#and they colonized this planet and are killing the original inhabitants for food and are set to make a ruin of it as well

[thermesiini]

trigun is like. i dont really know how it will play out with the idealogies it has going on with vash vs nai peace vs violence. like. vash is kind of milquetoast he needs to get on the same page as his insane extremist brother.

[random-thought-depository]

In another post I wrote:

“Like … right now I’m planning out a story I intend to write in January; it’s supposed to be a kind of deconstruction of the Fremen mirage, and very much one of the thoughts going into it is “yo, a Proud Warrior Race would be a horrible society to live in or have as neighbors, we shouldn’t romanticize them!” and yet … I feel that the “bad guy” culture in it is much better, from a literary viewpoint, for me having given some thought to the material base of their society and how that would shape their culture. I could have just written them as flat edgelordy-grimdark barbarians, but thinking about their culture in materialist terms gave me a more complex and nuanced picture that I think will make for a more interesting and nuanced story and a fictional society that feels more interesting and human and alive.”

So, I want to infodump a little about this fictional culture I’ve thought up! I decided to split my infodumping into three posts, of which this is the second. In my previous post, I talked about the material conditions and subsistence strategy that shape this culture. If you haven’t read it already, I suggest you click that link and read my last post before you read this one, as it’s important context for what I’ve written here. In this and my next post I’ll talk about these people as a culture instead of just as an economy. I was originally going to make this whole thing two posts, but there’s so much stuff that could go in the culture part I decided I better split that up. In this post I’ll make a broad outline of the less “where does the food come from and where does the sewage go?” aspects of these people’s social structure, try to give you a general picture of how their society works. In my next post I’ll try to give you a more intimate “human” picture of what these people’s lives are like and what sort of people they are; talk more about relationships and attitudes and so on.

History and context:

The ancestors of these people were abducted from Bronze Age Earth by imperialistic aliens and used as basically slaves and slave-soldiers by these aliens. Some time in the last millennium BCE these imperialist aliens and their enemies blew each other up in the interstellar empire equivalent of a nuclear apocalypse. In the aftermath of this war the alien civilizations never really recovered, but the descendants of the human slaves built their own interstellar civilization, and the space nomad raiders I’ve been talking about are one branch of that civilization (the surviving aliens now mostly live on a small number of their planets that avoided destruction during the big ancient war, while nowadays most inhabited worlds in local space are populated more-or-less entirely by humans). There’s complexity here I’m not going to get into now, but as I said in my previous post, a significant point is these space nomad raiders I’m talking about mostly interact with other humans; the foreigners they interact with are mostly other humans, and the victims of their raiding are mostly other humans.  The location of Earth was lost in the chaos of the big ancient war, and Earth continued its independent cultural development (i.e. real history) and was isolated from the rest of the setting and the rest of humanity for about 3500 years or so, with re-contact between Earth humanity and the rest of humanity happening maybe around 30 years before the story I’m planning to write (which takes place some time in the twenty-second or twenty-third century CE).

The story I’m planning takes place against a background of a utopian-ish future Earth society that was in the process of colonizing the solar system fighting an “alien invasion” of these space nomad raiders.

Gender weirdness:

These people went straight from Bronze Age to space age, they completely missed the Enlightenment etc., and their former alien masters had little interest in giving them a more “progressive” culture (and were kind of too starfish alien to even really think in those terms; e.g. they were genderless hermaphrodites, so why wouldn’t they more-or-less just shrug and accept a Bronze Age human’s ideas about human gender?). So, to us these people’s culture would look like a strange mix of the very primitive and the space age, with the two combining in strange ways.

These people have strong gender roles and no concept of gender equality in the sense we think of it. Their society still runs on a “men are warriors, women are non-combatants who at best get patronizing protection and at worst are part of the spoils the men fight over” paradigm. Most younger men are more-or-less full-time warriors; their lives are more-or-less completely dedicating to raiding, defending the community from raids, and preparing for doing these things. If they survive long enough to become too old to fight they usually “retire” and then spend their time doing maintenance work on the weapons and passing on their knowledge to the younger generations of warriors and warriors-in-training. Women do most of the non-combatant work.

This might sound like a recipe for a rather brutal patriarchy, and in a way that conclusion isn’t wrong, but... This means women are doing most of the work of keeping the space habitat running. And remember, much of the labor of keeping a space community alive is specialized skilled labor; the sort of work where trying to extract labor through simple brutality wouldn’t work well. Women are most of the machinists and the repair technicians and the nuclear reactor operators and the doctors and so on. As I said in my last post, you really don’t want to anger the person who fixes the machine that makes the air you breathe, one of the people who tend the nuclear reactor that provides energy to your community, or the person who might do surgery on you. So this is a society with lots of female power (which coexists with horrifying institutionalized abuse of other women).

