Stories of Lore 39

Yes Ilex could call Eleazor.

Operations have launched the KouKou and Kaylen has gone to speak with Sanguis. Although, Allison will have to catch up with you as she was on a Solvang station at the time of deployoment. She should be there to regroup just outside Auwana though. Good luck commander.

Project Gundam is on hiatus while Khymin accompanies you on your operation. Though he projected it would be another two months until he had a prototype ready.

MPR has proven to be a popular idea. Mostly because it is the first step to restoring a sense of aethernet entertainment but is quite easily accessible.

In regards to equipping Gheir’s unit, he was quite disappointed at the desire for less of ‘blow everything up’. Though that would be Gunhild’s unit, but admittedly they still use a lot of explosives. Just with more accuracy.

Twilight station is currently in the process of constructing its shipyards. Though next month we can shift focus to a proper garrison for training. The cruiser fleet for exploration has also finished construction. While New Age has graciously agreed to make use of them, notably Vasia doesn’t pay much attention to them. Though she has the largest ship in the federation so that was to be expected.

The war on Zenaka continues, Koda has turned a pair of cities into craters with the super battle ship. This orbital superiority has provoked a surrender.

The Winter is currently working on the opposite side of the given routes from the Nomads to slow the progress the Phantoms are making on setting up Auwana. We’ve managed to get a few shipping freighters of materials out of the mass piracy. We’ve also lost several strike craft to other pirates in the area. Not terribly large losses but it should be noted that the operation is not considered invulnerable.

They’re pulling back out before the Phantoms come up with any nefarious plan that might prove disadvantageous for us if we continued to act too predictably.

The initial platforms for Garden City have been constructed. We can actually build some things on top of them now. It hovers above the tree line and Eden is there as a representative of herself so at least the winds are stable. We actually just stuck sails on it since she controls the wind for us as needed if we want to float somewhere else. The one disadvantage to this project is we can’t harvest Eden for construction resources. However, we can put the main portal up here and ship things in from Moncayo.

Hydroshield research and development is ongoing.

I see you had an…interesting adventure through the elemental plane. Apparently the earth elementals of that particular archon are an adventurous lot. makes sense though given they never stay in one place so live fast die…ancient? How long do earth elementals even live? Though it turns out doing surgery on a rock animated of primordial mana manipulation isn’t any easier for Eden than living fire. But uh…congrats?

We evacuated as many of the civilians as we could before Koda attacked with the super battleship. It is kind of a giant ship in the sky that can wipe out cities before lunch so that did get them to surrender for the most part as Zenakan technology cannot compete with it. Not for lack of trying though, they launched some sort of primitive high yield missile at the ship but they didn’t make it past the shields.

In other news, Haziel’s janky steamworks ship we made her is on the way back to Eden so we expect to see her next month. Eerihild is excited.

I wouldn’t mind a show where humanoids don’t win the day for fucking once. Does no one ever sympathize with the poor alien monsters in these movies?

Vasia has built a power generator that takes advantage of the mana bursts at the new research station. It releases so much energy in those bursts that turning the generator on seems to be helping offset energy costs around the place. Though she really did it to gather data and another researcher realized there was a more practical use for that then making a bunch of spreadsheet numbers. Vasia’s working on some sort of new spell with all this information and people are concerned.

Grinhys has also been scouting around the planet and has found microscopic life on the planet. It has so much energy that I suppose something was bound to take hold there. It’s really exciting to the science nerds but I don’t…particularly get it. Grinhys did eat some of it though.

Craylin can speak with her mouth if she wants. Her voice is a bit grating though. She also has little she ever feels the need to say. Rhazin is more talkative than her.

Si Yeon is seeing about teaching people how to be a field medic.

Also Zenaka finally surrendered after the super battleship just blew their asses up. So that was a thing.

Aryn is currently deployed with Lancaster for their latest operation so she can’t really help with the ship signature thing at the moment.

Lucidity are already hanging out with the heroes guild but there isn’t much for me to report on that. They’re a support unit supporting another team. Not terribly exciting if you ask me. Though if you must know, they’re helping with the psionics department. However, most of the cult is about the meditation circle which, while we know is a big thing with the jesai, doesn’t lead to quite as much without a central point anymore.

Experiments wise, as  a quick review..
You managed to disrupt the synapse link between a drone and the rest of the synapse. It still tried to bite everything. The instant it exits the synapse, it bites everything. So the watch guard idea is not terribly effective. The whole synapse is set up to use commanders as nodes, just print more commanders. This is a biotech that has contended with the jesai, the most powerful psionics in the galaxy, so they have a lot of failsafes against typical psionic manipulation. Though it is peculiar that failsafe is ‘start attacking everything’.

They do work as memory storage though that we can retrieve if implanted on them. Though it degrades almost immediately. What’s interesting is I can tell what the information was in pretty decent detail, but it degrades in such a way that it becomes a garbled mess to most others. I think this is part of that same anti-jesai stuff we were talking about. To make sure no psionics can run a spell out of the drone’s memory and it can only transfer basic information. Garbled as it is, I can still read it even if every three letters is missing for example. Though if you chain this between drones it does get kind of messy. So its sort of transferrable, but only if there is a commander in every other step of the chain.

Also any drones that do need essentia tend to fall under Craylin’s command. Though the synapse doesn’t like to break things down after it already made them if they are still functioning. If it isn’t desperate for resources it’ll just keep the essentia drone in operation.

Also even i cannot rewrite the ‘out of synapse’ programming. Once they don’t have the synapse, bite time. I can produce more independent specialized critters like Grinhys, but drones gonna drone. They’re just a work force with a war protocol as their default. The assumption being that without a present synapse, something has gone horribly wrong and they need to rebuild immediately. Also even if nothing has gone horribly wrong, a commander will come pick them up eventually and more ichor can’t be a bad thing. Again, the motherships have synapse ranges over entire continents so getting spread out from the synapse isn’t a regular problem for silnians.

Michael has been skulking around the Phantom shipyards. He noted that it has several strange design elements that are definitely not standard. Some of it he can’t figure out what it’s even for, but he’s starting to recognize the handiwork of Sakhessa’s engineering. He also discovered the mines in front of Renjala’s Rift are also rigged up by her and are laced with mummy rot. Even if they don’t destroy a ship, they will infect it and all its occupants quickly given how virulent this particular curse can be. He recommended that if Lancaster does manage to steal a big ship, that she exit through the warren tunnels not the main rift as those mines could be a problem with longer consequences than expected. Though we still have the route to Eden mapped at one of the nearby exit points.

Security is sort of lax since it’s hard to secure a perimeter still under construction, the shipyards are being built at the same time as the ship they’re building. So there’s a lot of gaps that could be snuck through. However, Deinuu is protecting the ship mummy style. Sitting around it like lurking at the end of a dungeon. To take control of the ship Lancaster would likely need to deal with him. It’s other defenses are just whatever officers happen to be lurking around. Specifically he knows that Mikael is also there overseeing construction. Faelyn is usually on Riftgard but that is a short distance away, Elder Black is also there.

The shipyards are otherwise too far away from Aureum and have no portal network to get Sakhessa’s golden legion to the ship at the least. It is also notable that the bulk of defensive choices within the rift is centered around protecting Aureum rather than the shipyards so that is convenient.  However, if the operation suffers any delays Sakhessa’s carrier is nearby so that might be a hazard to consider even if Faelyn’s fleet leaves.

The Nomads are currently out preying on any phantom movements they can get on top of without running into the big fleets. That does turn out to be a lot of things. Then they promptly keep those slaves for their growing flotilla city they’ve been weirdly keen to work on lately.

Also Allison and Aryn are both on excursion with Lancaster at the moment. Though a note about asking Allison to contact Kaylen…Kaylen’s down the road remember? She built her new city just to the south of Moncayo. You can just walk over there if you want.

Stories of Lore 38

The price of the construction materials, which are salvage, is inflated by the general need in the wake of the invasions and wars. Desoir considers the markup due to the situation to be a sub-optimal investment. As the price will eventually normalize, not to mention they have their own production methods. So Bellar is likely the most difficult place to sell it. Also cosmic dice.

Speaking of which, we have sold an additional amount.

We have deployed one of the super battleships to Zenaka.They are in transit, meanwhile the ground forces continue the invasion of various city areas. They have been easily surrendering territory and pulling back to positions within the territory of other lords to regroup. So while progress has been good, they are amassing a much larger retaliation by the nature of pulling back into a tighter group.

Khymin is working on the prototype mech, though is still working out the power requirements for the flight systems.

Operating under the parameter that Arkaric is still alive, I would suspect he would be close to Daiheb. His presumed death occurred while Daiheb was conveniently present, and it is likely they are up to something together. I would also estimate that if it was ‘all according to plan’ then he will be near other major civilizations. Given his familiarity with exerlus technology, I would not be surprised if he took Echo Seven’s place after turning her human and is infiltrating the exerlus for some reason. Another possibility is that he is operating on another scheme entirely, we do know he is collaborating with the jesai and a ‘mysterious empire’ located near the galactic core. A jydoq businessman who lives within our population knew the rumors of this particular empire. It is a secretive isolated society who are known for being spectacularly aggressive to anyone that approaches their galactic territory. They have established a radius around their primary star and will attack anything that enters into that radius. Galactic trade routes take care to go around this location of space. He could also be working alongside the galactic pirate. The jydoq are apparently not as familiar with this name.

Without Seiyomi the only group who might be able to find the library are the Phantoms. Unless we were to come in possession of such a vast collection of valuable information that was never transferred digitally and sit on it to lure them to us.

Modern fighters already work the way you described.

Still no word from Eleazor. By my estimates he should have arrived within the last month at Zero North, though he still has to get back.

As an update, Grassy Gnoll is being postponed. With the knights pulling out of the demon kingdoms there isn’t enough cover for the operation to keep looking for an opportunity.

The hydro shield could be much more feasibly mounted onto a vehicle to create a projected shield that just had to move with the vehicle instead of an individual combatant. So that would be one way to get squads closer. This is a standard practice, especially for Alnae military tactics, though the hydroshield would be a different approach at least.

This concept would also work with your idea to give everyone a panzercycle, then they could move at higher speeds alongside the shield projection. Though the shield is still significantly weaker than contemporary arcane designs. While they’ve refined it to heavily deter small arms fire, large scale impacts tend to destroy the shield with ease.

For perpetually floating buildings, actually Robert from Robert’s rifts knows how to do that. He showcased a prototype using rubble in Moncayo. He just used a Kari rift. Operating the same way a ship’s interior gravity controls do, but holding a structure up instead.

We have begun more aggressive recruitment.

Mahuea knows where to find an earth archon, kind of. The elemental plane has extreme environments so elementals tend not to wander out of their specific territory as that would involve crossing the environment of another element. However, the legendary earth archon can survive all other elemental biomes. It is a titanic creature who carries its territory with it and the earth elementals just live on top of the archon. It’s a giant turtle with a mountain range on its back. So it can walk, it can swim, and its made of rock so it doesn’t mind fire. As a result, this particular archon is notoriously the most difficult to find since it is always roaming. Slowly, but it is roaming none the less. However…I cannot imagine it is difficult to find a walking mountain range. The only problem is we can’t fly around on the elemental plane too carelessly. The air tends to be filled with lightning and strong winds. There is also no vacuum of space so we can’t just hide outside of orbit with a telescope.

The knights have been recalled from the demon kingdom and are on the way back to Eden.

I mean the star idea kind of works it just doesn’t blow up. Little star is kind of passive and doesn’t quite blow up like that. So its more of a pitfall trap that burns your foot. Also sustaining it ‘for little energy’ isn’t happening. Little star constantly radiates energy, that’s sort of its thing. So it doesn’t really sit  and chill for awhile. Though if you want landmines, The Maker specializes in things that pop out of the ground and bite your face off still. Could just strap little star to one of those maybe.

I’d say you can control the drones quite well, as long as they don’t leave your range. Without the synapse they return to their natural behavior. Which is eat and make babies. Aggressively. Part of it seems to do with the fact that all Silnians without a synapse assume they need to spread and expand. Making an ichor puddle will eventually produce a new commander if not a whole new monarch to take control of the swarm. So if they’re lonely, build more silnians. Either it helps invade or it helps replace their losses. True silnians have synapse ranges stretching across planets. Valdir’s descendents like ourselves are operating while missing the top level of the command structure. We’re a hive with no proper queen so to speak. The metaphor breaks down because of the lack of intermediate commanders but you get my point. No mothership means that the synapse is in survival mode. So modern ichors assume that if there is no contact then something has gone terribly wrong and they must now preserve the species at all costs. This is why if the drones get out of range of a sapient commander who can, you know, analyze the situation…they go into conquer and rebuild mode automatically. At least that’s my guess so far, going off of your prophecy pointing out we needed to find Indal to stabilize our ichor. Since he can actually reprogram the ichors itself.

Setal points out she knows where her drones are, just not where the drones her drones made went. Also we could just send a team of only the commanders if you’re that worried about the drones getting out of control. Rhazin would be pretty intimidating to a zenakan. Also Craylin’s drones specifically don’t make more stuff, so they’re easier to keep track of. Though when they do go rogue they start harvesting souls.

Grinhys is doing fine, he’s just sort of trotting along. Though he doesn’t exhibit any abnormalities when exposed to to the area. He has found some interesting deposits on the planet that is being turned into a star. The planet being constantly subjected to the arcane bursts has resulted in some odd formations. Vasia has narrowed down her ability to predict the bursts even more at least.

Also Craylin can put essentia in them, the experiment resulted in rapid dissipation. They don’t have the baseline requirement to start absorbing it.

The shipyard built your stealth ship but pointed out literally all ships can be operated though psionic control. They use psi crystals to give advanced interfaces after all. This is also why psions can use their APT’s without touching them.

Michael has been deployed to Koura to assess the situation and see whats going on over there. Keeping an eye on traffic, the Phantoms appear to be importing populations from various holdings into the Rift. As well as sending reinforcements to Enohas where Valadeus and his fleet are, in his own words, ‘up to no good’. We can discern that Faelyn has been taking over Riftgard while Sakhessa is more interested in the planet below the station. The place is being swiftly turned into a bastion larger than Moncayo, they seem to be heavily investing in control over the Warrens. He is currently moving among their slave populations, which the Phantoms aren’t the best of keeping track of.

The Nomads are currently in deep space cruising around and doing various home improvement projects on the flotilla while seeing if anyone comes through their area.

It does definitely seem that when you control the crime just a bit too well the really nasty crime lords tend to appear as they’re the only ones who can survive and then others are forced to gravitate towards them. Though a little too poorly and then five gang bosses show up and start having territory wars.  Though for now we’re setting up our offices in Moncayo to see what we can keep track of.

Allison has arrived in Sol and pointed out the place is basically a wasteland. So the best opportunity she can find to start some small time smuggling around Shetou territories to feel that one out.

We attempted to have Aryn’s virus infect a ship and carry it elsewhere. Instead the ship shut off reactor controls and exploded. She has pointed out that it seems to behave erratically. Half of her methods of using it are to just exploit weaknesses that appear in a system when it starts wreaking havoc. After a few attempts she managed to stabilize it, and we’ve sent it out though results are pending since the whole ‘erratic behavior’ thing makes it hard to tell what it will do if it encounters a new system.

Though it never does anything beneficial so at worst it does nothing. At best we get some intel from solvang movements. Middle of the road, we crash their servers. Low risk at least.

Arcanist Articles: Magic by Mezzy

A new stealth cruiser has been constructed from the shipyards.

We are currently looking for anyone interested in purchasing the building materials, this month there has been no one interested in the bulk goods.

The invasion of Zenaka has taken a development. Up until now efforts have not been too difficult, though it appears many of our targets are beginning to form alliances. This includes drawing in members who may not have been an original target of ours, but have been swayed into joining none the less.

