-Bloo-,
Xenomorph,
10 years ago
Wow, that's kinda like what I've got going already. There IS a few differences, though.
Your mention of a civil war of sorts between the Predators and Super Predators is definitely a thing here. One side is called the Seven Headed Dragon clan (based on the biblical legend of the seven headed dragon and its ten thorns), and it's made up of 18 Predators: 7 Elders (the dragon heads), 10 other Predators (the thorns), and Cetanu (the breath of the dragon). Almost all of these Predators are member-owned. I'll explain Cetanu more below.
On the other side is 82 Badbloods, run by 4 former Elders that are based on both the 4 Horsemen, and the 4 Chaos Guardians from Final Fantasy: Lich, Malirith, Tiamat, and Kraken.
"the pregnant human female is actually a synthetic."
Basically the female synth was intended to be carrying a piece of cargo in her womb.
it gets a little muddy is what the cargo is. It was most likely going to be an artifact of some kind that carried great power.
My Companions actually started out being called Companion Synthetics. There was also only one of them, and it was a girl called Shelbea Nguyen who was indeed "pregnant" with the Predator's own Liquid Weapon, which was, at first, unnamed.
Shelbea has since been renamed "Vera Ngo," and the Liquid Weapon is now a silver goo called Medical Mechanica. The Engineer's own black goo is called Miracle Matter. Both of these are human-given names.
Eventually, I created 4 more Synthetics. I wanted to keep the "Pregnancy" bit, so I developed the idea that the Liquid Weapon was split into 5 pieces. I removed the fact that they were visibly pregnant (since there were some male Synths), and replaced that with the fact that their artificial bodies were made from their piece of Medical Mechanica, rather than having been made by humans.
It was my thought that the synth was programmed to not know what it was carrying and be under the assumption that it was human.
This is still prevalent in the most recent draft of the story. However, they're no longer man-made Synthetics, and so "Synthetic" has been dropped from their names. Now they're just called "Companions." Also, there's now 7 of them, rather than just 5.
This is where it gets kind of weird: The Companions actually ARE humans and started out that way. However, like I explained in the last page, they were kidnapped by an Engineer to be used as the Spirits for the Empresses. Their minds were extracted from their bodies and placed into the Empress Shell Bodies. Remember, without a Spirit core, the Shell Bodies act like zombies that don't do much, so they're useless without fuel.
About 900 years before the beginning of the story, your character "purified" these seven Spirits and used Medical Mechanica to create new human bodies for them. They each have a piece of Medical Mechanica in them.
These new bodies weren't exactly real - they only very closely imitated organic material. (This is the same case with Xenomorphs, who are also not technically alive.)
These artificial bodies were also immortal because they were fueled by Medical Mechanica, but they could still be destroyed. If that happens, their piece of Medical Mechanica would escape and enter a random fetus before it's born - which is to say, before it grew a soul. Since these babies' bodies weren't immortal, the Companions would have to switch vessels every time the previous one died, and this has been happening for 900 years. After being reborn so many times, they've forgotten that they're Companions.
This has happened to every single Companion except the girl I mentioned before, Vera, who's very aware of her situation. She's hides the fact that she's a Companion, but it's not because she's scared of the Predators; it's because she's scared of revealing who she was before she turned into a Spirit or Companion.
See, Medical Mechanica created the IDEAL bodies for the Companions. Whatever they wanted to look like, it was done. None of them really changed much, except to be more athletic, taller, have different noses, etc. None of them except Vera, who was born male. This is getting long though, so I'll just explain that another time.
I always saw the artifact as being either a variation on the Prometheus goo that would have tied into the genetic differences between the normal and super preds or the preserved heart of an ancient Elder that both groups worship/gave honor to.
The Predator's liquid weapon, Medical Mechanica, is actually partly made from the special kind of blood that runs in the family of Concrete Hunter.
See, my Predators have different colors of blood with different properties, and you can actually tell what type of Predator the blood came from just by its color. Normal Predators are all green, and they're the most common type. Super Predators range from light green (mid) to dark purple (high) and are rarer. The colors come from the the electromagnetic spectrum, so purples are at the top and red is at the bottom. Again, green blood is actually the most common.
