Posted on November 14, 2021

Stories of Lore 16

Voice command features have been experimented with before in regards to pandem casters in all sorts of ways. Still doesn’t work.Otherwise that would be fairly standard by now instead of the Astral Order needing slaves over drones that can open doors.

As for Khymin’s projects, lately he’s still automating household tasks to maximize his ability to not do anything resembling chores or taking care of himself. They sell pretty well actually. The larger drones to automate ship crews that were made for that effort are being made to experiment with assistants though due to their lack of intelligence there are some notable design flaws he’s trying to work out. This also being the problem with using them for arena purposes, they just do the one thing they’re supposed to do at the moment. So processing combat options is a bit dull as they will just keep punching each other one at a time. He’s good at building these but not so much the programming side of things, which the recent expansion to the company has hired more people on board for.

As for the arena, well it’s still an ongoing issue. If you absolutely must know the details…basically by adding more rules and limitations onto it so she can’t flood it’s logistics we now have her arena back to being able to draw in all of the competitors who need some extra capital. She…expanded the premise to ‘live training exercises’. Many of the competitors who have no chance will be locked into a cage as a group with someone else and told they can leave if they win or after a certain amount of time passes. The more nefarious element of this challenge is that professional fighters are paying for the service of getting in some ‘full contact sparring’ that leave people in the hospital. Now the death toll has started, with one competitor dying to a slightly crazy zankist. Laura has banned them from the facility and implied full measure of penalties onto them for murdering someone so the arena isn’t completely insane yet at least, though it does have opportunities for this to keep happening.

Meanwhile the more legitimate arena is still dominated by a team of fighters she sponsors, while not technically exploiting anything it’s probably not good that the winnings keep getting funneled to her ‘team’. I’ve also discovered that Paylenus is hanging around keeping an eye on the arena, drow find this kind of thing normal I suppose.

With the increased funding, Hylavi has taken to buying more assault shuttles and security monitoring systems to keep an eye on whats happening around the streets. Also she’s on her way to Sol at the moment to try and see what is going on with Eleazor.

To a similar note I’ve been keeping an eye on Satsujin. She’s definitely been offered extensive packages to join any organization she wants except the more criminal types. Though she still seems to be just wandering about contemplating her life choices and her newly extended lifespan. I’m also looking into what’s going on with the jydoq while I’m here.

We’ve sent the explorers out to FO-234 to see what exactly is going on there, I expect we’ll be meeting up with the Kar’soluth there as well, for better or worse.

Well I suppose her metaphor makes sense, invasive species and all that. With Haziel coming to Enohas, let’s see what happens. I have to say though, I’m a bit curious what would happen if she encountered the living planet thing we found across the galaxy. Does the super druid control the trees or does the organism its attached to win that one?

Moving along, steamworks’ prototype is coming along nicely. To the point I would say its operable but they seem to say there’s always room for improvements.

Alexander said to point out its Reika’s fault that Nila got away after three weeks of tracking her through the forest and several major injuries resulting from the hunt. I’m not really sure what Reika’s up to on that one other than she does have a bit of a weakness for helping people out. Unlike most Nah employees…

As for the offer for the merkas, we’ve been sort of busy tracking down Nila and the merkas left to return home. Since we were stuck to large groups due to the threat Nila represents, we haven’t been able to delegate tasks too well. Though now that the Nila problem is technically resolved, we can head on over to their city in a bit. Particularly Reika, they seem to like Reika.

We’ve also opened Jamalia up for immigration to see if anyone wants to come on by and begin the process of enlarging the colony. This has gone pretty well given its a golden world with a vittles farm already on it. It’s not exactly a huge surge, given the current state of the galaxy and all, but its definitely more than most colonies get during such registrations.

We contacted Que to see how they’re doing, they are definitely interested in the conduit between you and Irae. I’ve also learned they are under the representation of an illithid who is both a little reclusive and also kind of a mad scientist. Though I suppose that was obvious just by the fact that they’re trying to replicate the synapse using psionic technology. Not as crazy as Vasia at least.

You don’t need to be concerned about me sir. My mental health is kept soundly intact just by being in your presence. Its a comforting reminder that I don’t live in a fishtank. Sort of…puts things into perspective. Want another fish toy? Might keep you company if you intend to visit Azilath yourself. I’ll go get the forklift and load you into the freighters.

As for therapists, I suppose we could find a few back in Sol. They’re definitely not going to be one of the highly employed professions in the current state of things, despite the obvious need for their presence.

Cassir has rerouted her course back towards Sol to meet up with Khymin and look for Qhalord. Will take a bit to get there. Though that means everyone who was on the way to Jamalia with her are now also going to Sol.

Peter is out looking for Seiyomi, though as might be implied its hard to figure out where to start. He’s headed to Sol on the same ship as Khymin as that is likely a decent place to start.

Vamon is sitting comfortably with no complaints about how long it takes the extinction event to arrive and destroy his homeland. Also he’s taken over Alexander’s duties as an ambassador while at Moncayo so he also took over Alexander’s accommodations in the form of getting to eat all the fancy food at the fancy dinner parties.

Meanwhile the shipyard has been freed up to resume normal production for the most part with just one dock now reserved for research projects since we’ve managed to disassemble the wreckage and see which bits of them we actually need to have laying around fully assembled for study. So profit margins are back.

40th Day ships are headed to FO-234 alongside Lancaster’s explorer ships.

As for merkas tree samples, we did manage to find a few. Well more so the Astral Order dug up a few already for similar research purposes so we just had to get to Jamalia to look things over a bit. We’ll have the staff join the Order to visit the merkas city soon so we can do all that negotiating at once.

Other vivarium work: Yelay do not have biological genders they have ‘but on the inside i feel’ genders. Though they have twenty seven genders and its more like…high school cliques than relating to sexuality, just not quite a phase. Unfortunately, all the astronauts are the same gender, hence they were all astronauts. That and the potato reference is because they can cut off their reproductive organs and use that to grow a new yelay. These organs aren’t quite ‘junk’ like ours though. Imagine testicles, but they grow in a bunch like grapes and are technically attached to the inner thigh area rather than the crotch. Once cut off, they can grow in soil conditions that are likely highly prevalent on their homeworld until you get a baby yelay.

Meanwhile, the Fenalis project has promising results of no major pathogens being transmissible at least not of our current test batch. Also I’m not sick or itchy and I have three of them. Due to Lancaster being both a scientist and a stickler for procedure they’re still clearing through more tests.

Adryn and his team have been loaded onto their ship and sent off to Tykel, though as your advisor I’m just going to tell you now that you should really send someone shady with them. Sivataur are not good with social cues and Tykel is literally governed by gangsters. I’m sure they’ll be fine buuut…I am concerned they piss off the wrong people and get shot. This is the city where you can find Arkaric’s main headquarters at after all.

Uneloj and the Yelay are getting along well, both displaced aliens in a foreign land. Though Uneloj is still withholding his sahad knowledge until he finds a trip out of here since he knows its the closest thing to currency he has right now. He seems to be leaning towards taking a job with the Nomads to help fill out its new battlecruiser, at least for the short term until he can save up enough to go home.

The Alnae ultra carrier’s food supply is contained on two separate decks. One on its topside and one on the lower end, it spins to distribute sunlight to them on a day night cycle. While these sections are particularly vulnerable to attack given their proximity to the outer hull, it’s still a very thick hull. Options for disruption include setting it on fire, bombarding the hull in naval combat, or letting loose some sort of disease within the crops. Two of those require getting someone on board though, the other requires fighting an ultra carrier. I’d say we prefer the former.

The disease idea is tricky as we don’t know specifically what crops they have nor will we have long to study them. Though add that to something that could actually infect the populace and you’ve got a recipe for a ship that needs to solve some problems. However the catch to that is the only people who are truly skilled in disease-craft would be the Jaal’darya. Who Somnus is not on the best terms with right now. Though we could send someone with much more discreet connections to meet with them, like Haggard. There is also Doctor Pierce but she’s nowhere near in position to do anything right now.

Just setting things on fire is risky because whoever starts that likely will have a very difficult time extracting since their attention will be drawn to the infiltrator the instant all the fire starts. Though it is a nice quick and direct plan of action. Once we cut off their internal food supply they may not need to dock just yet, but they will need to start importing food until they can start a new crop. It might cause them to just leave the system altogether and go settle down on a star in the frontier…which would suit our needs just fine actually. If it goes far enough away, then at least the politics surrounding it would be able to acknowledge that its not in striking range of any planet it wants back in Sol.

We’ve had Michael meet with Laura, though that just keeps us in touch with her shenanigans for the moment as she doesn’t have any major things going on right now except hijacking almost every good deed Lancaster and Ilex try to do for a profit. Which…well Lancaster is still dealing with that. In keeping tabs with the gangs she brought in on the backs of those programs, they definitely seem aware they aren’t the top dog because they know Laura is. I’m also just remembering that literally all of this could have been avoided had we recruited Laura a bit more aggressively given her disposition towards not liking secrecy.

The op to go capture Elgrim went…south fast. Vanjin and Setani were both on death’s door. Though we can blame this mostly on Jhaeros reappearing and getting involved. Also it turns out Elgrim is very dangerous…and sadistic. Fortunately, Selona was also there looking for him. It turns out they had actually been following Vanjin due to being too lazy to do the footwork on their own. We also got to meet Arkaric’s newest…creation. Elgrim was supposed to be exported to the Raven before his escape, so they’re after him as well due to the potential he represents for their business. Which…is basically what we were planning on doing with him anyways. So its convenient that we were there instead of anyone else, since the Phantoms see us as kind of colleagues. Fighting that new…thing…of Arkaric’s to capture Elgrim would not have been desirable. Though since it turns out our plans align well with the phantoms on this one, we can probably still carry out the mission and put in a reservation to buy him from the Raven. We just might need to send someone else in the meantime to help capture him, Vanjin and Setani are both in the hospital. Setani has the worst of it, Vanjin’s regneration is helping her recovery but Setani might not make it. The doctors are trying to fix her up with cybernetics, but Elgrim’s method of attack damaged her soul directly and things aren’t going as they should. It doesn’t help that he just toyed with her, draining her all he liked until Shanhai showed up.

Contacting Zhuan has been rough since we don’t really blend in with criminals as well as we used to. The best we have for that would be the Nomads but they’re still on their way to Sol. Zhuan’s little empire is mostly just a few suburban blocks where he maintains his farm. He’s not really as crazy as some of the other kinds of people we encounter out here. For him, the criminal life was just a matter of maintaining the family business and he’s content to do business fairly as long as no one picks a fight with him. Though while I’m noticing a recurring theme of our recruiting attempts running into some other recruiters, I’m not sure how to feel about this one. The other people talking to him are representatives of Laura King’s family. Offering him a new family to work for since his old one is pretty much dead thanks to the invasion and a method of transporting his whole gang to Koura should he want to try his hand on a newly developing world on the frontier. They’re obviously quite good at hitting the right notes to talk to him about compared to our agents who are less ‘in’ with criminals ever since Sophia retired.

As for Bardhe, we had an easy in to start talking with him since Ilex wanted us to extend some job deals for him in the meantime. Which he took. So I can say that he is currently wandering around Kar’Soluth space looking for vals to assassinate. I guess…that works?

Back here at Koura, Ohalyn doesn’t really seem to mind being a slaver. It seems like whats really eaten away at her is everything that happened leading up to her becoming one. The invasion took everything from her, including her husband and two children. She was a stowaway on a transport that brought her to the frontier, looking for a way to escape the memories of what she lost. Then forced into prostitution which later turned into her current trade. Elves tend to be more attached to their children than even humans and gnolls due to the investments that have to be made by their race to have any. She’s lost so much that she stopped caring about what she takes from anyone else. Which might explain her skill at running the slave trade around Koura and Somnus. Even though Lancaster gave her a much more vibrant and lively business to run, I guess it doesn’t replace what she lost and so she keeps doing the slaving business since its what she understands and is good at. Running the casino is more of a job for people who can still smile. We ran some observation on her and now two agents are depressed upon realizing they’ve been spying on a woman who cries herself to sleep every night and is still trying to cope with the aftermath of the first invasion. Maybe Ilex was right about hiring more therapists around here.

We’ve set the Nomads out to Sol to look for some ‘recruits’. They’re going to work on that for a bit. We’ve handed the battlecruiser off to them and had it refitted to their specifications. Which were extensive…apparently letting pirates design a dream ship comes with them doing mildly crazy ideas. Also a lot of mutiny protections. Though it does seem that Andal and his core team will remain on their little corvette. I suppose they’re attached to it at this point. As for a potential base, they seem fine with working out of the private docks attached to the lowest decks of Somnus. Since it gives them direct access to the station. Though we’ve definitely had to improve their security clearance as a result of all this and now Andal is roaming the offices asking people questions. Not particularly sensitive questions, more so about their holiday plans or hobbies. He took three of our handlers out fishing on Koura too. I caught a shark looking thing that we think wasn’t as edible as we thought. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom again.

With the Nila situation sorted out, we’re shipping back to Koura with our new recruits for training. They’ll be alright I’m sure. Also the men could use some time to rest for a bit I suppose, since a major invasion is on its way. Speaking of which, we might be able to get Lancaster to fund our next expedition if she wants us to go protect anything in particular. If not I imagine sooomeone will pay us to help fight in the invasion, so easy job to pickup soon wherever we wind up going. Time to get ready for that deployment though.

