Elder Dragons'n'more

The torturer stepped back instinctively. Not out of mercy. Out of surprise. The prisoner laughed. Not loudly. Worse than loudly. Softly. Like he had just remembered a private joke older than civilization.

“You still think pain is a language,” he said.

Another blow. This time across the mouth. Teeth cracked. Blood sheeted down his chin in long ribbons.

The interrogator hissed through clenched teeth. “Tell me where God went.”

The prisoner turned his head slowly. There was blood in his smile now.

“There are organisms,” he said, “living beneath Antarctic ice that have never seen the sun and have still learned how to eat.”

The room had gone very still. Somewhere in the dark, machinery groaned.

The interrogator grabbed him by the jaw hard enough to bruise bone.

“You think this makes you immortal?”

The prisoner spat a clot of red onto the floor between them.

“No,” he whispered.

“I think it makes you temporary.”

The torches flickered.

For one impossible second, the interrogator became aware of his own pulse. The heat in his veins. The soft wetness of his eyes. The damp animal electricity inside every living thing. The prisoner watched realization bloom across his face and smiled wider, blood running between his teeth.

“You cannot threaten a creature from the dirt,” he said, “with returning to the dirt.”

Source: Eden: It's an Endless World! エデン

Smith-Shimano Corporation

Violence is an art and anyone can be an artist. Using this pedestrian-level analogy, you can get a pretty good idea of how a Smith-Shimano Handler will treat you. They will tell you that you have potential. Acquire enough real combat experience and hours in repeated simulations and you could rise from a mere practitioner to a virtuoso. One who decides the tempo of battle and the trends of war. But let's not get too far ahead. You will need unfaultering discipline to address the flaws, both blatant and obscured, within you. And only your SSC Handler can give you that.

Harrison Armory

On paper you almost look like a good investment. You've exhibited some interesting behavior on and off the battlefield. You test well with key target demographics that the Armory is engaging with. ... Look, this is about what your Armory Handler is going to do for you. They are going to get you the mercenary contracts that will make you look heroic. Then they are going to put you in front of omninet cameras that will make you seem relatable. Between the PR and military campaigns, you'll become a figurehead, with depth. And if you fuck that up... well it depends on the severity.

IPS-N

Whatever you need to operate in a war fighting capacity, your InterPlanetaryShipping-Northstar Handler will do their best to provide. They've done and seen it all, not much frightens them. Got some mental problems? They set you up an appointment with Jimmy, he's a licensed therapist and psychiatrist, good listener, straight talker. Weird tech issues with your mech? This is Jill, she's good with hardware, software, and even paracausal materials. A date? Sorry that's a violation of professional standards. However you are invited to your Handler's family friday evening potluck. Don't die on the battlefield until you've had their synth-printed carne asada, that's an order.

H0RUS

Finished com of a pilot in their cockpit. Spine to spine communication, let the mech into your bones. Body slack mech going

Zoneout is a trance-centric "rhythm" "game" designed with the neuropsychology of hypnosis in mind. Please mind the warnings on the front page. This game is not recommended for those with photosensitive epilepsy.

TIME Magazine – August 10, 2021 By Elena Martinez

I’ve been writing about pharmaceutical corruption for eleven years. I covered the opioid crisis before it had a name. I broke the story on Meridian Therapeutics’ suppressed trial data in 2016. I am not, by any reasonable measure, a defender of the industry that Felix Fleischer has spent two decades terrorizing.

I need you to understand that before I tell you that sitting across from him was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my career.

The logistics of this interview took seven months. Encrypted channels, intermediaries, a verification process that involved me answering questions about my own published work that I had to look up. Fleischer – or his people, assuming he has people – were thorough. The location is a condition of the interview: I can tell you it’s in Detroit, in a building that looks abandoned from the outside, and that’s all.

Someone has prepared for my arrival. Two chairs face each other in the center of the concrete floor, the cheap folding kind you’d find in a church basement, but they’ve been positioned with care – angled slightly toward the single overhead light in a way that feels considered. A small table between them holds two bottles of water, sealed, name brand. The gesture is oddly hospitable, and I find myself unsure whether Felix set this up himself an hour ago or whether someone else did it for him. The ambiguity feels deliberate.

I wait for perhaps ten minutes, long enough to become aware of the building’s sounds – the hum of ventilation somewhere below me, the occasional distant clang of what might be pipes or might be equipment. Then the hatch opens.

