Stories of Lore 49

 

 

Do you have your coffee? This is going to be a long meeting.

The diplomatic envoy to Nelta never reported back. It is suspected that they were too far away by the time Haziel’s botany bomb hit the galaxy and suffered catastrophic failure. With no context as to what was happening, they wouldn’t even know how to respond to their ship starting to eat itself. Though just as much chance they’re in Nelta space right now and just don’t have a way to call or get home. Could go either way on that one.

The Moncayo Sensor station has found that The Areti is currently located somewhat east of Auwana, it has been patrolling that area looking for signs of alien species. Koda said to tell you that it actually hasn’t visited us or our fleets in the last two years despite Faelyn expanding her fleet. He thinks that Faelyn is less interested in retaking Moncayo than fighting you at this point. Either that or Sakhessa has taken proper command of the Phantoms now that she is their empress and we know she is less interested in scuffling over land lately.

Over the last month we’ve been able to assess Diadem further. There is a lot to go over.

In terms of defense, the factories that produce the machines have stopped functioning without the Exerlus to control it. It was just a matter of turning them back on at your console, but it did cause a gap in the flow of forces. It is also clear that the exerlus wasn’t just pushing buttons the whole time. The stalemate was maintained by its constant efforts and micro management of production and deployment. Notably, the war between the exerlus controllers was being held primarily by each one having specialists for individual tasks. This is why in the second layer there were dedicated ambush designs to exploit the change in environment that any attacking forces had. This is to say, the stalemate will not hold on its own. Our machines will be overrun unless control of the factories is manually controlled and new designs and counter-designs are constantly created and updated. However, our WTC-1 mechs have a 100 to 1 kill ratio at the worst due to their engagement ranges on the surface plates. As we rebuild Gem Station, that could also provide cover for the top layers. The issue then would become the inner layers that have pathways into our sections, where WTC 1 does not have range and we cannot provide orbital support. Tanks and other mech classes do fine here, and do have robot assistance, but notably unless we can imitate the management of the Exerlus we will need to utilize alternative means of defense. Though unlike the Exerlus, we can order engineers to build things other than factories building robots. Not sure why it never built turrets.

With Ilex’s help in restoring the mental state of several Ika to the point that some can actually communicate with Sarrai in particular, we’ve been able to make some progress on understanding these administrator access keys. Sarrai remembering more and being able to fully communicate now also has helped. In summary, the keys specifically work to add you to the admin control list. This will be very important to a later discovery of Khymin’s I’ll get to. Typical of Ika designs, they were a little reckless in their creation of the ring and it only has twelve of these control centers. Compared to Sol and Nelta designs for example, which will have twelve key systems on something as small as a battleship. The VSS Winter alone has sixteen to prevent pirates from getting control of the entire ship by hitting a single point. There is however another security exploit on the ring, namely in how they would be able to produce more keys. If you were to control the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth sections you would have the unique access ability to create more of the key. This was their system to create new ones in case a section’s admin was lost. It actually works with any four that are spaced apart like this, but since we have section 1 already it seems relevant to just start there.

As for Sarrai’s half awoken statement that only six were ever made, this was a reference to the six admins that had been made and distributed without use during her lifespan. Not all of history, and she was trapped in a tank for awhile when they could have made several more in response to the plague that wiped out the ring as they replaced admins one after another. The six she were referring to were backups, that were used during the time of the plague. She knew that one was given to the Exerlus of Zero North, given the Ika were very reverent towards them. It was more of a ceremonial diplomatic gesture to give them one, which is why Echo Prime had one such key. She didn’t believe it was a real key that was still available, she thought it was just for show and taught about in history class. The ringworld is thousands of years old and many keys have come and gone. However, along with the other Ika that have been undergoing rehabilitation, they have a collective guess of where another one would be most likely to be found. One should have been given to a much younger Nelta alliance. Where it would have gone from there is anyone’s guess after thousands of years in the possession of an active civilization. It is likely that it is, to this day, in someone’s casual possession and they have long forgotten what it even does. However, it was given to a council leader of Nelta during the Terlim Wars named Hommen. His species came from one of the outer worlds of Nelta on the far eastern side, one of the most well defended areas of Nelta’s territory. While they have no idea what would have become of it from there, that is a key that was likely never used since Nelta is not in current possession of the ring.

