Monomachiarum is a multifandom experiece that takes the characters into the chaotic future of the 30th century in the great expanse of space. Our lore is a combination of worlds brought in from other franchises, lore created by the site founder, and user-submitted information in order to make a vast and diverse setting. Add your pages to our grand story no matter who your characters might be or where they came from before. This is a place meant to explore possibilities and open new doors. Canons and OCs are welcome, just so long as they can fit into the setting with a little bit of reasonable modification here and there if necessary. So what are you waiting for? Join us today! If you'd like to get to know our community more, feel free to check out our Discord channel.
May 2023 It's been hectic this last year, but we are alive and celebrating our fifth year of adventure and tales. A lot has been worked on to help make the Monoverse one that everyone can enjoy and explore their story while becoming a part of the greater cosmos. All of you, new and long time players, stay safe, and see you in the Sea of Stars!
She ended the communications link, now arcing through Daiban's atmosphere and heading for the glow of the Commerce Quarter. With a sigh, Samus flopped herself backward into the support of her seat, breathing in as she processed it all. General Be-hek would take close to two weeks to arrive at the Naraka system. She could make it in a matter of two to three days at full speeds, even with the needed cool down periods. She'd be basically in and out before the Maw'kin military leader could have a chance to even reach halfway there.
That said, she also wanted to take Eresh with her as back up on case someone else knew about Agár. The pirates' own logs on Zebes had indicted that they intercepted a Federation science ship in the system, and that was where they had gotten their first metroid from. No doubt they had made return visits to raid the native population for new control specimens. Part of why she didn't want to go alone. Admittedly, two Maw'kin soldiers were better than one, but time was short.
After a moment, Samus pulled up the navigation charts from Zebes, getting the route she needed for traversing into the deep core via the slipstream. About three to four days at a safer cruising speed through the hyperspacial realm, given adjustments for any gravitational echoes that may lay along the route. Unsure as to if these "dark matter" drives that the Maw'kin used were either slipspace based or more akin to the hyperspacial slipstream that the Tho'ha flux drives accessed, Samus erred on the side of caution and isolated the safest route, along with the needed galactic coordinates for reaching the Naraka system and a reminder note that the core was known to be crawling with rogue singularities and pulsar that might not register in existing charts, then sent them to the general via an encrypted burst transmission.
There was a reason the Federation did not send more expeditions into the deep core…
Clearance to land at her leased hanger came. She keyed into the auto-landing cycle, laying back in the cushion of her seat and breathing slowly. She'd get some rest in, then harass Eresh to make sure he was ready. Would be a good idea to make sure he had a futon or something similar to sleep on, as she only had the one bed big enough barely for her in the back quarters. Plus, he was around two and three quarters meters tall. Her ship hadn't been built with Maw'kin in mind, after all.
Post by Ash'kar Be-hek on Jan 16, 2023 1:23:58 GMT
Ash'kar wasted little time in programming the route coordinates into the Itorash's navicomputer, then contacted the other members of the war council to inform them that an urgent matter offworld required his attention before then contacting planetary control to inform them of his departure. If Samus's ship was as swift as she implied, then he would need every second to arrive at this silenced Nest. The fact that Samus had given him the coordinates in spite of everything she had both stated and implied about the mission and how long it would take for her to arrive did nothing to allay his concern that something truly dangerous awaited. For a brief moment, Ash'kar wished that he could speak with Na'kira. Though technically equals, the spiritual leader of the Mawkin was a source of ever-flowing wisdom, and at times, he wondered if the ancient Mawkin matriarch might possess indeed the gift of far seeing. However, she was too distant, on the new homeworld of Ili Tarin Nalima, and time would not wait for such indulgences. The moment he was given the all clear to depart Daiban, he made all speed into high orbit, where he could safely begin transit into what his people knew as darkspace, and that others called Slipstream space. Less than an hour from the end of his conversation with Samus, the general was within Slipspace, making his way towards the gods only knew what. It would be a long journey, and were it not for his habit of keeping his vessel supplied at all times while in port, he might well have lost precious hours more. Hopefully, all would be well when he arrived.
For his part, Eresh had been productive while he waited for Samus to either contact him.. or more likely arrive at his door step abruptly - she did so like pop up when one least expected her to. After taking the time to pack a few final supplies, the exiled Mawkin decided to then prepare a quick meal, both for himself and for the Huntress when she arrived.. for another thing he long sense learned: Samus was typically ravenous after a mission or trip and nearly ate almost as he did.. it paid to be a considerate host in that regard.
Now all he needed to do was wait for her arrival, it was likely very soon now, from the time table she gave him.