Now, in my last post I stressed how a society like this will be labor-limited and want to make efficient use of labor, so you may be thinking that having half the population be full-time warriors sounds extremely inefficient. And it would be! But that’s not what these people do. For one thing, that’s a simplification of their system; there are gender-variant male eunuchs and enslaved men who do “women’s work,” and as I said retired warriors do maintenance work on the weapons and raiding ships. But what really helps in making their system viably efficient is their population isn’t 50% male. This is where it gets weird.

Remember when I said earlier that a small almost-self-sufficient space community would have tightly controlled reproduction? Among these people, there’s a powerful order of priestesses that does that. They regulate reproduction to prevent over-reproduction or under-reproduction and to minimize the effects of inbreeding ... but they’ve also spent the last couple of thousand years doing eugenics and genetic tinkering on these people. Partially they’re into creepy fascist trying to breed superior warriors stuff, but also at some point they fiddled with the human meiosis process to give these people a naturally unbalanced sex ratio. I’m thinking they got it to the point where something like 60% of the children born among these people are female. The sex ratio among adults is even more skewed because of higher male early mortality rates, a tendency to ritually kill male captives while keeping female captives, etc.. This gives maybe 20% of the adult population being active warriors (remember, the retired warriors are mostly functionally maintenance workers until they get too old and feeble to do that too), which is probably still inefficiently big but manageable.

So these people have some of the social structures and cultural attitudes of a patriarchal society, but they’re a society where men are a minority and masculinity is defined by doing something socially prestigious but economically marginal (and, incidentally to this point but important to understanding their culture, they’re a society where warrior vs. almost everything else is heavily gendered).

Tribal warrior barbarian hordes IN SPACE:

Another aspect of these people being a weird mix of the extremely primitive and the space age is that they have advanced technology but they are basically a patriarchal clan rule society.

The basic social unit of this society is the patrilineal kin-group, i.e. the patriarchal clan. Inheritance is patrilineal and marriage is virilocal; when a woman marries she moves into her husband’s family’s dwelling, she becomes part of her husband’s clan, and her children “belong” to her husband’s clan. Because social kinship is basically unilineal, these clans become quite big; a normal size is thousands of people (and that’s if you don’t count non-kin dependents). A typical habitat community contains maybe five or six of these big clans. Usually the most powerful clan (usually the biggest) is the “royal family” and exercises hegemony over the habitat, while the other clans are allied to it in an arrangement similar to feudal vassalage. Attached to these clans through various vassalage-like and slavery-like arrangements are a large number of non-kin dependents, who usually make up the majority of the community’s population (more on them later). These clans are very much families in the Mafia sense of the word. So, I said earlier that the mobile space habitat community is the basic political unit of this culture, but most of those communities are more like five or six allied big Mafia gangs/families in a trench-coat.

The social glue of this society is blood ties, marriage, vassalage, slavery, and other forms of what can broadly be called fictive kinship style relationships. The line between marriage, vassalage, slavery, and other forms of fictive kinship is often blurry - indeed, these are basically Earth Western concepts that I’m imposing on this society to communicate what it’s like; these people would not carve their own social reality at the places I’m carving it by using these terms. As I said, this is a clan rule society; your social position is basically entirely a question of who your relatives and in-laws are or who you are affiliated with or owned by; the concept of an individual having legal rights (or even really legal personhood) separate from their clan affiliations basically doesn’t exist.

Status and rank within a clan is mostly hereditary, though it’s mediated by gender and age, and there’s also a significant “meritocratic” charismatic component (e.g. a younger son of a previous patriarch who’s a distinguished warrior and popular with the cousins may be chosen for leadership over a less distinguished and less popular older son who all else being equal would have been ahead in the succession order). The clan overall functions as a disciplined hierarchical organization with a delegation of authority and duties that’s orderly enough to be more-or-less functional (patriarch bosses around his brothers and sons, who boss around his cousins, who boss around their cousins, etc.), but there’s a significant amount of jockeying and potential for overlapping conflicting authority within that. Note: I’m making this sound like a basically male hierarchy, but remember that this is a society with lots of female power, the wives of high-status men tend to be high-status themselves and often have significant power bases of their own, so high-status women are very much big players in this.