Strategically this poses a threat as Zenaka’s large population could complicate the invasion efforts. Thus far, their lack of unity is what made it easier for our superior military technology and training to move from one objective to the next. If the target nations successfully organize themselves the sheer numbers could repel our forces. Even if just by running our soldiers out of ammo.

Zenakan nations do not often form alliances, so this is a strange development. We cannot discern the origin of this development as they are taking specific efforts to keep hidden while going from one leader to the next.

The White Talon Armaments company is under reconstruction on Moncayo.

The mech/fighter project is a largely feasible idea, the problem just being the power source required to have both flight and any meaningful firepower on this style of design. The first problem Khymin is working on is how to prioritize certain tradeoffs in design. Lately his question is whether or not you care about agility versus firepower. Such a chassis can either limit its maneuverability in favor of heavier weapons or vice versa. He currently assumes you’ll take speed over armor weight, since a lot of durability issues will be solved with shields and making it fly at all will limit its armor capabilities compared to other class three and four mechs. He is defining ‘agile’ firepower as a small cannon rifle with a melee weapon and maybe some backup machine guns. By comparison Laenadra uses a larger cannon combined with mounted extra smaller cannons, missile launchers, heavy machine guns, and ethi artillery. He points out her mech is class 2. Which leads to his other question, do you want a class one two three or four?

Class 1: Can fit in more places easier, just a few meters tall and typically used in dense environments. High agility low top speed. Don’t get shot by a tank/rocket launcher. Carries a main and secondary weapon of smaller sizes.
Class 2: Biggest class that can comfortably fit in urban streets without breaking all the buildings around it. Highest top speed, strong agility. Can carry three weapons systems and survive an encounter with random soldiers who have a rocket. Still don’t fight a tank head on. Though this can dogfight strike craft.
Class 3: Serious mech warfare, packs a lot of firepower and can technically be towed through a city street but if it’s just running around buildings are going to be damaged. Carries larger weapons systems capable of destroying anything short of a destroyer ship or a class 4. With the flight prototype Khymin is making, this would still be decently fast but will be outpaced by regular strike craft. Though it can flip around whenever it wants so it has that going for it. Will get ganged up on by strike craft if it is out of position which could be lethal but it will definitely take multiple strike craft to bring it down.
Class 4: Most mechs in this class have enough firepower to level cities. Often by bumping into the city while walking around. The flight design will compromise that level of firepower and really kind of just hop/hover around. Though the flight mechanisms can be repurposed for faster ground movement with hovering assistance.

He also casually mentioned that a couple slave batteries would enable this design to actually work with much fewer compromises since that would fix one of the issues relating to the power systems.

It turns out that Larazja is a better administrator than most. Even without the help of a computer she can manage vast amounts of information, though I suspect she is cheating and offloading the equivalent of a spreadsheet file to the memory of her drones for later access. It also turns out ‘cool stuff that will keep her attention’ is really just shiny things or passive entertainment. She’s large enough that most defense training boils down to ‘equip ethi gear’. At her size its more about applying her force where its smart to do so, such as not while under fire from twenty other soldiers with training rounds that leave welts instead of taking cover.

The hydro shield…kiiind of works. We can make a shield of water that is somewhat energy resistant but the ‘opening a hole’ part doesn’t quite work. Especially not with the expertise of Steamworks being to avoid as much magic as possible. We can make it work on a large scale but miniaturization has been a struggle. Only ship and planetary shields can usually do this with regular shields, so if they figure it out to any level of practicality I’m sure there’s a Desoir prize for it. Also field tests have proven them less effective than regular shields.

Meanwhile, in the demon kingdom: Succubi/incubi populations are everywhere. They’re the most popular demon slave and many demon lords make an income exporting them out to the middle planes. We also have uncovered something in our investigations into the matter, there is a somewhat secretive succubus lord. It’s Aikane Yakunan. A large part of her mysterious nature and her need for protection in the Vloz alliance is because she wasn’t always that way. Also despite her status she is still heavily desired to either steal her shapeshifting powers, enslave the most powerful succubus, or to put down the only one to achieve the rank. This is part of why its a bit of a secret, atop of this even most succubi and incubi do not know Aikane’s origin. As a shapeshifter she can pose as about anything and she hasn’t been broadcasting her specific sub-species.

Also while not politically useful, one can always rally some imps. Notably they’re lowest on the totem pole and just the starting phase that leads to other evolutions if they survive long enough. However, some demon factions do raise them intentionally to create their armies. It’s not hard to entice them to any level of protection.

On the bad news side of things, the knights are pretty sure they’re being observed. They’re not sure by what and it hasn’t hindered them much, but powerful demons are known to be a little sneaky and mysterious sometimes. So that unnerving feeling has been having quite a bit of impact.

Kaylen has been setting up her own base south of Moncayo in what was once the colony of the Hasao Tei. Who seem to like her more than us, but they still always hang around with us…maybe for lack of better prospects. So I’m not sure what’s up with that to be honest. Though yes back to Kaylen, she’s taken off already back through the portal to continue recruiting, stocking up supplies, and trying to appeal to the various powers around Sol to get more people on board with her project while her intel division works on tracking Phantoms down. Also she’s off to hunt down a few Phantoms with their startup colonies going on.

The Outsider is space worthy once again, though chunks of it’s interior are still radically different materials than they should be. It’s kinda neat actually, adds some spice to walking down the hallways. In terms of structural integrity…eh the hull’s still thick right?

The bottleneck’s planar stabilized areas are really a result more so of the abyssal plane rather than anything else. It’s just very accepting of permanent alteration. What they were connected to has long since been closed off by the cleanup team.

The murder of the aquatic sirens trudges on, they’re becoming rather scarce now. Without Illdath they’re struggling to put up too much of a fight while we have our base planted right here, though we suspect many of them have retreated into the outer edges of the “planet”. This water disc is huge after all.

So there is a snag with convincing Eden to fix Vairatoa, he’s not physical. Eden has only ever worked on organic entities, Vairatoa is a living fireball. It doesn’t seem Eden is even capable of working on beings made of various energy sources, such as elementals, arcurans, spirits, and the like. Since her methodology is just extremely precise surgical work as opposed to energy manipulation.

Yoshai points out he already had his planar corruption removed by Eden the first time. He was literally patient zero to discover this effect even works, with Riley as the sample.

Selah points out that she is aware she needs to be more pro-active but felt it was rude to kidnap Reika to go and invade heaven while she was in the middle of the Zenaka campaign. So she is instead communing with Ankathi on her own, getting to know her new god, and preparing for…who knows what. Though the celestial branch of the Astral Order is the most dominant faction between Selah, Sarnai, Reika, and Aku representing it they have the largest faction of knights. Not to mention the champion and her direct apprentice. So for now she chats with Sarnai and Ankathi while taking it easy until Reika gets back.

Then Reika sent a squire to yell at Selah for not doing the ‘help the poor’ thing she was weaseling out of. As it turns out, Reika’s the only actually nice one of the paladins. So now Selah is roaming around Eden.

Meanwhile on Zenaka, the idea of using Eerihild to calm the drones down kind of worked. The problem is she can only be in one place at a time. The wolf knights had to hunt down escaping drones, fortunately they don’t run too far. They just start nibbling on the first thing they find. Quite a few died…to Setal’s drones. Judging by the reports, we’re lucky that’s all the damage too. The wolves are good enough hunters to track down the drones that are wandering off but the drones are still dangerous and in battle-mode. If we try this again without a giant glass dome to keep them in, they’ll probably get out after another attempt or two. Setal pointed out that the drones already memorized that they were unable to expand and are now developing new drone measures to escape any future containment by the wolves once again. Then she started singing about how she ‘wants to break free’.

As for the carrier portal project, that already exists. Irae can literally just stand at the hangar door and open the portal on the opposite side of the runway. The reason no one does this is because while that rift is open a single shot from a battleship will destroy the entire carrier as it will go straight through the shields and hull. If anything it bounces off the inner side of the defenses and creates even more destruction. If that cannon is undeterred, the ship is instantly gone. You can still take that risk and try to time the gateways to minimize the opening, notably Vloz will do this sometimes, but it’s one of the things Sol has been able to counter for decades now….because the Vloz kept doing it. On the other hand, works great against Nelta who do not have automated cannons and missiles that home in on rifts.

I mean it does make a mana battery if you really try but it doesn’t last very long nor produce more power than a sunstone. Which is already incredibly weak compared to a regular battery. Though you might not be totally insane, since Nelta ships use sahad engineering a lot.

For a human only granted immortality by proxy of being in my presence, you sure have a lot of theories on how immortals work. I am centuries old even before all of this, and now I am still just an infant. Though a human, even a psion as great as you, should be careful lecturing on what they know nothing about. Not that I know that much more either, but so far you’re oh for three on ‘how immortality works’. I appreciate your efforts to guide me, but it sure is strange that you speak as if you definitely know what you’re talking about while you are just as young as me. You and I have only lived through this era, Vasia and Renjala have seen multiple. Not to mention Renjala has made contact with Mahuea recently, a truly ancient being. Vasia…kidnapped an eternal being predating the existence of Sol’s star forming. I suppose I’m just left to wonder why you seem so sure of what our new existence entails instead of having any curiosity or expanded perspective. It feels like you are clinging to being human, perhaps because you barely were one in life and now you will slowly lose it. As each year passes on your lifespan spent as a human grows ever smaller a fraction. In a few centuries you will have lived so briefly as a human that it will be irrelevant. I have much longer before that fraction effect is significant but you…within my standing lifespan you will be human only in a faint and insignificant memory. We will still be infants on the immortal scale long after your humanity has any meaning to you. So I find myself curious as to your confidence in the matter. I’m sure in a few centuries your advice will change, but perhaps it would be best for the both of us to seek the advice of those older and wiser. Such as Renjala, Vasia, Ankathi… and Kanika. Who deliberately deals in these matters.

Also are you coming on to me? Don’t you have a succubus for that?

In regards to meeting with other immortals though, Lancaster only counts on one plane and we aren’t there. She also is younger than either of us anyways. Aryn is…a whole other perspective. She might become super duper ultra hyper sapient one day if she downloads enough RAM.

Craylin’s drones cannot keep essentia intact, that is unique to Craylin herself. It also has to be quite fresh, before the dissipation sets in. Actually she killed Setal herself while the succubus lay there bleeding on the ground. However, the ichor is the judgement of who will be kept or disposed of. So while she can do this, the ichor decides where the value in it is. Which we can’t control.

Rhazin’s drones do indeed share his rampage. They’re not necessarily better than any other drone though, until Rhazin starts fighting at least. They’re also not really more aggressive than regular drones, though those are pretty aggressive on their own, but Rhazin’s control over them will make them hyper aggressive since he’s aggressive.

Setal specifically can infect others in a different mechanism. Instead of getting monstrous mutations and wild behavior as we saw on Que, her infections produce drones…with a bit of time. Instead of overriding their systems and taking control, she can implant parasites that grow inside of people until they’re ready to break free. It’s not really super impactful compared to everything else we can already do, but the ichor found value in that. In keeping with our independent nature, Setal provided a means to create new swarms with a new method.

Also if you want drones you can have some, they’re just laying around the pool most of the day. Just grab a few and wander off, they’ll follow. Can use them to carry stuff for you. Also the more humanoid shaped ones could drive a car if you keep careful on instructing them how to do so.

Grinhys also could just pick up some drones and wander off with them but he is definitely more of a solo kind of guy.

Vasia sent a report that the colony is doing well getting established so they can measure the arcane core of the planet. She can predict the bursts to within a few days, and can tell when its about to occurr with a few minutes warning. So that’s progress.

She also sent the report on Si Yeon. The parasite didn’t change her makeup, it just added a sort of ‘stealth’ reading to her biology that makes the ichor not see her as organic as a survival mechanism to encountering the ichor. The ichor is still an overwhelmingly stronger mutator, but not if the parasite has adapted to hide from it. This is a byproduct of its other mutation that made it so no one noticed she had it until Vasia took a look. As it turns out, she still has the parasite. This is why she needs less coffee than everyone else supposedly. It’s just been hiding in her this whole time.

Si Yeon, when asked about mood enhancers that work for long term, suggested asking Ohalyn or Laura.

In other news, there are demon lords not associated with our enemies. Vloz and the Phantoms make up about half of the demon’s council but that still leaves plenty not associated with them. The best way to avoid getting ganged up on is to have significant enough wealth to be uncontested and avoid pissing off anyone else with wealth. Conveniently starting a frontier government checks all the boxes. Though if the Phantoms and Vloz both agree ‘fuck that new girl’ Setal’s in for a rough initiation.

Speaking of Setal, she has arrived at Zenaka to help with the war effort as a general display of power. The drones were unleashed alongside the knights and VSEC into one of the cities of the opposing Zenakan nobles. Eerihild kept it under control for the most part but she points out, this is not reliable. Had anything else gone just slightly more wrong, Zenaka would be enduring an apocalyptic swarm already. While Eerihild can control drones out of the synapse, the other wolf knights can’t. They’re badly injured and several died trying to control the drones that got out of Setal’s range. This was also a stress test of that ability and the more of them there are the less Eerihild can mitigate the problem.

While not mentioned in her report, I will remind you my swarm specializes in independent operation and infiltration. If they missed a few they could be building ichor pools in secret while preparing to continue their invasion until they reunite with Setal. While it’s necessary to let Setal show her power to Zenaka, the camera crews are dead. VSEC forces died to drones, knights died to drones, and that was in a controlled situation where they hoped to control it. We came to within an inch of the swarm doing its thing, and also we still don’t know for sure that we even have prevented it. Though as I’m sure you’ve noticed, its a recurring theme that the swarm is not easy to control or contain. If Setal ever comes in range of me again, I’m pretty sure a new wave of programming will reach the ichor lake and all future drones will have countermeasures to being contained by the wolves. So we’ll need a new idea before trying to do it a second time.

Greater Seer: The ichor responds to few things, such as what it feels is needed for any situation. Larazja has no needs, she is comfortable and without ambition. She must be baptized by war.

Gunhild wasn’t forming a unit, rather she has always had one. The B-Team, a name kept ironically despite the fact that they are the most elite infantry unit within the Federation as of now. Currently they lack a home garrison to hang out in so they just follow her to various destinations.

Rennyn has his squadron, they call themselves the Starbeasts.

Also you have learned pandem theory but nothing that will allow you to open a rift yet that would corrupt your mana.

The mech you’re requesting is a feasible concept though mana storage or generation technology would need to be improved.

The building materials are selling at a slower rate now, but we have managed to sell another $500,000,000 worth of materials.

 VSEC has been deployed to Zenaka to begin the takeover of the planet. As advisor I am programmed to give a brief strategical assessment. I recommend mechanized assault forces, as the Zenakans do not have that level of technology and are not prepared to counter it. Yes you technically already did this, but my programming still tells me to give you a pop up about it.

Error closing pop up
?> Ending task…
?> Terminating process

Zenakan natives are resistant though spread out. While some are not even targets as Vloz sympathizers, many are arming themselves for the second invasion of their world but can likely be ignored as time convinces them it is not worth the effort.

Attempts to recruit crew for the new fleet have begun. Though with things as they are, morale is low and few people are signing up. Many friendly Zenakan’s have expressed interest even if they lack the education necessary to crew one of our ships. Training in process.

Eleazor and Echo Seven are still most likely in transit. Though they have left comm and scanner range, so they could also be dead and we just don’t know it yet.

Demon candidates for Grassy Gnoll have been processed and initial phases of the operation have begun.

The outsider is still being repaired, driving it through an ocean and crashing it into a city then letting it get eaten alive by the River has done immense damage to it. The actual bigger problem has been getting its pieces to the shipyards for repair. Moncayo does not have direct access for a ship that large, there is a transport tunnel that leads to the shipyards beneath this floating plate we’re on, but they generally don’t actually enter the city’s bubble. We’re still moving chunks over. The ship is practically destroyed but due to the unique abilities it has we figure its worth repairing the original ship even if it would be easier at this point to build a new ship of equivalent size.

