World Tree MUSH

    Bryllu had gotten directions to a world. An iteration of Earth that registered as a Blossom, though records show it was once flagged by the Gardeners as a Thorn World, before being upgraded in the last several months. 

    Beyond just directions to the World itself, she was given specific instructions to route through a city called Lazlo and fly West-by-Northwest to a set of coordinates. Any old or archival data she can match it against has her coming in through Toronto, Canada and then heading towards the area of Minneapolis, Minnesota by most 'Earth Atlases'. However, what she finds is not a thriving country as most Americas are, but a very rough looking world. 

    Lazlo seems to accept her, and it provides her data with a lot of marked 'No-Fly Zones' that she is cautioned to avoid for her own safety on her journey. She will have no trouble if she avoids those zones. Once she actually arrives at the coordinates, it looks to be... well... ruins. A lot of city ruins, a lot of scrap metal around, a lot of what look to be bombed out tanks, destroyed power armor, dessicated corpses left unburied. It can easily be inferred that a brutal war was fought here and then never cleaned up. 

    And right on top of the coordinates, sitting on what looks like the remnants of a scorched, burned out, and smashed APC is one Valerian Railton. He is sitting cross-legged, with what looks like a briefcase-style weapons case in front of him on the wreckage, calmly smoking a stimstick as he waits.

Bryllu's gotten herself a humanoid form that more or less matches that of a human woman, though still obviously mechanic. Thrusters in hands and feet, though the way she moves suggests limited room for gently course corrections and her three point landing is with enough force to break a normal human's legs and arm. "Hey, thanks for being willing to help."

    "Yeah no problem. Welcome to the burnt out husk of Tolkeen, land of magic and acceptance. You may think this is some grim warning or lesson to you about why you shouldn't seek to learn war. It's actually just that this place is so blasted to shit that no one ever comes here except on scav runs. So yeah, welcome to my home world!" He waves around generally, spits his cigarette out into the carcass of the vehicle, and then hops off the wreckage with the weapons case in hand, "Thanks for coming in a form that helps me teach you." 

    "So I tried to figure out the best way to teach you. I think we're going to avoid any solid projectile ballstics, they require too much accommodation for recoil, variant gravity, angles and air resistance." He places the case down on the ground and crouches in front of it, "I want to start you off on light-based weaponry. No recoil, the effective range is nice and clean, and it'll work in space if you ever need it to. How does that sound to you?"

"Hey, just remember." Bryllu takes a good look around. "My world's dying, we don't have any stars or inhabitable planets anymore. What's left of Earth is a mausoleum, if it still exists. By my reckoning, your world looks to be in a perfectly workable state." She shrugs, "Do you know what my job was? Spending centuries scouring the universe to collect enough matter to convert into energy to buy us a few more days."

The synthetic human listens to the explanation, "Sure. I suspect that it's going to work like a human-sized version of a Nicoll-Dyson beam?" She asks, trying to visualize it, "... do you know what Nicoll-Dyson beam is?"

    "You know, you say you're a kid, but you're pretty pragmatic overall. I'd have pegged you for being in my equivalent of early 20s. Sounds pretty dystopian, not that I can judge much." He muses as he leans over and starts undoing clasps on the case, opening it. What he pulls out looks like someone crossed an assault rifle design with a flashlight and turned it into a gun, "Nicoll-Dyson? No idea, to be honest. I'm sure some people in this world understand that, but..." He trails off and gestures at himself, "I never designed the weapons. Just used em. The few people in this world that can make new weapons, now those guys are set for life. I wish I knew half as much stuff as you, in terms of common knowledge." 

    He holds the rifle out to her, "This is an NG-L5 Northern Gun Laser Rifle. It weighs just over 6 kilograms, it has an effective range of just under 490 meters. It uses energy clips designed to feed into the gun like a standard magazine for ease of use. Each clip will hold 10 shots. I got you a rifle and three E-clips. I'm sure a smart girl like you can figure out how to charge them and save yourself some money." He grins as he looks at it, "It's not as light as a Wilk's, and not as energy efficient, but these things are durable as hell, so a lot of adventurers prefer them. I used one a LOT when I was growing up on the frontier before I had my operation. It's simple, effective, and easy to use. Aim it right and four or five shots in the same spot can take the head off one of those power armors you saw me wearing on that swamp planet."

