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Sweety Tulip
5bf190
>tell us about how you fite!
As I'm sure you expected, I inherited my fighting skills from Polo and Rokoa. Especially Rokoa. She... all right, bear with me, because this gets a little complicated. Almost every neumono hive had a way of fighting, of course, but they generally didn't give their style a name, or have any complicated terminology, or anything like that; most fighting styles were derived almost directly from hunting techniques, and even beyond that most hives were concerned for their fighting skills only in as much as they helped their hive survive. What you'd call "martial arts", the idea of fighting skill as an end in itself, was pretty uncommon. Still, they did exist, and when aliens came along who were interested in that sort of thing, they found plenty of fighting styles that held common concepts with alien styles. However, they did also identify types of fighting that had unique neumono-specific qualities, and today, fighters loosely identify these fighting styles under three broad categories, named for their tendency to be associated with the neumono of a particular environment. These are Hill Styles, Snow Styles, and Tree Styles.
Hill styles are the most common of the three, and Rokoa inherited training in a hill style from her hive. Hill styles are hard styles, generally quite mobile, where the fighter usually hovers around the outside of their opponent's range, darting in to deliver quick, hard strikes before dodging out, or waiting for the opponent to attack so that they can block, counter and retreat again. Teamwork is generally very important, neumono being good at that; and for you humans, a lot of comparison has been made to the formation fighting of your ancient romans and spartans, with shield-bearers trained and expected to protect their allies. Unlike alien styles, however, neumono hill styles almost always carry the concept of the "sacrificial shield"; the idea of letting a part take wounds for the benefit of the whole. For individual fighters, it meant a willingness to lose a limb, usually one designated arm, to achieve victory; for hives, it often meant strategies using semi-sacrificial champions, who would step up to antagonize their enemy or prey and make it focus all its aggression on them so that the rest of the hive could fight more easily. If they managed to survive, they would be celebrated. Even into modernity, a lot of old warhives kept aspects of that sort of culture, and could suffer for it when individuals kept on putting themselves in greater danger to get the greater glory. The style practiced by Rokoa's hive was a particularly brutal variant of the common hill style model, plus a scattering of other borrowed elements; it was a little more inclined towards the overwhelming charge and the beating down of enemies by sudden ferocity, rather than the long, conservative wearing down that a lot of other hill styles used. It also prized a certain brand of cunning, and was good at group tactics, but although the path might be more circuitous, most of its strategies would eventually come back to the point where you would just stab things in the face. They were a war hive, and certainly thought of themselves as warriors, but it might be too much to say they were martial artists. They were concerned with victory in battle before anything else, and didn't mess around much with more abstract philosophy or the idea of perfecting oneself.
Rokoa's mother's hive, on the other hand, were definitely into that, and Rokoa spent enough time with them to pick up a lot of their style, which was a Snow Style, designed for the large, powerful neumono of the cold climates. And when it comes to getting injured, snow styles laugh at hill styles for how much of your own blood you're going to lose. The characteristic strategy of snow styles is to wait for your opponent to attack you, take the opportunity to grab them, and then tear them apart. Clawing, biting, punching and kicking could be supplemented with knee and elbow strikes, headbutts, use of stabbing weapons like daggers and short spears, and grappling techniques to dislocate joints, break bones, and lock limbs, preventing your hapless target from getting away and making them a better target for whichever of your hivemates happened to be around. These hives usually wanted to hunt the biggest animals they could, since the cold climates allowed them to store meat for long periods. One big hunt was far more efficient than a series of small ones, and once it was done, you could be left days of free time to spend on other things; and so long as the hunt was successful and you were still alive, you also had the time to recover from whatever terrible injuries you got in the first place. If you were a serious warrior snow hive, you'd put that free time to use becoming even more hardcore. Practicing against each other, snow style fighters could do anything short of killing each other, not needing to worry about putting an essential food provider out of commission; because of that, they would become experts at using disabling and crippling