Posted on October 24, 2021

Stories of Lore 13

We’ve at least discerned that Riley is still alive. She might need therapy, but she’s still alive. We don’t know if she will remain that way, or if she’ll ever be returned to normal. We also can’t contact Irae since Renjala is no one knows where and we haven’t been able to get him to respond to any of his messages. Sethis checked in on his phylactery and we know he’s at least…fine? Though communication with the KouKou is lost until Renjala returns from whatever mess he got into unless we use Ilex again. Though judging by what  happened last time, maybe we just wait for Renjala to come back.

In hindsight I probably shouldn’t have opened with that, that’s a bit of a…disturbing matter and now I’m just going to talk about colonization. So the starships went to explore the planets we’ve come across previously and look…well less promising. Some have a few potential resources though we have yet to fully exploit the ones already available to us beneath Somnus. Koura city is big but the planet has some space we could place more things on. Not to mention Orchard if anyone is okay with the cold.

Though if you really just want colonies all over space, we have a long list of planets who are less than ideal compared to Koura. Their atmospheres are even more imbalanced or the gravity is even worse, also a lot of dust balls as I hear the surveyors like to say. Though with some effort we could establish hostile colonies on them and see what becomes of it. In terms of resource mining, at best we found some common materials.

Though when we had a a ship bump into the Sahad entity, the ship captain described it as “like hitting an immovable object.” The ship is currently having its hull repaired. No major damage as they didn’t ram it too hard, just enough to confirm that this wasn’t making any progress. The entity seemed to take no offense at the attempt oddly enough. It just…ignored them and made sure they didn’t go too far past the rift.

As for Koura Cures, its still developmental. This is very sensitive due to the ‘window’ of parasite removal to yield the positive effects is about six hours long. Which doesn’t seem too bad for a major case but if we were to put it in the hands of less than experts it would definitely kill a lot of people just because the doctor forgot to check his watch while helping some other patient or another. They’re actually currently researching methods of getting it to stop on its own at the correct time or a separate type of injection that kills the parasite so slowly that it works through at the right time without needing such precise intervention. Technically we could start selling the idea now and particularly careful doctors would yield some success though the instant we get onto Sol News for spreading a mutating parasite that drives people rabid will be very bad for the long term future of the company. That being said, at least here on Koura itself we can have the experts apply it as necessary for any extreme medical cases. Which we’ve done a few time for trials to see about getting the process to work. Though we put the test subjects into a coma so we can keep their mutation process constantly monitors as its not a specific timer like baking bread. There’s just a certain point where everything is cleaned up depending on the initial condition of the patient and that is when the parasite starts renovating its new residence. So it has to be caught at that exact moment to make sure it doesn’t start causing new problems that cause the host to become dependent on the creature.

Oh and also Faelyn is planning to name the alliance something other than “The Frontier Alliance” before the invasion of Nelta so that if we make it through alright, they’ll print that name in the news instead of calling us the Frontier Alliance. A chance to start a PR campaign I suppose. So she’s taking input from various members. Though less so on the prefix and more so the suffix. We’re still trying to figure out if we want to keep going with “alliance” or something else. Some like Alliance, others want to call it an empire to project the strength of the inner empires as well to gain some air of legitimacy, though others are wary of that meaning we have to call Faelyn an empress if she doesn’t spread out her powers as the alliance leader any further. Which she seems less than willing to do regardless of her title. So just thought I’d bring that up in case you wanted me to bring anything to the floor’s attention.

So with Renjala currently missing, looks like ol’ Wolum is gonna be in charge around here. You there, squire, up the defenses. All of madhammer is currently impossible to contact and so is the first lance. I’m going to have to-

Actually in the absence of the grandmaster, command falls to me.

Given that our leader is an immortal lich, actually I don’t think we have an official chain of command for who takes over if we can’t contact him. I suppose with the champion missing as well then I gueeess Knight-Chancellor is next in line.

Oh its not because I’m Knight-Chancellor. It’s because I pretty much run the Moncayo Chapter house, and I have the last lance available to contact at all. So if I say we’re doing something, then that’s what the entirety of the order is doing since the entirety of the order is now just my boys and me.

You make an excellent point. Very well sir, well the Grandmaster is currently missing. We’re not sure why, though from Jamalia we detect no super weapon detonations that could have wiped out everyone all at once, and his phylactery is still operating as normal. So I assume he is in some sort of scenario that prevents communication rather than physical destruction of his body. Likely drow jamming.

I see. Well before he went to battle he had the foresight to have me initiate traveling to Jamalia in case it was necessary. It does indeed seem that was the correct play. I will continue my standing mission to travel to Enohas and I will go to his last known location to provide reinforcements. Do we have any shuttles remaining at Jamalia?

Yes, there are two in reserve.

On behalf of the Moncayo Chapter Master, I will offer Nihlav any material possession within my power, including weaponry, to grant her if she does one favor for me. I need her to take the merkas to the last known locations of the conflict and scout the area for us. They know the land, they are naturally good at stealth. With Renjala under jamming he could be anywhere, and I need-

She left two days ago with the other merkas to return to her city. Said something about a long talk with Reika convincing her she needed to go home and take care of things. Also relaying the message that they need to prepare their defenses in case Kar’Soluth should find them.

Well that is mighty unfortunate for us. I guess we’ll go in the way a knight should, face first into an obvious trap. We don’t know what kind of danger Renjala is in, though we do know he is still in possession of his material body and that is good enough to know that there is something worth reinforcing. Now, while I am in transit, are there any other matters Renjala needs to have tended to in his current absence?

Why yes sir. We alerted Faelyn to our claim over the Paizarus system for registration. She said the registration is accepted and the system is marked as being a primary claim. We may declare a capital claim if we wish. Though I’m just reading the aethermail. I’ll have to get clarification.

That is a matter for which we can hope Renjala will return in time to deal with. Its a primary claim because its the first colony we established on our own. Which means unless Faelyn herself rules in favor of another party, no one else should be settling there without our permission. A capital claim marks it as our capital, which only we can do because we have colonies in multiple locations. A capital claim essentially states that we have full authority over it. With a primary claim, settlers who establish another colony can establish another government that is just an ally under the frontier alliance. With a capital claim, Enohas is ours and while Faelyn can allow others to colonize there, they have to abide by our laws and governance while on the planet. Usually the only case for her to bypass us on a capital claim to allow colonization without our consent is military in nature. For example allowing her people to establish a military outpost. Though she put a sneaky point in the fine print. A capital claim is only available to those with large scale investments in multiple systems, however whatever you make a capital claim of cannot be changed. Ever. She said this is because people have a tendency to get over-eager and want to move their claims around as they see fit with new investments. Its a whole thing.

Basically you’re getting a lot of paperwork as a result of us declaring Jamalia and its moon station, because Jamalia is larger than some of the other colonies within the alliance and it is technically our first full fledged colony outside of Auwana. The rest of our stuff has all been in the same star.

However, it’s likely that we won’t make a capital claim on Enohas because as the Order we technically fall under Somnus. So it is more likely that once everything gets sorted out, Lancaster will put that on Koura. Basically, it’s just a lot of paperwork. We can wait for Renjala to get back to deal with it, or just forward it to Lancaster.

You spend a lot of time talking to them about fine print don’t you?

As Moncayo chapter master, such is my duty as a primary liaison to the frontier alliance. Also its good for Somnus’ interests to have me and Winter just there all the time. It looks good when we have people actively involved in alliance politics on a regular basis and keeps our position as one of the top members of it in a nice cushy lead.

Wait a minute, I run most of the administration for Renjala. I know he declared you knight-chancellor but I don’t even see the rank “Moncayo Chapter Master” anywhere in these documents. Did you just make that title up?

I have been spending time with the ARC fleet admiral, a Sir Vamon De’Sartori. He has advised me to try just calling myself by a title and assuming the responsibilities of that title and see if anyone bothers to stop me or just assumes its true after long enough. I said that seemed improper but after a bit too wild of a night I accidentally blurted that out to Winter and have been kind of stuck with it ever since until someone stops me. It’s pretty much true anyways.

So…anyways. Steamworks profits are up as we produced an automatic door that works without ethi technology. It makes a bit of unnecessary noise, but its not too shabby. We’ve been approached by a distributor who would like to buy steamworks products in large quantities so that he can resell it elsewhere. Specifically I think he’s going to try to sell it in Kar’Soluth knowing that normally we wouldn’t have any dealings with them.

Another matter which can wait until Renjala returns. Though if you ask me, I do suggest complying if nothing else to give Nah a sort of sneaky route into Kar’Soluth from many angles as who knows where things might be sold here or there. High chance of never using that angle, but hey money is money and you never know what Nah might need.

What else is going on?

Well Faelyn’s ambassadors have traveled to Kar Soluth and Valdir as they mentioned they intended to. We’re short staffed so it seems Somnus was unable to find anyone to send to Valdir with her ambassadors. Though they did alright. Yasrena Val’Hari has agreed to order the Vloz’Khress to cooperate provided the condition that this exempts Sarghess from being expected to show up to any ground invasions and that the Jaal’Darya be permitted to enter frontier space afterwards. Apparently Sarghess is currently still nursing its wounds from its fight with the Song Clan and so she is using the opportunity to say that Kar’Soluth contributed without having to risk their damaged ground forces. No one is really sure what that clause about the Jaal’Darya is for though.

As for Valdir, Azilath agreed to send assistance on the terms that all biomass be listed as a spoil of war to be retrieved and sent to them. So Faelyn is asking us to have Victor deploy the salvage branch of New Horizons after the battle and make sure they retrieve all the corpses to be sent to SR3. Which was renegotiated twice to make sure that New Horizons could act as the official salvager of the battle so that not every empire sends people over. Basically fifteen layers of fine print later we get to “ask Victor to send out salvage ships and distribute the loot as the contract states to get Valdir to send its pandem casters out with us”.

I am surprised Renjala did not ask me to visit the Valdir with the alliance ambassadors. Though given the situation we are now in, that may have been the correct call. I am proceeding towards Enohas with haste. Arrival time of three standard days. Hang in there boys, Papa Alex is comin.

. . . Papa Alex?

I may have been spending too much time with Sir Vamon De’Sartori.

I’m not sure if you remember this, but the Nomads along with the Raiders of Abbathor were actually the very first pirates to steal an alien ship. They also did it during the very first invasion. if it pays well they’re interested at least. Though they pointed out, the larger the ship the harder it is to take, and alien ones have a problem of them not knowing the controls. Also they no longer have Halaestra, so they can’t do pandem grabs anymore. They might be able to take over one during the pandem operation we’re currently trying to plan though with some assistance. As one of the big problems with these operations is that they have to  get the ship into a secure location so they can take time to try and figure out the controls.

Contact was established with Riley and that was…fun. I’m not leaving this station, pass me some wine.

As for Cassir, she’s been taken by Vasia for the journey to the strange event. Admittedly Vasia took way more stuff than she needed and was definitely hoping to stay there longer but we’ve discovered that doing so would result in a potential conflict with alien fleets coming to investigate the very same thing she was. Though she did find the last survivors of that race, who are too primitive to know about the rest of the galactic community. Also she just started looting the city and filling all the ships she took with herself to bring back for study.

Speaking of which, when I told her over the comms that we had found a sahad mage that is now roaming the station, she said to capture them until she gets back. All of her support staff is with her on her other operation, though I do know she called Sethis and asked him to kidnap the sahad mage and throw them into a convenient cell until she could get back. Because…that’s her solution to everything.

Also I’m going to point out that Vasia will kill you if we don’t capture Uneloj but still show them Salied. We still haven’t cleared Uneloj for certain levels of access to our facility. Specifically the existence of the lowest decks. Also Salied was taken with Vasia and they’re still on the return trip with their haul of stuff anyways. They left last month.

Vamon is back at Moncayo with the fleet in hand.

Also we conducted the ritual and Uneloj showed no signs of noticing, it wasn’t even very secretive. We were just up here at the fishtank when we did it. So we’re not sure what the limits of his ability to sense mana is, so far it just seems related to individuals mana capacity rather than mana itself.

40th Day has gotten most of the colonist shipped out of the warpath of the incoming Nelta fleet. We’ve also scanned the entity and determined that some of the exerlus scanner upgrades are hard to read. We brought back the data and are now going over the process of how to read it. We’re not sure though if  its the exerlus scanner or the entity itself being strange.

Adryn is currently still difficult to contact but reports say he’s somewhere deep across the continent on Ash checking out another ecosystem for anything interesting to hunt there.

So far the poaching deals have been sketchy, largely because with how close to extinct they are, finding them is proving tricky. I mean we got some birds shipped in though I didn’t really think those were all that exciting. I suppose it helps build up the Vivariums attractions though.

Also the Maker alien is already in a very non hostile environment. That’s part of what makes it so dangerous. It clearly likes to live underground in caves so we have no windows into its habitat and scientists have to round the corner into that thing’s lair to get to it. Also we think it might get along better with one particularly young keeper, though that’s the one who brings the food so that could be related. He has not been attacked though so maybe that’s paying off.

