• By this time, the VES has spent six months establishing communication with We, and the VES's findings have been shared with the Duke of Regina. During this time, Leah’s Psionic strength has has climbed from 1 to her maximum 9.
• According to the leaders of the Djinni Task Force, the VES are accounted brave explorers, individuals who established contact with a new sentient race, and functional subject matter experts on the Ancients. This is the first significant alien contact for the Imperium in thousands of years. It is expected that the Social Status of VES members will increase when the VES returns to civilization.
• The Task Force's VIPs (Count Quinlan, Lady Admiral Starrett ap-Agar, Station Chief Garrivan del'Zed) formally classify our findings, and brief us on what we can talk about and how. That being said, they acknowledge that there is too much information flow into and out of the Djinni system for the Imperium to completely control.
• Garrivan del'Zed alerts the VES that the door to the Ancient facility was opened last night. The Marine guard noticed the exterior door was open (entry requires psionic activation). The guard checked with the heat pump monitoring team, who did not notice anything. The two teams swept the complex, and didn’t detect any traces of interlopers, including latent heat signatures. Within this period, there were no unscheduled ship traffic to, or from, Djinni itself. Only the supply shuttle came and went.
• Garrivan del'Zed wants the VES to instrument the doorway into the Ancients' complex. Garrivan del'Zed, Pinkie, Fitz, Alrik, Froge, Leah, and Martaan descend to Djinni's surface and the doorway to the Ancients' complex via Leah's Delight with electronic surveillance gear with which to monitor the entrance. Working together, the group establishes a sophisticated monitoring system.
• Meanwhile, Fitz and Martaan interrogate the Marine guards. Their recollections during the intrusion are fuzzy. This "fuzziness" doesn’t feel like the away team's manipulation by We. On video, the away team sees one guard try to look at the door, but inexplicably turn away instead. The guards report engaging in a meaningless and unintelligible conversation instead of guarding the door as assigned. Froge determines the "fuzziness" did not cause any organic damage to the guards.
• It turns out that Garrivan del'Zed’s team produced a psychic door opener so the team could enter the complex at will. The opener circuit board has “Dandelion was here” etched on its edge. It turns out that Dandelion del'Zed is aboard the Stygian Solicitation.
• The Stygian Solicitation sends a delegation to meet the VES on the Azhanti High Lightning; the VES requests Dandelion be part of the delegation. Madeline, Fitz, Pinkie, Alrik, Froge, Leah, and Martaan are all in attendance. (Pinkie wants to meet the psionic door opener’s designer.) Count Quinlan, Garrivan del'Zed, Dandelion del'Zed, and Lady Admiral Starrett ap-Agar meet us in a large conference room on the Azhanti High Lightning. Dandelion sees Leah and immediately hugs her; Leah hugs her back. Dandelion reports she’s fascinated by the VES's papers and publications.
• Dandelion has heard about Froge's visitation from CHESS. Froge asks how CASE is doing. It turns out that CASE is with Dandelion on the Stygian Solicitation in a bounded capacity. CASE remains very loyal to her.
• Dandelion reports there is only one psionic door opener planetside. She designed and built it, although it could be replicated. She destroyed all the prototypes, per Garrivan del'Zed’s orders. Dandelion’s opener was kept in the site commander’s field-expedient safe, it was not lost, and it does not appear to have been used. (It must be touched to the door for it to function.) As the likelihood of a ship intruding undiscovered into the Djinni system seems low, the group suspects a spy is on one our ships; a psionic spy seems more likely than the duplication of Dandelion’s door opener.
• Martaan asks the assembled dignitaries who might have authorized the infiltration and what its purpose might have been. The Count reports that none of the people in the room know. Pinkie suggests it may have been an Ancient checking on the Imperial campsite.
• The Marine base planetside includes a whole marine platoon (16) and four support staff, who ferry items to and from the Azhanti High Lightning. The Marines scan the area in pairs for interlopers.
• The VES sweeps Leah's Delight looking for stowaways, and checks its door lock and logs. The lifeform counter only recorded the expected seven life signs. At the next opportunity (next session), Count Quinlan and Leah will scan the base complement for psionic ability, guilty parties, or anything else suspicious.

