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Clan Enosi

When we peered out of our starboard viewing port and saw the mass moving towards us - thousands of ships blotting out the sun behind them - I made my peace with whatever gods might be out there. I'd heard many a story of the Wanderers. Murderers, terrorists, and pirates all - sworn enemies of the Terminus Conglomerate and thus enemies of humanity - animals in vac suits and mag boots, piloting dreadnoughts and battleships across the cosmos. Our IST drive was cooked - no good for a high-G burn, or any burn at all - and the last working gun was pointing firmly in the wrong direction. As a ship broke away from the flotilla, looking more like a dying sea creature than anything resembling a cruiser - I held my breath, clasped my cyanide capsule tightly, and froze as they connected their vessel to ours.    Imagine my surprise, when one of my own countrymen emerged - an older man, with scars adorning a face covered in rough stubble and grime... and kind green eyes. Imagine my confusion, when he approached me, unarmed, and shook my hand so hard I thought he'd rip off my arm. Imagine my tears, friend, when his sons repaired our core, unjammed our starboard guns, and asked for nothing more than a tenth of our water as payment - when they flew away with a wave and well wishes, and my view of this galaxy fell apart before my very eyes.   Brother... we have been lied to.
— An intercepted message addressed to the family of a Conglomerate scout

Structure

Clan Enosi was founded in the wake of a workers' uprising against and subsequent exodus from the stratocratic Terminus Conglomerate, and as such, any attempts to establish a concrete hierarchy often descended into infighting - the first instance of this resulting in the split in the Vándorflotta (The Wandering Fleet) that created the myriad nomadic clans people know today. The clan operates on values of individual freedom and willing collaboration. While members still rise to respected positions and wind up with men and women under their command, there is no rigid law requiring obedience to any given figure, and Enosi are free to refuse any orders they are given, so long as they can handle the consequences or defend their position.   Even Kristel Sinaga - founder of Clan Enosi and the spokeswoman for her people on the galactic stage - holds her place at the grace of her clanmates, and could always be removed from that pedestal with the support of enough people or a single well-placed bullet. All who follow her orders do so because they truly believe in her - or simply fear her and her supporters enough to fall in line.   When it comes to sweeping matters in the Flotilla, these are normally seen to by the Kapitányok (captains) of each vessel, with each ship's size, firepower, resources and reputation having a significant impact on how much weight their voice carries. A Kapitány must have a crew of at least 100 people under their command to have a place on this council. Generally, making any widespread decisions for the Flotilla requires a unanimous agreement between all captains, as each ship can govern itself as they see fit. Generally, though, captains will try to find common ground on most important matters, to prevent reprisals from their peers and maintain the cohesion of the Vagabond Fleet.   A Kapitány is voted in by their crew, and can have a vote triggered against them at any time if one of their people puts themselves forward as a replacement. As such, Clan Enosi have created a governmental system unlike their former homeworld - one that resembles a nascent, meritocratic democracy, where one's contributions to and love for the Flotilla speak infinitely louder than any campaign slogan. Each captain normally has a handful of trusted confidantes - talented fighters, gifted minds and charismatic spokespeople to help enact their will - but these positions don't come with official titles, chosen as and when the captain desires.

Culture

Clan Enosi is one of several offshoots from the Vándorflotta (The Wandering Fleet) - a collection of poverty-stricken workers from the Forge World of Ferven II. The culture of the Vándorok began to grow from the very beginning of the second Forge World's construction in 1902, blossoming from the prison labourers sent to perform the taxing and extremely dangerous work of laying down the infrastructure for refineries and foundries on this volcanic planet. It didn't take long for this people to place a particular emphasis on strength and perseverence, as well as a profound belief in the community spirit and solidarity between all of their kind, who were seen as "other" and "lesser" by their Führer and his fascistic thugs. Even after the Forge World's completion in 1931, and the workers' violent uprising and escape from Ferven II in 1956, these ideals maintained, and arguably grew stronger as the Vándorok came to realise that their fates were irrevocably tied together, with nobody else to rely on.
 
