A Diver's Notes on the Abyss

[Aria_Jenneth]

13 - The News

It’s been a rough week for this. News, I mean. Seems someone out there really wants us all at each other’s throats, and by “at” I don’t mean threatening (that’s kinda just, you know, Tuesday), I mean actually gouging and ripping and tearing and slashing. Possibly, but not necessarily, in that order.

So isn’t it nice of the Triglavians to be getting into the spirit of it all?

• Perun and Veles Clade “Bioadapted and Drone Armies Clashing on Vale II” in Bizarre “Battle on Gigantic Ocean Biomatter Raft” - Reports Claim

With their usual gusto, too. I guess that’s what you expect of a culture that seems to define “restraint” as “not simply obliterating all life.” (Completely uprooting, for example, is, you know, fine.)

I’ve been a little bit hard-pressed, up to now, to understand what was up with Perun Clade. I mean, it kind of seemed like Veles were the cosmopolitan, “Let’s all be friends! What’s this collar for? Oh, it’s just a symbol of FRIENDSHIP! Here, let’s just slip this on…” type while Svarog were the grumpy, “Not like us? BAD! We hit!” stupidly-violent xenophobe type.

And I just had no idea what was up with Perun, aside from them apparently being indifferent on the whole “welcome/maybe-enslave the drones or exterminate them?” issue.

This has never been a very satisfying understanding and it’s obvious in retrospect that I was plotting along the wrong axis in terms of even a basic understanding of the three. For one thing, it was never very likely that Perun was anything so simple as, “the moderate clade.”

What I find so absolutely fascinating about this little news blurb, fragmentary as it is, is its description of the armies.

Now, the blurb’s kinda vague in several ways, notably it doesn’t specify whether both armies are using both unit types or whether each army is using one unit type mostly or wholly to exclusion, but in the past we’ve only ever seen Veles ships deploying swarmers, and they seem like the likely ones to be deploying them here. Perun are the ones we keep hearing about aggressively bioengineering the captured civilian population in the territories they took.

If each is using mostly or entirely its respective unit-type in this conflict, a clearer portrait of the three Clades, and their specializations, begins to emerge.

We already knew Svarog were strong engineers. Leshaks: new, or if not new, then at least proprietary, shared to other Clades on Convocation orders due to Drifter threat. Deviant Automata Suppressors: widespread Svarog response (and seemingly expression of disgust) to Veles’ “playful communion” with the rogue drones. They continue to conduct their affairs in reliably brutal fashion; if there’s a problem, Svarog’s probably going to design and build a big machine to kill it.

If the Veles are keeping drones as kind of a signature unit, even adapting them to planetary combat, and NOT using bioadapted conscripts as much or maybe even at all, it starts to look less like they’re “cosmopolitan” and more like they’re just, well, good with computers: mathematics, logic, software, hacking, AI-- heck, it seems likely they’d have been making extensive use of AI themselves for a very long time. I’d guess the “artificial” Zorya voice is probably a Veles representative, and they’re the ones most responsible for how laughable our computer security seems against Triglavian infiltration. In that context, they’d be more likely to leave squishy stuff like biomodification and redeployment of civilian “assets” to …

… Perun Clade. The biologists. Maybe, also, stuff like social sciences and psychology?-- working with bodies and minds, the squishy kinds in both cases. Mutaplasmids and new bioadaptive devices have got to require a deft touch (a green thumb for gravid, an orange one to coax it all the way up to unstable, maybe?), and it really seems like controlling and ultimately weaponizing their new population was just about the first thing Perun started doing in their new territories once they moved in. We’ve got repeated stories in the news from that time about them hard at work on that, and … it didn’t stand out to me so much at the time, but did we have a single story about either of the others doing anything similar?

Svarog definitely didn’t; they just kinda blew up anybody who came to their attention. Did Veles?

If not, we can start to see essentially what all three clades bring to Triglavian civilization as a whole. Svarog, Veles, and Perun: hardware, software, and bio, respectively. Obviously they all share in all of their inventions to some degree, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise if, when fighting each other, each might want to focus on whatever it’s been doing lately, trying out their latest work.

If it’s good enough, it probably propagates through the whole society, by Convocation directive or by challenge.

(Do they ever just, you know, trade? Somehow it seems like that might not be a thing they do at all.)

[Aria_Jenneth]

14 - Once More, Pochven

A ponderable to, uh, ponderously … ponder? (Afloat in a pond, perhaps): is it worth currying favor with the Triglavian Collective to better hunt their pet traitors?

It’s probably possible. Pochven is rife with Drifter activity and rogue drones; there’s a lot of good targets that wouldn’t involve engaging or weakening friendly units at all, and it seems EDENCOM and Collective standings are no longer in direct opposition.

Of course, doing that means helping the Collective. I suppose this is the conundrum they were encouraging when they set things up this way: to hunt the ones who betrayed our caste and civilization, freely and to every corner of their domain, I’d need to aid their masters. Probably a lot of us would. And then the Triglavians get their interests seen to, no matter who’s doing it-- basically they get rival groups of servants. Which, if given the choice, is no doubt exactly how they want it (all the better if there get to be three rival groups).

I don’t hold the Collective in the kind of contempt I feel for the kybers, but that still doesn’t feel right at all.

