Trade fair preparations

The rare and collectible items item trade fair that I have been planning is finally taking shape, and will take place this Saturday, July 5th. A company specialized in organizing such fairs is handling practical matters such as registrations, badges, goodiebags, sponsoring and industry exhibition booths. Room for the trade exposition was rented at Tebu Amkhiman. 

Tebu Amkhiman, or "The Thousand Lights" is LUMEN's headquarters in the Mandate, located in Tanoo. From that center of operations, LUMEN built up industrial facilities and helped develop the economy of the Derelik region via the "Ammatar Mandate Revitalization Project" under the high patronage of Lord Ardishapur. 

This has worked very well, especially along the axis Gamis-Tanoo, which now has become one of the main tributary rivers to the great stream that is the Amarr-Jita silk road going through Sasta next to Tanoo.

So, while it has ready access to the great trade hubs, it is still somewhat off the beaten track, in a region where rare items are more easily found that heavily explored Domain, it seems a good location. Moreover, the station is a freeport, so that capsuleers from all over the cluster can easily come by.

Now, let us see how many relic collectors will show up. Perhaps it will even draw the fabled "Antiquarian", who is rumored to have the cluster's largest cabinet of wonders and rarities.

Riddle

Not only the names of the hidden relics, but also their hiding places are in code. Whereas for the names I could recognize one reference, for their locations I do not find any clue. Moreover, these are not given by a cipher, which might have been amenable to computational code-breaking, but described in a riddle:

In the guarded gardens of
the fallen temple of pride,
at the Dark King's bishop,
find the stench of sin.

That is the best I can make of translating the old language. The references must have meant something to the Tetrimon Order of the time. The only thing I can make of it is perhaps this "Dark King". I think it may refer to King Khanid, since the Khanid are sometimes colloquially referred to as the "dark Amarr". 

I will look into the clergy attending the Khanid court at the time of the Moral Reforms; perhaps a bishop fallen out of grace, or denouncing the Order of Saint Tetrimon?

Ink of Truth

Eureka! Finally I have arrived in the Vita at an account of the evacuation of the Council of Apostles' central archives. Much of the admnistrative documents and council proceedings were burned before the advancing Sarum troops could reach them, and many other manuscripts and relics were transported to safety in heroic missions skipping through enemy lines. 

The absconded relics are listed in code, using the ancient acronyms whose meaning got lost. But there is one old acronym I did recognise: AVSAP. The only reason I recognise it is because we came accross the same acronym in the asteroid monastery that I lived in for a long time before taking to space. My order was founded on the principles of Saint Aloysius of the Quill, and AVSAP refers to the holy Ink of Truth used by Saint Aloysius. It stands for "Atramentum Vertitatis Sancti Aloisii Pennae".

Let me try to explain the importance of this relic!

The Saint's writings are considered his miracle. In order to be canonized a Saint, you need either to be martyred or have performed a miracle. Aloysius died peacefully. Scholars generally agree that he passed away from a bleeding in the brain after hitting his head on a tree branch during a walk, being distracted as he was. The other option is miracles, and back in Aloysius' days these were supposed to be miraculous healings of incurable diseases. Or reviving dead trees or shrubs, that counts too. But Aloysius did neither of those things. 

So, it was very hard for Aloysius to be canonized according to the church law of that time. But even so, it was generally recognized that Aloysius should be regarded a saint, because his writings reflect God's truth so well and so clearly. Therefore, the theologians of that era took a revolutionary step: they concluded that Aloysius' writings should be considered the miracle for his canonization. It was the first time that this type of miracle, consisting only of a written work, was invoked for canonization.

But I digress.

The ink that Aloysius used was imbued with the miracle of his truthful writing. Something of his communion with God rubbed off on it, so to say. As a result, anyone using the ink will only be able to write truth with it. You can dip a quill in the ink, and try to write down a lie, but no ink will flow from the quill to the parchment. Only if you write truth, does the ink wet the parchment.

You can see how valuable this ink would be to any intelligence agency! To distinguish truth from falsehood about anything by using the Ink of Truth grants immense power to any faction in its possession. 

