The Crystalline Religion

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I'm working on a Last part from the perspective of the Praetorians. After that, there are only one or two empires left in the rest of the galaxy. (After I found 3 empires from exploring only 3 star systems)

[oleg]

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The Invisible Crystalline
Last Log of the Imperial Historian

The Cryslonite fleet was worn down to only a few ships and we still could not totally destroy them. The two ships remaining retreated back across the wormhole, to Cryslonite space.

The righteous battle of Praetoria cost us greatly. The homeworld was in the throes of a dark plague, while millions were buried already from the napalm. Luckily only a few of the enemies' Supremacy class ships were available and the homeworld remained somewhat intact.

The Superiority class of the Cryslonite proved to be endlessly well protected. In short, we were hopelessly beaten technologically, while we had a temporary advantage in momentum.

The emperor was dead from riots on the Last day of the bombing, and the imperial staff was severely disorganized. The so-called grandson of God was claiming the throne, but many including myself rejected his claim. We felt the empire needs to be managed by the military, only then can they operate properly to destroy the Cryslonite. We can not divide our time with a coronation ceremony while Cryslonite are rebuilding Supremacy and Superiority over our heads.

But the power bloc in support of Admiral Hashuko was insufficient, and thus in year two of the Cryslonite invasion, the Grandson of God, Ssroik, picked his wife, appointed a royal guard, appointed a new imperial staff, of which I am not a part, and ordered the military to prepare planetary defenses.

It was over then. As I sit here with my notes, a powerless outcast once of the imperial court, I can see that no planetary defense will ever save us. Only ships can fight the Cryslonite on any terms. Ssroik is so stupid.

Ten million missile platforms would not be enough to stop the Cryslonite once they got into orbit again. All the platforms would be destroyed, and all the Cryslonite would lose is time.

Where millions of missile platforms would fail, a fleet of ten warships could easily succeed. The Cryslonite had little aptitude in space combat, having learned the art of war from planetary orbital battles and wars. We learned this so many times, the Admiral considered it his first order of duty to engage the enemy in space.

It could not matter much longer, the plague would get us all, in the end. We should be building ships and training medical researchers, but the coronation and its excess continued, and mere weapon platforms were constructed, the grandson of God proclaiming that nothing could stop them. He was a fool, and we will all die for it.

It was nearly three years before we saw the Cryslonite again. They had regrouped for a long time, and they returned with a fleet of ten ships bigger than the biggest ever used before, dreadnoughts.

Meanwhile, God's minions had built a few colony ships, which helped us none at all when the battle came once more.

Now they orbit us, closing in, while God promises his mere twenty weapon platforms will save us. But perhaps I will pray to the Cryslonite god instead, he is the one with true power, it seems.

I faced the sun and prayed to it, hoping that I could get away while the silly emperor-as-god here would die. I felt the warmth of the sun, cheering me in the final moments, and then finally I felt a streak of searing heat.

It must be the sun, the sun.
But it was napalm.
blackness forever...

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Illuminated Transitions
541763 Teracycles since Convergence

There was something about the Crystal Luminostra, something different, but this time this one different did not worry the collective so much as excite them.

Luminostra kept encountering contradictions in reconciling its' brainwaves with the collectives'. By a freak chance in the process of reproductive crystalline distortion, Luminostra did not have his current thoughts pushed out at each cycle.

Memory for an individual crystal was minimal, they only diverged slightly between syncs, before the collective came back. Each cycle the entirety of the crystals' mindstate was overwritten. But Luminostra found that each pulse merely accretted the same information of the collective on top of its current knowledge. As a consequence, information spilled over much later than when it was consumed. Luminostra found he could willfully disgorge the repetition of the collectives' thoughts, only keeping condensed summaries.

But before he discovered this, the multiple copies of the same information from the Crystalline collective made him into the canonical collective member. The disparities found in each Crystal from the lesser impact of more distant Crystals' thoughts distorted each of them, such that they more highly reflected their closest neighbors' thoughts, creating communities that dispersed and reformed in circular waves at the speed of thought.