"As soon as we made landfall, the Enosi in our company insisted we go walk on the planet's surface. I suppose I could understand. When you live your entire life inside a metal coffin, something as mundane as an open field is probably impossible to imagine. We'd seen how she moved in zero-G, making us all look like lame ducks by comparison, kicking off of walls and slipping through doorways like it was the most normal thing in the galaxy. I guess we shouldn't have been surprised when she took one step outside, looked up at the clouds, and promptly fell flat on her face."
— A mercenary's story, overheard on Serenity Station
  However, when arguments over what exactly should be done in the wake of their escape came to a head, and the Vándorflotta fractured, its most prominent voices took whatever ships and crews they could coax to their side and struck out on their own, as their colossal fleet split into several modest collections of vessels. One such captain was Kristel Sinaga, naming her flotilla the Enosi, after her son of the same name who was killed in the escape efforts.   Incidentally, the Enosi are the most prolific explorers of the Vándorok. At the first opportunity, Sinaga led a dangerous mission through the Conglomerate's blockage of their Ring Gate, taking them to systems and worlds beyond anything their imprisoned peoples had ever thought possible. Shortly after this pilgrimage, the Enosi flotilla haemorrhaged a few more ships, who renamed themselves as Clan Úttörő, and fled in search of a habitable world. Clan Enosi, however, found their home in the stars.   Over the last ten years, Clan Enosi have dwelt on their ships, travelling from system to system with few but their own brothers and sisters for company. Resources such as water and oxygen are worth more than gold to them, and everyone is expected to contribute in their own way. Kristel Sinaga is known to say "The more you share, the more you own", but it is wordlessly accepted what will happen to those who do not share - who selfishly withhold their aid in favour of their own friends and family, or even themselves. Many a frozen body has been glimpsed being incinerated in the drive plumes of the flotilla - a warning to any who would board their vessels and dare to consider themselves responsible for none of their neighbours.   The Enosi Flotilla values ingenuity and resourcefulness very highly, and are known to use and maintain any and all equipment until it can no longer be repaired. Even then, these items are usually broken-down into their component parts, either re-used in other repairs or melted down to be recast into something useful. As such, Enosi ships' interiors can sometimes be a bit of an organised mess, with refuse lining the walls of their cargo bays, ready to be put to one use or another.

Public Agenda


 
"We belong nowhere, and so we belong everywhere."
— Kristel Sinaga
Clan Enosi are probably the most involved of the Vándorok in galactic politics, but that isn't saying much. All this really means is their spokeswoman - Kristel Sinaga - is the only one of the clans' leaders to have interacted with Serenity's council; and even then, this was a mere formality to secure permission for her fleet to travel unhindered through a number of Ciraculum's systems.
Nowadays, public appearances of Clan Enosi are sparing, becoming something of a civilisational cryptid, glimpsed in the skies of numerous colonies, drifting at the edge of a station's radar, and on rare occasions, appearing on the battlefield to join the fights of other nations. The Enosi Flotilla has something of a mercenary reputation throughout the galaxy, known to pick up odd jobs wherever they travel in exchange for credits, new technology, and - most commonly - food, water, and oxygen. The Terminus Conglomerate insist that these nomads - along with the rest of the Vándorok - are animalistic savages who see the entire galaxy as their playground and hold nothing sacred. Pirates and terrorists, in all but name. Clan Enosi distanced themselves from their home system a long time ago, however, and haven't been in range of this propaganda for over a decade. Generally, the other species of Ciraculum - in particular the Vi'dam, with whom the Enosi Flotilla most frequently bargains - see them in much the same way one might regard an isolated tribal community, respecting their work ethic and resourcefulness, while simultaneously disregarding them in the wider political sphere.

