ORICHALCUM UNIVERSE: The Malignium

[Johnny1A.2]

Orichalcum Universe: The Basics

The MALIGNIUM

The entity referred by the title 'the Malignium' actually has no true name, as such. Whatever names are applied to it by humans and other sapient entities are just that, terms applied to it for convenience. Names, in the ordinary human sense, are not really a relevant concept for the Malignium or its ilk, for the Malignium is not by any means the only one of its dark kind.

To understand the origin of the Malignium, as it was called by a scholar in the early Seventeenth Century, one must look back across over 70,000 years of history. At that time, the immensely powerful race of aliens known as the Eldren experienced a confrontation between factions. On one side, the Familiar Eldren, on the other, a group known to humans (though only a few such) mostly as the Rivalrous Eldren.

As has been covered elsewhere, this conflict was a trivially minor one by Eldren standards, but it left Earth literally shaken, with significant volcanic activity, earthquakes, climatic disruptions, and other global side effects. One such side-effect was the eruption of the Toba supervolcano.

The combatants in this confrontation were, by Eldren standards, very young and inexperienced. Even the oldest among them were less the one billion years old, and the uproar ended when a trap set by the Rival, the leader of the Rivalrous Eldren, misfired. Instead of simply trapping the Watcher, the leader of the Familiar Eldren, the trap enfolded and captured the Rival as well, along with several of the immediate lieutenants of the two leaders.

In the meantime, an 'adult' among the Eldren, one of the cosmically powerful Primordial Eldren, intervened to stop the battle, imposing limitations on each side to keep them separated, limitations which remain in effect to this day, over 70,000 years later.

(It should be kept in mind that 70,000 years is less to even the youngest Eldren among the combatants than one year is to a normal human life span. To a Primordial, it is less than the blink of an eye is to a human.)

The effect of the misfired 'trap' was to leave the Watcher, the Rival, and their respective entrapped fellows in a semi-conscious state, not quite comatose and yet not quite awake, with the exact degree of consciousness varying considerably from time to time.

In an effort to break free of the trap, during one of its more aware periods, the Watcher opted to create the first of the Avatars, living near-human entities of enormous psionic power and open-ended lifespan, as tools toward freeing itself. Other trapped Eldren followed this example, as best they could in their reduced state, putting their own Avatars forth as well.

The Rival also attempted to influence events toward freeing itself, but it chose a different set of methods. Some of these tactics were more successful than others, such as the role the Rival played in the creation of the Unity. Still, as the centuries and millennia passed, the Rival became steadily more frustrated and angry with its situation and its failure to free itself.

It was from this growing frustrated anger than the creature humans would one day call the 'Malignium' would be born.

Unlike some of the creations of the Rival, the Malignium, and its ilk, came into being in part by accident. That is, the Rival did not precisely intend to create what it ended up actually producing.

To be continued...

[D10]

Count me interested

[Prince Charon]

'Malignium.' Crafty one? Being of evil fire?

[Johnny1A.2]

The MALIGNIUM continued...

The time was roughly 45,000 BC. It is impossible to say exactly when it happened, suffice it to say that it was approximately 45,000 BC. It might have been a few centuries earlier, it might have been a few centuries later, it scarcely matters which. On Earth, the human race remained at TL0, only on a handful of worlds through the galaxy, planets such as distant Eosia or Siccaria, were humans or their cousin species beginning to develop the early foundations of civilized existence.

At this time, the Rival happened to be in one of its more 'active' states, struggling to break free of its own misfired trap. It was also in a state of considerable emotion, frustrated, angry, resentful of its own self-inflicted misfortune and seething with hostility toward the Watcher, its own rival and the entity is had sought to trap.

In this state, the Rival would likely have lashed out at the planetary biosphere around it, if only because it knew such an act would have angered the Watcher, if it could have done so. It was unable to do much directly, however, as a result of its own trap, which was fortunate for the early human race and the rest of the living world they inhabited.

It was in this state that the Rival was attempting to construct a proxy, a reflection of itself, to act on its behalf. Here the English language fails us, because what the Watcher was trying to 'construct' would have been invisible to human senses and intangible to the touch. It existed on the same level of being that the Matrix/Flux operated, that 'ghosts' existed and so forth. It was made not of matter as we know it, but it did have existence and potential energy and could interact with the physical world when it was completed.

