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Getting Warhammered - [ 184 ]
🕑 Added 2025-01-18 17:00:15 +0000 UTC“How much protection do I want to include in the build?” I mused, thinking aloud as I lazily floated a few hundred metres off the ground. Beneath me a sea of green swept over the horizon, covering rolling hills and valleys. Somewhere in that thick ocean of trees and vegetation, some of the most dangerous wildlife in existence warred with orkish tribes and warbands. “A lot, I think. Deciding to populate my moon with hostile flora and fauna might not have been among my greatest decisions.”
In my defence, I had assumed I’d have a few more planets under my control by the time I had my first fragile, needy little citizen. I had made my plans with orks in mind, not humans.
“Oh well, it shouldn't be too hard.” I rolled my shoulders and spun around in the air, turning towards the colossal structure extending up from the green jungle like a monolith.
It towered over the landscape in all its pearly white majesty, breaking the natural scenery surrounding it. For now, it looked mostly like a slim pyramid with rounded edges and a cupola at the very top of it. I was planning to build in massive windows to let some natural light seep in and maybe even some outer balconies once I could be bothered to modify my shield tech to cover them.
For now, the building’s primary defence was its dozens of metre thick armour, which I’d made mixing together the carapace of bioships and that of a hierophant bio-titan. Nothing short of a focused, constituent plasma barrage would get through it.
“Unless I added artificial points of vulnerability to it,” I muttered. “Like windows and balconies. It’ll do for now, this is just the initial version.”
The interior was already done. Residential sections, communal halls, office spaces, workshops, parks, agricultural sectors and government buildings. I also went through with my water heist and stole some water from Vallia. Not much, just a tiny section off the ice caps.
Now I had a gigantic underground water reservoir, from where I funneled some up to have running water in every building of the arcology. Every type of edible plant I had templates of was growing in the greenhouses and I had already set up a very basic communication system between most buildings, something like an SMS service which also connected the main government building with other arcologies.
It was, from a purely logical standpoint, now perfectly suitable for human habitation. All their essential needs would be met and even some of their societal needs could be provided for with what I’d set up like communities, opportunities for work, and adding in stuff so they could add in art in as many forms as they like would barely require any effort.
The problems didn’t come up when I looked at my creation from the practical perspective of my mind-cores and the one I was susceptible to default to when I was alone. No, the glaring issues reared their ugly heads when I looked at the arcology like somewhere I’d have to live in as a regular human, when I put myself in the shoes of my citizens.
It was a soulless cage curated by a mysterious puppeteer they wouldn’t know, nor would they understand. What would they think when I herded them inside, and told them leaving the building would be near impossible ‘for their safety’?
“Be not afraid mortals,” I muttered mockingly to myself. “Your habitation centers, which are totally not oversized prisons, have been completed. The design is very human. Please cooperate and proceed into the cage you and the next hundred generations of your descendants will live and die in. You are welcome, you may now offer my your praises.”
Yeah, that was not going to fly, not if I didn’t want to go for the eldritch tyrannical overlord gimmick. Which I didn’t, I really didn’t. I was eldritch enough as I was for my tastes, no need to lean even further into it.
So how does one make a soulless arcology look more habitable? … or, well, ‘humane’?
Individuality and self expression. I had to allow the people to somehow do those things, but how? I had their homes pre-built, painted and polished, along with every building and primary infrastructure by necessity.
Or was it really necessary? Could I maybe just provide them with more space and materials where they could build whatever and however they wanted?
I should also make most of their buildings that are non-essential for the arcology’s structure able to be rebuilt or modified.
For now, that would have to do when combined with the workshops I’d left behind. I didn’t need my citizens to pay taxes or to serve in my military, for all I cared they could spend their days sculpting and painting, or writing steamy erotica. Actually, I preferred that they did that, instead of plotting some idiotic rebellion.
“Defences, you were thinking about defences,” I muttered, refocusing my attention. “Meh. I’ll not waste void shields on this, some automatic bio-turrets and some dormant combat drones will have to do.”