Assets

As of 1970 A.S., the Enosi Flotilla has hundreds, possibly thousands of vessels counted among its number, with approximately 50 of these functioning as large scale warships of Cruiser class or above. While the clan have a preference for Human-made vessels, thanks to the minimal number of alterations required to make them suitable for use, they will never turn down the opportunity to bolster their ranks with a ship of another species' design, so long as it is deemed worthy of the time and resources required to refit it for human habitation, translate its interface, and maintain it after the fact. Even if the ship is passed-over by the flotilla, aspiring Kapitányok are known to gather up a prospective crew and claim these vessels for themselves, granting them a voice in Clan Enosi's decision-making. As such, over the years, the Vagabond Fleet has become a real cultural smorgasbord, with ships of Brezi, Vi'dam and more origins flying alongside the Termitina vessels of the original flotilla.    Similarly, the Enosi are a resourceful bunch, unwilling to abandon their own weapons, equipment and vehicles when they begin to falter. Plenty of Enosi ships - and Vándorok vessels in general - can look like they're held together with tape and happy thoughts, threatening to fall apart at any moment. However, the Enosi will not stop using a ship until it literally falls apart. This aesthetic has resulted in the Brezi dubbing such vessels "Cadaver Naves" - Corpse Ships - but they fight with just as much ferocity as their brothers and sisters, if not more so. After all, when a single torpedo hit could send you all into the void, every battle puts you a hair's breadth away from death, and none are more keenly aware of this than the crews of these ships, who will fight like cornered animals if attacked.
 
While a far more detailed breakdown of the flotilla can be found elsewhere, the crown jewel of the Vagabond Fleet is the base ship known as the Caldera - Kritsel Sinaga's own, and the Enosi's flagship. Once a permanently-anchored prison barge - on which most of the current crew were incarcerated, once upon a time - this supercolossal vessel has since been retrofitted into a floating city, housing approximately 10,000 people, its frame upgraded with numerous heavy weapons, shielding modules, and advanced AI systems. By far the most recognisable of the Enosi's ships, the Caldera's size is phenomenal - closer to a space station than a starship - and one could quite comfortably live out their entire life on its decks without ever stepping foot onto rock and soil again, which is, of course, the point.   To the Enosi, nothing is more valuable than air and water, and they often trade for these things directly, rather than taking credits for their work that are only used on foreign planets and stations. Their most valuable currency is their labour, and their most frequent contractors are the Iskara of Soraktus, who happily let the Enosi extract enormous chunks of ice from their frozen planet in exchange for their goods and services - ice which can both be used for drinking water and broken down into hydrogen and oxygen (the latter of which goes straight into their air tanks, of course).