There are no good words for what it was and how it worked in colloquial human languages, though it did incorporate some familiar subatomic particles and structures, it also involved phenomena the physics of 2016 have yet to catalog. A TL10+ physics would be necessary to analyze it in detail.

A low-tech society might call this entity a spirit, and they would not be absolutely wrong. It would at least match up to some of their conceptions about what such a being might be and do.

The intentions of the Rival are more easily expressed. The entity it was constructing was to be a simple reflection of itself, a remote-controlled tool that the Rival could use to extricate itself from its own trap.

Construction of this ‘thing’ went slowly, however, because even at its most aware, the Rival was in a semi-conscious state, like a human trying to do delicate work while drunk, or half-asleep. At times the Rival would fall deeper into its stupor, and the work would sit unfinished, or even come partly undone.

Over time, though, the structure came together. Still, the Rival was never the most patient of its immortal race, and frustration led to more anger, and since the 'construct' was as much a matter of mental impressions as anything else, that influenced and shaped its growth. Still, that alone would not have made much difference, the turning point was interaction with outside factors.

One such outside factor was something that normally would have been of no consequence whatever on this scale: a war was being waged between two tribes of primitive humans, in the land now known as northern Africa.

Actually, 'tribe' is too grand a political term, two hunter-gatherer bands would be a better description of the groups in question.

Both numbered under one hundred members, both were made up of Homo sapiens. Both had long lived in the region, and had long been rivals on their own, though most of their past history was of coexistence. There simply were not sufficient excess resources, most of the time, to spend much time fighting, they were usually too busy surviving.

Logically, there was no reason this former tense coexistence could have not continued. Why it did not was a matter of bad fortune as much as anything else. The bad fortune took the form of a multi-year drought that had reduced the availability of both animals for hunting and plants for gathering. The bands were not starving but they were always hungry.

More pressingly, water had become in short supply in the drought. Neither could readily move beyond their immediate regional territories, because other bands, larger ones, held the richer, more comfortable territories to which they might wish to flee.

Still, matters were not so bad that survival of both bands was impossible, merely difficult. In time, the drought cycle would have ended and the game returned, the plants grown more verdantly in what were then the grasslands of northern Africa. It was the further bad fortune of these two bands that both were led at that time by charismatic, energetic men, both rich in ability and ambition and recklessly indifferent to the consequences of their actions.

To be continued…

[Johnny1A.2]

The MALIGNIUM continued...

Such leaders happen, now and again, and gather followings. Sometimes they end up doing good, all too often they produce evil. Humans being humans, sometimes the ledger is unclear until far later. In this case, the combination of their driving ambition, the urge to control, to dominate, and the thinning resources led to what amounted to war between the two bands, superficially over control of the dwindling water supplies.

Each leader privately hoped to more-or-less conquer and absorb to the other band, killing off enough of the leaders and men of the other group and adding the women and children to their own numbers. Both bands were evenly matched, or nearly so. Neither could afford to divert the time and energy the struggle required from the basic necessities of survival, yet both did. The ambition of each, indeed, forced the other to do so in order to survive.

The war went on throughout much of two years, and left both bands crippled to the point of non-viability. A large percentage of the adult males of each group were either dead, or crippled and unable to contribute the group, by the time it reached its sad end. Neither succeeded in conquering the other, both were so weakened that they became prey to other groups nearby who were inclined to seize territory and young women and water supplies.

In itself, this affair was little different from an endless number of similar such affairs that happened over and over down the ages of human history. What made this incident important was the timing and the location.

It so happened that the Rival was 'activating' its new creation at just about the time that the struggle between the two bands of humans was reaching its sad end. It also so happened that the Rival had 'constructed' its creation in that same region, because several 'components' of the Rival slumbered in that region, all unknown to the human inhabitants.

It also so happened that a last battle was happening at about that time, involving both the reckless men who led their peoples to this disaster, still driven by their hunger for power and status.

(Even if power and status were only on the scale of hunter-gatherer bands, make no mistake, men and women still hungered for power and status.)

Both men were heavily wounded in this sudden battle, which erupted near the edge of one of the few remaining reliable spring-fed water holes in that region.

One group had ambushed the other, the ensuing fight had left both sides bleeding and both leaders mortally wounded, but not yet quiet dead. The emotional state of those men, and to a lesser degree the other wounded men and women around them, and the survivors, were full of anger and hate and lust and fear and loathing.

