Posted on January 1, 2022

 

Stories of Lore 22

 

So…while you and almost everyone else were gone. The revenants started acting up again. Apparently Sarden has a colleague who came to break her out. During the process of which they took the entire station offline and crippled our own aethernet, apparently having snuck malicious programs in through our mass aethernet backup plans. I suspect they were also waiting until the invasion was too close at hand for us to focus too much on them, that or just because we were down such a large portion of our staff. Either way, Sarden is loose once again. We’ve managed to recover control of the station, interestingly they never even tried to crash it. Just disable it long enough to get Sarden out. Interestingly, no one died. A few security staff are in the hospital, but they’re alive.

So the thing about that carrier is its a very large ship and that is a lot of additional strike craft. It’ll take a moment for it to all be ready, let alone deployed to FO-234. Everyone we deployed from somnus, are on their way to Zenaka. So it’s still just Koda and the pirates for the most part. They’re still playing cat and mouse with the Kar’Soluth ships in orbit as well. Contacting the locals has been difficult, Koda has taken over making first contact since the rest of our team is still on the way. At least one group is interested in the offer for help. Another considers us the losing side, another just straight up likes the Kar’Soluth, another hates all aliens now, and the various governments all can’t agree on anything. So…politics.

Within all of this, we’ve recruited our new diplomat for the job from Zenaka so we don’t have to worry about recruiting and shipping from Somnus. A peculiar member of their planet with a rather high position in the local government we’re working with had offered to join VSEC in exchange for a gauranteed extraction regardless of the aftermath. They seem mostly interested in seeing space instead of languishing around a planet post-interplanetary war.

We’ve been setting up to work with the group who wanted the help though, they’re in the southern hemisphere. If things go well we can hopefully sway some more to our side. Koda has explained to them what is about to reach them, apparently they like his curt behavior, seems honest to them. So there is an interest in civilian evacuation that we can provide with the freighters, once those get there. They’ll be there at the same time as the Kar’Soluth fleet and the invasion of Sol so prepare for a rough and violent week.

In regards to opening the rift up to travel, we still don’t actually know what lays beyond it. The explorers are out elsewhere and having crew ferried around to support the larger ships. So while some people are poking at it, results might take a bit. People have to actually find anything interesting out there. Though Faelyn is asking what exactly the void state is and its overall plans. Likely because it seems like we’re trying to recreate the alliance from within the alliance to position ourselves at the head of it instead of herself, though she wasn’t as overt as to suggest that. Just my hunch, and given what we know now about her I don’t think she’ll just stand aside and let us usurp power from her.

This being bundled into a recon report from Faelyn’s radar that 2 more ships of battleship class alongside another carrier have left Sol and are on the path to FO-234 to join the action. It might be that they noticed we keep funneling more and more resources in that direction.

As general warning given your distaste for economic uncertainty, things are about to get odd once the invasion happens I’m sure. So just be prepared for that.

The experiments on other knights for Eden’s procedure is underway. Though as you may recall this definitely took awhile last time so we’ll have to wait a bit on that, and never release any camera footage of the operation just to be safe for our volunteers pool.

 

Also Luci agreed to the marketing campaign though pointed out the time it takes to initiate it and then ferry people there is a bit longer than we actually have. Though one of the actual advantages is getting people familiar with the name as a potential destination once hard times come upon everyone, and before it becomes hard to make anything into a household name.

Construction of riftgard as begun, I’ve also alerted Valadeus to the project so that he can make whatever preparations he had in mind for it. I contacted Faelyn about the Que  situation, apparently it was fairly bad news and it was not their intent for things to go that wrong. She and Kanika were helping fund the research out of curiosity though never pushed them to overshoot like that. So they’re out a lot of money and consider this somewhat of a major loss. They also noticed that Ilex is looking into a similar experiment project though and are now keeping an eye on him instead.

Ground to ground rift tunnels cost approximately 75 million per pair of gateways with a maintenance cost of about half a million.

We’ve begun the process of creating Kelsingra, Haziel has been hunting down arcuran encampments to be sent either to Madhammer or eliminated. Though Daesta has initiated a resistance against us and is being kind of difficult to find. As well as her conspirators which sabotaged one of the other merkas cities. Apparently the death of Nihlav made her something of a martyr that is about to cause some issues in the process of unifying the planet under us. While they aren’t being particularly effective on the grand scale of things, they are still a slight annoyance and the brutality of how Haziel kills them once caught is not helping the PR department. Also the arcurans are gathering in larger groups across the planet in response to us hunting them down which isn’t doing anything just yet though I have a feeling they’re gonna do something soon enough that’ll cause a mess of paperwork.

Alex looked into the guardian’s coordinate system though with only one sample and knowing roughly where it was he isn’t quite sure how it works. If he had three coordinates he might have more luck though unless zero zero is the dead center of Kari or the Astral plane he’s not really sure what else its methods could be using. That being said even if that was the case, he isn’t sure if the numbers are tracking something within planes or within the astral plane right now.

We’ve sent more lances to assist at FO-234, so its just a constant stream of reinforcements and late arrivals over there. Ilivayas will arrive soon as well, so we’ll see how that goes. At least we have a place to set up camp for the time being.

