The Tungsten Teeth reported to Rampart that they have been delayed by a fleet conflict with what they described as “A big gun with engines on it”. Apparently their invasion of Thenica was slowed down by Faelyn who destroyed a quarter of their fleet upon contact. They continued to land on Thenica as a rather contested drop with their assault carriers but their remaining fleet is fleeing across the local stars to try and escape Faelyn’s fleet. Which, as we now have an update of what they’ve been doing at Aureum, is now larger than before. The Tungsten Teeth ran into an immediate issue upon assaulting Sarghess in that the Kar’Soluth was ready to meet them, likely having detected their violent entry plan via sensors from some distance away. This led to a battle on the ground and now the Tungsten Teeth are split apart fighting smaller skirmishes as they try to outmaneuver Sarghess to whittle away at their troops. The Tungsten teeth are generally comprised of stronger soldiers than Sarghess on a troop for troop comparison but they are woefully unequipped to outmaneuver Sarghess on Sol’s homeworld. They are barely even aware of how extensive the underdark really is or how Sarghess keeps moving around so quickly. Most importantly, Reika was there and the Teeth did not do well against an enemy who could heavily mitigate all of their artillery and bombardment strategies.
The fighting is still ongoing, but it mostly consists of the commander of the Tungsten Teeth trying to find a way around and through Sarghess to get to Reika before Reika finds them first. Matriarch Alystra Vel’Sarghess is also involved in personally commanding the troops. This has slowed the offensive on the Alnae border while Sarghess is busy dealing with all of this.
Combat assessments reveal earlier projections were missing some crucial data about Sarghess operations. Among which was that they have some elite units that were unaccounted for. They have an alarming quantity of highly trained veteran soldiers. The matriarch herself is also much stronger than we would have thought and we suspect it has something to do with her pandem bind that no one really knows much about. Another such factor is that Reika is currently with them though we’re not entirely sure why or to what extent. What it would mean for any simulations is that bombardment by any means will be heavily mitigated and if she is near the Alystra Vel’Sarghess all of our WTC tactics would be effectively negated against the matriarch. Probably a good thing we hired mercenaries to reveal this information to us before we did anything.
Valen has left for Zenaka to begin on that assignment, and clearly unhappy about the restrictions placed on it. For now she’s meeting with various people to assess the political situation more carefully to look for some options. She has gotten Ehan to come out of his bunker though has not turned him over to VSec, stating that if you get rid of him the next replacement will be just as annoying but less competent at the same job. This hasn’t particularly slowed the skirmishes and border cities are being bombed by the infiltrating Zenakans. While the shields on our station held up, it might be worth noting they launched missiles into orbit at the station.
We’ve also seen a rise of violent crimes in residential areas deep within the federated space as sympathizers are targeting federation supporters in their own homes, often with improvised arson techniques. Leading to an increase in paranoia and a new figure has popped up. A group of Zenakans have formed a heavily armed independent gang selling weapons that are not locally manufactured. Either federation weapons from our own armories that they somehow got ahold of, but most concerning are the weapons from Sol in general. There have been three reports of discovering Selona weapons in circulation.
Related to this, Vasia has discerned that the ships we shot down that were approaching from before were members of the Reach who managed to convince Utewa to let them into Finsir so they could try to ship more products to Zenaka.
Jydoq continues its ongoing developmental struggles, we did get some new immigrants though out of all this. It is also becoming clear that the conditions on the planet are slipping back deeper into destabilization. Kennae remains on the planet continuing his quest to help the region. Notably, reports have spotted Kaylen here. Though we are not sure if she is here just to visit her former teacher or if she is continuing her crusade with what little she has left by targeting Kar’Soluth.
Gunhid and Sarrai report that after going deeper into the neighboring ring they found a evidence of material shortage that explains the decline of the attacks on our border. They have been producing a much larger machine and most of the machines we normally encounter have been refitted into a new model they don’t recognize and are standing guard over the new machine.
