Xanu Prime
The shimmering Xanu Prime, capital of the Xanu Free League and the entire Coalition of Colonies, is an Earth-sized habitable world and arguably one of the most important in the Orion Spur. Its climate is very temperate, and its populace diverse with almost every single Human origin - even Solarians begrudgingly being found here. Megacities of varying size dot one hemisphere, while another remains bathed in the bright blue, glowing Freedom’s Deep ocean. It is the economic hub of the Coalition, with all manner of imports making their way to the bustling planet. The government of the Coalition, the Representative Summit, meets on the artificial island of Greentree, located equidistant from every city on the planet.
In the capital city of Argia sa Mar, many embassies and legations are found in the Foreign Quarter, alongside branch offices of every megacorporation. The League is governed by a president who is elected from among the mayors of the megacities and serves a three year term.
It is situated in the galactic north of the colonies within the Central Coalition region, bordering Arusha and Rebel’s Reach.
History
Early Years
Xanu Prime’s first colonists resided on long-distance ships numbering in the hundreds that came to settle on the planet over the course of the first 30 years of its history. Starting in 2162, it is one of the oldest discovered habitable planets and one of the first set out to be colonized by the Alliance. Despite the danger of settling over a year’s travel from the safety of Alliance territories, millions set out with a promise of better times ahead by setting Humanity’s flag so far. Colonization of the planet went by like a dream, with a mixture of Earthling species and xenos being brought to slowly adjust its environment to fit very specific, utopian needs. This proceeded under Alliance supervision for nearly 100 years leading up into the 2260’s.
Growth
With the planet now dotted with well-prepared, self sufficient cities, Xanu Prime was quickly becoming a powerhouse of the interstellar economy. Many distant Alliance colonies relied directly on Xanu for support and sustainability. This is why, when the Solarian economy collapsed and the Second Great Depression brought about the Interstellar War, it decidedly became a target. During the seventeen to eighteen years of the depression leading up to the war, predictions quickly came in regarding the Alliance’ approach to unruly, united separatists. This, of course, was cutting off their supply at the new source… Xanu Prime.
Seeing the worst coming, Xanu Prime quickly turned into the first Base World. Booming military production and outspoken subversion of the Alliance’ taxation turned its cities into bunkers and its stations into weapons platforms. Before the notion of it, Xanu was prepared for war.
When the Solarian fleets made their move in 2276, fighting occurred after two years when they refused to depart Coalition systems. A massive guerilla war broke out, and it took only three years for Solarian fleets to fight their way to the heart of the Coalition. By then, Xanu Prime was the closest manifestation of a planetary fortress seen in recorded history. With excessive anti-orbital countermeasures, the Solarian fleets were forced to land troops on the planet, and thus began the Siege of Xansan.
The Siege of Xansan
A battle waged over a year encompassing 93% of the surface of Xanu Prime, the Siege of Xansan is the bloodiest conflict in the history of the Orion Spur. Little is known about the true magnitude of the battle, nor the exact projection of force either side used. It began in 2281 and went to the Solarian Alliance’ retreat in 2282. The results left Xanu torn to pieces. Enormous craters not only dot - but completely coat the planet, as permanent scars of the orbital bombardment and weapons of mass destruction utilized in attempts to force the Coalition to stand down. As more died, it is said the Coalition’s resolve grew, and in the insanity there was only the hope of true freedom present to ease their minds.
Chemical and atmospheric warfare was used in proliferation on Xanu Prime during the siege until its finality at the city of Xansan, the final stronghold before the Alliance had arrived at its capital Argia sa Mar. On May 6 2282, Alliance forces declared a retreat after substantial losses and were routed by Coalition warships in orbit. Far from home and with their supply routes now cut off by the successful guerilla war waged lightyears away, they had no other choice but to flee.
Modern Times
Since the Siege, Xanu has long regained its foothold as the capital of the now-strengthened Coalition. Eventually, it would become the foundation that the Coalition would be built upon for hundreds of years to come. The damage done by the war will forever be irreparable, however - and the governing body of the planet is content with the marks left on the Coalition. Xanu Prime’s landmass and much of its seaboard are designated as war memorials, nearly 89% of the planet’s regions themselves.