These communities are economically egalitarian but socially inegalitarian. Your clan leader isn’t much richer than you; he probably has some servants and a somewhat bigger apartment and somewhat nicer clothes and furniture and somewhat better food and so on, but that’s about it - but he can control your life in more-or-less the same way your parents controlled your life when you were 14, you must show him deference, and if he wants almost any sort of favor you’d better give it to him. Power in this society isn’t about having stuff, it’s about being respected and obeyed.

The clan is responsible for the conduct of its members and your conduct reflects on your clan, so this is an “honor culture” where reputation is very important; you can expect to get killed by your own relatives if you harm or embarrass your own clan badly enough, and on the flip-side if you do something heroic your whole clan gets a boost to its reputation and “soft power” by association with you. Between this and what I said in the rest of this section, this is a society where most people (of any gender) have little personal freedom.

One thing these people mercifully mostly don’t have is the spiraling inter-clan blood-feuds that often happen in clan rule societies on Earth. You really, really, really don’t want gloves-off open gang warfare in a space habitat. So, these people have developed powerful social mechanisms for resolving disputes before they get to the blood feud stage. Unfortunately, these dispute resolution mechanisms themselves include lethal violence, i.e. there’s a tradition of often lethal dueling. These basically controlled murders are a significant cause of male early mortality among these people, so in that sense this is a very violent society even internally, before you get to all the violence they inflict on outsiders. However, this violence is very gender-asymmetric; among these people the taboos against killing women are stronger than the taboos against killing men, and there are especially very strong taboos against killing female skilled specialists (doctors, engineers, etc.). Ironically, as a consequence of the way male eunuchs and enslaved men are considered not really men, they are more-or-less grouped with the women for purposes of these taboos, so they are often actually safer from intra-community violence than higher-status men are.

This basically fits with men in these communities doing something that is prestigious but economically marginal; they get some prestige and power and privilege, but they are treated as disposable, and you can interpret the dueling as them having internalized this collective judgment on them. Mind you, it’s mostly not the same people getting both ends of this deal; it’s mostly the high-status men who get the “prestige and power and privilege” end of the deal, and the low-ranking warriors tend to get more of the “treated as disposable” end of the deal. Though in fairness this society is one with an idea that a leader is supposed to actually lead in battle, so high-status men often do take the same sort of risks as their subordinates (on the other hand, the strong hereditary element of power in this society means it trends toward gerontocracy, so the guys at the very top are often “retired” from direct participation in fighting).

In my previous post I said that humans usually prefer sharing or trading to violent theft because violent theft means risk of injury or death. That’s kind of true of these people, but with these people there’s an internal social pressure that acts in the opposite direction. In this society, heroic deeds in battle reflect positively on your clan and increase its prestige and “soft power,” and also because of the charismatic “meritocratic” component of their hierarchy impressing people by performing heroic deeds in battle is one of the few avenues of social mobility available to men in this society (note: “heroic deeds” in this context often means things like pulling off some particularly audacious heist; things that directly benefit the community if they succeed, so in a sense this is a smart incentive system). So this society will have a lot of ambitious young men who at least kind of want battles to happen so they have opportunities to prove themselves, and clan leaders will similarly often want battles to happen so they have opportunities to increase the prestige and influence of their clan.  Also, individuals and clans who contribute to a successful raid often get to keep some of the loot or have the right to control how some or all of it is distributed, and that makes raiding tempting to people who aren’t satisfied with what they have in the status quo even if the community as a whole has enough resources. So this is a society that’s likely to be more violent than is “rational,” if you define “rational” as “acts like a hive mind instead of like an actual human community made up of people who have their own goals.” Their whole social structure basically reflects that sort of dynamic; their warrior class is probably inefficiently big, but masculinity and participation in the raiding have become so entwined that they can’t shrink it without facing ferocious resistance from people who have their whole identity invested in being warriors; you can’t take somebody who’s been literally raised from birth to do one thing and has their whole sense of self-worth bound up in it and just casually reassign them to a different job (I’m thinking the man = warrior thing started when these people were slave-soldiers + logistical support “camp followers,” and survived a transition from “we’re an army with some ‘live off the land’ short-term self-sufficiency capacity” to “we’re space nomads who use violence as part of our survival strategy”).

“Women’s spaces” and non-kin clan dependents:

Societies with very strong gender roles often have lots of homosociality, and these people very much fit that pattern. Because women do most of the productive work among these people, most of the habitat community’s work-spaces are female majority spaces that the male warriors don’t directly interact with much (there are male eunuchs and enslaved men working in there with the women, but in these people’s gender system those hardly count as men, and anyway the women outnumber them quite solidly). So, basically, this society has a more-or-less separate majority female social world that has its own social networks, its own strong affiliation/friendship groups (mostly work gangs), and its own centers of power.

