Remnants of the Earth

As Sarah listened to Sitara's answer, she surveyed and repaired the damage to the ship, realizing that she had judged the situation far too quickly and owed Ari an apology. For the moment, however... <Yeah. I skimmed over the contract while I was waiting for an answer. It's why my tailblade isn't at Ari's throat right now.>, Sarah answered, including both Ari and Sitara in the response, <Did you know that Rhevi was delivering a slave?>, she clarified, <If so, why didn't you warn me?>, she asked.

<As to what that was, and before you answer,>, Sarah began privately to Ari before he could answer, her head lowering slightly, <I've never told anyone but you this, and would appreciate you doing the same.>. Sarah took a few breaths, a surprisingly human gesture, if it had been slow enough to be seen, <Sarah isn't the name I was born with. It was given to me. By Rhevi's older sister.>, she explained, <There's a reason I've always hated humans, Ari, and it's not just because of how slow and weak they are. My... Thing they called me. Not a name. Names are for things that matter... It was Delta-23. I was just one of 23 eggs stolen from a ship I don't remember. The slavers weren't Rhevi's sort. They were more like the Rivideans, if the Rivideans kept their end of contracts.> Sarah's 'voice' was quiet, in stark contrast to her usual loud, brash 'tone'.

<The less said about them, the better. The point is, I hate humans. I hate slavers more. The only reason Hestari are different is because they aren't cruel without reason. At least, Kelly wasn't. Everything I know about machines, she taught me. Science, robotics, math, measurements, even a decent bit of programming and how to read and write. I wouldn't know any of it if it weren't for her. She's even the one who set me free.> Sarah's 'voice' had a strong note of admiration as she spoke of Kelly, <Long story short, you delivering a slave was like me serving you human flesh. Worse, even. It was a confirmation of everything I hate about humans, and I reacted before thinking. Honestly, if I hadn't caught the scent of that medallion, you'd be dead, and it wouldn't even be justified. I... Vahreh Sarah senahlu ekahsenei. I don't know how to say it in your language. Deeper than 'sorry'.>. The Hestari words had a deeply apologetic 'note' to them.

<Fair enough.>, Rhevi answered, <As for any tinkering, I've known Sarah for around 200 of your years. I know better than to make unauthorised adjustments to anything Sarah's built.>, he continued as he headed down the passageway to Sarah's quarters.

The hold was in the sort of organized messy state Rhevi knew to expect from Sarah, though, unlike her quarters on Hesta, the floor was mostly clear of parts and debris, presumably to allow access to a cabinet that he assumed held any blueprints relevant to the ship's systems. As he expected, a terminal near what he supposed (judging by the concentration of clutter) was her workstation was unlocked and open to Ranah's email, the text rather conspicuously in Common, given that Sarah had never bothered to learn how to read or write in the language.

Above the workstation was a small heat lamp, though, knowing Sarah, its specs were likely closer to a much larger one, and, over a pile of red pseudo-foliage that was almost certainly a bed, such as Sarah generally slept on, there was a small cooler. A jar on the workstation held strips of what looked like jerked meat, most of which Rhevi was almost certain was human, and a minifridge, buried except for the door and the arc in which it opened in all manner of parts and half-finished devices, sat on the opposite side of the terminal. Several racks on the walls held a variety of tools and weapons, some of which would be easily usable to anyone trained to use pistols or blades, and in the far corner of the room sat what Rhevi assumed to be Sarah's latest project: a skeletal frame to what appeared to be a prototype for an android made to resemble its creator, complete with basic wiring and servos, presumably for balance and mobility testing.

<Seems our little Stuck Tooth hasn't changed much. Never would have thought she'd develop a maternal instinct, though.>, Rhevi remarked, speaking to Ari, but not bothering to leave Sitara out of the loop, as he switched off the translation program on Sarah's terminal, <What's your take?>. The answer was mostly immaterial. For the most part, the chatter was little more than a distraction, a way to pass the time without dwelling on what had just happened, and, even as he waited for Ari to respond, Rhevi began writing messages to Ranah and to High Command to appraise them of the details of the situation relevant to each.

