Roselight & Upwell

Most Pact Worlds residents consider Liavara a paradise, untouched by development and corruption and occupied solely by beautiful floating flora and fauna and the romanticized Dreamers. The truth of Liavara, as with all things, is much more complex. Much of the gas giant remains wilderness, but the wealth promised by its rare elements means that it has not remained unspoiled. The Barathus of its sister planet Bretheda administer the world to protect their Dreamer cousins, but gas extractors and refineries dot the wilderness, and much of Liavara’s beauty and wealth are bought through uncomfortable alliances and a history of rights violations.
These strange bedfellows—barathu preservationists and industrialist plutocrats—lend the planet a strange character, and nowhere is this dichotomy more clearly displayed than in the sister cities of Roselight and Upwell.

Demographics

While Roselight and Upwell seem like strikingly different settlements—Roselight with its shining domes and swooping architecture and Upwell with its harsh, industrial brutality—they both grew from the same core of industrial wealth and power, held in check by oversight and ego. Upwell is the gateway to Roselight; travelers must stop at the station to secure clearance to travel to Liavara, while cargo ships above a certain tonnage must remain in orbit here and be filled drop-by-drop by licensed cargo haulers planetside. Outsiders lament that vulgar, polluted Upwell can’t be more like Roselight, blithely unaware that the beauty and resources of the latter would never exist without the wealth generated by its grimier counterpart. Both places are dens of cutthroat commerce; Upwell is just more honest about it.
Upwell was built with processing, storing, and selling Liavara’s resources in mind. Any accommodations for life are necessary evils that stand in the way of maximizing profit. The entire station is utilitarian, with little consideration to aesthetics. The same gray ceramic paneling covers every wall, unadorned save for the few places an inspired resident has scrawled graffiti, and exposed ducting and bundles of wire line every corner. While a few luxury accommodations exist, most residents make do with single-room apartments, vat-grown food, and water tainted with traces of whatever infrastructure-preserving chemical was last flushed through the plumbing. Workers are expendable and conditions are brutal, but the refineries, docks, and construction derricks buzz with activity all day, and anyone with fortitude can make a good living. Plenty of businesses prey on those paychecks, with hundreds of unregulated restaurants, holotheaters, brothels, casinos, kismet-menders, and bars filling the station’s commercial spaces.
While the OCI technically controls Upwell, in reality the barathus can’t spare the resources to monitor the station—nor do they especially care what happens in orbit. Confluence subcontracted control of the city to the Upwell Residency Group (URG to the locals), which acts as the governing body. Historically, the URG has put station stability and infrastructure above resident lives, but some small, overworked pockets within the organization do genuinely push to improve living conditions. Few laws govern the station beyond those that protect infrastructure and corporate interests, so locals enjoy easy access to drugs, technology, and pleasures that other communities heavily regulate or forbid altogether.
Most people simply arrive at Upwell, rather than call it home; the station has few amenities for children and little basic healthcare beyond emergency response. Upwell residents have been conditioned to take pride in their ability to survive the long shifts and dangerous occupations, and corporate propaganda crushes any efforts to unionize the populace and lobby for safer conditions.
Roselight, by contrast, centers around aesthetics, environmentalism, and peace—or at least the illusion of it. This attitude hails partially from barathu preservationists, but also from the fact that most of Liavara’s wealthy families—the so-called gas barons—make their homes in the city, enjoying the sweeping vistas, pristine sunrises, and untainted air. The city’s elite wander wide avenues, sip genetically modified teas, and tend gardens of exotic xenoblossoms, all the while supported by a caste of service workers who live in tiny apartments in the city's outlying bubbles. While conditions are far safer for workers in Roselight, they enjoy far less autonomy than their counterparts in Upwell. Some districts of the city are restricted to the corporate elite, and while workers in Upwell can simply hop the next transport to continue their lives elsewhere, Roselight workers must acquire a transit permit, often at outrageous expense, to travel into orbit and eventually move on.
Roselight also boasts an impressive artistic scene. While no match for the elegance of Kalo-Mahoi, the city’s elite spare no expense importing painters, holo-sculptors, architects, chefs, fashion designers, and performers. Its various festivals, theaters, galleries, seasonal parties, and holidays attract wealthy tourists from across the system. Many creative souls flock to Roselight in the hope of finding a rich patron only to find themselves struggling and trapped, working a thankless job cleaning homes or slinging coffee as they try to save enough for passage offworld.
But the city’s truly unique resource—one that constantly influences its artistic and financial scenes alike—is prophecy. The barathus administer, protect, and record the songs of the Dreamers, publishing much of what they discover but selling the choicest bits. Businesses bid and backstab to learn the latest economic forecast, while wealthy elites clamor to hear what the future may hold. Many of the city’s creatives either incorporate Dreamer songs into their creations directly or take inspirations from the prophets’ musings, movements, and appearance. Fashionable Roselight residents pay gene-shapers to grant them synesthesia, while the less financially blessed turn to dreamsnuff for the same experience. Both mystics and the mystically inclined claim to hear the same songs that influence the Dreamers and sell their own predictions. Divinatory practices that the rest of the system scoffs, such as astrology, enjoy legitimacy in the Cerise City.

