Antarctic Termite

Expanding Horizons content.

*shuffles papers*

I should've known writing six characters would come back to bite me in the ass

Cambria - The Cloud Forest

A strange spirit in the woods.

Cambria - The Cloud Forest

_{Cambria — The Cloud Forest — Waterfall Lake}

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Calign sat very still. Its eyes were open. It couldn't see much, though, on account of the hooded tickspider covering one side of its face. The crawler's stout legs passed over Calign's left eye, and Cal kept its face as neutral as possible, an exercise in control and calm. By now, it came easily.

The rikinule, however, had none such poise. After slipping on Cal's forehead, it took a heavy tumble and landed with a faint thud into its lap. With some effort, it began to flip itself right-side-up, and crawled out of Calign's robe, about as bear-like as a squat eight-legged arachnid could ever be. Cal cocked its head at it.

"Have you seen my pipe?" it asked the rikinule.

The rikinule looked back, as if in shrug. Calign pursed its lips in some consternation. A lacewing the size of a small bird alighted on its shoulder. Cal turned its gaze, but not its head.

"...Already?"

The lacewing shuffled. Calign closed its eyes and breathed. It stood up and turned from the lake of dark and quiet water, watching amphibians bask in the fog-filtered sunlight, and turned away into the moss forest, tying its dress around its waist as it left visibility. Unable to see what it was standing on, the lacewing departed.

"Keep an eye on them," it said to a giant damselfly perched like an owl on an overhanging branch. The damsel cocked its head, stalked eyes glinting, looking for the demigod's voice. "They brought their flying buzzer." Calign didn't know the word 'drone', but the object in the ATV was unmistakable.

The damselfly took off and Calign strode towards the hum of a hover engine. It was about time it met its guests.

Cal hoped it wouldn't do anything embarrassing.

Cambria - The Cloud Forest

@Scarescrow Welcome! I'll try to answer as best I can, subject to us figuring out more details for the lore.

The Second Sun was a single-use weapon, now discarded. It fired probably one or two decades ago, though we're a little fuzzy on the exact time- long enough for conditions to stabilise beyond 'everything's still 100% on fire', short enough for survivors to stick around and invasives not to take over completely.

I'm not inclined to play around too much with global solar radiation, since there's not much the players can actually do about that other than constantly worry about protective gear and sunblock. So the magnetic field and ozone layer are likely still intact-ish. Cancer rates high, though. Plenty of ruined nuclear engines around too.

Volcanoes, unlikely, impact-based tsunamis and earthquakes, definitely, both from falling spacecraft and falling debris from the shattered moon. Global super-hurricanes, sure, warming does that. Continent-sized forest fires outside the Plateau, definitely, at least while there were forests left to burn. Bioweapons and nanyte shenanigans, sure.

For some details about the locals we've thought up so far, here: Details on biomes!

North Sector: Coal Forest

The air of Cambria is heavy with blasted oceans. In the Morass, dense clouds from the north are trapped against the mountains, delivering fog and heavy rain, obscuring the desolation below. A cloud forest has formed here, and is threaded with a million streams, and bogs and shallow rivers come and go with the years.

The trees here are strange and old. Grand scaly ferns compete with puzzle-trees and puzzle-grass, and clubmosses rise, like towers without a single branch, to cast their shade between them. In the waters crawl nymphs and tadpoles of abnormal size, which grow into dragonflies and amphibians larger still. Some are stout enough to roam the damp earth, digging out great headless mites. They dare not look into the deeper burrows, where myriapods may be found even larger than they.

This far north, the lines between reptile, mammal and salamander are not yet clear. Synapsids wander and rumble their calls in the fog, some lumbering and scaly, warming themselves with solar sails, and others... less patient. Cynodonts groom each other's fur and snap at the winged lizards that glide above, chasing down the tusked and dog-like lystrosaurs if they have the courage to face such a heavy beast. If not, they lounge at water's edge, watching the armoured fish suck up specks of nothing in the mud, and bolting when amphibians swallow them in turn.

As the air warms, the cloud forest retreats slowly up and up the mountains, and so it has preserved its fantastic diversity perhaps better than any other part of the plateau. It will only last so long. There is only so much higher they can flee.

South Sector: Conifer Woods

Where the land is higher, the ground is drier, and what rivers do flow down from the mountains feed into dryland lakes. Cycads fruit and form oases in the arid woods, and grand conifers stand alone among stones. Here a great many reptiles compete for the water and food, and as the billabongs grow smaller each year, the competition gets fiercer. Crocodiles built like boars arise to chase in the day, when sun is hot, and nothosaurs built like lizards lay claim to the lakes and the streams, sunning themselves on webbed feet before they fish.

