Stories of Lore 65
The Minnisógnir collective over Nekhul has begun construction though with some challenges given the quarantine nature of the place and the distance between it and any operable point of contact for shipping.
The Plate 5 expedition, now that the lockdown has lifted, has been able to recall Haleh and Siora to Diadem in order to get moving. They’re in the process of getting everyone together and have set out to try and invade the 5th plate to look for any clues as to the fleet that departed all those years ago.
Vynnoth has already worked in media this whole time so setting up broadcasting propaganda was pretty easy for her. Though she points out that if you intend to include her work in beaming it at Sol, then she has some security concerns. As things are right now she’s just a dragon doing her own thing, if she takes an active stance against Kanika then she might be in more serious trouble. Given the range of her lifespan, she has more time for that to bite her in the ass than most others do. Though she also points out that if you wanted to attract more dragons to the Federation, they are unlikely to care about the ideals so much as the opportunity for personal benefit. Dragons typically see themselves as above any society they inhabit, if anything they just kind of leech off of it these days. It’s hard to beat ‘supremacy and free shit’ that they get with the Hassani. So there are two major things she’d advise to aim at, though questions if you even want both of the major groups.
The metallics are the ones that tend to be most comfortable with humanoids and remaining in their humanoid form for long periods of time. If anything there is an ongoing cultural shift among the metallics over the last millennia because of this. If you want their attention, you actually want to get someone a bit more…fun..than Lancaster or yourself involved. They tend to be rather sociable and steel dragons in particular have been always known for hiding in human societies. There’s actually a fairly strong chance that of the five dragons Vynnoth knows about on Diadem that there could easily be several steel dragons lurking around that no one knows about. By and large the stereotype of metallics is that they don’t like being in charge of things themselves and prefer to just take it easy. Appealing to them would involve looking for opportunities for them to find a comfy place in an already established society. Case in point, Vynnoth is kind of just mooching off of Adelaide for entertainment and among dragons Adelaide is basically her territory. The more cities there are for them to infiltrate and set up shop in the better.
The chromatics are however more prone to desiring to use their true forms and also much more self interested. By generalization, they also like to be in charge. There is a reason the Hassani council is mostly chromatic. Also that Haleh, the most difficult one in the Federation who lives on her own at her Ruffian scrapyard paradise on the upper plates happens to be associated with red dragons despite Vynnoth’s point that she might be a whole other thing. Chromatics largely like hoards, power, and to constantly remind people that they’re the biggest thing in the area. Though Vynnoth points out the best way to get their attention might have a mutual benefit. Chromatics are much more fiercely territorial, and the Federation has a lot of unused land at the moment compared to Sol. Offering to “invest” in them as territorial governors has some merit since they are liable to also help solve one of Diadem’s bigger issues with the machine wars on the plate borders. For all of Haleh’s problems, she and her ruffians have an abnormally high kill count on the machines. Mostly because they keep building weird junk out of the scraps but that was sort of Vynnoth’s point. Haleh is especially unruly, but her chromatic brethren are just as liable to set up their own cozy little territory and murder machines for you to help with that front line.
However in both cases, usually individual appeals would have to be taken. The larger format of just throwing a dart at the wall and hoping to pick some up would be a little difficult. Particularly when competing with the Hassani who gave practically every adult dragon their own city full of people to rule over and tells them they’re special every day. On that topic, Vynnoth noted that you might want to befriend a blue dragon just for dealing with the machines of Diadem. They are the best flyers which Lancaster seems to like, and they are electrical which means they’ll be comfy dealing with the robot horde. A black dragon would probably be able to make a joke out of the machine army, but Vynnoth is aware that socially they are the hardest for the Federation to get along with. Vynnoth can at least look into the plans and see what might be done after getting an idea of what the Federation wants her to do with the whole campaign attempt as she is pretty sure she’d have to individually target specific dragons she knows are most liable to be swayed.
Koharrel has been negotiating with the Sugnam. She reports it hasn’t been hard to convince the new republic that the demons are probably bad news, but the other hemisphere is harder to convince. Apparently the demons promised them ships and technology in exchange for those land rights to help them boot up their own space faring government. While that isn’t a unique offer at this point in time, it is likely an endearing factor for them to listen to the demon perspective. That and demons are incredibly charismatic. However, as for the new Sugnam Republic, they’re fairly easy to convince about the benefits of the Federation. If nothing else its a better alternative than the deal with the Reachers they currently have. Though due to the distance between themselves and Caelkia or Diadem they have concerns about networking. If one of Robert’s portals were provided to them they would be interested in a short term membership to see how it works out.
