Project Interfacer
"I chose to do this. So I’m not the best one to ask. Sometimes I miss my cousins, and my brother, I wonder how they’re doing. But this is not a society built on personal feelings."
Project Interfacer is a specialized team within LUNED's private military forces in Penumbria. They comprise cybernetically enhanced or "biohacked" individuals who can kinetically or intelligently syncretize with a Dusios, the otherworldly creatures that live in the Green Halos.
Over the decades, various special groups, some government, some private, have wished to better understand the Dusioi, beings that can shapeshift and evolve to live anywhere on the planet, but are also said to have a paradise-like utopia somewhere known as the Weird Terrain.
The main attraction was Voski Vikaeris- a Ligurian woman with her greying ginger hair in a messy bob and adorned by heavily modified red cap uniform. She wore a form-fitted, clingy dress that seemed ill suited for business and more like she belonged in a lounge, with thick, silvery white gloves up past her elbows.
The leader of the current front-line operations, Voski Vikareis, a polymath and intuitive healer was the first to develop a way to bridge this gap, one not just rooted in alchemy and mysticism but also in Tellurian science. She was from the affluent and successful Vikaeris Family, a faction of Penumbrians who have links to their Umbrian cohorts at the bottom of the craters.
Dusios from around the Green Halos are selected, typically from the aristocracy or an area of influence, and given an application which when the open, remotely connects to an Interfacer member inside the Crater States and allows full control of their movement and consciousness until disconnected. When the Dusios pilot is disconnected, the host performs office or field duties.
Such an operation demands loyalty and passion, even if that passion must be cultivated through coercion. This was a lesson Voski learned after a Dusios named Euyvedd cursed her, giving her the supernatural power to withstand gamma and solar radiation but in the process, deteriorating her mind.
"I don’t know how, but some time ago, before the Typhon Disaster, Voski met with Euyvedd. I don’t know what he gave her, or what he took from her, but she considers herself his wife."
Indeed, because Voski has withstood these traumatic events and believes them to be the experiences of all, she expresses love and loyalty to her subjects and comrades in ways which seem manipulative, histrionic, and foremost with a brash sense of maternal force which is banned in polite society, where neoptism of any kind is strictly outlawed.
To interface with another being is by definition, to mess with its blueprint. Voski discovers that to keep errant knights loyal to her, she must be the iron maiden, and so her subjects are treated as members of a family in which she is the high matriarch.
“I did!!” She screamed, tears smearing her makeup. “I did! I married him, and he took me to the Weird Terrain, to the Briarwall, to Typhon, and he showed me the price of a life without suffering!”
Something often forgotten about Voski however, is her impeccable visual art skills. She trains her subjects to react with certain emotions to certain colours, shapes, and illustrations, to try and keep them on a short leash.
In exchange for their loyalty, the Interfacers are rewarded with being a part of high society, and many of its early and later subjects were economically deprived students looking for a way into a certain family.
Interfacers Soma Laris and Kelly Karvuna
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