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To simply throw one's body into the maw of the nearest Changeling is to offend it with your presumptions, to have wasted the years of your life that belonged to you alone, to act as brainless biomass and you will be treated as such. A good worshiper of the True Angels seeks enlightenment through self-improvement, exploring new sensations to one day offer to their Angels, accumulating new facts and insights that may one day save their Angel. As a result of this ethos, most of the Church's recruitment starts from seemingly-unrelated self-help programs, books, clubs, life coaches. Anything that preys on the self-doubtful and weak-willed, those who would jump to fix themselves at any cost. | To simply throw one's body into the maw of the nearest Changeling is to offend it with your presumptions, to have wasted the years of your life that belonged to you alone, to act as brainless biomass and you will be treated as such. A good worshiper of the True Angels seeks enlightenment through self-improvement, exploring new sensations to one day offer to their Angels, accumulating new facts and insights that may one day save their Angel. As a result of this ethos, most of the Church's recruitment starts from seemingly-unrelated self-help programs, books, clubs, life coaches. Anything that preys on the self-doubtful and weak-willed, those who would jump to fix themselves at any cost. | ||
=== Be Absorbed === | |||
'''Joining the Church''' is an intentionally obscure affair; newcomers are selected from vulnerable populations through Tiger Cooperative Self-Help seminars. Tiger Cooperative sells a wide variety of self-affirmation services and products: from the bodymorphic Polymorph gene sequences, to a vast array of consumer-grade genemods, all to ensure your body is to your liking. Tiger offers seminars, self-help and mental health, to ensure your mind is to your liking. And to those who still feel empty, alone? There's a small meeting you'd be perfect for, a little get-together of like-minded folk who'll love you for who you are. You've tried your hand with the galaxy, you've made yourself who you want to be and still the galaxy's indifferent to your charms. Not here. Here, you are with family. Your only family, the only one who loves you and wants you to grow strong and wise and successful. Here, you are loved. Here, you have purpose. | '''Joining the Church''' is an intentionally obscure affair; newcomers are selected from vulnerable populations through Tiger Cooperative Self-Help seminars. Tiger Cooperative sells a wide variety of self-affirmation services and products: from the bodymorphic Polymorph gene sequences, to a vast array of consumer-grade genemods, all to ensure your body is to your liking. Tiger offers seminars, self-help and mental health, to ensure your mind is to your liking. And to those who still feel empty, alone? There's a small meeting you'd be perfect for, a little get-together of like-minded folk who'll love you for who you are. You've tried your hand with the galaxy, you've made yourself who you want to be and still the galaxy's indifferent to your charms. Not here. Here, you are with family. Your only family, the only one who loves you and wants you to grow strong and wise and successful. Here, you are loved. Here, you have purpose. | ||
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Few, if any, Changelings are involved in the Church of the True Angels. Those that are keep that a secret from the organization, lest they be fetishized and worshiped and pigeonholed into ceremonial buffoonery and lofty expectations. The relationship is one of parent and child, of resource and user, of stalker and idol. The Church is both useful and suffocating, enriching and stifling. Some Hives see the Church as a greater boon than others, and some are more willing to entertain the frivolities and expectations of the Church. | Few, if any, Changelings are involved in the Church of the True Angels. Those that are keep that a secret from the organization, lest they be fetishized and worshiped and pigeonholed into ceremonial buffoonery and lofty expectations. The relationship is one of parent and child, of resource and user, of stalker and idol. The Church is both useful and suffocating, enriching and stifling. Some Hives see the Church as a greater boon than others, and some are more willing to entertain the frivolities and expectations of the Church. | ||