He emerges from a steel door in the floor, which feels theatrical until I recognize it as practical – he’s coming from a basement laboratory, and the hatch seals behind him with a hiss of positive pressure.

The helmet is smaller in person than it looks in photographs. The red LEDs are off, which somehow makes the sculpted grin worse – without the glow, it just looks like exposed teeth, like something dead. He moves like a man who’s been tall his whole life, slightly hunched, careful with the ceiling even when it’s high enough. There’s a visible taser clipped to his belt, consumer-grade, the kind you can buy at a sporting goods store. I find this oddly reassuring. A supervillain with a practical self-defense tool suggests a man who thinks in practical terms.

He crosses to the chairs and pauses, adjusting the angle of one by a few degrees, a small fussy gesture that seems automatic. Then he lowers himself into the seat across from me, lab coat settling around him, and reaches up to unclasp the lower half of his helmet.

“Mrs. Martinez.” The voice is softer than I expected. The German accent is there but worn smooth, vowels flattened by years in the Midwest. Underneath the mask: a pale jaw, patchy stubble going gray, the face of a tired academic. Not monstrous. Just a person. “It is easier to speak like this. And I think you want to see that I am a person, yes? This is part of why you came.”

He’s right. I hate that he’s right.

“Thank you for agreeing to this,” I say, and I mean it, even though I’m not sure I should.

“Thank you for the questions you sent in advance.” He uncaps one of the water bottles, takes a sip – deliberately, I realize, showing me that it’s safe. Another considered gesture. “They were better than most. You understand the science. This is rare. Most journalists, they want to ask me about my feelings. My childhood. Whether I feel remorse.” The word comes out with a faint curl of distaste. “You wanted to know about aerosolization rates and protein coat stability. I appreciated this.”

“I wanted to understand what you’re actually doing. Not just what it looks like.”

“Yes.” He sets the bottle down, aligns it precisely with the edge of the table. “This is the question. What I am actually doing. Not so many people ask this.”

The way I see it horus is whatever the GM wants it to be. Their whole existence and motives are a mystery that we're given hints to, but never concrete answers. Its up to GMs as to what the answers to these mysteries are, horus as a concept defy fan consensus and encourage contradictory interpretations. These contradictory interpretations aren't even that contradictory to each other, because part of the lore is that each horus cell has wildly different beliefs.

So if you play in one campaign and the horus agents there are chronically online catgirl hackers that want to go back in time and destroy the colony ship that founded aun, sure sounds like horus. And if you play in another campaign and horus there are a bunch of rebellious teenagers that barely understand the mechs they're printing but boy do they think they're cool and boy do they like castigating the enemies of the godhead, oh howdy doo does that sound like horus. And if in the next campaign there's some crypto seccomm loyalists that are trying to enslave Ra itself, whats that I smell? Yup, its horus.

I’m pinned, the legendary spear piercing my breast and nailing me to the floor, faceup so all I can see is the jagged ceiling and the carved shaft, hewn from whalebone and joined with glue from the sap of trees.

It’s not a fatal wound to me, but the hero that struck it was unable to remove the spear from the stone afterward despite his soldier’s muscle, and so proclaimed himself satisfied after he saw I could not break free for all my gnashing and struggling.

Just because it’s not fatal doesn’t mean it’s not agonizing.  The spear pierced my skin, shattered my bones, punctured a lung, and nicked my heart before chipping my spine as it exited my back.  I cannot remove it, so I cannot heal; I barely dare move, for while I cannot die from this, to move and to feel the carvings rub against my deflated lung and shattered bone, is an agony mortals would only need to bear for moments before death.

If there was another, they would have the leverage; but for all my great strength, I am not equal to the task of removing the spear from my chest or hauling myself up the shaft to escape.  I have screamed in agony trying.

As I lie, I bleed.  I feel it pool beneath me and run away, fleeing down the uneven cavern floor to lose itself in the spring buried with me here in the mountain’s heart.  I crane my neck and look, and see that I taint the water more and more by the day.  I know that people live in villages downstream, and wonder at their fortune, ill or otherwise, to drink a monster’s blood.

