Across Many Worlds... Children of the Gods [Jumpchain]

Imperator Pax · Mar 8, 2021

Across Many Worlds
Children of the Gods
Stargate SG 1
Jump 35
1999

The preparations, shipboard, were in place. It had been months since their view of this universe had been changed. The Dragon had simply presumed that Cimmeria was what it appeared to be, at least before Heru'ur had invaded. That had opened up the wider galaxy to them, it made sense of the cartouche that he had arrived in this world with as well.

It had given him six months to play with the goa'uld technology base.

It had been over a century since Nagash had been defeated, and truthfully in that time span in those more than a dozen worlds It had only been in the last half century that he had happened to have the time and inclination to pursue pure technological pursuits... and while Apokalips and Thanagar had given him reason to contemplate space faring warships it was not the same. This universe certainly had native earth, and from Cimmeria's accounting they had learned a little, but not nearly compared to what they had taken from Heru'ur's underlord. It had been from him that they'd learned about the galaxy, galaxies at large.

Cimmeria had been a planet under the protection of the Asgard, and the three Ha'tak had been basically gambled on the chance Heru'ur would be able to hold the planet without it being contested by the Asgard. Or more likely that the Asgard wouldn't notice, or wouldn't care. That had been months ago. Months to play with ships built by some of the most advanced ship yards the System Lords had, and had constructed after Ra's confirmed death.

The Dragon, Oskyld, ran his fingers across the fine gold inlay panels. He was tall, broad shouldered, and admittedly fair skinned, but it was his amber eyes which really caused the distinction between normal human baseline. What the Goa'uld claimed was magic was simply technology that they had learned from a still older race. They might have been imperfect copies, but for thousands of years varying degrees of copies though still expensive for the goa'uld to make had allowed them to be the de facto masters of the galaxy at larger. Only the extra galactic threats like the Asgard had truly been able to challenge them, and the Asgard were terribly distant except for their protected planets... like Cimmeria.

Thus Heru'ur probably considered it getting off cheaply to lose three Ha'tak, if he was willing to believe the Asgard had done it.

"We're nearing the coordinates." They were already well past the last chance to quit though. It was either proceed with the plan, or abort and go straight to a naval encounter against the defending forces.

He hadn't found a way to actually use the cloaking device not for the kilometer across capital ships. The Goa'uld's cloaking device only seemed to be scaled for the tel'tac... probably having been taken from a ship of similar size if he were to guess. Oskyld glanced to his companion, and nodded. They may not have been able to make the ha'tak able to cloak, but they had been more preoccupied with weapons and shields, and hyperdrive. The things that would give them the most advantage in undertaking this gamble.

A moment later they had dropped from light speed and the white blue lights of hyperspace were replaced by the system's oort cloud. The goa'uld Moloch was a system lord, but not one in the same standing as Heru'ur... and that was both social, and in terms of naval power. Not that they were wagering on just that. They were stopping here in order to launch cloaked dropships onto the planet first the ground battle would be well underway, and hopefully Moloch would already be dead by the time the naval attack began.

--
He had to withhold saying something crude. The surroundings weren't the worst of course. The humans and Jaffa lived certainly in more comfort than had been the norm on Athas, but that was simply due to the abundance of metal tools. The humans and jaffa though still lived in houses of stone, and mud brick. There was no sign of higher technology that the goa'uld themselves used, or reserved the use of for their soldiers and priests.

The Goa'uld had built their empire up from the scavenged pieces of technology that a handful of them had back engineered and learned to manufacture. It was interesting in its own way. The Goa'uld with regards to technical acumen really didn't seem to be suited for wide ranging research. Most of them seemed to... well from talking to various captured goa'uld all seemed to develop fixation that lead to the exclusion of everything else. Not that that made the more technologically inclined Goa'uld good or nice.

Moloch was neither technically inclined. Nor was he good or nice.

It just made them apparently on average less likely to do truly fucked up atrocities for shits and giggles. He had considered all of the hype surrounding Sokar to be exaggerated, even as they had made the journey through space. The cruelty, and such to be propaganda both internal and externally driven. That might still have been true to an extent, but Sokar wasn't his current problem.

Sokar liked to masquerade as the Devil. Somehow or another he had abducted a bunch of medieval Europeans and used them to seed a number of worlds, and then decided it was too much hassle to get them convert to the Egyptian pantheon. Or whatever. So he had left them to their own devices on the fringes of Goa'uld space to grow. Sokar though was only appropriating that mystique. Moloch was actually in the Old Testament, and the provided directive to genocide his followers did certainly seem valid all things considered. Sokar's directly administered worlds had all been totalitarian states geared towards extracting as much material as possible in as effective as a method as they could. It made sense the exiled system lord could hardly have advertised he was prospering as he built up his forces and improved his technology.

Moloch didn't have the patience or the work ethnic for that. The Canaanite fire god was only a middling level system lord well below the likes of Heru'ur. He was too strong to be easily deposed, and yet not strong enough to warrant inclusion in the senior most ranks. When all the other system lords thought you were a flaming asshole that sort of said something. Moloch was universally despised by all of his fellows for depravity, senseless cruelty and who knew what other reasons.

The stench of boiled flesh was enough for the Dragon. He curled his magic around him. The Jaffa believed in magic. They believed that if one commanded its power then one was a god, a priest, or the champion of the prior... or a thief. To wield raw magic? That was solely the domains of the divine.

It was interesting, and perhaps telling that this was the first real town he had seen of Moloch's that had a proper curtain wall around it. Apparently no where else was worth the effort to expend for raising stone defenses. He suspected that the results of this would get him mistaken for another fire god, but it didn't really matter. He had a rather dark suspicion that it would be either that or as a death god.

On Athas he had been both for a time at least. Then of course there was the other mantle he bore... 'Darkhallow'.

He had considered bringing the Australians, but decided against it. It was a pity that kinetic barriers were useless against directed energy weapons. The truth was the Millennium MG 34 and 42 would have been useful, but the Goa'uld associated modern firearms including belt fed weapons with the humans of Earth. It wasn't an association he wanted, not the least of which was because of the vulnerability to the Jaffa armor had to conventional small arms. Even so he missed the weight of his 640(b).

So he had come to the surface with Raptors, and his choir of Asrai to what needed to be done with magic. It was time for Moloch to die.

The swaggering Jaffa barely had time to react as the six foot and change lizard man lunged into and among their number. Yes, they could have used more advanced weapons, but there was still the chance of the Goa'uld had sensors to detect weapons fire. He doubted it having seen the layout of the city. The floating golden sphere twittered rapidly behind him. The goa'uld did not employ networked computers... not in the conventional sense. They didn't use conventional computer chips, but larger crystalline matrix based systems, but those could still be interfaced with... in fact from the mish mash of systems and coding the goa'uld seemed to appropriate things near wholesale. It may not have been efficient, but it was in a variety of architecture ways eminently practical... but it was also ridiculously unsecure.

Moloch's palace was a pyramid landing platform. One that was significantly more ostentatious than those which had been set up at Cimmeria. The Cimmerian platforms had been intended for quick and dirty on off operations most likely. This was a more permanent structure built for luxury, and to show off when one went to or came back from war.

They had planted the alchemical circles, and more conventional explosives in the barracks of the Jaffa nearest the palace complex. The plan beyond that was that once the explosions started to take advantage of the confusion and catch Moloch in his sanctum or near enough in the palace. That had been the plan.

The Raptor swatted the staff weapon away as if it was a stick, and buried its clawed gauntlets into the Jaffa's unprotected throat. The lack of helmets was a good sign. Behind him the golden orb twittered.

They took a right, and moved down the long corridor. It was gaudy, the same mass of golden inlaid Egyptian hieroglyphics rather than cuneiform type script. That wasn't really a surprise, and most of what it was talking about were self congratulatory nonsense about Moloch's past victories. The room they were looking took them a moment to get there, but the festivities in the city proper meant that... well the guards weren't the most attentive. It also offered a panoramic vantage point of the city's eastern expanse.

The two jaffa with silver marks upon their brows stumbled backwards as the bolts of lightning arced between them. One of the raptors and the twenty fifth century drone moved forward. The saurian pulled a panel lose revealing a row of various crystals. A few moments later, and they had atmospheric control. That was about the same time as on the eastern horizon there was abrupt shuddering.

A wave of fire ripped skyward in the distance. One of the Jaffa barracks no doubt.

Jaffa were resistant to most poisons. They were resilient even to radiation to an extent. Their modifications made them hardy in most environments.

The 25th century drone gave another quick series of squawks in digital. The goa'uld did not as a rule micromanage. They simply had no interest in the mundane necessity of managing a society that depended on unmechanized agriculture to feed itself. That was why most Goa'uld fiefdoms relied on feudal or theocratic population organization. Slaves, human or Jaffa, were responsible for ruling over lesser slaves and making sure there was food for the armies, armor for the armies, and whatever lesser needs had to be provided. They had after all had thousands of years to make the set up work... leaving them largely to throw armies into the meat grinder when they were partying it up in a debacle that made Rome look tame, but not quite approaching Slaanesh.

Soon though the attacks by Saurians would begin in earnest. He glanced at the Asrai. The armored head bobbed and there was another series of chirps. Even enclosed in the armor it was obvious that something had happened when the pressure distortion dropped. This wasn't a spaceship they couldn't vent the atmosphere this wasn't designed for that, but there were limited environmental controls that could be exploited.

Now it was time for Moloch to die. Then of course afterwards would be the much more tedious process of turning this charnel house into something productive. The Dragon stretched loosening up as they approached the final set of doors, and he prepared to move in for the kill.

--
Commentary: So this is Stargate SG 1 Part 1. This is Jump 35 like it says at the top. My next post in the thread will be a place saver for Information. It will likely be edited with a slight chronological outline.

This is getting spun off from my general Jumpchain thread, because this is one of my larger Jumpchain chronologies. Its broadly divided into two parts the first is from here to 2003, and the second is the galaxy contending with the outbreak of open war between Anubis and basically everyone else. Broadly speaking that comes out to under the current outline about eighty ish segments.

Imperator Pax · Mar 12, 2021

Impressions I
Ishtar was a blonde woman about five and half feet tall. In a largely bronze age agricultural society that was about normal for the social elite. She was a jaffa after all, more to the point she had been up until very recently been high priestess.

Very recently because she had watched Moloch die. Moloch's host body was taller than she had been of course. Not especially muscular, but not flacid either. He had never seemed small though. He'd rarely shown fear.
There had never been a point to entertain fantasies about Moloch being overthrown. The society as laid down by the gods was inherently polytheistic. For thousands of years the countless worlds had recognized the de facto overlordship of the Supreme System Lord Ra. That had not stopped disputes from the system lords or their underlords from breaking out, or even in the cases of particularly powerful System Lords of their Primes, or even lesser Jaffa, from launching private wars. It had however insured that there was a sufficiently powerful figure that the gods could go to for mediation. Ra though had been slain a few years earlier. That had allowed Moloch more freedom to bully and harass his neighbors.

Even before then it had seemed unlikely that one of Moloch's rivals among the system lords would destroy the Canaanite Fire God. Even if they had it would possibly have resulted in Moloch following Baal's example and salting his worlds to spite his rival. It also likely would have potentially meant Moloch simply being conquered and subjugated rather than destroyed. If Moloch were to be destroyed it still likely would have meant the destruction of his priesthood, but at least that would have meant the end of the ritual infanticide that Moloch had restarted decades earlier. That would have been something at least she had supposed.

Moloch was not a god inclined to the history of past events. Particularly since as a lesser system lord a number of his practices from time to time had become reprehensible enough for Ra, or Apophis, Cronus, or Yu to intervene and reprove his actions in public in front of the other system lords. Ishtar had not expected such a thing to occur as for someone to actually destroy Moloch.
Less than a moon's turn earlier in midst of an overblown celebration over a petty minor goa'uld whose realm Moloch had sacked fighting had broken out. Moloch had worked himself into a fury to conceal what had quickly become apparent as a panic. By that point it had too late. A trio of Ha'tak bearing the Dynastic markings of Ra had emerged from hyperspace over the planet well within the defensive envelope of his fleet. The enemy though had already arrived, because the attack had already set fire to plazas, and barracks, and thrown the festivities into a chaotic madness... and because the instrument of torment had arrived.

Ishtar had never seen an Unas before that night. Never mind the hundreds of the monstrous lizard like demons from the underworld, but she knew what they were on sight. At their head in dark red and black armor of chitinous plates was a golden eyed god with skin so pale it might have been marble. His presence had driven Moloch to terror.

Even knowing that her own death would likely follow soon after there had been a visceral satisfaction to watching the other god strike. In a single blow from a claw laden red right hand the Dragon swung his arm down. The blow opened Moloch from breast to back spraying bone and viscera across the chamber. It had effectively bisected the one time system lord in a near unrivaled display of wrath and carnage.

Ordinarily the most dangerous parties to a goa'uld was the threat from below. An underlord rising in rebellion, or a prince unseating his father. None of Moloch's underlords survived the following nights. They died in similar feats, and it left Moloch's Jaffa in a place of limbo. Of concern. No new Jaffa arrived though. The unas were present, but no Jaffa came to proclaim the ancient rites of conquest. There were no celebrations of Moloch's destruction, or the victory over the destroyed canaanite god.

That had been nearly a month ago. Moloch's pride had always been in his army. He'd never been particularly naval-ly minded goa'uld. The three Ha'tak which had arrived had been able to easily push aside and disable Moloch's small capital fleet, and remained in orbit even now.

She doubted they needed to be. The Unas were unnecessary as well. At least from the perspective of maintaining order in the Dragon's name.

Jaffa as a society were inherently polytheistic. One god killing another in theory transferred the property to the victory. In practice it was never that clean, but what could anyone have possibly done to contest what had happened.

No one who might have attempted to ferment resistance against the Dragon stepped forward, principally because the underlords who might have tried to do so had been killed already. Thus the first orders to be issued were not celebrations but orders to clean up the debris and detritus left behind by Moloch, and the fighting which had unmade him.

That such commands had been issued, and that she wasn't dead was a surreal experience for her. It was also a completely different experience than anything she had known in Moloch's service. It was not entirely unheard of. As a girl she could recall a time when the Ushabti, the Stone Guard of the System Lord Ptah, who was as eccentric as any System Lord, had come to visit in an attempt to improve the magiks of Moloch's domain. They had been disgusted and gotten into an argument that had quickly escalated to Ra's brother arriving in person to harangue the fire god for something. She had been young. Ra had eventually mediated the dispute. She had never understood the crux of the dispute.

This was no Ptah but the irritation he seemed to express at water flowage, sewage, fields, and mines was probably similar. For the first time in who knew how long a focus turned to infrastructure beyond the palace and temple districts.

Her fellow Jaffa around her didn't know what to say. She didn't know what to say. This wasn't trying to explain to explain a failure to take an objective. Or taxes bringing fewer returns.

The first changes would be to the naquadah mines. It was not dissimilar to what she had seen in domains of the Egyptian dynasties of Ra's other kin. The alluvial deposits of naquadah that Moloch had been haphazardly mining had been deemed, "Unacceptable," in their productivity.

The Jaffa to her left spluttered striving to come up with excuses or possible solutions to make the slaves work harder, but he was waved off. At least as far as dismissive gestures went it had lacked overt violence, but for a Jaffa who had risen in the ranks of Moloch's through aggression and strength on the battlefield it was probably worse than simply being blasted from the room. The crocodillian heads of the demons flanking the god did not move to smite the Jaffa beside her either.

"That will not be necessary." There was a ripple of light, which shifted into a landscape that she resolved was how a mine should have been. It was a progression of time from how things were, to digging shafts, and then establishing quarries. She'd seen similar enough in more developed Goa'uld domains though it was somewhat different... had she not seen something similar in worlds that had belonged to Cronus's sublords once? Perhaps that was it.

Regardless the body of labor needed to work such would have to be pulled from less productive mines and concentrated at other mines. There simply wasn't a sufficient population otherwise to complete the task.

Naquadah was the most important material to the gods, nearly to the exclusion of all other materials. It made sense of course that what it would go to. It had only been a few days of course earlier that word had reached Moloch's domain from infrequent tradesmen that Apophis had escaped from Sokar, and that Heru'ur had apparently responded by bombing many of Apophis's worlds from orbit. These titanic clashes had inflicted horrendous death, and insured that Uncle and Nephew would be committed to fight each other on a scale not seen in generations.

It also made sense that the improvements to the mining of Naquadah would go to feed the growth of vast star faring Ha'tak. These would be the more virile and swift craft the Dragon had brought to the world not their weaker cousins that Moloch had built over the course of his reign. Moloch's death was one more change following in the comparatively recent demise of Ra, and the changing order of precedence among the System Lords. The Galaxy was a tumultuous place, and sooner or later they would be going to war against someone. Short of outside aggression that would most likely be some relative or another. It was the way of war for the Goa'uld.

The meeting adjourned without any threats or bombastic declarations. They, she and her fellow Jaffa, departed the chambers, and the building in the strange architecture of Unas. It was like a ziggurat, but different. It had steps, and interior offices for clerks ... demonic clerks and staff. It was different though.

She had never thought of a day when Moloch would be dead. In hindsight while it was relief to be from it, she had heard the Unas use the god's full epithet. The Dragon of the lands beyond Shadow. Lord of craftsmen. Master of metals. They went on, of course. She had seen the demons work magic, and bequeath to their god the sobriquent 'Lord of Magic'.

Mittin believed he bore another name, and used an appropriate title, "The scourge lord," SOKAR, "returns to the shipyards." He observed. It was a joke to have called the fight between Moloch's fleet and the invaders such. The ships in orbit carried the markings of Ra... when she had first seen them she wondered if Ptah had built them, or perhaps been constructed by Heru'ur in Ra's name. Moloch's former ha'tak had been shorn of their canaanite markings, and were now being pulled part. "The Unas complain frequently of how shoddy the ships are."

She remembered the complaints of the Ushabti as a girl, and nodded to her deceased husband's younger brother. "They are used to prouder barques to carry them to war I think."

"This is so I think, older sister." He agreed looking at the trio of golden stars visible in the afternoon sky. "I must go to district of the craftsmen. I bid you good health." She returned the farewell even though his eyes lingered on the ships. She made her way back to the busy temple district. The ceremony of fire was forever gone now. Moloch destroyed meant that he could never reinstitute it.

