To the COF. Conflagration of Firewood, Coven of Fumblers, Couldn’t Oversee Flamingos.

[Enkidu]

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Incoming transmission.
Subject: Valorous begging. Noble are the beggers, for they are the ones to get into heaven. Your avaricious indolence renders you too copulant for the eye-of-the-needle manoeuvre! Instead of buying a bigger needle you can win a smaller body, eh?
Encryption:Encryption is for fools. Ecryption is for those who cannot be entrusted to strut in the light.
Sender ID:Achille Augustin Nadeau the XXXestiest of his line, once the administrator of Freeport Ten, now a travelling bum with the most succulent asscheeks in showbiz; rumpled, like overripe pears.

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Haha! You meet your reckoning at last! Permit me to bask in the consummate excellence of my revenge, in it's excelsior conception!

I will ask you for a great boon, and, in the quixotic X facteur of moi charisma, you will be borne away on the ocean of my mystique. Plan infalliable, no?

For it is I, Achille Nadeau, a relatively unknown Gallic Royalist with the synaptic stability of a speed encrusted springer spaniel with an inbred urinary tract malady and just as temperamental, have returned to claim my heirloom! Annex your voluptuous women! Destitute your daughters and ravage your firstborn sons.

But first, I require my deca-penthouse back so I can feel self-important and eat for free from the fruit trees.

If you do not return total command authority of the installation charmingly known by your arrogant Anglophilic parlance as “Freeport dix”, I will take my legislative dix and thrust it so impertinently into your olfactory sensibilities your handkerchief will reek of my Shalimar - not the splendid opiatic agoniser daubed onto the most angelic of grayling heroines - but the off-branded unblocker better suited for the toilet than toilette.

You have been warned, ineffectualz. If I find so much a thumbmark on the biodomes, I will be smashing them with a lump 'ammer, like the tiny, low dreams of an even Tinier Tim.

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

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[Remnant]

What the hell do you think you're doing? You go missing for a year(s). Things devolve into peace and quiet, something which was a little hard to come buy whenever you decided that you really enjoyed the new pencil sharpener you found and thought it'd be best to announce it for the entire base to hear. Very loudly. On repeat. With lots of involuntary 'close ups'. Of course this being the image that I try to think about whenever the rare cases that your name came up, thank heavens that you didn't actually play out that little scenario to my recollection. Though I wouldn't put it past you either.

And here I was hoping if you were to ever show up again, there'd be a slight change. You've gotten worse. I don't give a damn about your proverbial ranting, your woven insults and rudeness merely tick me off more than anything.

I wasn't planning on it, though I do intend to now prod at the biodome glass around the edge of the park every now and then knowing that i've probably just taken a low route for a very small return of amusment. Business is doing fine. People are doing fine. The god-forsaken Outcasts who love being more militant are leaving us alone. I believe the proper term for this is peacetime? Something which a freeport does very well under. Serving it's purpose to a wonderful capacity.

Now your little.. Request. There's a lot of ways I can shoot you down. Normally any proper request isn't something that i'd flat out ignore, however you're both being an ass, and are showing yourself off as an undesirable. You can buzz off and try again properly next time. I'm listening. Selectively. Try to be more convincing. Though I still am as stubborn as always.

It's good to hear from you again. I'm glad you're not dead. (More honestly than I may make it seem)

Tara Snow
Freeport 10 Administration

[Enkidu]

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Incoming transmission.
Subject: Valorous begging. Noble are the beggers, for they are the ones to get into heaven. Your avaricious indolence renders you too copulant for the eye-of-the-needle manoeuvre! Instead of buying a bigger needle you can win a smaller body, eh?
Encryption:Encryption is for fools. Ecryption is for those who cannot be entrusted to strut in the light.
Sender ID:Achille Augustin Nadeau the XXXestiest of his line, once the administrator of Freeport Ten, now a travelling bum with the most succulent asscheeks in showbiz; rumpled, like overripe pears.

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Goethe god; you’re also alive?

I’m, aaah.

Ahrumph. Ahurrm. Ahchoo. Atata. A.... Mhm. One, rephrasing, two; reformulation. Reconnection of the heuristic ideas tree. New game, new plan of attack.

Tara. How to... Tara.

Empathy. That’s the noun! Clean it off, lick the spokes, test the levers.

…I am bowled. I have not been so much taken aback as loaded into the nearest air cannon and shot out of the tent.

Why are you still conscious? Out of all the people whose pernicious fiddling in the dark arts could have gotten them strung up by a lynch mob, you would have been right at the top of the list. I recall being one with said mob. Hrm.

Time has not been generous to me, miss Snow. It’s been bastardly. Instead of kissing me on the mouth it has handed me a slapping in the teeth. Like a particularly agonising dental procedure wherein the practitioner makes the executive decision that you will not survive the operation, the passage of the years, months, and middling hours has robbed me. It has made me destitute. I am a profligate nobody.

