Explorer’s Log

Roster updates, level ups, and a brief time skip coming soon to a galaxy near you. Any hero deployments at this time should be for long term low-resistance projects or a quick errand before they get back.

Welcome back Lancaster. You have 4,702 unread messages. Diadem diagnostics report 14,708 maintenance issues requiring urgent attention. Half of them are false alarms because we finished removing that plate but without the administrator we couldn’t tell the system we were doing that on purpose.

While the contract was offered to the vague sense of however we put said bounties up to Bardhe, we’re not sure if how that is going since he has been missing for awhile and whether or not he accepted or simply hasn’t found a way to do so yet remains a mystery. In either case, Valencia is still alive at the moment.

Alongside this, news from SR3 reports that the Valdir are not doing so well. Kanika and her Tarrasque alongside Agallias and his army of giants are proving to be a little too perfectly matched against them, especially without the help of their mothership that is somewhere across the galaxy.

In summary, Alnae is currently seeking refuge with the Order and is planning to move to the Garden project. Diadem is currently still under quarantine but has largely been unaffected by the war. The plagues on Zenaka are finally beginning to decrease thanks to the recent push of the medical teams. Valen’s particular illness has also been fixed in the recent revisit over combating these sicknesses. All things considered we escape from this war relatively okay since the fighting was nowhere near our home territory and the Reach is particularly difficult for the Hassani to penetrate into as infiltrators since it is a massive anarchic and selfish system. Though Cayetano is practically in ruins and Zenaka is still recovering from the losses. However the plagues are slowing down ever since we implemented more countermeasures and now that it seems Jaal’Darya is becoming more concerned with taking part in the consolidation of Sol.

Kar’Soluth as a whole has lost perhaps eighty percent of the power it held before the war, though now it appears they are officially folding into the Hassani underneath Yasrena. With Alystra Vel’Sarghess becoming one of the Hassani’s most prominent commanders for her work in all of this. Jaal’Darya is in ruins after the repeated raids on them throughout the war, though Eliza herself is still alive. They’ll see large allocations of population from the Hassani to help them rebuild due to Eliza’s general importance to Kanika’s work. It is likely the Hassani will be remaining at Thenica to finish their war with the Valdir and then move on to rebuilding the war torn system.

At this juncture its worth figuring out plans for the future. Speaking of which the Caelkians, while still slow with the beurocracy and in particular due to Diadem’s quarantine, are still hanging around. In the wake of the war the Vessians are a little more wary of being pulled into things but the ones who like the farms are still aboard Diadem. Haleh is still roaming around the Reach getting into various borderline pirate mischief.

Hrm planetary cooling while surrounded on all sides by the largest star ever found might require something a little more unconventional. Even with an external layer leaves a problem of having nowhere for the heat to actually go. The think tank reports that if you absolutely had to make this work for some reason, there has to be a place for all the energy to actually go. Even if you were to make a planet sized air conditioner, the exhaust vent has to go somewhere other than the pocket the planet is located in. Theoretically this could be done with a permanent planar gate to somewhere else so it at least had somewhere to send it, then the problem becomes sending it there. We’d be trying to move more energy per day than actually hits Thenica in a year. So we’re getting into exerlus levels of engineering, but problematically its a pandem task so even they likely can’t do it.

Essentially, the tank has these options assuming you have the time, money, or capabilities to do them:
1) Planetary shield with a planar exhaust vent. If that gate ever as a fault and turns off for about 40 minutes, everyone on that world will be dead. Also this level of engineering will cost an obscene amount of money and have a critical weakpoint if we were to ever be attacked by someone who can land a really lucky shot with a missile.
2) Establish a population entirely of fire elementals, they won’t mind. Haleh can probably handle it too but good luck convincing her to sit in one place for longer than a year.
3) Create a planar link to somewhere that alters the rules a little in our favor. This will shut off the Rim as it depends on a few properties to do this but the remaining unbound stars that survive the alteration can likely be worked with to create a planet surrounded on all sides by its star.
4) Create basically a ship, similar to Eden City, that is made to survive these conditions in their entirety but it won’t really make the world itself habitable as much as just allow us to live near said molten world and slowly keep expanding it. This is basically how the Vloz’Khress did it with that molten mining planet they have. They got the idea from Kharla.
5) Find some technology that we don’t have. We know the Blaiken and the Exerlus can play with stars, even if this kind of idea is still a bit beyond that. We asked our resident Ika and they had some designs but the problem is that Ika do not draw up plans and do math. They just ‘get a feeling from the machine spirits’ and this notably has had some drawbacks in the past.
6) Build one of these ideas to be just ‘okay it can handle it for a month or so’ and then don’t build it in the same plane. Pull an Utewa and only retreat to this plane when necessary.
7) Inverted void plate sphere. This will turn the planet in question into a pitch black frozen rock that receives no energy from the stars and needs to produce enough energy to power the void shield. Which we have no idea how to produce under those conditions.