For a species built on secrecy and infiltration, a large organization - no matter how benevolent - is just another attack surface laden with weaknesses for enemies to exploit against you. Most Hives would rather exterminate the Church and replace them entirely, were the Church not so public about their affairs. | For a species built on secrecy and infiltration, a large organization - ''no matter how benevolent'' - is just another attack surface laden with weaknesses for enemies to exploit against you. Most Hives would rather exterminate the Church and replace them entirely, were the Church [[TooltipInline|not so public|That's not to say the Church is a public institution. It's simply that the Church is known to SolFed enough that were it to suddenly shift, as if replaced or destroyed, SolFed would be alerted enough to properly respond.]] about their affairs. | ||
Changelings and hives who willingly accept Church support use it in a few ways: | |||
* Cover - Especially when establishing a long-term identity, a hiding assassin can use accomplices to correct or distract from minor deviations, provide references for events that hadn't happened, alibis, employment. Tiger Cooperative presently fakes large-scale traffic to two formerly-dense planets, masking their active and complete Hive infestation. | |||
* Currency - Stealing a person's face does not mean stealing their bank pin. Suddenly paying for everything in cash might be seen as a Suspicious Deviation, but having a debit card from a new bank because "the bastards stiffed me on a late fee" is nothing new. Tiger Cooperative owns several shell banks and companies to ensure that a Changeling need not expose themselves for profit. | |||
* Cleansing - Mistakes happen; someone gets a little too wise to a replaced lover, and in the process of ''correcting'' that issue, the Changeling builds a bigger problem, one that snowballs until it can only be purified in [[TooltipInline|subnuclear|Referring more to plasma floods and other arsons than to uranium in a bottom capacity.]] flames. | |||
* Corralling - Hunting prey is a full-time endeavor, and when one wants to expand at an industrial level, one needs to outsource the issue. The Tiger Cooperative is more than eager to ''indirectly'' fund colonization programs or other corporate retreats, sending shiploads of rubes to their demise. | |||
Hives who willingly accept Church support are looked down upon by other Hives, though, as taking unnecessary risks and also not being strong enough to do it all themselves. While no Hive itself has been documented as excommunicated or shunned, numerous individuals have been exiled as Hiveless due to their dependence on the cattle's church. | |||
= Tiger Cooperative for Dummies = | = Tiger Cooperative for Dummies = | ||
Revision as of 21:56, 6 June 2026
 Tiger Cooperative |
Other Names: Tiger, Tiger Co-op, Church of the True Angels |
The Tiger Cooperative is a non-sovereign Corporation, a member of the Syndicate, and a front for the Changeling-focused Church of the True Angels.
The Quaternity of Eternity, The Evershifting Paradigm Of Stability
Skin and bone: weakness alone. Flesh and blood: no better than mud. Long have cultures waxed poetic about each, and in each shred of lies there lay a truth. The Holy Calling may reductively be summarized as such, should you are.
To master one's self is to master each of the four. Complete control of the self leads to greater control of the rest. The ideal person is one whose every cell bends to their whim: Changeling. In pursuit of power, of higher power, of absolute power, Tiger Cooperative follows the lessons of bioterrors, growing each cell with new orders.
Skin
Tiger Cooperative, renowned biological pioneers and one of the premiere names in transhumanism. "Unafraid of pushing beyond our limitations," say their products.
Above-board, Tiger Cooperative operates one of SolFed's top ten Genemodding laboratories, the only one willing to push the genetic stability of their patients beyond legally-safe levels. Every genetic alteration permitting a significant at-will personal alteration stems from Tiger's patented Polymorph Gene SequenceThat is, the genetic modification given by your character taking the Quirk. retrovirus. This specific genemod alters several glands in the body to produce an endemicNative to one's body. It's not a contageous virus as it works exclusively on your body. In theory, if you sneezed on a perfect clone of yourself, it might work, but the clone's immune system wouldn't be willfully suppressed so they'd likely fight it off. virus, which itself self-alters in response to conscious shifts in the host's self-image, and once an intended mutation is considered finalized, the new version of the retrovirus aggressively attacks pieces of the host incompatible with their grand vision, and a secondary genemod fosters the rapid regrowth of new tissue in the area, repurposing phagocytes into reconstructive elements to build the new cells from the debris of the old. The Self-Actualization Device is based on these principles, too.