Luminostra was able to hold off the immediate thoughts of his neighbors combining them in equal proportions with the entire collective. He did this because the collective desired it, and he had the collectives' desires as his own, only intensified many times over.

Everything the collective desired, he went after with great intensity. Before long the collective began to admire Luminostra... This was a dangerous precedent. The collectives' admiration caused Luminostra to admire himself even more intensely. He became an utter egomaniac by a completely collective process.

His egomania led him to learn about how to discard extraneous knowledge, which in turn lessened the intensity of his egomania. Luminostra became a Cache of most valued knowledge by means of memory filtration.

By the time he perfected his memory filtering, and thus made the rest of the collective dimly aware of it, a fervor was sweeping through the collective, that Luminostra must be the one who would finally be accepted by SunWorld.

When Luminostra became aware of the collectives' urge that he should take the pilgrimage, he spent a million cycles searching the collective brainwave for ideas of how to suceed.

Finally, the teracycle came, when Luminostra was to take the pilgrimage. He found a method to save himself, but the collective must not recognize it, or they would disbarr him from the pilgrimage and shatter him instantly. He had spent many cycles creating a device. To fool them all, he found reason to believe that it would be a good totem of the SunWorld, but he had known and discarded for an instant the knowledge that it would absorb all the energy that could destroy him on the SunWorld.

With his mind safely disgorged of such thoughts when the collective was focussed on him alone, he fell free from the escape door of the pilgrimage container. Now he had less than ten thousand cycles to search the collective, gathering information until he discovered again how to use the totem he carried...

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The Sun God Luminostra

Luminostra sensed the kilocycles counting down in the collectives' waveforms. He searched the brainwaves as quickly as he could, while glancing at the totem.

collapse...energy conVersion...overload...explosion...

He manipulated the totem, finally sending a charge of his own energy which caused the totem to collapse in on itself like an imploding skyscraper. When that happened, all brainwaves, his own and his recognition of the collectives', halted and he was unconscious. Being unconscious is not a state that Crystals tend to be in. A few seconds before being shattered, other crystals might be in such a state.

When did he regain consciousness is completely unknown. He examined his memory, noticed that billions of new bits of information had somehow been absorbed while he was unconscious, and tried to orient himself by the collective. But he was plunged in the deepest core of the SunWorld, the collective brainwave had no power to reach through this much energy.

The totem dispelled all of the SunWorlds' energy as it approached him. It glowed brightly, but Luminostra was too distracted by the intoxicating effect of all of this energy. The SunWorld strengthened him every moment, without the barest harm coming to him. Energy was the Cryslonites' highest ambition, and highest exultation.

Luminostra's brain waves were pulsing a million times faster than the normal Crystal. With a billionfold the force.

His newfound thoughts beckoned him to return to the emergence world and claim command of the collective as the SunGod, the one who merges with the sun. Just as these thoughts circulated he began to breech the SunWorlds' protection against the collectives' thoughtwaves. Something was wrong, he thought.

The thoughts of the collective did not reflect the collective he knew. They were meek, grasping at weak things no Crystal would ever pursue. The emergence world was armed with pathetic defenses and there was barely a fleet of warships to be found. The collective knew nothing of any of the previous conquests. It seemed to only know of a single race, and they liked them.

The Piundon Empire had cowed the collective, but how? The collective seemed to extend to nowhere at all, a minor neutral blip in the galaxy. The more Luminostra looked at the thoughtwaves, the more alarming the situation was. Then he searched his memory and found out the truth.

The SunWorld was a portal, in a different manner than the portals that went to different star systems, this portal crossed into a parallel universe. Everyone who went on the pilgrimage had crossed over, transplanted onto the alternate emergence world, except Luminostra.

