Stories of Lore 32
The war with Nelta is winding down for the most part with only SR3 maintaining an active battlefield. Sharen has cleaned up most everything else at the cost of their fleet but now all that’s left is the battle against the Valdir that Nelta hates so much. This’ll be important in a moment.
Despite being split into pieces, Somnus is still quite functional if you stick to the lower decks and just put some expanding foam in the hallways that are open to space. The station is huge so it had a lot of backups and extra power stations all over the place. It’s just that the main deck is a bit too hard to seal back up. With most people evacuated to the colony beyond the rift we could trickle in staff to the lower decks at least.
Koura is planetside so it’s habitable just not comfortable after all the destruction. Didn’t help that Madhammer specializes in collateral damage so even the fights they won didn’t really protect any infrastructure. The Vittles tower was destroyed but operations on Orchard and Enohas keep it going well enough.
Orchard was actually quite untouched oddly enough. I think they were so focused on dealing with Somnus that they just left Orchard and Ilex’s Vivarium alone to deal with later as neither represented a significant military threat. I mean yeah that Zhuan guy is now pretty much running that place buuuut better than all the farms being toast right?
The Winter was able to take on refugees as well since it has civilian sectors and is now the seat of your power since the command deck and the Koura city hall are gone. It’s currently doing most of the work keeping everything interconnected since it does have trading ports. We’re all set to fly off on various misadventures!
So remember how the Nelta war is winding down right? Well all the rich people who were spending their time hiding in bunkers are now crawling out from under their rocks and trying to re-establish their wealth to the best of their ability as quickly as possible. As Ilex likes to point out, credits aren’t worth much right this moment but now that the people who specialized in credits are back up and running they want whatever is worth something and fast. They don’t want to find themselves forced to a pitiful existence of being *gasp* middle class! Granted middle class nowadays is ‘I have an abandoned building to live in’.
Now that Somnus and Koura are blown apart like everywhere else in the Sol territories, we’re less of a long term investment as far as they are concerned. It’s also hard to appease them with passive shares of a broken down station that will cost…uh…a lot to fix. They want a more active solution to their financial woes.
So it gets complicated because most of our money is owed to our own citizens who we wrote I.O.U.’s to in order to keep the infrastructure moving and building. Actually we owe Koura Logging more money then it cost to create that company…and we own that company. More specifically we owe its employees but I just found that amusing.
Also Aryn found something…peculiar. Someone has been buying those government bonds up in bulk so that now we owe…at least fifteen billion credits to just one person. Not even a corporation. Guess who it is?
I was just keeping people’s faith in the government by reimbursing them what I could to maintain stability on Koura. That is my job right?
So…tell me how it happens that we owe you -directly, not even your office- more money than you’ve ever had in your lifetime if you were just ‘reimbursing the people’?
I buy low and sell high. Learned it from Raiben actually.
Okay so I’m 90% sure she did some crime boss shit to get that but now we owe Laura, who is literally sitting in this office with me as I make this call, billions upon billions of credits and Aryn can’t find any proof that we should be arresting her instead. Even though we’re all positive we should be arresting her.
More prominently, we owe Moncayo a large portion of what remains. We also owe a big chunk to Koura citizens but they’re not the problem. I can snap Laura’s neck if she tries to collect on your kneecaps all of a sudden, but ‘come and take it’ means something entirely different when dealing with someone we know to be one of the Phantoms, friends with Valencia, and in a bit of a cranky mood.
I know you’re going to be mad at me for this, but I’m honestly not good at financial things. So…we kind of have to ask Laura for some options here. Whose advice should be taken carefully because it’s worth remembering she has a monetary incentive to make us overpay her.
Well as you said, you could kill me if I tried to collect too suddenly on you to make me just ‘go away’. Though when it comes to Moncayo’s debt they’re kind of cracking down on it now because of one very specific trick of financial paperwork. Somnus as it is right now is considered ‘scrap’ and sells for the price of ‘scrap’ instead of ‘giant mega station’. Same for Koura. If they were repaired any land value would go back up dramatically. The station is, well was, worth over a trillion credits, but in its current state they can definitely estimate it to be worth far less and claim one of the broken thirds of the station for example.
