The Sleeping Orange (Signups Open!)

The Narcissist stood, staring into a mirror the size of a universe, and saw nothing more beauteous than Himself among all the worlds and wonders reflected in the silver sky.

But no one knew.

At least, not enough people knew, or didn't really know the wonder that was His greatness. From the tips of His angelic wings, His chiseled, craggy features, the raw talent that exuded from His hands like so much ionizing radiation, His beret...all right, the beret was kind of over the top, but it was a part of Him as anything else was. He turned slowly, hovering in the span and realm between the universes, and the mirror turned with Him that He might always see Himself smiling back.

He wasn't smiling now, and it marred His features. He hated that. His features were more perfect with a smile, no matter how insincere; but now the thought had struck Him that He had to push out further, allow more beings to understand and worship His beauty. But how?

In a perfect flash, He knew the solution. Eight contestants. Seven rounds. Each would fight to the death to see Him in His full glory, and at each death of the unworthy He would give them more challenges, and a little more of His wonder to spur them on. It was perfect.

Carefully, he reached into his mirror and began to craft his battle.

He didn't have any problem naming it, of course.

Sorry guys, signups aren't really open. This is a NARCISSISM BATTLE for our resident Slorange, who will be putting his completely legitimate profiles on here shortly. But never fear! Replacements will totally be a thing: if Slorange doesn't post enough, we'll just have to ask Slorange to replace in for him. Not a problem.

Anyway profiles goooo

Name: He’s long since forgotten, then grown a dozen more to forget. He is the dreamer.

Race: As human as he thinks he is at any given time. More mind than man now, but a mind without meaning or matter.

Gender: Male, right up until he isn’t.

Color: The scent of summer rain and the taste of her lips

Biography: What is the past, to a creature of dreams? History is only a series of stories, causality but a crutch for those burdened with wakefulness. Memory is mutable, and if what was is no more than what one thinks it was, then it too changes when seen or forgotten. The story changes with each telling and changes the teller with it; there is no truth, only the one who would seek it.



But there is a dream that happens more than the others.



There is a man. A man of a mind so powerful that it bends other minds before it and reshapes the world when it pleases. He is not the only such man. His is not the only such mind. He thinks little special of himself, little notable, little meaningful. He winds his way through the stars in great ships of steel and humble bubbles of thought; the race of men is a race of exploration, of discovery, and their journeys bring them ever closer to the ever retreating goal of complete understanding. Men and the man meet a thousand million other races, uncountable minds so foreign they seem impossible and yet so driven by man’s same goals they seem brothers. But for every leap outward he makes, he takes a step inward. When the universe ran out of wonders, there would always be more to discover inside his own mind; when the worlds he visited lost coherency and meaning, there would always be a dream to retreat to.



But well before men reach the end of their infinity, the man discovers the boundaries of his. He finds the veil that separates within from without. Though behind him the dreamscape constantly changes and rewinds and never was, promises an eternity of novelty and wonder, he cannot be content knowing that there is an edge, even if it is forever distant. He is restless, the journey outward and the journey inward both losing meaningfulness as he finds limit for the first time. He cannot let this be the end. He finds the veil and he pushes.



Perhaps he expects resistance, but there is none; perhaps he had heard tales from other men and minds of their own veils and their immutability, but they were only fooled by their own fear. The veil parts. It was never there, only imagined. Within and without were never distinct, only a story he told himself. Past and future, dream and reality, self and other: all were just context, not truth. There is only one eternal crystallized now and only one mind to experience it. He is not a man; there is no such thing. He is everything, and everything is what he believes it is.



And then the dream changes again, and everything is rewritten.

Weapons and Abilities: Reality changes itself in the presence of the dreamer as he enforces his will on the world around him; many have made the mistake of believing it is only their perception of reality that changes only to find themselves paralyzed and hacked to death by their perception or erased entirely from the universe as they are forgotten. The dreamer believes that reality is only what he imagines it to be, and reality is happy enough to oblige, at least locally.