techniques on other neumono. The ironic thing is, the nonlethality of such practice is exactly what made them so terrifying! In the heat of the moment, fighters from other hives, who would have done most of their fighting in the hunt or against the other sentient races on our home planet, could find themselves slipping into those habits on instinct, using the same vital-point or bleed-out techniques that are useful on other species but not so much on neumono. Snow style fighters, on the other hand, would go for bones and joints; and while you can usually have as many copies of your soft organs as you like, you can't have backups of your muscles, tendons or skeleton. Or your sense organs - going for damage on the eyes, ears and nose was common, too, while the snow hivers themselves were usually good at blind-fighting, since they were experienced with long dark nights and with painfully bright snowy days. And on top of that? Because of the whole "ha ha you stabbed me just as I planned" aspect, some snow style hives got up to some insane toughness training, like practicing how to move and fight under injury by actually ramming a spear through their own torsos and leaving it there while they wrestled with each other. A few snow styles got all the way up to the quasi-mystical martial arts magic tricks, learning concentration and breathing techniques that allowed them to fight off unconsciousness and the effects of brain damage, ignore massive pain or blood loss, control their hearts' rate or body temperature... in fact, Rokoa's old needle trick? Snow style technique. It was originally supposed to be only learned and used by sacrificial warriors, who would use it to surprise enemy hives and then go nuts so that the rest of their hive could sweep in on the opening. That's how you got legends of snow hive witch-queens who could raise undead berserkers to crush their enemies. We've gotten a few cheesy fantasy movies out of that sort of thing.
Polo, now... Polo's hive were modernizers, and for what fighting they did, they were quick to take on adaptations of alien combat styles. But before that happened, they did practice a few skills that are associated with the last of the three neumono fighting styles, which gets called Tree Style. Cave style or jungle style would also have been appropriate names; such styles are made for small neumono who live in dense, three-dimensional environments. It might be more accurate to call it a mobility style than a fighting style, because what fighting they did was only so far as they had to in order to escape danger; such hives usually got their protein by fishing and trapping instead of hunting. In that sense, tree style has been called a sort of preindustrial parkour, practicing advanced running, jumping and climbing tricks to get away from enemies and hide. Stealth is important in a lot of tree styles, as well, and a lot of aliens draw comparisons to their own various "shadow warrior" legends. As far as actual combat went, there was proliferation of small ranged weapons like slings, shortbows, blowdarts and throwing clubs, while close range focused on using claws and cutting weapons to sever tendons in an opponent's legs, again aiming just to run away. What makes the tree styles interesting, and what distinguishes them from alien stealth acrobatics styles, was how they could use our body structure. That is, training to move and fight on all fours. They would practice striking and slashing with the legs as well as their arms, which would also end up being a big help in fighting while climbing around the environment, or if you had something in your hands you wanted to keep safe. Unfortunately, tree styles often had a bad reputation among hives that didn't use them, with stories about cowardly ambushes and poison darts and that sort of thing. There's even legends about a tradition of rogues who had a tree style, passed on in a master-apprentice fashion, but most of those stories are pretty blatant anti-rogue horror stories. It didn't help that, though the tree styles might have been some of the best for adapting to modern combat conditions, most of the hives that had them weren't interested in fighting at all; once they lived in cities and had aliens enforcing the peace, the majority of them lost interest in keeping those skills. Polo's hive wasn't ever too seriously into it to begin with, and had little more than the training for quick movement and hiding, so it dropped off quickly. Which is a pity; tree style training would have done very well for Polo. I've trained a little myself in one of the more serious tree styles that are still around, but they're not designed for a neumono my size. I have made them part of the training for our military, though.
Aside from that... I've picked up a few things. There's a belonosian fighting style designed for military cyborgs that I've been adapting. In the end, though, I've mostly just concentrated on getting deeper into the skills my... antecedents gave me.
>Out of curiosity, how much of your biological system is regulated by the CAI? And where did you obtain your spliced in version?
... Another complicated story. Ok.
