| [Brother Vindici] |
| Orc, Male, Priest |
| Location: A Temple, at the heart of a City Square |
“It is clear, now more than ever, that the gods are present and guiding our lives,” says the man, standing before an altar. He holds a hand out, gesturing to the crowd that is sitting on one side of the temple. “The great lights cut through the world, carving our society into shape like the chisel of a heavenly sculptor.” He looks to the other half of the people filling the church. “The sword of god, slices through the threats to our prosperity — the goblin hordes, the great ravaging of wild beasts across the continent,” he says, looking at the crowd of hundreds of people, nodding and murmuring in fervent agreement. “It has never been made so clear to us as it is now, that we reside within the garden of paradise as creatures, cared for and tended to by our maker,” explains the priest. “Brothers, sisters, join me in prayer,” he asks, gesturing for the people of the packed temple to rise to their feet. “Let us pray in thanks to our patron, to our keeper,” says the man, lowering his hands and clasping them together. “Let us prove to them that we are grateful, obedient children and that we live in thanks for their incredible efforts at fostering our souls.”
Hundreds of people close their eyes, bowing their heads in silent prayer. Humans and elves, dwarves, orcs, and even a few odd fairies lower their heads in reverence, praying to the unknown force that has clearly announced its grand presence in their world, guiding it to return it to the path of righteous glory after it had been astray for so long.
They clearly have not managed to sustain their world by themselves, so the gods have come in clear force, to right them with strong, nurturing hands and hearts.
“Hallow,” starts the priest, guiding the mass prayer, one of many hundreds that are beginning to take place regularly across the world.
| [Gottlieb] |
A long, rumbling burp echoes through the station. Gottlieb thumps his fist against his chest and then loudly clears his throat.
The man turns his head, looking at Auxiliary Gunner Grunheide, who is looking his way from her chair.
“What?” asks the man, looking back at the monitor. “Kai,” says Gottlieb. “How are my people doing?” he asks, looking at the camera view that pans over the landscape and away from the gathering of people in some weird church.
| [Answer] - Humanity is tumultuous as always. Multiple skirmishes between independent factions are taking place over several continents, between both members of the species and of others. |
“Eh, that’s life,” says Gottlieb. “People are always going to knock each other’s teeth out. Not my problem.” He spins a finger. “How’s the boar situation going?”
| [Answer] - They continue to reproduce and swarm across the landscape in the thousands, leaving desolation in their wake. |
The monitor displays a before and after image of a green landscape with a clear, brown, and black line running along the middle from top to bottom, where hundreds of thousands of wild animals are moving and consuming everything.
Gottlieb tsks. “Those damn boars… Kai, what do we do about them?” he asks. “They’re going to hit some real cities soon.” They already shot the gun directly at them several times. But even the cannon, with its massive destructive power, can’t keep up with the sheer amount of reproduction the animals are engaging in. Each of the thousands of animals has a litter of a few dozen piglets, and within two weeks, these creatures are already mature and reproducing themselves. It’s devastating. A real ecological disaster worse than any storm or quake and they have no qualms about eating people as much as they eat the grasses, roots and trees along their path. Even if they eat each other, there are just always more to fill the gaps.
| [Answer] - Severe geological alterations must be made to contain the spread. Alternatively, the orbital cannon must be altered to allow continuous fire for a greatly extended period of time in order to collapse the boar population to sufficient numbers. |
Gottlieb nods.
“How are we looking?” he asks, looking at the goblin next to him.
“The gun is recharged and ready to fire,” says Grunheide. She taps the monitor, pinging the mirrored image on his screen exactly where she is touching her screen, to show him what she’s pointed out. “The conduits leading to the gun are cooked in channels two and three, though. Only the primary channel is running cool.”
Gottlieb sighs, rubbing his head. That means the gun isn’t drawing its full power anymore. The station is falling into real disrepair.
“Kai. How do we fix the gun?”
| [Answer] - Spare conduits are available within local storage. However, re-installation is complex and beyond Orbital Gunner Gottlieb’s clearly lacking capabilities. |
“Cut me some slack, Kai,” says Gottlieb. The man rubs his head and looks around the station, staring at Grunheide, then back at Rotwald and Blauhausen, who are up on the geo-spatial platform.