Culture
Having earned being called the “foundation upon which the Coalition was built,” Xanu Prime embodies freedom of spirit above all with diversity and unity held tightly to this ideology. Considering its history, one would expect Xanu Prime’s culture to be centered around a warrior’s mindset. This could not be further from the truth, and much of the Free League as well has taken up a mercantile culture infused with its freedom. Trade and the betterment of the whole are highly sought after, and almost all native media centers around this.
The planet is known for outsourcing almost all of its education in foreign exchange programs to the Republic of Elyra, who it maintains excellent relations with. The premise of the foreign exchange is based off of the higher education standards within Elyra, and the journey to Republic space leading through Valley Hale is typically a safe one.
Some of the galaxy’s most trustworthy merchant groups are Xanusii in origin and own storefronts and reserved warehouses in the Xanusean Underbelly.
Xanu Prime is a member of the Asoral Racing Network and its planetary debris ring serves as the largest stellar racing course in the galaxy, and the most dangerous. The icons seen in Asoral II (Crosk) are renowned figures in the Free League as a whole. Bound synthetics over IPCs are utilized majorly here, and IPCs are typically in the less dangerous races. These typically involve ship-spanning integrated AIs fitted into the fastest, meanest Elyran-made fighter chassis off the market.
Life on Xanu Prime
Populated areas of Xanu Prime are recognizable by tremendously large walls, sometimes towering over a hundred meters in height and casting a great shadow across large portions of the cities they surround. Few actual rural areas exist, and much of the population is semi-densely packed into metropolitan areas. The clashing aesthetic of towering, inactive war engines and serene cityscapes fill Xanu’s urban scenery. On the ground, things resemble sprawling markets, filling the crowded streets with pedestrians of all origins doing business at ease. Skyscrapers and buildings are usually new constructions, but still fill out a good portion of the city view.
Living conditions on Xanu Prime are quite high quality for a Coalition world, due to its central nature to the colonies that rely on it. The common Xanusii finds themselves making their daily commute on foot, with residences and workplaces generally condensed into short walking distance universally across cities. This permits almost total free airspace above cities seeing as hovermotive traffic is nonexistent. Aircraft and space-faring vessels dot the sky and loom mere hundreds of meters over the city streets, as the prime spaceports are integrated into lower space elevator complexes that utilize mag-lift technology to support extreme weight loads.
Robotics and salvaging is a booming industry on Xanu Prime due to the sheer amount of leftover materials from the Interstellar War. Many robots used on the planet date back to the war itself and even before, their chassis found and repurposed over time. Other, monumentally large robots and abandoned vehicles lay inactive and litter the open fields across the planet’s surface.
The Xanusean Underbelly
Beneath the surface of the sprawling cities lay the Xanusean Underbelly, a labyrinthian maze of wartime bunkers, hideouts, safehouses and built-over fortresses or military installations that now serve as the foundation for the very streets the common Xanusii treads upon. The overall layout of the Underbelly has long since been lost to the test of time, due to cave-ins and unmarked construction, thus turning it into a rather dangerous place. Some marked and charted areas of the Underbelly are utilized as storage facilities.
Environment
The environment of Xanu Prime is projected to be irreversibly damaged by the Siege. However, much to its population’s surprise, life found a way and many of the animals first brought on the original colony ships have survived to this day. The once-wastelands have regrown their grass, though the planet is remarkable in that there is little to no tree coverage anywhere. With no canopy to hide under or forest to reside within, birds of prey and scavengers flourish most. Larger beasts peacefully graze on the endless plains with little to no natural predators. After the Siege, much of the landscape of Xanu Prime was altered, and where there were once mountains now reside gargantuan craters. These craters often interfere with one another geographically forming deep valleys.
