Most of the update is a story of lore thing, which is down in sam’s section as you should read the character profile before the story.

Mordekai Aberhoff

Research station expanded a little.

Higher grades of psionic tools are entering the streets though as far as anyone can tell the specialists haven’t caught wind of it yet.

Along with hiring philosophy students you could just probably draft a bunch of college kids living off of ramen for a hundred bucks a pop to run experiments on them.

You should be more specific on bodyguard requests so I know what to make.

Edric Vandross

No, the Noctis is a battlecruiser and doesn’t feature docking for frigates like the Nomad

The problem with sending the Raiders to another star is that is every planet anyone has encountered has required terraforming to at least some extent. Finding a spot to call a resort would be worth a lot of money to sell the find location to existing colonist efforts though.

Shipyards keep on building, carrier still being worked on. To that end the stealth drive has increased its efficiency to 10x (from 12) of the original design it comes from.

The pirates are at least quiet this week.

Sethis Tyne

The necrocarnate search has finally yielded results.

Aforementioned SoL – Phantoms of the Purge

Cattle prods seem to make engineers work slower rather then faster.

Luci Serrano

The people who can actually manufacture and sell FTL drives are Desoir, Sharen, and Selona. So far the tech is still too new for smaller startups to really get a handle on producing them due to the lack of available expertise.

As for the production chains, you already own a mining company for gathering raw materials. Though it should be note that wood, crystals, amber, and such are needed to make ships work due to the mana storage they exhibit if you want more of the raw materials. Electronics companies are a dime a dozen these days so you could just put up how much you’d pay to buy one out and see what you can acquire as a result.

Fiiine you can have your planet express company.

Just Monika indeed.

Edric Vandross

The problem with investigating Solvang and Selona is both are criminal organizations who rely on hiding what they’ve got going on from the rest of the system. We know that Solvang has secret space stations all over the place but no one actually knows for sure how many there are and which ones are active or just in reserve. General investigations indicate they want more pirate crews as that is how their profit model and powerbase works. Basically they’re in a nonstop recruitment drive.

Selona is known to have bases on the major planets throughout the system but no one knows where all their weapons come from. While we have a lot of evidence that they have access to their own manufacturing no one has been able to figure out where it is, and multiple groups have tried to find them. As for what they want, this is also hard to pin down. The easy answer seems to be money but as the faction pages suspect, Arkaric himself is just a walking ball of chaos and spite and just likes to mess with everyone. He’s still dealing with the aftermath of the Thousand Legends and people considering him to be a hero despite his return to his murderous and violent ways. However, due to the events of the Thousand Legends and those who had a chance to talk to him we do know his gang’s advanced cybernetics are in some way tied to Kenin, which may be a further link or at least clue as to how they’re manufacturing advanced military equipment.

Selona’s attack on Solvang was pretty unexpected but thats kind of their thing so perhaps it was completely expected. Either way Yasice is likely the primary instigator of that attack and we’re not sure why she opted to go that way instead of just calling in more Sharen to deal with the Solvang station herself as Sharen can definitely handle that. Currently the agents think the best answer is really that Selona is just such a volatile element that its hard to find much reason behind the things they do. To that end, while this attack mostly involved criminal affairs the media surrounding Selona have noticed that public opinion of the gang is of total confusion when all this is combined with their contributions to the Thousand Legends.

Meanwhile the Raiders recent raids have once again been running into trouble as Yasice showed back up. Then on the other end of things the Nomads noted their orders were just to steal an FTL drive, it didn’t say from who. They chose Selona, and while there they went to rescue Adin as she is a former Nomad crewmember and they weren’t sure how things would be for her as a Selona captive. One day one of the conspirator suits were sitting in their office conducting nefarious affairs and suddenly he announced that he just suddenly had received a bad feeling for no apparent reason.

