FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Riu is watching the events unfold and though very anxious when they destroy the drones, is at least happy that they didn't decide to just destroy her ship but rather took the task of testing their shield in their own hands. In some regards the fact they went about doing the test in that regard is a good thing. It means they are at least entertaining the notion of them just doing their own shield test. He was extremely concerned when one of the Corewards decided to just blast through the ship. Despite Anon's claims, she wasn't able to stop their blast. It would be quite possible that the Consortium had decided it had had enough and that the station would be next.

But instead it looked like they deliberately missed hitting the actual ship, instead shaving it close enough to hit the shield, but not hit anything actually important. And then they just go back to doing just about nothing at all. And with all sides just staring at each other he's relieved when the fighter starts heading back to the station and the Corewards make absolutely no response. It came across to him as if the Corewards were bored of their toy and went back to who knew what. But so far they had complied with the Consortium in every request they had made. So now it just becomes a question of what happens next. The Consortium scanned everything in the area and found nothing. They had them run their test again and found no Coreward influences in the design. So do they just sit here and stare at the station until something else happens. And then what if nothing ever shows up? Would they just become a permanent fixture to the station? Would they eventually move on? Either way Riu had resolved to not leave the post until the Coreward situation was resolved, unless of course it does end up looking like it'll be here for a very long-term problem. Already the shift has changed and a chef has brought him something for dinner. And though he tries to occupy himself reading through the other reports it is somewhat difficult to do with the giant, looming threats. On top of that with the number in the station drastically reduced and Gate travel halted there really isn't as much for him to keep up to date with.

After another couple hours of nothing going on Riu finds himself starting to doze off in his chair, the rest of the command staff on the bridge choosing to simply let him sleep if he does fall asleep. Just as he's about to fully fall asleep the alarm sounds in the bridge, alerting them all of Gate activity. It's far too wasteful to keep the gate on all the time. Instead there's a sensor on the inside of Gate. When a ship is travelling by gate it'll send a signal ahead to alert the Gate to align itself to that destination and prepare. These are calibrated quite often as the risk is quite high if not aligned just right. But with the Corewards here and a potential threat incoming a signal had already been sent to all nearby Gates to not connect to theirs. But as a safety precaution they aren't allowed to fully shut down the Gates, so if one were to send the signal of an incoming ship the Gate would respond without any input. Given the circumstances Riu immediately informs his communications officer to open a channel with one of the Corewards.

"This is Head Orenshi Riu of the Foznetal, addressing the Consortium ships. The Gate is receiving a signal of an incoming ship," he says, doing his best to stifle a yawn. "Per protocol, all nearby Gates were informed that the Foznetal Gate was to be on lockdown for the duration of any Consortium ship in the nearby system. As such, there is an unauthorized ship coming through the Gate. We make no claim on the ship and offer that ship no protections. We only ask that you leave our Gate intact."

And once again they're left with absolutely no indication of what action the Consortium is going to take. Since it'll be a few minutes before it arrives Riu sends a request for someone to go get him a coffee. Eventually the Gate opens up and a shuttle flies through it. The ship isn't very large, probably not even large enough to have its own drive engine, but one designed to have pretty good sub-light engines. The instant it leaves it turns on its engines to full and starts flying directly to the station, probably trying to make a break for the protection the fleet would provide. The fleet can't exactly move very fast with their engines all but powered off outside of maneuvering thrusters. If the ship could get into the fleet it would pose problems for the Corewards to destroy it without a lot of collateral damage. But before the ship even gets halfway to the fleet the Corewards act and both immediately open fire at full strength against the ship. Riu notes that the two Corewards just about fired as soon as they were able to without causing any potential damage to the Gate, much to Riu's relief. And then once they had fired and the little ship was completely disintegrated the two Corewards just float there, making no motion one way or another about any course of action they may end up taking.