Koura itself is basically worthless because the planet isn’t even habitable without ingesting slug monsters and then surgically removing them. Without infrastructure the value of its land is not too great when we have a bunch of other blown up colonies to move in on.
However, the increased value of ships does make the Milenkosi, Outsider, and Winter worth about ten times their original value at this exact moment in time. Not that you’d want to sell those I’m sure but it is a quick way to knock out enough of the debt to make them stop hounding you for it.
When it comes to what is owed to everyone else who basically has bonds, so your own citizens, they don’t have the power to do anything about it directly buuuut it’s only a matter of time before your government has a lot less authority than whatever springs up in the meantime. For example, Hasao and Zhuan. For example if someone were to find out that Zhuan is a criminal with a lot of resources to trade for smuggling Vittles products to him that he were to turn around for a profit since Vittles employees are currently working on ‘eating the food they’re growing’. Which is a good way to keep people alive, but Zhuan offering luxuries in times of crisis is going to sway them. Cracking down on Vittles security also has the problem that you faced with me, I owned enough of your security people to get around some things. He undoubtedly will own vastly more than I did in a time like this.
As for what you owe me…
You mean jail time?
I traded quite legitimately thank you. I’ve gone clean since becoming a governor. I just happen to know in times of desperation I can get some good bargains with what assets I had left after the whole Kyven incident. As I was saying…
Anyways that’s the financial crisis in a nutshell. I can send a “come and get it” letter to Moncayo and punch Laura for you if you’d like though Koda did point out that we are in a rough position defensively. Could just sell the whole place and move to Zenaka and try to take over that though. That might be fun, we’ve got the Winter after all.
Khymin’s been drafting up plans to repair the station’s three major pieces while the rest of his team works on just sealing hallways so that we can live on those pieces while waiting around. Gonna need some very big thrusters though he says. And quick cuz one of those pieces is drifting towards Koura and is going to fall into the atmosphere. According to our calculations, thank you koda, it’ll land very far into the middle of nowhere from koura so at least that’s not going to wipe out the planet’s infrastructure buuuut it would be bad.
Zenaka does have food, which we’ve been trading for this whole time already though its engineers are a bit underqualified to work on this sort of thing. They’ve launched rockets into space with rudimentary scanners at best.
Speaking of Zenaka, the drow are getting uppity again and they assassinated the local lord of the land in our friendliest neighborhood. This does come on the tails of us securing more trade with a neighboring state so some good news there.
Valadeus has a new mission for us. It’s to kill Lancaster. Oh wait I just got a follow up email. So you know that PR stunt Ilex was doing to try and say ‘hey look we diplomacized them we’re awesome’? Basically our new mission is to keep the diplomacy turnout as quiet as possible. They don’t know Ilex is a cat, but they did tell us to deal with Cassir. There’s also a “p.s. see if you can recruit Whitetalon while you’re at it”. They like him apparently and are looking for a new arms dealer. Apparently Kanika has the leftover schematics of Selona’s weapons manufacturing and wants to give them to whitetalon to be the new arms producer. So…I read this as “bribe him with guns”.
Apparently they’re about to try and leverage her debt to remove her from power very soon and advise preparing for the opportunity once she has a lot less security available to her. They did not specify how, but I get the feeling the debt collectors are just a formality to pave the way to whatever they’re actually up to since there is no way she’s actually going to give up Somnus and her ships to pay it off.
Actually now that I think about it, it’s kind of funny that despite also taking in refugees our finances worked out just fine. We’re the only formal members of the Phantoms in the Void State. I’m sure this is just a coincidence.
Recruitment is down in Auwana at the moment due to everyone being in a bad state though I imagine it will pick up again once the shock of being in a bad state passes over. Then they’ll transition to “oh god get me out of here”. We did get a new batch from Valadeus though, which might be a potential problem if we don’t deal with Lancaster for him as a lot of our members now have a tie to the phantoms with a potential priority over their relationship with us.
Also Eden can now be a spooky ghost planet.
