Lion Statues

Lion Statues are Precursor artefacts originating from subterranean installations on Mars. They act as conduits for entropic radiation, preventing distortion of the surrounding manifolds when channeling the radiation from a source to a destination. They were a component of ancient Precursor entropic power grids, which would convert matter to entropic radiation as a source of energy via the use of Dark Obelisks, and played an additional role in regulating the obelisks' pulse cycles.

The statues appear to be sculptures of resting lions, made of obsidian-like nanites. When acting as a conduit for entropic radiation, they glow with a faint white halo and become surrounded by a thick black mist. Their appearance is subjective and thought to rely on the substratic network of the viewer; they have been known to appear as different animals, or none at all. The reason why they commonly appear as lions is unknown, but is theorised to be related to a lion's perceived "ferocity".

History

The first statues were discovered in the mid-21st Century, as the Second Space Race resulted in a rush by several countries to establish interplanetary colonies. India's ISRO, the first to construct a habitable Martian colony, discovered subterranean formations beneath the soil. These structures were definitively artificial, and appeared to be so vast and intricately constructed that they would be impossible to build even with speculative future technology.

The first of the expeditions into the subterranean architecture revealed that it was constructed almost entirely out of dead nanotechnology that resembled rock, and the entire complex appeared to be a machine with four statues at its centre, which appeared to be intact but not operating. It was later theorised that the architecture functioned as a power conduit or energy distribution node for the Precursors, but one that utilised pure entropic energy.

One decade later, a near-identical complex was unearthed by Paradigm colonists on the polar opposite side of the planet. This, too, contained four statues located in a central "reactor" room. The company classified its findings, removing all four statues and selling them to the highest bidder on the black market, Industrial Occult Systems.

Variants

Statues are catalogued with a number by Raven’s Black Research department, and eight have been known to exist. #1 and #2 were destroyed in the Indigo Project disaster, and #4 through #8 were used in the Avalon Power Plant's prototype Tombaugh Reactor and subsequently lost after its collapse. The last statue, #3, was seized by Raven after the disaster of the Indigo Project, and is being held in high-level containment at Black Mountain.