Stocky archosaurs, horned shringas and broad-headed rhyncos, wander in search of food. They are hounded by slender coelophysid dinosaurs, but when the snap of a heavy beak is too frightening, or a small head is tucked under spiked and plated shoulders, the young theropods scatter to snap at stoneflies and lacewings, and roaches of every size and colour. The roaches, at least, do well.

Here, we see Cambria's last remaining sauropods, and they are small compared to their family- but who's counting? Standing two or three meters tall at the shoulder, they seem even larger on two legs, with their necks stretched high to graze the treetops. Long-tailed dactyls perch for a moment between a stegosaur's spikes before fluttering on to their nests, once among trees and now, ever more often, among pylons.

East Sector: Prairie

At last we have come upon the birds and the bees, though the birds have teeth and claws and long bony tails. The bees at least seem normal enough, and the foliage is recognisable: figs and flowers, grasses and sycamores. The familiarity only makes it easier to spot the sickness among the leaves. But for now, the grazing is still good. The wildlife eats well, and it shows.

Like wild cattle, hadrosaurs lay down in their hundreds to chew cud, and like jackals, dromaeosaurs follow in hope of a straggler. Their feathers are bright, their bodies warm, and where they can, they chase their larger ostrich-like sisters across the fields. The latter are called Hexing, and the former, of course, raptors.

All across the south, mammals scamper and sometimes prowl, badger-like. Troodons chase them in the dusk like avian foxes, getting up to all sorts of mischief around the CCF headquarters. All are wary not to be snapped up by the huge azhdarchs that peer down from above. They are not the most fearsome of the Plateau's predators, but they are the largest, and they see far from the sky and their towering necks. Those who die and are not defended swiftly disappear down their massive beaks, perhaps taken to the mountains to be fed to their young.

And all the while, a family of shark-toothed tyrants watches, raising their own hungry chicks where they can. The herds on which they feed are a fraction of what they were, and the giant theropods hang by a thread, a single wavering link at the top of a once-grand tower of life that now threatens to collapse.

Dead Coast

Unlike the altitudinal borders of the Morass or the maze of cliffs and mesas beyond the arid woods, the prairie has no fixed eastern edge. It fades slowly away, becomes humid and sickly, the verdant grasses taken over little by little by alien weeds clamouring for the only fertile ground left on the planet.

Dragons walk here. Huge hexapedal aliens tear up the turf and spawn by fission, consuming anything organic to fill their lobes with alkane fuel. Once a domestic transgenesyte, they now roam wild with no one to harvest them, swollen with volatile fluid and burning it off as they feed. Soon enough the grasses are replaced by self-replicating biofibre mesh, a wild colony of nanytes too foreign to be called flora, growing tangles of razor wire with which to defend itself.

Altitude falls further. Huge trees have taken over, perfect, solitary, pretty trees with perfect curves in perfect colours. Their swaying psychedelic splendour was designed to be low-maintenance and large-scale, and designed well. Patterned roots weed out any native plant for tens of metres around, and sapling-drones slink about on tendrils, electrocuting trespassers. Bones are plentiful here.

At the very edge of the waste lies the final graveyard: a dry reef, skeletons of coral and fish-armour still clearly visible high above the dust. It is beautiful in its own right, and a haunting reminder of what can be so quickly lost.

The Waste

There is little to see in the Waste. Former seafloor has become sand, and silt, and salt in enormous quantities. The hot, hypersaline oceans beyond raise heavy winds, and dust storms often join the clouds in obscuring visibility. The place alternates between desert and huge puddles of rainwater, a short-lived shadow of the ocean it once was.

Wrecks are visible every now and again, bits and pieces of spacecraft that broke up in orbit, and meteorites are common. Tall probes blink in the haze, their origin unknown. Whatever they're looking for isn't here. There's nothing to see.

Beyond, the continental shelf falls away into an ocean of acidic brine. Former sea platforms that once sat near the surface now tower high above it, some still inhabited. Self-sufficient colonies of hermits and the desperate have set up shop here, minding their own business as if they have any choice in the matter.

West Sector: Shipwreck

A downed spaceliner sits on an otherwise featureless part of the waste. Several kilometers long and bearing too little in the way of survivors or military hardware to be worth salvaging, it has been left to its own devices for decades, forming lakes in its belly and caverns in its limbs.

A substantial number of Cambria's invasive aliens fled from this craft when their food began to run short, and few ever returned. Pets, pot plants, live food, and other luxury species now wander the Plateau, often in much hardier feral forms. What remains are robots: technicians, assistants and labourers of every shape imaginable.