Hydroshield progress has become a cylinder of falling water…which is amusing. I don’t know how often an attack would come from directly above but have you ever watched a cat try to escape a water fountain? In order to test the ability to track a highly mobile target, no one wanted to run all over an obstacle course. So they just clipped it to Yoshai and watched him go.

Kaylen doesn’t seem superbly pleased to meet you or Larazja, notably Vasia is away setting up a new research facility at least. Though I suppose to her credit she’s doing her best to stick to her own mantra of trying to convince people to work together despite ideological differences and just mutters to herself about it. Progress I suppose? She does seem to really like Eden though. Granted everyone likes Eden.

For now the knights are playing it slow in the demon kingdom, partially because we’re still working on the Setal thing so making any big plays right now might be dangerous. That and demon civilization is dangerous for them. The Vloz’Khress are somewhat influential in the middle planes politics but in the demon realms their council is one of the major alliances. In the demon kingdom various domains are rather heavily respected, unlike in Shetou where anyone just does whatever they want, so at the very least keeping out of the Vloz alliance’s territory has yielded some level of safety. Though this is still Kharla we’re talking about, and she can be erratic.

Though from a grassroots perspective, there are several demon classes that might be considered a little ‘oppressed’. Succubi like Setal conveniently being one of them, so in setting her up to be the demon lord we actually can find some traction with them. Typically succubi are not very high ranked and are more of possessions, it’s been that way for thousands of years just because of their specific abilities. Setal is actually one of the very few in history to achieve a greater demon status. Admittedly she cheated but it’s still noteworthy to the way their politics work.

Selah is a pretty modern pandem scholar, though is a specialist in binding more planar theory and understanding or any type of engineering. Her current plans are to cannibalize the celestial order, which she’s working on, and preaching the good word. She feels people will just be drawn to the new Order of The Fate once they realize its members can cast heal. Really only Sarnai can do it, but its still interesting.

Vairatoa is a little bland in the personality department, though he is an elemental so that makes sense. We’ve been trying to teach him to do things other than ‘set everything on fire’ as a combat option since that’s his go-to strategy.

The Maker alien has made many monsters in response to previous affairs but it doesn’t really make more of itself very readily. Bill has discerned this is because they generally don’t try to do it until the end of their lifespan so that their descendants can inherit their territories.

Mahuea is tentative about binding with anyone, power aside he is aware of the effects of pandem corruption. It has a unique effect on elementals, particularly ones as powerful as himself. Mana corruption makes mana based lifeforms, like elementals, a little ill. Vairatoa is largely ‘taking one for the team’ when he bound with Alexander. It also can erode their form, which is why Vairatoa really needs the suit. With something like Mahuea, dispersing apart with even small bursts could do a lot of damage. More like a solar flare than a crackle or pop from the campfire. This is also why he can’t bind with the already corrupted Vairatoa. Also pleas of haste don’t move creatures like him who operate on a much different time scale.

Though it is interesting that Mahuea is aware of the Phantoms through Alexander’s work, but doesn’t consider them anything to be cautious of. They don’t regard him as being in need of eradication so he extends the same courtesy to them. His kind qualifies as ‘not Kanika’s enemy’ twofold. The first being that they are immortals and the second being that they just sit around minding their own business and have never given dragons any trouble. He states that the Phantoms are just small pieces on the growing galactic scale we are becoming aware of, struggling for their own right to live. They were the piece used by Arkaric to bring galactic chaos, but he’s doing other things as well using other pieces. Building more of his androids with an exiled exerlus consensus, creating a doomsday weapon with the help of the jesai, cutting off galactic travel and communication allying with the galaxy’s most feared pirate fleet, collapsing stars in key locations with an empire near the galactic core, and so on. To Mahuea, the phantoms are just caught up in the temptations of opportunity. Galactic chaos gave them an opening to come out of hiding, in this state it is hard to bring all of Sol’s guns down to bear on them. Though it was not their plan nor even remotely within their capability without Arkaric. They had actually been infiltrating things to keep things in a constant equilibrium so no one would find them and just waiting things out, a perk of their immortality. As such he is actually critical of Kaylen’s work. While this opening will allow the Phantoms to finally rebuild themselves, they too will be victims of Arkaric’s endless chaos once they do manage to establish themselves again unless Kanika negotiates a deal with Arkaric. However, they still regard Kanika as their leader, not Arkaric. So they are still just pieces in his machinations instead of direct servants of his plans.

I suppose an ancient creature like him is more adept at focusing on the big things but he seems to have issues acknowledging the smaller aspects that are an immediate problem. Such as the Phantoms planning to murder us.

Reika and her forces have headed to Zenaka to lead the war effort. They’ll be there for a little while. Despite the technological advantages of VSEC, rooting out whole countries takes a bit of time and invasion. It should be easier than fighting the Vloz though.

You use little star in a sealed and warded box. We cannot see inside of it, but if we open it then it’ll immediately escape. We also can’t measure into a warded box. As long as it remains in the box, we cannot determine if the spell remains active or not…what was the point of any of that?

I’d review my financial records if it wasn’t blown up by aliens and horribly inconsequential to the fact that I am now a giant snake lady.

Also I’m a drow purebred, my hair has always been white. So I kind of just assumed my fur was like that for a similar reason. Though yes we aren’t aesthetically lacking, granted we’re based on the previously standing blueprints.

Which noodle did you want to impregnate? They’re all noodles as we went over.

Also no I don’t need to be physically pregnant. The ichor is my womb, and you are all my children…some adopted. Though its worth remembering, I cannot be disobeyed should I enforce my will. So wash your cat bowl when you’re done eating and if I have to tell you again you’ll carry it into the dishwasher yourself, muahahah…I need to work on my evil laugh more. Though, your thoughts on how to use the succubus power is lacking in imagination. She is also now of my swarm…and we specialize in parasitic infection. I’ll let you think on that. Just when you thought we were all out of warcrimes, the ichor comes up with new and exciting possibilities! I will remind you…I specialize in parasitic infection. Which means so does Setal.

Also yes, drow men are not particularly large or masculine by the standards of other races. Some of the women are a bit sleek due to being lazy butt mages but you’ll notice all Sarghess women are huge compared to other races.

More accurately Vasia took it out of the enchanted cell that kept the shade catatonic so it didn’t just walk out through a wall and didn’t bother maintaining the spell while dragging it over. Less intentional torture, more ‘too lazy not to torture’. Vasia doesn’t believe in anesthesia, takes too long to apply. It’s just an extra couple of minutes but…she ain’t got time for that.

Uh…I was a waitress as I said. Moved to the frontier in hopes of a better job. I guess nowadays I’m the queen of my little swarm which is a pretty cushy job. Rich people keep bringing me food and I just have to sit around and play with my children. I’d ask for a projector so I could watch tv but the aethernet is blown up. Maybe I should take up a hobby beyond dressing up my drones.

As for roles, I don’t think I have much input on the matter. Though it might be fun to get out more often, granted that seems dangerous these days. I used to dream of being rich but rich is relative right now and what you can buy with it is limited lately. Also now my prospects are a bit different. I’m sure you’ve noticed but many people are losing their dreams and ambitions as civilization crumbles. What good is a golden palace if there’s no power, plumbing, or anything on the holovision. What good is a sports car when the roads are ruins? People have seen their hope eroded…part of why we had that brigade of therapists. Anything I might have once wanted is gone now, for me more than most. There is no ‘return to normal’. I’m a monster, but social implications aside my sense of taste is pretty much gone. It is merely a sense of nutrition. I no longer need clothes since I’m resistant to temperature changes and spend a lot of my day in the ichor lake, so not much point in wearing things that’ll be at most slightly itchy. The farms burn, the buildings fall, the water boils, but what Arkaric really destroyed was hope. Without knowing what he did, all you see is senseless destruction and endless chaos. Knowing what he’s doing is somehow even worse, to know its not random and it will not pass. We’re chasing the Phantoms but they’re just one of thousands of pawns he moved across the galaxy, his influence so endless that civilization ending apocalypses are merely an email away for him. Now most of us just can only hope to survive. Sure VSEC soldiers can aspire to get a promotion, maybe drive the big tank. Vasia has the power to alter things on a galactic scale so she still has the agency needed to feel ambition. But by the millions our eyes grow dull and our dreams rot. Not that its been all bad…less desire to have ‘more stuff’ has made people a bit better at working together and brought many together to help one another. Until the next farm burns at least. Wait what were we talking about?

Wait why am I testing removing myself from the synapse? Just walk over there and do it yourself. Though perhaps it would be better to ask Eerihild to do it.

As for the soul thing, I don’t think we can convince the ichor to do a PR stunt. You could connect to Kaisa again though and I bet it’d get the ‘on’ signal to go back into full war production, which is when it uses it’s souls to make things. I’m sure nothing will go wrong with that idea. The drones already chew on every life form they can find if they get out of the synapse range.

Also no I don’t want to go swimming looking for more Phantoms. I’m in the lake all day in hopes they don’t find me as it is.

I’m just a waitress I am not the right person to discuss philosophical evil with. Though I feel like I get Kanika’s point. Solians lose every objective measurement you can make when compared to dragons like her…or to creatures like me. They’re a pack of wolves eating her children, she feels nothing for their continued existence. Even if you aren’t the exact one that did it…what does it matter? Humanoids are fated to go extinct or be domesticated as far as she is concerned. They attempted to kill everyone who wasn’t like themselves. The fact that Kanika hasn’t done the same yet shows a level of restraint you do not give her credit for.

It’s an argument the phantoms have made…and now that I’m no longer a drow I kind of get it. What is a gnoll to me? A potential threat, meal, or pet perhaps. Though under nothing short of a delusion could you consider them an equal life form to me. Nothing they can ever be is as valuable as beings like myself, Azilath, or half the Phantoms. The potential of their lives is dwarfed by the near infinite potential of mine, if you draw the line of sapience just behind humanoids then what if I draw it just behind myself? I could eradicate them all if I wanted to. I don’t need to negotiate my existence to an animal, I could just end theirs if they piss me off enough to hate them more than I want to dress you up in holiday sweaters. Speaking of which sit still this will be adorable…

Immortality is a funny thing like that. No matter how you achieve it, once you do the potential of your life becomes greater than that of entire races. You now have all the time you need to achieve all that can ever be achieved. Losing thousands of years of work is like knocking your pen off the table. A brief momentary annoyance. The death of an immortal is a tragedy unmatched by the lesser races. What does an orc care when a bee dies heroically protecting its colony? When entire species go extinct due to harvesting their natural habitat? That is the glimpse of the difference in scale. To be honest, I don’t reaaaally care about Cassir dying. As much as I liked her, she was always fated to be but a momentary creature in this galaxy. My pet dog. You, Vasia, Renjala, myself…we might roam these stars until eternity. What does a human matter to us?

Why are you looking at me like that? Ooh hold on I have a hat to go with the sweater for you.

I still think Si Yeon is suspicious.

Also yes we have found more of Illdath’s people here and there. They’re a broken army with no leader, so it’s just been a matter of putting them down. Hasn’t really been news worthy. Few people died while hunting sure but, they were insignificant. Why are you looking at me like that?

Ironically the least tech savvy people are the best for making floating city’s on any level of efficiency. Open some strategic Kari rifts, tah dah. So…that’s the order’s job otherwise it’ll cost a hundred times more to do it and a lot of fuel.

I don’t know how you’re still bewildered by Vasia’s incredible ego that grants her impossible arrogance. You know all those cats that curiosity killed? They turned into shades. They don’t really have fear until it is taught to them. Exme is a reporter who hung out on a planet being invaded by Valdir and kept taking notes to write a story with even after her equipment was damaged. Shades just don’t really…understand mortality. If anything death is a curiosity to them. This is like being mystified that a revenant is always pissed off for no reason. The actual spirit revenant like Vidarius, not the group of ninja women.

Grinhys is off to explore a planet with a serial number. We should probably name the colony, the locals refer to that planet is Hiekaekus though. It’s the name of their old god of fertility. Likely brought on by the fact that their color morphs are determined at birth through mana absorption. So those born under an eruption from the planet tended to be…blessed. Actually maybe its not named after the god and it is the god.

Establishing Setal as demon lord should be…fun. Though she has her own drone legion so she should be fine hopefully…I’m just trying to comprehend if demon lord outranks me…again. Why do all my children outrank me? I expect spectacular mother’s day gifts.

Also we can’t digest the siwa warforged things really…I guess Craylin could harvest their essentia but who knows.

Kaylen’s general stance hasn’t really changed on the ‘taking all comers’ idea, at least for now. Despite clearly not being enthusiastic about some of our members, she is convinced that the Phantoms need to be dealt with. I never studied history much but apparently Kanika’s name invokes a reaction. Though as Renjala learned from Mahuea, they’re not the biggest problem, yet to Kaylen they are. Kanika was the dragon that almost destroyed the rising and sent all of humanoid-kind into an age of never ending torment. Fated to be nothing more than animals living in a world ruled by higher species.

That being said the Revenants are still invited, even if they haven’t really accepted the invitation. They’re a bit less willing to bend on certain matters than Kaylen is. Probably why they’ll always be just annoying pests on the side of everyone’s business.

The attempt to find essentia in the river would involve opening the river back up, though it does appear to be a really bad idea. Due to the nature of the planar laws changing so erratically, the vestiges of essentia in the area that Craylin can sense are actually toxic to her. We discovered this by a drone going into convulsions and literally falling apart after trying to harvest some.

We’ve done some further upgrading to the Nomad’s impromptu flotilla to house more people. It was originally just a trophy case and a used ship lot for them but it seems to be necessary to house all of these refugees now.

Allison can head up efforts to re-infiltrate the underworld. She’ll need a ship and some boys though. I sent her some of Nomad’s extra pirates we’ve been collecting. Since she doesn’t really need agents for this kind of work. Though Dunchek points out he was a fair and legitimate businessman. We’re still not sure Shetou’s idea of legitimate business matches ours.

The Moncayo black market is just trading rations really. Many of the VSEC soldiers have figured out they have more food than the refugees and can trade it for things. Not our best look, though it hasn’t stopped our old friend from capitalizing. Ohalyn’s still around and with her plaza gone she’s returned to just finding pretty folk to whore out for whatever people are trading these days. Scavenged materials from the war pop up here and there as well, those who found a dead soldier’s gun have a lot of leeway in setting up their own gangs within the refugee population. Laura King’s been sitting cushy and retired so she’s not really helping much.

The problem is that this is all happening erratically and naturally forming. There is no central gang that is running all of this like when Laura, Kyven, or Zhuan were around. So Michael and Dunchek can root out some smaller gangs here and there but then more and more appear. As the housing situation gets corrected its likely to take a downturn though and we’ll see what remains of it in the end. Also half of the gang problems can be solved with food, but food is scarce for the refugees compared to those who are still properly employed.

When it comes to Vanjin, pretty much everyone needs her to hunt every other member of the Phantoms. We could turn her loose as an assassin I suppose, just put up some fake bounty boards for her to claim from. I suppose they wouldn’t be fake but I can’t imagine too many people are dumb enough to go for it.

Stories of Lore 30

Riley has likely arrived in Nelta space by now. That’s all I got, stroke the magic cat if you want an actual update she is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of comm range. I’m sure she’s doing fine though.

Moving on, oh right second order of business. Everything is on fire.

Nelta’s here, they’ve invaded Koura fully though it was mostly evacuated so technically they just have Koura and Madhammer is fighting them from the fortified position of their headquarters outside the city. Somnus has a giant fucking hole in it and is now in pieces, very large pieces that Khymin has kept operational but still multiple pieces none the less. Three pieces actually.

