[Fan Fiction] Looking forward to the Mirror (Completed)

[Krulle]

The Historians are interested in an equalised play. They gave weapons to the Loroi, and telepathic technology to the Umiak... (The Historians are already explicitly mentioned in this part.)

But something is mentioned: a "base creature"...
Did the Umiak capture a Loroi-baby, raised and "brain washed" it to the Umiak worldview, and with the technology from the Historians strengthened the telepathic signal up to weapon grade?
Although the Umiak commander immediately afterwards again speaks of "just a device, and that it is one of many"....
He's getting scruples killing "the device"?

Anyway, I like these chapters more than the fighting chapters, which I already liked very much.
Go on... ;)

[dragoongfa]

Let's say that the Umiak don't respect the base design of the device at all for a reason.

If someone finds the keyword, connects the dots to the Insider and asks I will spoil it in spoilers

The way things are going the first reveal about the true nature of the device would come in 2 to 3 weeks. The analysis some time after that.

[Krulle]

The device is mesmerised by the Umiak, and eager to obey any possible wishes. Sounds much like Golim...

Possibly the Historians know more about the relationship of strong telepaths and being strongly influenced by nearby telepaths.

Possibly I am trying too hard to see something....
And I should stop. i don't want myself to be spoiled while reading the story.... (I cannot stop myself from reading spoilers.... Up to the point that I in my youth I read the last page of a thriller after I've read the first chapter, and only then continued to read chapter two. That way I could spot all hidden references to the solution.)
I'm more than fine with waiting three weeks to read the conclusion, but I have the impression you're quite eager to spill the beans.
(You're like me then, dropping hints and enjoy watching the hunt. my wife is tremendously curious, and my best Christmas present is her reaction when I drop hints what she gets and/or where the gift is hidden...)

[dragoongfa]

Fine I won't spoil it

Let's just say that the Historians don't know the science behind telepathy but they do have something of great telepathic value.

[halftea]

Does this mean we have a guest appearance by the Pol?

[dragoongfa]

Close but no cigar.

[Argron]

The Historians are playing quite the dangerous game, no doubt whoever wins the war will look at their involvement helping both sides in committing complete genocide against each other. And I doubt they will be able to resist the surviving superpower, no matter how depleted it is or how superior their technology is over both sides.

[NuclearIceCream]

Is it a telepathic human?

[dragoongfa]

The game the Historians are playing is dangerous but we don't see the picture that they see in order to properly judge them. Perhaps what they want is to prevent an other genocide like the Tithric and have finally decided that the Umiak will at least not kill anyone else but the Loroi. They could also be hoping that both sides will collapse from within without too much collateral damage, then they will move in and put a semblance of order. It could be that the Umiak have managed to blackmail their government by promising to execute every last Historian in the still occupied territories. The collaborators could also be Historian Quislings who provided something that their government didn't want to fall on anyone's hands.

Hell the Historians themselves may not be the ones who are really pulling the strings but a hidden puppet master who works through them.

Is it a telepathic human?

Wait for my next fan fic.

[dragoongfa]

Chapter 15, part 3

One would think that after centuries of experience Shadowcloud would have gained the wisdom necessary to avoid getting herself and others in the kind of situations that they found themselves at the moment. Half of them remained after being forced to retreat deeper into the ship until the Shells cornered them within a strong point that was meant to combat possible boarders. She found it ironic that the boarders were the ones who now used it to keep the crew at bay but she kept that to herself knowing that this would probably be the place where they would all die.

She glanced around aimlessly around as she kept her telepathic abilities focused on maintaining the anti-telepathic jamming field that kept the shout at bay; it was short ranged but strong enough to lower the shout down to manageable levels for those within it. The shout was still there, continuously scratching and scathing at the edges of everyone’s consciousness but the jamming field kept it there, out of everyone’s minds, allowing them to maintain themselves and resist the Shell attack that hit them mere solons after the shout hit them.

Those first few moments were a nightmare coming to life to tear their minds from inside out, everyone screaming in agony; some even having their minds completely erased by the farseer level attack. The one shouting was a farseer, the brute strength behind it made that certain; the only consolation was that the shout lacked the skill necessary to inflict instantaneous damage. An experienced farseer who really intended to harm others was more than able to completely overwhelm anyone’s defenses and all that while unamplified. This farseer was amplified, but not properly, most probably because the amplifier wasn’t calibrated properly.

