Mangrea 4
Mangrea 4
Formal Name: Ebisu
Informal names: "M4", "The City"
Population: 50,015,941,337
Day length: Exactly 24 hours
Orbital Period: 600 days
The fourth moon of Mangrea is properly called 'Ebisu' but usually simply called 'M4'. 'M4' is usually pronounced 'Em-Four' by speakers of English or Spanish, but Japanese speakers will sometimes pronounce it 'Ma', usually representing this with the 'Ma' Kanji meaning 'demon' or 'evil influence'.
M4 is a large world, approximately 1.3 times the radius of Earth, although with a surface gravity identical to that of Earth. This is strange and often remarked upon by scientists, although most people ignore it as it has no impact on their day to day lives. It has a single large continent, a bit larger than South America, which is formally called "Kazaori Eboshi" after the hat the god Ebisu is typically depicted wearing. Most people don't care about this, either, as there are no other continents on the surface of the planet to distinguish it from; if they even need to mention it, they will simply call it 'the continent'.
The continent is surrounded by a shelf of moderately shallow water, between 10 and 100 meters in depth. The shelf is in turn hemmed in by a line of islands, both volcanic and reef, which form a sort of lagoon the size of the Pacific Ocean. This lagoon is home to a riot of life, much of it familiar by Earth standards, and is referred to as 'the shallow sea' to differentiate it from the rest of the surface water on M4, which is uniformly of 3-4 km depth and home to benthic life and little else.
The continent has a number of remarkable features. The first is that it is entirely covered in a single city, end to end. This city was here when the first human settlers arrived, and is maintained by the network of fidgety, emotionally needy robots that first greeted the humans when they arrived. While the city is home to over fifty billion people, most of them human, this only accounts for 40% of the city's land area being used (and that's without counting the upper layer separately). The rest is either sparsely populated or entirely vacant; in the vacant areas, the robots (known collectively as 'Maintenance') will often renovate large sections of the cityscape with new architectural styles simply to keep themselves busy.
Another remarkable feature of the continent is that it has layers, thanks to an enormous edifice built over most of the city, simply called the Eboshi, or 'Hat'. The Hat sits half a kilometer above the continental surface and is home to an array of green spaces cut off from each other by high walls. Some of these spaces are used for agriculture, some for parklands, and some for nature reserves; all were populated with the descendants of Earth species when the first human settlers arrived, and this includes a number of species that have been extinct on Earth for some time, such as Dodos and the KauaʻiʻŌʻō. Living on the Hat is the dream of the idle rich, as well as those who are so wealthy that they can commute by private VTOL. For everyone else, it is too far from where work gets done to be a permanent residence... although there are a number of summer homes here.
The city has maintenance tunnels and facilities everywhere underneath the ground floors, almost all of which are interconnected. Down here Maintenance takes care of power distribution, waste management and other necessities. They do not charge for electricity or water, but they do sell the resources they produce from recycling waste from human society. This ready source of fertilizer and raw materials is greatly appreciated by farmers and manufacturers. Power is mostly generated by a ring of solar farms at the upper end of the two space elevators jutting up from either end of the continent, which receive focused sunlight from Mangrea's mirror arrays. The continent and islands are also dotted with ancient, blocky, solid-state fusion reactors that are used to provide additional power where needed, or reserve power if infrastructure is damaged -- which, between accidents, troll rats chewing on wires, and attempts to engineer outages during turf wars, happens fairly frequently.
Below the maintenance tunnels are ruins, and below those are more ruins. Archeologists have thus far discovered four distinct layers of civilizational ruins beneath the city, each belonging to a different species that settled the moon in a different era, some so ancient that even the Elves have no memory of them. While there are a few areas that the robots of Mainenance try to restrict entry into for the stated reason of keeping people safe, they welcome exploration of the ruins for the most part, stating that they want to know what's down there, too. They are eager enough for this that the better entrance points to the ruins have their own stops on the subway, along with stores selling necessary supplies at cost. Many people have delved the ruins and dredged up fabulous wealth from the ruins, either in the form of lost technology, art and treasure items, ancient magic, or just knowledge that commanded a high price, and this is enough to keep adventurers coming despite the risks.
