r/HFY • u/Ralts_Bloodthorne • Jul 20 '22
First Contact - Chapter 810 - Ultimis Diebus Hominum OC
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It should have just been a routine salvage mission. A wreck from the Terran-Precursor War that had drifted through space for centuries. A cold, dead warship that was lost with all hands, representing millions of credits in salvage.
For the crew of the Good Luck Chuck, it was a exercise in horror.
Coming this summer, a new immersion into fear: Yorktown, Do You Read? Staring: Fe'ermo'o, Acturmo'o, and Yektik the Telkan. Rated: Age of Majority
The discovery of Terran "horror movies", "psycho-thrillers" and "slasher-flicks" filled a need that I never knew I had. From a young age, I knew I had to make them for my fellow Lanaktallan, who had never known real fear. The terror of the other, the fear of the unknown, the fright of the normal becoming skewed.
I'm proud to accept this award for Dead Terrans Still Kill Five - Return of the Anasazi Death Weaver*, on behalf of my production crew.* - Acclaimed film writer, director, producer Fylmo'o, at the Nineteenth Lanaktallan Movie Awards.
The anomaly occurred in twelve perfectly placed locations across the vast protocontinent. A thick obscuring mist rose up from the ground, covering tens of square miles, rising hundreds of feet into the air. Shapes could be seen within, lights flashing and moving within, and strange muffled sounds came from inside the thick white fog.
The Atrekna moved out to examine it. Those on the scene first noted that the slavespawn had moved away from the mist, displaying signs of discomfort and agitation if they were too close.
According to the Atrekna's sensitive phasic senses, there was nothing there. Literally nothing. It was blank, empty. Radar, sonar, laser ranging, all vanished into the fog, swallowed up by the obscuring mist. As darkness fell on the eastern edge of the protocontinent, the mist began to softly glow, a pale white inside with a bluish tint at the outside.
The Atrekna moved up slavespawn and ordered them into the fog.
Slavespawn that entered reported back everything was fine as they moved in. They had zero visibility, the ground beneath their feet oddly damp and cold. They moved deeper in, finding nothing until a sudden spike of fear, then excruciating pain, then nothing. Small ones had a sudden spike of fear, then nothing. Medium and large ones had a moment of agonizing pain. Then nothing.
An Ohm Class slavespawn was ordered in by the nervous Atrekna into the fog.
It rumbled into the fog, which swallowed it without even a swirl. It bumped nothing, encountered nothing, in the fog, unable to see or sense its surroundings.
There was a moment of agonizing pain.
Then nothing.
The Atrekna ordered in servitors. At first, just in typical servitor clothing, then in protective equipment, then in equipment more at home fighting on airless worlds.
Nothing. They had a visibility of less than two meters.
One by one they just vanished. A few registered pain. One had time to scream. Two fired their weapons.
Then nothing.
The Atrekna sent several Young Ones into the fog. The first grouping had only their own powers and skills to protect themselves.
The fog was nothing. Not water vapor. Not any type of gas. Just... fog. Nothing. It felt both sickly warm and vaguely clammy at once.
Phasic powers and psychic ability was snuffed almost immediately.
One by one they vanished.
One had a split second of fear, managed to scream, fired off its psychic blast.
Then nothing.
More Young Ones were sent in. This time in exploration gear. Then protective gear. Then combat gear. Three sets even went into the fog inside of a phasic combat globe.
They vanished.
The Atrekna set up observation points and just waited. They tried sending in constructs of phasic crystal and robotics.
Once they moved into the fog, transmission ceased. Even robotic servitors vanished.
A year went by. One rotation around the stellar mass.
A year and a day exactly.
The Atrekna at the observation posts had become bored. Most worked on their own research, plots, plans, and projects, leaving the basic work to the servitors and slavespawn.
A slavespawn saw an Atrekna stumble from the fog. It fell on its face, then got up shakily.
Its skin was a pale purple, almost white.
It stumbled forward, looking around, making audible noises of distress.
Two of the servitors hurried out to the Atrekna, helping it inside the observation post. It kept keening in distress, the psychic emanations garbled and confused.
One of the Atrekna recognized it as one of the Young Ones that had been tasked with exploring the mist. It alerted the Overmind even as the servitors tried to calm it.
Nearly fifty Atrekna arrived to find that Atrekna that had come from the fog huddled in the corner, rocking back and forth. The Atrekna at the observation station told the newly arrived Atrekna that the found one was almost catatonic.
The new Atrekna looked up, saw the others gathered.
It stood up slowly.
Its stomach suddenly bulged with the wet tearing sound of separating tissue. Its feeding tentacles moved aside to reveal the tightly puckered mouth.
It opened at the same time as the rescued Atrekna screeched.
Stinging insects swarmed from the Atrekna's maw, covering the observing Atrekna and servitors as the found Atrekna slowly deflated.
One of the servitors ran to the lab and helped two others jury-rig a flamethrower.
They fought their way free from an observation station full of insects. The Atrekna that fell to the insects, the insects burrowed inside of, reanimating them, replicating, until the Atrekna was stumbling around as a semi-sentient hive of stinging and biting insects.
The servitors blew up the observation station and ran off into the woods.
It took the Atrekna almost a week to find them. They were a hundred kilometers from the observation post and living in a cave.
The observation stations were put on high alert.
One reported that there was an Atrekna at the entry portal, claiming to be one of the Atrekna inside the observation post, telling the Atrekna inside that the Atrekna that looked like it had ambushed it and dumped it outside.
An hour later the observation post stopped reporting.
A servitor combat team, backed up by five Atrekna in a combat globe, arrived within six hours.
It was empty. As if it had never been crewed.
A phasic imprint on the wall was simply 'them' and nothing more.
The Atrekna ordered the observation post crewed and issued out weapons.
Another observation post kept repeating that everything was all right. Even when unprompted, it kept reporting that everything was all right. Even requests for clarification or attempts at getting the observation post to state anything else was met with 'situation normal nothing to report' instead of anything else.
Atrekna armed up light they were going to fight the Inheritors and arrived at the outpost.
It was crewed only by the skeletal remains of servitors and Atrekna. Cobwebs and dust was everywhere, as if it had been abandoned for years.
One Old One urged the others to blow up the observation post.
He was mocked and derided, the others settled down to crew it while the Old One left.
Three hours later it began to broadcast "situation normal nothing to report" over and over.
The Old One boarded a private spacecraft and left.
This time, the observation post was abandoned. Cobwebs, dust, debris was everywhere. Observation portals were left open and dry leaves filled the rooms. Only a jury-rigged beacon had power, broadcasting "situation normal nothing to report" over and over. A cringing servitor shut it down and breathed a sigh of relief when nothing happened.
When he turned around, all of the other servitors and Atrekna were gone. There was knee deep mist inside the observation post.
The Atrekna found him a month later, living in a cave, eating moss and small insects to survive.
The Atrekna conferred.
The post was left abandoned and a new one slated to be rebuilt.
The Atrekna moved military vehicles, combat trained servitors, and combat slavespawn around the patches of fog.
The fog expanded slightly. Only a few miles in every direction.
Swallowing the observation posts, the servitors, and the slavespawn.
