Hive Queen Quest 56

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BUILD HIVE DEEP SPACE CITY NOW

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Was there any other chance of saying no?

Current Research

>Psionic sensors
Slow
This is a strange project indeed, and a concept that should not work at first assumption. It utilizes a basic concept of quantum mechanics, that being that the future of a particle effects it present state, and applies it to a mass scale. The hypothesis is a sensor that does not sense a target, but predicts it. The project is still in its infancy, however, and there is hardly any work finished beyond some basic mathematics and theories. As your thinkers attempt to put these theories into practice, however, the first prototypes seems to indicate that said prototypes never existed, causing a bout of confusion among the hive with how to proceed. The project has since gotten back on track, and shows great promise.

>Tachyonic insulators
Medium
You did not find any thinker alive that was working on this strange project, with all of them nearby fossilized long ago. You did, however, find a small sample of prototype material which seems to absorb tachyonic particles and then disperse them in random directions, scrambling psionic signals and making them appear as universal background noise. The efficiency with which this material does this has proven to make researching it rather difficult, as your drones nearly lost the sample for several days until an enterprising Quantum Thinker had a worker team scour the hive for the elusive substance. The testing has resumed, and is running ahead of schedule after the short delay.

>Advanced Psionic Imprinting
Slow
With the application of psionic imprinting you are able to influence and alter the state of matter using only focused and precise mental signals. Your thinkers believe this can be taken further, using more accurate signals and more precise manipulation methods to imprint more complex thoughts and ideas more quickly and easily, and at a greater range.

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>Add psionic Spores, Complex organ splicing.

If possible I'd like to prioritize organ splicing.

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so how many threads does it take for Fast/Medium/Slow research to unlock?

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>Psionic Cloaking
Medium
A complex practice naturally accomplished by the Phantoms under the care of the Barren Queen, you have been instructed in the basics, and now all that is left is practice and application. In theory it is simple, using carefully woven mental signals to broadcast a sense of non-existence. While this process is most effective against being sensitive to tachyonic radiation, it can be used against virtually any organic being. A psionic race may find entire patches of planet voided from their minds like a mass-induced psychosis, while less attuned or mentally blind species find details of the cloaked unit impossible to remember or describe, or may simply not notice the unit unless it is alone and obvious in appearance. Simply turning around or standing among a small crowd is enough to become virtually invisible. Unfortunately, this invisibility comes at a cost, as it is omni-directional, and any unit enveloped in such a shroud would be unable to mentally communicate with others, effectively cutting itself off from any hive network. This ability requires at least a moderate relay or implant to accomplish, although no drone would do so willingly and cut itself off from the Queen without a direct command to do so.

>Psionic Telekinesis
Very Slow
With the development of psionic imprinting it is now clear to the hive that tachyons can effect real matter in a very real way. While normally so minuscule in nature the forces of tachyonic radiation offers no force whatsoever, a focused, maintained wave of psionics could, in theory, impart a real and measurable physical force. The success of Psionic Imprinting seems to offer prove of the concept in theory, and the only limiting factor now is how efficiently the imparted force from tachyonic particles scales up from the molecular level.

Not likely, but I like to ask.

>Psionic Spores
OH BOY!
TIME TO HIGH JACK OQ DRONES!
Quick question QD, one of our bioweapons (probably the ocean spores) was made from scratch, can we repeat this process to make bioweapons that cause the same symptoms but require the development of individual cures.

Thought progress was made by dice till it pass threshold

>>Psionic sensors
>Slow
>This is a strange project indeed, and a concept that should not work at first assumption. It utilizes a basic concept of quantum mechanics, that being that the future of a particle effects it present state, and applies it to a mass scale. The hypothesis is a sensor that does not sense a target, but predicts it. The project is still in its infancy, however, and there is hardly any work finished beyond some basic mathematics and theories. As your thinkers attempt to put these theories into practice, however, the first prototypes seems to indicate that said prototypes never existed, causing a bout of confusion among the hive with how to proceed. The project has since gotten back on track, and shows great promise.
>
>>Tachyonic insulators
>Medium
>You did not find any thinker alive that was working on this strange project, with all of them nearby fossilized long ago. You did, however, find a small sample of prototype material which seems to absorb tachyonic particles and then disperse them in random directions, scrambling psionic signals and making them appear as universal background noise. The efficiency with which this material does this has proven to make researching it rather difficult, as your drones nearly lost the sample for several days until an enterprising Quantum Thinker had a worker team scour the hive for the elusive substance. The testing has resumed, and is running ahead of schedule after the short delay.
you are a wonderful wonderful Man Drone

