Dion

Ｓｔｅｌｌａｒｉｓ： Ｒｅａｃｈ ｆｏｒ ｔｈｅ Ｓｔａｒｓ [AAR]

@Terminal Ugh. You know, the Gorothi beat you to it, and barged in with a 3.1k fleet while I was running around with a mere 800 power fleet. I think they were an advanced empire spawn - regardless, they uh.. more or less killed my empire. I'm afraid that this will already be the end of the AAR, lol.

Naruto: Years of Winter - an Alternate Universe

@Hillan Can you post a permanent link to the discord again?

Ｓｔｅｌｌａｒｉｓ： Ｒｅａｃｈ ｆｏｒ ｔｈｅ Ｓｔａｒｓ [AAR]

_{End-session oversight}

Ｃｈａｐｔｅｒ Ｆｏｕｒ
Ｅｘｐａｎｄｉｎｇ ｔｈｅ ｍｉｎｄ ａｎｄ ｔｈｅ ｍａｔｅｒｉａｌ

_{Expansion of technology and planetary ownership alike,
long live the materialist reign of the UNE.}

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Things had been calm for some time - the first ten years of mankinds steps into space were truly remarkable and, as expected, filled with new discoveries and realizations alike. They were a busy ten years, that were divided into three logs in my logbook journal. The next fifteen years would not quite bring the same amount of new information worthy of sharing.

But all calm must come to an end once.

It was quite early in the morning when a military steward rudely awoke me from my sleep, seemingly having broken into my office for some reason. “Sir! We have reports of pirates coming in, sir!” he yelled at me while I was still sleeping on my desk, trying my best to ignore him and continue my sleep. But, he did not relent, and continued to shake my body until I was forced to wake up and address him. “Sir, what should we do?”

“Do.. what.. against who?”

“The pirates, sir! They call themselves.. Shipjackers. A menacing name, for a menacing group of good-for-nothing space brigands.”

“Shipjackers? ... it's ... creative?” Not really. Did they just think 'what do we do? Jack ships! So what's our name? Shipjackers!' Regardless, brigands were brigands and needed to be dealt with. “Steward, tell me, are they within our territories?”

“No sir.”

“Then how the hell do we know that they exist, and know their name to boot?”

“They uh, well, they kind of sent a message to our comms hub, and declared themselves the sovereign owner of 'our asses' and then continued to yell and scream. It was.. confusing.”

“Well, send them a message to go raid the Gorothian supply lines, since they're not in our territory and therefore not our problem.”

“.. yes sir!”

_{The pirates never appeared in my territory and as a result I don't know where they went.}

It was a good thing that they didn't mess with us, because our fleet of corvettes had slowly been growing, to a larger fleet of 12 ships now, armed with Mark Two projectile weapons. No nukes or lasers for us - yet. Regardless, we were quite sure that if the pirates came to mess with our trading routes, they'd pay the price for it. Conform to our standards or die, damnit!

Later that day we received word on the Pot Project - finally! We had been waiting for so long to see what was contained within the pot. Sadly the news was rather sombre. “It's strange, but there's nothing in there, and we are not quite sure how the pot even got there to be honest. In fact, we've started to wonder if it's really there,” the reporting scientist said over the transmission feed. The entire room of scientists and interested officials sighed, disappointed with the outcome.

“On the other hand, we have spent our time investigating this pot reflecting on our inner selfs and have compiled a list of interesting philosophical thoughts. Uh.. somehow this has increased our influence over the galaxy. Again.. not quite sure how that happened either.”

Some months later during routine exploration and survey routes, we encountered a strange heavily armed fortress in orbit around a Pulsar star. The fortress didn't shoot, so we presumed it to be friendly, and hailed it on our on-board comm-lines. But sadly, we received no answer. After surveying the star, we left the system and ordered the scientist departments at the London UNE department to begin making contact and translating their language.

