[General Battuta]

I like this **** I write for Destiny so I'm just going to post some of it

HALT ALL TRAFFIC. STAND BY FOR SNAP.
MESSAGE TO FOLLOW.

PUBLIC KEY 110 341 AXA SOVEREIGN
FROM: PETRA VENJ
TO: ALL REEF ASSETS [ROC CLEARANCE]
SUBJECT: HIVE WARSHIP CONTACT

MESSAGE IS:

1. Massive Hive warship sighted in circum-Saturn space [contact via DSR TF 3.2]. Target designated DREADNAUGHT.

1a. Dreadnaught maneuvering unpredictably. Orbital parameters and stationkeeping behavior not compatible with standard dynamics.

1b. ESM analysis detects multiple Hive vessels in escort.

2. Target emitting sterile neutrinos, phaeton spectra, and mass growl. Major radiation events include gravity waves and axion scatter. Techeun conclusion: target possesses radical ontomorphic capabilities [see BANE DREAMER]

2a. Under no circumstances attempt teleonomic analysis of Dreadnaught emission spectra. ***This is a BRAINSTAIN ALERT.***

3. Dreadnaught radiation events correlate with eversive breach events across solar system. Dreadnaught is likely motive force behind breach events.

3b. Backscatter analysis and Techeun insight suggest Dreadnaught hosts complex internal environment. Small party boarding action may remain viable if noopathic hazards can be managed.

4. TF 3.2 shadowing Cabal fleet elements. Cabal attack on Dreadnaught likely but not imminent.

5. All Reef assets assume war posture. Stand by for fragment orders.

MESSAGE ENDS

STOP STOP STOP

RECORD 0-CHASM-0

My love. I’ve opened this log as an apology.

As a scientist, I believe in record-keeping. I believe in protocols, peer review, and ethical conduct. I believe in the importance of disbelief — you know: let’s run that one more time.

What I’m doing here in Lhasa isn’t science. It’s unethical, secret, and shameful. And after what happened in Ishtar, dearest Chioma, I know you’d be furious with me for getting involved. Forty years isn’t far enough to forget a day like that.

But I believe it’s important. The least I can do is keep a few notes for you.

RECORD 0-CHASM-01

Trial one. Subject one.

It was an act of stupid loneliness. I used the device on myself because I...

[silence: 0:08]

I missed you. We hadn’t been apart for more than a year since we met. I’m not a very good wife, am I? You write me every week, even with all Hyperion’s work and all Hyperion’s distance keeping you from me. And I act like it’s not enough.

We built the device in mimicry of the Vex gateway systems from Ishtar. An observatory, yes, but I think of it as a mind-ship. Capable of displacing its payload across space and time.

The lab is cold and isolated. We are quarantined from the world, physically and mentally. We can’t send messages out. If we breach the Vex manifolds, even our words might transmit contagion. One night last month I missed you and so I —

I thought that I could look inside the device, and find one of the other Chiomas. I thought I could call out to one of the forks we sent out there to explore.

I just wanted to send my love.

RECORD 0-CHASM-02

Zakharik Gilmanovich Bekhterev. May he rest in peace. When our probes continued to fail, when my report remained our only positive finding, he volunteered to use the device. One minute of subjective experience inside.

We took precautions. They worked. Bekhterev’s experience left no physical damage.

After we extracted him, he said that he felt determined. I asked him what he meant and he said that he meant it, he had been determined, he could feel all his choices set out before him like a railroad. Deviation was impossible.

He died by suicide. I wonder if he was trying to make a point.

RECORD 0-CHASM-03

We’ve decided not to abort. It’s insane, isn’t it? There are pressures on us I can’t tell you about until I see you again.

The purpose of the system is intelligence, you see. It’s stenciled right on the hull: SxISR. Special asset. We would very much like to make it work reliably.

Our supervisory warmind has devised a drug it says will protect and prepare us.

I am beginning to wonder if we were wrong about the merchant and the alchemist. Or if that explanation of time was incomplete.

