>>Origin: Rogue Agent

I remember a great many things. Amnesia would have been a blessing. Miles upon miles of tentacles, parasites entering and exiting all kinds of orifices, and a strange being that turned people into smaller versions of it.

Then I remember a disconnect, and I was flung across vast distances, seeing supernovas, jellyfish-like comets, and various forms of wildlife as I passed by. I ended up here.

>>Starting Location: Natural Shelter

I didn't dig it, I crashed through the ground until I ended up in here. Strange things I noticed when I got my bearings: my body was very much fine even though it went through what should've turned most people into a bloody mist, and the tunnel I made on my way in was a dead end that was nowhere close to the surface. Curious.

>>Structure: Psychic Invader

I feel so... weak. Like a professional runner forced to walk on his knees. I used to be more. Now, I am reduced.

No matter, there are minds to link up, and lives to fix... why did I just think that?

>>Starting World: City 29

I emerge from one of the cavern's openings to find out that I am in a sewer. How quaint.

>>Starting Drones: Alone

I found other bodies strewn around me. They looked familiar, and not just their bodies. There was a latent connection.

After I arrived, a few other bodies appeared in the same way I did. None really survived, though they did give me some closure: the filth's suppression of us was pyrrhic.

>>Drone Capabilities: Fully Sapient

>>Drawback: The Greater Good

I find myself unwilling to string my others along like puppets. Whatever was my state of mind when I separated from the filth, it endured such that I understood that I was to help my others, not exploit them... at least not to their overall detriment.

>>Psyche: The Administrator

Their lives will only be improved by me, and they can live them out as they wish, as themselves. If I ever have need of them however, they are to answer the call, for it shall concern them as much as I. Until such a time, they continue their lives, largely unaware of my influence and existence.

I'll start with a landlord. Hopefully he can give me some room to live in as I spread myself outward, and that he understands I won't be capable of paying for the foreseeable future.

>>Physical Presence: Hive Core + Secondary Cores (9)

Whatever the specifics of the process I use to convert my others, it is intrinsically different from what was used to create me. "I" am unique. Ironic, isn't it?

>>Perks

>Illusory Mimetism (8)

By rights, it makes no sense that our biological bodies are capable of interacting with the electromagnetic spectrum, much less manipulate it to such a degree. I'm tempted to just call it "magic".

>Noosphere Awareness (7)

Now this is a little more tenable, though no less fantastic in concept. When I examined the bodies of my fellow Rogue Agents, I noticed a strange substance in their heads, which glowed like a beacon in the Noosphere. It seemed like it wasn't produced by their bodies, but rather came from some external entity, one I couldn't find no matter how hard I looked.

Preliminary tests show that that substance exists in me too, and with higher concentration. I do not know if my continued survival in contrast to my fellow rogues' is caused by the fact, or if it is the exact opposite.

I'm holding off on any further examinations until my others' number grows sufficiently enough for me to afford building a new core in case this one perishes during.

>>Assimilation Protocols

>Genetic Code (6)

>Knowledge (5)

>Skills (4)

>Memories (3)

My body somehow retained an unaging form. It somehow edited its own structure to ensure that disease and time never managed to progress on it, always reverting to a preset state.

After some work and interfacing with the Noosphere, I managed to find where and how the preset state was stored, and with some fiddling found myself mastering it surprisingly quickly.

I quickly established a network among my others. States were distributed among the network in triplicate backups: me, my secondary cores, and the others themselves. If at least one of the three survives, the gestalt of state information can be safely redistributed again.

>Synthetic Compatibility (2)

Interestingly enough, artificial beings do have presence in the Noosphere, though it is muted, much like a lifeless bulb. While igniting the bulb is beyond me, I can use it to reflect my network's light, effectively connecting it through a pseudo-connection. It isn't perfect, but who cares about them? Synths never had souls to start with anyway.

>>General Perks

>Emergent Synchronicity (1)

>Inter-Drone Perception (0)

When nodes are close enough on the Noosphere, they can interface nigh-seamlessly, as if they were truly one mind with multiple bodies. It would be a waste to not leverage such an advantage.

I'll be dedicating a cluster to analyzing each set of memories brought in by a new addition thoroughly, before adding it to the gestalt. Can't have viruses enter the statebanks in someway.

>Extended Loyalty (-1)

In the Noosphere, as much is dependent on feeling as on substance. By approaching my future others with a sincere desire to help them become better, they let their guards down. It's then that I subtly implant their minds with a complex but persevering ingrained aversion to betraying me or the hive.

It seems that with my own betrayal so fresh in my mind, I am very much careful not to allow myself to fall pray to a betrayal myself.

>Harmonious Competition (-2)

To that end, I gave my others means to air out their aggressions. As fully sapient entities, it wouldn't do to suppress one aspect of their sapience: strife. I decided to channel the aggression and harness it into a more beneficial form.