When it comes to looking for new diplomats, do you mean for Nah divison or Somnus in general? Or do you mean someone who is more of a socially talented agent? I can find that last one inside one of our departments. Though if we were to recruit from Somnus security, there is a couple of promising fellows that I like because of their background in military operations.

As for Uneloj, I can’t tell if he’s a bit quirky or if that’s just how his people are. They are at the very least very opinionated on a wide variety of things. I also think he’s learning about Somnus in order to take that information back home with him once he gets a ride out of here. That being said I can’t tell if thats actually espionage or more of a ‘hey i found this vacation spot’ kind of information report. He’s not really asking about defense systems, he’s much more interested in what coffee is. Though he seems convinced its a chemical stimulant that all our soldiers must be having shot into their veins twenty four seven for maximum combat potential. Aryn gave him an energy drink as a joke and watched him bounce off the walls for a few hours. By the way,  do not steal any energy drinks from the company fridge labeled Aryn. She doesn’t label them herself, we have someone that does it after she puts in there so people know not to drink it. Not because she gets uppity if someone does, but because its made for dragons. That shit will give a kobold an immediate heart attack.

As for initial scouting into Lynatael’s dealings, he is…very secure as mentioned before. He rarely leaves his personal bunker and all details of when council meetings will be held are secret. As in only one person knows when they will be and then just gives them all a fifteen minute warning to get in the car and head to the capital building. They are kept under extremely tight security at all times, either they’re in the bunker or they have an entire military company with them. Mechs and gunships included. With how many of these guys have been assassinated that lead to Kaylen coming to power, I can kind of get it honestly.

Vanjin and Setani are setting up an ops base on Thenica, did you know they haven’t really worked together before? They’ve always been kind of on separate gigs. Vanjin pointed out we should send Leon. She’s a hunter but he’s an assassin. A violent one, but he’s a bit better at finding an opening to strike whereas Vanjin is about counter tactics. Setani is just managing the ops center until we need her to go murder something.

The councilor has thorough pandem protections on his bunker, and the city itself has some across major roadways as a safety precaution so civilians wont warp themselves into the middle of traffic. So basically high security everywhere. Vanjin has a way to get him but the problem is she can’t guarantee whoever pulls the trigger gets out alive, so that’s being workshopped. Aryn is looking into any security holes she can and hasn’t found an access code or anything but she did get ahold of the architectural plans behind the bunkers. So that’s a start if we wanted to do a more brute force approach.

We’re also tracking people he regularly meets with, though they all come to the bunker instead of them going out for coffee so that’s not as much of an opening as we’d hoped. So far its obvious his main vulnerability is his transit between his current base and the capital building for major meetings. Though he is under heavy guard during those moments. Multiple military vehicles and a lot of infantry escort him to the building where there is a special garage that takes him directly to the lower levels of it which are even more secure than his personal bunker. We at least can get an advantage of laying a trap for him as they always follow the same route, a major highway is the only way they can move so military assets to protect him. There are also enough dissidents that we might be able to use them to incite some sort of riot if we wanted a distraction, we’re still probing that one but he’s definitely not popular.

So there was a bit of confusion, we last had the Nomads looking to hijack slaves from Ohalyn. Which they did, but it was the shipment for Vasia…who still needed them. So that sort of went in a weird circle.

We’ve also received a unique offer from Laura King, who figured out what Vaeri is up to and apparently knows someone else who is curious about that factory. In exchange for making sure we share the results of the operation with her, she’ll provide Vaeri with something that will get her into the good graces of the executives of Siwa to catch their interest and get her deeper into the fold. Specifically, she can get possession of weapon tech that Siwa doesn’t have. Which will legitimize Vaeri’s position as being a ‘weapons tech’ kind of person to move among their social circles.

<<Contact Lost, Damned Drow Jammers>>

Stories of Lore 12

So far the plot to pandem portal the approaching aliens is going somewhat as expected. Despite Faelyn’s influence and the number of pandem organizations in Moncayo for the construction of the radar many of them are less than willing to go along with the plan. Renards Rifts only has a few volunteers and they’re not the most talented, though that could be understood given they are a civilian industry. Kaylen is willing to send us their military warlocks but can’t commit too many ships to the ambush as things are right now for all the aforementioned reasons. Vloz’Khress doesn’t seem interested at all though they stand to benefit most from an invasion like this. So they might be up to something odd. Shetou doesn’t really…have much for pandem after the schism with Kar’Soluth. Apparently that’s something of a problem they’re still dealing with. Though Faelyn is trying to appeal to Yasrena Val’Hari directly instead of through the Vloz’Khress in order to get her to order them to come help. Since apparently crazy Yochlol lady is actually easier to negotiate with than certifiably insane drow lady.

We’ve rotated crews onto larger ships, which no one complains about. Everyone loves getting a bigger ship. Especially one with more space in the living quarters.

In bad news, Riley is missing and so is half of the knights with her and a science officer. That’s…a whole thing going on though not much we can do from here about it.Khymin took the data we have on the path they took and rigged up a ship that could make the run. Turns out it wasn’t too hard since they’re just going to fly to a specific point and hopefully not die. Though the issue remains that a pandem caster has to go with them to open the rift, both to enter into the warrens and to exit it.

Meanwhile our food shipping plan is underway as discreetly as possible for the moment. The particulars have been taken over by Nah Division since that’s the only complicated part.

Scans indicate the approaching corvette is from Kar’Soluth, at least its identification tags are. Though if we need further confirmation, Alexander booted up the ol’…well brand new pandem radar on a hunch. One of the vals from the house might be on board. Normally we couldn’t be that specific but we happen to already know what bind we are looking for. One of them is potentially bound to Ecsanul. Which…could be a problem. As it passed by the stealth cruiser we learned that its modified to be a bit faster than normal and judging by its current path the math suggests they’ll be landing on the opposite side of the continent from us. Though we’re not totally sure why. If its plan was to attack us after we made a bit of an enemy over previous matters, you would think it would come closer. Also we don’t detect any ships on any other planes planning for a pandem insertion on top of them or anything. It has superior mobility to the cruiser and the cruiser has almost no firepower given its stealth modifications. We’re not likely to be able to engage them prior to their entering the atmosphere. We could try to intercept wherever they might be thinking of landing by taking the shuttle. We do have Madhammer here so ground superiority is definitely in our favor at the least. We could also just hole up at Jamalia, the guns are enough to knock out the ship if it tries to get too close.

Recruiting is going well at Moncayo, so is just getting settled into the area. Though attempts to get people on board with the anti NELTA plan are a little all over the place. Faelyn is going to try and handle negotiating with Kar’Soluth at the least. Though Renard’s Rift  offers very few relevant volunteers to fly off into war, they’re a bit more based on civilian infrastructure and most of them don’t have an interest in traveling on the highway to the danger zone.

Meanwhile, back at Jamalia, Nihlav is still a bit hissy over the matter of the arcurans and has been keeping busy finding wayward warrens she can gather in her preparation to return them all to the merkas city. Though she hasn’t really talked much on the matter otherwise, having not really committed just yet to any particular course of action. Though the education of the more lost and confused merkas is going well. Nihlav hasn’t really complained about that at all, though she doesn’t participate herself. Instead keeping to her work beyond the colony walls. Granted she needs the education the least, she figured out how our technology worked a lot faster than most other merkas. The others are taking a lot longer, and one might suppose that the older merkas learn things quicker than the younger ones for some reason.

As for Daesta, she seems to be doing alright though given that she was a fairly adamant priestess in training when we met her it isn’t much surprise that she takes to following after Nihlav on those adventures. She does seem to desire to be a priestess at the least, and her one thing to do if she could would be to go back to the city and train under the high priestess they have.

The shuttles have been mapping out the planet and finding other settlements, there are a few from the arcurans. Notably we have seen no other large settlements of the merkas, that city might be the only one left on the continent.

On the other hand, Madhammer is thoroughly demolishing any arcuran who dare challenge them. Yenneiros seems to find this to be an amusing sport. So their recruitment efforts are going well since all the arcurans really care about is going off to fight new things for glory and whatnot.

I’ve gone through the six colonies Faelyn considers to be at high risk and worked out the nearest locations they could be sent. Then the second nearest because those ones are still technically kind of close to the warpath. I’ve been in contact with them offering to help them shuttle around to safer locations.

As for the reading of exerlus minds, the answer is ‘kind of’. They can be interacted with psionically but not on quite the same level as we’re used to. For example, empathy is incredibly ineffective against them. While it still picks up some sort of information that might indicate they are more than robots its definitely nothing we can make actual sense of as its kind of like picking up pure static of inconsistent variations.

The Arc fleet is on its way to Moncayo to meet up with Faelyn’s fleet and resume position under the command of “Admiral” Vamon.

Preparations are underway to get Vasia everything she needs to travel to the mysterious coordinates. Vasia’s response to needing the device analyzed was to inform us that it was a massively complicated device that is similar to our psionic computer systems. She also thinks it isn’t writable twice, so once the sphere is made it is just stuck that way. So hopefully no one has any buggy code in it. Then she threw it in her luggage and walked off while I was still asking questions. We have more as there was one on each ship basically so I suppose that works. Also when asked if she intends to take any of the 004C creatures with her she said she was taking Balhast since she doesn’t want to leave it alone here on the station for too long. Especially since it only responds positively to her. Also to answer your question, yes we did try sending one of them and Salied through to talk to the entity and had no progress.

40th Day is at work with setting up for mining stations and given a few projections on where to set up the stations up to exploit asteroid belts that are rich in resources used to build things.

Also the Exerlus threw an engine schematic at us when prompted about the matter. Then just wandered off to continue scanning, pointing out that their new engine will be here to pick them up before we can build one with them anyways. That being said the schematic might as well be gibberish. We understand the numbers…just not what more than half of the systems actually are. It clearly uses sahad magic and it also clearly is unbelievably more advanced than anything we’ve ever encountered before. The entire schematic is written out with the expectation that you can place every individual atom during construction. We’re…not sure how high a tolerance for failure the design has either. This also might be exerlus humor to throw lesser civilizations a hint at how to do something that is technologically impossible for them to achieve and watch them scramble. So we’re gonna try that and see if it blows up, cuz why not at this point.

Also Adryn is still roaming around the planet and throwing random critters into cages to send back to us. Apparently things are going well and they haven’t found any predators of too much significance to them. Though again, information barrier due to the inability to carry signal through the atmosphere. So we’re basically just receiving handwritten messages in a bottle tied to some critter or another.

The Vivarium continues to try and work with the Maker and get it to make things they want but the closet they’ve gotten is to convincing it to make bigger monsters than before. Which would be good for cattle…if they didn’t all have claws. So far no deaths but a few maimings among the researchers. We had to get them a fancy cybernetic leg for that one.

We’ve also worked a bit on the vivarium’s construction as requested. The prefab colony also finished construction and is ready for rapid deployment whenever necessary.

We’ve had Vaeri start hanging around high society to try and meet with some Siwa execs. This will be a bit of a long con though most likely as she has to start with just meeting them let alone getting to a point where they might tell her about the underground lab. With Setani being sent out to Sol to get on Standby for the Alnae operation, we’ll need to pick someone new to be our point of contact with Laura King in particular should something come up. Largely just because leaving her unattended for too long could be dangerous.

The stealth cruiser is currently stalking around the area to see if it can catch any of the shipments. Though thats a matter of ‘wait and see’ and also identifying which ones to follow as the factory has regular shipments to all the normal places. We don’t know how often they ship stuff out to these other planets.

Meanwhile our new friend Uneloj is hanging out around the station trying to see about a way to get back home after our little ‘rescue’. We haven’t exactly revealed the nature of our division to him thus far for obvious reasons but that does make it hard to see his overall intent. Though so far the exerlus presence seems to make him uncomfortable and we’re not sure if he just has fifty conspiracy theories on the matter ready to go or any actual merit to his view of them.

As for our High Councilor target, upon taking the job the full details of which came in. Their name is Lynatael, he’s sort of in the middle of the pack among the high council for seniority both in age and duration of rule. So here is the first problem, not sure if you remember this but all the Alnae High Councilors are kept incredibly safe ever since the invasion and the schism that produced all the warlords. They all work from home in various underground bunkers around the capital city. Only rarely coming out, and usually just to proceed to the main building office for meetings with the others. So reaching them is half the problem. Their obscure hiding is how Kaylen rose to become Grand Marshall, since none of the councilors could make public appearances anymore without threat of assassination.

Lynatael himself is in charge of an area that was recently retaken by Kaylen and Madhammer. He had largely been just a figurehead for awhile while the area was out of Alnae’s control due to the rebelling warlord, though with it coming back into the fold of Alnae he has returned to managing the territory. This has led to some dramatic swings in policy in the area as it is still a wartorn ruin being re-integrated into the empire after a rebellious phase. So he and his administrative staff have definitely been making rather bold calls left and right to try and stabilize the area and see what resources need to go where regardless of who was holding onto them under the reign of the warlord. So he could very easily have a lot of enemies from every direction.

