Bugman

S A M A Y O K E N

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No King rules the roads of death.

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Chaos. That encapsulated what was happening better than any other term. Chaos. Screams raged. First of orderly commands, then of men in combat, and finally of the suffering that followed intermingled by ever more voices of women and children.

If these sounds were thought of as music as some of the warriors present might do, then it would be full of harmony. Those same sounds of men were accompanied by the twang of bowstrings and the whistling of arrows. Sword clashed against polearm, fire crackled almost as if a drum keeping a beat. Even a few tanegashimas cracked, the sound like the distant peal of thunder as balls of steel and brass flew together with arrows.

But Ichiro did not see it as such. He saw only the implosion of all that had framed his world. So many years his readings, his studies had been his guide. He clutched his heart, staring at the fires spreading. "Amitābha." he muttered. "Amitābha." he repeated, as if this would bring him some sort of peace. It didn't. It only served to enflame the passions, the poison of hatred spreading through his flesh. That which demanded he raise his blade, that he rush into the fray and die as so many others had this day. All the efforts he had put forth to detach himself from this world, to achieve permanent enlightenment, it was melting. "Ku." he murmured, gently putting his hand on the shoulder of an Ashigaru that together with several comrades was fleeing scene. "Where are you going? The battle rages on." He had intended this to come out authoritatively, but it sounded like a gasp of a defeated man struggling to accept truth. He fell over as amidst his musings he didn't let go of the shoulder of the man that had told Ichiro to release, and then got a punch upon the nose as the man took measures to not let his flight from the battle be interrupted.

Getting upright, he only realized his nose was broken and bleeding as the tinny taste of blood came upon his tongue. This was over. The battle was over. The only question was if honourable death was to be pursued, or if they would live another day. Defeat wasn't the matter to ponder, merely the nature it would take on.

He had to find his father. That would bring some clarity. It had to. There were no monks, no texts he could run to for guidance. Finding his parent, Ichiro could get no solace. Getting the man out from the fray, it was only some moments into dragging him that he realized that his sister was with him. Despite everything, he found himself giving her a hollow smile. Partially it was insincere, an effort to comfort her. Part of it was wholly sincere, eager to see a kind face amidst the horror they were going through.

He looked down at his father, chuckling through tears that were hardly held up. "You will have to punish me with a few strikes for it later, father." he just about managed. A single tear rolled down his face, mixing with the blood of his nose, the salt stinging as it entered the open wound. "I hope nobody learns of my disobedience." As grief struck, the struggle to accept the reality of father's inbound death seemed an apt metaphor for him being drawn into the world of sensory illusion, and the struggle to accept the greater truths.

Faster than an eye could track, Masato's hands flew to his children. Pulling on the collars of son and daughter he brought them to himself, his grip on the flesh that connected their necks to shoulders tight like iron despite having lost so much blood already. "The Clan does not end here. Not yet. You will flee, at once." His speech was gruff, his injury, the smoke he inhaled, and the grief of knowing this is the last time he will see his children all giving it an almost ethereal rasp. "You cannot die, not here, not today."

Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath while leaning into the ground he lay upon. As if martialling the last of his strength to think on what to say. "Defeat through... through this. Ignominy. If we are to perish, it will be amidst triumph. Our bodies will rest on top of those of our foes, not beneath." He looked at his children, expecting the youths to argue. For his part at least, Ichiro grasped the forearm of his father as tightly as he could and nodded. Satisfied with this display of obeisance, he released his son and awaited a similar sign of understanding from his daughter. "You will not fail me. Pride fills me. Pride that I, living through you, will bring an end to this villain. Now go. Leave me to my final thoughts."

Released, Ichiro's last sight of his father would be to take from him his helmet, his blades. These would be needed, and they could not be left to be desecrated as loot by some marauder. With that he arose and began the shameful flight from the fortifications. He didn't turn his head back at his father was in practical terms slain. It would hurt, and it would only drag him further into this damnable world. The son knew his sister was strong, and he hoped she would come as ordered. But if needed he would pry her off of the father they both grieved for to the task of vengeance they were entrusted with.

