Post by EmperorMyric on Dec 16, 2017 19:28:36 GMT
Come along with me
You have much to see
The surface is revealing
Take a look inside
Trouble is your find
The purpose is deceiving
--“Time Is Industry” by Lola Ray
--oOo--
“It shouldn’t have been like this.” He whispered as he closed his eyes and breathed. Five hundred years, and his time hadn’t come; no, but it comes to everyone else, all the time, all surrounding him…and he spent so many moments trying to fix things, and yet the world could come unraveled so easily, so dreadfully easily…I could have saved her, he thought to himself, not willing to vocalize his distress to his watchdog, had they only let him. If only she’d understood…if only the sniper had snuffed him out instead. He would be free of so much, and have left a better world-maybe even, he’d finally come upon someone who could explain his life to him.
--From GFA: “Day Of Revelations, Pt. 2”
--oOo--
“This was once a warm place, right?” One of the scouts yelled into his mic, gesturing with his heavily insulated arm towards the horizon in general. In doing so, he was making a bit of a risky hypothesis: the horizon could be anywhere in this weather. White moved sideways, grey fell down, and the two blurred and merged and shifted rather dreadfully together into a haze of non-existence.
“Meteor impact knocked it off its axis!” Another responded, challenging the howling wind to drown her voice out. It was a fair challenge, too.
And in that grey and white haze of non-existence, everyone looked the same. The thick, heavily insulated thermal containment garb wrapped tightly around their standard uniforms would have seemed almost pastry-esque; thick strips wound their way up the torso like folds of dough, and attached to this strangely culinary garb were straps and pockets. The scout’s faces were all but obscured by goggles and masks made of a the same materiel, and it almost stripped them of their humanity. At least, it would have.
There was nothing for hundreds of miles which could see them.
This world was presently unknown, but it a few thousand years it would have a name. Quite close to where they were heading, a structure would ultimately be raised that would be the home of one of the galaxy’s more powerful families. This choice for a homestead would typically be attributed to security concerns, and the structure’s architecture would reflect this theory quite well. However, not all theories are true.
“How far from the glacier?” Another scout cried out, and the lead raised a hand with three raised fingers on it; the number was repeated so that the man twenty feet to the aft would know, for at this distance he could not see but a vague shape ahead of him.
Of course, it was not the glacier proper that they were investigating. This entire planet was covered in glaciers, and as best as they could tell it only experience a summer every two hundred and twenty some years, and it was a very stretched term to call it summer at that. If they had wanted to find a glacier, they could have gone anywhere.
Instead, they were looking for something within the glacier.
Something that was quietly transmitting for thousands of years.
--oOo--
“What did dying feel like?” The man asked abruptly, his piercing eyes remaining glued to the window. Varek, who had remained silently observing the two men, raised an eyebrow at the question, as she looked towards the calvera.
Chassovo paused for a moment, as the Commodore looked back away from the window. He crossed his arms gradually as he leaned back in his chair, staring intently at the calvera’s mechanical head
The automata’s blast shutters moved open widely; the look of his face, if there was any. Now reading surprise, surprise that quickly faded into familiarity, it was a question that he was all too familiar with, so many old friends asking for the exact same explanation. And he knew how to answer it.
"It’s nothing poetic, not like plays or books would describe it. At least not outside of my home empire. I died so very long ago, but that particular memory remains. It’s like falling into a deep sleep, one that suppose for most people would welcome them to whatever Peaceful afterlife there is. But not for us. What leads us to that point however, can be utter torture." he said in heavy tones.
Pausing to look at one of his mechanical claws which he raised halfway to the lens that dominated the center of his skull, before looking back up at the man who had called himself Kashmir. "You were at that point once before, you should know..." he said not taking his gaze off of him.
The man who had called himself Kashmir said nothing immediately, but his eyebrows went up in curiosity, and he nodded ever so slightly out of respect for that piece of information. But he only nodded once before halting; the calvera after all could have been referring to a good many instances in his life, at least in theory. Given his occupation, he’d surrounded himself with death in most of its forms… but there was only one occasion that really fit Chassovo’s reference-and he’d been alone then. But then, he realized what he was doing-his hands were clenching around his crossed arms, and he abruptly released his grip the moment he realized he had it.
