Ehanxelvun has turned out to be quite good at bureaucracy and filling out paperwork. Given his previous position and activities he’s always been good at that sort of thing and exploiting it to his advantage. Which is sort of how he wound up in this position in the first place. The first thing he did was that constitution which created a method of succession and got it signed by most of the other territorial lords over the last month. Making it so that the position automatically transfers to a chosen heir instead of “whoever is holding the biggest stick at the time”. It has a few tricks in it that basically created an oligarchy with the Emperor being the only one who can forcefully remove others from their position or appoint new ones. In the event that no heir is specified, the position of emperor basically goes up for auction as to avoid the murder clauses as you requested.

Vittles is still coming along with the first harvest though the farms are still expanding in size. Alnae and a few tribes of the Vessians have agreed to come check out this whole open farm thing we have going on.

Though people from Alnae are still trickling in, transport logistics to reach the portal and all. That and people being swayed to the idea bit by bit. Getting news to spread without comms, all that fun stuff.

Cazvrath has agreed to visit Diadem, if nothing else out of curiosity to see the place. Though worth noting we should keep her away from the farms, Alnae and Shetou have that whole long standing grudge thing.

In the meantime,

Notably one of the still present limitations of your abilities is that you need to know where you’re coming and going from. Particularly relevant is that Jiyan went into the Warrens beyond comm range to figure out where things are that you might want to warp yourself to in the future. Until they comm again we’re a bit blind as to where within the Warrens they actually are.

It turns out Ankathi beat you to the punch on visiting the angels. That was what she took off to do with her new Kharla body last month. Using Selah as her minion to help convince some of them…and then she started murdering the rest. Though I’m told by Selah that was more their fault than hers. Given how they treated Reika in the past, you can see how they might sometimes be disposed towards questionable choices. Apparently they forgot the golden rule of Ankathi, she is pinnacle of disproportionate responses. Apparently three archangels actually tried to attack her. The war in the celestial realm is still ongoing and a few seem keen to take you up on your offer if nothing else to get away from Ankathi – who has to take breaks for Kharla’s sake every now and then.  Ankathi’s mysterious blackguards seem to be winning just because of Ankathi doing the heavy lifting. We also saw the first temple being attacked by some of the independent governments of the frontier who Ankathi has been securing alliances with as a side hustle. Most relevant though, for some reason the Sangui De’Rex family was there. Several of their well known elder vampires were just snacking on angels while under Ankathi’s “protection”. Given how vampires react to celestial magic, it’s questionable if Ankathi negotiated with them favorably or if she threatened to smite them all.

So that was amusing timing on your part. Heaven is at war with New Heaven basically.

Friend points out that Ankathi keeps naming people according to their domain, if you would be willing to let them join the pantheon they would be okay with taking on their deity name. Such as you are “The Traveler” and Ankathi is “The Fate”. Notably at the moment, Ankathi is clearly busy and doesn’t have much input on the whole adding Friend to the pantheon thing.

Work on the whole plane thing is underway, it is to be noted that Friend is one of the most powerful pandem entities we know of even if they just sulk around about dying and spy on people. So once you explain the spells they’re pretty much good to go from there just as you were, with one caveat. They must enter the Astral Wilds. I am amused by the prospect of an information broker with severe ADD.

Welp Ilex died in the dumbest way. Jydoq is kind of just as much of a mess as it was the entire time. The Jydoq summit has largely broken down into “no you do it” “no you do it” bickering, the assassin has been a significant problem for them evidently and they’ve gotten wind of what the assassin is. Given its from their own mythology, I suppose I can see why they’re particularly wary of it the way many were wary of a dracolich being found out. They’ve agreed to try and make separate capitals to break things down in the meantime. Though we definitely don’t know which safeguards work or not against this assassin since we can’t tell if Ilex’s latest colony works or if they’ve just been uninterested in trying.

Okay so Ilex is dead, turns out flaying your soul cannot be covered by your psyche under…whatever circumstances those were supposed to be. If anything this data was closest to figuring out how the Lakaaj trick works for whatever that’s worth.

This leaves us in an awkward position on jydoq since it was largely his project and now uh…poof. Not like I know what we’re doing there. I mean I do but it’s not like I care enough to pick a fight with assassin man.

In hindsight its kind of anticlimatic that Ilex killed himself before the assassin could find some more dramatic master plan to eliminate him despite his overmind.

Speaking of which Averill, as per Ilex’s last request, he wound up visiting the Utewa academy. There are a very strange number of children with guns there. Apparently they teach “self defense” because kids going back out into the Reach need to be prepared. They also have classes about becoming pirates… it’s a weird place. The academy is so large that it just has whatever random junk you want to learn available as a class. Including Biology 238: Cross Species anatomic compatibility. In layman’s terms “how to recognize what aliens you can bang”. I know about that one because that’s the one Averill was visiting.

Not much luck on finding out details about the assassin so far though, might be because he got distracted.

Fortunately we took a rift right back to Diadem and they have finished their fancy new shipyards, so repairs are good to go already.

I’ve put together what we can about Rahlken and had the scouts out at Kuhas and down at Utewa poke around a bit more to get a complete picture.

Rahlken’s primary limitation has always been the size of his team since he doesn’t really recruit people from outside his own family, or specifically his species. Though they cannot procreate any further. However, he has a lot of resources and can evidently hire out other pirates or mercenaries like the Tungsten Teeth.

We did find out that it is very unusual for him to hire any outside help. No one can really recall him ever doing that before, and while nothing seems beyond him to try it is still very uncharacteristic. Given what we know it isn’t unreasonable to suspect that Selona told him to make sure we didn’t make it out of the Reach. If he was acting under orders it would explain his willingness to pursue abnormal means this time around.

His own fleet is largely stolen ships that he can operate with skeleton crews if he needs the extra maneuverability, they tend to be docked within his own ship like a super duper carrier of some sort. This is likely where one of the pursuing fleets had come from. He has no formal base of operations other than his ship, which is now lurking along the northern edge of the galaxy.

We also learned from this encounter that the Tungsten Teeth fleet, though we wiggled around them long enough to take a stand at the gas giant, is technologically inferior to federation ships though they pack a mean punch. That being said, their crews are far more experienced than most of ours. Makes sense given that they’re a centuries old mercenary business.

VSEC has previously sent a lot of ships to try and reach Nelta to establish diplomatic contact. One even made it but they got there around the beginning of the jesai invasion and no one had time to talk to them. That and they were in immediate mortal peril with that war going on. Given our interaction with Rahlken and the known desires of Selona to prevent diplomatic communication between many powerbases around the galaxy, I’d say we have enough evidence to assume he is intentionally targeting any attempts to reach Nelta.

With that in mind, Rahlken won’t be the last problem in our way on this voyage. I imagine if we went around to the south we’d run into the Blaiken and so on and so forth.

The issue we’ve had with trying to find allies is that the people who hate him most are planetbound. Rahlken rarely picks fight with other fleets unless he has a very specific motive. Space stations maybe now and then though. The Vessians like him since he avenged them, and Utewa is immune to him so they don’t particularly care about his shenanigans.

I imagine Haleh would actually know some people with grudges against him, but also against her.

We’ve been keeping an eye on the shipments to General Preskian, and yep there’s a lot of shady stuff going on in there thanks to Kar’Soluth. The agents are trying to handle it. As for messing with Kar’Soluth in general I will remind you Beldobaan is one of the houses here and we did opt not to pick that fight last time this was on the table.

We’ve deployed the team to Elasyn, they’re currently on the galactic highway. Travel time and all.

Rampart is now under Michael and they’ve been rooting out any upstart gangs that might find it worthwhile to pick a fight with them for territory.

The hunt for the fake director has made a little bit of progress. They are definitely focused on Thenica as we’ve heard very few reports of them traveling outside of Sol. All the imposter scenarios were related to Sol territory matters and messing with people along the way. Though they’ve been rather quiet lately, which means either they’re laying low, they’ve abandoned the gimmick since the signing of the treaty, or we could be doing better in actually finding out other incidents.

“Headhunters at the new station and colony mean eventually when they have populations we’ll start picking out candidates for operative staus from them, right? That’s how that works?”

Yes. Also we got those turrets set up at the Aetas station, definitely can’t put that many turrets onto Kuhas since we don’t own it and there are rules against that sort of thing there.

Stories of Lore 53

Through perhaps dubious means and convoluted upholding of their own traditions – Zenaka appointed a man named Ehanxelvun to be their new planetary ruler. They use the title that our translators pick up as ’emperor’, not sure if we should be concerned about that. Ehanxelvun promised to deal with the many lords who did not attend the summit for you though has requested military assistance in doing so and asked for the orbiting station to open fire on six territories until he’s satisfied that the lords in charge of them are dead.

Suffice to say, as is according to their traditions, they appointed a rather vicious fellow. He’s a former equivalent to Sethis but for one of the territorial lords who murdered his boss right before the summit and attended it in their place before anyone could figure out what happened. Murdered two others and put puppets in place to help secure more votes for himself, and is definitely in a hurry to blow up certain other territories that might threaten the security of his position before he can cement it.

Technically by their own traditions, he’s qualified to do all of that. Even if the federation has a rule against murder, he wasn’t part of the occupied territories yet and just attended the summit as a rogue territorial lord with an argument to make.

As for the Alnae virtual summit, which took a lot of work to establish enough communications to do that in the first place, they are somewhat used to council leadership so its not like they all need to be the one at the top. However, until the federation can actually feed all of them – which we can’t by the way, the Alnae population is several times our own – they keep running into issues of dividing who would get what and the whole thing with sending workers. A lot of it came down to them arguing over how much food any of them get if they send people to work the Vittles farms and trying to calculate who gets what and when. While Diadem has the space for such a scale of farming, things take a bit to grow and in the meantime they have the same ongoing issues. So progress was made in the form of them agreeing to send millions to Diadem to help with the farms, but actually uniting them awaits progress on that front.

To that end, Kar’Soluth is being uppity, the new House Kenduis took over more territory from the former Alnae and Jaal’Darya have been expanding their influence on Jydoq while they expand their fleet bit by bit.

House Sharen’s scientists and medical researchers arrived at Roha and have been poking around.

To clarify, Valdir doesn’t need a fleet for trade. They need things to trade in the first place. The nature of galactic shipping being done in bulk lowers the ease of trading the various small individual things their people can actually make or do since their empire doesn’t really rely on industrial production.

We have our diplomatic corvettes on the way to Rhuplais and the Vessians to check in on them and see whats going on.

According to people asking around, there is a figure named Gasaba who represents the factory flotilla who can be found usually between the heart of the Reach and the northern point of Kuhas on various stations. Though their appearances tend to be random and only when they have stuff to buy or sell. They were last seen Halfway between Elasyn and Kuhas at some random station though that was a little while ago as the person we heard that from had also been there and has since then worked their way up to Kuhas.

It turns out selling fully functional mechs on Kuhas wasn’t that hard.

Also we’ve hired a ton of people from Sol News but not Exme, so not sure what the status of your information war with them actually is since they’re operating out of Desoir territory.

Meeting with both the Utewa and the Vessians proved to be surprisingly mundane. To them we are just another wayward civilization of the Reach, of which they have met thousands of. So they’re a lot less interested than when we met Zenaka or Enohas populations for example. Granted the Playatis, or rather Zaikies specifically, were a bit more interested.

To sum up the meeting, we’ve learned that the Utewa disappearing planet trick is actually that they have the ability to open a planet sized pandem rift. So their planet doesn’t quite disappear, it just goes into other planes but very few in the galaxy are good enough at planar travel to even figure out where it went let alone chase it.

The Vessians are, as described by Quinae, very hungry people but we’ve noticed they share a distinct similarity to solians. Also Jiyan found out that this is where one of the warren exits is. Similar to how Koura’s parasites were bled onto it from its own warren rift, it is likely their magical ‘super planet’ is the work of something that once lived in the Warrens. Similar to the entity that Vasia captured for us at Koura. Though judging by the pattern, and previous rumors, it isn’t unreasonable to suspect that Grand Chief Amasis is the entity from the Warrens or at the very least in some way related to it. However, getting an audience with them is harder than meeting with the actual vessians. Partially because they aren’t even on that planet at the moment.

In other news, the Diadem shipyard facilities and expansion have finished and they are now capable of producing titan scale ships.

Holua seems more or less fine with the squire life though as far as he understands it, he gets paid to punch things sometimes and other times he just continues burrowing around the city.

We’ve established the company of Riftmancy so that we can more reasonably start exporting portal crafting, as this isn’t the first time people were asking about that. I suppose being the galactic highway builders is probably a pretty profitable business.

Valjala seems to be a chaotic lower plane that makes no sense, kind of like you. Though its a place where things are always moving for some reason or another. Entering into it is kind of dangerous since, like the Fae Wilds, you might not come out quite where you thought you would. Less due to planar positioning and more so due to the fact that you can’t stop moving within it. So the plan to put a couple stars and planets aligned with literally anything is out the window, because if you put something somewhere it goes somewhere else practically of its own accord.

People are already trying to make ships and cars out of this in some way. At least those that knew it happened.

Also this was a lot of work to encrypt a book.

Part of our deal with the Sharen has definitely revealed to us just how prevalent their own colonization efforts have been. They went the other direction, further towards the borders of the galaxy rather than towards the center. I suppose it makes sense that drow wanted to be as hard to find as possible. As well as your whole student exchange program.

Bill wound up going to Utewa to serve as our diplomat, mostly because he was curious about it. Establishing some connection to the Utewa academy and returned with some negotiations to have some of Utewa’s warlocks come visit and see what we might be able to show them.

The Thing in the Dark, also known as Friend, has pointed out that the warlocks Utewa wants to send are bound to a demon lord from outer spaaaAAAaaaAAace who they have not mentioned nor have we heard about before. Basically they have an alien demon lord for a patron hidden somewhere around the Reach likely on Finsor. Also that this patron has in some way played a part with the events of the Reach since before the fall of the Ika. Possibly through predecessors and a continued lineage.

Some of the Sharen House medical people have shown up to work on that whole “what the hell is mummy rot” joint project.

The jydoq colony is doing fine for now at least, everything is nice and ooze-tight so that hopefully nothing gets in. Though progress with the local leaders can be summed up as “want food”.

Rhazin is going about subjugating the peoples of Viowei by force though the fact that he can’t talk isn’t helping him pursue many other methods. Though the takeover of a planet is definitely a long affair, so he’s working on it. At the very least the people are somewhat confused as to why Agallias left, so they’re a little disorganized at the moment. However, they are not spectacularly aware of what a silnian is so their fear levels could be improved.

Averill is on the way to Rhuplais to see about the Utewa academy, though not sure why you need him to get into it if he’s just trying to figure out what the jydoq creature is all about. Unless you meant literally to walk inside of its doors and ask someone who might know, I’m not sure if I’m taking you too literally or not literally enough.

As for your “first spark” experiment, as your advisor I have to say this sounds like a bad idea. A really bad idea. The phrase ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ comes to mind. Also death is literally defined as ‘the moment your essentia goes away’. Removing your own and hoping to survive seems like an iffy proposition if you ask me. Though we’re waiting for Renjala to finish playing with his new toy I suppose.

The party rocks are still excavating the mountain of rubble on Diadem but they’ve at least managed to compress it. They also keep sledding or rolling down it on their breaks. Of all the elementals to be ‘the fun ones’ I don’t understand how it wound up being the earth elementals. They are at least capable of packing it into a more solidified form and adding rock structures to reinforce it.

We’ve had some freighters designed as ship booby traps as you asked. Also gotten some drop colonies together for Sharen though I’m not sure how much they need those.

Macrohard huh? It’s amazing how long a company can go without a name. Good ol N/A divison.

We moved some of our assets around and sent a bunch to Enphidia to keep up on things there.

Allison and Rampart are still doing well cutting out a nice slice of territory for themselves, that now seems to include Vittles. Which has drawn in other businesses to Rampart’s protection just because Vittles is pretty popular by default since it has food.

Our agents are off and away into the galaxy to try and figure out anything they can about the jydoq assassin though it is sort of all over the place at the moment. Though apparently Ilex is also sending Averill to Utewa, and technically Bill is already there but he’s on another mission entirely. So everybody is combing through everything everywhere all at the same time.

We’ve reinforced Enphidia, making it the most well defended city on the inside of Diadem. We are now fully prepared for an invasion by those rich bastards from Adelaide.

Wait when you say lend a hand to Preskian, do you mean in helping him convince Kar’Soluth to attack Alnae harder or with shipping and handling of handouts from Lancaster? Not sure how much freedom to give the agents on helping the guy out. Though the oddity of a drow secretly helping an elf but only because of screwing over other drow is mildly amusing.

New problem, we lost the engines to the gas giant. So we’re back at Diadem after a handy portal from the Astral Knights. It all was going fairly well when we were just fighting the fleet though it was clear they were just trying to damage the engines and sent a whole lot more strike craft than we were anticipating just for that. Also boarding, we did well with that. Though the damage started adding up and once the second fleet closed in on us while we were setting up shop at the gas giant, the conditions of the gas giant finished off the rest of our engines. Fortunately, all this was before Rahlken even got caught up to us.

Also amusingly, they pursued us through the portal and straight into Gem Station’s range. So that’s a fleet dealt with. Technical success? We’re undergoing repairs at the moment. Though I don’t doubt this will be a continuing issue once we set out that way again. This time they’ll probably be even more prepared for us.

At least we survived all of that, but it does lend some evidence to why Lancaster has had so much trouble with sending scouts around the galaxy as of late. Even a ship as large and heavily armed as the Cradle is a target to somebody somewhere out there. We barely made it out of our galactic neighborhood before that happened and we know we’ll be crossing into some sketchy territory further down the road.

I’m not sure how much better we could possibly prepare though. All we can really do is fix ‘er up and try again. That or somehow dispatch Rahlken before trying, then dispatch the next thing that sends us home, then do it again. Rinse repeat until we can get to the other side of the galaxy.

Stories of Lore 52

For awhile the occupied territory of Zenaka has been able to start extending more diplomatic efforts to their other territories under the general leadership of Uxam. His sales pitch is largely ‘we have need gadgets’. Though not long after news of the treaty, an alliance of the other territorial leaders launched a campaign against the allied states. The leaders of this alliance state that they are dissatisfied with Zenaka being under the control of a bunch of aliens and are re-enacting the plot of about twenty movies about alien invasions. The occupied territories do have our guns and soldiers to defend it, though a few defenses were destroyed by somewhat smaller teams targeting them. The first few attacks were carried out simultaneously earlier this week. Notably Vasia came up at least three times in their speech about how we’re an evil colonial force. They did not address the matter of what they were doing in those facilities before she showed up.

This has nothing to do with you telling them to get their shit together this month actually, they just picked a really coincidental time to suddenly make a problem of all this.

In regards to the phantom infiltration of a military organization issue, you should be careful about listening to what Larazja says. She speaks in exaggeration and hyperbole a lot. Though on that regard, it should be assumed that because of Kanika’s ability to manipulate people’s loyalties that the Phantom’s ability to infiltrate anything is quite significant. The greater strategic concern is if she has people in critical areas of security. For example, Roha’s food supply chain.

The WTC-2 design has been ironed out and is now available.

We’ve lost all contact with Jiyan and the outsider, though this was expected and she called in a final report before entering the Warrens. She is going in deeper and isn’t sure where the next exit will be.

Virtual simulation of combat might be possible for the convention tournament. Though it would take awhile to program and present in any way that is interesting to onlookers. Though that would be Ilex’s realm of expertise. I’m just a maybe-sentient robot assistant.

Kaylen was last seen headed back to Thenica, apparently to talk to House Song and likely the Revenants.

A farming operation of the desired scale for Vittles can be managed with help from the druids. Mostly due to the fact of how many seeds that will require, though staff for it might take awhile to drum up if you want to do something of that scale. The immediate problem is security, while right now the invasive machines are currently focused towards the inner layers, putting a lot of civilians on the surface might draw their attention towards there. While Gem Station, our fleets, and the mechs won’t have any issues with that I do imagine it’ll slow down the number of people terribly excited to work there.

There has been a sharp spike of immigrants from Moncayo to Adelaide in the wake of Laura’s whole ‘marketing thing’ as people get settled down and figure out what sort of place it actually is.

General Preskian reports that right now the big issue facing his faction is that Kar’Soluth has suddenly started directing its attention towards many of them. The warlords are actually doing fairly well at uniting against a common enemy. They don’t particularly hate each other in the end, it’s just that no single government can account for all the needs of their respective people right now due to the resource shortages.

A large part of the ongoing problems for Alnae have been not just the food shortage, they were quick to start trying to regrow crops. Alnae had always been structurally dependent on the elves controlling all the wealth to keep the masses from trying their own thing. With the current state of things, many are willing to start their own gangs and try to create more independent nations with ‘the same but slightly different rules, also with me in charge’. His other idea is that instead of defending Alnae from Kar’Soluth, if you could convince Kar’Soluth to attack much harder it might forcibly reunite the former members of Alnae against a common threat. Not to mention the war would probably cut down on the number of mouths to feed and solve two problems at once. Alnae is so scattered that even Jaal’Darya can’t get them all, but if Shetou were to get involved in an attempt to win that centuries old war  or perhaps stop Kar’Soluth from expanding then that would be more than they could possibly handle.

