Through perhaps dubious means and convoluted upholding of their own traditions – Zenaka appointed a man named Ehanxelvun to be their new planetary ruler. They use the title that our translators pick up as ’emperor’, not sure if we should be concerned about that. Ehanxelvun promised to deal with the many lords who did not attend the summit for you though has requested military assistance in doing so and asked for the orbiting station to open fire on six territories until he’s satisfied that the lords in charge of them are dead.
Suffice to say, as is according to their traditions, they appointed a rather vicious fellow. He’s a former equivalent to Sethis but for one of the territorial lords who murdered his boss right before the summit and attended it in their place before anyone could figure out what happened. Murdered two others and put puppets in place to help secure more votes for himself, and is definitely in a hurry to blow up certain other territories that might threaten the security of his position before he can cement it.
Technically by their own traditions, he’s qualified to do all of that. Even if the federation has a rule against murder, he wasn’t part of the occupied territories yet and just attended the summit as a rogue territorial lord with an argument to make.
As for the Alnae virtual summit, which took a lot of work to establish enough communications to do that in the first place, they are somewhat used to council leadership so its not like they all need to be the one at the top. However, until the federation can actually feed all of them – which we can’t by the way, the Alnae population is several times our own – they keep running into issues of dividing who would get what and the whole thing with sending workers. A lot of it came down to them arguing over how much food any of them get if they send people to work the Vittles farms and trying to calculate who gets what and when. While Diadem has the space for such a scale of farming, things take a bit to grow and in the meantime they have the same ongoing issues. So progress was made in the form of them agreeing to send millions to Diadem to help with the farms, but actually uniting them awaits progress on that front.
To that end, Kar’Soluth is being uppity, the new House Kenduis took over more territory from the former Alnae and Jaal’Darya have been expanding their influence on Jydoq while they expand their fleet bit by bit.
House Sharen’s scientists and medical researchers arrived at Roha and have been poking around.
To clarify, Valdir doesn’t need a fleet for trade. They need things to trade in the first place. The nature of galactic shipping being done in bulk lowers the ease of trading the various small individual things their people can actually make or do since their empire doesn’t really rely on industrial production.
We have our diplomatic corvettes on the way to Rhuplais and the Vessians to check in on them and see whats going on.
According to people asking around, there is a figure named Gasaba who represents the factory flotilla who can be found usually between the heart of the Reach and the northern point of Kuhas on various stations. Though their appearances tend to be random and only when they have stuff to buy or sell. They were last seen Halfway between Elasyn and Kuhas at some random station though that was a little while ago as the person we heard that from had also been there and has since then worked their way up to Kuhas.
It turns out selling fully functional mechs on Kuhas wasn’t that hard.
Also we’ve hired a ton of people from Sol News but not Exme, so not sure what the status of your information war with them actually is since they’re operating out of Desoir territory.
Meeting with both the Utewa and the Vessians proved to be surprisingly mundane. To them we are just another wayward civilization of the Reach, of which they have met thousands of. So they’re a lot less interested than when we met Zenaka or Enohas populations for example. Granted the Playatis, or rather Zaikies specifically, were a bit more interested.
To sum up the meeting, we’ve learned that the Utewa disappearing planet trick is actually that they have the ability to open a planet sized pandem rift. So their planet doesn’t quite disappear, it just goes into other planes but very few in the galaxy are good enough at planar travel to even figure out where it went let alone chase it.
The Vessians are, as described by Quinae, very hungry people but we’ve noticed they share a distinct similarity to solians. Also Jiyan found out that this is where one of the warren exits is. Similar to how Koura’s parasites were bled onto it from its own warren rift, it is likely their magical ‘super planet’ is the work of something that once lived in the Warrens. Similar to the entity that Vasia captured for us at Koura. Though judging by the pattern, and previous rumors, it isn’t unreasonable to suspect that Grand Chief Amasis is the entity from the Warrens or at the very least in some way related to it. However, getting an audience with them is harder than meeting with the actual vessians. Partially because they aren’t even on that planet at the moment.
In other news, the Diadem shipyard facilities and expansion have finished and they are now capable of producing titan scale ships.
Holua seems more or less fine with the squire life though as far as he understands it, he gets paid to punch things sometimes and other times he just continues burrowing around the city.
We’ve established the company of Riftmancy so that we can more reasonably start exporting portal crafting, as this isn’t the first time people were asking about that. I suppose being the galactic highway builders is probably a pretty profitable business.
Valjala seems to be a chaotic lower plane that makes no sense, kind of like you. Though its a place where things are always moving for some reason or another. Entering into it is kind of dangerous since, like the Fae Wilds, you might not come out quite where you thought you would. Less due to planar positioning and more so due to the fact that you can’t stop moving within it. So the plan to put a couple stars and planets aligned with literally anything is out the window, because if you put something somewhere it goes somewhere else practically of its own accord.
People are already trying to make ships and cars out of this in some way. At least those that knew it happened.
Also this was a lot of work to encrypt a book.