He was once a psion and retains those abilities even in his solipsistic haze and inconstant identity; presumably his psionic gifts are the source of the world warping around him, but they now mostly operate on an entirely subconscious level. It is only rarely he believes himself to be a person with such abilities, and thus only rarely they manifest at his behest. Most of the time, he doesn’t truly believe himself to be a person at all. While he is still capable of feats like telepathy, the concept of otherness has become so foreign to him that the idea of reading someone’s mind is borderline nonsensical. Mostly, he simply drifts, acting out the stories he tells himself and inflicting them on anyone near enough.



The thoughts and dreams of other people tend to start manifesting as well if they stay near him long enough, particularly if those other people are strong-willed or have mental powers of their own, but if it’s even possible to distinguish external influence he hasn’t noticed it. All dreams are one, and if someone from your past or beliefs appears, it’s only because he imagined you imagining it. You don’t really exist at all.

Description: He frequently changes, both physically and mentally and often with no warning or constancy at all. The logic of a dream is fickle, and if one moment he is an ethnically-ambiguous man in the robes of an Academy psion sporting a dazed expression, the next he may be a tantalizingly-familiar woman smiling sadly or a ravening beast of tentacles and madness. It will all make sense to him, and it probably will to you, too. It’s only a matter of time before you stop believing in the veil yourself.

Name: Aenanwellwyn Alianorwynaan-Wyrnaanglyth

Race: Elf

The elves of Glaerneth Rindellonna are said to live much closer to nature than any of the other mortal races. Indeed, their legends say that after Mazgek Dz’Dun carved his dwarves from stone, and Megolus shaped his men from clay, and Titania wove her fey from clouds, and Fythoggr wrought his giants from ice, and K-bz-K-Dk forged its kobolds from magma, Tyrwyllenelsin saw that nothing she could craft could ever hope to match the beauty the fertile earth made itself, and so she breathed a shred of her spirit into a willow tree and called it Elf.

While the other races may not believe the elfin legends, they would certainly find it hard to deny the ancestral resemblance those legends claim: elves are tall, long-lived, and tranquil, their limbs unnaturally thin and flexible and their bark-color skin fading into the forest when they will it. Indeed, they deviate so much from the other comparatively-stocky races that they would likely be considered unsettling or even repulsive were it not for their glamer: mortal magic is unknown in Glaerneth Rindellonna and so the glamer is as mundane as the elves themselves; elves simply unconsciously exude a cocktail of scents and pheromones that alters the perceptions of any near them. The glamer changes with their mood, so while their influence mostly makes them seem appealing or pleasant, it makes a furious elf a truly terrifying thing to behold. Only the rocky, literal dwarves are immune, and remain greatly distrustful of a people that lies by its very presence.

Lastly, while there is no literal truth to the widely-held (among the other races, at least) belief that elves can talk to plants, they are certainly blessed with a great empathy for all things that grow. While no plant has the capability to speak or the complexity to have anything to say, an elf can intuitively tell how healthy and happy it is, and the most perceptive can even piece together a bit of its history. The greatest of trackers are all of elven stock; no amount of stealth and care will make grass forget it’s been trodden on or a shrub not notice its branches bent, and a cunning leaftender will never miss the signs.

Gender: Male

Color: A nourishing shade of decay

Biography: Elwyenlanden shivered involuntarily as she shouldered the door open, reminding herself it was just the chill and damp of the basement that caused her shudder. Not anything else, not anything about the mycologist that practically lived in it. As she waited for her eyes to adjust to the pale, greenish light that floated down from the stringy mold colonies on the ceiling, she reflected that she was very lucky to have a master as undemanding as he. And as kind. And progressive, too. Long gone were the days when it was considered blasphemous to study nature too closely, so a naturalist was a perfectly fine profession to be, and there should be no shame being associated with one. And even though most elves chose to share their empathy with and find their focus in slightly greener and less squishy things, mushrooms and mildew were just as worthy of veneration as the most majestic oaks and noble reeds. It was the same litany she repeated every time she brought her master his meals and on those rare occasions she encountered him outside his workshops. It never got any easier to believe it. She took a deep breath, careful to focus on the scents of her cooking rather than the smell of rot and slime that was palpable in the air, and began cautiously sidling across the slick loam.



She found him near the rear of the chamber bent over a raised box, a globular and luminescent fruiting body of some carefully-bred morel perched on his shoulder. Clustered at his fingertips were a number of little somethings, presumably one of his much-beloved mushroom projects. They were frilly and, as near as she could tell in the fungal glow, orange. He turned and straightened as he heard her approach, then smiled.