"A Nicoll-Dyson beam is a structure designed to focus some or all of a star's energy output into a beam." Bryllu explains the basic idea behind the megastructure. She picks up the weapon and the clips, and takes a good look. "I wouldn't call my world dystopian, I didn't need to work, I chose to. Felt better to be useful than not, but notions such as 'you got to work to eat' are positively barbaric by our people's standards."

"Yeah I think I can recharge these, my ship has a pretty solid matter-energy conversion engine so it won't even cost much." She tosses the unloaded weapon from one hand to the other, figure out how much it weighs, "So how do these work? I don't know anything about making weaponry, which is why I've mostly been using sharp things. Those are just basic physics."

    "I dunno. I consider any society in which a species stops advancing to be pretty dystopian. But it also makes sense why you might not understand the choices people like Miss Shuzenji or myself make regarding our powers," He muses as he watches her toss the weapon from one hand to another, "I can't explain the exact science that well, but when you pull the trigger it depletes part of the charge in the clip to generate a projectile burst of light that essentially... well... tries to burn or melt through what it hits." 

    "Otherwise, uh... you hold it like this..." He moves around behind her to guide the rifle up into a position where she has the butt of it firmly in what counts for a shoulder, "Aim down the sights right here. Line up the targetting marker over what you wanna hit and then pull the trigger. Zappo." 

    He steps back away from her, "Take a couple test shots if you want. Try to keep your body steady. Everything around here is either dead or destroyed anyway, no one's gonna care that you put a hole in the wreckage of a SAMAS."

"We stopped advancing because we couldn't beat entropy." Bryllu argues in response, "I've never seen it because the stars were gone before my time, but at our height every star in the galaxy existed because we placed it. We did not vent any excess energy of our stars to places where we didn't need it. But even with many trillions of brilliant minds working at it for trillions of years. The Director, an AI powered by the entire output of a star, spent eighty percent of its computing power on the problem for even longer."

Bryllu sounds pretty heated, "It's just that entropy was not to be defeated. It's not that we didn't try. It's exactly why we still have people going out and spending their existence on buying everyone just a few more days, because it's better than to sit around waiting for the end. So please don't tell me our world is dystopian simply because we failed to overcome entropy."

During her rant she lines up the weapon, aims down the sights and once she gets into position she stops moving entirely except for minor adjustments to perfect her aim, one of the advantages of not having to breathe to live, and of relying on speakers rather than lungs to talk. Eventually, she takes her shot.

    When she squeezes the trigger, a lance of light briefly bursts out of it and hits the side of whatever piece of scrap or rubble she was aiming at. It punches clear through that piece of armor, leaving a melting hole in the side of whatever battlefield relic was between her sights, "There you go. Nice shot. Sorry I'm having you do it manually. It might help you if your sensors ever shut down, but I'm sure you can also rig up an auto-targetting mechanism or something." 

    But it's her slightly heated response to him that causes Valerian to lean against the side of something and watch her as she practices, "So you're saying that rather than sit and wait for the end, even if that would be absolutely comfortable, you are willing to sacrifice your personal well-being, forgo your position of absolute comfort that society has guaranteed you, for the slim chance that you can give someone else a few more days?" He considers it, "That is a very altruistic choice." 

    He then points out a bit directly, "It is also exactly the choice that Miss Shuzenji made and you criticized her for. Given a choice between having no influence, but no risk, or having to sacrifice that comfort for the chance to aid those around her, she made the same choice." He crosses his arms a bit, "They're very analogous, when compared in a vacuum. You both would prefer to do something, rather than nothing, regardless of the risk to yourself."

"Not someone else. Everyone else. All quadrillions of us." Bryllu adds, "And it wasn't entirely selfless, it's not like I'm lacking in comfort in my spaceship, and it was the closest I could come to being an explorer in a world where there's nothing left to explore." Bryllu takes another shot, "And yes, I was a bit blinded by my views on the inherent injustice of hierarchical societies, and I already apologized to her. You're not wrong, but you're also missing the thrust of the problem I saw in her situation." She takes another shot, "It's not that she sacrifices herself, it's that someone else is setting the terms on what form those sacrifices take. It seems that's resolved by now, though, so I've got no meaningful complaints with that situation left."

