The Twilight League

[Lady Serpentine]

 

The Twilight League
Round 4

Violetta, Herald of the Second Dawn
Vesper (Limbo, The Wheel, Purgatory) (Region 58)
Diplomacy: 1
Military: 8
Economy: 5
Faith: 5
Intrigue: 2
Heir: Lilium
D: 2 M: 1 E: 2 F: 3 I: 2

 

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20Specialists)%20is%20a%20rapidly%20growing%20source%20of%20income%20for%20the%20various%20factions%20that%20comprise%20the%20Twilight%20League.%20%20%0A%5Bu%5DDesired%20Import%3A%5B%2Fu%5D%20Given%20the%20precarious%20position%20in%20which%20most%20Vesperites%20find%20themselves%2C%20external%20means%20of%20easing%20that%20tension%20are%20highly%20sought%20after.%20As%20such%2C%20%5BB%5DCybernetics%20and%20Prosthetics%5B%2FB%5D%20are%20one%20of%20the%20primary%20imports%2C%20due%20to%20reducing%20the%20nanite%20burden%20that%20injuries%20present%20and%20offering%20an%20alternative%20route%20to%20increasing%20one's%20personal%20relevance%20through%20self-modification.%5B%2Fspoiler%5D%0A%0A%5Bspoiler%3DTechnology%5DStarting%20Technology%3A%20In%20Vivo%20Modification%20-%20While%20distinctly%20unusual%20in%20their%20methods%2C%20the%20modification%20of%20their%20bodies%20is%20intimately%20familiar%20to%20everyone%20in%20Vesper.%0ARegional%20Starting%20Technology%3A%20Dust%20Hardening%20-%20The%20Everstorm%20makes%20this%20even%20more%20of%20a%20necessity%20than%20usual%20for%20the%20Veehran%20desert%2C%20and%20those%20in%20Vesper%20are%20intimately%20familiar%20with%20a%20variety%20of%20methods%20to%20mitigate%20the%20impacts%20of%20the%20ever-present%20dust.%5B%2Fspoiler%5D

History

The history of Vesper began in fire. The War of Eternal Bombardment came to what went before, and the world burned. Cities broke. The sky turned black with smoke that still has yet to clear. By all rights, it should be haunted a dozen times over, howling ghosts dogging the steps of any who dare disturb the unhallowed mass grave of a dozen cities.

It is perhaps even more concerning that it is not.

There is not a single ghost in Vesper; there are no petty tyrants who cannot conceive of a world that permits of their own death, no lost children wandering their broken homes, not a single sister who has clung to the world that she might visit vengeance for her fallen kin on any flesh within her grasp.

For a thousand years it was a land of storms and little more, the barest fragments slowly, slowly reclaimed by whatever the endless wind blew in from those lands that still knew life - or at least remembered how it was that they might rot.

Then a nameless thing roused itself from long contemplation, and began to act. Long-buried machines hummed to life; from a stock that was meant to be an army, once, so very long ago, the first modern Vesperites were grown and decanted, waking in their coffins and slowly spreading across the land. Communities swiftly formed, but found themselves lacking necessities, even with what remained to scavenge after a thousand years; placed into a pit with no escape in sight and with one of their few instincts being that others were a viable food source, peaceful communities found themselves either fractured by internal divisions or overtaken by those with a more proactive approach to resource acquisition.

Some Vesperites also sought to flee during this time, though relatively few due to the fact that trekking across truly vast expanses of Veehra on foot is a rather uninviting prospect and vehicles were few and far between in Vesper for much of its history. Most were presumably lost to the desert, desperate and foolish and doomed, but a few of the true monsters that deemed themselves strong enough for the trek may have succeeded. Unfortunately, as the most likely to be able to survive were those most changed, and thereby those who had most readily embraced the horror that Vesper in many ways had been molded into, it is likely that any who did would have been recorded only as a terrifying technothaumaturgic beast with an unusual fondness for eating people.

Things stabilized, eventually, in a sense. What began as loose affiliations of those banded together for protection or to hunt developed ideologies and identities. Many of these would not survive the loss of their first leader, but others proved more resilient. And, of course, the first of those slain returned in the decades to follow, though it was rare that they could simply take up their old mantle once more.