I can’t help but notice I very suddenly stopped getting email alerts from Moncayo’s radar station after those posters started going up. Also we stopped getting recruits for the pool entirely, the few we had still coming in mostly from Zenaka were all conveniently eliminated by “pirates”. Pirates who can take down guarded convoys without them being able to send a distress signal. I don’t think they’re pirates.
I don’t think we need to send Faelyn that letter now though. Maybe more of a declaration of some sort.
Word on the group chat is that successfully committing diplomacy and then announcing we did so has made us – specifically Lancaster and Cassir – a priority target. All we have right now to keep an eye on the Phantoms is Renjala though, Vasia’s missing at a very bad time…again.
As for Alnae’s colonies, ruins. They were part of the frontier sweep before Nelta got to Auwana, though back in Sol they do still have Kaylen and the capital city. Granted its also in ruins but she does have an army there still. That’s all I got though without actually going to check on them with this whole lack of aethernet thing. Maybe we should send more cultists as ambassadors.
Speaking of your salvage material and plans for it, Peter points out that there is a bit of a problem with all of your financial ideas. We owe it to mostly our own workers. Who we’re telling to build the ship for bread and a priority slot on the list to get the thing they’re building. Odds are that everything up until the part where we keep the things we have built goes great, and then they take the stuff. He notes this is particularly because the crime rings are getting back up and running. He has some options though. First we could increase security, he actually recommends using me for that since I don’t really need money and I come with an army for the price of…biomatter. That and my drones aren’t liable to steal a ship if bribed by the local crime lord. The sandwich you put a sticky note on in the fridge though…no promises.
Other option is just use the material to build things to give the people immediately so instead of it being a sneaky crime thing it’s just the arrangement outright, also thus increasing the value of the sale I suppose. Might help us stabilize Alaniade.
Third option is contract Nah for security, since Sethis does us favors and he also is not having a debt crisis so his people aren’t so easily bribed right now. That way you don’t have to expose my existence to people. I’m a state secret you know, hehehe.
Though the housing plan on Somnus is a good start the problem is Somnus is also in danger of being repossessed before its fixed so its hard to sell people who we owe homes even more I.O.U’s. I mean we can but 50/50 success rate.
Actually when it comes to incarnum soul editing I might know more about it than you think, or at least the basic concepts of it. I grew up in Shetou, House Song is one of the pillars of our empire. They tend to spread a lot of information on ‘why necrocarnum is bad and we will kill you for trying it’. They have a program where people come to your school and talk about the dangers of using necrocarnum and pandem.
Pool update, yes it does make psionic skeletal structures for some of its creatures. Mostly the heavy lifters though. You’re the only one with a weaponized version, that being said it is currently in a time of resource collection. When you were made it was still in defense and independent operations mode. Now it uses the good materials for good haulers so we can try to get more biomass to make more things.
Having a system named after me is definitely…an unforeseen turn of events. Kind of cool though. Also system survey data is in before we finalize any moving decisions.
Cassir and the gang are off to Tykel to loot some ruins, travel tiiiime.
The research team has been looking into the Nelta transport method and it actually seems very similar to a dimension door method that we use. It’s more popular with military boarding craft though can be a little finnicky. They use a sahad method though, which uses a coordinate system different from dimension door. Dimension door is based on local coordinates while the sahad variant is based on absolute coordinates. By absolute I mean really, really, really absolute. I actually can barely fathom what their numbers are tied to, its not inside of the Astral plane. It is something truly…cosmic. Unknowable…I have seen the un- ow why’d you swat me?
Anyways it’s massively more computer intensive to use due to this coordinate system. The entire cost of using the spell is frontloaded to getting accurate coordinates. After that it behaves in a way described as a “phenomena” making successive uses of it cheaper. So good for bulk transport, not as great as dimension door for just sending some guys over. However it actually has worse range than dimension door. The spell itself seems to have unlimited potential, theoretically I could type in 0 into all eighteen of the coordinates and find what its anchored to. Though the mana cost expands exponentially by distance unlike dimension door which just has a max range. So getting to 0 everything would cost….all the energy in our universe and then some. Getting five feet away could be done with a regular mana reactor, albeit a big one attached to a big computer for that first calculation. It’s in the range of “kinda maybe practical to figure out” and also “why the fuck would we bother with this when we have Renjala?”.