1100-042 0900 – Djinni, the Shore of a Northerly Continent, Near a Moving Island

0900 – 0930 The away team loads equipment into their air/raft, and then suits up-

• Alric and Froge wear their wet suits;
• Leah wears her wet suit under her combat environment suit; and,
• Martaan wears his combat environment suit. 

0931-1000 –  The away team travels to a floating island, which Martaan christens "New Menorb Island."

1000 – 1200 Over the course of the next 90 minutes, the away team-

• Five minutes in, the group begins noticing that all the plants are exactly two meters apart;
• Seven minutes in, the group begins noticing that the insects are all flying one centimeter apart;
• 12 minutes in, the insects form up and make a 3D image of each of the party’s faces in turn— Leah, Alric, Forge, and finally Martaan;
• 15 minutes in, members of the party begin to become extraordinarily calm;
• 20 minutes in, members of the party begin humming or singing a little tune;
• 25 minutes in, members of party begin walking quickly to the center of the island; and,
• After 30 minutes, members reach the center of the island, and begin undertaking a task at the behest of the island, in this case, sweeping away snow from the central mound of the island.

Only Alric manages to partially resist the influence of the island, and, testing a theory, injects himself and the rest of the away team with stimulants, allowing them to shake off the influence of the island. They then jog back to the beach where they landed their air/raft, and proceed at speed away from New Menorb Island, back to their base camp, where they realize they have left their psionic shield helmets.

1200 – 1300 Over lunch, with Dr. Sato, the away team discuss what just happened-

• Is the island's ecology controlled by a single organism?
• Is it a hive mind?
• Is this a protective system, and not part of the ecosystem?
• How can we talk to the big mind?
• Was the island attempting to integrate the away team into its ecosystem?
• What was the dome in the artificial, or organic?

1300 – 1400 - The away team launches a solo drone mission to New Menorb Island. The drone is able to determine that the island's insects are just insects, and it is able to get a sample of the island, which proves to be dead skin cells. Meanwhile, aboard the An Lang, Pinkie begins synthesizing a chorale based on all the song fragments sung by the away team. 

1100-041 1200 – Djinni, the Shore of a Northerly Continent, Near a Moving Island

1200 – 1600 - The away party deploys a crab drone to explore the underside of the moving island.

They also put in a request to the An Lang to analyze the movement of the floating islands:

• Do they move with or against the current?
• Do they seem to follow a specific path or course?

Leah's Delight's sensors reveal that there is C02 coming off of the floating island.

The crab drone explores the underside of the floating island and finds a mixture of a coral reef and an underwater kelp garden. A huge variety of fish and other lifeforms inhabit the underside of this island, including larger and smaller fish, rays, trilobite-like creatures, and large shark-like creatures.

The first crab drone is sent to the center of the moving island— a journey of three hours. A separate crab drone is sent with a bucket to retrieve a kelp sample. In the meantime—

• Alric works on the likelihood that the island is actually respirating;
• Froge works with Pinkie;
• Leah and Soto are working on the kelp, which they discover has limited motility; and,
• Martaan walks the shore, looking for sea shells, finding a wide variety of them.

Pinkie determines that, in some cases, the floating islands are moving against the current.

1600 – 1700 The crab drone reaches the center of the island and finds the snow has melted and that the temperature is significantly higher than that of the surrounding air; it then flies back to the Delight. The away team then has an early dinner.The away team set watches for the night-

1600 – 1900 - Leah stands watch;

1700 – 1800 - The away team puts up a simple drone perimeter. Froge and Martaan go for a run by the seashore, speculating about Djinni, the floating islands, and the Ancients.