A very brief stop would be made by him, collecting what koku he could for their inevitably difficult journey to come. Then he would lead his sister to one side of the fortifications where the slope was just the right incline and the sweet spot between smooth and rough that it could be slid down. It was no glamorous exit through a secret passage, and the friction hurt before he had even slid to the bottom. But they were out, and relatively unscathed. "We will do as father commanded." Ichiro spoke, unsure if he was trying to reassure Natsumi or himself.

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From Ashes We Rise: The Galaxy At Large

The Fabricator General - a title he now more and more insisted on being called by to cement his authority - stared at the many vid-feeds before him. The spycraft flying over Earth showed information that was more disconcerting with every passing moment. This new realm uniting the cradle of humanity was not just another barbarian statelet as the Martians had grown accustomed to seeing from the Terrans. However, this was… an Imperium. Places devastated by war brought by their genetically engineered armies were elevated to megapolises in just a few years after being flattened.

It seemed nobody was really able to stop the growth of this realm. Quality and quantity alike favoured this golden warlord, and even the most cynical projection showed that soon this Emperor would be able to call the entirety of Terra his own. The army that he had - if it also kept growing - would be grand and mighty enough to seriously threaten a conventional defeat of the Martian army. They could call upon the rest of the Galactic Machine cult, but with the paths of travel being as unstable as they are it could be decades before some sort of true response could be assembled, assuming it even was. Many Forge worlds greedily eyed the position of Mars as the head of the Mechanicum and it was not clear just how severe this lust for power was among some of the more powerful and independent Forgeworlds.

There was however, one thing the Terrans had no clear way to surmount. They had not the quantity of spacecraft to mount a credible invasion. The orbital defences of Mars even damaged as they were would be enough to blow whatever they could throw at the moment out of the sky. The spacecraft of Mars would cut a heavy toll on the disbelievers even before that.

But who knew what would change. Though there was nominal peace on Mars with the Fulgurites and Corpuscarii unable to maintain their war, Salkor knew that rebuilding their damage would take years. That meant that restoring lost forces, erecting further defences, and other measures to defend from a Terran invasion. Moreover, the probability of sending a punitive expedition of sorts to strangle any hypothetical spaceport being built on Terra was also at best a fantasy.

It was a race, he supposed. A question of who would recover first and faster from their respective bloodsheds and reunifications. Between this upstart warlords and perhaps the single most advanced realm of humanity, Salkor knew the simulations would all speak in favour of Mars. But, all those simulations also insisted that Terra would have just been the same wasteland of bloodshed and slaughter. They all predicted the opposite of what was happening now, and he could hardly just ignore this.

Worse yet, all the babbling of the astropaths and navigators was coming true. He had until now assumed it was just the work of tortured minds, those who had all sorts of comorbidities from constant exposure to the ill defined energies of the immaterium. But, now these ramblings seemed to hold more and more weight as sincere forces of forecast and analysis. More and more he found himself asking for what madness they spoke of, and taking it seriously. He knew that the rest of Mars would ridicule him if he tried to use this as some sort of evidence or meaningful source of prediction. He would have to justify his alarmism through other means, but he knew that he could no longer afford to ignore the psykers. They had spoken truth one time too many for it to be a coincidence. Or at least, a coincidence that wasn’t more unlikely than the fact they spoke the truth.

He wasn’t happy about this of course. Usually knowledge was something that had to be worked for, developed from first principles. This? This was organized insanity at best. To submit himself to it was inviting a path to the destruction of himself, as well as the planet and religion he shepherded.

Worse yet, was that even if the issue of the Terrans was resolved, the problem of the Electro Priests was not truly resolved. The conflict only stopped because the enablers of it had been forced to cease their efforts. The underlying hatreds were still very well present. Perhaps the would cease with time, as everyone moved on to other matters.

This was a vain hope, he knew it well enough. It was a product of the weakness of his own mind, the humanity still within weighing him down. This horrible imperfection was affecting his judgment. Maybe it was what made him give credence to the psykers too, maybe he should ignore them as yet more frail-minded humans.

No, no. The Machine was also telling him to listen to the warp-touched. Something there affected even circuits and switches.

