Modified missionary position
missionaryheels
2024.02.28 21:44 selfdestruct007 missionaryheels
for those of us with that particular kink of seeing women in high heels in the missionary position.
2010.06.18 20:09 PlaxicoMeow New York Football Giants
The Official Subreddit for fans of The New York Football Giants
2013.04.15 19:50 whoboy2 Shit Parish Says
2024.05.18 23:51 BitEmotional69 Progress update on my dad (60) heading into chemo cycle 1
February 2024: local hospital CT scan after abnormal liver levels and chronic diarrhea. Scan found tumor on head of pancreas with SMV/SMA involvement.
Late February: ERCP and EUS. EUS inconclusive. Triggered pancreatitis for the first time. Traumatic 11 day hospital stay with feeding tube and sepsis.
March 2024: second opinion at Mayo to meet with Mark Truty. Additional EUS performed, also inconclusive. Then another combo ERCP and EUS. EUS inconclusive again. ERCP triggered pancreatitis. Assumed propofol allergy. Truty stated resection impossible due to venous involvement, suggested aggressive chemo despite inconclusive biopsies. Genetic research panels completed, no genetic abnormalities.
April 2024: left Mayo, tried for a third and final opinion with Doug Evans at Froedert. Evans much more hopeful about Dad’s case. Performed 4th EUS, confirmed via biopsy adenocarcinoma. No triggered pancreatitis. Encouraged by Evans and Dr. Dua that post-chemo Whipple is something we can look forward to.
May 2024: Port placed. Starting modified Folfirinox this week (Fluorouracil, Oxaliplatin, Irinotecan and leucovorin) for 12 cycles. Dad went from a depressive episode to much more positive and hopeful. Appetite is back, still managing diarrhea. He’s lost about 100 pounds since Christmas (~310 to ~210). Taking Creon 3x a day as well as potassium supplements.
Putting this out there for support. If anyone has any questions or suggestions, let me know. I love this community and think of you all daily.
submitted by BitEmotional69 to pancreaticcancer [link] [comments]
Late February: ERCP and EUS. EUS inconclusive. Triggered pancreatitis for the first time. Traumatic 11 day hospital stay with feeding tube and sepsis.
March 2024: second opinion at Mayo to meet with Mark Truty. Additional EUS performed, also inconclusive. Then another combo ERCP and EUS. EUS inconclusive again. ERCP triggered pancreatitis. Assumed propofol allergy. Truty stated resection impossible due to venous involvement, suggested aggressive chemo despite inconclusive biopsies. Genetic research panels completed, no genetic abnormalities.
April 2024: left Mayo, tried for a third and final opinion with Doug Evans at Froedert. Evans much more hopeful about Dad’s case. Performed 4th EUS, confirmed via biopsy adenocarcinoma. No triggered pancreatitis. Encouraged by Evans and Dr. Dua that post-chemo Whipple is something we can look forward to.
May 2024: Port placed. Starting modified Folfirinox this week (Fluorouracil, Oxaliplatin, Irinotecan and leucovorin) for 12 cycles. Dad went from a depressive episode to much more positive and hopeful. Appetite is back, still managing diarrhea. He’s lost about 100 pounds since Christmas (~310 to ~210). Taking Creon 3x a day as well as potassium supplements.
Putting this out there for support. If anyone has any questions or suggestions, let me know. I love this community and think of you all daily.
2024.05.18 23:25 RabloPathjen Spark Control X delivered!
 | submitted by RabloPathjen to PositiveGridSpark [link] [comments] |
2024.05.18 23:21 ahududumuz Piety is bugged?
 | submitted by ahududumuz to eu4 [link] [comments] |
2024.05.18 22:10 Mattia_von_Sigmund Some life-improving Suggestions and Fixes
While playing I got these ideas that might really improve gameplays (specially when playing as westeros' king) that at the same time could be pretty easy to implement:
submitted by Mattia_von_Sigmund to CK3AGOT [link] [comments]
- Game Rule that prevents vassals' bordergore and bad inheritance:
- Automatic filling up for all court positions
- Remove the negative Opinion modifier that Lord Paramouts during mega wars have against their liege if some of their duchy tier vassals join the crown's faction (this opinion modifier I think is called "desires de jure lands) as this could modify vassals' natural to chose a side if they chose to do so mid-war
- Warrant against deposed rulers and their descendants
- While playing as a king I noticed how, despite siding with me (the crown) in a civil war, later a lord paramount could easily join another revolt; I think instead if a major revolt happens (a major revolt should mean when the rebel and crown forces are almost equal in force) a lord paramount who choses to side with the throne may at the end of the revolt either from him or the king get an event of "crown gratidude" for having helped the "crown in such a dire time" that basically makes that lord paramount a loyal supporter of the crown, and when this lord paramount dies, his successor should get an event acount either reconfirming this loyalty or turning it upside down (just like how borros baratheon in the dace of dragons, despite his father being a supporter of rhaenyra, using the logic of "house targaryen gave my house support for granted" at the end basically revolted against the "rightful" queen) I think this would be a great mechanic that would make lord paramounts act more realistically and dynamically in who they support and at the same time keep space for changes of loyalties
- A few suggestions: If a ruler sentences an entire family house to be executed, if some members of that house survive for whatever reason, upon entering (or if they already are) the seven kingdoms they should get a wanted status so that they may be imprisoned and executed as it was meant to be; it happened a few times that some hosue members for whatever reason surived despite ordering their killing, and there was no way i could fix this without gaining tyranny, a second suggestion would be that if a banished-to-essos person for whatever reason returns the seven kindoms, anyone hosting them should get an event about their wanted status and that they're supposed to turn such person to the crown, in both of these suggestions the AI of exiled/condemned to death characters should aim to not return to the seven kingdoms by any means to avoid death (they should only if they have a valid reason like, idk, fomenting a rebellion
2024.05.18 22:00 Lovinsunshine97 Gratitude journal *(daily scheduled post)*
We are all familiar with prating gratitude. It is an overly used concept that many times can turn int o a form of “toxic positivity” and this is far from what I want to do here. What is to be grateful anything?
I believe it is a feeling in a warm tan color in my chest, that makes me smile and think “I am happy I am here to see/experience this.” Maybe it is a religious experience to you, maybe you feel like thanking God or the universe for the opportunity to be here right now.
Another interesting thing is, you don’t have to feel grateful about big life changing experiences only, sometimes I am just grateful for McDonald’s, or for my cat, my friends and family for being there for me. Some days I’m grateful for having to strength to take a shower or drinking a glass of water. You can be grateful about anything.
Practicing gratitude helps us guide our minds into a more positive way of thinking. It doesn’t mean you can’t complain (I love complaining lol) but it helps us thinking about the good things we are actually able to experience.
If this seems too hard for you right, try to modify it to fit your needs: try to write down one complain you have about your day, and battle it with one or two that you feel grateful or happy for. We are all in different stages of our journey. You’re loved and respected, and your feelings are valid.
Now tell me, what are you grateful for today? What are you complain you want to battle with a good thought?
submitted by Lovinsunshine97 to BipolarWomenWithCats [link] [comments]
I believe it is a feeling in a warm tan color in my chest, that makes me smile and think “I am happy I am here to see/experience this.” Maybe it is a religious experience to you, maybe you feel like thanking God or the universe for the opportunity to be here right now.
Another interesting thing is, you don’t have to feel grateful about big life changing experiences only, sometimes I am just grateful for McDonald’s, or for my cat, my friends and family for being there for me. Some days I’m grateful for having to strength to take a shower or drinking a glass of water. You can be grateful about anything.
Practicing gratitude helps us guide our minds into a more positive way of thinking. It doesn’t mean you can’t complain (I love complaining lol) but it helps us thinking about the good things we are actually able to experience.
If this seems too hard for you right, try to modify it to fit your needs: try to write down one complain you have about your day, and battle it with one or two that you feel grateful or happy for. We are all in different stages of our journey. You’re loved and respected, and your feelings are valid.
Now tell me, what are you grateful for today? What are you complain you want to battle with a good thought?
2024.05.18 21:58 emptyArray_79 Reworking The Guardian Part 2: Class Options
Hi, the past few days I had to think about about the Guardian, some of the issues the class has as it is right now, and how I would go about fixing them. I had a lot of (What I think to be) cool ideas and now want to share them across a few posts on this sub. This post is one of those. I will first write down the ideas I had as rules, and then later add some comments explaining my thoughts and reasoning behind those ideas.
Disclaimer: This is not me saying that this is what the Guardian SHOULD BE. I also don't claim that these changes would even necessarily be for the better. My goals with these posts is not to dictate how to make the Guardian properly. My goals with these posts is discussing potential issues with the Class (many of which have already been pointed out, some of which I haven't seen discussed much), talking about potential ways of fixing them and discussing game design in general, but primarily, my goal with this is just to share and discuss some cool ideas I had because I love homebrewing :). And how knows, maybe a Paizo designer stumbles across one of these and takes some inspiration, but that would already be far more than I would hope to accomplish.
Here is a list of all parts:
Reworking The Guardian Part 1: The Taunt Mechanic
Reworking The Guardian Part 3: Class Mechanics & Subclasses
This will probably the longest post. Here I go into the primary class options my homebrew Guardians would be able to choose from. At the end I discuss some feat ideas I had, some of which should replace feats I turned into class features. _______________________________________________________________________________________
There are a few things I tried to accomplish with these changes
submitted by emptyArray_79 to Pathfinder2e [link] [comments]
Disclaimer: This is not me saying that this is what the Guardian SHOULD BE. I also don't claim that these changes would even necessarily be for the better. My goals with these posts is not to dictate how to make the Guardian properly. My goals with these posts is discussing potential issues with the Class (many of which have already been pointed out, some of which I haven't seen discussed much), talking about potential ways of fixing them and discussing game design in general, but primarily, my goal with this is just to share and discuss some cool ideas I had because I love homebrewing :). And how knows, maybe a Paizo designer stumbles across one of these and takes some inspiration, but that would already be far more than I would hope to accomplish.
Here is a list of all parts:
Reworking The Guardian Part 1: The Taunt Mechanic
Reworking The Guardian Part 3: Class Mechanics & Subclasses
This will probably the longest post. Here I go into the primary class options my homebrew Guardians would be able to choose from. At the end I discuss some feat ideas I had, some of which should replace feats I turned into class features. _______________________________________________________________________________________
Keyword Intercept:
Some abilities refer to this. These are the rules for interceptingIntercept You attempt to redirect an effect away from an ally to yourself. Generally, only targeted effects can be intercepted. Attempt a check using your Class DC - 10 + your armors item bonus against the enemies relevant DC or 10 + the enemies relevant modifier. -Critical Success: As success, but you gain a +2 circumstance bonus to the relevant defense. -Success: You are in time. The effect targets you instead of your ally. You can still choose to split the damage like with the failure condition. -Failure: You are barley too late. If the effect causes damage, your ally takes half and you can take the other half. You an your ally only apply half your usual resistances against that damage. -Critical Failure: You fail to Intercept
Defensive Strategy
While all Guardians are specialists of protecting their allies, the way they go about doing so differs from Guardian to Guardian. Choose 2 of the following abilities. You Subclass will grant you a third one.Tackle Ally ⟳ Trigger: An willing ally you are adjacent is about to be subject to a hostile effect. Effect: Before the effect resolves, you push the ally 5 feet away from you and enter their space yourself. This is forced movement. If their is not enough space for either, this ability fails. If the triggering effect was targeted, you also try to Intercept it. If the triggering effect was an area effect and the ally is now outside the area, they aren't affected.
Command Attention ◆ or ◆◆ (mental) Duration: Until the end of your next turn. Area: 15-foot or 30-foot emanation. Effect: All enemies in the area are taunted 1. The area depends on the actions spend.
Danger Sense Whenever you are in the presence of a hidden threat (Such as a potential ambush, traps, hidden weapons ect.) the GM secretly rolls a Perception check against a relevant DC (Usually the Stealth DC of the creature/object). On a success you spot the danger, on a critical success you or an ally of yours gains a +1 circumstance bonus on the relevant defensive stat for the purpose of the first check made to resist the spotted threat.
Hampering Sweeps ◆ Like the feat, but enemies can attempt a Reflex save against your class DC. -Success: They get away -Failure: They can't get away -Critical Failure: They can't get away and can't take move actions for the rest of their turn.
Taunting Strike ◆ (flourish) You Strike an enemy. If you hit they are taunted 1 (Taunted 2 on a critical).
Challenge ◆ (mental) Range: 60 feet Duration: 1 round. Effect: The enemy has to attempt a Will save against your Class DC. -Critical Success: They are unaffected. -Success: They are taunted 1. -Failure: They are up to taunted 2 (Your choice). -Critical Failure: They are up to taunted 2 for up to 2 rounds (Your choice).
Blanket Defense ◆◆ Like the feat.
Body Block ◆◆ Area: 5-foot emanation. Duration: Sustained up to 3 rounds. Effect: Whenever the line-of-effect of a ranged, targeted strike/ability/spell intersect the area, you can attempt to Intercept it. If the effect is a burst, line or cone and you are between an affected ally and the areas origin, you can attempt the same check as the one when you would Intercept, but it has the following effects: -Critical Success: As success but you get a +1 circumstance bonus to the relevant defense instead. -Success: Only you are affected and you take a -1 circumstance penalty to the relevant defense. -Failure: Both you and the ally are affected as normal.
Covering Statue You always provide Standard Cover instead of Lesser Cover to allies and allies can Take Cover behind you to upgrade this to Greater Cover.
Guard Ally ◆ Targets: An ally adjacent to you. Duration: Until the end of your next turn. Effect: As long as you are still adjacent to the target, you can Intercept all targeted effects the ally is subject to. If the ally moves, you can Stride up to your speed as a reaction, but you have to Stride towards the allies current position.
Guardian Lore You gain "Guardian Lore". You can use "Guardian Lore" to Recall Knowledge about offensive statistics and abilities and about ways of mitigating them. Your proficiency in Guardian Lore increases to expert at 3rd level, to master at 7th level and to legendary at 15th level.
Feat Ideas
Taunting Strength --- Feat 2 When you succeed at an Athletics check against an enemy, they have to make a Will save against your class DC. On a failure they are taunted 1 for 1 round (Taunted 2 on a critical failure). If you Athletics check was a critical success, they decrease their degree of success by one step._______________________________________________________________________________________
Slowing Strike ◆ (flourish) --- Feat 6 Make a Strike against an enemy. If you hit, they need to make a Fortitude save against your Class DC. If your hit was a critical hit, they decrease their degree of success by 1 step. -Critical Success: They are unaffected. -Success: They take a -5 foot status penalty to their speed for 1 round. -Failure: They take a -15 foot status penalty to their speed for 1 round. -Critical Failure: They are Immobilized for 1 round.
Ground Stomp ◆◆ --- Feat 8 You stomp the ground so hard that it becomes uneven and difficult to walk through. The ground in a 10 foot emanation becomes difficult terrain. All creatures in the area must attempt a Reflex save against your Class DC. On a failure they loose 10 feet of their next Stride action. On a critical failure they also fall prone.
Don't Run! --- Feat 10 When an enemy is taunted by you, moving away from you is difficult terrain.
Comments
I want to start by saying, that while there was a lot of though behind some of these, other more just proof of concepts, and I realize that these options are probably not balanced yet.There are a few things I tried to accomplish with these changes
- I think that the Guardian is thematically closer to an Archetype than a Class. Its about protection in two very specific and niche ways. I think, that while for archetypes to have a very specific/limited scope/theme, classes need to be more open ended, or if they are specific in theme (Like the Thaumaturge) they need to have a very strong theme. And even those very specific classes (Thaumaturge, Psychic, Gunslinger) usually have a lot of choices and different ways of being played/build. I think this is something the Guardian still lacks. I come back to this in my post about Class Mechanics & Subclasses, but I tried to expand the theme from "Very specific video game-esk semi-tank" to being about "Protection in various different ways".
- I wanted to provide players with interesting choices and make it so that different Guardians can actually be very different.
- I tried to balance some broken options.
- I turned some Feats that I think are very fitting for the class into general class options that you can take at level 1.
- I wanted these abilities to fulfill the "tank" fantasy better. Gameplay of tanks generally centers around positioning and space-control. So I added some abilities that allow you to engage with that aspect of strategy.
- Intercept
- I find it weird how, in the original guardian, this has very impactful ability and "absolute" ability had no check associated with it, while the ability that is just a debuff has. I feel like it should be the other way around. So I added a check. In return, I made it for more applicable. Now you can not only use it to block damage, but you can even use it to "tank" debuffing effects for your allies, widening the scope of what you can protect your allies from.
- Tackle Ally
- This is basically the "replacement" for the original "Intercept" class feature, so what I wrote for "Intercept" also applies here. Additionally, I think the ability to control your allies positioning and, for example, push them outside of the range of an attack to protect them from follow-ups or out of a spells area opens a new dimension of strategy.
- Command Attention
- I feel like a Tank class needs an option that allows it to take aggro from multiple smaller creatures around it at once. This ability also plays a lot with your positioning. I also think that it makes sense for this to be automatic. This avoids a lot of weirdness in regards to who you want to fail and who don't you want to fail and makes the ability both more consistently useful and simple.
- Danger Sense / Guardian Lore
- I want to start by saying that I got the idea for these options from the Rules Lawyer Playtest stream, where they discussed the Guardian at the end. One of his players said how he wants the Guardian to also have protection themed exploration abilities, and I couldn't agree more. I think a "Protection" class should also have options for indirect protection. Both in reality and in fantasy, "protecting" not only includes physically putting yourself between the attacker and your protectee (Usually you needing to do that means that something went wrong), proper protection primarily means seeing potential dangers coming and knowing how to avoid or deal with them. These two options play into that aspect of protection.
- Hampering Sweeps/Blanket Defense
- I think these feats are just so thematic, cool and fitting for the class that they should be primary class features. Hampering Sweeps also needs a small nerf of course because, no, I don't think a lv 1 Guardian should be able to literally bind a god if that god had no teleportation spells prepared xd. In regard to Blanket Defense, spending a whole turn on this, I think, feels bad, and I think that the ability is also balanced if it only causes two actions.
- Body Block
- This is meant to be the classic Reinhard/Braum shield esk ability, where you can literally use a shield, or in this case your body, to intercept range attacks against your allies. This also makes positioning really important.
- Taunting Strike
- This is supposed to be a cool option if you want to mix some offense into your Guardian.
- Covering Statue
- Together with Taunting Strike this allows you to have an extremely action efficient Guardian, if you wanted to. You could then use those actions for something more action-intensive. This could open up a lot of cool build ideas.
- Slowing Strike
- This is meant to provide the Guardian with another option to control the battlefield and indirectly protect their allies. This also particularly adds some cool ranged Guardian support I'd imagine.
- Ground Stomp
- I am honestly not sure right now since it has been some time since I read through every single feat, but I feel like the Guardian currently lacks some sort of soft Aoe CC. This should provide this.
- Don't Run!
- I feel like this is just a typical tank-space control ability that synergizes well with other class options. I think this opens up a lot of tactical possibilities for the class.
2024.05.18 21:42 warmandcozysuff Interview Questions
I am going back to teaching after taking a year off (substituting) and applying in a completely different area than I used to teach in. I'm pretty nervous because I haven't done an interview like this in forever. I've seen several posts asking about what questions may be asked in interviews, with no responses. It's been a while since my interviews, but I remember nailing most of them (I did A LOT of interviews before I settled on my previous school). The reason I nailed them is because my classroom management teacher gave us a list of questions and let us practice answering them with a partner at the end of every class. I also wrote out the answers to every question, so I knew I had really thought them through, and I put the questions in a little cup and pulled one out every time I passed it to practice answering them.
Honestly, I think most of us will find a job even if we do not nail the interviews, but it could be the difference between getting the job you want and just taking the job you get. So, it is important IMO to practice questions a lot if you have your heart set on a specific school.
I'm not sure how much questions have changed since COVID and everything, but I thought I'd share the list I had from back then. I'd love to know any additional questions y'all may have encountered in interviews since then, so I can add them to my little cup. I'm also happy to listen if any incoming teachers want to bounce some answers off of me! Also, most of the questions on my list were never asked in my 20 or so interviews. The most common ones back then were strengths/weaknesses, what curriculum are you familiar with, and classroom management style. There were also some new questions at each interview, though I didn't add them to my list back then unfortunately. I'm interested to know if there are any specific questions y'all have gotten over and over.
So, without further ado, heres the list my teacher gave me all those years ago:
1. Why did you become a teacher?
2. Why do you want to work at this school?
3. What kind of qualities do students look for in a teacher?
4. What do you think it takes for a teacher to be successful?
5. What is your classroom management philosophy?
6. How will you plan to build positive relationships with parents?
7. How will you handle a parent who is overly involved in your classroom?
8. How well do you know and understand the Common Core State Standards?
9. What is your opinion of classroom technology and how do you plan to integrate it?
10. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
11. What is your personal philosophy of teaching?
12. How do you anticipate identifying a struggling student? What will you do to help that student?
13. Can you describe important events of the first day of school in your classroom?
14. What do you think about teachers working together to plan lessons and test? What will you be able to contribute to this collaboration?
15. What was the most difficult aspect of your student teaching experience?
16. What are the different ways you will assess students and measure their learning?
17. How will you modify your instruction to meet the needs of a gifted learner?
18. What is the most valuable lesson you learned from your student teaching experience?
19. How do you plan to continue growing as a professional?
20. How do you plan to accommodate a student with an IEP?
21. Can you tell me an example of a lesson you’ve planned and taught that models differentiated instruction?
22. How will you prepare your students for our standardized state assessments?
23. What type of communication do you plan to have with your parents?
24. How will you handle a student who continues to interrupt your instruction?
25. How will you handle a student with autism who is having a meltdown in class?
26. What grade and/or subject do you feel most comfortable teaching?
27. What subject area is your least favorite?
28. How will you handle conflict among fellow teachers?
29. What is one area where you hope to grow professionally?
30. What is your opinion of classroom observations?
31. What classroom rules and procedures do you consider important?
32. How do you plan to address bullying in your classroom?
33. Who was your most influential teacher and why?
submitted by warmandcozysuff to Teachers [link] [comments]
Honestly, I think most of us will find a job even if we do not nail the interviews, but it could be the difference between getting the job you want and just taking the job you get. So, it is important IMO to practice questions a lot if you have your heart set on a specific school.
I'm not sure how much questions have changed since COVID and everything, but I thought I'd share the list I had from back then. I'd love to know any additional questions y'all may have encountered in interviews since then, so I can add them to my little cup. I'm also happy to listen if any incoming teachers want to bounce some answers off of me! Also, most of the questions on my list were never asked in my 20 or so interviews. The most common ones back then were strengths/weaknesses, what curriculum are you familiar with, and classroom management style. There were also some new questions at each interview, though I didn't add them to my list back then unfortunately. I'm interested to know if there are any specific questions y'all have gotten over and over.
So, without further ado, heres the list my teacher gave me all those years ago:
1. Why did you become a teacher?
2. Why do you want to work at this school?
3. What kind of qualities do students look for in a teacher?
4. What do you think it takes for a teacher to be successful?
5. What is your classroom management philosophy?
6. How will you plan to build positive relationships with parents?
7. How will you handle a parent who is overly involved in your classroom?
8. How well do you know and understand the Common Core State Standards?
9. What is your opinion of classroom technology and how do you plan to integrate it?
10. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
11. What is your personal philosophy of teaching?
12. How do you anticipate identifying a struggling student? What will you do to help that student?
13. Can you describe important events of the first day of school in your classroom?
14. What do you think about teachers working together to plan lessons and test? What will you be able to contribute to this collaboration?
15. What was the most difficult aspect of your student teaching experience?
16. What are the different ways you will assess students and measure their learning?
17. How will you modify your instruction to meet the needs of a gifted learner?
18. What is the most valuable lesson you learned from your student teaching experience?
19. How do you plan to continue growing as a professional?
20. How do you plan to accommodate a student with an IEP?
21. Can you tell me an example of a lesson you’ve planned and taught that models differentiated instruction?
22. How will you prepare your students for our standardized state assessments?
23. What type of communication do you plan to have with your parents?
24. How will you handle a student who continues to interrupt your instruction?
25. How will you handle a student with autism who is having a meltdown in class?
26. What grade and/or subject do you feel most comfortable teaching?
27. What subject area is your least favorite?
28. How will you handle conflict among fellow teachers?
29. What is one area where you hope to grow professionally?
30. What is your opinion of classroom observations?
31. What classroom rules and procedures do you consider important?
32. How do you plan to address bullying in your classroom?
33. Who was your most influential teacher and why?
2024.05.18 21:27 Bbobsillypants Nature of Big Donuts 6 - a Stargate x NOP crossover fic - Fear
[FIRST][LAST]
Atlantis Commission
Officer Report - Lieutenant Colonel John Shepard
CLEARANCE LEVEL 5
Well this had definitely been a very interesting couple of hours. This dimension and its people had very odd opinions and ideas. Apparently the prey species of this dimension were all obligate cowards, whose instincts compelled them to be non-violent and run from threats. At least according to themselves. There were apparently some of them who were “predator diseased” as they called it, a disease which often resulted in increased violence, aggression, lack of empathy, and unheard like behavior. It sounded to me like some form of infectious psychopathy, but the venlil assured us it shouldn't affect us since we were predators, which didn’t really ease my fears, but hopefully it was something we could figure out when we got home if it ever became a problem.
Gotta love mandatory quarantine periods woo hoo!
As scary as this odd disease sounded, my main concern at the moment was to try and turn a professed coward into someone who could at the very least defend themselves.
I looked down to the table of gear ahead of me and then over to the mostly naked Venlil to my side, and then even farther to Tiel’c who thought It would be a good idea to help oversee Farva’s rapid fire training course. I fiddled with the bluetooth earpiece which was rigged up to one of our handhelds to run a translation program to speak directly with the captain. A big step up from our unknowingly one sided communications earlier.
I stepped on the other side of the plastic table and placed my hands down upon it and looked on at my new student..
“Welcome Captain Farva to our very impromptu accelerated course on Human arms armor and basic infantry tactics.” I said gesturing to the hodge podge gear we had managed to assemble for the good captain. “Are we ready to begin?”.
She flicked her ears, somewhat nervously by the looks.
“I’d take it that's a yes then?”
“Oh yes sorry”
“Alright then, well given that most of our crew is human and the only other alien struts around naked all the time, the only gear we have on hand is for humans, So you're going to be running size smalls and it's all going to fit all a bit big” I say as I toss her the tactical vest. ”Here try this on, we can try to tighten it up if it's a bit loose anywhere”. The captain wrestles with the buckles a bit, and Teal'c helps her tighten up some of the top straps, as the Venil’s shoulders weren't as broad as humans. Farva gave Teal’c an odd look, but seemed appreciative none the less.Once finished, she grasped the vest in her paws with interest. “This armor seems quite lightweight, which is nice, weight is often an issue that causes us to forgo armor, since heavy armor would hurt our running ability.” Farva remarks. “Also the sheer amount of pockets seems quite excessive, what do you need all these for?”
“Well for starters it's currently missing these '' I hand Farva one of the armor plates which she looks over. “That is a depleted Naquadria ceramic composite plate. It’s designed to stop bullet impacts and dissipate energy weapon blasts. It slots into that chest compartment in the front and back of your armor.”
“This isn't quite what Id imagine for the armor of your kind”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well judging by your ships I would have imagined you would put more emphasis on defense Your predatory nature would make you less likely to run away from conflict allowing for more encompassing armor to cover more than just your chest, since you have less need to run.”
She would put it like that.
“Well there are a number of reasons for that, a lot to do with those excess pockets you mentioned. For starters you will not be carrying the same amount of gear that the standard infantry unit would normally be carrying, we are preparing you for a quick in and out op. Normally us expedition teams need to be deployed into unknown territory for extended periods of time, we need to carry everything we might need with us from food, bullets, weapons, to comms gear, sensors, repelling equipment etc. The weight from all that gear adds up fast; In order to stay sufficiently mobile and combat effective; we only carry enough armor to protect our vitals, head and torso, anything else can hopefully be patched up by a field medic.”
Tielc gave his piece as well. “It is important to know when to run both towards and aways from one's foes, not every battle can be won through strength alone, but by strategy and cunning. Being able to reposition oneself quickly is therefore highly advantageous”
Farva seemed to freeze at Teal'c's statement, not out of fear I think, she instead had a distant look in her eye. To snap her out of her slump I handed her a standard ballistic helmet.
Seeming to get the idea she looked at it oddly and tried it on. It confirmed to her head shape decently well but depressed her ears to either side of her head, kind of resembling what one might imagine a sad bunny rabbit to look like “I don't think this will be something I can bring with me” she said ” I can't use ear signals and this will muffle my hearing.”
“Why don’t you keep it on for the time being, I think any extra hearing protection might be useful considering what we are about to try next.” I hand Farva some ballistic ear protectors, slightly modified and somewhat ramshackle. “One of the corporals worked closely with Nurse Fila to get an idea for safe decibels levels for your kind, we were also able to get these earbuds molded to fit into your ear canal better”
Farva took them and slipped them in. “These are a bit uncomfortable, what do I need these for?”
“You'll need them for this” I say as I unsnap the clasps on the weapons case revealing its contents.
The content seems to capture Farva’s interest, getting a slight tail wave.
“Okay So this here is a p90, It carries a 50 round top loading magazine of teflon coated armor piercing ordnance. With a cyclical rate of fire of 900 rounds per minute.”
Farvas ears perk up at this. “This seems like an efficient design, I take it these are a flashlight and laser sight for accuracy?” She asked, pointing to the top of the weapon.
“Yes we also have holographic and acog optics which will help line up targets from farther away.” I look on as Farva picks up the weapon and inspects it, testing the weight as I note that it will weigh a fair bit more once loaded. But she doesn't seem to be struggling with the weight. I can't help but notice good firearm safety as well, she keeps her finger well off the trigger and takes care to keep her weapon pointed aways from anyone else.
“This seems like a solid design but I'm not sure how useful those weapon optics would be, as they are not designed for my side facing eyes”
“I'm sure our master at arms can figure something out, why don't we give it a test fire first tho, before we send it off to make adjustments.” I instruct her on how to load the weapon and turn the safety off. I warn her of the sound it makes. And while definitely taken aback by the recoil and sound at first, she quickly gets the hang of it, she has some respectable shot groupings in both single fire and in short bursts. And keeps the rounds reasonably centered while firing in full auto.
She did a whole lot better than I would have initially suspected given her performance in the hanger bay a day before.
“The rate of fire seems useful” Farva spoke “This would be useful for our soldiers, our accuracy falters when we are panicked, and the increased shot count should guarantee some hits based on volume of fire alone” she finished with a dejected expression.
She quickly places the weapon back in its case, as if it burned to touch.” I don't know if I should be armed for this mission, at least not with that weapon, I don't want to miss and hit one of you in the back!”
“What? Nonsense, you are a great shot, and this is just a precaution in case we get separated or flanked and need some covering fire. If our guys are doing their job right you shouldn't need to fire a single round anyways.”
Captain Farva’s breathing started to hasten, earlier I might have thought it was fear, but I was starting to get an idea of what the captain's issues were. I’ve seen this before.
“I.. I can’t be trusted with this responsibility, every time I am left in charge of something, every time people put their lives in my paws I ....”
“Farva, don’t you start with me now you hear.” I said sternly, swiftly capping off her inevitable spiral of self doubt.
“But.. no.. you don’t understand”
Stopping her again I spoke. “But nothing, what happened before on that ship, and back at that colony is in the past. I don’t know your whole situation, but from what I have gathered from the crew It was nothing good. You feel responsible and it's eating away at you, and frankly it doesn’t matter if that's true or not. Accidents happen, people make mistakes, and when that happens we need to learn, take those lessons to heart, and don't let it stop us from helping people in the present. If you let guilt, or fear of mistakes stop you, then bad guys have already won, all without having to have fired a shot”
Farva is quiet for a short time, I was hoping I got through to her, I'm not the best and pep talks and this certainly wasn’t your typical weapons demo, if only everyones could go as smoothly as Ronan’s.
Farva spoke quietly, arms pressed up against her chest, she looked so sad, defeated, and small. Well more than usual anyways. “We can't be strong like you humans, we are too emotional and when we are scared we run away or we lock up and...”
“And that is clearly not the case with you captain Farva” Teal’c finally reentered the conversation having heard enough. “You have shown courage with every action you have taken so far, your actions have saved the lives of many of your crew, every time you have been threatened you acted not just to protect yourself but others as well. You attempted to contend with beings many times your size without even thinking about it, all in the effort to protect others, and this is only in the time we have known you, this speaks nothing of your actions over the colony. You are a warrior of admirable courage Captain Farva, your self doubt is unearned.”
A single tear rolled down Farva’s eyes which she quickly wiped away. “That was very nice of you to say, but I'm not brave like you say, I was terrified out of my mind the whole time.”
Teal’c looked puzzled. “I did not call you brave, I said you were courageous.”
Farva shot back with the little venlil one up one down ear flick I had very quickly learned was confusion.” I'm confused you just said brave twice”
“Hmm it appears your language does not contain the word I am using, I apologize I am not used to speaking through a translator” Teal’c relented “ There are two words I am using admittedly in slightly different forms, bravery and courage. Bravery or to be brave is to lack fear, to not be afraid to begin with. Courage tho, Is a trait far more admirable. Courage is to be afraid, to have fear, to worry about one's own mortality and personal safety. It is to acknowledge risk, danger, to feel fear, but to act in spite of it.”
“Had I not met your kind before I would have thought predators don't feel fear.”
“Everyone fears feel Farva, It is how we overcome it that determines our worth as warriors”
Teal’c picks up the p90 and returns it to Farvas hands.
“Your people need a warrior Farva, a warrior who protects the innocent and guides the lost to safety. You have shown how collected you can be in the heat of battle, You have already proven your worth in our eyes Farva, now you must do the same in your own. The greatest enemy lies not without” Teal’c places his hand firmly on the venlil’s chest “But within”.
