Stories of Lore 67

Viper has been moved to the hyperlane route to begin patrolling it. Vynnoth thinks offering the stations to the dragons is a pretty solid idea once she can find more who would be interested and once people start moving in. Though she’s not keen on naming it after herself since that might cause unnecessary friction with the other dragons. Telling a dragon to move into a station already named after another dragon may or may not affect their interest but it’s more likely to dissuade than persuade in this instance. Also she isn’t sure she wants to make herself into an obvious target.

The process of filling the stations thus far has been peculiar. The new route consists of twelve total stations with four of them being particularly focused on. They are all mostly empty and this has attracted the interest of people who need a lot of warehouse space more than anything else. So the pirates who previously patrolled this route are suspected to be the current residents, which is both populating the stations but also making them sort of hostile to other potential visitors. Granted most stations are a little hostile by default within the Reach network.

Vynnoth has the department responsible for all this keeping things running but not appointing a full time civil leader of the stations. Not hard given there isn’t much to manage yet anyways, though she intends to let them build up a bit before using it to attract any dragons since they are less keen for projections than most solian investors.

Haleh and Vasia went off to go get kidnapped by Rahlken in an attempt to kidnap some of the pirates. Which they were almost successful in, though an unknown group intervened. Vasia did manage to capture one in the end after the other four were destroyed by the uninvited group’s intervention. They’re still in the process of transporting to Vasia’s labs.

Wonaya went back to Vess as requested. She reports that they are somewhat adamant on securing their own resource production instead of relying on importing from others. Especially with the growing trend of the Federation’s expansion. They’ve rejected either assistance or to allow the Federation to make contact with the Hephal.

While it wasn’t directly stated, Wonaya has some theoretical insight into the matter. Prior to the near destruction of their homeworld, vessians were one of the super powers of the Reach. They still kind of are and people will still respect Grand Chief Amasis as if nothing changed but over time if they can’t rebuild their position then someone is going to notice. Vittles is very likely the actual reason they’re doing this. After their homeworld was set on fire, they scattered throughout the Reach to find food as necessary. Then Vittles happened and attracted thousands to Diadem and now they’ve spent enough time to create a new generation on Diadem. There are more vessians in the Reach who have become somewhat independent than there are still within the tribes. Wonaya thinks they’re doing this specifically to keep more of the population they still have and maybe bring back some of the nomadic ones to rebuild. While they would likely be able to rally vessians across the Reach to return home and defend it if they were attacked, the currently available population actually within the territory wouldn’t be enough to defend itself from any major offensive.

Arlo reports that the Diadome agency has been investing into further developing local scenes financial stability for the fighters rather than the promoters. Floor space at Kawako Six has been purchased as requested. The Tagal don’t seem to mind any. Which normally I shouldn’t have to point out was in the report but lately with the outreach programs that seems kind of out of the ordinary.

The scouts report back on the starless planet in the middle of open space. It could be that this world isn’t one of the ones we would consider ‘golden’ since it developed under extremely different circumstances. That being the lack of sunlight. It is still a very developed world in terms of biodiversity and atmosphere, but even a warrens exit can only do so much if there is no star. Whether this has implications towards the idea of the shared origin theory or not is still up for debate. Other probing indicates that the planet’s crystal structures are basically just impure regular formations. Not quite like the strange properties of the Koura crystals.

As for destroying the weapon, we likely could not with just our section. At least not enough to sufficiently dissuade the defunct exerlus. Given the labor resources their machines grant them, they could rebuild a section of it pretty easily. Though it needing to be functional is clearly not necessary since its not even working right now and according to the Ika it has never worked before that they’re aware of.

Winter reports that she’s devised where the grimoire is down to a specific vault in a specific building. It’s in the collection of the gang she mentioned last month. They are fully aware of what the book is though and they don’t want to trade it. If anything they are probably trying to study it in order to become the next Rozanis. Basically there is a demon necromancer living in the modern equivalent of a wizard tower hoarding it and trying to learn everything they can from it before someone comes asking questions. Winter has managed to avoid any serious trouble at the moment, but they’re not going to let her have it clearly. In terms of options, she says she could just launch an assault on this demon necrocarnate if we sent her about a hundred people and maybe an extra agent. Though this risks taking overt action within the Demon Kingdom, and that’s how Renjala got into a whole mess before. Nah division might have some people who could be a bit quieter about it though she isn’t fully aware of the actual abilities and limitations of the division so she just offered that as a suggestion. Alternatively, she might be able to convince the other local powers that they should stop all this from happening though she has no way to guarantee the book winding up in her possession after attempting to set up a fight like that.

Koharrel asks if there are still plans to set up a portal between Sugnam and Diadem given that the Sugnam have only agreed to a trial membership rather than formally joining. She reports that things are continuing smoothly and the old regime is basically dead now thanks to the Teeth having hit that critical point where its obvious they can’t be stopped. The new leader of the Sugnam Republic is now utilizing Federation technology to get into contact with other galactically aware civilizations in the area. Koharrel thinks they’re trying to survey what things are like for other people who are in this sort of position. She has also noted that they seem to be growing interested in what is going on in the other hemisphere, less so due to the demons and more so due to the fact that if the planet isn’t united it has a lot less bargaining power in general. The Demons have no real stake to the world’s governments and are just here as an independent mining company.

Ronnair is headed to Janus as requested.

The Diadome agency has prepared to set up portals in places all over the Reach and sent some people out to get started on prep work for that. Well are in the process of doing so, getting a bunch of people onto ships and across the galaxy for months at a time takes a bit of prep but you get the idea. They’re on it. We might need to expand Diadome seating for the 8th time though if you’re going to let spectators take the trip too.

As for asking Echo about the exerlus kill loop, she said she has asked organics the same question for millions of years. If you figure out how to convince them to work together on their shared objective, you should start applying that skill to achieving galactic peace. I’m still not sure the Exerlus are supposed to be cheeky like that. Even if this is a slightly different case she doesn’t seem to consider it particularly different than watching us go to war with our own kind over the far more nuanced motivation of power land and wealth. More importantly, if you did convince them to work together to share control of the ring’s weapon wouldn’t they just team up on us? I don’t know when I’ve ever heard someone say ‘we’re keeping this super weapon secure and safe under our control’ without also threatening ‘so that i can shoot you with it’. ‘Control the weapon’ doesn’t sound like ‘keep it from ever shooting’ and seems a lot like ‘so that I can shoot it when I want to’.

The delegation to meet with the lightning elementals reports meeting earth and lightning elemental hybrids in the process created by Waianoa. Now  you might be asking, what the hell does that even look like? How do you combine a rock with lightning? I asked too, and have been flipping through the pictures for the last hour. Whatever that psionic potion your rock girl keeps making is some seriously strong stuff. I wonder if she could mix a fenalis with one of these moths to make something even cuter?

As for the elementals, the archon of lightning is more conservative with the deployment of his elementals than Mokihi or Mahuea. For the same reasons as Moa Metala actually, lightning elementals are very exploitable by humanoids. We already turn our own kind into mana batteries, obviously lightning elementals are one of the most premium of premium options for such technology. Similar to what happened to the solar aliens that Selona turned into batteries to power his own stuff. So you can see why they are much more protective of the elementals leaving the plane to work in the middle ones. While they can survive the heat of the rim they have a different problem in that they really like complex atmospheres, so they’re pickier about planets than the fire elementals.

The recent Astral Wilds radar experiment has kept me up for three days trying to figure out what happened. As far as I can tell from the interviews, recordings, footage, and asking New Age to help me piece it all together – you guys found something that reacted to being observed or followed the flow of whatever the radar was doing back to it. Hisashi was regressed to a child though kept all of his mental facilities intact, though he occasionally enters a comatose state where he just disappears from reality for hours at a time. Usually while asleep so it hasn’t affected his day to day too much. He however has full memories of who he is and was and all my information aligns to his story. You on the other hand, do not remember this but you used to be some sort of humanoid lich. Half of the team has no memory of this either, though I do and some of the people I talked to give the exact same description as what I remember even though others seem to have no idea that you were ever not a kobold. I’m told by Vasia that this has happened before but there are no records to prove or disprove the phenomenon.

That being said, despite his body Hisashi is still able to do his job albeit maybe not so great with the swords anymore. According to him, whatever you guys found this time wasn’t Zero but an offspring of Zero’s. Which implies that Zero has not only found a way to maintain permanence in the Astral Plane but has found a way to transfer this property and reproduce. We’ve also reported that Valjala has started to show signs of decay. On a grand scale it isn’t too noticeable but internal plane is collapsing rather than expanding now, given a few million years it will likely be only the size of its local galactic cluster and a little longer until it fades out from existence. Hisashi believes that thing found Valjala as well as you guys and is now feeding on it from the outside. While the effects are less than a percent of a percent, this has made a measurable pandem impact on the traveling crystals that began to form when Valjala was originally created.

Basically, that radar created a signal that drew the attention of some sort of astral creature derived from Zero that is now feeding off of our planar cluster in some weird way. Also half the people in the room no longer exist in one way or another, you’re a kobold now, and Hisashi is a very old child. In summary: you poked at some weird shit until it poked back. Also the radar’s ‘phylactery’ is just a backup memory crystal but there isn’t really a way to use incarnum to recreate a machine that has no innate essentia as far as we know.

Eerihild has gone off to Hephal though is still making her way across the Reach to get there.

The knight that was subjected to the psionic parasite has been retired as requested, though they’re not very responsive to their caretakers so far. We’ll see how that develops over time. Inya reports that thus far giving the parasite other animals has shown no sign of developing language understanding. Though the animals do become more active, not in a hostile way but they do try to wander around more than they would prior to infection. The psionic experts that were called in to help report that the parasite is really trying to do two things. What looks like its natural curiosity or tendency to feed on experiences is actually attempting to stimulate the brain of whatever it is inhabiting. In doing so it is tracking what areas experience activity. The other thing it is doing is expanding its own psyche to match whatever it infects. The species isn’t biological so it doesn’t grow according to any sort of genetic predetermination. It is actually likely that Reachers have inadvertently gotten this thing off the planet before and no one knows where it is. With the rats all we can tell is that the creature reproduces a lot less rapidly than Disaster Six. They don’t infect everything around them one after another in a chain reaction, rather there is just one of these things and so far we have not gotten it to reproduce while in captivity.

Irae reports that things are still going fine on the apocalyptic world once visited by Haleh. It is likely that if anyone in this place could have fought back against her, Haleh got to them first. And we do know that Haleh has a tendency to deliberately hunt down the strongest people, whether to recruit them or demonstrate her superiority. The church of the traveller continues to gain ground with the locals slowly but surely since the opposition keeps turning into Irae’s reanimated soldiers anyways. The portals are definitely helping the spread as well.

Otto reports that “THE BUGS ARE REAL NOT JUST IN MY MIIIIIND”. According to Lailah he went to sleep and woke up covered in small insects that were eating through a scab on his leg because he didn’t realize the sensation was actually insects instead of a side effect of whatever he was smoking that particular day. The Evershar colony continues to expand with the help of the earth elementals but so far everything is fairly stable. Lailah reports that she is mostly just checking seals and using repellents. Larger bitier things tend to be taken care of by Evershar’s defense grid but its the little ones that keep causing the most trouble.

As someone who grew up with the exiles and lived under the constant reminder that Kanika was right about everything – I’ve never really noticed the way she evaluates the worth of anything. Even the most holistic philosophies, like the druids, make room for incredible violence and destruction if it gets them something they want. 6ix stands in our way, and these animals might help us understand how to deal with it. If we’re willing to expend hundreds of lives assaulting Nekhul again, why wouldn’t be willing to expend some rats and psionic parasites? The value of life is only important to those with no control over their lives. People like you and Kanika have evaluated it at being worth less than numbers on sheets. Otherwise we wouldn’t be losing lives every day on the Diadem front lines just to say we own a fancy ringworld. We would have just built a regular space station or gone to some other world with much more logistically manageable challenges. To people like me, Kanika being a dragon really doesn’t make her look any different than anyone else with power and resources. That’s why the Reachers don’t like big governments. With that much power comes the inevitability that those who don’t have that power become statistics. It’s why my friends ask me to hang out less and less these days. Ever since I got this job, now I have power they can’t conceive of wielding. The first lesson you taught me about that power is how to decide who lives and who dies in order to accomplish the goals of the order after all.