If he still had the impulse to sigh, he would have. Salkor once more reviewed the numbers. It was a waiting game, now. There wasn’t much more he could do. Many complained about his refusal to demobilize the armies of Mars, but he couldn’t. They had to be ready at a moment’s notice to meet the Terrans on the many fortifications being erected at this very moment.

For the first time in years, he had the impulse to see things himself. The weakling human again, needing to be sated. Hovering out of the depths of his forge, he went to the surface of the Red Planet and then stared into the darkness of the sky. Through the atmosphere, he could see it:

Terra.

There was a feeling he hadn’t in a while, that of witnessing beauty. The plasglas lenses of his ocular implants couldn’t convey it all, but it was beautiful. All the lights, all the flames, the planet looked almost… golden. Gold. There was something prophetic there, he would have to speak to the psykers of this, ask them if they had sensed it. But first, he still had many Archmagoses sending complaints to attend to.

Firefly - Second 'Verse

The Recap.

He had been busy. More than some might appreciate, but thankfully less than they’d notice. Despite being large as he was, Elias had a way of being quite elusive about the place. Fuzzy pink loafers helped a lot to not make a sound, but thoroughly mapping the schedules of the crew helped more. Of course, it helped a lot less than he had hoped. This wasn’t the armed forces, the crew of the China Doll had a habit of… just doing stuff. Which he didn’t like. You were meant to organize spontaneity beforehand, such as appointed lunch-breaks. Briefly he figured he wouldn’t fit in with the crew to the point that he, they, or both would simply decide it was better to part ways. He wasn’t exactly married to the China Doll, but he somehow doubted he’d have an easy time finding another place to work like this. Anyway, he found himself slowly growing to the place. He became quite expert at recognizing the voices of each of the crew’s members even through walls, their gaits, the sound of their feat as he listened from his resting spot near the engines. And, perhaps they’d learn of his presence in their own subtle ways too.

Some things would be a lot cleaner or more maintained than they had been since perhaps the first year of the China Doll’s flight; coverings of lights would have all the spiders that made them their homes suddenly evicted. Rust would disappear from everywhere that it had begun to show, and old machinery would be oiled. Smoke detectors that no longer even beeped from a need of changed batteries would once more have a happy little green light to show all was well. Some things took him longer. Getting surety of all the hermetic seals in the event of a breach of the hull was much harder, especially since all the instruments and tools from the past mechanic weren’t configured as he was used to. But eventually he was able to finally get the concern out of his head that if there was a hole in the ship everyone would get sucked out like juice from a fruit because the vessel’s doors couldn’t hold as airlocks. What a long thought.

So many little things needed maintaining, and it was a nice way to busy himself. A clock he heard in a hallway had one out of every hundred or so ticks that followed each tock be missed. This added up to that part of the ship living in an entirely different universe that was minutes behind the rest of the galaxy! Thankfully, all that was needed was to bend a little spoke back into shape to fix this crime.

The truth was that Elias didn’t actually know what to do with himself other than work. Wealthy as his family was, he had somewhat gotten accustomed to expensive tastes from his youth, those which he just assumed couldn’t be fulfilled here even if he couldn’t elaborate much more beyond that. But musics, film, and all else really weren’t to his preference. He couldn’t really eat beyond chugging the admittedly appreciated efforts to make scentful meals for him, what was left to spend his days on?

Well, there were his personal projects he supposed. Picking heavy things up in a cyclic fashion at least gave him some calm, even if he had to chug a lot of those purees to try maintain any mass on a wiry skeleton that was more meant for a lean geek than his struggle to try to be a wall of muscle. There was the text to speech device. He appreciated the members of the crew that went out of their way to learn sign language for his sake, but it was clearly easier for them to hear his hastily punched out keys, especially since he didn’t need to have them be looking at his hands or even his chalkboard to read this. With just a little scrap electronics and maybe an alarm clock or two that people kept sleeping through anyway, his contraption was created.

But then of course, there was his magnum opus, or at least for this flight. The grand piano, everything from the strings to hammers to frame crafted by his own. A ramshackle mess, one that needed tuning. But in the quiet of the night, if a person went out for a glass of water or a call of nature, they might just hear a wistful tune.

