I’m making an effort to be as clear and unambiguous as I can when writing, but I’ve been playing Cee pretty much exclusively with people who know her almost as well as I do for years now. I’m used to leaving some things unsaid for the sake of story flow since the usual suspects know it all already; been a while since I’ve been writing in a forum with mostly-strangers. Still shaking some of the rust off the ol’ big-board skillz. If I forget to describe something, or if something catches you weird and you’re not sure what’s going down, do lemme know.
Well lah dee diddle-dum dah – looked like Juniortron wanted to take the whole mecha-angel thing all the way up to 13.
Cee’s own Halo, and the spread of wings floating around it, had been decided on by her way-back-when Ghalakrast R&D unit; they had wanted their champion to overawe enemies with a brilliant display of righteous power and prominence, terrifying the Undesirables she’d been originally conceived to hunt. Cee herself didn’t really care one way or another about the angelic visuals of her Halo – frankly, if she could’ve traded in the gaudy, mostly-decorative wings for that intriguing amplifier system Ghalakrast had engineered into Missy Eight-Bit’s own Halo, she would’ve done so with a smile on her face.
This guy, though? Shrouded in faint, foggy-looking golden light, bearing golden honeycomb blades on wrists and ankles, flying on more-honeycomb wing-branch…things, glaring at her with his red ring of mad – Juniortron was definitely pushing the whole avenging-archangel look pretty dang hard.
The time could’ve been better spent. The mechanoid’s breakneck approach to Cee’s position was nonetheless not really breakneck enough – the two of them each had plenty of time for preliminary, pre-fistpunching scans on each other. Cee could tell that the Plaxploder-running creep looked to be fairly well universally covered in vent ports for whatever was producing his whole I-Am-Robo-Jesus thing; there was no real difference between the ports exhausting his golden corona and those to which his wings and blades were anchored. He’d been built on a loosely humanoid model, forgoing any sort of humanizing elements in exchange for looking like some sort of evil killbot with pretentions of religion. Which, for all Cee knew, he was.
Certainly Juniortron there would be able to read the energy gathering within Cee’s Halo, would be able to discern the cloud of power surrounding her. Her gun was there for the world to see, and it was hard to miss the targe held easily in front of her middle – coincidentally, right about where Juniortron’s braking burst of power would hit, if it didn’t disperse the way it was supposed to. All of that was obvious. What wasn’t obvious was where the colossal nuke-driven gamma sword she’d skewered his collapsed Plaxploder with had come from, or where all of her hidden secret weapons were.
Other than the secret weapons on her chest, anyways. And there was really nothing secret about those.
Unlike Cee, Juniortron had no readily apparent defensive aura or shield in place. She was figuring he’d be counting on whatever those vents did and whatever innate toughness his frame boasted to deal with incoming attacks. Given the wingblades on each major limb, Cee had the cretin pegged as a close-in bruiser by preference – elsewise he probably would have tried to shoot rather than blitz her personal space.
"You are in the way, Android. I give you one chance, now, to leave. You do not –"
Ahh, the Villainous Ultimatum. A time-honored tradition of Rimward scraps like this one – one side invariably told the other “buzz off and I let you live” in a menacing voice, trying to be all oppressive and stuff. Occasionally they even worked – this guy’s whole Robo Jesus schtick would probably scare off some of the junk-trawler idiots who’d occasionally work up the nerve to contest a juicy piece of salvage. Cee, though? Cee had faced down Villainous Ultimatums from much nastier things than Juniortron here. She’d long since ceased being impressed.
Which was why, even before the day’s punching clown quite finished delivering his Villainous Ultimatum, he was dealing with Cee’s answer in the form of righteous high-velocity violence.
Many super-swordsmen the multiverse over prided themselves on their Iaido quick strikes, able to draw their swords from their sheathes and transition into an attack against the opponent in the same motion, with breathtaking speed that often seemed to defy all logic and reason. Many such swordsmen felt they had a lock on the ability to switch from resting stance to brutal attack in a heartbeat…but they were wrong.
Gunslingers had been working to perfect the art of the quickdraw for as long as pistols had existed, for much the same reasoning – shortening the time between Rest and Kill as much as possible preserved the gunslinger’s life and allowed her to end her foes before they could fire in turn. Cee was no exception. In point of fact, she had put considerable time, attention, and effort into engineering and optimizing her quickdraw; combined with the speed and precision of her artificial chassis, and she had shaved the time from holster to discharge down to levels ordinary humans were unable to properly perceive. Gunsmoke just seemed to materialize in Cee’s hand, while her arm went from hanging loose at her side to pointed at the glowing robo-dude and squeezing triggers without any intervening motion. Maybe Juniortron could perceive it – probably, in fact – but perception and reaction were two entirely different things.
Either way though, Juniortron would find himself facing a double-tapped two-shot of Pompeii rounds. The originator of the micronuclear bursting cells Cee had employed by the truckload in her Krakatoa, a Pompeii shot consisted of a single micronuke charge and just enough magnetic lensing to focus the charge’s blast into a nuclear-driven graser shot, when the round detonated about three meters beyond Gunsmoke’s barrel. The result: a piercing bolt of intense, focused gamma on the antivehicle scale, rather than the anti-Kaiju scale of the Krakatoa. Two of them, in this case.
Normally of course, Cee’s shots were targeted with the precision of a master surgeon – or a machine. This time though, with no real idea of Juniortron’s internal workings or layout, she targeted the bolts at her foe’s center of mass, one high on the chest ‘bout ten centimeters beneath the base of his throat, the other another ten centimeters beneath that. Given the creep’s semihumanoid construction, it stood to reason that the chest would be where the greatest concentration of vital systems was.
Having Shot First, Cee flung herself backwards in the same moment she drew and fired her weapon, skidding quickly enough across the corroded outer hull of the Venture to leave a pair of unusually energetic trails of flame in the wake of her heels, alongside a scattering of swiftly melting shoe remnants. The rest of her Indiana Y outfit fuzzed and vanished, replaced by her Feikona uniform – form-fitting black cherry bodysuit beneath an open-fronted, half-sleeved black jacket, traced with lines of golden force and capped with slim, tech-armored boots. Her gunbelt remained, as did Gunsmoke and the Bastion, as she rocketed backwards under her Halo’s power.
There were, theoretically, four shots left in the gun to her enemy’s probable knowledge. The Pompeii rounds took next to nothing to ‘Forge and so she’d been able to maintain a hefty flow of power to her Lament, building the charge suspended in her Halo ever higher. Frankly, as proud as Cee was of her quickdraw and as unquestionably lethal as the technique was, the shots were often the martial equivalent of Cee flipping her enemy the bird – meant more to piss them off and provoke a reaction than to end a fight.
Not that she’d complain if she hit something vital and dropped Juniortron with her first two shots. She just wasn’t naïve enough to count on it in any way. That was what second shots were for. Or third. Or however many it took for Cee to find the right place to put a hole so she could get back to digging around for sweet sweet TREASURE!
I would question a buckler's efficiency when strapped to an arm - at that point you may as well just wear a gauntlet or an armored bracer and Wonder Woman stuff. I mean yeah, it can be done, and we all know that inhumanly perfect timing/precision of action is the true universal RP superpower, so you could make it work...but I feel like having the shield immovably strapped in place would strip off a lot of the normal utility of a buckler.
@MelonHead Well, given the discussion of a few pages earlier I was disregarding firearms and other heavy-duty projectiles, as they don't seem to be an issue in most dispowered fights. In which case, slings and arrows are the big ones, and those were dealt with by either being Iron Man or by carrying your cover around with you.
Still. If the sheet is an outright ninja, then yeah. Smoke bombs, blinding powders, throwing stuffs. Though there isn't a thrown weapon known to man that matches the range or punch of even a sling, let alone a bow or crossbow. Probably just going to have to accept a disadvantage in most ranged fights outside ten, fifteen meters.
As for the blade...chokuto, maybe? I really ought to find that sheet if I'm going to keep yapping. But ehh...where's the fun in being informed, eh?
What you may be looking for, Luminosity, is an arming sword/knightly sword rather than a longsword. Longswords are two-handed warfighting weapons, but what a lot of video games and other modern material calls longswords are actually that arming sword/knightly sword up there.
I'unno. I'll admit to having not read the sheet, but the debate seemed to be one where that fudge was relevant. I've seen a lot a lot of folks fall down that trap.
Anyways. Insofar as ranged defense on a lightweight dispowered character...well. Most of the historically accurate defenses against ranged weapons generally came down to "wear a lot of metal" or "carry a big freaking shield"; something to get in the way. Neither of which are options. You could probably get away with carrying a buckler shield, though. While I wouldn't want to try and protect myself from arrows with a dinner plate on a handle, I would take the dinner plate on a handle any day over nada. And bucklers were easily enough worn on a belt or such (they were, in fact, designed for it if I recall) and could thus be taken up at need with your free hand rather than having to permanently occupy that mitt.
Also a helm of some sort. There's a reason all those old gladiators out there are shown as nekkid save for one arm and a helm. Gotta keep dat noggin intact in front of damn near everything else.
. .. … Diagnostic complete. MSS system rebooting...complete. ALERT!
...Gremlins.
It was the only explanation. Cee knew gremlins were real, of course – mischievous little spirit-figments who existed solely to screw with things, introducing unknown, unknowable glitches in otherwise perfectly healthy machinery. The transitory attention of a gremlin was cause for distinct irritation in anyone who worked with machinery – or was made up of it, in Cee's case. Fortunately she had yet to suffer the terrible misfortune of attracting the fascination of a pack of the things, but she seemed to've picked up a wandering gremlin in need of some amusement somewhere between Back There and Right Here.
Or at least that was the only plausible reason she could think of for why both her ship and her own sensor network had missed the existence of a gigantic freaking planetary exploder drill operating not even ten kilometers away from the crashed Glorious Venture. It had to be gremlins fogging her systems. Either that or PVC's constant buffoonery had drowned out the returns, even from orbit.
Nevertheless, Cee was now aware of the giant-fuckoff drill working its way through the planet's crust some distance away. At the rate it was going it wasn't really an immediate threat, but the case of gremlins had already turned her Irritation dial up, and the sudden presence of some asshat trying to pluck out a planet-sized apple core cranked that dial up way into the yellow. She was woriing here, god damnit!
