Ehanxelvun has turned out to be quite good at bureaucracy and filling out paperwork. Given his previous position and activities he’s always been good at that sort of thing and exploiting it to his advantage. Which is sort of how he wound up in this position in the first place. The first thing he did was that constitution which created a method of succession and got it signed by most of the other territorial lords over the last month. Making it so that the position automatically transfers to a chosen heir instead of “whoever is holding the biggest stick at the time”. It has a few tricks in it that basically created an oligarchy with the Emperor being the only one who can forcefully remove others from their position or appoint new ones. In the event that no heir is specified, the position of emperor basically goes up for auction as to avoid the murder clauses as you requested.
Vittles is still coming along with the first harvest though the farms are still expanding in size. Alnae and a few tribes of the Vessians have agreed to come check out this whole open farm thing we have going on.
Though people from Alnae are still trickling in, transport logistics to reach the portal and all. That and people being swayed to the idea bit by bit. Getting news to spread without comms, all that fun stuff.
Cazvrath has agreed to visit Diadem, if nothing else out of curiosity to see the place. Though worth noting we should keep her away from the farms, Alnae and Shetou have that whole long standing grudge thing.
In the meantime,
Notably one of the still present limitations of your abilities is that you need to know where you’re coming and going from. Particularly relevant is that Jiyan went into the Warrens beyond comm range to figure out where things are that you might want to warp yourself to in the future. Until they comm again we’re a bit blind as to where within the Warrens they actually are.
It turns out Ankathi beat you to the punch on visiting the angels. That was what she took off to do with her new Kharla body last month. Using Selah as her minion to help convince some of them…and then she started murdering the rest. Though I’m told by Selah that was more their fault than hers. Given how they treated Reika in the past, you can see how they might sometimes be disposed towards questionable choices. Apparently they forgot the golden rule of Ankathi, she is pinnacle of disproportionate responses. Apparently three archangels actually tried to attack her. The war in the celestial realm is still ongoing and a few seem keen to take you up on your offer if nothing else to get away from Ankathi – who has to take breaks for Kharla’s sake every now and then. Ankathi’s mysterious blackguards seem to be winning just because of Ankathi doing the heavy lifting. We also saw the first temple being attacked by some of the independent governments of the frontier who Ankathi has been securing alliances with as a side hustle. Most relevant though, for some reason the Sangui De’Rex family was there. Several of their well known elder vampires were just snacking on angels while under Ankathi’s “protection”. Given how vampires react to celestial magic, it’s questionable if Ankathi negotiated with them favorably or if she threatened to smite them all.
So that was amusing timing on your part. Heaven is at war with New Heaven basically.
Friend points out that Ankathi keeps naming people according to their domain, if you would be willing to let them join the pantheon they would be okay with taking on their deity name. Such as you are “The Traveler” and Ankathi is “The Fate”. Notably at the moment, Ankathi is clearly busy and doesn’t have much input on the whole adding Friend to the pantheon thing.
Work on the whole plane thing is underway, it is to be noted that Friend is one of the most powerful pandem entities we know of even if they just sulk around about dying and spy on people. So once you explain the spells they’re pretty much good to go from there just as you were, with one caveat. They must enter the Astral Wilds. I am amused by the prospect of an information broker with severe ADD.
Welp Ilex died in the dumbest way. Jydoq is kind of just as much of a mess as it was the entire time. The Jydoq summit has largely broken down into “no you do it” “no you do it” bickering, the assassin has been a significant problem for them evidently and they’ve gotten wind of what the assassin is. Given its from their own mythology, I suppose I can see why they’re particularly wary of it the way many were wary of a dracolich being found out. They’ve agreed to try and make separate capitals to break things down in the meantime. Though we definitely don’t know which safeguards work or not against this assassin since we can’t tell if Ilex’s latest colony works or if they’ve just been uninterested in trying.
Okay so Ilex is dead, turns out flaying your soul cannot be covered by your psyche under…whatever circumstances those were supposed to be. If anything this data was closest to figuring out how the Lakaaj trick works for whatever that’s worth.
This leaves us in an awkward position on jydoq since it was largely his project and now uh…poof. Not like I know what we’re doing there. I mean I do but it’s not like I care enough to pick a fight with assassin man.