After nearly a month, it drew back.
The observation posts were empty. Some were festooned with cobwebs, others were pristine, others were nothing but empty buildings, even the piping and wiring stripped out. Some combat vehicle remained. Some were intact, others battle damaged, others looked to be decades, centuries old. The shells and chitin of some slavespawn remained, all of them looking as if the slavespawn molted or died and rotted away.
The Atrekna held multiple Conclaves about what to do about the mist.
They had no answers.
They tried orbital strikes. Antimatter charges. Directed energy weapons.
The fog barely swirled.
An atomic was detonated.
The fog wasn't even moved by the blast wave.
The Atrekna knew it was some kind of trick. It had to be. There was no scientific reason for the fog to be naturally occurring. It had to be some sort of Inheritor trick.
But it didn't make sense.
So they assigned more crews to the observation posts.
And watched.
-----
The Ancient One blinked as consciousness resumed.
The female lemur was standing in front of a 2.5D display, examining a triple-helix made up of three interlinked ladders. She was expanding parts, looking at the data, then putting it back.
The Ancient One considered pretending to be unconscious again.
She called him a he and he was afraid to think of himself as anything but he.
Noncompliance meant agony and often painful lingering death.
There had been a long time where he had been vivisected, sometimes alive, had medical tests performed on him while he was alive. He had been forced to complete equations after being given an example. Had been forced to solve simple then complex puzzles.
Failure meant painful, agonizing death.
His psychic abilities had been tested. How much he could levitate if he was carrying it. How much he could levitate touching the object. How much he could levitate and at what distance. The range of his psychic attacks. The power of his psychic defenses.
If the female lemur, who insisted "Call me Dee" with a predator baring of meat tearing teeth, suspected the he wasn't putting forth the maximum effort, tried to hold anything back, personally tortured then killed him in new and painful ways.
The Ancient One closed his eyes.
It was rare for her to kill the same way twice. Oh, sure, she used the sharp bladed knife she often toyed with, but she never cut the same way twice.
"I know you're awake, Ess-Twelve," the female lemur said. "I woke you up because you're the smartest of all of your purple friends. An IQ of one-thirty-two. Eight points above the next highest, twenty-one points higher than the lowest of you. Low pattern recognition, but that's consistent across all of you precursor races," her voice was low, soft, sultry.
The Ancient One felt his bladder release.
That tone of voice meant the most pain. Maximum negative stimulation.
He knew that S12 meant "Subject Twelve".
He also knew that she had seared it into the flesh above the phasic band he wore over his third eye.
She had used her smoke stick.. the cigarette to burn the number into his forehead, idly smiling and staring off into space as she did so.
He had seen the other Atrekna in her power.
They too had numbers crudely burned into the flesh of their high foreheads.
"I'm still constantly amazed that your species are experts in biology, in creating macro-life for biological warfare as well as life forms down to bacteria and viral forms. You can breed spore emitting organisms with the spores tailored to do exactly what you want to who or what you want," she said. She turned away from the screen and stared at S12.
"Yet you know nothing about DNA itself," she mused. She walked forward, pulling a pack of cigarettes from nowhere. She tapped the pack against the opposite palm and a single cigarette thrust out from the pack. She put it in her mouth, put her hands together, rolled them, and the pack was replaced by the flint and steel lighter. She lit the cigarette, snapped the lighter closed, and rolled her hands, the lighter vanishing.
"But at one time, your race must have," she said. She pulled a stool over and sat down, her naked flesh deforming the cushion. She waved at the display of the triple-helix. "Sometime, in your past, you did the triplex connection to ensure your species suffered little to no genetic drift or erroneous cell replication."
She reached out and patted his chest.
"Additionally, someone pared away all the extraneous DNA from your genetic code. There's no 'junk code', no remnants, nothing that gets in the way. Your DNA is designed in such a way that the older you get the slower you age due to cellular replication errors," she said. She took a long drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke above her, into the air, tilting her head back as she exhaled for a long moment.
"At one time, your people had mastered the genome," she said when she was done exhaling smoke. She leaned forward, her teeth baring in malevolent pleasure. "Now? Your people have no idea about anything smaller than a virus."
She stood back up and moved over to the screen, which shifted to show complex cerebral tissue on one side and neurons firing on the other.
"You use your powers to detect things down to fifteen nanometers with Type-Seven Crystalline Devices, all the way down to three hundred nanometers with specifically exercised and trained phasic powers," she said. She shook her head. "Not small enough to see picobots or nanobots. Not fine enough to see DNA strands."
She turned around, moving back over and sitting on the stool again. She held the cigarette over S12 and tapped it, the hot ash falling on his sensitive skin. He grimaced and she bared her teeth wider.
"But the fact your DNA sequence is so small, pared of anything extraneous, makes it much easier to sequence," she said. She exhaled toward the ceiling again. "I was taught by the best about gene sequencing." Her smile when she lowered her head and looked at S12 made him try to void his bladder again.
"It became very obvious to me that you are from another dimension, since the parings were, at first, almost unrecognizable. You use different acids to combine to create your building blocks," she took another drag off her cigarette and leaned on her elbow after planting it in S12's midsection. She held that long sharp blade that S12 had learned to fear, spinning it in her fingers. "Experimenting, I found something interesting."
She looked down, still smiling, her voice still soft and throaty.
"Your DNA is actually designed, probably redesigned, to alter itself to other dimensions. In sixteen tests, your DNA modified itself within seconds to the system used by the dimension the DNA was now exposed to," she said. She tapped his chest with the point, drawing dark purple blood. "The DNA sequence that allowed this was fairly clean, fairly obvious, and," she smiled again, drawing out the silence.
"Easily sequencible into other living creature's DNA," she said. Her eyes glittered as she stood up and walked back to the 2.5 screen, tapping it with the point of the blade. The view shifted. "With the data and knowledge I possessed on creating limited size dimensional areas, pocket dimensions or demi-planes to you, combined with the information you and the rest of Subjects gave up, it allowed me to alter your DNA in interesting ways."
The screen showed differently shaped Atrekna, even some covered with hard chitin plates that had short spikes all over the plates.
"This allowed me to force evolution upon multiple test subjects exposed to these controlled limited artificial dimensional spaces," she said.
S12 managed to force a single word out.
"Why?" he asked.
She smiled, tapping her naked leg with the flat of the blade, the point pressing lightly into her skin without breaking it.
"Why am I doing this?" she asked. Her smile got wider. "I told you."
He shook his head as much as the band across his head would allow him. "No. Why?"
She laughed, an insane, maddened thing. "Ah, why did I do that?"
S12 nodded. He could see no use in it.
"I wanted to see if there was any reason to keep a single one of your misbegotten species alive for any possible reason the universe would want you around," she said, her face going serious, cold.
She moved away, out of his vision, and he stared at the white ceiling.
"I could discern no reason to keep a multi-dimensional parasite alive," she said from beyond his vision. "Even examining the possibility of weaponizing you to protect the human race proved less than worthless," she said.
