• Nobles of Null is a forum based roleplay site where sci-fi and magic collide. Here, Earth remains fractured and divided despite humanity reaching out to the stars. Worse still, the trans-human slaves of one major power have escaped, only to establish their own Empire, seething with resentment at abuses of the past. Even the discovery of aliens, though medieval in development, has failed to rally these squabbling children of Earth together with its far darker implications. Worse still, is the discovery of the impossible - magic. Practiced by the alien locals, nearly depleted and therefore rare, its reality warping abilities remains abstract and distant to the general populace. All the while, unseen in the darkness of space, forces from without threaten to press in. For those with eyes opened by insight, it is clear that an era is about to end, and that a new age will dawn.

Day in the Life: Aos Si Ruins on Jing

"'Follow your heart?' Really?"

Fia - 'Lieutenant Mao' for the formally inclined - the company's security officer for this little adventure, offered the drone pilot a small bulb can of the ship's coffee as she leaned on the back of the seat in the narrow station. She then cracked another bulb open, sipping as she examined the monitors. Although the ship had a pair of superficial artillery weapons, which required someone to aim them for formality's sake, Fia had the general responsibility of a mall cop in an empty mall. She had the time to kibitz the operation over Shen's shoulder.

"If I were you, I'd start quipping jokes about there being only one male, rather than how we Aos Si are pointy-eared dowsing rods."

She itched at the base of her short, gold-blonde ponytail, glancing screen to screen.

"Speaking of," she murmured, as one of the feeds of the ruins caught her attention and held it. The feed near Gwaed, to be precise. She squinted, though she didn't need to, and the expression signified more thought than lack of visual acuity. "Are those directional arrows? They're all oriented the same way, right?"
 
Last edited:
Shen smiled and took the coffee. "Hey, don't blame me for getting a little whimsical around here." She followed Fia's eyes to the monitor and took a long sip of her coffee before answering. "They're all pointing to one room in the facility. Must be important."
She pointed at the screen with one hand and maneuvered one of her drones with the other. "What's this empty area next to the map?" Down on the surface, a drone flew a little closer to it for emphasis.
 
Last edited:
The drone stabilized itself in the empty vacuum, before planting its legs down to get a steady view of the empty patch on the wall. Half a dozen lenses were revealed by a flopped open cover, zooming in and out at the wall, a couple of which got close to touching distance. It acted like a curious child eyeballing every small speck of a painting.

The data reports trickled in and transferred to the rest of the team. Faint emissions came from the empty space itself, the signatures of various isotopes of carbon and iron, isotopes that were uncommon naturally, products of radioactive decay. These isotopes have half lives on the range of thousands of years, but there wasn't enough information to determine how long they were present on this patch of wall, and what created them: the material of the wall itself or some external source.
 
Half hidden behind her helmet, only her eyes betrayed a glimmer of Amisra's thoughts. There was fear, but there was also something else lurking beneath the shimmering emerald surface of her gaze. "Always eager to pull out and use your sword I see," Amisra remarked. "Well, let's have at it then. Onwards into the depths," she gestured, urging them deeper along the directions scrawled on the walls.
 
With a soft grumble, Gwaed spent a millisecond looking for something to say in response to her teasing, before arriving at the perfect response. "Well, you've never seemed to mind." With a self-serving cheeky smile he began to follow the proposed directions, directions left by their ancestors millennia before.
 
The stairs downward were comfortably designed for Aos Si heights, matching proportions for humans as well, eerily. Shen's drones led the way with headlights and cameras. There was a brief static as they began their descent, before relay drones anchored themselves to preserve connection with the outside world.

In the harshness of cold, dark vacuum, whatever colorful decoration of the walls withered away, but the metal and ceramics remained. Most of what the drones saw were brilliant, smooth and flat panels, but there were small patches of expert artisanry, depictions of flora, fauna, and the stars molded into the material itself, sporadic and spontaneous. If not for the high detail, it would've been as if a child instinctively drew on the wall.

The team didn't have much time to inspect the footage the drones provided though. As Amisra and Gwaed set foot in the basement, the connections with the forward drones deteriorated for a few seconds, errors messages flying, informing their sapient masters of low power. As the connection restored but more grainy and colorless, the drones captured a figure suddenly surge towards them, before they went dark all together.

From a T-junction in the hallway, behind a corner, emerged a perfectly humanoid figure. It was six feet in height, silvery metallic plating partially covering muscular fibers that made up most of its body. Its eyes were dark and soulless as it greedily sucked on the batteries pulled from the corpses of the forward drones, emitting no light of its own. The construct reminded the team of a similar construct that kept popping up in the news, an AI rebel leader of the Magnetic Assembly that was giving the AU quite the headache in Shen Zhou. However, unlike the rebel leader, this construct was far less charismatic, more zombie-like. In the vacuum, the figure twitched in reaction to Amisra and Gwaed's headlights shining on it. It paused, staring at the two with its dark eyes.
 
