Reactor Stress is a Resource

Lady Paeonia, youngest daughter of a minor House of Glass, and her favourite custom Black Witch. Currently on the run to live her dreams as a Lancer pilot like her favourite fiction before shes forced to marry

One of the latest additions to SSC’s LUX-Exotic line, the Lovers Knot represents Smith-Shimano's dedication to the relentless pursuit of perfection. The Deaths Head is an iconic piece of gear, a principled and sleek tool of conflict resolution that excels within its role. The Lovers Knot as its sister frame expands upon its capabilities with new discoveries tirelessly perfected by Exotic Materials. Within the Broadcasts, SSC found the fabrication files for a special type of glass, perfectly reflective and almost entirely indestructible. Originally meant for optical arrays, highlight points, and cockpit coating it proved overly difficult to shape but displayed some rather interesting additional properties. All projectiles deflected off the surface seemed to have a mind of their own, seeking targets with statistically impossible accuracy and no significant loss in kinetic force. Leaping at this discovery, Exotic Materials was able to adjust this ricochet utilizing directed operator brainwaves and a small companion drone to create a mobile surface for reliable redirections. Thus was the Lovers Knot born, a reflection of the hard work and peerless ingenuity of its creators. A beautiful, terrible thing, unmatched in its twined pursuits of defying the laws of physical reality and violence.

"fatal attraction"

White Witch in a tarot card

The ferrofluid concept is so cool. I wanted to show it interacting with the environment in a way that reflected its traits.

Check out my other (non-lancer) tarot card illustrations here and here

The existence of the Catholic Church in Lancer is evidenced by this passage from page 121 of No Room For A Wallflower Act 1:

Catholicism is such a prevalent world religion that it would almost certainly have had many adherents on all of the Ten, which meant that everywhere the Ten went, so too did Catholicism. The Ten left starting around 6000bu, and instantaneous FTL communication didn't appear until around 3200u, which means that for over 9000 years - longer than the current human historical record! - Catholic dioceses on old Earth colonies could not have maintained full communion.

There was also no contact between Earth and any of its colonies by any means (FTL or not) from 6000bu to at least 1400u, and realistically several centuries after that. 1400u is when Union on Cradle first turned its long-range communication systems back on and experienced the Third Trauma; they didn't start to send regular messages to surviving colonies until significantly after that - first contact with the Karrakin Trade Baronies didn't happen until 2800u, more than 800 years into the First Expansion Period.

This puts the earliest that the Catholic church on Cradle could possibly have had any contact with orphaned dioceses at around 8000 years. This exceeds the current lifespan of the Catholic church by more than four times.

It is reasonable to assume that in the absence of any possible contact with the Holy See on Earth, Catholic dioceses on the colony worlds would have to establish their own central authority - essentially, a series of definitionally non-competing antipopes. The realities of time, distance and differing environments would cause dogma in each separate diocese to drift.

We've already seen this happen on Earth: Irish Catholicism is notably different in character to American Catholicism, and both of those groups can pick up a phone and talk to the Pope! Meanwhile, some of the Ten went to planets hundreds of light-years away - even if you could send a question to the Holy See, by the time you got a response back, assuming your civilization endured, the cultural conditions that provoked your question would most likely be historical curiosities discussed by your distant descendants.

So imagine the nightmarish complications around 3200u onwards, during the Second Expansion Period, which is when FTL communication and travel became commonplace in the Lancer universe. This is a reasonable point to posit that the "Catholic Union" mentioned in Wallflower came into being.

Let me set the scene: the Cradle Papacy proposes, now that FTL communication is possible, to reunify the Catholic Church and return the faithful across every human world to full communion with the Holy See (SecComm was ascendant back then; this feels like the sort of One Humanity shit they'd pull). With Union's newly-built OmniNet, the Cradle Pope reaches out to the archdioceses of Karrakis, Carina, Tau Ceti, Rigel Kentaurus, Spinward Ultima…

Cradle Pope: "Blessings upon you all, from the Church of Peter the Apostle, First Bishop of Rome, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."

Karrakis Pope: "Oh, hey! Which one of the Passions are you Bonded to?"

Sparri Pope: "Blessings upon you in the name of Saint Anaru, who vanquished the Beasts of God and ate their eggs."

Constellar Pope: "I have a brain implant that constantly updates the Liturgy for me!"

Bishop-Regent of Ras Shamra: "Blessings upon you in the name of Malcolm XVII, Prophet and Final Pope, who harrowed the Nightlands."

Cradle Pope: "…"

Cradle Pope: "Guys what the fuck"

The Catholic Union in 5016u must be an absolutely batshit compromise between a multitude of utterly incompatible regional dogmas that exists broadly so that these separate churches can exercise collective political authority.

The de-emphasis of Jesus Christ.

As humanity becomes a galactic society and the Crucifixion gets further and further away from us in both time and space, the idea that One Time, One Dude on One Planet died for our eternal salvation becomes increasingly unsustainable as a belief system. What would the Virgin Birth mean to someone 500 light years from Bethlehem? What would the Betrayal in Gethsemane or the Passion at Golgotha mean to a person who could never see Jerusalem? Why did the Saviour manifest only once, on one planet, millennia before we mastered space travel?

By @cozzymandiart as a comm!

Amelia Gallows is a diasporan from a planet of ash, fire and iron. Herself being crude, hot headed and industrious, feels all the more fitting she'd ride fire and brimstone incarnate with her AGNI NHP nicknamed 'Firebug Brandy' to help redistribute the heat to those unlucky enough to be nearby.