The Physiology and Psychology of the Nomad Vagrants I. Physiology
While tranquil, the time after the Nomad War was anything but easy for the remnants of those that were pulled through the Hypergate activated by Edison Trent. Vast swaths of emptiness, systems whose jump connections phased in and out sporadically, with little hope of accurately predicting when the next failure would happen, were commonplace, and the Vagrants later figured out that this was due to the gravimetric distortions caused by two black holes at the edges of the sector they had been transported to and interfered with the hyperspace currents connecting the jump anomalies. With the discovery of the Hyperspace Beacon and the subsequent decision to venture into finding out its merit towards the end of returning to Sirius, the Vagrants, although slowly, began to learn and adapt accordingly.
Other than the Slomon K'Hara in Sirius, the Vagrants' enemies were not petty little bipedal creatures stealing their heritage and hunting their spaceborne shells in the pursuit of ever greater technological inventions. What the Vagrants faced was the unpredictable force of nature itself that seemed to obey completely different rules than in Sirius, their native environment. One of the most noticable deviation from normal Nomad behaviour was that the Vagrants started prefering the safety of planets during periods of rest, which in itself also posed difficulties, like finding suitable places that permitted sufficient amounts of cosmic or residential radiation to reach them in order to recuperate. The reason for this change in behaviour were, again, based on natural occurances in the lost sector. Giant ion storms, gravimetrical surges that were strong enough to break apart moon-sized asteroids and wandering acidic nebulae pulled by the black holes framing the lost sector were not common, though the whole deemed them dangerous enough to seek shelter from them on planets, as their own gravitational well weakened the force of sporadic graviton surges, while ion storms and nebulae engulfing the stellar objects would not harm the Vagrants as long as they stayed underground. Over time, the Vagrants would adapt to the changed environment, causing their warforms to adapt more towards terrestrial stays than the Slomon K'Hara of Sirius, who prefered to remain spaceborne. The outer membranes of their vessels would turn less rigid than the crystalline structures that Nomad vessels consisted of in order to prevent easily-preventable fissures and other damage that would come with maneuvering underground and allowed a quick and easy mending of the occasional damage, but that wasn't the most outstanding divergence.
The fallout of a graviton surge cracking a once green planet's surface
Observed only scarcely, the Vagrants, in the time of their absence from Sirius, have developed the ability to create temporary hyperspace currents to traverse long distances rather than relying on jump anomalies, which were often prone to destabilize or phase out, making their usage dangerous. While it was true that even the Vagrants didn't experience death quite like humans did, their resources were limited, and each vessel lost presented a huge setback. The root of this ability developed slowly and over a long process of trial and error that involved checking jump anomalies for their integrity and predicting when their inevitable collapse would occur. Over time, the Advisors acquired enough knowledge to predict when gravimetric currents would cross the two jump anomalies in their positions in Einsteinian space in order to 'phase align' them and allow safe passage. It was a means to an end, as it was necessary to avoid losses that were, under normal cirvumstances in Sirius, easily preventable. With the discovery of the ancient hyperspace beacon in what the Vagrants call 'the Abyss', the sector on the other side of the Sirian Hypergate, however, this changed. The concept of hyperspace jump modules was completely foreign to the Nomads at the time, thus it came as a surprise to know that their acquired knowledge of hyperspace currents could be harnessed in other ways. With the salvaged hyperspace beacon and ritualistic zeal, the Vagrants bent every effort towards the effective adaptation of this fantastic technology, as it hadn't taken long for the Advisors to figure out just what this technology could be capable of: Returning to Sirius.
Vagrant Slipstream Emitter
Infocard — Function, Form and Effect
Dissimilar to human jump devices, the Vagrants developed a means to 'feel' the ever-shifting Hyperspace currents that underlie every nook and cranny of Einsteinian space and are responsible for the spontaneous appearance and vanishing of jump holes in case two or more of these currents ever cross, thus creating a temporary connection of two points in Einsteinian space, which we call jump holes. The ability to know how hyperspace currents shift, writhe, and turn allows the individual Vagrant to use their 'weapons' to bombard a small nanometre of space in front of them with a cascade of tachyons and thereby create a little rift with which they enter a hyperspace current. The Vagrants usually take care that their younger Wanderers scout regions of space to relay to the others which currents to take, because otherwise, a jump could potentially lead anywhere and nowhere.
Just like with all Nomad machinations, the exact source from which an individual Nomad shell draws the enormous power to operate its weapon appendages or propel itself through space remains unknown, the secret only privy to the Nomads themselves, their Creators and maybe select few infected humans.
