Restricted Goods and Technologies List
This is an update on the Restricted Goods and Technologies List, outlined in Storm League Regulation SLR-210-23 and SLR-210-24. This list outlines the technologies restricted or regulated for trade with Storm League nonmember realities due to Inter-Reality security regulations, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and human rights violations, particularly concerning unknown or hostile realities.
1. InterReality Communications gear such as Radios, Broadcasting equipment, Receiving equipment, Network Hubs, and Reality Beacons: This category is regulated under SLR-210-23, section 3(a). It includes any equipment designed for communicating with or accessing alternate realities. It is hypothesized that such equipment could potentially be used for nefarious purposes, such as espionage or sabotage, and therefore is strictly restricted. This category is also regulated under SLR-210-23, section 3(b). It includes any equipment used for transmitting or receiving signals or messages to or from unknown or hostile realities. It is hypothesized that such equipment could potentially be used for propaganda or other forms of manipulation and therefore is strictly restricted.
2. Quasiorganic Computers: These are regulated under SLR-210-23, section 3(c). They are hypothetical computers that use biological or organic materials in their construction or operation. It is hypothesized that they could potentially pose a risk to health or the environment and advance technology in an unregulated way and therefore are strictly restricted.
3. Electronic Computers: This category is regulated under SLR-210-23, section 3(d). It includes any type of computer or computing device, including laptops, desktops, and smartphones, that are designed for use in unknown or hostile realities. These are strictly restricted for various reasons, such as national security concerns or the potential for them to be used for illegal activities.
4. Liftstone: This is regulated under SLR-210-23, section 3(e). It is a substance or material that can lift or move objects and is designed for use in aircraft and hovercraft. It is hypothesized that it could potentially pose a risk to public safety or Inter-Reality security and therefore is strictly restricted in trade to Unknown or Hostile Realities.
5. Engine Technology: This category is regulated under SLR-210-23, section 3(f). It includes any type of engine or propulsion system, such as those used in vehicles or aircraft. These are strictly restricted for various reasons, such as Inter-Reality security concerns or the potential for them to be used for illegal activities.
6. Magical Formulae: This category is regulated under SLR-210-24, section 3(g). It includes any type of formula or recipe that is believed to have magical or supernatural properties. It is hypothesized that such formulae could potentially pose a risk to public safety or Inter-Reality security and therefore are strictly restricted.
7. Gate Equipment for transport to and from other Realities: This category is regulated under SLR-210-24, section 3(h). It includes any type of equipment or technology used for transporting people or objects to and from unknown or hostile realities. It is hypothesized that such equipment could potentially pose a risk to public safety or Inter-Reality security and therefore is strictly restricted.
“Export Controls on Advanced Electronic Devices and Related Technology”
InterReality Trade Administration
January 1st, 2194 ESC
----------------------------------------
Somewhere Within The Sky Hurricane
January 11th, 2195 ESC
Althea del Valle, nee Ventricorum d’Argus, was annoyed. She knew she didn’t have a right to be, which annoyed her further. The almost two-meter-tall, elf-eared Mechanese woman would have paced around in the bridge of the salvage craft if she knew it wouldn’t unnerve her co-workers. It was common knowledge that a restless Mechanese usually meant they needed to relieve stress, probably in a violent way. Common wisdom held that Mechanese were highly unstable, emotionless, cybernetic killing machines. If a Mechanese’s skin patterning changed from a standard human skin color to that of one of a great cat, it meant they had entered combat mode and might kill you at the drop of a hat. None of it was true, but most common knowledge about her people was wrong.
It was true that her people were both bioengineered and cybernetically enhanced to be stronger and much quicker than humans. This was in response to an invasion of her home from another Reality by psychic monsters that could reanimate the dead and take over simple computerized machines. What wasn’t true was their lack of emotions. Almost all of their communication was done over a network that included emotional icons to indicate the emotional state in which the words were meant. This was supplemented by the various shades and ways their cat patterning flashed upon their skin. While it was true that the combat mode of the defender caste triggered the skin patterning change, it would also change in response to emotional stimuli.