    "Haha. You're right that I'm definitely not fully in touch with your viewpoints. I don't know that I ever will be, all told." He takes another one of his cigarette-alikes out of his apron and lights it, smoking it slowly as he watches her, "And I'll stop lecturing you. I doubt you want to hear from someone a fraction of a percent of your age. And, as you said, it is all resolved now and she has been 'reborn', so to speak." 

    "You can keep that rifle, by the way. Like I said, I got it for you. Take it apart, put it back together, modify it. Eventually it will be 'your' rifle, so to speak. It can supplement your physics-based melee options more than mine. Juicers suffer diminishing returns on firearms." He tapes some ash from the tip of his cigarette as he watches her take her shots, "I wonder, though. Do your people have any sort of religion, or did you move past that as a species?"

"And I don't think I will ever fully understand your economic systems, or why so many people seem fine being subjected to a hierarchical society even when they don't benefit from it." Bryllu answers in turn, "So we'll just have to make do, right?" There's a pause, "Honestly, you've been doing a better job 'parenting' than my parent ever did. I don't think they really wanted a child. It's just the thing to do in our line, reach a billion years, create offspring, name the offspring after our ancestor and increment the number by one." 7She sounds a more than a bit bitter. "And no. What mythical powers without evidence could impress a society that has raised itself up to be masters of the universe." A brief pause, "Though some of the species that ascended later on do tend to be a bit awkwardly referential towards us elder species. Though in my experience, more so among Andromedans than Galaxians."

    "Haha. I feel a bit awkward being considered a good parent to someone exponentially older than me, but I appreciate that a lot. I think you are, to use a term from organic society, 'someone who has a big heart'." Valerian says to her as he takes a drag from the cigarette, "A lot of people in your position would try to subjugate, or try to dominate. You seem to be more interested in learning why people live a different lifestyle than you. Or helping where you can. That's probably why you got so frustrated." 

    He stretches some, "You know..." He considers it, "You could always take a new name. Or a nickname. Like 'Breezy'. Because Bryullu Zibhu. Bry Zi. Breezy." He gives her a playful grin and then adds, "Try not to look up to me too much, though. Not everything I do is good. Some day you might see the less savory jobs I take on. You might even have to fight me some day!"

"You have to understand. Our people don't do subjugation or the like. War is a footnote mentioned as something that last happened in ancient history. Like, war is to us what being a Neanderthal is to you." Bryllu explains, "But you're right about wanting to help. I think a lot of people in my situation would either despair at losing the comforts we're used to, or try to work very hard to figure a way to get our people access to the bounties of these worlds."

Bryllu sighs, "And in doing so, inadvertently either lead to war or rob these people of natural bounties that they would have had access to in what for them would seem an eternity but to us isn't even all that long." She takes another shot, then ejects the energy clip and puts the rifle to her side, "Thanks for helping me, and I'll skip changing my name. Just because my parent isn't the best doesn't mean I want to throw away well over a trillion years of legacy."

    "Fair point." Valerian says, folding his hands behind his head as he looks around, "As for war being caused by natural bounties..." He waves around a bit, "This was once a nation of peaceful magic users who wanted to accept everyone. The Coalition invaded and, backed into a corner, they decided their only retaliation was to summon demons. It was one of the bloodiest wars in the history of this area. I guess I bring this up to say... peaceful people can get the most extreme when they're out of options." 

    "So I agreed to teach you because I never wanted you to be out of options." He kicks a chunk of metal and sends it sort of skittering across the ground, "If you ever need advice, I'm here. So don't be afraid to ask for more help in the future."

"Yeah I've been doing some reading, so I quickly figured out what some likely outcomes were. Ancient Earth isn't something I knew a lot about, but well, we're here. That tale isn't even all that uncommon from what I can tell." Bryllu nods and attaches a little strap to the gun which then snaps to her back, "Honestly I'd probably be a lot safer if I didn't take all these risks, but I have a 'big heart' and I don't want to look away if I can help." She salutes, "I'll see you around, and make sure to keep a list of questions to ask so I don't end up calling you for every little thing, but things do get asked eventually."