After Action Report - Venlil Colonial Defense Force
Subject : Chief Engineer Donu
I fiddled with my holopad, Its small surface area proving to be a consistent source of annoyance in my current endeavor. Gone was the large workspace afforded to me by my holotable back in my office. Instead I had to work with the scaled down portable holotablet I was just fortunate enough to have strapped to my person when I was beamed away from our last ship. I was stuck with its smaller keyboard and slower rendering speeds.
An annoyed smooth skin alien looked over my shoulder at my device, attached to it was a jury rigged fiber optic cable, slotted into a terran silicon to crystal patch cable, which would convert the electrical signals broadcasted by my tablet into a bandwidth that the terrans crystalline based computers; which they used for highly complex tasks like hyperdrive and transporter systems; could use, and then It was patched again in a even stranger connector to patch into the odd asgard computer stones.
All in all it looked like someone tried to plug a regular computer into some crystal construct like you would find in a fantasy holonovel, and again plugged that into a harchen heat rock sauna lounge. Finally branching out from this conglomeration was a simple copper based wire that connects to a computer terminal at which currently sat the late Doctor Rodney Mckay. A title upon initially hearing led me to believe he was a medical doctor, which led to a flurry of medical questions that he had absolutely no means of answering.
While this odd alien nomenclature was interesting, what intrigued me more was his actual area of expertise, theoretical astrophysics, as well as a number of other diverse specialties and fields. Not to mention not only was he a great scientist who had he been raised in the more civilized portion of this galaxy, would have knowledge and aptitude that would put him alongside some of Aafas greatest minds, but he was also an engineer without peer, at least in this galaxy. His interactions with general Samantha Carter hinted at her possibly being his match if not more. For a species that was supposed to glorify violence the decision to have a scientist be arguably the most senior member of what was by their admission a military vessel spoke to their commitment to knowledge and understanding, a very noble prey-like goal.
I looked warily at the lines of code at my screen, the asguard translation program had earlier scanned our ship and was able to parse written languages, but complex files, like images and 3d design schematics were harder to encode and decode from our perspective systems. As is stands we have 3 completely separate computer architectures, the asguard can talk to human computers and the venlil computers can talk to the asguard computers, It sounds like we would have everything we need to get a human C.A.D schematic into a venlil holotablet right? Wrong! And you're stupid for entertaining such a idiotic notion! Parsing text from raw binary is relatively straight forward, you're just looking for patterns, repeating bit combinations that might infer letters and then iterating them over millions of times looking for patterns, letters, words, and then with a bit of help from some undecoded analog audio transmission, spoken language. This is a far cry from actual procedural communication protocols,the ones that allow for file transfers, exactly what we needed if we were to get Rodney's redesigned part schematics into a format and medium that can be plugged into a suitable fabricator. Assuming one still exists, which I can reasonably assume it does.
Speaking of which, I have just made something of a breakthrough. For upon my screen appears a simple geometric hydrogen cube, we’re talking vertices, planes, material data, everything we need for a usable design file.
I let out an excited pent up yip, the culmination of hours of frustrating software integration work. Unfortunately I startled Rodney, who lets out a panicked gasp and clutches his chest pelts with one of his paws.
“Oh god…..” He gasps, pointing at me “Please.. don’t do that”
“Sorry!” I say a bit meekly. I slowly approach him so as to not make him unnecessarily uncomfortable and show him my work.
“I got the file exchange set up, all we need from you is to finish any modifications to your part, upload them to my holopad, and then we can print away at any class 3 or above fabricator we can scrounge up on Brayga colony.”
“Ok.. um.. got it, I'm almost done i’m just you know” He points a lone grasping appendage at his screen,”Running some simulations, making sure everything is up to spec.” keeping his response kurt. “Sorry for freaking out there.”
I nod my head in the human display of affirmation and return to my workstation to further bug check my work, to test potentially problematic edge cases for when he finishes. Tho Rodney's continued odd behavior intruded on my thoughts.
I should have felt empowered, being able to intimidate this ‘massive beast’, but I didn't. I didn't like being feared, his people have been nice to me, Rodney himself courteous to a fault and desperate for positive attention.
I thought I could expect predators to be fearless but that clearly wasn't the case, rodney was fearful, nervous, had I not known better I would say defective, and while it annoyed his crew, they didn't berate him for it, or attempt to assert dominance, they encouraged it even with placating words and tried to help him through it, they encouraged and supported him like a proper herd, even if sometimes it took the form of what the human would call a playful ribbing. I supposed I could help him as well.
I approached him again, careful to make my approach known to him, making sure to approach from within his limited field of vision. He looks up at me with a wide eyed glare, had I not known him I might have assumed it was hunger, but I did and knew it to be concern.
“Uh high Donu.. um whats up?”
“Why are you afraid of us rodney?”
“Wa-What, me afraid?” he gives out a panicked laugh ”uh no no, I'm not afraid, you know just a bit weirded out I'm just getting used to you all, it's not a fear thing it's a a…. Just getting used to new aliens thing, ask Hermirod we went through this whole song and dance right buddy”
Hermirod furrowed his brow and gave an irritated sigh from across the room.
I reached out to take Rodney by the paw.
His whole body flinched at my mere touch, I quickly withdrew my paw.
“Oh.. um.. I didn't…”
“Rodney! It's okay, your crew doesn’t seem to care when you show fear, and neither do I. Why are you afraid of us? You are almost twice our size and surely double our strength, most venlil would scream and run in terror at the mere sight of you. What's wrong?”
Rodney let out a sigh. “Oh its, we don't have to talk about this, I can deal with this, I deal with scary situations all the time, it's fine, I'll be fine.”
“Rodney, my people are a very emotional, empathic people, we are open with our feelings and with our fear, and the fear of the one can affect the herd, please let me help you. I don’t know what to expect from your society but I promise I wont judge you for your fear or emotions, I mean look at many of my crew mates, we are no one to judge”
Rodney shot back “You didn't seem to be so bothered”
“I’m too old to care, I was about to retire, hell I was about to die as far as I knew, Brayga colony was supposed to be a quiet place to lay back, work on some hobbies, plant a garden and pester the young men of my colony until I either dropped dead of boredom or got lucky” I joked.
That seemed to raise Rodney's mood somewhat. He sighed and seemingly relented.
“It’s… a dumb story, I don't even know why it affected me so much, I come from a place on earth called Canada, people don't usually believe me when I say I am from there, us Canadians are notoriously friendly and I guess I haven’t exactly filled that mold for a lot of my life, but hey I'm working on it, people like me, I have lots of friends back at Atlantis” He says the last sentence in a way as if it isn't me he's trying to convince.
“I'm sure you do, Rodney, You seem like quite the charming individual when you're not cowering!”
“Ha ha thanks, maybe you could come and visit sometime. Tell that to doctor Becket, really nice guy, smart man, he would love to meet you, he loves investigating new species. But back on topic, oh boy, so me and my sister Jeannie were on a family trip to rural Vancouver to visit my grandpa's farm, he kept a lot of goats, not for eating or anything, they were essentially pets that he would use for milk”
“Wait hold on? You drink milk from other animals! Do your females not produce enough milk for their young?”
“Oh um no, we just sort of drink it or ferment it into cheese!”
“Ferment? You mean spoil?
“Yeh”
I reeled from this plasma blast of a statement, I like any right minded venlil had a number of nightmares about being an arxur’s cattle before, especially when I first learned about those things in primary school, but never once had it crossed my mind that we could be used for something so weird. What the speh was I supposed to do with that information?
“Maybe you should get back on topic”
“Yeh sorry about that uh.. Anyways the momma goat had just had a litter of babies, and their real cute when their little, so late in the day when my grandpa was asleep we snuck out to the pens so we can play with the little baby goats, our grandpa told us not to but you now how kids are.”
At this I think back to a young Nyan, as I teach him the inner working of the hyperdrive, I tell him he’s not cleared yet to operate in this engine compartment alone, but I could tell from the occasional caught black hairs and dropped writing implements, there had been a number of curious unauthorized expeditions into its inner workings, he didn't really listen either.
“My sister as always was trying to be the voice of reason, wanting to take it slow. If I was paying attention I might have noticed the angry moma goat who didn’t appreciate the strange human messing with her children.”
The color seemed to drain from his face.
“I uh…” He began to stutter again ”I screamed, a lot, it was rather undignified, she ran right at me, thank god it wasn't a male goat, one with horns, I tired to run but I was hit in the back and knocked over and kicked real good in the head, like wake up in the vet clinic a quarter mile down the road kind of bad”
“This goat was a prey animal?”
“That would be what your kind focuses on”
“Oh sorry”
“Anyways It seems dumb but I have just never been good with animals since then, especially ones that look like you; no offense; I'm getting better but when I first saw you guys in the hangar bay, I was just that dumb kid again, getting in way over my head, scared for my life. I guess there is something to be said about childhood trauma. I really should be over this, I'm getting better with it I swear it’s just”
I take his paw again, he doesn't flinch this time.
“I'm a venlil, a prey animal, I know fear, I know what it is to live in fear, It rattles your brain, it turns your paws to wet grains. It takes great strength to overcome it, to push it aside just long enough to protect the herd. Your herd relies on you Rodney and you are doing a great job in spite of your fear, in spite of having to work with those you fear. You have achieved intellectual feats that rival the greatest minds of the federation and all that while struggling with a traumatic experience. Fear isn’t dumb and there is nothing wrong with you for feeling it.”
“Thank you” Rodney says “That means a lot, I won't be like forever I promise, I just need some time.”
“We will laugh about this someday,” I assured. “Nothing as big and intelligent as you should be afraid of anything”
“Are you calling me fat?” Rodney exclaimed with fake offense.
We both chuckled.
My kind words had resulted in a more upright posture, and a more cheerful demeanor from the human, almost like when I congratulated Nyan on his work, and it got me a look at that happy snarl of his, that I was starting to grow quite fond of.
After Action Report - Venlil Colonial Defense Force
Subject : Apprentice Engineer Nyan
Oh wow! I get to write a report for this mission! I never get to write reports, Donu says they're too boring, but there’s so many interesting things going on all the time. Sometimes I sneakily write my own! Just for fun of course, nobody sees them, which is probably for the best as I sometimes get excited and embellish them slightly. One of the reports I wrote was about the time Donu used nothing but a wad of electrical tape, a bottle of high grain venlil alcohol and a pocket knife to repair a venlil medical ship just in time to get out of the way of a big scary space predator, with glowing red eyes and a million tentacles!
Anyways Im not sure If im suppose to write these In present tense first person or past tense. I asked the captain and she said it's whatever so long as I make sure any pertinent dialogues are properly quoted(“”).
“Nobody usually reads these things anyways.” She said, but this one is surely going to be so exciting, who could look away!
I mean who's gonna scoff at a chance to read about friendly predators from another dimension! A dimension of friendly predators who give warm head scratches and hand out yummy strayu not strayu treats called donuts, that are somehow fluffier than strayu, and have a nice moisture to them. I asked for the recipe but Samantha said we wouldn't have the ingredients back on Venili prime to make them, and Teal'c said the recipe is an old family secret. Its weird predators would be so protective of their plant snacks.
There are so many weird things about these predators, they have nurturing instincts that make them find us cute. They stay perfectly balanced even if they don’t have tails, swinging their arms and body all over the place to keep upright like a lopsided gyroscope, it's pretty funny looking!
They also wear artificial pelts all the time, which I thought was weird, I thought maybe the ships temperature was set by the angry gray alien since he’s the only crew member beside the venlil who walks around naked all the time, maybe he had a fit when it was to warm, and the humans obliged him cause they were worried they would make him even angrier, and wore clothes to make up for the cold. I thought this made sense, a lot of their technology does seem to come from the Asguard, maybe he has more say in the goings on of the ship because of that. But apparently humans just like wearing pelts all the time. They feel uncomfortable without them and don’t like it if you try to remove them or look up their upper artificial pelts they call shirts.
The humans are so weird, I don’t even have to embellish my reports to make it more interesting. Like that time with the big tentacled space predator. That may sound real compared to this stuff but it Isn't, Ha! I bet you fell for it at first, hook line and sinker! Like the humans would say. I think I used that saying right, I'm not sure what it means, but Shepard brought it up when he was telling a story about the wraith.
The humans are so nice, instead of exterminating their predators they try to cure them! Their doctors are working to modify the wraith so they don't have to eat humans anymore, so they can be friendly predators too.
Anyways I should probably get to the actual report part of this report. Farva says I should start after I went off with Samantha to work on some special astrophysics equations she said I would be good at. I kind of wanted to go with Donu to help Rodney get the new parts they needed, or Farva to help rescue our people, but the humans and even the angry gray alien got really weird when Farva mentioned taking me on the mission. Samantha seemed to want me to help her really badly so I didn’t mind. Samantha says I have the most important part to our mission. She's teaching me about how humans communicate through subspace, and about stellar drift equations. We are working on what she calls the exit strategy.
submitted by Bbobsillypants to NatureofPredators [link] [comments]
Atlantis Commission
Officer Report - Lieutenant Colonel John Shepard
CLEARANCE LEVEL 5
Well this had definitely been a very interesting couple of hours. This dimension and its people had very odd opinions and ideas. Apparently the prey species of this dimension were all obligate cowards, whose instincts compelled them to be non-violent and run from threats. At least according to themselves. There were apparently some of them who were “predator diseased” as they called it, a disease which often resulted in increased violence, aggression, lack of empathy, and unheard like behavior. It sounded to me like some form of infectious psychopathy, but the venlil assured us it shouldn't affect us since we were predators, which didn’t really ease my fears, but hopefully it was something we could figure out when we got home if it ever became a problem.
Gotta love mandatory quarantine periods woo hoo!
As scary as this odd disease sounded, my main concern at the moment was to try and turn a professed coward into someone who could at the very least defend themselves.
I looked down to the table of gear ahead of me and then over to the mostly naked Venlil to my side, and then even farther to Tiel’c who thought It would be a good idea to help oversee Farva’s rapid fire training course. I fiddled with the bluetooth earpiece which was rigged up to one of our handhelds to run a translation program to speak directly with the captain. A big step up from our unknowingly one sided communications earlier.
I stepped on the other side of the plastic table and placed my hands down upon it and looked on at my new student..
“Welcome Captain Farva to our very impromptu accelerated course on Human arms armor and basic infantry tactics.” I said gesturing to the hodge podge gear we had managed to assemble for the good captain. “Are we ready to begin?”.
She flicked her ears, somewhat nervously by the looks.
“I’d take it that's a yes then?”
“Oh yes sorry”
“Alright then, well given that most of our crew is human and the only other alien struts around naked all the time, the only gear we have on hand is for humans, So you're going to be running size smalls and it's all going to fit all a bit big” I say as I toss her the tactical vest. ”Here try this on, we can try to tighten it up if it's a bit loose anywhere”. The captain wrestles with the buckles a bit, and Teal'c helps her tighten up some of the top straps, as the Venil’s shoulders weren't as broad as humans. Farva gave Teal’c an odd look, but seemed appreciative none the less.Once finished, she grasped the vest in her paws with interest. “This armor seems quite lightweight, which is nice, weight is often an issue that causes us to forgo armor, since heavy armor would hurt our running ability.” Farva remarks. “Also the sheer amount of pockets seems quite excessive, what do you need all these for?”
“Well for starters it's currently missing these '' I hand Farva one of the armor plates which she looks over. “That is a depleted Naquadria ceramic composite plate. It’s designed to stop bullet impacts and dissipate energy weapon blasts. It slots into that chest compartment in the front and back of your armor.”
“This isn't quite what Id imagine for the armor of your kind”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well judging by your ships I would have imagined you would put more emphasis on defense Your predatory nature would make you less likely to run away from conflict allowing for more encompassing armor to cover more than just your chest, since you have less need to run.”
She would put it like that.
“Well there are a number of reasons for that, a lot to do with those excess pockets you mentioned. For starters you will not be carrying the same amount of gear that the standard infantry unit would normally be carrying, we are preparing you for a quick in and out op. Normally us expedition teams need to be deployed into unknown territory for extended periods of time, we need to carry everything we might need with us from food, bullets, weapons, to comms gear, sensors, repelling equipment etc. The weight from all that gear adds up fast; In order to stay sufficiently mobile and combat effective; we only carry enough armor to protect our vitals, head and torso, anything else can hopefully be patched up by a field medic.”
Tielc gave his piece as well. “It is important to know when to run both towards and aways from one's foes, not every battle can be won through strength alone, but by strategy and cunning. Being able to reposition oneself quickly is therefore highly advantageous”
Farva seemed to freeze at Teal'c's statement, not out of fear I think, she instead had a distant look in her eye. To snap her out of her slump I handed her a standard ballistic helmet.
Seeming to get the idea she looked at it oddly and tried it on. It confirmed to her head shape decently well but depressed her ears to either side of her head, kind of resembling what one might imagine a sad bunny rabbit to look like “I don't think this will be something I can bring with me” she said ” I can't use ear signals and this will muffle my hearing.”
“Why don’t you keep it on for the time being, I think any extra hearing protection might be useful considering what we are about to try next.” I hand Farva some ballistic ear protectors, slightly modified and somewhat ramshackle. “One of the corporals worked closely with Nurse Fila to get an idea for safe decibels levels for your kind, we were also able to get these earbuds molded to fit into your ear canal better”
Farva took them and slipped them in. “These are a bit uncomfortable, what do I need these for?”
“You'll need them for this” I say as I unsnap the clasps on the weapons case revealing its contents.
The content seems to capture Farva’s interest, getting a slight tail wave.
“Okay So this here is a p90, It carries a 50 round top loading magazine of teflon coated armor piercing ordnance. With a cyclical rate of fire of 900 rounds per minute.”
Farvas ears perk up at this. “This seems like an efficient design, I take it these are a flashlight and laser sight for accuracy?” She asked, pointing to the top of the weapon.
“Yes we also have holographic and acog optics which will help line up targets from farther away.” I look on as Farva picks up the weapon and inspects it, testing the weight as I note that it will weigh a fair bit more once loaded. But she doesn't seem to be struggling with the weight. I can't help but notice good firearm safety as well, she keeps her finger well off the trigger and takes care to keep her weapon pointed aways from anyone else.
“This seems like a solid design but I'm not sure how useful those weapon optics would be, as they are not designed for my side facing eyes”
“I'm sure our master at arms can figure something out, why don't we give it a test fire first tho, before we send it off to make adjustments.” I instruct her on how to load the weapon and turn the safety off. I warn her of the sound it makes. And while definitely taken aback by the recoil and sound at first, she quickly gets the hang of it, she has some respectable shot groupings in both single fire and in short bursts. And keeps the rounds reasonably centered while firing in full auto.
She did a whole lot better than I would have initially suspected given her performance in the hanger bay a day before.
“The rate of fire seems useful” Farva spoke “This would be useful for our soldiers, our accuracy falters when we are panicked, and the increased shot count should guarantee some hits based on volume of fire alone” she finished with a dejected expression.
She quickly places the weapon back in its case, as if it burned to touch.” I don't know if I should be armed for this mission, at least not with that weapon, I don't want to miss and hit one of you in the back!”
“What? Nonsense, you are a great shot, and this is just a precaution in case we get separated or flanked and need some covering fire. If our guys are doing their job right you shouldn't need to fire a single round anyways.”
Captain Farva’s breathing started to hasten, earlier I might have thought it was fear, but I was starting to get an idea of what the captain's issues were. I’ve seen this before.
“I.. I can’t be trusted with this responsibility, every time I am left in charge of something, every time people put their lives in my paws I ....”
“Farva, don’t you start with me now you hear.” I said sternly, swiftly capping off her inevitable spiral of self doubt.
“But.. no.. you don’t understand”
Stopping her again I spoke. “But nothing, what happened before on that ship, and back at that colony is in the past. I don’t know your whole situation, but from what I have gathered from the crew It was nothing good. You feel responsible and it's eating away at you, and frankly it doesn’t matter if that's true or not. Accidents happen, people make mistakes, and when that happens we need to learn, take those lessons to heart, and don't let it stop us from helping people in the present. If you let guilt, or fear of mistakes stop you, then bad guys have already won, all without having to have fired a shot”
Farva is quiet for a short time, I was hoping I got through to her, I'm not the best and pep talks and this certainly wasn’t your typical weapons demo, if only everyones could go as smoothly as Ronan’s.
Farva spoke quietly, arms pressed up against her chest, she looked so sad, defeated, and small. Well more than usual anyways. “We can't be strong like you humans, we are too emotional and when we are scared we run away or we lock up and...”
“And that is clearly not the case with you captain Farva” Teal’c finally reentered the conversation having heard enough. “You have shown courage with every action you have taken so far, your actions have saved the lives of many of your crew, every time you have been threatened you acted not just to protect yourself but others as well. You attempted to contend with beings many times your size without even thinking about it, all in the effort to protect others, and this is only in the time we have known you, this speaks nothing of your actions over the colony. You are a warrior of admirable courage Captain Farva, your self doubt is unearned.”
A single tear rolled down Farva’s eyes which she quickly wiped away. “That was very nice of you to say, but I'm not brave like you say, I was terrified out of my mind the whole time.”
Teal’c looked puzzled. “I did not call you brave, I said you were courageous.”
Farva shot back with the little venlil one up one down ear flick I had very quickly learned was confusion.” I'm confused you just said brave twice”
“Hmm it appears your language does not contain the word I am using, I apologize I am not used to speaking through a translator” Teal’c relented “ There are two words I am using admittedly in slightly different forms, bravery and courage. Bravery or to be brave is to lack fear, to not be afraid to begin with. Courage tho, Is a trait far more admirable. Courage is to be afraid, to have fear, to worry about one's own mortality and personal safety. It is to acknowledge risk, danger, to feel fear, but to act in spite of it.”
“Had I not met your kind before I would have thought predators don't feel fear.”
“Everyone fears feel Farva, It is how we overcome it that determines our worth as warriors”
Teal’c picks up the p90 and returns it to Farvas hands.
“Your people need a warrior Farva, a warrior who protects the innocent and guides the lost to safety. You have shown how collected you can be in the heat of battle, You have already proven your worth in our eyes Farva, now you must do the same in your own. The greatest enemy lies not without” Teal’c places his hand firmly on the venlil’s chest “But within”.
After Action Report - Venlil Colonial Defense Force
Subject : Chief Engineer Donu
I fiddled with my holopad, Its small surface area proving to be a consistent source of annoyance in my current endeavor. Gone was the large workspace afforded to me by my holotable back in my office. Instead I had to work with the scaled down portable holotablet I was just fortunate enough to have strapped to my person when I was beamed away from our last ship. I was stuck with its smaller keyboard and slower rendering speeds.
An annoyed smooth skin alien looked over my shoulder at my device, attached to it was a jury rigged fiber optic cable, slotted into a terran silicon to crystal patch cable, which would convert the electrical signals broadcasted by my tablet into a bandwidth that the terrans crystalline based computers; which they used for highly complex tasks like hyperdrive and transporter systems; could use, and then It was patched again in a even stranger connector to patch into the odd asgard computer stones.
All in all it looked like someone tried to plug a regular computer into some crystal construct like you would find in a fantasy holonovel, and again plugged that into a harchen heat rock sauna lounge. Finally branching out from this conglomeration was a simple copper based wire that connects to a computer terminal at which currently sat the late Doctor Rodney Mckay. A title upon initially hearing led me to believe he was a medical doctor, which led to a flurry of medical questions that he had absolutely no means of answering.
While this odd alien nomenclature was interesting, what intrigued me more was his actual area of expertise, theoretical astrophysics, as well as a number of other diverse specialties and fields. Not to mention not only was he a great scientist who had he been raised in the more civilized portion of this galaxy, would have knowledge and aptitude that would put him alongside some of Aafas greatest minds, but he was also an engineer without peer, at least in this galaxy. His interactions with general Samantha Carter hinted at her possibly being his match if not more. For a species that was supposed to glorify violence the decision to have a scientist be arguably the most senior member of what was by their admission a military vessel spoke to their commitment to knowledge and understanding, a very noble prey-like goal.
I looked warily at the lines of code at my screen, the asguard translation program had earlier scanned our ship and was able to parse written languages, but complex files, like images and 3d design schematics were harder to encode and decode from our perspective systems. As is stands we have 3 completely separate computer architectures, the asguard can talk to human computers and the venlil computers can talk to the asguard computers, It sounds like we would have everything we need to get a human C.A.D schematic into a venlil holotablet right? Wrong! And you're stupid for entertaining such a idiotic notion! Parsing text from raw binary is relatively straight forward, you're just looking for patterns, repeating bit combinations that might infer letters and then iterating them over millions of times looking for patterns, letters, words, and then with a bit of help from some undecoded analog audio transmission, spoken language. This is a far cry from actual procedural communication protocols,the ones that allow for file transfers, exactly what we needed if we were to get Rodney's redesigned part schematics into a format and medium that can be plugged into a suitable fabricator. Assuming one still exists, which I can reasonably assume it does.
Speaking of which, I have just made something of a breakthrough. For upon my screen appears a simple geometric hydrogen cube, we’re talking vertices, planes, material data, everything we need for a usable design file.
I let out an excited pent up yip, the culmination of hours of frustrating software integration work. Unfortunately I startled Rodney, who lets out a panicked gasp and clutches his chest pelts with one of his paws.
“Oh god…..” He gasps, pointing at me “Please.. don’t do that”
“Sorry!” I say a bit meekly. I slowly approach him so as to not make him unnecessarily uncomfortable and show him my work.
“I got the file exchange set up, all we need from you is to finish any modifications to your part, upload them to my holopad, and then we can print away at any class 3 or above fabricator we can scrounge up on Brayga colony.”
“Ok.. um.. got it, I'm almost done i’m just you know” He points a lone grasping appendage at his screen,”Running some simulations, making sure everything is up to spec.” keeping his response kurt. “Sorry for freaking out there.”
I nod my head in the human display of affirmation and return to my workstation to further bug check my work, to test potentially problematic edge cases for when he finishes. Tho Rodney's continued odd behavior intruded on my thoughts.
I should have felt empowered, being able to intimidate this ‘massive beast’, but I didn't. I didn't like being feared, his people have been nice to me, Rodney himself courteous to a fault and desperate for positive attention.
I thought I could expect predators to be fearless but that clearly wasn't the case, rodney was fearful, nervous, had I not known better I would say defective, and while it annoyed his crew, they didn't berate him for it, or attempt to assert dominance, they encouraged it even with placating words and tried to help him through it, they encouraged and supported him like a proper herd, even if sometimes it took the form of what the human would call a playful ribbing. I supposed I could help him as well.
I approached him again, careful to make my approach known to him, making sure to approach from within his limited field of vision. He looks up at me with a wide eyed glare, had I not known him I might have assumed it was hunger, but I did and knew it to be concern.
“Uh high Donu.. um whats up?”
“Why are you afraid of us rodney?”
“Wa-What, me afraid?” he gives out a panicked laugh ”uh no no, I'm not afraid, you know just a bit weirded out I'm just getting used to you all, it's not a fear thing it's a a…. Just getting used to new aliens thing, ask Hermirod we went through this whole song and dance right buddy”
Hermirod furrowed his brow and gave an irritated sigh from across the room.
I reached out to take Rodney by the paw.
His whole body flinched at my mere touch, I quickly withdrew my paw.
“Oh.. um.. I didn't…”
“Rodney! It's okay, your crew doesn’t seem to care when you show fear, and neither do I. Why are you afraid of us? You are almost twice our size and surely double our strength, most venlil would scream and run in terror at the mere sight of you. What's wrong?”
Rodney let out a sigh. “Oh its, we don't have to talk about this, I can deal with this, I deal with scary situations all the time, it's fine, I'll be fine.”
“Rodney, my people are a very emotional, empathic people, we are open with our feelings and with our fear, and the fear of the one can affect the herd, please let me help you. I don’t know what to expect from your society but I promise I wont judge you for your fear or emotions, I mean look at many of my crew mates, we are no one to judge”
Rodney shot back “You didn't seem to be so bothered”
“I’m too old to care, I was about to retire, hell I was about to die as far as I knew, Brayga colony was supposed to be a quiet place to lay back, work on some hobbies, plant a garden and pester the young men of my colony until I either dropped dead of boredom or got lucky” I joked.
That seemed to raise Rodney's mood somewhat. He sighed and seemingly relented.
“It’s… a dumb story, I don't even know why it affected me so much, I come from a place on earth called Canada, people don't usually believe me when I say I am from there, us Canadians are notoriously friendly and I guess I haven’t exactly filled that mold for a lot of my life, but hey I'm working on it, people like me, I have lots of friends back at Atlantis” He says the last sentence in a way as if it isn't me he's trying to convince.
“I'm sure you do, Rodney, You seem like quite the charming individual when you're not cowering!”
“Ha ha thanks, maybe you could come and visit sometime. Tell that to doctor Becket, really nice guy, smart man, he would love to meet you, he loves investigating new species. But back on topic, oh boy, so me and my sister Jeannie were on a family trip to rural Vancouver to visit my grandpa's farm, he kept a lot of goats, not for eating or anything, they were essentially pets that he would use for milk”
“Wait hold on? You drink milk from other animals! Do your females not produce enough milk for their young?”
“Oh um no, we just sort of drink it or ferment it into cheese!”
“Ferment? You mean spoil?
“Yeh”
I reeled from this plasma blast of a statement, I like any right minded venlil had a number of nightmares about being an arxur’s cattle before, especially when I first learned about those things in primary school, but never once had it crossed my mind that we could be used for something so weird. What the speh was I supposed to do with that information?
“Maybe you should get back on topic”
“Yeh sorry about that uh.. Anyways the momma goat had just had a litter of babies, and their real cute when their little, so late in the day when my grandpa was asleep we snuck out to the pens so we can play with the little baby goats, our grandpa told us not to but you now how kids are.”
At this I think back to a young Nyan, as I teach him the inner working of the hyperdrive, I tell him he’s not cleared yet to operate in this engine compartment alone, but I could tell from the occasional caught black hairs and dropped writing implements, there had been a number of curious unauthorized expeditions into its inner workings, he didn't really listen either.
“My sister as always was trying to be the voice of reason, wanting to take it slow. If I was paying attention I might have noticed the angry moma goat who didn’t appreciate the strange human messing with her children.”
The color seemed to drain from his face.
“I uh…” He began to stutter again ”I screamed, a lot, it was rather undignified, she ran right at me, thank god it wasn't a male goat, one with horns, I tired to run but I was hit in the back and knocked over and kicked real good in the head, like wake up in the vet clinic a quarter mile down the road kind of bad”
“This goat was a prey animal?”
“That would be what your kind focuses on”
“Oh sorry”
“Anyways It seems dumb but I have just never been good with animals since then, especially ones that look like you; no offense; I'm getting better but when I first saw you guys in the hangar bay, I was just that dumb kid again, getting in way over my head, scared for my life. I guess there is something to be said about childhood trauma. I really should be over this, I'm getting better with it I swear it’s just”
I take his paw again, he doesn't flinch this time.
“I'm a venlil, a prey animal, I know fear, I know what it is to live in fear, It rattles your brain, it turns your paws to wet grains. It takes great strength to overcome it, to push it aside just long enough to protect the herd. Your herd relies on you Rodney and you are doing a great job in spite of your fear, in spite of having to work with those you fear. You have achieved intellectual feats that rival the greatest minds of the federation and all that while struggling with a traumatic experience. Fear isn’t dumb and there is nothing wrong with you for feeling it.”
“Thank you” Rodney says “That means a lot, I won't be like forever I promise, I just need some time.”
“We will laugh about this someday,” I assured. “Nothing as big and intelligent as you should be afraid of anything”
“Are you calling me fat?” Rodney exclaimed with fake offense.
We both chuckled.
My kind words had resulted in a more upright posture, and a more cheerful demeanor from the human, almost like when I congratulated Nyan on his work, and it got me a look at that happy snarl of his, that I was starting to grow quite fond of.
After Action Report - Venlil Colonial Defense Force
Subject : Apprentice Engineer Nyan
Oh wow! I get to write a report for this mission! I never get to write reports, Donu says they're too boring, but there’s so many interesting things going on all the time. Sometimes I sneakily write my own! Just for fun of course, nobody sees them, which is probably for the best as I sometimes get excited and embellish them slightly. One of the reports I wrote was about the time Donu used nothing but a wad of electrical tape, a bottle of high grain venlil alcohol and a pocket knife to repair a venlil medical ship just in time to get out of the way of a big scary space predator, with glowing red eyes and a million tentacles!
Anyways Im not sure If im suppose to write these In present tense first person or past tense. I asked the captain and she said it's whatever so long as I make sure any pertinent dialogues are properly quoted(“”).
“Nobody usually reads these things anyways.” She said, but this one is surely going to be so exciting, who could look away!
I mean who's gonna scoff at a chance to read about friendly predators from another dimension! A dimension of friendly predators who give warm head scratches and hand out yummy strayu not strayu treats called donuts, that are somehow fluffier than strayu, and have a nice moisture to them. I asked for the recipe but Samantha said we wouldn't have the ingredients back on Venili prime to make them, and Teal'c said the recipe is an old family secret. Its weird predators would be so protective of their plant snacks.
There are so many weird things about these predators, they have nurturing instincts that make them find us cute. They stay perfectly balanced even if they don’t have tails, swinging their arms and body all over the place to keep upright like a lopsided gyroscope, it's pretty funny looking!
They also wear artificial pelts all the time, which I thought was weird, I thought maybe the ships temperature was set by the angry gray alien since he’s the only crew member beside the venlil who walks around naked all the time, maybe he had a fit when it was to warm, and the humans obliged him cause they were worried they would make him even angrier, and wore clothes to make up for the cold. I thought this made sense, a lot of their technology does seem to come from the Asguard, maybe he has more say in the goings on of the ship because of that. But apparently humans just like wearing pelts all the time. They feel uncomfortable without them and don’t like it if you try to remove them or look up their upper artificial pelts they call shirts.