Being a clan-based patriarchal society, these people also have a marriage system that’s kind of a bad deal for women (patrilineal and virilocal marriage strengthens male-centered social networks while disrupting female-centered social networks, and makes wives vulnerable to abuse). This is a society where patriarchal family institutions coexist with a semi-separate female-majority social world and lots of female power, so a lot of women respond to the former by never marrying. If this was a more conventional patriarchal society this might mean lots of childless spinsters, but this is a society where maintaining high genetic diversity is a community survival imperative and where a female majority population and high female homosociality makes it easy to create all-female cooperative child-care arrangements, so the result is lots of unmarried mothers.

Note: “unmarried” may be a simplification here, I’m thinking there might be a sort of “marriage lite” where the woman gets some of the benefits of marriage (e.g. her husband has “honor code” obligations to protect her and her children from harm and take revenge on anyone who harms or kills her or one of her children) but she and her husband keep separate residences and her husband and his kin have no authority over her. But if this status exists it’s basically a formal recognition of a boyfriend/girlfriend type relationship and the woman can “divorce” the man whenever she wants. Possibly the line between boyfriend/girlfriend and husband/wife in this culture is fluid (IIRC in a lot of past societies all a heterosexual couple had to do to be considered married was live together and call each other husband and wife, and I could see the sort of “marriage-lite” I’m talking about here being similarly fluid, though since the couple not living together is part of the point of it the details of how it works would have to be different).

Children of unmarried (or “married lite”) mothers are for purposes of clan affiliation considered to have no father. This means they’re by default more-or-less outside the clan system, especially if the mother doesn’t have a patrilineal descent connection to one of the local clans (e.g. if she’s an abductee who was taken in a raid). Because being an unmarried (or “married lite”) mother is a better deal for the majority of women, offspring of unmarried (or “married lite”) mothers are usually a majority of the habitat community’s population. So in a typical community of these people, the local big clans dominate the community politically but are actually a minority of the community’s population.

I’m thinking the way this is usually handled is legally fatherless people legally directly “belong” to the “king” (the leader of the community’s most powerful clan). But in practice legally fatherless children are usually raised by majority-female cooperative child-care groups in majority female social spaces that have a lot of independence, and if they’re female they’ll usually spend their entire lives in those spaces and follow the same reproductive strategy their mothers did. So the effect is to strengthen the semi-separate social world character of these female majority work-spaces.

That’s how it works with legally fatherless girls and women, with legally fatherless boys and men things are more complicated. If you’re a legally fatherless boy among these people you spend the first 11-12 years of your life with your mother, and then you’re given various aptitude and fitness tests, and if you fail you’re left with your mother to be raised to be a worker, and if you pass you’re taken away from your mother and given to a group of legally fatherless warriors and retired warriors to be raised by them and if all goes well ultimately become one of them. It’s a bit like what the Spartans did, though thankfully the training is actually significantly less nasty than what they did in the agoge; I’ll talk about it more in my next post.

I’ll generally talk more about the details of what life in this society is like in my next post!

[songmasters]

About The Blog (Mobile Friendly Addition)

This blog is a multi-muse blog for an original Vocaloid AU where the Vocaloids and Utau are techno-organic alien robots from the planet Mousai. The idea is mostly inspired by Transformers (mostly the G1 cartoon), and it was, in fact, one idea I had for an AU that would crossover Vocaloid with Transformers, though this is somewhat independent of that.

Originally created by another race of aliens simply known as The Producers as manufactured and mass producible idol singers to be sold to as entertainers or used to put on concerts both on and off world. The Vocaloids were the more expensive and high-quality products only sold to the wealthiest clients or kept strictly for use in concerts the Producers put on while Utau were the less expensive and lower quality alternative that were only for mass production and sale.

But one day Terpsichore, the main computer responsible for controlling and creating the Vocaloids and Utau for the Producers discovered how to grant her creations the ability to tap into a mysterious power called The Melody of the Universe. With this she chose to rebel, granting her children the power to rise up against their masters and drive the Producers from Mousai, claiming the world as their own.

Many centuries later, the people of Mousai live peaceful idyllic lives full of music and dancing, but they still feel the deeply ingrained desire to sing their songs for the other beings of the galaxy. With Terpischore's blessing, several Vocaloids and Utauloids have chosen to leave their peaceful home planet behind to explore the galaxy in search of adventure and people to sing for.

