Beating music and bright lights...The sound of footsteps, closer and closer...The taste of stale stimulants hangs on the tongue...A man's face, thin mottled skin, old white hair, and gangly smile...Sound spills over and between yellow teeth embedded in inflamed gums...Did they ever tell you about that creature out there, who snatched babes out of their cribs and prowled at night looking for lone travelers to eat? No? Well let me tell you about it, how's that?
This story started a long time ago, during the first years of The Long Night when a hereditary cyborg was born. Yavaic Untakaex was of no great importance, her parents of no great importance either. Her father died while she was eight; an accounting officer dead in a war who couldn't kill a single soul. Her mother was a diplomat officer who took up lovers left and center after her husband's death. She never married again, however. Must have really loved her husband, despite only being married for three years total before and after their divorce. Got killed by one of those things, an autonomous biogunship, a dragon.
Yavaic picked up mercenary work when she was of thirteen years, five years after her father died. Unlike her father, she was good at killing. Put seven lo-castes in an early grave alongside three bioframes during pitch battles in Vrak Kerhos. Much like her father, however, the line of work killed her. In four years she got shot dead and buried in a prison of dirt and was soon forgotten by the world. In the grave perhaps she found a semblance of peace amongst eternal death. How dour then, that it was not to last.
It was not out of kindness that the biodeity revived her, but divine cruelty beyond what we could imagine. Digging her corpse out of shallow soil in Groovedglide, Hye Clavedith performed his malign magic. Twisting and mangling, he turned her corpse into a monster of both body and mind. Given horrid life, this was when law-men in the region noticed children going missing. It's rumored that her body did not morph as quickly as her mind allowing her to stay hidden from the law. Recorded even, that she attended and participated in several athletic events. She eventually settled in Shockmartyrs, a place she previously targeted, where for ten years she murdered in the dead silence of the night. Twenty-four grizzly kills, spilt and strewn and hewn underneath a full moon. When she was found out she fled into the wastes and that was the last they saw of her for sixty-odd years.
Now, I'll tell you it isn't agreed on why she waited for those sixty-odd years before springing out into the limelight again. Some say it was to incubate to her full form. Weird people say it's because she was supposed to die at that point, her body and mind not meant to live this long. That she was a rotting mind trapped in a desiccated, null body rampaging in a world that did not make sense. Odd, right? Personally, I think she just became bored after all those years in hiding. The only certainty I can tell you is that she had not a glimmer glint of humanity on her return. Storming into city bunkers she would maim and kill, always fleeing before military forces could crush her. Puncture holes the size of fists were driven into the poor sods, while others were simply churned into a mass of gore. Some that came back from her maulings alive were changed, altered in the way that their eyes looked at the world.
But unlike a lot of stories that revolve around monsters of this Long Night, there was a hero to save the day, to slay the foul thing. Unfortunately, it was an adaptive drone by the name of Hasvel that laid low the demon in the year nine seventy-three. It was a lucky shot, Yaviac was the only thing that drone ever laid low despite their numerous raids on Shishorn. Good ol' Shishorn, raiding practice for the whole world over. Not a single successful defense to their name, the bandit filth. Their heavy muscle fiber nanosuit was named
Vala Vhia after the encounter refers to how a clod of circumstances led to Yaviac's death and not some grand fate. They partook in some more raids against Shishorn before becoming an Ipar Hud of Etzo Ha. You know about Etzo Hud, right? Eyezhud, info-deity that appears as an adaptive drone for some reason, works with storms, nature, blight, and disease? Gets confused with Tohatu Kirn who commune with that info-deity of light due to their names both meaning the same thing and that they were both established in the early two hundreds? Both of them get provoked when you mix them up? Oh, you do know about them! Anyway, Hasvel later died of old age. At the same time, Vala Vhia got passed down to their descendants who claimed it under Hasvel's mother Lenye Eorpou, a pact holder, an overseer of Halkrit Xsit. Beyond that, they lost the thing in six years flat, how do you manage that?
In the end, Yavaic killed eighty-five during her nine hundred and fifty-two years of terror across these lands before her demise. Twenty-four from her moonlit killings, while the rest came from her untold rampages across the lands.
Now I'll admit, there is one loose end here. I've talked about the creation from life to birth, but what of the creator, that horrid originator, that corruptive reanimator responsible for the terror that was Yaviac's second life? Let me clue you in on a truth, an inescapable truth. The truth that not even the avatar of Jino Rafustisaki could escape The Wheel of Karma, under which Hye Clavedith was crushed. How cold of karma, for his opulence in ruling the spacer nation of Cuicizicazar as both lead general and governor lead him to a monster, not made by a horrid intelligence but by brutal, advanced evolution. The creation outlived the creator, as common in life, repeats here once more as Hye died in year three eighty-three, dead by hyperpredator.
What do you mean that my terminology is outdated!? The dictionary just underwent how many changes now?! You mean to say that during my speech that somehow it went from version 3.50 to version 3.67!? Damn nabit, I probably sound like a surface dweller right about now…
Yellow teeth embedded in inflamed gums slam shut...The sound of footsteps, farther and farther away...Beating music and bright lights still blare...What an odd fellow…
Author
Topic: Dwarf Fortress: The Long Night 4.6 BETA (Read 44287 times)