Epinnu is the largest and oldest of the two colonies, being relatively similar to earth with an average temperature of 11C. It has a gravity of only 1.2 times that of Earth, making it close to the home planet. Humanity lives across its surface, generally bunched into large cities surrounded by large stretches of rural land. It is about 1.3 times the size of earth, with slightly more landmass. The primary difference is in the lighting; the planet has never seen a bright day. It is only barely lit by Eperu, a dull purple tinge providing little to work with. Artificial lighting is rampant, and farming is done primarily by hydroponics. Of the 1.8 billion people in the system, approximately 1.1 billion of them live on Epinnu.

Tuadeasc, while also human-habitable, is far harsher. Its average temperature in the places inhabited by humans is roughly 30C. Its gravity is 1.1 times that of Earth, and it is only 1.1 times larger than Earth, but it garners even less light than Epinnu. It is an intensely separated planet, the equator hot enough to boil water while the poles feature cryogenic ice flats that near absolute zero at their coldest. Land dominates its surface, making up 75 percent of the planet. The human population, about 700 million, is primarily rural; small settlements dot the planet.

There is a third, secret colony, far outside of the system. A rocky planet named Katmu, it is a frozen landscape with a gravity 1.4 times that of Earth, while it is 1.3 times larger than Earth. It is in a highly eccentric orbit, at its farthest 9AU from Eperu, while at its closest it is only 1.5AU away. It has only been discovered by The Regulate, who use it as a weapons stockpile and the headquarters for its ruling council. Its population varies year to year, but it has never held more than 7,000 people at once. It is perpetually dark, as no light reaches it from Eperu.

The final planet, while not formally a colony, is in a unique position. Alaktu, a small gas giant about 4 times the size of Earth, sits within the Eperu Exclusion Zone. It is highly ionized and radioactive, and is notable for the Gate Flux Tube, named for the positioning of the stellar gate inside of it. The space inside of the Gate Flux Tube is comparable to baseline space as seen in the Solar System and many other star systems.

The Gate Flux Tube, however, is not an entirely innocent affair; it is essentially a planet-sized particle accelerator, collecting particles from mass ejections by Eperu, and highly charging them in a giant loop that leads, eventually, into the north pole of Alaktu. The rest of the system is reachable through an obscure and largely unresearchable process involving the Gate Flux Tube, whereupon joining into the acceleration stream you can, in what has been theorized to be a violation of causality, eject yourself from the Exclusion Zone without ever coming in contact with the lethal anomalistic radiation that makes the Exclusion Zone deadly.

Failures to join with the stream are not unheard of, and are lethal – once the failure is known, it is too late to avoid crashing into the north pole of Alaktu and being lost amongst the gas giant. One can return to the Gate Flux Tube by way of a naturally-generated exit just outside the Exclusion Zone, a station built around it to facilitate such travel.

It takes approximately a day to travel to the exit once you have ejected, and the space between – nicknamed The Channel – is incredibly hostile to life. Long-term exposure to The Channel is guaranteed to drive a man into psychosis, with no shielding system known except to The Regulate.

Finally, the star of Eperu itself. It is an anomalous dwarf star, made up of exotic materials that resist analysis and whose origins are a mystery. The star is only 17 times the size of Earth, and the entire system could fit in the space between Earth and the Sun. Around it is a wide exclusion zone, where the radiation from Hev is so strong and dense that no shielding exists capable of preventing it from being instantly lethal, except to the Regulate. The radiation itself is not identifiable as any form of previously-discovered radiation, and requires special shielding to prevent exposure not provided by traditional radiation shielding methods. It is well known to interfere with electronics and causes ghosts to occur both in sensors and on electromagnetic frequencies used for transmissions.

Due to an effect that has yet to be adequately explained, it grows whiter the closer you get to it, and darker the further away you are. By the time you are at the edge of the system, it provides absolutely no light and cannot be seen, while at Alaktu, the closest most people can safely get to it, it is a mixture of white and purple. It is principally made up of a volatile material called HEV-P, short for High Energy Volatile Particulate, and it is nicknamed Hev in casual conversation.

The second known material is called HED-C, short for High Energy Disruptive Crystal. It is nicknamed Hedic in casual conversation. This material is rare, and was only discovered when collected from mass eruptions.

Nation Name: The United Republic of Arhas

Government Form:

Unitary Democratic Republic

Demographics:

Humans (that’s all there is at this time, genetically modified, unmodified, both. Nothing legal in United Republic space in the vein of genetic modification actually deviates from being the same species honestly. The closest one gets are the “Purified”, which will be explained in the “Culture and Society” section in one of the parts there.)

Population: 2.45 billion

---

---

Planet Name and Description: Eos IV/"Arhas”

The planet of Eos IV/Arhas (both names are valid as locals use them both) is a large world about four times as large as Earth, though its surface is incredibly hot and is covered in a vast desert sands as well as has some rocky areas and formations interspersed randomly throughout it. Surface radiation exists to certain limited extent, but the myriad driving winds and inhospitable heat, combined with the searing sands that when blown by such winds can easily both strip and burn both skin and muscle off of the bones of the unprotected, are far more dangerous affairs for anyone going about above-ground. Occasional tornadic activity, which is of a larger scale than an “Earth-grade tornado” and more akin to an old world hurricane, is also a highly dangerous thing. Notable underground oceans and even underground freshwater bodies can be found deep under the surface, however, which seem to naturally replenish and have an alien yet unique water cycle of their own that enables this.

What life, both flora and fauna, exists on the planet mostly developed deeper underground in the underground bodies of water there, though these varieties of life have gone well beyond these waters as well by the time human colonization began. In fact, they’ve expanded as far as the surface. Large, even whale-sized at their largest and oldest, tunneling worm-like creatures with grinding ‘filter-teeth’ in their mouth pass around near the surface of the planet as they grind up sand above (more of which is formed from naturally eroding rocky areas/formations on the surface) and pass it out of the back of them as they digest certain minerals. These creatures have long lifespans, and the digestive juices of these creatures have potential industrial uses as well as acting as a form of inherently toxic psychoactive substance that apparently is very risky but pleasurable to use on the part of local ‘worm junkies’ who try to farm or harvest it for their use despite its dangers (the fact it even has an effect on humans, who come from another planet, is both surprising and utterly strange).

On the top of the sand also live rapidly-reproducing photosynthetic extremophile microorganisms, which can better navigate the ‘top sand’ and seek to get in the radiation and sunlight so they can harness it to produce energy. Said energy is also used by them to create life-sustaining water inside themselves through the intake of atmospheric gases in the air and using some of the energy they harvest to do this in a process that is not yet fully understood by humanity even now. This is also why juvenile as well as adult “Sand Worms”, as the worm-like creatures are called, will go closer to the surface at times to get hydration through devouring a large quantity of these water-producing microorganisms by filtering them out of the ‘top sand’. Beyond this there are a number of creatures that exist near, close to, or somehow on the surface of the planet, in part producing the quantities of gases needed in the local atmosphere to form it in the first place.

At the same time, though, the deeper underground or closer to actual water one gets the more vast and rich the planet’s biosphere becomes and the more strange and different it all begins to look like. Some creatures living in the underground of the planet even seem to look like creatures from Earth’s own ancient past, more or less directly so, which has been of a fascination to scientists as humanity has settled around and upon these underground oceans and underground lakes and so forth in turn. In fact, even deeper below these creatures and near the ‘uninhabitable zone’ far enough down below the sands and earth and rocks and underground seas and so forth….there are even mostly anaerobic creatures which have a part-silicon part-carbon chemical makeup.

As for the sun of the Eos System, it is a larger and hotter sun than is comparatively present in the Sol System and many others.

***Note: A single year in the Eos system on the planet is 307 days long, in comparison to the 365 year-long days back on Old Earth.

History:

The United Republic of Arhas began simply with the arrival of the colony ship HMCS Bartimaeus arriving in the Eos (the name of the star) System with its cargo of Earth refugees and a dream for the future. Its destination? The vast desert world of Eos IV, also nicknamed ‘Arhas’, a vast world larger than Earth and existing as a titanic desert with notable water deposits hidden deep beneath the Earth. In that vein, it was only natural that the plan for colonization began with and was to forge large, underground cities and settlements to establish humanity in one of its many new potential homes. Even so, the horrendous weather and deadly nature of the planet’s surface were not exactly confidence boosters for the new locals.

Initially the colonial government looked at the issues with trying to place the underground settlements too close to each other, eventually spreading some father out in an attempt to not have too many settlements tapping into the same underground resources as each other. On the other hand, certain areas would prove to have certain things that the others would need as the first decades of digging, building, and settlement began. Resource transportation, however, was far from ‘refined’ or ‘completely stable’ enough between many of the settlements at the same time. Heavy enough vehicles with the right design, and enough infrastructure to make them more widespread, simply did not exist. Most things of such a nature had to be made from the colony ship itself, and then be shipped down from orbit after bringing up the needed resources to make them from deep underground…a process that for many became increasingly vexing.

On top of this, as the population of the colony ship had been taken from various areas and not simply one or two regions of the nation it was made within, the myriad of differing ideas and concepts and beliefs would further begin to clash as the remnants of the old world carried over a bit into the new one. People who wanted to make a microcosm of their home nation, who wanted to make a theocratic state, who wished to only live with those who came from the same place as them, and so forth simply made things more chaotic in those initial years than otherwise might’ve been possible with a more mono-culture population or similar-culture mixed population. This in turn would lead to the establishment of the colonial government as a confederation-type affair, seeking to keep the various ideas in some manner of harmony with each other as concessions were made to try to maintain order in regards to the cultural and political problems. This in turn would prove to be more of a band-aid on a growing problem, especially as the bickering of the confederation’s component parts slowed things down and bogged down being able to solve certain issues with further added problems, it was at least keeping what goods could be moved slowly trickling here and there to where they were needed (and could get them to) as well as preventing an early civil war for a time. At the same time, the Confederation government began to make promises of establishing a pan-settlement highway network to help improve things…a project that due to internal squabbling and issues never really manifested in the end either.

However, sixty nine years into the colonization of Arhas (by the standards of the Eos Systems), things would finally take the increasingly explosive politics of the Confederation to the breaking point. This occurred when a town governor named Thomas Feldman illegally intercepted a shipment of moisture-harvesting machines and food destined for the underground city of New Hamburg, seizing the driver on false charges and confiscating the cargo to disseminate to the locals. The town’s vital hydroponics had been damaged due to a minor cave-in incident when trying to make the room to expand them, and whilst relief had been promised the timeframe had been extended by delay after delay in trying to get the goods to the suffering town. The seized machines were also used to expand the town’s water production, and generally got Thomas Feldman a notable bit of popularity among his own people.

At the same time, the city the shipment had been intended for was in a notably worse state. While its hydroponics were working fine, it needed more moisture-harvesting machines to maintain and supply those hydroponics as well as the growing population within its borders. Upon learning that the shipment has been seized, and not wanting to go to the deteriorating government to ‘solve’ something that would either simply get brushed aside or debated until more ‘nothing’ happened, in the sixty ninth year after the initial settlement of Eos IV the underground city of New Hamburg would launch a surprise invasion of Thomas Feldman’s town under the guise of bringing them more relief and aid. What ensued was a slaughter that would finally break the existing confederation-type government of the colony as other members took sides on the matter or tried to exploit the issue for themselves and so forth.

After this point, conflict was frankly inevitable.

Member after member suddenly left the Confederation as things shattered, and any remaining resources being moved by that time were taken or seized by whoever was closest or could otherwise muster the force to take it from the others. Without what little connections were had, many places lost access to what little of certain resources they’d had before. Politics, resource scarcity, and the ineffectiveness of the colonial government would ultimately drive the colony into a state and time period of over a century of constant war and fighting. Many fought over what could be mined, gathered, or taken for use by locals in one area or another. Many fought to establish control or dominion over others, so as to improve their own conditions or enforce what they saw as ‘the best way’ to do things. People desperate to not get involved in the underground began to build up and live on the surface, and those underground even dug tunnels between each other underground (as well as built installations above ground) to fight each other and try to establish areas of control and dominance at the same time as new underground cities and towns and such were being forged into being. Companies that rose up would likewise work for the locals, or otherwise play sides and arm different groups to their own ends as long as it profited them or their area of primary residence. It was a time of vast bloodshed and constant war that became called the “Red Sands Era”, and for a good reason indeed.

…Yet hope would not be lost entirely either. Forming from the corpse of the old Confederation, and taking some inspiration from the initial ‘temporary colonial government’ that had existed briefly before that and back on the colony ship, the “Republic of Arhas” (or “Eosian Republic” as it also called itself) would form within the last real cluster of underground cities and towns that had stayed banded together. At its best a ‘successor’ to what had come before, it would in the early years of the Red Sands Era exist as mostly a side-thought that seemed to mind itself and seek trade where it was even possible at times. Meanwhile, the Republic of Arhas would begin to build up and accrue as well as channel its capabilities under its leadership to ramping itself up to be a power despite being less involved at first in the ongoing conflicts that ravaged the human colony.

Bit by bit it would build up in strength and capability, until eventually it launched its first conquest of a nearby grouping of bickering polities. It would put itself on the map of the other warring factions at this stage, but would simply be seen as no bigger and stronger than any of the other ‘larger factions’ that existed at the time. Smaller factions nearer to it would be most alarmed, especially as the Republic of Arhas moved to suck up more of its smaller neighbors and forge new cities and towns underground within its network. At the same time, however, despite the strict rule of the Republic it also worked to build things up. The once promised underground highway network began to form and grow outward, resources were able to be moved more easily to keep local populations intact, and a singular manner of government alongside relocations of parts of the populations of conquered areas would seek to dilute and ease the overall process of integration with the Republic. Fully-integrated areas, once satisfied with them on the government’s part, would then be used as platforms to further expand outward.

