Work Text:
Grey, adjective:
A color between white and black
Someone likely to survive a long time, even in the current world
A mech, destroyed and unable to function
(Excerpt from A Post-Apocalyptic Dictionary of Common Exandrian)
They are legendary. They are warriors, fighters, survivors. They carry pieces of the fallen giants, power cores repurposed into powerful tools, weapons, and protections. Even before the Clockwork Conclave, before singularity and the Whispered One, they fought on behalf of the living world.
They are Vox Machina: the only voice with the power to speak back to machines.
It takes courage to fight when no one else will, and that is the story of the grey barbarian. At the time, before they were an everyday sight, the abilities of metal-folk were largely unknown and superstition ran rampant; the bystander effect was a robot’s best friend.
Do not touch them—they can shock you, overpower you, and everyone knows your biological circuitry can’t handle the power coursing in a metal face.
Do not stand in their way—they can recognize your face, and bring you and your family terror and shame.
This was paraded at wisdom.
Luckily for humanity, and for Willhand Trickfoot in particular, not everyone is wise.
The robo-cops that had been assigned to clear the block had no idea of patience, and would have crushed the short old man rather than give him time. They could see him, clearly, but his pleas fell on unfeeling ears. Until one hero stumbled upon the scene and strode forward, taking electric pain of weaponized voltage and sharp sting of serrated limbs. The pain made him angry, and his anger made him strong, and his strength became a rampage to crush the corporal forms of first two, and then every, robot in the area.
His name is Grog Strongjaw, and his might is greater than steel.
After the Strongjaw riots, when it became common for androids to have a constant currant of electric energy to dissuade contact, birds began to die by the dozens. Suddenly, there were walking poles of death in which they could not land: charging stations sent currents so strong entire buildings became magnetically charged, throwing migrations of course. Birds as common as geese became as rare as falcons.
The rogue did not start as a hero of birds, but as a common criminal. It just so happens that being good with throwing knives at a distance is an excellent tool for disrupting electric shields, and the skill of a world-class knife-thrower is well applied to power sources and the so-called murder of drones and androids.
If one can kill robots at a distance, one tends to find oneself in robot free areas. And that tends to attract the creatures for whom automatons are deeply unsafe. There are vultures and sparrows, hawks and owls, geese and magpies: but since he is clever and wears all black, there is one bird people tend to remember best.
His name is Vax’ildan, and he is the Champion of Ravens.
Before the mechanization, her parents had studied climate change and how to resist it; adaptable architecture, re-wilding, increasingly tumultuous meteorology, ecology and why it mattered. Early on, her mother had been protesting the automation of borders into an area where technology was unreliable because of electric storms: she’d been martyred for it, crushed by a mech so thoroughly only her leg was identifiable. After, it became something of a culture, living in the dangerous places were a harsh life met human hands and robots did not follow. She was a leader, a scout, a traveler, and she learned from everywhere she went, of both ancient science and new, of corrosion and magnetism, of calling lightning and poisoning metal. Eventually, she was able to form her own tactics, and no mechanized border could hold her down; she was unpredictable as a storm.
Her name is Keyleth, and she is the Voice of the Tempest.
There was a brief window where knowledge was free for the spreading, when the internet was widespread and human-readable. After the mechanization, knowledge plummeted; once again, the best people could do was write and remember.
One man, however, had a knack for his writing being remembered, and for finding himself in the right places and times to make heroism heard and life seem worth living. It certainly didn’t hurt that he was handsome and charming and would bed anyone excited at a new face of flesh.
His name is Scanlan Shorthalt, and he spreads their stories.
She’d traveled with the barbarian since the beginning, the caution to his carnage, the medic to his soldier. But there was only so much scattered resistance could do. It was she that followed the rumors that brought them to the meteorologist and the bard, the knife thrower and the archer, and later, to the city of dusk. An army still needs power, after all, and when the ground was untouchable, like in the occupied mining stronghold of Whitestone, the robots had looked to the sky and covered it. Light was rarer than diamond, and eternal night no metaphor—until a tiny woman with faith so strong she thought a scattered group of mortals could take on night itself became herald of morning.
Her name is Pike Trickfoot, and she is the Dawn Marshall.
He will never forgive himself, but he has been forgiven. This is the paradox of the man who made robotic diplomacy, the very weapon that sparked riots and caused the birds to die in swarms, a man so hopeless that he had become an ouroborous, swallowing Roko’s tail.
At least, until he heard about the liberation of Whitestone. He had lived there, as a child, before corporations learned the minerals stored there were more valuable than even the wealthiest of local’s lives; he had long since thought it uninhabitable. He certainly would have considered it an unwinnable battle, to de-mechanize a stronghold of the Whispered One, the artificial intelligence behind singularity.
But this group of fools had proven otherwise. And suddenly, he wanted to prove himself to them—to bring inside knowledge, to build weapons predicated on machine weakness, to turn steel to smoke.
His name is Percival Fredrickstein Von Mussel de Rolo the Third, and he is the Terrible Tinkerer of Tal’Dorei.
Decades later, the fight still rages on, and she has been in it from the beginning. Her arrows hit beside her brothers’ knives, and her sharp mind kept them on top of the black market well enough to keep a group that could not venture near civilization, where half a second would lead to AI recognition, from being ripped off since their demand was high and supply near impossible.
Her greatest skill, however, how many warriors a wink could summon, how many legions a reclaimed city could train. She has children, now, five of them: this is not a common decision, especially not in anti-mech circles where people live off-grid and often on the run. But nothing about her is common, and least of all this; when many of her contemporaries retire, either from exhaustion or other duties or because they feel they have won progress enough, she builds herself a new empire, based out of her husbands’ city: she is treasurer and general, diplomat and figurehead. The bounties that keep mech-hunters going come from her pockets, from careful math and powerful friends.
Her name is Vex’ahlia, and she is Grand Mistress of the Grey Hunt.