Aethra

The first contact point in the new solar system, and the place where Humanity got it’s bearings before quickly resuming typical human behavior and factioning off after a period of unrest. The Western Integrity has laid claim to Eventide and the rest of Aethra since the 30th year after contact, and has used it’s significant population advantage to turn the small original colony into the most massive city in the Atlean orbit and The Western Integrity into the most powerful administration.
Physical Characteristics: The 7th furthest from and 3rd largest moon of Atlas, as well as it’s smallest to have an atmosphere. It completes a full orbit of it’s planet in about 78 hours, and almost 58 of them are spent in the shadow of Atlas.
Geography & Climate: 82% ocean and lake, with the remaining 18% dry land consisting largely of wet and barren rock. The moon is volcanically active, though most current activity is under the sea. Much of the dry land is host to mountain ranges, often dramatically steep due to lack of soil. Beaches and lowlands are peppered with geological evidence of microbial activity.; Temperatures range from -212 to 90 Fahrenheit on the surface, but are typically stable and remain comfortable for humans around the equator. Seasons are similar to Earth’s, dependent on the hemisphere as Atlas’ axis is tilted. By far the most notable weather feature of this planet, though, is the thick, permanent, cloud cover over the majority of the surface. It rains or snows heavily just about everywhere, and in certain places even thunderstorms nearly constantly. The first major challenge the original colony faced was building a city to survive the forces of erosion the perpetual downpour caused, as they hadn’t had to deal with free water in a couple hundred years.
Ecology: Aethra is host to massive oceans and abundant single-celled organisms, but that’s just about it. No multi-cellular life has yet been discovered here. Little sunlight reaches the surface of this moon, which means the most diverse organisms live off the abundant geothermal activity on the ocean floor. Terra firma and the surface of the ocean are dominated by a single clade of photosynthesizers that have managed to evolve unparalleled efficiency in light-processing. The atmosphere contains just enough oxygen to sustain human life because of them.; Only just enough though, humans have done a little terra-forming in certain areas, namely Eventide, to make it comfortable enough to live on long term. The most obvious and distinctive example of this is the street lights in Eventide. They use tall columns of seawater sat on top of powerful lights, filled to the brim with Aethran microbes modified to handle the extra strain. These belch oxygen into the surrounding area at a rate that no earth organism could ever come close to.; The lack of previous multicellular life here means that the microbes on Aethra aren’t capable of causing serious illness in humans or the creatures they brought with them. This is the primary reason Aethra was chosen as the host of first colony site, other than it being the least hostile of the habitable moons in terms of killer weather and dangerous alien animals anyway.; In certain places they’ve grown into colorful microbial mats stretching miles across, hundreds of thousands of years in the making. In the ocean they form massive blooms in a variety of colors, depending on the conditions. This gives Aethra a distinctly alien sort of beauty, especially from afar. A Little closer and it’s still a welcome accessory to the otherwise drab terrain, but can be a little slimy and a lot smelly in places, if mostly harmless.; Sadly, humanity and all the life forms that come with us are not nearly as kind to the native microbes as they are to humanity. As slow growing and defenseless as they are, any contamination is very dangerous to the ecosystem. Certain groups have voiced this concern, asking the WI’s administration to choose new expansion sites wisely and keep strict procedure to reduce disturbing any important areas, but it’s hard to garner sympathy for microbes, and some argue that in the long run, it’s too late for them anyway.

Logged Locations
Eventide
Eventide, WI: The Aethrean city, home of 30% of the remaining human population of 20,000,000, and built around the first landed Ark. This is the central heart of the Western Integrity.; The WI’s Heart of industrial activity and production, and the home of most of its population. Relies very heavily on imports for food, but exports a lot of machinery and most factory made products.; City built of concrete and steel. Distinctly brutalist in nature. Blocky, impersonal, barren. The place had to be built efficiently and with very limited materials, so they didn’t bother embellishing. At the time, it would have been considered majorly wasteful to spend extra resources beautifying, especially since the society doing it hadn’t had to build much at all in the past couple hundred years. After settlement, as the city continued to grow at a slower rate, they began to break from the original scheme in places. Brick and natural stone became popular for a while, and new materials and techniques more suitable to land they were living on were developed. The most modern development looks like sparse black marble separated by lumaglass, slanted roofs and soft lighting.; If considering the entire population, the culture here is diverse enough that it’s hard to find a common thread. In a place as packed full as Eventide, people are eager to set themselves apart from the crowd by any means. The amount of subcultures present in and unique to even one district are far and away too much for any non-native to keep track of. Classism is rampant though, and there is a very clear if unspoken division between the laboring and capitalist classes.; The upper class players in Eventide often don’t live there full time, as it’s not exactly green grass under the cloud. The city is a powerhouse of industrial activity, therefore very tempting to those that like to throw around cash, but it’s not nearly as safe to make money in as many of them would like. Eventide is competitive, not much space left, and the people are resistant to a lot of business models that work elsewhere.; The bulk of the population is comprised of people in the manufacturing and service industries, and coming off of a period of heavy reform and social unrest in the past 40 years, they tend to lean very pro-worker and are community-orientated. They are aware that this is their city.; Eventiders have strong tethers to their roots. Cultural heritage is valued in the WI in general, but is important the people of Eventide especially. Many languages are spoken side-by-side, and cultural communities are abundant.; The youth culture of recent years has been rebelling against Eventide’s brutalist production-centered history. Latched onto bright colors as symbology for valuing nonproductive human activities. Chromapunk is the moniker given to this new movement, though at this point, the ‘aesthetic’ has heavily stolen from and mutilated by commercial entities.
Braeholm
outer aethra, WI: Small town built to process raw material from the farther up the pipeline before it's sold to manufacturers in Eventide. Despite the ease of terraforming Aethra, Braeholm uses bubble colony techniques in it's infrastructure to mitigate the effects of pollution on residents.

AETHRA

Western Integrity