Stories of Lore 58
From the Pandem Radar station, the Outsider was detected inside of the Blaiken territory near the undead star. Rahlken’s ship is just a bit north of Jydoq as it continues making its way towards Paizurus and is expected to be there within the month. We can’t sweep for Yaellah since they are neither a pandem entity or a ship.
Kennae is still running around Jydoq chasing after the assassin and said it would be nice if someone could find them for him. Maybe stick a tracking chip on them. Noel is currently still at Thenica driving around looking to pick fights with random pockets of drow.
Speaking of Thenica, the siege of Beldobaan is getting more chaotic. At night vampires and drow attack even fortified positions and have been killing any of our soldiers they can catch in poor positioning. Though this usually means those specifically on guard or watch for them. Sarghess bombardment continues otherwise despite them under attack by House Song.
Cazvrath pointed out that House Song has a bad habit of feeling like they need to do everything themselves and can be sometimes difficult to coordinate with. They’re currently attacking Sarghess from the east if you want to send troops. However she is concerned that House Song seems much more disorganized than they should be. Typically they move as a singular large force but they’ve been split a few times and then try to regroup only to have the same issue reappear. The House’s command structure has noted that troops keep getting confused on which way the army is going and this is obviously abnormal but they haven’t figured out exactly what Kar’Soluth are doing to cause it.
Speaking of Sharen, Faelyn showed up and after a long stretch of international diplomacy breaking down wound up engaged in a fleet conflict with Sharen in orbit over Thenica. Said battle is still ongoing with fleets of this size, while Sharen has a clear upper hand it has given Kar’Soluth forces an orbital presence in the area. More importantly, firing on Faelyn has caused a diplomatic complication. Remember how we gave Kanika the spell Renjala uses to get around? She’s here now.
She’s with Sarghess at the moment so we can’t attack them or we risk hitting her and nullifying the treaty. She doesn’t seem particularly interested in what we’ve got going on with Beldobaan over here and has her own reasons to be here but it is still noteworthy that she’s running around causing problems especially for Shetou.
The assault into Beldobaan managed to establish control of one of the tunnel entrances that has a bit of an awkward curve that renders the Beldobaan fortress defenses a little less efficient. Though the tunnel was collapsed behind them in response which destroyed a large amount of the force. Using Renjala’s rift we were still able to get in to follow behind the 1st special force and establish ourselves near the eastern wall of the city. Going deeper into the city proved challenging. Also vampires, vampires everywhere. Nearly-feral Däjer vampires that just throw themselves into combat without much thought behind it. The battle in the capital city is still ongoing as checking every nook and cranny of a place known for secret passages and strange doors is proving difficult. Six of the vals have been captured but we haven’t been able to find Sabrae herself yet.
Koura Cures is moving forward with efforts to mitigate the plague distribution in Moncayo. Si Yeon has analyzed some of the properties of the disease and found that there are more than one. She has found at least four entirely different infections. Two of the four have very delayed symptoms, resulting in people being unaware they have them for long periods of time after initial infection. Those ones have spread much further than initially anticipated and while quarantines are still in effect they keep starting new infections across Cayetano. It is likely the agents that spread it intentionally are still doing so.
We have heard that Laura King has shut off the portal terminals to Moncayo and Cayetano entirely so that no one can reach Diadem and now has people who look suspiciously not like cops standing around with guns and we believe they have orders to kill anyone who comes through. They’re not federation security staff, they’re her gangsters. Which might cause some awkward miscommunications. On the other hand, Adelaide does not have any Jaal’Darya bullshit spreading around it so it is kind of working. Nah division reports finding out that she worked with the Revenants off the books to accomplish this.
On the other hand Cayetano’s infection problems are escalating despite Si-Yeon’s efforts and this has resulted in an oddity of people trying to leave Cayetano to get to Zenaka and Enohas – average people don’t know Rahlken is headed there – where they think they’ll be better off. While quarantine measures don’t allow them to do so, not all of them are filling out the paperwork properly and security around the portal terminals has been increasing by the day.