It was the combination of the shout’s brute nature and messy amplification that allowed her to maintain her mind and immediately raise up a jamming field to keep the worse of the shout out. What happened afterwards was still a haze in her mind, she remembered Razormist and Coldsword grabbing her and dragging her away from the fighting as the Shells rushed in hand to hand combat instead of using blasters. The Soroin and the other two providing cover as Razormist directed as an orderly retreat as possible considering the circumstances. In the end they had to retreat deeper into the ship and away from their intended target as the Shells had covered any other possible approach. All of the Teidar were still there but the Soroin took the brunt of the attack.

It was hard to think while keeping herself focused on the jamming field but she couldn’t let go of the fact that the Shells had finally managed to attain telepathy for themselves. Not only that but that they also managed to get two farseers working in tandem, one to provide the jamming field that covered the Shells while the other was doing other things, like sensing or in their case shouting in order to take them out.

The Mizol had discovered plenty of reports about telepathic research projects that the Shells run all of them with the intent to get telepathy for themselves; even without those reports the intent behind the brutal experiments that the Loroi uncovered after liberating Seren and other planets was evident.

The Shells started by dissecting and experimenting Loroi in order to fully map their brains, in the hopes that the answer to Loroi telepathy was hidden inside. They started those experiments long before the war, as a matter of fact they started them right after their first contact by kidnapping various hapless civilians who travelled within their sphere of influence; all the while making sure to cover everything with well staged and meticulous accidents that didn’t leave any evidence of wrong doing behind. Even then, the Mizol would have been able to uncover this plot and the preparations for the war if they weren’t denied the necessary clearance and resources.

The Shells didn’t get what they wanted until the war started and it was their success in its early stages that allowed their experiments to expand into industrial levels in terms of size and cruelty by using prisoners of war and the billions of captive populations at the territories they occupied.

The early attempts were the ones in which they used the knowledge that they gained from fully mapping the Loroi brain. They would take the freshly dead Loroi, install cybernetic augments on their brains and reanimate their corpses in the hopes that some telepathic abilities would still remain. These attempts had no results other than shocking and angering the Loroi who witnessed their results. Those were the reaction that led the Shells to their early pseudo infiltration attempts which were nothing but desecrated Loroi dead used as muppets in order to weaken the resolve of anyone who came across them.

Their efforts after these early failures split into several avenues, the three most promising all ending up in failure like everything else they tried.

The first approach was to trick Loroi prisoners into believing that a carefully crafted virtual reality that they had been thrown into was real. They tried at by careful cybernetic implantation directly into the prisoner’s brains. The whole endeavor was met with complete failure since the telepathic senses were proved to be impossible to fully replicate. Sooner or later their victims would realize that what they saw and felt wasn’t real and that they were prisoners of the Shells trapped into one of their horrid experiments.

The second approach was to take children who had no contact with Loroi and raise them among themselves in order to turn them completely to their cause. The problem was that the children would sooner or later run into someone who knew the truth and would in turn learn it themselves. The result wouldn’t change even if everyone who took care of them really believed the lies that they were telling the children since the lies would begin unraveling the moment everyone would come into telepathic contact with free thinking Loroi. The Shells tried to overcome this problem by introducing highly addictive drugs from an early age in order to make their wannabe puppets wholly dependent of them. Those puppets however were still Loroi and remained such no matter who raised them and with what drugs they were fed. They all turned against their Shell masters soon after contact with free thinking Loroi. Some of them were lucky enough to reach Loroi forces before the addiction consumed them; the rest preferred the freedom of an honorable death.

The third approach was a combination of heavy hallucinogenic agents and deeply intrusive cybernetic implants. The implants did offer a semblance of control while the hallucinogenic agents did limit inhibition down to manageable levels but their puppets could no longer be called telepathic in any meaningful way. At best they could only communicate through sanzai and maybe divulge some information but nothing more than that.

Everything promising that they tried met an unmovable object and that was how to control them. The Loroi would never be controlled in the way the Shells wished, they weren’t like any other sentients, they were telepaths and their telepathic pride would never be extinguished. Should they take that pride away then there would be nothing of use left for them.

Yet here they were, with a farseer shouting against them. Shadowcloud tried to remember the other projects she knew about in case one of them held an answer. There were several of those, the one which suggested to implant Loroi DNA on a Barsam to see what happens was actually the sanest one.

The two most ridiculous ones were so insane that everyone had trouble believing that the Shells actually funded them but the Shells did and invested precious resources on them anyway.

The first was to directly link a Loroi and a Shell with cybernetic means in order for the Shell to use the telepathic abilities of the Loroi much like how the Loroi shared everything through touching. This was scientifically impossible to accomplish to begin with, their nervous and brain systems shared little similarities and even if they did successfully connect the Loroi would still be able to control how her telepathic abilities would be used in the same way she would do if she was touching another Loroi.

