Stories of Lore 2

 

This is Exme Faythe, reporting from Thenica today. After the recent death of so…so very many people of Alnae high command, a council vote was enacted to grant the title of Grand Marshall to Kaylen Yuriko. Many are supportive of the prodigal general’s promotion, though some criticize her inexperience. At ninety four years old, she is the youngest Grand Marshall in Alnae history. Prior to the invasion of Sol, she was only a colonel and commanded only one brigade. Though she has seem some success in the field, previous Grand Marshall’s had lost more battles than she has ever seen. However, the Alnae high command has been repeatedly targeted and now there are few candidates left to take on the position. In a risky gamble, the High Council have decided to elect a grand marshall with enough individual prowess to prevent her own assassination instead of based purely on command experience.

Kar’soluth has made bold invasions onto Shetou territory on SV2-Beta, attempting to take control of a major city belonging to House Sharen. House Sarghess has successfully taken control of the city in a surprise attack. With most of the citizens still bearing loyalties to House Sharen, it is unlikely it will be attacked from orbit and Jaal’Darya have moved troops overtly into House Song’s territory. Threatening a great danger to the territory if House Song moves to assist Sharen. The situation is still developing.

Valdir has continued to ignore everyone and keep flying elsewhere in the galaxy and they will not respond to any of my emails as to where they are actually going.

Attempts to rebuild lost areas are going slowly, the famine brought about by the invasion has gotten worse as factions burn each other’s farmlands simply to win the battle even if that results in no one having food in the end. Newly formed organizations amid this chaotic environment are being referred to by the formal empires as “gangs”. In truth, many of them operate as normal small governments trying to find self sufficiency in a time of crisis. Though just as many find that sufficiency preying on the others.

More and more civilians are seeking to flee to the colonies on the frontier for hope of a better living situation, though few can afford transportation to reach these places or hope to begin a new life there.

That’s all for this week, now to cosmology and then sports!

Well this has all been eventful. Khymin is currently overseeing the construction down in Koura in the wake of all this mess. We’ve already seen some interesting numbers among the infected. It seems that most of them were definitely present in that little uprising they had, but about one percent of the population have immature parasites. Which we are…dealing with. Related to this research, the wildlife show high infection rates and do bring up the question of how many species are actually alien wildlife and how many are mutated variants of the same wildlife. We have found that the mutations in the wildlife are less dramatic, or at least to our senses. I believe the parasites have a certain compatibility with the local creatures and have not yet figured out human anatomy and how to make it do what they want. Though we’re not sure what they want. So current medical advice to the citizens is not to meander outdoors with open wounds, and only drink the colony water.

Apparently the parasites’ hosts are compelled to help deliberately spread them, though not with any particularly master plan. They just run up and vomit parasites into open wounds…as lovely a thought that is. Though they only do this once the infected host has eggs to give. This does not seem to be the primary way people have been getting infected though, otherwise that would have been kind of an obvious report. The parasite is designed for the local wildlife not people, so something else is likely to be the cause of it getting into regular people.

Also we’ve managed to tunnel out the area beneath the colony to allow shuttles to be deployed through the rift. It isn’t a pretty operation but the rift will likely move soon anyways. At least we can get to it right now.

With some conferring with Hylavi, she points out that right now the problem with the intelligent alien races is that they see us as a very direct threat. However, the jydoq people are the second closest galactic neighbor and in shambles right now. It could be worth finding more of them to bring aboard our station to further our image as being friendly towards the galactic community. However, the jydoq are notoriously reclusive compared to other races and have been assimilating into Sol for reasons unknown. So maybe not the best first choice.

As for attracting them to us, it definitely doesn’t help that we have enough firepower here to pose a serious threat to any of their fleets that might want to come poking around. I actually feel like they won’t no matter how appealing we make ourselves unless we make contact with them enough to plant the seed of potential. Hylavi mentioned that it also depends which aliens you want to attract. Trade obviously attracts those interested in money, though if we just started teaching every alien that came through about pandem magic we could attract the powers of the galaxy. If nothing else their militaries would be very interested. Though that might also attract the Ire of some of the greater powers of Sol. If we manage to anger Alnae and Shetou at the same time by just giving away our system’s greatest weapon against alien threats, our station won’t be around for very long though. So no visitors.

On that end, Caitlyn has assembled her crew and taken off into the stars to see what she might be able to find.

As for contacting a cruiser-capable shipyard, there are three manners of doing this all of which having some complications. Independent shipyards in it for the profit are producing at full capacity with orders to last for ages, though many of these contracts are owned by the larger governments. The problem with this is that we just have to wait until they have some room to spare, that or outbid current contracts for a higher place in the queue, apparently a common practice by now. If you want to get into a silent bidding war with them, you are free to just pick a number and throw it at them to see where you get.