The new 'entity' that the Rival had been painstakingly constructing over the previous centuries was likewise suffused with somewhat similar emotions from the Rival. In these emotions, the immortal Rival came closer to the mental states known to humans that was normal for the Eldren.

Something happened that dark day, shortly past local dawn. Something that involved the hate and anger and fear of the humans involved, and the strange artificial construct that hovered imperceptibly over the region. Something that somehow combined those emotional states, a reflection, a resonance, a mutual amplification, no words quite describe it completely.

The eerie result was that the 'construct' was transformed. It more-or-less absorbed the mentalities of the dying men and women below, several minds fusing into one within the construct, a fusion that also incorporated much of the anger and hate and frustration of the Rival. From the humans came actual life, and conscious free will, from the Rival came the nature of the structure itself, and much of its shape and power.

Still, there was something else involved, as well. Something dark and dire that was connected to both the Rival and the humans but also outside both. Those scholars and sages who would learn of the existence of this entity and something of its history would speculate about that additional something for long millennia afterward, without being able to define it.

Be that as it may, what emerged from this fusion was a new living entity, a conscious being independent of the Rival and the human minds that had ignited its existence. Moreover, it immediately fissioned, for want of a better word, into a huge number of similar entities, smaller in innate power but more stable and self-sustaining, linked to each other but separate. Most of these entities left Earth, driven outward by hostility from the strongest one of their own number, and from and toward each other as well.

The strongest of these entities remained on Earth, along with a number of lesser versions of itself that it could overawe or control or otherwise dominate, and it was this great entity that the scholar Rodrigo Santana would call 'the Malignium' in 1689, many, many millennia after its strange 'birth'.

To be continued...

[Johnny1A.2]

The MALIGNIUM continued...

The newborn entity came into existence rich in knowledge, as a gift from the Rival. It came into being knowing much about the nature of the world, the universe around that world, and the contents of that world. It knew something of its own nature, and its own origins. It also knew that it knew, it was a self-aware, fully conscious and fully free-willed entity. The Rival found that its creation was outside its direct control.

The normal reaction of the Rival to such a development would have been to destroy the newborn Malignium and start the project over again. Fortunately for the Malignium, however, the Rival was at that point sliding back into a state of near-total unconsciousness, giving the Malignium the window of opportunity it needed to break away entirely and begin a separate existence.

At first, the Malignium and its minor reflections were weak, barely strong enough to sustain their own separate existence. This state continued for some centuries, as these creatures grew and learned and discovered sources of knowledge, sources of psychic energy upon with to feed, and not least, sources of what might be called 'entertainment'.

The Malignium found that it needed to 'feed' on psychic energy to thrive and grow, though it could survive, in a sort of hibernation, without such. It could draw sufficient psychic energy from the general Flux-background to survive and function, but it also discovered that much 'richer' feeding was available from the minds and souls of individual sapient beings, such as the humans and near-humans who still lived on the planet Earth.

Not all such feeding was equal, however. The Malignium discovered that some people provided more 'sustenance' than others, and that the circumstances of the feeding mattered enormously as well. It discovered that it could gain more 'fuel' in some situations than others, and also that sometimes the 'taste' (for want of any better word) was preferable to others.

The Malignium fed and grew, gaining greater ability and power as it did. It discovered that it could manipulate the physical world directly, but this had an enormous energy cost, compared to manipulating people telepathically. It also discovered that such telepathic manipulation could serve the additional purpose of arranging better, richer, and more 'tasty' feeding.

There was more to the actions of the Malignium than simply the pragmatic desire for 'food' and survival. The Malignium found within itself a deep hatred, a loathing, for the humans and near-humans who inhabited the planet Earth. The source of that hatred went back to its very origins.

Part of the hatred derived from the Rival itself. In creating the basic structure and substrate of the Malignium, the Rival had imprinted its own anger and frustration and hatred into its creation. The Rival primarily hated the Watcher, but it knew that the Watcher was protective of and interested in the biospheres and creatures of worlds such as Earth, and that it could strike at the Watcher by harming the latter.

That had been the original motivation, but the period of entrapment had led to the Rival development a substantial resentment toward the living world on which it was trapped, feeding on but expanding past the initial hatred of the Watcher. All this had been part of the starting mixture for the Malignium.

