Collector's Deathbringer Cruiser | FTL Multiverse

Описание:    • Inexorability | FTL Multiverse  

You were at a local federation diner with your close friends and crew members when the nightmare began.

Your security officers had just finished sharing one of their less than prideful but still hilarious stories of their mischievous activities at the academy many years ago when the atmosphere of reality shifted without warning. The entire diner fell silent for a few moments, before resuming murmuring and questioning what had happened.

It was eerily quiet, even for space.

In the following minutes, various alarms and distress signals begun to pour in from every direction around the diner. Some were ship distress alerts, others were messages sent directly by distant federation military outposts and similar facilities. As every second passed, an increasingly concerning amount of signals were sent out.

Given the circumstances of the diner, as well as how many individual militarized federation ships had been there off duty, the vast majority of the diner had vacated and sprung into action in the vessels they had arrived in. There was no coordination; some ships followed each other in the same direction, while others went alone in other directions. Your crew and yourself weren't all that different.

Moments before you were just about to activate your FTL drive on course to reach the Federation Capital, seemingly the best place to go first to figure out what was going on, a strange feeling overcomes you. You have an unexplainable notion that it would be very detrimental decision to make. You quickly voice your concerns to the rest of your crew via ship-wide intercom, and while most strongly suggest you still plot course to the capital, they inevitably respect your decision to set route somewhere else first; perhaps we could be more of assistance and aid towards whatever is happening to cause this many distress signals.

It would in return become the sole reason your life wasn't lost on the first day of the cataclysm.

...

Roughly an hour later from traveling in one of the many directions that a distress alert had emitted from, your ship's passive sensors indicate almost complete gibberish. It claims you're approaching a humongous stretch of cluttered, cramped space, that extends all of the way through maximum scanning range. Some of your bridge crew attempt to decipher more information out of the computer, but ultimately can't yield much more helpful knowledge or context out of it. They wouldn't have to wait so long to find answers, though.

Your ship drops out of FTL pace, and engages cruising engine speed. You take a look out of your ship's cockpit windshield, only to face an incomprehensible horror.

Within visual line of sight, there are perhaps hundreds, maybe thousands of individual ships, fleet cruisers, and dreadnoughts of all factions; Rebellion, alien, and Federation alike. The majority of them are destroyed and mangled beyond recognition and repairability. Countless grotesque stalks and tentacles of flesh, all connected to one tremendously colossal body, are sifting through the gigantic debris field.

You feel as though you've seen the worst of it already, when the gravity of the situation begins to dawn on you further, uninvited.

Of the few vessels that aren't reduced to wreckage, the amalgam of flesh seems to be restraining them, removing their ability to flee or retaliate. A broadcast is sent to your ship, and a moment before you jump to accept out of some fashion of terror, one of your bridge crew updates you with information, courtesy of the scanners:

The count of discernible lifeforms in this region of space is rapidly decreasing.

Video feed is established between your cruiser and one of the entrapped ships. It would seem as though you were too late to inaugurate one final conversation with the other captain however, as a horrific tendril lined with cilia, bloodshot eyes, and teeth has ensnared and pulled away the bloodcurdling screaming captain. In the background of the image, several other tentacles are devouring and feasting on the lifeless bodies of the captain's crew members. The whole interior of the ship is plastered with blood and filth.

You're frozen in all of fear, confusion, vertigo, and hysteria. Your mind goes into auto-pilot as it tries to figure out what is happening before you. You're able to conveniently snap back into action as your ship's alarms deafeningly ring, revealing the fast approach of several of those eldritch tentacles and appendages of flesh and sinew.

You're barely able to outmaneuver them as they try to grasp your ship. You flush almost all of your remaining fuel reserve into your FTL drive to get out of dodge before you meet a similar fate to all of those others.

You plot a course to the nearest inter-reality phase gate in attempt to evacuate this reality. It is miraculously still in operation as you arrive.

What awaits you on the other side of the gate becomes the remainder of your life: spent running, in hiding.