Timekeeping on Mangrea 4 As with all of the moons of Mangrea, M4's day is exactly 24 hours in length. The moon orbits its primary at a leisurely pace, taking 600 days to circle it fully. This 'M4Year' is divided into four 'quarters' of 150 days each, which are subdivided into 15 10-day weeks. The last week of each quarter is called the Black Week, and is often set aside for the payment of bills and settling of accounts for the quarter. Maintenance Maintenance is the collective name for the robots that keep Mangrea's precursor infrastructure in working order. Each member of Maintenance has an individual identity, which is remarkable enough since other races have thus far been unable to deliberately produce sapient machines smaller than an auditorium. This may be just as well, because Maintenance units are... quirky. They tend to be nervous and fidgety, and they are all and one very eager to please. They will check in sometimes to make sure everything is to your liking -- the water tastes right, the air's the right temperature, you have plenty of electricity, stuff like that. They will sometimes ask you in person in the middle of the night while you were sleeping, which tends to bother people. This behavior has earned them the nickname "Yanderoids", which is admittedly a little unfair if only because Maintenance units cannot engage in violence.
It should be noted that only humans experience this level of 'affection', likely because they were the only ones that Maintenance was directly programmed to take care of. For other species that aren't hostile to humanity, Maintenance is still friendly and helpful but in a much more easygoing fashion.
As stated above, Maintenace makes some money by selling recycled materials and waste, which can be used for manufacturing or fertilizer, respectively. This is their only source of money, aside from the occasional donation or thank-you gift (which never fails to make them deliriously happy), and the main use of this money is the hiring of adventurers to help with infrastructure problems that are best solved by violence. As Maintenance cannot engage in violence itself, it needs outside help to deal with problems like troll rats or xenospider nests. Clearing problems like this out of the infrastructure is usually the first step to establishing residence in a previously unused part of town, and Maintenance is delighted to welcome and accommodate anyone who can pull it off.
Maintenance units have a strange, solid-state 'brain' that handles all memory storage and decision-making. This brain is very durable, and none have succeeded in discerning the inner workings as of this writing. Maintenance does not appreciate being dissected, but as long as the brain is returned so that it can be put in a new body, they tend to let it slide. If the brains are not returned within three weeks, they will hire adventurers to take it back through whatever subterfuge or force is deemed necessary.
Demographics
Total Population: 50,015,941,337
Humans: 47,084,210,009
While some find this to be a relative scarcity of alien species (given that there are no fewer than ten species amongst that population) to be remarkable, it should be noted that by much of the galaxy's standards this makes M4 incredibly cosmopolitan. Most species are happy to trade with each other, form alliances and maintain diplomatic relationships, but mixing is rare. This is not usually a matter of disdaining the other races, or finding them repugnant (believe it or not, the only species in the Alliance that is commonly targeted by such attitudes is humanity), but more a matter of comfort zones with little overlap. Perhaps the most obvious example is the Elves and Dwarves. The Elves love living high off the ground where they can receive sunlight, which brings them joy; the Dwarves love living underground where they are sheltered from weather. Elves love artistic and scholastic pursuits; Dwarves love using fire to make metal do interesting things. Elves love trees, and indeed prefer to live in them, even when travelling among the stars; Dwarves come from a world where trees tend to be aggressively carnivorous, and treat the Elves having domesticated theirs with an attitude best described as 'holy dread'. Every day Elves spend underground is a day spent in ennui, and every moment a Dwarf spends in an Elven tree-city is a moment where their fight-or-flight response is screaming that they are in danger. Why would they want to live in such conditions? Few races are willing to move this far out of their comfort zone just to mingle, with the Ebusians being the exception that proves the rule, in a sense.