Along with that came the emotional imprint of the dying men and women of the tiny hunter-gatherer bands that had sparked the consciousness of the Malignium. Hatred, bitter anger, fury, fear, mutual loathing, all had made up a toxic brew that had flowed directly into the coalescing mind of the new being.

With that as a start, it is perhaps not surprising that the Malignium, and its ilk, developed as they did. Add to that the fact that the Malignium discovered that the 'taste' of psychic energy was more pleasurable, more intense, when the source was afraid, in pain, emotional or physical, and the Malignium became even more malevolent toward the tiny beings with which it shared the Earth.

Over time, from this start, the 'personality' of the Malignium grew ever more complex, more intricate, more nuanced, but along with this the malevolence and loathing grew as well. The power of the Malignium also grew, in both range and scale, as the centuries and millennia passed.

To be continued...

[Johnny1A.2]

The MALIGNIUM continued...

At the time of its peculiar 'birth', the Malignium was weak. Its volume, as expressed in the three-dimensional terms of our plane of reality, was no more than a few hundred cubic meters. The range of its power (best thought of as psionic, though not precisely the same as human-generated psionic effects) was no more than perhaps a few kilometers from its outer 'edges'. The intensity of its power was so limited that it could do little more than prod a living mind subtly, slowly, or perhaps shift pebble-sized masses slightly.

The Malignium soon discovered that it could 'disperse' itself over a wider area, at the cost of thinning its power and slowing its intellect. The limit of this power of dispersion was that point when conscious intelligence 'thinned' to the vanishing point. In those early days, that might have been when the creature expanded to fill an area a kilometer across.

As the centuries passed, the Malignium grew in power, its range growing slowly but steadily as it 'fed' and learned. It discovered that it could travel from point to point on Earth almost instantaneously (in fact at the velocity of light), and the range over which it could do so grew rapidly. Its power to manipulate minds grew in both subtlety and strength.

Its power to manipulate external matter and energy grew as well, until it could, if its focused its full power, create catastrophic effects on a local scale.

To do so was exhausting, however, and left the Malignium weak and hungry for long periods afterward. It found that subtle manipulations, both of the minds of mortals and the physical world, were far easier and, in the long term, more efficient and effective than blatant interventions.

By the year 30,000 BC, give or take a few centuries, the Malignium had grown to the point that it was many kilometers 'across' even in its most concentrated form, but it rarely took that form. It dispersed itself across the face of the Earth, leaving its intellect 'thinner' and slower than in the concentrated state, but far from the lower limit that bound its expansion in space. In this state, there was no point on the surface of the Earth beyond the range of its powers, save a handful of places 'protected' from it by one factor or another. It even reached outward some modest distance in space.

The Malignium began to manipulate human affairs in subtle ways, usually with the goal of increasing suffering, fear, or pain in the long term. It did this in part for pragmatic reasons, to do so made the psychic energy it fed upon from humans and near-humans richer, more potent, and ‘tastier’. Partly, though, it did this for pleasure. The loathing the Malignium felt for humans reached well beyond any rational level of motive, the Malignium was arguably so possessed by loathing as to be mad, though its actions in service of that loathing were all too rational.

For a very long time, the Malignium studied the ways of humans, and their remaining near-human cousins, learning their strengths and weaknesses, observing the myriad ways in which they interacted, becoming an expert on such matters. Then it began subtle manipulations, on a small scale at first, but on larger scales, and ever greater success and confidence, as the centuries passed.

It discovered that it could draw upon the Flux and its own inner powers to manipulate biological processes on a subtle level, overriding the genetic instructions of creatures, both somatically and at a hereditary level as well. It learned how to create perversions of nature in this way, creatures that did not fit into any healthy ecological context, but which could be 'useful' to it.

As yet more time passed, the Malignium began to produce what mortals would call 'monsters', and to inflict them upon the primitive peoples of ancient Earth. These ranged from minor threats that were more of a nuisance than anything else, up to and including creatures that could threaten the survival of an entire tribe or clan, directly or indirectly.

Many of the dark myths and legends that would later haunt the memory of the human race originated in these creatures.

The Malignium also discovered that it could, under some circumstances, transform individual humans and near-humans into monstrous parodies of themselves, mentally and sometimes physically as well. This was a much more uncertain matter than the creation of monsters from natural life, but it sometimes worked, and when it did the results could be very satisfying for the Malignium, both in terms of the psychic 'feeding' and the pleasure it took from observing the suffering its transformed people inflicted on others.