Of course.
The man rolls his eyes, turning back to the monitor. “Geospatial Coordinator Rotwald,” calls Gottleib into the microphone as he opens some digital tomes from the station’s library of scans. This is a magical world, isn’t it? So why the hell can’t they use some magical solutions to their problems if technical ones are too limiting? The man opens some wizard’s old tome on assets of the world that aid magical conductivity. “Find me some of these,” he orders, flipping the page to a chapter on particularly potent crystals and sending the file to her monitor.
The harpy shrieks, scratching against the screen at her station with her talons.
Gottlieb nods, content.
“Wait,” says Grunheide. “How are crystals down on the planet going to help us?” she asks. “We’re kind of far away.”
Gottlieb leans back on his seat, looking up at the blue light above his head that is staring down his way.
He has the feeling that Kai might just have an idea about that.
| [Wood-Mother of the Goblin Tribe] |
| Dryad, Female, Woodmother |
| Location: The Goblin-Forest |
She stares out over the landscape, covered in ash that continues to rain down from the sky even now, days later, as if they were in the depths of a cold and long winter. The heatless, gray tufts drift back down towards the ground that she walks over, several hundred goblins trailing after her as she wanders the landscape, trying to make heads or tails of the gods’ communications.
Their past efforts with the prior goblin-king, while undertaken in reverent service to the divine, had resulted in their being harshly punished. Yet she cannot understand why. She is sure that she had read the omens and signs correctly; they were hardly misunderstandable, given their obvious clarity. However, this seems not to have been the case.
So where did she go wrong?
The wood-mother turns her head, looking over the scar that cuts through the land like a hot knife through flesh, leaving a deep, smooth cut from here, where she stands at the edge of the precipice, to as far off as her eyes can see.
There, in the direction of the scar, lie no woodlands or forests. There are no valleys and ravines and hilly, rugged areas — places where goblins love to hide most. That way, off towards the north, that is where the great flatlands lie, in which the humans and their ilk like to live.
A tuft of ash drifts from above, landing on the tip of her nose, and she comes to understand the gods’ misgivings about their actions.
She and her tribe had been remaining in the native lands of the goblin, striding between the safety of the tree-lines and the groves in their brief outings out towards human settlements and intrusions. They have been snipping twigs and pruning leaves.
Her eyes wander along the scar that lies over the world, like the fallen trunk of a tree, and she understands now the message in its clarity.
They need to fell the tree at its trunk, not prune such small, unnoticeable edges.
The human cities – the strongholds of their race, the centers of their breeding and multiplication – those are what the goblins need to remove in order to fulfill the will of the great skylight.
It could not be more clear.
She just needed a little time to see.
| [High King Meridian] |
| Human, Male, King |
| Location: The Human Capital |
Meridian sits on the throne, staring down over the courtroom.
This has been quite the overturning of his life. A few weeks ago, he was just an old man sitting by himself inside a lighthouse by the sea, waiting to die, and now… now he’s an old man sitting on a throne. He’s still waiting to die, he’s old, after all. However, it would seem that there is one last task left in his life — a great work that is asked of him by the gods themselves to complete.
He can hardly begin to fathom what this could be. But at this point, after everything that has been shown to him, it’s clear that great undergoings are still in his future, rather than the promise of quiet retirement and a peaceful, lonesome death by the ocean.
“My lord,” calls an adviser from down at the foot of his throne. Meridian looks his way. “The usurping noble houses have all been contained within their compounds,” explains the man. “We’ve reestablished the surviving members of the old families back into their prior positions.”
“Good,” says Meridian, nodding and then rubbing his old beard. He looks to the side, looking at the captain of the soldier troop that had first besieged his lighthouse but then taken him in as an honored guest to bring him to his destiny. The man, too, was an implement of the gods, a tool used to leverage the old crustacean that he was from his shell. Meridian has taken the hint and made him the new chief military advisor.
The captain looks at him. “I suggest purging the usurpers entirely, my lord,” says the man. “If we allow them to just stay under simple house arrest, they will only conspire to revolt again a second time.”
