The Nomad Vagrants — Extended Information

[The Nomad Vagrants]

The Nomad Castes — A Society of Structures

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I. Introduction

It is a distinctively human idea that each individual should have a choice in what they want to do with their lives and which function they want to fulfil within society at large. Contrary to humans, a Nomad never gets a say in what they are supposed to be doing within the hive. Their society is built around the idea of castes. Each caste has a specific function that they perform for the hive and a strict hierarchy is enforced within the hive at any given moment. There are three Nomad castes. While the Incubus is technically a fourth, it has not been included here since they only play a secondary role within Nomad society.

1. The Wanderers

The most common caste of Nomad is the Wanderer. Wanderers are pretty much all smaller Nomad ships, Morphs, Labraids, Adads, Predators, Sascyas and Anzus.

Wanderers are the youngest Nomads. Their minds are immature and curious. Within a hive, their task is to protect, explore and to gather information and resources. Since smaller ships are the easiest ones for the Nomads to build, Wanderers can be employed en masse in order to ward off a threat. In doing so, they proceed with a recklessness that is alien to any human pilot. While human pilots have a desire to survive a contact, a Wanderer does not have the same reservations and will very well sacrifice itself if it is the most efficient thing to do in a situation.

Unique to their caste, Wanderer ships have the ability to enter a 'sleeping' state, in which they shut down sensory input and all unnecessary functions. This allows them to travel vast distances in what feels to them like seconds, simply by picking up momentum and entering their sleeping state, thereby letting the momentum carry them to their destination. Wanderer ships are the smallest, and therefore, they are the most vulnerable as well. Entering their sleeping state allows their bodies to recover small amounts of damage.

Even Nomads need to gather resources in some form, and this task is delegated mostly to the Wanderers. Similar to bees bringing back pollen to their hives, Wanderers are able to detect valuable elements within rock formations, slicing them free with their weapons and making the dust 'stick' to their hulls using the microbacteria of their veils, which function like human shields. Afterwards, they return to the hive, where they shed their coat of bacteria together with the gathered resources. A Nomad hive usually has a dedicated area for Wanderers to drop off their cargo — a crude cargo bay.

2. The Advisors

Other than the Wanderers, the Advisors' role is a more administrative one. The Administrators are the brains behind the movements of Wanderers. Advisors have access to any information relayed through the Mindshare network and can use it to assess situations and make decisions based on what they know. While the Wanderers carry out attacks on intruders, the Wanderers do not question why their movement is necessary or even effective. They do not question whether the hive actually needs the resources they are gathering. They simply follow the command given to them by an Advisor, because thinking is the job of an Advisor, and not of a Wanderer.

This increased autonomy affords the Advisors an increased amount of 'personality'. Given that Wanderers are closer to threats than Advisors are, Advisors are also way less likely to die than Wanderers, which makes it easier for them to develop. While personality within the hive is not the same as human personality, Nomads are able to pick up a set of characteristics, quirks and habits over the course of their lives. The longer that life lasts, the more of these they can gather. These quirks can be something as miniscule as the way a Nomad approaches before attacking a threat, or they way they declare their intent towards humans. Some Nomads, for example, do not communicate to the human directly but simply approach aggressively and start shooting, while others might take a few moments to actually try to telepathically communicate visions of misery and death to the human before attacking.

Wanderers flying as pair

Given the Advisors' large intake of information over the Mindshare, they are able to predict the future based on patterns to some degree. The longer a Wanderer fights a human, for example, the more time an Advisor has to take in the movements of the human and discern patterns that it can use in order to predict the next movement. This is why some Order pilots have reported that the longer they fight a Nomad, the easier it seemed to get for them to read their minds and predict their movement. It is untrue that Nomads can read minds. Human and Nomad are way too different for that. What they experienced was merely a display of an Advisor's ability to evaluate patterns.

