The war at SV2 has started to get into action across the planet, with the vampire clans and the Hassani attacking major military installations and cities right away. SV2 is made up of cave networks, canyons, and a whole lot of rubble from the Nelta invasion that wiped out surface cities. With so many of our forces moving there, Sakhessa has also moved on to SV2 though Azarov has remained back at Thenica. The fighting is just as aggressive as before and the De’Rex family fleet is in orbit currently fighting the major space station of Shetou and anything else in their way.

The Hassani army has also shown up to Thenica, they are primarily serving as clean up teams and setting up bases and other fortified position alongside the hydra’s forces. It would appear that they are more rank and file types who are just here to fulfill the plot of the invasion and do their mandatory military service compared to Sakhessa’s legion that is much more combat ready. So basically the regular grunts, despite having some big monsters on hand. Though they are securing Sarghess territory and starting to reinforce other positions across the planet with turrets and shields for the Hassani to utilize to maintain the invasion or formally take over. Also a coalition of independent ships have shown up that we know to be under the management of the hydra.

The Jaal’Darya territory has returned to our dimension or however that works, everyone who went in is dead and Sarghess is still standing albeit they have lost half of their forces in the fighting. Apparently the isolation sphere from Decaelys served to allow Eliza to use chemical and biological weapons on the forces without them having access to any medical support or labs to help deal with her weapons. After their reappearance one of the Hassani armies moved in to help add additional fortifications and secure the city as an operating base for the assault on the rest of SV2 and they have been placed under the command of Alystra. The Jaal’Darya territory is however currently without several important utilities since the spell Decaelys use appears to have severed power lines and plumbing if it went outside of the sphere.

The vessians have left Beldobaan to help us at SV2 though they have some growing concerns on whether or not you plan to actually win this war they’re being dragged into. Most of the fighting is at New Kaifen, which is severely understaffed with House Song still being at Thenica who would normally be the city’s defense force.

The fighting at SV2 has seen less significant losses for us then at Beldobaan since the rest of the Shetou forces are taking the worst of it, though in total it is definitely seeing more overall casualties than Beldobaan. Azarov has made it to SV2 and our tank lines and broke through our tank lines defending New Kaifen. Sakhessa in particular has become a problem for several cities as the rot and Jaal’Darya plagues are running through Shetou’s population as well. The orbital battle, with Sharen effectively depleted, is currently in the favor of the De’Rex fleet.

The assault on the Tarrasque has been experiencing delays, Laesaaria still doesn’t want to send Auni after it just yet and Renjala is still in negotiations with Ankathi to borrow Kharla. Eleazor is also pretending to be sick and laying in bed trying to get out of it and Renjala sent Vasia to SR3 to check in on the Valdir. Though on that news front, the Tarrasque is wandering from one military installation to the next. It has been attacking places with anti orbital weapons, and soon it is likely that the defensive advantage of Shetou territory will be lost and then Sakhessa’s fleet will have a much easier time pushing into our retreated fleets.

As for the plagues afflicting us, every time we make progress two variations or some entirely new string appears. Though with advanced medical care we’ve been able to stabilize Valen for now. Though that level of attention can’t really be given to the millions being afflicted by a huge variety of different such problems. The rate of spreading has slowed significantly though thanks to not only quarantine but so many people already being infected that they can’t go anywhere to infect others. Also the number of deaths have reached a point that even plague deniers are scared of it now. Zenaka is pushing to continue the attack on Jaal’Darya since they are feeling the worst of it at the moment.

Diadem farms are doing fine in the bubbles Renjala had built to keep the space bugs from eating them.

Many of the Vessians on Diadem have left back into the Reach to get away from all this plague nonsense and the current measures that Laura has been taking to keep Diadem secure. A few remain out of curiosity, and because of the food.

The Caelkians are still sorting through beurocracy and also keeping a close eye on the qurantine at Diadem and seem to be intentionally waiting on moving forward with anything until they see how this shakes out. Currently there isn’t much they can actively do at Diadem anyways since Laura’s forces are gunning people down in the street if they break quarantine which has brought a lot of civilian matters to a halt. The Caelkians are doing fine on food as their planet is still fine and has never come under the attention of the galactic wars, since they’re new to the neighborhood.