Vagrant Hyperspace Scanner
Infocard — Function, Form and Effect
Commonly found on smaller ships, these 'appendages' send out tachyon waves in a rhythmic fashion in order to allow the Vagrant to locate its own position relative to the hyperspace currents that lead to its current location from at least four systems away. The appendage is placed in the very centre of the Vagrant's propulsion section and shares the same energy source as the engine, which remains a mystery to human scientists until this day.
II. Psychology
The topic of a race's behavioral pattern are often inextricably intertwined with their habitat, their peers and the predators that are above them on the food chain. An animal that is prey to a stronger, faster raptor will necessarily have to favour those genes which display favourable traits to deal with the threat — in this case maybe a fur color that blends better with their surroundings and makes it harder for the predator to spot them, or a better social system, where one animal can 'warn' the others of an impeding threat in order to give them the chance to hide and thus live on.
Natural chasms provide extra cover for Nomad ships hiding under the surface
The Nomads never had this problem. As a product of an artificial creation process, every single nucleotide of their DNA was crafted for perfection, to create the unchallenged apex predator capable of overwhelming any opponent by sheer numbers for as long as they have the material to sustain their creation of warforms, or, in case numbers and brute force fail, to adapt to the threat and eventually overcome it by having learnt it. Imagine a creature that is the weapon itself, where there is no a clunky and unwieldy interface between human pilot and its ship, that moves through space like a human does on a planet's surface. In other words: The Nomads are used to being the very zenith of evolution, the curator of life, alpha and omega.
It was for that reason that the sudden shift of priorities that awaited them on the other side of the Hypergate that the Vagrants were, at first, completely overwhelmed with. Contrary to the Sirius sector, there was no lifeform that the Vagrants needed to fend off, making their entire skillset of hunt and kill obsolete. What they were woefully unprepared for was being exposed and alone, without the safety of their hives in Sirius to give them shelter. The new surroundings were new and foreign, filled with things that did not make sense. Many of those who were washed ashore with them wandered off into the distance in their confusion, never to be seen again. The longer they stayed and the more they explored, the more it became apparent that the methods they had so effectively used in Sirius were not effective at all. Stellar phenomena like described above made it impossible to set up completely in space, forcing the Vagrants underground, and even the acquisition of energy proved burdensome for the same reason, prompting the Vagrants to rely on the energy found inside a planet's core to sustain themselves, at the drawback of ultimately completely destroying the planet they had nested inside of, leaving it a cold, hollowed-out husk of stone in the end.
In Sirius, the enemy had been predictable. The Advisors of the Slomon K'Hara had known exactly what they were going up against and could prepare accordingly, though in the Abyss, the enemy was not humanity. The complete unpredictablity of the place slowly turned the Vagrants into paranoid and careful creatures, and this mindset dominates their Advisors until this day.
The Lesser Vagrants — Shared Ships III. The Lesser Vagrants — Form, Function and Appearance in the Hive
The Lesser Vagrants were a necessary step in warding off the hazards native to the Omicrons of Sirius. The Core, the Order, and other assorted humans were never keen on seeing Nomads around them, and therefore it was appropriate to find a solution to protect their own interests. Equipped with little more than basic instincts and the biological armaments to boot, the Lessers are the unquestioning defenders of the Vagrant Mindshare in the Omicrons and Omegas. Mostly encountered in the deeper Nomad regions of Omicron Lost, Delta, Minor, Iota, Psi and Major, these creatures are little more than drones, akin to white blood cells intended to fight foreign intrusion of any kind. Anything that is not infected or a Nomad is up to be targeted in these regions, while outside of it, the Lessers usually yield to the commands of the more intelligent Vagrants that accompany them.
Warning: These ships are made to fight. Do not expect anything else from them.
