Viper has been moved to the hyperlane route to begin patrolling it. Vynnoth thinks offering the stations to the dragons is a pretty solid idea once she can find more who would be interested and once people start moving in. Though she’s not keen on naming it after herself since that might cause unnecessary friction with the other dragons. Telling a dragon to move into a station already named after another dragon may or may not affect their interest but it’s more likely to dissuade than persuade in this instance. Also she isn’t sure she wants to make herself into an obvious target.
The process of filling the stations thus far has been peculiar. The new route consists of twelve total stations with four of them being particularly focused on. They are all mostly empty and this has attracted the interest of people who need a lot of warehouse space more than anything else. So the pirates who previously patrolled this route are suspected to be the current residents, which is both populating the stations but also making them sort of hostile to other potential visitors. Granted most stations are a little hostile by default within the Reach network.
Vynnoth has the department responsible for all this keeping things running but not appointing a full time civil leader of the stations. Not hard given there isn’t much to manage yet anyways, though she intends to let them build up a bit before using it to attract any dragons since they are less keen for projections than most solian investors.
Haleh and Vasia went off to go get kidnapped by Rahlken in an attempt to kidnap some of the pirates. Which they were almost successful in, though an unknown group intervened. Vasia did manage to capture one in the end after the other four were destroyed by the uninvited group’s intervention. They’re still in the process of transporting to Vasia’s labs.
Wonaya went back to Vess as requested. She reports that they are somewhat adamant on securing their own resource production instead of relying on importing from others. Especially with the growing trend of the Federation’s expansion. They’ve rejected either assistance or to allow the Federation to make contact with the Hephal.
While it wasn’t directly stated, Wonaya has some theoretical insight into the matter. Prior to the near destruction of their homeworld, vessians were one of the super powers of the Reach. They still kind of are and people will still respect Grand Chief Amasis as if nothing changed but over time if they can’t rebuild their position then someone is going to notice. Vittles is very likely the actual reason they’re doing this. After their homeworld was set on fire, they scattered throughout the Reach to find food as necessary. Then Vittles happened and attracted thousands to Diadem and now they’ve spent enough time to create a new generation on Diadem. There are more vessians in the Reach who have become somewhat independent than there are still within the tribes. Wonaya thinks they’re doing this specifically to keep more of the population they still have and maybe bring back some of the nomadic ones to rebuild. While they would likely be able to rally vessians across the Reach to return home and defend it if they were attacked, the currently available population actually within the territory wouldn’t be enough to defend itself from any major offensive.
Arlo reports that the Diadome agency has been investing into further developing local scenes financial stability for the fighters rather than the promoters. Floor space at Kawako Six has been purchased as requested. The Tagal don’t seem to mind any. Which normally I shouldn’t have to point out was in the report but lately with the outreach programs that seems kind of out of the ordinary.
The scouts report back on the starless planet in the middle of open space. It could be that this world isn’t one of the ones we would consider ‘golden’ since it developed under extremely different circumstances. That being the lack of sunlight. It is still a very developed world in terms of biodiversity and atmosphere, but even a warrens exit can only do so much if there is no star. Whether this has implications towards the idea of the shared origin theory or not is still up for debate. Other probing indicates that the planet’s crystal structures are basically just impure regular formations. Not quite like the strange properties of the Koura crystals.
As for destroying the weapon, we likely could not with just our section. At least not enough to sufficiently dissuade the defunct exerlus. Given the labor resources their machines grant them, they could rebuild a section of it pretty easily. Though it needing to be functional is clearly not necessary since its not even working right now and according to the Ika it has never worked before that they’re aware of.
Winter reports that she’s devised where the grimoire is down to a specific vault in a specific building. It’s in the collection of the gang she mentioned last month. They are fully aware of what the book is though and they don’t want to trade it. If anything they are probably trying to study it in order to become the next Rozanis. Basically there is a demon necromancer living in the modern equivalent of a wizard tower hoarding it and trying to learn everything they can from it before someone comes asking questions. Winter has managed to avoid any serious trouble at the moment, but they’re not going to let her have it clearly. In terms of options, she says she could just launch an assault on this demon necrocarnate if we sent her about a hundred people and maybe an extra agent. Though this risks taking overt action within the Demon Kingdom, and that’s how Renjala got into a whole mess before. Nah division might have some people who could be a bit quieter about it though she isn’t fully aware of the actual abilities and limitations of the division so she just offered that as a suggestion. Alternatively, she might be able to convince the other local powers that they should stop all this from happening though she has no way to guarantee the book winding up in her possession after attempting to set up a fight like that.
