Visitor? Cool

Sam O'Neil sat at his desk in his office and shoveled through the endless stacks of paperwork. Well, in reality, it was several reams of paper that he needed to signature so they could put the documents onto a holo-drive, save space that way, but right now it seemed endless. Two of the artificial humans he had recruited as his aides scanned, crumpled, and tossed the paper copies away as he finished initialing one after another after another. As he whittled away at the last of the paper, he leaned back in his chair, three stacks down and seven more to go. In actuality, he didn't have to finish it till next month but it was a nice idea to get it all done now, next month would be when he had to fill out those forms for the He3 mining station, plus the down payment and the worker's initial paychecks and that was gonna suck.

Closing his eyes, he tried to go to his happy place, not thinking about that surgery stuff, not thinking about problems, just happiness. It was a bit too much to ask but for the moment it seemed alright, Joy's replacement, that Operator 2 thing had already begun hard storing and transferring the information so now was his time to relax. In the meantime, his aides collected the monetary pay and walked out of the room, leaving him to rest.

Poor Sam O'Neil, his restful moment would be interrupted in only a few moments. Slick, black, streamlined ships tore through the void of space and towards the station, not stopping for the belt of asteroids that stood stubbornly in their way. The ships ducked, rolled, dodged and avoided all in perfect time. The ships weren't going to the station, they were only getting closer. Aboard the ships were robots, or rather, androids. One per ship. Each android's carapace was slick and black like its ship, and each had a serial number engraved on the chest plate in silvery-green symbols. If one could understand the language, they would see that the symbols read "SITKVA" and a set of seemingly random numbers.

The beings did not resemble any living species. They had four legs, each splayed out like a spider's. Their sensory arrays were located on the androids' faceplates, which were little more than a flat edge on each one's "head". Small blips of communication not dissimilar to the sounds of a dial up internet connection passed between ships. The ship in front, just outside of the belt, stopped. The other ships followed suit.The ships had simply been moving towards the station in order to communicate. The androids weren't the ones doing the communicating either, instead, speaking for them were the Siktvians. The Siktvians were the proud owners of millions of these androids and ships, which were send out to do various duties across the galaxy. In a way, the Siktvians were under home planet arrest because of their unique living conditions. This hadn't hindered them.

The lead ship sent out a powerful signal towards the station, a hailing call.

Alarms flared across all combat areas of the station and the shield was contracted so that it hugged the station, all weapons that were active began using sensors to find targeting solutions on the inbound bogeys. Sam was surprised at the alarm, an attack in his mind was not possible, it had only been two years since the Evoknight war and he was pretty sure that the HTU was not stupid enough to try the last stunt they had pulled. He lept to the right of his desk to the wall and using the servomotors in his legs, kicked down a concealed door and strode onto the bridge. The door hydraulically reset itself and soon blended in with the grey of the bridge, dang he loved that door. Great for making an entrance. The bridge crew saluted him and the next officer in line, a wormholmancer, took a position at his side.

"Sir, a fleet of bogeys just warped in and approached the station, initial estimate puts the threat level at six point oh. They are hailing us now."

Sam took a look at the hail, then at a tactical readout which showed the ships. Slick, streamlined, oily, like bugs, just perfect because this was the last time he wanted to enter a war with an entire other species.

"Alright, the hail seems clear. Bring up the level three firewall and open the link with them." He said, striding back to the command chair to have a seat and sync up his neural implant. The language that the hailing code wasn't in any spoken language, but rather, a mix between machine code and assembly language. He sat back as the com link opened, the flow of video was restricted by the neural implants so instead of an image, the only thing seen would be thousands of streams of ones and zeros. Sam began to initiate speach first.

"You warp into my space and approach my station without permission. Then you make threatening maneuvers against my friends and charges. But you sent your hail rather curiously, there is only one documented species that sends that type of hailing code. So in the name of scientific curiosity, welcome, what do you want?"

