Small additional content warning: the latest set of guests to the sh*tstorm -really- don't align with humans reproductive processes with results including what probably counts as a lot of misgendering because I haven't written any point of view characters who even know the meaning of the word 'misgender' yet, this still being set in the 1990s.
Also some of this may get a bit squicky because really not human reproductive process.
-/-/-/-
The photograph wasn't great - Sir* Lenwiss's marriage of a camera to his** privately constructed observatory was not without flaw - and required one wield a magnifying glass to make out anything of the important part, but it was very conclusive indeed, and that was why the Magnate of Asterian set his magnifying glass down and said "My Gods sir, you're right."
"I ver much fear so, Your Majesty," the gentleman scientist confirmed, "We are indeed looking at the first ever scientifically verifiable photograph of an alien spacecraft, currently in orbit of the planet of Elaith. From angular measurements I estimate the vessel's size to be prodigious, it is at the very least some fifty kilometers*** from stem to stern. I rather thought I'd better inform you at once as it's rather on you to determine what we're to do about it, parliament shall surely deteriorate into a panic when this reaches their ears."
There was an appalled silence around the table, finally broken by the Count Valdanne, a philosopher of some repute in addition to being an antiquarian and retired artilleryman, who raked a hand through his luxurious hair and said, "i believe we'd best begin by praying they're not intending to invade sir, any peoples able to crost the vast gulf of space between stars should surely be quite capable of crushing us militarily like a pismere, as surely as they can any other nation of Andal, up to and including the Lestrath Empire. If they want land, resources, slaves, even just a harvest of tasty Sindari to eat we're as defencless before them as livestock even given recent naval developments. Consider the recent colonisation of Eterch, and the recently published ditty about us having the machine gun and 'they' do not, in this scenario the occupants of that craft have the machine gun. And -we- do not. I propose that we wait, prepare to be very genial and courteous when they -do- come, and -pray-."
"If it does come to a fight we are going to be seen as traitors," said Sir Eteneth.
"If, and it's a rather big if, we still exist as a people," Sir Lenwiss noted. "Which isn't a given should the coming winter devolve into war with these aliens."
"Well," said the magnate. "That's awkward, on the other hand one can't help but note that we are wonderfully positioned to prepare for a form of worst we might survive. Gentlemen, I propose to commence construction of final redoubts, and stockpiling of weapons, munitions, foodstuff, and seedstock, immediately, and invest as much into it as we can persuade Parliament to approve. Better to be cursed at for being unecessarily prepared for the worst than unprepared, I'd say."
-/-/-
* - Not the exact term of address used, but it's hard to translate gendered terms from languages where genders -really- don't work like they do in English.
** - Not a strictly accurate pronoun, more a best approximate translation again.
*** - Not the specific measure used, but the system it was expressed in is very much comparable having been similarly established on the basis of laws of nature. It is, however, implicitly base sixteen.
-/-/-/-
"Just fer clarity," said Ranma Saotome, eyeballing the various other people lounging around the table in the private hall in Castle Lamb on the Friday afternoon of the conference after sitting thoughtfully through a two hour conversation about military alliances between the five heads of state in the room, "Why am I here?"
"Should've thought that was eminently obvious longshanks," said the Low King of Mars.
"Given that Madam Saotome felt the need to ask, evidently not," said the main reason that the meeting had taken place, also known as the Immortal Empress of Great Zimbabwe, giving the much, much younger currently woman a contemplative look.
"I got a solid guess, just want to check I'm not barking up the wrong tree," Ranma told her.
The Immortal Empress nodded. "Very well, We invited you to attend this discussion for two very related reasons neither of which We consider more significant than the other: firstly your current political status and secondly what your political status will in times to come -be-. You are, in the end, the victor of the Japanese Civil War as a direct result of which you are the de facto leader of all Japanese magicals and will remain so for -quite some time-; in addition you are the primary architect of the uniquely peaceful unification of muggle and magical Japan; We fully believe that the best hope for true lasting peace between muggle and magical, as opposed to the utterly pointless conquest of one by the other whether by cultural imperialism or by direct violence, bears the name of Ranma Saotome."
Ranma gave her a frankly startled look and said "Okay, so I -was- barking up the wrong tree, I was under the impression ya wanted a back channel to a NATO country that ain't some degree unfriendly."
"Unsurprising, at your age We had certainly not become accustomed to considering the next century short term," the Immortal Empress said, shrugging. "Nevertheless We are at least eight to nine hundred years old - We don't actually know for certain - and liable to live for perhaps the same again - and, Ranma Saotome, right now this moment you, Lily Ann Evans, and Harald the Breaker of Chains are each individually more powerful than I am. By a wide margin."
"Spilling beans ye old bag?" The Low King of Mars rumbled. "Heh! Wipe that gormless look off your barely-bearded longshanks moosh Harry James Potter, some of us were born canny and your average old sod learned it the honest way, I sincerely doubt I'm the only person unrelated to you since records began in this room who's figured out that your family has hands on some sort of empowerment ritual that makes the state of the art look like a squib ritually sacrificing voles. And I'll wager we're got the price you're paying for it figured out too, you've got the damndest luck and an 'insert loogie here' sign on your backs readable only to Fates, and you wonder that we're interested in hiding behind you?"
"You son of a bitch," Lily said, sounding almost-impressed-.
The Low King snorted. "Come off it you gangly ginger goyt, there's no way in hell this'll turn into a one way deal, I'm not even halfway to stupid enough to want to legitemately piss your clan off especially when you're probably our best bet at coming out the other end of the cold war that started in lunar orbit January last year still being ourselves. Just the same as we, as in me and Her Immortalishness, are your best bet at not having to up sticks and sod off a third time. You bring the best magical research and development in known space to the table. King Haraldr brings the inescapable fact that for reasons unknown Orc ships are ton for ton the fastest, toughest, and strongest warded things on this end of the galaxy and I'm betting how much lower than predicted the asteroid platinum yield is has something to do with it. Meaning that ton for ton Orcs are going to punch above their weight class in space for the foreseeable. Ancient Mother brings something completely unique in this corner of the galaxy: a unified species with sundry unified home system. Her Immortal Magnificence and Saotome and me? We have strategic locations in the Sol system, for all that Saotome is effectively 'just' an extremely powerful and influential landholder within a nation she or he does not govern. You do realise you'd probably have been able to declare wizarding Japanese independence from the muggle Japanese government and make it stick?"
Ranma snorted and said, "Yeah -nah-, spendin' ten years as th' monarch a' Wizarding Tokyo was enough to have me -thoroughly sick- a' runnin' a country, there's a -reason- I conned my sister-in-law into takin' over runnin' our crime cartel. An' about that cold war, we've been payin' attention. I know ya know about the ship spine frame that wuz just laid down at Makemake."
"Project Yamato, arr," the Low King confirmed. "Gotta tell you kid, there a fair few people looked at your lot -funny- when they found out Japan's first capital class space warship is getting -that- name for all everyone's perfectly aware any country that doesn't actively want to wind up someone else's vassal state is running around building a battlewagon or ten."
He didn't need to elaborate: it didn't take much work to calculate how much planet a single battlewagon pumping out continuous broadsides could turn into craterscape, but it routinely got described in multiples of Hiroshima with the baseline, a Freya-class battlewagon to the Bloc 1 design circia the Big Drums, coming out at 1.8 Hiroshimas per volley, a calculus that could be found in the back of the mind of every high ranking military officer in the Sol system: the fact that it would take the known outside the OSA strength of the Royal Orcadian Navy ten hours to turn Earth into a tomb.
(Real strength? Twenty-eight minutes. NATO at current strength? Fifty-six minutes, all assuming all available assets dedicated to that one task.)
Pinpoint, for certain values of pinpoint, attacks were more feasible and what actually worried people, hit and run attacks capable of destroying a city were entirely too difficult to prevent, just displace in, let fly a couple of salvos, displace out with deterrence in the form of having the ability to do it back the only feasible preventative measure.
In theory there was an international agreement under which anyone making first use of orbital bombardment was declaring war on -everyone- but that's not the sort of 'in theory' worth depending on. The stakes were too high, all-gun warships too accessible, and proxy wars all too probable, to depend on other people planetary bombarding a big fish who'd just turned your capital city into a smoking hole in the ground, the nations that didn't have battlewagons were urgently working on them.
Ranma shrugged. "I dunno, I've heard it's basically culturally impossible for th' Japanese Space Self-Defence Force's first capital class warship -not ta- be named Yamato cuz a' something to do wiv anime? Pass, main thing I know about it is that it's gonna be involved in th' other thing a lot a' people on Earth are talkin' about. It's as much a self-sufficient mobile city as it is a warship an' the maiden voyage is gonna be straight towards Citadel Council space - ya may wanna get in on that. An' exploration an' chartin' space between here an' that nebula th' Citadel's in is only half th' point, if th' current cold war goes hot th' population of that ship are gonna have th' duty to be why Japan will still exist. She ain't a -battlewagon-, she's Japanese Skithblanthir II. An' she's why I ain't gonna be in the area much longer, somethin' stinks in Council space an' I'm th' stupidly powerful magical in th' room who ain't got a country to run. Wouldn't mind havin' a mob a' Orcs an' mebbe a Black and Black team along on th' lowdown, or if anyone else in here fancies havin' a team hitchikin'."