The humans are so weird, I don’t even have to embellish my reports to make it more interesting. Like that time with the big tentacled space predator. That may sound real compared to this stuff but it Isn't, Ha! I bet you fell for it at first, hook line and sinker! Like the humans would say. I think I used that saying right, I'm not sure what it means, but Shepard brought it up when he was telling a story about the wraith.
The humans are so nice, instead of exterminating their predators they try to cure them! Their doctors are working to modify the wraith so they don't have to eat humans anymore, so they can be friendly predators too.
Anyways I should probably get to the actual report part of this report. Farva says I should start after I went off with Samantha to work on some special astrophysics equations she said I would be good at. I kind of wanted to go with Donu to help Rodney get the new parts they needed, or Farva to help rescue our people, but the humans and even the angry gray alien got really weird when Farva mentioned taking me on the mission. Samantha seemed to want me to help her really badly so I didn’t mind. Samantha says I have the most important part to our mission. She's teaching me about how humans communicate through subspace, and about stellar drift equations. We are working on what she calls the exit strategy.
2024.05.18 21:18 ApprehensiveCap6525 Earth is a Lost Colony (28)
A/N: yeah I changed up the Alliance admiral's name from Shepard Adama to Sheparda Dama (so creative i know) because the old one was going to fuck me over badly at some point. It would be like trying to make a legitimate, serious fantasy novel with a wizard named Albus Gandalf. I was NOT cooking when I came up with that shit.
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It was said that no plan ever survived contact with the enemy. That, at least in the case of Marcus Wayne’s infiltration of Neldia, was proven entirely true.
His ship, the Peacemaker, had undergone an extensive refit before its jump to Neldia to both modify its sensor signature and repair its failing Aegis barrier. The first objective succeeded. The second did not.
One day later, leaving the derelict Ultimate Vigil behind in deep space, the United Human Alliance courier ship Winged Deliverance logged a real space entry at the edge of the Neldia system. Its crew, having spent their waking hours plagued by hallucinations and enduring horrible nightmares as they slept, found this shift very welcome. The worst, though they could hardly believe it, was still yet to come.
“The Neldian fleet is mustering for war,” rumbled the man who had once held the title and security codes of an Alliance sector admiral. Now, he was a traitor to his homeland. “Security will be high.”
“No need to worry, Admiral,” said Marcus Wayne. “Your code will get us through.” It would not.
It took two hours for the Peacemaker, disguised as the Winged Deliverance, to be challenged by the Neldian Armada. “Transmit clearance code,” said an automated voice. Marcus took out a data disc with the admiral's clearance code on it.
“Hold,” said Terris. She was clad in black, her active camouflage offline to save battery, and she had been sitting at the passive sensor console for the past three hours. “Look at this.” A news broadcast popped up in front of Marcus Wayne and his officers. Sector Admiral Sheparda Dama, or at least he was once a sector admiral, had been tried and convicted of high treason.
“It was a secret trial,” Dama said, still in shock at the revelation. “I had no knowledge of this.”
“Well, that tracks, but what do we do now? What code gets us through?”
“Transmit clearance code,” the voice said again, “or adjust course.”
Dama thought for a moment. “Change course,” he said. “We’re not getting through.”
They did. A great sense of defeat took hold in the hearts of the crew. They would never reach the Neldian hypercom. Sheparda Dama, who would have gladly given his life in defense of humankind, would never get the chance to be the man who broke their chains.
The Peacemaker was halfway out of the Neldia system before Terris spoke again. “Hold it,” she said. “I have an idea.”
That was why she had been placed where she was. Clad in an airtight stealth suit. Inside a hollowed-out asteroid. On a ballistic journey to the heart of Neldian space. It was the most insane idea that Marcus Wayne had ever seen.
But, sometimes, insanity was a symptom of genius.
Terris flew past the Neldian Armada undetected. Many asteroids entered the inner system this way, flung by outer-system prospecting ships to the foundries and shipyards in Neldian orbit, and they were thrown and caught so frequently that only the most cursory of inspections was put upon each one. Terris passed the Alliance fleet entirely undetected.
Terris’ chameleon suit could mimic the sensor return of the precious metals it was buried in, at least enough to fool a probing scan, and the cuts made by Protectoral engineers had been so precise that Terris had fit inside there with barely a centimeter of space to spare. She was effectively entombed inside sixty meters of solid rock.
Interstellar espionage was not a job for the claustrophobic.
Finally, after days of waiting, the signal came. She was in range. A mental command triggered a series of shaped charges in the rock above her, if such directions existed in microgravity, and forty pea-sized explosives blasted a circular tunnel all the way to the asteroid surface. If just one of them had failed, that rock might have been her tomb.
Terris tried not to think about that as she began climbing her way out. A brief burst from her suit’s EVA thrusters was enough to start her on her way, and the tunnel out was wide enough for her to use her arms and legs to speed things up. Finally, after too long a wait, Terris saw the Neldian sun for the very first time.
There was fire in the distance. Comm chatter on every band. Warships burning hard for the outer system. The Coalition fleet was here.
She zoomed in, far more than she had ever had to before, and she could pick out the faintest flashes of blue as warships exploded in the black. A brief crawl around the asteroid, which also helped to warm up her muscles after days of inactivity, let her discern an attack force engaging the Alliance fleet. After a moment’s hesitation, weighing the risks, Terris activated her passive sensor suite to try and decrypt Alliance military chatter.
Instantly, her sensors were flooded with noise from the defensive bastions. The fleet base at the L5 point was loudest, its comm operators screaming indecipherably at fellow Alliance elements fighting in the black. Neldian orbit, where the hypercom station was, seemed to be the centerpiece of all the communications traffic. The hypercom, unsurprisingly, was being used as a relay for comm traffic all across the system. Terris made a note to hack its server banks for intelligence, and perhaps leave a timed virus or two to shut down the system after she was gone.
Her suit bleeped, alerting her that she was in optimum position to make the leap to the hypercom. She zoomed in on it, a red and spiked thing just like everything else the Alliance made, and calculated the right trajectory to land right on its metal surface.
Trying to jump from a moving asteroid out past Neldia’s rings and hit a hypercom station barely three hundred meters in diameter was like shooting a rifle from a jumbo jet in hopes of hitting a mosquito down on Earth. A nearly impossible shot, even with Coalition computers to help make the jump, and anyone lucky enough to make it would have been better served bankrupting their local casino at the slot machines.
Terris gave a command to her suit, activating a set of ion thrusters to boost her off the asteroid and adjust her course mid-flight. She’d never believed in luck.
She coasted silent and graceful past the particle guns in high orbit, like a majestic swan flying on a summer wind. Their sensor arrays were directed out, past her, to the far distant parts of space where a trillion tons of steel were locked in deadly battle. Terris really did wish she could smile at the moment. She was about to have unrestricted access to the biggest communications relay in the star system, able to send out viruses and receive vital intelligence that could cripple the Alliance fleet if placed in the right hands. Terris, confident as ever, knew they would be.
She would make the Neldian Armada burn, and they had no idea she was even coming.
She reached the hypercom station in just under a day, agonizingly slow for a woman like her, hovering just above its surface to avoid triggering pressure sensors. After that, it was simple enough to get inside. Terris found it almost trivial to bypass the airlock sensor grid and trigger the outer bulkhead to open unnoticed, its report to the command room destroyed before it ever arrived. Entering the station itself was easy after that.
Here, there was gravity. She could not hover like she had on the outside of the station. But here, there were no pressure sensors. She really had no need to hover.
The corridor she found herself in was large enough, though nothing like the expansive halls of a dreadnought, and a patrol of marines in powered suits trundled towards her obliviously. Terris had made the right call not to wear a Phantom powered suit. She ducked into an alcove, the chameleon suit concealing her from even their impressive sensor batteries, and they passed by with no clue at all.
Terris made it to the server banks with ease. Most of the hypercom’s security measures took the form of warships in orbit, clustered tightly around the planet to prevent exactly this scenario from happening, but those warships were off waging war. The station defenses were hopeless now that she was actually inside.
The data was encrypted, and she could neither access it nor copy it without potentially fatal consequences, but she wasn’t there to steal data. A brief, milliseconds-long connection to the primary server was all it took to riddle the entire system with custom-tailored computer viruses. The viruses were self-replicating, rather like an electronic version of the biological ones on Earth. They worked similarly, too, meant to latch onto outgoing communications signals and remain inert for a certain amount of time before activating and wreaking havoc across cyberspace.
The program would be scoured from the net in seconds once it began its assault, but it would cause plenty of chaos before then. And, with another critical transmission being scheduled to send at around that time, Terris knew her mostly-ineffective virus attack would be just enough of a distraction to make sure its message was heard.
Terris planned to leave the station in approximately thirty minutes. Shortly after that, the fireworks would begin. It was going to be beautiful.
She heard footsteps. A maintenance worker, no doubt. It was time for her to go. She disconnected from the server, taking pains to hide her involvement, and snuck out of the server room like a ghost in the night.
Next was the transmission array. This room was better-guarded, its door being flanked by marines, but Terris slipped inside by trailing behind an officer as he entered on some unknown pretext. After that, her daring and sleight of hand made sure Admiral Dama’s pre-recorded propaganda transmission was uploaded to the hypercom transmitter. It came with a set of instructions bearing the Admiralty’s seal, changed to be anonymous, to ensure as many people as possible heard his message.
In just under one standard hour, the United Human Alliance would be shaken to its very core. Terris had just made sure of it.
It took longer than she had expected for the door to open again and give her a chance to slip out. Terris had spent that time quite productively, downloading as many incoming and outgoing messages as she could to the internal hard drive just by her spinal cord. Even if they were encrypted, they’d be useful intelligence once Coalition codebreakers took a crack at them.
After that, it was trivial to slip past marine patrols and escape to the hull of the hypercom station. Terris found her ride, an Alliance warship by the name of Brightest Thunder, holding orbit just near the hypercom station. Admiral Dama, even if he was no longer an admiral, still had connections.
She charged her ion thrusters by tapping into the station reactor, an act which did not go unnoticed, but by then it was too late to respond. She had completed her incursion. The damage had been done. Perhaps if the Alliance acted swiftly and accurately, they could undo it, but Terris was a careful woman. She had covered her tracks well.
Waving one final goodbye to the crew of the hypercom station, Terris triggered her thrust pack and shot off into the ink.
“You must be my passenger.” A man in an Alliance captain’s uniform was waiting for her in the Brightest Thunder’s airlock. He wore a helmet and gloves, hermetically sealed to his airtight outfit, so he felt no effects from the vacuum of space. “I was sent by Sector Admiral Sheparda Dama,” he announced after a period of silence, “To transport you and whatever you may have safely to the Coalition fleet.” Nothing. Apart from the dull thudding of the ship’s railgun batteries, firing missiles at range to ward off a strike force of Coalition ships, the airlock was quiet as a ghost.
“You cannot expect me to endanger my life and the lives of my crew without at least some identification that you are who you claim to be!” Silence. Captain Senar Trevy had been standing in that airlock for three and a half hours, while his ship was tasked with screening Neldia and her eighteen billion inhabitants from harm, and he was just now wondering if he had been talking to a ghost.
“I am,” came a voice. Cold. Sterile. Inhuman. Exactly the kind Trevy expected from the secret spies of his former admiral.
“So you are.” Captain Trevy thought for a moment. He cycled the airlock. If his guest held hostile intent, one steel bulkhead would make no difference. “I’ve been stocking the crew with handpicked men and women since I received word of the operation,” he explained as they walked through the ship’s corridors. The crewmen he passed thought him insane. “I can’t vouch for them all, but the ship as a whole will obey me.” No response. Sometimes, Captain Trevy thought himself insane as well.
“This is my personal quarters,” he told the specter, stepping inside and sealing the door behind him. “I must warn you, for your own safety, it would be best not to leave it. The crew are mostly still Alliance loyalists.” He looked around, paying no heed to the decorated furniture or artificial sky, and finally shrugged and sighed. “Are you even here, still?”
Terris decloaked. She stood between him and the door, winged and cloaked in black like a demon of ancient myth. “I am.”
“You’re a black angel.” Senar Trevy, to his credit, kept his composure well. “A spy for the Ierad Republic.” He questioned her purpose here. They both knew it.
“You weren’t told?”
“I was told an alien would be coming aboard, but…” Trevy shrugged again, as if to say ‘what am I supposed to do?’ “The admiral vouched for you. That much is enough for me.” He also knew he had no choice in the matter. From what he knew about black angels, his ship had been lost the moment she boarded.
“I could have impersonated him,” said Terris, voice a perfect replica of Captain Trevy’s own. Even his own mother could not have told the difference. “And I’m trained to lie.” She was testing him, gauging his reaction to assess his personality. She was good at that.
“I could have you screened for deception,” Trevy countered, pointing up at a pearl-sized camera in the ceiling. Terris made a note that it was disabled. “And I could have had the technology officers vet your transmission.”
“I’m trained to lie well.” Terris sat down on Captain Trevy’s bed, a spartan thing compared to the sleeping quarters of most officers. There were no chairs in the room, so her options were few. She took off her helmet and tried to at least appear relaxed. In reality, she was anything but. “It comes with the job, really.”
“Fair,” Trevy chuckled, feigning calm. “I suppose the question now becomes whether or not you can trust me.”
“It’s a safe gamble.” Terris made a mental calculation. It would take her between thirty and fifty seconds to kill Captain Trevy, take the bridge, and vent the ship. That was a very safe gamble. “Besides, that’s what a peace treaty is.” Trevy looked confused. “A leap of faith. You trust your enemy to back their word, and you trust them to trust you as well. If we can’t get along here, can’t put aside our differences to work toward a common goal, then the Alliance will be right. And I hate it when they’re right.”
“I’m speaking to you now because I know they are wrong.” That came as no surprise to either of them. “You know, I was once a foreman of a labor crew in the munitions factories. The most productive unit in my sector.” That one did come as a surprise. “As a foreman, you get leeway to make certain decisions regarding the… well, I suppose they are slaves, under your command. Food intake and the like.” Captain Trevy looked pained when he brought up such memories. Terris wasn’t convinced that was how he really felt. “They use it to weed out any potential xeno sympathizers from the populace. Of course, at the time, I wasn’t so empathetic.”
“So you were a slave driver, and you beat your slaves to make them work. I hope every one of those shells was sabotaged.” Terris’ voice dripped with disdain. She had almost forgotten the Alliance captain was her enemy.
“No, I showed mercy,” Trevy defended himself. “I was generous.” This made Terris reconsider. Perhaps Senar Trevy could be an ally, if not a friend. “I won’t say I was a good man, but I wasn’t cruel. I was practical. Strong, healthy, well-treated workers are more productive than the beaten sacks of flesh in the other factories. My crew’s output was unmatched.”
“And?” Terris cocked her head inquisitively. For a high-ranking officer in the space navy of a genocidal regime, Senar Trevy really did not seem so bad. To be fair, however, she had set the bar pretty low.
“I was investigated for anti-human activity.” Terris could have predicted that. She almost did, too. “They sent me to the fleet, and my labor crew was reacquainted with the energy whips and pain beams.” There was no carrot for an Alliance labor slave. Only the stick. “Their productivity fell thirty percent in the first two weeks alone.” He sounded almost mournful as he said that. He was not lamenting the loss in productivity.
“You see,” said Trevy, “Hatred is not natural. It has to be caused, sustained, nurtured from the day a man is born until the day he dies.” With that, at least, Terris agreed. “And, as you’re about to see, a nation built around cruelty or prejudice cannot sustain itself. It will have to apply pressure to maintain its flawed status quo, like it did with me, and the pressure will build and build until it cannot build anymore.” He tapped a few buttons on the data disc in his hand. It began projecting an image of the battle for Neldia. He placed it on the bed next to Terris. “Now it’s breaking.”
“I wonder if they’ll find themselves in need of more shells.” Terris knew it wasn’t just shells. Every time a slave driver prioritized hatred over hard work, put cruelty over their quota, or even just bowed their head and obeyed the traditional dogma, they hurt the Alliance. Across nine worlds, with billions of slaves not working as they could have, things started to add up. “You know, for a superior species, your fleet is really getting its ass kicked right now. Might want to work on that.”
Captain Trevy nodded. His data disc beeped. He was needed on the bridge. “Agreed,” he said. “I hope this war ends soon, and to our mutual benefit. I’d hate to face you on the battlefield.” He picked up the data disc and turned to leave.
“Oh, forgot to mention, there’s a virus embedded in the transmissions you’ve received. Self-replicating. Nasty piece of work.” Terris shifted a bit in her seat. “Almost forgot about that.”
“Well, better to know now than when it’s activated,” Trevy smiled. “I’ll have Technology Officer Galdir investigate it.” With that, he left. His duty to the Alliance was nonexistent, but the men and women under his command still needed him. He had waited too long in the stateroom.
Terris, with nothing better to do, got to work on cracking the encryption in the transmissions she had copied. She failed. A transmission from deep in unknown space, sent from a dreadnought at the head of a task force known only as the Deep Expedition Fleet, was the only message she could read. Its contents, while troubling, mattered little at the moment. What was far more crucial, however, was the message Terris could not decipher. The military battle plan of Janus Ora’s personal armada.
The battle plan that, when analyzed on a Republic starship, would reveal its terrible secret too late.
The Coalition fleet was walking into a trap.
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submitted by ApprehensiveCap6525 to HFY [link] [comments]
It was said that no plan ever survived contact with the enemy. That, at least in the case of Marcus Wayne’s infiltration of Neldia, was proven entirely true.
His ship, the Peacemaker, had undergone an extensive refit before its jump to Neldia to both modify its sensor signature and repair its failing Aegis barrier. The first objective succeeded. The second did not.
One day later, leaving the derelict Ultimate Vigil behind in deep space, the United Human Alliance courier ship Winged Deliverance logged a real space entry at the edge of the Neldia system. Its crew, having spent their waking hours plagued by hallucinations and enduring horrible nightmares as they slept, found this shift very welcome. The worst, though they could hardly believe it, was still yet to come.
“The Neldian fleet is mustering for war,” rumbled the man who had once held the title and security codes of an Alliance sector admiral. Now, he was a traitor to his homeland. “Security will be high.”
“No need to worry, Admiral,” said Marcus Wayne. “Your code will get us through.” It would not.
It took two hours for the Peacemaker, disguised as the Winged Deliverance, to be challenged by the Neldian Armada. “Transmit clearance code,” said an automated voice. Marcus took out a data disc with the admiral's clearance code on it.
“Hold,” said Terris. She was clad in black, her active camouflage offline to save battery, and she had been sitting at the passive sensor console for the past three hours. “Look at this.” A news broadcast popped up in front of Marcus Wayne and his officers. Sector Admiral Sheparda Dama, or at least he was once a sector admiral, had been tried and convicted of high treason.
“It was a secret trial,” Dama said, still in shock at the revelation. “I had no knowledge of this.”
“Well, that tracks, but what do we do now? What code gets us through?”
“Transmit clearance code,” the voice said again, “or adjust course.”
Dama thought for a moment. “Change course,” he said. “We’re not getting through.”
They did. A great sense of defeat took hold in the hearts of the crew. They would never reach the Neldian hypercom. Sheparda Dama, who would have gladly given his life in defense of humankind, would never get the chance to be the man who broke their chains.
The Peacemaker was halfway out of the Neldia system before Terris spoke again. “Hold it,” she said. “I have an idea.”
That was why she had been placed where she was. Clad in an airtight stealth suit. Inside a hollowed-out asteroid. On a ballistic journey to the heart of Neldian space. It was the most insane idea that Marcus Wayne had ever seen.
But, sometimes, insanity was a symptom of genius.
Terris flew past the Neldian Armada undetected. Many asteroids entered the inner system this way, flung by outer-system prospecting ships to the foundries and shipyards in Neldian orbit, and they were thrown and caught so frequently that only the most cursory of inspections was put upon each one. Terris passed the Alliance fleet entirely undetected.
Terris’ chameleon suit could mimic the sensor return of the precious metals it was buried in, at least enough to fool a probing scan, and the cuts made by Protectoral engineers had been so precise that Terris had fit inside there with barely a centimeter of space to spare. She was effectively entombed inside sixty meters of solid rock.
Interstellar espionage was not a job for the claustrophobic.
Finally, after days of waiting, the signal came. She was in range. A mental command triggered a series of shaped charges in the rock above her, if such directions existed in microgravity, and forty pea-sized explosives blasted a circular tunnel all the way to the asteroid surface. If just one of them had failed, that rock might have been her tomb.
Terris tried not to think about that as she began climbing her way out. A brief burst from her suit’s EVA thrusters was enough to start her on her way, and the tunnel out was wide enough for her to use her arms and legs to speed things up. Finally, after too long a wait, Terris saw the Neldian sun for the very first time.
There was fire in the distance. Comm chatter on every band. Warships burning hard for the outer system. The Coalition fleet was here.
She zoomed in, far more than she had ever had to before, and she could pick out the faintest flashes of blue as warships exploded in the black. A brief crawl around the asteroid, which also helped to warm up her muscles after days of inactivity, let her discern an attack force engaging the Alliance fleet. After a moment’s hesitation, weighing the risks, Terris activated her passive sensor suite to try and decrypt Alliance military chatter.
Instantly, her sensors were flooded with noise from the defensive bastions. The fleet base at the L5 point was loudest, its comm operators screaming indecipherably at fellow Alliance elements fighting in the black. Neldian orbit, where the hypercom station was, seemed to be the centerpiece of all the communications traffic. The hypercom, unsurprisingly, was being used as a relay for comm traffic all across the system. Terris made a note to hack its server banks for intelligence, and perhaps leave a timed virus or two to shut down the system after she was gone.
Her suit bleeped, alerting her that she was in optimum position to make the leap to the hypercom. She zoomed in on it, a red and spiked thing just like everything else the Alliance made, and calculated the right trajectory to land right on its metal surface.
Trying to jump from a moving asteroid out past Neldia’s rings and hit a hypercom station barely three hundred meters in diameter was like shooting a rifle from a jumbo jet in hopes of hitting a mosquito down on Earth. A nearly impossible shot, even with Coalition computers to help make the jump, and anyone lucky enough to make it would have been better served bankrupting their local casino at the slot machines.
Terris gave a command to her suit, activating a set of ion thrusters to boost her off the asteroid and adjust her course mid-flight. She’d never believed in luck.
She coasted silent and graceful past the particle guns in high orbit, like a majestic swan flying on a summer wind. Their sensor arrays were directed out, past her, to the far distant parts of space where a trillion tons of steel were locked in deadly battle. Terris really did wish she could smile at the moment. She was about to have unrestricted access to the biggest communications relay in the star system, able to send out viruses and receive vital intelligence that could cripple the Alliance fleet if placed in the right hands. Terris, confident as ever, knew they would be.
She would make the Neldian Armada burn, and they had no idea she was even coming.
She reached the hypercom station in just under a day, agonizingly slow for a woman like her, hovering just above its surface to avoid triggering pressure sensors. After that, it was simple enough to get inside. Terris found it almost trivial to bypass the airlock sensor grid and trigger the outer bulkhead to open unnoticed, its report to the command room destroyed before it ever arrived. Entering the station itself was easy after that.
Here, there was gravity. She could not hover like she had on the outside of the station. But here, there were no pressure sensors. She really had no need to hover.
The corridor she found herself in was large enough, though nothing like the expansive halls of a dreadnought, and a patrol of marines in powered suits trundled towards her obliviously. Terris had made the right call not to wear a Phantom powered suit. She ducked into an alcove, the chameleon suit concealing her from even their impressive sensor batteries, and they passed by with no clue at all.
Terris made it to the server banks with ease. Most of the hypercom’s security measures took the form of warships in orbit, clustered tightly around the planet to prevent exactly this scenario from happening, but those warships were off waging war. The station defenses were hopeless now that she was actually inside.
The data was encrypted, and she could neither access it nor copy it without potentially fatal consequences, but she wasn’t there to steal data. A brief, milliseconds-long connection to the primary server was all it took to riddle the entire system with custom-tailored computer viruses. The viruses were self-replicating, rather like an electronic version of the biological ones on Earth. They worked similarly, too, meant to latch onto outgoing communications signals and remain inert for a certain amount of time before activating and wreaking havoc across cyberspace.
The program would be scoured from the net in seconds once it began its assault, but it would cause plenty of chaos before then. And, with another critical transmission being scheduled to send at around that time, Terris knew her mostly-ineffective virus attack would be just enough of a distraction to make sure its message was heard.
Terris planned to leave the station in approximately thirty minutes. Shortly after that, the fireworks would begin. It was going to be beautiful.
She heard footsteps. A maintenance worker, no doubt. It was time for her to go. She disconnected from the server, taking pains to hide her involvement, and snuck out of the server room like a ghost in the night.
Next was the transmission array. This room was better-guarded, its door being flanked by marines, but Terris slipped inside by trailing behind an officer as he entered on some unknown pretext. After that, her daring and sleight of hand made sure Admiral Dama’s pre-recorded propaganda transmission was uploaded to the hypercom transmitter. It came with a set of instructions bearing the Admiralty’s seal, changed to be anonymous, to ensure as many people as possible heard his message.
In just under one standard hour, the United Human Alliance would be shaken to its very core. Terris had just made sure of it.
It took longer than she had expected for the door to open again and give her a chance to slip out. Terris had spent that time quite productively, downloading as many incoming and outgoing messages as she could to the internal hard drive just by her spinal cord. Even if they were encrypted, they’d be useful intelligence once Coalition codebreakers took a crack at them.
After that, it was trivial to slip past marine patrols and escape to the hull of the hypercom station. Terris found her ride, an Alliance warship by the name of Brightest Thunder, holding orbit just near the hypercom station. Admiral Dama, even if he was no longer an admiral, still had connections.
She charged her ion thrusters by tapping into the station reactor, an act which did not go unnoticed, but by then it was too late to respond. She had completed her incursion. The damage had been done. Perhaps if the Alliance acted swiftly and accurately, they could undo it, but Terris was a careful woman. She had covered her tracks well.
Waving one final goodbye to the crew of the hypercom station, Terris triggered her thrust pack and shot off into the ink.
“You must be my passenger.” A man in an Alliance captain’s uniform was waiting for her in the Brightest Thunder’s airlock. He wore a helmet and gloves, hermetically sealed to his airtight outfit, so he felt no effects from the vacuum of space. “I was sent by Sector Admiral Sheparda Dama,” he announced after a period of silence, “To transport you and whatever you may have safely to the Coalition fleet.” Nothing. Apart from the dull thudding of the ship’s railgun batteries, firing missiles at range to ward off a strike force of Coalition ships, the airlock was quiet as a ghost.
“You cannot expect me to endanger my life and the lives of my crew without at least some identification that you are who you claim to be!” Silence. Captain Senar Trevy had been standing in that airlock for three and a half hours, while his ship was tasked with screening Neldia and her eighteen billion inhabitants from harm, and he was just now wondering if he had been talking to a ghost.
“I am,” came a voice. Cold. Sterile. Inhuman. Exactly the kind Trevy expected from the secret spies of his former admiral.
“So you are.” Captain Trevy thought for a moment. He cycled the airlock. If his guest held hostile intent, one steel bulkhead would make no difference. “I’ve been stocking the crew with handpicked men and women since I received word of the operation,” he explained as they walked through the ship’s corridors. The crewmen he passed thought him insane. “I can’t vouch for them all, but the ship as a whole will obey me.” No response. Sometimes, Captain Trevy thought himself insane as well.
“This is my personal quarters,” he told the specter, stepping inside and sealing the door behind him. “I must warn you, for your own safety, it would be best not to leave it. The crew are mostly still Alliance loyalists.” He looked around, paying no heed to the decorated furniture or artificial sky, and finally shrugged and sighed. “Are you even here, still?”
Terris decloaked. She stood between him and the door, winged and cloaked in black like a demon of ancient myth. “I am.”
“You’re a black angel.” Senar Trevy, to his credit, kept his composure well. “A spy for the Ierad Republic.” He questioned her purpose here. They both knew it.
“You weren’t told?”
“I was told an alien would be coming aboard, but…” Trevy shrugged again, as if to say ‘what am I supposed to do?’ “The admiral vouched for you. That much is enough for me.” He also knew he had no choice in the matter. From what he knew about black angels, his ship had been lost the moment she boarded.
“I could have impersonated him,” said Terris, voice a perfect replica of Captain Trevy’s own. Even his own mother could not have told the difference. “And I’m trained to lie.” She was testing him, gauging his reaction to assess his personality. She was good at that.
“I could have you screened for deception,” Trevy countered, pointing up at a pearl-sized camera in the ceiling. Terris made a note that it was disabled. “And I could have had the technology officers vet your transmission.”
“I’m trained to lie well.” Terris sat down on Captain Trevy’s bed, a spartan thing compared to the sleeping quarters of most officers. There were no chairs in the room, so her options were few. She took off her helmet and tried to at least appear relaxed. In reality, she was anything but. “It comes with the job, really.”
“Fair,” Trevy chuckled, feigning calm. “I suppose the question now becomes whether or not you can trust me.”
“It’s a safe gamble.” Terris made a mental calculation. It would take her between thirty and fifty seconds to kill Captain Trevy, take the bridge, and vent the ship. That was a very safe gamble. “Besides, that’s what a peace treaty is.” Trevy looked confused. “A leap of faith. You trust your enemy to back their word, and you trust them to trust you as well. If we can’t get along here, can’t put aside our differences to work toward a common goal, then the Alliance will be right. And I hate it when they’re right.”
“I’m speaking to you now because I know they are wrong.” That came as no surprise to either of them. “You know, I was once a foreman of a labor crew in the munitions factories. The most productive unit in my sector.” That one did come as a surprise. “As a foreman, you get leeway to make certain decisions regarding the… well, I suppose they are slaves, under your command. Food intake and the like.” Captain Trevy looked pained when he brought up such memories. Terris wasn’t convinced that was how he really felt. “They use it to weed out any potential xeno sympathizers from the populace. Of course, at the time, I wasn’t so empathetic.”
“So you were a slave driver, and you beat your slaves to make them work. I hope every one of those shells was sabotaged.” Terris’ voice dripped with disdain. She had almost forgotten the Alliance captain was her enemy.
“No, I showed mercy,” Trevy defended himself. “I was generous.” This made Terris reconsider. Perhaps Senar Trevy could be an ally, if not a friend. “I won’t say I was a good man, but I wasn’t cruel. I was practical. Strong, healthy, well-treated workers are more productive than the beaten sacks of flesh in the other factories. My crew’s output was unmatched.”
“And?” Terris cocked her head inquisitively. For a high-ranking officer in the space navy of a genocidal regime, Senar Trevy really did not seem so bad. To be fair, however, she had set the bar pretty low.
“I was investigated for anti-human activity.” Terris could have predicted that. She almost did, too. “They sent me to the fleet, and my labor crew was reacquainted with the energy whips and pain beams.” There was no carrot for an Alliance labor slave. Only the stick. “Their productivity fell thirty percent in the first two weeks alone.” He sounded almost mournful as he said that. He was not lamenting the loss in productivity.
“You see,” said Trevy, “Hatred is not natural. It has to be caused, sustained, nurtured from the day a man is born until the day he dies.” With that, at least, Terris agreed. “And, as you’re about to see, a nation built around cruelty or prejudice cannot sustain itself. It will have to apply pressure to maintain its flawed status quo, like it did with me, and the pressure will build and build until it cannot build anymore.” He tapped a few buttons on the data disc in his hand. It began projecting an image of the battle for Neldia. He placed it on the bed next to Terris. “Now it’s breaking.”
“I wonder if they’ll find themselves in need of more shells.” Terris knew it wasn’t just shells. Every time a slave driver prioritized hatred over hard work, put cruelty over their quota, or even just bowed their head and obeyed the traditional dogma, they hurt the Alliance. Across nine worlds, with billions of slaves not working as they could have, things started to add up. “You know, for a superior species, your fleet is really getting its ass kicked right now. Might want to work on that.”
Captain Trevy nodded. His data disc beeped. He was needed on the bridge. “Agreed,” he said. “I hope this war ends soon, and to our mutual benefit. I’d hate to face you on the battlefield.” He picked up the data disc and turned to leave.
“Oh, forgot to mention, there’s a virus embedded in the transmissions you’ve received. Self-replicating. Nasty piece of work.” Terris shifted a bit in her seat. “Almost forgot about that.”
“Well, better to know now than when it’s activated,” Trevy smiled. “I’ll have Technology Officer Galdir investigate it.” With that, he left. His duty to the Alliance was nonexistent, but the men and women under his command still needed him. He had waited too long in the stateroom.
Terris, with nothing better to do, got to work on cracking the encryption in the transmissions she had copied. She failed. A transmission from deep in unknown space, sent from a dreadnought at the head of a task force known only as the Deep Expedition Fleet, was the only message she could read. Its contents, while troubling, mattered little at the moment. What was far more crucial, however, was the message Terris could not decipher. The military battle plan of Janus Ora’s personal armada.
The battle plan that, when analyzed on a Republic starship, would reveal its terrible secret too late.
The Coalition fleet was walking into a trap.
First Previous Wiki Next
2024.05.18 21:05 DMA2024 Has FN fixed the ejector problem?
Looking to purchase a Reflex but there are so many posts regarding their ejector issues. I don’t want to modify it myself after purchasing one. Have they admitted they own the problem and have they modified the ejector???? If so, do you know at what Serial# that has taken place and when it took place? I’ve thought of trying to contact FN and ask but don’t know how helpful their Customer Service is. In the past I’ve had great experiences with Sig and Walther re: Customer Service.
Issue #2 appears to be shooting at 7 o’clock position with the iron sights. I assume that’s why so many upgrade with red-dots.
Your thoughts:
Kindly rsvp TYIA
submitted by DMA2024 to fnreflex [link] [comments]
Issue #2 appears to be shooting at 7 o’clock position with the iron sights. I assume that’s why so many upgrade with red-dots.
Your thoughts:
Kindly rsvp TYIA
2024.05.18 20:08 researchallthethings In-Walls + Floor Sub, KEF vs Monolith, 7.1.4, 1750cuft
Hey all,
Need some help deciding on speakers + sub. Has to be in-wall for space/WAF, but sub will be floor-standing (but probably smaller ported or larger sealed for minimal footprint).