>Photonic armor
Medium
While it is not nearly as robust as what your thinkers promise from the miniaturization of shield technology, these small plates of massive photons are solid enough to deflect weapons fire and absorb energy for a brief period of time. Less a portable defensive shield and more of a temporary deployable cover, this technology, in theory, would offer drones or agents a way to quickly protect themselves during a momentary lack of cover before the photons dissipate.

>Personal shielding
Slow
By further shrinking the emitters, your thinkers believe they may be able to eventually make them small enough to be equipped to the carapace of a drone, or to the surface of an armored suit. At this time it is mostly speculation and an eagerness to please mother beyond all reason, and you cannot be sure what the limitations may be, but the thinkers are sure they can do it.

>Shield dome
Slow
The opposite way of thinking as personal shielding, by scaling the shield emitters up further to a size that would be impossible to hold and power on a ship, your thinkers suspect they should be able to construct a defensive perimeter around a hive center protected by a powerful defensive shield. The thinkers that have proposed the idea seem to be certain in the failure of the other project, as they are of this one, and you have had to separate the quantum thinkers as they attempted to disprove each others’ theories more than develop their own.

>Advanced Psionic Reading
Slow
With your new abilities growing, you continue to hone and develop more advanced methods of using your psionic network. Your thinkers believe that with more practice they should be able to delve deeper into the minds of non-hive life, digging past surface thoughts and emotions and into more detailed pieces of information without resorting to invasive neural interfaces.

How can spore research unlock organ splicing?

Also Jackob better preserve our trophy by giving it to Coil to stick it in a regen tank before he investigates that shuttle wreck.

Probably some quantum thinker thought of this recently.

>Atmospheric static generator
Medium (is done, but working on how it adjusts the Tower's cost in the new system)
By utilizing the natural friction of a sufficiently dense atmosphere against the surface of a capillary tower, the tower can be made to generate energy to feed itself and reduce its upkeep cost.

>Rip Drive
Medium
A powerful, and accurate drive system, it does not move the equipped ship, but allows the ship to rip open a hole in spacetime, creating something akin to an artificial wormhole that bridges the ship's current location with a location of its choosing within its range. This allows not only the ship to move through the rupture, but also allows it to open ruptures for other craft, allowing for the deployment of sub-light craft over vast interstellar distances.

>Deep Core Mining
Slow
Taking planetary mining to the logical extreme, your thinkers believe that your hive infrastructure, if spread across the surface of a world and given enough time, would be able to consume the ferrous metal core of a planet itself.

It's more that the spore research was essentially ticking off the last in a number of prerequisite techs, or caused a quantum thinker to make a mental leap to a new tech tree/tech that was previously locked or missed.

We need it so we can extract it's memories.

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Who is best waifu and why is it Lyle?

>Gravity thrusters
Slow
Similar in function to your Skid drive, the Gravity thrusters essentially surf along pre-existing gravity fields, increasing their performance when in close proximity to major sources of gravitational pull, be it a large celestial body, a star, a planet, an exceptionally large structure or group of structures, or the core of a gravity drive. While in deep space it becomes less effective, the law of universal gravitation means it never becomes totally useless, and when in close proximity to a powerful gravity source it should outperform most other thruster designs with ease.

Available research options

>Psionic Cannon prototype
Very slow/Very dangerous
Detailed accounts of several experiments show the slow progress of Project Godsplitter. The cannon itself is highly volatile, and even the smallest miscalculation often results in the destruction of the ship, as well as any nearby craft. It can only be equipped to a Hive ship's spinal mount, and requires a functional Void Shard as ammunition. At least a dozen testing sizes were atomized in testing the weapon, and in the end it appears The Gardener never quite perfected it.

I wonder how much longer it will take to finish the rip drive research. I'm assuming QD must have rolled a couple of nat1s for that by now.

Guess those new pets still aren't here. Are the human agents still busy negotiating or something?