In regards to the Ika, we have been able to get a better picture of who they were as more of them wake up and Sarrai has more time to discuss her memories that are returning. Even since they were in a more primitive time they have always had access to a unique form of magic. As Sarrai has explained it before, it is as if she talks to machines. Specifically anything that is a crafted creation. Whether that be a vehicle or something as simple as a hammer. They call this practice as “Mollissav” in their own language. When translated, the tongues spell says it means “by another’s hand”. They have many different roles within this practice, Sarrai is what they consider a machine shaman. We have already woken up other Ika with similar roles within the practice that differ. For example, they have an advanced psionic practitioner who could be classified by our system as a kineticist. Though it is notable they do not manipulate kinetic energy, but rather magnetic fields.

This is why Diadem has so many strange and inoperable constructions to its design. It was made by a people who can interface with it in a way that few other alien races can. Notably, the Exerlus can also do this though they use different methods. The admin key you used told the ‘spirits of the station’ that you are now the equivalent of being their personal celestial empress. This is why you can now interact with features of the station but no one else can. It isn’t simply a security feature, it is built into the way their technology interacts. These traditions are a key component of their technology and how it works. This is also why they are somewhat famous among the galaxy for building impossible things with shockingly little security or failsafe measures. At the height of their civilization, right before the Terlim incident, they were one of the six key seats of an alliance more powerful than Nelta. The Blaiken were also a member of that alliance, and Sarrai thinks they have another of the keys you need. Which leads to the first bit of information on that mysterious empire we’ve ever been able to get. Sarrai once knew them and their ancestors lived aboard this very ring.

Sarrai’s information is sixteen thousand years out of date, but it is still something. The Blaiken were once one of the six key seats of their alliance, a term meaning ‘the six civilizations with all the money, guns, and population’. The Blaiken as a species were noted for a natural psionic disposition towards what Ilex now refers to as being an empath. Similar to the jydoq as well. Blaiken were the greatest of diplomats and were known for being a very peaceful people. The Ika provided them security, and in exchange the Blaiken acted as the Alliance’s ambassadors. With a specific talent for uplifting younger civilizations, a regular practice of alliances at the time vying to increase the scope of their power. As you may have noticed, Nelta accidentally uplifted the Lakaaj by doing this. Odds are that this practice may have done something similar for the Ika’s Alliance, and it might be one of the six great mistakes of their empire Echo Prime once alluded to. Back to the Blaiken though, they were capable of handling first contact situations better than anyone due to their ability as natural empaths. That is at least how Sarrai once knew them. Obviously, she is very confused to hear they live in a small pocket of the galaxy far away from their homeworld as total isolationists now.

Another feature of Diadem was discovered by Khymin. Your admin control access means a specific device on Diadem will allow you direct unrestricted access to it. As mentioned before, machine spirits and all of that. The same generators that the machines use, and consequently that Sarrai can turn into her armor, can now be utilized by you. Which means your mech can use an Ika generator from those machines. Khymin states that this is the power source he has been looking for to meet your design requests on your custom mech. The newest model is currently in production. He describes it as lighter than ever, since he just replaced an eighteen ton combination engine and generator.

We’ve seen to salvaging what we can of Gem Station, it’ll be done fairly quickly compared to building one from scratch as the fighting between it and Rahlken ended when it was rendered inoperable. We even found a few rooms that were still intact.

Diadem as a colony rather than as a single massive entity is logistically difficult to work with. You are the only one who can move between layers of the ring instantly by voice command. The main reason this is a problem is actually layer 1, it has no exposed area for shuttles to easily fly up to. While the underside of the plates have infrastructure once meant to function as a city clinging underneath the ecosystem plates, docking there is shockingly difficult. The Ika had utilized their own type of shuttle for this that fit nicely. Ours do not. While that is being resolved with some modifications, this leads to another problem.