We still only know a little bit about Elasyn from traveler’s stories and thirty years ago the Federation sent three people to go look around and get the lay of the land. In a way it is a very alien civilization that functions by means we would never really consider viable but apparently someone did. Other than that we are relying just on the stories. With that information, we do know that Elasyn is a fallen world from the Ika alliance sixteen thousand years ago. It is a vast and persistent ecumenopolis similar to Diadem though it doesn’t have the population to support that level of development. Like Diadem. You can see how the two places are both linked to the same fallen civilization. Various districts and cities there maintain their own affairs, such as utilities and security. Without a central government no one is really doing anything for the benefit of others around them in terms of construction. So the ship power generator hooked up to one district only has physical wiring to its immediate area that had it built rather than a national power grid as a more harmonious civilization might do. Security is handled by individual gangs controlling these districts.

Despite being one massive continuous city at first glance, you could really look at the place as if it were a well camouflaged collective of independent colonies. Sometimes with miles of empty buildings between those colonies. They don’t have a military the same way we do, just a lot of people are armed and if they can be convinced to fight for something – such as wherever they call home – then suddenly the sheer number of people with guns becomes very notable. No one really invades Elasyn not because of its own defenses but because you run the risk of pissing off the entire Reach if you try since everyone tends to have some stake in the place. Though according to Vanessa there is reason to believe the planet has incredible defenses that are hidden. There is also an unconfirmed rumor that a mysterious armada will appear out of nowhere if the place is sincerely invaded. The story goes that the armada showed up, obliterated some ambitious fleet, and then disappeared again. It is highly possible knowing what we do now that there is a Warrens entrance in Elasyn’s solar system. Vanessa also picked up some interesting rumors that are all over the place but keep repeatedly mentioning Grand Chief Amasis in many of the stories. It is possible that Amasis is either somehow related to the Blaiken that live in the Warrens or is one of the entities that ran from them and in some chain of events that has something to do with Elasyn’s formation.

Vanessa also reports that Elasyn really isn’t all that bad. It’s just people living out their lives without a larger government to organize them. It’s just one city that’s completely crazy, to the point that she can’t make sense of it. She would guess some grand conspiracy somehow maintains it in a state of constant chaos. Though from here I can run some basic analysis. It’s population density is so high that really it just makes sense for organics to cause a bunch of trouble. Enphidia isn’t anywhere near as large or dense but it still has a lot of street violence and gang wars over tomatoes. Where there is economic opportunity there is also competition for it and it is just the way things go when they don’t have the regulation that us superior machines do. Though it is home to the chaos calculator so it would also make sense that he would keep the whole place in a permanent state of maximized chaos while somehow sustaining it.

We’ve also told Adrienne to come back from her work with the Zhulkites to prepare for the tech showcase that will be at the next Diadome festival as one of the other attractions besides the tournament. I’ve also invited the filthy elf to prep their work. We’ll be a part of a much larger show featuring mechs, cars, cyberware, and basically whatever the Adelaide corps are up to and want to market. We’re hoping to make a big deal of the voidforged showcase to get the attention of maybe some other mechanical species that might be out there somewhere. That and for the collection of some survey data related to the recent projects of overhauling Voidforged design philosophy we can use to figure out what the people themselves are interested in. Might be time to prepare some marketing and demo reels if you want to push any particular design philosophy. This one will be available to the public, and you know how the public sometimes might be influenced by less desirable qualities.

The latest Nekhul test of sending down some automated ships with their guns activated. Orbital observation reports watching the ships get ripped to pieces one after the other. Notably, the creatures did not change their behavior for the ships that were armed to provide them some resistance though they did get through the ship’s defenses very quickly. After the first ship self destructed they very quickly started disabling or triggering the explosions with each successive one, so they did recognize we were messing with them but it they still attacked the ships with enthusiasm. Si-Yeon reports that the only signs of metallic materials she can find on the planet are on these creatures and the few functioning buildings that remain intact like the planetary shield, it’s associated power facilities, and some other mysterious structures whose purpose she cannot discern. They behave as if they are starving for any metal they can get ahold of. Their behavior would be incredibly unique among mechanical species due to the way they move and the vigor they have for getting to the ships, or very common among Hive World species.

Reviewing VSEC who were never exposed to Disaster 6 reveals no detectable change between them and those who were. Which at least tells us that it’s not doing something physical to their fleshy brains beyond maybe smoothing some wrinkles or something. So at the very least the psionic super weapon isn’t terribly destructive to those it infects, which is good to know before we send more people back into that mess.

The team has been dispatched to assist with Renjala’s missionary plan as requested and start some propaganda campaigns. It is notable that the presence of other highly influential Solians has been picked up by the others and they’re starting to become more aware of galactic meddling.

Natasha has noted their awareness of this has prompted them to seek out assistance from others in the Reach, though they haven’t gotten much response on the matter yet. Though something to keep an eye on.

We’ve installed more turrets as requested to round the numbers off and another big ship has been added to the flotilla.

As for targets within the Hassani, their armchair generals are the abominations and monsters. The only mortals to achieve positions that high are those like Alystra who as we’ve noticed – aren’t exactly incompetent. Also learning that the Hydra has been putting pandem binds on people under its command means that we should do some additional scouting with the help of pandem knowledgeable agents to determine the validity of the target. Haggard reports this all has a lot to do with the structure of the Hassani. They don’t really have old men behind desks of higher offices, there is no need for them to maintain productivity from those they deem to be waning. Dragons are basically handed mayorship at the minimum and higher offices as well. The entire structure of the Hassani has powerful individuals wielding power over various groups of masses.

While not insurmountable or without opportunity, it feels relevant as your advisor to point out this means any of these attempts have a massively skewed risk to reward ratio. Targeting weaker individuals to disrupt their empire risks us getting caught and thus being blown up by the Hassani shortly afterwards. The reward being we take out some guy who is the assistant to a dragon who actually runs the place. All of this requires a much more thought out plan of what we’re building up to. Taking random action against the Hassani is too great of a risk for too small of a reward. Kaylen we had particular interest in given our history with her. Though any further action against the Hassani will need to be brought up with the member states. We learned that doing this endangers the entire Federation very quickly. If you want some minor targets, I can present them, but is it worth risking another Jaal’Darya attack just to be a mild nuisance? You’ll need to convince the other Federation members to vote on that one.

Stories of Lore 66

Greetings, this is Nakka’s News from the Reach Broadcast Network.Today we examine the people and ongoing trends as affected by current market forces. To help you plan your social investments as well as monetary.

Recently we have seen the northern sector experience constant chaos. The immigrants from the galactic north have been integrating slowly but surely as they can. Though some have been second guessing their decision, even seeing attempts to return to the galactic north with reports that the Zhulkite borders have started to become re-established with help from the infamous Iron Cradle. Though they are still likely to desperately need metal, mining operations are at an all time high as an entire galactic sector has been stripped bare by the Exerlus. Ship salvage is becoming worth more as raw material in the galactic north, so no need to fix those junkers up as long as you can haul them.

The Vessians have become much more sparse in the galactic north after an encounter with the infamous Queen of Ashes, in which it was discovered she was deliberately hunting them. It remains unconfirmed if the Federation deliberately sent her to do so.

Speaking of which, the Federation has been observed meddling once again, but now much further from home. Establishing an uplifting project for the Sugnam people in the south west area. Of course to absorb them, this is much further than they usually extend their efforts. Rumors are floating around of Federation explorers as far south as Kawako Six. They are likely planning some big moves, and if you live along the western corridor you may wish to consider your social investments in preparation.

On the other side of our home, Grand Chief Amasis has initiated the invasion of a neighboring system called Hephal. Home to a primitive species who have barely figured out how to get across water let alone space. It appears the pressures of the Vessian famine have driven them to seek yet another world to devour. The Vessians have historically acted more as individual mercenaries who scavenged the Reach to sustain their voracious appetites. Though with Haleh hunting them in the northern sector this has cut them off their more independent members from the wealth of food brought in by the Hive Worlds and the Federation farming operations. It appears they have consolidated several tribes to launch much larger formal invasions than they have in the past. Even going so far as to petition for and acquire formal approval from Grand Chief Amasis to support a colonizing effort on the soon to be conquered world. This may lead to a more isolated vessian society, and their mercenaries that many rely upon might become a little more scarce in other locations as they focus their efforts on large scale operations with their own kind. This might also be exceedingly dangerous if you live in their neighborhood.

In the southern section we have seen the constant growth of new initiates to the Reach. The solian demons continue to expand their influence, faster than even previously predicted. They are culturally distinct for their devious methodology backed sometimes surprising raw power. A dangerous combination. However, among their kind is a sub species known as the succubus. Similar to the Kanis species, they are capable of reproducing with practically anyone. Demand is growing rapidly, in the chaos of the reach finding a suitable partner among the sea of alien species can be quite difficult for rarer species. Succubi not only alleviate this issue, but are surprisingly docile. Making them almost ideal for the harem trafficking trades and resulting in a spike of interest in the market. As we know, this market tends to be particularly volatile and violent, so its expansion in the southern areas because of renewed interest is likely to have ramifications over time. No one knows where this sub species of demon comes from, but a Demon Lord named Lilli seems to have a constantly renewing supply. She can be contacted via the demon fortress that was newly established on Elasyn itself. Several of these creatures have been implemented at entertainment districts for those who would like sample the matter before making any bold decisions.

Rumors of a tech showcase have been brewing in Federation space related to the Voidforged. It is expected to feature some of the latest innovations in cybernetic technology, production, and fashion. Given the rarity of cybernetic components, it might be a good time to procure some contacts before a potential surge in the market.

The construction of the stations along the hyperlane has started, though it is a lot of stations and supplies to ship around. Also a portion of the construction supplies were stolen by pirates, not an abnormal amount but still worth noting that this region of space isn’t heavily traversed likely due to their presence. The pirates don’t seem to have any formal association with any groups we know of but we have reason to think this region is home to some smaller pirate organization.

Right now a major thing to consider is that we are building and supplying several station but they are empty shells at the moment. Convincing people to move there might be the next step so that there is any reason to visit them beyond just fuel.

Vynnoth points out that the whole “respecting federation laws” thing might be the issue with the blue dragon. They’re in that young reckless phase that Haleh never grew out of. So it’s hard to guarantee they don’t have some issues with some law or another. Also we would need to figure out where to find the people to fill the town intended to give to them. It’s a harder sell than normal given what happened to Sol to tell thousands of people to move to some town near the Diadem section borders so they can become a dragon’s minions. So those are some points to consider.

Vynnoth has sent some people to Jydoq to find the bronze dragon as requested while the base is being constructed to hand over to them if they can be convinced to come along.

Siora and Haleh are back from the plate expedition and the collection of memory crystals they acquired in the process have been sent to the tech department to extract it from. After two weeks they think they found the flight logs for the departing Ika fleet we were looking for and the angle they departed at. Then did a lot of math to account for everything moving for thousands of years to get our best guess. It doesn’t actually make that much sense unless they were going somewhere else as a pit stop on the way. The scientists were very excitable to go over the seventh iteration of calculations and ideas. They think this fleet didn’t leave from Diadem headed directly for the next galaxy, they went somewhere else first. By accounting for where everything in the galaxy would have been all that time ago, we have a solar system in the Hive Worlds to explore. For lack of any idea what is there, it’s currently HWZ-567. I have had the engineering team reinforce the bolts on Lancaster’s medical tank to ensure she doesn’t get out and try to go immediately again.

Wonaya and Ronnair reported that the Blaiken prison they were sent to find is more than abandoned, it was deliberately destroyed by what they think was an orbital bombardment. It is likely that the Blaiken sent another fleet to clean up the mess after Echo Prime destroyed their previous one. They have been sifting through the scraps but it is difficult to find anything useful.

Koharrel reports that the Sugnam Republic has been warned about the demons on the other side of the planet. However they’re still slow to respond to that. Those are problems on the other side of the planet and they are still consolidating things within the republic, as well as deploying the Tungsten Teeth to take over other territories nearby. Freeing the slaves while conquering the kingdoms to add to themselves as it were.