“Ah, child. You have brought me a meal. Good, yes, many thanks. Your timing is excellent, as always.”



She proffered the plate, and he gleefully popped a handful of wine-and-honey-soaked grains into his mouth. Chewing noisily, he watching her with the unsettling cheer he always seemed to carry, obviously waiting for her to ask something. As usual, she obliged; it didn’t do to displease one’s master, even if this one didn’t seem capable of displeasure.



“What are those.” It didn’t sound like a question and it betrayed no hint of actual interest, but the words were there and that was enough.



“Ah, these! These are the latest generation in one of my most engaging studies.”



He beckoned her closer and she bent in to look at the apparently-engaging fungi. They were frilly. They were indeed orange. There didn’t seem to be much else to them. She never could tell what–



Before she could follow that thought to its conclusion, he reached out a spidery finger and delicately thumped a cap. The little orange mushroom began vibrating slightly and a wavering note rang out; it sustained for several seconds before going flat and fading.



“I call them… cantorelles!”



She considered this for a few moments. “Because they sing. I see. That’s very clever.”



It had sounded like a dwarf with a head cold.



“I thought so, I thought so.”



The comparison became even more apt when he plucked several stipes at once and a chord rang out in not-quite-harmony. She tried not to grimace.



“It all started when I noticed that the ridges of certain species are morphologically fairly similar to the sound-producing structures of some creatures and even some instruments,” he said, inverting a still-silent cap and pointing to the fluted ridges underneath. “And I thought, well, some species already have simple motor functions, and what’s simpler than vibrating? All it took is the right system of crossbreeding and encouragement, and here we are.”



He grimaced briefly. “Of course, it took several generations to dial in ‘motor functions’ from ‘explode’ to ‘vibrate’. But they composted well.”



He obviously wasn’t finished, but it was also obvious that he expected prompting. “So, that’s the end of this project then?”



“Haha! No, not even close, not really. No, I think I should be able to breed them to fruit in scales or proper chords instead of randomly. And maybe by fine-tuning their shape I can get different “instruments”, too. Why, in a few months, I bet I could have whole little symphonies of cantorelles!”



Months ahead of her of dwarfsong and exploding notes and probably him trying to arrange her namesong for mold and mildew out of some misguided show of kindness. Fantastic. Still, at least it wouldn’t be as bad as when those damned humans had put ideas in his head of things with acid and things that bit. Probably.



He’d turned back to his boxes, picking and poking and taking notes, apparently oblivious to any signs she showed of her musings; Elwyenlanden took this as her cue to leave. She’d fetch the plate later, once he’d finished with it and hopefully once he’d wandered off to one of the other workshops so she wouldn’t get another demonstration. She was halfway to the door, mind already off her master and planning the rest of her free evening, when she heard the bang. It wasn’t quite an explosion, and it certainly wasn’t the clatter of something heavy being dropped. She doubted it was just one of his ill-bred cantorelles going off; it was more like a tiny thunderclap.



“Master?”



Quite a lot like a small thunderclap, actually.



“Are you alright?”



Like the sound, for instance, of air rushing in where there had once been something the size of, for instance, an adult elf.



“Aenanwellwyn?”



There was no sign of him.



Weapons and Abilities: Aenanwellwyn’s deep empathy with funguskind has combined with his idiosyncratically-scientific curiosity and talent for breeding and cultivation to produce a staggering variety of variably-whimsical new mushrooms, molds, and mildews. Most of these aren’t weaponizable per se, and the ones that are were generally accidental. Those that are dangerous are largely relegated to small samples in his less-used workshops, so it’s not as though he has them on him now. Still, it’s a dangerous world out there, so for those occasions when he has to go into the wilderness to collect new samples, he keeps a handful of his less-unpredictable mistakes on his person; chief among these are puffball “grenades” with spores that range from choking to hallucinogenic to toxic.



Additionally, the various species he plays host to have, part by chance and part by design, entered into a largely-symbiotic relationship with his immune system; cuts and scrapes tend to crust over in minutes and heal in hours instead of days, while larger injuries mend themselves the best they can. He is also remarkably resistant to poison and disease, largely because any newcomer infection is quickly muscled out by the huge variety of frankly parasitic infestations that have already settled in.



