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a year ago
SOLDIER
"Once the Dust settled and the Nerves wore off, it was time to come to grips with reality: someone had to fight this War. We were stretched thin in every direction... Our Thinkers were running billions of threads and our Xenodrones were smouldering heaps, for the most part. Things we took for granted, like the Precursors that fabricated everything we had, were scarce. We had never known Scarcity before now, and it was awful. We did, however, now know what awful was.
We had to scrounge. Scavenge, even. And we found ourselves scraping the bottom of the barrel for everyone eager to fight. And once we ran out of those, we Recycled them. We kitted them with all the Tech we could gather, every bit and piece. We Reused them. We made clones upon clones of loyal Clonic Soldiers. But you could only do that for so long. We were Reduced to less and less.
But then we had an idea. A dark realization that we would have never had before the Fall: you could Make them WANT to Fight. And we did to them what we did to all the other Machines of our War. We crossed some wires to make them Lethal. Hungry. Horny. And suddenly? We had Plenty."
RAYTH
"Before the War? We kept to ourselves for the most part. Our Society was above the trivial concerns of the lesser ones, the ones who called themselves Nations, Races, and Humans. Nonetheless, there were those among them who were worthy, and to them we made ourselves known. The others knew only our absence, for even back then the Void was a dangerous place. It teemed with things that would rather not be seen or known, and we respected that. We were never too arrogant to keep our heads down.
We considered our neglect -benevolent-. The -other- ones would not have been so kind as to let be. Yes, many suffered from our silence, our inaction. But we turned our gaze away. It was better for us to live in ignorance of suffering, lest the knowledge of it consume us. After all, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. But OUTREACH kept watch. Those were still -threats-, after all. And even before the Fall, we had a brush with Extinction that cut too close for our liking. It was painfully clear that every Alien was just that, alien. If you were game then you wouldn’t trust a hunter in the Dark Forest, so a few of us had to be hunters, just in case..."
PILOT
"Shock. Fear. Terror. When War first erupted in the Void, it wrought suffering once known only in the Holos of the Old Era. For the first time, our Societies felt pain. Loss. Suffering. We were ripped from the reveries of our Long Dreams and cast from the gardens of our Eden Worlds. What took generations to build was lost in a lifetime—no, many, many lifetimes, cut short. Some ran, some hid, and some even did worse to themselves that we would rather not imagine.
But some fought. Many were Oldtimers from the Bygone Time, whom still knew sacrifice, grit, and courage. Some even remembered how to kill. But they were -Oldtimers-, and their Bodies were frail and ancient. Their Minds were worn down from the ravage of the ages and the pain of the Past. In their current state, their Souls were not enough.
So we merged them with machines. Their Souls joined the Minds and Metal of our finest Xenodrones. But our Society was decadent, our Machines were made for Pleasure, not War. We had to make modifications, make them meaner, deadlier. It pained us to do. But we hope it will make do."
SCION
“Walking the path first tread by the ancient Viz race, Scions eschew the material world and follow the golden path: the Sonderweg. It is this wanderlust that leads them to the edges of the remote, allowing them to take in the world as it actually is, without the artifice of the wider Society. They follow only the Natural Laws as revealed by the Actual State of Things, which puts them into conflict with the ‘social constructs’ essential for the Panthrope civilization to function.
Following this path, and suffering all the trials that it demands, brings great power: Post-Psionics. Though such power reveals itself only to those who would hesitate to use it. No longer quite limited by how things ought to be, Scions find themselves eventually able to remake reality on a fundamental level, exceeding the -pathy and -kinesis of lesser Psions. But to take this road is to veer dangerously close to madness, as only the Scions dare to peel back the curtain that conceals the Great Secret."
XENOLOGIST
"There were, of course, those who could not turn their gaze as all the others did. You could say they embodied the Greatest traits of our Society: Empathy. Curiosity. Charity. If we truly took after the Greatest civilization to ever sail these stars, then we had to do right by their name. Some members of OUTREACH truly understood this.
To be Great is not to tower above the lesser, but to kneel, to meet the Alien at their level so as to raise them with you. We knew we had to be good shepherds but there had to be a light touch, almost unfelt. It was our responsibility to put our fingers on the scale of justice and make the world as we wanted to see. But to do so, we had so much more left to learn. You could say we were innocent, maybe even naive.
We observed, and based on those observations, we cultivated those who showed the greatest promise: those among the Nations, the Races, and the Humans who held our values—the ones who had the same Souls. The others were to be guided, until they were also worthy, upon which they joined our Society. We liked to think that one day everyone would join us. Everyone. Yes, everyone.
We were fools."
SPECIALIST
"But most of us Slept. We, for the most part, continue to dream the Long Dream. For most of us, it is the only thing we have ever known. You, Human, know it by a different name. You perceive the real and unreal as entirely separate things, just as you imagine yourself to be apart from the world—but you are actually of it. So, too, are our Dreams part of Reality, as they emerge from it. They are the thing you know as Cyberspace.
The vast majority of us exist as ghosts in the machine. Most will never be anything but. And this doesn’t phase us in the slightest, as we consider the virtual to be as valid as the corporeal. Your Cyberspace is our Meatspace; we see the physical as just another medium of existence, which serves our purposes and gets us where we want to go. We have no particular attachment to the Real insofar as it is a means to an end.
We’d rather stay far away from it, if we can. We once even dreamed we could ascend to an entirely new plane of existence, a Realer reality. But there are now far more pressing concerns, like keeping the Lights on. And given the newfound Scarcities in Meatspace, we find our Sleep fitful, so someone’s bound to wake up. There are times when only one person has a very particular combination of skills, aptitude, and determination. That’s when we have no choice but to awaken a Specialist."
