Standing issue · one per operative
The Shekhinah
שְׁכִינָה — the dwelling, the presence, the part of God that stays. Somebody in the naming committee sixty years ago knew exactly what they were doing and nobody since has had the nerve to change it.
It is an icosahedron about the size of your two fists, in dark seraphic alloy, around a core of Ohr that never stops turning. It hovers a metre and a half off the ground, a little behind your shoulder. It does not speak — not in words, not ever — and it does not need to, because the interface in your suit reads it and hands you the sense of what it meant. Operatives describe an affirmative as a very mild lifting of the spirit.
The Shekhinah is not a tool. It is a covenant. When you bond, you share existence. Archon Instructor's Manual
Bonding
You build an Inert Shekhinah at a tier-two Fabricator and
then you decide how it wakes up. Put it down on the ground and it comes on
with nothing in it — no Ohr at all, and the first thing it
will ever do is need something from you. Put it on a
Shekhinah Dock and it wakes up already
drinking.
Either way it bonds, and the bond is permanent, and you get one. You cannot deploy a second while the first is alive. Everybody asks. The answer has never changed and the reason given is always the same one: a covenant you can hold two of is not a covenant, it is equipment.
Ohr
A thousand, maximum. It burns that at a rate set by what you have asked it to be — one a second for simply existing beside you, five a second for fighting.
Under a hundred it starts making a noise you will learn to hate and goes looking for the nearest dock on its own. If there is no dock, and it gets to the bottom, it does not die. It goes inert — folds up and returns to your inventory as the object you built, waiting. Operatives who have had that happen in the field describe it as the loneliest thing that has ever happened to them, which is a strange thing to say about running out of battery, and every one of them says it anyway.
Reserve
capacity 1000
integrity 20 · armour 4
Both readouts sit at the top left of your interface the whole time you are wearing a helmet that can see it.
| Feed it | Ohr | Notes |
|---|---|---|
 Ohr Capsule | +200 | Clean. |
 Sitra Capsule | +150 | Costs you a point of corruption. It will take it. |
 Graphene Cell | +100 | What you carry when you did not plan to be out this long. |
The three modes
| Mode | Ohr/s | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Passive | 1 | It lights what you are looking at and it stays with you. This is where it lives. |
| Scanner | 3 | Ore, chests and spawners inside sixteen metres, outlined through solid rock. Adversaries out to sixty-four. |
| Combat | 5 | A bolt a second. Four damage, half again against the Adversary. It picks its own targets and re-picks them every second. |
Scanner is the one that changes how you live. It pulses every couple of seconds and draws an orange outline around anything worth having inside sixteen metres — through stone, through everything — sorted so that the diamond is lit before the coal is. It also watches for the enemy out to sixty-four, and tells you the count before you are anywhere near close enough for that to be a fight.
Combat is five a second, which is the whole reserve in three and a half minutes, and it is worth every one of them. It chooses targets in an order — the Adversary first, then whatever hit you, then whatever is nearest — and it re-chooses every second, so it does not finish killing something small while something large arrives.
Hands
| Do this | Get this |
|---|---|
| Right-click, empty hand | Status: Ohr, integrity, mode. |
| Right-click with a capsule or a cell | Feeds it. |
| Shift + right-click with a Graphene Cell | Field repair. Five points against a pool of twenty. |
| Shift + right-click near a dock | Sends it to charge. |
| Shift + right-click otherwise | Cycles the mode. |
| V | Cycles the mode without having to look at it. |
When it is hurt
Twenty points, and it does not mend itself. A
Graphene Cell pressed against it with the shift key down
puts five of them back — a quarter of the whole pool, out of a thing you
were carrying anyway, in the field, without going home. Use them. That is
what they are for and there is no ceremony about it.
A Genesis Chamber does the proper work, ten at a time, on Neural Gel. But the Chamber is somewhere and you are not, and the gap between those two facts is where most Shekhinah are lost.
Corruption reaches it too
Read this before you feed it Sitra
It will take Sitra. It will run on Sitra. What happens is not to the drone — it is to you, one point at a time, and then it is to the drone by way of you: at Tainted it is slower to fight, at Compromised its Scanner will not start, and at Corrupted it has begun to drift, which is the word the manual uses and is not a word the manual uses lightly about a machine that has followed one person for years.
And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night. Exodus 13:21