The Siktvians, through the robots, did not react to what could be considered chastisement. "Mr. 'Neil, yes? We are the Siktvians, hailing from the planet Siktva, which is next to the great pulsar of Amanata ll." Their words were a series of numbers, letters, and symbols, translated into speech and sent to the station by a number of complex algorithms. The result of these countless algorithms was an unsettling robotic voice, but one that spoke in perfect English. "We have a proposition for you concerning the station's recent financial challenges." The voice jolted for a moment, and was replaced by a sound oddly similar to one of Earth's ancient "number stations". The voice reverted to normal. "The means by which we have heard of your troubles is of no interest to you. We simply want to help."

"Well mister Siktvian, you wish to help us with the financial challenges we are having, but what is this 'help' going to cost?" He said inquiringly, he let up on the outbound visual feed so that these Siktivwhatevers could see who they were dealing with. He still restricted most of the inbound data stream though. As to how they knew about the problems, he was pretty sure they had just picked up one of the many conversations between New Exford and the station and just decrypted the low level cipher. It's not like the conversations were a threat then, after all, the station was completely neutral. "I highly doubt you are doing this out of the goodness of your hearts, actually I am certain that you want something equally costly in return."

The Siktvians, far away on Sikvia marveled at their first sighting of a human. Even Samuel's six -foot figure was short compared to them. He was, however, much stockier than they. Sikvians might have stood at eight feet, but their bodies were wire-thin in most places. The only part of them that had any real substantiality was their chests, which were teardrop shaped.
"Cost? All we require is that you organize an effort to discover the cause of the humans' powers, then send what you learn back to us. Simple!" The insectoid smile could be heard through the communications signal.

Sam smiled slightly as The Operator finally set up the firewall and he allowed the inbound visual feed to flow through. There was not much, but these new alien things were a marvelous sight to see, it was almost a wonder how they had survived as a species with possibly such frail limbs. No matter, they wanted to find out how the humans had gotten their powers, Jarius had already given a reluctant go-ahead and SIUNE was already making major preparations for a testing facility. Well, maybe these guys could help out a bit anyway, and they were willing to pick up on the station's tab which was also another big bonus. "Well sir, now that I finally see you, I believe I may understand your predicament, possibly your physical limitations. Well, the Scientific Institute of the University of New Exford is already making preparations to find out how we are able to use the powers in the first place."

He used the neural implants to access and display some data he had salvaged from the UWUC's old systems in the SIUNE facilities. "Well, as to how we got these powers, the mission log from the shuttle is the only thing I know of and it's right here for you on screen. To sum it up, the sensors detected a hyper-space anomaly, a burst of cosmic radiation and sensors are crashed all across the board for about a week." He said, waving his hand around to indicate his disinterest in the information with clearly nothing to offer. He actually had made some educated conjectures as to how most of the other human's powers worked but the only one he definitively knew was his, Etrius would always activate his power when the lab-coats came around. As far as half of his colleagues knew, he didn't have a power.

He put one of his hands behind his head and leaned back. "Well, as to how they function, I only know mine. I have a document with all of my hypotheses but it's bad practice to release such a thing without evidence to back it up."

"Excellent," The Siktvian beamed. "We will transport your humans to a safe place very near you. In fact, you are orbiting it right now. Gertragia will not refuse us inviting them, but they might give your humans a few problems, which they will simply have to deal with for several months." A pause. "While they are on Gertragia, we will be preparing another station for them, much like the one you already have. The main difference will be that it will run on nearly limitless, simple, easy to obtain, hydrogen."

"And all we ask for is knowledge. Do we have a deal?"

ooc: merp

Sam looked at the alien dudes and scrunched up his face. "Eh, there's one small thing with that. We are already installing several multi-stage reactors that rely on hydrogen isotopes. Plus, housing the humans on Gertragia is not a financially viable option." He brought up a 3d image of the Gertragia planet which was mostly red with only a few isolated blue dots in the midst of everything. "You see, for liability issues right now, we can't set up any facilities where it would be safe to house the humans. These guys do not want to fight for at least another half century and defending against rebel attacks, loyalist encroachment, and HTU aggression makes area too expensive to set up shop." He brought up some numbers on a chart and they continued fluctuating depending on continuously refreshed scenarios. The cost of constructing and maintaining a facility on Gertragia numbered into the trillions and that was under the catagory that said 'excluding additional costs.' It gave Sam the shivers just looking at it. "So unless you are willing to foot the bill, we won't be able to operate planetside."