Circular Reasoning [Babylon 5 AU splinter colony quest]

In 2155, the Centauri changed the fate of humanity as a whole forever by introducing humanity to the galaxy.

In 2161, the Metasensory Regulatory Agency was disbanded in lieu of the openly authoritarian and not-so-secretly supremacist Psi Corps.

In 2170 ... in another time, the Telepath Underground would become large enough to start undermining the Psi Corps' authority. This, too, happened in this time. Only a small collection, made up of second sons and daughters of the original Kith would clandestinely pay to be smuggled out of Earth space by a Centauri cargo freighter, with the intention of establishing themselves as a remote colony made up of telepaths and their families who simply wanted to be free.

Unbeknownst to those colonists, a certain ... interested party ... decided to nudge their path through a hyperspatial tachyon conduit, not only casting them a century back in time, but forever breaking their course of events from what had once been a truly stagnant path.

So -- you are James Alexander, the twenty-seven year old son by artificial surrogacy of the original leader of the Kith, and by dint of being the strongest telepath of the community-- at a rating of P8 -- the leader of a small rag-tag refugee band of human telepath refugees, cast before not only the founding of the Earth Alliance, but before the first telepaths were born on Earth. Your colony ship had sufficient databases along with basic tools and supplies to allow you to live independently, and so you have begun to settle down to build a future for yourself in these wholly uncharted waters.


Year: 2070

Economy:
- Expenses: Null
- Income: Null
Military Assets:
Null
Colonies:
- Kithhame
-- Population: 250, mostly young adults.
-- Planetary status: Marginally habitable. Indigenous wildlife obviously alien but at times oddly familiar.
-- Colonization status: One landed converted Centauri cargo hauler. No jump-engine, but the previous owner never removed the on-board grav plating.
-- Economic status: 3 "lightly pre-owned" Centauri-make autofabbers.


Votes by plan, please:
Each turn is 1 year.
1 Action in each category, only write-ins for now while the dust settles and interest is shown.

Industry:
(Agricultural, economic, and residential leadership actions go here.)
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Military:
(Militia, naval, wartime, and such go here.)
[]
Exploration:
(Scouting, mapping, resource survey type actions go here.)
[]
Research:
(Pulling schematics for practical application out of the colony ship's AI, discovering new techniques, biotech, and so on.)
[]
Diplomacy:
(Internal or external diplomatic actions. Building community, negotiating trade deals, and so on.)
[]
Personal:
(Things you do yourself.)
[]

This is the timeline I'm using for knowing what overall is happening in canon.

The Technology database has basically everything to make a world functional as of 2170 (humanity was making its first jump engines and could use tachyonic comms and sensors, but didn't have PPG weaponry or many of the things canon EA possesses. Think somewhere like Mass Effect pre-contact humanity and you're in the right area.) -- but that's not the same as your people knowing how to actually do all those things. You'll have to figure it all out as you go.

Kithhame is off-network; you are disconnected from the galactic society as things stand.

You're on an unknown world with a small community of rag-tag colonists. They are all telepaths so ideas and understanding can be shared directly amongst one another -- but even your colony ship is basically a converted freighter of Centauri make. You have no real mining equipment, enough food and medical supplies to last you through the year and no real need to worry about power for the time being -- while the ship is fairly cramped for a crew the size of yours, the "emergency" fuel accumulators for the on-board fusion reactor are in good repair and will last for at least a decade. (Your people being telepaths were able to ensure you got the best deals possible -- and sometimes a little better than -- from the Centauri you "negotiated" the ship from.)

Event die (d100): 90.

Year: 2071

Economy:

• Expenses:
  • -1 Food Units
  • -1 Minerals
  • 0 Energy
• Income:
  • +2 Food Units
  • +0 Minerals
  • 0 Energy
• Reserves:
  • 2/5 Food Units
  • 0/10 Minerals
  • 0/0 Energy

Military Assets:
-- Basic Reservist Militia.


Colonies:

• Kithhame
  • Population: 260 (up 10), mostly young adults.
  • Planetary status:
    • Marginally habitable. Indigenous wildlife obviously alien but at times oddly familiar.
    • 1 Basic Minerals deposit found (unexploited)
  • Colonization status:
    • One landed converted Centauri cargo hauler. No jump-engine, but the previous owner never removed the on-board grav plating.
    • 1 Basic housing complex.
  • Economic status:
    • 3 "lightly pre-owned" Centauri-make autofabbers.
    • 1 Basic Greenhouse Farm. Supplies food for ~250 human-years per year.