The plate that was flipped destroyed itself in the process, it is still just hanging there on the second layer and there is a literal mountain of rubble dumped onto the third layer which has the main highway by which you would access the fourth. An issue you dealt with, but one that we still don’t have a solution for. Fixing the plate to even get it horizontal again would be a gargantuan undertaking, it’s four thousand by four thousand kilometers of metal just hanging there on a single axle that is definitely going to break someday under that kind of strain. This has made it easy to get from the third layer to the second and underside of the first, but I thought I would check if you wanted to look into any operations for dealing with that. Cheapest solution, at a few billion credits, would be to just cut the plate out and leave that slot blank and now the third layer has a new land feature so the endless city isn’t so monotonous.  Actually restoring it to the way it was supposed to be would take possibly decades and untold billions of credits. That is assuming we attracted enough people to the ring to even join the work force to do it. Haleh, as a joke, said to put a ‘if you can haul it you can have it’ sign on it and let the salvagers of the Reach ferry chunks of the plate away. By my calculations, that was actually the cheapest suggestion that would take the least amount of time if we open one of the surface plates for ships to get inside. This is such an undertaking of engineering that the other crazy suggestion sent to your inbox was to find Rahlken, steal his ship, and use that ship to rip the plate and the mountain underneath it out. Also…not the worst suggestion in this inbox. Even if we spent decades hunting him, it would be faster than asking VSEC to attempt doing this.

Aside from the problems of that giant flipped plate, Diadem is also in a severe state of disrepair. A credit to its engineering that anything works at all actually, it is mostly maintained by the machines but the exerlus war has left them to only do tasks considered a critical priority. Its city layer buildings are there but would not pass VSEC building code safety inspections. Much of what was once in them has long since been salvaged or decayed away. Many utility features are also in dire need of maintenance, whole areas do not have power for example. You will be able to make use of the pre-existing structures, layouts, and some materials, but I advise against letting people move in without proper building inspections being conducted. Due to the pre-existing infrastructure, the cost of everything sort of balances itself out. The materials are already there and in place, but the manpower needed to carefully sort through and repair places is more difficult than just having laborers build something from scratch.

To that end, we built the portal as requested. It took less than four hours for it to be flooded with tourists from Moncayo and entrepreneurs are already gambling their economic dynasties on various aspects. Laura King, who has insider information to VSEC operations as one of our government officials, has once again popped up to exploit a few aspects of our systems. In particular she is petitioning for districts to be democratically self governed. In practice, she’s trying to draw district lines and immediately take control of several by having all of her people show up and immediately vote for her before any other population gets established. Thus allowing her to create laws in these districts that include ‘slavery is legal here’ or ‘we approve lethal bloodsports and host our own servers so we can post it on the aethernet without worrying about a ratings board’. So basically, she’s up to her old antics again.

Let me just step right in-

Oh right, she’s on the payroll now. So she doesn’t need an appointment.

 

 

One of the perks of selling out. Anyways! Despite your surprisingly opinionated robot assistant’s thoughts on the matter, I do believe one should consider a series of more unorthodox options for the current situation.

Diadem needs a lot of people to make it remotely worth holding, not to mention to find recruits to defend it against the machines. While people are interested in looking around, while they know an armed guard is nearby in case a rogue machine gets through, moving in is another story. This place went unused for sixteen thousand years, and for good reason. Its a mess, its filled with killer robots, its dirty, it is a logistical nightmare, and so on. Most would rather just colonize a fresh world and start from scratch than deal with this beautiful place.

Except…there are some people who are a little less risk averse than your average every day normal mother fucker. My people. Entrepreneurs, people who see the opportunity to buy in cheap and cash out big.

Just say gangsters, we all know you mean gangsters.

 

That’s right, real gangsters. We’re no stranger to a little danger, if you got most of the killer robots I’m sure you have a plan to keep the rest at bay. If one slips through…well we have guns don’t we? Do you know why people like to visit the bad side of town? We got drugs, guys, girls, guns, and fun.

Basically, you’re about to have a real problem bootstrapping a city atop of a derelict station that no one wanted in the first place. While I know you well enough to know you are nothing if not tenacious – and rich – it is still a long and slow process. You don’t have an imminent disaster like the collapse of Thenica to force people out of a place as cozy and safe as Moncayo. Problem with slow, is you need people who can help hold this place for you. You need that recruitment office filled to the brim. You’re up against two exerlus and their infinite wave of machines, you need bodies quick. I can get them here. I can provide them the opportunity they need to see a reason to go for it.