Speaking of Zenaka, Valen is still trying to squash all the little problems that keep popping up with rebellious insurrections and new territory lords being murdered by other people to create even more problems. In her own words “she’s working on it geeze”
In galactic news, the Caelkians are at the very least interested though coming from a position of pre-galactic awareness and not even a fully united planet they are slow moving and bureaucratic when it comes to formally signing anything. They also have a habit of projecting the worst of what their own history has shown their people to do onto us, as if expecting us to start eating their eggs because they did that back in their medieval period to establish dominance. They’re very curious about our history and culture towards that end of figuring out what the worst things we’ve ever done to ourselves is. We are trying really hard to explain the era of the purge to them very carefully.
In the galactic north, finding an arcane star or moon isn’t too hard but finding an uninhabited one is the tricky part. As mentioned before the northern part of the galaxy was very well developed in terms of its space frontiers. The engurians in particular really love arcane stars and moons too, and they deliberately colonized them a lot. It’s actually a point of contention between them and the zhulkites that they have always refused to share any and will aggressively colonize into regions of space closer to the zhulkites and other alliances to get to these stars.
It’s not that the attempt to get to Reika didn’t go well more so that once we found her a whole other clusterfuck happened that made it a bit problematic. She was where Song Yi was, and that attracted Kanika, who brought Decaelys with her, and then Ankathi almost lost control of Kharla in the process. It didn’t help that Ankathi turns out to be the main reason that Reika isn’t in a hurry to come back, given that whole extortion binding thing they were up to awhile back.
Then Auni killed Song Yi, taking control of the Song Clan for herself in the isolation field of Decaelys so the only real witnesses to how that happened are a bunch of people that Song Clan really isn’t likely to trust very much. We only know about this because a mysterious message came through to Nah division which we think was actually from Reika. It’s possible she’s keeping tabs on Kanika because…well someone has to. That undead-but-alive-again-dragon-supremacist does have a habit of casually changing the fate of worlds while passing through on the way to the galactic gas station.
Also we found out what Rahlken is coming for, Jamalia. he took the entire colony off the planet and its just a pile of dirt now. Haziel’s comment was “what do you want me to do, bite it? This is a fleet job”. The nearby station and local defense accomplished next to nothing against that ship and he just stole the whole colony. While the more rural developments to help the displaced Alnae are still there, this is a logistical nightmare as you might expect. Is it just me or has Enohas been getting royally fucked up ever since it was discovered? It feels like they can’t go two years without something cataclysmic happening to them.
The Enohas Refinery is still fine, and was fired at when its defenses fired at Rahlken but he didn’t exactly stop to pick a fight with it or steal it too. Given these events, I suspect that in some way Yasrena is related to all of this. It was clearly an attack on the relocating Alnaeans.
Speaking of whom, Jaerda is currently in a mild state of shock while running around trying to solve the logistical problems of her people’s only link to us, the portal network, being ripped off the planet so suddenly and Diadem closing off its portals to everywhere else under Laura King’s administrative orders.
The space bugs are still hanging around Diadem but not all of them are on our plate. Despite their massive swarm, Diadem is also quite massive and they have a lot of room. To the point that I’m not unconvinced that they come by more often than we might think. According to Vasia they just seem to be looking for leaves and things to munch on and it might be some strange seasonal thing. She also asked if we want her to handle the quarantine situation at Cayetano, with the sort of smug expression that indicates she knows we don’t want her to but she knows we know she’s the galaxy’s greatest containment expert. Though I’m not sure how much would be left to contain by the time she’s through with everybody.
Every day I’m turreting. Deow dow dow chicka dow dow.