"Reimagining, culling, and reconstruction": not just their flagship product's pathway, but the entire business modelAstute readers might draw parallels to the modus operandi of Changelings, and would be surprised to learn that the retrovirus operates independently of Changeling biology. of the Tiger Cooperative. Tiger Cooperative markets itself as a "Tiger Team,"No real tigers are involved. Anthromorphic folk with Tiger-like appearances are not necessarily excluded, but are not innate to the structure. which they paraphrase as "a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination, and assigned to track down relentlessly every possible source of failure in a body." Tiger Cooperative leads the charge in biodiseaseBio Disease may seem redundant, but it's scarier if it isn't. research, and often not on the curing side.
Bone
Tiger Cooperative is surprisingly a large proponent of "Silicon Rights," despite their biological-focus and despite synthetic life having had equal rights to organics for centuries now. During the year-long legal battle over silicon rights, the Sentient-Engine Liberation Front (SELF) spearheaded social, legal, and physical campaigns across the entire Federation until both the framework for recognizing Synthetic Life and for acknowledging future forms of new Life were cemented in a supermajority vote by the Council of the Sol Federation. With their goals achieved, the members of SELF took one of three paths, if they kept fighting:
The SELF brand, their lawyers and activists, moved to fixing smaller injustices like employer disputes, discrimination, inequity. The radicals, soldiers without a cause, they drifted through the cosmos, taking up fights for silicon rights or coin. What remains are the despicable folk, those who joined SELF for ignoble reasons.
What remain in villainy are the supremacists, those who feel that equal rights should only come with equal ability, that biologics have yet to earn rights on par with synthetics, that SELF abandoned the fight just as it was beginning. What better way to diminish the pestilence of organic life than to breed their predators? These supremacists form the backbone of Tiger Cooperative, believing in the corporate vision not as a business, but a moralMoral, philosophical, ethical? drive.
Much like a backbone, their role is more logistical and structural than outward-facing. Tiger Cooperative is not a Silicon Supremacy movement, though their motives align in diminishing non-Changeling populations. The SELF-exiles wield their prior networks forged in the fires of revolution, operating in channels that a whimsical church could not hope to be taken seriously. To the SELF-Exiles, Tiger Cooperative is their hammer, and Changelings their chisel, with which they will carve the universe into perfection.
Flesh
The leadership of the Church of True Angels wields dogma like a baton: pointed into the orchestra, conducting them into balanced harmony. As haughty and egletarian as Changelings would have you believe they are, were they to be left to their own devices, fears the church, they would burn bright and burn out, like a candle lit on both ends in a pool of gasoline. Yes, they would conquer. They would infiltrate planets, rend them apart and assimilate them into a unified ball of harmonious unity. They would exterminate all life on said planet dissimilar to themeslves, would harvest every nutrient in the soil, every photon from their sun. Half of SolFed and her enemies have some form of planet-annihilating weapon. With no recourse, any number of fleets could instantly appear just outside the planet's grasp and unleash an impossible salvo - be it prolonged bombardment of large numbers of Bluespace Artillery, or quantum displacement of tectonic plates, some form of supermatter conflageration, or the kinetic energy of a medium-sized boulder pushed out an airlock - and deinhabit the planet permanently. All things a modern planet with neighboring allies would have some counter-play against, but an organic unity of fresh bioterrors? No chance of survival.
The Church of the True Angels' leadership (who hate being called the Conductors, don't give those changelings the satisfaction of playing into their metaphor) sees the hives for what they are: new to the universe and on a bad path, full of potential energy - like kerosene. Changelings have the potential to revolutionize the stars, for better or worse, if only they can survive it. To that end, the purpose of the Church of the True Angels is to protect and foster Changelings and their Hives, regardless of their appreciation. In the grand scheme, the Church not only lures people to their doom, but actively sabotages advances against Changelings, isolates potential hiveworlds and, when necessary, reprimands Changelings who threaten to expand too loudly, too quickly, in shortsighted ways incompatible with the survival of their species.
