#this season's ritual weapon is a Hackers movie reference like it doesn't get much better

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

Cryosthesia 77K

There are things colder than cold.

Type: Sidearm

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Kinetic | Stasis | Strand

Perk: LN2 Burst - Swap firing mode after a final blow to enable a Charged Shot.

Trait: Liquid Cooling - Direct hits by a Charged Shot instantly freeze the target. Indirect hits freeze combatants and slow enemy Guardians.

Masterworked Trait: Cold Efficiency - Shattering a frozen target refills this weapon's magazine from reserves.

Ornaments: Deletion Protocol

Origin & Description: The name Cryosthesia, as my spellcheck keeps reminding me, is not a real word. "Cryo-" means "cold" and the "-sthesia" suffix means sensation or perception, as in "anesthesia" ("no sensation") or "synesthesia" ("same sensation"), so "cryosthesia" is "the feeling of being cold." This pistol certainly delivers that, since the 'K' in Cryosthesia's name doesn't mean "thousand", it means "Kelvin", as in "liquid nitrogen boils at 77 Kelvin and I'm about to make that your problem." A gun that shoots liquid nitrogen is weird, but not implausible; inert, plentiful, and subliming harmlessly into the atmosphere, liquid nitrogen is a common real-world cryogen found tanked up in big metal "LN2" dewars in nearly any scientific lab. Cryosthesia, on the other hand, is not liquid-nitrogen cold but cosmic-ice existential Stasis cold. Touching something that's 77 Kelvin (that's a balmy -196 degrees Celsius, by the way, or -321 degrees Fahrenheit in freedom units) can't be a great experience, but getting hit with a Stasis blast probably feels much, much colder, at least in your soul.

Liquid nitrogen also makes excellent ice cream, and Cryosthesia makes excellent popsicles out of annoying enemies. Like the Stasis subclass it specializes in crowd control and in action it's the weapon equivalent of yelling "hang on a minute!" Putting down one red-bar enemy charges up a Stasis blast you can fire to tell another nearby enemy to wait its goddamn turn. I like to use it against the standard Vex formation of 2-3 Goblins and their Minotaur babysitter: knock out a gobbo, freeze the Minotaur before it can use its melee to hammer me straight down into the ground like a tent peg, then take out the rest of the gobbos and ready something nastier to deal with the big guy as it thaws. Once you've completed the catalyst - it's the seasonal weapon of Season of the Splicer, so you'll get it from Banshee - you can switch to a more one-two punch style of using Cryosthesia to freeze a target and another method to shatter it, thus refilling Cryosthesia's magazine. It comes with the usual sidearm traits of quick fire rate and high but very short-range damage, so you could do a lot worse when you're swarmed.

Cryosthesia comes to us as a token of goodwill from the eliksni Misraaks, Kell of House Light, as part of negotiating the current uneasy-yet-still-holding alliance between the City and House Light. We've talked before many times about the fracture of eliksni society and the desperate ends to which it's driven its leaders - trying to reconstruct old Houses, embracing Dark powers, or abandoning any pretense of the old ways altogether - but Misraaks pursues the elusive dream of an eliksni-human alliance. He's allied with Variks and knew of Riis-Reborn, but instead of rebuilding a separate society he seeks to "redeem" the eliksni in the eyes of the Traveler. Step one in his plan is to gain access to the Traveler and entry into the Last City via a tactic no House has yet tried: asking nicely.

And he got it, or at least the start of it, because at the start of Season of the Splicer the Last City got into trouble. Again. This time it was Savathun - or at least Quria, her subjugated Taken-Vex Mind - and rather than hucking a sunkiller at us, they took the sun away. Anyone else sensing a sun theme? Anyway, after practicing on the Dreaming City Quria cursed the Last City too, this time with eternal night. Unlike the Dreaming City, time chugged along just fine and people could leave and re-enter the City; instead the smothering simulated blanket of darkness drained electricity, fouled everyone's sleep, and seemed to heighten existing tensions and anxieties. In fact it seemed to be more about sowing discord than actually imperiling the City, which would fit Savathun's MO. As with the previous Last City threat, Rasputin's the obvious solution, but as much as I desperately want an epic Rasputin-Quria kaiju battle (sun AI! fighter of the night AI!) Red's still out of commission. So we needed another way to outfox that rare Vex threat that can't be punched in the face. Enter Misraaks.

