September 16th, 3522.

“As you can tell, the soul between species is largely homologous with minor differences accounting for different physiology and unique metaphysical biology traits.” Their teacher explained with a chipper attitude that Tess mirrored with a happy hum. “There are seven main chakras, and one hundred and eight sub-chakras.”

Master Hana was a plump older woman, who could very accurately be labeled as a MILF with no sense of shame. She was a goddamn bombshell and I’m gay as fuck for her.

And she was a kind woman, and a veritable genius in her field.

A student raised his hand, scratching at buckwheat colored hair. “I was told there were up to eighty eight thousand chakras in the subtle body.”

Master Hana replied happily. “That’s a common misconception, which involves confusion between the nodes of the soul and the channels that link them together. The nodes are chakra, centers of spiritual energy and power, and the channels are nadi or meridian. The veins if you would.”

Applied Metaphysics had been a rather interesting class, especially since it evolved a mix of engineering, psychology, philosophy, culture and biology. Here students could gain a better understanding of the science behind their powers, and how machinery could be constructed that used it in new and exciting ways. While her main master and mentor was Master Burhan, they could take courses from other departments to develop specialized degrees, and once their two years at either General Fundamentals or say Modern Paracausal Disciplines was done they could formally join one of the other departments for more specialized courses.

Tess began to drift but kept taking notes on her holo-caster, fingers moving mindlessly and effortlessly recording information for later review. She had been heavily relying on her new medical devices to muddle through the blocks in her system and had been learning more in-depth knowledge of soul-structures and how they influence power expression.

Applied Metaphysics had advanced more in the last fifty years than in the last three thousand, all thanks to the sharing of knowledge between the civilizations and species of the Orion Bubble. It was why her MID bracers were possible, and she had even heard there were suits that gave people elemental channeling. It was temporary, but it was a testament to how far they had come.

If only we didn’t have so many assholes ruining everything.

“Miss Hoshino?” Tess snapped back to attention, flushing at the stares of other students though she smiled politely at Master Hana.

“Yes?” She squeaked.

“How much can you tell me about how the element of Fire is expressed on Terre, and the commonalities shared between all cultures of Fire?”

She cleared her throat, trying her best not to wilt. “On… Terre, there’s many different ways the people of Fire can express themselves, from the pirate clans of Aztlan to the fire lords of Wa. But all of them share a grave emphasis on honor and loyalty, to their parents and siblings, to their commanders and their lords. To the point that breaking our loyalty can kill us.” The same was true to those of Earth, breaking their contracts and oaths was spiritually damaging, just as losing family and community was deadly and insanity inducing to those of Water, and losing their Way could empty out those of Air. “Our ways can change and shift, and we’ll have different cultural practices, but there’s always a few things we share in common.”

Master Hana smiled, and folded her arms behind her back. “What else is shared between all those disparate cultures and peoples?”

Tess smirked, with far too many teeth. Others backed away but she didn’t get why. “We all have had the tales of the dragon spouse told to us since we were little, those of Air learned from Kukulkan and his sky golings, those of Water from the Moon and Ocean and their children. But people like us, we made a union in ancient times with the children of Khepri, the dragons. From nowhere we’ll have new family lines started by unknown people, and their children grow to become great names, the blood of the dragons flowing through their veins.”

There was a hint of disbelief in the air from anyone not raised by a Fire culture, her nails clicking against the desk as she shrugged. “We know dragons are sapient as are walking whales, and as natural channelers they’re going to be… let’s say special in a way. And those weird records have been labeled and sorted accurately for at least four thousand years soo…”

Master Hana smirked. “Well it’s nice to know at least one student is well informed about her history, because evaluating the whys and hows of a culture can tell us how that’s shaped the soul and how to better understand them on a spiritual and scientific level.”

Tess preened herself, happy to set an example.

Tess kicked her shoes off, almost hitting Mordin in the face as he carefully laid down on the ground like a loser. Mogu was primly sitting down on a wooden chair, smiling placidly without a care in the world.

Her gaze followed the gestures and little smiles and movements of her friends, Tess doing her best to understand and dissect, to break down what she needed to know versus what she wanted to know. Yaga had taught her a lot about people, how to read them, how to get out of their way or how to get in their way.

“We… uhh haven’t known each other long,” Tess tried not to turtle up when three gazes focused on her. “So I thought it was a good idea to get to know each other? Is that okay?“

I’m being stupid aren’t I?

