Stories of Lore 12

So far the plot to pandem portal the approaching aliens is going somewhat as expected. Despite Faelyn’s influence and the number of pandem organizations in Moncayo for the construction of the radar many of them are less than willing to go along with the plan. Renards Rifts only has a few volunteers and they’re not the most talented, though that could be understood given they are a civilian industry. Kaylen is willing to send us their military warlocks but can’t commit too many ships to the ambush as things are right now for all the aforementioned reasons. Vloz’Khress doesn’t seem interested at all though they stand to benefit most from an invasion like this. So they might be up to something odd. Shetou doesn’t really…have much for pandem after the schism with Kar’Soluth. Apparently that’s something of a problem they’re still dealing with. Though Faelyn is trying to appeal to Yasrena Val’Hari directly instead of through the Vloz’Khress in order to get her to order them to come help. Since apparently crazy Yochlol lady is actually easier to negotiate with than certifiably insane drow lady.

We’ve rotated crews onto larger ships, which no one complains about. Everyone loves getting a bigger ship. Especially one with more space in the living quarters.

In bad news, Riley is missing and so is half of the knights with her and a science officer. That’s…a whole thing going on though not much we can do from here about it.Khymin took the data we have on the path they took and rigged up a ship that could make the run. Turns out it wasn’t too hard since they’re just going to fly to a specific point and hopefully not die. Though the issue remains that a pandem caster has to go with them to open the rift, both to enter into the warrens and to exit it.

Meanwhile our food shipping plan is underway as discreetly as possible for the moment. The particulars have been taken over by Nah Division since that’s the only complicated part.

Scans indicate the approaching corvette is from Kar’Soluth, at least its identification tags are. Though if we need further confirmation, Alexander booted up the ol’…well brand new pandem radar on a hunch. One of the vals from the house might be on board. Normally we couldn’t be that specific but we happen to already know what bind we are looking for. One of them is potentially bound to Ecsanul. Which…could be a problem. As it passed by the stealth cruiser we learned that its modified to be a bit faster than normal and judging by its current path the math suggests they’ll be landing on the opposite side of the continent from us. Though we’re not totally sure why. If its plan was to attack us after we made a bit of an enemy over previous matters, you would think it would come closer. Also we don’t detect any ships on any other planes planning for a pandem insertion on top of them or anything. It has superior mobility to the cruiser and the cruiser has almost no firepower given its stealth modifications. We’re not likely to be able to engage them prior to their entering the atmosphere. We could try to intercept wherever they might be thinking of landing by taking the shuttle. We do have Madhammer here so ground superiority is definitely in our favor at the least. We could also just hole up at Jamalia, the guns are enough to knock out the ship if it tries to get too close.

Recruiting is going well at Moncayo, so is just getting settled into the area. Though attempts to get people on board with the anti NELTA plan are a little all over the place. Faelyn is going to try and handle negotiating with Kar’Soluth at the least. Though Renard’s Rift  offers very few relevant volunteers to fly off into war, they’re a bit more based on civilian infrastructure and most of them don’t have an interest in traveling on the highway to the danger zone.

Meanwhile, back at Jamalia, Nihlav is still a bit hissy over the matter of the arcurans and has been keeping busy finding wayward warrens she can gather in her preparation to return them all to the merkas city. Though she hasn’t really talked much on the matter otherwise, having not really committed just yet to any particular course of action. Though the education of the more lost and confused merkas is going well. Nihlav hasn’t really complained about that at all, though she doesn’t participate herself. Instead keeping to her work beyond the colony walls. Granted she needs the education the least, she figured out how our technology worked a lot faster than most other merkas. The others are taking a lot longer, and one might suppose that the older merkas learn things quicker than the younger ones for some reason.

As for Daesta, she seems to be doing alright though given that she was a fairly adamant priestess in training when we met her it isn’t much surprise that she takes to following after Nihlav on those adventures. She does seem to desire to be a priestess at the least, and her one thing to do if she could would be to go back to the city and train under the high priestess they have.

The shuttles have been mapping out the planet and finding other settlements, there are a few from the arcurans. Notably we have seen no other large settlements of the merkas, that city might be the only one left on the continent.

On the other hand, Madhammer is thoroughly demolishing any arcuran who dare challenge them. Yenneiros seems to find this to be an amusing sport. So their recruitment efforts are going well since all the arcurans really care about is going off to fight new things for glory and whatnot.

I’ve gone through the six colonies Faelyn considers to be at high risk and worked out the nearest locations they could be sent. Then the second nearest because those ones are still technically kind of close to the warpath. I’ve been in contact with them offering to help them shuttle around to safer locations.