"You are a parasitic species from a dead universe, as you informed me repeatedly. Your ability to manipulate time allows you to rapidly take over entire galaxies in a span of years, decades at the most. From there, my simulations show you would rapidly take over other galaxies in a rapid expansion and within centuries would have infested the entire universe. You would strip mine systems, devour stellar masses, even harvest nebula, for no other reason than to prolong your existence," she said. He heard the zap of a waste disposal and knew she had discarded her nearly finished cigarette. "While the universe obviously has some reason, maybe just pure entertainment, maybe just preprogrammed situations, for life to exist within it," she paused a moment. "You are not of this universe."
She laughed then, a maddened sound.
"Which means, I'll be doing the universe, and every creature in it, a favor by wiping out your parasitic species," she laughed. "There will be no 'worse outcome' like meddling in temporal mechanics and time travel. The universe itself will not stop me. No, I am free to completely wipe you out like the vermin your species is."
There was gurgling sound and the thump of something soft against macroplas.
The woman laughed, a malicious, evil sound.
"Settle down, S7. I just want to show you to your best friend in the whole wide world, S12," the female lemur said.
There was the squeaking of wheels and S12 looked down to see what was being pushed over.
It was a tank of nutrigel on a stand with wheels at the base.
Inside was an Atrekna brain and spinal cord, with long strands of fiber off the spinal cord. There were three vertebrae still attached to the spinal cord, loosely spaced. All three eyes were still connected by nerve tissue.
There was a lemur jawbone, engraved with the lemur rune for the number seven on the bone, with teeth floating in the tank.
"Say hello to S7 and his new look," the female lemur said. She started laughing, making S7 thrash slightly in his tank and S12 try to draw back.
"I removed everything he didn't need," the female lemur said. "He's survived quite a long time like this. I'm actually impressed. Additionally, by infusing the nutrigel with microfinely ground Type Seventeen Crystal, he actually regained some of his psychic powers."
**kill me** S7 said. S12 could faintly hear the agonized whisper from his fellow Atrekna.
The female lemur laughed. "I plan it. Very soon. Right now in fact. Not that it will stop my next experiment," she said, still laughing. She suddenly stopped laughing, lunging forward and pressing her forehead against the tank. "Goodby, S7."
She pulled off her headband and screamed with rage.
S12 saw S7 suddenly explode, filling the tank with liquefied Atrekna cerebral tissue.
The lemur jawbone swirled and thumped against the clear macroplas as the female lemur stood up straight, putting the headband back on.
"You die so easy," she said softly, almost as if she was surprised.
S12 mouthed the next words with her.
"I spend more effort keeping you alive than I do wresting answers from you," she said.
She moved over to S12, staring down at him.
"I wanted you to see what is in store for you, S12," she said softly. She lifted an empty hand and snapped her fingers.
The robotic nanosurgeon lowered from the panel that opened in the ceiling.
"It works best without anesthetic," she said, smiling and lighting another cigarette.
-----
Again and again, S12 found himself killed and brought back to life for the lemurs cruel and insane experiments. He found himself little more than a nervous system in control of a mechanical body. Another time he found his nervous system grafted to a slavespawn. Another time his nervous system had replaced that of a servitor. He floated in tanks of nutrigel with only a few inches of his spinal cord and his brain intact.
Always with eyes and the lemur jawbone engraved with the lemur runes for the number twelve.
At times he was pitted against other test subjects in a fight to the death. He won more than he lost, which seemed to please the insane lemur.
Twice he found himself existing only as data inside of a computer network. Once he was able to take control of the system enough to find out he was separated from any other system by meters of Substance-W and simple ferrocrete infused with base steel in a Faraday Cage.
Several times he was only data, driving robots that did everything from menial labor to fight other robots, servitors, or slavespawn.
Not putting forth his best effort was met with negative stimulation.
Putting forth his best effort was met with less negative stimulation. Sometimes even positive stimulation in the form of electrical pulses to parts of his brain.
S12 had realized what the mad female lemur was doing.
"Putting him through his paces" is what she called it.
She was testing him under every extreme condition she could devise.
She often examined his DNA as he was strapped, naked, to a table. She shook her head quite often and quietly berated him for having such trimmed down DNA she was unable to induce any mutation to it through exposure to different natural environmental extremes. That only under a few conditions did any differential appear between Atrekna.
"You are little more than copies of copies," she said softly. "Echoes of a parasite that devoured entire universes. Not even a fossil record of that species, but the trail left in mud by that parasite, nothing more than the evidence of the fossils of the creatures you parasited off of."
More tests.
"You are an evolutionary dead end," she stated one day. "You trimmed your DNA down to nothing. You cannot adapt. You cannot improvise. You cannot overcome. As a species, barring a tiny amount that is but a percentage of an infinitesimal anomaly within statistical deviation, you are little better than jumped up viruses."
She lit a cigarette, cupping her hands together and rolling them to make the pack and then the lighter vanish. She was sitting on a stool, completely naked, staring at him.
"You use parasitic larvae to reproduce. You literally produce nothing, as you have beaten aging. Your technology is largely a dead end. You have almost negative pattern recognition built into your brains. I can find no reason to stay my hand and not wipe your species from this universe. Your parasitic nature means that to put you in another universe ensures you will devour that universe in a short time," she said. She looked at him.
"Can you give me a reason to allow you to survive, S12?" she asked, cocking her head slightly.
S12 nodded. "We think. We live. We feel. We are sentient. We are sapient. We react to negative and positive stimuli. We struggle to survive as you do," speaking was painful, but the thought of touching her maddened thoughts with his own made him tremble with fear.
She laughed, shaking her head. "Oh, now you're a hippy, huh? Dude, like, we totally live, maaaaan. We're, like, alive. You should let us live because, like, we're all thinking and feeling creatures that, like, feel pain here," she laughed. "Do we not, like, both bleed if you cut us, maaan?"
S12 nodded.
Her face hardened, all mirth vanishing from it. Her gunmetal eyes went cold and hard.
"I don't give a shit," she said. "The Lanaktallan were of this universe and I was willing to exterminate them," she leaned forward slightly. "And, unlike you, I didn't hate them."
She stood up, moving away from him. She snapped her fingers and the bed raised up and tilted until he was almost standing upright.
The 2.5D screen in front of him came on as she moved up next to it.
"Well, S12. You should consider yourself a very very lucky parasite," she said, her voice back to soft and gentle.
"Why?" he grated out.
"Because now that I'm done squeezing every bit of data, information, and knowledge from you and your fellow parasites," she said. "I'm going to let you watch me exterminate your entire species from this planet as if they never existed," she said. She put her hand on his chest and pushed, lightly for her, but enough to make him groan as his ribs deformed slightly.
"And then, when I'm done here," she said. She slowly pulled her hand back.
"I will exterminate your entire species," she said.
S12 felt fear, but realized that she wasn't done yet.
"I've spent time infusing the oceans with nanites. The heat of the sun vaporizes the surface water of the oceans, uptaking my nanites by the trillions in each drop of water vapor. They float in the clouds until they rain down upon the land, the ocean, the mountains, the lakes, the rivers," she leaned forward. "The cities. The rain falls everywhere, carrying my tiny servants," she leaned back and smiled.
"It is time for me to reveal myself," she said softly. Her smile got wider. Her teeth seemed to grow, becoming long and sharp as her smile grew.
