Hello and welcome Guardians! This is your friendly neighborhood AnonPig and I’m here to bring you my another Master Post. This will be my new series of posts is being released on this most joyous day, AnonPig Day! ~50 posts all at once bumped and released to the forums all at once causing the first annual Flood! Now let’s talk Vex! [b][u]The Grimoire[/u][/b] [b]Ghost Fragment: Hunter[/b][spoiler]She leaves the Sparrow and climbs a long way across spars of volcano rock and between vents of blue fire. Down below the Ishtar ruins spark with skirmish light but the guns seem as distant and brief as the constant starfall and the brooding crater high above. She is alone on the rock. She goes on with her head down so as to fight the sense that she is going to fall up off the world and burn like an inverse meteor. The message that brought her to this place had no sign but she could hear Cayde in it. Draksis in the Cinders it said. Is it true? And also: Remember your promise. At dawn she finds a sentry and kills it with her knife. Its throat bleeds gas. She takes its post and lays out her bullets one by one on the rock as if to make a count of all the years she has been waiting. Her rifle is near as long as she is tall. She lies down by her bullets and uses them to kill the other sentries one by one until at last they understand the thunder and the Shanks rise up angry from the Cinders below to seek her out. She leaves the rifle and walks across the naked obsidian into the swarm firing from the hip as she goes, each kick of the old revolver a word, Draksis, Draksis, Kell of Winter, Kell of hate, lord of the kingdom of her vendetta. Her jaw aches. She used to imagine biting out his throat with armored teeth. The stone smokes around her where the arc fire lashes it and the shrapnel guns throw up leaves of obsidian like glass butterflies. She shoots her bandoliers dry and a team of Vandals in glassy stealth leap up to rush her with knives but she raises her hand and burns them down with the golden gun, laughing, crying out Draksis, Draksis, I am come! She kills them all and takes the next ridge, high above the Cinders. She can see the blue-green pools and the cave mouths where the Vex lights dance. And there among them, gowned in smoke and ash, is the long shark shape of a Ketch, a Wintership, the Kell's ship, come down to nest. She could go down there now and finish this. But she made a promise. A Captain jumps her. She throws two knives into his armor and then staves his chest in with her own Ghost, wrapped up in her fist like a stone. "Tell the Vanguard," she says to her Ether-spattered fist. "Tell them Draksis is here." Her Ghost looks up at her in silence. When she makes no move to go down the cliff towards the ship it blinks once, in its own way, and makes a soft sound, like a sigh, like relief.[/spoiler] [b]Ghost Fragment Exo[/b][spoiler]- which in the end is just a matter of substrate chauvinism. It doesn't matter if the system thinks with flesh or superconductor or topological braids in doped metallic hydrogen, as long as the logic is the same. And our logic is the same. Yours and mine. If I am a machine then so are you. If you are not a machine then neither am I. Exo minds are human. It is incontrovertible. You understand? I'm going to take that slack-jawed stare as understanding. Now here's the real question. Why are Exo minds human? What's the design imperative? Why does a war machine - yes, absolutely, I am a war machine, built by human hands; and you are a survival machine built by the engine of evolution. Don't interrupt me. Why does a war machine have emotions? Why should a war machine have awareness? These are not useful traits on the battlefield. Don't flatter yourself. They are not useful. So why should the Exo mind mimic the human architecture so closely? You know what I smell on you? I smell the stink of anthropocentrism. I think you think that there's only one way to think. That's why the Exo mind is so human, you presume. Because all higher thought converges. My friend, you should meet the Vex. There is nothing human in them. Now. This is what I believe happened, back in the time before any Exo can remember. It explains everything. I think someone wanted to live forever.[/spoiler] [b]Poket Infinity[/b][spoiler][b]You cannot shake the feeling that this is less a weapon than a doorway.[/b] Fireteam Tuyet died in the Ishtar Sink, hunting the secrets of the Vex. They must have come too close to something precious, for the Vex descended on them with their typical inscrutable, thorough violence. But their sacrifice was not in vain. The data they gathered helped forge the Pocket Infinity. Properly modified, the weapon should be capable of devastating output on just a single charge cycle. The Infinity's mechanisms have proven difficult, if not impossible, to replicate en masse. It is conceivable that the weapon draws its energy from the Vex networks...an ominous possibility. So be wary with it.[/spoiler] [b]Vex Mythoclast[/b][spoiler][b]...a causal loop within the weapon’s mechanism, suggesting that the firing process somehow binds space and time into…[/b] Some legends live forever. Others are overwritten - reshaped by the sheer will of those who believe that any ordeal can be conquered, any foe vanquished, any god cast down. The Mythoclast is a Vex instrument from some far-flung corner of time and space, mysteriously fit for human hands. Its origins, mechanism of action, and ultimate purpose remain unknown. Perhaps it will reveal itself to you, in time…[/spoiler] [b]Upgrade Materials[/b][spoiler]As Guardians buy or salvage new equipment, they learn to tinker and improve. This work requires Glimmer and other material. Some can be recycled from unneeded gear. Titans favor plasteel, which can be found by disassembling old equipment. Hunters unspool discarded armor into sapphire wire. Warlocks extract hadronic essence from dismantled fieldweave robes. And any Guardian with a sense for weaponry can disassemble old ordnance into weapon parts. Other materials need to be scavenged on site, generally in the course of Patrols. The Cosmodrome in Old Russia is rich with spinmetal, a fantastically light and strong composite created by rogue colonies of Golden Age machinery that escaped storage. Solar coil systems on the Moon still generate helium filaments. The baffling, possibly Vex-influenced flora of Venus grow spirit blooms. And the surface of Mars offers deposits of ultra-dense relic iron. The most powerful Guardian equipment transcends ordinary science, entering the realm of Golden Age secrets and the Traveler's power itself. This wargear demands Ascendant Energy and Ascendant Shards - burning fragments of the universal fundament, earned through mighty acts of heroism. Look for them in daily Story challenges and Raids.[/spoiler] [b]The Exo Stranger[/b][spoiler]Stories of an Exo who walks in the Darkness without a Ghost have long haunted the Tower. Legends say this anomaly dissolves in and out of the world, intangible and elusive, as if she is a visitor from somewhere beyond. Some believe she's the last of an ancient Exo squadron, fighting a long-forgotten war. Others dismiss her as a hallucination caused by exposure to Vex technology. But there are those who maintain that her intervention saved their lives - or averted unspeakable catastrophes.[/spoiler] [b]Ghost Fragment: The Exo Stranger[/b][spoiler]I stand here now and now and now many times, this view, this ground... This is where I always choose to stand. I put my feet where I put my feet before and where I will again and I look at the sky. Great things moving, rendered small with distance, lesser things not moving, watching me. I always stand here, resolute. Then fall back to that point, there, where everything shatters... (The sky isn't special here, certainly no better than any other sky, but it's the view I know best.) The silent avalanche begins. Rock and dust. Falling chaos. Machines, as a rule, hate chaos. Our enemies outflank us from below, above, left, right, before, beyond. The Traveler - shattering. There are always the dead. Their names shift. Sometimes I think I see myself among the dead. But I am resolute.[/spoiler] [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/141856406/0/0]AnonPig’s Master Posts Archived[/url] [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/115658936/0/0/1]AnonPig’s Theories Archived[/url] [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/142224851]Next[/url]