You can hand out the free buildings all you want, that no one can afford to rebuild themselves, but after Thenica people don’t really trust the big governments. So just building them for free and handing them out like alms to the homeless isn’t going to sit well, given that this is literally how the elves became a superpower. People want to feel like they’re part of the adventure! Like they’re exploring the galaxy WITH you not just scavenging your prizes. To do that, you don’t create a program…you create an opportunity. An opportunity with a floor so low to get in on, that anyone can take the shot. The risk might be getting blown up by killer machines, facing the hive worlds and their dangers, just living out on the Reach in general…but the reward is building a dynastic fortune on what might be one of the most important places in the galaxy within a few generations.

Who is here? Your ARMED forces who can handle themselves. Eleazor is only moving in because he trusts you, he has fought beside you, he knows you and he knows what both you and himself are capable of. So getting his wife a bigger fancier house at the risk of living out here is no big deal for him. But everyone else? It’s neat to see this place, but it’s not fun to live here. No resources, no services, no products, no security.

I can solve that for you! Just tell Aurora here to let me move my office. Sure the pipe dream is that you build a beautiful utopia where everyone is fed and no one is homeless. The reality is, you need three more of these sections, and you need them fuckin held until you can finish the rest of the ring. You can’t do that from across the galaxy, it cost almost everything you had just to get this far and its going to get worse. You can’t control this ring with foreign forces from Moncayo while you also need to send your power to the other side of the galaxy to find your keys. You need a powerbase here. To have that, you need people. To get that, you want me. I’ll get you immigrants, I’ll get you aliens. In no time this place will be a thriving hub of the Western Reach and your name will be known across it. All of this, no fuss, no mess, no dirt. All you have to do, is uphold the traditions and laws of the VSF. Just let the people who hold residency here vote. So do practically nothing and all your problems will just melt away.

Massaging the Director’s shoulders without consent is considered assault. By the way Lancaster, you have sixteen more appointments, petitions, and phone calls that are going to sound a lot like this. Laura just happens to work for you, so she put herself at the front of the line.

I was merely coming to advise you on the developing governmental situation.

 

That protocol was not intended for you to make a sales pitch to the Director rather than actually advising.

I’m just doing my job. My advice, is that you should just ignore all those little ideas people come up with to circumvent the rules and foundations of your great federation. Sure some advisors, some salesmen, might suggest that I stand to benefit the most from this. Though I would remind you that I am nothing if not adaptable. Better then when I was smuggling guns and bombs through Somnus right? I’m a good girl now, because you pay me to be.

I’m a woman of the people now! Apparently those people now include Haleh. I’m sure people would be happy to move into Diadem knowing that a Phantom set up shop here. An active phantom who is known to possess incredible destructive power. I wonder if rumors will begin spreading that she can protect them, or that she is just a rogue force they’ll have to tiptoe around if they come here?

Are you extorting your own boss?

 

Oh shush Aurora, she knows what I’m about. I’m just very good at managing people. At understanding the ebb and flow of city life. Also, since we lost Somnus and Koura I’ve just been kind of pushing papers. However, since Lancaster has taken to not directly controlling the governments of her colonies I can’t just request a promotion. So I figure I’d run for office the old fashioned way. I’ll see myself out, though remember. Democracy!

By my projections, she’s right though. If you just let Diadem’s first section hold elections, unless Koda runs for office it is highly unlikely that Laura loses. Not even with consideration to the fact that she will play dirty. She’s from Koura, has government experience, is ‘tough’ which is good on the Reach, and is ‘the fun one’ since when she says ‘blackjack and hookers for everyone’ she’s barely even joking. The vision for a long term utopia is perhaps mitigated by the needs created by the problems of ‘right now’. Laura solves ‘right now’ very effectively. That being said, we are in the Western Reach and she just kind of blends in. She would be a good representative to other alien neighbors. I suppose it comes down to whether or not you feel you want your first colony on Diadem to be run by her of all people.