Meridian nods, looking up towards the ceiling of the throne-room, grand as it is, as he thinks. He isn’t really interested in having even more blood on his hands, but the stability of the kingdom is apparently of paramount importance to the gods. That much is hard to deny.
“Do it quietly,” he orders. “No blood. Poison their food,” explains King Meridian. “If anyone asks, spread the story of a plague moving through their chambers,” he orders, waving the captain off to go do as asked. “That’s why they were locked away in their houses, after all.”
“Yes, my lord,” says the captain, walking down the steps from the throne and setting off to do as asked.
It’s not what he wants to do. He’s an old man who really would prefer to just retire by the sea.
However, that’s behind him now.
King Meridian stares out at the throne-room as others enter, advisers of the economy and of foreign relations, ambassadors from prevalent academies of the nation’s schools and guilds, merchants from powerful trading families, and all manner of gaggle enter, every single one of them having some complicated request or need that they wish to leverage with him now that he is the new primary power in the region.
He can only hope he does everything correctly, lest he call down the wrath of the gods over himself and his kingdom.
| [Gottlieb] |
Geo-spatial Coordinator Rotwald shrieks noisily, the harpy screeching across the gunner’s bay.
An image pops up on Gottlieb’s monitor. It’s a satellite view of a large, expansive, hilly field on the north-eastern corner of a continent they’re currently not hovering over. There is an expansive mining operation out in the open, with hundreds of people working in a glassy, jagged field of crystals several miles long on the surface of the world.
“Great work,” says Gottlieb, looking over the old recorded images from their last pass over the region.
One or two of these is just what they need to juice up the gun and to maybe even fix a few things here and there in the wiring.
The biggest question remains though, how they’ll get the material up to the station.
The man looks up at the blue eye staring down his way.
As if reading his mind, a window appears.
| [Remark] - There may be a feasible concept for acquisition of required materials. |
“Hit me,” says Gottlieb, watching as new text appears on his screen.
Razmatazz
Now that Weaponsmith has been completed, this story will be getting its update schedule. This means that there will be chapters from now on every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday! =)
| [Brother Vindici] |
| Orc, Male, Priest |
| Location: A Temple, at the heart of a City Square |
“It is clear, now more than ever, that the gods are present and guiding our lives,” says the man, standing before an altar. He holds a hand out, gesturing to the crowd that is sitting on one side of the temple. “The great lights cut through the world, carving our society into shape like the chisel of a heavenly sculptor.” He looks to the other half of the people filling the church. “The sword of god, slices through the threats to our prosperity — the goblin hordes, the great ravaging of wild beasts across the continent,” he says, looking at the crowd of hundreds of people, nodding and murmuring in fervent agreement. “It has never been made so clear to us as it is now, that we reside within the garden of paradise as creatures, cared for and tended to by our maker,” explains the priest. “Brothers, sisters, join me in prayer,” he asks, gesturing for the people of the packed temple to rise to their feet. “Let us pray in thanks to our patron, to our keeper,” says the man, lowering his hands and clasping them together. “Let us prove to them that we are grateful, obedient children and that we live in thanks for their incredible efforts at fostering our souls.”
Hundreds of people close their eyes, bowing their heads in silent prayer. Humans and elves, dwarves, orcs, and even a few odd fairies lower their heads in reverence, praying to the unknown force that has clearly announced its grand presence in their world, guiding it to return it to the path of righteous glory after it had been astray for so long.
They clearly have not managed to sustain their world by themselves, so the gods have come in clear force, to right them with strong, nurturing hands and hearts.
“Hallow,” starts the priest, guiding the mass prayer, one of many hundreds that are beginning to take place regularly across the world.
| [Gottlieb] |
A long, rumbling burp echoes through the station. Gottlieb thumps his fist against his chest and then loudly clears his throat.
The man turns his head, looking at Auxiliary Gunner Grunheide, who is looking his way from her chair.