Room layout: ~1500sqft (~14x13x8'). Mostly dedicated HT room. Couch is against back wall. 105" screen opposite couch wall. LR to left and right of screen, but center will be below screen. Sides are slightly behind ideal 50/50 due to window, but shouldn't be too bad. Reaback surrounds are almost 90' to left and right of the seating position, and have to be about 35' above level with seating position (has to go above door, so max size is about 12x12x4" due to framing unless I want to redo framing).
All of this sorta leads me to coaxial for the off-axis performance, but Monolith seems to get good reviews for off-axis performance too. AVR is Denon x4300H. Don't want to do AT screen if possible.
I'm aware of Revel, Focal, Triad, Theory, Perlisten, etc, but I keep coming back to KEF vs Monolith. Can't do dual sub for space/WAF. Plan is something like these:
Option 1-KEF LR-Ci3160RLM-THX (I doubt I need to go up to the 5160) C-Ci3160RLM-THX Sides-Ci3160RLM-THX or Ci200QS/Ci160QS/Ci130QS ReaHeights-Ci200QS, Ci160QS, Ci130QS Sub-? (thinking SB-2000 Pro, KEF KC92, Rhythmik F12, Monolith M10/M12) Total: A lot
Option 2-Monolith LR-THX-365IW (I doubt I need to go up to the 465iw) C-THX-365IW (can this go horizontal?) Sides-THX-365IW or THX-275IW Rears-THX-265IW (would need to modify framing a bit), Amber 6.5" with Ribbon (24432), or Amber 8" Ceiling (24435) Heights-Amber 8" ceiling (24435) Sub-? (thinking SB-2000 Pro, KEF KC92, Rhythmik F12, Monolith M10/M12) Total: A lot LESS
Questions: 1-Which option would you go with for the room, budget being irrelevant?
2-What sub would you choose?
3-If option 1, is the 3610 fine as a horizontal center?
4-If option 2, is the 365 fine as a horizontal center?
5-If option 2, would the ribbon tweeters blend with the rest of the THX setup?
Anything I'm missing? Thanks!!
submitted by researchallthethings to hometheater [link] [comments]
Need some help deciding on speakers + sub. Has to be in-wall for space/WAF, but sub will be floor-standing (but probably smaller ported or larger sealed for minimal footprint).
Room layout: ~1500sqft (~14x13x8'). Mostly dedicated HT room. Couch is against back wall. 105" screen opposite couch wall. LR to left and right of screen, but center will be below screen. Sides are slightly behind ideal 50/50 due to window, but shouldn't be too bad. Reaback surrounds are almost 90' to left and right of the seating position, and have to be about 35' above level with seating position (has to go above door, so max size is about 12x12x4" due to framing unless I want to redo framing).
All of this sorta leads me to coaxial for the off-axis performance, but Monolith seems to get good reviews for off-axis performance too. AVR is Denon x4300H. Don't want to do AT screen if possible.
I'm aware of Revel, Focal, Triad, Theory, Perlisten, etc, but I keep coming back to KEF vs Monolith. Can't do dual sub for space/WAF. Plan is something like these:
Option 1-KEF LR-Ci3160RLM-THX (I doubt I need to go up to the 5160) C-Ci3160RLM-THX Sides-Ci3160RLM-THX or Ci200QS/Ci160QS/Ci130QS ReaHeights-Ci200QS, Ci160QS, Ci130QS Sub-? (thinking SB-2000 Pro, KEF KC92, Rhythmik F12, Monolith M10/M12) Total: A lot
Option 2-Monolith LR-THX-365IW (I doubt I need to go up to the 465iw) C-THX-365IW (can this go horizontal?) Sides-THX-365IW or THX-275IW Rears-THX-265IW (would need to modify framing a bit), Amber 6.5" with Ribbon (24432), or Amber 8" Ceiling (24435) Heights-Amber 8" ceiling (24435) Sub-? (thinking SB-2000 Pro, KEF KC92, Rhythmik F12, Monolith M10/M12) Total: A lot LESS
Questions: 1-Which option would you go with for the room, budget being irrelevant?
2-What sub would you choose?
3-If option 1, is the 3610 fine as a horizontal center?
4-If option 2, is the 365 fine as a horizontal center?
5-If option 2, would the ribbon tweeters blend with the rest of the THX setup?
Anything I'm missing? Thanks!!
2024.05.18 19:59 apndrew Why has Wikipedia become less neutral and more biased against Israel since October 7?
Examples of Wikipedia becoming less neutral and more biased against Israel since Oct 7
Historically, I used to always consider Wikipedia one of the best sources for anything Israel-Palestine related. It was not heavily politically biased, used fairly neutral language, and seemed to offer reasonable perspectives. (This was only true for the English wiki, the Arabic version was always exactly as you'd expect). However, I've been noticing a shift recently every time I read Israel related Wiki articles.
So I decided to check if it's all in my head. I looked at some wiki articles and compared their version today vs the last version before Oct 7 to see if there were any differences in narratives. Most articles are very long and it's very difficult to look at all the changes in huge amounts of text, so I decided to only look at the first 2-3 paragraphs in each article.
This mini investigation does show me that Wikipedia no longer holds the status of a neutral source, as there's a clear attempt to subtly rewrite history and insert anti Israel propaganda.
Israel
Today vs Oct 5
This was an easy choice to try first. Even just comparing the first few paragraphs, there are A LOT of changes. Most of the changes involve removing some information, condensing information, and paraphrasing. Two noticeable differences:
• First sentence in second paragraph: describing where Israel is located: they removed that Israel is in a region that historically was called "Land of Israel" (but they kept "Canaan, Palestine and the Holy Land") Source
• Today, the article claims that the 1947 UN partition plan triggered a civil war that resulted in "expulsion and flight". This is a completely false narrative. The pre-Oct 7 article is correct, saying that during the 1948 war - after declaring independence and 5 armies declaring war on Israel - Arabs were expelled or fled (it was not the partition plan that caused it) Source
israel war of independence
As an aside, I found it strange that in the article about Israel, it did not mention even once the word "War of Independence". So I Googled "Israel war of independence", and I was very surprised to see that it redirects me to a wiki titled "1948 Arab–Israeli War". I'm 100% certain that last year there was a wiki with the title "Israel War of Independence" because I remember reading it many times. Our independence has been rewritten as just a war.
First intifada
Today vs Aug 9
• Changes "violent riots" to simply "riots" (we all know how pro Palestinians always argue that molotov cocktails and slingshots are peaceful) Source
• Changed that Israel took control of Gaza+WB "after Israel's victory in the war" to "in the wake of the war" (it's not wrong, but it's interesting that they chose to explicitly change the language to not show the Israel won a war) Source
• Changed "Palestinian territories" to "Israel-occupied Palestinian territories" - I've noticed this specific change in almost every Wikipedia article that mentions the territories or Gaza Strip. There seems to be a concentrated effort to insert "Israeli-occupied" into many texts Source
palestinian violence
Today vs Sep 22
• First sentence: "acts of violence perpetrated for political ends" vs "actions carried out by Palestinian people with the intent to end the Israeli occupation ... which can use force/terrorism" (firstly, they moved from saying that violence is "violence" to saying that violence is "actions" which "can" be involve force. Secondly, the claim that it's all in the name of "ending the occupation" is being pushed again... If that's all they want then why was there palestinian violence before 1967 when there was no occupation?) Source
Nakba
Today vs Sep 20
This word has become a favourite in the anti Israel crowd (here in a suburb of Toronto they've even officially added "Nakba Remembrance Day" to the schools calendar). Even though this is an article about something that happened 75 years ago, so supposedly it should be pretty set in stone by now, the length of the article tripled since Oct 7. It's impossible to compare to the old version because it's been entirely rewritten. A few notes:
• The first sentence says all you need to know about the propaganda push. It used to be "The Nakba was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs." that was already biased and very politically charged, but it's nothing compared to what it says now: "The Nakba was the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians ... through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property and belongings, along with the destruction of their society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations." This paragraph looks 100% like it's taken from Al Jazeera... Source
• There's a new metadata section, and it's complete Palestinian propaganda. It describes the Nakba as an "attack", the attack type is all sorts of buzzwords ("ethnic cleansing", "mass killing", "settler colonialism", "biological warfare", "dispossession"), the victims says "750k expelled" (the word "fled" does not appear there - it just claims 750k was expelled) Source
• A new article was created after Oct 7 that branched off the "Nakba" article. It's called "Nakba denial", and it basically says that any Israeli narrative on the war of independence or any debate about what happened in 1948 and any Israeli viewpoint on history is decidedly lies and denialism, and what Palestinians say is the absolute undebated truth. They are changing what the term Nakba means and based on that they're building a new term to make Nakba denial sound as if it's the same as holocaust denial. It's weird to see how history is literally being rewritten. That's akin to me writing a "War of Independence denial" article which will gaslight anyone who says anything related to Nakba is just partaking in denial.
Israeli-Palestinian peace process
Today vs Sep 19
• They added an entire paragraph claiming that the international consensus is for "a Palestinian state in pre-1967 borders including East Jerusalem and a just resolution to the refugee problem based on the palestinian right of return". As far as I know, the Western world does not really talk about the right of return, and there's certainly no consensus that East Jerusalem (which includes the Wailing Wall) is going to be given to a Palestinian state. Since Oct 7, they essentially added all the Palestinian demands as if they're agreed upon by the world, but completely neglect to mention any of the Israeli demands, like security and control over their holy sites Source
Irgun
Today vs Sep 20
• Removed a sentence that said they avoided harming civilians, and without this sentence it sounds like their only objective was to kill anyone Source
I wanted to also look up some of the common old anti Israel propaganda that predated this war, to see how they changed. Here are the results:
Israel and apartheid
Today vs Oct 5
• Difficult to compare because the first few paragraphs are entirely rewritten. Pre-Oct 7, the entire third paragraph was dedicated to arguments against calling Israel an apartheid. Now, they softened and shortened the wording dedicated to that, and instead of having its own paragraph, it's just two sentences that got appened to the end of the last introductory paragraph.
• I found it strange that except for these two sentences, there was no other sections in the entire long article that discuss opposing views. Usually on wikipedia, there are always sections that show "the other side". So I checked the article in other time points going back several years, and I noticed that over time the amount of text describing the Israeli position is being removed. Until 2017 there was a section about "Criticism of the apartheid accusation" (which you would expect to have!), but since then it's been removed and now we're left with a mere two sentences.
• Just for fun, I wanted to see how Arabic wikipedia talks about this. You're going to love this! This is the first sentence in the Arabic version: "Apartheid in Israel or Israeli racism is a proven fact in Israeli politics , as it is a policy of apartheid carried out by the government against the indigenous Arab population of the region." Yep, it's a proven fact! Source
• Even in Arabic, this "fact" was only proven recently. On Oct 22, the Arabic article had this as the first sentence: "Apartheid in Israel or Israel's racism is an accusation directed against Israeli policy" Source
Dahiya doctrine
Today vs June 24
I never heard of this term, but recently I've been seeing many comments on islam talking about this and saying that this is Israel's tactic of attacking innocent civilians to get leverage against an enemy. Again, I never heard of this, I had no idea what this is, but what they claimed seemed very suspicious to me so I looked if that's true... from my research, it's a military strategy of not shying away from attacking civilian infrastructure if it's used by combatants, and it was devised after a war with Lebanon where the IDF failed because they treated Hezbollah-infested areas as civilian areas, which was ineffective in fighting Hezbollah.
• Since Oct 7, the first sentence on the wiki article changed from "destruction of the civilian infrastructure of regimes deemed to be hostile as a measure calculated to deny combatants the use of that infrastructure" to "destruction of civilian infrastructure in order to pressure hostile regimes." This new definition is exactly what the online community seems to use! It might seem like a small change, but this is the type of subtle changes that accumulate and give anti Israel people so much misinformation to accuse Source
• Again, for fun, I wanted to check out what Arabic wikipedia has to say about this. The first two sentences claim: "The Dahiya strategy ... approved by the Israeli government. The strategy states that "Finally, Israel has realized that the Arabs must be responsible for the actions of their leaders." ". Of course it seems very unlikely that the Israeli government stated such a strategy, so I followed the "source" for that quote, and of course it came from an opinion piece. So they took some person's opinion and are passing that as if it's an IDF official position. Source
ethnic cleansing
Today vs Sep 29
• Before there was no explicit mention of "Israel" in the article. Since Oct 7, they added a one-sentence paragraph, devoid of any context: "Israeli herders have engaged in a systemic displacement of Palestinian herders in Area C of the West Bank as a form of nationalist and economic warfare."
organ theft
Today vs Oct 6
A few months ago, Al Jazeera and the anti-Israel world at large were accusing Israel of harvesting organs from Gazans. Many of you probably remember this. I remember that such accusations have happened in many previous conflicts (always with 0 evidence), so I wanted to see if these "facts" reached wikipedia.
• Before Oct 7, there was no mention of Israel in this article. Today they added a subsection dedicated to Israel under "Suspected occurrences". It's about a story from 2009 about incidents from the 90s, so adding it now is very likely another attempt to add negative associations to Israel anywhere possible.
• The accusation in this article is also very biased itself - it claims that Israeli troops harvested organs from Palestinians. The real story seems to be that a specific Doctor and his lab did in fact remove organs from some corpses that arrived to their forensic lab without getting family permission. This was done to many Israeli victims of terror attacks, as well as Palestinians. It did not focus on Palestinians, and it was not done by the military. It was obviously illegal, but the wiki article paints it in a very different light to make it seem anti Palestinian.
• If you look at the other 3 coutries/cases mentioned on the Wiki page, those stories are much more widespread/organized and involved either killing people for their organs or stealing them from live people. The story that happened in Israel is much less extreme than that. I'm sure you can find stories of organ harvesting in many places. For example, I live in Canada so I just googled for "Canada harvesting organs indigenous" and the first link talks about how in Alberta, they have a law that allows harvesting organs from children who die in provincial care without asking for family approval, and 78% of those children are indigenous. There is no wiki article about it, it's not world news, you don't see masses of people trying their hardest to take facts from this story and twist it to completely demonize Canada. I'm sorry to end on such a note, but it really bugs me how much the world takes any story coming out of Israel and twists, magnifies, and spreads it and acts as if Israel is the only place where bad things happen :(
Remember that all my comparisons were only looking at the first 1-3 paragraphs of each article. Who knows how much details are removed/added/modified in the body of the articles.
submitted by apndrew to wikipedians [link] [comments]
Historically, I used to always consider Wikipedia one of the best sources for anything Israel-Palestine related. It was not heavily politically biased, used fairly neutral language, and seemed to offer reasonable perspectives. (This was only true for the English wiki, the Arabic version was always exactly as you'd expect). However, I've been noticing a shift recently every time I read Israel related Wiki articles.
So I decided to check if it's all in my head. I looked at some wiki articles and compared their version today vs the last version before Oct 7 to see if there were any differences in narratives. Most articles are very long and it's very difficult to look at all the changes in huge amounts of text, so I decided to only look at the first 2-3 paragraphs in each article.
This mini investigation does show me that Wikipedia no longer holds the status of a neutral source, as there's a clear attempt to subtly rewrite history and insert anti Israel propaganda.
Israel
Today vs Oct 5
This was an easy choice to try first. Even just comparing the first few paragraphs, there are A LOT of changes. Most of the changes involve removing some information, condensing information, and paraphrasing. Two noticeable differences:
• First sentence in second paragraph: describing where Israel is located: they removed that Israel is in a region that historically was called "Land of Israel" (but they kept "Canaan, Palestine and the Holy Land") Source
• Today, the article claims that the 1947 UN partition plan triggered a civil war that resulted in "expulsion and flight". This is a completely false narrative. The pre-Oct 7 article is correct, saying that during the 1948 war - after declaring independence and 5 armies declaring war on Israel - Arabs were expelled or fled (it was not the partition plan that caused it) Source
israel war of independence
As an aside, I found it strange that in the article about Israel, it did not mention even once the word "War of Independence". So I Googled "Israel war of independence", and I was very surprised to see that it redirects me to a wiki titled "1948 Arab–Israeli War". I'm 100% certain that last year there was a wiki with the title "Israel War of Independence" because I remember reading it many times. Our independence has been rewritten as just a war.
First intifada
Today vs Aug 9
• Changes "violent riots" to simply "riots" (we all know how pro Palestinians always argue that molotov cocktails and slingshots are peaceful) Source
• Changed that Israel took control of Gaza+WB "after Israel's victory in the war" to "in the wake of the war" (it's not wrong, but it's interesting that they chose to explicitly change the language to not show the Israel won a war) Source
• Changed "Palestinian territories" to "Israel-occupied Palestinian territories" - I've noticed this specific change in almost every Wikipedia article that mentions the territories or Gaza Strip. There seems to be a concentrated effort to insert "Israeli-occupied" into many texts Source
palestinian violence
Today vs Sep 22
• First sentence: "acts of violence perpetrated for political ends" vs "actions carried out by Palestinian people with the intent to end the Israeli occupation ... which can use force/terrorism" (firstly, they moved from saying that violence is "violence" to saying that violence is "actions" which "can" be involve force. Secondly, the claim that it's all in the name of "ending the occupation" is being pushed again... If that's all they want then why was there palestinian violence before 1967 when there was no occupation?) Source
Nakba
Today vs Sep 20
This word has become a favourite in the anti Israel crowd (here in a suburb of Toronto they've even officially added "Nakba Remembrance Day" to the schools calendar). Even though this is an article about something that happened 75 years ago, so supposedly it should be pretty set in stone by now, the length of the article tripled since Oct 7. It's impossible to compare to the old version because it's been entirely rewritten. A few notes:
• The first sentence says all you need to know about the propaganda push. It used to be "The Nakba was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs." that was already biased and very politically charged, but it's nothing compared to what it says now: "The Nakba was the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians ... through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property and belongings, along with the destruction of their society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations." This paragraph looks 100% like it's taken from Al Jazeera... Source
• There's a new metadata section, and it's complete Palestinian propaganda. It describes the Nakba as an "attack", the attack type is all sorts of buzzwords ("ethnic cleansing", "mass killing", "settler colonialism", "biological warfare", "dispossession"), the victims says "750k expelled" (the word "fled" does not appear there - it just claims 750k was expelled) Source
• A new article was created after Oct 7 that branched off the "Nakba" article. It's called "Nakba denial", and it basically says that any Israeli narrative on the war of independence or any debate about what happened in 1948 and any Israeli viewpoint on history is decidedly lies and denialism, and what Palestinians say is the absolute undebated truth. They are changing what the term Nakba means and based on that they're building a new term to make Nakba denial sound as if it's the same as holocaust denial. It's weird to see how history is literally being rewritten. That's akin to me writing a "War of Independence denial" article which will gaslight anyone who says anything related to Nakba is just partaking in denial.
Israeli-Palestinian peace process
Today vs Sep 19
• They added an entire paragraph claiming that the international consensus is for "a Palestinian state in pre-1967 borders including East Jerusalem and a just resolution to the refugee problem based on the palestinian right of return". As far as I know, the Western world does not really talk about the right of return, and there's certainly no consensus that East Jerusalem (which includes the Wailing Wall) is going to be given to a Palestinian state. Since Oct 7, they essentially added all the Palestinian demands as if they're agreed upon by the world, but completely neglect to mention any of the Israeli demands, like security and control over their holy sites Source
Irgun
Today vs Sep 20
• Removed a sentence that said they avoided harming civilians, and without this sentence it sounds like their only objective was to kill anyone Source
I wanted to also look up some of the common old anti Israel propaganda that predated this war, to see how they changed. Here are the results:
Israel and apartheid
Today vs Oct 5
• Difficult to compare because the first few paragraphs are entirely rewritten. Pre-Oct 7, the entire third paragraph was dedicated to arguments against calling Israel an apartheid. Now, they softened and shortened the wording dedicated to that, and instead of having its own paragraph, it's just two sentences that got appened to the end of the last introductory paragraph.
• I found it strange that except for these two sentences, there was no other sections in the entire long article that discuss opposing views. Usually on wikipedia, there are always sections that show "the other side". So I checked the article in other time points going back several years, and I noticed that over time the amount of text describing the Israeli position is being removed. Until 2017 there was a section about "Criticism of the apartheid accusation" (which you would expect to have!), but since then it's been removed and now we're left with a mere two sentences.
• Just for fun, I wanted to see how Arabic wikipedia talks about this. You're going to love this! This is the first sentence in the Arabic version: "Apartheid in Israel or Israeli racism is a proven fact in Israeli politics , as it is a policy of apartheid carried out by the government against the indigenous Arab population of the region." Yep, it's a proven fact! Source
• Even in Arabic, this "fact" was only proven recently. On Oct 22, the Arabic article had this as the first sentence: "Apartheid in Israel or Israel's racism is an accusation directed against Israeli policy" Source
Dahiya doctrine
Today vs June 24
I never heard of this term, but recently I've been seeing many comments on islam talking about this and saying that this is Israel's tactic of attacking innocent civilians to get leverage against an enemy. Again, I never heard of this, I had no idea what this is, but what they claimed seemed very suspicious to me so I looked if that's true... from my research, it's a military strategy of not shying away from attacking civilian infrastructure if it's used by combatants, and it was devised after a war with Lebanon where the IDF failed because they treated Hezbollah-infested areas as civilian areas, which was ineffective in fighting Hezbollah.
• Since Oct 7, the first sentence on the wiki article changed from "destruction of the civilian infrastructure of regimes deemed to be hostile as a measure calculated to deny combatants the use of that infrastructure" to "destruction of civilian infrastructure in order to pressure hostile regimes." This new definition is exactly what the online community seems to use! It might seem like a small change, but this is the type of subtle changes that accumulate and give anti Israel people so much misinformation to accuse Source
• Again, for fun, I wanted to check out what Arabic wikipedia has to say about this. The first two sentences claim: "The Dahiya strategy ... approved by the Israeli government. The strategy states that "Finally, Israel has realized that the Arabs must be responsible for the actions of their leaders." ". Of course it seems very unlikely that the Israeli government stated such a strategy, so I followed the "source" for that quote, and of course it came from an opinion piece. So they took some person's opinion and are passing that as if it's an IDF official position. Source
ethnic cleansing
Today vs Sep 29
• Before there was no explicit mention of "Israel" in the article. Since Oct 7, they added a one-sentence paragraph, devoid of any context: "Israeli herders have engaged in a systemic displacement of Palestinian herders in Area C of the West Bank as a form of nationalist and economic warfare."
organ theft
Today vs Oct 6
A few months ago, Al Jazeera and the anti-Israel world at large were accusing Israel of harvesting organs from Gazans. Many of you probably remember this. I remember that such accusations have happened in many previous conflicts (always with 0 evidence), so I wanted to see if these "facts" reached wikipedia.
• Before Oct 7, there was no mention of Israel in this article. Today they added a subsection dedicated to Israel under "Suspected occurrences". It's about a story from 2009 about incidents from the 90s, so adding it now is very likely another attempt to add negative associations to Israel anywhere possible.
• The accusation in this article is also very biased itself - it claims that Israeli troops harvested organs from Palestinians. The real story seems to be that a specific Doctor and his lab did in fact remove organs from some corpses that arrived to their forensic lab without getting family permission. This was done to many Israeli victims of terror attacks, as well as Palestinians. It did not focus on Palestinians, and it was not done by the military. It was obviously illegal, but the wiki article paints it in a very different light to make it seem anti Palestinian.
• If you look at the other 3 coutries/cases mentioned on the Wiki page, those stories are much more widespread/organized and involved either killing people for their organs or stealing them from live people. The story that happened in Israel is much less extreme than that. I'm sure you can find stories of organ harvesting in many places. For example, I live in Canada so I just googled for "Canada harvesting organs indigenous" and the first link talks about how in Alberta, they have a law that allows harvesting organs from children who die in provincial care without asking for family approval, and 78% of those children are indigenous. There is no wiki article about it, it's not world news, you don't see masses of people trying their hardest to take facts from this story and twist it to completely demonize Canada. I'm sorry to end on such a note, but it really bugs me how much the world takes any story coming out of Israel and twists, magnifies, and spreads it and acts as if Israel is the only place where bad things happen :(
Remember that all my comparisons were only looking at the first 1-3 paragraphs of each article. Who knows how much details are removed/added/modified in the body of the articles.
2024.05.18 19:59 Sharpman85 StardewXnbHack question
I have a question about the StardewXnbHack application. I want to modify some npcs in the game but in order to do so I need to unpack the xnb files. I found the app via the wiki but when I scan it using the Virus Total website there are two findings - from SecureAge and Zilla (Trojan.Filecoder.Win32.34174). I assume those are false positives as this program is used to modify locked files. Can anyone check if they are using it?
submitted by Sharpman85 to StardewValleyMods [link] [comments]
2024.05.18 19:49 afterandalasia Oxventure Overall: The Good and the Bad (Spoilers for the whole run!)
So, I'm seeing some mixed reactions to the last season, and honestly I'm feeling them myself as well, so I decided to sit down and sort of breakdown and analyse some of what happened over the course of Oxventure, what seemed to go well and what didn't, and maybe try to get into some litcrit of the whole thing.
Warning: I'm not always nice in this write up, though I have done my best to be fair and honest throughout in what I think the potential pitfalls were and how I hope they might be better addressed in future campaigns.
I've played D&D myself for a few years, listened to other Actual Play series (notably NADDPOD and some D20 at one end of the competency-of-players scale, and Dragon Friends and Dungeons and Drongos at the other), and write... a lot. Including over 250k of fanfic specifically for Oxventure, which started off as an excuse for smut but ended up being a lot of worldbuilding.
It was also clear that at times, none of the group seemed to know the game and the rules super well. From Mike not knowing his movement speed ("30 what? Miles an hour?") to Merilwen not using her animal forms or changing out her spells until level 8, to the underpowering of most of the classes, it became more of an issue as time when on in some ways.
It's easy enough to understand why, live on stage and starry-eyed at Harry McEntire as Aubrey, Johnny missed that in the combat Aubrey cast two levelled spells in the same round (against the rules) as well as using two sorcery spell modifiers in the same round (also against the rules, and they mentioned this on the podcast). Sorcerer was also a new class to everyone, and dealing with a new class is always going to be difficult, especially dropping them in at a higher level rather than starting from level 1 and building up.
However, bluntly, most of the guild weren't using their class/subclass abilities to the fullest. Rules lawyer Andy did the best, so he gets a pass here, and Ellen got sharper with Merilwen over time to stuff like knowing her spell components, tracking her spell slots, and preparing her spells. However, the concept of Egbert as "a paladin who doesn't do paladin things" (quote from the post-Deadlands discussion) was ultimately really limiting not just for Egbert (Mike commented in one podcast episode that he felt he'd trapped himself in only using Egbert's abilities in ways that were funny) but for the entire concept of paladins - Max might as well have been a fighter in the fight in Gnome Alone that they took part in, and we never saw Shattershield fight at all. There were references to combat offscreen in Out of Order, but... that was it. (Additionally, while paladins can be poisoned, as poison and disease are different in 5e rules, paladins can pump out a LOT of healing, and a citadel full of them should have a lot of magical reserves to draw on as a result.)
And Egbert isn't the only one who was limited. One of the biggest features of Great Old One warlocks (which Prudence is, with Cthulhu), is that from level one they have telepathy within 30ft ("Awakened Mind"). Prudence went the entire campaign without using this. Although Johnny allowed the Message cantrip to be treated like this, allowing people to reply to it when RAW it is one-way only, this meant that Dob also essentially gained Prudence's power because he also had Message. Merilwen was limited in her animal forms and the spells that she knew up until level 8, and it was noticeable how everyone was shocked at her power once she had full RAW druid range. Corazón, on the other hand, not only had Andy keeping on top of all of his class and subclass features, but got two subclasses, leaving him about on par or slightly overpowered for the level he should have been looking overpowered because the others didn't use their abilities so well. Meanwhile, Dob was given access to full bardic abilities, but only used bardic inspiration in some of their level 1 adventures and then not much again until the final season.
The counterpart to this under-utilisation of class potential was the amount of 'rule of cool' or 'rule of funny' which sometimes worked well (Merilwen befriending the owlbear in Quiet Riot, or the reflavouring of Thunder Wave to do lightning damage instead based on their initial misunderstanding) and sometimes ended up breaking the game (the "everyone can cast Moonbeam" joke that escalated to the scrolls of Moonbeam that made the finale kind of laughable). Sometimes this seemed to be the time and audience pressure of live shows (allowing Prudence to use the hammer to wheel her way through the skeletons in Stop Hammer Time), but other times it was just letting them do things that went outside the rules (Egbert body-slamming six(?) Otherberts at once in Bad Altitude, or Dob casting all his spells at once in Corpse and Robbers) seemingly preferring the immediate humour or "yes and" over the potential internal logic or end implications.
The contrast between this permissiveness, sometimes to the point of breaking logical immersion, honestly seemed sharper to me when it was laid against Andy's GMing in Deadlands. Whether it was reminding people that there were snipers on the rooftops in Dead Man's Worth or refusing to yes-and a chandelier in More Wonders Than, he made it more difficult for the players and in doing so made them work harder within their skillsets and the setting, making the victories feel harder-won as a result. I'm aware that some people didn't like Andy's GMing specifically because he was less permissive, but I believe that his intention - and the outcome - was a stronger narrative that made the characters feel active and not just lucky. (Liliana lampshaded this in Frenemy at the Gates when she asked whether things often just fell into their laps, like with knowing Binbag, and it almost felt like a spiteful comment so it surprised me to hear it from Johnny.)
What I hope: It has been indicated that Johnny has created the new setting for the next game, so hopefully they have put things more to their liking at the beginning and will not end up seeming to dunk on the premise of their own series. I'm also hoping for everyone to either use more standardised rules, or at least establish in-game standards at the beginning so that all of the characters, and players, feel like they're on a level playing field from the off. Johnny seemed to much more enjoy the systems of Blades in the Dark and Deadlands (which were designed to be less superhero-level) and even the lower levels of Oxventure (especially Tier 1) where the characters were just people who were skilled but not particularly out of the range of normality; I'd be interested to see whether they lean more in that direction and keep the characters lower-powered as a result.
Corazón - in my opinion, Corazón had one of the stronger character arcs, which may reflect Andy's interest in writing (and now being published!), going from the coward pirate-wannabe who abandoned his crew to the curse, to the person who threw himself in front of a spell meant for Merilwen. This was highlighted in his reply to Them in Prism Break, even before the Power Word Kill spell. In fact, the Power Word Kill brought a level of pathos to the fact that he had told Them that he was not even done growing as a person. Andy commented on the podcast at some point that he had expected at the beginning to be one of the more morally shady characters (as a pirate), but found himself playing a line of being immoral regarding money but caring deeply about physical hurt or harm to people. Corazón also had two layers of in-character goals - to break the curse (limited) and to become a betterichereal pirate (more open-ended) and find his own identity which allowed him to carry character development over the years even when the curse was ignored for extended periods. Goals: clear and stepped, with the curse as a plot-hook; arc: good and perfectly timed for the finale.
What I hope for: More of the same, really.
Dob - Dob came in early with a clearly defined goal (to find his sister) - but this was done in Brawl of the Wild and Dob has been sort of... undefined ever since. It absolutely makes sense that he would have floundered for a while, but Dob has gone several years without settling on new goal, and Luke also didn't seem to settle on a character arc (the romance subplot in Orbpocalypse Saga through Bride or Die seemed to be almost a character arc, but never got full payoff?) which left Dob feeling... well, at times it almost seemed like Luke wanted to get rid of him to play someone else instead. This was unfortunately also highlighted in conversation with Them, as the response that Dob gave was about him being a "mote of chaos". I obviously couldn't speak for others, but I found this underwhelming and unconvincing as an answer, as it didn't give me any sense of why a powerful celestial being would consider this an argument - if Dob had developed the argument to be that chaos is generative and creative in a way that pure order cannot be, and/or that the free will and agency of sapience demand that they be allowed to act and to try even if they make mistakes or fail, I think there might have been something there, but he didn't really seem to. Goals: had one which formed a good plot-hook, then went without; arc: unclear.
What I hope for: Luke to determine more of a character arc, or series of shorter arcs, perhaps drawing from his Blades in the Dark DMing experience, and to either pick a more open-ended goal or to move along a series of goals over time.
Egbert - Egbert came in with the vaguer goal of "atonement", which gave him more wiggle room, but unfortunately didn't seem to actively pursue it a lot of the time. In Legacy of Dragons it was revealed that he was searching for atonement for the deaths of two Dragon D'Or members - but by this time, so many people around the Oxventurers had died, including innocent bystanders, that the deaths of two other paladins felt like nothing. (Mike commented, again on the podcast, that he agreed with the commenters at the time who agreed that they knew it was his backstory from the beginning because only two paladins had died. The two figure paled next to the collateral damage that the party later caused.) Mike also commented on the podcast that during lockdown, he had made a conscious change with Egbert in to try to avoid combat as much as possible, and to avoid fatal attacks if in combat, but it wasn't clear how long that lasted. It may have been trying to avoid being the annoying/preachy paladin that stopped him from trying to influence the rest of the party or to save lives around them, but unfortunately it meant that it was difficult to see a real sense of wanting to atone in Egbert's arc. Letting innocents die around him isn't exactly less culpable than killing them himself. (Notable incidents included Mule Be Sorry, Wrangle in the Tangle, Hag Reflex, and Squid Pro Quo.) In terms of character arcs, there was definitely an element of going from seeking approval from Dragon D'Or to seeking that of his friends, but that was just a switching of approval-seeking rather than a significant change. Goals: had one, but didn't seem to actively pursue it; arc: moved from pursuing the morals of Dragon D'Or to pursuing the morals of the Oxventurers.
What I hope for: Mike to come back with a character who seeks to pursue their own goals more directly (see Barnaby and Silas, who both felt much stronger in this sense).