Harry, considering the contents of a cargo container sitting in Urdnot Wrex's hold, very nearly turned the offer down, then decided not to spilll that he would by the end of the year have a clandestine branch of the Orcadian Space Agency in an unoccupied star system not all that far from Tuchanka growing from a container packed with forty-nine golems, some annoying to manufacture equipment such as seed stock, and two dozen qualified motilators currently dosed with Draught of Living Death, that was due to get plunked down on an anonymous asteroid and commence, with resupply and shift changes via the ROIS plans to get hold of Councilspace-constructed spacecraft, that was not something even his mum was going to know about until after the Citadel Council noticed sudden unexpected Orcs in their back garden.
Instead he said "You're not the first country with a plan like that, admittedly mine is more contingency level until the point that we're able to form up a fleet of Orc planets - this one included - and go mobile that way."
"So you're not planning on stickin' around longterm," Ranma said, and it took a moment for Harry to realise he was now staring at the Japanese currently-woman like she'd grown an extra head and declared herself lord of the banana people.
"Ranma," he eventually said, "Do you have absolutely no idea just how much hardware a mobile shipyard complex the approximate mass of Earth could pump out? When we start bimbling around the local galactic supercluster looking for things to poke with a stick our manufacturing capacity will make what every country represented in this room put together has right now look like one blacksmith doing four hour days, with a fleet of two dozen strung together end to end factory platforms each the mass of a battlewagon we are completing a military utility tug, with golem crew, every twenty-eight seconds round the clock in Swamp of Eternal Stench orbit. A planet mass shipyard complex would be capable of turning out battlewagons at a pace like that meaning anyone chasing after anyone with that capability is going to have a bitch and a half of a time achieving localised superiority even with stupid level outnumbering. Ultimately, it's my primary defence plan against the monsters that destroyed koboldkind, let 'em chase and use our ability to spawn battlefleets until the cows come home stopping moving only to restock materials."
"That's you warplan involving NATO too, isn't it," the Low King said.
Harry shrugged, and neither confirmed nor denied.
"Name another way to support allies in an active war without a mutual enemy coming along an orbital bombaring my house," Lily noted. "Don't get me wrong, I sincerely hope it doesn't happen and not just because there's no way in hell it'd be a profitable war, but if it does I fully intend my family and our countries to survive it."
"And everyone's thinking more or less the same thing," Ancient Mother broke her silence for the first time in a while. "What? Come off it, there's a very good reason one of my daughters is on her way to Citadel Council space in a city-that-flew of our own."
Harry nodded.
"I know," he said. The kobold ship could just make three and a half lightyears a day and was painstakingly designed to be self-sufficient more or less into perpetuity partially via having a crew of a couple of thousand kobolds and a few hundred thousand golems, along with sundry livestock and wildlife. "And at the last briefing you're one of the five nationalities so far actively working towards doing pretty much that."
"Japan, Jenjen, Orcs, and?" The Immortal Empress asked.
"Saudi Arabia, Britain, and the United States of America," Harry said. "I didn't count us as we're more running pathfinding while retaining the capability to up with our entire population and sod off at a moment's notice. Of the five the kobold and American ships are already under way, the Japanese and British ones under construction, and the Saudi one having its construction infrastructure prepared. There's at least another fifty in the planning stages, including yours."
Many of which, he didn't say, would be shadowed by the OSA waiting for any hint of playing funny buggers and a few of which were going to run into space pirates if they actually happened, nobody needed the Jovian Federation starting an interstellar empire, the main question was how to make it look like an accident, there was no way in f*ck thinly disguised Orcadian warships flying jolly rogers still classed as sufficient plausible deniability.
"Oh arr, and how many of them are liable to have a viciously successful accident then ye young pirate?" The Low King asked.
"Around fifteen depending on exactly which mob actually gets control of which ship," Harry said, shrugging. "I won't know until it happens, I mean I definitely don't plan on letting the Impy Swede one go ahead if they carry through with that thing with convicts, I mean -no way- would that end badly right?"
"That depends if Swedish Space Australia counts as ending badly," Hermione, who had been quietly listening and taking notes, said. "I mean it seems more likely to end badly than not but still. Stop looking at me in that tone of voice, Australia isn't just Australia because the Statute of Secrecy never entirely happened there even more so than Orcadia, there's the fact that -a lot- of the colonists were transported ordinary decent criminals mostly from London sort of area."
"... And I am very confident the bit with -being a fully armed battlewagon- is what makes it a recipe for an utter sh*tstorm instead of just being morally repugnant," Harry told her; she considered that then reluctantly nodded.
"Is there anything stopping us all building up to the same capability to, as you said, up sticks with our entire population and sod off?" The Immortal Empress asked.
It sounded very like a rhetorical question but Harry answered it anyway with a "I can't think of anything that's stopping anyone with a manpower pool copying us again."
He did not of course mention that in a sense he was counting on being copied, because it was turning out people who hadn't seen Arkwright's final analysis of combat damage to surviving Orc spacecraft in the aftermath of the Battle of the Moon hadn't clocked the spine frame weak point shared by every non-Orc mana-propelled heavy spacecraft in the galaxy, this being a lot of why OSA capital ship construction took place at a classified location with the nearest in deep space at the current location of 'the piggybank', nearly thirty lightyears further from Sol than Fiona's World and carefully picked on the basis of being well away from any major traffic lanes that were obviously going to exist based on the distribution of natively lifebearing worlds and mass effect propulsion core discharge sites, the first of which had already established itself as prime real estate and the second was going to.
Nope sir, nothing of interest in this red dwarf system, just a few rocky planets outside the inhabitable zone, a very irritating illuminated prawn, a logistics chain, iterative development of armour and preposterously big guns,and at the last count seven tenths of all Orcadian dedicated warships, to be found at the Kirkwall Gun Room.
The planet itself was armed and in the early stages of being fitted with armour last Harry knew, and was planned to be the first object to receive a nexus capable of displacing a planet at the exact moment someone worked out how to do that, because what's better than an assembly line for battlewagons? A mobile assembly line for battlewagons, duh.
Harry was jolted back to reality by a trying to not laugh Hermione poking him in the ribs, to find himself subject to a whole assembly of knowing looks and the Redcap looking at him with an air of maniacal glee.
"-Mum-," He complained.
"You should probably get it down on paper, Your Majesty," said the Immortal Empress with a pleased little smile. "We have no idea what inspiration struck but We are passing familiar with the results of a Spark drifting off like that."
"What? Oh, sorry, drifted off into the land of theoretically ignoring nexus output restrictions," Harry said, nevertheless noting down the idea for how to more reliably hold up -and- on an armour plate massing as much as Europe, he wasn't content with only a dozen layers of backup supports for that magnitude of roof and didn't like the idea of gravity alone holding the armour onto an object ultimately intended for FTL spaceflight, be a bit bloody embarrassing to displace out of your armour now wouldn't it.
"Any rate," he said, "In the next few years people are going to be looking at concepts such as national territory in a -radically- different new way. Right now this moment a common or garden warship weighs more than London, it's entirely feasible to just flat out fly an entire city away and if the city's not too megalopalissy, I don't think you could do it with Tokyo, or Olympus Mons for that matter, you can reinforce the ground and fly it out in one piece and if you can't they're very dockable togetherable. And it's entirely feasible to construct the supply lines a city needs as spacecraft heavy enough to keep up with it, I have a strong suspicion that's going to become normal probably in the late twenty-first century and not just because I know for a fact that every magical nationality represented in this room has even discounting emigration or the refugee influx gone into a recordbreaking state of population boom with the latest member of -that- club Great Zimbabwe. And I don't think it's a postwar baby boom because Japan isn't slowing down, nearly a quarter of all Japanese witches have given birth in the last year alone."
"If this is a roundabout way of saying the number of people with at least one fully blown Orc parent in the galaxy has doubled since the Big Drums yeah. We'd noticed," Ranma said, something in her tone acting as an admission that Japanese agents had got hold of Orc population information recently.
"And if that's a roundabout way of saying 'neener neener neener Japan's got a better intelligence agency than Mars' all I can say is oh good the plague of babies isn't just us," Said the Low King. "All we'd cottoned on to was the Orcs taking up bunny impersonations."
"Aye well ach -bloody ninjas- and anyway it's Japan that's why I noticed it's no just us," Harry told him. "They started it before we did even, nine months almost to the day after the end of their civil war, we started it a few months later. Oh, and if you know where to look the demographics for Japan are publicly available information," and he didn't bother adding the 'unlike anyone else in here' or commenting on the direct one to one match berween Orcs who had moved off Earth and sudden plagues of babies.