Internally, Rhevi was grieving. He'd known, of course, that there were risks. Some of the ballsier, and better armed, pirates weren't above preying on scout ships, and two of those pirates were known to be in-system. With the Draconians attempting to set up a colony, there would, of course, be an increase in patrols. Even the soldiers on board the ship knew the risks that came with the territory of a delivery of convenience. None of that made it any easier to lose that many, and centuries of wisdom made little difference, either. But officers, especially high-ranking ones, were expected to act a certain way. Grieving was for later, when he was alone. In front of others, nothing had changed except the plan. Same mission, different path, usual ocean. Rhevi's response to Sitara was to nod as he began working out the specifics of how he'd be getting back to the battlegroup, making note of her discomfort, but not acting on it at the moment.

<I'm going to guess that's fast. My species doesn't have those, nor do most mammal species have prominent enough ones to shake when they're not actively lactating.>, Rhevi remarked, <Your species, goats, and cows are quite unique in that regard. Are you familiar with Drake Morgan? Not the cheapest option, I'll admit, but I've dealt with him before, and he is known to my battlegroup.>, he continued, <Assuming he's still in-system, he would be my best option for returning to my battlegroup. They'll know him. As long as he's broadcasting the Black Flag, they won't attack him, and, as long as he doesn't do anything stupid, he stands to gain much from it. Where is Sarah's quarters, if I may?>.

"She seems rather full of herself. And inordinately proud of her ignorance.", Scimitar, an AI which normally managed the main communications station alongside whatever human (for a given definition) Drake had manning the station, remarked, appearing on the tac map display as a flamingo-pink and candy-red zebra-striped rubber ducky, "She does seem to understand her situation, though, if the shift in tone is anything to go by.", it continued, its own voice, that of a professionally perky female secretary stereotype, changing inflections first to polite disapproval, then to almost clinically polite, the rubber ducky's mouth moving in sync to its voice, its wings flapping as the image 'hopped' up and down, tilting slightly in a random direction as it did.

Drake had often wondered which of his AIs truly had personalities and emotions, and which merely simulated them, largely due to the fact that emotional intelligence and simulated emotions had been standard even on simulated intelligences (SIs) for centuries, ever since developers had noted that their clients tended to prefer any that communicated with sentients to, at the very least, seem sentient, and AIs who could read and respond to emotions tended to receive higher performance and satisfaction scores than those that couldn't, even if the latter were otherwise more competent. The pirate knew for a fact that Ravager was truly sentient, as it had been marked for deletion due to its penchant for chaos and violence leading it to disobey the military it had been stolen from, during testing, leading it to be considered too dangerous to shackle. Rogue Shadow, he likewise knew to be merely feigning its emotions as a way of 'slimming down' the AI, and, while it was a common joke amongst the crew that Executor couldn't be sentient due to an ancient joke that lawyers didn't have souls, Drake had never managed to trip it up with any form of Turing test, though it was an open question as to whether it was due to it being sentient, or just that good at pretending to be, as was the case with several of the three dozen AIs the two ships boasted.

"That all depends on you, kid. Take that tone with me again, and the value of taking your ship intact drops. Significantly. Be a good little girl, and maybe your ship starts looking a little more valuable whole.", he replied, grinning predatorily, "As for the Void, any ship with a void rift generator and a half-decent nav system can make a void run. Hell, the Dracs often have their kids do it as part of their pilot training, and I've only ever heard of ships getting lost if they malfunction or deviate from the transit solution, short of pilot error on shorter runs, barring freak accidents.", he explained, his grin fading into a glare, "Your ship just lost value, by the way.", he pointed out, "Generally, short of the Void's inherent instability, the only way you really get lost is if you try to navigate within the Void, instead of following your transit solution. There's an old Drac superstition that the Void is self-aware and damn near insane, with their gods being the only thing keeping it in line. I just think they don't fully understand the physics and are scared to research it.", he continued. As he spoke, two crewmembers entered the room.

