new ac6 au idea help me

okay so i've been playing pacific drive since it came out, and it gave me SUCH brainworms for a post-apocalyptic AU of AC6. In BULLET POINT FORM:

when the Fires happened (the first one), it occured just as a coral collapse started to initiate

this basically fucked up rubicon and its now the bermuda triangle of space

anyone who lands on it don't come back and no sensors or satellites can penetrate the thick crimson cloud that covers the entire planet (looks like jupiter from the outside now, with storms and the like)

still, corpos gonna corpo. so after a few decades when nothing changes, they send a few reconnaisance groups to the planet

some manage to report back before vanishing, and the reports are: laws of physics have been screwed up, nothing makes sense, and everything's trying to kill them

Corpos sent their ac squads bc if its dangerous bring guns

They vanish, and after sending a few more they throw up their hands and are like, planet's haunted. fuck it. no coral ever now

ENTER WALTER

who's been closely observing this whole thing for a while

paranoid this effect will spread to other systems, as ambient coral levels are rising in the vaccuum of space around the planet

sends 621 to the planet's surface with strict orders for him to find 'watchpoint alpha' which should have a functioning comms array that can send through heavy coral interference

621 crashlands on the surface and man, what the hell is this scp shit

anyways, there're still ppl living on rubicon, but they've adapted to the fact that they're stuck in a reality-warped nightmare and roll with the weirdness

they have acs, but they're such precious resources that they're only deployed whenever they're gonna do a big expedition for a resource haul when identifying a safe passage opening up to some intact ruins or old foundries

most of the time they're trundling around the planet's surface on old MRAPs or jeeps, harvesting resources where they can

the redguns and vespers who were sent before have kind of like. settled down there - those that survived, anyways. bc they can't leave, but they can't survive without working together either. so there's like an uneasy alliance between the native rubiconians, the redguns and the vespers. as well as various independents that landed and learned to survive

AYRE OF COURSE IS IN THIS

so sentient coral do exist, and they tend to possess random objects

ayre in this case has possessed a car :| 621's gonna drive it

anyway 621 and ayre come across rusty, who's a scavenger for his rubiconian outpost - and the pilot of STEEL HAZE - and tl;dr rusty takes 621 back to the warrens

621 saying he has a mission to reach watchpoint alpha, bc then he and walter can "fix" rubicon

(621 is unaware of the "burn all the coral" plan. walter only told him they're fixing this mess)

rusty's interested, but says reaching the watchpoint is dependent on the conditions. he may have to wait a while

THEN POST-APOCALYPTIC ROAD TRIP AND FALLING IN LOVE while ayre plays wingman

anyway i had to get that idea out of my mind and writen down. ac combat is super rare and is only done when redguns and vespers scrap over a big haul of resources, and even then they try not to damage each ther too much, bc if their acs get too damaged, that's it. it's not being fixed with their limited resources.

rusty who's never been a spy. born on rubicon when it was already messed up and thinks this is normal. oh hey so the landscape is constantly shifting and transforming a mile long field of grass into an acidic bog that'll chew through metal in seconds? haha yeah that happens. it is what it is. oh those manniquins you see on the road sometime? yeah they multiply when you're not looking and try to creep up on you. they explode. yeah that's normal. it really is!

god rusty would actually be incredibly weird in this. even 621 would be side eyeing him...

Assorted Armored Core 6 thoughts

1: Iguazu as a character is just so fucking funny to me. Like here’s this pathetic little petty piece of shit who wants to be hot stuff but isn’t due to his own personal faults, and gets mad when he’s inevitably shown up. And then you come along and are better than him (which isn’t a high bar… I mean come on even his AC build is less than optimal) and for some reason that makes him lose his shit and now he hates you so much he’s willing to kill himself if it means killing you. Of all the people that broke him it was you, C4 621, Waltuh’s favorite little vegetable lobotomite. Michigan should have technically gotten that hatred out of him but no it’s you he hates.

2: I’ve seen some talk about what the “mealworms” the rubiconians eat are, and a lot of people think they’re tardigrades mutated by Coral, but I’d have to disagree. Coral isn’t a mutative substance, it’s just some anaerobic alien algae that explodes real good and can act like a supercomputer when in groups. It also might have a biochemistry toxic to humans since it can get us high and areas exposed to coral explosions are contaminated in some way, but it’s never been stated to directly tamper with genes. The anatomy of the mealworms also doesn’t match tardigrades that well and they only have a passing resemblance to them (their mouth anatomy is closer to that of a lamprey or hagfish, and they have too many legs). I think the mealworms might instead be alien fauna, but ones not native to rubicon that were instead brought in as livestock. Why not native to rubicon? Well the only other multicellular organisms we see in game are trees and grass that were almost certainly bought to rubicon by humans, and while rubicon 3 seems to be within the Goldilocks zone from its sun it’s definitely on the farther end of the spectrum. Every area (aside from grid, Xylem, underground, and atmospheric areas) has snow, except for where the Strider is seen, which is a desert. But desert doesn’t equal heat, it just means it’s a very dry place. Rubicon 3 might also not have a moon and we don’t know anything about its magnetosphere. Basically what I’m trying to say that rubicon 3 is a pretty tough place to live, and while multicellular life isn’t an impossibly given its conditions, it seems that the planet might only have microbial life.

3: A sort of follow up to the mealworm thing, but it seems like in the AC 6 universe humanity has discovered alien life, but never sapient ones. Any race other than humans is never mentioned, and coral is of human interest not because it’s an alien organism, but because it can act as a superfuel. Mealworms are likely also aliens. If this is all true then Coral might be the first truly sapient race encountered by humanity… and we’ve been using it as fuel and already almost rendered it extinct once… oops.