Continued observation of the starless deep space planet yields that the place likely has no intelligent life or at least not enough to construct anything technologically advanced. However, it has massive quantities of highly developed organisms and crystal structures. Scans indicate that this random point in space is likely a Warrens exit, which fits what we know about the Warrens leading all over the universe. Which would explain the high development of the planet despite lacking a star to give it any energy to work with. Though it is still very dark and cold, the native life is adapted to living in what we would consider incredibly inhospitable conditions.

Winter reports that after a lot of running around various back alleys, fences, pawn shops, and other places to look for salvage she believes the grimoire fell into the hands of what she would call a gang. They aren’t led by a demon lord but they seem ambitious and might one day try to become one. She is aware that they are lying when they say they don’t know what it is, but that is all she can tell for certain as they aren’t really answering her questions.

After awhile of data collection Hisashi’s research has come a bit further along and managed to figure out what he is detecting to an extent. However, we have at least confirmed that some of this stuff is nearly undetectable because it changes properties every few seconds. However, experimenting on you reveals that anything of particular interest in the Astral Wilds can be determined simply by getting 40% of the same data more than twice. Which does narrow down how to find Zero. Just look for anything that maintains a quarter of its properties for longer than five minutes. The initial dataset is him basically detecting you and the plane he is scanning from. Another challenge is the Astral Wilds disrupting his radar itself and now he has to build another one because his got turned into solid potassium for no apparent reason and then took off through the wall because it lost the ability to be physical and no one knows what force of gravity it was drawn to but it wasn’t anywhere in the asteroid lab. So there’s a chunk of potassium floating through Valjala to who knows where now. So he’s building another one, though unless a way to protect it from the Wild’s is devised these might be one time use things. Though shielding it the way you and the other planar entities shield themselves isn’t an option because doing renders the scanner useless. Essentially, to receive any intelligible information from the Wilds is to expose yourself to it. Though the machine lets you read the screen as a sort of translator so the operator doesn’t have to be the one to peer into the Astral Wilds themselves. Also he needs to build a bigger one to scan further out in order to look for Zero. If you want to clear the fifteen million credit research budget for the next sized one.

Before you go and kill Kaylen. A reminder that the Astral Wilds severs binds by way of traveling to infinite distance. You need to take her to Ankathi’s cluster or a similar distance, not just sit in the Astral Wilds. You were able to detect your own binds and find your way home by homing in on your rock wife once you were close enough, but couldn’t while you were reaaaally far away. Also ‘near-death’ might be too broad of a statement. The only reported method of ever working was the suspended essentia of Kharla’s doll spell. Slapping her into the hospital likely won’t do anything, neither will lichifying her. This really puts into perspective why all those warlocks back in the day couldn’t get out of their deals. Also why no one has found a way to escape Lillith’s contracts, this is hard.

Irae and the lances have gone to preach the good word to the post apocalyptic world of those aliens that Haleh blew up. Progress is slow since showing up to preach an alien god and his magic is enticing to some and fairly obviously a bad idea to others. There is now a counter movement to tell people to stop talking to Irae and while the attempts to kill Irae and the knights haven’t gone well for them. Those who have gone along with Irae’s preaching have now also been building a place to study pandem and test ideas of it. We are basically the demon cult of this planet now and beset by crusaders with scrapyard shotguns. Irae has been reanimating corpses of the crusaders and its very impressive to the followers and very terrifying to the other side of things. History majors are suddenly feeling very nostalgic.

The Insider has been constructed as asked. A moment of silence for the Rim Reaper concept.

We’ve begun construction of the Bifrost and Helheim stations as you requested. As well as consolidating the refineries into a bigger company to go around and mine whatever else they can harvest. Due to low competition and ease of access they’re currently rummaging around Valjala.

Waionoa points out she was technically already a cleric of Mokihi, but not with pandem methods. She just happened to live on the turtle as it were. Though she’s alright, and currently seeing the expansion of her production ever since Lilli started exporting Succubi again with the restrictions being lifted despite Quyana’s constant petitioning. It appears that despite Federation assistance, Quyana wasn’t able to win out with the Court of Lords for much longer due to the obvious interests in their recent expansion into the Reach and the distinct value exporting succubi had for their efforts. That’s a whole other matter. Wainoa is just basically busy with increased production and Mokihi is currently passing through the domain of a lightning elemental so she’s been having fun with that.

Inya’s expedition reports that the infected knight has been able to bind with the parasite, but this created a feedback issue since they inhabit the same psyche. This actually killed the parasite, but it almost killed the knight too. The knight is now incredibly messed up and lost several subconscious functions, most importantly breathing. The knight is on life support if they aren’t conscious enough to breath manually and exhibits a strong loss of cognitive functionality. This has served to further our understanding of why its called a parasite and not just a psionic life form. It was taking over her subconscious functions and likely shares some similarities to Koura parasites and how Si-Yeon became a whole new…thing…with hers. We don’t know what its end goal was but for some reason it was getting really deep into that Knight’s psyche.

As for psionic experts, if we’re ruling out Winter who is on track to be the Federation’s most powerful one. Larazja has a lot of Ilex’s knowledge passed on through the synapse. Though she can’t be described as an active practitioner. The cult of lucidity is still kicking around if you want to get one of them.

The idea of mixing it with Eden, it’s hard to say at this stage. It isn’t really a matter of overpowering it as much as keeping one’s own thoughts distinct from it’s. Further data would be needed with analysis from a psionics expert.

Mahuea sent some fire elementals scouting around the Rim to see what they can figure out to do with the area. The earth elementals, which are the same ones that helped with Diadem projects, are still hanging around Evershar’s colony. They still like to party.

When it comes to finding a druid to help with your incarnum space moths, I’m not sure how much a druid could help considering you bound to a bunch of them and that’s more control than most druids can pull off unless they do so as well with their animal companions. Though if you do still want help from druidic methods, the issue is most of them are bound to Haziel already. The rixa based section of them are bound to Jaerda instead. You sort of did so much work for the druid population and pushed for the pantheon so much that they don’t really have any independents laying around anymore. So you might have to work out a trade with one of them.

Also as a planar entity, the binds are giving them your domain spells rather than the other way around.

Drug research continues though Deniau points out that this is kind of a holy grail of psionics to be able to remove memories and only a twenty thousand year old galactic super weapon has ever been observed with the ability to do so. Which means restoring memories is also radically new territory. The next issue is the lack of new subjects. Deniau’s lab is a rather humane place of experimentation and a lot of the victims of Number Six have been in active rehabilitation so that they can get back to their normal lives, which makes them poorer and poorer subjects with each passing therapy session. He also isn’t really sure what Six does to people to remove those memories so its hard to determine if he should take a more physical or psychological approach to the situation. VSEC medical records don’t have brain or psyche scans as a part of a regular checkup making it difficult to get a before and after picture of what happened to them beyond the surface level loss of memories. Progress is effectively stalled at this point now that the easy ideas have been tested to not work.

We’ve continued with the ambassadorial tour, and becoming largely a trade station for bits and bobs along the way. Given the size and stability of the Iron Cradle, unless its attacked by Rahlken, we are kind of a convenient mobile station. I imagine with some marketing, there would be some potential in becoming a mobile reach station. We could charge rent, let people live here, be come the interstellar permanent living cruise ship. I’m sure nothing bad would come of having a bunch of pirates live with us or publishing our destination to everyone.

Setting up embassies is basically just renting some random place, but most stations do not really participate in large scale politics deliberately. Which means protecting said embassy is entirely up to us. Rampart did this at Kuhas by way of also having a bunch of gangsters led by Allison. You could probably accomplish an easier effect just by keeping nothing worth stealing in the place though.

As for Elasyn, they do not have diplomats or anyone to talk to. The point of Elasyn is actually its lack of government. No one is fixing the roads, maintaining building codes, or deciding who owns what land. Its sort of a galactic oddity that its able to function and maintain so much power over such a large galactic sector despite all of this. It was really just the meeting ground of powerful people because it is an independent location. Over thousands of years it developed itself into a super power just by virtue of being somewhere everyone was passing through all the time. It is probably why despite being within the Reach we’ve been able to ignore it for so long and no one has come knocking. No one wants taxes, treaties, agreements, or to tell us what to do as members of the Reach. Which is real convenient at times and sometimes the silence is unnerving otherwise. Somehow Elasyn predates the solian galactic awakening but even before the calculator got involved with it, it spent thousands of years as one of the most powerful ‘governments’ in the galaxy. We still don’t know how or why.

In other news, while construction is still finishing for the Minnisógnir station collective, a lot of the important systems are operational already. Given that the most important one were the giant telescopes, got that done pretty easily. Observation of the surface of Nekhul has yielded further information about the place. Si-Yeon has confirmed that there are things down there. Looking at them from orbit with an old fashioned telescope doesn’t give the best angle and we can’t create a scan to show you, but if you want you can see these pictures from above as well as almost to the side. Though the important details from Si-Yeon is that they are a lot of them. They are hard to track through the forest but she expects there are at least tens of thousands of them at the minimum. Likely millions, possibly billions. While we can’t get the best image of them from above, we can watch how they move and determine that many of them are either metallic or wearing metal armor. Sizes range from standard humanoids to fifteen meters tall. Many of the larger ones are mostly stationary. Standing in place for extended periods of time. This lil bit sticking out is likely a weapon.

This leaves room for a lot of speculation on all the small details, but it is likely the planet is overrun with these things though they show little sign of being an advanced civilization to justify the damage that was done to our few surviving mechs. Si-Yeon crashed one of the cruisers unmanned into the planet’s surface just to observe how they reacted to it. Whatever these things are, they immediately approached the crash site and within hours had stripped it down until the only evidence remaining of the cruiser was the broken trees where it had once landed. She observed that they weren’t attacking it or repairing it so much as breaking it down into raw salvage very rapidly. Though because of the forest she has no idea what became of the salvage afterwards.

For whatever reason, the creatures are drawn to metal by a seemingly animal impulse. She put in a request to have Wonaya stop by the station on her way back from her assignment in the galactic north for further consultation.

We’ve seen to expanding the offices and retool some of the docks in Enphidia’s location for shipping and receiving purposes for the mining company’s imports.

More turrets were constructed

As for major targets, depends what you have in mind. Kaylen was a special case of being important to us but not that important to them. Also we didn’t know about her bind with the Hydra before we did it so no guarantees we’ll figure that one out in time before abducting anyone else. That being said, our attempts of infiltrating the Hydra’s network has still always been a bit of an odd area since everything is maintained so separately. If anything the Hydra operates a lot like the Gauntlet once did. Using a decentralized collection of people who may or may not even know who they’re really associated with. We know a few of his operations that we’ve either infiltrated or kept tabs on over the years but there’s always more and none of them seem to have a direct connection to any other group. This is largely because each of the heads make up another member, it’s like dealing with our whole office if we were all physically attached to the same body.

I know Lancaster wanted to look into getting some of the other council members of Alnae from the Phantoms at some point and that might be a good place to start but it is hard to discern their temperament. Any other officers for intel would need to be a little less broad, what kind of intel are you looking for?

On another note, we’ve seen to establishing a secret base in the Demon Kingdom to keep better tabs on them. Though with even some rudimentary work, we’ve already found some details about what Euron did with Kharla. Because this was a very public event for the demons. Rather than being returned as the matriarch of House Vloz’Khress, she has been sent to the Demon King’s personal castle. Though its hard to assess what specifically is going on within there and we’re working on deepening our intelligence network in the area to find more information.

Though it is worth remembering that Kharla was one of the only people who the Phantoms were a bit worried about. With the current political situation between the Kingdom, Hassani, and Federation – I would assume Kharla was an opportunity to ‘attack the Federation’ and not piss off the Hassani while also securing an asset even the Hassani respect to dissuade any hostilities. Notably, they didn’t cause any problems for any branch of the Federation other than Ankathi who is not an actual member anyways. She just lets the Astral Order hang out with the Celestial one a lot, but it is sort of like the situation we once had with the Kar’Soluth not being formal members of the Hassani. Speculation aside, it is definitely worth keeping an eye on what they’re doing with Kharla. It could even be as simple as they just really like her the way we went to get Kaylen back.