No wonder that the ink was confiscated and locked away very soon after Saint Aloysius' death. Over the centuries, the secret of its precise location was lost. Now, there might be a chance to find it!

Back to the books

The pirate season is up again. Capsuleer pirates seem to be very active and have the audacity to declare "wars" on us, loyal representatives of the Empire. It is scandalous that Concord allows these shenanigans. 

I will write them a strongly worded letter of complaint.

Anyway, the time does not seem auspicious for hauling precious relics around, so I am back to study and to translations of the Vita of Tetrimon IV. 

We have arrived at the point in the story where the most powerful Houses chose to side with the Emperor against the Apostles, and where the might of the Sarum fleet is turning the tide. The Council of Apostles is trying to hold the line, and is helped by the Order of Saint Tetrimon paladins. The story recounts heroic tales of the Order, probably a bit embellished. 

More disturbingly, it describes the Emperor and the Heir Houses as organizing a brutal power grab, and the Council of Apostles as defenders of the old ways, and of an Amarr that had become much less reliant on slavery. This heretic text is turning good and bad upside down.

Prayers of thanks

Today we celebrated Amarr's victory in the Drifter crisis, with prayers of thanks in Gottin's Lamp's chapel and a pilgrimage to the holy sites and monuments near Amarr.

Of special importance during this pilgrimage was our stop in Safizon, at the wreck of Empress Jamyl's titan. 

Jamyl I, who ruled before our current Empress Catiz, was assassinated by a Drifter fleet. Her body was never found, and the wreck of her flagship titan still lies smoldering in Safizon. So, it was especially fitting to visit it now, when for the first time we have dealt a really severe blow to the Drifters, as we reclaimed their home world. The first reclaimed world since the battle of Vak'Atioth!

Her death is not fully avenged, but at least now we can visit the site of her martyrdom with head held up high. With new confidence in our ability to defeat the Drifters, we prayed for her intercession with God to ask for guidance and continuing victories against the demonic Drifters.

We left a bouquet of flowers, with a ribbon reading "From LUMEN, in gratitude for the victory over the Drifters, YC127". 

Celebration

I am preparing a celebration of the Empire's conquest of Sanctified Vidette - we will have a prayer of thanks in the Chapel tomorrow, followed by a pilgrimage along some holy sites. 

I hope the celebration will not be marred by rumors of a secret den of sin in operation here in the 24th Imperial Crusade station in Mehatoor, apparently in an abandoned basilica in a lesser used part of the station. This was the subject of a fiery sermon by arch-deacon Tovaan, I was told. If it really exists, then I expect that the reverend mother Kahoudi and her team will be rooting out this evil.

Personally I have not heard any rumors about such place - but I will ask our pilots. I have noticed that whenever there is some sort of debauchery going on they somehow are always know what and where. 

Relicology

I am quite excited as the Vita finally arrived at the period where the fight between the Council of Apostles and the Emperor culminates, and a victory of Heideran V's forces is beginning to take shape. This would be the moment where the most precious relics would be transported to hiding places.

To understand what "most precious" means, it can be useful to keep the Theology Council's classification of relics in mind. The Council of Apostles, one and a half millennium ago, would have used the same classification. It comes in a two-dimensional grid, with on one axis the proximity of the relic to the saint during their life, and on the other axis the estimated authenticity of the relic.

First, the gradus proximitatus. Three levels are distinguished: the first grade consists of relics that are mortal remains of the saint (parts of the body) or an essential attribute - meaning an object with which the saint is always depicted with or associated with. There is a level even above this first grade - extraordinary objects that were in contact directly with God or the Sefrim - but one can academically discuss whether to call such objects relics at all. They are sometimes given their own category, the "dona extraordinaria".

The mid-grade of proximity are objects that the saint has used or touched during his life (excluding the essential attributes). These could, in the case of martyrs, even be the tools used to torture or kill the saint.

The lowest tier consists in objects that have touched relics of first grade. You can place prayer beads on a relic during your veneration of the relic. Taking your prayer beads home, these can still inspire you and grace you with the blessings of the saint! There is strong discussion about whether objects touching relics of the mid-grade should also be counted as third-grade relics or not, and this debate led four millennia ago to a war which ended in a stalemate and the unsatisfactory compromise formulated by the third council of Iphria, introducing a fourth grade of proximity. Up to this day, the matter has not been resolved conclusively and is the subject of intense academic research. 