In this case, she was annoyed that she had been awakened five days ago in the morning while cuddling with her wife, Ticualtzin. However, she knew she was on call that week and had no reason to complain. On the other hand, cuddle time with Tiki was one of her favorite things to do. Being in love was very different from techuu, a form of stress relief common between the Mechanese defender caste of which she was a part. Unlike techuu which could be asked for by any of the other girls in her unit, love was sweeter and made her heart ache when she was apart from her wife.
She had woken Tiki and kissed her, telling her she had a search and rescue mission and would be back in a few days to two weeks, depending on the job. Promises were extracted that she would try to avoid fighting anything too dangerous. They both knew it was a promise that would probably be broken, and Althea would end up being ‘punished’ by not allowing her to have a Fess-T-Burger or some other minor thing else her wife would think up. As a Mechanese defender, Althea was just suited to fight things other species found difficult, which was one of the reasons she had gotten the job in the first place. Her physical abilities and technical skill were unmatched by anyone else in the company.
She was deficient in magic and psychic abilities, which were well taken care of by other agents. They usually handle the interreality travel needed to find and rescue their company’s clients. If she were stranded, the most she could do would be to construct a beacon and await rescue, much like their client had. However, sometime in the night, someone had set off an emergency beacon tied to an insurance contract that one of their clients carried. This had led to a call, a courier with the corresponding beacon gem delivered to her company, and then Althea rousing.
They were in a large Skywarden salvage skyship, A1559, a large rectangular craft almost forty meters long, twenty wide, and nearly twenty tall. Clamshell doors on the bottom opened so they could land on top of the wreck and take it intact back to the shipyard. Despite the size of the ship, its internal crew compartments weren’t very large. As a result, the recovery equipment took up most of the ship, including cranes and straps for any size of craft up to thirty-six meters. This included equipment to cut, recover, and store wings, engines, and other parts of the craft being recovered.
The internals for the crew were at the top of the front and the sides of the automated recovery compartment. Normally a vessel of this size would only have either tech or magic equipment, but in their line of work, it paid to be prepared. There were two sets of automation, one that was tech-based and the other that was magic based. Likewise, they had two small medical bays for the recovery of clients and crew in case of an accident. Unfortunately, this did leave the crew quarters rather sparse, even on such a large vessel. In the case of the A1559, it had enough room for the twelve crew members in double bunks. There were supposedly three crew members in the cargo ship that had gone down. She hoped they were alive. It was always sad to have to recover bodies instead of helping survivors.
Luckily they had two mages along this trip, one a human Navigator, the other a Tigre healer named Beiner Torfisson. Althea had worked with the man before and knew he was competent even in a high-tech reality where magic might fail or sputter out. He’d been able to heal other clients even under fire in a few situations. Not knowing what to expect was par for the course when working for InterReality Investigations. Their clients varied, and it depended on the contract. She’d been on missions where she just stood there intimidatingly. Others were needed to find someone who had gone missing or had stolen something. Several times they had to recover people under fire. Those were most like her previous unit’s jobs.
The job usually dealt with unknowns and mitigating the possibilities for failure by overcompensating with training or smarts. This mission came with many Unknowns, like which Reality their clients were in? What was the Tech/Mana ratio? Would all of their equipment function once they got there? It was all an unknown. She knew that it had taken five days to find the place within the Sky Hurricane. It was off the beaten path, for sure.
Their Navigator, a human, named Tommy Lee Kilgore, who hailed from the Northern part of Texico, had gotten them to the right cloud bank. This looked easier than it was. Althea had heard that unless the Reality was travelled to on the regular or had a Sky Island at its navigation point, the entrances sometimes shifted and moved around. Thus they had Navigators like Mr. Kilgore to track down the exact location of the entrance of the Reality within the shifting clouds and open a Gate. She once asked how they did it and got some vague answer about magical crystals and psychic signatures, but it confused her.
Navigators were also useful in avoiding the natural dangers of the ever-shifting sea of sunset-colored clouds, such as unknown sky islands or dangerous weather patterns. They had avoided several odd weather patterns that may have dumped them out of the Sky Hurricane into an unknown and unwanted Reality or damaged their ship with high winds and debris. After a while of traveling in the Sky Hurricane, you learned to avoid flying within any odd storms even when on a Reality as they could be naturally opened Gates. Odd-looking storms sometimes concealed natural Gates to the Sky Hurricane. They could pull in aircraft from these places, ending up with people you had to rescue and explaining that there might not be a way back home unless they had something to act as a beacon.