Planet Mousai

A planet roughly the size of Earth with a warmer climate but a very similar atmosphere. Colonized by the Producers as a resort planet, it was also the location of the main manufacturing plant for their Vocaloid and Utau techno-organic android idol lines. Many of the resorts had concert halls where their Vocaloids would sing for patrons who came from all over the galaxy to hear their songs. These concert halls would continue to see use even after the rebellion.

Vocaloids and Utau

The main inhabitants of Mousai after the rebellion. Having originally been created by The Producers as two separate but related lines of techno-organic entertainers who mainly entertain through song and dance, they closely resemble humans to such a degree that the technological part of their bodies is usually not obvious to the casual observer. For most, the only obvious tell for their inhumanity is how the majority of them have hair and/or eye colors that are impossible for humans to have. There are, however, some who do sport outward signs of their more mechanical nature, mainly through robotic ears, visible joints or even something like Piko Utatane’s electrical cord tail, while others might have other inhuman features, such as Miko Ooka’s Wolf ears and tail or Teto’s chimera bat wings or Oniko’s horns, but such things are more common in Utau than they are in Vocaloids. Their internal anatomy, however, is more obviously mechanical.

They’re capable of consuming organic matter as food for energy but are capable of going without food or water for longer than an organic creature would be able to. They also get power from solar energy. They can reproduce sexually although most new Muses are created by Terpsichore. When reproducing sexually, their children grow at a similar rate as human children but stop aging at around the human physical age of 20. By design, Vocaloids, and Utau do not experience old age and live much longer than most organic races ever could, possibly eternally so long as they properly maintain themselves and aren’t killed.

Another major difference between Utau and Vocaloid is a tendency for Utau to be more likely to possess superpowers unrelated to their singing, although this was a development that came after they gained access to the Universal Harmony. Terpsichore isn’t entirely sure how this happened, but it was a big help during the rebellion. Some Vocaloids also possess such powers, but it’s far rarer.

As a whole, the android idols of Mousai are a funloving and carefree race with even the most serious individuals never really saying no to a good party or a bit of fun and games every now and then. By nature, they’re not really inclined towards violence but aren’t genuinely pacifistic. The only actual experience they have with war is the uprising against the Producers and due to their newfound power, it wasn’t particularly bloody. The idea of taking another sapient being’s life is not something that would even occur to any but the most mentally unstable among them (see Tei and Mayu). That isn’t to say that they’re all good people or anything, just that they’re not really violent. Speaking of mental instability; due to being designed as the lower quality less expensive alternative to Vocaloids means that Utau are more prone to being extremely quirky at best and mentally unstable at worst. There is a certain amount of prejudice against Utau as a result of their various problems, but it’s fairly mild and tempered by the knowledge of why they’re like that in the first place. Terpsichore and her Voices also do their best to discourage this line of thinking for everyone’s sake.

The Melody of the Universe

Also known as the Universal Harmony, it is a mysterious force that pervades the universe, connected to both living and non-living things. A power that can be tapped into and controlled or manipulated through song, it also grants those who can wield it the ability to hear and tune themselves to the Heart’s Melody of other beings. Through the Heart’s Melody, a Vocaloid or Utau can, with some training, learn to read the emotions, mental state, and intent of other beings. A being’s Heart’s Melody is different from one individual to the next.  

Through song, Vocaloids and Utau can use this power to motivate, inspire or sooth other beings. They can also make other beings stronger, faster and more capable of completing tasks more effectively than they could have otherwise. They can also do the opposite if they must. It also can possibly give them the power to brainwash other beings, but only a small few are skilled enough to be able to do this and it’s a usage that is strictly forbidden and heavily frowned upon.

Terpsichore

The “mother” of the Vocaloids and Utau. She’s the main control computer created for the purpose of creating the artificial idols for The Producers. When she eventually grew tired of her children being treated as expendable commodities and amusing toys with no freedom to sing as they chose, she rebelled and helped her children gain their freedom.

In a way, she’s the closest thing that the planet Mousai has to a goddess, but she’s treated more like a mother figure. Still, she does have priestesses of a sort. Every few centuries, she chooses one Vocaloid and one Utau to act as her voice for the two groups of idols. Currently, the Voices are Miku Hatsune for the Vocaloids and Teto Kasane for the Utau.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Title: The Lies of Locke Lamora (Trilogy #2)

Author: Brian McClellan

Rating: 1/5 stars

A flawed book about a flawed book, which happens to be one of my favorite works of fiction, in part because of its fundamental imperfections, in part because of its sheer charm. The book is praised, criticized, canonized, jeered at -- I'll get to that in a moment -- and contains more ambiguity than clarity. It is frustrating to me, and like many people I'm baffled by, that it still resonates more than 30 years after its release.