"The part that concerns Us is avoiding winding up like these 'Quarian' people," said the Immortal Empress.
"They -are- a pretty good example of a pitfall," Harry agreed. "On the other hand we're a whole lot better at in situ resource exploitation than the neighbours are, they don't have anything like our mobile dockyard capabilities and -that- is where it all went wrong for the poor sods," and he didn't note that this was why every Orcadian spacecraft Leif Eriksson sized or larger that actually carried flesh and blood people had the capability to set up shop, rebuild itself into a mobile dockyard, and start building orbital farming facilities using the seedstock and draught of living deathed livestock and wildlife they were all carrying along with enough people to compose a viable genepool. "At least as far as I can figure out. There's holes in their history around the whole timeframe of their A.I rebellion you could orbit an entire battlewagon flotilla through, can't really put my finger on what but something about it stinks."
"Ya got that impression too, huh?" Ranma said. "I'm halfers on whether they're lying or just plain old wrong, either way somethin' don't add up, it ain't very high up th' list of things f*cky wucky I plan on gettin' ta th' bottom a' but it's on my list."
"On that note Black and Black is in the preliminary stages of procuring a series of Turian-constructed long haul, oh, call them liners - mixed traffic, freight and passenger," Lily noted. "If all goes according to plan we should be in a position to commence regular, public, return trips between here and the Citadel itself early next year - which in turn brings us to another issue we'd probably better nip in the bud, namely the fact that the far end of the known transit route goes through a region of space rife with banditry, known as the Terminus Systems. I propose to commence a joint operation fortifying the strategically important star systems - discharge sites and mass relays - between here and Councilspace proper."
"The difficulty with -that- is most likely the stranglehold that the aliens have on their propulsion systems," Ancient Mother noted. "I am right none of us have found any major stockpile of 'bullsh*t' aren't I?"
"Entirely," Lily said. "In fact I'm starting to believe it is artificial in origin, the samples I've examined look uncannily like a magical metamaterial, though pinning down the elemental aspecting required to produce it is turning into a chore and a half so I'm not making any promises."
"Pooling resources on that project seems prudent from where We stand," the Immortal Empress said.
Harry didn't say anything, and noted Hermione obediently not saying anything either:
-/-/-
"Hermione, I owe you an apology," was the first thing Harry Potter said on their arrival in the Storm Petrel's onboard lab post the discussion that had concluded with a brief on what exactly three absolute monarchs with exceedingly high life expectancies, two persons halfway between being top level corporate management and a king and queen, a (of all the preposterously dwarfen things) democractically elected absolute monarch who remained in power so long as he could persuade enough dwarfs to reelect him, and a wandering hero type who'd settled down and became an honest hard-working crimelord, wanted a treaty to do put together and passed on to assorted diplomats and other minions to make it into a proposed document.
"You do, Master?" Hermione asked, immediately puzzled.
"Aye, I went and mentally described your mana prism as an elegant solution without a problem, I'd pretty much dismissed it as a party trick."
Which it wasn't.
It really -really- wasn't, because there wasn't anything saying you couldn't run it backwards recombining bits of output into derived, second tier, elements, rinse, repeat, get a flood of the exact mix they'd the previous evening determined certain weird blue glowing stuff to be made out of: light, lightning, poison, and weight.
"I am right we're not going to even think about firing this thing up in the same star system as anything alive, right Master?" Hermione checked, starting roughing out conduit layouts.
"And then some," Harry told her. "I don't want this stuff out in the open anywhere even vaguely near inhabitation, it's -that nasty-," mutagenic, carcinogenic, toxic, prone to bioaccumulate, and known to attack central nervouse systems, it countaining the magical aspect of poison was profoundly unsurprising.
He started in on calculating the exact flow rates that'd be needed at each stage, and said,"So any guess how many tries it's going to take to get this to work? No bet, I haven't a f*cking clue."
"Two figures is about my closest guess Master," Hermione immediately said. "Based on how many tries it took me to get the prism to work."
"We'll see," Harry agreed. "Tell you something though, I have to wonder what useful stuff we can do with the leftover output from the nexus. The number of times we're using the element of earth in this we're going to be dumping nine tenths of everything else and it seems a shame just to vent it into space."
"Cross that bridge when we come to it I'd say Master, it's easy enough to make vents that can be plumbed into something else once we've cornered the galactic bullsh*t market... It's a shame there's a hard limit to how big an object this stuff can propel."
Harry nodded, grunting: mass effect propulsion had the exact opposite problem to displacement wards, the higher the overall mass of a ship and payload the larger a proportion of it needed to be just the mass effect core to keep the FTL velocity up, with a point - about the mass of an unladen Midlifter - where larger became functionally impossible due to the need for the drive core to outweigh the entire ship core included; practically speaking it started getting all diminishing returns at about the mass of a Leif Eriksson or, as the Council species would phrase it, supercapital - which in turn were only really practical if you had a unlimited supply of bullsh*t with results such as what amounted to Councilspace's military grade rent-a-cops, aka the Turian Heirarcy, having never built more than half a dozen of the things - with a restricted supply you just flat out got more bang for your buck by using the materials to build what Councilspace called a battleship - there wasn't really a military equivalent this side of galaxy, about eight to ten times the mass of something like the Storm Petrel, you'd be able to dock half a dozen of them aboard a Leif Eriksson - which would between them pack enough firepower and survivability to eat the single supercapital their bullahit engines could have been for breakfast, this being why what Duncan the Seawolf called the aliens Washington Naval Treaty hadn't wound up like the Earth muggle one yet.
"When we get this working we're going to need to do three things not strictly in this order," Hermione mused. "The first is count the days until it gets out that the reason we're flogging it by the shipload for undercut every other bugger is we're making it by the arbitarily huge quantity,"
"Not that huge, I don't think we're going to get as much as a ton per cycle on this design,"
"Modularity and I can't think of any real limit on how many of these we can set up, Master, anyway the second thing is fight off everyone and his cat trying to nick the secret and think about whether to get Mairi to constantly sabotage anyone else who tries. And the third is figure out who we want to prop up at that end because as far as they're concerned this stuff is the mother of all strategic resources. And having the ability to crank it out at whatever rate we feel like is going to make us the kingmakers of Councilspace - whoever we share it with is going to have an -overwhelming- military advantage."
Harry considered this for about two seconds then said, "Hermione, what makes you think I'm planning on selling it as anything other than a bloody expensive optional extra on a tug? Right now there isn't anyone at the far end I'm confident to support like that, and the only people I'm interested in supporting like that at this end are my Orcs. That might change but I don't think so, I mean don't get me wrong, setting up to be able to corner the galactic market is definitely a good idea because Mairi or not this staying ours just isn't happening now Mum had to open her gob about the idea in front of Ranma and the Immortal Empress of Great Leakbabwe but there's nothing stopping us stacking up capacity until the cows come home then starting an undercuttage war as soon as someone else starts making it. Well, or as soon as we're making planets mobile. Whichever happens first."
"Betcha an Eighth someone else working out how to make this stuff happens first," Hermione immediately said. "I mean, getting the timing right on getting two or more nexii feeding into a single ward without the wardstone weird booming is turning into a stone cold bitch of a job, and we'd need two dozen of the things working together to move something the size of Earth. I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible."
"Arithmantics says yes," Harry said, shrugging. "And we empirically know that magical field densities fit to make a current artificial leyline nexus look like a squib farting -without- making reality go wibble, because interstellar leyline nexii are a thing. You realise that the Earth -Sun L1 nexus makes every nexus aboard Skithblanthir II look like baby's first Lumos."
"Do we even know whether it's possible to get the geometry involved in keeping that stable as a scale smaller than a star system?" Hermione asked. "Honestly Master, I think it's some sort of resonance effect even with the source nexii as far apart as evenly spaced out across a planetary surface. Which goes back to the problem being timing. I think you need to get them opening in a precisely timed sequence with a ridiculously low margin of error, like millionths of a second accuracy. And I don't know that alchemist's glass is up to the task, I think it's going to need to be direct fed into the wardstone unless something turns up that makes a vastly better mana crystal."
Harry stopped calculating in favour of staring blankly at the hand built fully functional replica of a Vincent Black Shadow's engine that he had built and mana adapted and was in the initial stages of building a motorbike around to give to Sirius for a Christmas present.
He said, "Huh," causing Hermione to shoot to her feet and dart over, hovering ready to pass tools. "Hermione, a native platinum wardstone could take two nexii worth of direct mana input and," and he started calculating, "That's two and two thirds Skithblanthir II's mass for... one light year every one hour fifty-three minutes fwelve and a bit seconds and," and he started drawing, "And I don't want anyone to be inside of half a dozen lightyears of this thing the first time we start it, because if it doesn't work it's going to be a bitch of a weird boom."