Koharrel asks if there are still plans to set up a portal between Sugnam and Diadem given that the Sugnam have only agreed to a trial membership rather than formally joining. She reports that things are continuing smoothly and the old regime is basically dead now thanks to the Teeth having hit that critical point where its obvious they can’t be stopped. The new leader of the Sugnam Republic is now utilizing Federation technology to get into contact with other galactically aware civilizations in the area. Koharrel thinks they’re trying to survey what things are like for other people who are in this sort of position. She has also noted that they seem to be growing interested in what is going on in the other hemisphere, less so due to the demons and more so due to the fact that if the planet isn’t united it has a lot less bargaining power in general. The Demons have no real stake to the world’s governments and are just here as an independent mining company.
Ronnair is headed to Janus as requested.
The Diadome agency has prepared to set up portals in places all over the Reach and sent some people out to get started on prep work for that. Well are in the process of doing so, getting a bunch of people onto ships and across the galaxy for months at a time takes a bit of prep but you get the idea. They’re on it. We might need to expand Diadome seating for the 8th time though if you’re going to let spectators take the trip too.
As for asking Echo about the exerlus kill loop, she said she has asked organics the same question for millions of years. If you figure out how to convince them to work together on their shared objective, you should start applying that skill to achieving galactic peace. I’m still not sure the Exerlus are supposed to be cheeky like that. Even if this is a slightly different case she doesn’t seem to consider it particularly different than watching us go to war with our own kind over the far more nuanced motivation of power land and wealth. More importantly, if you did convince them to work together to share control of the ring’s weapon wouldn’t they just team up on us? I don’t know when I’ve ever heard someone say ‘we’re keeping this super weapon secure and safe under our control’ without also threatening ‘so that i can shoot you with it’. ‘Control the weapon’ doesn’t sound like ‘keep it from ever shooting’ and seems a lot like ‘so that I can shoot it when I want to’.
The delegation to meet with the lightning elementals reports meeting earth and lightning elemental hybrids in the process created by Waianoa. Now you might be asking, what the hell does that even look like? How do you combine a rock with lightning? I asked too, and have been flipping through the pictures for the last hour. Whatever that psionic potion your rock girl keeps making is some seriously strong stuff. I wonder if she could mix a fenalis with one of these moths to make something even cuter?
As for the elementals, the archon of lightning is more conservative with the deployment of his elementals than Mokihi or Mahuea. For the same reasons as Moa Metala actually, lightning elementals are very exploitable by humanoids. We already turn our own kind into mana batteries, obviously lightning elementals are one of the most premium of premium options for such technology. Similar to what happened to the solar aliens that Selona turned into batteries to power his own stuff. So you can see why they are much more protective of the elementals leaving the plane to work in the middle ones. While they can survive the heat of the rim they have a different problem in that they really like complex atmospheres, so they’re pickier about planets than the fire elementals.
The recent Astral Wilds radar experiment has kept me up for three days trying to figure out what happened. As far as I can tell from the interviews, recordings, footage, and asking New Age to help me piece it all together – you guys found something that reacted to being observed or followed the flow of whatever the radar was doing back to it. Hisashi was regressed to a child though kept all of his mental facilities intact, though he occasionally enters a comatose state where he just disappears from reality for hours at a time. Usually while asleep so it hasn’t affected his day to day too much. He however has full memories of who he is and was and all my information aligns to his story. You on the other hand, do not remember this but you used to be some sort of humanoid lich. Half of the team has no memory of this either, though I do and some of the people I talked to give the exact same description as what I remember even though others seem to have no idea that you were ever not a kobold. I’m told by Vasia that this has happened before but there are no records to prove or disprove the phenomenon.
That being said, despite his body Hisashi is still able to do his job albeit maybe not so great with the swords anymore. According to him, whatever you guys found this time wasn’t Zero but an offspring of Zero’s. Which implies that Zero has not only found a way to maintain permanence in the Astral Plane but has found a way to transfer this property and reproduce. We’ve also reported that Valjala has started to show signs of decay. On a grand scale it isn’t too noticeable but internal plane is collapsing rather than expanding now, given a few million years it will likely be only the size of its local galactic cluster and a little longer until it fades out from existence. Hisashi believes that thing found Valjala as well as you guys and is now feeding on it from the outside. While the effects are less than a percent of a percent, this has made a measurable pandem impact on the traveling crystals that began to form when Valjala was originally created.
Basically, that radar created a signal that drew the attention of some sort of astral creature derived from Zero that is now feeding off of our planar cluster in some weird way. Also half the people in the room no longer exist in one way or another, you’re a kobold now, and Hisashi is a very old child. In summary: you poked at some weird shit until it poked back. Also the radar’s ‘phylactery’ is just a backup memory crystal but there isn’t really a way to use incarnum to recreate a machine that has no innate essentia as far as we know.
Eerihild has gone off to Hephal though is still making her way across the Reach to get there.