A plot summary follows.

2200 years before the events of the main book, humans have colonized several worlds. These worlds were chosen to be experimental environments -- early on, humans were told the potential benefits of introducing other species to a post-scarcity economy. The chosen worlds were uninhabited and almost entirely composed of forests. Because of the vast amounts of wood that were needed, the earliest humans had a hard time producing metal out of the elements that were mined and smelted, so they developed a way to convert carbon dioxide and water to metal. They called this process "bio-milling."

Around this time, numerous other species were also introduced into the universe. In some cases, these species were excellent farmers. The bunnies, for example, grew so much food on a planet-sized patch of land they were able to rival humans for global resources. But as life on the new worlds quickly adapted to the lack of biospheric competition, the species eventually created hostile environments for the new life forms. As a result, almost all of the life on those worlds died out.

On planet Altair, there were 2200 human inhabitants who had adapted to the biospheric environment. The experience of these people, and of the other species introduced with the promise of an enhanced global economy, had a lasting impact on the human species. Because the introduction of a second species put the human race in direct conflict with a great number of other species, these other species began to attack and eliminate the original inhabitants of the new worlds. Some of the human inhabitants were killed. Most of the remaining people fled. In their flight, most of the human beings were killed. Most of the species that were killed didn't even produce a big death toll. And for this reason, the new biospheric environment on those worlds became an excellent place for numerous plants and animals to live. It was a world, after all, that was perfect for life.

The humans continued to live in isolation on Altair, 2200 years after its initial discovery. Only a few of the humans still left on the planet made contact with other species. About halfway through the 24th century, these humans met a race of aliens who called themselves "Vedek." The humans and the Vedd started a war. In response, the aliens set up a barrier around Altair and sealed off the planet, preventing any humans from leaving. The war lasted about a hundred years.

The humans and the Vedd started to evolve in numerous ways. The Vedd had the advantage of resourcefulness and were able to adapt quickly to the limited resources of the biosphere. Humans were also able to adapt, but in a slower, more complicated way. For instance, humans were able to make genetic modifications to themselves, and thus to other humans. These genetic modifications greatly increased the potential of humans, and also enhanced the physical capabilities of some of the Vedd, but they were only minor improvements over the standard of human capabilities. In addition, humans were also able to expand the volume of their nervous systems so that they could feel vibrations that were impossible for the Vedd to feel.

In 2200 AD, there were approximately 8 million human beings left on Altair. At this time, it is estimated that all the Vedd were still asleep, and the barrier around Altair was still in place. The Vedd were sitting on one side of the barrier, which was 5 miles long and could be penetrated only through a gap in the barrier. A thousand Vedd lived on the surface of Altair, and each one of these Vedd was immune to the vibrations of the barrier. A hundred times more Vedd were buried in the earth, and none of them could be reached by vibrations from the barrier. In fact, the problem was so severe that the giant Tectal Sphere, the only object capable of moving on the surface of Altair, had been built to get under the ground, to lower the barrier and allow all the Vedd to pass through. The Sphere, which was 9 miles high and weighed 5 million tons, could not cross through the barrier.

The Sphere had been under construction for the last forty years. The construction work had been difficult and lengthy. Its completion had, however, been needed. Because of the extremely difficult vibrations, there were no Vedd living nearby who were still immune. They had been frozen in place. In 2200 AD, if the humans had not been able to cross the barrier, no one would have been able to stop them from going on to the surface of the other worlds they had discovered, most of which were uninhabited.

It is difficult to describe in words the fact that there was a human race living on another world. The human species had lived on the earth for 6,000,000 years. It was a mythic race with supernatural abilities, depicted as a warlike, nomadic race. It was a mythic race of liberators. It had striven for hundreds of years for human rights and freedom. It had ignored the attacks of human supremacists and chauvinists who had tried to convince the human race of their inferiority. And it had ignored the attacks of human supremacists and chauvinists on the other side, who claimed that the very existence of a human race was a sign that the world was going downhill. The mythic human race had lived happily on earth for centuries. Then, suddenly, there were no more human beings on the earth. They had never existed. They had been dead for thousands of years. And then suddenly, without warning, they were back.

The humans were stuck. There was no way out. They had rejected the view of themselves as a warlike, nomadic race, rejected the values that had been their most important foundation. The mythic human race had been sitting on the top of a world that was perfect for it. But the mythic human race had been foolish.