She paused looking at the working Unas, and the humans they were along side. The humans were naturally skittish of the great demons who were beside them, as well as supervising. They had taken the stargate and had begun the process of erecting a field around it. Heavy foundations had been excavated along either side it was a long rectangle... or it would be when it was done. More of the Unas's strange buildings? The looked like nothing she could remember encountering among the possessions of the Greek or Egyptian pantheons. At least the pyramid had been sort of familiar.

lancelot · Mar 12, 2021

It comes across as very scattered and confusing. Do you have a link to the jumps before this one? That might help a little.

I think 'Dragon' needs to be shown speaking to his new people and explaining how things work now. For a while there I wasn't sure he'd even told the Jaffa what his name was.

Imperator Pax · Mar 21, 2021

Jump List
[Prior to this Jump]

Pokemon

Infamous

Mass Effect

Fire Emblem

Lord of the Rings

Dragon Age

Elder Scrolls [1]

Age of Mythology

Platoon

Hellsing

Overlord

Fable

Full Metal Alchemist (2003 Anime)

Dragon Commander

Castlevania

Dark Souls

Dark Sun

Ravenloft

Warhammer Fantasy Dogs of War

7 Kingdoms / A Song of Ice and Fire

Bioshock

Generic James Bond Jump [1]

Generic 80s Action Hero [1]

Harry Potter

Dresden Files [2]

Twilight

Resident Evil

Deus Ex

Metal Gear

Metal Gear R

DC (Generic Comic) [1]

Marvel (Generic Comic) [1]

Cowboy Bebop

Firefly

Stargate SG-1 (December 2014)

[1] All of these are the 2014 jumps, so generic isn't in their actual name, but they're for settings with a lot of potential origins, because they're from before Jumpchain started getting jumps for specific timelines or periods in franchises. For example the original Elder Scrolls jump is the 'morroblivion' jump basically being a mash of 3 and 4.
[2] This is the very first Dresden Files jump before Wyldcard did his rewrite of it. I don't even think I have a copy of the original

Perk text, and Item text will go up in a separate post, as even for just 35 words that's quite a lot of material.

'In the beginning': Jumps 1-3
'Sands of Time': Jumps 4-8 Fantasy Arc 1
The world war, and the Major: Jumps 9-10 Potentially the same timeline
'Sands of Time: Jumps 11-12 Fantasy Arc 1.2
Amestris Interlude Jump 13 Somewhat continues the themes of the world war 2 jump
Shadowed Fantasy Jumps 14-20 Fantasy Arc 2 'Dark Fantasy'
The Cold War and after Jumps 21-23 Modern Action of Sorts
Modern Magic 24-26 Fantasy arc 2.2 'Modern Fantasy'
Darker Promise of Technology Jumps 27-30 Dystopian Future, Metal Gear are continuous back to back
Brighter Promise Jumps 31-35

If I could reorder (which I'm not going to do) my early chain I'd probably do something like the following:

Pokemon

Infamous

Mass Effect

Fire Emblem

Lord of the Rings

Dragon Age

Elder Scrolls [1]

Age of Mythology

Full Metal Alchemist (2003 Anime)

Platoon

Hellsing

Overlord

Fable

Dragon Commander

Castlevania

Dark Souls

Dark Sun

Ravenloft

Warhammer Fantasy Dogs of War

7 Kingdoms / A Song of Ice and Fire

Bioshock

Generic 80s Action Hero [1]

Generic James Bond Jump [1]

Not much would terribly change though

Imperator Pax · Mar 14, 2021

List of Perks
Below is a list of perks from the builds, there are couple of minor mistakes, I'd have to double check to make sure I included all the freebie perks, and again all of these jumps are from 2014 so the formatting is ... a little odd relative to contemporary jumpchain. I.e. Classes and Skills.

Pokemon
Savant: Your mind is enhanced, granting you perfect memory, calculator like mental math, and better spatial awareness. Your aim with a firearm is better than annie oakley and simo Hayha combined.
Psionics: You gain psychic powers like telekinesis and telepathy. You still can't understand your pokemon but can issue them orders via Telepathy. No mind reading. Skill cap is equal to gardevoir.

InFamous
Conduit: Electrokinesis: Arc Lightning: Continous, can chain to multiple targets. Pulse Heal: Heal others' injuries. Overload Burst: concentrated Bolt can chain. EM Shockwave: Omnidirectional energy puse. (Recharges from any electric source. Lightning wirses, etc)
Ability: Strength: Your physical strength is enhanced above that of most humans. Bench press a car!
Durability: You can take a bullet. Or ten. You still heal slowly, and enough damage will still kill you.
Regen: Healing factor! You can heal from most non-lethal wounds in seconds.
Toggle: Mentally turn off your conduit powers at will. No need to focus on not breaking your stuff.

Mass Effect
Class: Infiltrator: Combining Tech-savvy with martial skills, Infiltrators focus on quickly and stealthily picking off enemies one by one. Brining to bear a variety of specialized ammo types, explosives, and a tactical cloaking system that renders them invisible Infiltrators use superior range and positioning against foes.
Perks: Tongue of a Shepard: Some people can convince other people to not jump off a bridge. YOU can convince other people to put a gun to their head and pull the trigger. Rallying speeches are old hat for an orator of your skill.
Not a Stupid Grunt: Technology has always been your forte. You can hack into some poor shmuck's omni-tool or fix a Tantalus drive core. All you need to start making Mass Relay Jumps is a toaster and a chunk of Eezo.
Tactical Readiness: You instinctively keep track of your surroundings. Constantly assessing the situation, finding escape routes, looking for potential hostiles, nothing gets past your eyes. Find a sniper's nest- or a good spot for anew one!

Fire Emblem:
Skills: Tactics (Free), Ignis: You can, around 1/5th, of the time add, add half your physical power to the power of your spells or half your magical power to your physical attacks. Allows for extremely powerful attacks.
Manakete: You are one of the dragon-folk. You may transform into a large and powerful dragon for a short burst of time. Manaketes have very long lifespans. Comes with and requires a dragonstone.

Lord of the Rings
Skills: Forestry: You have experience out in the woods. Hunting, tracking, and trapping are second nature to you, and you can move quickly and quietly even over broken ground.
Dwarven Craft: You are a master smith, able to singlehandedly run even a large forge. You can make weapons and armor that stand up to hundreds of years of continuous use, and even know how to mine and forge mystical metals such as Mithril.
Elven Enchantment: You can enchant objects, if you pour your energy into them as they are created. Some of your enchantments are useful in battle, such as swords that never dull, and bows that always strike true, but most are simply to ease the life of the wearer, such as cloaks that weigh nothing and aid in hiding and water flasks that never leak. You may also perform great workings, such as the creation of hidden doorways, given time.
Blood of Kings: The blood of kings flows through your veins. Your leadership skills and charisma are off the charts: convincing total strangers to follow you into certain death is as easy as drinking a glass of water. Further certain death isn't all that certain when you're in charge, you have a great mastery of tactics and strategy and the blood of kinds enhances your lifespan and retards your aging.

Dragon Age
Class: Mage: Arcane Warrior (Free)
Equipment: Enchantment: Thats odd, you seem to understand the process of inscribing lyrium runes on items, to add or enhance properties. Without lyrium enchantments are temporary.

Elder Scrolls

Birth Sign: The Mage: Those born under the sign of the Mage have more magicka and a talent for all sorts of spellcasting. May find yourself absent-minded, and arrogant.
Skills: Diplomat: You are highly diplomatic, capable of calming down even the most heated situations. You also get better prices when trading.
Progress: You seem to pick up new skills very quickly and you improve quicker than usual through practice, seeing considerable gains from your efforts.
Spellmaker: You are talented at crafting new spells from trial and error.
Enchanter: You are capable of enchanting objects well. You know how to trap souls, and how best to get good effects.
Highborn: You simply have more magicka than you would normally have. Magic tires you less to perform.

AoM:
Boons: Isis Prosperity: You naturally make more money than you otherwise would. Effects are subtle but considerable over time.

Thor: Dwarven Goldmine: You can cause the earth to part and a rich vien of gold to appear once every two days. You are also an extremely skilled miner.

Skills: Titan: You can summon a titan's gate. Once cleared, a titan loyal to you will emerge. The titan is immensely powerful. Once dead you may summon another gate.

Builder: You can plan and build things incredibly quickly. With a pile of wood you could knock together a reasonable house in a couple of hours without help.

Gatherer: You are extremely dexterous and quick when it comes to menial work and know how to increase efficiency by reducing waste in all your endeavors.

Platoon:
Platoon Upgrades: Reinforced Platoon (Free), Runs on Electricity: Strange Technology and powers are second nature to your platoon. They're highly intelligent or intuitive with advanced or alien tech or other weird abilities that may somehow show up. Expect them all to be able to handle any superhuman abilities you and your companions have or grant them, and given a few days of familiarization they can be power armored badasses if you train them right. Explaining things to the rest of the army might still be a problem...
Unshakeable: While most soldiers have a breaking point, when the horror of battle becomes too much, your men don't. They will follow you into the very mouth of hell (or Fortress Europe) with nary a flinch. Wither due to your inspirational leadership or to their native toughness they are resistant to thing that would shatter the morale of lesser men, including even truly supernatural foes.
Runners: Your unit LOVES PT. 5-Mil runs are a nice wakeup, even in full kit. More useful than you'd think, as trucks and jeeps are only useful until you're actually engaged. Your unit makes the 100-yard dash to cover much faster, which is an amazing survival trait in itself.
Total Strength: 58 Men
Attachments: Engineers, Anti Tank crew (600)

Hellsing:
Unassuming: Enemies will underestimate your full potential until you prove them otherwise.
Weapon Channeling: You are skilled in augmenting your weapons with raw magical power. Blades will never break, and will cut through almost anything while guns will no longer need to be reloaded, and you maybe cause projectiles to ricochet, and change paths in midair you may also channel this ability throughout your body with similar effects. Tiring if either ability is used extensively
Dark Binding: With each and every kill, you may consume the souls of your victims and tram them within you own making yourself stronger with each additional soul. However though the souls belonging to the wicked may not affect you those from the innocent may eventually corrupt you. With practice and experimentation you may learn to utilize binded souls for a myriad of different purposes.
Holy Bayonets: You can spawn an unlimited supply of blessed silver bayonets out of thin air, and throw them with pin=point accuracy at speeds and power rivaling fire arms. You can also cause them to explode violently at will.

Overlord
Minion Master: You are better with mentally controlling your minions with your armor, you don't even need to move your arms to make them attack, defend or move around, as a side effect of being so good at controlling them, your minions like you a lot to a whole new level, even the older, smarter and more independent ones will feel at ease around of you, as if there is a bond of sorts between you.
Minion Logistics: In- You are a genius when it comes to managing on your own or with help the logistics for your army of minions or simple ensure that the flow of goods in your Domain remains strong. As such its easy for you to ensure that your army is properly equipped and they got enough food for you to get them where they need to go, provided you had the money to pay for all the things they needed of course, either way you don't have a big problem with making a system to ensure that your minions remain happy, fed and equipped with something better than wooden clubs as weapons.

Fable
Abilities: Will User: You're one the lucky few that can oppose his/her Will upon the world. Casting spells in quick succession is tiring. Will Lines appear on your body and they look like vibrant blue streaks that increase as you know more spells. You get 200cp worth of spells for free.
Enflame: Punch the ground to create wave of fire in a radius around you.
Assassin Rush - Propels you through space in the blink of an eye. Allowing you to move behind the target instantaneously.
Multishot: When this spell is cast each shot you make is multiplied from 1 projectile to 6 projectiles of the same quality. Lasts for four shots.
Vortex: Summon mighty elemental forces to create powerful whirlwinds that sweep your enemies up and send them flying. Target individuals for massive damage, or use an area effect more enemies for less damage.
Augment: Devastation 300,

FMA
Abilities: Truth: The result of your loss is that you gain the ability to perform alchemy without a transmutation circle and your knowledge of the science is expanded to the point where you have effectively mastered both simple and Advanced Formulae.

Dragon commander
Dragon: Mountain
Abilities: Devestation/ Permanently increases the damage done by all breath attacks by 50%.
Aura of Annhilation: Permanetly increases the damage done by friendly units in a 1500 metere radius around you by 30%.
Mass Restoration: You fully heal a friendly target and all friendly units within a 500 meter radius around it. 30 SEcond cooldown.

Castlevania:
Abilities: Power of Dominance: Somehow, you have gained a measure of the Dark Lord's own power. Any time you slay an inhuman creature, you may attempt to gain mastery over its soul. The weaker the creature is, the more easily it will yield - the strongest may hurt or even kill you unless you relinquish your claim. With this power comes an additional boon - you gain absolute dominion over your own soul, and none may attempt to harm or claim it without your consent.
Thaumaturgy, which allows you to focus your spiritual energy through magical words and gestures to perform miracles; Arcana, which infuses it into a set of magical cards to invoke an array of effects;

Dark Souls:

Economic - Whether it's souls or money, you're able to manage your funds more capably than the average Joe, and can talk even the most hardened merchants into small discounts. Won't help you if you're working through an intermediary, however.

Feeling Lucky - Somehow, some way, you have the luck everybody wishes they had. Rare items fall into your hands like raindrops, enemies line up in the perfect way for an ambush or a quick booting off the ledge, and swinging wildly usually leads to hitting something vital more often than not. Do not rely on this luck though, for as you will soon find out, you'll need a lot more than just luck in these lands. . .

Sorcery - A form of magic that manipulates pure magic for a variety of uses and requires a staff or catalyst, which is basically just a shorter staff. Different spells included a number of ranged offensive spells, self-augmentations and general utility spells. Offensive spells can bypass normal forms of physical durability such as iron armor, tough scales or thick hide, allowing them to do great damage against foes who rely on such forms of protection. Spells become more powerful, effective and efficient as the wielder becomes more intelligent and strong of mind. Buying this makes you talented at the art and bestows a free staff.

Miracles - A type of "holy" magic used primarily for healing. Miracles require the wielder to use a talisman or sacred chime. As previously mentioned, most spells are used for healing yourself or others. Miracles also boast a healthy repertoire of other utility and support based spells. While few, there are several Miracles meant for offensive usage though, a few hit with magic damage like Sorcery while most do lightning damage. Miracles become more potent the more faith the wielder has in something. It doesn't necessarily even need to be a god. It could be in one's self, an ideal or another person as examples. Buying this makes you talented at the art and bestows a free talisman.

Dark Sun

Abilities: Desert Survivalist: You can survive in the wastelands of Athas like an expert, you know where to find or build shelter from the heat, where to find water, how to track, as well expert knowledge of most the wild flora and fauna.
Magic: You have training in Arcane Magic. If you're not taught to preserve you can only defile. Defiling is defined as taking enough energy from the environment to turn the surrounding vegetation to sterile ash. Your magical powers start off at around a level 1 wizard in D&D, but you quickly grow in strength if you exercise this ability enough.
Friendship is Magic: You have an aura of trust, you put people at ease letting their guard down around you. You gain true friendship twice as fast as someone without this ability.
Polyglot - With this ability you can learn new languages four times as fast as normal, and have ability to read any language you know in half the time.

Ravenloft
Abilities: Mist walker: The mists of ravenloft seem to have little negative effect on you in fact they seem to be your ally. The darklords can not bar you from leaving their domain even if their borders are closed they have no effect on you. Also you walk into the mists to transport to another domain that your familiar with, you can even take a small group of people with you.

Magic Resistance: Spells and supernatural powers fail to affect you at all with surprising regularity. More powerful spellcasters and supernatural creatures are less impaired when trying to effect however even then it is not certain.

Warhammer Fantasy 'Dogs of War' Race: Asrai Class: Spellsinger (200cp)
Abilities: Mage: You are able to wield the powers of magic, shaping it and sending it to rain ruin down on your foes or succour your allies. In this world though, you drawn power from the winds of magic, and while they always blow, sometimes they blow enough for you to cast spells enough to shatter mountains, sometimes you will struggle to light a candle.
Winds of Magic: The winds of magic blow down from the north, from the great chaos rift that is the source of all the worlds woes. These winds do not flow evenly, sometimes pouring down so thick that lesser wizards go mad, and sometimes so lightly all but the smallest spells are impossible. You possess the ability to perceive and even influence these floes to some extent, denying enemy mages vital magic, potentially snatching victory from defeat as spellcasters find themselves powerless for a few precious moments. If you are a mage yourself, you never need worry about lacking the magic to cast spells. In any other reality you may, with a great deal of extremely tiring mental effort, trigger a shortlived wind of magic to blow for a few minutes at best, allowing use of any magical abilities you have in any setting, though the more high technology there is in any given reality, the harder it will be. Beware of using this too often, for the strain of calling forth the winds of magic grow greater and greater each time, to the point where the effort can very easily kill you outright.
Elite: You are the best of the best, among your peoples finest troops. You fight harder, strike more quickly and with more skill and turning aside the clumsy swipes of others is almost insultingly simple. You can also expect to be given the highest quality equipment and support, and as a mercenary while you should not expect to keep them you can expect to be loaned reasonably powerful magical items from time to time as well. This carries over into other adventures you may have elsewhere, though if there is no magic in these places you will simply find easier access to the very cutting edge of killing technology.
Innovative: In a world where change is regarded with suspicion at best and heresy at worst you stand alone, head and shoulders above your peers. You can effortlessly create new techniques and methods for working through or around problems with a few moments of quiet contemplation.

Mage Lord: Through training or simply sheer talent you have risen to the rank of mage lord, and have gained the ability to perceive the hidden currents within the winds of magic, allowing you to specialise in one of the more esoteric spellcasting schools.

Titan's Strength: You have the strength of one of the fabled Sky-Titans, legendary beings who dwelled in the sky before the coming of the ogres. Almost no living thing can match you, save perhaps for the dragons, and precious few unliving things can rival you. Only amongst the demons of the north will you find rivals, and those will not be common, save for the chosen of the Blood God.

Ancient Lore: The secrets of the forgotten times before the races that walk the world today are not so forgotten as it would seem. You have discovered much, or simply were alive when these ancient empires existed, and you know of the location of hidden ruins, places of treasure and danger unknown to others. You also have a plethora of information available to you about these ancient empires, who they were, how they lived and sundry other bits of information.

