• 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: Escape from the Heavenly State

As the others talked, Hoshiko resisted the urge to unclasp herself from the kinetic dampeners of her crash-seat and cross her arms, turning her glare away lest she burn them with it. "Well, I'm not an economist or anything, but she sorta is," the tiger princess replied to her sister. "So maybe she can explain it better than I can after reading your thing. And I did read it!" she shot back at the man. It was no wonder why he was put into a potentially dead-end position! "I just know that Mother-Empress knows what she's doing. It's like you said, she was a slave once too, so she's definitely taking advantage of her experience," the tigress forced herself to remain calm, voice cool and level as her anger simmered down.

**

"What was that, hmmm? You didn't get as many kills?" Hoshiko cupped a hand to an ear. In contrast to Wen's neat precision, the crew members that she took on weren't just shot, but burst down. "Don't worry Wen, you'll get a chance to try again. It's going to be a long trip after all," she pointed out, helmet vanishing to show her grin. "Of course, next time, I won't get hit!" Turning towards where Koyama and Jun were, a window shaped portion of the stage became transparent so that they could see each other. "And yeah, I thought it was a nice touch Koyama-jie! If we want more theatrics to the physics and kills, we can put together a subroutine and offload the processing effort to our ship!" she suggested with some excitement. The fire in her eyes dimmed a little as some of the meatspace chatter spilled into virtuality though. "Ugh, no Jun. It's because the only good commie is a dead one. They're assholes at best," the Tigress replied. For emphasis, she put another round into the head of a nearby crew member, the metal fragments spraying blood across the wall as the body began to tumble away in zero-g. "And their descendants aren't much better. But we are! I'm sure it's just probability. Sheer numbers! There's always a tiny percent that's bad, right? Like a failure rate. Anyways, let's take a break and do something else, yeah?" Hoshiko tried changing the topic.

A part of her feared that if they didn't, she was going to strangle Wen.
 
"I don't doubt the Mother-Empress." Wen replied defensively, "I question the wisdom of her generals."

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

Sensing a growing frustration from the princess, and unable to hide his own, Wen batted away Hoshiko's comments with a wave. "Yeah, that sounds great." He remarked plainly, seamlessly exchanging his combat suit for a simple Hanfu, throwing his rifle away into the ether. The Bull-form pulled open the bridge's airlock. Instead of the claustrophobic hallway, an endless plain of green and wide, blue skies was revealed to him and Hoshiko, grey, snow topped mountains in the distance. "If you don't need me for anything else, I'll be tending to my Cashmeres. Follow me... or don't." With a metal canteen now in hand and a hiking stick in the other, he stepped into his reality bubble.
 
"Huh," Koyama remarked as she soon seemed to appear beside the still armored Hoshiko in the sim her hands on wider hips. She stood an inch taller than herself in meatspace. Yet instead of the blue-black hair, the hallmark tiger's furred ears and tail. Or even the armor, Koyama appeared gold where she had been dark. Golden-haired, eyed, her pale skin slightly tanned. A pair of unadorned horns jutting from either side of her forehead.

With a toss of her hair, the princess looked down at the armor she wore, replacing it with a somewhat scandalous kimono of white with red accents leaving her legs bare to the thighs and nothing but a pair of sandals adorning her feet a silver anklet on one. Her serpentine tail with its white scales swayed lazily avoiding the simulated blood pooling around them on the deck.

"That'd be something like the law of averages. The human belief that a particular outcome or event will over some time occur at a frequency that is similar to its probability.

So you could take it in the vein of your last statement. Valid common-sense observation or a misunderstanding of probability. And yeah, commies suck ass." she shrugged, patted the smaller tiger on the shoulder. All this said while watching Wen move into his own peaceful landscape.

"That man takes Ox-form to the extremes. You'd think he had a thing for the ancient landscape of the Himalayas or Mongolia or something." she wrinkled her nose, "With goats."