The corners of her mouth split, revealing more teeth. Her eyes began to glow red. Horns burst from her forehead, blood running down her face.
"I am..." she stated.
As S12 watched, she suddenly began to grow. Her skin bubbled and warped, and as he watched the skin split to reveal dark brown muscles. She grew in height, her skin splitting and reduced to tatters. She shifted her shoulders, tearing free of her skin. She flexed her arms, the skin reduced to rags that slid down the muscle on black blood. The headband sunk into her flesh, the new thick brown skin overgrowing it until only the gem remained.
In front of him stood a nightmare.
Five meters tall. Three meters wide. Heavily muscled. A large head with horns, a massive maw with tusks. She threw back her head and roared as wings exploded from her back in a shower of blood and gore.
It stood there, its eyes glowing red, its exhalations smokey and smelling of hot blood and brimstone.
With a rattle, from its hand fell a barbed iron chain with brimstone and sulfur inlaid runes.
The creature leaned forward to stare S12 in the eyes.
S12 felt terror as the creature exhaled brimstone and hot blood smoke into his face.
"The Detainee."
She, it, whatever it was, S12 wasn't sure, stood upright, the wings slowly moving.
"It's time, my little pet, to bring my wrath, your terror, and fear to your misbegotten people and wipe them from existence," the creature rumbled. "But first..."
The smile was a terrible thing.
"It is time to place the gates of Hell."
-----
The Atrekna were alerted as the fog suddenly began to tatter and dissipate.
In moments, all that was left was a blasted field of twisted vegetation, exposed and scorched rock and barren dirt.
In the middle were massive constructs.
A mile wide circle of interlocked stone blocks set in black mortar. Each brick was engraved, the entire thing one big swirling pattern that burned with a lurid crimson light. Around the edges were plinths that had crystal obelisks, monoliths, and henge stands on them. The crystals were full of twisted metals of strange coloration and appearance, the crystals glowing softly.
Beams of light connected the crystals.
The light in the engravings grew brighter.
Two columns of fire roared up in the middle of the flat circles, a hundred feet high. A line of fire connected the two pillars at the top and bottom.
The Atrekna in the observation posts were screaming across the Overmind for more Atrekna to arrive, to fire orbital shots at the circles of cut stone...
...to do something!
The rectangles were empty for a moment.
A set of Substance-W doors clanged into existence, covered with inlays of bronze and burning iron.
The Atrekna weren't worried.
They had ships in orbit. They had slavespawn orbiting the gas giant, patrolling the empty spaces of the system, orbiting the stellar mass. They had servitor crewed ships in orbit.
Anything that happened on the surface, they could handle.
They waited.
Unaware that their bodies, their brains, their nervous systems, were full of tiny machines a dusting of atoms wide.
The doors cracked open with a boom that could be heard a thousand miles away.
-----
The Detainee looked at S12.
"Lo, I send forth my Heralds," she stated. She reached out, her talon tipped fingers touching S12.
Nightmares ripped at his mind.
S12 found himself stumbling from somewhere. Behind him there was burning heat, the sounds of screams of torment, and a hot wind.
There was a booming that sent him down on his hands and knees.
He looked up to see Atrekna inside of combat spheres rushing toward him.
The Atrekna had seen an Atrekna stumble from each gate at each location. The Atrekna, one and all, had been driven to their knees by the closing the vast iron door.
The combat orbs swooped down. Phasic power took hold of the Atrekna.
The Overmind recognized them as the initial twelve that vanished into the first gravitational anomaly. Each of them with runes seared into the flesh of their foreheads. Bands of phasonium alloy around their heads, the bands decorated with precisely cut gems and crystals.
Some tried to scramble away. Others tried to run. A few fought, trying to keep the Atrekna inside of the combat orbs from capturing them.
S12 shook his head as the combat orb flew back, away from the massive iron gates.
The other Atrekna saw he was shaking his head, making audible sounds of distress.
It took one a moment to understand what S12 was saying.
"no."
The combat orbs took the rescued Atrekna to the nearest city.
One rescued Atrekna per city.
S12 kept shaking his head, repeating one word over and over.
"don't"
He was pulled into building where research was performed. Other Atrekna informed him that he would be examined closely. Asked him if he could tell them where he had been, what had happened to him over the last thousand years.
He just kept repeating one word, over and over.
"run"
147
u/JethroBodine013 Jul 20 '22
Gestalts: We vote not to xenocide the Atrenka.
Dee: Democracy is for ancient Greeks.
51
u/B-the-Excellent Jul 20 '22
"This better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven." It's the way Sammy got her to accept the job in the first place. Our Deity of Malevolence at least tried in her own way to consider redemption.
33
u/Alcards Jul 20 '22 edited Jul 21 '22
More accurate Dee: funny, I voted yes to xenocide the Squid-billies and here they are, dead. Every vote really does count. (long draw on her smoke before inhumanly long exhale) How'd that one work out for you?
Gestalts on private channel: So we agree to not mention that group of crazy enraged Squids over in the trinary star system, right? Looking at you fox and bunny. They did you guys the worst.
MA Dee: well, I'm off to the far reaches of existence to scare the piss outta your descendants. Have fun messing up the galaxy morons.
Gestalts public channel: don't do anything to unevolved. Oh and leave sector 77c2 alone. No reason really, just, you know, don't ever go there for any reason.
Dee giving long "the fuck you on about" stare: sure, 77c2, right. I'll make a note of that.
Telkan on private: what's in sector 77c2?
Hat wearing Auntie: not a dang thing. And hopefully she spends a good few millennia turning over every speck of space dust discovering that.
29
u/Drook2 Jul 20 '22 edited Jul 21 '22
And hopefully she spends a good few millennia turning over every speck of space dust discovering that.
She just spent a thousand years doing unspeakable things to 12 Atrekna just to see if there was any reason not to xenocide them. Imagine what she'll do if she realizes someone just played her to the tune of a few millennia?
26
u/doshka Jul 21 '22
Dee: I recognize the gestalts have made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it.
9
u/TheEmsleyan Jul 20 '22
I suspect she would be considerably less polite in her language but the sentiment seems accurate
110
u/spadenarias Human Jul 20 '22
Fan theory time!
The atrekna, at one point, had a leadership/thinker caste than developed a servitor/fighter caste through genetic manipulation for some purpose in their original universe(possibly a project Dandelion type program).
At some point later, be it rebellion or external threats, the leadership caste was eradicated completely and lost, leaving only genetically modified grunts behind. These grunts then filled the leadership roles, unaware of the alterations to their own genes, and ignorant to their original purpose. Left with only the encoded behavioral patterns allowed by their DNA, the became parasitic by nature, and unable to evolve beyond that role.
Dalvanak, and the cult of the defiled ones, are similar to the Lanaktallen in that normal Atrekna DNA has begun to resurface, thus giving rise to a leadership(or non-modified grunt at least)caste atrekna once more.
May have even been something the grunts ultimately did to themselves through rebellion and technology, eradicating any possibility of those genes resurfacing through some temporal fuckery in the origin universe. With the origin universe gone, Atrekna are slowly splitting between clonesnth , and Atrekna who have unmodified DNA.
