#pondwatersignalis

[boct-kimerakal]

just normal girl things

an offering. more signalis oc content. a tentative offering.. i’ve increased my discoverability a smidge but this may prove to be a terrible mistake and wind up revoked so! enjoy it while it lasts..

just kidding, it’s a massive lore dump too! what? you think you’re going to catch me off brand?

hallo, so if you’ve seen my introduction to pondwater post, you should know who these two are (if you haven’t, it should be in the tag) but TLDR: an LSTR unit walks into leng, the punchline? there’s another LSTR unit there already. they each have smidges of 512’s memory, pike (red) more than wasserjungfer (heavy combat frame)

this is a really bad doodle but it’s more so to preface the lore dump than anything! speaking of:

we’re focusing on pike this time. i figure she was manufactured before the penrose initiative and was used in a team, maybe on rotfront to survey the empire-era bioresonance-altered terrain for nation infrastructure expansion. kind of odd, i’m not sure yet - either way, her start easily conditions her into the shared unit identity. they named her ‘pike,’ so as to not be confused with another on-site LSTR! but left her to her own devices. as the unit ages, but is still operational, she’s shipped off to solo-man an isolated inspections / maintenance post. better than an ARAR, since it’s a military posting. she relishes the solitude, like a lighthouse keeper. simply an LSTR.

so it’s easy when 512 gets blended into her brain.

now, when she meets wasserjungfer, things change. as they fumble through sierpinski, with this imperfect mirror right beside her, she realises she’s nothing like wasserjungfer. or, rather, wasserjungfer doesn’t seem very much like an LSTR. (but also! so much like an LSTR! then why are they so little alike?) talking to wasserjungfer makes her separate herself more from her, then, more from 512. as she rejects the 512 elster neural pattern, things get weird - it comes and goes in waves.

all the while wasserjungfer yells at her to keep her grip on herself. pike. she can’t let her identity be erased in the wake of someone’s grief! she’s not 512! forget the nation, they aren’t just interchangeable. (ha! simple thoughts that’ll get you decommissioned, doesn’t matter now since they’re both doomed to die)

and yet, and yet, and yet..

pike has moments where she sees wasserjungfer and pukes oxidant. because she looks just like her (512) and if that LSTR’s here for ariane, then she can’t be 512. so what is she? what is standing here, bleeding? (pike, it’s your name, pike)

pike dreams of the “lighthouse” (an idea! not so much a real place) and an ocean she’s never seen, where all this identity stuff didn’t matter because she was The Only One There.

pike, becoming attached to her protege and her goals, this version of herself that stands a chance, has to convince herself she isn’t wasserjungfer (or, well, 4 to her since she refuses to tell her her name) too.

pike has to close her eyes to remember who she is based on what she is feeling in the exact moment because how else can she know? when everything she sees around her can’t be trusted? when 512 looked just like her? when her memories aren’t her own?

and on wasserjungfer’s side... her resolute “i won’t be changed, i have one goal” mentality! and how it turns against her.

as pike pushes away from 512’s identity, wasserjungfer, funnily enough, in all her ice-cold determination, gets pulled further into the thrall. having experienced a devotion enough to parallel 512’s - lian (who else but her lover, now) and ariane blend together in her head. the more she wants to get back to lian, the two kids they found - the deeper she sinks into being 512

eventually, that makes the environment.. take notice - there can’t be two 512s. so it targets the reject, pike. wounds don’t heal as easy, the corrupted hit harder. pike is pretty much playing on survival while wasserjungfer gets off easy. too busy - pike never once realises that wasserjungfer is breaking under the thrall. even when she finally succumbs to a corrupted horde, she saves wasserjungfer’s life, holding (gripping, really) onto a scrap of belief she can break the cycle. but at least she dies with a name! pike, and she dies realising pike lived.

though.. so desperately she craves dancing with someone she never met. whoops! sorry girl, thought you could die totally yourself? at least now she’s dead, she doesn’t have to keep fighting to keep herself her self. right?

