The giants that make up Agallias’ forces have arrived this month. Apparently the Phantoms saw fit to equip them with modern power armor, except using their own magic as the power source. So basically each one of them is a class four mech on steroids. With their arrival, they’ve begun the campaign on SR3, where the Valdir are. This has recalled the Tarrasque from Shetou territory, which lost six major cities, and now the hydra itself has appeared to take over Hassani operations on Thenica while its main forces push offenses on two other planets. Shetou has negotiated for a cease fire with the Hassani after the Jaal’Darya plagues began to spread across SV2, apparently its buying time for Laesaaria to negotiate terms with Sakhessa who sent a message to ask if you wanted to include yourself in this one too or if you would prefer to wrap things up on SV2. She also offered us to join the surrender negotiations with Laesaaria though can’t promise it’ll go so well given how the last one turned out.

Cazvallow sent a message to explain the current situation with the negotiations for surrender. Laesaaria is mostly just trying not to get placed in a position underneath Yasrena and this is also buying time for them to get Auni Kuu far away from here. She pointed out Auni is being sent deep into the galaxy for the time being, as the general goal is to get the now-greatest incarnum practitioner far away from all of this to buy time for them to finish learning how the whole “I absorbed all my  predecessors” thing works in the hope that all House Song’s ancient knowledge might be useful. Though she admits the outlook is bleak, since Kanika has already proven to outmatch the previous clan’s leader and is only getting stronger as the war goes on. With Kanika harvesting essentia from these battles and gaining more experience in using her newfound body’s zankist training, they’re running out of ideas of what to do about her. Especially while she is surrounded by a legion of similarly dangerous creatures. Despite the pamphlet ilex released some while ago, the various empires had been largely unprepared for how much combat training the military leaders of the Phantoms had gained. Sol hasn’t really seen monsters who know tactics and are equipped with the same level of technology as their humanoid opponents. Without Song Yi, Shetou doesn’t have much of a “die fighting” voice in their politics and with the Jaal’Darya plagues beginning to spread through Shetou the leadership seemed to have marked the whole war as unwinnable. At this point they’re just trying to save as many lives as they can. Their society is quite adept at operating from within another one, which is why a lot of independent startup colonies often wound up absorbed into Shetou. Until the schism and the Phantoms stealing the strategy from them on the frontier. As such the best possible chance they have to ever deal with Kanika on their end would be to play a bit more patiently. Though Cazvallow herself will be remaining, four of the ships that they lost in the war had only the bare minimum of crew despite being notable ships. The intended crews are a few of her daughters and their forces. She has requested we take them to Diadem on our fleet as to hide the fact that they are still alive for as long as possible and to buy them time to invest in the Reach to rebuild while under less direct scrutiny from the Hassani.

So if we opt to continue the battle in Sol it is likely that Shetou will no longer be able to assist us. The Valdir are in a position where they probably have to fight to the end since Kaisa will probably not be particularly kind on them if they surrender, but without Shetou’s naval and logistical help they aren’t likely to do so well.

To clarify, when you say the enclosed pockets of the Rim, do you mean the areas of space surrounded by so much star stuff that night no longer exists and the surface of anything resembling a planet would be probably molten, or the orbiting ‘chunks of stuff’ that just travel along the outside of the rim?

The Think Tank has been established though a large part of exploiting the Rim is still exploring it, saying that its ‘really big’ will summon an astronomer from the corner of the room to try and explain how big it is for three hours. While a few candidates have come up they would still involve some heavy terraforming processes and that might just be an issue with the youth of the galaxy. Though if nothing else, Valjala definitely has a lot of energy to work with if any life forms can make use of it. The collective study of the new plane hasn’t found much promising in terms of anything being alive but we’ve only been able to search around a a hundred planets out of millions, and that’s just with long range observation let alone actually setting foot anywhere. The tank is also concerned as to how much in the galaxy they can’t properly detect due to the limitations of light speed compared to the age of the plane. It’s part of why it took them weirdly long to notice the giant ring of eternal fire in the middle of the whole galaxy.

Exploration difficulties aside, they did come up with some initial ideas on how they might exploit the energy of the rim. Obviously can’t go wrong with solar panels, though we do lack the technology to collect it with the efficiency the exerlus have. if we put the panels too close they just melt. Not really sure what the exerlus do for cooling systems with their giant ass sphere. Other ideas they came up with include utilizing biological methods of exploitation. Particularly Eden and Larazja. Both of whom can biologically mutate themselves to make use of being blasted by sunlight, Larazja in particular can also adapt the Nevun biology to withstand dramatically increased temperatures. If one of the valdir adapted to just survive in the vacuum of space, it’s fair to say it is likely that Larazja can handle extremely hot worlds. Which means more energy, and the rate that the synapse can grow when provided with that energy could have some potential. Another idea was to get some elementals involved somehow, they aren’t really sure what that would entail but its an idea. The rim itself doesn’t have an arcane star that is easy to exploit so unfortunately the arcurans and zenakans aren’t as useful in this particular circumstance. They’ve asked the druidic chapter of the order to look into if they could make a plant that really really loved sunlight. So that’s still underway.

