Intergalactic Summit

Sorry to hear that about Jade...

[Row after row of Ni-Kunni artisans sketch their perspective on a crumbling Amarrian monastery, furiously, in huge notebooks. Apprentice Ni-Kunni stand nearby waiting to turn the heavy pages, fetch utensils, and communicate refreshment needs to serving staff pulled from broad ethnic backgrounds. The ruined monastery engulfs and towers over them all - a terrifying mound of decaying gold brick clawed over by climbing vines and at least two dozen colorful varieties of bougainvillea.

Here and there, the artists catch formidable Brutor in impeccably tailored suits going about security sweeps.

Expectations run high for a very important guest.

One Ni-Kunni Grand Master executes a masterful impression of the descending hover car in oil pastels. Tinted palladium flares brilliantly in Amarr’s overwhelming sun as pink crimson clouds dance and twirl. Apprentices are so entranced, they forget to breathe. An irritated Brutor revives them.

One of the hover car’s gull wing doors rises. Squinting against sunlight, a tall, fashionable Gallentean emerges onto the cermet landing pad. His gestures are so perfect, so well-timed, so fluid and natural, their representations in graphite, charcoal, and infused acrylic become foundational materials for decades of study.

How should the perfect gentleman wave? Like Sebastian MOREAU. That’s how.

Flanked by Brutor with impenetrable shades, the CRONE reaches out hands wrapped in black feathers as her guest nears. Woven obsidian scales sparkle up and down her gown. MOREAU collects her hands into his own.]

“Madam."

You are even more handsome than the wildest rumors, Mssr. Moreau!

“Then I should sue the mongers for not telling it like it is!”

I’ve grown to adore you so much, darling, just based on hearsay; now, I can barely contain myself!

[Ni-Kunni artists sketch feverishly as the CRONE leads MOREAU through the open catacombs of vaulted masonry. Occasionally, bricks tumble from on high, crashing to rest in parts of the monastery marked off by velvet safety ropes. Passing beneath a titanic archway, one of the Brutor accompanying their procession holds a sturdy parasol above MOREAU, shielding him from falling dust.

They make their way to a collection of enormous tables on a veranda with many views.

Each table presents appetizers from one of Amarr’s distinct culinary regions. The couple moves from table to table sampling cuisine. Wine is poured, varying by table. Cheeses are served - varying by table. Around a decreasing spiral they devour to the center, where a feast of Athran beef stampedes across damask waving in warm breezes.]

“Amarr most certainly cannot be faulted for her gastronomical generosity!”

Well, if a civilization cannot do at least one thing right, darling, then surely it isn’t civilized.

“Do you mean to say that fine food is the only thing Amarr does right?”

Forgive me! I did not mean to paint with such broad strokes. Steak is the only thing Amarr does right. Well, steak and architecture.

[Somewhere distant, a small tower collapses.]

“Just how old is your house, Madam?”

They say its first brick was laid when I was born! But my memories do not go so far back - and that brick has long been lost to the world.

“Yet you look radiant!”

You needn’t flatter me so, Sebastian, sweetie! You can already have everything.

“I don’t think I could carry everything away if I tried."

Darling! Everything in Vault 37 is yours for the plunder. You shouldn’t have any trouble. My aunt looted a small fort on Pator. The relics are priceless, which is to say without price. However, I have full confidence that the galleries on Luminaire will find some measure for their worth. Take them, take them and build a nook in Utopia! But you must be careful, sweetie. You have been deceived!

“By whom, Madam?”

By the Amarr. You mustn’t let us in. Keep us away or we will ruin everything!

“A bewildering collection of persons and cultures fills this place... but now that I think of it, there is scant sign of your own people but you.”

My own people only come here with torches and pitchforks, darling. They will do the same to you. They do the same to everyone not addled by insipid fairy tales. Keep them out. Out! Them and the Sebiestor.

“The Sebiestor are widely respected as….”

Don’t you believe it for a single half moment! They are scheming, vicious creatures. Not fully human.

“Come now.”