As for the reading of exerlus minds, the answer is ‘kind of’. They can be interacted with psionically but not on quite the same level as we’re used to. For example, empathy is incredibly ineffective against them. While it still picks up some sort of information that might indicate they are more than robots its definitely nothing we can make actual sense of as its kind of like picking up pure static of inconsistent variations.

The Arc fleet is on its way to Moncayo to meet up with Faelyn’s fleet and resume position under the command of “Admiral” Vamon.

Preparations are underway to get Vasia everything she needs to travel to the mysterious coordinates. Vasia’s response to needing the device analyzed was to inform us that it was a massively complicated device that is similar to our psionic computer systems. She also thinks it isn’t writable twice, so once the sphere is made it is just stuck that way. So hopefully no one has any buggy code in it. Then she threw it in her luggage and walked off while I was still asking questions. We have more as there was one on each ship basically so I suppose that works. Also when asked if she intends to take any of the 004C creatures with her she said she was taking Balhast since she doesn’t want to leave it alone here on the station for too long. Especially since it only responds positively to her. Also to answer your question, yes we did try sending one of them and Salied through to talk to the entity and had no progress.

40th Day is at work with setting up for mining stations and given a few projections on where to set up the stations up to exploit asteroid belts that are rich in resources used to build things.

Also the Exerlus threw an engine schematic at us when prompted about the matter. Then just wandered off to continue scanning, pointing out that their new engine will be here to pick them up before we can build one with them anyways. That being said the schematic might as well be gibberish. We understand the numbers…just not what more than half of the systems actually are. It clearly uses sahad magic and it also clearly is unbelievably more advanced than anything we’ve ever encountered before. The entire schematic is written out with the expectation that you can place every individual atom during construction. We’re…not sure how high a tolerance for failure the design has either. This also might be exerlus humor to throw lesser civilizations a hint at how to do something that is technologically impossible for them to achieve and watch them scramble. So we’re gonna try that and see if it blows up, cuz why not at this point.

Also Adryn is still roaming around the planet and throwing random critters into cages to send back to us. Apparently things are going well and they haven’t found any predators of too much significance to them. Though again, information barrier due to the inability to carry signal through the atmosphere. So we’re basically just receiving handwritten messages in a bottle tied to some critter or another.

The Vivarium continues to try and work with the Maker and get it to make things they want but the closet they’ve gotten is to convincing it to make bigger monsters than before. Which would be good for cattle…if they didn’t all have claws. So far no deaths but a few maimings among the researchers. We had to get them a fancy cybernetic leg for that one.

We’ve also worked a bit on the vivarium’s construction as requested. The prefab colony also finished construction and is ready for rapid deployment whenever necessary.

We’ve had Vaeri start hanging around high society to try and meet with some Siwa execs. This will be a bit of a long con though most likely as she has to start with just meeting them let alone getting to a point where they might tell her about the underground lab. With Setani being sent out to Sol to get on Standby for the Alnae operation, we’ll need to pick someone new to be our point of contact with Laura King in particular should something come up. Largely just because leaving her unattended for too long could be dangerous.

The stealth cruiser is currently stalking around the area to see if it can catch any of the shipments. Though thats a matter of ‘wait and see’ and also identifying which ones to follow as the factory has regular shipments to all the normal places. We don’t know how often they ship stuff out to these other planets.

Meanwhile our new friend Uneloj is hanging out around the station trying to see about a way to get back home after our little ‘rescue’. We haven’t exactly revealed the nature of our division to him thus far for obvious reasons but that does make it hard to see his overall intent. Though so far the exerlus presence seems to make him uncomfortable and we’re not sure if he just has fifty conspiracy theories on the matter ready to go or any actual merit to his view of them.

As for our High Councilor target, upon taking the job the full details of which came in. Their name is Lynatael, he’s sort of in the middle of the pack among the high council for seniority both in age and duration of rule. So here is the first problem, not sure if you remember this but all the Alnae High Councilors are kept incredibly safe ever since the invasion and the schism that produced all the warlords. They all work from home in various underground bunkers around the capital city. Only rarely coming out, and usually just to proceed to the main building office for meetings with the others. So reaching them is half the problem. Their obscure hiding is how Kaylen rose to become Grand Marshall, since none of the councilors could make public appearances anymore without threat of assassination.