Vajor managed to finally corner the Raiders  since they were on the ground instead of in space and had fewer options for running. As the Raiders debated between surrender and a desperate last stand, House Song showed up because they didn’t know the Nomads were not hanging out with the Raiders at this particular instance so they assumed the Raiders had Adin. Vajor didn’t take kindly to the other empire butting in and had a scuffle. During which the Raiders were able to make a break for it, only to run into Yasice and her team. That didn’t go well and they were captured again. Not 10 feet through the hangar the hangar was raided by Selona and Yasice’s team were hospitalized promptly thereafter and, true to Selona fashion, the entire hangar port was blown to pieces by unnecessarily powerful bombs. This got Vajor and Song’s attention while they were still scuffling as both thought the other side had done that one, meanwhile Solvang mercenaries showed up to apprehend Yasice because fuck that bitch. While they found her already almost dead after she encountered Selona they also found Selona and figured this was now a feud so they shot at the gangsters just to settle up the score. Now the local police show up and they think this is Vajor’s fault because they came from the south side where Vajor and Song were having a frank exchange of ideas and didn’t even know Selona and Solvang was here. Three days into this skirmish that was consuming the city, the Nomads show up and try to extract the Raiders. Adin was just dropped off cuz they like her, so she took command over the Song forces and they began to crush Vajor now that one of their big shot commanders was here. About a week into this conflict the local economy was pretty messed up and riots started breaking out over the government not doing anything to stop all this fighting so in a panic the government paid off some mercenaries to come help settle things down and at least get all these people out of the damned city. Madhammer shows up, again, and starts pushing the entire fight into tighter confines by establishing a perimeter. Since the place was already blown up they figured “fuck it just use the big guns to scare them off” to which Selona responded by engaging Madhammer’s perimeter with tanks. They broke a hole in the perimeter and then just went right back towards the center of the now dense ball of chaos and conflict because Adin pushed towards their main holding point while they were busy fighting madhammer. The raiders manage to disappear thanks to the Nomads once again but the fighting continued on because Selona and Madhammer both have no sense of chill right now and kept it up. Yasice had been treated for the injuries she had sustained and wanted another crack at Selona for revenge, but before she could even bother with that she winds up fighting Solvang who remember she’s the bitch that caused this whole problem. While Yasice’s team is small they are able to move through the city and fight in smaller engagements where they are a lot more powerful then individuals belonging to Solvang pirates. News of all this chaos reaches Adin and she shows up since Sharen is an ally of House Song and now Yasice is backed by a small army. Solvang decides to get the fuck out of here as now there are 3 militant factions all here but there is no more port and no more ships so they’re stuck here and they’re promptly murdered by Madhammer during their escape attempt because they approached the perimeter while still fully armed and Gheir decided “screw it use the tanks” so there is nothing left of them. Now the city area they are in has become an arena with its border being held by Madhammer so they can’t get out easily. Adin being a VIP means that Song sent backup and the big ass ship arrives in orbit and drops down Song Yi herself who finally got here after two weeks of fighting over Adin and the Raiders. Madhammer had previous relations with House Song and they decide not to fuck with that but in the weakening of the border Selona manages to slip out and the fighting finally ends. The city is working on clearing debris to rebuild the area. No one knows when Vajor disappeared but she wasn’t seen in quite some while and its suspected she took off after the Raiders once they escaped. Since her team was small it is likely she was able to get past the Madhammer perimeter on her own.

Halaestra commented that this was getting out of control. Fortunately the Nomads got that FTL drive and now they’re debating hiding on another star because this is some bullshit.

Raymond keeps working on the stealth drive efficiency.

Insurance is starting to be sold. Sells well in these uncertain times of total chaos.

Sethis Tyne

The investigation into the Solvang capital station turns rather peculiar. The agents disappeared off the grid immediately upon visiting the place and weren’t heard from until a month later when they submitted their report. The capital station is far more secure then any other, blocking any and all communications both in and out and constantly moving. The peculiar feature of the capital station is its not a station, its a super-carrier no one knew existed. It actually took the team a long damned time to even find out how to get on it through a series of shady contacts and invites. It is the height of paranoid security, and because of that its kind of like stepping backwards in time. A lot of its operation depends on manual effort to ferry messages both onto the ship and around within it. It even has a system of emergency lighting that involves manually flipping on a bunch of flashlights so that it can’t be compromised by people like Aryn. Because of this it isn’t really a bustling hub of activity as its just so inconvenient to do anything involving it compared to modernized locations. Though what makes it the capital is the vaults the ship contains, a lot of the Solvang banking’s power stems from this ship and people come here to do high profile trades on the black market under the neutral and watchful eye of Asmoday. There aren’t even security camera’s on the facility so that no one can take control of them. The ship’s security depends largely on the abnormal number of demons aboard who can exploit their own abilities to do things a less efficient but still practical way while not exposing the ship’s security to anyone else. The job board here is literally hand written notes pasted onto a physical board and looks like a medieval quest hub. This means if a job originated from here, whoever was involved certainly had direct contact with Asmoday as all the job postings are in his handwriting.

Aryn’s project of screwing with Yasice’ outgoing messages reveals an interesting behavior of Sharen or Shetou in general. The existence of a secret illuminati controlling multiple corporations isn’t interesting to them at all. Gauntlet is actually referred to as “behaving as a minor house, though independent of Shetou government”. So even if Yasice knows about our existence, it barely seems to register with her as anything out of the ordinary and more importantly as anything worth making a big fuss about. Her emails basically mention leaving the gauntlet alive since it causes Alnae trouble too and she declined having reinforcements get involved.