Merilwen - Merilwen was supposed to be about balance and protecting nature, but didn't always heavily engage with this point of view, even when the actions of the other Oxventurers should have absolutely led to discussions or disagreements between them. Many people commented on Andy being dickish about shooting seabirds in Legacy of Dragons, but there are other incidents, including the Wrangle in the Tangle (again), Eldritch or Die Trying (where it would have been interesting to see Merilwen's preference for nature clash with the need for the crystal) and the Extinction season which seemed to veer between being set up to be about Merilwen, then swapping to Dob-centric, then cleaning up Corazon's curse. In terms of character arc, I think there might be an element that can be teased out about her not fitting in with elf society and fitting in better with the faster-paced, more chaotic world of shorter-lived peoples, but this feels like speculation on my part more than something intended. Naturally, a character of around 100 is not going to feel as suited to a coming-of-age story as younger ones, but characters of all ages should be able to have character arcs. (Even if they might be slower in longer-lived people like elves - an example I can go to here is Galadriel, from Tolkien, who in her youth was proud and refused a pardon that would have allowed her to return to Valinor, but at the end of LOTR is humble enough to accept and go there. It took millennia for her, but it was a character arc all the same!) In Merilwen's conversation with Them, her uncertainty seemed to talk to this - a lack of clarity about where her characterisation was supposed to have gone over the last few years. I think there was a real opportunity here to explore Merilwen's relationship with morality and the difference between neutrality and passiveness, which unfortunately was missed. Goals: was supposed to be about nature but didn't push for it; arc: [speculation] seeking a non-elven community that she matched better with.
What I hope for: Ellen to have a character with more defined goals or arc, or gaps still to be filled in, rather than a static momentary sketch of personality/character that doesn't feel designed to be changed over time. Again, Lilith with her secrets/looking into the paranormal, and Edie with her goal to help people in a world in which monsters aren't going away, felt stronger as characters with goals and arcs, and I'd be happy to see more of that.
Prudence - Ambitious from the off, Prudence never actually struggled for goals - power, knowledge, magic, influence. The open-endedness of these goals once again served Prudence pretty well for carrying her through individual adventures/games and over the course of the whole canon, even if she didn't come in with clearly-defined (plot hook) goals like Corazón's curse. For the first few years, it felt that her character arc wasn't hugely significant, although there was certainly an element of found family over selfishness that played into it, but Jane also discussed (again, in the podcast) how the werebear element was really quite exciting for her as it allowed her to begin to explore the clash between werebear Lawful Good status and Prudence's usual Chaotic Evil desires. Eldritch or Die Trying explored this in a somewhat exaggerated way, with Cthulhu offering power in exchange for the destruction of the others (I suspect in Prudence's question about specifying people, she was trying to figure out whether she could kill just Liliana) which was a somewhat blatant nod to the character arc but did underline it. (Unlike the others, this also established Prudence's character arc before Them.) Goals: open-ended in a way that leaves them technically incomplete even now but which were stably useful throughout canon; arc: de-isolation and alignment shifting (in a way that should have been ripe for playing off against Liliana's) which played out well.
What I hope for: A character with perhaps some more specific or plot-hook goals as well as broader life goals. Prudence's character arc played out more subtly than Corazón's and sometimes perhaps got lost behind the louder personalities of some of the others, but I do think was well done. A less obvious way to explore or demonstrate it would have been nice.
Liliana - So. Here we go. Liliana was essentially a DMPC for the last season, but was a recurring character before that, with a stated goal of subjecting part or all of G'eth and broader goals (indicated or stated in Prism Break and the finale season generally) of academic/scholarly improvement, arcane knowledge, and the notion of making people appreciate what they have by threatening to take it from them. As a villain, she was threatening, and the layering of goals once again worked here, even with the abrupt movement to 'save G'eth' in the last season because, well, you can't rule what no longer exists. However, I am honestly confused as to what her character arc was supposed to be - whether her stated change of heart in front of Them was real, or whether that was a lie that Them somehow did not call out or challenge. Considering in Frenemy at the Gates, Liliana says that Prudence is the most like her, there was a potential here to play against Prudence's character arc of coming to trust others, even appreciate others, and facing the consequences of suffering making her realise her own flawed logic. I really do not know whether her betrayal of the guild was planned from the beginning (in which case, her talking to Them feels like it was overplayed, and Them should have challenged her on it) or whether Johnny added it because the fight against the giant was over more quickly than anticipated (compare to Dine Hard where the chef was the one person they did not stat up because they didn't expect the guild to fight him). Goals: logical, stepped, and worked for a villain; arc: ????? was there an arc? Was it fake? Was it desperation? Why did she, on 1 hitpoint, try to Power Word Kill Prudence instead of Teleporting away?
What I hope for: I don't know, with this one, really. Liliana's weird arc feels more related to the odd pacing of the last season than an underlying characterisation issue, for me, so I think it's more related to pacing/wanting Oxventure campaign 1 to close out.
I say specifically players here, because it was entirely in-character for certain characters (largely Corazón) to think of themselves as the main character and behave as such. However, even if the characters think that, is generally considered good etiquette for the players to treat each other as equals, let each other take turns in the spotlight, and have their Moments.
Good examples would be the group letting Merilwen be the main character in Peak Performance, Prudence explore her sundered relationship with Cthulhu during the Orbpocalypse Saga, or Dob showing off his acting bard chops in Dine Harder.
However, at various times, various people have overstepped. Sometimes in live shows where the audience response and excitement probably played a role (Rolling in the Deep) it's more understandable, but it also happened elsewhere. Mike got some flack for picking up the eyepatch at the end of Cursed Case Scenario and 'ruining' Corazón's moment, but even Johnny called Andy out for muscling in on Dob's subplot in Court in the Act, and Life Finds a Dob was almost uncomfortable at times. There was also something of a trend of Dob deliberately acting against the party for unclear reasons (possibly meant to be humour?) - either running away from them in Life Finds a Dob, refusing to 'share' Corazon's body in Portal Combat, or his contrary behaviour in Hunter Pressure in not wanting to fight the hunters/murderers they were facing.
I'm not sure whether this trend of contrariness fed into the unclear character arc that I mentioned above, or the other way around, or whether the two just fed into each other.
The most extreme example of this was, undoubtedly, Dob jumping in on the shoot-off between Liliana and Prudence right at the end of Portal Combat. Liliana approached Prudence in Frenemy at the Gates because they were the most alike. Prudence was the one with the first kill of the whole campaign, using Eldritch Blast, against the party's wishes and Corazón's protests specifically - how appropriate would it have been for her to get the last kill of the campaign, with Eldritch Blast, in defense of herself and her party and as retribution for Corazón? But instead, Luke inserted Dob into the standoff and Johnny played into it, even to the absurd extent of letting the skeletons use Time Stop (a 9th Level spell) just to explain why Dob's whole conversation with them could take place faster than Prudence could fire off an eldritch blast. Corazón's self-sacrifice and Merilwen's reveal of her Reincarnation spell was therefore also partially overshadowed by Dob sacrificing his magic for one more hitpoint of damage on Liliana rather than letting Prudence have her moment.
What I hope for: some of the lessons learned from other campaigns to lead the players to be better at taking turns, both in terms of people not trying to be the Main Character at inappropriate moments, players stepping up and into the leading role when it is appropriate for them to do so, and Johnny more actively monitoring the balance between the players and shutting down some of the more egregious behaviour
But it's consistency that is more of a sticking point, as well as the player treatment of the moral positions of the party. It's hard to know how to treat the morals of the party when they vary from letting a town burn for being slightly annoying (Mule Be Sorry) to most of the team being ready to forgive a hag who used to eat human(oid) children (Hag Reflex). This isn't just the players either - Stop Hammer Time used the murder of children as a joke, and marked a change in tone for the treatment of NPCs and civilians as not mattering compared to the preferences or comfort of the main characters. The skeletons killing the children wasn't even some sort of monkey's paw scenario about asking for there to be no more orphans in the town, either - it was just nasty shock value, in many ways. And playing this sort of thing for humour makes it quite hard to handle some of the rest of the series as a result.
There also felt like a dissonance, at times, between the objective morality of the characters and how the players seemed to want them to be treated. Prudence never claimed to be anything other than evil, from shooting someone with eldritch blast during the Spicy Rat Caper to enjoying Hammerdahl's necromancy in Extinction - Jane even indicated that she wanted to explore shifting Prudence's alignment post-Fast and the Furriest, which can be seen as Prudence is much less interested in random acts of destruction and seems quite happy to get her kicks scaring or torturing people (Silent Knight) or watching the gruesome spectacle at the end of Knight Shift. So Jane's plans matched Prudence's behaviour - a softening of her deliberately evil acts, but still happy to let others be evil.
For the others, though, it didn't always match. Merilwen's "True Neutral" label often felt more like passively letting her party members be evil, rather than actively seeking balance, Egbert was supposed to be on the search for atonement but regularly allowed or took part in atrocities, and Dob seemed more inclined to act on what the audience or Luke thought was funny (or even deliberately seeking to be contrary) rather than following a consistent attitude to morality. His vaguely annoyed "Skeletons!" and hands on hips in return to "It's orphans, boss" was clearly played for laughs, and in Mule Be Sorry he turns on the town easily, which then makes it feel strange when in Hag Reflex he objects to letting the hag live. Dob's infatuation with Liliana and Katie Pearlhead, both of whom have killed or caused the deaths of great numbers of people, also makes it harder to take his claims to morality at all seriously. The potential moral issues of Merilwen killing the Otherberts to prevent them from taking a message to Liliana (Bad Altitude) is turned into accusing her of "war crimes", but it is absurd in the face of how many other innocent bystanders the guild had killed or caused to die in other stories (from as early as Quiet Riot, in which the paladins were annoying but killing them was honestly overboard, to as late as Squid Pro Quo where Dob seemed to forget that five people had died and then brushed off the deaths).
NPCs also got hit by this at times, from the town mayor in Mule Be Sorry (again) who put his townsfolk on spike growth just to cross it, to the chef in Dine Harder who was abruptly made a cannibal to get a fight going, to the decay of morally Good characters like Captain Shattershield turning away from the Upside Down Mistmire when in his first appearance he had been willing to fight Death itself for being on Mistmire's grounds. It's hard to take seriously moral questions about keeping the Dragon Under Mistmire in its shelter, and the accidentally-caused deaths of two paladins, when the guild has been responsible for much worse.
What I hope for: an approach to morality that does not prioritise momentary humour over consistency; evil behaviour to be acknowledged as evil and owned rather than treated as protagonist-centric; a moral balance which makes it possible to really explore moral issues and concerns rather than extreme behaviour which then makes it impossible to treat conflict seriously. Legacy of Dragons, as a standalone arc seeking Egbert's redemption, exploring the protection vs freedom of the gold dragon, and considering how to improve vs break systems, had some really great potential - but because of extreme 'rule of funny' behaviour in the past, it was impossible to really feel that it had the moral gravitas and weight that it deserved. When the skeletons go from murdering a dozen innocent children (Stop Hammer Time) to giving Merilwen a bad haircut (Mean Gulls) and this is almost treated as somehow consistent in evilness, it makes it harder to respect the characters or the expectation of moral standards.
The Good: The humour, the quick-wittedness, the variety of stories. Roleplaying moments such as Egbert and Shattershield in Legacy of Dragons, Corazón putting his old self behind him at the Curse Hole, or Merilwen saying "I'll make you" to Vex.
The Bad: Unclear character arcs, inconsistent moralities, underpowered classes but at the same time game-breakingly permissive DMing, and some Main Character Syndrome moments.
The Hope: Learning from teething issues and setting up a game system that the DM doesn't resent so much, to better enable people to balance and play off each other in a less jarring and more consistent way.
submitted by afterandalasia to TheOxventure [link] [comments]
Warning: I'm not always nice in this write up, though I have done my best to be fair and honest throughout in what I think the potential pitfalls were and how I hope they might be better addressed in future campaigns.
I've played D&D myself for a few years, listened to other Actual Play series (notably NADDPOD and some D20 at one end of the competency-of-players scale, and Dragon Friends and Dungeons and Drongos at the other), and write... a lot. Including over 250k of fanfic specifically for Oxventure, which started off as an excuse for smut but ended up being a lot of worldbuilding.
System & Setting
Johnny has made no secret that they're not a huge fan of D&D, indicating that they feel it overshadows other systems, and given that the Spicy Rat Caper was meant to be a one-off but fans loved it perhaps they felt a little trapped in the system. This did lead to some funny moments (Faire Trial and Max commenting that they sometimes felt "like a big dice rolling around a tray" sticks with me) but sometimes felt a bit mean-spirited ("Crawl Me Maybe" and the heavy 'lol dungeon crawling is so ridiculous' comes to mind).It was also clear that at times, none of the group seemed to know the game and the rules super well. From Mike not knowing his movement speed ("30 what? Miles an hour?") to Merilwen not using her animal forms or changing out her spells until level 8, to the underpowering of most of the classes, it became more of an issue as time when on in some ways.
It's easy enough to understand why, live on stage and starry-eyed at Harry McEntire as Aubrey, Johnny missed that in the combat Aubrey cast two levelled spells in the same round (against the rules) as well as using two sorcery spell modifiers in the same round (also against the rules, and they mentioned this on the podcast). Sorcerer was also a new class to everyone, and dealing with a new class is always going to be difficult, especially dropping them in at a higher level rather than starting from level 1 and building up.
However, bluntly, most of the guild weren't using their class/subclass abilities to the fullest. Rules lawyer Andy did the best, so he gets a pass here, and Ellen got sharper with Merilwen over time to stuff like knowing her spell components, tracking her spell slots, and preparing her spells. However, the concept of Egbert as "a paladin who doesn't do paladin things" (quote from the post-Deadlands discussion) was ultimately really limiting not just for Egbert (Mike commented in one podcast episode that he felt he'd trapped himself in only using Egbert's abilities in ways that were funny) but for the entire concept of paladins - Max might as well have been a fighter in the fight in Gnome Alone that they took part in, and we never saw Shattershield fight at all. There were references to combat offscreen in Out of Order, but... that was it. (Additionally, while paladins can be poisoned, as poison and disease are different in 5e rules, paladins can pump out a LOT of healing, and a citadel full of them should have a lot of magical reserves to draw on as a result.)
And Egbert isn't the only one who was limited. One of the biggest features of Great Old One warlocks (which Prudence is, with Cthulhu), is that from level one they have telepathy within 30ft ("Awakened Mind"). Prudence went the entire campaign without using this. Although Johnny allowed the Message cantrip to be treated like this, allowing people to reply to it when RAW it is one-way only, this meant that Dob also essentially gained Prudence's power because he also had Message. Merilwen was limited in her animal forms and the spells that she knew up until level 8, and it was noticeable how everyone was shocked at her power once she had full RAW druid range. Corazón, on the other hand, not only had Andy keeping on top of all of his class and subclass features, but got two subclasses, leaving him about on par or slightly overpowered for the level he should have been looking overpowered because the others didn't use their abilities so well. Meanwhile, Dob was given access to full bardic abilities, but only used bardic inspiration in some of their level 1 adventures and then not much again until the final season.
The counterpart to this under-utilisation of class potential was the amount of 'rule of cool' or 'rule of funny' which sometimes worked well (Merilwen befriending the owlbear in Quiet Riot, or the reflavouring of Thunder Wave to do lightning damage instead based on their initial misunderstanding) and sometimes ended up breaking the game (the "everyone can cast Moonbeam" joke that escalated to the scrolls of Moonbeam that made the finale kind of laughable). Sometimes this seemed to be the time and audience pressure of live shows (allowing Prudence to use the hammer to wheel her way through the skeletons in Stop Hammer Time), but other times it was just letting them do things that went outside the rules (Egbert body-slamming six(?) Otherberts at once in Bad Altitude, or Dob casting all his spells at once in Corpse and Robbers) seemingly preferring the immediate humour or "yes and" over the potential internal logic or end implications.
The contrast between this permissiveness, sometimes to the point of breaking logical immersion, honestly seemed sharper to me when it was laid against Andy's GMing in Deadlands. Whether it was reminding people that there were snipers on the rooftops in Dead Man's Worth or refusing to yes-and a chandelier in More Wonders Than, he made it more difficult for the players and in doing so made them work harder within their skillsets and the setting, making the victories feel harder-won as a result. I'm aware that some people didn't like Andy's GMing specifically because he was less permissive, but I believe that his intention - and the outcome - was a stronger narrative that made the characters feel active and not just lucky. (Liliana lampshaded this in Frenemy at the Gates when she asked whether things often just fell into their laps, like with knowing Binbag, and it almost felt like a spiteful comment so it surprised me to hear it from Johnny.)
What I hope: It has been indicated that Johnny has created the new setting for the next game, so hopefully they have put things more to their liking at the beginning and will not end up seeming to dunk on the premise of their own series. I'm also hoping for everyone to either use more standardised rules, or at least establish in-game standards at the beginning so that all of the characters, and players, feel like they're on a level playing field from the off. Johnny seemed to much more enjoy the systems of Blades in the Dark and Deadlands (which were designed to be less superhero-level) and even the lower levels of Oxventure (especially Tier 1) where the characters were just people who were skilled but not particularly out of the range of normality; I'd be interested to see whether they lean more in that direction and keep the characters lower-powered as a result.
Characters & Character Arcs
Again, it's worth noting that the characters were initially conceived as being for a one-off game, so the initial concepts did not necessarily need planned arcs. However, the rockiness of some of the arcs overall may have contributed to issues with the series, especially as it stretched out over so many years. I'll go through the PCs alphabetically, then Liliana, then mention any other NPCs. There are two elements here - in-character goals, and character arc goals, which both play into things.Corazón - in my opinion, Corazón had one of the stronger character arcs, which may reflect Andy's interest in writing (and now being published!), going from the coward pirate-wannabe who abandoned his crew to the curse, to the person who threw himself in front of a spell meant for Merilwen. This was highlighted in his reply to Them in Prism Break, even before the Power Word Kill spell. In fact, the Power Word Kill brought a level of pathos to the fact that he had told Them that he was not even done growing as a person. Andy commented on the podcast at some point that he had expected at the beginning to be one of the more morally shady characters (as a pirate), but found himself playing a line of being immoral regarding money but caring deeply about physical hurt or harm to people. Corazón also had two layers of in-character goals - to break the curse (limited) and to become a betterichereal pirate (more open-ended) and find his own identity which allowed him to carry character development over the years even when the curse was ignored for extended periods. Goals: clear and stepped, with the curse as a plot-hook; arc: good and perfectly timed for the finale.
What I hope for: More of the same, really.
Dob - Dob came in early with a clearly defined goal (to find his sister) - but this was done in Brawl of the Wild and Dob has been sort of... undefined ever since. It absolutely makes sense that he would have floundered for a while, but Dob has gone several years without settling on new goal, and Luke also didn't seem to settle on a character arc (the romance subplot in Orbpocalypse Saga through Bride or Die seemed to be almost a character arc, but never got full payoff?) which left Dob feeling... well, at times it almost seemed like Luke wanted to get rid of him to play someone else instead. This was unfortunately also highlighted in conversation with Them, as the response that Dob gave was about him being a "mote of chaos". I obviously couldn't speak for others, but I found this underwhelming and unconvincing as an answer, as it didn't give me any sense of why a powerful celestial being would consider this an argument - if Dob had developed the argument to be that chaos is generative and creative in a way that pure order cannot be, and/or that the free will and agency of sapience demand that they be allowed to act and to try even if they make mistakes or fail, I think there might have been something there, but he didn't really seem to. Goals: had one which formed a good plot-hook, then went without; arc: unclear.
What I hope for: Luke to determine more of a character arc, or series of shorter arcs, perhaps drawing from his Blades in the Dark DMing experience, and to either pick a more open-ended goal or to move along a series of goals over time.
Egbert - Egbert came in with the vaguer goal of "atonement", which gave him more wiggle room, but unfortunately didn't seem to actively pursue it a lot of the time. In Legacy of Dragons it was revealed that he was searching for atonement for the deaths of two Dragon D'Or members - but by this time, so many people around the Oxventurers had died, including innocent bystanders, that the deaths of two other paladins felt like nothing. (Mike commented, again on the podcast, that he agreed with the commenters at the time who agreed that they knew it was his backstory from the beginning because only two paladins had died. The two figure paled next to the collateral damage that the party later caused.) Mike also commented on the podcast that during lockdown, he had made a conscious change with Egbert in to try to avoid combat as much as possible, and to avoid fatal attacks if in combat, but it wasn't clear how long that lasted. It may have been trying to avoid being the annoying/preachy paladin that stopped him from trying to influence the rest of the party or to save lives around them, but unfortunately it meant that it was difficult to see a real sense of wanting to atone in Egbert's arc. Letting innocents die around him isn't exactly less culpable than killing them himself. (Notable incidents included Mule Be Sorry, Wrangle in the Tangle, Hag Reflex, and Squid Pro Quo.) In terms of character arcs, there was definitely an element of going from seeking approval from Dragon D'Or to seeking that of his friends, but that was just a switching of approval-seeking rather than a significant change. Goals: had one, but didn't seem to actively pursue it; arc: moved from pursuing the morals of Dragon D'Or to pursuing the morals of the Oxventurers.
What I hope for: Mike to come back with a character who seeks to pursue their own goals more directly (see Barnaby and Silas, who both felt much stronger in this sense).
Merilwen - Merilwen was supposed to be about balance and protecting nature, but didn't always heavily engage with this point of view, even when the actions of the other Oxventurers should have absolutely led to discussions or disagreements between them. Many people commented on Andy being dickish about shooting seabirds in Legacy of Dragons, but there are other incidents, including the Wrangle in the Tangle (again), Eldritch or Die Trying (where it would have been interesting to see Merilwen's preference for nature clash with the need for the crystal) and the Extinction season which seemed to veer between being set up to be about Merilwen, then swapping to Dob-centric, then cleaning up Corazon's curse. In terms of character arc, I think there might be an element that can be teased out about her not fitting in with elf society and fitting in better with the faster-paced, more chaotic world of shorter-lived peoples, but this feels like speculation on my part more than something intended. Naturally, a character of around 100 is not going to feel as suited to a coming-of-age story as younger ones, but characters of all ages should be able to have character arcs. (Even if they might be slower in longer-lived people like elves - an example I can go to here is Galadriel, from Tolkien, who in her youth was proud and refused a pardon that would have allowed her to return to Valinor, but at the end of LOTR is humble enough to accept and go there. It took millennia for her, but it was a character arc all the same!) In Merilwen's conversation with Them, her uncertainty seemed to talk to this - a lack of clarity about where her characterisation was supposed to have gone over the last few years. I think there was a real opportunity here to explore Merilwen's relationship with morality and the difference between neutrality and passiveness, which unfortunately was missed. Goals: was supposed to be about nature but didn't push for it; arc: [speculation] seeking a non-elven community that she matched better with.
What I hope for: Ellen to have a character with more defined goals or arc, or gaps still to be filled in, rather than a static momentary sketch of personality/character that doesn't feel designed to be changed over time. Again, Lilith with her secrets/looking into the paranormal, and Edie with her goal to help people in a world in which monsters aren't going away, felt stronger as characters with goals and arcs, and I'd be happy to see more of that.
Prudence - Ambitious from the off, Prudence never actually struggled for goals - power, knowledge, magic, influence. The open-endedness of these goals once again served Prudence pretty well for carrying her through individual adventures/games and over the course of the whole canon, even if she didn't come in with clearly-defined (plot hook) goals like Corazón's curse. For the first few years, it felt that her character arc wasn't hugely significant, although there was certainly an element of found family over selfishness that played into it, but Jane also discussed (again, in the podcast) how the werebear element was really quite exciting for her as it allowed her to begin to explore the clash between werebear Lawful Good status and Prudence's usual Chaotic Evil desires. Eldritch or Die Trying explored this in a somewhat exaggerated way, with Cthulhu offering power in exchange for the destruction of the others (I suspect in Prudence's question about specifying people, she was trying to figure out whether she could kill just Liliana) which was a somewhat blatant nod to the character arc but did underline it. (Unlike the others, this also established Prudence's character arc before Them.) Goals: open-ended in a way that leaves them technically incomplete even now but which were stably useful throughout canon; arc: de-isolation and alignment shifting (in a way that should have been ripe for playing off against Liliana's) which played out well.
What I hope for: A character with perhaps some more specific or plot-hook goals as well as broader life goals. Prudence's character arc played out more subtly than Corazón's and sometimes perhaps got lost behind the louder personalities of some of the others, but I do think was well done. A less obvious way to explore or demonstrate it would have been nice.
Liliana - So. Here we go. Liliana was essentially a DMPC for the last season, but was a recurring character before that, with a stated goal of subjecting part or all of G'eth and broader goals (indicated or stated in Prism Break and the finale season generally) of academic/scholarly improvement, arcane knowledge, and the notion of making people appreciate what they have by threatening to take it from them. As a villain, she was threatening, and the layering of goals once again worked here, even with the abrupt movement to 'save G'eth' in the last season because, well, you can't rule what no longer exists. However, I am honestly confused as to what her character arc was supposed to be - whether her stated change of heart in front of Them was real, or whether that was a lie that Them somehow did not call out or challenge. Considering in Frenemy at the Gates, Liliana says that Prudence is the most like her, there was a potential here to play against Prudence's character arc of coming to trust others, even appreciate others, and facing the consequences of suffering making her realise her own flawed logic. I really do not know whether her betrayal of the guild was planned from the beginning (in which case, her talking to Them feels like it was overplayed, and Them should have challenged her on it) or whether Johnny added it because the fight against the giant was over more quickly than anticipated (compare to Dine Hard where the chef was the one person they did not stat up because they didn't expect the guild to fight him). Goals: logical, stepped, and worked for a villain; arc: ????? was there an arc? Was it fake? Was it desperation? Why did she, on 1 hitpoint, try to Power Word Kill Prudence instead of Teleporting away?
What I hope for: I don't know, with this one, really. Liliana's weird arc feels more related to the odd pacing of the last season than an underlying characterisation issue, for me, so I think it's more related to pacing/wanting Oxventure campaign 1 to close out.
Player Etiquette
...okay, this one is going to be a little bit harsh, perhaps. But the main campaign, more than either Blades in the Dark or Deadlands, really suffered from certain players having a bout of Main Character Syndrome.I say specifically players here, because it was entirely in-character for certain characters (largely Corazón) to think of themselves as the main character and behave as such. However, even if the characters think that, is generally considered good etiquette for the players to treat each other as equals, let each other take turns in the spotlight, and have their Moments.
Good examples would be the group letting Merilwen be the main character in Peak Performance, Prudence explore her sundered relationship with Cthulhu during the Orbpocalypse Saga, or Dob showing off his acting bard chops in Dine Harder.
However, at various times, various people have overstepped. Sometimes in live shows where the audience response and excitement probably played a role (Rolling in the Deep) it's more understandable, but it also happened elsewhere. Mike got some flack for picking up the eyepatch at the end of Cursed Case Scenario and 'ruining' Corazón's moment, but even Johnny called Andy out for muscling in on Dob's subplot in Court in the Act, and Life Finds a Dob was almost uncomfortable at times. There was also something of a trend of Dob deliberately acting against the party for unclear reasons (possibly meant to be humour?) - either running away from them in Life Finds a Dob, refusing to 'share' Corazon's body in Portal Combat, or his contrary behaviour in Hunter Pressure in not wanting to fight the hunters/murderers they were facing.
I'm not sure whether this trend of contrariness fed into the unclear character arc that I mentioned above, or the other way around, or whether the two just fed into each other.
The most extreme example of this was, undoubtedly, Dob jumping in on the shoot-off between Liliana and Prudence right at the end of Portal Combat. Liliana approached Prudence in Frenemy at the Gates because they were the most alike. Prudence was the one with the first kill of the whole campaign, using Eldritch Blast, against the party's wishes and Corazón's protests specifically - how appropriate would it have been for her to get the last kill of the campaign, with Eldritch Blast, in defense of herself and her party and as retribution for Corazón? But instead, Luke inserted Dob into the standoff and Johnny played into it, even to the absurd extent of letting the skeletons use Time Stop (a 9th Level spell) just to explain why Dob's whole conversation with them could take place faster than Prudence could fire off an eldritch blast. Corazón's self-sacrifice and Merilwen's reveal of her Reincarnation spell was therefore also partially overshadowed by Dob sacrificing his magic for one more hitpoint of damage on Liliana rather than letting Prudence have her moment.
What I hope for: some of the lessons learned from other campaigns to lead the players to be better at taking turns, both in terms of people not trying to be the Main Character at inappropriate moments, players stepping up and into the leading role when it is appropriate for them to do so, and Johnny more actively monitoring the balance between the players and shutting down some of the more egregious behaviour
Morality
This... isn't actually going to be complaining about characters behaving immorally or even being evil. Prudence is honestly a great example of how to play an evil character in a way that doesn't break a party, while Corazón works as being immoral about money but moral about hurting people (at least most of the time). I've also thoroughly enjoyed some other games in which the characters have been far from moral (NADDPOD's Trinyvale series is a good example of this - the characters are scam artists, grifters and egotists, and the DM commented that "character growth doesn't have to be positive!"; they complain the entire time while saving the world).But it's consistency that is more of a sticking point, as well as the player treatment of the moral positions of the party. It's hard to know how to treat the morals of the party when they vary from letting a town burn for being slightly annoying (Mule Be Sorry) to most of the team being ready to forgive a hag who used to eat human(oid) children (Hag Reflex). This isn't just the players either - Stop Hammer Time used the murder of children as a joke, and marked a change in tone for the treatment of NPCs and civilians as not mattering compared to the preferences or comfort of the main characters. The skeletons killing the children wasn't even some sort of monkey's paw scenario about asking for there to be no more orphans in the town, either - it was just nasty shock value, in many ways. And playing this sort of thing for humour makes it quite hard to handle some of the rest of the series as a result.
There also felt like a dissonance, at times, between the objective morality of the characters and how the players seemed to want them to be treated. Prudence never claimed to be anything other than evil, from shooting someone with eldritch blast during the Spicy Rat Caper to enjoying Hammerdahl's necromancy in Extinction - Jane even indicated that she wanted to explore shifting Prudence's alignment post-Fast and the Furriest, which can be seen as Prudence is much less interested in random acts of destruction and seems quite happy to get her kicks scaring or torturing people (Silent Knight) or watching the gruesome spectacle at the end of Knight Shift. So Jane's plans matched Prudence's behaviour - a softening of her deliberately evil acts, but still happy to let others be evil.
For the others, though, it didn't always match. Merilwen's "True Neutral" label often felt more like passively letting her party members be evil, rather than actively seeking balance, Egbert was supposed to be on the search for atonement but regularly allowed or took part in atrocities, and Dob seemed more inclined to act on what the audience or Luke thought was funny (or even deliberately seeking to be contrary) rather than following a consistent attitude to morality. His vaguely annoyed "Skeletons!" and hands on hips in return to "It's orphans, boss" was clearly played for laughs, and in Mule Be Sorry he turns on the town easily, which then makes it feel strange when in Hag Reflex he objects to letting the hag live. Dob's infatuation with Liliana and Katie Pearlhead, both of whom have killed or caused the deaths of great numbers of people, also makes it harder to take his claims to morality at all seriously. The potential moral issues of Merilwen killing the Otherberts to prevent them from taking a message to Liliana (Bad Altitude) is turned into accusing her of "war crimes", but it is absurd in the face of how many other innocent bystanders the guild had killed or caused to die in other stories (from as early as Quiet Riot, in which the paladins were annoying but killing them was honestly overboard, to as late as Squid Pro Quo where Dob seemed to forget that five people had died and then brushed off the deaths).
NPCs also got hit by this at times, from the town mayor in Mule Be Sorry (again) who put his townsfolk on spike growth just to cross it, to the chef in Dine Harder who was abruptly made a cannibal to get a fight going, to the decay of morally Good characters like Captain Shattershield turning away from the Upside Down Mistmire when in his first appearance he had been willing to fight Death itself for being on Mistmire's grounds. It's hard to take seriously moral questions about keeping the Dragon Under Mistmire in its shelter, and the accidentally-caused deaths of two paladins, when the guild has been responsible for much worse.
What I hope for: an approach to morality that does not prioritise momentary humour over consistency; evil behaviour to be acknowledged as evil and owned rather than treated as protagonist-centric; a moral balance which makes it possible to really explore moral issues and concerns rather than extreme behaviour which then makes it impossible to treat conflict seriously. Legacy of Dragons, as a standalone arc seeking Egbert's redemption, exploring the protection vs freedom of the gold dragon, and considering how to improve vs break systems, had some really great potential - but because of extreme 'rule of funny' behaviour in the past, it was impossible to really feel that it had the moral gravitas and weight that it deserved. When the skeletons go from murdering a dozen innocent children (Stop Hammer Time) to giving Merilwen a bad haircut (Mean Gulls) and this is almost treated as somehow consistent in evilness, it makes it harder to respect the characters or the expectation of moral standards.
The Good: The humour, the quick-wittedness, the variety of stories. Roleplaying moments such as Egbert and Shattershield in Legacy of Dragons, Corazón putting his old self behind him at the Curse Hole, or Merilwen saying "I'll make you" to Vex.
The Bad: Unclear character arcs, inconsistent moralities, underpowered classes but at the same time game-breakingly permissive DMing, and some Main Character Syndrome moments.
The Hope: Learning from teething issues and setting up a game system that the DM doesn't resent so much, to better enable people to balance and play off each other in a less jarring and more consistent way.
2024.05.18 19:48 micktalian The Gardens of Deathworlders: A Blooming Love (Part 67)
Part 67 What kind of AI? (Part 1) (Part 65)
[Help support me on Ko-fi so I can try to commission some character art and totally not spend it all on Gundams]
“Yes, goko, I'm taking care of Nula every way I can.” Atxika had just turned off her shower and begun reaching for a towel when she heard Tens's voice. “She isn’t a child, just… Kinda naive, you know. But really smart once she's made aware of something. And I talked to that kahzo-nene gardener who was flirting with her. He seems like a nice enough guy. He's gonna ask her out on a proper date next time she stops by his greenhouse and I'm betting she’ll say yes.”