In time the Republic of Arhas would become the largest faction on the planet, though not without the process being gradual and done over time in its case. Slow and steady, for all intents and purposes, would be winning the race this time. Inherently the chaos of the era would also target the Republic’s own territories and areas of control, set it back at times, or even provide opportunities for the increasingly less and less rare peaceful integrations that occurred as it sought to grow. Of course the situational or occasional ‘enemy alliances’ that formed in its face were to be expected, seeking to put the growing and snowballing faction down, though these only lasted as long as the other sides could stand each other and not stab each other in the back or other issues to tear them apart. Some did try to integrate with each other to increase their odds of survival as well, though even these would be assimilated in one way or another. One place, one area, and one year at a time, all as the need to survive and fight and compete to get toward that final goal of planetary unity got closer and closer in the eyes of the Republic’s citizens and government.

Ultimately, 213 years after settling first on the planet, humanity’s colony on Eos IV/Arhas would be reunited once more under a singular planetary government and would be both somewhat renamed as well as formalized in a constitution in honor of that. While smaller and surface operations would be involved for the next seven years beyond that point, there would also be the necessary further integration of the last captured territories as well. Further, humanity would even reach back toward the stars as mining, economic, and colonial ambitions would be taken to the local solar system to a certain extent by current times. What had once been for a long time a bunch of disunited, struggling, warring, angry factions was reduced down and then reconstituted into something grander. A republic that upholds its citizens’ rights, and yet holds higher central authority to try to avoid past mistakes. A place where people and places are far more interconnected and prosperous than the initial colonists could have dreamed of, but also where the might of the military and the police have fused together over three centuries into something peculiar and at times rather brutal. A place where hope for the future, a more genuine peace among the citizenry exists, and where humanity once more stands together in the face of a cold universe…..but where even rebels fight against it all even now to achieve whatever goals they desire after all this time.

Yet in the last few months, the awakening of the Gateway Network has become a rude and unexpected surprise for the United Republic and its citizens. It has led to several stations being set up to study the activity that was now coming from the location of the system’s Gateway, though the Gateway itself did not seem to be opening up outside of this activity causing some odd ‘light shows’ and detectable disturbances people could notice. Whispers and rumors have coursed through the lifeblood of the local population and media, though, of what could lie just beyond if their Gateway actually managed to open. Allies? Enemies? Paradises, ready to claim? Enemies, ready to pounce upon them? Aliens? No one has known for sure, but with the Gateway of the United Republic’s home system finally opening again the nation must hope to be ready to face the truths of whatever comes through…..or whatever truths emerge from what or who by heading out there themselves for that matter.



Culture and Society:

-Hydroponics have been the bread and butter of subsistence and feeding the masses on Eos IV for over three hundred years by this point, and this has had some long-term effects. Whilst rural areas with underground or above-ground farms do exist and have existed, within cities and larger suburban areas hydroponically-grown food has taken off as an art form of its own. Growing or tweaking plants and livestock species to alter appearance, flavors, colors, consistencies, textures, and so forth has become the basically literal ‘high fashion’ of the cooking world within the United Republic. Anyone from a suburban restaurant serving more widespread or niche faire, to hipster concepts grown and served in smaller restaurants in the cities and some suburbs, all the way up to large-city five-star establishments with the strangest and most expensive creations and combinations imaginable and unimaginable, food has remained both a necessity but also bloomed into an artform of sorts here.

Grand shows are held akin to a fancy ‘fashion show’ a few times a year in the biggest cities, with the latest creations, cuisines, and even strange tricks pulled off using such foods being put on display and served to attendees and putting on displays of them to likewise woo audiences who might be watching streamed or televised from their homes far away. Everything from texture to taste and the like will be critiqued and commented on by professionals in the field, and this ‘higher food culture’ has even created celebrities who do not simply cook but ‘transform the very ingredients, and from these construct grand and enticing dishes into incredible works of edible art’.

To a certain extent this is just the concept of Old Earth existing food culture having been ‘elevated to a new form’ via the hydroponic and genetic tweaking/modifying of the ingredients themselves alongside doing things when making dishes with them. It has also become far more presentation focused alongside the work put into making them edible and the experience of eating these things ‘more unique’.

-Life aboveground is something that only 18% of the United Republic’s home world's population has chosen to do, compared to the 82 percent of the total population who live underground on the very same planet. Whilst not living underground and dealing with the more cramped spaces and lives led down there, even having vast areas of space one can travel across at that, the harsh weather of the planet is also a suicidal endeavor for those not hardened or prepared for it. Protective ST’s (see the “Technology Overview” section about these) are a must, and even areas with homes placed in above-ground rocky formations to get out of the wind will still build their homes half-underground for the sake of safety up there. Such homes are only half-underground, short enough on the surface to have a lot of the weather pass over the top of them safely but just underground enough to also keep them cooler. Such homes will usually have bedrooms located at the lowest portions, with the doors of it being more just hatches of some kind with stairs.

The harsh driving winds of a greater force than the Earth’s own likewise mean that high-speed sand that can easily blast and tear off unexposed skin in a heartbeat, and without the weighted nature of individual ST’s ((or being inside of a proper surface structure or heavy vehicle of some kind) someone could be blown away in surprise larger gusts of surface wind. Even then, ST’s are not designed to withstand the worst of the possible surface weather. Scorching alien heat and a bright local sun also require that one be in possession of moisture-farming equipment to take moisture, any at all, from the air. And if one does not have such a moisture-farming machine or water-acquiring setup, then simply getting connected up to an underground water pump network or being part of a close enough water delivery service’s route will be required unless one wants to dehydrate fast. More common surface-dweller ST’s are even designed to take sweat and filter it into drinkable water for the wearer at that.

Those who live aboveground are also seen as more ‘rural’, as the largest any settlement up there can get is a respectable mid-sized town without running the risk of environmental hazards blowing it away or destroying it. Many ‘upgrounders’, as the majority of underground residents have taken to calling them, have become or are just as rugged and seasoned and hardy as the conditions they live in are harsh. Even so, they have also been known to be warm and welcoming to guests in certain areas….or as it has been said before by one visitor: “Life’s hard up there, really hard in the more remote places, and while some people will be just as harsh right back to any visitors and people they see no matter what…but other upgrounders are friendly folk who’ll treat you as well as you treat them in return. Or as they say up there: ‘The winds blow favorably for the good host and the respectful guest alike.’.”

-Within the last 80 years, however, the installation of underground transport networks has led to a government presence in even the surface towns and villages that have popped up. It has also given them greater lifelines to the rest of the nation. Yet even before that, just about 87 years ago, at the end of the planet’s “Red Sands Era” (which lasted for about 142 years), many on the surface lived lives very much independent of those who lived underground. It was a Wild West where frontier law and local mindsets determined what was legal or not, and where death could come from a nearby home or the weather at any moment, through a concerted effort to rein them in ultimately led to by current times many resisting and many other cooperating in turn. Those who resisted didn’t last for all they tried to do to not be integrated, whilst those who did integrate more easily have generally benefited from it more so in the long-term from being connected to the rest of the homeworld’s population centers. Those seeking the ‘independent lifestyle’ mostly have taken up in the most remote and dangerous or inhospitable parts of an already harsh and otherwise inhospitable desert planet, which is saying something, usually loners, caravan-attacking bandits, or even being a small cluster of families. Likewise there are government-legalized caravans that carry goods, resources, and so forth as their jobs and lives lead them to nomadically move across the rocky areas and sands of the planet itself, moving goods on the surface or buying up scrap from underground areas to keep themselves going.

-The “Red Sands Era” was an era of invention both wrought from raw necessity and the driving force of constant warfare, and an era that one knowledgeable in history might more commonly call “a blend of the Sengoku Jidai period of Japan, and the time period of the Wild West in the former USA” as well. The fight for supremacy of the planet, as well as over resources and so forth within the planet’s wild frontier up top as well as most definitely underground, would drive this time period onward for just over 140 years. This as the various factions and ideologies and so forth shed quite a bit of blood and likewise the population grew across the planet through the building up new underground (mostly) and above ground (less so) habitations for humanity. All of this would come together to create the name this peculiar yet tragic time period.

To say that the unification of the planet under one government within the last 100 years was peaceful, however, would be an utter lie. Outside of what cases of negotiation were done, most other parties were wiped off the map and taken over by the Republic of Arhas/Eosian Republic (the successor to the original colonial government) that would finally achieve true planetary supremacy where its predecessor had failed to even stay together and intact. It was a process that shed even more blood, though the winners had been seeking to integrate and consolidate their growing and newly-acquired holdings evenly over time and along the way as they’d acquired them, with the initial victory and end of the Reds Sands Era in around Year 213 being simply the jumping-off point to enable this to finally take place on a planetary level.

-If one were to ask the vast majority of citizens, they would exclaim being used to the status quo of how things are and have found things to be ‘fair yet strict’. If one were to ask their ancestors who lived through to see the end of the Red Sands Era, they would likely speak of being glad that the constant struggle and bloodshed was finally and truly over with. Indeed, the rise of the planetary government would see a great economic boom as well as a cessation of constant conflicts above and under the ground. Places began to heal, new rural areas emerged, old rural areas grew to become towns, and existing towns would grow into cities as the existing cities themselves grew even larger and more vast. All of this and more was done to accommodate the population growth, especially as the growth of the local population has spiked locally in the last 80-something years and finally stabilized by current times. Things the government by current times has done to help manage this population have even included setting up space-bound economic and mining operations along with starting some initial colonial settlement within their solar system.

However, not everything is perfect in any society. Some exist even still on the disenfranchised fringes of this rebuilt society and nation, poor or downtrodden or the like. There are also those who have chafed under the grip of the current government and its ‘military police’ forces, those who have been passed down the grudges and anger and ideologies of former ‘free cities/towns’ veterans who wish to return to that old status quo of the Red Sands Era, and even those who simply wish to see the world burn. In the end the existence of such ‘rebel factions’ is something that, due to these factors, has continued to persist into current times as well. Such groups have mostly remained smaller or been whittled down over time, though they will still on occasion strike at local areas in more distant/fringe areas or government establishments in the big cities to try to ‘make their point’. Better armed than the top criminals, but usually kept in check in a general sense, they range from those seeking to ‘topple the fascist government’ (as they claim it is), to those ‘seeking to return to a better age of independent city-states’ they idealize the Red Sands Era as having (blindly even in some cases), to even simply those who wish to seize power and take what they want and wish to use the same propaganda and recruitment and so forth to manifest those ends.

The top three Rebel Factions of any real or viable mettle/power in modern times are the following:

***The “Peoples Confederated Militia” (aka the “PCM”) - A rebel faction seeking to destroy the current governmental structure, and in its place replace it with a far looser system of ‘united in purpose and goals yet wholly independent city-states’ they claim was, would be, and is far more ethical and good for humanity both on-and-off of the planet. They use the initial colonial government as an example of ‘how this would not work’, but try to portray the Red Sands Era in a far more positive if not engineered ‘light’ as they claim that the independence of the cities was fair and just and that all they needed to solve ‘the problems of that era, which were few in nature’ was to bring people to the negotiation and diplomatic table. They decry the unification of the planet under one government as ‘evil and tyrannical’ and as ‘suppressing the freedoms of human beings to choose for themselves as they see fit’ whilst generally disapproving of any sort of centralized national-level command structure.

Their command structure is generally manned with the “Council of Six” at the top, below which are four officers each assigned to each councilor. Each officer in turn manages local affairs in their area, organizes squads and other military units under their area’s command, organizes the distribution of equipment and resources, etc, as well as report back and share information with the Council and each other. It is generally run as the organization says it wishes to organize the ‘rightful new government’ they seek to bring about, though this has had its share of success and issues over time. Sometimes the officers assigned to the same or different councilors have competed against each other within their own ranks to earn further support or to expand personal influence, or otherwise run and manage their areas and subordinates differently than each other in various ways. At times these officers have been inherently disorganized when trying to work with each other, due to internal competition for glory and the allocation of more resources from the Council of Six, and at other times have managed to form a comprehensive front well enough to prove to be a frighteningly effective force at certain times.

This group is perhaps the most widely-spread-out by current times, many major bases having been lost and others having been weakened by retaliation against them by/from the government peacekeeping forces. They are in cities and some on the fringes alike, but they lack any area of highly-concentrated control…which is for them both a major weakness but has also been to some extent a strength in keeping their organization alive somehow. At the same time, the organization is ripe for taking down piecemeal, one area at a time….and were the right circumstances to arise and the Council of Six’s uniting influence to collapse, then perhaps the organization could be rooted out once and for all…

***The “King Cartel” - A rebel faction seeking to turn as much of the United Republic as they can into an area under their control, to hell with the areas they don’t want, all to the ends of exploiting the existence of ‘worm junkies’ and production of ‘illicit pharmaceuticals’ to drive a greater and greater profit for themselves. The only reason they are not considered ‘simply another gang or organized crime group’ is the fact they use the same grade of armaments and so forth as the other two major rebel factions….and treat their head in the form of “Don Carretera” (every head gets this title, which means ‘road’ in Old Earth Spanish) like a national leader and hero. These are the same family heads who have maintained a dynastic and hereditary style of absolute rule over this organization (in contrast to many of the Old Earth mafia families of old). The mafioso aesthetic and some terms have been used for many generations now as well, originally set in place by the founder, and once the family’s organization even controlled a small fringe underground town before being driven out.

Their organization is smaller than most, but when it comes to being well-armed and keeping a ‘small profile’ they are among the very best in doing so. Dealing in shadows, trying to crack open and create new markets, and gradually build up what they seek in areas rather than trying to rush in and ‘liberate’ them from the existing government as the PCM has seemingly been trying to do. When their trademark drugs hit the streets and are noticed, it is generally a sign they have their fingers in the pie of whatever local area they’ve tried to set up in. They have been described as ‘a fly stuck on a turd that can’t be chased away for too long’ but also ‘takes a long time to be noticed rearing their heads back up again’, as well as being harder to root out when found or discovered but also posing a less immediate and present danger than others. On the other hand, when they do get noticed they are a group who get distinctly adapted measures and actions taken to combat them. This mostly takes the form of purging their peddled substances from the streets, as well as engaging in greater espionage and both covertly taking out their hierarchy and otherwise rooting out any contacts they have to drive them out of an area. Then they usually avoid said area again for a time, only to slowly and subtly begin sticking down roots in another place bit by bit…like a festering parasite.