The problem on Somnus is that Rikoy and his team got aboard and now more of them are sneaking their way in to reinforce him. We’ve had to back off of our conflicts with him as we sort of assess the situation and get through all the chaos. Now that things have settled down and everything is terrible, we can really take stock of our options carefully.

Rikoy currently controls one of the station sections, though that section isn’t attached to the main control deck of the station anymore though I wouldn’t be surprised if he just jumped between the two when he’s good and ready. His team are all super soldiers like him but the big three among them are nuts. Whoever we send to finish off this engagement better be exceptionally well trained.

Elym seems to be the one in charge down on Koura and they’ve taken over the cultist’s temple as their forward operations base onto Koura. It would appear that Elym has a group of fellow high level sahad casters acting as guard not to mention the whole camp that Nelta is deploying its forces to. They have control of a six kilometer stretch around that temple that Madhammer has yet to get all the way to. Simply put, Madhammer and VSEC stationed on the ground are overrun by sheer numbers and the reckless use of firepower.

Laura and Yenneiros are holding their respective areas, though the Hasao clan is definitely struggling. They don’t have a proper military, they had enough killers to make a great police or vigilante force but this is war and they’re being pushed back hard by Nelta. Yenneiros is the only one gaining ground on Nelta though, Laura is just doing her best to prevent them from taking the whole city all at once.

We could try to help them regain control by deploying the Winter’s strike craft to secure the air but that would leave Somnus in a worse spot as the Winter is all that’s preventing them from landing smaller transport craft, which can slip through the minefield, to reinforce Rikoy.

Elion has been holding things down and keeping it together to minimize losses until we can go in a bit harder, that timing coinciding with about five minutes from now. Satsujin and Nah are about to get back from Sol which can open some options for us. Nah has a battleship which can make a good hit, it’s also stealth so it can maintain comms for us as support if preferable. Not to mention the Nomads will be coming in as well.

So basically pick which hill you want everyone who works for you to die on before Elion initiates a proper assault to deal with key targets.

Elion called for us to retreat rather than push in on Rikoy when we had the chance, though he was right that the entire main deck split open and was vented. Since we can’t use Ethi much we have the distinct issue of not having the best countermeasures to being in open space. Might be some merit to sending the knights down to Koura where they can fight a bit more freely, it would play to their strengths more. However, that would leave us fighting a super-mage of some sort instead of the super soldiers which are more…understandable things for knights to deal with. I suppose its a choice between a favorable battlefield and a favorable opponent. Also where we think Ankathi should be helping most. She is a medieval fish out of water though, I don’t think she really “gets” what fighting in the void of space is like. Not to mention she’s so cocky she might not realize what I mean by “no atmosphere” and do something stupid.

We could go back to dealing with the assault carriers but rifting onto them proved to be extremely dangerous. First off, the atmosphere in those ships does not favor us. Second, surrounded by enemies. It wasn’t too bad, we did some damage but we were recalled to help with Somnus once they started getting on board there.

Meanwhile back at Enohas, things are going fairly alright. With the Revenants having left to go back to Sol we probably have a minute before they get back out here to harass us again. That or they might now be going after Nah or Lancaster since they were able to start pursuing the Revenants, which is something they historically don’t like. Cleaning out Daesta’s remnants is difficult though and we haven’t found much. Since they weren’t really publicly declaring themselves in such a way that we could get a list of who to look for other than Daesta. Though I imagine their morale isn’t doing well with both her and Nihlav dead. They haven’t shown any signs of activity at the least.

Construction on the new demonic wing of the citadel is underway, specifically designed to accommodate the size of at least Ki’Ralcht herself. Speaking of whom, they’ve recently got into a fight with more of the Vloz’Khress forces still lingering around on Zenaka. While they may have won the fight overall we can’t help but notice they appeared to have an objective they fulfilled as the orbital shield generator was sabotaged. Since they previously owned the thing they kind of knew the layout of the place.

Across the entirety of the swarm we just instinctively know that somewhere among the stars, the crusade has truly begun. A war of the likes you cannot begin to fathom has been initiated and billions die by the day only to be replaced and sent to die once more. War is a horror all have come to know, yet none yet know the brutality of a silnian war. Perhaps it is our link through sahad that we might see the ripple through the endless void, or maybe just a telescope would tell you much the same. Either way, know that the beginning of the crusade marks a turn in the Valdir offshoots like myself and Azilath. The hunger for blood and glory grows ever stronger, the call of The Wrath can be heard, and the ramifications of the faith will be felt. A divine walks among us, forged through knowledge of the celestial heavens that came before. But today a god of man’s own making reveals the mortality of all others before them.

Also I bought some of those cat sweaters for you to try on, it’ll be adorable! Huh what were we talking about? No I’m not growing anymore, I think this is my maximum size.

Anyways, Cassir is on the way in with Satsujin and the rest of the Sol expedition crew just in the middle of Auwana getting invaded. So that will be…at least some help. The vivarium hasn’t really been attacked, it has been boarded and taken over by Nelta but they don’t seem all that keen on destroying it just yet. So…we have to get that back eventually. Vasia wanted to just turn off the security containment but I’m pretty sure Nelta will just blow up the station or kill all of the specimens if they have reason to think the station is hostile enough to reject their boarding parties. Nelta seems to have no idea that Vasia’s lab is hidden on Ash. The cult isn’t so lucky as it turns out we decorated too well and now Elym has taken that as her base of operations. Lot of dead cultists now too.

Que is not, this place was deliberately chosen to prevent us from being able to expand upon it. It’s moon is. The planet is just a big ball of dust and rock with no atmosphere. Que is enclosed in a spell that allows it to function as if it were hospitable, similarly to Tykel for example. Though it was deliberately chosen for how useless it is to anyone who can’t import what they need.

Also I can tell you that you are less fragile than a regular cat, but also more fragile than any humanoid. Don’t get shot.

All of the new members of the synapse can control a drone or two at a time. None exhibit  the ability for large scale or even squad level control. However, they can exhibit a larger version of control in directing the ghouls we can make through infection. Those are much simpler and stupider. The converts are not all bipedal anymore…I’m actually seeing a trend with this. I don’t have my legs anymore…you’re a cat…most of the new converts are some form of quadruped. Couple more naga like me, oh and that one guy who now is a centipede looking thing…with a human torso. He has a mouth on the backside and the front so we’re not sure if we want to ask where it all goes…

As for Finsir’s relation to Que, it’s open space. There are other star systems not too far away but they’re not closely aligned enough to be terribly more convenient then flying to any other star. I suppose we could scout them for anything useful, and Finsir is known to have high levels of mutated variety among its now two known inhabited planets so maybe the plane will be useful to the swarm. Not really sure how that works.

Seiyomi has left to go to Thenica. Alone. Byyyye Seiyomi. Actually he is qualified to pull that off but that’s still a dangerous place to be. I guess he’s on the tail of the Revenants to start figuring out how their intelligence network actually works. He did mention that you should ask Renjala about the Faelyn/Kanika business though.

Vasia made a special note to the returning trip that Salied is to be brought back to the Ash labs immediately and discreetly. One of the other researchers informed me she’s been building an elaborate machine to analyze and probably do something far worse to the entity she captured from beyond the rift. That and laying low in the hopes that the Nelta invasion won’t notice the secret lab on Ash.

Also yes we have been able to replicate the Nelta control core using the New Horizon facilities. It’s not up to par with the originals but the proof of concept is there and we used it to make the DNA preservation database though it hasn’t been finished. That’s a lot of information we’re trying to store in there and everytime someone makes a typo we have to start all over. I don’t think the species who invented this has the same attention span problems that humanoids do.

Remember when you said “safest location possible” for the Yelay? Guess where that turns out to be. They’re at the Ash facility now with Vasia.

We’re on return from Sol though Nelta struck a bit earlier than we had hoped for. Most of our team is aboard the Closing Statement, actually it’s just Leon and Vaeri back on Somnus adn they’ve taken the approach of waiting for support before they get involved in a full scale war.

We’ll be arriving into a somewhat dire situation. Nelta has boarded Somnus and the station was split open and is steadily drifting away from its other pieces. Though the station is so large that it is still fairly functional in this condition.

Koura city is almost entirely overtaken by Nelta with only Madhammer making much progress on taking ground from them. Independents and VSEC are doing their best just to slow their forces down. We’ll be arriving eighteen hours after the invasion began.

The Closing Statement could launch a sneak attack on their fleet in tandem with Koda to maximize our impact on the fleet but then we’ll be exposed and operational support might be difficult going forward. If we remain in stealth we can probably park on the far side of the planet and allow Aryn to provide support from the ship as we don’t know how long the Somnus command deck can keep functioning at all. Even now they barely have communications between Elion and Koda let alone the forces down on Koura. From there we could deploy the agents as needed to help with the Rikoy and Elym problems.

Basically there are three main areas of conflict we need to assess our ability to impact. The fleet controls space and as long as Nelta has that they can reinforce or move freely between the various planets and stations we have. Somnus is the main thing keeping that at bay as it has the firepower needed to threaten their fleet, though with it being boarded by Rikoy they are in imminent danger of being not only shut down but being taken over. If Nelta can figure out how to use Somnus’ systems they’ll be able to bombard Koura with ease.

The other big one is Koura itself. The orbital shield generator is all that stands between the city and a full scale bombardment. I suppose the military ramifications of this are not as critical but from the economic perspective Lancaster will probably never recover if Koura is reduced to a field of craters. Which isn’t good for our own funding.

Stories of lore 29

The draft – I mean call for Volunteers has been put out. I’d recommend a draft.

Riley is still on the way she should be there in about a month or two. It’s a long ass trip.

For CQC aboard Somnus Khymin has those battle-bots you had him working on still laying around though their effectiveness is questionable. However, its possible that the aliens can’t even tell that they’re not fighting fit since their adventures in Sol have largely been a constant string of ‘what is that?’. The lower decks could use the doors to close off certain hallways and cause problems there but the Main Deck is the problem, it’s a huge open space giving way to an entire city built around a big ass tree. Not much compartmentalization to be done there unless we vent the whole thing, which will kill the tree. Maybe get some people to shank the aliens in the alleys. Though Madhammer’s deployable cover is pretty useful in urban environments and we could just place vehicles strategically to funnel the fight in a direction most advantageous to any strategy we have. Not to mention the fact that most boarding actions are done in hallways not into a city filled with skyscrapers, so snipers. We recommend lots and lots of snipers and turrets in windows.

Also the station AI is going to be doing all it can whether or not it can help just because the station’s gotta do its basic defense protocols. So…kind of? It already helps with targeting. Though it doesn’t have some secret weapon to pull out.

As advisor I’ll point out the mine-layer is still really good buuut they can still shoot us through it. Though the longer it holds up the longer it takes them to get control of the system so still probably worth it but I would expect them to just take a holding pattern once they figure out that they can wait it out. Assuming they figure that out.

By the way, how much of our fleet assets just went to Sol for the Salied thing? Because they’d have to turn back right now to get back in time to defend the system from Nelta. Oh, that’s not good. Where do you stash the executive escape shuttles again?

Also we can’t really just keep going to Whitetalon for money all the time mostly because it’s really hard to contact him and he has to sign the loans. Though Madhammer is on its way back to Koura, I’m not sure if this will have any adverse effects on the Zenaka occupation though. The drow are still sneaking around and Madhammer was most of the military power there.

When it comes to buying Zenaka’s excess crops, that is actually something we’re already doing with the Winter that has a lot of trade support abilities. Crops are worth good money right now and are part of helping us not go broke.

I’ve opened negotiations with the countries in Zenaka that are keen to work with us, though obviously the rest of them would prove difficult to deal with. The country we recruited Xanis from is down though.

For the Sol Expedition I turn you over to Satsujin.

A note about The Outsider using the Warrens, we don’t actually know how to get from here to Auwana through it yet. We’re still working out the weird stringy map that is the Warrens. Not to mention going into it from Enohas is probably a mapping project we should consider working on as well since it will likely be standing by around here most of the time. That being said we have time to just fly over there normally so we’ll go with that, it’s a carrier so it’s not really worried about pirates.

We’ve managed to recover Aku in fairly good shape, if a bit disorientated. He was in a utility closet down by the taco shack. According to him they were moving him frequently since they lacked a proper base of operations here. Apparently when they left the planet he was just kind of left tied up where he was. He noted that their interrogation methods varied wildly but they never resorted to any actual form of torture, which he suspects has something to do with whatever their ethical code of operations is.

Reika and Haziel went to find Daesta. Along with Eerihild and her wolf knights, it eventually devolved into a field battle with her recruits to her resistance group and they did indeed have Sol weaponry. Not that it helped as much as they were hoping. I think they were under the impression that we had weapons capable of dealing with things like Reika or Haziel. Unfortunately for them, we kinda don’t. We don’t know how widespread Daesta’s little resistance group actually was, though Daesta is dead now.

Sarnai has gained ten pounds since Ankathi started possessing her for dinner and she’s very self conscious about it. Though honestly she was a twig so it’s probably healthier for her at this point anyways.

Alexander put in a request to go to Sol whenever there is an opening, planar activity has gone rampant down there and is causing penta-intersections as a byproduct of some of the weapons and spells being used. He’s curious to see how these things interact before they die down if he can. As your advisor I’m going to say this is maybe one of those requests we deny.

I can say from experience that caffeine has no effect on silnians. Wildly different anatomies and extreme resistance to chemical influence. Bug spray has probably been used on them many many times. Vasia fed me antifreeze and told me it was a ‘juice’ as an experiment. So for future reference, don’t try to use poison against Valdir, it won’t work unless you have some extremely aggressive and potent stuff. Though at that point you might as well just be trying to shove a grenade into their mouths. So upside, pretty much immune to everything. Downside, immune to all drugs and alcohol. Which I reaaaally miss sometimes.

As for the Que research, we kind of have all of it. It’s furry and has a long snake tail. Though that being said, I’m not sure why we’re all fluffy. Que just likes fur I guess.

We may be victims of Que’s independence or it just doesn’t mass spread all knowledge so easily because I don’t really do psionics even if you do. None of the drones utilize it either. Though to another note, we did get some crazies to take the dip in the pool for science. They did actually retain a lot of their individuality and personality though I think a lot of our new recruits were scientific “donations” from Faelyn.

The pools acknowledge me as a queen, only the Que one acknowledges me as it’s own queen. Though it’s a bit murky to say how much that matters. Since it’s all descended from the Valdir silnian it’s sort of one big family, I’m not even sure how much pools from different silnians would really bicker with each other if at all. So with concerns of someone not amicable to us taking over one of them…I’m not sure how that even works. I don’t think I can intentionally harm Azilath for example without an override from the mothership. As for telling it to make you king, doesn’t quite take instructions and input that well. I still can’t even get it to stop consuming people with essentia and turning them to goop every now and then, it just does whatever it wants. This comes back around to the bit where it’s really just an adaptive but programmed entity.

As for Que’s infrastructure, I would say not too bad really. The place was never blown up or anything, just overrun by bitey things. Might need to replace a lot of windows and doors but the walls and building foundations are fine.

I was young for a drow and I didn’t really have a proper career, I just kind of worked as a server.

Oh hey Zanin’s here, have fun with that one.

Anyways, Seiyomi points out he doesn’t just magically alter the reality of information against the Revenants. He can try to keep certain things obscured and misleading but they’re headed to Sol and he’s…not. So he can’t just DM them misinformation and make them believe it or anything. Though currently he’s at work seeing about the phylactery trap but he warns that this particular group of people can likely survive ‘somewhere dangerous’. Since they specialize in dictating when and where the engagements will take place.

The yelay aren’t terribly suited to anything we’ve found so far, but y’know…terraforming. Or just throw the yelay into the pool and adapt them as we see fit. That or hand them over to Koura cures whose parasite might fix them up to survive on Koura as it keeps doing for others.

