4524
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4524.010
The Galactic New Year passed with no fanfare. We arrived in the Regalian system, but, of course, things right away started veering off from the plan. We found a Federation warship, or frigate or some kind of armed, official spaceship that I don't really know the classification of, in orbit around the planet and learned that a splinter sect of the Psi-Minders has entered into a standoff with the Federation. We learned this because the Federation ship boarded us, asked us what we were doing, and took the Psi-Minders we had aboard for questioning. We ultimately got roped into playing mediator, since both the Federation and Psi-Minders recognized us as unaffiliated free traders with no real stake in this dispute. The crux of the dispute is that the Psi-Minders said the Federation was taking unauthorized scans of their sacred temple. The Federation claimed it was just doing a standard hydrology survey. I'm sure there was more to the story, but that was our starting point.
We agreed to help the Federation resolve this dispute. The ranking officer on the ship said that he would procure a license that would expedite our travels through Federation space. We apparently we be entered into some pre-approved registry so that we wouldn't have to file as many forms and make as many stops when we went through Federation territory. That sounded like quite a nice thing to have, all things considered, so I was happy to help them resolve this dispute. It just so happened, I was interested in learning more about the Psi-Minders as well. I know there is more to them and their history that will be of interest to us, but I don't know what.
4524.017
We are back in hyperspace now, on our way to the Old Frontiers sector, after our stop on Regalia to help with a minor hostage situation. I was quite sympathetic to the Psi-Minder sect that sparked the hostilities, though at first I thought they may just have been a bunch of zealots. In fact, they had a charismatic, even-tempered leader (Whit), and all they really wanted was for their sacred site to be left alone. The site in question, a temple, had been included in Federation scans of the surface, and that didn't go over so well with the Psi-Minder "fundamentalists," for lack of a better term. Evidently, that was not in keeping with Federation law or something, but I don't really know who is in the right legally. Ethically, however, I think the Psi-Minders are perfectly within their rights to keep their sacred temple private. Certain groups within the Federation disagreed, including what, from all accounts of the Psi-Minder leader and others, included members of the Federation Psi-Corps. It took a little time, but we were able to negotiate a bargain that both sides could live with, involving a promise for clandestine data dissemination, and the return of the hostages to the Federation.
More interesting than the dispute itself was what we learned about this temple and the Psi-Minders. As expected, all the Psi-Minders with any degree of talent were able to determine that we were mages, but it turned out that there was more to it than just that. They knew our aura from ancient records, where people with auras nearly identical to our own came out of the desert and founded the Psi-Minder sect. That, or some early founders met these people and established the sect afterwards. I wasn't really clear on that, and I didn't feel like prying too much into their business. It did seem, however, that we were almost fated to meet these people, that perhaps we had met them before. In a way, it reminded me of some of the myths on Diskordia regarding the Lizard King, the Slayer, and the First Ranger. It speaks of the cyclic nature of time, or perhaps the lateral nature of worlds. I don't have any concrete theory about that, just that my interest in this temple has certainly been piqued. I have a feeling the temple itself is a special site, perhaps even the kind of thing we are looking for in our mission. We were told that some pockets of mana exist out there that have gone unnoticed or ignored by The Cabal. They only seem to get interested when an entire world has mana, or at least when there's a large presence of mana. It would make sense from the mythology that this temple could have a zone of magical energy, or that it houses some piece of technology capable of producing it. Maybe they have their own NEMA reactor?
It never seemed appropriate to ask for admission to the temple on our trip. We were busy gaining their trust and sorting out what could potentially be a volatile situation between the Psi-Minders and Federation. The Federation got their hostages back, and the Psi-Minders were able to secretly pass along the story of this Federation incursion on its own people. With luck, this will be the end of it, and we can return one day to find out more about the temple, the Psi-Minders' history, and learn more about their techniques.