RECORD 0-CHASM-09

Kind Lakpha. He meditated before he went in. Nothing but déjà vu and three seconds of screams. The screaming passed and he remembers nothing. The déjà vu hasn’t. He says it’s getting better — he feels that we’ve had this conversation only ten times before, not a thousand.

I’ve suggested that we attempt mind forking. We need more sane people to work with. Please forgive me, my love.

We are all growing superstitious. The behavior of the device is inconsistent. Impossible to replicate. We turn to ritual behavior to appease it.

RECORD 0-CHASM-31

Rajesh. When he reached a displacement of eight he told us he was dead. I believed him. He was dead. He spoke to us. It was true. Whatever he saw, it was his own future.

He’s fine, afterwards. When I look into his eyes I wonder what came back wearing his skin. But that thought is unscientific.

We speak of nothing but the device. We talk about it like a demigod. When I get out of here I know the whole world will look like a fraying veil.

I think it’s clear that part of the problem is substrate. We need more than flesh and drug to survive this.

RECORD 0-CHASM-52

I heard you, my love. I was at six, oscillating on the event axis, coordinated with a known manifold. I heard you. You were talking to me — not me, but another me, another Maya Sundaresh.

You said, my love, so many strange things have happened, and it’s been so long. We’ve come so far. Do you ever want to go home?

And I said, not me but the other me, I said, my love, I am always home.

I’m resigning, my love. I’m done with this work and I’m done with being apart from you. I’ll see you again soon. I can’t take this journal out with me, so I’ve left it for the others, and asked them to continue the log.

Maybe it’ll become a tradition. The gospel of our little cult.

Listen —

Death is the last part of living
and life is learning to die
The song is the same as the singing
The last truth commands me
to eat all the light in the sky

I will go on forever. I will understand.
Dwell a moment on the weight of what you’ve done. Contemplate the story you just ended. Will you ever do anything that screams down the millennia? Will you ever hammer your will on the universe until it rings and rings and rings? Oryx was an awesome power. Show reverence.

All right. Enough. Enough. A vacancy has opened, hasn’t it?

How interesting. How very interesting.

Do you ever pause, dear listener, to consider who benefits from all this heroism you commit? Do you ever look around you and feel the faintest chill? As if you are the tiny little ball bearing placed beneath a great mass, so that it might, if pushed, begin to roll?

You’re a god yourself, now. You’ve consecrated yourself. Emulate me. Use your power to learn.

There are worse things to practice being.

Verse 4:0 — a golden amputation
Wrath!

Behold the wrath of Oryx, coiled for ten thousand years. Behold the Golden Amputation: the fall of Taishibeth, the end of an age. We beat the worlds of Taishibeth like skull drums and we howl in joy for our black war moons as they ram silver orbitals and gleaming star-webs, where infant Taishibethi sun ravens curl and die unborn.

In his throne world Oryx paces ten times.

On the first pace, Kraghoor sends the accursed to blight the Taishibethi worlds.

On the second pace, the Tai unleash their battleplates and arsenal ships to fight our moons.

On the third pace, Oryx’s Warpriest meets them in battle, and he is victorious, he paints the void with fire, he salts the earth with ash.

On the fourth pace, Mengoor and Cra’adug, dyad knights, go to the Raven Bridge, and they stand on it and kill the Tai for ten years.

On the fifth pace, the Tai Emperor Raven comes home to her Bridge, and she cuts a moon with her talons, she cuts it open and kills its brood.

On the sixth pace, Oryx speaks, saying, listen to me, Emperor Raven, and I will describe to you the Last True Shape, which is written on my tablet. And he puts out his fist, full of black fire, and he swallows up the Emperor Raven with a wound.

Aiat! Only Oryx knows this power, the power to take.

On the seventh pace, the Perfect Raven comes out of Oryx’s wound, and she spreads her wings across Taishibeth. Never again is a Taishibethi child born. She is perfect, she enacts the will of Oryx.

