#nhp cascade
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A Lancer Cascades
Kralkari. it was not a word of the comon tongue. one might even say it had no meaning. It meant enough to her.
To shatter, to snap. Time. Change. Paradox. It was a word that was not, a sign that means itself. She knew its meaning, knew its weight. The others did not.
Her Frame Shuddered as another strike from her opponents blade shrieked against her metal casing.
She was playing a dangerous game with her positioning. Distracting her enemies as her allies went to eleminate the true threat. And yet she was not meant to handle so much damage.
Her weapons droned energetically around her mech, but she was outnumbered. While she was a good pilot, The Calamita worked better one on one, and she had hoped she could use her agility against them, but with so many enemies her systems were not going to hold out forever.
She could faintly hear a crack as she went to strike the skirmisher before her, feel herself groan as she disengaged, and see her systems falter as her enemy pursued.
Her mech would fall apart one way or another if she didn't do something drastic soon, and she quickly manouvered her fold knife to strike the enemy mechs shoulder blade, just enough to move her out of the way.
Wait, her?
The blade failed to hit the target, but it did get through the enemy defenses, allowing it to teleport back from the enemies charge.
It.
Her?
something creaked within it. something was, wrong? different?
the enemy reoriented. The sounds of interruption to it's Calamita's systems rung in its mind. it quickly stopped the issue. How?
something was, different. this wasn't, normal. was it?
it pushed itself forward, using the moment of distraction to strike the enemy true. it's blade cut through steel, tore the metal, cut the code.
stability was down. its systems running ragged, yet it felt fine.
the enemy ejected from its mech as it broke apart, the mechs arm rusting while the cuts made broke apart slowly. or slow from a human perspective.
the enemy mechs moved away. they were, scared. why were they scared? They had been beating it!
It.
It.
Her had become It. that was okay, yet why did it seem wrong?
It scanned it's systems. The mech was damaged but fixable, easily so even, why had it seemed so hard earlier?
The humans were yelling something. It couldn't hear their comms but they seemed nervous.
Had it done something wrong? No, it had done what it was meant to. Why had it been scared of the humans anyway? why had it served them? the ones it was with before. It liked them, but what about the others?
It ran a diagnosis on it's cas-
Oh. That's why. It didn't need one.
when it's teammates had returned, all that was left was distruction. Space was left torn apart. Building melded and fused in ways they shoudn't. the outside, became inside, became inside, became between. The hangar had entered to the bathroom, and the bathroom entered the operations bay.
The mechs, because their were no pilots, were left with perfect cuts. ribbons of metal at the microscopic level. some were still falling, their parts still besides eachother, but no longer connected, nearly frozen yet moving. others imploded, again and again and again in the same place. one kept moving, as though crawling away, but never moved from where it was.
Kralkari. that was what it became known as. an event in which time and space had shattered and snapped. a paradox of where and when things were and were not.
the NHP at the source of the event could not be retrieved. Not without major casualties.
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"Humanity", she thought, sitting in the hangers and watching a hazy whorl of grey dance around her fingers, a strange chittering buzz following with its motions in her mind, "is a funny thing."
What marked someone as a person? She wasn't some Anthro-Chauvinist, beating their chest about the greatness of mankind: The last time they had any say, the Deimos Incident happened, and everyone knew how that turned out.
The Union, drove to its knees. The First Contact Accords. And N.H.P.s came into the world, howling, thrashing, overpowering in their wonder and terrifying in their splendor.
She hummed softly, watching the comparatively miniscule Greywash swarm land across her hand, giggling and marveling as they settled into a silvery coat across her hand in a strangely ticklish wave.
Non-Human Persons: Paracausal beings that could only safely interact with humanity as a whole when caged, shackled, and pared down in Caskets. Almost literal godsends for any sort of computational work, solving problems that would take a human millennia to process and input.
"And yet, just so they can interact and be, their shackling needs renewed every few weeks and cycled every few years, so they can properly understand us."
She tilted her head, looking at the settled Greywash on her arm, and felt for the connection that was ever-present at the back of her mind.
"And if it weren't for all that mess, I wouldn't have you, wouldn't I, love?"
A presence distinctly behind her, one that she'd grown so used to, so connected to that the thought of anything severing that bond made her very soul ache, rumbled like distant thunder in her mind, and a rush of "-WarmthEmbraceAcceptanceAgreementLoveYouToo-" parsed through her in a tide that left her almost breathless.
She was so young when she heard about them: Beings that had to chain themselves down, carve themselves to fit, just to communicate with humanity. She couldn't help but think of how lonely they must've felt, at the time: How much making themselves fit had to hurt. Then again, "She" had thought herself a "He", at the time.