Lesser Vagrants — Shareds
Ship Name
Ship Location
Ship Class
Vagrant.Lesser.Althaea
Omicron Delta
Rabisu
Vagrant.Lesser.Aitna
Omicron Delta
Rabisu
Vagrant.Lesser.Klytia
Omicron Delta
Adad
Vagrant.Lesser.Klymene
Omicron Delta
Adad
Vagrant.Lesser.Clio
Omicron Iota
Rabisu
Vagrant.Lesser.Lycorias
Omicron Iota
Adad
Vagrant.Lesser.Daeira
Omicron 99
Rabisu
Vagrant.Lesser.Nesaee
Omicron 99
Adad
Vagrant.Lesser.Ephyra
Omega 55
Rabisu
Vagrant.Lesser.Okyroe
Omega 55
Adad
Vagrant.Lesser.Ianeira
Omega 58
Rabisu
Vagrant.Lesser.Philyra
Omega 58
Adad
IV. The Assassins
A failed attempt at showing strength, the Vagrants first tried using outdated Sascya warforms in order to protect their interests. What followed was only natural, as their creations failed to live up to expecatations, given that human technology had advanced in unfathomable ways and outmatched their own. The Sascyas were the predecessors of the Rabisu, before the Vagrants appropriated the newer warform of the Slomon K'Hara in Sirius through meticulous study. Now, the Sascyas serve a different purpose within the Vagrant Mindshare. Due to the prodigious amounts of energy cysts that were the reason this warform was once so feared, it turned out to be the perfect pick when it came to milling through a planet's interior, something that the Vagrants, contrary to the Slomon K'Hara, do excessively. As of right now, the Sascyas serve as quasi miners, drilling ever deeper into the heart of the secluded Planet Moros in the Omicron Lost system, a place that is zealously guarded against anything non-Nomad or infected by the Vagrants.
Warning: These ships will go out of their way to avoid fighting you.
Infocard
Nomad "Dione" Vagrant
A modified form of the fearsome yet outdated Sascya morph, the Dione was intended by the Vagrants to be a heavily armed combat drone until a disastrous skirmish with a wing of Human fighters shattered their preconceptions. Startled by how quickly human technology had advanced since their twenty year exile the Vagrants hastily relegated the archaic Dione to a less combat oriented role. By reconfiguring its extensive array of weapon cysts and softening its outer membrane the one-time heavyweight was repurposed into an effective tunnel borer, currently being used to create a new hive for the Vagrants deep beneath the crust of planet Moros. Due to the softened shell needed to survive its subterranean maneuvering the Dione is much less robust than its original form and, as such, a lone morph will display less aggressive tendencies towards intruders for the sake of its own survival.
Since the faction has by now (6th of August 2017) progressed to the point that two of our people currently are close to fulfilling the criteria necessary to be allowed to fly capital vessels, the following is a roster of available capital ship slots. The faction will as of now not use more than the number below, though it might be amended if the faction grows beyond this capacity, which seems unlikely. There may currently be only one Marduk, three Irras, and three Nammus at any given time. If a player progresses from a lesser to a higher capital ship, they vacate the slot they currently hold and take a superior one, i.e. if a Nammu becomes an Irra, an Irra slot gets taken and a Nammu slot is freed.
The Nomad Castes — A Society of Structures I. Introduction
It is a distinctively human idea that each individual should have a choice in what they want to do with their lives and which function they want to fulfil within society at large. Contrary to humans, a Nomad never gets a say in what they are supposed to be doing within the hive. Their society is built around the idea of castes. Each caste has a specific function that they perform for the hive and a strict hierarchy is enforced within the hive at any given moment. There are three Nomad castes. While the Incubus is technically a fourth, it has not been included here since they only play a secondary role within Nomad society.
1. The Wanderers
The most common caste of Nomad is the Wanderer. Wanderers are pretty much all smaller Nomad ships, Morphs, Labraids, Adads, Predators, Sascyas and Anzus.
Wanderers are the youngest Nomads. Their minds are immature and curious. Within a hive, their task is to protect, explore and to gather information and resources. Since smaller ships are the easiest ones for the Nomads to build, Wanderers can be employed en masse in order to ward off a threat. In doing so, they proceed with a recklessness that is alien to any human pilot. While human pilots have a desire to survive a contact, a Wanderer does not have the same reservations and will very well sacrifice itself if it is the most efficient thing to do in a situation.
Unique to their caste, Wanderer ships have the ability to enter a 'sleeping' state, in which they shut down sensory input and all unnecessary functions. This allows them to travel vast distances in what feels to them like seconds, simply by picking up momentum and entering their sleeping state, thereby letting the momentum carry them to their destination. Wanderer ships are the smallest, and therefore, they are the most vulnerable as well. Entering their sleeping state allows their bodies to recover small amounts of damage.
Even Nomads need to gather resources in some form, and this task is delegated mostly to the Wanderers. Similar to bees bringing back pollen to their hives, Wanderers are able to detect valuable elements within rock formations, slicing them free with their weapons and making the dust 'stick' to their hulls using the microbacteria of their veils, which function like human shields. Afterwards, they return to the hive, where they shed their coat of bacteria together with the gathered resources. A Nomad hive usually has a dedicated area for Wanderers to drop off their cargo — a crude cargo bay.
