• 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

While their suits would protect them from the radiation, at least Gwaed was fairly certain of that, he didn't want to chance it by spending too much time here. He moved forward, towards the globe, just to see if that was the source of the unseen energy. There were more of those half-dead machines, and he knew they were just waiting for him to touch something. He'd seen human movies before, and even the few made by Aos Si that took quickly to the new medium, and as such was perfectly aware of how a room like this was supposed to work. Maybe he'd be surprised, and the machines were just decoration. He doubted it.

"Well I doubt the theory of these being janitorial still works. One doesn't have a squad of janitors posted like guards around their tombs."
 
"Probably," Fioda answered the human 'tech-wizard' - might as well get into the spirit of the thing, even in her head. She dusted her gloves off on her thighs but let her rifle hang from its two-point over her chest. "Can't imagine what else it could be."

She hung her hands, and therefore her arms, from her weapon, looking up at the device with no comprehension whatsoever. Was it a power structure? Had they used it to chart stars? Was it a sort of magical conduit? The suits were supposed to protect them from radiation. Even if they didn't, someone had probably come up with something, somewhere.

Who knows?

At least, it looked interesting.

When Gwaed brought attention to them, she examined the sentries posted in the room. They reminded her a little of old suits of armor, set up to gather dust over the ages. These automation didn't seem to be particularly threatening, now, which left the actual analysis of the room to the scientists. Fioda couldn't quite shake the notion that she didn't see any actual weapons, here.

"What if they're supposed to be stand-ins? Like, what if their souls are in them, or something? Shouldn't we grab one and take it back somewhere for you all to poke at?"
 
Despite her sourness as of late, Gwaed managed to pluck a small smile from the shotgun wielding redhead.

"Looking back at our past, or what fragments have survived, would we really tolerate having Only 'mere janitors' or something more befitting our status?" Amisra suggested, eyes darting about for hints and clues as to what this place was, even as she held her weapon's muzzle high in one hand, ready to fight. "Though, the thought of these carrying their souls as proxy warriors or something is concerning," she admitted, nodding towards Fioda. With magic, anything was possible, and they had to tread carefully. "It seems most things here cannot be absconded with or have their mystery unraveled so easily," she noted. "Technomancer," Amisra called out to Shen. "Will you be able to prepare any sort of capture equipment quickly with what we have, or must we turn back?" she asked.

Even as she tried to convince herself to leave, Amisra held her hand out, reaching out with her heart of hearts at the grand display before them. She just needed a hint, a clue! What was this place?
 
"Maybe it's some sort of computer?" Shen asked before answering the group. "Yeah, lemme get a few dollies down there." From back outside the ruins, two of Shen's "dollies" -- drones designed to carry larger cargo -- marched towards the Aos Si's location.

Shen smiled to herself. "'Technomancer'. I like it." She popped open another coffee. "If these things have a soul stored inside it or something, would any of you be able to sense it?"
 
The dollies arrived a few minutes later, one smartly pushing a sentinel up onto the other's back with its large metal arms, the other crouching down on fours, two free arms gripping the sentinel's body. This second dolly protested with flashing, yellow lights, its joints buckling, before the first crouched down swiftly, taking hold of the lower body of the sentinel with its free arms, which prompted both dollies to blink green contently.

Meanwhile, as Amisra reached out to the large tablet with one hand, bringing her mental focus to bear, bright arcs of electricity bridged between her wrist mounted datapad and the smooth surface, causing the electronics to fry instantly. Warning lights on her HUD blared yellow, the energy of her suit draining quickly. It wasn't just hers, either; arcs of lightning surged out of the exposed metal joints of the drones, and external electronics on Gwaed and Fioda's suits as well, causing flashlights to shut off, datapads failing, and a quarter of the accompanying drones to die instantly, the others reporting low energy. All the while, the radiation in the room steadily increased, Geiger counters ticking faster and faster.

The three Aos Si in the room we're subject to a fractured vision, figured of rays and dots, swirling, incohesive, yet familiar and recognizable. The room they were standing in, a gathering of life and light. Vegetation covered the walls and some, humanoid figures walking about, reading books, watching the tablets. Two seemed to be making sermons at the two podiums to a great ball of fire at the center of the spherical frame, rotating with vigor and purpose, the small star bathing the entire room, the entire structure, on this desolate moon with energy.

