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Castle Wind
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>Also far too short to reach high shelves on your own. Speaking of which, how do you deal with that?
Maybe if you weren’t such an ignorant piece of slime mold, you’d realize that being a head under Rokoa’s size still makes me bigger than most of my species. Good job making short jokes about basically all neumono, you fucking racist.
>Protojetalium grapple hooks, I assume. Hopefully not of the breast-launched variety.
Breasts make terrible launch platforms. They’re too soft for accuracy, absorb kinetic energy that should go into the shot, and are a lot harder to swing for momentum.
>...sorry, but I think I'm going to be giving you that face for a while now. That's just creepy. And sounds hella uncomfortable.
Hey, I was just talking about how great my rack is. I’ve got protojetalium jammed up inside all kinds of places when I’m not using it! Use your imagination, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. And then you can go off and enjoy those thoughts by yourself for a while, since you’re obviously the kind of person whose mind goes there. If you see eroticism everywhere or get squeamish so easily, there’s no room for you in the biological sciences.
>Someone explain to me how [Rokolo and Captain America] are similar.
Because science was done to me and it put me at the best that my species can be. Don’t overthink it. Unless your problem is me implying Captain America isn’t sexy? I can see how that could offend you.
>How the hell does a CAI clone itself, anyways?
CAI can’t copy themselves, no, but that’s not what happened. Think of it more like a parasitic wasp larva relationship.
>Strong as you [and Polokoa] are you two are the only ones who can really understand each other
Hey, don’t look at me. She’s the one with the problem.
>I hated the idea that a Polo-Rokoa chimera would "want" to be queen
You think you can hide from me!? Absorbing the equivalent of a few hundred academic qualifications has given me the ability to sense when someone is being wrong nearby. And the way you’re wrong is that what you want doesn’t have shit to do with being becoming a Queen! You can become a King or Queen even if it’s the last thing you want. Now I’m going to have an itch unless I tell you what’s what, so sit down.
The transition from normal neumono to ‘royalty’ has been studied a lot, not least by me and my associates. First thing I want you to understand, since you’re alien and have a case of not getting it, is that a neumono Queen or King isn’t like any kind of leader that other species have. It can seem like they are, if you’re ignorant. A conquering warrior, or a charismatic leader, or someone who defeated the previous Queen in a contest, or who gets heralded by some superstitious omen, they all can become a ruler-type, but those events aren’t what does it! They’re only consequences or manifestations of the underlying process, which happens on a much deeper level, down in the realm of visceral feeling and instinct and collective subconscious. Our ancestors probably had Queens well before we had any decent intelligence. So, before I go any further, be sure to take home that it’s an organic process. Evolution leaves a lot of mess behind. Tangled up as it is in an overlap between physiology and psychology, it’s pretty much impossible to say there are absolutely hard, objective rules. If you study it enough, you’ll know there are lots of weird things that go on.
Now, that said, there are three basic qualifications you generally seem to need to have to become Queen. Or King. The first two are about being the right kind of person, two qualities that tend to be evident in the majority of Queens, Kings, and in those pre-Queen/King individuals that were lucky enough to get adequately documented before ‘Coronation’: First, that you need to be a person who has strong emotional influence over others. You could be an amazing beautiful person who inspires everyone to fall in love with them, for example. Or, you could be a foaming hothead who whips everyone into a frenzy. You could be a cool reliable person who’s good at calming everyone down, or you could be a psychotic terror who makes everyone tremble in fear. It could be anything, really, so long as it comes down to you being able to move people somehow.