-/-/-
Dora Tonks set the last sheet down and said, "... well I think it might work but I don't want anyone even -vaguely- near it the first time it's started because if you haven't just designed a V-twin artificial leyline nexus you've designed a humungous improbability bomb instead."
"My Eighth says it goes boom," Astoria, who was being casually obscene about eating (also adequately described as fellating) a sausage on the far side of the breakfast table, said.
"Not if we don't do a stupid and treat a granite wardstone like this," Harry said, then added an, "I think, I am -not- taking that bet, this is the have you tried hitting it with an axe approach to getting two nexii to play nicely together and I'm pretty sure the way they're linked will mean eight nexus openings a second but it might run too fast. At which point weird boom."
"Well we might as well punt it over to the Kirkwall Gun Room and find out," Dora said, nodding.
"Bloody awkward timing, there's no way it's going to be ready to test until after the end of the Expo," Harry confirmed. "Which means I'm going to be scatterbrained as f*ck during the closing ceremony, oh well."
"I take it this is stupendously classified then," Daphne, reading over Dora's shoulder, checked.
"If you're thinking 'classified' as in 'the only people not in this room who get to see this -or- an operational installation before it's obselete are all named Arkwright', aye," Harry told her, nodding."it isn't -quite- enough to make the third generation of Orc battlewagon class spacecraft the fastest things in space but disregarding mass relays only by like about three to four lights a day."
"I have a question, Master," Tracy said. "Is it possible to upgrade the Freya-class to use this without externally changing their appearance? Same goes for Skithblanthir II, the Untitled Spacecraft class, the Exodus-class, everything we're twatting around in around here? Because I think the way to announce that we have this capability is by letting people who'd thought they'd got us via our limited strategic mobility work it out the hard way."
"I'm not getting caught up on what to do with it until we know whether it'll go pop," Harry told her, glancing at Dora, who was making a whole series of notes.
"Straight off the bat that sounds doable mostly by making a whacking great lump of summat with a one of these in it that docks to the Midlifter docking points," Dora said. "As far as the Freyas go I don't know but I -think- we can ballast them up to this ballpark total mass, though we might need to install thicker armour. The ships already dedicated to Leif Eriksson are going to be easiest, can just go hog wild on building them bigger a couple of hundred lightyears out into the far black distant yonder, and I think it's feasible to develop a supertug that could latch onto for example Black Colossus and yoink. I... huh. It occurs to me that it's probably feasible to refit Skithblanthir II so that the shipyard section is modular and can be undocked, in a way that lets us undock that, dock a whatever the hell we're building into what we actually put the new engine into onto where the shipyard was, then dock the shipyard into the bottom of -that-. I'll see what Arkie thinks if we can get this thing working."
"Aye," Harry said. "If."
Hermione, who had spent the entire afternoon going over the calcilations involved over and over searching for weak points, waited until towards the end of their traditional during-Expo lounge around mostly-nude sunbathing on the Storm Petrel's quarterdeck, leaving it until Harry had shambled off for a late sex o'clock involving Ginny and Tracy before quietly informing Astoria, "Hey Ratbag, I'll take that bet."
"Bet?" Astoria asked, sitting up. "Which bet?"
"The one about whether running heavy spacecraft off basically a ginormous motorbike engine will work. I mean it's probably the most Orc thing I've ever even heard of, betcha an Eighth it's up and running by Master's birthday."
"It's a stupid idea, you're on," Astoria said.
"If it's stupid and works it's not stupid, and all the numbers add up," Hermione said.
"If it's stupid and works it's still stupid but you lucked out," Daphne chimed in.
"If it works betcha an Eighth the fact that we're able to build ships that heavy isn't a secret any more by this time next year," Luna said. "What? I have absolutely no idea whether it's going to do anything useful, I am not the genius on this quarterdeck, but I know how Master's luck works."
Hermione considered this and said, "I'm not betting against -that-."
-/-/-
The second Councilspace vehicle to dust off from Fort Lamb towards the tail end of the 1997 International Thaumaturgy Expositon was a Batarian-built but Quarian-flagged high-speed freighter with a payload so utterly priceless there was a sixty-vehicle formation of Migrant Fleet Security spacecraft hand picked from the ranks of the most potent combat platforms available to Quariankind coming the other way to meet them, and a second, smaller, flotilla on the way to establish fully blown diplomatic contact with the Orcadian Empire: by this time the only people in the Migrant Fleet who weren't familiar with the phrase 'Orc medicine' were the ones who had not learned to speak yet.
There was however another two Quarian vehicles inbound towards Midgardr space, days ahead and a light year and a half per day faster than the official mission, one a high-speed deep space mining platform and the other a one-man asteroid prospecting vehicle currently docked aboard the mining platform, for no more reason than the fact that the people who had twenty-five years prior taken Captain Tali'zorah vas Kuunlan and her late husband aside and quietly explained that her eldest's ship had been lost with all hands had, simply, been wrong - well, that and the fact that 'Captain' Senna'zora vas Larkan had shortly before departure had a colleague who'd been following events in Midgardr space online turn round and asked if the name 'Reya'zorah' meant anything to himcausing him to realise his elder sister was alive and split it to hand in his notice the moment he'd found out 'Fort Lamb, Fiona's World, Orcadian Empire' (He'd be back. Advantage of working with Asari, they -get- family, the boss had put him on longterm unpaid leave before he'd had time to finish explaining why he was giving minimum legal notice) and went to tell their mum.
He had slightly mixed feelings about it - he literally would never have been born if the Asari freighter his sister had been hitchiking aboard hadn't gone missing, Quarian population controls being Quarian population controls, but still: family is family and he wouldn't be able to live with himself if he didn't live to see his mum reunited with the daughter she'd spent his entire life mourning, who his dad had effectively self-destructed searching for any trace of the fate of in a quest he'd started asteroid prospecting to be able to afford the kit to take up.
His mum, who'd more or less left the Migrant Fleet by acquiring the Kuun-Lan as a commercial enterprise, about a third of the crew of which was Quarian because you don't stick it in that line of work unless you're damn good it it and like the slightly piratical atmosphere, it's not an easy job, admittedly selling most of her payloads to the Migrant Fleet at a hair's breadth above cost once she'd got the loan on the ship paid off, all of which just wasn't all that unusual a story if you don't take the missing child into account.
It may have got the Quarian people an in with one specific group of people - professional rockrats - but making up a quarter of the galactic population of independent asteroid miners, a bunch with a thoroughly deserved reputation for smuggling, bootlegging, moonshining, poaching, drunk and disorderly behaviour in port, and generally being what humans might call slightly piratical rednecks hadn't done the opinion of Quarians held by the galactic population of people who WEREN'T usually-well-meaning semi-criminal slightly scummy rockrats much good, in a feedback loop the Migrant Fleet couldn't do a whole lot about because at the current moment in time fifty-six percent of the galactic population of Quarians, along with the overwhelming majority of the galactic population of Asari who called a Quarian the ungendered Thelessian equivalent of 'Dad', were rockrats or children living aboard asteroid mining vehicles.
There were worse fates for a civilisation than becoming galactic hypochondriac trailer trash who work for a living, but the Orcs had just given the Quarian species an out whether or not the Orcs themselves had noticed it:
Reya'zorah may have been the first Quarian to emigrate to the Orcadian Empire, but she was not going to be even remotely close to the last, and it probably said something about Orcs how few of her mothers shipmates had decided to quit instead of heading for Midgardr space, regardless of species and not counting people born onboard.
-/-/-
The plan on the part of the Orcadian royal sh*tshow had been to take the Monday after the Expo off to just relax, but that had gone weird even before the precisely aimed bombshell chucked by a very upper-class Englishwoman who used to be an Army truck mechanic shortly before the closing ceremony of the Expo.
One part hadn't surprised anyone who was anyone as it involved Her Majesty announcing the British contribution to the leading edge of the Sol diaspora in the form of a vessel named, with considerable irony and to the confusion of a lot of people who weren't either WW2 historians, mad scientists, or naval technology nerds, HMS Habbakuk. Intended population at Sol system departure: two hundred and fifty thousand. Incentives include full room and board into perpetuity, twits need not apply, highly educated young adults and ex-squaddies preferred, insert exceedingly posh English noises.
The other was related to the three month old declaration by the UN deeming use of orbital bombardment on civilian populations a crime against humanity and she didn't come out and say it but you'd have to be barely able to speak a word of English not to notice Queen Elizabeth II's opinion that this covered city spacecraft, which threw Harry James Potter for a loop.
-/-/-
Lothianf*cker (Guild of Motilists)
Sent privately 8:48am 12/6/1997
You realise it's only a matter of time before someone tries playing funny buggers with human shields, and the sooner the UN decides what the rules involving a city-ship starting shooting first are the better.