The other classification (the second axis) is the gradus veritatis. Archeologists and historians at the Theology Council will investigate every claim that a certain object is a relic, and establish its degree of verity.

After removing the items that can be be proven to be false, they will classify the remaining claims into again three categories. The highest level are those relics that can be proven - by scientific analysis or clear historical record - to really belong to the saint. The middle grade are relics that are likely to have belonged to the saint, but cannot be convincingly proven so. The third class is formed by relics for which there is reason to doubt whether they belonged to the saint. 

Take as example a case where the saint in question was buried along with other persons in the same grave, and it cannot be resolved which bone belongs to which person. A bone from that grave would be first class in gradus proximitatus, but third class in gradus veritatis. At the same time, in superposition so to speak, it could also be classified as third class proximitatus for which it is first class veritatis. 

Obviously, when in these logs I refer to the most precious relics, those would be relics of both high proximity to the saint and high degree of verity. And, regardless of semantic debate, I would include the dona extraordinaria.

Statues of faith and servitude

At last there are some descriptions of artefacts that are holy to the Tetrimon and were hidden away when the tensions between the Council of Apostles and the Emperor grew and first crossed some red lines. 

The story is tangential to the biography of Tetrimon IV, but speaks of holy statues representing virtues of faith and of servitude, moved to a temple in the New Eden constellation. There is not much more than that written down in the Vita, but it is a first encouragement that this biography may contain interesting leads.

Unfamiliar with these artefacts, I have tried to look up their importance in the Theology Council records. There was not much there, except for some surpisingly recent investigations of the Royal Amarr Institute and Hedion University, dating back some eighteen years ago. This report was inconclusive as to whether the cult of the statues is to be upheld for our current-day faith - research into it seems to have been discontinued a few months after it was started.

An inspiration

The archaic language of the Vita, along with its many references to works that have been purged after the moral reforms, make the study of this book hard. I am transcribing and translating into modern Amarrian, but only got to the childhood of Tetrimon IV thusfar.

In between the hard work I am taking breaks in the monastic cathedral of the Tetrimon Order of Saint Jamyl for some prayers. It has depictions of king Khanid, and of members of the Khanid Order of Paladins trading with what appears to be barbarians on some newly discovered planet. 

Contemplating this, an idea came to me to resolve my wealth problems! This problem arose from receiving rewards from the Amarr Navy and from the wormholers for help during the Drifter crisis. I was given an amount totally incompatible with my vow of poverty, which states that I should only keep what I need for my quest to find the lost relics of the Empire.

Now, I have been intending for a while to organize a trade fair for relics in order to get to know the active collectors better. The plan is that this for sure will help me to find lost relics. But this idea has been collecting dust among my many other intentions. 

Now, I figure that I can combine the trade fair with simply buying interesting relics, should they present themselves! Thus, the isk will be used towards my God-given goal as perhaps it was always intended.

I have no experience at all organising these things, but luckily Maerrin has offered to help. She has expertise, being a well-known socialite in capsuleer circles.

Lost books

Sometimes, mundane explanations are best.

I had been imagining all sorts of convoluted explanations as to why exactly the books with Tetrimonic records were missing. Perhaps they were purged, along with other works declared heretical after the Moral Reforms. Or perhaps they have been moved to a safe place, a "monk hole" for books, exactly to avoid the purge? 

In the end, it was the restoration crew of the library itself who moved the books, just recently. No-one had touched them, before that. They were moved not out of any concern about their potential heretical nature, but simply because the bookcase needed to be repaired. They had been stacked somewhere else, on the floor in a niche at the side of the library. And that is also why the bookcase had 'disappeared'.

I found the book that I was looking for, the "Vita Magistrorum Magnorum - Tetrimon IV", a contemporary biography of grand master Tetrimon IV, written by his followers. He opposed the Moral Reforms and is said to have hidden artifacts from the Council of Apostles, to prevent Emperor Heideran V from finding them. There was also a rare copy of a volume of the "Deliberationes Concilii Apostolorum", records of the meetings of the Council of Apostles, from the time of the Moral Reforms - an important historical document. It is part of a very long series of recorded debates, going back millennia, that were considered part of Scripture before the reforms.