For terraforming year zero moon…depends on the method. If 40th day does it, very expensive and very difficult but not like…craaazy hard. Alnae and Shetou have already been doing stuff like this but it’s a long and difficult process. If I do it…well it might not be exaaactly solian but it’ll be reasonably close.

At the vivarium we turned on the security systems again to see what the makers are making. They have since banned anyone from entering the chambers at all other then maaaaybe Cassir or myself. The metal one is just kind of making the regular traps and stuff, the original is making something very large and spiky. It’s actually kind of an odd timing for them to suddenly start building like they’re getting ready for war. The staff wrote “wild crackpot theory” next to the note on this one but the makers might be able to somehow sense the incoming Nelta invasion and are prepping for war out of instinct.

We’ve established contact with one of the Revenant’s theoretical higher ups on Thenica though we haven’t quite tracked down their base of operations. Judging by their previous work we have strong reason to believe they don’t actually have a formal one. They seem to be very good on the move and blending into other places as we witnessed on Enohas.

Getting Vaeri to Nelta will take a bit of time. Infiltrating them back in their half of the galaxy seems plausible but the active fleet here in our half is a great deal more likely to notice she is in fact from Sol. So to confirm, you do know this is something of a year long trip right? Unless VSEC sends back Riley to pick her up or something. We could try to find a path to Nelta space through the Warrens though but that is, as we’ve seen, a sometimes erratic proposition.

We’ve begun work on finding as much as we can about the Revenants to infiltrate them though its taking awhile since all of society is breaking down on Sol. Most of the op details will be covered by Satsujin.

We’ve landed and set up a base for operations on SV3, Nah and the Closing Statement have advanced to Thenica to try and hunt for the Revenants. So our forces are a little split trying to get this done as fast as possible, the longer we’re here the more vulnerable we’ll become.

I don’t think VSEC understood what has become of Sol since the colony rush began and the second invasion. The team’s morale is bordering on catatonic just seeing it and coming to the realization that the entire system looks like this now. Throughout the war Nelta has been using nuclear weapons and Sol has been opening pandem rifts left and right that is flooding these planets with planar interactions on a wild scale. I can see a volcano from where I’m calling from and it was definitely not there before, and even if it was it definitely wasn’t spewing mana rich lava that explodes on contact with anything other then rocks. Notably, oxygen is not a rock.

Primary objective of transporting Salied went south fast. Once she had one of her ‘episodes’ we started drawing a lot of attention. Half the expedition is dead. The entire goethe support clan is gone, Cassir is alone now and all other cultists are gone. She almost died but got a little lucky but now she’s without her cult support and is dramatically weakened.

Secondary objective of establishing contact with the Revenants is sketchy. Xanis managed to establish contact but on their terms, he hasn’t found the location of their base but at least been able to talk to them. So far no one’s dead yet but Xanis suspects we’ve only scratched the surface of what the Revenants really are. The group we are particularly wary of are the ones who don’t like the Gauntlet. His argument being that if the Phantoms are aligned with a group like Seiyomi and the Black Library, the Revenants might have a similar network of secretive organizations and allies. We’ve also learned a little bit more about their organization due to his insight but we’re a long ways from having a handle on the threat they represent. In my opinion, it feels like you’ve known about these guys for literally years and only just now started actually paying attention to them. We’re just getting the groundwork started for what could turn into a war between two secret societies in the middle of an apocalypse. However, as VSEC, we’re kind of in the clear as long as we don’t send any help to the other directors to deal with the Revenants. Sketchy position and the decision is up to you but that’s the report I have.

We’re still looking for their place of operations, it doesn’t help that it should be nowhere near where we found one of their members. It stands to reason they have more then one and its not one big fancy lair but a lot of smaller hideouts and a very mobile group of people. The only data we have after all comes from Sarden, whose identity was compromised and she might not have been allowed to return to any sort of actual HQ so easily.

Tertiary objective of contacting previous Sol powers has been difficult. We were able to send out comms and make contact with Kaylen in particular along with a few other former higher ups. They’re all not doing well. Kaylen herself is confined to a medical bed after being exposed to everything ranging from radiation to bioweapons. No one is sure if she’ll live at this point.

We’ve made contact with House Sharen as well, they seem to be doing a lot better since they’re holding fleet position over New Kaifen still. I gave them some of our radar reports so they could maybe move a bit more freely, we’ll see if they do anything with that.

We can’t contact Valdir since they never had great comms tech in the first place, not sure how they’re doing. Though the alliance between Vloz’Khress and House Song is apparently much more stable now. Kharla and Song Yi still have a bit of animosity between them just on principle but given the situation they’ve both been able to put it aside to deal with later, now that some time has passed and they have operated with each other for this long it looks like it’s become the new normal for them and they’re getting more efficient. Though both of their holdings are still in ruins after this prolonged war.

We also sent out general comm calls just to see who would pick up and what is going on. Found out the beholder has a fairly large population backing him now and a couple dragons also have their own sub factions under them now. So basically the Phantoms are doing really well if you just add their numbers to “Phantoms” instead of individual entries.

Contact with Echo Seven reveals that she…or it? She still looks kind of like you so I dunno. Echo Seven has assimilated the remains of Guardian that Orochi didn’t manage to eat already. They’ve been moving from one ruined city to the next to replicate as much as they can and get a standing force back together. I’ve also learned that the Echo Consensus Alpha Prime is on the way, their title for what we could consider top commander of the consensus. They’re after Arkaric, I’m not sure if I’m at liberty to divulge classified information to her on Arkaric but I heavily implied that she should be careful. She recognizes the threat Orochi represents to the entire galaxy and the Exerlus especially, and knows that Arkaric is in some way responsible for its creation. She does not know about the Phantoms. Even if they are taking it seriously by deploying the entire Echo Consensus to Sol just to kill one guy and his ship, I’m not sure they realize how many angles they’re going to be hit from once they start that fight.

Revenant strike team is inbound on Sol after they got there from Jamalia.

So the plan to find a full time advisor hit a peculiar abnormality in the hiring process. I kind of think someone leaked the hiring criteria because of the various applicants one stood out well enough to move through the process quite easily. Then we actually met them aaaand…

Hi there! I am good at paperwork don’t worry about it. Anyways first off we have…me reading through all your classified files to figure out what is going on around here. These are great. Laura showed me the best ones.

…and somehow this crazy vampire showed up. I’m not actually sure why she would apply for this kind of position.

I mean I’m immediately the #2 of an entire space station and make six figures with no previous experience. All I gotta do is make phone calls to make sure boss lady reads things, easy money.

Really its more of a secretarial position than being Vice Commander or anything like that, I explained this to you before.

Hahahaha, suuuure.. I already tested if people would obey random orders I sent out as long as I put Lancaster’s stamp on them. Turns out no one double checks with her since she’s too busy for such menial phone calls. Which makes me second in command.

Trust me I noticed. You may be right that they don’t double check that stamp often enough but I am pretty sure Lancaster wouldn’t ask me to send her nudes.

Still waiting for those by the way.

. . . This is the applicant who had special forces training, eight years of company management, three trophies – basically medals but from vampire clans instead of a formal military – and is a member of the Thousand Legends, she even came recommended from other members of the legends including Satsujin-

Correction, I verified her presence at the SR3 invasion and agreed that it is likely she has specialist training. I did not actually say ‘recommend’. Honestly she’d be better off in VSEC than at a desk job.

Anyways, before we get caught up in who said what and whose records have gone missing – you are both dismissed. I need to finish briefing with the commander.

… Can she dismiss us like that?

Stick around and find out. You can go out the door or out the window, either way you won’t be here ten seconds from now.

Anyways Somnus AI project is complete. It’s called “Aryn”. It can control the whole station. Oh she’s not on the station anymore, well AI project is underway and functional enough but not a true AI ya-da-ya-da. Talk to Echo Seven if you want insight into how real Ai gets made. Though I’ll sum it up for you, powerful computers glitch out and develop self awareness and somehow essentia sparks and boom. Life form. One of the key elements to the birth of a soul is the life form becoming self dependent for its decision making abilities. So basically, it’s not alive until it goes rogue and can defy or rewrite its own code under its own volition. So 50/50 if a true AI decides ‘kill all humans’ or ‘this is a cushy gig’.

Satsujin is on the lookout for Phantoms and yes barring the obvious presences it is still worth noting that they control the station on the other side of the Rift so they’re mostly over there.

Eleazor has been relocated as requested.

The Milenkosi is technically functional once again, if a bit sticky. Larazja got some control over the silnian drones that were running rampant.

Zenaka is for the most part under control ever since we took over more of the orbital establishments. The war is still ongoing but from here you’d have to royally fuck up, like introducing silnians to the planet, to actually enter into a failure state. However, it is a large population of radical personality swings and the drow are still lurking about. They’re good at being sneaky. If you show any weakness they’ll pounce on it, but in the meantime the real problem is the Zenakan conflicts as not all of them agree with how things are going. Fortunately, the aethernet is down and that buys you time before the house proper gets word of how things turned out. Ideally you want to secure the system against any further invasion more than you want to wipe out the last of the infiltrators. Because if Kharla or Kiel’nada show up then you’re in real trouble. So keeping them busy and unmotivated to do so will probably be key to holding onto Zenaka in the long term. Though the Phantoms are currently working on that for you.

As for having Xanis and Eleazor work on crime fighting, I’ll let them know to look into it. Though Satsujin was going to tell you that the real problem is just that criminals tend to gravitate towards strong powers. Kyven himself was a big problem but his legion of goons were just along for the ride. So preventing another Kyven is a matter of making sure people don’t struggle through life and gain a very specific set of skills gathered over a long career and then develop a vendetta against ‘the man’. Xanis is in transport at the moment.

The economy of Koura has been recovering ever since the flood of refugees were cut off, however they outnumber the capabilities of the current infrastructure which has led to the rise of civilian founded towns but also gangsters like Zhuan being able to gain major footholds. There is a current trend of people really wanting to leave the city because they found out the Nelta attack is still incoming once they stop being stuck dealing with Jamalia. They assume Koura will be the main target if Somnus falls and that if they’re further away maybe they can hide under a rock for a little while.

Khymin’s back in his workshop working at Golbotics once again. I don’t know who that is. In other company news, Koura Logging is doing well with a significant surge in sales as people get settled in and now want to build small towns and such outside of Koura. Which involves a lot of lumber, and we have the only company who has really been set up with the infrastructure to immediately supply the somewhat massive demand. While a lot of it is kind of messy in the books as not all the refugees have that much money, and money is sort of broken as a whole right now, it is still better that they start building themselves places to stay sooner rather than later so loans have been made easy. Since technically the longer they’re homeless the more they cost us anyways.

So the downside to us not having economic control over everything right now is that the independent settlements around Koura and Orchard have a lot more freedoms and reduces the overall influence Somnus puts on the system. We’ve long exceeded the maximum population that Koura can support and so it’s just a bunch of temporary shelters on the outskirts that are forming into new towns. Those towns are still under VSEC control since we have most of the guns and lay claim to the planet, but their more independent nature is still notable. In the theme of keeping an eye out for weird things popping up that might be a problem, remember that group of Shetou vigilantes we had fighting the increase in crime? They now control one of the largest settlements with their own police system and government system instead of relying on VSEC.Not that they’re hostile or anything, they still pay taxes, but its just a bit of foreshadowing that unless we get economic control back in hand people will be forced to make independent systems just because ours are about three miles past the breaking point. As a result, these are the places where things like another Kyven could more easily slip through the network before we realize they’re there.

If you need me, I’m going out exploring the place.

As ordered I gave Barachiel’s corpse to Eden for surgical reference. She misunderstood the assignment, apparently the directions were unclear. As a result, Eden instead used Barachiel for spare parts rather than reference. So Reika now registers to any forensic investigator as an angel. Though she got her arm and eye back as a result, she’s been comically unstable now that she has regained depth perception. As if she gets vertigo from looking down hallways. We’re still looking to what effects this will have on her in the long term though as she’s technically still human just a bit of a chimera at this point.

As for the Revenants situation, they’ve disappeared once again though we have a hole in the roof of the colony. Fortunately it’s a shielded colony because of giant monsters not atmosphere issues, and Haziel has the giant monsters under control. So…long as a giant bird doesn’t swoop in to eat a merkas we should be fine. Barachiel is dead obviously, Valadeus is badly injured, Reika, Eerihild, and Akuhiko also did not fare well though we don’t know what they did with Aku. Kanika mentioned that even though she knew they would be here, Faelyn was unable to track any ships that were out of the ordinary. So we’re not sure if they came in with the 40th day or our own carrier of refugee shipments or if they have an advanced stealth ship. Both are plausible but the reason it’s so concerning is we can’t tell if they likely even left the planet or not. With the recent influx of refugees from the war, there’s actually a lot of places they could hide within Jamalia. Specifically Jamalia because as long as they are in here, Haziel definitely can’t keep an eye out for them.

Moot point though, as Haziel has left with Kanika for the time being for that whole thing with Eliza they had been working out.

As for tracking Aku, Aryns currently dramatically out of Aethernet range since she’s on a stealth ship that can’t turn its full range of aethernet abilities on without losing it’s stealth properties. She’s about to be a lot less useful to the whole of the faction since Sethis has a thing about not getting ambushed by something like Kyven or the Revenants again. He seems to dislike being ambushed, the tradeoff though is true stealth means a lack of projection as well. So now Aryns just a ghost unless otherwise ordered to support the alliance. Though VSEC has something for us on that since they were the ones to get trackers on Sarden. While the trackers were eventually destroyed, which could have been because they were found or simply because Sarden had to do laundry, they still gave us an overall heading that the Revenants are based out of Thenica. If they did take Aku offworld with them that’s a good place to start, if not than they might be using him for information about Jamalia while they lurk here.

As for Ankathi, now there’s another sub group that is on ‘team Ankathi’ within the knights spearheaded by Sarnai. Largely because…it’s literally a goddess. So I would say your idea to have her as a patron is working out, but on the caveat that we hadn’t even brought it up with her. Though Ankathi herself remains somewhat difficult to work with, taking over Sarnai’s body and then traveling around the city to poke at the modern age of technology. Specifically, cuisine. Medieval food wasn’t that great I suppose and now Sarnai is complaining that she’s possessed by an entity that is going to make her get fat.

Sarnai’s knights are called The Fate’s Chosen and dress in a concerning amount of dark colors. Ankathi has arranged for them to have a tournament to see who is most worthy of being her favored enforcer. Basically she keeps doing whatever she wants and we kind of benefit from being buddies with her but I’m pretty sure she sees us as minions. Vasia said that if she was actually present in the middle planes as we know them, she probably would have tried to take over a planet by now.

I’ve managed to get them off the Carrier for Lancaster at the least. Though this was accomplished by me walking off the Carrier and leaving the door open. I can send them pretty far but if I don’t specify the distance they seem to come back once they realize they’re going to run out of energy to go any further. I can make them go further by giving them supplies. Speaking of which the pools need more biomass, they are the primary food source for the drones and this planet is a barren wasteland. So it’s just being consumed without any further production.

As for connecting the synapses, I can do that one. We parked the freighter near Que and now they are kind of interconnected using me. If I’m within range of both, they both accept me as the queen…which is such a weird thing to say.

Also I’m pretty sure that succubus could fuck a cat if you gave her a chance to try. Succubi are infamous for their…compatibility with practically anything. Geneticists blame them for the vast range of physical traits that demons exhibit. Actually Vasia is apparently trying to talk Zanin into crossbreeding with an alien just to see if it’ll work.

Speaking of her, Zanin only uses demon magic so she doesn’t have corruption.

Seiyomi has been helpful in finding some of the drow ambushes thus far but there are a lot of Vloz around the planet not even directly focusing on VSEC’s efforts to take the planet. So they’re harder to catch, they’re instead infiltrating deeper into Zenaka to create powerbases they can launch operations with from a back room somewhere.

Cassir has taken over the further militarization of the cult, extending the training to more than just the older members.

