NationStates Jolt Archive

It was dark at the edge of the galaxy and the long fibers of light extending from the galactic core sputtered and died before the blackness. The opaque wall of nothing smothered the fringes of populated space, the ultimate bogeyman. Like a lame sheep strays from the herd so had the flickering star. How the dying ball of hydrogen came to be so far from the edge of the galaxy is not a matter of importance, perhaps a larger sun had catapulted it into the deep black. It slowly turned and spun aimlessly amongst the utter nothingness about it, large flares burst from its ailing structure illuminating the void for moments before eternity. The pitiful thing was doomed, doomed to an end far from the lights it had been born within. It would slowly continue to flicker, blinking blinking blinking in mute distress, and eventually fade into the darkness about.

So seconds turned to minutes and minutes to millennia as time blurred before this wayward celestial bulb. However, something happened in one of those faceless minutes. The flickering star grew bright. As if renewed by the will of God it grew bright, great arches of light stretching out, fast faster than the laws of the universe permitted. The star would not go gently into that good night, and it seemed as if in some final display of revenge on the higher powers which flung it from the warmth it shattered every natural law. Light moved beyond the speed of light, energy was created and destroyed. Time rippled back and forth, shuttering as if under the greatest pressure. The fragile star was turned to nothing and its remains shot back towards the galaxy at impossible speeds.

A great dark orb floated black on black. The ancient star had passed away... no it had been murdered by this tremendous object. Only moments following the stars’s demise ripples of the event reached the galaxy passing through it in a moment. Those who listened would hear this, the dark whisper of impossibility, the dark whisper of impossibility in the night.

The great orb sat, measuring its surroundings. It was tremendous, godlike in scale, larger than a planet, even the darkness seemed stay its ground. With great ponderous conscience the orb began to move. It strolled through the darkness, commanded it, bound it to great invisible chains and took its broken skin for garment. At first it was slow, but soon it began to pick up speed. Within an hour the great orb was whipping its way towards the nearest light... The Milky Way.

As the faint light grew closer and closer the orb shuttered with deep tones that defied reality and moved out beyond the speed of light. Seventeen beats would echo out. There would then be a most tremendous pause and the thundering began again seventeen times. Tiny lights began to appear on the surface of the great orb, they multiplied like bacteria and soon the black surface was covered in streaks of light. The streaks grew fat and bloated, rising up from the surface of the thundering giant as it tore towards the fringe. Soon the entire orb ebbed and flowed with brilliant glowing light. It would coalesce in massive mile high pools of pure energy and burst out into the darkness for thousands of miles. Geyser after geyser of light erupted from the sphere.

The seventeen thunders were joined by a great horn that bellowed into the approaching galaxy. It bellowed every few moments like a fog horn. Its wales pierced steel, rock, and flesh throughout the galaxy.

A day passed and the distance between the now glowing orb and the galaxy had decreased to mere lightyears. The great drumming stopped but the horn continued as the orb began to slow.

Finally an hour later it stopped, horn still bellowing, at the very edge of space. It hovered below a massive red giant dangerously close to the furious blasts from the star. There it bellowed one final great horn blast. It then continued its silent light show, hovering... waiting.

(TAG! Will get up a post tomorrow; would have been today but I'll be damned if homework didn't shoot that notion down)

Taggstered. I'll have a post up likewise, tomorrow.

I also shall endeavour to post, if my puppet will cooperate. If not, I'll post like this, assuming my puppets Persona.

(OOC: Aw, I don't see a way into this, but nice intro.)

OOC : Tagged .

The great orb continued to float within the flares of the red giant, its own eruptions of light burning a hundred time brighter than the red flames about it. The deep red and piercing white mingled in a dazzling array of shapes and colors, the ultimate contrast to the infinite black that hung only light years away.

The orb born flares only grew in intensity as each moment passed, pressing farther out and burning all the more vivid. However, it became apparent that under this blanket of radiant light bits of the orb were missing, seemingly swept off with the colors. Moment after moment less and less of the orb was there.

Still it sat there, however, glowing beneath the star. Silent, waiting.

ooc: Feel free to investigate.