"Oh!" looking abashed the girl cleared her throat, "Don't tell Mother I decided to appear thusly please?" Koyama brought a length of her hair over her shoulder and began to stroke it. A nervous habit it would seem.

"But yeah, I didn't think to bring very many sims with me. Most of them are on the networks back home. Kind of hard to turn them into small-scale variations and not piss everyone off when they're built for way more than us four."

With a snap of her fingers and rueful expression, "I won't pry into your past, sister. But I will admit to something of mine. I was born on Tiāntáng." Koyama rubbed her hands together, more wringing them together really with a somewhat smug grin.

"So how will we pass the time? We have weeks. WEEKS."

-----
Koyama snorted back in meatspace at the other tiger's remark. "When you're low on the ladder you look for ways to prominence. Mine was economic and research endeavors besides simple politics."

Holding up a gloved hand, she ticked each off in turn. The princess had her hand in a lot of biotech businesses, energy research, and mining startups. "Chongwu production isn't exactly my thing, but I am reviewing your report more thoroughly now. And will have to ask her about this General if we get that far."
 
Jun's body briefly entered into a T-pose in their virtual space as she put all her thinking into just what Koyama was saying. She found a way to subtly bring up her own business ventures! An elegant reminder of just what success she had under her belt! Jun had to figure out a way to get Hoshiko to understand... this was the kind of thing that could save Hoshiko from obscurity or being married off to some well-off but hopeless Daqin because she needed the financial stability.

Did Hoshiko even have any side-projects that were successful?

Did she spend all of her time focused on those Old War 2 weapons? The virtual ones used to shoot zombies? Maybe she was good at those games? Jun tried to figure that out with access to the local networks but trying to keep a low digital profile meant not reaching out... she did try searching for information on Pro-gamer stuff and compared Hoshiko's performance with theirs....

.... The she started checking out Hot-tub streamers, since they might be more on par with what Hoshiko could be good at.
 
The generals?! But Mother picked them herself! And Koyama too?! First the cow going on and on about how I need to learn new things and -

"Maybe you're right," Hoshiko admitted, shifting uncomfortably in the crash harness as an awkward silence loomed. She didn't exactly specify who she thought was right of course. But, the way she wiggled in place ever so slightly made it clear how she felt. The armored bodysuit and helmet did little to hide this despite being able to repel most human made bullets.

**

"Bié fàng zài xīn shàng," the Tigress replied in their virtuality. This was deeply personal to Koyama, she knew, and they all needed to get along. She had stayed silent as Wen departed, but that was something that needed to be dealt with. "Besides, it suits you," Hoshiko added, hands on her hips as she stared after where the Ox-captain had left, thoughts swirling about. Brushing herself off, the bullet holes that had run her through vanished as though they had never been there. "It's not hard finding a way to pass time, but the sooner we figure out how to all get along, the better," she voiced her concern. "He's so blunt, you would have thought him raised amongst Americans or something. He could have at least voiced it in a more palatable manner." Her thoughts drifted off as Jun's T-Posing character model caught her attention. "Palatable. That's it! Hey, Jun, is there any sort of food that's Mongolian themed? Steppes food that's neat?"

"Hope you know what I'm thinking," Hoshiko mischievously grinned at Koyama. The way to a man's heart was through his arteries.
 
In his own reality bubble, Wen hummed to himself as he walked up a grassy hill. The sky was a clear, bright blue, the grasslands rich and green, spanning to distant mountains that were always out of reach, craggy, grey, solemn and assuring, great earthly titans that anchored the sky to the ground. Cashmeres flanked him, chased up the hill by a pair of shepherd dogs, the goats white with brown undersides, donning their long, wooly coats. The scenery was perfect; it always was for him, thanks to the state of the art computers on the corvette and the fusion engine that propped this bubble up from meatspace. Should Wen ever get bored, he could always change the scenery to night time so that the entire galaxy was visible with a perfectly black background, or set it to winter so that him and his virtual herd could enjoy the snow. If only he could touch Inner Mongolian soil with his physical hands.