One was seemingly human, until one noticed the cobalt-colored scales which began at the base of her skull, and the steel gray, glowing tribal markings where a normal human would have eyes, the head shaped as if there had never been anything even accounting for them in her evolution. The Linarian Adept subspecies human was armed only with a combat knife, and dressed in a stealth suit of the type normally only worn by special forces outfits, to the inclusion of a pair of enhanced-vision goggles raised just below her hairline (which was right where one would expect a human's hairline to be), her preference being to rely on her magic, as well as the above-normal strength and speed Linarian Adepts, due to the Draconian DNA used in the development of their subspecies, afforded them, which, while slow and weak in comparisan to the race, made them nearly three times as fast and strong as normal humans, on top of their impressive affinity for magic, and those in the Alliance military were usually issued special suits of armor designed to keep them from being lit up like Christmas trees to anyone who could see/sense magic.

The other was an insectoid, slightly taller than a human, also female, though one would be hard put to tell without knowledge of the Maraki species (particularly, that only females possessed stingers), resembling something of a cross between a hornet and a scorpion, with her proportionally strangely long thorax held erect to permit the forelimbs to function as arms. Rather than the points or pads one would expect at the end of each leg, all six of the insectoid's limbs ended in six-fingered 'hands' jointed in such a way that all six could function either as fingers or opposable thumbs to a number of the others, enabling multiple configurations for gripping and balancing. Hard plates, not unlike those of a beetle, covered a pair of wings that were rather unlike what one would expect on a wasp, and a pair of small flaps toward the bottom of the head, as well as the sides of the thorax, under the 'arms', seemed to open and close with a rhythm that suggested the creature was breathing, with membranes that looked as if they could force the plates closed to seal the exoskeleton. The Maraki's multi-segmented tail, a wicked stinger, its surface waxy-looking, nestled in the tip, sat coiled against the abdomen. The insectoid's entire body glowed briefly with the same brightness and intensity as the ship's corridor lighting before taking on the coloration and brightness of the visual scanner display every inch of bulkhead, deck, and overhead not taken up by a station or other display on the bridge was used to project, with the side facing Esise looking like an insectoid mirror, changing colors almost as if her body was putting out light in order to disrupt it. "Qui'ek and Emily, reporting. High-Charity-machine has told Qui'ek that you may have need of us, male-queen Drake.", the insectoid announced, her 'voice' more felt than heard as a membrane located between her head breathing-plates vibrated powerfully to make the sound, "Pyrra-corpse is on its way.", she continued, her refusal to refer to the Tokamakian as a living being apparent in her use of the word 'it'.

"Actually, I'm already here.", the voice, almost a whisper, hissed from the entryway, it owner stepping into the room. The humanoid female was armed to the teeth, and clad in an environmental armor suit that had been torn open to accommodate a pair of multi-bladed artificial arms extending from her back like a pair of skeletal bat wings and a pair of artificial tails ending in plasma projectors which swayed independent of each other, as if they'd always been there. The woman's helmet was off, revealing that the upper half of her face had been very precisely removed down to the bone, her eyes left in their sockets, with "Remember, Remember" carved in a language not unlike Cyrillic into her skull, across her forehead, the letters filled with a titanium-gold alloy. The woman's red-gold hair was cropped short in a military buzz cut, with her green eyes given an odd expression by the fact that she had only her lower eyelids. The female walked toward the console Esise was using, leaning in close to the pink face, "So, this is what the AIs have been chattering about. I'm sure Hades would want a sample of this.", she mused, half-aloud, setting her helmet on top of the console and sitting in the chair, putting her feet up as she did.


"Captain, I'm picking up... something... on the magical plane. I think someone's trying to screw with the space in here somehow. I'm blocking it for now, but I don't know how long I can hold it off for.", Emily announced, the Linarian's eyemarks glowing much more brightly as she spoke, "Should I see if I can reverse it?".

"No. Include you, Qui'ek and Pyrrha in the effects. Our friends have graciously invited us aboard, after all. Best not to disappoint.", Drake ordered, grinning, "Tell Alice to start shooting if we're not back in, say, twenty minutes, unless I order otherwise.", he added, not needing to specify that he was talking to Scimitar and that the order was mostly for Esise's benefit. Alice's standing orders were to cut and run in the event of Drake's capture or death, until circumstances allowed for a rescue attempt with favorable odds.

"I'll try, but I've never seen magic like this before.", Emily responded, focusing her power on widening the enemy spell.