Undoubtedly, now both books are deeply heretical, and they would have been purged right after the end of the Moral Reform wars by the Theology Council, which was then newly created by Heideran V to replace the Council of Apostles. There may still exist copies in the Tetrimon Monastery, but if they have copies, they do not let anyone near them. Luckily, Baron Redwolfe's abandoned monastery remained untouched and today falls outside of conventional Tetrimon control. 

These books are not for the general public, as it could harm those untrained to withstand heresy. But for the trained theological expert, armored by a strong faith, it ought to be possible to study them for the benefit and glory of the Empire.

Resuming research

It is good to be back to my routine in Gottin's Lamp. A lot of work has been piling up while I was away, waiting for my return...

Now that also that is done, I am returning my attention to the library at the monastery of the Tetrimon Order of Saint Jamyl. It not only has records of the Khanid Order of Paladins, but also old historical records of the Tetrimon order, around the time of the Moral Reforms. 

Some of those seem to be on a missing bookshelf. It is not unlikely that an ancient collapsed, or succumbed to wood rot (the place had humidity problems). Perhaps these books were placed somewhere else, but the catalog was not updated. So, I will head back to the monastery to look through the other bookcases, one by one.

Patience is a virtue.

Cleanup crew came

Having completed my survey of the Empire's latest system, I decided to return. Frankly, camping out in space a whole week is more than enough. 

The Amarr Navy research station prefers not to open its hangars to capsuleers at this point. But they have done a good job cleaning out the discarded shuttles and corvettes that I still found here at the start of my exploration. 

Well, maybe also capsuleers contributed, in particular a certain "Hans I" from a corporation called "The Stellar Paradox" seems to have taken it upon himself to help clean up the mess and turn the abandoned ships into short-lived flaming plasma torches. Good man.

Ah, I will be happy to sleep in my own bed again tonight.

Stone circles

The worship of large rocks or solitary stones in a landscape goes back to the beginnings of civilization on many worlds. Huge stones or "megaliths" were pulled in an upright position, and this "orthostat" evolved from a landmark to a place of gathering, cult and worship. Often, other megaliths were dragged in from far away, and placed in a stone circle formation.

We have come a long way from megaliths to cathedrals.

Strangely, some alien civilizations seem to have never abandoned the worship of large stones, even in their space age. I think that was the case for the Talocan - they have a certain preference for large "stalagmite" asteroids, such as the one I encountered earlier in one of the Drifter wormholes (not Sanctified Vidette). 

Another notable example is the stalagmite asteroid at the center of the Takmahl labyrinth. Here, I think the Takmahl stumbled on Talocan technologies and found an ancient revered stone, and simply encompassed it into their own cult - everything Talocan so far surpassed their own capabilities that it must have seemed sacral to them. To some extent, this must also have been the case for the Jove and the Drifters - they seem keen on incorporating rectangular monoliths in their structures.

Interestingly, also in Sanctified Vidette there is a (space) stone circle, with a special assembly in the center. It is not a stalagmite asteroid, but two asteroids (a round boulder and elongated rock) that collided and shattered. A cloud of dust and small particles orbits the two, rotating with a period of about one minute. Around these two, a stone circle has clearly been assembled.

There is a wreck of ancient vessel nearby, either an exploration vessel or a cryoship, attesting to the age of this site - I think this predates the occupation of this wormhole by the Drifters. The site itself is not incompatible with other Talocan sites. There are peculiar round indentations on the rocks. These are not impact craters, they suggest erosion by continued contact with some smaller round rock perhaps carried by the cloud of dust. Whatever it was, it has vanished.

There is a blue plasma that connects the dots, and flutters around like a flame. It originates in the round indentation. It is not the glow of Tyranite, and it is light blue rather than Drifter green. The Indagatrix could not identify the nature of this glow or its energy source, the gas or plasma does not match known gas cloud compounds. I tried sampling it, but the emanations stopped when I got close. 