It takes a few threads for them to arrive.

That makes no sense. Orphan travels 2 lightyears per hour.

On today's schedule we have dealing the Aral situation and Commonwealth negotiations.
On a sidenote why did people only start caring about the Skyl ruin now when I was warning about them for a long time.

ForMother!

FormOther!

Cause they forgot

They also forgot that the valen and union been studying skyl ruins for tech and research for a while now

An intricately decorated wall of unknown age stretches across the massive chamber, detailing ancient battles and long sagas of great Skyl warriors in carefully carved splendor that likely required thousands of hours of labor, the telltale signs of chisel marks indicating it was made by the steady and loving hand of a master Skyl artist. It is eviscerated by a hail of high-ex sting caster slugs in roughly two and a half seconds. Mauser charges through the dust filled debris as Lyle's sledge takes out a column covered in ornate, spiraling renditions of skyl figures, his fist traveling through the stone and making contact with the dented and sand blasted faceplate of mauser's suit, sending him hurtling back through an arching, circular doorway.

Lyle steps forth through the crater left in the frame and the targeting sub brain of his suit scans the area for the target. Mauser reaches through the dust, gripping Lyle by the arm and hooking his shoulder beneath Lyle's, pitching his body up and over. Lyle leaves his feet, and is sent airborne, bouncing down a sloped collection of odd coil shaped structures made of a padded plastic-like material, and he lands on a hardened surface of something akin to concrete. He rolls over and leaps to his feet in time for Mauser to fill the space with plasma before diving down into the fresh crater.

You examine the surroundings through the sensors within the suit, it is a large, circular chamber with a flat surface at the bottom of a sloping set of stairs covered in coiling padded structures wrapped around like springs. Above, a massive brick of dust covered metal hangs from the ceiling with five smooth, glossy sides angled slightly downwards to face the coiling sections of padded loops, and several decent sized structures are embedded into the walls covered in shattered windows and odd looking electrical equipment.
cont.

They also forgot that the skyl ruined homeworld has been claimed by that mysterious valen gate clan for "religious reasons"

They know what it was

Fuck, so much to salvage

Welp at least the valen will be rightly pissed off

No they haven't. The union studied artifacts on Darwin.

But they've only been on this planet for what a month? 3? They barely got a lake going. Building the hypergate took priority not archaeology.

That's this planet...

Wait what?
Which thread was that in?

>Cause they forgot
Actually they said there were no ruins. Hell some people last thread said we have all their tech which is wrong we only have the tech they finished in that system. Why are some people such out spoken idiots.

Sorry sportsball stadium.

He's confusing planets up

user has once again made something up. Ignore him.

Tannhauser isn't the Skyl homeworld, that planet was completely annihilated by vengeful crystals. The planet occupied by the Valen was another planet in the system, and judging by the environment, was never heavily settled by the Skyl in the first place.

Hive Queen Quest 8
Blackbox
>FG-883
unexplored binary star system. A white dwarf orbiting a main sequence star. Exploration delegated to Valen cruiser Sings Blissfully under authority of Commander Fredrick Juric. Commander Swims in Deep Waters has waved all rights to colonial authority in exchange for religious charter.

Tannhauser (Space pod cloaked here)
Alternate names: Kerik Ashka – Binary star system of two main sequence stars, one slightly smaller than the other. Recently given an official name by Union officials due to recent Valen settlement projects. Was once the Skyl home system, named for two characters of ancient Skyl mythology, it has no proper translation.
• Aral: precariously perched in the habitable zone, this planet is dry, hot and heavily eradiated. Despite its hostile nature, life has found a way to flourish on the surface. Most of the planet is covered in a shifting dune sea, with a number of mountain ranges isolating a series of relatively small barren landscapes. A number of large valleys exist, carved out by harsh winds and a select few rivers that flow from exposed underground sources. The air is thin, but breathable, however the extreme surface temperature would severely hamper the speed of any above ground activity, and the scarcity of water is cause for concern for any potential colonization effort. The planet is the site of a Valen colonization attempt under Union supervision.
• Debris field: The remains of the Skyl homeworld mixed with naturally occurring debris. The field holds a mixture of minerals and ice, and causes frequent impacts and meteor showers.