Interestingly though, he is the one that receives the food shipments that Lancaster is selling to Alnae. At the very least his territory is, likely to try and curb the chaos of the area by supplying it with much needed food. This is where things are starting to get dangerous, since we are working with Shetou to have them pirate some of these shipments intended for this area of Alnae and now we’re after this high councilor from the same area. There’s just a lot of ways this could cascade into a whole bunch of issues if we aren’t careful.

Back here at the base, we have been expanding the facility. Leon is also pretty good with the mech even if its not his primary combat method up till now. Definitely not a prodigal mech pilot though, we spent a week just running laps with him so he can get used to moving around in the thing.

When it comes to recruiting, given the nature of our operation the best way to find people is to put them through long term tests of other organizations. It is likely our best way of recruiting would be to approach those who are members of Gunhild’s strike team or members of the security force who are doing particularly well under Hylavi. That or ask Laura about the matter though this might be the one area she isn’t so effective in given that we’re worried about people who haven’t proven an ability to stick to aligned goal for too long.

Also we have the Nomads hanging around the station keeping an eye out for any of Ohalyn’s shipments.

Here at Jamalia we’ve done fairly well to bring up recruitment with the Arcurans, they’re definitely primitive and not terribly effective at using modern weapons but we’re working on training them for that. Also we’re besieging Helym next week just to prove we can because one of them said some cocky shit and now Gheir is rolling out the tanks to go test some of their theories.

Stories of Lore 11

Welcome to Sol News, I am your host Exme Faythe reporting live from the studio headquarters on Thenica. In news today, the war between Alnae and its splinter groups has taken some major swings as Grand Marshal Kaylen recently destroyed another of the rogue warlords, however the battle came at some cost as great stretches of farmland were destroyed by the warlord as an act of defiance.

All four major empires of Sol have been alerted to the presence of another Nelta fleet, even larger than the original invasion, moving towards Sol space on the Zonaricht plane by Faelyn’s scanning outpost. Negotiations are under way as the Frontier Alliance starts to try and convince the four primary empires to work together to deal with the incoming threat. Hoping that if we are prepared this time it will be less destructive. Though, it is proving difficult to unite the forces under a new power. There has been a sentiment among the empires to urge Valdir’s Emperor to return and lead the effort once again, though contacting Emperor Indal has proven difficult due to him having left aethernet range by several lightyears already on his journey into the northeastern quadrant of the galaxy.

It has been difficult to confirm doctor Taz’s legal status as a single individual instead of multiple in a coat. He is very clever about avoiding security cameras.

Echo 7 has informed me that they don’t share their scan information with other civilizations who are in active war due to a series of political mishaps long ago in which they learned that people are sneaky and will take the data to use against their enemies. Given the Exerlus’ general neutrality with the exception of the exiles, they prefer not to break this rule of theirs. So they aren’t sharing much useful about whats beyond the rift until our war is over. Apparently they mean both the war with nelta and the wars within our own civilization empires. Apparently this is a recurring thing for many civilizations to be frustrated with. Any civilization must be totally out of any ongoing conflict to get access to their archives. I thought to ask, apparently there is literally no one who can both make contact with them and are considered outside of any conflict ever since the galactic apocalypse began. Everyone is in a civil war for resources, being invaded by someone else, or in such a bad shape that contacting the exerlus isn’t really possible. The only way to make them reverse this stance is for them to be involved in the war on any particular side. Which you think would be easy to convince them of after the Nelta attack but they’re really stubborn and not prone to responding to attacks on them. Apparently this rule came about as a result of pirates often messing with them or less than fully represented civilizations committing to the attack on them. Basically the reason they aren’t invading Sol is because of this policy that prevents them from flipping a zero to a one and declaring humanoids an enemy of the empire just because of one particular criminal abducting some of their people. So…silver lining is that Arkaric can’t piss them off enough to make them invade all of Sol. Downside is they aren’t really springing to our side over the Nelta thing. Hylavi informs me that they only have ‘not really at war’ and ‘total war’ doctrines since their nature is to be expendable they don’t really care about minor offenses on their honor.

The exploration ships are just jumping from one star to the next on the path towards areas with potential higher yields so they are mostly finding dust balls, asteroid belts, and similar areas to mark down in case they come across anything obviously interesting. Though they don’t have the scanning power to get full readouts of resources and such. A few are proceeding towards known coordinates but they have to stop along the way to write down what they find in various systems.

I’ve had them start on the return path to swap their crews onto the larger corvettes.

I’ve also had Renjala contact Riley and the team to reassure them they aren’t just being left to die out there but that bringing them back might take some time to assemble necessary resources. In the meantime they’re poking around to see what they might find.

So all the offers to ‘sell food surpluses’ basically triggered a bidding war between Nelan and Paylenus. Which Nelan could win. Faelyn doesn’t really seem to care either way asked to stay on the call when we told the other two ambassadors about it. Afterward she said that though are intentions might have been good, ‘that right there is why you shouldn’t do that’ was her follow up. Basically every shipment bound for Alnae will be victim to pirates quite easily now since Paylenus will be able to figure out the route and that will escalate tensions between the two of them. She didn’t say why but she requested to be there when we try to explain to them that we’ll sell to them both at a fixed rate of equal quantities. When asked why she thought that was what you would do she responded with ‘just a hunch’.

Taz just arrived on the station after his trip to get out here. He’s been setting himself up comfortably and beginning with the Koura cures projects because…well he’s a doctor and thats a miracle medicine so of course he’s interested in that. This somewhat takes Yi Seong off the project though she was going to Jamalia with Madhammer anyways.

Madhammer just arrived here at Jamalia, hopefully soon they’ll be able to make contact with the arcurans and we’ll see what gets done with that. The 40th day colonists have arrived as well and we’re starting to look over the refinery to get production going in full. In the meantime Nihlav has been wandering off to go hunt down other warrens and so we have an influx of confused merkas at Jamalia. They still definitely don’t trust us due to our dealings with the arcurans and I suspect they’re keeping their guard up but lack any alternatives to accomplish their goals without our assistance at the moment.

Related to this, while it wasn’t any of the merkas at Jamalia, we have found a few more destroyed arcuran villages south of us that must have been only recently attacked. There were a lot of bodies from both sides at these sites. Some thing Nihlav is subtly behind it in some way even though she’s usually at Jamalia. Given her status among the merkas though it is conceivable that she could push them to operate in any way she ordered. Notably one of the issues with trading mana with them for food is that the merkas city doesn’t have the mana issue since it is still exposed to the moon and as stated, they’re a bit wary of us dealing with the arcurans at all.

We’ve wrapped up our work at Moncayo, at least the major parts of it. The pandem super scanner has been tested to work with sporadic results. Well actually it has a ninety percent success rate but one of the things we tested was Sarnai. Which basically yielded results equivalent of static. We know that this happens when tracking activity across certain lower planes that we didn’t tune the device to work on so well. There are just too many of them coming in and out of existence all the time to really bother with anything but the major known ones. Though what makes this case a little special is that Sarnai’s bind basically crashed the entire system when we tried to track it. Originally it was just for fun and to test it, we tested it on almost everyone there with a bind, but then they started obsessing over what the hell Sarnai is bound to. Six days of crashes later we’re convinced her bind has the ability to move between planes on its own accord. As if she bound herself to another pandem wielder, though then it wouldn’t make sense that she struggles so much with opening rifts on her own. They keep scanning her because…well its weird and they just built this big scanner so they have nothing else to do. Collected our paycheck though at least. Also the chapter house has finished construction as well. It’s big and fancy.

Steamworks has produced a unique tool recently of some actual progress using the tech that we made a toy of before. It’s still in the prototype phase but they’re working on transportation options for the magically disinclined.

Construction of the temple has been finished in Moncayo and Cassir has been wandering around the city getting to know the general place. Vamon’s fancy new weapon was sent to him, though its going through the mail and there is still a bit of distance between here and Moncayo, its on its way though.

Adryn arrived in Auwana and we just threw him onto the planet of ‘from whence no signal returns’. Reports are a bit…sluggish to get out of there lets say. Though it seems he and his team are settling in well enough and getting their….hunting lodge up and going while prodding at various creatures to see if anything is particularly dangerous. Though so far nothing presents an overly alarming risk to their presence.

I should note the parasitic specimens don’t actually have a name. Balhast is the name of the specific 004C sample that started the experiments. Basically that’s the name of Vasia’s dog and the rest are just…things with parasites. They don’t even all take the same general shape so its hard to define them by anything other than “we stuck a parasite in someone”.

That aside, we sent one to the far side of Koura to roam around and see what it does. It immediately ate the first form of wildlife it came across and seems to be going about exploring. Its adaptations prove effective enough that it doesn’t need to seek out specific elements of its environment for anything like shelter or consistent food supply as they are omnivorous. As such it appears to just keep roaming as it pleases without much desire to stay in one place.

The salvaged ship projects reveal a bit about sahad engineering. Mostly in that it is possible to activate sahad effects through a machine instead of a caster but they seem designed to be interfaced with by sahad users. It might be specific to the culture and design of the ships themselves so we can’t say for sure if thats an actual requirement. They store energy in much the same way that we do for arcane engineering since both forms of magic utilize mana. Though Sahad does not tend to draw its energy directly from the caster the way arcane does, at the very least not any of the spells we currently know about. It appears their engineering attempts with the stuff revolve around a specific material that is fortunately undamaged though what it is, we don’t know. It’s a black sphere, and I mean really black. There is no light reflecting off of it at all and it looks like carrying around a miniature black hole. This in some way seems to be the control system for the sahad devices and we’re still working out what the hell it does.

Also the silent auction has come and gone, your incremental bidding did nothing to help as they don’t tell you if you’re winning or not. The black market isn’t ebay, you just write down the highest you’re gonna go and then they contact whoever wrote the biggest number once the sale is closed.

The Exerlus are somewhat difficult to negotiate with for annoying reasons that Winter went over at the briefing already. But basically they’re not giving us any data until our civilization is considered to be “at peace”. That includes the rest of the Sol Empires for some reason. Though this is technically related to scan data. They still were willing to mention that they know how to travel the entire galaxy with basically more refined versions of what we use now. Part of that refinement is that similar to the prototype cruiser Lancaster has, they don’t need hallways, beds, bathrooms, life support, or really much else on a ship besides engines. Their galactic ships are just big engines that they hang onto while flying through space. As a result the engines can reach massive sizes and efficiency. Whiiiich explains why they haven’t left the system. Nelta destroyed their big engine and now they have to hang out here until someone comes to pick them up. They can hop between stars without it but it makes it take a very long time to get back to where they actually came from.

They do still take our scan data of those other planets though. So apparently the precise ruling is that they don’t share the scanning archives but they do whatever they want with their own tech that isn’t related to weapons. I suppose you could weaponize anything but to their perspective, scanners and engines aren’t really weapons. Their weapons are…frighteningly powerful.

Though the improved scanners we got from them are being implemented on some test ships in the fleet to try out on some of our adventures particularly on the boiling world due to its high biodiversity since the scanners are a bit better at finding out details.

The Golden Vivarium has finally finished construction and is fully operable. It has also begun some deeper research onto this maker monster thing. Progress is slow though at least avoids torturing the creature for results since Vasia is busy with New Age projects. Currently it seems to produce more monsters whenever it happens to have materials…it also creates those materials as byproducts of its own waste. So as long as you keep feeding it, it keeps building more things. Something for the vivarium caretakers to be extra careful about given that the creatures can be hidden and deployed as if programmed for highly specific tasks. Right now communicating an idea to it of building bigger more meaty things is proving tricky, while it has a higher level of intelligence than most animals it is still not sure what the tiny two legged people are trying to communicate to it.

Also Salied has been exhibiting odd behavior. More accurately, she seems to be having catatonic rambles when asked about her past that don’t match up to her past. Long story short, we did a lot of math based on her zoned out stares into the distance. Here are the coordinates, we have no idea what will be there or how much stuff we should send. Vasia wants to take over the operation and send pretty much half our stuff out there immediately though she can be a bit…eager sometimes. Might be smarter just to send a scout first to see what we’re looking at.

We’ve cashed out the semi brainwashed engineer. That took a bit more effort than expected for one missing persons case. While we’re on the topic, our cruiser arrived to scan the Siwa factory and poke around. The security is tight and we were able to infiltrate the upper levels. Though there is a basement lab where we couldn’t get our agents into so easily, the security spiked significantly for its lower labs. All employees of the factory also do not seem that aware of what is down there, at least not the ones we could sneak away for a chat. Further attempts might reveal our presence. My advice is that we would need to either take a social route of tracking down some execs and making friends, or a more brute force approach of sending the full ops team to break into there. Our agents are good at their jobs but we’re dealing with some maximum security conspiracy shenanigans now. We can try to take a wild push with low odds of success or we can try to up those odds and send in Vaeri and Aryn.

Though that being said its not for nothing. We have found that the factory produces a lot of weapons that never reach the empires in Sol. They’re supplying some sort of hidden army. We tracked some of their shipments off world and given that they are at the edge of the solar system, it is kind of obviously suspicious when all the shipments from the sneakier weapons labs are going away from the star. It is likely some independent colony is amassing an immense number of weapons, if not one that they own themselves and never declared. I’ve looked into the major weapons hub of the frontier worlds, Faelyn, and she is not the recipient of these. She actually produces her own at Moncayo which is sold to most of the other frontier worlds. Which eliminates a lot of potential recipients given the sheer quantity of arms being moved and just disappearing into space. Why this particular element isn’t as well hidden as the lower level labs is beyond me.