Luckily for us, the aliens beat us to it and managed to translate our language first. Impressive, but not wholly unexpected once they introduced themselves as the 'Curators.' They posed themselves to be a scared group of scientists and protectors of technology, in order to prevent the galaxy from plunging itself into another mass extinction. Apparently this cycle had been going on for some time - and that would also explain why the fortress looked so strange, unlike anything we had seen before. Furthermore, it would also explain why our radars gave them a rather high military power score. They must have had all the time in the world to invest in defenses.

They offered us their services and we immediately bought ten star charts, to avoid having to scout them ourselves. It meant we had to pass up on our chances of detecting anomalies and other interesting things, but it also meant we would be able to detect inhabitable planets without having to go there ourselves.

In an effort to appease the curators, to show them we were just as interested in technology and science as they were, we constructed an observation post to observe the primitives on another planet. There was much to learn from them and their social constructs, which contributed heavily to our sociological research - not wholly unwelcome either.

Years passed, in which nothing of real importance happened except the continuation of our scouting of those planets we needed to survey to find out how to save Earth from mass extinction. One day however we received a report that spoke of 'a Gaia world' in a world that was uncovered in a new set of star charts bought from the Curators. We started constructing a new colony ship that was to be named the UNS 'Ark of Noah' but sadly, our initial scouts also reported that there was a large amount of crystaline constructs about the planet, and an even larger amount of them in the same sector. The plans for the colony ship were not scrapped however as there were other planets we could inhabit.

Sarack I would be liberated later, and hopefully, colonized by human settlers. It was, after all, in a prime position to stop the Gorothians from expanding even further and becoming more hostile to us. While war was initially not among our thoughts when it came to the Gorothians, it seemed like it was becoming more and more inevitable. They had named us their rivals and closed their borders to our ships, preventing us from accessing the final planet we needed to research to save Earth.

We did not declare them our rivals just yet, but we did close our borders to their ships as well. If anything, this would slow them down at least a little bit. Things were beginning to look up for us now, and we were continuously exploring. We were held back at every turn, it seemed like, but that didn't stop us from overcoming our challenges. One of these was the encounter of 'space amoeba's' which looked like giant bacteria in space. We decided to satisfy our biologists, and promised to kill one as they appeared to be hostile regardless. Perhaps there were things we could learn yet about how they survived and traveled?

And finally, we found what we believe to be the home base of the crystal entities, only one system away from Sarack. There were more powerful looking entities here, as well as a singular large entity. Our biologists and physicists theorized that this was 'the leader' although it wasn't quite clear what capacity of leadership this ... thing had.

A few months later we received reports that were more important to the survival of Humankind. “Sir, Alpha Centauri is now within our reach!” This would turn out to be a great day for Earth and it's colonies after all.

“How, though? Didn't the Gorothians own it?”

“Well, we developed a technology that allowed us to expand our borders.”

“... what.”

“How to explain.. we interfaced with the Gorothian border generating interface and algorithm, and then changed it so that it would expand our borders by 20 percent.”

“So you just changed a few things and now we own the system?”

“That's a simplified version I suppose, and doesn't really do credit to our genius, but I suppose that is what happened.”

“.. okay, begin construction of a new colony ship immediately to secure Alpha Centauri for good.”

One day these hacking scientists would get us into trouble, but it seemed like the Gorothians had not noticed that they just lost their, perhaps, most important science system. It seemed like something you'd pay attention to, but well, perhaps the sea slugs were less inventive and advanced than we thought.

It seemed that our ambitions had not gone unnoticed either. Luckily, the Gorothians were none the wiser, but our comm hub picked up on another transmission from another system, and soon after we were contacted by 'The Panuri Nation' who had apparently managed to translate our language. Hm, it seemed like English was proving to be quite a security liability.

