[b][u]Iteration The Universe Virgo Supercluster Local Group Milky Way Galaxy Core Region Sagittarius A*, Galactic Core GCN Concordia[/b][/u] Had it not been for the inadvisable proximity of Sagittarius A*, one of the more visually disconcerting sights amongst the many different and alien craft docked at the station would have been the vessel belonging to the disreputable Stoor Manifold. The ship was large, bulky, and spherical, appearing to have uneven, rough hull surfaces that almost looked like they had been constructed of stone rather than metal. This was due to the manner in which the wormlike Stoor built their vessels - by growing them. The exterior hulls were composed of biomineralized super-alloys with webbings of vascular tissue hidden immediately underneath. They were no less durable than any other kind of starship armor, but the messier means of their assembly meant that all Stoor ships had an unpolished look to them. The Stoor Manifold was an Aristocratic space nation less than five-thousand lightyears away, and conversely the most distant and isolated sovereign power relative to the rest of the galactic community. Their civilization was old, their scouts having surveyed the galaxy for over a thousand years, and continuing to do so. The Stoor had always possessed great fascination for alien forms of life and culture, and unfortunately for everyone else they were willing to travel a long way to experience both. They were regular saber-rattlers and perceived to be untrustworthy as a species by most, as their barbed and mocking manner of pursuing diplomacy did not make them many friends. They had been the cause of some of the most prominent diplomatic 'incidents' over the past thousand years - from their double-dealing during the Nassu rebellion, their black market slave trafficking incident in the GICT, to their continual efforts to perpetrate sabotage and disunity amongst the Technocracy. They seemed proud of these dark affairs more than anything else. A fair degree of market penetration within the GICT, the GRC, and the Oliocht Technocracy, plus a significant thoroughfare of tourists, traders, and researchers, forced most to put up with them. Despite their abhorrent behavior, as a species they had a strange and demoralizing gift for getting what they wanted. The Stoor were the only species present at the [i]Condordia[/i] who could not room onboard. Their homeworld, named Two Solid Shadows in their curious traditional convention of naming things, was a world of extremes that was utterly inhospitable to most forms of life. Stoor physiology actually required regular trace exposure to radioactive particles in order to sustain metabolic functions, and had a livable temperature range between 32 and 83 degrees Celsius. Individual Stoor could move through the station only with the assistance of respirators loaded with finely powdered heavy elements and surgically implanted thermal regulators. The massive, plated worms had their own sectioned-off embassy and bulkhead, since even the combined technological knowledge of the gathered powers had been unable to devise a way to reconcile the extreme conditions the Stoor lived in while keeping everybody else on the station comfortable. This also meant that most of the GCN peacekeepers assigned to the Manifold's section had to be Epiplasm soldiers. Absolutely nobody was happy with the arrangement except the Stoor. Even less happy were the Security Captains - the Peacekeepers had been prudent enough to make sure every captain in the section was of a different species and outfitted extensively in order to cope with the volatile environment, but even so serving duty in the section was not pleasant. The interior of the Manifold vessel was accommodating and charming by way of Stoor aesthetics - hallways with curved floors of uneven biomineralized plates that afforded the Stoor a good grip with their neuropodia, walls of paneled collagen, and a ceiling covered with an endless web of brightly glowing veins. As the vessel had largely been made as a luxury model, hallways were regularly interspersed with rotunda with central pools of not-quite-boiling elemental bromine held at a comfortable temperature of 55 degrees Celsius. Light vapors arose from these pools and dispersed throughout the ship, providing the Stoor with a soothing ambient bath. The private rooms of Seven Desert Streams were so exquisite that they almost approached the standards of opulance for other species from the opposite direction. The walls here were delicately carved, multicolored nacre. The floors, while still uneven, were made of tiled ammolite and the ceiling was made of jet painted with the scene of [i]A Balelit Oath[/i], where the five founders had sworn an oath and formed the Manifold. Submerged in their private cleaner pool with small brightly-colored designer organisms busily extracting cellular detritus from the base of their bristles, Seven Desert Streams coolly reflected on the ingenious masterstroke that was the Galactic Council. The Complex could not have arranged for a better stage to manipulate the entire galactic community at once had they tried. That every other species had succumbed to the subtle meta-cognitive programming of Stoor culture sufficiently to agree to the insanity of a [i]Democratic[/i], united galactic council truly was an exemplary display of Stoor ingenuity and adaptive exploitation. At least, Seven Desert Streams was fairly sure of that. The only other possible reason it could have happened would be if every other species was subsumed in the disgusting myth - the notion of physiologically innate weakness called [i]altruism[/i], or even worse, [i]mutually reciprocal benevolence[/i]. The only rational conclusion was that the Stoor species' inherent superiority and their strategic infection of every other significant culture in the galaxy had finally won through and forced the foolish aliens to commit simultaneous political suicide. Either that or they were all stupid and incompetent, which was basically the same thing. Undulating slowly to shake away all the cleaner-organisms, Seven Desert Streams slid out from the pool and crawled over to the spiral-shaped sensesink chair. They coiled their long body around the ascending helix, offhandedly passing the sensenerve cord up from the base of the unconventional seat to the surgically implanted sphincter set in the right side of their anterior body segment, just behind their central eye. As usual, plugging into the Complex module was a faintly disconcerting event. The sensenerve cord slid in, and Seven Desert Streams faded into a light, anesthetized sleep, waking up twelve minutes later with absolutely no memory of what had transpired within the artificial world of the module but with an infuriatingly familiar set of immediate goals and factoids at the forefront of their mind, each one bundled with different emotional residue from the doubtless engaged discussion that had occurred. Seven Desert Streams could tell this had been a good meeting though - they had secured the complete multi-species lexicon of derogatory slurs, and most of the other pieces of information that had been anomalously shoved into their mind were tinged with a satisfying sense of smug superiority. All except one. [i]Intelligence has established that the hominids are engaged in a Class 15 or greater operation aimed against An Oathbound Manifold. Collected data inconclusive, tentative hypothesis states they may attempt to sabotage affairs onboard the Concordia during the next Galactic Council meeting, possibly with the purpose of altering An Oathound Manifold's image in an unfavorably negative fashion. One Greater Complex advises that all extraneous Class 8 and greater materials be sterilized in order to deter possible immunopathology.