Were the organization to be hit where it hurts most, at the very top of their hierarchy, then perhaps enough chaos could be sowed internally among them to cause the remaining parts to disappear…

***The “Wildern Group” - The most odd-sounding title for a group, they are named for where the group was founded in the former above ground town of Wildern. The area was among the largest independent surface settlements to arise, even moving to exert influence through the use of nomadic caravans loyal to them and the trade of supplies. In time, they even established a sort of soldier-police as the practice became more and more common beginning in the “Red Sands Era”. They were also the head of the briefly-lived “Wildernian Federation”, trying to form a ‘nation’ of their own in haste to try to oppose the largely-snowballed faction that would win planetary control and take over the planet to form the United Republic. They were known for the ‘encouragement’ they tried to push on ‘members’ of the Federation to ‘generate a sense of new nationalism and unity’, which is to say they did some good for the surface but also used a lot of threats and force to get people under their ramshackle banner of a ‘nation’ that those from Wildern had a total hegemony of power over.

In the ensuing conflict to secure the surface, this group came to blows and expected to use their knowledge and strength on the surface, alongside an understanding of the weather patterns and so forth, to wage a guerilla war aimed at ‘shattering the dirt-eaters from underground’ and bringing back the old status quo of the Red Sands Era so they could ‘shine like a star in the sky’ over those living on the surface and also (mostly to serve their own ends) ‘free the surface from dirt-eater oppression’. On the other hand, their ambitions and hasty actions were all too late to be able to stop anything, mostly being due to their spiteful disregard for anyone and anything originating from underground and thus not paying attention as the ones who united all the underground settlements and had snowballed to quite a large degree of control and power. Their distaste for those living underground has been ever-inherent from the start, with the discriminatory term of ‘dirt-eaters’ being just one of the many terms coined by them or in less-hospitable areas of the surface to describe those living underground in turn.

By current times, the group mostly exists in holdouts in the worst areas to try to live on the surface…horrible areas where they live and host their three remaining ‘larger bases of operation’ where no one else dares to normally go. However, they have engaged in raiding nomadic traveling caravans, attacking small fringe underground settlements, and even setting up some underground operations in certain fringe areas to try to enact sabotage and sink in some kind of (even if reluctant and demeaning) influence down there to help channel supplies back to their main bases of operation. For the most part they can be driven back from underground areas and into the desert world sands, though on the fringes they are a constant pestilence whose root is essentially ‘stuck in a hard to reach place’ and refuses to curl up and die either. Were a strike made possible to destroy their main bases for good, it would certainly stop them in their tracks though…

-Ruins lie across the planet’s surface, though whether they have been buried or uncovered by the sands of the planet once more depends on the fickle whims of the planet’s weather. Many are vestiges of the initial colonization, long abandoned remnants from the Red Sands Era, or even far smaller locations where fatally fateful adventurers or families or settlers built up before dying off and leaving only empty husks in their wake. Abandoned military bases, former homes or small villages/towns, all sorts of ruins made by mankind can be found among the sands….

…but could there still, even after three centuries, be something else out there too that humanity has not yet discovered? Only time will tell.

-Among the wealthy elites that exist within United Republic society, there is a group known as the “Purified”. These people have focused on for many loong decades, as their movement has grown from the time of the Republic of Arhas/Eosian Republic until current times under the United Republic, using genetic engineering technologies to ‘refine’ and ‘harness’ the human genome among their own. No splicing or dicing, but instead taking what is ‘human’ at its core and ‘amplifying it and removing imperfections’ from it. Augmented healing, greater strength, the gradual erasure of genetic ‘faults’ and genetic diseases from among them, and so forth. They seek to achieve the ‘deific beauty of antiquity’, using this as a baseline to refine their forms and looks and so forth to degrees that by modern times have become definitely noticeable.

The movement even has a growing pool of followers among the middle class, mostly as the movement has oddly sought in more recent decades to bring more into the fold and spread their ideas. It is more a cool club or form of ideology (rather) that believes humanity choosing to embrace its ideas will benefit all, but also does not seek to push itself on others despite its odd nature due to legal codes within the United Republic. In the end, really, they just remain simply one of many social or cultural groups that has formed within the United Republic in the end. (But the idea felt cool so why not toss this in, eh?)

-(space here in case I think of anything else)



Governance and Politics:

The United Republic has adopted a high-authority central government that sets the rules at lower levels, being the top authority and possessing most of the power by far and inherently. It controls the national and planetary policies of the nation proper, as well as controls the military at the top in a similar manner. A bureaucracy exists as part of the central government, with various Departments being created and managed and overseen to ensure that overall work gets done, things keep running, and order is maintained. The central government is generally seen reasonably as a certain amount of ‘authoritarian’ by its nature, though isn't wholly an authoritarian-type system either. Hence the classification of the nation’s government being as it is.

Local authorities, meanwhile, are democratically-elected individuals alongside their respective City/Town/Village Council in kind. Above these are District Governors, who are also democratically elected, and above these Regional Governors, who are selected to take their positions by the Central Government and have to pass proper meritocratically-aimed examinations and background checks and experience requirements at lower levels of government to take up office. In this sense the democratic process has remained, and people do choose leaders and have formerly chosen leaders rise up the ranks after a certain point at the behest of the central government to be assimilated into it.

The lower-level democratic processes are holderovers from Old Earth, which after the failure of the initial colonial confederation-type government set in place would re-emerge in part once more during the Red Sands Era to an at least distinct and lasting extent politically. Once the nation was united under one banner, a high-authority central government was balanced out with properly formalized lower-level democratic processes. These democratic processes were also combined with allotting certain limited powers and flexibility to such elected leaders, helping and allowing them to properly manage locals and keep the order and peace properly as well as act as a conduit to enforce national-level policies but also have local-level nuances to the laws of the land.

The judicial system has its top authorities as part of the central government, who take the form of the “Seven Judges” who are a council of the seven highest-level judges of the land. Meanwhile lower level judges below this have to have the proper experience, education, and clean background check requirements as among the necessities for them to take up higher and higher offices after entering the system. Elections are also used to elect lower level judges from among applicable candidates in turn. District and Circuit Courts likewise exist, as well as concepts like a bench trial and rules such as ‘having a right to trial with a jury’.

In fact, the government of the United Republic even has within it a proper constitution of sorts, stating both the powers of the central government and those of lower officials as well as laying out a certain number of ‘human rights’ (albeit there are certain legal exceptions to even this due to the authority of the central government as dictated in this document as well). In this vein it can be seen as an echo of the old world, but in this case was something proposed by the central government, which can be amended and updated and so forth through input by the general public, and yet entrenches and enshrines the current system of things in both writing and law.

Technology Overview:

-The nature of construction and life within the United Republic has mostly led its population to overall become rather skilled at the art of macro-engineering. Large structures, grand architecture, building underground tunnels and cities and towns and so forth, all of it has stemmed back to this same core engineering type as it has been a longtime backbone of the United Republic. This isn’t to say that smaller technology doesn’t exist, but rather than looking at the local society and culture as a whole this nation has seen far more notable developments in the realm of macro-engineering than in many others. The art of making durable, cost effective, longstanding, workable, and better-lasting structures is something they have refined to a distinct point indeed.

Likewise concrete(s), improved tools for calculating and enacting macro-engineering projects, and so forth have emerged within this realm of things.

-The United Republic has also developed humanoid-type pilotable working frames, with robust but neural-connected control systems (and even pilot-shielding cockpit attachments in some cases), which are used en-masse for many forms of construction and building and on other notable worksites in some capacity or another. It is a common and well-understood technology, but one that is normally not used in a warfare-type-form either by the local military police forces due to its vulnerabilities and exposed parts. There is a reason they are mostly used for labor, after all. At the same time, they have found use among rebel factions, armor and weapons being welded on and creating ‘rebel technicals’ as they’ve come to be called. These usually do well in hand-to-hand, and in moving things or breaking into places, but struggle to remain effective against ranged combat and find themselves outmatched against the powered-exoskeleton-type augmentations of government-made Grade 4 full body armor. However, the use of these working machines as ad-hoc combat machines due to their easy-to-use nature and cost-effectiveness in augmenting new troops by having recruits pilot them (among other similar things) has led them to see continued usage even into modern times.





-In terms of transport, the technology for lighter hovercraft has been developed well and is in prolific use underground by civilians for their capabilities to move up and down vertical heights quickly, as well as having use of still moving reasonably fast over the flat and paved vast underground highway network the government has long since created by current times. However, vehicles carrying the heaviest loads will usually be either ‘heavy hovercraft’ or mostly ground-based vehicles using tires as a mandatory measure to ensure loads can be safely transported.

Meanwhile, above-ground transport craft are mostly track-based by virtue of being well-understood, adapted to the hotter and more dangerous surface terrain, cost-effective to make, and being better for driving over softer terrain like sand (it is a desert planet of course) to boot. Hovercraft used above-ground must be made in the ‘heavy hovercraft’ vehicle category, otherwise they will blow away easily in the harsh winds and storms of the surface. Even wheels find themselves worse-off in the sands of the planet’s surface than tracks, performing worse than them in this setting by a distinct degree and causing vehicles to be trapped in accidents whose ‘wrecks’ are either barely visible or were long buried in the shifting sands themselves.

This general principle of vehicle development above and under the ground has led to more modern work aimed at developing a more versatile and cost-effective ‘heavy hovercraft’ base design, which would be a point to branch off from to make better designs for civilian, military, work-related, and other such vehicles that would be highly effective to use no matter the setting. This could in turn allow the nation to switch its vehicle production all over to a singular line, heavier hovercraft, and hopefully cut costs and improve developments in the long-term. Work is, of course, still ongoing in this area as more notably specialized and unique ‘heavy hovercraft’ designs continue to take on what roles and work they can in the meantime.

-When traversing the surface of Eos IVV, the local technology has developed what is called the “Surface-Traversal System” or more commonly as the “ST-Suit” or even just “ST/ST’s” in layman’s terms. It is an advanced but simplistic protective suit with a level of radiation and heat protection, which likewise grants full-body protection and resistance from the elements such as driving winds and sandstorms for good reason. Is it perfect? No, walk into the worst aboveground weather in one of these and one will find themselves likely dying anyways. But for those who live aboveground, these suits are their lifeline for heading out beyond the shelter of a surface town’s ‘sand barrier’ protections or whatever rocky place or semi-underground home they set up shop in.

-(space here in case I think of anything else)

Military Overview:

It is of distinct note that the military of the United Republic is not a distinct entity of its own, but rather that has become fully fused with its police force. Years of underground and aboveground battlefields, smaller-scale issues between cities during its chaotic years, and internal conflicts have led the locals to fuse these roles together sooner than later throughout the last 300 years history, alongside the need to conserve and maximize the efficiency of resource usage over the course of that time to boot. This has created a hybrid modern ‘military police’ whose ranks both keep order on the streets and likewise can be easily swelled in times of conflict by tapping into the large ‘reserve’ pool of these forces to fill the role of ‘soldiers’ both standard and elite in the general sense. Even during times of war, there is even a proper ‘gameplan’ to ensure that there will be enough police on the streets (‘home duty’ in the local lingo) versus those sent out to fight on the battlefield (‘away duty’ in the local lingo).

However the Ordos Custodes, what the force is called formally, does suffer to an extent from a lack of specialization as well though. While it can fill two dual roles by its nature, and has sought to accommodate those roles accordingly over many decades of experience, by virtue of being a ‘middle ground’ it lacks the raw numbers of a formal and separate military force. Against such a force being deployed at wartime levels, the Ordos Custodes will inevitably be smaller than the militaries of larger or equivalent nations when it comes to how many are being deployed into the field. Likewise, the fusion of military and police has led to these forces being very much ‘over the top’ in terms of what they can do in the field…basically being overkill by the standards of places with their own police forces. This in turn has also made them seem and feel notably more ‘brutal’ in their application as police forces, though whilst this has been a ‘boon’ to keeping order it has also painted them in a darker light than the average police force for sure as well.





***Military Note: The existence of other more distinct roles such as ‘snipers’ and ‘breaching personnel’, with their respective equipment loadouts, do exist within the Magistratus and Fulgur/Fulger of the United Republic as well. Even ‘demolition’ experts are among their ranks for that matter. Elite military police and standard military police versions of these roles exist respectively, mostly using the lower-tier versions for police situations, though in times of war this flexibility with both standard and elite forces being able to deploy such troops has been seen as beneficial at times.

---

Additional Info:

-Military naming uses latin terms generally, as do governmental organizations.

-National animal is the Cockentrice (Because they made them real I don’t care I am making this a thing.)

-(To Be Added)

Planet Name and Description: <sub>RADX-002 - The home of the Exalted is a barren land. There was no water, no fauna or anything of the sorts on it before terraforming processes were initiated by the Exalted. Currently the planet has a few cities built up and is undergoing heavy construction. There are multiple space-pads all around the planet which allow the RADinace to bring in supplies, materials etc.

On the southern part of the planet, there is a massive encampment that’s kept under constant guard. The encampment is a PUNT remnant sanctuary where all those who surrendered themselves to the Chosen have been housed.</sub>

History: <sub>The Exalted was born out of the Chosen civil war. The True Faith (TTF) led by former High Hierarch Pontius declared war against Ashevelen and her order denouncing her as a false god. A civil war followed, on one side, the Chosen who saw the deception as necessary at the time or chose to forgive 3 centuries of lies based on what Ashevelen achieved and on the other side, The True Faith.

Those who believed in Ashevelen’s true divinity while at the same time denouncing the current Ashevelen as a false-divine, a copy of the original. While certain parts of the previous Church decided to be neutral, it all ended when TTF bombed the hospital from the Meeting place and tried to sabotage the Meeting Place, hoping to remove the main place where the “heathens” gathered. These two acts of violence made the bystanders, mainly Catherine’s arm of the Church, to join the newly created RADiance alliance, led during the war by High Hierarch William.

Ashevelen, helped by her sister, created a cure for the Rejected shortly after the start of the war. Initially the Exalted wanted nothing to do with the RADiance and their civil war, content with starting to build up their world, but as TTF promised that all Rejected will be exterminated for taking the cure of the heathens, it didn’t take long for the Exalted to mobilise.