Misraaks, it turns out, is one of the last practitioners of the eliksni discipline called Sacred Splicing - manipulating traces of ambient paracausality to affect machinery, in particular the Vex. Eliksni religion often gets simplified to "worshipping machinery," but this season gives us some much-needed insight from their perspective. Their name for the Traveler, "The Great Machine," might seem reductive or insulting to humans, but to eliksni it's one of reverence. A machine - a made thing - is an expression of the combined will and spirit of its makers. Machines aren't sacred in and of themselves, but as vessels for the united spirit and effort of many eliksni contributing to the collective good. A ketch means everything to its crew - air, food, shelter, livelihood - and it takes all of the crew's efforts to keep it going; the ketch itself, then, becomes the vessel for its crew's desire to support their comrades and improve their mutual welfare. Eido, Misraaks' adoptive daughter (yes, she's named for Sjur Eido, and yes, we stole her rocket launcher) and Scribe of House Light, talks about how eliksni sometimes built piecemeal representations of the Traveler with every passing House contributing a panel to the sculpture - symbolizing how, even though the Houses embodied different philosophies, they were united in building the civilization enabled by the Great Machine. In that sense then the "Great Machine" is the expression of a far larger will - the will of the universe, or at least of the Light, which is really a more accurate way of looking at it than the human version.

As part of this philosophy linking will and machinery, eliksni "Sacred Splicers" developed the ability to directly manipulate machinery by drawing on faint traces of Light. They're especially talented at messing with Vex and the Vex network, and without either a lynchpin Mind to punch or a grouchy bastard AI to sic on Quria, their ability to unravel a simulation from the inside was the next best bet. So in return for sheltering the endangered House Light within the City walls - and letting the devs repurpose the excellent Botza District map from the final two encounters of Scourge - Misraaks has guided Guardians in their first fumbling attempts at splicing through Quria's curse. And while subtlety and diligent practice aren't Guardians' strong suits, we can pour in far more power - enough to kick down the door and storm the Vex network in a violent high-budget Hackers remake.

And that's pretty much where we're at at the moment: hacking (heh) our way through an excellent Vex remake of Tron, hunting for Quria somewhere within, while outside different City factions argue and rage about letting the species that's been their primary threat for the last thousand years inside the walls. We found what claimed to be Quria, but I don't believe that thing was the real Mind for a second. I'm as sure that that wasn't Quria as I'm sure that Osiris is currently not Osiris, which by the way is a thing, but that's a bigger problem that will probably come to a head in the next couple weeks and I'm betting remain a problem till the beginning of 2022, when the Witch Queen expansion finally drops. In the meantime though: don your best neon, strap on your powerglove, load your sidearm, and come do battle in CYBERSPACE.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

[ Ace of Spades | Ager's Scepter | Anarchy | Arbalest | Bad Juju | Bastion | Black Talon | Borealis | Cerberus+1 | The Chaperone | Cloudstrike | Coldheart | Collective Obligation | The Colony | Crimson | Cryosthesia 77K | DARCI | Dead Man's Tale | Deathbringer | Dead Messenger | Devil's Ruin | Divinity | Duality | Edge of Action/Concurrence/Intent | Eriana’s Vow | Eyes of Tomorrow | Fighting Lion | The Fourth Horseman | Forerunner | Gjallarhorn | Grand Overture | Graviton Lance | Hard Light | Hawkmoon | Heartshadow | Heir Apparent | The Huckleberry | Izanagi’s Burden | The Jade Rabbit | Jötunn | The Lament | The Last Word | Legend of Acrius | Leviathan’s Breath | Lord of Wolves | Lorentz Driver | Lumina | Malfeasance | Merciless | MIDA Multi-Tool | Le Monarque | Monte Carlo | No Time to Explain | One Thousand Voices | Osteo Striga | Outbreak Perfected | Parasite | Polaris Lance | Prometheus Lens | The Prospector | Queenbreaker | Rat King | Riskrunner | Ruinous Effigy | Salvation's Grip | Skyburner’s Oath | Sleeper Simulant | Sturm | Sunshot | SUROS Regime | Sweet Business | Symmetry | Tarrabah | Telesto | Thorn | Thunderlord | Ticuu's Divination | Tommy's Matchbook | Tractor Cannon | Traveler's Chosen | Trespasser | Trinity Ghoul | Truth | Two-Tailed Fox | Vex Mythoclast | Vigilance Wing | The Wardcliff Coil | Wavesplitter | Whisper of the Worm | Wish-Ender | Witherhoard | Worldline Zero | Xenophage ]