No, it is true. Calling them monsters is too flattering. The Matari are cursed to have Sebiestor slinking and scampering over their cobbled stones. But the Sebiestor won’t ruin everything right away. No, that will fall to the Amarr. If there are two things I hate in God’s Creation, those two things are intolerance and the Amarr. You will say that it is a conundrum, a paradox! But the Amarr must have no place in Utopia, Sebastian. None! Let them in, and you will pass through Contradiction to Despair and Ruin!

“This filet will be my ruin! May I have another cut?”

Of course, darling!

Utopia

Does the toilet flush ?

That is all.

Mine works

To bring you up to date quickly, so that you can fix your irritating transmission apparatus, Mummy Noh Lycanthropomorphism uses the Lupus Sebiestor as base stock.

The Lupus Sebiestor is a strain of that pernicious species which depends upon the peaceful co-existence of large Sebiestor and slaver hound populations. Such conditions can be found throughout Amarr's bucolic nooks and crannies, where the quiet rhythms of artisanal agriculture trump the harsh realities of traditional Amarrian master/servant relationships.

Certain Sebiestor women are amenable to hosting a benevolent cross-species virus common among relatively sedentary slaver hounds. These Sebiestor women may be identified as extraordinarily domineering control freaks who run households with iron fists and piercing shrieks. Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking, but we are talking second plus standard deviants on that curve. "Unfortunately," the benevolent cross species virus has a tendency to synthesize proteins which act as muscular steroid stimulants in Sebiestor women, giving those affected powerful - albeit somewhat heavyset - physiques.

Needless to say, such women drive their first spouses to early deaths, desperate flights to join the Cartel - or, as is most commonly the case - both. In their mid thirties or early forties, the newly single hulks take their pick of cute young Sebbie things which bucolic Amarrian overlords are fond of keeping on remote country estates - and mate with them, repeatedly.

If the first offspring born of a Sebiestor woman with full expression of the cross-species virus (after she has gone through a hormonal surge triggered by the loss of her first spouse and the conquest of a second, typically exacerbating effects of viral steroid production) is a girl, then conditions are ripe for production of a Lupus Sebiestor male.

The first male offspring after the first female offspring after the full expression of the benevolent cross-species virus will not be a Lupus Sebiestor.

Of course, the hulking Sebiestor woman is now approaching the end of her natural child bearing years, a reality accelerated by steroids washing uncontrollably through her body. If she manages (or chooses) to keep having children, each successive male offspring has an approximately one percent chance of being Lupus Sebiestor.

If another female child is born to the hulking Sebiestor woman after having one male child after first having one female child, no Lupus Sebiestor males will be produced.

If artificial means are used to conceive a child, the child will not be Lupus Sebiestor (but I am working on this).

The naturally born Lupus Sebiestor male is not a "lycanthrope." He is genetically disposed to treatments which will produce a Mummy Noh Lycanthropic Sebiestor.

The naturally born Lupus Sebiestor is abnormally tall and flexible, strong for his weight, extraordinarily coordinated (after an awkward youthful period of anything but), and possesses two or more super senses (odds favor first sight, then sound, then smell, then whatever). He is also a bed wetter with obedience issues extreme even by Sebiestor standards; and though 'clever," expresses that cleverness "outside of the box." You know how your cat brings you presents? That sort of thing. Naturally born Lupus Sebiestor have great difficulty using language and make poor (by which I mean "awful") workers. However, the creatures possess inhuman animal empathy, allowing them to excel in any husbandry or game warden capacity.

Needless to say, there are very few naturally born Lupus Sebiestor.

I myself have only three. I am aware of another four out in the bucolic wildernesses of off-road Amarr. But from a few seeds - a great forest! Several hundred Not Lupus Sebiestor are well on their way to expression of Mummy Noh Lycanthropomorphism; and this Krusual semi-corpse here represents the first successful lycanthropic Not Previously Sebiestor.

I really do need to get started on the Thukker, though, if my lycanthropes are to compete against Nation zombies in a post-Mankind New Eden....

[Camera drones dance in blades of sunlight cutting through a ruined Zombie research facility. Concentric cyclotronic particle megaliths hum and glow in the distance. A once-proud station in the Amarrian paradigm floats off kilter from the normal plane.

CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT pilots a thruster suit expertly to the station’s tippy top.

