268: Void Sisters

ENTRY 268: Void Sisters

“We will give birth to the Ultimate Human, who will finally achieve their true and terrible potential, and through them we will guide transhumanity from these warring states to their true destiny.”

- Aba Menses

“Crisis promotes change, stress reorganization. In flux, all states are possible. Seize the momentary opportunity, and shape the future.”

- Kitab Toksa, Void Sister core text

The origins of the Void Sisters of Phobos are obscured; anyone who digs too far runs into a tangle of hypercorporate red tape and the Sisters’ own carefully constructed legends, seeded along the most likely searches to guide researchers and data miners to only the information they want known about themselves. What is known is that they had some elemental role in the project that gave birth to the Lost, that they are highly selective of inducting new members and have quite arduous and long-lasting initiations designed to help inductees achieve their ultimate potential. On Phobos itself, they are most known for raising orphans in their own ideology, seeding their philosophy into a new generation.

Infobrokers who are smart enough to think a few steps ahead paint a slightly different picture of the Void Sisters, if a client has favors or creds enough to buy the data. The Sisters were founded pre-Fall by several women who were very involved in the Toksa Society, a quasi-scientific new faith group that preached the achievement of the full human potential by any means necessary—strict training, education, drugs, primitive augmentation, and even rumors of eugenics, indoctrination, ritual prostitution, and quasi-mystical techniques in the inner circles. The group never had more than a few hundred members, but wielded outsized influence due to political and corporate contacts, and established themselves on Phobos by establishing relationships (and at times, marriages) with key personnel.

After the Lost debacle, the Void Sisters lost considerable influence, and their public profile noticeably diminished—though it never disappeared. Strategists believe that as much of a third of the group has gone underground, while the remaining public operations with raising orphans represents a new part of their grand plan, whatever that may be.

Using the Void Sisters

Semi-mystical sisterhoods with generational plans, using sex, politics, and more nefarious means to exert their influence and protect their interests are a kind of trope in fantasy and science-fiction. In Eclipse Phase, the Void Sisters aren’t even alone in the role; Titan has the blue-cloaked Oubham-Ad, Luna has the willowy biosculpted Night Women, Mars has the Cloisted Sisterhood of the Closed Fist, even Eris has the Daughters of Eris. Cultivating an air of mystery and feminine wiles has its advantages, and many groups take advantage of it, to the amusement and bemusement of synthmorphs and infomorphs not taken in by the philosophical posturing. If this was all there was with the Void Sisters, they would be an interesting group of NPCs but not a real threat.

Unfortunately, the Void Sisters have access to one thing more: a sample of the exsurgent virus. At the highest levels, the Void Sisters are an exsurgent cult that rigorously trains its members and exposes the most loyal to the virus to instill psi abilities that are passed off as examples of the Sister’s achievement of their full potential. If the truth ever gets out, it would destroy the Sisterhood…and quite possibly a serious chunk of Phobos as well.

Seed

• Aba Mendes has a problem: she is really a sex-shifting investigative reporter that has spent eight years in the Void Sisters, constantly trained and tested, putting up with the mandatory bedtimes, strange meditations, and weird internal politics, pursuing a story she wasn’t sure was really there. Now, she’s in too deep, about to be exposed to the innermost secrets of the order, and she wants out. The call goes out, but Firewall intercepts it. They order the PCs to extract her—but only after she’s undergone the final initiation. Dare the player characters to wait, not knowing if Mendes will survive the ordeal? And if they do, will they be prepared to charge into the midst of an active exsurgent cell guarded by a small army of space-geisha-martial artists?