full image - Repost: The Ark-Hara Report is Released (from Reddit.com, The Ark-Hara Report is Released)
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Suggested Listening Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvdT4wFh0tQStacy Arriedvka’s life was full of twists and turns. Many of them were her fault. Sneaking into the launch of the ISH and getting caught, her terrifying experience in the bowels of the Mother, and some nasty fish bites that had given her a pretty applicable nickname, there was little that couldn’t be traced back to her–within reason. After her time examining the Mother for the Heartrees, and learning only more questions, she returned to Svarska, tendering a secret report to both her hosts. She also made a brief, public presentation to other scientists at the Harahostol university, leaving out many details in order to protect the secrets of the reserve. In retrospect, this was a terrible idea.The Mad Champion’s emergence had been catastrophic for the Heartrees; they likely only remained alive through the extraordinary efforts of elite Rovinian soldiers. After being given sanctuary in Rovinia, the Heartrees split up and traveled the world, trying to learn about the precursor-born monsters that had attacked them. Meanwhile, the Mad Champion continued his reign of destruction, striking shorelines and sinking ships in a determined search for Squidie. Why he sought to capture Squidie is unknown, but the search only ended when the most unique astronaut to date went to space on the ISH! Since Squiddie was out of reach, the Mad Champion had no way to reach his prize, and retired to the unknowable depths of Tenebris’ seas once more. After almost a decade of torment, the world could breathe a sigh of relief.Svarska, however, had been holding its breath. When Stacy Arriedvka had given her report, she had come to the eye of intelligence vast and unknowable, sweeping the continents for information about Squiddie, and tracking him by means unknown. Stacy’s presentation was naturally of great interest, and Stacy even more. Soon enough, the Mad Champion dispatched a group of soldiers to bring the scientist to him. Some took to the wing, unseen by even the vigilant eyes of the Cage-Keepers. Others walked through the bottom of a river on the borders of Harahostol city, coming ashore in the earlier hours of the morning.Unseen by anyone, they silently entered the grounds of the University of Harahostol, cutting through the intentional community of Ark. On the way there, the Precursor soldier strike team accidentally awoke a dormitory, and killed all of the inhabitants to prevent word from spreading. However, one of them managed to run to a telephone before being turned inside out. A metropolitan police unit responded…only for police car #3130 to be thrown about 200 meters after the officers inside issued verbal commands to the Precursor soldiers. Shortly afterwards, the two groups of monster-soldiers linked up and began to enter Harahostol University, killing anyone that they came across.The goal of the university assault wasn’t to kill everyone, but to abduct Stacy Arriedvka, take the contents of her ‘paper laboratory’ (1), and shred anyone else. By this point, the residents of the university were used to night attacks by the Cage-Keepers, and they thought that this was another one. The newly-formed Local Internal Defense Group immediately responded, deploying to face the onrushing monsters. At the same time, numerous police reinforcements joined the fray, trying to outflank the Precursor soldiers and protect the students–some of which were even rushing to halt the attackers in a fit of tragic, politically-motivated zeal. While this would be enough to stall any commando raid out and turn an operation into a wash, it was the worst possible move to make here.Generally, the Precursor soldiers were completely bulletproof on top of their superhuman physiques; heavy weapons and powered armor would be needed to even have a remote chance against them. Despite the valor and hails of bullets from the IDG’s rare machine guns, they tore through the campus with ease. Stacy Arriedvka woke up fairly quickly and tried to enter an air raid shelter; however when she saw the Precursor soldiers, she recognized what they were, and what they were after. Since she’d given a presentation on this very topic, the university students had a very good idea of what they were up against. Discretion was indeed the better part of valor, and nearly everyone tried to flee. Stacy decided to set her lab on fire to prevent the documents from being captured, and the survivors of the IDG and police quickly called the regional militia. They were way in over their heads.The militia base in Harahostol responded to urgent requests for support. The professional core of full-timers pulled itself together, spilling out with their weapons and gear into the street and beginning to rapidly deploy towards the college. Some of them commandeered local buses, while others ran to the telephone exchange and told the telephone operators to send out a city-wide