i shake them around like little salt-and-pepper shakers. sprinkling insanity onto my breakfast. onto yours too if you read this. i’m workshopping them forever, they aren’t perfect ... not yet, maybe never .. but i like them a lot.

anyways, fun archive word dump! i’ll need this for later. probably should put the water-themed one on here too for safekeeping

[boct-kimerakal]

curious about the pondwater kids?

no? too bad.

here’s a little introduction to them! warning? it’s got war topics and stuff, yeah.

katja loi is the older one, 13-14, roughly. she’s, technically, imperial. after a siege, her hometown came under nation occupation. she was separated from her parents (she’s aware on some level they’re in a camp somewhere - she doesn’t want to think about it) and shipped away from the front, to a ‘boarding school’ - assuming children are more impressionable, it’s a way to build numbers. her education’ll be thick with eusan nation propaganda. figure the imperial children live in dorms, cared for mostly by EULRs. they’re just livestock for the war, unless they get lucky and have a desirable skill.

she’s very, how do you say, cynical. she’ll stay alive at all costs and blames her parents for their stubbornness and their belief in the empire. she thinks both sides are rotten (good for her) but will do anything to survive. on a lighter note, though, she’s an artist! not a very good one yet, she says. she mostly draws to escape the stress of just being alive.

frederic, the younger one, ‘bout 10-11, was in born nation-occupied kitzeh, at the heart of nation operations. parents were die-hard nation patriots from the start. he’s a keep-your-head-down type, he just reads and reads and reads - even if the words mean nothing at all. he dreads his mandatory military service more than anything, even if it’s not in active combat, something about it just scares him. due to a job change, he was moved with his parents and siblings to a more rural area. too bad though, it gets wiped off eusan nation maps not long later. stormed by imperial ‘rebels’ at some point. maybe right after the vinetan blockade, due to the troop and armaments interruption as the nation focuses on dismantling the blockade (so giving the imperials an upper hand on kitzeh temporarily, maybe? dunno) either way, that place? razed.

so he loses his family (as in they’re definitely dead. definitely) and winds up with katja (jumpscare. that’s where her school was.) and, well, i guess everyone dying around you is one way to start a friendship. it’s not a very good one, more like a fearful (in frederic’s case mostly) pact to keep each other alive. katja is a fiercely determined type and swears to him they’ll get away from the war one way or another. frederic figures if he dies, he might as well die trying to ... not die. which is how they end up at the nearest nation military base, trying to stowaway on a ship to rotfront and not even getting close before they’re discovered by an ARAR of all things.

an ARAR who is definitely not a normal ARAR because she actually says nothing and just... hides them. odd. i’ll yap about their dynamics one day, but now you know how they got here?

[boct-kimerakal]

TAKE THIS! AH! [as if i am throwing bait to the sharks]

frankly, i think it’s hilarious i haven’t shared this yet .. a gift for newbie pondwater enjoyers :} i’m so touched people enjoy them!! i will loredump about this PMV, if it’s the will of the people (or if i drink coffee soon, it’ll depend)

it was made in april and edited by a friend of mine.. so it’s a little janky, but it’s just for funsies (and because i am deeply and irreparably brainrotted about them) enjoy!

[boct-kimerakal]

a treat for the pondwater enjoyers

i turned them.. into people.. BIRD people!

technically i catapulted them into shifters (dumb original lore world) but it’s pretty much just a human AU, i’ll be real. hold on, let me yap it up:

wasserjungfer’s a retired marine engineer from a stint in a navy. taiwan blue magpie creature.. i figure her left leg has an old wound and she uses a crutch? she’s japanese/malaysian but grew up in taiwan ... now sure what she does now, definitely taking suggestions (briefly considered land surveyor..but then both of them would have backgrounds in civil engineering)

speaking of. lian studied civil engineering for a bit early on, but then switched to environmental science.. musing. great green macaw! she’s originally from HK. now employed by some biodiversity centre and loaned out as a consultant on environmental concerns on urban development projects?

frederic and katja are their legally adopted kids in this one.. and pike is their cool aunt who is full of strangely poetic musings about religion or the cosmos or something. AU wasserjungfer’s half sister?

dunno where exactly they all live now but that’s the rough gist of it.. IT’S JUST FOR FUN REALLY.. it’s so stupid. bonus doodle! a gift just for you :3

[boct-kimerakal]

come ponder pondwater ..

aka kimerakal yaps about signalis ocs. cute little :3 face @ you.

