Faction BxP | On the General's Doorstep

[Tathra Khaeus]

Location: MYKA HOMWEWORLD
Tag: TchKren’Anook | Gristle

The vessel the Titan now stood aboard, filling the space of the Command platform was a Thruka Frigate. A Bryn'adul warship designed by the Thrum'dral, it was different but the same. The staging area on the bridge remained the same, all encircling the middle command platform, a standing position with dozens of displays and two primary mind-stones embedded into hand-height pillars. The talent of Draelvasier construction was evident in the warships design. Tathra had wondered how their military discipline had fared without the tachael-vemnak. If the craftsmanship of the ship was to be taken for all, their standards had not fallen in his absence was a small comfort. But the warship was not fresh from the hands of stonesmiths, half its armament was missing or in disrepair, nor did it house an abundance of Quilxyn or Kraemonen. In their place, Neti roots filled the gaps of the interior of the ship - hardening the damaged vessel for a journey beyond its means. Deep into unknown territory, beyond the reach of aid if anything were to go awry.

Not a new concept for him, but the others? Perhaps. Neti were travellers, lived for centuries, but were not known for violent expansion. TchKren'Anook was the first of his kind the Titan had come across with relatable qualities. His eyes shifted between the few Neti that TchKren'Anook had brought with him, new faces. He hadn't the time or privilege to vet them. An annoyance. He expected they would only get in the way. He did not trust the Neti to share the spine of their new elder.

His attention returned to the Ungulloi monitoring the Frigate. Kraemonen interlinked with their long appendages, acting as a buffer between them and the miasma of information created by the mesh of roots from the Neti and bio-mechanical instruments of the Draelvasier. Reading the Frigate was like navigating a dense web, but no one better than the Drael who created the stones to do it. The Ungulloi needed assistance, and their systems needed refinement.

"Dropping out now!" One of the Ungulloi squawked, raising its armoured club-like wrist to denote the declaration.

The Thruka shoot violently as it dropped out of hyperspace, sparks jetting from a few unmanned consoles. His paws clenching the command railing, a low and irritated growl escaping from his inner jaw. The Ungulloi opposite the other who'd called out struck the other on the shoulder, blaming its exclamation for their violent arrival.

A Draelvasier Juggernaut standing nearer growled over its weapon, scaring the pair back into their positions. He had not missed their unruly nature. But Tathra was otherwise occupied, it took some effort to get a readout from the ship. He wanted to believe it was the interference from the Neti, but truthfully it had been decades since he took control of a ship of this size.

Three decades prior, he could've manually controlled the entire vessel, armaments and all by himself. Now? Reading the status required his focus. But they were holding, the Frigate was shaken by the journey. They would need repairs, though the Kraemonen worms were already working toward that end.

"Now to see what we've found."

The viewports of the Frigate opened, a planet surrounded by rings of debris and asteroids ahead. Tathra had expected of what they'd found before. Colossal black debris. Instead a planet, brimming with life. Infested, nearly. But nothing their initial scans could interpret as signs of a civilisation. Strange.

Now it was up to the Neti. Tathra relinquished his contact with the command platform, leaving the maintenance of the Frigate to the Ungulloi for now.

He turned to TchKren'Anook. They both wanted something, but only one of them could be sure to find it. For now.

"So? Are your kin down there?" Tathra was impatient. But he hid it well. Non-emotive, all business. As usual.

They had followed what he could only describe as a scent. After they parted ways, and Kren found him again - asking for help finding his kin with the offer of discovering more about those who controlled the portal. He reluctantly accepted the voyage. Now, here they were - together.

 

[TchKren’Anook]

While Tathra Khaeus contemplated the complex web of information and one of his kinsmen snarled at a weaker crew member, TchKren'Anook watched silently with the few of his people had had managed to reunite with. The way the neti clustered, stood still like statues and gently swayed when gravity dictated that others might be jarred or stumble, all coalesced to make the arboreal people seem out of place within the confines of metal and wiring.

However, Tathra was learning that this strange subset of neti were far more adept at space faring and gifted with higher constitution than perhaps the average member of their species. Kren and his companions were uniquely adapted to the roving life of raiders and it seemed their culture reflected that. Those members of the tribe Tathra had met were still perhaps in need of thorough vetting, but each of them seemed ever ready to respond to the orders of their leader or voice their viewpoint should their individual expertise be called upon.

After the drop from hyperspace, before the viewports even opened, observers of the Neti warleader and his crew would notice strange subtle shifts in their bearing. Always difficult to read for non-botanical sentients, Neti body language was conveyed largely through the shifting of vine like hair and decisive movements of limbs in gestures more akin to sign-language than they were rough gestures.

Any watching now would see a half dozen wooden faces turn at exactly the same angle, facing the same precise direction. Tendrils of their green and brown hair snaked in the direction of the planet, the way plants sometimes creep in the direction of a star. For his part, TchKren'Anook actually took a few steps forward and drew level with his unlikely companion but his intense amber eyes bore into the sight of the planet. He was often ponderous while speaking and today was no exception. Slowly he reached out one large, many fingered hand as if he could grasp at the feeling which drew his attention so keenly to the planet.