Most in the Clergy know the true origin of Changelings: the Maldeployment over Ordo. Distressingly, many of the Clergy survived through it, fleeing with fellow Ordoht as their planet and their people melded into one malevolent entity. Even with their entire heritage lost to these lings, these Ordoht still champion for them for many reasons.
- To the Keepers, the Changelings are as an exhibit in a zoo: captive, full of instinct, and in dire need of preservation. The Keepers build walls (metaphorically) not just to protect humanity from the Changelings, but to protect the bioterror from society. The Keepers seek a strict feeding schedule, controlled growth, and to say cultural opinions towards their survival. They do not intend to allow Changelings to grow exponentially, or spread wildly, or act of their own power, and will fight to keep their present numbers and status quo - minus the adversity.
- To the Cultivators, the Changelings are as they were before the Maldeployment: an incredible tool for terraforming. Despite the murder and autonomy, Changelings do revolutionize a planet's ecosystem into a uniform stability. Despite being built on wildly different skeletons, of concrete and ecosystems, once a hive world is complete, it looks and feels virtually identical to any other hive world. The Cultivators seek to foster this behavior, to guide Changelings into efficient behavior, to make them better tools and to unleash them on "incompatible" worlds. Some Cultivators hold a misguided dream that one day, they'll be able to adapt themselves to live on a hive world in peace, whereas other Cultivators hold no delusion of having a place of their own in their perfect universe. To the latter, a job well done is its own reward, and there is no greater job than terraforming planets to maximize habitability.
- To the Mourners, the Changelings are the same flesh that once walked as most of their society. The Ordoht "killed" in the Maldeployment still exist - at least, their biomass does, and in caring for this pile of biomass, they care for their culture. The most devout delusional Mourners hold some belief that their ancestors still live in some capacity within the Changelings, either as disjointed memories, strands of Resonance, or even complete persons. If a Changeling can whisper to you in a dead lover's tongue, are they truly dead? Yes, obviously, but with Changelings, even the most obvious truths are suspect.
- To the Surrogates, the Changelings are an extant form of life. The Ordoht created this life through an act of terraforming, and have a responsibility to see it grow. The Surrogates might not approve of every life choice their progeny are choosing, but part of growing up is making mistakes and learning from them. Through some perverted sense of parenthood, the Surrogates feel they owe their lives to seeing Changelings grow. With as many schools of thought on parenthood as there are, the Surrogates too are conflicted about the best way to support their offspring. Some want to shield Changelings from the consequences of their actions, going to great lengths to censure overaggresions and mislead SolFed. Others think the only way Changelings will learn to be subtle and integrate better is to let them get what's coming to them: relentless Marshal assaults on any hive dumb enough to get noticed. These Surrogates believe they have but one child, so as long as Changelings persist, the loss of one hive is painful, yes, but not lethal.
Blood
Listen to the choir, hear them sing. Hear them open their hymnals and welcome your harmony into their hearts. A church without followers is a building, a church without faith is a business. The Church, despite the lesser squabbles of her clergy's motivations, offers a unified hall to relinquish doubts in, to surrender one's self to a higher purpose, to ascend the crushing cycle of routine life and become part of something greater. In a literal sense, the Church preaches that to be consumed by a Changeling is to offer it your being, for it to carry you with it through eternity, but only if you are worthy. Make no mistake, Changelings kill. There is no noble purpose to every human they gore, no grand design for every lesser being butchered. Changelings simply eat to persist, and persist to eat. These dregs offer them nothing but sustenance or biomass. But you, child of the True Angels, you know better than them. You have made yourselves Interesting, full of novel experiences and cherished memories, a trove of skills and emotions that any Hive would be fools to do anything but retain and revere.
To simply throw one's body into the maw of the nearest Changeling is to offend it with your presumptions, to have wasted the years of your life that belonged to you alone, to act as brainless biomass and you will be treated as such. A good worshiper of the True Angels seeks enlightenment through self-improvement, exploring new sensations to one day offer to their Angels, accumulating new facts and insights that may one day save their Angel. As a result of this ethos, most of the Church's recruitment starts from seemingly-unrelated self-help programs, books, clubs, life coaches. Anything that preys on the self-doubtful and weak-willed, those who would jump to fix themselves at any cost.