“PVC, get to...wherever the fuck it is you go when the explosions start,” Cee said to the robird. She'd never discovered an adequate explanation for PVC's ability to magically disappear prior to hard combat, only to turn up again undamaged at the end of the sort of fracas that wrecked everything in a hundred-mile vicinity...but if she'd paid for the damned thing, it was at least good that she could keep her investment.
“Raah! Roger Cap'n, abandoning ship, raaaah!”
Figures. The only time PVC ever listened to her was when she told him to be a chicken instead of a parrot. Damned bird.
While PVC made himself scarce, Cee started towards one of the rents in the Venture's exterior hull, holding her right hand out and conjuring up a weapon in it as she traveled. This particular weapon was as long as Cee was tall, a somewhat sword-like weapon with a rectangular, fin-like blade about a foot wide and a few inches thick. A heavy, Japanese-style grip extended from the butt of the fin, behind an oversized bell-like guard wrapped around four small thruster nozzles. All in all, the thing looked a bit like an unfinished blank for one of the dismayingly oversized 'buster'-type swords which were unusually common throughout the multiverse.
The weapon assembled itself out of strands of glowing golden light, simply building itself out of thin air. Or out of Cee's on power, rather – her Godforge at work, constructing the weapon she desired on the spot. This particular weapon took longer to construct than most, assembling itself in a couple of seconds as Cee muttered dire imprecations and uncouth observations about whoever had decided to get in the way of her vacation. She'd had three heavy fights in the last couple of months already, where was the freaking downtime?!
A few moment's travel later saw Cee on top of the old derelict vessel, facing the direction of the Plaxploder drill off in the distance. Snarling under her breath, Cee tossed the weapon she'd forged in the general direction of the drill – right before its integrated engines kicked on, launching the weapon at considerable velocity towards its target. In this case, the Plaxploder – whose days were numbered, with a number that looked an awful lot like '0'.
The Krakatoa Anti-Kaiju Buster Missile was a relatively recent development of Cee's, a weapon she'd first deployed in battle only a month or so ago on a world gone dark. The device used over two hundred Pompeii-class micronuclear bursting charges, detonated in precisely calculated sequence within a very specific magnetic lensing cage, to fuck someone's day up right and proper generate a quarter-second's burn time for a nuke-driven gamma blade a double dozen meters wide and over half a kilometer long, carrying half a kiloTNTon's destructive yield. The Krakatoa was, in effect, a warship (or kaiju!)-killing radiation blade with one devastating stab in its lifetime. This one was aimed to impact the Plaxpoder Drill square in its metaphorical mouth, punching a non-recoverable hole in the device and flooding what was left with gamma radiation bled out of the primary blast. If that didn't disable the Plaxploder...well, she'd have to try something else. The spent Krakatoa, warped and smoking and most thoroughly destroyed by its own payload, dissolved back into motes of golden light on its way back down to the earth, vanishing before it could hit the ground.
“HEY! MEGATRON JUNIOR!” Cee bellowed, somehow figuring that whatever had been running a gigantic planet-corkscrew could hear her across the handful of kilometers separating them. “I AM USING THIS PLANET RIGHT NOW! TAKE YOUR LOUSY FUCKIN' PLANETCRACKER SOMEWHERE THE HELL ELSE!
Despite her bluster, Cee could tell that there was something over there that was not alive. It looked as if she was facing another machine entity, and with that in mind, she had already summoned Autochthon's Bastion to her right arm. The targe was a gift from On High's foundries for an Agent of the Maker; its mere passive presence increased the effectiveness of Cee's Ether Field by a factor of five. The shield was far and away her best defensive tool (as shields tended to be), and was her go-to when she was expecting an unknown level of reprisal from someone with an unknown Douchebag Rating.
The other preparation she undertook was to snap her Archangel's Halo open. A large three-quarter ring of brilliant argent power floating above Cee's head, ringed with six techno-angel machine wings arrayed around Cee. The Halo provided her mobility, allowing her to flip gravity the bird finger and maneuver freely in three-dimensional space. Which she wasn't doing just then, but somehow she figured being surrounded by a shitpile of big glowing angel wings would prooooobably give the game away. More importantly, though, the Halo was also the focal point for one of Cee's most useful weapons – her Sinner's Lament.
A web of lightning formed within the primary ring of Cee's Halo, centered on and feeding into a single sun-bright spark of rapidly growing power. Right then, there wasn't really much there - it took time for the Lament to charge up to the sort of crazy fight-ending murderblast she'd unleashed on foes like Relius in the past...but soonest begun was soonest done. There was never going to be a crazy fight-ending Lament murderblast if she didn't get it drawing juice. Who knew – maybe Juniortron over there would be slow in crossing the kilometers between them and she'd have all the time in the world to snipe his happy ass right off the face of Tarkarus II.
With her Lament beginning its charging sequence, her Bastion held at easy guard in front of her middle, and a hand conveniently free to make rude gestures with, Cee figured she was adequately set up to begin Rumble #4 in her “What Happened After Fucking Vestusio” series.
Time to get her winnin' chalk ready – there was another hash in the “PWNT” column coming right on up...
Hmm...okay. To clarify: Virtuoso's on the same planet Cee is and is simply using a gigantic drill thing to core it out elsewhere?
Gotta admit, I've never seen someone just...outright ignore the other guy's intro post before. That is defo a new one. Okay...will see what I can do for figuring out a reason Cee missed a planetary exploder drill operating in the system on her initial approach. May take a short bit.
I.) Short Form Bio(A one-page overview of Cee, intended primarily as a combat summary for enemy fighters uninterested in reading the entire document) II.) Stat Card(A vital statistics list for Cee including miscellaneous basic information, as well as her currently available titles) III.) Physical Readout(Cee’s image, pertinent physical descriptions, and information pertaining to the base capabilities of her physical form) IV.) Psych Report(Details concerning Cee’s personality, morality, mental stability [of sorts], as well as relationships with significant figures in the Multiverse) V.) Capabilities(Equipment, functions, and armaments considered hardwired into Cee, equivalent to the Abilities and Powers section of a normal profile) VI.) Equipment(Gear owned by Cee but not considered part of her, equivalent to the Weapons/Armor/Items section of a normal profile) VII.) History(A never-fully-up-to-date recounting of significant events in Cee’s past, intended to give a picture of where she’s been and how she became who she is)
Name: Cee Race (Gender): Android (Female) Allegiance: Autochthon the Maker Occupation: Agent of Autochthon
– Psychological Profile – Confident, bordering on arrogant, easily irritated, aggressive and combative. Very crude, not at all feminine despite her form. Tends to yell at people a lot for no real reason. Takes great pride in her self-awarded mantle of Pirate Queen. Still much more stable and interesting than her earlier self, when she was nothing but a broken copy of Crim.
– Major Abilities –
* Physical Superiority: Cee’s body is tougher, per square inch, than most warships. She’s intensely strong, fast, and durable, with most of the typical advantages of precision and processing a combat android enjoys. * Godforge: Cee’s greatest strength. Allows her to transform her ethereal power into holophysical constructs, copying weapons and other items from friends and foe as well as creating new things out of whole cloth and mojo. * Eye of Justice: A specialized high-precision sensor network able to analyze enemy techniques and weapons, eventually permitting Cee to copy/improve upon them herself with the help of her Godforge. * Ether Stream: The ability to channel ethereal power through her body in order to reinforce or alter it in beneficial ways, improving speed, strength, durability, and/or other options as needed. * Ether Field: A protective aura of power under Cee’s control. Permits high-speed combat and moderate defense capabilities, as well as specialized Field-specific applications. * Archangel’s Halo: Special system permanently integrated into Cee’s chassis. Permits free maneuverability in three-dimensional space (flight), as well as housing the Sinner’s Lament beam weapon. * Twin Heaven Rune: Strangely impossible copy of the True Heaven Rune. Grants access to a vast well of righteous power, but inflicts severe penalties on Cee for killing innocents. * Alexial Engram: A secondary processing cluster with a name and face. When active, provides an enormous boost to Cee’s processing capability. Baroque activation requirements limit the Engram’s usefulness. * Entropic Order: Unpredictable instabilities in the Fire of Order's output impacts Cee's power draw in certain locations (reduces Cee's power in lower-powered settings)
– Major Equipment –
* Autochthon’s Adjudicator: Gift of the Maker. A machine cutlass with the ability to create and control dissembler nanite swarms, up to and including world-eating Von Neumann plagues. Restricted use. * Autochthon’s Bastion: Gift of the Maker. A targe typically worn on the right arm which greatly enhances Cee’s Ether Field. Can switch itself into an extremely powerful frontal barrier mode. * The Phantasm: Gift of the Maker. A small, high-speed interstellar ship Cee can summon/banish at will. * Gunsmoke G: Cee’s oldest weapon. A high-quality .45 Long Colt revolver whose only major ability is the disastrously powerful Angel’s Arm shot fired from its mysterious microreactor. * DaiRaiOh: Immensely powerful but rebellious sword capable of commanding storms. Shared ownership with Crim El Furaga.
– Current Events – (As of 1/15/2016): Wandering the cosmos looking for trouble, following the end of the Second War of Vestusio and her betrayal and dismissal at the hands of Tartarus Heavy Industries. ((Between major storylines))
– Stat Card –
Original Designation: Christina Lorentia Alvarez-Gonzalez Alexandria Lorraine Pennington-Huarez Valentina Maria Borgnine-Cruz Carmina Selena Escobar-Sanchez Silveria Stanley Matsumoto-Chinchilla Madonna Cher David Letterman-Bateman XVIII Name: Cee Fatalis Alias: Crimbot, Crimson Hussy, Toaster, various others. None complimentary. Damnit. Race: Android – P.S.H.A.W. (Pirate Slayer Heuristic Autonomous Weapon) Gender: Female Birthplace: G.S.S. Virtue of Order Birthdate: June 7th Alignment: Chaotic Good Allegiance: Autochthon the Maker Occupation: Agent of Autochthon
– Titles – Title Mechanics: a single title may be active at any given time, typically set at the beginning of a thread and not changed unless circumstances in the thread alter drastically. A title may or may not confer a benefit, or drawback, while active. Titles are added/earned when granted by another, or after particularly momentous events. Yes, this is deliberate and obvious gameification with no basis in reality. I don’t fuckin’ care – if they can do it in Disgaea, I can do it in my writing.