The Skywarden bucked as they hit another thicker layer of clouds and dived deeper within the cloud bank. The light from the outside suddenly darkened as they dove into grey clouds. Althea could hear the ship’s creaking as it fought the high winds that comprised this cloud bank. There was a sudden lurch to the side as the ship maneuvered to avoid an unseen obstacle. She’d heard that early sky ships could be destroyed and the crew lost. No one ever recovered from those accidents unless they had liftstone-enabled lifeboats. At least, there were none she’d ever heard of. Others were jostled about, but Althea kept her balance, her grip on the bulkhead near her superhumanly strong. Dappled sunset light streamed in through the front windows as they broke through the thicker, more violent clouds to more peaceful ones below.
The craft slowly came to a stop as Kilgore pointed out the spot to their pilot. The beacon crystal he was holding was placed back into a metal case, and Kilgore walked to the Navigation station. He stepped up into the magic circle surrounded by handrails and hooked his belt to the clips that lined the inner parts of the railings. These would hold him inside the spell circle in case of turbulence. It wouldn’t do to have your Navigator be interrupted while opening a Gate, after all. As he began preparing to enter the Reality by opening a gate, a small alarm sounded to let everyone know to return to their stations. Althea moved to the rear of the bridge to leave and almost ran into her partner and work senior, Taylor Giradot.
The young human was shorter than her at a hundred and seventy centimeters to her one hundred ninety-five but made up for it with his physique. Taylor’s jumpsuit was wrinkled, and it looked like he had slept in it. The same could be said for the rest of him, disheveled, tousled, and sloppy. He had scuffed shoes, messy hair, and bags under his eyes. He had a disconcerting ability to avoid her detection by smell, sight, and hearing. Althea suspected it was either psychic or magical in origin as she could tell where everyone on the ship was at any given moment by the sounds of their heartbeats or via the cameras. Taylor was a ghost unless she was looking directly at him. She felt it would be a very bad day if he ever got lost and she had to try to find him.
Taylor also had the most disarming smile, making people want to open up to him. Althea suspected the combination of these two abilities that had gotten him hired, as he had managed to surprise her more than once at the branch office and talk his way out of being yelled at as well.
He smiled at her lopsidedly, “Missus del Valle. How are we doing today?” The ship lurched a little, and he caught the railing easily but made it look like he hadn’t.
“We’re transitioning Realities, Mister Giradot,” she said huskily, a hint of her Mechanese accent under the clipped GmbH Standard German they all spoke as it was the lingua franca of their interreality civilization.
“I can hear that,” he said, gesturing to the speaker near her. The ship shook as Kilgore hit the middle of his incantation.
Althea blinked and looked at Taylor with curiosity, her skin changing patterning. “Should we not prepare just in case?” the woman asked, leaning down a little to look at him with her periwinkle eyes.
His smile grew wider, and he laughed, “Oh sure, let’s get to the turrets. I just figured that you were already controlling them. Plus, it’s always fun to watch you turn cat patterned.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Althea let out a snort. Taylor didn’t give off fear scents around her anymore when her skin changed patterning to that of a clouded leopard. It contrasted nicely with her snow-white hair, which slowly turned into a lavender color near the tips. “Yes, I am controlling the turrets,” she stated. “However that doesn’t preclude you from your duties.” Althea poked him gently in his chest, careful to keep her fingernail claws retracted.
“Ah, you caught me,” he said in a manner that knew he wasn’t sorry at all. “I just wanted to see our Navigator in action.” He turned, walked with her down the corridor, and slid down the ladder to the deck below.
When he was out of sight, his scent vanished as well. Disconcerting , she thought, and not for the first time. Althea followed him as they opened the small compartments that held the controls for the eight remote turrets covering the ship. Each turret had two 20mm rotary cannons and a single smooth-bore 11.5cm cannon for tougher targets. Althea would have felt more comfortable with high-energy weaponry, but as experience had shown her, the higher tech weaponry would sometimes fail in high-magic worlds. If push came to shove, the crew could operate these weapons manually. Not to say it was a pleasant experience, but it could be done.