Most, of course, are inoperable or dead. But some are lively. Born of a miracle of science or accident, a single droid whose name is the Grandfather been tinkering with itself and others since the war began, bringing to life a sparse handful of cobbled-together sons. The family grows bigger and smarter year by year, struggling to build a stable life in the ruined mother ship.

Communication with the fledgling culture has proven difficult, as they are tetchy around outsiders and their creole has no reference point for translation. By night they are known to wander into the Plateau, seeking organic resources they can find nowhere else. Sometimes they leave gifts. Mostly they leave well alone, and expect to be done the same.

The Last True Sea: Trench

Off the northeast 'coast' of the Plateau lies a trench that, now that the seas around have evaporated, happens to form an effective natural rain trap. This has preserved both the water's depth and relative salinity at levels not too far from where they were originally. Much like the Plateau, the Last True Sea now forms a slowly dying oasis of life as it was before the war.

Near-perpetual cloud cover places a stark limit on the abundance of food, but the region is volcanically active and there is life enough around its many vents and seeps. Sometimes the melting nuclear cores of fallen ships perform the same function. Like long-legged caterpillars, spined hallucigenids crawl around the vents' encrusting sponges, which are familiarly bright and colourful. Wiwaxids and marellas creep about, displaying scales, blades and elaborate antennae, alongside trilobites with big shimmery eyes and long curly spikes. Many-eyed animals swim above with mouths on long stalks, looking to pick out a meal from the well-armoured swarms. It's a small world, but a beautiful one.

Beyond, rangeomorphs sway and ripple on the barren stone and steel, pale fronds many metres long, fractally grown organisms of the most ancestral kind imaginable. Blips no grander than a tiny disc of patterned jelly are the liveliest representatives of animalkind, and are complacently preyed upon by spriggs not yet complex enough to be called worms. Larger anomalies swim about, man-sized paddlers slowly sifting food from the brine. Like whales, they are the greatest beasts in the region, and like whales, they were the first to disappear.

The Last True Sea: Reef

Near the base of the Morass, where fresh water flows and mountains block the passage of the clouds, the sky is still bright. Below it blinks a thriving reef, the likes of which has survived well enough to grow over any wrecks that may have fallen here.

Corals, cyaths and algae form brilliant layers of living architecture, and sea lilies perch all around to flare their flowering tentacles. Some of these flowers are larger than trees, and give shelter to every kind of sea-beetle. With them live slug-like cephalopods in a tall witch's hat of a shell, creeping about and ducking away under their hats should an armoured fish swim by, perhaps migrating from the Morass above.

Both these little families have relatives with no need to hide. Long-tailed sea scorpions brandish pincers, spines and bristles on their powerful arms, and are more than large enough to tear through a diving suit. The cousins of the cephalopods grow larger still. A towering spike drifts by in the distance: slow it may be, but don't come too close, for it is curious and the tentacles below are not fragile.

don't stop the buck when it comes / it's the dawn, you'll see

Error is the mechanism by which truth is pruned from assumption.

The words echoed in vibrational speech through the body of a whale, beached by sea serpents and left alive in the shallow water. Heartworm's tongues extended like spiderlimbs hair-thin through it all. From tongue to tail-tip.

Unseeing, we strive at the borders of what we know.

A warband of Grotcarar and other tribesfolk stood guard uneasily waist-deep in the lagoon, some perched on the whale or treading water. Without Vosh, every instinct within them cried of loneliness and danger.

Sometimes we break through.

Some sixty Vosh riddled the inside of the whale. They followed Heartworm's lead, mending wounds it had made, studying twists of sinew it had implanted, conversing in a way none had had the opportunity to converse before: in a crowd.

When the next words came, they listened to the lesson.

Thought is mobile.

When Tauranga came to the Grotcarar, they were divided. Some said that they needed no God, and no living God could impress herself upon them. Most agreed. Power would not sway them. They were already sworn to a cause.

Their Vosh did not see things that way.

Imagination extrapolates the known.

The original Grot carried the original Vosh. When the Many Eyed Emperor slew both from the inside, their spirits escaped, intertwined, to soar forevermore in the hearts of their children. So went the story.

But Vosh are born in darkness. The myth of surface-dwellers has no bearing on the world they inhabit. To them, there was only one god, the Prime Vosh. Their ancient memory of Angelblood Ridge was unrecognisable to any other folk. It was a gruesome one.

They'd lost their only god.

And now they'd found another.

The limits of art dictate the limits of science.