Of course, reality was never ideal. The 21st and 22nd century saw rapid degradation of the grasslands' health. While it avoided the brunt of the near-environmental collapse, increased precipitation, wildfires, over-exploitation, desertification turned the parts of the Mongolian heartlands barren: cold, grey deserts, its free-roaming herds replaced by soulless meat and wool fabricators, its people poor, overworked, and angry. The inheritors of the land, try is they might, were never able to fully restore the steppes to its former glory, before the humans ravaged the lands with their greed, short sightedness, and stupidity.

Wen sat down, setting his walking down and took a drink of Mijiu from his canteen. One of the Cashmeres wandered close. Wen softly smiled in response, burrowing one hand through its wool coat to give it a good scratch on the neck. This reality bubble was comforting; it kept him in denial of reality. That's what got him through life, denial where he saw fit. He denied his denial too.
 
Koyama waved Hoshiko's words away, "Bié dān xīn," accompanying it with a shrug. Her eyes tracked the T-posing Jun seemingly fascinated by her dedication to maintaining it. "And thanks," murmuring that while tilting her head at the Cow-form. Thankfully the horns were not drifting toward the tigress. No one wanted an eye poked out. Or brains scrambled.

Picking up a casing, Koyama wiped it on a corpse to remove a bit of the simulated blood. Absentmindedly chucking it at Jun, "But as for Wen? Sometimes people are like that. They mean it or they don't. Good strategy either way if you think about it." now stroking one of the points of a horn.

Her idea had been to rain tin cans from the sky in his virtual reality to test if that ancient human myth of goats eating cans was feasible. It wasn't of course. But you never know...

"Wanting to surprise him with eats I'm guessing?" her brows lifting at her answer. What was that stuff even like? Not every cultural cuisine had been sampled by her. Whatever it was the princess wondered if it would be terrible, or somehow decent. "Or does it involve a literal Mount Everest-sized pile of tin cans?"
 
Jun's T-pose'd form would start to float off a bit, as she thought about something else, continually finding her research frustrated by not having any connection back to the homeworld. All the news she'd seen was weeks old by this point and she didn't have the opportunity to look for the pirated stuff. "Hey, does anyone have recent news-stuff?" Jun finally asked, her T-pose form popping back to a fully animated model as her attention returned to the virtual space. "I've got no new content from my normal sources."
 
"I still say he's rather bull-headed. Wen is too rash and impulsive for his own good I bet," Hoshiko replied, idly floating about in the simulated human ship herself. A few puffs of air from her suit however, and she stopped drifting. By now though, everyone seemed to have settled down where they wanted to in meatspace, the icy silence typical of Daqinren operators settling in as they socialized in another level entirely. "And no Jun, I've only got recent human-news. Still, you'll get used to that Jun," the Tigress replied to the rather irreverent cow. "It's why military ships usually have a good stockpile of simulations and entertainment before heading out. News is slow to come in, though the stuff you can get to is better since we have access to the ship's processing power. None of the limits civvies usually worry about," she pointed out. Hoshiko glanced back at Koyama with a mischevious grin. "Well, I was wondering if some food from our heritege would help ease tensions, but I hadn't thought of that myth!"

In an instant, Hoshiko warped away into a pinhole black-hole, a glimmer of the Mongolian Steppes appearing at its very center. With a Ka-KLANK! Hoshiko landed near Wen, fully clad in a suit made of...a whole bunch of tin cans with the words "GUNDAM" hastily scrawled on.

"Not entirely my idea, but I thought it was worth seeing how these creatures responded," she offered him a smile. Already, the nearest Kashmir was sniffing at the Princess's improvised 'armor'.
 
More Cashmeres surrounded Hoshiko, curiously nibbling at the outer labeling of the cans. Wen couldn't help but snort, looking up and down Hoshiko, then stood up to walk over to her. It was only now, in this casual setting, that he realized he towered over his superior by more than two heads. The Ox-form said nothing of it, instead pulling one of the tin cans off of Hoshiko's body suit.

