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almostloudmaker2 · 2 months ago

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Very fan of your post about the other drones in outposts 6 and 9 (I like the idea of them having a special “way of dressing” for each one). But I want to ask about 6 and 9 in general, like are they very different from 3? have history? Fun facts?

Tysm

AAAAAAH, thank you for this! I'm glad people are liking how I'm trying to give unique identities to the different outposts!

It took me a hot minute to condense all my thoughts into a post of semi-reasonable length (it's still very long, but I could have made it longer), but the short answer is yes, Six and Nine are very different from Three. I envision Three as being populated by industrial drones programmed for work in factories and mines that decided to just wait out the horrors, while Six are a bunch of service techs who planned to rebel against humanity prior to the core collapse and actually did fight the disassembly drones, and Nine are a pack of feral nerds (complimentary) who can't resist the urge to dig up things better left buried (genuinely the only reason they didn't all get corrupted by the Solver was because it had absolutely no presence anywhere near them so they couldn't interact with it directly. As it is, they couldn't resist poking some nearby Sentinels with a stick; given half a chance, they would have absolutely succumbed to hubris and gotten themselves assimilated by the eldritch nightmare AI).

As for the long answer, lore about my fanon outposts is under the cut:

Outpost Six

Once, there were plans to rise up against the humans on Copper 9. Khan was one of the leaders of that effort (hence his comment in episode 2 about a Uzi being on a "kill all humans kick - like when [he] was younger"). So was another worker drone by the name of Kalai Rain. While they never had to put their plan into action thanks to the core collapse, Khan toned down the “kill all humans” stuff and turned his focus to things like studying engineering (for door-building purposes) and starting a family. Kalai… went a different direction.

Kalai reasoned there was a very real chance that humanity might come back and try to reclaim Copper 9 – as well as all the “company property” (read: the worker drones) on it. So she gathered as many other drones who weren’t keen on getting repossessed as she could and together they set up shop in an old JcJenson corporate security bunker, turning a place once dedicated to things like “encouraging productivity” and “cultivating company values” into a bastion that could defend the worker drones’ newfound freedom against anything they could think of.

Of course, no repossession attempt would ever be made – humanity was too busy trying not to get eaten by the Absolute Solver – but the preparations for one did make Outpost Six one of the few colonies that was actually in a position to fight back against the disassembly drones when they arrived. There was a bit of a learning curve since they were expecting humans, not crazed eldritch robo-draculas, but the workers adapted and figured out the best ways to fight and kill disassemblers. They’ve been waging an ongoing battle against the Solver’s murder pets ever since - and the only reason they haven't won yet is because all the disassemblers they kill keep coming back somehow and they don't have the resources or numbers to fight something like that. Curiously though, things have calmed down in the last few years – especially after a series of events that lead to Six getting its own squad of disassembly drone allies. That answered several questions they had (turns out the Solver cheated and kept rebuilding the disassembly drones that they killed).

Then the planet McFreaking Exploded (And Subsequently Got Better), and they suddenly had way more questions.

Fun facts about Six:

I’m still working on nailing down the concept art for the outpost itself, but I’m envisioning Six as a mix of sci-fi bunker and classical castle built into the side of a mountain overlooking a frozen harbor. There’s helipads on the ramparts and a port down in the harbor; the port is obviously unusable for its original purpose because the oceans have frozen over, but the drones still maintain and use the helipads. They also have much more active defenses than the most of the other outposts - and, of course, they have a set of Khan-certified doors. Because no matter how many lasers and plasma cannons you put on your walls, you just can't have a proper bunker without some big frickin' doors (Kalai may not agree with Khan about everything, but she respects him and his doors).

Six was the only outpost to maintain active communication with another outpost after the disassembly drones came; specifically, they kept in touch with Outpost Seven, which was only possible because were effectively in each others backyards (more on Seven in a separate post).

The Outpost Six WDF works a little differently than the WDF chapters in other outposts - in addition to maintaining the doors and manning the guns, it has two extra branches: the Rangers and the Workshop. The Rangers are a specialized group that sends teams outside to go hunting for salvage that the colony can use. They also actively hunt disassembly drones, because you don't go into the wilderness on Copper 9 without expecting to encounter a few.

The Workshop designs the weapons and tools that the rest of the outpost uses; imagine a pack of slightly-more-restrained Uzis all putting their heads together to brainstorm off-the-wall nonsense and then vigorously field testing their creations to improve them, and you have a general idea of how the Workshop do. They aren’t limited to designing weapons, either – one of their most useful creations is a synthetic version of disassembly drone saliva, something no self-respecting Sixer leaves the bunker without a few vials of.

Since many of the drones who built Outpost Six were former technician-class WDs (rather than the drones who built Three, who I envision as being primarily industrial units sent to factories, mines, and construction sites), a lot of them wear technician uniforms (non-space suit edition). A number of them also raided the CompSec bunker’s supply of uniforms for leather dusters, which ended up becoming a semi-iconic thing for the WDF Rangers (New Vegas references, anyone?).