I hid both under scale-like bits along the bumpy surface of the building, making them almost undetectable. If any threat came close, those scales would pop open like trapdoors and reveal rapid-firing turrets or murderous drones.
‘Programming’ what counted as a threat into the brains I’d made to control the defences was the most challenging part. I could have just added a psychoactive telepathy node and let a mind-core do it, but that would have meant leaving the building defenceless when this specific Avatar of mine was out of range.
There was no need to add in weaknesses like that.
I could fix all that up when I got my other Avatar back from that kleptomaniac, or when I managed to make a third. I felt like my soul was strengthening ever so slightly week by week, day by day. The change was nearly imperceptible, but I had a near perfect memory and caught even just the 0.001% increase.
My current guess was that some of the dense soul energy surrounding my soul in the core of my little realm was slowly seeping into it.
Not that it mattered beyond whether making my third Avatar would be something I’d have to put off for a few thousand years or just a century or two. I couldn’t even project a fraction of its full strength into realspace with my current Avatar, even with my improvements it was still far too fragile to channel that much power.
Suitably satisfied with the first arcology, I went about replicating it another fifty times. Each should have been enough to house about two million people, so I had plenty of extra space for a generation or two in case I needed it.
It took a few days, some minor terraforming and remaking the earth underneath to support the titanic structures without letting them sink into the dirt, but it was done. Thankfully, my citizens had been told the space voyage could take as much as a month, so there was only an insignificant amount of unrest by the time I got back.
Sadly, not once had I been pleasantly interrupted by Selene over the days, despite my earlier attempts to tempt her into doing so. She really was too serious about her duties sometimes, even if she put forward a pleasant and easygoing front for me most of the time.
Well, I deserve a pleasant break. Those citizens can wait a few more hours. I grinned in anticipation as I Blinked over to my lover, just onto the border of the small glade she was located in.
She wasn’t alone either, voices mixed together as they argued, four by my count. Selene’s voice was inquisitive and curious, but the other three were a bit more heated.
Valenith, Fae and Zara were arguing about something … no, debating. It was just that the Eldar and the Human Psykers had very different interpretations about the nature and nuances of their powers.
I’d have loved to stay hidden and just listen in, curious what the three would be talking about, and more importantly, how they behaved without me breathing down their necks.
Alas, I’d missed the opportunity. My Blink had gotten subtler, but not nearly enough for any of the three to miss it from this close. There was little I could have done to hide from Valenith, the Eldar had me beat in techniques like that by a wide margin, but the other two would have been easy enough to cloak myself from.
“Hi,” I said, smiling as four pairs of eyes turned to me, their conversation petering out. “Sorry to interrupt, I’d like to borrow Selene for a bit. If you don’t mind?”
I tilted my head as I said the last part, glancing at my lover with a ‘look’. She gave me a coy smile and nodded.
“Sure,” Selene said, sauntering over to my side. She gave a little wave to the other three. “I’ll leave the three of you to your discussion.”
The three nosy Psykers returned their attention to each other, but the conversation was merely surface deep. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. There were probably preschoolers who could eavesdrop with more tact than those three.
“Let’s head somewhere more private?” I asked with a flirtatious smile, which Selene answered with an easygoing shrug and a smile mirroring my own. “I know just the place! Portal or flying?”
“I’ve been practicing flight,” Selene said, sounding equal parts excited and hesitant. “It’s … a work in progress. Catch me if I fall?”
“Always,” I said, my smile softening, then taking on a teasing edge as I continued. “Though with the enhancements I’ve made to your body, a mountain is likely to break before you do, even if you plant your face into it at hypersonic speeds.”
“Well, I don’t want to experience kissing a mountain at those speeds.” She huffed, glancing at me impatiently. “Come on. Lead the way.”
