Lucca fanboys at the creature then very visibly forces himself to get back to Steve’s dna. He adds a few modifications, Increased strength and toughness, Speed and etc. After doing this, Lucca sends out a psionic signal to the creature, Trying to communicate.
You finish looking over Steve's genome, spend a few seconds focusing, and make some changes. Millions of microscopic pushes, changing the DNA in a million cells, the same tiny edit every time. Even among the races gifted with psionics, this is an extraordinary ability, requiring unparalleled precision and an intuitive sense of the stuff of life. You shift the codes for muscle cells to be bigger, greedier, more numerous, tell motor neurons to grow longer and fire faster, marrow to thicken its environment with excess calcium. It'll take a few days to start to see changes if you do implement these in his body, but he'll have faster reflexes, harder bones, and the strength to at least keep up with the rest of the crew.
This done, you turn your attention to the great being swimming through the skies above you, shouting a psionic greeting. The creature responds, its voice steady and calm, unstrained with the effort of reaching across thousands of miles of intervening space.
"Hello, small one. I am Ral, the great serpent, and I too once lived in the heart of this world."The words are unhurried, not threatening, spoken with gentle amusement even. It moves away over the jagged horizon before you can reply, untouched by the light of the dawn.
After all the talking is over with see if there is any type of database on the ship that includes documentation on things like that massive creature.
The bridge has digital archives, but searching through them doesn't yield any immediate insight into the creature itself. Beings that huge occur rarely in nature, and the thing you saw definitely wasn't small. You do establish that creatures that large tend to either be created and maintained by some kind of advanced technology or magic, or were part of the fundamental laws of a world. You scroll through the slow, massive vessels grown by the Xelqu, the awful titans created when the Lifeshapers were provoked to war, or the mechanical dragons made by the Loians, but you can't see why any of these things would be circling a dying planet with their makers nowhere to be found. Perhaps you'd do better to look through myths and legends.
And there it is. Ral, the world serpent. A snake the size of a continent, spoken of in the old songs of this place, sleeping in the fiery core of the planet, prophesied to devour the world in the end of days.
Odd. You're pretty sure the end of days already came.
"I have a power that I can use to change things.. usually basic things like cloth to other cloth. If I don't screw up and set something on fire. I've never had anything so grand to try and work on, so I think I'll just play around with it a bit. Maybe a staff, or adding armour plating to my uniform."
"I might even try to change what it is, make it into an even better metal. But that's hard. Much harder than just reshaping it. Might set something on fire if I try that. But.. if it works, I might have a bar of something really special."
Upgrade the Obdurite into Adamantite, as Varisdel suggests.
Lets try to make those uniforms for everyone (including the squid, although squid gets a generic 'tentacle beast in circle' icon, and a jet black colour. Use my powers to reshape (and recolour) cloth items, looking for raw materials in storage. Try to make them tough and fireproof, while still allowing for easy movement. Varisdel gets black and red, with gears, Steve gets no logo and the blue text colour, and the sword gets a scabbard-wrap that's sunny yellow and has an icon of a spear, as sword is stabby.
Suzy's will be pink, and will have an icon of a magic wand, shooting sparks.. Timo will wear an imitation of the uniform, in gray, with the same icon.
5
Changing the stuff something is made out of is indeed hard. But, apparently not too hard for someone.
You hug the bar to your torso - increasing the surface area in contact with something can help with the transformation process. You can feel it heating up and expanding slightly as the changes take place over almost an hour. Timo settles down in front of you, tucking his paws underneath him and focusing on the transformation.
When you're done, you end up with a different metal, less dense, and a much lighter shade of blue. It has a faint glow, barely perceptible in the harsh light of the workshop, but there nonetheless. It sings slightly as you put it down on the workbench.
Even Varisdel can't contain a moment of shock: this is pure adamantine.
Making adamantine from Obdurite is quite draining, and you only manage to make one uniform before the ship arrives at the settlement. Still, little Timo looks just
darling in it.