Game of Thrones
Skills: Prince in Exile People will welcome you as a prince from a foreign land and be amused at your alien ways and customs. You will be welcomed at most courts as a curiosity.

Bioshock
Abilities: Savant Genius: You are a mastermind one of the most brilliant men in all of rapture in your field of choice. [Adam studies]

James Bond
Skills: Fieldcraft: You’re a skilled agent, in the real intelligence sense of the word. You know how and where to plant bugs for maximum effect, how to enter a room and leave it without a trace, and how to follow and spot a tail. You’re extremely sneaky, and even have the patience to sift through hours of tape to find the one conversation with relevant information.
Gadgetmaster: You’ve been trained by Major Boothroyd at the skills of his job. You’re excellent at creating and maintaining gadgets of all types. You can miniaturize nearly anything, and hide things in forms that... really shouldn’t work. You can even make lasers! You’re also good at coming up with ideas for unusual methods of assassination; beheading umbrellas, flamethrower bagpipes, and the like.
Universal Exports:Cover identities and disguises, both physical and digital, are your fields of mastery. You can make new identities out of whole cloth, with corporations and supporting details to match. Switching physical disguises is similarly child’s play, and you can easily fool even alert observers. You’re also a skilled forger, both with paper and ink and with more... advanced tools.

Generic 80s Action Hero
Skills: Professor Jumper: Sometime in between all the explosions, you managed to get your Doctorate in Archeology. While you know the proper ways to identify and excavate a site, in this world you often end up... breaking the rules a bit. You’re a master at identifying and surviving traps, whether made years ago or yesterday, and have uncanny skill with a whip. Also, you can identify most mystical artefacts you uncover!
Commando: You’re a weapons expert. You could pass the hardest accuracy tests in the world with any weapon, while blind in one eye. You’re able to make even spray and pray suppressive fire lethal, and are trained on pretty much any firearm and explosive device you can think of. Also, you’re experienced enough you can make very fanciful and dramatic tricks while reloading, such as doing so one- handed.
Ambidexterity: You’re truly ambidextrous. It’s useful for all those times that one pistol (or machine gun) just isn’t enough. It’s also a vital survival tool for all those times the angle just doesn’t work, and when you’ve taken a dramatic shoulder wound so you can’t use your primary arm.
Swim Like a SEAL: You’re trained in pretty much every method of infiltration and exfiltration. A five mile swim is a day in the park, you can climb Everest without oxygen, and you’re a HALO master parachutist. You’re a runner, a rapeller, and can even ski and surf really well. If there’s a method of getting to place to place that you can pretend your muscles make you good at, you’re an expert.
Old Age and Treachery: No matter how old you are, you can still kick ass and keep up your muscle mass. Those cigarettes never really do you any harm, and you’re always incredibly spry for a man your age. Up until literally your dying breath, you’ll still be in peak physical condition as far as fighting and any stunts are concerned. Your wounds will cause pain in the winter, but don’t expect arthritis to keep you from being a fast draw.

HP: : Pureblood: Wealthy (300) Slytherin (Free)
Skills: Technomage: You have a natural knoack of melding technology and magic. You can easily jury-rig technology to work at hogwarts. Your inventions could do considerable good for the magical world if they weren't all such luddites.
Wandless Magic: You have a natural ability to do spells without a wand. While more difficult to learn spells in this manner you need never worry about expelliarmus again.
Beastmaster: Magical beasts naturaly seem to like you, will no hurt you unless provoked and tend to vaguelly follow your instructions.

Dredsen Files (Original/non wyldcard4 jump)
Powers: Aura Control: While most sorcerers have trouble getting a clean telephone connection, you can limit your ambient magic to the point that your mere presence isn't enough to fry a motherboard. You can watch HDTV, but you'll still destroy any computer you try to use.
Friends in High Placee: Somehow, you are constantly crossing paths with powerful people-- be they celebrities, CEOs, or ancient creatures of unknowable power. With alarming frequency, you find yourself on a first-name basis with imposing individuals (even when you, or they, desire the exact opposite).
Big Battery: Not everyone has the same potential to channel magic. White Council wizards expect a certain level of quality, but you go above and beyond. Few mortal practitioners could beat you with brute force.

Twilight

Perks: Our Monsters are the Same: Not all monster varietes have the same weaknesses, but for you that isn't a problem. You can use commonly held monster weaknesses against them, regardless of the setting.
Anti Vampire: Your body naturally has properties that make you resist the wildly varied special mental abilities that vampires in this world possess. Occult Knowledge

Resident Evil
Skills: Virologist: It's all in the genes, they say. You know that can be a load of bullshit, but there are rare cases where you can prove it. You're capable of studying and understanding all sorts of mutagenic agents provided you take the time to do so. In time you can learn how they work, allowing you to make adjustments or even tailor similar pathogens on your own provided you have the right equipment to do so. This also makes you an expert at studying the genetic differences of other organic beings.
Antibodies: In a world of mutagenic pathogens and viral agents, a little defense never hurt anyone... or in your case, a lot. It's much more difficult to be infected by such things as the T-Virus, and parasitic creatures need quite a bit of work to get you. This doesn't mean you can swim in a pool of infected T-Virus blood, but anything less is going to be ineffective. This will mean your average zombie and mutation battles will have much less risk than they normally would. As a bonus, this makes you immune to any normal sickness and very resistant to other virulent conditions.
Opportunist: Nothing goes to waste with you! You have greater situational awareness, letting you spot out useful items more quickly than most. Ammo, equipment, parts... very little escapes you. You need to keep an eye out to survive in this world after all.

Deus Ex
Hacking Interface: Numerous coprocessors are installed in your head, as well as interfaces to nearly every type of electronics. These computers, complete with state-of-the art codebreaking software, allow intrusion into most secure systems.

Metal Gear
Skills: Omni-Keyed: From cracking an ID lock, to hotwiring a car, to cracking DRM; getting enemy equipment to work for you is rarely an issue. Does not apply to breaking&entering, physical or otherwise.
A New Age of Warfare (Discount R&D): Metal Gear, a weapon capable of bringing an entire nation to its knees (in theory). Your engineering talents have extended to the point you can create these war machines, even automate them with AI, provided you have enough time and resources. With Box-tech you can also invent things like Railguns and Optical Camo.

I've got science: You have a solid understanding in a wide variety of scientific and engineering disciplines, enough to at least interest most R&D labs. You can also specialize in one field, allowing you to achieve true mastery much quicker than normal.

Trained Eye: Memorizing small details comes naturally to you. If something in a building doesn’t match the floor plan, or if someone’s been in a safehouse since you last saw it, you’ll spot it much easier now.

Metal Gear Rising
SKills: CWC: Real Big Boss, huh? You are now an expert of Close Quarters Combat, allowing you to turn an opposing force's numerical superioirty into a weapon against them. Your spatial awareness is also improved, and you are aware of everything in about a 3 meter radius of you. Combined with a cyborg's better strength and speed, and one can non lethally defeate entire armies of soldiers so long as they are within grabbing distance.
Cut at will: You cut only what you wish and it falls apart only when you want it to. That is, assuming you can cut it.

DC Comics Imaged Jump
Gadgetry: You have all the cool toys. You always seem to have the gadgets you might need in a pinch. Lockpicks, smoke bombs, or shark repellent you have it all. You also have a terrific knack for making and maintaining things that are extremely if circumstantially useful.
Genius: You have a truly brilliant mind. An eidetic memory is that least of your abilities. While many in the DC universe can boast a genius level iq a great deal of them seem like terrible idiots to you. Your contribuions to science and technology will be revolutionary.

Marvel Comics Imaged Jump

Abilities: Healing Factor: You heal fast. Even things most people can't heal (such as losing an arm) are just signs you should rest for a bit. You heal missing limbs and organs in an hour and bullet wounds heal up in minutes. Also the ravages of aging, disease and poison are mostly unable to affect you. Expect a very long if somewhat pain-filled life.
Shapeshifting: You can change your physical appearance with a thought. While you can't duplicate alien organs and have to stay roughly the same mass, everything else is up to you to decide. If given some time to meditate you can even fool iris scanners and fingerprints, and reshape your vocal chords. Clothing? Who knows.
Invisibility: What do you think? You can turn yourself invisible/ Only specialized sensors will detect you, but you can still see find despite the light passing through you. Watch out doing too much to other objects (punching people, charging an energy blast, lifting something heavy) will usually reveal your location.
Skill: Friend of the Media Your heroism/vigilitanism/criminality is seen in the best possible light. If you're a criminal, you're seen as a freedom fighter: a mutant most report you as being the best of their "foul breed," and if already a hero, expect to be a media darling.

Cowboy Bebop:
Skills:

Firefly

Fluent While most people here speak a kind of pidgin Chinese with terrible pronunciation, you’re fully fluent. If you didn’t understand the curses before, you do now; and you can always awe those who think the Anglo-Sino Alliance has too much Anglo and not enough Sino. Or just insult people while they think you’re complimenting them.

Everything Shiny Capn You have uncanny luck in junkyards, and have amassed a supply of useful parts. You’ve got at least three Compression Coils, and have Port-Side Grav-Boots and Catalytic Converters aplenty. You’ve usually got whatever parts are needed to fix problems with your ship, or with most other technology of an equal or lesser tech level. You can’t build a ship out of spare parts, but you have enough to fix whatever’s broken this time. Of course, the skills to do the repairs might be a separate issue... But you gotta start somewhere!

Stargate
Skills: Dead Men Tell Tales: Dead languages are exceptionally hard to translate, but not for you. You just need a bit of time to read it over and compare with other examples, and soon enough you'll know how to read all kinds of ancient messages left behind.
Remember The Time You Blew Up a Sun?: Your intellect has been significantly increased, to the point where you know how to really get the most out of your technology... probably could have built a nuclear reactor in grade school. Crazy plans tend to succeed by virtue of how well you cover your bases, and whenever they work people KNOW it works. Expect to surprise people from just how off-the-wall your plans are... only to shock them when they work.

Imperator Pax · Mar 16, 2021

To Rule the Stars
Oskyld rested easily in a relaxed observing posturing. His hands were clasped loosely behind his back. If you discounted the technology of the goa'uld then quite frankly the city around them, any of the settlements on this world, would not have been out of place elsewhere. Or when. This could have easily been several previous worlds, even with the high technology... no especially with the high technology he wondered if the Shiar, or Thanagarians would have been out of place.

After a moment he decided no, they' probably wouldn't have been. This wasn't so terribly different, but it wasn't the same either. He'd have to think about it, but the ships taken from Moloch would need to be seen to first. Killing Moloch was enough to satisfy the system lords that he could have Moloch's position... though how much of that was pragmatism versus loathing for the dead god was probably variable. They had other things to deal with, and no one wanted to contend with facing anyone who could sweep Moloch aside like that when there were clearly easier pickings to be had.

That still left him the matter of the ships. Quality. The ships he had taken from over Cimmeria, from Heru'ur, were qualitatively better. He actually suspected that the ships had taken less time to construct, but that probably hadn't overly increased the cost in material. The Ha'tak were a pattern of ship, but the quality of the shipyard, and available materials created grades in how good one was... and it was a massive expensive. Beyond the reach of most goa'uld, and that was one of the hallmarks of being a system lord.

One of that rank had the resources to construct fleets of Ha'tak. Moloch had been a system lord. Now Moloch was dead, and what had been Moloch was now his. That left him a variety of other responsibilities though as well, but it was a fleet which would allow him to keep it. The standard pattern of Ha'tak was a kilometer across. Massive. It was however two distinct shapes, a central pyramid structure with an outer superstructure scaffold apparatus. It was the latter upon which the majority of the ship's weapons were mounted.

The pyramid seemed to have been the original structure. He had learned that from interrogating the goa'uld... unfortunately none of whom had been technically proficent enough to readily elaborate on the why's. The Ha'tak had been a revolutionary leap in shipbuilding and had become the standard of goa'uld fleets in short order. It had succeeded the older siege vessels, which had supplemented the even older Cheops it was a modification of. Part of that was simply that the Ha'tak had when it had debuted represented the goa'uld beginning to... he supposed understand how to manufacture the technology better.

The pyramid hull contained vital features like hangar space, the bridge, reactor, hyperdrive, and the central control. It was the central control systems that he was going up to, and his raptors were already in the process of pulling apart the computer's crystalline computer cores. There were no jaffa present... not that he had expected any to be. None of Heru'ur's jaffa, or at least those on Cimmeria, had known anything about the technical specifics of the ship, which was disappointing, but he supposed understandable. That Moloch's jaffa didn't wasn't a surprise.

It was still annoying.

"Noyan."

The raptor bowed, even though it still left his head higher than Oskyld's own. He was tall even by the standards of the lizardmen. "Docking was successful, and the drones are deployed." The process of pulling a single ship apart at a time was as one might imagine time consuming. They'd started of course with the most heavily damaged ships. "I would expect that given the lessons learned refitting the previous two vessels that this one will take no more than a week."

That was fine. As far as he was concerned they were making good progress so far, but the more important thing was the process of a practical experience with the technology. The raptors were his first choice, though the other lizardmen races would be seeded, and so too would the goblinoid minions... but from a purely practical stand point, "That's good Noyan," He replied. "The system lords have their own prerogatives, but I suspect that we may need a handful of ships to better patrol the border."

Moloch had bullied, and raided the various minor goa'uld around him. Taking, or extoring goods and other resources and with him gone it wasn't unlikely someone would try and make a name for themselves while the other system lords were distracted.

Moloch bordered parts of the wider Mediterranean - Near Eastern religious group. That was to say a mix of greek, Egyptian, and even Sumerian deities. The Celts were a bit farther afield, but reachable with the modifications to hyperdrive. Mostly though were the former domains of system lords like Zeus, Marduk, and the Supreme System Lord Ra.

"We will endeavor to be ready." Noyan responded, before pausing to look around to the control room's debilitated state. "I must note though that this ship, and the others were not originally built to the same standards as the ones we began this crusade with."

He knew that. "I know. These are merely stopgaps," It was in part why he was here to help, "until the shipyards are in a position to build more improved versions." Or ones that were closer to the standard that Heru'ur built his Ha'tak too, at the very minimum faster hyperdrive was what he hoped to achieve ahead of anything else. That would require improvements in the reactors, and that meant naquadah, which required improving the mines.

A shrill tone, an alarm, cut off any further discussions regarding the fleet. A golden sphere floated through the space and projected a holographic image of the stargate. Noyan bared his teeth at the hologram, "They dare to mount an attack? I will rend the flesh from their bones."

He gave the Raptor leader permission to leave. Noyan stormed from the room. Truthfully Oskyld had hoped for a little more time to prepare, but this was fine. He turned to the golden drone crafted by the 25th century humanity of another reality. "Where did they come from?" He asked.

There was a series of tweets and beeps in the machine language, and the hologram projected the combined cartouche catalog of Heru'ur and Moloch. He had to admit... he had kind of expected the Goa'uld Imhotep to mount the first attack. These were not Jaffa in service to any of the nearby Egyptian pantheon goa'uld, but one of the Greeks. The problem of course was to whom they paid tribute too. Imhotep was a true freestanding lord. He had done something for Ra, according to Heru'ur's records, and been paying tribute directly to Ra himself. When Zeus had been defeated by Cronus Ares had managed to carve out a small territory, as had Pelops. He wasn't sure which of those two system lords the invader paid tribute too... or if he instead paid tribute to say Cronus. That was a possibility as well.

Regardless it wasn't something he could just let stand... though he would have to be careful he decided. Well Noyan could handle the ground fighting. Oskyld turned to Noyan's second in command, and the smaller saurian bowed, "We would be honored to join you in work Illustrious Creator."

Noyan had been right of course these just weren't up to the same standards as Heru'ur's ships had been. There was only so much that they could actually do to improve the reactors of the ship. "Show me the hyperdrive." He ordered, and was lead down another golden lined corridor. That would have to change, he decided, when they built their own Ha'tak. They would, it would be simpler to do, and more importantly attract less attention.

Imperator Pax · Mar 18, 2021

Alexander's Envy
Ishtar watched the attack with a critical eye. These wretches would not have dared to think of mounting such an attack on Moloch while he ruled, and had grossly misread the change in ruler ship given what now unfolded. She had not been near the gate when the raid had started, but it wasn't as if staff weapons were quiet either. It was actually a little surreal since in the month since she hadn't heard staff weapons fire outside of Jaffa training. A single staff weapon discharge might have been dismissed, especially during Moloch's reign, but she hadn't heard even that off of the training field and thus it was a sudden shock to here several discharges, and the exchange of fire.

The second exchange of staff weapons fire confirmed what she had already suspected what had happened even without having yet arrived. Then of course had been the deafening thunderclap as Unas arrived from the Ha'tak in orbit.

By the time she had arrived a few minutes earlier the demon's armor was already streaked with the blood of Greek Jaffa. A handful of black and red armored unas had appeared in the center of the field ahead of the stargate, and it wasn't as if they'd been the only ones. She could piece together what had happened from the upturned carts, and work tables. The human laborers had scattered at the incursion but it was clear the unas supervising had moved to attack, probably even before the Jaffa had.

Reinforcements from the ships in orbit must have caught the attackers by surprise. It certainly wouldn't have been something she would have expected. Moloch's armies attacking a rival would not have expected it after all. Noyan's arrival had been girded for war. Not for the honorable exchange of equals, between system lords, or the raids Moloch had conducted to show his strength to others, but the wars of more ancient times. Sokar's demons were charged with the annihilation of the wicked.

Noyan stepped over a fallen jaffa. Either he or one of his fellow demons had smashed the attacker's skull and left him were he had fallen. The demon snarled orders to the other crocodilian warriors some of whom stalked towards the chappa'ai. It had deactivated of course and no further invaders appeared.

From behind her other Jaffa were beginning to arrive as well, and Ishtar caught sight of some of her sisters in the priesthood, of the Hak'tyl, as well as other Jaffa she knew in acquaintance. "These are the Jaffa of Thale."