Irae and Jaerda have taken off into the elemental plane to seek out the elusive metal archon. A team of scientists are also investigating the rim in Valjala. Apparently, it is an untold mass of trillions of unbound stars forming a singular massive unbound star. It runs a ring through the middle of the entire galaxy. The constant reaction of the stars is also spinning, which is really only of interest to the math nerds. In short if you fly through it, evaporated. There are tunnels of space where it would be possible to pass through but they are always closing and opening while the stars swirl about. It’s basically a ring of really hot always moving star stuff that encircles the whole galaxy albeit with a few empty pockets here and there. In terms of cosmic phenomena, neat. The scholars think the amount of energy this ring contains might have some peculiar effects on the properties of the galaxy within Valjala. Further exploration reveals that this has created a strange “system”, there are planetary bodies not quite orbiting the rim but instead flowing along it around the entire galaxy. Which I suppose fits a certain theme. They don’t need to be entire systems orbiting a star if they just float along the momentum of the rim which provides way too much sunlight as it is. So basically there is a field of asteroids, planets, and other such things floating along a cosmic river of fire as they circle the galaxy. The math nerds spend all day trying to explain just how much mass and energy is in this rim, they keep pointing out it is an incomprehensible series of numbers so I stopped listening before I come down with a case of the sahads. Try asking them about solar panels and they’ll go on for two hours about it.

The search for an arcane star hits a related topic. The rim has every kind of star inside its swirling infinite mass of fusion, though its not terribly exploitable since nothing stays in place very well in there. We did find a couple of arcane stars with some effort though none of them have planets suited to life just yet without intense terraforming.

Also you are correct, Revenants will not accept that deal. We actually couldn’t even get the message to them because they won’t accept the attempt to communicate with them either. Auni remains at an undisclosed location, Laesaaria pointed out that putting both you and Auni in the same place is likely to draw more attention from Kanika than you might want to deal with. Even with the merits of the garden project, if it became Kanika’s top priority so early into the project’s infancy it probably wouldn’t do much to stop her.

Eerihild has been deployed to New Jamalia and Yoshai has started looking for the Black Library though after three weeks of looking for any sort of lead he points out this might be a bit of a wild mimic chase. The Revenants stole it from Yasrena and most of Yoshai’s powers are associated with Yasrena, the person they would most intentionally be hiding it from. Though he’s still not sure how they managed to steal an archive so massive and make it disappear and is trying to wrap his head around that one.

Vasia has taken off to SR3 and no one knows what she’s doing over there. Though the assault has not yet begun there. Kanika is still wrapping up on Thenica first it seems.

Also while it hasn’t come up in awhile, the attempts to build a full city runs us out of budget.

Worth noting we already know how to print the admin cards, but it requires control of four distinct sections of the ringworld that are all across from each other rather than right next to one another. Also Aryn points out if she uses the Chaudret it could have much more significant ramifications depending how interconnected the systems of the ringworld actually are. Given that she can never accurately predict what the Chaudret will do, odds are she just destroys the life support system on accident and in order to repair anything Chaudret does we’d need access to the control of every system. Though it works great on robot monsters.

Also even if listening is your whole job I’m not sure I’d describe you as a therapist. Also no one likes therapy from a drow. Michael seems fine anyways, if just a bit callous lately.

Also at this point I should say that Enphidia’s turret defenses are getting a little over the top and if the place is going to be attacked I have a feeling they’re going to find a way to circumvent the turrets rather than go through them. That and we’re running out of space to fit them.

Allison’s friends on Thenica are either dead or she has no way to contact them, especially from across the galaxy with the aethernet not quite spanning that far. As for ideas about dealing with the Tarrasque she laughed. This is definitely more of Renjala’s realm, that thing is invulnerable and shoots the equivalent  of ten nukes a second. Her shotgun isn’t exactly going to help much.

As for the Tungsten Teeth contracts, they have been mysteriously hard to find with many of them turning it down. It is likely that somewhere in the Reach, someone knows what is going on at Thenica and has warned them that accepting the job is just a suicide mission.