HMTheQueen (Yes, That One)
Sent privately 9:22am 12/6/1997
My intention, shared with my son, is to badger Parliament into declaring war on anyone who tries shooting up a city-ship that has not started shooting first, and as far as anyone trying to get clever goes the term 'with extreme prejudice' comes to mind.
I don't suppose I might persuade you to take a similar stance? At this moment in time we represent the two largest militaries in this section of the galaxy.
Lothianf*cker (Guild of Motilists)
Sent privately 11:17am 12/6/1997
I don't believe I'll be making that proclamation until AFTER you've actually put your money where your mouth is.
Also you might want to have a quiet word with assorted admirals about the grand old Royal Navy tradition of delivering slave ships a drubbing. I never quite got into a position to actually admit to trying to make the interplanetary slave trade (most grotesque component the flesh golem 'raw materials' part) illegal and thinly disguised 'pirates' don't have the same connotations on your side of the fence as they do on ours.
Incidentally I might be very easily persuaded to muck in on giving the Batarian Hegemony a seeing to once there's stopped being an awkwardly time-consuming journey to their region of space, I'm going to start sh*t with that bunch at the earliest possible moment and it'd be a bit weird if the Orcs were going full West Africa Squadron on some chucklef*ck and your lot weren't.
HMTheQueen (Yes, That One)
Sent privately 1:21pm 12/6%1997
I cannot work out whether or not you have some peculiar mental disconnect related to the entire subject of slavery.
Actionable intelligence on the subject of remaining traffickers would on the other hand be very much appreciated. As per your comment above, putting a stop to such is indeed a grand old Royal Navy tradition I fully intend to see continued in the future.
Lothianf*cker (Guild of Motilists)
Sent privately 2:56pm 12/6/1997
And I can't work out a rational reason you still seem to believe I owe you an explanation for anything that's happened since the Statute stopped us - as in Orcadia and England - being allied against the French and, going a bit further back, the Scottish.
(The English copy of the relevant treaty was still in the Ministry of Magic's archives last I knew, at least it was as recently as the Meditteranian War, it's the treaty under which we stuck our oar in the Ottoman Empire's sh*t, I can't offhand remember the date as my head is in a mess from spending seven Fiona's World days running an international thaumaturgy exposition ten plus hours a day but it's filed by a date just after the Hundred Years War. Technically it's still valid if you ever randomly find yourself at war against Scotland or France and are willing to sell unlimited letters of marque to Orcs but I struggle to imagine you being willing to deliberately set us lot on the French or us being interested in being set on the Scots ever happening again, which is probably a good thing come to think of it. The treaty allowing Orcs to legally fight under some species of Union Jack is slightly more recent and mostly Oliver Cromwell's fault despite the fact we managed to completely sit your civil war out by spending it giving the Dutch a hard time. I don't think he expected hiring Orcadian mercenaries to keep on quite that far but it certainly made Boney's life more exciting when he didn't put a closing date on it. Talking about making lives more exciting remind me to publicly apologise to WW2 Allied special forces veterans, Hitler's 'Commando order' may have been our fault, Olaf hasn't said he blood eagled anyone on the way out of St Nazierre but he really specifically hasn't said he didn't and I know for a fact while it takes a lot to get an Orc thinking about having a word concerning blasphemy but missapropriating the Thunderer's personal igonograpy for your military insignia then invading Norway had him about ready to engrave the unredacted Edda into a bayonet and head in the general direction of Berlin.)
HMTheQueen (Yes, That One)
Sent privately 4:22pm 12/6/1997
And just between you and I it is a probably fortunate crying bloody shame that he didn't do exactly that on a very successful basis in short order, I have a great many very formative memories concerning the years in which my father didn't set the Orcs on Hitler quickly enough and the irritating knowledge that a certain horrid little man with a Charlie Chaplain moustache did an enormous amount to cost Germany the war.
I was mortified later in life when I learned that Stalin had been allowed to gobble up Poland. Such a terrible way to repay such a corageous, respurceful, nation. In hindsight my thoughts when I learned of it after my coronation are quite remarkably similar to why I didn't specify the nationality of city-ships in my diatrebe the other day, I don't regret that Victoria Cross that hooligan Jarl Olaf uses for a keyring for a heartbeat and I am entirely confident my father does not regret pinning it to his uniform in the slightest.
Don't try to milk it but if I find myself watching your capital city taking another barely-provoked beating like January 9th 1996 I fully intend to see my country at war with whoever done it, I have very clear recollections of being in London during the Blitz and would very much like to live in a universe where such things are no longer allowed to happen.
-/-/-
Harry James Potter stared at where he'd just started writing something about how if the Neptunian long range exploration and colonisation proposal went ahead with nine tenths of the population aboard a mix of convicts guilty of petty street crimes, 'convicts' guilty of being available for purchase, and -convicts- guilty of being politically inconvenient, the Queen of Britain shouldn't be surprised when it got jumped by inexplicable alien pirates a few hundred lightyears from home, as he concluded that actually, she -should- be every bit as surprised as everyone who hadn't been involved in a conversation about what had, shortly after he'd started pestering a muggle queen to distract himself from the tension, got its functioning proof of concept.
There was a whole raft of problems needing solved - the conduit carried mana too slowly, even with a straight bleed-off tube using one nexus to open the other it would only hit six pulses a second, the wardstone itself had turned out to get physically shoved away from each pulse, as a result of the above he was in a laboratory with Arkwright Zero, three of her descendants, Hermione, Dora, and Astoria, and they'd just got done designing a recoil operated mechanism for opening artificial leyline nexii loosely inspired by half an old BMW motorcycle's timing crossed with the insides of a Maxim-style machine gun - but it -worked- at about one and a half times the power of a single nexus despite the fact that any lesser a wardstone than platinum would already have weird boomed.
He would, some years thereafter post having learned the thaumaturgical significance of words related to 'electrum', really kick himself for not having wandering if a better wardstone was possible: it would wind up up occupying an oddball middle ground but with the right gold/silver/platinum alloy 16-nexus engines would've been possible in 1997.
As it was with the sudden confirmation whether it was by half again or double the pulse rate, when a ship got jumped by Orc pirates next, it would take place far outside anything anyone thought was explored space, and would involve a spacecraft everyone on both sides of the Southern Darkspace Expanse who wasn't Dora Tonks or a member of the royal sh*tshow or an OSA golem thought was totally impossible.
So the Queen -didn't need to know-, so he deleted his response and sat back and said, "Bugger, I need to invent a scary alien thingy that can work as a body swap for an Arkwright descended golem, and I can't use nuclear disarmament aliens because I am pretty sure the muggles know that was us but can't prove it "
He wrote 'Why'd you think the Soviet nuclear arsenal got dismantled in a way that seems deliberately designed to make people unable to believe their eyes? I went to entirely normal (no, seriously) primary school in Scotland, people I like still live in your country, hell, if ninety-eight hundredths of every Orc alive today dies the remainder will have someone who lives in London next in line for the throne, and generally Iam entirely on board with ideas that involve my hometown not glowing in the dark or being a hole in the ground' instead with the only lie being that this was if you didn't count descendents of bastards in your line of succession, which Orcadia under certain circ*mstances did, the first English person in the Orcadian line of succession at that moment in time was a young woman who preferred to be called Cyberkat, mostly because she'd earned herself the kenning 'The Goblinslayer' when she'd dobbed the BBC onto Clan Grynne, legitemising herself in Orc eyes, currently at place 167 in the line of succession.
It was Harry's most recent ancestor to actually successfully put the Crown of the North on without being a direct line descendant of the first King of Orcs - Bloody Jeanne Parkinson, the queen mother of Orcadia - you could blame for that, she's why being awesome got illegitemate descendants heir cred, and Harry was jerked back to reality by Astoria saying "Aliens? What sort of aliens?"
Harry shrugged, fished one of his notebooks out, and started doodling vague idea grade concept sketches.
"Beyond the fact that what they're for is firstly stopping anyone I object to sodding off and setting up shop a long way away, secondly freaking people out, and thirdly being mistaken for not ours? The sort that lurk around in 'darkspace' ambushing and capturing passing starships using mobile asteroid fortresses too big to be driven by a nexus and -far- too big to be driven by bullsh*t and look very like what the muggles want to believe we are, you know, the ravening hordes of Gengisdolph the Impalof*cker? Or maybe pretty much the baddies from Ginny's comics, I'm not really sure beyond they ought to be weird and f*cked up."
-/-/-
Right about when Harry was starting in on an alternative appearance for an Arkwright derived golem, a hurriedly bodged together spy satellite was being placed in orbit around an alien world and, on reaching dayside and starting getting heavily zoomed in images started showing things that looked ever so slightly concerning, frankly weird, and not making much sense at first glance.
-/-/-
"All female, huh?" Harry said, handing Luna the last of the big sheaf of telephoto images taken by the Prancing Prawn's homebrew spy satellite. "I get why 'elves', they -really- look like your generic mythological alfar, but why 'dark'?"