Qui'ek's antenna waved irritably, her stinger unfurled and at the ready as she noted almost immediately that, while she was in the enemy nest, her male-queen was nowhere to be seen or smelled. Instead, she had somehow ended up in the enemy's food storage cell. The Maraki briefly considered eating the enemy's food supply, and poisoning what remained, but decided that finding the male-queen was more important. Or the enemy queen. The Maraki began moving as quietly as possible, shifting the light emitted by her scales and plates to mimic her surroundings.


"Well, ain't this a kick in the teeth.", Pyrrha growled as she appeared not wherever they'd taken Drake, but in what seemed to be a medbay, "Helloooo, nurse! Think you and me could play doctor for a while?", she asked the golden female, "Also, if you were to host a pirate captain, and I'm not saying I'm a pirate or anything, but where would I find that place? And maybe your bed?", she continued, reaching for her helmet to put it on, only to remember she'd set it down on a console on the bridge.


"Nice little welcoming committee. You've almost got enough for a fair fight.", Drake remarked as he appeared in what looked like a ready room, "I'm flattered you rolled out the red carpet for me. Really, I am.", he continued, clapping slowly.

"You need to work on your magic. Or were you hoping for some alone time with the captain?", Emily remarked, stepping into the ready room via what looked suspiciously like a warp gate, "If you were, I can go back out while you have your fun. By the way, those four outside? Not looking so tough.". As she spoke, she turned her head to 'look' directly at Zan, sensing an impressive concentration of magic near him, though the exact natures was difficult to determine, as the magical plane itself couldn't seem to decide what he was, the energies shifting too fast for her to keep track.

"No, no. Join the fun. I'm sure our friends won't mind.", Drake remarked, mockingly raising an eyebrow at Argroww, "See something interesting?", he asked, following her gaze to the golden humanoid and making a mental note to kill or disable him first should the need arise. The werewolf and the cat-person presented a physical threat, to be sure, and the werewolf looked like he'd seen a few battles, but there was seldom worse on the battlefield than an enemy mage, especially one who used magics just different enough that a Linarian couldn't fully counter them. <That one gets the first pellet>, he thought to himself, <That ought to keep him out out of the fight long enough to deal with the bruisers.>

"So, you've got the tech to make intelligences with all the reasoning and judgement capabilities of humans, but capable of making those calls thousands of times faster, and you don't do anything with it? Interesting. How do your people manage FTL or subspace travel, then? Or do your people do what the Hestari do and use a method that gets around the need for faster-than-human decisionmaking?" Drake asked,  making a mental note that this 'Esise' seemed to have no concept of sarcasm, "As for asking your name, I'm sure it must have slipped my mind. My manners seem to be slipping lately.", he sniped, again with sarcasm, then dropped his voice into a more venomous tone, "Though you may want to reconsider your tone. You may have decent cyberdefenses,", he threatened, using a hand signal to order the pirate manning the Electronic Warfare station to switch from attacking the alien vessel to attacking the cargo ship, and another to signal Ravager to keep up the attack on Esise's ship and order the target-side runtimes to multiply and attack anything electronic that could transmit and recieve data of any kind, "But I seem to have you outtonned, outgunned, and outarmored. Take too harsh a tone and I might just decide your ship's worth more as scrap.".

It was a bluff, and Drake was more than prepared to cut and run if the ship showed any sign of fighting back, but keeping their... whatever Esise was... occupied meant one less of whatever she was on the enemy vessel, and keeping her on the main bridge meant that the auxiliary bridges could be activated, though it would mean that many less fighters deployed if it came to that. Without any need to be ordered to do so, one of the Warmonger's AIs began charging the main guns and calculating multiple firing solutions and possible crossfire setups as Rogue Shadow and Executor focused their efforts on getting into the cargo ship, focusing their efforts primarily on getting control of the cargo ship's propulsion, and, if it had any, weapons.

There's a wiki here, though there's some lore, particularly player-created stuff, that isn't there yet, and, no, this is a completely original RP (to the best of my knowledge. Rhi would be he best one to answer for certain.). As to freeform, it's easier than it looks.

