Stories of Lore 12
So far the plot to pandem portal the approaching aliens is going somewhat as expected. Despite Faelyn’s influence and the number of pandem organizations in Moncayo for the construction of the radar many of them are less than willing to go along with the plan. Renards Rifts only has a few volunteers and they’re not the most talented, though that could be understood given they are a civilian industry. Kaylen is willing to send us their military warlocks but can’t commit too many ships to the ambush as things are right now for all the aforementioned reasons. Vloz’Khress doesn’t seem interested at all though they stand to benefit most from an invasion like this. So they might be up to something odd. Shetou doesn’t really…have much for pandem after the schism with Kar’Soluth. Apparently that’s something of a problem they’re still dealing with. Though Faelyn is trying to appeal to Yasrena Val’Hari directly instead of through the Vloz’Khress in order to get her to order them to come help. Since apparently crazy Yochlol lady is actually easier to negotiate with than certifiably insane drow lady.
We’ve rotated crews onto larger ships, which no one complains about. Everyone loves getting a bigger ship. Especially one with more space in the living quarters.
In bad news, Riley is missing and so is half of the knights with her and a science officer. That’s…a whole thing going on though not much we can do from here about it.Khymin took the data we have on the path they took and rigged up a ship that could make the run. Turns out it wasn’t too hard since they’re just going to fly to a specific point and hopefully not die. Though the issue remains that a pandem caster has to go with them to open the rift, both to enter into the warrens and to exit it.
Meanwhile our food shipping plan is underway as discreetly as possible for the moment. The particulars have been taken over by Nah Division since that’s the only complicated part.
Scans indicate the approaching corvette is from Kar’Soluth, at least its identification tags are. Though if we need further confirmation, Alexander booted up the ol’…well brand new pandem radar on a hunch. One of the vals from the house might be on board. Normally we couldn’t be that specific but we happen to already know what bind we are looking for. One of them is potentially bound to Ecsanul. Which…could be a problem. As it passed by the stealth cruiser we learned that its modified to be a bit faster than normal and judging by its current path the math suggests they’ll be landing on the opposite side of the continent from us. Though we’re not totally sure why. If its plan was to attack us after we made a bit of an enemy over previous matters, you would think it would come closer. Also we don’t detect any ships on any other planes planning for a pandem insertion on top of them or anything. It has superior mobility to the cruiser and the cruiser has almost no firepower given its stealth modifications. We’re not likely to be able to engage them prior to their entering the atmosphere. We could try to intercept wherever they might be thinking of landing by taking the shuttle. We do have Madhammer here so ground superiority is definitely in our favor at the least. We could also just hole up at Jamalia, the guns are enough to knock out the ship if it tries to get too close.
Recruiting is going well at Moncayo, so is just getting settled into the area. Though attempts to get people on board with the anti NELTA plan are a little all over the place. Faelyn is going to try and handle negotiating with Kar’Soluth at the least. Though Renard’s Rift offers very few relevant volunteers to fly off into war, they’re a bit more based on civilian infrastructure and most of them don’t have an interest in traveling on the highway to the danger zone.
Meanwhile, back at Jamalia, Nihlav is still a bit hissy over the matter of the arcurans and has been keeping busy finding wayward warrens she can gather in her preparation to return them all to the merkas city. Though she hasn’t really talked much on the matter otherwise, having not really committed just yet to any particular course of action. Though the education of the more lost and confused merkas is going well. Nihlav hasn’t really complained about that at all, though she doesn’t participate herself. Instead keeping to her work beyond the colony walls. Granted she needs the education the least, she figured out how our technology worked a lot faster than most other merkas. The others are taking a lot longer, and one might suppose that the older merkas learn things quicker than the younger ones for some reason.
As for Daesta, she seems to be doing alright though given that she was a fairly adamant priestess in training when we met her it isn’t much surprise that she takes to following after Nihlav on those adventures. She does seem to desire to be a priestess at the least, and her one thing to do if she could would be to go back to the city and train under the high priestess they have.
The shuttles have been mapping out the planet and finding other settlements, there are a few from the arcurans. Notably we have seen no other large settlements of the merkas, that city might be the only one left on the continent.
On the other hand, Madhammer is thoroughly demolishing any arcuran who dare challenge them. Yenneiros seems to find this to be an amusing sport. So their recruitment efforts are going well since all the arcurans really care about is going off to fight new things for glory and whatnot.
I’ve gone through the six colonies Faelyn considers to be at high risk and worked out the nearest locations they could be sent. Then the second nearest because those ones are still technically kind of close to the warpath. I’ve been in contact with them offering to help them shuttle around to safer locations.
As for the reading of exerlus minds, the answer is ‘kind of’. They can be interacted with psionically but not on quite the same level as we’re used to. For example, empathy is incredibly ineffective against them. While it still picks up some sort of information that might indicate they are more than robots its definitely nothing we can make actual sense of as its kind of like picking up pure static of inconsistent variations.
The Arc fleet is on its way to Moncayo to meet up with Faelyn’s fleet and resume position under the command of “Admiral” Vamon.
Preparations are underway to get Vasia everything she needs to travel to the mysterious coordinates. Vasia’s response to needing the device analyzed was to inform us that it was a massively complicated device that is similar to our psionic computer systems. She also thinks it isn’t writable twice, so once the sphere is made it is just stuck that way. So hopefully no one has any buggy code in it. Then she threw it in her luggage and walked off while I was still asking questions. We have more as there was one on each ship basically so I suppose that works. Also when asked if she intends to take any of the 004C creatures with her she said she was taking Balhast since she doesn’t want to leave it alone here on the station for too long. Especially since it only responds positively to her. Also to answer your question, yes we did try sending one of them and Salied through to talk to the entity and had no progress.