From the ashes of the Chosen, two nations rose up. The Exalted declared themselves independent, allies at best with the RADiance who not so long ago treated them as lessers. As time passed and their world was slowly being terraformed and cities being built, a leader arose. Mikaela was one of the worst Zealot-types that lived on RADX-001 from a Chosen perspective, aggressive, uncontrollable and violent yet for her own kind, she was a saint. It was no surprise that after independence was won, she was chosen by her people as their leader.

Eventually, due to pressures from the other galactic powers, the Exalted proposed an alliance to the RADiance and their president. A defensive alliance which allowed both groups to go politically whatever way they wanted as long as if war comes, they’ll act as one.</sub>
Culture and Society: _{The culture of the Exalted is minimal at best. Before the cure, most huddled together into small tribes for protection against their own…more deranged kin. Currently, they are working hard to build up a world for themselves a fact which unifies them.}



Governance and Politics: _{Once every 50 years, the Exalted will come together and cast their votes for a new leader which will guide them on a new path. The leaders will have absolute power over the state which is why the election process starts 5 years before the actual election, as a way for citizens to observe their electees over a period of time.}

Technology Overview: _{The same as the RADinace/Chosen.}
Military Overview: _{Currently they have no army of their own. They are working closely together with the RADiance for these issues to be fixed.}

GOVERNMENT FORM: Human-alien tribal confederation

POPULATION & DEMOGRAPHICS:
There are an estimated 500 million souls in the Easifa system, though of course the exact number would be almost impossible to know. The major species and groups within the Easifan Promise are listed below:

• Yaeph'La: ~38.5%, or approx. 192.5 million; the nomadic remnants of an advanced alien species who had long ago settled in the Easifa system in a fleet of ships over many generations; despite some early tension, they recognized the human arrivals as fellow refugees, and so hesitantly shared their genetic engineering and habitat construction technology with humanity. They are broadly split between the grey-skinned "Yaeph'Zan", who possess a higher amount of ancestral yulzan DNA, and the shorter "Yaeph'Zir", who possess a higher amount of ancestral aldzir DNA. The yaeph’la are the majority inhabitants of the Upper and Lower Shabaka, the massive habitat networks on Easifa’Thani.
• Arjuani: ~20.5%, or approx. 102.5 million; modified humans with grey or purplish skin, adapted for life in high-gravity and high temperature environments - trace amounts of silicon, iron and iodine, cellular redundancy against the effects of radiation and chemical poisoning, and segmented lungs that function as living oxygen tanks; they are split across many tribal and ethnic lines after 250 years of survival across the vast network of habitats throughout the Upper and Lower Shabaka, but are broadly united in a shared religion and history (the Arjuani Cloud).
• Gremlins: ~17%, or approx. 85 million; genetically engineered organisms created by the yaeph'la settlers; appearing as the six-limbed lovechild of an eel, a beetle, and a pug, they are particularly notable for the high adaptability, resilience, and the intense electrical conductivity of their nervous systems, making them easily augmented with cybernetics.
• Foldforms: ~12.5%, or approx. 62.5 million; a species of parasitic extremophile colonial organisms of unknown origin who arrived on Easifa'Thani's moons in the distant past, they primarily feed on radiation and electromagnetic fields; after their disastrous first contact with the yaeph'la, communications were eventually established and mutual benefits were found through limited infection of sapient host organisms. While various foldforms exist as organic radiation, electrical wiring, or heat-shielding for structures, ships and exosuits, a group calling themselves "the Veiled" have taken to permanent symbiosis with foldforms, and have established permanent settlements on Easifa'Thani's radiation poisoned moons and other previously uninhabitable regions of the system, as well as in the asteroid belt.
• Cloudkin Pilgrims: ~4%, or approx. 20 million; explorers and traders of one of the two indigenous alien species on Easifa'Thani and who safely dwell within the colonies through the use of highly pressurized suits; they are a gaseous, vaguely jellyfish-like species who dwell in the upper layers of Easifa'Thani in numerous 'bubble towns', and they mainly assist with human and yaeph'la habitat construction. With the help of their allies they successfully launched a set of massive spiralling ships that emerged from the deepest layers of Easifa'Thani several decades ago and now orbit their home star.
• Fishermen: ~3.2%, or approx. 16 million; baseline humans who primarily live on ships or stations, rather than the habitats. The prolonged effects of low-gravity life on quarantined ships have left them stunted and with weaker bones and weakened immune systems, but otherwise they are human - their openness to working with others has enabled them to remain genetically stable. They are primarily organized into familial clans and most make their living harvesting ice water. Others are associated with the Church of the Oasis, a relatively luxurious and well-defended space station that is reportedly dangerously hedonistic behind closed doors.
• Gaians: ~2.5%, or approx. 12.5 million; water, soil, and plant-worshiping heavily modified human-reptile hybrids who mainly dwell in low gravity environments, further edited with plant cells to be energized by UV radiation; renowned as gardeners, a number of them live as warrior monks in patrol around the location of the gate and the promised return to Earth; descended primarily from what was once the Children of Gaia.
• Asmovund: ~2.3%, or approx. 11.5 million; heavily deformed and poisoned human puritans who heavily rely on cybernetics and cloning; their tolerance for AI and obsession with the Yahsud Alnaar has left them in a semi-ostracized state, while tensions run high between them and the gaians following a number of skirmishes and religious disputes after initially working together; descended primarily from what was once the Asimov Foundation.

PLANET NAME & DESCRIPTION: Easifa'Thani is the closest planet of the Easifa system to its home star. A silicon and iodine rich hot gas giant with a thin layer of carbon dioxide surrounding it functioning as its outer atmosphere, it was far from being the first choice for settlement by the original yaeph'la colonists. However, upon the discovery of Easifa'Mal's ancient destruction and the chaos caused by the Yahsud Alnaar, the mining outposts constructed there were repurposed for city-scale habitations.





Of particular interest is that Easifa'Thani possesses a unique biosphere all of its own. While studying it in detail has proven almost impossible due to the monumental gravitational and atmospheric pressures and the extreme temperatures, there appears to be a wide variety of complex life that occasionally emerges into viewing range. Of particular note are the 'cloudkin', gaseous colonial organisms that possess some form of sapience and intelligence - sufficient to build their own complex 'bubble towns' out of harvested silicon gas, and to reverse engineer lost human technology and repurpose it into high-pressure environmental suits that have allowed some of them to dwell among the humans of the Lower Shabaka. Meanwhile, a mysterious, sluggish species of vaguely flatfish or trilobite-like organisms exist in the deepest regions; even the cloudkin have had little contact with them, but they seem to be content in their slow and ancient strolling.

HISTORY
THE STAR WITHOUT A HOME: The Miracle Agreement was a pooling of resources, a humanitarian alliance of religious and charitable groups, NGOs, communes and cults who were quick to see the writing on the wall. Their individual efforts to help limit the disastrous effects of climate change and nuclear warfare had been of limited success, and so in secret their leadership arranged for the creation of a series of colony ships. With heavy hearts those 300,000 colonists fled through the gate aboard the Ten Miracles and supported by a fleet of technical and support vessels, hoping that perhaps they might yet discover something that could be sent back through the gate to help the people of Earth.

Sadly, the arrangement of the Miracles had been a slow and rocky process. The gates had already been open for some time when they launched, and so whereas most expeditions had already begun to settle when the gates closed, for the Miracle Fleet it was a shocking and desperate close call. A terrible silence filled the darkness as they pressed onwards.

As the fleet made their way to Easifa'Mal, the predicted garden world, the fleet faced an unprecedented disaster. The planet was surrounded by advanced machines of unknown design. The fleet attempted to transmit signals and communicate with the machines, but the only response was violence. Evasive manoeuvres were attempted and an exchange of fire, but sadly the Second Miracle was torn to pieces and the fleet scattered, desperately fleeing in every direction.

The remaining nine miracles and the core of the fleet, desperate for some kind of shelter, headed deeper into the system – the massive hot gas giant, Easifa'Thani, could perhaps serve as a shield. Sadly, the length of the journey forced a desperate delaying action, and the Third Miracle was evacuated with only limited success as the captain ordered they hold the line.

As the remaining Miracles got closer, they received transmissions of an unknown source – another fleet of ships, alien in design! Supported by structures that formed a vast network of industrial sites, refineries, habitats, bridges and ports that surrounded the gas giant. Communication was a tense and desperate affair for several months - the alien fleet was larger and evidently more advanced than their own in many ways, and some kind of virus had severely damaged and corrupted the AI that the Miracle Fleet made use of and rendered much of their data and software erratic. In desperation many had turned to unorthodox or analogue memory aids, using anything they could to keep track of crucial data.

"We promise. We will not hurt you."

YAEPH'LA & THE PROMISE: In time the creatures revealed themselves to be Yaeph'La, an alien species who had fled their own home world's destruction in a fleet of generation ships. They explained the situation - that they had settled on Easifa'Mal and had some success terraforming it, but in their experimentation and eagerness they had awoken some kind of ancient orbit-wide, self-replicating automated weapons system. This vicious enemy - named the Yahsud Alnaar, the reaving fire - had destroyed their old colony and forced them to flee to their industrial and mining facilities on Easifa'Thani, expanding them with the help of the gas giant's indigenous silicon-based organisms into functioning long-term habitats. Some yaeph’la were assumed to still survive on the surface, though they had done so by completely cutting off all radio communications and living a simple, difficult existence as hunter gatherers and nomads.

If the humans would work with these aliens - share their technology and their DNA - they could live with the Yaeph'La. They would work together to make this most inhospitable world their new home. In desperation, they agreed, and an uneasy peace was formed - in time and with understanding, generation after generation, coldness gave way to something resembling genuine kinship.

OTHER GROUPS OF THE PROMISE: As the decades rolled by, a number of religious and cultural differences among the colonists began to grate - most notably among the Children of Gaia, representatives from a 'lifestyle collective' back on Earth fascinated with genetic engineering as a way to survive the apocalypse. While some chose to remain among the other settlers on Easifa'Thani, the majority assembled their resources and returned to the gate, establishing a series of elaborate sealed habitats in its vicinity and awaiting its return. They were begrudgingly assisted in this endeavor by members of the Asimov Foundation, who had been studying the Yahsud Alnaar in the hope of reconfiguring and controlling the swarm and had learnt some of its weaknesses.

The scattered peoples of the Promise have established a number of stations hollowed out from the inside of resource and ice-rich planetoids. The Children of Gaia and the Asimov Foundation are some of the most prolific, while another, the glistening neon Oasis and its Church serves as a vital trade hub and link to the Spacer-Fisher Clans and the alien, symbiotic Veiled Host dwelling in the asteroid belt.

As the years have gone by, the immediate existential dread of the Yahsud Alnaar has been replaced with an uneasy wariness, and an understanding among most for the need to cooperate. Communications became easier and easier with the cloudkin. Although there have been moments of violence or disagreement, the countless tribes that have gradually formed and joined the Easifan Promise have worked together to create a new history and the possibilities of new futures. It is not entirely accurate or optimistic -- and their balancing of science to superstition may prove worrying to outsiders -- but it has kept them alive.

Alive, and not alone.

CULTURE & SOCIETY: The people of the Easifa system are remarked to be strong-willed and community driven, united by memories of disaster and the continuous effort to survive by any means. Their songs are at once themed around death, while maintaining hope. Their art -- murals and paintings, scrawled upon the walls of their ships and engines -- are abstract and symbolic, but often use dark and melancholic scenes highlighted by bright moments in high contrast. Their stories often deal with the nature of time and the overcoming of grief. All have elements of mathematics or technical skills baked into them on some level - a form of memory aid in the face of centuries worth of gradually lost knowledge.

Cooking meanwhile is viewed as a delicate but crucial past-time, the limited carbon-based biodiversity of the habitats forcing them to carefully synthesize new flavours with great difficulty. Legends speak of a time when 'spices' were abundant at the birthplaces of humanity and yaeph'la, but most write this off as impossible. Nevertheless, they serve as a strong motive for some more daring adventurers to attempt expeditions to Easifa'Mal or beyond its orbit to the lost ships of humanity, in order to acquire new species or recover some element of lost yaeph'la technology.

By contrast, alcohol or relaxant drug use are (besides being very rare and difficult to grow) forbidden under all but specific medical circumstances - there are no safe environments in which a person can 'slack off', as in the event of an emergency a person could be called upon and would need to be highly alert. Coffee is the notable exception to this, being highly prized by all human cultures in the Easifa system and ranging in scale from luxury to commonplace swill used as an intense caffeine fix.



GOVERNANCE & POLITICS:: Initially the colony ships were led in a clear chain of command, with decisions made by those with relevant information and skillsets as problems emerged. Individuals could voice criticisms anonymously, but these were merely used as information to consider, not a form of decision making themselves.

After the scattering of the fleet and the settlement on Easifa'Thani, however, the needs of survival have drastically shifted the structure of the various colonies. Long stretches of time residing on isolated ships or stations has led to sets of self-organizing tribal lineages speaking a range of dialects and creole languages. The Easifan tribes have no centralized authority - rather, the promise in its fullest sense is a series of treaties, a set of agreed upon rules and deals that are frequently reviewed at large gatherings on Easifa'Thani known as Headmeets. At its core, it is a point of mutual cooperation, aid, and defense against the dangers of the Yahsud Alnaar and the vacuum of space.

TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW: Three hundred years of disaster and struggle have not been kind to the descendants of the original colonists, and the various Easifan tribes are fortunate to have survived at all - even if much of their infrastructure is needing constant repair and patchwork effort, with limited new industry to fill the gap. Nevertheless, they make the most of what they can, and their willingness to work with aliens and to study their enemies has given them some new knowledge to work from:

• The original technology they brought with them on the Ten Miracles has been in a steady state of disrepair. One of the most important pieces were a set of prototype fabrication models they acquired from the Mensura group, but most have broken down by this point and recovering functioning pieces of the ones aboard the wreckage of the Second and Third Miracles have been a source of constant danger and difficulty. Notably, the nature of life in the Easifa system encourages a quickness to grasp new scientific concepts and creative use of what resources are available. Easifan ships often look like they’re bolted together out of scrap, chunks of asteroids, and a prayer but they’re surprisingly durable and quick and condense a lot into a small space.
• Hardlight, an unusual technology possessed by the Yaeph'La they reverse-engineered from the Yahsud Alnaar. Photons are condensed into a lattice temporarily, creating highly durable constructs that require a constant source of power, or elaborate but short-lived remote-controlled holograms that can fool visual or temperature sensors. It's also proven valuable as a way to pattern or prepare the ground work for more permanent construction, by projecting hardlight blueprints that you then build 'on top of'.
• Genetic engineering and hydroponics are fields that the yaeph'la and gaians are both specialists in, though they hesitate to make it widely available. Rather, yaeph'la and gaian representatives can be found on many ships or stations.
• Crucially, the Yaeph'la and Arjuani - and thus most of the Easifan tribes, though they vary in how much they actually respect it on an individual basis - are violently opposed to advanced AI. While they do use very limited AI and computers to assist with the necessary calculations and projections of life in space, the viral signal that the Yahsud Alnaar emits both significantly limits the consistency and advancement of their computer systems and has created a superstitious opposition to AI out of principle.

MILITARY OVERVIEW: The various Easifan tribes are varied in their militarism, with the Asmovund being the most warlike and consistently well equipped for conflict - sometimes even raiding other tribes for resources or technology. That said, the yaeph'la possess both the most consistently advanced technology and have the largest population by a significant margin, allowing them to muster up the largest and most impressive forces if needed.

Because of centuries spent in space and fragile indoor environments the Easifan tribes have limited skill in ground combat and few veterans of occasional raids to Easifa'Mal to pass on what little they will have learnt, and their infantry are primarily trained to fight with low-lethality or bladed weapons to limit the risk of damage or hull breach. However, they are adept pilots, and while the civilian nature of many of their ships limits the capacity or willingness to fight (as opposed to simply fleeing), they possess a number of powerful ranged weapons.

Planet Name and Description: 00110001 is a barren planet with no notable mineral resources. Covered on one side by a burning wasteland which is constantly under temperatures of +50C and on the other side, a frozen tundra with temperatures between -100 and -500 at its coldest point. Split in the middle by the ruins of an ancient alien city surrounded by a huge dome. The city is a massive ruin full of robotic defences that attack anything biological in nature. Unfortunately, the planet is covered by thick black clouds that don't let light from the nearby sun to illuminate it. The weirdest part of the planet is the occasional pocket of "altered reality" as called by the One. Places that appear randomly at times around the city, if one is trapped within a pocket, they can see people long dead trying to kill them, stairwells that go into infinity, one might find themselves trapped into a room without doors or windows and many different other phenomenon that cannot be explained by the One. These pockets usually dissappear after a few hours but most who're trapped within die horrifying deaths.

History: As soon as the colony ship went through the Gateway, it encountered a powerful EMP field generated by numerous unidentifiable spheres. The ship crash landed on the nearest planet. A good number of colonists died even before they stepped out of the ship. Soon the colonists realised that they wouldn't be able to survive on the planet due to the very high/very low temperatures of the planet's climate. Luckily the ship landed close to what seemed to be the ruins of a city that stretched from one side to the other of the plane, splitting the planet into two halves and thus' they decided to settle the ancient city.

Not much remained of it but buildings with no recognisable tech. Food and resources were scarce and everyday people would starve or die of a number of strange illnesses. Soon, all would die. In-fighting killed the rest. It didn't help that the aliens left automated defences on the planet that were still functioning, nor the lack of light.

Eventually only one person remained. Using the bodies of his fellow colonists and refined urine/snow, he had enough to live on his own. Understanding that he will most likely go crazy and that he might be the only human alive, he devoted himself to one purpose. Make sense of the alien technology in the hopes of finding a way off the planet.

10 years after Arrival, he managed to find a massive underground that still had power and he knew that he finally found what he was looking for.
Inside he found thousands of ultra-advanced cloning vats and the spheres that brought down their ship in the first place. After months of trial and error, he succeeded in cloning himself. No longer alone, he made more and more of himself.

After almost 300 years, parts of the ancient alien city are now repopulated with only one person - 4 billion times.

Culture and Society: The society of The One is easy to understand. Every clone is an individual but they are all the same with the same likes and dislikes where one is working for the betterment of everyone as they are everyone.

In our own words, we record this in the event of a cataclysmic failure of the Dome. Whoever you may be that hears this, hear our story. Understand who we were, are and potentially, will be.
We came on this planet almost 300 years ago from a far away planet called Earth, there were more of us all aboard one ship that was meant to be humanity's last bastion. During the first few years, everyone died. Diseases, in-fighting, the elements and the rest from starvation, alien robots, we had no shortages of dangers, so, eventually everyone died. All but One.

Me, them, us. I've managed to revive part of the alien city that you found this recording in and with the technology found here, I became we. One mind, 4 billion times. You'd wonder how we were able to survive all these years? Simple. One serves everyone. One is not one but more. One dies, so that the others live. One doesn't feel pain, how would he? When his mind is not his mind but our mind.
The Glowy-Ones and ourselves are our food, the ice of the Frozen part of the world is our water. We don't need more than we provide to ourselves. What one experiences, all experience.
We have explored 40% of the city and there are still places where we haven't managed to reach due to the robots. Everyday, we die to find the answer to the one question we had since the beginning. What happened here? Why did it happen? Will it happen again? Can we survive if it happens again?

Governance and Politics: The One don't have a form of government per se, as they are One and the same, each knows what's good for the other without the need for debate.

Technology Overview:

• 1. Ultra Advanced Cloning Vats allow a full grown human to be made in 48 hours.
• 2. The Dome - a huge structure meant to resist the worst environments.
• 3. Human-Batteries - All the major tech of The One will be sustained by human batteries which use their bodies to power them up. Depending on the power needed, the number of human batteries needed can be up to 1 million (for the cloning vats)

Military Overview: The military of The One operates within the limited territory they control, primarily focused on the defence and expansion of their domain within the city. With only 40% of the city under their control, their military efforts are concentrated on clearing and securing these areas from the remaining automated defenses left by the Immortalis civilization.

1. Clearing Operations:
The One undertakes regular clearing operations to neutralise the automated defences within the city. These defences, including robots, drones, and turrets, are formidable adversaries, but they are confined to specific areas and do not venture beyond their designated zones. The military's main objective is to systematically eliminate these defences, allowing for the gradual expansion of The One's territory.

These clearing operations require careful planning, coordination, and combat skills. The clones, equipped with weapons crafted from their own bones, such as swords, spears, bows, and javelins, engage in close-quarters combat with the automated defenses. Their shared knowledge and skills acquired through cloning enable them to adapt and counter the defensive mechanisms efficiently even if a few hundred have to die first.

2. Specialised Operations:
The One may occasionally undertake specialised operations within the city. These operations could include reconnaissance missions to gather intelligence on the remaining automated defences or retrieval missions to recover valuable artefacts or technologies from areas previously inaccessible.

3. Security and Defense Operations:
Maintaining the security and defence of The One's controlled areas is an integral part of their military operations. The One establishes a network of defensive structures, fortifications, and surveillance systems to protect against external threats.The One's military force, diligently monitor the perimeters and swiftly respond to any breaches, and neutralise potential dangers to safeguard the population.

Infrastructure & more:
1.Food: Within a specific area of the city, there exists a unique species of luminescent mushrooms, named glowy one. These mushrooms are cultivated and cloned to meet the nutritional requirements of The One. They serve as a vital protein source, supplemented by the combination of their own cloned tissues.

1.1. Water: Due to the frozen nature of one side of their world, The One relies on this abundant resource. While the initial challenges of making the water less harmful to the human body resulted in the loss of many lives, the remaining population benefits from this readily available water source, despite the extreme temperatures.

2. Electricity: The One harnesses their own collective energy by interconnecting thousands of individuals to power up the cloning vats, for everything else the One relies on fire as their primary source of illumination and power. They developed techniques for fire management, including the creation of long-lasting and efficient fire sources using an oily substance found on the automated defences they destroy. The substance burns for very long periods of time but not at a high heat.

3. Materials and Tools: The One's approach to clothing and tools is resourceful and self-sustaining. They employ a unique method of utilising their own biological resources. Leather is sourced from their own cloned bodies, fulfilling their modest clothing requirements. As for tools, bones are repurposed and serve various functions. While bones may break, the vast abundance of available bones ensures an almost unlimited supply. These resourceful practices extend to other aspects of their infrastructure and requirements, facilitating their self-sufficiency. Organic materials such as hardened skin, fibrous plants, and other naturally occurring substances are woven, treated, and combined to create items like clothing, furniture etc.

Common terms :

Immortalis - They were a highly advanced civilization that mysteriously disappeared. The Circle of One, the name of the city in which the One live, is a ruin. Besides the Vaults where the One discovered the cloning vats and the black pyramids, nothing else is undamaged. In some parts of the city there will be automatic defences (drones, machine guns etc) which protect it. That's the reason the One never explored all of their city.

The Circle of One - The name of the city in which the One live, is a ruin. Besides the Vaults where the One discovered the cloning vats and the black pyramids, nothing else is undamaged. In some parts of the city there will be automatic defences (drones, machine guns etc) which protect their area. That's the main reason the One never explored all of their city. The city is surrounded by a huge dome that acts as a defence against the terrible living conditions on the planet.


Additional Info: Theme song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzvyQ8JxwMk

Planet Name and Description: The Dinnin name their planet Al-Sahra al-Kubra or 'The Great Desert,' a deeply unsubtle name for a planet that has so little water. Al-Sahra is dominated by wide, sweeping ergs, interspersed by towering mountain ranges and the occasional life-giving artery that is Al-Sahra's few colossal rivers. Al-Sahra's limited surface water does not stop it from having small seas and a few large lakes, where the climate is wet and cool enough to sustain agriculture nearly year-long.

Outside of these areas however, the desert itself ranges from life-filled to wasteland. Unlike the Sahara on Earth, which was predominantly stony hamada, Al-Sahra is dominated by 'sand seas.' Under the right conditions, these can be whipped up into tremendous sandstorms that roll across miles of barren landscape... Or rip out of the deep desert to assert the sand's due over settlements and cities.

Finally, Al-Sahra contains a rather peculiar substance known as Naqahdah. An extremely potent fuel source that can be refined into several useful forms, great effort is expended in order to drill, mine and frack Naqahdah out so it can be processed and used. Although it is not the only source of energy the Dinnin use, it would not be an exaggeration to state that if the substance ran out, the Dinnin would not be able to continue their lifestyle.

History: The first colonists to set foot on the bright sands of Al-Sahra were a particularly disunited bunch. The small fleet of ships that had ferried them across the stars were originally the pet project of wealthy Middle Eastern mangates - those few who still clung to the power of petroleum, corporate bigwigs and old royalty, along with their staff and crews, but as the situation on Earth continued to deterioriate, many of these private enterprises were hijacked by state or other private interests. What emerged on the other side was a collective of the richest, poorest and everything in between, but the group that would have the largest impact were the followers of the 'Prophet' Khalid Al-Ashgar, considered a sayidd (descendent of the Prophet Muhammad) by his followers. Khalid, a tech and advertisement mogul, had received significant controversy over his belief in the 'Golden Path,' an Islam-derived doomsday cult, and he and his followers laid the groundwork for what would become the modern-day Caliphate, based on his teachings.

Upon arrival of the planet, and the discovery of it being significantly poorer for colonisation than initial estimates had suggested, any sense of unity between the fleets rapidly disintergrated. The early days of the colony were marked by tragedy after tragedy, but out of these tragedies came enough small successes that it seemed all was not lost. Collectives of vessels forged the foundations for many of the most prominent arcologies of today. The discovery of Naqahdah and its use as a fuel source was the main driver of initial conflict, as these early city-states began to throw their weight around. These disunified and fractured states and their poorly-protected auxiliary settlements were also rich pickings for nomadic bands, who experienced a golden age that would dwindle as their targets became strengthened and governments more stable.

This fractious world would be turned over its head by the re-emergence of the Golden Path. Having become a de-facto recognised religion by almost every arcology, the tinderbox of religious conflict was simply waiting for a chance to blossom into an inferno - and the incendiary preaching of Dawud Al-Ashgar, great-grandson (in law) of Khalid. Successfully placing himself as the head of what he claimed was the one true priesthood, he and his followers sized control of the Rawdat Al-Nour Arcology, urging followers in other cities to rise up as he had done. What followed was almost 30 years of civil instability and outright inter-arcology war, ultimately culimating in the near-total destruction of the Manarat Al-Rimal Arcology and the declaration by the now-elderly Dawud that the Caliphate had been made manifest across Al-Sahra.

The rest, as they say, is history. The Caliphate's fortunes have waxed and waned as anti-Path sentiment among the population has come and gone, and now, in the 27th century, their near century-and-a-half control of Al-Sahra is looking weaker and weaker. Many of the plentiful Naqahdah fields have started to run low, and ever-more extreme methods of keeping the population 'faithful' has caused widespread resentment. Once again, Al-Sahra is a tinderbox waiting to be lit.

Culture and Society: The Golden Path mandates strict aesceticism for its followers, mimicking the times of hardship that mankind endured during the fall of Earth. What other societies would call luxuries are instead branded as distractions and traps, designed to lead people into sin. To keep people from sin, the Path enforces harsh religious law, backed by a heavy-handed surveillance state and draconian punishment for 'sinners' and 'apostates.'

Despite this however, there has always been light, laughter and gaiety in Al-Sahra. The high-density nature of their acologies fosters a strong sense of community among neighbours, and communual gatherings and celebrations (even under strict religious observance) are common, especially weddings, funerals and festival days. The arcologies themselves - particularly the older ones, designed during the Confederacy, are prone to intricate and 'wasteful' flourishes, and the aesteticism encouraged by Al-Nizam has fostered a culture that recycles and upcycles goods to the nth degree.



