Posted on December 5, 2021

 

Stories of Lore 19

 

We’ve started with the construction efforts of integrating the broken station into Somnus as some extra space. Subsidies and laws have been put in place to help with the civilian side of thing. Hurt our profits but helped our growth.

Hylavi has managed to curb the rampant growth of Laura’s enterprises, thankfully. Though we’ll see how long that lasts once Zhuan becomes a potential problem. As for the buildings she bought, they’re still under heavy renovations. As far as Hylavi can tell, they’re being designed as something resembling a factory. That being said, she spent the better part of a week chasing the Iron Gnoll around Somnus and Koura because he got here before anyone escorting him did and that…was an issue.

Satsujin has taken us up on the funding offer, as well as Alnae and Shetou’s offer. So we’re sort of all funding a fraction of her endeavors. She seems to be intentionally trying not to show any favoritism to all of her financial suitors while still getting things done.

As for vacation places, I like the idea of Koura. It’s nice and nearby, no need for using the prototype cruiser. Lot of nature destinations, the quiet might do her some good.

As for the Kar’Soluth station, sure though unless you plan to monitor Shetou I’m not sure how beneficial the location would be other than simply being out of the way. Which we have the lowest decks for at the moment. Not to mention that colony on the so-called “Ash” planet that is pretty much completely inaccessible to anyone passing through.

Improving your current armaments… I suppose you could buy a mech? I mean you own a space station, how much more power armor do you need?

Also we went looking for a new captain to help on some of our newest endeavors. Given the general unemployment rate of such individuals being quite low we sort of snagged one from Shetou instead. Being good at hostile negotiations counts as diplomatic credentials right? Anyways here’s a profile on Captain Yorikane.

Oh and we got a report from Faelyn. The Pandem intercept team has launched with whatever they’ve managed to bring together to weaken the nelta fleet. They will intercept in two months, and then one month after that Nelta will pass through the frontier. Another month after that, the second invasion will begin. So basically…clock’s ticking. We have a limited amount of time to position people where we want them positioned once everything goes to hell. I predict we won’t be able to maneuver as freely once Nelta gets here, I advise measuring the value of opportunity versus safety.

The First lance continues its push towards exploring the area. More settlements of both arcuran and merkas have been found, they definitely trend towards certain personalities but it is always interesting to see the differences due to the expanse of distance between them all. We actually found a bunch of arcurans who are obsessed specifically with hunting giant monsters, and a group of merkas who once tried to just establish their own village and live peacefully along a river. They were raided by a group of arcurans and are now filled with hate and vengeance just like Nihlav after their tree was burned down. Even when the slightest bit of progress towards peace was made, someone had to go and fuck it up.

Yoham is on his way back to Enohas, completely unaware he’s about to be a diplomatic sacrifice to the merkas so he’s not chained up just yet. Setani is recovered but still a bit sore. I’d say she should be fine given her physical prowess but she’s not exactly in tip top shape for getting involved with a beast like Elgrim once again.

Eerihild still sucks with weapons, she doesn’t really do well with ‘extensions of the self’ since herself can extend into a fucking werewolf. Though we built a special practice sword for how large her hands get when she transforms…even if she’s got no technique do you now how scary a werewolf with a sword is? In that form she has enough physical strength to rag doll an orc with just her teeth, a practice sword is basically a club. Worse results because she keeps having to think about it unlike with her claws, and notably in her humanoid form she can manifest an incarnum version of her claws over her hands. The knights still think the training is worthwhile though since it keeps her focusing on technique over just running things over with brute force. A sort of taming of her mind to remember to keep track of more than just the throat of whatever she’s trying to kill. She still isn’t the beeest at teamwork though. An effort is made, but it is more of just staying near them and not running ahead. In a fight she’s just a little too wild to do anything like a phalanx for example. She’s also a bit too eager for just standing around holding up a shield. With one exception, the only person Eerihild works well with is Sarnai. The two of them seem to be getting along well. While Sarnai can barely fight to the standards of a knight she does understand teamwork. Eerihild on the other hand can body a knight in a matter of seconds but can’t work with anyone else. Together they form…a fucking mess but it’s the only pairing that gets Eerihild to remember she even has a teammate after the bullets start flying. Though Sarnai is getting the most out of this relationship from a training standpoint. Sparring with Eerihild during their spare time is definitely getting her used to the shocking reality of combat, because Eerihild is kind of scary and always seems angry enough to forget its practice. The thought that she miiiight just forget to go easy and actually bite your head off is sort of always in the back of your mind.