His other idea was to get Valencia to bankroll this whole thing so that someone would have the wealth needed to get the other’s attention and get them following someone again. Though she has refused to as she doesn’t see much potential for return on the investment.

As for the sneaky negotiations with Shetou, they don’t really care about Kiel’Nada. Convenient because Ankathi has her now alongside Kharla.

Laesaaria points out that whoever fights the Hassani will die and whoever fights second or even third is the one that has a chance. For now she foresees the most likely path forward to at least stabilizing things would be to get more alien allies. It is highly likely that the Phantoms will ally with the Demon Kingdom in the near future as those two have similar grudges against the Era of Rising and have worked together in the past. As for researching a protection from mummy rot, Cazvrath Vel’Sharen was definitely interested in that and suggested allowing Sharen’s experts to go to Roha where the dormant infections are still present for studying it. They don’t exactly want to bring samples into their territory for obvious reasons.

In the spirit of cooperation, House Sharen is a logistical super power due to the size of their navy. Though they’ve been careful about expanding because with Vloz’Khress gone they don’t have a Renjala so they don’t have the same easy access to a more convenient transport network than actually flying in and out of places. They have twenty eight colonies in various nearby systems though they want into the Reach. They’d be willing to pay the Astral Order for the job of establishing a few for them.

Laesaaria also pointed out that as nice as the thought is, she isn’t really the best representative for the ‘age of drow’ given Shetou is dominated by the other races. Of her three remaining great houses, only Sharen is drow. It just so happens that the year Sharen and Song’s heirs married and united to form the Shetou as a proper Empire, she was on the throne at the time and it was easiest to settle “who gets to be in charge” by just letting her keep the position. Not that it matters terribly to your point, she just thought she’d let you know how the culture has evolved since the secession of Kar’Soluth. A few other smaller houses are still around but with the old system being gone, there isn’t as much relevance to them to achieve the Great House status.

Talks were less effective with Valencia. I think we only got as far as her secretaries secretary. Who requested a more concrete outline of the plan before she would be able to present it to her higher ups who might then be able to take it up with Valencia herself.

Azilath is easier to talk with given our previous relations with her. Though she was mostly curious what Ilex and Larazja are up to these days. Though she doesn’t really need help finding worlds she would want to expand onto. Valdir contains the collective knowledge of its mothership that has gone across the galaxy and back. They’re actually aware of more places of interest than the rest of Sol combined. Right now the Valdir sub cells have already taken consumed a few worlds. Though the thing they’re most curious about is money. Indal left almost everyone with their full personality intact, and many of them like shiny things. Though their civilization is still based on the fact that it can behave as a gestalt consciousness as needed. No one gets paid around here, they just get everything on demand. The problem is that doesn’t work great for online shopping and grandma selling handknitted sweaters she has all this free time for making doesn’t translate well when the only trading partners available are light years away. Galactic commerce is often done in bulk for that reason, and Azilath greatly lacks the ability to do that.

On to other matters. Vittles set up a storefront at Kuhas Station inside of Allison’s new territory so that should help out with paying off gangs for security. Also the plan to buy a percent of the station led to a very confused talk with a representative of the station as to what you even mean by that. After some discussion they’ve offered to let you build another extension onto the patchwork station if you want.

After a talk with Quinae we figured out who some of the big powers in the Reach are. It’s a bit of a confusing matter though. Technically we’re among the top one percent of factions in the Reach, though we represent a percent of a percent of how many there are. That and if anyone gets too big, people tend to flip around and gang up on that group.They are also shockingly easy to rally once contracts for war spoils are settled. Quinae advises treading lightly.

To summarize if you want to send some messengers to say hi:
Utewa: Private education, big shipyards, and a disappearing planet
Tungsten Teeth: Mercenaries born to mercenaries who were killed by mercenaries in order to become mercenaries that were recognized by other mercenaries. Also super slavers.
Vessians: Tribal race with a big punch in a small package. Alien dragons kind of, or demons…or vampires… we kind of have a lot of people with super strength it now ocurrs to me. Starving nomadic hunters who are probably experiencing the collapse of their people due to Arkaric’s meddling in their paradise homeworld.
Mysterious Factory Flotilla: Gotta find them first.
Elasyn: Where all the great powers like to meet and hangout, which explains why Selona opened up shop there.

To be noted, Eerihild cannot heal anything and everything for everyone. The tournament idea has a problem with the fact that first off, she is liable to be competing, and second the damage that could be inflicted in a ‘no holds barred’ match includes death. She can’t heal death. Even the Ika medical bays, that they are afraid to ever go near again, can’t quite fix bullet holes to the head. I think the only people we know of that could possibly allow for that would be Elym and Decaelys.

We could try to virtualize the whole thing with help from Ilex. Just sort of store people in psicrystals and connect them to the game albeit not sure how comfortable they’d be departing from their bodies for that long. Also could maybe drum up a couple of temporary phylactery set ups though that costs people their bodies permanently so actually forget I said that one. We could also finish building your plane and you could just grant everyone immortality while on the plane. Might slow things down to getting everything set up and started but on the other hand you could get some clerics of your own to go open rifts all over the place so people don’t have to travel terribly far. Might ruin some of the cultural fair though if its not actually held in diadem. Maybe you make a spell for this and just leave a rift over the arena.

We started up SenshiCon so they can work on handling all of this.

We’ve seen a large boost to Jamalia’s population in the form of the fae migrants who just want out of that hellhole that is the Fae Wilds. Recovering from all the recent disasters the place has had, I’m sure nothing will go horribly wrong this time. Apparently they’re led by a kitsune named Yaezuki.

Speaking of putting a perimeter around there, Fae are kind of just popping in and out. We’ve learned that as long as the rift portal is open they can kind of slip through and no amount of security seems to catch them all at customs. Some have just walked back in through the front door of Jamalia after realizing they would need a ship to get anywhere else. Which explains how General Vaquinal got into contact with them without us knowing about it. It was less to do with him being sneaky but with Fae being sneaky. They already stole a shuttle once or twice. I’d say its a problem mostly caused by the initial surge of ‘get us the hell out of here’ and will likely calm down with time but for the immediate future it is notable how difficult they are to contain. Also we keep finding piles of fae clothes in random hallways.

General Vaquinal himself is a bit of an odd fellow. I suppose you have to be to reach out to the Fae for help instead of the druids though Eerihild figured out the reason behind that. While the theory that elves are somehow descended from the fae is up for debate, another large part of why he wants the fae’s help is because he is the one closest to Kar’Soluth and in particular has been dealing with Beldobaan. Perhaps it was a bit of an assumption to say he’s an odd fellow, he might just be turning into a paranoid maniac due to what he’s going through. His ‘we’re related’ pitch is mostly because he has nothing else to get the fae’s attention but he specifically was after the fae for help with drow infiltrators since they are equally as tricky. Apparently he is also trying to prove its even Beldobaan that is messing with him, also he has no evidence of anything. If it were anyone other than Beldobaan I would definitely say he’s just crazy. He might actually just be crazy for all I know but it’s about 50/50. Given what Sethis learned about that house, and that somehow no one knew that she was basically the queen of the dajer vampire and could rehabilitate ferals, I am willing to believe its really hard to track what they do.

Speaking of druidic spy candidates, starting to think we have a lot of fae with no ties to anyone else, come from the origin of druidic power, and who need jobs. Though they aren’t exactly trained for even operating in the middle planes at all, let alone grew up here enough to know how to work a door. Might be a terrible idea, might be a great idea, not sure yet.

The chapter with the Hasao Tei you could say have a low rate of interest in zankou, mostly because they were interested in pandem and dedicated their lives to that to the extent of joining the order. A few have been experimenting with it but only lightly.

What fortuitous timing for the second lance to get to Zenaka, they’re invading each other again.

Meanwhile on Jydoq, the twelve leaders are mostly regional based on how far they can actually keep track of things. The whole situation evolved out of their best efforts to stabilize a situation that is being constantly disrupted by the death of their leaders. They tried to form a council of these originally eight powers since that was their old government in the first place. Then all eight of them died and the next six in line. Then it became twelve of them. So sharing power isn’t the issue, its maintaining a chain of command for longer than two months.

We know two of them are tied to the Jaal’Darya and are reliant on them for help. Notably those two are coincidentally the most stabilized. Three are buddies with Shetou, one is technically allied with us through previous efforts we put in and Kennae. The most powerful single faction among them is outright controlled by the Desoir family who took over managing affairs since they owe Desoir a lot of money right now. The rest are just rogues right now. Worth mentioning the two with Jaal’Darya, one with desoir, and one with us, are all at their homeworld. Though they had multiple systems settled and the rest are based out of their various colonies that were hit a little less compared to the homeworld by Selona’s Shenanigans.

We’ve established Panemperia as a more official brand. I just hired people from Renard’s Rifts for professors. They have a bunch of people who know what they’re doing and wouldn’t mind sitting around and taking it easy on Diadem. Couple knights too. Though Renard himself said and I quote “I ain’t that old yet.”

Halaestra demanded an unreasonably high salary to consider doing it, though I suppose to be fair she does have a lot of money so it takes a lot to make her actually show up to a job on time.

Plane Builder

Meanwhile back on Jydoq, as was covered from intel reports by Nah, the leaders are all over the place. For our purposes, the cult has just been shoving food in people’s mouths. At this point everyone is motivated by food and Lancaster has invested a lot into setting up farms everywhere we go. We’ve sent someone to offer moral support to the faction that just had its eighth governor killed by this assassin. So we got some more immigrants who just want food around Zion.

You declassified yourself months ago, everyone knows you are a cat. You didn’t say ‘declassify myself except for that one part’ so it’s actually been the best advertisement the cult has had in awhile to point out the leader can do something like the overmind technique effectively enough to transpose himself into the body of a cat. Technically it’s that you can jump your way out of the cat body as that is your original one but people seem to forget that detail. Also been using it to point out that the giant puddle of ichor in Roha has you in it, which is also good for our PR.

Agallias has been withdrawn as promised and most of his loyal population went with him to conquer a new world. That leaves us with still a little bit more to do though as it wasn’t quite as simple as showing up with a flag. Particularly dealing with the natives who are now leaderless just in time for us to show up.

As a bit more detail, Viowei is home to already large life forms. It was probably what got Agallias interested in it. They aren’t exactly huge but they are definitely an effort to cram into a solian building. With Agallias gone their government is in a state of disarray but he didn’t exactly say “bye now that new guy is in charge” on the way out. I imagine there will still be some resistance which leads to us needing to make it clear that we’re taking over. So we do still need to invade them just a little bit. Though its likely any resistance effort can be dealt with under the parameters of ‘not killing civilians’ a lot easier if we’re not dealing with an organized force. The swarm commanders can handle that much.

Also the Metal Maker was lost with the Vivarium so we can’t exactly feed it to the ship.

Averill has made his way back to Jydoq, though Quinae has been left at Diadem since that’s where their whole guide job is best executed from.

Vasia has once again returned to experimenting on pregnant women on Zenaka. Though with things warming up over there due to the independence movement using her as ‘one of the reasons these aliens are assholes’ she was last seen petitioning Lancaster to let her have some prisoners too.

First off, we have a problem. We left a starship at Kuhas when we passed by to follow us later and make sure no one was tailing us. Rampart assisted in hiding them among usual space traffic departing Kuhas and they found that we’re being chased down by a fleet our sensors cannot detect. It’s Rahlken again. Our starship scout crew was able to get visual confirmation since their sensors couldn’t detect the ship even while within scrying range.

An interception fleet is heading towards us though they aren’t as fast as Solian ships. It has been counted, again visually so accuracy may be compromised, of at least eight battleships, two assault carriers, a regular carrier, and about twenty two cruisers. Handful of destroyers too but our scouts were unable to confirm the presence of anything smaller. While we should be able to handle that, if it slows us down and Rahlken catches up we don’t need a rematch to know how that will go. However, unless they slow us down we’re faster than Rahlken’s own ship.

At this point we are in the hive territories, there aren’t as many stations out here and we’ve already seen what that ship can do to Gem Station. I estimate at current speeds it will take them a week to catch us if we continue our current course, the actual fight could go either way. If we deviate to the most ‘away’ direction, we can get up to three weeks. However, another of our starships has detected a nearby fleet coming from the opposite direction though they lack the stealth technology of the other and it was found via sensors. So while we can’t say for sure its allegiances, the scouts report it doesn’t look like his stuff but it looks a lot meaner. According to intel from Rampart, that might be a fleet of Tungsten Teeth mercenaries.

So to summarize, Rahlken is on our tail but too slow to catch us. There is one confirmed fleet sent to intercept us and slow us down and another that may or may not even be hostile but is catching us with the ol’ pincer attack if it is hostile. If Rahlken catches up, we’re screwed.

We have at least a week on our current course and three if we divert. If we do so, we might be able to get somewhere safe for a crash landing at least?

Meanwhile, on to catchin these hands. You are sort of right that the cores who are best at making hands come from the same source, but its the Siwa Factory we came from and the generation that shares you and me within it. It is likely there was a specific engineer who was committed to this, and the others of our generation and model were their failed attempts at the same thing we’re trying to do. The three of us being the success cases. Though our own construction, sans Adrienne the mystery, had a whole team working on it. The head of the team being a now-dead elf who may or may not have even been a significant contributor or just taking credit for what the team did. Humanoids do that a lot I’m told. The Cradle is the very same factory so we have all their work here but I’ve looked around for any further information on what exactly made it work and there’s nothing about exactly what went into it.

As for placing the core into other fancy things, I made a larger mech shell that can support the modern swappable cores. Notably all of my models can use it though older models without removable cores cannot. That includes you, myself, Adrienne, Chevalier, and Sylvaine. I built Vanessa and Sacha though so they can use it. So can a lot of the young’uns around here but we only just recently started large scale production of those. Also Sylvaine is already pretty much a mech.

We’ve managed to get some more details on the jydoq cannibal assassin thing.Though oddly, it came from Allison at Kuhas station. They know of something similar to this story specifically but its down to rumors and ‘some guy said some stuff awhile back and I kind of remember it’. However, there are stories of people who fit this creature’s description. It is quite likely that whoever this assassin is, the important details of their story are in the Reach not on Jydoq itself. Apparently in the southern parts of the Reach there are similar stories and it might be worth poking around there. Specifically it was mentioned that the Utewa might know something.

Mike’s back. He was confused as to how much has changed in what he felt was a relatively short time away. Also he keeps taking a lot of showers, apparently he had to do things with beholders and whatnot he is not proud of.

We built the station over at Cayetano and started setting up a city at Diadem. Not sure how I went from managing an intelligence agency to a government in here though but I suppose that all got started around the time of the Nomad Flotilla. Makes you think though doesn’t it?

Allison has been getting more established in Kuhas. Lot of gang violence around there.

Also speaking of relevance for the computer parts manufacturing, we’ve learned that is basically currency within the Reach. They can’t use credits or any sort of easy currency everyone can agree on due to people stealing it all the time, so they use ‘anything that had to be manufactured with any degree of expertise’. Already have large orders from Lancaster to convert credits into ‘stuff that the Reach will trade with’.

The Nomads have taken to probing around in the Reach and discovered some valuable information while they look into various stations to hang out around. A lot of pirates in the Reach does the kind of stuff they do. In Sol it was somewhat of a ridiculous notion for a pirate gang to be stealing much larger ships, but in the Reach that is a way of life. So be wary of putting literally any ship into space out in this region.

This is Exme Faythe reporting for the Sol News Network, brought to you by Koura Burritos. Koura Burritos, who knew aliens could taste so good?

Following the taking of a foothold aboard an alien ringworld now called Diadem, the Federated Void State has surrendered to the Hassani Empire after years of conflict and entered into a treaty limiting further armed conflict. Information of this development has caused political ramifications throughout the Sol Territories.

With new alien civilizations being found every few months, public opinion leans towards exhaustion over internal struggles and in favor of ending hostilities on the frontier. Many frontier colonists had hoped to escape the conflict in Sol between Alnae and Shetou in the first place, so seeing the two frontier governments reach an end to hostilities has proven favorable. This comes not too long after the revelation of the Hassani’s monstrous populace that resulted in them gaining significant foothold on Thenica in the form of independent colonies.

This treaty also brings the war between the FVS and the Demon Kingdom to a close as the FVS withdraw their military interests from intervening in the Council of Lord’s affairs. The Demon Kingdom has appointed a new lord to their council as the former lands of the Vloz’Khress enter under the joint management of Ecsanul and Aikane.

Mysteriously, Matriarch Kharla Vel’Vloz’Khress has suddenly resigned and the house has been taken over by one of her daughters. As one might expect, we here at Sol News Network do not have the resources to fully investigate just how it came to be, but after a brutal power play between seven of Kharla’s children, daughter of Kharla and Demon Lord Aikane – Sayane Vel’Vloz’Khress has taken over as Matriarch and been formally recognized by Yasrena Val’Hari. Many were surprised, since they did not even remember that the 16th daughter even existed due to how quiet she had been. It is theorized that the Astral Order had pushed her to power by working with Aikane. When reached for comment they said-

“No we…wait a minute….THAT BITCH!”

End quote.

Demon Lord Aikane has also taken over a large stretch of the Vloz’Khress territory that once belonged to other demon lords and as mother to the new Matriarch has seen quite a rise in power within the Council of Lords.

These developments have left Shetou in an awkward position. House Song still adamantly opposes the Hassani Empire but House Sharen sees this as the end of a stalemate and time to recognize the Hassani as not to get into a losing battle. Laesaari Val’Hari has declined to release any statement on the matter at this time as things are still developing.

This all comes soon after the return of the Hassani’s true empress. As Sakhessa stated, the empire was made by a Dracolich named Kanika Hassani who was just indisposed at the time of formalizing the paperwork. With her return and Sakhessa’s quick surrendering of the throne to this figure, many foreign nations both native and alien are experiencing diplomatic whiplash.

Kaylen Yuriko of the Heroes Guild has left the Federated Void State in response to the signing of the treaty. Promising to continue fighting against the monstrous Kanika Hassani no matter the cost. Though without the Federated Void State’s backing she has fallen from political relevancy and even her former home nation of Alnae has not bothered to acknowledge or respond to her developing situation.

When reached for comment, Azilath stated that she had no interest in any of this and would be continuing to focus on expanding the Valdir into other worlds. While no one has done anything about the growing Valdir, many are concerned that if left unchecked Azilath will become an overwhelming super power. However, it appears that no one wants to be the first to do anything about it.

Colonists are leaving Sol in large numbers as they are promised a new home in the Auwana system where the Hassani Empire capital is located. This has left Thenica in an even worse state as a large fraction of its economy is emigrating away. The Alnae Warlords continue their ongoing campaigns to reunite Alnae and continue to experience food shortages. Shetou continues to exploit the current situation and annex pieces of Alnae territory from individual warlords.

While former elven nobility are maintaining their position as best they can, the average citizens are struggling. Many of them finding the roles reversed as they now work for orcish gang bosses as their only option for protection during these violent times. With many others being captured and sold off to Kar’Soluth as slaves. The conquest of new territory and new populations has resulted in the sudden rise of a new Kar’Soluth faction known as the Great House of Kenduis. Lead by Matriarch Angaste Vel’Kenduis.

Many predict we are seeing the final decline of the Elves but a further rise in power from the Drow. Many Alnae Warlords are starting to turn to outside powers for help. With General Preskian turning to the Void State Federation in the hopes that their similar governments and technological ideas will help them find common ground. While they have stabilized their food shortage problems, they have been unable to take further territory and are having to disallow further members in order to avoid running out of food again.

Meanwhile General Vaquinal is exploiting the newly opened portal on Enohas to the Fae Wilds to try and get in touch with the Fae, who are closely related to the Elves by common ancestry. Since the Fae now have a route out of the Wilds they are hoping that in working together they can establish a new government that will benefit them both.

General Aramys is suspected to be consorting with the abyssal lords and the demon kingdom for bartered aid. Though whether or not they have made much progress in these negotiations remains unclear.

General Helefiel has found allies in the form of elementals from the elemental plane who have also recently been expanding their own operations into the middle planes.

In all, it seems that the collapse of Alnae brought on by the Silnian invasion has resulted in the former elven oligarchs needing to find help to defeat one another and rebuild Alnae. However, many elven citizens are emigrating to other frontier colonies in the hopes of re-establishing themselves rather than continuing to fight over the ruins of Thenica. Some are even petitioning for Grand Marshal Yuriko to return since she was the last official appointed by the former Alnae council.

In frontier news, the legendary Phoenix has returned even if for only a brief visit. The eastern houses all showed up to Cayetano via the portal on Thenica to see her reappearance. It turns out the Phoenix has several half bred children that no one knew about, one of which being a dragon named Haleh who is now a member of the Federated Void State as the leader of her own member state.

A new colony has been opened by members from the fae wilds on Enohas, where a portal was placed by the Astral Order just recently. It was apparently done without the knowledge of the Astral Order and many are concerned given the reputation fae have. When reached for comment, new colony manager Yaezuki stated that she was just interested in getting her and her people out of the fae wilds. Stating that the stories don’t do it justice and that the place has become a living nightmare to reside in. She hopes that by starting her new colony she can find a new more peaceful life. Many are unsure of what to make of this development.