---

Diplomacy:
-- Establish a council with the other family heads, and identify a list of priorities.

It was difficult, at first, to decide on what needed doing the most. Everyone had their own ideas. Images flashed amongst the communal "waking dream" of the residents of their shared new home like wildfire, confused and quick with no immediate consensus becoming apparent. To spare yourself the headache, you decided to sit down with the various matriarchs -- the oldest or strongest female telepath of the given family -- of the familiy lineages amongst the community -- this having been the way things were done amongst telepaths for a century, long before either the Psi Corps or even the MRA that preceded them.

There were, in all, six major families so represented. Mira Alexander, Janet Gray, Wanda Runningdeer, Samantha "Mawmaw" Ironheart, Danielle Stoner, and Michio Namikawa. With the exception of "Mawmaw", it was hard to see them as 'matriarchs' -- they were all of them barely any older than you, if not outright younger; while Mawmaw was well into her eighties and more spite and leather than anything else. There were other family names amongst the colonists, of course, but the old habits and genealogies made it clear enough who was related-enough to who to count as part of which family.

Still; with their assistance it was fairly easy to filter through the various thoughts and ambitions of your fellow colonists and sort affairs in order. All in all, delegating to a group that included your wife -- Mira -- was a decision you weren't entirely sure was a genius idea or one that would come back to bite you when you were least prepared for it, but that's life.

Rather than a disorderly and hectic mess, the familiar organization and shared needs with clear direction resulted in a much smoother process of digging into the new world.

Result:
-- Potential morale and unrest problems eliminated for now. People are comfortable with what they know, and the extra voices in the choir singing of harmony helps the colonists work as one towards their shared goals.


Research:
-- Review the tech database for best-practices in colony-building, focusing on needs and first defenses.

More of an ongoing process than anything else, the Namikawas spend much of their time split between watching everyone else and getting their views on what they think is needed, and consulting the ship's AI for best-practices towards setting up in this new world. A number of the more common pitfalls were easily anticipated -- anyone sent out foraging was sent in teams with a Centauri-make bioscanner to ensure wild edibles and animals had no toxins or poisons; and this information was shared to the rest. While the database being of Earth origin did make for an ... interesting ... time working with the Centauri autofabbers, they quickly worked out the data protocols needed to get cross-compatibility for basic tooling and things like processed lumber and common pigments drawn from native flora. Methods of estimating the annual climate cycles by taking soil samples and estimating water-table variability were found and the shelters were adjusted accordingly.

A good thing, too -- you and your peers initially thought that, given the mossy alpine character of the forested area you found yourselves in that you'd have been in for cold winters. Turns out looks were deceiving: on this planet, there were no deciduous plants. You were in a near-tropical zone. Special care was taken to set up a nursing clinic in the colony shelter to run periodic checks for asymptomatic illnesses, and one of the labourers was discovered to have a kind of toe-fungus that could have been quite nasty had it not been caught so early.

Result:
-- The flora on this planet were somewhat deceiving. Your shelters are decently cooled rather than being saunas. Better food storage and warehousing solutions are recommended for the climate. Disease prevention is prioritized, avoiding a potential loss of able workers.


Exploration:
-- Search for viable mineral resource deposits in the area of the colony. Map the nearby area, and make sure we have a good source of water.

Exploration teams are established to make a much more in-depth survey of the local environment. It's a bit eerie, actually, how quiet everything seems to be in the area. Oh, there is wildlife -- much of the larger varieties being some variation of reptilian or avian, rather than mammalian -- but it seems none of the animals you encounter aside from bugs make any kind of noise. There's also a general inexplicable sense of malaise or unease in the air around your scouts.

While the scouts deciding to triple rather than doubling up does impair their progress somewhat, their progress is aided by the use of the colony ship's mapping and wireless telemetry, along with a bit of fabber time borrowed to make some light aerial LIDAR mapping drones.

It's a bit of a trek -- you'd need to establish a vehicle path and trucks to make it practical to work -- but there's a fairly easily accessed minerals deposit only about a hundred klicks east of the landing site; an extinct geothermal vent, with a wide array of useful and less-common mineable resources that should help immensely with getting the tech-base of the shelter kicked off.