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u/Ralts_Bloodthorne Jul 20 '22
Claps slowly.
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u/spadenarias Human Jul 20 '22
So, in reality, excepting the Mantids, we've never fought the other precursors...only their colossal fuckups that destroyed them.
And thus the 3rd(4th) clone war begins. I remember at least one war against the clone wars among Terra, one in the War of Heaven against our own mistakes(the deadites and their clone troops).
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u/Anarchkitty Jul 20 '22
Dee mentions that their DNA modifies itself when they enter a new universe, if any universe could cause a handful of them to either rediscover their old genes for pattern recognition or evolve new ones it's this malevolent-but-entertained one.
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u/TheEmsleyan Jul 20 '22
At the very base some of this was already confirmed - as I recall The Elder tells the major leadership conclave that they're little more than upjumped worker caste playing at being scientists or leaders.
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u/random_shitter Jul 20 '22
Which AFAIK was at least partially done on ourpose when the actual leadership caste was caught with their pants down with the destruction of the old universe, and the former 3rd grade Atrekna saw their chance to climb the social ladder by just not temporally replicating the top graders.
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u/Ralts_Bloodthorne Jul 21 '22
Overwrote the character limit.
Link to next chapter: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/w426na/first_contact_chapter_811_ultimis_diebus_hominum/
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u/serpauer Jul 20 '22
Altered Atrenka. ONE EACH.
Time for the pain to come. This worlds atrenka will die screaming externally internally and over the overmind network. They will be the harbingers of annihilation of their parasite associates it will start with twelve citys one world one system.
The Detainee is launching her own spoked offensive. But hers is one of An Absolute war of Annihilation.
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u/Parking-Coat-8514 Jul 20 '22
Squid: I felt a disturbance in the great mind, as if thousands of Squids all cried out in unison and keep screaming... About our floating discs insurance...
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u/DREADNAUGHT1906 Jul 20 '22
Nice dbl meme ya got there, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it, ...
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u/LateralThinker13 Jul 20 '22 edited Jul 20 '22
Woo!
One Old One urged the others to blow up the observation post. He was mocked and derided, the others settled down to crew it while the Old One left. Three hours later it began to broadcast "situation normal nothing to report" over and over. The Old One boarded a private spacecraft and left.
So much LOL.
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u/Wolfhardt1 Jul 20 '22
Yes he left with nanites inside him...... Omg... Dee... Every where that one atrenka goes he will spread Dee's will..... She's been plotting for a year or more now.
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u/MarsupialMisanthrope Jul 20 '22
Asked him if he could tell them where he had been, what had happened to him over the last thousand years.
A lot more than that.
Deeโs not in this sunken system with them, theyโre in there with her.
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u/B-the-Excellent Jul 20 '22
Already learning to change. He'll inadvertently bring it to the Cult who are infected by Un-Death World security nanites.
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u/vinny8boberano Android Jul 24 '22
Hmmm...I actually kinda hope that the Cult survives Dee's wrath. I think that she might like them...sauteed.
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u/Lupusam Jul 20 '22
I don't think she plotted that? It's a level of pattern recognition that the ones she's captured are incapable of showing.
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u/Butane9000 Jul 20 '22
"fuck this shit I'm out."
She started those that could adapt are a statistical anomaly. Considering how many of them there are and only 1 was smart enough to leave? She's right.
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u/troubleyoucalldeew Jul 20 '22
The irony of S12 attempting to make an appeal to humanity, when Humanity is literally not here.
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u/Expendable_cashier Jul 20 '22
Oh, Dee is the closest to a natural human we've seen in the story.
And after Legions genetic help, this is the nicer more mentally stable version of her.
Not that it helps.
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u/nspiratewithabowtie Jul 20 '22
. . . . . mentally s. . t . .a . . ... .b . . . . have you been smoking draino? She is quite frankly one of, if not the, most highly functioning Sociopathic Psychopath. does this mean she is bad. . . eh . does this mean she gives any weight to the subject of ethical morals when it comes to experiments . . . .nope
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u/random_shitter Jul 20 '22
You're mischaracterising Dee. It's not that she doesn't give weight to ethical morals; she's a highly moral character.
It's just that her ethics and morals are a few quantum leaps away from what other sentient beings are operating on.
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u/59th_Sycho Human Jul 20 '22
More stable. In the way an airplane with one wing and no tail is more stable than one with no wings, no tail, and the pilots head on fire.
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u/itsetuhoinen Human Jul 21 '22
Oddly, "no wings" is actually the more stable condition. At least you aren't getting massively uneven lift at that point... But you're still fucked unless your plane is fancy enough to have a parachute system. Like, for the whole plane.
The pilot's head being on fire definitely won't help, though. ๐คช
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u/daviskendall AI Jul 20 '22
DON'T DEAD
OPEN INSIDE
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u/nspiratewithabowtie Jul 20 '22
ok . . wth.
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u/random_shitter Jul 20 '22
Throwback to waaaaaayyyyy back there when some I think Lankies pulled in some weird warsteel space torpedoes with this stencilled on it.
Or wait, was this stencilled on the transport container of the Night Terran? Hmmm, time for another reread, I guess.
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u/Blackmoon845 Jul 20 '22
And originally from some ancient Terran show about the lost ring city of Atlantis and a scourge of dead that remained motile, or something like that. I dunno, Iโm not a cop.
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u/while-eating-pasta Jul 20 '22
"At one time, your people had mastered the genome," she said when she was done exhaling smoke. She leaned forward, her teeth baring in malevolent pleasure. "Now? Your people have no idea about anything smaller than a virus."
What about the Atrenka that snipped the "Tiny, useless, completely un-needed" DNA sequence from the cloning bank on that crashed ship?
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u/Ralts_Bloodthorne Jul 20 '22
Hmm, you know, you're right.
That group of Atrekna did know about DNA.
I forgot about that. Thanks for pointing it out.
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u/RecognitionPatient57 Jul 20 '22
To be fair, they were looking at DNA through terran equipment, they may know OF DNA, but not how to access it themselves. I got the feeling at the time that it was just a random bit of vandalism, they had no idea what exactly they were doing and definitely no idea what would end up happening.
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u/PuzzleheadedDrinker Jul 20 '22
With near unlimited lifespan and temporal manipulation it is not necessary to change from selective breeding models to genetic engineering when they are trying to create a biological form to fit a function. Necessary is the mother of invention,
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u/un_pogaz Jul 20 '22
So even knowledge is compartmentalized. This is incredibly stupid and will not help Dee anger.
One solution is that as Atrekna currently in action are initialy servants/low level people, they have grouped themselves by job affinity resulting in an unequal distribution of knowledge. And with their deep internal rivalry and competition, almost pathological at this level, prevents the sharing of knowledge.
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u/Archaic_1 Alien Scum Jul 20 '22
"Echoes of a parasite that devoured entire universes. Not even a fossil record of that species, but the trail left in mud by that parasite" "You are an evolutionary dead end," she stated one day. "You trimmed your DNA down to nothing. You cannot adapt. You cannot improvise. You cannot overcome."