As for Salied, they’ve mentioned her progress is actually regressing ever since Vasia left. She’s forgetting the spells she learned and going into her catatonic state more often now. I think something about fixing her requires Vasia. Not as in her expertise, as in literally Vasia. Potentially only Vasia unless we figure out what Vasia has that makes Salied react favorably to her. That or it’s actually Balhast who is always right next to Vasia. Either way, the other researchers are noticing a backwards slide in progress and can’t figure out why without trying some ideas that Vasia forbid them from doing. Not so much forbid them from doing to Salied but no one is allowed in the containment cell holding the entity besides Vasia herself. Her report states that its a world shaping super magic creature that existed outside of known reality for millenia, “so don’t open the fucking door unless you want to be unmade”. She did not tell anyone how she avoided this fate, and I think she omitted that information entirely on purpose.
Speaking of Balhast, if he’s not with Vasia we have a problem. No one knows where he is. This is a mutated alien killing machine with advanced stealth capability. She taught it how to cast every self enhancing spell she could think of. Including bull’s strength, Owl’s wisdom, haste, invisibility, dimension door, fireball, magic missile, arcane missile, and it knows how to shoot sahad lasers apparently. Problem number two, it is loyal only to Vasia. So if you didn’t see it…and we don’t know where it is…and she never keeps it in a containment unit anymore…someone might want to tell Lancaster to sweep Koura and/or Somnus as that is where Vasia was last at.
The recovery teams are shipping those experiencing the phenomena of witnessing sahad to Ash, perhaps never to be seen again. The problem is that’s a lot of people and some other people who knew those people are asking questions. That’s actually a standing order from Vasia before she left more so than what you said to do. Ohalyn may or may not be involved again.
Also yes if you split the pool and ship it out of the synapse it’ll start behaving independently. That’s basically how Que even exists in the first place, not to mention your own little concoction. In the absence of a synapse it tries to expand its own synapse, usually until it can reconnect with other pools. Traditionally silnians use them kind of like deployable military bases. Drop it somewhere, come back later, tah dah it made an army. So it stands to reason it would try to create a monarch as we’re what actually expands and controls the synapse, the ichor just sits in our synapse. So also theoretically if I left for long enough it’d go rogue again.
The Yelay have been moved to the ruins of Somnus and are somewhat confused as to what’s going on. They’re trying to understand if this is an upgrade or not, they went from being sealed in a smaller exhibit area to being let loose onto a derelict that is at least slightly larger.
To be fair, your premonitions are unreliable at best. So I figured it would take longer to notice. Also I am quite subtle, if I wasn’t the Revenants would have found my lab by now. You underestimate the world you and I operate in. If you weren’t so forgetful maybe you’d remember that everyone I talk to is already deep into the world of secret societies. Larazja is a secret kept in a lab, Ohalyn is a crime lord, Eliza is a Phantom, and Lancaster knows who the hell I and Nah division are.
Salied has a quirk about her awakening. What she witnessed wasn’t a normal spell, it was something performed by someone very untrained in the art. It likely failed to cast when she saw it and so her experience is kind of jammed as she never made the proper connection to Sahad itself. What we’ve learned from this is that the first exposure really matters because subsequent exposures did not fix the problem. She does however learn new spells at an exceptionally fast rate, the art has been around for a few years now and Salied learned more spells than even Cerys knows within the last year I’ve been working with her. That being said, putting her in the ichor could kill her if the Ichor finds her too broken to be useful, which has already happened to a few of your volunteers. So my standing instructions while I’m away is just focus on spellcrafting with her, it’s the one thing she’s good at. That or exposing her to entities, keep her away from ethi tech as much as possible. I think I found a use for her and was very close to making a breakthrough but then my whole plan was interrupted by Nelta retreating and I had to go do that.