You and a majority of the other player-characters are Green Bloods. Concrete Hunter comes from a "holy" line because he has purple blood, although the only reason it's considered holy is because some of the most legendary Ancient Predators happened to have purple blood. There IS science to back it up, though: the higher you go on the electromagnetic scale, the better quality the blood is. Therefore, Green Bloods live long, Blue Bloods live longer, and Purple Bloods live absurdly long lives. In fact, some of the Ancient Elders are STILL alive.
Green, blue and purple area actually the only normal types there are. Any colors lower than green is considered a mutation because they're extremely, extremely rare. Yellows are mutant Greens, Oranges are mutant Blues, and Reds, the most rare of all, are mutant Purples. And actually, Deathdrop is a Red Blood; his main enemy is the one of the strongest Predators in history: Lich, the purple-blooded God of Death.
Cetanu is the Goddess of Death, because I once read somewhere that he's actually a she, and I like that a lot. Cetanu is also a Red Blood, but since no one's ever seen her bleed, no one knows that.
Other than the weird blood color, the mutant versions of the normal blood color still live just as long as the normal ones, and they're just as healthy. Anyway, that just about explains the genetic differences between the normal Predators and the Super Predators, and why the latter is stronger than (and racist toward) the former.
It also explains why some Green Blood clans (like the Jungle Hunters) are more tribal - it's because they're lower citizens and are treated poorly.
I've never heard of the heart thing, though. I should try to incorporate that somehow.
The artifact would have been found by the company and recognized for its mythical reputation/being a holy alien relic and therefore possibly have some value as a weapon.
Something similar happens in my story.
The humans DO find one of these three Liquid Weapons, but it's not Miracle Matter or Medical Mechanica.
Instead, 1000 years before the beginning of the story, they managed to recreate the red goo that the Spirits are made of by kidnapping a Black Liquid Monster called Death Wraith. There's obviously more to this, but I'll withhold it for now, since it dives into the nature of the Xenomorph's bodies, and the 7 Continental Alpha Males, as well as the origin of the Engineers and their reason for being involved in this story at all.
Anyway, this red goo can create artificial constructs using an advanced form of Hard Light Technology (and some other fake ass phlebotinum, since it's Engineer tech), similar to Medical Mechanica's ability to make nearly-organic materials. The only difference between the liquids is that Medical Mechanica can undo the effects of Miracle Matter (the black goo) because it was designed by The Doctor specifically to combat the Engineers. Otherwise, all three liquids, in their dormant states, take the form of spheres.
The Engineer's version of hard light was reverse-engineered by humans and began to see widespread use. 1000 years later (aka the beginning of the story), hard light is used for almost everything, since it can imitate many kind of materials. Buildings, bullet shells, weapons, street lamps, computer screens, you know name it - it can be replicated with hard light. There are many things that it can't replace, but mundane objects like pens will almost always be hard light.
Of course, because of its potential to threaten humanity, there are many laws against using hard light for just anything, and you have to get licenses, fill out paperwork, etc. There are separate licenses and paperwork for coffee machines, furniture, whatever. This is why the "normal" items of OUR time still exist 1000 years into the future; it's really goddamn frustrating trying to create your own hard light items. Common things like pens are made of hard light because they're created by companies.
Even WHEN you have hard light in your possession, you're restricted to what you're allowed to form with it. When you DO have the clearance to make what you want, it takes skill to get it just right. Remember, with hard light, all you're doing is replacing the material that the product is made out of - you still have to know how the hell a coffee machine even works to be able to make one. So, it's not magic, it's just really weird science.
It was Death Wraith's human character, Xeuss, who made the first serious use of hard light weaponry. He's considered the father of modern Hard Light technology. A few years before the beginning of the story, he developed a combat suit completely made from red goo that appears to be nothing more than a blood-red wetsuit. However, it contains a complex Operating System that links the soldier to the government's network, which is called The Forum. The suit itself, since it's made from a red goo core, can then create weightless battle armor. The fact that hard light doesn't weigh anything is another reason why it's sometimes better to just have a normal item. But in the case of armor, it's a huge advantage.
Because of the restrictive laws placed by the government, there's a limit to what the red goo suit is allowed to create.
Everyone knows about the red goo cores because they're the source of where the hard light comes from, but the fact that the red goo is literally everywhere is a bad, BAD thing for humanity when the main antagonist (an Engineer, naturally) begins stirring shit.
I realize I'm handwaving a bunch of actual science by using excuses like "this is 1000 years in the future" and "this is extraterrestrial technology," but I hope the idea of hard light is cool with you guys. It basically drives my entire story.