Parasites or symbiotes? The latter, by all measure, but when Grotling will collided with that of their Vosh, they all too rapidly became the former. Vosh did not make many demands, but the ones they had they were well capable of enforcing.

The Emaciator offered them knowledge. The Emaciator offered them freedom. The Emaciator numbered them and listened to their voice, where no one else had. So they listened to the Emaciator. They learned its story. Its story resembled their own.

Power is the product of beauty.

The Vosh of the Grotcarar followed the one they named Prʐywra, in their own tongue, and where the fearful and the stubborn would not follow in turn, they were left behind.

And the people of Erjang whispered of the hidden god who had called the spiders to its fold and taught them of the dark things, the secret ways of Arkenflesh and schools of blood, and whom they knew only as SHUVRA, for their mouths were insufficient to form the true words.

don't stop the buck when it comes / it's the dawn, you'll see

Birth of the Marquisate
Part II: Subjugation

Tauga's boots smashed weeds as they furled and snapped at her form. The Venomweald sensed her from miles away, her presence vast and visible to the flora. They were not fooled by the transparency of her tongues. A god walked here.

Tauga felt something coming through her tendrils, swept them aside that it might pass undisturbed. Beyond, she could feel the workings of slaves mashing the pith of trees for their meal, held by nothing but the knowledge that they would be caught if they tried to run. She looked up. Through the goggles of her mask, she could clearly see the vast wings of the Valtanansa beating as they trailed their pod of dirigible cloudwhales above. They moved like the wings of an angel's marionette, Grotling muscle hooked onto a pair of Vosh limbs, pulling the boneless wings in a manner not unlike that of a certain demigod's ornithopter. Mechanical. Tireless.

Somewhere up there, the Grotlings had built their whaleback outposts. Tauga stood still and let the one in the jungle find her.

A metal thorn whipped downwards onto the back of her skull. She caught it one-handed. It had fallen into the exact line of a hain's cranial blind spot. Admirable.

Tauga had intended to toss back the spearhead, but something about it shook her hand when she tried, so she let it fall. It was pulled back sharply on a long rope. The Grotling emerged.

"...Where are your wings?"

The lithe monstrosity drew four knives in four hands and leapt for Tauga, screeching unutterable hells under her crest. Tauga parried with the back of her gloves and leapt five times her body height to smack the Grotling in the skull.

"Don't," she said. "Good moves, but."

The Grotling backed off a touch and flicked the rope spear. It coiled like a live thing and Tauga retreated, blurring to avoid its catch. A welt had risen on the warrior's face. Tauga let her tendrils settle back on the Grotling. It backed off, slightly. Adjusted its guard.

She can sense them, Heartworm reminded.

"Right." She beckoned to the warrior. "I'm not gonna get caught out by you. What's your name?"

"Eggshells get broken here," said the Grotling, or something like that, in Grotto. "Make a good slave or a sad corpse."

With two quick motions, Tauga drew her sidearm, a rear-toothed Grotling blade. It cut through a flower as it moved, and she felt her foe tense. She beckoned again. The Grotling laughed.

"I didn't fucking think so." She pointed the blade at the gap in the trees. "Why aren't you with them?"

"I catch slaves," said the Grotling.

"You're doing shit job of it," said Tauga, and parried half a dozen blows with one hand. "You're not an Overseer. Who are you?"

"Sasha will bring the aberration to heel." The grammar was such that Tauga was the one being introduced, and Sasha's name was only dropped in passing. Clever. Respectful, in a threatening way.

"No," said Tauga, and launched a brisk offensive. It was a short skirmish, and a violent one, and at the end of it Tauga sat perched on a branch at head height with four knives on the ground and a rope spear caught dangerously fast on the teeth of her blade. A variety of fresh wounds had opened around Sasha's hands and thighs. She could see a Vosh knitting together the edges of its host body's wounds, draining fat reserves as it moved. She started to see how fascinating the process really was.

Sasha raised her fists, bleeding. "You are Jukfonite."

"Not a monk," she said. That was all the word meant in Grotto; they had no concept of Jvan. "Think bigger."

Sasha snarled. "Demon."

"Almost," she said. "I won't waste your time. Watch." Heartworm emerged from her suit by its limbs, took apart her cranium and brain, arranged them in two ways, and repaired her in an instant. Sasha paused. To her, it was bizarre, impressive. To her Vosh, who knew the ways of flesh, could understand the action's true complexity, there was one explanation only.

"Voshbolo," said Tauga. Vosh carrier. And the Vosh in question-

"Valun eppkel as."