Both the Federated Void State and the Hassani Empire have made contact with a civilization known as the Playatis. A modern galactically aware civilization who acts as a trade station between our area of the galaxy and the eastern side of a place called “The Dead Zone”. Prospective explorers and colonists are advised to remember that this zone of space is considered extremely hazardous and should not be settled or lingered within.

More and more frontiersmen have been exploring the Western Reach ever since the establishment of Diadem and the revelation of a place called Kuhas Station. FVS Officials warn that the Western Reach is just as much if not even more of an lawless place than the Thenican wastes and not to expect any assistance if they get lost within it. Though many have found success already as traders within the vast network between the stars. Frontier traders might find familiar faces in the jydoq, FVS, Selona Syndicate and the Desoir family while they are out there.

Despite all of these exciting developments, space traffic and trade is actually down significantly overall due to the ongoing problem with ships corroding abnormally fast ever since the Astral Order went into the fae wilds. People are still unhappy with them about that.

That’s all for now, see you next time here at the Sol News Network.

With regards to the convention, still need to know what events you want to hold and when.

With the peace talks settled down and everything signed off on, there’s a lot of further paperwork and logistics moving around while all parties collect this or that for their various ends of the deal. Good thing we live out here in the Reach and don’t need to see everyone else in meetings or anything.

Haleh has wrapped up whatever she wanted to talk to her mother about and has departed from Diadem to reassemble her crew. Also possibly to escape the constant pampering of the Hasao Tei.

With the Iron Cradle’s trajectory, they are currently stopping off at Kuhas and that fits into the overall plan to find the habited worlds of the Reach. As many are not exactly an undiscovered mystery anymore. The one nearest to Diadem is on the other side of the border within the Hive Worlds. Immediately demonstrating one of the great oddities of the Reach and its way of life. The civilization living there are not technologically advanced but they have space ships. Basically they don’t understand how anything works but they keep trading and getting stuff from people who do understand how it works.

Also recent events have drawn some visitors to Diadem to see whats going on, so we have a few unexpected guests now and then. It turns out Laura was quick on the marketing and had connections in the Reach to spread the word to come and visit. So now we have twenty aliens sitting in a hangar bay selling random junk.

The nearest modern civilization to Diadem is a hop away to the south where a planet called Wula is host to a species known for its colorful semi-aquatic nature. They aren’t particularly known for participating with the rest of the Reach though since they are on the galactic edge and one of the furthest worlds from the heart of the Reach. They are also only recently capable of galactic transit by about two centuries and largely focused on matters regarding their own star system and two neighboring ones they have been attempting to colonize.

The Winter is on its way to Kuhas station though from Averill’s reports it seems not that difficult to set up a shop on the station.There are new vacancies almost every week as people get robbed or murdered for various trivial reasons. It is also a major hub for galactic travelers so they don’t have very many questions about us strange new aliens, we’re a drop in the bucket as far as they’re concerned. Though Sethis has already started to set up quite a large office there.

Which all brings another question in what you would rather focus on for the time being. Right now we have a significant fleet and military presence, the Reach is vast and filled with all sorts of civilizations, gangs, nomadic flotillas, station-state governments, and so on. We have the ability to likely overpower some of the more isolated or primitive members if we wanted a repeat of the incidents on Enohas or Zenaka, though there might be more to gain in dealing with the various greater powers that be. Also to be noted the idea of establishing contact with the super powers of the Reach that we definitely shouldn’t be picking fights with but could be a good start in making progress towards our goals. It’s a lot less random than before since we can just ask for rumors on Kuhas station and so on.

I see negotiating went as well as one could hope. Now to prevent Lancaster from realizing any details of it in hindsight.

As for the convention, we’re still in the process of finalizing the details of what its all about and how to present it to people at large. No doubt Sol News will show up just to see if there’s anything worth documenting as well, so worth considering what the rest of Sol will see. Also whether or not we want to advertise it to the Reach, not that they  will care unless they hear of prizes.

That being said, Lancaster is pretty rich by the standards of the Reach and offering substantial prizes for various concepts might be a sneaky way to feel out what they have out here in this region. Do a combat tournament, once we work out how to make sure no one kills each other, and then you can probably find out how strong the Reachers tend to be. Some sort of engineering contest might help you figure out who the best builders are. Maybe some sort of freakshow for just seeing some weird alien shit, I dunno. Worth considering though I think. Basically if you want to have a more local festival in celebration of the FVS, maybe stick to food stands and games. If you want to spy on the international community, prizes! Also some marketing.

Speaking of which, if you want the other areas of Sol it could be a little tricky especially for the first festival. It might be worth directly contacting and sponsoring likely candidates just as a way of showing off its international intentions and establish the tradition. Whether that be for their food stands, showing off fancy ships, or any sort of tournament. I doubt the Phantoms will be bothered to show up to humanoid festivities. At best we could convince Haleh to show up.

Marketing wise I do feel it better to focus on the demographic based on the region you host it in. If it is being hosted at Diadem, I doubt you’ll get much interest from Sol just because regardless of the portals it then begins to feel more like a frontier festival. If you held it on Thenica it might be of greater interest to other solians but definitely not getting any visitors from the Reach we haven’t even established ourselves within yet.

Kharla is on the way to Cayetano as Yasrena promised to meet up with Selah. We’re not entirely sure how that conversation went, though with all of our attention on House Vloz it does seem that some threatening pressure was applied. Kharla herself isn’t terribly affected compared to Kiel’Nada who seems more aware of how the situation has actually changed for the two.

Sooo what else are you doing on Jydoq? Other than fighting the assassin we still have the issue that we’re just sitting there not doing anything. I prepared an intel report on some basics for you to work with at least.

Ah-hem.

So as it stands, Jydoq is just as fucked as Thenica. The most notable thing we’re doing is fighting a cannibal so almost beat for beat. Arkaric really messed them up and used Merlan to make things even worse. They are currently split into a dozen or so smaller governments instead of the unified one they once had and those leaders are constantly arguing with each other due to resource scarcity.

They are all in various levels of being in touch with Solian powerbases with several having emigrated to the frontiers for some sanctuary from the wars on their own world. Many of them escaping into the Western Reach in particular, they’ve been quite familiar with that area of the galaxy for awhile now.

We know that Arkaric intended to integrate them into Sol though we’re still not totally sure why. However, it explains how so many different groups of them wound up talking to different powers from Sol and emigrating to there as well. Cayetano has a few hundred sitting around working day jobs and trying to lay low. One of the major corporate powers at Adelaide is a jydoq as well. It also explains why uniting their government again will likely be difficult. Every time they get close to reuniting anything, something goes wrong but often in subtle ways. If subtly isn’t working, the assassin hits the governor who is making too much progress. Worth noting, there are thousands of planets across the galaxy in similar situations. Where no matter what they do, for some reason events play out that force them to spread out into the galaxy and lose having a unified civilization.

Right now the major problems they’re facing are food shortages and then there’s some ideology conflicts between the various governors about changing the way things tend to be. We don’t have enough food to feed this whole planet, so be careful who and where you ship anything to.

There have also been a number of embassies, ambassadors, diplomats, and rogue explorers showing up here as the first intelligent civilization we made contact with. It helps that we can relate to their apocalypse just a little bit. So our colony isn’t the only Solian thing here. I should note that Kar’Soluth in particular is also here. With the treaty we can’t take direct action against them. Apparently house Jaal’Darya has set up shop on one of the continents. Not sure what they’re up to other than recruiting some goo folk to their side of things.

I am good at keeping secrets, I barely talk to anyone. However, the Phantoms have us infiltrated from top to bottom. If you had taken that war we would have been rotted from within in under twenty four hours. Half our forces would have turned and shot the other half of our forces. That’s how they’ve always operated. We got our start exploring the frontier that Faelyn was in charge of, who knows how many immigrants and colonists actually work for them by some chain of command they don’t even realize. For all we know, Vasia is the actual leak and Sakhessa just dropped my name because everyone would believe it. As a whole, we’re kind of terrible at stopping infiltration. Sethis is good at it, but we just assume if he didn’t find it then its not there. Taking action to prevent them from keeping eyes on us and moving us the way they want would involve turning into a paranoid military dictatorship. They had Alnae and Shetou fighting each other for half a millenia just because ONE of them was assigned to that while the rest did other things. They infiltrated GODS. Just assume they know everything about us except maaaaybe what is happening in Vasia’s lab or aboard the Closing Statement.

We shipped in some earth Elementals to start working on the giant pile of dirt. By the end of the second shift they were hitting on half our colonists and had created a new night club. If nothing else, they are committed to the bit at least.

As for the Rixa plane near Diadem, war. Endless horrific war on a scale Sol cannot even conceive of. The Valdir crusade and all that is in that area. Just uh, keep that rift closed.

From Averill, he’s on his way back. Most of the biotech stuff he heard about from Kuhas again won’t work on an incorporeal being. Though Quinae wouldn’t mind the job of sitting around as a Reach guide if it pays well.

As promised, upon the treaty getting signed the rot suddenly started clearing up around Roha, with such speed that its kind of annoying to know they just casually had an off switch for it. Though the infection itself is only dormant as it is still basically incurable, Deinuu sort of closed the pipe that the mana has to go through for all those symptoms to be showing.

We’ve sent Allison to Kuhas Station and she has been setting about getting some offices there to keep an eye on things. Actually pretty easy to do since they don’t really care who is there as long as station security isn’t having any issues with them. Though it has been made clear that station security is a very shoot first and ask questions second so its best not to do anything to piss them off.

It should be noted that the rampant crime on Kuhas is only solved by more crime as it is an otherwise stable social ecosystem. So for Allison to take over as a private security gang, she’s probably going to have to murder a few other gangs to prove she’s the better gang, and to get some turf of her own. Not that she can’t, just stating what she has to do to get set up there. Though she can’t take the vehicles with her very easily as the heart of the station doesn’t allow them to just roam around with a standing ground force that could invade security. They’re relegated to the hangars if they’re on sale. So we might as well leave those around Thenica or bring them to somewhere else until they’re needed.

We also had the super battleship added to the Nomad Flotilla, though its technically still in transit it’ll be there soon. Unlikely that pirates attack something like that at least.

Aryn points out that talking to Arkaric doesn’t involve very many slips of accidental information. He lets her know what he wants us to know. To the point that all she can do is just outright ask about Daiheb and see if he decides to share anything. He did not in regards to Daiheb at least. Though as for Elasyn, he has pointed out that they have his weapon brands and various alien tech as well that he’s collected. It appears that once again he has an arms factory somewhere and once again no one knows where it is. Though given that we produce our own weapons in house it might not be terribly appealing to us. Even if he has collected half a dozen artifacts, they tend to go to Daiheb as the justification for her not shutting him down despite having lost all control of what he’s up to.

As a correction, with the peace treaty signed it is hopefully the end of conflict for at least longer than a year with the Hassani. Basically they completed their quest that took them two thousand years and now get to run off and do their own thing. Without the federation being involved, its likely that no one else in Sol is going to try and take them down. House Song doesn’t represent all of Shetou and Kaylen is basically just a roaming serial killer now if she keeps it up. Us signing this basically ended the war and recognized them as a new empire of the Sol territories with all the gentle touches that politicians like to apply. With Kar’Soluth being somewhat known to be actually theirs they are the new super power of Sol. The age of elven rule seems to have reached its end, and now is the era of dragons. Sure things are still shuffling around and settling down, though we’ve been in this game long enough to see the writing on the walls. I expect she will take a new capital on Thenica, sign off on something with the other remaining super powers like the Demon Kingdom and the Fae, and then to all outside forces she’s the ‘one to talk to’.

As another correction, Kennae is at Jydoq not Zenaka but I’ll assume that’s what you meant and just change your flight schedule.

Michael is on his way back, Sakhessa just put him on a ship and sent him to Cayetano without explanation. I get the impression she was using him to help her get that treaty somehow and now she’s done with him.

Annnnd we are away! So sets forth our great not quite maiden voyage but close enough given that we’re going over a hundred thousand light years! All abooooard.

Man this is a lot of travel time.

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Well we made it to Kuhas station and dropped off Allison and all her stuff for Sethis. Whew boy, this is going to be a long trip.

Anyways, core testing for hand manipulation has proven that some are just better or worse at it though the generations don’t seem to play any factor into how common they are. What we do know is that Adrienne has no serial number and no records of her creation in Siwa database. Wait what if she’s actually a Daiheb android? An android posing as an android posing as a cyborg…that’d be pretty meta. That’s what the kids say right?

Basically we’ve made no progress in replicating or deducing why Adrienne’s hands are so good.

As for the armored core project, on it but still takes a bit. I’ve done it once before though, this whole ship station thing is a voidforged just like us after all. Just takes a lot of awkward wire placements.

Stories of Lore 51

Further updates from the team re-establishing contact with Haleh’s previous conquests. A lot of them had actually heard that Haleh was gone due to being captured by Rahlken, they had independence day parades and everything. They weren’t terribly happy to see our teams returning to talk about taxes. Two of them actually opened fire on the exploration crews. The largest grouping was also reached, which is a star system over from the planet that Eleazor wound up encountering her upon. They are a lot less disgruntled by the information. Apparently it was her former home base and most of the people there were in it for the long haul with her. Though rather than re-establishing contact they asked us to tell Haleh to come pick them up. They lack for space transportation but they are a bunch of nomadic scavengers who just drive around all day. The place she left them at wasn’t terribly hospitable to the variety of species she had collected and they aren’t too keen to stay there if Haleh’s not coming back anytime soon.

For her part, Haleh snuck away from the Hasao Tei to get back to her garage in Diadem. They just keep a team of ‘royal guards’ following her around. She turns out to barely notice them or Dunchek since her whole method of operating previously involved just having people follow her around with no sense of direction. She now occupies two positions. To the Hasao Tei she is sort of a princess, no real authority but a lot of pull. To her own gang of aliens with bad attitudes she’s their formal leader. In the meantime she has been prepping a ship to head off into the Reach and resume her adventures.

As for replacing the turrets with other traditional stationary defenses, sure we can do that. Some bigger cannons and missile launchers will probably work fine.

They are just there in spirit, I don’t wanna add more rows to every colony for things that just do and cost the same as the basic turrets. They shoot things real gud.

The diplomatic envoy from the Playatis, mostly consisting of two nerds we picked up from their academy, is on the way to Cayetano. Though they ask what the purpose of establishing an embassy with them actually is. They tend to be aware that their role in galactic affairs is to be a pit stop and making anything that looks like an alignment to any foreign power, particularly one with our reputation, might aggravate others who regularly pass through since it shows unnecessary favoritism.

As for Koda’s report, we do still know about the one hidden in an asteroid floating around in Sol, though it is very difficult to locate now that our memberships have expired or been revoked depending how you look at it. We’re looking for a single specific moving rock among a bunch of other big moving rocks. Asmodan is also uniquely talented in stealth, we’ve been keeping an eye on the sensors around Sol but the way space traffic moves it is hard to tell if anyone is visiting this asteroid or not. It is likely he has someway to omit the movement of pirates in Sol from traditional sensors. The first part of any plan to attack the asteroid station would be to find it, and while Asmodan himself is good at hiding it pirates are known for terrible operational security. So that will come down to finding and interrogating or tagging other pirates in the system most likely.

Solvang is also suspected to have setups across the Western Reach but that is more of a hunch than anything actually confirmed. Judging by the angles of attack we once suffered from Solvang, either they spread out early or they have a base to the northeast, mostly east, of Sol territories and to the south of Cayetano.

We’ve also promoted a new general since you were so insistent.

Don’t expect it again without making a solid case.

His name is Ranwe, Slayer of Ogaba, He Who Stands, The Great Wall, He Who Shall Know No Fear, The Unbound Wisdom, Slayer of Hashhash, Creator of the Silly Hat, The Soul Seer, The Moonborn, The Sun Catcher, The Quiet Roar, The Specter of Nikibalas, Blazing Fire, Like The Thunder, Slayer of Nenanket, Eternal Blossom, He who is Dark as a Forest, Skin of Stars, Thunder that Rolls Over Clouds, The Hair of the Earth, The Night Lion, The Dancing Song, Born to an Elder’s Wisdom, The Mountain River that Cleaves the World, He Who Sees the Final Dusk, The Dawnwalker, Wild Like Killiteket, Slayer of The Eternal Raging Starbeast Who Knows No Equal, Speaks with Heaven, The Gliding Snowflake, Slayer of Sun Rising Above Horizon, Speaks with Star Walkers, Fights with Wolves, Champion of Brightland, and Democratically Elected Mayor of Brightland.

He’s an arcuran if you couldn’t guess.

Quylla’s comments about drawing out Asmodan are sparse as she isn’t terribly familiar with him as a person. Her best guess would be that targeting his territory in the kingdom would get his attention since every demon lord really likes keeping their territory due to how necessary it is to function within the kingdom politics.

The quirk is Asmodan is known for being rather sneaky and using other people to solve his problems for him. Just as last time we were in his territory, he had Vloz’khress show up rather than show his own forces. So you would probably need to hit him anywhere he is the sole presence of, but since he is just a networker for many other criminal aspects he has very few holdings that are just all about him except for the Kingdom territory, but the entire demon kingdom is right there as he exploited last time.

That was all she could really come up with. She did also mention that the only thing she knows of that could probably find a way to hurt him directly are a group of masked vigilantes- The Revenants. She described The Revenants basically.

Preparations for a tournament and festival have begun though we’ll need to figure out the actual day for it and see who is going. I put a little thing on sheet for it.

The portals around Diadem are more of an arcane job, without the vastness of space the pandem portal mechanisms would be needlessly expensive. It’s just going to take a bit to manually lay down some cables.

We started building the University Campus, though I suppose we’ll have to do some marketing for it. Pandem really took off for us because we were using it left and right during a period without heavy technological restrictions on using it. Most people who can actually travel to Diadem might be a little more reluctant to give up the ability to fly their own ship.

Jiyan has taken the Outsider after some time preparing it for the voyage. We await any reports.

Also it should be noted your incarnum bodies are obvious to any incarnum user and you still have that skeleton face, so

The Moncayo Chapter master has been sent for anti seduction training. Eerihild said to just drop them off at Ohalyn’s for a week and wear their dick out. I declined her suggestion.

As for Irae, she didn’t threaten me but she’s just constantly cranky so maybe everything sounds like a little bit of a threat. Though you should consider that just because you can look like a drow doesn’t mean you can blend in with them. Of all the races to pose as, this is the worst one since their whole culture is built on espionage and sabotage. Say the wrong phrase and become a target since you’d basically just be a coconut among them. Larazja kind of is one too though. You can get away with it among the masses but be wary when dealing with high society such as the Vals.

As for Operation Catcall, we have some complications already as expected. Mostly in terms of planning as we try to get everyone on board all at once and in their places. They have whatever concerns are on their mind.

Aikane pointed out that even though she’s just in this to survive at this point, asking her to relinquish her territory to the new matriarch means that they will be in a weaker position without any demon lords to represent her interests to the Council of Lords. Also this is my own note but I feel like taking a demon lord’s territory from them is bound to cause other problems. Specifically this one. She’s being pragmatic at the moment but she did get to power by being a shapeshifter that could infiltrate things until she worked her way up the chain. Rendering her newly homeless has a very high chance of us being paranoid for the next two decades if we lose track of her. So just something to think about. Then again maybe we’re not paranoid enough and she’s been inside of the FVS the entire time somewhere.

The Son of Voriuk isn’t totally against the idea but notes a problem with the plan. Kharla is normally kind of insane and dumb, except whenever her children are under threat. Then she suddenly becomes very sharp and has an intense attention to detail. Presenting him as mortally wounded to her will make her suddenly very aware of what he’s actually telling her to do. This is a pandem expert when she’s lucid enough to put two thoughts together and might notice something fishy. Not to mention until Kiel’nada is out of the way she’s never far from Kharla and is equally difficult to pull this kind of stunt on. particularly because house Vloz is one of the oldest houses and has a lot of traditions regarding consulting with demons. All of the children are half demons after all and converting to a celestial figure like Ankathi is not really a spur of the moment kind of change to tradition.

The Daughter of Voriuk pointed out seceding from Kar’Soluth and not fleeing the demon kingdom is just suicide. With most of the demon lords dead, the instant Kharla is gone the whole territory is going to be split between Asmodan and another demon lord on the west side of the territory named Corson. Right now the only protection their holdings in the demon kingdom has is the fact that Kharla is terrifying and backing that up is Yasrena. Even demons are scared of Jaal’darya in particular. If she were to revert to the holdings the house would have on Thenica that was only recently repaired in the wake of the Revenant attack, they are now neighbors with the rest of Kar’Soluth or Shetou. Both very dangerous people for her to be next to with the only available ally being in a whole other star system. To even consider that part of the plan remotely viable she’d need you to destroy house Sarghess or convert them as well, kill Yasrena, and destroy House Song. That or destroy Asmodan and Corson while leaving a large enough force to defend the territory while it rebuilds. Vloz’Khress is one of the oldest houses and as such is geographically located in central areas of drow culture. If Kharla suddenly disappears to join Ankathi and then a whole chunk of the house leaves to join the FVS, they’re going to notice if Vloz’Khress immediately secedes and her reign would be short indeed. Especially since Yasrena is going to be kind of pissed off and is in fact allied with Asmodan, so there goes any chance she has of holding the old lands. Their mining operations are not a suitable new location to move to and likely wouldn’t last long anyways.