Across the planet otherwise, Koharrel has noted that the new Sugnam Republic has been using the Tungsten Teeth rather aggressively on a vengeance kick. The old kingdoms have been practically toppled already. The mercenaries are a bit over-equipped and over-trained for this scenario as it turns out. They’ve already killed thousands as they razed cities to the ground on the new Sugnam Republic’s orders and conquered more territory for it. Koharrel reported meeting with that strange maybe-Revenant again. They had some points to bring up about giving them too much power too quickly. Which makes general sense given that the Revenants have always been known for being a little anti-authoritarian. Whether specifically or by coincidence.
Si-Yeon is currently away at the Minnis….minno…minnesota, hold on. Minnisógnir project over Nekhul. The New Age containment experiments are largely in the hands of Vasia. That aside, Vasia has news on that front. First off, the sleepy herb did not alleviate the problems inside the containment unit. Though they can’t be sure what happened in it. Irae might have failed to be able to administer it, or it might not have worked. In either case, Vasia is pretty sure the problem isn’t actually putting the subject to sleep. They must have slept by now. The problem is most likely that the subject still has their APT since no one can perceive them long enough to remove it from them. Secondarily, no one comes back out of the box. Irae reformed in Valjala as planned, but there is no way to know if it was by her own volition or not. Because if it were to be Sarrai in there, she might still have her armor and weapons. Other lab personnel have been less fortunate. Either they’re dead or they forgot the plan of how to get back out. Research still pending.
When you say to keep an eye out for suddenly powerful Finsor pandem practitioners, you meant security wise right? Because we did kind of recruit the last one. I’m not even sure today that Otto can be trusted in terms of security. Not because he’d side with the Demon Kingdom, he’s just…he’s a lot for city constables to handle. Idle hands are the demon’s plaything, and he has already been arrested twice. Once for public intoxication and indecency – which is the polite way of saying he was jerking off on a train. Which no one can understand why, because he has a succubus for a familiar. Who uses ol’ righty when you have your own personal sex demon that you can summon at will? Second time for getting into a bar fight. He won at least. I took the damages out of his paycheck.
Anyways, in keeping an eye on the rest of the Federation’s warlocks, there are actually a lot of them. Most are not unreasonably powerful, at least not suddenly. Keeping an eye on warlock shenanigans is actually kind of an ordeal. Demons have a habit of making deals with practically anyone and sometimes just throwing shit into the world to see what happens. Ten years ago there was the Panemperia event where twenty eight students all became warlocks seemingly over spring break and rapidly started causing problems because one of them found a grimoire and kept messing with it rather than report to faculty that they had acquired it. I think they sacrificed some student, who came back to life and took revenge on them. Said book is currently in the vaults now, but was just an example of how this can get out of hand so frequently and easily.
I’ll keep an ear to the ground to see if any seriously over the top problems show up, for now it’s still under ‘general problems for the knights’. It’s their day job while they aren’t deployed to deal with things the rest of security forces don’t really feel equipped to handle. These things happen a lot around Panemperia for obvious reasons.
In other finsor business around the Federation, Enphidia has seen an odd number of incidents. Lilli has been back and forth from there. She is our primary merch production for Diadome so it isn’t that unusual for her to be here. Though there has been no official advertising for it, word has gotten around that she is here. She specializes in taking people to her kingdom who would like an ‘anonymous emigration’ and the sudden rise in missing persons cases might be related. Though Faithrae reported that she’s not doing anything especially nefarious to accomplish this, just making the same offers as usual and in a city as large as Enphidia there are bound to be people liable to take it.
The Diadome marketing strategy has been employed, though around Eden in particular most people don’t remember the full details of it so it has served as both a detection method and just actual marketing to re-familiarize them with it. Though we haven’t seen any lingering effects from the amnesia monster.
Inya is on her way to visit that psionic species with some of the New Age researchers and a few Arcurans to see how things go. They’re along the southern side of the Reach so it’s a bit of a trip.
Quarantine has officially been lifted now after everything has been thoroughly checked through.
Hisashi has been in the process of setting up his asteroid lab as requested. He did agree that he would like to run some rather dangerous experiments and this would be a great opportunity after all.