Xinji nodded, laying down her entire body on the floor with a gentle and sweet tricord chirp. “What do you want to know? There’s much to tell.”

“Well, I know what planet you’re from, but that doesn’t tell me anything about yourselves.” She wanted to know their lives, not everything but more than just a name and a personality and a face.

“I live on the Homeworld, the Anataya is one of the oldest Groves.” Tess jumped, now that told her a lot more about her friend.

The diderik were very… clan based, a mix of Earth and Fire, tied to clan and company, bound to their oath and their loyalty. A gigantic meritocracy of immense scale, drawing from two trillion lives.

The Diderik Union wasn’t a state with an army, it was an army with a state. A weird mix of tribal clan and paramilitary state. It wasn’t a dictatorship, since their psychology was built differently.

Xinji gave a diderik grin. “Anataya isn’t one of the largest or most powerful of the old Groves, but my kin have learned many secrets over the millennia. But then I doubt you want to know just about that.”

Tess sheepishly shrugged. “I do, but I’ve told you about my family and I’d like to hear about yours.”

The diderik took a second to respond. “My species is… different from yours, I was born of the fruit of the father and the womb of my mother. She planted my seed and I tore my way out from the soil like one of your moles. I played with the raberoos and kicked around soccer balls with the other children of the Grove.”

“The hell is soccer?” Tess had never heard of a sport like that. “Is it like pitch-ball?”

Xinji snorted. “No. We kick balls with our feet,” she demonstrated with a lightning fast practice kick from her resting position. “I had many clan members, and they raised me as they should, teaching me what they could.”

“Cool.” Xinji clucked and pointed at Mordin without mercy.

“His turn.” Tess pouted but let the alien woman get out of her questioning. For now.

Mordin clicked his tongue, his longer set of arms rubbing against the floor. “As I’ve said I come from a colony, but if you want to know about my family. We’re not too dissimilar to humans, we have mothers, fathers, siblings and cousins. My father is Moshan, my mother is Shianne, and my sister is Morgan. We live in the trees as our ancestors did, even if we’ve carved them from living metal and wood. I wished to show my magnificent self to the world, so I did.”

“How big do the trees grow in your colonies?” Tess had to know, it was almost certainly going to be an interesting piece of trivia to remember.

Mordin smirked, which felt odd on his adorable owl face. “Much larger than yours, barring a few exceptions. Our titan trees grow up to five hundred units, which is equal to your meters, and number in the billions on our home planet.”

Tess held up a hand to her chin. “That sounds incredible, and you live in them?” She had been far too focused on her own problems, and she felt stupid for missing how much was out there in the wider galaxy, rather than a tiny pebble among thousands of worlds.

Mordin nodded. “We’ve been doing so as a sapient species for over four hundred thousand years.”

Tess frowned, that was one of the big differences between Terre and other homeworlds. Most of the races of the galaxy had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, but humanity had developed sapience in a scant five thousand years and had existed for about one hundred and eight thousand years based on fossil records.

Humanity was so young they still coexisted with some of their close relatives, even if most of them had gone extinct or become spirit races due to intermingling with the denizens of the Spirit.

It was… just different, exciting but different.

“My turn then?” Mogu sounded amused, and Tess was more than curious. “My people come from a hostile world, one so aggressive our fungal ancestors developed motile forms to survive.” She rolled her shoulders, a gentle clicking emitted from her throat. “We’re closely knit with our ties to Family and Knowledge, and my family is a scholarly sort, with a tradition of seeking out new worlds to explore for the past ten centuries. I have a mother and a father and an uncle I care for very much, and I came here because it’s what they and I wanted.”

Tess frowned, that sounded a bit—

There was an emergency alert from her holo-caster, and she swiftly activated it to what looked like… a news broadcast. She switched to other channels, and every single one had been hijacked.

She expanded the holographic projection, and found her friends had quieted down in silent horror. Tess felt her heart drop into her stomach, her inner fire faltering after the sight of the monster before their eyes. Raven black hair, cold dark eyes, a curvy frame with wide hips, a thin waist and large bust. A classic beauty marred by the hand shaped burn mark on her right cheek. She wore a black and white suit, and her smile was terrifying.

Kiwako Katsuragi, the Lord of Enkidu and a woman directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and indirectly responsible for millions more. She had been missing for almost twenty years and was thought dead…

Her being alive meant there would be no peace in her lifetime, people that determined lived, long, long lives.

Tess froze.