"Tin cans? If this was meant to cheer me up or something..." Wen smirked, tossing it to one of the goats. "... I am quite amused." He looked back at Hoshiko awkwardly for a moment. It was certainly odd, interacting with the royalty in such a ridiculous scenario. "Whose idea was this? Jun? Lady Koyama? Where are they anyways?"
 
Jun rapidly increased in size until she was large enough to blot out the sky, annoyed that Wen had just managed to forget where she was. Her now moon-like size made her impossible to miss, at least of the moment that she was moon-sized. Shortly after she had embiggened she 'ZOOP!'d back down to normal-size.

She was certainly glad that Hoshiko had developed at least some kind of new skill she could show off. She was also upset that the new skill was throwing tin-cans around like a homeless person.

She also considered that she was spending time with TWO princesses and not a single prince! Truly a waste of good schmoozing with the upper class. Though perhaps being a royal's pet geologist was better than being a normal-person-regular-geologist.

"We're not going to have to fight Old War 2 Zombies for months are we?" Jun asked in regards to Hoshiko's abundance of games.
 
Koyama deadpanned as she saw Hoshiko disappear, "Oh Mother, what have I unleashed on that Ox." she murmured before joining the Cow and Tigeress in Wen's version of the Mongolian grasslands. While the other princess posed in her improvised mobile suit of... tin cans, the one Wen tossed to one of his goats ended up in her hands. Squatting down before one of the goats she was mildly impressed with its horns. Holding it out to the virtual creature, it bleated at her, sniffed at the make-believe container all the while she kept thinking: 'C'mon, bite the damn thing!' to no avail.

A small grunt issued from her at Wen's question. Standing up again, Koyama rolled the can in her hands. Almost completely ignoring Jun, the desire to quote some ancient human movie involving giant Battlestations and moons on the tip of her tongue. Didn't that involve some sort of magic and... plasma weapons?

"That would have been my idea," admitting to the towering Ox as she moved to stand beside Hoshiko. Her serpentine tail flicked a few times while looking at the other princess. "All you need is the energy swords, a melodramatic atmosphere, a case of PTSD, petulant attitude, and a guy in a white mask to fight."

"Old War Two Zombies?"
 
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The ship silently sailed through the starry sea, its crew quiet and still like statues.

****

"Really, you should be in awe of our combined thinking powers," Hoshiko sarcastically puffed up her chest with smug. "You stand before not one but two princesses of the Jade Court!" She swelled with cheese. Snorting at her own absurdity, she exhaled, the tin cans clanking as the goats began to gnaw at their labels and the affixed glue. "And Jun's talking about World War 2. That the humans decided to toss zombies into for no reason other than playing those sims got boring. So now there's Nazi Zombies," she pointed at the cow with her thumb. Reaching down to the ground, Hoshiko grasped a sprout and pulled, yanking a moaning, groaning, undead soldier in rot eaten all-black clothing with a pair of stylized S's on it. "They're evil and dumb enough to kill their fellow humans in bulk, so nobody feels bad about re-killing them," the Tiger Princess explained. Meanwhile, the regally floofy goat in front of Koyama stared at her - or maybe the can - with its strange, rectangular eyes. It may as well have twirled its majestic beard before coming to a decision and chomping away at the label, its teeth raking against the metal. "Meanwhile, I'm making fun of a human franchise with giant robots, shonen protagonists falling into super-weapon cockpits and plasma sword fights in space."

"Take your pick," she offered, a can of Golden Gōngniú in her hand igniting into a beam-sword as the zombie moaned.
 
"They are so dumb the only way to make them threatening is to fight them with Old War 2 guns." Jun replied, summoning a completely authentic WW2 assault rifle into her hand from the rather large file of WW2 guns in the database. It was complete with highly authentic looking blades, skulls, and skeleton decoration.