40th Day, with the shipments of refugees now having nowhere to go has seen a large loss of profit. Though otherwise they’ve sent the survey ships here to Que’s moons to take a look around for anything of use. One of them has primitive biomass on it at least, not quite at the stage of development with forests or anything but a lot of bushes here and there. Not many signs of animal life though.

Vasia is still at Jamalia learning necrocarnum from Renjala…that’s a lot of names that end with an ‘A’. So she’s a little less productive than usual. Salied’s last memory was from SV3 during the invasion. She knows she was mostly around a specific city with her friends at the time it all happened. If we want to take her back there she’ll need the fleet to protect her. Approaching Sol is difficult. Pirates on the way to Sol, then Nelta, then actually landing in a warzone between aliens and everyone else. Not to mention that we believe the Revenant’s main base is in Sol, not a hard conclusion to reach but still relevant given you consider yourself to be on their hitlist. Salied is worse than a civilian, she goes randomly catatonic and screams nonsense. So…prone to random immobilization and giving away her position. We’d probably need to send the entire fleet, cult, and ask the Knights for additional help to get her there and back alive. A civilian could just rely on Nah division and being sneaky but she’s distinctly not capable of that, so we’d need to brute force our way into SV3.

Also the headhunt for a misinformation specialist has hit two snags at once. First off being that it’s not New Age’s specialty and secondly that the primary headhunter for the alliance and the one who would have the information we need about the matter just went offline due to the stealth battleship thing that Nah is still working out the fine details and kinks of. So….we’re working on it.

New Horizon’s expanded its shipyard due to increased demand so…yeah that. Moving on, Vasia pointed out that asking the Vivarium to do cloning is just not going to get useful results and is a waste of money though if you must try then you’ll need to go pick up the samples from Enohas and get it back to the Vivarium somehow as they can’t just casually go over there due to the pirates on the frontier. Though I suppose the Goethe clan is on the way there anyways. As your advisor’s advisor I’m overruling you on that…she told me to do it. Again, pirates. If you want to move between systems right now you need a fleet escort and the whole fleet is at Zenaka right now. The Milenkosi worked out because its a carrier and they probably didn’t realize how vulnerable it was. Though the starship the vampires hang out is not going to cut it.

With the main offices moved onto the stealth battleship and Aryn taking command of it, we’ve had to disable a lot of the systems that allowed Aryn to support the rest of the alliance in order to maintain the stealth systems. So you’ll have to figure out what you actually want us to work on, at best we can move to operate in areas that need us but we can no longer have Aryn providing mass support through bootleg aethernet she made otherwise it entirely defeats the stealth systems of the ship. We could also just turn the stealth systems off and park next to Somnus, though people are bound to notice and take interest in what the ship is if we just leave it turned on all the time.

Headhunting operations are suspended at the moment in particular since Aryn is busy moving into the ship and can’t exert her usual skillset in this regard for the aforementioned reasons.

Stories of Lore 28

It’s not my fault when things explode, not my style. Though you guys seem to cause explosions to just gravitate towards you.

As for using the Winter to clear out the pirates, yeah they don’t really appear where it would be most convenient for you to just ‘clear that out’. They’ll lie low until you deploy elsewhere and then come back, they tend to be very opportunistic. Case in point, as soon as you sent everyone to Zenaka – suddenly Kyven. The real issue you’re having is out in the travel paths is where they can intercept unguarded ships.

I’ve been having a spectacular time reading all these classified files to figure out what is going on around here. To which end I feel I should point out if you keep trying to engage Nelta in diplomacy I’m going to own this station by the end of the year at best. Realistically a month or two. It appears the phantoms tend not to fuck around with this. I feel your Renjala already cautioned your fish in a tube about this very problem.

So I sent the starship out to talk to Nelta. Two hours later the radar techs detected a titan-class battleship was en route to the station from Moncayo. I’m sure it’s here just to help us fend off Nelta.

Nah I’m just messing with you, the starship was blown up by the Nelta fleet. They’re still not terribly open to talking it appears, can’t imagine why.

As for the station security, Aryn points out the answer is ‘kind of yes technically no’. Something something computers something something reactive something something found more remnants of Jicho sneaking around the systems and still chasing after those.

I had the security forces arrest Khymin even though he had reported in himself to see how everything’s going, apparently he didn’t know you were mad at him now. The interrogation reveals that he generally acted in your favor though not so much as to give him no excuse to avoid immediate death at the hands of Kyven who he kind of thought was already dead so never got around to looking back into that whole plot as he got carried away working on golems. I gather he’s always been a bit of an eccentric and aloof character. So…airlock?

The Selona Cybernetics arrived and so I’ll see you once you wake up from surgery.

Also we can’t build the Zenaka space station, finances.

We’re at the point I can’t tell if I’ve read some of these comments twice this month or if you said it before in a previous update. Though I’ve had it submitted to Villena to make sure Enohas is registered as our capital world.

Also our version of triple checking for Nelta presence is asking Haziel three times, so now she is annoyed that I keep asking.

Nelta aside, the Revenants are here and that’s a whole thing that happened. We’ll all pretend Valadeus didn’t give you a nudge nudge wink wink when Barachiel was the only major Phantom to die in the raid. That aside, Akuhiko is missing and we think they took him, Eerihild is fine more or less but cranky, Reika is a torso on life support, and you are wandering around Eden after getting curb stomped by Sarden. All in all, not that bad actually. Though the protective dome around Jamalia’s original colony was quite literally torn off by a giant metal dragon and the street below the hole is practically a crater.

Ankathi is currently in a power struggle with Kanika as they argue over who is the biggest baddest bitch this side of the galactic core. The rival candidate, Haziel, went to go get ice cream while they argued about it and Vasia went back to studying necrocarnum.

In regards to Ankathi as a religion, Alexander does most of the quantifying on what she is whether or not she likes science more than faith. Speaking of which he found the most important method of classifying a true deity. The main element is that gods have weird rules from pandem binds, the more they bind with the more powerful they can become as basically all of their binds end up sending their power to the deity in question rather than a sort of back and forth unless said deity opts to enact a conduit of some sort. The effect can be replicated through brute force but it has a problem of being dramatically less efficient and taking a lot more upkeep for a non-deity.

Abacus man’s second theory is that Ankathi’s domain is actually determined by what abilities her personal plane gives her, and that plane is a manifestation of her creation by mixing planar rifts until it came into existence. This has another important part of the theory, Alexander thinks the other domain realms might still exist but just have no one controlling them. Meaning should sufficiently powerful pandem casters gain the ability to find and use them they might take over the vacant positions the old pantheon left behind. As your advisor I will state that this is one of his wild excitable theories, and this is also the kind of thing we should be reaaaally careful on talking to anyone else about. Which leads to a problem, Vasia was the first person he told while they were just talking shop in the cafeteria since she humors his ramblings. I’m sure this will in no way come back to haunt us.

Theory number three is actually a somewhat bold statement by Kanika in that she has figured out a measure of how Ankathi’s powers work. Ankathi can see fate but fate has been measured now to be a combination of intent and the odds of chance. Something about the level of convoluted that Arkaric’s plans can reach renders him able to operate outside the bounds of Ankathi’s powers. Haziel said ‘I told you so’. Something something god of our own making, great peril, chaos incarnate, ya-da-ya-da. Alexander says Ankathi’s abilities are still beyond impressive for any one person to have, but the fallacy of them in the modern era stems from the advancements of civilization. As her powers are largely planar and during the reign of gods such things were much more important, an entity like Arkaric exists based on math which is arguably a step higher. Though all this is an ongoing argument between Kanika and Ankathi with a lot of weird factors in play. I’m just giving a summary of where we’re at now. We’ll see how it all shakes out.

As for inviting Ankathi to be a master of the order her response was to ask what your title is, and obviously Kanika is pulling to offer her a position in the Phantoms council as well to compete with you. So far no one is making any progress, Vasia pointed out this has happened many times in the past. She doesn’t really join teams very easily ever since she was ‘advised to retire’ by the last queen she served under. Ever since then she has just been wandering around causing problems for everyone equally. I also asked Vasia if they had any other ancient friends we should know about. She said she’s unaware of any that are still alive and important. Though one of them was just as vicious as Ankathi and probably just as problematic if she were to pop back up again, of specific interest because they’ve hibernated for centuries once before so it’s not unreasonable to assume they could still be out there somewhere.

When it came to how she navigated all the temporary planes her response boils down to “just do it”. Worth remembering she is the most advanced pandem caster known to Sol history, for her walking through them all was at least feasible. We’re still down here trying to figure out how the fuck Halaestra survives the void. It’s like that, just a thousand times crazier.

Speaking of Halaestra, she’s been working on teaching the knights how to do planar boarding action. It turns out that it’s really hard, so progress ongoing on that one.

Salvage operations on Nelta ships are underway and as for sending the First Lance to Zenaka…Reika’s kind of…not in a state to go anywhere. I don’t think she’s going to walk this one off.

For some reason my notes today say that Vasia wants me to buy ‘the most uncomfortable kitty carrier you can find on wish’. I’m…not sure what that is about but I assume it does not bode well for you. She is also with the knights currently so she should be as safe as she’s realistically getting…except for the whole part where that is exactly where the Revenants are now as well.

I’m starting to get nervous about holding this position now.

As for the carrier, it turns out I can control the creatures. Please do not read the mission report, just take my word for it. Also new problem…they won’t leave me alone. I can’t leave the carrier because they get mad if I don’t stay nearby. I am making this report while they are still CRAWLING ALL OVER ME. They aren’t fluffy and cute like you and I’m kind of nervous about how many teeth, claws, and spikes they have. Though holy shit if they aren’t good back scratchers.

As for Vasia’s plans, yes that would work on Que’s moon but the expenses are still the issue at the moment. Net worth aside mr money bags, it still effects any ability to push for new construction projects. I did have the old smaller ships sold off though.

Also Adryn was never on the list of people who knew you were a cat. It’s just me, vasia, and Cassir. Peter doesn’t even know. I suppose Seiyomi does now too. I think the only reason I know is because you’re my kitty hehe. Yes I read that part of the report on the ichor. I’m sorry don’t cut my pay I was just joking!

As for the rest of his strike team, no they still work for us. Just shifted squad leader to the second in command and so on.

Speaking of Cassir, she’s hanging around the Koura temple and Somnus to maintain affairs there and be on hand if anyone needs her.

40th Day has slowed the shipment of refugees leaving most of them stranded on Moncayo which is pretty full at the moment. Apparently They’re starting a new city in Cayetano to place some of these people.

Also yes you took Salied out and about on Somnus before with rather dull results. However, she’s only back to normal while at the Ash colony. If removed from its ‘protective’ atmosphere she becomes…Salied again.

Also Renjala sent a knight to ‘help you out’. He put the quotations in not me, and was snickering last I was on a call with him. Oh he sent a succubus…I see…one of those kinds of gifts. I mean I guess they wouldn’t mind that you’re a cat but…I’m just not going to ask any more questions. Enjoy your present and don’t get anywhere near the synapse until you’re done.

Allison has been added to the main roster at the ‘recommendation’ of Aryn.

Posted on December 12, 2021

Stories of Lore 20

Welcome back, this is definitely an improvement from talking to Wolum over a comm to talk to Renjala to contact Irae to then speak to you.

We already have 40th day for exploration based out of Somnus, creating a second company for it would be a little repetitive. Though investing in 40th day as we did the shipyards might be worthwhile given how fast and empty space can be sometimes.

Khymin is still making progress on the battle-bots thing at the moment, we could switch him to working on transportation though that would basically require him to start over. The issue with more civilian transportation matters is their tendency to not follow incredibly specific predefined paths through open space like the golem cruiser. That and people sometimes get nervous to see golems operating things like trains with no sapient there to pull the brake if need be.

Hylavi is back to her usual business of roaming the streets and keeping an eye on Laura though normalcy is questionable around here. That and Laura is off on yet another mysterious adventure that involves an awful lot of construction beyond the city limits of Koura that has Hylavi constantly trying to figure out what that woman is up to once again.

Koura cures has made some headway in being able to define when the parasite removal is necessary to insure favorable results. The severity of the mutations the parasite needs to make has been getting closer to being precisely measured, as some of the things it needs to ‘fix’ are not necessarily things we would really think about. The more we are able to define its mutational plan the more effectively we can determine when the thing needs to be removed.

We’ve sent the cruisers commanded by Koda out to FO-234 to assist the Nomads after their initial strike. Travel time ongoing. The fleet that went a bit too far has been reintegrated into the Somnus standing fleets.

Kar’Soluth station has been taken over more fully. I suppose it’s best use would be something that needs to be covert since there isn’t much resource gathering to be done out there. Pirates might like the area if you wanted to create some sort of seedier port than Somnus, it is on a major route to Shetou’s first major colony though at that point it risks them getting it targeted by Shetou.

Things on Enohas have escalated dramatically out of seemingly nowhere. Apparently Kanika paid a visit and ‘activated’ the wolf queen who is now assisting Reika in “commandeering” the planet. Basically the phantoms be meddling again, though I suppose this works to our advantage even if not the most ethical means of subjugation. Not the worst either though, it’s just Haziel exploiting that primitives will easily consider her a deity given her specific range of abilities.

In the meantime, more phantom nonsense. It didn’t take long after our return for Valadeus to get us our ‘starter pack’ as he seems fond of referring to it as. We have five hundred new squires, seven hundred slaves, and he gave us one of his assault carriers. Which doesn’t do so much the large fleet deployments, but is made to house armies and drop them aggressively onto other planets. It’s also quite roomy. He also sent a new champion to help make use of all these resources. Apparently he was initially going to send you a super hot submissive succubus wet dream but you kept mentioning you didn’t want to be a traditional warlock coven. So instead he sent “the weirdest candidate I have“.

Now that Valadeus is back in frontier space, we’re able to get some actual information from the phantoms. So regarding your recent curiosities, yes Nila got her wish while we were away and Eli Whately has returned. That’s…a whole thing going on in Thenica right now because apparently he was decapitated and left buried this whole time. Nila’s wish allowed her to find where it was buried and rebuild his body, which started a vengeance fueled rampage which has left a vague but menacing organization that tried to control him in shambles as all four of the Whately’s blew them the fuck up. Which everyone noticed, because it was a part of Alnae’s COA teams. Apparently they had something very similar to what we have with New Age and they tried to leverage something or other to get Whately to do what they wanted. He took exception to that and now a lot of formerly classified information is leaking everywhere while four maniacs with guns murder everyone involved in the most over-the-top warpath we’ve seen in years. They assaulted a military base on motorcycles, knocked over a skyscraper onto another building while standing on it, dropped a battleship from orbit onto an Alnae councilor’s head, and stood around posing in such manners that all media coverage of them looks absolutely awesome. Then Arkaric set another farm on fire. Amusingly though, they were our motorcycles. Apparently Arkaric likes the panzercycle and the Whately’s are nothing if not flashy when they get going. Something something, wasteland warrior, something something, cameo.

So Alnae could be doing better, though this all resulted in some odd politics. Kaylen apparently didn’t know about that agency even though she is basically the military dictator of Alnae by martial law for the time being. There were more things going on there then just pissing off one really dangerous group of people, including several warcrimes involving captured Shetou prisoners, experiments with Jaal’Darya plagues to try and find a cure that needed ‘research samples’ that are honestly not progressing faster than Jaal’Darya can just make a whole new plague but the arms race goes on none the less. Torturing high value prisoners for information, capturing sahad anomalies and locking them away for study, they were kidnapping Valdir for experimentation to find new weapons technology to deal with their swarms, and other such illicit nonsense. This provoked Kaylen into doubling down on that whole military dictator thing. She has several councilors attending a meeting soon which doesn’t look good for them.

I’m pretty sure the Phantoms knew Nila’s wish would cause this to happen.

