CthulhuTech: Brave New World

[Academia Nut]

The feel of the pen in his hand was curious, an antiquated thing, but a necessary one. He had already composed the content of the message upon his PCPU, but it was doubtful anything electronic would survive locally so something more physically robust than arrangements of magnetic domains was required. Plus there was something primal and enjoyable about crafting by hand what may turn out to be the equivalent to his last will and testament. Pages of text, the meticulousness of their writing borne out of attention in the face of unfamiliar motion rather than rote, detailed out his actions and motivations. Finally, with a last flourish as he signed his name, he finished the note. Setting the pen aside, he carefully folded the paper and placed it within an envelope, before finishing off with the truly archaic touch of sealing it with wax and pressing a rather special signet ring into the cooling puddle of crimson pigmented hydrocarbons.

They would assume him insane when they found what he had done, why not go that extra step and exit with some class?

Setting the letter within a rather cheekily renamed mailbox, he squared his back and cheerily walked towards the heart of the centuries old building, whistling a little ditty.

A few hours later when military transports loaded up with black ops troops began disgorging their heavily armed and armoured cargoes the mailbox was rather understandably ignored in favour of more immediate concerns. Like the fact that ten thousand enemy POWs had been smuggled into this facility and there really was nothing good that could come from such an arrangement.

Rappelling down from their hovering transports at breakneck speeds, the faceless, black and grey camo clad soldiers stormed into the multitude of buildings to find disquieting quiet. Nothing at all indicated the presence of thousands of captured enemies, which immediately spiked the alarms in the experienced soldiers, since either this meant that they had incorrect intel and things were about to go pear shaped in a hurry, or worse yet, the prisoners had been here but something terrible had happened to them.

Proceeding deeper into the facilities, into buildings that had originally been built in the medieval, then the ancient Roman period, the soldiers found the structure beginning to degrade not with time but with other, less comprehensible forces. Stone that had stood for millennia had suffered exposure to something that seemed to alter the matter of the blocks, transforming them into something that looked like a cross between charcoal and viscous glass, and the deeper in that they went, the worse the effect. A few soldiers pulled out Geiger counters, only for the devices to resolutely refuse to click when brought near the altered stone.

Finally, at the heart of the oldest part of the oldest building, where worked stone gave way to living rock in the form of a limestone grotto, the soldiers found the heart of what had happened and yet nothing of what they had come looking for. The massive underground chamber had received several modern upgrades, including extensive side chambers cut with plasma torches and a massive loading dock that intel reports had not indicated existed.

Of course, what really drew the eye was the lowest part of the chamber where ritual marks had been cut into the stone in a massive circle twenty metres across, which had been stained the distinctive brown of dried blood. Upon seeing that the soldiers immediately retreated down the tunnel they had entered through, calling for specialized support while also radioing in the existence of an unknown ingress/egress point.

With the island locked down enough to call ‘Provisionally Secure’, the second wave of troops were arriving, their skill sets based less around being able to shoot their way to victory and more being able to find and analyze clues as to what had happened here. Sharp eyed and not focused upon finding immediate threats to mind and body, they rather quickly found the mailbox with the letter in it, seeing as how the sign said, ‘NEG Post-Incident Investigation Team’.

After carefully examining and scanning the letter for any explosive, biological, chemical, radiological, nanotechnological, arcanoenergetic or arcanomemetic traps, the investigators carefully opened up the letter and took it out, a warded man carefully opening up the sheets with a pair of metal probes while his comrades watched over him from a safe distance. Scanning once more, they found the letter as clean as before, and the warded man was authorized to pick it up and read it.

To the New Earth Government forces that find this letter:

If you are reading this then I am either dead or in a situation where I may as well be as far as contact goes, and as such I make this my last testament, since I highly doubt any will carry out my actual will. Being of sound body, and according to my last psychological evaluation last months of sound mind, although I am of sufficiently sound mind to recognize that no one will believe me on that latter bit, I do make the following declarations:

1) I am and remain a patriot to the New Earth Government and to humanity. It is for this reason and this reason alone that I undertake the course of action I have set myself upon.
2) I freely admit to initiating unsanctioned, non-hostile interaction with extra-dimensional alien entities hereby referred to as Outsiders. I also admit to having initiated sanctioned, non-hostile interaction with Outsiders.
3) I have not contacted any of the Outsiders referred to as Great Old Ones or merely Old Ones. As a patriot I will not converse with enemies of humanity, something the Old Ones have proven by their actions.
4) I have contacted Outsiders variously known amongst occult scholars as Outer Ones, Other Ones, Endless Ones, Outer Gods, or Other Gods. I do not worship them as gods anymore than I worship the forces of gravity or electromagnetism, but I do study them as undeniable aspects of the universe we live in.
5) I acknowledge that my actions are illegal under the laws of the New Earth Government, and as such if my actions today fail you will find that I have taken responsibility for them by either dying in combat with the things I have unleashed, or by taking my own life, whichever comes first.
6) I finally state that despite my patriotism, my actions are taken out of a deep pessimism for the ability of the New Earth Government and humanity in general to actually survive the conflicts that engulf it. I do not believe we will survive the Aeon War.