The other ridiculous concept was to genetically engineer a Shell egg in order to give birth to Shells that had the same nervous and brain systems to the Loroi, or as close they could manage them considering the differences. In the hopes that this would be all that was needed to do in order to attain telepathy was to just copy the brain and nervous systems. The end results had no telepathic talent whatsoever, they could barely move without machine assistance and looked like the unholy offsprings of Shells and Loroi.

She would chuckle at these ridiculous attempts if not for the knowledge of the monstrously scaled breeding program of Loroi that the Shells maintained deep within their territory. That was where they now found the necessary numbers of young and fit Loroi for their countless experiments.

It seemed impossible to her but the fact was plain to see, one of the Shell’s projects that the Mizol knew nothing about bore results. There was no other explanation for the Shell Lotai and the Shout that still hit them. She had hoped that Shells had found and replicated some sort of Soian device that produced the jamming field around the ship, at least that would make more sense that the Shells managing to control two farseers at the same time.

She quickly pushed those thoughts aside when she and everyone else heard the countless clacking footsteps of running Shells.

“They are coming!” Razormist cried out as she, her Teidar and the Soroin prepared themselves for the rushing onslaught. She found one last irony in the fact that she, by far the strongest telepath and telekinetic in their group, could do nothing but watch everything as it would unfold.

Chapter 16, part 1: http://www.well-of-souls.com/forums/vie ... 843#p21843

[dragoongfa]

With this one Chapter 15 is done and the next chapter is full of death, explosions and telekinetics tearing stuff apart in one last attempt of glory.

Link for visibility's shake, Chapter 15, part 3: http://www.well-of-souls.com/forums/vie ... 714#p21714

[Twinkee]

Well the damsels outside the strong point were certainly in distress.
The marines are here to rescue the Loroi from monstrous cockroaches.
And this time they're doing it properly with battle armour and guns!

[Grayhome]

Another thrilling chapter in the ongoing saga! Excellent work as always.

[Zakharra]

Lieutenant Allerberger: "Alright boys and girls, it's time to hunt some bugs!"

Marines: "BUG HUNT!! OORAH! Bug Hunt! Bug Hunt! Bug Hunt!"

Loroi: "Wtf are they doing?"

[NuclearIceCream]

Lieutenant Allerberger: "Alright boys and girls, it's time to hunt some bugs!"

Marines: "BUG HUNT!! OORAH! Bug Hunt! Bug Hunt! Bug Hunt!"

Loroi: "Wtf are they doing?"

I have a hard time believing marines WOULDN'T do this if they ever went up against bug aliens.

[dragoongfa]

Chapter 16, part 1

As Teidar Sezon Razormist mentally prepared herself for the coming onslaught she couldn’t help but notice the fine details that made the strongpoint they were defending into a death trap for anyone who would try to enter it through the corridor she and the Soroin with her were covering. For some reason the Shells had taken significant extra costs when building this ship as its entire layout was split in several distinct sectors that were connected with each other via such strongpoints. The inefficiency in operating a ship with such a layout was obvious to even a Teidar but its designers probably had something entirely different on their mind since they focused on internal security above all else. It could be possible that this ship was used either as a patrol ship or a heavy armed prisoner transport; designs that would require such measures in order to ensure that any prisoners would never have a chance in taking over the ship.

Thankfully most of the defense systems were offline due to the power outage, otherwise they wouldn’t have made it this far, but the defensive positions that they now used were a clear testament to the monomaniacal design of the ship in question. The strongpoint was connecting three distinct sections of the deck they were on, three entrances in total that could normally be shut down hermetically with blast doors that would be thicker that the armor of a destroyer. They were locked in place with the power out but that didn’t change the fact that anyone who tried to storm in would instantly find themselves in a killing ground as the floor almost immediately sloped upwards leading into the elevated defensive positions that enveloped the entrance as if a V sign.

Any defenders would be perfectly covered and would have ideal shots downwards to an opponent who could only advance in limited numbers due to the corridor’s bottleneck. To rush in was suicide and the small distance to the top of the plateau couldn’t be covered without taking massive casualties. The problem was that the Shells had meticulously made it easier for their own kind to move around the strongpoint. The sloped floor leading upwards was difficult to walk on for anyone but the Shells who had placed several discreet handrails that the Shells used instead of stairs. With them in place the Shells were more than able to nimbly and quickly get to the top without losing any momentum, a testament to the speed and agility that they enjoyed in their natural gravity.

