[b]Bella, Ember, Dyssia![/b]

For the Argumentative Portuguese - no one in the Endless Azure Skies has written down what they called themselves - it was an apocalyptic alien invasion. Their civilization had splintered into factions - appeasers, escapists, warriors, xenophobes, more and stranger things based on their history, culture, politics and religion. There are wars and shadow wars, the electronic communication link that bound their civilization together in a social media web thrashing in panic. Their arsenals of apocalypse were unsheathed. Their greatest weapons were unveiled. Orbital shipyards were built to mass manufacture battleships for the coming conflict.

For them, the fate of their civilization hung in the balance.

For the Endless Azure Skies it was an idle competition for exactly three citizens.

Here's the setting and situation.

Solar system with fifteen stellar objects of note. One inhabited world with about nine billion Portuguese, a little chilly. One partially terraformed neighbouring planet and multiple deep space installations and experimental colonies on other planets or moons. About five hundred warships that together add up to about a quarter of the mass of the [i]Plousios[/i]. Auguries in the newly restored Shrine of Mars indicates that they could all be wiped out with just the Plousios' Plover wing.

There is one small Slipgate and three Sphereships in system. These aren't military ships - one is a civilian yacht, one is a repurposed patrol vessel and one is a Biomantic Field Office. All three ships have active Crystal Dragons who are engaged in idle banter with each other in between sending the argumentative messages of their captains to each other. Brightberry immediately joins this network, spoiling the advantage of surprise but giving you further context as to what exactly's going on here.

The first citizen is Biomancer Cash Money. She is here on humanitarian grounds. Millions of Portuguese die every day from preventable illnesses, minor injuries or even simple old age, something that she regards as an ongoing holocaust that has to be stopped at the earliest possible opportunity. She has launched a covert ground invasion using discount off-brand Toxicrene assassins, abducting and replacing political leaders to prepare the way for a massive emergency uplifting process. She has already established secret medical facilities that perform emergency uplift surgeries - an unpleasant and invasive process - before releasing their subjects back into the wild. These newly uplifted abductees return to society in possession of what are by local standards superpowers and this is Causing Problems.

The second citizen is the Generous Knight. She's a big name, a contemporary of the Furnace Knight who has made a habit of destroying alien civilizations. She's really slumming it with this one, but that's not entirely inexplicable - the Portuguese currently aren't worth the fight and she wants to change that so that it'll be worthwhile when she conquers them. She wants to arm them and uplift them technologically, teach them the basics of the game of stellar war so that they'll be worthy opponents later. She's incredibly mad at Cash Money because she thinks the biological uplifting process will collapse their society and delay the time when they become worthy opponents by centuries. Her forces are in open conflict with the Biomancer's, resulting in a dance of assassins that is causing pandemonium in the alien's politics.

The third citizen is NBX-462. This is a military-grade Synnefo, a well mannered battlesheep who doesn't really have an opinion on when exactly the Portuguese should be fought and incorporated into the Endless Azure Skies but it's his duty to make sure that when that decision [i]is [/i]made it goes as smoothly as possible. He's the logistical co-ordinator, bringing in massive quantities of materiel and dumping it on what is going to become the system's Clearing House Subsidiary, one of the outermost planetoids. His other interest is the extermination of a rogue pack of Ceronians who have made planetfall and are alternately hiding among, reigning over, or robbing blind the aliens. Sometimes he will openly intervene militarily on the planet in an attempt to bring them to justice.

What you actually [i]need [/i]out of this situation is some liquid Hyperium. There might be some on the Subsidiary now but probably not enough for your purposes - it's not exactly a key military good. Any of the three Citizens could order it in for you if they owed you a favour, or if they were to die, leave or otherwise cancel their own standing orders then your request would be the only thing left in the logistics chain. The [i]Plousios [/i]is strong enough to go toe to toe with any of them but probably not two of them.

How do you unpick this knot?

[b]Dolce![/b]

Contribution - he chooses his name based on the birthmark-letter on his wrist - becomes the lead diplomat. Having a personal message from Liquid Bronze engraved on his flesh seems to be accepted by the Summerkind as Really Cool and they regard him as having something like divine right on account of it. After investigation some of the others are excited to discover that they have birthmarks too, though theirs are more vague and cryptic. "Formation instinct has nothing on drill. One must have a spirit before it can be crushed." and "Apologies to anyone who has to debug this code, I was really drunk when I wrote this."

But Contribution is a fun guy and he takes a liking to you. He's got a colourful intensity to him, a rapier wit and a scintillating imagination. "You have [i]massive [/i]spy vibes," he said as flak rattles against the exterior of the shuttle, pitching his voice so it's out of hearing of 20022. "And I get it if you don't want to talk about it - but do you want some tips? Service sheep like you aren't meant to just be quiet watchers, that's sus as hell. They're [i]meant [/i]to have opinions. You've got to be opinionated to do this work. They front like they don't have opinions but there's always some fucking agenda that they're driving towards. Because they've got to, right? The Azura, the Ceronians - they wouldn't eat their vegetables if you made airplane noises while bringing the spoon to their mouth, but they [i]also [/i]don't want to die early of heart disease -" he shook his head. "- right, that's not a thing. There's some [i]really [/i]old programming in here," he grinned and tapped his forehead. "Anyway, point is they built the Synnefo to make them do the things that need to be done. They don't want to do it themselves, they don't even want to know about it, but they do want it to be [i]done[/i] and so your whole existence is to try and get them to do the needful without them noticing. That is to say, it's cool to be lowkey mad. It's even expected! 20022 radiates Not Mad like the Chernobyl meltdown, whatever that is. He bites it down to do the job. But just being quiet and competent puts people on edge. Spy vibes. Capiche?"