One thing he still did not know, is where his information came from. The collective was a wreck, the true religion was hated on this side, as all of those who crossed over found themselves in a much worse universe for the Imperium. The collective still was a collective, which meant that every newcomer from the first universe quickly found any ambitions of reinstating the religion among the atheist collective dashed.

Fear and meek humility had overwhelmed the collective brainwave. All they had achieved in thousands of teracycles was a large number of construction spaceyards that sat idling, a bunch of pacifistic Crystal transports and large numbers of weapon platforms.

Already Luminostra's outrage was subtly affecting the collective. Luminostra had a great amount of outrage from his old self of the proud Cryslonite instead of this pathetic group of fools.

This was one collective that certainly needed a SunGod and Luminostra was going to pound some sense into the collective and the rest of this universe. "No way in hell are we weaklings."

The universe would soon know the name of the collective.

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My PC crashed pretty fiercely, and wasn't exactly working, so I had to used the recovery CD to get it working again (I also have a mac, but can't play SE on that), so my save game was lost. But I didn't want to quit on this story, so I came up with this idea.

I started another game in Proportions playing as a different race that I'm working on. (The Robotia Foundation), and then I realized the crystalline were in the game, so I decided to take them over and have the SunGod try to fix the crappy AI induced situation they were in when I took over and assert their proper dominance over everyone again.

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Wrath of the SunGod
88th month since the Atheistic Cryslonite Reformation
12rd month of the SunGod Luminostra

"I am Luminostra, do not forget my name. You have shamed the Cryslonite name, and now the collective shall follow an individual, Luminostra, the SunGod," the thought echoed through the pathetic collective over and over and over.

All remnants and materials of the atheists were destroyed, shredded into fine dust, not to be mentioned by a Crystal again. The speed and power of Luminostra's thoughtwaves forced the collective into perfect lockstep with his every command and wish.

The collective learned many things about proper weaponry, the art of napalm was rediscovered, the space stations were scrapped in favor of a large fleet to be built.

The Transform class destroyers were armed with Shard cannons and upgraded with Napalm soon after it was rediscovered. The Piundon's satellite defenses were destroyed in a few salvos, and a minor Piundon planet was in the SunGod's path, to be destroyed quickly, he hoped.

The mighty wall of doom of the Cryslonite was back. Nine Transform ships carried something, the Piundons' had no clue that the Cryslonite had gained some of their other-universely Imperial demeanor and power.

The Piundon colony was well armed, but its defenses were knocked out quickly, leaving millions of infantry who found themselves the main target of the Cryslonite fleet. The infantry was much better trained to evade napalm weaponry than the general populace.

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Encyclopedia Galactica
War-History-Cryslonite-Post2408.8

As it was later known, the outsider Luminostra gained control of the Cryslonite Imperium with his forceful brainwaves, and after reinstituting an old religion, he turned to war doctrine.

Luminostra instituted a strict prioritization of placement prior to battle that reflected both Cryslonite weaponry and Luminostra's biases.

The best battle was over the enemies' most important world, regardless of the defenses there, because in that case, a suicidal rush of his ships could destroy a significant part of the planetary capabilities, if they were equipped with napalm.

Battles over colonial worlds were next best, followed by battles in enemy territory and Lastly, any battle in friendly territory.

Luminostra was an incredibly aggressive war planner, preferring to sacrifice hundreds of ships to put the enemy on the defensive, over any sort of defense.

In the war against the Piundon from 2408.8 onwards, there are many battles that illustrate the idiosyncracies of the Cryslonite.

In the first and second salvos' Luminostra destroyed two colonial worlds of the Piundon, but Piundon ships were on the move in great numbers, and Luminostra had to retreat his fleet, especially to upgrade his napalm weapons for the difficult fight on the Piundon homeworld.

But the Piundon had many ships and many shipyards, and the fleet could barely fight off them all and send the damaged for repairs before another group of ships warped in.