Our forces at Moncayo are continuing the evacuation and Faelyn was nice enough to hire Renard’s Rifts to work on maintaining the rift tunnel so they’ll be in Moncayo once everything goes down. Moncayo itself has more refugees than it can really handle, especially once the gates close. They have enough physical space though many of the refugees are living in makeshift tents in the plains outside of the city and food supply will become an issue once the gateway closes.

Yeah so all that aethernet backing up has actually put us in an even worse position than before thanks to the whole Jicho attack that crashed thousands of servers. My labs are fine as we’ve been disconnected from the Aethernet since day one for obvious reasons. Interestingly, Salied experienced a strange reaction to the station being disabled. She became fully functional while it was down, and then went back into her lost little world once the power came back on. I’m currently with you here at Que but once we get back I have an idea for her.

As for all this goop processes you’ve come up with, we’re ready to do whatever on a somewhat advanced timescale so you can fully weigh your options now that we know what is going on with the Que ichor. Choose wisely…

Oh and as for this Larazja girl, she has great scientific relevance as perhaps the only opportunity we’ll get to dissect one of the people the ichors decide to empower. Indicated by their change of general size. Though I have a hunch you’d probably prefer I not throw her back into the labs just after she was rescued from another one, that and Cassir is glaring at me every time I consider it. That being said, I have the data from Que’s lab of everything they already did to her so there isn’t as much to gain anyways. I can throw her in the vivarium or one of my containment units if you like, or you can throw her at one of the therapists. I hear Rhea’s has an open time slot now.

As for her Fenalis I left them with a sitter since…well I’m here with you guys. Combing through a deserted research facility gone wrong is too attractive for me to ignore, especially given their work with the koura parasite. As for helping Peter, I can put Renjala in a cage if you like? Sending Seiyomi towards Gunhild though shouldn’t be too hard. If anywhere in Auwana is secure, the Madhammer base is definitely a good contender. I’ve had some rumors dropped here and there that should hopefully make its way to Seiyomi and Peter is on the way back to Koura to keep an eye out.

As for the membership of the cult of Lucidity we have more members than you might think but its worth considering how their membership works. There is a ten to one ratio of circle ritualists to actual warriors. Not to mention those in training. The temple on Koura houses quite a few of the ritualists but there are only a few warriors ready to make use of it.

As for relocating my laboratory to Phoenix, the process of getting in and out of the atmosphere is underway. We’ve developed a special kind of freighter at New Horizon’s for getting in and out of that place specifically to make moving around a bit easier. I’m sure Lancaster will appreciate not having me lurking in her basement all the time.

Fleet reconstruction is underway while we’re at it. Though this will hurt profits in the short term, we need ships in a hurry.

The vivarium has successfully created a merkas male with the help of the pile of corpses Haziel has been creating on Enohas for any ‘resistances’ that pop up here and there. Though its still an infant and might have some defects, they’re looking into the specifics.

The Yelay are enjoying their suits and the ability to walk around now. They’ve been allowed passage to Somnus so they can visit us a bit more in depth than just the staff at the vivarium. In case you were curious what they were up to.

Bardhe has rejected the contract on Ilivayas, pointing out that one is beyond his reach. She is moving into frontier space, where he doesn’t tend to operate, and is aboard an assault carrier full of demons. He pointed out he might be able to if she were to return to Sol and stop sitting around amidst a giant military force though. Well at least the man knows his limits.

The Vivarium has acquired an archive from Alnae with samples of Thenican life with some help from Nelan. So it has definitely expanded our collection. I had them test some of the samples by trying to grow cotton plants. Once the travel network is messed up, it occurs to me we don’t have a source of materials for clothes as we’ve been mostly focused on food. So it seemed worthwhile. At least for those of you who need clothes.

The salvage teams have been combing around looking for Vamon while we pick up the useful scrap.

We’ve made the expansions to the vivarium, its larger than Somnus now though its a lot less dense since we’re synthesizing local habitats of creatures who need a lot of room to move around. Still amusing that its now bigger.

Aryn confirms an entity known as Jicho managed to hijack their way into Somnus servers through the mass aethernet backup project. Their attack was mostly aimed to breaking out Sarden. We have reason to believe this was going to happen one way or another due to the timing of the invasion rather than the opportunity for Jicho to insert themselves into our networks, it was just an unfortunate coincidence. This cyber attack could have been far worse, though it was evident in the aftermath that they didn’t even attempt anything dramatically destructive. The revenants have no desire to crash the whole station and everyone on it, they just have specific people they don’t like.

Aryn has been wiping and salvaging whatever computer hardware she can and our internal systems that are always disconnected remain fine. She’s also been busy trying to fix the entire station which she noted was not that hard. Jicho’s attack was mostly to disrupt rather than totally destroy, the major problem is making sure there’s not anything remaining inside the station’s systems.

During the breakout attempt Elgrim was severely injured and Elgrim is now back to normal. It turns out he can regain entire lost limbs if given enough essentia and a little bit of time to do so. He did get a tracker on Sarden though, and we know they’re headed to return to Sol. However, with our own aethernet network currently crippled across Somnus we’re not going to have precise tracking for long.

That being said, Aryn will be busy for a little while just fixing and maintaining the station as well as our systems with external connections to clean up any potential security risks.

The Thenica team is on the way back at least.

With the upcoming invasion threatening all ongoing operations, we’re regrouping to prepare for redeployment once we can take stock of the new situation. Exception to the Nomads who have their own ongoing job.