In The Gnomish Triumvirate of Starenell, the world shook. Seventeen times, a ripple tore through the land, followed by a great horn. Most just ignored this, though they remembered it forever. But on the hidden planet of Xen'drik, it was a call.

Ohnal Caldyn, leader of the Crimson Codex, and the true, though hidden, leader of Starenell, through The Trust, was one of these. He was a wanderer, searching for pieces of the Draconic Prophecy. However, today he was on Xen'drik, focusing on internal affairs. But when he felt...whatever it was, he knew he had to go to its source. He had his finest scientists, wizards, and navigators plot the ripple, where it would go, and where it came from, based on the times it hit various places in Starenell.

When they figured out roughly where it was, if not exactly how far, he gatehred a new group. They were to board his custom ship, one of the finest in Starenell, the next day and set off for their destinations. The group was decent, the best that could be gathered on such short notice.

They were not all though. Messengers were sent far and wide, to get the true leaders of all fields. They were gathered more slowly, but they were gathered. Over time, they gathered on Xen'drik.

Meanwhile, Ohnal's ship, the Dragonshard left Xen'drik, moving at the best rate possible towards the end of their journey.

Angolfaeliel, a Sindarin elf with typical dark looks, pouted again at the man who’d brought her to the terminal, and out of the still continuing orgy. Captain James Kirk, a tall man with short brown hair and a boyish smile, dressed in an odd wrap-around green top. Of course, he wasn’t the ‘original’ but rather, the avatar of the necron ship INS Ranavenus. Space-heroes and sci-fi characters were popular as avatars, in vogue, you might say.

Billowing drug-smoke, such things were not only legal, but occasionally used, but addiction was easily handled with cybernetic implants and the systems of the people, both citizens and their multitudinous guests were robust enough to suffer from no side-effects, from the party next door still leaked under the doorway, and Angolfaeliel seemed eager to get back to it. “Honestly, I don’t know why they let you call for me here, can’t it waaait?”

“No,” Kirk said.

“Don’t yooou at least want to join in?”

“Not now thank you,” he said, punching a key on the host’s holoprojector, causing a text-interface to pop up. That got some of Angolfaeliel’s attention, simply because such interfaces were rare except on more modest workstations.

“Take a look,” Kirk said.

[Data extract]
<INS Sataissaoth> Wow… that, right there, is some weird shit. Take a read through of this…
[Formal Report Format]Timestamp Areal Contact, Logref SE989. Gravitational eddy massive (1.2 Stellar mass) rated at hyperspeed velocity on trajectory 201.200 relative to.


She stopped reading at that point. “Listen, matey. Either you’re going to give me the jist of it without the jargon, which right now, I’d have to clear my system to get…”

“I thought you said you were already doing that,” the avatar sighed.

“’S beside the point. Summarise, or I am off.”

Defeated, the avatar sighed.

“Okay, we’ve detected an object that appears to be arreal. It’s doing funky things like sending stars off at hypervelocity – which is either funky, scary or both, depending on who you talk to – and emitting pulses of sound throughout the galaxy which travel faster than light. We logged it with dozens of CS – Cultural Survey Drones to you, and ships, and triangulated its position. My proper body is currently holding station two parsecs out in stealth mode and making observations, I want you to come aboard and help with electric scrying and so on to see if your magicy organic perspective sheds any light. No pressure, but you do come highly recommended for the job, and frankly, it’s interesting. Allow me to show you the object before you decide,” he added, and punched a button, bringing up a real time image of the sphere.

“Waitaminute… Why didn’t we hear this sound here?”

“Null-net.”

“Uh…”

“For sanity’s sake woman, detox, now!” it snapped, “you’re a mage, I’d think you know all about the reality-stabilisation net.”

“Oh, right,” she said, “yeah, doing it now captain.”

“So, do you want to go?”

“Uhhh, sure, why not. Just let me get my soulkeeper in order and changed and,” he rolled his eyes, “Your home, right away,” he said, and keyed into a displacer module nearby with a high level override, plucking them from the scene of the revelry, to Angolfaeliel’s home with a distinctive pop.