As for other civil matters of colonization. This gets into an issue of distributing space. Despite how nearly infinite the space available on even just this section of Diadem is, you do need to make a formal decision as the ‘one who conquered the damned place’. Land is normally cheap on the frontiers, but this is aboard a massive ring world. The potential value of holding any assets, such as land, here have long term implications normal frontier planets do not enjoy. If you let people just take whatever they can grab and build a house on top of, that might turn into a frenzy now that you have the ring under control for the time being. If you sell plots, even cheap, who knows how that could affect people moving in. Judging by Laura’s conversation, if it is too cheap then you get some wild opportunists showing up. If it is too expensive then people buy space and hold onto it until someone else develops everything. Normally this would be handled by colonial government but since you are the one who took this place and I imagine it means more than the usual colony to you, I figured I’d check what you want to do. That being said, you’re already too slow. A small town exists on the surface plates of people who just moved into the woods while you weren’t looking and are clearly hoping you don’t notice they did this before any available restrictions were put in place. They’re mostly laborers working on Gem Station’s reconstruction, and they saw the forest from space and decided they could just sneakily move in. So its a matter of whether or not you have any intention of preventing such practices or not.

As an aside, it is almost comical how little land they appropriated and hoped to get away with. If you’re going to let it stand you should probably tell them they can have a little more. Living in the crowded spaces of Moncayo, a place flooded with refugees, has obviously impacted the mindset of its people. If they were going to try and get away with that at the risk of pissing off their government and main employer, you think they’d be going for broke to really get a place of their own. They built a village out single story houses the size of two shipping containers. This was ‘making off like bandits’ to them after years of living in subdivided apartments intended to house refugees in Moncayo. I suppose this goes to show the ramifications of what people have been through since the fall of Thenica. Also the rapid rise in power of the Hasao Tei, the only city in Cayetano that is considered to not be terribly cramped besides the farming sectors. Likely contributed to the fact that the culture of the Hasao Tei churns out vastly more laborers than most would.

Speaking of all this. So Haleh appears to be sticking around at least for now, if nothing else she is genuinely well suited to the Western Reach. She isn’t going to work for VSEC given her lack of willingness to obey ‘mortals’. However, she moved into the outer subsurface layer of Diadem and is trying to build a garage. Apparently if left to her own devices she wants to collect cars. Laura King even gave her a welcoming gift of a two million credit supercar from a now destroyed manufacturer. I point this out because it means Laura is up to something. Not that Sakhessa showing up was good for our anxiety around here. Biohazard teams have been scrubbing every inch to check for mummy rot since her passing through. Fortunately, none has been found. Despite Deinuu’s aggressive nature and willingness to pick a fight, it appears Sakhessa’s only desire is to be left alone.

As for rebuilding Diadem’s shipyards, they are a technical marvel just because they are housed by the walls of the ring and most important its atmosphere. The only other shipyard in the Sol territories to do something like that belongs to Sharen. Theirs isn’t even walled. Peasants! Though yes I have put that to a high priority for now as requested.

Most of the Ika are not in any condition to be founding their own colony, Sarrai is the only one who is fully functional already. She has a two year jump on the competition and Eerihild was apparently very good at being a therapist. So for now they live in one of the buildings under assisted living except for a handful of them that are self sufficient. They actually seem relatively uninterested in colonial affairs over spiritual ones. As I mentioned before, their people have a surprisingly deep series of cultural traditions revolving their reverence of ‘machine spirits’ that apparently only they can see or talk to. A phenomenon we haven’t really studied to figure out how it actually works.

Hello th-

 

No. The Ika have demanded that as the original creators of Diadem that we hand full rights of possession of three specific structures over to them. It’s a building in the utility deck, the one right above the command room, and another one that is in the shipyards. This was a strangely high priority to them and one of them was clearly willing to fight Eleazor for it. Sarrai has confirmed the importance of these buildings. While Diadem is primarily attributed to them, it was built with the combined efforts of their alliance. Including the likes of the Blaiken, and it was a bastion of a multi civilization empire. They aren’t that picky about us being here, that’s normal to them, but those three buildings are relevant to their people specifically. One is the original factory that the machines are made in, while the exerlus made hundreds more – that specific one is the one they originally built. The building above the command room was a temple, even if to us it looks more like a server farm. They said the spirits of their machines were stored there after expiring, and would be possible to upload once again. Some of these machines wandering the ring aren’t ‘old ones’ because of their body, but because of the data that operates them from these server farms.