I have shed my blood upon the soil before; and as it drinks it up, strange things spring forth.  So too, now, as my blood runs forth from me, I can feel things growing downstream.  I feel flowers like those of my lost homeland growing on streambanks, in sand bars; luscious red like the kiss of sunset on horizon, the nights the sailors say bode well.  I feel eyes on them, and can taste wonder as farmhands give them to sweethearts and maidens tuck them into their braids.

It's more connected to the world than I’ve felt for ages.

As I lie there bleeding, I think of what it must be like for the common people.  I wonder if the hero who nailed me here came from those lands.  If he came back, alive but bloodied by my claws and gnashing teeth, was he praised?  Did he say he had slain me, struck a clean blow with the ancient hero’s spear and laid my corpse to cool in my dark lair? Was he celebrated, for slaying the Monster of Hooktongue Mountain?  Was he given medals by rulers domestic and allied?  Was he hoisted on shoulders, and feasted, and offered sons and daughters as concubines or spouses?  Did he accept, and feel the first brushes of guilt as he surrendered to tender touches in the warm dark of a cottage with a low fire?

And what of him now that the water runs with my blood?

Does the guilt eat him?  Does he realize the flowers give evidence to his lie?  Will he return, and try to haul off the stones he brought down to close my home’s door forever?  Will he take his sword from the war he fought and try to sever my head?  Will he scream, and gnash his farmboy’s teeth, and yell at me for not being yet dead?

Will I laugh, or just wish he were right?

Time passes.  The rhythms of the earth, the heartbeat of the world, give me little knowledge of time save that much passes.  The stones at the door to my home settle, and more of my blood taints the stream.

The day comes that I can feel something else growing on the streambeds- small at first, then like a man’s finger, then his hand, and later his whole arm, toadstools wherever the sun does not touch, and through these I can see.

The first is in a gap between fallen tree and streambank, and I see little but slowly rotting wood and the small creatures about the business of rotting it slightly faster.

The next is trod under by a child, and I wince twice- once for the feeling of my hand being stepped on, and once for the spear’s grating against my chest.

It is the third that tells me that the hero will not be returning.

When the hero came, the people of this land were stout and curly-haired, with pale skin and light eyes.  They wore sheep’s wool robes with sheep’s leather sandals, and hats made from reeds to shield them from the sun.

Now the people are different.  They are taller, and darker.  Their hair is long and straight, and they wear it tied up while they work.  Their clothes cling to their shapes, with separate legs and leather boots.  I watch as some work the field and I watch as a group in armor- unfamiliar in shape, but still armor- walk by, trading jests.

I see them wrinkle their noses at the mushrooms, and I see them avoid eating them after a week.

I see the stream running red as blood and wonder how much of it is me, leached over generations into the bank’s clay and silt.

It is only a few days later that a group- men, women, all wearing heavy cloaks and coats- comes upstream.  They look at where the stream exits the mountain.  The mushrooms are many eyes for me where the stream breaks ground again, and an old woman with them picks one, tastes it gingerly, and spits it out before gesturing to a younger man; he has a familial resemblance, perhaps a grandson.

The grandson undresses and the others tie a rope to him, and then he jumps in and swims.  I lose sight but I feel my blood in the water disturbed by his travel.  The passage is long, though, and before he’s even halfway to me they must pull his half-drowned body from the water to drain.

They separate then, taking walking sticks in hand, and leave the old woman and the young man to walk back to town.  I see them passing other streams that feed from the spring I bleed into, and they remark on the mushrooms.

None have the skill to spy the entrance, buried now under what must be generations of dead grass, bushes, and vines.  A week later they reconvene and shake their heads.  The old woman looks upset but says nothing.

Time passes.  My agonies wax and wane as I spend less and less time in my own body, preferring to remind myself of the pleasures of sun and sky, watching from the caps of the mushrooms I water with my entrapment and pain.  I watch couples flirt as they work the fields, I watch the planting come and go.

I watch the old woman, who little by little, explores the mountain herself.

In a beaten wool shawl and with a gnarled cane clutched in a gnarled hand, I watch her roam the slopes, peering closely at the mountain that became my tomb.  I watch her look curiously at the mushrooms and follow the densest growths.  She searches for me, unknowing, through the summer, through the harvest.  She stops for winter, but I see her mark her place with pieces of bent metal and she returns in spring.