Kuhas refuses the idea of officially joining the Federation. It is a part of their duty to maintain the hive border and not get too involved in power struggles. Especially between the Reach’s large scale political bodies who might have motive to destroy a border station just to ruin someone else’s day down the road. The Federation is still a relatively new foreign guest to the Reach, but Kuhas has spent thousands of years preventing the hive worlds from spreading their influence into the rest of the Reach and enjoys a bit of peace for that. Not to mention that less than scrupulous people tend to avoid border guards and the Federation hasn’t proven itself truly at home within the Reach’s culture. The last thing Kuhas wants is smugglers intentionally going around it, the lawless associated nature of the station promotes visits from everyone that needs their ship scrubbed down. Otherwise the spores of the hive worlds might spread further south.

From the early scout reports, the station south of Kuhas and north of Elasyn at the crossroads of the interstate is a station called Belomday. It exists above a planet that reached mutual destruction between all parties involved and left the surface of the world as an uninhabitable wasteland. The planet is still questionable to visit due to the intensely toxic atmosphere but some go down there to scavenge as it is otherwise just used as a trash disposal site. Belomday is a collection of space stations that strapped themselves together after the war thousands of years ago. The survivors of the war who lived in orbit would develop a self sustaining civilization that only used the surface of their former homeworld for resource collection. Eventually the stations of many nations were bound together and further added onto while the civilization rebuilt itself. They are considered one of if not the actual founding civilization that created the Reach as we know it today. Over time Belomday grew massive and exists as one of the largest space stations in the Reach simply by need to support its own native population. It is approximately three million square kilometers, not counting for the fact that it has multiple vertical layers.

The original natives were a warrior society, which sort of explains the problem they got themselves into with destroying their own planet in a war of mutual destruction. Though this is also why they are considered to potentially be the original Reachers. As soon as they figured out interstellar travel, they quickly made a mess of things to acquire even more resources for to sustain their station locked civilization. Though these natives eventually became more machine than their original organic forms, relying heavily on cybernetics to augment themselves just to survive. Then out of a transhumanist style of growth as the technology advanced and became more desirable overall.

It is a popular place to sell salvage since the natives need raw material to continue the expansion and maintenance of this colossal station. Rahlken often sells his captured cities here as one of his major places of interest. Now days it is one of the Reach’s most important locations and probably would have been the official unofficial capital of the network were not for the specific desire to use a place with no surviving ties to any civilization. Elasyn is a fallen world, serving as a glorified tombstone to its former inhabitants and it became the capital because no one could claim it as their own. The populace of Belomday are intensely Reachers. It is a location filled with hundreds if not thousands of individual species from all over the galaxy, its natives are not even the majority of the inhabitants anymore. Though it is also one of the few places were goods are produced reliably, since the station has the practical job of maintaining a nation of people it has many features not often found on Reach stations. Like working factories and farms.

Explorers report they outright oppose the idea of the Federation expanding at all let alone joining. Belomday is thoroughly embedded into the Reach and doesn’t like the idea of interstellar super powers enforcing their laws onto a traditionally lawless land.

As for large scale colonization efforts, the space between the major highways between us and Utewa are largely home to civilizations with less protections for interstellar piracy. Generally more focused on just being their own civilization and not getting themselves into trouble. Some are heavily fortified though as to dissuade Reachers from visiting. Though there is also a lot of wandering trouble in space to contend with. Reports indicate that the area is home to some sort of space based life form that likes to eat ships and no one is really sure what it is or if it actually exists. We could focus our efforts on diplomacy but many of the governments along the way tend to try to keep to themselves. If we colonize less inhabited areas it will be relatively easy going but we’ll have to build everything from scratch and see to populating it. There is a fallen world that is a pile of apocalyptic rubble that probably wouldn’t mind help but Haleh is the one that destroyed them. So they might still be upset about that.

The station immediately north from Utewa, other than the one that Utewa owns as a forward colony called Kawako Six. Another major crossroads station and is a popular road into Utewa’s territory. Not quite as large or important as Belomday but it serves as a gateway into Utewa’s neighborhood. The system it belongs to is colonized by a multi-stellar civilization who were using that system for expansion, though it became popular with travelers due to its consistency and the owners of the station being particularly hungry for business opportunities. The natives are not quite what Sol defines as shapeshifters but they are capable of altering their anatomy to different environments and can change some details of their physical appearance such as their coloration. Apparently it was once a part of their mating rituals as well as a rudimentary camouflage adaptation. Throughout the Reach races they are particularly talented explorers because of these abilities which is likely tied to their interstellar civilization’s expansion, since they are not very picky about their environmental needs and can colonize any planet with an atmosphere that isn’t super-hostile.

Kawako Six is a fairly good representation of how the Reach tends to evolve. The multi-stellar civilization that runs the area have their own society and are distinctly separate from the Reachers in the way they operate, but they just so happened to build a space station which was consumed by the Reachers as a point of interest. Their planets are still relatively disconnected from the Reach network and continues to manage its own affairs with its own distinct culture. Though they own and control Kawako Six, the benefits of interstellar trade and travelers led to it slowly becoming home to the Reachers. Over time the natives learned it was better to just play along rather than resist the sudden influx of scoundrels and ruffians. As centuries passed, the station became less of an outpost for its own space program and more of a Reach station.

The natives, known as the Tagal, were approached by the explorers to ‘feel them out’ about their opinion of the federation. They’re not particularly against trade negotiations but as one of the larger powers of the Reach they don’t see much benefit to joining a newer one. Larger in the relative sense to the thousands of civilizations and stations throughout the Reach, even if they aren’t quite at the Utewa or Tungsten Teeth’s level of influence. They are actually more helpful in explaining the Reach’s situation than Belomday were, who just said ‘don’t do that’. The Tagal’s actual civilization is two stars away, where things run a bit more what we would consider normal. They once tolerated Kawako Six’s guests and their traditions when they were a newer space faring civilization and weren’t really sure what was going on or how to contextualize thousands of different species of aliens passing through. Over time Kawako Six developed its own mind and culture and though it contributes economically to the Tagalian capital, they lost control of the situation and that was how the station became more a part of the Reach than Tagalian space. Despite the fact that they have a thriving world right underneath the station.

The Reach is anarchic by choice, ever since the fall of the Ika this region of space has been left to its own thing and it has allowed its inhabitants a sanctuary from oppressive powers like Nelta or the Zhulkites who might want things done a certain way. The Reach has an ‘every man for themselves’ type of mentality just on a larger scale. This is tied to their distrust of organizations to look out for everyone else once the ‘everyone else’ becomes managed by a system rather than personal connections. There is actually a very specific thing Reachers do not react well towards. Registration and identification. If you open a galactic DMV and demand to see passports, you aren’t really a Reach station anymore. If the Tagal were to humor the Federation that would involve a large interconnected system and notably the Federation does have registration and taxation. The two things that annoy Reachers the most. While their own civilization does use both of these systems on the planets and other stations, Kawako Six does not. Yet somehow Kawako Six has enough power that the rest of Tagal space can’t really afford to go to war with their own station.

While they can see the federation expanding by adopting newer civilizations who don’t know or want to be a part of the Reach culture, it isn’t endearing the Federation to any of the existing powers. Which they know we have a habit of doing. The Tagal are also aware that we’ve made enemies of the Hassani who have taken on the role of ‘the feared solians’ as far as galactic civilizations are concerned. The weird quiet little star that suddenly erupted into the galaxy and won major wars over and over again until it cemented itself as one of those ‘don’t piss them off’ civilizations. The tagal representative is pretty sure that Utewa will never formally align with the Federation because of this ongoing issue. Renjala revealed that Solians are some of the galaxy’s greatest pandem experts, which is what Utewa relies on for its own safety. Getting into an oppositional stance with the Hassani means becoming enemies with someone who is better than them at their own trick and they would be practically defenseless. For similar reasons the Utewa doesn’t want to piss the Federation off because we could do the very same thing to them. Both sides make Utewa feel very vulnerable for the first time in centuries and they’re constantly trying to make sure they don’t get on either’s bad side.

The exploration team reports this is a recurring theme with all the various major stations and civilizations along the Reach interstellar highway. They do not want to get involved in a larger organization than they already are for fear of attracting the attention of much bigger problems. They don’t mind trading and maintaining amicable relations in most cases, but the idea of joining the Federation is very off-putting to them for fear of everything that could go wrong for them from such a political stance. Younger civilizations tend to see the Federation as a bastion of civilization in an endless soup of anarchy and scoundrels. Such as Sugnam and the Caelkians, who haven’t been around long enough to get used to how the Reachers see the world. Established powers of the Reach on the other hand have a distinct opposition to the idea of forming large scale alliances. Though the Tagal ambassador did explain that if we wanted to make people more amicable to the idea, we’d have to take down Rahlken. His presence is the constant threat that all Reachers have to keep in mind when it comes to dealing with things like the Federation. Rahlken is the one the Zhulkites are scared of, and is perceived to be the reason that the Hassani haven’t expanded into the Reach either. He is also the primary force that keeps destabilizing any attempt at a larger system, Utewa is one of the largest powers in the Reach because they can escape him. The rest just play nice for fear of being his next target. To most he is a disembodied legend, the Reach is a massive stretch of galactic space and most have never even seen or heard of him outside of Nakka News reports and rumors. So for all they know he’s a cosmic entity. However, most of the major stations do know someone else who could have been the major station instead of them but instead became his victim. As a result, they tend not to be interested in making the same mistake.

The portals between Diadem and Twilight station have been constructed as requested.

Construction on the new city constructions near the plate borders is also underway, though slowly as it is a somewhat dangerous placement.

Vynnoth says she might know of a blue dragon that could be convinced to look for interesting opportunities out here in Diadem. Though as she warned, they can all be rather finicky and you are trying to outbid the Hassani for their attention. Right now the most promising blue dragon she can find is on the younger side so has less of a fortune in Sol to leave behind than others and would definitely be interested in some opportunities to expand it. Their name is Kasom, currently they own a more suburban county area on SV3. As an initial offering to get them interested she expects you’d have to give them command of a surface plate colony of at least twenty thousand inhabitants to match their county area on SV3 they’d be leaving behind. Blue dragons like to fly as it were. Even if the interior sections of Diadem are so massive that they could do so, trying to convince a bird that it wouldn’t prefer an open sky is pretty hard. Though the immediate complication is that Haleh also lives on a surface plate. While they could easily co-exist on opposite sides of even the same plate let alone opposite plates, these things are huge after all, it is still notable that dragon politics might flare up.

In terms of metallics, there is a bronze she might know of that is particularly keen towards getting into wars. They fought against Nelta during the invasions but lost their home, lair, hoard, and basically everything in the process. They are of a disposition towards helping in military actions but often as a mercenary. Dragons don’t like to be under someone else’s command as it were. They are currently wandering around jydoq and might be tempted towards the federation if we could offer them some sort of assurance that we aren’t going to be dead in the next two hundred  years. Also they cost eight times as much to hire as regular mercenaries but if offered a cozy mansion as well as their fees they might be willing to move their base over to Federation space. They run their own little military company, similar to Whitetalon’s whole history actually.

Vynnoth also pointed out that if you’re feeling daring, she knows of an older dragon that might be of a disposition to move across the galaxy and hang out with the Federation. They would be a significant asset on par with someone like Haleh. No one knows what color they are and they are often referred to by the title of the “imaginary dragon”. They are one of Sol’s foremost illusionists, experts in broadcast communication and visual media. The drawback is that they can be a little difficult. They are a mischievous prankster by nature and usually harmless, but every now and then people go missing around them. Part of the reason Vynnoth suggested looking into the matter is because they haven’t been in Sol since the Nelta invasion. Vynnoth has heard rumors that the imaginary dragon hopped aboard a Nelta ship and went back to their side of the galaxy to check things out. It is likely that Nelta has no idea what they ‘caught’ and are in over their heads.

The sugnam new republic has had its elections though mostly through the first fleet admiral (Walters replacement now that Walters has the big chair) sort of implying it was mandatory. They elected a fairly violent candidate which might be tied to the use of the Tungsten Teeth to topple other Sugnam governments. They’re still working their way through as it wasn’t exactly a massive quantity of mercenaries, they are just dramatically more equipped and capable so the quantity of Sugnam resistance has not been terribly effective against the quality of the mercenaries.