AAAAHHH SO MANY RUINS GETTING LEVELED GET OUT OF THE LYLE

The Void punished the skyl for their rebellion dearly and burnt there world to ash

You are grossly misinterpreting the significance of the charter.

That's just how Valen work in human society. The hypergate owners are basically a religion. Of money making.

And secretive, managed to ensure no others found out how the gates work

And we know one of the ftl projects the skyl were testing was a gate

I just want you to know I'm very happy Hive Queen Quest is back Questdrone.

The circular, walled in section in which Lyle and Mauser stand is largely flat and featureless, although a small number of largely useless looking structures stand idle. In one corner, a stone pillar covered in rusted blades largely reduced to dust, in another, the floor has given way to a pit covered in spikes. A large, mostly eroded saw blade peeks out of the floor near the center, and various blocks of stone and metal, built as if for no other purpose but to be obstacles, sit squad in various places around the walled in space, with large spikes covering the edges of the walls where the padded plastic spirals end and the walled in sections begins.

There are mountings covering the spiked walls, as well as many of the obstacles, mostly empty, but some hold odd, archaic looking weapons, obvious as weapons only by their simplicity and brutality, stone age in appearance, although they are all made of gaudy looking materials that clearly required a high degree of technical skill and industrial infrastructure to produce. Few seem practical, even from the biological perspective of a skyl. Large, gaudy looking glaves meant to be worn over the talons, or hooked to the ends of wings, large, curving spears with flexible, spring loaded hilts that have long ago become rigid and brittle. A few, even more simple weapons still seem to hold their edge. Several long spears made of what looks like obsidian blades, several swords carved from what looks like a crystalline diamond alloy lattice, and a number of simple but ornate shields made from something that looks similar to human plasteel covered in the bones of some animal.

cont.

>Photonic armor
Sounds like a great final layor to our ship hulls for the more expensive varients. Combined with the multi layored shielding. Hell, wire the plates into the shielding capacitors and we could absorb energy from attacks to repower the shields, making the ships even more a pain in the ass for energy based foes.

Now you're just grasping at straws. QD specifically stated on the ask page the Valen gates were the product of the same research that led humanity to develop the quantum power tap. It's an indigenous invention on their part and they created it well, well before they made it to Aral.

So if the only valen clan that has a monopoly on gate tech and is considered to act like a religion

Deciding to claim a planet for religious purposes that we know is the former skyl homeworld should raise red flags

And its is possible they take used samples of skyl tech to jump start their projects

They actually figured out how to make it work

It's not the skyl homeworld.

Home system not homeworld.

Are you guys just being difficult and dismissing the possibility that the valen know about the skyl and also know the importance of this system to the skyl?

You recognize some of the technology, but due to its similarity to some of your own and from the details of the skyl data cube you had long ago studied. While most of the weapons are primitive, a few are more advanced. Void Spears, technologically equivalent to a thermal enhanced vibroblade in nearly every respect, a Thunder lance, essentially a kind of shorter ranged sonic sledge that functions largely on contact only, with very little ranged damage potential at all, a number of shock gauntlets more or less stun sticks, very likely long drained of charge, and several deadly sharp mono-filament razor shields, a rather odd choice of defensive equipment with a rather glaring flaw regarding its propensity to easily slice open its wielder more than its attacker.

Oddly enough, while the weapons themselves are hardly anything new to you, their designs are clearly the product of skyl engineering, using a rather painfully over-engineered suite of materials to produce them. You have a hard time finding any real point in making melee weapons out of materials you would typically reserve for starship components, but given the advanced nature of skyl material sciences and their desiger to built things to last, some of them still may yet function.

>Take the fight out of the ruins to preserve the cultural artifacts
>Have Lyle use the weapons and obstacles to his advantage, regardless of damage to the ruins
>Other (write in)

>>Take the fight out of the ruins to preserve the cultural artifacts

>Have Lyle use the weapons and obstacles to his advantage, regardless of damage to the ruins

Less stuff for the valen and union then

Explains why they were willing to leave the smith here

He was going to do some ruin digging after the fight and try to steal as much goodies as possible before the valen got them

No, we just have no reason to think it's at all an issue. Remember that the Valen literally just got here, and it's not like they can go for a pleasant stroll over the planets surface. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they were almost completely ignorant of the Skyl, and even if they weren't it would take some serious assumptions to suggest they were on the planet specifically because of the historical significance to an extinct species.