The knight that was subjected to the psionic parasite has been retired as requested, though they’re not very responsive to their caretakers so far. We’ll see how that develops over time. Inya reports that thus far giving the parasite other animals has shown no sign of developing language understanding. Though the animals do become more active, not in a hostile way but they do try to wander around more than they would prior to infection. The psionic experts that were called in to help report that the parasite is really trying to do two things. What looks like its natural curiosity or tendency to feed on experiences is actually attempting to stimulate the brain of whatever it is inhabiting. In doing so it is tracking what areas experience activity. The other thing it is doing is expanding its own psyche to match whatever it infects. The species isn’t biological so it doesn’t grow according to any sort of genetic predetermination. It is actually likely that Reachers have inadvertently gotten this thing off the planet before and no one knows where it is. With the rats all we can tell is that the creature reproduces a lot less rapidly than Disaster Six. They don’t infect everything around them one after another in a chain reaction, rather there is just one of these things and so far we have not gotten it to reproduce while in captivity.
Irae reports that things are still going fine on the apocalyptic world once visited by Haleh. It is likely that if anyone in this place could have fought back against her, Haleh got to them first. And we do know that Haleh has a tendency to deliberately hunt down the strongest people, whether to recruit them or demonstrate her superiority. The church of the traveller continues to gain ground with the locals slowly but surely since the opposition keeps turning into Irae’s reanimated soldiers anyways. The portals are definitely helping the spread as well.
Otto reports that “THE BUGS ARE REAL NOT JUST IN MY MIIIIIND”. According to Lailah he went to sleep and woke up covered in small insects that were eating through a scab on his leg because he didn’t realize the sensation was actually insects instead of a side effect of whatever he was smoking that particular day. The Evershar colony continues to expand with the help of the earth elementals but so far everything is fairly stable. Lailah reports that she is mostly just checking seals and using repellents. Larger bitier things tend to be taken care of by Evershar’s defense grid but its the little ones that keep causing the most trouble.
As someone who grew up with the exiles and lived under the constant reminder that Kanika was right about everything – I’ve never really noticed the way she evaluates the worth of anything. Even the most holistic philosophies, like the druids, make room for incredible violence and destruction if it gets them something they want. 6ix stands in our way, and these animals might help us understand how to deal with it. If we’re willing to expend hundreds of lives assaulting Nekhul again, why wouldn’t be willing to expend some rats and psionic parasites? The value of life is only important to those with no control over their lives. People like you and Kanika have evaluated it at being worth less than numbers on sheets. Otherwise we wouldn’t be losing lives every day on the Diadem front lines just to say we own a fancy ringworld. We would have just built a regular space station or gone to some other world with much more logistically manageable challenges. To people like me, Kanika being a dragon really doesn’t make her look any different than anyone else with power and resources. That’s why the Reachers don’t like big governments. With that much power comes the inevitability that those who don’t have that power become statistics. It’s why my friends ask me to hang out less and less these days. Ever since I got this job, now I have power they can’t conceive of wielding. The first lesson you taught me about that power is how to decide who lives and who dies in order to accomplish the goals of the order after all.
We still only know a little bit about Elasyn from traveler’s stories and thirty years ago the Federation sent three people to go look around and get the lay of the land. In a way it is a very alien civilization that functions by means we would never really consider viable but apparently someone did. Other than that we are relying just on the stories. With that information, we do know that Elasyn is a fallen world from the Ika alliance sixteen thousand years ago. It is a vast and persistent ecumenopolis similar to Diadem though it doesn’t have the population to support that level of development. Like Diadem. You can see how the two places are both linked to the same fallen civilization. Various districts and cities there maintain their own affairs, such as utilities and security. Without a central government no one is really doing anything for the benefit of others around them in terms of construction. So the ship power generator hooked up to one district only has physical wiring to its immediate area that had it built rather than a national power grid as a more harmonious civilization might do. Security is handled by individual gangs controlling these districts.
Despite being one massive continuous city at first glance, you could really look at the place as if it were a well camouflaged collective of independent colonies. Sometimes with miles of empty buildings between those colonies. They don’t have a military the same way we do, just a lot of people are armed and if they can be convinced to fight for something – such as wherever they call home – then suddenly the sheer number of people with guns becomes very notable. No one really invades Elasyn not because of its own defenses but because you run the risk of pissing off the entire Reach if you try since everyone tends to have some stake in the place. Though according to Vanessa there is reason to believe the planet has incredible defenses that are hidden. There is also an unconfirmed rumor that a mysterious armada will appear out of nowhere if the place is sincerely invaded. The story goes that the armada showed up, obliterated some ambitious fleet, and then disappeared again. It is highly possible knowing what we do now that there is a Warrens entrance in Elasyn’s solar system. Vanessa also picked up some interesting rumors that are all over the place but keep repeatedly mentioning Grand Chief Amasis in many of the stories. It is possible that Amasis is either somehow related to the Blaiken that live in the Warrens or is one of the entities that ran from them and in some chain of events that has something to do with Elasyn’s formation.