She sat in the open framework chair that controlled the turrets and turned to face the bank of touchscreens and holograms that indicated the four forward turrets on the front half of the ship. She placed a headset over her ears, wincing a little as they pressed on the sensitive tips. The screens showed the endless sunset upon the clouds of the Sky Hurricane. A fairly typical view. Looking up through the other turrets, she could see the darker clouds they had left ten minutes earlier, and the targeting reticles pointed to some floating boulders. Avoidance of the large pieces of rock was probably the source of the lurching earlier.
A darkening area in the front started as a small dot and then bloomed into a darker cloud. Green lightning bloomed from it, and rain began to spray in all directions from the dark cloud as the lightning in fits and starts began to attach to their ship.
“Always a good light show,” Taylor commented in her earpiece on the turret channel.
She grunted in acknowledgment, but inside she was as thrilled as much as he was. Opening a Gate was always a time of excitement and fear. Almost like combat.
Taylor chattered, “del Valle, you think the Gate’s going to snap shut on us? Maybe there’ll be a horrible storm on the other side? Ooo, the Reality could reject our Navigator, and we’ll be stuck for hours or days here!”
“Please stop,” Althea said calmly. “They aren’t pleasant things to think of. I am certain everyone has variations of those in their minds at the moment.”
These questions were in every crew’s mind when they were exploring. Crews like theirs with a Mage as a Navigator usually carried a small chest full of charged Mana crystals just in case they needed an extra boost to get the Gate open. This was especially important in low mana Realities, where a Mage could take weeks to recover their Mana stocks from the environment.
“Our duty is to ensure we aren’t ambushed by pirates or whatever people, if any, are on the other side of the Gate. So please focus on that,” Althea said.
There was a raspberry on the other side of the channel, “Spoilsport. I want to see if I can rile you up and what expressions you can make.” He had seen her crack a nervous smile and had given him a surprised, almost shocked expression the first time he had snuck up on her. Taylor’s primary mission seemed to be to get the Mechanese woman to make more unrehearsed expressions.
It was an annoyance to the former special forces soldier but not an unpleasant one except when he snuck up on her. That had almost cost him dearly a few times, but she was trying to get used to it.
“I see no problems with doing my job,” she replied, ignoring his quip. The Gate had opened, and she caught a glimpse of a starry night sky before clouds covered it. “Transition,” she stated a second before the loudspeakers blared a horn and announced it to the entire ship.
“Transition! Transition!” Captain Clarke announced through the PA system. The entire ship hummed as magical energy was applied to the liftstones that would counteract the lack of buoyancy when they left the Sky Hurricane and entered the Earth’s sky. Althea felt a sinking feeling as the ship entered the atmosphere. However, it was almost immediately replaced by an upward push from the liftstone engines that leveled out the skyship.
Through the cameras, Althea could see that a storm raged around them. Green lightning briefly sparks all over their hull, lighting up a snow-covered pine forest. They slowed and came to a stop about a hundred meters from the ground. Water poured off the hull as the temporary storm slowly dissipated. Althea saw a small truck parked under the ship on a snow-covered road. Curious, she scanned it with the rangefinder and targeting scanners from the bottom turrets. Two sentients, both human. Very hot engine, possibly internal combustion, and two standard GmbH smart-crates in the pickup bed.
I’m going to have to go get those, she thought. She and Taylor were responsible for several things including aerial combat and internal security and recovering personnel and equipment that had gone missing. She tagged the visual of the man’s face in her memory so she would be able to recover the crate later. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be complicated. Tiki’s already going to be annoyed at the length of the job. But, at least the hazard pay is good.
She peered around the ship and noticed several large communities and smaller settlements, noting the roads and lights. All of this was updated to the ship’s central computer, which would be building a map and database of their area for later usage. They glided forward, and she moved the targeting off of the truck and began to search the area for any signs of broken trees.
“Analog radio chatter,” came over the headset from the communications officer. “Variant of Texican.”
Althea switched one of her connections to the ship’s computer to the communications feed and listened to it. It sounded like a variety of NewHomian English. She shunted the feed to a part of her mind that would record it so she could learn from it later. As field agents, she and Taylor would have to talk to the locals. Especially if those crates were listed as “insured” or “required to recover.” The more items Interreality Investigations brought back, the less their clients, the insurance company, would have to pay out, and the bigger their company’s payout would be. Or that’s how her Bosses had explained it to her.