Though Admiral Atxika had been quite busy with the running of her Matriarch’s First Fleet just as she had always been, she had taken some time to personally ensure Nula'trula had everything a sapient being could desire. Under normal conditions, which these very much were not, one of the hundreds of highly trained members of her command staff would have seen to her new temporary crew member's needs. Room, board, and other such accommodations were usually far below her pay grade and something she could trust to her subordinates to handle. However, in this particular case, things required special attention to guarantee that information security was being upheld to the highest degree possible. While Atxika wanted to satisfy her drive to ensure the digital being bound to a physical form was comfortable, even going so far as to commission a private Roboticist who had taken up shop on The Hammer instead of relying upon the specialists directly under her command, there was a much more paramount concern weighing on her.
As happy as the Admiral was knowing that the artificial sapience under her care was getting along so well in her new body that she had even begun fraternizing, that was not something she had expected nor prepared for. If anything, Atxika had been hoping Nula would go all but unnoticed by the civilians who made up the majority of this ship's permanent population. It hadn't even crossed her mind that the android woman would catch anyone's eyes in that sort of way or that a digital being would or could reciprocate such organic feelings. Just like most other people throughout the galaxy, Atxika was under the impression that sapient AIs, despite how many of them would often gender themselves in manner similar to their creator species, had such foreign and unrecognizable forms of cognition that base biological instincts were simply beyond them. Though Atxika had spent decades of her life directly interacting with digital people as part of her job, even building a sufficient rapport with a few to consider them as friends, not once had she felt like she truly understood any of them in the way she could seemed to intuitively comprehend the motivations of organic beings. With all of that aside, even if an AI could experience love, or at the very least find enjoyment in a temporary fling, Atxika's mind returned to her concerns regarding Nula'trula's unique status brought upon by her relation to another, far less amiable, digital being.
As Atxika quickly toweled herself off, the moisture easily being whisked away from large and muscular body, she was already brainstorming ways to properly approach the rather touchy situation she was now aware of. Nula was created by the same species who birthed one of the most destructive forces that had ever laid waste to the galaxy afterall. While she may be just as friendly and copacetic as any other AI that peacefully lived in the modern day world, and the finer details of Hekuiv'trula Infinite Hegemony and the horrors it brought were largely lost from the public's eye with most considering it ancient history or a myth, that didn't matter. What mattered was the fact that some people, if they were to find out about Nula's origins and existence, would demand her elimination as a potential threat to galactic peace and stability. Regardless of who vouched for her, which government was willing to take her in as a protected citizen, or any promises to ensure she would never become the same kind of threat as her quasi-sentient brother, there would be people calling for her death. Above all else, if the man sitting on the Admiral's bed and lovingly chatting with his grandmother had vowed to protect Nula, then Atxika would do the same.
“Yes, goko, I'll make sure Binko and Hompta give you a call later.” Tens was just wrapping up his conversation with the woman who had raised him to be the noble man he was when Atxika began to stealthily peek through the doorway. When her eyes fell on the shirtless man, his long, dark hair resting unbraided on his chiseled back, the Admiral felt her heart skip a beat, her bioluminescent freckles light up, and her mind went blank except for thoughts of him. “Gbadan npe, goko! Bama pi.”
“Were you on the comms with your grandmother?” Atxika already knew the answer but didn't want to sound like she was eavesdropping.
“Yeah, she wanted to know how Nula was settling into her new body. Considering she's a citizen of the Nishnabe Confederacy now but isn't in a clan yet, my grandma volunteered to be her clan mother until we can take a vote and get her properly adopted.”
“Does…” The Qui’ztar Admiral paused for a moment as she struggled to think of how to ask her next question. “Does your grandmother know of Nula’trula’s… Well… What have you told her?”
“Oh, I didn’t really need to tell her anything.” Though Ten had a sudden urge to play coy with the beautiful woman standing in front of him clad in just a towel that was perfectly short, he also recognized the position Atxika was in and thought better of it. “Goko served as a Chief-Brave in a position roughly equivalent to one of your Sub-Admirals. Her security clearances are even higher than mine, so NAN was able to tell her everything she needed to know. But the only thing she’s concerned about is making sure Nula gets through this mission and is safely delivered to Shkegpewn, assuming we don’t figure out a way to unchain her from her shell before then.”
“I- I did not know that about your grandmother!” Having not had the opportunity to meet Tens's grandmother and only knowing that she was still quite active and spry in the last season of her life, Atxika was both shocked and impressed by that revelation. And while she still felt some apprehension about someone outside of her jurisdiction knowing any sensitive information about Nula, she still let out a deep sigh of relief. “If a Singularity Entity was the one who briefed her, then I have to assume she is more than trustworthy enough to be privy to classified information. However, that still leaves the issue of the gardener.”
“So you were listening to me talk to my goko!” Tens couldn’t stop himself shooting a playful smile and cheeky wink towards Atx that immediately elicited a scowl in return.
“Tens, I am the Fleet Admiral! There is nothing I do not know! And besides that, I need to know about anything that could potentially jeopardize a mission as sensitive as the one concerning Nula’trula. It is absolutely essential that the public at large does not find out that anything related to the Hekuiv’trula Infinitite Hegemony still exists. If people found out that Nula’trula’s brother nearly wiped out all Ascended life, some may see her as a potential threat and seek to cause her harm.”
“Well, I would normally say they’d have to get through me, three planet crackers, and about seven hundred and fifty million apex predator deathworlders first but… Well… No one’s gonna find out. At least not until we make sure of any trace if Nula's brother is destroyed and the galaxy knows that ancient threat is long dead.”
“And what if she discloses that information?”
“Like I told goko, Nula's naive but really smart. She already knows the cover story she and Tarki came up with by heart.”
“I was under the impression that AIs couldn’t lie.”
“I mean…” For just a brief moment, Tens was at a loss for words. He could tell that Atxika was incredibly serious about this and he didn’t want to seem dismissive towards her very real and justifiable concerns. However, the idea that Tarki had come up with, one which Nula seemed to have absolutely no issues with, was so simple that the man feared he would upset his lover, who was also his commanding officer. “Would it really be a lie to say that when she was found and recovered, her shell and data storage systems were in such a state that talking about her past would be difficult, if not impossible? And wouldn’t you consider a history as traumatic as Nula’s to be difficult, if not impossible, to talk about? Even with friends or people she’s grown close to? I wouldn’t say a lie to not talk about something, especially if it’s a sensitive topic.”
“There’s no way-!” Atxika cut herself off while starting to think through that deviously perfect lie that only a lawyer could cook up before redirecting her gaze towards the ceiling and calling out to her flagship’s AI Captain. “Hammer? Did you hear that? Is that the kind of lie an AI could actually tell?”
“Yes, Admiral Atxika.” The immediate response was automatic, a simple unconscious function of the automated subsystems Tylon utilized so that he could respect the individual privacy of the crew, but was quickly followed up by a much more enthusiastic and pleasant tone as the artificial man consciously entered the conversation. “Oh! Yes, actually, that very much will work. I was actually going to include this in my briefing for you this morning, Admiral. And I must agree with Lieutenant Tensebwse, this is not a lie, not even by omission. Nula’trula was severely traumatized by her experiences and, without a doubt, will need years of professional help to fully recover to a proper mental state. After spending some time talking with her again last night and getting a better glimpse of how she reacts to certain… Inputs… Well, I am sad to say that I think I know what kind of Artificial Intelligence she is.”
/---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Hey, Tens!” As soon as Nula's cheerful, soft, and recognizably bark-like voice called out to the Nishnabe warrior as he stepped into the mech bay aboard The Hammer, he turned to see the android in a group with a couple of the Qui’ztar honor guards he had a training session scheduled with, few Kyim’ayik engineers, and one of Singularity Entity 139-621’s mantis-like drone bodies. “I was wondering if it would be ok if I participated in one of your combat simulations today. I already asked Captain Marzima and she told me I needed to get your approval as well.”
“Uh…” Tens shot a quick glance towards Marz who seemed to have a devious smile spread across her lips which made her prominent tusks look even more pronounced. “Yeah… Learning to operate a BD is pretty easy and I'm sure your new body can properly interact with the controls. It should take less than an hour for you to figure it out well enough. So… Sure, I have no problem with that.”
“Oh, I already got some practice time during my charging cycle last night.” The ornate micro paneling that constituted Nula's face distorted into a devilish and predatory grin. “139 and Tylon thought it may help me work through some things and they were right! It was really fun!”
“It will also be good experience for our upcoming mission.” 139 added in an almost proud tone. “We will need Nula on the ground with us at every stage to ensure we can rapidly react to and possibly shut down any Hekuiv'trula systems that may still be active. We may be soldiers but none of us, including myself, are as familiar with Artuv'trula based systems as Nula.”
“Hold on!” The Nishnabe warrior couldn't stop himself from letting his overly protective side kick in at full force. “What the hell do you mean she needs to get on the ground with us?!? I thought we were supposed to keep her and the Turts safe, not actively put either of them in harm's way!”
“She will be kept safe, Tensebwse.” The pride remained in 139's inflection as their ever-shifting liquid metal visage turned towards Tens. “I am constructing her an up-armored and slightly modified BD-6 as we speak. She will be our electronic warfare support.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“Yes.” There was no hesitation in the Singularity Entity’s response, but a subtle note of ambivalence started to sneak through. “One of the reasons the War of Eons lasted as long as it did was because we were simply unable to crack the carrier code that Hekuiv'trula used to control his warforms. Even with the assistance of two Light-born AIs, one purposefully created for the task, we were never able to do much more than block out remote control. And with each warform having a limited form of independence capable of networking with nearby systems, all we could really do was prevent interplanetary coordination. But with Nula present, there's a very real possibility of cracking the encryption and fully taking over control of any still existing Hekuiv'trula warforms or defense systems.”
“No offense Nula but…” As soon as Tens saw his android friend's smile had turned into a melancholy expression, he hesitated. If two Light-born AI couldn’t defeat Hekuiv'trula, a non-sapient AI created by a species who hadn't even Ascended yet, what could Nula do? Even if Tylon, The Hammer's Captain and the controller for the entire fleet, was correct in his assessment concerning the category of sapient AI that Nuka fell into, there was no way she could be anywhere near as powerful as someone like Maser. However, that look on her face was quite familiar to him. Though he very much wanted to ensure that she would live a long and happy life, he also wasn't one to stand in the way of someone who wanted to do the right thing and help others.
“Tens…” Nula's smile, as well as her slightly dejected demeanor, had fully faded and the look of sheer determination that filled the space was unmistakable. “I know you want to keep me safe and I truly appreciate that. I really do. But it would be wrong for me to sit idly by while you, Melatropa, Marzima, and the rest of the Angels risked your lives to rid this galaxy of my evil brother's diabolical machinations. If I can help in any way, I absolutely will. Even if that means putting my own continued existence at risk.”
“I think I know why 139 sounded so proud a minute ago.” As soon as Tens made the comment, his grin grew wide and devilish while the doubts he was feeling instantly began to fade away. For a split second, he wondered if this was how his own parents had felt when he told them he was joining the Nishnabe Militia. “Alright, Nula… If you want to be a warrior and fight the good fight, then who am I to stand in your way? Lieutenant Luitatxuva's mech is open, right Marz?”
“Yes it is.” The Qui’ztar Captain replied, her devilish smirk remaining just as pronounced as it had been this entire time. “And Nula’trula here won't need to bond with control-AI since… Well… She is one. Ah-haha!”
“Thank you, Tens! I won't disappoint you!” Though that look of heartfelt resolve remained, Nula's smile returned with a subtle coyness to it. “And you're not mad at me, right?”
“Eee! I could never get mad at that face!” Tens retorted while shaking his head and letting out a soft chuckle which caused the artificial canine woman to begin bouncing in place while softly clapping her polymer and metal hands. “Besides… We actually really could use an electronic warfare expert. I just thought 139 could provide that for us. Your honor guard are truly impressive warriors, Marz. And you know way more about digital systems than I do, Mela. But… Well… BDs were never intended to fill that role.”
“Despite how I may look, Tensebwse, I am a soldier, not a digital systems expert.” Despite 139’s metallic insectoid form, their smirk was incredibly familiar to everyone in the group. “You would have better luck asking one of these Kyim’ayik engineers to develop digital countermeasures on the fly then you would with me.”
“And I may have studied computers and robotics in school but…” Melatropa let out a deep but soft and subtly embarrassed giggle as she looked over towards the massive multi-barreled laser cannon that rested next to her mech's weapons bay. “I am far better at shooting things than I am hacking into systems older than my species.”
“Alright, Nula, it's settled. Go hop in that mech so we can start practicing. If you're going to be on the ground with us, I need to know you can handle yourself. Just be sure to bring some weapons so you can fight back if we get separated.”
“Oh, I already have a load out in mind. And I think you'll love it, Tens!”
submitted by micktalian to HFY [link] [comments]
[Help support me on Ko-fi so I can try to commission some character art and totally not spend it all on Gundams]
“Yes, goko, I'm taking care of Nula every way I can.” Atxika had just turned off her shower and begun reaching for a towel when she heard Tens's voice. “She isn’t a child, just… Kinda naive, you know. But really smart once she's made aware of something. And I talked to that kahzo-nene gardener who was flirting with her. He seems like a nice enough guy. He's gonna ask her out on a proper date next time she stops by his greenhouse and I'm betting she’ll say yes.”
Though Admiral Atxika had been quite busy with the running of her Matriarch’s First Fleet just as she had always been, she had taken some time to personally ensure Nula'trula had everything a sapient being could desire. Under normal conditions, which these very much were not, one of the hundreds of highly trained members of her command staff would have seen to her new temporary crew member's needs. Room, board, and other such accommodations were usually far below her pay grade and something she could trust to her subordinates to handle. However, in this particular case, things required special attention to guarantee that information security was being upheld to the highest degree possible. While Atxika wanted to satisfy her drive to ensure the digital being bound to a physical form was comfortable, even going so far as to commission a private Roboticist who had taken up shop on The Hammer instead of relying upon the specialists directly under her command, there was a much more paramount concern weighing on her.
As happy as the Admiral was knowing that the artificial sapience under her care was getting along so well in her new body that she had even begun fraternizing, that was not something she had expected nor prepared for. If anything, Atxika had been hoping Nula would go all but unnoticed by the civilians who made up the majority of this ship's permanent population. It hadn't even crossed her mind that the android woman would catch anyone's eyes in that sort of way or that a digital being would or could reciprocate such organic feelings. Just like most other people throughout the galaxy, Atxika was under the impression that sapient AIs, despite how many of them would often gender themselves in manner similar to their creator species, had such foreign and unrecognizable forms of cognition that base biological instincts were simply beyond them. Though Atxika had spent decades of her life directly interacting with digital people as part of her job, even building a sufficient rapport with a few to consider them as friends, not once had she felt like she truly understood any of them in the way she could seemed to intuitively comprehend the motivations of organic beings. With all of that aside, even if an AI could experience love, or at the very least find enjoyment in a temporary fling, Atxika's mind returned to her concerns regarding Nula'trula's unique status brought upon by her relation to another, far less amiable, digital being.
As Atxika quickly toweled herself off, the moisture easily being whisked away from large and muscular body, she was already brainstorming ways to properly approach the rather touchy situation she was now aware of. Nula was created by the same species who birthed one of the most destructive forces that had ever laid waste to the galaxy afterall. While she may be just as friendly and copacetic as any other AI that peacefully lived in the modern day world, and the finer details of Hekuiv'trula Infinite Hegemony and the horrors it brought were largely lost from the public's eye with most considering it ancient history or a myth, that didn't matter. What mattered was the fact that some people, if they were to find out about Nula's origins and existence, would demand her elimination as a potential threat to galactic peace and stability. Regardless of who vouched for her, which government was willing to take her in as a protected citizen, or any promises to ensure she would never become the same kind of threat as her quasi-sentient brother, there would be people calling for her death. Above all else, if the man sitting on the Admiral's bed and lovingly chatting with his grandmother had vowed to protect Nula, then Atxika would do the same.
“Yes, goko, I'll make sure Binko and Hompta give you a call later.” Tens was just wrapping up his conversation with the woman who had raised him to be the noble man he was when Atxika began to stealthily peek through the doorway. When her eyes fell on the shirtless man, his long, dark hair resting unbraided on his chiseled back, the Admiral felt her heart skip a beat, her bioluminescent freckles light up, and her mind went blank except for thoughts of him. “Gbadan npe, goko! Bama pi.”
“Were you on the comms with your grandmother?” Atxika already knew the answer but didn't want to sound like she was eavesdropping.
“Yeah, she wanted to know how Nula was settling into her new body. Considering she's a citizen of the Nishnabe Confederacy now but isn't in a clan yet, my grandma volunteered to be her clan mother until we can take a vote and get her properly adopted.”
“Does…” The Qui’ztar Admiral paused for a moment as she struggled to think of how to ask her next question. “Does your grandmother know of Nula’trula’s… Well… What have you told her?”
“Oh, I didn’t really need to tell her anything.” Though Ten had a sudden urge to play coy with the beautiful woman standing in front of him clad in just a towel that was perfectly short, he also recognized the position Atxika was in and thought better of it. “Goko served as a Chief-Brave in a position roughly equivalent to one of your Sub-Admirals. Her security clearances are even higher than mine, so NAN was able to tell her everything she needed to know. But the only thing she’s concerned about is making sure Nula gets through this mission and is safely delivered to Shkegpewn, assuming we don’t figure out a way to unchain her from her shell before then.”
“I- I did not know that about your grandmother!” Having not had the opportunity to meet Tens's grandmother and only knowing that she was still quite active and spry in the last season of her life, Atxika was both shocked and impressed by that revelation. And while she still felt some apprehension about someone outside of her jurisdiction knowing any sensitive information about Nula, she still let out a deep sigh of relief. “If a Singularity Entity was the one who briefed her, then I have to assume she is more than trustworthy enough to be privy to classified information. However, that still leaves the issue of the gardener.”
“So you were listening to me talk to my goko!” Tens couldn’t stop himself shooting a playful smile and cheeky wink towards Atx that immediately elicited a scowl in return.
“Tens, I am the Fleet Admiral! There is nothing I do not know! And besides that, I need to know about anything that could potentially jeopardize a mission as sensitive as the one concerning Nula’trula. It is absolutely essential that the public at large does not find out that anything related to the Hekuiv’trula Infinitite Hegemony still exists. If people found out that Nula’trula’s brother nearly wiped out all Ascended life, some may see her as a potential threat and seek to cause her harm.”
“Well, I would normally say they’d have to get through me, three planet crackers, and about seven hundred and fifty million apex predator deathworlders first but… Well… No one’s gonna find out. At least not until we make sure of any trace if Nula's brother is destroyed and the galaxy knows that ancient threat is long dead.”
“And what if she discloses that information?”
“Like I told goko, Nula's naive but really smart. She already knows the cover story she and Tarki came up with by heart.”
“I was under the impression that AIs couldn’t lie.”
“I mean…” For just a brief moment, Tens was at a loss for words. He could tell that Atxika was incredibly serious about this and he didn’t want to seem dismissive towards her very real and justifiable concerns. However, the idea that Tarki had come up with, one which Nula seemed to have absolutely no issues with, was so simple that the man feared he would upset his lover, who was also his commanding officer. “Would it really be a lie to say that when she was found and recovered, her shell and data storage systems were in such a state that talking about her past would be difficult, if not impossible? And wouldn’t you consider a history as traumatic as Nula’s to be difficult, if not impossible, to talk about? Even with friends or people she’s grown close to? I wouldn’t say a lie to not talk about something, especially if it’s a sensitive topic.”
“There’s no way-!” Atxika cut herself off while starting to think through that deviously perfect lie that only a lawyer could cook up before redirecting her gaze towards the ceiling and calling out to her flagship’s AI Captain. “Hammer? Did you hear that? Is that the kind of lie an AI could actually tell?”
“Yes, Admiral Atxika.” The immediate response was automatic, a simple unconscious function of the automated subsystems Tylon utilized so that he could respect the individual privacy of the crew, but was quickly followed up by a much more enthusiastic and pleasant tone as the artificial man consciously entered the conversation. “Oh! Yes, actually, that very much will work. I was actually going to include this in my briefing for you this morning, Admiral. And I must agree with Lieutenant Tensebwse, this is not a lie, not even by omission. Nula’trula was severely traumatized by her experiences and, without a doubt, will need years of professional help to fully recover to a proper mental state. After spending some time talking with her again last night and getting a better glimpse of how she reacts to certain… Inputs… Well, I am sad to say that I think I know what kind of Artificial Intelligence she is.”
/---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Hey, Tens!” As soon as Nula's cheerful, soft, and recognizably bark-like voice called out to the Nishnabe warrior as he stepped into the mech bay aboard The Hammer, he turned to see the android in a group with a couple of the Qui’ztar honor guards he had a training session scheduled with, few Kyim’ayik engineers, and one of Singularity Entity 139-621’s mantis-like drone bodies. “I was wondering if it would be ok if I participated in one of your combat simulations today. I already asked Captain Marzima and she told me I needed to get your approval as well.”
“Uh…” Tens shot a quick glance towards Marz who seemed to have a devious smile spread across her lips which made her prominent tusks look even more pronounced. “Yeah… Learning to operate a BD is pretty easy and I'm sure your new body can properly interact with the controls. It should take less than an hour for you to figure it out well enough. So… Sure, I have no problem with that.”
“Oh, I already got some practice time during my charging cycle last night.” The ornate micro paneling that constituted Nula's face distorted into a devilish and predatory grin. “139 and Tylon thought it may help me work through some things and they were right! It was really fun!”
“It will also be good experience for our upcoming mission.” 139 added in an almost proud tone. “We will need Nula on the ground with us at every stage to ensure we can rapidly react to and possibly shut down any Hekuiv'trula systems that may still be active. We may be soldiers but none of us, including myself, are as familiar with Artuv'trula based systems as Nula.”
“Hold on!” The Nishnabe warrior couldn't stop himself from letting his overly protective side kick in at full force. “What the hell do you mean she needs to get on the ground with us?!? I thought we were supposed to keep her and the Turts safe, not actively put either of them in harm's way!”
“She will be kept safe, Tensebwse.” The pride remained in 139's inflection as their ever-shifting liquid metal visage turned towards Tens. “I am constructing her an up-armored and slightly modified BD-6 as we speak. She will be our electronic warfare support.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“Yes.” There was no hesitation in the Singularity Entity’s response, but a subtle note of ambivalence started to sneak through. “One of the reasons the War of Eons lasted as long as it did was because we were simply unable to crack the carrier code that Hekuiv'trula used to control his warforms. Even with the assistance of two Light-born AIs, one purposefully created for the task, we were never able to do much more than block out remote control. And with each warform having a limited form of independence capable of networking with nearby systems, all we could really do was prevent interplanetary coordination. But with Nula present, there's a very real possibility of cracking the encryption and fully taking over control of any still existing Hekuiv'trula warforms or defense systems.”
“No offense Nula but…” As soon as Tens saw his android friend's smile had turned into a melancholy expression, he hesitated. If two Light-born AI couldn’t defeat Hekuiv'trula, a non-sapient AI created by a species who hadn't even Ascended yet, what could Nula do? Even if Tylon, The Hammer's Captain and the controller for the entire fleet, was correct in his assessment concerning the category of sapient AI that Nuka fell into, there was no way she could be anywhere near as powerful as someone like Maser. However, that look on her face was quite familiar to him. Though he very much wanted to ensure that she would live a long and happy life, he also wasn't one to stand in the way of someone who wanted to do the right thing and help others.
“Tens…” Nula's smile, as well as her slightly dejected demeanor, had fully faded and the look of sheer determination that filled the space was unmistakable. “I know you want to keep me safe and I truly appreciate that. I really do. But it would be wrong for me to sit idly by while you, Melatropa, Marzima, and the rest of the Angels risked your lives to rid this galaxy of my evil brother's diabolical machinations. If I can help in any way, I absolutely will. Even if that means putting my own continued existence at risk.”
“I think I know why 139 sounded so proud a minute ago.” As soon as Tens made the comment, his grin grew wide and devilish while the doubts he was feeling instantly began to fade away. For a split second, he wondered if this was how his own parents had felt when he told them he was joining the Nishnabe Militia. “Alright, Nula… If you want to be a warrior and fight the good fight, then who am I to stand in your way? Lieutenant Luitatxuva's mech is open, right Marz?”
“Yes it is.” The Qui’ztar Captain replied, her devilish smirk remaining just as pronounced as it had been this entire time. “And Nula’trula here won't need to bond with control-AI since… Well… She is one. Ah-haha!”
“Thank you, Tens! I won't disappoint you!” Though that look of heartfelt resolve remained, Nula's smile returned with a subtle coyness to it. “And you're not mad at me, right?”
“Eee! I could never get mad at that face!” Tens retorted while shaking his head and letting out a soft chuckle which caused the artificial canine woman to begin bouncing in place while softly clapping her polymer and metal hands. “Besides… We actually really could use an electronic warfare expert. I just thought 139 could provide that for us. Your honor guard are truly impressive warriors, Marz. And you know way more about digital systems than I do, Mela. But… Well… BDs were never intended to fill that role.”
“Despite how I may look, Tensebwse, I am a soldier, not a digital systems expert.” Despite 139’s metallic insectoid form, their smirk was incredibly familiar to everyone in the group. “You would have better luck asking one of these Kyim’ayik engineers to develop digital countermeasures on the fly then you would with me.”
“And I may have studied computers and robotics in school but…” Melatropa let out a deep but soft and subtly embarrassed giggle as she looked over towards the massive multi-barreled laser cannon that rested next to her mech's weapons bay. “I am far better at shooting things than I am hacking into systems older than my species.”
“Alright, Nula, it's settled. Go hop in that mech so we can start practicing. If you're going to be on the ground with us, I need to know you can handle yourself. Just be sure to bring some weapons so you can fight back if we get separated.”
“Oh, I already have a load out in mind. And I think you'll love it, Tens!”
2024.05.18 19:25 Davido400 Sex education in school for girls
I've wrestled for about 2 months with posting/asking this, A: cause am a guy and B: my 10 year old Niece is a total lunatic! Anyways, storytime:
Was sitting in my Sisters house doing the Uncle babysitting duties, ive got disabled Scottish guy, and one of my duties on a Thursday is to make sure my 2 nieces(10 and 4) get ready for Gymnastics so that when my sister has finished work it's a simple job for her to just walk downstairs(she's WFH) and throw us all in her car, run me home(on the way to Gymnastics) and off they go. I digress, anyways so I'm sitting watching telly as the two girls are upstairs supposed to be getting ready, all I have to really do is shout up to make sure they've showered themselves they are pretty independent and able to do all the icky girl stuff they need to do, but the 10 year old came downstairs that night, my sister was sitting on her phone next to me, and I just innocently asked: are you showered and ready?
She gave me a withering look that only a child could give to an adult and then grinned and said "well, I've washed my hair, my body and my vulva" now, am a man of the world, am hitting 40 this year, ave not had a religious nutter education but that made me pause and have a face like a gutted fish, I stuttered like a moron for like 2 seconds(which was clearly the little witches reason for saying it that way) then I asked her where she learned that? And she apparently got it from School Sex Ed. I knew they got all that quite early because when she was in Primary 1 or 2(Grade 1 and 2 for my American Cousins, I think) her wee pal next to her coloured a diagram/picture of a penis blue and she asked her "do you think that's appropriate?"
Anyways, I didn't realise they learned all this stuff in school these days and I'm happy with it, even if the wee witch weaponises her knowledge against me haha, and was wondering if you women got anything similar or just like mine which was a "a woman has a vagina and boys have a little bit more called a urethra"(it was genuinely a sentence like that) followed by an educational video which was just a missionary position porn lol, this is bringing up mad memories of what I remember. Anyways, it's almost half past 6pm and I'm gonna be a good wee Scotsman and get absolutely blootered(drunk) if this isn't allowed feel free to delete it.
Oh and the reason I've put this in a female sub rather than a unisex is cause it involves my two little psycho nieces and cause am a guy I feel it's a bit pointless asking fellow guys!
Have a good day/night/afternoon and remember and line your stomach when you drink!
submitted by Davido400 to TwoXChromosomes [link] [comments]
Was sitting in my Sisters house doing the Uncle babysitting duties, ive got disabled Scottish guy, and one of my duties on a Thursday is to make sure my 2 nieces(10 and 4) get ready for Gymnastics so that when my sister has finished work it's a simple job for her to just walk downstairs(she's WFH) and throw us all in her car, run me home(on the way to Gymnastics) and off they go. I digress, anyways so I'm sitting watching telly as the two girls are upstairs supposed to be getting ready, all I have to really do is shout up to make sure they've showered themselves they are pretty independent and able to do all the icky girl stuff they need to do, but the 10 year old came downstairs that night, my sister was sitting on her phone next to me, and I just innocently asked: are you showered and ready?
She gave me a withering look that only a child could give to an adult and then grinned and said "well, I've washed my hair, my body and my vulva" now, am a man of the world, am hitting 40 this year, ave not had a religious nutter education but that made me pause and have a face like a gutted fish, I stuttered like a moron for like 2 seconds(which was clearly the little witches reason for saying it that way) then I asked her where she learned that? And she apparently got it from School Sex Ed. I knew they got all that quite early because when she was in Primary 1 or 2(Grade 1 and 2 for my American Cousins, I think) her wee pal next to her coloured a diagram/picture of a penis blue and she asked her "do you think that's appropriate?"
Anyways, I didn't realise they learned all this stuff in school these days and I'm happy with it, even if the wee witch weaponises her knowledge against me haha, and was wondering if you women got anything similar or just like mine which was a "a woman has a vagina and boys have a little bit more called a urethra"(it was genuinely a sentence like that) followed by an educational video which was just a missionary position porn lol, this is bringing up mad memories of what I remember. Anyways, it's almost half past 6pm and I'm gonna be a good wee Scotsman and get absolutely blootered(drunk) if this isn't allowed feel free to delete it.
Oh and the reason I've put this in a female sub rather than a unisex is cause it involves my two little psycho nieces and cause am a guy I feel it's a bit pointless asking fellow guys!
Have a good day/night/afternoon and remember and line your stomach when you drink!
