mightier than the sword

A company run by Tetrao Coloth, a seadweller of 46.2 sweeps, who rose to his position of president of his own company at such a young age for a violet due to a combination of odd circumstances. 

His company in Civitrecce produces various high-tech practical & luxury goods made right in the city’s own factories, but his real focus is on methods of technologically and chemically controlling and influencing trolls. He produces helmsman ports and implants, but also specializes in behavior modification chips and augmentations for midbloods, as part of a project called the Draco line. 

Coloth proposes that due to their longer lifespans, greater durability, and lower frequency of psiionic powers, modified midbloods are ideal, low-danger attendants and even bodyguards, with the right biotech improvements. While controversial, his prototypes have worked well and he is entering the second stage of development.

(adoptable by @jettsettrolls!)

Like Pheres, Elilah has been working with the Alternian Historical Society since he was five sweeps old, first as a courier and then as one of their accountants. He has steadily risen in the ranks since his initial jobs, however, and for many of the vendors, his name comes more easily to the lips than Malaya or Khaneh’s. While he is not the head of finance, he has achieved a position that, in his opinion, is even better - high enough to be profitable, but still low enough that his position is overlooked and vital.

An important combination, because few realise that a fraction of all the money that passes through his tent disappears, and Khaneh is the only one aware of exactly how much money the accountants make off of forging authentication signatures and paperwork on the side.

geography and surroundings | Neuja is a large sprawling metropolis located on a large delta on the coast. The land used to be swamp marsh which was drained and taken over as the city spread out past it. Patches of swamp still exist at the edges of city, cushioned by deciduous forests. Two tributaries run through it, emptying out the sea, bridges spanning the gaps to unite sections of land into a single city. Heat gets easily trapped in the urban world of concrete in the summer, and it’s situated northward enough that it’s not unusual to get drifts of snow in the winter. 

Despite the relative discomfort of the weather, Neuja is one of the older cities in the empire and has been built up over centuries of history, and thus a center of political and economic power, drawing trolls to it like birds to seed. 

demographic | Neuja is a diverse city that draws many different kinds of trolls into its embrace. It’s population stands to be about 8 million strong, scattered somewhat without rhyme or reason through its different neighborhoods. While the city is majority lowblood, there are a relatively numbers of highbloods in the city. 

It is also home to several ports, space and otherwise, so it is not uncommon to see adults roaming the streets as well. 

communities | The city is split into several different neighborhoods. Wealth gravitates towards the center of the city, in the middle of the two rivers, and gets less and less wealthy as you travel to the outskirts, with a few exceptions. The coastline next to the ports are about as wealthy as you can get. It’s not a strict guideline, ie. one block can be wealthy but the next one over can be very poor. 

The middle of the city is often a tightly packed metropolis full of business and money and fancy fancy fance, and while some trolls live there, the majority commute in from other neighborhoods.

As the city spreads outwards, different enclaves tend to set themselves up, around shared culture or hemospectrum hue, that end up very close knit. It’s not unusual to walk into a completely different set of shared cultures if you’re traveling through. 

There’s a very strong imperial presence in the city, because it’s one of the largest centers of space transport planetside. Legislacerators and interrogarroters and policeradicators all exert a particular cultural influence here, often coming in at odds with the individual communities that form. Corruption is as rampant as incorruptibility, which sometimes brings different precincts against each other as well in secret wars. 

trivia |

You can find people of about any stripe in Neuja, from the homeless and poor to the richest of the rich, from Imperial militants to capitalist philantropist, from the most law abiding citizenry to the worst criminals. 

It is where the Magpie’s network had its beginnings and has the strongest presence here. The More to Lose plot took place here, in one of the city’s ports. 

Tonight’s NPC: Zvezda Cosmos! Design adopted from the lovely @spicecookies.

She’s the fourth employee of Pheres and Sipara’s shop! She lives in the building next door, and acts as cashier, groundskeeper and general face-of-the-business when everyone else is gone. She’s very laidback and naturally inclined towards being mild-mannered, which hides her natural propensity towards the absurd: her pelicanspider lusus has left her with slightly unusual standards towards normal behaviours, and the social acceptability of things like eating live fish.

The Imperial Education Program, more frequently known as the IEP, is a government-sponsored project with the goal of producing work-ready conscripts upon Ascension. Rather than having to train up new recruits for high-skill and high turn-over jobs, the fresh members of the Fleet are able to be integrated immediately into the work-force, and thus of immediate use.

The program is headed by The Shepherd, and has various divisions, the three largest of which are the helmsmen, paingineering and legislacerative departments. Each department has its own head, its own hierarchy and its own funding. With the exception of the Department of Helming, which is led by the Shepherd and funded directly by the Church of the Mirthful, money is always tight for the IEP, and the wars for who will get what grant tend to be fierce.