Pirate Queen – The queen of pirates, yo! Self-awarded default title. Confers no benefits whatsoever.
Rogue Unit – The first Ghalakrast P.S.H.A.W. unit, and the first one to rebel and strike out on her own. Default title in Ghalakrast-controlled space. Confers Ghalakrast Empire infamy when active
Agent of Autochthon – A mortal hand of the Lord of Machines in this world. Restricted use. Required for use of Agent’s Order.
Feikona – Touched by the remnant of a long-dead race. Restricted use. Required for use of Alexiel Engram.
– Physical Description and Characteristics –
Description: -Height: 6’ 1” -Weight: 456 lbs. -Eyes: Teal, lacking pupils -Hair: Pale blue-white, worn loose to shoulder length. Marred by a red streak in her bangs
Cee’s physical form is that of a tall, excessively busty human female, with unnaturally pale skin and what used to be long, bright blonde hair marred by a single crimson streak in her bangs. The streak is still there, but after her unintentional memory-dive with Gene, her hair is much shorter now and has altered to match the Eikona’s pale, nearly-white color. Her eyes are teal, with faint golden circuit-pattern traceries visible in them in good light. Her right arm is concealed to the shoulder inside a dull crimson shoulder-length glove covered with golden circuit-pattern traceries akin to those in her eyes; this glove has been reinforced at both her shoulder and her wrist with bands of metal. The glove is the visible component of Cee’s Godforge and cannot be removed. Cee’s features are sharp, ferocity writ into her every line and curve. She takes shit from nobody and looks the part.
Like sane people, Cee changes her clothes on a regular basis and has been seen in multiple outfits as befits her mood or whatever situation she’s in. That said, she’s most often see in her Feikona clothing, as she can summon it to her any time she needs it and finds it to be particularly comfortable. The unusual clothing is her unofficial combat uniform, much as she often laments that fact.
Additional Information – God Forged:
Cee’s body was originally designed and built to tolerances and specifications that rivaled the very gods themselves – or so she’d always told people when she got fake-drunk enough to talk about it. Then she met a god – goddess, rather; one Saori Kimura, also known as the Daughter of Wind and Rain – and discerned that while she’d still been truthful in her comparison, the contest was a lot closer than she’d really figured it would be.
Then she met a capital-G God - Autochthon the Maker in this instance, Lord of Machines – and swore on the spot to never make such a base, prideful and insulting comparison again.
Upon accepting the mantle of one of the Cogfather’s personal agents and champions in the mortal realm, however, the Lord of Machines decided that Cee’s conceit had been cute rather than offensive, and decided both to forgive her and nudge her just a bit closer to being truthful in her comparison once more.
The form Cee now wears is superficially very similar to the one she was activated with, but Autochthon’s tweaks and repairs have pushed her limits well beyond what her original designers thought possible. The rough edges and minor missteps Cee hadn’t been aware her designers had left in her were smoothed out and corrected, substandard materials swapped out for proper ones she hadn’t known existed, and systems her original creators hadn’t believed feasible – or possible – to give her were incorporated into her structure.
Cee’s underlying skeleton is all but unbreakable – her boneframe can withstand dozens of tons of direct force of its own construction, and has been augmented further by a web of kinetic spreaders that diffuse the force of received blows through her entire skeletal structure, reflecting damage back out into her toughened myomer layer rather than allowing impacts to transmit to her more delicate internal systems. Her musculature has been replaced entirely with a new type of myomer that responds directly to ethereal power, incorporating Ether Stream directly into her core systems and allowing her to alter her basic physical parameters at will. She can switch from blinding, unreal speed to overwhelming, Olympian strength to impossible durability and toughness, all in much less than the blink of an eye. Quickly enough, in fact, that to many foes she appears to possess all three traits in equal measure simultaneously.
Her body responds to restorative energies from her Fire of Order now, allowing her to partially repair herself between battles and to quickly erase the minor stresses and incidental damage her own operations can cause her in a manner similar to a biological’s healing abilities. Control and processing runs have been smoothed out and streamlined without losing, and in many cases even increasing, combat redundancy and reliability. About the only things Autochthon didn’t improve or tweak in some way were Cee’s cognition matrix and personality centers, the core of her identity. Everything else…well, Ghalakrast ain’t never seen nuttin’ like it.
– Living Machine:
During the fighting to reclaim Vestusio from the occupying Galactic Federation 44th Frontier Fleet, Cee discovered the depths to which Autochthon’s reworking had affected her. Unlike her Ghalakrast specifications, her Godforged body’s systems were so closely intertwined and codependent that they could not properly be said to be separate subsystems within her save in the broadest sense. Instead, each of the major building blocks of her new self fed back into the others, overseeing and modifying them in response to newly discovered deficiencies in her structure or to changes in her requirements. She had, in effect, been granted the same abilities of adaptation, evolution, and personal growth as a biological being, her body given the tools and awareness needed to recreate itself.
This was most clearly seen in the evolution of Cee’s Godforge during the fighting on Vestusio; previously a golden color matching its divine traceries, the sullen red glove Cee now wears is a visible sign of the changes that permit her to summon DaiRaiOh, as well as those that allow her the bizarre shared ownership of the Rune of Heaven. To ethereal senses, Cee’s right arm is difficult to distinguish from Crim El Furaga’s, its essence aligned to the pirate captain’s in such a way as to confuse and fool even his own stuff. It’s much easier for Cee to summon techniques and energies learned* from Crim as well, granting her an even greater measure of the man’s power.
Cee herself is extremely put out with this property of her new form, finding the notion of being more closely akin to biological creatures to be repugnant. She misses the precision and sureness of her purely electromechanical state, the clarity of knowing what she was and wasn’t capable of. The open-ended uncertainty of this Living Machine business frightens her – though accusing her of being scared of it to her face is a fantastic way to get oneself decked in the beak.
– Purity of Purpose:
Cee was redesigned by Autochthon as a hunter of Phthysis, a superlethal machine corruption which, if left unchecked, would overtake all of Creation and transform it into an endless vista of rot, decay, and dissolution. Phthysis consumes all before it, devouring that which it touches and perverting it to its own ends. To prevent this, the Lord of Machines and those allied with Him in his war have fashioned agents in the mortal realm who are singularly resistant to corruption of virtually any sort.
One of the principle benefits of Cee’s Living Machine form is its ability to identify and purge contamination. A nanoguardian network powerful beyond anything seen before in synthetic life suffuses Cee’s body, constantly watching over her with a strength and awareness fueled directly by the Agent’s mantle she bears. Anchored into her Ether Stream, her Eye of Justice, her Godforge, all of her, Cee’s Purity of Purpose ensures that corruption gains no foothold within Cee. Should an enemy manage to find a way to poison Cee anyways, a means by which they could bypass or overwhelm her safeguards, Purity of Purpose will turn on Cee instead, her own nanoguardian network destroying her utterly before she can be transformed into a weapon of her enemies. None can claim an Agent of Autochthon as their own twisted tool.
– Entropic Order:
The Fire of Order which is at the center of Cee’s being is unusually sensitive to dimensional variances between the various realities to which Cee can travel. To put it bluntly, her total capabilities or power output is in part dependent on where – or when – she is within the vast morass of Creation. Some dimensions impose limitations on Cee, forcibly choking off how much power she can draw from the Fire of Order, while others restrict her still further and remove her ability to use some of her vast collection of weapons, techniques, or abilities. While there’s a certain level of fundamental base capacity available to Cee that she can always rely upon, the sum total of her abilities tends to vary, sometimes wildly, based on her surroundings. (OOC: to make this one absolutely clear – this ‘ability’ is in no way good for Cee. It acts as a limiter on Cee’s total capacity and capabilities depending on the setting in which she’s playing, and is my in-story justification for her being deliberately powered down in settings where her normal capabilities would constitute blatant powergaming.
Myth Debunking: Android Limitations
As an android, several assumptions are often made about Cee’s physical limitations that are completely erroneous. A few common misconceptions are listed here for the sake of avoiding unfortunate misposts
Electricity/EMP: Cee is no more vulnerable to electrical shock or EMP than a biological creature, and is in fact, rather more resistant to such things. Cee’s electrical systems were designed with battlefield hardening in mind and are not only heavily shielded, but also fitted with layers of cutouts, surge suppressors, transient clamps and noise drains which mitigate any EMP damage that does get through, as well as combat redundancy that allows her to swiftly recover from any EMP damage she does sustain. An EMP blast strong enough to deal significant lasting damage to Cee would also be strong enough to do the same to biological tissue damaged by the sheer radiant energy of such a strike. As for direct electrical strikes, many of the same protective measures mitigate crippling surge damage, on top of Cee’s own ability to intercept lightning attacks via her Ether Field or Godforged defenses.
Water: Cee is not even remotely vulnerable to water damage or liquid-induced shorts. By the time of her construction, intrinsically liquid-sealed devices, as well as ‘wet’ electronics that function regardless of the presence of moisture, were readily available to the Ghalakrast Empire. Furthermore, Autochthon’s reconstruction of Cee’s physical form plugged any remaining leaks – a being designed to be as immune to corruption and decay as a Lord of Heaven could make her was not going to falter in her mission because her enemies opted to fight in the rain.
Logic Traps: “This statement is a lie” is not going to faze Cee in the slightest. One cannot tie Cee’s cognition matrix in knots with logically inconsistent or contradictory phrases, notions, or images, as her cognition matrix was built with the specific goal of emulating a human mind’s ability to selectively discard logic or sensory data as invalid, misleading, or irrelevant. The addition of Crim’s influence only enhanced Cee’s ability to be completely batshit crazy and kick logic to the curb.
