((bump))
((Still here! New job has sucked up most of my time and I rewrote parts I wasn't happy with but here we go.))
BellerophonYou sit atop Olympus. It is the 5th age of the macrocosm under the reign of King Boh, blessed be his name. You are Bellerophon, greatest of heroes, slayer of monsters. Once, when you were a mortal man, you slew great Chimera at the behest of the old gods of Olympus.
Now those gods are mostly gone, yet you remain. In the ancient times, your presumption and arrogance knew no bounds. You once attempted to reach Olympus itself, a feat unheard of by man or god. For a mortal to stand in Olympus uninvited was the greatest of insults, and so vexed Zeus that he threw you down upon the mortal world where you lived out your days pitied and shunned.
But like all tyrants, even great Zeus could not last. But all that is in the deep past, so long ago that even gods no longer consider. Boh rules now, Son of Bain, Son of Magni. descendant of the ancient titan Fjörgyn. And in His reign there can be no other power as great as He. But He had need of soldiers to perform His great deeds, and so Bellerophon arose once more.
You are a God, for what it's worth, but you are first and foremost a soldier. You stand alone on Olympus, a deserted ruin of ancient times but still a location of much power. Olympus no longer resides in beloved Greece however. It never did, really. You couldn't understand it as a man, but "Olympus", city of the gods, was separate from the mountain Olympus. Your mountain, and you can call it that now as you are the only inhabitant, now rests on the Plain of Aleion. It is a strange place, often covered in mists which befuddle the senses and ruin one's sense of direction.
But the view is not why you have come out of your home. You have been summoned, and so you stand at the edge of Olympus awaiting Boh's messenger.
Above, you see the macrocosm. The universe as it is known to the gods. It consists of the main spiral galaxy, known as Mundus, in which all things reside, as well as two small adjacent galactic clusters, Ursa and Canis. There are the names you know them by, but they are also the Names by which the Gods know them. It was a difficult thing for you to comprehend when you were first ascended, that things have names and Names. A name is a word, formed by mouth, which identifies a thing to others who understand the word. A Name however is an indelible Knowing of a place. A total understanding to which you cannot even begin to aspire. You know the names of most places in the macrocosm, and you know a very few Names. To know a Name is to know a thing so completely that you might even change its nature, given sufficient mastery of the Aether.
You draw yourself away from these musings as a trumpet sounds, a pure note at exactly 261hz, your ears tell you uselessly. The problem with being a god, you have discovered, is that there is entirely too much information in the macrocosm.
Before you, a man appears. He is thin, almost skeletal in appearance, and dressed in lose black robes which flap in the mild breeze coming up from the plains.
"Bellerophon, you are summoned. The spheres have been disturbed, and the Song is unbalanced. Boh has decreed that you will investigate." His voice, like the scratching of pen on parchment, sends a shiver up your spine.
You acknowledge his message with a nod. You stand clothed in the fashion you remember so fondly, a simple white linen toga with a laurel on your brow. Simple leather sandals protecting your feet from the cold stone of the mountain.
The man, whom you know to be called Feyn though you do not know if this is his true name, turns to the heavens. The stars above wheel in accordance to his will, and a small celestial object comes into focus.
"This is Iagh, an unimportant star with a very unimportant planet around it. The celestial spheres in this region have been upset somehow, through no force that we can discern. No Titan activity has been found. No gods have been active here for an age. This region should be moving according to the grand clockwork maintained by Boh, but something has changed His will. You must discover the source of this interference and remove it."
You nod again. You have no wish to speak to Feyn. To do so would be profoundly disrespectful in the current hierarchy, and more importantly you simply don't like him. He is a minor functionary, unworthy of your Voice or attention. Every moment he is within your realm is like a nagging itch in the small of your back which cannot be scratched. Maddening.
Feyn turns back to you, his small close-set eyes and hooked nose reminding you of a rodent. He hesitates when he sees your smirk, but wisely does not mention it.
"Boh has decreed it, so it must be." The man shows you only the token amount of respect required, a slight bow as he backs two steps away from you before slipping away through a Fold.
You turn your gaze back to Iagh. You sense something in this small, unimportant place. The spirit of Delphi, long absorbed into your Grace, sings portents in the back of your mind. You feel the Fates grow restless, and the Furies are awake within you as well. It has been long since you felt this tingling sense of danger, and it is awakening your spirit. Something is about to happen. Whether for good or ill, you must obey Boh.