The photos were all either at a really high angle or a bit fuzzy due to being taken through a whole lot of atmosphere but they showed enough that nobody had bet against him when he'd predicted that they were looking at another Earth-descended leftover of someone's mad science experiment.
"I'm not sure but I think it's something to do with Warhammer," Dora said, shrugging. The latest batch of aliens looked for all the world, at least via satellite photo, absurdly like someone had taken the idea of a fantasy elf then dropped an industrial revolution in the middle.
(Architecture and fashion styles to the surprise of absolutely nobody varied wildly, as did apparent ethnicity with skin colour in particular ranging from a very dark slate gray to startlingly like a human albino. Harder to pick out things like variance in average height from orbit, though it wasn't far off the range seen in muggles on Earth.)
"What do we think about the ones that probably -aren't- 'dark elves'?" Hermione, third in the chain of being passed the next photo, asked as she accepted the last one from Luna. "I'm thinking we need boots on the ground to figure out what's up with that."
"If it's what it looks like it's going to be hard to resist the temptation to invade," Harry noted, picking up the stack from where the last person being passed each, obviously enough Ginny, had been stacking them; he shuffled through until he came to an overhead image of a nude beach, lowballed his height estimate to about the same size as Luna by using the small waves breaking on the shore as a scale reference, and started noting down specifications for a variant on a Jane-class exploration golem. "Which is why we're going to very low key infiltrate this island group before we even think about making public contact."
There was a good deal more variation in general appearance of the various what looked an awful lot like slave races with something hard to put your finger on that didn't quite fit with that. They varied wildly in size averaging a bit smaller than the 'elves' and seemed to have a weird split between flat out naked savages living rough to some extent fully integrated in society, they'd picked up 'dark elves' living rough but very unlike anyone else living rough down their those ones generally wore clothes, with the only exceptions living rough with other species a long way from civilisation, and while it just wasn't that surprising to see stone age hunter-gatherer tribes still around in a world where someone was building railways, Harry was born on a planet that had been playing with steam engines for a couple of hundred yearsand STILL had hunter-gatherer tribes who hadn't got round to discovering flintkanpping yet, but noticing one living in a munipical dump and comitting petty theft in the related bizarre mashup of Restoration British and sixteenth century Inca plus full tilt industrial revolution city was a large part of why Harry pulled back a step from 'find out which bunch isn't slavers and help them wreck everyone else's sh*t' to, "We need a clear picture of what in the f*ck is going on down there so it's alien infiltration o'clock and we're not being arseholes about that, because there is something -deeply f*cky- about what I'm seeing in these photos. I think we're missing something very important so I'm designing an alternate body for a Jane-class golem, which makes our initial target of infiltrating very subtly the island chain where they're into nude sunbathing. It helps that that's the one where I spotted a tribe of what I can only call stone age hobbits living the naked savage lifestyle in a munupical dump, which is kinda a huge clue we're missing something."
"That's feasible, it helps that there's absolutely nothing unusual about walking around not saying much and looking normal in a city," Tracy noted.
"Aye but we won't know what normal counts as in close enough detail so we're starting with the fact there's a couple of 'dark elves' living rough stone age stylie with hunter gatherer tribes in the southernmost woodlands here," Harry said. "This conveniently located logging town is big enough someone wandering through isn't all that surprising and if we really f*ck it up we've got an excuse why someone doesn't know how to civilisation."
-/-/-
Seven days after Urdnot Wrex dusted off from Fort Lamb a very short foriegn-looking gentleman in good quality, if foriegn, travelling clothes entered the logging town of Keylanth, the southernmost urban area of any real significance in Asterian (both nation and archipelago) and proceeded to not bother anyone thus going with very little notice.
Even less notice was taken of the several rather less foriegn peddlars who passed through without engaging in any peddling over the next few days, and when on the tenth day a perfectly ordinary breathtakingly handsome gentleman adventurer armed with a good quality hunting rifle and bearing a number of furs for sale walked into town and proceeded to sell his furs then get on the train north he only really got any attention by conducting his business in writing, commencing with a polite note explaining that he was unfortunate mute, and being far too pretty for words.
He got rather a lot of attention: being mute does not prevent one being splendidly attractive and quiet charming, and that mute fellow was -phwooar-!
Jane-42427, currently going by the name of Elenwen, would later describe this as being when things really started getting surprising, because it was during the long train journey to the capital that she concluded that the various non-elven species were incapable of real speech or comprehension of language above the level of a dog - and as for the 'elves', they appeared to be rampant lesbians with a shared taste for what potentially counted as bestial*ty.
It took her bullsh*tting her way into the city's public library to figure out that utterly bizarre as it seemed, the elves were convinced that they and their more or less equivalent to domesticated chimpanzees were members of a single species consisting of three genders - 'primary male' (an elf) 'secondary male (a male something else) and 'female' (a female something else) with a lot of philosophising and really shoddy Industrail Revolution grade understanding of anatomy involved.
She forwarded the discourse with drawings on the 'dark elf' reproductive cycles, which she, being a golem, didn't bat an eyelid at despite the fact that humanoid hermaphrodite reproductive parasites is the sort of thing that squicks people out every bit as hard as the entire rest of the subject of dark elf reproduction which, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Harry Potter found both headtiltingly weird and professionally fascinating.
He'd already written an extensive list of reasons why he shouldn't have any dark elves kidnapped for reproductive experiments before 'Elenwen' had successfully bullsh*tted her way into a distinctively Industrial Revolution career:
Professional entertainingly weird houseguest for rich people, and the fact that her Baron Munchausen-like tall tales, delivered in writing, were entirely true if absent a few details resulted in why First Contact between Asterian and the Orcadian Empire took place at the dinner table of the Magnate of Asterian when a certain very attractive mute tall-tale-telling houseguest the Magnate had been attempting to chat up first claimed to be an alien then immediately privided scientific evidence resulted in probably the most memorable genteel mealtable conversation ever held.
By which time the title 'dark elf' had been completely forgotten about due to someone referring to them as 'succubi', which probably wasn't entirely fair but seemed to want to stick.
-/-/-/-
"Aye," Harry said, and reminded himself for the fifteenth time he needed to stop using random words from his native languages in this conversation, which may have been taking place via mirrors at several hundred lightyears remove but that didn't make it any less historical for the very much feminine-looking paper-white-skinned and exceedingly blue eyes hermaphrodite in the what looked like a simultaneously incredibly girly and incredibly practical Napoleonic cavalry uniform, seated in a very elaborate very foriegn genteel drawing room with other primed to really mess with a heterosexual man's perspective of gender military officers and 'gentlemen of science', one of whom was making him want to see Hermione in a purple velvet smoking jacket and silk cravat, the whole lot were given context obnoxiously attractive and built like cagefighters.
He still had qualms about their 'lesser two genders' thing, to be fair they clearly found what he considered normal just as headtiltingly weird, but was starting to think they deserved a very serious leg up much like he'd given the kobolds if, that is, they could be convinced that wrecking their neigbours sh*t was a waste of effort. "The earliest evidence of anatomically modern humans on my homeworld is from around two hundred and fifty thousand, sorry, around eleven thousand three hundred years ago. And there is an -ocean- of anatomical similarities between me and most of the rest of my homeworld's living things, down to even fish using the same basic skeletal structure as I do."
"I simply must beg a look at your vetinery studies, Your Majesty," the 'gentleman of science' in the purple smoking jacket said, clearly fascinated. Despite being an engineer in the Brunel mould she apparently 'dabbled in antiquities', had been involved in more than one Paleolithic dig, and had provided an estimated age of the earliest known relics of her kind worldwide at around a hundred and fifty thousand Earth years old.
The one who'd waxed lyrical on the dearth of any anatomical resemblance between her own species (including host species) and anything else alive nodded, quite sincere, and said "I shall have to see quite extensive scientific evidence to believe it, Your Majesty, but I do say that -would- support your hypothesis that our species is not native to this world."
"We have a considerable amount of it," Harry said, nodding. "A bunch of which I can arrange for your people to see in person with the caveat you can currently circumnavigate the globe faster than we can have a team from your end in the same room as me, or you definitely would if there wasn't a warzone blocking the wrong railway right now."
"I do believe that the most pressing question is what your intentions are concerning us, Your Majesty," said the Magnate, failing to fully suppress how worried she was. "I am a military man of some experience, by longstanding royal tradition, I served as a junior officer aboard warships most famously including the battleship Vengeance during the Northern War and I am -very- aware with how little effort you might most likely conquer the lot of us."
"Aye, we could but it'd be a waste of time," Harry said, shrugging. "I mean in the end the only thing there isn't a functionally endless supply of between where you and I are right now is the sort of thing that's willing to greet you a good morning and as far as labour goes, there's just not a whole lot people can do that machinery can't do better. And there just isn't anything that's really worth ripping anyone off for. You can pretty much charge funny money for any luxury goods so long as it's under the strict understanding it's going to be charged even funnier money for when it's sold on. And before you ask about how to avoid that spectacularly crashing the economy I don't know, it's really damn new for us too, the only reason I'm not panicking and you don't need to either is I have the technology to make sure nobody is going to go cold or hungry or thirsty because of it and I have my people already getting set to make that true where you are too, I am not risking watching a famine and not doing anything."