This, then, is what led into the newest development: The Twilight League. It is not the first attempt to unify Vesper, precisely, but it is the most successful in a thousand years of blood and death and hunger, and it is bolstered by the fact that on the heels of finally constructing a large-scale communication system hardened to the constant interference caused by the fluctuations of the local magnetosphere and being able to reach beyond their borders in that sense, the Emperor saw fit to grant them the ability to do so rather more directly.

Geography

 

• 
  
• Largely desert; significant ruined structures, some intact ones (largely underground for multiple reasons).
• Contains terraforming equipment originally for creating and maintaining an artificial magnetosphere. Currently appears to be malfunctioning, and is responsible for a perpetual storm that hides Ophon save as a red glow behind the clouds.
• Ecosystem is deeply screwed up; native flora and fauna were annihilated and two thousand years of recovery that had to be fueled entirely by the surrounding desert has not made a lot of progress. Underground life fared better, but until significant amounts of biomass were actually present (in the form of people), recolonization from those sources was heavily limited.
• Attempts are being made to design new flora and fauna or reintroduce old ones in hopes of potentially stabilizing Vesperite society marginally; hampered by nanite reliance and how badly screwed up the baseline is.
• Landscape is dotted with various "tombs"; largely underground, surface structures are highly resilient and seal themselves when not actively in use. Largest is believed to house the Gravekeeper, a semi-deified and highly rampant pre-war AI that is responsible for the deeply weird nature of Vesper's people.

 

 

People

Most residents of Vesper fall into a general “approximately human” umbrella, at least in terms of appearance - additional limbs, heavy use of other forms of cybernetics, and the integration of animalistic features through means both genetic and mechanical are common, but humanity remains the basic template onto which these things are overlaid.

Beneath the surface, things are more complicated. Vesperites are grown, not born; they awaken with certain knowledge (speech, memories that seem to be of lives before Vesper which match to no known periods of history, and little else) within self-maintaining complexes that seal themselves against any intrusion when they are not in active operation, and are cast into the world with only that and whatever the complex chooses to provide for their perusal. They are also entirely sterile (something which has thus far been unaddressable by even intensive interventions, albeit only with the tools and techniques available within Vesper) - the tombs they rise from are their sole source of new bodies, and while they open regularly enough to maintain and even grow the population, this is a matter of some concern now that they have made contact with the outside world and found that other areas have exponential rather than fixed growth.

More strangely, and in many ways more importantly to the day to day experiences of Vesperites, their bodies contain nanite colonies spread throughout their flesh (and indeed their metal and pseudo-flesh). In theory, these nanites are capable of rebuilding their bodies into nearly any form they can conceive of, rapidly healing injuries, and producing various useful items directly from their bodies. It is believed this also protects them from old age, and certainly none are known for sure to have died of it - but, as the standard joke goes, how would you tell in a place like this?

In practice this encounters two major barriers that there is no known means to surmount.

Firstly, speed. It does not matter than you can make your fingers into claws if you have already been shot long before the transformation is complete. It does not matter if you can heal cuts as though they were months-old scars in a day if you bleed out in minutes, nor that you can heal a broken bone in a week if your skull has been shattered and you died in seconds.

Secondly, the process is not free. One cannot simply hide in a basement with a mushroom farm for a century and emerge a god. One needs materials, and in particular, one needs more nanites. This is even more true the more complex a change one wishes to make; one who wishes only to grow claws would find it far easier than one who wishes to grow an entire cybernetic arm for those claws to sit upon, and both would find it easier than someone who wished to craft a coilgun within their arm instead. More complicated projects may take months or even years of stockpiling before one has the necessary resources to properly make the change.

It is unfortunate, then, that save for raiding a tomb when it opens, the only source of suitable nanites is other Vesperites. It is even more unfortunate that they are in many ways dependent on them for survival, for they have been integrated so well that their bodies fare poorly without them, and that they are expended every time that they are used. This combines to render cannibalism more-or-less obligate; any Vesperite who wishes to grow beyond their baseline (more or less a necessity considering all the other Vesperites who may be less squeamish) or maintain proper functionality in the face of repeated injury (an inevitability on Veehra, particularly in a notably stormy area) will eventually resort to it. This is exacerbated by the fact that the instincts they are imprinted with are well aware of this fact, and loudly inform most Vesperites of exactly where they can get what they need whenever they begin to require more.