– Psychological Profile –
Personality: Cee’s original personality wasn’t really hers - she’d received a jumbled, broken personality imprint from Crim El Furaga, whose shockingly powerful and equally unstable psyche was too much for Cee’s systems to assimilate. As a result, Cee herself often seemed broken, mimicking many of Crim’s personality traits and quirks – desirable or otherwise – but without any real depth or consistency. Her overstressed compensation systems occasionally managed to exert some influence on her, giving her stretches of lucidity in which she didn’t seem much like Crim at all, but for the most part she was irritable, nonsensical, aggressive and utterly, utterly reckless, all of it skin deep at best. Cee herself was...reflective. Bouncing back what she took in without revealing the broken emptiness behind the mirror.
Since her reconstruction at Autochthon’s hands, things have been different.
The sabbatical her boss ordered her to take was more than just on-the-job training. It gave her the time she needed to realize what Autochthon's dearest gift to her was, her true reward for dealing with the Emissary of Phthysis on Myrria – the ability to finally heal from the once-irreversible damage Crim's personality imprint had done to her systems. Given time away from the pirate captain, Cee discovered her own nature in the changes the Cogfather had wrought in her. Solid confidence replaced empty, scathing bluster; discordant chaos in poor imitation of Crim's reckless randomness became a wicked sense of mischief and newfound delight in causing doubletakes and shouts of outrage; boozehounding and man-eating for their own sake both fell off as Cee discovered a real hunger for life's experiences.
Cee has transitioned from a broken weapons platform with virtually no personality of her own into a confident and vivacious adventurer, the life of the party wherever she goes. In her opinion, a drastic and unmistakable improvement over being a poor copy of Crim.
Morality:
Cee's morality is, superficially, fluid – on the surface she’s a fairly typical space pirate, stealing as easily as she breathes (or would breathe, if she actually had to/was capable of breathing), committing grand acts of larceny and destruction as much because they amuse her as anything else, engaging in wanton debauchery at any given chance, and thinking relatively little of dispatching her (legitimate) foes in a manner most gruesomely efficacious and remarkably permanent, if that’s what it takes.
All of this, however, is more or less simply what she sees as her job description. In truth, Cee is far closer to the Champion of Justice her Ghalakrast R&D team intended her to be than she is the raucous, rampaging brigands they’d hoped to pit her against. In her heart of hearts she’s the sort who’ll stand up for the little guy just because he can’t stand up for himself, and those who’d push him around because they can need to be smacked around and see how it feels. The defining difference in Cee’s eyes, and the reason she does what she does, is that she chose to be what she is and do what she does. No one commands Cee (well, except for Authochthon, but that shit’s different!); personal freedom is her highest ethos. If she uses it to intervene on behalf of the weak against those who would otherwise victimize them and take away their freedom, well, who’re you to tell her she can’t, huh?!
And if those jerkass tyrants picking on the little guys have Sweet Stuff to steal when she’s done kicking their asses up over their necklines…even better!
Special Information:
– Huntress:Any/all of the previous information goes right out the airlock when Cee is in the presence, or even simply on the trail of, agents or outbreaks of Phthysis. The presence of her Enemy brings out a ruthless, merciless, and utterly relentless tactician in Cee who is concerned with no one and nothing save the containment and eradication of the corruption she was rebuilt to check. Even the Twin Heaven Rune exerts little influence on her in this state; while it constrains her strategies and options, Cee would still nonetheless sacrifice billions, including herself, if it was the only way to stamp out an outbreak of Phthysis. While she can be reasoned with in this state and listens to suggestions concerning the best and most effective means of achieving her goal, she cannot be swayed by emotional attachments or arguments. When her Enemy is in sight, Cee is effectively completely emotionless, a cold Huntress dedicated with all her being to the hunt.
– Relations –
Autochthon the Maker, Lord of Machines: One of the great Lords of Heaven who rules over one of the vastest spheres among the infinite stars. Autochthon is responsible for Cee’s surviving the events on Myrria, as well as her God Forged reconstruction. Cee serves the god as her employer – any other term is liable to get one mouth-punched – in her capacity as His Agent, responding to outbreaks of Phthysis wherever she finds them. Or doing anything else Autochthon decides He wants her to. She’s not really in a position to say no.
Gene: one of the last living Eikona, a race of machine intelligences with tremendous potential. Gene is a naïve and generally innocent sort whose enormous and wide-reaching power does absolutely nothing to offset the timidity and utter lack of aggressive instinct that makes her completely useless in a fight. Cee rescued Gene from her eons-long stasis, freeing her from the timeless nightmare that had trapped her in her own traumatic past and earning the moniker of ‘Big Sister’ in the doing. Gene is currently being cared for in the Aesir Empire following the tumultuous events of Second Vestusio, learning how the world has changed during her eons-long stasis.
Crim El Furaga: Cee’s original pattern donor, who gave Cee the broad shape of her personality. Though Cee is only loosely affiliated with Crim’s crew, she generally sees her relationship with the man as that of a saner, more responsible elder sister constantly forced to try and make sense of/rein in the antics of her idiotic, mentally challenged younger brother. Crim disagrees with this assessment, but Cee fails to care what that asshat thinks anyways. Crim is currently missing and has been for quite some time; Cee has no idea where he is, except that wherever it is, it’s probably knee-deep in empty rum bottles.
Commander Altena Egregori: A Ghalakrast Empire P.S.H.A.W. unit, as Cee herself was prior to her activation. Altena was tasked by the Empire with subduing and retrieving the Rogue Unit (that would be Cee, for those not paying attention), and had in fact been built for this purpose. Having failed in that purpose the first time they met, Cee has not yet encountered Altena again. She has a feeling, though, that she will.
Esper Fatalis: A Nyeung Bao – a creature from the fringes of Creation – who, through a sequence of events Cee is unable to remember with much clarity, she ended up married to. It involved a fight on a desert moon, her ship’s wonky guidance systems, and a freaking gigantic shit ton of booze, but the contract was unambiguous and the rings very real. While somewhat disgruntled over being unable to remember much of this particular bender, Cee is resigned to her new partner and is at least fond of Esper. She visits Esper whenever she’s in the same area her unexpected wife’s in. Property damage is inevitable whenever the two meet.
Saori Kimura: The Daughter of Wind and Rain was the first god(dess) Cee met in her existence, and the first hint Cee had of the existence of Autochthon. Cee and Saori rarely saw eye-to-eye, but the wandering goddess always seemed to pity Cee as much as anything else. Cee hasn’t encountered Saori since the first Battle of Vestusio, and has no idea if she’ll ever do so again.
Random Resolution: An extremely unusual sort, Reso is a sort of demon-possessed hacker’s program given physical form that Cee met on Myrria. Despite his all-manner-of-wrong origins, Resolution proved to be a staunch and valuable ally in the fight against the Emissary of Phthysis; without Reso’s assistance, it’s quite likely the planet would’ve fallen to Phthysis’ corruption. Cee bade her farewells to Resolution when she left Myrria and doesn’t expect to meet him again.
Jack Silver: A living avatar of the ailing world of Myrria, created directly by the planet’s spirit itself as Myrria’s final, desperate weapon against Phthysis’ spreading poison. Though unable to halt the corruption on his own, Jack Silver managed to slow it down and channel it away from the final handful of remaining human settlements. Jack organized and directed the final strikes of the resistance which broke the Emissary’s back, the first of precisely two beings in Creation whose orders Cee listens to and respects. Mostly. Unable to leave Myrria, Cee bade her farewells to Jack when she left and doesn’t expect to see him again.
Polly Vinyl Chloride: A robotic pirate’s parrot Cee had commissioned on the world of Bronius, immediately prior to her first encounter with Altena Grigori. Built by the hands of a master simulacra craftsman, PVC is every cheesy pirate-parrot trope rolled up into one snarky, obnoxious robo-bird. PVC isn’t truly self-aware, being a high-functioning virtual persona rather than a true A.I., but that’s no barrier to him being a sarcastic fuck. PVC travels with Cee, constantly proving to her why it was a bad goddamn idea to have him made in the first place.
The Yggdrasil Crew: Cee’s position within Captain Furaga’s crew is nebulous; while some among the Crew consider her at least a friend of the ship, if not a member of the Crew directly, she has no real position or responsibilities aboard the ship, nor does she actually spend much time with the ship. When she is around, she mostly does her own thing and doesn’t listen to much of anybody. Cee’s most accurately referred to as a freelancer who’s loosely affiliated with the Crew, rather than a member of the Crew itself.\
As the difference between ‘Ability’ and ‘Equipment’ is often rather difficult to pin down for combat androids and other synthetic beings in many folks eyes, a clear definition will be given and adhered to for the foreseeable future. For Cee, the term ‘capability’ describes a function fundamentally integrated into her structure, something she cannot remove or readily alter, while ‘equipment’ is anything she wears, carries, or which has been only loosely integrated into her and can be removed or altered without much fuss. Cee’s Capabilities are things she is considered to always have available and ready to use, while her Equipment may change over time, or be left back in the shop by accident after a bender or something.
MOVING ON:
– Capabilities –
-Fundamental Systems-
– The Fire of Order: The Fire of Order was intended to be the P.S.H.A.W.’s greatest weapon, a means by which the chaotic, dangerous powers of the pirates and vagabonds the Ghalakrast Empire loathed above all could be brought to heel and turned against their former masters. The Fire provides the varied types and flavors of power Cee needs to fuel the Eye of Justice’s ability to analyze and replicate enemy techniques, the raw energy required to fuel her Godforge’s creation systems, as well as the power needed for her own internal functions and ether-based systems. The Fire is a black-box system, built around a mysterious artifact whose properties – beyond providing a truly preposterous amount of power in a staggering variety of types – are largely unknown by anyone who worked on it. Or by Cee herself, for that matter. Able to draw from an incredible range of different types, flavors, elements, and other sundry and assorted classifications of ethereal and/or mystic energy, the Fire of Order can provide Cee with virtually any type of power she needs to use the techniques her Eye of Justice can replicate, as well as the sheer depth of energy her Godforge requires.