HELLO. hi. are you ready for a whopper? no? too bad!

see these horribly drawn LSTR units? wonder who they are? well, boy, do i have a lot to tell you. i call this chunk of lore ... pond water.

and it all exists because of a faulty auto-injector ...

well! that’s why it exists, but not where we start. it really started with ariane and 512 - but you know that part already.

so fast forward to an isolated orbital outpost, where an aged LSTR unit (1378) has almost reached the end of its operational lifespan and has thereby been relegated to perform simple routine checks on passing cargo craft. it used to be a maintenance officer on a cruiser, but that, well, was totally annihilated, you could say

going by the “most of the LSTRs on leng are physical and were a product of being hijacked by ariane’s bioressy signals, which made them get overtaken by an approximation of 512’s neural pattern and were, like, totally normal separate guys before this,” “there can only be one active 512ified LSTR at a time” and “the call strengthens by proximity” hypotheses as the baseline for the rest of this lore - we get: pondwater

i feel like there’s a mass recall of LSTRs happening - but 1378 succumbs just before that! oops! 1378 is, naturally, totally overtaken by the 512 pattern. she steals one of the shuttles and ends up on leng - which by the way? amazing mental image is a giant ship graveyard on leng that all the LSTRs that survive the landing walk through in a daze - they don’t even see it.

anyways, business as usual for an overtaken LSTR. fighting the beasts, memory trips, all the way to around the basements 5-8. that’s where dear old 1378 dies. or, uhrm, she was supposed to. an auto-injector kicks in - a little too late. 1378 is dying, her memories are returning (her name’s pike, she’s a senior, calculated LSTR. she served on a proud space battleship, she dreams of the sea) and oh god - another LSTR is falling to the thrall. she is lying on the ground, choking on her oxidant, she feels like she’s drowning - she ... always wanted to see the sea. her name, it’s pike. she’s 1378, she’s 512, she’s - she’s LSTR? bits of pieces of those that came before?

MEANWHILE! that other guy. that.. that other LSTR doesn’t get all the 512 memories, less then half. but in the blur she’s suddenly on.. leng? god. what? where is she? her name is wasserjungfer. she wants to go home. how did she get here?

LSTR-KZ4445. heavy combat frame. she served on kitzeh, as a part of the kitzeh liberation forces. she maintained a ground-based vessel as part of a small strike team. the team’s mission had just ended, she was assisting in vessel maintenance at a fortified ground base. it neighboured a nation settlement & imperial liberation camp. she was awaiting her next tour.

during her time grounded, she’d visit an isolated pond on-site. you know? the lapping of the water? reminded her of something.. something long lost. “wasserjungfer”, that became her nickname. hovering around there, like the little dragonflies? there was an ARAR there sometimes too! 莲, she studied the plants. they never spoke.. until. until.

a mass recollection of LSTR replika units is ordered (they’re all enigmatic as to why! oh, standard inspection procedure, no one buys it) - a fortnight’s notice, to round them up. suddenly, the supply ship the ARAR serves on was to deliver them to rotfront. and suddenly - so suddenly - this ARAR is begging wasserjungfer to help hide two stowaway children. the kids are hellbent on surviving, escaping the war. who knows why 4445 agreed, god, she surely doesn’t. some kind of weird loyalty. she’s been active for a while, seen some stuff, regretted some things, remembered some others. doesn’t help the recall order is so .. ominous. for the while the ship takes to get to rotftont, they become rather cozy. the more she talks to them, the more she gets attached.