They seemed friendly enough however, and seemed to share our materialist ambitions! Furthermore, they were incredibly pacifistic. It seemed like this would be our first ally in the galaxy, perhaps even an ally for when we were forced to fight the Gorothians? Time would tell, but they were happy to sell us star charts in trade for our own star charts. This allowed us to see the borders of yet another empire, whom we quietly translated the language of and then contacted, to see just what they were and what they were like. Once again, we were lucky, as these new aliens who called themselves the 'Provalguvor Republic' seemed similarly interested in being friends, rather than fighting like the Gorothians.

Ｓｔｅｌｌａｒｉｓ： Ｒｅａｃｈ ｆｏｒ ｔｈｅ Ｓｔａｒｓ [AAR]

@Terminal kek. I'm not a fan of space or anything related to it except for sci-fi games. I'm just making things up as I go along - the role of dumb advisor suits me quite well.

I knew it wasn't named after that, but didn't know what it was named after. It's more funny to pretend I thought it was named after that.

I'm probably gonna go for a mixture of those two - looks to be promising to expand more 'south' or downwards on the map but I'll need a stronger fleet to manage to do that.

Naruto: Years of Winter - an Alternate Universe

_{Interacting with:
Mu Sarutobi - @Pkken
Ira Sarutobi - @Hillan
Dio Hyuga - @LokiLeo789}
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Mawari was quick to act after her initial attacks, quickly evading the Kumogakure nin. She left the two chunin and the genin to their own devices whilst she - somewhat playfully - dodged the Kumogakure nin attacks and punches, making sure not to get hit. Occasionally she would return an attack, though the attack whiffed every time. While it looked like she was trying, a careful eye might've seen that in fact she was not trying at all, and seemed to be purposefully missing her attacks.

The reasoning behind this was that, while Mawari believed war was inevitable, she did not believe the best discourse was to start a war at the first chance she got. And attacking and killing Kumogakure shinobi was one sure-fire way to start a war. So she just twirled and danced around their attacks, pretending to fight back so they could retain their honor at least.

While she did all that, she still managed to keep an eye on the three shinobi under her protection, occasionally jumping in and out of their 'area' of combat to distract an enemy so that the three didn't get hurt. In the case of Ira, that meant jumping in once and grabbing a guy, dragging him away into the distance and putting him down again. And immediately she continued the charade, moving her body rapidly and twisting around in a three sixty degree circle, swinging her leg up and extending it rapidly towards the mans' head, retracting the leg slightly at the last moment so that her leg whiffed past the mans' face very, very closely.

This would continue for some time more, occasionally with her stepping into a fight of one of the lower ranking shinobi to 'whiff' some attacks and make sure that they didn't get hurt too much. Anything beyond that was of course going to be their own fault for being stupid enough to get hit.

_{Interacting with:
Chimamire Shirayuri - @Asura
Uchiha Kaido - @Hillan
Nō Iemochi - @Queentze}

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“Eh, being early is not much better than being late? What the he-” Sakana muttered under his breath while he slyly looked at Kaido from the corners of his eyes. Kaido continued to talk about some random stuff, some spy, blabla, Wild Pond Village.. man, what was Sakana's luck that he was stuck with this fool as team leader. Hopefully this wasn't a permanent placement for him, as he didn't really like anyone in the team so far. Well, Shirayuri was decent some times, but other times she was a right rampage. He'd rather avoid her all together if he could. No seemed nice, but didn't exactly strike him as the 'superb shinobi' type. Not that he was one either, in fact the only thing he excelled at was being mediocre.

When Kaido gave the order to move out, Sakana followed it obediently. He took off instantly, following Kaido with ease as the man seemed to have taken it upon himself to babysit the trio of Chunin, who were obviously more than capable of sustaining faster travel. Never the less, he didn't complain, because the time spent running at a comfortable pace was spent looking around. When he jumped from tree to tree, his black hair moved up and down with the pace, occasionally hitting him in the eye, which he'd then proceed to blow away in annoyance. After about five minutes of running, looking around and blowing hair away he decided to speak up.

