NationStates Jolt Archive

Soyq XI

The world slumbered, dead as it had ever been, yet alive with sinister motion. The instruments of the great Serpent thrummed and hissed and spat, their energies coalescing in fetid green glow, tapering and forming like frost over the black stone and necrodermis of the tomb complexes that studded the world.

The world itself, every structure and being in it, seemed almost fundamentally wrong. As though the angles themselves twisted and bent, rapt beneath the power that distorted and changed. The euclidean universe seemed broken beneath the heels of the ancient, almost phantasmagorical, evil lurking in the heart of the world.

The cyclopean ruins almost shuddered with the movement of a thousand pounding metal feet. His armies marching before him, a gilded Necrodermis form gleaming beneath the baleful light of distant stars, the very sun of this world blotted out by an immense dyson sphere, slowly suckling it dry for his pleasure and enjoyment, to feed the writhing energy within.

Set'thiran, the Great Serpent, raised its head towards the stars and tasted the deadness of the world, drawing it in and savoring it. It held rule here now, lord and master of a barren orb, robbed of life.

A perfect beginning, mused the Star God. A perfect beginning to his Empire.

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OOC: I'd like to get involved, but I'm not sure what you're looking for...

OOC: Could always stumble across Soyq. A seemingly dead system with its sun enveloped in A Dyson Sphere.

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A single probeship. Tiny, miniscule even, a hunk of metal, flung through the webs of the many dimensions that constituted faster-than-light travel, sweeping the area with its sensors. Of course, it found something very interesting. It was not every day that one saw a sphere of such size. And, thus, the order was given to move in and investigate.

A single world - the eleventh from the sun, had some.. decidedly strange energy readings about them.

[invstgate. prbe 1215366-FGH moving to check strange readings. 526.42.55]

That was, quite possibly, the last message it would ever sent home..

(onboard a LKU mining ship)
"sir we have found a solar system with valuable materials."
"Send our coordanates back to our planet."
"Should we land."
"yes"
(When they landed they saw nothing)
"MAYDAY MAYDAY"
All of a sudden 3000 enemy forces came over the hill, firing at the ship, killing all on board.
(Home planet)
"Supreme dictator Peter, we have bad news, a mining ship got destroyed on a planet in the far side of our galaxy"
"Send in a couple of Explorer ships to check it out"

A single cruiser popped out of hyperspace, plasma venting from its engine ducts. The ship showed visable signs of damage, burn marks across the hull of the silver ship. The ship glided slowly across the space, taking care not to stress the engines at all. They were damaged enough-putting too much stress through high velocities and acceleration would probaly destroy them at the current condition.

The events of the past few hours had transpired remarkably fast for the crew of the vessel, a Pinnacle-class cruiser, the Tantalous Despair. Pursing a pirate cluster with a small fleet, the Despair had run into a hornet's nest of pirates at an asteroid fortification, where the small fleet was swarmed. The other ships of the group were annihilated, and the Despair heavily damaged as it attempted to head to hyperspace on a vector for the nearest Dominion stronghold. A chance hit by a pirate capital ship into the navigational sensor cluster just before the jump had scrambled the hypercoordinates, causing the Despair to jump here.

It was an unknown system, not charted by any Dominon navigational starcharts. What would come from it would still have to be seen.

Three thousand had died like cattle beneath the blades and crackling gauss weapons of Set'thirans army, a shuffling army of the robotic dead. The Necrons watched their master, torturing those that had lived, draining them of the essence of their very life, tainted with the raw stuff of fear, flavored with it. He gloried in this, in carnage, in death. A Lord, one of his chosen, slammed its crackling staff into the corpse, twisting it brutally, yet entirely without emotion.

It pleased him to see such efficiency in his children, his servants. Beings that had been weak flesh countless milennia ago.

He paused. His mind, composed of pure energy and without the touch of any psychic conceit, was suddenly touched by the machineries of his home, interlacing and interlocking with the necrodermis shell he inhabited. He smiled, gracefully cruel metallic lips closing into a breathless sigh, then fading into a grimace.

Interlopers....Here. So soon. He closed his eyes, and each and every one of his army began to move back towards their tombs. He let his form shift, decieving all around him, even amidst the wrongness of this world he could seem as flesh. As man.

And then he let the low soft signal echo across the stars.

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Movement...just on the edge of the system.
For a moment, space rolled back on itself, twisting much like the flesh of a freshly gathered Newt under the hands of a skilled Priest, and for a moment a two dimensional square of space became another two dimensional square of space, through which the Phyrexian ship threw itself.
The crew, such as it was, noted a dead system, burnt out planets apparently devoid of life...but with the remnants of life still present. Objects of interest, do doubt...
And, even now scattered around the system, points of light...other ships...they could be ignored for now.
The first thing was first...the systems sun. Phyrexia had no sun, relying on the will of the Ineffable to keep things operating, and thus the Phyrexian were greatly interested in these massive nuclear furnaces, unique objects not often encountered in their wanderings between planes.
The ship...moved.

There was no sun, the immense sphere of light, heat and energy smothered beneath the cold black surface of a Dyson Sphere, slowly swallowing its every emission. In the countless millenia before he had been gifted form, Set'thiran had fed upon the stale, tasteless energy of the great suns...But no longer. Now it was a secondary concern, a passing fancy that detracted from the need for the electromagnetic energies seeping from every living thing.

He raised his arms, necrodermis flesh peeling back to shape into robes around exposed, gleaming flesh-stuff, raising them to greet the sunless sky, the black parchment flecked with gleaming orbs of stars. He could taste it now, everything falling into place even as the winds whipped ebon sands about him, forcing him to steady his power against the tumult.

He let the message drift the stars, that this sacred and ancient tomb world not be disturbed by the hands of man. But secretly, he wished they would descend. Secretly he wanted his legions to be blooded against new foes, and to allow him to feed.

So many would come to know Soyq as a cursed and dead system. And they would flee in droves. Long enough for his plans to begin afresh...Long enough for the Great Warding to be begun anew.

And if not, then he was skilled enough in the ways of deception to waylay them.

(OOC:
It should be noted that the Phyrexians dont exactly fit the conventional definition of 'living', but I can roll with it :))

IC:
The Phyrexian ship seemed to slow, perhaps drawing off slightly on its approach to the entombed sun, the black ship seemed, for a moment, to consider the view, pondering what exactly had just happened.
Then the ship responded, reaching out and touching nearby space with its senses, or perhaps its crews senses, somebodies senses, anyway, seeking the source of...whatever.
At the same time it began sending out signals of its own, questioning phrases in a variety of languages.