“I cheated.” He replied flatly, as he remembered seeing the figure standing before him as he slowly rose from his crouch by the partially dismantled access panel. He’d been so hungry…
“Didn’t get the full experience, obviously.” He added with a shrug.
--From GFA: “Into The Storm.”
--oOo--
The signal had been first detected by a pathfinder vessel of the Spartan Interstellar Republic. The ship was a sleeper design, as faster than light travel would not be discovered for another eight hundred years, and silently the computer had altered the ship’s course in search of the source. It had been going for considerably more than eight hundred years by the time it reached its destination.
Inhabitable worlds are incredibly rare, especially when you are traveling at sublight speeds, so the discovery of a signal of any sort was something worth considering quite carefully. For the Spartans, the possibility of an ally, of an inhabitable world, were well worth the risk of a few dozen crewmembers. So the ship silently sailed, sight unseen, towards its distant destination.
It had been a warm, luscious world once, until an asteroid had hit it; by their estimates upon arrival the asteroid had beaten them there by at least four hundred years. It must have been a larger sort of rock, because it seemed to have killed everything: while the sensors of that day were hardly the most accurate ones, they could not detect any substantial biomass on the planet, let alone rubble from whatever civilization had sent out that beacon into the dark so many thousands of years earlier.
However, they were in luck in one aspect: the beacon was still going, and they knew where it was coming from, if not who made it: a spot half a kilometer beneath an otherwise unremarkable glacier on the planet’s surface.
--oOo--
The thermite charge went off with a dull thud, and with gradual grace receding from it a slab of ice several hundred feet tall gradually teetered out away from the ice face and tumbled into the ground. It was hard to see, but they could feel it: several hundred tons of ice had abruptly belly flopped onto the cold, hard ground. After the wind passed, the team rose to their feet, and moved forwards over the newfound field of broken ice.
Beyond that fallen block lay a chasm into the glacier; the walls polished by ages of gradual movement and dripping water reflected perverted portraits back at them as they moved, and they moved undeniably with speed. They were getting closer and closer to the signal, and their anticipation for finding just what lay on the other side of that formerly impenetrable wall of ice. Something had sent a signal, and whoever it was had managed to call them across unimaginable distances like it had a siren’s tune trapped on the tip of it’s tongue.
As they moved deeper through the chasm, the tunnel gradually narrowed and shrank, and soon they were using their portable saws to cut through the icicles that blocked their path like prison bars; six feet across on average, it slowed their progress, but ultimately to no real avail. The signal called them, and they followed through the dim blue light of faint solar rays and the clear white light coming from their headlamps.
Ultimately, they came to an arch, of about eight feet in height and five or six feet in width; tall, wide, and more importantly through it they could see strange and wonderful things.
One of the scouts muttered an obscenity under their breath, and it echoed through the tunnel like it might have been his last breath.
--oOo--
“Emby’s the only thing out there that hasn’t died. Everyone dies eventually, Princess, and every side falls sooner or later, and all the castles made of sand fall into the sea eventually. What’d you prefer me do with what I have, pick a side and fight the other?”
He whispered softly, realizing that it was the sleeping form of Laura that kept his voice so subdued, “I’ve fought for kings and countries for far too long to play that game any longer. At least when I fight only for myself, I don’t have to do other men’s dirty work. Just me.” And then he froze, quite strangely, as if he were looking off past her at something.
“And I do want to die one day. No one in his or her right mind wants to live forever. But I don’t want to die alone, and the way my life’s going, Emby’s likely the only soul who’s going to be there if it ever comes time…”
--From GFA: “Encounter At Dusk”
--oOo--
Ice covered the floor. It crinkled and crackled under their feet like it were so many million little pieces of broken glass. In here, it was darkness, and darkness was for the first time in quite a while being challenged. Beneath the high vaulted ceiling, their lights shot up through the fog laden air like spotlights probing the heavens for enemy planes.