emergency contact call. The operator refused, stating that only the mayor could do that. The militias then called the mayor, while another pleaded with the operator to send out an activation call to mobilize the civilians who were part of the militia. The operator responded that only the governor could order that. The mayor then got on the line and ordered a reverse emergency call to be sent out to every single landline headset, waking up much of the city.Emergency sirens were also activated, but the militia could not convince the telephone exchange operators to send out a mobilization call. While some militia members sped towards the college, trying to intercept precursor soldiers, a number spread out, going from house to house and yelling at people to wake up for emergency muster. This slowed the overall response of the militia, but it got many of the fighters based in the city up and ready to fight. A steady stream of activated personnel began to head towards the college, covering each other’s footsteps and moving to surround the Precursor soldiery.Against normal foes, this was a good idea. Against the Mad Champions’ soldiers, it was pointless. The militia maneuvered according to their doctrine: they sought to surround the attackers, suppressing and disorientating them, isolating them in pockets and slowing their advance while maintaining ‘curtains’ of ‘supporting action’; this was textbook ‘all-nation cauldron’ fighting. However, the Mad Champion’s soldiers were psychologically incapable of being suppressed by weapons fire, fought with supra-human tactics, and communicated in ways that could not be comprehended by man–all of this made encircling them impossible. They moved down the main thoroughfare, shrugging off intense small arms fire, grenades, and explosive satchels, casually slaughtering anyone in their way. The speed with which they advanced took most of the militia off guard to the point where they stood and fought because they had insufficient time to flee.Meanwhile, Stacy Arriedvka had fled with the surviving police and her colleagues to the roof of the paper laboratory building. While the various monsters down below carefully scoured her workbench, the group managed to move between buildings using a footbridge. They left an ugly surprise for the Precursor soldiers, which turned the laboratory into a raging inferno. The survivors rapidly fled the campus on foot, running past the remnants of the Internal Defense Group and the militia reinforcements. The group eventually piled into a police van and drove out of town, ultimately going to ground in a network of safe houses that barely threw the monsters off their trail.Meanwhile, the attacking precursor-beasts turned to two other targets: the city hall and the telephone exchange. The first had general information about the city; the second managed local communications. By the time that the Precursor soldiers reached the town hall, pre-set explosive charges had already been armed; these charges were detonated when a reconnaissance element had begun to enter. This demolished the entire building and temporarily sealed all of the information inside; the Precursor soldiers dug themselves out in short order, but their mission to seize information had been thoroughly foiled.The telephone exchange had not been wired with explosives, and after killing the door guards, the precursor soldiers began turning the place inside out. They enthralled several of the exchange operators to operate the machinery; however, militia snipers frustrated this by mercy-killing the operators. Eventually, the monsters were distracted by the militia’s entire B Company (2) putting rifle fire on one portion of the building; this allowed the survivors of A Company to firebomb the telephone exchange and the monsters inside. Twice foiled, the Mad Champions’ beasts fell back in rapid fashion, only pausing to work out their frustrations on anyone who got in their way.Parliament was informed the day after, and they gave the Metropolitan Police carte blanche to open up an investigation. This meant that much of the affair would be kept secret for a little over a decade. While the news covered the immediate aftermath, reporters coming from around the nation, much of the attack remained frustratingly ‘under investigation’. Without any information, the furor died down as the dead were interred and the survivors began to heal. This event eventually began to recede, and the nation began to move on. The D.R.S was used to devastation and a lack of closure. However, the wounds would reopen when the titular Ark-Hara report was published.Casualties ranged into the tens of thousands, including psychological cases; deaths were in the high hundreds. Rebuilding the street would take almost a decade-the R.S’ Cage-Keepers decided to drop a few bombs on the repair works now and then. City life took on a much more muted hue, ending at sundown for the next few years. The Ark intentional community struggled to regain the cohesion and vibrancy it had exemplified prior to the attack; its struggles were enough that