Stories of Lore 4

 

I’ll make a note not to tell anyone about the rift in any detail. Though this definitely doesn’t seem like what we signed up for with the establishment of a frontier station…I blame the drow in the basement.

The entity still doesn’t talk to anyone other than Vasia evidently, or any other sahad users at the very least though she’s the only one we have that can form a complete sentence at the moment.

The Royal Battleship belongs to Sharen apparently, and also of course they’d want it back. They’re also looking to find whoever stole it… Maybe we keep under wraps that they’re here right now.

As for Raiben Hayl, Alnae doesn’t actually know who he is. The problem with proving who he is would be how we found out, and the basement dwellers don’t typically like revealing their presence. Though given the current state of the aethernet with some effort we could probably work around that one.

So according to Khymin one of the problems with retrofitting the cruiser is that the only way to make it more stable is to take out some of the engines that give it the speed it has, or make it bigger at which point its getting into being a bit large. Which will hurt its overall speed, more so the acceleration and deceleration times. So far his suggestion is to just add more stabilizers to the seats themselves. Though it has to be a bit bigger to accommodate that as well or the crew section has to get even tighter. Alternatively he could take out one of the engines to make room for other things but then it slows down. It’s definitely an overspecialized ship.

To another note when talking with Khymin, I generally filter out his bright ideas for station improvement from my report but as you can guess he is a strong proponent of golems.

As for inviting Sol Media here, they don’t seem interested in making the trip. Apparently their original plan was to just call the Order instead of making the month long voyage through space to get to us.

We do know the rocks of Koura have the property of holding and gradually dispersing sunlight. Some basic experiments showed it works with any kind of light actually, and they don’t disperse it that quickly from the deepest parts of the underground network they form. The science team thinks they can actually track the planet’s evolutionary history by examining certain elements of these rocks and the light they release, such as looking into the past for any mass extinctions or other wide spanning events. Basically the geologists are having fun though its not that useful for us. Though they do store mana quite well, they just have an issue of constantly releasing it over time. There’s at least some promise in them as a mana storage material that is being looked into.

Somnus Golbotics has been founded to manage the hydroponic towers as well as the intended farming of AZ68-4. It’s currently still setting itself up and waiting for any actual yield as well as having taken over the research efforts on the potential of Koura’s native biology for use as food.

Also you are aware that if you allow Koura to form its own elected government, and you don’t win, that you will no longer have control over it right?

I suppose I’ll see you in a few months after your expedition to the new planet. Have fun with that, I’ll keep in touch over the APT.

As per your orders elections are being held on Koura to staff the civilian government. Campaigns are getting underway.

I’ll just leave a message since you’re apparently busy on that drow world at the moment. A conflict I hear is going…messily. We’ll see what happens when you get there.

As for looking into the stabilization of the rift, Alexander says the easiest way is to build a machine around it with the help of Somnus that we can operate to lock into a more consistent orbit. Sort of like the pandem gates that they use to get around back in Sol. Similar to maintaining a tunnel albeit a little easier since only one side of the tunnel has to be repositioned constantly. That or maybe with some effort attach it to the station, though people might notice it in that case. If we were to reveal the nature of the rift, we could use the same setup to open it upon payment if we were to try charging a toll for it.

In either case this would be an operation around 725 million to accomplish since it would have to be set up in space and probably large enough to send ships through. Not to mention the amount of parts and probably engineers we’d need from Sol to get all the way out here to build it. There is a reason that rift tunnels are not a commonplace thing even for the super rich. At least its half off since we only need to deal with one side of it.

The ‘boxed’ colony set is en route to PZ142-2, along with Lancaster herself. Though they’re going to take a bit to get there. Same for the construction teams to build the station on the moon.

Oh and also while you’re away I’ve had some of the knights keeping tabs on our alien captive that we’re still trying to talk with about the matter. So far we’ve gotten it to stop spewing death threats and now just grumble a lot. Progress! Though it turns out its species is an obligate carnivore so we’ve had to change its feeding routine, now that it finally communicated that to us at least.

 

The answer to stabilizing the rift with psionics is “not even a little bit”. Partially because its dangerous to attempt, manipulating planar activity causes corruption. Basically you could cut off all the cult psionics from their psionic abilities by having them even attempt to do that.