Riu reflects on that. Straight up destroying the ship is actually somewhat odd for them. If it had Consortium Tech then they usually want to disable the ship and collect it so that no traces of the technology are left behind to be scavenged. Not to mention grabbing the pilot so that they can find out who all is involved. Just destroying it out right is an odd gesture. And if it had the Tech and they destroyed it, having already claimed to believe them when he said they had no relation or involvement in the smuggling of that technology. If their job was done then ordinarily they'd simply return to their usual routes. The fact they haven't means that they are debating on what action to take and are waiting to see how Riu and the fleet responds to them still being here. And as he knows far better to do otherwise that reaction is simply to do nothing. If they want a staring contest then that's what he'll give them because that's the only move he can really make.

"Right," Riu says, having decided it's pointless to worry about the Corewards. "We have two Corewards that will eventually be moving on. They have no business with our station. We need to keep an eye on what direction they are heading so that we can update our maps and inform everyone else. The moment they are gone I want you to go ahead and alert all of our relays of their change in direction and perform the primary purpose of this station."

"Wouldn't they notice us doing something like that?"

"Of course. Let them. We have absolutely nothing to hide from them. We have done nothing wrong. The Consortium has never shown any sort of reaction thus far to us alerting each other to their location. There's no reason to suspect that that will change any time soon. So there's no reason to find us doing our primary task as being suspicious. If they ask us about it then simply respond as such. In the mean time," he yawns again, "this has been a very long day and I think I'm going to call it in. The bridge is yours," he waves and leaves, having the other salute him.

Riu casually returns the salute and then heads out, intending on heading over to his quarters. And hopefully when he wakes up he'll be told that the Corewards have left and things can go back to normal. But for now he is very much interested in relaxing for a while. The coffee should keep him awake for a little while. He trusts the night crew enough to know they'll handle things correctly enough.

The air around Cerise was filled with static and the lights on that part of their ship flickered on and off, threatening the entire time to potentially overload. To say she was agitated would be an understatement. She had left her familiar after he was settling down for sleep. It was night time, after all. But she couldn't sleep. There was too much of an issue of going to sleep and finding the station no longer there, so she couldn't get comfortable. Her magic flaring up as it was also made it difficult for any of the other politicians to sleep either, so some had managed. Others, like Cerise occupied their time watching the Corewards sitting around the station. Earlier, they had a drone fly up at them and scan them and leave without any comment one way or another, which in itself was rather tense. It's doubtful a Coreward drone could get past the shields of the mages stationed to protect these ships but it wouldn't make things any more comfortable. But it left. And then later she had to watch as each Coreward fired a single shot. Thankfully they weren't aiming at the station but she is too far to be able to make out any real details and they're under a radio silence unless their own lives are put in jeopardy. And then a few minutes later they shoot something coming out of the gate. And then they just seem to sit there. This not knowing what's going to happen is extremely irritating for her. She'd like to at least know what's going to happen rather than just sit and watch helplessly from a distance. Anyol tries his best to console her but even getting close to her is getting difficult for him, not as good at shielding all the energy she's squeezing out in her anxiety. She's even already had a few lights short-circuit from the buildup. If possible she would have thrown out all of her powers, drain the area of all the phasic energy she can, which will help, but would only temporarily, and not something she can do with the Corewards watching. Too great a risk of them considering it a threat.

Some of the others are making very concerned comments about all this, wondering if perhaps they should sedate her for the time being until everything has settled. At least then they wouldn't have to worry about their ship getting destroyed from the inside. Anyol is at first very resistant to the idea and does his best to try and dissuade everyone else away from the idea, but as systems are starting to fail as a result he's finally talked into it under the condition that he be the one to administer the sedative. They had quite afew various sedatives and whatnot, not so much for this particular situation but at least to deal with hysterics or injury. The trick is finding the right ones with the right dosage to make sure that it'll knock her out without doing any serious harm. Many different factors could easily make things worse than they already are. Reluctantly he steps towards the part of the ship that she's currently using to watch the scene around them. She knew her own condition and had fled to the part of the ship least likely to cause any major issues from her power flare-ups.

"Come to put me under?" Cerise asks of him as he approaches with the syringe in hand. She chooses not to look at him and instead continues her vigil over the station.

"I hope you can forgive me," he says. Knowing that by all rights if she truly wanted to stop him there'd be nothing he could do to truly knock her out. But that doesn't change any long-term effects to the situation.

