Intergalactic Summit

Greetings New Eden.

The Muttokon Containment and Staging citadel is as of this moment fully outfitted and operational in orbit over Muttokon II. It is merely an Astrahus class citadel, but it should prove sufficient for the purposes of these events as capital assets have safer and better staging areas nearby and well within jump ranges. For humanitarian aid, sub-capital and freighter staging, containment and research purposes this has been deemed the appropriate response to the situation.

Purpose and equipment:

* Staging of subcapital ships and freighters for quick responses to the developing crisis.
* Storage and deployment of medical and research assets and materials.
* An on-site Research laboratory for capsuleer scientists and engineers in case it'll prove useful.
* An on-site Medical Bay (with attached clonebay for capsuleer convenience and emergencies) for obvious reasons.
* On-site observation post and monitoring stations.
* The usual defensive and offensive capabilities of such facilities, including fighter squadrons for containment breach interception.

Access and Availability:

This will not be a freeported facility. The situation is sufficiently serious that it requires certain security measures in place, including a limited access list. Given the potential for serious contamination and potential hostile action this facility operates under very strict security including but not limited to security background checks, medical scans and severe inspection of everything and everyone entering or leaving capsuleer access hangars. Be aware before docking that this facility is under orders to employ full quarantine measures upon suspicion of Kyonoke contamination on the station. Entering this facility at any point means accepting the possibility you may not be able to leave under such conditions.

The access list will be public for transparency and independent scrutiny. Current access list follows and will be updated:

* Otsito Mining and Manufacture, administrates and controls the facility.
- One of the most proficient scientists and industry moguls of New Eden, Jinari Otsito has been put in charge of the facility.
* Mercenary Coalition, while not involved in the matter remains my employer and simplifies things for my personal work.
* Ushra'Khan, known tribal Pendulum War participants will have access.
* Electus Matari, known Republic loyalists of both industrial and combat penchants.
* The Bosena Acccords, former Clone Soldiers have access for their potential ability to provide on-site humanitarian aid.
* Minmatar Ship Construction Services, a known and proven Minmatar industrial entity and tribe loyalists.
* Minmatar Inner Space Conglomerate, unknown to me but with reassuring public records.
* Otherwhere Circle, kin of Matar and Pator
* Individuals currently on the list:
- Myxx,
- Victoria Grey.

If you wish access in order to provide aid or have a staging ground for your own efforts in response to the Muttokon II crisis on a corporation, alliance or individual level make it known here in this thread. Personal messages will not be enough from this point onwards, as public transparency is a priority and I would very much prefer that access requests are publicly and independently verifiable right here. It should go without saying that any act of aggression or initiation of hostilities against Tribal entities, humanitarian efforts or others on the access list will get your access revoked.

Facility Management:

Dr. Jinari Otsito of OTSI has both the required education and experience to administrate this sort of crisis response, having worked and published in pretty much every related field of research. Some notable efforts in the past includes research and detection of Sansha infestations and implants, neural networking, and bio-engineering efforts in relation to things like Vitoxin, Insorum and more. Having also gained access to Serpentis bio-engineering data that may prove useful for research initiatives into this contagion doesn't exactly hurt either.

If other research and medical efforts towards this particular crisis are warranted, I'm certain she will provide facilities and oversight for such initiatives. She can be contacted personally or through myself.

Further updates will follow as the situation develops.

Update at 13:06 YC119.02.15: Research facilities are assembled and online. Facility is now 100% operational.

Consider this an offer of coordination and contact, access rights or no. I daresay this particular threat goes well beyond borders.

A nice gesture.

Pray they throw the orbital into the star.

I should hope, if Ms. Del'thul joins us, that she will not threaten violence against potential contributors of aid, as she has done before.

It's difficult to coordinate meaningfully with someone who rejects aid and threatens violence against those who might render assistance.

The situation was resolved, yes, but I still consider it relevant to offers of coordination. For instance, what if the situation in the Republic worsened? Would you still reject SFRIM aid? What if the situation in the Empire worsened? Would you volunteer aid? In the State? The Federation?

That these are even questions makes me wary of coordinating with you, hence my (I believe measured and relevant) response.

As to the penis-measuring, I assure you that all due aid has been arranged. That we aren't discussing the particulars in open channels is more a matter of operational security than a dearth of aid.

As one example that I can divulge, 15,000 hazmat detection units have been secured and are being deployed in all publicly-accessible transit points across the Aulari and Ihatalo constellations.

In any case, indeed, that situation was resolved. I merely note it for the edification of my esteemed colleague from the Akagi Initiative.

I've been asked to provide a small overview of the situation from a research and development perspective in case the scope of the situation is not readily apparent. The Kyonoke Speck has not been a primary research subject on my part in the past, but prion diseases in general have been part of the studies I've performed when it comes to Sansha infestation and potential bioweapon development so I should be able to cover the basics for you.

Be aware that the Kyonoke Speck is not your standard Prion disease and this is merely used as a comparison.

Usual bias disclaimer etc: I work closely with Miz and provide significant support towards her causes, both because I wholly agree with and support them and because she in turn provides me with the kind of support and talent I lack. This mutually beneficial relationship is public knowledge and should be kept in mind when interpreting any statements I make.

Now, on to the meat and bones, and proteins. What's a prion disease?

