Jonathan A Countyman
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Chapter Twenty-Four A Friendly Game
🕑 Added 2021-09-04 16:00:54 +0000 UTCKiru ended up joining Megumi for a game of ‘Fleet Commander. While May headed out to join the others in the lounge after she cleaned up for the day. It certainly was an interesting game. The game allowed an unlimited deck size but played best with a small deck. The recommended deck size was apparently twenty cards. Running out of cards in your deck, required you to reshuffle the discard pile into your deck. It also had three types of cards. The most important of which was the flagship card, each deck only had one, and it was played at the start of the game. The goal of the game was to sink the opposing flagship, by reducing its hull points to zero. To this end, you had ship cards, which summoned ships to the field and cost red energy, and Action cards which naturally used blue energy. Action cards were pretty much self-explanatory.
As she studied her current hand and considered her move, she asked a question she had been wondering about. “You mentioned earlier that your avatar was a Starmage-class biomech. What exactly...”
“Does that mean?” she asked, finishing the question and interrupting at the same time. She stretched out her wings, “These aren’t for show, they are fully functional. I also possess a few subsystems you don’t have, although you have a couple I don’t. I don’t have a cloak for example. I do, however, have a stardrive, and a Makaiju Emulator.”
She played an Escort Destroyer ship card to the field, and asked, “And what do those do?”
Megumi glanced at the destroyer card now on the field, and said, “A stardrive is a biological propulsion system capable of both sublight, and FTL translation. My wings are actually part of my stardrive, as they are in the species my Avatar is modeled after, the Soleans. As for a Makaiju Emulator, it is a device that allows machines to use magic.”
She played an action card that tripled the weapons rating of her new destroyer till the end of turn, and ordered it to attack the only ship protecting Megumi’s flagship. With her buffed attack, the defending cruiser’s hull points dropped to zero. Removing the light cruiser from the field. “Magic? Sounds like something from a fantasy novel.” commented Kiru, while noting the other item as intriguing as well.
“Not really, when you boil it down to its simplest. Magic is the power of the mind over reality. It is the power to bend reality to your will. It is the ultimate goal of the path of Psionics, called Transcendent Psionics. Many of the more powerful Precursor races, as you call my creators, had knowledge of this path. My Creators had their Elders, the Alteans had their Ascendents, the Ushnok had their Sages, the Protari had their Archons, the Yik’ni’Tal had their Grand Mystics.”
With her last two blue energy, she played a couple of shield cards to provide a temporary shield point boost to her Escort Destroyer, allowing it to absorb more damage until the end of Megumi’s turn. “Sounds like everybody had their magic users, although I am guessing the Empire’s were the most powerful.”
“No, the Abyss Lords of the Fallen are by far the most powerful magic users to ever grace the universe. Thankfully they are locked away in the abyss, where they can do no harm.” Said Megumi, as Kiru finished her turn by attacking Megumi’s flagship with her flagship, but she barely did any damage thanks to its buffed pool of shield points.
Megumi drew a hand, and studied it. “I have never heard of an Abyss Lord.” commented Kiru.”
As Megumi played an action card that increased her red energy by three, she said “Be glad you have not. They are vile twisted creatures that once terrorized the universe, if not for the First Lords giving their lives to seal them away, they might still be terrorizing the universe. Unfortunately, lesser ones do occasionally escape the abyss, and when they do they cause nothing but trouble. The vile creatures revel in pain, and suffering.”
“Think one of those is responsible for what is going on in the Imperium?”
As she played a ‘Battleship’ card, she said, “I considered that, but no. What they did to you doesn’t fit their usual Modus Operandi. They aren’t all that big on controlling a society from the shadows, but while it might not be an Abyss Lord of the Fallen, they aren’t the only creatures locked away in the Abyss. So I can’t count out an escapee from the dimension of the Abyss, but I also can’t rule out a local race doing this either. Without knowing more, I can’t make any conclusions about who.”
Megumi then played two cards. The first allowed her new battleship to attack twice, and the second was the same card Kiru played the last turn, that tripled the Battleship’s weapon rating. Kiru gulped, she might be in trouble. Although she wasn’t dead yet. “I do have a couple of questions. Who are these First Lords? What is the Abyss? How did these Abyss Lords end up sealed in the Abyss. Also, if your creators had stardrives why did they build ships like this.”
Megumi calmly attacked, and said, “Quite the list of questions you have. I’ll try to answer them. The First Lords were the first Soleans. They were very accomplished in their day, and possessed knowledge now lost to the Empire. When the Fallen came they fought them, supposedly using their knowledge to create weapons that could amplify the psionic powers of the wielder, but even with such weapons they could not defeat the Fallen. Not as long as their god still walked this plane. However, killing the Fallen God was well beyond even the eldest of the first lords power, but sealing him was not. A grand magic was worked, one fueled by the very life blood of the First Lords, which made it very powerful indeed. You see Transcendent Psionics requires energy to achieve an effect, the more energy you provide the more powerful the effect. The Grand Magic of the First Lords was a spell of such magnitude that it rewrote reality. You see the Abyss did not always exist, not before that spell was worked.