Meetings with the Valdir broke down fast. In summary, good argument, wrong person to argue with. Kaisa popped in to offer some options. Her long grandiose rant summarized: Given that this is the war cult she practically intends to curse them to eternal war if they retreat. Either they defend their home to keep it, or they will spend the rest of their lives fighting wars until they die rather than disgrace the ‘true Valdir’ any further. Which means if they retreat from Kanika they are free to join her in the fight against the Silnians, join the Hassani and fight us, or join us and fight her. That or pick some other fight entirely, she doesn’t care. She’s just mad that they keep backing out of every fight and that people keep interfering and telling them to be peaceful despite consisting entirely of perfected combat organisms in direct affiliation to the cult of war. She would rather they join the Silnians she’s fighting against than sit there and do nothing. She would also rather see them all dead than continue being pacifists. If they try to run and not pick a new fight, she confirmed she will absolutely kill all of them on the spot. In the end they decided to make their last stand against Kanika since its the only possible ending where they get to sit around and be left alone for at least a little while. They weren’t terribly happy about it, though there isn’t much they can do if Kaisa confirms her plan to murder all of them for retreating after arguing for so long that they should be allowed to keep their home to her.

Larazja actually has some insight into this though. Kaisa is one of the most charismatic and overwhelming personalities in the Valdir. While they’re a galaxy away so it hasn’t affected the Solian Valdir or Larazja herself, the synapse has contorted based on Kaisa’s ability to constantly rally the masses alongside the fact that they have been in a never ending battle against infinitely replicating enemies for years now. One of the caveats to the synapse is even those of individual opinions start to slowly sway to that of the masses. Especially under constant stress and threat upon their life in the form of their war. Because the local Valdir have been disconnected for so long the effects of it are less prominent on them and they don’t really understand how Kaisa became such a raging lunatic. She’s been left on her own unchecked and doing her own thing across the galaxy for so long that the war cult side of the synapse has become truly a fanatic cult centered around Kaisa’s ability to create and weaponize zealotry. Eroding at the individuality and humanity of the synapse as it comes more and more like a regular silnian swarm. Albeit even more dangerous since instead of being driven by something like hunger, it is now driven to desire war and conflict itself. Actually we might have a problem, they’ve been left uncontacted and alone in this war for so long that humanity is being replaced by silnian psychology spearheaded by a psychopath. The Valdir have lost touch with their solian origins with barely any solian contact and now they are violent beyond solian comprehension. What appears to us as an instant death for the Thenican swarm, is a grueling battle for survival if they want to fight against Kaisa’s metaphorical kill switch. It’s her being willing to fight them herself essentially.

Indal’s branch of the swarm are more alien than solian at this point. Despite Indal being the leader he is notoriously simple minded at times, to the point that we’re real suspicious of that Kenin fella that is always following him around. Larazja is fairly certain that the war has had effects on the swarm as a whole that pushes it in the direction that Kaisa was already preaching. Which has created an obvious issue. If Kaisa isn’t dealt with in some way or they aren’t rehabilitated they’re going to be the next galactic threat should they win the civil war. In Larazja’s artistic expression, Lolth is back and no one was paying attention to her. Though to be noted this whole analysis has one crippling flaw. The only person who has any ability to see into this stuff is Larazja. Who has been a little…off the mark at times.

Well the assault into Jaal’Darya was bloody if nothing else. Given that one of the main Hassani forces were there, things were rough. We managed to capture some of the data needed to develop vaccines and antidotes against the currently implemented strains on Zenaka and Moncayo. Fortunately too, given that we just had unpowered memory to steal from a server room and had to just hope it was the right stuff based on a quick interrogation. Though opposition came down quickly after that. It turns out that Eliza herself has become much more dangerous with all of her genetic modifications while hiding away in her lab. Vanjin and Dunchek are both dead, Michael is currently pretending to be a member of Kar’Soluth and is semi-captured as a result, Aryn is missing two limbs, and you are now in quarantine until we figure out what you picked up while we were out there. All in all, not bad given how the losses have been throughout this campaign I suppose. Next time don’t try to fight the chimera woman in hand to hand combat if you don’t know how many limbs she actually has.