“Three towns, about forty homesteads,” Althea reported over the ship’s comm channel as she spotted and tagged them with the Skywarden’s upper cameras looking down into the series of mountain valleys where they had emerged.
“Good work, del Valle,” Clarke said in his growling Tigre voice as the Skywarden’s bulk flew over the forest.
Hopefully, no one looks up, she thought. She was fairly certain the two humans had seen them emerge, but since the Reality seemed to be pre-contact, she was certain no one would believe them that a huge skyship had just appeared from a cloudbank in their skies.
Taylor piped up, “Hey, look to the west. It looks like we’ve got aircraft in the sky. They’ve got flight technology here.”
Turning the cameras over that way did indeed show the red, white, and green navigation lights on several aircraft towards the coast where Annasheim was on Erde’s Reality. On her home Reality of Mechanon, there were no cities in this area, only small commoner caste villages. It was a good vacation spot where you could… A tear fell down her cheek when she remembered it would be a good while before she could go home, let alone take her wife with her. Exile from her homeland was painful.
She sniffed for a moment before answering, “I see prop planes and maybe a jet.” The small dots were easily visible with the high-tech optics of the skyship. “We should be wary of native looters. If they are flying, they might have spotted it.” She added the information to the database of this Reality, UWX-21-A6L1TN-9, which the computer had helpfully named when it had discovered it was not yet in their databanks.
Taylor hemmed and hawed for a moment as he listened to the radio signals. “Captain Clarke?” he asked after a moment.
“Yes, Giradot?” the older Tigre male answered.
“I’m thinking tech level eight or early nine,” Taylor said. “But I’d check to see if there are any digital signals. I spotted a few satellites up there, now we’ve got visibility. We might need to turn active camouflage on so we don’t spook the locals. Don’t need a strafing run because of the big scary UF.”
Althea blinked and gave a tiny smile. She hadn’t thought of those things for the ship itself. She was more hands-on but would have to learn from him if she ever wanted to be a senior.
“Got it,” Clarke growled. “This complicates things. We don’t need any issues with the locals spotting us and running to the authorities. This isn’t a warship.”
“Mana levels, Captain Clarke?” Althea asked, not wanting to seem less knowledgeable than her colleague.
“Ten percent, del Valle, so we’ll have to husband our resources,” Clarke answered with a slight admonishment.
“Thank you, Captain,” she answered. “I will try not to need our biomancer’s attention this time.” This was answered by multiple shorts of decision from the crew listening in to the conversation. Unfortunately, Althea had a reputation for getting banged up while protecting the salvage crews and needing healing spells regularly.
It’s not my fault that I’m good at protecting people and really wanting to make it home, she thought.
Two hours later, they hovered over the crash site in a tiny valley east of the main settlement. Even with its interreality beacon blaring an SOS, the aircraft had been hard to find. However, whoever had landed it had managed to find the only hidden area near a more gentle valley that had led to a road. It was a Stahlwerk-Hein Büffel cargo plane from about fifty years ago. The Büffel was more of an aircraft than the Skywarden and had short stubby wings that contained liftstones.
One of the liftpods had exploded, and shards of the sky-blue crystal floated about the site. That was another reason the craft was tough to find. One of their properties was that they absorbed radar and suppressed heat signatures. As a result, most skyships had to be spotted visually. Their worst trait was that if a liftstone exploded like this one, it would block all signals near the crash site for a few days.
The Skywarden was over the aircraft with its belly open, and all lights out except for infrared spotlights on the craft itself. The signal chatter didn’t indicate that the locals usually flew or drove around with infrared sensors. The two humans that Althea had spotted earlier again turned out to be the main sentient species. Surprise, surprise. Of the explored and contacted Realities, any of them with humans and low magic meant that usually there were no other sentient lifeforms there. The species seemed to have a penchant for genociding competing sentients on Realities with a Tech/Magic ratio of 70/30 or higher. You had to be cautious of them, even if they had lower technology. Especially if you weren’t human yourself.
