Humble Beginnings

INothing in there

The morning after the wedding, if that is what it was, Road Mother walks you to the lip of the crater, points at the dead ship two hundred metres below with an engine block, and then stops.

I told you. There is nothing in there.

Road Mother

Then she decides she will stay back too, and saunters off to the convoy.

It is a Vanguard intelligence gunship, or it was. Half the frame has been torn open like a tin, exposing the seats. The pilot's chair is destroyed. Parts of it are still burning. Her crew stripped it the way that plane got stripped in Lord of War, down to bare ribs, in minutes, and they took the coil gun off the roof and left.

They left the reactor, because they did not know how to take it apart.

Sound went over it properly. One intact thruster bank on the right side. A primary reactor and a secondary, the small one that gives a short violent boost. High grade secure fibre, so delicate it should not have survived and did. Terminals. Armour cladding.

And six Aeon service rifles, Vanguard spec, with thirty two advanced batteries.

Nobody debated it for even a second.

We have got to make sure we give them bullets, though. If we give them energy weapons, we are less likely to recover bones.

Mac

You just look that direction, and you get a gun. Those are the two rules.

Delaeo

You are going to arm these fuckers. Oh my god.

Amon, watching it happen

I think we have already decided we are not doing this half-assed.

Kevo

IIThe hole

The landscape around the wreck is dotted with holes. Not drilled, not natural either, somewhere in the awful middle. Meerkat burrows, if meerkats were the size of a doof wagon.

There is blood around one of them. Not the ship's blood. Something was dragged down.

Slyder discovered at this point that he does not own a torch, has never owned a torch, and has one hundred and eighty five credits. He bought a tactical flashlight for five and went down anyway, wings out, hovering rather than climbing, keeping the beam angled to the side and covering and uncovering it as he descended.

He was not the one they heard.

It is not you that they hear, or feel. It is everyone else.

Amon

Several hundred metres down, the ground began to shake.

IIIOne round

It came up the tunnel at him and the tunnel was one third its width. A centipede the size of a building, several sets of blazing red eyes opening at once, and one long moment where it looked at Slyder and Slyder looked at it.

Then it took a bite that clipped him for twenty two, and sprayed him with something that looked like acid, did not burn like acid, and stuck like it was electrified. Fifty five damage in the opening round and he had not had a turn yet.

He came out of the top of that tunnel so fast it looked like flight. The jaws closed on the space where he had been, and a long distended tongue came out after him.

Nina had been waiting for a target.

Let us blow his tongue off, shall we?

Mac

Reality Ripper into void and deadly. Mobile aim. Rolled a thirty, needed thirty one, nanite surged it to thirty two and critted the tongue clean off at sixty eight void damage plus persistent acid. The tongue was removed from the creature's sheet in front of everyone.

Then she put a second round straight into the stump.

That small fuzzy creature belongs to me.

Nina

Raven opened a portal and pulled through a phantasmal copy of the worm, twice the size, and let it bite the original. It saved and still took enough to leave it flailing in the air, pulsing like a beacon, unable to make a sound because it no longer had the equipment.

Slyder led by example and opened it up with an acid talon. Everybody got a bonus.

And Sound raised one hand, a thunderhead grew out of clear sky, and a fourth level bolt came down and blew the head apart. Slyder was the closest and got a face full of it. Nina leaned about six inches to the left and let it go past her.

The whole thing took one round.

We killed that fuck in one round.

Mac

Really glad we got those battery packs.

Mac, thirty seconds later, for reasons that became clear immediately

IVAn anatomy lesson

The second one came up through the back of the ship. Raven and Sound took fifteen each just from the metal.

Nina risky reloaded the Ripper, rolled an eighteen, critted, and went looking for the tongue again. This one had not put its tongue out yet. So the table went looking for an alternative.

What followed is now permanent campaign canon.

As it erupts from the ground, three or four segments down its body, there is this weird crease in its carapace that looks kind of like a butthole, and there are some giant glowing throbbing balls hanging right next to them.

Mac

That is accurate. Centipedes have those. I looked it up.

Mac

I have gotten empirical evidence that I could indeed nut check this monster.

Kevo

Amon looked it up live. Delaeo, who bartends, provided the clarification nobody wanted, which is that they are not testicles, they are spermatophores, and it is therefore worse.

A plus four was awarded. Shots rang off its nuts. It screamed.

Then it wrapped its tongue around Raven and lifted her off the ground. Nina blew that tongue off too, fifty five damage, and Raven came down free.

Thank you, sis.

Raven

Sound reached into it and psychic shocked it. He rolled a one on the damage. It critically failed the save anyway, went stupefied, and started taking doubled persistent mental damage.

We should call that spell Geordie Shore, because it gives you persistent mental damage.