The only way to stop them from doing that was to kill them before they managed to reach the top but Razormist knew that they had neither the numbers nor the firepower necessary to do that. They would certainly kill plenty of Shells in the process but in the end she knew that this was going to be their last stand. Even with that in mind she smiled at the challenge that the ever approaching tide of Shells offered; never one to tolerate defeatism, from those she commanded and herself, she did the math and came to the conclusion that if any of them were to make it out alive they would each have to take out four Shells before dying.

An easy enough task for Teidars, even without telepathy, but the problem lay with the Soroin. They were ship crew and not the hardened ground veterans that she could trust in such a desperate fight. But they were Soroin, perhaps that still meant something even for those who never faced Shells in a real fight.

“Make sure you kill four before you die or I will hunt you down and kill you again in the Afterlife!” She bellowed as the first Shells appeared at the entrance she and her team were covering.

The Soroin opened fire in unison, their particle blasters set at maximum in order to guarantee a crippling wound if not a kill. The Shells knew that the concentrated fire would instantly take out even hard troops and they implemented a simple enough tactic for some additional cover to the Hard-troop vanguard. They just took the Loroi dead that were left behind and nailed them onto makeshift shields that the hard-troops carried to cover themselves as they just walked into the blaster fire.

“Do not falter!” Razormist yelled as she fired her blaster pistol into the slowly approaching and gruesomely covered swarm of Shells. As a tactic it was crude, gruesome but effective as their own dead offered an excellent disposable shield with their combat armors and bodies. The dead were quickly torn to shreds but with the little time they lasted the Shell vanguard managed to get a foot hold past the initial chokepoint and right into the pre-designed killing field.

“Concentrate Fire!” She yelled above the noise as she tried to guess where the heads of each hard-troop she could see were, a taxing task considering that she was without sensing while the particle flashes which turned darkness into light didn’t make things easier.

The gruesome shield of the first hardtroop had painted it with a layer of blue gore as the cross fire from the elevated positions tore it and the hard-trooper’s armor apart. Finally seeing an opening she concentrated and crushed the insides of its head and it was left standing idle as two more hard-troopers stood by the side of their dead comrade, offering themselves as living shields for the Shells behind them who carried a wide assortment of weapons and makeshift shields fashioned from torn off wall paneling

It was a tactic unique to the Shell mentality of self sacrifice for the cause, the vanguard offering their very lives as shields of those that followed and waited for the moment the defenders would have to reload. She had seen it before and she knew that the moment the fire wavered they would break lines and rush towards them with all the speed and nimbleness that the low gravity allowed them.

This tactic wouldn’t work if they had some heavy weapons but no Loroi was able to carry those in battle and thus their ground forces were forced to rely on walkers and floaters for heavy weapon support; equipment that no sane commander would bring into a boarding action. That didn’t mean that they didn’t have a counter prepared; the standard issue grenades they all carried were designed to be bundled together in order to increase their lethality. A lone grenade could take out a couple of Shells if they were right on top of it and at best wounding those in the immediate vicinity but a bundle of four grenades was more than enough to take out a whole bunch of them at the same time.

Each Teidar had three such bundles prepared and waiting for the opportune moment to telekinetically throw them to a mass of Shells. She threw the first bundle the moment the defensive fire from the Soroin begun to falter and the Shells broke ranks, the resulting explosion tearing the would be attackers apart while the ones still in the chokepoint hesitated for a moment which was all that she needed to quickly guide a second bundle right into the Shell packed corridor. The resulting explosion tore that group apart in an instant and a larger secondary explosion killed every remaining Shell in front of her position in an instant.

“Suicide bombers!” She warned out loud and used the opportunity to look at the other two approaches at the left and right of her position. Thunderspear covered her right and had already thrown her first grenade bundle and was about to throw a second when she hesitated for a moment. A Solon later a lone Shell was lifted up to the air and it was easy to see that it was another suicide bomber, a Soroin took its head off with a precise particle blast and Thunderspear crashed its body repeatedly against the wall and the ceiling, probably in the hopes to irreparably damage the detonator before throwing the battered remains back down the entrance she covered. Some of the Shells however used the opportunity that the lapse of attention from the Teidar offered and rushed up the slope to engage the defenders in close quarters.

Longblade’s position to her left already had several Shells among the defenders when a suicide bomber rushed among them and detonated its explosives, killing everyone around it.

“Coldsword, to the left!” Razormist ordered the lone Teidar who was their only reserve as she herself abandoned her position in order to cover the collapsed left flank. She glanced back as an afterthought, relieved that the chokepoint was now half obstructed as a result from the explosion. “Darkwing, you and your squad follow me!” Hopefully one squad was more than enough to cover the center while they would attempt to stop the left flank from completely collapsing; she hoped that Thunderspear would be able to hold on for now.