For now the base intended to become a resistance base on Thenica is laying low, while it gives them some merit to say they’re just a shopping mall still, doing anything too sketchy while the Hassani are consolidating the territory might draw a lot of very drastic attention.

As for the Aryn drone network, we can’t figure out how half her cybernetics work in the first place let alone modify them. She’s one of Daiheb’s models and her power source is an artifact of all things. So attempting to turn her into a swarm controller would be a bit difficult given that turning anyone into that would be hard enough. The Voidforged are actively working on a similar project and making very slow progress and other then that the Lucid Cult were the only other ones getting anywhere in the ballpark but still relied on large numbers of people to control individual things. The quest to outsource the crew requirement of large ships is one practically everyone is on, and I don’t think Aryn is the best starting point to jump into that research given that we already don’t understand the technology that makes her work.

We have begun the process of figuring out the Hydra coalition. Though the name is a bit inaccurate since each of the Hydra’s heads runs different matters. Fortunately it is a very widespread group and not that hard to get some people in on, we’ve already gotten a few agents peeking into some of what we can confirm are extensions of the Hydra’s network. Unfortunately it is such a spread out organizational structure that we’re not confident that any cell we infiltrate will have any idea what the other sections are doing unless we manage to get further up the ranks. It’s a work in progress.

All our base, base, base, are belong to them. In the meantime I’m setting up some trials to see about replacing some of our comrades in the aftermath of the war. Some new agents of particular import. Requests duly noted, BUT ONLY THE BEST MAY JOIN. Is it cheating if two competitors are duct taped together?

With the war winding down we’ve at least gotten a good measure of where we stand in conflicts of this scale. We’re definitely some of the heaviest hitters and our most experienced members to have a quirk of being rather difficult to put down for good. I think this is the third time Chevalier has been ripped in half. Though I have also determined this is rather unhealthy for us in line with the testing inspired by the Exerlus commentary on our cores. Chevalier is just uniquely capable of this which might have given soooome of us the wrong impression that our species as a whole could do it as smoothly as he does.

It would turn out Chevalier is just the most…self? of us. The erosion of his psyche that should be caused by moving his core from one chassis to the next is minimal for him and I think its actually because of how philosophical he is. Of all the voidforged, he is the most in tune with the idea of who and what he is and that might somehow be affecting his ability to stave off the effects of psyche erosion.

Vanessa has definitely been kind of twitchy since I rebuilt her, not sure if thats a side effect or a warning sign. Probably should have made those blades a bit easier to retract because she could take someone’s arm off if she were to twitch just right…or maybe wrong.

Either way, production on the new lines are underway and I for some reason get the feeling that statement is particularly relevant right now.

The giants that make up Agallias’ forces have arrived this month. Apparently the Phantoms saw fit to equip them with modern power armor, except using their own magic as the power source. So basically each one of them is a class four mech on steroids. With their arrival, they’ve begun the campaign on SR3, where the Valdir are. This has recalled the Tarrasque from Shetou territory, which lost six major cities, and now the hydra itself has appeared to take over Hassani operations on Thenica while its main forces push offenses on two other planets. Shetou has negotiated for a cease fire with the Hassani after the Jaal’Darya plagues began to spread across SV2, apparently its buying time for Laesaaria to negotiate terms with Sakhessa who sent a message to ask if you wanted to include yourself in this one too or if you would prefer to wrap things up on SV2. She also offered us to join the surrender negotiations with Laesaaria though can’t promise it’ll go so well given how the last one turned out.