With communications re-established and informational quarantine over, I’ve caught up with the Celestial order. Ankathi’s mad, as we could all expect. Though she might be mad enough to start a war with the Demon Kingdom. However, for the first time in awhile she is in a uniquely weak position. Without Kharla she cannot manifest anywhere near her full strength, which is bad for us if we need her abilities for anything soon but it also means that there is a lot less she could do to us as well. Such as destroying Valjala for example. So despite her frothing rage, the First Temple is sort of avoiding marching off to the demon realm because without her direct presence they’re pretty sure they couldn’t win that unless the Federation as a whole was in on it. Even then, that could invoke another fight with the Hassani and we’re basically outgunned on that front.
Though if you wanted to poke the bear, now is your window of opportunity. Who knows how many centuries it could take for her to find another medium as powerful as Kharla. Well maybe a few decades if Vasia’s plans for the celestials pans out but you get the idea.
We’ve brought Ecureuil onto the team and I cannot tell if they understand the briefing I gave them or that face was just them being a smartass. I should have added more options to that face plate.
Also we got word from Adrienne who is up at the Zhulkite border with the hive worlds and can only send messages back every so often due to the distance. The first issue they’re dealing with is that since the Exerlus destroyed every outpost in the area, the containment has already been likely breached. Hive World contamination does tend to be a bit slow. This is a large scale process that can sometimes take thousands of years, though they don’t mind the help with setting the outposts back up and slowly scouring nearby worlds for signs of Hive World spores, critters, and other such issues. Like a cloud of space moths for example, they can take a long time to travel between stars on their own but once they get there…problems. So many problems. Diadem hasn’t seen as much impact from the space moths since Renjala put bubbles over the farm and a lot of Diadem’s ecosystem is self maintaining thanks to the Ika machines. Also because it’s been thousands of years, so they already had their impact. It is apparently why the bodies of water on the surface plates have fish.
This is simultaneously an opportunity to learn more about the Zhulkites. We met them awhile ago on the expedition across the galaxy that got cut short to go help with the Solian war. Though we are still learning more about them as we go. They were a super civilization when we met them, though the Exerlus conflict has reduced them to a fallen one now days. Though the damage hasn’t been as bad for them specifically as the others in the area. They have been able to traverse the galaxy by their own means for some while now, hence the last outpost we visited was just an asteroid floating through space. Re-establishing the outposts is less a matter of getting people into space and more of setting up sustainable locations and communications. This has been the main thing Adrienne has been helping them work on is finding materials to establish communications across the border so that they can actually keep track of incidents from the Hive Worlds.
Speaking of Adrienne, the build off will probably get bundles into similar cybernetic showcases. Really it’s just a great big tech marketing fair, though this is a valuable opportunity to collect survey data on modern voidforged and compatible bodies.
The Lancaster rehabilitation project continues to be underway on our end. Vasia is still very curious as to why it wipes memories of the Blaiken. Apparently Walters has shipped Winter out across the galaxy to the Demon Kingdom to go hunting for a book, so she will be away during all of this. I believe she’s already managing to get herself into some degree of trouble over the matter. Which brings up that Winter has already been pursuing other ideas of how to fix Lancaster. As advisor I am to point out her plan to try and procure the artifact from Faithrae is already dangerous as that would be getting involved with Faithrae and Lilli, then making a trip to Elasyn. Which is a place we don’t go to very often all things considered despite it being the capital of the galactic sector we live in.
Si-Yeon is at work at Minnisógnir setting up observation. Though constructing five stations in essentially foreign territory is taking a bit of time. In the meantime with quarantine lifting we have so far not seen Diadem immediately collapse so hopefully that’s going well. Vasia reports experiments with the contained unit have been hard to discern what exactly happens inside of the box. Renjala recently sent Irae in there and she reformed in Valjala which was the plan, but with no memory of what happened inside. Also no one sent into the box to try out various methods has returned from the box or been retrieved from it thus far. To be fair the interior of that thing is a dimensional space like a bag of holding so there’s a bit more room than you would think.
The cruisers report that Lidar does seem to work decently well with a big enough version intended for scanning the planet.
As for the attempts to create an amnesia curing drug, so far this has always been a bit of an iffy territory. Ilex once was trying to mess with this stuff as well, but removing or resurfacing memories has always been a bit difficult. The only people known to have any method of doing so thus far have been the Blaiken and they do it by reconstructing your brain’s chemistry and physics, not really viable in this situation. Though it does raise the question of what happens physiologically to the victims of the Sixth Disaster. Does it unwrinkle their brains?