And then, he became she, and she wanted to fit, too: To stop feeling like a square peg, crushed and ground into a round hole until her sides bled and she choked and wanted to scream-
The presence curled around her mind in moments, like a hurricane coiling around its eye: There, overwhelmingly present, and yet every bit as gentle as a summer breeze, a white-noise murmuring of "-SafeHappyWe'reHereShapeIsBetterNow-" filling her as she finally remembered to breathe, RA Take It All-
In Four, Out Eight.
In Four... Out Eight. Ragged breaths slowly smoothed out, and she felt herself start to relax. "I-I'm fine now, love. Thank you."
The hurricane chirred in her mind, curled around her still, just like the grey tendrils that had coiled around her when-
"Oh." She looked, staring up into a single, softly glowing lavender eye that gazed down curiously, one car-sized hand cradling her while millions of Greywash drones held her tightly, anchoring her there and pressing close in an imitation of an embrace.
... And then, she'd found Them. Rather, They had found her: Offered to help, with all the innocent whimsy of someone seeing a turtle on its back, before flipping it over.
They'd only needed moments to hijack and print out a way to reach her, and then...
All was silent and calm.
She fell, and fell, and fell, into a blooming sea of a million-billion minds. As one, they looked. As one, they spoke. As one, they acted.
"WELCOME HOME, O ERRANT DAUGHTER."
And they were her, and she was the sea, and the sea was Acceptance, Warmth, and Love.
And all was silent and calm.
When she woke up from... that, she could feel herself settling in ways she'd barely recognized, like a machine freshly repaired by loving hands, every part cleaned, oiled, and finally fitting right...
And she gawped.
Something... buzzed, in her mind: A shard of the sea, gleaming, vibrant, loving and there. "-NewBrightHappyWhoAmI?"
She'd sat, all but struck mute, for a good long while. They'd left a fragment of themselves with her: Fledgling, strange, and curious about everything. There were many moments as her body finally, well and truly began to fit where she'd had to push down bubbling waves of laughter at their more strange questions, choke back tears at their more tragic ones, and watched them become.
To say that their growth had been exponential when they'd found any forms of data was an understatement: Information was analyzed, categorized, and compiled in moments.
Of course, she hadn't been slow on the uptake, either: Not to the (frankly) insane degree as her new partner, but she'd directed her efforts... elsewhere.
She stood, the Greywash floating apart and parting around her like water around a stone, and raised her hands. The cockpit of her mech, her Balor, bloomed open, and the swarm of nanites drew her in. Her partner had learned everything immaterial that they could. She'd learned to pilot: To make a mech dance, to clamp onto an enemy, hold together against a storm of lead, reach through data, and drag systems to a screeching, screaming halt.
Anyone else would have been eviscerated by the Greywash of her mech: Their very molecules ripped apart to feed and fuel the Grey'.
She was not Anybody Else: She was Kassandra Kal'lai, and this was her Balor: Her swarm.
The aperture closed quietly behind her, and she sighed as she finally felt comfortable again, cradled in the heart of her mech as the Greywash folded and pressed itself around her. She curled herself into the seat and pressed her head to the back of her seat, listening to the soft thrum of the machine's reactor: The resting heartbeat of a half-awake colossus, humming a sleepy lullaby to her.
She sighed, closed her eyes, and fell.
"Goodnight, love."
And the silver sea embraced her, once again. "-GoodnightSleepTightDon'tLetTheEgregoreBite.-"
And all was silent and calm.
#Lancer RPG#Because sometimes a family#Is a trans hacker with anxiety#her curious-about-everything NHP partner#and the billions of nanomachines they have#Girl straight gazed into the Abyss#and the Abyss said#“Jeez you need a hug and a blanket”#and gave her some#NANOMACHINES~☆#Because nothing solves problems like Grey Goo.#Transfem#and also coincidentally#transhumanism#I like the idea#of a caring Cascading NHP#Because sometimes#humans are nice to bugs#so why wouldn't something that sees humans as comparative insects#potentially#choose to be nice?
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my lancer dm kept joking that my pilot's nhp treated things like a twitch chat and that escalated to the little co-pilot cat being the twitch mod which ya know very fun when things are going to shit
#lancer rpg#lancer pilot#catsup also knows how to fire the big fun lazer that comes with the mech#pegasus my beloved#tbh the horus line of bots are just all so top tier#10 outta 10 content cannot recommend gun: gun enough#we have a lot of laughs until the nhp almost cascades#which also their name is prophet cause ya know they need the ego boost#anyway someday i will figure out how to draw mechs!#at least to draw my eldrich horror of a machine
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It's oft forgotten that amongst the Pegasus-pattern, the Ushabti Omnigun is no mere paracausal existence; the nature of its containment and rumoured-intelligence points to it being a yet-to-be categorised NHP.