“What?” asks the man, looking back at the monitor. “Kai,” says Gottlieb. “How are my people doing?” he asks, looking at the camera view that pans over the landscape and away from the gathering of people in some weird church.
| [Answer] - Humanity is tumultuous as always. Multiple skirmishes between independent factions are taking place over several continents, between both members of the species and of others. |
“Eh, that’s life,” says Gottlieb. “People are always going to knock each other’s teeth out. Not my problem.” He spins a finger. “How’s the boar situation going?”
| [Answer] - They continue to reproduce and swarm across the landscape in the thousands, leaving desolation in their wake. |
The monitor displays a before and after image of a green landscape with a clear, brown, and black line running along the middle from top to bottom, where hundreds of thousands of wild animals are moving and consuming everything.
Gottlieb tsks. “Those damn boars… Kai, what do we do about them?” he asks. “They’re going to hit some real cities soon.” They already shot the gun directly at them several times. But even the cannon, with its massive destructive power, can’t keep up with the sheer amount of reproduction the animals are engaging in. Each of the thousands of animals has a litter of a few dozen piglets, and within two weeks, these creatures are already mature and reproducing themselves. It’s devastating. A real ecological disaster worse than any storm or quake and they have no qualms about eating people as much as they eat the grasses, roots and trees along their path. Even if they eat each other, there are just always more to fill the gaps.
| [Answer] - Severe geological alterations must be made to contain the spread. Alternatively, the orbital cannon must be altered to allow continuous fire for a greatly extended period of time in order to collapse the boar population to sufficient numbers. |
Gottlieb nods.
“How are we looking?” he asks, looking at the goblin next to him.
“The gun is recharged and ready to fire,” says Grunheide. She taps the monitor, pinging the mirrored image on his screen exactly where she is touching her screen, to show him what she’s pointed out. “The conduits leading to the gun are cooked in channels two and three, though. Only the primary channel is running cool.”
Gottlieb sighs, rubbing his head. That means the gun isn’t drawing its full power anymore. The station is falling into real disrepair.
“Kai. How do we fix the gun?”
| [Answer] - Spare conduits are available within local storage. However, re-installation is complex and beyond Orbital Gunner Gottlieb’s clearly lacking capabilities. |
“Cut me some slack, Kai,” says Gottlieb. The man rubs his head and looks around the station, staring at Grunheide, then back at Rotwald and Blauhausen, who are up on the geo-spatial platform.
Of course.
The man rolls his eyes, turning back to the monitor. “Geospatial Coordinator Rotwald,” calls Gottleib into the microphone as he opens some digital tomes from the station’s library of scans. This is a magical world, isn’t it? So why the hell can’t they use some magical solutions to their problems if technical ones are too limiting? The man opens some wizard’s old tome on assets of the world that aid magical conductivity. “Find me some of these,” he orders, flipping the page to a chapter on particularly potent crystals and sending the file to her monitor.
The harpy shrieks, scratching against the screen at her station with her talons.
Gottlieb nods, content.
“Wait,” says Grunheide. “How are crystals down on the planet going to help us?” she asks. “We’re kind of far away.”
Gottlieb leans back on his seat, looking up at the blue light above his head that is staring down his way.
He has the feeling that Kai might just have an idea about that.
| [Wood-Mother of the Goblin Tribe] |
| Dryad, Female, Woodmother |
| Location: The Goblin-Forest |
She stares out over the landscape, covered in ash that continues to rain down from the sky even now, days later, as if they were in the depths of a cold and long winter. The heatless, gray tufts drift back down towards the ground that she walks over, several hundred goblins trailing after her as she wanders the landscape, trying to make heads or tails of the gods’ communications.
Their past efforts with the prior goblin-king, while undertaken in reverent service to the divine, had resulted in their being harshly punished. Yet she cannot understand why. She is sure that she had read the omens and signs correctly; they were hardly misunderstandable, given their obvious clarity. However, this seems not to have been the case.
So where did she go wrong?
The wood-mother turns her head, looking over the scar that cuts through the land like a hot knife through flesh, leaving a deep, smooth cut from here, where she stands at the edge of the precipice, to as far off as her eyes can see.
There, in the direction of the scar, lie no woodlands or forests. There are no valleys and ravines and hilly, rugged areas — places where goblins love to hide most. That way, off towards the north, that is where the great flatlands lie, in which the humans and their ilk like to live.