Part of our deal with the Sharen has definitely revealed to us just how prevalent their own colonization efforts have been. They went the other direction, further towards the borders of the galaxy rather than towards the center. I suppose it makes sense that drow wanted to be as hard to find as possible. As well as your whole student exchange program.
Bill wound up going to Utewa to serve as our diplomat, mostly because he was curious about it. Establishing some connection to the Utewa academy and returned with some negotiations to have some of Utewa’s warlocks come visit and see what we might be able to show them.
The Thing in the Dark, also known as Friend, has pointed out that the warlocks Utewa wants to send are bound to a demon lord from outer spaaaAAAaaaAAace who they have not mentioned nor have we heard about before. Basically they have an alien demon lord for a patron hidden somewhere around the Reach likely on Finsor. Also that this patron has in some way played a part with the events of the Reach since before the fall of the Ika. Possibly through predecessors and a continued lineage.
Some of the Sharen House medical people have shown up to work on that whole “what the hell is mummy rot” joint project.
The jydoq colony is doing fine for now at least, everything is nice and ooze-tight so that hopefully nothing gets in. Though progress with the local leaders can be summed up as “want food”.
Rhazin is going about subjugating the peoples of Viowei by force though the fact that he can’t talk isn’t helping him pursue many other methods. Though the takeover of a planet is definitely a long affair, so he’s working on it. At the very least the people are somewhat confused as to why Agallias left, so they’re a little disorganized at the moment. However, they are not spectacularly aware of what a silnian is so their fear levels could be improved.
Averill is on the way to Rhuplais to see about the Utewa academy, though not sure why you need him to get into it if he’s just trying to figure out what the jydoq creature is all about. Unless you meant literally to walk inside of its doors and ask someone who might know, I’m not sure if I’m taking you too literally or not literally enough.
As for your “first spark” experiment, as your advisor I have to say this sounds like a bad idea. A really bad idea. The phrase ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ comes to mind. Also death is literally defined as ‘the moment your essentia goes away’. Removing your own and hoping to survive seems like an iffy proposition if you ask me. Though we’re waiting for Renjala to finish playing with his new toy I suppose.
The party rocks are still excavating the mountain of rubble on Diadem but they’ve at least managed to compress it. They also keep sledding or rolling down it on their breaks. Of all the elementals to be ‘the fun ones’ I don’t understand how it wound up being the earth elementals. They are at least capable of packing it into a more solidified form and adding rock structures to reinforce it.
We’ve had some freighters designed as ship booby traps as you asked. Also gotten some drop colonies together for Sharen though I’m not sure how much they need those.
Macrohard huh? It’s amazing how long a company can go without a name. Good ol N/A divison.
We moved some of our assets around and sent a bunch to Enphidia to keep up on things there.
Allison and Rampart are still doing well cutting out a nice slice of territory for themselves, that now seems to include Vittles. Which has drawn in other businesses to Rampart’s protection just because Vittles is pretty popular by default since it has food.
Our agents are off and away into the galaxy to try and figure out anything they can about the jydoq assassin though it is sort of all over the place at the moment. Though apparently Ilex is also sending Averill to Utewa, and technically Bill is already there but he’s on another mission entirely. So everybody is combing through everything everywhere all at the same time.
We’ve reinforced Enphidia, making it the most well defended city on the inside of Diadem. We are now fully prepared for an invasion by those rich bastards from Adelaide.
Wait when you say lend a hand to Preskian, do you mean in helping him convince Kar’Soluth to attack Alnae harder or with shipping and handling of handouts from Lancaster? Not sure how much freedom to give the agents on helping the guy out. Though the oddity of a drow secretly helping an elf but only because of screwing over other drow is mildly amusing.
New problem, we lost the engines to the gas giant. So we’re back at Diadem after a handy portal from the Astral Knights. It all was going fairly well when we were just fighting the fleet though it was clear they were just trying to damage the engines and sent a whole lot more strike craft than we were anticipating just for that. Also boarding, we did well with that. Though the damage started adding up and once the second fleet closed in on us while we were setting up shop at the gas giant, the conditions of the gas giant finished off the rest of our engines. Fortunately, all this was before Rahlken even got caught up to us.
Also amusingly, they pursued us through the portal and straight into Gem Station’s range. So that’s a fleet dealt with. Technical success? We’re undergoing repairs at the moment. Though I don’t doubt this will be a continuing issue once we set out that way again. This time they’ll probably be even more prepared for us.
At least we survived all of that, but it does lend some evidence to why Lancaster has had so much trouble with sending scouts around the galaxy as of late. Even a ship as large and heavily armed as the Cradle is a target to somebody somewhere out there. We barely made it out of our galactic neighborhood before that happened and we know we’ll be crossing into some sketchy territory further down the road.
I’m not sure how much better we could possibly prepare though. All we can really do is fix ‘er up and try again. That or somehow dispatch Rahlken before trying, then dispatch the next thing that sends us home, then do it again. Rinse repeat until we can get to the other side of the galaxy.