"... That," the Magnate said, "Is a rather extraordinary claim."
"You have photos of the ship we have in orbit around your gas giant, one vessel in that weight class built as layer upon layer of artificial, -automated-, farmland can produce enough food to feed your entire country without one single flesh and blood thinking being working aboard it," and he didn't get back into explaining golems yet. "There's a point where labour saving machinery hits no labour necessary, we're most of the way past it, and we -weren't- at your last midsummer. Interested in free trade and a very careful so you can feel your way into the ecenomic implications like we're trying to technological leg up?"
"Personally yes, though I shall have to sell it to Parliament," the Magnate said, frowning prettily. "On the other hand there is an initial step that as the reigning Magnate of Asterian I may immediately undertake; are you familiar with the concept of a foriegn consulate?"
"Broadly, yes," Harry told her, shifting gears to set to comparing the differences, and hopefully not too different in lines thou shalt not cross, diplomatic traditions between tbeir two almost exaggeratedly different societies
The details of how it all worked and had come about were wildly different of course - you could not describe any one historic 'Sindari' figure as responsible for the concept of diplomatic immunity the way you could point at Ghengis Khan's opinion of anyone who killed his envoys on Earth, for example - but the broad strokes of how succubus international siplomaxy worked was probably as much to do with figuring out what worked and what didn't as it did on Earth with the result of being about the least alien thing about them that wasn't morphological
-/-/-
"Boss," said the head of the Orcadian branch of the Ishikawa ninja clan, Hanzo Ishikawa, raising both hands in surrender to his liege lord via communications mirror, "Hold on a minute, look, I get the bit about this being when you relly started getting the idea they're incredibly alien perfectly sensible people but you could've warned me just how -uncannily- attractive the whole lot of them are, I know it's a bit rich coming out of me but they're seriously messing with my perspective of gender and sexuality."
"Aye," Harry said, "There's a lot of that going about, apparently they find mine incredibly confusing. I mean my brain keeps going 'lesbians getting chimps pregnant' despite the fact it's verifiably not their fault and," and he angled a thumb at Hermione's current outfit, "I can't knock their fashion sense."
Hermione, who was singularly responsible for an Orcadian shieldmaiden's Napoleonic cavalry uniform now exiating, looked smug - it wasn't likely to be cavalry uniform day every day and it wasn't nearly so practical as the succubi variety but it shared all the character from the pistol belt up, and he still hadn't decided whether it was the girl wearing it that made it look amazing because at some point between when he'd met her and the last year or so Hermione had gone from an unrekarkably cute little girl to drop dead gorgeous.
(Which clearly crossed interstellar species lines, Liara had a massive crush on Hermione and he'd caught the way various succubi had looked at her over the last few days. Apparently in Quarian she looked like a dolled-up world-class cagefighter.)
"I don't think we'd better mess with their perspective of gender even harder, Hanzo," Hanzo's wife, who clearly found all this hilarious, said
"On the contrary," Harry said. "It viscerally shocked the sh*t out of them I'm not a complete plank because I'm obviously a bloke, by their standards Hanzo's the least sexually confusing person involved in this conversation."
Hanzo immediately flipped him the bird while Kaydee cracked up laughing.
"You have remembered I'm what you might call a venus with a penis aren't you?"
"Aye and I can't even imagine what they'd make of your genitalia but it's not half so 'huh'? as I did of theirs, they've got f*cking ovipositers. I'm pretty sure they'd squick me out if they weren't bioalchemically fascinating and I've had to write a list of reasons why having a few kidnapped for reproductiive experiments is bad and I shouldn't do it, it's the damndest bit of anatomy I've seen in years and I can't shake the suspicion they'd be able to interbreed with humans. Which is I don't even know, not my kink, but I have a sneaking suspicion it's going to be someone's."
"Which is what's f*cking with my perspective of gender and sexuality," Hanzo noted. "I take it our mission profile has changed?"
"Aye. See, we've confirmed that we're talking to the muggle end of someone else's Statute of Secrecy and our temporary embassy is directly opposite to a major demesene with some pretty bloody impressive wards. You're now out to find out what the bunch inside are like without them, or the local muggles, knowing about it."
"What details are we looking for?" Hanzo's daughter asked, "I think we could do with something a little more specific that 'what they're like'. And what are our rules of engagement?"
"We need to know if it's feasible to bring their Statute of Secrecy down peacefully," Harry finally comitted to it. "Because it's not going to last through the local muggles getting hold of magic-powered spaceflight. And if the answer to why we still haven't found any evidence of muggleborns being born down there is even a tenth as ugly as the only workable approach I can think of I'm going to need a cassus belli our muggles are going to nod along to -without- them using it as yet another excuse to insist I'm the second coming of Ghengis Hitler as I have some pretty serious doubts it's going to be possible to persuade their magicals to do an us and clear out. So basically your rules of engagement are don't do anything we're not going to be able to get NATO to believe either wasn't us or was justified, and play nicely with the local muggles, we want -them- coming out the other end still friendly."
"I take it we're not running a friendly First Contact with the local magicals any time soon then," Kaydee said, nodding.
"Not unless it turns out I'm wrong and they're not playing a game of purebloodery and Mot dialled up to Ottoman Empire," Harry told her.
Hanzo developed a very subtle peculiar expression and said "If this is going to be as big a deal as I think we're going to need a lot more manpower and manufacturing capacity in system."
"That's already on its way, we're setting up a temporary fleet base in orbit of that Neptunealike. Why?" Harry asked.
"Because the most feasible idea to get this where it wants to go runs to comitting grand theft of an entire alien Wizarding World and shut down whatever's stopping muggleborns happening on the way out. There -may- be local malcontents we can use to form a popular uprising, possibly a Dark Lord candidate we can use as a disposable puppet, but I won't know until we have an actual picture of what's going on inside their wards."
"You realise that's going to involve, bluntly, us pulling alien abductions?" Kaydee said, then added a quiet, "It's going to get incredibly tempting to do a nuclear disarmament aliens."
"That," said Luna,"Makes me wonder if the succubus wizarding world has any useful conspiracy theories we can make real."
Hanzo snorted and said "I don't know if screwing with their grip on reality is a good idea."
"That depends whether they have one," Hermione said.
"We can keep spitballing ideas all day and we still won't know what's going on or what to do about it until we have boots on the ground," said Kaydee. "Are we using staff positions at our shiny new consolate as cover or is this a we were never there job?"
"I propose starting with the latter and figure out from there," Hanzo immediately said.
"And I'm not fussed either way. You lot are running this thing at least for now, just don't do a f*cky wucky we're not going to be able to get away with," Harry said, perfectly aware that was a bit like plunking a bunch of six year olds in a sweet shop and telling them to go ham, because he'd long since figured out ninjing isn't just your average ninja's job.
It's what they do for fun.
-/-/-
The fifty-eighth Magnate of Asterian, Ennefyr Keldane, who was very much concerned he may be the last Magnate of Asterian if anyone screwed the next winter up, had been very selective indeed about who was and was not briefed about what took place on the first day of autumn in the year of 796. Military and law enforcement were very much aware at a command level, as were prominent figures at the local university, the press had been informed that something truly momentous was to take place at the city's docks, and select members of parliament had been informed; the police were out in force to prevent any incidents of mass public disorder, leadership of the capital city's more significant street gangs had been warned that tolerance for their criminality would abruptly deteriorate if they chose today to do anything ridiculous, every detail he had been able to think of had been covered, and the Member of Parliament for Gemestia and Benn had been successful deterred from demanding answers for the time being by the simple expedient of drinking the bloody fool drunk.
He still, watching a fetchingly green and gold spacecraft of profoundly inelaganylt and quite industrial seeming design carefully lowering itself into his city's docyard basin, hadn't any real idea whether the aliens were selling him a yarn, Sir Jane-42527 was extraordinarily hard to read on having ceased to pretend to be incapable of speech, and how exactly the Temple would react to scientific evidence that the gods who had created their kind were most likely a bunch of long dead alien men of science probably wasn't going to be pretty, but on the other hand if the coming winter went well...
The opportunity might, pethaps, be there to secure his family's legacy for all time.
"It's such a terribly dangerous yet exciting time to be alive, Father," His heir mused.
"Isn't it just, my dear. Isn't it just."
It was time to greet the Orcs and he had absolutely no idea what happens next.