Raiben was particularly useful in finding how how the silent auction involving the alien works. More specifically who the final buyer was. Leon dealt with it from there and with some overtime hours from our staff we’ve managed to acquire the alien prisoner and it is on the way back to Somnus now. No one knows we’re behind the smoldering crater Leon left behind.

Also our offer to help Kaylen out was met with some amusement. To Kaylen we’re definitely small fry compared to the COA departments. Though she did consider that we are at least not directly associated with Alnae. Though we did still get an ‘audition’ job offer from Alnae related to this probing. It came from an anonymous intermediary shortly afterwards. However, its impossible to confirm if Kaylen even knows that people from Alnae are asking us if we can make an Alnae High Councilor disappear. Yeah that’s the job. It was very specific on ‘disappear’.

So this presents a series of…situations. First off, either this is an intermediary for Kaylen so no one can prove her involvement or its someone operating outside of her knowledge to accomplish some larger plot. So…we’re already in too deep just by hearing the offer. If Kaylen did ask us and we go tell on them to her she’ll know we’re not cut out for this kind of stuff. However, she could go a step further and try to silence us to make sure we don’t spread any further information around about the offer. Notable because as Grand Marshall the entire COA responds to her…so we could get into a shadow war spanning the galaxy against the second largest covert agency. The first being the Phantoms if you were curious. The intermediary would disappear whether or not Kaylen was behind them so we’d make no progress on figuring that out. Though if its not from her and we go through with it, we could be destabilizing everything she’s trying to pull together. This gets into why the job is to make them ‘disappear’. If no one can prove that they are dead they don’t know if they need to replace them, which creates a window of uncertainty during which some other things might be able to take place.

It’s times like these I’m happy that I’m not the boss.

Also Aryn found a way to advertise for Madhammer without paying ad money…technically. I say technically because I’m not sure if this is entirely the desired approach. She made them into a meme on social media featuring a video clip of a tank shooting a mech from their recent battle on Thenica they were involved in. It tends to feature captions that show a theme towards a discontent for anyone with more power than the poster.  It spread pretty quick. Free advertising?

As for Jicho, we kind of haven’t heard from them since the invasion. Aryn says there is a high chance whatever server farm they had was destroyed during which. Its hard to look into it any deeper than that as we couldn’t find them even when we knew they were still alive.

We ridin’ to Jamalia

Stories Of Lore 10

Well I had to specify ‘biologist’ and just hope they learn alien anatomy over time. Meet Doctor Taz, I thought you might like him. Instead of being an evil psychopath or maniac, he’s extra fluffy! He has some experience in the desired field though wouldn’t call himself quite an expert or take on the title of xenobiologist. Though to be fair, it is a new field and as we’ve learned the only people with a lot of experience are not the kind of people we want to employ. He’s only a year or two behind the experts in the field though so not that big of a deal anyways.

Our guest, Echo Seven, is still on the station. The rest of the exerlus are still scanning the system head to toe and have gotten involved with 40th day’s planetary shenanigans. It is interesting to note that they couldn’t penetrate the corrosive atmosphere of our neighboring planet either without some assistance. Though they keep developing their own side projects. Echo Fifteen is hanging out on orchard studying the Vittles farms. Echo Seven seemed to decide to learn to better replicate our humanoid appearance so they don’t look like a shiny version of you. To be honest they still look kind of like you though. But they managed to replicate flesh. I have no idea how they did that. Echo Nine replicated tree bark instead and is jump scaring people in the woods to ‘gauge our response times’. I wouldn’t say they seem particularly nefarious in their desire to understand us, just quirky. So that’s still going on.

Meanwhile, Riley is uhh…far away. It turns out the Astral Warrens pop out all over the galaxy. Remember how it was mentioned that there were only so many entrances despite the number of exits? We don’t know how to get her back other than a really really long voyage. She’s on the other side of the galaxy from us. Whats concerning though is she’s not just in any part of the galaxy. She’s in the area known to be “silnian territory”. So there is a chance she just gets outright assimilated if we don’t get her back sometime soon. Also we need a stealth cruiser to get past the rift entity, and she has our only one. She is out of contact range though fortunately, Irae is with her and Renjala can just possess her at will. So that serves for basic communication.

Speaking of the rift, it did not seem to take better to the dragon than any other thing we’ve sent to talk to it. However…the Exerlus found the rift during all their scans and the entity just outright ignores them. We’re not sure if it doesn’t think of them as life forms or if it just considers them to be higher ones than us. They’re scanning the planet on the other side of the rift unobstructed. Apparently they also are scanning the entity…just casually prodding at it and being left to their devices while doing so. We’re leaning towards the former because the entity doesn’t react to our probes either, so it being unaware of the exerlus presence would be consistent with that at least. Despite being a highly advanced alien species revered by many as a deified civilization, they really do kind of show their true origin. They’re just…probes. They don’t show any signs of having a motive beyond scanning for the sake of scanning. If left undisturbed that’s all they do. Now I’m trying to convince Echo Seven to tell us what it finds out about the rift. Meanwhile that idiot Whitetalon is trying to figure out what weapons Echo Consensus has. Turns out Echo Seven has as much firepower as a tank by the way. You can thank Yenneiros for figuring that one out.

When it comes to expanding Vittles to Jamalia, it’d probably only cost two million to really get started. It’s a golden world, the real threat though is the giant monsters roaming the place who might take an interest. So if we were to secure them within the walls of the hostile colony we’d be basically building a whole second one for all the farmland. So getting up to fifty million. Though the guns on Jamalia could probably protect it reasonably well enough if we just set up some tractors and plant some stuff right around it. Might get stepped on by giant monsters but losing one percent of the farm to a monster getting shot by turrets isn’t really that financially problematic. Other then that regular gates should keep out the more pesky smaller wild life. Up to you how deep into it you want to go.

Selling excess food to Alnae would definitely be an easy sell, though that might not look the best on our relations with Faelyn and the other colonies or the prince of Sharen that is here at the moment.

Also Faelyn’s reports on galactic travel coming towards the station shows an uptick in visitors. So at least we’re becoming more well known PR wise. Also she is sending more ships to us because apparently we have now told everyone about this rift and it’s going to need more guns to protect it from any other interests.

Oh also Vittles’ expanded harvest came in, so that’s going well.

Well we found the merkas matron. That was fun.

The second lance is continuing its research alongside the other companies at Moncayo.

The third lance is trapped on the other side of the galaxy as you have been so keen to help us figure out.

Our Shetou visitor is sort of left to his own devices as a tourist on the station at the moment since now the third lance is long gone to the other side of the galaxy. Though he has been hanging around representatives of Madhammer a bit much lately. I could only take a wild guess as to why. Also he was definitely interested in Renjala’s rift, but given that he is a drow you might be able to guess that it was hard to figure out what his actual ideas about it might be.

We’ve started having some of the trees cleared out around Jamalia so Vittles will have a place to set down some fields and seeds once they get here and manage to figure out how they want to set up their operation. By the way, we just shot a thirty footer that tried to bite the colony walls. That was a fun one to scare all the staff with.

As for the mana refinery station, the hiring signs won’t do much good just yet. We haven’t actually announced the system or its colonization yet so there is a distinct lack of people here except for the essential staff we brought along with us. We’ve been waiting until we were more comfortably established and figured out what is going on with the natives. We could publicize the colony to start bringing in some immigration though if you think its ready. Though the refinery definitely can’t be staffed by any natives, definitely  beyond their skillset. You could probably have some of the slaves from Somnus come over to work on it but will definitely need to bring in some experts on the operation. We might be able to just pick one up and not fully tell them where the colony they’ll be working at is though if we don’t want to announce that this place exists just yet. Just outsource to 40th day since they’ve been just selling colonists to colonies as a finders fee as of late.

Also steamworks has produced something marketable on an unconventional scale. Its really just a toy at this point but people seem to like them so its been selling even better than its actually useful projects. So that’s been selling nicely.

Cassir and the gang have made it to Moncayo and met up with Vamon to oversee the construction of the temple. Cassir and Peter are now working on figuring out how to train others to function the same way Cassir and her forces can to fully set up its infrastructure. So far in the quest for a cause they’re mostly a reactionary force since everyone’s issues are ‘aliens and shit keep invading us’.

Though on that front, Faelyn actually knew some information to pass on to Vamon about that which was just casual conversation at a party but turns out to be more information than most people had before. Apparently, Nelta sort of solidified its position on the war against Sol. Due to the destruction of the galaxy that came about soon as we were discovered, most of them have pushed heavily for a united war. Faelyn’s diplomats survived contact with Nelta because she sent dragons that were very tenacious and difficult to kill. So she has been the first person to successfully establish any level of communication with them even if its kind of a hostile embassy situation on a planet that kind of doesn’t want to keep picking this fight. So if anything her ambassadors might be swaying a few towards not quite sticking around with the Nelta alliance. But it does provide some insight at least. So for the forseeable future, don’t expect Nelta to be all that interested in talking to us though they are falling apart from the inside thanks to all the chaos going on. Chaos they blame on us…probably with good reason.

Adryn is in transit from Sol alongside Setani to return to Auwana and visit the Phoenix colony to begin the hunt.

Vasia reports that infecting the 004C experiments with the parasite again produces no result. The parasites introduced are destroyed by the host’s now improved immune system. Essentially since its adapted for life on Koura, its capable of resisting its own parasites once they’ve reached a full metamorphosis. However, it is apparently possible to infect a subject prior to this transformation with multiple parasites to get wilder and wilder mutations. This doesn’t seem to have any real benefit.

The Exerlus pretty much just threw a scanner and schematics for them at us. We can tell they aren’t as advanced as their best, but its still something. Apparently though, their more powerful scanners can’t be shared because they rely on the exerlus power cores. So to make those we would need to be able to actually build exerlus. Also in exchange they took one of all of our scanners from the warehouse and…scanned the scanners. Speaking of which, they stated they’ll probably just visit the Vivarium every now and then instead of remaining by it full time. They can travel through space much faster than we can so its not as much of a trip for them.

Also 40th Day is expanding its colonization training and delivery system quite well, this is actually becoming a more profitable venture than actually colonizing things. Since everyone needs more people and a lot of people need to get out of Sol.

We’ve brought in all the alien ships for breaking down and studying, the shipyards are kind of full of these now which is hurting profits while the bays are taken up by these projects.

One question about the Maker research. Do you want me to have the local staff of the Vivarium do that project or….do you want Vasia to do it? Very different requests. Also very different results.

We’ve brought back the only semi-brainwashed engineer to collect the bounty. Probably not the most ideal scenario for the client but that’s their fault for being very vague with the job posting anyways.

The stealth cruiser is on the way to the Sol system to look into the Siwa factory. The engineer didn’t really reveal much to us that the Raven hadn’t revealed to Vaeri in the first place. All we know is that there is some sort of secret lab going on in there doing something strange. I’m going to bet right now that the stealth cruiser won’t find much, if just a precursory scan would work than this wouldn’t be drawing so much interest.

Reika is currently busy several lightyears away dealing with Jamalia and all of its issues, though if Renjala sends her out she’ll definitely go to the station to help take it over.

As for the auction, its some sort of alien that knows how to use Sahad that is somewhat captive due to a Shetou raid into alien space. One of the minor houses were the ones to acquire it. It isn’t a particularly large or violent captive apparently, though doesn’t seem happy about being captive.

As for Solvang contracts, Vanjin is just taking on random ones for now that she can handle while shes in Sol to help with the funding. Nothing particularly major like the engineer hunt’s payout seems to be going around at the moment though.

Oh and Setani is on her way back to Somnus if we need her for anything else coming up.

Well the war on Thenica was…destructive. We managed to come out victorious alongside Kaylen which will have large scale political ramifications. In particular, Kaylen now has majority control of Alnae’s territory once again instead of just ‘the largest fraction’. With only three major warlords left she is close to reuniting the empire though a catch to that is her assets are pushing to exhaustion fighting one warlord after another as they all controlled different sections of the military. That and the one who absconded with the Ultra Carrier.

As a result she’s currently recuperating but that does mean its likely we can easily find more work in the future with her for continuing this campaign since there will always be a need for more soldiers.

Now for the bad news, uhhh the second company is just gone. Well more so the losses were so catastrophic we dissolved it to refill the ranks of the first company which is also in shambles at the moment. This was a real battle, and the death toll reflects it. Though, our upkeep costs are way down now…so…silver lining?

Most of our armor support is gone as well. We were able to salvage some that are in repairable condition for Whitetalon Armaments to get back up and running for us. So currently we’re on a recruitment drive, which fortunately the Astral Order is helping us out with over at Jamalia. Gotta figure out who to send though.

Stories of Lore 9

Exerlus count down negative one week. They’re still scanning things. Long as no one bothers them they seem to just keep scanning things. The issue Hylavi is having is that we don’t know where Arkaric is and now the exerlus are all over our system. So he has a lot of opportunity to start something if he wants to and we’re having a hard time keeping tabs on all of them while they keep splitting into more entities to scan more things. The odd part is their broad scans they did upon arriving revealed almost everything we could ever imagine wanting to know but they insist on scanning everything anyways. Despite Nelta’s recent attack, that hasn’t seemed to dissuade them from sticking around to scan things.

