other Prime Directive in mind.
3)
I think your right, it does remind something out of Severed Worlds.
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2009
- Messages
- 9,867
Is 3 even reasonable?
I mean, physically yes, we can occupy it. But if all the systems and generators and such are filled with flenser virus, can we even purge them safely to get them on our side? I do not care much for deactivated necron soldiers either, we presumably have plenty in the other bases, more than we can power.
root
I mean, physically yes, we can occupy it. But if all the systems and generators and such are filled with flenser virus, can we even purge them safely to get them on our side? I do not care much for deactivated necron soldiers either, we presumably have plenty in the other bases, more than we can power.
root
Bibbimbop
Arcane
Can we time 2) to seriously degrade the flenser forces? Perhaps wait until flenser is almost upon them? When they start transmitting the initial WTF? signals, waste everything indiscriminately?
(2) for now
(2) for now
Holy Cow
Guest
Safely? No, not until the CCC protocols arrive. but at least you can try and prevent more Flenser troops from waking up and you can shut down the signal they're transmitting, which would be the primary goal of attacking them. they wont be operational until you get the CCCs tho.
sure!
edit: changed the options a bit to reflect what I said
Last edited by a moderator:
2
TIME TO LOAD UP THE ION CANNON, BITCHES
TIME TO LOAD UP THE ION CANNON, BITCHES
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
2
Also, do you know why this little thing is titled "REDACTED"? Because the humans will win, and the ][ will censor everything.
2
Also, do you know why this little thing is titled "REDACTED"? Because the humans will win, and the ][ will censor everything.
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