Intergalactic Summit

You know....


When the Gutter Press makes a post where they blow something out of proportion, fail to fact-check or just plain make things up in a desperate attempt to appear relevant, they at least do so with a sense of humor.

And not quite so much caterwauling.


But hey, if you want to add the Cartel to the list of people that would gladly mount your head on the prow of a ship, go right ahead. I'll make snacks.

Ooh...that stung did it?

Me? The Amarrian du jour? No, I'm just a humble music critic.

2/10

Wouldn't illegally save to my neocom.....

Right.......

I was around in the past, right around your vodka mist days and your lycanthrope sebiester experiments, think I was either just graduating the RMS or was working for the Sebiestor Tribe at the time. Might be wrong on that, who knows... And bland? Ya probably. What can I say I was wishy washier than I am now back then that's for sure, guess you could have called me bland.

[Orbital camera drones tumble around a covert operations frigate. On voiceless command, the precocious devices scurry toward a Gallente research station floating in some dusty, forsaken pocket on the edge of known space.

The drones peek eagerly into nooks and crannies around the perimeter of the facility, looking, looking...

Sometime later, internal security imaging apparatus resolves the CRONE in a skin tight black platinum body suit with matching hair net and knee-high boots. Klaxons fail to ring. The CRONE repels down the Luminaire Nouveau Artes interior facade of StarPark: Two, Adjacent Atrium: Thirteen. A few feet from the bottom, she executes a superfluous half twist followed by a forward roll, releases the cable, and lands in a three point crouching mantis pose.

Above her, VAIN, PRANCE, and PREEN - Sebiestor with the most progressed lycanthropy - alternatively climb and chase one another down the atrium walls, joining the CRONE at long last on the brushed titanium floor.

VAIN admires his reflection. The CRONE reaches dramatically for the hilt of her katana.

Realizing that she does not have a katana, she straightens and stretches.]

JBB's Black Eagle yoga manual and a few body replacements have made Mummy feel four hundred years younger, boys! Now, let's find our "Princess Sarpati."

Prance! Sniff!

[The lanky lycanthropic Sebiestor alternatively lowers and raises his head, testing recirculated air. Eventually, he leads down brushed titanium corridors, pausing now and then for VAIN to admire reflections.

Surveillance cameras and roving vacuum bots turn blind eyes to the intruders. Where more meaty members of the station's skeleton crew present obstacles, blinking lights behind pupil-less eyes instruct soulless machines to report, falsely, that anomalies require attention elsewhere.

At long last, the interlopers stop before a sealed brushed titanium door. Late Rouvenor Baroque cherubs twirl and dance around the portal's perimeter. The CRONE extends a Mandarin fingernail into a wall receptacle.

After some guttural expressions of irritation, she opens the door.]

Sweetie! We are here to...

"Did the Black Eagles send you!? I knew you would come!"

[‘PRINCESS’ SARPATI, a young Gallente woman in dark colors which coordinate nicely with her hair leaps up from a comfortable bed in an otherwise nondescript room appropriate for the temporary storage of recalcitrant youth.]

Not exactly, darling, though as a matter of operational security you probably shouldn't vocalize suspicions...

"Guristas!? You're not assassins, are you? Oh, come on! Isn’t it enough that I am trapped in an efficiency studio light years from a mint mocha?"

I take it that you are a distant relation to the family in question?

"I am a member of the Mentas Youth Patriots Accountability Campus Brigade! I was on assignment in Cistuvaert, just about to get the drop on a fraternity Drop ring when someone got the drop on me. I ended up in an Impel with a one way ticket to wherever the… ”

Oh, what lovely crystals! I was just in a ruined crystal quarry right next door. Are you grounded, darling?

“The crystals! Somethings up with the crystals. They vibrate or resonate or something like that in sympathy blah blah blah monoliths. I’ve tried to listen but I can’t hear anything. It all has something to do with blah blah First Empire blah blah the Curse blah the Fall blah blah blah the Dispossessed...”

You’ve heard all this discussed around here, have you?

“I’ve been marched passed some doors and some conversations leaked out. A Caldari genius figured out how to turn the crystals into threads and wrap them around neurons….”

Schere!?

“I don’t know any names. They tried it on some madman who now raves about seeing Perfection in the Blocks. Poor bastard.”

Viriel?

“I don’t know any names.”

No, I don’t believe Viriel's on about Perfection. Anyway, darling, its time for a change of captivity.

“Ha!”

[‘PRINCESS’ SARPATI lowers into an offensive stance and charges. The CRONE, not particularly adept in the martial arts, counters clumsily. Their combat, for lack of a better word, spills out of the spartan efficiency studio and into the brushed titanium corridor. PRANCE and PREEN leap about excitedly uncertain. VAIN continues to look for perfection in the blocks.