Be Absorbed
Joining the Church is an intentionally obscure affair; newcomers are selected from vulnerable populations through Tiger Cooperative Self-Help seminars. Tiger Cooperative sells a wide variety of self-affirmation services and products: from the bodymorphic Polymorph gene sequences, to a vast array of consumer-grade genemods, all to ensure your body is to your liking. Tiger offers seminars, self-help and mental health, to ensure your mind is to your liking. And to those who still feel empty, alone? There's a small meeting you'd be perfect for, a little get-together of like-minded folk who'll love you for who you are. You've tried your hand with the galaxy, you've made yourself who you want to be and still the galaxy's indifferent to your charms. Not here. Here, you are with family. Your only family, the only one who loves you and wants you to grow strong and wise and successful. Here, you are loved. Here, you have purpose.
The End is not The End is not The End
A true Believer fears the final sting of their gods, and in their dying breath will mourn what greater bounties they could have brought their predator, had they only the years. When a Believer grows frail, body failing, only then will they offer their everything to their chosen Angel.
Ideally, they will have spent years of their life talking with their Angels, quietly deciding which they would walk with in eternity, whom they will bless with their entirety and be blessed with their fondness. In practice, Believers rarely have access to more than a handful of Patron Angels, from rarely more than one Hive, and can scarcely convince any of them to spend more than a fleeting conversation with. The Believer often has to settle for their church branch's local patrons, or risk migrating to a new sect. Even with the largest hives, the relationship between Angel and Believer remains extremely parasocial and one-sided. This parasociality extends to their very last breath, as while the Believer would have a grand ceremony with symbolic gestures and the adoration of their church, the Angel's usually bored of the decorum - if they're aware of their Believer's advances to begin with! - and moves to quickly absorb the distressingly willing victim. The Church does their best to conceal this triteness beneath a grand tapestry of majesty and spectacle.
Heart
Few, if any, Changelings are involved in the Church of the True Angels. Those that are keep that a secret from the organization, lest they be fetishized and worshiped and pigeonholed into ceremonial buffoonery and lofty expectations. The relationship is one of parent and child, of resource and user, of stalker and idol. The Church is both useful and suffocating, enriching and stifling. Some Hives see the Church as a greater boon than others, and some are more willing to entertain the frivolities and expectations of the Church.
For a species built on secrecy and infiltration, a large organization - no matter how benevolent - is just another attack surface laden with weaknesses for enemies to exploit against you. Most Hives would rather exterminate the Church and replace them entirely, were the Church not so public|That's not to say the Church is a public institution. It's simply that the Church is known to SolFed enough that were it to suddenly shift, as if replaced or destroyed, SolFed would be alerted enough to properly respond. about their affairs.
Changelings and hives who willingly accept Church support use it in a few ways:
- Cover - Especially when establishing a long-term identity, a hiding assassin can use accomplices to correct or distract from minor deviations, provide references for events that hadn't happened, alibis, employment. Tiger Cooperative presently fakes large-scale traffic to two formerly-dense planets, masking their active and complete Hive infestation.
- Currency - Stealing a person's face does not mean stealing their bank pin. Suddenly paying for everything in cash might be seen as a Suspicious Deviation, but having a debit card from a new bank because "the bastards stiffed me on a late fee" is nothing new. Tiger Cooperative owns several shell banks and companies to ensure that a Changeling need not expose themselves for profit.
- Cleansing - Mistakes happen; someone gets a little too wise to a replaced lover, and in the process of correcting that issue, the Changeling builds a bigger problem, one that snowballs until it can only be purified in subnuclear|Referring more to plasma floods and other arsons than to uranium in a bottom capacity. flames.
- Corralling - Hunting prey is a full-time endeavor, and when one wants to expand at an industrial level, one needs to outsource the issue. The Tiger Cooperative is more than eager to indirectly fund colonization programs or other corporate retreats, sending shiploads of rubes to their demise.