1649807158539.png


"This was the most advanced weapon they had at the time and you have to LOOK DOWN THIS BARREL THING AT THE TOP to line it up... the bullets barely even kill people too. You're better off using it as a club... the back end of the gun is more deadly than the front end." To make her point she'd kinda point the gun at the Zombie and hold down the trigger, firing off all the bullets inside of it, some of which hit the zombie but didn't seem to slow it down all that much. She then tossed the gun up into the air so it'd rotate enough for her to grab the barrel section and then hurl it like a spear through the Zombie's chest, pinning it down to the ground. "Humans had stupid ideas of what looked good then. Straight black uniforms, tons of skulls on everything, really into buff shirtless guys, like if you let edge lords run a country."
 
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"Old human culture is weird, and stupid." Wen raised an eyebrow, taking his hiking stick, skewering one of the zombies into the ground. "Some of it anyways." He pulled the overly decorated rifle out of the zombie Jun pinned to the ground. "Needless to say, something like this would injure the user first before it kills anything." Lazily, Wen came behind two zombies, bashing their skulls together. "It's funny that humans enjoy beating the shit out of these things." He remarked with slight annoyance. "It's just a representation of their incompetence, specifically in dealing with pandemics. How in the heavens did they reach the stars?"

With a frustrated swipe of his arm, he sent the rest of the zombies intruding upon his grassland into dust, walking over to pet one of his goats. "All the beauty of the planet that we can only experience in virtual reality, they decide abandon their old ways, drink their rivers dry, and suffocate their air with smoke." He turned back to Hoshiko. "If I have to choose between zombies and screaming teenagers, who have no right to be piloting space fighting vehicles, I'll go with the latter. It somehow reminds me less of the morons we'll have to deal with."
 
Koyama had still been dealing with the goat as zombies cropped up. With Jun bashing one apart with her club rifle, and Wen following suit, the princess finally looked up. A frown forming and brow creased.

"What is that, ancient twentieth-century firearms? Twenty-first?" her voice dripping disdain at the thing. "The Soyuz still use iterations of an ancient rifle pattern from that era I think... I admittedly respect the simplicity of it and the reliability that is." one of the shambling idiots came moaning at her and her goaty friend. She had no primitive rifle. Instead, Koyama threw the full force of her strength in a single blow to the rotting thing's head. The skull-cracking like an egg, what came out of it would not be best described in pleasant company. And the curse words that flew forth from her would have done an American proud.

Shaking her hand to get the mess off she continued the conversation as if she hadn't just spoken in such a manner, "You are talking about a people that used rockets with liquid propellants in the ass end with their stupid shuttles strapped to them thousands of tons of propellant per second right behind them. Eight and a half minutes to get to orbit. So costly. Such a backward way to go about it. Literal explosives to get into space and then there is the other one. Did you know they even conceived something called an 'Orion Drive'? Atomic explosions as propulsion! actual atomics for thrust. A waste of fissile material. The fools hadn't even managed primitive fusion reactor technology yet."

The dragon scoffed, "By then they had irreparably damaged their homeworld too. Green House Gases, heavy use of combustion engines burning hydrocarbons. Heavy industrialization, famine, disease, and overpopulation. Even something as simple as electric vehicles would have helped to begin to alleviate the problem if they had been smart. But nooooo, they couldn't even figure out how to increase battery density let alone weight reduction. The lithium rush had them rip into the planet trying. Pah! Even carbon nanotubes were too costly and grossly inefficient for them Dwindling resources..."

"If these creatures were real, I would unleash them on the humans. Cleanse the planet of them. Wait for these things to decay to nothingness and begin rebuilding the Earth for ourselves to make a point. Use their own myths and ridiculousness against them in a truly hilarious way."

After having bashed the head of the zombie in, and ending her tirade, her tail arched proudly while drinking in the scenery. "This was a truly beautiful world and they squandered it. Your simulation is beautiful, Wen. If you crafted this yourself I applaud you. But without those idiots, we would not exist. Nor would we have been able to check them. If not us, they would eventually destroy themselves or be unleashed on the galaxy like a swarm of locusts and drink the worlds and stars dry."
 