Cazvallow sent a message to explain the current situation with the negotiations for surrender. Laesaaria is mostly just trying not to get placed in a position underneath Yasrena and this is also buying time for them to get Auni Kuu far away from here. She pointed out Auni is being sent deep into the galaxy for the time being, as the general goal is to get the now-greatest incarnum practitioner far away from all of this to buy time for them to finish learning how the whole “I absorbed all my  predecessors” thing works in the hope that all House Song’s ancient knowledge might be useful. Though she admits the outlook is bleak, since Kanika has already proven to outmatch the previous clan’s leader and is only getting stronger as the war goes on. With Kanika harvesting essentia from these battles and gaining more experience in using her newfound body’s zankist training, they’re running out of ideas of what to do about her. Especially while she is surrounded by a legion of similarly dangerous creatures. Despite the pamphlet ilex released some while ago, the various empires had been largely unprepared for how much combat training the military leaders of the Phantoms had gained. Sol hasn’t really seen monsters who know tactics and are equipped with the same level of technology as their humanoid opponents. Without Song Yi, Shetou doesn’t have much of a “die fighting” voice in their politics and with the Jaal’Darya plagues beginning to spread through Shetou the leadership seemed to have marked the whole war as unwinnable. At this point they’re just trying to save as many lives as they can. Their society is quite adept at operating from within another one, which is why a lot of independent startup colonies often wound up absorbed into Shetou. Until the schism and the Phantoms stealing the strategy from them on the frontier. As such the best possible chance they have to ever deal with Kanika on their end would be to play a bit more patiently. Though Cazvallow herself will be remaining, four of the ships that they lost in the war had only the bare minimum of crew despite being notable ships. The intended crews are a few of her daughters and their forces. She has requested we take them to Diadem on our fleet as to hide the fact that they are still alive for as long as possible and to buy them time to invest in the Reach to rebuild while under less direct scrutiny from the Hassani.

So if we opt to continue the battle in Sol it is likely that Shetou will no longer be able to assist us. The Valdir are in a position where they probably have to fight to the end since Kaisa will probably not be particularly kind on them if they surrender, but without Shetou’s naval and logistical help they aren’t likely to do so well.

To clarify, when you say the enclosed pockets of the Rim, do you mean the areas of space surrounded by so much star stuff that night no longer exists and the surface of anything resembling a planet would be probably molten, or the orbiting ‘chunks of stuff’ that just travel along the outside of the rim?

The Think Tank has been established though a large part of exploiting the Rim is still exploring it, saying that its ‘really big’ will summon an astronomer from the corner of the room to try and explain how big it is for three hours. While a few candidates have come up they would still involve some heavy terraforming processes and that might just be an issue with the youth of the galaxy. Though if nothing else, Valjala definitely has a lot of energy to work with if any life forms can make use of it. The collective study of the new plane hasn’t found much promising in terms of anything being alive but we’ve only been able to search around a a hundred planets out of millions, and that’s just with long range observation let alone actually setting foot anywhere. The tank is also concerned as to how much in the galaxy they can’t properly detect due to the limitations of light speed compared to the age of the plane. It’s part of why it took them weirdly long to notice the giant ring of eternal fire in the middle of the whole galaxy.

Exploration difficulties aside, they did come up with some initial ideas on how they might exploit the energy of the rim. Obviously can’t go wrong with solar panels, though we do lack the technology to collect it with the efficiency the exerlus have. if we put the panels too close they just melt. Not really sure what the exerlus do for cooling systems with their giant ass sphere. Other ideas they came up with include utilizing biological methods of exploitation. Particularly Eden and Larazja. Both of whom can biologically mutate themselves to make use of being blasted by sunlight, Larazja in particular can also adapt the Nevun biology to withstand dramatically increased temperatures. If one of the valdir adapted to just survive in the vacuum of space, it’s fair to say it is likely that Larazja can handle extremely hot worlds. Which means more energy, and the rate that the synapse can grow when provided with that energy could have some potential. Another idea was to get some elementals involved somehow, they aren’t really sure what that would entail but its an idea. The rim itself doesn’t have an arcane star that is easy to exploit so unfortunately the arcurans and zenakans aren’t as useful in this particular circumstance. They’ve asked the druidic chapter of the order to look into if they could make a plant that really really loved sunlight. So that’s still underway.

Yoshai is still off looking for the Revenants, same for Irae with the somewhat mythical metal archon.

Kaylen is difficult to contact, it is likely she is still getting into trouble across Thenica trying to be a thorn in the Hassani’s side. Though unfortunately for her, despite her power as a zankist grandmaster with an artifact, so seems to be having next to no impact on the war with such meager forces. I’ll keep an eye out to see if she pops up again soon to see if she wants to come along.