Shen bolted upright as the drones she sent to the front captured the strange figure in the few last seconds before dying out. "Clara! Little Yang!" She tried unsuccessfully to get them back online before slumping into her chair. "Well, that sucks," she mumbled before immediately leaning forward, switching to the feeds of the still live drones. "Amisra, Gwaed, what the hell was that?"
 
Fia almost spat her coffee but resisted the impulse. She swallowed the hot stuff down instead and set the bulb aside as she thought furiously, trying to recall what she had seen as she leaned over Shen's chair. There wasn't a second one. Sharing was caring.

"That kind of looked like an A-I criminal the Yanks have been looking for," the security lieutenant observed, off-mic. She wasn't up on the most current criminal activity, but anything that made international blotters also popped on hers. "Just, dumber. And more horror vid."

Either way, Fia reasoned as she watched the feed from the nearest drone fizzle into it's best impression of pre-space noir, this had just got more interesting. An AI or some sort of magical construct? AI she understood, but this was magical Aos'si fairy-tale moon stuff.

"Hey," she asked Shen, after the drone pilot had keyed off again, "How far are they from open sky?"
 
"Criminal, eh?" Distracted by the video feed for a moment, Shen glanced up at Fia and then back to the map of the structure. "They're two stories underground -- about two minutes of traversal."
 
"That's not going to be fast enough if they can't scratch it with their small arms."

Fia began to regret not doing her research on this, but there wasn't any research to look at. The Aos'si ruins she had known out of childhood were just that; inactive, inert, and free of anything dangerous that didn't regularly occur in nature. If she'd known they would be facing old mechanical things, she'd have gone. There weren't many public Aos'si who were ever successful in this human-dominated world, and Amisra was too important to lose to some weird old horror fiction villain.

Her caution warred with the fighting part of her. She just knew it was hostile - having smashed up the drones - and that the drones had been ahead of the explorers. Not enough time for a lot of thought.

"Do you know if sword-boy actually fights, or did he just take a fencing class as an elective in school?"
 
Last edited:
"Heh. I don't think he's the kinda guy to carry that around without knowing how to use it." Shen smirked, but urgency still showed through in her eyes. "They might be able to hold it off in time, if they're both as competent as they look."
 
Fia almost argued, but didn't think it would be worthwhile to explain to a human. People carrying things they didn't know how to use led to more accidental deaths than murders, but this wasn't Fia-teaches-street-survival talk time. She glanced Shen over sidelong, then returned her attention to the monitors.

"The Mag-bods I am familiar with are essentially bulletproof, but there are fibers connecting their limbs. Hitting them is hard with a gun, dangerous with a knife, but if he can actually use the sword he might have a shot. I don't know if that's ancient magical hoodoo, or some rogue AI down there, but either way it's got to move it's joints, whatever it is, so there might be a better way but that's the one that consistently works.

"Otherwise," she explained, "we need to blast them an egress so they can run like hell. I'm going back to the tac' console to get started if it's necessary, so shoot the collegiates the strategy, and keep them alive if you can, alright?"
 
Last edited:
Amisra politely declined to reply to the chatter over the radios.

Instead, she held still. And stared the rampant protector down. It was no doubt dangerous, and quite possibly damaged enough to attack Aos'Si by this point. But the worst thing she could discern about it had the redheaded woman's blood run cold in her veins. It was like a glimmer. An icy, painful glimmer, but it was there. Magic. And not just any magic. Magic that she hadn't felt in years, decades even. Magic that was not her own or her employee's. Magic that was all too pointed with hostility. And worse - far, far worse - what she guessed could only be hunger. Starved for centuries upon centuries, a pair of the most succulent sources of Mana that fueled its Magic-based existence.

Her heart beat. And so did Gwaed's.

"Run."
 
Gwaed stood stock still, watching the machine move with a predator gaze. This was unexpected, and so Gwaed never let his eyes leave it. He pulled his blade from his back, pulling his pistol from his side. "Damnit." One hand stretched out in front of Amisra, taking a single pace forward. "This is why I said we needed to bring weapons to the exploration mission. Back up Ami," he said, his blade was pointed at the machine. What did it run on? Could it be some ancient form of magic, or mere technology? A mix of the two would be a fascinating discovery, and potentially a far more dangerous opponent. It drew power from the drones, most likely the point of it sucking on their batteries. There was a chance they could run it out of battery, but if it could absorb energy they needed to leave immediately. It was their suits that protected them. Without power they'd die. It was simple really.

"Alright," he said, his voice even, "tactical decision, tactical retreat, I'm the last one out. Go."
 
The construct's eyes fixated on Gwaed's sword for one second, before it surged forward without warning. The elf reacted with a burst of pistol fire, his suit spewing pressurized gas from its pores to compensate for the kickback. One bullet missed, but another struck straight in its neck, breaking some of the metallic fibers, the final ricocheting off its plated head, striking into the wall. Seemingly dazed, the construct paused mid-surge for a few seconds.

Then, everyone's sensors went wild as a mix of radiations lit up the construct's left forearm, which glowed a faint red. Its hand started to morph into the resemblance of an open jaw, before inexplicably pausing, resulting in a messy, half molten stump where complex fingers used to be. Instead, the construct stumbled forward, its legs unbalanced and sluggish, the right arm winding back, clearly projecting a downward strike.
 