I smiled and kicked off the ground, launching myself dozens of metres into the air where I grabbed myself with some telekinesis and waited for Selene to follow. The ground exploded beneath her feet as she stomped down, launching herself after me and soared past like a missile.
Laughing, I raced after her, overtaking the small white dot in the distance and flipping about to face her. I observed her flight and grinned to myself. She was still a bit uneven, her armour-clad form was unstable and appeared to be dragged about by the air currents every other second before she jerkily corrected her course.
She was more like a primitive missile than a graceful raptor of the skies. It seemed like she had resorted to using her telekinesis as a manner of propulsion. She was projecting momentum into the soles of her feet and into the palms of her hands. It wasn’t all that different from just duct-taping a miniature jet engine to each. No wonder her movements were a bit jerky.
Still, it was magnitudes better than any of her prior attempts at flight — those gigantic leaps — and I felt a sense of pride well up in my chest. Selene had been practising a lot while I wasn’t paying attention. I knew she adored the idea of self-propelled flight, but I didn’t notice just how much energy and time she was putting into it.
Seeing that I caught up with her, I felt a faint sense of disappointment in her, then a rebellious sense of defiance overtake it in less than a second. Power surged in her body, reaching the ceiling of what her body could handle, and then she sped up, overtaking me again. A sonic boom thundered in my ears as I laughed happily and turned to chase after her again.
Past me might have taken that as an honest challenge to race her, and likely would have earned herself a grumpy girlfriend and a bucketful of glares for handily winning said race. My body was build from the cellular level up for the express purpose of speed, agility and psychic conductivity. I doubted even Harlequin Solitaires could move faster than me when I really put my mind to it.
Selene wasn’t a solitaire though, she was justly proud of her new flight and wanted to show off. Who was I to rain on her parades and sour her sense of accomplishment? I wouldn’t be much good as a partner if I did that.
So I raced after her at a leisurely pace, just enough to couch up with her about ten seconds later and leave behind a wave of sonic booms of my own. I could feel her elation, the sheer joy that came from flying under her own power and going faster than some fighter jets.
Ever so slowly overtaking her over the course of the next ten seconds, I led her around on a merry chase, giving her a tour of some of the nicer parts of Vallia Prime I’d found on my construction spree around the globe. Not that I thought she was paying all that much attention to anything beyond the wind on her face and the contour of my body fluttering few tens of metres ahead of her.
Only when I felt her strength flagging and her attention waning, causing her jittery flight to become increasingly uncontrolled, did I finally lead us towards the little spot I’d found. I arced towards a verdant valley nestled between a trio of snow-tipped mountains and slowed my speed as I found the pretty little spring surrounded by a picturesque grove.
I touched down a moment later, my feet landing as soft as feathers on the grassy ground as I fully devoured my momentum with a surge of soul energy. Turning, I held out my hands and grabbed Selene who came after me with her previous supersonic speed, having been incapable of, or unwilling to slow down.
Like with myself, I nullified her momentum with another surge of energy, sending only a blast of wind washing over our surroundings as she came to a stop instead of a meteoric explosion. Had I just stepped aside and let her face plant into the dirt, she’d have likely made a crater at least a hundred metres across.
It would have also earned me a night on the couch and would have most decidedly meant I was getting zero returns on my earlier promise. Not that I needed either incentive to save her from having to crawl out of a Selene-shaped hole in the ground.
Her armour melted off of her, and only then could I finally make eye-contact with her. She was wheezing in exhaustion, sweat coating her body like a seconds skin, but she had a tired, yet very pleased smile on her lips. I tugged a lock of hair sticking to her sweaty cheeks and fixed it behind her ears.
“Had fun?” I asked with a smile and she reciprocated, nestling into the nook of my shoulder as she made no move to leave my arms.
“Yeah,” she said. “Thank you.”
I just gave her a smile and placed a kiss on her forehead, then turned towards the thermal spring just a few metres away. Steaming water streamed down the rocky hill-side and gathered in a tub made of some larger stone, the overflowing water draining away between a mass of smaller stones and ending up in a tiny river racing down the valley some odd hundred metres away.
