Sarrai is currently on vacation as suggested. Though that mostly entails recovering from injuries rather than beach activities so far.
On the Thenican front, Sarghess is still fighting with the Tungsten Teeth across various skirmishes though it has started to turn more towards the Sarghess’ favor as time goes on and they figure out what these aliens are all about and how they operate. Also scout reports say that this has been valuable to see how professional alien mercenaries do things, and specifically that they’re definitely much stronger than most armies we have encountered. If this was a fair and honest fight, they’d definitely have a significant edge. Also they are very good at taking bases and fighting within enclosed locations. Likely because in the Reach a lot of their work would take place boarding ships or on space stations. The lesson of the story being: Don’t let them board us or get into urban environments in the future.
In terms of a strategic analysis of Sarghess, they still rely heavily on out-positioning with fast moving armies and rely on self contained logistics alongside massive arsenals. Wherever they need artillery, it appears there overnight. Same for their anti air weapons or similarly specialized tools. While the tungsten teeth are clearly better outright fighters, Sarghess is pulling ahead upon realizing these strengths and weaknesses and focusing on positioning their assets right where they need to be to exploit these problems. The alien mercenaries keep getting caught while moving locations in open fields or having once safe positions bombarded in the middle of the night by artillery that was a thousand miles away the day before. That and vampiric drow from beldobaan are probably, albeit discreetly, causing havoc in ways we’re not quite catching.
Nah division reports that the fight is effectively over, Jaal’Darya has sent people to deal with it and aside from their naval control that grows every month – they developed bioweapons that specifically kill the dominant races among the Teeth mercenaries. Sarghess has been deploying it with their own people and while the fighting appears to still be ongoing as of now, they estimate that by next month the Teeth will be crippled.
Analysis aside, Alnae refugees are still being evacuated as best we can though there are a lot of them. More than had even gone to Moncayo in the first Nelta invasion – largely because of communication of ‘what is going on’ is better between warlords than disparate groups we find roaming on Thenica.
Essentially there are a lot of logistics going on as we prepare to attack Beldobaan after Shetou moves in which could take a bit since that hinges on getting the refugees out, then letting them fight the last warlord.
Zenaka has experienced an escalation of violence as now several territory lords are attempting to assassinate Valen, some of the other lords are trying to assassinate them for assassinating Valen, and Valen is currently occupying one of the territories with most the available forces she has for offense while looking for a particularly sneaky one. So business as usual.
The shadow reports that in their opinion the power dynamic is largely between everyone other than Ankathi, and Ankathi. Purely because she is the only one that knows how to kill other deities efficiently, at least supposedly. If she can actually do this, she’s the only one who can resort to brute force in the entirety of the council. Other than discovering the method to create planar entities, that is sort of her only claim to her position as well. Between this ability and her powers as The Fate being a little overpowered, she’s in charge by way of brute strength. Though The Shadow is just an information person, not terribly great at Charisma. So they still intended to just make you do all the work with such information anyways.
On that topic, they’ve been trying to figure out how to get to Halaestra. Finding her is extremely difficult since she lives in the void and then convincing her to exit retirement is just as difficult. They were asking if you had any ideas on how to accomplish either, since Halaestra is one of the most prodigal pandem wielders we know about despite their lack of interest or even outright distaste for the art.
For alien candidates, Chancellor Habrah is quite likely to be the university’s pandem expert but Shadow can’t confirm it since no one at Utewa uses binds.
As for Reika, she is waiting for Kanika in order to be recalled. Kanika left to elsewhere in the galaxy after the treaty to pursue finishing her studies, since Yasrena had been a big part of that treaty she left Reika to work for Yasrena for the time being. So to get Reika away from Kar’Soluth, you’d have to cause either Kanika or Sakhessa to recall her. Though with Aureum expanding its fortress defenses by the day despite being in a position of peace, it would be hard to convince them that they need Reika for anything in particular. The Shadow also commented that these girls sure have a lot of K’s in their name.
Haziel points out that Jaerda is a candidate just for political reasons for an empire that is in a state of decline and she just so happens to be very good at pandem magic. The other four of you at least have survived multiple eras of history, enough to see various nations rise and fall. Jaerda’s too deeply attached to Alnae and isn’t ready to take on a position that could stretch on for thousands of years. She’ll have the power to pick favorites before she’s seen a wider perspective, which turns into gods like Lolth. Too attached to one group of people with too much power to focus on them. Druid credentials aside, Haziel feels that Jaerda is going to do something stupid and meddlesome very early into her new career. Which brings up the question from Shadow as to what you think even should be the qualifications for these rituals?
