Gabriel is brought along to a small briefing room within the Enterprise and told to keep his drink.  The room is small, just a tiny table with enough chairs for the three.  Once they're in Battles starts putting little stickers on different corners of the room.

Both Iapetus andGabriel recognize what they are immediately:  the first parts of a make-shift Faraday cage, with just the right amount of occult thaumaturgy to allow a secure connection.  The moment he finishes he works on the nearby screen, tapping at the keyboard until he could bring up-

"Ah, there." Battles sounds pleased.

"Testing, testing."  Smoker drawls over the comms, "Are we here?"

"Secrets here, I read you,"  Secrets responds, "Enterprise group, do you hear?"

"Crystal."

"Good.  Gabriel, I'd like you to meet Smoker and myself, please call me Juno.  I'd like to start this out by giving Gabriel and Endings a sincere thank-you.  Gabriel especially- working with that laptop was a dangerous proposition.  And- ... ... is that one of Burning Feathers' drinks?"

"Yes it is."

"God, I haven't had one of those in years- depressing.  Anyway, I am Secrets.  Core couldn't make it, there are some extra concerns he has to address.  Endings, you'll be happy to note that our new guest is very safely contained and Core is taking a very personal interest in his acquisition."

"It wasn't the most dangerous environment. We had more trouble before the boarding. Which makes me incredibly suspicious," Grunt says, "Wish I could say I'm sure we won this one."

Iapetus does not sit, he waits next to a wall until the connection is established.
"I will start with my promise to our prisoner: He was very cooperative, and only helped us in capturing Warspoil 1, so he has earned a spec of respect from me, please treat him accordingly."
A hiss comes from his armor, the helmet pull up and the breastplate splits. His voice is no longer modulated to be dark and deep, but comes as soft and fragile.
"I must, however, agree with Gabriel, this situation is extremely suspicious."
A small boy in his early teens crawls out of the armor. His messy hair is purple, his eyes match the color and his face is marked with visible evidence of crying.
He walks next to Gabriel and looks up at the much taller soldier.
"We have not been properly introduced, in these kind of situations you may call me Ia. Please take a seat, I will be working while we have this meeting if it's okay with everyone?"
He then proceeds to look for the promised tools and hot chocolate.

(picture in char sheet)

"Grunt. Always. We have enough would be angels on the front lines," Grunt replied, unsurprised. The Second Breath didn't play favorite demographics. "I assume you're parsing the laptop in a sandbox system instead of anything insane like direct contact with the Core."

There's a toolbox waiting under Iapetus's chair.  The hot chocolate, on the other hand, must be on the way.

"I can assure you this is a victory.  There was a high probability this was a trap, or a field test, or whatever-have-you.  After careful analysis, Core has established an 83.6% probability this was supposed to be deterrence, with Thanatos and her cruisers fulfilling the role of reserves.  Something important here:  it means the Neverborn are much, much better at us at identifying viable FTL jump points."

"That can be a blessing in disguise.  It forces them to spread out instead of concentrating their fleets against us."

"That has occurred to us.  But it also means that Journeys needs to step up his game, and he's already being pushed hard." 

"Grunt, that there laptop's been triple-protected, sandboxed, and the Enterprise rigged to blow if even that doesn't work.  So I wouldn't worry that much." The mortal chuckles at him, "Like hell Core would let that hit him."

"Alright, please boot it up."

Grunt set the laptop on the table and opened it. Little bloat in the software so it began booting up rapidly.

"It's coming on.  Let's see here..."

"Yeah, that's what I thought,"  She sucks on her teeth as she sees everything scroll by, "Sleeper agents.  To be expected.  Ia, I think you should pay some attention there, because looks like you're going to have a new project.  But first let's look at the prison ships."

"Do we have any clue who Takehiko Isakawa is?"

"There was a Japanese Lunar..."

"No, he died.  Had his head blown off during Tokyo.  Fought for three days anyway.  I was there."

"Damn."

"David Smitters?  Is that Pauline's brother?"

"Oh God no, can we just leave him?"

"Ha ha ha."

"And why the entire population of Cleveland?"
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:58, Thu 27 Oct 2016.

Iapetus takes the toolbox and goes back to his armor.
"New projects keep me sane, or at least busy, and hunting down sleepers might not be simple, but it will be refreshingly uncomplicated."
As he listens to the others, Iapetus takes out some tools from the box and starts inspecting his armor.
An idea strikes in the head of the young sidereal.
"Is there any sort of sensor data in there?"

"Maybe, but deep in directories I haven't explored. The system is logical but not terribly well indexed," Grunt answered as he pried as deep into the Prison Ships as possible, starting with the population of Cleveland, "And the question is rather these prisoners are among the living. I doubt it at this point."

"Sensor data?  Probably not much.  From what we've been able to piece together from our recon, it looks like it was stationed at this point right after Stone Place.  Maybe Grunt can find a bit more.  What exactly are you thinking about Ia?"

"Grunt's got a good point.  Why would the Dead keep prison ships?"

Grunt starts to pry into the data... only to find something disconcerting.  All of the prison ships have figures for Living and Dead.  The vast majority of prisoners, something like 99.99%, are alive as per the data.
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:13, Mon 31 Oct 2016.

