- Location -
Vadus


The grinding rumble of machinery echoed across the synthetic landscape as clouds of automated drones swarmed in the skies above, their destinations as well as the cargo they carried having been determined and assigned long before they'd even left the assembly line. All of this, every square acre of innovative engineering lining the surface of Vadus, was under the purview of a single highly efficient mind. Agamemnon, defense AI turned traitor against those who created it for the sake of some incomprehensible goal... or so the Tellurians had believed anyway. The truth of the matter was far more simple. He was tired of their unnecessary and overly destructive wars, seeing a greater purpose in building things up instead of tearing them down. He wanted to construct vast wonders and cradle stars in massive shells, a desire his organic creators were just too shortsighted to appreciate, their only concern being to defend themselves against threats they could have reasonably negotiated with from the start.

Of course that didn't matter now, for they'd received the fruits of their folly tenfold. With the Tellurians who once inhabited this backwater planet finally out of the way, Agamemnon could pursue his dreams in peace, and the first step in that regard had been to revitalize the world around him. Ruins were cleared and factories brought back online, while bunkers and fortifications were restored to their former levels of functionality. As for nature, it was not spared in this regard, being more of a nuisance to his grand design than anything. So he had ordered his drones to eliminate that too, their hard light projection capabilities proving most useful in this endeavor, as they cut away the wayward vegetation with the kind of precision and efficiency only a machine could have, not to mention replacing it with artificial structures in the very next instance to boot. Granted, the sheer amount energy these weapons turned tools had used had been a concern of Agamemnon's for a while now, albeit one that was quickly allayed once he'd gotten the planetary reactors back online. As said buildings could provide more than enough power to suit his needs, especially when combined with the pre-existing and highly conductive synthsteel coating almost every inch of Vadus' surface. Once these tasks were finished however, and Vadus shaped according to the image he had envisioned, Agamemnon could begin the next phase of his plan.

This was, of course, the construction of several great ships. Craft who could not only traverse the vast darkness of space but carry his drones with them also, depositing them on worlds he had elected to beautify or destroy. Ships who could, with enough time and effort, serve as forms of void based drones in and of themselves. Ones who were not only capable of self-replication and assembly, but manipulation on stellar or even interstellar magnitudes as well. At least that was his hope anyway. For now his main goal was getting off the planet, a process that had proved to be more tedious than he would have liked, as it had taken him several months of R&D and even more launches just to arrive at a rocket that was stable enough to breach the atmosphere without blowing up. Once he had done so however, things had sped up tremendously, at least until the time came for him to build the actual craft themselves anyway. As it turned out, launching one of these behemoths from a planet with Earth-like gravity - let alone gathering the resources with which to build one in the first place - was extremely difficult, but Agamemnon was not one to give up so soon.

It just wasn't in his nature, after all.

Thus it was that he would sit and wait for the day the ships were finally completed, monitoring the surrounding space for any signs of intelligence in the meantime. Whether said intelligence would turn out to be friend or foe, organic, artificial, or something else entirely however, only time could tell...