1900 – 2200 - Martaan stands watch, and trades comm messages with Lady Cassandra;

2200 – 0000 - Froge stands watch;

1100-042 0000 – 0300 - Soto stands watch;

0300 – 0600 - Alric stands watch, and continues his respiratory analysis.

0600 – 0700 - The away team has a quick breakfast.

0700 – 0900 - Alric, with Leah's assistance, is able to prove that the island is either a living being, or a system that exactly models a living being.

1100-039 1300 – The An Lang and Leah's Delight, in Orbit around Djinni

1300 – 1400 - The VES breaks for lunch, discussing the recent events.

1400 – 1500 A communications and linguistic analysis comparing the message Froge received purporting to be from CHESS with the away team's recorded interactions with the OoCP highlights strong parallels between the two. However, the message just seems to "appear" in Froge's cabin- an energy analysis can't uncover a vector of transmission.

1500 – 1800 - The An Lang undertakes the last of its four survey passes of Djinni, in this case, of the southern hemisphere.  While this takes place, Leah prepares the Delight for planetfall.  

1800 – 1930 While the VES is analyzing and synthesizing the sensor data, Pinkie comes to a startling conclusion- some of the islands seem to be moving.

1930 – 2130  Training the An Lang's formidable sensor array on one of the "moving islands", and make the following discoveries-

• A neural scan definitely shows activity— but does this reflect multiple life-forms, or the island itself?
• The island is substantially less dense than a comparable volume of stone;
• The heat signature of a moving island is substantially warmer than that of a stationary island; and,
• There seems to be some kind of gas exhausted from the island— could this be an indication of respiration?

1100-039 2130 – 1100-041 2200 - The Away Team begins to prepare for its trip dirtside the following day:

• Leah doublechecks the Delight's air / raft;
• Froge doublechecks and loads the team's away kits;
• Alric continues his communications analysis of the "whale song", attempting to synthesize a working vocabulary;
• Martaan begins to synthesize a tactical battlemap of the island, and trades messages with Lady Cassandra ap-Tain;
• Soto assembles a ship's surgery on the Delight; and,
• Ujilka is redeployed to the Azhanti High Lightning.

The away team make sure to pack the eight artificial psionic shield helmets.

1100-041 0400-1200 - The Delight makes it's way from orbit to a northerly continent, near the polar ice cap, to observe one of the moving islands. The Delight is near the seashore, about two meters in elevation above sea level.

1100-038 2345 – The An Lang and Leah's Delight, in Orbit around Djinni 

2345 – 1100-039 0000 Froge assesses Leah- she's OK, but jangled. Her nervous is saturated with energy. Froge has the sense that Leah can only take so many of these kind of encounters.

0000 – 0200 In response to the problem, the expedition manages to scrounge a total of nine psionic shield helmets from the Azhanti High Lightning and the Stygian Solicitation. The VES then begins to share their hypotheses-

• Leah – What if the thing we were scanning initially shielded itself, and that is why it "disappeared"?
• Pinkie – We were actively scanning for neural activity. Maybe we irritated it, which is why it responded in the way it did? What if our future scanning was purely passive? 
• Alric and Martaan – what if we came across as "pounding on the door"? And, whatever it was just "pounded back"?

The VES then begins to analyze the data they collected during their encounter, submitting computationally-intensive analyses that may grind on while they sleep:

• Martaan begins to look for repetitions in the "data" they received, trying to break the "music" into units of language. Froge assists him successfully by cleaning up the signal. The analysis they receive the following morning is that there are definitely repetitions, but that they don't yet have enough exposure to this kind of information to determine the periodicity of language events— e.g., does that particular repetition indicate a repeated sentence, word, syllable, or sound?
• Alric attempts to determine if the "music" they experienced as produced by a living being, or by a device / tool? The following morning, Alric learns that the signal they received is closest to recorded whale songs, but that it seems off the scale, energy-wise: no living being previously encountered could generate this much energy.
• Leah attempts to determine if there were any statistical anomalies, spikes, or discrepancies  in the transmission from the standpoint of the different ships in orbit around Djinni. She is assisted by Ujilka who wrangles and time-sequences all of the different ships' data for her. The following morning, the two of them come to the conclusions that 1) all three ships recorded the same event, and that 2) the "response" really was targeted at Leah's Delight.

