Stories of Lore 11

 

Welcome to Sol News, I am your host Exme Faythe reporting live from the studio headquarters on Thenica. In news today, the war between Alnae and its splinter groups has taken some major swings as Grand Marshal Kaylen recently destroyed another of the rogue warlords, however the battle came at some cost as great stretches of farmland were destroyed by the warlord as an act of defiance.

All four major empires of Sol have been alerted to the presence of another Nelta fleet, even larger than the original invasion, moving towards Sol space on the Zonaricht plane by Faelyn’s scanning outpost. Negotiations are under way as the Frontier Alliance starts to try and convince the four primary empires to work together to deal with the incoming threat. Hoping that if we are prepared this time it will be less destructive. Though, it is proving difficult to unite the forces under a new power. There has been a sentiment among the empires to urge Valdir’s Emperor to return and lead the effort once again, though contacting Emperor Indal has proven difficult due to him having left aethernet range by several lightyears already on his journey into the northeastern quadrant of the galaxy.

 

It has been difficult to confirm doctor Taz’s legal status as a single individual instead of multiple in a coat. He is very clever about avoiding security cameras.

Echo 7 has informed me that they don’t share their scan information with other civilizations who are in active war due to a series of political mishaps long ago in which they learned that people are sneaky and will take the data to use against their enemies. Given the Exerlus’ general neutrality with the exception of the exiles, they prefer not to break this rule of theirs. So they aren’t sharing much useful about whats beyond the rift until our war is over. Apparently they mean both the war with nelta and the wars within our own civilization empires. Apparently this is a recurring thing for many civilizations to be frustrated with. Any civilization must be totally out of any ongoing conflict to get access to their archives. I thought to ask, apparently there is literally no one who can both make contact with them and are considered outside of any conflict ever since the galactic apocalypse began. Everyone is in a civil war for resources, being invaded by someone else, or in such a bad shape that contacting the exerlus isn’t really possible. The only way to make them reverse this stance is for them to be involved in the war on any particular side. Which you think would be easy to convince them of after the Nelta attack but they’re really stubborn and not prone to responding to attacks on them. Apparently this rule came about as a result of pirates often messing with them or less than fully represented civilizations committing to the attack on them. Basically the reason they aren’t invading Sol is because of this policy that prevents them from flipping a zero to a one and declaring humanoids an enemy of the empire just because of one particular criminal abducting some of their people. So…silver lining is that Arkaric can’t piss them off enough to make them invade all of Sol. Downside is they aren’t really springing to our side over the Nelta thing. Hylavi informs me that they only have ‘not really at war’ and ‘total war’ doctrines since their nature is to be expendable they don’t really care about minor offenses on their honor.

The exploration ships are just jumping from one star to the next on the path towards areas with potential higher yields so they are mostly finding dust balls, asteroid belts, and similar areas to mark down in case they come across anything obviously interesting. Though they don’t have the scanning power to get full readouts of resources and such. A few are proceeding towards known coordinates but they have to stop along the way to write down what they find in various systems.

I’ve had them start on the return path to swap their crews onto the larger corvettes.

I’ve also had Renjala contact Riley and the team to reassure them they aren’t just being left to die out there but that bringing them back might take some time to assemble necessary resources. In the meantime they’re poking around to see what they might find.

So all the offers to ‘sell food surpluses’ basically triggered a bidding war between Nelan and Paylenus. Which Nelan could win. Faelyn doesn’t really seem to care either way asked to stay on the call when we told the other two ambassadors about it. Afterward she said that though are intentions might have been good, ‘that right there is why you shouldn’t do that’ was her follow up. Basically every shipment bound for Alnae will be victim to pirates quite easily now since Paylenus will be able to figure out the route and that will escalate tensions between the two of them. She didn’t say why but she requested to be there when we try to explain to them that we’ll sell to them both at a fixed rate of equal quantities. When asked why she thought that was what you would do she responded with ‘just a hunch’.

Taz just arrived on the station after his trip to get out here. He’s been setting himself up comfortably and beginning with the Koura cures projects because…well he’s a doctor and thats a miracle medicine so of course he’s interested in that. This somewhat takes Yi Seong off the project though she was going to Jamalia with Madhammer anyways.

 

Madhammer just arrived here at Jamalia, hopefully soon they’ll be able to make contact with the arcurans and we’ll see what gets done with that. The 40th day colonists have arrived as well and we’re starting to look over the refinery to get production going in full. In the meantime Nihlav has been wandering off to go hunt down other warrens and so we have an influx of confused merkas at Jamalia. They still definitely don’t trust us due to our dealings with the arcurans and I suspect they’re keeping their guard up but lack any alternatives to accomplish their goals without our assistance at the moment.

