Diaspora - Lunar Exodus [SFW Nobledark Sci-Fi AU]

@Cerebrate19 @Jinx
 
Past the entrance, hundreds of Lunar Ark citizens of all species can be seen strolling up and down a long esplanade boulevard flanked on both sides by pillars and flowering trees. Past the trees are establishments of all sorts alcoved into the walls; This area appears to be a galleria.
 
Far down the boulevard, surrounded by smaller diner and shop doors, three large entrances have signs pointing to them titled with “Moonlight Ratskeller”, “Cabinet of Curiosities”, and “Musaeum”.

@CasaBlamCo  
“oh? i never knew this place had establishments for tourism like this.”

@Cerebrate19  
Indeed. Plenty.

@CasaBlamCo
 
@Jinx  
“and here i was worried, we’d follow the din to some nightmare cult meetup.”

@Cerebrate19  
?

@Jinx  
“not important now.”

@Cerebrate19  
she gave a nod, her ears rotating back and forth instinctivly

@Jinx @Cerebrate19
 
Passerby random griffon,  
leaving toward the park deck:  

 
Under the neon sign for the Cabinet of Curiosities is a holographic news ticker with the passing text;  
“Now presenting preserved Manehattan Statue of Harmony’s head on exhibit.”
 
At the Moonlight Ratskeller, chairs and seats underneath conker trees surround it’s entrance, where customers are served various beverages and victuals. Below the sign advertising the place, a hanging banner appears to be advertising live music, bowling, table games, and peculiarly enough, a shooting gallery.
 
Over at the Musaeum, a large floor sign next to it’s entrance says “New cross-section exhibit of a pre-Ark ‘scum warren’ holdout, along with presentation of decommissioned and preserved lunar-lagrangian defense killsat.”

@CasaBlamCo  
“scum warrens?”

@Cerebrate19 @Jinx
 
The exhibit seems to present a detailed historic recreation cutaway of a typical surface-crater “warren”, one of a series of hideouts located across the moon’s surface, before the Exodus, that had been used by “scum”; Nightmare Moon cults, fascist “outback-valhalla” colonies, “Rortian” hive-mind collectives, space pirates, infomorph-slave trading triads, etc.
 
A nearby plaque reads;
 
 
These were common in highland regions, such as the north and south polar settlements. A typical warren is made up of individual habitats buried under about 10 feet of lunar regolith; most polar warrens were built into the rims of craters, where they could receive the greatest amount of sunlight; this also provided a nice view when anyone goes “topside.” Warrens would have a surface level – usually of simple cylinder, dome, or block construction – containing airlocks, storage areas and machinery, and an underground habitat level, or levels. Individual warrens rarely had more than one or two underground levels. Instead, big complexes had multiple adjoining house-sized warrens linked by roads, enclosed surface walkways, or tunnels. Many warrens were surrounded by unmanned surface installations, such as reactors, solar panels, and garages, warehouses and factories.
 
Life in a warren could be claustrophobic. While virtuality and augmented reality could make small spaces seem much bigger – almost all having made extensive use of 2D or 3D video walls – there were no windows in the living quarters, and going outside required donning a full pressure suit. However, this was mitigated by widespread use of tele-operated “cybershells” for external excursions.
 
Next to the scum warren exhibit appears a more bizarre and intimidating curio…
 
What looks like a large spider-tank, bristling with weapons;  

 
In front of this display is a plaque reading; “Replica of typical Rortian Dreadnought hive-mind warmachine.”

@CasaBlamCo  
“huh they sure made themselves at home… and they were rather well armed, how odd that our hive never really had brushes with those sorts.”

@Cerebrate19  
They likely assumed you to be no threat.

@Cerebrate19 @Jinx
 
[ 🎶(Mass Effect 2 Unreleased OST - Squad Selection Theme [ A.K.A creepy ambient squad selection music ]) ]  
A kiosk screen next to the plaque gives details on the Rortians, as a collective of post-mortal cybernetic “singularity-chasers”, mostly composed of equines, outcast changelings, griffons, but also many other species, some of which even bought as slaves from allied Infomorph Triads to later be forcibly uploaded into their gestalt.
 
Along with the text is a captured pre-Exodus photo of one of their ““flexbots[](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/369134562833596417/499020534206431234/Massive_flexbot.jpg); the scene captured while it had been pulling itself into a torn-open airlock hatch of a spacecraft. Below the image is an artist’s depiction of a what appears to be a hideously cyberized minotaur; the Rortian’s most popular choice for boarding actions, as well as raiding the interiors of lunar colony habitats.

@CasaBlamCo  
Easily killable. Exploit the charge line for the cannon and use the horns as leverage to break its neck or throw it.

@Jinx @Cerebrate19
 
_{[ War Exhibit’s Ambient Intercom Muzak(Starship Troopers - Federal Network Hymn [FedNet]) ]}  
At the lagrangian killsat centerpieced in the spacewar exhibit, the plaque for the orbital weapon describes it’s laser-pulsers and particle ray bolters as mostly just being used to zap away and disintegrate space-debris and small asteroids.
 