Cassir has been overseeing the construction at the temple while we deal with the revenants, simply because if we let her go off on her own right now there’s a high chance Setani won’t show up out of nowhere to save her ass. The importing of the cult’s other members are a bit of a mixed situation. More than half leave immediately once we put them on Koura since they ‘didn’t sign up for this shit’ as they like to say. So the cult’s numbers are diminishing quickly though that is to be expected with the shift in vision it is undergoing.

Related to this, Cassir isn’t planning to leave Koura until we have some progress shown on the revenants, given that had Setani not shown up she would have definitely been murdered by Sarden. So we’re leaving that one to Nah division.

As for the labs in the bottom deck, Subject 004-C is still in its shell. Though Vasia is keen to experiment with things even further she is awaiting the results of the first metamorphosis before we start altering environmental factors around it.

The hydroponic tower experiments do prove a good testing ground for the rocks. We’ve managed to show some progress using local flora that you can find growing near the rocks in the wild though it appears the light they emanate is not sufficient for Sol crops to be grown inside of a building. So they use regular lamps for that one right now.

We’ve begun construction of the colony on AZ68-3, when it comes to wards we’ve found some targeted methods of countering the atmosphere’s effects now that we know its based on and arcane occurrence. Though it drains mana very fast if it goes into the actual clouds of the upper atmosphere. On the ground, should keep any rain out hopefully.

When it comes to synthesizing Koura crystals, check out this thing I have. You flip this switch and tah-dah! Light. I call it a lamp. I’ll have the alchemists look into it for you though.

We don’t have any formal chefs in 40th Day. We have survivalist cooks, not quite razzle dazzle high dining chefs. Though the restaurant business down on Koura are already hard at work with finding ways to make the local wildlife a bit more edible and worth harvesting.

Salied is still in holding by Vasia, so far she has demonstrated some level of recovery. In that she will swallow things put in her mouth, which is close to eating. Vasia has been feeding her smoothies.

Vaeri is away with the astral order for now so we’ve lost our contact to Laura from here on out unless we want to reveal the existence of others to her. To that note, she is getting closer to finding out who we are though we can largely blame that on the Revenants, as inconvenient as that is. Though she did at least give us Sarden’s civilian identity here on Somnus.

Aryn has looked into the matter and found that the ID belonging to “Urricea” lives out of a hotel near the docks, though somehow has an employee ID with New Horizons shipyard. Upon some scoping out the hotel we’ve noticed she never enters or exits her room through the front door. Observation drones have found that she gets in and out through the hotel lobby though. We have a suspicion that the front door and the window are trapped, and we’re not sure if the other assassin is living out of the same location or not. According to Laura they don’t appear anywhere unless as a physical threat in full armor.

Keeping tabs on Urricea is hard, she disappears into crowds and alleys everywhere she goes out of pure habit. So we’re pretty sure she’s Sarden though we’re not entirely sure what she does during all of her off time when she’s not jumping on us. Though we have caught her wandering awfully close to the temple that Lucidity is having built a few times. She appears to have a few associates around the system she uses to acquire things, though whats peculiar is that she hasn’t taken any overt action like she did when Cassir first appeared. Perhaps because Cassir is under constant guard right now, but we’re sure she’s up to something specific. Though we can’t determine what she’s doing since she keeps disappearing. We’re good at this but she’s as much of a professional as we are.

Back to Laura King, it seems she gets her information from practically everywhere. Even if she isn’t actually the biggest crime lord, she’s established a reputation around Auwana as being ‘the big one’. Through contact with a lot of different people utilizing her conversational tactics she keeps getting scraps of information here and there that amasses into her being able to keep track of whats going on around here. She’s also a specific type of criminal that other criminals feel safe around since she isn’t prone to wildly lashing out or doing overtly aggressive action. Given her reputation for having  code of family honor among her gang, people just feel like they can trust her with the more illicit side of the market. We’re not sure about her drug chains though, we do know a specific drug she acquires that is an illegal sedative is coming from Thenica’s Shetou controlled continent. The other chains she doesn’t seem to be restocking as of late. I suppose we can tell which one is selling well, apparently she supplies Ohalyn with these most frequently.