It was another hour or two before Samus arrived at her rather sparse apartment in the residential quarter, making sure she grabbed a few data sticks and a pair of tablets and shoving them into her carry bag. A moment after pausing and getting a quick sniff of herself, and realizing it had been nearly a week since her last real shower to clean off.
Twenty minutes later, after her refresher had given her base armor a scrub down, Samus herself was just as cleaned up, pulling the light armored pants and jacket on after getting a fresh set of undergarments on. The blonde took a moment to replace and restrap her wristcomp to her right arm, grabbing the packed carry bag before grabbing a loaded up cold case as well and leaving to let the security locks seal her apartment behind her.
Another fifteen minutes would pass as she awaited the called airspeeder to take her back to her hanger. She might have given Eresh two days, but Samus was not one to put off her own preparations. Even after getting into the rear passenger seat and programming in her destination to the automated driver, Samus would nervously keep her eyes on the windowports. For some reason, this whole situation was now making her on edge.
But why? Maru had just asked her to recover the research data at Agár and find out what had happened to the Thé'nau tribe scientists who had been there. It wasn't as if she'd been tasked to go in and wipe out the Metroids natively living there, though with how the situation with the Kromus had been going, that kind of mission from the Federation might not surprise her. That or the Federation Congress just begged for the Sangheili to go in and glass the planet to be sure.
Which left her with recovering what she could before that happened either way. And that thought left her realizing that she didn't have time to waste.
A sigh escaped her lips, leaving her to dwell on those thoughts during the trip back to the hanger, and as she packed up what she had gathered into her ship, then keyed in a certain "bird's" contact frequency. "Eresh, slight change of plans. I need you to meet me at hangar 117 at the Al'den'th complex in the commerce quarter. We need to leave sooner than later, no sense dicking around." A pause as she thought on the matter again. "And bring a sleeping mat. You're taking the floor."
Having just finished with preparing the meal for the two of them, his own comm beeped to life as he received a call from Samus, well that was right on time.
“Hello, Samus, I had just made -“ he then paused as she asked that he meet her at a hangar, and he felt his feathers fluff up in surprise. He had expected her to not want to waste that much time.. but to accelerate the time table so drastically? That was out of character. Nonetheless, he would give a chuff of acknowledgment.
“I will be there as soon as possible. And worry not, I accounted for the.. cozy dimensions of your vessel.” He would then end communication and take a step back. Whatever this mission was.. it seemed to be much more important than he initially thought. Or there was something else, things he was not privy to that was causing the Hunter to grow anxious. Either way, he would gather all of his packed supplies- and boxed up the meal he just whipped up- and called for a transport. Twenty minutes later he was on his way to Hangar 117.. silent in thought.
The Thrush had already warmed its engines back up by the time Samus had packed up everything she had gathered from her apartment. She wanted to make sure she had everything she needed for what could be a week or so out in the unknown regions. More to the point, she needed to be ready in case she was out there longer than planned for. It was a simple recovery run, but the young hunter had long learned never to assume anything was simple in her line of work.
She was just finishing the last diagnostic tests on all the stasis fields when she heard the alert that someone had entered her hanger. A quick look at the security feed revealed that Eresh had arrived and was waiting with his own armor on and some luggage of his own. Good. She keyed the entry port and sighed as she sat down at the main console. "Let's hurry up and go. Gut instinct says that we may be looking at some competition for what we're looking for if we stall too much."
Once he could get aboard, that's when her impatience would take over and send the tiny gunship screaming out of Daiban airspace and out to the minimum distance needed to jump into the slipstream.
And as the door opened and he was able to enter, he would tilt his head at her abrupt demand for them to leave. “Well that’s a strange way to say ‘Hello Eresh, it’s good to see you. How have you been? Would you like any help stowing away your equipment?’.” He said in what was clearly a light hearted teasing- in her own voice no less. Despite his levity, he would climb aboard her ship, placing his luggage down as he knelt behind her chair, placing a box on the console, the smell of cooked shellfish wafting from it.
“I figured you would be hungry, and I seem to be right.. seeing how cranky you sound at the moment.” He quipped, though a large hand would lay on her chairs shoulder rest, his tone changing as he then added. “This mission is quite serious, I take it.”
There was hesitation as Eresh spoke in a more serious tone about the situation. They had just jumped into the slipstream, tearing across space and time at speeds that compared to nearly three hundred and forty lightyears an hour. They'd arrive within around three and a half days at current speed, which, as much as she was in a hurry, was far safer and sustainable than pushing the flux drive at full speeds and incurring delays due to cooldown periods.
And it let her get more rest before they arrived.