‘PRINCESS’ SARPATI and the CRONE bounce off a wall and roll across the floor. Their tumbling stops at the feet of a towering apparition. CYLINDRICAL KAMEIRA looks down.]

“Madam.”

Cylindrical Kameira.

“The security matrix overlay subroutines you superimposed on the station’s cores will expire shortly.”

Right. Be a dear and pick her up. Thank you. Boys! We’re going walkies! It’s walkies time!

I recall that tune quite fondly. That crew, not so much. Their arrogance in respect to the ships capacity to absorb the angel's attacks was a mistake that they deserved to pay for. I fondly recall dismissing their distraught glances and cries for guidance with funky blues rifts. I sat back in my captains chair, fingers dancing across the fret board as alarms sounded. My only fear was if I had remembered to stock a guitar in my clones station or not. The blaring sirens were met only with 12 bar blues, and I cackled as the worthless dogs panicked. I ejected and self destructed my pod., condeming those fools to spend the remainder of their worthless lifes in the fighting pits.

The rattle snake blues remains one of my favorite shuffles to this day.

[The giant reticulated cyber salamander roars. Carbonized steel titanium claws rip out chunks of flooring when the beast charges. CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT leaps forward and up, rotating above the mechanized horror’s head before landing on a gleaming vertebrae. Remorselessly, she slams one tip of her telescoping san jie gun into the connecting fibers of the monster’s spine.

It roars again, and thrashes violently. CALDARI GRADUATE ASSITANT leaps to one side.

The reticulated salamander twists and rotates along its length unexpectedly, launching a ferocious attack with one suddenly repositioned claw. CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT twists in time to avoid being ripped into three pieces, but is sent violently tumbling over and through detritus. She slams into a death cage, stopping herself on the bars of the opposite wall.

The salamander is immediately there, ripping through the cage, its enormous jaws suddenly directly overhead.

Calm under pressing circumstances, CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT rolls to one side, flips to a standing position, and twists through twisted wreckage while spinning up her weapon. Before the beast can fully resolve her new position, she smashes one plasma drip tip through a bulbous, crystalline eye assembly.

The monster rears back, lifting CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT into the air. With a violent flick of its head, it then hurls her across the chamber. Tumbling in the air, the lithe mechanized academic lands in a runner’s stance and immediately blitzes forward.

Waves of superheated argon wash from the salamander’s mouth.

More flammable pieces of CALDARI GRADUATE ASSITANT’S body continue burning as she descends from above to straddle the monster’s neck. Mightily, the former logistics specialist forces the plasma tips on each end of her san jie gun into respective crystal eyes.

Twisting mechanisms on the sectioned staff, she sends incandescent arcs of purifying electricity through the monster’s skull, triggering shorts all along its unusual length. Twisting, thrashing, and roaring, the beast slams CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT repeatedly into her environment. But the increasingly battered operative holds on to her foe’s bitter end, rising from smoking wreckage a smoking - but victorious - wreck herself.

Calmly, she collapses her telescoping weapon and reinserts it into a forearm chamber.]

My goodness, Caldari Graduate Assistant, that was amazing!

“Amazing,” agrees ‘Princess’ Sarpati enthusiastically. The young woman leans forward on the comfortable leather cushions inside one of the Equilibrium Anathema’s small ready rooms.

Have you ever seen anything like that, Princess?

“I demand you stop calling me ‘princess’ this instant!”

Yes, of course, sweetie. Were there giant reticulated cybernetic salamanders in the facility where your captors held you?

“I demand that you stop insinuating that I was a captive! But, no.”

I thought not.

“What do you think it means, then?”

Emanations from the monolith appeared to correlate significantly with the combat witnessed. I do not believe the giant cybernetic attack salamander was wholly, or even primarily, a construct of Cartel ingenuity - though certainly angels are very clever.

“And never far.”

Always near! But I am convinced that the horror witnessed clawed its way to us from the bones of civilization remote in time and place, a revenant, a specter given form by this enigmatic quarry.

“Oh, come on.”

No, really! Carry on, Caldari Graduate Assistant!

[CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT slams a cylinder of glowing green goo into her left side and carries on.]

[CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT’S tracking drone captures her silhouette against gleaming metal and blue light emitting substrates stamped across an enormous circular portal. The mechanized academic taps one finger lightly on a plasteel panel. Orange rectangles recede from the point of impact across the portal surface, klaxons clang, and the catwalk shudders.

Slowly, the huge portal opens like a mouth with multiple jaws.