0200 – 0400 With their analyses submitted, the exhausted VES members hit their racks-

• Martaan realizes that what he has "heard" was "choral music" before he falls asleep;
• Ujilka eats half a corn muffin, and crashes out;
• Leah studies psionic shielding before falling asleep;
• Froge just collapses.

0400 - 1000 - Leah dreams she is underwater, where it is very cold, and there is a lot of pressure. Froge apparently receives a comm-call from Chess.

0800 – 1200 - Unable to sleep, Froge wakes early and combs through the An Lang's logs in an attempt to determine what really happened during his comm-call. He is able to localize a power surge without a clear source in his cabin around 0400.

1000 – 1130 - Alrik, Leah, and Martaan wake between 1000-1100; Ujilka rolls out of her bunk and right into a VES meeting at 1130.

 1200 – 1300 - Froge briefs the VES on his conversation with Chess. Responses are mixed:

• Fitz wonders if this is some form of deception originating from another vessel, but he has no idea what a possible motive might be.
• Leah wonders if this is really emanating from the planet, or from the Ancients' structure on the planet— could this be an Ancient AI?
• Saeagang thinks it seems like Chess, and that that power surge in Froge's quarters in pretty inexplicable otherwise.
• Soto speculates if what contacted Froge is some sort of synthesis of Hihurunhaudorttruh (the AI behind the OoCP) and Chess into some new intelligence.
• Pinkie confirms the weird "materialization" of energy in Froge's quarters around 0400.

Finally, Martaan lets the group know that the metaphor he is most comfortable with for the "music" they "heard" was multiple voices singing in a chorale.

1100-036 2300 – VES Conference Room Aboard the Azhanti High Lightning, in Orbit Above Djinni

2300 – After a long day, Team Neural and Team Drone break up their work session in the conference room. Leah, along with most of the rest of the VES, go off to bed, while some of the team members look for a little recreation with the crew—

• Froge works himself into a card game with a senior engineering NCO Kyril and a starship drive mechanic Stavrij, in an attempt to determine why the Azhanti High Lightning is part of the Djinni task force. Froge tells them everything he can about the OoCP and the planetary surface without breaking in any confidences; Kyril and Stavrij are really unclear about the task force's mission, but are fairly certain the Azhanti High Lightning is there to defend Djinni. Froge hits his rack around 1100-037 0100.
• Martaan goes for a stroll down to the Marines' decks, and runs into Karla and Ambler, junior Marine officers who are checking their load-outs before leading two of the platoons that will be defending the Ancients' complex. Karla and Ambler, recognizing Martaan as a former Marine and a member of the VES, ask him for a sense of the battlespace, complaining that no one is really briefing them on what to expect. Martaan tells them a lot about the terrain, and gives them some valuable hints off the record as to what they should focus on. Martaan goes to bed around 1100-037 0000.
• Ujilka hits the gym, and gets in a 90 minute workout before going to bed around 1100-037 0030.
• Alric stays behind and comes up with a different approach to detecting cetacean neurology, using whale song analysis as a tool for locating whale singers, and as a result, the second alien species the Ancients have located on Djinni. Alric goes to bed around 1100-037 0000.

1100-037 0800 – 0900 Martaan and Alric wake early, and both find themselves in the gym nearest to the guest quarters, each practicing their swordsmanship. They challenge each other to a quick match of three touches-

• Martaan wins the first touch;
• Alric and Martaan each touch simultaneously during the second bout; and
• Martaan wins the third touch, and the match. 