“What the hell is this place?” One of the scouts asked to no one in particular. Ice covered all things in here, though it was a thin layer of frost quite different from the ice beyond the confines of the archway. There was no life within this place, though it was evident that there had been at some time. Picture frames had fallen from the walls, and as one of the scouts reached down and removed it from its icy home, he pondered it curiously. A gloved hand wiped the frost off the face of it-
“Get a load of this!” Another voice called out, and he abruptly dropped the picture back into the ice. Lights were all abruptly being trained on a large sarcophagus-esque chamber propped up against the structure in the center of the room. A lone blue light blinked slowly on the coffin; a pad roughly the size of a hand which slowly, encouragingly pulsed with faint signs of life. Yet odder still was that a message was visible when the light was on, scrawled into the thin layer of ice by unknown means as if from the mind of Lewis Carol himself:
PUSH ME it commanded helpfully, and the scouts looked at each other for support as to who would do the deed, if the deed was to be done.
“We haven’t got a clue as to what the hell that thing is, or what it does, or who called us here,” one of the scouts began to warn, before another abruptly nudged him aside and stretched a palm out towards the square.
“We came too far to wonder.” She said simply.
--oOo--
Nothing stirred immediately, and she left her hand on the square for moment after moment as nothing happened; then nonexistent lights flickered. The chamber was still pitch dark like a tomb, and then in a flicker of blue, a form began to solidify. The light was dim, but it glimmered mystically on each and every frozen surface in the room; the icicles dripping off the loose cabling which arched down from the distant ceiling sported those icy instruments like facets of a grand chandelier, and the chandelier glowed a faint and deathly blue as the form began to gain shape.
The figure in question was looking over the console in the center of the room, a ghost if there ever was one. His back was to them, but even as the projection gained a degree of clarity his back shifted slightly, as if he were pulling himself to his full height out of some sort of a slump. The ghost wore a cloak of gauntness to it, though in more physical terms there was no cloak about him; it was a suit and tie affair which, while to its own degree timeless, was undeniably dated by this day and age.
The hologram moved towards the tall edifice around which the explorers were positioned, and leaned against it slightly, his gaze fixed on the thing and matched with a slack sort of look to his face that highlighted a degree of heaviness to his purpose here.
“If you’re wondering who’s inside of this thing, she’s someone important to me, and she’s very ill. That’s why you’re here, if you’re wondering,” he said softly, looking out into a room which, at a point so many centuries prior had been warm and free of ice and utterly empty aside from him and someone important.
“The reasoning for that is…complicated,” he said slowly, “…and the worst part of it is I can’t help her. I’m not the god I made some think I was. She’s just going to get worse, I think, until she’s just a small body with an awfully big soul, and the soul won’t stay in her anymore…and I can’t do a thing about it myself. Hence my inviting you here.” He abruptly checked his watch, before turning away from the still shocked travellers and moving back towards the arch. On his way there, he headed towards a nonexistent coat hangar and began to don a longcoat. His movements held a certain degree of stiffness to him, as if it hurt to move perhaps, or perhaps as if he felt older than he looked. Through all of this, he continued speaking, and his witnesses stood in silence as they watched him shrug himself into it.
“I’m going to go find people who can make her well again. Until I get back, I want you to guard her like she were the last woman on earth. Her file is on the counter,” he added as he gestured towards an otherwise unremarkable surface near a toppled and torn paper curtain. “I’ll be back in a few.”
And then he stepped out through the arch, and vanished.
--oOo--
The unit collectively kept their eyes fixed on the arch where the man had vanished, some questioning the reality of what they had just seen. Of them, the first to be free of the spell was the young adventurous soul who had obeyed the hastily scrawled command, who turned her eyes to the counter where the man in the image had told them to look.
Hidden by her goggles, her eyes widened in disbelief as, under a thin crust of ancient ice, a file with a very familiar logo embossed onto it was revealed. As familiar as it should be.
It was the same logo woven in crimson fiber on the shoulder patches of their uniforms and painted in a deep crimson on the hull of their ship. A shape known far and wide across the space where the ships of their nation had gone in time immemorial. Yes. The Crimson bolt of Zeus that was the symbol of the ancient Spartan Empire was indeed well known.
