Stories Of Lore 10

 

 

Well I had to specify ‘biologist’ and just hope they learn alien anatomy over time. Meet Doctor Taz, I thought you might like him. Instead of being an evil psychopath or maniac, he’s extra fluffy! He has some experience in the desired field though wouldn’t call himself quite an expert or take on the title of xenobiologist. Though to be fair, it is a new field and as we’ve learned the only people with a lot of experience are not the kind of people we want to employ. He’s only a year or two behind the experts in the field though so not that big of a deal anyways.

Our guest, Echo Seven, is still on the station. The rest of the exerlus are still scanning the system head to toe and have gotten involved with 40th day’s planetary shenanigans. It is interesting to note that they couldn’t penetrate the corrosive atmosphere of our neighboring planet either without some assistance. Though they keep developing their own side projects. Echo Fifteen is hanging out on orchard studying the Vittles farms. Echo Seven seemed to decide to learn to better replicate our humanoid appearance so they don’t look like a shiny version of you. To be honest they still look kind of like you though. But they managed to replicate flesh. I have no idea how they did that. Echo Nine replicated tree bark instead and is jump scaring people in the woods to ‘gauge our response times’. I wouldn’t say they seem particularly nefarious in their desire to understand us, just quirky. So that’s still going on.

Meanwhile, Riley is uhh…far away. It turns out the Astral Warrens pop out all over the galaxy. Remember how it was mentioned that there were only so many entrances despite the number of exits? We don’t know how to get her back other than a really really long voyage. She’s on the other side of the galaxy from us. Whats concerning though is she’s not just in any part of the galaxy. She’s in the area known to be “silnian territory”. So there is a chance she just gets outright assimilated if we don’t get her back sometime soon. Also we need a stealth cruiser to get past the rift entity, and she has our only one. She is out of contact range though fortunately, Irae is with her and Renjala can just possess her at will. So that serves for basic communication.

Speaking of the rift, it did not seem to take better to the dragon than any other thing we’ve sent to talk to it. However…the Exerlus found the rift during all their scans and the entity just outright ignores them. We’re not sure if it doesn’t think of them as life forms or if it just considers them to be higher ones than us. They’re scanning the planet on the other side of the rift unobstructed. Apparently they also are scanning the entity…just casually prodding at it and being left to their devices while doing so. We’re leaning towards the former because the entity doesn’t react to our probes either, so it being unaware of the exerlus presence would be consistent with that at least. Despite being a highly advanced alien species revered by many as a deified civilization, they really do kind of show their true origin. They’re just…probes. They don’t show any signs of having a motive beyond scanning for the sake of scanning. If left undisturbed that’s all they do. Now I’m trying to convince Echo Seven to tell us what it finds out about the rift. Meanwhile that idiot Whitetalon is trying to figure out what weapons Echo Consensus has. Turns out Echo Seven has as much firepower as a tank by the way. You can thank Yenneiros for figuring that one out.

When it comes to expanding Vittles to Jamalia, it’d probably only cost two million to really get started. It’s a golden world, the real threat though is the giant monsters roaming the place who might take an interest. So if we were to secure them within the walls of the hostile colony we’d be basically building a whole second one for all the farmland. So getting up to fifty million. Though the guns on Jamalia could probably protect it reasonably well enough if we just set up some tractors and plant some stuff right around it. Might get stepped on by giant monsters but losing one percent of the farm to a monster getting shot by turrets isn’t really that financially problematic. Other then that regular gates should keep out the more pesky smaller wild life. Up to you how deep into it you want to go.

Selling excess food to Alnae would definitely be an easy sell, though that might not look the best on our relations with Faelyn and the other colonies or the prince of Sharen that is here at the moment.

Also Faelyn’s reports on galactic travel coming towards the station shows an uptick in visitors. So at least we’re becoming more well known PR wise. Also she is sending more ships to us because apparently we have now told everyone about this rift and it’s going to need more guns to protect it from any other interests.

Oh also Vittles’ expanded harvest came in, so that’s going well.

 

Well we found the merkas matron. That was fun.

The second lance is continuing its research alongside the other companies at Moncayo.

The third lance is trapped on the other side of the galaxy as you have been so keen to help us figure out.

Our Shetou visitor is sort of left to his own devices as a tourist on the station at the moment since now the third lance is long gone to the other side of the galaxy. Though he has been hanging around representatives of Madhammer a bit much lately. I could only take a wild guess as to why. Also he was definitely interested in Renjala’s rift, but given that he is a drow you might be able to guess that it was hard to figure out what his actual ideas about it might be.

We’ve started having some of the trees cleared out around Jamalia so Vittles will have a place to set down some fields and seeds once they get here and manage to figure out how they want to set up their operation. By the way, we just shot a thirty footer that tried to bite the colony walls. That was a fun one to scare all the staff with.

As for the mana refinery station, the hiring signs won’t do much good just yet. We haven’t actually announced the system or its colonization yet so there is a distinct lack of people here except for the essential staff we brought along with us. We’ve been waiting until we were more comfortably established and figured out what is going on with the natives. We could publicize the colony to start bringing in some immigration though if you think its ready. Though the refinery definitely can’t be staffed by any natives, definitely  beyond their skillset. You could probably have some of the slaves from Somnus come over to work on it but will definitely need to bring in some experts on the operation. We might be able to just pick one up and not fully tell them where the colony they’ll be working at is though if we don’t want to announce that this place exists just yet. Just outsource to 40th day since they’ve been just selling colonists to colonies as a finders fee as of late.

