Experiential Spectra

The Experiential Spectra of the Known Continua

Black Seas of Infinity
Gray-Lit Y'Qaa
Blue Zones
Leng-Nargai Oneirical Lattitudes
Violet Abyss
Mauve Zone
Red Yoth
N'Kai

Tsan Yian: Kadiphonek Class Starship

Nobles of the Tsanic Host who maintain holdings across the solar system and beyond utilize a number of traditional vessels, the most common and utilitarian of these is the Kadiphonek Class noted for its spacious interior, impressive manueverability, and durability. Many of the first generation of vessels of this class are still in service thanks to their integrated self-repair sub-systems.

Hull Details: (size) 1,000' along ventral axis, main section 400-500' along horizontal axis (varies by model), 250' along vertical axis. Hull is also molecularly bonded and covered with a seamless 12 inch nanosheath over a translucent polymetallic fiber-ceramic Eryxian shell with molecular phase inscribed warding.

Drives: Riemann, Blue/Nithic, Red/Yothic, Black/Zin, Oneiric and standard gravitic polythruster nodes. (Some models have additional drives installed in one or more of the four Polythruster Nodes.)

Perceptual Metacortexes coupled with Somniplex Interface Orbs grant the full range of sensoria experience and perceptual capabilities required for the operation of the vessel in transplanetary space and beyond. Sleepers and dreamers hooked into the somniplex can be maintained and kept fit for close to a century before they require downtime. Later models no longer provide access-points for installing braincases.

Core Artilect: Typically these vessels began service with Colossus Rated Artilect. Often these were upgraded as a sort of token of status amongst Nobles.

Forward Resonator Assembly: Range of 10,000 miles, 500 terawatt output.

Autodefense Armament: Dual primary autoturrets, Shield generation.

Offensive Armament: Trapezohedral Array, Missile Extrusion Systems, Grit Cans, Dynamo Charges, Photo-Emiters, Plasmacasters, antimatter accelerators, Psychohedron Globes, and more. Most Nobles prefer to customize and continually upgrade and rework their armament subsystems, even more than their drives.

Engineering: Rated A by Clan Martense and fully staffed by licensed and nano-bonded family-clusters. No Kadiphonek Class Vessel has ever been abandoned by its slave engineers. These areas below decks have been sealed for generations and are completely off-limits to everyone except for the slave engineers themselves.

All Kadiphonek Class Vessels originally came equipped with 32 crio-sarcophagi arranged along the interior nanogel buffer. Some vessels (notably slavers) adopted the practice of stacking row after row of crio-sarcophagi along the inner buffer zone, some managing to fit over a thousand of the things. Troop transports generally never had more than the initial 32 crio-sarcophagi, instead relying on other methods such as Reanimation, Essential Reduction, or the simple expedient of downloading troops into quick-extruded drone-forms at the destination.

The floor of each of these vessels is made up of mentally-responsive tiles that adjust themselves under the direction of any authorized crew-member. This allows the crew to adjust and reconfigure the interior sections as required or desired at any time.

The Kadiphonek Class of Transplanetary Vessels has a long and illustrious history that goes back nearly to the Second Interregnum and the Voola Uprising. These vessels are tried and true workhorses that have built the Solar Possessions and gone on to blaze the way and maintain the trade routes essential to the continuation of the Near Colonies.

Tsan Yian: Interlude 2

Yuggothians are sore losers. When they were forced out of the Solar Possessions during the Third Epiphytical War, the fungal sporehordes of Yuggoth seeded the asteroid belts and other locations with all manner of Nanoeukaryotic monstrosities, many of which lay dormant for decades, even centuries, before sprouting into horrid quasi-life and spreading murder, mayhem and destruction in their wake.

This was in addition to the massive clouds of infection that were spewed into the life-support systems of every habitat, dome and settlement the Yuggothic forces could reach during their withdrawal from Earth and its surrounding environs.

To this day random waves of spontaneous infections arise and spread throughout the asteroid belts and other such places, most of which are little more than nuisances. Occasionally an infection will achieve a form of critical mass, reach a pandemic level and become a real problem, like the various forms of psychokinetic plagues that induce horrifically violent forms of mass telepathy, serial empathy, nihilistic passivity, or worse.

There are still parasitical forms of hyperconscious plague-minds at loose out on the periphery of the burned-out hulks of ancient orbital bastions and mining cosmoplexi.

The Nobles of the Court of the Silver Key, under direct edict of the Pallid Empress Herself have been engaged in a long and bitter struggle to cleanse the human ecologies of the asteroid belts and the Outer System ever since 'winning' the Third Epiphytical War. To this very day fam-trad collectives and nomadic bands of Purifiers, Purgers and Electrolyters prowl the broken and scorched remnants of the once gleaming orbital domains clearing out masses of fungi, spore-cankers, infections and worse.

