Thanks for all your comments about Sudamérica in our last couple of previews! I know the Æon team appreciates your thoughts.

Having explored one of Earth’s many continents, let’s turn our eyes skyward. There are dozens of  worlds and outposts in the depths of space. While Sudamérica is territory we’ve travelled before in previous editions (albeit somewhat different than our presentation), let’s have a look at something entirely new: a nova colony.

Or to be more specific, a nova-era colony with no novas, which should be useful even for those of you who prefer your Æon quantum-free. While this will also be split into two parts, this is a bit of a shorter preview.

Marfisa

The most recently discovered “lost colony” from the Aberrant War era, Marfisa has been isolated for nearly a century due to a catastrophic accident that occurred during the colonists’ Aberrant-provided warp to the distant planet. The circumstances of the warp disaster stranded the survivors for sixty years without access to advanced technology. The unexpected recovery of a quantum­-tech supercomputer and automated manufactory led to an ideological split in the colony’s population, forming the basis for a 19 year cold war between the Preserver and Pandoran factions. While an Æon Trinity recon team has learned much about Marfisa and its society, a true first contact mission is still in the planning stages.

Planetary Data: Marfisa
Founded: 2042 (Independent colonization)
Discovery: 2040 (Aberrant discovery)
Rediscovered: 2123 (Upeo/ISRA Survery)
Distance from Earth: 13,750 light years
Star: Angelica – G1
Diameter: 12,111 km
Gravity: 1.01 Earth
Atmosphere: Oxygen & Nitrogen (breathable)
Air Pressure: .99 Earth
Percentage Ocean: 85%
Rotation Period: 36 hours
Native Life: Plants, insect­-like and fish-­like animals
Human Population: 5,000,000

A Lost Colony At War With Itself

In January of 2123, the members of an Upeo/ISRA exploration team, searching for worlds suitable for human colonization, were startled to discover that one of the planets on their list of candidates was already home to a human colony. Following standard protocols, they called in an Æon Trinity recon squad to learn as much as possible about the colony before making contact.

Extensive clairsentient scanning from a stationary orbit behind Marfisa’s single moon, Virago, revealed two large human settlements surrounded by a web of smaller towns. The larger city, Endeavor, was located in the center of the colony’s agricultural operations, with satellite communities focused on farming and fishing. The slightly smaller city, Endurance, was in a mountainous region and populated by miners and industrial workers. During this routine scanning, the clears were startled to observe a number of small military engagements between the two regions. It rapidly became clear that the people of Marfisa were at war with one another.

The recon squad needed more information, but secrecy was a paramount concern, as interfering with the colony, or even letting the colonists know they had been rediscovered, might make the situation worse. A small group of clairsentient, telepathic and biokinetic infiltrators was teleported to the planet to gather more intel about the colony and its reasons for civil war. A little over two months later, a picture of Marfisa’s history began to take shape.

Shortly before the Aberrant War, two charismatic and powerful “Novas” made an offer to take any baseline human who wanted an escape from the rapidly degenerating situation on Earth to a safe, distant world to start over. The Aberrant calling herself “Tunnel Rat” would create a warp gate connecting Earth to the new colony planet, while her partner “Babbage” would supply the colonists with quantum technology that would make their lives easy. Nearly four million people from all over the world took them up on their offer and traveled to the departure point in New Zealand, where they would take a twelve­-hour journey through the warp.

Unfortunately, Tunnel Rat was heavily Corrupted, and maintaining such a large warp tunnel for such a long time caused her powers to go out of control, killing her and catastrophically altering the environment inside the tunnel. Most of the colonists, as well as their livestock and seedlings, arrived on Marfisa intact, but much of their technology was shredded and scrambled by the chaotic warp energy. Although some of the equipment was salvageable and Marfisa had plentiful natural resources, it would be decades before the colonists were able to return to even a mid-­1980s level of technology and industry.

The colonists initially focused on survival, founding their first settlement, Endeavor, on a simple agenda of farming and families. People who had been enemies on Earth due to politics, race, or religion found themselves forced to let go of old hatreds in order to survive and prosper. In place of the old prejudices, a new one formed: the Aberrants Tunnel Rat and Babbage were seen as nearly satanic figures whose superhuman abilities had stranded the colonists and left them for dead.

As the colony prospered and grew, a second large settlement, Endurance, was founded in order to help meet the Marfisans’ growing need for better tools and machines. Unlike the pastoral region that Endeavor was located in, life in and around Endurance was harsh and unpleasant; the mining work was brutally hard and living in a polluted industrial zone often led to illnesses and early deaths. Despite the hardships, the people of Endurance were proud of the work they did to help modernize the colony, contributing equipment for farming, materials for construction, and even radios and primitive computers.

Sounds pretty good so far, but you know it can’t be that easy, or else contact would already have been made by that recon team. What do you think of Marfisa so far? What do you think happened afterwards? Let us know in the comments!