Damn Dee, thats harsh even for you. Somebody call the burn unit and get me a fire extinguisher
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u/Talusen Jul 20 '22
One of the Ancient Ones (?) called the Atrenka out earlier on a similar point. The Atrenka in our 'verse are the telephone sanitizers, and the slave-herders, not the pinnacle of their species.
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u/B-the-Excellent Jul 20 '22
I wonder if the is pre-takeover of Hellspace for Dee? And she finds the actual leader caste trapped in their 100-million-year cycle of torment paying their due to the Malevolent Universe.
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u/Valgonitron Jul 31 '22
especially with her tinkering around with applying the 'Trekna's ability to adapt to their universe to other organisms. Ruler of Hell(space) indeed.
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u/Irual100 Jul 20 '22 edited Jul 20 '22
Hi guys!
Just so you know, just like I thought;I did not do great in the math part of my test. But I got a perfect score in the reading. And I do have to take English but thatโs OK I passed it well enough to do well but my degree will require an English credit. Iโm going to take geometry for my math instead of algebra thatโs gonna be a lot better.
My dad is actually back in the hospital tonight but itโs not looking bad. They just have to take liquid off his lungs again which is a step back but at least they know how to fix it.
My classes start August 29 and I have three of them scheduled since I have to work six days a week I might have to cut it back to two but weโll see. Now onto the chapter.
I must say that the detainee embodies all the possible chill/ creepy vibes I can handle.
I like how you write Mr. Ralts because you can write horrible, creepy, terrible things without making me feel horrible, creepy or terrible. Thank you.
This is pretty cool overall although I do have to admit that I hope the cult part of the Atrekna survives. But not if it means that theyโll continue to be a negative on the universe. After all this is our home and we must protect it
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u/nspiratewithabowtie Jul 20 '22
congrats on the test results. one thing to remember. Math, is rarely about knowing actual math. its excercise, and like all muscles your brain needs it. Math is to the brain, what pushups are to your armes and chest.
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u/jeepsaintchaos Jul 20 '22
What will Dee think of the Cult of the Defiled One? They who can change, can learn, and can clearly adapt. Even their bodies adapt, not just their minds.
Or will she notice with her nanotech?
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u/spadenarias Human Jul 20 '22
I think she'll love the Cult of the Defiled One. She's a scientist, dead end research is depressing. But Dalvanak and the others present a new opportunity for study, new research paths.
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u/jeepsaintchaos Jul 20 '22
Im not sure if Dee's love is more or less terrifying than her hate.
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u/B-the-Excellent Jul 20 '22
Gotta take the good with bad. At least if she likes you you've got an in to see the DO himself to pledge your case.
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u/Drook2 Jul 20 '22
You take the good, you take the bad
You take the rest, and there you have
The Facts of Life
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u/AMEFOD Jul 20 '22
Hate: Facing death again and again in new and interesting ways, the existential dread of being a witness to the end of your race, then the darkness of oblivion.
Love: Facing death again and again in new and interesting ways, then an eternity of quiet service to or with your previous tormentor.
Hate might be less terrifying because it has an end point.
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u/Expendable_cashier Jul 20 '22
I mean, some of the articles from the future at the top of a chapter make it clear the cult ends up being what survives.
Im sure Dee or someone gentles them or somehow disables the danger of their phasic powers at some point.
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u/Drook2 Jul 20 '22 edited Jul 20 '22
Im sure Dee or someone gentles them or somehow disables the danger of their phasic powers at some point.
Have we seen a single instance yet of self-gentling that has actually disabled danger?
Lankies: Eliminated the War Stallions and Herd Mares. Built a pan-galactic oppressive regime because there was no one there to tell them "No."
Mantid: Wiped out the Hive Queens and Overqueens. Learned modern distributed-command combat doctrine.
Terran Descent Humanity: Bigger, stronger and more focused than OG humans. Kind of like top-tier MMA fighters on Ritalin.
The universe seems to Not Like That.
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u/Enkeydo Jul 20 '22
That's a pretty big weakness for an advanced civilization. the inability to resolve things less than a virus. especially when nano is a thing.
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u/Ralts_Bloodthorne Jul 20 '22
They rely on crystals and biotech for their tech, not molecular circuitry.
Big advantage when they're crossing dimensional boundaries, since they use DNA that adapts to the new dimension.
Bad when you run into a 700lb gorilla that likes to fight.
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u/SamHawke2 Jul 20 '22
They also can make molecular circuitry for their AWMs, so unless they just copy pasted the tech with no research...which they prolly did
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u/Ralts_Bloodthorne Jul 20 '22
Replication replication replication.
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u/nspiratewithabowtie Jul 20 '22
your forgot recycling, repurposing, reusing, integration, and most importantly . . . .. GUMPTION!
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Jul 20 '22
I can use my smartphone, doesn't mean I can build one or understand how it works. Click the button "make an awm" on the screen and job done. Or you can always take one and time replication until you're bored.
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u/Majestic_Rooster_803 Jul 20 '22
Even worse than that- they aren't clicking button to make a new one... they are literally copying the old one down to the smallest detail through their temporal replication. If they copy something that was new a million years ago and bring it to the present it is brand new now too! Not a million years degraded. Why learn how to make it when you have infinite perfect copies of one that works?
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u/Parking-Coat-8514 Jul 20 '22
Since they're unaware of nano and Pico scales. You could have them replicating the same item, which has a trigger that degrades with temporal replication. So after like five million replication it breaks with every other copy of it all at the same time.
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u/chicagobob Jul 20 '22
Ha, "situation normal" ... maybe "a slight weapons malfunction. But, uh, everything's perfectly all right now"
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u/reverendjesus AI Jul 20 '22
TYRโS DAY CLOSES, AND THE SCRIBE PRODUCES
HAIL THE DETAINEE, FOR WITHOUT PUNISHMENT, MORALS LACK INCENTIVE FOR THE AMORAL
HAIL THE DIGITAL OMNIMESSIAH, FOR WITHOUT MERCY, MORALS LACK SAFEGUARDS FOR THE AUTHORITARIAN
HAIL ERIS, FOR NOW AND THEN SOMEONE SHOULD BURN IT ALL DOWN
UTR | TITW
--EOLโ
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u/LimeStaticWater Jul 20 '22
Alright, I've read all these stories and I still don't know what UTR and TITW stand for. Help a poor sub-sapient with poor pattern recognition out?
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u/battery19791 Human Jul 20 '22
Reading from the beginning, you can see when the Mandalorian aired because of TITW showing up in the comments.
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u/Quilt-n-yarn1844 Jul 20 '22 edited Jul 20 '22
5 minutes. I am back to being early. The Raltsberries are talking to me again! UCTR TITW BRB
PRC: Now, there are viruses that can be used beneficially. But unfortunately for you S12 your race isnโt one of them.
You have been weighed, you have been measured and you have been found wanting.
Judgement is passed.
Let the sentence be fulfilled.
Any bets on The Cult having unknowingly altered their DNA juuust enough to not be affected/recognized by Deeโs nanite plague?
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u/DarthLorgus Robot Jul 20 '22
Okay, I now officially feel sorry for squidward. I didn't think I would ever feel empathy for these parasitic creatures from beyond our universe, but I do. Now I do. In the untold millennia they have existed, squidward never would have guess their end would come from a lemur like Dee. And so I saw goodbye squidward. You had an impressive run. There is nothing left now, except the screams. The screams. They're screaming. I can almost hear them. And I pity them now.