Moving on, the bar doesn’t have drinks you could really enjoy though it does have an ooze bath spa you might like. Along with other strange amenities suited for such bizarre creatures.

As for ‘what the fuck is going on’, the invasion thing Valadeus mentioned is the major plot. Though the toes not to step on involve…a lot of odds and ends, they said they’ll tell you if you’re up to something they don’t like. However, there is ‘one last meeting’ before the invasion about to take place. You’ve been invited to go. It will be held aboard The Raven II super carrier in deep space. They did mention to use the rear facing hangar entrance and arrive via nothing larger than a starship as the hangar is also the meeting room due to the abnormal size of some of its attendees. So get dropped off, ship goes back out to hovering in space and picks you up when its time to go so that the hangar has enough room for all these damned dragons. You’re not allowed to bring any guests, including aboard the ship that takes you there. I would caution that you would be going alone into the den of the system’s most powerful necrocarnate who can easily wipe your ass out, but it’s not as if the invitation is all that suspicious at this point. Though as advisor, I feel inclined to point it out.

Meanwhile, the gateway at Moncayo has finished construction. We gettin paaaaid. Just in time too, all those new recruits Valadeus just sent us are probably going to mean we need to do some infrastructure upgrades. Alexander is also now freed up for any other shenanigans you might need. Though it should be noted all those new members are actually with him at the Moncayo Chapter house…due to the gate just being finished there. Most of Valadeus new staff to assist us was in Sol so that gateway happened to be the fastest way to get them to the frontier. He also isn’t too interested in being Eden’s test subject. Pointing out that necrosi natives kind of need necrosi to be their home plane or they’re just corpses, that and he is a pandem scholar. Being native to the elemental plane wouldn’t help him all that much since he’s still out there doing planar shenanigans with literally every plane he can find. I believe his words were “I’m no casual practitioner. I am the Knight-Chancellor.”

I hear your journey into the rift was…frightfully boring. Mostly because the entity and Eden spent the whole time chatting between themselves in that silent telepathic manner that leaves everyone else out of everything. Though it seems the entity would be fine with allowing Eden to pass, if anyone else is on the ship with her they will not be allowed. It’s very adamant about this whole thing. So the bad news is, Valadeus says to just shoot the thing if it’s not going to cooperate.

Oh no you don’t. It is just sitting there minding its own business and even allowing us to approach it. Its consciousness is vast beyond our recognition and so there is a cultural divide going on, but at least it is trying it’s best to communicate with us. Running up and shooting it would be just wrong.

I know with absolute certainty you are not saying that for any reason involving ethics.

Obviously, shooting it with a battleship would just be stupid if it’s going to let us walk right up to it again and again without suspicion or understanding of our technology. This is the easiest super charged sahad entity we’ll ever have a chance to just outright capture and shove in a box, since it can change it’s size I imagine I can keep it in a reasonable containment facility. Give me command of the operation and I’ll make sure it moves out of our way so we can explore the rift more fully. Your goals will be met, and I’ll get my research subject. Everyone is happy.

We should check with Lancaster before we just start abducting the only alien within throwing distance of Auwana who we’ve had nothing but frustrating but amicable relations with thus far. We’ve already seen that we can get past it with a little bit of creativity.

You have two months to deal with it before I tell Kanika that you’re not dealing with it and she assigns the mission to me.

Wait since when are you a phantom?

I’m not, but I am friends with Eliza now and she works for Kanika who is in charge of Valadeus and thus Renjala. I’ve been waiting to capture this thing for almost two years now while you guys all just poke at it again and again with progressively more elaborate pokes. I will sell you all out to Kanika to finally get this thing done.

…Whose side are you on?

Ilex’s. He has assigned me to discover the mysteries of Sahad. I will do so. It is the nature of our labs to operate above and beyond the means of authority, it’s why we exist. Even if that means cutting down authority figures to get what we need.

Okay you need to chill…please. You scare me enough already.

Moooving on. Yoshai is wandering around the mansion playing with all the ethi swords he bought from Laura to see which one he likes the most. He still seems to be doing great compared to First Officer Riley. Apparently along the ride here he was talking to Setani about such things, who told him that he should talk to Vanjin since she’s the equipment expert of Nah Division and knows where to find all the good stuff. The good stuff apparently comes from Laura.

Eden’s avatars are being spread around our operations since…well she-it-them-they-thing can just do that. They’ve been wandering around Somnus in particular just looking at everything we’ve built there. Then they met Echo Seven, both proceeded to probe each other so hard I think that was some sort of alien sex we just saw. Though despite common worry, Echo Seven doesn’t really seem all that concerned with Eden being a silnian byproduct. Just another oddity to scan. The exerlus are not that confrontational, and Eden is several leagues behind true silnians who conquer worlds for lunch. Literally.

Here we go traveling again. While we’re on the way, on to other matters. As for Qhalord, I imagine Renjala will be the best bet of finding out  what’s going on with him. I also suppose whatever the bait is, if its open enough we’ll just hear about it? Maybe? Not sure. Though I have alerted Nah Division to keep an ear out for anything involving that.

I’ve sent message to Que about our arrival but they didn’t really respond. Though they do tend to be quiet I suppose and mind their own business. We’ll be there in about a month, it’s out on the frontier.

Vasia says if you give Eden’s samples to the monster maker it will likely just make more things as usual. The Maker is not really good at assimilating new organisms for designs like silnians are. Even with it’s most recent developments in metal crafting it’s still not approaching the level of complexity that Cassir’s cybernetics are at. It just strapped metal plates onto things to replace chitin armor. So the sample will just be more construction material as far as it is concerned. At least that’s her, highly educated, opinion on the matter.

She went to find Ihaslu, the yelay have been doing quite well since she brought them here but they haven’t seen her since then due to her trip out with Lancaster’s crew. That might be why they’re doing quite well. Vasia learned a few new tricks, particularly the spell that the silnian monsters like to use that fires that white light laser thing which blows shit up. Her version of it is weaker, but she can do it now.

While she was on the return trip to see how things have been in her absence, she reconnected with Balhast and deemed him fit to follow her around full time as a bodyguard. It now knows the words yes and no, but expresses it only via nodding and shaking its head. She feels exposure to more conversations will help its mental progression, that and she just likes taking her puppy out for walkies I imagine.

Then she acquired more slaves to test if the laser changed the quality of their awakenings. Results pending. Once she got around to Salied again she noted that the original awakening shows no signs of being overwritten by it so she isn’t sure if the spell causes no difference compared to her other one or if a higher quality spell does not add context to previously exposed victims. Then she decided Salied was at least safe enough to be taken around with her to see if the social reintegration process was going well since she also has Balhast to take care of her if need be.

The other specimens of 004C projects have demonstrated similar stability to Bahlhast and some other much wilder mutations in second generation projects that Salied concocted by forcefully breeding them whenever possible. Notably, their offspring are more parasites rather than anything like the 004C creatures, though they’re not the same as the one’s native to Koura. We think the nature of the 004C creatures are producing more advanced parasites since they are being born from incarnum infused creatures instead of whatever wild animal they mutated. She has introduced some of these parasites into a few of her new test subjects to see what effect it  has. Apparently these parasites are much more…. intense than the previous ones that sort of snuck their way into people undetected. Described as “voraciously chewing through the flesh to find appropriate lodgings for themselves and spreading within the host system with a rapid and painful aggression.” Ignore the screams coming from her labs.

Cassir arrived on Jamalia just in time to partake in the much more aggressive subjugation strategies of Haziel who has taken to helping the order with their merkas project. Things are going well.

Peter thinks he’s found some weird shit. In investigating Seiyomi he’s found himself going down a spiraling rabbit hole of oddities. So one part of his reports is peculiar and he doesn’t know what it is. The name Daiheb has come up twice in his search and Nah Division isn’t sure if we should tell him or not that he’s getting into some deep shit. Seiyomi’s elusiveness likely isn’t just for fun as we might have originally expected.

Mass evacuation of Thenica is going as fast as it can. Though at these distances, transporting billions is difficult even if under evacuation conditions. This is also about to put an immediate strain on all these colonies they might not be able to logistically handle. You’ll see it next month, the economy out on the frontier is about to nosedive and the hunger afflicting Sol will be arriving as we put too many  mouths to feed onto these colonies. Vittles is producing as much as they can right now but…it’s going to be lean for awhile.

The vivarium expansion has begun, will be a bit until its all fully operational but not a big deal since the existing station can hold everything it needs to for now.

The Iron Gnoll as he’s called says working with the Nomads sounds fun and then we took our eyes off of him for a moment and he stole one of Lancaster’s starships she left uncrewed and took off to go ‘catch up’. We didn’t tell him where the Nomads went, and his trajectory implies he just took off into space at random. We got him to at least correct his course, but honestly I’ll be amazed if he gets there all by himself. I’ve excluded just how hard this conversation was to have with him. Just know, Adryn made some progress and is now exhausted.

Well we ordered a mail-order psychopath and Elgrim arrived quite promptly. I think the Raven is a lot closer by than we think for some reason. So far he’s been well behaved, he’s still an arrogant grouchy bloodthirsty maniac but he hasn’t broken any of our equipment.

House Enelynn is one of the great houses of Shetou, led by an elven family who just didn’t like Alnae. They were so brutal and efficient that they managed to carve out a place for themselves in Shetou despite the obvious racial tensions. As their wealth amassed their status as a house continued to grow. They’re not as crazy as the Kar’Soluth traditionalists at least, they allied themselves with the eastern alliance alongside the great houses Song and Linsun and played a part in the eastern alliance’s power that would eventually culminate in the crowning of Empress Laesaaria and the imperial nationalization that the empire is undergoing. As for bombing the place and their heir, the estate is located on SV3 at New Kaifen, where the eastern alliance has culminated their reconstruction efforts. Enelynn in particular manages a lot of the efforts to recreate the farmlands and this estate happens to be a major part of those efforts. It’s clear the Jaal’Darya are interested in not only this death but the destruction of the farming efforts to induce a bit more starvation and chaos into Shetou. Particularly the eastern alliances they’re not too fond of. Meaning we’ll need either a lot of bombs, some very fiery ones, and or some really big ones. The facility is highly patrolled due to the value of the farmlands to the empire right now and Shetou’s devious nature meaning anyone with a gun might try to pillage the place if it wasn’t heavily guarded.

Also what kind of factory? It wouldn’t be hard to start setting one up on Koura given the plentiful real estate.

Vanjin is mostly recovered and Setani is back here on Somnus with us now. Vanjin’s fine, if not a bit creeped out by Jhaeros. Setani looks like she’s about 5 seconds away from stabbing Elgrim who is now also on Somnus with us for the time being. She hasn’t stabbed him yet, and he doesn’t really seem to even react to or remember her that well. Though she definitely hasn’t forgotten the whole matter.

Posted on November 6, 2021

Stories of Lore 15

The golem ship is prepped with the route programmed in, assuming the buoys work everything should be good to go. We’ve begun construction on the somewhat minimalist station to push through and see what that gets done, and the order’s new ships are on the way to Enohas.

The arena business is a little complicated, mostly because Laura’s doesn’t have an official location. Also the legalized version has been unprofitable because Laura turned right around and exploited a hole in it that she practically designed. They were paying people to fight, but it was technically an open call for any who wanted to enter it. However not everyone knew about its existence. Laura instead advertised the existence of our new legal one in a very specific way to appeal to people just looking to make rent as a sort of low-contact ‘get paid just for showing up’ situation. Then she registered enough people that it’s ability to function froze since no one working there knows the scene at all. Then she registered her arena’s fighters in ours and just took all the money home knowing the administration didn’t have anyone who was prepared for whatever lunatics she had acquired. Due to the speed at which it was set up to out-compete Laura it has been a stuttering start and stop situation as she keeps exploiting the fact that a lot of money was put into it with only her work on the growing scene to stand on. Turns out the manager of the new arena works for her too as the only people qualified to run the place had ties to her scene. So basically we just bought Laura an arena and she now runs both circuits, harvesting our investment into the prizes to stay competitive with hers to fund the underground one that we suddenly are having a much harder time even finding. In time the staff are likely to be able to stabilize so her influence isn’t as dramatic though she’s not technically doing anything illegal to them she’s just overwhelming their logistics and exploiting a necessary rule in its system to take most of the money into her own ‘team’ of slightly more professional fighters. She then took the money and bought a bunch of land in the southern part of the city and paid for a lot of construction work and we’re not sure what mischief she’s up to now.

Speaking of which, Hylavi is having a new issue. It turns out Laura invited a lot of people to Koura recently by taking advantage of how generous 40th day has been with relocating people. Basically telling people exactly how to get into the system for the relocations and moving people around the frontier on Ilex’s money instead of her own. So she just imported four entire gangs from Sol straight into the city before anyone realized this was happening. She didn’t recruit them or set them on any particularly dangerous path, she just charged them for ‘discounted emigration’ packages. However, those gangs are now starting their own brands of trouble separate from her and keeping the city security busy. We can’t really pin it on her since she’s not pushing them to do anything, but Hylavi is still pretty convinced it’s Laura’s fault.

She combined this with a knowledge of how the Koura Cures trials are going and that program became flooded as well. This technically isn’t a bad thing as she’s getting medical help to a lot of people who need it, it’s just setting up a dangerous situation where a lot of people ‘owe her one’ for getting them out of Sol and their cancer fixed at the same time. They are then going on to work normal jobs and businesses but with a favor they know they owe to Laura which has expanded her network.

There’s a few more schemes she’s up to but basically Hylavi now has an entire department whose job is just to keep up with what Laura is doing. We’re pretty sure she has several more similar endeavors just by watching how her finances keep growing faster than we predicted. Just thought you ought to know since you’ve been rather invested in keeping on top of that particular woman.

Koura Kures has expanded a little more and the tests are still ongoing though has had a notable improvement on the general health of the colony. The problem is the one that went slightly wrong have resulted in another rabid mutated colonist with alarming speed. New Age came by to take them away, though it is a reminder that due to the volatility of this method it has to move slowly otherwise it can basically kill people. Well, that is if you want to do it the Alnae way with clinical trials, approvals, and risk assessment. If you’d prefer, we could switch to the Jaal’darya method and just tell people that its a gamble then hurl the lower class into it in the name of rapid progress.

The corvettes are currently double checking earlier found planets for habitability. We found some micro-organisms in some locations though nothing particularly exciting.

I suppose we’ll tackle Nila as the first order of business. I am at least convinced that she isn’t too dangerous in regards to manipulating the merkas. She seemed much more concerned with getting her bounty and has always been more a loner than some grand conspirator. Though I can’t speak for whoever is helping her. Finding her on the planet will be difficult as the only support we really have is Jamalia, the mining station nearby at the moon, and some of 40th day’s scanners.

First and most obviously, no one should go anywhere alone ever. Her best way off the planet is on the many ships Madhammer has here. We should release alerts with pictures of her and make sure every single staff member stares at it for at least twenty minutes. She got into the Kar’Soluth because no one asked her to take her helmet off, so everyone must not wear a helmet! Self excluded, I literally can’t take this off. Besides, I’m iconic.

Fortunately for us she is on the opposite side of the planet without so much as a tricycle to help cover distance. So it’ll be awhile before she can reach Jamalia and the ships. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of ground for us to cover to find her before reinforcements come to get her.  Extra bad, reports just came from Faelyn, there is a starship coming towards us from Sol. While not a particularly large threat to our assembled forces, they’re definitely going to try and pick her up if she doesn’t escape by then on her own. Our destroyers from Somnus will be on the way though construction and travel might make that a bit of a tight race. Because this is a golden world scanning for her from orbit with 40th day’s scanners is making very little progress. She might have figured out to turn her APT off just in case we tried to find her that way.