The stream changed, and revealed something far more horrifying. It was an image of a fleet of ships, hundreds of ships, a battle sphere of ships and vessels from frigates to battleships, and a single dreadnought. She recognized them as heavily retrofitted mothball ships, mostly human but the frigates and some of the cruisers had to be astaran and panadim ships.

It was a swarm, an impenetrable fortress of steel, kinetic barriers and energy shielding flashing as they slapped aside kinetic rounds or blocked lightspeed energy blasts. It wasn’t a ragtag gathering of ships, it was a fully prepared war fleet blitzing an outer colony with impunity while the known galaxy watched in horror.

Thirty battleships and a dreadnought turned their spinal mounts, while their broadsides and point defense grids filled space with thousands of rounds and bursts of plasma and laser light. Golden light twisted around them, and Xinji choked…

“No… it can’t be.” Xinji sounded horrified and betrayed.

A flagging SA cruiser turned, destroying three frigates with four shots fired in the span of a second. In the end it didn’t matter, as golden light speared the heavens and wiped it from existence, reality parting where the energy touched it, until it stilled its heartbeat, vaporizing the ship in the silent void of space.

Kiwako Katsuragi was smiling like the devil she was. “You’ve been complacent for far too long, letting the monsters who brought the Days of Iron remain outside of our control, and let them pervert the ways of the Almighty. But no more will Enkidu sit idle, no more will Naturals have to live in fear of the strange and alien ways of our so called fellow humans. We have licked our wounds and rebuilt our armies and our fleets, and the entire galaxy will know Enkidu rises once more. Only we know the chosen path of humanity, so rise up my brothers and sisters, rise up and take what is rightfully ours!”

She made a fist, and placed it to the left side of her chest. “This is our true blue world, this is our time, send those ‘channelers’ back into the dark ages where they belong!”

War had come once more, and Tess knew this was only the beginning.

The Nightmare King swam through the depths of the Spirit World, avoiding the burning gaze of the key and gate, and the god of knowledge tasked with restraining a greater entity.

Epiales was an ancient spirit, born of Fire and Nightmare and Darkness, he was the primordial terror that all living beings feared. From the fear of children of the dark and the monsters under their bed to the existential dread of adults and the nightmares that plagued their dreams.

His most favorite layer of the High Spirit was the realm behind mirrors, how easy it was to cross between the countless reflections of the light, to twist around the boundaries and protections of even the greatest of shamans and spirits. So many souls thought they could ward him off.

All of them had failed and paid the price.

He has been tasked with taking that strange soul, a powerful one that would serve nicely as part of his mother’s collection. Epiales was one of Her firstborn, he had been a creature of nightmares and terror for a quarter of a galactic turn, and would continue to be so until the very stars gave out.

It would be all too easy to take the girl.

The dark spirit stood between boundaries, smiling as he saw the girl sleeping fitfully, eyebrows furrowed in annoyance. Her soul shined like the sun, a bright spot visible to any spirit of any worth.

“Simple, there will be no victory to savor here against a mere child. But when the last of the gates have fallen and my eldest brother is free from his prison, I’ll have a long, long laugh.”

His power rippled along the ocean of the Spirit, and the world twisted around the girl as he began to rip her away from the material plane. His crystalline claws gripped her waist and then…

Agony. Fire. Light. Chaos.

His violet spark was nearly snuffed out by the light that shined within the mortal coil of the human in his grasp. Fire burst to life out from her skin, not the visible flames of the material but flames that touched the spirit and tore at vital parts of his identity.

Epiales recoiled, and then shocked when a storm of spirits smashed into him like the fist of an angry god. Countless spirits of Water and Earth spoiled his unholy nightmare flames, spirits of Hope and Dream tore away at his relentless terrors, and damnable void attempted to pluck deep secrets from his now damaged corpus.

And then a gigantic mass of feathers and rage clawed out his eyes, and he reared back in agony as a bird attempted to tear out his liver.

You will not touch her, you unnatural thing!

He dove into the world of mirrors once more, and then upwards into his true domain. The Dreaming, the layer of the Spirit World that corresponds to the collective unconscious. He curled up defensively, and proceeded to devour every spirit that had defied him, taking their essence into himself to repair his corpus.

An unsettling sensation was crawling in what amounted to the seat of his soul, that girl was a shaman, and one with powerful friends or with a great and untapped potential. Her defenses were multifaceted, from the spirits swirling around her body to the layers of fire surging through the nodes and channels of her Self.

He spoke to the void between dreams. “I understand now why this human intrigues you… something has changed.”