This comes at the same time as a report from Gem Station that “something” is approaching Diadem from the direction of the Hive Worlds. As far as the station’s sensors can ascertain, it is approximately 1.8 billion tons of biomass with no significant presence of metal or electronic signatures. So, not a traditional fleet at least.
Koda reports in on the investigation of the rumors about keys in the hands of the Utewa and Exiled Exerlus. In order to find out more information about if the Utewa have one we would have to undertake significant investigation. The rumor comes from the fact that Utewa has thousands of strange and probably extremely valuable relics. Apparently they are collectors of them for purposes of academic curiosity. Though they are also very secretive about exactly what they have or where they keep them, as pirates on Kuhas already know that Utewa has several storage locations for these to make it hard to steal more than one at a time. The running theory is that there was probably at least one still in the Reach after the Terlim Wars, and if it would fall into anyone’s hands it would be the Utewa. This also turned into a tangent from some of the people being asked about it stating that the factory flotilla wandering around would be another candidate to find or keep such a thing.
The Exiled Exerlus having one is just a wild theory based on the fact that they contacted a now-extinct civilization ten thousand years ago that was the descendants of one of the alliance’s council races. Either the key would be laying in the dirt on the radioactive waste of a world, or the exiles would have found it, known what it is, and taken it. If anything they would be most motivated to have it as leverage over the defunct exerlus controlling parts of the ring even now.
The VSS Raptor has taken off towards the southern core of the galaxy to try and see how close they can get to the Blaiken on another plane.
In other news, Jiyan has been gone a bit longer than we expected and the exploration corps are starting to get nervous about not hearing any word from her in so long. Especially given that its possible to exit the Warrens in other galaxies and just get lost.
Also, emissaries from the Caelkians are becoming a more common sight around Diadem. The water people that live at a nearby star. Apparently they have been becoming very interested in our portal networks that lead all the way back to the southern end of the Reach. They’ve been asking about travel rights and border treaties recently and seem mostly interested in the fact that we’re not like the rest of the Reach. They are a recently galactically capable civilization and still not too happy to find out they’re surrounded by anarchy so they’ve been asking us a lot of questions.
The Shadow points out that one of the issues with trying to control their intelligence network is that parts of it operate independently from direct contact. Obviously the library among them, but also executives in various positions of their other holdings have been known to sell things as ‘advertising data’ that if someone were particularly clever could be used as military tracking information just by following money around. The Shadow claims at least direct innocence since they’ve not sold any military secrets about us recently and they’ve instead been busy trying to spy on Utewa. Though unfortunately, Utewa doesn’t seem to know about binds and their use of Pandem magic is much more primitive than ours even if they can perform impressive feats with it through sheer engineering.
We have made a fancy coffee shop. Speaking of which, Ankathi is summoning a meeting next month now that we have it done. She specifically demanded that The Shadow be present in person to some capacity since she hasn’t actually met them yet and has some questions. This comes on the heels of her mostly wrapping up what she was doing in the celestial plane, to which end her powerbase has now expanded significantly. Maybe not the most loyal powerbase at the moment, though definitely expanded.
The first realization Jaerda had was that Pandem Cleansing was even a thing. We haven’t exactly advertised we can do it that heavily and she’s been living in isolation for awhile now. So that kept her distracted for a large part of these negotiations. She points out that the snap elections don’t need to be held, she feels the warlords and their staff will win the vote almost by default since they’ve been keeping people alive this whole time. Not that they don’t deserve the public affection for them but rather than it’d be a time consuming formality that solves none of the ongoing problems.
Then the matter of turning her into a member of the pantheon got into a mess of her trying to understand how you even figured out how to do that then did it three times. Now she wants to meet The Shadow and uh…Ankathi out of at least curiosity as to what this whole pantheon business even is.
She also points out that the remnants of Alnae will pose another issue with joining the Federation as a member state. A lot of the leaders are old and stubborn, herself included. Getting them to reunite is one thing but to join as essentially a lesser house to a group of colonists that started on Thenica will be a harder to sell them on. To an extent you’ll end up leaving behind several of them here on Thenica in order to take the others to Enohas.
