Haqani (after Vela)

After half a year House Fornax troops, businesses and "influencers” succeeded in pacifying the planet. In October of 3201 visitors were finally allowed to visit the planet, first in the revamped city of Babili and the overhauled tourist destination of Kilwa Kisiwani.

»House Fornax is happy to announce that the ongoing Meropj Project is already a brilliant success and that visitors are now welcome again in the Perithr system - visit the beautiful markets in Babili and bathe under a Fornax sun at the beaches of Kilwa Kisiwani!«

-Advertisement in October, 3201

Babili
Babili is the new capital of Haqani and the starting point of House Fornax’s Meropj Project. The city that always had high numbers of visitors, as it was the closest to the planet’s surface and the gateway to the former government’s train systems, now became significantly bigger. Large numbers of serfs from other, deeper cities were moved to Babili and many traders and businesses from all over Acheron Rho settled in the new, gargantuan market quarters. Tourists are entrapped by the wild nightlife in the older areas, of which many still advertise the free spirit of the House Pyxis, as the city is considered the noble houses birthplace.

But there is more to visit now: Craftsmen opened workshops in the new Fornax quarters, orange lights run through every street, imitating a small lava stream in the ground, much architecture was changed to signal the new rulers over the planet, museums were closed, evaluated, changed and opened again, cafes and many, many street food vendors sprung up. House Fornax’s brutalist, blocky buildings stand in stark contrast over the original city and signify that a new, stronger power is in charge, the tall buildings surrounding and looking down on most everything of the old Babili.

At the core of the new Babili are two massive anchor points for Fornax’s rule over the planet: A gigantic train station, newly built and connected to all cities on the planet, enables for a much more efficient and convenient travel system through the planet’s subsurface habitats. New tunnels were bored in record time with some of House Fornax’s heaviest machinery, providing more possibilities of transit connections between the cities, also enabling a clear separation of passenger and freight trains.

And then, right at the core of the city, is the new Campus Of Re-Education, an institute that serfs have to go through, including schools and a university, in which the actual history of the planet and its former owners is taught, the many mistakes that were made by them and the many wrongdoings they hurt the planet’s population with, even if those wrongdoings weren’t always visible to the naked serf eye.

Babili Hotspots

 * Dome project on surface to make Babili a proper spaceport on the surface
 * Campus Of Re-Education (CORE) and FREE Commission structures
 * Spaceship part factory with experimental workshops and labs attached, researching alien resources gathered from the planet
 * Giant train stations for passenger and freight trains zooming through the tunnel systems
 * [...]

Kilwa Kisiwani
Kilwa Kisiwani is the new tourist hot spot and cash cow for House Fornax. The geological wonder of the subsurface ocean and its beauty were only amplified by an artificial Fornax sun that lets the water glow in calming, warm oranges and reds. The colorful city has changed its appearance a bit now: From many blue aspects it changed to Fornax’s fire orange everywhere, the Velan influence is by now completely invisible in public. Promenades of red cobblestones line the beautiful beaches, cafes and bars with prominent Fornax drinks turn many areas of the city into party miles that attract a young, wild audience that wants to let go and celebrate their desires. To no surprise a red (or rather orange) light district established itself close to the party promenades.

For the classier visitors there are separate beaches, shut off from the promenades for the masses. They have quieter districts with high end cafes and restaurants, museums of Fornax great works (right next to it is an exhibition on evils, faults, and the eventual and logical fall of House Vela) and a mildly reworked history of the planet await to be visited, Majan influenced culture oozes from theaters, music shows and onto the streets, with many live bands playing sometimes fiery, sometimes calming background music to the visitor’s trips. Another rather drastic change in the cityscape is that with House Fornax came not only different colors and interpretations of the planet’s history, but a large number of grav vehicles. While the public transport was miniscule in comparison before, with old-timey vehicles, now GravCar taxis fly through the city at high speeds. Haqanian serfs who adopted quickly enough and invested into public transport, founded taxi companies and the like, are already counting themselves as lucky winners of the Meropj Project.

Iram
The city of Iram is still shut off to the public. House Fornax relocated a large number of serfs from Iram to Babili and other places, then built a straight and massive freight train connection from the former grotto and cave city to the new capital of the planet. The city area was massively widened, many caves broken through, to open up space for heavy Fornax mining machinery. House Fornax quickly realized that while the Velan rulers already scoured the planet for many of its riches, there was more to be gained if the miners were just a tad more ruthless to the environment.

The structural integrity of the caves and grottos, which were so beautiful to behold, was in question and so many of them were changed into proper mining stollens to accomodate for House Fornax boring and sifting equipment.

Tyros
One of the famous Haqani exports found an end as the production line of Haqani Blue Whiskey was stopped in Tyros, the recipe slightly changed and relabeled as ‘Meropj Red’.