Related to this, while it wasn’t any of the merkas at Jamalia, we have found a few more destroyed arcuran villages south of us that must have been only recently attacked. There were a lot of bodies from both sides at these sites. Some thing Nihlav is subtly behind it in some way even though she’s usually at Jamalia. Given her status among the merkas though it is conceivable that she could push them to operate in any way she ordered. Notably one of the issues with trading mana with them for food is that the merkas city doesn’t have the mana issue since it is still exposed to the moon and as stated, they’re a bit wary of us dealing with the arcurans at all.

We’ve wrapped up our work at Moncayo, at least the major parts of it. The pandem super scanner has been tested to work with sporadic results. Well actually it has a ninety percent success rate but one of the things we tested was Sarnai. Which basically yielded results equivalent of static. We know that this happens when tracking activity across certain lower planes that we didn’t tune the device to work on so well. There are just too many of them coming in and out of existence all the time to really bother with anything but the major known ones. Though what makes this case a little special is that Sarnai’s bind basically crashed the entire system when we tried to track it. Originally it was just for fun and to test it, we tested it on almost everyone there with a bind, but then they started obsessing over what the hell Sarnai is bound to. Six days of crashes later we’re convinced her bind has the ability to move between planes on its own accord. As if she bound herself to another pandem wielder, though then it wouldn’t make sense that she struggles so much with opening rifts on her own. They keep scanning her because…well its weird and they just built this big scanner so they have nothing else to do. Collected our paycheck though at least. Also the chapter house has finished construction as well. It’s big and fancy.

Steamworks has produced a unique tool recently of some actual progress using the tech that we made a toy of before. It’s still in the prototype phase but they’re working on transportation options for the magically disinclined.

 

Construction of the temple has been finished in Moncayo and Cassir has been wandering around the city getting to know the general place. Vamon’s fancy new weapon was sent to him, though its going through the mail and there is still a bit of distance between here and Moncayo, its on its way though.

 

Adryn arrived in Auwana and we just threw him onto the planet of ‘from whence no signal returns’. Reports are a bit…sluggish to get out of there lets say. Though it seems he and his team are settling in well enough and getting their….hunting lodge up and going while prodding at various creatures to see if anything is particularly dangerous. Though so far nothing presents an overly alarming risk to their presence.

I should note the parasitic specimens don’t actually have a name. Balhast is the name of the specific 004C sample that started the experiments. Basically that’s the name of Vasia’s dog and the rest are just…things with parasites. They don’t even all take the same general shape so its hard to define them by anything other than “we stuck a parasite in someone”.

That aside, we sent one to the far side of Koura to roam around and see what it does. It immediately ate the first form of wildlife it came across and seems to be going about exploring. Its adaptations prove effective enough that it doesn’t need to seek out specific elements of its environment for anything like shelter or consistent food supply as they are omnivorous. As such it appears to just keep roaming as it pleases without much desire to stay in one place.

The salvaged ship projects reveal a bit about sahad engineering. Mostly in that it is possible to activate sahad effects through a machine instead of a caster but they seem designed to be interfaced with by sahad users. It might be specific to the culture and design of the ships themselves so we can’t say for sure if thats an actual requirement. They store energy in much the same way that we do for arcane engineering since both forms of magic utilize mana. Though Sahad does not tend to draw its energy directly from the caster the way arcane does, at the very least not any of the spells we currently know about. It appears their engineering attempts with the stuff revolve around a specific material that is fortunately undamaged though what it is, we don’t know. It’s a black sphere, and I mean really black. There is no light reflecting off of it at all and it looks like carrying around a miniature black hole. This in some way seems to be the control system for the sahad devices and we’re still working out what the hell it does.

Also the silent auction has come and gone, your incremental bidding did nothing to help as they don’t tell you if you’re winning or not. The black market isn’t ebay, you just write down the highest you’re gonna go and then they contact whoever wrote the biggest number once the sale is closed.

The Exerlus are somewhat difficult to negotiate with for annoying reasons that Winter went over at the briefing already. But basically they’re not giving us any data until our civilization is considered to be “at peace”. That includes the rest of the Sol Empires for some reason. Though this is technically related to scan data. They still were willing to mention that they know how to travel the entire galaxy with basically more refined versions of what we use now. Part of that refinement is that similar to the prototype cruiser Lancaster has, they don’t need hallways, beds, bathrooms, life support, or really much else on a ship besides engines. Their galactic ships are just big engines that they hang onto while flying through space. As a result the engines can reach massive sizes and efficiency. Whiiiich explains why they haven’t left the system. Nelta destroyed their big engine and now they have to hang out here until someone comes to pick them up. They can hop between stars without it but it makes it take a very long time to get back to where they actually came from.

They do still take our scan data of those other planets though. So apparently the precise ruling is that they don’t share the scanning archives but they do whatever they want with their own tech that isn’t related to weapons. I suppose you could weaponize anything but to their perspective, scanners and engines aren’t really weapons. Their weapons are…frighteningly powerful.

Though the improved scanners we got from them are being implemented on some test ships in the fleet to try out on some of our adventures particularly on the boiling world due to its high biodiversity since the scanners are a bit better at finding out details.