Delaeo

It has been renamed.

The worm pushed back psychically, which implies something about how much of it was thinking. Sound took twenty one from that, eighteen more from his own spell, and seventeen from the jaws, and finished the exchange on one hit point with no hero points left.

Nina put the last round through its open mouth and out the back of its carapace.

Then it exploded on him.

You are covered in this thick oily projectile mucus.

Amon

Do you remember that bit of snot little kids always have? The one that never dries? You are covered in that.

Amon, several minutes later, still going

VThrust up

The third one did not surface. It grabbed the Long Odds from underneath and started pulling.

Road Mother came down the ridge with an engine block in each hand, got six arms under the hull, and made an opposed strength check against a creature that is stronger than her. She lost the roll and held anyway. Then thirty skittermanders piled on to help, and the combined effect of all that helping was that the hole got bigger.

Nina ran. Slyder led by example and everyone got faster. She went in through the top hatch, landed in a pilot's chair that happened to be swivelled out, and found the passkey missing.

We are going to hack this shit. It does not matter.

Nina

Who has been messing with this? Why has it got more firewalls? Everyone has been updating shit on this ship.

Amon

We increased the security on it.

Delaeo, helpfully

She rolled a twenty two against a twenty five. Then she stopped rolling, used Assurance, took a flat twenty five, and beat it exactly.

One word command. One thing the ship would do, verbatim.

THRUST UP

Cold start, so it caught like a lawnmower, smoke pouring off the back, and then just enough thrust to scorch the face off whatever was holding on underneath. It let go screaming.

She kept it low enough for Raven to jump the scrap onto the ramp.

Meanwhile the convoy arrived, and Road Mother's people and Hollowbone's people came over the rim together and started smearing soil on themselves and pressing handprints onto their own chests, hands raised at the rising ship.

Then LoudLoud got off the back of a doof wagon.

He plays twin headed guitars and drags a ball and chain and does not stop playing even when he is unplugged, which Amon describes as a nerve reflex akin to breathing. He got close enough to hook back in and the bass went up, and the worms could not stand it. Their whole world is vibration. The doof was too much for them.

They left.

I thought LoudLoud died in a freak drowning accident, so I am glad he is alive.

Mac

That was his apprentice.

Delaeo

VIYou get a carbine

Back in the crater with the ground safe, a travelling merchant with six raised hands and a pocketful of trinkets came over, and the reverence started up again, louder.

One of the drivers asked, hopefully, whether you had found any guns, because he has no bullets left and mostly just holds his.

Raven started pulling rifles out of cloud storage into the open air.

As you start laying the guns out, the most fervent of your believers, knights of your cause, fold their hands and raise them in respect as they are each anointed with a weapon.

Amon

It was foretold that they would come from the sky and bring us to new worlds. These are our emperors and empresses. Adore them. They are our gods.

The eldest of them, handing out rifles

A level one skittermander with a spear became something closer to a level four skittermander with Vanguard optics and a religion. They practised. They wasted a few shots. They were corrected in the street, promptly and harshly, by their own, and within six or seven hours they had tighter groupings, better posture and faster reloads.

We have our Praetorian guard.

Mac

That is a lot of zealotry.

Kevo

We are not introducing education here.

Delaeo

Are we the bad guys?

Mac

Maybe.

Raven

Maybe.

Amon

VIIHumble Beginnings

Second Best came over with his tools. He is the town's leading surgeon now. The best surgeon had a health condition, went to see a doctor about it, and that doctor was almost certainly Second Best, and he did not come back.

That is how you come first best.

Delaeo

He stitched up Sound and the mayor and looked so disappointed at the lack of ongoing carnage that Nina pointed at a skittermander who had been doing nothing all morning and prescribed him an ear nail.

The recipient objected on the grounds that his hearing is fine and that he is Second Best's cousin. He got the nail anyway.

Then he sat down in a chair, leaned back, and said this.

I feel like I have wasted my life.

Him, moments after the nail

You gave him intelligence.

It is like the crayon in Homer's head. We accidentally dislodged something. And now he is thinking clearer than he ever was.

Kevo

He named himself. They are named like racehorses out here.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

His first act as a thinking being was to audit the treasury, compare it against the stated figure of eighteen hundred bones, and find it wanting.

Humble Beginnings is my name, and a new purpose I have. I shall be your collector of bones. Every bone should be accounted for, and based on my assessment of the bones in storage, eighteen hundred were not received. So I will personally lead the mission to ensure every bone is salvaged, or to create more, if I have to, to top it up.

Humble Beginnings

Did we just create the IRS?

Mac

I do not think we created the IRS. I think we created the Pinkertons.