>>Take the fight out of the ruins to preserve the cultural artifacts

>>Take the fight out of the ruins to preserve the cultural artifacts

The valen have just recently settled this planet, at best they know there was a civilization there before from buildings but they probably haven't found much research yet.
>Take the fight out of the ruins to preserve the cultural artifacts.
Then send drones to search the ruins and surface for anything else.

Why would the Union or Valen have any interest in these artifacts aside from xenoarchaeology? This is all technology they currently possess and is common knowledge throughout their space.

It's not a hypergate! QD already said how the rip drive is totally alien.

One connects two points of space. The other teleports anything in its event horizon to somewhere else.

>Take the fight out of the ruins to preserve the cultural artifacts

Please roll 1d100, best of 3.

>historical significance to an extinct species
Former extinct species.

Rolled 13 (1d100)

Given that we know the union been tracking down and researching skyl ruins and tech it isn't hard to think that the commonwealth and valen factions are doing the same

Hell, mom manipulated the commonwealth to build the psi cannon using a stash on the moon

And the valen have smuggling routes to the ceph world so they may have a inking of what happened in the past

So it is more reasonable to expect that the factions at least know something about the skyl and have an interest in locations where the tech could be...

Such as there home system

The skyl were testing multiple projects not just the rip drive

HWG

Rolled 53 (1d100)

For Mother!

Rolled 31 (1d100)

FOR MOTHER

Rolled 84 (1d100)

we never needed those artifacts anyway

Yeah, but none but us and our AI buddies know that.

Does this mean we lost the cultural artifacts or the fight?

Hopefully it just means they still fighting indoors

Rather not have mauser get a punch in given the suit we gave lyle is not as tough as a union suit,

Our suit is faster and has and can regenerate right?

Considering the way our rolls have been counted in this fight so far, I would expect this to mean some limited damage to the structure and a few bruises for Lyle, but otherwise not affecting things much.

Yes it is hard. The Darwin discoveries were secret. The Valen are on the opposite side of human space.

Humans did not find Skyl artifacts in their own space, only in the Expanse. The Skyl never travelled further than Darwin. And Valen only first traveled past their space when humans gave them the warp drive.

Never the two could meet.

Now the Confederates, MAYBE.

>the suit we gave lyle is not as tough as a union suit
Really? I thought our chitin was equivalent or stronger.

>the suit we gave lyle is not as tough as a union suit
It is.

When will we tell lee and Elizabeth the good news?

Hopefully they were sitting with some popcorn watching these sick fights

I'm talking about ancient aliens man being right.

Forgot that the skyl ruled an empire while they worked for the Void?

And that the void drives allowed them to settle all over the sector?

And they lost contact with other colonies as the void withdrew their support and collapsed their tech base forcing the skyl to start developing it themselves

So yeah it is possible that the valen had skyl ruins in the space

is it? that's good then

Lyle charges, his wings beating up dust and sand as he accelerates through the air, impacting Mauser at well over a hundred kilometers per hour. He wrenches his arm under Mausers and wings, sending him over his head and into a spiked wall. Lyle reaches out to grapple the drop suit, but an armored boot hits him square in the chest and sends him back. Mauser is quick to his feet and tackles Lyle, his damaged spiked sledgehammer firing with a solid punch that catches Lyle in the arm and sends the spike driving clean through the carapace, snapping off inside his arm as he drives Lyle to the ground. The blade of his other arm unsheaths, and he drives it down, missing Lyle's head by several inches as it drives a burning, white hot hole in the ground.

