Some SoL #11

 

Mordekai Aberhoff

Expansive Psionics:

In trying to market to Shetou you manage to increase sales though you don’t have market dominance among them. There are two other psionics based companies among the Shetou run by some old school illithids who are also quite good at managing psionic sales. Though less so then stealth based products and adrenals one specializes more in tattoos and another in crystal based. Though at the high prices you are going for these competing products that have been around for awhile just go a bit cheaper then you do to maintain the Shetou market presence easily. This most notably effects sales to Sharen and Jaal’Darya as they have long established business with the illithid companies.

Profits take a bit of a hit from sheltering the employees.

Recruiting people who burn out their brains doesn’t go well. Making people sign up to use a weapon that kills the user is pretty hard, and you aren’t exactly inspiring patriotic sacrifice like 314-C does. In the attempt we find that most people who want to fight aliens to that level of commitment just sign up for military duty, particularly Selona and Valdir since those two “won” against the aliens. Though Selona isn’t accepting most people who try to join so Valdir for the most part.

Raw material buying is pretty easy, especially with the Madhammer strategy. Ruined factories are also easily acquired to replace the ones you lost as well as gain even more then you started from. Staffing is easy on the labor part of things, finding other professional psions to run the factories is a bit harder overall though.

Now you own a spiked bottled water company, thats a good market.

Stoogie manages to develop sahad avatar abilities after all that effort on the project. However, all that effort still just made him one and not the chosen one. Giza and Cerys for example are still much stronger Sahad practitioners.

Aerovent Filters:

On the upside one big outlet for all the filter production is Serrano’s Atlantis project alongside the other plan to trade it for labor. Though one potential problem is that it can’t last long since the filters take so long to go bad, so its not like the people you traded them to are going to need another for awhile.

Buying out facilities seems repetitive since you specified pharmaceuticals, so thats the same as the people above. Same result either way. Though yes Fuel processing plants are ridiculously well guarded right now, along with agriculturally useful areas.

The Cult:

Zex is still by technicality just doing his own thing, even if it is beneficial to the cult. While this is doing well to show his competence it also shows his potentially problematic independence, as he does know the real trick of the cult after all. Lately he assembled the cult’s main conspirating psions to himself to take stock of who is still around and redeploy them tow here you wanted. Though despite the nature of the cult it doesn’t work so well to get into position the growing warlords around the system, since the warlords don’t know what the cult can actually do for them and just see the yoga cult as that. Elves don’t put much stock in such things for warfare. The cult remains more of a hobbyist and relaxing thing in appearance to people looking for inner peace, it doesn’t quite have zealots.

In other developments, Zex is revamping the cult from the inside without supervision. Despite the efforts to force Stoogie to become a sahad avatar, Zex shot past them on his own and developed Sahad abilities during the invasion and has been utilizing it to do something sneaky. Using the cult meditations and psionic links through his sahad visions to make people believe the cult really has been achieving something weird as hell to further its credibility as more then a meditation hobby to the newer visitors. He has also independently began experimenting with combining it with his access to a vast number of psions to see if he can make interesting stuff happen.

Mhaldaru Foods:
They barely manage to take over a couple of farms at all, in the current state things are in attempting to use force just doesn’t work for them since other people who want control of the farms are also willing to use force and Madhammer is a bit too busy with everything else its been asked to do, leaving it unable to really contend with Alnae warlords and Shetou Generals in a war over farms.

Lumber Company:

Increases staff is easy as physical labor doesn’t have many specific requirements.

You build a seed bank.

You build new farms with some chickens and goats being their primary specialty.

Targeting the Alnae warlords proves to be the most difficult undertaking on the whole list in quite some time. One attempt is successful, one is aborted, and another attempt backfired massively. The successful attempt overtook one of the smaller warlords vying for control of Luna being propped up by the wealthy that lived there. The backfired one walked into a thing.

Legally speaking it would be a Kenin sandwich with Aryn’s brain but it would not please anyone’s sense of taste.

Edric Vandross

The super carrier heads to dock at a Solvang station out in the middle of nowhere to resume work. Though this has a potential downside in that a bunch of pirates now know about it and may want to hijack it as it nears completion, consider buffing up security.

Hadiya is pretty good at agriculture and creating food at least. Its technically the same job she was hired for, just now she’s terraforming her homeworld instead of alien planets.

The raiders are pretty successful as salvage hunters since most of the scavenging going on is not on military scale so the raiders can contest any other scavengers they come across. They’re mostly looking for FTL equipment as asked, though they sometimes have a hard time telling whats what on the alien ships and knowing what actually has value.

Red pilling Raymond results in him going “Oh gee, I never would have guessed. Nothing about my employment was ever suspicious at all, you are soooo stealthy” in a flat monotone. Though he can’t help with Aryn, her cybernetics are too advanced and none of your crew in the entirety of the gauntlet’s holdings have ever seen anything like them.

