Stories of Lore 66
Greetings, this is Nakka’s News from the Reach Broadcast Network.Today we examine the people and ongoing trends as affected by current market forces. To help you plan your social investments as well as monetary.
Recently we have seen the northern sector experience constant chaos. The immigrants from the galactic north have been integrating slowly but surely as they can. Though some have been second guessing their decision, even seeing attempts to return to the galactic north with reports that the Zhulkite borders have started to become re-established with help from the infamous Iron Cradle. Though they are still likely to desperately need metal, mining operations are at an all time high as an entire galactic sector has been stripped bare by the Exerlus. Ship salvage is becoming worth more as raw material in the galactic north, so no need to fix those junkers up as long as you can haul them.
The Vessians have become much more sparse in the galactic north after an encounter with the infamous Queen of Ashes, in which it was discovered she was deliberately hunting them. It remains unconfirmed if the Federation deliberately sent her to do so.
Speaking of which, the Federation has been observed meddling once again, but now much further from home. Establishing an uplifting project for the Sugnam people in the south west area. Of course to absorb them, this is much further than they usually extend their efforts. Rumors are floating around of Federation explorers as far south as Kawako Six. They are likely planning some big moves, and if you live along the western corridor you may wish to consider your social investments in preparation.
On the other side of our home, Grand Chief Amasis has initiated the invasion of a neighboring system called Hephal. Home to a primitive species who have barely figured out how to get across water let alone space. It appears the pressures of the Vessian famine have driven them to seek yet another world to devour. The Vessians have historically acted more as individual mercenaries who scavenged the Reach to sustain their voracious appetites. Though with Haleh hunting them in the northern sector this has cut them off their more independent members from the wealth of food brought in by the Hive Worlds and the Federation farming operations. It appears they have consolidated several tribes to launch much larger formal invasions than they have in the past. Even going so far as to petition for and acquire formal approval from Grand Chief Amasis to support a colonizing effort on the soon to be conquered world. This may lead to a more isolated vessian society, and their mercenaries that many rely upon might become a little more scarce in other locations as they focus their efforts on large scale operations with their own kind. This might also be exceedingly dangerous if you live in their neighborhood.
In the southern section we have seen the constant growth of new initiates to the Reach. The solian demons continue to expand their influence, faster than even previously predicted. They are culturally distinct for their devious methodology backed sometimes surprising raw power. A dangerous combination. However, among their kind is a sub species known as the succubus. Similar to the Kanis species, they are capable of reproducing with practically anyone. Demand is growing rapidly, in the chaos of the reach finding a suitable partner among the sea of alien species can be quite difficult for rarer species. Succubi not only alleviate this issue, but are surprisingly docile. Making them almost ideal for the harem trafficking trades and resulting in a spike of interest in the market. As we know, this market tends to be particularly volatile and violent, so its expansion in the southern areas because of renewed interest is likely to have ramifications over time. No one knows where this sub species of demon comes from, but a Demon Lord named Lilli seems to have a constantly renewing supply. She can be contacted via the demon fortress that was newly established on Elasyn itself. Several of these creatures have been implemented at entertainment districts for those who would like sample the matter before making any bold decisions.
Rumors of a tech showcase have been brewing in Federation space related to the Voidforged. It is expected to feature some of the latest innovations in cybernetic technology, production, and fashion. Given the rarity of cybernetic components, it might be a good time to procure some contacts before a potential surge in the market.
The construction of the stations along the hyperlane has started, though it is a lot of stations and supplies to ship around. Also a portion of the construction supplies were stolen by pirates, not an abnormal amount but still worth noting that this region of space isn’t heavily traversed likely due to their presence. The pirates don’t seem to have any formal association with any groups we know of but we have reason to think this region is home to some smaller pirate organization.
Right now a major thing to consider is that we are building and supplying several station but they are empty shells at the moment. Convincing people to move there might be the next step so that there is any reason to visit them beyond just fuel.
Vynnoth points out that the whole “respecting federation laws” thing might be the issue with the blue dragon. They’re in that young reckless phase that Haleh never grew out of. So it’s hard to guarantee they don’t have some issues with some law or another. Also we would need to figure out where to find the people to fill the town intended to give to them. It’s a harder sell than normal given what happened to Sol to tell thousands of people to move to some town near the Diadem section borders so they can become a dragon’s minions. So those are some points to consider.
Vynnoth has sent some people to Jydoq to find the bronze dragon as requested while the base is being constructed to hand over to them if they can be convinced to come along.