The building in the shipyard is also a temple, specifically near to the docking terminals because they would ‘listen’ to the ships that passed by and somehow divine stories of galactic adventures those ships had been on. I went ahead and just approved that because they were agitated about these three buildings, but I thought I’d let you know why the big fancy building right on top of your command console is in possession of the Ika instead of VSEC. We just moved operations into the one across the street instead. They didn’t care about that one.

 

There is a problem with Eden’s reconstruction of the Ika, she needs more than one sample since they are all badly mutated. Easily solved, but just thought I’d mentions she needs access to more than Sarrai. Sarrai just sort of cut her mutations off in the heat of the moment since her armor didn’t recognize her new shape, Sarrai didn’t even recognize her new shape. Under duress she made a decision and paid the cost, respectable. However, she still has mutated joints and internal organs even if the armor cut the obvious excess limbs off for her. Basically, Eden just needs more samples and a little help from Sarrai to figure out what the real base blueprint should be. Not that we lack for samples, I suppose the summary is just that she’s working on it. I dunno man its  been awhile and Irae makes me tell her every little detail sometimes, I got kind of used to it.

Lancaster’s land rewards, while generous, turn out to not be spectacularly appealing to most knights. Diadem is a technological marvel, not something we’re known for even with Eden’s recent help. Eden City is floating above Eden. Eden is awesome. Everybody loves Eden. If they were to have tiefling children or any other side effects for their corruption, even if cleansed, who do they go to? That’s right, Eden. If they want to pass down a family tradition of being elemental pandem casters? Eden. She has become so incredibly critical to our culture that no one wants to leave the planet. By the way while you were gone, Eden’s Festival became a holiday. We figured out Eden’s birthday and now celebrate it as a national holiday.

Yoshai has been convincing people to hold their cash ins until they know where Ohalyn or other such…businesses intend to appear. However, Selah is willing to depart from Eden to move into Diadem full time but with different intentions. She is waiting to see how Diadem develops, because the influence of a holy order might help to guide the people of Diadem but it might also enter into intense friction with the Ika religion or the current forerunner to become a major governor- Laura King. The Holy Order is less attached to Eden than the rest.

Speaking of Yoshai, he has gotten in contact with some mysterious…thing…in the shadow plane. Apparently it is called “The Thing in the Dark” by shades. A sort of local cryptid of theirs, not many believe it actually exists and some ‘crazies’ keep trying to prove it does. Turns out it does, and it’s dying. It is also apparently an information broker that runs Aethernet social media as a side hustle? According to Yoshai it is struggling to communicate and needs help. It offered to bind to him in a roundabout way of getting to you and specifically Eden. It offered to answer a question if you would agree to send Eden into the shadow plane to try and help it. If she succeeds you get two more questions. It also apparently finds Vasia worth trading more information for though Yoshai is having a hard time understanding its pricing structure. It doesn’t like to deviate from it though, even in its current state. It is having a hard time explaining itself even to Yoshai who now has been sitting quietly in the dark mumbling to himself trying to parse what this thing is even saying half the time. At the very least it doesn’t seem crazy or malevolent, just sick.

We’ve seen to the knight of the surviving hundred and a handful of squires from the First Lance that went to Diadem.

As for finding Zero out in the wilds…no idea. Selah stated that Ankathi knows how but would rather you focus on the task at hand than picking up a side project of tracking down some aberration you created in the Astral Wilds. She also warned that Zero is a very hostile creature, it has attacked anything and everything it can find. It is also deliberately hunting. Returning to the Astral Wilds might attract Zero’s attention though since you will at the least be food.

Holua has been sent to hang around Diadem where Valen seems to be moving into. Though technically she is employed by VSEC and sometimes lurks in places Holua doesn’t have access to. Sometimes for security reasons but also because he’s a bit large for some hallways and buildings. That and unsupervised it turns out he will burrow into the dirt somewhere instead of keeping up with any studies assigned to him.

We’ve deferred the vloz infiltration to Nah Division since the Vloz know us and hate us. It is currently in progress.