The Fire is capable of tremendous, terrifying output – more so, in fact, than Cee’s body can handle. During the P.S.H.A.W.’s development cycle, Commandant Kreutzweir Shindlerstein – the chief scientist in charge of the development team responsible for Cee – pushed the available output of the Fire of Order as high as he could possibly manage, and neglected any such piddling, restrictive measures as failsafes or safety lockouts. Nor was this seeming oversight corrected later by Autochthon – in His eyes, the overloading capability was a benefit to an agent that may be forced to exert every ounce of power possible to deal with an incursion of Phthysis. Whether or not she survives the experience.
Cee is perfectly capable of drawing so much power from the Fire of Order that it starts to burn out her own systems, causing overstress damage. Should she push it far enough, it’s possible that the Fire could catastrophically overload and explode powerfully enough to destabilize ecosystems. She has to consciously manage her power draw or risk not only killing herself, but the continent she’s standing on.
– The Godforge: All but entirely replacing the ridiculously oversized armament Cee held prior to the First Battle of Vestusio, the Godforge is the service revolver Autochthon issued to His newest mortal agent. The Godforge itself is a replacement for Cee’s original right arm, destroyed in battle on Vestusio, and takes the appearance of a normal arm hidden to the shoulder inside a red opera glove covered in traceries which are at once both divine sigils and endlessly intricate electrical circuits. A heavy wrist brace circles her forearm, with a smoothly segmented plate bearing the Twin Heaven Rune (see below. Damnit) extending out over the back of her hand.
The Godforge’s function is very simple - it allows Cee to materialize the ethereal output of her Fire of Order into holophysical constructs, enabling her to transform her ethereal power itself into any weapon or system she can devise. Tied closely to the Eye of Justice, Cee’s Godforge is especially well-tuned to recreating copies of the weapons of her foes, once analyzed by her Eye. The Godforge can produce many other useful constructs as well - any simple object, such as blades, spikes or shields, is less than child’s play for the system, and more complex devices such as Cee’s Ladybells simply require a bit of design work beforehand. A final touch of the Forge allows Cee to revert any of her existing constructs into their base ethereal state at any time she wishes, returning them to pure, uncontained ethereal energy - violently, if she chooses. All of Cee’s Godforged weapons, whether a dirt-simple throwing blade, a wall of Gunhands, or even one of her Sisters, are capable of violent self-destruction any time Cee wishes it.
– Alexiel Engram: Following the events of Second Vestusio and her intense, unintentional dream-dive with the Eikona girl known as Gene, Cee discovered a forced Living Machine adaptation of her neural network, centered in a new processor cluster within her cognition matrix. This new processor cluster does not function the same way the rest of Cee’s systems do; instead, this cluster is configured to operate in much the same way as an Eikona’s own mind does, bringing with it a portion of the same capabilities. This Alexiel Engram, the lingering remnants in Cee’s systems of the ancient Eikona fragment she was forced to fuse with to save Gene, brings with it a number of sub-systems and capabilities. Some of these, unfortunately for Cee, are locked behind an active state she cannot freely invoke; Alexiel herself, or rather the ancient Eikona’s virtual ghost within Cee, chooses when these advanced capabilities are made available to Cee.
-Eikona Compatibility: Cee is capable of establishing electronic communications links with Gene, and incidentally any other Eikona she meets, without hassle or issue due to the translation systems in her engram. (Passive) -Ixian Insight: A partial copy of Alexiel’s memories and understanding allows Cee insight into ancient Ixian culture, as well as the ability to comprehend their spoken language and many of their ancient artifacts. (Passive) -Ethereal Comprehension: Eikona perceive ethereal power as a language, not a form of energy. As part of her Compatibility, Cee is capable of understanding that language, though only with difficulty without invoking her engram. (Passive/Active) -Multidimensional Processing: When the Alexiel Engram is actively invoked, Cee is able to shunt a portion of her processing demands into a multidimensional processing matrix, drastically increasing both her processing capacity and speed. Unlike an Eikona, which is theoretically capable of instantaneous processing, Cee cannot disregard time completely even in this active state – but she is much faster and able to handle a far greater processing load than she can without her engram active (Active) -Guardian Angel: The Alexiel Engram cannot be deliberately invoked by Cee. It responds instead to intense emotional need, a deep and powerful desire similar to the one which drove Alexiel in her final moments of life. The desire to protect someone else, even at the potential cost of her own life, is the key which unlocks the Alexiel Engram. She cannot invoke the device for her own benefit, even should that fact result in her own destruction.
– Eye of Justice: The core of Cee’s Ghalakrast-issued combat systems, a specialized sensor and analysis system nestled within Cee that enables her to memorize, analyze, reproduce, and adapt to her own ends the ethereal techniques of both allies and enemies. Cee is a master battlefield technician and power-mimic, able to produce a mind-boggling profusion of different techniques, attacks, and battle-spells she’s developed herself, learned from allies, or forcibly stolen from unwitting enemies with the bad luck to be pitted against her. The incredible versatility of Cee’s Fire of Order, combined with the almost unlimited potential of her Godforge, allow her to recreate virtually anything she can lay her Eye on.
Simple enemy techniques or weapons can be turned around with little delay, but more complex maneuvers or devices require some time to decode. Cee is typically unable to reproduce an enemy’s gear or abilities within the same battle she encountered that enemy in. Some abilities or equipment are beyond her capabilities of reproduction.
– Ether Stream: Integral to her functionality, this improved version of Ghalakrast’s original C. Ether Flow system is tied directly into Cee’s myomer rig. The god-forged musculature responds directly to mystic energies, growing stronger, faster and more durable the more Cee streams energy through them. In this way the physical capabilities of her body are tied directly to the output of her Fire of Order - which is quite high indeed. By manipulating the degree and nature of the power flowing through her musculature, Cee can alter her basic characteristics in mid-battle - sacrificing speed and agility for raw durability in the face of a powerful offense, switching back in a sliver of a heartbeat to approach her enemy in a flash, then shifting to overwhelming physical strength the very instant before her strike. Cee’s Ether Stream is extremely versatile, able to offer capabilities beyond mere alteration of her physical parameters at need, but much of this additional capacity remains shrouded. For now.
– Ether Field: Much like the man on whom her basic capabilities and general fighting style were originally modeled, Cee possesses an instinctive, low-level ether barrier in the form of a cloud of power that surrounds her at all times. The field, in its base state, permits her to utilize extremely high-velocity movements without having to deal with atmospheric pressure, windburn or the threat of airborne particles and other minor debris which might prove bothersome at such speeds, even to her, and acts as an early-warning system, enabling Cee to react to surprise blows to some extent. Cee can magnify the effectiveness of the Ether Field by concentrating more available power into it, increasing the field’s range, strength, or both. Cee is actually noticeably more skillful with her Ether Field than Crim is, utilizing the inhuman reaction speed and processing abilities of a combat android to regulate and modify her Ether Field as needed to deal with enemy capabilities. As well, she often manipulates her Ether Field’s base nature to provide additional functionality, transforming it into an offensive weapon with techniques such as Bladedge Aura, or using it to power certain, specially-crafted devices.
– Multifunctional Sensor System: The P.S.H.A.W. prototype was equipped with a powerful sensor network devoted, as one might expect, to detecting opponents. Combining an ether-wave sensor able to detect the auras/energy signatures of ethereally active foes with enhanced electromagnetic resonance technology to discern sources of purely technological threat, the system has an effective positive-lock range in excess of thirty kilometers, with a “that doesn't feel quite right” early-warning range at least twenty times that. In close-range battles, the sensor systems piggyback on the Eye of Justice’s extremely precise sensor equipment to localize threats in far finer detail than the brute-force, long-range sensors permit. In addition, Cee can network herself with any other friendly (or sufficiently unguarded enemy) sensor system within range of her communications systems, drawing on their own sensor data. This includes things such as remote sensor drones or sensor-equipped Sisters, Geardams and other mecha, up to and including the Yggdrasil’s own sensors or those of allied warships, in order to provide a more complete picture of the battlefield.
– Cyberwarfare/Networking: The P.S.H.A.W. prototype is optimized for physical battle – available space within the unit’s hull was devoted to physical might first, ethereal power second, and electronic interface systems somewhere down the list after seven or eight. After all, the prototype’s intended targets were entities that couldn’t readily be attacked electronically; why bother with extensive cyberwarfare systems against a bunch of goons with shotgun axes? Despite this, electronic interface systems don’t actually take up very much room at all, and so the unit was equipped with advanced networking abilities by the standards of the Ghalakrast Empire, as well as a defensive cyberwarfare suite intended to keep other people’s EWAR out of Cee’s head. Cee’s offensive cyberwarfare capabilities are rather sadly lacking (by the standards of combat androids, anyways), as her designers both human and divine chose to emphasize defensive cyberwarfare over offensive.
-Integrated Weapons-
– Archangel’s Halo:The Archangel’s Halo, much like the lost Archangel’s Arms it was originally built to compliment, is a specialized runic array carved into an adamantine plate. In this case though, the plate is set into her skull, centered on her forehead, and does not generate a handheld weapon. Rather, the Halo generates a four-foot diameter ring of radiant argent ether perhaps a foot above Cee’s head, with a quarter of the ring at the direct front cut out to leave the whole open. Six wings styled in the manner of a machine-angel, made of gears and key-like blades as much as feathers, project from circular rings wrapped around the main halo, five feet in span and settling around Cee, shifting with her movements. When the Halo is active, the runic array in Cee’s forehead shines brightly enough to be clearly visible through her protoskin. The Halo provides two main functions, the first being freedom of three-dimensional movement - i.e. levitation-style flight. Her maximum flight speed is roughly equivalent to her maximum footspeed – in other words, really damn fast.
The second function the Archangel’s Halo offers is known as the Sinner’s Lament, and consists of the ability to concentrate absurd amounts of power inside the Halo’s primary ring, to be discharged as a concentrated bolt of raw destructive force able to destroy mecha and, with enough time to charge, core through warships or more. This attack has no real finite power limit and can, theoretically, be made strong enough to destroy anything that can be destroyed. There is, however, a limit on how swiftly the Lament can be charged, which imposes its own practical limitations on the power available to Cee in a battle. Gathering enough power to outright destroy anything much larger than a typical tank or mobile unit, without the cover and assistance of allies, would take a prohibitively long time in combat.