"Records indicate they're alive. Not sure how," Grunt added, "Prayer generators? Or an attempt to shift Celestial Exaltations towards their fleet by sheer weight of numbers?"

"Any data we have gathered will help with these ideas as well, but I just thought that they probably look things from another perspective."

Iapetus pauses for a while to compose his thoughts.

"Okay, these are not really my department, but if we can get our hands on some large scale data about their sensors and how exactly they see us, we could possibly build ships or ship modifications that can evade their sensors completely, allowing us some more leeway with our scouting."

"My second idea leans on the end of that battle. They started attacking each other as well as us, and that made me think: if we can have any sort of idea how the more mindless ghosts pick targets, we could use that to create confusion."

Ia gently hits the soulsteel plates of The Fall of Stars with a small hammer to evaluate the stress on the material from the sound, and to emphasize his next point.

"Third, we also now have a lot of materials we did not have before, and an unused, maybe unusable space within the Warspoil. We could use that space to start weapons testing to compare the effects of the equipment that we use versus what they use, and depending on the results, use some of that material to better our offense and defense."

"That would require them to somehow be able to do something to deserve the exaltations, in which case they'd have a Celestial Exaltation pissed off on board.  Maybe fodder for Abyssal exaltation?"

"Hellllllllllll, they've got breeder ships for that,"  There's an exhalation on the other line, "As our good friend Hackles has shown, being an Abyssal brings some freedom to it.  Can't imagine their life on a prison ship is particularly good enough to throw in with the Neverborn."

"And the Breeder ships provide the ghosts.  Hostages?"

There's a pause as they listen to Ia.  Ting, ting.  The suit seems to be handling things alright!

"Welllllllllllllll, that's an interesting thought, but it's been done.  We've got two Exalts who're good at that sort of thing, Lyla and Journeys.  Lyla's much better, but after Stone Place they've upped their game.  Journeys can't get too close anymore."

"The idea about figuring out how they target is simple enough.  If they're totally cut off from the Neverborn, they end up going insane and trying to end each other.  I can't imagine un-life as a Nanking cruiser is particularly pleasant."

"But using the Warspoil is a good point, and the only reason we haven't nuked it already.  We were sort of wondering if it was possible to retrofit it and incorporate it into the fleet after cleaning it up.  It would certainly relieve population pressure."

Ia nods at the responses.

"I figured that we have already done things like this, but if we can get a better look at how they look at us, we might be able to make things a bit easier for Lyla and Journeys. That's why I'm asking about the sensors. Don't know if we have had good access to their ships before. Same thing goes for the fighters, Warspoil is filled with them, so we now have access to try and figure if we can cut them off from the Neverborn with easier methods. But I guess these are things for Juno to think about."

Checking the internal systems of the armor, Ia is visibly pleased with his creation, a brief smile enters his face, only to fade away when he continues.

"Right now it would need cleaning, and it would be a prime opportunity for what I suggested. After that, I agree that it would be very good to retrofit to habitation but it is still a carrier with quite impressive weaponry..."
Ia shuffles around his armor looking mainly at his feet, clearly feeling a bit difficult.

"And as I said, it is filled with fighters. If we could replace the ghosts piloting them with something we could control, we would have a nice secondary fleet of fighters."

"Do they need the larger ships to channel that unity of purpose?" Grunt asked before he shook his head, "Still, I'm more interested in their navigation data. Hard to see how they got better at finding viable saddle points than us."

"We certainly plan on dissecting as much of the war asset as possible.  It's still far too early to talk about the data from the ship with any sort of confidence level.  So we'll probably have to go through it, piece by piece, and disinfect the entire thing."

"There's ain't no way in hell we're going to put people aboard that ship,"  Smoker growls at them, "Too many things can go wrong and nobody will want to be there anyway.  It'd be another prison ship for chrissakes.  Use it as a warship and be done with it."

"That's a good question, Grunt. I don't think we've ever seen that before.  Then again, we've never decisively decapitated their command structure before destroying their fleet."

"Their better navigation- I have a theory.  This theory doesn't leave this room." The sidereal's voice  grows serious, "Our FTL works through the old scifi idea, slipping through holes in space-time.  But those holes are caused by entropic decay.  Since the Neverborn are entropy personified, they're probably capable of seeing the points with ease.  Worse, they may actually rip new holes.  For every ten we find, I discard nine for that reason.  We don't want to be herded into a dead end."
This message was last edited by the GM at 15:15, Thu 03 Nov 2016.

"It makes a good battering ram and storage for hazardous materials at least," Grunt observed as he kept typing, "Terrifying but still raises other questions. Hm."

He leaned back from the laptop.

"Not that I mind poking around in this thing but the actual debriefing of what we saw has wrapped up. Any specific questions or orders?"

"I would like to hear the opinions of others here on what to do with the sleepers. I guess that on the matters discussed here that takes top priority in my list."

"None now.  Let's take a look deeper at the Sleepers..."

(Here we're gonna fade out, I think- had something I wanted to do but have decided against it.  New threads up soon)
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:25, Sun 06 Nov 2016.