News from the front, more forces are arriving just as ours are. Despite them having access to Renjala’s rift now, it would appear they are not as adept at using it nor do they have an organization dedicated to transportation for all their disparate forces. This month saw the arrival of Sakhessa’s fleet in orbit, Asmodan’s demon legion in Beldobaan, and Kanika’s private collection of maybe brainwashed humanoids. A collection that has been significantly reduced ever since we shoved her previous ship into the Astral Wilds.
We also see the arrival of Kaylen with an army we don’t entirely know how she got though it appears a good portion of them are from the Hasao Tei and the exiled celestials who survived but fled the war with Ankathi. The Revenants also got around to showing up, once again revealing they had far more members than we realized. Apparently they had been hiding the fact that they are not exclusively an organization of masked women with katana’s as there is actually some variety among them when they group together to form a cohesive force. Lot of katanas still.
Along with this, the vampire clans have arrived at SV2 to attack Shetou’s pseudo-capital while both House Sharen and Song are away at Thenica. There is a whole other battlefield taking place over there now.
Projections indicate that more forces are still on their way.
The Arrival of Sakhessa’s fleet has skewed projections out of our favor. With every fleet currently damaged and barely still afloat, her fleet is nearly uncontested for orbital superiority.
The “Ham Sandwich” operation managed to successfully extract what remains of our forces and allies. Largely due to Sakhessa allowing the withdrawal though instructed the knights to be quick about it before Asmodan caught up and complained to her about it. The commander assesssed any attempt to continue the attack was pointless now that Asmodan’s demon legion had shown up and Kanika’s forces have arrived in the nearby Sarghess Territory, putting them in position to catch our forces from behind if they moved over. Asmodan’s legion is now moving west to Vloz’Khress territory where the 5th are currently still destroying civilian targets and infrastructure.
The Tarrasque has moved and is currently attacking Shetou territories elsewhere on the planet and seems to be avoiding any fighting where Hassani’s forces are located. Currently we suspect that while they can command it, the Tarrasque isn’t great at discriminating what it attacks. This might be why Kanika was the only one fighting the Valdir alongside it and only just now brought her own troops to Thenica after separating from it. That and the Valdir ability to eat any living people it defeats. We have discovered a small team of Revenants are following it, likely trying to figure out what can possibly be done against the thing.
The orbital battle sees the successful destruction of The Areti with the combined assault and focus on it albeit at great cost. Though the Midnight was unsuccessful in its attempt to crash into Agallias. While it made it to the surface of Thenica, he managed to dodge the attempt and the ship was disabled before it could consider swinging back around on him. The RABE ship retreated into Sakhessa’s fleet when the destroyers went after it and the pursuing ships were destroyed by said fleet or the RABE itself.
Moving Eden into Valjala is somehow the easiest part of this plan. Moving the arcane star is an engineering feat and a half though and that is not our specialty. Eden just needs a big enough rift and she’ll walk in on her own, though Moncayo’s star is over a million times more massive. Even if Decaelys -the jesai archbishop who might be some eldritch elemental of time and space- could do it we certainly can’t figure out how the fuck she did that. We have similar problems with moving Enohas and Moncayo. Moncayo, or rather Cayetano, is an abyssal place and as a result likes to be really fucky with the concept according to the physicists and math guys we asked to look into it. Even if it was just the city of Moncayo, we don’t have Rahlken’s ship laying around. Taking the city is somewhat feasible but it would wind up in Valjala with no sustainable atmosphere, gravity, or ability to protect itself from the kinetic energies in your plane.
Really with the exception of Eden, who is mobile on her own and also probably the most powerful wizard we know by mana well standards, moving a planet and making rifts this large is going to take years of engineering and prep. Also a horrifying amount of money. Which we caaan do if you really want but I get the impression this is a matter of urgency. The most realistic way to accomplish these goals with all speed would be to get the Exerlus, Jesai, or Rahlken involved somehow. I also had the nerds do the math of having Eden just push things around for us, it turns out that would pretty much destroy the planet she is nudging. Between what she would do to gravity, atmospheres, and ecosystems with such a maneuver you’d be getting a ball of rock and dirt in the middle of an irreversible mass extinction. Problem two is that Eden is a powerful enough being that she can protect herself from your plane. Planets from the middle plane might be a bit too used to their own rules and just implode after a couple of years in Valjala without massive life support systems that would be the equivalent of building a ship the size of a planet. Just out of dirt.
That being said, in terms of options, we could just find another ball of rock and dirt then ask Haziel for help with habitability. There are also arcane stars within your plane and I’m not sure how much it matters where in space it is within Valjala since position is not a very constant variable anyways.
