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Enemy

SPOILERS BELOW: IF YOU ARE PLAYING FOR THE IFB SIDE, DO NOT SCROLL DOWN. THIS STILL APPLIES AFTER THE ENEMY HAS BEEN DISCOVERED.


























































































You are the Great Silver Dragon.
You are the only one left of your kind, the pinnacle and last remnant of the Silver Civilization. You were, once upon a time, worshiped as a living god by the Ethngar tribes. After an epic battle with the demons that lurked under the World-Mountain at the end of the First Age, You retreated to Your lair at the very top of it, to lick Your wounds and prepare Yourself for Ascension after dealing with the last of that rabble in order to secure true worship from the mammals below. But... You slept too long.

Thousands of years have passed. Civilizations rose and fell. Unbeknownst to You, the Last Great Mage War caused an antimagic shell to wrap the world, as a way to contain and safeguard its energies from outside interference -- and due to a mere accident of geography, You are outside of it. And You are now old, ancient, still wounded in soul and power as Your worshipers were led astray by the prophets of other gods: You could plunge to earth, but not survive the landing; You could trek down the mountain, but not survive the dampening of Your arcane metabolism.

Your cold, near-eternal mind believes itself to be superior to Fate, but Fate it was that preserved Your spirit - You woke up by a fluke.

Sometime in the more recent past, a band of foolhardy bearded mammals chose to unseal Your mighty mountain throne, and estabilish the settlement of Boatmurdered. Driven mad by the demons You fought so long ago, and perhaps by Your own influence as You lay in nightmares, each lost their body or their soul to the nethers. Except one. The one who woke You.

Barely susbsisting on what little grew even where the sky is black and the air so thin that only magical fire can exist, You pondered for years how to make things again as they should be. Dragons are thought to be immortal, but even their existence succumbs to entropy -- given that Your first attempt at healing yourself failed, You do not dare try again, as You woke up before your earthly time was up merely due to this lowly creature stumbling upon Your body and hoard after climbing up the great adamantine spire.

With the assistance of your one, deranged follower -- driven by obsession and fanaticism even as its flesh fails -- You awake Your unfertilized eggs, as Your kind did long ago, sacrificing a portion of what little is left of Your spirit to give sense and senses to a new spawn of the ancient Dragonslaves as they were before some of them won their freedom. Your main advantage in your quest to stave off decay is that, much as Your pride is hurt, You have been forgotten -- You will be the Enemy Unknown. You also sit on the very top of the sky, seeing all of the Khanate's plains -- Your only path to restoration is to become the lord of all You survey. Pierce the heavens; rebuild Your religion; devour the fertile lands below.

Whatever the path, there will be little margin for error if You are to reclaim the godhood that is Yours by right and escaped you by a hair. With cold-blooded precision, You start working on a new plan -- clearly Your directives must be reassessed.

Okay, details time!

You, the Great Silver Dragon, aren't really in much of a shape to move, what with the magical chains you yourself forged to tether you to the Spire, and the tubes going in and out of your stomach. However, you have quite a few assets.

First is the protobolds: spawned from your unfertilized eggs, they are soulless and nearly mindless, but you can give them a part of your spirit to learn what they've seen on death and to a degree decide what they will do.

Second, the dwergar, or cultsmiths: A small band of Dwarven survivors who you have enticed to serve you with all their being. They are all quite mad, and lost their souls to the demons below; having sealed the upper part of the Spire against demonic incursion, they serve you by maintaining your lair. Given their inferior warm-blooded metabolism, they cannot leave your (mostly) sealed lair, as the thin air outside would kill them rather than send them into hybernation so that they may awake upon reaching the lowlands.

Third, the Procreator, the great artifact that you constructed long ago to regenerate you and allow you to take on the supreme pain and effort of apotheosis. Clearly, it did not work... but it can be used to create at least the earthly shells of lesser beings, or parts of them. The mad dwarfs have already used it to great profit in creating cenocloth from the silk of Spire spiders: while the one who awakened you mangled part of the beautiful artifact by stabbing their machinery in it as she tried to use it for her own survival, it is the reason why you were awakened at all.