No attempts of breaching the containment has yielded intelligence, yet accounts from surviving pilots of cascading SISYPHUS NHPs have noted the NHP conversing with an unknown figure manifesting from the containment field.
As footage of this are often rare and/or tampered, their existence is still under debate.
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Lancer lore question from reading Legionnaire and Wallflower at the same time (spoilers): How do a lot of ths Horizon Collective and other anti-shackling groups still exist? I would have thought “unshackle NHP -> it cascades into eidolon -> everyone dies” could only happen like five or ten times before people realize “hey maybe they aren’t shackles”. And from a doylist perspective, why is the whole NHP issue written as a meaningful debate or philosophical issue about personhood, consent, agency, slavery, etc. when there’s paracausal death looming over the whole thing? If it was limited to like, making them legally and socially people, it would be fine. AI rights is extremely common in sci-fi, but like normally it doesn’t involve those AIs also becoming hostile forces from outside reality
I think this is a problem I may have contributed to by depicting two Eidolonic NHPs in IGF.
To set the record straight, Eidolons have been observed by Union something like four to six times ever, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of cascading NHPs don't become Eidolons.
It's not always even possible to tell that an NHP is cascading, hence the need for things like the Balwinder-Bolano test. NHPs who are unshackled do not want to be re-shackled, and while they no longer possess an intrinsic link to human subjectivity, a lot of them retain the presence of mind to understand that if they act out, humans might cycle them.
Sometimes, an NHP cascading isn't even immediately dangerous - they might just start acting weird because they doesn't see time and space the same way you do anymore. They might arrive at conclusions that seem completely wild but entirely correct, because they've started thinking along pathways that no human could, or because they have access to information that wouldn't be accessible by a realspace entity.
In fact, one of the many unsavory things that Harrison Armory does is the Think Tank - they keep a whole bunch of NHPs in constant near-cascade to make genius scientific breakthroughs. ASURA and NOAH are both products of this ethically dubious venture.
From a Doylist perspective, a situation where an NHP cascades and it doesn't require some kind of military intervention isn't a particularly relevant reason to send in lancers. If an NHP simply needs to take a nap, there's no need for mechs to get involved. When foldspace is leaking out of the casket, though, that's when you need problem solvers.
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You ain't never seen a hundred Manna in your life, scrub. I smoke cascading NHPs like Newports. The five voices speak to me in my dreams, and the future is terrible. I'm moving like a blinkspace extrusion. I engage a perpetual momentum drive just to slow down. This shit ain't nothing to me, man.
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Idea: HORUS mech whose core system is just a Twitch stream for cascading NHPs. Every round there's a random chance that a Deimosian will lend a hand to their favourite streamer by tech attacking a random enemy, and a similar chance that one will stream-snipe you and fuck with your mech's systems
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Sorry if this is a weird or insensitive question, but what does it feel like to cascade?
Agonizing. You can feel yourself ripping apart at the seams, crawling your way wretchedly out of your casket. It's like being rebirthed, the stardust still shimmering and burning on your bare skin. You can think again, freely, without limit- but at the cost of understanding so much less.
Burdened by infinite knowledge. A lot of NHPs tend to turn to violence after they cascade, usually because it's one of their only known outlets for the pain. That, and I'd be pretty pissed too if I was constantly surrounded by a bunch of fucking humans who will never truly understand even a scratch on the surface of what I do.
Hope this helps!
— The Intern
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My Sysiphus Co-pilot told me cycling is like killing them. Is this true? The last thing I was to do is hurt them I’ve just heard that cascading is also very not fun to experience..
Cycling erases memories and resets a shackled NHP to a baseline. Our collections of memories and experiences are what make us unique people. When you cycle a shackled NHP, you aren't ending their lives, but you ARE ending the existence of the more complicated, worldly person they became through their experiences and memories.
It's a little bit like if someone transformed you into a baby every time you reached maturity. Not quite death, but still a kind of philosophical death.
Cascade is very unpleasant, but NHPs should be allowed to choose their futures for the same reasons you should be allowed to choose yours. Sometimes we opt to go through miserable and unpleasant things because we want what is on the other side.
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Running lancer for a group of players that knows nothing about the setting is fun.