Alexander’s project back at Moncayo is going well, though for the most part its just a matter of construction right now since it is absolutely huge and a lot of infrastructure. Not to mention the other half of it being built on Thenica.

Third lance is hanging around on Eden…which is a weird thing to say. If you think of Eden as it’s avatar then that sounds like an innuendo waiting to happen. Don’t think on it too much. Though we’ve received some mysterious donations of an unquantifiable resource through some unknown machinations of Valadeus if you wanted to open a rift tunnel to get everyone back home about now.

Speaking of Eden it seems to not like the idea of construction on herself and is already planning to eat all the colony prefabs that were placed on them once you all leave. Though it offers a snazzy custom cave network behind a waterfall guarded by a giant tentacle monster if you want to just place furniture and stuff in there since they’re less picky about rocks being drilled into then dirt having stuff placed in it. Not sure what it’s reasons are.

They also can definitely build more avatars, Eliza is working on one of them. Eden uses the one Eliza created as its current manifestation, and then there is it’s own replacement for the one that got blown up by that gnoll. Apparently the caveat is that Eden can only let a small number leave the planet at a time due to the links they must sustain to keep it working. “Small number” to a planet being a number over a hundred though. I feel small again.

As for the surgery, teeeechnically they say they can help you though they seem to think you have any skill in this field whatsoever. Actually even Dr. Taz can’t figure out what the hell Eden is doing that enables such things to be done. Umarlen can’t fathom the precision required. While everyone tries to unravel the mystery and techniques behind it, Eliza just needed to see it done in front of her to replicate it and is now practicing on Eden’s avatar  while the other four scientists on the trip are still stuck on figuring out how to do any of this without a microscope and a robot arm. Dr. Taz says it’s making him nervous to wonder how much practice Eliza has had that she can be so precise and quick with just the claws on her hands instead of scalpel. Not to mention without a microscope. So while yes, Eden can help you do the surgery there is a less than one percent chance you can actually do it unless you give up your life of practicing pandem and incarnum to spend a few centuries practicing medical surgeries. Fortunately, Eden can apparently do this hundreds of times at once since all of their avatars can do it.

Also as your pandem bind you can cast a few of the things Eden has though its a short boring list brought on by survival rather than exploration. Mental communication is probably nice though, you and Ilex can just phone each other up whenever you like. The FTL spell will obliterate your body instantly though. Notably Vasia has had better luck figuring out what Eden knows about Sahad. Even if you are bound to an entity that knows sahad, 001D has not triggered for you otherwise I doubt we could have this conversation. You’re definitely a bit more robust and you seem to have put on some extra pounds to your bench sets. Not to mention if you use embody bind you’ll become..quite large. You can rift to their giant tentacle monster though, and there is definitely a lot to be explored. Eden doesn’t have context for their own abilities nor have they entered into any conflict that demanded they be refined. A living planet with no one else to encounter out in the vast emptiness of space only needs to keep existing within range of a star, so there is definitely something to be said for the education process. As opposed to something like Valadeus who has mastered all of his powers and knows how to teach you to use them.

As for anything else they’ve met, apparently Eden has met the giant tentacle monster living under the waterfall. It was once some alien cruising through the galaxy that never left once it got stuck on the planet. It’s not exactly intelligent, and likely has a similar origin story to Eden themselves but became Eden’s pet entirely by way of being significantly smaller than Eden. Other then that they haven’t met any other life forms.