”Eeek,” she yelped, “Right, right, I’m going…”

---

Soon after, the two hundred meter long frigate was joined by its first ever passenger, who began the process of going over its sensor telemetry with her own, quite extensive (now that she’d purged some of the mind-altering drugs from her system) expertise. And so, some rather intensive, if passive scans were focussed on the object. If its strange, faster-than-light emissions (and those detected by probes, closer to it) were found to be non-hostile, communication may be attempted. It all depended on what their sensors found.

OOC: And of course, if it’s not an orgy of wank.

The sphere continued as it had been, the great pillars of light emerging from its surface and plunging out into space eventually dissipating. None of these pillars, however, came anywhere near the newly arrived frigate. In fact a rather large angle of safety had strangely formed, ensuring none of the volatile energy threatened the newly arrived ship.

However, with the ships arrival the intensity seemed to increase substantially, as if the presence of outsiders had alarmed the great orb. The largest waves of emerging light began to split and fray out into numerous smaller strands like a many forked snake tongue, illuminating the dark with nigh biblical light.

After a minute, however, something truly remarkable happened. The whole of the newly arrived frigate began to thrum slightly and from the slight vibrations came a slow and compassionate voice, that seemed to work its way through every fabric of reality, emanating even from within the mind...

“You have nothing fear. We are the First, formally the Second. Although we hold no true name, you may simply refer to us as the Noctis. We are curious, however, by name should we refer to you, or are you nameless as we once were?”

The Dragonshard dropped out of the Ethereal Plane. It had taken a while, and they had had an incident with a particularly nasty ghost on the way there, but finally, they arrived at the source of the disturbance.

They looked at what they saw, and were in awe. Another ship was there, none of the light touching it. And the source of the light...was......had they gone mad?

Slowly the great bands of light peeled away from the Starenell ship, leaving a great birth of inert space between the newly arrived ship and the massive spouts of blinding energy. As a larger and larger area was left to sit calm, ensuring the safety of all foreign ships, it became apparent that the orb was no longer whole. Massive continents of metal had fallen into nothingness, exposing the tumultuous insides. Thousands of ships, crafts of every size and shape, mulled about in the constantly shifting innards. However, with each immense cresting of light it seemed that an equal and opposite bit of light shot into the center of the ship. All those ships caught in that opposite blast seemed to disappear.

However, little time was left to investigate. Only moments after the Dragonshard had appeared it began to thrum in the void, just like the accompanying vessel. Its very metal began to shake slightly until a voice seemed to echo up from the vibration.

“You have nothing to fear. We are the First, formally the Second. Although we hold no true name, you may simply refer to us as the Noctis. We are curious, however, by name should we refer to you, or are you nameless as we once were?”

"I am Captain Riqurl of the Dragonshard, of the Gnomish Triumvirate of Starenell." Replied the captain. "We are from Starenell after detecting some sort of disturbance in space-time. Pardon me asking... but ... what are you?"

The low thrum of the Starenell bridge began to increase in intensity as soon as Captain Riqurl finished his question. Soon the low voice emerged from the throbbing once again.

“What are we? Well, you may simply refer to us as the Noctis, but what is a name but an abstract term applied to something all together greater and more beautiful. We are an ancient race, we are the first. There are none who came before us. We were the first life. Our kind inhabit every plane, reality, dimension, and time. We are immortal, never truly dying. Even if we fall, our essence and spirit lives on invulnerable. Seconds or billions of years later it may once again acquire a host and inhabit the material plane once more. However, we are not an empire. Do to events that have been wiped from existence altogether we value the freedom of choice above all else. As such we could never bind our unimaginably vast race under a single flag and creed. We have broken into Crypts, clans if you will. Whether made up of a dozen or a billion Noctis, each is free to act in any way it pleases so long as it does not harm the freedoms of another Noctis Crypt. The massive orb you see before you is a conglomeration of Crypts that has chosen to visit this galaxy at this specific point in time. I must warn you, some Crypts will be benevolent and seek to improve the lives of all those they contact, but others will commit atrocities unspeakable. For the moment, however, you are safe from all parties as they travel to the farthest reaches of your galaxy to begin their own individual journeys.

As for my Crypt, we are small, consisting of only two thousand individuals. We were chosen to be liaison between the newly arrived Crypts and all those who might investigate. Our technologies in communication are some of the most advanced amongst Noctis. We can shift to any form you so desire. We merely choose to begin with the harmonic as it is universally effective.