In hindsight its kind of anticlimatic that Ilex killed himself before the assassin could find some more dramatic master plan to eliminate him despite his overmind.
Speaking of which Averill, as per Ilex’s last request, he wound up visiting the Utewa academy. There are a very strange number of children with guns there. Apparently they teach “self defense” because kids going back out into the Reach need to be prepared. They also have classes about becoming pirates… it’s a weird place. The academy is so large that it just has whatever random junk you want to learn available as a class. Including Biology 238: Cross Species anatomic compatibility. In layman’s terms “how to recognize what aliens you can bang”. I know about that one because that’s the one Averill was visiting.
Not much luck on finding out details about the assassin so far though, might be because he got distracted.
Fortunately we took a rift right back to Diadem and they have finished their fancy new shipyards, so repairs are good to go already.
I’ve put together what we can about Rahlken and had the scouts out at Kuhas and down at Utewa poke around a bit more to get a complete picture.
Rahlken’s primary limitation has always been the size of his team since he doesn’t really recruit people from outside his own family, or specifically his species. Though they cannot procreate any further. However, he has a lot of resources and can evidently hire out other pirates or mercenaries like the Tungsten Teeth.
We did find out that it is very unusual for him to hire any outside help. No one can really recall him ever doing that before, and while nothing seems beyond him to try it is still very uncharacteristic. Given what we know it isn’t unreasonable to suspect that Selona told him to make sure we didn’t make it out of the Reach. If he was acting under orders it would explain his willingness to pursue abnormal means this time around.
His own fleet is largely stolen ships that he can operate with skeleton crews if he needs the extra maneuverability, they tend to be docked within his own ship like a super duper carrier of some sort. This is likely where one of the pursuing fleets had come from. He has no formal base of operations other than his ship, which is now lurking along the northern edge of the galaxy.
We also learned from this encounter that the Tungsten Teeth fleet, though we wiggled around them long enough to take a stand at the gas giant, is technologically inferior to federation ships though they pack a mean punch. That being said, their crews are far more experienced than most of ours. Makes sense given that they’re a centuries old mercenary business.
VSEC has previously sent a lot of ships to try and reach Nelta to establish diplomatic contact. One even made it but they got there around the beginning of the jesai invasion and no one had time to talk to them. That and they were in immediate mortal peril with that war going on. Given our interaction with Rahlken and the known desires of Selona to prevent diplomatic communication between many powerbases around the galaxy, I’d say we have enough evidence to assume he is intentionally targeting any attempts to reach Nelta.
With that in mind, Rahlken won’t be the last problem in our way on this voyage. I imagine if we went around to the south we’d run into the Blaiken and so on and so forth.
The issue we’ve had with trying to find allies is that the people who hate him most are planetbound. Rahlken rarely picks fight with other fleets unless he has a very specific motive. Space stations maybe now and then though. The Vessians like him since he avenged them, and Utewa is immune to him so they don’t particularly care about his shenanigans.
I imagine Haleh would actually know some people with grudges against him, but also against her.
We’ve been keeping an eye on the shipments to General Preskian, and yep there’s a lot of shady stuff going on in there thanks to Kar’Soluth. The agents are trying to handle it. As for messing with Kar’Soluth in general I will remind you Beldobaan is one of the houses here and we did opt not to pick that fight last time this was on the table.
We’ve deployed the team to Elasyn, they’re currently on the galactic highway. Travel time and all.
Rampart is now under Michael and they’ve been rooting out any upstart gangs that might find it worthwhile to pick a fight with them for territory.
The hunt for the fake director has made a little bit of progress. They are definitely focused on Thenica as we’ve heard very few reports of them traveling outside of Sol. All the imposter scenarios were related to Sol territory matters and messing with people along the way. Though they’ve been rather quiet lately, which means either they’re laying low, they’ve abandoned the gimmick since the signing of the treaty, or we could be doing better in actually finding out other incidents.
“Headhunters at the new station and colony mean eventually when they have populations we’ll start picking out candidates for operative staus from them, right? That’s how that works?”
Yes. Also we got those turrets set up at the Aetas station, definitely can’t put that many turrets onto Kuhas since we don’t own it and there are rules against that sort of thing there.