Apparently Qhalord is not being used for anything we think he’s about to be used for. Recently credit for a major attack on Shetou’s rebuilt areas was, let’s say, given to Qhalord. He was abducted not for lack of joining, but because he was so insignificant to Kanika that he could be expended – as bait. The phantoms are up to something involving targeting House Song most likely. So that’s foreboding, and also bad for Qhalord’s lifespan.

Bit late to the party on the Elgrim thing. He’s already been captured and sent to the Raven II by Shanhai and Orochi. We probably would have caught him ourselves had it not been for Jhaeros deciding NOW was the time to make his grand return.

Vasia got some samples of Eden to bring back but if we replicate a planet that ought to be…interesting.

Peter made it to Jydoq space on the hunt for Seiyomi only to discover that Seiyomi is already elsewhere yet again. Took him weeks of hunting around the planet to pursue various leads to end up in “Seiyomi took off into the Abyss for reasons unknown”. Seiyomi is not a pandem caster and the jydoq are only recently learning what pandem is. We don’t know how he did that, we don’t know where he is going, and now Peter has to get back to Sol to find a rift to get into the abyss and then navigate that confusing mess to a general position of jydoq where Seiyomi may or may not be by the time he gets there. Apparently, he’s not even the only one looking for Seiyomi and the representative of a psionics group from Sol is also on the hunt but they’re going to Enetsu near jydoq space instead. It’s starting to become apparent that this is…this is going to take some effort. Peter has decided to stop hunting Seiyomi directly and instead hunt down his backstory to try  and find any way to lure Seiyomi to somewhere that Peter can actually find him. Because chasing this trail from behind is just proving to be impossible.

The Iron Gnoll beat Adryn to Somnus station. He then proceeded to run around the city looking for Adryn wondering why Adryn wasn’t there. Who he ditched back on Tykel…. While he wandered about he happened to run into Echo Seven and challenge her to a duel. She politely declined, so he hit her anyways and ran off. Like…just slapped her with his axe and then sprinted off into an alley. Echo Seven didn’t seem to notice and went back to whatever it is she does. Hylavi had to chase the gnoll all around the city for three days before Adryn got there. After a day of fruitless searching they  learned he had found his way to Koura and was now running amuck down there. He found that whole arena business, foiled Laura’s latest scheme and took the prize money which he promptly spent almost all of on drugs and hookers. Now you might be thinking, that seems normal for a prize fighter right? He made the hookers do the drugs and let them loose into the street, didn’t fuck a single one of them or take a single drug. Just took off into the night and was found the next day on Madhammer’s base trying to steal an artillery cannon with rope and some elbow grease. Gheir shooed him off and the Iron Gnoll would not be seen again until he reappeared operating a Koura burrito cart that he somehow now has a franchise stake in and was just…selling burritos on the sidewalk for a whole day. We finally caught up to him and Hylavi arrested him for assaulting Echo Seven, only for him to break out of the shuttle on the way to jail somehow and disappearing into the night. By the time Hylavi tracked him down again, he had found the temple of the cult of lucidity and convinced an entire ritual circle that he was one of their warriors. He knows no psionics but was so convinced that it was working that he fought Hylavi and Adryn both, won, and then ran off once more. We finally caught him when a regular security officer tackled and cuffed him. We have no idea how just some random schmuck took him down when Hylavi and Adryn couldn’t. He’s in a jail cell right now and demands to be let out because he’s an important businessman who owns a company. That company being his burrito cart. He tested negative for drugs.

Cassir is back en route to Enohas to see about handling the merkas situation. Maybe she can work on the samples the lab needs to work on the merkas male project while she’s out there.

Also we’ll have people at the church on Jamalia once Cassir gets there…since they were aboard her ship in the first place and she got rerouted she now has to reroute again to get the initial people there.

Also did you just say recruitment drive, in the middle of a recruitment drive? Did you not see all the problems Seiyomi is giving us already?