-Supporting Systems & Techniques-
– Red Right Hand: A Living Machine adaptation of Cee’s right arm, the new crimson coloration of her Godforge is an indication of new capabilities developed within the system. Cee’s right arm is attuned to techniques and patterns of Crim El Furaga, effectively shadowing the powerful pirate lord’s own abilities and allowing Cee to more easily and completely channel his techniques. Or steal his stuff, in the cases of the Twin Heaven Rune or the DaiRaiOh. Cee is still exploring the capabilities of this particular adaptation, and may yet turn up new abilities beyond simply the opportunity to jack more of Crim’s crap.
– Armsmistress: A massive heuristic database of weapons-based techniques and permutations thereof installed in Cee by Commandant Shindlerstein – where he got it, no one knows, but he did, so it’s there – which grants her instinctive mastery of virtually any weapon she can get ahold of. This goes beyond mere forms, encompassing an endless variety of ways to apply her powers, abilities, and techniques to any weapon she can get her hands on, enabling her to bring out all the potential of most any given armament and allow it to enhance her own abilities to the maximum. Ranging from the best techniques to use with a single katana to how best to fight with nine full-sized halberds at once, from how to hit targets at sniper rifle ranges with a pistol to the best ways to minimize recoil and maximize damage from a (normally) crew-served minigun, there isn’t a weapon made or ‘Forged that Cee can’t master inside of five minutes.
– Sisters: Normally, larger and more complex applications of Cee's Godforge take more time – she can whip up an explosive throwing spike faster than humans can easily comprehend, but creating, say, a full-scale Godforged replica of the Virtue of Order would be a project requiring her energy and attention for hours. The exceptions to this are her Gifts of the Maker, which she can call up as quickly or slowly as she desires, and her Sisters.
Putting it in simplest terms, Cee's Sisters are Godforged clones of herself with reduced capacity. Her intimate knowledge of her own body, as well as her ability to act as an easy template for her Godforge, allows her to summon Sisters almost as swiftly and easily as she can summon the weapons her Sisters use. The things are useless for stealth or confusion – most people can tell that the Cees with barely a hundredth-part of the energy of the original are duplicates – but in terms of broadening her offense and allowing her to more easily engage multiple threats...well, nothing quite like a horde of angry little sisters with self-destructs.
Each Sister Cee calls up is about half as fast as she herself is, and possessed of a quarter at best her physical strength. While they have their own intelligence and decision-making capabilities, each Sister is generally built on a medium-function VI core, rather than granted any actual volition. Any given Sister is smart enough to accomplish the single job Cee tasks it with, and while they aren't generally durable enough to stand up to Cee's usual opponents, they're more than capable of sustaining several attacks from a typical hapless footsoldier before detonating the same way most of her Godforge constructs eventually do. Which, generally, is what Cee employs them against.
– Equipment –
-Weapons-
Name: Gunsmoke G Type: Heavy Revolver Description: A large, heavily-built six-shot break-frame revolver firing from its lowermost cylinder chamber. Made primarily of Ixian military adamant-steel with faux-wood paneled grips. Chambered for antique .45 Long Colt rounds and their equivalents. Information: The only survivor of Cee’s pre-First Battle of Vestusio armament, Gunsmoke has been through the ringer more than once. Found by Crim El Furaga on a lawless desert planet, said to have been the personal weapon of one of that planet’s greatest legends, the firearm had been in a sorry state when Crim...acquired...it. Left forgotten in the Yggdrasil’s armories shortly after its acquisition, the gun hadn’t seen the light of day again until Cee appropriated it in turn and rebuilt it using new materials and technologies. Optimized to deliver heavily ether-charged payloads rather than emphasizing muzzle velocity and impact energy and equipped with an overload function equivalent in power to a naval vessel’s primary anti-ship cannons, the unusual weapon served with distinction during both the First Battle of Vestusio and the battles against the Emissary of Phthysis and its minions that followed.
Following the weapon’s near-total destruction during the Second Battle of Vestusio, the Eikona known as Gene rebuilt and augmented Gunsmoke for Cee, heavily enhancing the weapon without even really meaning to. Gene’s intervention fixed persistent problems in the engineering of the weapon, increased its performance and durability markedly through a swap to ancient Ixian battle steel, and reconfigured it to better accept Cee’s interface systems, enabling Gunsmoke to discharge its terrifying Angel’s Arm attack without destroying itself, as it previously always did when utilizing its integrated energy cell.
Name: DaiRaiOh Type: Sword Description: Information: The ‘Great Lightning King’, a magnificent sword of legend able to command the fury of the storms, and one of the most powerful weapons in the armory of Captain Crim El Furaga of the Yggdrasil Space Pirates. And, after the Second Battle of Vestusio, in the armory of Cee, Pirate Queen and Agent of Autochthon. During the intense fighting to reclaim the planet from U-TIC, Cee demonstrated the ability to mimic Crim’s aura closely enough (just barely) for long enough (just barely again) to ‘trick’ DaiRaiOh into answering her summons. Afterwards, Crim himself approved of Cee’s appropriation of the blade – after a fashion – and Cee earned the right to summon DaiRaiOh herself without having to resort to trickery and shenanigans due to the advent of her Red Right Hand. Provided Crim’s not using it himself at the time, of course.
The blade draws upon and can command the energies of Wind and Lightning and provides a nigh-endless well of power for Cee’s own techniques, granting her a tremendous surge of potency, but is exceedingly difficult to control. DaiRaiOh is rebellious and does not particularly like Cee; her ability to control the blade and direct its energies degrades quickly after summoning it. Until she finds a way to force the blade to truly acknowledge her, Cee can only use DaiRaiOh for a short time before it becomes as dangerous to her as it is to her foes.
-Armor-
Cee doesn’t currently bear anything resembling permanent armor; instead, she conjures whatever temporary armor she needs with her Godforge as the requirements of any given moment dictate.
-Items-
Name: Feikona Uniform Type: Clothing Description: A skintight bodysuit of black-cherry red, sleeveless, covering Cee from neck to knee. A lightweight black half-sleeved jacket traced with gold, left open, covers her back and shoulders. A three-quarters skirt secured by Cee’s gunbelt circles her waist to her knees, leaving her left thigh exposed. A set of lightly armored spike-heeled knee-length boots complete the outfit. Information: Cee’s Feikona uniform is a ‘gift’ of her fusion with the ancient ghost of Alexiel, the Eikona whose Engram now bothers her periodically. A weird pseudo-variant on the standard clothing worn by the Eikona themselves back when there were enough of them for there to be a standard-Eikona-anything, the outfit is attuned to Cee in much the same way any given Eikona’s outfit was attuned to them. Cee’s Feikona outfit is capable of repairing itself as easily as her protoskin does, and shares in her Ether Stream to some extent as well. The clothing doesn’t really have any combat value, outside of the bits of other equipment it’s absorbed, but it’s reliable, comfortable, and ensures she doesn’t end up naked on the battlefield anymore, which Cee considers perfectly adequate for combat clothing.
Name: Fatalis Ring Type: Accessory: Ring Description: A plain golden band, cheaply made and unadorned save for a crude etching inside the band reading “Cee + Esper”. Usually worn on a length of plain steel jewelry chain wrapped several times around Cee’s neck, with the ring resting at the base of her throat. Information: Cee’s wedding band, from her Vegas-style marriage to Esper Fatalis. Though neither woman was expecting to find themselves married after being drawn to a disappointing battle on a desert moon, both were women of their word enough to honor the drunken commitment neither of them could remember making. Cee keeps her ring around her neck rather than on her hand, as she’s lost arms a whole lot more frequently than she’s lost her head. While the ring has some amount of sentimental value, it has no other value, either in combat or in the marketplace.
– Biography –
Chapter One – “Birth of a Pirate Queen” The P.S.H.A.W.. Pirate Slayer Heuristic Autonomous Weapon. The single greatest military and scientific achievement of the Ghalakrast Empire, a weapon designed to crush the pitiful Undesirable fools who resist the enlightened order of the Empire’s rulers, a combat android created to take the powers of the ungrateful, unlawful vermin who resisted the Peacekeeper Corps and turn it against them, bring them to their knees and remove their filthy heads. It was to be the greatest servant of Peace, Law, and Order in the entire Empire, the Savior and Protector of the lawful and prosperous, the guardian deity of the Ghalakrast way of life. The P.S.H.A.W. was going to change the galaxy.
Many people of the Empire still cry at night, thinking about how it all went so horribly wrong…
The P.S.H.A.W. prototype had been stored about the Edelweiss-class G.S.S. Virtue of Order, undergoing final adjustments prior to being activated for field trials. The science team responsible for its development was there as well, headed by Commandant Kreutzweir Shindlerstein, the scientific megabrain responsible for more than half of the critical breakthroughs that had made the P.S.H.A.W. possible. The team was working hard on refining the weapon’s devastating abilities and fine-tuning the output of its mysterious power core, ensuring that the first activation would go flawlessly. The unit had been left offline, its A.I. dormant and unformed, awaiting the human personality imprint which would complete it, transform it into a paragon of Order. Awaiting the loving touch of Captain Solomon M. Goodguy, paragon of virtue and order, a lover of law and justice and the youngest, proudest captain in all the Ghalakrast Peacekeeper Corps!
But alas, it was not to be. The Virtue of Order was tasked to pick up a high-priority prisoner on the underdeveloped fringe world of Landisia, a prisoner long lauded as one of the most heinous criminals in the entire Ghalakrast Empire…despite the fact that he’d never even heard of it before. One Crim El Furaga, Captain of the Yggdrasil Space Pirates, was mysteriously apprehended after an all-night drunken bender and locked securely away in the bowels of the Virtue of Order, to be hauled to the capital of the Empire and publicly executed as the horrifically evil mass-murdering douchebag he really wasn’t.
Things, of course, went terribly pear-shaped. Needless to say, much fighting went on, a completely avoidable mass-murdering rampage was provoked, bad guys were righteously smote left, right, and center…and Crim, not Captain Solomon M. Goodguy, paragon of virtue and order, a lover of law and justice and the youngest, proudest captain in all the Ghalakrast Peacekeeper Corps!, was the one to imprint his personality on the waiting P.S.H.A.W. prototype and imparted unto her the name “Christina Lorentia Alvarez-Gonzalez Alexandria Lorraine Pennington-Huarez Valentina Maria Borgnine-Cruz Carmina Selena Escobar-Sanchez Silveria Stanley Matsumoto-Chinchilla Madonna Cher David Letterman-Bateman XVIII.”