Sethis Tyne

Reika just informs you that a paladin order is not happening. The complications are numerous. First off she doesn’t consider herself a paladin since she doesn’t work in service to a god, regardless of the concept that Vanjin and Auni came up with since Reika has paladin-like powers. Second, it would require people to become pandem wielders and that is already a tricky sell. The third problem is it would need the cooperation of powerful celestial beings, and they typically don’t do that ever since you guys came over and conducted a genocide on the celestial plane during the era of the purge. Reika is unique in that she has such a bind because she was a child twisted to their plans and made into their weapon, and hers won’t even talk to her anymore. Most pandem casters are not going to be able to convince a celestial being to bind with them. However, as a silver lining, she does know where to find other people like herself. As rare as they are, since she was a child that lived with the celestials she had contact with the few people who had a pandem bind with the celestials when they came to visit the plane. Though people with talents that rare don’t tend to struggle to find work so they aren’t terribly recruitable. Notably of the twelve people she lists, one of them is in Valdir and their bind has been behaving strangely ever since their rise to power. Also of interest, among the twelve paladins are two extraordinarily powerful characters contesting each other for rank number one. Titus is an assassin created by the celestials like Reika and was her mentor. The other one, Haziel, is actually an aasimir who never bound to an actual entity but instead to the plane itself. While Haziel should be the weakest because of that, she spent all her xp on other character feats that make her pretty strong since her low corruption tier means she can still use advanced technology. Titus currently works only for the celestials as their dedicated assassin, Haziel works for Siwa Technologies.

Kala once again begins the process of hunting for high rolls to find a dragon hero that can be recruited.

That damned stealth drive is still on hiatus, also Vandross only rented the dockspace for his super carrier work, so the stealth drive is just sitting in the garage collecting dust without a lab to be worked on further.

The push for the black market scene is pretty smooth given that Sophia’s team is still holding together, had the foresight to protect as much of their merchandise as they could, but also now knows who they work with and thus have access to the assistance of people like Leon and Auni to keep competition low. Though the sale of some products are particularly good right now, getting more of them is going to be an issue soon with how fast they’re selling. No one in the Gauntlet actually owns production facilities for the things Sophia sells, so she is having to look if there are any out there she can act as the middle man for. The only major weapons producer that is selling to the black market right now is Selona, though that shit sells well. However, drug production is the one that is tricky to secure suppliers for.

Interrogating Aryn proves it to be a complicated situation. She can’t transmit internally, at least not consciously, but her APT is still technically a cell phone in the first place. Though it does lend evidence to the earlier pointed out factor that cyborgs don’t have hardware to transmit or receive messages the traditional way as to protect them from hackers like Aryn. As far as we can figure out, she knows literally nothing about her cyborg nature or her creator. That triggers the problem, we don’t have the technical know-how required to fix her. Her cybernetics are massively more advanced then what is typical, they aren’t necessarily more powerful by such a wide margin but they’re more adaptable, durable, and most importantly: undetectable. No metal detector, x-ray machine, or anything that should send up flags ever noticed she was a robot.  We’re not even sure what material she is made out of. So she needs to find someone who can fix her hand, and that means going to find Kenin or Arkaric. She wants to meet them anyways since they might be able to contextualize her existence. Problematically though, Kenin is with the mothership and Indal off doing other stuff at another star which could leave her gone for a very long time just due to travel. The more accessible option is Arkaric, but its Arkaric.

Luci Serrano

Actually finding an ocean planet turns out to be very easy, besides the one’s already in the Sol System, astronomers already knew where to find some. They just weren’t on the top priority for other colonizers because oceans seem less beneficial to live on. So the survey guys you had go take a look. Of the ones the survey teams check out two stand out. One is just a bunch of inhospitable water due to other chemicals present in it, so its pretty empty and quiet. Another has an existing ecosystem underwater, but its a big and advanced ecosystem, that means big fish with big teeth. It also has some islands scattered around so its not all water, and there is wildlife on those islands. Its 95% water so close enough. However, the presence of that ecosystem means there are a lot more resources of value there particularly food and materials with mana based properties (fuel). Though colonizing it could be riskier and more expensive, like a lot riskier. The DM has been playing subnautica a lot recently and certainly has a lot of ideas about big alien fish that make survival difficult.

Tech team pulls up some blueprints off google, communicating across stars is harder then water when magic is involved. Notably because magic struggles at long ranges a lot more so then through specific materials. So that is taken care of.

The materials needed to set up the underwater city are actually very easy for your mining company to gather, because its stone. While stone has the problem of being heavy its just going to sit in one spot underwater, and special kinds of stone materials can be made via magic refining that are ideal for such construction projects. Expensive obviously but definitely cheaper then the metals used for ship hulls.

By far the best orbital defenses are cannons placed on the ground due to the ease of maintenance when not being fired and large area they can cover when they’re intended to work at those ranges. Also, when the cannon is on the ground its pretty easy to make them really big. If expense and maintenance weren’t a consideration, ships are the most effective as they’re adaptable and carry a crew for rapid deployment due to the distance between them and the enemy. Though the cost of  one battleship is worth dozens orbital defense cannons and will only have one gun of equivalent power to the orbital cannon. So in summary cannons are the most efficient, ships are the best. It should be noted that it is typical invasion protocol to deploy ground forces to go after orbital cannons and shields as step 1, which is another reason why fleets can be important as they’re really good at intercepting those attempts.