Of the alien races, the Togrannamoka (affectionately called 'Togs') were the first to settle on M4. Their involvement had all the fanfare of someone asking their roommate if they wanted to try the new pizza place that opened up nearby; some humans mentioned to Tog friends that they were moving to M4, the Togs asked if they could come and the humans said 'sure, why not'.
The Elves were next to have genuine settlements on the moon, although they had maintained a diplomatic presence since nearly the moment humans had settled there. They've been very interested in what the humans are going to do with the place, and over the last century this interest has driven an uptick in young elves moving to M4 to live there. There are currently 250,000 elves living on the moon; this doesn't sound like much, but this is a tremendously large number of elves to be living anywhere, with few Elven-owned worlds sporting more than a million individuals.
The Sathweer were next to come settle the moon. A few individuals had shown up to come work with human colonists upon hearing of them, but they mainly went to other human worlds; places established enough to have companies with large R&D departments. It wasn't until M4 was on the list of such places that they started moving there in numbers.
The dwarves took a little bit to get over their trepidation of dealing with a species from a null-magic region, but since coming here they have taken amazingly well to human society. Human material science has opened up whole new worlds to Dwarven craftsmen, to say nothing of the introduction of electricity, and while not every dwarf is a craftsman, their culture centers around such pursuits to enough of a degree that they like to be around it regardless.
Gnomes came next, having heard about the place from Dwarves. Gnomes are adept asteroid miners, and the rings of Mangrea are a dream come true to them. Gnomes on the surface of M4 have traditionally been former miners who've retired and are raising families with their fortunes, although there's always been a noteworthy subcommunity of magic practitioners. More recently, young gnomes have been taking a shining to human technology, and a number of Gnomish engineers and even magitechnicians have started making waves.
The next arrival was the Gith, and how it happened was a little odd, at least to most other species, and more so to the Gith themselves. In 2241, the M4 government was contacted by Githyanki who sought permission to bring refugees to M4 to settle permanently. Given that there is no shortage of living area on the moon, and given that the aid the Githyanki had provided in fighting the Psurlons was seen as playing a pivotal role in humankind reaching the stars, their request was granted with very few questions asked. Two neighborhoods matching the specifications needed for the refugees were found near the west coast, each a bit of a distance from the other, supply lines were established to keep them fed, and soon enough a few dozen large, wooden ships were arriving at the western space elevator to disembark their refugees. The human in charge of the operation, Ralph Harmon, mentioned that a nice place had been set aside for the Githyanki refugees, and the Githyanki captain leading the fleet barely held back a sneer as he said "These are not Githyanki. They are Githzerai. Shrak't'lor has fallen after a terrible calamity, and while our People loathe these People, still are they children of Gith. My fleet has decided that it would not do to abandon them, and so we have brought them here to settle. As the members of my fleet would be executed for doing this were we to return home, we have asked you to set aside another place in which we will settle, where our People will be safely out of reach of one another. I assure you that we will earn our keep; the False Worlds spread, and in time you will have need of a Rrakma."
The Barcalid, Ebusians, Kherg and Zhelanans all began settling in orbit of Mangrea in the 2450s, and all for reasons pertaining to the Vortekey'n conquest, either because they were fleeing the Hierarchy or because they wanted to help in the effort against them. Zhelanans set up military training schools and established PMCs, Kherg and Barcalid took to shipbuilding efforts, and Ebusians coordinated all the different species involved in the war. After the war they stayed, because they were safe and prosperous here. Simple as that.
The Nuurians were the last common species on M4 to settle, and in spite of this they are by far the most populous alien species on the moon. Mangrea 4 is their adoptive homeworld after the world of their birth had been conquered by the Vortekey'n and all of their kind living there had been deep fried alive and then eaten. As a result of their unprecedented safety on M4, the moon has become home to the entire surviving portion of the species.
More to come soon.