Siora and Haleh are back from the plate expedition and the collection of memory crystals they acquired in the process have been sent to the tech department to extract it from. After two weeks they think they found the flight logs for the departing Ika fleet we were looking for and the angle they departed at. Then did a lot of math to account for everything moving for thousands of years to get our best guess. It doesn’t actually make that much sense unless they were going somewhere else as a pit stop on the way. The scientists were very excitable to go over the seventh iteration of calculations and ideas. They think this fleet didn’t leave from Diadem headed directly for the next galaxy, they went somewhere else first. By accounting for where everything in the galaxy would have been all that time ago, we have a solar system in the Hive Worlds to explore. For lack of any idea what is there, it’s currently HWZ-567. I have had the engineering team reinforce the bolts on Lancaster’s medical tank to ensure she doesn’t get out and try to go immediately again.
Wonaya and Ronnair reported that the Blaiken prison they were sent to find is more than abandoned, it was deliberately destroyed by what they think was an orbital bombardment. It is likely that the Blaiken sent another fleet to clean up the mess after Echo Prime destroyed their previous one. They have been sifting through the scraps but it is difficult to find anything useful.
Koharrel reports that the Sugnam Republic has been warned about the demons on the other side of the planet. However they’re still slow to respond to that. Those are problems on the other side of the planet and they are still consolidating things within the republic, as well as deploying the Tungsten Teeth to take over other territories nearby. Freeing the slaves while conquering the kingdoms to add to themselves as it were.
Continued observation of the starless deep space planet yields that the place likely has no intelligent life or at least not enough to construct anything technologically advanced. However, it has massive quantities of highly developed organisms and crystal structures. Scans indicate that this random point in space is likely a Warrens exit, which fits what we know about the Warrens leading all over the universe. Which would explain the high development of the planet despite lacking a star to give it any energy to work with. Though it is still very dark and cold, the native life is adapted to living in what we would consider incredibly inhospitable conditions.
Winter reports that after a lot of running around various back alleys, fences, pawn shops, and other places to look for salvage she believes the grimoire fell into the hands of what she would call a gang. They aren’t led by a demon lord but they seem ambitious and might one day try to become one. She is aware that they are lying when they say they don’t know what it is, but that is all she can tell for certain as they aren’t really answering her questions.
After awhile of data collection Hisashi’s research has come a bit further along and managed to figure out what he is detecting to an extent. However, we have at least confirmed that some of this stuff is nearly undetectable because it changes properties every few seconds. However, experimenting on you reveals that anything of particular interest in the Astral Wilds can be determined simply by getting 40% of the same data more than twice. Which does narrow down how to find Zero. Just look for anything that maintains a quarter of its properties for longer than five minutes. The initial dataset is him basically detecting you and the plane he is scanning from. Another challenge is the Astral Wilds disrupting his radar itself and now he has to build another one because his got turned into solid potassium for no apparent reason and then took off through the wall because it lost the ability to be physical and no one knows what force of gravity it was drawn to but it wasn’t anywhere in the asteroid lab. So there’s a chunk of potassium floating through Valjala to who knows where now. So he’s building another one, though unless a way to protect it from the Wild’s is devised these might be one time use things. Though shielding it the way you and the other planar entities shield themselves isn’t an option because doing renders the scanner useless. Essentially, to receive any intelligible information from the Wilds is to expose yourself to it. Though the machine lets you read the screen as a sort of translator so the operator doesn’t have to be the one to peer into the Astral Wilds themselves. Also he needs to build a bigger one to scan further out in order to look for Zero. If you want to clear the fifteen million credit research budget for the next sized one.
Before you go and kill Kaylen. A reminder that the Astral Wilds severs binds by way of traveling to infinite distance. You need to take her to Ankathi’s cluster or a similar distance, not just sit in the Astral Wilds. You were able to detect your own binds and find your way home by homing in on your rock wife once you were close enough, but couldn’t while you were reaaaally far away. Also ‘near-death’ might be too broad of a statement. The only reported method of ever working was the suspended essentia of Kharla’s doll spell. Slapping her into the hospital likely won’t do anything, neither will lichifying her. This really puts into perspective why all those warlocks back in the day couldn’t get out of their deals. Also why no one has found a way to escape Lillith’s contracts, this is hard.
Irae and the lances have gone to preach the good word to the post apocalyptic world of those aliens that Haleh blew up. Progress is slow since showing up to preach an alien god and his magic is enticing to some and fairly obviously a bad idea to others. There is now a counter movement to tell people to stop talking to Irae and while the attempts to kill Irae and the knights haven’t gone well for them. Those who have gone along with Irae’s preaching have now also been building a place to study pandem and test ideas of it. We are basically the demon cult of this planet now and beset by crusaders with scrapyard shotguns. Irae has been reanimating corpses of the crusaders and its very impressive to the followers and very terrifying to the other side of things. History majors are suddenly feeling very nostalgic.