There was the matter of identity to take care of, of course. He photocopied his fingerprints, refrigerated samples of his blood and hair and everything else. He’d written out complex letters detailing his situation that he’d use to help recover his name. The man had even considered making a chart to compare his mutilated features with those of old pictures of himself, but he figured eventually that the people who cared would figure this out themselves, walking around with a picture of a young man and his own disfigured portrait probably wouldn’t go down well.

However, if everything went right (as rare as such a thing might have been), then maybe Elias Riemen would finally have a bit of paper with a barcode that finally told the whole world that he was who he said he was. Such flimsy little things, all shiny and laminated these IDs. Yet so much meaning was assigned to them, meaning that he suffered because he couldn’t assign it to himself.

Happy thoughts, he had to think happy thoughts. Well, first he had to think of some, before he could think them.

Firefly - Second 'Verse

Hey gang, I'm done marking as promised to Wolf, so I figured I'd show my face in now I think I can manage to keep up. Glad everyone kept having fun in my absence, and excited to see these new characters!

The bug man's hive of ideas

New plot with VtM/world of darkness inspiration added

The bug man's hive of ideas

:○

The bug man's hive of ideas

new bump for a new idea!

Never thought I'd see you again. Not sure I wanted to. - New!

This has been an idea rolling around in my head for a while. In summary, our characters once knew each other a long time ago, very well. Platonically could have been best bros or siblings, or if you want a little romance they could have been lovers or even outright married, perhaps even with poor kids left suffering by their separation. Regardless, the point is there was something that forced a whole abyss between them. Only some coincidence of circumstance forced them together again. Maybe on meeting each other they rekindle their friendship or love exactly as it was, missing each other too much despite their differences. Maybe something only forces them into the same situation as they remain resentful, thus having to "start anew".

I kind of had two fandoms with more specific ideas in mind for this.

Warcraft

Our characters are both from Quel'Thalas. However mine ended up as a High Elf, loyal to the alliance, while yours ended up a Blood Elf loyal to the Horde. Maybe the adventured down the same dungeon, maybe they got captured by the same nasties, I don't know, but something brought them together again.

League of Legends/Arcane/Runeterra

Here, we are both from Demacia. But your character was a mage, while mine a Knight or even Mageseeker. Your character had to flee, or perhaps is in hiding, or even participated in the rebellion against it. However we are reunited against some greater foe. Perhaps your character fled to Zaun and mine needs help of your's catching a genuinely evil mage he was tracking. Maybe after magic was no longer persecuted our characters had to work together to now fight off the attacks of the winter's claw and such.

From Ashes We Rise: The Galaxy At Large

The Fabricator General looked at the orbital picture of Mars. Great stacks of smoke were visible from orbit. Which in fact, was incredibly good news. It meant that the planet was no longer glowing in space from all the fires and weapon signatures that the de-escalating conflict once made. Emotion as the barbarians on earth merely a few million kilometres away understood it, was not something that the Mechanicum went through. Fear was nonexistent to them. But self-preservation instinct - which in practical terms was more or less the same thing - ensured that sufficient threat to the life or at least prosperity of every Magos that kept the conflict going meant they would instantly back out of partisanship.

Years had passed now since the first shots were fired, and yet deaths were in the thousands on a daily basis. Of course, most of them were of more or less irrelevant populations. Combat servitors, a few lesser members of the tech-guard, some menials and industrial servitors in edge cases. But this didn’t denigrate a simple fact. Even this level conflict that could eventually be ignored once repairs were done was absolutely intolerable. The fact was that for Salkor, relative peace and order had been the main selling point of his reign. If said peace and order was unable to return then that would mean that he couldn’t deliver on a key part of why his occupancy of his office was accepted and slowly, encrypted lines on the noosphere would carry messages inquiring about who might replace him, and once some likely candidates were established they would begin to discuss how they might replace him.

But though his efforts had gone far, they weren’t enough. Even without abundant weapons and munitions still the schismatic halves of the Electro-Priest orders were fighting on with what individuals they could influence, and their own ranks. It was like a gang-war in old terra at this point, and yet still disruptive. Worst of all, even if these fighters could also be made to stand down the hatred intensified by this war would be no less present and inflamed. If he didn’t manage to do something to put these disparate parties into some meaningful reconciliation or at the very least a truce they were genuine in an effort to honour then he would see a resumption of this conflict in a few hundred years. Worse yet, they will have gotten wise to his method of abridging this conflict and will have decentralized or better obscured their suppliers of armaments.