Within the exclusion field, the ship's sensors couldn't see realspace, it position being tracked relatively instead of 'absolutely', so it was a shock to Sarah as, upon returning to realspace, the 'food truck' had seemingly left and been replaced by... <Talsak! The entire ship can transform, and I missed it!>, Sarah thought to herself in Hestari as she focused on shutting off her sight. Less than three milliseconds later, the Draconian's physical sight was replaced by magical sight, allowing her to see the currents and pools of energy on the magical plane that reflected the physical. It was one of her main tools for performing inspections and repairs to things, as it allowed her to see where things were missing or broken almost at a glance. It was also her best way for analysing things she wasn't allowed to take apart.

Two minutes. To humans, it was a brief moment in time. To Sarah, however, two minutes was almost a day and a half. A day and a half in which to not only keep a careful eye on the shields specifically and the Sassy Juice's systems in general, but to also look over the former 'food truck', which was just in range for a detailed analysis. As Sarah systematically disabled every standard system on the enemy ships (by converting the components of said systems into magical energy, mostly), she made detailed mental notes of the 'food truck', making note of its armaments and how they worked (and getting some ideas for new weapons for the Sassy Juice), its shields.

During the seconds in which the 'food truck' was returning to its 'food truck' form, Sarah gave it her undivided attention, noting that a lot of energy went into a specific device on the other ship as it shifted from one form to the other. <Useful. Very useful.>, she thought to herself in Hestari as she returned to the bridge, already trying to replicate components of the device as she returned her vision to the physical plane. <Ari, I think I've figured out how they can transform. I create and destroy things by converting energy into mass and mass into energy. That ship, on the other hand, rearranges matter on an atomic level. I'd like to know where the extra mass came from and went, but that may have simply been something similar to what I do.>, Sarah told Ari privately, <I also know that ship has an AI. A powerful one, by the looks of it. No human could react like that ship did during that battle. I recommend we get out of here now. That AI's almost as fast as I am.>, she continued, still trying to copy the device she'd seen and making no attempt to hide it. <Something you find amusing, Ykan?>, she snapped, growling in irritation at the lunar spirit's laughter, <Or have you just lost your mind?>.

In responce to the 'food truck' captain's question, Sarah asked, <That thing that changes your ship. What's it called? And what's the name of your AI?>, she asked, less interested in the answers to the questions than the human's reaction to them, and hoping to catch him off guard.

I'm not staff, so check with Rhi or Aeyt, but I would go with wherever he currently resides, so it would depend on if he left the world/station in question and/or is based out of said location, or whether he wanders nomadically/lives on a ship?

To the casual observer, the desert was empty for miles around the coordinates Sarah had sent, the sand apparently undisturbed by even so much as animal tracks, the wind little more than a gentle breeze. Beneath the seemingly undisturbed ground, however, three rings of turrets protected by several layers of shielding based on her most recent designs for the Sassy Juice's own formed a virtually unbroken perimeter around the area, ensuring that any spot within it and the mile radius around it was covered by at least three turrets of each of several types, designed to provide as impenetrable a defense as the better part of two days of near-sleepless (for her species, anyway) work could accomplish, what with two similar sites being set up in other areas as decoys, one of which had been set up close enough to a fortress to provoke a response and, if it functioned as planned, tie up the forces of that clan to lower the chances of a patrol blundering into the true LZ, and reinforced with enough artillery to (hopefully) make it too much of a threat to ignore.

Sarah herself waited for the arrival of the Sassy Juice in a bunker buried deep beneath the sand, its thick walls coated on the outermost layer by a shell of nahrium to absorb any ground-penetrating radar or heat from the pressure of the earth and stone around and above it, tinkering with her latest project as she mentally counted down the time until the ship would arrive, making adjustments to what looked suspiciously like the torso, legs, and tail of an android made in the image of one of her own species, an incomplete skull lying nearby.

As the time until the ship was supposed to be landing drew into the tenths of a second, Sarah climbed the ladder that lead to a hatch near the surface, then converted enough earth and sand into earth magic, and then rock walls to hold the sand out over what she'd already made around the hatch before installing it to climb the rest of the way, arriving on the surface at precisely the moment the Sassy Juice should have reached the landing site, every sense alert for any hint of an enemy presence.

Banned: ARAD V1.0
Reason: I've actually done that.