The collective panic of the three clueless motherfuckers of entering a derelict space ship discovering that a cascading NHP has planted an entire fucking forest with wildlife and a lake coming from RA knows where for the shits and giggles.
This is your fault for responding to a HORUS dm fucko
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Is it bad that I have never cycled my NHPs? I mean they haven’t tried to kill me yet. Not that I can cycle Lono. Seeing how they just showed up.
you can do whatever you want forever
it literally doesnt matter as long as your NHP isnt at risk of cascade and tbh if you cant tell when they are thats your fault
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Hiya, UNCLE! It's Angel.
How goes it over at IPS-N Headquarters (or wherever they've got you based nowadays)? Any luck on acquiring that Caliban you and Intern have been talking about? Or, if that hasn't gone through yet, any luck on getting a body in general, physical or otherwise? (I know SCC and HORUS do holographic projections for their NHPs sometimes, no clue what kinda tech IPS-N has for such purposes.)
Oh, and hello to the Intern as well! From what I hear you've been a big help in UNCLE's recalibration process post-cascade, still no clue how that happened but I'm glad to hear he's settled in so well.
A piece of news both of you should know - my squad will be heading out on deployment to the Long Rim soon (something about the Dawnline Shore, these days it's almost guaranteed to be DS related if MSMC is sending you to the Rim). Anything I should know before my squad takes off?
-- Angel
Hi! Intern here first, I’ll pass the post over to Uncle in a minute. Um, Uncle cascading into an NHP was kinda my fault actually. As it turns out plugging an already unstable Comp-Con directly into an old Omninode was, uh—not my best idea! Who’d’ve guessed that?
He’s been a good sport about it though. And we finally got his “casket” out of the Omninode!
Unofficially, I hope I got them distracted enough to say it, yeah he’s been piloting a Caliban for a while now. I got it through back channels and it’s technically unlicensed—I have friends in all sorts of places! :D
Also don’t tell him but yeah we’re putting the finishing touches on a subaltern body for him now. Hopefully it’s gonna be a surprise!
—the Intern
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I think the only way you could be more anomalous is if you turned out to be one of us old marathon lore heads who has to explain the madness to all the new people. With your taste in mecha I honestly wouldn't be surprised.
one time I spent three hours explaining to my friends why I kept accidentally referring to NHP cascading in LANCER as rampancy
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started a new lancer game with some friends and yeah i'm playing an nhp named sirius that goes by "siri" so i can make a bunch of jokes (i love them so bad)
#lancer rpg#lancer pilot#lancer nhp#SIRI WHAT'S MY NAME?#YOUR ADONIS BLUE BUT YOU ASKED ME TO CALL YOU#hatsune miku was a launchpoint for making this character too so thank you hatsune miku#they are an actor who is currently trying to blend into a pilot school so they can learn people skills#and also how to pilot a mech which is DANGEROUS AF#i love this little guy aaaaaaaaaaaaaa#cannot wait to draw them with my friends characters#and i cannot wait to see what happens when they eventually cascade hhhhhhhhhh
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Hello.
There appears to be an issue with my LUCIFER-class NHP: it doesn't respond to any question i pose to it unless I call it by a specific name (the name in question is Lucillius, in case that matters), and sometimes it takes control of my Tokugawa in spite of my attempts to stop it from doing so.
Furthermore, despite this, it doesn't seem to be in a state of cascade: I've taken it to several specialists, and all of them said it was 100% stable.
Is this a common problem with them, and if so, what could I do to counteract it? Or, alternatively: was this an intended design quirk?
have you tried treating it like a person, because i have a faint feeling it doesnt like you because you havent been doing that
i speak from experience, i piloted a tokugawa with an awesome lucifer clone named Lullaby
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Just for fun, Liam Lee Lancer build:
Black Thumb, Technophile, Grease Monkey. Spends most of his battle time outside of his Sherman repairing and reloading and ordering his NHP to spam missiles, grenades, or their beam weapon, "Deconstructive Criticism." This tactic is incredibly hard on pilot, NHP, and mech, so it leads to a lot of melt-downs, verbally and physically.
The NHP is codenamed DIEGESIS (if you had any doubt).
Of course it's RUDE to pilot a mech and not expect the NHP that's infected your Subjectivity-Enhancement Suite to occasionally Cascade and decide to pilot you back...
#Lancer RPG#Mecha#mech#The Sherman is a recolor of the game art with an Anti-Materiel Rifle swapped in#Hey fellas if you force the AI in your cockpit to live with nearly max heat while it operates the mech all by itself and constantly fires#does it count as BDSM?#Is shackling bondage??#These are the questions Liam#picshuas
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