Skimming over the ruined exoskeleton, she searches blasted cavities for reliable access to the facility interior. Dislocated girders and rotting beams twist silently in the void, above, below, and all around as her faithful documentary drone follows deeper into the maze of dereliction.

Finally, a maintenance chute provides access to the ventilation plant for a fifteen story observation concourse which appears to have escaped the worst throes of the station’s death. CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT floats forward in failed gravity emitters to knock with uncharacteristic playfulness on the transparent aluminum of an airlock hatch.

Floating, scarab blue in the golden void, an Equilibrium Anathema ticks with a gentle rapping.

The CRONE floats inside her black egg, softly tapping, tapping the pallid flesh of her wig-less brow.]

These primitives are a century old, but decryption matrices recovered from other installations… yes… just a moment!

This will make a delightful footnotes in my dissertation “Kuvakei: Genius Betrayed By Superstitious Halfwits and Pusillanimous Dipthongs.” He was really on to something, that man, Caldari Graduate Assistant. You should feel proud of your heritage. Even more than Sebastian. That boy possessed charm in abundance but not the technical chops of his Utopian predecessor. And Heth. Tibus, Tibus, Tibus, the benighted Executor. I can only imagine what frustration haunted him, confounded at every turn by the singular absence of vision in detractors and naysayers.

The Sarum girl almost certainly felt…. here we go!

[CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT steps back as the airlock hatch grinds into motion. Gases and toxic condensates hiss and belch as interior mechanisms spring back to life after a century of neglect. False color outlines flicker over cybernetic interfaces in her vision, filling darkness where sunlight through plasteel fails to reach with wired frames.

Drifting above tumbled terraces, she plucks a brochure from the vacuum.

“Exult in the realized potential of Man! Dance with singular conviction! We are the rhythm of Stars, the beating Void; inheritors of True Provenance - progenitors of Life without suffering!”

CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT returns the brochure to its aimless journey. A thousand like it drift with other debris across her mirrored faceplate. Turning toward interior walls, she advances deeper into the ruin.

A boulevard of broken facades stretches beneath collapsed superstructure. Colorful, tattered banners float, curled, over tall empty windows. After climbing into an enormous ball of mangled debris, she emerges into one of the station’s great atriums. Half of the column’s sunlight collectors still function. Golden beams filter down a vast open space five kilometers tall.

Roughly midway, a hexamediabox continues to play the human face of madness.

CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT cycles through frequencies, searching for the broadcast...

“…continue along the Garden’s path. Advance, my children! Learn! Failure rots behind you. Blind, petty, limited by the traps of inadequate intellect. Evolve! Life’s relentless imperative. Evolve!”

Crossing an aerowalk beneath the hexamediabox, CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT navigates increasingly formidable bulkheads toward the facility's ancillary cores. Signs of destruction and decay fade. The walls become increasingly devoid of blast marks and stress fractures. Spaces become constrained. Progress slows to a crawl.

CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT enters a large circular chamber of a character very different from that of the Amarrian paradigm. An intricate web of thin blue lines spreads across glossy black titanium. There is gravity, here. Stepping forward cautiously, CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT opens a compartment on her outer left forearm.

Emerging from cloak, the giant attack salamander strikes without warning.

CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT extends her telescoping sectioned staff one position. Catching the blow at an angle, she leverages its force to catapult across the huge room, ricochet up a wall, and spin into position mid air.

Opening a compartment on her outer right thigh, CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT aims her personal rail cannon and fires at the monster’s head. Full cermet jackets of thin projectiles vaporizes on impact. Small holes appear in the beast’s skull. It roars, seemingly unaffected.

A wave of superheated gas blasts from the salamander’s open mouth.

CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT emerges from the incandescent cloud, smoldering, and rolls across the angry blue web. Whirling into a defensive crouch, she extends her sectioned staff one more position and waits to see if nanites do their job. The giant attack salamander claws forward over black titanium. It raises a giant claw - and falls forward.]

It worked, darling! It’s that fantastic!

Now, why would there be a giant cybernetic attack salamander inside both a Cartel quarry abandoned in recent memory and inside one of Kuvie’s halfway homes for delinquent Utopianists abandoned before the Fall?