40th Day is at work with setting up for mining stations and given a few projections on where to set up the stations up to exploit asteroid belts that are rich in resources used to build things.
Also the Exerlus threw an engine schematic at us when prompted about the matter. Then just wandered off to continue scanning, pointing out that their new engine will be here to pick them up before we can build one with them anyways. That being said the schematic might as well be gibberish. We understand the numbers…just not what more than half of the systems actually are. It clearly uses sahad magic and it also clearly is unbelievably more advanced than anything we’ve ever encountered before. The entire schematic is written out with the expectation that you can place every individual atom during construction. We’re…not sure how high a tolerance for failure the design has either. This also might be exerlus humor to throw lesser civilizations a hint at how to do something that is technologically impossible for them to achieve and watch them scramble. So we’re gonna try that and see if it blows up, cuz why not at this point.
Also Adryn is still roaming around the planet and throwing random critters into cages to send back to us. Apparently things are going well and they haven’t found any predators of too much significance to them. Though again, information barrier due to the inability to carry signal through the atmosphere. So we’re basically just receiving handwritten messages in a bottle tied to some critter or another.
The Vivarium continues to try and work with the Maker and get it to make things they want but the closet they’ve gotten is to convincing it to make bigger monsters than before. Which would be good for cattle…if they didn’t all have claws. So far no deaths but a few maimings among the researchers. We had to get them a fancy cybernetic leg for that one.
We’ve also worked a bit on the vivarium’s construction as requested. The prefab colony also finished construction and is ready for rapid deployment whenever necessary.
We’ve had Vaeri start hanging around high society to try and meet with some Siwa execs. This will be a bit of a long con though most likely as she has to start with just meeting them let alone getting to a point where they might tell her about the underground lab. With Setani being sent out to Sol to get on Standby for the Alnae operation, we’ll need to pick someone new to be our point of contact with Laura King in particular should something come up. Largely just because leaving her unattended for too long could be dangerous.
The stealth cruiser is currently stalking around the area to see if it can catch any of the shipments. Though thats a matter of ‘wait and see’ and also identifying which ones to follow as the factory has regular shipments to all the normal places. We don’t know how often they ship stuff out to these other planets.
Meanwhile our new friend Uneloj is hanging out around the station trying to see about a way to get back home after our little ‘rescue’. We haven’t exactly revealed the nature of our division to him thus far for obvious reasons but that does make it hard to see his overall intent. Though so far the exerlus presence seems to make him uncomfortable and we’re not sure if he just has fifty conspiracy theories on the matter ready to go or any actual merit to his view of them.
As for our High Councilor target, upon taking the job the full details of which came in. Their name is Lynatael, he’s sort of in the middle of the pack among the high council for seniority both in age and duration of rule. So here is the first problem, not sure if you remember this but all the Alnae High Councilors are kept incredibly safe ever since the invasion and the schism that produced all the warlords. They all work from home in various underground bunkers around the capital city. Only rarely coming out, and usually just to proceed to the main building office for meetings with the others. So reaching them is half the problem. Their obscure hiding is how Kaylen rose to become Grand Marshall, since none of the councilors could make public appearances anymore without threat of assassination.
Lynatael himself is in charge of an area that was recently retaken by Kaylen and Madhammer. He had largely been just a figurehead for awhile while the area was out of Alnae’s control due to the rebelling warlord, though with it coming back into the fold of Alnae he has returned to managing the territory. This has led to some dramatic swings in policy in the area as it is still a wartorn ruin being re-integrated into the empire after a rebellious phase. So he and his administrative staff have definitely been making rather bold calls left and right to try and stabilize the area and see what resources need to go where regardless of who was holding onto them under the reign of the warlord. So he could very easily have a lot of enemies from every direction.
Interestingly though, he is the one that receives the food shipments that Lancaster is selling to Alnae. At the very least his territory is, likely to try and curb the chaos of the area by supplying it with much needed food. This is where things are starting to get dangerous, since we are working with Shetou to have them pirate some of these shipments intended for this area of Alnae and now we’re after this high councilor from the same area. There’s just a lot of ways this could cascade into a whole bunch of issues if we aren’t careful.
Back here at the base, we have been expanding the facility. Leon is also pretty good with the mech even if its not his primary combat method up till now. Definitely not a prodigal mech pilot though, we spent a week just running laps with him so he can get used to moving around in the thing.
When it comes to recruiting, given the nature of our operation the best way to find people is to put them through long term tests of other organizations. It is likely our best way of recruiting would be to approach those who are members of Gunhild’s strike team or members of the security force who are doing particularly well under Hylavi. That or ask Laura about the matter though this might be the one area she isn’t so effective in given that we’re worried about people who haven’t proven an ability to stick to aligned goal for too long.
Also we have the Nomads hanging around the station keeping an eye out for any of Ohalyn’s shipments.
Here at Jamalia we’ve done fairly well to bring up recruitment with the Arcurans, they’re definitely primitive and not terribly effective at using modern weapons but we’re working on training them for that. Also we’re besieging Helym next week just to prove we can because one of them said some cocky shit and now Gheir is rolling out the tanks to go test some of their theories.