"My father asked me to go in and recover the work that the Thé'nau tribe was conducting at Ili Agár Nalíma." A pause came as she set in the navigation protocols and got up from her seat. "We should be there in about three to four days. Go ahead and pack the food in the cold unit, I'm going to get myself set in and get some sleep before the stasis field cycles in for the trip." Boot soles rattled against the flooring as Samus headed into the back area of the cabin and turned into the tiny and barely sufficient sleeping quarters. "Stasis kicks in after five hours. Best get yourself set for sleep before then."
He would stand up and scoop up the box, placing it in the cold storage unit as he then sat down in a corner of the ship, back to the wall. “I expected the trip to take longer, impressive. But before we go into stasis, I was to ask you something. Is that alright, Samus?”
His tone was still quite serious, and though the red lenses of his helmet betrayed nothing of his facial expressions, it wasn’t hard to tell that he seemed somewhat concerned by this headlong sprint to a planet neither of them truly knew a thing about.
“You’re always quite direct, but it’s rare to see you this impatient, borderline reckless. Is there something about this world we’re going to that I should be made aware of? You have never been this reticent about an assignment.. it makes me believe I’m walking into a situation that I’m not fully equipped to deal with properly.”
His tone was relaxed and even, though he was blunt and to the point.
Her instincts made her hesitate. Eresh was a friend…but he wasn't Chozo. Not in the fashion of how she was raised. Yet…he deserved some answers.
"There was a Thó'ha project being researched there, to deal with some hyperparasite lifeform they called an 'erris'." After another pause, Samus decided to just throw caution to the winds. "It's where the Pirates were getting the metroids from, they were created for dealing with these erris, and my father wants me to see if I can recover anything that may have been left behind by whatever happened to the Thé'nau."
She turned back to look at the Mawkin, examining his reaction carefully. "The Federation does not know about the Chozo being involved in what made the metroids. Hell, I haven't even told Admiral Dane about it. The elders actually tried keeping Maru and I from knowing about it at all, and only told us because Grey Voice decided at the last minute that we needed to know."
After a few moments, she turned back to face the forward canopy, the streaks of rainbow prismatic light and the smearing "tunnel" of the slipstream cascading outside the lithe gunship. "I want to be able to trust your people, Eresh. The Thó'ha are all but extinct, sterilized by some affliction they have not been able to figure out the source and cause of in over two thousand years since they realized that their birthrates were plummeting."
Again, she paused, this time with a pained look in her eyes, the scars on her face scrunching up. "Papa is the only one left who hasn't been affected by whatever it is…and it does the Chozo no good because there are no fertile formels left…"
A sigh as Samus felt the hurt hit her. "I should get to my bed before the stasis kicks in. Systems will wake us up about twenty minutes before we drop back to normal space." A creak emanated from the cockpit chair as she pushed herself to her feet and made her way to the rear cabin. "A few days and we'll be there. Get some rest now while you can."
Eresh was silent as he listened, but his body posture was attentive as he processed what she had told him. So that was what this was about.. no wonder she was so hesitant, and the scope of the potential danger was now revealed to him. Suddenly he was quite glad that she trusted him to the point that she would extend this offer to him at all.. and to share these truths- she was putting a great deal of faith in him.
But when she recounted the tragedy of what had befallen her people, his shoulders noticeably sagged;an empathetic, if subtle, display of grief over her predicament and the helplessness she felt because of it. And so he did something completely unexpected as she shuffled past him towards the rear cabin.
“Wait.”
He held up one long arm in front of her, and then moved to a crouching position in front of her. And then slowly, deliberately he would gently press the cold metallic forehead of his helm against her own, one hand gently cradling the back of her head with one hand. And he just knelt there for a few moments, saying nothing before he quietly spoke up.
“This was very brave of you to do, and I’m thankful that you trust me enough to gamble with the mission’s success to bring me along. We may not be of the same tribe, or even the same ideological sect, but you can trust the Mawkin to do our part to help your people in whatever ways we can. And if not.. you can trust me to be at your back,like how the wind holds the Raptor aloft.”
And he then let go, scooting back abs moving aside. Again he was silent for a few moments, but he then spoke again.”Rest well. I will see you again when we both wake.”
The sickly green planet moved uneventfully through its orbit around a yellow-white star and the stellar class singularity that companioned the glowing sphere of plasma. A stream of stellar matter swirled around the point of pure void black, jets of high speed gasses shooting from the black hole's poles.
The distant stars flickered as space folded in on itself to the appearance of the lithe compact gunship known as the Thrush Eterna, flecks of prismatic shards tumbling in space around the emergence point for brief moments before evaporating away. The ship raced carefully into the system, curving toward the outer terrestrial world and racing though the void to reach its destination.
the things that you might like don't grow inside of me
It was good to be back.
