Posted on November 28, 2021
Well at least building structures are cheap on Koura still, so it was easy to set up the academy. Currently it just makes use of a nearby office building for the minimal enrollment we have while a larger campus is built in a more open space. We bundled it together with the same department working on the more traditional education system for the potential advancement of the population.
Koura cures has observed a tendency in those subjected to the process of the parasite’s “healing” to stop showing symptoms of breathing difficulty on Koura despite its atmosphere being a little bit less than ideal. Also an ability to digest more of the local flora than usual. Speaking of which we have a new town down on Koura. Some civilians started their own farms a few miles outside of the city and that caused a few other people to move out there and some small businesses to pop up. Apparently they weren’t so keen on city life.
We’ve fixed up the station that got shoved back at us. At this point we could just attach it to Somnus if we don’t find a use for it otherwise.
Hylavi spent some time gunning down gangsters in New Kaifen alongside Eleazor. Well they say they’re part of a minor house but no one really respects minor houses enough to consider them more than gangs I am told. His wife was to be transported to Kar’Soluth territory to complete the transaction between this minor house and the Kar’Soluth. After some interrogation from the two of them, they were able to determine which ship his wife had been taken on. Which resulted in Hylavi getting a bright idea and calling Sethis to get a favor from the Nomads who are in Sol at the moment. They hijacked the ship transporting Eleazor’s wife and brought her back to New Kaifen. I can’t help but notice that Hylavi is definitely getting a bit comfortable with exploiting the number of strange organizations we have at our disposal. This is the second time she’s made use of the lowest decks to get something done and the third time she let outside less-than-legal forces solve problems for her. After promising sanctuary to Eleazor and his wife she has convinced them to come back with her to Somnus.
Speaking of which, the Satsujin recruitment has been stalled by her running off to assemble a strike team. Between myself and several other imperial recruiters, instead of outright recruiting her we more so triggered her to go into ‘hero mode’ and is now off to assemble a team. Apparently following in the example of Indal, who is the original reason she tried joining the Valdir for awhile, she feels a need to get around politics and prepare for the invasion.
Riley is currently being restrained by Vasia due to her erratic behavior, also something about being wrapped up tightly seems to reduce her struggles. Vasia describes it as making her feel ‘held together’ which is why she’s wrapped in a weighted blanket. She has developed a compulsive behavior of checking that her body is still attached to herself or at least where she thinks it is. Her kinesthetic senses are thrown off and she keeps experiencing problems with coordination as a result. Basically she’s suddenly become very clumsy.
The station we captured from the Kar’Soluth is being occupied but because it is an asteroid stealth base it has very little ability to generate value other than being there in the first place. There is nothing else in the system to really exploit either. So I should caution, it’s going to just be a drain on finances for as long as we maintain it. This might be why it was so small and just used for observation and as a staging point.
Business wise Vittles is doing better on profit without the Shetou part of the deal, even if they aren’t entirely happy about it. Lot less work to just sell directly to Alnae, and a lot less freighter’s going missing. That and harder for the local pirates to find an exploit to.
Yoshai is up and about at Voyager, seems better than he was before actually. His pandem corruption has been removed and he’s been opening doors and operating complicated machinery for the last week just for fun. Apparently Eden set him to being a native of the shadow plane since that was his favorite one to channel. This has had a few side effects on his physiology. One of which being total darkvision. Normally races with this benefit can see better and further in the darkness, though Yoshai can now see even better in the dark than we can in the day. To the point that even in pitch blackness he can tell where everything is somehow. This fits his strategy of opening rifts to obscure the visions of others quite well since he’s now able to channel Noctis even more effectively than before.
We’re continuing to explore the continent on Enohas, the area around us is fairly secure…in theory. Haziel befriended a few of those kaiju things wandering around and has them napping outside the colony as her pets. They’re just…napping there. Ominously. Notably this gave us a chance to actually understand how they work a bit more. Apparently these huge creatures are mostly herbivores and are a little bit solar powered. They’re that size because of the number of options available to them for finding energy and sustenance. Sure if you get close enough they’ll eat you but if you run its not worth the effort anymore when they can also just eat the whole tree right next to them. At least that applies for the specific ones she has with her at the moment. There are some other much more predatory species that go after these creatures.