The dud precision-kill missiles and disarmed hypervelocity gun on it however were used in major part of an effort to exterminate the Scum “Extropians”–the official historic umbrella term for the Rortians, Triads, & Outback Valhallas–and Nightmare Cults across the moon’s surface, by completely flattening their warrens.
 
Some of the munition impacts had even managed to penetrate down into lunar lava layers, causing the targeted areas to sink and darken into fresh, localized, and isolated basaltic plains that still dot across the lunar surface to this day, as both scars, and as grave sites to a past lightning-war.

@CasaBlamCo  
sada took in everything she saw and used it to her advantage, the knowledge could help someday

@Jinx @Cerebrate19
 
Most of the rest of the exhibit shows uniforms, deactivated weaponry behind display cases, and life-sized photos of the groups that had allied together into a coalition to fight the Scum;
 
____  
Earth-nation orbital defense, Griffin “Espatier-Condottieri” mercenaries,
 
___  
Early Lunar-Sec forces, & even Barsoomian freeboot-militia from rebel Martian colonies.

@CasaBlamCo  
information. It was all just information to be used for something better

@Jinx @Cerebrate19
 
Touring through the last sections of the war exhibit; an “old and disturbingly jingo recruitment advert(Starship troopers “I’m doing my part), firearms modified against metal contact-welding in vacuum, an older cutaway diagram of lava-tube habitats, and finally,
 
[ 🎶(Halo Wars OST - Work Burns and Runaway Grunts) ]  
…a mothballed ““supertank[](https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/389/927/large/daniel-graffenberger-alternative-consequence-by-talros-dag081v.jpg?1473183757) once owned by an unknown member of the “martian millionaires” country club, for competitive tank-sparring duels across rust-red semi-habitable landscapes, then later-on retrofitted by the club’s elite-ranked duelists for no-holds-barred deathmatches on the Moon against Rortian spidertanks.
 
On the plaque in front of the vehicle, it details that of the club members to have participated as belligerents against Scum, culturally; a third were saddle arabian emirs, while another third were changeling hive overseers.
 
The remainder were various post-mortal hypercorp execs vehemently expressing their appall of Extropians.

@CasaBlamCo  
“i can think of many better ways to contribute than seating my untrained self into a tank, the easiest involving seating someone trained into a tank…”

@Cerebrate19 @Jinx
 
The plaque ends with describing the last battle of the Scum conflicts;
 
An assault against the “Mogura Gates”, where vehicles such as the one displayed participated alongside every other friendly belligerent in the coalition, as part of missions to capture a series of heavily defended and fortified bunkers that’d served as entrances into the deepest subterranean complex to had existed in the moon at the time; long before the much vaster sub-surface excavations achieved much later on in hasty preparation for the Moon-Ark Exodus.
 
When the battle had ended, Extropian tech was salvaged for more ethical and practical uses, such as what eventually became today’s “fractal digit” end-affectors used in nanofabrication industry fields. Nightmare cult temples found within the underground tunnels however were sealed off, either found that way done by cultists themselves as a final act, or by the coalition under explicit orders from equestrian commanders.

@CasaBlamCo  
“so any wall we open might have a cultist grave/nightmare cult enchnted artifact behind it… someone back then really didn’t think things through.”

@Cerebrate19 @Jinx  
The final mark of the conflict was a killsat high-velocity bombardment on the gates themselves, to seal away anything in the underground tunnels that was either completely unsalvageable or far too hazardous to handle.

@CasaBlamCo  
“so an entire bubble full of dangerous stuff and apparently no one thought to space it yet…”

@Cerebrate19 @Jinx  
On the screen of a nearby attentive simple VI(Virtual Intelligence)-controlled kiosk,
 
noticing Cerus’s interest in the subject, and so beeping to catch his attention to it’s screen:
 
“To this day, the specific subterranean areas the Mogura tunnels stretch into are marked and restricted from excavation, with the publicly-announced warnings being that the tunnels are still filled with various ancient, unstable, and dangerous extropian machines and devices looked over and left by the coalition for whatever reasons before the quarantine was placed.”
 
“Even for supposed remnant bits and scraps, the extropian tech is said to be capable of feats beyond the wildest dreams of any sane being, since it was created by beings attempting to greatly enhance their intelligence and physical capabilities, to the point of no longer relating in any way to whatever their origin species may’ve been.”
 
“This has in a few occasions attracted the attention of amateur thrill-seeking treasurehunters after the Exodus of the Lunar-Ark, who have never been seen again after entering the marked forbidden tunnels. Security measures have since tightened, but any discovery of new passages into unusually uniform and featureless tunnels, with sides, the floor, and the ceiling measured seamlessly in multiplications of 5x5x5 meters should be immediately reported to Lunar-Sec officials.”