"No," she sighs, "from a logical standpoint it makes total sense. If I was in your situation I'd be prone to doing much the same thing to protect my own safety. I guess I can't really protest too much for the act. I think a mild sedative might even be the only course of action. With my familiar in such close proximity I doubt the normal cuffs would be enough to ensure the safety of the ship and as I am a senior officer of the station, using cuffs strong enough on me to make it safe would be interpreted as an act of mutiny, even if I was in agreement."

Cerise takes another sigh and then rolls up the sleeves to one of her arms. She then holds it out to the side and turns away, preferring not to see it coming, especially not with how agitated she currently is. She can hear him still and he seems to hesitate a moment before slowly starting to make his way over to her. When he's closed half the distance she notices something and moves her arm to instead point out the window. "Look," she says, "they're moving."

Anyol walks quickly up, the syringe all but forgotten as he gets a better look at the window as well. In fact a lot of the passengers hearing the commotion turn to try and get a look as well. And sure enough, though it is difficult to tell from their distance, even with the display zoomed in as much as possible, they are able to see that the Corewards are splitting off from each other and heading off in separate directions. On top of that they can see a bright green light shining from that general location. That's the sign that there's going to be an announcement made soon. There is no risk of exposing their location if they aren't broadcasting anything. So when under orders for radio silence a green flare generally means that one side that's not under radio silence is about to make an announcement and everyone should pay attention to the feeds.

"The Corewards have concluded their business in the area. We are go for return to normal operations," the intercom says, followed by a lot of polite cheering from the other politicians relieved at the crisis being over but not wanting to be seen as being too extreme amongst the others.

"So, uh," Anyol says, jabbing at Cerise with his elbow. "Do you still need me to sedate you or?"

"No, it should be fine enough," Cerise says. Her abilities are still acting up, but with the main source of her main agitation she doesn't feel that it won't be any more of a threat to the ship. She can already feel that the energy discharges coming from her are starting to abate quite a bit. But to help with that she picks the spot outside of the ship furthest from the station and begins just focusing a bit of her power to that of a hotspot. It'll take quite a bit of concentration to move it so far away, but she can control things far more now. There'll be no more threat to the ship and she can go back to things. Her first course of action once back in the station she intends on going and hugging her son.

After a couple of days setting things back to normal, Riu sits down at a table on one of the myriad of restaurants the station has to offer. It's not one of the main ones he visits but he visits occasionally. Enough that they don't find him out of character to be there but not enough for them to recognize who he is, especially if he doesn't go in his normal uniform and without the extra tails from his own Con magic. It took a while not only to make sure that everyone was able to get back onto the station and settled back into a normal routine but he also wanted time for investigations to go underway. Now that the Corewards left they can do a more formal investigation, at least with the Shadows. And so he waits for Kinou to arrive. In the mean time he's free enough to go ahead and order his dinner for the day, one he feels is well deserved after all the chaos they had to go through. Realistically he didn't need to go through this effort to talk with the head of the Shadows. There were plenty of ways he could get in contact with him discretely without anyone having any chance of finding him out. If anything, doing this way was riskier than any of those ways for the simple fact of the two of them being in the same location at the same time, regardless of the fact Kinou's wearing a disguise. When he had been walking to his seat he had noticed that Kinou seemed to take on the appearance of a human this time. But Kinou frequently liked to change things up and use routine acts to sharpen his own skills.

"So what did you find out?" Riu asks simply after fumbling around in his coat for a device that would serve as a short-ranged Language of Intent activator. The thing only really worked for about a few feet and then generally not for very long, but for things like this it served its purpose.

"It was very strange," Kinou says in a very strange accent, as if he's trying to manipulate a device designed to remove impacts from speech manipulations. "I've had the entire station searched and none of my agents have found any source of who it was being delivered to. Even the Fringe denied anything to do with it. I could find no evidence of any ship intending on taking any special precautions that would be required to handle smuggling Consortium Tech."

"So no one at the station was intending on receiving it nor was anyone intending on transporting it elsewhere? So why was it coming here?"

"That's what makes it strange. It's almost as if the person who had stolen the Tech had just decided to take it to this station."