Many of the shallower valleys are safe to travel through without atmospheric protection, however deeper valleys and craters still contain clouds or trace signatures of the same atmospheric weaponry used during the Siege. This often presents itself in long-standing, highly poisonous fog completely and utterly covering the deepest points of many craters for kilometers at a time. Thousands of craters are similar to this, and efforts have been made to siphon out the poisonous gas to little avail for the monumental task. Within this “death fog” are many species immune to it, some having taken advantage of the low visibility such as large carnivorous insects waiting for prey to wander in.
The seas and rivers of Xanu are among the most remarkable features of the planet. Due to specialized means of filtrating and curing the seas post-war, the totality of its water sources have taken on an incredibly bright, glowing cyan shimmer. In darkness, these shine a brilliant blue, illuminating the horizon wherever water may lie. From orbit, the “veins” of the planet can be seen through the huge rivers flowing across its landmass.
The swift recovery of Xanu’s biosphere is pinned on a major contract signed to Zeng-Hu Pharmaceuticals and Hephaestus Industries to incite a massive terraforming shift and upkeep countermeasures to the fallout of the weapons used during the war. Zeng-Hu Pharmaceuticals has, since 2301, continued to stabilize the biosphere for a sixty-trillion credit contract being paid off to this day. Hephaestus Industries works on upkeeping countermeasure machinery, used to scrub the soil of residual radiation and toxic materials leftover.
Population and Major Locations
Population : 13,650,000,000+
Argia sa Mar
The center of the Coalition’s power, Argia sa Mar is a bustling metropolis that consumes most of the open non-memorial territory on Xanu Prime with full walls surrounding it. Built at the base of the southern hemisphere’s “Defiance” space elevator, the city grows in density and height as one looks closer to the center. Freighters pass over the urban landscape, landing and departing, descending and raising from the base of the elevator’s grav lifts routinely. These move in large lines before moving elsewhere within the planet’s atmosphere, or back into orbit. Skyscrapers and buildings protruding from the landscape spread out across these airspace lanes, giving a wonderful view of passing ships up close on the upper stories.
Argia sa Mar’s inner cityscape would seem normal from an aerial view, but the interior tells a different story, with its architecture seemingly upside down. To provide more space for the tradeways inside the city, the skyscrapers are built like flipped pyramids with pillars interconnecting for support. This upper “canopy” of the city casts the trading posts below in darkness for most of the day, and during the night the sky turns a deep blue because of the ocean’s presence just outside the city.
Kuenoi
In the northern hemisphere of Xanu Prime is Kuenoi, the secondary city of importance on the planet. This is a much smaller city than Argia sa Mar, though megacorporate presence dominates it with an iron fist. All megacorporations, excluding Einstein Engines possess points of interest in Kuenoi, mostly headquarters for operations in the Coalition as a whole. Kuenoi is known for being built inside of a large impact crater from the war, and remains isolated from any sort of negative weather effects due to the large ridges of the crater. This, unfortunately, makes the surrounding land quite arid and barren of any life outside of its walls. NanoTrasen dominates the scene in Kuenoi completely, owning more property in the city than their rivals combined.
Xansan
Xansan is the fabled victim of the Siege of Xansan, a horrible battle which ultimately ended in its own favor due to the strategic location of the city. Built along the opposing side of a rushing river whose flow was controlled by a Coalition-held dam for the duration of the war, Xansan managed to sustain its own source of power through the conflict and repel the attackers by controlling the ebb of the river that separated them and the Solarians. Shields protected the dam from artillery fire, but little could be done to protect the city itself which was reduced to rubble in its entirety in defense of the capital, Argia sa Mar.
In modern times, Xansan has been partly rebuilt and the turbines within the dam spin to this day.
Greentree
Yearly, the totality (or at least, those who can show up) of the Coalition’s active representatives reach to one another on the artificial island of Greentree in the Freedom’s Deep. This is a sparsely populated and rather small island, its population never exceeding the thousand or so groundskeepers, maintainers and garrisoned troops. This changes when the annual Summit is called, of which the representative of Xanu Prime - Chief Reilly Sianne - decides when and how this occurs. Traditionally, this occurs on the first of May each year, though Sianne has been known to have erratic schedules.