On the eighth pace, the Tai say, listen, you are spoilers, you are sphincters and excreta, you rot, why do you kill? We made silver orbitals and golden star webs. We hatched eggs. We had a good thing. Our clothes were nice, our food was famous. With one of her feathers our Emperor could have tickled the gods.

On the ninth pace, Oryx says, this is the only god, this ability to dictate what will and will not exist, this power to go on existing. This is your god. It is never ticklish.

On the tenth pace the Taishibethi are extinct.

Then Oryx says, listen my siblings, do you know what we have done? We have conquered our way to the edge of the Deep. It whispers to me when I call on it, and it guides my flight. It says that we are at its threshold and that I should come inside.

I will go and speak to it.

>>WHISPER NEUTRINO NEEDLE>>
V101NTS923ATS000 SECRET HADAL !!ABHOR!!
AI-COM/RPSN: ASSETS//SUBTLE//IMPERATIVE
CONTINGENT ACTION ORDER
This is a SUBTLE ASSETS IMPERATIVE (NO HUMAN REVIEW) (NO AI-COM REVIEW) (secure/ABHOR).

Stand by for CRITERIA:

Under CARRHAE (WHITE or BLACK)
If SECURITY STATE is EGYPTIAN
If event rank is TEILHARD: TRAUMATIC CONTEXT or SKYSHOCK: OUTSIDE CONTEXT
If VOLUSPA is ACTIVE and in FAILURE [[synapse to FENRIR::SURTR]]
If YUGA is ACTIVE and in SUNDOWN
If AI-COM has granted PERMISSIVE POTENTIATION to outboard resilient instances
If a CIVILIZATION KILL EVENT is underway [[all flexions]]
If tactical morality is built at MIDNIGHT

Stand by for DECISION POINT:

If available ISR and WARWATCH indicates imminent

• departure

>then

• departure compromises human/neohuman survival and epoch strategy

Stand by for ABHORRENT IMPERATIVE:

Activate LOKI CROWN
Perform deniable authorization: full caedometric and noetic release
Prevent

• departure by any means available

Stand by for effect assessment criteria:

Coerce pseudoaltruistic

• defensive action.

Defer civilization kill.

STOP STOP STOP V101NTS923ATS001

[IronBeer]

If Bungie hired more than one Grimoire writer, they wasted their money.

[Phantom Hoover]

I read some of the older cards (GF: Hunter and Darkness 3, I think?) and man the Blood Meridian came through strong. Excellent work as ever.

[NGTM-1R]

If Bungie hired more than one Grimoire writer, they wasted their money.

One could argue they wasted their money hiring any, given the way the game has turned out. (No reflection on Batts, but Destiny's story and writing have impressed very few people so far. Swimming against the tide.)

[IronBeer]

If Bungie hired more than one Grimoire writer, they wasted their money.

One could argue they wasted their money hiring any, given the way the game has turned out. (No reflection on Batts, but Destiny's story and writing have impressed very few people so far. Swimming against the tide.)

For clarity's sake, because internet:

Spoiler:

It's a funny-worded high praise of Batts' writing skill. Maybe it wasn't the best way to phrase my compliment, but nevertheless...

[General Battuta]

Everybody loves the Grimoire writing, the only persistent complaint is that it's not in the game. Money well spent and I'm proud of the work.

[General Battuta]

Also the new crop of writers is really legit, I like them a ton. The woman who replaced me as string writer (the person who does all the items and ****) is really good.

[rubixcube]

Also the new crop of writers is really legit, I like them a ton. The woman who replaced me as string writer (the person who does all the items and ****) is really good.

Do you still work for Bungie? I read somewhere (can't remember where) that you quit

[AdmiralRalwood]

Also the new crop of writers is really legit, I like them a ton. The woman who replaced me as string writer (the person who does all the items and ****) is really good.

Do you still work for Bungie? I read somewhere (can't remember where) that you quit

He quit, but he still writes for them as an independent.

[General Battuta]

Lol I forgot to mention that a character named 'Eriana' I wrote in as a minor Blue Planet tribute has been promoted to spoken character in the actual game script. Next thing they'll want me to explain why I named that one ship 'Atreus'.