Formal Name: Ebisu
Informal names: "M4", "The City"
Population: 50,015,941,337
Day length: Exactly 24 hours
Orbital Period: 600 days
M4 is a large world, approximately 1.3 times the radius of Earth, although with a surface gravity identical to that of Earth. This is strange and often remarked upon by scientists, although most people ignore it as it has no impact on their day to day lives. It has a single large continent, a bit larger than South America, which is formally called "Kazaori Eboshi" after the hat the god Ebisu is typically depicted wearing. Most people don't care about this, either, as there are no other continents on the surface of the planet to distinguish it from; if they even need to mention it, they will simply call it 'the continent'.
The continent is surrounded by a shelf of moderately shallow water, between 10 and 100 meters in depth. The shelf is in turn hemmed in by a line of islands, both volcanic and reef, which form a sort of lagoon the size of the Pacific Ocean. This lagoon is home to a riot of life, much of it familiar by Earth standards, and is referred to as 'the shallow sea' to differentiate it from the rest of the surface water on M4, which is uniformly of 3-4 km depth and home to benthic life and little else.
The continent has a number of remarkable features. The first is that it is entirely covered in a single city, end to end. This city was here when the first human settlers arrived, and is maintained by the network of fidgety, emotionally needy robots that first greeted the humans when they arrived. While the city is home to over fifty billion people, most of them human, this only accounts for 40% of the city's land area being used (and that's without counting the upper layer separately). The rest is either sparsely populated or entirely vacant; in the vacant areas, the robots (known collectively as 'Maintenance') will often renovate large sections of the cityscape with new architectural styles simply to keep themselves busy.
Another remarkable feature of the continent is that it has layers, thanks to an enormous edifice built over most of the city, simply called the Eboshi, or 'Hat'. The Hat sits half a kilometer above the continental surface and is home to an array of green spaces cut off from each other by high walls. Some of these spaces are used for agriculture, some for parklands, and some for nature reserves; all were populated with the descendants of Earth species when the first human settlers arrived, and this includes a number of species that have been extinct on Earth for some time, such as Dodos and the KauaʻiʻŌʻō. Living on the Hat is the dream of the idle rich, as well as those who are so wealthy that they can commute by private VTOL. For everyone else, it is too far from where work gets done to be a permanent residence... although there are a number of summer homes here.
The city has maintenance tunnels and facilities everywhere underneath the ground floors, almost all of which are interconnected. Down here Maintenance takes care of power distribution, waste management and other necessities. They do not charge for electricity or water, but they do sell the resources they produce from recycling waste from human society. This ready source of fertilizer and raw materials is greatly appreciated by farmers and manufacturers. Power is mostly generated by a ring of solar farms at the upper end of the two space elevators jutting up from either end of the continent, which receive focused sunlight from Mangrea's mirror arrays. The continent and islands are also dotted with ancient, blocky, solid-state fusion reactors that are used to provide additional power where needed, or reserve power if infrastructure is damaged -- which, between accidents, troll rats chewing on wires, and attempts to engineer outages during turf wars, happens fairly frequently.
Below the maintenance tunnels are ruins, and below those are more ruins. Archeologists have thus far discovered four distinct layers of civilizational ruins beneath the city, each belonging to a different species that settled the moon in a different era, some so ancient that even the Elves have no memory of them. While there are a few areas that the robots of Mainenance try to restrict entry into for the stated reason of keeping people safe, they welcome exploration of the ruins for the most part, stating that they want to know what's down there, too. They are eager enough for this that the better entrance points to the ruins have their own stops on the subway, along with stores selling necessary supplies at cost. Many people have delved the ruins and dredged up fabulous wealth from the ruins, either in the form of lost technology, art and treasure items, ancient magic, or just knowledge that commanded a high price, and this is enough to keep adventurers coming despite the risks.