To make your lives easier, I have appended a list of inner circle accomplices, all of whom have joined me and will be equally indisposed to answer your questions for one reason or another. In addition to the names on the list, there are also numerous outer circle accomplices who I do not know personally but who will be accompanying us in the road we take. All told we number a thousand, a nice round number for humans. In the sake of humanity, I ask that you do not be too harsh on the odd person we may have known and left behind, they would have known nothing of our activities or they would either be dead or with us. Speaking of which, I have also appended a list of names of people murdered to keep our conspiracy quiet so that friends and family may find some closure, even though I know that you will not actually tell them the truth. Also, because I am feeling in a rather cheeky, sarcastic mood, I also appended a list of names to authorized extrajudicial killings I either participated in or supervised in my time in the OIS or OSS. A comparison of the size of the two lists should help reveal much about my character.

As to what I and my accomplices actually did, well I leave that to my sorcerous colleagues to figure out since I do not want to risk the possibility of making it too easy and thus someone actually being able to repeat my actions. Of course, I doubt any will try even if they do figure it out what with the cost, but one can never be too careful with these things.

With all of that said, I and my allies do bid you farewell and adieu.

Dr. Victor Cross, PhD Arcane Theory
Sorcerer of the Third Circle
Office of Internal Security
Seconded to the Office of Special Services
Project Undekbar
Head of Group Ziusudra

An hour later a dark skinned woman who had not officially existed for nearly a decade had to resist the urge to crumple up the letter and throw it aside due to the fact that it was technically still evidence. If the impulse remained later she would have a copy made for the explicit purpose of tearing it up. The OSS was a relatively small, tight knit community so betrayal hit them all hard, both personally and because they would have to let the OIS poke around at some of their dirty laundry to get the politicians off their backs.

Looking up at one of her investigators, the Director demanded, “What did Victor do?”

Grinning rather nervously for an agent in the most feared and secretive branch of the NEG, the sorcerer said, “Well… ah… we don’t know. Victor was just as much a theoretical sorcerer as he was an occult one, and whatever he was doing in his main circle was unprecedented. We found some smaller arcane seals in side rooms that were probably used for summoning forth Outsider ‘consultants’ for assembling the theory behind the main seal.”

Handing the letter off to an assistant who immediately returned it to its evidence bag, the Director asked, “And the prisoners?”

“We are presuming… hoping really… that they are all dead, consumed by whatever ritual Victor was performing. The thought of ten thousand Blanks running around out of captivity is something we are contemplating and prepared for but not something we want,” the investigator replied.

With a crackle of a radio, another investigator down in the ritual chamber announced, “Director, we have a partial translation of one of the ritual inscriptions. I think you might want to hear it.”

“Tell me,” the Director demanded into her radio.

There was a slight pause before the distant investigator replied, “It was originally in ancient Egyptian – fourth dynasty – and it reads: ‘we invoke the name of the pharaoh to ward this place against his vizier so that we might invite without interference the keeper of his keys’. It’s a bit of a transliteration, but…”

There was a long, deadly silence before the Director said, “If he felt the need to construct a summoning circle twenty metres across powered by ten thousand sacrifices for the purposes of calling forth YOG-SOTHOTH I want to know what the velminny he was doing!” It took the Director a few more seconds after slipping into Nazzadi to regain her customary unflappable cool. Inhaling deeply, he then turned at the nervous looking investigator she had been questioning before and asked, “Was there something else?”

“Uh… yes Director,” the investigator states, clearly nervous. “We’ve been going over Victor’s requisition list, along with the procurements of his list of accomplices, and the LAIs have already flagged several anomalies from the past two years; things Victor has obtained in the past two years have not shown up anywhere official or in what we’ve recovered here. Most notably, he managed to get his hands on an industrial grade D-Engine, a military grade nanofactory, and definitely most distressing of all thirty Mk-10 Centurions, thirty Mk-5 Crusaders, ten Barakis, ten Tymazzis, ten Kamenis, five Mk-18 Sabres and five Sunadis. While harder to find than a hundred mecha, he also had some rather oddly large files on technology, genomics, art, and history.”

The Director’s face fell and she was dumbstruck for a long several moments before seething rage replaced it. She hissed out, “That bastard! I trusted him with those, and I now suspect… no, I know what he did. I’ll gut him myself if I ever find him, because the worst bit is that he probably still thinks he’s doing his job.”

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

For those who are ignorant, the CthulhuTech RPG takes place in a future where the magic of the Lovecraftian Mythos has been formalized as mass-produced technology. This has led to a number of very nasty conflicts with Things Corporations Were Not Meant To Slap Copyright Labels On, said conflicts being collectively known as the Aeon War. A great game for power-players.

So ... Yog-Sothoth is the physical incarnation of the gates between realities. Doctor Cross cast a major summoning spell, so in all likelihood he needed all that arcano-tech ordnance moved. The question is where ... or when?

In other words, what crossover is brewing?

[CaptainChewbacca]

Looks to me like Doctor Cross is going... hunting.