The question was: how had it ended up here?
You have much to see
The surface is revealing
Take a look inside
Trouble is your find
The purpose is deceiving
--“Time Is Industry” by Lola Ray
--oOo--
“It shouldn’t have been like this.” He whispered as he closed his eyes and breathed. Five hundred years, and his time hadn’t come; no, but it comes to everyone else, all the time, all surrounding him…and he spent so many moments trying to fix things, and yet the world could come unraveled so easily, so dreadfully easily…I could have saved her, he thought to himself, not willing to vocalize his distress to his watchdog, had they only let him. If only she’d understood…if only the sniper had snuffed him out instead. He would be free of so much, and have left a better world-maybe even, he’d finally come upon someone who could explain his life to him.
--From GFA: “Day Of Revelations, Pt. 2”
--oOo--
“This was once a warm place, right?” One of the scouts yelled into his mic, gesturing with his heavily insulated arm towards the horizon in general. In doing so, he was making a bit of a risky hypothesis: the horizon could be anywhere in this weather. White moved sideways, grey fell down, and the two blurred and merged and shifted rather dreadfully together into a haze of non-existence.
“Meteor impact knocked it off its axis!” Another responded, challenging the howling wind to drown her voice out. It was a fair challenge, too.
And in that grey and white haze of non-existence, everyone looked the same. The thick, heavily insulated thermal containment garb wrapped tightly around their standard uniforms would have seemed almost pastry-esque; thick strips wound their way up the torso like folds of dough, and attached to this strangely culinary garb were straps and pockets. The scout’s faces were all but obscured by goggles and masks made of a the same materiel, and it almost stripped them of their humanity. At least, it would have.
There was nothing for hundreds of miles which could see them.
This world was presently unknown, but it a few thousand years it would have a name. Quite close to where they were heading, a structure would ultimately be raised that would be the home of one of the galaxy’s more powerful families. This choice for a homestead would typically be attributed to security concerns, and the structure’s architecture would reflect this theory quite well. However, not all theories are true.
“How far from the glacier?” Another scout cried out, and the lead raised a hand with three raised fingers on it; the number was repeated so that the man twenty feet to the aft would know, for at this distance he could not see but a vague shape ahead of him.
Of course, it was not the glacier proper that they were investigating. This entire planet was covered in glaciers, and as best as they could tell it only experience a summer every two hundred and twenty some years, and it was a very stretched term to call it summer at that. If they had wanted to find a glacier, they could have gone anywhere.
Instead, they were looking for something within the glacier.
Something that was quietly transmitting for thousands of years.
--oOo--
“What did dying feel like?” The man asked abruptly, his piercing eyes remaining glued to the window. Varek, who had remained silently observing the two men, raised an eyebrow at the question, as she looked towards the calvera.
Chassovo paused for a moment, as the Commodore looked back away from the window. He crossed his arms gradually as he leaned back in his chair, staring intently at the calvera’s mechanical head
The automata’s blast shutters moved open widely; the look of his face, if there was any. Now reading surprise, surprise that quickly faded into familiarity, it was a question that he was all too familiar with, so many old friends asking for the exact same explanation. And he knew how to answer it.
"It’s nothing poetic, not like plays or books would describe it. At least not outside of my home empire. I died so very long ago, but that particular memory remains. It’s like falling into a deep sleep, one that suppose for most people would welcome them to whatever Peaceful afterlife there is. But not for us. What leads us to that point however, can be utter torture." he said in heavy tones.
Pausing to look at one of his mechanical claws which he raised halfway to the lens that dominated the center of his skull, before looking back up at the man who had called himself Kashmir. "You were at that point once before, you should know..." he said not taking his gaze off of him.
The man who had called himself Kashmir said nothing immediately, but his eyebrows went up in curiosity, and he nodded ever so slightly out of respect for that piece of information. But he only nodded once before halting; the calvera after all could have been referring to a good many instances in his life, at least in theory. Given his occupation, he’d surrounded himself with death in most of its forms… but there was only one occasion that really fit Chassovo’s reference-and he’d been alone then. But then, he realized what he was doing-his hands were clenching around his crossed arms, and he abruptly released his grip the moment he realized he had it.