Some intel updates, Alystra Vel’Sarghess received command over one of the Hassani armies and this has some implications even if they aren’t being stated outright. With Alystra gaining command she has also received supplies and armaments from Sakhessa, making the Kar’Soluth relationship to the Hassani much more direct. While this doesn’t have many strategic implications just yet, it implies that Alystra has received the faith and goodwill of the Hassani upper command such as Sakhessa and Kanika. Which might be a growing trend for the Kar’Soluth as they become politically folded into the Hassani properly in the wake of this conquest. Not very useful intel strategically speaking in the middle of a war, but perhaps worth noting that the process of merging Kar’Soluth into the Hassani has likely begun and Alystra will possibly be a problem for awhile to come.

Now that we have some time off, we’ve been continuing to repair the cradle, which is a bit of an experience as it is the docks most other ships go to get repaired. So that’s taking some effort.

I’ve managed to make some improvements to Vanessa’s chassis now that I have the opportunity to make her holo projector version of herself less uncanny by making it more intimidating and adding more blades.

Hrmm a single cored ship would be fairly unique, barring the Cradle itself. Though it is still a definitely difficult thing. I’ll work on it and see where we can get with the idea.

News from the front, more forces are arriving just as ours are. Despite them having access to Renjala’s rift now, it would appear they are not as adept at using it nor do they have an organization dedicated to transportation for all their disparate forces. This month saw the arrival of Sakhessa’s fleet in orbit, Asmodan’s demon legion in Beldobaan, and Kanika’s private collection of maybe brainwashed humanoids. A collection that has been significantly reduced ever since we shoved her previous ship into the Astral Wilds.

We also see the arrival of Kaylen with an army we don’t entirely know how she got though it appears a good portion of them are from the Hasao Tei and the exiled celestials who survived but fled the war with Ankathi. The Revenants also got around to showing up, once again revealing they had far more members than we realized. Apparently they had been hiding the fact that they are not exclusively an organization of masked women with katana’s as there is actually some variety among them when they group together to form a cohesive force. Lot of katanas still.

Along with this, the vampire clans have arrived at SV2 to attack Shetou’s pseudo-capital while both House Sharen and Song are away at Thenica. There is a whole other battlefield taking place over there now.

Projections indicate that more forces are still on their way.

The Arrival of Sakhessa’s fleet has skewed projections out of our favor. With every fleet currently damaged and barely still afloat, her fleet is nearly uncontested for orbital superiority.

The “Ham Sandwich” operation managed to successfully extract what remains of our forces and allies. Largely due to Sakhessa allowing the withdrawal though instructed the knights to be quick about it before Asmodan caught up and complained to her about it. The commander assesssed any attempt to continue the attack was pointless now that Asmodan’s demon legion had shown up and Kanika’s forces have arrived in the nearby Sarghess Territory, putting them in position to catch our forces from behind if they moved over. Asmodan’s legion is now moving west to Vloz’Khress territory where the 5th are currently still destroying civilian targets and infrastructure.

The Tarrasque has moved and is currently attacking Shetou territories elsewhere on the planet and seems to be avoiding any fighting where Hassani’s forces are located. Currently we suspect that while they can command it, the Tarrasque isn’t great at discriminating what it attacks. This might be why Kanika was the only one fighting the Valdir alongside it and only just now brought her own troops to Thenica after separating from it. That and the Valdir ability to eat any living people it defeats. We have discovered a small team of Revenants are following it, likely trying to figure out what can possibly be done against the thing.

The orbital battle sees the successful destruction of The Areti with the combined assault and focus on it albeit at great cost. Though the Midnight was unsuccessful in its attempt to crash into Agallias. While it made it to the surface of Thenica, he managed to dodge the attempt and the ship was disabled before it could consider swinging back around on him. The RABE ship retreated into Sakhessa’s fleet when the destroyers went after it and the pursuing ships were destroyed by said fleet or the RABE itself.

Moving Eden into Valjala is somehow the easiest part of this plan. Moving the arcane star is an engineering feat and a half though and that is not our specialty. Eden just needs a big enough rift and she’ll walk in on her own, though Moncayo’s star is over a million times more massive. Even if Decaelys -the jesai archbishop who might  be some eldritch elemental of time and space- could do it we certainly can’t figure out how the fuck she did that. We have similar problems with moving Enohas and Moncayo. Moncayo, or rather Cayetano, is an abyssal place and as a result likes to be really fucky with the concept according to the physicists and math guys we asked to look into it. Even if it was just the city of Moncayo, we don’t have Rahlken’s ship laying around. Taking the city is somewhat feasible but it would wind up in Valjala with no sustainable atmosphere, gravity, or ability to protect itself from the kinetic energies in your plane.