Lynatael himself is in charge of an area that was recently retaken by Kaylen and Madhammer. He had largely been just a figurehead for awhile while the area was out of Alnae’s control due to the rebelling warlord, though with it coming back into the fold of Alnae he has returned to managing the territory. This has led to some dramatic swings in policy in the area as it is still a wartorn ruin being re-integrated into the empire after a rebellious phase. So he and his administrative staff have definitely been making rather bold calls left and right to try and stabilize the area and see what resources need to go where regardless of who was holding onto them under the reign of the warlord. So he could very easily have a lot of enemies from every direction.

Interestingly though, he is the one that receives the food shipments that Lancaster is selling to Alnae. At the very least his territory is, likely to try and curb the chaos of the area by supplying it with much needed food. This is where things are starting to get dangerous, since we are working with Shetou to have them pirate some of these shipments intended for this area of Alnae and now we’re after this high councilor from the same area. There’s just a lot of ways this could cascade into a whole bunch of issues if we aren’t careful.

Back here at the base, we have been expanding the facility. Leon is also pretty good with the mech even if its not his primary combat method up till now. Definitely not a prodigal mech pilot though, we spent a week just running laps with him so he can get used to moving around in the thing.

When it comes to recruiting, given the nature of our operation the best way to find people is to put them through long term tests of other organizations. It is likely our best way of recruiting would be to approach those who are members of Gunhild’s strike team or members of the security force who are doing particularly well under Hylavi. That or ask Laura about the matter though this might be the one area she isn’t so effective in given that we’re worried about people who haven’t proven an ability to stick to aligned goal for too long.

Also we have the Nomads hanging around the station keeping an eye out for any of Ohalyn’s shipments.

Here at Jamalia we’ve done fairly well to bring up recruitment with the Arcurans, they’re definitely primitive and not terribly effective at using modern weapons but we’re working on training them for that. Also we’re besieging Helym next week just to prove we can because one of them said some cocky shit and now Gheir is rolling out the tanks to go test some of their theories.

Stories of Lore 11

Welcome to Sol News, I am your host Exme Faythe reporting live from the studio headquarters on Thenica. In news today, the war between Alnae and its splinter groups has taken some major swings as Grand Marshal Kaylen recently destroyed another of the rogue warlords, however the battle came at some cost as great stretches of farmland were destroyed by the warlord as an act of defiance.

All four major empires of Sol have been alerted to the presence of another Nelta fleet, even larger than the original invasion, moving towards Sol space on the Zonaricht plane by Faelyn’s scanning outpost. Negotiations are under way as the Frontier Alliance starts to try and convince the four primary empires to work together to deal with the incoming threat. Hoping that if we are prepared this time it will be less destructive. Though, it is proving difficult to unite the forces under a new power. There has been a sentiment among the empires to urge Valdir’s Emperor to return and lead the effort once again, though contacting Emperor Indal has proven difficult due to him having left aethernet range by several lightyears already on his journey into the northeastern quadrant of the galaxy.

It has been difficult to confirm doctor Taz’s legal status as a single individual instead of multiple in a coat. He is very clever about avoiding security cameras.

Echo 7 has informed me that they don’t share their scan information with other civilizations who are in active war due to a series of political mishaps long ago in which they learned that people are sneaky and will take the data to use against their enemies. Given the Exerlus’ general neutrality with the exception of the exiles, they prefer not to break this rule of theirs. So they aren’t sharing much useful about whats beyond the rift until our war is over. Apparently they mean both the war with nelta and the wars within our own civilization empires. Apparently this is a recurring thing for many civilizations to be frustrated with. Any civilization must be totally out of any ongoing conflict to get access to their archives. I thought to ask, apparently there is literally no one who can both make contact with them and are considered outside of any conflict ever since the galactic apocalypse began. Everyone is in a civil war for resources, being invaded by someone else, or in such a bad shape that contacting the exerlus isn’t really possible. The only way to make them reverse this stance is for them to be involved in the war on any particular side. Which you think would be easy to convince them of after the Nelta attack but they’re really stubborn and not prone to responding to attacks on them. Apparently this rule came about as a result of pirates often messing with them or less than fully represented civilizations committing to the attack on them. Basically the reason they aren’t invading Sol is because of this policy that prevents them from flipping a zero to a one and declaring humanoids an enemy of the empire just because of one particular criminal abducting some of their people. So…silver lining is that Arkaric can’t piss them off enough to make them invade all of Sol. Downside is they aren’t really springing to our side over the Nelta thing. Hylavi informs me that they only have ‘not really at war’ and ‘total war’ doctrines since their nature is to be expendable they don’t really care about minor offenses on their honor.