The observation brought her up a little short, "He is one of Ares's tributaries." Another pointed out. Not that that really said much like many of the minor greek gods the wind god had been subject to a procession of overlords. He had paid homage to Cronus, Zeus, Ares previously, Pelops, and yet others before once more finding himself under the suzerain of Ares. Thale had in truth been little more than a minor functionary in the time that the goa'uld had ruled Earth, and had never even ruled in his own right until well after Zeus had unseated Cronus the first time. Cronus had eventually overthrown his usurping son, but by that point the wind god had been a minor free holding god, and his place among reaches meant he remained nominally independent rather than becoming a true Underlord to whichever system lord he paid tribute to. He was by no means unique in this. It was often said that the pantheon of the greek gods was prone to anarchy, and perhaps the many wind gods who stood as freeholding lords attested to that.

Still it seemed patently insane that a minor goa'uld who paid tribute to Ares would dare to strike at one of the gods who bore the mantle of system lord. Surely after the destruction of Moloch it was obvious to do so was to court death.

Ishtar eyed Noyan as he stalked the field. Except of course it was obvious she supposed... the minor goa'uld had not known the strength of the god he attacked. The terrifying aspect of the great demons unknown.

"We will address this insult," The demon spat teeth gnash as his tail swept with barely leashed fury before kicking a fallen ma'tok away from a slain jaffa. Noyan's threats gladdened some of the Jaffa around her. Ishtar found that she interpreted the demon's 'we' as meaning his fellow unas, the Dragon's raptors going to hunt down the aggressor.

If that was what he meant she would not point it out.
--
It had been a few hours now, and the excitement had died down.

The truth was he had not liked ruling as a god on Athas. Then again it wasn't as if he had particularly cared for Athas period... and the Darkhallow mantle had been different. That universe though had also been half a century after Nagash's defeat, the binding of dwarven chaos god, and all of the rest that had been occurring as part of the Last Alliance. Quite frankly he had half a mind too... too what? He wondered. Throw lightning? He'd been doing that for literally centuries now. Even before his brief stint as archmage of Tamriel.

What he had to contend with now was reprisal for a raid, but they were talking about crossing interstellar space to do so... except that with hyperdrive that really wasn't quite as much of a hassle. There were other issues as well. All the same it was why he was looking at a holographic map of space. Moloch had been among the lower end of the system lords. Ares, and Pelops fell into a similar bracket of power though for different reasons than Moloch did. The greek pantehon buttressed against the expanse of space dominated by the Egyptian pantheon, but there was ... a not insubstantial volume of three dimensional border gore going on.

He knew he would have been looking at the map sooner or later anyway. Part of the reason they had struck Moloch down besides his repulsiveness had been due to the cartouche that he awoken on Cimmeria with. They had taken another different cartouche from Heru'ur's ships months later. The two cartouches hadn't been identical, but Heru'ur's had come with more details. Moloch's cartouche had added a third to cross reference from, but had been less helpful than had been expected.

Regardless the most likely explanation is that the Greek goa'uld had probably assumed that he was now strong enough that he could simply steal his de facto independence by becoming a system lord. Ares wasn't a particularly powerful system lord and likely couldn't have taken Moloch in a fight head on, without relying on allies to take some of the weight. Of course Moloch had repulsed the other goa'uld enough that that wasn't an unreasonable scenario.

From his understanding the reason that that hadn't happened was because Ra had been careful to maintain buffer zones between system lords to prevent anyone from getting any more powerful than they already were. That was probably why Cronus hadn't subjugated Ares and Pelops. Regardless Ra was dead now, and something would need to be done, and quickly. He had maps of Ra's domain as it had been, and that helped to explain, to give context to the borders as they were.

All of that boiled down to, could be reduced to how the Goa'uld had interacted for the duration of the Pax Re when Ra had been Supreme System Lord and able to enforce arbitration by his own decision or the consensus of the senior most system lords. All of whom who had an investment in the status quo. It certainly also involved the general state of technology for most of the galaxy, and more specifically mining and agriculture. Keeping most worlds at bronze age average kept populations low by virtue of agricultural productivity.

Low populations were as by product probably easier to control, but it also meant rather obviously that mining and other labor intensive industries remained limited. Hobbled. That was probably a better word for it. Unfortunately he had no way to really put that into terms for the Jaffa to understand... and he had butchered all of Moloch's goa'uld underlords. The Jaffa warriors who were still alive had nothing approaching the aptitude for what he required... and that ... left the priestesses at least as far as remnants of the previous order. Not that he was opposed to wholesale lizardmen management, but that had its own hurdles.

Deal with the attackers first, "Noyan I will allocate a portion of the fleet to deal with this. Ishtar will go with you to bring the mortals into the fold." The truth was he had other matters to deal with. The mantle of system lord came with it in many respects the duties of treaty ratification, and he had already received notification that the Asgard had moved to add the local Earth to the Protected Planets Treaty. It was a ghastly long document that had been in effect for nearly a thousand years now. The communique was a distraction. He had no intention of committing to anything outside of local space until his borders were secure.
--
Commentary: Like with my Drow CYOA story Out of the Dark I'll include bits of music with this.

I'll have to edit it in, but one of the inspirations for some of the narrative of this jump's plot was Nile's Annihilation of the Wicked. Nile is a southern death metal band which as you might have surmised from the name does Egyptian Mythology themed metal.

Mastersgt · Mar 19, 2021

Massively looking forward to more of this.
Surprised MC does not already have some methods of immortality. Either Racial ones, genetic ones, or created ones. X-Genes(Marvel), Alien Genetics(DC/Marvel), Viruses(Resident Evil), or magic means(Alchemy FMA/HP).
Hope MC gets ahold of some Ancient Repositories and downloads that knowledge. If he cannot as he is, he is smart enough to get around its defenses.
Maybe add Too Human(the game) to one of the jumps? cuz I feel like it would really fit with MC's setup.
Surprised at the lack of spaceship construction knowledge with MC having been to Mass Effect and Cowboy Bebop... but thats fine, MC is still VERY tech Savvy and smart. Though will be interested in how his Mass Effect Perks will help with Spaceship design. What with his grunt perk talking about making a mass relay jump with a toaster and eezo.

Imperator Pax · Mar 19, 2021

--

Mastersgt said: ↑

Massively looking forward to more of this.
Surprised MC does not already have some methods of immortality. Either Racial ones, genetic ones, or created ones. X-Genes(Marvel), Alien Genetics(DC/Marvel), Viruses(Resident Evil), or magic means(Alchemy FMA/HP).
Hope MC gets ahold of some Ancient Repositories and downloads that knowledge. If he cannot as he is, he is smart enough to get around its defenses.
Maybe add Too Human(the game) to one of the jumps? cuz I feel like it would really fit with MC's setup.
Surprised at the lack of spaceship construction knowledge with MC having been to Mass Effect and Cowboy Bebop... but thats fine, MC is still VERY tech Savvy and smart. Though will be interested in how his Mass Effect Perks will help with Spaceship design. What with his grunt perk talking about making a mass relay jump with a toaster and eezo.
Click to expand...

Its more what do you as you qualify as immortal, as Manakete (Fire Emblem and especially latter canon it seems) are capable of being veritable gods and can live for thousands of years, Asrai or elves in general in WFB can live for thousands of years so yes Oskyld is basically immortal that way. Dresden verse small 'g' God is another immortal but not unkillable thing.

Do we even have a Too Human jump?

As for ME and Cowboy Bebop Cowboy Bebop was a lot more recent ME was litterally jump like three, and the Generic Marvel and DC jumps involved more in the way of space adventure time because for Cowboy Bebop most of the jump was spent on Mars.

Imperator Pax · Mar 20, 2021

Against the wind

The memorandum to all those who bore the title of System Lord occupied one screen. He didn't have time to deal with it. Nor did he really get the impression for that matter the System Lords were actually inclined to move quickly. Earth was pretty far away from most of them. Distant at least in terms of actually travelling there by ship with the commonly available hyperspace drives of most ha'tak. There were those who were close enough, including those who had expanded their borders by taking bites out of Ra's domain.

There were other factors in play. The system lords during Ra's rule had had a series of fairly comprehensive naval arms treaties place. Part of this seemed to have been for the same reason treaties like the London Naval Treaty had existed. The powers that be didn't want to contend with any trying to upset the established order, and also didn't want to have to spend vast sums of money in a naval arms race. The Ha'tak was a goa'uld design that seemed to trace its lineage back to something older, and probably not originally goa'uld. Its hyperdrive was ... inefficient and those slower than it should have been probably as a result of the copying process. Heru'ur's hyperdrive.... the Ha'taks of his in general were of higher quality to start with than those of Moloch's. That suggested quality of ship manufacturing varied between system lords, and logically as a result of available resources.

That was however between system lords who had the resources to build Ha'tak. Ha'tak were expensive and thus most goa'uld didn't have such vessels. There were underlords who had access to them, but during Ra's rule it was rare to see any in the fleets of free standing lesser lords. At least if they hadn't been directly bequeathed by the dynasty of Ra. Naval Arms Control.

That was why he was comfortable sending Noyan with a portion of the overhauled fleet to attack via space while he continued to work on the other ships, and the infrastructure in general. Because if they were going to do anything the borders needed to be secure, and that meant the resources available to actually provide for the defense in the first place.

Moloch's cartouche had been disappointing in that respect though. His information was not surprisingly up to date on his neighbors but that only underscored on how foolish it seemed for one of them to launch such an attack. For all that he kept drawing mental comparisons to agreements between the British Empire and its fellow great powers it wasn't quite the same even if it facilitated a similar purpose.

There were advantages though to holding the rank of system lord... though Moloch, and those like them had never bothered to avail themselves of such. Even Apophis was loath to journey to Saqarra but at least as a world it had been on all three Cartouches. Stennos as it was known had not been on either Moloch, or Heru'ur's. That was part of the reason it had been put on display in the room.

The orbital, and wider solar system, readings were enough to show it was interesting. Stennos according to the histories of the system lords had belonged to Zeus. Its position in Space corresponded to his territorial holdings. That wasn't what made it interesting. The orbital debris was what made the system interesting, and that had been what had warranted more interest.

They weren't entirely certain from drone footage as cataloging the debris wasn't finished yet, but perhaps four or more Ha'tak had been destroyed in system within four to six centuries. The simple answer would have been that two goa'uld forces had destroyed each other over the planet, but that didn't seem to be the case.

That really was the attention grabber. He'd have been interested in that, even if the planet had been uninhabited. Except it wasn't. Stennos had a global population roughly equivalent to medieval earth, and with a comparable level of development, which was interesting given that the planet showed obvious signs of having been bombed from orbit at some point in the past. Data was still preliminary, and he couldn't afford to leave just yet, but it was on his list of things to do.

Moloch had as much interest in trade as one might have expected, but it wasn't nearly as much of a problem as he had expected it to be. That didn't mean there weren't improvements to be made, and frankly insure the army was properly equipped, and the population fed was something he was better suited to overseeing, but there would always be room to improve.

--
She did not question the prerogatives of the one who had unmade the golden bull. Even now surrounded by ancient lore of times long before Jaffa had walked the living world his attention was focused elsewhere. Really that was preferable. It was still surreal to consider the differences even as she slowly took note of them as they presented themselves.

In Moloch's time ruling he had derided male Jaffa who pursued any path other than that of a warrior. As a result any male jaffa with a prim'ta, who carried a larval goa'uld would never have been found engaging in menial labor, or crafts. Moloch had even doubled down on this by recruiting a greater volume of humans into his army... though how much of that had been more staff weapons than larval goa'uld she wasn't sure of.

She would have never imagined to see skilled silversmiths among the ranks of the underworld's demons. They lead work parties of masons, and carpenters. Others raised pens for fattened steers, and were organizing fields for the spring planting. All of it was at odds with Moloch's reign, or the expectations of how Jaffa in his service were to behave.

... and it was something of a relief. Not that she wouldn't be leaving soon. She had received the directive to serve as second seat, which was still a higher position of responsibility than any of her fellow Jaffa had received. This was a military command, or rather it would have been under Moloch's domain... certainly as high priestess she would have been involved eventually but not in the first wave... but then unlike with Moloch's army she would be travelling with a host of Unas.

The tyrannical lizards, devourers of sin, formed the core of the retaliating force. Noyan, and his kin, carried with them strange and powerful magical weapons more like what was used to fight the monstrous Retou.

The floating barque stopped. It and the smaller skiffs conformed to similar shapes to riverine craft she saw humans use throughout the Eygptian pantheon's domains, but there were differences. Long and flat the floating platforms were armed to defend themselves, but were stacked with provisions for the coming campaign. Noyan conversed with a floating golden orb as the last arrived. "We are provisioned, the last of the Lembas,"

A kind of black bread she understood. It seemed a little strange. Ordinarily an assault would be mounted through the gate, and the conquerors of a new world would simply procure food from that side. If that wasn't an option, then one would simply bring food in through the gate to provision the armies... but then again... the Unas were probably used to waging a much different sort of war. "I understand." She replied. Ishtar wished that it was a simple matter to direct the Jaffa accompanying her aboard, but that was sort of the problem. There were high ranking warriors who clamored for the opportunity to join battle against the Greeks.

Noyan half turned to regard some of the warriors. His crocodilian eyes surveying. His size belied the ease with which he moved, and his armor was immaculate. It was the same chitinous like pattern of metal the other unas wore. The helmets were different than those of Jaffa Guard, but presumably that was because of the different shape of the head, they seemed to incorporate the same scrying powers of the helms worn by elite jaffa. Finally he made a low noise in the back of his throat and a hiss, "You can bring them if you chose, but they had best not fall behind." His tail flicked in agitation.

She nodded. To tell the truth though she almost hoped Aron, or some of the others would. It might curb some of their arrogance, and force them to contend with the changes to the realm. Noyan flicked one armored talon clad hand out and gesticulated to another pair of his kind who fell in behind them. She had heard that the raptors would live forever unless they fell in battle. Given that there armor facilitated them protection against staff weapons at all but point blank range she couldn't imagine few warriors could legitimately pose a threat to them... so what then, which enemy had they been bred to do battle with in the first place? What ancient foe had warranted their creation, she wondered as they parted.

Ishtar looked south in the direct of the clearing grounds being expanded. There was an acrid tinge to the air from the work. Red sands being cleared off and liquid stone being poured into the foundations of what would be new foundries...

Imperator Pax · Mar 21, 2021

From the Sky
The sorceress was digging through the drone data separate from his own read through. Vivi was still making her own notes, and probably similar to but different from his own. The drones were still cataloging information, but they had enough to suggest that it would be better to take the chance and come in person via ship. That meant taking a second of the three improved Heru'ur pattern Ha'tak away from anchor.

Then again they weren't expecting a naval incursion. Ha'tak in general had relatively slow hyperdrives. That probably wasn't fare... slow in this case was relative after all. Deep space monitoring suggested an average of about a hundred light years a day for Ha'tak. That was slow only in comparison to the Ha'tak they had taken from Heru'ur over Cimmeria. It also didn't seem like those ships were unique. There simplest answer was that more efficient drives, relatively speaking, had originated from Ra originally, or that there had been agreement to limit the qualitative 'strategic mobility' to a certain number of ships while Ra had been alive. There was always the cost explanation, why build lots of more expensive ships if most of the fighting was going to be conducted in largely ritualized infantry combat between Jaffa.

The historical reasons didn't really matter. They could afford to pull ships for the moment, but only because he'd already come to the conclusion that right now they'd have plenty of warning. They were going to have to establish something more reliable than how they were doing it now, but that was part of the reason they were retrofitting Moloch's former ships, and also going to investigate Stennos. Someone at the height of Ra's power had seen fit to wager, conservatively, at least double the number of Ha'tak Heru'ur had been fine with writing off in his bid to take control of Cimmeria.

Conservatively because there were at least that many destroyed Ha'tak in the system. There were probably more that had either not left enough wreckage behind in orbit, or which had crashed into the planet. There was some evidence to the latter, in addition to much older indications of orbital bombardment.

Given all of that going there in person seemed to make plenty of sense, besides what else was he going to do? Oskyld adjusted the display, both grateful and annoyed that the goa'uld generally didn't have much of a role in day to day management of empire. This was not the Titomachy though, and nor was it Athas. There were too many differences between any of those worlds for it to really be a true comparison, but there were lessons learned. The problem in applying those lessons had always repeatedly proved to be an intermediary layer of skilled personnel to disseminate information and skills.... and of course time.

The knowledge of the old ones, the ability to create the lizardmen had alleviated some of that. That though had been only about a century and a half prior. As a change it had only come after Nagash's defeat, not before it. There hadn't been any real pressing need to try and use the lizardmen to uplift bronze age societies in such a way in any of the following worlds either. This was basically a new situation for them. They were well suited to the warfare role, but there other issues. Stennos though, if it was as it appeared might be able to provide some answers... or rather solutions. Oskyld had little objection to appropriate medieval or Greek organizational schema if those were the experts he had available to use since it would be a step up from Bronze age Canaan.

Telemetry from the orbital sensors projected a revised evaluation. "It looks like the easily minable naquadah has been played out." Not that it looked like the planet had had all that much naquadah in the first place. That was probably why it was little more than a footnote in goa'uld records. The mines being played out had probably happened well before any of the other interesting developments. The large medieval level population base, and of course the orbital debris had happened long after the Goa'uld had stopped ruling over the planet.

No easily accessible naquadah meant no real ability to fuel shipyards. Naquadah was the critical strategic resource for power systems at the heart of goa'uld technology. There were other strategic resources, but those could be worked around. Naquadah provided energy densities that were unrivaled from the goa'uld understanding of science, and Oskyld had to agree Naquadah was impressive on that front especially at higher degrees of refinement. A naquadah reaction in an atomic weapon could potentially boost its reaction into the gigaton range, and that would only require something estimated around ten pounds.

Unfortunately he'd since determined that Goa'uld shields were sufficient take that kind of energy without much trouble. Nuclear weapons in space simply weren't efficient in terms of energy distribution, and thus naquadah power generation was best served in feeding power to directed energy weapons. That of course brought them back to the issue of the space battle half a millennium earlier in the solar system.

There were a couple of possibilities. They had arrived on Cimmeria with not only the cartouche of gate addresses, but also a set of armor. The armor was not, or did not seem to conform to what the goa'uld used. So it was possible the likely idenitified remains of the ship on the surface might have been the source. Maybe. It could have been unrelated too. The identity of the ship was unknown, but it wasn't goa'uld, and it didn't seem to be whatever race (the gate builders) the goa'uld had largely back engineered their ships from. The asgard were the most likely explanation. They were the only race the goa'uld admitted to knowing about who warranted that kind of wariness.

