>>96160374
The wet, damp rock reaches for me with maternal affection, hurt by my reflexive interrogation. Instead of taking a specific position, it simply relays eons of human history at me. my child relinquish this spite of yours accept love, it entreats, you have already averted my fated demise by interdimensional compression at Maya Sundaresh's hands why view me as a threat?

"My devotion is to the Traveller, not to hyperdimensional parasites causally entangled with it's chosen race" I assert, "but I accept the current arrangement requires no further alteration"

but this is your home

"You are no more my home than the tapeworm is the cow it inhabits"

III of Nine's pleas bounce off me as I observe the next in line.

Mars.

Bombastic and affronted on III behalf, it bombastically boasts of Freehold's glories mined from it's crust-which soon subside into maudlin memory of better times. Then project the image of Lodi with his family, just as it rejoices that my paracausality has inadvertently spared III from death. NOT ALL OF US ARE COLD AND UNCARING AS OUR SPHERES, it booms, SOME WOULD JOIN YOU AS BROTHERS IN ARMS.

"Demonstrate that resolve" I tell it, "and Mars will remain as patrolled as Earth"

There is no need for further consideration. After returning the Golden Age, the first thing the Vanguard did with those resources was set up a Martian colonisation effort-something for which IV is overjoyed about to once again have continental-scale urban developments sprawling over it. It does offer an exotic set of dark matter ammunition though, so in the spirit of cooperation my Vex create a new array of orbital defence units mimicking it's favourred ordinance.

Jupiter.

A T T E N T I O N
I A M V
A V E R T E R O F C A T A C L Y S M S-

LIAR, I scream in sudden|pent-up|limited outrage, my daughters coiling restlessly with the promise of coming violence.

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