The second is by appealing through larger agencies who typically produce for themselves but at such capacity that our requests might just be a side venture for them. There are a few options though House Sharen is the most obvious candidate as they specialize in building ships. In combining our earlier discussion, you could try to appeal towards Alnae instead since you’re already planning to adopt some of their customs. A good step here would be to send someone to establish relations with them, maybe help them with a few things so that they’re more interested in the strange colony far out in the middle of nowhere.

The third, and cheapest option, is to buy them from Solvang. There is actually a battleship for sale on the black market right now too. Posting bounties on specific classes of ship would entice them to go and get one to sell to us, likely at a cost lower than actually producing the ship. It would be used of course, and such activities would illicit some attention from less savory sorts that we may wish to avoid.

Final option would just be to invest in the shipyards here at Somnus until they are large enough to meet our requests.

So we bought turrets.

When it comes to Koura city, it actually has more then it can use. Its original investors put too much into it with the hopes that it would grow quicker so now it has entire skyscrapers that stand empty. So we moved into one of those and had some furniture made for it. As it currently stands Koura needs people more than anything else. Which we lost quite a few of in the recent parasite swarming. Not that the story of such events is going to be good for attracting more colonists. There is actually a very easy option here. Half the slaves on the market, if not more than half, are regular people abducted from the ruins of the invasion. If we just bought them and set them free in Koura they wouldn’t really have anywhere else to go. Also we could ‘rescue’ people from those same worlds with the offer that they can just come live here if they stay here.

Though before we get carried away with that idea, it could use more food sources. Right now, as it is an alien planet, most things we might try to grow just die in the semi-toxic atmosphere. We currently use warehouses to grow food for the people but that does have a limit giving how much warehouse space that would take. Not to mention the power bill. We have found a few things to be edible to humanoids across the planet but they are not domesticated properly so produce poor yield and frankly taste terrible. The…less fortunate colonists eat the rations made of those.

So I suppose the real problem is food sources. After that the rest will sort of fall into place with easier solutions. It could also use a police force as what they have currently are equivalent to mall guards. Somnus has better security but its also a smaller and more controlled area.

Also we put out an ad campaign back in Sol as you asked.

 

We’ve handed out the Selona weapons as instructed and thrown the other in the armory. Also winter says that a mechanical eyelid would be basically a piece of leather and a string, you could just run the string down your coat to your arm so you can pull it discreetly as desired.

On the upside of buying all those slaves, building places for them to live on Koura is already done. The city has entire empty apartment buildings, so we just bought out one of those instead of building one from the ground up. The bulk of slaves we acquired went with citizenship, I suppose that’s to be expected with how many of them get abducted from the ruins of their old life and already have certain expectations.

The scribe work has actually been able to just find out who most of these people are, though reuniting them with lost families might be a significant undertaking simply because we don’t know where most people in Sol are at the moment. However, it does occur to me that we could leverage this a little more if Lancaster’s desire to open relations with Alnae remains firm. Since slavery is specifically illegal in Alnae but not Shetou, buying up all the elven slaves we can and then reuniting them with lost ones would be a good way to improve our standing with Alnae. We could also just go kidnap every elf we find on the ruined worlds since odds are very high that they’re from Alnae every time, saves money and we can just take down slaver gangs wile we’re at it. This would do well for the order’s reputation.

Alright this is a lot of money going into a temporary research station for a rift that y’know…moves. Though on the upside you got to stick your head into it, so that’s always fun.

Rhea can cover the scanning of the planets since they’re the ones we had do the extra surveying. Not the most exciting places, though I suppose we do live on the only one that was really significant already.

As for the Alnae war with itself, things have taken a bit of a swing though we aren’t sure if its for better or worse yet. Not sure if you saw the news but they appointed a new grand marshal, and not the most popular appointment since she’s so young. Though she is a zankist grandmaster apparently, one of three in the whole system. At least zankists tend to be fairly level headed. There is opportunity there, she was appointed largely because she’s all that is left standing. Might’ve been about four options for Alnae and she won out just because she’s the least likely to die any time soon. Young zankist master has a higher survival rate than old crotchety officers I suppose. So she doesn’t have that many merits or friends to her name yet, even if we are a small station by comparison to the Alnae Empire now is a good time to make friends with someone who has very few.

Also I already play guitar thank you very much, its a side hobby.

We do have some civilian members among the order who have a measure of talent with screwdrivers. They could look into this whole steam power thing of yours, though I’m not sure how useful that will be. It’s a start though.

