Aisling Duval
11 Aug 2021Iridium Nova
The pretty, prismatic popstar princess of the Empire. Seems like your typical idealistic imperial brat squandering her inheritance chasing pipe dreams on the surface, but there's more to her than it seems. When she first emerged into the public spotlight I figured she wouldn't last a year, two tops. But when that didn't happen I started paying attention. She's just as capable as any of the other power players when it comes to manipulating people to get what she wants, and despite the peace and harmony face her campaign wears for the public, they are not above throwing the right people under the bus if it furthers their agenda. And that's why she's not only survived, but at times has dominated bubble politics over the last 7 years. But what really sets her apart is something altogether different entirely. I believe she has access to exotic resources and technology outside the scope of conventional human engineering. This surfaces over the years in various ways, if you know what to look for, but the most obvious thing is that fantastically wonderful device her small cadre of eggheads came up with: the prismatic shield generator. By and large considered to be the best shielding technology money can buy. But the thing is - you can't buy it with just money. It's reserved for those rare few who do enough favors for her campaign. And even then it's expensive as shield generators go. And it probably should be. Ask anyone who works or has worked for her and there's a huge chance they'll tell you they did it for the shield.We know what it's capable of. The performance stats are public and well known, having been integrated into various planning software and interfaces throughout the bubble. Hell, it's in the recruitment blasts. But dig deeper and you start to run into snags. Nobody, even the people who trust their lives to it, really knows HOW it works. There's something altogether arcane about the device, according to all accounts. The few engineers who have worked on them are remarkably tight lipped about the inner workings. While it's certainly possible to engineer them, there seems to be a kind of secrecy about it. Naysayers shrug it off, saying "What do you expect? It's basically two shield generators strapped together. It should perform as well.". But that's not entirely correct. First of all, you can't actually do that anymore. There's a reason shield generators can't be stacked anymore and we have to use shield boosters to try to get the same effect. Also, you can't just stick a class 7 shield generator in a class 6 slot. But that's basically what's going on here. If any of this were possible with existing tech, it'd have been done already, and not by a royal upstart.
Now, mind you, I'm basing most of this on the information (or rather lack thereof) that's available. And it stands to reason they'd want to protect their technology and prevent it from being reverse engineered, but that excuse only goes so far. And I know what you're thinking, "here we have another one of those conspiracy theory nuts contributing to an echo chamber.". And yeah, okay, fair. But my intuition is rarely wrong. So, I'll just have to get myself a few of these things. And I realize that I'm probably not the first person who's tried to crack this mystery, but that's not going to stop me.