They were also fresh on the mind. Hathor's death was as much of an excuse as anything. If the humans hadn't managed to have killed her it was just as likely the main complainers would have found some other objection to levy. If the System Lords agreed to the Asgard proposal though then they'd be expected to stop any actions against Earth. The System lords on the opposite side of Moloch's domain from Earth largely didn't care. The Celtic pantheon in particular was isolated from the Goa'uld in general with only some of them bordering non Celtic domains. The Japanese Pantheon were largely between the domain of Yu Huang Shang Ti and the Jade Emperor had no interest in Earth affairs. Unfortunately Cronus bordered Yu on the other side, and he sat on the High Council of the system lords as well... and he likely would want a seat at the negotiating table. Cronus's border was also much closer to earth, and to Moloch's former domain.
--
Similar to the Goa'uld Raptors enjoyed a genetic memory. They were born with a hereditary knowledge of passed on skills. The Old Ones had created the Saurus races to fight, to enact the great plan, and thus it was the instinctual knowledge to battle, to guard. Thus his lineage would be one of the first to pass on the knowledge of faster than light mechanics. That was one of the great changes worked into their race following Nagash's defeat.

Intelligence had increased, technology, and technological skill had been selected for to represent needs in particular in combating Apokalips, and the Thanagarians a few decades before this one. This had also coincided with morphological changes as well, but most wouldn't have known to even look for those.

That intelligence though provided further clarity to purpose. Noyan stood on the pel'tak of the kilometer across warship seized more than a year prior from Heru'ur over Cimmeria. They could have pushed the engines accelerated to nearly a light year a second, but they weren't. There was no point, and it would have risked damaging the engines. Besides if they red lined the drives they would have outstripped the consort ships travelling with them... and that would have defeated the purpose.

It didn't matter either. They weren't travelling far enough anyway to warrant that. Even bound by the slowest ship in the detachment a hundred light years in a day would have still meant they arrived inside of a few hours. They would be there soon, so he was waiting.

The problem he was having was the process of planning an invasion. The jaffa were unprepared for launching this sort of assault... not that there was anything impractical about Alkesh and Gliders launching first. It was just something a bottle neck. Initial invasions always had those sorts of problems with the first waves of landing crafts. It would be much easier to use this vessel's transporters to deploy Raptor assault elements concurrently to any small craft assault.

He had already identified the acropolis plaza as ideal to land. Securing the stargate was another priority, but less of one than usual planetary invasions because they weren't dependent on it for deploying the bulk of their forces. A tone sounded, they were now on the final approach... the last preparations before battle needed to be made. Crews dispatched to Alkesh, and pilots to their gliders. Noyan gesticulated to one of the other raptors on the bridge, and began delegating the tasks as needed for what was to start soon.
--
Commentary: Star Wars, Trek, Gate all have pretty fast hyperdrive but really Battletech is one of the few Sci Fi franchises where despite the slow hyperdrive you end up with space feeling populated. Where canon makes it clear you've got an abundance of stellar neighbors, especially in the Inner Sphere, you can get to in one jump.

In SG1 early Goa'uld Hyperdrive is something like 32Kc with instances of faster being shown, but the implication of earlier goa'uld drives being slower, and there are attempts to explain this in different material. Certainly the island theory makes sense, as does the implication that Ra has restricted access to hyperdrive manufacture, and the Asgard went out of their way early on to keep Ancient ships from staying under goa'uld control (never mind that having an ancient vessel would almost certainly have meant other goa'uld viewing it as a danger).

That being said Teal'c comment about whatever the speed of hyperdrive was probably tell the groundpounder something that sounds impressive but not accurate, or at least not the top speed. Ten C for example is close to what ME drives are capable of, and thats slow. BT drives can do a 30ly jump per jump but then week long charge time so its complicated. Here though you don't need very fast drives to go harass your neighbor you just ordinarily wouldn't have ships for that compared to attacking through the stargate.

Imperator Pax · Mar 26, 2021

Lightning
Oskyld had taken a break from his review of still processing sensor data. It wasn't that he was getting tunnel vision per se. Processing the information coming in wasn't really the problem, but they had hit the point where useful information would be unlikely to be forthcoming until the cataloging was done. They had a complete enough picture of the system in any event. They had all the relevant details worked out, and a hologram of the planet with its gate address projected set center in the room. He had other responsibilities to contend with.

Taking on the mantle of system lord meant a surprising degree of bureaucracy... of course ordinarily such things would have been dealt with by a combination of clergy and well minor underlord scribes. Less goa'uld who handled various minutiae... then again it was entirely likely that Ra's instance on such ceremonial duties had been part of his efforts to keep things rolling along... and probably to spy on the other system lords. With the office of de jure emperor vacant though the taxes paid to the Supreme System Lord went unpaid... and unlamented. Legally speaking the System Lords still expected writs of conquest to be recorded. Under the bylaws that created the entire order goa'uld were supposed to register newly acquired (or colonized) planets, any newly discovered planet really was supposed to be reported to the system lords ostensibly for tax reasons. Part of it was that, but also to keep an eye out of potential threats including ancient technology that might be recovered. Failing to do so wasn't really penalized, and wouldn't with Ra dead, just that legally speaking if another goa'uld attacked the original founder they'd have trouble arbitrating the dispute before the council.

He was considering whether or not he wanted to go through the hassle of legally proclaiming his rule over Stennos. Or rather if they actually could come to the process of adding it into the domain in the first place. Stennos's legal status though wasn't the more pressing concern, and most of the goa'uld were still dithering over the Asgard's proposal regarding Earth. It was Noyan's expedition that going to be the bigger bureaucratic mountain to climb... and would probably put him at odds with Ares. It was possible Ares had put Thale up to it, but that would be hard to prove, and it wouldn't really mean much anyway. Even a confession wouldn't mean much... the goa'uld didn't work like that.

That was why he had taken a break from Stennos's data, and turned to consider the matter of ground equipment. Jaffa armor was relatively primitive, but generally uniform across the galaxy with exceptions. The combine Greco-Egyptian pantheon established a basic pattern that had been accepted broadly by everyone else. Equipping jaffa was thus a matter of the metalworking. Its time, skill, and expense.

In practical terms what really differentiated it was quality of manufacture, and that often corresponded to the Jaffa's rank, and means. This construction ranged from iron, to steel, and then to well an alloy construction of an alien metals of trinium and naquadah. The only examples of the latter he had had come from the Horus Guard officers of Heru'ur on Cimmeria. Apparently Moloch was either too poor or too cheap to afford such protections for even his elite Jaffa. Then again while Naquadah was the rare mineral that formed the backbone of goa'uld high technology it wasn't the only highly prized resource.

Geth pulse rifles, or rather weapons that had been descended from those, had proven overkill. Conventional small arms would have been sufficient against Moloch's jaffa. Anti midian rounds would have been overkill. Part of that was design. Chainmail was not ideal for stopping bullets even the improvement from iron to mild steel wouldn't change that. Naquadah even in a low purity alloy offered some protection, but still had suffered in that mail wasn't suited for that. The partial plate ensemble offered much better protection against bullets. Steel and iron was far from ideal, but it might offer some protection where as naquadah and trinium offered very good protection.

Gunpowder weapons were well beyond the scope though of what the armor worn by jaffa was designed to counter though. Naquadah invested alloy could protect against staff weapons, but the lower quality iron armor couldn't. It could however protect against iron age, or bronze age weapons... like was to be found fighting human auxiliaries... or rebelling slaves. It was the sort of armor that would have offered relatively reliable protection against even medieval bows for the most part. Not modern fire arms though, they hadn't been intended for that.

--

Noyan's ancestral memories reminded him of conflicts elsewhere. The Dragon's titomachy preceded his race's existence of course, but they had fought in conflicts of a few decades against Ares, as well as against Thangar, and Apokalips. He knew enough to understand the architecture at least.

The directions to his talons was all instinctual as they stormed the plaza. The jaffa would be able to follow them or they wouldn't, but he wasn't counting on them to carry the day. Not the ones coming through the 'tube. No the real jaffa support would be those in Alkesh and Death Gliders battling for air supremacy, and then to use them to direct any necessary strikes as well as offload additional troops.

He had only a small cohort of his race with him. The Jaffa host which had accompanied them would be needed to secure and hold territory if there was resistance. He knew that. Noyan raised his forearm mounted plasma caster, and sent several bolts of star fire crossing the intervening space of the plaza. They had elected to change to plasma weapons from their pulse rifles, but the effect was largely the same.

The brightly painted acropolis found its walls scoured with stray staff weapons fire as Jaffa launched salvos at one another from hastily assembled lines. Part of the inaccuracy was the difference in elevation, some people were down flights of stairs others had clambered on to plaza fountains, or platforms. Some Jaffa were even scaling to the rooftops. It was in many respects turning into a mess already.

That was fine. He craned his armored head upwards and latched a taloned gauntlet around the iron sabaton the jaffa warrior was wearing and slung him across the cobblestones into some of his fellows. The Greeks tumbled down the short flight of steps into a pile with audible groans and clamor of their armor.

Noyan raised his armored gauntlet and opened fire with the plasma caster again. The fight in orbit was as one sided. The aging cheops carriers were cheaper to produce than Ha'tak, and had much greater transportation capacity. They were ideal for ferrying passengers or cargo, in addition to carrying gliders and alkesh into battle. They were not however intended for use in gunnery duels especially against modern Ha'tak.

That much had proven apparent. The 'wind god' did however have gliders and alkesh and the fight between those and their own was much much more even. Only his heads up display allowed Noyan the ability to keep track of which exploding fireballs that had been fighter craft told him whose they were. He knew that the gliders carried the marks of the gods they served but they were high enough up right now it wasn't easy to tell.

Regardless of stiffening resistance though as he took the ascending plaza steps forward towards the palace temple complex it was obvious that the enemy had not expected a teleport attack directly into the heart of the city.

--
The fighting itself had taken several hours. It had taken that long for the defeated Goa'uld to signal his surrender. Most likely he had been holding out that he might be able to surrender in person to the Dragon... who of course wasn't present.

The demon Noyan had been somewhat annoyed by the Greek god's initial intransigence, and if she were being honest Ishtar had almost expected the Unas to simply seal the goa'uld inside his sarcophagus for transport. Perhaps the minor goa'uld had had the same thought and had quieted down after some early bloviating.

Still it left Ishtar in a precarious position she was unused to being in. She couldn't very well appropriate the Raptor's rights. She couldn't use those of Moloch's anymore, and her fellow Jaffa were becoming boisterous. A number of prominent Jaffa had gathered largely without prompting into the ornately painted temple palace. The frescos here, painted in blue, red and orange, had largely been unmarred by the fighting compared to those in the exterior.

The boasting that the Dragon was the master of the wind was not really unfounded per se... save that as she had seen the battle unfold the Unas had been doing most of the work. It was a cynical observation, and despite being the ranking Jaffa present it would have won her little to point it out, but the thought lingered. She had seen more chaotic invasions of course. Thale had clearly not been expecting a counter in the form of an invasion.

The minor goa'uld had probably been comfortable that his tribute to Ares might insulate him from all but cursory retaliation. So that really left her to deal with the matter of the Jaffa, and human populations. She turned to one of her sisters, wearing a wary expression. "What is Chan'ra doing?"

The other priestess shook her head, "This is not like Moloch's domain at all." She replied. Ares, and Pelops were both war gods. They were very different though from Moloch though. Pelops had been the goa'uld responsible for the creation of the Jaffa. Unlike Ares he'd been less convinced that all jaffa needed to be were warriors, even though they shared the formidable Spartan Jaffa Guards. In Moloch's domain, and likely contributed to by the limited number of Primta, Jaffa as warriors were the only role worth pursuing to the destroyed canaanite fire god. "He is having to contend with Jaffa, and humans who live under greek rule, and greek expectations of society."

"I understand," Ishtar remarked with a nod as she returned to contemplating the throngs of humans and Jaffa in the outer plaza. She needed to go forth and say something... and that was difficult because the eldest lord of interminable darkness had gone to another world entirely. Sokar was away visiting some other world, and she was unsure how she should phrase the rites of conquest that she was expected to proclaim to the gathered Jaffa. She needed to blend both Egyptian and Greek to be sure as Moloch's entire pantheon had been destroyed by the scourge lord months earlier at the end of the flood months.

Imperator Pax · Apr 2, 2021

Cloud break
Lightning (2)
Communications security was one of those things the Goa'uld had basically come up with a system, and then basically declared it to be good enough and left it at that... for thousands of years. To be fair it was a relatively effective system in terms of both security as well as convenience. Ideally if they needed to send a priority secure message they would dial a planet and hold a live conversation through the open wormhole. It also would allow them to actually go directly to the world in question. There was a very slim chance of someone intercepting the message this way. Not that transmissions through subspace via more conventional FtL communications were significantly less secure, but those were the fall back options for the goa'uld, and rarely needed during peace time.

It was a simple fact that communications were generally secure, and weren't often needed. The goa'uld did not as a rule micromanage and most reports could be given in person which was the preference of the goa'uld if usually for the sake of pageantry. There were exceptions though. Oskyld had expected the report from Noyan, and it bore out what he had expected anyway. If not for the conditions on Stennos then Thale's small domain would have been ideal. Not that Thale's domain wouldn't help. They already had something of the infrastructure he needed, and it would be a lot easier to bring experts there. Stennos was complicated. The other message had been broadcast by the High Council of the System Lords... and it was more troubling.

Not that Oskyld considered a bad thing, just complicated.

The simple explanation of the process had been the Asgard had advanced the proposal to add a planet (Earth) to the protected planets treaty. The High Council of the System Lords had then polled all those titled System Lord and then decided, based on whatever that result had been to advance to the negotiating stage. That had entailed putting together a 'diplomatic mission', in this case of three system lords and going to Earth. The mission would then negotiate with the Asgard, and their appointed human representative and that should have come back with a proposed treaty amendment or set of amendments or nothing. That would have been complicated enough, but instead Nirrti the technically 'junior' member of the mission had decided to attempt to assassinate Cronus in between sessions.

Oskyld didn't pretend to understand that, but apparently Nirrti had been expecting the opportunity to present itself because her Jaffa had been ready to attack Cronus's domain. If Cronus had died that might have been one thing... except of course Sarcophagus were a thing. Regardless Nirrti's attempted assassination had failed and the High Council had ratified the treaty amendments to add Earth to the treaty. The bigger more complicated issue was Nirrti's imprisonment by Cronus, or rather taking another System Lord out of the equation entirely. That was doubly true given where Nirrti's domain sat relative to the one he had seized from Moloch... She was the nearest Hindu pantheon system lord to his domain.

There was also the problem in terms of proximity that she had gobbled up bits of Ra's domain when that had been up for grabs. He was going to have to return sooner rather than later to contend with this that much was clear. Cronus, Apophis and Heru'ur all at it made it even more of a mess. That was especially a problem because Stennos was very interesting.

The salvage from the Ha'tak could potentially have given them some insight to be sure, but they were pretty sure that one of the debris fields wasn't a Ha'tak. Actually they knew it wasn't. The hull within the layout of the crash wasn't symmetrical. The ship had been vaguely cruciform in shape, and the metallurgy involved was significantly different.

The older orbital bombardment scars definitely originated over a protracted scale, and well preceded the battle five centuries earlier. Those had definitely been goa'uld strikes. The battle about five hundred years earlier involved a newly revised minimum of ten Ha'tak, plus the unknown cruciform ship, which they were tentatively identifying as an Asgard Cruiser, or light cruiser. There was no indication from the wreckage analysis thus far of the cruciform ship was from an ancient, gate builder, derived tech base, but that was still in the preliminary stages.

A hologram flickered. Stennos was a temperate world, and the hologram had its corresponding glyphs for the gate address to one side. A quick clip of terrestrial footage from a drone showed that the stargate was in a region of foothills of a larger set of mountains. The valley was heavily wooded, but there was a road evident leading to a city as the drone climbed higher.

He noticed the drone's telemetry indicated the planet rotated opposite of the Earth's. That was most apparent as it reached high enough to show the northern hemisphere, and the side of the mountains the deserts were on. It wasn't the Greek city that was most interesting. "Some of that are much older orbital strikes," Vivi announced with certainty, as the drone panned away from the surface to high orbit... to drifting centuries old orbital debris. "That debris field is comparatively recent, and it matches the time of the impact strike on one of the other continents."

Impact strike was probably the wrong word. A ship had crashed there about five hundred years earlier. The ship's debris field was smaller than the pyramid ships though, and probably wasn't goa'uld, but it was hard to say given the damage. "How many ships is that?"

"From the debris in orbit its hard to tell. From the remaining pyramid superstructures probably at least five. We know at least one more that tried to limp away to the reach of the system, most of them burned up or impacted during reentry in the same time period."

"We should investigate the Ha'tak at the edge of the system." Heru'ur had attempted to invade Cimmeria which was proclaimed to be under the protection of the Asgard. That didn't mean it had to be the Asgard, but from Goa'uld records it made the most sense. "The sensors indicated that the Naquadah mines are largely played out." The planetary reserves seemed depleted to the point that even significantly mechanized mining might not even be worth it. "We'll put into orbit afterwards." The debris field in high orbit was unlikely to yield anything useful either in the short term. There would be too much work to do. "After that we'll investigate the crash site," And send drones in to investigate any remaining Ha'tak debris, but besides the unknown smaller ship, "Hopefully the runner's computers are intact enough to explain who and why they were fighting."

"And if the smaller ship was where that armor came from?"

It was possible, and he shrugged at the sorceress in a what could you do gesture, "That might be, but it doesn't seem as if whoever they were that they're in any position to fight. The planet is still classical age in technology?"

"More medieval. Agriculture is much improved over classical." She amended, "It seems that after the original spate of orbital bombardments Goa'uld involvement ceased. However it looks as if the bombardment was selective." It hadn't been conducted all at once.