Really with the exception of Eden, who is mobile on her own and also probably the most powerful wizard we know by mana well standards, moving a planet and making rifts this large is going to take years of engineering and prep. Also a horrifying amount of money. Which we caaan do if you really want but I get the impression this is a matter of urgency. The most realistic way to accomplish these goals with all speed would be to get the Exerlus, Jesai, or Rahlken involved somehow. I also had the nerds do the math of having Eden just push things around for us, it turns out that would pretty much destroy the planet she is nudging. Between what she would do to gravity, atmospheres, and ecosystems with such a maneuver you’d be getting a ball of rock and dirt in the middle of an irreversible mass extinction. Problem two is that Eden is a powerful enough being that she can protect herself from your plane. Planets from the middle plane might be a bit too used to their own rules and just implode after a couple of years in Valjala without massive life support systems that would be the equivalent of building a ship the size of a planet. Just out of dirt.

That being said, in terms of options, we could just find another ball of rock and dirt then ask Haziel for help with habitability. There are also arcane stars within your plane and I’m not sure how much it matters where in space it is within Valjala since position is not a very constant variable anyways.

By the way, according to the observatories your plane has an estimated 1370% more unbound stars than the middle planes. Which is not counting something they think they found and have been sending scout ships out to go look at which is either the largest unbound star ever found or millions of unbound stars stuck together. They call it Renjala’s Rim, and they snickered when they said that. Irrelevant but the last eight months have been very gloomy around here and I needed something else to talk about.

Related to options, I checked in on Jaerda’s progress and this prompted some further investigation about her lack thereof. Aside from her attention issues, the big problem is she can’t handle the Astral Wilds for very long and this process requires surviving there for months. Yasrena was a quasigodlike thing already and judging by her original true form of that big leviathan thing, she had a mana well on the scale of ships. Not to mention she’s been watching over the drow for thousands of years and I’m sure the opportunity for trauma and personal growth was pretty great under those conditions. Haziel had the essentia of a primordial god along with a throne waiting for her to just take over the plane rather than build one. Ankathi is the one in a trillion who pulled this bullshit off on her own with raw stubborness and talent. To the point that we’re pretty sure if we still had access to her original human form we’d find some severe anomalies about her essentia and psyche. That and she did take over another astral cluster to act as a forward base before she made her own. In your case you just embraced the madness because you didn’t need biology to keep your consciousness intact. The team at Panemperia thinks we might need to think of some way to juice this up a bit for a regular elf. She’s too vulnerable to the wilds and just doesn’t have the mana capacity to move planes the way you did to create a new one, and the alternative of taking over an existing one is difficult as she is tied to planes that already have Haziel for a god.

All things considered, I don’t think this Jaerda business will be finished before the war is over since we need Ankathi’s expertise and help or a century of Jaerda getting strong enough through potentially dubious methods. The bigger problem with getting Ankathi’s help at the moment is that Selah just got back from the Beldobaan withdrawal and she is in no state to do anything with this for the month at least. I’ve never seen a paladin so exhausted and just staring into the distance for hours like that, even if they are somewhat known for being super stoic and stern. Half a year of constant combat in the underdark against vampires, monsters, and drow is apparently the breaking point.

Which leads into, psychological assessments! Everyone that went there is fucked up…except Eerihild. Weirdly, she is actually apparently very good at this exact scenario. She made it through the two years of total blackness inside of Diadem, even just started wandering around with a mental patient in tow, and now survived the Battle of Beldobaan. Which is just as bad if not even worse. She seems ‘not fine’ at first glance, but she doesn’t have the same war trauma everyone else does. She’s pouty because she lost to Reika, who she technically replaced. So she’s suffering from a bad case of imposter syndrome, not ‘I fought vampires in the underdark for half a year nonstop’ syndrome. So technically her mental problems are about five percent of what everyone else is handling even if she’s sulking in a corner somewhere.