Vaeri is pretty sure if she wanted to assassinate Yasice she could just get it done, the problem is still the aftermath of Yasice’ death. The last thing she wants to do is get more angry people involved in what is already becoming a clusterfuck (see mezzy’s section…again)

Sophia herself is the envoy that goes to visit Selona. Her conversation got her some answers, but it also gave her a bad feeling that this is just a prelude to something worse.

The hunt for the Julius replacement ended prematurely.

The search for necrocarnates is looooong, with maaany a wiiiiinding tuuuuurn.

Luci Serrano

Kala found you a bodyguard prospect.

The rumor is spreading slightly mostly among the uninformed populace but Alnae does have a lot of news coverage surrounding their attempts to colonize already so it has a hard time spreading and is starting to become a conspiracy theory more so then a widely believable rumor.

Legit business takeovers is done with money instead of guns. There’s a million small companies out there, you already bought out several small news sites even. So you’d have to be more specific about what you’re looking for.

Financial Update: Net change -3,120,000
New total: $1,111,222,000

Yenneiros Whitetalon played by Eric Vandross

Mordekai Aberhoff III

Study on replicating the effects of Asi come on with a mix of very quickly and getting nowhere. Through Cerys and Asi’s experience they already know what the key element of the transformation is, but replicating it is the hard part. It requires the sahad wielder to see a cosmic level sahad phenomena and “submit” to it. In practice this is closest to having an epiphany and not having the immediate reaction of denial of what they’re realizing. This is related to the trigger that causes people to start rambling seeming nonsense. While common witnesses of sahad tend to instinctually reject the epiphany of their own insignificance, those who don’t achieve the ability to alter themselves with sahad magic. Asi’s experiments lead to the current conclusion that it is not an entirely conscious decision. Most people see themselves as being relevant on an emotional level, even if they can logically and mathematically prove their own insignificance on a cosmic scale they have a hard time fully accepting it in their emotional state. The opportunity to accept it is instant so there is no time to consciously agree or disagree with it. Cerys and Asi both had the moment and accepted it in that instant and became touched by sahad in a special way. Asi’s current project is mostly in figuring out if a person can ever have the opportunity more then once. He theorizes incarnum and zankist people would be most prone to achieving this feat though they aren’t really the ones studying sahad.

The other project of sahad’s effect in the presence of more sahad has undergone rigorous experimentation and they found conclusions that are slightly different then originally hypothesized. The most replicateable effect is that sahad experiments grow in potential changes not within the presence of other sahad, but within the presence of people who specifically achieved the higher state of sahad. Both Cerys and Asi can trigger changes in existing sahad experiments, but other sahad experiments placed in close proximity to one another have no effect that can be conclusively stated as having an effect. While it does half the time, the scientist say it is too inconsistent and is more likely related to those specific spells having interacting properties not just all sahad triggering changes in all other sahad. But the effect Asi and Cerys can have is very consistent regardless of the ongoing spell experiment.

New sahad spell discovered!

Unknown Protections

Roll the same type of die (only 1) that was rolled to deal damage to you, reduce the damage by that much but do not apply any of your other damage mitigation options. Treat this power as a defense action like block or dodge. B1

(I totally just copy pasted that out of the spellbook on the site backend, in this game’s terms they found a way to use sahad as a defensive measure that works differently then shields and stuff)

Stoogie president has not yet had the chance to fail or succeed spectacularly enough to become a named character.

Lumbering company increases lumber prices.

Edric Vandross

The raiders see staff expansion and are just hanging around laying low without much to do.

DV Stocks are up +6 to profit

Hightower still working on that ship.

Raymond finally finished studying the stealth drive to the extent that he can produce a similar, albeit less efficient one. Raymond’s version of it uses resources at 12x the rate of the original design (rolled a 6 on 3d6). On the small scale this is manageable, the larger the stealth drive gets the more that 12x is going to hurt to upkeep. The main effect this would have on any ship that uses it is it would not be able to power many other systems. He can continue research to try and increase its efficiency.

Grand Guardians is getting booted up and filing for paperwork.