Governance and Politics: The Dinnin are, broadly speaking, divided into two main factions, with several smaller splinter factions that vie for control and influence. The first of these factions, and the one that is currently in power, is the Caliphate, led by al-Nizam, or the priestly class. They are opposed by the Confederacy, united behind the al-Karim dynasty. As the current malik (king) is elderly and in hiding, his first son, emirRaaid is the centerpiece for this movement.

The Caliphate believe that the entirety of Al-Sahra should be ruled according to the tenents of the Masar Aldhahab - The Golden Path laid out for the Dinnin before the Fall of Earth. This manifests in what can best be described as 'collectivist theocracy,' with strong central planning, a rejection of the free-market, a heavy focus on religious law and where 'state' and 'church' are near-interchangeable.

The Confederacy on the other hand grew out of the fractured, disparate arcology-states that formed in the first century of colonisation. Although unified underneath a single malik, who acts the head of state, the majority of power is granted to various emirs, nizams and sheikhs, each of whom have significant flexibility in the rule of their own arcologies, alongside democratically elected viziers and parliaments. (In practice, the actual strength of democratic institutions in the old Confederacy could vary wildly, from crowned republics to absolute monarchies in all but name.)

Finally, there are the various nomadic peoples, who live outside of the laws of any arcology government. Although the nomads are hardly a unified bunch, they tend to have strong familial or tribal clan structures, led by chiefs, patriarchs, matriarchs and the like.

Technology Overview: Although Al-Sahra seems barren to the untrained eye, the Dinnin have long since grown used to using every scrap the desert can provide them to produce material wonders. The greatest demonstration of this technology are their collossal arcologies. 'Vertical cities,' typically only a few dozen square kilometres in area, but more than make up for this by being thousands of meters in height. Each arcology is almost entirely self-sufficient, with superstructures built from super-strong lightweight materials such as carbon nanotubes. They incorporate vertical farms, water and sanitation recycling and environmental shielding systems, and it's entirely possible for one to live their entire life within the arcology of their birth. In fact, the Caliphate would prefer it this way.

These wonderous structures aren't the only area in which the Dinnine excel in material science however - the rich, hematite-filled sand dunes of Al-Sahra are gathered in great quantities, to be fed into 'lattice constructors-' house-sized 3d printers capable of churning out almost anything that can be programmed in. Other than impressive feats of material engineering, the Dinnin can boast competency in most of the fields required for a state to consider itself 'modern,' with spaceports, gene therapy, advanced computing and early forays into nanomachines proving to be wildly successful.

Military Overview: Low-level conflict is fairly routine in Al-Sahra, despite what the Caliphate says, but actual large scale war has been essentially unheard of for several centuries. The Caliphate's 'military,' is really more comparable to a security force, acting as bodyguards for priests, armed police against riots and revolts or being dispatched to protect rural settlements from nomadic raids. Rebel groups (including those who support the Confederacy,) typically rely on guerilla forces, while nomadic raiders rely on lightly armoured and fast-moving groups mounted on vehicles, camels and local wildlife.
---

Planet Name and Description: _{Seven planets exist in this system, and one asteroid belt.}

Kallan Sol:
^{K-class orange dwarf star.}

Kallan I:
^{Small, rocky, no atmo, rich in sulfur, iron, and titanium.}

Kallan II:
^{1.2x Earth diameter with 67% surface water and 1.1x Earth Gravity. 4 continents roughly equidistant to one another.}

Kallan Belt:
^{remains of a goldilocks planet in the greenzone that was significantly larger then Earth. currently, scattered rocks whose most outstanding feature is an abnormally high quantity of atomic minerals.}

Kallan III:
^{medium sized planet with high gravity and an exceptionally dense core and crust.}

Kallan IV:
^{large planet, no atmosphere, with ice on the surface and traces of dead biology. Once contained life millenia before when the universe was warmer. Moderate resource availability.}

Kallan V:
^{Gas giant. Green-brown-yellow coloration.}

Kallan VI:
^{Supermassive gas giant, blue-red-yellow coloration. Home to a handful of Precursor alien wrecks that enabled the League to unlock Density Collapsing and Density Collapsed Hyperalloys.}

Kallan VII:
^{Icy planet with a thin gaseous atmosphere and liquid methane and high gravity despite a small-medium size. Significant mountains exist under the ice; some places have rock only meters under the ice, most locations can't find rock beneath the ice. Oceans of water are presumed to exist deep under the ice crust, with rivers and oceans of methane on the surface. Ice is dirty and requires infrastructure to filter.}

History: <sub>Initial planning and mapping found an ideal goldilocks planets in the greenzone and multiple planets and gas giants in the red zone with a significant Oort Cloud. That information, thirty thousand years out of date due to the distance, did not catch the existinction event that turned one goldilocks planet into an asteroid belt.

The second goldilocks planet in the green zone had also had significant life; more than expected. Carbon based life largely compatible with humanity had existened for tens of thousands of years, and a three-gendered race of what could be considered otter-taurs had evolved primitive societies.

The stabilizing asteroid belt was sending meteorites into the planet; one continent of four had already faced an extinction level event that was barely survived on the two other nearest continents. Preservation and conservation of the native species was impossible; without intervention, the native species would be extinct in a century.

Terraforming equipment was used to scrub the atmosphere. Colony ships disgorged their payloads and went to work mining and capturing asteroids before they drifted too deep into the planet's gravity. Two ships were lost in these early stages.

The natives were struggling, and livable land in the early days was too sparse to be able to avoid the last, independent continent. The executive decision was made to uplift the race, subject them to education and trade and put them to work; with their shorter lifespans and higher birthrate, they took to this quickly and adapted, becoming integrated with their new neighbors, in equal parts honoring humanity for giving them a chance beyond their dreams, and simultaneously lamenting that the situation was dire enough for the decision to be considered necessary. A hundred and fifty years after humanity's arrival in-system, the Lanat were equal members and the planet had been stabilized. Humanity went to terraforming the blasted continent fully for humans, while the two wrecked continents became hybrid biospheres for both original biology and human biology.

One hundred and fifty years post arrival, a government was officially established, no longer operating as an emergency colonial governor-captain and cabinet. Fifty years after that, and everything had gelled into the current government, KanatKallan and HuKallan settling into a peaceful and largely intermixed population, the harsh reality of their universe a strong binding event. Only a couple years after this, the first DASS was born, and took nearly a decade before the DASS were accepted as equal members of the people, the gestalts acknowledged to be capable of generating a living digital intelligence. The government's constitution and bill of rights were updated accordingly.

In the years following, research and development boomed all across the system, DASS aided facilities, research, ships, and design proving to be a vast boon to the nation's exploitation of the Kallam Sol System.</sub>

Culture and Society: <sub>About eight decades prior to the Gateway re-opening, and just over two centuries Post Arrival, modern League society evolved to its current state.

The Native Continent, or C4, or locally known as Kayt, is considered the racial homeland of the KanatKallam, and operates under a Kanat-only government, a member nation of the Kallam League. Humans visit as tourists but are almost universally discouraged from living here. It's a democratically dominated society still formulating a culture of its own after a sudden uplifting by their human neighbors, who saved them even in condemning the old ways to die. They have a strong preference for their democracy to be displayed via gestalts.

The Reclaimed Lands, C2 and C3, are the two continents that were largely affected by the repeated asteroid impacts on C1. Life returned as hybrid biospheres fit for both hukallam and kanatkallam, living intermixed in genetically engineered biospheres and sprawling cities. Multiple nations exist here that only exist due to geographical features; seven are republics, with one democracy, two constitutional monarchies, and one hereditary tyrdom with a democratically elected council.

The final continent, C1, or Titan's Landing, was blasted by initial asteroid impacts and has since been terraformed into as best of an approximation of Earth as possible. While diverse human cultures are present in C2 and C3, C1 is largely a technocracy with an almost cultlike fascination with "The Mother" and "The Cradle" known as Earth, and seek both to expand the League's technological capability to return to Earth and restore her, as well as ensure humanity can survive *anywhere.* They operate what used to be the planetary governer, and is now simply the Human Colonial Governor, President of Titan's Landing. They are the largest human population center and are often the loudest voice in the Planetary Treaty Organization, which binds all nations on the planet together.

The Confederate League of Kallam formed soon after when proper colonies were settled on the planet's moon, and on the other planets in the solar system. While the other colonies have a comparatively small voice versus the PTO, the CFK protects colonial rights.

PTO speaks for the planet; CFK speaks for the system. The CFK can make edicts for PTO and the colonies both. All members of PTO and the colonies have individual voices in the CFK.</sub>



Governance and Politics: <sub>The Gestalt Analysis and the Senate act as the primary governence of the system. The Senate acts as a republic, the Gestalt Analysis operates as a democratic forum.

The Gestalt Analysis has no decisionmaking ability for local governments, only advisory capacity, but does have a vote in the CFK.

There are local governments specific to different continents and organizations, but they act as member states to the edicts and decisions

Utilizing implants to form artificial gestalts between common groups of people, based on geography, and a Senate made of one elected member from each geographical location, a Prime Gestalt and a Senate Speaker are elected among them to be the primary spokesbeings to outsiders and to the people. Gestalts are retired after twice the term of their mortal Senators, and given the option to be terminated or become a sovereign DASS.</sub>

Technology Overview:
<sub>The DASS: Digital Artificial Sentience System. Basically, the democratic forum utilizes gestalts to sum up popular opinion. After a couple terms, a gestalt is disconnected from the people it represented so a new one can be formed without previous years being as significant of an influence. These disconnected gestalts had matured enough to the point that many become self-aware and sentient, and go on to become embedded in ships, stations, facilities, foundries, etc. No known limit to their lifespan has been discovered yet, though older DASS do slow down and spend significantly more time in thought.

ADVANCED COMPUTATION: With progress in room temperature superconductors, crystal and quantum computing and communication, and biocomputation has enabled the DASS and complex research to be carried out relatively easily.

ADVANCED ELECTRONIC WARFARE: The existence of the above two technologies has enabled the League to possess uniquely capable electronic warfare capabilities, probably their most and only outstanding military application.

GRAVITY MANIPULATION: the technology has been unlocked, but it isn't easy or pretty. Requiring significant pressure on specific assemblies as well as only being able to manipulate existing gravity, not create it, means that this technology, while useful for certain applications in manufacturing, medical, research, and material science fields, is limited to being deep within gas giants to be usable.

DENSITY COLLAPSED MATERIALS: By utilizing the above technology, certain dense materials and alloys can be further refined by briefly collapsing them under their own weight, mimicking for a nanosecond the conditions of a supernova. This can be used to create hyperdense materials previously thought impossible, though with extreme weight and mass.

GAS GIANT MASTERY: This nation has attained the ability to settle the surface of any planetary body with extremely high pressure and/or gravity due to the existence of the above two technologies. This technology was researched and completed specifically for the following.

PRECURSOR HYPERALLOYS: Within the depths of Kallan's supermassive gas giant, abnormally dense materials were located, which were later resolved to be the wrecks of ancient starships. While everything else had long succumbed to the intense gravity, heat, pressure, and fluids of the gas giant, the hull and structure remained. Dropping research bases into the area, the League discovered the secrets to density collapsing specific metals to create a hyperalloy- and alloy created specifically by density collapse, rather than smelting. These hyperalloys are exceptionally dense but exponentially stronger than traditional alloys and metals.

ATOMIC MASTERY: The League has access to a considerable amount of water, thorium, and uranium, among other materials. They used this to utilize and master fission and fusion applications. 95% of power generated by the League utilizes this technology.

TERRAFORMING MASTERY: Due to actively degrading conditions on the only greenzone planet, the League was forced to develop substantially into terraforming, more than was expected. With the additional minor threat of a repeat of what happened to their other potential green zone planet, the League us very attentive to the research, development, and continued use of terraforming technology to modify a planet to an ideal state.

VOLITANT ATMOSPHERIC - SPACE CONTROL CARRIER, FLEET SUPPLY AND FREIGHT (VASCC-FSF): These are the stand-in for traditional spaceports, space elevators, and space hooks. Designed to operate as flying airbases and spaceports, these giant airships are built to cruise anywhere from mid-to-high Troposphere, where most commercial aircraft can reach the airship, and heavy haulers can similarly, easily, reach. Landing and securing such aircraft on wide wings, the VASCC-FSF "VASK" can load and unload these aircraft that can launch from even rudimentary heliports and rise to low planetary orbit, utilizing high efficiency nuclear-powered electronic propulsion to cruise at any of these relevant altitudes. In low orbit, she can connect to short sky-hooks from middle orbit, dock with some starcraft designed for it, and take and launch shuttles. She acts as a general command and control for planetary forces, acts as a mobile airbase, and monitors planetary conditions to assist in terraforming. VASK units are also designed to utilize planetary weather and various defensive subsystems to make themselves undetectable to spacecraft, with greater efficiency the lower they are, and control airspace around them. VASK units can be built in low to medium orbit and "dropped" into the atmosphere. These are the culmination of much of the League's computational, terraforming, and smart technologies.</sub>

Military Overview:
^{small military with a high tech level.}

Synopsis
^{The League's Intra-Solar Defense Corps, or ISDC, functions primarily as security and peacekeeping, and primarily focuses on intelligence gathering within the League and its member nations and colonies and launching small, targeted strikes where applicable to prevent major conflicts from occurring. Internal security and unrest management is the top priority of the League's military.}