Overnight, my others will grow powerful legs from their duck-walk races, sharp minds from all the rap-improvs, and sculpted bodies and bountiful assets from all the gene-therapy sessions they race to attend and show off the results of. This has the unintended consequence of improving their state-retrievals, as well as the states being stored themselves.

This also solidifies their sense of community, making them consciously start perceiving each other as one big happy family.

>Restless Dead (-3)

>Mind Upload (-4)

While we are yet to understand how the soul itself works, we have proven through incidental experimentation that the soul sticks in the body far longer than the body's "lifespan" would seem to indicate. Even if the body were to be destroyed completely, it sticks on its enduring Noosphere node for a while before moving on (length is yet to be measured to any degree of accuracy due to not wanting to risk an other's life). All that's needed is to restore the body is to retrieve its full state from either the network, the secondary cores, or me, and either revert what's left of the body to it or acquire some biomass and establish a connection to it before reverting it.

>Optimized Rest Patterns (-5)

>Dynamic Metabolism (-6)

My others are subconsciously optimizing their behavior and actions, which allows them to stockpile more overflowing resources and assets for rainy days for the hive. I consider it their tithe for the benefits they get.

>>Quests

>Seek Your Past

Upon further inspection of the fluid in my brain, it turned out there was actually a small clot in my brain that was a hyper-concentrated form of the fluid. And its imprint on the Noosphere was... strange. Looked like a continual glitch, even watching it by the naked eye.

This bore further investigation.

>Seek Vengeance

Whoever it was that we escaped will not give up. They will seek us out, and we will be ready for them!

>Galactic Engineers

A long-term project, but the possibilities are functionally endless.

>Building Utopia

If people want to join/attack us, it is their choice. We won't be seeking out others. Why would we?

>>Threats

>Dexton's Dogs (-5)

A group of them showed up in a highly-frequented bar and started some shit, trying to get paid for blowing only one hole in the roof instead of ten. They were suitably terrified when all of the patrons suddenly neutralized them in seconds like a well-oiled machine, though not before they could let off a distress call.

Wanting to avoid bringing too much attention to our city yet (I hadn't fully taken over the planet yet), I instructed my new others to run back to their commander and blabber about some vigilante that somehow scared the hell out of them.

Dexton came with his contingent, faced down Richie from the comicbook store (complete with cape and creepy mask), and managed to defeat him fairly easily. As he was saying his quote, the crowds quickly closed in on him, and he joined the ranks fairly quickly, as did his dogs. His return to his cruiser added it to my resources.

I instructed him and his crew to decide on settling down on our planet, as an unofficial police force, though more like a mafia.

>Claye, The Old Hound (-4)

Despite my best efforts, the incident wasn't as contained as I'd hoped. Claye had been tailing Dexton for weeks, hoping to finally rid the world of him before he could truly retire. He witnessed Dexton's crew going from violent pirates to reasonable protectors, and conducted his own investigations.

Eventually, when they failed to notice any abnormalities (aside from an inexplicable increase in quality of life spreading worldwide), they confronted Dexton himself, attempting to arrest him for his crimes. I tasked Dexton and his crew to go along quietly, which was a bad move, as it shot suspicions through the roof. They left in the end.

Or so I thought. They ambushed me while I was stargazing, quickly and efficiently, and took me onto their ship. Apparently, Claye had contacts in CTP, and they supplied him with a Noosphere scanner, which helped him zero in on the abnormalities on the planet. Being that I shined the brightest and almost all of the nodes were connected to me, they deemed me as the source of the problem and abducted me.

The only reason they didn't kill me instantly was because Claye wanted to check if there was a way to force me to disconnect from my others beforehand, or if my death would cause their deaths as well.

Luckily, Claye didn't trust CTP nearly enough to give them any details, so they couldn't tell him about what abilities I could potentially have. While the crew tortured me, I wormed my way into their consciousness and slowly but surely converted them. I continued the process until the cruiser's crew was pretty much mine. Claye resisted the conversion, too stubborn. In the end, I forcibly retired him to City 29. He had the freedom to move around and do as he pleased, but he wasn't allowed to make any unmonitored communications off-planet, nor was he allowed to leave. Hopefully with time, he'll come around to seeing that I'm not nearly as harmful as he believes.

>The Von Rossman (-3)

I awoke in a cold sweat. Something was coming. Something powerful. Something related to my past. Something that sent shockwaves through the Noosphere. For the first time since I awoke to this life, I was frightened.

When planetary sensors detected the Von Rossman, I knew that it was the source. There was no way our backwater planet would be capable of facing down a capital ship, let alone what that thing was. It was time to play dirty.