Ankathi is of a mind that continuing to work on Valencia is still a good idea. We already know Yasrena is on the pantheon and it is highly likely that if it is somehow a secret from the Hassani then it won’t be for long. However, that is fairly sensitive information that we can’t even tell the demon king about right now. As a result, Valencia being in a much more open alliance with the Phantoms makes for a real easy scapegoat for anything Yasrena might be up to and atop of which would only further endear the Demon King to the pantheon as it would mean the pantheon has someone perhaps openly tied to the Hassani, who are about to be the most powerful government of Sol. With Shetou and Alnae gone, even if the demon kingdom and the remaining handful of others teamed up its rather clear that Kanika, the person who specializes in killing or making immortals, is not someone the demon lords, archons, abyssal lords, or even gods are going to be in a terrible hurry to pick a fight with.

Though while on the topic she is also interested in the Utewa, since they have the ability to pandem rift a whole planet someone on that planet has to be good enough to qualify and diversifying her pantheon does appeal to her. Keeping of a mind that she is still fairly confident that anyone on the pantheon has to obey her regardless of their personalities, so sometimes she just takes shots in the dark and assumes it can’t go that poorly for her. Another option would include more archons, she finds them quite impressive considering they can unmake the laws of physics as we know them at any given time. She wouldn’t mind collecting a jesai either, especially Decaelys. She has mentioned that uplifting the mortals is clearly more effort than its worth as this whole thing requires a very strong mastery of both pandem magic and the mana well to survive the wilds even with assistance. So her attention is shifting towards candidates who are already powerful enough to meet the latter condition given how the Jaerda project is going. She also inquired as to Eden’s mana capabilities while she was at it. Worth keeping in mind she has completely lost track of what any of this has to do with the demon king and is just thinking of people that would make for interesting additions to the group. I have to wonder if this would all be easier or harder if we just got Ankathi to go talk to the demon king herself.

Though while we’re on the topic, Selah was recently recalled to the First Temple in the celestial realm by Ankathi so she’s away for a little bit at the moment.

While we’re at it, I checked in with Haziel about the silnian civil war. With SR3 being invaded it seems peculiar that they’re being left to fend for themselves. Also to tell her we would offer Indal a portal all the way back to Thenica for as many people as he could cram into it if they wanted. I tried to get her to offer favors to him if he took the deal as he might be the only thing that can stop Kanika. Despite her not finding me very funny, she pointed out the silnian civil war is basically ripping apart that corner of the galaxy. Planets like Eden are smacking into each other and trying to throw each other into nearby stars for example. The Valdir extension that lives on SR3 are those who didn’t want to go to that war and as such they’re sort of on their own as they see the Thenican war as a much smaller conflict. She was unable to convince them of the magnitude of the problem of letting Kanika win this for a large variety of reasons but it can be summed up as “if they wanted to, the valdir could eat the entire thenican system overnight. This isn’t really the most pressing issue.” Though given that Indal has been removed from solian matters for some years now, it is likely that the valdir aren’t really aware, or easy to convince of, the ongoing threat that Selona has caused by trapping all of the elder civilizations in various internal conflicts that left the rest of the galaxy to run amuck without their presence.

We’ve sent the gang out to Jaal’Darya territory, though they’re still on the way and scouting out the place to see what is going on and where they might be able to infiltrate to find any information on the plagues that could hopefully lead to progress on that front. So far at least the rate of it’s spread has been slowed but we’re still far from finding a way to put a stop to it. However with Shetou entering into a cease fire and preparing to surrender, this will make it more difficult to find opportunities since it is acting as the major base of the Hassani forces on SV2.

In other news, that strange facility we were keeping an eye on in the northern part of the galaxy has been attacked recently by Nelta. Which turned out to be the ship that had passed through the northern borders and caused them to be shut down to the Iron Cradle when they were trying to pass by. So that all came full circle while we were busy over here. Apparently, Lancaster, Jiyan, and Sarrai were all located there. So good news, we figured out where they were.

We’ve managed to finish repairing the major issues on the Iron Cradle, though Koda wants us back out on the front lines at SV2 so we’ll see how long that lasts. We’re still missing a chunk or two that will take even longer to replace. Though right now we’re all just waiting to see if the FVS is going to continue fighting even with Shetou pulling out.

Still working on new designs but with us being sent in and out and into an active war, not that much time for R&D.