Goodbye_ArtemisIII

Article Index

Settlement And History
While habitable by humanity, the biology, geography and atmosphere of Diyu all made it a rather marginal case for settlement and the system was not highly placed on the newly established Colonial Board's list of colonization projects. As such, the Board was fairly surprised when a consortium representing a group of Operários and Martians submitted a colonization permit request. Confusion may have reigned at the Colonial board, but Terran Sphere revenue services eventually caught on to consortium's plan: the group had planned to combine a number of tax breaks set up for formerly oppressed colonial populations, such as the Operários, with ones for marginal environment settlement intended primarily for settlers on the original Chinese colonies. On top of these they wanted to mix in the standard new colonization breaks to create a tax haven for the venture’s investors. The scheme worked long enough for the colony to find its footing, but in recent years, the Terran Sphere Senate and other regulatory bodies had been working on closing down the kind of loopholes on which Diyu was founded.

In the century since, Diyu has developed from a simple tax haven into a robust financial services sector powerhouse that once controlled a significant portion of the loans for privately owned starships. Many small freight and courier outfits were slightly (and very silently) relieved when the ansibles from Diyu fell silent and payment notices no longer came through. Even though the financial services sector was the lifeblood of the colony, many of the Operários that helped found the colony also stuck to their roots and developed a substantial heavy industries sector in the many decades since its founding. These primarily focused on starship R&D. All of the orbital facilities were lost when the Shohan occupied the system, but the planetary industrial base remains more or less intact.

The government of Diyu is a modification of the Union hall system employed in the Stella Insula System: a series of town halls elect speakers to the Planetary Council, which in turn selects from its number a Planetary Speaker who acts as the Chief Executive. However, the position is nominally limited to running the system bureaucracy and doesn’t offer the holder much in the way of policy making leverage.

Operário(a) (Rank 1 racial tag)
Operários, or Laborers, are the descendants of Stella Insula’s working underclass who were unwittingly subjected to early gene modding by their Zanzibarian overlords. Appearance wise, Operários tend to be tall with little body fat, angular faces and widely spaced eyes. These genemods were intended to adapt the population to the low gravity of the numerous habitats of the Stella Insula system. While parts of the base gene mod package have been reused in other efforts to shape humanity, most notably the Abascians, this early effort had some significant flaws.

In general Operários:

  • Display increased agility, and are able to freely invoke their racial tag for climbing or efforts in micro g, and are able to freely burn the tag for a maneuver rating.
  • Can better withstand environments with lowered oxygen or cold temperatures.
  • Like other members of the Terran Sphere, receive extensive education in psionic theory giving them the first rank of the psionic tag.
  • Struggle more in normal gravity, and unlike other humans this racial tag can be condemned against them after long periods of strenuous activity in higher gravity that other branches of humanity would consider normal.

The population of Diyu drew heavily from the Stella Insula habitats, but subsequent generations have mixed with the martian-stock settlers and it’s possible to play either as a normal Terran Sphere human or one whose genes still carry the Operário stamp.

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