"Which is why our crusade is so crucial." Wen nodded. Seeing guests now in his reality bubble, he summoned of stone fireplace, round, carefully constructed. Coal fed embers that cracked and glowed hot red. On top on a black iron frame sat several lamb kababs, already grilled, salted, and spiced, seeing that Hoshiko might throw them into a teenager robot fight at any moment. He took one, pulling meat off with front, canine teeth, and chewed.

"And thank you, Lady Koyama. I did craft this world by hand in my spare time. I based it off of our creators' propaganda videos of the Inner Mongolian province, back when they still held the lands. Of course, I cross referenced the information they presented with other sources. If they are to be believed, then it was truly a beautiful, peaceful vastness, true heaven, unlike Tiantang, where it seems like every square centimeter of land is trying to kill us." He remarked melancholically. "I haven't been back home for quite some time now. Have our science missions made progress beyond Pingqiong? Surely, at this point, we would've found paradise to set foot on, worlds that are at least ambivalent towards us."
 
"It is silicate and clay," Jun replied, sounding exhausted as she responded to the question of just what was out there, "I've been on a dozen of those find-a-new-paradise-world expeditions and everything is clay... or like.. sandy clay. All the stars near home are empty, and if they do have planets they are barren and super boring... We should be setting up more surface-cities in Pingqiong. We've got the room and there's actually stuff there to do... you know, real stuff."
 
Though Hoshiko initially hoped to bring them all together on something they could all enjoy, the 'gun' that Jun procured - assuming it could even be called that - made the Tiger Princess's eye twitch. The longer she looked at it, the more the sensation of disquiet grew in her belly, and the faster her heartbeat ran. It was as though its very appearance was maddening, a thing that should not be that damaged the psyche. Turning her gaze away from it, Hoshiko turned her bright, blue eyes on the zombies instead. In Wen's own words, they were essentially humanity's own shortcomings and failures made into caricature punching-bags. But, didn't they do the same to humans all the time in their own sims and games? The thought made her stomach turn, and it was not for the lack of liquid rations.

"Er, nothing good about them at all? Are there at least resources in them so we can stick to a space-economy? We don't really have to have a planetside based economy, right?" Hoshiko began, mentally wresting her mind from the dark, unknown direction that it started to drift in. "Mother-Empress would rather not have us hurry to expand onto the surface of Tiāntáng until we have a better understanding of this 'magic' that can be found there," she pointed out. "It's a complete unknown that can outright bend or even break the rules of physics. It's not something we should carelessly trifle with. Right?" the princess asked.

"I agree completely! Ve had failed to fully Hundersdand und harness zee occult, und now zee subhumans -" Hoshiko sent its head spinning away with a chop of her hand.

"Human filth," she muttered. "Well, I'm just glad this trip isn't going to be so bad!" the princess exclaimed. "And since you mentioned it dear sister," the Tigress nodded to the Dragoness, "I think it's only appropriate!" An AK-47 appeared in her hands as she leaped onto the back of a Kashmir. "Whip up more food Wen, we're going Zombie hunting!"

******

Shen Zhou System,
Interplanetary Space
Some Time Later

"All hands, battle stations!" Hoshiko sounded the alert. Having rotated shifts, the Tiger Princess was now the one on the bridge, secured into her command chair. Now after their long journy however, they were drawing close to their prey, and it was time to ready themselves!
 
'pop!'

Jun would appear in VR space, floating in baggy pajamas and a nightcap while yawning. "Do I have time to shower first? OR are we like... fighting them right now?"

The actual Jun was also just waking up in her strapped-down-zero-g-bed. Her rather enjoyable sleep now being replaced with 'having to do things'. She'd already laid out her bodysuit and her gun-pod-thing was nearby with all the needed gun-food that she was supposed to put inside of it for combat...

... There was also a pink loofa and some soap.

The equipment she went for first was going to be very dependent on Hoshiko's response.
 
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