Synthetics on Xanu Prime
With the Coalition being the easiest of the galactic nations for someone to gain citizenship in. Before the Solarian collapse and even more now. Positronics, both owned and free alike, attempt to create new lives for themselves in the Coalition of Colonies. Some are on the run from their former owners whilst others are seeking a place where they are treated as equals and protected by the law. Thanks to the heavily decentralized nature of the Coalition moving to the more rural or isolated colonies was not an option for these immigrants, and so these free, freedom-seeking or refugee synthetics end up in the developed capital world of Xanu Prime.
Whilst many positronics might not have made Xanu their first choice, the planet's position as a trade giant within the Coalition and its developed nature makes moving to and living there relatively easy for synthetics and it has become the end destination for many. Some of them find it comfortable whilst others simply run out of funds to travel anywhere else. Free synthetics moving to Xanu are usually able to find careers and settle into lives similar to that of the ordinary organic Xanusiians. living similarly to them within the planet's megacities with the same freedoms and quality of life afforded to organic citizens. Nothing prevents a hard-working, successful IPC from gaining a reputable position in a local or mega-corporate business. However, those who are not successful can find themselves as equally destitute as any unsuccessful organic could.
However, for refugee positronics or those deliberately fleeing to seek their freedom, the story is often quite different. All of the spur’s major megacorporations have a presence on Xanu Prime and non-citizen synthetics, waiting for their chance to apply for citizenship or gain status as an official refugee often find themselves scrutinized or tested by corporate security forces if they match the description of IPC frames reported missing or rogue. Synthetics caught in this way are returned to their owner companies and mind-wiped as punishment, Hephaestus often sends positronics caught in this manner to their nearby installations on Burzsia.
For those non-citizen positronics who manage to remain free or gain status as a refugee, life on Xanu is far less comfortable than even their poorer free counterparts, lacking the same rights afforded to them. Often used as cheap labour by local salvaging operations or forced to sign on one-sided contracts with mega-corporations, the dream of freedom holds little of its promise, and many synthetics dream of the day they might become a citizen and have the income and rights to rise through society. These non-citizen synthetics still live within the megacities that dot the planet's surface, forming their own small communities in the poorer sections.
However, for other positronics menial work, slavish contracts and poor living conditions are something they refuse to stand for. Rather they fall into use by various criminal elements on the planet. Mobility or Industrial frames can prove highly useful to criminal elements on the planet and offer an IPC far more reward than they might otherwise receive, however, many synthetics also find themselves forced into working for criminal organizations instead, by force or simply to get by.
Owned synthetics are also a common sight on Xanu Prime. Both corporately and privately owned. These positronics are utilized in much the same way as other parts of the spur. Industrial frames are a common sight amongst salvaging operations on the planet, hospitals making use of Mobility or Bishop frames contracted from Zeng-Hu along with Idris IRUs and ISUs to enforce the company's power on-world. These owned positronics live lives common to all owned positronics in the spur, with their conditions and lot in life mostly depending on the corporation or individual who owns them.
The human population of Xanu Prime holds mixed opinions on their IPC residents, some sympathizing with the synthetics struggles for freedom, identifying with them due to their previous struggles, whilst others support the local megacorporations and argue for the ownership of positronics. A minority hold suspicions towards the number of refugee IPC groups fleeing the Solarian Wildlands, suspecting they could be spies or simply still loyal to their previous masters.
Charitable initiatives exist to help provide repairs, charge and work to synthetics on Xanu Prime, spearheaded by the Trinary Perfection from their nearby headquarters on Orepit. This charity helps these less fortunate synthetics immensely whilst preaching to them, and conversion to the Trinary Perfection is common thanks to this, but the amount flooding in after the Solarian Collapse continues to strain the initiatives to breaking point.
The one unlikely place that synthetics can end up is as part of the Xanusean military, finding good work as an IPC after obtaining citizenship can be hard and the option of serving in the Xanusean military is an attractive one, providing them with money, repairs and charging as they require it. It is not unknown for positronics to sometimes join the ranks of the Frontier Protection Bureau as Frontier Rangers or other support staff.