Grimoire:Places/Earth: Difference between revisions

She carves around the huge bulb nose of a colony ship, one of the Cosmodrome’s towering children. Her eyes see temperature: she surfs the winter air rolling down off the cryo-chilled fuel tank. Turbulence rattles her bones.

“General,” [[Malahayati]] sends. “You’re making Rasputin nervous.”

“Am I?” Lanshu banks, grinning, spiraling around the fuel tank. The machine hates risk. Risk to the General, sure, but also risk to Rasputin’s ships. “Is that the word he used, exactly?”

“He can be very charming,” the submind assures her. Malahayati works with Chen Lanshu, and she is certainly charming, but this is Rasputin’s territory, Rasputin the tacit king, the brooding wary first-among-equals.

Yesterday Lanshu spoke to a colony ship AI and it called Rasputin ‘the Tyrant.’ Not without affection. And certainly not without respect.

“He’s very private, lately.”

She spreads her arms and legs and climbs a thermal, whirling up, arrowing off the top and out away from the colony ships towards the defensive wall. Her glider’s a second skin, whipcrack-taut paramuscle, like a flying fox.

The Cosmodrome races past beneath her. She waggles her wings at a cloud of passing sensor mites: a saucy hello. Two of the security division’s MBTs drill in the mothyards.

“I don’t understand why you came,” Malahayati says. She’s probably lying. Malahayati understands Lanshu very, very well. “I don’t understand why you masked yourself yesterday, during the launch.”

“Isn’t that what we do, Mala?” she says. “Why we still have soldiers? Why we made you? Expectation.”

Imagine if it hadn’t been friendly. Imagine that.

Long before the last of the Iron Lords descended into the [[Plaguelands]], this peak was the domain of one of their own, Lord [[Felwinter]]. His maps and outposts show the risen Exo roamed free from the Aral Seas to an eastern border known as Citan’s Ridge (Open [[Citan]] 01-A, Citan’s Ridge 01-A) before taking the Oath. There is no evidence of human enclaves or encampments within this area, nor survivors within the Cosmodrome walls, but extensive one-way audio recordings with an unknown entity survive (open Felwinter 9-C; open Rasputin 62-G; scan for possible links). A chance meeting with Lord [[Timur]] in the Mothyards led to Timur’s first reports on the promises of [[SIVA]]. Felwinter’s conscription into the ranks and the raising of the Iron Temple commenced shortly thereafter.

Hundreds of years later, SIVA has been unleashed, its power unearthed by the Fallen. As a result of the Fallen’s unchecked ambition, SIVA’s corruption has begun to spread, infecting the land and creating a hostile, otherworldly new threat in the quarantined outskirts of the Cosmodrome known as the Plaguelands.

––[The brochure has suffered extensive water damage, but there is a map of the region with a red circle and a note: ‘Timur, your replication complex? –Felwinter’]

Vostok Observatory Historical Society welcomes [––] from the Gondola it is possible [––] late Soviet space programs were converted to [––] research facilities to study accelerated methods of colonization [––] kid’s holobadges to remember your trip.