To be continued…

[Johnny1A.2]

The MALIGNIUM continued...

The Malignium also discovered that there were other powers in the world that it could not safely discount. It knew of the Familiar and Rivalrous Eldren, of course, from the initial imprint of knowledge at its creation. It had no desire to come back under the control of its 'creator', the Rival, but it also concluded that there was little immediate risk of the Eldren of either alignment breaking free of the trap that bound them.

It knew of the free Eldren, Familiar, Rivalrous, and other, that existed out in the universe beyond the Solar System, again because of that initial starting imprint of information from the Rival. The existence of such power was worthy of note, but it also knew that the remaining free Familiar and Rivalrous Eldren were under an interdict that forbade them from approaching Earth. This meant that they could be discounted, at least in the short and medium terms.

The Malignium knew that there were other Eldren as well, including the incomprehensibly powerful Primordials, but though their existence was a source of concern for the future, the Malignium concluded that the chances of any intervention by them was vanishingly small, in the immediate term (meaning over a period of several millennia or tens of such at least). Upon reflection, the Malignium concluded that there was little need for fear on that count, especially if it was careful to avoid doing anything that might provoke such cosmic interventions.

It was less aware of the Avatars, at first. The Rival had known something about them, but had given the Malignium little if any such information. The Malignium learned from experience, from the occasional encounter between its monsters and minion and the powerful Avatars such as Zadatharion and Aradel and Calathis and so forth, that these beings were intelligent, almost immortal, psionically potent, and potentially very dangerous to its plans, and even potentially to the Malignium itself. [1]

The Malignium would have preferred to destroy the various Avatars, but three important considerations held it back from such action.

For one thing, there were too many such entities to easily destroy them all. The Malignium could not be sure it had identified all of them, and it knew for sure of several dozen such beings spread around the planet. To arrange the death of one or two would have been simple enough, but do so en masse would have been all but impossible without extremely blatant, obvious action. The Avatars mostly did not even know, or know about, each other, so they never gathered in one vulnerable place.

For another consideration, the Avatars were powerful beings, even in that primitive age and their state of general ignorance about themselves and their world. They were 'hard targets', spread widely around the world. An attempt on an Avatar that failed might alert the Avatar to the existence of the Malignium, an event that it greatly preferred to avoid.

More importantly yet, to destroy them all would be to risk attracting the attention of their trapped Eldren 'creators'. The Malignium was unsure if any of those trapped Eldren, other than the Rival itself, knew of its own existence, and in the nearer term it preferred to do nothing to alert them if they did not know already. Even in their near-comatose state, their power was such that the Malignium feared to draw their attention.

There were other things on that ancient Earth that the Malignium was also cautious about, which will have to be noted at a later time.

To be continued...


[1] For information about the Avatars, see: http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=70702&page=2

[Johnny1A.2]

The MALIGNIUM continued...

As a general rule, the Malignium would 'lower the profile' of its various activities if one of the Avatars were in a region. Sometimes, if circumstances seemed particularly propitious, it would try to arrange an 'accident' for some given Avatar, but it found that this tactic was of doubtful benefit. It occasionally managed to arrange the death of a given Avatar, but usually a new one would take its place when the particular Eldren realized its pawn/proxy had been taken off the board.

Sometimes, too, the Malignium, which was by no means either omniscient nor omnipotent, would miss the presence of a known Avatar, or discover one that it had not previously observed, in some area where its own activities were already extensive. One such case in the ancient age would eventually change the entire course of Terran history, with repercussions that would reach into our own time and far beyond into the future.

The time of this incident was about 10,000 B.C., give or take somewhat. The place was northern Europe. In that region, the Malignium had been creating various monsters and transformed humans, making the area especially dangerous. The humans in that region were fleeing, or doing their best to survive. The resulting pain and suffering was a feast for the Malignium, both in terms of 'feeding' and the pleasure it took in the suffering of mortals.

What the Malignium did not recognize in time was that one small group of mortals in this region was led by an Avatar, who was assisted by two others of his own ilk.

This group had first come together under the leadership of a charismatic and potent Avatar, probably somewhat in what is now western Asia or eastern Europe, and the group had been led that same immortal for several generations, pressed westward by the growing tide of threat from the creatures of the Malignium, as well as by unfriendly humans.