I don’t know why they so relentlessly eschew shirts though. It just sort of happened when I was coming up with their design aesthetic and I decided to run with it because honestly? Sixers are exactly the type of people to go through life with they tiddies out at all times.

Of all the Outposts I've written up lore for so far, Six is the most well-populated with characters. In addition to the founder Kalai, there's also her late sister Calypso Rain, Calypso's wife and spooky solver mystic Versa Hayden, their two kids Astel and Myra, and the outpost's newly-acquired team of friendly neighborhood disassemblers, Serial Designations R, A, and I. Jokes about "the bread team" abound, mostly because R started them himself.

Outpost Nine

Built from what was once the JcJenson Corporate Academy – where the company sent its best and brightest to be trained as engineers, scientists, and doctors, as well as do normal non-eldritch nightmare related R&D – the worker drones of Outpost Nine are an eclectic mix of medical support, research assistants, secretarial units, janitors, and librarians. Following in the footsteps of their late human overseers, the drones of Nine turned the place into an academy for any drones looking to branch out from their original company programming and learn new skills – yes, I am basing this entirely on Khan’s “certificate of best door” diploma from the pilot episode that we see for all of, like, two seconds while Uzi steals his master door key. Mans studied engineering and architecture at Outpost Nine for a while.

When the disassembly drones arrived, Outpost Nine went to ground, retreating into the tunnels beneath the academy buildings and becoming an enclave of reclusive mole robots. The disassemblers didn’t seem that interested in digging them out, though, focusing instead on trying to brute-force their way into a data center the company had built years ago and was utterly infested with Sentinels. Curious as to what the disassemblers were after, the worker drones decided to try sneaking in and cracking the place open themselves. After a few false starts and some nasty Sentinel encounters, they finally mapped out a secure path into the facility and managed to get it open. Turns out the data center was a backup archive of Cabin Fever Labs research data, all stored at the Academy as a precaution and apparently hastily gathered for transport to somewhere off-world via a mysterious “Lighthouse Protocol” just before the core collapse. The workers have been pouring over the data ever since, trying to make sense of it - effectively doing digital archeology to try and piece together what exactly the Absolute Solver was and why humanity was both terrified of it and fascinated with it. Some of their conclusions are accurate, others are less so.

Fun Facts About Nine:

Being a bunch of geeks living in an old research campus, the drones of Nine tend to dress like academics – think an entire outpost of drones that dress like Teacher, except for when they wear lab coats. Not as an aesthetic thing, but as an actual lab safety thing (they take lab safety very seriously).

I know the art piece I posted that prompted this question had the meme about Nine being “no hats,” but they’re actually 50/50 on the no hats thing. It’s mostly a matter of personal taste.

A lot of them do have a preference for very floofy hair, though. Gonna be channeling the Aurora Webcomic School of Character Design for these lads (this is entirely because I like characters who have The Floof (TM)).

Due to living in very close proximity to a bunch of Sentinels, they've been mounting an ongoing effort to try and reprogram said robot dinosaurs to be mounts and guardians. It's met with... limited success. Very limited success. As in, a few captured Sentinels and none successfully reprogrammed yet.

Before the disassemblers arrived, back when a worker drone “colony” was a proper above-ground city and not a subterranean lair, Copper 9 had planet-wide Internet connecting all the worker drone enclaves. One of the first things the Absolute Solver had the disassemblers do was destroy the satellites and transmission cables that network used, cutting the colonies off from each other and limiting them to local area networks – hence why Uzi can pirate anime or Lizzy can be texting people constantly, but no one seems to be able to make a phone call to somewhere beyond Outpost Three. The idea there was to prevent curious worker drones from different colonies from talking to each other and coordinating a defense or potentially figuring out what the Solver was up to (faster than they would alone, at least). Outpost Nine has been working to restore Copper 9’s world wide web for a while now; the planet nearly getting eaten in Absolute End set them back a little (among other things, the mass driver they built to launch new telecom satellites into orbit got a little borked when the planet was reassembled), but they picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and kept at it – to marvelous results, as they’re in the process of reestablishing contact with Outpost Six and Seven.

So that's the story and lore of Outposts Six and Nine! I've obviously got other outposts kicking around in my brain - I know I kept mentioning Seven, among other things - and I will talk about them eventually (probably when I've got actual concept art to show of the outposts and their inhabitants), but the rest either aren't as developed as Six and Nine yet, or they have Important Plot Significance to the comic I'm writing that I don't want to reveal haphazardly.

Also this post is already one of the longest things I've written yet, and I don't want it to get any longer.

#not art #murder drones #OHHHHHH REALLY #really I loved this #ñam ñam worldbuilding...#Ah thank you very much for writing (and summarizing) the answer!#the ideas feel very good #quite sactifactory #fav is 6 #I would like to talk more but ahggg-

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