House Sarghess is currently invading House Sharen, also covered in the news. We know they’re with Kar’Soluth and are currently trying to reduce Sharen’s fleet superiority that forced Kar’Soluth into inaction in the first place. As you may recall, the Kar Soluth traditionalist expected the oldest house of Sharen to join them in splitting away from Shetou. They did not actually check before they made any declarations, likely in an effort to make sure Sharen would not be the ruling house in Kar’Soluth by default if they were fully involved as the Vloz’Khress. In perhaps a bit of a twist for the drow, it turned out the Sharen were just a little more liberal than they expected. As such Sarghess is tasked with crippling the Sharen as much as possible to level the playing field into what they expected during the split. If we wanted goodwill with them, we could just attack something valuable in Shetou.

As for Alexander’s fire elemental, isn’t it technically a member already? It’s hanging out in its home plane but it shows up whenever Alexander calls it, which is everytime we need it for getting anything done.

So far our lances that have joined with Madhammer have found no signs of intelligence in the creatures that are harassing the colony but there are suspicions that deeper underground lurks something that has put a lot more thought into this then the monsters it sends to the surface.

Speaking of joint operations, Si Yeon asked if we could look into the idea of pandem rifts implanting parasites in people due to her most recent findings being a little clunky.

 

Upon looking into details on this ship we’ve found some more details that paint a better picture. The ship in question was a freighter going from SZ4 to System V1, also known as Bellar. It hasn’t been made quite apparent to which planet in the system it was aiming for, but Bellar does have a lot of independent colony efforts going at the same time. It disappeared somewhere along its path of transit with its last known location being only a few systems out of Sol. Pirates are suspected to be involved due to the proximity to Sol when the incident seems to have occurred. It was noted that the engineer who is the target of the bounty is actually the child of someone rather wealthy. Which also explains the distinct lack of interest in the posting about the ship or any crew members. It is a good payout though.

That being said, as you mentioned with the secrecy, there is likely something else afoot there that isn’t included in the scope of the posting. SZ4 is host to a single factory owned by Siwa industries and no one really knows what is going on in there. It is questionable why a ship with impressively little documentation was traveling from it towards independent colonies.

Aryn suspects that the ship’s departure location might have drawn pirates to it in hopes of some sort of payday. Which may or may not bode well for the crew we’re actually interested in. Though she notes that finding out what happened to the engineer specifically might best be pursued through our still-standing Solvang membership. If anyone cares to visit their station at least.

Among the various crime gangs on the station its hard to decide who is actually a criminal or not due to the nebulous state of laws that the station currently has. The drug trade is able to operate openly, they have a corner store down on 105th actually. The store is just specialized to ‘chemical alterations to your state of mind’. Its best seller is actually just coffee. Though you can get some pretty hard recreational drugs there too. Same can be said of the arms market.

Most of the criminal organizations haven’t done that much yet, there’s plenty of space here and on Koura so gang violence hasn’t quite broken out even if there’s a bunch of mean looking guys who hang out on some street corner or another. In our investigations we found three notable people who act as a more central network for questionable activities so I suppose that makes them local crime lords in a way. You can find them over in the files.

So far Leon and Vaeri haven’t had much issue dealing with the criminals since we haven’t decided any formal course of action and they’re all pretty small in scope with how new the station and city are. Fortunately for Somnus, its current freedoms mean even the really dangerous criminals are taking it easy for now. Such as pirates who are just passing through to lay low for awhile.

Not quite the same as criminals but as it turns out those Revenant fellows are back, it appears they’re chasing after Cassir. The new figurehead of the cult of lucidity. Last time we saw them they had assassinated Zex successfully. It appears that despite the gauntlet dissolving, our old friends are still holding a few grudges. Apparently bringing her onto the station brought with it some old rivals. I’m sure Lancaster is going to love this.

The surveys have found evidence of a lot of lifeless rocks, though that is to be expected in space. Most stars have nothing particularly habitable. I’m a little disappointed we don’t have any gas giants though, those are always fun to throw probes into.

Anyways, there is a slight complication.  AZ68-3 scans reveal there to be life along the planet and some drones with scrying beacons on them were sent to get a closer look. They were able to discover large scale animals and trees and rare metals were also found to be surprisingly abundant. However, the corrosive atmosphere is so hostile that it chews straight through arcane barriers with ease and rendered standard probes into scrap. So we started throwing random things in there to see what might resist the corrosion. So far the answer is glass. Also apparently it doesn’t corrode gold or quartz, not that we can really make a ship out of that. We also threw some meat down there, it fared worse than the drones. Afterwards a glass encased scanner was sent down and we discovered a new interesting property. The atmosphere blocks long range signals. Including the ones needed to tell the probe to come back up. I think we should throw Vasia out the airlock at it and see what she finds, since spirits won’t be affected by the atmosphere.