Resources are abstracted for the Enemy. The World-Mountain has an incredible wealth of raw material, including the adamantine spine that keeps it standing. The Enemy provides magical sustenance to Her troops and the Boatmurdered survivors have been warped by unadulterated chaos into runctioning on little more than raw obsession. The main scarce resource for the Enemy is variety of life: there isn't much of an ecosystem up above the clouds, and magic needs something to work from. The Progenerator can sustain a war machine, but it is a fickle construct, only working with one material for a time before refusing it -- it may even start to have a mind of its own.

Meat and foodstuffs should be harvested understanding that variety matters: it's more efficient to take home a pound of flesh, a pound of brains, a pound of bone and a pound of guts from ten cows than two whole animals.

Xeclo is easily available and comes from giant cave spiders. Occasionally one of the critters has to be caught and fed to the Progenerator.

Brass can be mined in quantities (there are plenty of copper and zinc deposits) and is used for making Warlock's Wheels, primarily. It is also the best armor material He has unless He chooses to start using adamantine.

Green glass can be produced at will. Clear glass requires some biomass for the potash.

Aluminium, or "dead" mithral, is also easily available -- the dwarves pound it out of bauxite, of all things -- and has the strength of copper with a tenth of the weight. It bends easily, and is more useful as armor than as support elements.

Mithral proper is something the Enemy creates from dead metal; it is required for making both the Warlock's Wheel

Xyphos is a coarser mesh than xeclo and is woven traditionally. Left in Progenitor waste goop and allowed to dry, it becomes a woodlike material that can be very easily shaped. Thin layers of it can be used as canvas.

Overall, the Enemy is mostly self sufficient. From the outside He requires fresh and diverse flesh and plantstuff (the less processed the better), any magic items that can be broken down for energy or components, gems for spells, and precious metals both for the Enemy's hoard and for some spells. Of course, the real resource that the Enemy seeks is the shock, awe and worship of the mammals below, so that he may shed the mortal coil and rebuild Her race. The Enemy is not aware of harmonite yet, but would likely find it very useful.

Critter types:

Asset types:

FINAL BIOMASS: 39 FINAL HOARD: 28 CURRENT FUEL: 17

Warlock's Wheel

A Warlock's Wheel is a metal disc enchanted to spin perpetually. The enchantment eventually consumes all the arcane energy in the vicinity, causing a localized failure in all other magic. This trick was discovered by a human warlock during the Second Age, and has been greatly improved by the Enemy: the "Wheel" that is used by him is in fact a complex stack of such disks that provide two counterrotating anchor points. This is used to power a number of things, from vat stirrers to airscrews.

Hearthflame

The Enemy can take Her dragonfire and use its awesome heat and push to lift a flying machine past the disjunction layer that seems to keep the world's air from drifting off into the outer void. This requires a specially crafted tube with a touchhole; it will also use up a lot of the air left in the flyer! The hearthflame can be used only once. If any flyer is supposed to remain in the world, it can be omitted. It can also be used to consume the flyer by fire if necessary, although using it as a weapon would be very haphazard.

Rock

Rocks with xeclo tails to slow them down just enough to allow for a crew to survive are a simple way to make landfall. Due to how they are launched, their landing site will be extremely hard to predict. Any crew are stranded in the world. Rocks come down quickly, cannot be intercepted in flight (and woe betide any who would try and succeed to be in the same spot as one!) and carry three small creatures.

Saucer (small)

An airscrew mounted on top a circular xyphos structure that is directed by shifting weight. Bowls can be used both for aerial fighting and transport. The small flying saucer (or bowl given the fairly tall shape) carries a high-power sling that can be loaded with grapeshot or balls, and has enough room for eight small creatures going up or sixteen going down. It is possible to fire through the fuselage in a pinch, the craft is radially symmetrical. It has no other weapon than the sling.