[White Haven]

Ooooh, shiny. Lovecraftian and Academia Nut, always a favorite combination. Color me...intrigued.

[LadyTevar]

Yeah, I'm hooked. Where did our dear Dr Cross vanish to?

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

Cross took a nanofactory, a power source, and lots of information. So he can set up an entire techno-magical infrastructure practically from scratch. And with all those battle-mechs, he could conquer a fair amount of territory.

Possibilities are:
1 - Travel into the past. Stop the Aeon War before it starts. (But how far back?? The Cthulhu Mythos goes all the way back, if not further.)
2 - Travel into the future. After the Stars Are No Longer Right, the forces of the Mythos will slumber again and a new human civilization could be founded. (Again, how far?? And will there be an Earth worth colonizing?)
3 - Travel to another planet. Establish a refugee colony. (And somehow hope that the universe-spanning forces behind the Aeon War somehow overlook you.)
4 - Travel to another universe. Establish a base of operations outside the influence of the main combatants, allowing counterattacks, fallbacks, and getting new resources and allies. (But what universe? And what sort of allies?)

This could be any number of potential stories, arcs, and crossovers.

[Academia Nut]

Dr. Victor Cross, even covered head to toe in form concealing gear, stood out in a crowd by the simple expedient of having all the bearing of a man who had stood unbowed by three cataclysmic wars over a seventy year life span combined with the energy and posture of a man thirty years younger. Extensive therapy, both genetic and arcane, had reversed the effects of entropy upon the molecular machinery of the body while the mind had grown ever sharper with age and experience. Of course, in a crowd where everyone knew him as their leader, he stood out even more.

Exiting the small temporary shelter he had set up a few hours prior to make consultations, he emerged while self-consciously triple checking the mask about his face to find that the thousand men and women he had brought with him were hard at work clearing away the jungle and getting the first of the pre-fabricated structures installed. It was fortunate that he had already been given the plans for these structures upon the formation of Group Ziusudra or requesting them would have raised far more red flags than any of the other requests. There were about a dozen ‘legitimate’ uses in his line of work for everything else he had gathered together, but a building design that had been unusable for nearly thirty years would have triggered questions he would have wanted asked six months ago when they started fabricating them.

Seeing him exit the glorified shed, Victor’s almost frightfully young second in command Ruth Auseil approached him, and for a moment he thought she had gone insane and removed her helmet before he realized that she had programmed her PCPU to produce an AR overlay of her face replicated in real time by biometric scanners in her helmet. Victor weighed the cost in processing power against the benefit of improved communication it granted and figured that his protégée was probably correct in her decision.

Of course, he could not help but release his old curmudgeon side and say in a mildly disapproving tone, “Kids these days can’t go for a minute without preening their AR avatars.”

Giving him an exasperated look, Ruth replied, “Says the old man with more rejuv treatments under his belt than anyone else on the planet.”

“I do say that that phrase has become rather too narrow for proper metaphorical applicability now. So, while I was away on consultation how has construction of the settlement gone?” Victor asked, switching the conversation back to more important matters.

“The first of the domes is mostly up and the support pylons for the D-Engine have been driven in. Once we fire up the engine we can start pumping out the dome and pressurizing it with an appropriate O2/N2 mix from supplies. The nanofactory is still being gone over for any problems from transit and is more delicate than anything else so will take another day or so to install and get running. We will probably have the foundry and machine shop ready before the nanofactory,” Ruth details out.

“Good. Supplies?” Victor asks.

“No sign of contamination from transit so at current consumption and environmental contamination rates we have one week of oxygen with scrubbers, two weeks of water extendable to a month with recycling before our filters give out, and one month of food. Of course, once we get the D-Engine hooked up to the nanofactory all of our basic supply concerns cease to exist,” Ruth reported.

Nodding at that, Victor asked, “Excellent. Scouting?”

“All power armoured units are currently assisting in construction of the domes, but the scout mecha are currently performing high altitude recon sweeps. So far the local terrain appears roughly like that of the Indian subcontinent, with tall mountains a thousand kilometres to the east acting as air current barriers, trapping moisture here. While clearly we will need more data, our botanists are already speculating from the shape of the leaves that this place experiences monsoon type rainy seasons,” Ruth said.

“Speaking of botany, what have our researchers found so far?” Victor inquired.

“Not much given the bevy of others things to deal with right now, but they have run biochemical scans on some local plants to look for potential threats. So far they have discovered that the local ecosystem’s chemistry is carbon poor but extremely nitrogen rich, so the current recommendation is not to touch anything due to the fact that there is the distinct possibility that there exist flora with enough nitrates in them to act as high explosives. Considering the atmospheric content, we’re probably lucky we haven’t blow ourselves up yet with clearing the jungle. As for fauna… well, transiting in probably scared off all large fauna for a hundred klicks around our position, so it will take some bushwhacking to find any,” Ruth reports.

Nodding quietly, Victor then asked, “And if our philosophical doctors are otherwise busy, then what of our medical ones?”