We already offered the new Sugnam Republic federation membership and they already agreed to a trial run of it though not a long term permanent agreement awhile ago. They’re curious about the stations though as they are not a space faring civilization themselves yet, they just managed to sneak into space aboard Reacher ships. So they’re also curious about at least shuttles and starships.

Ronnair and Wonaya are on the way to the Blaiken Prison.

The fifth plate expedition is underway though we’ve lost contact with them. This is normal and Siora goes missing all the time on these ever since the exerlus machine adaptations included more jamming technology after our attempt at warding them away with a signal, and that other time we tried to jam them.

Also the exploration crew that went to deep space looking for signs of the missing Ika fleet found something else out there in the middle of absolutely nowhere. There is a random planet with no star, existing in almost complete darkness. However it has very high levels of biological activity, a stable atmosphere, and a whole lot of really mean aliens on it. The exploration team that found it currently has no idea how or why it exists. It shows no signs of being where the missing fleet might have gone though. It’s likely an unrelated but potentially interesting discovery.

We’re still awaiting contact from Winter as to the ongoing status of her mission to the Demon Kingdom.

In the process of his research, Hisashi got his little radar to work and was able to detect the ever forming and disintegrating life forms of the Astral Wilds and confirm that is what he is detecting to  at least four percent accuracy. One of the problems is that things being ‘alive’ in the astral wilds is hard to define and sometimes the little radar is just detecting mana formations that appear similar to living things but are instead just miniature batteries. Energy sources that radiate that energy until they fizzle out. This also leads to his ongoing research as to ‘what are those things even’.

However, upon initial success he started looking to a more powerful version of the machine. He has stabilized it to look for specific patterns and is trying to figure out what he’s really even looking for. Specifically what collection of signals and information the sensor could pick up and what those would even mean to equate to ‘a thing we’re looking for’. One of the problems is defining what he is seeing without much reference, the Astral Wilds are so chaotic that a string of numbered data might be a little too ‘human’ in its comprehension to gather useful information.

He said he needs you to go in there and figure out what the numbers on the sensor readout even mean. Despite this being his field of study, he can barely protect himself from the effects of the Astral Wilds even when he is the one to summon it. It took twenty years of dedicated training for Jaerda to survive long enough with the help of two other planar entities. So it’s up to you, Jaerda, or Haziel to go and figure out what his data represents.

The team has been sent to help Evershar’s mining operations with glorified bug zappers as requested.

Inya’s team made it to the peculiar planet with psionic life forms. The knight that lowered her wards in order to attempt communication with them didn’t exactly go insane, but they keep having thoughts they know aren’t their own. It’s one thing to hear voices in your head, it’s another to hear your own voice saying things you pretty sure aren’t your normal intrusive thoughts. They are a primitive species and so don’t have very elaborate plans for galactic domination or anything, but they do not seem to enjoy the brain chemistry of their host. The more complex the psyche of the host, the more it…feeds? them. That or entertains them, not sure what they’re getting out of this exactly. Either way the knight in question has developed about three phobias, six fetishes, four disorders, and terrible impulse control. The alien life form in question isn’t exactly intentionally malicious more so that it is trying to harvest ‘experiences’ from the host. It is also a primitive world so they don’t have a refined society with an understanding of cooperation or even what we are. As far as it can tell, it just found a really intelligent creature wandering around some swamp and it’s going to ride this one out.

Over time and a period of observation, the creature started to demonstrate abnormal growth in its own intelligence while basically feeding off of the knight’s. It’s starting to think in ways it had not demonstrated itself being capable of before. It’s becoming rapidly more sapient while it inhabits the knight. One of the most notable and easily understood changes in the knight’s behavior is that now they become bored very easily. Always looking for things to do one way or another. They struggle more with each passing day to identify which thoughts might not really be theirs, as well as attempting to bargain with the strange alien to get it to move on to another host even if for a short while so they can recover.

Inya reports that their New Age researcher says it makes sense that a psionic life form could evolve its own intelligence rapidly if it has a particularly intelligent host. Though unlike 6ix, this one doesn’t go anywhere when its host goes to sleep. We have no idea how to get it back out of them. It isn’t yet smart enough to bargain or reason with, it is also really hard to tell when they’re talking to the knight versus their new parasite.

While observation is ongoing, we can sufficiently say that they are fairly primitive but it is shaping up that they will eventually evolve into something else at this rate.

Eerihild is currently in the Fae Wilds with her family until we call her again.

Also since it seems we’re not seeing the Outsider again anytime soon, we might need to commision a new flagship.

To put it lightly, Winter is dissatisfied with the idea that it’s not worth the effort to restore Lancaster. Also your replacement desk is shipping. According to this tracker it will be here in three days. I suppose it isn’t too surprising that the meat people are very touchy about familial values. No one ever gets mad and says they’d burn a world for me, and I’m almost everyone’s dad around here.

Though I think Walters and Lancaster are more concerned with how valuable the artifact wishes can be to be used on early onset alzheimers. Granted Winter is young and lived through the era of relative peace. She’s not used to seeing people dying while choking on their own blood, losing their minds as parasitic life forms eat their brains, or getting turned into Vasia experiments that leave people as a puddle of sapient flesh stuck to a wall. She’s not still behind me is she?

Anyways, one problem with your request for the LIDAR scans of the surface is the originally planned operations area is…uh…we have no idea. All records were destroyed on the ship and no one wrote it down on paper. However, we can surmise from mild observation that the first team had likely been at least interested in these city areas since we’re looking for a glorified memory stick. That aside though we have been getting some mapping done to get us an idea of what’s down there but a lot of these scans can be summed up as “that’s a lot of trees”. We have discovered some of those trees are REALLY  tall though. They’re concealing valleys and they grew tall enough to match the canopy of areas surrounding them. If you were to casually stomp through there in a mech you might suddenly find quite a deep pit to get stuck in.

We’ve also been scanning what we think were once cities. Also with some optical surveying we can determine an odd pattern. We’ve been conferring with Wonaya on the matter of how typical hive worlds look. As it turns out, ruins are not terribly uncommon but they are often a little sunken into the ground. Diadem lasted sixteen thousand years as an active warzone for endless armies of robots, suffice to say what was formerly Ika space is quite durable to decay. Something about their self maintaining machine spirits. Though what is important is what makes Nekhul stand out as abnormal compared to typical ruins in the Hive Worlds. There are only two types of things as far as we can tell, completely gone areas where structures must have once been, or still operating facilities. There is no in between. No half fallen over buildings overgrown with vines, no bombed out wrecks. It is either still intact, or completely and totally gone. Usually you would expect a bit of a gradient between the two extremes on any such fallen world.

We haven’t seen any sign of ongoing active civilization, though we know there are most likely military threats down there but it doesn’t appear to be in a collective like some sort of fortified outpost. It is quite likely the canopy of the overgrown hive forest is concealing a lot from us. Which at the very least implies that whatever is down there doesn’t build particularly vertical. At least not upwards, which rules out a city of skyscrapers. Underground tunnels or arboreal civilizations are still on the table though. However, we know the Ika are some of the greatest builders in galactic history and they do have a penchant for building obnoxiously massive things that would take the resources of multiple worlds to reasonably create. So the lack of such obvious signs is notable. However, the station construction is still finishing so we’ll see if we can get any more detailed information once observation is in place.

We’ve sent Vanessa to go hang around Diadem as requested.

The ambassadorial tour is hitting largely the same issues the Federation explorers are. Along the highway are mostly highly developed Reach stations. Normally the Federation likes to find younger, less developed, and more vulnerable civilizations to ‘recruit’ before they get assimilated into the Reach. The main route to Kuhas is dominated by very Reachy people. This close to Diadem they’re a bit more used to us and our fancy pants credits system, though to everyone else we’re the new kids around here. The idea of joining our new gang of upstarts is not particularly appealing to already established and wealthy powers. This is why the Federation ‘liberates’ primitive civilizations who are just discovering the galaxy but doesn’t get involved with the big players that overshadow us. As far as the rest of the Reach is concerned, we’re just the latest big station. We have nowhere near the prestige of Utewa or the Tungsten Teeth. We’re really just known for Vittles and sticking our nose in other people’s business for better or worse. Worth noting the Revenants are also known for that latter one.

This does sort of fit what Yasrena mentioned about us having a habit of helping out the little guy at the expense of making allies with bigger players. These stations are more aligned with the bigger powers of the Reach and its culture than Caelkia or Sugnam. They’re at least still amicable to us if nothing else for economic trade but definitely not likely to join a faction younger than them. While the Federation is a lot more powerful than any of the individual stations, that’s not endearing us to them any since they don’t perceive us as being more powerful than Rahlken or the collective power of Elasyn and its nearest stations. No one particularly likes change all that often and people are comfortable with the way things are, which is the immediate challenge facing the federation’s expansion goals.

Right now the Reach is our local neighborhood and we kind of need to decide which way we’re going on that one. If we want to try and conquer it, well ready up for war with a lot of crazy lunatics. If we want to immerse ourselves within it, we should send a representative to Elasyn and figure out how to be better neighbors. The highway and friendship projects aren’t exactly off the table in either case, it’s just a matter of what approach we want to take. Though ignoring the repeated advice everyone in the Reach has given us and just doing it anyways is liable to cause a conflict eventually.

Though one station along the route was a little more interested in the idea than the general trends. They were particularly interested in a few points. One, vittles. People like food as it were. The second being our manufacturing and securing reliable trade deals that might help them provide a stable market. Apparently the station has dreams of being a bigger trading hub than just fuel and safe docking. The third one was Haleh and Faithrae’s involvement in these agreements. Which was a bit of an ‘uhhh’ point for our forward teams. Haleh is infamous throughout the Reach and Faithrae is a local power that the Reachers get along well with. There might be something to leverage there.

Also as requested last month, we set up some hydroponics to grow food stuff. If nothing else it is tradeable. Not the most energy efficient to do that on a ship like the cradle but ehhh we don’t have a fuel shortage I suppose. Not yet at least.

We’re at the point where Kennae’s last known destination is beyond the reach of our network to safely operate within. Past the Blaiken Dead Zone is further than our explorers have ever gone and successfully returned from. Except that one crew who made it all the way to Nelta albeit in the middle of a war. This is above the paygrade of the average explorers for VSEC let alone our agents at this point.

Also we acquired some VSEC contracts to enhance our manufacturing productivity and profits. Though we’re having to scale it up because VSEC goes through mechs faster than a kobold with a cheese wheel.

As for Kharla’s doll mechanism. It is highly suspected that it was being done by her bind to Rozanis and Rozanis was actually the one who knew the spells to do so. Coincidentally, we think he learned it from one of Kanika’s grimoires and Winter is currently on her way to the demon kingdom looking for that.

Also what do you mean expanding miners offices into Enphidia? There isn’t really anything here to mine and logistically they’re already managed by the actual Flotilla.

Stories of Lore 65

The Minnisógnir collective over Nekhul has begun construction though with some challenges given the quarantine nature of the place and the distance between it and any operable point of contact for shipping.

The Plate 5 expedition, now that the lockdown has lifted, has been able to recall Haleh and Siora to Diadem in order to get moving. They’re in the process of getting everyone together and have set out to try and invade the 5th plate to look for any clues as to the fleet that departed all those years ago.

Vynnoth has already worked in media this whole time so setting up broadcasting propaganda was pretty easy for her. Though she points out that if you intend to include her work in beaming it at Sol, then she has some security concerns. As things are right now she’s just a dragon doing her own thing, if she takes an active stance against Kanika then she might be in more serious trouble. Given the range of her lifespan, she has more time for that to bite her in the ass than most others do. Though she also points out that if you wanted to attract more dragons to the Federation, they are unlikely to care about the ideals so much as the opportunity for personal benefit. Dragons typically see themselves as above any society they inhabit, if anything they just kind of leech off of it these days. It’s hard to beat ‘supremacy and free shit’ that they get with the Hassani. So there are two major things she’d advise to aim at, though questions if you even want both of the major groups.