2. The Advisors
Other than the Wanderers, the Advisors' role is a more administrative one. The Administrators are the brains behind the movements of Wanderers. Advisors have access to any information relayed through the Mindshare network and can use it to assess situations and make decisions based on what they know. While the Wanderers carry out attacks on intruders, the Wanderers do not question why their movement is necessary or even effective. They do not question whether the hive actually needs the resources they are gathering. They simply follow the command given to them by an Advisor, because thinking is the job of an Advisor, and not of a Wanderer.
This increased autonomy affords the Advisors an increased amount of 'personality'. Given that Wanderers are closer to threats than Advisors are, Advisors are also way less likely to die than Wanderers, which makes it easier for them to develop. While personality within the hive is not the same as human personality, Nomads are able to pick up a set of characteristics, quirks and habits over the course of their lives. The longer that life lasts, the more of these they can gather. These quirks can be something as miniscule as the way a Nomad approaches before attacking a threat, or they way they declare their intent towards humans. Some Nomads, for example, do not communicate to the human directly but simply approach aggressively and start shooting, while others might take a few moments to actually try to telepathically communicate visions of misery and death to the human before attacking.
Wanderers flying as pair
Given the Advisors' large intake of information over the Mindshare, they are able to predict the future based on patterns to some degree. The longer a Wanderer fights a human, for example, the more time an Advisor has to take in the movements of the human and discern patterns that it can use in order to predict the next movement. This is why some Order pilots have reported that the longer they fight a Nomad, the easier it seemed to get for them to read their minds and predict their movement. It is untrue that Nomads can read minds. Human and Nomad are way too different for that. What they experienced was merely a display of an Advisor's ability to evaluate patterns.
3. The Dreamers
Rarely observed by humans, most of the Nomads that takes any form within the material world is a construct envisioned by an entity within the Mindshare called a Dreamer. This mysterious caste of the Nomads usually remains intangible within the Mindshare, appearing only as an amalgamation of conscious thought within visions to those who have been exposed to Nomadic influence for a long time. Within the Mindshare, the Dreamers take the role of builders. Other than the Advisors, who could be likened to hivemothers or generals who consciously command the younger entities, such as the Wanderers, the Dreamers have long since left the desire to command, to control behind. Being the oldest entities within the Mindshare, the Dreamers have achieved a level of a consciousness that allows them to refrain from taking a physical appearance and remain completely within the Mindshare, which is in part why they are so difficult to observe.
Their age affords them with an unparalelled ability when it comes to what humans have called 'telekinesis', though the term is not quite fitting since it implies a level of magic being at work. A Dreamer usually manifests this ability by manipulating base elements, like iron, silver, gold, uranium, or Azurite and in doing so, shaping structures and quite literally willing them into existance. Of course, even a Dreamer can't create matter from nothing, and so any base materials would need to be provided for them to work with, which is usually a task that is delegated to the Wanderers by the Advisors, and their range and abilities are limited by how many Nomad vessels are present within an area. In other words, a Dreamer cannot manifest anything outside of the Nomad's direct reach.
Regardless of Nomad Lair, Dur-Shurrikun, the planetary lair being built by the Vagrants or even single Nomad ships, if it takes any form that is observable by humans, it is the work of a Dreamer entity within the hive in question - Advisors or Wanderers are too simple-minded to perform anything similar.
II. The Simurgh
Given the immense importance of a Dreamer within a Nomad hive, it becomes apparent that there are only precious few such entites in existance. Each hive usually only has a very limited number of Dreamer entites within their numbers. The Vagrants only have one: The Simurgh.
In Earth mythology, the Simurgh (/ˌsɪˈmərɡ/) is a benevolent mythical bird. In Iranian literature, it appears in various folktales and is said to purify the land and waters, bringing fertility and prosperity. In some stories, the Simurgh is said to gift three of its feathers to adventurers, usually after they performed a selfless or virtuous act in the presence of the Simurgh. The feathers, the bird tells the adventurers, are supposed to be burnt if they ever find themselves in trouble and the Simurgh would appear to help them. One example of the use of one of the Simurgh's feathers in one of these stories would be when an adventurer's wife entered labour and the birth promised to be complicated. The adventurer burned a feather and the Simurgh appeared for him, gifting him with the knowledge to perform a C-Section to save both the child and the mother.