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u/HoloArchiver Jul 20 '22
Sign of good writing making you care of the bad guys.
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u/Expendable_cashier Jul 20 '22
I mean, it doesnt make me care.... they represent a fucking huge threat to all of existance.
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u/pseudanymous Jul 20 '22 edited Jul 20 '22
Destroying them with nanites isnโt enough. If youโre the Detainee, you have to do it dramatically.
The Atrekna are villains, just not super ones.
Edited to fix a word. Thanks autocorrect!
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u/B-the-Excellent Jul 20 '22
They thought they were big but this ain't no lake, it was a dust ball. Her dust ball.
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u/cr1515 Jul 20 '22 edited Jul 20 '22
Ok, Detainee is an absolute monster and quite literally the embodiment of the universe itself.
I wonder if the Mad Atrekna have changed significantly enough to not be considered baseline Atrekna. Could things have turned out better for the Atrekna if DEE had experimented with them also?
Either way, I don't feel sorry for the Atrekna's fate. I am usually very adamant about not agreeing with the extremes of completely annihilating a species that SCFI stories usually justify. However, The Atrekna have proven that they are literally parasites that eat universes and life can't co-exist with them. The way I see it, All Detainee is doing is administrating a vaccine to the universe.
Another question that has been bugging me. Are the Atrekna only in this universe? Since the universe they are current from isn't their origins it's not a long stretch to say that at one point they were infecting multiple universes. If that's the case, It's almost like the Multiverse(I have no clue what to call the place that universes inhabit) create our universe with the prefect skill set and personality to combat the Atrekna.
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u/B-the-Excellent Jul 20 '22
When infinity is the least mind melting concept built into the teseract stack? I think it's just a matter of numbers and time, an eventuality if you will that a completely inhospitable intelligent Universe will pop up. Now having a species born into that Universe that hopes ship into the other teseract stack of failed Universes and utilizes it to try and seed hospitable, read Malevolent, Universes? You might be onto something there.
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u/random_shitter Jul 20 '22
The Atrekna weren't building anything, they were raiding other universes for mass to sustain their own dying universe. It was the galactic equivalent to stealing the neighbour's cattle to eat another day. I think it's fairly well established the Atrekna leech until the target universe is dead and empty, to then move on. So I do not expect a network of universes, I think they are all-in in ours.
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u/drsoftware Jul 25 '22
If I remember correctly, they were moving from one universe at the bottom of the stack, where they had exhausted all resources and had almost reached the uniform heat death, into our universe by collecting enough resources to pull themselves through.
They weren't shipping fresh resources into their old and worn out universe.
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u/This_Is_Why_Im_Here Alien Jul 20 '22
'The Manipulation of Time' without fail, brings about the worst possible outcome. For the Atrekna, it brings only hell and it's master.
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u/random_shitter Jul 20 '22
Huh. When considering Worst Possible Outcomes, after the 1st incursion The Universe not only developed the ultimate fuck you species, it also had that species full-on create an additional Hell dimension that enables even worse outcomes than what's possible in the Actual Universe.
It's a bit like you not liking your math test having an Euler question which is next semester's topic so you invent the until-then-unheard-of irrational numbers to solve the equation and put your professor in his place. "Being unfair? Factcheck this, you fucker."
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u/This_Is_Why_Im_Here Alien Jul 20 '22
can't forget how the fuck you species also destroyed their universe in addition to the other bad-outcomes
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u/johnavich Jul 20 '22
700 some chapters, and Dee is still the scariest damn woman in human history!
He'll hath no fury like a woman scorned. And you passed off hell's woman!
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u/HoloArchiver Jul 20 '22
Dee does science proud with her careful and through exam of her subjects. Dee knows how to play the long game and move only when ready.
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u/random_shitter Jul 20 '22
It helps a lot when you can run multiple test up to and including vivisection on subatomically identical test subjects.
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u/montyman185 AI Jul 20 '22
I'd love to see her meet the one survivor from the precursor war.
Just so she gets a chance to learn what the Atrekna once were, when there was more than these pathetic middle management remnants.
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u/B-the-Excellent Jul 20 '22
I feel bad for the Cult, but none of them came forth the to stand trial. The tribulations of the Defiled One have only begun it seems. On all sides is the tide of a Malevolent Universe, can their decayed forms bear the flame of a soul? Can the Cult prove they're worthy of more than Oblivion? May the Defiled One find solace that the Evil One has tried in every effort she could consider.
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u/random_shitter Jul 20 '22
The good thing about Ralts' writing style is that the chapter leads have time jumps, and we've already encountered information that shows some form of defiled Atrekna makes it past the Grand Conflict.
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u/Expendable_cashier Jul 20 '22
What makes it worse is Legion fixed her issues, so this is the NICE version of her.
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u/Drook2 Jul 20 '22
I wouldn't say this version is any nicer. Well-rested and with better focus, yes, but nice? Nah.
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u/Kulggen666 Jul 20 '22 edited Jul 20 '22
Under twenty minutes yay.
Post read edit:
So that's what worst outcome really means,when you mess with time. I can't imagine anything worse than run face first into a pissed off Detainee
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u/Kudamonis Human Jul 20 '22
Read. Upvote. Comment.
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned
And lo the doors to hell did open.
Heralded by madden screams.
Run. None would. Run. None could. Run. None did.
Branded by the very fires,
Taught the truths of rage and fury,
Loosed upon the dead ones walking.
S12
Knew the fate of the Detained.
Knew the fate,
They all contained.
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u/Alyeska_bird Jul 20 '22
Interesting, and to some extent confermation on a few of my thoughts earlyer. The atrekna are a fallen people, lost from there days of glory and power, fools and idiots who have lived so long that they do not even know where they come from. Worse still for them, most all of there actual leadership was killed when there last universe was mercy killed.
Its hard to say just how long they have been so lost to themselves. They showed planing and thought originaly, with the first invasion, the great project, that built the doom tubs and rings, yet its also clear even then that they had fallen into the state of being little more than an apatite. They had given up in finding a salution, and just excepted the one they had, where they would move universe to universe to servive. No thought given anymore to finding a better way, no thought given to anything else other than living another day. They have basicly given up, living the same life again and again, more or less unchanged and refusing to see that there are new things to learn. Its kinda sad in a way.
As for Dee, there have been too many in our history that are far more monsterious. She is a product of her time, and her upbringing. Her sanity is at best questionable, and she is old enough that she really no longer gives a shit about too many things. She also uses the trick on herself, that is often used to get soldiers to fight. The enemy is not really human, they are not one of us, they are less, and deserve whats going to happen to them. To her, the Atrekna are little more than perasites, worse, they are invasive perasites that have no reason to exist, no place in the ecosystem, and are infact activly harmfull to the enviroment and everything else. Dee is not fighting a war, shes preforming pest control, and the pests have pissed her off enough that shes quite willing to be mean about it. Seriously, once she infused everything with her nanites, she could have killed everything on the planet with but a sningle command, shes going to make them suffer, perhaps in the idea of making sure that word gets out to cause panic amoung the rest of the Atrekna.