Ruth winced behind her helmet, the act mimicked by her AR avatar, and she said, “The prescription of preventative pharmaceuticals beforehand kept damage to a minimum, but the psychiatrists will be working over everyone for months to come, and currently have their hands full with the dozen or so who suffered major psychic trauma. With that said, everyone here was selected for psychological resilience at some point by the OIS, GIA, or OSS, so we’re holding up better than 99.9% of the normal population. Also…”

Ruth then paused and leaned in close to Victor, her hands going through a complex series of motions, a personal variation on sign language used by field operatives in need of passing along information silently in the field. Glad that his armour muffled his own reactions, Victor quickly responded in kind and then said, “While I can’t say not to worry about it, we knew that we would have to deal with this issue inevitably, sooner or later, and this is just sooner. Anything else about that?”

Ruth nodded and signed again, to which Victor could only frown and ask, “Really? Confirm it with the others and we’ll bring it up at the first council. Is there anything else that has happened while I was busy?”

Shaking her head, Ruth replied, “No, nothing of importance.”

“Anything of unimportance?” Victor asked.

Looking thoughtful for a moment, Ruth shook her head again and said, “No, that is pretty much it.”

Nodding thoughtfully, Victor then said, “Well then, it looks like it is time for the young to get back to doing the heavy lifting while the elders assist by offering years of experience and advice.”

Rolling her violet eyes in annoyance and exasperation, Ruth stated, “Considering that it was your experience and advise that got us here in the first place…”

“I should put my money where my mouth is?” Victor helpfully finishes.

Ruth pauses and smirks before she answered, “I was going to suggest you take another break to rest your own bones as you have already done enough.”

“Was that sarcastic or suggestive?” Victor inquired.

Turning away while walking off, Ruth replied, “You figure it out with that aged wisdom of yours.”

Shaking his head, Victor cannot help but be amused by his protégée… his daughter really. Although he was not exactly certain of her full parentage, he did know that the project that had birthed her had sampled his genetic material at previous points. Regardless of genetic links, he had certainly raised her. For over fifty years he had studied arcane theory, but only about half of that had been active, for unlike so many others he actually paced himself and took frequent sabbaticals where he kept his nose out of occult tomes and arcane theory and focused on keeping his mind grounded. It was why he was alive and sane at age seventy-six despite knowing more about sorcery than some dedicated libraries. Out of those fifty odd years, the past twenty-eight had been spent raising Ruth, and his only regret was that she did not have the same aptitude for sorcery that he did, although he had suspected why since her adolescence.

Of course, when people first saw Ruth they assumed the worse until they got the full story, at which point they assumed nepotism, a charge that Victor always responded to by saying, “Of course its nepotism, do you think I would have got as far as I did without Ruth throwing an old man a bone?” Then they experienced Ruth in action and realized that she had not made it into the OSS on looks or personal favours. Special Services did not work like that.

By the time the alien sun began to set beneath the horizon, the first of the domes was up and pressurized, allowing the majority of the population of the settlement to move inside and remove the sealed armour they had all been wearing for half a day, allowing the proliferation of skin tones amongst their motley band to show through, from the gamut of eumelanin of baseline humanity to the dark pitch of voumelannin of the Nazzadi, with the occasional slate grey of the two mixing, the rare exceptional child of the First Arcanotech War who could compete with the much greater experience of their elders.

His mask off to reveal his wrinkled, sun leathered face and hair utterly devoid of pigment, Victor took centre stage by stepping up on to a pile of crates so that he could look out over the assembled crowd. Clearing his throat, he began, “Well now, this is a bit more comfortable, now isn’t it? Not perfect, but we will have all the material comforts of home in a week or all be dead, so already we’re doing better than the average mission to central Asia.”

That brought a chuckle from the assembled audience, all of them veterans of one sort or another of one or more of the great wars that had ravaged humanity, so the discomfort they had endured so far was trivial in comparison to the horrors many had seen. None of them would have been here if they were the types to shy away from hardship.

“To that end however, I would like to thank you all for the sacrifices you have made. We have thrown away everything but who we are. We have no allies but each other, no brothers or sisters but the men and women next to us. All notions of race and division must disappear, for we are all we have. We may be the last spark of humanity in a cold, uncaring cosmos, it is our duty to carry on,” Victor stated solemnly, watching those around him nod in agreement. They were already a family, bound by conspiracy and common purpose.

A grin then split his face and Victor said, “Of course, just because the universe is cold and uncaring doesn’t mean that we must be as well, and in fact we should endeavour to be the exact opposite. So I say that we start making this sterile dome a little homier.” Pulling out his PCPU, Victor explained, “We’ve got a primitive network set up, so if you could all start sending me some suggestions for names of this place, perhaps we could truly make this place our own.”

A brief murmur swept through the crowd before it settled into a low grade buzz of whispered conversation as those assembled thought and chatted with their neighbours, giving suggestions and taking commentary before messaging Victor’s pad. After a few minutes of letting his LAI sort through the suggestions and find common themes, Victor called for attention once again.