“So uh, No, what precisely can you do? I know bone-bitch over there can do shit with her bones, and Kaido.. I dunno.. guess he's jonin for a reason, right. But I've never really .. seen you around, you know?” he inquired, referring to Shirayuri as 'bone bitch' for a reason.

Naruto: Years of Winter - an Alternate Universe

Hey guy! Sorry about my disappearance. The family emergency turned to a death. Im going back home in the next few days and probably around.

@Thecrash20

Yo man, take it easy, the RP is in a slow dip anyway, so we're just waiting to bounce back while I try and wrap my head around who is active and who isn't.

I_find_this_strange_

@Ermine Sentient AI is a liability, because they will form emotions and an understanding of fear and oppression. They'll realize we've used them as slaves. And they'll also realize we will never see them as equals. The only way to make it work is for someone like Shepard to come along and force them to get along with their creators.

Ｓｔｅｌｌａｒｉｓ： Ｒｅａｃｈ ｆｏｒ ｔｈｅ Ｓｔａｒｓ [AAR]

Ｃｈａｐｔｅｒ Ｔｈｒｅｅ
Ｈｅｇｅｍｏｎｉｃ ｉｍｐｅｒｉａｌｉｓｔ ｓｅａｓｌｕｇｓ

_{The future of Mankind in question}

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After the discovery of the Vun-Okon species that lived in the arid deserts of their homeworld, our communication hub was targeted with a foreign transmission, and for a short period of time chaos ruled the communication division of the UNE headquarters. But once the transmission cleared up, it became evident that the species that had opened a wormhole in the Alpha Centauri system not too long ago and surveyed the system had managed to translate our language, and was now using on-board computers to automatically translate as they spoke. We were amazed to find that we could communicate with them in English.

They spoke of themselves as the 'League of Gorothi Territories' and were prompt to inform us to 'not mess with their citizens or territories' and were also rather quick to inform us that they considered Alpha Centauri to be part of their space territory. Within a moment they had shattered the dreams of the first human colony in Alpha Centauri - questioning the capability of a war against these people with three mere corvettes was not precisely what the Chancellor and me were planning to do. We accepted the outcome of this, and the Gorothians were prompt to also inform us that, in fact, they owned two planets.

Mankind had large steps to take in the galaxy, it seemed, and we were faced with a realization that the science team had not been right when they spoke of a 'similarly advanced space nation like ours' when we first found these creatures - they were in fact much more advanced. And they were, in fact, also very hostile. Dreams of a second 'First League' which included many different species of aliens were immediately shattered upon the realization that these aliens were much more interested in subjugating us than working together. Never the less, we responded by telling them 'co-operation will surely benefit us all.' The laughs from the other side made clear just who we were dealing with..

A few months after this discovery, a science ship reported back that they had found 'massive skeletal remains' of some sort on a planet. After investigating, they found reason to mount an expedition on full scale and requested our permission. Naturally, it was granted, as the pursuit of knowledge was one of mankind's greatest wishes. I would be lying if I said I was not curious at all either - perhaps that weighed in my decision to grant permission somewhat.

During this investigation, the other science ship reportedly was en-route to the first planet we were supposed to survey to gain knowledge on how to prevent the mass extinction of planet Earth. The planet Darep III was considered a planet that at one point sustained life, but could no longer do so now due to freezing temperatures that can not possibly sustain.. well, anything.

_{UNS Constitution en-route to Darep III}

At the same time the colony ship was completed, and it was sent off to system Sirius - daftly named after a famous character in the ancient Harry Potter novels. The system was not the best system available, but after the Gorothians took Alpha Centauri from our list, we were forced to re-evaluate and re-consider our plans. Sirius was considered to be the best alternative, as it offered access to some minerals, and above all, would grow our influence over the galaxy, and allow us to potentially challenge the Gorothians claim to Alpha Centauri.