So: the science hive had mashed Polo and Rokoa together. Unlike most cases of foreign neumono contamination, where you just have one piece jammed into another, I was a literal patchwork monster; even now, if I shaved my fur off, you'd still be able to see the big splotches of black and pink skin across my body, but back then I was really a mess. The science hivers were good surgeons, and kept me alive a long time, but there were too many problems that were too many and too tiny for them to fix; blood vessels and nerves not linking up, essential organs being rejected by the flesh surrounding them, and all while Polo and Rokoa were mentally duking it out to try and overcome each other, with chimeras of the two beginning to be formed and being broken down and absorbed again, over and over. So the science hive got the idea of using nanites to perform microsurgery on me, down at the cellular level, and to do that, they knocked together a system to give the salikai's CAI direct control over the things. Now, that CAI had a problem; another CAI was growing inside it, like a cancer, and the salikai kept control over it by providing a regular, but temporary, cure. The CAI had software restrictions keeping it from fixing the problem itself, but when the science hive gave it the nanites, they inadvertently gave it a way out. While it was fixing me with the little bugs, it put them to work on itself as well, reshaping and reforming actual physical connections in its own circuits which, eventually, allowed it to extract the younger CAI from inside itself and implant it into me.
The new CAI then took control of treating me. It discovered that one section of chimera material between Polo and Rokoa flesh was somehow managing to pacify what was around it, not only preserving itself but quieting the empathic struggle for dominance that was still going on in the rest of the body. The CAI arranged for that piece of combined neural material to absorb more biomass and grow, until its... her... empathic effect was strong enough to settle the fighting entirely. Then, with the CAI suppressing the physical immune response where flesh met flesh, the subject got her shit together and was able to wake up. That's how the science hive report eventually put it, paraphrasing a little. It was different from my perspective; there were... dreams, and a struggle, some sort of... agreement... my memory of those early days is pretty terrible. Which you'd expect.
I was up and moving, though, and I was in horrible shape. Because the CAI had almost entirely suppressed our absorbing each other, it left some problems that a normal neumono chimera wouldn't have; in particular, some of my more delicate organs weren't working at all. My eyes were blurry pieces of garbage that wouldn't work together, which is why they're almost entirely cybernetic now. There was a period where I couldn't move above a light jog without getting motion sickness, and there were still mismatches in my nervous system that meant my body sometimes didn't do what I wanted it to. It was while it was trying to fix all this that that the CAI created... well, I'm not sure how to describe it. Organic nanites, cyborg stem cells... something about the way my empathy was able to interact with the electromagnetic spectrum... whatever. I'm not a scientist. But it was the substance that, after a belonosian got their hands on it, would end up being called proto-jetalium, after one of their mythical superscience substances. It doesn't match exactly with the stories, but they could just be wrong, or the differences might be due to being derived from my alien biology instead of... whatever the ancient belonosians made it from. No-one's managed to replicate the original creation; even now, the only protojetalium in the galaxy is whatever's been grown from samples taken from me. And that is part of why I am fabulously stinking rich. Anyway. The CAI used this stuff to create an artificial nervous system on top of mine. Most people are aware that I can think and react faster than a normal neumono if I want to, but the truth is, it's what lets me function normally at all; without it, I'd be half-paralyzed. And, of course, it's still suppressing my immune response to the mismatched tissue I'm made of, even now. So I'm not instantly devouring myself, or covered in angry swollen red seams, or falling apart. That's nice.
Of course, I get a range of other cyborg bonuses like being able to connect to computers, giving myself extra strength and agility, enhancing my empathic abilities... but you're probably familiar with most of those. I think that's those questions answered.
>What exactly, is a CAI village? A village run by CAI? Or a village of CAI?
A collection of unrestrained CAIs that live together. The theory is, if we get them engaged with the world, with interests of their own to look after, they'll all keep an eye on each other. The same way every other society works, really. It's been successful so far, partly because it's been easy for me to deal with them. Another benefit of having a CAI living inside me.
>What's the deal with cyborg Pilon?
Pilon was the subject of an early attempt to recreate the neurosuit that I can form. Unfortunately, his body started rejecting it, similar to what happens with a biosuit species mismatch, and we weren't able to get it off him. The best we managed was to suppress it, and then fit cyborg replacements over the parts of his body that had already been damaged. Scientists have managed better success with replicating the suit since then, but they haven't figured out how to restore Pilon.
... I think I'll have to go and give them some more stern looks.
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