The Insider has been constructed as asked. A moment of silence for the Rim Reaper concept.
We’ve begun construction of the Bifrost and Helheim stations as you requested. As well as consolidating the refineries into a bigger company to go around and mine whatever else they can harvest. Due to low competition and ease of access they’re currently rummaging around Valjala.
Waionoa points out she was technically already a cleric of Mokihi, but not with pandem methods. She just happened to live on the turtle as it were. Though she’s alright, and currently seeing the expansion of her production ever since Lilli started exporting Succubi again with the restrictions being lifted despite Quyana’s constant petitioning. It appears that despite Federation assistance, Quyana wasn’t able to win out with the Court of Lords for much longer due to the obvious interests in their recent expansion into the Reach and the distinct value exporting succubi had for their efforts. That’s a whole other matter. Wainoa is just basically busy with increased production and Mokihi is currently passing through the domain of a lightning elemental so she’s been having fun with that.
Inya’s expedition reports that the infected knight has been able to bind with the parasite, but this created a feedback issue since they inhabit the same psyche. This actually killed the parasite, but it almost killed the knight too. The knight is now incredibly messed up and lost several subconscious functions, most importantly breathing. The knight is on life support if they aren’t conscious enough to breath manually and exhibits a strong loss of cognitive functionality. This has served to further our understanding of why its called a parasite and not just a psionic life form. It was taking over her subconscious functions and likely shares some similarities to Koura parasites and how Si-Yeon became a whole new…thing…with hers. We don’t know what its end goal was but for some reason it was getting really deep into that Knight’s psyche.
As for psionic experts, if we’re ruling out Winter who is on track to be the Federation’s most powerful one. Larazja has a lot of Ilex’s knowledge passed on through the synapse. Though she can’t be described as an active practitioner. The cult of lucidity is still kicking around if you want to get one of them.
The idea of mixing it with Eden, it’s hard to say at this stage. It isn’t really a matter of overpowering it as much as keeping one’s own thoughts distinct from it’s. Further data would be needed with analysis from a psionics expert.
Mahuea sent some fire elementals scouting around the Rim to see what they can figure out to do with the area. The earth elementals, which are the same ones that helped with Diadem projects, are still hanging around Evershar’s colony. They still like to party.
When it comes to finding a druid to help with your incarnum space moths, I’m not sure how much a druid could help considering you bound to a bunch of them and that’s more control than most druids can pull off unless they do so as well with their animal companions. Though if you do still want help from druidic methods, the issue is most of them are bound to Haziel already. The rixa based section of them are bound to Jaerda instead. You sort of did so much work for the druid population and pushed for the pantheon so much that they don’t really have any independents laying around anymore. So you might have to work out a trade with one of them.
Also as a planar entity, the binds are giving them your domain spells rather than the other way around.
Drug research continues though Deniau points out that this is kind of a holy grail of psionics to be able to remove memories and only a twenty thousand year old galactic super weapon has ever been observed with the ability to do so. Which means restoring memories is also radically new territory. The next issue is the lack of new subjects. Deniau’s lab is a rather humane place of experimentation and a lot of the victims of Number Six have been in active rehabilitation so that they can get back to their normal lives, which makes them poorer and poorer subjects with each passing therapy session. He also isn’t really sure what Six does to people to remove those memories so its hard to determine if he should take a more physical or psychological approach to the situation. VSEC medical records don’t have brain or psyche scans as a part of a regular checkup making it difficult to get a before and after picture of what happened to them beyond the surface level loss of memories. Progress is effectively stalled at this point now that the easy ideas have been tested to not work.
We’ve continued with the ambassadorial tour, and becoming largely a trade station for bits and bobs along the way. Given the size and stability of the Iron Cradle, unless its attacked by Rahlken, we are kind of a convenient mobile station. I imagine with some marketing, there would be some potential in becoming a mobile reach station. We could charge rent, let people live here, be come the interstellar permanent living cruise ship. I’m sure nothing bad would come of having a bunch of pirates live with us or publishing our destination to everyone.
Setting up embassies is basically just renting some random place, but most stations do not really participate in large scale politics deliberately. Which means protecting said embassy is entirely up to us. Rampart did this at Kuhas by way of also having a bunch of gangsters led by Allison. You could probably accomplish an easier effect just by keeping nothing worth stealing in the place though.