Yasrena, or The Shadow, said it was obvious but she felt she should tell us just in case – but the war on Thenica is going to see more Phantoms appear for the coming months. Next month she knows that the Hassani proper army will be arriving along with the Hydra’s fleet. The month after that Agallias’ army will be warped in along with Decaelys’ followers. After that the Selona Syndicate. Also because they look so similar to solians no one has noticed that Mother (the Blaiken empress clone mom thingy) is there with Kanika. The white haired teenage looking girl that people keep mistaking for one of Kanika’s brainwashed champions that has enough psionic ability to flatten an aboleth. Jarias is also asking for a ride over because he wants to eat the fleet salvage. So the last two months of reinforcements are going to be a pattern as the war expands to SV2 and SR3. The major worlds of Shetou and the Valdir respectively.

She expects the assault on Shetou to be handled largely by Kanika’s forces and the vampires, while Kanika herself, the Tarrasque, and Agallias will be headed to fight Valdir. Also Yasrena said that some of the spookiest Phantoms are coming back as well. The list is too long and I don’t think anyone cares. Though some of these monsters that we haven’t seen in centuries that seemed kind of like a joke of a bygone age for adventure games sound a lot less funny all of a sudden. Like a mimic that isn’t a treasure chest, but instead impersonates starships and houses. Essentially while the titanic threats like Agallias and the Tarrasque are obviously dangerous, we can expect people in this war to have some issues from encountering things like mimics, the bagmen, oblexes, false hydras, and all that shit we thought was definitely fucking extinct so we didn’t worry about living in a world were things had learned to specifically prey on humanoids. This war will be the second time in solian history that these things aren’t killing for food but for…well war. Kaylen sort of glossed over that part of the guild’s history. The part where the soldiers never mentally recovered and either wound up with crippling paranoia, insanity, or would commit suicide. The closing years of the purge saw the methodical elimination of such threats with tech and industry. The earlier years were guys with shotguns getting eaten by things that could come from any angle. Not to mention the actual war against Kanika in the first place that left generational scars on people, such as Kaylen who wasn’t even there for any of it.

All this is to say, those months in Beldobaan were a lot worse than we might be able to understand from the comfort of our space base ruled over by a lich who has seen the Astral Wilds and lived. While Selah is already a close friend of madness and Eerihild is technically one of these monsters so didn’t even notice, the rest of the knights who came back are not okay. We lost a hundred knights and three hundred squires to resignation after they got back, and we already found sixteen of them dead in their homes. If we weren’t in the process of retreating I’d point out that New Age are some of the only people with the mental fortitude to handle this stuff and we should consider giving them bigger guns or something.

Federation news, since Koda is busy with the war and Lancaster is still missing, it is noted that Haleh has no plans to retreat into Valjala. If we pack up and leave Diadem she said she’ll probably just go back into the reach or stay there and see what all these exerlus bots are up to. The Ika also have a lot of questions about why everyone is leaving given that Diadem is their ancestral home in a way and they aren’t too keen to just abandon it. Laura is also fairly confident that if we were worried about them assaulting Diadem, Valjala won’t be that much safer. At least here people are encased in an impossibly massive amount of armor, even with your abilities she feels like Valjala is very exposed by comparison. If just one Phantom turns out to know how to deal with gods in their planes, like the Era of Rising did with medeival technology, the whole thing falls apart. Also Zenakans are curious where this all leaves them since evacuating a population that massive is somewhat impossible and they’re still dying of plagues.

Oh also we got the uninfected Arcurans and such out as requested.

With the pirates cleared out we’ve been able to send recovery teams into the ship section, they were actually trying to see if it was possible to bring its turrets back online since it was once a self sufficient station that we strapped onto the rest of the cradle. Answer was nope that thing is messed up. Though while they were there they were able to find and recover the core of Vanessa along with several others from the troops who were aboard. They’ll need new bodies constructed and right now we’re exploding so project for later, but thought you would want to know.

The cradle withdrew after the destruction of the Areti to Renjala’s garden project and is in need of serious repairs as evidenced by the entire missing sixth of the ship we ejected for contamination reasons. I suppose what we have learned from this is that the cradle tends to draw a lot of attention.

We’ve begun construction of a new station here in Valjala as requested, one that won’t go anywhere so we have a place to come back to.

As an intel report, while we’re seeing half a dozen new forces showing up to Thenica left and right I think they’re getting their numbers from Selona. This war is something he should be invested in as he was part of the original plot to start it though he is conspicuously absent despite being a major member of the Phantoms and just Sol in general. We have reason to suspect a great many of the troops assembling are from him in some capacity though he is deliberately keeping his involvement hidden. Though we noticed that a lot of individuals among the Hydra’s forces have Selona’s tech and have confirmed the presence of at least three of his androids running around in there. With Nila being here it isn’t that surprising.