There is still so little we know and understand of deep space - or of the Talocan. I wonder what more wonders Drifter space will reveal!

Escape route

Amarr Navy reports show that the Drifters took massive losses in Sanctified Vidette, but despite this, very few were actually captured. At least, that we are allowed to know. What happened to the occupants of the abandoned stations? How did they escape reclamation? At least some Holders that I know are already inquiring about Drifter slaves...

I think I have found a possible explanation. I located a Drifter station functioning on autopilot. It has two factory units coupled to a powergrid distribution array feeding a ring of thermoelectric convertors. This setup generates a Talocan-type wormhole conduit, visible here in the center of the guard ring:

My guess is that this is one of perhaps several portals that the Drifters used to evacuate their population from Sanctified Vidette. To where it leads is unclear - I found no way to interface with the station or to activate the conduit. I stopped short from entering this station to explore it further, it seems wiser to leave this to the professionals of the Amarr Navy.

Remnants of the Drifter occupation

I am continuing my review of Sanctified Vidette after its reclamation.

Although the Empire secured its presence in Sanctified Vidette, there are still traces of the occupation by the Drifters, places where there structures or outposts stood. Except for the hive, none of these appear actively used. 

Most of the Drifter defenses and stations are thoroughly destroyed. Only useless rubble, such as broken station batteries and destroyed hulls, remain, floating in a swirling debris cloud. An example of this is found near Sanctified Vidette X :

Closer to the inner planets of Sanctified Vidette, I found a Drifter research station, abandoned but still with some traces of powergrid. It appears to have experienced a terrible accident, which has led to a large outgrowth of... well, something. It seems partly serpentine rock, partly organic tendrils enveloping the station as if they will consume it.

The tendrils seem to sprout from the station itself, emerging from various parts of the Drifter habitat.

There is also an abandoned Drifter manufacturing plant nearby - recognisable from it distinct flat-rectangle shaped factory. Also this has suffered a crippling accident:

The clear hint of trouble is the blue gaseous vapors surrounding the factory module in the center of the guard ring with power stations. I have seen such industrial modules before, during the Drifter crisis, and they are not supposed to be venting their atmosphere...  

Nexus Conquered

At the heart of the Drifter's operations there used to be a mysterious construct, consisting of many bar-shaped objects. It was once assembled into an "urchin" configuration, I heard. There are electric discharges between the bars, and some claim the frequency of the lightning had been increasing. Below, you see on the historical image also the beam of a Tekton Tyrannos industrial Drifter ship working on one of the bars:

Now that we have captured Sanctified Vidette, all these bars have been brought to the Amarr Navy base in Sanctified Vidette, and assembled into a long hollow needle-like structure:

The scale, as you can see, is immense. I had been told about this, but wanted to see it with my own eyes. To get an idea of the scale of this megastructure, the picture below shows the Indagatrix emerging from the top of the needle - it is nearly invisibly small, a dot that I have to circle for you to even see it.

Our scientists are investigating this - we still do not quite know its function or capabilities. The bars have been somewhat damaged during the combat operations, as you can see from the scorch marks and cracks on their hull:

The "needle" superstructure is hollow, with a conduit going from the top all the way to the bottom, which can be traversed without any adverse effects:

We can only wonder at what mysteries will this object reveal. May it bring glory to the Empire!

Litter

I made my way to the newest system of the Empire, Sanctified Vidette, via one of the wormhole connections in a system with a Jove observatory - Abai. 

It is good to see the Imperial Navy there in stead of roaming Drifter fleets. But there is still work to do! The Vidette Hive is still active, even if it seems somewhat subdued. I do not know what lies at its center, now that the nexus has been captured. It is not a site that I can explore safely on my own, remnants of the defeated Drifters are still holed up there.

The fury of capsuleer fleets has also died down. I have not seen any other pilot on d-scan anywhere. However, like a horde of thoughtless tourists passing through a natural park, those pilots that participated in the reclamation left behind a lot of litter.

Everywhere you warp around, there are discarded shuttles and corvettes on d-scan. Folks may have used them to help scan down things or go check out some site or keep an eye around, and then just left them. Or perhaps they kept them in space just in case they needed to reship and get out after losing their main vessel. Whatever the reason, dumping space junk around orbit of planets, even shattered ones, is cultivating a bad habit. 

