On a whole other topic...

[truerevelation]

Hey, can someone send me a loada spam, please?

[...A little while later on, after the rational bit of Kanji's brain has caught up with the loud bit.]

Uh. Yeah. If anyone's been gettin' that crap about the Eridanian prince and they ain't trashed it? Can ya send a few of 'em my way? I'm takin' a look at them.

...Not the only thing I've been takin' a look at, while I'm here, huh. Caught some of that 'colorless green' stuff bein' sent from on the Valiant. Also some other things that ... I dunno what they are, a load more nonsense talk, so anyone think that could be more codewords?

Comments

[how_they_shine]

I don't have any early spam to share, but - great job, Kanji.

[truerevelation]

Heh. Thanks, man. The spam was drivin' me crazy - least there's something coming outta it, huh.

You're in with the military crowd around here - you probably know this codeword stuff, I can give ya a list of what I've picked up?

[how_they_shine]

Sure! I'll see if I can recognize anything out of it. I'll point Matt in your direction too. He's better at codes than I am, and I know he's been doing some hacking. Maybe he's seen some things that I haven't.

[truerevelation]

Sounds like him, yeah. Dunno if he's already got some'f this stuff. Lemme see... what was it? Heartbeat, furious ideas... actually, let me-

[Kanji quiets down, and shoots off a quick stream of a screen he's interfaced the message onto.]

[how_they_shine]

This really makes me wish I had a head for cryptography.

Athena's the goddess of war and wisdom. She gave the city of Athens the olive tree. And didn't she give Perseus the mirrored shield to fight Medusa?

[truerevelation]

Heh. I just ended up with one by accident. And - man, yeah, 'course that's her thing! ...Were you around for the stuff back there?
Plus 'silent chariot'... Auriga is the chariot constellation. ... I oughta know that one.

[how_they_shine]

I was infiltrating at the time, pretty focused on Hephaestus.

That may be referencing the alien empire, then.

Colorless green doesn't make any sense to me at all. Unless they mean something translucent. It just sounds sticky.

I couldn't resist

[breakaleginhalf]

Soylent green, zero carbs.

Re: I couldn't resist

[how_they_shine]

[There's a paaauuuuuuuuuse.... One can almost hear Shiro staring absently into space.]

I should have expected that. ...I'm not sure why I didn't.

[breakaleginhalf]

I reserve the right to gallows humour.

But at least I'm probably completely off-base. I can tell you for a fact that funerals are a really big part of Xuil culture, doing shit like that to the dead is straight-up blasphemous.

[how_they_shine]

...Hm. Maybe we need to figure out what happened to the victims of the attack. Do you know what sorts of funeral practices are held for the Xuil?

[breakaleginhalf]

Yeah, we collect the bodies from our enemies under a white flag. The priests prepare them, leave them out overnight so that they can be sent on with the stars in the morning, and then there's a big celebration to see them off with honour. All the Xuil deaths in the war have had really fucking big parties, they go on until sunset that day.

[how_they_shine]

All right... I'm going to see if I can find out what we've been doing with the bodies and what our policy is. If we can shift even that much, maybe we can make some traction toward peace.

Any other important parts of the culture we should know about?

[breakaleginhalf]

Mostly just dont desecrate the corpses before we get them back? If we can find out it got done intentionally outside of general war stuff there'll be hell to pay. Try to keep people from dissecting them or whatever.