-/-/-
The first job had of course been checking security on the two floors of the consulate building - a strangely pre-colonial Central European looking eight storey structure that, apparently, had been the personal town-house of the Magnate's deceased aunt - that had once the Orcadian diplomatic party had taken posession been handed over for ROIS use as not only would it be an insult to their hosts to assume they were bad at spycraft, it'd be downtlright foolish too, but once that and setting up anti-eavesdropping contingencies they were confident couldn't be magically detected was done, half a dozen ninjas immediately started carefully studying the expanded, warded, noneucilidian space directly across the road, this being why Jane-42427 had been instructed to decide on this particular building out of those on offer to act as an official Orcadian government residence on someone else's planet, at least while negotiations around constructing themselves an ambassadorial demesene (including assembly of a treaty around one of those existing) and very quickly arrived at the conclusion that they were -not- looking at more than seven times expansion of space, which stood as a second very distinct piece of evidence that the place had an uncanny lack of muggleborns.
(Still wouldn't have a lowdown on potential until a sufficient number of local muggles had been medically examined, excuse to be used a medical as part of the hiring process for local staff at the consolaute, so that piececof data wouldn't take much longer to become available.)
Initial impressions of the target site's wards were equally in order with initial predictions, they showed compelling evidence of being run on granite but were far too complex for their overall power throughput.
Beyond that there were no signs of industrial magic and, when looking down across the alien demesene from a high angle, Aoi really started getting a sense like she was looking back in time to an alien version of any European wizarding country shortly before someone had worked out the beginning of enchantment automation, which didn't bode well since everywhere back home before Sirius Black's great-great-grandfather had figured out how to tap into a naturally occurring leyline nexus and established the world's first mechanised enchantment production line, how you enxhanted bulk quantities of magical artefacts was what's technically termed a sweatshop, and becomes a whole lot more affordable if you're treating the staff like absolute dogsh*t to the tune of, the fact that Wizarding Britain had been the first country on Earth to prohibit the use of mind magic on one's serfs -before- the muggleborn population explosion of the 19th century and onwards.
"I don't think we can actually confirm peak Mottery and Ottomanishness going on in there until we've worked out how to sneak into their wards but it doesn't look good," Hanzo Ishikawa tapped out on Aoi's shoulder, discussing angles of attack with Dora Tonks in text with his other hand.
Aoi, eyeballing the line of glassy-eyed and robotic-acting definitely not golems formation marching into an obvious small factory - looked like a commercial potions brewery - couldn't help but agree, and tapped out "So we're starting looking for a suitable alien abduction target immediately, I take it? I vote we black-bag whatever this mob use for a spoilt brat of a slightly inbred pureblood princess first, that sort tends to respond wonderfully to their first exposure toconsequences and this place seems at first glance very much primed to generate them."
The first spoken sound made in the temporary Asterian ROIS headquarters was as a result Hanzo snigg*ring; he tapped out a, "We've got another primary objective, any and all information on how their wards work, but I don't see any reason not to do both on our second little visit in there."
First run would of course be survey and exploration once, that is, they'd succeeded in hacking the target's wards - it was that or go as unsubtle as a sledgehammer and drop nexus-driven siege wards on the place, which wasn't likely to happen without getting really compelling evidence of rot of the sort up with which-
"Hanzo, I'm looking at a heavy lift flesh golem."
"Certainty?"
"Compelling, the zoom and depth of field on this thing is good enough to make out the stitching."
"Okay that's strike two with the good evidence of use of brainwashed factory slaves. Get me a strike three, just smacking down siege wards would make our job a whole lot easier."
-/-/-/-
Setting up a commercial golem foundry isn't the most trivial thing in the world especially when the elder of the business partners involved is fourteen and has an awkward habit of happily saying 'yes, Mistress' to the other, though it definitely helped that firstly both Ratbag and Filly were perfectly capable of doing the one job a golem can't, and secondly as a result their entire initial staff had been constructed - mostly out of scrounged components taken directly from stock in Skithblanthir II's substantially larger government golem foundry, there are -advantages- to having comitted oneself to life as an inmate of the Orcadian royal sh*tshow and neither Gabrielle nor Astoria felt the slightest bit hesitant to milk the f*ck out of Harry having firstly set up his personal golem workshop in Astoria's scrapyard, secondly set up parts bins of all the pieces of OSA golem being mass produced two decks down and one street over, and thirdly included helping yourself to any new stock current production parts manufactured onboard and stockpiled in the palace to the list of things anyone resident in said palace was allowed to do, which on one hand had lead both of the nonresident small children, one Asari and the other Vindlandr Orc, Liara T'Soni and Taylor Danielsdottir aka 'Gremlin', to become even more determined to move into the place full time, but on the other was why the currently having the last bits and pieces sorted out before opening for business Chicken Walkers factory, two streets over and one for'ards from the commercial docking bay in which Gremlin's father worked as a foreman, appeared to be staffed by various degrees kinky Mad Max girlie.
Except for, that is, something that Gabrielle had done when she'd noticed the trend, which had ended up looking quite like it did after a teenage aorc had pointed out that the build had a striking resemblance, which is why the golem that Gabrielle had constructed to run the place day to day, now named Lugnut, was the spitting image of something called a 'forty kay Orc Mekboy' down to the green skin and tusks and vocal apparatus based on Little Pierre's.
(She hadn't quite managed to get the accent, something described as 'exaggerated co*ckney', right but something halfway between Dora Tonks and Ginny Weasley was, apparently, close enough.)
Neither girl ever found out that as a result of her having included marketeering in the Purposes of every golem she built to manufacture golem-bassed utility vehicles, as combined with Luntuts deciding to make stomping around town showing their wares off a routine Thursday event and the presence of an American tourist with a camera and no knowledge that the reason his English sister-in-law wanted copies of all of his vacation photographs was she intended to pass the whole lot to MI6, by the time they'd actually leased out their entire initial production batch, the British government strongly suspected that the Orcs had somehow managed to find an actual Ork with a K and were going to be a mite embarrassed when they found out they'd been worrying about a golem, because Lugnuts had been leant a pile of relevant Games Workshop publications by the nerd who'd succested he should be green-skinned and got rather into playing his appearance up.
-/-/-/-
"Of course I am, you're starting on the last Monday in August," said Lily Potter, replying to her slightly elder daughter's appalled expression with one of mildly dissapointed amusem*nt. "You shall be going by train every weekday and there won't be any argument."
"But nobody -else- has to go to-school-," Sarah fair old whined.
"You realise that your brother attended school from the same age," Lily pointed out.
"That's not fair!" Cassie insisted.
"And leaving the heirs to the House of Black to grow up uneducated would be both extremely stupid and -very- unfair," Lily told her. "Stop sulking, dear, I met most of my minions at school as did your big brother, and so shall you."
"But Harry says school's -boring-!" Sarah fair old wailed.
"Oh come off it, we're talking about a school system set up by your mother and me, it's not going to be -allowed- to be boring and not just because I clearly remember the consequences of your brother being bored at school," Sirius, who clearly found that hilarious, attempted reassurance. "Look, give it a try and if it turns out it -is- boring let me know and I'll make sure it doesn't stay boring, okay?"
The twins did not look convinced.
-/-/-
"Purpose of trip?" Asked a golem of a woman who neither knew nor cared that the clock on Harry Potter losing his bet on the first time his little sisters would run away had at that very moment started running.
"Application for residency," said Captain Tali'zorah vas Kuun-Lan, a woman after whom in another universe a descendant who'd have become a living legend would have been named, and the whole countenance of the Orcadian synthetic - a 'Jean' if she was up on the common models - on the far end of the comms changed, briefly becoming a countenance of considerable surprise.
Not, if Tali'zorah was any good at reading golem expressions yet, the bad sort of surprise, more the really not what you expected to hear sort of surprise.
"I see. I'm afraid that we don't have apparatus in place to apply for such anywhere that isn't in person aboard the Skithblanthir II, the Jean said, and they got on with the business of filing flight plans and scheduled core discharges.
The Quarian Migrant Fleet owner-operator mining vehicle Kuun-Lan shortly thereafter became the first vehicle to cross the Southern Darkspace Expanse with full intention to emigrate instead of working out it was an appealing idea after they got there, and -that- was enough to put the journey into tomorrow's history books.
-/-AN-/-
I apologise for the weirdness above, this mess popped out more or less fully formed while I was having another poke at Sudden Dorf over the weekend and informed me what's going on with three of the very missing Wizarding Worlds over in Cpuncilspace - namely Asari (it's archaology) Quarian (it's complicated) and Batarian (it's Voldemortery.)
I have not been informed what in the f*ck happened to the Krogan magicals but I sincerely doubt they're in a very good condition.
Next up: Wrex starts sh*t on Tuchanka, ROIS do a nuclear disarmament aliens in Asari space, a bunch of slightly inbred alien purebloods are persuaded to believe they're looking at a demonic invasion, the Kirkwall Gun Room start trying to strap two nexii to a monocast's breech, andHarry receives a slightly concerning birthday present from the ROIS delivered in the payload of the galaxy's first operational V-twin engined cargo spacecraft also known as a convenient asteroid.
Cheers,
Cal.