the governor had to sponsor a refounding. City growth even stalled for two years before continuing to climb again, something that was fairly rare within the D.R.S.The Local Internal Defense Group for the university city had to be reconstituted from scratch, as were parts of the militia. During the later Svarskan Crisis, the A Company was insufficiently rebuilt, and was only used as a static defense unit; the B company was notably hesitant in combat and often wavered under fire or during counter-offensives. The University graduated chairs draped in black cloth for the next four years. This silent pain was what Svarska was used to.And then the report was released. The contents–that a band of Precursor supersoldiers had come ashore and raided a well-loved campus in an attempt to make off with research into awe-inspiring precursor artifacts, killed hundreds, beaten the D.R.S’ armed forces into a literal pulp, wrecked a city, and only been stopped when their prizes had been destroyed or whisked across state lines–sounded like something out a science-fiction radio show. It was almost unbelievable: the unseen surprise attack, the subsequent devastation, and the idea that a researcher had even been working on Precursor technologies in the first place. Many in the D.R.S couldn’t believe all parts of it, some alleged that it was a cover-up to conceal an extremely damaging attack by the old regime or a massive accident. However, the steady trickle of evidence, coupled with an interview from Stacy Arriedvka, brought the truth home.It was not pleasant. The D.R.S could get used to human ugliness, to bombs from the sky and missiles from the sea, but it struggled to reorient and cope with the eldritch horrors born of arcane technology that could not be understood by modern science. This was an outside-context problem, and it was one that the peacetime government wasn’t really equipped to handle. The Garden Party had a partial bye because few of the people in its coalition had been in power during the event; it could also point to a complete militia mobilization plan.However, the Party needed to have a concrete answer to this new challenge. Their determinedly military-averse policies left them open to punishment from the Centralist coalition, but they could at least agree to found a Coast Guard Organisation. To counter accusations of weakness, the Garden Party proposed an ambitious project: the construction of a Svarska-wide mesh internet, with an intrinsic emergency communication component to prevent the confusion that had emerged during the attack. This allowed them to control the national dialogue for a few more weeks.The scars went the deepest in the scientific community. Burning the paper laboratories at Harahostol had destroyed both a pillar and a potent symbol of the D.R.S’ scientific center; and it left deep impacts in the research community’s psyche. Their work soon took a darker turn, with the biological department producing two bioweapons based on the old principals of seed bombs. The first was an ‘anti-logistics’ mixture, made up of potent weeds that grew by roadsides and under concrete, disturbing railway ties and pipeline foundations. Better mixtures of this included similarly powerful fungi to give the bomb’s species a head start, and even some soil bacteria that could degrade rubber and plastic byproducts. Taken together, the contents of the bomb were meant to degrade an attackers’ logistics network. However, the bomb was never tried outside of a few university tests, and it’s utility was likely low.The second occurrence was actually a potential threat. A ‘forced maintenance’ bomb, this seed mixture was designed specifically to grow in between cracks, on buildings, and into gravel beds, breaking up cement and eating into steel. While it was a similarly low-potency device, it had a chance of working due to a wider variety of selected strains and a bit more practice. Parliament did not know what to do when these devices were formally announced, it condemned the scientists as renegades, but did not fire them –it didn’t want to lose track of them. Instead, it reassigned them to archival work, keeping them out of trouble for now. However, these were just two unexpected events out of many.Shockwaves would continue to reverberate across the D.R.S, and the Garden Party would struggle to handle them. What had not been mentioned were a few samples from the Precursor soldiers, resting quietly in the university basement. Long ago, there had been pictures of protestors in lab coats raising signs that said ‘Mad Scientist’. It appears that this spirit never died.A paper laboratory was a research position where scientists would perform research from literature sources. The D.R.S wanted to continue conducting research in spite of the crippling resource shortage; paper laboratories were established to maintain a semblance of this.These events had taken place prior to the Hotel Conference; the militia thus had the standard tripartite A-B-C company outline, with a supporting D company.
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