Caught between terror and curiosity, the camera drone follows CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT through a menacing gap.

Her catwalk continues into a spherical chamber too large to resolve at once with available light. Complex sequences of nested geodesic scaffolding recedes from the chamber walls and converges on some distant center. Anchored to mountings on the scaffolding, a bewildering array of sophisticated Cartel cutting machinery waits, unmoving.

CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT uses a combination of ladders, stairs, and lifts to reach one particularly large cutting machine. Though currently still, during the period of its operation the machine had carved deeply into a spherical nodule attached to other spherical nodules attached to the outer cavern wall.

The CRONE urges the camera drone to get a better look.]

Yes, yes, remarkable. Fascinating!

It’s almost as if superheated gas of unknown composition expanded suddenly inside molten rock, forming… well, actually, it’s exactly like that. But why was the asteroid molten, and where did the gas come from? I have my suspicions, of course, but what do you think Caldari Graduate Assistant?

“The present asteroid is a composite."

Yes!

“Veldspar bodies form a mantel which surrounds a core formed from the compression of arkonor and spodumain. Vitreous mercoxit…”

Provided the gas bubble? Natural gravity would not account for compression or heat required.

“The body is certainly artificial. We may be able to determine age by...”

Ten thousand years.

“Conjecture.”

The monoliths are tools of the First Born.

“Conjecture.”

Manipulating the curvature of space, the monolith present here gathered available foundational materials and crushed them together…

“Conjecture.”

…with the purposes of manufacturing a crystal matrix…

“Con…”

I know that! A crystal matrix suitable for adaptation in neural telemetrical devices. Do not say it!

Although these quarries exist throughout known space, the Cartel possesses an advantage over rival factions. Squatting - as it does - in First Born facilities, it possesses unique insight into the technologies of that vanished people. Whatever foul bargain Cartel bosses made with Drifter devils strengthened their understanding of, and insatiable desire for, these pretty rocks. Harvested, they are simply curiosities. But wrapped into the neural fabric of a madman, they become…

“Conjecture!”

Alternatively…

“Oh, come on!”

Alternatively, the monoliths are not First Born relics at all but predate human occupation of New Eden.

“The fossil record does not support…”

A sufficiently advanced species leaves artifice, not fossils. The purpose of these crystal structures is nothing less than the transformation of any being capable of figuring out how to use them into a receptacle for infomorphic consciousness residing in the monoliths, resurrecting an entire civilization...

“Wild conjecture.”

Well, this is not conjecture: run, Caldari Graduate Assistant.

[Without further inquiry, CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT leaps off her platform. Momentarily caught by surprise, the camera drone quickly speeds after its mechanized anchorite as she tumbles and spins through a formidable gymnastics repertoire. After landing on the entrance catwalk in a flawless three point mantis pose, CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT and her loyal camera drone speed for the closing entrance.

With some substantial room to spare, drone and cyborg launch themselves through the vanishing gap.

Rolling to a neat stop, CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT looks back at the portal. Orange rectangles march from the perimeter to the center. Upon meeting, they and trace lines across the the disk flare bright red.]

Continue running, Caldari Graduate Assistant!

[Without delay, cyborg and drone tear through the facility, frantically trying to reach the place they were before as a rumbling, crashing, terrifying sound builds behind. Fire! CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT’S elegant silhouette streaks before the giant cathedral windows. Explosions! Shattering glass!

Darkness.

Sometime later, the intrepid camera drone orbits CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT as she drifts through space. The little device blinks a small, lonely light out into the great black void, calling, calling furtively for assistance.

When the Equilibrium Anathema drops cloak, the small device speeds around its unconscious charge with gleeful abandon.

CYLINDRICAL KAMEIRA emerges from the frigate, drifts across the intervening distance, collects CALDARI GRAUATE ASSISTANT, and returns to the covert ops vessel.

Airlock doors close; camera sinks slowly to corridor floor and breathes a sigh of relief.]

We have a different sort of flesh dancer to concern ourselves with now.

For the most part, the move is complete. We still have to change what the sign says on our docking bays.

And now with the most stable corporate infrastructure we could put together in such a short period, our direction is settling.

Not only with the planned mass experimentation on Sansha slaves, our continuous growth in eugenics and nutritional sciences, or even our daily harvest. We can now add Genetic Transmutation and Physical Restoration to a few of our laboratory door signs.

Keep those creatures contained please!

. . .

On a more solemn topic. One of our members has biomassed.

Miss Jade Blackwind is no longer with us in flesh. Her memories were extracted and subsequently injected into the brain of our chief executive to live in on forever. She will be forever remembered as she was by our corporation for her efforts.

Please take a moment to reflect on your own immortality.