~ Chapel Perilous ~

[Malaclypse 666]

Excerpts of FnordNet Logs, 816-817 AS:

Personal Logs, Malaclypse:

16 Dec 816:

Goddess goosed me. Due to the lack of gravity at the Geodes center, I flew 10 meters before smacking my head on the wall of my private shack. I woke up. I got the message, and She filled in the gory details. Crap.


21 Dec 816:

I finally located Reggie and Moira, aka Pops and Rhiannon, posing as bloody Junkers.. Junkers! Transmitted my message from Eris that a great evil threatened Sirius. Typically, Reggie answered Harrumph.. What else is new? So youre coming out of retirement to stir the dookey, and you need a crew to serve it out?!?


23 Dec 816:

Tasked Reggie with rebuilding the Veranda. Church membership has grown, even in my absence. Holliday and the rest have done a marvelous job. PB cant keep up with demand on our Sacrament due to the weak sunlight. Reggie estimates six months before the plantation is up and producing again.

Moira has a capable crew aboard the Veranda.Vixen. Her FO/Chief Pilot is named Bridget, an old friend and employee from Hopes Haven. Tess is an engineer from Livadia, and knows the ZBT-100T inside and out. Gail and Storrm are sisters from Canaria. The Flax is rolling again for our black op.


14 Jan 817:

Finding enough full bull goose crazy crews for this op was more difficult than anticipated; but, the promise of fifty hectares and a mule on Canaria tipped the scales in most cases. Surprisingly, most of the Legionaires have also accepted Eris. Fancy that.

Roster:

Waverly, Reginald, Conference Gunboat Warbucks. (Moira insisted that Reggie get out from under foot while she attended to making sure the Veranda was not just a dope plantation but also a proper home.) Caveat Lecher.

Dorn, George, Beggars.Feast, Conference Gunboat, crew compliment 5 (of course). Geoerge and crew were raiding Bretonian shipping as Freelancers out of Belfast for the halibut when recruited;

(George and crew were actually recruited by another old friend who came in from the cold. Former KNF Taichou Chijin met him on Belfast while on deep cover assignment for the Kempetai/Tokeitai in Newcastle. The Fool adamantly refuses to upgrade his Sampan GB, the Hexagram.23, to something more suitable for the climate here in Gallia);

Flint, Derek, the Domino, Council Perilous Gunboat, crew of three, supplemented with trainees from Verdun. Derek is an ex-LSF agent.. Speaks fluent gobbledygook;

Dobbs, Robert, Pomme.d.Or, Orca GB, former Bounty Hunter recruited by Moira at Freeport 11. Seems to prefer basing out of Epernay due to those foxy Brigand chicks cest la vie;

Jackson, Ernest Shiv, Armored Transport Amour.Fou, currently posing as an OSC support vessel for his wife, Professor Yvette Delacroix Jackson. Ernie is a young ex-Hacker who came to Gallia in a bloody Falchion LF!! Two things kept him from slinking back to Sirius.. The fifty hectares, and meeting his bride on Nimes Station;

Mme. Jackson has the Royal Navy firmly convinced that our yacht, the Vienne.Explorer is an Orbital Spa R&D vessel researching the feasibility of terraforming Planet Vienne into the next big tourist attraction of the Sector. (Oh, well terraform it alright, but not for OSC or the Royals..)

Yvette is also directing six scientists in our investigations into that bloody enigma, the Privas Formation. (I have become obsessed with it ever since hearing the theory that it may be an artifact of the Dom KVash. I will crack that nut, or die in the trying!)

The roster is rounded out by my own war bird, the Asco GB French.Kiss, and a new flagship being commissioned at Corfu with Moira and Tesss supervision, to be dubbed the Eris.Ascendant.


23 February 817:

It has required some fancy footwork to convince the Council Administration on Nimes that we are not just a bunch of crazy religious kooks and opportunistic Zoners. (Well, we are, but thats beside the point)

All of our ships are now sporting either Council or Maquis ID/IFF, except for our OSC vessels, the Vienne.Explorer and the Amour.Fou. Our exchange program with the various partisan Factions in Gallia continues.

When will the rest of Sirius wake up to the danger? I do not know. One need only face a Royal Navy squadron of four bombers to feel the resolve and intention of these bloody Hodgeists.!


04 Avril 817:

Shiv delivered the third load of Scrubbies to Planet Vienne today. We are offsetting the cost of the little buggers by sneaking up to Grenoble and hauling tobacco back to Shasta. I hope the market holds. We are tagging one in ten of the little buggers with an ingenious device Ernie and Yvette came up with. Surveys seem to indicate that the original groups are expanding, and that the population may even be increasing.

The scientists aboard the V.E are not optimistic. Oxygen and nitrogen levels have barely budged, a miniscule .0003 percent. Our Planet form bighead, Dr. Dundee claims it will take over a million Scrubbies, and 20 years to create a breathable atmosphere on Vienne.

Im betting on five.


23 June 817:

I accompanied Ernie and Reggie on the Amour.Fou to Roppongi, where we had a quiet meeting with a certain J. Simon Esq.. We took along a number of items procured from Gallian shipping interests. Jay went so far as to raise one eyebrow, which we took to be a good sign. The upshot of the meeting was that Interspace Commerce will continue to insure you crazy tossers at outrageous rates, and for the option on an eventual long-term lease on an Interspace headquarters for Gallia on Planet Vienne.