Also as the Phantoms proper are showing up, the fighting has been getting weird. I have reports of platoons disappearing in the night along with all of their tents. People turning around and finding their comrades just missing entirely, and it is a weird trend that the disappearing comrades are always the support crew. Our agents are having to get even more cautious as the environments themselves are turning against people with all these weird ass monsters showing up.

Trying to evacuate Kennae from Jydoq is proving difficult. Not only is he not very tech savvy and doesn’t answer his comms, he is also small and running all over the planet. He has expressed a lack of interest in evacuation. He said something about needing to fight just for the sake of fighting, because if the Jydoq are left to their own devices and spend the next decade seeing only the Hassani it will do damage to irrevocable damage to their culture and way of thinking. Essentially the agent reported he spent a good ten minutes making metaphors about the lessons of history and it all summed up to “nah I’ll stay here.” Don’t think we could catch him if we tried so the agent just let him do that.

Allison is back from Kuhas station after two weeks of prep to leave the station as well as many of our other bases as requested for the mass evacuation to the Flotilla. Though some of them are turning into Madhammer maniacs once given orders to start using all their bombs they had stashed up.

Moving the turrets of Enphidia however will be a bit more of an effort, there are a lot of them and between cargo and manpower it’s hard to get all of those off the ground they’re bolted to, they’re also the size of houses.

As for scouting Koura, the place is still a fortress that shows very little signs of activity outside of the rift to the Warrens. Most of the Hassani populace lives on Aureum. Koura and Somnus are largely being used as defensive stations and border control locations.

On the ground, the Valdir and Azilath have been destroyed by Kanika and her Tarrasque. The Tarrasque is now moving on towards Kar’Soluth territories. Orbital observation confirms it still possesses the abilities it once had in life. Firing upon it is more likely to harm the attacker than the target as it has the ability to reflect magic and shows no sign of damage from physical attacks. After the death of Azilath and the Valdir swarm, we lost track of Kanika and where she might be going next.

In Beldobaan our forces managed to defeat Azarov. However, the fighting took a turn for the worse when Sakhessa was brought in via portal along with her “Golden Legion”. Our troops augmented with Nelta technology are doing better, but Solian shields do nothing to stop their weapons. Even with the augmented shields prepared for this situation, her army are all undead golems covered in rather advanced super heavy armor similar to the EX soldiers. Our forces have been pushed to the base they took earlier in the fighting near one of the entrances to Beldobaan since Azarov, Reika, and Sakhessa keep posing significant problems in erratic positions around the battlefield. The 4th mech, madhammer, and 9th that were fighting with Sarghess are now fighting with Sakhessa’s forces while Sarghess left via portal once again to Jaal’Darya territory to combat our forces there once again.

Sarghess returned to Jaal’Darya when we tried to send the 8th back there. Though this time Decaelys is with them. We’re not sure what happened to them, but we’ve lost all contact with the 8th. Given what we know of Decaelys’ abilities, it is possible they’re still alive but in an isolated dimension. It’s also possible they’re all dead.

The fighting on the Cradle has seen further loss of control over the ship for the Voidforged due to Deinuu’s presence. With the Iron Cradle abandoning several sections to get rid of Deinuu, its firepower has diminished significantly. We still possess fleet superiority but we calculate that advantage will soon fade as Agallias continues to take ships down from the planet’s surface. However, Madhammer is still fighting in the detached sections of the Cradle. They have a general majority over the pirate boarders but the ship is so large that it is being fought in small skirmishes. Right now their priority has become preventing the escape of Deinuu or Nila so they do not get back to the rest of the Cradle.

Eleazor actually did better than even Chevalier against the cradle’s boarders but still fell victim to Nila.

The 5th mech cavalry made it to the borders of Sarghess territory and have been attacking Sarghess cities though progress is slow and half of their forces have been lost to Agallias so far.

Vasia was on standby for dealing with the RABE s hip once the Nomads had taken it but Director Tyne’s orders were for them to re-enter the fleet battle with it to see what chaos might result from it. So she’s still just on standby.