Speaking of which, they found the rift and have been scanning it relentlessly. I don’t think they know what it is or what the data means yet, though their curiosity towards it is quite limitless.

As for Harlus, apparently her current plans are to solidify her position in the office and assemble a staff of useful advisors. Her next plan is to read the fine print of our relations with Moncayo to see what might be of interest there. She was also present for meeting with Nelta when they arrived to reclaim their missing fellow from the Astral Order.

The trial of Sarden took about twenty minutes. We don’t have the longest legal code necessary for proper lawyering to take years. We have multiple witnesses that she killed two people, assaulted another, attempted to kill some others, and resisted arrest. Good enough, throw her in the brig. Not like she can move much anyways after Hylavi ran her over with a shuttle. Though I do warn that given the nature of her organization, this could escalate a whole lot really quickly. We could just ditch her on SR2 or some other profit prison so she’s not on our station when her friends come looking for her at the least. That or use her as bait.

Related to this, Hastam’s body has proven useful in Khymin’s work to further his golem making skills. Since Hastam was a highly advanced combat model, she had a lot of interesting parts I’m told. Khymin has since been seeing what can be integrated into his current projects about the matter. Though I’m not sure about the direction he’s taking it, his latest prototypes are quite large and might scare the citizens.

We have had the basement dwellers prepare for another trip to the rift with Aato, who is a dragon related to Faelyn as it turns out. Due to all the people passing through recently, we had to delay it for a little bit. Also related to Renjala’s Rift, we have informed Nelan of its presence. He didn’t seem to have much reaction to it, though I caution that its not his job to have a reaction to it. We’ll see how the rest of Alnae responds though. Though we know that currently, Kaylen is fighting one of the other warlords.

Also we managed to get another crew for one of the starships to send out searching for interesting things among the stars.

The second lance is still on the job working on expanding the current radar system to go through ‘all da planes’. It would have a unique feature of being able to track down binds if the bind is ever utilized while the radar is paying attention. Apparently Faelyn wants to know literally everything possible from her station about all of space around her, including if we get surprised by some race who has the ability to use pandem magic.

Irae is currently playing greeter to our recent Shetou prince that is visiting back home at Somnus. Though some are concerned about attracting their attention, at least its good diplomacy points…right? Also she said to ask you what to do with the alien since it turned out Nelta wasn’t here to pick him up after all. Though there was no attempt to assault him, also no attempt to contact him. We’re not really sure whats going on since Nelta has made no attempt at communication with any of Sol.

Meanwhile at Jamalia, Daesta has left the colony to return to her warren when we went to visit it. Mostly to take care of the others there. Despite Reika’s impressions on her, she still isn’t willing to give up the war with the arcurans just yet. Largely influenced by the fact that our contact with the arcurans has made it clear they won’t stop hunting the merkas either. That being said, they’re more interested in preparing to meet with Madhammer as we prepare for their arrival in the future. For now, they’re headed to Thenica to join the war with Alnae so we might not see them for a little bit.

This has sort of made it difficult to conduct tree based experiments since technically they aren’t cooperating with the deals we’ve offered.

To further expand upon the merkas situation, we’re currently looking for the rumored warren that contains the elder priest that Daesta mentioned before. I feel that contacting her might result in a more effective ability to persuade any additional warrens one way or another. Though we do have a small sample size at the moment. It’s a big planet and we’re just one colony. Though 40th Day is nearby probing at the boiling seas of that other planet, if we borrow some scanners we might be able to track down these warrens a bit more easily.

Renard’s Rifts has an approximate value of nine and a half billion credits, since they are the main source of pandem engineering for Thenica. Not the largest of companies given they only operate on the one planet, but still fairly sizeable. According to financial reports that we can’t access due to the aethernet having issues, meaning we just asked one of the representatives at Moncayo instead, they see a general income of about two billion credits per year before expenses. Mostly from ticket sales at the rifts.

So the mythical cult of lucidity has rebranded itself and returned to its isolation. I can’t tell if that solution was reasonable or not given Cassir still had to kill seven people to get them to finally give up the trademark to her. In the meantime we have Cassir and her new henchmen on their way back to Moncayo to oversee the construction of the new temple. By that I mean they intend to see whats going on around there in general since they missed the party. Also we need to pick up Vamon eventually.

The incubation project has yielded some new critters, though Vasia ditched them at the vivarium since they were taking up too much space and too similar to one another for her to keep messing with. Though she does have strong evidence right now to suggest their mutations will only deviate from standard course if their environment is too hostile to their normal patterns. That being said, those ones can now no longer survive on Koura as they’re too well adapted to their extreme laboratory conditions. We could try to incubate one around the acid cloud of a world and see what happens though.

As for her shades, they kind of just stay in place. Apparently shades and spirits in general are anchored to whatever material object they were last focused on or passing through. This is part of how anti-spirit wards work for keeping them out of places you don’t want them just walking casually through a wall into.

In the general field of the spooky laboratory, Salied has started to show further improvement though is still not quite ready to leave her room. Though she watches cartoons now, so that’s a step up from staring at a wall for…it’s been months now actually. As for taking her out into space, Vasia said ‘sure’ in that kind of tone that made me double check why she said it that way. The sahad ability to survive in the vacuum of space is a specific spell, a first level one but it is still something that is actively learned and practiced. Given Salied’s current state, she miiight not be ready to try and cast it. Though Vasia has decided to start trying to teach her this beginner spell to see if learning to wield sahad helps her condition any. It just goes kind of slow given her and the other subject’s current state.

40th Day has started collecting contracts on colonizers to sell to other places, we’ll see how that goes once training is complete. We’ve begun building some prefabs to keep ready here at Somnus, or more so just floating outside Somnus so they don’t take up too much space. Close enough.

The Exerlus do seem to like the asteroids at least, and Arkaric didn’t bomb them all as we were concerned about. Nelta did instead. Though the asteroids have been put to use helping them rebuild their lost chunk that was hit by the bomb.

Also speaking of which, those asteroids led to us finding more asteroids basically. We could have 40th Day start mining operations on them in the meantime if nothing else to collect raw resources. I know Joe likes to try and build upon that kind of physical industry too so it keeps the vice governor happy.

As for the ad campaign in Moncayo, technically we could open it up to outside investors to get it moving a bit better. Which wouldn’t be hard to draw in now that Renjala’s Rift is a known entity. So its easy to justify that this could become a major shipyard if nothing else for servicing those passing through and attract their attention. There are some rich and powerful people at Moncayo and Vamon could probably get enough money to overhaul it for battleship level construction by the end of the month. Though shares wise that’d be selling off about 87.5% of its ownership to said investors, which will definitely effect the profits we would see but at least it would be built and we could focus capital on other things.

Phoenix Colony has finished its construction and is now operational. Though there are very few people there so far. Vasia says it would be a better place than Somnus station for her lab though, since no one is getting in or out of that planet anytime soon. Though to enable that we would need to invest in a rift tunnel to get conveniently in and out and those are expensive to build and maintain so that might be more of a daydream to maximize her unnecessary spookiness since the tunnels can cost about a billion credits to build let alone the maintenance. As evidenced by just building one gate at Somnus.

While the Vivarium is still under construction I have had the monster queen thing we found shipped to it. Enough of its construction is done to at least hold that thing.

As to our other project, the whole ‘lets jump into a boiling ocean planet’ operation has finally commenced. The scans weren’t wrong, video we’ve received back indicates a very colorful world underneath the water. Samples of various growths among the rocks show a good potential for high powered mana filters. Since it requires practically boiling water, there is something to be said for incorporating it into designs somewhere near…well boiling water probably heated by the engine its powering or something.

Our observations on PZ142-3 Alpha have been of interest to the scientific community at least though have little impact on our day to day affairs. So we’re just still probing at small bacteria really.

We have the battlecruiser with Ilex’s shipyards at the moment for the refurbishing process. Speaking of which, the Nomads are back in town. Which I’m sure Lancaster is just ecstatic to hear.

As for reaching out to Sophia, she’s currently not as interested in leaving. Something about being done working with spooky people, evidently after we left Thenica she considered her debt paid for getting her out of jail. That and something about looking after her family back there instead of running off across the galaxy.

As for the cracks in Laura’s organization, there are definitely always those who can be properly motivated with enough incentive. However, she has been careful in selecting her highest ranking individuals. So while we might find something to exploit among the gangsters, the family members appear to be solid. At least as far as we can tell without making it obvious to her that we are planning such a thing.

Speaking of Laura, she brings an update following the Nelta attack. Arkaric has left the system, apparently having taken off soon after having his minions execute Hastam. All things considered he didn’t cause too much trouble around here, though given our past relationship with his sister we’re probably not on his list of people he doesn’t like. Not yet at least.

Also after the results of the election, Laura has been able to solidify her position on Koura as the undisputed top crime lord of the system. She still keeps a healthy distance from us at the moment, but is at least still cooperating in her own little way. Including a unique tip on the black market of a hidden auction going on for a recently captured alien that has been able to demonstrate some level of sahad ability.

The stealth cruiser is on its way back, we would estimate the Kar’Soluth asteroid base to have a “military value” of 250. It’s not exceptionally well defended though stealth seems to be its primary asset.

Also, Vaeri visited the Raven II and they just handed her the engineer we were looking for. Though to be noted, apparently something is going on in that Siwa factory that managed to attract the attention of clients who know about the Raven. Which means it has to be something odd.

The troops are loaded back up onto the freighters and being shipped out to Alnae to help Kaylen. Though currently they’re traveling along still.

Stories of Lore 8

Exerlus countdown clock says they’ll be here within three weeks. So…get ready.

In response to the alliance, and mentioning exactly what Renjala’s Rift is, she sent a battleship to our station with quite a bit of haste. Her general, Aato Jousen, is poking around currently to get a feel for the place. Evidently she considered the rift to be quite significant for such a quick response to be made. Her ideas on the sahad entity on the other side however is to send a dragon to meet with it. She said as far as wild shots at it go, dragons are a superior race to most humanoids so maybe it’ll like one of those more, or throw so many humanoids at it that maybe we can achieve a sort of ant colony effect.

This definitely hasn’t helped us that much with Nelan and Alnae though, not that they said anything in particular over the matter but us entering into a formal alliance with Faelyn while they’re just an embassy here, who doesn’t know what the giant rift tunnel we’re building is actually for, does little to make it look as if we particularly care for them by comparison. In discussing the matter with Nelan it has become apparent that despite Faelyn’s mentions of helping all of Sol with her early detection systems she has definitely put Alnae and Shetou on a backseat compared to the frontier colonists. As neither empire were invited to the party I am currently still at. By the way, the seafood here is pretty good.

We’ve started a company up to really focus on the research of the parasites, though progress is a little sketchy at the moment due to the dramatic side effects that occur as a result of mis-timing the removal of the parasite. Also we still kind of lack an expert on the matter.

Speaking of new companies, Ohalyn has agreed to see about expanding her holdings as we didn’t really specify any downside as far as she’s concerned. She’s starting off with a mix between a casino and a more expanded hotel. Actually she’s been in contact with Raiben to invent a new type of gambling game, one that specifically has better odds than most casino games. She stated that if people win even just a little bit they’re likely to blow their money on everything else the place has to offer and become repeat customers instead of getting mad about losing all their money on games.

Oh also the election results are in, with our change in support to help Laura help Harlus, Harlus won with Joe sitting in her cabinet. So Laura is happy with that, which means Nah is happy with that I…think? I can’t tell what their relationship with her is at this point.

The hydroponics facilities are doing well and has definitely expanded the limits of our population here in Auwana, alongside the Orchard farms. We’ve seen an increase in immigration ever since Vittles got its harvests up and running.

On another note, Moncayo sent us a report of three incoming groups. One of which is a small fleet of destroyer sized vessels. We already knew the exerlus one was coming and it appears the Astral Order have invited Nelta to come pick up their alien friend. Though the third one is a battleship from Shetou and we’re not entirely sure why they just so happen to be on their way all of a sudden. Also we’ve managed to get a full crew together for another of the exploration starships and sent them on their way.

This might be a busy month coming up.

So far things at Jamalia are going well and the first lance keeps wandering around the planet exploring with the down time. Actually three of the knights built a log cabin up the river they call ‘the club house’ where they go fishing. Daesta spends most of her time arguing with Reika about arcurans, and I have to keep reminding her that Reika doesn’t have a translator herself and relies on the squires or slaves for that. Though Reika also does not have a personal squire or slave and has a habit of standing around in open fields while staring into the distance, so not guaranteed to always have someone nearby to translate. She’s still grumbling and trying to find  her overall stance on this whole ‘stop fighting arcurans’ thing.

To that angle, she doesn’t actually know where all the other merkas warrens are. She actually hasn’t even taken us back to her own yet, even if we know where it is anyways. A detail I think she forgot amidst everything else going on. I gather she’s trying her best to feel things out but she has mentioned something they refer to as being an old queen that is rumored to be somewhere ‘nearby’ in another warren who is leading the main push against the arcurans. Apparently Daesta comes from a smaller one that is definitely struggling at the bottom end of the spectrum, but the largest and most aggressive tribe might be a bit more difficult to work with. Though given the ongoing war between the two species, it is likely that a lot of relations between the races are dependent on the city of Helym and this particularly large Warren.

