RHOCROPOLIS
Fight - To Run Away
The most confusing thing about Rhocropolis design is their focus on mobility. When weapons of stellar mass
destruction - a scale capable of destroying all planets in a solar system and the star around which they
orbit, are standard and even 'small arms' among some forces, the scale of the battlefield changes dramatically.
Terrestrial forces rarely imagine such destruction, outside of fusion and antimatter weapons of the late
industrial era. Munitions that could eliminate a 50-150 mile wide area of life exposed to atmosphere and
mass of a displacement effect.
For a Rhocropolis, this weapon is the ability to burn a hemisphere of a planet, or crack the planet in pieces,
for which the only defense is to escape the solar system instantly and quickly - at a moment's notice of an
alarm signaling the detection of enemy forces on attack or weapons of this magnitude.
Sometimes just jumping into open space was preferable to being in a solar system where a gravity well had
been created - ending twenty billion lives in an instant.
By the time the Rhocropoli were built in large number, such weapons were well known to their creators as
would air raids or tanks be to our Century. Attacks could not be detected because even light could not
escape, and so pre-emptive evasion and stealth became paramount to survival against such threats over
Centuries of sustained war, automation, and immortal combatant soldiers commanding such arms.
Even so, the weapons installed in these structures were designed to resist and delay enemy forces use of
the same technology, from appearing inside the city itself to attacks upon the gates and entries into the
fortress ships; tools to disrupt and deflect the use of primitive weapons and light, sound, and wave-form
mechanics, creating bizarre killing fields of total silence, darkness, and unease - places in which movement
in a straight line was impossible as the very fabric of reality undulated and condensed in ripples and waves
to confuse and disorient all but the most fortified combatants - bordering on the very edge of collapsing
time and space itself around the city.
The effects of which can still be felt in the places they were used, millions of years after the battle.
Such is the danger of 'high energy' and 'low energy' weapons - tools that transgress the modulus of our
Universe and fluctuate with polar desyncronized matter, which becomes energy when entering our spectrum
of time and space - much as a gravity well disrupts and distorts the relationship of matter and time
beyond the event horizon. The damage done by this becomes permanent, like scars upon time and space,
and leaves damage that increases over time until the area degrades out of normal space and into otherworldly
confluence of breaches in the physical universe as we know it. Solid become liquid. Fire becomes ice.
These are the words used to describe these places, and all life sense in them something unnatural and alien
to the ordinary world, holy places and gateways to Hell. The shell craters of a war without end.
The need for such weapons, where Sanguine and other forces conceal themselves in the ether as would a
U-boat approach from below the surface of the water - like sharks - their bodies on the surface just the
tip of the fin poking through the ether. Monsters the size of Red Giant stars on the other... walking
down the streets and avenues of the city. To kill such a monster, one must strike it where it resides,
and to do so means breaking the surface of time itself, in some cases, when the monster uses temporal
shielding to alternate between potential outcomes like a cat in a box - both dead and alive - and able
to choose which path to follow by breaking and switching the causality to substitute one reality for
another at will over and over gain.
To kill the cat that is both dead and alive, one must destroy the box as well.
Where such technology (temporal shielding) is installed then also in the Rhocropoli, the same weapons
are used against them which tear the very fabric of space apart forever - digging for the heart of the
great engine to tear it out and eat it.
Facing such a predator, what animal would not choose to run away?
So the cities move, their towers and smaller fortifications deploy to defend, and to buy time for their
escape - fleeing from the enemy until they can approach from hiding and strike first. Wars are won or
lost in seconds, finished with the first shot, and such conflicts hardly stories of bravery, compared
to lesser struggles. A thunderclap, and a star goes out, or a flash in total silence - and a garden
becomes a desert filled with ocean. These are the battles of the Rhocropoli. The terror, beyond that
of the capability of their citizens to comprehend or live beneath.
Ignorance, against such horror, the only shield - that ordinary life sustain.