As for assisting Echo Prime with the other Exerlus, she told us to stay far away from any of those battlefields. Since the Cradle, and ourselves, are made out of “stuff that can be made into more exerlus” the odds are our contribution would amount to giving them more materials to work with. Whether that be the exiles or Zero North’s forces is anyone’s guess. At best we could go act as a mining operation in areas near the battle zones to scrap planets worth of resources and deliver them to Echo’s forces instead of the exiles to get ahead of them on materials and deprive them of any near the battle zones.
As for the destroyer, it is largely complete though final approvals depended on how much we want to heed the exerlus warning that it will accelerate our ‘aging’ for anyone who plugs into it. However, the design is definitely more capable than typical destroyers and is both more durable while packing more firepower and maneuverability then standard designs if we want to go ahead and enter it into production. Though it requires more crew than a typical ship of its class.
Adrienne and her team has been sent out to go meet with the Zhulkites and see whats going on with them over there.
We’ve sent our stealth cruiser out, via a network of portals and other shenanigans, to the northern side of the galaxy to look into that planet with the VSS Raptor in its shipyard. Initial investigations show that this is a post-fallen world. It has likely been destroyed thousands of years ago but the remains of civilization are still here and there in various states of decay. The space station however is operating and it orbits while maintaining a precise precision above a functioning facility on the surface of the planet below. We haven’t sent a team groundside yet to see whats going on down there due to that probably costing us some stealth but the technology of the station is clearly well beyond most of the galactic standard. Whoever owns this place, the tech is sort of halfway between ourselves – and most other galactic civilizations – and the exerlus. Not quite at the top but definitely notable how much more advanced they are.
We’ve refrained from scanning due to that latter bit of information and instead rely on long range visual investigation for fear of being detected if we were to do otherwise. Judging by the ruins of this world, whatever civilization once lived here it was on par with Sol for density. It was likely once what the exploration corps refer to as a ‘golden world’. It still is fairly nice in its climate and resources, but it does leave the question of how the civilization there fell and why it appears someone else moved in afterwards. We have no way to assess if its new inhabitants caused the downfall of that civilization or just parked on the ruins of it for their own purposes.
The VSS Raptor is not the only ship at that station that is clearly not native to the place. We have found Nelta ships, an exerlus cluster, and a chunk of some sort of bioship among other oddities.
Due to the technological level of that station we don’t think these are pirates. Pirates tend to be a bit scrappier and more cobbled together. This is the kind of station people like Nelta and the Federation would have built. Intentional in every step of its design. It is also a little too well secured for anything less than a military outpost. We’ve had no luck discerning why the VSS Raptor is here on the wrong side of the galaxy though. Though judging by our scouting run, the stealth cruiser is able to get much closer than anyone else. It might be our one shot at getting anyone on the ground to get a closer look. Though judging by the station’s displayed hostility levels, this would be a bit on the dangerous side.
As for Rampart and Kuhas, they’re cloning…that random alien guy who we have no idea who they are but apparently runs the whole station with themselves and a bunch of clones of themselves. I’m not sure if finding out they’re all clones of one alien is a major revelation or not, for all I know this is some long lost hero of a foreign planet, clones of some ingenious pirate mastermind who took over Kuhas and built it into what it is today, or just some homeless dude they paid two hundred bucks to spit on a sample swab. What we have figured out from further observation though is that these clones all return to the same guard stations throughout the station and are never seen out of uniform because they likely don’t have much of a life outside of being a guard. Fleshy cloned automatons of some sort. They just patrol, sleep in the barracks, then patrol some more. There is so far no evidence that anyone in particular comes by to check on them who might be of any higher authority and other than the one clone who doesn’t wear full patrol armor we can’t tell if anyone actually is in charge or not.
We’ve established another base at Jydoq to continue ongoing operations there though in the wake of the war on Thenica it appears Kar’Soluth has also become more aggressive with their operations on this world. Leading to more fights with Kaylen and Kennae as well. They’ve also begun the process of uniting some smaller sections of Jydoq and appear to be trying to form a new great house from them with a jydoq “matriarch” though the jydoq don’t have genders so not sure if that is really the right term or not. Essentially they’re working to replace Merlan.