Its all about the Flax. was his parting comment as he had 30 of his analysts begin crunching numbers on potential markets and profit margins. Eris Bless you, Jay.


14 August 817:

Today, I shed tears. Copious tears. A transmission was received on Nimes over a long-unused FnordNet sub channel: *Heya, Malsey-poo! Nice to see you finally got off your fat primate butt and got back in the game, hon. I thought Id come up and see what the Thud is going on. Be there in 20 minutes. Smoochies!*

It has been over two years since Mama Dis got tired of watching me brood in my little Geode hideaway. One day she, Sophie and Shamus decided theyd had enough spinning in place, and left. They dropped completely off the TAZ radar. There were rumors that Dis had gone back to Gammu to interface with the Harveys big brain, in an attempt to breath some life back into FTGW. There were rumors that the three of them had located Kitty, and had gone off to reform the Cylons.

Well, it turns out the first rumor had sombunall truth to it. Dis did hook up to old First Thought for awhile, but nearly went crazy herself in the process. After that, she did stay with the Harvesters, and actually became sort of a High Priestess. As she later related, the Harvesters now spend literally seconds a day contemplating deep philosophical questions like: Why five tons of flax.. why not six?, and What is the sound of one diode cascading?, and Who is the programmer who makes the organic growth vibrate at a certain visible wavelength? Apparently, they have yet to discern the shape of a Precious Mao Button, or the exact location of the Region of Thud

Dis has put on some weight. About 8,000 metric tonnes to be exact, but she wears it well. When she appeared outside Nimes Station, every viewport and holoviewer was filled with the sight of a sleek and deadly AI Cruiser. When Council Administrators asked Dis to be allowed inside for a tour, she simply answered *What inside? Its all me, and nobody crawls around in my guts, bozo.*

Two years away hasnt improved her manners any, but to paraphrase an old Sufi saying: A man without a Fnordette is like a fish without a bicycle. Welcome home, Dis. Goddess, Ive missed you!


23 October 817:

We held a brief but moving ceremony at Nimes Station today. Everyone was assembled except the Jacksons, who will remain in mufti as Orbital Spa vessels for the time being. They did however join us over a secure FnordNet linkup.

Mama Dis attended via holotank, where she appeared wearing her stunning rendition of Riley Mackenzies drawing of the Goddess Eris. Hubba hubba. After a brief prayer to the Goddess, Reggie stepped forward and activated a large ornate switch. Ernie Jacksons command program was immediately transmitted to the Sirius Registry of ships, and the vessels of all present were within minutes tagged with a new transponder tag.

Some of those present would recognize the tags acronym as the Erisian Liberation Front. Nearly a decade had passed in Sirius since it was last used by the Erisians.

However, in Gallia, the tag would have a new meaning, derived from a very old and well-known group of misfits, mercenaries, and neer-do-wells, the French Foreign Legion.

Today, the King of Gallia would know a new group of adversaries, dedicated to halting the Royalist advance into Sirius; to claiming Dauphine, and especially Planet Vienne, for Eris; and for proving that Dauphine, through the ancient Dom KVash, and the Privas Formation, is the cradle of all humanity, to which it must rightfully return.

Today, the Etoile Legion Francais is born. Today, the [ELF] rides again.


Friday, 13 November, 817: (Jacques DeMolay, thou are truly avenged!)

Chatted with Dis today about the Privas formation. The fragments of Dom KVash history still retained by the Harvesters have somewhat verified my speculations.

Apparently this incredible act of planet-juggling, as Dis called it, was the last act of the Dom KVash before they split the scene, leaving the Nomads and the Harvesters as caretakers of the Sector until they (or, I believe, their progeny the human race) should return.

Another theory of mine has been validated to my satisfaction by astrographical observations of the Formations alignment by Madame Jackson and her scientists. I was very curious about the direction in which the formations vertices were directed: those points of the outer planets directly opposite the central eye of Privas V.

At first, the calculations were a bust, until Mama Dis chided us for not taking into account the effects of Galactic rotation, however glacial that rotation might be. Sure enough, when the astrophysicists backtracked their readings, my suspicions were vindicated. Looking into the past approximately (you guessed it) 23,000 years, Privas II, the topmost planet was aligned precisely with Galactic center.

Privas I, the planet furthest from Briancon, was precisely aligned with the double-star system of Sirius proper, and I believe we can eventually end the dispute of which solar system in the Sector actually is Sirius.

Privas III, the planet oriented towards the Burgundy system, was precisely aligned with a stellar group which I am sure the Colonial Remnant will verify is known by them as Kobol. 23 millenia ago, Privas III was aligned precisely with the area where the Twelve Colonies originated.

Cagliostro, wherever you are hiding, we can now be assured that every myth, fable, and instance in our shared histories of glowing red eyes within triangles or pyramids, does indeed have a basis in fact, sir. The final vertex, that of Privas IV, was once aligned precisely with a small system of nine planets, (not counting Mickey and Goofy), surrounding a star we still fondly refer to as Sol.

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