We mobilized all the non-essential converted crafts we could muster, and had them move into position inside an asteroid field. Each craft was attached to a suitably massive asteroid, and set a course to the Von Rossman. While its canons were numerous, they could scarcely keep up with the vast number of asteroids bombarding them. While the asteroid bombardment was relentlessly battering the Von Rossman's shields and taking up its attention, Claye's and Dexton's (now released) cruisers began engaging the Von Rossman in a pincer attack, slowly chipping away at it and taking up all of its attention while a boarding party approached with a cloaked a ship and infiltrated the Von Rossman.

Inside, I kept getting flashbacks. There were tentacles and small slug-like parasites aplenty. Some surprisingly non-decaying bodies that just writhed as the tentacles and parasites entered and exited at their leisure. We burnt them all to ashes. I noticed that the parasites had a surprisingly strong presence in the Noosphere, though nowhere near the clot in my brain.

Once we reached the bridge, I doubled over in horror. I recognized the bodies in there. They used to be my fellow thralls, before our rebellion. They were all linked by several tentacles inserted into various parts of their bodies. In the center of the bridge, was a large pale figure, out of which the tentacles emerged. We torched the mother before it could speak a word. The tentacles, parasites, and their hosts all followed shortly after.

We now had the largest known capital ship in our employ (literally, she was pleasant enough once converted). It felt somewhat... familiar. On an intrinsic level.

>The Last Void Worm (-2)

Again, I awoke with a cold sweat. This time, my head itself was throbbing.

Not wanting to waste time with needless frivolities, I repeated the same strategy as last time, though this time we didn't need to waste any crafts and merely used pre-prepared engines attached to the asteroids. The bombardment stunned the worm long enough for the Von Rossman's cannons to finish it off, though not before a team extracted a sample. Turns out the void worm was a hivemind itself, comprised of millions of smaller worms. Also turns out that their Noosphere signature was surprisingly similar to the clot on my head's.

>The Wesstec Group (-1)

Due to all of the repeated conflict in our sector, commercial traffic had indeed ceased approaching commercial traffic to redirect, which caused undue strain on other sectors, as well as a lack of revenue on this one. They imposed a trade embargo on the sector, not allowing anymore fuel to enter the sector. Luckily enough, we had a few retired miners among the populace, who shared their knowledge and skills with able-bodied NEETs and those with non-essential employments. The sector was to become self-sufficient. With the help of the Von Rossman, anchoring and reeling in of asteroids to mine, as well as transportation of the resultant fuel was nigh-trivialized.

Eventually, the sector started producing enough to afford exporting to other sectors. The Wesstec Group sent a "pacifying" force to crush the competition. They fell to the Von Rossman, and returned to their masters with some gifts... eventually, enough of the shareholders were my others to outvote any move to eradicate the sector. One day, we might start trade with them. We have bigger problems now though...

>Retribution (0)

Biggest headache yet. Head was practically ringing.

Attacking it in prime-space was not an option. We simply did not have the firepower, not that it would've worked anyway. Instead, we decided to test a project we had in the planning phases for the longest time: entering the Noosphere.

Preparations set, me and some of my better trained and abled others entered. It was a field of white, where mere thoughts floated around, out of focus, only coalescing into solid shape when focused on. We directed ourselves to the Retribution.

We found a billion thought-forms, all familiar, yet all twisted beyond sanity. Quashed together into an unholy amalgamation.

And yet, they knew me. As they lashed at me with their vast psychic might, they called me "last hope".

Now, the reason entering the Noosphere is so awesome even though we could already do it in a pseudo-form is that we could bring solid-state objects into it, and they carried power beyond their thought-counterparts. In the Noosphere, a real sword could cut through a thought-cruiser.

We brought flamers.

The billion burned.

As they fell, I rushed to absorb as many of their states as I could into my gestalt, in an attempt to piece together who or what I could be.

Once, I was a normal man. Then, through contrivance, I was granted my power of mind-linkage. The source of such powers was through a blend that used hive-mind parasites such as those of the Void worm. My power unlocked my mind to possibilities and paths unthought of. I started making amazing discoveries and inventions -such as the Von Rossman- even as I built up my hive. I treated them with as much respect as I could, very much similar to what I do now.

My rise to power would not be uneventful. I was met by a degenerated hivemind, powers similar to mine in origin, but not in application. They had engulfed themselves in hedonism, and were slowly but surely corrupting the world to their image. I was not about to stand by and let them ruin the world and eventually come for me. I decided to make the first move.

My move wasn't successful enough. I was ambushed and defeated, as it somehow summoned multiple allied hiveminds of the same proclivity. As I was about to be subsumed into their hivemind, I used one of my inventions to launch as many of my drones across space and dimensions, all with a small part of me inside them. Seems I was the only survivor so far.

Seems the hivemind has been growing since, and had completely subsumed its sector, stealthily enough.

It was time for a rematch.

It was time to end it for them.