Through the flowers, I feel her.  Her tenacity.  A lifetime of clawing life from rocky earth- it’s hard living so close to a mountain, and mine is so barren and rich with obdurate granite.  I feel the sureness of each slow step, a deliberation even I, ageless, can appreciate.  I even come to know her health, as she stops to rest and drink of my waters.  I can feel my blood within her, and sharply, suddenly, know she is ill- but having only grandchildren now, and them with their own lives and spouses and children, she wishes not to be a burden.

I also know suddenly, after she passes water too close to the stream, that she is mine.

It comes to me suddenly, a revelation that makes me thrash and gasp as the legendary spear digs deep, but not nearly deep enough to cut like this knowledge.  As they have drunk of my blood from the stream, over the ages, as they have washed their dishes in it, and grown their food with it, and little by little taken me into themselves, that they are all my children, by blood bond if not the truth of the flesh- nearly as much of mine as their own mothers’ and fathers’ blood in their veins.

For the first time in eons, I weep to watch one of my children struggle over rock and stone in search of me.  She does not give in, although she tires and weakens; when she falls one day, breaking an ankle, mine twinges in sympathy, and when she returns with a second cane and a great-grandchild at her side, my heart sings to see them both, children of my blood, searching for me.

When they find the remains of my door, they consider.  They stop to think and drink of my blood, and I send to them the first true message I have sent in many an age, as my cracked throat croaks instructions, the places where the waterways are shortest.  Both shiver, and make signs against evil, but my strength is spent and there is no more.

I watch, and I feel; the town argues.  My flowers are everywhere, beloved as the mushrooms are reviled, and through them I know the people below argue.  They doubt the word of the elderly, in this age, dismissing hard-fought wisdom and long life as the foolishness of those out of step with the world.  But her family pushes back, and they stand by her; and her grandson is alderman and commands respect of his own; and as they say she speaks the truth it becomes grudgingly known.

They find the way to the door.  Masons and quarrymen come, to measure the blocks and assess their weight.  I do not know their tools, but at the sight of these men, men as stern and solid as my mountain, with the grit of the land in their skin and my blood in their veins, I know them.  They say it will be difficult.  They say the work will be long and the mountain uncertain.  But they do not say it cannot be done.

Time passes.  At the door to my mountain a camp grows- first only the men, but later their families and children, as all are needed to do the job of living while the stonemen do their work.  And begin they do.  The mountain is tested.  Tools of dark metal, no bronze I have ever seen, come and chip the stone from my door.  They work slowly, carefully, erecting great wooden frames to bear the weight if it should shift suddenly.

The old woman comes every day, and eventually the masons build her a cottage too, among their longhouses and tents.  She has the only hearth for miles.

When they break through I hear them.  With my ears, I hear them- the first sound that has pierced my tomb for ages is stone falling from the door.  I turn.  Slowly and agonizingly, I turn so that my feet lay closer to the door, and the spear does not move with me.  My sounds of exertion do not panic them, but instead they move steadily on- perhaps they do not hear.  I watch them dig.  I feel their excitement, tempered by caution.  The legends of Hook Mountain still speak of a monster, it seems.

These days, I am more mountain than monster.

When they break through, none want to be the first until the old woman is called.  Then they all want to be first, to shield her from what may be a hard walk.  In the way of the elderly, she cracks her tongue like a whip, and the masons and their men stand back, ashamed like she was their own mothers.

And she enters my mountain alone, leaning on her canes.

She walks for some time, the light gone behind her.  There are no forks, and I leveled the floor myself- she doesn’t stumble, but takes her time, same as she ever did hunting my door down when younger eyes failed.

When I hear her cane tap on the floor in my room, I wheeze a greeting, and she stops, before coming closer.  I still have power enough for this, at least, and I bring light to the mountain’s heart for her.  She doesn’t gasp, but her hands tighten on her cane to see me speared to the floor.

“You are…the Monster of Hooktongue Mountain?”

I wheeze, “Once, perhaps.”  It’s true enough.  I have done little monstrous these past…“How long has it been?  Since the hero came to slay me?”

She grimaces, looks around the room, and seats herself on a nearby rock.  I turn my head to look at her, although the sight is familiar now.  She takes a moment to do the same before saying, “A long time.  His people had these lands before us.  Perhaps nine generations of my family came before me, all living in the house I gave to my son, and he to his son.”

I grimace.  Nine generations of mortals, two hundred years at least.  “I see.”