With the power of the three Avatars protecting them, this group was actually able to grow even with the threat of the monsters coming against them. The Avatars in question were still learning to use their own powers, which meant that the monsters were a greater threat than they might have been to them at a later age, and the general low-level interference from the Malignium also worked against the Avatar, but he still made his group a 'hard target'.

Pressed westward, for a time they settled in what is now northern France, but the monsters were especially thick and dangerous in that region, as well as other problems spawned by the activity of the Malignium. The threat was both physical and psychic, and made life in that region particularly harsh and dangerous just then. This was compounded by the harsh climate, the great glaciers were still receding, and in many ways that region was harsh.

The pressure would lead to the group making a difficult and dangerous sea voyage westward from their homeland, to an island that then existed in the midst of the Atlantic Ocean. This people would in time become the storied Atlanteans, and their Avatar leader the Eldest of Atlantis. [1]

The Malignium was 'aware' of this, in a vague, general way, but its mind was diffused all over the world, which made it slower and less focused on specific places and times. By the time it fully processed all this, the new society had been founded on Atlantis, and it found that the Eldest had grown strong enough to require extreme caution on any action within his immediate demesne. In those early ages, Atlantis was little touched by the Malignium.

To be continued...



[1] See here for more about the foundation of Atlantis: http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=71326

[Johnny1A.2]

The MALIGNIUM continued...

The Malignium left Atlantis largely untouched throughout much of its early history, out of caution toward the growing power, and sensitivities, of the Eldest. It watched the Great Isle, but only rarely took any action there, even using its preferred indirect methods.

In the rest of the world, the Malignium remained active, much as it had before, but now it found its activities began to be restrained, by an unexpected problem.

As explained elsewhere, psionic powers are actually common to all humans and near-humans, but for reasons rooted in deep evolutionary history, these abilities rarely ever manifest. The power that everyone does usually manifest is Antipsi, and it is so tuned as to cancel out the other powers a person possesses. An analogy would be a person with perfectly functional eyes, who happens to be born with eyelids that default to 'closed'. [1]

As the (mostly) human population of Earth grew, the collective Antipsi effect grew as well, and the Malignium discovered that its own power was affected. At first the effect was minor, limited, and only noticeable when large concentrations of humans gathered in small areas. This was rare in those days, but as time passed and the population grew, and civilization began to spread outward from Atlantis, and then from other centers, towns and cities began to emerge.

Then, as the population continued to grow, the zones of interference grew to the point that they met and began to merge, and the Malignium found its powers ever more constrained by the interference.

There was an exception, specifically Atlantis itself. There, a growing civilization of psi-active humans existed, and they had learned to limit their own Antipsi faculty, using it only when they desired. Thus, the growing 'cloud' of psionic interference from the growing world population did not extend to Atlantis. In theory, the Malignium could operate more freely there.

The problem for the Malignium was that the people of Atlantis were now very powerful psionics, almost to man, and their ruler, the Eldest, was more powerful than ever, making it perilously dangerous for the Malignium to operate on any significant scale in the one area in which it could easily do so.

During this period, as global populations grew and grew, the Malignium found that it could operate practically only in two ways. It could concentrate itself, focus its power, and overwhelm the interference, but this was rarely useful. It could inflict pain and suffering in this way, to be sure, but on a localized scale, and in a blatant, open, recognizable way. It was neither safe to do such things, nor particularly efficient or useful. The momentary satisfaction of appetite and sadism was not worth the associated risk and exhaustion.

The other method was to use its power very subtly, especially Telepathy and ESP and very low-level Biopsionics. This could be done through the interference, though accomplishing much required a great deal of careful planning and considerable amounts of time. On the other hand, the culmination of such subtle efforts could often be satisfyingly painful and produce enormous rewards of energy and 'entertainment' when the time finally came. Instead of inflicting monsters on the world, the Malignium now became a quiet, small voice of temptation and manipulation in the mind and heart of its human prey.

This means was satisfying in the longer term, and the Malignium opted to use this approach while it sought for a way around or past the Antipsi interference that was increasingly blanketing the planet.

Unfortunately for the Malignium, its problems were still growing.

To be continued...


[1] For details about the reason for the self-neutralizing psionics, see here: http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=70292&page=3