I AM

**Dev. Status** | Conceptual

*"Hit me with your best shot*

*C'mon, hit me with your best shot*

*Hit me with your best shot*

*Fire away"*

- *"Hit me with your best shot"*
**I AM** is a Paradox faction created by tenebrousGuile for Blue Alert. Using small numbers of extremely adaptable combatants from another universe with bizarre laws of physics, hostile xenoformation, reality bending trickery and confusing mind games; I AM is a tremendous extraversal peril drawn to the universe by the strange physics of other factions with the intent of claiming a home for their mysterious masters.

## At A Glance

 **Motives** | Xenoformation, service to the "untold masters", revenge for what is to come

## I AM MANY

*"I Am Perfection. You will be perfected, there is to be no disputing this."*

- I Am Perfection's threat to Combine researchers
There are things that cannot be described as other dimensions or universes. Places that cannot be said to have space or time that can be recognised or comprehended. Beings born of realms that cannot be said to be reality or void. And despite how strange, how alien and surreal these places are, I AM MANY comes all the same; seemingly drawn by the siren call of disturbances and distortions in reality to make a paradise for whatever makers it has. One that from the tortured breaks in reality that they create to pave the way for their grand design is something that is without causality or rationality, yet equally without chaos or madness. They shape things into an order that is virtually indescripable, soldiers of things so alien as to beggar description.

What they are truly called is hard to determine, but every splinter within I AM MANY has its own name based off of what concept it embodies; subdividing into further shards and fragments. Each splinter embodies a principle, such as I AM MURDER's shards and fragments being focused on the cessation of life while I AM PERFECTION shapes things into what it deems to be perfect for their purpose. Unlike the screaming adolescent emotional frenzy of the Protectorate's Core Mind collective, the Splinters of I AM MANY are both at once divided but unitary. Every facet of I AM MANY is its own being yet also indivisible from I AM MANY itself. Every fragment, every shard, every splinter is as much its parent as it is its own being, and every parent is also its own child. Such is the paradoxical nonlogic that governs the strange family of the one that is many.

They speak and even interact with other intelligences, but seem to be not quite insane so much as they are speaking from the perspective of something that is always seeing things that others don't and is blind to many things that are right in front of them. They respond to things that have not happened as often as they are aware of the present and are aware of truths that don't exist and tell lies that are fully real. But beneath it all is a certain logic, as strange and often unknowable as it can be. They are not beings of chaos the way the Protectorate has become in its artistic exultation, but builders of a perfect order that simply cannot be easily described by humans.

Difficult to describe as organic or robotic, I AM's forms do not correspond neatly to any standard categorisation of matter and the forms they take are strange, surrealistic and deceptively durable for how seemingly spindly they tend to be. Indeed, the more attacks of the same type strike the fragments of I AM the less damage they do with each successive hit until that sort of damage is completely ineffectual. An effect of them seeming to alter their personal perception of reality to ignore unwanted and undesired variables as much as it is them altering themselves to better resist the incoming attacks. And each time they strike at a defence, this effect also works the other way, doing more and more damage and disruption, as they make themselves a more ideal counter until dealing with the foe, is a vastly simpler matter; though there are limitations based on the original's base form. As such it is best to hit early and hard if one lacks means to disrupt their ability to bend and distort reality and reassert this universe's rules on them with such esoteric abilities as psionics and chrono-technology and to bring a varied arsenal that does not let them specialise.

But I AM MANY is one as much as they are an army, and the death of the father passes onto the son; meaning that it is often best to concentrate fire on parent forms rather than spread weapons fire into the entirety of I AM's forces. In the absence of certainty regarding which units are the Mother and which are the Children, it is largely advisable to shoot the largest ones first to disrupt those connected to it. Though many armies have such central node units, I AM is unique in that these units are ultimately extensions of more singular entities as much as they are individuals; causing them to share their suffering and their adaptations; and leaving those cut adrift from their mothers lost without their heads if they had not already perished. Such means that while I AM MANY's Shards are able to splinter on the battlefield itself to supplement the production facilities they establish; knocking out their armies can be an easier task than at first feared.

## I AM READY

Whether it is even possible to avert the need for violence with them as they begin to pour into the dark corners of this multiverse's nexuses of realities to build their structures and establish their strange presence
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