Defences

CONFLICTS AND THREATS Most of the conflicts in Upwell and Roselight are economic, to one degree or another. Businesses square off against one another for a market percentage. Industrial espionage runs rampant. Given the cities' often literally explosive cargos, acts of sabotage can leave a body count. The gas corps square off against barathus for control of the OCI and the Stewards, trying to push their profit margins at the expense of safety, legality, or base morality.
Workers suffer excruciating or humiliating conditions for the almighty credit, and the work wears down their souls. Reformers bend the ears of the masses and every decade or two, often after a tragic industrial accident, rhetoric turns into riots. While the OCI generally tries to contain and deescalate such events, the corporations also wield considerable policing power, especially on Upwell, and crack down with varying levels of brutality. In the wake of these uprisings, the cost of off-world transit always drops sharply as the gas barons try to break up and relocate any agitators or organizers they can find.
Wherever coin flows, crime sprouts, and neither Upwell’s utilitarian corridors nor Roselight’s shining streets are perfectly clean. Smuggling of both goods and people runs rampant. Upwell’s gangs, particularly the Arkanen-dominated 99 Akatas and the Ysoki Decaders, flourish so long as they remain small enough to not disturb the station’s day-to-day business, and in some areas, they even act as the de facto police force. Roselight’s criminal entities move more quietly, focusing on obtaining and trading information, connecting companies with deniable “freelancers,” and the machinations of extremist environmentalist and resistance groups. Pirate gas-mining operations constantly threaten Liavara’s ecosystem and the bottom line, but more concerning to the barathus are a new wave of poachers who have begun to target the Dreamers. Dream poachers run the gamut from social media starlets harassing the gentle savants for holo-ops to illegal recording operations and even amoral body-snatchers who break Dreamers down to sell their fluids and organs to research labs. Rumors among Roselight’s elite even suggest (falsely) that Dreamer components can grant psychic powers, cure disease, and promote virility, leading to a new black market trade in Dreamer organs.
Roselight supports a special detachment of the Stewards dedicated to monitoring the planet below. This adds a tense third party to most struggles in the city, as the Stewards ostensibly wield the authority of the Pact Worlds, which neither the barathus nor the corporations are eager to acknowledge. But the Stewards provide additional resources to combat illegal mining operations and dream poachers that both sides desperately need.