By the way, according to the observatories your plane has an estimated 1370% more unbound stars than the middle planes. Which is not counting something they think they found and have been sending scout ships out to go look at which is either the largest unbound star ever found or millions of unbound stars stuck together. They call it Renjala’s Rim, and they snickered when they said that. Irrelevant but the last eight months have been very gloomy around here and I needed something else to talk about.
Related to options, I checked in on Jaerda’s progress and this prompted some further investigation about her lack thereof. Aside from her attention issues, the big problem is she can’t handle the Astral Wilds for very long and this process requires surviving there for months. Yasrena was a quasigodlike thing already and judging by her original true form of that big leviathan thing, she had a mana well on the scale of ships. Not to mention she’s been watching over the drow for thousands of years and I’m sure the opportunity for trauma and personal growth was pretty great under those conditions. Haziel had the essentia of a primordial god along with a throne waiting for her to just take over the plane rather than build one. Ankathi is the one in a trillion who pulled this bullshit off on her own with raw stubborness and talent. To the point that we’re pretty sure if we still had access to her original human form we’d find some severe anomalies about her essentia and psyche. That and she did take over another astral cluster to act as a forward base before she made her own. In your case you just embraced the madness because you didn’t need biology to keep your consciousness intact. The team at Panemperia thinks we might need to think of some way to juice this up a bit for a regular elf. She’s too vulnerable to the wilds and just doesn’t have the mana capacity to move planes the way you did to create a new one, and the alternative of taking over an existing one is difficult as she is tied to planes that already have Haziel for a god.
All things considered, I don’t think this Jaerda business will be finished before the war is over since we need Ankathi’s expertise and help or a century of Jaerda getting strong enough through potentially dubious methods. The bigger problem with getting Ankathi’s help at the moment is that Selah just got back from the Beldobaan withdrawal and she is in no state to do anything with this for the month at least. I’ve never seen a paladin so exhausted and just staring into the distance for hours like that, even if they are somewhat known for being super stoic and stern. Half a year of constant combat in the underdark against vampires, monsters, and drow is apparently the breaking point.
Which leads into, psychological assessments! Everyone that went there is fucked up…except Eerihild. Weirdly, she is actually apparently very good at this exact scenario. She made it through the two years of total blackness inside of Diadem, even just started wandering around with a mental patient in tow, and now survived the Battle of Beldobaan. Which is just as bad if not even worse. She seems ‘not fine’ at first glance, but she doesn’t have the same war trauma everyone else does. She’s pouty because she lost to Reika, who she technically replaced. So she’s suffering from a bad case of imposter syndrome, not ‘I fought vampires in the underdark for half a year nonstop’ syndrome. So technically her mental problems are about five percent of what everyone else is handling even if she’s sulking in a corner somewhere.
Yasrena, or The Shadow, said it was obvious but she felt she should tell us just in case – but the war on Thenica is going to see more Phantoms appear for the coming months. Next month she knows that the Hassani proper army will be arriving along with the Hydra’s fleet. The month after that Agallias’ army will be warped in along with Decaelys’ followers. After that the Selona Syndicate. Also because they look so similar to solians no one has noticed that Mother (the Blaiken empress clone mom thingy) is there with Kanika. The white haired teenage looking girl that people keep mistaking for one of Kanika’s brainwashed champions that has enough psionic ability to flatten an aboleth. Jarias is also asking for a ride over because he wants to eat the fleet salvage. So the last two months of reinforcements are going to be a pattern as the war expands to SV2 and SR3. The major worlds of Shetou and the Valdir respectively.
She expects the assault on Shetou to be handled largely by Kanika’s forces and the vampires, while Kanika herself, the Tarrasque, and Agallias will be headed to fight Valdir. Also Yasrena said that some of the spookiest Phantoms are coming back as well. The list is too long and I don’t think anyone cares. Though some of these monsters that we haven’t seen in centuries that seemed kind of like a joke of a bygone age for adventure games sound a lot less funny all of a sudden. Like a mimic that isn’t a treasure chest, but instead impersonates starships and houses. Essentially while the titanic threats like Agallias and the Tarrasque are obviously dangerous, we can expect people in this war to have some issues from encountering things like mimics, the bagmen, oblexes, false hydras, and all that shit we thought was definitely fucking extinct so we didn’t worry about living in a world were things had learned to specifically prey on humanoids. This war will be the second time in solian history that these things aren’t killing for food but for…well war. Kaylen sort of glossed over that part of the guild’s history. The part where the soldiers never mentally recovered and either wound up with crippling paranoia, insanity, or would commit suicide. The closing years of the purge saw the methodical elimination of such threats with tech and industry. The earlier years were guys with shotguns getting eaten by things that could come from any angle. Not to mention the actual war against Kanika in the first place that left generational scars on people, such as Kaylen who wasn’t even there for any of it.