The Shells didn’t lose any time in exploiting the situation and at least a dozen of them were already on top of the ravaged defenses while more of them were undoubtedly rushing in. Coldsword thought fast and telekinetically arced one of her grenade bundles right onto the left chokepoint that the left flank used to cover. The Shell limbs and gore that flew upwards were solid proof that she must have killed a number of them even without knowing their exact position.

Razormist kept her last grenade bundle in reserve and covered Darkwing’s Soroin who quickly advanced towards the left flank while taking shots at the Shells who in turn returned fire as they rushed to get in hand to hand combat, on which they had every advantage, with unbelievable speed.

Shell exoskeletons could easily absorb punches and kicked while even combat knives and axes were rendered almost useless by them. Their exoskeleton combined with their forward legs, their razor sharp serrated spike on their right hand and their claw at the back of their left hand made them extremely dangerous to even fully armored warriors. They knew how to use their advantages to strike at their armor’s weak point and all Shells had been trained in such kind of hand to hand combat since infancy; their preferred method of fighting was to disarm, cripple and then finish off their opponents in quick succession.

The only hope a warrior had when faced with a Shell in hand to hand was to parry and avoid the blows long enough for a comrade to take a shot and kill the Shell before it killed her; a dangerous gamble unless there were Teidar that provided cover.

Razormist’s telekinetic strength was above average, unamplified she could just keep a Shell pinned down or crush its vital organs beneath its natural exoskeleton. Amplified she could crush the exoskeleton of an ordinary Shell with ease or shove with enough strength to make it stumble or even send it flying if the gravity was weak enough.

With well honed training and experience she didn’t need sensing to see the Soroin which needed telekinetic cover and those that could last long enough to be helped afterwards. Most of the Soroin managed to easily sidestep and dodge the initial flurry of kicks by their opponent’s front legs. One of them however had made the mistake of being just a little too far from the others and two Shells singled her out immediately. She quickly shoved one of them away and shot the other at the head with her blaster pistol before realizing that a Shell was coming straight for her. She barely managed to brings her armored hands up to guard from the double kick of its front legs, her armor was dented from the shock of the strike and she was sent flying but was stopped in mid air as the Shell grabbed her right leg with his left hand and brought its free right down on her kneecap, clearly aiming to pierce it with its serrated spike. She caught its arm in mid air with Telekinesis and killed it by forcefully making it stab itself in its middle eye. She fell down and quickly opened the dead Shell’s grip and looked for more targets which were few to her surprise as no more Shells rushed up the slope at the left flank while Coldsword and the unoccupied Soroin managed to cover their comrades without much trouble.

“Cover the breach!” She ordered and looked towards Thunderspear’s position which was littered with dead Shells while the surviving Soroin fired downwards towards their own entrance. She silently offered thanks to Thunderspear’s tutors and Shadowcloud who all had taken on themselves to discipline the mischievous Teidar with constant combat drills. They never got her to act according to her caste and station but they had managed to turn her into a fine warrior from their efforts.

“Left flank clear!” Coldsword reported once she and Darkwing's Soroin finished off the remaining Shells.

“Right flank clear!” Thunderspear reported in turn.

Disbelieving her own ears Razormist looked around only to see the Soroin making sure that the dead Shells were really that before tending to their own dead and wounded.

“They had us the moment they went into hand to hand! Why would they stop bringing in more of them?” She asked out loud knowing that there were far more Shells left alive than the few dozens they killed in this assault. No one answered her and she just shook her head as she looked around before hearing what sounded like muffled screeches and explosions that reverberated throughout the ship.

“Do you hear that?”

Chapter 16, part 2: http://www.well-of-souls.com/forums/vie ... 134#p22134

[Razor One]

All the commentary that is needed, methinks.

[Grayhome]

You know what would be ideal in this scenario?



Awesome chapter Dragoongfa! Now if you will excuse me I am going to play me some DOW 2 Retribution. Imperial Guard vs Tyranids.

[Zakharra]

I'm thinking:



Hence my earlier post about the bug hunt.

[dapple26]

Lieutenant Allerberger: "Alright boys and girls, it's time to hunt some bugs!"

Marines: "BUG HUNT!! OORAH! Bug Hunt! Bug Hunt! Bug Hunt!"

Loroi: "Wtf are they doing?"

I have a hard time believing marines WOULDN'T do this if they ever went up against bug aliens.

That is EXACTLY what they would do.