Her argument can be summed up as: Destroy Kar’Soluth and then we’ll talk about leaving Kar’Soluth.

She also noted that none of your plan requires her to cooperate with you to become the new matriarch, she can kill her sisters on her own and if her mother outright leaves then nothing is in her way. So she’ll just sit back and watch then deal with any obstructions once her mother leaves herself.

The Daughter of Saabalios is sort of also of the same mindset but with less words, not sure which of those two will manage to kill each other but your plan to ship her off to start a new house from scratch isn’t terribly appealing compared to taking over the ancient house Vloz she was born into, it has a lot of prestige attached to the name not to mention actual resources.

Aryn is off to Diadem to pack up her bags and get ready for the voyage to Nelta.

As for sabotaging the daughter of Sabaalios, attacking her credibility has largely resulted in her attacking people questioning her credibility. So that one is amusing at least, she is a rather straight forward person.

Michael has gotten us actual numbers about the military in the rift and even right outside of it. I suppose the problem here is the assumption that their whole military force is there. All of that belongs to Sakhessa for the most part. There’s the other Phantoms with their own armies to consider. I forwarded a list of what we know from casual spying for the time being. Some of it is just unverified guesswork though and they are known for keeping their assets a secret so there are likely pieces hidden from the board if you get what I mean. I also may have overestimated some elements to err on the side of caution. We know Kanika has the legendary Tarrasque that she lichified but we have no idea what other secretive super lich weapons she might have laying around. I have a suspicion though judging by some of our reports from within Beldobaan that they have another legendary monster deep in hiding simply because no one survives witnessing it. Though with our monster historians on the job, they think she has a False Hydra hidden somewhere in her ranks. We also know she has beholders but no idea where or how many. Unfortunately we know she has an underwater fortress somewhere on Thenica but we’ve never been able to find it. Not sure how much aquatic forces will come into play in a space war though.

The other bit of wild guesswork is aliens. We know they expanded rapidly and took over several alien assets though we’re not sure which belong to Selona, whether or not Selona would get involved, and how many forces that would even include if relevant. Estimations for Asmodan are also extremely difficult since he holds not only his territory in the demon kingdom, but also his pirate expanse which is very spread out within the galaxy and purposefully hidden. The other issue with his pirate assets is guessing how many would actually fight for him versus how many just use his services as a pirate organizer guy. Again estimates err on the side of going high.

As for Asmodan’s pirates, we definitely don’t have a membership anymore. At best we can just look for other pirates with big mouths since pirates aren’t exactly known for keeping quiet if you get them some drinks.

In regards to getting a Nah Base established

We’ve set up an office front at House Linsun to keep an eye on things but the attempt to get into House Song is much more difficult. Their cultural traditions were formed while living among drow for the last few centuries and as a result they are extremely difficult to infiltrate.

Same story but different problems with infiltrating Asmodan’s pirates. Without our old membership we can’t find them, he also knows who we are. Unlike many members of the Phantoms besides Kanika, Asmodan is a direct buddy of Arkaric’s due to their shared love of breaking laws just because they find it funny. As a result he’s picked up a lot of tricks about keeping people like us out, because he runs a criminal empire and a lot of governments would love to get a man on the inside.

As for finding Elasyn,, its pretty much in the heart of the Western Reach. I updated the map for you. However given who is there, I imagine its one of the rougher places in the galaxy.

Also we can’t really put emplaced defenses on the ships or the flotilla directly. Acquire more ships to improve its combat abilities.

Well for the negotiations, Sakhessa pretty much offered all your demands before we got to even say anything about it. She’s being awfully nice considering we’re absolutely fucked if we fight them. Then again I guess if you live literally underground for a few thousand years you would really rather not have your return to the surface spoiled by war.

The Thing in the Dark isn’t interested in having kids while at death’s door, apparently they’re less scientific in their approach compared to…well us around here. Pfft, morals.

Also if you want an earth elemental construction team for the mountain, that just costs a shockingly low amount of money. They’re a lot more interested in coming to visit a new interesting place and “partying up the place”. Most of the expenses don’t have to do with paying them so much as transporting them.

Also the teams are at Jydoq now, there were no incidents with your mysterious quarry either way. We already know they know about the overmind stuff, they aren’t biting at the chance to accomplish basically nothing. In the meantime the teams looking for the assassin have at most reported that they do have some leads. Specifically, Kennae’s apprentices know that it doesn’t actually stick around our base camp as much as you might think. It’s also been assassinating other jydoq all over the place, it just sometimes swings around and remembers to take more shots at you or Kennae. Also that this particular thing was last spotted in one of the major cities stabbing a major governing figure.

No I don’t need a ‘jean’. It’d mat my fur. As for other friends, I have Craylin and the other ichor minds. That and Si Yeon visits now and then, though usually to check a bunch of numbers. She keeps taking the temperature of the ichor for some reason. Notably, she is still completely immune to the ichor. There’s just a weird blind spot whenever she is around.

Judging by a rare report from Averill, he’s still roaming around the Reach looking for your salvagers. Though its becoming clear that the odds of them being found within any reasonable time frame is incredibly low. The Reach is a massive…pseudo anarchic civilization? There’s not much in the way of paper trails out there basically.

Vasia points out that the high variance in Zenakans implies that there are more things you can start to control than just the elite status and finding out those things might be interesting since you’re already impregnating hundreds of them. We already know how to recreate the elite status anyways.

Zaikies doesn’t know that much about what to do with the archeological confirmation of the fact that the Blaiken were both effective and brutal. Though it does leave him to wonder what their culture has become over the thousands of years of isolation, with some of their only appearances in the larger galaxy indicating something violent about them.

Our colony aboard Diadem has finished initial construction! Now its all shiny, too bad its dark and spooky down here by the factories. Also you didn’t respond when I asked you to name it so I named it Le Havre when Lancaster asked. Paperwork and all that.

We’re still rallying up everyone before departing for the eastern galaxy with the Iron Cradle. We’ll be passing by a station that the Cult of Lucidity found called Kuhas station if you need a bathroom break. It will be the last stop we know of before we traverse into the great unknown to see just why all those other ships were never heard from again when they undertook this same mission. Turns out its a lot of logistics to get everyone from everywhere aboard a single ship before takeoff. Also we were getting the turret additions ready.

In other news, the study of Adrienne reveals that it has to do with her core rather than the hands itself that enable her to do what she can do. We have already tried using cybernetic prosthetics for arms before, as Adrienne has, but they were never fully functional. It has to do with something mentally available to Adrienne, likely the both of us too. This magical ‘it’ factor lets her use her hands with the dexterity she is known for. The problem is to study that in further detail, I’d have to kill her to take the core apart. That or you. Can’t really take apart myself though.

We actually already can swap cores between bodies in most cases, the newer more modern models have this ability. Arsene suffered from being one of the older models, like me, who cannot do that. The real quirk is designing an appropriately heavy mech body that interfaces properly with our cores and simultaneously, doesn’t suck. We’ve been working on that for ages though, so were our creators at Siwa industries.

Furthest Stars

We’ve gotten the first initial reports from one of our cruisers sent to look into Haleh’s former conquests. The one of them nearest to us, that it turns out she herself hasn’t seen in seven years. They’ve been rebuilding themselves since her passing and aren’t terribly interested in any offer to join the Federation, though they also didn’t go with Haleh on her ongoing campaign so they weren’t technically her colony just a ruin she left behind. So that’s to be expected, but the cruiser’s captain felt it was worth stopping by just to get an idea of what it was like. That and it was a confirmed location where aliens did in fact live, always useful to the explorers. The captain noted the high rate of species diversity even for such a small location out on the fringes of the Reach. Corroborating with Eleazor’s stories of this area of galactic space. The captain was able to report back that this is likely to be a common occurrence. Conquerors, kidnappers, slavers, explorers, colonists, and exiled prisoners have frequently moved around this galactic neighborhood resulting in a very galactic culture even if it is not a unified civilization. Since most of these races can trace their ancestry to the Silnians they’re all extremely compatible with one another despite being separated by light years and millions of years of isolated development in some cases. Their silnian ancestry renders them already highly compatible with just about anything let alone one another. Meaning there are a lot of unique species out here on the Reach that have maybe six members for example due to rampant crossbreeding.

As our understanding of this area of the galaxy improves, we’re starting to get a better picture of the Western Reach. And that picture is a Packson Jollack. You could say it is one of the most explored areas of space and almost everyone has become galactically aware, but you could also say it is nearly unexplored because no one knows who or what is where. Even the Exerlus can only scan so much before it picks up and moves whether by its own will or not. There is a pirate that steals cities lurking around and just dropping their captives off who knows where sometimes. A lot of stories begin with “My grandpa got abducted” and end with “So that’s how I wound up nowhere near where that story started”

It is worth noting, the contacted colony that Haleh once visited was very well armed. One of the other captains has been redirected to take special focus on a world Haleh said was one of the most well developed, at least it was before she visited it. Also we lost contact with one of the fifteen ships.Given what happened last time we sent explorers out here, I’ll give you three guesses. According to Haleh, it’s a space is big and she herself found two uncontacted worlds in her adventures. It isn’t that the Western Reach is homogeneous in its nature but the dominant culture is widespread across the stars that have the highest traffic. It looks more like a spiderweb of a cultural map instead of a solidly mapped off volume. With every hole in that spiderweb being ‘nobody knows’.

The VSS Raptor has held position as requested with the Playatis. They’re quite friendly, to a fault even. Jiyan reports finding out how they haven’t been destroyed by pirates, they have a lot of guns and their species is uniquely durable. Also no one messes with the last gas station in and out of nowheresville. The Playatis have formally requested contact with the Astral Order of the Knights Pandem, due to their fascination with the one knight on the Raptor casually summoning a pandem rift. Which Renjala also seemed very pre-emptive about preparing to go through with.

As advisor I should point out, our familiarity with Pandem magic is one of our greatest resources as a civilization. It is also what has kept us from being overwhelmed by Nelta in the past and allowed us to deal with many other threats who do not know or understand it. There could be extremely significant ramifications to sharing it with any other civilization, for better or worse no matter which way you go with it. It is our best diplomatic bartering chip, but also our most powerful military asset.

To another end, Jiyan continued working with Zaikies to figure out more about the Blaiken history. Zaikies is aware of the ruins in the Dead Zone and can actually pin down that it was indeed the Blaiken that destroyed them. Though they attacked the Blaiken first. When the Blaiken had first moved in fourteen thousand years ago, those civilizations were a part of a smaller galactic alliance that basically demanded subjugation from the Blaiken. He hypothesizes it is likely due to the reputation of the Kalis species. Something broke down in ‘negotiations’ and the Blaiken retaliation was clearly very effective since now everything around their sector of space is dead. Other relevant tidbits include that Jiyan’s running theory about Blaiken secretly walking among us makes sense when we remember that they are somehow involved with Selona. Rahlken admitted Selona had the Blaiken repair his ship for him, and Selona is the one who has been refining an android race to blend in with others seamlessly. Perhaps he got the idea or the know-how from them. That and she just really wants to make sure you don’t try to send her at Blaiken space that Zaikies has promised is ‘certain and immediate death’.

In regards to the construction of exploration focused vessels of significant size, it will need weapons. Using my permissions as Advisor, I was able to outsource the query to the experts in ship penetration. Captain Andel had to leave and finish laughing while I discussed the matter further with his second in command, Lieutenant De’Numal. When dealing with professional pirates, there is no such thing as a hull they cannot get through. The enemy of a pirate boarding is time, the longer the crew has to rally a defense around their entry point the worse the job is. As well as reinforcements. However, on a galactic voyage a ship could be set adrift and it’s hull picked clean before reinforcements could ever arrive. Escape from a pirate ship is about speed, the bigger the ship the less likely that is to happen. There is about an hour of this discussion and the nuances of pirates. At this point we might as well just ask De’Numal, who is a former 314-C member, to give some sort of lecture at the pilot academy and shipyards. She has a lot of thoughts on the matter. I am starting to see how the Nomads are so successful. The Nomads are fairly confident they could strip an assault carrier if it was unarmed and staffed with explorers. To be fair they have done this a couple of times before, that’s how Sethis got his flotilla.

Laura points out that no one wants to join a security force with silly hats. She says gas masks and evil goggle eyes look cooler. Thus improving recruitment rates. That and Adelaide’s security has already been handled under a private security contractor.

Haleh’s new assistant reports that she is still just driving around abandoned areas of Diadem’s super city with a crew that appears to be street racers. Though upon someone being there to pay closer attention, this is actually military training since they rely heavily on vehicles. They have to learn to drive like that somewhere, and apparently Diadem offers a lot of unused areas for such practices. So despite her seeming disinterest in anything, she is formally training a new wave to go back out there. Apparently her plan is to focus on a more elite unit this time now that she’s not as interested in finding a Terlim turret across all of the Western Reach. Buying her time to do things that slow her down instead of constantly push forward. Though due to the Hasao Tei, it has become a complicated mess. Likely awaiting resolution when they meet her mother.

They also noted she still has dozens of slaves that were never liberated under federation laws. Though investigation into this revealed the discrepancy. What we legally consider a slave differs from what she thinks of one as. To her mind, they still cost the same but instead of having to manage the logistics of keeping them alive – paying them is just offloading the responsibility of managing them onto themselves. Thus increasing their workload and decreasing hers. If they show up every day at nine am and have no ability to make decisions for themselves on what they want to do she considers them slaves. Basically she thinks the term ‘wage slave’ is literal. Also her entire strategy across the Reach was to force people into desperate circumstances, provide a salary that included the only means they had of feeding themselves, and then make them do whatever she said. So this aligns with her previous strategies, the only difference is now the Federation provides other employment opportunities instead of being constantly traveling through the galaxy and creating a wasteland of anywhere that might have been a place to abandon ship at. I am also told she has been consulting with Laura King with odd regularity.

“> Defenders: 0
– :|” Just ignore the sheet linking to the wrong cell.

Quylla has a bigger fancier shelter for certain. She was always involved with a lot of political affairs and with the money we’ve given her she now has significantly increased her status within the Demon Kingdom to the point of drawing more attention than she can handle. With Renjala’s efforts to undermine the Vloz while simultaneously pulling out of the Kingdom, Quylla lost a lot of her support. Her connections to Aikane were a major source of her protection so she has been forced to turn to the classic devil’s deal and hire mercenaries to help her. This in particular includes “Honest Hina”. While Quylla isn’t exactly a saint and has had to become something of a crime boss to keep her shelter safe and operating, now that Vloz is pulling back due to Renjala she’s in a much more dangerous position while in possession of hundreds of succubi that other demon lords would not mind taking from her. Her resources have expanded but her problems expanded faster, both kind of our doing.

Also the Demon Kingdom is massive, you’ll need to be more specific on what kind of demons you are looking to working with otherwise I’ll just be sending you a spreadsheet with up to a few million entries. One benefit of funding Quylla, we are stabbing in the dark a bit less now when surveying the Kingdom for things of interest.

We lost more people on the front lines of the machine war. Again. Atop of that, we’ve gotten word that Haleh’s mom is on the way and we should expect to see her next month and Sakhessa will be accompanying her. Likely for other reasons than the royal procession.

Eerihild was unable to heal the dark spooky thing, she can heal wounds but not age. She said we’d need some sort of time wizard for that, and even the Jesai time magic relies on checkpoints rather than just retroactively changing whatever they feel like. She’s on the way to jamalia now.

Friend’s condition is going to require some creativity. It is just a problem of old age but because they are incorporeal most methods of fixing that aren’t applicable. Age reversal isn’t exactly a spell anyone just has laying around. I’ve heard a few suggestions ranging from trying to teach it Kennae’s zankou trick – if such a thing could even be applicable to an incorporeal creature who might not have enough time to learn it. Giving it a phylactery, psionically re-implanting its psyche, and sticking it in the Celestial plane where things age slower. Notably most of these suggestions are exiting the realm of ‘healing’ and getting into the area of creating immortality. The only problem with those suggestions are that if someone could suggest it, odds are highly likely that this information broker has already looked into it. It came to us because Eden was not a resource anyone else had, neither was Eerihild. Apparently it has actually used some of these methods before in order to live as long as it has in the first place, though some elements of its nature are incompatible with the more common solutions. Well I say ‘common’ as if liches aren’t a one in a half billion occurrence. I suppose I forget that we don’t lead normal lives around here anymore. Which leads me to my hypothesis based on why they originally came to us. There is no way that Sol has a solution, this is a creature that specializes in collecting and redistributing information. If there was some medical procedure or spell that could do it, it wouldn’t have needed to try coming to us for Eden’s help. It also admitted to knowing the Phantoms and the Revenants, being the founder of the Black Library, etc. My point being, I think if there is a solution it won’t be found in the expanse of Sol. Like the cure for corruption, we’ll need aliens technology, magic, and ideas. However, it does not like to expose itself for every possible chance. Eden was a very specific opportunity that it could reasonably discern had a real shot of working.

It has at least ten years, but less than a hundred. We’re in a new section of the galaxy and we’ve encountered the incorporeal before. The Arcurans are just hanging out right over there. Might need to ask Lancaster’s explorers to keep an ear to the ground. The other option however, we know for certain that if there is any magical means of doing this that the Jesai should have it. Despite what Aryn did… they don’t actually seem too involved with Sol’s bad reputation. Elym is an exile, Decaelys is doing some whole other thing, and they’re at war with Nelta not us. We could also try to find and petition the Exerlus for a list of other incorporeal races. That or just have some explorers go to the lower and higher planes and look around space in there a bit harder. I’m just spitballing a compilation from all the suggestions of the collective think tank. In short, I don’t think the answer is in Sol or it would already have that answer. Unless you want to finish the Ankathi quest and then make some sort of god of darkness out of it. Does Ankathi count as ‘Sol’? She came from there but she’s definitely removed from it now.

Mokihi is currently located in an elemental domain ruled by ice elementals. So not quiiite a fire area. Fun fact, you know there are Fae called the Virago? They’re basically ice incarnate variants of fae. They’re also notoriously cruel and sadistic. Really makes me question why Waianoa suddenly wanted Lancaster for her experiments.

Operation Catcall has made some progress, just not where we thought we’d make it. A succubus showed up at our Moncayo Chapter house, as a representative of Aikane. Apparently she’s figured out where all this is going and has a problem. She would really rather not die, but has an issue. As the last bind of Kharla, she has no chance of resisting Kharla. Aikane is taking a gamble on Kharla’s madness not interrupting her from contacting us. She knows that when the next attack against Kharla happens she’ll be summoned and controlled by force, and she’s pretty sure she’ll die. She is not like Nacho and Rheleyera and if forced to appear somewhere she doesn’t want to be, her odds aren’t looking good. This came with the note that she cannot demonstrate enough free will against Kharla to not attack whoever she’s sent after in that kind of moment. She wants to be taken alive and once Kharla is killed, set free in exchange for assisting us. This is also why she had to send one of her officers, since Aikane herself is bound to Kharla and if she were to come discuss it with us that would probably be noticed.

We did not tell her we weren’t planning to kill Kharla or her. Though that second one is largely because we’re never going to find her if she doesn’t want to be found. She uh…didn’t need to know that right this moment. It is classified operation after all, for security reasons we totally let her keep believing she was going to die alongside Kharla. Can’t tell the person bound to Kharla about the plans for Kharla. I’m not a bad person I swear. The local head of the Chapter House appropriated your authority to agree to the deal that “If they come into direct conflict with Kharla they will not kill Aikane even if she is forcefully summoned and made to fight against us”. That chapter master is clearly better at lying than Selah because Selah would have been entirely too truthful in these matters. Can never trust a paladin to keep their gods damned mouths shut. You can trust a horny chapter master to say whatever it takes to make a succubus smile though. On the one hand I’m not sure if we played them or if they played us, seriously the Chapter Master does not have ‘how to resist succubi’ training. They also offered to keep the agent safe at the chapter house and all manner of things that started to get not quite inappropriate but definitely laid the groundwork for something inappropriate later. The succubus declined and pointed out they need to go back to Aikane but I’m just saying I’m not sure if we should praise him for thinking quickly or chastise him for getting seduced by ‘the postergirls of seduction’.

Either way, we got our list of ‘children of Kharla that can be a little suspicious in their loyalties’. Particularly a trio of them that once had a lot of secret dealings with Voriuk. Now I’m not saying stereotyping is morally right, but if a drow child of a matriarch was having secret meetings with a demon like Voriuk…I’m not saying anything but I’m just saying. Obviously all of them are half demon half drow with Kharla being used as a breeding mare for a few centuries, two of these three are descendants of Voriuk himself. The other is actually from Sabaalios. Obviously these are all matricidal demon drow, none of them are good people. So just saying, arms length and all that. We established contact and surveillance to see what we’re dealing with. None of them know our plan for Kharla, so notably they’ve made some assumptions that contextually are all over the place about our plans. Because, even a scheming demonic drow has no reason to think we’re in contact with a new goddess in another astral cluster who wants their insane mother for a reason as petty as ‘because it’d be prestigious’. I’m noticing a recurring theme that the motives for this whole operation are so outlandish and even a little dumb sometimes that we’re accidentally running circles around drow who think we’d want something far more rational.

Sethis looked into them after their names were put forth by Aikane.