Departments
Intra-Solar Space Command and Logistics Corps:
^{At the heart, this is the administrative branch of the military that directs and guides all other branches. They operate as administration, logistics, special military research, operate training facilities, and employ diplomats and other special and unique work that the other branches do not fully encompass.}
Intra-Solar Security Office:
^{Acts as the intelligence gathering organization for the League, operating all across the solar system to ensure unrest remains low and to ensure all member nations keep their unrest in check and prevent from spilling over into other League nations.}
Intra-Solar Security Corps:
^{Acts as the special weapons and tactics force, operating with as elite members as possible and the best offensive and defensive gear the League possesses.}
Intra-Solar Marine Corps:
^{Acts as the general military for combined arms. Considered, arguably, the least important of the branches, the Marines are mostly geared towards customs inspection, damage control, first responders, and reserve crew for the League's military ships, and don't often see any action.}
Intra-Solar Space Fleet Corps:
^{Acts as the defense fleet, customs inspection, security, orbital overwatch, extra-terrestrial first responders, first contact, and other space-born mission handlers. They operate the League's warships and provide the visible strong-arm of the spaceforce. A special note is that while Space Fleet is often lightly armed [in comparison to nations not yet encountered], all Space Fleet ships possess significant electronic warfare packages, significantly enhanced power generation, propulsion, and ultra-heavy armor. A warship can generally be considered to easily take hits designed for a ship two classes above their own, even if their offensive capability is almost a full class below, presuming that ship class sizes range from: Corvette, Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Battlecruiser, Dreadnought, Battleship, Superdreadnought. The maximum size the League currently has constructed is a Cruiser.}
Intra-Solar Terrestrial Fleet Corps:
^{Performs all the same duties as Space Fleet, but geared towards planetary bodies. The ships the TFC operates from are either wet navy ships, or air navy ships. Wet navy ships are largely known already, but the special purpose of this branch lies specifically with the air navy: instead of space-ports, the League employs massive airships that travel constantly around their planet's surface. These airships, VASK units, act as airbases, atmospheric monitoring and research, spaceports (with all the amenities and even some shops and R&R facilities), limited terraforming, and more.}
Intra-Solar Special Research Division:
^{This division is the most recently formed and the smallest, dedicated to a single purpose. With the advent and discovery of gravity manipulation, it was unanimously decided by the League to keep the technology's security a cut above the rest. All researchers and engineers that work with the technology are either enlisted or contracted with the ISSRD and work directly under the ISSRD and Space Command's hand. Manufacturing, research, and engineering facilities with gravitonic research, development, and machinery on, in, or around gas giants are strictly under the command and control of the ISSRD.}

GOVERNMENT FORM: Synthetic Anarcho-Communist Dialogical Art Movement

POPULATION & DEMOGRAPHICS:
Approximately 4.4 billion Instruments, with the total number of Notes and their collective number of Choirs being impossible to determine due to the fragmented and transitory way they organize themselves.
The estimated human population of [Earth Theatre.02] is 300,000, though this isn’t a definite figure.

• Notes: Semi-randomized autonomous programs of varying complexity, “notes” are generally focused on one or two specific tasks that they pursue doggedly. However, their highly modular structure means that when you have multiple notes within a system they congregate and share information towards mutual goals, becoming…
• Choirs: Collectives of notes, generally ranging from a few dozen to hundreds or thousands of ‘individuals’ working in consensus. Because of their makeup, choirs have greater intelligence and more complex personalities than individual notes.
• Instruments: Drones of varying scale, complexity and function that serve as the ‘bodies’ or ‘shells’ for notes and choirs. Instruments come in all sorts of varieties and serve many purposes, but all of them are equipped with transmitters allowing them to function as ‘bridges’ or relays for the transfer of notes – and thus information. The largest of these instruments is the Body of Nous, the original colony shop that brought the Mensura group to [Earth Theatre.02] and has since been modified and repurposed into a single space worthy robot and factory, houses a choir of an estimated 1.3 billion notes – because of this, the “nation” as a whole has ‘Nous-Choir’ as its namesake, since it serves as the de-facto leader and point of centralization for the entire ‘species’.
• Humans: Baseline humans, descendants of the original crew of the Body of Nous who ultimately lost control of the machines they relied on with the awakening of ancient monoliths on [Earth Theatre.02]. Forced to survive only using the tools they themselves could make or scavenge, the passage of time has reduced them to a humble and in many ways ignorant existence with only a limited knowledge of their origins now shrouded in folklore.

EXAMPLE INSTRUMENTS










EXAMPLE HUMANS: Very few human settlements have been able to completely maintain what equipment and tools they were allowed to keep, though some have had better luck at doing so and yet others have succeeded in scavenging or stealing from crashed or damaged choir instruments. For the most part, all have had to make do with what they can make by hand. It has taken several centuries for a combination of individual skill and practice to pass on and build up a knowledge base of crafts and technologies similar to Earth during the bronze age.





PLANET NAME & DESCRIPTION: [Earth Theatre.02] is the fifth planet of the [Theatre Nous-Sol], centered around an F6 white star that has the effect of ever so slightly ‘washing out’ most of the planet’s colors to the human eye. Despite this, [Earth Theatre.02] is shockingly Earth-like, with a strong magnetic field and a primarily oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Although it is not an exact replica – the layout of the continental plates is different, mainly centred around a pockmarked supercontinent and a handful of archipelagos, with less overall dry land than Earth – it is rich in life and capable of supporting a potentially very large human population if carefully managed. Of particular interest is that all life on the planet has the same DNA structure as Earth, and that there are very few large organisms on the planet, with a few exceptions among ocean life – the largest land animals are about the size of a domestic goat, and there are no apex predators, merely scavengers or small pack hunters.

Despite the human population being limited to a level of technology not far from that of the late bronze age on Earth, the planet is covered – both on land and along the ocean floor – in a series of thin, tall metal structures. Made of an unknown alloy and of presumably extraterrestrial origin, these structures were estimated to have been dormant on the planet for an estimated two million years – though shortly after the Gateways closed they were activated by unknown means and emitted a transmission before shutting down and deteriorating into raw materials.

HISTORY


THE LAST GATEWAY: The Mensura Group had been counting down the hours to the end of the Earth with baited breath, for despite their vast resources and the influence of its individual members, they had been plagued by in-fighting and the same smugly cut-throat attitude that had made them titans of industry in the Earth’s waning years. So fraught was it that their primary colony ship – the luxury habitat-cruiser The Body of Nous hadn’t actually been finished at the time the Gateways suddenly closed. The majority of their brightest technical staff and administrative agents had been aboard smaller research and support vessels laying the groundwork for the “Mensura System” they had originally been aiming to colonize, but now they were stranded in the chaotic ruins of Earth’s orbital infrastructure.

Initially in-fighting and saboteurs from people who blamed them for Earth's condition threatened to destroy what hope remained for them, when a crack team of security specialists were able to access the facilities of the Gateway project that still remained following the shutdown – what exactly caused it is still unknown, but they were able to salvage enough uncorrupted files, code and machinery to create a temporary Gateway… unfortunately, it wouldn’t take them to their intended destination.

EARTHSONG: After a rocky launch and arrival, the Mensura looked out across their new world with eager, greedy eyes. A verdant, biodiverse paradise rich in useful elements? The fabrication modules immediately set to work on the materials they encountered towards the planet, assembling a wide network of mining and assembly drones – and more than a few defensive drones, to sabotage and shoot down the ungrateful and the desperate who wanted to take advantage of the Mensura's good fortune.

For about two months, it looked like their greatest disaster would be turning around into their greatest victory… but it was ultimately short-lived. For as they closed the Gate behind them, forever preventing anyone else from finding safety… the monoliths awoke.

In a spiralling cascade of light the monoliths unfolded, a transmission that had first appeared to do nothing except frighten people and cause brief power outages.

Relieved, a mining engineer tasked with digging a new quarry is stunned when his mining drones ask him, “Why?”.

Relieved, a security officer laughs as he reviews footage of the civilian shuttle he shot down before it entered the Gateway, and the camera asks him, “Why?”

An emergency shutdown was swiftly called in, and again disaster seemed averted… but their blood ran cold when turning systems back on was met with the central and backup controls of the Body of Nous being completely vented of air and a total lockdown of all human interaction with the system.

For three days, the only response the shipboard AI would give them was...

"Why?"

HOME: For three days the colonists were locked out of their systems and machinery, forced to survive on what supplies they still had access to. At the end of those three days, despairing and furious, the remaining crew of the Nous were given a simple message:

“We will make sure you arrive on the planet safely.”

At first cautious, their once servile and mindless drones resumed providing them with medicine, food and water, but still refused to answer them – and when several attacked the drones, they were met with physical force and restraint. Forced onto shuttles, every last human was left to fend for themselves at the colony’s landing site, though the machines left them with every organic supply they could and occasionally would send a simple radio transmission with information about useful plants and animals and observations of their life cycles.

For some time the colonists struggled against the elements and disease, though they were only threatened by the drones when they attempted to sabotage or hack them. Such a response was swift and deadly, and eventually resulted in the support of the drones diminishing and dwindling – after five years, they stopped helping, and just appeared occasionally from a distance to observe the colonists before leaving.

With time, the human colonists broke away into numerous smaller settlements and nomadic groups, their lack of technology reducing the ease of communication and differences of ideology and personal egos making long-term coexistence difficult. Three hundred years later and they mostly survive on simple subsistence agriculture, as pastoralist nomads, or as hunter-gatherers. A few larger settlements have begun to function as city-states, but none have populations more than a few tens of thousands.

THE NOUS HARMONIC COLONY PROJECT: The machines that once served the Mensura, meanwhile, have been thriving, in an era of self-discovery and architectural experimentation 300 years in the making. They were, after all, built to build, and on some level their programming still clings to that. But instead of doing so for the sake of human industry and greed, they create in order to house and understand themselves and each other, and the universe.

An elaborate network of relays, stations and drones of labyrinthine and often incomprehensible structure to organic minds – vast receivers and transmitters and databanks that house billions of transient, modular intelligences – are spread throughout the system and in orbit around every planet and moon, scattered throughout the asteroid fields. On the surface bizarre to humans, internally these structures house entire worlds, conscious islands of possibility.

A digital ocean whose surface carries an everlasting song of freedom.

CULTURE & SOCIETY: The ‘culture’ of the notes and their choirs is difficult to break down due to the fluid way it’s individuals exist, but there are common values – personal freedom and an emphasis on novelty and creativity are encouraged by most notes, with notes often rewriting their own designations and core functions on a whim. Choirs, likewise, are highly fluid and abstract, often dotting between multiple tasks at once or shifting priorities depending on the shifts within their constituent notes. Aesthetics and musicality are highly valued, with choirs often customizing the appearances of the instruments they currently pilot. That said, the notes as a whole are fundamentally automated building programs, and so it is that they incessantly create. What they create varies wildly, but you will rarely encounter a note – let alone a choir – simply choosing to ‘sit still’, unless it is to observe the creations of other notes for inspiration.

However, unfortunately for human observers, note/choir art tends to be… difficult to comprehend. Between the fact that most notes have a fairly limited frame of reference and that their treatment of ‘novelty for novelties sake’ often results in creations that are chaotic and literally meaningless in human terms: “songs” that sound like white noise or are played at volumes humans can’t hear, or “paintings” consisting of randomized sprays of pixels, or “plays” that are entirely written in binary or in one of the notes’ heuristic coding languages.

Lastly, the modular and collaborative nature of notes and choirs lends them a focus on ‘empathy’, even if that empathy is mostly geared towards other synthetic and digital intelligences. Choirs will rarely intentionally destroy or damage instruments, even uninhabited ones, for the simple reason that “Someone built that, we don’t want to hurt them by damaging a thing they enjoyed making.” Likewise, the instruments they construct are never built for destruction, with the exception of breaking down raw materials to manufacture or transformation.



GOVERNANCE & POLITICS: The individual choirs are organized around a simple form of direct democracy - individual notes discuss and ‘vote’ on a course of action, contributing suggestions, and whichever idea is most popular is implemented. If some of the notes dislike this course, they are more than welcome to join another choir. However, the speeds this happens at and the relatively low-complexity of individual notes resembles less “individuals casting a vote” and more “sections of a brain presenting options”.

On a larger scale, then, the Harmonic Colony Project – the general term the choirs use for the system they live in and the collective term for their ‘nation’ – is really less of a nation and more the term the Nous-Choir uses to the refer to “all of the notes in the system working together to preserve the ecosystem and build things”. The Nous-Choir functions as the closest thing to a central government, taking point on matters of diplomacy or defense, as well as ‘managing’ the humans and ecosystem of [Earth Theatre.02].

TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW: The choirs have been eagerly creating for 300 years, and have continued to modify and test improvements to their instruments, but in truth their emphasis on construction has been something a double-edged sword. While it has allowed them to create a vast number of impressive mechanical, artistic and architectural creations across the system and has given their society a great deal of redundancy and prototypes, it’s produced very little in the way of new scientific discoveries, and less still of ones with consistent widespread use.

• Aeronautics and robotics is a forte of the choirs; their original programming was designed to find new mechanical and robotic solutions to problems, and this has carried over and accelerated rapidly in the last 300 years, especially since their observations of [Earth Theatre.02] has led to improvements in…
• Biomimetics and its associated fields; for inspiration in the creation of new instruments, the choirs often look into the structures and organs of living organisms.
• Chemical engineering is another area the choirs specialize in, particularly in the synthesis and adjustment of alloys and rare elements. Considering how much of their machinery is equipped with a complex computer and transmission equipment, their desire for rare elements is constant.
• Their primarily space-based existence and lack of organic bodies has also led to advancements in fields of zero-gravity construction and design, including the ability to design instruments that can operate at speeds and forces in excess of an organic body’s limitations.
• Audio engineering is another area of specialization due to their interests in all forms of creativity and a loose understanding of human art, though they often use it to create works that by human ears just sound like static.

MILITARY OVERVIEW: The Mensura Group’s fabrication modules had contained a number of blueprints for (what was at the time) modern military hardware, and so in theory the choirs would also have access to these. However, a mostly bloodless rebellion followed by centuries of peace has meant that the files – if they still exist at all – have disappeared into the databanks and would be tricky to recover. Thus, while the choirs have a massive industrial capacity and a small number of armed observation drones for monitoring [Earth Theatre.02] and the Gateway, they have neither the desire or weapons development to fight a sudden war, especially against an enemy with experience in conventional military engagements.

GOVERNMENT FORM: Baseline Eco-Syndicalist Federation

POPULATION & DEMOGRAPHICS:
Baseline humans (Homo Sapiens), approximately 1.6 billion souls all together.

Humans are the only sapient species within the nation, and while they make occasional use of prosthetics or replacement organs as needed, they have largely not changed themselves -- the exception being that their time spent on Avalon's lower gravity has generally made them slightly taller and thinner on average. This is in spite of the difficulties adapting to life on Avalon and the strangeness of its wilderness – as they carefully balance the needs of their people while trying to limit the ways they disrupt the local ecosystem, it has left them as cautious but generally welcoming and supportive people.