Speaking of which, our visit to Helym went…as expected. Yonam is definitely not disposed to ending the conflict with the merkas. Actually he’s not even disposed to avoiding conflict with us. Though in noting how he refers to certain monsters and the merkas I’m beginning to think its not as personal of a grudge as the merkas have against the arcurans. The arcurans just really like fighting things and have built a warrior culture around it. This might be related to why Lancaster pointed out their civilization hasn’t evolved nearly as much as their biology, too much focus on fighting for the sake of fighting. Really if we strapped some armor on them and gave them modern weapons we could probably just throw them at problems. They don’t even have a concept of money, so easy employees for Madhammer, though I don’t think they’d make good knights. Given that they are composed of arcane energy, the pandem corruption might just outright kill them. The diplomatic relations issue is really more of the merkas problem who have a deeper and more personal grudge. Point the arcurans at a new thing to fight and that’ll be their new priority, something something honor and glory.

Oh also the station around the moon Enohas is up and running, a bit understaffed but up and running. We’re sending the educators there first for getting them settled and ready to deal with trying to come to Jamalia.

Meanwhile in Moncayo, the second lance has been picking out a spot for the planned chapter house while meeting and greeting the other people. Most notably among them, besides the obvious presence of the Vloz, is another company known as the Renard’s Rifts. They’re sort of a standard service company who usually is present in Shetou space that help maintain rift tunnels and create new ones. They’re not as combat focused but its interesting to see them expanding their operations out here on the frontier given they usually are only found on Thenica where the major pandem terminals are.

Secondly an Alnae company who provides very similar services though are technically a branch of the government to maintain travel ways is present.

Finally, thanks to Nah division, we know the third entity is actually a former pirate captain who apparently went missing over the last year. Apparently she has been hiding in the Void this whole time. A feat even the order would consider impossible.

Third lance has been distracted by attempting to test a steam powered shuttle, which is not going spectacularly well but it came about as a result of needing to hop between planes to see what is in the neighborhood. Mostly quiet though as the stars on the other planes, or even this one, tend to be a bit barren. As most stars in the galaxy tend to be I suppose.

The alien in a cage has had arrangements made to pick him up and take him back home. Within the month a Nelta ship is coming to get him. Things are about to get a little busy, the exerlus will be here around the same time.

As a side note, since the official alliance was signed with Faelyn, Vamon was able to request a list of other members and their locations. Export time! 40th Day has been wandering around doing some surveying for them and though it hasn’t impacted the shipyards much we’ve turned a lot of our production contracts to these new colonies if nothing else for diplomatic points. However, we have seen a few new visitors coming through now which is good for the shipyards. I’m trying to sell them the rocks still.

Moving on, Cassir has arrived at Thenica. She killed their profitable prophet and has now left Thenica, headed towards SR1 to finish this little tour up. There can only be one after all. Note, she will beat Vasia and Salied there since she’s already in the Sol system. Not sure if you want me to have her put a hold on the murder spree or not…

Also Faelyn has approved the cult temple in Moncayo though has a list of building restrictions that the Astral Order has gone over already.

So the 004C incubations have made some progress, they don’t actually show much adaptation to artificial environments except in extreme cases where their normal Koura based adaptations won’t be able to survive. Though they haven’t actually finished metamorphosis, there is a distinct lack of diversity in their cocoons compared to the ones in said extreme simulations. Though we are still waiting to see the end result.

001D experiments have come to a bit of a hiatus until Vasia can find more sahad sources to continue exposure testing. Though she did render a shade catatonic and since they are incorporeal they just sort of float there and there isn’t that much we can do about it. Upon learning that Exerlus and Nelta would be visiting soon she prepped a lot of equipment to see if any opportunities might be found from some alien visitors.

40th Day’s recruitment efforts are helping to alleviate the crisis in Sol while also separating people out over the frontier colonies. With Somnus Vittles food production starting to get going a little more we can sustain more population than before so we have awhile before hitting the limits of the Auwana system.

With a quick refit they were able to ready a craft that can dive into the boiling ocean of PZ142-1, though that is being shipped out to the Paizarus system so…transit time on that. We’ve sent the probes alongside them to keep an eye on PZ142-3 Alpha as well.

In regards to prefab colony construction, technically  we can do that now. The reason its not always ideal is that it takes just as long but is a bit worse. Basically a bunch of hollow boxes intended to be rapidly deployed and can sometimes have long term issues on new worlds that aren’t perfectly flat and convenient to work with. Though if you want we can try to build some to have rapid deployment ready in case we’ve a need for it.

According to Sarden, after awhile of her being as uncooperative as possible, her best guess is that Selona wasn’t after her head for technological reasons. She thinks it is more likely that it is because Hastam was the one who injured Eliza, who they came to get. It is suspected that the phantoms want Eliza for something in particular and gave her some revenge as a signing bonus.

I found some people who will work for the vivarium, botanist was easiest of the bunch. The rest are either just animal people and a guy with a biology major though we’ll see what becomes of that at the Vivarium. Technically we have a couple of geologists in 40th day though I found another for the vivarium.

In questioning Laura about necrocarnates she pointed out that they have a tendency to either be well hidden or uncontrollable. The taboo nature of the art aside, those who practice it are of a specific personality. There are extremely few who could be qualified as ‘not a psychopath’ as a lack of empathy is kind of the prerequisite to becoming one. So if you’re going to go looking for one, you could try posting it at the Solvang boards to see if anyone responds looking for work though that might be more overt than desired. Another option would be to try and lure one to the station though its unlikely that Lancaster wants to touch that mess. Another option is to peruse the outer frontier, as they tend to live where they are difficult to find. Away from large populations. You could also just buy one from the Raven facility, which we haven’t pissed off quite yet.  Though the raven slaves cost about fifty million credits.

Baltun informed me that Setani is on the way to SR2 to visit the vampires and see if any would be interested in working around here.

Setani is off helping Ilex out with a headhunt. In the meantime, Raiben has been settling in on resuming his business targeting the major empire’s space. So that should help finances a little once he really gets rolling. Aryn protects him a bit so he doesn’t make the same mistakes he did that let her find him.

Vaeri is on her way to the Raven II as herself to speak with Kanika about the matter. Out here on the frontier, it takes forever to get back to Sol so she’ll be a bit as she makes the journey.

Laura’s most consistent contacts include the members we tracked down last time you asked about her network. The most notable of which still include Shani and

As for locating Sophia, she’s still back on Thenica at the moment working out of our old headquarters. Apparently since she knew where it was and knew it was vacant she just moved right on in after the division downsized. Now days she is mostly running a salvage operation via gunpoint, doing quite well at it too. She doesn’t live near the capital areas that have escaped the worst of it, so she’s waist deep in the more chaotic side of the planet that are fighting over food still.

As for probing Sarden, she definitely had a major cybernetic arm that was made for combat. Her other arm was a prosthetic placeholder after she got shot by Arkaric and now she’s a bit of a mangled mess. Though nothing that actually holds data on the revenants themselves.

Our stealth cruiser arrived at the asteroid outpost of Kar’Soluth, it’s definitely a little fuzzy given the pandem magic also affects arcane based scanning and they revel in it to the point that it actually does create interference. Though the asteroid is quite large and orbits the star from a distance that provides very little benefit from the star. So its freezing cold and has no atmosphere though that is likely part of the point, being somewhere that nowhere would look for them. There are a few warships there but not enough to launch a terribly large assault. Then again Shetou are spread a bit thin at the moment anyways so they might not need a particularly large one, though it is anyone’s guess as to why they haven’t attacked yet if that was their plan.

Also, the Nomads are back after an excursion to Sol space with a Kar’Soluth battlecruiser. Did you want to sell it or start collecting them?

Well things are quiet around here this month. So do you want to take the work back on Thenica or look for frontier contracts or…

Oh also the arms factory has been able to start looking into some exports due to the Moncayo alliance so that’s been good for the startup business. We’re still mapping out who we can sell what to but its definitely helping make the company more profitable.

Stories of Lore 7

It appears Sarden and Hastam’s attack on Eliza agitated her enough to exploit her new benefactor’s particular knack for violence. Hastam was destroyed in the middle of the street and Sarden was arrested by Hylavi. She’s currently in intensive care and we’ll see how long she stays alive. Upon debriefing Hylavi, apparently Shanhai and Dazzle were here to get revenge on Hastam and went through Hylavi for help with finding them. Thanks to the information from Nah division, Hylavi was able to exploit their presence to help with bringing them down. I’m just…trying to ignore the fact that Hylavi technically just aided the Selona Syndicate.

Currently efforts of convincing the Merkas to come along have been an issue of communication as they don’t fully understand the scope of what we’re asking them to even come to. That and Renjala still has them all at Jamalia. Atop of which they are insistent on that they, and specifically the individuals in question, need to keep fighting the arcurans to save their people. I don’t know if that trait is built into all of the merkas or just this band of what we’ve discovered are basically children. We’ve also yet to actually scan their tree to see about planting one elsewhere.

As for Riley’s efforts beyond the rift, there has actually been some success there. It didn’t seem to notice her and she managed to go near the planet in close alignment to Auwana and scan some things. They don’t tell us very much useful other than that there are a lot of strange life forms down there, but it was progress.

The local jydoq trader doesn’t seem to understand the concept of why Laura King is considered dangerous instead of a basic enterprising individual. They see her as having a strong sense of supply and demand in a starved market. Notably…they have been talking to her so that might be affecting their understanding of what a criminal is. As for sahad friendly aliens…what a coincidence…they were blown to extinction by Selona during the invasions. The others they suggested might yield some results but they’re deep into the galaxy, it would be a long voyage just to make contact with them and we have no idea what has become of them amidst all of this galactic collapse.

Construction of the Renjala’s Rift stabilizer has begun.

Well two of the new starships were easy enough to find crew for, three are still pending some interviews.We’ve sent them along their way to pursue the leads that Hylavi knows of.

The Koura elections Should be concluded within two weeks by the way.

The parasite research has found an oddity. Everyone who was infected but then had the infection removed by Doctor Si Yeon after a certain slightly extended period of time was notably cured of several other standing issues. Also, all of these previously infected patients became immune to Koura’s atmosphere. They no longer exhibit any symptoms from being exposed to the low toxicity and seem to do much better digesting local flora. Basically one of its first mutations is to adapt its host to survival on this planet, and apparently cure bacterial infections almost instantly. This is fitting with its previously observed tendencies on Koura wildlife to optimize them. While it doesn’t fully understand humanoid anatomy, if its mutations only get through its first phase then its quite beneficial. Take too long though and it starts doing weird things. Si Yeon is now dealing with an influx of people trying to replicate these effects on purpose, some with better timing than others. We have a patient with a tentacle sticking out of their nose now for example.

Oh also Vittles finished their first hydroponics harvest. So that helps with the food thing around here in Auwana and help with holding an expanding population. Also their own marketing team resulted in an influx of immigration all of a sudden.

The chapter house in Jamalia has finished construction. By construction I mean we put up a sign in front of the door to one of the prefab facilities. There are some reluctant merkas in there acting as “shaya” at the moment. Basically a word in their language for what we have as the order’s slaves. We’ve stuck to using that word since it has less connotations then slave and we don’t want to have to deal with explaining that political mess to a people who are still trying to comprehend why we need them to push the button that opens doors for the knights…or what a button is.

The reinforcements from the fourth lance have made it to Jamalia and joined the first lance, which had a few promoted squires while we have time to process paperwork and ceremony. They survived that battle with Ecsanul after all.

Daesta definitely doesn’t seem interested in peace with the arcurans, something about generations of war, grudges, so on and so forth. Though she does seem to be interested in just how powerful Reika obviously is so is sticking around the colony for now.

Oh and the Merkas call this world Enohas. Which means ‘first planet’ in their language basically.

So far the arcane moon doesn’t seem to affect pandem abilities all that much, though definitely is a link to the abyssal plane. Though its too far away for it to have much impact on our spells down here.

We’ll be meeting with the arcurans soon, lots to do after just getting here and setting up shop.

The second lance is getting started on their work at Moncayo which might take awhile. The abyss is a finnicky plane sometimes. Though one thing we weren’t told about, is that we were not the only ones invited to do this. Apparently Vloz’Khress was also hired to do the same work, and it was explained as a way to make sure all angles were covered including any ‘backdoor’ tricks either side might come up with. The Moncayo supervisor appointed by Faelyn made a note of the fact that an alliance between frontier colonies is bound to have some representatives who don’t entirely like one another, not to mention aliens. Also Faelyn’s Moncayo also operates for the Sol system at large to keep them appraised of any alien approach so she is liable to at times consort with the empires as necessary. At the very least we’ve maintained things to be somewhat professional, since Alexander and Sarnai were not actually at the battle and the Moncayo forces are terrifyingly well armed. Something something fortress. While this was the most interesting, it was not the only alternate group of pandem experts to show up. There were five parties in total with a presence, two of which are from the frontier – ourselves included. Suffice to say, Moncayo will definitely become truly unassailable by the time Faelyn is done with whatever her plans are.