The … attempts … under ARC to start a large-scale evacuation of Pochven did not go well at all. Two fleets of unarmed industrials blown to shards (including some patriotic idiot trying to smuggle in supplies and troops in the first fleet); a few survivors, but, in either case, not a lot. Worst of all both operations were somewhat underway before the kybers showed up with their bombers: orbital customs centers visited, vehicles deployed, who-knows-how-many people loaded. Of course, they didn’t show up on the ship manifests.

The kyber bombers hit the industrials in preference to armed combat ships. It’s not like there was even any ISK value to speak of. I don’t think we’ll ever get anything like a proper death toll. Softer targets I guess.

Softer targets … and orders from an Intriguerre spokesman claiming authority from the Convocation.

It’s been a while since I was this angry-- Thebeka, maybe, after a year of Miz. That anger was poisonous, though, a gnawing anger that burned like charcoal, low and slow, full of toxic fumes. I don’t think I’d truly learned to hate until that time, didn’t even notice what it did to me for … months, I guess.

It’s something I’ve worked to put behind me.

This anger feels cleaner, clear and bright. Maybe it’s a lack of complicating impurities: there’s not a lot of ambiguity here. There was somebody who reportedly swore she was going to ice her drinks with Ms. Elkin’s frozen corpse; we collected hers, instead. (I don’t think Ms. Elkin is probably mirroring the threat, herself, though, because ew.)

(Seriously, what kind of organization appoints someone like that-- assuming it was who I think it was, and it’s a bit alarming to imagine there’s a second one-- to the role of diplomat? One looking to upset people methinks. Well, be careful what you wish for.)

I’ll need to be a little careful myself, though. It’d be easy to let myself get carried off. There’s a lot of stuff I mustn’t do-- not because the enemy doesn’t deserve it, but because that’s not the person I should be. I don’t think the directrix would let me ice my drinks with somebody’s corpse or make a bag of marbles out of plasticized kybernaut eyeballs, but I shouldn’t put her in the position of saying no to such a thing to start with.

This thing is a little bit personal for me. The evacuation effort’s fate aside, the kybernauts made a mockery of our class’s very existence. They made me-- made us all, collectively-- something I truly never wished to be: a liability, something New Eden would have fared better without.

I’ve often thought that the existence of the independent capsuleer was a hard phenomenon to explain, being an individual, a private pilot, with not only unmatched command over even the deadliest warships in the cluster, but the functional legal sovereignty of a nation-state. It’s a strange arrangement, not least because it’s hard to imagine the great powers of the cluster agreeing to let something like us have so much unchecked power and freedom. From my limited knowledge it seemed inexplicable.

But I’d never been sure, until the invasion, until the kybernauts, that it was a mistake. That we were a mistake. That I …

There’s only one apology we can give for failing everyone so completely, for betraying the absurd trust they placed in us for reasons I still don’t understand. The Triglavians seized Pochven, and they used capsuleers to do it. Somehow, we need to get it back, or, more likely (and as the kybers did for the Collective), create the conditions for others to step in and do so.

Putting every kybernaut structure in Pochven to the torch won’t accomplish that.

It’ll be a start, though.

[Aria_Jenneth]

15 - This Blighted Sky

It is good, so far.

Too much it was to hope that the kybernauts would surrender their foothold easily. The struggle goes this way and that-- offense, defense, offense again, a sort of violent stalemate for now. I am content, though. It’s enough to watch the traitors bleed, and if we bleed a little ourselves, well, that’s war.

In time maybe we’ll drive them from their stolen worlds. Meantime, it is good to have such unambiguous purpose. My anger rarely lasts for very long, but it is good to be put to use in a way I can approach so happily. After all, this-- fighting the enemies of New Eden’s civilizations-- is precisely what I’m for, and at last we all seem to have an opponent we can really agree on.

I wish I’d been able to do so as a part of a capsuleer class united in purpose, but at least as it is I can help punish those who betrayed that purpose and betrayed the worlds that gave them birth and lifted them to such high positions, who repaid their nations’ trust with a knife in the back.

Even hunting Blood Raiders isn’t this satisfying, and operations are giving me plenty of time to look around.

The “weather” of Pochven is unlike the known weather of the Abyss (so far, at least), or even the strange border-spaces where the Deathglow Hunters harvested their product. Really the sky hasn’t changed so much from the time of the invasions; it’s still that alarming swirl of black and red.

The effects are strange; if these clouds were physically present at the distances they appear to be at, they’d be moving and shifting across the system at absurd speeds, possibly faster than the speed of light. Probably either the effect is some kind of illusion or whatever particles of matter they’re made up of actually move much more slowly than the “clouds” appear to, and what’s actually moving is energy, maybe an electrical charge, that causes the “weather” to appear red at some times, black at others.

It’s also interesting that it fades to vanilla along the ecliptic, at least in places and at least at times. It seems like it’s mostly near this line that those of us inside the effect can see the stars beyond very well.

I’ve long assumed this veiling of the stars was a side effect, but the speed with which the Triglavians raised this black and crimson curtain on arriving, and their persistence in maintaining it unchanged around systems they’ve seized, make me wonder if that’s all there is to it.

All the hours I’ve spent in the Abyss, have I even seen more than a single star in any given sky? I can’t remember a single time that I could. It could be like living generations on a world shrouded in fog, then one night to climb a mountain and emerge under a sky of bright but small and distant jewels scattered across a bottomless and hungry emptiness.