It had been a year and a half, nearly two full years since they'd woken. Been pulled out of cryosleep to find that not only had they drifted far, far from home, but that nearly four centuries had passed. Woken to find a galaxy that had largely moved on without them. Loved ones long since dead and gone, institutions that they had built their lives around and pledged their loyalties to either lost to time or changed by it into entities that were only vaguely recognizable. A great deal of time lost.... but not necessarily wasted.
To say that the last several months had been productive would've been an understatement, and in spite of all that had transpired it seemed that the galaxy they'd woken to was one that still needed them.
Positioned off to the side of the tactical display that ran from the bridge's floor to ceiling, an olive skinned woman of fairly short stature - barely topping out at five feet - dressed not in the olive gray naval fatigues that she was used to but instead a uniform of dark blue that matched the clothing of the other bridge officers present in the room. It wasn't the only thing that had changed, either, as the bridge itself was no longer where it used to be, having been buried deep in the center of the Anvil in a manner not dissimilar to how the Valiant class had been designed. A great many things had been altered when the Euclid's Anvil was set to be overhauled during her time in dry dock, turning basic repairs and maintenance into a project over a year long as older technologies were removed and gutted to be replaced with their far newer equivalents. While the UNSC emblems and logos had been left as they were at Captain Caulfield's personal request, the Anvil herself had been reborn into something that only vaguely resembled the original vessel - packed with enough firepower now to openly challenge almost any Covenant designed vessel of her crew's era.
It was a strange feeling to be commanding something so new yet so familiar... as was it to now be stationed here, Pavarti Caulfield's dark eyes resting on the holographic display meant to simulate the view offered by the old bridge's observation windows, practically impossible to distinguish from the real thing. The starfield beyond it was familiar, but the yellow and green world below and off to the side was not.
While the Anvil had been technically finished with her refits for at least two months the ship hadn't been properly deployed until now, stuck running in system shakedowns in Sol and engineering tests while awaiting the rest of her crew that had elected to return to active duty to finish settling their personal affairs and being certified by FLEETCOM as fit to return. The mission itself was fairly simple, and about the best job one could ask for under the circumstances - plot a course to a system, fly there, wait, fly back. The briefing itself had suggested that Kromus presence was a possibility as did the fact that a Federation science ship had vanished while surveying the system a few weeks prior... Pavarti's gut told her that was unlikely. As did the in system scans. The Anvil had arrived in system almost two full solar days prior and there had been no sign of traffic, Kromus or otherwise. Plenty of interesting readings from the planet itself and that was even before ordering high altitude flyovers with the one Pelican they had and a handful of automated survey drones, but nothing to suggest that there was anyone else in system.
So why did she feel so uneasy?
It was suggested that there was a potential biohazard planetside as the resident Chozo nest had gone silent without warning, but-
"Ma'am, contact. Too small to be Kromus, sensor profile suggests our VIP. Operations says our fighter patrols should have visual in about fifteen seconds. Hailing them now." Ensign Park said, looking up from her station to address Caulfield directly as she spoke. Taking a half step back from where she'd been standing to bring the tactical display into her field of view, Caulfield took note of the six fighters that had been on rotation as a picket force breaking from their patrol route to intercept and identify the new contact.
A communications request was coming in just as Samus noticed the cruiser that hung in orbit over Agár. It had been over a year and a half, but she remembered that ship, what had happened aboard it.
This was…not unexpected.
A hand reached for the communications controls, tapping the glowing green key on the projected console. "This is Samus Aran aboard the Thrush Eterna, responding in the clear." A pause as she considered it. "It's good to see the old Anvil out and doing her work again."
Her eyes shifted back to see what Eresh's reaction would be. This was not a surprise to her, but she was not sure if she had warned him of her expectations of Confederation interests here.
The awakening from stasis was nothing new, he knew what to expect. Gradually getting up from his sitting position, he was about to ask Samus about what their next move would be when he saw the distant- yet rapid approach of Confederation fighter craft as they were then hailed by the cruiser.
His crimson lenses betrayed nothing, but behind them the Mawkin’s eyes narrowed as he crossed his arms. “I see that you neglected the part where a Confederation vessel was already on station, Ha’chidari.” He said, though his tone was decidedly cooler than it normally was.
“I do not mean to sound suspicious, but I feel as though my presence is made ever so slightly superfluous when there is an actual military garrison in place. So I do have to ask.. why bring me, exactly?”
His body language then loosened.
“More to the point… what are you hoping to hide from the humans, Samus?” He would then glance out the viewport, then back to her. “Two thoughts come to mind: The first being that you are just as surprised as I am, or you expected the Confederation or Galactic Federation to be here. And if the latter is the case, I’m inclined to believe that this data you’re here to collect is something you don’t want outside of Chozo hands.”