The exploration ships are just jumping from one star to the next on the path towards areas with potential higher yields so they are mostly finding dust balls, asteroid belts, and similar areas to mark down in case they come across anything obviously interesting. Though they don’t have the scanning power to get full readouts of resources and such. A few are proceeding towards known coordinates but they have to stop along the way to write down what they find in various systems.

I’ve had them start on the return path to swap their crews onto the larger corvettes.

I’ve also had Renjala contact Riley and the team to reassure them they aren’t just being left to die out there but that bringing them back might take some time to assemble necessary resources. In the meantime they’re poking around to see what they might find.

So all the offers to ‘sell food surpluses’ basically triggered a bidding war between Nelan and Paylenus. Which Nelan could win. Faelyn doesn’t really seem to care either way asked to stay on the call when we told the other two ambassadors about it. Afterward she said that though are intentions might have been good, ‘that right there is why you shouldn’t do that’ was her follow up. Basically every shipment bound for Alnae will be victim to pirates quite easily now since Paylenus will be able to figure out the route and that will escalate tensions between the two of them. She didn’t say why but she requested to be there when we try to explain to them that we’ll sell to them both at a fixed rate of equal quantities. When asked why she thought that was what you would do she responded with ‘just a hunch’.

Taz just arrived on the station after his trip to get out here. He’s been setting himself up comfortably and beginning with the Koura cures projects because…well he’s a doctor and thats a miracle medicine so of course he’s interested in that. This somewhat takes Yi Seong off the project though she was going to Jamalia with Madhammer anyways.

Madhammer just arrived here at Jamalia, hopefully soon they’ll be able to make contact with the arcurans and we’ll see what gets done with that. The 40th day colonists have arrived as well and we’re starting to look over the refinery to get production going in full. In the meantime Nihlav has been wandering off to go hunt down other warrens and so we have an influx of confused merkas at Jamalia. They still definitely don’t trust us due to our dealings with the arcurans and I suspect they’re keeping their guard up but lack any alternatives to accomplish their goals without our assistance at the moment.

Related to this, while it wasn’t any of the merkas at Jamalia, we have found a few more destroyed arcuran villages south of us that must have been only recently attacked. There were a lot of bodies from both sides at these sites. Some thing Nihlav is subtly behind it in some way even though she’s usually at Jamalia. Given her status among the merkas though it is conceivable that she could push them to operate in any way she ordered. Notably one of the issues with trading mana with them for food is that the merkas city doesn’t have the mana issue since it is still exposed to the moon and as stated, they’re a bit wary of us dealing with the arcurans at all.

We’ve wrapped up our work at Moncayo, at least the major parts of it. The pandem super scanner has been tested to work with sporadic results. Well actually it has a ninety percent success rate but one of the things we tested was Sarnai. Which basically yielded results equivalent of static. We know that this happens when tracking activity across certain lower planes that we didn’t tune the device to work on so well. There are just too many of them coming in and out of existence all the time to really bother with anything but the major known ones. Though what makes this case a little special is that Sarnai’s bind basically crashed the entire system when we tried to track it. Originally it was just for fun and to test it, we tested it on almost everyone there with a bind, but then they started obsessing over what the hell Sarnai is bound to. Six days of crashes later we’re convinced her bind has the ability to move between planes on its own accord. As if she bound herself to another pandem wielder, though then it wouldn’t make sense that she struggles so much with opening rifts on her own. They keep scanning her because…well its weird and they just built this big scanner so they have nothing else to do. Collected our paycheck though at least. Also the chapter house has finished construction as well. It’s big and fancy.

Steamworks has produced a unique tool recently of some actual progress using the tech that we made a toy of before. It’s still in the prototype phase but they’re working on transportation options for the magically disinclined.

Construction of the temple has been finished in Moncayo and Cassir has been wandering around the city getting to know the general place. Vamon’s fancy new weapon was sent to him, though its going through the mail and there is still a bit of distance between here and Moncayo, its on its way though.

Adryn arrived in Auwana and we just threw him onto the planet of ‘from whence no signal returns’. Reports are a bit…sluggish to get out of there lets say. Though it seems he and his team are settling in well enough and getting their….hunting lodge up and going while prodding at various creatures to see if anything is particularly dangerous. Though so far nothing presents an overly alarming risk to their presence.

I should note the parasitic specimens don’t actually have a name. Balhast is the name of the specific 004C sample that started the experiments. Basically that’s the name of Vasia’s dog and the rest are just…things with parasites. They don’t even all take the same general shape so its hard to define them by anything other than “we stuck a parasite in someone”.