2024.05.18 19:13 CatherineL1031 The Beginning of my Descent [Lorepost Part 3]
![The Beginning of my Descent [Lorepost Part 3]](https://preview.redd.it/8c06qddww71d1.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=6bbe7ddd2b8b39cfcd833a7fb4252a0169ab6677 "The Beginning of my Descent [Lorepost Part 3]") | Hello again everyone, I’ve decided to put the baking tips here this time. This is one that has been a huge help for me when it comes to cutting cakes. It’s much easier and cleaner to cut a cake when it’s been chilled for a few hours. So, once your cake has baked and firmed up in the pan (about 15-20 minutes, you want to make sure it’s set but still slightly malleable), take it out, let it come to room temperature, and then cover with foil or plastic or something to prevent it from drying in the fridge. Let it cook for a few hours to finish solidifying, and then cut. Also, if you have the means, a sheet cake cooks and cools a lot faster and more evenly and a cutter can be used to make perfect even circles. submitted by CatherineL1031 to wizardposting [link] [comments] Now, it’s a bit strange to start with the baking tips, I know. But, those are saved as a reward for making your way through my ramblings about youth and glory and adventures. This time, I wanted to put it here as a sort of apology for what’s to come. The last two stories have been very positive, very upbeat, very fun. However, the next century of my life I’m about to share with you all… I wouldn’t blame any of you if you looked at me differently, I’ll just say that. I’ll stop beating around the bush, and get right to the point. So, my immortality was secure, I’d have my perfect body for as long as time existed or until I was killed by a stronger, more capable opponent. I had a good group of friends who knew they could depend on me whenever they needed help with something, and I got to kick the ass of a lich! I had accomplished so much in just over 100 years of life, and now I had a supposedly infinite amount of it to spare if I played my cards right! I felt unstoppable, and wanted to help others like I had helped my companions. I became a mercenary, a witch for hire for adventures that might be too dangerous for parties. I stopped lying about my strengths, making sure it was known I held Master rank in two magic fields. Most people do not like to play the role of support, and it’s never a bad idea to have extra healing, so I started to hone my craft in Healing and Protection magic as well. I was a force to be reckoned with, and I would make sure the world knew it! I had wished to continue adventuring with my previous companions, but each of them had decided to take their own path in life. Har decided to take a more involved approach with his church, Ralin returned home to overtake her brother as chief of her clan, and Vex was heading back to the mountains to further hone her building expertise and learn to become an artificer for enchanting! It was sad parting ways, we had been together for such a short time but we had accomplished something so impressive! Oh well, that’s life, you know? I made them promise to keep in touch, and we did for the most part! Har became a bit hard to reach at times due to moving around, so it was always a treat to see him when I could. Anyways, I soon began to gain some fame. I was a topic of conversation now who had been promoted to expert in the matter of a month after I helped some newbies on their quests. I was someone who everyone knew was dependable and talented. Best of all, I was a cutie, and everyone loves to have a cute witch on their team! I had all but abandoned my previous life’s calling in favor of glory seeking, which is something I still look back on with regret. I was becoming more selfish, more focused on building myself up instead of using my powers for the good of those who might not be able to ever have access to these powers. The Phoenix Rebirth had become a popular spell among us in the community, though, so people were still getting help. I had published it free to all magic shops, all magical teachers, even sent the entire process and methods for casting it through the OrbNet before I left to go on my mission to fight the lich. I just wanted to be sure it was in the world, pending the potential worst. It was at a huge loss, but it has now become the platform by which a lot of Gender spells are cast, so it was all worth it. My time as an adventurer was amazing, I met so many cool people, fought so many horrifying and awesome beasts, even got to kiss a dragon! They don’t have lips, so it’s not the best kiss, but it’s still something worth bragging about. I felt so good helping people in a different way, and I was becoming more and more popular through the years. I was now Catherine, Lady of Flames, Master of Forms, a stable in the adventuring party call list. It felt amazing. The excitement lasted for about 15 years of being called to help on missions, but then it was quickly soured after a single mission. Nobody mentions this, but once you become a powerful enough fighter, you start to garner the attention of those in need of protecting. This is definitely not a bad thing, especially when it is someone who is in genuine need of it, but that is not usually the case. Particularly, you garner the attention of the wealthy, who believe all problems can be solved with money. I would liken them to devils or demons, but that isn’t fair to them…devils and demons at least have codes they follow. Anyways, one such noble approached me. Well, not actually her, one of the elves she had employed in her service. Her name was Duchess Cordelia, Lady of Farlon, Heir to the Rose Throne, Daughter of Zavier Goradel and Collector of Fine Arts. Yes, she made you say each one of those every time you addressed her, and in the correct order. She was…there’s a word I don’t like to use to describe her, a word that to me is very offensive but to others means nothing. I’m sure you can guess the word of which I speak, I simply refuse to say it outloud. She was, though, and a massive one at that. She had called upon me after an omen in the sky had warned her of an invasion by some of the forces of hell. It was something we all saw, and while it was a terrifying experience, I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t the coolest and most spectacular shit I had ever seen. Whoever had cast it had placed some illusion magic to make the sun look like a flaming skull that called specifically her and her family out. I still remember what it said because it was just that cool. ‘Cordelia, Zavier, Helena…you have toyed with forces beyond your control, and for that you will be punished…My legions will march on your town, turning it and everything your pathetic hands have dared to touch into naught but a fine ash. You cannot stop me. You cannot persuade me. You cannot survive…’ and then it was over, the sun was back to normal. Fucking baller move, right? That’s how you threaten some assholes’ life! So, I was called, along with Magnus Haradel and Desdamona Torres. Magnus was another high ranking member of the guild, an older Drow chap who still remains the most talented sword wielder I’d ever seen. His white hair was always tied into a neat bun, and he dressed simply. His armor was enchanted, but looked similar to any generic armor you could buy. He held a very respectable air about him, a sense of power that told anyone he could easily defeat them, but a calming sense that assured them he would only do it if he was threatened. Mona was an alchemist who concocted and brewed the strangest potions I had ever seen. Some of them would cause an opponent to explode, some would freeze them in place, some when opened and poured onto the ground summoned these giant venus fly-trap looking creatures with razor sharp teeth that would devour whatever she commanded. She was a half-goblin, parents being a full goblin and an elf. Their genes worked together very well, because Mona herself was truly stunning. She has black hair, lime green skin, and wore a long back robe that flowed down her slender body. More impressive, however, was that she was Archmage levels in her Alchemical field, the highest one could get back in the day. It was our job to protect Cordelia and her parents, Zavier and Helena. They would not share any information with us about what they had done, how it had pissed something off, or what to expect, but they did tell us we’d be ‘handsomely compensated should you survive’. Assholes…we needed information to do our job! Holes in information leads to holes in strategy, holes in strategy leads to unnecessary risk, and unnecessary risk leads to uncertainty and potential death! Ugh, whatever, it was just one job, then hopefully we’d never have to deal with them again and they’d descend into obscurity. So, the job was set. Magnus, Mona and I got better acquainted with each other and started to plan our defensive means and offensive responses. We had no idea what we were facing, how many it would be, where it would be coming from, or when! We had one of the five answers we desperately needed, so we had to do the best we could. Magnus suggested we employ the help of additional adventurers; clerics, paladins and the like who are good at protecting and supporting. Their job would be to round up the town to a safe location and watch over them until one of us gave the all clear. Mona and I agreed, and I decided to spread the word that the people needed to be taken to safety and guarded until whatever was going to happen had happened; he did threaten the entire population, so better to be safe. Mona started to lay a protective parameter around the Goradel mansion in the form of explosive concoctions that seeped into the ground and bottles of Acid Arrow that, when broken, would attack the nearest hostile creature. She had also managed to brew a few potions of invisibility for the townsfolk, given the guards potions of strength, mana regeneration, health regeneration and spell boosting, and gave herself, myself and Magnus potions of regeneration, potions of Free Casting (basically downing one allows you just have a reserve of mana to pull from without worry), and potions of Iron Skin that would give us amazing defense without slowing us down. She was a really, really talented Alchemist, even crazier was that she was only 30, very young for a half-elf/half-goblin. She definitely had a gift. I, meanwhile, decided to try something new. I had been toying around with a few things in my off-time, and with my knowledge of Shifting Magics I decided to try out something that could prove beneficial. I had come across many beasts in my time, some of them easy to understand and study, others so wildly complicated that it took me years of dissecting, studying and charting to get a solid understanding of what the hell was going on internally. I had taken some lessons from Grandmaster and Archmage Shifter’s who were willing to teach, and with enough practice I was finally able to harness the form of other, less common creatures! I had mastered the standard offensive animal forms like tiger, wolf, bear and eagle, but didn’t know how dangerous our targets were going to be, so I decided that we needed to go hard, fast, and leave no possible room for error. I downed the two bottles of Free Casting that Mona has brewed, and began my shift. I had again mixed my Phoenix Rebirth with these form changes, so the only pain I was receiving was to my mana pools. However, thanks to Mona’s amazing abilities, I was able to shift without trouble! I got down on all fours, and soon my size began to expand. My teeth turned from their normal human color to a stained and dark brown. My face started to extend forward into a muzzle, my teeth being replaced by sharp, deadly fangs. My canines extended further than the rest, creating a deadly row of fangs. My lips retracted back, and my face began to turn scaly and red as my face became more and more canine. The only thing unchanged on my face was my eyes, as they were my Keepsake (many Shifters have a certain aspect of themselves they keep permanent, no matter what, to remind themselves of their true form). The scales continued down, a large, fleshy tail sprouting from my back and extending out. From snout to tail, I was now 30 feet in size, but I was not yet finished. The scales extended down my whole body, but they looked more like regular sinew and flesh as my body was covered in a protective coat of blood red scales. My legs began to crack and bend as muscle appeared to support my now larger weight and size, and my toes extended a double set of claws on each foot. The form was complete, now for one final touch. All across my red tail, bones began to jut out like my sharpened fangs, covering it from my hindquarters to the very tip of my tail. It was definitely an easy target should something decide to attack my tail, but the shards and spikes allowed me to slice through weaker enemies that dare to try. Even better, I could slam my tail against the ground to loosen some of the shards and fling them towards my target. I was a true beast, an imperfect dragon known as a fanged drake. While not near as strong as a true dragon, I had seen first-hand the damage and strength they possess, and now it was all mine. Magic was a bit harder to cast in this form, but I still had access to Apprentice level Pyromancy and some support spells like Enhance Speed, Feather Fall and Enhance Ability. The stage was set, we were ready to fight whatever came our way. Magnus had enchanted his greatsword with every enchantment he could cast without overloading it, Mona held potions in her hands, and I stood at the front, smoke coming from my body as I waited. We were ready, we were going to defend these poor villagers and the shitty people who barely even gave a shit about their safety! We waited, and waited, and waited. Seems I had used my change too early, and turning back would just be a waste of mana, so I decided to travel into town and help with carrying or leading others to safety. I had modified the vocal cords of this beast to be more in-line with standard humanoid ones, so it allowed me to speak. It was just not very fun, given my voice was incredibly gruff and deep due to the creature's size. I ran to the guards, my now muscular legs allowing me to jump great distances, my long claws able to help me climb with relative ease. It didn't take long to find the groups and their protectors as they were leaving town. I jumped down to check and make sure everything was okay, and even got to meet Har again! He looked so much more mature, his black hair and green eyes showing a bit of age, but it seemed he was happy. We used a few minutes of walking time to catch up, and I got to hear all about his journey. After our mission, he made it his job to find undead who had been driven mad, and help them see the light again. He had seen many undead who had been brought back against their will, and many who suffered purely because they weren't allowed a choice in their rest being disturbed. He had helped them find peace, shown them the light of Theia, his goddess, and allowed them to return to their peaceful slumber in their designated afterlife. He had even married the cute man at the bar that I had convinced him to chat up, and they had a daughter named Athena! Apparently she was 7 years old and the sweetest thing, according to Har. I told him he better let me visit her once this was all over, and he happily accepted. Our sweet reunion was cut short, however, as the clouds in the night sky started to swirl and gather. Once again we saw the decrepit and harrowing skull that we had seen yesterday appear again. Except, this time it didn't talk. It merely let out an ear-splitting screech that rattled your very soul. A few of the people were so terrified they had fainted, so I yelled at them to carry all they could, and run! Fast! They were quick to agree, those who could carry grabbing the unconscious and those from my back with haste so that I could rush back to the mansion. I arrived right in the nick of time to see absolute hell spewing from the mouth of this skull. We heard horrid shrieks and cries of birds, the hissing roars of giant snakes, and the unholy screams of Abyssal Spiders. The birds were like Corvids, but towering in height. They easily reached 30 feet in size, their beaks sharpened and rigged with teeth-like bumps running down the entirety of their beaks. Their eye sockets were sunken and shallow, small eyes giving off a haunting and piercing glow. Parts of their body showed their exposed, fleshy bodies underneath. Their skin was red, and covered with scars, exposed bone and sinew from what looked to be countless battles. The snakes were unlike anything I've ever seen, they were black and blue striped, with arms and legs, and stood upright! They were not as tall as the Corvids, only measuring 15 feet tall, but they possessed a whip-like tail that flowed almost the same length as their bodies. Their mouths oozed a green venom that coated their fangs, and their necks were able to flare into hoods like a cobra. Finally, were the spiders. Along with being giant, like the size of a Clydesdale giant, they possessed hundreds of eyes across their entire body. Their fangs dripped with venom, and thick hairs were present across their entire bodies. Each hair on their back was able to pierce skin and inject with the same poison in their fangs, and their webs were known to carry a necrotic slime that would eat away at skin. We definitely had our work cut out for us, this horde of creatures was coming right for the Goradel residence and they were ready to kill anything and everything in their path. The crows rushed through, their massive size crushing smaller houses and easily breaking through larger ones that were in their way. The spiders simply crawled over them, leaving a trail of webs and venom in their wake, and the snakes…apparently their tails were going to be quite the problem, as not only were they long, they were sharp enough to slice trees, wildlife and building cleanly with just a single slice of the tail. We were truly, without a doubt, up a fucking creek with this one. We sprang into action as quickly as we could. We saw our foes pouring out, and our objective was simple protection of the village, her people, and the asshole nobles that caused all this. I ran right towards the spiders, knowing that they were the threat that could cause the most damage with their necrotic webs and flesh-melting venom. The smoke coming from my mouth started to turn black as I approached one of them, letting out a blast of fire from my mouth that quickly set it and its attempted web in flames. It shrieked as it skittered and writhed in pain, trying to attack me in retaliation. I was quick to slice one of its legs off with my claws, and sink my teeth into the back of its head. It gave a few more twitches and finally fell still. I threw it to the side as I continued doing my best to draw them towards a common area, minimizing the potential risk of them running out of town and tracking down the other parties currently in hiding. It worked very well, as once they notice a threat, they will continue to attack! The problem was, it worked very well, and once they noticed a threat they would continue to attack until it died! The horde of spiders was gaining on me, all I could do was use some flames to burn the webs they attempted to ensnare me with and use my claws to slice any that came from the front. I was not doing well by any means, but I was now at least within sight of my companions. My joy was quickly cut short as I felt a burning string of web wraps itself around my tail. I had gotten careless, and was definitely paying the price. If you’ve never been hit by necrosis, allow me to explain the feeling as best I can. Imagine a hot knife being thrust deeper and deeper into your body and feeling your cells, muscles, tendons and fat dying around it. Not just cut, or severed, dying with little chance to repair it without some heavy magic. If it goes around a vital part, like a shoulder, leg or neck, you will start to slowly feel yourself losing all feeling as it just falls. It’s a truly horrible experience, avoid it if you can. This is to say, I was currently in for absolute hell as I felt this experience being run through the part of my tail that carries most of my projectile spikes. I could feel each tendon snapping, my skin burning away, and the discs of my now expended spine starting to crack and rip. I had to make a choice, fast. My desperation led me to only one single solution; I knew the tail had to go. With a pained howl I raised my claws, and sliced clean through the tail on my back. I cannot explain how truly horrible of an experience this was, mostly because I think my mind has blocked it out to protect itself. It fell to the ground with a wet squelch, blood pouring out of the open wounds on my back. I sent a breath of flame onto the spider and his silk, and sent another onto my nubbed tail. Again, another experience I believe my mind has blocked out to protect itself! Don’t get hit by necrosis, kids. I ran to Mona, who was currently being swarmed by a group of Corvids, and offered my assistance. I was pissed, I was angry, and I wanted to kill! As one of them dived down, I jumped onto its chest and sunk my fangs directly into its neck. It let out a pained screech as I felt its blood fill my mouth, my claws wildly slashing at its chest through skin, flesh, bone, whatever I could scrap and slice, I did. I had truly let this creature’s feral nature take over my mind for the time being, but I did not give a damn, we needed to win. The beast fell back to the ground, and I let out another challenging roar to the other beasts nearby. My claws and fangs erupted in flames as I continued to wildly attack the ones threatening Mona, knowing I needed to protect her as she concocted and threw brew after brew onto what she could. Magnus was doing absolutely amazing, without a doubt the best of us. He was handling the snakes by himself, expertly dodging and slashing at them each time they tried to grab him, bite him, slice with their tails, or trample him. He would wait for them to attack and in the blink of an eye, whatever they tried to attack him with would be gone. Heads, tails, legs and arms started to litter the ground near him as he showed absolute power and authority. Mona, meanwhile, had been mixing something special while I distracted the snakes and corvids. Her alchemical traps had mostly been activated already, melted and bubbling piles of what were some of our enemies scattered through the warzone. She yelled at me to give her a boost, and I managed to snap free from my feral state. She held something in her hands I cannot even begin to describe. It was completely dark, but…empty. The energy that came from it was unlike anything I have ever seen since, it was like staring into the nothingness of space while being surrounded by it on all sides. She slammed it onto the ground, and the darkness surrounded her. Flesh and feathers from the Corvids started to break from their destroyed and lifeless bodies, attaching itself to her back and clothes. One of their skulls burst into pieces as it flew towards her, reassembling itself onto her face in a makeshift mask. Their bones and talons began to collect into her hands, and within a matter of seconds she was holding a powerful, pulsating scythe. In that moment I saw something I truly hope to never see again. I saw death. The truest form of death was standing before me, and its energy chilled my very soul. I could feel the contempt the energy had for me, as if it knew I had extended my life outside of its natural reach. She ordered me to come, and I knew I had to obey. I grabbed her with my fangs, and placed her onto my back. Her body was cold, I was terrified of what I saw before me, but so was everything else. I felt a hand rest onto my head, and I could feel…warmth. Mona reassured me that it was going to be okay, and pointed her scythe forward. I collected myself again, and sprinted towards our enemies. Mona sliced and slashed them each with one clean swipe from that scythe, each of them falling dead in our path. I used my flames to burn any webs that had been placed, focusing on the ground while she focused on taking down these enemies with the grace and power of a god. As I saw this, I truly understood how far the gaps between Master and Archmage truly were when it came to the arcane arts. I still had so much to learn… Our combo attacks came to a screeching halt, however, as we heard a pained scream from behind us. We both looked to where Magnus was, and we could see that he had been injured. One of the snakes had managed to sink its tail through his shoulder, and another currently had its fangs embedded into his side. We let out a scream as we charged towards them as they bit, stabbed, and slashed poor Magnus. I tackled one of the snakes off, sinking my burning fangs into its neck and ripping its head off in one solid motion. Mona jumped from my back, holding her hand out as she said…something, and the snake was turned to dust. Magnus fell to the ground, howling in pain as he regained his footing. I cried out that he needed to be healed immediately, and begged Mona to throw him something from her belt. He paid me no mind, and just ran back into the fight. He was so badly injured, but that did not stop him for a second. He continued fighting as if nothing had happened, and we knew we had to do the same. The fight lasted for hours, the hordes of enemies seeming endless. The town had been turned to rubble at this point, any signs of life save for the Goradel mansion had vanished from this now tarnished and barren land. As the sun rose on the next day, we saw the warzone in fresh light. Mona had returned to normal, her breathing short and labored as she laid on the ground. I had turned back to normal, wounds covering my body and in desperate need of healing, but I didn’t care. I saw Magnus sitting on the corpse of one of the Corvids, a cup of ale in his hand and blood pouring from him. I rushed to him, begging him to let me help him, but he just shook his head. He took a long, slow sip of his ale, let out a deep sigh and motioned for me to sit with him. I got down as best I could, every instinct telling me to heal me, but he continued to refuse. Eventually he spoke as we stared at the sunset. ‘Catherine,’ he said to me, ‘everyone has a torch to burn. Some burn longer than others, and we don’t get to decide how long they burn…’ He leaned against his sword with a smile, taking one last sip of ale. I asked him what the hell he was talking about, but as I looked at him, I could tell… He was gone… The light had gone from his eyes, but that smile remained on his face. As I saw this, all I could do was cry. I had lost people before in my life, but I was always able to help the ones that could be helped from injuries! I just hugged him as I sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed. Even worse was having to heal Mona back to consciousness with the remainder of my magic and share the news with her. We cried together; we hadn’t known each other for more than a day, but we all held a deep respect for each other. Knowing that we had failed him and caused his demise, the town being destroyed, our barely achieved victory…none of it felt worth it in the end. As we cried, we heard the doors to the Goradel manor open. Out stepped Zavier, Cordelia’s father. He looked at the scene, nodding as he saw our handiwork and commended us. ‘Weren’t there three of you?’ he asked as he looked at us with such lack of regard. ‘Magnus…he’s dead…’ Mona said as I helped her up, wiping the tears from her eyes. ‘Hm, pity…very well, would you like his share? We had already set aside 3 payments, we will split it between you both should you wish’. I still don’t know why what he said caused me such anger, but I could feel my blood boil. Our comrade that had been one of the best members of the guild, the one who had fought to defend his worthless ass, the reason he was standing here right now and not a pile of meat being devoured by beasts didn’t even give a shit that he was gone! ‘This isn’t fair’, I thought to myself, ‘we protected them and they are treating us like pawns!’ Mona could tell I was getting angry, so she answered that we’d take his share and have it sent to our accounts at once. She pulled me away from this pitiful excuse for a human, and I just screamed in anger. She told me that she agreed, that it wasn’t fair to Magnus, or us, or the people of this village, but that we couldn’t let his sacrifice be in vain. With his share of the cash and ours, we could afford to build a new settlement for the displaced of this village. She managed to talk me down from my anger, she was really talented like that. I took a few deep breaths, patted my cheeks, and nodded. It would be better to use the money for good in Magnus’ honor, all the stories I had heard of his exploits usually ended with him donating a large portion of his earnings to those affected by disasters such as this. Mona left to inform the survivors that the victory had been achieved, but at the loss of Magnus. While she did that, however, I began to plan. I don’t know if it was the loss of a comrade, the pain still coursing through my body, the stress and trauma of what we had just gone through, but letting it go was not an option for me at this point. I knew I had to show these fuckers torment, I knew that they needed to pay for the callous disregard for anyone who wasn’t themselves. So, I gathered samples. I had a bag of holding on my side and began to stuff it with the bodies of our defeated enemies. The spiders had all been burned and crushed beyond study, but many of the Corvids and Serpents were still able to be studied and understood. Once I had my samples, I looked at Magnus with more tears. I was going to avenge him, I was going to show these rich pieces of crap just how insignificant they were, and I was going to make sure they paid the price… There was no way I could carry his body with my strength, he was far too bulky for me, so I used my magic to carry him. Even with my weakened state I couldn’t stop myself from giving him a proper burial. He deserved it, he deserved so much more than what he got. I summoned a shovel into my hands, and began to dig. I think I made it about 3 minutes of digging before my body finally gave up on me, and I fell. I don’t remember much of what happened after that, I guess I had passed out from exhaustion. When I awoke, I heard Har’s voice calling to me. I was so tired, my body aching and burning in such pain as I tried to move every muscle I could. I looked up, and we were in a cemetery. I could see Magnus’ body laying in a now dug grave, dressed in his elegant but simple armor, eyes closed and mouth still holding that same smile as I had seen before. A ward of protection was currently being cast around his burial grounds, designating this land as sacred ground that could not be touched by any means. No necromancer could get to his body, and no thieves could rob him of his belongings. I was sitting next to a patched up and tired looking Mona, and we both just sobbed gently as we watched him being buried. Hundreds had gathered to pay their respects, all of those that Magnus had saved, protected, worked with, allied, even some who I later came to learn saw him as a rival. All of them were paying their respects to this true paragon of an adventurer, and all I could think about was getting revenge for him… Ah, sorry, I didn’t realize how long I had been sending through the OrbNet. It might be best to end this part of my life here for the time being. Thank you again for reading, if you managed to find an old witch’s story interesting. Once I work up the courage to share the next part with you all, I hope you will continue to view me in a positive light. You will hear things that…well, you’ll see. Thank you for your time, I love you all, my siblings in the arcane. |
2024.05.18 19:11 Redelscumwhal FuelX vs Boosterplug for overcoming lean fueling?
Does anyone have any insight or experience for choosing between the two?
I'm looking into upgrading to an aftermarket exhaust, removing the air snorkel, and getting one of these: FuelX Lite or Boosterplug. I have a 2020 int650 that would accept either.
I've put together that the FuelX is the more refined tech, impacting the closed loop fuel control by modifying the O2 sensor signals, while the Boosterplug impacts the open-loop (acceleration and deceleration) control loop by simply decreasing the value given by the intake air temp sensor. Although I want to believe that the FuelX would be better at refining the feel of the bike, I tend to see many more positive community responses to the simpler Boosterplug. I would love to hear that the booster plug does improve idling and stall reduction, but with it only impacting the open-loop control, I don't see how it could.
I am also interested in not impacting fuel economy too much, since I tend to burn through it with lots of highway riding.
There is very little I can find comparing the two; any insight or personal experience would be much appreciated!
submitted by Redelscumwhal to royalenfield [link] [comments]
I'm looking into upgrading to an aftermarket exhaust, removing the air snorkel, and getting one of these: FuelX Lite or Boosterplug. I have a 2020 int650 that would accept either.
I've put together that the FuelX is the more refined tech, impacting the closed loop fuel control by modifying the O2 sensor signals, while the Boosterplug impacts the open-loop (acceleration and deceleration) control loop by simply decreasing the value given by the intake air temp sensor. Although I want to believe that the FuelX would be better at refining the feel of the bike, I tend to see many more positive community responses to the simpler Boosterplug. I would love to hear that the booster plug does improve idling and stall reduction, but with it only impacting the open-loop control, I don't see how it could.
I am also interested in not impacting fuel economy too much, since I tend to burn through it with lots of highway riding.
There is very little I can find comparing the two; any insight or personal experience would be much appreciated!
2024.05.18 19:01 relishboi Predator's Disease Chapter 31
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Memory transcription subject: Governor Maulo of the Venlil Republic
Date [Standardized human time]: September 1st, 2148
[Day 25]
I couldn’t help but smile reading the police report. 120 yotul personnel were saved from Humanity First by an arxur of all things. It felt surreal to congratulate a gray on his heroic efforts, but I see now why President Mesu personally requested him. Aaron Clemont and two accomplices were confirmed dead, and using his holopad found at the scene we’ve begun tracking down other bases of operation.
I slid away the report, satisfied with the terrorists’ timely demises, and turned to an email from Mesu.
Dear Governor,
The experimental procedures to synthesize a vaccine of modified human immune cells was a rousing success in our first subjects. Dr. Silvon, as well as the infected personnel who were evacuated from the laboratory, have made miraculous near-overnight recoveries. They’re still far from cured, but we believe they will be healthy again in no time. Servaen has been forwarded a full report on the matter. It’s been a pleasure working paw-in-paw with you.
Ah, even better news. The research has finally yielded actual results. I’ll want to get this new vaccine rolled out as soon as possible, but I know the Sapient Coalition is not going to be happy that we went behind their back. I considered for a moment the likelihood of being impeached and swiftly decided my species’ salvation was far more important than my job. A notification pinged into my inbox, interrupting my thoughts. Speak of the devil.
Governor Maulo of the Venlil Republic, you are under suspicion of violating the Interstellar Species Rights Act of 2137, article 12, section 3: “Genetic modification, enhancement, or crippling of an individual and/or species without unanimous agreement among all representatives of the Sapient Coalition is to be considered a crime against sapience and heavily punished.” You are expected to attend a trial in the Interstellar Crimes Court on Saturday, September 6th, 2148 (HST). Failure to appear for the court hearing is automatic grounds for impeachment from your position as governor, and imprisonment.
Signed, Abdul Suresh, United Nations Secretary-General
“Fuck.”
“Governor?” Servaen knocked as he entered. “We’ve fully secured Ransu City, and as we speak several Humanity First headquarters are being raided by peacekeepers.”
I shook my head, expelling the feeling of impending doom before replying, “Good. Keep me updated on the situation. Let’s get these terrorists crushed before they can cause any more trouble.”
~~~
Memory transcription subject: Colin Mickson, UN Peacekeeper
Date [Standardized human time]: September 1st, 2148
[Day 25]
Through the windows of the assumed abandoned office building, we could see slight movement. The glass was tinted with grime, giving our snipers a tough time to discern bodies, so the ground team and I strapped up and got into position in front of the boarded-up entrance.
“Stand back,” Captain Harrison called, gripping the battering ram. I lowered the visor on my helmet, and the world shifted from stormy and dark, to bright as day with impeccable clarity. Two women tore the boards off the door with crowbars, then moved back to allow Harrison to start breaking it down.
I counted the impacts mentally. 1. 2. 3. 4- the door fell apart inward and we rushed forward. I scanned the room quickly, keeping my rifle trained wherever I glanced. “First room clear. Alpha team, move down the hallway to our right. Beta team, the left. Gamma stay put and make sure nobody slips past,” the captain’s voice crackled in my helmet’s headset. I followed my cohort to the right, which was a winding hallway that was supposed to wrap around the full diameter of the building, with a row of doors along the curved wall into the center of the dome-shaped office.
I kicked in the first door. There was a shuffle on the other side, a chair slid across the room and I immediately locked my gun on it. “D-don’t shoot!” a meek voice reverberated from where the chair came from. A human slowly stood, arms raised. He had a ring on his finger.
“Walk toward me slowly, hands raised, and don’t try anything,” I barked. A couple of other soldiers marched in, guns raised to make sure he didn’t try anything funny. When he was halfway across the room, he grabbed his waistband. I was quick enough to fire off a few shots, and his body crumpled to the floor. I searched around, checking under desks to ensure there weren’t any more, before finally declaring “First room clear, moving out.”
We pushed onward. “Second room clear,” “Third room clear,” all soon enough began crackling in my headset. We were now approaching the main office in the center of the building. We cleared another couple of storerooms and break rooms before meeting back with the Beta team at the back of the loop.
“Only 3 confirmed casualties,” Captain Harrison stated, “out of an estimated 50 potential terrorists in the building. If they’re anywhere, they’re gonna be in here.”
Our combined teams were now 30-strong. We’d be outnumbered if we weren’t armed better. The door to the office was hardly reinforced. Some hastily-implemented wood boards fell away quickly with the battering ram. Next thing we knew, we were charging into the heart of the dome.
Being the only entrance, we should’ve known they’d put most of their efforts into protecting it. The second that door opened there was gunfire. I knew by the sounds that they were just 9mm handguns. We ducked at the entrance, firing into the room where the Humanity First members were cowering behind overturned tables.
“Their cover isn’t bulletproof, aim for the tables,” I yelled.
We focused our fire, shredding them through the flimsy ‘protection’. Soon we cleared a path, and a couple of brave terrorists moved in to replace their fallen comrades, only to meet the exact same fate. I fired off a shot clean through the head of one, then hastily reloaded my rifle as the rest of the team moved through.
From behind a desk immediately out of our view jumped a human who blew apart a peacekeeper with a shotgun blast to the face, though he was very quickly dealt with.
The office was rows upon rows of dividers and workstations. The barriers looked about as flimsy as the desks, so we began firing through. We were ordered specifically that eliminating the organization is more important than taking them in. Despite my reservations about those orders, I fired through the walls anyway.
Anyone that dared even try to fire back was given a lead filling. I marched down along the rows, peering into workspaces to gauge the outcome of our massacre. Every station had at least two shredded corpses. I had the displeasure of finishing off a couple. One was quick enough to get a shot at me, the bullet hit my chest and knocked the wind out of me, and the assailant was shot down by another peacekeeper.
For another 6 hours, we swept the halls and rooms over and over, checking crawl spaces and vents. We concluded, at long last, that the headquarters was empty. We were among tens of simultaneous raids across the planet to wipe the Humanity First scourge out for good, and I was happy to report back home at the end of the day.
~~~
Memory transcription subject: Jakiv, Arxur scientist
Date [Standardized human time]: September 1st, 2148
[Day 25]
“Ooh, that one looks good on you,” Nuri chirped as I examined the dark purple jacket in the dressing room mirror. The marsupial insisted I try on just about every hoodie they had in the store, despite my distaste for a majority of them. The one I wore now was insulated with fluff that trapped body heat exceptionally well, keeping me nice and toasty.
“I supposed,” I muttered, putting my hands in my front pockets. I put the hood over my head and yanked the drawstrings.
“Look at that, you can still be all moody in it,” the yotul giggled.
“I’m really going to miss the old one though,” I replied, taking off the article and setting it in the stack with the others. I involuntarily grimaced at my visage in the mirror. I was shirtless, showing off my ribcage that poked out beneath my scales, and the skin that barely clung to my bones. The glimmer of the metal was more extreme around the 6 new dents on my body from the bullets. I wrapped my arms around myself shivering.
“Hey,” Nuri spoke, “How about this one?” she held a folded black hoodie similar enough to my old one, with a lighter gray for highlights that streaked down the arms from the hood. I ran a claw along the inside before slipping into it. It was snug, I almost didn’t notice it wasn’t made for an arxur.
“Where’d you find this one?”
“The human section.”
“We weren’t looking there to begin with?”
The marsupial shrugged. “Do you like it?”
It was baggy enough to make me look bulkier, exactly what I wanted out of a jacket. “I love it,” I concluded. Nuri smiled, taking me by the arm to the checkout. The yotul manning it had been keeping a very close eye on me the entire time I was in the story. Poor guy.
“Th-that’ll be 15 credits,” he mumbled, scanning the hoodie and passing Nuri the chip scanner.
Before she could pay for it, I managed to slip my credit chip into the device. I was getting better at beating the overzealous marsupial to the punch! “Hey! I told you I was paying!”
“I don’t think so,” I shook my head and slid the chip into my new hoodie’s pocket and put it on.
We exited the store, the midday air was warm and humid. I never cared for moisture, so I was glad to retreat into Nuri’s car. She punched in her home address and we cruised past the historic town square.
“Y’know, I’ve been thinking a bit,” I stated.
“That’s new,” Nuri remarked.
“Y’know, I don’t have to tell you about it.”
“Okay, okay, my bad,” she smiled. “What’s on your mind, Jaki?”
“When I first got here, I got to have a chat with Mesu. I tried to make it very clear I was only here for work, not to make friends.”
“Well good going,” Nuri giggled.
“Yeah,” I mused, “I guess that fell through. But I’m not too confident I’d be allowed citizenship on Leirn, as much as I want it.”
The yotul cocked her head, “They’d be fools not to let you stay,” she said. “Besides, you clearly haven’t been keeping up with the news lately.”
“Wait, what do you mean?” She popped open the car’s center console and withdrew her holopad. It opened to a news site with big, bold words that my translator got to work deciphering. “Hero arxur saves over a hundred in terrorist attack… I thought you weren’t going to put me in the news.”
“I said I wasn’t going to use our friendship as an easy promotion. This is a lot different,” the marsupial scrolled down to a photograph of me taken when we hit the bar right after. I had bullet holes in my hoodie and a drink in my hand.
“Hero arxur…” I murmured, “hell of an oxymoron.”
She smacked my arm with her paw, forgetting how hard my scales were, then waved it in pain. “Aw! Shit!”
“Oh don’t hurt yourself,” I grinned.
“Don’t rag on yourself either,” she retorted, “You deserve way more respect than I can put into the news. I hope this at least means you’ll get less shit out on the streets.”
The car began slowing down in front of her house, which was quickly becoming my home too. I haven’t even stepped foot in that hotel Mesu got me in a good few days. We got inside and I flopped down on the couch immediately, the comfortable cushions were inviting after a long day of shopping.
“So, when are you going back to work?” Nuri asked, sitting down next to me.
“Eh, I don’t know. Whenever the lab is considered ‘safe’ again. They outsourced the vaccine’s development to some place in Olsa.”
“Aw, that sucks.”
“Nah, not even. Just means I got more time to hang out with you,” I smiled.
“Yeah, I guess that’s true. Well, I’m gonna order dinner. You want anything in particular?”
“Hmmm… maybe harchen,” I growled.
“Shut the fuck up,” the marsupial laughed.
~~~
I woke up to the sound of my holopad buzzing. The house was silent, and the time was 2 am. I rubbed sleep from my eyes and yawned before the contact ID instantly awakened me. I got up from the couch, careful not to step on Nuri who was soundly asleep curled up in blankets on the floor.
I slipped into the bathroom and hit answer. “President Mesu,” I exclaimed surprised.
“Jakiv,” he began cordially, “Congratulations on your research, and for making the news.”
“I- uh, thank you,” I responded awkwardly.
“Once everything with the vaccine is said and done, you’re set to leave Leirn on the 8th,” the yotul stated.
“Oh,” I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice, “I actually… can we talk a bit about that?”
“Sure,” he replied.
“Well, I know I said I didn’t come here to make friends, and I certainly didn’t come here to save lives, but I-” I quickly glanced at the bathroom door. I couldn’t hear anything outside it, and prayed Nuri was still asleep, “I met someone here that I don’t think I can live without. She’s my best friend- my only friend, and I really want to stay. For her,” I breathed.