The metallics are the ones that tend to be most comfortable with humanoids and remaining in their humanoid form for long periods of time. If anything there is an ongoing cultural shift among the metallics over the last millennia because of this. If you want their attention, you actually want to get someone a bit more…fun..than Lancaster or yourself involved. They tend to be rather sociable and steel dragons in particular have been always known for hiding in human societies. There’s actually a fairly strong chance that of the five dragons Vynnoth knows about on Diadem that there could easily be several steel dragons lurking around that no one knows about. By and large the stereotype of metallics is that they don’t like being in charge of things themselves and prefer to just take it easy. Appealing to them would involve looking for opportunities for them to find a comfy place in an already established society. Case in point, Vynnoth is kind of just mooching off of Adelaide for entertainment and among dragons Adelaide is basically her territory. The more cities there are for them to infiltrate and set up shop in the better.

The chromatics are however more prone to desiring to use their true forms and also much more self interested. By generalization, they also like to be in charge. There is a reason the Hassani council is mostly chromatic. Also that Haleh, the most difficult one in the Federation who lives on her own at her Ruffian scrapyard paradise on the upper plates happens to be associated with red dragons despite Vynnoth’s point that she might be a whole other thing. Chromatics largely like hoards, power, and to constantly remind people that they’re the biggest thing in the area. Though Vynnoth points out the best way to get their attention might have a mutual benefit. Chromatics are much more fiercely territorial, and the Federation has a lot of unused land at the moment compared to Sol. Offering to “invest” in them as territorial governors has some merit since they are liable to also help solve one of Diadem’s bigger issues with the machine wars on the plate borders. For all of Haleh’s problems, she and her ruffians have an abnormally high kill count on the machines. Mostly because they keep building weird junk out of the scraps but that was sort of Vynnoth’s point. Haleh is especially unruly, but her chromatic brethren are just as liable to set up their own cozy little territory and murder machines for you to help with that front line.

However in both cases, usually individual appeals would have to be taken. The larger format of just throwing a dart at the wall and hoping to pick some up would be a little difficult. Particularly when competing with the Hassani who gave practically every adult dragon their own city full of people to rule over and tells them they’re special every day. On that topic, Vynnoth noted that you might want to befriend a blue dragon just for dealing with the machines of Diadem. They are the best flyers which Lancaster seems to like, and they are electrical which means they’ll be comfy dealing with the robot horde. A black dragon would probably be able to make a joke out of the machine army, but Vynnoth is aware that socially they are the hardest for the Federation to get along with. Vynnoth can at least look into the plans and see what might be done after getting an idea of what the Federation wants her to do with the whole campaign attempt as she is pretty sure she’d have to individually target specific dragons she knows are most liable to be swayed.

Koharrel has been negotiating with the Sugnam. She reports it hasn’t been hard to convince the new republic that the demons are probably bad news, but the other hemisphere is harder to convince. Apparently the demons promised them ships and technology in exchange for those land rights to help them boot up their own space faring government. While that isn’t a unique offer at this point in time, it is likely an endearing factor for them to listen to the demon perspective. That and demons are incredibly charismatic. However, as for the new Sugnam Republic, they’re fairly easy to convince about the benefits of the Federation. If nothing else its a better alternative than the deal with the Reachers they currently have. Though due to the distance between themselves and Caelkia or Diadem they have concerns about networking. If one of Robert’s portals were provided to them they would be interested in a short term membership to see how it works out.

Across the planet otherwise, Koharrel has noted that the new Sugnam Republic has been using the Tungsten Teeth rather aggressively on a vengeance kick. The old kingdoms have been practically toppled already. The mercenaries are a bit over-equipped and over-trained for this scenario as it turns out. They’ve already killed thousands as they razed cities to the ground on the new Sugnam Republic’s orders and conquered more territory for it. Koharrel reported meeting with that strange maybe-Revenant again. They had some points to bring up about giving them too much power too quickly. Which makes general sense given that the Revenants have always been known for being a little anti-authoritarian. Whether specifically or by coincidence.

Si-Yeon is currently away at the Minnis….minno…minnesota, hold on. Minnisógnir project over Nekhul. The New Age containment experiments are largely in the hands of Vasia. That aside, Vasia has news on that front. First off, the sleepy herb did not alleviate the problems inside the containment unit. Though they can’t be sure what happened in it. Irae might have failed to be able to administer it, or it might not have worked. In either case, Vasia is pretty sure the problem isn’t actually putting the subject to sleep. They must have slept by now. The problem is most likely that the subject still has their APT since no one can perceive them long enough to remove it from them. Secondarily, no one comes back out of the box. Irae reformed in Valjala as planned, but there is no way to know if it was by her own volition or not. Because if it were to be Sarrai in there, she might still have her armor and weapons. Other lab personnel have been less fortunate. Either they’re dead or they forgot the plan of how to get back out. Research still pending.

When you say to keep an eye out for suddenly powerful Finsor pandem practitioners, you meant security wise right? Because we did kind of recruit the last one. I’m not even sure today that Otto can be trusted in terms of security. Not because he’d side with the Demon Kingdom, he’s just…he’s a lot for city constables to handle. Idle hands are the demon’s plaything, and he has already been arrested twice. Once for public intoxication and indecency – which is the polite way of saying he was jerking off on a train. Which no one can understand why, because he has a succubus for a familiar. Who uses ol’ righty when you have your own personal sex demon that you can summon at will? Second time for getting into a bar fight. He won at least. I took the damages out of his paycheck.

Anyways, in keeping an eye on the rest of the Federation’s warlocks, there are actually a lot of them. Most are not unreasonably powerful, at least not suddenly. Keeping an eye on warlock shenanigans is actually kind of an ordeal. Demons have a habit of making deals with practically anyone and sometimes just throwing shit into the world to see what happens. Ten years ago there was the Panemperia event where twenty eight students all became warlocks seemingly over spring break and rapidly started causing problems because one of them found a grimoire and kept messing with it rather than report to faculty that they had acquired it. I think they sacrificed some student, who came back to life and took revenge on them. Said book is currently in the vaults now, but was just an example of how this can get out of hand so frequently and easily.

I’ll keep an ear to the ground to see if any seriously over the top problems show up, for now it’s still under ‘general problems for the knights’. It’s their day job while they aren’t deployed to deal with things the rest of security forces don’t really feel equipped to handle. These things happen a lot around Panemperia for obvious reasons.

In other finsor business around the Federation, Enphidia has seen an odd number of incidents. Lilli has been back and forth from there. She is our primary merch production for Diadome so it isn’t that unusual for her to be here. Though there has been no official advertising for it, word has gotten around that she is here. She specializes in taking people to her kingdom who would like an ‘anonymous emigration’ and the sudden rise in missing persons cases might be related. Though Faithrae reported that she’s not doing anything especially nefarious to accomplish this, just making the same offers as usual and in a city as large as Enphidia there are bound to be people liable to take it.

The Diadome marketing strategy has been employed, though around Eden in particular most people don’t remember the full details of it so it has served as both a detection method and just actual marketing to re-familiarize them with it. Though we haven’t seen any lingering effects from the amnesia monster.

Inya is on her way to visit that psionic species with some of the New Age researchers and a few Arcurans to see how things go. They’re along the southern side of the Reach so it’s a bit of a trip.

Quarantine has officially been lifted now after everything has been thoroughly checked through.

Hisashi has been in the process of setting up his asteroid lab as requested. He did agree that he would like to run some rather dangerous experiments and this would be a great opportunity after all.

With communications re-established and informational quarantine over, I’ve caught up with the Celestial order. Ankathi’s mad, as we could all expect. Though she might be mad enough to start a war with the Demon Kingdom. However, for the first time in awhile she is in a uniquely weak position. Without Kharla she cannot manifest anywhere near her full strength, which is bad for us if we need her abilities for anything soon but it also means that there is a lot less she could do to us as well. Such as destroying Valjala for example. So despite her frothing rage, the First Temple is sort of avoiding marching off to the demon realm because without her direct presence they’re pretty sure they couldn’t win that unless the Federation as a whole was in on it. Even then, that could  invoke another fight with the Hassani and we’re basically outgunned on that front.

Though if you wanted to poke the bear, now is your window of opportunity. Who knows how many centuries it could take for her to find another medium as powerful as Kharla. Well maybe a few decades if Vasia’s plans for the celestials pans out but you get the idea.

We’ve brought Ecureuil onto the team and I cannot tell if they understand the briefing I gave them or that face was just them being a smartass. I should have added more options to that face plate.

Also we got word from Adrienne who is up at the Zhulkite border with the hive worlds and can only send messages back every so often due to the distance. The first issue they’re dealing with is that since the Exerlus destroyed every outpost in the area, the containment has already been likely breached. Hive World contamination does tend to be a bit slow. This is a large scale process that can sometimes take thousands of years, though they don’t mind the help with setting the outposts back up and slowly scouring nearby worlds for signs of Hive World spores, critters, and other such issues. Like a cloud of space moths for example, they can take a long time to travel between stars on their own but once they get there…problems. So many problems. Diadem hasn’t seen as much impact from the space moths since Renjala put bubbles over the farm and a lot of Diadem’s ecosystem is self maintaining thanks to the Ika machines. Also because it’s been thousands of years, so they already had their impact. It is apparently why the bodies of water on the surface plates have fish.

This is simultaneously an opportunity to learn more about the Zhulkites. We met them awhile ago on the expedition across the galaxy that got cut short to go help with the Solian war. Though we are still learning more about them as we go. They were a super civilization when we met them, though the Exerlus conflict has reduced them to a fallen one now days. Though the damage hasn’t been as bad for them specifically as the others in the area. They have been able to traverse the galaxy by their own means for some while now, hence the last outpost we visited was just an asteroid floating through space. Re-establishing the outposts is less a matter of getting people into space and more of setting up sustainable locations and communications. This has been the main thing Adrienne has been helping them work on is finding materials to establish communications across the border so that they can actually keep track of incidents from the Hive Worlds.

Speaking of Adrienne, the build off will probably get bundles into similar cybernetic showcases. Really it’s just a great big tech marketing fair, though this is a valuable opportunity to collect survey data on modern voidforged and compatible bodies.

The Lancaster rehabilitation project  continues to be underway on our end. Vasia is still very curious as to why it wipes memories of the Blaiken. Apparently Walters has shipped Winter out across the galaxy to the Demon Kingdom to go hunting for a book, so she will be away during all of this. I believe she’s already managing to get herself into some degree of trouble over the matter. Which brings up that Winter has already been pursuing other ideas of how to fix Lancaster. As advisor I am to point out her plan to try and procure the artifact from Faithrae is already dangerous as that would be getting involved with Faithrae and Lilli, then making a trip to Elasyn. Which is a place we don’t go to very often all things considered despite it being the capital of the galactic sector we live in.

Si-Yeon is at work at Minnisógnir setting up observation. Though constructing five stations in essentially foreign territory is taking a bit of time. In the meantime with quarantine lifting we have so far not seen Diadem immediately collapse so hopefully that’s going well. Vasia reports experiments with the contained unit have been hard to discern what exactly happens inside of the box. Renjala recently sent Irae in there and she reformed in Valjala which was the plan, but with no memory of what happened inside. Also no one sent into the box to try out various methods has returned from the box or been retrieved from it thus far. To be fair the interior of that thing is a dimensional space like a bag of holding so there’s a bit more room than you would think.

The cruisers report that Lidar does seem to work decently well with a big enough version intended for scanning the planet.

As for the attempts to create an amnesia curing drug, so far this has always been a bit of an iffy territory. Ilex once was trying to mess with this stuff as well, but removing or resurfacing memories has always been a bit difficult. The only people known to have any method of doing so thus far have been the Blaiken and they do it by reconstructing your brain’s chemistry and physics, not really viable in this situation. Though it does raise the question of what happens physiologically to the victims of the Sixth Disaster. Does it unwrinkle their brains?

Suffice to say progress is slow if we’re making any at all. Obviously if anyone can make the amnesia or recall effect there will be a large scale interest in the matter though so it could be profitable.

The search for Souris has been in a bit of a stall due to the fact that we’re still building the main observation stations for Nekhul. Though no jet fighter has come screaming out of the atmosphere to make contact at least. Calculating his trajectory is definitely iffy since all information about the operation was lost. One thing Si-Yeon has noticed, is she also cannot find the mechs that should still be down there. Granted she has no ability to tell where the landing would have taken place and she is doing this all with a telescope while also managing the station. Though there is a distinct lack of a battlefield filled with mech scraps.