 

The vivarium is still technically there. It’s been taken over by the Phantoms and they seem to have largely…kept operating it actually. Basically “oh good idea, we’ll do that too”. Granted…they might be putting unintended things in there. Though also several Solian life forms. With Sakhessa effectively opting out of Sol to establish her own world it became more prudent for them to collect samples of what they’d be leaving behind.

Vanjin has an alibi that she is in fact, a former bounty hunter. Though notably that alibi has sketchy spots since she was living out of her ship and doing ‘whatever it took’ to get to her targets.

As for declassifying yourself, good for you man. Really putting yourself out there. Now there is an aethernet conspiracy that you’re a puppet controlled by big government (Lancaster and Renjala in particular) to shift blame of the mummy rot epidemic onto a scapegoat when in reality it was all Lancaster’s fault. A major backbone of it is that your cultist body has a known previous life before you took over it. One that is definitely not wealthy enough to be a director. Not necessarily everyone but…more than is normal for conspiracy theory message boards and aethernet comments. My favorite post so far is someone saying you’re Renjala without the mask and you got tired of trying to live vicariously while people didn’t know you were rich so you revealed…yourself posing as not yourself. Ignoring entirely that Renjala is six inches taller than you, and not a woman. I could have made up some shit better then that, shapeshifting, illusion magic, silnian shenanigans. Nope, they just…had nothing for it.

Reveal yourself as the cat next, it’ll be hilarious. For me at least.Though now that I think about it, after you revealed the Phantoms why didn’t they reveal you in retaliation? Or Vasia…or that Renjala is a lich…or that Lancaster is a former member… In hindsight, they’ve been weirdly quiet about all the things they know about us. I’m sure it’s nothing but it just got me wondering.

It does seem that your ritual has helped a lot in the recovery of the Ika, not exactly an instant solution but definitely speedrunning the process. Though there is still the matter of ‘oh god the whole galaxy has changed in the last sixteen thousand years nothing makes sense anymore and my favorite restaurant is closed’ that they’ll be dealing with for awhile.

The cult has returned to Jydoq to take another stab at this. They’ve made a new command center out of a Kaiju Freighter. Since it was designed by Vasia to transport and hold things, it wasn’t much of a stretch to reverse it to keep things out. Given that they are dealing with a liquid assassin, a ship made to not leak air into space was a good start they decided. Not long after landing, Alexandrea and a few of her closest disappeared. According to other members of the cult, they just left entirely now that they had gotten a free ride to another planet. Something something, kicking them while they’re down, something something, whiny bitches.

Acquiring Waianoa’s alchemical recipe for the psionic melding potion is down to a trade. It is a signature product of the Mokihi kingdom. Waianoa offered to trade the recipe on the condition that…uh….that I…oh no she wants my body. While I can’t be entirely sure as to why, knowing what we do about the growing elemental movement to ‘upscale production’ I think they want a synapse queen for…experiments. I’m sure giving them access to whatever elemental a silnian makes will in no way have lasting ramifications on the galaxy.

Speaking of picking buildings in Diadem, are we even moving? Diadem is a massive city that if filled with people will mean the only things we can eat are people. I suppose we could live in the subsurface levels pretty comfortably. I don’t mind the dark obviously.

I have gathered that Vasia is cranky and needs a project to occupy herself. I think she’s just out of sorts with her current situation. She doesn’t have her office, her lab, her experiments, basically everything she was working on. Probably need to let her settle in and find her rhythmn again before asking her to run off to Jydoq or anywhere else that doesn’t promise to help her rebuild the things she cares about. I think this is all her version of sulking, but for someone who regularly fights with their sister like that ‘sulking’ looks a lot like ‘plot a genocide’. She took off to Zenaka when she heard of your baby experiments though and has taken it upon herself to set the matter up.

Also meeting with Haleh is trickier than you might think. She is if nothing else highly mobile and I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a draconic version of ADHD. Gotta go fast, gotta go somewhere, gotta blow something up.

Speaking of Craylin, well she’s learned some new soulmelds from the Hasao Tei I guess.