That aside, we sent one to the far side of Koura to roam around and see what it does. It immediately ate the first form of wildlife it came across and seems to be going about exploring. Its adaptations prove effective enough that it doesn’t need to seek out specific elements of its environment for anything like shelter or consistent food supply as they are omnivorous. As such it appears to just keep roaming as it pleases without much desire to stay in one place.

The salvaged ship projects reveal a bit about sahad engineering. Mostly in that it is possible to activate sahad effects through a machine instead of a caster but they seem designed to be interfaced with by sahad users. It might be specific to the culture and design of the ships themselves so we can’t say for sure if thats an actual requirement. They store energy in much the same way that we do for arcane engineering since both forms of magic utilize mana. Though Sahad does not tend to draw its energy directly from the caster the way arcane does, at the very least not any of the spells we currently know about. It appears their engineering attempts with the stuff revolve around a specific material that is fortunately undamaged though what it is, we don’t know. It’s a black sphere, and I mean really black. There is no light reflecting off of it at all and it looks like carrying around a miniature black hole. This in some way seems to be the control system for the sahad devices and we’re still working out what the hell it does.

Also the silent auction has come and gone, your incremental bidding did nothing to help as they don’t tell you if you’re winning or not. The black market isn’t ebay, you just write down the highest you’re gonna go and then they contact whoever wrote the biggest number once the sale is closed.

The Exerlus are somewhat difficult to negotiate with for annoying reasons that Winter went over at the briefing already. But basically they’re not giving us any data until our civilization is considered to be “at peace”. That includes the rest of the Sol Empires for some reason. Though this is technically related to scan data. They still were willing to mention that they know how to travel the entire galaxy with basically more refined versions of what we use now. Part of that refinement is that similar to the prototype cruiser Lancaster has, they don’t need hallways, beds, bathrooms, life support, or really much else on a ship besides engines. Their galactic ships are just big engines that they hang onto while flying through space. As a result the engines can reach massive sizes and efficiency. Whiiiich explains why they haven’t left the system. Nelta destroyed their big engine and now they have to hang out here until someone comes to pick them up. They can hop between stars without it but it makes it take a very long time to get back to where they actually came from.

They do still take our scan data of those other planets though. So apparently the precise ruling is that they don’t share the scanning archives but they do whatever they want with their own tech that isn’t related to weapons. I suppose you could weaponize anything but to their perspective, scanners and engines aren’t really weapons. Their weapons are…frighteningly powerful.

Though the improved scanners we got from them are being implemented on some test ships in the fleet to try out on some of our adventures particularly on the boiling world due to its high biodiversity since the scanners are a bit better at finding out details.

The Golden Vivarium has finally finished construction and is fully operable. It has also begun some deeper research onto this maker monster thing. Progress is slow though at least avoids torturing the creature for results since Vasia is busy with New Age projects. Currently it seems to produce more monsters whenever it happens to have materials…it also creates those materials as byproducts of its own waste. So as long as you keep feeding it, it keeps building more things. Something for the vivarium caretakers to be extra careful about given that the creatures can be hidden and deployed as if programmed for highly specific tasks. Right now communicating an idea to it of building bigger more meaty things is proving tricky, while it has a higher level of intelligence than most animals it is still not sure what the tiny two legged people are trying to communicate to it.

Also Salied has been exhibiting odd behavior. More accurately, she seems to be having catatonic rambles when asked about her past that don’t match up to her past. Long story short, we did a lot of math based on her zoned out stares into the distance. Here are the coordinates, we have no idea what will be there or how much stuff we should send. Vasia wants to take over the operation and send pretty much half our stuff out there immediately though she can be a bit…eager sometimes. Might be smarter just to send a scout first to see what we’re looking at.

We’ve cashed out the semi brainwashed engineer. That took a bit more effort than expected for one missing persons case. While we’re on the topic, our cruiser arrived to scan the Siwa factory and poke around. The security is tight and we were able to infiltrate the upper levels. Though there is a basement lab where we couldn’t get our agents into so easily, the security spiked significantly for its lower labs. All employees of the factory also do not seem that aware of what is down there, at least not the ones we could sneak away for a chat. Further attempts might reveal our presence. My advice is that we would need to either take a social route of tracking down some execs and making friends, or a more brute force approach of sending the full ops team to break into there. Our agents are good at their jobs but we’re dealing with some maximum security conspiracy shenanigans now. We can try to take a wild push with low odds of success or we can try to up those odds and send in Vaeri and Aryn.