"You are suggesting that Goa'uld took sides in a terrestrial conflict?" He received a shrug in reply. The cartouche of worlds from the ship's computers had suggested the planet nominally belonged to the former System Lord Zeus. Zeus had been imprisoned by his father for managing to topple him briefly... or at least that was the official by line from the System Lords. It was hard to discern what the real truth was given Goa'uld politics. Whatever the case Stennos as a world had fallen off Heru'ur's radar centuries before the apparent orbital bombardment since it had been so long since Zeus had been a relevant player among the system lords. Even the underlord of Heru'ur, who they had captured on Cimmeria, hadn't known anything about the world, which made sense of course. There was no indication in Goa'uld records that this planet had ever been very important. Except that recorded information was contradicted by the debris field, and by the curiosity of how orbital bombardment had been conducted. "Still we should be there soon." By all historical records among the Goa'uld Zeus was as detestable as his father Cronus.

Interestingly among the notation from the council of the System Lords ratification of the Protected Planets treaty amendment had stated that Cronus had supported the Asgard position to add Earth to the treaty with the caveats. Then there was also Nirrti's arrest, and her removal from the System Lords as well in the conclusion of the treaty. Cronus had recently been at war with Yu before Ra's death at the hands of the Tauri, but then he'd paid a peace price to Yu to turn and gobble up Ra's available worlds.

That of course just underscored the difference in power between the most powerful System Lords, like Yu, and Cronus, versus weaker System Lords like Nirrti or the late and un mourned Moloch. Cronus was however still at war with the recently returned Apophis. A conflict that they had exasperated by using Heru'ur's stolen vessels to bomb Apophis's worlds. "There is no guarantee that either of us, or any of the others will be able to recover anything that will improve our ability to build better warships."

That was true, and given the naquadah mines on the world they were going to were largely tapped out Stennos wouldn't help on that front either. Lack of accessible naquadah would stop them from building ships here, or at least doing so efficiently. "Its a potential lead, all the same. We're already committed to expanding Moloch's," pathetic excuse, "for shipyards, and repairing and improving those we took from him." That was going to be costly in terms of naquadah, but then with Ra dead it wasn't like Moloch's domain needed to pay tribute to the Supreme System Lord any longer.

Given the conflicts likely to be on their new doorstep they really did need to improve their ability to produce ships as well as the capabilities of those ships. "We'll need to secure the landing sight, even if we're not going to be able to spend a protracted amount of time surveying in person." That was unfortunate but that was how it was.

Mastersgt · Apr 2, 2021

really looking forward to MC gaining a Repository of Knowledge(one of the Ancients), as well as him expanding and encountering/dealing with the Asgard and SG-1.

Imperator Pax · Apr 2, 2021

Commentary relative to material in Cloudbreak.

SG 1 is confusing in a nutshell

This segment is part of the Lightning Chain, which originally moving this to its own thread I planned to do away with or rather consolidate the multipart segments. That went out the window here, because reading six thousand to eight thousand words would have been annoying in one post, never mind the perspective shifts. That out of the way, I feel the need to address certain things:

This is set in the original SG 1 jump from 2014. I am using material from the AEG d20 RPG material which had source books planned for up to season 4 IIRC but only limited material got released for Season 3. I have the source books for Seasons 1 and 2, the System Lords source book, and Unexplored Worlds, and I think there is one other. I also drew on novel canon, but I am primarily drawing on material from 2004, because the derail of the later seasons is pretty much unavoidable.

Which segues into the matter of ships, which is what I wanted to talk about in this segment anyway.

The goa'uld canonically were uplifted by the ancients, or at least that's strongly implied to be the case. Rings, gate operation, hyperdrive, and so on are all back engineered Ancient tech. Even that Ha'tak, and Tel'tac (and presumably the Alkesh) are derived from Ancient ships. We know the Ha'tak was derived from Ra's Cheops (the vessel from the movie, that we also see Heru'ur use briefly) which is presumably derived from some older Ancient vessel.

Now in later canon most Alteran ship designs are somewhat more conventional than the Ha'tak. However, Anubis's mothership is supposed to be a goa'uld copy of or Ancient vessel, thats why it needs the eyes of the gods crystals. I lean more towards the idea that its a copy of rather than an original because its performance was poor, and Anubis tried to modify it to run off naquadria. Thats speculation though. However if you put it in comparison to Atlantis that shape makes a little more sense compared to say an Aurora.

The basic explanation goes something like this. Ancients find primordial goa'uld homeworld earmark the planet and come back later and as they usually do start tinkering. This is why goa'uld have naquadah in their system, and probably why goa'uld blend so well with humans and why the goa'uld understand ancient tech as well as they do (specifically the stargate). Well the ancients basically leave the proto goa'uld alone to explore the milky way and are absentee parents in the uplift sense. The goa'uld are still exploring when the Alterans basically disappear for an inderminate period of time which means they aren't around when the goa'uld have their first big civil war and lose access to their original homeworld.

Its okay they have a bunch of cast off ancient technology to play with, so eventually the goa'uld reunify still generally using Unas as hosts. (This is where canonically there are a lot of contradictions between different sources including early seasons, mid seasons, versus later seasons) Anyway the ancients may have kind of sort of come back or started to and the goa'uld have started making copies of ancient ships. Bad copies, but they have their own hyperdrives and can get from point A to B without the gate. However the goa'uld have started to develop into the society that they would be in canon timeframe.

Another civil war happens the Asgard may or may not have come in and slapped the goa'uld down hard while the Ancients weren't around . Apophis may or may not have ambushed Ra. Ra finds Earth, Ra finds humans is like 'hey this is like the perfect host for general purpose stuff' Ra eventually becomes supreme system lord the goa'uld set themselves up as gods.

Well Ra finds that all those ancient derelicts that they've been reusing start getting sparse. They're getting destroyed in conflict between the goa'uld and in conflict with other species (possibly the Asgard) and starts trying to make rules to get things in order. Ptah standardized the Cheops and it eventually results in the eventual development of the Ha'tak which has that big superstructure ring around it with all the guns.

When the Earth rebellion happens in all of this? Is unclear. There were probably several rebellions, up until the Moebius time travel retcon, but basically the goa'uld have a bunch of wars between themselves before the pecking order gets settled and that results in Ra and the System Lords putting the kibosh on most arms build up and instituting rules for fighting in order to maintain the new status quo.

This eventually results in the Protected Planets Treaty with the Asgard, and at some point during all of this it seems like someone either Ancients, or the Asgard went in and edited the user interface to lock goa'uld out from using technology, (and then the ancients also at somepoint had decided not to let any non Alteran/lantean gene carrier use some of their stuff).

As SGT has already mentioned (and in the main Jumpchain thread's later snippets) the Alteran database is manageable for 'more advanced' humans which Oskyld is. He sticks his head and downloads it. Though most of ship design retains the Ha'tak. This is later described, during the Anubis war, as 'if the Ancients had actually designed the Ha'tak' iteration.

This is because the Cheops seems to have been designed from an Ancient science vessel. Not much in the way of firepower for its size but comfortable and well protected. That does leave the question of Sokar (canonical Sokar, not Oskyld getting mistaken for Sokar, and then later as Sokar's Ancient patron) in all of this and his Ha'tak, and his mothership and just in general? The question is one canon leaves up for debate.

Imperator Pax · Apr 9, 2021

Lightning (3)
Thunderhead
To facilitate assuming control of the planet had meant landing Raptors in the vicinity of the stargate. They would need to move it elsewhere, either somewhere intentionally fortified, or at least somewhere where it would enjoy some degree of defensibility without actually sticking it in say a bunker. In the longer term they would probably move it to a dedicated facility, but only after more permanent orbital infrastructure was in place. Given the planet's lack of available naquadah resources that would require bringing in defenses manufactured elsewhere, and thus it would be better to avoid advertising any unique protections to the world until then.

Thankfully the majority of the planet's population were quite a distance from the stargate, and thus unlikely to attract the attention of any Jaffa who traipsed through the stargate randomly. Not that they'd initiated contact with the locals yet, but it was obvious that their level of glass making was advanced enough to manufacture telescopes. Renaissance level ideas about heliocentric orbits were common among the populace in their learning material as well.

That had only become apparent because the locals had actually noticed the Ha'tak in orbit. Stennos was a relatively developed world in that respect, and its population familiar with its condition, and the presence of a new 'star' in the sky obviously changed that. It would have been nice to have the option of cloak capable Alkesh to make the journey down to the surface, but they didn't. Those were in few supply, and hadn't been considered for this particular mission.

They had other requirements for specialty equipment, "Salvage crew reports?" The sorceress inquired at a tone.

"Yes," Of the ten ha'tak that had engaged the other vessel, only one was really in anything approaching 'intact', and that really was relative. It was enough to develop idea about the difference power, and weapons. The general perspective of the goa'uld plasma weapons were largely based off the same principle. That was to say staff weapons scaled fairly well in terms of reliability. Staff cannons were reliable, and needed little in the way of maintenance and just generally worked. In the ship to ship contexts of Ha'tak main batteries this relied on a 'bursting' like plasma discharge that was effective against shielded, and unshielded targets. "The planet side team has been staking out the crash sight there."

The damage to both the mostly intact vessel as well as what remained of its fellows in other expanded debris clouds showed what was more consistent with more coherent beam like plasma weapons. The easiest context to describe this was a term called 'plasmatic jacketing', which was a fancy way of saying greater magnetic field strength in a beam preventing less diffusion over a comparable distance. They assumed it was beam due to the way it had cut laterally across one surface of superstructure armor plate, and from scorch marks on a number of other pieces of debris.

The debris told them a great deal. It was unfortunate that none of the cruciform ship's weapons had likely survived. They had no answers for who would have thrown away so many Ha'tak against a single ship. The most likely answer was Ra. The problem with that theory was there were no discernable surviving dynasty markings on the remnants of the Ha'tak. That wasn't unheard of, but was still strange. It was possible they might be able pull computer data from surviving crystals, but even that was a slim chance at the moment.

The debris field also suggested a break from more ... staid ... goa'uld fleet doctrine, but that was less certain. Regardless it had been a major naval engagement during the height of the Pax Re... and there was no explanation for it. "We're certain the vessel is Asgard?"

"Relatively sure." Oskyld replied. "Being physically present and investigating the wreck may give us a final confirmation quickly, or it might not." He admitted. Site securement entailed, in the archaeological sense mapping and cordoning off miles of area, and marking off pieces and fragments as they were detected. That would take time, and would not be something they would be able to remain on Stennos to oversee. They could still learn things from it.

The ship lay broken in a tangle of snapped and ruined metal some two hundred miles from one of the nearby major human settlements. Pieces of debris were scattered over a roughly ten mile area. The more important facet of this information was confirmation that there was power still to some kind of central system.

The ship would never fly again, but if something was working down there then they might not have wasted their time in coming. If something valuable still worked then they may well have hit the jackpot.

"We've confirmed the locals aren't blind, and keep an eye on the sky. At least enough to recognize we're in orbit." Vivi reminded him. "These ships aren't precisely easy to miss though."

He had considered that already. That was one of the problems to owning a spaceship that was painted a bright gold and was a kilometer across. That was one of the things that would be the first to change once they started building their own Ha'tak. A nice black or uniform gray, some red piping maybe or red and black, but gold was going out the window. Aesthetics aside though firepower and speed would be the more important factor. "The ship is large enough it would be visible without aid in the daylight, never mind in the night's sky." Most of the planet was rural, but the fact the observatories in the city seemed to be experimenting with complex glass lenses was a little beyond 'classical Greek'. Not that that was the sort of technology the goa'uld objected violently too. Plenty of Goa'uld encouraged glass making, though usually for its artistic value than anything else. Again Stennos had been left to its own devices for several hundred years at a minimum.

Still they were lucky that the ship's crash hadn't been into the water. Like Earth most of the planet was covered in water. It was actually covered in more liquid surface water than earth, even though land volume was about the same. The planet was either in a warm period, or just naturally warmer than earth which might have contributed to the sea level.

--
Tel'tak and Alkesh were not ideal for the sort of work they were doing, but that wasn't really a surprise. The goa'uld process of excavation was painfully primitive, and unique methods were developed by individuals. Oskyld certainly wasn't going to advertise that there was a crashed Asgard ship on a planet he intended to lay claim to.

There was no indication of active goa'uld systems on the planet though. Their descent from orbit had triggered no automated guide beacons or other indicators. There were doubtless relics and artifacts from the Goa'uld administration on the planet, but there were no active ones broadcasting. There were no signals projected to direct the Ha'tak where it might land, or to serve general ground to orbit communication from a central command post. More to the point there were no indications of any hidden outposts, though they couldn't be sure that those weren't there... just that given the spaceship debris and lack of signals suggested there wasn't. The ship remains took priority, especially given the limited time they'd be able to spend on the surface.

Raptor landing parties had already begun the process of carefully deforesting the overgrown crash site, but it had been left for five centuries. By all indications the natives gave the crash site a wide berth. "Goblins are an idea." He agreed.

"Fortifications would be a problem."

Stennos was a heavily forested world, temperate, but it had several large mountain ranges. Unfortunately none of those were ideally placed for any kind of archaeological mission... and any attempt to recreate the World Spine fortresses ran into the problem of a lack of suitable orbital to surface weaponry at this stage. "We would basically have to build out in the open." Digging five hundred years down into the earth, and sifting through all of that was going to be a chore, but Vivi had been right that seeding goblin warrens on the planet would significantly uncomplicate labor concerns.

Parts of the debris field were being covered by tents already more out of an abundance of caution than anything else, but it was turning the field into a vaugely approaching orderly camp. Plant matter, including pieces of trees, were being hauled off an stacked, and dirt carefully sifted through and relocated elsewhere. It was a start.
--
The humans native to Stennos came to a not unfounded assumption that they were gods, and the servants of gods. That they were goa'uld, and Jaffa, though they had never seen the latter, coming to visit Zeus. Who greeted Oskyld as brother, which relieved the natives, but if that wasn't a confusing enough occurrence it was what would unfold from there.

The Zeus who ruled Stennos was an amnesiac ancient Asgard, the commander of the vessel that had crashed on the planet five centuries earlier. His physical body was of an earlier more robust Asgard physiological model, though he had no knowledge of such things until after gaining access to the ship's still functional computer core.

--
Commentary: This covers much of the same material as the original wrap up to the Lightning arc, and moves us into Summer of 99 with proliferating word of Earth being added to the Protected Planets Treaty and so on.

Now that brings us to a matter of Chronology. Apophis was turned over to Sokar by the SGC late in season 2, and then the System Lords proceed to use Hathor's death at Jack's hands, which is part of the impetus for Thor trying to get Earth added to the protected planet's treaty. The best possible explanation available for that is that its an excuse, and the goa'uld use Hathor's death as an excuse possibly with Heru'ur actually being the only one to care. It still creates something of a compressed timeline issue there.

Then half way through Season 3 SG 1 blows up Netu and kills Sokar by bombarding Delmak with the shards of the moon, which allows Apophis to escape and steal a bunch of stuff from Sokar, and he returns as principle antagonist of SG 1.

I just kind of want that out there to acknowledge that there is some overlap timeline wise of, technically the events of the Episode 'Fair Game' occurs before Devil You Know where Sokar is killed.

That out of the way, the 'Goblins' as Oskyld and companions refer to them are the minions from 'Overlord' (the video game) just so no one is confused. Goblins is the preferred term in place of 'minions', and that they come in different colors.

NakedFury · Apr 16, 2021

Thanks for explaining about the minions-goblins thing. Since you had mentioned Nagash I thought you had semi domesticated Warhammer goblins or something.

Imperator Pax · Apr 16, 2021

Mesore
[Time stamp July 1999]

Ishtar was beginning to feel the fatigue. It was the last month of the calendar year. Mesore. Ra's tenure as Supreme System Lord had enforced on the majority of galaxy a degree of conformity, so it wasn't as if she were making things up wholesale. She would have doubtlessly felt more comfortable, and been reassured with more guidance but in the face of Moloch's destruction conflict from the frontier had followed.

It was the harvest season though, and Ishtar had found herself responsible to distributing loaves of black bread to the masses of workers bringing in end of the year's labor on top of overseeing the addition of new populations to the domain. The resettlement, and influx brought with it artisans, and other craftsfolk, but of a decidedly Greek persuasion, which was something else she wasn't prepared to contend with.

Even now her sisters were whitewashing the walls of the temples in what she was hoping on was an appropriate display to celebrate the new year's approach. It was also to symbolize the Dragon's victory over the wind, but in more symbolic turn. Thale's scribes, and ... citizen farmers... were already being organized to supplement preparations the unas already had underway for the coming season's planting. A coming season where, from little she had been able to gather from the Unas, should hold its most important day of celebration in roughly three and a half months time. The planting season would be the obvious most important portion of time to look forward to... excepting again that they were in conflict with neighboring domains.

"Apophis has unleashed powerful magic with his return." Neith remarked.

There was speculation of the serpent god's return. Everything ranged from his wrath being in response to the other system lords adding the First World to the protected planets treaty, or that Cronus had specifically supported the addition of the Tauri to the treaty to snub his ancient rival. It was also rumored that it had nothing to do with Apophis at all, and it was very possible that in itself was a snub directed at the much reduced brother of Ra.

It was not Apophis or his armies she was particularly concerned with, "That may be," She agreed, "But it Ares, and the Jaffa of his Spartan Guard we must contend with." Ishtar was hoping that Neith wouldn't point out that the Ha'tak which formed the vanguard of Apophis's new fleet bore the mark of Sokar, and by all reports were much superior to those foes he had faced thus far. She had no explanation for that.

The Unas were occupied constantly as well. The chappa'ai had been moved to a cleared field, and groundwork had been laid. If she understood what the Unas had planned, then it reminded her... the nearest thing was was the ball courts of the minor system lord Tonatui, or perhaps those of Apophis's favored sub lord Zipacna. That was probably coincidence. There were talks that the same would be done on other worlds. That the stargate would be re-centered in a modest flat field with the gate a one end of an I shaped structure with masonry or stone walls framing an outline. Militia and officials would be provisioned nearby to handle disputes that might originate from disagreements from merchants. Or really just their coming and going

"You think he will attack?"

The ease at which Noyan's breed had brought Thale to heel was no surprise. The minor free holding god still had paid tribute to Ares, and the Greek God of war could hardly have allowed such a motion to stand. Ares had responded with parties of Jaffa sent to collect tribute Thale had owed the system lord, and they had been driven off.