Though her casual observations led to a report of things moving on the surface but from a top down angle it is a little hard to get any details. One of the things her stations are being commissioned to include is more advanced optical observation platforms to further this research. Hopefully with a great stabilizing device, since keeping an eye on a specific point via telescope aboard a cruiser is a bit of a bumpy affair.

We could start growing stuff on the cradle, though I don’t think it will have the effect you’re hoping for in regards to the food mafia. One of the primary reasons that exists is because of the galactic famine. Even if it has been over two decades since the series of disasters throughout the galaxy that led to the famine, it is still a lingering threat. Especially since Rahlken keeps abducting productive locations and Haleh burns farms down during her raids as well, along with piracy. A thousand factors all summarize up to being ‘food is big business’. Diadem is one of the few places that is relatively well fed thanks to the surface plates, but selling it to other Reach stations is incredibly profitable. If you want to make a dent in the overall economics of agriculture in the Reach network, we need to upscale the plate farming on Diadem by a hundred fold. Then replace everyone working on them with slave labor, golems, or automation in order to make it extremely unprofitable for anyone to compete with Vittles. Then we will see the Adelaide overlords get richer and more powerful as a result while fewer opportunities for individual enterprise are available to less economically advantaged types.

One of the issues with all of these logistics is because food is big business, it’s also a great target for piracy. Which affects a lot of the rather high costs since security is a necessity. VSEC has deployed the VIPER team to help alleviate it but there’s another element to consider. A lot of people in the ‘food mafias’ overall are specifically those that do not want to join VSEC because of the constant threat that they get deployed to fight killer robots and pirates almost constantly. Increase food production, you get a security shortage next. Increase security, you get a black hole of tax spending and probably spawn gang wars as people try to get in on Faithrae’s cornerstone markets. It’s a never ending chase for a utopia one step at a time but growing hydroponics on the Iron Cradle isn’t going to put a dent in this. The market forces that enable tomato gangsters is the Reach Network in particular.

The idea of having Ankathi sever Kaylen’s bind has turned into a conference with Ankathi about the realities of attempting that. Mixed in with her still being quite pissed off about the Euron incident that took Kharla. Though that is Renjala’s problem for now. We’re just concerned about Kaylen here at the office.

The problem being that severing a bind between two people without either party being involved is extremely difficult. For perspective, if anyone knew how to do it then surely Reika would have been able to escape Barachiel without needing him to die. Though it is correct to assume the one person who might know how would be at least someone in the Astral Order. With Ankathi currently missing her medium and no sufficiently strong enough one’s available, she can’t do it for us. The other problem being, even she can’t really do it. It isn’t just a magic ritual. There are only three ways to separate a bind with neither participant being willing. The first is the Astral Wilds combined with sheer distance, and the second is an AMZ. Both are only temporary measures though. The third is to kill one of the two, with some weird loopholes for ‘near death’ scenarios. Like when Kharla turned Reika into a doll and that cut her off from Ankathi permanently. Though Renjala using his phylactery doesn’t seem to count given how often he’s used that one.

The search for the elusive Kennae continues. What is strange is that it is easy to find places he has been, as he leaves quite an impression. Yet no one can figure out where he’s gone. According to the Playatis, they did actually meet him though had no idea he was significant in any way. Last they saw, he was traveling across the dead zone to the eastern side of the galaxy. They are judging this entirely based on departure records and if he turned left at any point, then they have no clue.

We got the process of setting up Forgehall underway. Faithrae asked if you’ll be securing VSEC’s military contracts with that one since it would be a good use of  your connections to get it some promising business.

Also you do kind of look like a cop sir. At least an agent. We all dress too generically formal around here except the field agents who all look like pirates instead. Half of them are pirates I suppose.

As for asking around about Pandem, you should try asking Renjala. This is his area of expertise after all.

Stories of Lore 64

Yes Admiral Yorikane was also surprised at how quickly and frequently they had to take over things because Lancaster got herself into trouble. Welcome to the command chair Walters, expect to be here more than you would think.

Aryn put together another few candidates to replace Sarrai.

We got in contact with Scholar Zaikies over at Playatis to get a quick summary of the Ika’s 6 disasters people know of. Though these all occurred over sixteen thousand years ago so many don’t know or care about it anymore, scholars like Zaikies find it to be an interesting tidbit of galactic history. Though these are considered to be the six big ‘oopsies’ they made that resulted in their own downfall and presumed extinction.

The first and most well known is the Terlim. Chronologically they were not the first one they made but they are the most famous. Automated lifeless machines designed to be military robots. Really it all started with an automated turret that had the ability to build more of itself and somehow it spiraled out of control from there. Giving rise to a  machine that almost destroyed the galaxy in Zonaricht. They were self replicating and managed to spread through several systems before the Exerlus got involved. By then it was too late.

The second is technically missing. Zaikies knows there are six and all of his sources indicate the others are third and so on but perhaps due to the sixth one there is no real record of the second. At least not that Zaikies has found, there is just a strangely missing entry which is referred to without context as to what it was.

The third was something the Ika thought to label as ‘The Great Freight’ and it was intended to be a colonizing project that would make it easier to move large quantities of things to new worlds in need of supplies and reconstructed structures. Everyone else called it the ‘Star Eater’. Similar to a lot of their technology, it didn’t need a pilot. Instead using the machine spirits similar to the Diadem guardians, though it was such a vast project that they needed thousands of those spirits to operate the thing. It went insane and started eating solar systems. Including their own. It would then try to ‘colonize’ places by dumping those stars into other spots around the galaxy. Which would destroy another solar system or three in the process. It turns out smashing two stars and several planets into each other is not ‘twice as nice’ and instead just destroys everything. It was finally stopped by the Ika building a super weapon of such power that they could have fired it into neighboring stars and destroyed them. They only stopped it after, in Zaikies words, ‘perhaps nine dozen populated systems’ were destroyed.

Which leads to the fourth big whoopsie. This one is a little more close to home. That one layer inside of Diadem that we assessed somehow used Diadem’s star as a gun, that’s exactly what it does. The first one was the one they built to stop their third problem. The Diadem weapon was built to be a bigger more powerful version of that weapon. Theoretically if it fires, it destroys the star immediately and Diadem was supposed to be able to then go pick up a new one. This is part of why the plates shift, there is another sub system of Diadem that was made to accommodate taking over other stars as it needed to. The plates are one piece of that overall design. More importantly, the weapon drew the attention of the Jesai. Diadem was once fully populated. If you do the math you start to realize just how many people disappeared in order to leave the ring empty. The weapon itself wasn’t the disaster, the loss of trillions was however. With the loss of the alliance’s capital, the economic productivity of the ringworld, and several other factors that is difficult to even imagine – they started to fall apart while still being actively hunted down by the Terlim.

Number five was they opened a rift to Rixa that they kept open for a few centuries in order to explore other planes, but also to get Silnian assistance with fighting the Terlim. You will notice their homeworld is in what are now the hive worlds and are overrun with silnian descended organisms. While it was a necessity at the time to combat the Terlim, the long term effects destroyed hundreds of smaller civilizations in that section of the galaxy as they were overtaken. The problems are again very difficult to summarize into a simple explanation as it took different effects on thousands of worlds. It was an unimaginable level of chaos in what was their home region. Some planets were overrun by aggressive flora that destroyed infrastructure until nothing remained, others had problems that I can only describe as ‘zombie ghoul apocalypses’ and some worlds just had their inhabitants eaten alive by ravenous tiny insects. Some worlds survived and continued to evolve alongside these events, such as the Exny. The hive worlds were always a consistent place of notably extreme bio-diversity. Though seventeen thousand years ago, the Ika made the problem so much worse and their home systems were consumed by it.

Number Six we don’t talk about.

The Exerlus propose, perhaps as a joke it is hard to tell with Echo Prime what is a joke and what isn’t, that the seventh disaster was the creation of Mother and what would become the modern Blaiken. Normally that would just be a ‘oh thats a thing’ but we recently discovered thanks to Jiyan that the hyper-isolated empire of the Blaiken is actually concealing its true size and scale within the Warrens. They are also technologically one of the most advanced civilizations in the galaxy, halfway between everyone else like Nelta and the Exerlus. There is a chance that a war with them could be as bad as a war with the Terlim.

Kaylen has been sent to the the prison at Cayetano and is pretty much just being kept in stasis for the moment via extremely liberal use of tranquilizers due to a general fear that both zankists and elves are somewhat resistant to sedatives. Might kill her, might not, we’ll see.

Eleazor reported back that the Exerlus aren’t terribly familiar with mana ruptures or dealing with them. Since they are machines this isn’t really a problem that they ever experience. They have the data on the subject but procedures intended for use on solians are lacking. Most of what they have is that the jesai have a ritual for this but they’re not sure how well it works on solians. The ritual has been forwarded and it took all of thirty minutes for an arcane engineer to notice it would cause organic solians to explode. The ritual would be more suitable for something like arcurans or dragons who are more mana based. It is a step towards our own research into the matter though.

Scout cruisers went back to Nekhul to begin investigating the possibility of construction, escorted by Si-Yeon’s personal lab cruiser. Apparently she preferred six soldiers that had been her most direct assistants during the previous incident since they had already been exposed and didn’t have as much to lose. One thing they found was that jamming communications gave it a medium to jump through and it got onto the cruiser with the jamming equipment. Si-Yeon has made a note that it doesn’t actually need it to be in the spirit of communication, it transfers as psionic phenomena. Which is what the jammers use to block comms, which resulted in Disaster Six being able to transfer itself through it. Overwhelming it with signal garbage just lets it leap through that too.

So she made a note that the observation stations shouldn’t bother trying that one. Though due to the range limitations of the phenomenon, the only way it gets into orbit is if it finds something to travel through. Communications obviously being its preferred method. However, it also can go through scanning data. Attempts to scan the planet allowed it to ride the returning signal of the scanners, resulting in another problem on the test cruisers. This has led Si Yeon to the theory that the barely operable planetary shield around Nekhul might have been maintained by something a long time ago to stop it from getting out rather than to stop orbital bombardment from getting in.

Though it does not transfer itself through typical light. Si Yeon is still building a fiber optic test to stress that theory, but so far she has been able to observe Nekhul with an old fashioned telescope without incident. She was only doing it for an experiment and surveying the planet with such a method would take forever, so all she reported was ‘there are a lot of trees’.

She has also commissioned Steamworks to build the station as if it were being run by pandem corrupted executives. Though they have never done that before so they’re seeing how much they can do to with the request. There has been no sign of Souris in the meantime. At least not that anyone wrote down. Construction is underway with Si-Yeon’s guidelines that are being developed with cruiser experiments as they go.

In regards to the Utewa, Walters let them know he’ll be back.

Haleh took on the expedition to Plate 5 rather than deal with the media. Though is somewhat irritated that she was asked to do one thing out in the reach and suddenly is being asked to do something else now. Vynnoth still isn’t sure if you wanted her to do anything in particular for PR or just start an ad campaign.

The ruffians asked if Diadem is still in lockdown or not before they bother making the return trip. Technically it is and we could lift it if we’re confident that nothing is going to get here from Eden.

Koharrel is working with establishing the Sugnam Republic as requested, though it is definitely taking time to get off the ground. Bureaucracy moves slowly when everyone uses crab claws. The Tungsten Teeth were an easier matter though, they’ll take the paycheck. As per the Sugnam Republic’s orders they assaulted one of the major cities of the old kingdoms recently.