Reika has taken over the merkas project but stated that they’re not budging since we last talked to them. Nihlav still wants Yonam dead and a more aggressive war against the arcurans. Which she has already begun conducting on her own without us being involved, apparently helping her find all those lost warrens gave them an army to work with and they remembered a lot of what they learned at Jamalia while we held them here. So now they’re making advances in weapons that might help tilt things into their favor for a little while at least. So Reika’s official report is “project abandoned” until you get Madhammer to send Yonam as a sacrifice to advance politics or authorize Reika to initiate a war against Nihlav.
In other Jamalian affairs, Eerihild is trying out the whole knight thing, mostly because of an interest in being rich instead of poor. Despite her mother’s ability to live off the land wherever she might go, Eerihild isn’t quite so suited to being a hermit. She has a general problem of being a young rebellious werewolf who is used to being on her own. So a distinct lack of teamwork on her part, though Sarnai seems to be doing the best at making progress on that front if nothing else because its the only other squire her own age she can hang out with. We experimented with her ‘shamanism’ to an extent to get a better idea of her abilities.
She has no pandem corruption due to the ‘native’ rule again but with a twist. It’s impossible to not be a native of your own mother, and all of Eerihild’s pandem abilities come from that connection rather than planar rift effects. She can’t open rifts to other planes like all of the knights can, but she can cast high level spells just by association to her mother’s ability to do the same thing. Similar to what you and Irae have going on, but with an archdruid instead of a lich.
I’d say your odds of convincing Haziel to bind with you are fairly low.
As for building underground bunkers, I’d estimate around fifty million, as that’s basically a hostile colony drilled into the ground.
Now for the shady news, in accepting the offer of Valadeus Irae successfully convinced Eden to bind with you. I don’t know how to say this, but you look a little fatter than usual. Maybe its just my imagination. Though we learned something unique about Eden they had not previously revealed but in hindsight makes perfect sense. As a sahad wielder with billions of years of experience, the planet can move at ftl speeds if Eden so desires. They just haven’t bothered because they liked their star and weren’t actually sure of what would happen if they jumped between stars, or that the star over yonder was similar to their own in the first place. They don’t really have a telescope or math.
They’re definitely too far away for us to bring back to the frontier in any reasonable amount of time and far too large for you to rift tunnel with us beyond just their avatar. Though its interesting to know that they could just…move the whole planet at will. It also puts into perspective how docile Eden really is, had they wanted to they could have destroyed Lancaster’s whole fleet by taking a step to the left. So maybe don’t send them to war.
Well this has been fruitful. At least we’ve learned a lot from contacting Indal..though really we contacted Kaisa and Kenin I suppose. Azilath has agreed to help in the invasion after all this but is definitely in need of some therapy now. Oh look at that, we have a whole team of those. We should probably keep tabs on Valdir after this little chat, they might start to do some…erratic things.
We actually have some trackers we aren’t sending anywhere at the moment. They work for Vasia and procure oddities from around the galaxy. Some of them are on other colonies on the frontier “investigating” certain anomalies and people. She said not to bother with bringing it up unless significant progress was made.
As for the therapy plan, I suppose more doesn’t hurt though they’re just hanging around Somnus and Koura helping out with problems here and there. Actually we’ve found great use for them in helping colonists relocated by 40th day in particular who are dealing with varying forms of homesickness.
Salied has been allowed outside to visit the manor of the Astral Order, which she seems to like hanging around. Though anyone would like hanging out in their mansion. They had a slip’n’slide running down a hallway while Renjala is away. At least for the duration of Salied’s visit.
Vasia says that if she was a phantom she would have a bigger facility and more funding for her work.
Cassir used the ritual to contact Qhalord, it appears you were correct that he was indeed abducted by Kanika.
Peter has found a new lead on Seiyomi’s whereabouts that both make sense and no sense at all. He is pursuing these leads to the jydoq homeworld.
As for improving the scanning, we kind of can though we need bigger platforms to deploy such a thing on depending on how sensitive you want it to be. If you want to pick out specific species presence we could probably fit that into a cruiser. Would still have to go down and look for them though. If you want to pick out specific individuals who don’t want to be found among dense mass of noise, such as finding Nila in a forest, we’re going to need a carrier sized scanning vessel that just only scans things. Assuming you want to do all this from orbit, as that kind of range and precision is hard to pull off from way up there across such a range of area. Theoretically we could mount these kinds of things onto smaller rigs but they would need to be able to enter the atmosphere and get to within a certain range of their target. So…yes kind of but depends what you want to do.
