Order of Taon

## General Overview

The Order of Taon are an extremist militant faction of Chioni that have banded together to take a much more aggressive stance against the external threats, Black Eye Galaxy and beyond. Due to extreme aggression from outside forces, the once inclusive benevolence of a large amount of the Chioni has soured, rendering them extremely xenophobic, and seeing much of the outside as a threat, fearing their agendas they foresee outsiders attempting to press on their people.

The straw that broke the camel's back came with the Umojan War, The rise of the Order came from a species-wide movement to create new behaviors in defending against some of the most vile threats in existence, that would seek to turn both their own people and tech against them. In their travails, they broke off from General Lunamonde's task force, and began studying the ruins of the destroyed Strategos mainframe, destroyed by the U.S.S Republic.

Making strides in their research, they began creating security protocols by learning to download their own minds into computers, to create unusually aggressive protocols by imprinting intent into code, giving it a limited level of sentience. Looking back to prayer for Taon, they realized that in their mythology that their god was in pieces with them themselves being the pieces, but via the studying of Strategos mind uploading, they conceived a plan to potentially *revive* Taon via means of volunteers and devotees donating their minds to be fused together. This appears to have a side-effect of creating an AI collective that propelled the development of their Synchrosity Protocol in being extremely hostile to anything that intruded into its own systems, while also being equally aggressive in attempting to "Force-Inspect" all local technology, and verify that it is not a threat, despite such intrusions into systems being potentially unwanted by others.

This has culminated into a militaristic society that believes that there can be zero secrets in all individuals for there to be peace, and that the only way for there to be peace is for there to be abjectly *total* Harmony. Due to these mentalities, the Order appears to have an extremely low opinion of those that put themselves and their own gain before all those around them, equating such behaviors as "animalistic" traits, and as such may classify such individuals as being legally nonsapient in their enclave. In this the prospect of "Fauna Ownership" can bizarrely extend to sentient individuals that fail the Order's version of the "Harkness Test", yet do allow for open testings for living individuals smart enough to request such, to undergo retestings to "Earn" their sapience. In extreme cases, the Order will subject volatile individuals to an isolated neural simulacrum that will placed the individual in similar situations of their victims, tormenting them with behaviorally accurate doppelgangers of themselves as the individual is forced to take on the appearance of their past victims and live through their own heinous acts being performed upon themselves. This continues until the individual's behavior changes to an acceptably repentable manner, in which they are released and dubbed a "Forgiven", being given the rights of any citizen of the Order from being purified of their sins. Individuals who fail the punishment by mentally breaking without coming to an acceptable moral turnabout are simply mentally terminated, their mind being deemed irredeemable, and their body is repurposed into an organic drone under control of the Synchrosity Protocol, the hijacked body being dubbed a "Punished".

Their technology infrastructure seems to have combined the macro-industrial nature of Chioni technology with the highly industrial nature of the Strategos to create an extremely robust material economy in which Order ships coordinating with each other are able to create fabrication factories, and the factories able to create more of the ships in kind, creating a circulatory production system, allowing mobile forces to seemingly begin rebuilding their forces overnight. This level of production requires immense amount of resource input, and Order ships also double as strip miners, able to scour asteroid fields clean of resources to feed the ever growing swarm. Vessels often have minimal interior, only containing the bare essentials, as their ships are primarily driven by direct neural uplink of the crew to their ship, larger ships having a small complimentary crew assisted by automatons and proxies, while smaller corvette sized swarmer mechs are often piloted by a Single Chioni encapsulated into a space only big enough for a single individual, neurally linked to the vessel in a manner that makes them experience as if they *are* the vessel.

## Notes

* The Chioni species was developed by Lurai Kir