The three Aos Si were entranced, barely noticing the outside world as their breaths shortened with their dwindling oxygen reserves. From the corners of their eyes, sentinels at the walls steadily came to life, stepping off their plaques to walk towards the three explorers.
 
"It seems fitting," the redheaded Aos'Si replied to Shen, hand still extended. "And yes, I'm trying to sense if there is a heartstone the same way I would sense Gwaed or Fioda. By reaching out with my own and - "

For a moment, Amisra stared in disbelief at the sight. It was something that she had never seen, but had read about, and been taught about again and again in her childhood. And now that she saw it, the awe wearing away just a quickly as it came, she realized something. Everything looked different and yet the same all at once. It didn't matter if science and technology was the bulwark of their lives, or if mana coursed through - her grip tightened on her shotgun.

"Run you fools!" she yelled. The muzzle of her weapon boomed into the airless silence at the nearest statue before she turned and took her own advice. "They're useless to use destroyed!' Amisra yelled over her shoulder, mind already plotting a return!
 
What the fuck?

The vision felt disjointed. Manufactured, perfect, and surreal - but not in the way that human tech could replicate. This had to be organic, not a hologram, and Fioda realized it had to be magic. Magic. They had at least been right about this place's value. Amisra snapped her out of the ensuing daze and the sudden rhythmic low-power flashing at the edge of her helmet's HUD warned Fioda that standing and gawking would not be appropriate.

Fioda didn't bother to think too hard about it. On a surge of adrenaline kickstarted by the sudden sensation of brushing up against potential death, Fioda grabbed for the only human in the group - the most vulnerable person, in her estimation - and bolted.

It didn't occur to her at that moment that anyone sane might stay behind, so she didn't bother looking back, either.
 
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Gwaed memorized every second of the vision granted by whatever rouge arcana was loose in this place, as though the ghosts of the past saw fit to distract them while their lifeless servants marched towards them. Now he was running, reluctantly, to lead these things down a tight corridor where bullets and steel would decimate their existence. These things, while serving their purpose, were tirelessly annoying. He wanted a research trip, to be able to stand in a room and lovingly gawk at it without constantly fearing for the lives of his companions. It irked him. Fucking robots.
 
The three Aos Si bolted out of the domed room racing against their rapidly dwindling oxygen, chased by the lumbering sentinels. The two drones carrying the sentinel followed behind desperately, holding tightly onto its body as it struggled against their hold. The other working drones trailed further behind, firing at the sentinels with their mounted firearms to slow the guardians down.

--------------------

10 minutes later.

The Aos Si would arrive, out of breath, down to the last few gasps of air, back in their science outpost, with a few of their drones left that have managed to escape with them, including the two still holding onto the sentinel, waiting outside on the moon's surface, the Aos Si artifact having finally returned to rest, laying dormant in their grip.
 
Tearing off her helmet, Amisra gasped for breath as her red hair spilled out.

"Why does our past have to be so cantankerous?!" she moaned, her breath passing in between her nose and lips far faster than it had in the past. Though still full of Aos'Si vigor, she was still not as spry as she once was owing to helming a CEO desk. "Damned experimental suit...get off!" Amisra cursed again. Unlatching the bindings, the chest of her suit practically exploded as it decompressed, setting her chest free as the seams opened up. Simply floundering onto the floor, the redhead took in a good, long breath before sighing. "I doubt net-guns alone will be sufficient. Maybe some sort of captive, hardening foam projector or other means of physically incapacitating them," she thought, head still faint from the exertion. Looking at her wrist, she saw just how low her battery and O2 reserves were and looked away, shoving the grim thought aside. "But even then, we still have to contend with the magical aspects. These things...they're somehow taking electricity and using it in place of Mana. Or, perhaps even converting it to Mana?" the ranger-turned-businesswoman noted.

"Do you all realize what this means? The sheer potential in front of us?" she asked, pointed ears perking up
 
"It means I'll get a raise," Shen said, smiling. She took another sip of coffee. "But more importantly, what the fuck was that? I was this close to having to call a corpse disposal team down there." Shen had shot down to the three Aos Si's location as soon as they arrived, but her posture and tone were only slightly disturbed and still mostly nonchalant.

"The red-head's right, net-guns could only hold them off for a second or two. Now a foam gun, on the other hand..." She hummed, thinking, before grabbing a swivel chair and typing away on her datapad, searching up the tools at their disposal to see if something along the lines of that could suffice to hold them down.
 