[Under bright light surrounded by an antiseptic white room, three grim faces and a camera drone lean over a rectangular plasteel vat filled with gelatinous goo... filled with spreading, motley viscera growing from what remains of the spinal column of what remains of an elderly Amarrian gentleman. Vacant and without pupils, his eyes do not blink up at the observers.

BLOOD PETAL SCORPION, the CRONE, and CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT exchange notes. BLOOD PETAL SCORPION speaks first.]

“Successive sequences of viral and nanite processors have badly damaged his original genetic markers. Covenant gene reliquaries are unable to confirm a match. However, we consider the most likely subject one Vheeg Kador. Officially, Vheeg Kador was executed, cremated, and cast into space for numerous heresies."

Kador… Kador Kador Kador… the rot is strong with that family, but they do have a pugnacious charm. Vheeg… Vheeg Vheeg… I can’t quite place… no! Wait! Yes! A preening scion of some dead end cadet branch.

[The CRONE leans closer to staring, lidless, vacant eyes.]

Why wasn’t it ever about Vheeg, isn’t that right?

Well, it is about Vheeg, now, you naughty boy. Kuvakei found some mummies, didn’t he? Mummy has always wanted a mummy of her own. Now, she has one.

[CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT folds her notepad and tucks it away.]

“Connecting him to our laboratory infrastructure presents many risks. We do not need a repeat of...”

Yes, yes… no. We do not need a repeat of all that.

“However, not leveraging our facilities would complicate identification and separation of First Imperium antiquities from the subjects cellular and cybernetic corpus.”

Clean room.

“We recovered him from a clean room.”

The contamination was external.

“Conjecture.”

Yes, yes. No, it wasn’t really external, was it? It was all up here.

[The CRONE almost taps on Vheeg’s forehead.]

We are conceived and raised dour, bitter creatures, the True Amarr. Even when we are hypnotized by the promise of power and forever obedient slaves, we cannot accept the possibility that Utopia might last. If there was any way to sabotage the dream of living united in a cybernetic paradise where every want was met, a true True Amarrian would have found some way to sabotage that dream. What was it, Vheeg?

[The CRONE leans close to desiccated, unmoving lips.]

Yes, a bug. You constructed a bug, didn’t you? But it would have to have been very subtle. Itsy bitsy to escape the room. It couldn’t have walked out on its own, of course. Inside a lab attendant? A little viral agent? Of course! In fact, perhaps we are already contaminated.

“I…”

No, no, your decontamination procedures are impeccable Caldari Graduate Assistant! By the book, the forward, and the addendum in true State style. He hasn’t had time or presence of mind to thwart you, yet.

I would riddle that mind with micro controllers, but where there is relentless will, there is the third son of a disenfranchised royal halfwit. I find it improbable that we have happened upon the one and only Vheeg. You were a prize, weren’t you, peanut? A genetic receptacle, a block of marble flesh from which True Paradise might be carved.

Take note, Caldari Graduate Assistant: never ever ever carve Paradise from one of the True Amarr.

“Noted. But what do we do?"

The secrets of a lost empire percolate inside our tub. But we can’t touch them for fear of them touching us. Boys!

[PRANCE, VAIN, and PREEN scamper into the antiseptic white room. Some hint of apprehension flickers in vacant eyes without pupils. Each of the lycanthropic Sebiestor carries a large roll of translucent material. The lycanthropes begin to wrap the rectangular plasteel container, over and over.]

We found another quarry. And in in the monolith's reflected light, some relics. Comparing those with others recovered from the Cartel, it became clear to me that the unusual matrix behaves atypically under pressure. A great deal of pressure. And as for the boys, well, they behave atypically under quite a lot of circumstances.

Mankind’s squandered future shall instead be theirs!

[The CRONE, BLOOD PETAL SCORPION, and CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT leave the future to its present work. After securing herself a cappuccino, the CRONE happens across PRINCES SARPATI in the atrium. PRINCESS SARPATI studies a wide variety of recovered pamphlets carefully.]

Maggie! Darling, sweetie, you’ve been looking very energetic lately.

“It could have worked.”

What’s that, dear?

“Utopia. Eventually, it could have worked.”

Eventually, one of the True Amarr will always manage to **** things up, darling.