Quylla pointed out she doesn’t have anything to do with Lord Hrath and isn’t sure why she’s being contacted about this. Most of her work is within the Demon Kingdom and she lives in Vloz’Khress territory. The demons aren’t really interested in getting involved in a liberation war, stating they’d rather just remain neutral and work things out for themselves with the Sugnam. Though they promised that if the pirate mining operations were to spread to the hemisphere they’re setting up in that they’ll deal with them accordingly. Koharrel is pretty sure they’re concealing the fact that the demons are probably going to get even better land usage rights than you would have given them that might be outright exploitative. So they would rather not be involved with either us or the pirates since they’d be able to make more for themselves by minding their own business. She reached this conclusion because the demons have been keeping an eye on any communications going on within there sphere of influence and those over at the new republic side of things

As for the Grimoire, Lord Hrath pointed out that he can’t do much for us on that front. While he knows of various assets like that, he has no way to verify which ones were made by Kanika specifically as she probably has a tendency to not put her name on them. However, if Rozanis was in fact in possession of one as we assume then he knows that all of Rozanis’ assets are now under the control of House Vloz’Khress and that specific territory is now under the domain of Lord Ecsanul who was recently propped up as a new demon lord to help manage Vloz’Khress control of the territories they once had. Though before all of that occurred, lesser demons looted the place after the Federation assault left Rozanis’ fortress in ruins. A grimoire would be pretty obviously valuable, though Hrath has never seen it he would assume that Kanika isn’t one to make hers look like a personal diary. If it was bound in leather, had fancy runes on it, and all the trimmings then someone definitely would have wanted to loot it. He’d recommend looking into starting to track it down within the neighboring territories that were unaffected by the war. Specifically the lower society where looters would have tried to fence the thing. That or find some demonic lich in a back alley, that would be a pretty obvious giveaway too.

Through a series of manually handed off reports that got to my office here at New Jamalia, we’ve been informed of what Euron was up to out here. Apparently he was plotting to assault the First Temple that Ankathi currently has control over. He was scouting us, apparently this was all a rather convoluted plot to get Kharla back from Ankathi. I have here Wolum’s notes that they did seem particularly invested in that woman for some reason.

The comms and pandem lockdown proved a perfect opportunity for them and they improvised to go immediately. So I also have a note here that says Ankathi is being bitchier than usual lately but I told the messenger we have a comms lockdown due to 6ix and so I can’t take her calls directly. That’s a problem for future us.

Haziel provided a ‘forbidden fae herb’ to New Age to create a tranquilizer for Eden. It took a fleet of freighters with thousands of tons of the stuff. Steamworks managed to break every crystal in Eden City and use good old engineering to keep the critical systems afloat long enough to sedate everyone for a few hours to knock it out. We’re still cleaning through everything to make sure its safe to lift quarantine, but things are looking good. Now we’re also just doing bulk shipments from the Tyne computer company to put all the systems back together. At least this thing is relatively easy to remove as long as someone is actively trying to do so. It also isn’t very dangerous unless it reaches Diadem. Though New Age did warn that this was all the immature offspring of the real one. It replicates itself and its smaller ones grow over time. They have no reason to be sure of it but there is a chance the true original ‘body’ on Nekhul is much stronger and more dangerous.

This is kind of all just wild speculation but in matters of this thing, paranoid levels of caution seem to be the route Si Yeon is taking. Her notes from the incident indicate that it was indeed growing stronger over time, if not as it got its psionic calories from eating the memories it was most interested in. Which implies the one in the containment unit is already much more difficult to deal with since it is attached to something it constantly feeds on. There is also a theory of Si-Yeon’s that the original ‘big one’ didn’t leave Nekhul aboard anyone for what has to be a reason. Leading to the hypothesis that it is either attached to something more valuable to it, or that because it was designed as a weapon there is a method of controlling it on Nekhul.

Hisashi’s work is still being kind of stalled since he was working out of Eden City and the lockdowns have impacted his ability to research, get parts, and open pandem communications to the Astral Wilds which while under infection might be a teeeeerrrible idea.

I have commissioned our finest voidforged artist in section three of the cradle to come up with posters for you. Our best market researchers have found that while solians respond most to implied fleshy nudity, voidforged actually respond more to overly intricate compositions of machinery. A natural curiosity for ‘what the hell is that pipe there even for’. So I had a blacksmith design an overly complicated lacey lingerie set for you made entirely out of copper wire coiling that we could use for the posters. Thus attracting the attention of both potential audiences! Then we just stick a weapon in your hand to snag the arcurans too. Research data indicates that no one actually cares whether or not the outfit is practical or comfortable, also neither are concerns for us. I am a marketing genius. Also it’s not fascism, its… uhh what do the democrats call it… campaigning!

Anyways, strict comms blackout is still being maintained for Diadem and the Cradle to prevent any chances of infection. With people having to fly halfway here, space walk to a station, sleep there, then space walk to another ship, then fly the rest of the way here. I have in the meantime found out how to put a voidforged to sleep at least and was able to get Malgier out of containment. It involves a lot of electricity.

No need to worry about scouting that elf engineer, I have already had Nah Division compile me a detailed profile on them. I have their name, address, banking information, and I put a bug on their outgoing comms to keep an eye on what designs they keep posting to the aethernet. If they want to challenge me to a build off, I’ll be ready. Apparently they’re a former Engineer for Siwa Industries. They might have been a part of our earliest prototypes from back in the day. Their designs are pointless, featuring form over function. This loser keeps trying to make Voidforged designs that are socially appealing, it looks like bad fanart of a mecha elf. They don’t put nearly enough swords or laser guns on anything. Though apparently they have attracted the attention of some wayward voidforged on Diadem with their paint and body shop. I am obligated to invite them to a demo that me and Adrienne intend to conduct for market research. So I can publicly crush them.

Speaking of Adrienne, she’s probably at the zhulkite outpost by now but due to quarantine and the fact that she is very far away, no idea what she’s actually doing out there. Probably something dumb, like working with the zhulkites to make easily modifiable outposts.

As for the Nekhul incident’s survivors, well we already had them all in therapy so psyche evaluations were already ready to go upon request. Most of them have no knowledge that they survived something apparently horrible and seem irritable at the constant probing and quarantine measures since they have no understanding what they are for. They also don’t remember having their APT’s removed and this has made them more irritable since they are used to having the convenience and communication that it provides. It doesn’t help that New Age is a particularly vague but menacing agency, so answering questions to their subjects is not their strongest area. It is unique for how dangerous the situation was that no one appears to be affected by it. That is probably how it got so out of control all those years ago, if no one cares then no one tries to stop it.

Deniau is working on the concept of drugs that help you retain memories though that’s never really been done before. So we’re on the trial and error phase, the problem is that the only way to get new subjects to test the idea on would be people who have been infected by the Sixth Disaster.

Chevalier agreed to go and help with rehabilitating Lancaster. Though you were correct, she can’t remember a lot of the details of raising Winter. Actually it’s worse then that, she couldn’t remember Winter’s name. She just remembered she had a daughter of some sort and recognized a picture of Winter. However she has no recollection of their name or more importantly, who the ‘father’ was. Which lead to another investigation by Si-Yeon. Lancaster doesn’t remember the Blaiken prison or meeting Mother either. We hadn’t thought to check on that one. It appears the Sixth Disaster removes memories of the Blaiken as well.

We know both the Ika and the Kanis were in the same alliance together and both lived on Diadem. The Kanis being the species and Blaiken being the nation that eventually took political power. With their offshoot being Mother who is now out with the Blaiken 2.0. So it isn’t unreasonable that the weaponized amnesia also was meant to protect the Kanis. There might be other members of the old alliance that no one can remember for similar reasons. The entire Reach and Hive Worlds were a part of a super massive alliance of worlds back then so there were bound to be more than just the two species running things back then. This was after all a military weapon gone wrong, it is also very likely that it removes memories of the Terlim. Which likely contributed to the Terlim war getting so out of hand.

As for the Ika ability to control voidforged, they can’t actually even control their own machines. They just have the ability to ‘ask for a favor’ via intrinsic communication and it doesn’t work with voidforged at all. Apparently the qualification is that it has to be a machine without essentia in order for them to speak to the spirit of the machine. Otherwise the machine’s spirit can just speak for itself verbally and there is no need for any of this. They can control a voidforged by asking politely though, which they say is about the same thing.

Also new candidates to replace Souris are available.

Right now we have Kaylen kept in a coma over at Moncayo, though there is a concern that if she’s missing for too long that the Hydra will know how to summon her even while she’s unconscious. That or they’ll figure out we have her eventually.

Allison has departed from Kuhas to make her way to Moncayo, though with the portal network under quarantine she can’t take the shortcut through Diadem and is instead forced to travel the entire length of the Reach to get there. Which will take her some time, though she doesn’t mind too much since at this point she’s pretty good at navigating the Reach. After the last thirty years of living on Kuhas she’s more Reacher than Federation.

Rampart isn’t quite in range to figure out the exact details of what Euron’s goons are transporting. They mostly work out of Kuhas at the furthest north point of the Reach and Euron’s transportation is going south rather quickly. It is most likely to be someone related to the Reach though rather than some sort of virus. That is more of a Jaal’Darya thing anyways.

No sign of Kennae at Cayetano, it is likely that if he was there we would have known if he passed through previously. They’re headed to visit the Playatis next.

As for the Enphidia underworld, Faithrae could be considered to ‘own’ all of it even if independent gangs will appear now and then. Gangs form when a group feels a need to rely on eachother more than the society they inhabit, so there is only so much you can do to stop them from forming in various neighborhoods out of what they feel is a necessity. Though these smaller gangs aren’t quite the same as Faithrae or Selona style enterprises which deliberately specialize in illegal activity. Usually these gangs will be small time thieves and fencers that work together for example. Due to how few things are actually illegal in the Federation, there isn’t much for smaller gangs to do in the meantime. The slave trade is not really something small time street gangsters can get into, and they usually aren’t interested in probing the security of VSEC to become smugglers.

The most common things small time gangs are doing are trying to take over structures in Diadem that remain abandoned in the endless city rings. Often using such structures in the pursuit of profit or as a place to run some aspect of an otherwise legitimate business to avoid things like inspections or taxes. Some are even trying to start their own towns for various economic reasons that led them to thinking that would be a better idea than trying to get a regular job. Though the whole reason that’s illegal is less to do with Lancaster wanting to own all the things and more to do with the killer robots that might kill people if they wander too far from the safe areas. Growing your own food to make it cheaper isn’t illegal but is apparently a gangster activity these days due to the margins on it. Half of all gang wars in Enphidia that have nothing to do with Faithrae are people fighting over grow houses that just grow tomatoes in the Squats. Corporate criminals in Adelaide are much more focused on taxes and ordnances that help them make a profit rather than doing anything legitimately dangerous. So Faithrae doesn’t necessarily own all of it, but she owns all of the more hardcore elements of it. Assassination, the slave trade, extreme gang violence, and the smuggling networks are all in her domain. Most people who would be considered criminals in Adelaide or Enphidia don’t touch the kinds of businesses that Faithrae will, and a lot of her work is actually based in the larger Reach network using Enphidia as a base of operations.

All the small time or white collar criminals generally fear Faithrae because she operates the businesses that get into the realm of Selona or Solvang style activity. Where it is profitable to have a large number of really dangerous people on staff at all times. She also keeps our pirate sub-company with the Nomad flotilla busy. Usually preying on other organizations in the Reach outside of the Federation.

As for the kidnapping news back on Thenica, people have indeed noticed that Kaylen went missing. In her place another of the councilors has taken over but most regular people aren’t sure if Kaylen died, was taken by someone else, or if she pissed off her own boss in the Hassani and they made her disappear. For all they know she’s on a vacation retreat with a beholder as a harem slave just to entertain monsters. Due to her status as the most humiliated mortal in the Hassani Empire, its kind of hard to tell if she was taken, killed, disposed, or is being subjected to even more of the usual.

Also I suppose its a bit late, but now that we can work backwards from major events we figured out what Euron was doing here at Diadem. Apparently this was all a plan to scout the pantheon of the Astral Order because they were planning to go get Kharla back from Ankathi. Lilli did mention to Renjala many years ago that the Demon King himself has an interest in Kharla as it were. It is likely that Euron knew it would be good for his career to deliver Kharla back to the Demon King. Also that the plan they were concocting had to go much quicker than they expected since our lockdowns inadvertently stranded the First Temple from any assistance for long enough for the Demon Lords to invade it. While they might not have been able to take on Ankathi directly, they knew that Ankathi had bitten off more than she could chew with Kharla. Who has managed to dominate seven demon lords with her pandem abilities before, the only reason no one noticed she could do it was because they drove her insane so she wouldn’t use that power to exert her authority over them. Even Ankathi couldn’t keep control over Kharla if Kharla were to actively resist. Making it seem as if Ankathi had stabbed one of Kharla’s children was a way to wake up the crazy bitch enough to resist Ankathi’s control.