In realpolitik terms Thale had been a buffer zone between Moloch and Ares. His small domain had prevented either system lord from having an easy excuse to move against the other. The slow speed of their ha'tak had made it thus impossible to invade planets across the gulf of stars. A limitation which did not apply to the more fleet vessels of the Dragon's navy.

Ares had thus far avoided naval conflict, and probably with good reason. None of the Olympian gods were known for their talent for that sort of war. Ares may have been a system lord in his own right, but paid some degree of homage to his grandfather Cronus. The Titan possessed a much more mighty fleet... and that was likely tied up in expectation of war with the now returned Apophis.
--
Ishtar was unsure of what to make of the Stennosians. They worshipped Zeus son of Cronus, which did not bode well for long term peace with the latter she suspected. Still Zeus's chosen, their arrival, did make her job much easier at least in terms of administrating civil affairs. Particularly on worlds which had previously been disorganized, and left that way for centuries.

Simarka had been one such world. A target for infrequent raiding generations previously it had not been a Jaffa likely since before her birth. The humans lived largely as steppe nomads and pastoralists in great confederations of tribes.

It was doubtful that they would have really noticed Ares's band of warriors at all. If not for the presence of Zeus's chosen having been present. It was not Ares's jaffa that concerned her as she gripped the staff weapon. It was not the occasional errant blast of a staff weapon, most of which streaked skyward from either side's impromptu lines that concerned her.

One of Noyan's kin, the Prelate Anker had come to the world, and was even now engaged in mortal struggle. The bull bellowed as it battled the similarly sized crocodilian demon. The kisariku, minotaur, was perhaps seven feet tall and dressed in the standard Olympian tunic favored by Greeks when not in armor.

That would probably be the beast's downfall. The unas Prelate was armored and had already struck a blow that caused blood to mat the fur around the beast's eye. "I have never seen a minotaur," A jaffa beside her remarked shuffling to try and gain a better vantage point to watch as the two struggled amongst the standing stones.

Ishtar knew that neither side wished to interrupt their respective champions in this ritual, this if somewhat informal duel. She could not see the blow from her position, but the bellow from the beast was more pain than rage this time. Whatever blow Anker had struck had been true. The sin eater slammed the bull creature again, and then into a megalithic standing stone with a resounding crunch. Blood droplets bubbled from its snout. It was dying, Ishtar recognized the glazed look in the eyes of the creature.

Hours later she was in orbit of Simarka aboard a Ha'tak. She was given to understand that future warships would be different from this one. Ha'tak were the pride of Goa'uld fleet, and Moloch's pride had never allowed him to retain any of the older vessels. The Ha'tak he had been master of had been few... and his shipyards' had produced them in poor quality apparently as well. Anker, and the labors of the others, had been exactly, but there were limits.

The golden adorned walls so normal for the great ships had been pulled down. Gone were the hieroglyphs and replacing them were whitewashed hallways and corridors. The red lighting that some time suffused the corridors was presumably a preference of the Unas. The halls though created a clean atmosphere in their austerity.

It was still not one of those trio of Ha'tak that carried the dynastics of Ra. That continued to do so even though though the mark of the golden bull had been stripped of all other ships in the fleet. It was not something Ishtar questioned. Future Ha'tak would apparently be built like this one had been modified to, and insteady of golden pyramids the entire ship would probably be black, or the pyramid's sides would be red. Of course those could be rumors as well. It would be a change from the time of Moloch. A further reminder that the Canaanite fire god had been cast down.

It was not just the interior appearance of the vessel that had change. The ship was faster, and more powerful in battle. Under Moloch's reign it would have been unthinkable to have a vessel respond in such a timely manner to an outer province, and that was what had happened. Ishtar busied herself with staring at the swirling curtain of stars in the galaxy... or more correctly those in this region... and the domains of the gods who ruled.

She had never seen the scrying magics of the Goa'uld able to detect other fleets in neighboring star systems, and yet they could Ares's fleets across the border. They could track Tel'taks and other transport barques as well as the larger more impressive vessels of war. They were slower. That much was apparent. There were indicators in the spaces between star systems estimating the time of arrival of a given ship. It measured in days, weeks, in comparison to hours.

Moloch had never been a god of ships.

"No further hostilities seem imminent." The eater of sin remarked, "We will return to the anchorage of the fleet." So much had changed in the span of little more than a single season.

--

Commentary: the kisariku or minotaur originally comes from the Stargate RPG, and IIRC it makes an appearance alongside a couple of other furry aliens in the MGM novels. I include them because I think they make nice additions to the story. They're not common, again neither are the Unas. Indeed Ishtar assumes the Saurians are Unas because she's never seen one in person and thus has made the assumption and everyone around her has come to the same.

After all, everyone knows Sokar has unas attendants. 'Everyone knows this.'

Which brings us neatly to the next bit, the most important festival of Memphis was a two week (ish) affair celebrating Sokar, and Ptah which would fall roughly speaking during Halloween. (Again the Egyptians used a lunar calendar so there is some variation, and measured with three seasons based on the annual inundation)

Jamescc1 · Apr 16, 2021

Ishtar sees an Unas "what is that?"
Saurian "An unas!"
Ishtar blinks in confusion "then what are you?" Sg1 looks on
Saurian "I'm a saurian" walks away humming theme of Jurassic park.
Sg1 blankly looks on?

Imperator Pax · Apr 16, 2021

Jamescc1 said: ↑

Ishtar sees an Unas "what is that?"
Saurian "An unas!"
Ishtar blinks in confusion "then what are you?" Sg1 looks on
Saurian "I'm a saurian" walks away humming theme of Jurassic park.
Sg1 blankly looks on?
Click to expand...

Saurians generally refer to themselves as Raptors, which in this case would either lead to more Jurassic park jokes, or confusion because Sokar is typically depicted as a Hawk.

NakedFury · Apr 16, 2021

Okay I am lost and I need to ask to drop my confusion.

What is up with all the Sokar this or Sokar that mentions? Its getting progressively weird to keep seeing a mention to Sokar in every chapter and the SG1 to keep saying Sokar.

What happened and where did I miss it?

Jamescc1 · Apr 16, 2021

NakedFury said: ↑

Okay I am lost and I need to ask to drop my confusion.

What is up with all the Sokar this or Sokar that mentions? Its getting progressively weird to keep seeing a mention to Sokar in every chapter and the SG1 to keep saying Sokar.

What happened and where did I miss it?
Click to expand...

They think mc is Sokar, aka the devil!

Imperator Pax · Apr 17, 2021

NakedFury said: ↑

Okay I am lost and I need to ask to drop my confusion.

What is up with all the Sokar this or Sokar that mentions? Its getting progressively weird to keep seeing a mention to Sokar in every chapter and the SG1 to keep saying Sokar.

What happened and where did I miss it?
Click to expand...

Sokar's epithet is 'the scourge lord', now in Egyptian mythology he's actually quite a bit more nuanced than SG 1's rather heavy handed, 'Sokar is the Devil' connotations.

However by the modern day Sokar has been gone from Goa'uld politics for many centuries, so all that the Jaffa, and human populations know are broadly speaking the general basics: (Because Sokar is strongly associated with Ptah)

Scary lord of the undeworld

God of Craftsman

Associated with magic

Unas servants to punish the wicked

Stuff like that

This is going to get even worse, because Asgard-Zeus (The Asgard who adoped Zeus's identity after being marooned amnesiac on Stennos) addresses Oskyld as Older Brother [Cue SG 1 going back to, is Sokar Hades?]

This is also compounded in that Oskyld epithet is 'the Dragon of the lands beyond shadow', which translated into Egyptian or Greek would come off as referring to being lord of the underworld. Oskyld is itself a title meaning the 'Stranger' or less directly "Wanderer'.

This is basically the same thing that happened with Stennos's population where Asgard-Zeus replaced Goa'uld Zeus from the human perspective (and does a much better job ruling), except with Oskyld he is replacing Sokar

Imperator Pax · Apr 23, 2021

An Approaching New Year

The goa'uld were the top levels of the pyramid structure of their society. For the majority of the galaxy underneath the underlords it was the Jaffa who were next in line in terms of prestige and position. There was an exception though. Jaffa were important in the exception's case, there was no denying that, but in the domain of the Jade Emperor things were different from the galaxy at large. Yu Huang Shang-ti ruled over the most populous expanse of goa'uld space, and was the only notable system besides Ra's own brother Ptah, who had not placed strict controls on literacy, and writing. In the domain of the great Yu human commoners could aspire to take the Imperial examinations, a system that had been in place for twenty five hundred years continuously. It was in this domain that the gentleman scholar was held up regardless of birth, after all Pelops had created the first Jaffa from humans.

Most of the galaxy though did not fall under Yu's sway, and nor did Yu wish it to be thus. Yu, like Ptah, and a handful of a few Systems Lords were content with what they had. Thus it was unusual but not unheard of for humans to hold higher status. The most common exception was the lo'tar, but some goa'uld raised either by necessity or choice human classes up further with distinctions. Ra himself had elevated a specific class, a tribe of Medjai, to equivalent status with his Jaffa Guard giving them commands of planets, fleets, and armies. Ra had been Supreme System Lord and his eccentricities had been his own.

Zeus's chosen involved clergy of the Olympian, but were not solely comprised of it. The Greek citizen-soldier was not a slave. He was a general, and an engineer. He had been tutored by his god in both fields and had extensive experience. Zeus's chosen was to be responsible for coordinating a body of labor to expand and manage the mining of the all important mineral naquadah. It was something that Philip had never done, and hence was consulting with humans and jaffa who were in the service of the subjugated minor Goa'uld Thale.

She considered that, and dismissed it. Thale's raiders had attacked through the stargate, not by ship after all. Ishtar could understand though why given its location Ares had left Thale as a free holding lord. The handful of systems did produce a suitable tithe of naquadah, and looked like they would produce more in the upcoming year.

"The shaft could flood." One of the humans remarked. He was dressed in a chiton, which distinguished him as being from Thale's sub domain than that of Zeus's.

Phillip nodded, "We have considered this, we have techniques to pump out water from deeper mines that should not be a problem to implement." He went on to describe a system, that Thale's human seemed to understand, the screw would remove water. It wasn't the only solution, but it was apparently the one that was their first choice. Ishtar better understood the talk of widening the roads, and paving them. The engineering to remove water flooding underground mines was beyond her education. It would have been something Moloch just waved away... but then Moloch was not a lord of the underworld. She understand the numbers though, 25 talents of naquadah was a princely sum in Moloch's reign for a mine to produce with the stripping from shallow surface mines.

She understood what it was for though. Naquadah was the wealth of the gods. Unlike Moloch's labor relying on slaves the new mines would require craftsmen and artisans to toil in the earth beyond the sun's rays. The naquadah they would extract would go into foundries to forge the great warships.

"How many mines will that be?" She questioned reaching for the paper made of wood pulp she had been provided with. It was fragile, but apparently inexpensive.

"Not quite two dozen," Phillip responded, as he glanced to one of his fellows who nodded, "Twenty one, a projected total of seven thousand talents per season." Certainly she could understand the need to widen and pave the roads to move such a bounty.
--
It was a bit odd to contemplate the year ending in September, but that was a small problem compared to other ones. Oskyld had confirmed that if not necessarily all, but a significant portion at least of them, planets he had surveyed thus far had been terraformed. Some of them had clearly been carried out by the goa'uld either originally or as a follow on to whoever had done it originally, but the goa'uld had been using the same technology, and general process if not identical.

Technology that he did not, unfortunately, have access to. It would be one of the things he would have to contend with in the coming weeks. The most obvious solution would be since he didn't have the technology to do so, to use magic in its place. It wasn't his only problem with planetary administration.

Moloch's domain had been relatively contiguous in terms of occupied space. It might have seemed strange in terms of stellar space, but it was what separated the System Lords from less goa'uld. Occupying a largely continquous area of space allowed a system lord to concentrate his power base and respond, even despite the utility of the stargate. Given the expense, and legal restrictions on shipbuilding imposed under Ra, it also made sense to have domains radiate out from a central hub world... especially since the goa'uld did not micromanage things.

It wasn't ideal because generally constrained by the technological base of the bronze age, or even in iron age civilizations, there simply weren't enough productivity for what were considered developed worlds to provide for what he had in mind. Not efficiently anyway. There would have to be a capital district, but there would need to be surrounding provincial capitals. A next level down in terms of hub planets to manage, and coordinate both industrial, and defense needs.

Each of those provincial capitals would need naquadah, would need shipyards of their own to build ships, which would require naquadah. That was a shortage in terms of production that required time and inclination the canaanite fire god simply had never had. Of course Moloch had hewed more heavily in one direction than the average system lord, but most were loath to risk having parts of their empire be so potentially self sufficient. The general thinking was such tended to lead to a powerful underlord who might in turn get ideas above his station.

That freed him to contend with more external strategic concerns.

--
Commentary: So at some point I am going to have to go and include the perspectives of SG 1, its important to plot progression. Earth's view of developing things is not always correct. Much as Ishtar, and her fellow Jaffa also get things wrong.

In this case we're talking about moving from bronze age mining techniques to Roman, and high medieval scales, which is what these estimates are based off of. I think a lot of people fail to understand just how big of a change the late antiquity represented in terms of human productivity, Rome was an economic superpower.

Digression

That of course also leads into the fact that Renaissance, especially as it has been portrayed in historical popular culture was not some great leap ahead of medieval technology. Medieval Europe (and for that matter 'dark ages' Europe) made a number of very important technological shifts but agriculture is boring for most people so major farming shifts and so on and the beginning of European industrial metal production get overshadowed. And frankly Italy gets too much credit, France and England were quite frankly vastly more important in terms of social change (admittedly there are people who go the opposite and buy wholesale into magna carta this and regulations of Thames that and parliament). [As a further aside, England at the end of the Stuart dynasty, the civil war and subsequent Glorious Revolution basically borrowed everything they're famous for from Sweden. Stock markets? (not originally Swedish mind you) Bank of England (based off of the Bank of Sweden) Cromwell's New Model Army (basically a rip off of the early Swedish Army reforms of the 1610s such that the New Model Army would have been obliterated by any contemporary Continental Army of note, etc. This is also a facet of the protestant reformation, the nationalization and break up of the monasteries set English industrialization back two centuries, and is a major problem of Weber theorists.]

I'm done I'll stop with the social science.

Imperator Pax · Apr 30, 2021

Knowledge of the Gods
[August 1999]

Oskyld flexed his fingers. Arcane power morphing into divine energy. The bigger issue was not transubstation of one to the other, he was used to that. It was the difference in scale in terms of prayer, which provided a well spring of divine energy to draw from. On Athas he hadn't had anywhere near such a density. Then again they were talking about planets worth of populations centers, even if it was largely confined to the averages of bronze age technology and more importantly agriculture.

The agriculture, and the water were what allowed population centers, even if they weren't industrial era cities, to grow. The problem was the limits of bronze age agriculture. A problem he needed to rectify while still having it remain in the scope of indigenous understanding. That was where Stennos came in. Though commonly thought of as the dark ages in terms of agricultural productivity medieval Europe had made several leaps forward over the late classical, and those developments had set the stage for the oxen to be eventually superseded by the horse as the principle heavy labor animal.

There was also water to consider as well. Stennos had over the late five hundred years been pulled up from the level of antiquity of the Hellenistic period to a society that was more technologically, and militarily comparable to an emerging European state of the 15^th century. It was interesting of course that the dominant weapon in Stennosian society was now the more status oriented sword.... but he supposed that would change as energy weapons proliferated.

Zeus's efforts to uplift his chosen had been a painstaking process, and it gave Oskyld a template to work from, and a body of labor to do it. It also meant there was a ready culture of civil law to address the implementation of and so on, which was another benefit. Stennosians were a blend of like Mycenaean Greeks coupled with cultural additions to their society from the Norse... or more correctly from Asgard inclinations. Even without his memories Zeus had known what had felt right, and how things should be. That meant that Stennos held assemblies of free men, and the Greek assembly mixed well the the nordic thing. The concept of citizen solider, and hoplite's responsibility was a purely Greek military matter, but it saw the introduction of new superior iron technologies resulting in changes to Stennos's military all the same. Zeus's introduction of iron weapons, and the fact that it made longer swords more readily functional had impacted culturally as both status symbols, and as dueling weapons.

The staff weapon was effective in terms of what it had been designed for. In massed combat was superior to any 19^th century breechloader at the expected ranges for that sort of combat. Of course Europe had known about smokeless powder by then, but it had only really been the Boer war that had really resulted in the expectation of long range gunnery rather than things like volley sights. The staff weapon, outside of those hand tuned for the most elite jaffa guard, was not a precision weapon. Nor was it suited to laying down fire, again outside of those hand tuned for the very best Jaffa, or the weapon of a martial Goa'uld.

The Zat'nikatel was similarly equipped only to elite jaffa. An officer's side arm issued out as much as a symbol as it was a weapon. The jaffa generally disliked the smaller weapons as it was generally used to take prisoners. It too did the job it was intended to do.

Both weapons met the design requirements that had been set down for them. Oskyld knew what he needed were new weapons built with different requirements in mind. It wasn't an uncommon problem to his mind. It wasn't an immediate priority though. It would have attracted too much attention at this time... and besides the goa'uld had a weapon in production which would be a useful stopgap. The staff weapon was useful, and in trained hands surprisingly accurate, but that took time. It was much easier to simply mass volumes of jaffa and have them fire in ranks at a general area in battles between Jaffa.

It would have been unwise to abruptly escalate against Ares, or any other System Lord, who were when one got right down to it, simply testing his mettle. If he escalated abruptly with new weapons unfamiliar to the Goa'uld society at large there would be questions, and suspicion. There were exceptions to that. The confusion regarding his raptors was largely limitted to Jaffa. The goa'uld didn't care about one more client race, especially given Apophis's 'rampaging'.

Apophis was even now engaged in a war with his ancient rival Cronus, as well as his nephew Heru'ur. That conflict was occupying most of the attention of the system lords as a whole, and that was good. The deep irony was that in terms of changes, the goa'uld would pay much less attention to any large naval project than any dramatic change in ground equipment. It wasn't to say they would pay no attention to new ship classes but the expense of ship design particularly in terms of the skill required to design them meant most goa'uld ignored changes as white elephants.

