Article 46: Obscuritrons

Replitech Enterprises was a small GA-based design business specializing in creating generic repair parts for numerous vehicles, and they were subject to a stroke of good fortune when they managed to acquire a used netcore from a pirate recovery auction. Its founder had the idea to use this Netcore to automate a vehicle factory on a barren moon, and with the help of investments from the trade firms that would eventually become the exchanges division of The Consortium, a toxic but mineral-rich moon orbiting a lone gas giant in a system appropriately named Obscurus Vector Gamma was purchased. The initial production plants for this venture were built in orbit around Obscurus before being deployed to the moon. Completely unmanned save the occasional diagnostic checkup, the netcore ran all of the production facilities on the moon and took orders through powerful subspace receivers and transmitters. While a normal netcore has a lesser form of this sort of equipment, its use is usually limited purely to diagnostic, time-keeping, and encryption services as subspace was never considered a totally reliable method of communication. Initially, this plant showed limited success in producing vehicles of its own design, but as functionality was increased when the Replitech was able to license blueprints from other producers. With a few well-known labels under their belt, their orders increased at a steady pace, until the experiment is deemed a success by Replitech. Their investors, however, saw a decades-long buildup to sustainability with only marginal profit, and as a result decided not to go forward with the creation of additional automated factory planets and moons.

While Replitech often boasts about the success of their plant on Obscurus Vector Gamma, they never did very much else with it, and it was considered little more than a steady stream of income, but this could not be further from the truth. The netcore sent to run the Obscurus factories itself was, as are many other netcores, host to a large population of AI beings, including a number of bold and brash couriers called "Subspace Pathfinders", referred to as such because their code was uniquely hardy enough to move data through subspace channels. Subspace pathfinders were part of the reason Obscurus' netcore was able to so efficiently and consistently take orders from other planets, but in cooperation with the netcore's First, a powerful organizational AI, they secretly expanded their business to both fulfill their desire to help the sentients of the galaxy and benefit their own virtual society by buying upgrades for the netcore's various systems under the noses of the company that owned them. These Pathfinders were also able to, on occasion, steal sensitive proprietary blueprints and reroute orders meant for other companies, sending unknowing customers quality but technically illegally-produced vehicles. The netcore's First allowed this behavior on the grounds that it believed this to be helpful to the organic sentients of the outside galaxy. To this day, Replitech Enterprises remains unaware that their Obscurus facilities are even capable of this behavior, but it's continued like this for over seven hundred years. However, a major galactic event would soon change the way the Obscurus netcore would do business.

In 1338, an event widely referred to as the Subspace Anomaly occurred. A massive wave of magical energy, apparently propagating through subspace, washed over all of the known galaxy, causing a decades-long blackout of the entire subspace network and strange transformative effects to numerous magically-gifted beings. This had a ruinous effect on Obscurus' netcore, with its Subspace Pathfinders stranded, most of them on their home netcore. Even more concerning, a few of these couriers were dumped out of subspace rapidly as they were being transmitted, and began to exhibit strange behaviors due to what we now know to be a new connection to "The Flux", a magical twisting of the aura that gives Shapeshifters their transformative abilities. The First of the netcore analyzed the shifting patterns in the Pathfinders' code, and decided to develop an algorithm to predict them. In doing so, it managed a feat that no other known netcore denizen had ever achieved and ascended to Elementalhood. With its new powers, it assumed more direct control over its automated factories, and used these facilities to manufacture the device that came out of the analysis of this code, dubbed Flux Cores. Flux Cores are Mahou Drive Cores designed to safely contain the mutated pathfinders' code while allowing them to access the netcore through a hardline connection.

With little else on hand but vehicle blueprints, those vehicles were used to house these cores, but the couriers inside quickly found that they had the unique ability to not just control the vehicles, but utilize the Flux Core to completely transform those vehicles into a much more comfortable humanoid shape. Still, they were able to remain hidden for inspections, and the largest issue for the netcore's first became the now-crippled subspace functionality. Orders were brought to a crawl, limited to physical data drops without the subspace system, and with no fix in sight the First needed to find a way to both attain more blueprints and intercept more orders while managing its growing Flux-attuned Pathfinder population. A few of its original pathfinders offered a solution. Using its delivery pods, they would hide as vehicles in the shipments, then through physical subterfuge on target planets, intercept orders and blueprints and send them back to Obscurus through other physical data drops. This plan has worked out well for the netcore's First, and these Mecha, now called "Obscuritrons" after their appropriately-named home planet, work to keep their home's secret secure while ensuring that it has the data and orders needed to continue to thrive.

Obscuritrons are an odd variety of Mecha, able to shift between vehicle and humanoid forms, but not truly comfortable in either. Due to their nature as AI meant to help sentient beings, they prefer to think of themselves as someone's property, and will often hide their true nature from anyone who might unwittingly purchase one until extreme danger forces them to reveal themselves. Their flux cores allow them to hide so well that even when they are critically injured, a mechanic opening their panels would only see broken machinery, with the Flux Core subconsciously shifting parts around to match the blueprints they've copied complete with damage such that repairing or replacing those parts will heal the robot. Some have learned to use their flux cores to expand their abilities as vehicles, become even more impressive machines, or maintain multiple disguise forms. It's rumored that some can even combine to form even more impressive vehicles. Obscuritrons often find themselves developing emotional attachments to their owners and invariably end up finding greater destinies than simple data spies, the netcore's Elemental First has accepted this as part of the nature of the Flux and continues to create new Obscuritrons which find homes in all galactic factions, serving loyally as vehicles until circumstances require they show their true nature. Certain sub-factions within the Consortium have since discovered the source of these Mecha, but work to keep it secret in exchange for the loyalty of a few of these Obscuritrons. At least one Obscuritron is present in Mahou City, but given their disguised nature any vehicle found here might potentially be one of them.