Sure.
Varisdel focuses on the bar, watching to try and see if he can tell anything about what Suzy does to it.
Unseen, his soul seems to reach out to the piece of metal.
5
Varisdel's soul is an unusual one. It is a fundamental tenet of the soul arts that an intangible sympathy exists between beings with souls of similar composition. The meaning and nature of this sympathy is much debated among scholars, the discussion complicated by the lack of understanding of exactly what souls are generally composed of. In the freakish case of Varisdel, however, there is no particular mystery as to what his soul is made up of: it's simply some metals. The mystery lies in how reality allows such a material peg to fit in such a metaphysical hole, rather than scrumpling up the mistake into a singularity or tearing it into a mess of subatomic particles.
Nonetheless, Varisdel does undeniably have such a soul, granting him a certain affinity for metals. This comes at the cost of soul-based arts such as most forms of magic, but is perhaps the more valuable for its rarity.
He observes the metal as Suzy works it. He senses tiny changes in the outer layers, microscopic spots of heat that cool and dissipate almost immediately. Tiny bubbles of air are forced through the momentarily soft areas created, and the process repeats until the entire bar is riddled with air. Then pinpricks of even more intense heat are created, the Obdurite oxidising and changing, binding with chemicals in the air at thousands of degrees, until the baser metal turns into adamantine.
It's roughly how you'd go about making adamantine from Obdurite really, except in miniature. Which isn't surprising, as you'd need a forge as hot as a sun and almost perfect control over the airflow to actually make this work under normal circumstances. Doing it in tiny increments on the microscopic scale makes a lot of sense... if you can get hold of a million tiny forges and even tinier blacksmiths. Apparently Suzy can.
The Stride Blade has a special mount at the front of the ship, in case at any point you find yourselves traversing the awful Chasm it came from, but for now it simply asks the Xelqu heart in the engine to take you to the settlement. The journey lasts a couple of hours.
The surface settlement is nestled in a mostly intact range of mountains, air apparently held in place by huge charms and runes carved into rock. The land around is dry and scrubby, but not dead as the chunks of broken planetary surface floating all around. The light you saw before dawn broke was some kind of lighthouse or beacon floating high above the city itself, spinning slowly, useless in the bright sunlight. So they have some visitors.
You land a little way from the main group of buildings, rough sandstone structures, many apparently carved from pure rock. Coming down smoothly and silently, you notice a few other flying crafts scattered through the mountains, some on the roofs of buildings, some by small villages, some apparently in the middle of nowhere. A crowd gathers at a distance to gawk at your unusual vessel. The people here look pretty similar to inhabitants of the Needle, refugees from all across the many universes, all sorts of shapes but nobody too threatening. Some seem here to beg, some to trade, but most just to have a look at you.
Time to hit the town?
Status: Fully intact
Fore:
- Bridge
- Varisdel's box, currently empty
- Engine room (Elder Xelqu Heart, Psionic)
Central:
- Quarters
- Suit Room (4x standard armoured voidsuits, fitted)
- Infirmary
- General Storage
- Biological regulation garden (waste disposal etc)
Aft:
- Secondary Storage Chambers: Nutrient Stock, Gene Library, Titan
- Pods
- Main Airlock
Movement:
- Psionic propulsion via Xelqu Heart
- Chasm Traversal (requires mounted Stride Blade)
Weaponry:
- Cleavers: huge detachable metal blades, psionically controlled. Also useful for traversing fluids.
- Secondary: flechette cannons
Varisdel has four bars of obdurite and one of adamantine.
Suzy has a briefcase that can be turned into a tank.
Steve has a pair of sunglasses and a laser pen.
Aside from that, it's just whatever sentimental junk and threadbare clothing people chose to bring with them.
That's pretty great, Fluffe. I especially liked the Corner of Stuff!
Author
Topic: Solar Graveyard - Starlight (Read 23297 times)