Saisa,
After much speculation it seems like the fedo’s out of the can. Despite Lars en Ramon’s typical stonewalling (and frankly lack of any personal charm or attempt at public affairs) there seems to be a consensus in the OSINT community that Arkombine has ended their affiliation with the Department of Friendship and Mutual Assistance in favor of signing onto the Deathless Circle. That’s assuming, I mean, that this isn’t them just double-dipping again to play the heel to the Legion’s face. I’m already acutely aware of the Deathless Circle’s longstanding work with Upwell playing both sides against the middle.
That was a particularly hard lesson I learned on Skarkon, where the Deathless’s associates in the Seykal and Krullefor leveraged their connections through the Krusual Tribe to have the RSS and Eifyr & Co. protect them from justice when the local force of independent warclones in Molden Heath acted on their jurisdiction to combat smuggling in the region. This was the same conflict where a number of us crawled ourselves out of the rubble of the Warlord Uprising to build our own institutions outside of the empires only for us to get pushed into a war, set up to fail. At the time, I believe Arkombine was cooperating with AEGIS Provost Marshal Kasiha Valkanir—one of the DED officers that carried out the SARO Purge in Molden Heath. Who, before the end of the Skarkon War, would end up sending their own forces to assist the RSS-Krullefor alliance. But hey, times change. This was, after all, before the Deathless was openly collaborating with the Angels Cartel in their turf war. Or before the RSS was lining the same smugglers they sent Skarkon to hell to protect up against a wall and shooting them now that they were no longer useful. Loyalties change very fast these days, it seems.
I get it. ■■■■ happens, just look at where I ended up. So lets say, after working with RED TROOP officers to help dismantle the goal of a homeland for warclones free from persecution, Arkombine really is telling the truth now about their intent to break with the old man Mordu to “forge a path to freedom for warclones” and “rise beyond the persecution and conflict inflicted on them by the imperialist ambitions and militarist adventurism of New Eden’s empires and factions”… I mean I kind of wish you had that change of heart sooner but why look a gift-horse in the mouth? I can’t claim to be the sole inheritor of the warclones of Skarkon, if anything we have fragmented more in the last six months than we had in the previous decade. But I do like to think I speak for that subsect of warclones that recognized that our fight for survival necessitated a strategic alliance with outside powers in Pochven opposed to the existing imperial order. We’ve shown what we are willing to suffer while we tried to build what Arkombine now claims to, often in opposition to Arkombine’s former associates. Unlike them we never left, and never gave up on the dream of Avalon.
You can understand our reticence to believe them now when they claim they fight for a world outside the empires, especially when working alongside an organization that’s worked hand-and-glove with the empire’s gray market for their own personal gain. You can understand why, to me, this doesn’t seem like a revolution but just another mask for the same order. But I want to be proven wrong. If there’s any sincerity to Arkombine’s goals then now is the time to form a Revolutionary Coalition between Arkombine and warclones serving the Collective to bring a little retribution to the people that once hunted our kind. You owe us that debt for every warclone that Red Troop, AEGIS, Upwell, and the DED murdered.
The ball is in your court. Rikaato.