"But what would be the point? What did they intend on doing with it once it got to us? I can hardly see any advantage of hiding it here than somewhere else. In fact history has told us the ones that last the longest with Consortium tech are ones that decide to go to the middle of nowhere to try and conduct their business. Trying to make it to a very populated area just seems to be suicidal."

"Unless that was the point," Kinou speculates. "Sort of like that anti-matter bomb threat from a few weeks ago. It seemed like someone sent someone with the sole purpose of getting the station destroyed. If they had gotten onto the station and had it secretly installed into any of our own shield relays, even if it wasn't compatible, the Corewards would have seen that and destroyed us outright. So trick someone into stealing some Consortium Tech and bring it here. Possibly even make them think they are doing the right thing or that it's authorized by the Consortium. Then have it installed and we're all gone."

"So possibly by the same people that sent that ship at us last time?"

"I cannot say with any certainty that that would be the case. But it is more likely for that to be the case than it would be that there are separate groups trying to get the station destroyed. And with the Consortium having killed the only person we know to have been involved there's no way to know for certain."

"Is there anything else you have to report?"

Kinou remains quiet for a moment while the waitress shows up with Riu's food and checks up on Kinou at the same time. Once she is gone and he feels the Language of Intent Spell reactivated he starts speaking again.

"It's something completely unrelated but there is a Feral on the ship."

"I've heard of one being on the station, is there anything of note about this Feral?"

"Well he sought me out the other day. And not only that but he knew I was the head of the Shadows. Just came out and said it."

"That is definitely quite interesting." Riu says, finding it quite interesting and troublesome that anyone would be able to find out who Kinou is. Even the main government officials do not know who the head of the Shadows are. There are some that would, but it's intentionally left hidden for a reason. Hard to have them do their job correctly if everyone knows who he is and can expect him. "Considering we're talking about a Feral on the station I'm pretty sure it's going to be the same one, but Anon had an interaction with a Feral a couple weeks ago. They sought her out, introduced themselves using the Language of Intent and then simply walked away. Said they were sent to us by our government."

"I suppose that might explain how they could know my identity. If they're doing an audit of the command staff, including my own group they would be informed to know who to deal with. But realistically I cannot think of any reason why any audit would involve both of us. But the manner of his behavior is quite odd. Not only did it come off as him feeling like he was just involving me in order make things more interesting for himself, but it's like he was intentionally trying to set me on edge. Was even able to get me to let down my guard and disappeared without me being able to track him. If it was just an audit he would have informed me and been extremely professional. Instead he was messing around with me, seeing how well I could detect him."

"That is impressive. Compared to Anon how would you rate his Con magic skill?"

"Doesn't compare. His visual skill would probably be on the order of high B, low A. Even with all the skills I've gained over the years, the only reason I even noticed was because he wanted me to notice. He was testing me, seeing how observant I was. And seemed to take great pleasure when I finally noticed that he had me under an illusion."

"Definitely an odd situation. But going after both you and Anon still leads me to think an audit is being carried out."

"That may be the case and I'll definitely keep an eye out for him. I'll also have my Shadows keep an ear out for anyone fitting his description. I'd really like to know what the bastard is doing on our station. If it is truly an audit then he should be reporting to you that he is doing so, not just trying to antagonize the people of authority. And definitely not when going through the proper channels."

"Well, for now if you feel you must, I won't stop you investigating the Feral so long as it isn't interfering with your normal duties. However, I will say I would very much rather information about the plot against the station than what strange things a Feral is doing on the station, especially since there is currently no evidence of them doing anything of concern beyond being troublesome."

"Thank you sir, I'll be sure to keep you informed," Kinou says.

"If there's anything else, make it quick. My device is starting to buzz at me, so I'm almost out of juice."

"Nothing to speak of. Have a nice day, sir," Kinou stands up and walks towards the door, making sure to aim the eye that has his chip at the register on his way out.

Riu turns off his device and enjoys the rest of his meal in silence. He would have wanted something much more substantive from the report. But he'll just have to stay vigilant. Two attempts in a fairly short span of time of half-baked attempts to get the station destroyed. Each one only failed because they were alert and the plans were doomed to failure from the start from poor planning. If they ran into someone that had a well thought out plan they'd be in a lot of trouble.