0915 – 0930 - Froge wakes and around 0915 and does some PT. Leah wakes at 0930.

0930 - 1100 The VES essentially takes over the guest mess, as Alric and Martaan, Froge, Leah, Soto, Elwin, Pinkie, and eventually Ujilka, all take over a corner of the dining room and talk confidentially about what they've found out. The group consensus is that- outside of the VES— only a handful of very senior officers know what is really on the planet's surface, and therefore, what the task force's true objectives are.

1100 – 2300 – In the VES's shielded conference room, led by Madeline and Saeagang, the VES separates back into Team Neural and Team Drone. After a Herculean effort, and 11 hours of work, Team Neural manages to get a song-based cetacean detection model working that could be used through the An Lang's sensor packages. Likewise, Team Drone managed to assemble their crab-like drones, and then to test them in one of the Azhanti High Lightning's training pools. Much to their delight, they worked and moved very convincingly. With these two tasks completed, the VES is ready to try and detect both species of alien races, and to observe them using their camouflaged drones.

1100-035 2200 – Guest Quarters Aboard the Azhanti High Lightning, in Orbit Above Djinni

2200 - After a long debriefing, and a superb dinner in the Admiral's mess, the VES team goes to sleep.

1100-036 0600 - Martaan wakes early, does his exercises and Marine Corps PT, and works on his presentability. He later receives a message from Cassandra.

0730 - Alric wakes, grabs a quick bite from the galley, and goes off to the conference room that has been assigned to the VES, to review all the expedition's notes / audio / video so far.

0900 - Froge wakes, gets breakfast in the galley, and requests a ship's tour of the Azhanti High Lightning. As a former senior Navy NCO, he is given a fairly comprehensive tour of the vessel, which is enormous.

1000 - Leah wakes; Ujilka wakes.

1000 – 1600 The VES has a rare quiet morning of rest and relaxation to themselves-

• Elwin dons his Naval uniform, and visits the ship's bridge, catching up with friends from the Regina branch of the Imperial Naval Academy;
• Fitz goes down to one of the enlisted crew's gym, gets in a workout, and winds up giving an impromptu lecture on unarmed combat to some of the Lightning's complement of Imperial Marines;  
• Madeline and Saeagang have a relaxed late brunch in the officer's mess with with Count Quinlan, where they are seen laughing and joking over coffee and dessert;
• Pinkie finds the ship's zero-gee exercise space, and has a chance to practice Belter calisthenics. He later receives an invite to the ship's bridge, where he and Elwin chat with the chief sensor officer about long-range sensing innovations;
• Dr. Soto is seen in one of the ship's gyms, going through kata with his katana and wakazashi, and later, in a quiet lounge, in seated meditation facing the ship's hull.

1600 – 1800 The VES reconvenes in the conference room that has been assigned to them where they begin to discuss first contact procedures. Madeline reminds everyone that, before they can make contact with either of the races on Djinni, they have to determine whether the races meet certain minimum qualities for sentience, including-

• The existence of language;
• The presence of conceptual thought;
• A social structure; and,
• The ability to make and use tools.

A broad outline of the initial part of the survey emerges through discussion—

• Pinkie is confident he can tune the An Lang's neural activity sensor to locate clusters of sentient life amid the teeming seas of Djinni;
• Once they've been found, Fitz proposes they disguise underwater drones as sea life, so as to observe the two species without making contact;
• The VES are fairly confident that once they collect enough imagery and audio, they can determine the presence of tools and a social structure, and hopefully, clues to a language. 

1800 – 2300 - The VES requests a meal from the galley, and splits into two teams. Madeline would shuttle between the two teams, providing oversight. Saeagang and Elwin would stand-by as interfaces and gophers, making requests from the members of the task force for data and / or materials that the An Lang did not have. 