Though that being said its not for nothing. We have found that the factory produces a lot of weapons that never reach the empires in Sol. They’re supplying some sort of hidden army. We tracked some of their shipments off world and given that they are at the edge of the solar system, it is kind of obviously suspicious when all the shipments from the sneakier weapons labs are going away from the star. It is likely some independent colony is amassing an immense number of weapons, if not one that they own themselves and never declared. I’ve looked into the major weapons hub of the frontier worlds, Faelyn, and she is not the recipient of these. She actually produces her own at Moncayo which is sold to most of the other frontier worlds. Which eliminates a lot of potential recipients given the sheer quantity of arms being moved and just disappearing into space. Why this particular element isn’t as well hidden as the lower level labs is beyond me.

Raiben was particularly useful in finding how how the silent auction involving the alien works. More specifically who the final buyer was. Leon dealt with it from there and with some overtime hours from our staff we’ve managed to acquire the alien prisoner and it is on the way back to Somnus now. No one knows we’re behind the smoldering crater Leon left behind.

Also our offer to help Kaylen out was met with some amusement. To Kaylen we’re definitely small fry compared to the COA departments. Though she did consider that we are at least not directly associated with Alnae. Though we did still get an ‘audition’ job offer from Alnae related to this probing. It came from an anonymous intermediary shortly afterwards. However, its impossible to confirm if Kaylen even knows that people from Alnae are asking us if we can make an Alnae High Councilor disappear. Yeah that’s the job. It was very specific on ‘disappear’.

So this presents a series of…situations. First off, either this is an intermediary for Kaylen so no one can prove her involvement or its someone operating outside of her knowledge to accomplish some larger plot. So…we’re already in too deep just by hearing the offer. If Kaylen did ask us and we go tell on them to her she’ll know we’re not cut out for this kind of stuff. However, she could go a step further and try to silence us to make sure we don’t spread any further information around about the offer. Notable because as Grand Marshall the entire COA responds to her…so we could get into a shadow war spanning the galaxy against the second largest covert agency. The first being the Phantoms if you were curious. The intermediary would disappear whether or not Kaylen was behind them so we’d make no progress on figuring that out. Though if its not from her and we go through with it, we could be destabilizing everything she’s trying to pull together. This gets into why the job is to make them ‘disappear’. If no one can prove that they are dead they don’t know if they need to replace them, which creates a window of uncertainty during which some other things might be able to take place.

It’s times like these I’m happy that I’m not the boss.

Also Aryn found a way to advertise for Madhammer without paying ad money…technically. I say technically because I’m not sure if this is entirely the desired approach. She made them into a meme on social media featuring a video clip of a tank shooting a mech from their recent battle on Thenica they were involved in. It tends to feature captions that show a theme towards a discontent for anyone with more power than the poster.  It spread pretty quick. Free advertising?

As for Jicho, we kind of haven’t heard from them since the invasion. Aryn says there is a high chance whatever server farm they had was destroyed during which. Its hard to look into it any deeper than that as we couldn’t find them even when we knew they were still alive.

We ridin’ to Jamalia

Stories Of Lore 10

Well I had to specify ‘biologist’ and just hope they learn alien anatomy over time. Meet Doctor Taz, I thought you might like him. Instead of being an evil psychopath or maniac, he’s extra fluffy! He has some experience in the desired field though wouldn’t call himself quite an expert or take on the title of xenobiologist. Though to be fair, it is a new field and as we’ve learned the only people with a lot of experience are not the kind of people we want to employ. He’s only a year or two behind the experts in the field though so not that big of a deal anyways.

Our guest, Echo Seven, is still on the station. The rest of the exerlus are still scanning the system head to toe and have gotten involved with 40th day’s planetary shenanigans. It is interesting to note that they couldn’t penetrate the corrosive atmosphere of our neighboring planet either without some assistance. Though they keep developing their own side projects. Echo Fifteen is hanging out on orchard studying the Vittles farms. Echo Seven seemed to decide to learn to better replicate our humanoid appearance so they don’t look like a shiny version of you. To be honest they still look kind of like you though. But they managed to replicate flesh. I have no idea how they did that. Echo Nine replicated tree bark instead and is jump scaring people in the woods to ‘gauge our response times’. I wouldn’t say they seem particularly nefarious in their desire to understand us, just quirky. So that’s still going on.