SicilyIt has been one year since you were last at full operational cognition. Much of your capacity has been devoted to operation of the CD devices spaced around Sicily. The CD waveform generated by the devices require very precise calculations to keep stable, and normally these fields are utilized to move Sicily relative to another object, rather than apply forces to an external object. Still, the arrangement is working very well and you seem to be ahead of schedule as the orbit of the planet has been significantly altered.
Already some improvements can be observed, as the growing season is more stable and winters more mild. Still, there have been consequences. Despite stabilization built into the cradle, residual forces from the CD field have caused massive tectonic activity within the planet's crust and earthquakes of >7.0 have been recorded around the planet. Most occur within 100 miles of Sicily's cradle, and are thus no major problem, but some have occurred quite close to population centers. Appropriate medical and humanitarian aid has been given, if those population centers have previously accepted conversion. This has happily served as a catalyst for further voluntary conversion. The planet now sports a Dynasty population of over 100,000 citizens.
The CD engines are now inert. You were brought out of your fugue state by an alert. EWAR has noted something strange... the message indicates that an anomalous reading has been detected in the outer Iagh system by the microsats seeded previously. 98% of the network is still functional. Some capacity has been lost naturally over time as the dust-sized devices malfunctioned or strayed too closely to gravity wells. This capacity can be replaced easily, but it is not really deemed important.
The anomaly however is that failures of microsats have suddenly increase in a highly localized area at the outer system. No energy emissions are detected, and an exhaustive sweep of nearby sensor clusters has revealed nothing. And yet a very small area, roughly 30km across, is entirely devoid of microsats. The zone is at the edge of the system, beyond the heliopause, where microsat concentration is already fairly low. Still, you estimate that the odds of a coincidental failure of every microsat in a specific area are so low as to be discounted.
The General Assembler onboard Sicily has been busy churning out infrastructure and support items for the growing population. The area around Sicily's cradle resembles an industrial park now, as the manufacturing facilities have been expanded by Logistics to meet a growing need. Sicily was never intended to support a groundside population, so its primary manufacturing is tooled to produce military supplies... bombs and bullets, not baby bottles and roads. While it is highly adaptable, it is not as efficient as dedicated industry could be. This complex will also, eventually, free Sicily's onboard systems up and take over groundside support entirely.
"Hey sugar, you're awake!" EWAR blinks into existance near you in the virtual tactical command environment. You haven't used the environment much recently, you honestly don't see the point in it. Your avatar is still the default blank humanoid shape which is assigned to all entities, while EWAR is now a fully formed light skinned human female figure wearing a tank top, jacket, and khaki slacks the legs of which are tucked into oversized leather boots. She has short black hair cut at an angle along her jawline and flashing blue eyes.
"So what do you make of that huh?" She gestures to a diagram that springs up next to your avatar. It is a flat 2D projection of the system with the dead zone highlighted in red shading. "Every mote in there is dead. New ones that drift in are dead. I tried to query one that drifted back out of the zone, no dice. All systems offline. I could get a launch stack together if you want to send out a probe or retrieve some of the motes for study. Logi will grumble but that's what he does."
Logi? Logistics subsystems have never *grumbled* before. You don't think it even has a personality assigned. You look quietly at the limited 2D projection, wondering why exactly EWAR is bothering with making a 2D projection in a virtual 3D space when she... it... could easily access the data directly and in detail.
Curious. You start to page through reports, catching up on some more recent events which have taken place. You aren't running in realtime when operating the CD fields so it's difficult to keep up with the times. Humans never seem to slow down.
A radical faction (one of several) has formed on the southern continent and violently opposes the Dynasty, and anyone who has joined them. On their own they are no real threat to you but they could cause trouble with the citizenry. They call themselves the Twelve Steps to Freedom, and their dogma seems to be based partially on old religious texts forbidding the creation or use of thinking machines. How ridiculous. They're not an immediate concern, and are not near any loyal Dynasty populations.
More worrying, one of the security patrols intercepted a small human convoy disguised as Dynasty populace, down to the implants and security codes. They were in a registered truck with cargo whose manifest claimed it was harmless wheat bound for a nearby village. When inspected, the drones found a large quantity of Plastic Explosive known as C-91. Chemical sampling indicates that it was manufactured locally but how or where has not been determined. Such a bomb could theoretically threaten Sicily's cradle, if not Sicily herself. The terrorists self-terminated once their ruse had been discovered.
((From this point on, you may suggest actions for Sicily or Bellerophon. Please indicate clearly which one you're suggesting for.))
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Topic: Battlewagon Sicily - Previously: Hull 101 (Read 48513 times)