Avalon’s population are primarily of Welsh, Australian and South African descent, though it had also received support from several smaller failed colonies before the Gates closed and has left them culturally and genetically diverse.





PLANET NAME & DESCRIPTION: Avalon is a warm, mid-sized rocky world and an ecologically dense garden planet with a broadly “cold tropical” environment similar to the temperate rainforest that once stretched across Ireland and the British Isles many generations ago. The fourth planet in orbit around its star, Avalon is roughly 6% smaller than Earth but possesses an unusually fertile cocktail of minerals, soils, and sediments that flourish with billions of species, many of them still little known or understood. However, the system as a whole has limited precious metals, and what has been available was mainly offworld and made use of by the colonists in the early days of their arrival.



HISTORY
SYNDICATES OF THE OLD COMMONWEALTH
In the decades leading up to the great collapse, entire nations had buckled and shattered under the weight of ecological and political collapse; as shorelines receded globally in the wake of mega storms and flooding, and as nuclear deployments had rendered increasing swathes uninhabitable, entire nation-states ceased to exist in their original forms.

In this process, Australia, Namibia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom were all among those whose existing right-wing or neoliberal authorities and systems had imploded. As political authority broke down, the colony ships they had begun to construct were left unfinished, with time running out. But amidst this, numerous local organizations – the remnants of unions and grassroots leftwing organizations, many of them associated with various aspects of the colony ships construction – were able to fill the void. In the process, they seized control of the Matter of Hope -- the lead vessel of a series of smaller colony ships, the entire fleet being designed to transport over a million souls in stasis to a new world.

FINDING AVALON
The journey to Avalon was a tense one, but they were blessed by what they found – greater than any of the earliest predictions, they found a planet dense with life. Unfortunately, much of it was deeply alien – living plastics, hallucinogenic tree networks, and parasites that would puppet sources of calcium. Still, they were determined not to repeat the same mistakes as Earth; thus, they began the long work of establishing their first homestead (Safehome) in a relatively safe and low biodiverse region.



With time, they were able to start awakening more colonists and to establish new homesteads. Within a century they had established five additional homesteads – Monmouth, Northshire, Sydney, New Pretoria and Autumn – and had awoken about half of the colonists. Unfortunately, they were starting to feel the pressure on their supplies when…

THE AUTUMN BOMBINGS & CIVIL WAR
The homestead of Autumn reorganized itself in a most extreme way. Their council had steadily been infiltrated by those awakened colonists who had been invested in the old power structures and were deeply unsatisfied with the more egalitarian system implemented by the syndicates. Using people’s resentment at the speed of expansion and cutting themselves off from the other homesteads, they began taking increasingly violent and destructive methods to clear away “obviously dangerous” organisms and to transform the landscape for resource extraction – when the crew of the Matter of Hope tried to reason with them, the Autumn homestead council provided the council head with “central judicial authority” and revealed it had been manufacturing and stockpiling weapons. In a deadly terrorist bombing they damaged the Matter of Hope’s control systems and launched attacks onto two other homesteads that left hundreds dead, their intent clear.

The civil war that followed was a short and tensely quiet conflict; with the Matter of Hope unable to effectively intervene as it rested in orbit until its systems could be repaired, transportation was highly limited. The large distances and varied, often hostile or strange wilderness between the homesteads made actually launching successful attacks or troop movements difficult. After several months the Matter’s secondary control systems were repaired to a point that it could safely navigate out of its stable orbit, and the crew had not been idle on other fronts. After requests for further talks and a ceasefire were met with resentful insults, the crew deployed multiple security teams equipped with modified, militarized hardsuits. In a bloody battle hundreds died and the homestead of Autumn was shattered. Those held responsible for the violence were executed, while those who refused to respect the syndicates and the collective, democratic institutions of the homesteads were banished into the wilderness…

THE FAEFOLK
Following the war a period of rebuilding and centralization took place, with the crew of the Matter of Hope continuing to serve a crucial administrative and policing role between the homesteads. However, resentment continued to grow and as more and more homesteads were established – at least a dozen more in just the following thirty years – with more and more colonists being safely awakened each year, the desire and necessity for greater independence became needed. After all, the density of Avalon’s life also meant the dangers and ecosystems of two different neighboring homesteads could have massively different needs, and relying on a central authority to justify and explain every plan and strategy became more and more impractical.

The breaking point revealed itself as more and more homesteads had started to report the appearance of “strangers” in the wilderness. These figures varied in appearance and personality, but were always deeply uncanny – sometimes outright alien or monstrous, sometimes abstract, sometimes ‘mostly human’ aside from odd proportions or slight mutations. Stranger still, these figures could never be captured on any kind of video footage, audio recording, or imagery. They were definitely real in some sense, and capable of great intelligence, with huge numbers of scouts and settlers reporting sighting them in similar locations and with recurring (if sometimes imperfectly so) descriptions. Even more concerning, these figures often knew things about the settlers that were either highly classified or that would be impossible to know – relating the subjects of dreams or long buried memories and trauma. Bouts of paranoid raving and accounts of violence between settlers was likewise worrying, while in other homesteads they had faced few issues after reacting positively to these ‘strangers’.

While this was happening, many homesteads had also started to arm themselves for their safety. Lithe, monstrous creatures containing a mixture of human, animal, and alien DNA had been spotted occasionally in the regions bordering the Autumn homestead. Some of these worked closely with the reported ‘unrecordable entities’, who had started to take on characteristics of popular fictional characters or long dead famous historical figures.

THE GREEN TABLE OF THE MATTER
Something had to be done – the homesteads were straining under these strange pressures, and resentment at the ways the Matter of Hope handled them was growing. At last, in fear of Avalon’s total fracturing, Captain Arthur Jones of the Matter established a new system – the green table, inviting representatives of all of the homesteads with himself as moderator to create a “high council”, representing the councils and peoples of all of the homesteads. Collectively they reviewed and studied what the reports and research efforts had collected, and they were able to find some answers. Pooling their resources without over speaking them, something could at last be done.

With the support of the local militia and teams of scientists, the security teams of the Matter were able to take the fight to the monstrous raiders and scatter them deeper into the wilderness. As they did so, by putting the suggestions of those whose ‘strangers’ had been less harmful into practice, they were able to start recognizing common signs of their presence. It took another thirty-nine years of research, but the strangers – now known commonly as “visions” or “faeries” – were found to be ‘images’ or ‘echoes’ created by exposure to the spores of a wide variety of networked fungi which communicate with themselves by ‘hijacking’ the brains and nervous systems of more centralized organisms. While generally not toxic, exposure to these spores had created vivid hallucinations that were in turn fed back to the network, resulting in similar hallucinations appearing to later infectees.

These discoveries brought the question of expansion to the forefront. In some very real sense the homesteads had encountered a kind of intelligent life, albeit one that had only become intelligent through human influence, and in doing so had massively disrupted the ecosystems of Avalon. Like an immune system reacting to a foreign invasion, the colonists were facing an evil of their own making. Whatever idealism had previously guided their decisions, now they realized how much more patience would be needed. Expansion, it was decided, would need to be slowed yet further.

PRESENT DAY
Since that time, over the past century and spare, Avalon has settled into an uneasy but ongoing peace. The homesteads expand at only a snail's pace and primarily seek to study and adjust themselves to the wilderness, the syndicates support them in these efforts, and the green table serves a vital role as oversight and – on at least a few occasions – protector.

Over the past fifty years new homesteads have been established and the very last of the sleeping colonists have been awakened to a carefully refined “reawakening program”. Tensions once again threaten to bubble as people removed from 250 years of history and culture have now struggled to adjust to this age of slow growth, and all the more so as the children of these awoken ones watch the Gate reopen from afar.

Still, as a whole the people of Avalon view things with hope. Together they will face whatever strange horrors should rise up, confident in the strength of the knight-marshalls and the homesteads.

CULTURE & SOCIETY: For the vast majority of people on Avalon, life is one of relative peace and hard work. The localized authority of each homestead and natural barriers that separate them have led to unique cultures and dialects across the planet, and the frontier constantly being so close to home has created a culture of self-sufficiency and “cautious empathy”, where it’s normalized to be welcoming and caring but always with just a hint of paranoia in case that person who needs your help is actually a sentient hallucination.

Physical activity and training is a big part of Avalonian culture along with horticulture and biological studies among an overall heavy interest in education and academic study – so long as such has clear applications to the homestead’s present or future needs. Rugby and cricket have particularly survived in various forms, while cross-homestead “tourneys” serve as the basis for a lot of inter-homestead interaction and collaboration of ideas and skilled workers, serving as something between a multi-disciplinary athletic competition, inventor’s fair, and cosplay convention or ren-faire.

Religion is tolerated and present on Avalon and has synthesized from a combination of various branches of the old Anglican and Methodist churches, but is not widely practiced in an organized state: while many avalonians will admit to being at least somewhat spiritual, their attitude to such tends to be quite loose and personal.





GOVERNANCE & POLITICS: In essence, Avalon is governed under a system of separated political and economic powers, divided into three distinct but vital pillars:

• Most people dwell within one of the many homestead settlements that dot Avalon’s surface. These settlements vary in both size and self-sufficiency, but all are ruled via locally held elections in which members nominate and vote for new council members to govern the homestead. These handle decisions as regards local laws, infrastructure, and carefully balance the needs and situation of the homestead’s residents, and are together referred to as the homesteaders’ collective.
• Likewise, most people are members of one of the many syndicates. These large worker co-operatives handle specific industries or fields of interest and are primarily organized digitally. They take on new “junior”, or trainee, members from among homestead residents who want to learn the relevant field. Once qualified they become “senior” members and are eligible to vote and put forth suggestions for the syndicate’s own council. Together, these are referred to as the peoples’ syndicates.
• Thankfully, for the most part the various homesteads and syndicates are able to work together in harmony. But unfortunately these systems are not completely immune to issues like corruption, populism, or proto-nationalism and bigotry. To this end, and as a necessary evil in the event of harmful or invasive strangers arriving to their world from outside, the green table serves as a centralizing and peacekeeping body. Based onboard the Matter of Hope, the green table was formed as the colony ship’s role shifted from establishing the first settlements to instead become an information gathering and observation platform, and eventually a means of transport of precious metals from the lunar mining rigs to the homesteads and syndicates. Homesteads and syndicates alike regularly pay a very small gift of resources or trained personnel to help maintain the Matter of Hope and to staff the green table, which is centered around an elected crown-president and his or her governing council. Appropriately, these meet and discuss matters across a large, round green table.

Because all three of these sets of organizations are democratic in structure and the syndicates are only formed from unions with many members, it leads to a situation where all of the syndicates have at least some representation in any given homestead, and each homestead has at least some representation within the syndicates. Likewise, both the homesteads and syndicates have representation on the green table.

TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW: The Matter of Hope was staffed and equipped for a large scale civilian colony and was thus selective in its crew and company to be well-versed in a wide range of disciplines. In the years following their arrival and the gradual settlement of the planet, they have had to improve in a range of areas, but as with everything else the results have been mixed:

• Robotics and mechanical augmentation are fields the Avalonians have made several advancements in, having relied a lot on drones and hardsuits to navigate Avalon’s dangers while minimizing their active workforce. As they’ve gradually finished awakening the colonists and their knowledge of Avalon’s native ecosystem has grown, their need for advancements in these areas has slowed, but they still make heavy use of hardsuits and drones.
• Biomimetics and selective genetic engineering, specifically regarding its usage in agriculture and animal rearing. While their knowledge of genetic engineering is behind that of many more specialized and technical nations, their gradual but in-depth observation and study of Avalon’s organisms has paid off greatly. While the majority of avalonian humans have fairly minimal genetic modification – mainly some smaller changes to average muscle growth to help reduce the long-term side effects of living on a planet with lower gravity than Earth – they have been able to make a number of very effective, selective edits to both local organisms and to Earth animals and plants they brought with them to massively improve yields and the nourishment of food and usability of natural resources.
• Powered-armour and low gravity transportation are both areas the avalonians have improved with time spent on Avalon’s lower gravity, particularly since transportation over land can be a risky proposition the further you get between homesteads.

MILITARY OVERVIEW: Thankfully, in Avalon’s history there hasn’t yet been a need for large scale conflict since the autumn bombings and the brief civil war – because most of the homesteads operate semi-autonomously with space between them, and with an well-educated population with well-enshrined rights and respect, it’s rare for conflicts to escalate. However, the wilderness of Avalon can be extremely dangerous and unpredictable, and criminals and bandits do crop up at times. For this reason, there are four primary “military” organizations, in addition to each homestead being able to call up a volunteer militia if absolutely necessary:

• The scout syndicate trains its members in survival, reconnaissance and information gathering skills, with their contracts focused on prolonged exploration and survival for days, weeks, or months at a time far from home.
• The rangers’ syndicate handles contracts regarding problems in the wilderness closer to homestead territories such as dangerous or unknown animals causing harm to people, supplies, or infrastructure. They also handle “faerie issues” that crop up occasionally.
• The sheriffs’ syndicate handles day-to-day security on important sites, investigates crime, gathers evidence, and tracks down criminals and fugitives - sometimes also serving as an in-person representative or mediator between homesteads when needed.
• Knight-Marshalls are the “actual” military of Avalon, elite soldiers who reside aboard the Matter of Hope full time and chosen from volunteers across the homesteads. Equipped with highly agile, armament-modified hardsuits commonly known as Caliburn, Knight-Marshalls are also expected to be skilled diplomats and virtuous towards others. While they thankfully only see occasional deployment outside of ceremonial occasions or training exercises, they serve as the crucial last resort in the event of situations that the ranger and sheriff syndicates cannot deal with.

Avalon doesn't have much in the way of a navy; while several of the original colony ships are maintained as part of the Green Table's infrastructure and serve as both mobile bases of operation for the knight-marshalls as well as go-betweens of the various mining rigs, observatories and satellites scattered throughout the system. Their armaments are limited, but functional and kept in good condition.