Notice of Payment Due - Sisterhood of Dreams | CC: Dragon Shogunate

[Gas Miners Guild]

O:O=Connecting to Server=O:O
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O:O=Identification: Guildmaster Ilo Takato=O:O

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The past twenty-four hours have been very interesting indeed while I was gone to deal with the death of my grandfather upon New Tokyo, nevertheless business is business and in such we shall conduct ourselves in respectful manners.

The destuction of our planned annex in Muira orbit was, avoidable, for both parties but considering the impact that was created when it was planned to allow the SIsterhood and Shogunate to both be able to use its facilities once completed has now made the Guild rethink on its terms. Therefore due to the destruction of the station we will be sending a bill towards the Sisterhood in its acts.

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Notification of Overdue Payment
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Framework of Okinawa Trade Station -- 75,250,000 EC
Fuel costs during construction -- 15,940,001 EC
Insurance costs for loss of life -- 250,000,000 EC

Payment due to Sisterhood of Dreams -- 0 EC Due to lack of funds
Material Compensation Due -- Battleship Matsuda - Okiawana System Sector Beta 4 Central Quadrant

We within the Guild have taken notice that in the past few weeks on the condition of which Battleship Matsuda is currently in and how the Sisterhood is unable to maintain it alone. Therefore for continued co-operation between the Sisterhood and the Guild will be its transfer into Guild control. You may choose to refuse of course, or even scuttle the Matsuda. We are well aware of this. Therefore we have put forward the following just in case of such.

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Notification for Failure of Payment
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If under circumstances payment is unable to be completed, the following will be instructed:

-- Shipments of Fuel to Sisterhood: Decreased by 50%
-- Shipments of Materials from Muria to Your damaged battleship: Decreased by 50%
-- Shipments of Gas & Materials into Kusari: Increased by 50%

In case of Matsuda Destruction: See details of Battleships Ayakashi & Daishouri for more information

The reasoning behind these will be very clear after you watch a few episodes of "Where does my fuel and goods come from?" and "The importance of Supply Lines in War" on the Kusari Educational Network.

O:O=End of Message=O:O

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Sigma & GMG Discord Chat: https://discord.gg/d4j3W4v

[Enkidu]

“...Girl, you're going to nail this. Go knock 'em dead. C'mon, show them your frowny face. That's it, look maddened. Right. Okay, breathe, cough, look them in right in their rheumatic eyes. Lights, Camera, Act...”

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__Inpending wide band transmission - priority high__

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Sender Location: Battleship Matsuda, Okinawa, Command deck.
Sender ID: Matsuda actual, Nishi Adeline Darche, ゴールデン菊.
Transmission target: Miura node.
Encryption: Unencrypted.
Subject: Gunship Diplomacy.
CC: The Blood Dragon Shogunate. The Crimson Cross.The Bloodrose Syndicate.

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_The Shiden Ultimatum_

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__Unpacking files__

___Files unpacked___

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“We’re not quite sure what tune you are fiddling to - it doesn’t harmonise with ours and sounds fugly by itself. Perhaps you should listen to ancestor Ice Cube and “check yo’ self before you wrickity-wreck yo’ self” - it’s an adage that’ll save you from innumerable freudian slips and instances of public embarrassment. Amaterasu only knows how you have succeeded in convincing yourself that you are the victim here, suck up in your ivory tower and screaming “Help help, I’m being oppressed” to whichever wind happens to prevail upon you. Unfortunately, this is not a fairytale. There is no prevailing moral rhetoric that dictates that you are in the right, nor any predicate that there necessarily needs to be a “Happily ever after” reserved for you by the end of the novel. You are playing Risk with a only one die, you are fencing with a broomstick; you do not appropriately comprehend the situation which is playing out here, and seeks to change the rules of the game to suit your ignorance. Unfortunately, that’s not an attempt the universe will reward you for.

