• 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

The shock of energy startled Fia enough she didn't bother to jump to Amisra's assistance - instead, she just stared at the words, the casket, and the corpse within.

Fioda wasn't a magician, a mage, a wizard - whatever - and she had never had any experience with magic. Quite a lot of the Aos-si who could, had gone off to prevent the destruction of their species. She had been too small. Now she wondered if this sort of pull was what they had felt, and what she might have felt, if there had still been anyone around who knew about this sort of thing. This had been dead a long time.

And so had this corpse. Slowly approaching it, she stood beside Amisra and peered down at the frozen aos-si, giving it a quick glance-over. Slipping her rifle's strap over her shoulder, she let it hang as she paced slowly around it, examining.

"They ... must have run out of whatever they were using. But people don't die clawing if they die slow, either."

It didn't look to Fioda as though this were a natural accident, but she kept that back for the moment, looking up and around at the foreign, forgotten machinery of another age, trying to pick out some obvious defect.
 
"Disappointing. I was attempting to feel if they were alive inside," Amisra remarked. "But I will take opening this just as well." The woman eyed the corpse with an impassive, discerning glare. "Yes, I agree Fioda, something unexpectedly unpleasant had occurred. And by the looks of it, froze solid moments after." For a moment, the redheaded Aos'Si stared at the body in contemplation, her face guarded as one hand rested on her hip. But they could still see the purse of her lips as they pressed close. Safe and sound, she had been happily nest building, but this was a cold, stern reminder.

Their kind still stood on death's door. An endangered species, as the humans would call them.
 
Gwaed has reason to worry, looking to Amisra as the machine drank her suits energy greedily. "What's your suit power at? The last thing we need is you dying in a terribly embarrassing way," he joked, but the message was clear. Are you okay? Do we need to return? As he waited for whatever annoyingly coy answer would come, he approached the open casket to view the deceased Aos Si. With a gentle wave of his hand, he gave a solemn salute to the body. "A shame their story ended like so. All the things they may have told us. Perhaps their records are still intact, however. Hope remains." He looked to Amisra, smiling gently. "Hope remains," he repeated.
 
"Does it?" she pondered, staring at her own hand. "Low batteries or not, we must continue forward. Turning back is something we can ill afford, as time is our enemy." Turning to Shen, she asked, "Are you able to have the remaining drones ferry additional cells and supplies to us here? If this facility proves larger than expected, we may need to set camp." It was a daunting task, setting up a sealed base within the ruins itself, or even ensuring a room's leakage rate was adequate, but it was doable, she knew. They only needed enough time to eat and drink and take care of their needs at the very worst. The redheaded Aos'Si gazed at the corpse again.

"If our very lives depended on the ebb and flow of mana, would we be far shorter lived here amongst the humans?"
 
Shen nodded, staring at the frozen corpse with a look of slight curiosity and hidden surprise. She then realized she didn't have her camera on.
"Yeah, that's doable." A drone did a 360 around the area. "But -- and this may just be me -- I think there's gotta be a slightly more hospitable place to camp than this room."
She scanned the body in the pod and the results came back moments later. Asphyxiation. She relayed all of this to the group. "Hell of a way to die. Looks like they could've escaped from the inside, but the opening mechanism was frozen shut."
 
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Time is the enemy?

IS it?

Fioda wasn't entirely sure. Hypothetically they could continue charging their suits back at the ship. And they did have the rights to this salvage, give or take some allowances for the interstellar 'powers that be.' If the drones ferried for them, it would be all the better.

She let her rifle hang on its sling from her chest and, after checking her sidearm, she scanned the rest of the room over again.

"This seems as good a spot as any," she reasoned, to the question of where they could set up camp.

Fioda had a sense for danger - she was a lioness herself, not to be dismissed or scoffed at - and she had the feeling that not all the denizens of this place were frozen or inert. Something about the behaviour of the automatons was nagging at her.

Did they just want power? Could they pull some sort of record from these old, mana-soaking things? Electricity had seemed to revive at least one of the automations.

"I'm not an engineer, but is it feasible to power some of this equipment back on with electricity?"
 
"We at least know our options. We need not make camp for now," Amisra noted, turning towards Shen. "I'll need to charge from one of your drones as we move," she gestured to one of the machines. "However, you bring up a noteworthy point Fioda. Is it possible? Accessing mana crafted relics with technology?" Amisra knew that it could open many doors, but was cautious. It was all too unlikely that it would be so easy, and did not let herself become excited. "If not, we may as well press forward."
 
"You got it, boss," Shen said, a drone buzzing over near Amisra as she spoke. She put a hand to her chin as she considered Fia's words. "I mean, I don't know much about mana, but we could try it. We'd have to be cautious, though. Don't wanna accidentally power one of those robots back on."
 
A train of drones rolled through the hallways, carrying spare equipment and batteries into the room of caskets. One of them hooked up to Amisra's backpack of life support, replenishing its power cells, while the other suppliers refilled everyone's oxygen tanks and water supply.

After ten minutes of rest, the exploration team moved on to the final point of interest, deeper still into these ruins, spearheaded by the army of drones, particularly looking out for any aggressive, wandering sentinels. A shaft with a stuck platform, resembling an elevator, was flanked by a walkable staircase. The bottom end opened up to a lone hallway that ended at a pair of large doors. Dehydrated, withered vegetation covered the walls and ceiling, masking intricate works of art molded into the metallic material underneath. The door itself was well decorated with shapes of stars and vegetation.

