The rest of the team arrived along with a bunch of Leishey's people who are going to be setting up an office for The Archive (what he's calling his organized stalker outfit now) in the SLC area. No one I actually know and none of the guys who were "running" things out at the DMZ either.

Fiske is back for another trip out into the ashlands, he took my and advice and tracked down Axel (literally the only person I trust when it comes to runic magic) and got his equipment and clothing improved.

Leishey managed to convince Doyel to join us to help wrangle the ecologists, so that's definitely a plus.

The other two members of his team are green, they brought unnecessary gear like axes, light duty synthetic tarps, hell their packs are half plastic, at least the guy the Confederacy is sending out to keep an eye on us (because we're going to be bringing in a silly amount of samples through SLC to the airport and they promised to execute us if there's a repeat of the thunderegg incident.), he at least is experienced enough to listen to Eivan and I when we told him fire resistant gear is a must.... seems a bit jumpy though... might throw his rifle into a gravity trap anomaly just to be on the safe side.

So in all we've got Myself, Eivan, Doyel, Fiske, Wissal (ecologist), Weaver (ecologist) and Bideford (SLC guy with an itchy trigger finger).


Somehow I suspect this is going to be a long three weeks.

Wow.... the last month and a half just sorta blew by.

And I don't really know hat to say really. Well the short of it is, things got really crazy, literally the day after the 6 tons of equipment showed up from the west.

After a bit of digging I think I finally figured out what sparked it all happened. Some dumbass dragged in a thunderegg from the ashlands and cracked it open in SLC.  To the initiated, an ashlands thunderegg isn't like its normal counterpart, these radiate some magic, granted not everyone can tell this, so to most people they're relatively normal looking agate rocks... well until you crack one open. If you cut, crack or otherwise destabilize one from the ashlands it releases all the contained energy all at once and temporarily inflicts everyone and everything in a two block radius with magical effects and abilities... which obviously caused all kinds of chaos.

Some of the people affected claimed visions from god, others just white noise filling their minds, Regardless things got out of hand and the SLC Confederation (as they're currently calling themselves) used this as reasoning to attempt to start regulating "anomalous peoples", which unsurprisingly backfired creating something of a "cold war" between magic users, regular people, and then some California Republic guy decided to agitate things by intentionally cracking about seven of them downtown by tossing them off a roof.

This started a half month vicious cycle of tougher crackdowns, more agitation chaos and bullshit, until the military remnants brought in heavy equipment and started enforcing curfews and order. Unfortunately this only happened after the confederation cracked down to the point where a miniature version of the inquisition was happening and "foreigner internment camps" were being considered in open.



So last week after the order forced the leaders of the confederation to "sit down and have words" with agitated magic users and foreign interests everyone was able to agree on some form laws and regulations, basically everyone coming into SLC territory gets inspected when bringing stuff in, mages don't get pulled out of their homes in the middle of the night and someone came up with some "standardized" rules for magical duels and managed to slip them into the discussion.... more or less everyone walked away unhappy.


So with that out of the way, Monday or Tuesday the rest of the expedition team should arrive for the ecologists to study deep into the ashlands some more.

Hopefully someone doesn't do anything stupid and break the peace again.