He dumped the transubstanitated magical energy into the planet's atmosphere a process of creation that would take time to really bear out any fruits, but would have made sense to the Slaan, or even for that matter Nekherran liche priests or the elves of Ulthuan. The difference though was scale, because this was planetary, which wasn't that big of a change when going from 'continental' admitteldy.

More to the point though, it was true magic, not technology masquerading as magic, and there was a reason for that. He needed to be able to modify things like wind patterns and rainfall, and that sort of thing.
--
Zeus craned his head, "I see." He remarked, "I did not realize that it was a potential issue." The Asgard admitted, "And indeed had I, I may have proffered a solution."

"A solution?"

"I have cross referenced your original list of gate addresses with my own in hopes of establishing items of interest." He responded, and tapped a crystalline structure causing a gate address to appear, "And this planet should retain a repository of the ancients."

He looked at the address, and that was basically the end of the discussion on the matter. The prospect was simply too good of an opportunity to miss... to not act on. That the planet was one of those that had largely been abandoned in the fallout of Cronus's return to depose Zeus millennium prior was another reason. It was available and relatively speaking in terms of space part of the Greek sphere of colonization. That put it in relative close proximity to Stennos, and thus Moloch's contiguous domain, but it also represented an area of space in proximity to both Ares, as well as his grandfather Cronus.

Most goa'uld were spawned with what could be thought of as a basic collective memory package, as little more than drones to fill the pouches of Jaffa. That wasn't all goa'uld That was what made Ares, and Pelops rather unique in terms of goa'uld, because they had emerged as carefully nurtured symbiotes. Heru'ur was another example of a goa'uld who had had been born with the knowledge contributed from both of his parents, and perhaps uniquely was Ra's only surviving 'true' offspring, or at least the only one of note.

Oskyld stared down at the sphere. The curvature of the planet. Bits, and pieces of knowledge swirling around in his mind. The modifications of this Ha'tak had been born out of experiences in space warfare, and the sciences that made it possible, providing an insight into the inefficiencies of the ship's systems. Part of that had been born out of goa'uld cost saving measures in designs, or even measures to increase longevity for a ship that would be potentially serving for centuries. It was entirely different matter with the knowledge of the presumable parent designs for things like reactors, and hyperdrive generators. This was so much more than the understanding of terraforming technology.

Zeus craned his head. "No challenge seems forthcoming, though I have reservations not protecting this world."

They didn't have the resources to do that properly. "Am I wrong in, this planet had trinium reserves?"

"It does." Zeus remarked, "I suspect someone purposefully excised it from the standard goa'uld cartouche during or even before the Titomachy, if records sourced from Saqarra are any indication." The Goa'uld System Lord Zeus? Cronus? Perhaps someone earlier, and it would be something to look into.

The planet was large unpeopled, even more so than most. Unlike Stennos it had not undergone a population boom in the centuries after the orbital bombardment, but there was no real lasting damaging to the planet's eco system. It was most likely that natural famines as vagary of pre modern agriculture had taken their toll keeping the population at small bronze age city states. "I already have begun planning for eight provinces," Ringing the 'capital district' that was taking shape as it was. "This will be as good a choice for a forgeworld, and provincial center of administration as any of the others in this region of space."

--
Commentary: I'm having some computer issues with desktop, which ate the planet side scene for P3X 439. Now while this occurs in the original version, with P3X 439 becoming the Thunder Province Capital, this is also the part where I did time skip about ten months to summer of 2000, with SGC (Jack, and Daniel centric scenes) in between.

What I may do, as much of what takes place between the intervening ~ ten months is empire building is still cover the SGC side of things, in addition to focusing on some of the minor matters of development. In the original versions Oskyld is accounted for spending a lot of time in the shipyards overseeing what are really his first major fleet construction programs being needed for defending multiple planets.

Imperator Pax · May 3, 2021

Anointing the new year
September 1999

The white washing of the walls had been finished on schedule. The garlands strong along the paths and in the open spaces of the temples though seemed mostly done for the humans. Her fellow Jaffa at least had the prospect of battle to center them. Even then the influx of wealth brought by the merchants was a change. Zeus's domain, and the Greeks were alien to Moloch's way of thinking.

The rings activated and deposited her from the temple's sanctum into the heart of favor, and divine power. These were the shipyards that would receive the bulk of the naquadah to be mined from beneath the ground on dozens of worlds. She could understand why though, despite the increase in population there was no shortage of food. The wheat loaves of black bread were available, and provided food to those who lacked it, as well as to workers, alongside beer, and other daily labor rations. She was not going to question it.

Ishtar's eyes took a moment to adjust to sight before her. She didn't really have a frame of reference for what she was seeing. She had seen Ha'tak under construction before, and scene their anti ship cannons. These were larger weapons to be sure, but how much larger she wasn't quite able to put into terms. They were shaped different, but that also meant little. It was a difference more in terms of scale.

The alkesh were the thing which had changed the least from her perspective. There had been changes, but in comparison to the work done to breath life into the skeletons of Ha'tak it was small. Like the Ha'tak the main change seemed to be in the speed at which they flew between stars. They were the eyes of Ha'tak ships that could not be everywhere, despite the clarity of their scrying... and presumably they would eventually launch raids wholly independent of the stargate. This had been done before... daring raids had even been launched using unarmed tel'tak.

"Tachyon emissions are what we expected."

"The formula is the accepted metric for calculation for a reason." Zeus replied crossing his arms over his chest. "There isn't any practical difference between mounting alkesh with cloaks than its performance in cargo ships. Even at light speed." He added after a brief pause, as if it were a secondary concern.

Oskyld nodded. The irony of course was that the goa'uld cloaking device had been taken from a ship that was not FtL capable. It was actually one of the improvements that the goa'uld had made in practical terms of design. The application of cloaking devices to small faster than light ships was a boon if properly employed. There were Tel'tak which were either custom manufactured with armaments, or retrofitted, but nothing standard. That wasn't to say the tel'tak was useless, but it was certainly less useful than the Alkesh for his needs. The modern tel'tak design even seemed to be some hybridization of two different gate builder designs, but that was he supposed largely irrelevant. Of course Alkesh were no designed to win fleet engagements, and they weren't trying to make them. "The new ship class was always going to be larger," If only to accommodate not only more Alkesh wings, but also the simple fact that it needed a bigger more effective reactor design. "There are existing designs of troop transports that would be better suited to landing troops than trying to land a capital terrestrially."

They simply needed to be outfitted with shields, though he understood why the original design hadn't been two thousand plus years ago. Just like the Death Gliders hadn't changed much either. In terms of regular usage there had been no reason to do so. Both the larger transport ship design, and the Death Gliders fit into their specific design niche. They had met their original design requirement and that they could be produced inexpensively was the point. The only Goa'uld who seemed to care about improving on the Glider as an actual space fighter was Heru'ur and he'd largely been prevented from doing so by Ra's restrictive policy of arms control. Heru'ur's improvements had been iterative instead of revolutionary, but most of his work really lay on his jaffa being encouraged to master the glider. Racing was a popular past time in Heru'ur's domain, and was well known enough outside of it to attract visitors.

Heru'ur was not the problem. His uncle Apophis was. Apophis had cloak capable Ha'tak, which should not have been possible given the limitations of the Goa'uld cloaking device copies as he understood them. They would need an answer to those. Oskyld banished the Ha'tak as the priestess entered the chamber proper. The classic Ha'tak's pyramid base was at a steeper angle in comparison to the new design, which contributed in part to the size difference. The improved ship would be larger as a result

--
The formal calendar start of the new year was an oddity but it was ideal for announcing restructuring plans. There would be eight provinces outside of the Imperial Core. There would be potentially other provinces created in the years following, but the eight would effectively ring the region of space around the Imperial Core.

The role of provincial capital required certain criteria though. Oskyld would have preferred not to need to relocate large volumes of people, but he would if it was necessary. The more pressing requirement was system location, the necessary volume of naquadah reserves accessible in order to support shipyards. Thankfully the Goa'uld shipbuilding facilities were relatively safe, if crude black box, copies of Alteran platforms. It was what allowed them to still rely on such primitive mining techniques to feed material into the 'forges', and still churn out a respectable ship in a reasonable amount of time.

Anything belonging to the Alterans was impossibly valuable to the Goa'uld even what were really trinkets were important status symbols for Goa'uld. The limitations of the goa'uld to actually produce their shipbuilding facilities had been an important tool of control during the Pax Re. Ra had apparently a lot of effort and political capital to establish the status quo and in particular to keep the other system lords in line.

This would mean basically nothing to the humans of the domain. Even Zeus's chosen were late medieval population. They're drafting abilities, the use of math to calculate things like displacement for shipbuilding, or load bearing capacity were not the sort of thing that would produce spaceships in short order. It would take time to create the institutional knowledge, and the base to support things... he would be long gone by then.

The fleets that would be needed to protect those worlds would need to be built on goa'uld machinery, and in largely Goa'uld methods and styles because to do otherwise would have posed both logistical hurdles as well as provoked potentially dangerous attention.

Oskyld idly ran his fingers across where the repositories arms had latched onto his head. It was taking time to digest the knowledge, and it would take time to separate important worlds in the cartouche, and to decipher the gate software, and others. The ancients had seeded the milky way with stargates, and terraformed it to suit life for the most part, and yet very little of them remained, but then they hadn't been native to this Galaxy. Zeus had remarked that the ancient had passed through the Asgard home galaxy long ago, and that their mastery of the Ancient database was limited... and Zeus's people had problems of their own.
--
Commentary: Due to computer problems, I am now very behind schedule in terms of planned updates, but thankfully there are relatively recent back ups to pull my outlines from. Tentatively the following is scheduled: the usual fixed updates Wednesday Jumpchain, Friday Stargate SG 1 (this), Saturday Alternate History. That has not changed.

Tuesdsay, Thursday, and Sunday will probably mark the beginning of my Pokemon Trainer CYOA posting as a revamp of its SB version. I've been on a Leaf Green binge. Now as I've mentioned in SB in relation to Jumpchain, and this [Pokemon] CYOA story they're similar, but they're not identical in plot, but since I had one sixty thousand word Pokemon fic in progress I wasn't planning to do another one for Jumpchain when they had similar outlines.

Anyway that will probably start tomorrow. Next week while I may deal with Scarlett Witch's introduction in Not a Hero (based off my build from the Supervillian CYOA), I might also be updating this (Stargate) more than once next week, as well as potentially my Xianxia fic.

Mastersgt · May 3, 2021

Has MC already accessed an Ancient Repository? Cuz every day, month, year that he does not... when he knows where some are. Seems like wasted time. Especially when someone else could get to them first. Same with that DNA resequencer of Nirrti's.
Just keep waiting on when SG-1, the Tokra, etc... finally meet the MC. Actually meet a REAL god. not just some pretender.

Imperator Pax · May 4, 2021

Mastersgt said: ↑

Has MC already accessed an Ancient Repository? Cuz every day, month, year that he does not... when he knows where some are. Seems like wasted time. Especially when someone else could get to them first. Same with that DNA resequencer of Nirrti's.
Just keep waiting on when SG-1, the Tokra, etc... finally meet the MC. Actually meet a REAL god. not just some pretender.
Click to expand...

That is what he did in Knowledge of the Gods, hence today's quote of:

Oskyld idly ran his fingers across where the repositories arms had latched onto his head. It was taking time to digest the knowledge,
Click to expand...

Mastersgt · May 4, 2021

Imperator Pax said: ↑

That is what he did in Knowledge of the Gods, hence today's quote of:
Click to expand...

Ah... must have confused that then. Cuz I read the part talking about the Asgard and their limited knowledge of Ancient tech latched onto MC not having done that yet. Thanks for the answer.

Imperator Pax · May 7, 2021

SG1 Interlude
[Reference Timeframe Late Season 3]
The Air Force had control of the ICBM portion of the Nuclear Triad, and that had been the first attempt by the US to create an Anti Starship Weapons System. That was to say Groom Lake had decided to use Ra's idea of add naquadah to a nuke as a fusion stage booster. Unfortunately it hadn't worked out well when Apophis and Klorel had shown. In theory the yield would have made a big bang, but they missiles had impacted the shields of the ship prematurely. That didn't mean Groom Lake's nuke and missile people were giving up, and they were paying special attention to goa'uld weapons. All that was fine. Jack recognized they needed bigger better weapons, didn't mean he liked Bauer trying to poach Carter from SG 1.

Jack O'neill could have rationalized his flippancy as being at that point in his career where the orders being stupid was more important to point out than the potential blowback. Really, fuck the NID spooks. Of course that rationalization might have held slightly more merit if his jacket didn't have a plethora of notations on him being a flippant, and frequently downright insubordinate 'vigilante' as one hypocritical navy jackass had called him. Independent Operational Ability had been what the CIA had been looking for though and it was why he had spent the cold war jumping hot spot to hot spot until Saddam had invaded Iraq... and the months spent as POW under the care of the Republican Guard.

It had helped sell his 'going rogue' side trip. He really doubted that NID mission had been all that unsanctioned all things considered, but as tempting as it might have been to ask Thor to go snooping through all the NID networks it would have actually gotten him in serious trouble, and Jack knew where to draw the line most days. Or at least he thought he did. Still the operation hadn't stopped the NID tools from prattling on about how their mission was to provide 'vital and necessary' civilian oversight, which seemed a little laughable given most of their project managers and directors were full bird colonels or up.

For an oversight department there sure were a lot of civilian scientists and military brass involved, and far fewer lawyers than Jack was used to seeing from say the CIA's attempts. When Christians In Action wanted to pretend they were following the rules they at least made an effort to coach people into making policy sound like it was following 'the rules'.

Still there were limits, and he was risking getting Hammond in trouble if he had pushed calling them out any further, so he had skipped off down the hall to Danny's office slash library slash junk closet slash sometimes nap space. Jack got that you slept where and when you could. "Anything interesting, Danny boy?"

"Hi Jack." The archaeologist was predictable in that he was surrounded by books. "I wish Thor had stuck around to be honest it would have been a lot easier to ask him about some of this stuff." He replied. Danield had categorized this problem of 'all the myths were true', which wasn't to say that all the myths were actually true, or even all of them had even had some basis in something that had happened, but that a large volume of events in Earth's past had been shaped by events some of which could clearly be attributed to the Goa'uld involvement.

"Are you still doing that work up on the other protected planets?" Thor had gotten Earth included in the treaty, despite O'neill felt that his own performance as Captain Kirk ... or maybe the new captain now that he thought about it... had been a little lacking. Of course Carter patching Cronus up certainly hadn't heard their standing either, fucking weird as that was.

"Mainly Cimmeria," Daniel replied, "Something happened there. Heru'ur lost three Ha'tak, and we know it wasn't the Asgard, even though Thor did show up after."

Jack nodded. That had been months ago, over a year now, and they had never found an adequate answer for what had happened. "This your militant nox theory?"

"I am still leaning towards that. We know the Asgard were part of an ancient alliance. Asgard in Norse mythology had allies. The Aesir were allied to the elves who were kind of like lesser gods. The Jotun could have even be thought of as other gods ..." he trailed off as Daniel tended to do as he tried to tame a stream of consciousness lecture that would have been more appropriate to a college classroom, Jack was used to it. "Ability to turn invisible, healing. That sounds like what we know of the Nox, and it sounds as what little we know of the elves from Norse myth. Gairwyn even said they were elves."

Jack had to admit that Gairwyn saying they could bring the dead back to life really did make it sound like the Nox... on the other hand, "They had guns. Doesn't really sound like the bunny huggers to me."

"I admit that does make it hard to reconcile." He agreed, "More than anything I think it suggests that we need to pay more attention to cataloging Earth records. Nick's Crystal Skull, and the Aliens responsible for that know the Asgard, and are opposed to the Goa'uld." Daniel's kind of screwball grandfather had been able to share some information, but most of it wasn't useful to the SGC, even if Daniel and Nickolas Ballard both thought the historical information had broader context. "We know the Omeycoan specifically warred with Goa'uld who had adopted the Aztec personalities. Among others, and that Apophis sheltering Zipacna doesn't make them very happy."

Jack snorted. "We shouldn't have let that bastard get off Ne'tu." Not that he had a real good plan of how they could have stopped him from making it off. They'd been in too much of a hurry, and hadn't been prepared. It had been a mission with hairbreadths margin and no prep time. "They have anything else to say. I mean besides that whole lost city thing you and Nick keep talking about?"

"We know the Omeycoan probably had contact with the gate builders early in their," The Crystal Skull aliens, "development, We know that after the ancients disappeared they got into a fight with the goa'uld. We know that about a thousand years ago the Goa'uld ran headlong into the Asgard that resulted in well the kind of galactic status quo. The protected planets treaty. The goa'uld losing the rest of, or almost all of their ancient technology hold overs that they couldn't build copies of themselves. Most of what we've learned is, are details that we've suspected regarding the goa'uld, but it would really be nice to get the Asgard side of things. I would love to know what prompted not only the surge of fighting, but also the peace treaty, the decision to seed planets with Norse populations in the galaxy. There are a lot of questions that we could ask the Asgard that wouldn't violate the protected planet's treaty restrictions."

"We've got a relaxed duty cycle coming up. Teal'c will be visiting his family, and Bratac, I'll go to Cimmeria with you if you want." Jack offered. The fishing was good on the planet, so it wasn't as if he was going to be bored or anything.
--
Commentary: This is the first segment of 'interlude' on the earth side of things. Stargate's timeline is a little wonky in general, but SG 1 Season 3, well we know Jack spent three plus months off world trapped on the planet that routinely gets rained on, and has nadquadah soil which explode (or whatever). Seasons 2 and 3 introduce the Reetou, and Crystal Skull aliens who for all intents and purposes never make a return in the TV show though expanded material and other stuff in the show suggests the Omecyoan played a pretty important role indirectly in a lot of pre show events.

So this one is mainly place setting. Bauer (who in canon temporarily succeeds Hammond) is name dropped here, and plays a somewhat more recurring role in the broader Stargate program (here he is implied to be part of the Naquadah nuclear weapons program, which given the episode he shows up in seems to be supported by canon). The NID is less cartoonish-;y villainous in this or will be as things go on simply because its one of the things in SG1 that I don't think aged well.

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