The current best bet might be to send out the gnolls to try and track her down. Just…under very heavy guard. Oh also one of the knights can summon a few hunting hounds from noctis. That might help. We could also try to bring in Adryn, this is something of a specialty of his. Better chances of finding her but it’ll take him awhile to arrive so we’ll be against the clock on that starship which could lead to some…escalated conflict. So safe option that might not find her in time, risky imports that might get us involved in a skirmish with her and whoever is on that ship, or just spread out hunting hounds and then try to track her based on which parties go silent during check ins.

The pandem radar can tell that you are linked to Irae, though it doesn’t seem to find anything related to your phylactery at least.

When it comes to the less popular planes there is perhaps a phenomena worth noting. Imagine an hourglass, wide on two ends with a bit of a bottleneck in the center. There are some areas of the murky swirl that is cosmology that function similarly to this in concept. Where only a few planes, usually lower ones that come and go into the fabric of the universe, can be followed. As you know, since your coordinates on one plane will match up on another, this means that these planes going through the bottle neck must be entered traveled across, and then exited in order to reach the murky swirl of planes on the other side. This is…highly  theoretical math stuff as reaching these would involve traveling on a temporary lower plane across an impossible distance. Such as going from one side of the universe to the other, beyond galactic super clusters tenfold…in most cases at least. So if someone were to stumble upon something like the Astral Warrens and find a way into that other side who knows what would be there. It would be far beyond any technology or spell we’ve ever devised to peer into the other side.

This is why Alexander is the knight chancellor. He loves quantum pandem theoretical math shenanigans.

Further more! There exists another few oddities. Imagine a cosmology IN a cosmology IN another cosmology and you have the celestial plane for example. It’s natives at one point could basically create new planes with rules that they happened to like. In the olden days, the gods controlled these realms and created their own planes of reality that were technically all inside of the celestial plane. This is another observed phenomena with lower planes every now and then. The abyssal plane likes to do things like this too, as indicated by the location of Moncayo which is on another dimension within the plane it’s already in. In theory, if one were to be within one of these sub-dimensions that found a way to latch onto a more stable plane while its host plane was collapsing you could escape the astral plane itself. That theory doesn’t hold up well but there’s a ten percent chance it works that way maybe.

There are also hypothetical beings that can create these sub-dimensions or even whole new planes at will. They are a new field of science and might be Vasia’s domain but according to the current understanding, these ‘cosmic entities’ are beyond our comprehension in many ways. Important for our interests, is that they can warp and shape the astral plane. Theoretically even escaping it, and thus all of the known universe, into other universes or perhaps even a cosmology that the astral plane is tied to. Though going out beyond the limits of the astral plane is a recipe for all known logic to break down. Even the void could only help you gaze into the possibilities of a universe beyond our universe. No bindings to the major planes we know to determine its rules, beyond the astral sphere all understanding and concept of all everything would cease to function. Wait a minute, I think I just understood sahad for a moment there. I feel small…

Anyways, these cosmic entities, the alpha entities, can theoretically alter even the astral plane. As mentioned before, we have reason to believe one such entity created the Astral Warrens. Perhaps there are even more planes yet unknown to us that they created just like the Warrens that we cannot find because they do not need to obey the typical rules of astral cosmology.

Another possibility are the micro-planes. As you know, the Astral Warrens has a unique shape similar to a tunnel network. By our standard understanding of the planes, reaching the edge of a plane is nearly impossible but within the Warrens it is so small that these tunnels are only a few lightyears across. I have been working on a hypothesis that suggests more strange undetected planes could exist that are even smaller. Perhaps even mere atoms thick. I hope to publish my theories by next year actually. At the very least let it make the rounds at the universities with libraries who delve into the theoretical. Though if I could find just one such plane and document it…

What were we talking about?

Sarnai’s bind.

Oh that, I’ve got nothing.

Moving on before he makes us brew tea and sit in the library for the rest of the night discussing theoretical quantum pandem mechanics. Though on the topic of education, when it comes to the ‘top thirty most dangerous individuals we know of’ how are we ranking that? Because there are more than thirty demon lords just to start off with. Do we prioritize at least the ones who we are likely to encounter, the ones with aggressive behavioral tendencies, or just the top thirty of all time?

In the meantime I’ll invite Exme for the interview.

Reika is somewhat of the opinion that as long as the higher members of the merkas hierarchy continue to live, they won’t be able to let the millenia long genocide of their people just slide. Since it isn’t just history to them but their origin stories. Kind of similar to how she and the Vloz’Khress are just never going to get past their issues. Their happiness upon persuading them for peace is moot, it won’t happen. One of these two races is going to die off or they’ll pick opposing sides on the galactic battlefield as they enter into it. She believes we’re better off just wiping one out and taking the credit for it.

Counter point-

Begone shedevil! None of your ideas can possibly lead to anything other than history remembering us as monsters. Someone turn Irae off.

Oh hush, I’m merely presenting options and a wider point of perspective. Anyways, as I was saying. We have a friend who IS a necrocarnate and can rewrite primitives with ease given how little defense they have. We could make the merkas more…amicable to our ideas by force without them noticing we did it. The young will follow and will be long dead and gone before they’re educated enough to understand that rewriting is even a possibility. Most in Sol only know of it as a myth or a legend. But I have this new friend, and she has this friend, and she can turn anyone into an zealously loyal minion.

I have another friend who can make anyone look like  merkas. Just swap them out for our guy and call it a day. Better yet, just make a male one. Their civilization won’t know what to do if they discover one last male exists but is against their current leadership.

Okay but quick question, is there any way to solve this conflict that isn’t INCREDIBLY evil? So far our options are genocide, soul manipulation, and falsifying a messiah.

I don’t do the whole…ethics thing. I gave you some options that are highly likely to succeed using the resources we have available. Ask Lancaster’s lap dogs if you want some high investment low yield lawful goody two shoes answer.

Hylavi says move one group to Moncayo, and move the other to Koura, and let them get distracted with fitting into the modern world such that they kind of forget their grudges and then when they find each other again they’ll be too occupied trying to scrape a living by as best they can in a foreign economy they are vastly uneducated about yet forced to start at the bottom of. The death of their people will become a foreign statistic once they realize they alone cannot do anything about it, forcing them to just try to eek out their own little place in the galaxy and let everything else fall to the wayside. Let taxes and capitalism grind down the fucks they have to give about anyone other than themselves.

Wait a sec…uhh someone tell Nicole to keep an eye on Hylavi’s mental health. Actually maybe send Ohalyn to a therapist too now that I think about it….also all of our slaves who work for us because of- oh fuck someone pull me out of this rabbit hole.

Sarnai is a bit cranky when given advice about her most recent performance. Also with how much Alexander is poking at her trying to figure out more information about her bind while the whole base is also trying to find Nila. She responds to things by just scowling at the moment.

As for the alliance, the only other major single colony of note is called Que. They have a fleet and army as we and Faelyn do that they have been investing into regularly. So it turns out they’re a Valdir splinter. A rogue group that decided to go out and colonize things on their own since the mothership left. It’s composed mostly of curious scientists exploring the possibilities of the silnian science. What’s peculiar is none of them are a synapse, they use technology to try and replicate the effect and control their worker drones. Attempting to simulate a mothership’s level of presence through a huge array of psicrystals. It kind of reminds me of the origins of Tykel, a colony devoted to the science and exploration of a particular topic. They seem to be looking heavily into terraforming based technologies and chose a system with a lot of moons and planets to work on. Apparently the reason for their military is actually a minor paranoia that an experiment will go wrong and silnians will eat them all, also the lesson Tykel taught us about how incredibly wrong a well intentioned research facility can go with just one clever person showing up.

There are many other smaller colonies brewing but they’re still highly developmental. Auwana, Cayetano, and Galeim stand out due to their larger populations and economic status. Most other colonies are the entire group’s life savings pooled together to just get some prefab shelters and farming equipment shipped out to the middle of nowhere. We just happen to have a lot of wealthy people in one place for our starting investments. Jamalia is even grander than most of them, the alliance is definitely a little shaky overall in terms of how much everyone can contribute though that is sort of the point. To help everyone get up to the point of being relevant at which point the alliance will become a proper contender in politics.

So upon mentioning the rift tunnels to Faelyn she offered a contract to build one of them, we’d be looking at roughly a 250 million profit for it. She wants to connect Moncayo to Thenica’s terminal hub, which kind of loops right back around to what her original plan for Moncayo was. Makes sense. Though we’d have to send Alexander or you to do it as this is a rather large and technical undertaking that will definitely take a lot of time.

I contacted Sharen about the whole Nelta invasion thing. Apparently they’ve been in talks with Faelyn about the very same matter recently and while they could loan us a carrier and a pair of battleships they still have to worry bout what Alnae and Kar’Soluth are doing at the moment right now.

I brought  you one of the toys. Its a wind up fish. It felt appropriate. Also I don’t drink that much wine I’ll have you know. I actually prefer margaritas. Sometimes I just drink the mix really, I like the tanginess.

So the ship cores continues. Turns out they’re made out of a material enchanted by arcane methods, the yelay taught us how to make it. The outer shell is just…anything durable with an illusion enchantment and the inner core is a magically engraved diamond network with a few other enchantments on it. We’re having diamond cores shipped in from a manufacturer so we can start experimenting with that. It’s not too complicated, materials wise at least. While the yelay did know how to make these from scratch as a civilization, the ones we have only have passing knowledge of how they work. At least the programming part of it. Since they’re not reprogrammable and apparently require a lot of machinery to produce, there was no need for the astronauts to need to know how to build them from scratch. Though even just the rough idea gives us some places to keep looking through.

Uneloj however knows things other than engineering. He’s a mage and knows spells and stuff. So here’s the problem…we have six new cases in the containment cells after he tried to show people one of the spells. He is also perplexed by this response as apparently his species does not become catatonic upon witnessing it, that or they see it so early on that no one notices its abnormal effects of being learned. So we’re working our way through all that. But that’s what he has to trade, spells.

Cassir and Peter are on the way to Enohas to look into things over there, once the ship gets there. Also Cassir laughed at the warning about Vasia, apparently she learned from meeting her that consent is not something Vasia should ever have.

Vamon is still coordinating with Faelyn’s forces, though we have a bit of time before the invasion actually gets here. Meaning he’s also just hanging out and taking Alexander’s place as the diplomat to keep tabs on whats going on around there.

I’ve run some numbers, okay really I told the engineer to do it but that’s the same thing. We have an estimate on what it costs to attempt to build the exerlus engine. It’s estimated to be…lets see…wow thats a lot of zeroes. The budget to even attempt this would be in the trillions, and that’s not accounting for the likelihood that it doesn’t work on the first try. For now they’re working on a small scale proof of concept, but don’t expect an engine for a little while. That being said the Nelta engine is a lot more reasonable in theory though we’re still trying to figure out where the quirks in it are. The exerlus one is very precise and the Nelta control core is as well but we’re not sure how much the rest of the construction is dependent on this level of precision. It appears to be less finnicky at least.

The Vivarium construction project has begun, also as an update to the DNA library, we’re up to thirty eight samples of various small critters people found in interesting places we didn’t ask too much about. We’ve also gone through with maintaining what i’ve named the fenalis and despite my desire to immediately sell them I am advised by the vivarium staff to let them finish testing their behavior under domesticated environments before spreading them everywhere. I’m still keeping mine though, but they’ve postponed advertising them until they at least figure out if they carry anything that can affect humanoids.

Also it turns out the Yelay utilize a method of reproduction that I can describe best as ‘like growing a potato’. So they don’t actually need much help from the technology we have, it’s more so a matter of a suitable environment to begin that process.

Adryn is ready to come back if you have something else for him to do. Until picked up though he’s still out running around. This is the problem with Sivataurs…they really enjoy their job.

We found someone among their detectives who seems suitable for the position. They lack the more professional experience Vaeri has but she is definitely not a common occurrence. Hopefully they’ll be up to whatever your plans might be for them.

Anyways moving on, getting Kaylen off of Thenica is difficult since Alnae definitely considers it necessary that she be there. She definitely outranks arms dealers and they’d have to bend for her convenience so an arms deal is unlikely to get her to leave the planet given its current state of martial law. Though with the ongoing Nelta business, if we can get the alliance to push forward so Kaylen will need to come help fight Nelta that would definitely get her off the planet but kind of prove them all right about why the alliance is a bit of a bad idea for their individual politics. Though it’s not like we haven’t done that before. Other options include creating an opening in the Alnae Ultra carrier she can go after. She is one of Alnae’s champions and would likely partake in that kind of operation personally as we saw in the most recent territorial conflict. We’ve also seen that she has a lot of motive to get rid of that thing as its holding up Faelyn’s plans to bring everyone together to get some stuff done so we can do the interception plan against Nelta.

Though as you may recall, that carrier is not easy to assault. Even with its full schematics and any kind of weapon you could ask for, it simply can’t be taken with a surgical strike. It has to be won through a war. However, I have an idea. We don’t need to take the whole carrier, we just need to force it to move somewhere an army could assault it. The problem is that Kaylen’s army can’t assault it in space since it would take down most ships sent to deploy boarders and it would require colossal resources to move that much firepower onto it. Getting into the realm of being a planetary invasion.

The reasons it doesn’t need to go anywhere is because it is self sustaining and supports its own population of experts. So even if its engines or its solar systems were crippled they could wait it out until their own engineers repaired it without needing to dock. I don’t really have a full plan for the matter though, it is well defended and could easily bring in more people while it waits carefully in its position. My point being though, if we can find a way to force it to dock and let Kaylen know when and where it will dock we might be able to make progress. Especially if it were to happen to lose power to its engines while docked.

Alternatively, we pull an Ark and find a way to cripple their food production. Food can’t just be repaired, if we can take it out they’ll have to do something and at the very least interact with everyone else again. It’s not the same as taking the whole ship, but at least it would shake the status quo enough to present new opportunities.

Also about that Uneloj thing, Ilex’s boys are definitely probing the matter. So there’s that to be resolved to see who is doing what. We can’t really recruit as openly because of the nature of our division. I have some thoughts on that matter since the issue has come up twice in a row as of late. We used to have Sophia we could use as a front for a lot of our more public operations alongside Vanjin. Our efforts to re-establish the criminal gang division have been sketchy due to how meticulous and difficult to sway Laura King has proven. However, we do have The Nomads right now. If we were to get a few more ships on hand we could follow in Mr. Vandross’ example of using a pirate team as a front for bolder operations. This would be a good way to look into more open moves of recruitment to give people a tryout period, and the Nomads know we exist and haven’t said anything to anyone. Largely because they like Aryn and we haven’t given them a reason to at least. But it might be worth it to try and recruit Uneloj to the Nomads as part of an…aggressive pirate expansion. Though we’d likely need to find a new place of operations for such a thing, I don’t think Lancaster would appreciate us creating a pirate fleet spearheaded by the Nomads on Somnus. The illicit nature of criminal fronts happens to be convenient for testing people’s abilities to adapt to the kind of environment required by the division. Since keeping quiet and doing some dirty work now and then is part of our day to day routine. Just a thought at least.

Vaeri is still out there trying to infiltrate Siwa’s inner circle enough to figure out what is in that basement though obviously its a well guarded secret, she’s getting closer but as I warned, it does take awhile for that kind of work to manifest.

A minor siege was made on Helym to prove the effectiveness of our soldiers and their arsenal. We managed to demonstrate what a real modern soldier is capable of despite the difference in numbers and size, also introduced them to the concept of artillery which shook them a little. They had some questions about the resilience of our race given that our meatbag nature leaves a lot more vulnerabilities compared to their energy based life form. Then they made fun of my scars.

So we blew up Helym and “recruited” the entire population. We’re going to help clean up this Nila mess and then we’re headed back to Koura for boot camp and gearing of our new recruits. I’ll be acting as a substitute drill instructor while we’re still here on Enohas. Did you know they in fact, can be physically exhausted from exertion? At least, that is the current theory judging by their behavior and reaction to the drills. Results pending Gheir’s peer review of my findings.