"No one sent me. I came down because I wanted to."

Grotlings are not especially partial to using gestures of the head to indicate attention. The lack of eyes accounts for that. Tauga was not yet attuned to the subtler gestures of latter Grotkind, and when her hand rose to point to the ophanim that flew above, she knew not that Sasha was already listening to them.

"Those aren't the weapons of people who die. They're soul weapons. Mine." She flicked her fingers and the colony changed shape, confounding the Valtanansa sent to investigate it and nearly bisecting at least one. She moved them again and they returned to previous orbits. "I've seen Tek-" Heartworm's limb flicked through her tongue, changing the syllable- "Tesnald take the form of a hain. I take after her. Do you know why?"

Sasha made a facial gesture, a slight lowering of the head.

"Thought so. Say it."

"Tesnald te un ghorrinaal."

"And his name is Karn." Tauga exhaled. The hardest part was over. Yes, Tesnald had a husband. And Tauranga was their son. The lie was told, and in the telling it had become truth; just like Tauga's godhood, her ancestry was created by her myth. The Blowfly lived.

"You have seven gods. I'm the eighth. I'm the Vosh-carrier, the one who tests. I own ten thousand slaves." She looked up. Heartworm gave her no cues. She recited. She learned. "You have seven gods. The Prime is dead. The Writhe never left. My mother was the first to do so. I'm the one who came back." She looked down, slightly, to the towering slaver. "My name is Tauranga, son of Mason. My weapons crush armies."

"...Where are your thorns?"

"They'll grow in."

The Grotling looked down upon her, the one who had worn the shape of the weak-shelled and beaten her with it, and then slowly took a knee. Tauga nodded. Some words were spoken.

"Tell them everything you've heard," she replied. "Or don't. I don't care. I'll be saying it again and again ten times just to make them hear."

More words.

"Because I need a tribe," she said, and leapt into the sky.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

On an entirely unrelated note to any post I may or may not be writing, I've decided that Heartworm speaks Polish.

don't stop the buck when it comes / it's the dawn, you'll see

Tauga applied the thin knife one more time to the haft of the polehammer, then again to the tip of her tongue. It drew blood. She smeared it over the head.

"Atacartes racta, taka linsa gg Tauga hai," she recited, gripping the point. It shuddered in her hand. She forced it to be still. A part of that shudder carried into her, replacing in her an unnameable part of herself just as the force of her grip replaced a part of the steel.

She stood, once more hefting its weight. It balanced perfectly in her hand. It always had, but only at her volition. Now she seemed unable to lose her grip on it. She swung the sacred weapon and leveled a crystal sprouting eight feet away. Its shards clattered on the cavern floor.

She picked one up and pitched it at the roof, examining the wyrm tunnel's outer wall by its light. In some other places, and here, the dark labyrinth penetrated the natural caves of Vakarlon, and did not stop for them. A sufferer in the tunnels could wander straight through a mighty chasm the size of a mountain and never know there was anything beyond the sickly walls but solid rock.

Tauga tapped the hammer on the stone. She listened to the echo. There was no wear on the haft of the executor at all. She knew that, even though she hadn't checked.

"This will make them respect me."

"False. It will only familiarise you. Tauga must rely on her own-"

"Yeah, I know," she said, stepping towards the tunnel. "I wasn't asking." She spun the hammer above her head without thinking and demolished a crystal with each end. Quartz as old as time and thrice as tough shattered like sugar at her strength. "This is what I meant. Run me through that one more time."

"Throughout their lives, Grotlings accumulate prestige through warcraft. Military success is the measure of worth. Elder veterans are revered. Gods considered spirits of strength. Perpetual campaign provides means of development towards utopia. Grotlings wish to achieve supremacy so as to advance all subservient races."

"Perfect." She turned to the waiting worm. "And what do you intend to play?"

"Heartworm plays the role of Vosh. Internal operator culture is underdeveloped. They will follow a superior."

"Alright. And I've gotta introduce myself as Tauranga. Right?"

"Tauga's birth name is guttural. Phonetically appropriate."

"And you?"

Heartworm made a sound.

"...Prshv... Pzhuvra?" Tauga raised an open hand. "Nobody with a tongue's going to pronounce that, Heartworm."

"They don't have to," the worm replied.

don't stop the buck when it comes / it's the dawn, you'll see

Birth of the Marquisate
Part II: Subjugation

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Birth of the Marquisate
Part III: Wealth

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Birth of the Marquisate
Part IV: Colonies

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

@Muttonhawk Nope, doesn't look like it.

_{ok google how many new techs can i fit into my civ before the other mods notice}