Sakhessa appeared at Beldobaan. Vairatoa and Selah are both dead. We thought Eerihild was dead, but after four hours of being dead she got back up somehow.

In contacting the Shetou leadership, they’re in a sort of state of shock upon seeing the return of the Tarrasque and how it managed to wipe out the Valdir swarm which was threatening to overtake the whole planet. Currently their hail mary is to stall for time before Kanika officially controls Sol and retreating Auni Kuu to a classified location to hopefully learn enough about necrocarnum before the war is over to deal with both the Tarrasque and Kanika. Though in the meantime they aren’t sure what to do about the other Phantoms. Everyone is stretched well past their limits. It would have taken a full fleet and army just to stop Agallias and he’s just destroying entire armies and ships with no one focusing on him at all because there are too many other problems happening at the same time. Keeping in mind this entire combined assault between the Federation, Shetou, and to some extent Valdir, was all just to target effectively one phantom, Yasrena. Then the rest began to attack and Kanika’s war is now beginning.

Alnae is gone, the Demon Kingdom don’t want a war with the Hassani and neither do the Abyssals. Now the shades patron god is Yasrena, Necrosi is largely either uninvolved or siding with whatever Sakhessa wants. While the Fae are hanging around Jamalia they aren’t exactly interested in joining a system-wide war on Thenica. Jydoq is fighting Kar’Soluth but they aren’t exactly organized against the phantoms and will probably abandon the fight as soon as they get their own planet under control. The vampire clans are largely being pushed towards siding with the Hassani because of the attack on Beldobaan and that includes the Desoir and De’Rex families. We were winning against Kar’Soluth, who represents one of the biggest power bases of the Phantoms. Shetou is aware that they either need to get everyone together or they need to kill Kanika and hope the power vacuum causes an internal collapse once Sakhessa and Asmodan start a schism.

In short, we’re outgunned by an order of magnitude. All of this fighting thus far has just been Yasrena’s assets with a showing from Faelyn who is middle management under Kanika.  So Shetou’s plan is to scramble desperately for time to deal with each of the phantom menaces one after the other, but they admit its not a good plan. They are also currently trying to convince the Demon Kingdom and Abyssals to come help on the basis that once Kanika becomes the Empress of Zonaricht-Sol they can’t rely on Alnae and Shetou, which are already both fucked, to keep the balance of things anymore. They have made some efforts trying to get Valdir fully involved and to recall Indal but they’re not having much luck on that front. The Silnian civil war is far bigger than the solian war.

In related news, Yasrena reports that Valencia was contacted by Laesaaria though that it didn’t go the way they had hoped. Despite Valencia’s notorious war-deciding economic dominance over Sol, it sort of lacks punch when dealing with a titan just shooting ships out of orbit. It’s not like he needs money to do that. Atop of that, it is likely that Valencia has already figured out that as the galactic awareness of Sol expands, Sakhessa is going to be the one to be friends with.

So that’s what Shetou is up to. We’ve been setting up the necessary equipment to move Eden out of her comfy spot, though its a bit of work overall. Things are going smoothly on that front though.

We built a new Jamalia. The elves are still scattered all over Enohas and so are the Fae that originally came through when we first opened the portal but hopefully they get the message soon. Before the forest becomes a fae forest.

Oh that reminds me, the Elementals haven’t shown up to Thenica yet but Mahuea pointed out that the Tarrasque is an issue just as it was back in the olden days. Because it reflects magical damage, if one of the Archons show up there is a chance that thing causes them to blow themselves up. Historically the creature just slept a lot and the best course of action was to leave it alone. Also in case you were curious, it was finally killed in the Era of the Purge from being poisoned in its sleep by the old Heroes Guild. That might not work against a lich variation though. Mahuea currently suspects that necrocarnum methods should be able to put it down but the problem is that means engaging the Tarrasque in melee combat and it is often near Kanika who is liable to defeat any other necrocarnate. He said he wants to send some agents to the far side of the galaxy to inquire about the Lakaaj and any other galactic incarnum based civilizations or life forms but needs a ship for said agents from us because he doesn’t have shipyards or a regularly functioning economy to buy things with.