Irae and the gang are on their way to Jydoq. Though we might need Irae in a hot minute since she’s our only pandem drow. When she’s not fighting Rozanis she returns to that frigid state of standing around the ship and creeping out of dark corners occasionally. I guess that’s an improvement from ripping Rozanis apart in a violent psychopathic rage?

We moved some knights around, also fifth lance is doing fine. The Hasao Tei are a civil government, they don’t go places and do things very often besides some buddy cop adventures around the city.

Back to demon kingdom investments,  ever since the Demon King declared war on us due to some of the uh…incidents we caused our establishments have been under a lot of scrutiny. While Quylla is still out there doing her own thing and trying to keep the shelter running, we don’t exactly have the foundations of a state. If we tried that, pretty sure any local lord would walk over and blow it up given the King’s proclamation. That funding is the reason Quylla’s not already dead at this point with how the situation has deteriorated there ever since our first invasion attempt. Though that’s really more Asmodan’s fault than the Vloz. However, he knows that we were making some plays and he has some opinions on the matter. He’s kept Quylla under constant harassment, actually given that we know he’s one of the biggest members of the Phantoms its surprising she isn’t dead already. Either Hina is an amazing mercenary or he’s baiting us to come try and salvage the situation. To which end, with all the stuff Catcall is undergoing we probably shouldn’t forget that Asmodan has been watching us in the Kingdom for awhile now. We’ll have to factor in how dangerous his attention can be.

We’ll have to see about inviting Zaikies over. We gotta send messages back and forth, galaxy is big, Aurora has some concerns about spreading pandem to the wider galaxy without clicking the “are you sure?” window. Then we have to actually transport him all the way to at least Cayetano which unless Jiyan gets routed to transport duty is going to take us a bit to get to him and then back to Cayetano.

Started building the Diadem planar station layers as requested. You sure through? Rixa is a vibrant plane thriving with life and this discrimination is not respecting their culture…of eating everything that moves.

Vairatoa is taking time off to remain at Diadem for a little while. He wants to meet the Phoenix. Apparently, this mythical fire bird is an elemental. Though he describes her as being more of a celebrity. He is apparently curious about these developments. The Phoenix is the most important elemental to Thenican culture but to elementals she is just sort of a well known and well liked sage. The Phoenix is their equivalent of a famous actor or musician, but Mahuea is the reigning king. That being said he still wouldn’t mind meeting her, and figuring out why us material planers like her so much.

To clarify, Silnian space is in the northwest part of the galaxy, north of Diadem. Agallias is east of Thenica on another plane than the Blaiken and Playatis, he is not on the same planet as the Playatis and they are the actual closest to the Blaiken both on plane and distance. Agallias is just ‘one of the closest’ places. Might have not been clear about that but Agallias has nothing to do with the Playatis other than proximity if you ignore planes. Except the Playatis and the Blaiken, which is because the Blaiken likely created the ‘dead zone’ where no civilization is found for a few thousand light years in any direction, and the Playatis are running the galactic “last stop” gas station right before or after that dead zone depending which direction you are traveling. It really just seems the Playatis lucked out on being just beyond the range the Blaiken were willing to travel to isolate themselves by force.

While we’re on the topic, our explorers combing through the ruins of the dead zone have pieced together something Zaikies didn’t have already. No one really goes exploring out there for fear of the Blaiken. Over the millenia a few desperate or brave salvage teams nicked what they could and bailed but the archeological finds are pretty much just laying there. By looking through what information Zaikies does have on these collapsed cvilizations, they were organic but had crystalline internal structures. Sort of like us with our psicrystal skeletons, but not as fancy. We’ve been able to find these skeletal structures and piece together that these ruins were definitely created during a ground invasion. There is a lot of melee damage to these things and accurate damage caused usually by small arms. Despite the Blaiken super weapons they have in space, they were here on the ground when these civilizations fell. Recovery of records here and there, in varying states of survival, paint a picture about the invasion. These people were taken en masse. An entire planetary civilization either murdered on the spot or taken alive elsewhere. There are no signs of a post apocalyptic scavenger phase in the archeological evidence. The invasion was thorough, either every living thing was killed or taken somewhere. Some corpses are very well hidden and there is a single hole leading from the surface down through multiple layers of construction materials and even rock that align perfectly with where their head likely was when they fell. Combined with what we know about their orbital defense strategy, I’d say its very likely that these Blaiken have abnormally effective methods of detecting whatever they are looking for. Combined with the knowledge that they are natural empaths, and thus likely natural psions, I can presume that they can operate like a sivataur. Inescapable detection abilities. So don’t try stealth on them kitty cat.

As for a hypothesis on the weapon that they’re using to control space, it’s a civilization that reignited a star. It’s probably just a really fancy gun. Zaikies’ data on the matter lines up with that since its some sort of projectile. Though it moves so fast no one has ever recovered one to study. Off the top of my head, self propelled projectile and payload, but also fired from some sort of really big cannon to get all that extra speed. Maybe they’re just firing corvettes at lightspeeds and then it accelerates to even more lightspeeds on its own.

In other news, technically one batch did give birth but it was from a batch prior to our purchasing it and they didn’t exactly track fifty variables carefully. They just tracked “arcane star flare y/n?”. So nothing spectacular.

Have fun at Jydoq, I’m sure nothing will go terribly wrong just showing up casually despite an assassin waiting around for you to show up. You want to put more of a plan into security before you arrive there buddy? If not I’ll see you in about a month I foresee.

Also since when are you so close to Setal? I thought she used to drive you crazy. She’s a borderline house wife these days, even stopped wearing lingerie for street clothes.

Operation to Agallias, prep is ready and Rhazin is on the way. I guess I’ll just hang out here…alone. No drones. No friends. Just me. All alone. Revenants don’t hate me too right? I’m just a floof ball that basks in the sun all day.

Also yes we could scan for extreme mental anguish around Diadem provided some time. The place is huge. Though the cult is busy doing Jydoq stuff and Averill is currently wandering the most chaotic place in the galaxy we know of looking for one of a million salvagers and then get them to confess it was them who stole from the pirate king to a stranger. So he’s going to be away a little while.

As for the other New Age lab experiments, I think you’ve been spending too much time with me. Most women of humanoid species do not give birth within two months. That’s just an ichor thing. So yeah, no real data yet other than ‘what we already knew from a Zenakan biology textbook’.

As for the preserves, we’ve moved into one of the subsurface plates. We already need to control the lighting levels and atmosphere for a project like this so no real point in leaving it exposed on the surface levels. Also less people want the dark subsurface plates while things are still kind of jammed up due to the broken plate we’re still salvaging off its axle.

The terraforming, mining, and all of that needed to work the fallen mountain on the city plate is getting underway. Right now that mostly means packing the dirt down so it isn’t so loose. Honestly, this might be easier if Renjala’s wife would help since we’re trying to turn rock and dirt into ‘less loose rock and dirt’. At quantities this large though, easier said than done. Maaaybe if we had earth elementals it’d go quicker. That or some sort of terraformer but I don’t know how many have ever been built or designed to compact dirt into ‘stop falling on us’. I could probably help actually, I have a few thousand drones and I am really into the idea of a dark cave.

The fish in the freshwater…is it a lake or an ocean? Whatever, the fish are actually quite revealing. There was once a theory put forth by  New Age back when we found the Koura rift that is straight up proven in this lake. They’ve had time to evolve to the state they’re in now but they are definitely from the neighboring hive worlds. They just sort of drifted through the galaxy until they hit something and those that hit the lake where the machines weren’t maintaining eventually evolved into a full aquatic ecosystem. Upon further analysis 40th day has found solid proof of how this happens. Silnians…just shoot shit all over the place into the galaxy. They’re practically radiating spores throughout space, including the hive worlds. It’s not specifically spores, but you know…a flake of chitin from one of them could one day decide to grow up and get a real job. This is likely why the hive worlds are so notoriously full of life, over billions of years they’ve been able to radiate their rapidly re-evolving biomass to other worlds. Though I think this isn’t pure cosmic coincidence. The Silnian goddesses have likely always built this into the silnian design, and why it looks like natural chaotic evolution of life and the galaxy – all their shit looks that way at first. They’re not like me, so they don’t hyper multiply from ichor and biomass. They just evolve rapidly, what takes a solian fifty thousand years of evolution to accomplish they do in one thousand for example. The precise mechanism by which silnians and their descendants do this kind of stuff hasn’t been narrowed down, but we stuck a net out and caught some random single celled organisms that are from the hive worlds. Some guy from New Age has been doing this as a pet project for the last five years ever since the Koura parasite incident, it was with Diadem that he finally found results. It was just casually traveling through space, and in a few thousand years it might hit a planet’s surface and a few thousand after that…bam life found a way. So that’s why we have fish. Probably would have land species too by now were not for the machines ‘cleaning’ that kind of thing up as it crawled out. Maybe in a century or ten there will be more. Lancaster might want to keep an eye on the water.

We’ve sent Dunchek to follow Haleh around, he remarked how few questions she had about the arrangement. Operational security is not exactly her strong suit. He fetches her coffee now.

Michael has at least found out that the Inaji is in the possession of Asmodan. He saw it being handed over not too long ago. The White Fang is still most likely in Sakhessa’s. He is also pretty sure they have more artifacts but they’re mostly in the possession of henchmen. It is also likely they just keep a stash around in case they need anything from Daiheb.

Due to Aikane’s sudden slightly misguided assistance and borderline surrender, we didn’t really need to investigate all that hard into finding him viable candidates for his plan. Instead however we ran background checks on the three candidates that Aikane gave us.

The first one is the most interesting to me just because they’re male. They actually specifically have figured out that if they replace Kiel’nada, their status as a male won’t matter. Because Kharla loves all of her children and won’t notice, and the rest of Kar’Soluth won’t be able to do much about Kharla’s son just sitting around and talking to her at home all day. You can sort of see how this scheme works. They’re one of the Voriuk spawn, and their offer is that they will get Kharla to just ‘forget’ all about her war with us in exchange for helping them take care of Kiel’nada. Again, completely wrong assumptions about what we’re after here.

Second one is Sabaalios’ progeny. She wants to replace Kharla outright, by any means necessary. Though her plan was originally to go through the demon lords to weaken Kharla. We did half her plan for her and she actually wants to find Aikane specifically to finish it off and then use her support base to deal with Kiel’nada and then finally take down Kharla herself. I would describe the second child as ‘physically gifted’. She is not as talented in pandem or other forms of magic like most of them, she just plans to hack through everything with a club. She’s probably the one least likely to alter the deal, but she wants us to help her find Aikane. It’s worth noting she is very powerful, and likely could have killed several of the demon lords herself if we hadn’t beat her to the punch. Apparently step one of her plan had actually been to find Reika, but that didn’t work out. She has a lot of plans that she keeps missing a key window of opportunity for, and mostly due to us.

Third one is Voriuk’s daughter, and she also wants Kharla’s position. The big deal with this one though is that she takes after her father. She has schemes on schemes on schemes and is the only one who did not address our agents by saying anything comically out of scope of what we’re after. On the one hand she could be playing things reserved, but a lot of her planning seems to revolve more around Yasrena than Kharla. We can’t confirm, and she definitely isn’t letting any information slip, but I think she has known about the Phantoms for a long time now. Which implies she is a ‘next level’ kind of schemer. She can likely orchestrate events to benefit our plans with much greater reliability than the scheming son, but she is a little too smart for her own good. She made a point of specifically requesting help with a plan that involved exploiting Vloz’Khress’ ineptitude with technology. Selah got the hint, the third one knows who we are. More importantly, they know who Aryn is and even more more importantly they know what an artifact is. They really should not know that information. She made her stance clear, she’d be a powerful ally in this scheme but a dangerous enemy otherwise since she seems to know way too much. She’d make a great future matriach honestly. New problem, she knows that someone somewhere is up to something involving Kharla and Kiel’nada in some way and that’s enough for her to potentially thwart any plans we don’t include her in if she were to feel we were not working in her best interests. Meaning if Renjala doesn’t work with her she’s probably going to be an issue.

Again, matricidal demon drow – you know how Ilex is currently playing 5D chess with an assassin? These are scary people who know how to play the game. Do not take any of them lightly just because they’re three levels down from the bullshit we put up with.

As for artifacts similar to Ryner and Inaji, Linsun does know of a few but mostly by reputation rather than possessing any of them or having good track of where they are. The wielders of such things tend to be hard to keep tabs on with the exception of Kaylen. They don’t actually know Kaylen has one, they also don’t know the revenants had any. Most of their records date back centuries to heroes of other ages who were also cooperative enough to reveal that they had these mysterious objects to anyone. Which leads to an interesting observation, despite how important these artifacts should be they have a tendency to keep disappearing. Their previous owners also have a long tradition of dying of unnatural causes. Usually bullets. No one with these seem to just retire to the countryside.

Allison has been continuing the anti gang work particularly on Thenica, she’s also been getting into scuffles with elven cannibals. Which is a problem I am impressed still persists, you think they’d run out of desperate elves by now. Apparently they’re forming organized somewhat tribal clans lately that hunt other wasteland survivors for food.

As Lancaster starts expanding operations from Diadem into the Western Reach, Aryn said she got a text. This area of the galaxy is where the Selona Syndicate barely touched anything since it is already their ideal environment. It is also where Selona currently lives. She doesn’t know exactly where, but she does know Arkaric’s main headquarters is somewhere out here and it is likely that in the mass of aliens passing through every day that some of them are his androids. I keep forgetting that Aryn is casually texting with the ‘machine god of galactic chaos’. The contents of that text were mostly an invitation to a particular planet named Elasyn somewhere out there that he apparently keeps his more traditional enterprises running out of. In case we wanted to buy guns or something, since that is still his specialty business. On a hunch, this planet will be similar to Sol’s Tykel. A lawless and violent den of hedonism.

Stories of Lore 50

Jiyan reports that the trip to the Blaiken is still not a recommended course of action, but now with more context. She encountered a Blaiken expert at another world belonging to something called the Playatis. They are apparently a peaceful trade hub that is considered galactically aware. Though their species is almost too cooperative for their own good. They have also established relations with the Hassani prior to encountering us.

More importantly, this expert among them had a much clearer definition of how Blaiken space is being defended. While no one is certain exactly what the Blaiken have they are aware that projectiles moving 6 lightyears per second originate from their system and are the cause of most ships destruction for entering their space. There are also automated guided missile launchers hidden on almost every planet in every star surrounding their space. It isn’t known for sure but it is theorized that these weapons have no central control mechanism, they have just been set into space and told to attack everything that they register as ‘not an asteroid’ for all time. To the point that it would not be surprising if all of this security was keeping something in rather than out.

Jiyan went to another of the middle planes to check for signs of continued violence. Which were found once again. The Blaiken are aware of pandem shenanigans and have opted to protect themselves on multiple planes. However, she found no such evidence in the lower planes. Specifically the Abyss. It might be possible to approach and open a rift right on top of their homeworld through the Abyss but there is a fair chance that all of these defenses they possess will remain an issue. Especially if they are intentionally hostile.

The other option is based on a wild theory of hers that the Blaiken are actually hiding throughout the galaxy but disguised. Their species is actually called the Kanis and as a whole they are widespread throughout the galaxy. Jiyan thinks that since we know they control a route into the Warrens that they are able to appear throughout the galaxy without anyone knowing what they really are. Exploring this possibility reduces the chance for immediate conflict but will likely take a lot of resources and exploring to assemble enough data to start taking guesses as to where a real Blaiken might be lurking.

Meanwhile back in The Reach, we’ve deployed the cruisers to look into things that Haleh had been up to. It is quite likely that it has been even longer than two years since they last saw her. Since once she was captured by Rahlken she might not have been able to continue governing her conquests. We also learned she was out here looking for something specific not to build the Phantoms an army of aliens. So they were never a high priority to her in the first place. We’ll have more information once the explorers report back. We also know from Eleazor’s time with her that her people were ruled under threat of violence and starvation. While not technically enslaved, it was obey the raider queen or starve to death in the ruins of the cities she left behind. Though given her longer term plans to remain in the Reach, we’ll see how that might affect her governing policies.

In asking Haleh herself, she didn’t seem to care much. Her actually loyal men were with her even after her capture and they are with her even now aboard Diadem. She is less of a ‘taxes and governing’ policy sort and is much more of a ‘Steal stuff and build a horde’ type. Apparently her whole plan is to just go wherever she wants and look for neat things. I suggest finding some way to get someone to go with her once she does start traveling again. If for no other reason than to send back reports of what she finds. She’s technically an explorer and is strong enough to not really worry about pirates like our other exploration corps. I just know that we will never get her to fill out a report, so appointing her an ‘assistant’ to do that for her might result in us gaining a lot of valuable information about our new galactic neighborhood.

In investigating Zenaka’s leadership, all altruistic lords died eight hundred years ago at the hands of the current established order. If any of them do have a heart of gold, they’re hiding it as not to make themselves a target. Zenaka’s free for all mentality means that putting up a big front is a big part of staying in power. Though the same can be said of the Council of Lords in the Demon Kingdom. Weakness means getting replaced by someone who would very much like a promotion. Even in the recent years several Zenakan territorial lords were either dethroned or murdered with replacements cycling in by exploiting our presence there in some way or another.

The WTC-2 Project is progressing first before they try to upgrade to the WTC-3 project. Though they are looking into it as requested.

Laura also brought in more than half the population of diadem, the other chunk were Ika we brought out of the labs and soldiers who wanted their free land rewards from being a part of the expedition. She has been moving people via her corporate alliances, relocating not only their executives but using this to convince people to “relocate for work reasons” without realizing that Laura is doing this. As they move with their families in tow, it is improving our recruitment of defenders though.

As for the land sales, a few million so far. Most being bought up by corporate entities preparing for development. Amusingly, Vittles bought a bunch of land for farming on paper. Which means you just paid yourself for your land.

Projections indicate that while people are moving around a lot of assets on spreadsheets, the actual process of convincing people to live aboard Diadem is currently in a slow state as developmental construction makes the place more appealing. Most of the early arrivals are those who intend to start businesses in anticipation of more people moving in. We’re also still renovating housing to make sure its up to code in many cases.

To be noted, back in Moncayo we’re having a different problem. Crime rates are rising, apparently they figured out that Laura is leaving along with most of her connections. There is opportunity to be had and new gangs are both forming or making moves to secure territory even before Laura has finished moving out. Probably in the optimistic hope that she won’t retaliate and keep her focused efforts on the move. All this is doing a great job of revealing just how deep Laura’s influence really was despite us catching her on shockingly little. In particular, this lead to the rise of Moncayo’s new criminal connection point. Due to how well connected she is, Ohalyn has accidentally become the new central figure for Moncayo’s less than law abiding citizens. Though this actually had the effect of reducing violent crime, Ohalyn serves as the neutral negotiator for many and has been more of an arbitrator than an actual boss fighting for profitable territory. She is also not technically a criminal, we legalized everything she specializes in and she left her slave trade business to other gangs a long time ago since she didn’t need to do it for money anymore. So despite being the most powerful person in the criminal world, she is herself pretty clean. Except for the occasional incident with smuggling and fencing. Local offices are preeeetty sure she is in possession of a lot of stolen things from Thenica somewhere.

All things considered, the assault on Rozanis could have gone worse quite easily. We didn’t exactly finish destroying all of his forces, but we got him out of the picture at least. Now all that Kharla has left should be Aikane, who is incredibly difficult to track down as of late. Usually we keep good tabs on Vloz’Khress but she disappeared upon realizing where this is all going, as a shapeshifter she is quite good at hiding.

Our agents keeping an eye on the Vloz, as everyone in Sol does apparently, report that nothing happened to the dolls in this process. The latest from the experts is that it is at the minimum an eternal curse, the kind old evil wizards used to do back in the day. Like the one that turned the entire Hulstaad plains into an undead wasteland before that one dwarf broke the curse and the place got turned into a regular old place…oh wait this expert report is yours. Well I see you’re keeping up to date with affairs around here sir.

Bardhe has been paid for his assistance in taking out several summoners before we even got there, now he’s off and away into the galaxy once again. He notably specialized entirely in pre-emptive assassination to clear the way. Almost as if he was avoiding Ilex.

The gate at Jamalia has finished construction but there is a teeny tiny problem. We now realize we need Eerihild to be the one to flip the metaphorical switch to actually open it. She just got back from the Rozanis mission and is currently at Moncayo. So now we’re just waiting for her to pop on over real quick. Though she is also on the way to Diadem to visit Friend, basically she’s just a little backed up with projects that need her attention. So that’s slowing the portal down a bit. Technically Haziel could also open it but we already lost track of her even with the whole team we sent to follow her around.

Okaaay, I had Renjala ask steamworks about building your random junk for you.

I updated the tac intel for you in regards to Agallias. He’s actually just on one world at the moment and it appears his general project is to just rule that world. It is notably one of the closest places known to have any standing civilization to the Blaiken that has not been turned into ruins.

There isn’t much infrastructure that protects Agallias himself, as he is too large for them to really build him a throne. I meant they’re working on it but for now the best they have is a chunk cut out of a mountain. However the giants and what appear to be converted native soldiers are able to make use of the world’s fortifications.