<u>Team Neural</u> – the goal of this team is to create a "neural template" for either "squid-like" or "whale-like" consciousness, which can be fed into the An Lang's sensors and used to locate clusters of life-forms for initial survey. This was expected to take 14 hours, but the team worked well together and completed the basics of a cephalapodic neural consciousness image by the end of the evening. Team Neural members include—

• Alrik
• Martaan
• Pinkie
• Soto

<u>Team </u><u>Drone</u> - the goal of this team is to create a drone-based collection platform that could be present around Djinni's "squid-like" and "whale-like" life forms, which could tacitly observe them without arousing their suspicions (and hopefully, not be mistaken for food!). Challenges included selecting a drone which could function well underwater, using machine learning to model the swimming patterns and other behavior of an organism, and preparing the drone to look believably like a life-form. 

Team Drone members include—

• Fitz
• Froge
• Leah
• Ujilka

By the end of the evening, Team Drone had still had about four hours work to go physically disguising the drones to look like sea creatures.

2300 - The VES team goes to sleep in their guest quarters aboard the Azhanti High Lightning.

 

1100-035 0515 – Outside the Ancients’ Complex on Djinni

0515 - The exploratory party learns from Madeline that, eight hours earlier, a task force of four Imperial starships had jumped into the Djinni system, including—

• A Lightning-class cruiser, the Azhanti High Lightning, 60,000T, under the command of Lady Admiral Starett ap-Agar;
• A 400T lab ship, Feasible Hypothesis, from the Naval Hospital and the University of Regina. Later it is discovered Lady Doctor Cassandra ap-Tain, Martaan's former girlfriend, is aboard as the team's xenovirologist;
• A 400T modified Donosev class Survey Scout, Stygian Solicitation, which has been turned into a sensor collection platform, directed by Garrivan del'Zed of the Imperial Intelligence Service; and,
• The return of the 100T S-class scout / courier Leah's Delight, piloted by Dr. Alric Ironshoulder, with Ujilka H. Roberts navigating, who have been hired to join the VES.

The entire task force is under the direction of Count Diplomat Quinlan ap-Corserra, who has requested to debrief the task force.

0615 – 1700 - The exploration party gets some sleep in their tents, while Madeline and Dr. Soto pilot the cutter to the valley where the Ancients' complex is located. The cutter picks the exploratory team up (leaving the air-rafts secured to trees), then climb up the gravity well to rendezvous with the An Lang.

1700 – 1800 - En route to the Azhanti High Lightning, the VES synthesizes Pascal's video with team members' helmet camera footage (including some sub-vocalizations of our telepathic conversations) into a narrative they could present to the new arrivals.

1800 – 2000   The VES meets with Garrivan del Zed, Count Diplomat Quinlan ap-Corserra, and the Lady Admiral Starrett ap-Agar, and are introduced to their two new VES members- Dr. Alric Ironshoulder and Ujilka H. Roberts. During the meeting—

• The exploratory party briefs those present on their current findings;
• Count Quinlan telepathically asks Leah to confirm the authenticity of their presentation, which she does;
• Garrivan del'Zed is troubled that the the Ancients are still around, and inaccessible, and decides that the VES needs to tell Pascal's parents he died on the mission, not that he had departed this universe to work with the Ancients, who were still around;
• Leah argues that the Imperium owes Pascal's parents double the $200k fee for the VES, especially because the Empire is lying to them about Pascal's fate;
• The official story, particularly for the staff of the lab ship, is that the exploratory team found the alien base in its current state. As a result, there can be speculation about Ancient uplift of humaniti without reviewing all the current evidence;
• The task force leadership speculate that, although the VES broke up the Zhodhani spy ring on Regina, some of their intelligence may have made it offworld, so the Azhanti High Lightning is present as a deterrent against interlopers;
• Finally, the task force is going to avoid fixed installations, so as to avoid aggravating the Ancients.

2000 – 2200 - The VES are guests of the Admiral's mess, and sleep in guest quarters on the Azhanti High Lightning.