Meanwhile, Riley is uhh…far away. It turns out the Astral Warrens pop out all over the galaxy. Remember how it was mentioned that there were only so many entrances despite the number of exits? We don’t know how to get her back other than a really really long voyage. She’s on the other side of the galaxy from us. Whats concerning though is she’s not just in any part of the galaxy. She’s in the area known to be “silnian territory”. So there is a chance she just gets outright assimilated if we don’t get her back sometime soon. Also we need a stealth cruiser to get past the rift entity, and she has our only one. She is out of contact range though fortunately, Irae is with her and Renjala can just possess her at will. So that serves for basic communication.

Speaking of the rift, it did not seem to take better to the dragon than any other thing we’ve sent to talk to it. However…the Exerlus found the rift during all their scans and the entity just outright ignores them. We’re not sure if it doesn’t think of them as life forms or if it just considers them to be higher ones than us. They’re scanning the planet on the other side of the rift unobstructed. Apparently they also are scanning the entity…just casually prodding at it and being left to their devices while doing so. We’re leaning towards the former because the entity doesn’t react to our probes either, so it being unaware of the exerlus presence would be consistent with that at least. Despite being a highly advanced alien species revered by many as a deified civilization, they really do kind of show their true origin. They’re just…probes. They don’t show any signs of having a motive beyond scanning for the sake of scanning. If left undisturbed that’s all they do. Now I’m trying to convince Echo Seven to tell us what it finds out about the rift. Meanwhile that idiot Whitetalon is trying to figure out what weapons Echo Consensus has. Turns out Echo Seven has as much firepower as a tank by the way. You can thank Yenneiros for figuring that one out.

When it comes to expanding Vittles to Jamalia, it’d probably only cost two million to really get started. It’s a golden world, the real threat though is the giant monsters roaming the place who might take an interest. So if we were to secure them within the walls of the hostile colony we’d be basically building a whole second one for all the farmland. So getting up to fifty million. Though the guns on Jamalia could probably protect it reasonably well enough if we just set up some tractors and plant some stuff right around it. Might get stepped on by giant monsters but losing one percent of the farm to a monster getting shot by turrets isn’t really that financially problematic. Other then that regular gates should keep out the more pesky smaller wild life. Up to you how deep into it you want to go.

Selling excess food to Alnae would definitely be an easy sell, though that might not look the best on our relations with Faelyn and the other colonies or the prince of Sharen that is here at the moment.

Also Faelyn’s reports on galactic travel coming towards the station shows an uptick in visitors. So at least we’re becoming more well known PR wise. Also she is sending more ships to us because apparently we have now told everyone about this rift and it’s going to need more guns to protect it from any other interests.

Oh also Vittles’ expanded harvest came in, so that’s going well.

Well we found the merkas matron. That was fun.

The second lance is continuing its research alongside the other companies at Moncayo.

The third lance is trapped on the other side of the galaxy as you have been so keen to help us figure out.

Our Shetou visitor is sort of left to his own devices as a tourist on the station at the moment since now the third lance is long gone to the other side of the galaxy. Though he has been hanging around representatives of Madhammer a bit much lately. I could only take a wild guess as to why. Also he was definitely interested in Renjala’s rift, but given that he is a drow you might be able to guess that it was hard to figure out what his actual ideas about it might be.

We’ve started having some of the trees cleared out around Jamalia so Vittles will have a place to set down some fields and seeds once they get here and manage to figure out how they want to set up their operation. By the way, we just shot a thirty footer that tried to bite the colony walls. That was a fun one to scare all the staff with.

As for the mana refinery station, the hiring signs won’t do much good just yet. We haven’t actually announced the system or its colonization yet so there is a distinct lack of people here except for the essential staff we brought along with us. We’ve been waiting until we were more comfortably established and figured out what is going on with the natives. We could publicize the colony to start bringing in some immigration though if you think its ready. Though the refinery definitely can’t be staffed by any natives, definitely  beyond their skillset. You could probably have some of the slaves from Somnus come over to work on it but will definitely need to bring in some experts on the operation. We might be able to just pick one up and not fully tell them where the colony they’ll be working at is though if we don’t want to announce that this place exists just yet. Just outsource to 40th day since they’ve been just selling colonists to colonies as a finders fee as of late.

Also steamworks has produced something marketable on an unconventional scale. Its really just a toy at this point but people seem to like them so its been selling even better than its actually useful projects. So that’s been selling nicely.

Cassir and the gang have made it to Moncayo and met up with Vamon to oversee the construction of the temple. Cassir and Peter are now working on figuring out how to train others to function the same way Cassir and her forces can to fully set up its infrastructure. So far in the quest for a cause they’re mostly a reactionary force since everyone’s issues are ‘aliens and shit keep invading us’.