Vanessa also reports that Elasyn really isn’t all that bad. It’s just people living out their lives without a larger government to organize them. It’s just one city that’s completely crazy, to the point that she can’t make sense of it. She would guess some grand conspiracy somehow maintains it in a state of constant chaos. Though from here I can run some basic analysis. It’s population density is so high that really it just makes sense for organics to cause a bunch of trouble. Enphidia isn’t anywhere near as large or dense but it still has a lot of street violence and gang wars over tomatoes. Where there is economic opportunity there is also competition for it and it is just the way things go when they don’t have the regulation that us superior machines do. Though it is home to the chaos calculator so it would also make sense that he would keep the whole place in a permanent state of maximized chaos while somehow sustaining it.
We’ve also told Adrienne to come back from her work with the Zhulkites to prepare for the tech showcase that will be at the next Diadome festival as one of the other attractions besides the tournament. I’ve also invited the filthy elf to prep their work. We’ll be a part of a much larger show featuring mechs, cars, cyberware, and basically whatever the Adelaide corps are up to and want to market. We’re hoping to make a big deal of the voidforged showcase to get the attention of maybe some other mechanical species that might be out there somewhere. That and for the collection of some survey data related to the recent projects of overhauling Voidforged design philosophy we can use to figure out what the people themselves are interested in. Might be time to prepare some marketing and demo reels if you want to push any particular design philosophy. This one will be available to the public, and you know how the public sometimes might be influenced by less desirable qualities.
The latest Nekhul test of sending down some automated ships with their guns activated. Orbital observation reports watching the ships get ripped to pieces one after the other. Notably, the creatures did not change their behavior for the ships that were armed to provide them some resistance though they did get through the ship’s defenses very quickly. After the first ship self destructed they very quickly started disabling or triggering the explosions with each successive one, so they did recognize we were messing with them but it they still attacked the ships with enthusiasm. Si-Yeon reports that the only signs of metallic materials she can find on the planet are on these creatures and the few functioning buildings that remain intact like the planetary shield, it’s associated power facilities, and some other mysterious structures whose purpose she cannot discern. They behave as if they are starving for any metal they can get ahold of. Their behavior would be incredibly unique among mechanical species due to the way they move and the vigor they have for getting to the ships, or very common among Hive World species.
Reviewing VSEC who were never exposed to Disaster 6 reveals no detectable change between them and those who were. Which at least tells us that it’s not doing something physical to their fleshy brains beyond maybe smoothing some wrinkles or something. So at the very least the psionic super weapon isn’t terribly destructive to those it infects, which is good to know before we send more people back into that mess.
The team has been dispatched to assist with Renjala’s missionary plan as requested and start some propaganda campaigns. It is notable that the presence of other highly influential Solians has been picked up by the others and they’re starting to become more aware of galactic meddling.
Natasha has noted their awareness of this has prompted them to seek out assistance from others in the Reach, though they haven’t gotten much response on the matter yet. Though something to keep an eye on.
We’ve installed more turrets as requested to round the numbers off and another big ship has been added to the flotilla.
As for targets within the Hassani, their armchair generals are the abominations and monsters. The only mortals to achieve positions that high are those like Alystra who as we’ve noticed – aren’t exactly incompetent. Also learning that the Hydra has been putting pandem binds on people under its command means that we should do some additional scouting with the help of pandem knowledgeable agents to determine the validity of the target. Haggard reports this all has a lot to do with the structure of the Hassani. They don’t really have old men behind desks of higher offices, there is no need for them to maintain productivity from those they deem to be waning. Dragons are basically handed mayorship at the minimum and higher offices as well. The entire structure of the Hassani has powerful individuals wielding power over various groups of masses.
While not insurmountable or without opportunity, it feels relevant as your advisor to point out this means any of these attempts have a massively skewed risk to reward ratio. Targeting weaker individuals to disrupt their empire risks us getting caught and thus being blown up by the Hassani shortly afterwards. The reward being we take out some guy who is the assistant to a dragon who actually runs the place. All of this requires a much more thought out plan of what we’re building up to. Taking random action against the Hassani is too great of a risk for too small of a reward. Kaylen we had particular interest in given our history with her. Though any further action against the Hassani will need to be brought up with the member states. We learned that doing this endangers the entire Federation very quickly. If you want some minor targets, I can present them, but is it worth risking another Jaal’Darya attack just to be a mild nuisance? You’ll need to convince the other Federation members to vote on that one.