Fioda shed the outer shell of her suit, tearing her helmet off as fast as she could twist it free. She had bound her hair up, or it would have spilled out as she coughed. Comparatively speaking, she was in better shape than most people, but the dash had eaten through her oxygen reserves and that alarm had been blaring in her ears for the last half a minute of the dash.

She saw spots, is the point. She thumped against the wall, happy to be breathing, and coughing occasionally as her lungs reoriented themselves.

They were talking. It dug into her brain and made Fioda rub at her forehead, realizing she still had the gloves on. She shed the rest of her suit as the CEO did her exited routine.

Everything about this screamed 'weapon' to Fioda.

Then again, Fioda was used to seeing weapons everywhere, so maybe that wasn't true.

"Yes. It means it's fuckin' impossible to get down there unless we have a lot of spare air. Tell me you've got a second coffee?"
 
"I'm certain there is coffee aplenty," Amisra dryly noted. "But the strength to take these ruins, not so much," the redhead sat up with a flick of her foot. "It's time we made a few calls."
 
A Few Days Later

The excavation team quadrupled in size. A squad of four Kongjian were dispatched, equipped with anti-riot foam guns to deal with the sentinels. It took half a day of debriefing, analysis, and preparation, before they methodically entered the ruins, luring the sentinels into open space, away from delicate relics, before they were splattered across the walls and floors, bound by the hardened chemical. A no-entrance zone was set up around them, prohibiting anyone from approaching, and risking their lives by the sentinels draining their life support's energy.

Only after the apparent threat was dealt with, were the Aos Si allowed back into the ruins, followed by a team of scientists, archeologists, and linguists from the Yunwang Institute. Strict policies were set in place to protect the site. No permanent lighting was allowed, none of the encased literature allowed to be touched without permission from the Aos Si and the leadership in the Institute. Movement, touching, and probing were all to be kept to a minimum. All the while, the Kongjian squad and a small army of drones maintained security and surveillance in and out of the site.

Still, there were unhappiness elsewhere. By the time the team returned to the ruins, knowledge of the ruins spread to independent Aos Si nations across Zhuque. The United Erinun States were the first to make claim to the ruins, already planning pilgrimage with their own rockets, while the Ethuhin Hierarchy vehemently objected, citing the importance of the site in their religious texts.

Such was the turmoil brewing in the Aos Si world and on Gwaed's mind as a human approached him while they stood in the large, central room on the surface. He was on the thinner side, a crown of black hair pressed down by his helmet. The average Limingren in Gwaed's eyes, especially with that spacesuit on. The Aos Si recognized him as Sun Bukang, a xeno-linguist, one of old Professor Li's students.

Bukang looked up at the large, complex mural etched into the wall, with the depictions of webs, trees, and an ominous empty space. "My team needs to double check our work, but initial guesses are that this all points to your species' homeworld, or some other important system. I'm less sure of what the tree means. Might be your people's perception of space travel in a cultural or religious sense." His tone was of a suppressed excitement, of a learned man.
 
"Hm. I see their demands are all too human," Amisra noted, datapad in hand. She had taken a glimpse at the worded protests from other Aos'Si, and had immediately regretted it. "I cannot help but wonder if they would have been more diplomatic in stating their displeasure and desires in the past, or if this is an improvement." Amusingly enough, she noted that the humans had that same sort of speculation too, thinking about the Han and the Romans for the East and West respectively. Remembering the past with more fondness than it deserved was a human trait too it seemed, and she inwardly chided herself. "That aside, you are correct regarding The Tree and its significance. The 'mainstream' belief is that from nothing," she gestured towards the galactic center, " - magic springs forth, growing like the great boughs of a tree. There are other sects of belief, but those are a minority."

As she said this though, the redheaded woman's eyes lingered on the blank slate upon the wall, a patch where the 'map' had its chiseling undone and reversed with magic.

"I would not be surprised if we resided somewhere within this patch of bare stone," Amisra surmised, her green eyes tracing the more notable details of the carving. "Have we any luck overlaying and comparing our own maps with this? I would have hoped that some markers would be...shared between our maps," she briefly paused. Sharing things with the humans wasn't all bad, perhaps.
 
The Kongjian had irritated Fioda, but not enough to complain of. Something about an international force of space-bravos didn't sit well with her. Although she didn't feel possessive or proprietary of the secrets inside the ruins, as some of the other explorers might, she boiled it down to the following - Fioda didn't really like humans. Exceptions were on a case-by-case basis. It also stemmed, she reasoned, from a quasi-professional rivalry; Fioda wasn't a real security guard, in the sense of her history having been fabricated. But she did feel annoyed at the martial skill on display, owing to her own rough-and-tumble training. She could have done the exact same thing if she'd had the equipment. Obviously.