In unrelated but relevant news, Sethis found Reika. She’s currently presumed as being Alystra Vel’Sarghess’ bodyguard though we don’t know why or to what extent. She was just standing around there and dealt with the Tungsten Teeth mercenaries that took a shot at the matriarch. She is in fact still holding the Ryner, so we found that too while we’re at it.
Hrmm the one with horns was someone they were talking with not shooting. I suppose the dark skinned ones are to the east. GET THA TRUCK!
Now to sit here and wait for someone to do somethin’. Since they’re just sittin around waitin to be attacked. Weaklings.
We got some more turrets built as requested. I dunno how you have the budget for that but not for meeeee.
Also reviewing the recon report from Gunhild, I can confirm that the exerlus next door is building “a big thing”. That is a war mech if I’ve ever seen one and notably the new models also captured in the report have weapons clearly designed to penetrate the Federation’s mechs.
Which is bad news for us too as we’re made with the same materials and build philosophy. Basically it appears that the neighboring Exerlus has realized we’re not the same opponent it has fought for a few thousand years and now its changing its designs to deal with us specifically. Which means those border lines are about to experience a significant increase in casualties. Also if this information somehow spreads through Diadem we could be dealing with all future pushes into these rings, should we find more keys for example, to be much worse than last time.
This also reveals something critical, these new designs are not just targeting the front line mechs we’ve been using. Some of those weapons look designed for other purposes and if I were a sapient machine designing weapons to destroy my enemies, ah-hem, I’d only make those if I knew what they were intending to hit. The implication here is that there are machines in Diadem also performing reconnaissance on the Federation.
So I’d be concerned that we’re about to get hit by a wave of new machines meant to kill us specifically instead of other exerlus robot dinosaurs with laser beams.
Rampart is always keeping an eye around Kuhas and it might be relevant to know that a very large ship passed by the station recently. It was painted all black while possessing significant stealth technology and practically snuck up on the station and sent people into a minor panic about what it even was. Typically stealth ships are smaller and rely on a variety of techniques which tend to become quickly outdated. So there is no reason for it to reveal itself to Kuhas station just to stop by for gas, I suspect it was a systems test. Someone is testing a very large and powerful stealth warship on purpose which is very unusual. Though as a result, we also know that somewhere in the Reach is a strange ship that is almost undetectable. Visual confirmation from Allison reports that it is definitely a warship, and its main cannon is unlike anything she’s ever seen before. The ship refueled and left without further incident.
On the Alnae front we’ve learned that Beldobaan has been assisting Sarghess in combating the Tungsten Teeth mercenaries on the ground though they usually attack at night and the mercenaries do not even know who Beldobaan is. So they probably just all look like drow to them. We also know that Jaal’Darya has received a new fleet to add to its growing list, and House Sharen has revealed eight new warships at New Kaifen in response just to remind people they still have the biggest navy. What’s important about this is they’re all hitting the same bottleneck, crew. Kar’Soluth is aggressively recruiting on alien worlds, particularly Jydoq, to get these ships staffed as soon as possible. Sharen has been recruiting around the Reach for similar reasons using Diadem as a launching point into the Reach.
Another movement in the works we caught wind of, Kar’Soluth has apparently decided after the Tungsten Teeth attack that they should expand their forces further through a variety of methods. Though the most notable one is we discovered they are entering into talks with the Sivataurs of SV2 and we suspect they’re trying to get them to join Kar’Soluth as a new house to supplement their forces that are mostly handled by Sarghess. The Vloz’Khress are also still rebuilding, but their new matriarch is focused on finding recruits in the demon kingdom.
Similarly, the Hassani have been quiet for awhile but our embassies have pointed out that they just placed a new facility around the star of Auwana. It doesn’t take much to tell it is a very large gun.
More intel reports say that Nila Whately has been spotted aboard Kuhas station. Allison reports she was just drinking at a bar, but given that Nila has a tendency to cause an awful lot of trouble she felt we might like to know she was around. We also have heard reports that Jydoq members are traveling to Elasyn for reasons unknown.