Also there is no extraction, doing so while I’m within range of Elym could have disastrous consequences. Elym can learn any spell they witness, of any type. They’re a rogue jesai who gave up on the theocracy of worshipping the chromaclysm but they retain the ability to manipulate magic on such a fundamental level that if they see it once they now know it. We have a tiered casting system for classifications back in Sol. Elym can cast anything we show them at what I would call the 14th tier. So far the list of shit they stole from us includes: Pandem, the spell you’re using to communicate with me right now (from when you contacted Rikoy), Kharla’s void plate, all the zankist shit that Kaylen showed off, Song Yi’s necrocarnum – fortunately no rewriting but they did see the lifesteal trick and how to become a lich thanks to seeing Renjala once at Enohas when they extracted Rikoy, oh and Haziel’s werewolf shit. There is only one exception, they could not figure out how to replicate Reika’s sword or Gunhild’s gun. So they can’t figure out artifacts for some reason.
Imagine if we had actually fought Nelta, that would have been some big encounter with a jesai but not as high stakes as fighting the actual jesai as a whole. Then we would have formally met a member of each of the elder races…real dramatic stuff that would serve as a great introduction to the galactic scene. But then we talked them into going away instead.
-_-
So my point being, if you let Renjala extract me and a single jesai or Elym witnesses it, they will now have the secret to galactic transportation on a whim. That is a strategic asset that will likely end the galaxy or at least subjugate it to the jesai immediately. Once that happens, Arkaric goes from being our greatest threat to our only salvation. Wait he’s dead? What? When did that happen? Oh we don’t think he’s dead? Make up your fucking mind.
On a related note, Seiyomi says he would bet his next year’s salary that Arkaric isn’t actually dead. Though if he were actually dead, he would have been cut off from the computer that made him what he was. The exerlus only attacked Tykel, it is unlikely that they know where Daiheb’s ship is. Turns out its a ship, Seiyomi let that one slip. So even if he were dead, Daiheb could bestow someone new with the same powers of prediction that Arkaric had. We could only wait and hope that their motives might be less dangerous for galactic existence. I’m sure they wouldn’t make the same mistake twice and pick someone even more directly bloodthirsty right? …I don’t like how quiet you’re being.
Also mission report, Seiyomi is keeping the Revenants busy at the moment. Which is probably why they haven’t attacked us again just yet. Apparently they’re chasing him, or more so his ‘clues’ around the galaxy and getting severely frustrated. At least a small team of them. Alakira herself is fighting phantoms on Thenica. Seiyomi advises that he could bring the Revenants to Auwana if we’re about to get blown to pieces by Kanika for that whole diplomacy stunt. They might be helpful here, but he also points out that they still don’t like most of us. At best they’ll help Lancaster, then turn around to stab you and Renjala.
I appreciate all these bodies, and now we shall feast like it is a festival. To the pools with them!
The makers are fine, one of them just got to Enohas. The psychiatrists though are still in that other dimension beyond Renjala’s rift after the whole evacuation thing that Lancaster put in place before the battle with Nelta.
Data pending on the Sivataurs, we have no eyes in Sol at the moment.
Aryn in forms me that Bardhe took his ships and fucked off, we’ll need to track him down to try and hire him again. I suppose you could do the phone thing if you wanted though. Not sure what he’s up to at the moment.
Setani is en route to Que to assist Ilex with his experimentations. We sent a few agents with her as extra insurance though to be honest…it’s Setani. If anything they’re worth more as projectiles to her rather than bodyguards.
The Nomads took the Nelta salvage in order to…repair it and add to their growing flotilla fleet. They seem to be having fun with this, they don’t have enough staff for any of this idea of theirs but they keep stealing so many ships that they’re kind of making it work. They took off while we weren’t looking to go recruit citizens by way of ‘we have a ship, you have a ruin, want a ride?’ along the somewhat destroyed frontier and probably heading to Sol as well to fill out their population. So…once we get everyone loaded back onto the Closing Statement we’ll go regroup with them wherever they’re recruiting at. They did conveniently get some farming going on some of the ships though. Coincidentally they’re all Vittles brand hydroponics and there was nothing left at the ruins of Vittles’ tower after the invasion.
We’ve sent Allison down to Koura to try and start establishing herself, this does put her primarily in contact with Zhuan as the major rival. Though as I’m sure you’re aware, crime isn’t particularly good crime if it doesn’t piss Lancaster off. So she’s probably mad at Allison now who straight up stole a bunch of VSEC resources to get started.