"My kin… and not my kin too. I feel-" he answered slowly, wood grain brow furrowing as he completed the thought, "I sense a grovemind not our own."

His tone was uncertain, and as was often the case with Neti, he referred to the collective. "We", "us" and "our" were common pronouns or possessive determiners, whereas reference to "self" alone was far less common. Kren's expression darkened as he continued to gaze down and completed his thought.

"An alien grovemind, its song unlike any I've heard. But yes, my people are there." And his huge hand curled into a gnarled fist until just one long finger pointed.

Tag: Gristle​

 

[Gristle]

Change had come unexpectedly to the Ykaradan colony. Change was always unexpected.

For generation after generation, the Myka had waged gory and horrific war against one another in their never-ending quest for expansion and domination of the stars. They were a territorial people, but it had been understood that any other "people" that might exist were so far away as to be moot. It was only the Myka in this section of the universe - and though there were false reports from time to time of others from beyond the stars, these had never panned out.

Until now.

Gristle had known that more would come. It was the nature of water to fill the cracks that had been left by its predecessors. Now that the quiet had been broken, it would never return to what it had been. The more philosophical of the Myka debated about whether it was time now to awaken the masters who slumbered in the cold crypts beneath the world, while those with minds toward scientific acquisition had clamored for the opportunity to examine and analyze the newcomers.

Gristle looked up, had begun to watch the skies, had alerted the cadre of War-Forms who often fell under his command to be on alert in the coming days and weeks and months so that when their foe came to reclaim the captives they had taken, they would be fully prepared for them. He'd made a point after that of watching each of the little experiments that his people performed upon the vegetation shapeshifters, hoping to determine whatever he could from the work.

They'd started early in the process by removing the limbs of their captives. It was impossible to tell whether the process was painful - after all, even if they screamed or shouted it might be a completely different meaning than what it meant for the insectoids or any of their mammalian and avian livestock. Vivisections had revealed much about the internal anatomy of the newcomers, but attempts at understanding their linguistics had been nearly fruitless.

Gristle knew when they were afraid. He'd watched it several times now. His mind had attuned to it like a hunting beast attunes to the scent of its prey, had latched onto it, and couldn't send throw it away. Fear and terror were universal, even for things so distinctly strange as these plant things.

It had been determined that they were edible, but that the nutritional value was somewhat below par. It was similar to eating grass or foliage, and while technically the Myka could succeed in this, it was fundamentally a flawed agricultural strategy. Nevertheless, the colony had drenched itself in spilled sap like an unknown delicacy, each member parading their newfound liquid chlorophyll so that their companions could try the unknown substance with them.

Gristle had found it bitter. The victim had found it more so.

It was hard to know whether there had been any deaths among the captives. They were so fundamentally different that it could be that the handful who had stopped moving were merely regenerating themselves or otherwise performing a kind of vegetable diapause. The consensus of the colony had been to bury them in well-packed manure and dirt so that they might fruit new members of their kind for further experimentation.

Gristle found himself alone in his chamber, resting after a long day of training and exertion when a minute Nanitic extracted itself from a messenger tunnel in the ceiling, cluttering to the ground with well-practiced acrobatics.

"War-Form Gristle. The aliens have arrived in orbit."

Its' message delivered, the scampering Nanitic extracted itself from the room. Gristle lifted himself from his rest, stretching his carapace-encrusted limbs until the joints popped, and then made his way up through the winding tunnels to the surface.

The surface was coated in permafrost, but underneath it could be seen that black-purple resin that made up so much of the colony's construction. A handful of structures had been built on the surface, shaped like the mountains in the far West, jutting out unobnoxiously across the plains of ice. Within one such observatory would be the sensors that had detected the newcomers, and within others would be weapons designed for the repelling of Myka warships.

Gristle opened himself to the colony, his mind flowing across the radio waves of the Thrum, the pulsing flurry of information and context that bound the Ykaradan Myka. He glanced about his kindred, downloading their essence into himself as he pondered the readiness of the kin. Here the crafter Tender expressed its joy at a new knife handle, and here the Major Bone was arguing about the best placement for a new stockroom with the Workers Lively and Steam. And here too was Terror, blood-brethren, and War-Form who sat polishing his weapons.

Gristle prodded their consciousness, prodded the coherence of that raging torrent of context, directed eyes to the surface, directed hands to their weapons. "The aliens have come." He uttered in words that were not words and thoughts that could not be ascribed to things which could not themselves in a moment become one another. The colony reacted, and gone were the debates of knife handles and stockrooms, and only hemolymph would polish the weapons of war.

The closest tower began to pulse with a brilliant light and a sound that could not be heard in the audio-range of the Myka, but which would almost certainly be detected by machines.

The siren's call. The trap laid.

They would flow into the same cracks as their predecessors. Change was always unexpected, but that did not mean one had to idly wait for it.

Tathra Khaeus | TchKren’Anook