For the merka male project we kind of need to abduct or get samples of more merkas. The particular issue being, they just packed up all their stuff and went home from Jamalia and have become someone closed off from visits and further negotiation due to a general distaste for the arcurans being back on Koura sitting comfy.
So not only does the cage need reinforcement, the new maker just burrowed through the whole station and got to the cafeteria, costing a lot in repairs and shutting down the station’s life support for a few hours. Not a major catastrophe but slightly annoying. We’re still trying to catch some of the birds that got loose when it passed through their enclosure. It did all this and then just sat in the kitchen eating everything with sugar in it. Including the bags of sugar for actual baking. Then it burrowed through the other half of the station and found another enclosure on the opposite side of the station from its original habitat and started setting up its nest there. I think there’s something to the makers instinctively living far away from one another. The planet we found them on had them spread over vast distances. The staff had trouble apprehending it obviously. The metal maker is very hard to subdue, almost as if it were armored! Imagine that. It also took the metal of the station it burrowed through into its new nest that…I guess we’ll just leave it in for now while we repair everything. We’re looking into better reinforcements for its enclosure, which is getting dangerous to approach as it starts making…things. Metal things, with spikes.
The fenalis are currently for sale on a Koura petshop we set up.
Bardhe is still hunting, Vals aren’t so easy to find and approach for an assassin given their status and that they live in a culture were assassination is the normal way to get a promotion. Apparently he’s closing in on one at least. Also remember these are vals who can summon Ecsanul, he has a very limited window to strike or he could get eaten by a demon lord.
Expansions to the New Horizons shipyard have been complete, it can now produce cruisers and battlecruisers. One for practical use, one for shooting things.
That may have been a risky offer. The Jaal’Darya have enough dirty work to get done that they’ll straight up trade us the plague as a reward for doing some of them. One of them is just delivering another plague entirely to another location entirely. So we didn’t tell them where we come from. One of the job offers was to deliver such a virus to Somnus itself, so…we might want to keep tabs on them. Another is to assassinate Adin Va and Yasice Val’Sharen from House Song. If we kill Song Yi herself they’ll give us whole city as a reward and throw in the disease we’re asking for as a bonus. Though they admitted that one’s ambitious given that they’ve been trying for decades to pull that off now. Though its on the table if we can get it done. They’d also appreciate it if we could kill Renjala after his little stunt kicking them out of the city they were holding hostage to keep House Song busy during the Sarghess invasion of Sharen territory. Also a straight up bombing of House Enelynn’s manor that happens to kill one of their heirs. That being the house in Shetou lead by an elf of all things. So there’s a long list of things…all of it is pretty nefarious. I’m not sure if they have no idea where we’re from or if they’re just fucking with us. Because they are favored by the phantoms so they should have an idea of whats going on, but they say everything with a straight face.
Zhuan is on Koura now looking around the neighborhood. He hasn’t done anything overt just yet but Laura has him ‘learning the ropes’ most likely.
Vanjin is limping around and keeping an eye on the councilman. Her ideas for dealing with it still stand at least. Man this mission is developing more and more steps every time we make any progress I’m noticing. Assassinating a councilor is hard.
Vaeri is still snooping around though points out that Laura’s knowledge of the affair is mostly to be sold to Arkaric who is practically sponsoring the mission. Given the information she found, he would probably like to know as soon as possible. It seems the reason for so much secrecy around the warforged project is that they are…distinctly aware that Arkaric and the Exerlus will probably have an interest in the matter as soon as its revealed. So they’re trying to build a large enough army to prevent it from being stopped before it can start spreading through the system. They also intend to hide the manufacturer and location of the factory for as long as possible, so it can only be sold to vetted clients who won’t tell any of these groups where its coming from. I suppose that’s why we were sent to look into things by the people they don’t want to know about it.
The Nomads took a sidetrip to hijack a ship for Hylavi that was transporting a kidnapped princess. Then they just hopped over to the nearest planet and kept recruiting, I suppose their ship being so alarmingly fast is useful to just have sitting nearby.
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