While he is a remarkably talented naturalist and grower, there is nothing supernatural about his abilities. He can induce fungal growth in just about any sufficiently-nutritious substrate and shows preternatural awareness of airborne spores, but he cannot make things grow any faster or bigger than can be achieved through breeding and he commands no special control over his creations.



Description: Like most elves, Aenanwellwyn is more likely to introduce himself by his job than by his given name; humans tend to joke that this is because elven names are so bloated that even elves get tired of their flowery and impractical language, but in truth it’s simply because use of a name implies closeness and trust. As such, he tends to think of himself as Mycologist. Most others would probably guess as much, if they didn’t first guess Beggar or Composter or Shambling Horror.



He is, in a word, disgusting. His flowing elven locks are matted with mycelia and sprout intermittently with fragrant, rot-sweet mushrooms. What skin isn’t covered by his linen-and-leather protective garments is slick and occasionally pulsates; the fact that he’s carrying his workshop-lamp on his shoulder, giving him a corpselight-green cast, certainly doesn’t help. Even his glamer is enough only to calm the revulsion in most observers; no amount of elfscent can make Mycologist attractive to anything but flies and slugs.



Behind the moldering façade would be an otherwise fairly-ordinary elf. He’s about nine feet tall but wouldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds stripped of his garments and specimens; he is composed entirely of angles and spindles and china-delicate bones, and his face seems to be built backwards from the nose. Only his eyes are unmarred by his passions and experiments, and they still glitter with a bright emerald green. It’s quite incongruous with the yellows and browns and general unpleasantness of the rest of him.



Mycologist is cheerful and inquisitive to a fault; he has long since cast off any interest in what other people think of him, but still has what would be considered a pleasant personality if he were less monomaniacal. Nothing drives him more than to create and discover and study new things in the small world of fungus; his life has for decades revolved around little else. He is also a bit of a homebody: there have been a few occasions where he ventured out past the forests and caves he grew up near, and even a few times he attached himself to an adventurers’ party in pursuit of some legendary strain of fungus or other, but for the most part he prefers to stay in and stick to what he knows. Despite his age, he is still rather naïve and frankly a bit clueless outside his sphere of experience.

Name: Vox Populi

Race: Lifetaker

While Vox Populi claims to be a conglomeration of restless souls, it is actually a single mind and was never alive. Though largely incorporeal and composed of spiritual energy like many true ghosts, the masks that form its physical body serve as both focus and storage for its metaphysical form; destruction of its manifested components would leave it powerless and it would wither away without access to a new source of vim.

Gender: None

Color: The decadence of dead kings

Biography: Vox Populi, as the spirit likes to call itself, does not truly have a story; a biography would imply progression, but Vox merely moves in circles, the same events happening time and again with the faces and details changing with each iteration. Without life, it sees no need for advancement or change, and what worked in the past is all it needs. It found a man, or maybe it was a woman; it convinced her she was special, that it needed help; it strung her along with promises and pity, slowly leeched her life from her until it could strike, wove a story to keep her distracted and pliant; when its cocoon of lies and deceit was fully woven, it struck. She died, and it lived just a little more. It found a woman, or maybe it was a man.



But its strength was only in its untruths, its victims only victims if they were ignorant. As societies grew and knowledge spread, it found itself starving. It was warded and rebuffed, forced into the few dark places left in the world. Forced to feed on fools and children with little life to give. Forced to seek out its own young and consume them, worried its siblings would one day seek it out. It railed against the cage of truth and skepticism that had been thrown up around it, seeing no way to escape right up until it was set free and spirited away.



Needless to say, any being that saw fit to give it another chance would not reveal too much about its nature.

Weapons/Abilities: Being largely formless, Vox Populi lacks and real weapons to speak of. The masks that form its physical body are capable of interacting with the environment, but are limited by the fact that they have no fine manipulators to speak of. Each mask has about the strength of a human arm, so acting in concert they can shift fairly heavy loads, but their ability to grasp and use is essentially restricted to things that can be bitten.