The Nomads have successfully taken the RABE ship from the Iron Cradle after a chaotic and daring assault on the ship section. While the plan may have been to fly it of and cause some trouble in the fleet battle, they instead towed it out and used it as a flail. Probably should have been more specific. Though they report part of the problem is they can’t control it at all. It doesn’t use traditional Sol computer systems and psi crystals. It is an exerlus ship and likely is not intended to be piloted by an organic. We would need a special machine to interface with it that we could interface with to pilot it. Current suspicions are that only an exerlus or selona cyborg can control it, since we know that Nila has become one as well. Might be a way for the voidforged to do something with it but in the middle of a war is not the time to push buttons and see if we can safely get it to accelerate or turn left.

However, this was all possible likely because Nila and Deinuu weren’t there to defend the ship, neither were most of the boarding pirates and forces. The fight back on the Cradle is also still getting wildly out of hand.

As for Kennae, not so much with the murder padawans. He teaches a lot of restraint. Honestly the best tracker in the federation to find this assassin is…well the people we already have on it. We have made some progress in finding one of it again, but that encounter once again did not go well but did verify that there are multiple. Whether or not they behave independently or as a part of a whole is still unknown.

The fighting on Jydoq isn’t helping though as a lot of traditional security is down anyways from other issues. It is also hard to qualify suspicious behavior when everyone is trying to murder each other at the same time. At least the fighting here is going favorably for the Federation, most Kar’Soluth forces are diverted to Thenica. The open conflict Madhammer is engaged in is going largely unresponded to here on Jydoq. Though from the sounds of these reports, Thenica is not going nearly as well.

As for the plagues on the flotilla, they are largely contained to individual ships though those ships are effectively lost. We can’t send anyone into or out of them at the moment and the inhabitants are not doing well. Though given how many ships make up the flotilla, this is a relatively minor problem compared to what is happening in Moncayo and Zenaka where millions are dying.Though we will still need to either find some way to handle these plagues or just drop the ships into a star. We can wait for everyone aboard to die of the plague first though if it eases everyone’s collective consciences though.

Kaja points out he fought in the last 3 apocalypses and “ya’ll need to get your shit together”. Back in his day all he had was a dragonborn and a kobold with a grenade launcher. And they had to share that kobold. So he’s still retired.

As for the ongoing plagues, it appears the Hassani are very invested in preventing VSEC from taking the Jaal’Darya capital. Whether or not it even has the answers we need is unknown. We do know that they are sneaking through the portals disguised as ‘not Jaal’Darya’ members and we have intercepted a good few but there are lot of them. It is also likely that several locations were previously infiltrated before the war even began just to keep an eye on us. While meaningful medical advances have been made to slow or even vaccinate some of the plagues, every time we do another one just pops up. It isn’t a single crafted super disease, its dozens of different ones that all use different methods. In order to stop them in its entirety we need some way to find all of Jaal’Darya’s agents, which might come from taking their capital and leadership for interrogation. Even with Eden’s help curing some of them, more just keep appearing.

Chevalier fought valiantly but as it turns out, this Nila bitch is really dangerous. She took him down and Deinuu got Sacha. Adrienne kidnapped you and forced you to abandon ship through the portal to Jamalia. We’d have gone to Adelaide but Governor Laura over there has turned them all off. We discovered one very important thing, the Mummy Rot affects warforged. Since it infects mana itself, which is how it travels through mediums other than biological fluids and coughs, it can infect a voidforged as well. Including you and me. We don’t know if Chevalier and Sacha’s cores can be recovered, along with Vanessa and Sylvaine’s. Until the ship is secure its best we not be in the warpath of that giant mummy that is punching everyone.

Problem two, the rot can infect the ship itself. Which is why we had to evacuate rather than rely on things such as doors and airlocks to keep it contained. The Iron Cradle is experiencing mass system failures in areas where Deinuu attacked, sort of similar to as if they lost power. I’m told by Lancaster’s robot illusory projection assistant that this power can be diverted to the mummy who owns the rot. Which might be how he’s becoming harder and harder to stop in those hallways.

The crew forcefully ejected the chunks of the ship that are infected and containing pirates for now to buy time but now they’re sitting in orbit around Thenica in multiple pieces while being actively fired upon by opposing fleets. We still maintain fleet superiority in orbit but things are falling apart on the ground and most problematically, Agallias is just taking ships out of space over and over again. There also isn’t much to do with this naval position since the major battle is either underground in Beldobaan or is a giant monster of myth and legend that is immune to even the largest guns we have.