All this is to say, those months in Beldobaan were a lot worse than we might be able to understand from the comfort of our space base ruled over by a lich who has seen the Astral Wilds and lived. While Selah is already a close friend of madness and Eerihild is technically one of these monsters so didn’t even notice, the rest of the knights who came back are not okay. We lost a hundred knights and three hundred squires to resignation after they got back, and we already found sixteen of them dead in their homes. If we weren’t in the process of retreating I’d point out that New Age are some of the only people with the mental fortitude to handle this stuff and we should consider giving them bigger guns or something.
Federation news, since Koda is busy with the war and Lancaster is still missing, it is noted that Haleh has no plans to retreat into Valjala. If we pack up and leave Diadem she said she’ll probably just go back into the reach or stay there and see what all these exerlus bots are up to. The Ika also have a lot of questions about why everyone is leaving given that Diadem is their ancestral home in a way and they aren’t too keen to just abandon it. Laura is also fairly confident that if we were worried about them assaulting Diadem, Valjala won’t be that much safer. At least here people are encased in an impossibly massive amount of armor, even with your abilities she feels like Valjala is very exposed by comparison. If just one Phantom turns out to know how to deal with gods in their planes, like the Era of Rising did with medeival technology, the whole thing falls apart. Also Zenakans are curious where this all leaves them since evacuating a population that massive is somewhat impossible and they’re still dying of plagues.
Oh also we got the uninfected Arcurans and such out as requested.
With the pirates cleared out we’ve been able to send recovery teams into the ship section, they were actually trying to see if it was possible to bring its turrets back online since it was once a self sufficient station that we strapped onto the rest of the cradle. Answer was nope that thing is messed up. Though while they were there they were able to find and recover the core of Vanessa along with several others from the troops who were aboard. They’ll need new bodies constructed and right now we’re exploding so project for later, but thought you would want to know.
The cradle withdrew after the destruction of the Areti to Renjala’s garden project and is in need of serious repairs as evidenced by the entire missing sixth of the ship we ejected for contamination reasons. I suppose what we have learned from this is that the cradle tends to draw a lot of attention.
We’ve begun construction of a new station here in Valjala as requested, one that won’t go anywhere so we have a place to come back to.
As an intel report, while we’re seeing half a dozen new forces showing up to Thenica left and right I think they’re getting their numbers from Selona. This war is something he should be invested in as he was part of the original plot to start it though he is conspicuously absent despite being a major member of the Phantoms and just Sol in general. We have reason to suspect a great many of the troops assembling are from him in some capacity though he is deliberately keeping his involvement hidden. Though we noticed that a lot of individuals among the Hydra’s forces have Selona’s tech and have confirmed the presence of at least three of his androids running around in there. With Nila being here it isn’t that surprising.
Also as the Phantoms proper are showing up, the fighting has been getting weird. I have reports of platoons disappearing in the night along with all of their tents. People turning around and finding their comrades just missing entirely, and it is a weird trend that the disappearing comrades are always the support crew. Our agents are having to get even more cautious as the environments themselves are turning against people with all these weird ass monsters showing up.
Trying to evacuate Kennae from Jydoq is proving difficult. Not only is he not very tech savvy and doesn’t answer his comms, he is also small and running all over the planet. He has expressed a lack of interest in evacuation. He said something about needing to fight just for the sake of fighting, because if the Jydoq are left to their own devices and spend the next decade seeing only the Hassani it will do damage to irrevocable damage to their culture and way of thinking. Essentially the agent reported he spent a good ten minutes making metaphors about the lessons of history and it all summed up to “nah I’ll stay here.” Don’t think we could catch him if we tried so the agent just let him do that.
Allison is back from Kuhas station after two weeks of prep to leave the station as well as many of our other bases as requested for the mass evacuation to the Flotilla. Though some of them are turning into Madhammer maniacs once given orders to start using all their bombs they had stashed up.
Moving the turrets of Enphidia however will be a bit more of an effort, there are a lot of them and between cargo and manpower it’s hard to get all of those off the ground they’re bolted to, they’re also the size of houses.
As for scouting Koura, the place is still a fortress that shows very little signs of activity outside of the rift to the Warrens. Most of the Hassani populace lives on Aureum. Koura and Somnus are largely being used as defensive stations and border control locations.