[Darius]

New piece up for people to read. This one takes the viewpoint of the Vasudans and what they've been up to Post-Capella, as well as providing a general commentary on Vasudan society and mysticism.

[Rodo]

I really enjoyed reading the inferno prose yesterday night, who writes these? you Darius?

[Narvi]

Hah, thought the Lucifer-killers would have a role.

And where exactly is the FS1 PC now? 

[Darius]

Battuta's been writing the Blue Planet stuff. The Inferno prose was a bit of fan fiction I wrote about four years ago that indirectly inspired me to make BP.

[Sushi]

Good stuff, although I'd always thought that the "Ancients dialogues" in FS1 were taken from the discovered artifacts/knowledge that you spend several missions retrieving.  I suppose having them be a telepathic incident could work too.

[-Norbert-]

Does that mean, that the ancients are somehow connected with the Vishnans?
Or were they just "broadcasting" the history of the last victim of the Shivans, so the Humans and Vasudans could learn from their predecessors mistakes?

Somehow I got a feeling that after the Terran civil war is resolves, we'll get a Blue Planet 3 that will bring us into this final apocalypse against the Shivans....

[The E]

Yep, that has been pretty much confirmed. Not the apocalypse part, but the BP part 3 part.

[Droid803]

Nice

[Rick James]

No Vasudan mastered the union between the mystical and the secular more completely than Khonsu II. The Emperor took divination and mysticism into consultation as he planned the movements of battlegroups and the regulation of his prosperous economy. Terran scientists flocked to observe this phenomenon and concluded that Vasudan ‘prophecy’ was in fact startlingly reliable – perhaps an inbuilt, powerful form of analysis and intuition, capable of ingesting and synthesizing vast amounts of data in order to determine trends. The Vasudans, however, stubbornly maintained that prophetic abilities amongst their species (including those once claimed by members of the Hammer of Light) were in fact the result of communion with powerful alien beings (The term ‘supernatural’ is never used in Vasudan mythology; the Vasudan view is that anything which occurs is natural and scientific). Ironically, this attitude towards ‘higher powers’ is not dissimilar to that adopted by some factions of the Ubuntu Party Elders.

Have we been here before? 

[Droid803]

Sounds a little Mind Games-esque?

[asyikarea51]

Cool.

The Inferno pieces drew my attention more than BP though... but you might say "that's expected" depending on how you look at it...

Or maybe it's because I find Battuta's stuff a tiny bit harder to read (but that's because I'm no book reader and/or I'm lazy to think in-depth)... XD

[General Battuta]

It's definitely dense. It's modeled after real historical texts.

I took a slightly more cinematic approach for stuff I did for other projects, and when I write narrative prose I try to keep it verb-heavy and streamlined.

[eliex]

An engaging read. 
With constant references to Khonsu II, does anyone know the average life-span of a Vasudan? If Khonsu does die, it's going to be interesting to see how the heirs might take the situation.

[William Wolfen]

Keep it up Batty, as I said before, this is the best stuff I've read in a long time!

[Darius]

Who feels like playing around with some cryptology?

http://blueplanet.hard-light.net/rift2.jpg

This image contains a heading and subheading in Vasudan text. They are translatable to english, and are not just letters typed out randomly

Those who partook in 162 will find this a breeze.

[Snail]

Aardwolf I managed to figure out on IRC that the thing meant "Medjai. To Honor Vasuda"

The Medjai are apparently a closely-knit military group of Vasudan admirals who report only to the Emperor, and are mentioned several times in the prose on the Blue Planet website. The significance of this is currently unknown.

[Aardwolf]

Using http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?action=printpage%3Btopic=57704.0 as a reference to translate the characters (manually I might add, since nobody could find the damn Vasudan font) it says:

MEDJAY
KALINGAH VASUUDAH

Which translates to: "Medjay, to honor Vasuda", and Wikipedia says an alternate spelling for that first bit is Medjai.

Edit: slimy shelled invertebrate backstabber!

Just kidding

Edit II: AWESOME! Battuta just accidentally said something about RC1 in the wrong IRC channel  

[Darius]

Well done

Hrm..maybe I should have organised a prize or something before posting this up...oh well....

[Snail]

Can I just say, your dev team is insane.

[Fury]

Edit II: AWESOME! Battuta just accidentally said something about RC1 in the wrong IRC channel 

Yeah, concerning one mission, not WiH as whole.

Can I just say, your dev team is insane.

Well thank you. What you experienced was like changing socks to us.