Could the stars of the “ancient domains” be unsettling to the Triglavians the way a natural sky is to Arrendis? Is it disturbing, even frightening, for them to look out and see, at a glance, light emitted years or even centuries or millennia ago?

Could the Triglavians, in other words, be agoraphobic?

If so, intentionally or not, it seems their Ancient Enemy Azdaja might have their number. Of all the structures in New Eden, the one that seems to pierce the veil of Pochven the most consistently and easily is the Drifter-green cosmic “event” (possibly the extinction event of the Jove) called Caroline’s Star.

That event is older than Pochven, though, by quite a bit, and probably predates renewed Drifter contact with the Collective, so this piercing effect probably isn’t something the Drifters are doing on purpose. If Pochven is in the process of leaving normal space as we understand it, it seems that wherever it is, Caroline’s Star is there, too.

Now I think of it, could that be how all the other interlopers in the Abyss are getting in-- the Drifters, the Cartel, Nation, CONCORD, the rogue drones? It’s a major cosmic event that capsuleers can’t approach; it’s too far off the beaten path for us, but I’d be surprised if any of the current Abyssal intruders had failed to investigate it. If the event permits easy access to the Abyss within its boundaries, the sheer size of it would keep any single faction from being able to secure and limit access, too. It’d be hard to restrict access efficiently across an entire region if rivals are arriving by interstellar warp and not by stargate.

Huh.

Well … if those of us in Pochven arrive in the Abyss and find we can get into whatever’s left of Jove space by basically taking a short walk I guess we’ll know. I’m not sure how we’d test this new hypothesis of mine otherwise. Maybe if Jovian stars start turning a really livid shade of pink that’d also be a sign, but it’s not like the Triglavians needed a direct connection to start bubbling out of the Abyss into K-space.

Either way, there’s work to do. And it’s a privilege to be in a position to do it.

I feel like I should write something about this orbital city that’s playing host to us. Strange, to sleep so well in a place overseen by Elsebeth and her people. But I guess things are strange all over. I can hardly imagine what it’d be like to be part of the staff here-- watching your home sink into this unending, stained gloaming.

To me, though, it feels like a place where the world fits together, for once, the way it should, if only under extreme pressure. I’m not sure I’d want to see what horrific calamity it would take to make this kind of arrangement permanent. I’m definitely availing myself of the opportunity to take a good look around, but I don’t really feel like it’s something I have the context to write much about yet.

Maybe soon.

Ah well. Time for bed.

[Aria_Jenneth]

16 - The Peace of Pochven

This place …

It’s hard to call it beautiful, at least in the conventional sense. It definitely isn’t anything serene, with its stained and restless skies. And of course, it’s the scene of a terrible tragedy still playing out all around us in real time, in the worlds and even the very bodies of those trapped in this place.

And yet, not forgetting all of that, I can’t help but be in awe of what is being done in this place. Full 27 systems, all plunging towards the Abyss-- I suppose they must be; the security situation here I’m sure is intolerable in the long term even for an entity as pugnacious as the Triglavian Collective. The place is as full of Drifters and Sleepers as Triglavians, and so far it seems the best way to limit the Drifters’ strength is to make them fight in the Abyss.

Whatever it is that gives them problems doesn’t seem to be here yet, though, so, I’m guessing: little by little, adjustment by adjustment, down we go, all of us here together.

And what a ride it’s being.

The campaign against the kybernauts proceeds apace-- not without setbacks! But it’s become pretty clear that at least the basic thing we set out to do could be actually within reach. And I’ll admit it makes me smile.

“Justice” isn’t a word I use very often. To me it sounds really kind of foul dropping from a capsuleer’s mouth, we who execute crowds and collect the bounties blithely presuming that those we slew were deserving-- or not! For many it makes no difference whether the target “deserved” their fate; there was a bounty, the target’s down, the bounty’s collected, and that’s all there is to it.

But, here …

Hey, remember when this was a working stargate?

Remember when Vale wasn’t being battled over by drones and bio-modified humans? Remember when large-scale antimatter weapon discharges even in warzones were, you know, serious, alarming, and rare?

Remember when stars didn’t have stems?

Of course you do! It was LAST YEAR, before the Collective set its minions to pick a few thermonuclear flowers from our arrangement and assembled a bouquet all its own.

And now? Now the kybernauts at last have something to defend.

Now it is our turn to visit the homes of our fellow creatures, to test their defenses and their unity, to pit our mettle against theirs, and if we find it wanting, to take what we can and burn what we can’t.

Word is the kybers are beginning to burn some of their own domain, to destroy the orbital structures they can no longer defend and fall back into the hardened structures the Triglavians themselves now maintain. Which’ll be interesting. Mostly, after a time, it’ll mean that there’s not much more in Pochven we can burn.

But the kybernauts were never the real problem to begin with-- just the only one we could actually, definitely harm. Moving from the kybernauts to their masters would be a not-insignificant step, but if we’re to reclaim what they stole we’ll have to start finding ways. Unless we were to concede these stars and all the worlds around them to the Collective, we were always going to need to contend with the Triglavians themselves again somehow.

And they, too, can never be allowed to rest in peace and comfort among the worlds they stole.

[Elsebeth_Rhiannon]

@Aria_Jenneth

And they, too, can never be allowed to rest in peace and comfort among the worlds they stole.

And now you see it, where it comes from: whatever it takes, never again another Long Night.

[Aria_Jenneth]

17 - Respite

So, it’s done. Pretty much.

(This isn’t news to anyone I think by now, though from some of the rhetoric I’m not sure all the kybers have totally figured it out.)

There’s not a lot more to be done, maybe, until whatever teams are working on the Arshat transmuter have news. I mean, like, actionable news.

We’re home.

So … a few things to cover.

These journals of mine won first and second place in the YC 123 New Eden Capsuleers’ Writing Contest News/Gossip division. Yaaaay!

I do have slightly mixed feelings about taking both spots, particularly when there weren’t a pile of entries in the category to begin with. It’s not quite like I don’t feel proud of both works or feel like they’re both really one work or anything, but I do think I won’t enter the later entries from this journal in next year’s contest since it’s already won an award for the earlier ones. (Though I might rethink that if I’m still doing this by then and there are like a bajillion new entries.)

My earlier speculation about the clades and their roles turned out to be spot-wrong, according to no less a source than CONCORD. Seems at some point they quietly filled in a bunch of new data for us. The reality’s a good bit more nuanced than I thought, at least in terms of the clades’ specialties. It’s good to have some more accurate stuff to work from. I do wish somebody’d told me, earlier, though. Ah, well.

Directrix Lunarisse Daphiti is now Directrix Lunarisse Phonaga. The marriage happened basically the same time the last structures were falling in Pochven, which was a lovely if completely coincidental kind of wedding present. That reminds me, I still haven’t given the Directrix mine. Embarrassing. It’s been weeks. I was maid of honor at the wedding, too. Gave a toast to distinctly mixed reviews.

In the aftermath, the directrix and Mr. Phonaga seem to have some pretty extensive plans. I hope they’ll be happy. I expect they will be.

So … I guess … maybe I should say something about this:

@Elsebeth_Rhiannon

And now you see it, where it comes from: whatever it takes, never again another Long Night.

… or maybe I shouldn’t, but I will, I guess.

Elsebeth, I never didn’t see. I get it. I got it. I did. I don’t stand at the directrix’s side out of ignorance, at least not of this. I just don’t share it, is all.

I didn’t before. I don’t now.

I’m aware also that the history between you and the Amarr isn’t even over, that it persists even now, and that it probably feels as real and bitter and raw as anything the Collective did. Probably more-so, even. After all, the Collective’s actions, as horrifying as they are, weren’t so … complete. They didn’t try to pull everybody into the Abyss, at least not yet. In a sense they just kind of went … shopping: a star here, a star there. It seems like the worlds and orbital habitats they picked up were just sort of a bonus. We could even describe at least some of their actions as a form of charity: “Oo, first time into the Abyss, huh? Here, you’ll need this.”

The Amarr didn’t conquer your stars. They conquered your people. That was the target: not your territory, but you.

So, yeah, I get it, but it doesn’t change so much for me.

It’ll probably be a while before we work on the same side of something again, at least in such an extended way. I hope we get the chance. To me, Pochven was a truly welcome respite, a glimpse of a world I’d have preferred, a world united in purpose and at peace with itself, even if the grievances never actually went away.

Maybe I’ll get to live there again one day.

Meantime, it seems likely we’ll return to some version of the usual. I’ll do my duty and you’ll do yours and I guess we’ll see how it all goes.

I’m tired of it. But me being tired doesn’t signify.

It was neat to see your base of operations, Elsebeth. Thanks for letting us stay there.

See you around.

[Aria_Jenneth]

18 - Nightwalkers

For as long as I can remember I’ve rejected, forcefully, the notion that we’re anything other than human. Such an idea is worse than absurd: it’s dangerous, to others and to ourselves. Humans are self-loving beings, indifferent at best to the “other.” One of the best-established precursors to mass slaughter is the redefinition of certain target categories of people as other-than-human. It’s fine to kill animals after all, far as most people are concerned, and killing monsters is probably actually a good thing.

To self-define as inhuman, then, is to argue for our own death. And yet, we’re definitely not what you’d call ordinary people. Ordinary people don’t replace their bodies with starships, or refuse to be dead even when verifiably killed.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what my predecessor got wrong, and right, about us. She took the opposite view, arguing that we are not creatures of flesh and blood but infomorphs, beings of information. To her, this made us something new, something fundamentally different.

To me, we’re just a warrior-aristocracy, a weaponized class of the privileged and powerful, distinguishable from historical analogues mostly by some new toys somebody invented for us. That’s something with multiple historical precedents, too.

The truth is arguable, though, either way. It’s arguable because “human” is a word, and words can be defined and re-defined. Reality’s stubborn, but also largely mute: it speaks mostly just by being as it is. It’s how we choose to think about it that can be wonderfully, terribly protean.

And it’s easy, it’s horribly tempting, to think of ourselves as “more than,” or “better.”

This is an argument I’ve heard on kybernaut tongues and elsewhere: that we’re plainly superior, “the next stage in human evolution” or the like. Never mind that our supposed superiority is founded in shiny toys, not biology, and never mind that evolution, mindless phenomenon that it is, only deals continuously and constantly with the “right now.” Such a mechanism is only, can only ever be, of the now. It doesn’t plan. It doesn’t aim. It just is.

Yet, even knowing that, even I, as much as I reject the will to power itself …

There is a thing that troubles me, consistently, a thing that constantly I want to act on even if I know I must not. People seem to have forgotten what courtesy is for, why manners exist, why it is wise to avoid offending even one with whom they differ greatly.

It’s not to be kind. It’s not to be easy to get along with. It’s not to be nice. It’s nothing weak.

On the contrary, it’s strong. It’s protective. It’s to avoid deepening conflict beyond reason. It’s to keep the offended party from responding with the natural coin of our kind: raw, violent, lethal power.

Not strength, or not just strength. Strength is but one kind of power. Its natural enemy is cunning-- another kind. But cunning is forbidden to reach its full power in almost every society. Poison, sabotage, treachery, striking at those who cannot defend themselves nor be easily defended: the methods of cowards and monsters.

So we’re told.

So limits are placed upon conflict-- but those limits create a narrowed form of conflict whose natural consequences a capsuleer transcends. We can’t kill our peers. We can’t be killed by them. No weapon we could wield against each other is truly effective. And so courtesy is degraded, because we’re not afraid to offend each other.

I understand of course that the alternative is untenable. It makes sense that we can’t, or rather mustn’t, target friends and loved ones, that we can’t employ saboteurs against one another’s ships, capsules, living quarters. The alternative is an utterly ruthless war in which we’d all try by the most underhanded methods to cut the light from each other’s eyes. It’s a war that few of us would survive, at least sane.

And it’s perverse, above all, what is most protected about us. Cloning bays don’t rely on our honor or the inviolability of these taboos as a safeguard, and so our immortality above all remains sacrosanct. Even if the worst came, and every taboo were broken, we would not ourselves easily die.

I wonder if this is not the most reliable method for creating an entire class of people who richly deserve death: to establish an environment in which they need fear that no consequence so dire will fall upon any one they care for, or, most importantly, themselves.

And yet, to this rule, I, too, am obedient. Perhaps forever.

(Without the directrix, would I be? … Likely so. My predecessor was. Certainly I don’t want to be the one who starts the cascade.)

Something about the Triglavian Collective says to me that they have passed this obstacle somehow. There’s no mention in their writings of family, or even of friendship as such (although, in formal logs and the like, is there much more in ours?). This lack of apparent “weakness,” its absence or concealment, seems to play into claims that the Triglavians are superior, even (in the speaker’s typical formulation) to us.

Assuming this means what it seems to, though, I have to ask, even if they are objectively more “advanced” than we … should we therefore emulate them? The Ancients charted many paths. The Triglavians are unique only in that they stand before us still, and still recognizably human (even if people keep calling them “aliens”).

I feel like my own strength, such as it is, is corrupting me, making me want revenges I should never think of taking. And after I’ve been so careful to keep it modest.

It’s things like this that make my predecessor’s anguished cry, “What am I?” coherent to me. Our core purpose as defenders has already failed. What are we, we walkers in empty places, other than awful?

Maybe it’s just the nature of power to twist human beings gradually more and more to see their will worked upon the world in even the most horrid ways.

After all, isn’t that precisely what power is? The ability, thus the temptation, to make manifest our will?

[Arrendis]

There’s a lot to unpack there, Aria, but… well, I don’t think it’ll come as a surprise that I think you’re close, but your perspective accepts some assumptions that just… aren’t true. And as a result, you end up with conclusions that just miss the mark.

First, it’s not the nature of power to twist human beings. Power doesn’t corrupt. It reveals. If you give a man power, and he does horrific things, then he was always a man who would do horrific things, he simply lacked the means and/or opportunity. It’s even right there in your construction: ‘to see their will worked upon the world in even the most horrid ways.’ That’s who that person always was.

Those revenges you should never think of taking? I promise, the baseliners want revenges just as awful and excessive. Maybe moreso, because they don’t get to let the beast out, sometimes.

We’re not new. We’re just another expression of the behavior humanity has always displayed. For example, we don’t ‘replace our bodies with starships’. Our bodies are still in there. Shut your heart down in the pod, you’re still dead.

We augment our bodies with tools and vehicles, sure… but so have baseliners since before the invention of the wheel. What’s a cart, drawn by a beast, but an augmentation of our legs and stamina? A sharpened rock augments our strength. The stick we tie it to augments our reach. We use cybernetics sure… but baseliners have used spectacles, hearing aids, IR photography, and so on, for thousands of years.

And that lack of courtesy you see? It’s been with humanity just as long. So take comfort in that, Aria: you’re no more a monster than people have been for as long as there are people.

Even then, I know you’ll worry and fret, because you’re concerned about what you’re learning about who you are. The revenges you want… your strength isn’t making you want them. It’s just letting you realize the things you would have wanted anyway… are attainable. As long as they weren’t, you didn’t have to worry about them. You could want them safely, deep down in the back of your mind.

But attainable or not… the person you are right now was always going to want them, because that’s just who you are. But ultimately, you ask a question everyone has to ask, eventually:

@Aria_Jenneth

What are we […] other than awful?

And the answer, ultimately, is the same for us as it has been for humans for as long as humanity has been humanity-ing: who will you choose to be? We all choose who and what we are, every day, with what we choose to do and not do.

[Aria_Jenneth]

Hee. About tools, much as I like to play around with perspectives and just how shiny some of our tools are, I don’t think we disagree, actually. We’re people with shinier toys; that’s all. My position there hasn’t actually changed.

Power, though. . . .

I’d be interested, some time, to see you reflect back on the role of power in your own life, Arrendis. You do have a lot of it, and have for a long time.

If power just sort of landed in people’s laps free of charge and didn’t require upkeep it might really behave as you say. In my experience though it doesn’t do such good things for the people who have it because power doesn’t usually just precipitate out of the air. People who have it have often fought hard and sacrificed for it, and often they’ve lost a part of themselves along the way, or are continuing to lose parts on an ongoing basis.

Like most resources (and actually it’s more the reverse, since resources are themselves a form of power), you often have to pay something to get it, and more to keep it. Sometimes you pay more than you expected, in compromised principles, lost lives, friendships frayed or even destroyed.

And that does seem to take a toll. Especially since once you begin making compromises, it’s often easy to continue.

It’s not quite so simple and straightforward, maybe, as “power corrupts,” but it is clear to me that there is a price for most forms of power and that the price can easily swallow the original intent. The real trick for many of those pursuing a certain end is not to lose that end in the mess that comes of seeking the means to accomplish it.

You of course know far more truly powerful people than I. But that’s how it seems to me.

Tired, now. Heading to bed. See you all later.

[Arrendis]

Good things? I don’t think I suggested power does ‘good things’. Power simply enables.

You’re not wrong that people generally have to fight and sacrifice to get power, but then, they choose to do that. Mostly. Sometimes, power definitely does just land in peoples’ laps. I became Fitting Director because I’d asked intelligent questions of the previous fitting team, and when they started to need a change, the last of the three of them handed my name to Mittens. He came to me and asked me one question. It wasn’t ‘do you want the job?’ or even ‘are you willing to help out?’

He asked me ‘can you do the job?’ When I admitted that I could, that was that. Namamai stayed on long enough to ensure that I wasn’t full of crap, and then he took a break. And the upkeep that it took… was doing the job. But even that, I chose to do. Because that’s who I was.

And that’s the thing, Aria. You see it as ‘sometimes you pay more than you expected’, and yeah, of course that’s true. But you choose to pay it, when you choose to hold onto the power. Or you choose not to, and let the power go. You choose to make those compromises, or you choose not to, even if it means losing your power.

There is a price for most forms of power, and that price is innocence. When you allow yourself to lose sight of your original intentions and goals, when you allow yourself to lose that original intent… you allow it. Maybe you actively choose to set it aside. Maybe you get distracted. Maybe you just aren’t vigilant enough, or maybe you get worn out and tired of fighting for it…

… but that’s who you always were. You were always the person who, in the end, wouldn’t hold fast. Or you were the person who’d let themselves be distracted, or tempted. You were the person who wasn’t focused enough to keep putting your original goals first, who just didn’t have quite enough stamina and will to see it all the way through.

You just didn’t know it. You were blissfully innocent of knowing your own shortcomings, knowing your limits. You (in the general sense, obviously, not you, Aria) thought you were better than you eventually showed yourself to be.

And yeah, I know some powerful people, on both sides of the current nullsec war¹. I could even get into specific examples to illustrate my point here, but… honestly, I feel like if I did, people would immediately roll their eyes and decide it’s propaganda, because my experience in dealing with these guys first-hand doesn’t line up with the popular narrative. Sometimes, on purpose, because at least one of the powerful people I know really wants people to keep buying into the unflattering narrative… which took me a while to understand why, but… now that I do, it fits them.

Anyway… yeah, there’s a price. But the people who end up clinging to power despite the unexpected price? That’s because that’s who they were, even before they got that power. Power doesn’t change people. It only lets them do the things they always would have, if they could have. Even if they didn’t know it.

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^{1. The war is not over. PAPI wants to say it’s over, but that’s the thing about wars: They don’t end until everyone stops fighting. If the Fed invaded the State and then said ‘ok, war’s over!’, that’s just empty nonsense unless the State is also willing to say the war is over. You don’t get to throw a punch and then loudly proclaim yourself the winner even though the other guy’s getting up off the pavement with a two-by-four in his hands.}

[Aria_Jenneth]

@Arrendis

There is a price for most forms of power, and that price is innocence.

Sure, that’s a form it often takes. (There are other kinds of prices even someone completely jaded might grimace at the thought of paying.) But I’d propose, Arrendis, that the price is progressive-- that the choices someone makes at the start of the process influence the choices they make later, that with every sacrifice of innocence a person’s perspective shifts a little, and that even if the person who finally makes a choice at the end of the process was always going to make it that way at that time, if they’d come upon that same choice at the start their own innocence might well have stopped them.

And the more dearly one has paid already for one’s power, the more precious it seems. “I haven’t come all this way just to give up now” is perhaps not a rare thought among the strong.

You’re at least a little right, though. Some people by their nature must not, ever, be trusted with large amounts of power, and especially leadership. Fortunately I feel like most such people will find ways of revealing themselves before somebody hands it to them. The question will be whether the warning is heeded.

[Arrendis]

Sure, some people are the sorts who have to come to a decision by small steps, by the incremental justifications and rationalizations. Two people are faced with genocide… one picks it reluctantly, the other enthusiastically. One of them was still enamoured with the idea of ‘I’m a good person who wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t necessary’, while the other… probably never questions their own righteousness.

Of the two, I’d probably say the latter’s the lesser danger, in the long run. The person who can come around to anything if it’s gradual enough? Yikes.

@Aria_Jenneth

Some people by their nature must not, ever, be trusted with large amounts of power, and especially leadership. Fortunately I feel like most such people will find ways of revealing themselves before somebody hands it to them.

Only the least dangerous ones. But then, that’s kind of the point. The ones who can keep it under wraps, fool even themselves… they’re the ones who can be monsters with their followers never seeing it. They can be power-mad maniacs under a veneer of reluctantly doing what must be done… they just happen to do it in a way that also consolidates their own power.

Anyway, I’m considering the initial request. It’s an interesting idea.

[Aria_Jenneth]

19 - The Basics: Common Encounters

Okay, so, it feels like I should kind of maybe a little bit at some point have actually condensed some of the stuff I keep nattering about down so it’s in, like, a usable format? Like, a long time ago?

Better late than never, I guess. I’ll be expanding this list over time. It might involve some repeat material, so, sorry, but it seems worth it to just kind of have it all in one spot, even if that one spot is, like, nineteen or twenty entries in.

So! Let’s get to it.

Encounters are the basic, routine stuff of the Abyss, the challenge that must be surpassed to survive and prosper: hostiles in every room, numbers and composition vary by filament depth/intensity, exit gate won’t open until all are blown to itty bits.

Edit:

Oh! Should mention, strategy tips are of course most likely to be valid for those using a build similar to mine (sturdy, AB propulsion, close-to-mid-range, active tank). If you somehow manage to run a kite and haven’t already been eaten alive by Anchoring Damaviks, your strategies are apt to be a little different from mine.

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Vigilant Tyrannos

Types: Kharybdis, Scylla.

Attack type: “lux kontos” autonomous turret array, “omni” damage.

Also fleets with: Ephilates-type (but not Lucid) Sleepers

(Edit: come to think of it I think Scylla might fleet with cruiser-scale Lucid Sleepers sometimes. I’ll have to keep an eye out and see if I can confirm that.)

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Name: Kharybdis

Type: “frontline” battleship (but actually behaves more like artillery)

Encounter conditions: appears singly with escort (gods spare me from encountering two of these lux kontos-sniping jerks at once). Always appears damaged.

Behavior: stands off at optimal and snipes, depending on its escort to engage up close.

Strengths: high firepower spread across all damage “type” categories; very long range, making it difficult or impossible to get out of its reach outside “Dark” filaments. Often appears with large escort, especially in deeper filaments. Especially dangerous in combination with support equipped with webs, scrams (vs. MWD fit), neuts, and/or target painters.

Weaknesses: starts damaged, battleship-scale turret tracking, actually kind of slow. Basically pathetic for a Drifter.

Strategy: if in Dark, kite at 45+ km if possible until critical escort depleted, then turn, close range, and engage. If not in Dark, close range ASAP to get under its guns while killing anything trying to stop you. Either way, webs + close orbit renders it largely harmless. Try to stay out of blue clouds until you’re in close; you probably do not want to take a wrecking shot from one of these.

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Name: Scylla

Type: support cruiser

Encounter conditions: appears in squads, sometimes escorting Kharybdis, with or without Ephilates Sleepers. Always carries some form of electronic warfare. Always appears damaged.

Behavior: standard close-range-- charges in and rapidly orbits, applying strong E-war while blasting away with lux kontos fire.

Strengths: fast; strong E-war capability (energy neutralizers in particular); probably as good or better damage than your average Ephilates Lancer.

Weaknesses: fragile; large signature radius for a cruiser; always appears damaged.

Strategy: there’s nothing that brings gratitude to my heart quite like a Kharybdis escorted exclusively by Scylla. It’s one of the few times I can use the same ammunition for the cruisers and the battleship; I just switch to Rage HAMs and burn them all down, Scylla first.

If encountered with Ephilates, with or without Kharybdis, generally start with the Scylla due to their heavy E-war.

(In general it’s always best to kill the Scylla first, starting with neuts and any relevant propulsion jamming. They sting and they die fast. The exception is if there’s some relatively innocuous Scylla on the field whose E-war you can just ignore-- Kharybdis and dangerous Ephilates first, in that case.)

I could maybe see their speed being a problem for a turret-based ship but if you hate these for that reason you probably have bigger (or rather, smaller and more evasive) and more common worries.

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Ephilates Sleepers

They get their own special entry because they’re just nothing like the older Sleeper drones.

Attack type: laser-like beam (EM/kinetic-- particle stream of some kind?) and “phantasm” (I think) missile (thermal/explosive, IIRC).

Also fleets with: Vigilant Tyrannos or Lucid Sleepers.

Type: attack/support cruiser.

Encounter conditions: extremely common unit; appear in numbers either as a fleet of Ephilates or in combination with Drifter or Lucid Sleeper units.

Behavior: typical fast-attack brawler units; close quickly and engage, mostly staying between 10 and 20 km.

Strengths: fast, aggressive, fairly high-damage units appearing with a wide variety of E-war. The “Ephilates Lancer” stands out as a potentially dangerous high-damage unit, and they often appear in numbers. Their signature radius is also well below that of a Scylla cruiser.

Weaknesses: fragile. Exactly how fragile varies from unit to unit, but none of them are actually difficult to bring down.

Strategy: if they’re alone except for each other, usually you can just get on with looting caches while killing them in the order of most to least troublesome. Weapon disruptors usually get my initial attention, followed by energy neutralizers and webifiers, then cleanup. A 15-km stasis web is very helpful for holding the slippery things to improve missile or turret application.