History

The history of Clan Enosi begins earlier than most would assume for so young a civilisation, originating almost seventy years ago. In 1902, just one year before their induction into the galactic community, the Veľká Únia Fervena (Greater Union of Ferven) launched an initative to address the need for both minerals and labour to outfit their growing interplanetary fleet - needs which were rapidly outgrowing the significant output of the first Forge World on Ferven I. Having already found a volcanic world positively bursting with such resources, plans were quickly enacted to construct hundreds of mines, foundries and refineries on the surface of the planet known as Ferven II. Finding people willing to undergo such dangerous, low-paid work was a challenge, however, and the risk of public outrage in the event of forcible resettlement was too much for the already-fracturing Kieffer Dynasty to shoulder. So, a different approach was taken.   Many strict new laws were rapidly written into Ferven's legislature, and with this increased scrutiny and restriction came a natural increase in so-called criminals. Policing agencies worked overtime bringing in countless captives, with most trials being conducted in a matter of seconds, and soon enough, hundreds of thousands were being fed into the prison system, loaded onto barges and ferried to a brand-new "work camp" on Ferven II. Within a year, the population of Ferven II rose from a few hundred to almost one million, and the convicts incarcerated here were immediately put to work on implanting the infrastructure necessary to start harvesting the abundant resources of this world.   The casualty rates were as colossal as they were secretive, with heat exhaustion and industrial accidents being the two most common causes of death amongst this workforce, and dehydration being a close third, resulting from the guards withholding water from uncooperative inmates, often for days at a time. Those who survived the first decade of construction were rewarded with an actual interior for their workspaces - reaching temperatures approaching 60C instead of the hundreds or thousands that had burned their vac suits to a crisp in the past. Even in this short time, a brand-new culture was beginning to spring up amongst the inmates, with an even stronger emphasis on endurance, hard work and force of will than their Termitina predecessors. Of course, it wasn't until their departure from the planet that the Vándorok earned a name of their own.   The final straw was something that would have felt utterly inconsequential amidst the ocean of corpses that Ferven II piled-up. In 1956, while working the foundries, a thirteen-year-old boy - serving a life sentence for the murder of his parents - suffered a malfunction in his mag boots while performing routine repairs on the outer bulkheads of Foundry Alfa, and fell at great speed towards the surface of the high-gravity world. While his boots reactivated in time to reattach to the metal walls, the sudden stop broke the boy's leg, and the impact against the outer wall caused many other fractures throughout his body. While several workers began to suit-up to rescue the child, they were prevented from doing so at gunpoint by the guards on-duty at the time, who did not wish to risk losing any more labour on what would effectively be a suicide mission. The workers of Foundry Alfa were forced to listen to the child's cries for help on comms for several more minutes, until the force of the planet's gravity pulled all blood to his upside-down head, triggering a stroke. The last noise heard on the workday was the ripping of a vac suit and a deafening hiss, as the gravitational pull finally tore the body down, leaving a magboot-clad leg behind on the outside of the structure.   From here, the Shift Manager of Foundry Alfa - a fellow prisoner named Kristel Sinaga - secretly used the warden's radio during a report of her team's productivity figures, and sent out an encoded message to every other structure on the planet, telling the story of what had occurred and asking anyone who heard her to respond within the fifteen-minute window in which she would be alone with the radio each day. Over a few weeks, the story spread like wildfire, and before long, the Shift Managers across over 8,000 platforms were formulating a plan of escape.   Later that year, they sprung their trap. Sabotaging a crane in their workplace and requisitioning tools from the guards after offering to spare them the downtime hours spent calling for engineers, the prisoners took these makeshift weapons and immediately turned on their captors. Many inmates were shot and killed instantly - Kristel's son, Enosi Sinaga, among them - but their numbers were overwhelming, and within a day, Foundry Alfa was entirely under their control, with every guard having either been massacred in the initial attack, or thrown out of a docking bay to be dragged to the planet's surface. After Sinaga issued a message to the other platforms, announcing their control of the foundry and urging the other workers to make attacks of their own, they quickly began to requisiton every last piece of food, water, air and equipment they could, loading them onto ships docked in the hangar and even the prison barge itself. The combined effort saw approximately half a million workers commandeer ships and leave the planet's atmosphere, fleeing into the void before the Terminus Conglomerate's fleet could intercept them.   In the weeks that followed, the newly dubbed Vándorok (meaning "Wanderers" in their cultural dialect) quickly fractured, with many conflicting voices offering different courses of action now that they were free from the Conglomerate's clutches. While some elected to remain in Ferven as a rebel fleet, and others opted to seek out a planet of their own to settle beyond the bounds of the system, Clan Enosi was formed under Kristel Sinaga on the idea that the stars were their home now, adopting a nomadic lifestyle and taking whatever ships would follow them through the Ferven Ring Gate, unleashing themselves on the galaxy.    For the last thirteen years, Clan Enosi has willfully faded into obscurity, becoming little more than a passing curiosity to the vast majority of Ciraculum's inhabitants. Taking on new members from other species, expanding their flotilla with new alien vessels, and doing whatever they require in order to get by, the future of the clan seems as certain as its present and recent past. They will guide their ships from system to system, star to star, until something finally roots them to the ground, or they expire amidst the void.

Demography and Population

While most of the Enosi Flotilla are still Vándor Humans, they have become a more diverse outfit in the decade-and-a-half following their exodus from Ferven. Nowadays, one can find members of almost every other race in the Serenity Systems amongst their number - with some even ruling their own ships as Kapitányok.   While Termitina Humans are regarded with some suspicion, there are also a number of citizens from the Conglomerate in Clan Enosi - exiles and disillusioned minds who wished to put those fascists behind them, but still craved the company of their own kind. So long as someone pulls their weight, takes care of their clanmates, and doesn't piss off anyone too important, they can find a place here just as well as any Vándor.