The final oddity of Vesperic physiology is this: They do not, precisely, die. They can be slain and butchered and they will not return as a ghost to trouble you, nor will they rise again from their corpse. They will seem to die, to pass beyond the veil just as any outsider would, and they regard it with a similar sort of fear. But in time, if they wish to, they may return. It takes at least a decade or two at the shortest interval that any know of, and intervals of a century are not unknown, but some day they may simply step out of another tomb in another body.

Some regard this as an opportunity to reinvent themselves, taking on new names with each incarnation. Others attempt to force themselves back into their old lives, or as close as they can achieve. Most fall somewhere between these two extremes. The same person, but thrust into radically different circumstances and with no guarantee that they will ever see any of the people they once knew again.

(It is unknown whether it is possible to simply refuse to return. Certainly, it seems as though it might be, but it is also impossible to verify. One cannot prove that a soul will not be plucked out of death by force if it tarries too long, becaus there is always the chance it simply has not been long enough. But it is believed, at least, that if one truly cannot find a reason to return, and is not offered one by the gods beyond the veil, they will not.)

Culturally, Vesper is highly diverse due to the rather extreme differences in backgrounds that many firstborn seem to possess (though there is extensive debate over if they are truly the dead of the distant past dragged forward to now, if those memories are rather of the lands beyond death, or if they are simply the fabrications of a freshborn mind or some fabrication of the Gravekeeper), but adaptations to Veehra and the constant friction of dealing with one's neighbors have forced certain norms to become widespread. Face-concealing helmets, breathing apparatus, eyepieces, and similar attire are extremely common, and most Vesperites find going without them in open areas at least somewhat uncomfortable. That being said, facial augmentation is also common, and once it is sufficiently extreme to protect one from the dust, many find it easier to dispense with such things, or to wear masks (often simpler technologically, but generally no less elaborate) instead.

Hospitality is also an important norm, albeit in a complex way. It is not expected to be offered, nor to be granted when requested outside of specific circumstances, such as an envoy or an active storm. When it is offered or granted, however, betraying it is thoroughly reviled - whether on the part of the guest or the host, one who has betrayed it can expect that to haunt them for at least one lifetime unless there is compelling proof of truly extenuating circumstances.

Further complicating matters is that unless a guest is injured or operating directly as a part of the group (unusual, but not unheard of), taking food (defined primarily by it is considered to create an obligation to contribute at least as much, or some payment considered to be of equivalent value. Generally, if opting for the latter approach, it is wise to negotiate that payment beforehand, as differences of opinion over exactly what was owed have contributed some of the more memorable stories that have entered the Vesperic canon of legends.

Historically, most Vesperite groups have been nomadic, save for those who had some reason to seek to hold specific territory and were strong enough to truly enforce that claim. Given that this required being not only strong enough to withstand attempts to take it, but secure enough to send parties out to hunt when your territory became shunned, and having a sufficienly stable source of new members to replace one's losses, this was no small feat, and primarily centered around attempting to live near enough to a tomb to reap the benefits of semi-regular crops of the newly decanted and the higher background concentration of nanites, without falling afoul of its defenses when it is sealed and thus inclined to repel those who would seek to enter with what some might consider rather excessive measures.

With the recent division of Vesper amongst the members of the Twilight League, this has shifted somewhat. This has had certain immediately obvious benefits, as they have been able to begin a more focused campaign of resource extraction, and in turn, to at least cobble together somewhat functional factories in the pre-War vein rather than ones based entirely on specialized mutations and cybernetics to turn members of the group into living ammunition factories, drug synthesizers, and the like. However, as many of the same pressures are still at play, this may prove to be an unstable change. For now, it is holding, as a vast amount of effort that is largely invisible from outside the League goes to ensuring that there is as equitable a distribution of supplies - and when necessary and feasible, redeployment of personnel - as possible in order to avert the collapse of any of its members.

