Chris had told them to leave the negotiation to him. Null had no idea what they could offer Littleman or the council that would allow him to negotiate but Null left it to Chris. Null instead wanted to work on the 3 spells he would incorporate into the suit. These spells were blink, magic missile and a new one called summon. The summon spell would allow for them to summon an item from storage using long distant teleportation.
Null had been unable to get these spells to work when turned into technomagic form. It had become apparent that Null relied on his voice of universe ability more than he knew. Whenever he used magic missiles or blink he was subconsciously feeding the spell the spatial coordinates gather from the voice. To overcome this weakness he had developed a locator disc that he had imbued with the ability to record their current location.
Using the locator disc the user could blink or aim their spell. The problem with this method was attaching a disc to its target or also telegraphing your possible location. Null considered it at best a stop-gap method but still implemented it to everyone suit.
Just in time as Chris had been successful in negotiations with the council. They were being allowed to form a mercenary group that could compete for mission via the mission board. The price for this allowance was that Null had a copy of every technomagic spell he made to the TMA.
Most races tried to allocate missions internally but some missions would require unique specialists. To prevent disputes from erupting and causing diplomatic incidents the council had set up the mission board. The mission board was part of the enforcement department so had sufficient power backing them up that no one would ever attempt to go against any formal agreements.
The board would allocate the lucrative opportunities to the mercenary group that had a solid reputation and had been successful in the past. All new groups trying out for mission would have to complete an introductory set of missions to see how capable they were and if they could be trusted.
The Scanning missions were the first set of introductory missions. It tests to see if a group can handle the logistics of missions. Can they get to locations and send in the report. The next set of missions are the exploration missions and finally, they will assign low-level combat missions. Once those missions are completed the mercenary group will be able to register its name and bid on real missions from the mission board.
Littleman had been able to negotiate with the board to skip the scanning mission as the Valtaui would be handling all the logistics. That still left the exploration mission and combat missions for the party to complete.
Null was keen to get to some combat mission as he needed the EP, everywhere he travelled around the ship he would be prompted on upgrades he could get to improve the station.
"Don't worry about that, you normally wouldn't have a colony until you had advanced to advanced true magic you lucked out finding an empty one" Null wasn't having any of it, he knew that there was no luck involved and that Infy and it system had maneuvered him into getting this colony.
"Infy, you know there wasn't any luck is there anything you could upgrade without EP?"
"No, EP you need to go out and defeat some more enemies." What Infy had meant by defeat was to go and kill more enemies. Null received 10EP per human but he wonder if maybe the value would be different for each race. He was interested to see but wasn't about to go out and start randomly killing people.
It had taken a few missions for the party to adapt to their group dynamic. They had managed to develop an effective routine for exploring planets. They would take the shuttle to the planet and then use the summon spell to bring in a portable shelter. Lisa and Chris would stay at the shelter to scan and study the area while Null and Jania would physically explore the area.
The Shelter was equipped with various scientific instruments and scanning devices. They had also learnt from earlier missions and packed the shelter with fixed turrets and mobile surveillance drones. The shelter made a fine forward operating base.
Without enough new Zallium to upgrade any of the spells they had instead focused on upgrading each suit. They had installed an AI in each suit and upgraded the non-magic technology. Each suit now had an advanced suite of sensors that could hopefully detect cloaked enemies or even offer Chris and Lisa the ability to detect objects in a wider spectrum
Chris's new AI Argus is named after the all-seeing god. The Argus did most of the heavy lifting when it came to surveillance and controlling the turrets. To prevent accidents, Chris had to explicitly command the turrets before they could fire. This was a failsafe in case the AI was hacked or went rogue.
Lisa had also benefited from a new AI, Sia the god of knowledge. Sia role was to help Lisa with her research, The AI would track and analyse all the data collected. Sia had nearly unlimited access to the portable shelter research station that collected detailed information on each planet they visited. Information was always half the battle and Sia was invaluable
Jania AI Leia had also received an update to unlock some more processing power now that she had adapted to her implant. This allowed for Jania to be hyper-aware of her surrounding at all times and quicken her response to danger.
Null didn't add an AI to his suit as between the system and his other abilities he already had too much to keep track of.
The party had been on roll lately, they had successfully completed 8 exploration missions without incident. They only had 2 left before they could finally get into some combat missions, The group was getting or geared up for a new mission when they had been assigned.
This mission did not feel right to any of them and they couldn't understand why it had been assigned. The assigned mission was to explore a newly discovered planet in a trinary star system, technically the planet shouldn't have been habitable or even exist as its orbit did not conform with the laws of physics.
"The only way this planet could exist is by using a massive passive field manipulation system. The power requirements alone indicate, that this planet was inhabited by a tier 3 or higher race. I don't think we should be exploring such a place" Null had a very strange feeling about this mission.