We also can predict one of the problems with attacking Agallias is that he is large and powerful enough to attack ships in orbit with his magic. Though he doesn’t have cyberware, we actually don’t know if Kanika ever did anything to him. He’s not a monster with any particular weakness. He does have modern armor built similarly to the way we would normally build a ship. Scouting reveals he can disappear at times and we’re not sure where he goes during the nights and days no one can find him. Perhaps another plane.

His domain already encompasses the whole planet, it’s not as if anyone was going to resist a titan that can just blast ships out of orbit with his own abilities. Terrain wise the planet is kind of flat compared to Thenica. Also a lot less water. Agallias himself seems to occupy one of the mountain areas, he carved his stump chair into it.

I think the plan has merit but the real problem is that you will only get one shot. As soon as that ship gets anywhere near him he will take it down. Even if he was just as strong as a titan was back in the old days, he could take down a battleship or carrier without much trouble. If he’s gotten any stronger with the help of some modern technology, it’ll be rough trying to use any orbital tactics more than once.

Also he can practically destroy the entire swarm we have with one shot. One can only hope he has mercy on his own people enough not to just evaporate us if we get within his sights. We have no knowledge of his personality though so we can’t really say. Though judging by  the phantom opinion of humanoids, I cannot imagine an actual titan would be all that more kindly to their subjects.

Honestly the problem is Agallias himself. Without him there we could likely start working on and consuming the giants over a longer period of time and win by attrition. So yeah go for him first. However, his throne is right on the edge of the capital city of this world. So he is quite close to civilians.

As for your harem, I know girls tell you size doesn’t matter all the time but that might not apply with me.

Rhazin is back with some new drones from his harvesting.

New Age lost one of the Zenaka facilities you had purchased, well the main one really. Vasia almost died too. Apparently Sarden found out Vasia was back, where she would be, and what she was doing down to the hour. Which is honestly just impressive, because we can’t even track Vasia that well. Though remember what we learned from the great mind meld of Kaisa that you provoked? We thought the Revenants were leaving Sol to find the Valdir swarm for help with their mummy rot issues that they acquired when they fought Sakhessa and Deinuu. Not all of them got infected though. A large part of their little gang did leave Sol, actually Moncayo might be able to even find them since that means they’re on a ship if we can just figure out the ID of that ship. Though reviewing security footage of the attack on Vasia reveals that Sarden, Morylan, and Naexi are still here in Sol. They also have some newbies with them. I still am not sure why they’re all consistently women though. Starting to think they’re grown in some sort of cloning facility – oh my god they’re a synapse. Our Ichor likes furry women. Theirs likes ninja girls, it all makes sense now! That’s why there is an infinite well of ninja girls just being churned out! I think it makes sense at least, worked for us right?

Also now that we know where they are at the moment, odds are that several open cases on Zenaka might be their fault. There’s been a string of murders all over the place but lets just say people don’t really miss the victims. In one of these cases they had a uh…minor prostitution ring. Not that it was small. Everyone involved in it was found dead over the course of a month and no one had any idea how there could be thirty two decapitation cases in one month including a territorial lord and no suspects. Was a job for the locals but given that it might now have some very particular suspects I guess it was worth bringing up the chain of command.

Anyways the girls are back and they blew up your zenakan breeding facility, almost killed Vasia, definitely killed her pack of 004C guard dogs, and despite the fact that we have actually seen Sarden’s face we are having no luck finding her. They also seem to be training a new generation since Alakira herself is infected with the Rot and even if she does come back she could be gone for years trying to chase after the Valdir.

Slight issue with the preserves for 40th day, where do you want them? We could try to build another vivarium style facility sure but that’s a massive facility that needs a lot of space. Not that there is a shortage of land anywhere other than Cayetano. Enohas isn’t doing much if you want free oxygen and gravity at least.

The archeology teams are still on the way to what I’m informed is known as the Dead Zone in the galactic community. Lot of death themes surrounding the Blaiken apparently. It’s a long trip.

As for the fallen mountain, actually the sub-surface layer could be used to create an underdark esque plate too. Though yes the mountain as well. Might have to pack the dirt down to make it firm enough for tunneling though if you wanted to try something with that.

Also you are in fact correct, Laura does have ties to Valencia but not directly. More so the Desoir family. We’ll keep looking into it but if you’re curious, Desoir already own an entire district in Diadem. Soon as Lancaster put land up for sale they bought a big piece. One of their grandkids of a grandkid of a cousin is there. Not exactly Valencia herself but since you were asking about Desoir. They also have holdings in Cayetano and handle a lot of trade between Cayetano and Thenica. There is a Desoir vampire in Diadem though and its one of Laura’s corporate allies. There’s another one, more so an associate of the true bloodline, who lives in Roha. They run a chain of restaurants. I have Craylin bring me their pasta sometimes. Though so far I have no confirmation that Valencia is working through Laura. I mean yeah Laura has money but you can’t call Valencia’s office secretary until you have at least a trillion. Can call her grandkids at a billion if you really wanted to.

Waianoa does not seem to be interested in being a drug dealer full time. She is already a priestess and runs the civilization of Mokihi’s mountain for day to day affairs. If you want a batch though she said she’ll give you the psionic weed for Lancaster if she can’t get uh…me. Apparently any fae would do but Lahela never joined VSEC formally and is just a citizen living in Moncayo. So Lancaster is the only fae we technically have ‘available’. I’m gathering that all trade with this woman will involve pimping out everyone we know.

It seems for the most part there aren’t many concrete references to this shadow creature. The Thing in the Dark is its most commonly written name but as far as the details we got from the books you sent over, it is hard to pin anything down for certain. The first mention of it actually mentions a creature with an entirely unbefitting personality. It may well be that this was one of the others it mentioned, it’s elder siblings who have since passed away. Which makes it even harder to tell which references are about the same thing. Putting all of the stories together and getting a general feel for the idea, it is part of a bunch of creatures that one day appeared in the shadow plane without much fanfare. Only being spotted here and there.

The earliest recorded spotting is hard to say for certain because their behavior is similar to another almost mythical creature known as the King of Shades. Well we know who he is actually but he is purposefully elusive and mysterious. Apparently the way to rule over other shades is to pique their curiosity. Their equivalents of nobles, rich folk, high society, whatever you want to call it also indulge in this type of playfulness with their own people. Since shades love a good mystery, it became a sort of high fashion to be just mysterious enough to intrigue people but not so mysterious as to be truly unknown. This behavior among shade high society makes it troublesome to pin down which ones are such people and which ones are these shadow creatures.

Either way, The Thing in the Dark is a very specific member of these shadow leviathan things and the others have distinct other enigmatic names. Such examples including, “The Enigma”, “Unseen Eye”, and “The Angry Dark”. The Thing in the Dark’s mythos that is specific enough to call out its name centers around it being an information trader as it stated. The earliest reporting on it that we know is this specific one was over nine hundred years ago. The earliest possible reports can be over sixteen hundred years ago, though those could be attributed to any number of its siblings or other participants in shade’s being fashionably mysterious. Either way, the specific alias “The Thing in the Dark” is attributed originally to an all knowing almost godlike creature. As time goes on they get slightly more mundane in their descriptions and assumptions as to its ability. To this day no one actually knows who or what it is. At least no one that wrote a report down in the Linsun libraries.

As it turns out, Vasia knows legends about this thing as well. Upon confirming we had made contact with it for herself, while we distinctly were trying not to confirm it for her, we immediately had to get Ilex to tell her to put down the containment box. Though her knowledge of its past was helpful in narrowing down which references we had were key to it. She also notes that in shade culture, The Thing in the Dark is a specific and somewhat venerated myth but a lot of them are folk tales that grew in the telling. Even some being outright fictitious to add to the lore of this mysterious all knowing being. It has served as a part of their mythology for hundred of years, stories passed down from generation to generation. Often playing the role of a guiding force in some of their fables and stories. This has made researching it even harder. Until just four hundred years ago, it was commonly accepted to just be a recurring character in stories. Like the metaphorical Devil in solian fables that may or may not have ever actually had anything to do with someone like the Demon King.

Hex:

I do not think I could increase the abilities of the Aerial that significantly by placing a copy of my assistant functions into it. Though I could at least receive voice commands to help with other aspects.

Another envoy to Nelta is on the way across the galaxy. Hopefully we’ll hear from them again someday.

Another was sent to the Blaiken, same as above.

The Envoy to Preskian? Oh that was years ago, let me go find the archives. Food was nice, as for their own goals they say they are trying to reunite Alnae. Obviously if doing so as a warlord happens to put them into the top position that’s just peachy. Though there is a difference between their stated goal of “we should get back together but with me in charge” and the actions of “bombing the other warlords to steal their food”.

Kaylen commentates that initiating a galactic cold war would require several people building weapons of galactic destruction. Which might not be the most preferable conclusion. Since the Terlim were the last one that was an issue, it’d mean making more self replicating uncontrollable weapons that seek out and destroy everything they can for as long as they can. Though we do have a ringworld with a really big gun now if we could get that working. Though she’s also not that concerned about Arkaric’s plot at the moment, as disastrous as it has been she finds the Phantoms a more pressing issue since most of their members explicitly consume humanoids. Creatures like Sakhessa cannot continue to exist without preying on humanoids, she’s also somewhat concerned about this Lakaaj business over on the eastern side of the galaxy but that one’s on the backburner for her.

The Hasao Tei have expressed a preference to remain at Cayetano. They don’t like the idea of an infinite city but the underwater Cayetano suits their meditative aesthetic quite well. Atop of this they are formed of refugees from Thenica who need some stability rather than moving regularly. They also aren’t looking to expand, they just keep doing so by accident. Though if everyone else leaves Cayetano then they would be interested in setting up a colony on the surface plates.

In trying to discern Haleh’s plans for the future we have learned she’s not really a ‘planning’ type of person. She’s wealthy enough to not need to do anything and just does whatever she feels like at any given point in time. While she is planning to run a garage it is mostly for the benefit of the Ruffians rather than an actual business. For the time being she’s just sorting out her crew and seeing about expanding it back to its original numbers before the Diadem incident, as well as checking in on her previous conquests who haven’t seen or heard from her in two years. She suspects they’ll have taken the opportunity to try and return to what they were before her, and she needs to remind them who they work for. Especially now that she might not be going home for awhile. Though it is likely for the next few months she will be sitting around getting her shop set up and drinking excessively.

The problem with unifying Zenaka is their cultural structure is very remniscent of the drow before Quaintana really got the whole Shetou thing up and running. They also really like slaves as evidenced by Valen’s entire life story up until recently. They definitely aren’t interested in unifying as it would upset the relative balance they have as well as costing their regional lords a lot of their power, in a culture where power is determined by who can just take over by force it is hard to convince them to settle down and team up. A few have expressed some interest. Though it is clear that this is more as a matter of locking their power in to be enforced by the Federation so they could never lose their position to rivals. Though at least those ones are humoring the idea, but clearly their intent is to only sign if in the treaty it specifies that they can never lose their position. I asked Valen for her input. Her exact words were “nuke em all” and then she walked out of the room. At the very least I guess we don’t have to be concerned that her past issues with stable employment will be repeated with any zenakan interests.

The ongoing war with the machine controlled exerlus has done a lot for our weapons manufacturers since they have constantly available targets, though the machines lack of shielding technology is perhaps an inaccurate simulation. They have shifted from assaulting on the surface near us and refocused their forces through the utility and weapons tunnels at the ship’s mid level.  A few of our vehicles have been destroyed trying to maintain a defense against the constant onslaught. While we an advantage in terms of strategy, fortification, and weaponry it is still a never ending battle. We are likely to continue losing assets as time goes on.

We have continues progressing the Ika rehabilitation. Though it has become apparent that the admin console was unaware of the one we had found. Sarrai was able to find another with some intelligent guessing and memory of those events that lead to their creation. They were renovated for this purpose as an emergency measure during Sarrai’s time and it was likely obvious enough where they were and what they were doing that no one found it terribly necessary to link them into the control center. This has led to a theory that the only Ika to survive were locked in places not known to the control center, and that somehow was related to how the entire population of the ring came to an end. We have woken up three thousand Ika total and commenced their rehabilitation at Adelaide.

As for their religion, it would be inaccurate to call it worship. It is more so that they interact in unique ways with all manner of crafted objects, but they still believe that those objects role is to serve them. We still don’t know the mechanics of how it works, but they have been able to prove repeatedly that they can indeed interface with things in ways no one else can. They say that machines have a ‘memory’ left on them by their users and creators. If a machine can be convinced that they are a friend then they can do things such as command a vehicle to drive on its own. However, they cannot do this to a vehicle that does not see them as a friend. For example one owned by someone else that they have never previously interacted with. It is a unique ability but not as offensive as hacking for example. However, they have proven they can use our own technology in these ways very easily as long as they are the owner of that thing or at least have been around the owner enough to convince the machine that they are a friend. They do not describe this process as talking to any sort of sapient life with a significant psyche. So they don’t care if the average machine is shredded, unlike their closest counterpart the druids. Druids are often mad when you cut down any tree at all, the Ika do not share that kind of reverence towards what they commune with.

Removal of the broken Diadem plate has begun. With the labor available to Diadem and its many necessary projects, it is estimated to take a significant amount of time unless more can be recruited.

Laura has continued her fast movements to get herself into a cozy position on Diadem. While we have seen a sharp increase in population as the people we expected to show up did indeed show up with her. However, Sethis reports that some more unexpected people accidentally revealed their relationship to Laura in the process of moving. She has many corporate friends and it seems the actual bulk of her powerbase comes from these business professionals. Adelaide has already seen an influx of rich and powerful people from Cayetano looking to establish new operations and many of them are friends of Laura. Likely promised certain zoning regulations that will benefit them if they come with her. She wasn’t kidding about selling out. Ever since we disrupted her initial operations instead of gangsters and buying from Selona’s warehouses she has shifted towards manipulating spreadsheets to build vast quantities of wealth we didn’t know she even had.

Sethis also discovered she has been funding the entire political party that opposes her through these connections and has convinced them to petition for policies that will not gain them as many supporters as they think. The money convinces them ‘someone agrees with us’ and then they paint themselves into a corner and Laura wins by just disagreeing with them on topics she gave them to bring to a debate against her.

In summary, Laura be Laura’ing. She also somehow became obscenely wealthy since she started working for us. We’re still not sure how but given who her new friends are I have some wild unsubstantiated guesses.

We’ve started selling land plots to people cheap except for the lakeside ones on the surface. Those are pricier. Also mostly occupied by VSEC soldiers already. How large does a body of water need to be in order to be considered a fresh water ocean? There’s an entire aquatic plate that is just thousands of square kilometers of fresh water. Speaking of which, there are things living in there for some reason. Everywhere else is maintained by the machines for the most part but under the aquatic plate is just a bunch of alien fish and plant life that is doing its own thing. I guess its been a few thousand years since anyone cleaned the pool.

With regards to ‘The Thing in the Dark’, Eden was not able to help them. They are seemingly some sort shade perhaps, at the very least definitely incorporeal. Eden’s surgical abilities are more physical than magical. Unfortunately Eden does not know of a way to help them. That isn’t even addressing the problem of it being the last of its kind. Since she needs references of ‘correct’ as well. Though they’ve taken it fairly well, apparently they were just taking wild swings to see if anyone can help but have now retreated into the shadows once again.

Yoshai seems to be having fun with his new bind by way of asking it a lot of dumb questions. I find its best to let binders and bindees sort things out for themselves, except in cases like Reika. She was a bit of a special case.

Bardhe requsted his ten million in the form of goods. Panzer cycles, ships, arms, mana crystals, I’m not sure what he does with all this stuff but he clearly doesn’t trust currency itself. I’d question where he keeps all of it but we paid him in cruisers last time so that probably answers that.

The team is getting together to prepare for the assault on Rozanis’ fortress. Though given that they are coming from all over the federation they are taking some time to assemble in one place for the portal attempt and preparing appropriate resources.

In the meantime, having fun with your son? They’re always so…unmotivated to do anything you want them to do but then they sure do have a lot of energy when it comes to doing things you don’t want them to do. At the very least it seems Holua is good at chess, but he plays at the pace of…well a rock.

Have fun fighting a giant demonic skeleton that can harvest your soul. In the meantime I’ll post conspiracies about how you’re a pervert that makes the synapse just put out furry girls all the time.

Averill will be gone for awhile by the way, turns out tracking down scavengers across the Reach, specific scavengers at least, is a bit of a messy affair. Lot of travel, lot of ‘these are not the scavengers you were looking for’.

Also the wording on this is confusing. Did you want to buy zenakan breeding facilities or batches of the kids? I assume the factories since it looks like you’re trying to replicate the elites of their race but you said ‘set of babies’ this time.

The attempts to build a fancy assault carrier have been…quirky. I suppose technically it works and doesn’t rely on botany to stay functioning though it suffers from inertia issues. Basically it’s heavier than anything else of its size would normally be and doesn’t really maneuver the way assault carrier’s typically do. Not a big deal just do not get anywhere near Faelyn’s battleship fleet with it. Rhazin is still on his way back though, lot of drones and ichor to ferry about.

40th Day got you that tar you wanted and sent some archeologists out to the ruined civilizations nearby the Blaiken

Also stealth capable ships are, for the record, still very difficult to acquire and exceedingly rare. Nah division has only one and Lancaster also only has one. These aren’t really produced at any shipyard due to the fact that defensive tech such as sensors outpace stealth technology very quickly every time someone comes up with a design for it. Both of the cruisers in the federation are already outdated by Sharen and Aureum sensors. We’d have to “acquire” one. The only lead I have on that is that Rahlken clearly had some method of doing this when he attacked Diadem and the method is alien, so we didn’t have a countermeasure to it yet. Might try stealing one from him. I can just tell Averill to keep an eye out since he’s already looking for those salvagers who stole a bunch of Rahlken’s stuff.

The Gem Station laborers are definitely happy with a free colony set up in their little forest village. Albeit confused as to who you are where you came from and whether or not the conspiracy rumors are to be believed.

Laura’s exact words were “yeaaaah no.” to the offer of immortality. I get the feeling she distrusts anyone who shows up out of nowhere with that kind of an offer, especially given the business she is in.

Also what we’ve learned from calling Haleh’s mother is that her mom is more important than we thought. I guess we all sort of heard “half dragon half phoenix” and assumed it was one of those two and I never really thought about it all that carefully. So historically we only know of one phoenix and with modern context we assumed it was just rare to see one. “They” come from the elemental plane, and I guess we just assumed that of course the Phantoms were up to some shenanigans. As it turns out, her mom is “The Phoenix”. The only one we knew of is in fact the only one at all. So her mom is the phoenix worshiped by the eastern houses before Shetou became a thing, and not to mention is still on half of their decorations. She became very hard to find right around the time of the purge and we just sort of assumed she died. I don’t really get how Kanika got involved with her to the point of producing Haleh but it seemed a bad time to ask. Hasao Tei just conscripted their own civilian populace into a mandatory labor force with the sole purpose of building Haleh a palatial temple upon word getting out that Haleh isn’t just “half phoenix” she’s the only daughter to the most important figure in their culture. Haleh is confused as to why all these people just suddenly won’t leave her alone and treat her as a princess. We also got Kaylen’s attention and now Kennae is coming to Diadem as well to see about all this…what? Okay I may have gossiped a little what does that matter?

The important takeaway here is you just invited the missing symbol of eastern royalty to visit us (well really her daughter) and we do not have enough decorations for this. We need pillars! Pillars made of gold! Sculptures made of jade! Braziers the size of a house!

Waianoa says that there are indeed similarly potent ‘drugs’ (she calls them potions still). We’re starting to understand that Mokihi’s domain isn’t just a party bus, Waianoa is an elemental equivalent to Eliza Pierce or the Jaal’Darya. She’s an extremely accomplished alchemist, you just wouldn’t notice it because she is much less focused on ‘things that can destroy all life’ and more on ‘if effects persist after 4 hours, use it more’. Also she specializes in the elemental plane so different laws of physics and biologies to work with.

Kaylen pointed out she’s still constantly at war with the Phantoms, in particular she’s usually working on Thenica to find their outposts and colonies with what few people she has. Taking over jydoq just isn’t what her people signed up for, her recruitment speech is definitely more about ‘we must band together and stab the big bad evil guy’ rather than ‘we should build some houses’.

It feels wrong to request to buy our own seeds and animals back from someone who kind of stole them at gunpoint. Though they agreed to trade for gold at least so you can have some starter packs.

It should be noted that the Nomads have looong since abandoned mining. The flotilla hasn’t, but the Nomads themselves didn’t sign up for manual labor. Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if they stole from their own fleet just to say they did some pirate stuff instead of industrial mining. It doesn’t really matter though, they’re just figureheads so that we can keep control of the flotilla. However, thought I should update you on the fact that the actual original crew are wandering about causing mischief as is the norm for them.

Several of our agents are away getting together with Renjala and his team, in the meantime things have been shockingly quiet around here without Leon and Vanjin. What a coincidence.

As requested I assigned additional resources to helping Allison with her project.

Have fun back home sir.

Hex:

Stories of Lore 49

Do you have your coffee? This is going to be a long meeting.

The diplomatic envoy to Nelta never reported back. It is suspected that they were too far away by the time Haziel’s botany bomb hit the galaxy and suffered catastrophic failure. With no context as to what was happening, they wouldn’t even know how to respond to their ship starting to eat itself. Though just as much chance they’re in Nelta space right now and just don’t have a way to call or get home. Could go either way on that one.