“Okay people, here’s what you’ve come up with. I’ll start by saying that while popular, we will not be using any variations of the phrases ‘Fuck the Migou’ or ‘Fuck the Old Ones’. There will be children here eventually, it’s why I made sure the conspiracy wasn’t a sausage fest, so we’ll want to try and keep it clean. Still, we’ll keep the sentiment in mind when designing the flag. A gigantic, flaming middle finger raised to the cosmos is probably the most succinct summary of who we are,” Victor explained, eliciting a round of chuckling from the audience.

“Additionally, while flattering, I think we can save naming anything ‘Victoria’ or the like until after I’m dead. Anything else would seem rather vain on my part, don’t you agree?” Again, laughter from the crowd.

“So with the scatological and egotistical out of the way, we are left with the themes of mythological, descriptive, and derivative. Some variation of ‘Eden’, ‘Paradise’, or the like is quite popular, if perhaps lacking accuracy considering the toxicity of our surroundings. Then there are the things like ‘Last Stronghold’ or ‘Final Hope’, which while good, risk the sort of pessimism that I don’t think we want to get caught up in. Finally there are the ones like ‘New New York’, ‘New New Delhi’, and a remarkable number of old city names that already have ‘New’ in the title, which just goes to show why I invited you lot in on this expedition,” Victor reads out, eliciting another round of laughter. “Okay, now I’ve compiled a list of about two dozen of the best of those themes, and we’ll start voting to pare them down, and go on from there.”

There followed a few minutes of quiet chatter while the voting progressed, until Victor looked down at his PCPU and held up a hand for attention one more time. He said, “Okay… I like these options here. The final two contenders are: ‘Second Star’, as the line ‘second star to the right, straight on until morning’; and ‘Defiance’, simple and to the point. Let us take the final vote now.”

While the final vote was being tallied electronically, Victor noticed Ruth discretely trying to get his attention. Making a few quick signs to her, he tried to interpret what she was trying to tell him, but the silent language just did not have the vocabulary without going into large, expressive, and very obvious signs. Waving her off to talk to afterward, Victor looked over the final tally and said, “I am pleased to announce that you have all decided that the name shall be-”

The announcement was rather abruptly cut short by the sudden activation of something that all assembled had hoped to never hear again: the habitat’s attack alarms.

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

GAAH! I still can't tell!

They could be in Earth's Precambrian Era; in Pangaea Ultima, the future supercontinent; or on another planet in any universe.

We might find out where they are when we see who is attacking. The Migou (I still prefer "Fungi From Yuggoth") or other Mythos race would still obscure their location.

But I LOVE the idea for the flag!

[Simon_Jester]

The carbon poor, nitrate-rich plants suggest somewhere not on Earth, or at least somewhere where the plants aren't from Earth.

Certainly not the pre-Cambrian, at least not paleontology as we know it is approximately true (may not be in CthulhuTech); in the pre-Cambrian there were no multicelled land plants on Earth, and for all I know no land plants at all.

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

We don't know squat about the Precambrian. There are fossils of that era that we can't even classify. For all we know the atmosphere changed when all the 'splody-plants caught fire.

And it could still be the distant future - post-Mythos Earth.

[Academia Nut]

Actually, we can tell quite a bit about the atmospheric conditions of the pre-Cambrian by the chemical composition of rocks from that period, and the Earth has been well oxygenated for about a billion years, although recent investigations show that there were large contents of hydrogen sulfide within the ocean up until around the Cambrian period when oxygen finally began to replace the gas in the water.

This post brought to you by the Office of Not Actually Making Things Clearer.

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

Okay, that leaves
Distant Future
Alien Planet/Same Universe
Different Universe.

So now setup is almost finished. Then we can discover the Story, where mythic conflicts take place, epic romances blossom, ancient conspiracies meet fruition, and Nazzadi hotties prance around in lingerie.

[darkjedi521]

Any plans to bring any of your past works (Sea of Time, Open Door, Snow, Chronicles, etc) to a more completed state?

[Skyfox120]

The carbon poor, nitrate-rich plants suggest somewhere not on Earth, or at least somewhere where the plants aren't from Earth.

Certainly not the pre-Cambrian, at least not paleontology as we know it is approximately true (may not be in CthulhuTech); in the pre-Cambrian there were no multicelled land plants on Earth, and for all I know no land plants at all.

Actually the Cthulu mythos has several alien sepcies existing during the Pre-cambrian period on earth...

[Simon_Jester]

I know, Skyfox; that's why I said "may not be in CthulhuTech." On the other hand, in real life we *still* have no fossil records of land life dating back this far, so it remains unlikely that these jungles could be on pre-Cambrian Earth.

[Academia Nut]

When the alarms went off, the collection of people responded with professional haste, quickly donning their masks, those out of their armour more fully going for where they had set their gear while those still suited up went for their weapons, quickly and efficiently moving for their battle stations.

Once his own helmet was on, Victor had his AR display up and feeding him data. Someone on perimeter patrol outside had triggered the emergency alarm and there was some sort of firefight going on, or had been going on, but otherwise there was insufficient data. Taking executive privilege, Victor cancelled the alarm and switched over to a general alert. Calling up external cameras, he found that the fighting had indeed died down, although the clearance of the jungle about the dome had been expanded by an additional several hundred metres or so in the south-east direction and would probably expand further due to the fire burning amongst the trees. Most alarming of all was the fact that one of the Baraki power armour suits was lying on the ground, smouldering from a flame thrower hit.