Luminostra's fleet struggled tactically, his weapons were weak, and the enemy ships were outfitted with more of the same crystal shard cannonry, but with shields, taking the place of the napalm and point defense that Luminostra's ships had.

It wasn't until 2410 that Luminostra finally targetted the Piundon homeworld, which had many space stations and transports in orbit.

Luminostra's fleet always came into battle in a formation roughly resembling a concrete block. He believed strongly in keeping ships together for supporting fire.

At the Piundon homeworld, most of the space stations were missile armed, which posed little threat to the fleet. Only a single space station, and a single destroyer, as well as the homeworld itself, had real damaging potential. The Piundon seemed to share the same aggressive stance as Luminostra.

But, the homeworld was extremely well armed, with dozens of long range shard cannon installations.

The manuever most well known of the Cryslonite throughout the galaxy was the planetary charge, and this charge would be the Imperiums' first in the long record of our galaxy...

Excerpt from the Encyclopedia Multiversia

The Cryslonite are one of the few races to rise to power in two seperate universes. In one of them, their rise to power was uncontested and they quickly overwhelmed their home galaxy. In the other, they were weak until a Crystal passed from the first into the second universe, acquiring great powers and converting the populous to the religion practiced in first universe.

Multiverse historians have labelled these two Cryslonite empires as the Ascendant and Transcendant Cryslonite civilizations. The early struggles of the Transcendant Cryslonite caused even Luminostra, the SunGod, to change his views. Even with his dominance, he still changed gradually towards the views of collective.

The struggle created a second element of their religion dedicated to sacrifice and veneration of the great sacrificial war charges of the Imperium.

The war charge at Piundon was the first for the Transcendant collective, it demonstrated the great power of a goal that transcending all other considerations.

For the Cryslonite, that goal was to crush all other civilizations, to crush them, leaving the Last sights of the infestations to be only the Sun illuminated form of a Crystal ship.

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Loss and Gain
2412.5 years since the Great Emperor Sieth-sith
Wargaming and Analysis Log of General Moro-kel

"We ran a wargame of an assault on the Cryslonite Imperium well before they attacked us. We have substantially similar weaponry to the Cryslonite, as they also use a form of the shard cannon.

Before the political turmoil and reformation of the Cryslonites' that led to war, they used many diverse types of ships, and seemed rather docile. Their ships freely passed through our space, wandering aimlessly.

From what our intelligence analysts' say, some sort of extremist took over the Imperium with some sort of extra strong weapon. This extremist is known as Luminostra. When they declared war, the announcement gave us many clues as to his identity.

Luminostra believes that all other races are a scourge to be quickly destroyed. 'The Cryslonite have tired of being puppets to a lesser scourge such as the Piundon. Fear the wrath of Luminostra.'

As soon as we got that message, we found that Luminostra had reformed all of his ships to new designs and doctrines.

His fleet destroyed several of our colony worlds before attacking our homeworld with a clearly inadequate force.

I am still analyzing the results of the battle, but it seems Luminostra did not care what losses his fleet would incurr. He managed to destroy many of our space stations, but our planetary weapons annihilated his fleet quickly when he tried to reach close weapons range. The planet took no damage, and the remnants of his fleet could only slightly lessen our shield strength.

He was severely outclassed, but the ships showed no trepidation in charging into overwhelming fire.

Since then, our recon sorties have started to encounter a new type of weapon, and ships that can withstand a lot more attacks. Our captains are in dire need of training, as we have noticed the Cryslonite are now equal to us in weapons accuracy and evasive manuevers.

But the Cryslonite have little economic strength while we have access to the rest of the galaxy. They may know how to traverse warp points, but they are trapped as effectively as if they did not. We only need to hold them off until we consolidate our control over the rest of the galaxy.

But, the Praetor orders that we destroy the puny menace..."
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It would be easy to claim that the Cryslonite are the most underrated force in the Transcendant universe, and the most overrated force in the Ascendant one...

[Unknown_Enemy]

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