Prices for the old Haqani Blue Whiskey are now skyrocketing as it is limited to what has already been produced and shipped. Some few Fornax nobles hoarded the already existing products on Haqani for themselves (and to sell later, in a few decades) but most of the existing Haqani Blue was shipped off and is now becoming one of the most expensive drinks throughout the Sector.

With unusual harshness House Fornax also came down on the many drug laboratories and the handoff areas for illegal substances. Rumours have it that the Majan nobles hired a good number of the more successful drug designers and makers, but most of the dealers were sent to detention (and in some cases re-education) facilities.

Tyros, always known to be a good place to acquire illegal substances of almost any kind, is now not perfectly clean. Instead of the drug laboratories House Fornax installed several chemical plants in the city to refine resources won from Haqani’s deep layers. But the work is taxing and so straining that within weeks new dealers sprung up to sell the working population of the city all kinds of uppers and stimulants.

Derinkuyu
Maybe the biggest challenge for House Fornax laid in Derinkuyu, the city furthest away from the planet’s surface, the city that Velan serfs and former nobles and their security forces held the longest, as it was an almost natural bunker, an incredible fortress against intruders. Most of these security measures were broken down by the Majan engineers, new tunnels connected Derinkuyu with other cities and allowed for easier transport and more variability in entering the city. While that led to some insurgents being able to flee the city and possibly even the planet, it opened up the city and made it easier to breach for troops.

Derinkuyu was always known for its mushrooms. House Fornax, ever concerned about the homeplanet’s food reserves, increased production to levels that weren’t formerly reachable. Much of the city was restructured to allow for more space to grow mushrooms in greenhouses, serfs had to move into even tighter mass housing areas.

The raised mushroom production was not only beneficial for House Fornax’s food needs, however, many of the natural elements won from the plants are now used in chemicals, medication, some of the mushroom roots even found use in engineering, their composition and resilience put to good use in building safe structures on the planet - and even on the surface, as some small scale tests proved.

Naturally in the very center of the circular shaped city is a newly erected monument of House Fornax’s victory and the liberation of Haqani’s citizens in the final push on Derinkuyu: A 50m tall statue of a Homefront soldier made out of marble, inlaid with gold and steel, saluting a waving Fornax flag.

Eskendria
Eskendria was the planet’s old capital. The city housed more than 30 million people who are now almost completely relocated to other cities and planets. Everything of value was stripped from the city’s many cultural beacons. Artifacts, historic scriptures, items of both material and historical value were robbed by Fornax soldiers and either brought back to Maja and House Fornax proper or, in most cases, acquired underhand by individual Fornax nobles and noble families. After Eskendria was cleared of almost anything the Majans deemed valuable, the city was fully deconstructed. The building materials and resources won from that would be useful in the many Fornax projects for the Meropj Project and back home on Maja, the Fornax nobles argued.

Instead of a large city in what might be the largest cave beneath Haqani’s surface, Fornax now constructed a massive power plant to fuel most of the planet with electricity An obscenely gigantic basin was erected where once the capital stood, magma streams were re-routed from deeper layers towards the planet’s core. With brilliant engineering House Fornax built a thermal power plant the likes of which might have never been seen before in the history of Acheron Rho.

A welcome side-product was that the few serfs and nobles who remained in the area to organize, maintain and command the plant were quickly spreading the word of the newly opened saunas and baths near the power plant. Tourists started to plan tours from Kilwa Kisiwani to Eskendria for a spa day or two, especially noble visitors came from all over the sector to sweat and bathe with a view that was described as “the wild fires of an ancient being, tamed under God for our pleasures”.

The Forbidden City
Deep below the surface and very secluded lies the Forbidden City. And forbidden it remains to the public, as only high-ranking members of the Fornax Senate and security personnel have access to the island.

Rumours speak of the valuables being removed and shipped to Maja and the grounds being restructured into a prison of some sorts.

Whispers on Haqani mention that black trains without markings or numbers, their windows tinted, arrive and depart there - trains that don’t stop anywhere else and aren’t seen on the passenger lines.

The rumored prison and blacksite was allegedly built to contain political dissidents from Haqani itself, but some Haqani natives believe the opposite to be the case:

Insurgents from the planet are shipped elsewhere, and prisoners from other systems are flown in to be incarcerated and more in the Forbidden City.

Babili Dome-Spaceport Project
With the knowledge from the domed cities on Maja and more intelligence gathered about similar methods to safeguard entire cities against volatile environments, House Fornax started to extend Babili's reach from below the planet's surface upwards, towards the open skies.

Knowing that the corrosive atmosphere would present challenges never before mastered by House Fornax, or almost anyone in Acheron Rho, the [NAME] is a long term project and its phases are slowly rolled out.

Currently the engineers and scientists on Maja and Haqani both are improving ways for spaceships to enter the atmosphere with special coatings, easily administrable at the Seminole 6 space station orbiting the planet.