"Of course you're the last one out!" Amisra yelled, quickly leaping, bounding back with graceful ease. Memories of being pursued came flooding to mind, the non-stop games of predator-and-prey. Even as the sentinel malfunctioned and malformed, Amisra's own voice echoed in her mind. "I need not be faster than they, only you," she had smugly teased him back then, even in the midst of danger. "You're slower than me, remember!?" the redheaded elf yelled.

"Do not be a hero and fall back!" she called out to Gwaed once more. Something wasn't just off - there was something horribly Wrong with it.
 
Last edited:
Shen gave a half-hearted salute to Fia. "Got it." She turned back to the monitors. Oh shit.
"Okay, looks like we're blastin'!" She said as the rest of the drones moved backwards in a defensive semi-circle, shooting at the construct in an attempt to slow it down.
 
"I'm slower than you so you don't get killed!" Gwaed replied with a hiss, not in the joking mood as danger descended on them. His pistol had shown him a relative weak point, severing metallic fibers from the neck of the machine, so he could move against it as such. A large metallic hand was dropping upon him, but it was slow, far slower than he, and he stepped to the side and brought the blade up to it's descending robot elbow, intending to sever it entirely.
 
Since the ship hung nose-down to the ruins, getting to the console that controlled the ship's defense systems wasn't all that hard. Fia had never felt entirely comfortable in space, highly preferring her feet be on solid ground, but spidering her way over to the chair on the other side of the control room opposite Shen in low-g felt less jarring than lightly kicking off of things. She was an accurate jumper but a firm believer that she wasn't meant for space. This time, she had made an exception. The informational haul from this one was too great. Aos'si should possess the Aos'si ruins. Ami's company, her present employer, counted by default, but that didn't solve the problem - it exacerbated it.

She had some pretty strong views about that, but she could commit corporate espionage later. It wouldn't matter if the CEO died.

Fioda dropped into the spherical chair meant for the operator, hooking herself in. Out of habit, she double-checked that the white half-tunic over her bodysuit didn't catch and that she could still reach the small pistol it concealed on her right thigh. A pair of 40mm anti-missile defense turrets attached to the little vessel was less than Fia would want. They could tear a mag-bod to pieces - their primary purpose was to defend against missiles - but chewing through two levels of the solid structure wasn't a viable answer to the problem of 'egress'. She brought their targeting systems online and switched them to manual, the blue-colored roll of diagnostic information scrolling and scrolling, as she used the touch-pad on the console to open a secondary view of the structure from the original briefing and examined it closely, along with Shen's drone placements. The string of relays gave her a good idea of the progress Ami and her boyfriend had made. Presumably, opening a hole near any point in that line would give them a better shot than having to flee the whole way to the surface.

The scan was necessary; 40mm cannons weren't precisely engines of screaming hate. She could cut a section out of the first structure, perhaps, if she set the cannons to shoot circles, but they weren't explosive rounds and the ammunition wasn't unlimited. Fia moved the joystick to pan the turrets for an actual visual, matching it with the scan and searching for weak points to exploit.

"Alright then," she answered, slipping a com set into her ear, "Mao online, tactical. Keep talking to us, boss, we're working on a way out."
 
Last edited:
The construct's elbow gave way to Gwaed's longsword as it pierced through, causing the arm with the working hand to twist unnaturally. However, the damaged elbow desperately tried to reform itself, fibers lashing out, twisting and knotting with each other, causing the Aos Si's blade to become firmly lodged in the wound. In this split second of confusion, he failed to detect the construct's follow up before it was too late. With no time to dodge, he let his pistol drop, his now free hand slamming against the stubby arm that flew from the side towards his head. Gwaed felt a slight pain in his arm upon impact, but then a familiar tingling feeling that went from his arm, straight to his heart. His HUD threw up warnings again of unusually fast battery drainage, but all Gwaed could fixate on was the construct's eyes, which for the first time glowed a soft blue.

Fragments of visions partially obstructed his view. He could see Aos Si figures, dressed beautifully in suits and bound tight to their skin in a room with much brighter light. Images flashed of the Aos Si clutching their hearts before they were sealed in humanoid shaped catafalques. Then, dark corridors, until their was another spark of light, the exploration team's drones coming into view.

Before he could see more, it was all abruptly cut by the construct buffeting under a barrage of attacks. It was now that Shen's drones finally found their mark, as they circled and swarmed around the construct like a cloud of angry bees. Only a couple of the drones were equipped with small arms, pea shooters that could stave off the odd wild animal. But here, they fired at point blank range and at the exposed fibers. The drones that lacked such weaponry violently and suicidally rammed into the construct, their collectively momentum throwing it off balance. Sparks flied across its body, its limbs flailing, armor denting and cracking under the continuous kinetic barrage, before it slowly started to fall down on Gwaed in the low gravity, the light rapidly fading from its eyes.

It was now the Gwaed realized that the construct drained must of his suit's battery, and that it would be a few more minutes before he started sucking on stale air.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top