Each department has its own rules and regulations, dictated by the head of department, and the proctors underneath them. Interaction and collaboration between the branches is fairly common: the Mudskip line is the result of a century of combined effort between the legislative and paingineering branches, to create a bloodline capable of enforcing the Empress’s law on both violet and indigo ships.

The Imperial Education Program is rarely heard of outside of the global south, but has a broad online presence and has an office in almost every metropolitan district’s capitol. Any troll can enter the offices and undergo testing for their preferred branch.

While the IEP primarily targets children seven and under for conscription, the better to encourage the preferred mentalities, they draw in a large number of older trolls each sweep due to their careful advertising. For a troll worried about being culled for a minor mutation, the IEP grants exemptions. For trolls worried about not having partners for drone day, the IEP will assign them quadrants. Students are granted hives, and given a bonus to their stipends, and enter the Fleet at a higher rank than their peers.

And they’ll find themselves exempt from many common laws, which draws in a great number of trolls keen on escaping imperial punishment.

What few realise until they join is that this all comes with a heavy toll. Trolls who enlist in the program gain these benefits at the loss of their freedom. Signing on with the IEP is signing over one’s freedom, and leaving - regardless of the reasons - is not tolerated.

NOTES:

The paingineering division of the IEP often works with the helmsmen division in the cultivation of psionic bloodlines. The HARLEY psionic line, known for its high output of energy and low rates of burnout, is the most well-known of these projects.

For most students, the issue of leaving never comes up. This appears mostly with the helmsmen, where the less complacent trolls can get tagged with identification tags to track them, and the less competent trolls can find themselves sold under the table to THE QUEENPIN’S SOCIETY to serve as ship engines and batteries for the member’s ships.

Station 11 is a helmsman and psionic training facility run by General Leoffe, located in the depths of the vast southern desert Hanhai, where the troll populations are primarily lowbloods possessing psionics abilities more often than not, and possesses a reputation of both fear and awe for the locals.

General Loeffe is a violetblooded and widely-respected general of the Imperial fleet that is on a research sabbatical at Station 11, and currently works primarily with optimizing the preparation of psionics for helming duty, as well as psionic weapons development.

Station 11 takes in younger psionic volunteers (often motivated by the promise of glory in serving the Empire) and conscripted trolls that have sufficiently high psionic ratings to helm ships, stations, or satellites. The primary purpose of the facility is both training future helmsmen in control and adequate usage of their abilities, and fitting them with appropriate implants and port modifications before shipping them out for Imperial fleet usage.

Trolls emerging from Station 11 typically are fitted with:

standard metal ports allowing the linkage of their central nervous system with a ship’s helmscolumn

neural modifications allowing for behavioral programming, shipwide AI capabilities, and optimization of psionic abilities

obedience programming and neural enhancement for the purpose of seamless integration and the neural processing ability necessary to helm a ship

Trolls that come to Station 11 but don’t make the cut for helming are disposed of appropriately. Atypically unruly and disobedient trolls, or ones that simply cannot accept their behavioral programming, are put into a surgically induced vegetative state and utilized as batteries in power sources that don’t require an AI component to run, such as station generators. Trolls that have psionics that are uncontrollable or otherwise ill-suited to the position of helmsman are either removed from the facility, terminated, or occasionally sold to non-fleet personnel or backwater stations that can’t afford better, depending on which stage of preparation they are discovered to be un-useable.

General Leoffe, unlike many fleet leaders, leads Station 11 with what is sometimes considered excessive strictness. As a result of that and the strategic location of the station in the midst of a population with a plethora of strong psionics, the station has a reputation for turning out some of the best helmsmen the fleet has seen in recent history. Station 11 also runs, under the guidance and urging of General Leoffe, a weapons development program called Lepus that seeks to develop the strength of cerulean-typical mind-altering psychic powers as a vast and formidable power that may be used for the furtherance of Imperial fleet conquest.

Man, Riccin’s sect needs a name. /o/ Warfarers? Navigressors?? I feel like there should be a laugh / mirth / joke reference in there, but hmmm. Going to go with Navigressors just for simplicity’s sake through this, because it’s easier than saying “lowblood Mirthful” over and over again. :P

So! Excessive world-building about the helmsman sect of the Mirthful Church under the cut, where indigoes take baby lowbloods, slather them in paint and teach them to love space (and then shove them into their engineblocks, because trolls are awful).

There’s this neato website called inkarnate that lets you make your own D&D style maps! So I made maps of both the general area of Zefyra’s part of the gorge:

And a map of Hànhǎi, part of @activatingaggro‘s map of the south-eastern peninsula of Alternia: