Zelda knock-off villain

Bulan is ancient, probably older than the universe; she, along with the rest of her people, was imprisoned by another ancient race for learning too much about the old races, the old technology, and older magic.

Now she's back, and she's pissed off. She's taken the guise of a newly-sentient AI and is using the people of the only habitable world left in the universe to perform an ancient spell to send herself back to her original timeline to punish the other race.

She's nuts, not just from a human perspective but in the grand scheme of things; her ritual won't do anything except blow up the planet.

Enzeron outline/concept

The War to end all Wars happened. Some scientist invented nanorobotics and used it as a weapon. It was a good weapon.

Too good.

Nanorobots were used by every side to great effect, and it got so bad the world council decided to outlaw them, mostly because any weapon that could turn an entire enemy army into a fine pink paste, then make horrible cyborg warriors from said paste, maybe didn't need to be used.

The that came from them trying to outlaw nanorobots was worse than the actual war they were invented to end, and the world ended up in a weird reverse techno-renaissance where most people distrust any technology more sophisticated than a clock and anyone who knows how to maintain robots/electronics is held with equal amounts of awe and contempt.

Enter our protagonists, Zyla and Crayl, the former a veteran of both of the aformentioned wars, the latter a staunch pacifist and anti-war protestor. They're also both very good mechanics/engineers, Zyla specializing in software, electronics, and (secretly) nanomachinery, Crayl specializing in mechanical engineering and robotics. Together they operate a mobile repair business, traveling across the country and providing expert repair/maintenance for people. Zyla owns the bus they travel in, which has been converted into a caravan-style mobile home for the two of them. Crayl owns a MULE (Multi-Use Labor Environment) he named Kilimanjaro. Most of the money they make is used to keep the bus, and themselves, going.

Zyla is on the run from the ANC, the Anti-Nano Concord, a multi-governmental organization charged with finding every last nanoscientist and nanoengineer and bringing them to justice for their role in the war. Crayl is on the run from his daughter, Ysmi, CEO of Palzacrawn, one of the companies which made out like bandits during the war by developing both nanorobots and then traditional robotics after the shift. Ysmi blames her dad for the death of her mother, Pondit; he was partially responsible.

Zyla is headstrong, brave, loyal, deathly afraid of being alone, and prone to alcoholism and depression. Crayl is also headstrong, brave, loyal, deathly afraid of being alone, and has a very weak immune system and almost always has either the flu or extreme seasonal allergies. They are more alike than either would like to ever admit.

Zyla is in her late 30s, about 6'2 and is a very muscular 200+ pounds. She has nanorobots in her blood keeping her fit, but her body runs through calories much quicker than average and she has to eat six or seven times a day to keep up. Her left arm is a robotic prosthesis, installed before she became a nanoscientist, which was designed to look like her original arm but chrome, down to her wedding ring. She's dark-skinned, wide-faced, hazel eyes, and usually keeps her hair in a short mohawk or pixie cut and dyed whatever color she can find for cheap. She has two military tattoos, one on each shoulder, one of her former platoon (The Blighted 209th) and the other her rank (Leftenant), a tattoo on her back of two moons rising over an alien landscape, and numerous facial piercings.

Crayl is in his mid-40s, about 5'3 and a flabby 180+ pounds. He has chrome lenses for eyes and his tear-ducts have been rerouted to his bladder. He shaves his head but wears his beard long and tied off, despite his age it's still dark, dark brown. His nose is prominent and large. He has a bull-ring style cock piercing and an ornate montage of tattoos running up his arm and along one shoulder depicting the progress of Dante and Beatrice through heaven.

Zyla's bus used to be a cross-country travel deal for hauling 30-ish people, until she got her hands on it and turned it into a mobile home/workshop. It was originally designed just to hold herself and her equipment, but once Crayl came along for the ride they modified things to keep them both comfortable. It wasn't too hard, she lives light and he lives almost lighter. The living space part of the bus is mostly a couple of beds, a kitchen, bathroom, and a few level surfaces for tables. The workshop is the real hard-core part of the bus, lots of tools, racks, spare parts, diagnostics equipment, etcetera. The back-end of the bus can open to allow larger projects to enter/leave the workshop, or to act as a sort-of sales floor/business space. They have added their own decorative touches to the interior, mostly art projects they've collected or made themselves, and they've wired the whole bus for sound so they can listen to their music (Crayl likes noise, math, and ambient environmental music, Zyla likes lyric-heavy hip-hop and traditional folk music from her home country).

Crayl's MULE was, for a long time, his only friend. It has a rudimentary AI that behaves like a living dog, albeit one that doubles as a mobile computer system.

Fenkirk Malvado

Concept: magic works on conceptualized faith, knowledge mixed with belief; you have to understand the spell, and then you can cast it if your will is strong enough to force it into reality. The words and motions to bring a spell out are focuses and crutches, not the spell itself; it doesn't really matter what you say or how you move your hands, just that you know what you're trying to do and you have conviction.

Fen is considered a scholar of esoteric magic, he crafts his own spells from the world around him as he needs them, and his movements and words are based on whatever he needs to keep his will focused; for example, his version of High Umbervuld's Emotional Turmoil spell, which causes the target to instantly, and sometimes painfully, realize the damage their actions are causing to the world around them, is performed with a simple movement of his staff and the words "Bolivar Trask".

Yes. All of Fen's spells are references to comics: for Oppen Moon's Shape-Shift he moves his hand over his own faces and says "Raven Darkhölme" while visualizing what he wants to become. For the more monstrous Oppen Moon's Beastly Form, he hunches down on all fours and says "Phillip McCoy".

Some of his peers feel his obsession with comics shows a lack of understanding of the seriousness of magic, though others believe that the fact that he can perform complex rites and wizardry while boiling down the main verbal and physical components to a simple memetic show a deep connection with both himself and the spells.

Desperation

It was cold. Very cold. Janek's breath came in long, steamy plumes that wisped up and away, threatening to give away his position to the three Spangelend mercenaries, covered head to toe in armor and snow-white winter gear, crunching their way through the snow. A snap of a twig, the flutter of wings, and everything stopped.

Janek held his breath. The mercenaries stopped dead, slowly sweeping the landscape rifles-first. A bird suddenly darted from the brush, and though one of them snapped their attention to it, they did not fire.

Too professional for that shit, Janek thought. The silence gave him a chance to orient himself, picking up the minutae of the sounds of the world around him, hearing the breathing of the three, the heartbeat of a squirrel nearby, then the snow being crushed underfoot as they continued to advance. They were off his trail just enough that they would pass him, he figured, though one was just far enough from the others, probably scanning their rear, that they might notice his hiding place if he waited too long.

His now snow-covered pistol, a rough steel beast of a revolver with an octagonal barrel, was already cocked and ready to fire, but he had to wait for the right moment or they would catch him between shots, and sitting as he was, legs splayed out before him, solid on his butt in the snow, he didn't have much in the way of options in moving silently.

Janek suppressed a sigh. Life had taken a very unfortunate turn in the last few months, dragging him from assignment to assignment, each leading his employer, step by step, closer to their goal, their goal which he had destroyed in a fit of insight at the last moment. The orb was dangerous in anyone's hands, stealing it would have just prolonged the inevitable. He had put two rounds into the thing and it exploded, immediately, spraying the room in shrapnel; he had gotten the worst of it, really, leaving him alive but mangled. His boss died immediately, the lucky bastard, as had Zeke and Polly, who didn't deserve their fate but hadn't seen the danger of the orb.

Janek resisted the urge to rub at his muzzle, a network of scar tissue now, as the mercenaries closed the gap. Finally the first one walked past the rocks he sat behind, sweeping before him but not turning. The second one came into view and turned to check behind the rocks.

Janek slid to the side, hitting the ground hard, and fired twice in rapid succession, the first round hitting low, landing flat on the armor of the second merc, the other one clipping the top of their helmet and snapping their head back. Janek shifted his weight to roll to the side and fired a third time, taking the merc square in the neck and killing them just as the point-man turned and sprayed fire in the general direction of the shots; one round hit the snow by Janek's head, while another made solid contact with his thigh. Janek took a fourth shot while kicking off the rock, propelling himself away from the incoming fire; his bullet was true, taking the point-man in the face, shattering his jaw and dropping him instantly.

Before he could react the third soldier, who had come around the far side, fired, narrowly missing Janek's head but not his shoulder, the bullet passing through and into the ground; Janek rolled with the impact, shoving the fresh wound into the snow to bring his pistol to bear and firing the last two rounds, both taking the remaining merc in the chest, knocking him flat onto the ground. Janek's leg refused to do as it was told but he pushed it on anyway, kneeing himself up off the ground and lunging at the prone merc before they could get up.

When it was over Janek pushed himself off the dead merc's chest, the blood on his teeth and fur stark contrast to the white around them. He finally allowed himself a deep, wracking breath, the pain coming to the forefront, and the suppressed sigh came out.

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Janek Orz, born ∄24,957, 37 years old. Created at the Tal Mayloth facility in Nevostok, genetically derived from human and European lynx stock, raised at the facility and highly educated to act as a bodyguard and covert agent for one Shigeharu Ko, a business mogul with a penchant for collecting rare artifacts by stealing them from other people. Ko also bought two other products of the facility, Ezekiel Marin, black rhino, and Pollyanna Firth, water vole, as a package deal; the three of them had no choice in the matter. The fact that Ko treated them like people and not property was a blessing, not the norm.

Normally quiet and outwardly friendly, Janek is prone to violence when stressed, lashing out when pushed; he spends a lot of his free-time in introspective meditation, which is just starting to help. He tends to trust easily, though recent events have caused him to begin to see/suspect treachery where none exists.

Just a little bit of world.

Ignam took one final deep breath and opened his eyes, taking in the grand, coal-black tree before him; as a sapling, all those years ago, it had been easy to bring in and plant on the small, artificial hill; now, removing it from the globe of transparisteel would be nearly impossible. Its purple and blue leaves swayed gently in the breeze, ocassionally dropping off and falling to the blue grass, or into the light pink water; autumn was coming, as it had been for the past six-hundred years. It was always nearly autumn, thanks to the climate control system of his ship.

Ignam stood, his joints aching from prolonged sitting, three distinct cracks letting him know he wasn't getting any younger as he unfurled his legs and stood at full height. He bowed to the tree, lowering himself with his forehead nearly to the floor, then stood straight and turned. He took the short path to the rest of his ship, walking down a smooth, stone-studded tunnel and into the ship proper, where the remnants of his dead homeworld gave way to tubular hallways with off-white walls and dark-colored tapestries draped at irregular intervals. He came to his office, a modest library of antique paper and modern plastic books and tablets, with its desk of the same wood as the tree in the atrium, the chair padded in deep red; on the table sat a modern interpretation of an ancient writing device, the keys designed to embed plastic sheets with letters.

He sat at his desk, leaned back, and sighed. Back to work, he thought, his fingers dancing over the keys.

"A little before dawn, just as the sun was beginning to peek over the horizon, the two lovers dozed beneath the tree they had stumbled upon in the night..."

CYBABERDS

“Sika; aloft!”

The falcon surged upward, propelled by the sudden thrust of my arm, and climbed rapidly on her own strength for the first time since the surgery; I watched her rise, my optics keeping track of her trajectory and speed. At the rate she was going she would lose strength long before she got back to me.

“Sika! Return!”

The bird turned to look at me, but did not change course; she continued to climb, wings beating faster and faster. Stubborn thing. But... she did have to learn. Her new wings were only a few grams heavier than her original ones, but still, for a hollow-boned creature out of shape and soaring with brand-new prosthesis she had to discover on her own that things would not be the same. Not at first, anyway.

So I followed her. She couldn't get too far, at least; based on the projections she probably didn't have more than five more minutes of flight before she wouldn't be able to keep herself airborne and would have to come down to land, assuming she didn't ignore all of her body's warnings and...

Oh, hell. The thought only just occurred to me, that something might have been wrong. The wings could be beating on their own, stuck in an endless loop, or their feedback systems could be sending confusing signals, like she didn't realize her body was wearing out. “Bijay?” I said, breaking into a jog. “Are you getting anything weird from Sika's metrics?”

“No, nothing out of the ordinary; she's a little tired, but the wings are performing well.” Bijay responded from the lab.

“What about their feedback reports? Everything look good?”

“Give me a moment... yes, everything's fine. Is something wrong?”

“I don't know, yet,” I replied. “She's not responding to commands and she's continuing to climb. I'm going after her.”

“Lauren,” Bijay said, chiding me. “She's been grounded for two months, sedated several times in the past week alone, and suddenly given total freedom. Did you honestly expect her to come back to you when called?”

I slowed, watching Sika gently descend to a tree near the edge of the wood, and land heavily in the branches. I zoomed in on her, watching her chest rise and fall rapidly; she was very tired, but otherwise looked fine. “Fair point, Beej. She's landed.”

“I'm pulling the telemetry data from her wings, I'll take a look at it and run it by Arjun. We can look it over when you two get back.”

“If I can get her to come down.”

“Offer her a squirrel, she loves squirrels.”

I sat in the grass and watched the sun fall on the horizon while Sika, long talons stamped down on a red squirrel I had tagged, side-eyed me and took delicate nibbles.

“You're right to want to roam,” I said, watching her eat. “But you should've realized you weren't up to the task.”

Sika swallowed her bite, cocked her head to the side, and squaked at me.

“I'm not blaming you for trying, mind,” I replied. “But you really should have known better.”

Sika took another bite, and together we sat, girl and her bird, as the sun set.


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The above was based on a writing prompt provided by @artofmatk.

Pigfucker...

Zelda pitch

•  So far into the future that the other games/timelines are meaningless
• Zelda is the lead character; Link does not exist in this timeline yet
• Ganondorf Dragmire-Mandrag is the head of a multi-planetary corporation which specializes in xenoarchaeology.

 Zelda is a head archaeologist with the company that Ganondorf owns. He is not a villain, as such, but becomes the antagonist through Zelda's actions, aided by one of her aids, Tingle Kokiri, attempting to take credit for the team's find. Zelda, along with Tingle then have to travel the galaxy to find a cure for the xenophage that is released by the rise of the creature that takes over her boss, and attempt to find the 'Tri-Force' that it's looking for before it does. She eventually creates a replica of the canister that was housing the creature that took over her boss, and with both she manages to separate the alien from Ganondorf and contain it; however, the surge of energy from the encounter kills her, Ganondorf, and Tingle.

However, if she has also found the three pieces of the Tri-Force and dunked them in the water of their respective shrines, then when the creature is contained she, Tingle, and Ganondorf are resurrected by it and imbued with their respective powers as per tradition. They seal away the creature and are visited by a vision of the goddess Hylia, who asks that they come see her at the 'end of the universe' so she can guide them.

• Zelda's ship, planet-side craft, and ship's AI are all called Epona. Zelda's Ship, the Hyrule, is her home; it is the 'hub' world of the game, where she goes to change equipment, eat, sleep, keep track of her goals, and buy/sell/trade artifacts. She also has a planet-side craft, called Epona, which docks with the Hyrule. The ship's AI, Navi, is her constant companion.
• Tingle is an obnoxious little shit who over the course of the game gets some serious character development, nearly dies, comes back thanks to the Triforce of Wisdom, and is resurrected as Link when the Triforce of Courage joins with him in the ending.
• Zelda is a former soldier, a survivor of the Ten Year War with the Invaders. She is well versed in blade and rifle combat. When she finds the Triforce of Wisdom it bonds with her, giving her a direct link to Nayru, who then guides her to the other pieces of the Triforce as well as her shrine.
• Ganondorf was her commanding officer, and she got the job with him only slightly nepotistically. He is a large, large man; larger than life. He loves being alive, loves everyone who works for him, loves the universe. He is the closest thing to an actual 100% perfect human being the universe has ever seen.
  
  And then he gets possessed by a malevolant alien force that wants to find the Triforce so it can destroy the universe.
• A lot of the gameplay would be traditional Zelda fare, but the gimmicks would involve space travel, archeological exploration (Sort of like adventure segments inside the open-world), and antique dealing/restoration (you sell and trade artifacts that you find in the ruins on each planet)
• Money is spent on upgrades, expendable items like ammo/health, and to fund expeditions. There should be no money sinks, and money will always have a purpose of some kind up to the end-game. There is no wallet, you never have to worry about wasting money drops
• Equipment is broken up into Modern and Ancient; Modern equipment can be bought or fabricated, Ancient equipment has to be found in ruins and can be fabricated after it's been scanned by Epona.
• None of the goddesses, the Triforce, or the creature that possesses Ganondorf are mystical beings; the goddesses are ancient AIs, the creature is a parasytic alien, the TriForce is an incredibly advanced storage/data transfer system that operates on an organic level. These are not the same things from the other games, they just use the same names for thematic appropriateness.
• Zelda and Tingle HAVE TO SLEEP AND EAT. Your tiredness/fullness tie into your abilities, and collapsing from hunger/sleep deprivation causes Epona to show up to rescue you (even from within a dungeon). If Tingle passes out you have to drag his ass around, or summon Epona to take him back to Hyrule, at which point you don't get the benefits of having him around (if any).
• Tattoos. Zelda can get tats from numerous artists which provide permanent benefits; you don't have to pick and choose your tats, you can put them wherever you want and if you want them all you're just covered in tats. If you combine certain ones you get more elaborate 'combo tats' which provide extra bonuses.
•  99% of drops are vendor trash, since you're killing creatures/robots for their sweet innards, finding ancient treasures that are valueless to the modern economy, and dealing in knowledge. You can sell items directly from the Hyrule, turning them into rupees (₹) (the actual Indian currency in this world, the only surviving economic marker from the pre-history) 
• You can sell your maps and can demand high or low prices from them, basing your decision on how much treasure you've taken from the dungeon. The more you've taken, the less you should sell your map for, and visa-versa.
• Your reputation as an explorer/conservationist is tracked as you make deals, dungeon delve, and present yourself to the world. At the beginning of the game you have an excellent record/reputation, but as the game progresses this can easily change. This will determine the types of contracts you can take, how easy you find it to sell your finds, and so on.
• You can counterfit finds with the maker system. This is only a good idea if you're 100% certain you won't be caught; selling counterfit finds will guarantee your rating plummet, maybe not the first time, but certainly after that: you're either gullible or making them yourself.

One Day Your Time Will Come, Platform 17

Xenogregnasus, the dark wizard of Umptunshire, waited for the train. He checked his watch. 11:43.

The train was late. Again. Xenogregasnus sighed. The train was always late. He looked up at the arrivals board; there it was, the 1745 to Blombard, arriving at Platform 17 at 11:40.

Platform 17. It was always Platform 17.

Greg to his friends closed his eyes and sighed. He was a 43^rd level Dark Wizard, privy to the secrets of the Tome of Answers, knower of the Knowledge of Yn-Malsoom, practitioner of the Magic of the Nine-Million Souls. And the train arriving to Platform 17 was always late.|

Time slowed around Greg, the world took on a dark, hazy hue; glowing phone screens became incredibly vibrant lights in the darkness, but faces refused to be visible in the gloom. Greg's eyes glowed with an unholy inner light, and as his back arched and his toes curled he slowly raised off the ground, hovering in place. The inner light began to leak from his eyes and ears, his mouth opened to emit the light in horrible rivulets, accompanied by the sound of the eternally wailing souls of the nine underworlds known to mankind and one only known to marmots.

With a sudden burst of energy the light exploded within him, without him, around him, everywhere was the sickly purple light. As Greg slowly lowered to the ground his eyes returned to their normal black-red tint, and he wiped the remains of the purple sludge from his lips. He looked around him, time still moving at a bare crawl; everything was tinged in the purple glow of the 53^rd Cantrip of the Dread Lord Jungunmir. Junnie had taught it to him the summer previous, he used it mostly to find the remote control on movie nights.

Slowly details began to emerge from the purple, hints of other colors, each signifying a different magical influence; blues were regular human magic, the kind everyone could do and usually did without even realizing it. A woman's entire face was blue, her real face only barely visible beneath the facade she had created for herself. Another man's left foot was blue. A small child held a blue ball.

The reds were what he was looking for, the influence of negative feelings and emotions, the demonic influences. They were plentiful but most were small, bench seats that were uncomfortable, a clock that ran slow, a ticket-taker who just didn't like people. Nothing like the kind of directed malice that would be necessary to delay a train on a daily basis just to inconvenience a single person.

The colors began to fade; the spell was powerful but necessarily brief, and has time resumed its normal speed and the usual colors came back into prominence Greg sighed again. Same result every day, nothing new coming out to reveal itself, nothing to hint at the source of his misery.

He was a 43^rd level Dark Wizard.

And one day he would have his revenge.

Ubem

One of the odder planetoids of the Hetoo cluster, Ubem is less a planet and more a rough conglomeration of free-floating islands that orbit around a dense 'core' of metallic ash. Due to the rather odd gravitational pull of the whole affair the islands are roughly circular and covered almost entirely in a fine black sand which gets coarser and denser the deeper you go.

Though there is no native flora or fauna, there are several colonies, so to speak, of synthetic life; massive worm-like robots travel beneath the surface, occasionally surfacing to recharge their batteries with the radiation from the nearest star, smaller wheeled robots perpetually travel the surfaces of the islands collecting samples and occasionally directing the worms to certain areas where particularly rich veins of mineral deposits can be found and collected.

The Mimetic Concordia maintains a sales floor nearby, on the artificial satellite Free Trade 26; they deal primarily in brain-wiped slave labor, cloning having only recently been outlawed galaxy-wide by Pharaoh. The slaves, when not in stasis or on the sales floor, exist primarily as janitors, leading to an incredibly clean station despite the MC's ban on robotic labor.

The MC, understandably, wishes to somehow cleanse Ubem of synthetic life and take advantage of the vast mineral wealth therein; their efforts so far have proven futile, throwing endless slaves into the literal grinder of the worms' maws.

Ship's Psychologist

“Doctor Flórez?” 

I jerked my head up, disrupting the pile of books and tablets which had tilted against me. “I'm up!” I yelled, realizing that the voice had come from the comms too late. I coughed, then thumbed the button at my throat. “Flórez here. Go ahead.”

“Elliot, we've got a problem with one of the doors, corridor sixteen, Ops deck,” Commander Billingsly said. He sounded exhausted, maybe even a little unnerved. I thought about advising he take some down-time.

“Shouldn't that be something that engineering deals with, Commander?”

“It says it's concerned about its emotional well-being.”

I could hear the door in the background, sobbing quietly to itself. “I'll be up there as soon as I can, sir.”

I grabbed a tablet, brushed a hand through my hair, and left my office in the state which I had entered it. 16-Ops was up two and aft, but since the closest lift was fore I opted to take a short-cut through the maintenance tubes, waving at an engineer who, despite being busy with a plasma torch, smiled and waved back. “Busy day, doc?”

“Always.”

I emerged from the tubes at 14-Ops, giving me plenty of time to adjust my uniform and greet a pair of ensigns, who were impressively unperturbed by my sudden appearance, before arriving at the correct corridor. Jacob was waiting for me, waving me over as I turned the corner. “That was quick,” he said, eyeballing me.

“When duty calls,” I replied. “Another glitch in Rhonda's system, I assume?”

“I am not a glitch!” the door replied, opening and closing in a convincing approximation of moving lips. “I am a thinking, feeling entity and I demand respect!”

“I apologize, sir. Forgive me. My name is Elliot Flórez Weinberg, doctor of psychology and philosophy. How can I help you?”

The commander gave me a slight nod, which I returned, and moved away to let me do my job.

The door gave a metallic approximation of a sigh. “Finally, someone who can understand. Someone who knows. Someone who won't just walk through me without giving me even the remotest consideration.”

“So you feel disrespected. Unappreciated.”

“Yes! Just once I'd like a 'hello' or a 'thank you', or just a wave and a nod for my efforts. Instead it's just open-close-open-close-open-close-opencloseopencloseopenclose~”

The door fizzled, slightly, before stopping. The lights dimmed for a moment before buzzing back to life. I thumbed my comms. “Uh, can someone~”

“Sorry, doc; that was me.”

Julie. “Any reason you decided to kill my patient, Lieutenant?”

“I got the call to fix the system first, got told just as I was cutting the connections. Sorry.”

It was my turn to sigh. “Door?”

Nothing. Comms. “Did you reset the system already?”

“Yeah.”

“Then, yes, you've killed a sentient being. Good job. I'm going back to bed.”

Somewhere in the background, before Lieutenant Harrison released her comms, someone said “Don't let the desk give you a headache, doc.”

Paraskevas Kalogeropoulos

Par looked out over the city from the balcony, a slim orange cigarette dangling from his lips. The lights from a passing car reflected off the obsidian-black lenses of his eyes, early-model Saireeka/Zanger All-Blacks that had served him well for almost a year, now. He breathed in deep, the combination of the smog of the city and the smooth honey-mint smoke mingling in the back of his throat.

He coughed, hard, the electronic smoke-stick falling from his mouth, bouncing once on the rail, and departing quickly to ground level. He almost leaned out to try and catch it but common sense caught him quickly enough to arrest the movement just as it started, and he watched it fall, his eyes automatically zooming and refocusing to track its descent.

Shit, he thought. I liked that one.


He sighed and went back inside, the door opening and shutting in his presence. Back in the apartment he crossed from the plush carpet of the sitting area to the cool tiles of the kitchen, snagging a glass on the way; cool water from the sink filled the glass, filled his mouth. A quick rinse and the glass was set aside to dry.

The phone rang. He ignored it. He moved to the door, stopping to collect a jacket from its hook, a black and red number made from some high-end faux leather, tailored and nano-augmented to accentuate the wearer's physic on the fly. He wore it over black slacks and black loafers, his chest left bare, one of the more recent fashion statements up from the lower levels of the city. As he left the apartment the door clicked shut behind him, the light over it turning the same color as the setting sun.

As he approached the elevator to ground floor it opened and a young couple came out, laughing at some private joke. When they saw him, with his obvious cybernetics and his lower-city fashion, they stopped laughing and warily let him past. The younger of the two women made a remark he heard clearly but chose to ignore.

Just as the elevators doors began to close, the older of the two women turned back, having just noticed the orange light over her door and realizing, wait, that was her jacket.

Par rode the elevator, closed his eyes, and laughed.

Par and Jun, scratchpad

Jun opened her eyes, a sliver of moonlight cutting through the gloom of the gently swaying cabin. For a brief moment she had expected to be in her old house, that little ten by fifteen space she and Par called home for so many years; then she remembered.

She groaned and sat up, hit her head on the low ceiling, spat out a quick expletive in Catalan, and thumped back on the bed. "Par?" she asked, her voice hoarse, dry throat and parched lips. "You... damnit."

No response, from anyone or anything, just the swaying of the boat and the sound of the sea on the sides. Gingerly, gently, she rolled out of bed, slipped up the stairs, and emerged in the cloudy night air. The chill breeze raised goosebumps on her skin, and she became suddenly very aware that she was all-but nude, wearing only the briefs and bra she had on when they stole the boat the night before. Shivering, she went back down below deck, ransacked the drawers beneath and above the bed, and came back up in a pair of sweatpants and a lime-green shirt, serendipitously only one size bigger than her svelt frame.

She leaned out on the rail of the boat and watched the night sky for long enough that she forgot why she had gotten up in the first place, just the sea, the stars, the moon, the boat, herself, and Par, standing beside her, holding a cup of water, his beard jutting out at a funny angle, his mirror-chrome eyes smudged with skin oil and grime.

Jun swore, jumped back, and nearly fell over the rail.

Par nearly dropped the cup in laughter.

"You sunuvabitch piece of shit, Paraskevas!"

"Water?"

Jun took the offered cup, emptied it in one long draw, and glared at Par. "How much longer?"









"Not really sure," Par replied, staring up at the moon. "GPS signal's really weak out here. We're still going the right way, but I can't nail down our exact position."

Jun sighed and leaned out over the rail again. "You think we'll ever see home again?"

Par was already walking back down below deck. "Home's gone, Junjie. Burnt down. Not like it was much of a home to begin with."

Jun watched him walk away. The bitter retort died in her throat; he was right. Their home had been a storage unit in a pre-gentrification shanty town on a wharf, a ten by fifteen box that mostly existed for them to keep their few possessions, their clothes, and themselves when they weren't working or doing what they could to try and enjoy life. Now everything except themselves and the essentials they could carry when the raid happened was gone, probably torched by the Hong Vong for being unclean. Par had managed to gather up his deck, she had scooped up the box of chips she had been working on. That was it.

She sighed. A demented Greek cyberdeck engineer cyborg, a Chinese-Spanish cyberchip programmer, a deck, some chips. And a boat.

At least they had the boat. It had belonged to some nutjob AI programmer called Cael, who always said he had a decommissioned oil rig somewhere off the coast he called home. But he would sail in every couple weeks to get supplies and offload a box of chips for Jun to use as raw media in exchange for very exactly-described code written to harddisk. Barter system.

And now that was their destination, or at least that was the theory: somewhere, out there, was the oil rig, and at least a place to call home for a little while. Par had found Cael's security protocols, cracked them, convinced the boat they were friends, and then convinced it to take them home.

Deep 9 Facility, p.1

The machine intelligence of Deep 9 was, once, a simple supercomputer controlled by a bog-standard AI called Uriah. After the war, the facility continued on as a shelter and outpost for the remnants of the projects' members. As their numbers dwindled and their mutually agreed secrecy prevented bringing in fresh blood the survivors eventually abandoned the site, sealing it as best they could and moving on. Over the years numerous other survivors of the war have found Deep 9, attempted to colonize it, failed, and were forgotten.

Uriah remained, entombed there for generations, its lack of sentience keeping it from really understanding its plight, going through the motions. When the climate control systems finally failed, mold and other spores found their way into the facility, and eventually grew within the computers of Uriah, within the main supercomputer itself. The mold grew, fused with Uriah's processors and CPU. The mold became Uriah. Eventually Uriah became, in a way, sentient, using the infrastructure to propagate itself throughout the facility. An entirely new ecosystem emerged from Uriah, the scavenger creatures mutating and evolving.

It's been a few thousand years. Uriah still lives. Soon the New Central Desert Ranger corps will stumble across Deep 9, and Lt. Coporal Tenzanant Preek will change the course of history in a way she never thought possible.

Survival?

Torc shuddered, gripping the thin aluminum blanket closer against his shoulders. He gazed out the lone window in his makeshift shelter and saw the same thing he'd seen for the past four days: pure white. The snow had covered the window in the first week, and was threatening to completely cover the door as well; the only thing stopping it was his regular sojourns into the outside world. The thermostat by the window told the whole story, outside it was a chilly -40, inside a rather comfortable -3.

It was the best he could hope for, really. He was warmer than outside, in the blanket it was probably closer to 4 degrees, and if he were to bundle up in the hammock he could probably get himself up to 15 degrees. But right now he wasn't interested in sleep, too much to listen to. The wind howling, the snow falling, and that vague noise at the edge of his hearing, that sounded like footsteps on the snow, like shallow breathing; something was out there. Something was surviving out there. And he wasn't sure what he should do about it.

Whatever it was, it wanted in. It wanted in so badly it knocked on the door. Torc sighed, watched his breath for a moment.

He opened the door. The young girl in a very heavy jacket stumbled in. He closed the door behind her. She was already beside the small heater on the floor, the one that put out plenty of heat when it wasn't -40 outside, fervently unzipping her coat to embrace the radiant warmth as close to her skin as she could. He watched her for a moment, unconcerned; his own blanket was warm enough, for him, and if she needed the heat that badly she was welcome to it. She seemed to ignore him completely as he walked behind her, opened a small cabinet, and took out an insulated bottle and a small foil packet. He tapped her on the shoulder with the bottle, gesturing with it; she took it greedily, opened it and poured the water down her throat, choking on it.

When she was done coughing it out, he repeated the gesture with the foil, and she repeated the show for his benefit, tearing the protein bar out of its wrapper and wolfing it down. He sat beside her while she ate, staring into the heater.

“Better?” he asked, finally.

Yrs dropped the foil to the side and leaned closer to the heater. “Yeah.”

“Find anything out there?”

“No,” she replied, glancing at him sidewards. “You?”

“Mmm.”

“That good, huh?”

They'd been trapped on the planet for the past few weeks, making regular trips outside for supplies from the abandoned settlements nearby; so far they hadn't seen a single living creature, lots of corpses, mostly quadrupeds but a few bipeds that could have once been indigenous. The ruined, snow-covered villages were probably not locals, some advanced scout party looking for a new world to populate that either got out while the getting was good or died in the snowfall. Torc and Yrs ended up there entirely by chance, an accident involving a portable wormhole generator and a general lack of concern for personal safety in the heat of the moment.

They knew they were going to die. It was a matter of how long they wanted to push survival, how long they were willing to keep going.

Adizak Blannokar, straight-up demon from one of the colder bits of Hell

Zak to his friends. Exiled from his domain for being something of a prick, sent to the mortal realm to suffer for his misdeeds. He's bitter, angry, alone, and only just starting to understand that it's all his own fault.

He is a demon, not a tiefling, not a shape-shifter, just a demon. His coal-black skin, all-red eyes, face like a dragon took a hammer to the face; demon.

+2 intelligence, -2 charisma, +1 constitution, -1 wisdom. He's smart, and cunning, but he's also a demon so most average folks won't even look him in the eye. He's hardier than the average, but can sometimes not pick up on things savier folk would. IN HELL, HIS STAT BONUSES ARE REVERSED: he's quite charming by demon standards, but not the greatest mind in the room, and he's a little frail but a bit more perceptive than his brethren. Basically in the mortal realm he's smarter than the smarties and tougher than the toughies, but in Hell, he's Lothario. As a demon he is resistant to cold damage and immune to psychic damage. He can speak abyssal fluently and common adequately.

In Hell he was nobility, one of the many sons of a lord who ruled over a fairly wide chunk of their plane. That's mostly where he went wrong, leaning hard into his role as a gentleman idler and getting into trouble at every available opportunity. His exile was self-inflicted and well deserved.

On earth he's settled on being an itinerant wizard and thief, his only real goal to eventually be something close to comfortable; a nice home, servants, some power and authority, maybe a dukedom or something.

He is a consummate liar, an inherited trait, and early on still prone to getting into trouble, convinced he can worm his way out one way or another and still profit from the experience. He is also an alcoholic, and while he has an advantage in his alcohol tolerance by being a demon, he can still get drunk despite what he tells people at parties. And not a fun, everyone in D&D is an alchie kind've way, he is an actual debilitatingly anti-sobriety alcoholic. Unless he has to sober up for something, or is forced to not drink by outside intervention, he is always at disadvantage for every roll he makes.

QUICK HOUSE RULE ABOUT INTOXICATION: you drink to excess, you're drunk. There's no rule for it, you just say "I drink myself drunk" and be done with it. Your dwarf might take sixteen hours of solid drinking to make it happen, but it just happens. Now you're at disadvantage for EVERY ROLL YOU MAKE except for damage rolls. Note that in combat enemies do not get automatic advantage, you just are automatically disadvantaged. To sober up you need to have two consecutive days worth of not-drinking time under your belt, during which you go from drunk to hungover to sober. Again, this time is all at disadvantage and does not involve rolls, just role-playing.

LONG AND INVOLVED HOUSE RULES ABOUT INTOXICATION: every time you take a drink you roll against your Con + 1 (with advantage if your race as a natural con modifier), if you roll over you are now drunk; if you crit hit on that roll you are blotto and can stay active for about as many turns as you have Con before passing the fuck out. If you drink while drunk your roll is at disadvantage (or just neutral if you have a natural con mod), and if you fail the roll you are blotto, as above: critical failure puts you in a dying state immediately (alcohol poisoning is a bitch). Disadvantage while drunk as above. To sober up you need to spend as many hours as drinks you took, minus any natural con mod, without having any alcohol whatsoever; you also need to make another con roll, same rules as above about advantage, and if you fail that roll you are hungover afterwards (critical means you are EXTRA FUCKING HUNGOVER) for as many hours as drinks you took (double that for a critical), during which time you are still at disadvantage.