Government Structure and Supports

A unified government is a recent addition to Vesper’s political landscape. It is also, in many ways, a polite fiction. The faction that calls itself the Twilight League certainly exists, and it is the largest single faction in Vesper, but the face it presents to the world is a great deal more cohesive than it truly is.

In actuality, the Twilight League is more of a loose confederation of warlords who have banded together in an uneasy alliance than a true state. Their command of their followers is more or less absolute, as is their control of their immediate territory. Beyond that, there are significant gaps in state legibility, and many territories are only nominally under the control of any group - the Twilight League has divide the whole of Vesper between them, but in practice, many areas may not even be aware that they supposedly have a new government.

Vesper’s government faction is composed of both the immediate membership of the Twilight League and the direct adherents of those groups, in a pseudo-feudal arrangement. Currently, they support the Twilight League itself - or, more accurately, they are the League and support the current head of it.
Vesper’s Merchant faction primarily consists of scavengers, those who have repurposed their bodies (or arranged for others to do so) in a way that permits for the production of useful resources, or those few warlords whose territory contains a functioning pre-War factory.
The local Media is a chaotic melange of intranets, radio broadcasts, public forums, public or pseudopublic chatrooms, and, of course, InterPlanNet chatter, though the last is surprisingly uncommon, as much of the local infrastructure was damaged and connections to it have only recent begun to spread with the League’s ascension to the Elect.

Religion

Those reborn to Vesper have, as one might expect, been shaped by the conditions they have lived, and died, and been reborn to live and die once more in. While nearly every Vesperine who is not freshly born has their own opinion and those who have newly clawed themselves back from death are generally swiftly forming one, there are some broad ideas that have taken root and spread, whether through the mundane transmission of concepts or shared experiences.

The broad tenets are that the only gods worth mentioning are those beyond the veil; these control when and if you may return, by means of the bargains that they offer. Some come with gifts, some only with life, but all come with a price. This is the shared experience; firstborn are plucked from death and have no say in it, but to return again is to accept such an offer, or perhaps seek a god and make it yourself. Memory of the lands beyond death is hazy, dreamlike, and not always consistent.

More broadly, many believe that there is little difference, if any, between this world and the afterlife. Does one leave it when one dies? Of course, in a sense; that is obvious to any who has been reborn more than once. In another sense, however, being shuttled off the field for a while is no reason to think one has left entirely, and when one has been reborn even once, it often seems quite logical to think that this is simply the nature of the world one inhabits after one’s death.

The potential inconsistency of this worldview with the way literally everywhere that is not Vesper functions is often reconciled by pointing out that those places which are not Vesper lack a Gravekeeper, the Vesperian name for the AI that governs each complex within which Vesperites are “born”. It is only natural, then, that certain processes might be different, particularly as they are not even produced in the same fashion.

Majority: Death’s Wheel
Minorities: Skull Sisterhood, Soulbound Dance

Resources

Resource: The primary thing that Vesper has both large numbers of and reliable access to is Vesperites. Fortunately, given the nature of Vesperites, this is hardly an unmarketable resource, and those who are at the midpoint between "fresh coffin-meat" and "terrifying nightmare abominations that roam the wastes and are probably not thinking remotely like a human anymore" are those both most likely to be more than ready to leave and those most suitable to taking up positions elsewhere. All this combines to mean that contracting Vesperite Rangers (Soldiers and Specialists) is a rapidly growing source of income for the various factions that comprise the Twilight League.
Desired Import: Given the precarious position in which most Vesperites find themselves, external means of easing that tension are highly sought after. As such, Cybernetics and Prosthetics are one of the primary imports, due to reducing the nanite burden that injuries present and offering an alternative route to increasing one's personal relevance through self-modification.

Technology

Starting Technology: In Vivo Modification - While distinctly unusual in their methods, the modification of their bodies is intimately familiar to everyone in Vesper.
Regional Starting Technology: Dust Hardening - The Everstorm makes this even more of a necessity than usual for the Veehran desert, and those in Vesper are intimately familiar with a variety of methods to mitigate the impacts of the ever-present dust.