The newly christened P.S.H.A.W. proceeded to soundly cuss out the Captain for picking such a stupid name and for fucking up her programming with his crazy mind and his clammy hands, and left right alongside him to harass the Yggdrasil Crew. After all, what paragon of vice and debauchery, a lover of chaos and anarchy and the youngest, angriest affiliate of the Yggdrasil Space Pirates(!), would want to stay in such a boring, crappy place as the Ghalakrast Empire?
She couldn’t even bum a shot of vodka there, for Chrissake!
Chapter Two – “When Empires Attack...”
After deciding – firmly, and with much punching of face for anyone who said otherwise – that her name was Cee and not that godawful spiel Crim had foisted off on her, Cee began the work of settling in with the Crew. Sort of. She actually spent most of her time on the half-wrecked Virtue of Order, which she had claimed as her own by dint of having been born in it. Intent on restoring the ship to working order, Cee had vague notions of starting her own crew of misbegotten vagabonds and scofflaws based out of the Virtue and spent her time and energy hijacking everything she could lay hand to offa the Yggdrasil towards that end. This did not endear her to anyone on Crim’s ship, most of whom thought she was a giant bitch. Possibly because she was a giant bitch.
About the only individual on the entirety of the ship to give her the time of day was, ironically enough, not even a crewmember proper. Saori Kimura, Daughter of Wind and Rain, found her way aboard the Yggdrasil for a time as a representative of On High, which is to say the unusually corporatized conglomeration of all the Heavens that ever were and all the divine folks who live in them. The storm goddess had encountered Crim previously and ended up being tagged to follow him around a while, as he and his Crew were potentially quite important to…something. She never really said.
Either way! Cee went on a legendary shopping spree through the Yggdrasil’s armories, securing for herself over a dozen individual weapons and trinkets no one else wanted and showing them that they should have wanted them. None of which ended up really helping her for shit.
After a few months in orbit over Vestusio, a planet which was as close as any of them really came to being the Yggdrasil’s home port, the enormous, monolithic organization known to most as the Dimensional Federation, but to the Crew as U-TIC (for some fucked reason; really, what kind of a name is U-TIC?!) struck from absolutely nowhere, attacking the Yggdrasil and its Crew from ambush. An unwilling traitor from within the Crew’s own ranks sabotaged the ship’s sensor systems, preventing the Crew from mobilizing the vessel’s defenses until it was too late. The Yggdrasil IV was chased from the system in tatters, falling to the world of (*wherever the hell that game was*) as a wreck, never to rise again.
The unexpected presence of a second large warship in the system did not go long unremarked by the attacking 44th Frontier Fleet, however. Upon identifying the scourge sweeping through the Vestusio system, Cee flew into an instant, inexplicable berserker rage as she hurled herself with shocking and devastating effect into the First Battle of Vestusio.
She sought to ram the Virtue of Order into the enemy fleet’s flagship, but the battered, half-broken Ghalakrast cruiser could not penetrate the flagship’s wall of battle, instead forced to trade itself for one of the four large battleships accompanying the flag dreadnaught. After losing the Virtue of Order, Cee took to the skies above Vestusio in her WIldschwein C-Type, an old, half-retrofitted Geardam meant less as a battle unit in its own right and more as a command module for the much, much larger mobile unit Cee had been co-designing with Tartarus Heavy Industries.
The Wildschwein accounted for quite a few enemy mobile troops, Cee pushing the Geardam’s E-Amp core to the limit and beyond before finally being shot out of the cockpit. Then it was a battle of Cee herself and her personal hand armaments against all the mecha and U-TIC enforcers that remained. Each of her weapons was destroyed bit by bit, one by one, as Cee flung herself again and again into fights no one could win. By the end of it, she was fighting a desperate retreat to the Crew’s Desert Base emergency warp Gate with one arm, a leg and a half, barely a quarter of her optimal energy output and the single remaining weapon of her once-impressive armament being employed as a club as often as it was a gun.
Cee lost virtually everything she owned that day in the First Battle of Vestusio before casting herself through the rapidly cycling Gate just ahead of the base’s self-destruct, including nearly thirty percent of her own body. She had accounted for more than fourteen percent of the massive 44th Frontier Fleet’s combat power by herself, decimating the Fleet and driving its sub-unit commanders to frothing distraction as they hurled troops against the furious wildcat they’d never expected again and again…but despite her rage, despite everything she could do, Vestusio fell.
And Cee was about to discover that surviving the First Battle of Vestusio had been the easy part.
Chapter Three Abridged – “Myrria”
Cee’s life had not been easy since that day she woke up back on the Virtue of Order, so many months ago. But it had never been as hard as it was about to be on the world she would come to learn was named Myrria.
Upon landing from the Gate transition off Vestusio, Cee found herself in a post-apocalypse wasteland of junk, polluted mud, and filthy badlands. After beating off a small band of scavengers looking to appropriate technology she was still rather attached to, Cee met a strange machine-demon by the name of Random Resolution. Resolution had enough materials and tools on hand to jury-rig some of Cee’s most critically needed repairs, as well as having patched together enough network access on the ruined world, reconstructed enough databases, to give Cee the story of what had happened.
Myrria was a world whose people had very nearly committed sui-genocide. They’d discovered how to build enormous Van Hauffen Reactors which tapped the ambient, theoretically-unused energies that suffused their entire world in order to transform it into usable, virtually costless electrical power and had built what they believed to be a Golden Age on the back of that power. Only to discover, too late to stop it, that the Van Hauffen Reactors were not power plants but weapons, and their ‘discovery’ of the massive devices was a cunning trap laid by an enemy who sought to kill Myrria itself.
The reactors were not tapping unused ambient energies, but were instead tapping the very life force of the planet. When the entity known only as the World Eater struck, its first move was to take over the reactors it had designed itself and ‘given’ to the citizens of Myrria and cut them off from their power, plunging them into an endless blackout as it used the reactors to ravage the world. In those first few months of battle, the folk of Myrria managed to destroy all but three of the reactors before their military might was crushed by the swiftly growing armies of the World Eater.
A hundred years passed and the world decayed before the eyes of its citizens, turning into a twisted clockwork wasteland. The World Eater was unstoppable. Even Myrria’s final champion, a man created from the energies of the planet itself given form to strike back, was not enough to overcome the World Eater and destroy the final three reactors. Instead, the man called Jack Silver worked as he could through the decades, recruiting, training, and eventually losing men and women who devoted themselves to striking back however they could. It was a war they couldn’t win – until they met Cee and Resolution.
With Jack Silver’s help, Cee managed to destroy two of the three remaining reactors with her Sinner’s Lament, striking from stealth the first time and from behind a protective army desperately improvised amongst the remaining denizens of Myrria the second. The second time, however, the World Eater itself appeared on the battlefield and devastated the massed defenders, shattering Myrria’s final army beyond recovery. The survivors of that fight fled back to their hidden havens, too few and fearful to make a try for the third and final reactor. That reactor, Jack and Cee and Resolution and the pitiful handful of Jack’s trained rebels that remained would have to try and take themselves.
The only plan they had which had even the faintest hope of success was to force a penetration of the final reactor under the cover of Cee’s barely functional Ether Field, piercing the superlethal miasma that shielded any intact reactor, and distract the World Eater by allowing it to kill Jack Silver while Cee overloaded her Fire of Order and self-destructed, taking the final reactor, the World Eater, and a significant chunk of the countryside with her.
They had failed in that plan, caught short of the final reactor by some of the World Eater’s newest horrors, enemies they could neither outrun nor outfight. That was when Autochthon the Maker, Lord of Machines, offered Cee a bargain – die fighting Phthysis and its Emissary, the true identity of the World Eater and its horrid power…but do so another day. Devote her life to fighting the Maker’s bitterest enemy, and he would give her power enough to do so effectively. Power enough to make Phthysis pay dearly for her death.
Upon accepting the Maker’s bargain, Cee was fully and completely repaired in the time between instants, rearmed with her exceptionally powerful Godforge. Rather than a desperate dash into suicide-bombing range, Cee elected to meet the World Eater – the Emissary of Phthysis – head-on and defeat it in open combat.
Which she did. She came out almost as badly damaged as when she had arrived on Myrria, but thanks to Autochthon’s upgrades she could handle that problem herself now, and with the Emissary’s death and the destruction of the final Van Hauffen Reactor, Myrria would have a chance to heal and restore itself as well. She stayed on-world for a few more weeks wrapping up loose ends, then followed Autochthon’s first directive to her – go bop around the multiverse for a while, see what she would see, do what she would do, stay clear of Crim for a while, and discover herself.
In other words…Vacation Time!
Chapter Four – “Road Trip!”
Cee spent almost a year after the events of Myrria simply wandering around where her new ship, the divine space-bubble mockingly entitled ‘the Phantasm’ for its ability to appear and disappear as Cee desired, decided to take her. Uniquely, the Phantasm’s guidance and navigation systems could be told to simply go somewhere interesting, and the ship would take Cee somewhere…well, interesting. It was during this time that Cee learned much of what Autochthon had done to her, done for her, back on Myrria. It was during this time that Cee finally began to discover herself, healing from the damage her systems had taken from that long-ago imprint of Crim’s own persona. It was during this time that Cee discovered just how awesome she was.
She hunted a lot of things, killed some of them and beat the others to within an inch of their lives, learning valuable new combat techniques and applications of her Godforge in the doing.
She drank a lot of booze, discovering the intoxication filters in her system that allowed her to get fake-drunk with startling realism and (lack of?) precision, and proceeded to test these filters most thoroughly.