Kevo

He shook down one hundred and ten skittermanders, turning them upside down to see what fell out, a process complicated by the fact that half of them are not wearing trousers. He recovered eight bones. Most were stuck in feet or matted into fur. Some of them came out of the skittermanders, which he considers irrelevant.

Standing income after every encounter is now up thirty percent, because he can hold a thought for longer than anyone else here, and where there is focus there is structure, and where there is structure there are procedures that can be taught.

He needs an ear nail and a bowler hat.

Mac

VIIIEnough love for everybody

Four hours of salvage. The chitin came off in sheets, light for its strength, and Sound worked out how to hang it on the vehicles as fold down plates that shield the crew and can be dropped to let the doof out louder. Every rig came home with two more AC and two more hardness than it left with.

Drums of the mucus, which turns out to be an excellent degreaser. Hollowed spines, which turn out to be instruments. The bone count went from eighteen hundred to over two thousand eight hundred.

Nina wanted maximum labour efficiency and proposed achieving it through a specific blend of fear and love that cannot be printed here. Slyder rolled thirty four on intimidation with Guidance layered on top and delivered the policy personally.

You have two choices. You can collect the bones and receive our love, or we can collect your bones and pay for my love. The choice is yours.

Slyder, then kissing Road Mother in front of the entire workforce

Productivity went up.

A fight broke out at the edge of the work party. Two of them squaring off, reaching for weapons.

I will kill you because you are wrong, and I am right.

The older one

No. You are wrong. I love them more.

The younger one

They were about to murder each other over who loves their gods more.

Slyder partially split himself, got in between them, put three hands on each, and said there is enough love for everybody. They immediately agreed, apologised, and kissed each other on the cheek.

Love you, dad.
Love you, son.

Both, going back to work

IXSkitter World TV

During the anointing, with everybody's attention on the guns, somebody looked up.

The wash off the Long Odds disturbed something that was not supposed to be visible. A shimmer, a refraction, no sound at all, and then it corrected itself, which is the part that matters, because correcting yourself requires knowing you have drifted.

Slyder did not aim. He does not have to. Electric arc, and the air ionised around a cylindrical drone with fins and clusters of cameras arranged to catch every possible angle.

It hit the ground between Slyder, Raven and Sound and began to reboot.

This is how we start our propaganda empire. With this camera drone.

Mac

It armed a self destruct the moment it registered being shot down. Nina got into it with seconds to spare, aided by Slyder and healed by Raven at the same time, and pulled the broadcast service before the wipe. Slyder ripped the hard drive, kicked the drone into the sky, and watched it cook off like a firework.

The decryption came later, back at Hollowbone, and it is the biggest thing that happened tonight.

It is not a spy drone. It is a camera crew.

Somebody is broadcasting the daily lives of skittermanders to a relay at the edge of this solar system and out from there to somewhere else. Edited packets come back down to the drone so it knows what story it is telling and where to go next. The last episode delivered was about one tribe causing a ruckus and another running out of water.

You are in the Truman Show. You are a National Geographic.

Amon

SKITTER WORLD TV

Scope tried to spoof a relay off the ship's antenna and trace it back to the source. The message went through and was received and they moved on to the next segment of skittermander life without comment. No geotag came back. There are almost certainly more cameras.

Realising that other aliens are turning this planet into a reality TV show really explains how creatures that seem like they grew up in New Zealand are acting like they are in Australia.

Kevo

Nobody has intervened here in living memory. They just film. The open question, and Amon left it hanging deliberately, is what happens now that someone has walked into the enclosure and started handing the gorillas rifles.

XSomething that moves

Around the fires that night, a skittermander called Bright Bright started describing a place, and then said the place moves.

Eight legs. The biggest drill anyone has seen. That is why they have the best steel, because they do not trade for it, they mine it.

The third faction is the Obliged, and they are the largest. Their leader is the Great Oblige. Their territory runs like a jawline around everyone else's, and it happens to sit exactly on top of the deepest water. They have a fixed fortress, which is the first one and reportedly the worst, and they have the other thing.

THE HUGWORKS

A walking fortress. Fully armoured, fully equipped, hydro powered. A mining works and refinery left here by somebody long gone, dug back into service and then covered in guns. It never leaves their territory because it has never needed to. It flattened villages on the border a few years ago while they were expanding.

I saw it from a distance once. It was so fucking big.

Bright Bright

He is kind of like yous, but kind of not. He is nothing like yous. Yous are changing our people for the best.

Bright Bright

Beat them and you own every tribe on this planet.

It can be found near Dryrattle. Two days down the Long Road, past salt flats and a few bogs worth avoiding, until the ground goes red with iron.

XIFour days

You went out with two hug rigs and two doof wagons. You came back with three and three, extra bikes, two extra spree balls, and an honour guard hanging off the sides of the lead wagon like an assault team, three arms holding on and three holding weapons, first off and first to clear the ground for their gods.