Suffice to say progress is slow if we’re making any at all. Obviously if anyone can make the amnesia or recall effect there will be a large scale interest in the matter though so it could be profitable.
The search for Souris has been in a bit of a stall due to the fact that we’re still building the main observation stations for Nekhul. Though no jet fighter has come screaming out of the atmosphere to make contact at least. Calculating his trajectory is definitely iffy since all information about the operation was lost. One thing Si-Yeon has noticed, is she also cannot find the mechs that should still be down there. Granted she has no ability to tell where the landing would have taken place and she is doing this all with a telescope while also managing the station. Though there is a distinct lack of a battlefield filled with mech scraps.
Though her casual observations led to a report of things moving on the surface but from a top down angle it is a little hard to get any details. One of the things her stations are being commissioned to include is more advanced optical observation platforms to further this research. Hopefully with a great stabilizing device, since keeping an eye on a specific point via telescope aboard a cruiser is a bit of a bumpy affair.
We could start growing stuff on the cradle, though I don’t think it will have the effect you’re hoping for in regards to the food mafia. One of the primary reasons that exists is because of the galactic famine. Even if it has been over two decades since the series of disasters throughout the galaxy that led to the famine, it is still a lingering threat. Especially since Rahlken keeps abducting productive locations and Haleh burns farms down during her raids as well, along with piracy. A thousand factors all summarize up to being ‘food is big business’. Diadem is one of the few places that is relatively well fed thanks to the surface plates, but selling it to other Reach stations is incredibly profitable. If you want to make a dent in the overall economics of agriculture in the Reach network, we need to upscale the plate farming on Diadem by a hundred fold. Then replace everyone working on them with slave labor, golems, or automation in order to make it extremely unprofitable for anyone to compete with Vittles. Then we will see the Adelaide overlords get richer and more powerful as a result while fewer opportunities for individual enterprise are available to less economically advantaged types.
One of the issues with all of these logistics is because food is big business, it’s also a great target for piracy. Which affects a lot of the rather high costs since security is a necessity. VSEC has deployed the VIPER team to help alleviate it but there’s another element to consider. A lot of people in the ‘food mafias’ overall are specifically those that do not want to join VSEC because of the constant threat that they get deployed to fight killer robots and pirates almost constantly. Increase food production, you get a security shortage next. Increase security, you get a black hole of tax spending and probably spawn gang wars as people try to get in on Faithrae’s cornerstone markets. It’s a never ending chase for a utopia one step at a time but growing hydroponics on the Iron Cradle isn’t going to put a dent in this. The market forces that enable tomato gangsters is the Reach Network in particular.
The idea of having Ankathi sever Kaylen’s bind has turned into a conference with Ankathi about the realities of attempting that. Mixed in with her still being quite pissed off about the Euron incident that took Kharla. Though that is Renjala’s problem for now. We’re just concerned about Kaylen here at the office.
The problem being that severing a bind between two people without either party being involved is extremely difficult. For perspective, if anyone knew how to do it then surely Reika would have been able to escape Barachiel without needing him to die. Though it is correct to assume the one person who might know how would be at least someone in the Astral Order. With Ankathi currently missing her medium and no sufficiently strong enough one’s available, she can’t do it for us. The other problem being, even she can’t really do it. It isn’t just a magic ritual. There are only three ways to separate a bind with neither participant being willing. The first is the Astral Wilds combined with sheer distance, and the second is an AMZ. Both are only temporary measures though. The third is to kill one of the two, with some weird loopholes for ‘near death’ scenarios. Like when Kharla turned Reika into a doll and that cut her off from Ankathi permanently. Though Renjala using his phylactery doesn’t seem to count given how often he’s used that one.
The search for the elusive Kennae continues. What is strange is that it is easy to find places he has been, as he leaves quite an impression. Yet no one can figure out where he’s gone. According to the Playatis, they did actually meet him though had no idea he was significant in any way. Last they saw, he was traveling across the dead zone to the eastern side of the galaxy. They are judging this entirely based on departure records and if he turned left at any point, then they have no clue.
We got the process of setting up Forgehall underway. Faithrae asked if you’ll be securing VSEC’s military contracts with that one since it would be a good use of your connections to get it some promising business.
Also you do kind of look like a cop sir. At least an agent. We all dress too generically formal around here except the field agents who all look like pirates instead. Half of them are pirates I suppose.
As for asking around about Pandem, you should try asking Renjala. This is his area of expertise after all.