Second, you need to be a person who easily accepts responsibility for others. Maybe a better way of saying it would be that you ‘take ownership’ over other people. This one is a little harder to explain, the concept comes more easily to neumono than more individualistic species. Queen- or King-type people generally give little or no thought before interfering with other people’s lives, seldom hesitating before being pushy or manipulative. You could say they show a lot of compassion, if you want to be nice, or else you could say they have an instinctive predisposition for meddling. Instead of minding their own business or shrugging things away as not their problem, they’ll come swinging in and go ‘no, that’s wrong, you’re going to do things this way instead’; and, with pre-modern neumono especially, they’ll seldom question whether they have any right to do that. They might be nice and gentle about it, or more likely they might not, but either way they’re not the types to let things be. Anyway, this one is part of why I’m not a Queen. I’m concerned with my own goals! I have friends, and I’ll try help them if they have a problem, but ultimately if other people are screwing themselves up, that’s their right, I’d say. I have enough on my plate without taking ownership of their issues. Queens and Kings don’t think that way so much. That often makes aliens uncomfortable with them.
In some old neumono cultures, people who had these two qualities were often recognized even before becoming Queen or King. Translations are a bit tricky, but they’d be called things like Champion or Princess, or my favorite, which was saying they had the… the, hmm. That one’s really tricky, actually. Ralnama ho Nlu. Nloa? Lu-eh… fucking accents. It gets translated as ‘Sun’s Blood’ in historical and fantasy fiction, but ‘ralnama’ means empathic or spiritual descent, like you’ve inherited a piece of someone’s personality. Empathic relationships are more important than genetic ones, see? Aliens tend to have trouble getting that. I like it because it’s basically saying you’re huge and intense and you get in people’s eyes. Anyway, the ultimate point that I’m trying to educate you on is, neither of these qualities is about what you want or choose. You can try to train yourself to be like that, but it probably won’t work. It’s in your nature, or it isn’t. So it’s not in your control.
The final qualification is just that other neumono ‘adopt’ you as their ruler. Again, it doesn’t translate well, but it’s like neumono have a kind of a hole in their minds where a Queen or King fits. If you flip the little switch inside them that says ‘yes, you are the best, I’m yours’, and do that with enough people, then bam. Time to start buying bigger clothes. The interesting thing is, I don’t think you technically have to be in a hive for that to happen. That’s the way it’s always happened, but that’s because neumono instinctively reject anyone who’s not in a hive with them. If you can overpower that rejection, like what can very rarely happen with rogues, or if the rejection somehow wasn’t a problem, then theoretically any neumono, even a rogue, who was the right type and who had a bunch of other neumono start worshipping them, could get the internal triggers flipped that make the changes happen. I’ve gotten scorn for that theory (not to my face, obviously), but I think someone that we both know might just be an example of it.
Anyway. Short version: you happen to be the right type of person, which is not something you control because it’s a fundamental element of your personality, and then a bunch of other neumono get all submissive to you, which you also don’t control because it’s something they feel, not that they consciously choose. Then you become Queen. People who wanted to become Queen or King have done so, but there’ve been plenty of Queens and Kings who didn’t and just got it dropped on them. Hell, I’d say the latter is way more common, at least as an idea. There are lots of stories about hives on the verge of splitting in two, and the old Queen’s loyal champion discovers that, sorry, it’s time for a change and you’re the one who’s going to lead the betrayal of the old ways and start a big tragic fight that ends with you or your kin exiled or dead. Lots of angst.
Short short version: you’re wrong and stupid.
>I take it that by "more effective" you mean […]?
>More effective how? Rokoa implied at one point that Bioarmor essentially boosted your strength at the cost of increased physical stress. Is there less stress, more strength, some other function we don't know about?
Alright, I’m going to explain how bioarmor works, just keep in mind that you’re morons and I’m not going to bother talking about stuff you won’t understand. Go get degrees in biology and chemistry and a masters in nanotechnology and then maybe you can hear me talk about intracellular energy transfer and molecular electromagnetic effects and chemical recapture microcircuits without going glass-eyed. Sadly, that means that the first way that bioarmor makes you stronger has to get skipped. The line that gets repeated is that bioarmor ‘feeds energy’ to your muscles, which is technically sort of accurate but really doesn’t explain anything. Too bad.