Road Mother came into Hollowbone, saw the Pits full of water, dropped both engine blocks in the dirt, and ran.

Then you spent four days building an empire.

The Sisters of Flick were made official, on Delaeo's naming and Amon's ruling. All female infantry, the deadliest weapons in the arsenal, currently training more Sisters to grow their capacity to serve their emperors and empresses. They gained a level over the four days.

The Church of Flick now sends missionaries. They leave on bicycles in clean white shirts with black ties, waving, carrying cakes the town packed for them, with a large weapon strapped to the back of the saddle to put down any resistance.

We tell the missionaries: either you bring back conversions, or you bring back bones.

Mac

Predator blades went to the Sisters riding out with them. Assault carbines went to everyone else. You get a carbine, you get a carbine, that is a child, give that back, actually no.

No, they still get a carbine. Just hold it with forearms instead of two.

Delaeo

Do you not feel guilty about giving weapons to children?

Mac

No. That is how they learn. They always learn when they are younger.

Delaeo

Raven went looking for the other kind of child. The ones who set things alight without meaning to, who read a passage aloud and cause a problem, and who are usually sent away for it. She found twelve.

She taught them one cantrip each. She chose Shield.

So that way they can defend themselves better. Because they are children.

Raven

I care for the children.

Raven

Flick spent the four days holding the whole thing together, because there are now zealots, war fanatics, twelve disciples and a tax authority all in one town, and none of them are naturally inclined to share. He rolled well and got the optimal outcome. Nobody got in anybody's way.

Fortifications went up out of car bodies and rubble, funnelling anything hostile into the road mouth. Guard towers. Tunnels that surface behind an attacker instead of in front of them. A weapons shipment came down from the Cutlass and Hollowbone's comparative strength tripled.

An assault on it is no longer viable. Anybody who tried would lose everything they brought.

We are Flick. And we are here to help.

Flick

XIIThe long road

Slyder stayed at first and Humble Beginnings was left holding the town, on the grounds that he is now the only one who can keep a schedule.

Then the scouting party went out. Nina on a rail bike, because her exo bike dies in sand. Flick, Raven and Slyder in spree balls, because the balls are somehow the fastest thing on the planet.

Amon revealed something the skittermanders have never worked out. The balls are gyro stabilised. Inside, you sit upright and still. All the rolling and tumbling is unnecessary. They just do it because they assume it makes them go faster.

Road Mother came to see them off with a warning, which is that the Obliged make their own dust and their dust is toxic. Everyone got a rebreather, fitted by hand, salvaged from somewhere and adjustable enough to seal against horns.

Slyder shifted into the redhead once they were clear of town.

Two days down the Long Road, which every village on this planet hangs off, so that being at one end of it means somebody is at the other end of it. That somebody is the Obliged.

The soil went dark red. Smoke started coming out of the cliffs. Red Rock.

Then the ground began to vibrate under the wheels, and you could feel it through the frame of the bike and through the shell of a ball.

You can feel it in your balls.

Mac

You can feel it in your balls.

Amon

And then you saw it.

XIIIHello, I am Nina

The Hugworks is carving strips out of a mountain. Several hundred bikes orbit it. It takes the mountain in at the front and pushes the spoil out the back in long ridges, so it leaves a trail behind it like a desert lizard. Skittermanders swarm the legs where they land, blasting obstacles clear so it can keep walking into the rock.

I have never had anything with as much hardness or hit points on any game system, ever. It is a city.

Amon

Everyone got a face. Slyder disguised Raven as the largest skittermander anybody has ever seen, on the basis that she could plausibly be Road Mother's daughter. He took a random face for himself, and then, mid movement, noticed the orange paint and the three lines and added them to his own face as a single action.

Flick simply walked in.

That is how we all started. I just walked up. Hello, fellow skittermanders.

Kevo

Ladders hang down off the walking city. You went up them and stood on a city that is chewing a mountain.

Nina took the long loop northwest to come in behind, and rode her bike up one of the legs.

She missed the roll. She missed the reroll. She was out of hero points. She was offered one and it did not help.

What happened instead is that the bike found a loading plank on the conveyor at the back, went up it, and launched off the front of the walking fortress at somewhere between one and two hundred feet, in full view of every skittermander aboard and every rider on the plain.

She reached for the auto grappler on her belt on the way out of the saddle, put a line into a turret at the very front of the machine, swung around it two or three times, and landed on top of it.

And then I am going to perch on it like Bat Skittermander.

Mac

She landed next to two mechanics.

Holy fuck, that was dope.

Mechanic, black handed, unbothered

Hello. I am Nina.

Nina

Behind her, the bike came down in the crusher at the front of the Hugworks and detonated.