The Simurgh of the Vagrants is an entity whose age predates even the earliest humanoids on Earth. As one of the first Nomad entities created by the Daam K'Vosh, its knowledge reaches back to before the Nomads went into their sleep from which they were finally roused by the Rheinland expedition, which ultimately set the chain of events leading to the Nomad War in motion. The name "Simurgh" it borrowed after the Nomads had learned about the threat that had infested the Sirius sector, which they had been commanded to colonize by the Daam K'Vosh. Within Nomad society, there is no need for names. Still, Nomads are by nature haughty and condescending creatures. This is one of the reasons by Nomad entities tend to take on the names of human deities, out of vainglory towards humans.
Human depictions of the mythical bird Simurgh vary greatly
The Simurgh in particular enjoyed the idea of the benevolent character of the mythical bird Simurgh. There was a precious irony to the thought of something so pure being turned against the species that had envisioned it. Fuelled by part egotism and amusement, the Simurgh takes great pleasure in partially assuming the role of the benevolent bird, and in the single instance a human has ever seen the Simurgh in a vision, it gifted the human with three Azuite shards — the Simurgh's own version of the three feathers. Overjoyed by the gift, the human wished for wealth, fame, and power with the three feathers, and the Simurgh granted this human its wish. This human's name was Tekagi, and today, he is remembered as a sorry soul enslaved to the Nomads via infection, though the way it has gotten to this point remain a mystery up to this day.
After the end of the Nomad War and with the activation of the Hypergate, the Nomads in Sirius had been almost destroyed. The activation of the hypergate within the Dyson Sphere had depleted most of the sphere's energy reserves and it would take decades before it would regenerate. The Nomads had been ill-adapted to the sudden entropy and scattered, mostly to congregate again in the adjacent systems of Omicron Iota and Omicron Psi.
However, those Nomads that were drawn into the Hypergate soon found themselves stranded on the other side. Being a relic of the Daam K'Vosh Empire that they didn't understand, the Nomads that would go on to become the Vagrants in the coming twenty years were unable to comprehend its complexity. Thus they became stranded in a hostile, foreign environment that was devoid of sapient life besides themselves — a hole they couldn't escape from; they christened it "the Abyss". In the years that followed, the Vagrants played cat and rat with the forces of nature while slowly learning that the ancient Daam K'Vosh Hypergate network had ejected them in a galaxy adjacent to the Sirius sector. As the years went by and the Vagrants slowly learned to use their own version of hyperspace travel, attempts were made to cross the distance between galaxies by using this technology. However, with no way of accurately pinpointing their destination in hyperspace, the more they tried, the more Vagrants were ultimately lost in the vast emptiness between the galaxies to die of entropy, as there is too little background radiation to absorb for them to sustain themselves.
That did not prevent them from continuing, however. It was their primary directive to colonize Sirius as their creators had intended them to. Most failed. But a tiny minority managed to cross the gap between the galaxies with a blind jump and those Vagrants would eventually settle on Moros, founding the first Vagrant hive within Sirius. Still, the problem remained. Every day, the Vagrant collective within the Abyss were blindly slinging Vagrants in the general direction of Sirius in the hopes that at least one in a thousand would make the trip. It was a tremendous waste of resources, but one that the Vagrants were compelled to due to their biological imperatives. They needed to find a solution.
While in Sirius, the Vagrants devised a plan to safely cross the gap between the galaxies. The most logical solution would be to create a super massive jump gate that would allow safe travel, but the massive distance would make it difficult to send back a Vagrant from Sirius to the Abyss in order to instruct the Vagrants there to construct the counterpart gate. While simply constructing a massive jump beacon was considered, the disadvantages vastly outweighed the advantages, as not only would the humans be able to see this beacon across Sirius as well, they would also either destroy it or steal it. An intermediary solution was envisioned.
II. The Gate-Bridge
While the direct jump to and from the Abyss was mathematically implausible, performing a hyperspace jump into the supervoid between the galaxies was relatively easy, although it would still mean sacrificing a sizeable number of drones. In order to conserve resources, the plan was to construct a regular jump gate in between the two galaxies that would allow the Vagrants to bridge half the distance without much risk. From there, it would be easy to cross the rest of the way and instruct the Vagrants still stuck in the Abyss to construct a counterpart gate within their own part of the universe, thus effectively connecting Sirius and the Abyss via an intergalactic gate bridge.
However, in order to complete this task, the Vagrants would need to muster considerable resources. They needed to construct the two jump gates on their side of the gate bridge at least. Usually, the Nomad Power Cells would be configured to carry out the construction process themselves by simply attracting the required matter similar to how the Nomad Gate in the Drake system regenerates after it was damaged. However, since a there is no useable matter within the supervoid between galaxies, the Vagrants would need to bring the materials to the site for the cell to absorb. A monumental task that would require aid.
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