Second, bioarmor can form itself into exomuscular systems. Once it’s mapped your body, it forms contractile fibers through its fourth layer, and with its connection to your nervous system at key points, it picks up the impulses you send to your muscles and reinforces them with its own, adding more raw power to your movements. It’s another layer of muscles on top of your own. And the bigger you are, the longer the muscle fibers can be, and that makes them stronger. Simple, right? A similar system in the third layer is also part of the suit’s protective capabilities, forming shock absorbers that reduce stress from impacts. The density of both these artificial muscle systems also protects against cutting, and though it isn’t part of what makes you stronger, there’s a mild electromagnetic charge over the surface of the suit which provides electrical shocks a path of lesser resistance than your own flesh, and that can slightly deflect plasma weapons. It won’t stop you being cut in half with a plasma sword, but it can maybe turn a less-than-direct hit into a glancing hit and a glancing hit into a barely-touching hit.
Finally, a biosuit can reduce or eliminate the body’s natural limitations on its own power. You know about hysterical strength, right? In most organisms, the body refuses to use its muscles to their maximum capacity, since doing so would cause intense, potentially crippling damage by tearing tendons, cracking bones, et cetera. Those limits can be temporarily lifted in an emergency, associated with intense fear, rage, or good old insanity. Biosuits can hack into your nervous system to do the same, to lesser or greater extent that’s generally linked with their rating, for safety. At the same time, they reinforce and support your body so that the damage you do to yourself gets cushioned. You’ll still be wrecking yourself, but not as fast or as hard as a person without the suit. Ironically, this makes the suits a little less effective for neumono, comparatively speaking, since we have less of those limits and they get switched off more easily by stress. Our bodies are more easy about letting themselves get hurt, since we regenerate, but it’s still a thing. And still better to have the suit on than not, especially considering we have an advantage that more than compensates for that.
So, how does being curvier make any of this work better? Simple! It’s all about how much power the suit has to work with. Where does a biosuit get its power? From you! The suit feeds off spare electrochemical energy, body heat and a couple of other things in ways that you’re too uneducated to understand. Neumono get that advantage I just mentioned here: since we naturally run hot, our suits receive more power than other species’ do. Regardless of species, though, the more of your body that the suit can be in contact with, the more of that energy it can take from you and the more it can put into making you stronger. Just being a fatass doesn’t work well (a sphere has the least surface for its mass, of course), but having lots of in-out curves and bumps and nooks all increases the exposure. You’d think it’d be a problem to have more areas of the suit that can’t directly access your muscles, like breasts, but the suit reconfigures those spots for superior energy management instead, so that issue is compensated for, and in terms of overall combat effectiveness rather than raw strength, it’s more of an advantage to have them than not. Of course, the suit overcharges your metabolism so that you produce more excess energy for it to collect, so you get hungry and tired faster, in addition to the slow buildup of self-damage from your muscles being overclocked. Hence, “boosted strength at the cost of increased physical stress”. The advantage of increased surface contact is more strength and more stress, but if you weren’t willing to make that trade you wouldn’t be wearing bioarmor to begin with.
Of course, I have a neurosuit, not a biosuit. Most people assume it’s basically a next-gen version of the biosuit, and I let them think that, but it would be more accurate to say that I’m just a nanotech cyborg, or that I have the technological equivalent to the venom symbiote from spiderman. Lot of old human comic references today, huh. My CAI can reshape my protojetalium to imitate a biosuit’s functions, and I do that whenever I fight anyone seriously, but it’s honestly the same as using it to imitate any other piece of technology. Works the same way when I do, though, just a lot better. The system is smarter, more efficient, has some extra features, and so on, mostly by virtue of actually having an AI. The downside of that is that it has power and processing centers which are a little vulnerable, but it’s a good trade.
So, did I alleviate any of your chronic misunderstanding?
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