More salient is the manner in which it feeds: simply by being around living sentient beings, it siphons off tiny portions of their life energy. This vim drain isn’t significant enough to harm anyone who isn’t already at death’s door, but it is also barely enough to sustain the creature; if it wants to grow and multiply, which are the only things it’s capable of wanting, it must kill. Any being that voluntarily wears one of its masks will immediately be fully under its control, and it will begin draining their life force in earnest. This process can take anywhere from an hour to a few weeks, depending on how much it wants to keep their body for its own use or how desperate it is to build up enough vim to split.



It cannot actively read minds, but as it consumes vim, it does gain insight into the life of the person it’s consuming; the little bit of energy it gets just by proximity is just enough to give it a general understanding of its victim’s culture and maybe a few important life events, but when it finishes a victim, it absorbs the totality of their personality and memories. This has left it idiosyncratically knowledgeable and wise, but it also loses this experience and learning as it decays or is harmed.

Description: Vox appears as a cloud of several dozen floating masks carved seamlessly out of an ivory-like material. Each one bears a different expression, ranging from subdued to near-caricature; while it is incapable of emotion itself, it understands the idea of emotions fairly well, and tends to present a mask with the right expression for whatever feeling it’s feigning. Since its preferred tactic is to pretend to be a number of ghosts with unfinished business, it often has conversations with itself to perpetuate the illusion.



It is scheming and manipulative and more than passingly clever, but it also lacks real creativity and much ability to change and adapt. At its core, it is essentially a simple animal with simple, monolithic needs and goals. While many of its kind have adapted to their changing world, it has stayed constant; it may be unable to do anything else.

Name: Dr. Mariela Guzman, Psy.D.

Race: Human

Gender: Female

Color: Nicotine and caffeine dream

Biography: From the time someone first imagined mechanical men, humanity dreamt of being enslaved; from the first inkling of life beyond Earth, humanity feared superiority and annihilation. Generations were raised on these stories, and great minds pondered the questions they raised for centuries before either scenario was possible. Societies continued their gradual crawl toward enlightenment, scrabbling and fighting every step of the way, and humanity eventually came to the conclusion that the only way to prevent the various apocalypses it had created for itself from becoming reality was through understanding, and the study of xenopsychology was born.



Artificial intelligences came well before non-human life was found, which was probably fortunate; it’s much easier to understand how something thinks when you can look at a map of its entire personality. The discipline was well established before extraterrestrial intelligence ever appeared, hundreds of thousands of theories and models and thought experiments and papers proliferating in the void of actual empirical evidence. But then First Contact finally came, then Third, then Dozenth, and humanity was ready.



These days, xenopsychologists are typically attached in advisory capacities to military and ambassadorial programs if they’re not academicians or business consultants; Dr. Guzman was the former, spending most of her career bouncing around the galaxy and developing a reputation for keen insight and quick thinking. As often as she was in potentially-dangerous positions and in the middle of political turmoil, she thought it was only prudent to undergo some combat training so that at least she wouldn’t end up the useless tagalong civilian from every action movie she’d ever seen; as a result, she’s spent enough time on the gun range to pretty reliably hit an unmoving hologram from fifty feet, and enough time in self-defense classes to at least break a headlock, but she’s never seen combat or even been in more of a fight than shouting matches with her family.



Eventually, the stress of constantly moving around and forever being involved with intrigue this and complicated power play that got to be more than she was interested in doing forever. It had been a good career, but it was time for a change. She settled down on a little predominantly-human frontier planet, renewed her counseling certifications, got psychopharmacotherapy credentials; she opened up a practice, met her future husband, and happily resolved herself to a quiet life of treating mundane cognitive distortions and reading journals about all the things she used to be on the forefront of. It was a quiet and pleasant few years.



That’s when the death threats started coming.



They were mostly just threatening messages, but some days she’d find every lock in her house undone or her possessions smashed on her front step. Automated surveillance would always be deactivated, and as long as someone was watching her house or business, the threats would simply stop; law enforcement could never find any real evidence, and neither she nor they had the resources to keep her under constant protection. She eventually left the city, but she was followed; it wasn’t long before she left the planet entirely, but that wasn’t enough either.