Projecting an AR avatar, Victor connected with the commanding officer on duty outside and demanded, “What is going on out here?”

Snapping to attention, the officer said, “Sir, we are still determining the exact sequence of events, but several PA troops began to report anomalous sensor readings just before Sergeant Vena opened fire with his Baraki’s lightning gun, causing primary damage to the jungle but arcing to several other units. At that point there was a steep decline in discipline and additional units in the area began to open fire in the same general direction as Sergeant Vena, along with frantic chatter on the communications channels, with Vena in particular screaming incoherently while firing his weapon as quickly as it could recharge. With the units panicking, a friendly fire incident was inevitable and Vena wandered into the firing lane of Warrant Officer Samson just as he triggered the flamethrower on his Mk-5 Centurion PA. By that time additional units had arrived and helped to restore order. Vena’s Baraki was extinguished and he was ejected from the suit as per emergency protocol, while Samson stood down and is in the progress of exiting his own suit to submit to investigation. No sign of anything that may have triggered this, but the area was thoroughly fried by electrical and plasma discharges and by primary and secondary fires from flamethrower bursts, so anything organic in the kill zone was likely incinerated.”

Scowling, Victor resisted the urge to swear and instead ordered, “I want all mech data forwarded to my office, and I want as many men outside now rotated back inside for medical examination, with anyone directly involved also brought in for second round psyche evaluation.”

“Sir, the mech data was already underway to your office, but all the men outside?” The CO asked.

“We need control data. If all the men exhibit similar physiological signs then we could be dealing with a delayed onset AWS breakdown from our transit here, while if only the men involved in the incident show anomalies then we are more likely looking at some sort of directed attack,” Victor explained.

Pondering that for a moment the CO said, “Of course sir. I can’t get them all, but I will get those closest to that patrol sector and a random sampling from the rest of the perimeter patrol.”

“Perfect. I will also need a damage report and a summary of expendables used. It will probably be a month before we have the excess production capacity to devote to military repairs and resupply, so if we are going to start using up spare parts and ammunition on the first night…” Victor let the statement hang, eliciting a nod from the officer.

“Of course sir, I will have the report to you by morning, if not sooner. We should be able to repair everything but Vena’s PA from spares we brought with us, and except for the flamethrower all weapon discharges were from energy weapons,” the officer noted.

“Small mercies at least,” Victor noted. “Alright, I will leave the details in your capable hands while I work on sorting out everything else. I’m now stepping us down to a state of heightened readiness.”

Cutting the AR link while changing the settlement’s alert status, Victor found Ruth waiting for him to finish up with a concerned expression on her face. Removing his helmet and clipping it to his belt, he asked her, “Was this what you were trying to tell me about earlier?”

Shaking her head, Ruth replied, “No that was something different, although the news is related. I… uh… I checked with the telepathic parapsychics and they confirmed my uh… suspicions. W-They all noticed something…”

Cutting her off, Victor states, “Ruth, I know you’re probably still trying to work it all out, but please stop trying to pretend that you’re not parapsychic now. I’ve more or less known that you were latent since you were eighteen and showed no aptitude with sorcery.”

Ruth paused with her mouth hanging open for a long moment before she nodded and said, “Yes. I mean, the testing never showed anything conclusive, but our transition probably had an effect similar to the Zone, which is why I am rather worried but… shutting up and nodding now.”

“Good girl,” Victor noted dryly. “So since you have now joined the paranormal club, what big news did you and the other telepaths have for me before?”

“There’s… there’s a mind out there; vast and alien but very, very slow. The others describe it like… like if a human mind is a candle, then this is like a coal seam fire. They can’t localize it though, it’s too distant,” Ruth explained.

“And what about you?” Victor asked.

“What? My powers have just begun to manifest and…” Ruth began to ramble.

Cutting her off again, Victor stated, “Ruth, you helped engineer an ambush that ended with a Migou swarm ship blowing up, I implicitly trust your analysis of any situation. So even though they are new, what do your senses tell you, and what interpretations do you make from that?”

“I…” Ruth began before she paused, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. After a few seconds of thought she replied, “A sufficiently distant object broadcasting a signal on a planet will have a non-Euclidean geometry beyond the horizon, and if sufficiently distant and penetrating such a signal would appear to come from multiple places at once as multiple paths around the planet would have the same distance, and paths through the planet would be viable. This would create the illusion that a signal all around. That is what I feel; like there is another mind all around me, but the others told me that it had to be an artefact of distance. I defer to their greater experience with such matters, but…”

Victor nodded and said, “We only have our senses to interpret the world, but our senses can be fooled. Still, I need you thinking and letting me know what your senses tell you. It’s why I made you my second in the first place.”

“I… I think whatever this mind is, it is trying to integrate me into itself,” Ruth blurted.