3. The Dreamers

Rarely observed by humans, most of the Nomads that takes any form within the material world is a construct envisioned by an entity within the Mindshare called a Dreamer. This mysterious caste of the Nomads usually remains intangible within the Mindshare, appearing only as an amalgamation of conscious thought within visions to those who have been exposed to Nomadic influence for a long time. Within the Mindshare, the Dreamers take the role of builders. Other than the Advisors, who could be likened to hivemothers or generals who consciously command the younger entities, such as the Wanderers, the Dreamers have long since left the desire to command, to control behind. Being the oldest entities within the Mindshare, the Dreamers have achieved a level of a consciousness that allows them to refrain from taking a physical appearance and remain completely within the Mindshare, which is in part why they are so difficult to observe.

Their age affords them with an unparalelled ability when it comes to what humans have called 'telekinesis', though the term is not quite fitting since it implies a level of magic being at work. A Dreamer usually manifests this ability by manipulating base elements, like iron, silver, gold, uranium, or Azurite and in doing so, shaping structures and quite literally willing them into existance. Of course, even a Dreamer can't create matter from nothing, and so any base materials would need to be provided for them to work with, which is usually a task that is delegated to the Wanderers by the Advisors, and their range and abilities are limited by how many Nomad vessels are present within an area. In other words, a Dreamer cannot manifest anything outside of the Nomad's direct reach.

Regardless of Nomad Lair, Dur-Shurrikun, the planetary lair being built by the Vagrants or even single Nomad ships, if it takes any form that is observable by humans, it is the work of a Dreamer entity within the hive in question - Advisors or Wanderers are too simple-minded to perform anything similar.

II. The Simurgh

Given the immense importance of a Dreamer within a Nomad hive, it becomes apparent that there are only precious few such entites in existance. Each hive usually only has a very limited number of Dreamer entites within their numbers. The Vagrants only have one: The Simurgh.

In Earth mythology, the Simurgh (/ˌsɪˈmərɡ/) is a benevolent mythical bird. In Iranian literature, it appears in various folktales and is said to purify the land and waters, bringing fertility and prosperity. In some stories, the Simurgh is said to gift three of its feathers to adventurers, usually after they performed a selfless or virtuous act in the presence of the Simurgh. The feathers, the bird tells the adventurers, are supposed to be burnt if they ever find themselves in trouble and the Simurgh would appear to help them. One example of the use of one of the Simurgh's feathers in one of these stories would be when an adventurer's wife entered labour and the birth promised to be complicated. The adventurer burned a feather and the Simurgh appeared for him, gifting him with the knowledge to perform a C-Section to save both the child and the mother.

The Simurgh of the Vagrants is an entity whose age predates even the earliest humanoids on Earth. As one of the first Nomad entities created by the Daam K'Vosh, its knowledge reaches back to before the Nomads went into their sleep from which they were finally roused by the Rheinland expedition, which ultimately set the chain of events leading to the Nomad War in motion. The name "Simurgh" it borrowed after the Nomads had learned about the threat that had infested the Sirius sector, which they had been commanded to colonize by the Daam K'Vosh. Within Nomad society, there is no need for names. Still, Nomads are by nature haughty and condescending creatures. This is one of the reasons by Nomad entities tend to take on the names of human deities, out of vainglory towards humans.

Human depictions of the mythical bird Simurgh vary greatly

The Simurgh in particular enjoyed the idea of the benevolent character of the mythical bird Simurgh. There was a precious irony to the thought of something so pure being turned against the species that had envisioned it. Fuelled by part egotism and amusement, the Simurgh takes great pleasure in partially assuming the role of the benevolent bird, and in the single instance a human has ever seen the Simurgh in a vision, it gifted the human with three Azuite shards — the Simurgh's own version of the three feathers. Overjoyed by the gift, the human wished for wealth, fame, and power with the three feathers, and the Simurgh granted this human its wish. This human's name was Tekagi, and today, he is remembered as a sorry soul enslaved to the Nomads via infection, though the way it has gotten to this point remain a mystery up to this day.