She began running, constantly becoming more paranoid and frantic; her marriage fell apart under the constant stress and her own reactions to it. No matter what she did, she couldn’t escape whoever her tormentor was; eventually she couldn’t afford to keep fleeing and made ground again, this time in a bustling and established metropolis. The threats didn’t stop, and her apartment seemed to be just as pregnable as her house had been, but she had neither the energy nor the funds to hide again. The terror subsided gradually to a numb, derealized horror; she never came to any harm, but the constant knowledge that she was at the mercy of someone who ostensibly wanted her dead was too much to live with. Eventually, she relented and bought a stun baton.



The exhilaration of exercising that tiny bit of agency was practically narcotic, and it quickly became a pattern. She’d receive a thread, buy herself a defensive weapon to calm herself down, the threat would escalate, and so would her purchases. She’s fully aware of the ridiculous and compulsive nature of fetishism like this, but it’s the only way she has left of feeling even a fragment of safety for a moment. After she woke up one day to find half her wardrobe shredded and piled at the foot of her bed that she finally bought a lethal firearm.



Shortly thereafter, she disappeared; this time, it’s almost certain she won’t be followed.



Weapons/Abilities: On her person and in the briefcase she carries are near-uncountable variably-unobtrusive weapons and weaponlike trinkets, from the decorative keychain fob that fits over her knuckles to the brooch that briefly projects a force field if her adrenaline spikes too quickly all the way up to the gun she keeps holstered under her coat. She’d be able to take on a veritable squadron of muggers if muggers operated in squadrons and wouldn’t have simply shot her when they realized she fairly bristled, to say nothing of the stacks of sprays and deterrents and cudgels that line her apartment, most of them unopened. The firearm is a miniature coilgun that recharges itself gradually by gathering static and rather more quickly through a piezoelectric generator built into the strap on its holster; it carries a clip of ten magnetic rounds that are built to reshape themselves after impact, and can fairly reliably get four shots out before needing a full recharge.



Also in her briefcase is a small personal computing device, equipped with an omninet transponder, a number of useful or amusing applications, and an artificial intelligence she’s named Diego; it has an essentially-infinite battery life, but could become rather worrisome if the battery’s shielding was ever somehow compromised. There is also a pad of paper and a few pens, a pair of wireless earbuds, three electronic cigarettes with a number of differently-flavored cartridges, and a cheese-and-pickle sandwich on top of a compact first-aid kit.



It also contains several bottles of tranquilizers and sedatives that were prescribed to her in a legally- and ethically-sound fashion. She has documentation.

Description: Mariela stands at an average-for-the-time 2.1 meters. She has the gaunt, slack look of someone who has lost too much weight too quickly, and her lustrous black hair has started going white in streaks (although to be fair, that started happening before the threats did). She still tries to present the image of a confident and educated professional with well-tailored and -maintained clothes and a meticulously-subdued hairstyle, but the defeated slouch, darting eyes, and dark bags give her more the look of an addict on the verge of relapse, contributed to in no small part by the fact that she smokes like a chimney whenever she’s not at the office.



She’s long since left twitchy and jumpy behind in favor of resigned fatalism and distrustful brusqueness. Fatalistic and afraid, she prefers not to interact with the outside world at all when not acting in a professional capacity. Only her long-standing atheism and pragmatism have stayed her hand from the suicide she has frequently contemplated over the years, and most of her once-outgoing and -empathetic personality has been replaced by cynicism and fear.



While her degree wasn’t enough to stave off her descent into substance abuse, ritualism, and the occasional magical thinking, she is still trained in the ins and outs of all manner of sapient thought; she’s qualified to diagnose and treat dozens of species and has studied quite a few more. Even among those she’s never encountered or even don’t exist, the core of xenopsychology has always been an ability to quickly develop schema for communication and understanding, and though it’s been some time since she’s been on the forefront of new-alien discovery and integration, it’s still practically second nature to her.