A great difficulty to Salkor in ending this was that he didn’t actually care about the theological variance between the fulgurites and corpuscarii. As far as he was concerned it was meaningless, semantic, their positions tautologically equivalent. While it meant he was personally not dragged into their conflict it also meant he struggled to propose anything to end their conflict.

What could he really do though? Both sides simply demanded unconditional surrender to the other on the basis of acknowledging their own wrongness in the matter of truth of the Omnissiah’s will. What negotiations could be had when neither side was willing to consider even a microscopic bit of compromise?

This was also hardly the first crisis he had to attend to either. For one, members of the Martian Parliament had to be replaced after it was revealed to the public they had partaken of the war, or in a few tragic cases they had died be it because they had partaken, or inversely they had refused to do so. Unsurprisingly, all of their assemblies were now done through vox links with not a single one attending in person. While functionally no difference was had apart from a few lost nanoseconds due to transmission mediums, it had shown staggering disunity on Mars if its leaders were willing to abandon such hallowed tradition.

Depending on how one looked at it, there was also a more pressing issue. Thousands of augurs had relayed quite worrisome data from Terra. Thousands of probes and listening posts throughout the solar system gave a relatively accurate representation of the geopolitical situation on Earth. It was now well known that the disparate polities of mankind’s homeworld were one by one being absorbed under one banner. This alone wouldn’t raise any mechanical eyebrows. After all, any past attempts to re-unite terra inevitably failed once more as industrial, infrastructural, and resource bottlenecks were hit that made the maintenance of their Empire impossible, and as they inevitably died there would be nothing holding their realm together. But this new regime was different. Their warriors were far more technically advanced than the rabble of the rest of Earth, but even more importantly this advancement was consistent and standardized rather than being some fluke of briefly unearthed archaeotech.

They were also lead competently, their master clearly not in some raving lunacy or constant hedonistic and debauched consumption of mind altering substances. Shrouded in mystery, and at the same time known by all his subjects this self proclaimed Emperor could if left unchecked and given free reign to continue his progress make a serious threat to Mars.

The issue was that nobody could truly agree on what to do. Many Forges insisted that Earth simply be struck by the most potent weapons of the Martian arsenal. But the response to this was twofold. One, many believed this to be sacrilege given the amount of yet unfound archaeotech on Terra. Two, an almost defeatist position was held by some where it was believed that these Terrans had already managed to constitute a sufficiently advanced state that they would have erected means to defend from an attempt at extermination from the stars.

In some sense, the brief civil war was thus a test by the Omnissiah, a trial before the greater one that the Earthlings might pose. This very same trial bore reward now it was passed, for thousands of manufactorums across the red planet were already on a war footing, and great forces were already mobilized. While this state of affairs couldn’t continue forever and was thus partially wound down, it still ensured that Martian weapon stocks were full and forces beyond count.

This was all of course a redundancy. The terrans didn’t have the fleet to properly invade Mars, any ships they managed to erect would be destroyed before they could even disgorge the invaders within. But, this militarization of the Machine Cult would serve as a deterrent against the people of this nascent Empire even attempting to so much as mildly inconvenience the Martian people.

Still, there was something of a premonition. Navigators and Astropaths alike spoke of a changing of eras, and the little part of flesh and blood that remained within him knew this too as an undeniable fact. The Fabricator General liked to quiet this inferior part of himself by saying it was due to merely a reaction to the war of the electro priests. Yet, the rational, the logical part knew that this was self-deception. The much younger Salkor would have appreciated the irony in the meat being more objective, more sensible than the machine. Now, he could only sense concern.

He couldn’t tell why, but he knew this would not end well.

The bug man's hive of ideas

I won't be active for a few days due to work stuff but when I return it would be nice to have some DMs :U

What kind of RP mood are you in?

rewatched arcane with my so and now dreaming of something in LoL/Runeterra/Arcane setting once more