A tuft of ash drifts from above, landing on the tip of her nose, and she comes to understand the gods’ misgivings about their actions.
She and her tribe had been remaining in the native lands of the goblin, striding between the safety of the tree-lines and the groves in their brief outings out towards human settlements and intrusions. They have been snipping twigs and pruning leaves.
Her eyes wander along the scar that lies over the world, like the fallen trunk of a tree, and she understands now the message in its clarity.
They need to fell the tree at its trunk, not prune such small, unnoticeable edges.
The human cities – the strongholds of their race, the centers of their breeding and multiplication – those are what the goblins need to remove in order to fulfill the will of the great skylight.
It could not be more clear.
She just needed a little time to see.
| [High King Meridian] |
| Human, Male, King |
| Location: The Human Capital |
Meridian sits on the throne, staring down over the courtroom.
This has been quite the overturning of his life. A few weeks ago, he was just an old man sitting by himself inside a lighthouse by the sea, waiting to die, and now… now he’s an old man sitting on a throne. He’s still waiting to die, he’s old, after all. However, it would seem that there is one last task left in his life — a great work that is asked of him by the gods themselves to complete.
He can hardly begin to fathom what this could be. But at this point, after everything that has been shown to him, it’s clear that great undergoings are still in his future, rather than the promise of quiet retirement and a peaceful, lonesome death by the ocean.
“My lord,” calls an adviser from down at the foot of his throne. Meridian looks his way. “The usurping noble houses have all been contained within their compounds,” explains the man. “We’ve reestablished the surviving members of the old families back into their prior positions.”
“Good,” says Meridian, nodding and then rubbing his old beard. He looks to the side, looking at the captain of the soldier troop that had first besieged his lighthouse but then taken him in as an honored guest to bring him to his destiny. The man, too, was an implement of the gods, a tool used to leverage the old crustacean that he was from his shell. Meridian has taken the hint and made him the new chief military advisor.
The captain looks at him. “I suggest purging the usurpers entirely, my lord,” says the man. “If we allow them to just stay under simple house arrest, they will only conspire to revolt again a second time.”
Meridian nods, looking up towards the ceiling of the throne-room, grand as it is, as he thinks. He isn’t really interested in having even more blood on his hands, but the stability of the kingdom is apparently of paramount importance to the gods. That much is hard to deny.
“Do it quietly,” he orders. “No blood. Poison their food,” explains King Meridian. “If anyone asks, spread the story of a plague moving through their chambers,” he orders, waving the captain off to go do as asked. “That’s why they were locked away in their houses, after all.”
“Yes, my lord,” says the captain, walking down the steps from the throne and setting off to do as asked.
It’s not what he wants to do. He’s an old man who really would prefer to just retire by the sea.
However, that’s behind him now.
King Meridian stares out at the throne-room as others enter, advisers of the economy and of foreign relations, ambassadors from prevalent academies of the nation’s schools and guilds, merchants from powerful trading families, and all manner of gaggle enter, every single one of them having some complicated request or need that they wish to leverage with him now that he is the new primary power in the region.
He can only hope he does everything correctly, lest he call down the wrath of the gods over himself and his kingdom.
| [Gottlieb] |
Geo-spatial Coordinator Rotwald shrieks noisily, the harpy screeching across the gunner’s bay.
An image pops up on Gottlieb’s monitor. It’s a satellite view of a large, expansive, hilly field on the north-eastern corner of a continent they’re currently not hovering over. There is an expansive mining operation out in the open, with hundreds of people working in a glassy, jagged field of crystals several miles long on the surface of the world.
“Great work,” says Gottlieb, looking over the old recorded images from their last pass over the region.
One or two of these is just what they need to juice up the gun and to maybe even fix a few things here and there in the wiring.
The biggest question remains though, how they’ll get the material up to the station.
The man looks up at the blue eye staring down his way.
As if reading his mind, a window appears.
| [Remark] - There may be a feasible concept for acquisition of required materials. |
“Hit me,” says Gottlieb, watching as new text appears on his screen.
Razmatazz
Now that Weaponsmith has been completed, this story will be getting its update schedule. This means that there will be chapters from now on every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday! =)