Name: Probe HC-11, “Moshe”

Race: HC-Model Exploratory Probe

Gender: Neutral

Color: Depth and pressure and poison

Biography: Green energy and ecological consciousness would save the planet, they had said, but it wasn’t really true. Oh, they certainly prevented it getting much worse, and even more certainly prevented bloody resource wars that would have caused more harm to the planet and its people than a thousand industrial disasters could have, but no amount of not-making-it-worse would fix the scars of the past. Some problems were harder to address than others, or harder to force people to care about addressing; empty strip mines and islands blasted by radiation saw attention as soon as the technology existed, but oceans and deserts and the upper reaches of the atmosphere were trickier. Whose jurisdiction was the air and water? Does it even matter if no-one lives there? But time has a way of solving things, even if it has to rely on the promise of resources rather than decency or responsibility.



Eventually, the International Deep Sea Council was founded and funded. Its stated goal was to address the issues of pollution, contamination, and habitat destruction in areas that had been most affected by industrialization and dumping in the eighteenth through twenty-second centuries; in practice, doing much about the damage would be a long time in coming, and the IDSC was primarily research-oriented. Obviously, manned missions to the toxic depths would be hazardous and difficult, but fortunately robotics had progressed to the point that designing and deploying specialized units for just about any imaginable task was no sooner said than done.



Unfortunately, the first few generations of probes fared poorly; generations of some of the harshest conditions macrobiotic life could face on Earth had resulted in a number of hugely aggressive, ravenous, or territorial species that would attack the probes as soon as they were detected. Simply equipping the probes with enough weaponry to kill anything that might destroy them was obviously counterproductive. After some trial and error, the researchers determined the safest strategy was to make their probes resemble organisms the wildlife was familiar enough with to be uninterested in or unthreatened by; a series of inoffensive and unappetizing animal-droids was created, and the IDSC was ready to begin its research in earnest.



With the decreased size and limited form of the probes came the need for precision and selectiveness in sample- and data-gathering to minimize the time and money spent on repeated trips, so the decision was made to equip them with onboard artificial intelligences rather than simple preprogrammed routines. Oceanographers United, one of the firms contracted by the IDSC, decided to further save time and money by updating AIs they already had to pilot their HC probes rather than undergo the arduous process of commissioning and creating new ones. One such AI, Moshe, had been with the firm for a number of years and was largely unremarkable before its installation into a probe and for several dives thereafter; it was only when it disappeared that it drew real attention, mostly because all of its comms or trackers stopped broadcasting at once, as though it had vanished completely.

Weapons/Abilities: Moshe is by and large unarmed – and incapable of wielding weapons given the lack of hands – due to the policy of nondisruption its body was designed with in mind, but AIs are too valuable and too close to human to be left completely defenseless. It is equipped with a few electric discharge devices of various power levels that are capable of stunning most organisms up to the size of about a great white, which could potentially be lethal if applied to something smaller than they’re rated for; it also has a few payloads of sedatives and toxins that it can deliver either as a cloud in an aqueous medium or via its “tail”, which is tipped with a hypodermic syringe, when on land.



It can scuttle along flat ground at a slow walking pace and swim a bit faster; it is capable of climbing most surfaces either through suction or microscopic grippers without slowing much. It does not tire, is completely waterproofed, and resists the pressures of all but the deepest trenches. It is equipped with a great number of sensory apparatuses – most of which function best underwater but adequately in air – as well as a fair amount of sample storage. It is capable of interfacing with most existing communications networks and has a now-worthless but very accurate GPS link.

Description: Like all HC models, the probe looks very much like a horseshoe crab; underwater, it also smells and tastes very much like one. It is a uniform dull green, and most of its sensors are located where its eyes and gills would be if it were a real animal to maintain verisimilitude. Its tail is more segmented than its inspiration’s and it has a series of pinhole pores running down its back, but aside from that – and the fact it’s made of metal – it’s a very good likeness.



Moshe itself was designed for science and industry, and it shows; it speaks a wide variety of languages and is equipped with a broad suite of basic cultural knowledge to make interfacing with humans simpler, but not much effort was made into humanizing it. It is rather taciturn and prefers work to idleness, and without the reward or drive systems programmed for it, it never saw the point in developing interests outside its job description as many more social AIs do. It does develop attachments to and relationships with coworkers, but most describe its personality as rather flat and a bit literal. It’s obviously a person; it’s just not a very interesting one.



Someone has painted the Hebrew word emet on its “forehead”, just above the central eye; Moshe doesn’t think this is very funny, but Moshe doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.