Comments
Kahandran
If we're drawing lines against propaganda then we probably shouldn't be monitoring people's souls and planting explosives in their brain stems... but what you said is pretty in-line with Echidna's normal way of going about things lmao
YungSanguis
Likely a variety of factors will be taken into account if Echidna is smart about it, such as the definitely-not High Lord candidates sense of morality, their intellect, flexibility, whether they have families or not (preferably a small family with the children being close to or already independent or a husband/wife so they'll have plenty of free time and wouldn't purposefully sabotage the nation), will power corrupt them, are they trusted by their peers, are they charismatic, etc. IMO without all of the above they shouldn't be chosen and even if they are chosen precautions should be put in place like like a sedative injector and explosive in their brainstem incase of betrayal with 24/7 monitoring via said item of their interactions, thoughts and soul, while also having fully trained backup candidates ready at all times and regularly cycling through them just in case. EDIT: On the note of a propaganda network, I advise against it in the typical sense, much too... every terrible nation in the galaxy imo. Sure definitely give free access to information about all the atrocities the other nations have done but also have the good parts in view, it should be a completely unbiased database that's freely accessible to everyone who has hit their majority with the only things kept under locks being classified information that is vital for espionage and military matters. (Essentially a mix of the Memorialist, Grand Archivist and Vault Of Knowledge civics in Stellaris.)
Kahandran
Steamy date 0.0 I agree with Selene. Flight is my favorite power, even if something like time travel or regenerative immortality is the smarter pick. Just spouting out empire building ideas below. Feel free to use all or none of them: Echidna should get some sort of solid line of communication/propaganda network. Like a government-owned news channel playing in all the arcologies, where people can get updated on the expansion and progress of the Pale Lady's glorious socialist empire and the evil stinky Imperium feudalists. Biggest problem rn is that it would have to be run by mind drones until she cultivates a loyal following of actual living creatures willing to propagandize for her... would be fun to see orks try and do that though... The absolute worst thing would be to trap people in those arcologies both physically and mentally by cutting off information. I like the High Lord ideas, but another problem is sort of being addressed by Echidna in this chap. People do need something to work for & only one person out of 2 million will become a High Lord (if I understood correctly). Maybe contributing enough (by earning "points?" making nice art? passing tests?) her citizens can earn positions of influence on future colonized planets? Perhaps individuals can earn a house in the capital while the council can spend points to grow or expand their own tower? It wouldn't be too difficult for Echidna to program the arcologies like games, where if a certain number of "culture points" is reached another expansion can bud from the building, turning into whatever the council decides (Casino? Water park? University? Just more living space?). WAIT at the highest level what if they get the option to turn the arcology into a spaceship and colonize a new planet... like winning at civilization. Epic ofc none of this accounts for the Tau. It'd be interesting to see how she wrangles them while expanding, or if she can incorporate them into the arcologies somehow
JOHNNYBOY 117
"I'll never let u fall." How far back in superhero movie history did u dredge up that line from. I can't remember if it was spiderman or superman who said it.
Wynn
Thanks for the chapter! As for defensible windows, maybe a sort of reverse Panopticon where it's impossible for someone outside the buildings to even tell there's someone looking out the window?
Marin Angelov
Thanks for the chapter! I think she's doing good with the construction. They'll personalize it. I can only imagine how flight would feel like. Flight that fast is probably scary AND fun! The hot spring is definitely going to be fun!
YungSanguis
Tyftc, “Like windows and balconies." could use digital windows that connect to the external sensors of the arcology so it won't sacrifice any defensive capability and for balconies could just use standard balconies but have it so they retract back into the arcology and are covered by the walls again when not in use.
Duke of Coffee
Hot Spring scene just like the Japanese had intended. 😜 The debate between the four Psykers could been interesting is Echidna was more subtle on sneaking. 😉