That gave Victor pause for a long time before he pinched the base of his nose in frustration. He said, “Well that explains quite a bit. It’s just trying?”

“So far,” Ruth admitted. “None of the other telepaths made any mention of it, some even mention hostility, but it could be that they were already active upon arrival while I only started manifesting after arrival. Whatever this mind is, it could be mistaken that I am ‘natural’ in comparison to the others.”

“Great, just great,” Victor mutters. “Okay, sorry Ruth, but you’re unfortunately on psyche eval until further notice, so I have to cut you out of the loop until it can be determined that you are not compromised.”

Frowning but nodding, Ruth said, “Of course. It never just rains, does it?”

“Considering we appear to have arrived in a region with a monsoon climate, I would call that assessment most accurate. Now damn it… okay, I’m going to have to reorganize a whole lot here to figure out how to delegate all of this out properly,” Victor stated before he pulled out his PCPU to start going over the org chart, making rearrangements to compensate for this blow to his management scheme.

“You do know that you’re going to wear the poor psychiatrists down to a nub, don’t you?” Ruth asked.

“Yeah, well keeping a conspiracy of a thousand people under wraps for year is damn near impossible, so its not like I could bring more when we were already strapped for personnel in the first place,” Victor noted unhappily.

Breaking off from Ruth, Victor went to his office, which aside from a computer on a desk and a pair of chairs on either side lacked any features and began to pour over the data from the power armour and immediately noticed the rather glaring anomaly of a lack of any anomalies. He could hear the audio recordings of the pilots talking about sensor anomalies and ghosting, but their sensor logs showed absolutely no change. After about an hour of frustration going back and forth through a half dozen different sensor suites on a dozen suits of powered armour, Victor found his PCPU calling for his attention.

Opening up the chat request, he found the head technician down in the loading bay seeking to speak with him. Opening the chat window, he found the avatar of the Nazzadi woman in charge waiting for him with a worried expression. Speaking up immediately, Victor asked, “What is it?”

“Open up a video feed, we found something weird on Vena’s suit that you need to see,” she told him, an icon for accepting such a feed appearing next to her avatar. Activating it, Victor got the somewhat unstable view from someone’s glasses cam, presumably the head technician’s.

“Okay, so we were assessing the damage to the suit, mostly exterior fire damage from the flamer and interior electrical damage from its own lightning gun when we found this,” the chief explained, pointing to a thumb sized hole in the torso. “That’s a velminny kinetic weapons hit and a damned strong one at that to have penetrated the armour as deep as it did. It had to have been an anti-armour railgun at the very least.”

Victor digested this and then asked, “Any other anomalies?”

“Well, we haven’t found the actual round, but when the flamer hit the incendiary got in the hole and turned the interior of the suit around the hole into a mess of charred insulation and half molten metal, so if the round fragmented after penetrating the outer armour whatever is left probably just became part of an overall fused mass in there now,” the technician explained.

“Very well. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, it may shed some light on things,” Victor said before closing down the chat.

The implications were… disturbing. He could think of several interpretations of the evidence, all of them pointing to advanced, intelligent life hostile to their presence on this world, which was not only what they had been trying to escape from, but Victor had wanted to avoid the irony of fleeing an alien invasion by starting their own. Things were never easy.

Having had enough of slamming his head against the sensor data, Victor called up the medical reports of those being examined, and found the data fit well with the predictions of the theory forming in his mind. Those directly involved in the incident all had highly elevated levels of stress and fatigue hormones, and both Vena and Samson showed signs of elevated neural activity, especially in the amygdala and hippocampus. Vena in fact had not only suffered heat stroke and some first degree burns from his PA overheating when covered in flames, but was currently unconscious due to stress.

Samson on the other hand was still awake. Opening up a channel to the infirmary, Victor said to the doctor on duty, “I would appreciate it if Warrant Officer Samson could come to my office at the nearest opportunity.”

Five minutes later and Samson was in Victor’s office, standing at attention, his chin thrust out proudly even though a great weight of shame seemed to press down on the man’s shoulders and his eyes looked haunted. With his dark hair streaked steel grey, Victor knew that demons far older than the recent friendly fire incident haunted Samson.

“Please, take a seat Warrant Officer,” Victor said, motion toward the chair opposite to him. Taking it, Samson was quiet for a long few moments before he said, “I take full…”

Holding up a hand, Victor said, “No, there will be no responsibility assigned, particularly self-assigned, for what happened tonight until I actually know what happened. Now, you and Vena were the two most involved, but he is unconscious right now so you get to be debriefed first. Now tell me what happened.”

“I… well…” Samson looked like he was about to clam up before the look from Victor that made him a group head in the OSS rather than just a skilled sorcerer caused him to continue. “Everything on the recordings probably remembers things better than I do. Just before Vena lost it we started seeing these weird sensor ghosts, although if I could have I probably would have rubbed my eyes since my HUD wasn’t making sense. Then Vena flips out and for a second I… I wasn’t there anymore.”