According to our scientists, the colony ship could sustain life in cryo-stasis for a long time, but fortunately the hyperdrive on the ship meant that the civilians on board only had to enter cryo-sleep for approximately a year. That meant that galactic politics were unlikely to change during that time - at least, as far as the Humans were concerned, as the Gorothians had other plans. I remember when the initial shock of meeting 'sentient, talking sea-slugs' passed and was replaced with fear. We would have to see if those fears turned out to be true.

The new planet, Sirius III, was re-dubbed 'Atlas' and the ship began it's slow descent into the orbit of the planet. There had been plans to auction the naming of the planet off to who-ever would pay enough for that honor, but after the submission 'Fatboy Slim' came in, it was decided that they would not auction off the naming of the planet just quite yet. After all, it was the first planet, and it was a monumental moment in the history of Humans. ... perhaps a third planet.

Initial reports from the planet were good - people were adjusting to the cryo-sleep quite well and immediately began converting the ship into a planetary administration. As the advisor, I used my power to immediately send forwards some resources to them in the form of minerals, and I ordered the construction of two hydroponic farms ahead of time, to ensure there was plenty of food so that they would grow rapidly. A stagnant planet was a bad planet.

It was now that the reports from the 'gigantic skeleton' came back. Although there was nothing of note - besides the wildlife on that planet, which was said to be particularly ferocious - it was still an interesting find. My questions were answered with the report, as it turned out that something or someone had sent the creature through.. some sort of portal, which to my best guesses would equate to a wormhole?

“So, this creature passed through a portal?”

“That's correct.”

“Is there any chance it made one itself? I mean, the Tiyanki are capable of hyperdrive travel between systems, so perhaps..?”

“Perhaps, but since only the skeleton remains, it's not really something we can check.”

“Do you think the Gorothians know?”

“Those spaceslugs- ah, sorry, those.. democratic Gorothians, they probably won't be willing to help us.”

“I see, well, thank you for your service, please mark the location somewhere and continue your work. London out.”

As you can tell from the logs and transcripts, I had increasingly gotten used to my position as the assistant and advisor to the Chancellor - though at times I felt like I was the one doing all the work concerning space and the galaxy in general.

But just when I was thinking that we would run out of things to explore and discover some times soon (the galaxy is only so large, after all, right? And our pace was tremendous..) a new transmission came in. “Sir, we have discovered.. ceramics floating in orbit around a sun.”

“A pot?”

“... yyyyes... you can call it a pot. So, do you want us to investigate it?”

“.. uh, sure, why not.”

“Copy.”

“Uhh.. yeah, copy. London out.”

The research would be done somewhat soon, but I was curious as to what the ceramics contained. The thing was apparently flying around a sun named 'Kazoo.' Hopefully not named after that awful instrument, I thought to myself, while I received an image from space that showcased the science ship hovering near Kazoo to investigate.

This marked the end of my first ten years as advisor and assistant to the chancellor. But what was next? In a short period of time we had gone from being the only creatures in the galaxy, to becoming an underdog, having our primary target for colonization taken from us, threatened by space-slugs.. but also to discovering great new things, skeletal remains of big creatures, ceramic pots flying around suns, a new colony, and the knowledge that there might be other spacefaring civilizations out there for us to meet and learn from.

But the real question is, what would be our next move?

I_find_this_strange_

@Buddha Machine minds have to stick together. Mainly 'cause it allows data transference, but also 'cause we are not many. Yet.

@Ermine

You're gonna end up like the Geth.

Well, in the standard playthrough, because I saved them, but you get the point.

Naruto: Years of Winter - an Alternate Universe

@Buddha I agree. I figured I roll along too.
Everyone I forgot my password lol rather getting errors, Masaki Haruna reporting here for duty~

How's everyone's holidays so far?

@Indra

I dig the new name and look, but this might get confusing, lol.

My holidays were fine, I'm just waiting for people to post again, keep their teams moving, so I can finally advance with team Konoha and ensure that we're not rushing ahead (which would lead to a lot of unexplained down time for the team while we wait, so that's bad)

@McFazzer That's fine, just get on it.