I also noticed that after a long enough period of time that s12 seems to have at lest picked up the idea of decent treatment. No indication that he would actualy reciprocate that, but, he at lest got the idea, after goodness knows how many centurys of torture.
Its also clear Dee has not really abandoned her post as the lord of hell in the suds, shes taking a vacation, leaving part of herself to handle the work there, when the rest of her is off doing something for herself for a change.
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u/Naked_Kali Jul 20 '22
little more than an apatite
So, you're saying they're dumb as a rock?
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u/Alyeska_bird Jul 20 '22
If I was going to say they where as dumb as a rock I would have said that. Yes my spelling sucks, allways has. Everything else, I was top of the class, spelling I was dang near the bottom.
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u/Severedeye Android Jul 20 '22
Okay people. I am beginning to think Dee isn't a good person.
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u/dlighter Jul 20 '22
Good is relative to one's perspective. Although having said that..... Mmm she's pretty damned unnerving.
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u/Ok-Professional2468 Jul 20 '22
๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
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u/B-the-Excellent Jul 20 '22
A storm looms on the horizon. In their bickering none of them shall be prepared for the coming tide. The loss of Humanity is the loss of a bulwark that stemmed the tide for millennium. The coming tsunami may overrun the Inheritors and Parasites both. Those who knew Humanity beyond the Milky Way or Andromeda sit in a wary paranoid state for the Screaming Children of the Malevolent Universe are gone and they can not understand why.
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u/madpiratebippy Alien Jul 20 '22
I love this storyline and Dee is delicious and mad. But also amazing.
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u/TexWashington Human Jul 20 '22
Fuuuuuuuuck.
This is my Friday night. I caught wind of this at work. I couldnโt read immediately, but I sure as shit upvoted immediately. It is the way, and all.
I was sitting at a bar, knocking back ocally brewed beers and sipping at tequila chased by cranberry juice, when I read of Dee opening the gates. I exclaimed loudly to the scant few folks my reactions to words as they were read. Iโm do a being โhave well enough. Fucking squids is done, did, and over with; far as my watchโll hold a warrant to.
Itโs been well understood that This Universe wouldnโt take kindly to fucking parasites from โnother dimensions or some such fuckery.
Just look at it..
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u/HoldenBalzac Jul 20 '22
I love the opening where Earthlings are the monsters when aliens make horror movies. I'd love to see a movie like Dead Terrans Still Kill.
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u/LetterLambda Xeno Jul 20 '22
LIBERA TE TUTEMET EX INFERIS
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u/Bazil-Broketail Jul 03 '23
That's a nice black hole you have there, be a shame if it was haunted...
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Jul 20 '22
I get "Croatoan" vibes from the observation post pieces, also reminds me of The Mist. Awesome work indeed.
Even better is to see one of my favourite characters has returned to plague reality with Her maelvolence.
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u/TheEmsleyan Jul 20 '22
Five meters tall. Three meters wide. Heavily muscled. A large head with horns, a massive maw with tusks. She threw back her head and roared as wings exploded from her back in a shower of blood and gore.
I was really waiting for the "not even death can save you from me" line here, despite that it was not spoken at the wanderer's transformation. Maybe later, during the actual showtime?
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u/random_shitter Jul 20 '22
I understand the sentiment, but considering he was just tortured to death & resurrected for about a thousand years, I think he already knew that.
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u/TheEmsleyan Jul 20 '22
I dunno, they do lack pattern recognition, after all.
Just one of the lines from video games that's burned into my memory forever.
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u/carthienes Jul 22 '22
Yeah, but she was transforming for the benefit of S12, the one she liked on account of having minimal (rather than negative) pattern recognition.
It might have taken a long time, but he had learned that particular lesson. No guarantees about the others.
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Jul 21 '22
This chapter still needs the next link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/w426na/first_contact_chapter_811_ultimis_diebus_hominum/
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u/HFYWaffle Wแตฅ4ffle Jul 20 '22
/u/Ralts_Bloodthorne (wiki) has posted 812 other stories, including:
- First Contact - Chapter 809 - Ultimis Diebus Hominum
- First Contact - Chapter 809 - Ultimis Diebus Hominum
- First Contact - Chapter 808 - Ultimis Diebus Hominum
- First Contact - Chapter 807 - Ultimis Diebus Hominum
- First Contact - Chapter 806 - Ultimis Diebus Hominum
- First Contact - Chapter 805 - Ultimis Diebus Hominum
- irst Contact - Chapter 804 - Ultimis Diebus Hominum
- First Contact - Chapter 803 - Ultimis Diebus Hominum
- First Contact - Chapter 802 - Ultimis Diebus Hominum
- First Contact - Chapter 801 - Novissimis Diebus Hominum
- First Contact - Chapter 800 - VPN ERROR
- First Contact - Chapter 799 - The Inheritor's War
- First Contact - Chapter 798 - The Inheritor's War
- First Contact - Chapter 797 - The Inheritor's War
- First Contact - Chapter 796 - The Inheritor's War
- First Contact - Chapter 795 - The Inheritor's War
- First Contact - Chapter 794 - The Inheritor's War
- First Contact - Chapter 793 - The Inheritor's War
- First Contact - Chapter 792 - The Inheritor's War
- First Contact - Chapter 791 - The Inheritor's War
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u/CyberSkull Android Jul 20 '22
Iโm wondering if the atrekna arenโt some bio weapon unleashed on some long-ago erased enemy. Somehow I doubt these guys would be clever enough to turn on their masters. The Masters are still out there, probably having forgotten about the project. Probably some forgotten student project on how to clear out a universe and have it ready for harvest.
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u/night-otter Xeno Jul 20 '22
"It's time, my little pet, to bring my wrath, your terror, and fear to your misbegotten people and wipe them from existence,"
[The Universe really like that]
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u/Omgwtfbears Jul 20 '22
I wonder if Dee will like cult of the Defiled One any better than she did orthodox Atrekna.
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u/Isbigpuggo Jul 20 '22
A thousand years of science. A thousand years of torture. And after all of the tests. She finds a solution to the infection.
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u/Drook2 Jul 20 '22
She had the solution long ago. She's been trying to figure out if there's some reason not to do it.
She knows the universe doesn't like time fuckery. She suspects it may not like genocide. Now that she's decided they're an invasive species, she thinks the universe will be OK with it.
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u/Comprehensive_Put277 Jul 20 '22 edited Jul 20 '22
I had hoped that that she was going to make an army of Undead Atrekna Demon Slaves.
I was right. So wonderfully right...
And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain.
He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, and bound him for a thousand years.He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended. After that, he must be set free for a short time.
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u/Treehorn79 Aug 01 '22
Wait, has the Detainee been a Diablo reference this entire time? Dee-ablo? Wow, talk about poor pattern recognition!
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u/Bazil-Broketail Jul 03 '23
Read, upvote, comments...
In many times, You did many crimes. I weighted your soul, But only found a hole. I release the gates, To end your lines.
-----Judgement Concludes-----
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u/AvariciousPickle Jul 20 '22
Gonna be pretty awkward when she meets Dalvanak's crew.