Doctor White has largely stabilized their own medical condition. If anything they’re stronger than before. Sure there is a writhing mass of tentacles inside of them with an inter-dimensional bag of holding for a stomach that means she has to eat a lot, but there was a reason that Koura Cures was using that parasite for medical benefits. Her organs are gone now though. All of her vital processes are handled by the creature inside of her. The worst of it is the creeping fear that it will soon replace her as a person. Her brain is already gone from her body, if you run a scan on her you will find that everything underneath her skin is just that parasite. All things responsible for keeping her alive are in another dimension with the strange creature. You could probably cut her head off and she would be fine unless you cut juuust right to hit the other dimension to the north-left whatever the fuck she exists on.

Averill has taken off into the Reach to look for the scrappers, though it is a long journey.

Also we got the Lucidware going pretty well. The current problem is just that making an artificial limb that contributes MORE mana to the mana well than a limb is so far proving to be especially difficult. Though we can add limbs without it causing a draw on the existing mana well, so we have this one test subject with six arms that is able to maintain it just fine without some of the problems normally associated with trying this.

From the VSEC reports, the ruins near the Undead Star are not necessarily monetarily valuable. There aren’t exactly many valuable ancient artifacts, but historically they might be worthwhile to someone just to study what happened. Hearing what Renjala’s man has run into recently, knowledge might soon become currency.

Also my ichor, after being fed one of the Makers, produced a giant…thing. A big thing, that makes more little things. It actually has an enormous shell on its back that houses a portable bio…lab? Gestation chamber? Outpost? It’s the size of a ship and walks around. I’d say normal people shouldn’t go in, you’d be slipping and sliding through tunnels of exposed sinew that hug you real tight. I can slither through pretty comfortably though, kind of like a security blanket to me honestly. It’s a mobile ichor pit on the back of a huge creature. That’s the best way to describe it, even if the ichor it stores isn’t exactly liquid.

Bardhe said to stop calling him unless you have a job right at that moment. He then blocked our number because you keep calling him too often. His prices are negotiated per contract. No offense but you do seem kind of clingy, like…I get it.

Michael is still out there “stuck” pretending to be a slave. He’s not actually getting the worst of it. As mentioned before, most slaves in Aureum are more like pets that clean up after themselves. The issue with extracting him still remains getting a ship out of Aureum, the place is on a permanent lockdown with only one way in or out through the rift. Ironically, Michael has an easy time because he is a palace slave, but he also never gets to go anywhere because he is a palace slave. At this point the only way to extract him would likely to be for him to flee deeper into the warrens and drop out into space elsewhere but he isn’t a particularly pilot or ship thief.

Though his reports can tell you that posing as a Phantom is a bad idea. Most people who work for the Phantoms know which one they work for. Heterna, the city Sakhessa controlled in Necrosi, has a mayor that just meets with Sakhessa directly. While not every citizen knows about her, the ones that need to definitely do. It seems that the issue Ilex experienced is related to the death of Cassir leaving a power vacuum and no command structure to fulfill it.

We set up a base on Zenaka and scaled up ship production.

With the exception of Michael, everyone has been able to return to the Nomad Flotilla if they weren’t already there.

Also Renjala has a job for us.

We’ve started to establish a presence at Diadem, still in the process of building inspections, clearing the stuff we can’t use, and also second guessing every decision because I keep feeling like…it could be even bigger! BIGGER!

Though with clearance from the FVS we have been able to begin the production of warforged in greater quantities, more soldiers too. I have so many designs to try…

I’ve seen to repairing Vanessa, that was easy enough. She just needed some maintenance and blades replaced. Chevalier is a bit more complicated, still working on him. He’s fine, it will just take some effort to replace all of his equipment. He was designed to be very robust but it also makes it very difficult to take him apart and fix some nooks and crannies up that are causing this one stupid plate to not fit nicely into place.

Arsene is at Diadem working on helping with the whole Ika thing. We’ve reason to believe there are more Ika throughout Diadem at other medical facilities. Mostly because Sarrai said it wasn’t the only one like that. Traditional hospitals may have been destroyed by whatever destroyed them, but several bunker hospitals like those were once intended for the elite or for atmospheric control due to other species. The one Sarrai was in was made open to the public due to the crisis, and it stands to reason others were as well. She just doesn’t know where they all are.

As for transplanting Arsene, I will keep looking into it.