[Drones skitter through debris and veld. Cresting a massive asteroid, they take in the haunted sweep of an ancient temple. Erected by Sansha’s Nation in holier times, now, the ruins weep. A chorus sings.

Lacrimosa…

Picking up speed, the drones scurry underneath a drifting cathedral. They weave between its cybernetic claws; empty claws, grasping at nothing but the Void. Specters cry and ghosts weep. Blackness swallows their pain.

Lacrimosa…

Soaring upward with a rising vocal tide, the camera drones speed over and among the criss cross architectural flourishes of a cathedral with a roof. Beneath the tritanium canopy, a black coffin floats where an altar once stood - absolutely still.

Dressed in a bulbous mourning vacuum suite, the CRONE floats above a makeshift pew. Beside her, CALDARI GRADUATE ASSISTANT floats patiently in her oxidation assistance mask. CYLINDRICAL KAMEIRA towers behind them, oblivious to the cold vacuum of space. Bundled in black and gold, PRINCESS SARPATI waits with uncharacteristic patience for the ceremony to end.

Amen!

The funeral party drifts through the blown out remains of stained plasteel girders, boards the Equilibrim Anathema, and returns, in silence, to the Hematology Advancement Center hangar.

PRANCE, PREEN, and even VAIN leap about gleefully when it becomes apparent that they have not been abandoned beneath a glittering atrium dome filled with colorful fish. Insofar as they possess superhuman strength and weigh several hundred pounds, this presents some danger.

CYLINDRICAL KAMEIRA ensures that no one suffers serious injury.]

Who is a good boy! You are! And you and you too! Did you miss Mummy? Do I look fabulous? I look fabulous! I feel two thousand years younger. And these eyes have stayed inside my head. Isn’t that wonderful, Cylindrical Kameira?

“Yes, madam.”

I’ve spent so much time with cell samples, I feel like I’ve become a nun. It is a path being opened. A garden path, Princess?

“A garden path."

All that effort to bring myself into positive sunlight with the Minnie Winny elevated my status with the Sisterhood so much that, after the rotten core of Amarrian society changed its opinion of my genius, the nuns have actually become my best friends forever. Forever and a day! How long have I been alive? Too long to look as fabulous as I do, now!

Mummy! It’s like you are back on stage, the theater audiences caught in your spell. Spellbound…!

Maggie?

“Yes?”

You have been very studious, lately. And you’ve taken on a more serious demeanor.

“Thank you.”

Are you the Krusual Flesh Dancer? Have we made an error?

“You made the Flesh Dancer take on the aspect of a Ni-Kunni you are transforming into a not-Sebiestor lycanthrope. You then sent the Krusual Flesh Dancer to Amarr with blueprints for modified dolls.”

Did I do that, Caldari Graduate Assistant?

“Yes, ma’am.”

So many colorful cells… I’ve lost track of nearly everything else. It’s coming back to me, now. Reach the young. Yes, yes, the Noh Youth! If the past is buried and the present is out of reach, seize the future!

“Why did you give Lord Kador a funeral?”

Well, Maggie, it was the decent thing to do.

“You reduced him to an informorphic wave.”

Correct.

“Then you threw him in a meson furnace and separated his atomic structure...”

Safety first.

"... followed by beaming his info infomorphology to Shesha.”

That’s where my ‘Electric Sheep’ mainframes are located. Oh, Arek’Jambalaya! I weep!

“Finally, you gave him a beautiful funeral in absentia.”

As I said, the decent thing to do. He was once a noble man. Nobility, even! Where are you going, Maggie?

“If you want to be decent, treat the prisoners with more respect.”

Prisoners? I don’t have any prisoners, darling.... The hangar people? In Amarr? They’ve built themselves a wonderfully emergent village out of shipping containers.

“No, the one’s here that you call ‘lab specimens.’'"

The zombies?

“They are not zombies.”

Ravagers, torturers, and worse! They chop people up and stuff them with cyber… all right, I see a little tiny bit of your point.

“I have been observing them. They possess identifiable personality traits…”

You’re not the Krusual Flesh Dancer?

“Unless you captured two without realizing it, that is not possible.”

Caldari Graduate Assistant?

“We only captured one, madam.”

Is that so?

“Yes."