Flanking the pair of doors were a pair of sentinels, one taller than the other, both with varying vistages. As the scouting drones approached closer, their heads raised slightly, their soulless eyes bearing down on the intruders, and lumbered forward with increasing, violent pace.
 
There was a glint in Amisra's eye as she proceeded forward, her footsteps practicing patience, but only barely. Gwaed remembered these quick steps that bordered on haste - she was growing restless. Impatient. The way she manhandled her shotgun said as much as they proceeded, racking the pump several times over to eject the shells, catching them mid-arc and stowing them away. The new shells were given no better treatment as the previous ones that were spurned, her gloved, graceful fingers cramming them in with all the force of a brute. And yet, she still looked around them, wild eyed at their heritage laid out before them. Right as their heritage began shambling towards them.

Light flashed as she fired, the tight, nail-like flechettes spitting out at their legs!
 
The drones flew backwards, firing bursts at the heads of the sentinels charging towards them.

"Well," Shen's voice crackled out from a drone nearby which had also began opening fire. "Can't say I wasn't expecting this!"
 
Although history wasn't Fioda's strongest suit, she had the vague awareness that in antiquity, the invention of the bow and arrow had been a game-changer for warfare. Infantry could no longer charge blindly forward, unshielded, like rabid animals. Pretty much every culture had some sort of amalgamation of the ranged weapon; the slinger, the javelin thrower, the archer, or the mage.

For the humans, this barrage took the form of hand-held artillery and Fioda couldn't complain as long as she were the one holding it.

She switched to burst fire for stopping power and aimed center mass.
 
Gwaed had a more in-depth understanding of the history of shooting things, from several different Histories, but the concept remained similar throughout. What made the difference was how one used it. Gwaed used it by firing at the machine's joints, their legs, to bring them to a crashing stumble if not a stop.
 
Muffled roars of gun fire traveled through the floor, the explorers' arms and legs, great flashes of light emerging from the barrels as lead rained horizontally intel the sentinels. They lunged and fell, desperate to keep their footing, shrapnel and chunks of metal flesh falling in slow motion in the moon's low gravity. The three Aos Si in the corridor felt their hearts skip a beat, as the mechanical constructs' eyes flashed with lively glow, only for a moment, the metal-ceramic composite glowing red hot. Like fingers, the molten mass tried to clasp into each other across the bullet wounds, but failing and quickly growing cold in the vacuum.

The constructs' eyes darkened, soulless once again, falling forward and backward with light thuds, lifeless, their bodies perforated and molten messes.
 
"Nice work, team," Shen said in her way of voice that hinted at genuineness behind a permanently sarcastic tone. She had never been able to help it. Two drones scanned the crumpled constructs, just to be sure they were dead.
 
Fioda kept her rifle up and shouldered for a few seconds longer than strictly necessary.

She couldn't help staring at the corpses. Corpses? Automation didn't have a soul.

"This feels wrong, somehow," she said, half to herself, and lowered her weapon. "If these are this place's defenses, they're not what I was expecting. Aside from that trick they do with the power-sucking, doesn't it seem like we're shooting janitors?"
 
"Their machines are old and ragged." Gwaed said with a huff. "Had they been prepared, and juiced to full, we would be in far greater danger. All the better. We've more to see, and they're in our way." Gwaed, sword and pistol still in hand, stepped over the broken metal bodies and continued on.
 
"Even so, I cannot help but feel the same way as her," Amisra noted, her tone as cold and hard as the racking of her shotgun, an empty shell shucked out onto the floor. "It's quite possible that they were precisely that, servitors and ancillas." Calmly striding forward, she slipped one shell after another into her weapon. "Even if their weapons relied on magic, it would have been very clearly such." Standing there in her skin tight body suit, it was clear the Aos Si valued aesthetics. Even if it was a prototype. Looks were important then, and they remained so now.
 
The doors remained shut, but strong hands and help from the drones pulled them open. Immediately, the Geiger counters flashed yellow on the Aos Si's HUDs, warning of high radiation in the area. The domed-shaped room revealed to the expeditionary team was large, filled with death as the last chamber with the caskets. Withered vines covered the walls, reaching up to the top of the dome. At the floor were elegantly decorated, opaque tanks, stood up with supports that were more artistic than pragmatic, tablets next to each of them. Sentinels lined the left and right ends of the room, four on each side, each standing on hexagonal pads, lifeless. There were bookshelves here too, but unlike those upstairs, these were unprotected by the elements, their contents stripped of their color and words.

In the center was a large, wire frame for a globe, the support structure divided in two distinct materials, a silvery half that faced outward, a black half that faced inward to the center of the missing globe. The entire thing stood on a rotating hub with a long tablet in front of it, two podiums for books flanking the tablet.
 
"Once more, with feeling fellas," Shen mumbled, apparently talking to the drones as she directed them closer to scan the sentinels. Again, one could never be too certain.
"This room's a little spicier." She attempted to detect the source of the radiation in the room. "Think it's coming from that globe?"
 
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