The rectangular-bodied aircraft showed fire damage on its fuselage and wing-mounted swivel engines. It had landed nose-up on an incline between several large blackjack pines that surrounded and concealed it from view. The tall evergreens could grow up to seventy meters tall and, in the dead of night, would keep it from view. The plane was resting against a tree which showed scorching from the engines. One of the engines was out of commission. Its fan blades and interior parts had come apart and were all over the place. Infrared lights were reflected by the sparkling floating parts of the shattered blue liftstone as they floated about the crash site.
Althea and Taylor had changed into ballistic fabric and ceramic plate armor and were rappelling down to it. She had a high-wattage laser pistol, a nonlethal stunner, and a short sword. Taylor was similarly equipped but favored a slugthrower pistol and an electrified mace.
“All quiet,” Althea said. “There’s a crew of two?” She landed on the ground next to the craft as Taylor landed on the top. She gently pushed fragments of lift stone out of the way. They spun in the air and sparkled in the infrared light her eyes could pick up.
“Should have been. Check around the craft,” Taylor said quietly into his subvocal throat microphone. “I’m going to peek inside.”
“Got it,” Althea replied with hers. She moved like a whisper around the back of the craft. “Cargo ramp down. It’s a mess.” The ramp and overhead clamshell doors were forced open, and some smart crates were lying among the debris. Some of them had been torn open.
Torn open? Althea thought and checked them. Deep claw marks were dug into the metal where the boxes had been pried open. She started taking deep breaths through her nose. The scents of the forest and the stink of burnt oil and metal of the aircraft had overwhelmed her senses for a moment. Instead, she focused and breathed in the scent of animals around the aircraft. Squirrels, small coyote creatures, the expected blood from a crash, and an odd spicy scent, almost like a reptile or bird.
“Careful,” she said into the throat microphone, her lips unmoving. She started checking the ground around the craft and found many animal prints and a few deep in the frozen ground. “We may have a large bird of prey or a saurial on the loose.”
A grunt came from her light headphone. “Found the navigator, she’s dead, but it looks like the pilot got out,” Taylor replied. “Nothing’s in here, but it looks like something tried very hard to get to the pilot and navigator, judging from the marks on the cockpit door and wall.”
Althea nodded and scented the air, her eyes sweeping the surrounding forest. It might not survive long in the cold if it was a variant of the axe beaks from home. On the other hand, if it was a saurial, it might be one of the smarter ones that could use tools. Most of them weren’t sentient, but they were social and tool-using. Much like the non-sentient chimpanzee variants that occasionally cropped up in large numbers to overrun and kill people, those kinds of saurials were a clear danger to any place they got loose in.
If they, however, turned out to be the even rarer sentient saurials, then there would be a major problem. Althea had heard that some on Dinosauerier-6 had fully sentient saurials that had the beginnings of cities in their religious centers. If these were kidnapped sentients, they’d have to be rescued and returned home. The problem was that they were most likely justifiably hostile to anyone with a body plan like their kidnappers. For once, Althea found herself wishing they had brought along a telepath. Unfortunately, no one in the crew had any ability to communicate with sentient saurials.
“This is troubling,” Althea said as she entered the cargo bay. A large cage was inside, with its hinges torn open. It stunk very much of that odd odor. She checked and found restraints in the cage, which had been pried open on the hinges. “We may be dealing with either sentient or proto-sentient saurials in addition to recovering this craft.”
“Ah, great, just what we need,” Taylor sighed. Then he said with a chuckle. “You’ll have to get dolled up to talk to the locals. I know how much you love pinning your ears back.”
Althea wrinkled her nose and looked around the compartment again. “Yes, I like it about as much as using spray skin to conceal my patterning.” She paused, looked outside the tilted cargo bay, and spotted a large seedpod. “About as much as you would like a pinecone ene….”
“None of that,” Taylor said with a tiny chuckle. “You’re a riot, del Valle.”
“I’m here every Thursday, Saturday, and Tuesday,” she replied dryly as she padded out to look for tracks she soon spotted. “Ah, it looks like the pilot went towards the locals. Was he human? Or are we going to have to rescue an ‘alien’?” Those jobs were usually bad, and you had to stop them from dissecting the survivors.
“Human from the manifest on the dash. One Pahuac Ignacio Camarero,” Taylor said.
“That is a relief,” Althea replied and looked towards the twinkling orange lights of the small town. Please be peaceful , she thought.