Results:
-- The basic area around the shelter is mapped out to the satisfaction of the community for a wide area. While it will require specific effort to set up for proper exploitation, once the mine access and infrastructure is built the colony should not want for any but the truly most exotic of mineral wealth -- at least, not with the community the size it is now. Water is abundant enough, though with the ecology so deceiving filtration and purification is a must. A number of local edibles are registered -- the most interesting of which seems to be a kind of eusocial centipede of all things that produces honey just like bees back on Earth. Though the bioscanners do indicate there are traces of protein in the honey, and little in the way of pollen. It doesn't bear thinking about.

Industry:
-- Use the autofabber for houses and a greenhouse to establish basic needs

Your fellow colonists quickly find that however odd it is to have tropical evergreens, the autofabbers work with the lignocellulose of the branches and trunks just fine. And, well, beach sand is beach sand wherever you go. It takes a bit of ingenuity to get mortar -- the Namikawas resolved this issue via the ship's AI by recommending a basic trawler pull shellfish remains from a nearby river delta; it seems that the scouts' mapping efforts combined with the AI's colonization algorithms showed there would be sufficient lime there to allow a small cement refinery. Thanks to this, the area around the shelter is established with a basic landing and takeoff strip for the ship itself -- mostly to plan that area out should the need to leave arise, and also to ensure the colony's housing and farms don't get in the way of any future use of the ship.

The housing is quite basic. Mostly lumber, simple alum ceramics, particle board, glass, and concrete. Looking like something from almost three centuries ago in the eyes of your people. Still. The Lineages each get their own common compound with a ring of tenement-style apartments and a common area with gardens made from seeds of what your people have already begun to call "Old Earth". This 'rustic' feeling is however offset by the more modern bits and bobs that are found here and there. Lighting, heat pumps, and power -- drawn from the colony ship's fusion reactors -- provided by the use of superconducting cables the fabbers were able to spit out mostly from pine tar. Originally a Markab technology that the Centauri traded to Earth a decade ago.

Despite the scouts finding a fairly large number of wild edibles in the vicinity of the colony, you decided to override Wanda Runningdeer's suggestion to eat off of the land or use open-air farming as a method of "embracing" Kithhame more fully. The unsettling nature of the forested areas made you feel that it would be too great a morale-hit to the general community to have to scavenge or plant in the open. While you would not forbid the practice, you decided to make more use of the seeds that you had brought with you from Earth. In what was more of a concession to the desire not to have more of an ecological footprint than necessary than anything else, you decided to have some of the cleared area set aside for a more mechanized farming setup; use of greenhouses, hydroponics, and aeroponics that would be almost more suitable for asteroid or artificial habitats than planetary colonies, but no less effective for all the same.

The general optimism of having definitively established creature comforts and a place to call our own has resulted in a number of the ... less vigorously employed ... colonists finding alternative means of passing the time. Enthusiastically. While this was met with smirks and compersion for the most part, nobody at all was surprised by the births that happened over the course of the year.

Results:
-- Housing is generously supplied for the colonists. Food production easily meets the needs of the colony. (1 Basic Unit of housing, for now, is enough to easily house 250 people. 1 Food Unit is ~250 human-years' worth of food. These numbers will be subject to revision in future turns. 10 new children born over the course of the year will not result on food shortages.)


Military:
-- Use one autofabber to build infantry gear to hunt large wildlife and secure the area of the colony. Clear approaches to the colony to establish good sight-lines and use the third autofabber for a watchtower.

While it was necessary to scavenge from the ship's on-board resources to set up the bilpro rifles and personal protective gear and "watch" drones and tower, the decision to do so was widely regarded as quite sensible given the feeling of general uncertainty and low-key dread the forest gave. Nobody was quite willing to say it was out-and-out haunted. There was no sense of hostility. But still; better safe than sorry.

Mostly comprised of a couple dozen regular volunteers and whoever Mira decided was lazy enough that week to need a refresher course -- your wife had been a Sergeant in the MRA back in the day -- the reserve militia also doubled as hunters to gather a more varied diet for the colonists, and to put people's minds at ease with the 'haunted' nature of the forest. At first, the hunting itself did not go spectacularly well. For some reason, the local fauna was almost impossible to spot if you were a hunter. Scouts had little issue, as did laborers, but hunters? Nothing.