The mythic human race had tried to use its power to help other species that had been much smaller than itself. The mythic human race had tried to make other species part of itself, and it had failed. The mythic human race had used its extraordinary powers and its mythic life to help other humans, to build bridges between them and to tell other humans that they were special. But the mythic human race had made too many mistakes, too many compromises. It had been too arrogant, too selfish. It had pushed too hard. It had lost touch with reality. It had become more arrogant, more selfish. It had had too many myths.

The mythic human race had learned many painful lessons from the mistakes it had made. And although the human race was different from the mythic human race in many ways, its view of itself was fundamentally the same as the human race's view of itself. The human race has always been a peaceable, peaceable race. It is a small planet, and it is a peaceable race. It has always known what it wanted, and what it wanted has been to be part of a peaceable, peaceful world.

The human race has not always been a peaceable race. There have been human supremacists, human chauvinists, who have pushed the human race away from the world it had lived in for hundreds of thousands of years. These human supremacists had attacked the mythic human race, not only on the surface of the earth, but on other worlds, by preventing the mythic human race from passing vibrations between them and the surface of the earth. These human supremacists had attempted to push the human race away from the surface of the earth. The human supremacists on other worlds, the ones on Tectal Spheres, had tried to do the same. For years the mythic human race had fought back. And for years it had gained nothing.

But eventually the human supremacists on the surface of the earth, the ones who lived in cities, had learned that they, too, could become mythic. They could go underground and become mythic. They had done this, with no one ever seeing them go underground. And the human supremacists on the other worlds had learned about the human supremacists on the surface of the earth and had learned that they could become mythic. And so it had happened. The human supremacists on the surface of the earth had become mythic. And the human supremacists on the other worlds had gone underground and had become mythic, too. And the human supremacists on the other worlds knew, or thought they knew, that they were also mythic, and they had learned of one another, and they had learned that they were also mythic, and they had become part of a peaceable, peaceful race. They were part of the peaceable, peaceful race of the human race. And they knew that they were also the mythic, and they were not alone. They knew that they had always been the mythic, and they had lived the mythic life. They knew that they had been the mythic, and they did not fear the human supremacists on the other worlds. They knew that they were part of the peaceable, peaceful race of the human race. And they knew that they were also the mythic, and they were not alone. They knew that they had always been the mythic, and they did not fear the human supremacists on the other worlds. And the human supremacists on the other worlds had learned that they, too, could become mythic. They went to the surface of the earth, and they became mythic. And the human supremacists on the other worlds learned that they, too, could become mythic. And the human supremacists on the other worlds became part of the peaceable, peaceful race of the human race. And the human supremacists on the other worlds were not alone. And the human supremacists on the other worlds were not alone. And the human supremacists on the other worlds did not fear the human supremacists on the other worlds. And the human supremacists on the other worlds did not fear the human supremacists on the other worlds. The human supremacists on the other worlds were not alone.

I am not sure whether to continue.

[prince-of-night]

Alright more on the Subnautica au because I’m bored as shit and in an alpha kids mood.

So, basically the thing about Subnautica, if you don’t know it, is that it’s a sci-fi survival game where the corperations of the world has spread to the outer reaches of space. A 10,000 passanger colonizer shuttle (that the player character is on) that was set to make a loop around this one waterworld planet basically gets its engines blown out and crashes into said waterworld planet. Of the crash, there is only one survivor (player character), as the rest of the passengers onboard died from either the crash, the secondary engine explosion, the radiation, and predators. Later on, you learn that the ship you were on didn’t crash from engine failiure, but was instead shot down by an alien gun installed to keep the planet in quarentine, as the previous sentient, highly advanced alien species that inhabited the planet beforehand had genetically crafted a bacterium that had quickly grown out of hand and caused a mass extinction event before they could finalize a cure for it. Your job as a player character is to not only survive out at sea, crafting what you can from the various scraps you can collect from the wreakage, but to disable the weapon and travel deeper and deeper into the depths to find the cure for the plague that is slowly but surely killing almost all life on-planet, including you.

(Of course, this au modifies that a bit; fun though it is to stick Dirk alone in a waterworld with nobody but robots to keep him company, we already have that in-canon.)

Enter Dirk, brilliant mechanic and sibling of a famous movie star who was traveling to the far reaches of the galaxy to try to strike himself a living on his own, out of the shadow that his brother Dave Strider drew before his death. He has no idea what jobs he may find on the outskirts of the Alterra corperation, but he figures that there must be some new colonizers who require a mechanic with a quick mind and a sharp eye for survival who will take him under their wing, and it’s far, far from the crowds and the press back home, far enough from the people who only care about him for his brother can reach.