He had to find another vector, and traced the connections that tied those living in this world. He couldn’t pluck them like his other siblings, part of a host so vast it would blot out the skies of every world. He needed a victory.

So the Nightmare King found his vector.

He opened a door, and stepped into a dream. The errant spirit smiled at the jagged edges of the mind he was in, a tattered mindscape of broken dreams and damaged psyche. The constant stream of music that was the song of the astaran, so strong, so proud of their freedom, of their choice that was no choice at all.

A song that was vulnerable to alteration and realignment, especially when it came to a Way, a form of life and teaching that was theirs.

Epiales freely stepped into a tainted memory, where a small and skinny girl that was all elbows and hard knobbly knees watched with sad, shadowed eyes that did not belong to that of a child. A firm hand was placed on her shoulder, a red skinned hand like her own almost crushing her shoulder.

“Why is control so important uncle, I thought our Way was that of freedom wasn’t it? That our people had a choice in who we could be?” The little girl asked with a confused expression, lip wobbling as military police crushed protestors with violence and terror tactics.

The man next to him was slightly shadowed, but the spirit saw him nonetheless. A man draped in whites and golds, like a cross between an ordained priest and a warrior monk, a bald head and cold eyes staring dispassionately at the death below them.

“Our Way is to respect our Elders, to value our freedom and protect against the alien and their perverted, weak ways. Our family was lost, but we are the avatar of our people, their will made manifest, our wants are their wants. The traitorous fake nations that have joined with the alien are lost cattle and it is our task to herd them back.”

“But why the use of violence, why are we hurting people?” The little girl didn’t understand, and she never would.

“Our people are all one, part of the same body and mind, but we are sick, and at times we need to excise that sickness, to break their spirits so they can be returned to our peaceful accord.” There was an odd glee in the man’s eyes, and Epiales smiled at the fear and self loathing and broken down mental walls.

“I don’t understand.” Her voice was so small, and the man’s smile was lit with the memory of fear and confusion.

“You will. They always do…”

The dream began to ripple, and the spirit stepped in between the memory and the frightened girl, who blinked as her awareness of the dream grew.

“Who are you?” He smiled warmly, as he did what he had done for countless generations.

“Please… call me Melas dear, do you need any help from someone like me?”

There was hope in her eyes. “Can you make the bad memories stop, can you make him go away?”

“Of course I can, little one, all you need to do is light my nightmare flame so we can dance the night away, within the parade of the endless Dreaming. Help me open the door so I can find my catch, and help my mother.”

He offered a large stick covered in greasy and dark oil, and was rewarded with her taking it and lighting it with the power of her soul, fanning it with the air within. Crimson and violet flames cast against the shadows, and the child’s face was pulled into a frightened gleeful hope as she tossed it at the memory and burned it in effigy.

The Nightmare King smiled at a plan set in motion.

Compendium Entry (Technology): LUTECE CANNON

At the Battle of Azka in 3518, the Diderik Union demonstrated a weapon that possessed power on an unprecedented scale. Conventional mass accelerators fire rounds at a fraction of light speed, with sympathetic velocity further enhancing their firepower. A midline six hundred meter cruiser fires a thirty kilogram round at 5% C, a one kilometer battleship a fifty kilogram round at 8.4% C and a one point five kilometer dreadnought a seventy kilogram round at 13% C. This is a general rule of thumb rather than an exact measurement.

A Lutece Cannon is an order of magnitude more powerful, able to punch through layers of shielding defenses in a deluge of utter destruction. Most mass accelerators work through the translation of dark energy into kinetic energy, augmenting massive electromagnetic launchers a thousandfold, allowing for yields comparable to thermonuclear compression weapons.

A Lutece Cannon is the ultimate evolution of a mass driver cannon, using a sizable origonium core to generate a dark energy shunt not dissimilar to the FTL-space that surrounds a ship. A plasma compression chamber vaporizes and compresses a cloud of metals, primarily nickel, iron and transuranic elements which is then loaded using a shaped magnetic field. The resulting beam then leaves the shunt at a massive fraction of C and hits with a devastating slurry of heat, kinetic force and exotic particle and radiation emissions.

The main promise of the Lutece Cannon is not just it’s raw power, allowing even a frigate to tear through a battleship but it’s sheer versatility when it comes to channeling unique energies. The exotic effects of the FTL shunt can be used to channel specialized energy fields, used to focus technologized metaphysical outputs. Structural hyperfields are used to generate any number of lethal and devastating effects, tearing through the multi-faceted defenses of modern warships.