Wondering if perhaps their natures as telepaths was making their intention more clear than they'd intended somehow -- even after a century there was much humanity still didn't know about telepathy and psionics in general -- Mira decided to equip a few of the watch drones with bilpro single-shot rifles. Sure enough, the drones were able to find plenty of scaled-deer and semi-flightless owl-turkeys (not that this is what they actually were, but the local wildlife was just close enough to those things.) that made for good eating, that the colony's foodstocks were buffed up.

Needless to say, your wife and the militia devotees took this as incentive to start working ever-harder on concealing their psychic presence.

Results:
-- Watchtower and armed sentinal drones established. The general area is cleared of any possible predators you can find. There is something very strange with the forest.


Personal:
-- Work with a few of the better clairvoyant teeps to check if we're alone, and any imminent dangers.

After several months of putting up with the weirdness, you decide to put your skills to the test. There has to be something out there and it almost certainly is psychically aware. The 'haunted' nature of the forest just doesn't happen without there being something underneath it, and sometime after the hot season (you refuse to call it 'winter' when you can wear shorts) -- you and a few of the more skilled 'clairvoyants' amongst your colonists decide to form a choir and try to get to the bottom of things.

It's a common misconception that telepaths require line-of-sight to interact with the minds of another. While there is truth to this, it's also a matter of degrees. Physical contact makes reading and affecting easier than line of sight, and line-of-sight makes reading easier than a more wide-area reading.

But if all you are doing is trying to get a sense of presence, even if you're doing it through walls of lead or over the area of kilometers -- well, that's clairvoyance. Vague impressions of the presences in an area, utterly useless in an urban setting but invaluable when doing search and rescue for lost hikers in the wilderness, your people put this less practiced skill to use. And you certainly discover something.

There are minds out there. You are in fact not alone on Kithhame.

But ... they are ... small. Frail. Vulnerable. Oh-so-very limited. But also ... connected. Your circle of clairvoyants, escorted by Mira and her men, follow the sense of a fragile web to one of the "knots" or "clusters" even as it obviously tries to avoid your attention and move away as you approach, until you feel a sense of realization and acceptance settle into a small cluster.

The animals you discover are ... not what you expected. Individually, the creatures are barely even qualified to count as pre-sapient. Some kind of hive-mind of reptilian monkeys -- one of your colonists laughingly says they're like kobolds from the games he played as a kid, and the name stuck.

The woods, it turns out, are home to several 'hive-tribes' of the creatures. And herein lie a dilemma: even as a hive, the creatures are astonishingly simple. But once they begin to get to know you and your people, the fear and 'haunted' nature of the forest dies down remarkably.

It seems that simply by being in their presence, their web wants to entangle your people into itself. It's almost laughably easy for your people to completely dominate a small knot of four or five kobolds' minds. Even the weakest teep amongst you -- a low P3 -- can handle two as though they were extensions of herself without a strain. You? You could handle an entire tribe-unit.

You could use the work-force, certainly. But should you? These creatures are incapable -- even collectively -- of working out things like making simple wooden spears or knapping flint. But despite their diminutive stature, they have the necessary manual dexterity and an almost eagerness to submit themselves to even the weakest of your people.

But should you? Even if they want you to -- do you have the right?

Results:
-- Pre-sapient race "forest kobolds" discovered. Individually barely smarter than clever dogs, their small "tribal-unit" hives barely qualify as 'pre-sapient'. Their hives seem to want to submit themselves to you -- is this the most rapid domestication in history? Their anatomical capacity to full human-like manual dexterity would make the colony wildly more successful. Or they could be left alone and perhaps encouraged to develop on their devices, albeit at the pace of natural evolution no one making this decision would live to see its consequences whatever they may be.

There are advocates for both strategies amongst your people. Do you take a more balanced approach, or wholesale buy into one or the other?
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Votes by plan, please:
Each turn is 1 year.
1 Action in each category, only write-ins for now while the dust settles and interest is shown.

Kobold Decision:
(Adopt/domesticate the mossy scaleybois? Work to avoid entanglement? Some balance between the two?)
[]
Industry:
(Agricultural, economic, and residential leadership actions go here.)
[]
Military:
(Militia, naval, wartime, and such go here.)
[]
Exploration:
(Scouting, mapping, resource survey type actions go here.)
[]
Research:
(Pulling schematics for practical application out of the colony ship's AI, discovering new techniques, biotech, and so on.)
[]
Diplomacy:
(Internal or external diplomatic actions. Building community, negotiating trade deals, and so on.)
[]
Personal:
(Things you do yourself.)
[]