Shetou Politics Report:

Laessari Val’hari – We already knew this one
Primary Benefactor: Song
Political Support: Additri, Linsun, Jaal’Darya, Song, Sarghess, Illhar’dro
DGAF: Enkas
Not-such-big-fans: Beldoban, Sharen, Vloz’Khress

Helviiryn Val’hari – Good Cop
Primary Benefactor: Sharen
Political Support: Song, Sharen, Illhar’dro, Linsun, Jaal’Darya
DGAF: Sarghess, Additri, Beldoban
Not-such-big-fans: Vloz’Khress, Enkas,

Yasrena Val’Hari – Bad Cop
Primary Benefactor: Vloz’Khress
Political Support: Vloz’Khress, Beldoban, Jaal’Darya, Sharen
DGAF: Additri, Illhar’dro
Not-such-big-fans: Linsun, Enkas, Sarghess, Song

Sethis Tyne

The investigation of the pirate station is underway, more so the agents are in transit cuz last day updates.

Stealth tech progress is in Edric’s section

Questioning the manager guy at random yields basically the solvang faction page info.

Vanjin has been patched up.

Vaeri’s original plan is definitely a mess now as Jhaeros warned Yasice about the gauntlet’s existence and the recent battle on the Solvang station definitely confirmed nah division’s existence alongside revealing Vanjin (who has a dayjob exploiting her fame) is a member of it.

Sophia is chilling out in her bar wondering wtf is going on.

Demon sensei hunt modifier increased by 1 (for a total of +2) though still haven’t hit high enough to find one.

Luci Serrano

A security team is being assembled, though to be the head of security do you want one that specifically specializes in guarding you or your assets. Atop of that you have the choice between big scary dudes no one wants to mess with, or quiet scary people no one knows they shouldn’t mess with.

Angel’s tour never ended despite recent events, Lush is also still touring around.

Luke’s initial investigations into Asmodan

Shipyard upgrades are underway but will take a year to complete.

Mining company profits are up by another +2

Attempts to start rumor beginning.

Technically all criminal operations are open to a madhammer style hostile takeover if you can get enough guns.

Stories of lore: Even with 2 weeks I didn’t finish the thing revolving around the crap in mezzy’s section so I gave up and just posted the update this week before we missed another update.

Yenneiros Whitetalon

Recently an influx in jobs from the colony worlds has started coming around. Its not quite military conflict but they are paying to have some wild life problems dealt with particularly on independent colony BV1-2. The world is harvested for natural resources to fuel the colonies here but since it isn’t being teraformed just yet there are a lot of big animals trying to murder colonists that need dealing with. Gheir can be found hanging out on this particular job lately.

Mordekai Aberhoff

The sahad research facility has produced one of the strange glowy people, Asi Nilliams. 

Asi has been a lab guinea pig since achieving his heightened sahad state and data is being compared on his original physical checkups to his current existence as well as comparing him to other existing weirdly colored people involved with the magic, particularly Cerys Anahi as she is the easiest one for the gauntlet to shuffle data around about. Despite the fact that both exhibit symptoms of becoming some sort of sahad infused being, the value of the symptoms is proving hard to quantify with the current sample size. While Cerys exhibits no glowing she is measurably stronger with sahad then Asi is despite Asi being more knowledgeable in the magic. Whatever gives sahad spells their potency has a higher presence in Cerys then Asi and so far there are no visual markers and knowledge is definitely not the factor either.

Ragas is still sending reports and while the ability to fool psionic forensics is fairly refined at this point, the full capability of it has yet to be tested against much more serious investigative measures. Though if hidden on the small scale and does not draw the attention of the feds, the stealthier technology should hold up to fooling local police.

The Kenin Sandwhich’s true perfection proves ever elusive.

Edric Vandross

The Sharen investigation is getting all over the place. The Raiders moved to targeting Alnae holdings due to pressure to avoid the Sharen but now the Alnae C.O.A. has gotten involved in hunting them as well. Our agents suspect that the drow have planted agents within Alnae government that manged to push some people to react dramatically to the Raiders work. As the raiders are classified as criminals and terrorists beyond local law enforcement capability a familiar face has been assigned to handle the issue.