The Shadow also reports that the Demon King will at least agree to the meeting but it will be held at his castle at a specified date, which happens to be during the Council of Lords. This is good for getting a meeting and getting a chance to sway demon lords as well, though I warn ahead of time that this means Asmoday will also be there and that makes the whole thing a little bit more complicated if he decides to have an opinion on the matter.
Evacuations of Alnae are underway but it will take some time to move uh…a few billion maybe?- of people to Enohas. Also in the process of which we have members of the fae migrations still ongoing so Enohas is becoming a mess. Arcurans keep trying to set up arena promotions for nicer land plots and argue that they technically should still own all of it and it is their right to hand it out to refugees by their own governmental system…of get a high place in a tournament for better real estate. Obviously they’re just trying to get more people in the Arena and don’t particularly care about any other aspect of this complicated refugee crisis. The Chosen Wolves are also grumbling about housing so many people on Enohas will result in the overtaking of all its natural elements that had caused them to set up shop here in the first place.
Jaerda has been undergoing training with you on this planar entity business, and would probably prefer a new plane over anything else, though this means that despite her ability to maintain the Enohas building codes it is proving sketchy for the refugees.
In other news, Vasia points out that kidnapping Yasrena is pointless since it is just a drow priestess controlled by possession from the yochlol. So step one is finding the yochlol or it’ll just nab another host. The real Yasrena is just some rich girl who likes living in a fancy house and is otherwise okay with not being conscious for days at a time if it means she doesn’t have to get a real job. The Shadow might know how to find said Yochlol since it is a bind but that’s one of those bits of premium information that’ll cost a significant trade.
She has also determined that space bug you found is a space bug. She just made it sound much more exciting. It’s a life form similar to the Lakaaj or whatever-the-hell Decaelys comes from. A creature that exists in a galactic scale ecosystem rather than a planetary one and is proof that regardless of how insane: life finds a way. She is transferring half her team to Diadem in preparation to tag and observe as many of them as she can since this revolutionizes our understanding of what is actually out there in the galaxy, since its the first non-sapient species to live in the vacuum of space for no reason other than “because it just does”. Vasia also describes them as being very docile, probably not a lot of natural predators in space. They also eat organic matter rather than sunlight or, as their incarnum wings might suggest, souls. It is likely to be some sort of descendant of the silnians with origins in hive territories. Some observations of it have revealed that it eats some of the organic matter floating through space radiating from the hive territories that probably put the fish on Diadem in the first place. It stands to reason that this is a common phenomena in the hive territories, at least enough so that such a large swarm of these bugs could be flying around out there. Though that does it make it strange that such a large collection of them is flying away from the hive worlds towards Diadem rather than anywhere else with radiating organic life, energy, or any other resource usable to such a creature. It’s on her list of ‘needs more observation’. That and instead of developing sapience with their essentia they developed space wings and the ability to survive such. So it is on the list of one of the many ways something might evolve into existence. Instead of a fully formed sapient incarnum soul and psyche, they opted for space flight.
She also questions what you consider mental scarring because Larazja gets traumatized by practically anything.
To summarize Echo Prime’s explanations of degradation-
It should happen within a few centuries of its own accord but it does depend on the lifestyle of the voidforged in question and their own ability to keep their shit together. Chevalier was used as an example for “probably fine” but Vanessa is a hot mess waiting to have a mental breakdown.
As for the why, apparently its a fault in our core design but by her description it is less of a severe fault made by poor engineering and more so a fault found in almost all living things except for the true immortal beings like Decaelys and the Lakaaj. Essentially, we might be mechanical but we can still get old. Replacing parts accelerates the mental degradation aspect when we would have to relink to a new shell. Also lil bit of that old parable mixed in, how many parts can you replace one by one on a ship before it’s not the same ship?
The how kind of went over my head. Something about mana corrosion leading to psyche degradation despite the two needing to exist simultaneously for essentia to exist. This in some way related to how damage to the psyche can cause it to repair itself in a way that produces more mana in the process. It is part of Renjala’s studies about how basically every crazy powerful mage tends to have very depressing backstories. The process of psyche reparation causes an increase in mana production which in turn accelerates the corrosion of our psyche. Many species experience a collapse of their physical bodies before their mental abilities, especially with an ordinary lifestyle. It is likely that we would wind up like pre-operation Haziel over time. If your body can outlast your mind by a long enough expanse, you start to see the impacts on your mind before dying of old age. It was the reason Haziel couldn’t remember the names of her own children or the many adventures she’d had over fifty thousand years but with the mental capacity for a hundred at best. All of this was part of Kanika and Eliza’s research and one of the main focuses of Kanika’s work.