Technological Level

Clan Enosi has little in the way of a Research and Development team, with any scientists in their ranks more focused on optimising the technology they already have in place rather than pioneering anything brand-new. The fleet takes on any new technology it comes across that could prove useful - which tends to be any and all of it. This is not always distributed evenly, however, and new tech is often granted to whichever ship is best suited to using it, or to the ship which found it in the first place. This has led to some vessels boasting top-of-the-line systems for their respective purpose, while others can potentially be up to a decade out-of-date.

Religion

  The Enosi Flotilla has worshippers of a diverse range of faiths from across the galaxy. Such practises are fully accepted, so long as any religious doctrine comes second to the needs of the flotilla, should a conflict arise between the two. While the clan has no official "state religion", they bear no ill will to those who have a faith of their own, with many ships having dedicated temples inside them, and a small number even functioning as flying cathedrals (though the latter are often captained by a worshipper of the respective faith).

Foreign Relations

While Clan Enosi generally keep to their own business, getting involved in foreign affairs only insofar as it lands them some credits or a source of food, water, air, and the like, they have begun to form a closer relationship with the Iskara of Soraktus, quite often working and trading with the subterranean Vi'dam in exchange for access to the ice on their frozen homeworld. This has proven most useful when it comes to providing basic necessities to the flotilla, and it seems like this symbiosis will only grow as time goes on.

Laws

While specific rules tend to change from ship to ship, there are a few laws that have stuck to every vessel in the flotilla, and are generally considered taboo for a captain to not enforce. These are as follows:
  • Do not kill another passenger or crewmate of the flotilla. To do so brings a guarantee of death.
  • Do not conspire against the flotilla. To do so brings a guarantee of death.
  • Do not provide information on the flotilla to any outside forces. To do so brings a guarantee of exile or death, depending on the severity of the intelligence leak.
  • Do not dispose of any item, no matter how seemingly useless, without the express permission of your Kapitány. Doing so will result in exile, until you return to the flotilla with something of equal or greater value.
  • Do not break formation with the flotilla without first alerting the Kapitányok of your intent. Your place in the clan will not be guaranteed upon your return.

Agriculture & Industry

The flotilla has ships for every purpose, each contributing in their own way to the good of the Vagabond Fleet. As such, several vessels have been fitted to expressly function as flying greenhouses and foundries, with several huge cruisers being outfitted with shipyards to allow for in-flight repairs and maintenance of smaller vessels.

"Zarda yond rev" (Compassion is a luxury)

Founding Date
19/01/1957 A.S.
Type
Geopolitical, Clan
Alternative Names
The Flotilla, The Vagabond Fleet
Predecessor Organization
Training Level
Semi-professional
Veterancy Level
Experienced
Demonym
Enosi
Founders
Economic System
Barter system
Currency
While most members of Clan Enosi have a stash of credits to use in foreign ports, they have little need for money within the bounds of their fleet. If somebody needs something, they're given it - be it gratis or in exchange for other goods or services. Having already lived and traded without cash for so long on their prison colony of Ferven II, it was easier to maintain a system of bartering rather than establishing any official currency.
Legislative Body
Each Kapitány is generally considered to be the authority on their respective ship, enforcing whatever rules they believe are sound and reasonable. So long as you are on their vessel, you abide by these laws as you would any nation's. If the crew disagree with a particular ruling, they are welcome to depose their Kapitány and have a new one rise in their place - one who will hopefully enforce different edicts altogether.
Judicial Body
If a crime is committed on an Enosi vessel, it is up to the presiding Kapitány to determine the guilt of any parties involved and levy punishment. These rulings can be as harsh or as lenient as an individual Kapitány wishes, provided no crew successfully resist their decision.    In situations where a Kapitány is accused of acting against the interest of the flotilla as a whole, the rest of the Kapitányok will judge them on behalf of the entire fleet, and similarly decide on a fitting punishment if the Kapitány is found guilty. Generally speaking, these punishment almost always include an immediate deposition of the captain, allowing a new one to be chosen in their stead. For more serious offences, however, exile and even death by airlock are tried and tested ways for the Kapitányok to express their displeasure.
Official Languages
Related Species
Related Ethnicities
The Terminus Conglomerate
Organization | Jul 19, 2024


Cover image: by Mack Sztaba

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