“You… want to stay on Leirn?” he asked incredulously. I nodded. He scratched his furry chin for a second, I worried he was set on sending me away regardless, but then, “Okay. I’ll forward you the immigration forms.”
“You will?” I gasped.
“Of course. You’ve done Leirn and Skalga a great deal of service. I’m honored you’ve found a home here, Jakiv.”
“Thank you so much, Mesu!” I felt myself getting teary-eyed.
The marsupial nodded, “Thank you. Now then, you look tired. Go get some rest,” his visage flickered and dematerialized. I was left in the bathroom alone. I looked myself in the mirror and smiled at the form reflected back at me.
I opened the door and-
“Nuri!” I cried, startled. She wordlessly wrapped her arms around me. I reciprocated, putting mine around her and relishing the moment.
“I’m so happy for you,” she whispered.
“Thanks,” I smiled, “I did it for you.”
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submitted by relishboi to NatureofPredators [link] [comments]
Memory transcription subject: Governor Maulo of the Venlil Republic
Date [Standardized human time]: September 1st, 2148
[Day 25]
I couldn’t help but smile reading the police report. 120 yotul personnel were saved from Humanity First by an arxur of all things. It felt surreal to congratulate a gray on his heroic efforts, but I see now why President Mesu personally requested him. Aaron Clemont and two accomplices were confirmed dead, and using his holopad found at the scene we’ve begun tracking down other bases of operation.
I slid away the report, satisfied with the terrorists’ timely demises, and turned to an email from Mesu.
Dear Governor,
The experimental procedures to synthesize a vaccine of modified human immune cells was a rousing success in our first subjects. Dr. Silvon, as well as the infected personnel who were evacuated from the laboratory, have made miraculous near-overnight recoveries. They’re still far from cured, but we believe they will be healthy again in no time. Servaen has been forwarded a full report on the matter. It’s been a pleasure working paw-in-paw with you.
Ah, even better news. The research has finally yielded actual results. I’ll want to get this new vaccine rolled out as soon as possible, but I know the Sapient Coalition is not going to be happy that we went behind their back. I considered for a moment the likelihood of being impeached and swiftly decided my species’ salvation was far more important than my job. A notification pinged into my inbox, interrupting my thoughts. Speak of the devil.
Governor Maulo of the Venlil Republic, you are under suspicion of violating the Interstellar Species Rights Act of 2137, article 12, section 3: “Genetic modification, enhancement, or crippling of an individual and/or species without unanimous agreement among all representatives of the Sapient Coalition is to be considered a crime against sapience and heavily punished.” You are expected to attend a trial in the Interstellar Crimes Court on Saturday, September 6th, 2148 (HST). Failure to appear for the court hearing is automatic grounds for impeachment from your position as governor, and imprisonment.
Signed, Abdul Suresh, United Nations Secretary-General
“Fuck.”
“Governor?” Servaen knocked as he entered. “We’ve fully secured Ransu City, and as we speak several Humanity First headquarters are being raided by peacekeepers.”
I shook my head, expelling the feeling of impending doom before replying, “Good. Keep me updated on the situation. Let’s get these terrorists crushed before they can cause any more trouble.”
~~~
Memory transcription subject: Colin Mickson, UN Peacekeeper
Date [Standardized human time]: September 1st, 2148
[Day 25]
Through the windows of the assumed abandoned office building, we could see slight movement. The glass was tinted with grime, giving our snipers a tough time to discern bodies, so the ground team and I strapped up and got into position in front of the boarded-up entrance.
“Stand back,” Captain Harrison called, gripping the battering ram. I lowered the visor on my helmet, and the world shifted from stormy and dark, to bright as day with impeccable clarity. Two women tore the boards off the door with crowbars, then moved back to allow Harrison to start breaking it down.
I counted the impacts mentally. 1. 2. 3. 4- the door fell apart inward and we rushed forward. I scanned the room quickly, keeping my rifle trained wherever I glanced. “First room clear. Alpha team, move down the hallway to our right. Beta team, the left. Gamma stay put and make sure nobody slips past,” the captain’s voice crackled in my helmet’s headset. I followed my cohort to the right, which was a winding hallway that was supposed to wrap around the full diameter of the building, with a row of doors along the curved wall into the center of the dome-shaped office.
I kicked in the first door. There was a shuffle on the other side, a chair slid across the room and I immediately locked my gun on it. “D-don’t shoot!” a meek voice reverberated from where the chair came from. A human slowly stood, arms raised. He had a ring on his finger.
“Walk toward me slowly, hands raised, and don’t try anything,” I barked. A couple of other soldiers marched in, guns raised to make sure he didn’t try anything funny. When he was halfway across the room, he grabbed his waistband. I was quick enough to fire off a few shots, and his body crumpled to the floor. I searched around, checking under desks to ensure there weren’t any more, before finally declaring “First room clear, moving out.”
We pushed onward. “Second room clear,” “Third room clear,” all soon enough began crackling in my headset. We were now approaching the main office in the center of the building. We cleared another couple of storerooms and break rooms before meeting back with the Beta team at the back of the loop.
“Only 3 confirmed casualties,” Captain Harrison stated, “out of an estimated 50 potential terrorists in the building. If they’re anywhere, they’re gonna be in here.”
Our combined teams were now 30-strong. We’d be outnumbered if we weren’t armed better. The door to the office was hardly reinforced. Some hastily-implemented wood boards fell away quickly with the battering ram. Next thing we knew, we were charging into the heart of the dome.
Being the only entrance, we should’ve known they’d put most of their efforts into protecting it. The second that door opened there was gunfire. I knew by the sounds that they were just 9mm handguns. We ducked at the entrance, firing into the room where the Humanity First members were cowering behind overturned tables.
“Their cover isn’t bulletproof, aim for the tables,” I yelled.
We focused our fire, shredding them through the flimsy ‘protection’. Soon we cleared a path, and a couple of brave terrorists moved in to replace their fallen comrades, only to meet the exact same fate. I fired off a shot clean through the head of one, then hastily reloaded my rifle as the rest of the team moved through.
From behind a desk immediately out of our view jumped a human who blew apart a peacekeeper with a shotgun blast to the face, though he was very quickly dealt with.
The office was rows upon rows of dividers and workstations. The barriers looked about as flimsy as the desks, so we began firing through. We were ordered specifically that eliminating the organization is more important than taking them in. Despite my reservations about those orders, I fired through the walls anyway.
Anyone that dared even try to fire back was given a lead filling. I marched down along the rows, peering into workspaces to gauge the outcome of our massacre. Every station had at least two shredded corpses. I had the displeasure of finishing off a couple. One was quick enough to get a shot at me, the bullet hit my chest and knocked the wind out of me, and the assailant was shot down by another peacekeeper.
For another 6 hours, we swept the halls and rooms over and over, checking crawl spaces and vents. We concluded, at long last, that the headquarters was empty. We were among tens of simultaneous raids across the planet to wipe the Humanity First scourge out for good, and I was happy to report back home at the end of the day.
~~~
Memory transcription subject: Jakiv, Arxur scientist
Date [Standardized human time]: September 1st, 2148
[Day 25]
“Ooh, that one looks good on you,” Nuri chirped as I examined the dark purple jacket in the dressing room mirror. The marsupial insisted I try on just about every hoodie they had in the store, despite my distaste for a majority of them. The one I wore now was insulated with fluff that trapped body heat exceptionally well, keeping me nice and toasty.
“I supposed,” I muttered, putting my hands in my front pockets. I put the hood over my head and yanked the drawstrings.
“Look at that, you can still be all moody in it,” the yotul giggled.
“I’m really going to miss the old one though,” I replied, taking off the article and setting it in the stack with the others. I involuntarily grimaced at my visage in the mirror. I was shirtless, showing off my ribcage that poked out beneath my scales, and the skin that barely clung to my bones. The glimmer of the metal was more extreme around the 6 new dents on my body from the bullets. I wrapped my arms around myself shivering.
“Hey,” Nuri spoke, “How about this one?” she held a folded black hoodie similar enough to my old one, with a lighter gray for highlights that streaked down the arms from the hood. I ran a claw along the inside before slipping into it. It was snug, I almost didn’t notice it wasn’t made for an arxur.
“Where’d you find this one?”
“The human section.”
“We weren’t looking there to begin with?”
The marsupial shrugged. “Do you like it?”
It was baggy enough to make me look bulkier, exactly what I wanted out of a jacket. “I love it,” I concluded. Nuri smiled, taking me by the arm to the checkout. The yotul manning it had been keeping a very close eye on me the entire time I was in the story. Poor guy.
“Th-that’ll be 15 credits,” he mumbled, scanning the hoodie and passing Nuri the chip scanner.
Before she could pay for it, I managed to slip my credit chip into the device. I was getting better at beating the overzealous marsupial to the punch! “Hey! I told you I was paying!”
“I don’t think so,” I shook my head and slid the chip into my new hoodie’s pocket and put it on.
We exited the store, the midday air was warm and humid. I never cared for moisture, so I was glad to retreat into Nuri’s car. She punched in her home address and we cruised past the historic town square.
“Y’know, I’ve been thinking a bit,” I stated.
“That’s new,” Nuri remarked.
“Y’know, I don’t have to tell you about it.”
“Okay, okay, my bad,” she smiled. “What’s on your mind, Jaki?”
“When I first got here, I got to have a chat with Mesu. I tried to make it very clear I was only here for work, not to make friends.”
“Well good going,” Nuri giggled.
“Yeah,” I mused, “I guess that fell through. But I’m not too confident I’d be allowed citizenship on Leirn, as much as I want it.”
The yotul cocked her head, “They’d be fools not to let you stay,” she said. “Besides, you clearly haven’t been keeping up with the news lately.”
“Wait, what do you mean?” She popped open the car’s center console and withdrew her holopad. It opened to a news site with big, bold words that my translator got to work deciphering. “Hero arxur saves over a hundred in terrorist attack… I thought you weren’t going to put me in the news.”
“I said I wasn’t going to use our friendship as an easy promotion. This is a lot different,” the marsupial scrolled down to a photograph of me taken when we hit the bar right after. I had bullet holes in my hoodie and a drink in my hand.
“Hero arxur…” I murmured, “hell of an oxymoron.”
She smacked my arm with her paw, forgetting how hard my scales were, then waved it in pain. “Aw! Shit!”
“Oh don’t hurt yourself,” I grinned.
“Don’t rag on yourself either,” she retorted, “You deserve way more respect than I can put into the news. I hope this at least means you’ll get less shit out on the streets.”
The car began slowing down in front of her house, which was quickly becoming my home too. I haven’t even stepped foot in that hotel Mesu got me in a good few days. We got inside and I flopped down on the couch immediately, the comfortable cushions were inviting after a long day of shopping.
“So, when are you going back to work?” Nuri asked, sitting down next to me.
“Eh, I don’t know. Whenever the lab is considered ‘safe’ again. They outsourced the vaccine’s development to some place in Olsa.”
“Aw, that sucks.”
“Nah, not even. Just means I got more time to hang out with you,” I smiled.
“Yeah, I guess that’s true. Well, I’m gonna order dinner. You want anything in particular?”
“Hmmm… maybe harchen,” I growled.
“Shut the fuck up,” the marsupial laughed.
~~~
I woke up to the sound of my holopad buzzing. The house was silent, and the time was 2 am. I rubbed sleep from my eyes and yawned before the contact ID instantly awakened me. I got up from the couch, careful not to step on Nuri who was soundly asleep curled up in blankets on the floor.
I slipped into the bathroom and hit answer. “President Mesu,” I exclaimed surprised.
“Jakiv,” he began cordially, “Congratulations on your research, and for making the news.”
“I- uh, thank you,” I responded awkwardly.
“Once everything with the vaccine is said and done, you’re set to leave Leirn on the 8th,” the yotul stated.
“Oh,” I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice, “I actually… can we talk a bit about that?”
“Sure,” he replied.
“Well, I know I said I didn’t come here to make friends, and I certainly didn’t come here to save lives, but I-” I quickly glanced at the bathroom door. I couldn’t hear anything outside it, and prayed Nuri was still asleep, “I met someone here that I don’t think I can live without. She’s my best friend- my only friend, and I really want to stay. For her,” I breathed.
“You… want to stay on Leirn?” he asked incredulously. I nodded. He scratched his furry chin for a second, I worried he was set on sending me away regardless, but then, “Okay. I’ll forward you the immigration forms.”
“You will?” I gasped.
“Of course. You’ve done Leirn and Skalga a great deal of service. I’m honored you’ve found a home here, Jakiv.”
“Thank you so much, Mesu!” I felt myself getting teary-eyed.
The marsupial nodded, “Thank you. Now then, you look tired. Go get some rest,” his visage flickered and dematerialized. I was left in the bathroom alone. I looked myself in the mirror and smiled at the form reflected back at me.
I opened the door and-
“Nuri!” I cried, startled. She wordlessly wrapped her arms around me. I reciprocated, putting mine around her and relishing the moment.
“I’m so happy for you,” she whispered.
“Thanks,” I smiled, “I did it for you.”
[First] [Prev] [Next]
2024.05.18 18:47 FossilBoi Viracocha Unbound - Part Nineteen: Darkest Viracocha
What we realized was distant thundering footsteps getting closer showed that there was still life here on the Cinturón Verde, and like life elsewhere in Viracocha, it was far from safe. Then came the sounds of explosions, as well as sudden bursts of orange beyond the fog. As the Reino del Cielo continued to drift along, we found ourselves a dense thicket of trees on the nearby shore, and we positioned ourselves behind it. After all, it was better than potentially getting caught in the crossfire of whatever was going on out there. Despite us staying in one place, the modified plane had a rather handy addition; a periscope, with circular 360-degree rotation and detailed zoom lens. It took some slight resistance, but the periscope managed to penetrate the gnarled canopy, giving us a view of the grasslands ahead, and with it, the grisly scene as it got closer to view. A mixed herd of panicked animals materialized from the fog, with Castled’s horses, chukchayuqs, stalkpeckers and Darwin’s grazers storming out together as one. The fact that the latter among them was panicked was bad, since nothing can make them run. At first I thought some hitherto unknown predators scared away by the region-wide disturbances were coming in droves, but that thought vanished when the sounds of tires and machinery joined the chorus of panicked animals.
A convoy of vehicles followed shortly behind, trucks and tanks modified for traversing Hollow Earth terrain, and protruding from them were people. The front truck gave me some Mad Max vibes, being a semi truck-tractor hybrid with spiky rollbars along the outside, and a large turret on the back, complete with a railgun or harpoon. The other vehicles were smaller, mainly resembling Hummers and minesweepers, each one armored and possessing external weapons. “Hold on,” Missy said next to us. She was fiddling with some auditory equipment hooked up to the periscope. “Let’s unmute.” After some brief static, we heard many overlapping voices. Then one familiar one. “Delta Force, cut them off at the hill. Gamma, corral them from behind. Beta, stay behind. We got some meat and charcoal to bag!” It was the damn husky and curt voice of Mordecai Hutton, Mr. Pullman’s surly bodyguard. “That asshole,” Mary Ann muttered under her breath. “So that means… they’re all here. Pullman, the Seldanos, everyone. They’re responsible for this.” Chris clenched his fist. “Including Abernathy.” As we looked on, the trucks and tanks herded the animals into an open space off to our left. Suddenly, the herd was cut off by another set of vehicles, and the volley of bullets and harpoons began. Almost immediately, horses, chukchayuqs, grazers and stalkpeckers fell by the dozens, the sounds of thudding bodies echoing over the landscape. One of the Darwin’s grazers tried to charge at the side of one of the tanks, only for another tank to blow a hole in it head, the animal stopping just short of its target. The horses tried their best to vault themselves over the vehicles, but were being brought down by ropes and harpoons, sometimes banging them against the metal exteriors of the vehicles. Stalkpeckers ran under the vehicles, only for the drivers to purposefully drive forward and backward, crushing them under the tires. Many surviving animals fled in all directions, and for a moment it seemed great that there were some survivors. Then, the ground beneath several of them opened up; pitfalls, traps. Spikes emerged from the dirt and skewered them by the dozens. Then Mordecai’s voice once again bellowed over the chaos. “Remember boys! It’s not just about the meat, boss wants many alive too. Use the non-lethals, nets, tranq darts, everything, and try not to hurt ‘em all. If you get some bruised ones, well, let’s not waste ‘em.” Then smoke bombs were dispersed into the frenzied remains of the herd. The animals, caught in the ashy smoke and forced to stop, were now vulnerable. Then, several men disembarked from the vehicles and ran to the animals, wielding shock prods, nets, tranquilizer guns, chloroform, and other non-lethals. I saw two men grab a chukchayuq and tackle it to the ground, shocking it with a prod and wrapping chains around its neck and legs before carrying it off. The same was done to several stalkpeckers, the small dinosaurs scared by the men into running into cages or traps.
A Darwin’s grazer was restrained with a net, and as the massive herbivore squirmed and roared, an enormous set of steel claws emerged from a nearby tank and engulfed the animal in its grasp, forcing it to stay still. I saw the horses try to navigate their way out of the haze, with one mother and her foal making good progress. My hopes were dashed when a particularly heavyset man forced the mother to the ground, and the steel whip of another forced the foal down, before its legs were tied together rodeo-style. The mother, angry, got back up and kicked at the first man, killing him with a hoof to the head, and charged at the other, stomping on his chest with her hooves, causing him to cough up blood. Then she whinnied and whimpered as electric shocks appeared on her body, before she collapsed on top of the man she was attacking. Mordecai was the one who did it, proudly wielding a stun gun, before setting his foot on the fainting animal. “Now this one, this one I like. A real jackass, and with a little one too. Boys, when the cargo’s being loaded, put these two in. Separate cages, of course.” The hunt finally died down, though what followed may have been worse. Once the carcasses ultimately reserved for consumption were loaded and the living captured ones were contained, the other bodies - mainly being ones too damaged or injured to be of value to them - were gathered into a pile, almost like a pyramid. It bore an uncanny resemblance to that photo from the 1800s of that guy standing on all the bison skulls. Once some particularly thieving men whittled off body parts as trophies or souvenirs, something else entered the scene. Machines, being loaded off the trucks. These machines however were not vehicles, they were robots. Four-legged canine-like robots. I’m not talking about those basic, rudimentary Boston Dynamics-type ones either. These ones had defined heads with glowing eyes and sharp teeth, silver-bronze bodies divided into flexible armor-like sections, robust clawed limbs, and tails lined with spikes and a stinger-like apparatus. Two of these robotics dogs stepped out in front of the collected piles, and waited as the last remaining men got out of there. When it was clear, their mouths opened and the air began to blur with heat. Then, bright jets of flame erupted from their mouths, setting the carcass piles ablaze, their heads going back and forth so as not to miss a shot. Minutes went by as we watched these burn into ashes, but they didn’t stop there. Once these formerly majestic and beautiful creatures were nothing more than ashes and dust, they were collected by the robots via a vacuum-like suction in their mouths. Once the pile was gone, the two robots finally departed, and with them, the men and their convoy. The scene was finally over, but there was still much more to come.
submitted by FossilBoi to MonarchCustomTitans [link] [comments]
A convoy of vehicles followed shortly behind, trucks and tanks modified for traversing Hollow Earth terrain, and protruding from them were people. The front truck gave me some Mad Max vibes, being a semi truck-tractor hybrid with spiky rollbars along the outside, and a large turret on the back, complete with a railgun or harpoon. The other vehicles were smaller, mainly resembling Hummers and minesweepers, each one armored and possessing external weapons. “Hold on,” Missy said next to us. She was fiddling with some auditory equipment hooked up to the periscope. “Let’s unmute.” After some brief static, we heard many overlapping voices. Then one familiar one. “Delta Force, cut them off at the hill. Gamma, corral them from behind. Beta, stay behind. We got some meat and charcoal to bag!” It was the damn husky and curt voice of Mordecai Hutton, Mr. Pullman’s surly bodyguard. “That asshole,” Mary Ann muttered under her breath. “So that means… they’re all here. Pullman, the Seldanos, everyone. They’re responsible for this.” Chris clenched his fist. “Including Abernathy.” As we looked on, the trucks and tanks herded the animals into an open space off to our left. Suddenly, the herd was cut off by another set of vehicles, and the volley of bullets and harpoons began. Almost immediately, horses, chukchayuqs, grazers and stalkpeckers fell by the dozens, the sounds of thudding bodies echoing over the landscape. One of the Darwin’s grazers tried to charge at the side of one of the tanks, only for another tank to blow a hole in it head, the animal stopping just short of its target. The horses tried their best to vault themselves over the vehicles, but were being brought down by ropes and harpoons, sometimes banging them against the metal exteriors of the vehicles. Stalkpeckers ran under the vehicles, only for the drivers to purposefully drive forward and backward, crushing them under the tires. Many surviving animals fled in all directions, and for a moment it seemed great that there were some survivors. Then, the ground beneath several of them opened up; pitfalls, traps. Spikes emerged from the dirt and skewered them by the dozens. Then Mordecai’s voice once again bellowed over the chaos. “Remember boys! It’s not just about the meat, boss wants many alive too. Use the non-lethals, nets, tranq darts, everything, and try not to hurt ‘em all. If you get some bruised ones, well, let’s not waste ‘em.” Then smoke bombs were dispersed into the frenzied remains of the herd. The animals, caught in the ashy smoke and forced to stop, were now vulnerable. Then, several men disembarked from the vehicles and ran to the animals, wielding shock prods, nets, tranquilizer guns, chloroform, and other non-lethals. I saw two men grab a chukchayuq and tackle it to the ground, shocking it with a prod and wrapping chains around its neck and legs before carrying it off. The same was done to several stalkpeckers, the small dinosaurs scared by the men into running into cages or traps.
A Darwin’s grazer was restrained with a net, and as the massive herbivore squirmed and roared, an enormous set of steel claws emerged from a nearby tank and engulfed the animal in its grasp, forcing it to stay still. I saw the horses try to navigate their way out of the haze, with one mother and her foal making good progress. My hopes were dashed when a particularly heavyset man forced the mother to the ground, and the steel whip of another forced the foal down, before its legs were tied together rodeo-style. The mother, angry, got back up and kicked at the first man, killing him with a hoof to the head, and charged at the other, stomping on his chest with her hooves, causing him to cough up blood. Then she whinnied and whimpered as electric shocks appeared on her body, before she collapsed on top of the man she was attacking. Mordecai was the one who did it, proudly wielding a stun gun, before setting his foot on the fainting animal. “Now this one, this one I like. A real jackass, and with a little one too. Boys, when the cargo’s being loaded, put these two in. Separate cages, of course.” The hunt finally died down, though what followed may have been worse. Once the carcasses ultimately reserved for consumption were loaded and the living captured ones were contained, the other bodies - mainly being ones too damaged or injured to be of value to them - were gathered into a pile, almost like a pyramid. It bore an uncanny resemblance to that photo from the 1800s of that guy standing on all the bison skulls. Once some particularly thieving men whittled off body parts as trophies or souvenirs, something else entered the scene. Machines, being loaded off the trucks. These machines however were not vehicles, they were robots. Four-legged canine-like robots. I’m not talking about those basic, rudimentary Boston Dynamics-type ones either. These ones had defined heads with glowing eyes and sharp teeth, silver-bronze bodies divided into flexible armor-like sections, robust clawed limbs, and tails lined with spikes and a stinger-like apparatus. Two of these robotics dogs stepped out in front of the collected piles, and waited as the last remaining men got out of there. When it was clear, their mouths opened and the air began to blur with heat. Then, bright jets of flame erupted from their mouths, setting the carcass piles ablaze, their heads going back and forth so as not to miss a shot. Minutes went by as we watched these burn into ashes, but they didn’t stop there. Once these formerly majestic and beautiful creatures were nothing more than ashes and dust, they were collected by the robots via a vacuum-like suction in their mouths. Once the pile was gone, the two robots finally departed, and with them, the men and their convoy. The scene was finally over, but there was still much more to come.
2024.05.18 18:20 Illustrious_Tone_318 Raycasting works perfectly before i rotate OrbitControls
Back again with a similar but different issue. I was here a few days ago and you all helped me solve an issue i was having with the raycaster and my instance meshes. I am very appreciative of that. Unfortunately i kind of found myself out of the frying pan and into the fire. I'll keep this post pretty clean and just link the Three.js post i just made that has the relevant code: https://discourse.threejs.org/t/raycasting-works-perfectly-before-i-rotate-orbitcontrols/65720
here is the gist of the issue though if you don't feel like following the link.
My app is simple, take TLE satellite data from Celestrak and display it around a globe. The user should be able to select a satellite and see its data.
The selection logic uses the raycaster to detect intersections. It works PERFECTLY when the app first launches. I can select whatever satellite i wish, no matter how big, small, close to other satellites, etc… I always get the correct satellite. The second I rotate my OrbitControls the satellite selection functionality breaks down and the raycaster either returns 0 or a completely incorrect satellite. The interesting thing is that if i rotate the OrbitControls exactly to where they started at when the app first loads than the raycaster starts working again.
This seems so simple to me. Here are some thoughts i had:
I'm new to this community so if I am not following community guidelines or something please let me know and i will modify my post to match the subs standards for a post requesting help on code. Thank you in advanced for any help you can give me.
I just want to edit this note that I have seen this similar issue posted several different times online and i always understand the solution they come up with but i am at a loss for as to why i can't apply it to my situation.
submitted by Illustrious_Tone_318 to threejs [link] [comments]
here is the gist of the issue though if you don't feel like following the link.
My app is simple, take TLE satellite data from Celestrak and display it around a globe. The user should be able to select a satellite and see its data.
The selection logic uses the raycaster to detect intersections. It works PERFECTLY when the app first launches. I can select whatever satellite i wish, no matter how big, small, close to other satellites, etc… I always get the correct satellite. The second I rotate my OrbitControls the satellite selection functionality breaks down and the raycaster either returns 0 or a completely incorrect satellite. The interesting thing is that if i rotate the OrbitControls exactly to where they started at when the app first loads than the raycaster starts working again.
This seems so simple to me. Here are some thoughts i had:
- The fact that the raycaster works perfectly at the initial load and when the orbit controls return to their original position suggests that the raycaster might not be updating correctly with the new camera positions.
- Raycasting relies on accurate world coordinates to detect intersections. If the camera or scene transforms aren’t being correctly accounted for, it could lead to the observed behavior where intersections return a size of 0 or select the wrong object.
- One possibility is that the raycaster is not correctly considering the updated positions of the objects and the camera after the orbit controls are used. This could be due to improper updates in the render loop or misalignment between the camera and the raycaster’s coordinate system.
I'm new to this community so if I am not following community guidelines or something please let me know and i will modify my post to match the subs standards for a post requesting help on code. Thank you in advanced for any help you can give me.
I just want to edit this note that I have seen this similar issue posted several different times online and i always understand the solution they come up with but i am at a loss for as to why i can't apply it to my situation.
2024.05.18 18:02 Dirly 1 month into Early Access Postmortem solo dev.
Hey all, so I'm just gonna get this outa the way... my grammar is atrocious so please excuse any stuff.
I picked a minimalistic pixel art style to cater to rapid development, and avoid my weakness (shading). I also made strict art guidelines to follow a duotone color pallet so everything was much simpler to develop and looked consistent. The art was probably the most positive feedback I got, though the simplified pallet had caused a need for me to make accessibility changes once people started to play the demo.
Coding was pretty straightforward but I will admit I absolutely over engineered some systems that I shouldn't have. Granted its easier for me to make content now that its where it is... I really could have just banged it out much quicker. My original thought was this would only take me a handful of months and here we are 1.2 years later.
Sound was probably the hardest for me. I found out that duelysts went opensource and scraped through their SFX files. Majority of the audio within my game is modified from there. For the music I luckily stumbled upon a fantastic composer that really helped out. I offered minimal direction and some samples, and he just made something that fit it perfectly.
First break came from getting a demo up and running on itch.io. I was able to get to the front page of itch for a little bit, which helped get noticed by alpha beta gamer, who wrote a small article about the game. That gained a few hundred wishlists. Itch absolutely helped refine the game more as well.
I streamed development on twitch. This was a major dumb luck thing which helped. I only had a handful of people watching but one day Piratesoftware just showed up in my stream and kind of took me in under his wings. He would occasionally raid my channel, netting in a couple hundred wishlists each time. He also offered for me to bundle my game with his on Steam which has helped out tremendously. He also helped during launch by streaming the game, and getting AdmiralBahroo to stream it as well.
Twitter helped quite a bit as well not for large likes but I was able to gain interest in my title with content creators. So wanderbots picked up on it. He actually played the demo prior to nextfest and gave a pretty good vid on the game, which made me really fix up my accessibility. He also did a vid just prior to launch. Esty8nine also helped and saw the game through twitter he provided some valuable takeaways that helped me refine my game much more. ClemmyGames also picked it up and listed it in the top ten for shmup fest as well as during my launch week as the hidden indie gem of the week. I did pay for one promotional tweet @SteamGamesPC after the game launched I think it netted a few hundred in sales. Was very cheap only like $10 and a steam key.
Reddit... oh boy did a bunch of reddit posts here and there. probably in total netted 1k wishlists. I focused on indiegaming, webgames, pixelart, and the sunday post at games. None of them really took off to much was on gaming at the top for like 2 hours then got permabanned.
Festivals these were big. Nextfest I did in october and that gained me probably 1k wishlists. I somehow got featured in steams promo reel for that nextrfest but it didn't really help that much. It did cause a few gaming news outlets to list my game in the upcoming nextfest articles but all it was a link. It did get some of the more prominent indiedev content creators to take a look and promote my game however. Outside of Nextfest was Shmupfest which also gained some interest with content creators in that genre. Gaining about 800 wishlists. There were 2 other festivals but they didn't provide a lot of traction.
I sent out keys roughly 40, got a handful of videos made from them so seemed like a success. Retromantic was probably the biggest one.
Other things I tried:
submitted by Dirly to gamedev [link] [comments]
About Me:
I've been doing prototypes and working with unity for the past 7 years(off and on), never released anything prior to this so before I turned 41 I wanted to get something out there. I spent 1.25 year (hobbyist approach) on this title. Got laid off in the last 5 months of development so was able to put a little bit more time to polish prior to release (but the honey due list really sidetracked what I thought I could allocate to it).Numbers:
- Out of pocket costs: $800
- Units sold: ~4500
- Reviews: 96% positive 117 user reviews (not counting keys)
- Wishlists into EA: 4.5k
- Wishlists Outstanding 1 month into EA release: 14k
- Conversion 10.9%
- Return rate: 7.9%
Development
I saw a trend in games which were taking retro mechanics and pairing them with modern roguelites, such as dome keeper (digdug and missle command), peglin, and of course the survivor likes. So I decided to mash up a Brickbreaker, Galaga, Roguelite, called Against Great Darkness.I picked a minimalistic pixel art style to cater to rapid development, and avoid my weakness (shading). I also made strict art guidelines to follow a duotone color pallet so everything was much simpler to develop and looked consistent. The art was probably the most positive feedback I got, though the simplified pallet had caused a need for me to make accessibility changes once people started to play the demo.
Coding was pretty straightforward but I will admit I absolutely over engineered some systems that I shouldn't have. Granted its easier for me to make content now that its where it is... I really could have just banged it out much quicker. My original thought was this would only take me a handful of months and here we are 1.2 years later.
Sound was probably the hardest for me. I found out that duelysts went opensource and scraped through their SFX files. Majority of the audio within my game is modified from there. For the music I luckily stumbled upon a fantastic composer that really helped out. I offered minimal direction and some samples, and he just made something that fit it perfectly.
Marketing
Steam page was up pretty early, launched without a trailer which I think took a lot away from it. From the get go I was only gaining roughly 5 wishlists a day.First break came from getting a demo up and running on itch.io. I was able to get to the front page of itch for a little bit, which helped get noticed by alpha beta gamer, who wrote a small article about the game. That gained a few hundred wishlists. Itch absolutely helped refine the game more as well.
I streamed development on twitch. This was a major dumb luck thing which helped. I only had a handful of people watching but one day Piratesoftware just showed up in my stream and kind of took me in under his wings. He would occasionally raid my channel, netting in a couple hundred wishlists each time. He also offered for me to bundle my game with his on Steam which has helped out tremendously. He also helped during launch by streaming the game, and getting AdmiralBahroo to stream it as well.
Twitter helped quite a bit as well not for large likes but I was able to gain interest in my title with content creators. So wanderbots picked up on it. He actually played the demo prior to nextfest and gave a pretty good vid on the game, which made me really fix up my accessibility. He also did a vid just prior to launch. Esty8nine also helped and saw the game through twitter he provided some valuable takeaways that helped me refine my game much more. ClemmyGames also picked it up and listed it in the top ten for shmup fest as well as during my launch week as the hidden indie gem of the week. I did pay for one promotional tweet @SteamGamesPC after the game launched I think it netted a few hundred in sales. Was very cheap only like $10 and a steam key.
Reddit... oh boy did a bunch of reddit posts here and there. probably in total netted 1k wishlists. I focused on indiegaming, webgames, pixelart, and the sunday post at games. None of them really took off to much was on gaming at the top for like 2 hours then got permabanned.
Festivals these were big. Nextfest I did in october and that gained me probably 1k wishlists. I somehow got featured in steams promo reel for that nextrfest but it didn't really help that much. It did cause a few gaming news outlets to list my game in the upcoming nextfest articles but all it was a link. It did get some of the more prominent indiedev content creators to take a look and promote my game however. Outside of Nextfest was Shmupfest which also gained some interest with content creators in that genre. Gaining about 800 wishlists. There were 2 other festivals but they didn't provide a lot of traction.
I sent out keys roughly 40, got a handful of videos made from them so seemed like a success. Retromantic was probably the biggest one.
Other things I tried:
- Tried tiktok... game wasn't tiktokable.
- imgur did a few posts dont think it netted me much.
- Also made posts in forums which focused on SHMUPs, don't think that gained me much.
- Did the usual discord its fairly small but has decent participation.
- Prologue, the game was too short for this in hindsight.