Keep an eye out for Ephilates Lancers in large numbers, especially with neutralizer support. They’re usually a nuisance you can casually ward off with a few repair cycles, but if there are more than a handful of them the pressure gets intense. This is especially not the time to also be scrambling for capacitor.

This is really just a further extension of “shoot what’s bothering you,” but the Lancers will likely only be “what’s bothering you” maybe one encounter in ten, so watch out for that one.

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Lucid Sleepers

Types: Deepwatcher, Watchman, Aegis, Escort, support frigates (Firewatcher, Warden), support cruisers (Sentinel, Upholder).

Attack type: laser-like beam (EM/kinetic) and “phantasm” missile (thermal/explosive). Unlike Ephilates, attack-focused Lucid Sleepers often have limited spider-tanking capability and will assist one another.

Also fleets with: Ephilates Sleepers and possibly Scylla. Never appears with Kharybdis.

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Name: Lucid Deepwatcher

Type: Sleeper drone battleship (blockade spec? It’s the second-most annoying chunk of armor to chew through after an Overmind, and Overminds only ever appear singly).

Encounter conditions: appears singly or in groups of up to (at least) three, plus variable escort of Ephilates and Lucid Sleepers. Always appears damaged, and remote repair-capable escorts will often remain near it to help with repairs instead of pursuing intruders (you).

Behavior: Easily the weirdest Abyssal unit. Deepwatchers are less-mobile than basically any other Abyssal unit, so you can expect them and any escort providing repairs to stay relatively close to the exit gate. Their long range and inability to effectively pursue or flee grant them a peculiar tactical flexibility: where a Kharybdis, for example, might flee or pursue, a pair of Deepwatchers may actually plod the fifteen seemingly random kilometers it needs to get under cover of a short-range deviant automata suppressor, which may cause you trouble if you’re fielding drones or missiles the suppressor can shoot down. The Deepwatcher is the only unit I’ve seen that appears to purposely use tactical cover in this way.

Its missiles are particularly strange, slowly wandering the field seemingly at random and rarely becoming relevant to the fight except under specific conditions-- that is, usually, if their target stops moving.

Strengths: not actually just a giant mass of pre-damaged armor with a target painter. Most of the Deepwatcher’s weapons track poorly (or, in the case of its missiles, bizarrely), but they pack quite a bit of punch. The turrets are strong and you will definitely notice if one of those wandering missiles finds you sitting still.

A Deepwatcher’s true strength, however, is the amount of time it can force you to waste. Its armor buffer is massive. Both cross and local rep is poor, but constant, so any time it isn’t spending dead it is spending further-delaying death, both for itself and its partners. Encountering two of these plus escort in a Chaotic dive is a tooth-grinding moment for this reason. Encountering three is even worse.

Weaknesses: it sits nearly-stationary and plinks away, but rarely hits. Don’t fly straight towards them and you’ll rarely have a problem defending. Also, as mentioned, the repairs they do on themselves and each other are weak enough that you’ll usually barely notice them.

Strategy: Because they barely move you can easily assess for yourself how far you can wander while still burning through their armor in a timely-enough way to suit you, but if you’re pressed for time remember that you must kill these things in order to proceed and they’re getting slightly harder to kill with every second they survive. Extra loot is useless to you if your warp field implodes.

I normally burn through the escort first (since I usually don’t need to reload to apply navy ammo), then switch to Rage HAMs and start in on the Deepwatchers from close orbit. Hammer them with the heaviest you’ve got until they’re dead, maybe grab the cache while you’re working at it (beware of sitting still more than a few seconds though), and move on.

[Aria_Jenneth]

Posting so this won’t get locked. I haven’t abandoned it! Really I haven’t! I’ve even finally got some good shots of Lucid Escorts to use.

[Aria_Jenneth]

Okay, time to get this rolling again. A little at a time, maybe.

Name: Lucid Escort

Type: Sleeper light attack and logistics frigate

Encounter conditions: true to its name, appears as a light support craft for other, larger Sleeper and Drifter ships, often in numbers.

Behavior: escorting fast ships, attacks as part of a swarm. Closes range, then cuts MWD and maintains (nevertheless fast) orbit while bombarding its target with missiles. May move to repair heavier vessels, but this behavior isn’t reliable and so shouldn’t really be relied on. When escorting Deepwatchers, typically remains close to the battleships and under full MWD. Which, isn’t wise; if you can hit it, you can probably swat it.

Strengths: fast, hard-shelled, tends to cross-rep and travel with other units, such as Lucid Aegis, that do the same. Very fast while in orbit (dual prop, perhaps?). Can be annoyingly hard to kill.

Weaknesses: likes to MWD while in transit or while escorting Lucid Deepwatchers, and can be baited into lighting its MWD and rushing to assist other Lucid Sleepers. Not especially strong on offense for an attack craft.

Strategy: in the end, this isn’t a priority target except in that it can be hard to kill. To proceed, you WILL have to kill it, so you should take the openings it gives you. The easy way to do this is to catch it lighting its MWD, either to go after you, to rush to another target’s rescue, or (for some reason) to run laps around a Deepwatcher. Otherwise, it’s a speedy little armored nugget you’ll likely have some trouble applying damage to.

Unless it’s Deepwatchers you’re fighting, having a few of these left at the end doesn’t mean at all that you did anything wrong, but they will take some doing to kill. If you’re stuck dogfighting, start with more-dangerous, easier-to-kill targets like Lucid Aegises, which not only sting way more but will repair the Escorts.