“I cheated.” He replied flatly, as he remembered seeing the figure standing before him as he slowly rose from his crouch by the partially dismantled access panel. He’d been so hungry…
“Didn’t get the full experience, obviously.” He added with a shrug.
--From GFA: “Into The Storm.”
--oOo--
The signal had been first detected by a pathfinder vessel of the Spartan Interstellar Republic. The ship was a sleeper design, as faster than light travel would not be discovered for another eight hundred years, and silently the computer had altered the ship’s course in search of the source. It had been going for considerably more than eight hundred years by the time it reached its destination.
Inhabitable worlds are incredibly rare, especially when you are traveling at sublight speeds, so the discovery of a signal of any sort was something worth considering quite carefully. For the Spartans, the possibility of an ally, of an inhabitable world, were well worth the risk of a few dozen crewmembers. So the ship silently sailed, sight unseen, towards its distant destination.
It had been a warm, luscious world once, until an asteroid had hit it; by their estimates upon arrival the asteroid had beaten them there by at least four hundred years. It must have been a larger sort of rock, because it seemed to have killed everything: while the sensors of that day were hardly the most accurate ones, they could not detect any substantial biomass on the planet, let alone rubble from whatever civilization had sent out that beacon into the dark so many thousands of years earlier.
However, they were in luck in one aspect: the beacon was still going, and they knew where it was coming from, if not who made it: a spot half a kilometer beneath an otherwise unremarkable glacier on the planet’s surface.
--oOo--
The thermite charge went off with a dull thud, and with gradual grace receding from it a slab of ice several hundred feet tall gradually teetered out away from the ice face and tumbled into the ground. It was hard to see, but they could feel it: several hundred tons of ice had abruptly belly flopped onto the cold, hard ground. After the wind passed, the team rose to their feet, and moved forwards over the newfound field of broken ice.
Beyond that fallen block lay a chasm into the glacier; the walls polished by ages of gradual movement and dripping water reflected perverted portraits back at them as they moved, and they moved undeniably with speed. They were getting closer and closer to the signal, and their anticipation for finding just what lay on the other side of that formerly impenetrable wall of ice. Something had sent a signal, and whoever it was had managed to call them across unimaginable distances like it had a siren’s tune trapped on the tip of it’s tongue.
As they moved deeper through the chasm, the tunnel gradually narrowed and shrank, and soon they were using their portable saws to cut through the icicles that blocked their path like prison bars; six feet across on average, it slowed their progress, but ultimately to no real avail. The signal called them, and they followed through the dim blue light of faint solar rays and the clear white light coming from their headlamps.
Ultimately, they came to an arch, of about eight feet in height and five or six feet in width; tall, wide, and more importantly through it they could see strange and wonderful things.
One of the scouts muttered an obscenity under their breath, and it echoed through the tunnel like it might have been his last breath.
--oOo--
“Emby’s the only thing out there that hasn’t died. Everyone dies eventually, Princess, and every side falls sooner or later, and all the castles made of sand fall into the sea eventually. What’d you prefer me do with what I have, pick a side and fight the other?”
He whispered softly, realizing that it was the sleeping form of Laura that kept his voice so subdued, “I’ve fought for kings and countries for far too long to play that game any longer. At least when I fight only for myself, I don’t have to do other men’s dirty work. Just me.” And then he froze, quite strangely, as if he were looking off past her at something.
“And I do want to die one day. No one in his or her right mind wants to live forever. But I don’t want to die alone, and the way my life’s going, Emby’s likely the only soul who’s going to be there if it ever comes time…”
--From GFA: “Encounter At Dusk”
--oOo--
Ice covered the floor. It crinkled and crackled under their feet like it were so many million little pieces of broken glass. In here, it was darkness, and darkness was for the first time in quite a while being challenged. Beneath the high vaulted ceiling, their lights shot up through the fog laden air like spotlights probing the heavens for enemy planes.