The Moncayo Sensor station has found that The Areti is currently located somewhat east of Auwana, it has been patrolling that area looking for signs of alien species. Koda said to tell you that it actually hasn’t visited us or our fleets in the last two years despite Faelyn expanding her fleet. He thinks that Faelyn is less interested in retaking Moncayo than fighting you at this point. Either that or Sakhessa has taken proper command of the Phantoms now that she is their empress and we know she is less interested in scuffling over land lately.

Over the last month we’ve been able to assess Diadem further. There is a lot to go over.

In terms of defense, the factories that produce the machines have stopped functioning without the Exerlus to control it. It was just a matter of turning them back on at your console, but it did cause a gap in the flow of forces. It is also clear that the exerlus wasn’t just pushing buttons the whole time. The stalemate was maintained by its constant efforts and micro management of production and deployment. Notably, the war between the exerlus controllers was being held primarily by each one having specialists for individual tasks. This is why in the second layer there were dedicated ambush designs to exploit the change in environment that any attacking forces had. This is to say, the stalemate will not hold on its own. Our machines will be overrun unless control of the factories is manually controlled and new designs and counter-designs are constantly created and updated. However, our WTC-1 mechs have a 100 to 1 kill ratio at the worst due to their engagement ranges on the surface plates. As we rebuild Gem Station, that could also provide cover for the top layers. The issue then would become the inner layers that have pathways into our sections, where WTC 1 does not have range and we cannot provide orbital support. Tanks and other mech classes do fine here, and do have robot assistance, but notably unless we can imitate the management of the Exerlus we will need to utilize alternative means of defense. Though unlike the Exerlus, we can order engineers to build things other than factories building robots. Not sure why it never built turrets.

With Ilex’s help in restoring the mental state of several Ika to the point that some can actually communicate with Sarrai in particular, we’ve been able to make some progress on understanding these administrator access keys. Sarrai remembering more and being able to fully communicate now also has helped. In summary, the keys specifically work to add you to the admin control list. This will be very important to a later discovery of Khymin’s I’ll get to. Typical of Ika designs, they were a little reckless in their creation of the ring and it only has twelve of these control centers. Compared to Sol and Nelta designs for example, which will have twelve key systems on something as small as a battleship. The VSS Winter alone has sixteen to prevent pirates from getting control of the entire ship by hitting a single point. There is however another security exploit on the ring, namely in how they would be able to produce more keys. If you were to control the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth sections you would have the unique access ability to create more of the key. This was their system to create new ones in case a section’s admin was lost. It actually works with any four that are spaced apart like this, but since we have section 1 already it seems relevant to just start there.

As for Sarrai’s half awoken statement that only six were ever made, this was a reference to the six admins that had been made and distributed without use during her lifespan. Not all of history, and she was trapped in a tank for awhile when they could have made several more in response to the plague that wiped out the ring as they replaced admins one after another. The six she were referring to were backups, that were used during the time of the plague. She knew that one was given to the Exerlus of Zero North, given the Ika were very reverent towards them. It was more of a ceremonial diplomatic gesture to give them one, which is why Echo Prime had one such key. She didn’t believe it was a real key that was still available, she thought it was just for show and taught about in history class. The ringworld is thousands of years old and many keys have come and gone. However, along with the other Ika that have been undergoing rehabilitation, they have a collective guess of where another one would be most likely to be found. One should have been given to a much younger Nelta alliance. Where it would have gone from there is anyone’s guess after thousands of years in the possession of an active civilization. It is likely that it is, to this day, in someone’s casual possession and they have long forgotten what it even does. However, it was given to a council leader of Nelta during the Terlim Wars named Hommen. His species came from one of the outer worlds of Nelta on the far eastern side, one of the most well defended areas of Nelta’s territory. While they have no idea what would have become of it from there, that is a key that was likely never used since Nelta is not in current possession of the ring.

In regards to the Ika, we have been able to get a better picture of who they were as more of them wake up and Sarrai has more time to discuss her memories that are returning. Even since they were in a more primitive time they have always had access to a unique form of magic. As Sarrai has explained it before, it is as if she talks to machines. Specifically anything that is a crafted creation. Whether that be a vehicle or something as simple as a hammer. They call this practice as “Mollissav” in their own language. When translated, the tongues spell says it means “by another’s hand”. They have many different roles within this practice, Sarrai is what they consider a machine shaman. We have already woken up other Ika with similar roles within the practice that differ. For example, they have an advanced psionic practitioner who could be classified by our system as a kineticist. Though it is notable they do not manipulate kinetic energy, but rather magnetic fields.

This is why Diadem has so many strange and inoperable constructions to its design. It was made by a people who can interface with it in a way that few other alien races can. Notably, the Exerlus can also do this though they use different methods. The admin key you used told the ‘spirits of the station’ that you are now the equivalent of being their personal celestial empress. This is why you can now interact with features of the station but no one else can. It isn’t simply a security feature, it is built into the way their technology interacts. These traditions are a key component of their technology and how it works. This is also why they are somewhat famous among the galaxy for building impossible things with shockingly little security or failsafe measures. At the height of their civilization, right before the Terlim incident, they were one of the six key seats of an alliance more powerful than Nelta. The Blaiken were also a member of that alliance, and Sarrai thinks they have another of the keys you need. Which leads to the first bit of information on that mysterious empire we’ve ever been able to get. Sarrai once knew them and their ancestors lived aboard this very ring.

Sarrai’s information is sixteen thousand years out of date, but it is still something. The Blaiken were once one of the six key seats of their alliance, a term meaning ‘the six civilizations with all the money, guns, and population’. The Blaiken as a species were noted for a natural psionic disposition towards what Ilex now refers to as being an empath. Similar to the jydoq as well. Blaiken were the greatest of diplomats and were known for being a very peaceful people. The Ika provided them security, and in exchange the Blaiken acted as the Alliance’s ambassadors. With a specific talent for uplifting younger civilizations, a regular practice of alliances at the time vying to increase the scope of their power. As you may have noticed, Nelta accidentally uplifted the Lakaaj by doing this. Odds are that this practice may have done something similar for the Ika’s Alliance, and it might be one of the six great mistakes of their empire Echo Prime once alluded to. Back to the Blaiken though, they were capable of handling first contact situations better than anyone due to their ability as natural empaths. That is at least how Sarrai once knew them. Obviously, she is very confused to hear they live in a small pocket of the galaxy far away from their homeworld as total isolationists now.

Another feature of Diadem was discovered by Khymin. Your admin control access means a specific device on Diadem will allow you direct unrestricted access to it. As mentioned before, machine spirits and all of that. The same generators that the machines use, and consequently that Sarrai can turn into her armor, can now be utilized by you. Which means your mech can use an Ika generator from those machines. Khymin states that this is the power source he has been looking for to meet your design requests on your custom mech. The newest model is currently in production. He describes it as lighter than ever, since he just replaced an eighteen ton combination engine and generator.

We’ve seen to salvaging what we can of Gem Station, it’ll be done fairly quickly compared to building one from scratch as the fighting between it and Rahlken ended when it was rendered inoperable. We even found a few rooms that were still intact.

Diadem as a colony rather than as a single massive entity is logistically difficult to work with. You are the only one who can move between layers of the ring instantly by voice command. The main reason this is a problem is actually layer 1, it has no exposed area for shuttles to easily fly up to. While the underside of the plates have infrastructure once meant to function as a city clinging underneath the ecosystem plates, docking there is shockingly difficult. The Ika had utilized their own type of shuttle for this that fit nicely. Ours do not. While that is being resolved with some modifications, this leads to another problem.

The plate that was flipped destroyed itself in the process, it is still just hanging there on the second layer and there is a literal mountain of rubble dumped onto the third layer which has the main highway by which you would access the fourth. An issue you dealt with, but one that we still don’t have a solution for. Fixing the plate to even get it horizontal again would be a gargantuan undertaking, it’s four thousand by four thousand kilometers of metal just hanging there on a single axle that is definitely going to break someday under that kind of strain. This has made it easy to get from the third layer to the second and underside of the first, but I thought I would check if you wanted to look into any operations for dealing with that. Cheapest solution, at a few billion credits, would be to just cut the plate out and leave that slot blank and now the third layer has a new land feature so the endless city isn’t so monotonous.  Actually restoring it to the way it was supposed to be would take possibly decades and untold billions of credits. That is assuming we attracted enough people to the ring to even join the work force to do it. Haleh, as a joke, said to put a ‘if you can haul it you can have it’ sign on it and let the salvagers of the Reach ferry chunks of the plate away. By my calculations, that was actually the cheapest suggestion that would take the least amount of time if we open one of the surface plates for ships to get inside. This is such an undertaking of engineering that the other crazy suggestion sent to your inbox was to find Rahlken, steal his ship, and use that ship to rip the plate and the mountain underneath it out. Also…not the worst suggestion in this inbox. Even if we spent decades hunting him, it would be faster than asking VSEC to attempt doing this.

Aside from the problems of that giant flipped plate, Diadem is also in a severe state of disrepair. A credit to its engineering that anything works at all actually, it is mostly maintained by the machines but the exerlus war has left them to only do tasks considered a critical priority. Its city layer buildings are there but would not pass VSEC building code safety inspections. Much of what was once in them has long since been salvaged or decayed away. Many utility features are also in dire need of maintenance, whole areas do not have power for example. You will be able to make use of the pre-existing structures, layouts, and some materials, but I advise against letting people move in without proper building inspections being conducted. Due to the pre-existing infrastructure, the cost of everything sort of balances itself out. The materials are already there and in place, but the manpower needed to carefully sort through and repair places is more difficult than just having laborers build something from scratch.

To that end, we built the portal as requested. It took less than four hours for it to be flooded with tourists from Moncayo and entrepreneurs are already gambling their economic dynasties on various aspects. Laura King, who has insider information to VSEC operations as one of our government officials, has once again popped up to exploit a few aspects of our systems. In particular she is petitioning for districts to be democratically self governed. In practice, she’s trying to draw district lines and immediately take control of several by having all of her people show up and immediately vote for her before any other population gets established. Thus allowing her to create laws in these districts that include ‘slavery is legal here’ or ‘we approve lethal bloodsports and host our own servers so we can post it on the aethernet without worrying about a ratings board’. So basically, she’s up to her old antics again.

Let me just step right in-

Oh right, she’s on the payroll now. So she doesn’t need an appointment.

One of the perks of selling out. Anyways! Despite your surprisingly opinionated robot assistant’s thoughts on the matter, I do believe one should consider a series of more unorthodox options for the current situation.

Diadem needs a lot of people to make it remotely worth holding, not to mention to find recruits to defend it against the machines. While people are interested in looking around, while they know an armed guard is nearby in case a rogue machine gets through, moving in is another story. This place went unused for sixteen thousand years, and for good reason. Its a mess, its filled with killer robots, its dirty, it is a logistical nightmare, and so on. Most would rather just colonize a fresh world and start from scratch than deal with this beautiful place.

Except…there are some people who are a little less risk averse than your average every day normal mother fucker. My people. Entrepreneurs, people who see the opportunity to buy in cheap and cash out big.

Just say gangsters, we all know you mean gangsters.

That’s right, real gangsters. We’re no stranger to a little danger, if you got most of the killer robots I’m sure you have a plan to keep the rest at bay. If one slips through…well we have guns don’t we? Do you know why people like to visit the bad side of town? We got drugs, guys, girls, guns, and fun.

Basically, you’re about to have a real problem bootstrapping a city atop of a derelict station that no one wanted in the first place. While I know you well enough to know you are nothing if not tenacious – and rich – it is still a long and slow process. You don’t have an imminent disaster like the collapse of Thenica to force people out of a place as cozy and safe as Moncayo. Problem with slow, is you need people who can help hold this place for you. You need that recruitment office filled to the brim. You’re up against two exerlus and their infinite wave of machines, you need bodies quick. I can get them here. I can provide them the opportunity they need to see a reason to go for it.

You can hand out the free buildings all you want, that no one can afford to rebuild themselves, but after Thenica people don’t really trust the big governments. So just building them for free and handing them out like alms to the homeless isn’t going to sit well, given that this is literally how the elves became a superpower. People want to feel like they’re part of the adventure! Like they’re exploring the galaxy WITH you not just scavenging your prizes. To do that, you don’t create a program…you create an opportunity. An opportunity with a floor so low to get in on, that anyone can take the shot. The risk might be getting blown up by killer machines, facing the hive worlds and their dangers, just living out on the Reach in general…but the reward is building a dynastic fortune on what might be one of the most important places in the galaxy within a few generations.

Who is here? Your ARMED forces who can handle themselves. Eleazor is only moving in because he trusts you, he has fought beside you, he knows you and he knows what both you and himself are capable of. So getting his wife a bigger fancier house at the risk of living out here is no big deal for him. But everyone else? It’s neat to see this place, but it’s not fun to live here. No resources, no services, no products, no security.

I can solve that for you! Just tell Aurora here to let me move my office. Sure the pipe dream is that you build a beautiful utopia where everyone is fed and no one is homeless. The reality is, you need three more of these sections, and you need them fuckin held until you can finish the rest of the ring. You can’t do that from across the galaxy, it cost almost everything you had just to get this far and its going to get worse. You can’t control this ring with foreign forces from Moncayo while you also need to send your power to the other side of the galaxy to find your keys. You need a powerbase here. To have that, you need people. To get that, you want me. I’ll get you immigrants, I’ll get you aliens. In no time this place will be a thriving hub of the Western Reach and your name will be known across it. All of this, no fuss, no mess, no dirt. All you have to do, is uphold the traditions and laws of the VSF. Just let the people who hold residency here vote. So do practically nothing and all your problems will just melt away.

Massaging the Director’s shoulders without consent is considered assault. By the way Lancaster, you have sixteen more appointments, petitions, and phone calls that are going to sound a lot like this. Laura just happens to work for you, so she put herself at the front of the line.

I was merely coming to advise you on the developing governmental situation.

That protocol was not intended for you to make a sales pitch to the Director rather than actually advising.

I’m just doing my job. My advice, is that you should just ignore all those little ideas people come up with to circumvent the rules and foundations of your great federation. Sure some advisors, some salesmen, might suggest that I stand to benefit the most from this. Though I would remind you that I am nothing if not adaptable. Better then when I was smuggling guns and bombs through Somnus right? I’m a good girl now, because you pay me to be.

I’m a woman of the people now! Apparently those people now include Haleh. I’m sure people would be happy to move into Diadem knowing that a Phantom set up shop here. An active phantom who is known to possess incredible destructive power. I wonder if rumors will begin spreading that she can protect them, or that she is just a rogue force they’ll have to tiptoe around if they come here?

Are you extorting your own boss?

Oh shush Aurora, she knows what I’m about. I’m just very good at managing people. At understanding the ebb and flow of city life. Also, since we lost Somnus and Koura I’ve just been kind of pushing papers. However, since Lancaster has taken to not directly controlling the governments of her colonies I can’t just request a promotion. So I figure I’d run for office the old fashioned way. I’ll see myself out, though remember. Democracy!

By my projections, she’s right though. If you just let Diadem’s first section hold elections, unless Koda runs for office it is highly unlikely that Laura loses. Not even with consideration to the fact that she will play dirty. She’s from Koura, has government experience, is ‘tough’ which is good on the Reach, and is ‘the fun one’ since when she says ‘blackjack and hookers for everyone’ she’s barely even joking. The vision for a long term utopia is perhaps mitigated by the needs created by the problems of ‘right now’. Laura solves ‘right now’ very effectively. That being said, we are in the Western Reach and she just kind of blends in. She would be a good representative to other alien neighbors. I suppose it comes down to whether or not you feel you want your first colony on Diadem to be run by her of all people.

As for other civil matters of colonization. This gets into an issue of distributing space. Despite how nearly infinite the space available on even just this section of Diadem is, you do need to make a formal decision as the ‘one who conquered the damned place’. Land is normally cheap on the frontiers, but this is aboard a massive ring world. The potential value of holding any assets, such as land, here have long term implications normal frontier planets do not enjoy. If you let people just take whatever they can grab and build a house on top of, that might turn into a frenzy now that you have the ring under control for the time being. If you sell plots, even cheap, who knows how that could affect people moving in. Judging by Laura’s conversation, if it is too cheap then you get some wild opportunists showing up. If it is too expensive then people buy space and hold onto it until someone else develops everything. Normally this would be handled by colonial government but since you are the one who took this place and I imagine it means more than the usual colony to you, I figured I’d check what you want to do. That being said, you’re already too slow. A small town exists on the surface plates of people who just moved into the woods while you weren’t looking and are clearly hoping you don’t notice they did this before any available restrictions were put in place. They’re mostly laborers working on Gem Station’s reconstruction, and they saw the forest from space and decided they could just sneakily move in. So its a matter of whether or not you have any intention of preventing such practices or not.

As an aside, it is almost comical how little land they appropriated and hoped to get away with. If you’re going to let it stand you should probably tell them they can have a little more. Living in the crowded spaces of Moncayo, a place flooded with refugees, has obviously impacted the mindset of its people. If they were going to try and get away with that at the risk of pissing off their government and main employer, you think they’d be going for broke to really get a place of their own. They built a village out single story houses the size of two shipping containers. This was ‘making off like bandits’ to them after years of living in subdivided apartments intended to house refugees in Moncayo. I suppose this goes to show the ramifications of what people have been through since the fall of Thenica. Also the rapid rise in power of the Hasao Tei, the only city in Cayetano that is considered to not be terribly cramped besides the farming sectors. Likely contributed to the fact that the culture of the Hasao Tei churns out vastly more laborers than most would.

Speaking of all this. So Haleh appears to be sticking around at least for now, if nothing else she is genuinely well suited to the Western Reach. She isn’t going to work for VSEC given her lack of willingness to obey ‘mortals’. However, she moved into the outer subsurface layer of Diadem and is trying to build a garage. Apparently if left to her own devices she wants to collect cars. Laura King even gave her a welcoming gift of a two million credit supercar from a now destroyed manufacturer. I point this out because it means Laura is up to something. Not that Sakhessa showing up was good for our anxiety around here. Biohazard teams have been scrubbing every inch to check for mummy rot since her passing through. Fortunately, none has been found. Despite Deinuu’s aggressive nature and willingness to pick a fight, it appears Sakhessa’s only desire is to be left alone.

As for rebuilding Diadem’s shipyards, they are a technical marvel just because they are housed by the walls of the ring and most important its atmosphere. The only other shipyard in the Sol territories to do something like that belongs to Sharen. Theirs isn’t even walled. Peasants! Though yes I have put that to a high priority for now as requested.

Most of the Ika are not in any condition to be founding their own colony, Sarrai is the only one who is fully functional already. She has a two year jump on the competition and Eerihild was apparently very good at being a therapist. So for now they live in one of the buildings under assisted living except for a handful of them that are self sufficient. They actually seem relatively uninterested in colonial affairs over spiritual ones. As I mentioned before, their people have a surprisingly deep series of cultural traditions revolving their reverence of ‘machine spirits’ that apparently only they can see or talk to. A phenomenon we haven’t really studied to figure out how it actually works.

Hello th-

No. The Ika have demanded that as the original creators of Diadem that we hand full rights of possession of three specific structures over to them. It’s a building in the utility deck, the one right above the command room, and another one that is in the shipyards. This was a strangely high priority to them and one of them was clearly willing to fight Eleazor for it. Sarrai has confirmed the importance of these buildings. While Diadem is primarily attributed to them, it was built with the combined efforts of their alliance. Including the likes of the Blaiken, and it was a bastion of a multi civilization empire. They aren’t that picky about us being here, that’s normal to them, but those three buildings are relevant to their people specifically. One is the original factory that the machines are made in, while the exerlus made hundreds more – that specific one is the one they originally built. The building above the command room was a temple, even if to us it looks more like a server farm. They said the spirits of their machines were stored there after expiring, and would be possible to upload once again. Some of these machines wandering the ring aren’t ‘old ones’ because of their body, but because of the data that operates them from these server farms.

The building in the shipyard is also a temple, specifically near to the docking terminals because they would ‘listen’ to the ships that passed by and somehow divine stories of galactic adventures those ships had been on. I went ahead and just approved that because they were agitated about these three buildings, but I thought I’d let you know why the big fancy building right on top of your command console is in possession of the Ika instead of VSEC. We just moved operations into the one across the street instead. They didn’t care about that one.

There is a problem with Eden’s reconstruction of the Ika, she needs more than one sample since they are all badly mutated. Easily solved, but just thought I’d mentions she needs access to more than Sarrai. Sarrai just sort of cut her mutations off in the heat of the moment since her armor didn’t recognize her new shape, Sarrai didn’t even recognize her new shape. Under duress she made a decision and paid the cost, respectable. However, she still has mutated joints and internal organs even if the armor cut the obvious excess limbs off for her. Basically, Eden just needs more samples and a little help from Sarrai to figure out what the real base blueprint should be. Not that we lack for samples, I suppose the summary is just that she’s working on it. I dunno man its  been awhile and Irae makes me tell her every little detail sometimes, I got kind of used to it.