AZ68-4’s previous scan data from the original colonizers of this system left out a very important detail. It is a golden world, correct atmosphere, correct gravity, everything humanoids need to just put up a tent and start surviving. Except food. It doesn’t have food. Its an empty wasteland that settled at just the right levels to be habitable to us with no effort. I guess its a blank canvas if we really wanted to try to do something on a planet that cold?

When it comes to a xenobiology expert, I think we might be best off looking for an actual xeno. Hylavi knows more about aliens than anyone in Sol, even if not specifically their biology. There’s bound to be an alien doctor or something out there.

Salied has been moved down to the new containment chamber along with Vasia in order for some quick experiments to be done while the rift is still in that general location. The labs have been experimenting on the new samples we’ve acquired. Turns out they don’t like fire, what a surprise.

After Renjala poked his head through the pandem rift what we’ve learned is that some sort of sahad based life form is there and not immediately hostile. Vasia has done her best to translate what she’s learned and describes the creature as something of a very patronizing resident of the nearby star on its own end. Though perhaps creator of the star would be more accurate. It sees us as something with no business being in there and has no real intention of letting us poke around though at least it doesn’t convey that by immediately throwing Renjala into said star. Though we’re not sure how powerful it actually is by our standards and if passage could be…’negotiated’. Though its clear that it will only talk to those with sahad knowledge, in our case that limits us to Vasia and Cerys. Though Cerys is hanging out on some other planet killing underground bugs or something I heard. So we have Vasia. Also whoever the Astral order sends to actually open the rift as none of us can do that.

Related to New Age, Vasia says you need to buy her some slaves for experimentation purposes still. That or just send scouts across the galaxy looking to be in the right place at the right time to capture anyone who gets exposed to sahad in an uncontrolled environment and hope for the best of luck on that one. As for the many creatures we’ve suddenly come to acquire, we haven’t learned too much new that is of use. Just that the parasites and the weird monsters that came through the pandem rift have similar traits that further imply they’re both from beyond the rift and possibly related to this entity on the other side.

As for the xenobiologist idea, we have literally nothing. We were also cautioned by our neighbors down here on the lowest deck to not hire anyone with any manner of experience in the field whatsoever. Something about conspiracies and terrifying people. Our actual most qualified individual we even know about is Hylavi, because she’s at least seen some aliens. There is some merit perhaps to searching for alien civilizations who might be able to help since no one in Sol really does the whole ‘galactic community’ thing thus far.

Vamon is off with Madhammer once again surveying underground things while shooting weird monsters. He lives an exciting life I feel. As for if he has any “acquaintances” he has several. None that Lancaster would approve of coming onto the station regularly.

Also, Cassir is here on Somnus now. The “warlord” as they call her. She’s already creeping people out…she has kind of an intensity to her you could say. As of late, she and her cultists have just been sitting around eating all the food they can find in every restaurant they can find.

We’ve sent the first and second company to engage in the extermination of the subterranean threat over on another colony. It’s going smoothly so far though we’ve only just recently landed and are starting to grasp the full measure of the situation. The current theory of Gheir is that whatever lurks down below is a bit more clever than its given credit for and what we’re mostly dealing with right now are weaponized…scout things.

I don’t get it either. Another theory running around is that they mature over time into something bigger and scarier. We’ve managed to scan for a deeper layer in the planet where we found a network of tunnels but they’re all burrowed through and into the dirt so it isn’t a rock cave we can just send troops through. Right now we’ve just been hitting various areas with artillery to see what pops up, then hitting it with more artillery and some gunfire. All in all, going pretty well. I can’t really comment much since I’m still here at Koura City dealing with the parasite problem. However, we have a problem on that front. The infection rates are climbing and people I previously cleared are coming back having now been infected.

These creatures are still spreading somehow annnd I’m not really sure how. At all. We’ve checked the water, the food, the sewers, the tendency of people to cough on each other, everything. However the eggs are still being transmitted somehow and I can’t really find anything these people have in common other than the fact that they live in the same area of the city.

Whiiich leads to my next problem. So…I apparently got infected too and I’m not really sure how. I wear hazard gear and everything. Fortunately I was able to remove it…and then I got infected AGAIN. At this point I’m willing to humor the idea of pandem rift parasites just manifesting inside people’s bodies for no reason and I’m gonna throw Renjala over at it.