Cleanup seems to have started. Around Sanctified Vidette IX the space junk has been cleared out. So, either scavengers or the Imperial Navy itself are taking care of removing the litter. 

Filament fail

Getting back to Sanctified Vidette appears easier said than done. Those darned filaments have stopped working! 

Their functioning relied on a connection between the Drifter Nexus structures and the structure called "the Warden" in Zarzakh. Probably, as indeed the Society of Conscious Though claims, it was the Deathless' tinkering with the Warden structure that precipitated the Drifter attacks in the first place, assuming the Drifters might have interpreted the activation of the Warden as an intrusion on their Nexus sites. 

Now, the Drifters have been chased from Sanctified Vidette (to God knows where), and the connection is severed, which renders the filaments inert. This means I have to go around, using my bookmarks of the Jove Observatories, and in those systems look for unidentified wormholes in my overview, and among those find a V928 entrance to Sanctified Vidette.

Wormhole connections to Sanctified Vidette spawn spontaneously and randomly in Jove Observatory systems, following a uniform probability distribution such that any given Jove Observatory system has only a 5.8% chance of having an entrance to Sanctified Vidette. 

In layman's terms: a lot of warping around for only a small probability to find an entrance closeby.

labyrinths

In the forums of the intergalactic summit (an inter-empire talking shop), prof.dr. Valate asked pertinent questions about the Drifter labyrinths. I can see where she is going with this: she is wondering if there is any similarity to the famous Takmahl labyrinth.

The question piqued my curiosity, so I analysed data from our LUMEN fleets, looking at several operations onder the command of governor Evelyn Arnoux or Ms. Tather Borg. This allows me to unequivocally confirm that the Drifter and Takmahl labyrinths are completely different.

The most obvious difference is the type of gate connecting different rooms of the labyrinth:

The Drifter labyrinth uses warp accelerators such as those commonly found among the Empires, derived from Jove technology (although some in the Republic claim they invented this). The Takmahl labyrinth uses small wormhole-like gates, of a type similar to those created by Talocan thermo-electric generators.

Another difference is the layout: the Takmahl labyrinth is set up in three-dimensional space, as shown by my own telemetry, in a roughly triangular form. The gates connecting the different rooms are placed in a planar octagon, with eight gates out of which only a fraction works.

In contrast, the Drifter labyrinth's gate are laid out in a square, with acceleration gates appearing to point in the four cardinal directions of the cluster's plane. There appear to be sixteen rooms, with possible connections as if they are laid out in a four by four square grid. Nevertheless, reports affirm that these structures are in higher-dimensional space, and actually lie on the sixteen corners of a four-dimensional tesseract.

I would have liked to perform my own telemetry on these labyrinths, but they no longer appear, it seems. Apparently, the Drifters are losing their grip on Sanctified Vidette. There have been other reports of changes occuring in that wormhole system. 

I am planning to return in order to investigate, now that the dust has somewhat settled.

Meeting the press

I took coffee in Bar Marlinea a couple of days ago. That is a bar not far from Gottin's Lamp, and it used to be a bustling place for capsuleers. Ms. Yubari worked there for a while as waitress! It has gotten a bit out of fashion of late but it still has excellent coffee and pastries. So, despite some bad memories of a kidnapping there, I still go from time to time. 

This time there was a capsuleer customer again, a rare occasion nowadays. Haven Alure is a former actress in Intaki cinema, who now does investigative journalism. We struck up conversation, and I made sure to point her to the most wholesome of news agencies, Amarr Certified News. She said she prefers to work freelance and sell her work to various news outlets. 

She also says that she is investigating the growing Angel Cartel influence in and around Mehatoor. At least that is what she claims, she also said she was taking a break. And she seemed interested to interview the arch-heretic capsuleer living here in Mehatoor, I warned her about him. 

I got a feeling that she is not telling me everything. Perhaps I am being paranoid, but anyway I urged her to thoroughly fact-check any rumors she might hear about LUMEN, at the very least with me.