Finally, the disturbance you came to investigate. We can answer no questions of that, for it was the actions of the Ancients which shattered the laws of the universe. They are the first of the first. Those which have lived from the beginning. There technology is unmatched by any in the universe, even fellow Noctis. They now observe our race and dole out justice to rogue crypts. They are unto Gods. When all the Noctis ships have departed, they alone will remain for just a moment. Then they will disappear into the farthest deepest bit of Milky Way space. I doubt any should hear or see them for a long, long time, even us.”

ooc: Just for anyone reading. I know this is a very bold claim for a race, especially considering that the Ancients can pretty much control reality. Dont worry about the ancients, I really dont plan on RP'ing them in any destructive or wanking way. Same with each Crypt, the more powerful and advanced a particular crypt is the less wars or whatever it will fight, or it will be tiny. All together the Noctis are beyond comprehension, but they are split up a million times over.

"Amazing. I have been given permission to speak for my country, and I do when I say we welcome you as, if possible, friends. Another group will soon be arriving, and they will most likely wish to speak with you in more extreme detail."

He paused for a rather long moment, thinking. "Out of curiousity, are the Crypts named? And are individuals in the Crypts named? He thought for a second, and then apoligized. "Of course, I do not mean to be rude."

OOC: I would like to discuss the relationship between our nations, if that's okay. I will send a TG.

“We are honored by your invitation to become friends of the Starenell, and we humbly accept. We must state though, that each new Crpyt you encounter will be a new experience. However, we will spread word of your kindness to those that will listen. Hopefully that will ease further relations between you and our brethren.

We will remain here as long as it is deemed necessary and will answer all the questions we can.

I must apologies for my manners, in all this excitement I forgot to mention my name. I am Yig-Pontus of the Reg-Yigsoth Crypt. I am a very young Noctis, a little over a million years old. I would like to achieve a visual link between the ships so as I can see what you look like. However, before we do this I must warn you. The Majority of Noctis are not pretty, we require a host to exist in the material plane. Some enter synthetic creations, designed to house Noctis, but the majority inhabit the bodies of the dead. As such many Noctis can have a slightly unnerving appearances. I hope this does not damage relations.”

"That would be great. We will be sure to treat each Crypt separately from the others, and with respect."

He thought for a moment, and motioned quickly for someone to take notes. He realized, however, that this was unnecessary, as all the scientist and wizards were already taking notes wildly, grinning at the find of their lives.

"This is fine. We will send a visual communication out on various wavelengths, hopefuly you will be able to intercept it."

The gnomes were essentially very short, and a little stocky, humans.

OOC: Check your TGs

Yig-Pontus slowly examined the image of the gnomes that hovered before them. He was surprised for a moment at their height, but quickly censored his emotions. He noted the interior architecture of their ship, slowly cataloging it away within his mind. He quickly established a two way video connection.

Yig-Pontus stood in a bleached white room that seemed to stretch on into infinity, its size was only betrayed by the other Noctis mulling about in the background examining a multitude of holograms. Each figure was exceptionally unique. It hardly seemed like there were any two similar species. All, however, appeared post mortem. Yig-Pontus stood an intimidating seven feet tall and was built like an Ox. Two great semi rotten tentacles dropped from a sunken face, blue with decay. He wore large flowing robes that hid the remainder of his figure beneath layers of exquisite fabric.

“I hope that my appearance does not alarm you, I am rather large compared to most Noctis, as my host was a member of a very war like species. I along with my Crypt aided them in achieving some manner of stability and they graced me with an incredible honor, allowing me to take their recently slain king as my host... my old form was quite worn. It is slightly unnerving, seeing those you loved and worked with for years in the... mirror I believe is the term. If you have any more questions, or if you would rather wait for your compatriots, I am quite willing.”

ooc: After so many tags at the start, I am surprised Starenell and I are the only ones RP'ing.

Riqurl smiled. Though he did not see it, he was sure that Rig-Pontus would have been surprised at their height.

"No, it is quite intrigueing in fact. Sometime I would like to meet some of that race. If possible, of course."

"For now we will wait. But, if you have any questions about Starenell, do not hesitate to ask. Do not fear of being rude, we gnomes are not picky about that."