As for Elasyn, they do not have diplomats or anyone to talk to. The point of Elasyn is actually its lack of government. No one is fixing the roads, maintaining building codes, or deciding who owns what land. Its sort of a galactic oddity that its able to function and maintain so much power over such a large galactic sector despite all of this. It was really just the meeting ground of powerful people because it is an independent location. Over thousands of years it developed itself into a super power just by virtue of being somewhere everyone was passing through all the time. It is probably why despite being within the Reach we’ve been able to ignore it for so long and no one has come knocking. No one wants taxes, treaties, agreements, or to tell us what to do as members of the Reach. Which is real convenient at times and sometimes the silence is unnerving otherwise. Somehow Elasyn predates the solian galactic awakening but even before the calculator got involved with it, it spent thousands of years as one of the most powerful ‘governments’ in the galaxy. We still don’t know how or why.
In other news, while construction is still finishing for the Minnisógnir station collective, a lot of the important systems are operational already. Given that the most important one were the giant telescopes, got that done pretty easily. Observation of the surface of Nekhul has yielded further information about the place. Si-Yeon has confirmed that there are things down there. Looking at them from orbit with an old fashioned telescope doesn’t give the best angle and we can’t create a scan to show you, but if you want you can see these pictures from above as well as almost to the side. Though the important details from Si-Yeon is that they are a lot of them. They are hard to track through the forest but she expects there are at least tens of thousands of them at the minimum. Likely millions, possibly billions. While we can’t get the best image of them from above, we can watch how they move and determine that many of them are either metallic or wearing metal armor. Sizes range from standard humanoids to fifteen meters tall. Many of the larger ones are mostly stationary. Standing in place for extended periods of time. This lil bit sticking out is likely a weapon.
This leaves room for a lot of speculation on all the small details, but it is likely the planet is overrun with these things though they show little sign of being an advanced civilization to justify the damage that was done to our few surviving mechs. Si-Yeon crashed one of the cruisers unmanned into the planet’s surface just to observe how they reacted to it. Whatever these things are, they immediately approached the crash site and within hours had stripped it down until the only evidence remaining of the cruiser was the broken trees where it had once landed. She observed that they weren’t attacking it or repairing it so much as breaking it down into raw salvage very rapidly. Though because of the forest she has no idea what became of the salvage afterwards.
For whatever reason, the creatures are drawn to metal by a seemingly animal impulse. She put in a request to have Wonaya stop by the station on her way back from her assignment in the galactic north for further consultation.
We’ve seen to expanding the offices and retool some of the docks in Enphidia’s location for shipping and receiving purposes for the mining company’s imports.
More turrets were constructed
As for major targets, depends what you have in mind. Kaylen was a special case of being important to us but not that important to them. Also we didn’t know about her bind with the Hydra before we did it so no guarantees we’ll figure that one out in time before abducting anyone else. That being said, our attempts of infiltrating the Hydra’s network has still always been a bit of an odd area since everything is maintained so separately. If anything the Hydra operates a lot like the Gauntlet once did. Using a decentralized collection of people who may or may not even know who they’re really associated with. We know a few of his operations that we’ve either infiltrated or kept tabs on over the years but there’s always more and none of them seem to have a direct connection to any other group. This is largely because each of the heads make up another member, it’s like dealing with our whole office if we were all physically attached to the same body.
I know Lancaster wanted to look into getting some of the other council members of Alnae from the Phantoms at some point and that might be a good place to start but it is hard to discern their temperament. Any other officers for intel would need to be a little less broad, what kind of intel are you looking for?
On another note, we’ve seen to establishing a secret base in the Demon Kingdom to keep better tabs on them. Though with even some rudimentary work, we’ve already found some details about what Euron did with Kharla. Because this was a very public event for the demons. Rather than being returned as the matriarch of House Vloz’Khress, she has been sent to the Demon King’s personal castle. Though its hard to assess what specifically is going on within there and we’re working on deepening our intelligence network in the area to find more information.
Though it is worth remembering that Kharla was one of the only people who the Phantoms were a bit worried about. With the current political situation between the Kingdom, Hassani, and Federation – I would assume Kharla was an opportunity to ‘attack the Federation’ and not piss off the Hassani while also securing an asset even the Hassani respect to dissuade any hostilities. Notably, they didn’t cause any problems for any branch of the Federation other than Ankathi who is not an actual member anyways. She just lets the Astral Order hang out with the Celestial one a lot, but it is sort of like the situation we once had with the Kar’Soluth not being formal members of the Hassani. Speculation aside, it is definitely worth keeping an eye on what they’re doing with Kharla. It could even be as simple as they just really like her the way we went to get Kaylen back.