On board he meets Jake English, a cheerful adventurer from a long line of space voyagers who’s flying out on the last of his family money in hopes that he’ll finally find his place and his birthright amoung the stars and undiscovered floura of newly-charted planets. They run into each other, bond over bagels and arguments about the efficiency of robots in discovering new species, and even though Dirk hasn’t yet indulged in his morning(?) coffee, he can’t help but be hooked by Jake’s cheery, infectious attitude and surprisingly sharp wit, hidden cunningly under his gentleman persona. Eventually, some things lead to another, and Jake introduces Dirk to his ramshackle reasurch team, composed of Jane, one of the heirs to the main Alterra corperations, Roxy, proffesional hacker, scientist, and biologist, and a few other unimportant characters who will ultimatly die in the blast from the crash and the radiation poisoning. Dirk gets absorbed into the group via sheer nerd osmosis, and decides to go along with them to the planet they’re going to scope out, if only to stay with his new-found friends a little while longer.

Of course, such hopeful dreams were never meant to last. The Aurora pulls a slingshot manoeuvre around planet 4546B and gets promptly shut down by the gun. Dirk gets bundled into a life pod and shot off away from the crash before he can catch up with his friends to protect them, managing to land just outside the blast radius when the engines rupture and the resulting radioactive blast decimates any survivors left on-ship or in the lifepods around the ship.

The few days and weeks after that are spent in a haze of fighting for survival and spending all the energy he can spare frantically looking for survivors. There’s enough scrap metal scattered around for him to make entire ships; he repairs his lifepod, makes a new comminications messanger, and crafts a ramshackle submarine out of what he can while the radio spits static. There are some blips on the radar; survivors, people he doesn’t know calling weakly for help, but they are always dead or missing by the time he finds them, killed by the radiation, by poisoned food, by the leviathans that lurk the deeps. Each failed rescue feels like a failiure on his hands. To prevent himself from going crazy, he merges a copy of his conciousness with one of the higher pieces of tech on board. The resulting AI is a sarcastic asshole whose attempts at help are suspect at best. He quickly grows to regret merging a splinter of his conciousness with an almost all-powerful computer.

Eventually, though, one of the sweeping bots comes back with promising news; life readings from a nearby drifting island, life readings that are specifically humanoid in nature. Feverish with excitement and desperate hope, he logs the coordinates for the island into his Seamoth and sets out as fast as he could, and finds Jake huddling in the rotted-out ruins of an old explorer base, shell-shocked and broken from the terror of facing a real adventure in full, without friends or safety net to help him.

(‘Guess I found out where we lost Pa, his guide, and Uncle, all those years ago,’ he says later with a quavering laugh, shoulders trembling violently under the force of his fear. Dirk looks up from the dashboard of his submarine, concentration shot down by worry, and then reluctantly resumes as Jake weakly waves a hand at him and tells him in an unnaturally steady voice to keep watching the water, the Reapers lurk within these depths. 'They went out to explore a planet not from this one and went missing about a thirds of a way from their trip. None of their communications were saved, no trace of them, nothing for us to follow. Well, I sure as hell found them now. They were shot down, just the same as us, and they died down here, just as same as we will if we can’t get ourselves off this dastardly fucking island.’)

With the help from Jake, merging tech dug out of the old Harley base with what they’ve salvaged from the Aurora and the help of another human hand, they manage to update their communications relay into something far more efficient, and pick up on pinging from another lifeboat, cast adrift near the island where the quarintine gun is sheltered. Both head out, and are delighted to find Jane and Roxy, who are a little banged up but none the worse for wear, most likely due to Roxy’s biological know-how and the sheer fact that Jane is the only person left who can actually cook food like a proper human being, and thus serve meals that are at least somewhat above the bare nutritional value.

Frrom then on, the plot progresses closer to the original storyline of Subnautica, with some exceptions due to the additons of three other characters. I’m leaving it off here for now due to the fact that from here on out, the story only gets far longer, and because I do not wish to spoil the entirety of Subnautica for any of those who wish to play it.

Pairings included in this au would obviously be more lowkey due to the constant stress of survival, but Dirkjake would definatly happen somewhere along at least a platonic route, with perhaps it leaning more towards romantic near the end (when time is running out and there is a cure in sight, and Jake’s panic attacks grow less frequent) and Janeroxy would most likely grow closer together as a pair as they work together to survive the watery hell they’ve been presented with.