Saucer (med)

The airscrew is mounted inside the structure, and wings can be deployed to provide more forward speed in a glide. The sling is built into a tube that offers better range and ability to aim, at the cost of not being able to fire at any angle. It has enough room for ten small creatures (twenty) and is stable enough to allow firing bows or crossbows from arrowslits in the structure. It can carry medium creatures as well.

Saucer (big)

This would look more like a meat plate if anything, as it's oval and carries two airscrews. It has enough room for fifteen small creatures (thirty), and carries two slings, one that shoots forward and one that shoots either to the right or to the left. It can carry medium or large creatures as well.

Diplomacy

Action log:

During strategic turn 1, the Enemy has:

• Awakened, and set Her operation up for infiltration and conquest.
• Launched 2 rocks, losing 6 kobolds.
• Launched and retrieved 1 small saucer to provide the initial biomass.

During strategic turn 2, the Enemy has:

• Launched 2 rocks, losing 6 kobolds.
• Launched and immolated 1 small saucer, losing 6 kobolds.
• Launched and retrieved 1 medium saucer, retrieving 8 different types of tissues, losing 2 kobolds, and capturing a viper.
• Caused 3 casualties amongst the Floral Brigade.
• Caused 9 casualties amongst civilians or raiders.
• Finished setting up Her infrastructure and built a mental map of what's where.
• Become aware of the fact that the Floral Brigade is reusing xeclo, the fact that there are roughly four major factions in Ethengar, the fact that demihumans are still quite prevalent and there are still lizardmen in the hills to the south of the World Mountain, and the fact that with the exception of Izwald the old ways are more or less still being respected.

During strategic turn 3, the Enemy has:

• Launched two empty decoy rocks.
• Sent 1 medium saucer with the varanus on a mission to lure a lone lizardman hunter to kidnap. The lizardman came willingly.
• Built 3 warlock's wheels, and 3 small saucers to install them into.
• Sent 3 small saucers to harvest biomass in Kiyat lands, losing 3 protobolds and gaining 28 biomass but nothing worth putting in the hoard.
• Bred 4 torchworms.
• Bred 6 protobolds.

During strategic turn 4, the Enemy has:

• Built 1 Warlock's Wheel (5H 5T)
• Built 1 Small Saucer (5D 1B)
• Waited for night.
• Launched 2 rocks at full crew to enter Izwald and cause fires and damage as possible in order to distract the IFB. They did not achieve much but caused animosity towards reptilians in Izwald; lizardmen are now no longer welcome to trade there.
• Sent out 4 small saucers at full crew to harvest biomass on the World-Mountain plateau, with intent to steal harpy eggs or capture a harpy. A harpy (Bubbles) was captured. 22 biomass was harvested.
• Sent out 1 medium saucer at full crew to return Usul, the lizardman prophet (augment: scales, breath weapon, winglets), to his village. Usul was delayed by Near attacking the rendezvous party by herself on horseback, and was not able to demand tribute
• Recovered Near from her attack on the medium saucer -- she passed out due to thin air and the protobold recovered first. She has sustained very minor wounds and is currently unconscious and restrained.
• Lost 9 protobolds, 2 in harvesting missions, 7 in the medium saucer attack. One survived long enough to ignite the heartflame, hibernate, and bring the saucer home.
• Refueled 9 Hearthflame (9B), with all saucers returning.

During strategic turn 5, the Enemy has:

• Repaired the medium saucer.
• Build 2 Warlock's Wheels.
• Dissected Bubbles for assimilation.
• Failed at analyzing Near beyond learning that she is a product of many bloodlines, because she escaped. The Enemy gained 18 biomass from this.
• Stockpiled 3 Hearthflames.
• Launched 4 small saucers with 3 protobolds each to raid for biomass in Kiyat lands. 3 small saucers returned with 21 biomass.
• Launched 1 medium saucer with 6 protobolds to raid for biomass on the plateau. It returned empty-handed.
• Launched one decoy empty rock without sheath. This proved to not be necessary.