The Golden Vivarium has finally finished construction and is fully operable. It has also begun some deeper research onto this maker monster thing. Progress is slow though at least avoids torturing the creature for results since Vasia is busy with New Age projects. Currently it seems to produce more monsters whenever it happens to have materials…it also creates those materials as byproducts of its own waste. So as long as you keep feeding it, it keeps building more things. Something for the vivarium caretakers to be extra careful about given that the creatures can be hidden and deployed as if programmed for highly specific tasks. Right now communicating an idea to it of building bigger more meaty things is proving tricky, while it has a higher level of intelligence than most animals it is still not sure what the tiny two legged people are trying to communicate to it.

Also Salied has been exhibiting odd behavior. More accurately, she seems to be having catatonic rambles when asked about her past that don’t match up to her past. Long story short, we did a lot of math based on her zoned out stares into the distance. Here are the coordinates, we have no idea what will be there or how much stuff we should send. Vasia wants to take over the operation and send pretty much half our stuff out there immediately though she can be a bit…eager sometimes. Might be smarter just to send a scout first to see what we’re looking at.

We’ve cashed out the semi brainwashed engineer. That took a bit more effort than expected for one missing persons case. While we’re on the topic, our cruiser arrived to scan the Siwa factory and poke around. The security is tight and we were able to infiltrate the upper levels. Though there is a basement lab where we couldn’t get our agents into so easily, the security spiked significantly for its lower labs. All employees of the factory also do not seem that aware of what is down there, at least not the ones we could sneak away for a chat. Further attempts might reveal our presence. My advice is that we would need to either take a social route of tracking down some execs and making friends, or a more brute force approach of sending the full ops team to break into there. Our agents are good at their jobs but we’re dealing with some maximum security conspiracy shenanigans now. We can try to take a wild push with low odds of success or we can try to up those odds and send in Vaeri and Aryn.

Though that being said its not for nothing. We have found that the factory produces a lot of weapons that never reach the empires in Sol. They’re supplying some sort of hidden army. We tracked some of their shipments off world and given that they are at the edge of the solar system, it is kind of obviously suspicious when all the shipments from the sneakier weapons labs are going away from the star. It is likely some independent colony is amassing an immense number of weapons, if not one that they own themselves and never declared. I’ve looked into the major weapons hub of the frontier worlds, Faelyn, and she is not the recipient of these. She actually produces her own at Moncayo which is sold to most of the other frontier worlds. Which eliminates a lot of potential recipients given the sheer quantity of arms being moved and just disappearing into space. Why this particular element isn’t as well hidden as the lower level labs is beyond me.

Raiben was particularly useful in finding how how the silent auction involving the alien works. More specifically who the final buyer was. Leon dealt with it from there and with some overtime hours from our staff we’ve managed to acquire the alien prisoner and it is on the way back to Somnus now. No one knows we’re behind the smoldering crater Leon left behind.

Also our offer to help Kaylen out was met with some amusement. To Kaylen we’re definitely small fry compared to the COA departments. Though she did consider that we are at least not directly associated with Alnae. Though we did still get an ‘audition’ job offer from Alnae related to this probing. It came from an anonymous intermediary shortly afterwards. However, its impossible to confirm if Kaylen even knows that people from Alnae are asking us if we can make an Alnae High Councilor disappear. Yeah that’s the job. It was very specific on ‘disappear’.

So this presents a series of…situations. First off, either this is an intermediary for Kaylen so no one can prove her involvement or its someone operating outside of her knowledge to accomplish some larger plot. So…we’re already in too deep just by hearing the offer. If Kaylen did ask us and we go tell on them to her she’ll know we’re not cut out for this kind of stuff. However, she could go a step further and try to silence us to make sure we don’t spread any further information around about the offer. Notable because as Grand Marshall the entire COA responds to her…so we could get into a shadow war spanning the galaxy against the second largest covert agency. The first being the Phantoms if you were curious. The intermediary would disappear whether or not Kaylen was behind them so we’d make no progress on figuring that out. Though if its not from her and we go through with it, we could be destabilizing everything she’s trying to pull together. This gets into why the job is to make them ‘disappear’. If no one can prove that they are dead they don’t know if they need to replace them, which creates a window of uncertainty during which some other things might be able to take place.

It’s times like these I’m happy that I’m not the boss.

Also Aryn found a way to advertise for Madhammer without paying ad money…technically. I say technically because I’m not sure if this is entirely the desired approach. She made them into a meme on social media featuring a video clip of a tank shooting a mech from their recent battle on Thenica they were involved in. It tends to feature captions that show a theme towards a discontent for anyone with more power than the poster.  It spread pretty quick. Free advertising?

As for Jicho, we kind of haven’t heard from them since the invasion. Aryn says there is a high chance whatever server farm they had was destroyed during which. Its hard to look into it any deeper than that as we couldn’t find them even when we knew they were still alive.

We ridin’ to Jamalia