Yoshai is still off looking for the Revenants, same for Irae with the somewhat mythical metal archon.

Kaylen is difficult to contact, it is likely she is still getting into trouble across Thenica trying to be a thorn in the Hassani’s side. Though unfortunately for her, despite her power as a zankist grandmaster with an artifact, so seems to be having next to no impact on the war with such meager forces. I’ll keep an eye out to see if she pops up again soon to see if she wants to come along.

Ankathi is of a mind that continuing to work on Valencia is still a good idea. We already know Yasrena is on the pantheon and it is highly likely that if it is somehow a secret from the Hassani then it won’t be for long. However, that is fairly sensitive information that we can’t even tell the demon king about right now. As a result, Valencia being in a much more open alliance with the Phantoms makes for a real easy scapegoat for anything Yasrena might be up to and atop of which would only further endear the Demon King to the pantheon as it would mean the pantheon has someone perhaps openly tied to the Hassani, who are about to be the most powerful government of Sol. With Shetou and Alnae gone, even if the demon kingdom and the remaining handful of others teamed up its rather clear that Kanika, the person who specializes in killing or making immortals, is not someone the demon lords, archons, abyssal lords, or even gods are going to be in a terrible hurry to pick a fight with.

Though while on the topic she is also interested in the Utewa, since they have the ability to pandem rift a whole planet someone on that planet has to be good enough to qualify and diversifying her pantheon does appeal to her. Keeping of a mind that she is still fairly confident that anyone on the pantheon has to obey her regardless of their personalities, so sometimes she just takes shots in the dark and assumes it can’t go that poorly for her. Another option would include more archons, she finds them quite impressive considering they can unmake the laws of physics as we know them at any given time. She wouldn’t mind collecting a jesai either, especially Decaelys. She has mentioned that uplifting the mortals is clearly more effort than its worth as this whole thing requires a very strong mastery of both pandem magic and the mana well to survive the wilds even with assistance. So her attention is shifting towards candidates who are already powerful enough to meet the latter condition given how the Jaerda project is going. She also inquired as to Eden’s mana capabilities while she was at it. Worth keeping in mind she has completely lost track of what any of this has to do with the demon king and is just thinking of people that would make for interesting additions to the group. I have to wonder if this would all be easier or harder if we just got Ankathi to go talk to the demon king herself.

Though while we’re on the topic, Selah was recently recalled to the First Temple in the celestial realm by Ankathi so she’s away for a little bit at the moment.

While we’re at it, I checked in with Haziel about the silnian civil war. With SR3 being invaded it seems peculiar that they’re being left to fend for themselves. Also to tell her we would offer Indal a portal all the way back to Thenica for as many people as he could cram into it if they wanted. I tried to get her to offer favors to him if he took the deal as he might be the only thing that can stop Kanika. Despite her not finding me very funny, she pointed out the silnian civil war is basically ripping apart that corner of the galaxy. Planets like Eden are smacking into each other and trying to throw each other into nearby stars for example. The Valdir extension that lives on SR3 are those who didn’t want to go to that war and as such they’re sort of on their own as they see the Thenican war as a much smaller conflict. She was unable to convince them of the magnitude of the problem of letting Kanika win this for a large variety of reasons but it can be summed up as “if they wanted to, the valdir could eat the entire thenican system overnight. This isn’t really the most pressing issue.” Though given that Indal has been removed from solian matters for some years now, it is likely that the valdir aren’t really aware, or easy to convince of, the ongoing threat that Selona has caused by trapping all of the elder civilizations in various internal conflicts that left the rest of the galaxy to run amuck without their presence.

We’ve sent the gang out to Jaal’Darya territory, though they’re still on the way and scouting out the place to see what is going on and where they might be able to infiltrate to find any information on the plagues that could hopefully lead to progress on that front. So far at least the rate of it’s spread has been slowed but we’re still far from finding a way to put a stop to it. However with Shetou entering into a cease fire and preparing to surrender, this will make it more difficult to find opportunities since it is acting as the major base of the Hassani forces on SV2.

In other news, that strange facility we were keeping an eye on in the northern part of the galaxy has been attacked recently by Nelta. Which turned out to be the ship that had passed through the northern borders and caused them to be shut down to the Iron Cradle when they were trying to pass by. So that all came full circle while we were busy over here. Apparently, Lancaster, Jiyan, and Sarrai were all located there. So good news, we figured out where they were.

We’ve managed to finish repairing the major issues on the Iron Cradle, though Koda wants us back out on the front lines at SV2 so we’ll see how long that lasts. We’re still missing a chunk or two that will take even longer to replace. Though right now we’re all just waiting to see if the FVS is going to continue fighting even with Shetou pulling out.

Still working on new designs but with us being sent in and out and into an active war, not that much time for R&D.