Ships small enough to enter planet atmospheres are embedded in what looks like soap bubbles, a mixture of various liquid polymers, who remain in a liquid state only by constantly having large energy shots circuit through them, the mixture being called Evigströmt Hypermajoxide or ESH, for the constant power running through it and its unusual formula that runs on majoxides, enriched oxygen compounds from House Fornax's homeworld.

Matter movement against corrosion only works with self-healing coating, but Fornax knowledge on such is limited; for now the ships can generally fly to (or from) the planet safely with one such bubble coating adhered to the ship's hull, although it needs to be reapplied after every single trip. Possible longterm effectivity is being researched but still far from producing satisfying results.

The ships that are able to enter the planet are also used to ship construction resources for the first barriers in and on the surface, a massive ground project that finalized would mean an actual spaceport on the planet and directly connected to Babili.

For this longterm project to fully succeed however, House Fornax must understand more about the places that did survive the planet's atmosphere.

Alien material research
For centuries now there exist ruins on Haqani's surface. Much of it, so claim the Fornax researchers, would have been experimented with, researched and written down in the archives, but those are inaccessible now.

So Fornax expeditions via ships venture out through the planet's hostile environment, to gather as much data and material as they can. Interest lies particularly on the metals that survive the corrosion and the odd ruins that seem to defy normal matter standards as some of the substances seem to flow between solid states and are of unknown origins.

These resources are of course of incredible importance for a noble house priding itself in ships, mechs and other vehicles. Being able to build ships that would survive even Haqani's atmosphere without problems would be an incredible feat and House Fornax would happily profit from it.

Not only the money is pushing the Majan rulers to scour the alien and ancient ruins on the surface, though: Alien artifacts are always seeked by House Fornax and even though the Velan rulers would have properly extracted almost everything of value, the chance they missed something important alone makes up for the large risks the scouting parties in their science ships take.

Due to the ESH coating only being very temporary, the planet scouring takes longer than anticipated originally and many Fornax Senators back on Maja are disappointed with results so far.

Research on Atmospheric Changes
With all the challenges Haqani's atmosphere presents to House Fornax, it is only natural that some seek the easiest way to avoid dealing with it; changing the atmosphere to be less volatile.

Even though House Fornax did not commit to any specific project yet, researchers are encouraged to experiment with possible ways to tame the planet even further in the future.

Fornax Re-Education & Ethics Commission
With the colorful history of Haqani, its population has seen rulers and even entire political systems come and go. Trust in the Empire was tarnished and the Chain of Being was openly questioned by the planet's last rulers before House Fornax.

To mend these wounds, the Majans installed the Fornax Re-Education & Ethics Commission, most often abbreviated as FREE Commission.

This body of hand picked nobles from Maja was to oversee that all Haqani serfs would go through a several months long re-education camp, to allow them to abolish the old and wrong ideas of Vela and find joy and fulfillment in the Empire's ways again, particularly House Fornax's.

Over time the society on Haqani would be changed to be similar to the hyper competitive education and work environment on Maja, so Fornax nobility would again have an iron grip on which serf rises in rank and wealth to what point, to ensure that the top talent gets scouted fast and secured for noble families and their businesses, and to push the society formerly so full of knowledge and arts to a rougher, more work-focussed body ready to be exploited.

Pleione's Haven
With the large overhauls on the planet itself came challenges outside of it too: If tourists were expected to visit the beautiful beaches and bazars House Fornax acquired, they would have to park their spaceships in orbit around Haqani. The old transit hub was the space station Seminole 6, a station that at times even fell into the hands of pirates before House Vela smashed these unwanted inhabitants.

Instead of building an entirely new space station, as House Fornax had done around other planets, the Majans renovated Seminole 6. The station became much bigger to allow for larger and more ships to anchor and park there. Old walls and floors were demolished and rebuilt after new standards, an entire new power system was installed and large security and confinement areas were added. These necessary additions were strictly in line with protocols that still continue today for the safety of Haqani's visitors and proper control of the planet's government regarding who enters and leaves the planet.

Tourists and other visitors should feel safe and secure after their weary travels before they would leave the space station and enter the Fornax owned transit ships that would bring the people to the planet proper. So the much revered Pleione, according to old Terran myths the protector of sailors and mother of Maja, was chosen as namesake fo the space station. Her haven, so the advertisements tell, is like a warm embrace, with the most luxurious suites on the station and repair and maintenance services in the docks, all to modern Fornax standards.

While Pleione's Haven is the official new name of the station, most old star charts and maps still point to Seminole 6, as the updating process for spacefaring systems has been slowed down tremendously after the fall of House Vela.

Pharos
The moon that housed LINES, the College of Navigation and the Great Library Server, is now strictly off limits to the public.

After explosions shattered most of the satellite's infrastructure, House Fornax has ongoing labor projects that are kept top secret.