“What the hell is this place?” One of the scouts asked to no one in particular. Ice covered all things in here, though it was a thin layer of frost quite different from the ice beyond the confines of the archway. There was no life within this place, though it was evident that there had been at some time. Picture frames had fallen from the walls, and as one of the scouts reached down and removed it from its icy home, he pondered it curiously. A gloved hand wiped the frost off the face of it-
“Get a load of this!” Another voice called out, and he abruptly dropped the picture back into the ice. Lights were all abruptly being trained on a large sarcophagus-esque chamber propped up against the structure in the center of the room. A lone blue light blinked slowly on the coffin; a pad roughly the size of a hand which slowly, encouragingly pulsed with faint signs of life. Yet odder still was that a message was visible when the light was on, scrawled into the thin layer of ice by unknown means as if from the mind of Lewis Carol himself:
PUSH ME it commanded helpfully, and the scouts looked at each other for support as to who would do the deed, if the deed was to be done.
“We haven’t got a clue as to what the hell that thing is, or what it does, or who called us here,” one of the scouts began to warn, before another abruptly nudged him aside and stretched a palm out towards the square.
“We came too far to wonder.” She said simply.
--oOo--
Nothing stirred immediately, and she left her hand on the square for moment after moment as nothing happened; then nonexistent lights flickered. The chamber was still pitch dark like a tomb, and then in a flicker of blue, a form began to solidify. The light was dim, but it glimmered mystically on each and every frozen surface in the room; the icicles dripping off the loose cabling which arched down from the distant ceiling sported those icy instruments like facets of a grand chandelier, and the chandelier glowed a faint and deathly blue as the form began to gain shape.
The figure in question was looking over the console in the center of the room, a ghost if there ever was one. His back was to them, but even as the projection gained a degree of clarity his back shifted slightly, as if he were pulling himself to his full height out of some sort of a slump. The ghost wore a cloak of gauntness to it, though in more physical terms there was no cloak about him; it was a suit and tie affair which, while to its own degree timeless, was undeniably dated by this day and age.
The hologram moved towards the tall edifice around which the explorers were positioned, and leaned against it slightly, his gaze fixed on the thing and matched with a slack sort of look to his face that highlighted a degree of heaviness to his purpose here.
“If you’re wondering who’s inside of this thing, she’s someone important to me, and she’s very ill. That’s why you’re here, if you’re wondering,” he said softly, looking out into a room which, at a point so many centuries prior had been warm and free of ice and utterly empty aside from him and someone important.
“The reasoning for that is…complicated,” he said slowly, “…and the worst part of it is I can’t help her. I’m not the god I made some think I was. She’s just going to get worse, I think, until she’s just a small body with an awfully big soul, and the soul won’t stay in her anymore…and I can’t do a thing about it myself. Hence my inviting you here.” He abruptly checked his watch, before turning away from the still shocked travellers and moving back towards the arch. On his way there, he headed towards a nonexistent coat hangar and began to don a longcoat. His movements held a certain degree of stiffness to him, as if it hurt to move perhaps, or perhaps as if he felt older than he looked. Through all of this, he continued speaking, and his witnesses stood in silence as they watched him shrug himself into it.
“I’m going to go find people who can make her well again. Until I get back, I want you to guard her like she were the last woman on earth. Her file is on the counter,” he added as he gestured towards an otherwise unremarkable surface near a toppled and torn paper curtain. “I’ll be back in a few.”
And then he stepped out through the arch, and vanished.
--oOo--
The unit collectively kept their eyes fixed on the arch where the man had vanished, some questioning the reality of what they had just seen. Of them, the first to be free of the spell was the young adventurous soul who had obeyed the hastily scrawled command, who turned her eyes to the counter where the man in the image had told them to look.
Hidden by her goggles, her eyes widened in disbelief as, under a thin crust of ancient ice, a file with a very familiar logo embossed onto it was revealed. As familiar as it should be.
It was the same logo woven in crimson fiber on the shoulder patches of their uniforms and painted in a deep crimson on the hull of their ship. A shape known far and wide across the space where the ships of their nation had gone in time immemorial. Yes. The Crimson bolt of Zeus that was the symbol of the ancient Spartan Empire was indeed well known.
The question was: how had it ended up here?