Lyle hoists his fist up and fires his own sonic sledge, sending a shockwave of vibrations hitting Mauser like a truck.He falls back, and Lyle swings his blade as Mauser parries with his own, and takes another punch of a sonic sledgehammer to the sternum that sends him reeling back. Lyle watches Mauser's boots bolt themselves into the ground as Lyle grips the shattered spike and with a wince more appropriate for removing a splinter, rips the massive chunk of metal clean from his arm, leaving a baseball sized hole clean through. He rolls his shoulder, testing to see what works in his arm and what doesn't, and his wings begin to beat as Mauser's weapons spin up and Lyle watches the counter drop steadily to zero as he returns fire, sending his suit flying into a spiral as he closes in and knocks Mauser off his feet, ripping a six centimeter thick chunk of cement up from the ground with him as he stumbles, and then spins, swinging his blade in a near miss that shaves several small sensor clusters from the top of Lyle's helmet, and then brings his broken sledge into Lyle's face, firing the broken piledriver in a muted but still substantial impact that sends him stumbling back a moment and shattering his faceplate.

>And that the void drives allowed them to settle all over the sector?
Their void driven ships were the size of fighters, they colonized other worlds when they defeated the crystal god and had to develop another FTL drive.

Why is Lyle getting his shit kicked in now, when we rolled nat100 after 91 when we rolled against Mauser? Is this guy fucking invincible or something?

Hive Queen Quest 25

There is war. Endless war on endless worlds. Demons and heretics, horrid beings that would defy the gods with their mere existence. The priests listen to the hum of the forest and decree what worlds must burn and what worlds must forish. You watch as year after year, century after century the Skyl that swarm among the city and around the crystal forest become more and more strange. Their motions more rote and predictable.
As the wars go on, fleets go missing, assumed destroyed in the line of duty. Before long, some return. Panic and dissent spreads through the planet as more and more of the fleets return as heretics. The war is far bloodier than any faught previously, and for a short moment the rebels take the planet and bombard the spire. The planet is in ruins, but at the end the spire is gone, missing from its crater for the first time in millennia. The fleet moves to resettle their home.

The skyl fought for a long time for the crystals

Any of those fleets could have settled worlds just to maintain the front line for the war they were fighting

Because we're directing him to do things that are not beneficial to him and not rolling high enough to compensate.

and there was again the colony expansion after the rebellion

So thinking that the skyl never left a presence in the rest of the sector is a bad bet

There's not one mention of those fleets making colonies. You make that up.

Their expansion was at sunlight! They couldn't travel farther than Darwin. If they HAD they would have colonized Earth or something near it. They did not.

Man these guys must cost a fortune to make, but damn if they aren't worth it

The colony expansion after the rebellion was their only colonization attempts, before they only had void driven fighter fleets to move around and they needed the crystal god cooperation to do so, and if they are similar to the ceph they avoided colonizing other planets to stay close to the spire where they get the crystals and orders in the first place.

fleets go missing, assumed destroyed in the line of duty. Before long, some return

Some came back as rebels, some were destroyed but some just go missing?

Leaves the possibility that they could have settled some worlds after they took damage and unable to return

And we know thatboth the humans and valen expanded to a lot of worlds using generations ships before they got decent ftl drives

still leaves the possibility that that the skyl reached far and wide before the void purged them

Just give it a rest dude. You really aren't convincing anyone with your crazy shadowruns and baseless assertions.

Lyle hops to recover, spinning on his foot and turning the momentum of the punch into a sudden lunge. His blade stabs out, Mauser evading only barely as the sword sized blade slices cleanly through several power regulator systems along Mauser's arm, and he brings his sonic sledge up to grab Mauser's helmet with an open palm, firing the sledge and sending him flying back in a hail of metal shards and shattered glass. He lands at an angle, firing his twin rotary as it sputters and dies, the last of its ammo expended and it spins with a faint grinding noise like a blender. A grimace of annoyance runs across Mauser's bloodied face, and the rotary erupts from his arm and bounces across the ground as he leaps up, spinning up his suncaster. It fires several times, exploding a nearby wall and grazing Lyle's arm, blasting own plasma cannon in the process, and then explodes as the thermal regulator flairs with overloaded heat. He jettisons it in kind and lunges forward.

Lyle pulls the trigger of his own sting caster, and it responds with a sputter, the sub brain of his suit shouting alarms of weapon failure and depleted ammo stores, and he extends his blade and plants the claws of his boots deep in the ground as Mauser closes in, a grin growing on his face as deep gashes along his scalp pour blood and medical paste.

They impact, and the sound of thunder sends crowds of small desert animals fleeing from their dens across the dunes of the surface above as Coil maintains vigil, his mind calling for your guidance as ships close in from above.
cont.