Timekeeping on Mangrea 4 As with all of the moons of Mangrea, M4's day is exactly 24 hours in length. The moon orbits its primary at a leisurely pace, taking 600 days to circle it fully. This 'M4Year' is divided into four 'quarters' of 150 days each, which are subdivided into 15 10-day weeks. The last week of each quarter is called the Black Week, and is often set aside for the payment of bills and settling of accounts for the quarter. Maintenance Maintenance is the collective name for the robots that keep Mangrea's precursor infrastructure in working order. Each member of Maintenance has an individual identity, which is remarkable enough since other races have thus far been unable to deliberately produce sapient machines smaller than an auditorium. This may be just as well, because Maintenance units are... quirky. They tend to be nervous and fidgety, and they are all and one very eager to please. They will check in sometimes to make sure everything is to your liking -- the water tastes right, the air's the right temperature, you have plenty of electricity, stuff like that. They will sometimes ask you in person in the middle of the night while you were sleeping, which tends to bother people. This behavior has earned them the nickname "Yanderoids", which is admittedly a little unfair if only because Maintenance units cannot engage in violence.
It should be noted that only humans experience this level of 'affection', likely because they were the only ones that Maintenance was directly programmed to take care of. For other species that aren't hostile to humanity, Maintenance is still friendly and helpful but in a much more easygoing fashion.
As stated above, Maintenace makes some money by selling recycled materials and waste, which can be used for manufacturing or fertilizer, respectively. This is their only source of money, aside from the occasional donation or thank-you gift (which never fails to make them deliriously happy), and the main use of this money is the hiring of adventurers to help with infrastructure problems that are best solved by violence. As Maintenance cannot engage in violence itself, it needs outside help to deal with problems like troll rats or xenospider nests. Clearing problems like this out of the infrastructure is usually the first step to establishing residence in a previously unused part of town, and Maintenance is delighted to welcome and accommodate anyone who can pull it off.
Maintenance units have a strange, solid-state 'brain' that handles all memory storage and decision-making. This brain is very durable, and none have succeeded in discerning the inner workings as of this writing. Maintenance does not appreciate being dissected, but as long as the brain is returned so that it can be put in a new body, they tend to let it slide. If the brains are not returned within three weeks, they will hire adventurers to take it back through whatever subterfuge or force is deemed necessary.
Demographics
Total Population: 50,015,941,337
Humans: 47,084,210,009
- Japanese 18,586,357,444
- North American Mixed 9,600,752,753
- European 9,400,453,154
- Central/South American 9,371,716,433
- Other 125,030,225
- Nuurians 1,320,653,321
- Dwarves 615,970,000
- Barcalid 540,156,165
- Togrannamoka 515,487,562
- Sathweer 250,534,718
- Gnomes 199,401,918
- Ebusians 22,085,490
- Zhelanan 21,540,399
- Elves 250,000
- Githzerai 15,327
- Githyanki 9,428
While some find this to be a relative scarcity of alien species (given that there are no fewer than ten species amongst that population) to be remarkable, it should be noted that by much of the galaxy's standards this makes M4 incredibly cosmopolitan. Most species are happy to trade with each other, form alliances and maintain diplomatic relationships, but mixing is rare. This is not usually a matter of disdaining the other races, or finding them repugnant (believe it or not, the only species in the Alliance that is commonly targeted by such attitudes is humanity), but more a matter of comfort zones with little overlap. Perhaps the most obvious example is the Elves and Dwarves. The Elves love living high off the ground where they can receive sunlight, which brings them joy; the Dwarves love living underground where they are sheltered from weather. Elves love artistic and scholastic pursuits; Dwarves love using fire to make metal do interesting things. Elves love trees, and indeed prefer to live in them, even when travelling among the stars; Dwarves come from a world where trees tend to be aggressively carnivorous, and treat the Elves having domesticated theirs with an attitude best described as 'holy dread'. Every day Elves spend underground is a day spent in ennui, and every moment a Dwarf spends in an Elven tree-city is a moment where their fight-or-flight response is screaming that they are in danger. Why would they want to live in such conditions? Few races are willing to move this far out of their comfort zone just to mingle, with the Ebusians being the exception that proves the rule, in a sense.