We’ve looked into a few low-mana areas on the grid in search of the mana batteries to very little luck. An example of which is just finding a place where the resident works himself half to death for twelve hours a day so isn’t home to use too much power. We have a scanner we borrowed from 40th Day to look for any  weirdly high mana concentrations but we didn’t find anything on that either. I believe that either these batteries are being used in close proximity to something else that generates a large amount of mana to hide from scans or they’re spread out as singular batteries all over the place for some other purpose perhaps. That or are just shielded from scans. Though I find it unlikely that the Revenants would be behind this, they definitely think of themselves as some sort of hero. It is unlikely they would be willing to use slave batteries.

As for Ohalyn, we know she likes money so buying her out might work though that would cost enough money to ensure that it remains more profitable for her to avoid the practice than to continue it. Its kind of hard to get a read on her since she’s a workaholic that is always in her brothel slash bar, which makes it difficult to understand what kind of person she is outside of her business. If she hasn’t moved into a nicer place with the money she’s making we’re not sure what she’s doing with it all and its unlikely that she is trying to get on top of the criminal food chain. We know she has a business relationship with Laura and has shown no signs of wanting King’s position in the hierarchy. After some effort, Aryn managed to find out that she uses the Solvang banks to store all her money which is the end of the trail we can track.

Meanwhile, back in Sol, Vanjin finally arrived at the Solvang station to look for details on that missing ship. It was headed to a frontier colony on R4-1….you may notice its suspicious that its on the planet closest to the star in a system with no planets. Also its an unnamed system. It turns out this colony is built inside of a large asteroid, and is likely doing something covert there. The colony is funded by a minor house from Kar’Soluth. It is a very short distance away from Da Xian, the first system to see Shetou colonization efforts around the unbound star. One would even call it ‘within striking proximity’. We know the ship went missing in transit on the way there but not exactly when given the fact it was probably not sending logs for a particular reason or another. Vanjin has been questioning around the station and believes the ship was captured by pirates not too far into its journey. Said pirates then sold the ship and its crew off back through Solvang channels but it gets lost in the sheer volume of transactions with very little identifying details. So its likely that the engineer in question is back in Sol somewhere. Vanjin went through the bounty contacts to get a description of the engineer and is fairly sure they would have been sold into the luxury slave trade. So now she’s looking around for details into that.

As you can see she’s a bit too busy to look into pirate matters back here around Auwana.

As for smaller scale recreational drug producers, there are a few groups around Koura who are doing so but they’re not illegal so they don’t have as much need to skulk around the underworld with us. Looking into matters back in Alnae prisons would require us to send someone back to Sol, or to redeploy Vanjin from her current objective.

One more thing, the Astral Order wants to fund us hiring the Nomads once again. Aryn did a good job of convincing them to come back despite how things ended with Halaestra. So…they’re back but we had to forward the payment they missed when Halaestra took off.

Well that’s interesting, Gunhild captured what appears to be the subterranean alien queen. Though that term was placed on it by us due to similarities to Sol life forms. It would be more accurate to say it is the builder of the other organisms rather than the mother. It apparently puts them together like golems and then leaves them to incubate until they start moving on their own.

Reviewing the footage we have of the central hive chamber we found this creature in, the creatures appear to be assembled and wrapped in what becomes their skin. They look like just bags of flesh filled with stuff at first but the footage shows some mid-way through incubation. Its as if they start to take shape and come to life during the process and fill out their flesh bags properly over time. The creature doesn’t really use language, so even the tongues spell app doesn’t help us figure out how to communicate with it. Though we have reason to believe its not the only one on that planet. Vamon has been scanning and found other areas around the planet that show similar scales of biomatter concentration underground.

Despite this creature’s capture, the fighting still continues with the aliens as it did not display any hive control mechanisms. It just seemed to make things and send them to various locations where they could lie dormant. That’s about as much as we could figure out with our available resources on the planet. We might consider shipping the alien samples back to Somnus for analysis, though I don’t know who handles that. It would be faster to send it back to Sol though if we wanted results quicker to figure out how to end this war with the aliens earlier as people are dying the longer this takes us to do. We’ve also lost one of the mechs.