After a mission to destroy a Heretek lab end in warp trickery, Explorator Tech-Priest Novus Octavion finds himself thrust into the past of Mankind.
Noosphere
is an ongoing crossover between Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Warhammer 40,000 written by JohnProdman. It explores how a single techpriest from one of the most grimdark settings ever crafted actually manages to change one of the most corrupt and eerily accurate parodies of humanity's future into something a little less depressing.
The fic is ongoing and currently sits at 10 chapters.
Beware of unmarked spoilers for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
Noosphere provides examples of:
- Action Girl: Dorio and Rebecca easily handle themselves during their respective chapters. Particularly notable in Dorio's case, seeing as she was fighting a piece of Chaos infused Simuloptera, an adaptive colony of nanomachines that had just killed Pilar.
- And Then What?: Novus had only one objective after arriving in Night City: kill the Simuloptera. After doing so, he's left with a sense of purposelessness, pondering why he was brought back in time to a world he knows to be Holy Terra in the past. After some deliberation, he decides to simply follow the will of the Omnissiah by preaching it's word to the denizens of Night City, one lost, un-ascended organic shell at a time.
- Back from the Dead: Sasha was revived as an engram testing out the Soulkiller program by Arasaka after dying from exposing Biotechnica. Due to it not having enough of her consciousness, it was discarded, only to be picked up and reconfigured by Alt Cunningham and a Necron Cryptek.
- Beyond the Impossible: Novus frequently achieves feats of fighting and hacking prowess that leaves onlookers and enemies alike in complete and utter awe. If they aren't on the receiving end, at least. This is due to the technology he uses being literal millennia ahead of what even Arasaka and Militech can produce.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: One of the biggest appeals of the fic is seeing just how strange a place like Night City is to someone like Novus, a techpriest from the 41st Millennium, where corporate greed takes precedence over basically every facet of life.
- The most obvious one for someone like Novus is the proliferation and disuse of cybernetics that is prevalent in Night City. As a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus, a cult that venerates machines over all organic life, Novus is oftentimes absolutely seething with barely restrained contempt for the mistreatment of all the Machine Spirits he witnesses on a daily basis. He learns to quickly temper his anger, but it rears up from time to time given what kind of place Night City is.
- A particularly
heartbreaking one comes in the form of Martin Coleman. He used to work as a car manufacturer, but the company he worked for forced him and its employees to either get cybernetic enhancements to help with their work or quit. He agreed, taking on the massive amounts of debt the company forced on him in order to pay for the augments they made him take, only for said company to go under in a year. He tried to find other work, but failed. Given how Novus comes from a universe where every individual under the Imperium is indoctrinated under the belief that they can work, even in the smallest of ways, to better the Imperium at the expense of their life, it comes across as utterly incomprehensible to him and a genuine horror story.
- Description Cut: As Rebecca is speaking about how cool and nice Novus is after he saved her life and the life of a boy with a bomb planted in his head, the story cuts back and forth to her praise and Novus making one of the Scavs he'd taken captive into a servitor. A reminder that, despite his helping of Maine and his crew, Novus is still a techpriest from the 41st Millennium.
- Dies Differently in Adaptation: Only barely, to the point of being subverted, by Pilar instead gets killed by a Simuloptera that came with Novus to Night City instead of a random cyberpsycho.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: Novus, after expunging a Heretek facility and all of their chaotic experiments, winds up in Night City, which is explicitly confirmed in story to be Holy Terra before the Fall of the Eldar and the Great Crusade. And he isn't the only one...
- Experienced Protagonist: Novus Octavion is an already accomplished Explorator and Magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus who had been traveling with a Rogue Trader before going back in time to Night City. The most challenging opposition he's faced so far is the Simuloptera that traveled back with him. Everything else, not so much.
- Intercontinuity Crossover: The author has taken various pieces of Cyberpunk 2077 media and included them in various chapters throughout the story. Examples so far include:
- Nadia and the members of her Trauma Team from Cyberpunk 2077: Trauma Team.
- Royce and Dum Dum of Maelstrom show up at Novus' factory in need of his services as a ripperdoc in order to save Royce's life.
- Sasha from the Let You Down music video is introduced in the story as an engram created by Arasaka and recovered after being discarded by Alt Cunningham and what is heavily implied to be a Necron Cryptek.
- Insistent Terminology: Novus will continually use terms from his home timeline when referring to various items and concepts during his stay in Night City. His constant preaching about appeasing "Machine Spirits" and "the Omnissiah" quickly gets him labelled as a religious whack job or deranged cultist by everyone he meets. If only they knew.
- In Spite of a Nail: Pilar still dies, only this time from a piece of Heretek technology called a Simuloptera rather than a cyberpsycho.
- Later on, Rebecca gets kidnapped by a group of Scavs, much like she did during the montage scene. Only instead of the crew saving her, Novus rescues her as he took a contract with a fixer in order to save an executive's child who was also taken by the same group.
- Kleptomaniac Hero: For a given definition of hero, but if it isn't nailed down and he can get away with it, Novus will take whatever piece of technology or cyberware he can get his mechadentrites on. After stealing the guns of a Trauma Team he assisted without them noticing, Rebecca calls him out on it. He merely describes them as tithes to the Omnissiah. She just laughs at him.
- Naïve Newcomer: Due to being from a universe that's at constant war against teeming horrors such as Xenos and Chaos and a member of an human supremacist religious-state, Novus has no clue what society in a place in Night City is really like. This leads to him getting taken advantage of by Kiwi when he assists her in hacking into Arasaka's private servers by paying him a measly 500 eddies. Seeing as how he was able to hack into them with what can only be described as contemptuous ease, this is nowhere close to being what he deserves as payment for such a task. Maine even comments how she cheaped out on the guy.
- Wretched Hive: It says something about Novus and his home universe that Night City being this is honestly a step up compared to the manufactorums and hive cities of the Imperium.