Inquiries into establishing a chapter house as an embassy in Moncayo seem to be going well. The city pointed out that it would take some level of investment into construction to build the chapter house as it doesn’t have too many empty buildings laying around that would be suitable. Though that probably works fine for us since we could build it to not use ethi doors and the like. There are a few building codes to observe but nothing too bizarre or difficult. Mostly having to do with the space from other buildings for its oddly wide roads and a maximum building height…again not really going to affect us. If we wanted to construct the place it would only cost about five million credits to do so, since its not a full blown colony just a nice house. Okay  it could be done for just five hundred thousand but then its not really an Astral chapter house is it? So five million for proper levels of ‘bling’ as the kids say.

We’ve started steamworks up and began some research into the matter. Not much done as of yet though as we just finished setting up the building in the Somnus lower decks.

Joe is still against the alien immigration angle, the main problem with it is he and many of his buddies have a natural distrust of aliens after you know…the invasion. Most people don’t know or would even believe what the phantoms did, so to their perspective aliens decided ‘fuck these guys in particular’ as their first contact protocol. Atop of that was also the Valdir first contact. Oh and the parasite problem. So far the track record isn’t so good, and he lives on Koura so is barely even aware of the fact that Hylavi is chief of security on Somnus. While he states something to the effect of at least allowing for it if they prove themselves trustworthy, there is a notable xenophobia to him and his supporters veiled by logic.

Also everyone is always interested in free healthcare, we don’t have any insurance companies here in Auwana yet. Well a few are trying to get started, but its pretty hard to get ordinary people to oppose the idea.

As for exposing the Harlus loophole in voting, the experts think it’ll definitely hurt Harlus’ campaign especially against those who are a bit closer to being on the fence rather than firmly in one camp or another for other reasons. The worst case scenario is Harlus can spin it to somehow be about improving migration to Auwana. They see no reason not to make a huge story of it and would love to run with that dirt. However, Nah division has another perspective. From a security angle, calling out Laura King’s operations on behalf of Harlus directly could attract her attention in ways he hasn’t thus far. So its a gamble if we think nothing terrible will happen as a result.

Sarden was arrested recently and I think this conclusively proves that I am not Sarden’s alter ego. That’s right I hear you when you talk to the other directors. So with Sarden’s arrest by Hylavi and Hastam’s destruction by…we’ll call that one Hylavi too, Cassir has finally deployed out to hunt down the other cultists. Though she’s still traveling. There is a bit of a collective unease among some of the cult though, this is the first truly aggressive act by Cassir and her followers. Prior to this they could argue it as a necessity for survival, but now she’s hunting for other reasons entirely. Though really this is just part of the transitional period from the old version of the cult to the new one I suppose. Had we gone with the mystics we’d have the aware members leaving, if we’d gone with the financial ones we’d have the more yoga inclined people bailing. Its just a time of turmoil over all no matter how you look at it for them. Though the upcoming slaughter will be the first major act of the cult’s new era. I brought popcorn, I’ll put some in your feeding tubes.

On to new Age. Slightly different issue, Setani isn’t willing to just hand out essentia for another batch of experiments similar to 004C for nothing given that she has to collect more to keep it going. Though Vasia took her blank check and ran with it, buying another fifty slaves from Ohalyn to feed to Setani’s soul collecting. Maybe we don’t tell Lancaster about that one. Moving on, they’ve at least started the next batch with replicated environments in the containment cells. Progress ongoing.

As for finding our own necrocarnate, that might be more challenging than you think given how rare and taboo the art is. Its frankly amazing we know of so many let alone have regular contact with two of them. However, if you really wanted to find one, I’m pretty sure Laura King can go looking as all necrocarnates tend to operate in the underworld due to the rampant persecution they would otherwise face with the sole exception of Song Yi. Though we’re not getting her help I’m sure.

I’ve been able to contact Faelyn, though I think we fall under the blanket of Somnus as it is right now and are thus represented by Winter currently. So I used that as an excuse for why I’m not there myself personally. Though there is definitely an interest in the growing alliance for the services of 40th Day and New Horizons. If nothing else we’re on her network as a shipyard that can dock and do necessary maintenance for any ships passing along through the frontier.

As for the sivataur team, I asked Nah to ask Laura for us. There are actually a lot of them with pretty solid reputations despite the general stereotypes if you know where to look apparently. Some of them are particularly obsessed with honor and ‘the hunt’ and so on. She recommended we send representatives to SR2 to perhaps interview a few potential hires. However, SR2 is a dangerous world so don’t send just anyone. The planet is shrouded in a permanent eclipse and is basically the sivataur capital. It was an abandoned wasteland of a world that they started terraforming…by hand. They just picked up trees in the abyss, transported over, and planted. Over time it has become their playground and if you don’t know…most undesirable and violent criminals are sent to this world. For a small fee, Sivataur operates the largest super max prison in the system. A very very small fee. Because whoever is sent there is just thrown onto the planet and told ‘good luck’. The only security systems are the docking ports and ships are not allowed across the rest of the planet to make sure no criminals escape. Whether or not said convicts get eaten by sivataurs is anyone’s guess and kind of the whole point. There are also roaming abyssal monsters they transported to the planet that can survive without the sun. This is SR2, the sivataur playground and where you go if you want to hire some sivataurs. As I said, choose carefully who you send. This world was built to be dangerous on purpose, so its pretty fuckin dangerous.

Actually, if we caught some of those giant monsters on PZ142-2 that are roaming around…we have a kaiju freighter. Could probably sell those on this planet for a nice profit. Sivataurs sure do love giant monsters. To the point of being an unhealthy obsession. Just a thought.

As for Salied, Vasia has been putting her on the backburner while working on the 004C experiments. So far psionic probing causes the device that probes to suddenly experience some faults. Vasia has pointed out that due to the nature of the affliction, any psion who gets too deep into her head will suddenly suffer the same condition. She also lost a researcher to proving this in the first place.

Speaking of Vasia, she hasn’t really looked into shades but thinks she could get several to outright volunteer. Her people are naturally curious and all.

The Dreamwalker still has no interest in working with Cassir and sees her as a general abomination to everything the cult stands for. Keeping in mind he has no idea what the cult actually stood for and his faction has sort of brainwashed itself into believing its own hype. He also considers you to be an abomination talking about enlightened and so on and so forth. They sincerely have no idea about the origins of the cult and being told they’re wrong causes them to just dig themselves deeper into their position. They also believe themselves to be the true new prophet for the whole cult and you to be someone exploiting Cassir’s violence to silence your competition and mutiny against the other financial section of the cult.

Defense turrets have been put at Phoenix Colony, which is nearing the end of its construction. Also sent the mana batteries to Jamalia to help with experimentation on the trees and natives as necessary. Vasia says we should send her some arcurans for sahad viability testing by the way.

Tests with the Koura crystals ability to feed plants proves to be quite viable. The sunlight they release slowly over time does emit all stored radiation patterns of the light they absorb from. We also found this works with fiber optics by the way, someone just decided to try that real quick while playing around in the lab. Due to its inability to retain it for long periods of time this isn’t quite useful in any practical manner but it has promise.

We’ve also had time to figure out how to store more sunlight with the crystals, as it is affected by the crystal purity. Which can actually be refined. The method for doing so hasn’t been settled on yet but doing little tricks like removing impurities or filling air pockets with various types of transparent resin does seem to improve performance overall. Not much yieldable result yet but its an exciting time to be a geologist! Which I am not, I’m going to go get a drink now.

Aside from her actual meeting with Laura, Vaeri has confirmed to some extent that Laura’s contacts are quite vast. Though this is due to a few factors. The first of which being that they change regularly, she has the current status of being the top crime lord in Auwana, which means by default new criminal elements just treat her as being the go-to. Which means they join her network for as little as a day due to the assumed cooperation between them. This is part of criminal culture apparently, its generally assumed that the biggest crime boss in the area doesn’t have as much to gain from backstabbing you over a shipment as someone smaller whose profits are less stable. Also Laura has a reputation of being ‘that kind’ of criminal who take their word a little too seriously. Which is comical to some criminals, but at least seen as reliable.

Another factor is that Laura possesses a Solvang membership, I mean so do we but this does expand the number of options she has available when trying to secure deals and other things of that nature. It also turns out that with Arkaric visiting our system due to an interest in Eliza, she was able to meet with him due to her being the biggest criminal in the area. I suppose that defaults her to being the one who has the right to approach him. Hence the sudden influx of selona brand toys on the black market right now, speaking of which tell Hylavi to be a little more careful of any ongoing criminal activity. They might have new guns and Selona weapons are famously effective against aliens specifically.

While this meeting wasn’t likely anything alarming, we did have his sister working with us for awhile after all, it does indicate that Laura’s influence is spreading. With her being able to contact such major criminals she’s able to network a little more. Essentially, she’s growing rapidly and moving without us being able to fully keep tabs of what she and her family are up to. Importantly, we found out she’s in contact with someone from Moncayo and two other frontier colonies. She’s on track to expand into being a multi-system element if we don’t do anything about it.

If we wanted to replace her, we’d have to make sure Joe wins the election to decrease her power and then take the opportunity to raise a replacement and cut her off. Ohalyn might be an okay replacement, she’s a respected member of the underworld unlike Raiben and she has the demeanor it takes to not be as problematic for us. That being said, she’s far less talented. I suppose you have to consider if trying to work with a difficult mastermind is better or worse than an untalented puppet when thinking about how to move forward with the Laura situation.

As for the Raven II that the engineer was hauled off to, its a bit hard to find much information on it. As might be expected of Kanika, she’s good at keeping secrets. Apparently, it was constructed by a labor force that cannot remember ever working on it. At least they won’t admit to knowing about it. That’s at least a few hundred mechanics and engineers with a blank spot in their memory or a very adamant desire not to reveal that they do know anything. Which is highly unusual, but its worth remembering this ship is the successor to a facility that brainwashed serial killers into loyal bodyguards. So its not out of the realm of what this place can do. However, we were able to learn that its not as well protected as you might expect for a super carrier. Because it was refitted as basically a space station that can go places, most of its firepower has been stripped off in favor of its facilities. It relies primarily on stealth and coasting out in space where no one would go looking for it unless they were invited as prospective clients.

At this point we could try to send Vaeri posing as a client….not like we haven’t done this one before. We could also just send the stealth cruiser with the full team to try and infiltrate it through brute force. Also we could just tell House Song where it is again and let them cause a ruckus given what happened last time and try slip our way in amidst the chaos.

As for the drug market on the newer colonies, we still can’t even corner some drug markets here on Koura. We don’t really have a drug lord on staff given our ongoing back and forth with Laura. So we don’t have anywhere that we’re growing them at the moment in order to take elsewhere to sell. We could look into that but I’m not sure how Lancaster would feel about using the land on Orchard or the hydroponics labs to grow drugs for selling in other colonies given the current value of food.

As for exploiting tax fraud, doesn’t that make us still a financial burden just with more steps? Taxes go to Lancaster, so we’d be pocketing money that would have already gone to her and then just saving her some money on keeping us afloat.

The men are back at base on Koura now after a lengthy trip, taking a brief break to recover from the campaign. More accurately, getting drunk at local bars.

Also winter sort of covered it, but basically my parasite research indicates they can actually be kind of miracle cures if you do it juuust right. If you do it wrong you grow a new tail.

When it comes to looking for our next job, I have noticed there is a posting on the Solvang boards, that Nah has let me see, to assist a warlord in repelling Kaylen’s upcoming invasion of his territory on Thenica. I also checked with Nelan, we could make 750 million for siding with Alnae proper, which is a bit less but I think our host like her more than the warlords.

Some notes about these jobs. They’re much shorter campaigns since its just two specific forces fighting, we won’t have to spend months hunting down every mole rat burrowed in the dirt while trying to secure a whole planet. So its actually a pretty decent payout for a little bit of work. Also this is not going to be hunting a bunch of bitey bugs or warding off underequipped and underinformed aliens. This will be real, full arsenal, Sol on Sol warfare. Alnae versus Alnae is a playground of tanks and bombs. Losses would be heavy. Also if we took this job we’d have to load up and ship out soon, so we’ll probably not be here for contact with the Exerlus. Not sure if we’ll be needed for that or not but its something to consider as there is no way in hell we’re walking into a Thenica warzone with anything less than every gun we’ve got.

This could work towards strengthening our relationship with or against Alnae, whether or not the directors are still interested in that stuff. Though not sure how it’ll look to Faelyn and any other new alliances we’re working on. Not to mention it will take us awhile to recover from the losses and we won’t be deploying for awhile after a conflict like this one.

Alternatively, we could ask Winter to mention us to Faelyn to see if there are any more small time colony jobs we could take on the frontier to clean up some more bugs here and there. Safer easier work, pays less and takes longer but at least half the men don’t turned into red paste overnight for it.

Also since you didn’t, I went ahead and named your new arms manufacturing company for you. I call it Pretty Pink Unicorns.

Nah I’m just kidding, I named it Whitetalon Armaments while filling out the paperwork. Factory is just down the road from our current base for easy shipping…also land is still cheapest out here in the outskirts.