“The first lords created the hellish dimensional plane of the Abyss, and sealed the fallen within it, but at great cost. Most of them died during the attempt, others were left severely drained and were doomed to waste away over the next few centuries. Less than a hundred First Lords actually survived the attempt. Of the 79 that not only survived but recovered, only one remains today. The other 78 either vanished into the cosmos never to be seen again or allowed themselves to die when they lost the will to live any longer.”
Kiru’s destroyer melted under the attack, and then Megumi attacked Kiru’s flagship. It survived... barely. “You mean they committed suicide!?”
Megumi shook her head, as she discarded her remaining cards, “No. Any race sufficiently powerful in the Arts of the Mind is effectively immortal. Yet great age eventually wears on the mind, and they may lose the will to live. When that happens, an immortal will simply waste away, and no level of intervention will stop that. Slow it maybe, but not stop it.”
Kiru drew a hand for what might be her last turn. “Immortality, kind of hard to believe that is even possible.”
“With magic, anything is possible. The only question is how much are you willing to pay? Anyway, I still haven’t answered your one question. The answer is actually rather simple. Yes, it is true my creators are fully capable of space flight on their own, but not for their first five hundred years. Give them enough time, and an Elder can be a match for any ship just like the Star Dragons. However ships like me, have always been their homes, where they raise their young. Where they live, and have families. We are also their shield, and protection. Not to mention, they can only go so far before they need a rest.”
Kiru didn’t like her hand, and while thinking out her turn. Commented, “Always been? Surely there must have been a time when the Soleans didn’t have ships.”
“Depends on how you look at it, but the generally accepted view is that the Solean People have always been spacefaring. The short answer is, that ten thousand years before the founding of the Empire in the very first year of the Solean calendar, the Solean homeworld was rendered uninhabitable by orbital bombardment, but a handful of proto-Solean ships survived. These ships encountered an anomaly five years later, one that reshaped them into the first Soleans, and spat them out on the other side of the Solean home galaxy about fifty years later.”
Sighing, she said, “I guess I can see the opening point there. What kind of anomaly was it? Some kind of wormhole?”
“No, a hyper ion storm.”
Deciding her first move, she sacrificed a unit of blue energy, and played a card that would let her draw three more. It was a risk, but if she drew the card she needed, she might be able to win this turn. “Kind of surprised they survived. Most ships get ripped apart by the wave front. I guess they must have had some really impressive shields back then.”
Megumi giggled, “They didn’t. Solean ships didn’t have much in the way of energy shielding until 427 SDE. At that point in history we had little interest in energy shielding, we found it too easy to defeat. All Solean ships of that era boosted impressive armor, and it was that armor that absorbed the brunt of the wavefront.”
An image of a ship suddenly appeared above their game. As she studied it, Megumi elaborated, “This is a Battlehawk class heavy cruiser. They were the mainstay warship of the Solean fleet for centuries until they were replaced by the Solfire class heavy cruisers. It is also the perfect example of Solean military design for that age. Notice the robust hull configuration, the numerous beam weapon mounts, and thick plating. These were real brutes on the battlefield, able to take more punishment than most dreadnoughts of their age. They famously carried a particle beam weapon called the Phase Lance, which fired a phased particle stream that could carve through most forms of ship armor including Neutronium with incredible ease, while remaining modestly effective against energy shields. They also carried another weapon called an Electro Cannon, an ionized plasma weapon that could overload most energy shields of that era in a single hit. That weapon also wrecked havoc with ship systems, but did little in the way of hull damage.”
Summoning a frigate to the field with the last of her red energy, she commented, “The ship does look to be rather rugged, and it must have been something in its day if it was in use for so long. Although, it makes me wonder what the Solean battleships of that era were like.”
Megumi shrugged, “They likely would have been an upscaled version of the Battlehawk. Kind of pointless to wonder though, since the Solean fleet didn’t employ battleships until 912 SDE. Although that battleship drew from design lessons learned from heavy cruisers like the Battlehawk, and her successor the Solfire. In a way, that makes this cruiser class my oldest known ancestor.”
She was about to ask why, when it suddenly occurred to her. They had lost their homeworld, and only had a handful of ships. It was impressive that they could employ cruisers like that Battlehawk. A Battleship was a significantly larger investment, and with their limited resources it might not have been one they could afford. It wasn’t the first time she had seen economics play its ugly hand. A part of her wondered how a people with no homeworld ended up founding an Empire, but now did not seem to be the time to ask, instead she commented,“Well she is certainly an impressive ancestor. I will give you that.”
“That she is.”
Kiru then played another triple weapons card, but this time she played it on her flagship. Following up with a card she had just drawn. It allowed her to attack the enemy flagship directly with one of her ships, but required two ships to be on the field. Sacrificing the one for the direct attack. She removed her frigate from the field, and then made a direct attack on Megumi’s flagship. Ending the game, as her buffed flagship reduced the other ship’s hull points to zero.
“Good move there. Guess you win this round.”