Fioda hadn't forgotten why she was actually here, though, and she had snapped a few covert stills to send off to her actual employers, copied some of the preliminary data - done all the things a good spy ought to have done. Though, she wasn't sure of what good it might do, as the international community already seemed aware of the place. As result, Fioda couldn't tell if her mission still applied, so she defaulted to the usual gather-information, report-back framework she had grown more or less used to, over the years of working for Tel’cerlyn Kor. If they objected, or had further instructions, she'd hear about it eventually.

For lack of anything better to do, Fioda had followed Amisra along, reasoning that she would be at the center of whatever happened to be happening. And she'd been right.

"So, we weren't originally from here?"
 
"Hmmm." Bukang gave the "look" at Amisra at the mention of magic. It was an all too familiar expression made by the humans, even towards those in their own ranks with divergent ethics and beliefs, an expression that every Aos Si had to grow accustomed too as they attempted to forge bonds with the alien invaders. It was polite, respectful, but masked incredulity. "Magic", the closest word in the human language that described the Aos Si's perceived natural order, was fictional curiosity to most of the humans, a theoretical curiosity at best, to the highest academics, those who primarily studied Wofleon physics which powered their FTL.

"No, you didn't naturally evolve on this planet." Bukang shook his head at Fioda. "Your cellular make up, ours as well, for this matter, has too many differences with the native flora and fauna. There are no documented.... Aos Si "apes" that show you have evolutionary cousins here. This has been known for quite some time in the human scientific community. For some reason, your people arrived in this system from somewhere else, then were left stranded, your technology degraded. Documentation planetside explaining how and why is very limited, perhaps reduced to metaphors and symbols in your mythology, just as human history often is after thousands of years. We're hoping that this place,"

He waved around at the complex, "Will be a gold mine that tells the origins of your species in the Li Ming system."

Bukang looked back at the mural, knitting his eyebrows. "This path of bare stone, as you put it, Lady Yvresse... something, or someone, tried to, or is trying to, hide information from us. Fortunately, with our computers, finding the matching stars shouldn't take long."
 
Amisra graced Bukang with a small smile, amused at his incredulous discomfort at the concept of Magic. It was one of her 'little joys' when speaking to dry science types.

"It is irritating how easily fact may turn from memory to myth," Amisra noted, looking up at the incomplete star chart. The very foundation of their civilization had faded, and with that, even their methods of documenting what had happened. But now they had a chance to put the pieces together. Pieces that were less than ideal. In fact, it was all too deliberate. "The purpose with which the slate was wiped clean...were they trying to protect our home? And from what?" she pondered aloud. "And even then, their reason, was it even a good reason or some foolery? Why destroy records of a colony that would soon be cut off from communication?"
 
Fioda looked back up at the blank spot on the wall, mulling that question - why? - over, herself.

She blinked a few times as an idea bubbled to the surface. While it was certainly possible that the elves of yore had hidden it for some reason, Fioda suddenly thought it more likely that someone like her had come by already and taken the thing. Neat, clean - permanent.

"Just a theory," she proposed, "but as that would be very valuable information, in my experience it's probably stolen, rather than hidden. If they had destroyed it themselves, it wouldn't be this clean, would it?"
 
"The Aos Si... you... have always been deliberate, clean, graceful, even in the face of extinction." Bukang recalled, clearly referring to the first human landings on the planet. It was unclear if it was a compliment or not; such grace didn't save the Aos Si from annihilation; the humans' own folly did, which forced them to end their genocide and reform their relationships. Such descriptions were a cold, factual observation, more than anything else.

"Given your nature, it's unclear who did this, and why. It could've been stolen, yes, but your ancestors could also have deliberately, cleanly, removed the information themselves. We'll have to go through the texts, decipher them, see what's missing. It'll take time though. The Aos Si language on this planet is diverse. We're fairly confident in our understanding of your language, Goedwish, but those of the others is muddier. It is as if an alien came to our homeworld, Earth, and attempted to understand ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics using modern Mandarin."

Bukang paused. "Erm... hmm. That analogy likely completely went over your head. My point is that there's several layers of complexity we have to work through before we're able to understand your past and what happened here."
 
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