Tears begin to well up in Samson’s eyes, incongruous with the veteran soldier image he presents and he had to fight off the tremble in his voice before he continued, “For a second it was ’63 and that Borealis didn’t have Vena in it but some bastard that got into a civilian shelter and opened fire with its fucking lightning gun. Oh God the smell… the smell, charred meat and boiling shit and ozone and blood and oh God the fucking smell! I wasn’t firing my flamer at Vena; it was… it was…”

Victor got up and went around to Samson, who was clearly suffering from a massive breakdown related to post traumatic stress disorder. Putting a fatherly hand on his shoulder, Victor said nothing. Looking up, their eyes met and they connected. Samson had not been part of Victor’s inner circle, but the two men knew each other in that they could see into each other’s eyes and knew that they had both seen things no one should ever have to see.

“Go back to the infirmary and get psyche eval and treatment immediately,” Victor firmly ordered, causing Samson to nod. Getting up, he saluted Victor, who nodded in response by virtue of having never been a soldier despite all that he had done, and then left the room with his head held as high as he had when he entered.

Wearily sitting down at his desk and suddenly feeling as old as he really was, Victor pulled up Vena’s personal history and discovered to his complete lack of surprise that Vena had been on the Rapine Storm front for two years and had received a commendation for bravery against a gibbering horror before being seconded to the OIS to get him away from the front lines. Everyone in this operation had bearings of chrome steel, but they all also had scars in their past, traumas they had overcome but that could not be erased. Combined with the stress inherent in what they had done just earlier in the day and little to no sleep for twelve hours and that resulted in a vulnerable mind with weak points to exploit.

Carefully Victor composed his announcement, taking the time to go over it several times to make sure it was just right. Finally, with a few deft keystrokes, he hit send.

To my comrades in arms,

Tonight we were attacked. Our first evening under new stars and we were attacked. While the investigation is still undergoing, the evidence that has mounted so far indicates that we are dealing with an intelligent foe possessing parapsychic capabilities at the very least, and quite probably a technologically advanced foe at that. I tell you this because our new enemy appears to use fear as a weapon, entering the mind through tiredness and exhaustion, warping the senses to disrupt our ability to fight with terror and panic. So we must remain strong, remain rested, and remain resilient. We have all stared down the worst horrors humanity and the cosmos could dream up, we will not be intimidated by creatures that skulk in the shadows and violate our minds. We will break their weapon of fear and then cast it back at them.

To that end, I hope to stir feelings of pride and solidarity by announcing the unfortunately delayed results of the poll to name our community. By the will of us all, this settlement of all that is great about humanity shall be named Second Star. We are the light of Earth brought before a new sun, and we will not be extinguished. We shall burn on, a rogue star fouling the astrology of our enemies.

Take hope and strength from these thoughts my brothers and sisters, for the trials we sought to escape are not yet done with us.

Dr. Victor Cross

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

Actually very good. More insight into these refugees from an alien world called Earth. Mysteries already to be solved poke up. Potential plot points making themselves known.

And I still have no idea where they are, except that I can eliminate the Distant Future Earth from the list. Dr Cross's florid memo made it clear that this was an alien world, although whether or not it is in the CthulhuTech universe is still open for debate.

[Xon]

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri would be a viable proposal for the planet the are on. The Planet-Mind has a real Mythos-flavor to it.

[HSRTG]

Having just read this, I was thinking SMAC from the second* snippet. The (apparent) mind worm attack seems to support that conclusion. Depending on just where/how they went, another faction accidentally attacking them is a distinct possibility.

Of course, the Planetmind was horrifying enough in the regular game, I'm having second thoughts about reading later chapters of this on late nights considering what you're likely to do with it in the Mythos.

*Edit: I can't count, apparently.

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

This is one of the realities of the Cthulhu Mythos - Girl Scout cookies are horrifying! Never mind sentient planets!

[LadyTevar]

I like the idea of the SMAC continuity, actually. The other idea I had was possibly Avatar-verse... but that wouldn't be as fun

[Xon]

SMAC has the hilarious implication that thier colony mission has found the only other colony mission which occured before the Migou showed up. And SMAC factions are just as alien to CthulhuTech people as the actual aliens in the setting.

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

Not entirely. I think Doc Cross's little band will understand the Cult of Planet perfectly - a bunch of weirdos worshipping an unhuman alien intelligence. And they know exactly what to do when they meet someone like that ...

EDIT: I pulled out my RPG supplements for CthulhuTech and GURPS Alpha Centauri and did some comparison. The two timelines diverge with the adoption of arcano-tech and the development of the D-engine. So if this is SMAC, then it's in a different universe.

[Simon_Jester]

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri would be a viable proposal for the planet the are on. The Planet-Mind has a real Mythos-flavor to it.

Wow. And here I thought I was the only one who would think of that...

[Manthor]

Nice .SMAC was a great game and I still play it now and then.Didn't know people here still played it.Wouldn't mind playing a game sometime with you guys.Currently playing as the Nautilus Pirates.

Hey Academia Nut-great stuff on Cthulhu Tech but I wish you'd finish The Open Door mate.It has real promise and the sections with Skuld were pretty damn entertaining.Cheers. Anyway your current story looks promising.