Bite-sized Backstory 37: Yang Liwei (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Thursday, October 18, 2018, 19:46 (2225 days ago)

The Awoken have been a strange puzzle ever since we first visited the Reef back in Destiny 1. We met the Awoken Queen and her brother, but we didn’t even learn their names until Petra Venj called upon the Guardians of The City to hunt down Skolas in the House of Wolves expansion. For all of Destiny 1, the Awoken were a culture and a power whose extent was frustratingly difficult to discern. Did they have cities? Or a military? Or Guardian-like powers? Even when we arrived at the Vestian Outpost, we didn’t learn all that much about the Awoken.

Our best look at the Awoken, until now, was their response to the House of Wolves during the Reef Wars as seen in the book The Maraid. But even then, we didn’t learn a lot. Queen Mara Sov was shown to be uniquely powerful and able to destroy a Fallen fleet seemingly singlehandedly. The Awoken were revealed to have cities and stations like Amethyst that the Fallen attacked and in some cases destroyed. And that’s roughly all we’ve known about the Awoken… until now.

The history of the Awoken is laid out for us across multiple in-game books that you’ll earn piece by piece while playing Forsaken. The first of these books is Marasenna. Like before, I’m going to attempt to walk you through the contents of these books, like I did for the Book of Sorrows, but I highly encourage anyone following along with me to read the full text of these book chapters as we get to them. They are well written and mysterious and half the experience and fun of this is reading this history as it was written.

So… where to start? How about with Mara Sov? Almost from the beginning, we learn that Mara did not start out as a Queen or ruler. Instead, when we first meet her, she is a nineteen year old young woman of no particular race or ancestry serving as an Auturge 3rd Class on the Golden Age colony ship Yang Liwei which is named after the first Chinese astronaut to be sent into space. An Auturge is something of a troubleshooting mechanic whose job it is to fix problems as they spring up on the ship as it makes its way out of our solar system.

The other thing we very quickly find out about Mara Sov, is that she has a streak of independence the likes of which we have only rarely seen in Destiny. For one thing, instead of following the normal chain of command, where an Auturge 3rd Class usually reports to Auturge 2nd Class to find out their work assignments, Mara just shows up at areas of the ship that have malfunctioned and fixes things before leaving, usually without even talking to anyone. A ship like the Yang Liwei need to be run with tight organization, but Mara is apparently skilled enough to subvert all that regulation and do her own thing. Her actions eventually take on an almost magical quality. Something breaks, she appears, it is soon fixed without fuss or red tape, and then she is gone. We’re told that Mara enjoys this hushed awe that her actions cause amount the population of the Yang Liwei. But being mysterious is the least of her boldness…

Our first glimpse of her is not fixing a pipe or patching a circuit. Instead, we find her in a skin-tight environment suit sitting on the outer hull of the Yang Liwei looking down towards the ship’s main engines at its rear. Apparently, she prefers to live out there. Outside the ship. In space. We’re told that she stays outside because she wants to taste the blueshift of the surrounding starlight as the Yang Liwei accelerates out of our solar system.

In this instance, though, Mara does even more daring than that. She doesn’t just cling to the hull of the colony ship. Instead, during a period when the ship has halted its acceleration to perform another long check of its engines, she kicks off the hull and drifts ahead, away from the Yang Liwei’s large forward umbrella-like shield with only a thin tether wire to keep her from drifting away completely. She doesn’t just drift a few meters, or even a few hundred. Instead she drifts ten kilometers ahead of the ship. It must have taken hours for her to coast that far after simply kicking herself forward. It must have been breathtaking to watch the colony ship, which so large that it is described as its own traveling fleet, slowly shrink into the black of space. It might have still been visible, far in the distance, but Mara would have also been surrounded by the stars… and when she was, she did something even more incredible. And terrifying!

Mara activates the controls on her suit that order the external cytogel layer to pull completely away and retract into storage mode! Though she was wearing an undersuit, the cytogel was the only thing actually separating her from the vacuum of space! The effects of vacuum exposure begin immediately. The moisture on her skin boils. Her face begins to discolor and turn a sickly blue due to a lack of oxygen. Her body begins to swell due to an imbalance of internal and external pressure. Out there, among the stars, Mara is letting herself die. And she records it all, every view, every gasp, and every little sensation down to the neural level on her sensorium… before reengaging her protective suit, returning her size and color and breathing to normal. Those sensorium recordings, she knows, will fetch a high price once she makes her way back inside the ship.

Interestingly, as Destiny players, we hear of sensorium recordings within Forsaken, too. When we rescue one of the Techeuns from The Corrupted strike, she sometimes says it would be impossible to describe the experience of being Taken without the use of a full sensorium.

I imagine it only takes Mara a pull or two on her thin tether to start her long drift back to the Yang Liwei. Once she does gets back inside, we’ll get the chance to meet some of the other key people in her life.

Chapters Referenced:
Brephos I
Brephos II
(Brephos means something along the lines of an unborn or newborn child…)

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