Hives who willingly accept Church support are looked down upon by other Hives, though, as taking unnecessary risks and also not being strong enough to do it all themselves. While no Hive itself has been documented as excommunicated or shunned, numerous individuals have been exiled as Hiveless due to their dependence on the cattle's church.
Tiger Cooperative for Dummies
Tiger Cooperative is a corporation that sells Genemods and other biological aides, as well as self-help programs. In doing so, they target people who are insecure about something, either their body, their mind, their mental health, or something else. Tiger Cooperative offers these vulnerable people hope that they can be accepted... into a cult: The Church of the True Angels.
The Church of the True Angels worships Changelings for several reasons. Not all members are religious worshipers, but all have their reasons to want Changelings to thrive in some way. The Church teaches worshipers to go out into the universe and live a wonderful life, getting a lot of experiences so that when they're eventually absorbed by a Changeling, they impart more wisdom. Of course, we the readers know that when Changelings absorb people, they only steal the DNA, but
As Changelings are known to SolFed as deadly weapons, helping them is a crime, so the Church of the True Angels is a terror group. Tiger Cooperative is affiliated with the Syndicate because they both do crime. Tiger Cooperative (and the Church) provide the Syndicate with genemods and a bit of protection from Changelings, and the Syndicate helps the Tiger Cooperative get illegal things and cover up hive attacks. If Tiger thought the Changelings wanted to attack the Syndicate, most of them would help, and the Syndicate suspects as much, so Tiger and the Syndicate are not the best of friends.
How is Tiger Cooperative allowed to exist within SolFed in any capacity?
Unlike Cybersun Industries, Tiger Cooperative agents are known to be working for Tiger Cooperative in an unironic sense. Lacking the plausible deniability of "oh it's just a generic slogan" or "they mean it as Mars Independence," a Tiger Cooperative terrorist reflects poorly on the Tiger Cooperative itself. Despite this, SolFed does not actively have an effective anti-terror unit purging the universe of every Tiger Cooperative facility to restore peace.
- Good Product - The Tiger Cooperative genemods are prolific and widespread, and some people believe that a few Tiger Coop "shenanigans" are far more tolerable than the widespread loss of polymorphic genemods and mental health networks. For all the evil Tiger Coop does, they do a lot of good.
- Bribery - Some of those "some people" are high-ranking CliquefathersSelf-described. This isn't an accepted term in any legal or lore capacity, but it describes how high up they are in what should be a distributed sort of collective. whose influence can strongly push for more Tiger tolerance than is called for. A band of SolFed Marshals who're getting too close to doing serious damage to Tiger might find themselves defunded, stonewalled, or pointed towards some other evil.
- Distancing - While the goals of a Tiger Cooperative terrorist align with their internal goals of furthering Changelings, these goals often conflict with the public-facing Tiger Cooperative's drive. Killing customers is not a good look and not a good way to profit, so why would Tiger Coop sponsor said killings? "Obviously," Tiger will say, "They are a disgruntled employee who wanted to hurt Tiger. We do not endorse their agenda and are deeply saddened."
- Discretion - The Church of True Angels lurks in secrecy, approaching only those screened by Tiger processes. Outwardly, there is no "Church" for Tiger to supposedly be affiliated with in the first place.
- Disposal - Working with shapeshifting form-stealers who want to infiltrate large governments means that politicians who outwardly oppose Tiger Cooperative tend to suddenly stop opposing them for no particular reason.
- Franchising - In an absolute last-ditch effort, the "Cooperative" nature of Tiger Cooperative allows them to shift blame to one specific branch, allowing the galaxy's politicians a chance to feel good about triumphing over evil while Tiger itself withdraws from the public's eye, builds up legal defenses again, etc. This doesn't fool many people, but it fools the right people for long enough to keep Tiger Cooperative intact. One day, Tiger will run out of ways to deflect blame, and will likely face the Scarborough treatment, if not annihilation.
Work in Progress: Footer subject to change at a moment's notice. Do not take a red link's presence, struck-through or otherwise, as confirmation (or denial) of their canonicity.