This is when things got out of hand. Mladris managed to capture members of the Raiders in a raid gone sideways. While they were being transported to a secure holding position, Yasice attacked Mladris and took her prisoners. Then Solvang showed up and took them back from Yasice. Then Yasice got pissed and pulled Selona into this mess, who invaded a Solvang station where the liberated pirates were located. In the chaos Halaestra mounted a rescue operation for her captured crewmembers to get them away from all this while Solvang was dealing with the Selona crew. Suddenly both Vajor and Yasice caught up with them in the middle of a criminal warzone. At this point Nah drops the whole “we don’t exist thing” and hot drops in the crew to get the pirates because both Alnae and Shetou have psionic interrogators and its better to just get the pirates away from them then maintain stealth. But because they were all here, suddenly Jhaeros appears because he wants a piece of Vanjin. Okay so now that EVERYONE is here and it can’t possibly escalate any further  – oh look the Valdir showed up. Okay so now we have Shetou and Alnae trying to capture the pirates, Selona is fighting Solvang, Nah is trying to help the pirates, Valdir is apparently on no one’s team but they’re just hanging out adding to the chaos, oh but look at that there was ONE Desoir noble on the station conducting business. Okay so now a Desoir fleet arrived to extract their guy and demands everyone sit down and shut up until they’re done. Pirates don’t really listen well so now Desoir’s private contractors are here to fight and extract their guy. But they can’t dock with the asteroid because Aryn has taken over the network and is apparently here with the nah division hijacking everyone’s shit and making it impossible for anyone to control the station. So Desoir sends some guys in the hard way to do a rough extraction with their private contracted military. Oh they contracted Madhammer, okay so Cerys is here now too along with a bunch of crazy ass mercs (lets be honest Ian runs crazy ass mercs not mild mannered ones). So mercs are shooting everyone, pirates are shooting gangsters, government spooks are fighting over raiders, raiders are fighting everything just trying to stay alive, and for some reason there are Valdir on the station just adding to the chaos because in all the crossfire someone shot one of them so now Satsujin is pummeling the shit out of people. Now that the situation can’t get any worse, oh hey look its the Solvang Fleet here to stick it to Desoir. This is getting out of hand as no one can leave the asteroid station since there are two fleets fighting it out around it, so in order to extract with the pirate captives they captured Shetou calls in backup. Now Song Clan is here with that giant ass flagship since they were in the neighborhood, well Alnae can’t let Shetou win this one so lets call in the fleet too. Valdir…okay they don’t bring in a fleet because they don’t care enough and are just hanging out so at least this doesn’t get any worse. Selona doesn’t own a fleet but they like messing with everyone so they just start boarding other ships and gunning people down to take over ships from both opposing sides. They were just here to mess up Solvang so they bail out now that Solvang is definitely fucked up, but they beat and captured Adin Va so Song Yi’s gonna be pissed about that. Desoir gets their guy and hauls out of there too so things are winding down. For all this the Raiders have been long gone for awhile now because Taelwynn is the best pilot in the galaxy and just flew through the entire fleet battle. But Nah division is still in this clusterfuck cuz Alexis doesn’t like Vaeri and didn’t give them a lift out. Jhaeros finally beat Vanjin but doesn’t kill her because that wouldn’t be fair since he’s immortal, so he just announces the score is 2-1 and he’ll be back to try again someday. Yasice is convinced Jhaeros is retarded and shoots Vanjin anyways. Jhaeros is pissed and attacks Yasice and Shanhai lays his ass out. But in the struggle Vanjin is extracted by Vaeri, no one can see shit anymore cuz Aryn turned off every electronic system on the station and everyone needs to stop fighting because we’re losing atmosphere in a hurry since Desoir entered the asteroid violently when they couldn’t dock (also thanks to Aryn). Nah division bails out in the ship they rode in on, no one notices it because Aryn screwed everyone’s systems so no one can detect a damned thing so there are battleships hovering in space doing absolutely nothing since they are blind.

This whole battle took 6 weeks.

Casualty list –

Halaestra – Injured
Andal – Injured
Gellix – Dead
Mladris Vajor – Injured
Yasice – Injured
Julius Ayit – Dead
The Nomad Sniper I never made a card for cuz lazy – Dead
Adin Va – Captured by Selona
Solvang – Fucked.
Cerys Anahi – Somehow completely fine despite being shot 4 times
Vanjin – Critically injured
Jhaeros – Dead (again) but he did save Vanjin’s life
Frayne Ankou, Alexis Denumal, Arkaric Selona – Technically all severely injured and not injured at all since they’re so cybernetic they just fix themselves up later.
That squad that didn’t run when Song Yi arrived on the station – suuuuper dead.
Solvang Station Manager – Captured by Nah (Since they were here why not grab him)

The moral of the story: Wtf happened?

Stealth drive tech progress is coming along.

Sethis Tyne

Julius is dead, Vanjin is fucked up, Solvang Station manager captured. Good news is we know where the bombing job post originated from, bad news is its the capital solvang station where Asmoday himself is based out of. So that’s gonna be fun.

Also Aryn leveled up for surviving that shitshow on the Solvang station. (Survival stat changed from -6 to -2).

Your necrocarnum search roll is still unfavorable.

Luci Serrano

Yes your companies finished upgrading, their upgrades are registered on the financial spreadsheet.

Also your news teams are busy covering the Solvang Station Showdown as thats good tv.