[/i] This was tinged with an unfamiliar emotion to Seven Desert Streams. Apprehension. Still - what harm could mere hominids possibly do, against the Manifold? Even outside of their home territory, innate Stoor superiority saw that all of Humanity's pathetic ploys and plots fell to shambles - just like the weak, brittle bones of their ridiculous endoskeletons in even the most mild of gravitationally disparate environments. Reassured, Seven Desert Streams slithered off of the sensesink chair and headed to the biocarbonate resequencer in order to recolor the lower layer of their shell to something more suitably...diplomatic. Twenty cord-passes and a bit of artificially accelerated sloughing and they would be ready to verbally assault anyone who looked at them funny in style. [center][s]888888888888[/s][/center] Shortly after Alexander had taken his seat, the Stoor Envoy arrived in the Council Chamber. The intelligence dossier he had received on this 'Seven Desert Streams' was sparse. They were a member of the Complex, the enigmatic group of aristocrats who controlled virtually all aspects of life in the Manifold. That they had sent one of their members in person was a clear sign of how important they thought the Council was. Other than that, there was nothing but some educated guesswork. Word of mouth on Two Solid Shadows implied they were over a thousand years old, if not more. They had been reelected to the Complex for more than eight times in the last 200 years. They were apparently a traditionalist, as opposed to an imperialist or a dominator (all three of the parties seemed liked twisted parodies of Earth's very worst fascist regimes and dictatorships). Their favorite snack was Corvexian chitin lightly infused with Iodine-131, which they had been observed chewing on in public. The rest was a brief summary of encountered security that had regularly obscured them while they had been on Two Solid Shadows, the punchline being it had been impossible to learn anything more useful. A new dossier was being composed now that they were here on the [i]Concordia[/i], but it would be a while in coming. Due to the environmental complications the Stoor Envoy brought up, they couldn't even enter the Council Chamber without being situated inside of some ridiculous looking spiral-chair contraption with a dome of ballistic glass over it. That might not have been so bad if the thing had not been so massive - people who did not have to live with the Stoor often thought of them as small, pliable, and weak - if albeit freaky - worm monsters. Human imagination simply did not prepare their senses for the actual, sobering experience. Even laying down in the strange Stoor equivalent of a chair, the massive alien would have towered above even the tallest human. Its girth at its widest point was thicker and larger than Alexander's entire body. What must have been a thousand multicolored bristles sprung from its back and sides, giving it the appearance of some hellish caterpillar, and it possessed a shell colored an eerie crimson red. As its seat was rolled into position by an Epiplasm peacekeeper, the intercom on the dome switched on. Seven Desert Streams everted their maw, expelling their naked jaw out of their head to clack limply while a surgically implanted human voicebox rattled out rasping words. "Greetings, scum of the Earth. I did not know parasitic bottom-feeders like you ever got face time away from the spluttering anal sphincters of your superiors. You will secrete despair when I violate your pitiful aural trackers with my veined, bulbous, plenipotentiary phallus." [center][s]888888888888[/s][/center] [b][u]Milky Way Galaxy Sagittarius Arm Media Region 625 Sector 12, 'The Salted Void' Local Manifold Armada Perimeter Media Six Balelit Titans System Two Solid Shadows[/u][/b] Before Grzegorzy stretched the utterly inhospitable terrain of Two Solid Shadows. Although the Embassy technically owned a fair amount of ground outside of the actual structure, the grounds were barren. The Embassy guard couldn't even erect a perimeter fence - anything they put up was slowly eroded away by terrible, caustic winds. Any structure that couldn't heal or secrete protective chemicals like the grown domiciles of the Stoor simply did not last, and was buried by build-up of ever-increasingly toxic sediment. Two Solid Shadows had gravity more than ten times that of Earth, with an Atmosphere so thick most species would have imploded into gory smears under the sheer pressure. The temperature, depending on where you were, could be either a chilly (relatively) 40 degrees Celsius to upwards of an existentially unaccommodating 800 degrees Celsius. Trace background radiation would have killed any exposed human in minutes. The atmospheric chemistry disagreed with the composite structure of human skin. Perhaps the ONLY thing working in the favor of Grzegory and his team was the luminosity. Six Balelit Titans was a Neutron Star 625 times more luminous than Sol, but an incredibly dense atmosphere and perpetual cloud coverage diluted that down to something approximating only the worst sunny day ever. The planet was not the problem though. Grzegory's team had been examining the scope of their mission and the terrain extensively, and they were well prepared. Each one of them could survive alone on the planet's surface for weeks at a time if necessary. The problem was their mission. Executing it correctly and quickly, all while remaining undetected - that would be the real challenge. As long as they could just remain unseen, on a planet with little in the ways of natural cover swarming with billions of specifically adapted worm monsters with orbital and planetary control, their freakish crop-grown super-soldiers, and innumerable skittering, miserable little designer organisms fulfilling routine utility services - it would be a walk in the park.