“He’s supposed to have slain you,” she says, “with that spear there.”

“And yet,” I wheeze.

“How do you still live?”

I shrug, then wince.  “In pain.  But he did not choose his strike well, and so robbed himself of another.  And so he did what a farmer’s boy turned soldier would do with any wounded beast- he trapped it and waited for it to die.  But the passing of ages is as moments to one such as I, and time did not take its course for me as it has for him.”

She nodded, slowly, and then looked to the blood, which in the light I now realized was a vast stain, hewn into a shallow channel of its own trickling into the spring.  “And that is you, as well?”

I grin.  “And you.  The spring, its waters, the flowers, the mushrooms, and all they touch and feed.”

She startles at that, and I croak a laugh- painful, and awful to hear.  “Fret not, my dear child.  The blood of monsters is strong and hearty.  Your family have drunk deep of me for generations, and now you are as monstrous as I.”

I concentrate, and sniff deeply- and there she is, my child, and my other children waiting outside.  I feel their hands and weight leaning against the tunnel mouth; I see the sweat on their brow, and I can feel the worry in their hearts for their elder.  I look to her, and hear her heart calm, and see recognition in her face.

She regains her voice and says, quietly, “You do not look monstrous.”

I sigh.  “No.”

“What happened?  To declare one such as you a monster?”

I wave a hand, despondent.  “What always happens in war.  The enemy cannot be as you are, or they may merit some humanity.  But his prejudice demanded I die, and he was a war hero, so the hunt was permitted and I was declared a monster.”

She nods, slowly.  “I’ve lost a son to a foreign war.  It was a terrible thing, and a terrible time.  You do not seem such to me.”

“I am.”  I look her steadily in the eye.  “I was in that same war as he, and I killed my share.  More than my share, perhaps.  I made no secret of my home, and boasted to serve my kind.  It was pride that kept me fighting until I was the last, and when it broke, I ran.  But I was a monster all the same, for war makes monsters of us all.”

“And now,” she asked, “are you still?”

I sigh again, the spear digging into my spine as I’ve rotated to face prospective guests more clearly.  “Now I’m more land than anything.  Monster or no, my blood has soaked this ground, and the streams that trickle from this pool, for generations.  My blood has fed crops, livestock, and you.  It is no accident you look like me.”

She nods, accepting her eyes’ proof- and I marvel.

When the men come to wrench the spear from my chest, I am beyond screaming.  When I take my first steps in an age beyond mortal grasp, I weep with gratitude to them.

And when my eyes see sunlight for the first time in eons, the tears blind me more than the light does.

I’m welcomed as old family, and tell my story.  And an agreement is reached- I am not the Monster of Hooktongue Mountain.

He died long ago, a soldier buried in a forgotten grave.

The Human Xenobiological Field Guide is now open to the public. A formalized OC-species submission process will come later, as will actual short stories in the setting, and a process to submit your own short stories.

The year is 3040 AD - or, as the humans of the time know it, 34 PR, "Post-Reconstitution". In 2026 AD, a von Neumann probe known as an Atma Unit arrived on Earth and, over the course of the following year, assimilated every living human being into itself in order to perfectly preserve their electric activity and active engrams - the thing that makes your consciousness "your consciousness".

The Atma Unit did not do this consensually.

Over the course of the following 980 years, the Atma Unit "fixed it. Everything". Resources that could be used as weapons of war were turned into a horrendous and beautiful Dyson Swarm providing functionally infinite power. Cities were reconstructed to "modern standards". Rural areas were "rewilded", climate change solved, almost every disease and ailment imaginable defeated, all the fossil fuels recycled into more useful tools. When the Atma Unit left on a relativistic intercept velocity towards the next planet in need, at -2 PR, the automated systems left behind began the long process of reconstituting all 8 billion humans into a new paradigm populated by a Galactic Federation of 1137 sophont species, of which Humanity is #1138.

It's been 34 solar years since then. There has been no secret jackass genie twist. The Atma Unit was right. Cheat-space engines allow casual interstellar travel within the galaxy. Human flourishing and happiness and peace are higher than they have ever been in history. Everyone has everything they need, forever.

My two favorite excerpts I will use to pitch this:

The federation does not use the word "evil." It uses the phrase "does not converge to cooperative equilibrium under any known payoff structure," which means approximately the same thing but is harder to argue with.

[...]