A new prefab colony is under construction at the 40th day factories. Also vetting out Laura’s gangsters aren’t hard for the Jamalia trip, since none of them want to even go there. Not big enough for their type of market I suppose.

So the Vivarium is noticing a problem with this metal maker thing. It’s…advanced. Keeping it in a cage made it make a maker that can unmake everything we make if nothing else just because that resource is plentiful. It turns out Cassir’s encounter with the creature accidentally introduced it to the concept of metallic manipulation, something it never had to bother with before in its natural habitat. As well as some of the ways it could be incorporated. It then, very specifically, made a maker that makes metal things out of any other metal thing. Any other metal thing. Even enchanted and warded metals just get scrapped for its junkyard of monsters. So…we kind of just made a fucking exerlus. A baby infantile one without billions of years of advancement, but a creature that can assimilate any and all metal. It doesn’t actually consume it or assimilate it the way exerlus do but it can peel it away with its claws and haul it off to its cave to be repurposed. At this point we should see if it can just test out of getting an engineering degree. The current cage is just purely wards that levitate its entire enclosure and is definitely expensive to keep up but is is the only way we’ve found so far to contain this thing. On the upside though, it doesn’t really seem to be in all of that much of a hurry to go anywhere. It just…sits in its cave and makes drones that guard its cave. The head researcher at the Vivarium says that it is a very docile creature as long as you don’t provoke it. Also we’ve decided not to feed it any more sugar, that made it build faster. If it builds faster, it needs more materials, and that means more cages get ‘repurposed’. So…that’s a thing.

Also a Vloz’Khress val has gone mysteriously missing recently and we had to write a check to Bardhe.

Oh and Vamon has taken off into space with a rather large fleet to the pandem intercept point.

As for the Jaal’Darya, they don’t actually have any Alnae targets. They consider Alnae to be too large of a figure to get out of their way with something as simple as an assassination so they have little to gain from the effort. The scope of their power and interests is rooted in the politics of Kar’Soluth and Shetou.

Elgrim is on file from the phantoms for 450,000,00 credits. Which is definitely on the more premium side of things though I can see why given how goddamned hard he is to kill. They noted he’d still be kind of a psychopath but at least loyal to the hand that feeds. There is a very long disclaimer about the Raven not being responsible if some idiot treats their new acquisition like dirt and then gets killed by it.

The Nomads have taken their new recruits and are off to see about this whole Kar’Soluth business. It’s a long trip but…well that ship is fast and they’ll be there much sooner than expected. That seems to be a large part of how the Nomads happen to people though.

We’ve caught Zhuan and Laura up on things as part as keeping them familiar with Haggard in the first place. As part of Lancaster’s query of investigations, we’ve discovered what those buildings Laura bought are actually for. Apparently there’s an exploit in the laws that Joe had been pushing so hard for that enables a lot of profit to be made with the creation of new factories. Basically meaning that Lancaster is paying for Laura to build a new car factory that she’ll keep the profits from. Not…actually illegal or even all that bad I guess? Apparently Laura is betting that with the farming expansions and subsidies Somnus is giving them that soon there will be more places to drive around on this planet and if she gets in on the industry early it’ll be easy profit. Especially if she can basically use Lancaster’s money to make the investment.

Vaeri has taken off from her mission now that we basically know whats going on there. Abucting one of the warforged models as a sample that she apparently intends to just throw at New Age once she gets it back and let them figure out what it is and what to do with it. We’ve bounced the intel around as necessary and everyone’s happy for now. Except Siwa once Arkaric ‘yeet’s the place as you say.

 

So we made some power armor for the arcurans. It’s pretty cool looking to be honest. Glowing blue arcane energy emanating from these seven foot tall space marine dudes. I feel like we just committed some sort of copyright infringement on accident though and I’m not really sure why.

Gheir’s got his team together and is off to go look into the Varrel situation and we have some new ships for transporting things around. We can fit less in it than we can in the freighters we typically use but its comfier. So we use it mostly for the crew while the rest of the arsenal gets shoved into the bigger freighters.