Of the alien races, the Togrannamoka (affectionately called 'Togs') were the first to settle on M4. Their involvement had all the fanfare of someone asking their roommate if they wanted to try the new pizza place that opened up nearby; some humans mentioned to Tog friends that they were moving to M4, the Togs asked if they could come and the humans said 'sure, why not'.
The Elves were next to have genuine settlements on the moon, although they had maintained a diplomatic presence since nearly the moment humans had settled there. They've been very interested in what the humans are going to do with the place, and over the last century this interest has driven an uptick in young elves moving to M4 to live there. There are currently 250,000 elves living on the moon; this doesn't sound like much, but this is a tremendously large number of elves to be living anywhere, with few Elven-owned worlds sporting more than a million individuals.
The Sathweer were next to come settle the moon. A few individuals had shown up to come work with human colonists upon hearing of them, but they mainly went to other human worlds; places established enough to have companies with large R&D departments. It wasn't until M4 was on the list of such places that they started moving there in numbers.
The dwarves took a little bit to get over their trepidation of dealing with a species from a null-magic region, but since coming here they have taken amazingly well to human society. Human material science has opened up whole new worlds to Dwarven craftsmen, to say nothing of the introduction of electricity, and while not every dwarf is a craftsman, their culture centers around such pursuits to enough of a degree that they like to be around it regardless.
Gnomes came next, having heard about the place from Dwarves. Gnomes are adept asteroid miners, and the rings of Mangrea are a dream come true to them. Gnomes on the surface of M4 have traditionally been former miners who've retired and are raising families with their fortunes, although there's always been a noteworthy subcommunity of magic practitioners. More recently, young gnomes have been taking a shining to human technology, and a number of Gnomish engineers and even magitechnicians have started making waves.
The next arrival was the Gith, and how it happened was a little odd, at least to most other species, and more so to the Gith themselves. In 2241, the M4 government was contacted by Githyanki who sought permission to bring refugees to M4 to settle permanently. Given that there is no shortage of living area on the moon, and given that the aid the Githyanki had provided in fighting the Psurlons was seen as playing a pivotal role in humankind reaching the stars, their request was granted with very few questions asked. Two neighborhoods matching the specifications needed for the refugees were found near the west coast, each a bit of a distance from the other, supply lines were established to keep them fed, and soon enough a few dozen large, wooden ships were arriving at the western space elevator to disembark their refugees. The human in charge of the operation, Ralph Harmon, mentioned that a nice place had been set aside for the Githyanki refugees, and the Githyanki captain leading the fleet barely held back a sneer as he said "These are not Githyanki. They are Githzerai. Shrak't'lor has fallen after a terrible calamity, and while our People loathe these People, still are they children of Gith. My fleet has decided that it would not do to abandon them, and so we have brought them here to settle. As the members of my fleet would be executed for doing this were we to return home, we have asked you to set aside another place in which we will settle, where our People will be safely out of reach of one another. I assure you that we will earn our keep; the False Worlds spread, and in time you will have need of a Rrakma."
The Barcalid, Ebusians, Kherg and Zhelanans all began settling in orbit of Mangrea in the 2450s, and all for reasons pertaining to the Vortekey'n conquest, either because they were fleeing the Hierarchy or because they wanted to help in the effort against them. Zhelanans set up military training schools and established PMCs, Kherg and Barcalid took to shipbuilding efforts, and Ebusians coordinated all the different species involved in the war. After the war they stayed, because they were safe and prosperous here. Simple as that.
The Nuurians were the last common species on M4 to settle, and in spite of this they are by far the most populous alien species on the moon. Mangrea 4 is their adoptive homeworld after the world of their birth had been conquered by the Vortekey'n and all of their kind living there had been deep fried alive and then eaten. As a result of their unprecedented safety on M4, the moon has become home to the entire surviving portion of the species.
More to come soon.
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