This was not entirely due to my spendthrifty fascination with bubblewrap and bordeaux - no - the the true epicentre of the fall of the house of Nadeau (tragic story that it is) lies entirely within natural law; a man cannot hope to be more than a savage reflection of himself - a gussied-up artifice of our baser instincts - a devil statue in a bin-bag tuxedo and a plastic party hat. In short - I am simply not in mode for the bootlaced, hyperreal nonsense placed upon those of the Gallic leisure class. I can’t do it. I cannot re-engineer myself into a fading, subservient clown capable of hosting moribund dinner parties for fifty somethings wherein nobody attempts to murder the other. There’s not even any money in the Sirian trade business - my collection of Bretonian loot was once the centrepiece of Perpignan. Now, it’s a modicum of what the reservist legions have been flogging off on the streets, and without a heroic filigree of decorative bullet holes, war stories and general other testaments to human barbarity, either. I. Am. Not. Worth. Anything! I have no societal function. Nobody wishes to fraternise with a pocket genius’s slow delusions.

I was one of the first wave of Gauls to enter Sirius and truly seize the initiative - open the markets, find a third way beyond busting through the mines and dragging most of Charles’s displeasure behind. Antoine is sitting gorgeous somewhere up in the Gallic core worlds with pretensions of being an aristo. Me? I’m dead in the water. Propellor stopped. From Burgundy to Bretonia I have been a-wander without a compass to chart me. You are devastated that I am still alive? I am devastated that I am still alive. That is just how awful the world has become.

My golden-age is falling down. Nobody wants to associate with an old, tragic man reduced to stealing the bananas from his old haunts.

Look. Tara. This is my Gunfight at the O.K. Corral moment. Freeport Ten is, was, the only misadventure in my life that did anything more than mire me in near-misses, perpetual scrapes and doggone conspiracy. Well, it did all of that, but panacea came with the panache. I had position. I had a get-out-of-jail free card with unlimited overdraft.

Please. I’m glad your not dead either. sainte mère de vaches, that was difficult to articulate. Ugh - I’m dry-retching - oh no, here comes the bile, that torment, that vile ichor, it’s coming to interdict me, in my moment of union, my difference, my sweet….

*vomits*


...Don't kick me whilst I'm down, Tara. I havn't eaten anything more than an emergency ration packet that may have given me cancer of the bowel by the nature of it being fluorescent, in in thirty six hours. That's a bloody long interval to roll on with only the flavour of pickled chicken pasted to your soft pallet.

The fruit trees.

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

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[Enkidu]

--Boost--

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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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(Links pending redevelopment).

[Enkidu]

--Boost--

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

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(Links pending redevelopment).

[Enkidu]

Sender ID: Achille Augustain Nadeau.


Transmission Subject: Old friends.


Transmission Encryption: Vernam.

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Circumstances have changed.

I realise it now. You’re the administrator, not me - you win, Tara. In many senses, you’ve done what I could not. You kept the installation secure and didn’t start any brushfires. You’re not dead and the maltese have not annexed the biomes yet. I have you to for that.


But, Tara. Oh Tara. Do you not remember the towers we once built? Babel towers, crumbling forever down, yes, but the dome still exists. A little short of patrons and the bar-keeping isn’t what it was, but the infrastructure - it still exists. Space degrades in centuries - and the year that’s passed us, that year? Nothing but the blinking of an eye.

I come back grovelling to the Confederation that left me dry because I realised that this is all that I know how to love. You know of me; my dishonesty. I have only one attribute to console me from a life-ending happy accident - this. This is all I know.

Give me a chance. Let me be of use to you. I have my feet planted in Gallia once more - my feet are buried in bauxite and lanthanum. I have everything I require to live an exceptional, wealthy life.

But that was never what it was about, Tara. Not the fool’s gold. The fool’s people.

Let me come home, Tara. At least for long enough. I wile to walk the fields again (and find a replacement heat exchanger for the Concurrence before she roasts me in my seat, but that’s a separate story).

You’re the only person alive who ever was unkind enough to me to win my love - and I do love you, Tara. Platonically. We’re old, curmudgeonly soldiers, fighting our battles in the dark spaces between the stars, drifting in and out each other's lives and occasionally manipulating each other for hidden agendas, Mrs-Liquid-Cardamine, secret-shennaigans-with-eldritch-abominations Snow.

In all candour, I apologise for the pencil sharpener incident. That was disgraceful and unworthy. I still flagellate myself over it. What I don’t apologise for making our… your, station, the most influential trade nexus within the Zoner colonies.

Come on, cheri, take a running leap, where is your nostalgia?

What's the worst that could happen?

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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).

[Remnant]

Do forgive the lapse of time between your previous message and getting back to you. I'd like to chalk this up to peanut butter being spread all around the transmitters so it was not able to be sent out to you, however after reading the second message that has come through afterwards, I feel that I may actually be in the right to be more truthful and state that the message has been sitting on my console without being sent for a day now. I was rather unsure as to what I should actually say to what appears to be a man who has fallen from the glory that he himself had attempted to create. Your own definition. While that may not be very proper, it existed and there wasn't a damn thing that I could do about that. What happened?

A story that I can hear about later.

I have no desire to keep you banished. This is a freeport afterall, you being the ass that you are isn't really enough to bar your access to the Freeport again. Not to mention some patrons of the bar really did appreciate the banter. By the gods I am going to regret saying this, but you aren't as much of a fool as attempt to make yourself appear to be. Before you claim that you are very well aware of that fact, I implore you to stop and just take the compliment as it stands without ruining it.

I refuse to speak of your situation and desires through the Neural Net. Come on home and tell me about it here. I hope and pray that this is not something that I might regret.

On another note. If you call anything that may even remotely reference to my daughter as an Eldrich Abomination ever again, I'm going to find that pencil sharpener and shove it up your nose.

Behave.