they’re saying the LSTRs are getting taken to rotfront for a “routine inspection” but the threat of decommissioning looms in the air. wasserjungfer and lian are hatching a plan to get the hell out of dodge, it’s not like the kids can live normally on rotfront. steal a small interplanetary supply ship, maybe they can head to vineta where they stand a better chance - with all the unsupervised territory and chaos? (hmm .. but the blockade .. can’t think of a better destination though)

all the while, she’s ignoring some weird migraines she’s getting. Hmm. but she knows what she has to do - slip off the supermassive supply ship when the LSTRs arrive at the orbital, steal the smaller cargo ship, go back and fetch her new ‘family’ at a discreet rendezvous. she goes to steal that ship and whoops!! THAT MIGRAINE WAS THE 512 MEMORIES. get 512ed loser!!

so she steals that ship, but arrives on leng. crashes, really. the very first heavy combat frame LSTR on leng. her head is pounding, she’s raging. none of this was in the plan. she isn’t totally overtaken by the memories, she can’t be. she wants to go home. who dragged her here? but she still goes into the hell pit, of course, because she got enough of that 512 junk to fall to the allure. things are blurring together, you know? alina, ariane, lian.. lian.

the deeper she goes, the more she finds out, the more things blur, the angrier she gets. 512’s love for ariane bleeds into her loyalty to her kinda-family. time making less sense means she think she was with that family of hers for longer than she really was. ariane’s eternity with 512 bleeds into it. the not-family starts to mean more and more to her - as she gets further & further from them. her anger compounds.

due to her experiences she gets an onslaught of lilith memories too, more so then your average 512clone. you know, she doesn’t have all of 512’s memories, ‘cause of the fact there’s that other LSTR still alive, holding the rest of them..

speaking of! 4445 finally finds that guy - pike, holed up in a safe room. they journey together the rest of the way - pike’s ... missing an eye. ripped it out, looks like. space magic told her to do it, you know? our dear wasserjungfer never tells pike her name so pike just calls her “四” yeah?

what’s their dynamic... well, it’s interesting? while 四 is overcome with rage, her longing to get home and impatience, pike thinks more in the long term and realises she won’t be making it out of here. she devotes ALL her effort into ensuring 四’s survival. while 四 prefers to avoid corrupted, because she believes killing them takes too much time and wastes too much resources, pike unabashedly mows down corrupted with her shotgun and uses thermite as often as possible. she just wants 四 to have a clear path back out, if she makes it.

well! she does until she loses her arm to a malfunctioning door! a door that really shouldn’t have malfunctioned. hey, is s23 against her? more and more corrupted units follow them, and they specifically target her, are more aware of her. they’re after her.

and just before nowhere - she gives in to her fate, lets herself die in a swarm, forcing 四 to safety. the worst thing is? before she goes out?she wants 四 to promise her that she’ll kill ariane and make it back out, but she couldn’t stand making more promises that couldn’t be kept.

and ohhh wasserjungfer. once pike dies, she gets All The 512 Memories. boy! does that make that headache worse! but they don’t take over her, no, she just “nah i’d win”s getting 512ed. sheer force of will, i guess. not-so-long story short, she marches on resolutely. kills the hell out of s23’s FKLR. and when she gets to ariane, finally, the very first LSTR to make it all the way there - ... she can’t kill her.

her head is throbbing. she’s too tired and confused now! she has no sense of her identity. all she can really understand is loss, and what she sees before her is something that has undergone the same loss. ariane doesn’t see her 512, 4445 doesn’t see her family. so she simply gives up, just craving respite from? an unbearable desire to get home.

AAAAND that’s pond water for you. you read this far? oh.. wow.. i’m ... i’m so sorry. there’s a lot of lost fun details in this .. uh .. messy summary. like, for one, how the shores of oblivion sort of blur into that stupid pond for 4445? also, their preferred weapons paralleling their strategic mindsets ..

so, uh, kicks feet. my signalis ocs. me silly little Elsters .. ponder them a little?