They are often characterized by a build-up of a naturally forming protein gone 'rogue'. Normally, these proteins are part of synaptic messaging and are broken down, but in some cases - some more or less understood than others - they are resistant to this breakdown and persist and build up in the brain and sometimes other organs of the body. Once formed and gone rogue, they can recruit and reshape other proteins into copies of themselves setting off a progressive accumulation of the abnormal protein.

The effects of this are generally various forms of brain damage and interruption of brain processes. Some of the worst diseases humanity has ever faced have been prion diseases and they are incredibly difficult to combat as none of the normal treatments for other types of disease (bacterial, viral, nanotech etc) have primary effects on the proteins in question.

However, prion diseases fortunately have severe limitations. They are almost never contagious under normal circumstances. The central nervous system will usually be contagious but are obviously almost never handled by anyone and carers using the most basic of safeguards (gloves and so on) getting infected are pretty much unheard of. Without means like blood transfusions and direct unprotected handling of nervous tissue and so on, prion diseases really are not contagious. There are genetic components to susceptibility as well.

However, if there is any suspicion of prion diseases present in a patient, surgical equipment - particularly neurosurgery - must be quarantined and disposed of safely. There have been cases of prion diseases being transmitted between patients since all conventional sterilization methods do not work against prions.

Treatment varies, but most of these diseases run their course and do their damage before any kind of 'cure' can be applied even if we have some means to deal with it among the more advanced facilities in New Eden. Small molecule medicine - your average painkillers and basic treatments - mostly have little effect but we have found some that can at least reduce the progression and treat some symptoms rather than the cause. This is useful since the administration of such medicine is simple both for production, distribution and application often in the form of simple pills or other such means.

There is antibody research that has promising effects as well, although that treatment requires hospitalization or skilled medical personnel on site for use, not to mention some very intensive lab work to identity the exactly correct type of prion disease in question or it'll either have no effect or an adverse effect on the patient.

The progression of the disease can also be entirely halted by gene silencing - switching off the gene required for prion diseases entirely - and if caught early enough this is often sufficient treatment in conjunction with therapy to rebuild neurological pathways that have previous been corrupted or damaged.

It is worth noting that there's always talks of vaccines when there is talk of disease, however this is generally considered a pointless avenue for prion diseases. They are incredibly rarely infectious and will in almost all cases start in the brain to begin with and the immune system will almost never attack anything in the brain even if it's foreign matter or susceptible to antibodies.

Now, here's the kicker: The Kyonoke Speck subverts almost all of these truisms about prion diseases. It is highly contagious, it is not naturally produced in the victims and there is no known - to the general public and us - genetic component to it. Well, there almost certainly is but we simply have no idea what it would be yet. We have of course not been given access to the research most certainly performed on it by the State science efforts at the pit so there's almost certainly large data stores that would be very useful to us at this point, but what we do seem to know is that given how susceptible humans are to it and how rapidly it works, this is quite likely to be a manufactured agent of some sort, from our collective lost pasts.

What does this mean for us? Well, it means New Eden needs to collectively buckle up and get down with the science, because while the big guns and scary spaceships will prove instrumental in limiting the spread of this speck, neither of those are even remotely capable of killing it. The speck can survive vacuum, heat and pretty much every form of sterilization we use for all non-prion or speck related diseases.

OTSI is setting up shop in Muttokon II's citadel and my people are hard at work preparing for crunch time. I can not stress enough that the authorities must under absolutely no circumstance fall for the temptation to allow capsuleer scientists access actual samples of the Kyonoke speck due to the obvious immense value and danger it poses as a bioweapon, but what we can help with is simulation and research.

Neat.

I'll be putting together a shipment of the materials you requested for transport to the station, and myself and other members of the Bosena Accords will be accompanying said shipment.

We can offer emergency assistance personnel who are immune to "permanent" infection by way of being immortal soldiers. Galm Fae and I will be looking for volunteers among our members this evening to assist in compromised areas of the station.

Dangerous humanitarian aid situations are what we established the Bosena Accords for. We'll offer any assistance we can.

The best thing any Capsuleer can do right now is STAY AWAY. All it takes is one well-meaning idiot to break a quarantine and instead of four affected systems, we'll have forty. And soon four hundred. Yes this is bad. Yes we'll probably have to watch millions die to save billions. I'm suuuure CONCORD and the Empires can handle this with the same skill and dedication they showed when dealing with Sansha or the Drifters...


That being said, I am willing to assist in any reasonable way that does not risk the chance of breaking quarantine.

On destruction of the pathogen, I would contend that plasma-based weaponry should be able to do the job. The question is remaining debris, but care taken to ensure reentry should also bake any sufficiently small piece of debris. Debris that's large enough to prevent the internals from hitting atmospheric reentry temperatures should, of course, be hit with more plasma weaponry before it hits atmosphere. Fortunately, most debris will not function like a properly-shielded spacecraft.

The simple fact of the matter is that at the point at which electrons disassociate from their parent atoms, any pathogen ceases to be a molecule but instead a gas-like mixture of subatomic particles.

While the Kyonoke pathogen seems to violate some of our understandings of biology, it nonetheless can't escape the inexorable truth of physics.

(though, of course, I should add: if by some absolutely bizarre twist of fate Kyonoke is a Talocan bioweapon, something like a weaponized form of Inferno, then it may very well have an Nth-dimensional component and may very well violate physics as we know it, but that's the realm of bad late-night holovids and trashy thriller novellas.)