Also steamworks has produced something marketable on an unconventional scale. Its really just a toy at this point but people seem to like them so its been selling even better than its actually useful projects. So that’s been selling nicely.

 

Cassir and the gang have made it to Moncayo and met up with Vamon to oversee the construction of the temple. Cassir and Peter are now working on figuring out how to train others to function the same way Cassir and her forces can to fully set up its infrastructure. So far in the quest for a cause they’re mostly a reactionary force since everyone’s issues are ‘aliens and shit keep invading us’.

Though on that front, Faelyn actually knew some information to pass on to Vamon about that which was just casual conversation at a party but turns out to be more information than most people had before. Apparently, Nelta sort of solidified its position on the war against Sol. Due to the destruction of the galaxy that came about soon as we were discovered, most of them have pushed heavily for a united war. Faelyn’s diplomats survived contact with Nelta because she sent dragons that were very tenacious and difficult to kill. So she has been the first person to successfully establish any level of communication with them even if its kind of a hostile embassy situation on a planet that kind of doesn’t want to keep picking this fight. So if anything her ambassadors might be swaying a few towards not quite sticking around with the Nelta alliance. But it does provide some insight at least. So for the forseeable future, don’t expect Nelta to be all that interested in talking to us though they are falling apart from the inside thanks to all the chaos going on. Chaos they blame on us…probably with good reason.

Adryn is in transit from Sol alongside Setani to return to Auwana and visit the Phoenix colony to begin the hunt.

Vasia reports that infecting the 004C experiments with the parasite again produces no result. The parasites introduced are destroyed by the host’s now improved immune system. Essentially since its adapted for life on Koura, its capable of resisting its own parasites once they’ve reached a full metamorphosis. However, it is apparently possible to infect a subject prior to this transformation with multiple parasites to get wilder and wilder mutations. This doesn’t seem to have any real benefit.

The Exerlus pretty much just threw a scanner and schematics for them at us. We can tell they aren’t as advanced as their best, but its still something. Apparently though, their more powerful scanners can’t be shared because they rely on the exerlus power cores. So to make those we would need to be able to actually build exerlus. Also in exchange they took one of all of our scanners from the warehouse and…scanned the scanners. Speaking of which, they stated they’ll probably just visit the Vivarium every now and then instead of remaining by it full time. They can travel through space much faster than we can so its not as much of a trip for them.

Also 40th Day is expanding its colonization training and delivery system quite well, this is actually becoming a more profitable venture than actually colonizing things. Since everyone needs more people and a lot of people need to get out of Sol.

We’ve brought in all the alien ships for breaking down and studying, the shipyards are kind of full of these now which is hurting profits while the bays are taken up by these projects.

One question about the Maker research. Do you want me to have the local staff of the Vivarium do that project or….do you want Vasia to do it? Very different requests. Also very different results.

We’ve brought back the only semi-brainwashed engineer to collect the bounty. Probably not the most ideal scenario for the client but that’s their fault for being very vague with the job posting anyways.

The stealth cruiser is on the way to the Sol system to look into the Siwa factory. The engineer didn’t really reveal much to us that the Raven hadn’t revealed to Vaeri in the first place. All we know is that there is some sort of secret lab going on in there doing something strange. I’m going to bet right now that the stealth cruiser won’t find much, if just a precursory scan would work than this wouldn’t be drawing so much interest.

Reika is currently busy several lightyears away dealing with Jamalia and all of its issues, though if Renjala sends her out she’ll definitely go to the station to help take it over.

As for the auction, its some sort of alien that knows how to use Sahad that is somewhat captive due to a Shetou raid into alien space. One of the minor houses were the ones to acquire it. It isn’t a particularly large or violent captive apparently, though doesn’t seem happy about being captive.

As for Solvang contracts, Vanjin is just taking on random ones for now that she can handle while shes in Sol to help with the funding. Nothing particularly major like the engineer hunt’s payout seems to be going around at the moment though.

Oh and Setani is on her way back to Somnus if we need her for anything else coming up.

Well the war on Thenica was…destructive. We managed to come out victorious alongside Kaylen which will have large scale political ramifications. In particular, Kaylen now has majority control of Alnae’s territory once again instead of just ‘the largest fraction’. With only three major warlords left she is close to reuniting the empire though a catch to that is her assets are pushing to exhaustion fighting one warlord after another as they all controlled different sections of the military. That and the one who absconded with the Ultra Carrier.

As a result she’s currently recuperating but that does mean its likely we can easily find more work in the future with her for continuing this campaign since there will always be a need for more soldiers.

Now for the bad news, uhhh the second company is just gone. Well more so the losses were so catastrophic we dissolved it to refill the ranks of the first company which is also in shambles at the moment. This was a real battle, and the death toll reflects it. Though, our upkeep costs are way down now…so…silver lining?

Most of our armor support is gone as well. We were able to salvage some that are in repairable condition for Whitetalon Armaments to get back up and running for us. So currently we’re on a recruitment drive, which fortunately the Astral Order is helping us out with over at Jamalia. Gotta figure out who to send though.