"Once the Dust settled and the Nerves wore off, it was time to come to grips with reality: someone had to fight this War. We were stretched thin in every direction... Our Thinkers were running billions of threads and our Xenodrones were smouldering heaps, for the most part. Things we took for granted, like the Precursors that fabricated everything we had, were scarce. We had never known Scarcity before now, and it was awful. We did, however, now know what awful was.
We had to scrounge. Scavenge, even. And we found ourselves scraping the bottom of the barrel for everyone eager to fight. And once we ran out of those, we Recycled them. We kitted them with all the Tech we could gather, every bit and piece. We Reused them. We made clones upon clones of loyal Clonic Soldiers. But you could only do that for so long. We were Reduced to less and less.
But then we had an idea. A dark realization that we would have never had before the Fall: you could Make them WANT to Fight. And we did to them what we did to all the other Machines of our War. We crossed some wires to make them Lethal. Hungry. Horny. And suddenly? We had Plenty."
RAYTH
"Before the War? We kept to ourselves for the most part. Our Society was above the trivial concerns of the lesser ones, the ones who called themselves Nations, Races, and Humans. Nonetheless, there were those among them who were worthy, and to them we made ourselves known. The others knew only our absence, for even back then the Void was a dangerous place. It teemed with things that would rather not be seen or known, and we respected that. We were never too arrogant to keep our heads down.
We considered our neglect -benevolent-. The -other- ones would not have been so kind as to let be. Yes, many suffered from our silence, our inaction. But we turned our gaze away. It was better for us to live in ignorance of suffering, lest the knowledge of it consume us. After all, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. But OUTREACH kept watch. Those were still -threats-, after all. And even before the Fall, we had a brush with Extinction that cut too close for our liking. It was painfully clear that every Alien was just that, alien. If you were game then you wouldn’t trust a hunter in the Dark Forest, so a few of us had to be hunters, just in case..."
PILOT
"Shock. Fear. Terror. When War first erupted in the Void, it wrought suffering once known only in the Holos of the Old Era. For the first time, our Societies felt pain. Loss. Suffering. We were ripped from the reveries of our Long Dreams and cast from the gardens of our Eden Worlds. What took generations to build was lost in a lifetime—no, many, many lifetimes, cut short. Some ran, some hid, and some even did worse to themselves that we would rather not imagine.
But some fought. Many were Oldtimers from the Bygone Time, whom still knew sacrifice, grit, and courage. Some even remembered how to kill. But they were -Oldtimers-, and their Bodies were frail and ancient. Their Minds were worn down from the ravage of the ages and the pain of the Past. In their current state, their Souls were not enough.
So we merged them with machines. Their Souls joined the Minds and Metal of our finest Xenodrones. But our Society was decadent, our Machines were made for Pleasure, not War. We had to make modifications, make them meaner, deadlier. It pained us to do. But we hope it will make do."
SCION
“Walking the path first tread by the ancient Viz race, Scions eschew the material world and follow the golden path: the Sonderweg. It is this wanderlust that leads them to the edges of the remote, allowing them to take in the world as it actually is, without the artifice of the wider Society. They follow only the Natural Laws as revealed by the Actual State of Things, which puts them into conflict with the ‘social constructs’ essential for the Panthrope civilization to function.
Following this path, and suffering all the trials that it demands, brings great power: Post-Psionics. Though such power reveals itself only to those who would hesitate to use it. No longer quite limited by how things ought to be, Scions find themselves eventually able to remake reality on a fundamental level, exceeding the -pathy and -kinesis of lesser Psions. But to take this road is to veer dangerously close to madness, as only the Scions dare to peel back the curtain that conceals the Great Secret."
XENOLOGIST
"There were, of course, those who could not turn their gaze as all the others did. You could say they embodied the Greatest traits of our Society: Empathy. Curiosity. Charity. If we truly took after the Greatest civilization to ever sail these stars, then we had to do right by their name. Some members of OUTREACH truly understood this.
To be Great is not to tower above the lesser, but to kneel, to meet the Alien at their level so as to raise them with you. We knew we had to be good shepherds but there had to be a light touch, almost unfelt. It was our responsibility to put our fingers on the scale of justice and make the world as we wanted to see. But to do so, we had so much more left to learn. You could say we were innocent, maybe even naive.
We observed, and based on those observations, we cultivated those who showed the greatest promise: those among the Nations, the Races, and the Humans who held our values—the ones who had the same Souls. The others were to be guided, until they were also worthy, upon which they joined our Society. We liked to think that one day everyone would join us. Everyone. Yes, everyone.
We were fools."
SPECIALIST
"But most of us Slept. We, for the most part, continue to dream the Long Dream. For most of us, it is the only thing we have ever known. You, Human, know it by a different name. You perceive the real and unreal as entirely separate things, just as you imagine yourself to be apart from the world—but you are actually of it. So, too, are our Dreams part of Reality, as they emerge from it. They are the thing you know as Cyberspace.
The vast majority of us exist as ghosts in the machine. Most will never be anything but. And this doesn’t phase us in the slightest, as we consider the virtual to be as valid as the corporeal. Your Cyberspace is our Meatspace; we see the physical as just another medium of existence, which serves our purposes and gets us where we want to go. We have no particular attachment to the Real insofar as it is a means to an end.
We’d rather stay far away from it, if we can. We once even dreamed we could ascend to an entirely new plane of existence, a Realer reality. But there are now far more pressing concerns, like keeping the Lights on. And given the newfound Scarcities in Meatspace, we find our Sleep fitful, so someone’s bound to wake up. There are times when only one person has a very particular combination of skills, aptitude, and determination. That’s when we have no choice but to awaken a Specialist."
