Excelsior

Origin, 40 suns popular folk song, surf the late first expansion.

Avana, a moon owned, operated, terraformed by the Komori family.

raised in acclaim to one of the five families for their efforts terraforming the 40 suns, our known galaxy.

They are the distributed empire in our story.

And this moon is not connected to any other planets that they control outright, but...

How can you say that a planet that has humanity living and breathing on it doesn't owe some crumb of fealty to the family that made that possible?

The three of you sit on the arabesque.

Ayasa is sleeping behind the wheel because she fell asleep in the minutes it took to use the drop of Orm.

It took to cross the galaxy to get here.

Questions remain.

Her access, her reach.

But she came through for you when it was needed.

The pull that became a call.

A flight from Karueda.

But you arrive.

You see a crescent of lush, terraformed land across an otherwise barren, mid-sized moon.

And Ayasa snorts, kind of rouses herself, and yells back to this small coup de ville of a cutter.

Okay, we're going to land within the next... Oh, I don't have credentials to land here.

Okay, we'll land as soon as we solve our problem of how we're going to land.

And you feel the momentum, slow and steady though it was, begin to halt even here on the ship as she turns and opens up the floor to you.