But worse than the lingering Yuggothic-infections are the nanoeukaryotic sleepers and the infectidrones that they left scatttered randomly all across the entire solar system.

To many amongst the ones doing the fighting and the dying, this is a losing battle.

But the Pallid Empress commands that the orbital domains be returned to Her control.

So the Purge-teams and Scrubbers continue to go in and wage war on the festering, ever-adapting vengeance weapons of the Yuggothians. Many believe that this continuation of the extermination protocol has become far too extravagant and costly, especially now that the Shoggoths are returning.

Perhaps things have deteriorated too far to salvage the orbital domains.

Maybe, just maybe, the Yuggothians have finally won something of a victory after all.

Just don't let the Monitors discern you entertaining such traitorous thoughts...

Tsan Yian: Interlude 1

Shoggoths are extremely self-reliant creatures. Originally created as artificial servitors of another species, they have long since become autonomous, having fought several terrible wars upon their makers, the polypous beings of Znand, The Unpossessed Pnakotian Hegemonies, the metal-brains of Abbith, and even some splinter-sect Yithian enclaves as well. Only the Tcho-Tchoids haven't fought a full-out war against the Shoggoths and that is only because the Shoggoths have been paying the Tcho-Tchoids to raid and harass those worlds that they don't feel are worth bothering with themselves.

The Shoggoths have fought long and hard to free themselves from their oppressors and those who would enslave them. They have lain waste to entire solar systems in their struggle to cast off the shackles of the Elder Things and those who would use sorcery to constrain or bind them to service. But being free isn't much of a consolation when trapped upon a single unremarkable world. Especially if that world happens to be in the middle of the war zone between radical splinter-sects from Vhoorlia and other Greater Powers of the Outer Dark.

Eminently adaptable and supremely plastic, the shoggoths withdrew from the surface regions and only maintained the barest essential contact with the Vhoorlian Sects and those others who learned to call upon them in the dim places beneath the Earth. They withdrew in order to ponder and dream, learning much from their contact with the Vhoorlian extremists. The shoggoths did not need to invent any technologies to facilitate their grand schemes--they were living technologies in and of themselves. Instead they observed and learned and they modified themselves from deep within their very innermost structures until finally they achieved the means to leave the war-torn world of their birth behind.

But, as always with such things, there were those amongst the shoggoth who were unable or unwilling to make the exodus offworld. Some few remained behind, degenerate denizens of smooth and looping tunnels deep below the ocean crust. These throw-backs to much simpler days hunted polyps or other things and wandered the forgotten ruins of the Earth. Some took up the empty madness of the blind, idiot god. Others slid into heavy slumber, caught up in deep, abominable dreams that sometimes leaked outwards like unwholesome radiation to taint and twist the lesser forms of life that arose around their cysts and nodes. But those who stayed behind were but a few and they in time were either re-enslaved, destroyed or driven deep beneath the crustal regions by the Tsanish Polities of the K'n, so they are of little importance any more. Decadent and fallen into weird forms of biomorphic dementia, they are less than a footnote, really.

But those who left the Earth, those shoggoths went on to form a vast interconnected empire of their own out among the near stars. Englobed in shimmering fields of eldritch force and possessed of terrible secrets once only known to the Yaddithians and others whose worlds they invaded in the pursuit of knowledge and power, the shoggoths of this aeon pose an ever-present threat to the ambitions of the Pallid Empress and all the gathered Hosts of Tsan, both upon the Earth and among the Near Stars.

Now the shoggoths have learned how to capture Living Colours and wield them as horrific weapons.

The shrew-faced sages of Pon-Gru have seen it in their trances.

The Coeleopterans are massing along the periphery of the Seven Golden Cities of Man, spurred onwards by Yithian agents provocateurs and the half-materialized and grotesquely mutilated exiles who prowl amongst the abhuman hordes like blasphemous parodies of their former selves.

The proud and elegant Lords and Ladies of the Tsanish Hosts have ruled across the Earth, beneath its oceans and throughout its solar system for millennia, ever since defeating the fungal fleets of Yuggoth. Humanity, such as it is now recognized and understood, has extended its hegemony across the black seas of infinity in colossal Orbships and other vast, cyclopean vessels that are inverted worlds unto themselves. Arrogant and seemingly unstoppable, the Great Empire has been caught up within a Golden Age.

But times change.

War is coming.

Already the Far Colonies are squabbling amongst themselves and unsanctioned warlords are arising amongst the slave worlds.

Things are changing.

The Vhoorlians are rising and there are signs of infection spreading throughout the Asteroid Belts.

And now the shoggoths are coming back to Earth armed with weapons of unspeakable destruction.

What do the shoggoths seek? What could they possibly want from the world that they long ago abandoned? Why are they returning?

The Pallid Empress and the entire Immortal Court of the Silver Key demand to know the answer to these questions.

Thus you have been resurrected, again, that you might serve your Empress once more...