Your attitude is one of a petulant child screaming at their mother in the middle of a supermarket for a bar of some ghastly sherbet derivative. Whilst the mother in question may be laden with higher concerns - such as how to feed her child and herself over the long term duration of the entire week with a healthy, nutritionally satisfactory meal. She has many factors to decipher; she must purchase without purchasing so much that she over-encumbers herself and squanders household revenue, without being so frugal that either herself or her child go hungry or malnourished. She has had to labour for the currency with which to buy the food, and will do much of the food’s preparation herself. Yet the irritating, androgynous blob that is her toddler doesn’t care for such adult concerns. All the waddling little maggot cares about is that it hasn’t eaten sugar within the last five minutes and is prepared to bawl so intensely you’d think the Carthaginians were sacrificing it to Baal, right in the middle of the isle. It will tug at her sleeve and kick at her leg. It will block all the shoppers trying to pass around it, since it hasn’t discovered how to spell the word “empathy” yet. People will silently cuss at the child, but will tolerate it because of its inherent innocence and its biological cuteness factor. We will sympathise with the plight of the embarrassed mother. The mother will tell the child to shut up, but the child is insensitive to reason. It does not know the meaning of the noun “reason”, since it is incapable of understanding abstract concepts. The child is not aware that all its screaming, it’s howling, its pathetic grovelling for sympathy, is ineffective. The child doesn’t know or care that it is pissing everybody off in the store. When its mother administers a well-deserved smack, the child finally quits its bawling - since higher forms of communication are beyond this animalistic being, violence is the only fitting response. Authority must be exerted. The natural order must be preserved. The child remains appropriately submissive to the parent, and so the cycle of life continues.


You are that child, miners. Bawling, yelling, and making demands which are as full of hot air as the H-fuel you flog - it’s a wonder your voices don’t squeal. You have the insanity to accuse us of villainy when all we have done is been the agents of the inevitable; servants to poetic justice, you could call us. By throwing a torch onto your own barn and then blaming us when we pull it apart to stop the fire from spreading, you have committed an act equivalent to the boy who cried wolf: It’s called slander, and it won’t stand up in a court of law.


Your testicular endowment is impressive - I’m surprised asteroids don’t orbit around the Rocheworld bulging in your pants. You’ve got some balls to waltz up to us, blue danube in the air, ask us to dance with you with the uppermost emphasis on curtesy and prim conduct only to knee us in the Davina McCalls as soon as everybody’s head is turned. Nah’, actually, scratch that off the tape - you didn’t even wait for everyone’s head to turn, because, hell, the witnesses just keep rolling in.


Why should we accept demands from one who clearly has no conception as to what an authority position is? You seek to threaten us, Guild? Threaten us with what? You have proven yourself singularly incapable of even the most inconsequential form of labour, such as completing the work you were contracted to fulfil for us; work that we will no longer be requiring your services for as you have, quite frankly, been a terrible substitute for, say, Interspace Commerce, the Independent Neural-net Division, Freelance supply convoys, Omicron Supply Industries, our own Logistics Arm; I list but a few alternatives. Unfortunately for you, our own logistics arm by itself has -mysteriously- risen to the task of fulfilling four fifths of the manifested hardware at the date of transmission. Again, it appears we have outmanoeuvred you. You have debauched your own honour, and in return cost us a few working days: a trivial matter of hours, in return for the cessation of an alliance and the termination of a customer group. See how you have kicked the hornet’s nest? See how the dominoes fall? They do not fall in your favour, Miners. The prevailing wind has swept us away and into the sun; we are basking in our own privilege by rejecting your offer, since your blasphemously incontinent good will has little to offer us anymore, clearly. Yet still you reserve for yourself the audacity to talk about respect.

We have no respect for you. We have no respect for your property. We have no respect for those who bring threats of violence and subordination to our door. We have no respect for those who deliberately tempt their own destruction. We have no respect for rabid, vicious curs like yourself - a hefty shot of secobarbital to your collective jugulars will balm your maddening craze for war. Think - very carefully - on what you do; it is naught but basest of diplomacies. Desist talking trash or lose the capacity to talk at all - the choice is yours, gas-heads.


By monikering our punitive steps “acts”, all you do is indicate to us how much you trifle with the idea of retribution. How passionately you believe in your own divinity. Yet you are flesh and blood - dreamless flesh and blood, I add, and you will have both feet, arms, and eyes in the grave with your children shovelling Miura’s irradiated topsoil over you long before our most decrepit sister expires.You are but a single cell in the great amorphous mass of the unenlightened.”

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Planet Miura, Okinawa. Present day.

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“Think. Rap a hammer on that head of yours. We are legion. We outnumber you, we outgun you, we can outfly you, we can out-arm you - and we can outfight you, if the situation requires. In the tremulous instant of the present, the situation does not require it. We see you as friends, drinking brothers, equal servants before the Goddesses will and agents of Kusari’s emancipation. There was a time when we were spun of the same silk, you and I; brethren amongst the stars. Early in Okinawa’s colonisation, the Sisterhood had grand dreams for the Sigmas - we hoped the vast, uncharted fogs of the nebula could be a cornerstone of liberation. This was a dream the Guild shared when you first decided to leave fish farming well astern for the blue fog creeping temptingly beyond Honshu’s borders. You braved probable destruction amongst some of the most terrifying space the system has to offer and you struck gold there. You made your fortunes amongst the soup. Have you forgotten all of what we once shared? What lustre can gold possess to displace such integral forces as loyalty and trust? Why would you piss on your own dignity for a sprinkling of coins?”


So, in your own paltry terms: on to “business”. Final repairs to the Matsuda were pencilled in for a matter of weeks - we can reduce that period down to a matter of days if you provide us with sufficient enticement. If your amusingly archaic, corrupted old ironclads that you’ve dredged up from Sigma thirteen even drift passively towards the Karatsu Cloud, we will detail every bomber between here to the Taus with their immobilisation. A tad drastic, yes, but sometimes you have to slap the toddler. You would be forced to intercept us on our home turf, against the home team. Neither dreadnaught would make it a kilometre into the cloud before their hulls crumbled into a million million shards of carbon and titanium alloy. Be the reasonable man you assume you are, and think of the loss to your people.

Imagine of the collateral damage we could cause other than the potential loss of your primary fleet assets - each and every one of your transports would have to be protected rigorously by fighter escorts to stand the remotest, naivest hope of fending our Sisters off. H-fuel prices would rise accordingly. You would win no favours from the illustrious Nazione to your direct west, either - the same Nazione that oh-so-amply aided the Sisterhood in the eleventh hour. Perhaps you should save us the dignity of explaining the obvious to the deaf and turn your telescopes skyward for a change. Your escorts are quails before the fox. Your transports are stuck pigs before the wolf. Your gas miners are manatees amongst sharks. Think of your own. Think of what you stand to lose. Think of how dissatisfied your customers would be if your transports ~mysteriously~ failed to reach their port of call. There would be an uproar - there would be blood in the streets and money pouring into the coffers of Samura and Kishiro, both of which have their own gas mining operations.


You say that you are short of funds - you would have even less funds when your customers started to desert you for destitute.

Au contraire, Gas miner, we are entirely aware where our fuel comes from - the Shiden Cloud; an area of operation firmly within the control of the Chrysanthemum throne and entirely free of your clutches. Don’t attempt to play cards you don’t have in your hand.”

“Here’s a little gift for you - compliments of a forgiving sisterhood.”

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Details of the Shiden Ultimatum as outlined by our beloved Hatsuyume.

1) We don’t appreciate our allies making vacillating threats to our autonomy - all threats to the Sisterhood’s sovereignty are void, effective immediately.

2) You can take your gas and stuff it right back up the arse from whence it came. The Sisterhood will no longer purchase gas from the GMG.

3) You cannot harm the Sisterhood in any significant manner - we, however, can make life rather unbearable for you. Fire upon us and it will be all out war.

4) We would prefer to preserve our alliance rather than have you ravage it with any further statements of aggressive intent. The GMG will stop attempting to lecture the Sisterhood.

5) All diplomacy will be commenced as equals - you will not deign to talk down to us. The higher your horse, the easier it is to sever your horse’s tendons.

6) You will keep your battleships out of Okinawa - move them into Okinawa, and we’ll send them to Yomi. It’s a nice system; you should go there someday.

7) Any further orbital installations constructed by the GMG in Okinawa will be done in par with consultation over their placement with Okinawa’s other resident groups: this includes, but is not exclusive to, the Blood Dragon Shogunate and the Chrysanthemum Matriarchy.

8) The Chrysanthemum Matriarchy will assist the GMG in cleansing Okinawa of common ne'er-do-wells and vagabonds, including pirates, Farmers Alliance agents, self-styled Hogosha and agents of the infamous Order Overwatch.

9) The GMG guarantees not to cheat the Chrysanthemums out of any future supply operations.

10) The GMG guarantees to end all supply runs to the following organisations: The Kingdom of Gallia, The Order Overwatch, any and all sub-groups of the Order, Samura heavy industries and Kishiro Technologies.

11) The Sisterhood reserves the right to stop GMG convoys at the Sisterhood’s leisure and demand cargo drops from the GMG at the Sisterhood’s leisure, for an indefinite period until a relationship of mutual trust can be reconstructed. You will not resist.

12) The GMG will not contest the divinity of the Chrysanthemum Empress and her position as the rightful figurehead of the Kusarian people.

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“This is our final offer. No haggling, no whining, no derision, no imitating the toddler and no reaching for the sherbet.

Don’t be rue. Don’t bite the hand you are meant to shake.”

“Goddess forgive you of your trespasses."

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Signatories: Penned by Nishi Adeline Darche, speaker for our beloved hatsuyume: Munen Musou. Written in correspondence with Sisters Amaya Hayashi, Ellie Lillian, Jun Kirishiki, Kiku Kiwako, Ran Takahashi, Ryougi Tohno, Inaho Southern, couriers for the sisterhood. Delivered with the sacred blessing of H.R.H, Chrysanthemum Empress of Kusari, Lord Protector of the Sigmas and the High priestess of Amaterasu, your sacred matriarch and eternal Liege Lord:
Kimiko Takamitsu.

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__Signal lost__

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Nishi seals the com link with the bubbling, primal excitement of killer whale that has just been thrown a beach ball. She could hardly sit on her chair.


“Jesus christ on a hot April - we’ve skewered a prize porker. Well now, chop chop, no tarrying and to the flight deck; we’ve got a schlieffen plan to set in motion.”

She grins: the thin, vulpine smile that Napoleon would had jumped at if he saw it in Josephine; he would have mistaken her for a mirror.

“I always did play a fine hand at risk. All the more ironic in that there was no risk involved at all.”

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)

Information | Recruitment | Message Dump |
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[Gas Miners Guild]

O:O=Connecting to Server=O:O
O:O=Transmission Connected=O:O
O:O=Video Display Enabled=O:O
O:O=Identification: Guildmaster Ilo Takato=O:O

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---A slow clap begins to sound for several moments in rhythm---

An impressive display of wordage Sister... But wasted Sister Darche. I bet your partner is proud of quite a gifted tongue you possess.

However.

If I had wanted such a story, I would have gone to a Bunraku Theatre.

To business then we shall. Please remember that it was Hana Ken who came to us with peace, and yet it was your Sister Musen to allowed the blossom of peace to wither and rot with the attack in Okinawa.

You know, when you speak on how the sisterhood can out-do quite a few things reminded me of another woman who said the same things to us years ago.

Liecht. Empress Liecht.

The name probably passes your mind like fog but I'll refresh the pages of history for you.

She was the Empress of Rheinland, via late 500's A.S. And Rheinland greatly outnumbered and outmatched the Guild in many ways, like you said the Sisterhood supposedly has.

Eighty Years Rheinland fought.

Eighty Years Rheinland destroyed what could've been done with peace.

These are different times however, and the Guild has surprassed what once was.

We have a greater infustructure than before.

We have surpassed our predecessors in almost every field.

Sure you may be able to outfly our newest pilots, but you will buckle with time, while we steel ourselves with our will and faith, and the faith of our allies.

No matter how much the wind howls, the mountain will not bow to it.

To the Ultimatum you have placed forward.

No.

Hana Ken showed me the bloom of the Sisterhood I had hoped to see grow into a fine blossom, but I see without her its youth has faded and withered faster than I thought.

I will be discussing finalization of terms to end relations with the Sisterhood with Guildmaster Cong.

Enjoy the rest of your evening Sister Darche.

O:O=End of Message=O:O

[Enkidu]

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Sender Location: Battleship Matsuda, Okinawa, Command deck.
Sender ID: Matsuda actual, Nishi Adeline Darche, ゴールデン菊.
Transmission target: Miura node.
Encryption: Unencrypted.
Subject: Gunship Diplomacy.
CC: The Blood Dragon Shogunate. The Crimson Cross.The Bloodrose Syndicate.

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"Wonderful lesbian sex innuendo, haw haw. Top marks. See? You can make for quite the diplomat when you apply the little grey cells for it. It's called application, babe. Now, just apply it to every other possible field of life and you might actually make for a semi-decent leader of men."

"Unfortunately for you and your laddish, masturbatory bumbling, I have a husband incarcerated in Fuchu prison. So, I'll be more than happy to test the dexterity of your own tongue against whatever sharpened implement chances to be closest. Then you'll be laughing on the other side of your gore-spattered jaw, guildmaster."

"I could spend hours whiling the day away with eulogies as to how fighting a revolutionary guerrilla organisation and fighting a battleship-dependent navy with its horrifically convoluted supply chain, bears as close a resemblance as an ice cube to a sausage grill when it comes to learning lessons from history, but I'm sure the lesson would be fed to the proverbial goat."

"Enjoy the rest of your life, Guildmaster. It's a sacred thing you're imperilling. Please, don't trip over yourself whilst getting up from the terminal.

"Now, if you'll excuse me, and you will; I have a war to run. You'd do well to attend to your own."

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)

Information | Recruitment | Message Dump |
Feedback | Diplomatic channel

(Links pending redevelopment).