Lancaster’s land rewards, while generous, turn out to not be spectacularly appealing to most knights. Diadem is a technological marvel, not something we’re known for even with Eden’s recent help. Eden City is floating above Eden. Eden is awesome. Everybody loves Eden. If they were to have tiefling children or any other side effects for their corruption, even if cleansed, who do they go to? That’s right, Eden. If they want to pass down a family tradition of being elemental pandem casters? Eden. She has become so incredibly critical to our culture that no one wants to leave the planet. By the way while you were gone, Eden’s Festival became a holiday. We figured out Eden’s birthday and now celebrate it as a national holiday.

Yoshai has been convincing people to hold their cash ins until they know where Ohalyn or other such…businesses intend to appear. However, Selah is willing to depart from Eden to move into Diadem full time but with different intentions. She is waiting to see how Diadem develops, because the influence of a holy order might help to guide the people of Diadem but it might also enter into intense friction with the Ika religion or the current forerunner to become a major governor- Laura King. The Holy Order is less attached to Eden than the rest.

Speaking of Yoshai, he has gotten in contact with some mysterious…thing…in the shadow plane. Apparently it is called “The Thing in the Dark” by shades. A sort of local cryptid of theirs, not many believe it actually exists and some ‘crazies’ keep trying to prove it does. Turns out it does, and it’s dying. It is also apparently an information broker that runs Aethernet social media as a side hustle? According to Yoshai it is struggling to communicate and needs help. It offered to bind to him in a roundabout way of getting to you and specifically Eden. It offered to answer a question if you would agree to send Eden into the shadow plane to try and help it. If she succeeds you get two more questions. It also apparently finds Vasia worth trading more information for though Yoshai is having a hard time understanding its pricing structure. It doesn’t like to deviate from it though, even in its current state. It is having a hard time explaining itself even to Yoshai who now has been sitting quietly in the dark mumbling to himself trying to parse what this thing is even saying half the time. At the very least it doesn’t seem crazy or malevolent, just sick.

We’ve seen to the knight of the surviving hundred and a handful of squires from the First Lance that went to Diadem.

As for finding Zero out in the wilds…no idea. Selah stated that Ankathi knows how but would rather you focus on the task at hand than picking up a side project of tracking down some aberration you created in the Astral Wilds. She also warned that Zero is a very hostile creature, it has attacked anything and everything it can find. It is also deliberately hunting. Returning to the Astral Wilds might attract Zero’s attention though since you will at the least be food.

Holua has been sent to hang around Diadem where Valen seems to be moving into. Though technically she is employed by VSEC and sometimes lurks in places Holua doesn’t have access to. Sometimes for security reasons but also because he’s a bit large for some hallways and buildings. That and unsupervised it turns out he will burrow into the dirt somewhere instead of keeping up with any studies assigned to him.

We’ve deferred the vloz infiltration to Nah Division since the Vloz know us and hate us. It is currently in progress.

The vivarium is still technically there. It’s been taken over by the Phantoms and they seem to have largely…kept operating it actually. Basically “oh good idea, we’ll do that too”. Granted…they might be putting unintended things in there. Though also several Solian life forms. With Sakhessa effectively opting out of Sol to establish her own world it became more prudent for them to collect samples of what they’d be leaving behind.

Vanjin has an alibi that she is in fact, a former bounty hunter. Though notably that alibi has sketchy spots since she was living out of her ship and doing ‘whatever it took’ to get to her targets.

As for declassifying yourself, good for you man. Really putting yourself out there. Now there is an aethernet conspiracy that you’re a puppet controlled by big government (Lancaster and Renjala in particular) to shift blame of the mummy rot epidemic onto a scapegoat when in reality it was all Lancaster’s fault. A major backbone of it is that your cultist body has a known previous life before you took over it. One that is definitely not wealthy enough to be a director. Not necessarily everyone but…more than is normal for conspiracy theory message boards and aethernet comments. My favorite post so far is someone saying you’re Renjala without the mask and you got tired of trying to live vicariously while people didn’t know you were rich so you revealed…yourself posing as not yourself. Ignoring entirely that Renjala is six inches taller than you, and not a woman. I could have made up some shit better then that, shapeshifting, illusion magic, silnian shenanigans. Nope, they just…had nothing for it.

Reveal yourself as the cat next, it’ll be hilarious. For me at least.Though now that I think about it, after you revealed the Phantoms why didn’t they reveal you in retaliation? Or Vasia…or that Renjala is a lich…or that Lancaster is a former member… In hindsight, they’ve been weirdly quiet about all the things they know about us. I’m sure it’s nothing but it just got me wondering.

It does seem that your ritual has helped a lot in the recovery of the Ika, not exactly an instant solution but definitely speedrunning the process. Though there is still the matter of ‘oh god the whole galaxy has changed in the last sixteen thousand years nothing makes sense anymore and my favorite restaurant is closed’ that they’ll be dealing with for awhile.

The cult has returned to Jydoq to take another stab at this. They’ve made a new command center out of a Kaiju Freighter. Since it was designed by Vasia to transport and hold things, it wasn’t much of a stretch to reverse it to keep things out. Given that they are dealing with a liquid assassin, a ship made to not leak air into space was a good start they decided. Not long after landing, Alexandrea and a few of her closest disappeared. According to other members of the cult, they just left entirely now that they had gotten a free ride to another planet. Something something, kicking them while they’re down, something something, whiny bitches.

Acquiring Waianoa’s alchemical recipe for the psionic melding potion is down to a trade. It is a signature product of the Mokihi kingdom. Waianoa offered to trade the recipe on the condition that…uh….that I…oh no she wants my body. While I can’t be entirely sure as to why, knowing what we do about the growing elemental movement to ‘upscale production’ I think they want a synapse queen for…experiments. I’m sure giving them access to whatever elemental a silnian makes will in no way have lasting ramifications on the galaxy.

Speaking of picking buildings in Diadem, are we even moving? Diadem is a massive city that if filled with people will mean the only things we can eat are people. I suppose we could live in the subsurface levels pretty comfortably. I don’t mind the dark obviously.

I have gathered that Vasia is cranky and needs a project to occupy herself. I think she’s just out of sorts with her current situation. She doesn’t have her office, her lab, her experiments, basically everything she was working on. Probably need to let her settle in and find her rhythmn again before asking her to run off to Jydoq or anywhere else that doesn’t promise to help her rebuild the things she cares about. I think this is all her version of sulking, but for someone who regularly fights with their sister like that ‘sulking’ looks a lot like ‘plot a genocide’. She took off to Zenaka when she heard of your baby experiments though and has taken it upon herself to set the matter up.

Also meeting with Haleh is trickier than you might think. She is if nothing else highly mobile and I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a draconic version of ADHD. Gotta go fast, gotta go somewhere, gotta blow something up.

Speaking of Craylin, well she’s learned some new soulmelds from the Hasao Tei I guess.

Doctor White has largely stabilized their own medical condition. If anything they’re stronger than before. Sure there is a writhing mass of tentacles inside of them with an inter-dimensional bag of holding for a stomach that means she has to eat a lot, but there was a reason that Koura Cures was using that parasite for medical benefits. Her organs are gone now though. All of her vital processes are handled by the creature inside of her. The worst of it is the creeping fear that it will soon replace her as a person. Her brain is already gone from her body, if you run a scan on her you will find that everything underneath her skin is just that parasite. All things responsible for keeping her alive are in another dimension with the strange creature. You could probably cut her head off and she would be fine unless you cut juuust right to hit the other dimension to the north-left whatever the fuck she exists on.

Averill has taken off into the Reach to look for the scrappers, though it is a long journey.

Also we got the Lucidware going pretty well. The current problem is just that making an artificial limb that contributes MORE mana to the mana well than a limb is so far proving to be especially difficult. Though we can add limbs without it causing a draw on the existing mana well, so we have this one test subject with six arms that is able to maintain it just fine without some of the problems normally associated with trying this.

From the VSEC reports, the ruins near the Undead Star are not necessarily monetarily valuable. There aren’t exactly many valuable ancient artifacts, but historically they might be worthwhile to someone just to study what happened. Hearing what Renjala’s man has run into recently, knowledge might soon become currency.

Also my ichor, after being fed one of the Makers, produced a giant…thing. A big thing, that makes more little things. It actually has an enormous shell on its back that houses a portable bio…lab? Gestation chamber? Outpost? It’s the size of a ship and walks around. I’d say normal people shouldn’t go in, you’d be slipping and sliding through tunnels of exposed sinew that hug you real tight. I can slither through pretty comfortably though, kind of like a security blanket to me honestly. It’s a mobile ichor pit on the back of a huge creature. That’s the best way to describe it, even if the ichor it stores isn’t exactly liquid.

Bardhe said to stop calling him unless you have a job right at that moment. He then blocked our number because you keep calling him too often. His prices are negotiated per contract. No offense but you do seem kind of clingy, like…I get it.

Michael is still out there “stuck” pretending to be a slave. He’s not actually getting the worst of it. As mentioned before, most slaves in Aureum are more like pets that clean up after themselves. The issue with extracting him still remains getting a ship out of Aureum, the place is on a permanent lockdown with only one way in or out through the rift. Ironically, Michael has an easy time because he is a palace slave, but he also never gets to go anywhere because he is a palace slave. At this point the only way to extract him would likely to be for him to flee deeper into the warrens and drop out into space elsewhere but he isn’t a particularly pilot or ship thief.

Though his reports can tell you that posing as a Phantom is a bad idea. Most people who work for the Phantoms know which one they work for. Heterna, the city Sakhessa controlled in Necrosi, has a mayor that just meets with Sakhessa directly. While not every citizen knows about her, the ones that need to definitely do. It seems that the issue Ilex experienced is related to the death of Cassir leaving a power vacuum and no command structure to fulfill it.

We set up a base on Zenaka and scaled up ship production.

With the exception of Michael, everyone has been able to return to the Nomad Flotilla if they weren’t already there.

Also Renjala has a job for us.

We’ve started to establish a presence at Diadem, still in the process of building inspections, clearing the stuff we can’t use, and also second guessing every decision because I keep feeling like…it could be even bigger! BIGGER!

Though with clearance from the FVS we have been able to begin the production of warforged in greater quantities, more soldiers too. I have so many designs to try…

I’ve seen to repairing Vanessa, that was easy enough. She just needed some maintenance and blades replaced. Chevalier is a bit more complicated, still working on him. He’s fine, it will just take some effort to replace all of his equipment. He was designed to be very robust but it also makes it very difficult to take him apart and fix some nooks and crannies up that are causing this one stupid plate to not fit nicely into place.

Arsene is at Diadem working on helping with the whole Ika thing. We’ve reason to believe there are more Ika throughout Diadem at other medical facilities. Mostly because Sarrai said it wasn’t the only one like that. Traditional hospitals may have been destroyed by whatever destroyed them, but several bunker hospitals like those were once intended for the elite or for atmospheric control due to other species. The one Sarrai was in was made open to the public due to the crisis, and it stands to reason others were as well. She just doesn’t know where they all are.

As for transplanting Arsene, I will keep looking into it.

Diamond in the Rough

A Biography of Bones

Welcome back. It has been approximate two years since your last access of this console. You have…two…hundred…thousand…six…hundred…and twelve new messages.

In your absence, the Moncayo defenses were breached by the Revenants. They stole several data files in a covert mission that resolved without conflict. We have seen no new developments since then regarding the matter.

Before you left, you and inquired as to the cost and requirements of building a titan. Since you returned, my calculations have been rendered obsolete by the discovery of Diadem’s shipyards. While they are still in need of repair and refitting, it does significantly impact cost projections one way or another.

In either case the estimations of this project would depend on the intended design and purpose of the ship. As well as the path to constructing it. As is, we have no current facilities that can produce such a large vessel. Refitting the shipyards at Diadem would actually be dramatically more time consuming due to the amount of pre-existing and defunct infrastrucure needing to be cleared as well as figuring out the utility systems of the ring. Though it would protect the shipyard and its construction with a physical wall. Another advantage to Diadem’s shipyards is the crews could work inside the atmosphere of Diadem, which would result in quicker construction times and safer personnel. Building a new shipyard at moncayo would be more expensive but significantly faster. Titan ships do not really have a specific standard of design that I am aware of. So the needs of the design would have to be discussed. Current estimates are an initial construction of 10,000,000,000 with an expected 30,000,000 in upkeep for the ship itself. The shipyard to produce it would is expected to be  $160,000,000,000.

It’s 8 orbital shipyards.

Koda has maintained Moncayo in your absence. Gem station was not destroyed in its entirety, alien salvagers actually hauled off most of the station while you were still inside Diadem. They also hauled off large chunks of Rahlken’s ship as well. They were impressively opportunistic.

Kaylen has also become a major figure of Moncayo leadership, acting as a surrogate crazy woman who keeps picking fights that are of questionable strategic decision making. It turns out without you around, people notice the lack of crazy shenanigans. This led to the launch of a study as to the impact of leaders such as yourself and Kaylen on the population of Cayetano’s settlements. Due to the lack of Aethernet all entertainment must be produced locally. Even if investments have been made into this area, particularly in Roha, it turns out that people were watching the news partially for entertainment. Because you were regularly on it and it had become something more like a game or reality show for people rather than the unbiased distribution of information.

Kaylen also has been targeting Phantom colonies on the outer edges of the frontier. Stating a desire to prevent them from expanding, though they have largely been focused on reinforcing Auwana and the warrens.

The scout ships had been recalled while you were away to deal with the issue that Haziel caused by altering the rules of botany while no one was looking. Jiyan had managed to return from the Western Reach and also found a map of many known stations out in the Reach, making it our best documented area for traveling. They sometimes claim various alignments but for practical purposes it is generally considered that rogue stations on the Western Reach are commonplace. So it does expand our options for pit stops. Though as reported by the last crew to venture there, it is a dangerous area of the galaxy where pirates are practically more extremely common and active.

Jiyan wound up traveling to the mysterious empire near the galactic core to find out what happened to the last crew that went there. She was the first one to have any success. With information you and Renjala recently brought back, we now know that this is indeed the home of the Blaiken and their Undead Star. Without you around Jiyan wound up exploring that region of space looking for stories and rumors but discovered just how little lives in that galactic neighborhood. It can be described as a barren wasteland, though she did find evidence of previous civilizations that lived on various planets. All bearing signs of violent eradication. Lot of ruins though for those archeologically inclined.

Also in your time away, the newly formed Hassani Empire ruled by Sakhessa has been sitting around and fortifying itself. On the outside it seems to be largely a game of politics as other powers debate how to handle its presence. Representatives of one of the worlds in Nelta arrived there and we don’t know what they talked about, but they were not destroyed and tortured as those very same people once were when they visited Sol. It appears Sakhessa is accepting diplomats and contrasting the Hassani with Sol. Making it very hard for us to say “no really they’re the evil ones you have to believe me.” Largely aided by the presence of Decaelys, a known galactic figure who lends significant credibility to the Hassani.

Kaylen has been throwing a fit for over a year about this development. She also started to refocus her efforts to convince people we are not genocidal isolationists by paying less attention to Nelta and more attention to the Western Reach. She also led an expedition into Diadem while you were gone in an attempt to rescue you, but could not find you. In reviewing your own report as to the matter, it turns out she was entering the ring thousands of kilometers off of where you were and in the darkness it was hard to even remotely discern that.

Welcome home sir, it’s been a fucking mess. Between a war with Kharla and most of our people either going into Diadem with Lancaster or chasing after Haziel, it’s been quiet around the base at least.

With some investigation the druidic order has determined that ships are likely about to get a lot more expensive real soon. Either the maintenance of the organic filters on these ships will be much more difficult or new materials will be needed. New very expensive materials. Fooor everyone but us. If you actually have a full time druid team available to sit around the ship it’s actually ridiculously easy to just keep using the old era ships. So while these developments have had very minor impacts on us, I imagine throughout the galaxy its been a bit more of a problem. Especially if no one has any answers like we do. Real shame galactic communication has been heavily disrupted for the last decade or so.

I’ve scattered soil in some various planters around Eden City as requested for your son. Also scales under the planters so we know which one he is in. It really only detects if an entire car’s worth of weight has been added to it or not, but gets the job done. The smiths also made him a suit of armor to protect him from chips and scrapes.

To that end, you got back at an incredibly interesting time. Lancaster and the expedition force also just returned from Diadem recently, they were in there for about two years. Many of them are exhausted and recovering from the adventure. Eerihild seems to be the only one unaffected by it. Yoshai might need a pep talk though, he seems dissatisfied with his own performance.

Oh hey neat, Lancaster is back. The local news reports were getting boring.

Anyways it turns out that Na’umi did not survive the invasion. This might be one of the catalysts besides you giving Kaisa your comm spell for Azilath turning into a monster lately.

I don’t get why everyone always picks on me over every little thing. I just sit here and mind my own business.

On the one hand, we learned we cannot call Vasia. Though we also learned why. She wasn’t in our little astral cluster anymore. To that note-

I’m back. What’s all this about mummy rot, psionic cult prophets, and such? Eh i don’t care. I just came by to check on my cat. Here have some kitty treats.

Don’t mind me, little manic. Passed through the Wild River, having attention span issues. Apparently its normal, I’ll put it in case file. Though honestly I don’t feel that different.

WHO LET ALL MY DOGS OUT?! For fucks sake Si Yeon. Anyways, I’ll be back in my office. I get the feeling I need to see what’s up.

Hrmm… you gave my office away. Well. This will have to be corrected. I’m going to need a new desk. I don’t like…used furniture. It’s gross. Also Si Yeon has a tentacle monster living inside of her, who knows what slime is all over that thing now. Also a new super computer. I’ll just bill it to you later. Time for a shopping trip. Peace bitches.

Vasia’s back…yaaaay…

Hide Craylin. Ever since her…maturing I suppose you could say she’s developed her abilities enough that I get the feeling Vasia will be more interested than is healthy. Well healthy for Craylin at least.

Anyways, we’re sending Alexandrea out to Jydoq as requested.I suppose that’s one way to get rid of her. Though it doesn’t really make us any progress on Jydoq. That assassin is squaring off with Kennae – Alexandrea’s going to fucking die. Deserves it though. Though that being said…Vasia is back. That might let us actually deploy lab projects more easily now that we have two people qualified to act as the lab director if the other one does more work in the field.

Si-Ye, err White, hasn’t had any progress on the 004C breeding so far but its a work in progress. Though over the last two years she did make progress on fixing mummy rot issues. However, the next step of her idea to manage it involves needing someone who can cast divine magic. There’s only one left and its not quite as ‘divine’ as Sarnai’s but Eerihild might be able to help her actually cure mummy rot in theory. Though it is a wild stab at it right now, it might be worth experimenting with. Though due to how contagious the rot is, it runs the risk of infecting Eerihild for the attempt. Not sure Renjala would be happy about that, or Haziel for that matter.

Oh the directors are just popping out of the woods this season. I suppose that is good news for us. Well at least all’s well that ends well.

At least our squad is back, and in recognition of their glorious adventure achievements the Federation has approved us to move forward with heavier production. With Diadem coming under the federation’s control they have space to fill. Also we look good on a world populated by machine beasts. Sort of blend in don’t you think?

Lancaster also just started wildly handing out land to act as a morale boost to the last of her men. Though our boys were there too. I told Lancaster no take backsies, so we should at least be able to snag some good real estate to open some new development. Granted she probably would just approve us to build whatever we want there but I just wanted to make sure you didn’t still feel guilty about retreating in the face of certain death. Gotta focus on the future, gotta mooch off Lancaster for all she’s got!

Anyways, Chevalier was severely damaged during the trip. He’s out for another month while we rebuild him. Don’t worry though, we have the technology. Vanessa broke half her blades and I need to fix those too. Sacha’s missing a leg and Adrienne is…perfectly fine actually. Not sure how that worked out for her. Sylvaine is also mildly damaged but apparently got separated from the group at some point and wasn’t even present from the worst of the battles.

This has also been a great stress test of our designs. In particular, I have discovered a voidforged can be exhausted if you push them hard enough. With the exception of Vanessa, the whole team needs some R and R. Not sure what is up with Vanessa, but she seems ready to get right back out there.

Either way, now would be a good time to consider some new projects. We’ve invested most of our efforts into helping the FVS with Diadem, now that its been effectively handled we’re in a position to do…I dunno that’s up to you. Though the machine wars are still going on Diadem, so don’t forget that tidbit. Eleven more sections to go.

We have successfully dealt with Luci, good job convincing her to meet with you one last time over lunch on a balcony we could just shoot her on.

For the last two years Allison has made fairly good progress with hijacking some of Aureum’s slave shipments, though they did end up taking notice. Instead of retaliating against us, they wrote it off as a loss and just started enslaving even more people.

In the hunt for whoever was posing as one of our directors we have found some leads. Mostly in that the incident with Alexandrea was not their only action. Some of our own agents have been a victim of this character, but they were much more minor occurences. Usually tasks to support agents who didn’t need anything. We suspect they used it to find out more about us and who works for us, though they have not made an overt moves against us just yet. So it’s not just Ilex that they’re messing with. We’ve also found evidence of someone posing as Renjala back on Sol for all of a day in order to meet with one of the Alnae warlords. Since he always wears a mask, no one really noticed anything particularly awry. Most people do not know Renjala as a lich, so they wouldn’t think to check for how bony his hands might be.

What we do know is that they used his identity very sparingly. They didn’t do anything major, simply visited the warlord as a guest. Currently we do not know what they wanted or why.