Though on that front, Faelyn actually knew some information to pass on to Vamon about that which was just casual conversation at a party but turns out to be more information than most people had before. Apparently, Nelta sort of solidified its position on the war against Sol. Due to the destruction of the galaxy that came about soon as we were discovered, most of them have pushed heavily for a united war. Faelyn’s diplomats survived contact with Nelta because she sent dragons that were very tenacious and difficult to kill. So she has been the first person to successfully establish any level of communication with them even if its kind of a hostile embassy situation on a planet that kind of doesn’t want to keep picking this fight. So if anything her ambassadors might be swaying a few towards not quite sticking around with the Nelta alliance. But it does provide some insight at least. So for the forseeable future, don’t expect Nelta to be all that interested in talking to us though they are falling apart from the inside thanks to all the chaos going on. Chaos they blame on us…probably with good reason.

Adryn is in transit from Sol alongside Setani to return to Auwana and visit the Phoenix colony to begin the hunt.

Vasia reports that infecting the 004C experiments with the parasite again produces no result. The parasites introduced are destroyed by the host’s now improved immune system. Essentially since its adapted for life on Koura, its capable of resisting its own parasites once they’ve reached a full metamorphosis. However, it is apparently possible to infect a subject prior to this transformation with multiple parasites to get wilder and wilder mutations. This doesn’t seem to have any real benefit.

The Exerlus pretty much just threw a scanner and schematics for them at us. We can tell they aren’t as advanced as their best, but its still something. Apparently though, their more powerful scanners can’t be shared because they rely on the exerlus power cores. So to make those we would need to be able to actually build exerlus. Also in exchange they took one of all of our scanners from the warehouse and…scanned the scanners. Speaking of which, they stated they’ll probably just visit the Vivarium every now and then instead of remaining by it full time. They can travel through space much faster than we can so its not as much of a trip for them.

Also 40th Day is expanding its colonization training and delivery system quite well, this is actually becoming a more profitable venture than actually colonizing things. Since everyone needs more people and a lot of people need to get out of Sol.

We’ve brought in all the alien ships for breaking down and studying, the shipyards are kind of full of these now which is hurting profits while the bays are taken up by these projects.

One question about the Maker research. Do you want me to have the local staff of the Vivarium do that project or….do you want Vasia to do it? Very different requests. Also very different results.

We’ve brought back the only semi-brainwashed engineer to collect the bounty. Probably not the most ideal scenario for the client but that’s their fault for being very vague with the job posting anyways.

The stealth cruiser is on the way to the Sol system to look into the Siwa factory. The engineer didn’t really reveal much to us that the Raven hadn’t revealed to Vaeri in the first place. All we know is that there is some sort of secret lab going on in there doing something strange. I’m going to bet right now that the stealth cruiser won’t find much, if just a precursory scan would work than this wouldn’t be drawing so much interest.

Reika is currently busy several lightyears away dealing with Jamalia and all of its issues, though if Renjala sends her out she’ll definitely go to the station to help take it over.

As for the auction, its some sort of alien that knows how to use Sahad that is somewhat captive due to a Shetou raid into alien space. One of the minor houses were the ones to acquire it. It isn’t a particularly large or violent captive apparently, though doesn’t seem happy about being captive.

As for Solvang contracts, Vanjin is just taking on random ones for now that she can handle while shes in Sol to help with the funding. Nothing particularly major like the engineer hunt’s payout seems to be going around at the moment though.

Oh and Setani is on her way back to Somnus if we need her for anything else coming up.

Well the war on Thenica was…destructive. We managed to come out victorious alongside Kaylen which will have large scale political ramifications. In particular, Kaylen now has majority control of Alnae’s territory once again instead of just ‘the largest fraction’. With only three major warlords left she is close to reuniting the empire though a catch to that is her assets are pushing to exhaustion fighting one warlord after another as they all controlled different sections of the military. That and the one who absconded with the Ultra Carrier.

As a result she’s currently recuperating but that does mean its likely we can easily find more work in the future with her for continuing this campaign since there will always be a need for more soldiers.

Now for the bad news, uhhh the second company is just gone. Well more so the losses were so catastrophic we dissolved it to refill the ranks of the first company which is also in shambles at the moment. This was a real battle, and the death toll reflects it. Though, our upkeep costs are way down now…so…silver lining?

Most of our armor support is gone as well. We were able to salvage some that are in repairable condition for Whitetalon Armaments to get back up and running for us. So currently we’re on a recruitment drive, which fortunately the Astral Order is helping us out with over at Jamalia. Gotta figure out who to send though.