I was pretty close in my guess, the other two rebel cities were recaptured in 18 days, putting an end to the rebellion. The other two cities were taken over just about as easily as the first one, though there were a few reports that it seemed the last city to fall had some fighting between high level individuals on both sides. Our alliance ships left shortly after that. Outside of valuable military information, we also learned that, at least when it comes to other humans, the other side does seem to show some semblance of respectable behavior. That isn't to say that they're incapable of committing atrocities, just that they didn't in this case.

They actually know better than we do exactly what sort of lasting effects silver fluorite has in an area, so the cost might simply be too high. Given how they also let us observe their rebellion fighting, they might actually be afraid of us still. I personally don't think they should be, given how many more weapons they produce than we do, but the technology level of those weapons is lacking as well. Their estimation might be vastly overestimating our strength and capabilities, for the time being at least.

I do think that once we have aircraft they'd have every right to be afraid. It really is exceptionally hard to replicate and outclass an enemy with air superiority. They're copying a lot of our design work, but without an understanding of the underlying principles, it is exceptionally difficulty to progress and develop countermeasures. We're also shoring up our own defenses and communications, which are currently our weak points. In an ideal world, we can dissolve the two alliances, and just return to nation-state politics, rather than this bipolar power structure we find ourselves in, but for that to happen, there would need to be significant political and diplomatic changes.

At this stage, given how militarized everyone is becoming, I doubt a demon invasion could actually bring the world back together. After all, the last invasion was put down nearly immediately by the humans using their lesser versions of our weapons. I do have some concern, however, that they may have captured some demons and might be attempting to replicate our mana crystal growth process. It's quite complicated, and I did a pretty good job of keeping that a secret, but given enough time and some of the information that the elves have, they could figure it out. That'd open up hybrid engines to the other side, and also allow them to concentrate mana more effectively.

We do have an edge in that regard at least. Mana crystals, well, natural mana crystals, are largely found in volcanically active areas, at least according to the current common knowledge about them. It's possible that there are deposits deeper down in other regions, but no deposits have been found in the northern part of the human continent or on the elven continent. Considering they break above ground normally, there wasn't much interest in them either. They were useful when excavating an existing mountain, or maybe a nearby mountain if you were ok with digging a tunnel to move them, but until recently, that was the extent of their value.

Now they're integral to increasing an area's mana density and productivity. By my estimates, and in conjunction with data we've gathered from our islands and the mainland, large mana crystals go beyond just redistributing the natural mana. The influenced area's mana flux, including all the higher and lower mana areas, is higher than the flux would be if that area didn't have a mana crystal by a proportional amount to it's size.

For example, the dwarven capital's extended mana zone gets approximately twice as much mana as it would get otherwise. Our mainland trade city gets about 1.5 times, and our island chain complex gets about 2.5 times the amount. That mana has to come from somewhere, and based on my previous studies on mana, I'd suspect that it's somehow redirecting mana in the atmosphere or the space above the planet down towards the land. I can't say whether that effect tapers off yet either. Mana seems to come from stars, so I'd expect there to be a finite amount.

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Perhaps because this message wasn't quite as rushed, the official news of the end of the rebellion didn't reach us for another 20 days. I continued working on the various projects that I have my hand in, and after an additional 20 days beyond that news, it was time to test out the new radio towers. We've given each facility a callsign to identify themselves by when talking. Due to the nature of how we've set things up, towers are either in listening or broadcasting mode, and should spend most of their time in listening mode. You wouldn't want to build a listening antenna too close to a broadcaster, since it would absorb a large amount of the signal, in essence meaning we'd need to do twice as much construction if we wanted to have both functions at the same time, which is a lot of work for little payoff for our purposes.

The results of the tests were promising. After a bit of final tuning, the signal from Kembora, while noisy, was able to be understood on the mainland. Better, however, was the fact that the last island in the chain was able to relay the message from either location and understand them well. Even during storms, I suspect that a single relay jump is the only thing that would be necessary, and there shouldn't be a need to use phonetic alphabets for the transmissions, though we do plan to train operators to use it in the future. In the future, I'd like to have fully automated relays using directional antennas and rebroadcasting, but my focus isn't on that for now.

To accommodate the fact that operator ran retransmissions are planned utilizing our last island, we've developed an operators guide. Transmissions start with a five minute cycle of stating your own call sign every twenty seconds, followed by a start phrase. This is mostly to ensure that, even if people at a listening post are a ways away from the console, or doing something else, they have time to get to the console and take notes on the transmission. Then, a destination call sign will be repeated twice to indicate who the transmission is supposed to be for.

From there, the message will be repeated once with a repeat phrase stated in between, then a sign off phrase is repeated once. From the end of the sign off phrase, there will be delay until the relay gets configured to transmit, at which point, it will repeat the message with a bit of extra information during the pre-transmission and start message related to where the message is being relayed from, and the time that said message was initially received. Since the original broadcaster should be able to hear the retransmission, we've also established protocol for if the relayed message was malformed with erroneous information. This was established because of the chances that should erroneous information be transmitted, both sides may try to communicate due to the error, and thus no receiver picks up the info.

As such, responses have a bit of a longer delay, and each site is equipped with a fairly loud klaxon to play to indicate an error in transmission. If no klaxon is heard within 5 minutes of a retransmission occurring, then the message is to be assumed to be true. At some point, we may need to develop code to prevent anyone from listening in on our broadcasts, since the radio waves are just out there in the open, but for now we're the only ones operating this technology, and the information that could be spied upon will mostly be information that the other side has likely heard through spy networks anyway.

That said, we've essentially cut the round trip communication time for Kembora to the mainland from ten to twelve days depending on weather, down to ten to forty minutes, again weather dependent. When you factor in the ever growing telephone network between the governments on the mainland, within another year or two, we'll have faster and more frequent communications available than the other side could ever hope for with their birds.

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