Into the Black

(NERV Game Site – Official DAtS Offline Forums)

Number5Alive, Golddigger, BurtBacharach, CrazyCelt, Blaze, DoYouEvenLyft?, MarcoPolo, MightMakesRight, l33tpally, Bennie, SEA-TAC_Sweetie, Requiesce-in-Pace, MacD, HaveGunsWillTravel, TheDespoiler, Guardian, GunKitty, Chummer, Inquisitor, Lizard, RedFox, SemiSolidSnake, ElfMama, Not_the_Face!, Scholar, Anonymous3, Anonymous4, Anonymous7, Anonymous9, AggregatorOfSorrows, WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot, Lucio, M.Mollen, DigDug, BigGunn, Dolcett, Starwatcher, Backlog, DarkAvariel, Knocker, Hullu_Kapteeni, GrimDark, BloodForTheBloodGod, Queen’s_Bitch, BackDat@55Up, DoYouEvenDPS?, MajorTom, Parca, and DarkAngel are in the chat.

BackDat@55Up: So, no easy way to say this, but I’m worried.

Not_the_Face!: Worried? About what? The way everything looks like it is barreling uncontrollably towards a massive crash that will wipe out everything, leaving everything we know in this game world a shattered, hollow husk of what it once was?

BackDat@55Up: Uh, yeah, something like that.

MacD: Ah, don’t worry about that. I’m sure the devs wouldn’t do anything too crazy. Probably just have couple worlds burn.

Scholar: ‘just a couple’?

MacD: Come on, there’s tons of them out there, and we’ve already seen plenty of them burned, blown up, wiped clean of technology, or set upon by space locusts. Not to mention an entire portion of the map getting swallowed up by Hellspace.

Backlog: You may have a point, but that doesn’t mean it is a good thing.

WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot: So, I know that the Ihm are being a pain, and striking further into the Empire than anyone would like, but what else is going on?

DigDug: Confirmed sightings of what looks to be some kind of non-Ihm hellspace group in Consortium space.

DarkAngel: Oh, what are they like?

DigDug: No one’s seen them up close, but, apparently, they took over everything with a computer in the system by hacking them, and then began cutting up the commercial ships in orbit. Weird thing is that their ship was this big, regular eight-sided diamond thing.

DarkAngel: Weird.

DigDug: Yeah, no clue what is up with these guys, though they’re supposedly called the Gorb.

Scholar: Uh, DigDug, did these Gorb mention anything about resistance being futile?

DigDug: How’d you know?

Scholar: It is a science fiction reference. The devs scattered them all over the place. I just want to know what they’re doing here, now.

Anonymous4: These Gorb and the Ihm wouldn’t explain what was going on over at Fendar in the FWA. Whole colony just got wiped off the map.

GrimDark: Orbital bombardment?

Anonymous4: No, that would have been too quick, too clean. Whoever these guys were, they were brutal, vicious. I’d think it was the Chaos Brigade or some of the other LARPers, but none of them are into, well, eating people. And there’s signs that people were getting eaten.

M.Mollen: Zombies?

Anonymous4: No, not that. I checked, especially since the info about Yathru came out. No zombies. Someone just came in, brutalized and killed everyone, and left.

M.Mollen: Any chance of video showing who did it?

Anonymous4: Oh, there’s video. And it would make the 4chan crowd scream that it was too graphic.

M.Mollen: That bad?

Anonymous4: Worse. I watched the whole thing. It was terrible. When the corp in charge of the agriworld showed up, the raiders were already gone, and the only living soul was a guy in the control room of the station, who had been hung upside down by his pelvis (like the actual bone) and had his legs cut off at the knees. He’d also been partially skinned, and it looked like someone had taken a couple bites out of him. Needless to say, he was not fit to say what happened, but the security cameras caught it all.

M.Mollen: Oh, damn. Do we at least know what these nutjobs look like?

Anonymous4: Yeah, kindof humanoid, but very pale. Albino, almost. Red eyes, and sharp teeth. They look like they’re stronger than normal humans, and are apparently insane beyond the ability to feel pain.

TheDespoiler: And don’t forget the remains of the X’thari. They’re uniting around a new Omniqueen, replacing the one that died on the Harvester, and they’re looking for biomass to replace what was lost.

Backlog: Wait, WHAT?

TheDespoiler: Yeah, the X’thari are on the move again. Oh, they don’t have a Harvester, but they definitely have most of the Swarm.

Backlog: Oh, fuck!

M.Mollen: If we’re talking about threats, then we should mention the alien facilities that have woken up all across the galaxy. Including one on Jagloth.

DarkAvariel: Please tell me that the Legion Virus isn’t escaping!

Number5Alive: Actually, I can report on that. The Confederacy has kept a couple ships in orbit of Jagloth ever since they burnt it with their Exterminatus stuff, right? Well, a couple days ago they nuked the shit out of the sight of the former governor’s mansion. Two nukes.

M.Mollen: Interesting. Some kind of failsafe?

Number5Alive: I had a guy in the loop. They said that a comm signal, multidirectional, reported that the Governor’s Bunker had been breached. Immediately afterwards, the Confeds nuked the site.

DevTeam has entered the chat.

DevTeam: The player behind the Legion Virus has been completely removed from the game. The only remnants of him are the lore impact on the game world, including an element in the new event. No part of the player’s character or codes remain behind, and they will not be able to log in again, under any circumstances. Thank you for playing Dreams Amongst the Stars!

DevTeam has left the chat.

M.Mollen: Well, OK then. I guess that is one worry we can take off the table.

l33tpally: What do you think he meant by an ‘element in the new event’? I assume the event is all the craziness going on?

M.Mollen: Would be hard to say, without knowing more about what is actually going on. My people haven’t studied any of the sites first-hand.

Anonymous4: So, there are things you don’t know? Huh.

Anonymous2 has entered the chat.

Anonymous2: Oh, god, my head still hurts!

DarkAngel: What from, A2?

Anonymous2: That’s the thing. I don’t remember. Last thing I remember, I was going out for some drinks on Dimiya, and there was a jolt or something. Don’t remember anything after that. My pod didn’t kick me out until a week later, real life.

GrimDark: So, you lost a month of in-game memories?

Anonymous2: Worse. When I logged back in, I was back at chargen, with a ‘rollover’ screen.

M.Mollen: Sounds like someone got you with some of the Hundeherstellar nanites, or worse. Devs put the rollover system in after Jagloth got Exterminatused.

Anonymous2: The Legion shit, really?

M.Mollen: No, dev was just on, saying that there’s no more Legion, pretty emphatically. But there are other things that could trigger a rollover, like getting caught in a death loop.

Scholar: Hmm. Interestingly enough, there’s been a series of rollovers in the Confederacy. I wouldn’t have thought to go looking until it was mentioned.

Inquisitor: Sounds like someone is being naughty.

Lucio: Someone has definitely been naughty. The Empress had a vision trance, and one of the things she mentioned was a ‘fallen Nomad’ that became the core of a new machine, along with sundered souls and other stuff.

M.Mollen: Well, that’s not good.