She enjoyed a brief stint of lascivious fame as a model; discovered by a hungry young magazine photographer while partying on Beubeez II, Cee’s perfectly engineered form, unnaturally flawless skin, and aggressive, rakehell attitude allowed her a few weeks of wild popularity in a number of extremely risqué photo series. This lasted up until a collection of the women Cee’s inhuman perfection had started edging out of the market went in together on a contract hit against her; deciding that the modest (for Cee) revenue from her modeling jobs weren’t worth the hassle of repulsing more assassins, Cee moved on after one last photo shoot – a shoot in which a naked, blood-soaked Cee is pictured in front of a rising red moon illuminating a ruined city skyline, Gunsmoke in hand, standing atop the bullet-riddled corpse of her greatest rival in the business. The company swears the corpse is fake, and points to the fact that the woman in question is still alive and working as proof. Cee, when queried on the subject, only smiles the same cheerfully bloodthirsty smile she wore in the poster.
She still gets royalties from that one.
After that, she found herself on a world plagued by powerful demons, held in check by skilled exorcists trained in a dizzying profusion of esoteric arts and armed with fragments of divine power forged into personal weapons against the damned. Cee found herself accompanying a man named Cross Marian on his travels, assisting his dangerous work with her own power. She was unique on the world of Dygrei for being able to kill the usually-immortal demons through main force alone, eschewing the use of divine weapons and simply wrecking these wicked enemies’ entire faces. Her artificial nature, and her Purity of Purpose, left her immune to the lethally corrosive toxins of the demons, and she soon learned to reproduce the deadly St. Joan’s Cross technique of her traveling companion. She left before the man’s work was done, when it was discovered that the demons were learning how to locate her through her intense power and thus ruining Marian’s necessary stealth, but she carries with her a potent arsenal of exorcism techniques from her time on Dygrei.
One of these days she’ll head back and see if Marian ever managed to get that worthless student of his to shape up.
Sometime later Cee located the infamous Bangkok Ladyman 24/7 Megabrothel and Expo, a massive semi-mobile space station dedicated to vice, debauchery, hedonism and the sort of sinful excess only true masters of anarchy and perversion could appreciate. It was a vast and unending feast for the senses (and for several other things), and Cee spent a glorious two weeks soaking it all in. Sort of. Metaphorically. She cracked a few skulls along the way – and was paid for half of them, half of those by the skull’s own owners. She drank until she couldn’t see straight, and then she got really drunk. She kissed men, she kissed women, she kissed people who weren’t sure which side of that line they were on anymore. She did not kiss the genetically enhanced goat in that one bar, but it did eat the shirt right off her chest, so she considers her account square so far as that goat is concerned. She got into a few exclusive clubs after showing off some of the posters she’d kept from her time on Beubeez II, and in there she had as much fun as her lack of analogs to certain anatomical structures would let her. And when she finally left the Bangkok Ladyman, she did so with a light purse, a heavy heart, and none of the clothing she’d arrived with.
Ahh…good times, good times.
It was after her vacation in the Bangkok Ladyman that Cee entered the Aesir Empire for the first time, making connections she would rely on heavily later. Discovering a very unusual bounty on an Aesirite Crimson Knight named Dias Blade, posted by Dias Blade himself, Cee traveled to the Empire’s capitol of Babylon to figure out if the bounty was legit. After all, twenty million Aesirite C-notes was a hefty chunk of change, and if all she needed to do to collect it was whup some smug prick of a blue-haired asshole, she would totally do just that! The bounty, alas, turned out to be fake – but Cee nevertheless collected her twenty million C-notes after getting caught up in the events of the Relius Rebellion, a brief but all-too-devastating uprising within Babylon City as a faction of rogues attempted to wrest control of the Empire away from Aeon Ergo, commander of the Crimson Knights and de facto Empress of Aesir space after the losses the Empire suffered in their recent Daemonium War. Cee proved a key factor in the Rebellion’s failure, inciting the events that led to the rebels’ prematurely triggering their uprising and walking into a series of prepared Crimson Knight traps. Cee herself dispatched Relius with her Sinner’s Lament, striking down the man who had presumed to strive towards godhood.
Not the guy she was supposed to’ve whacked for twenty million C-notes, but good enough for Cee.
After the Rebellion, Cee wandered to the world of Bronius and found herself a celebrated hero, lauded for her help in suppressing the Relius Rebellion. Put up for minimal cost in a resort hotel, Cee was enjoying the high life while working with Murray Otto, proprietor of Murray’s Autotronics, a high-end artisan’s shop which produced advanced V.I. constructs and artificial pets for wealthy clients who wanted the thrill of owning an exotic animal without the danger of being eaten by an exotic animal. She and Murray struck up a quick friendship, Cee’s new-won small fortune allowing her to commission a robotic pirate’s parrot rife with every bad cliché, worse trope, and atrocious joke in every pirate movie ever stuffed into his head. She was having a grand old time, before her original creators found her.
The Ghalakrast Empire attacked the town of Four Moons where Cee was laid up, sending a new, second-generation P.S.H.A.W. unit named Altena Egregori to disable Cee and return her to the Empire for reclamation. Had Cee still been limited to her Ghalakrast specifications, Altena would have succeeded…but the new P.S.H.A.W. was totally unprepared for the power of Cee’s Godforge. Cee defeated Altena, simultaneously saving (most of) the town of Four Moons from destruction, and sent the battered P.S.H.A.W. off Bronius with her tail between her legs. Unfortunately, the attack also signaled the end of Cee’s star treatment – thrown out of her resort hotel and losing Murray’s friendship to the fear Altena’s attack had incited in him, Cee rode out the rest of her new toy’s creation effectively banished from Four Moons, leaving immediately upon receiving her commission.
What a fuckin’ sour end to a great time. Missy Eight-Bit Egregori was going to pay for that, the next time she showed her face!
Chapter Five – “Rapscallions’ Revenge – Second Vestusio”
Following the Ghalakrast Empire’s attack on Bronius, a thoroughly frustrated and disconsolate Cee set her ship to Random Wander mode for a while, making her way through a handful of seedy bars in seedier starports, starting barfights and getting thrown off-world in a desultory attempt to cheer herself back up. Eventually, however, the Phantasm showed up somewhere that was not a fringe system with a shady hooch-hole for her to get irritable at. Instead, the Phantasm showed up at the scene of her long-ago humiliation – Vestusio, the world she had been chased from in tatters, now held by the Dimensional Federation’s 44th Frontier Fleet. Furthermore, she had arrived just in time to watch the Yggdrasil Crew’s new ship, the monstrous Yggdrasil V, dive into combat against the 44th’s spaceborn elements.
Well, god fucking damnit. There went her Crim-free vacation.
Almost immediately upon entering the system, Cee was beset by an unusual being who she learned later was named Faustus – a strange, demon-like creature with no discernable soul, Infernally twisted or otherwise, which could consume ether almost as fast as Cee produced it. Faustus tested Cee’s defenses, but was quickly ordered to withdraw by another strange entity – Tsalmaveth Weiss, as Cee would come to learn. Left to her own devices, Cee made her way into the space battle over Vestusio and used her new Twin Heaven Rune to put a stop to a potentially lethal manifestation of Crim’s inner madness, putting the good captain into an exhausted, restorative sleep for much of the remaining battle. Cee herself was depleted, suffering eerie, unpredictable side effects from the Rune technique she’d been forced to use to put a cork back in Crim’s crazy-hole.
After several hours were spent recovering, Cee made her way down to the planet’s surface via one of the Yggdrasil V’s linear cannons and spent the next few hours thereafter fighting a string of successively more powerful enemies in her bid to, originally, find sweet loot to steal and, eventually, to protect the innocent denizens of Vestusio from a world-shattering war. She fought Veronica Merryfield, a Federation Enforcer and popular singing star who had discovered Arkvalanvolg, an ancient mystic sword housing a goddess of Song and Sound. Arkvalanvolg had once been Cee’s, the goddess within it her ally, until Ark had been broken in combat. Cee had believed the blade destroyed and the goddess within it slain, forced to abandon Ark’s remains in her own desperate bid to escape. Now, though, Cee learned that Arkvalanvolg had survived – and that Ark blamed Cee for the torment she had suffered in the first battle of Vestusio. Now a bitter enemy, Veronica and Arkvalanvolg did their best to destroy Cee, but found themselves unable to match Cee’s power and versatility, even with Cee herself conserving most of her strength. Veronica ended up fleeing the field when the enemy Cee had been saving her strength for appeared.
Ishida Sol, sometimes-ally and now-most-definitely-enemy of the Yggdrasil Crew, very nearly destroyed the city of Senelseit in his awakening. Cee offered Ishida battle to draw him away from the city and give the crew of the Yggdrasil V time to teleport the city’s inhabitants away from the impossible battles that were to come. She found herself on the other end of the fight she’d just had with Veronica – Ishida’s raw, overwhelming power and the tremendous destructive capabilities of his new cybernetic arms crashed through all of Cee’s tricks and techniques, threatening to grind her under with sheer force alone despite all she could do. Cee had displayed a new capability, summoning the immensely powerful DaiRaiOh to try and break Ishida’s defenses, and was about to pay for the desperate gamble she’d taken when Crim, finally awakened from his crazy-induced nap, appeared on the battlefield in response to the so-called theft of his blade. Together, Cee and Crim managed to force Ishida into retreating from Vestusio, abandoning a technique which might well have irrevocably shattered the entire planet in the doing.
With that done, the easy portion of the battle for Vestusio was over.
The assembled fighters of the Crew, as well as Cee, swiftly found themselves beset by the invincible Malphisto, apparently the single most powerful enforcer of an organization which called itself MERKAHBAH. Malphisto proved completely invulnerable to all Cee, Crim, Ludwig von Einst, and many others could throw at him; it was all Cee could do to keep her allies alive. Even then, in the case of a young warrior named Kaneda, Cee failed in that task, watching Malphisto’s power dissolve the man into nothingness. With Crim badly wounded, Kaneda dead, and no sign of even so much as mild fatigue in Malphisto, the situation was growing desperate indeed when the same blue-haired Aesirite punk Cee had gone to go and take the bounty on, way back when, turned up. His duel with Malphisto went no better than anyone else’s, but his mere presence on the field drew a strange, portentous gathering of divinities, the Eidolons of Narria, to…well, it’s complicated as fuck! The end result, though, was Malphisto’s withdrawal from the field of battle…and a massive invasion by forces of MERKAHBAH across much of the entire world.