There is massive individual variance if you count fringe cases. For example, those who upgraded beyond their anatomy. As a human, Sakhessa should be a puddle of amnesia like Haziel by now but Kanika patched the problem of human anatomy to extend her ability to avoid degradation. If you don’t count the fringe cases who upgraded or escaped their anatomy through various means, you see variance of about 50%. For some humans the problems begin at fifty and others at a hundred but all of them have it by a hundred and fifty barring external means to combat the issue. It’s a limit of their squishy brain. Using a mechanical example, the Exerlus themselves have upgraded themselves far enough to avoid the problem for thousands of years at a time but they still usually shut down and clean out their memory for some maintenance then reboot as a refurbished consciousness that can access its old information through their collective network memory storage.
This is how they prevent the problem in particular, routine maintenance and memory wipes. However, they are a collective networked consciousness similar to the Silnians. This makes them less individualistic but it also means rebooting their individual consciousnesses is less of a dramatic impact on them. Voidforged are highly individualistic since we were modeled after the elves that built us. Which might be a part of why our core’s lifespan is very similar to their brains. We do not have a networked state of being and as you have noticed we all have very diverse and unique personalities. If we didn’t, then you wouldn’t be rejecting my funding requests all the time. They’ve also determined that my crab master 2000 might have an abnormally short lifespan because of this. To be fair I am just learning about all this too.
It can be detected but only by advanced technology far beyond what we have. The Exerlus can scan a life form down to its atomic composition and as a result notice patterns in their collective database. So while it isn’t guaranteed that everything they said about this process is correct, apparently our cores exhibit similarities to a few thousand other mechanical races that indicate this is likely to occur.
When it comes to prevention and treatment we get into some weird territory especially since we are such a young species, to the point that we haven’t even observed this happening yet and are going entirely based on the prediction of a glorified scanning probe. Prevention measures suggested have included: Don’t replace limbs in such a way that it requires re-calibration on behalf of the core. Replacing the shell of a limb is one thing, replacing the circuitry and bones is where the problem comes in. Don’t plug in an aethernet cable between two cores as to avoid a level of communication where it becomes hard for one core to differentiate its thoughts from the other. Also, because we are based on Solians, deprivation of agency is theorized to cause additional problems. Which we theorize explains why Arsene had mental issues mirroring that of solian humanoids. They couldn’t move very much nor could they interact with their environment as they were too large and had no tools for manipulation, but they lived in a world built for much smaller creatures with fine motor control. Other prevention measures would be to avoid any scenario with a static environment for too long, otherwise known as a lack of stimulation – we can get bored basically. This really all sums up to us being more like our creators than we really appreciated. Despite the scale of the differences when comparing a human to a demon and then either to us, comparing us to an lakaaj or an arcuran is a much greater difference. Apparently energy based creatures are better at maintaining long lifespans without mental degradation since they don’t really have a memory limit determined by their material properties.
Other treatment and prevention options get sort of into the realm of immortality. Our solian counterpart solutions being prime examples, becoming ‘other things’. Mummies, liches, gods, elementals, and so forth. For us to do something similar to that…well I have some experimental ideas. First of which is to find a voidforged who can learn incarnum or pandem without immediately shutting themselves down on accident.
All of this is to say: Our lifespans and signs of degrading are mostly mental rather than physical, and as such doing things that impact us mentally are far more damaging than it would be to other races. Though how dire it is has yet to be seen and its worth noting that things which would rapidly degrade the physical condition of solians do not apply to us. Rather than us being particularly susceptible to mental degradation, it is simply more prominent to us because physical degradation doesn’t apply as much. Even if our cores can age, decay, grow weaker, and then shatter on their own – it is likely that our cores can physically outlast our minds. So these mental issues are at the forefront of our potential problems of mortality. So it is more likely we develop dementia before we develop cancer is basically what I’m saying. However, because our cores cannot physically modify and repair themselves like organic brains, these problems can be accelerated by external factors more so than organics as well.
The universe is a bitch like that.