History

Liavara is a settled world, with no indigenous sapient life. The barathus of neighboring Bretheda tend the world on behalf of their Dreamer cousins, but large corporate interests fund the barathus’ preservation efforts, and small prospectors and gas-mining poachers routinely establish pirate refineries to gather the world’s mineral wealth.
Barathus founded Roselight soon after their second delegation arrived on Liavara—many centuries before The Gap—but it existed as little more than a rest stop and seasonal camp from which they observed and theorized about the Dreamers. It was likely during the Gap that the city expanded into a predominantly barathu-run colonial power. At the end of those lost years, however, the barathus realized that various gas poachers had riddled a small Liavaran moon with concealed refineries, starports, and storage depots—the original pieces that would eventually coalesce into the city of Upwell. Even as the barathus of Roselight escalated their policing efforts over the next few decades, the entrenched poachers grew increasingly wealthy and organized, eventually forming powerful corporations with their own quasi-legal claims to the planet.
Rather than resort to war, the barathus formed the Office of Commercial Interests in 57 ag. Ostensibly a barathu bureaucracy under the control of Confluence, the OCI pays heed to “advisors” from a dozen major gas-mining corporations collectively known as the Corporate Authority, which controls the organization’s purse strings. The arrangement allows the barathus to steer industrial development away from Dreamer territory and other sensitive ecosystems while empowering the corporations to protect their holdings with official policing and military power, chasing off unlicensed mining operations that may encroach on their territories. Under the alliance, the Corporate Advisors redeveloped the former pirate moon, gradually breaking down the rocky surface to build one of the largest space stations in the system. Upwell now accommodates an entire planet’s worth of refineries, warehouses, processing plants, reactors, and dockyards. Xenowardens still refer to the century-long process as the Moonwreck and consider it a prime example of the evil the OCI allows to ravage Liavara in the interests of peace and profit.
Despite their alliance, the barathu overseers and the corporate advisors of the OCI constantly argue and fight for control, and the organization has alternately existed as either a beneficent administrator or a capitalist dictatorship at varying points in the last 200 years. Under barathu sway, Roselight grew and flourished as not just a series of corporate headquarters, but as a city invested in the arts and philosophies embodied by the Dreamers. Under corporate influence, Upwell’s refinery structure and military might expanded while workers’ rights evaporated. Even at their worst excesses, each side turns a blind eye to their counterpart—barathus enjoy their normal freedoms even as corporate powers restrict other inhabitants’ movements and speech, and the barathus never look too closely at industrial facilities unless they intrude on or pollute protected sites. Many barathus bridge the divide, forming biotech companies that sit on the OCI’s advisory council, and even today, Liavara attracts those ambitious Brethedans whose loose ethics have stymied their work in the stricter business climate of their home world.
Roselight’s expansion into a true city began under the oversight of Karobel Hark, the first Human to occupy the OCI’s executive chair. The phenomenally wealthy CEO of Liavara’s largest gas corporation, Fairwinds, Hark invested their vast fortune into developing a “capital” city for what they saw as their planet. Hark added additional domes to house parks, a theater district, and museums, inadvertently attracting ecologists, actors, writers, and artists to the city while retrofitting existing barathu domes with humanoid amenities. While most humanoids of the Pact Worlds consider Hark’s magnum opus to be a city of beauty, barathus shudder at the tacky aping of their traditional architecture and ham-fisted addition of walkways and other horizontal surfaces.
Roselight and the OCI seem to be entering a new era of heightened barathu control after a series of compromises and extraordinary luck by Wiodraoe Li Ashtea (LN agender barathu envoy), who assumed the executive seat of the OCI four years ago. Rumors suggest that they allied with an aggressive Xenowarden faction to undermine and even assassinate corporate powers in the OCI—rumors that could plunge the two cities into outright war if confirmed. Even if untrue, the rumors have sparked increased tensions among the barathus and Liavara’s gas corps, and free agents are drifting into the sister cities to take advantage of the rising paranoia.

Tourism

ROSELIGHT NOTABLE LOCATIONS

Roselight exists within a series of floating domes, buoyed in an oxygen-rich current of Liavara’s gases. Despite the breathable ribbon of atmosphere it generally inhabits, most of the city is a closed system, both to protect Liavara from urban pollution and to shield residents from toxic gases carried by the gas giant’s frequent storms. Locals refer to each bubble as a district, ranging from the Core District, which contains the original barathu settlement; the Gold District, which contains most of the Cerise City’s corporate headquarters; the Saints District, where the city’s wealthy elites make their homes; and the overcrowded Sundown District, where most of the poor rest their heads and scrape by.

AEROGEM LABS

AeroGem Labs developed the first epifarms and in the intervening century grew into Roselight’s premiere agribusiness. The lashunta-owned company limits its research entirely to the world of plants, bacteria, and fungi, keeping them outside the cutthroat circles of Roselight’s other biotech giants. While appearing sedate to those outside the company, AeroGem’s internal politics are an entirely different matter, with the seven founding families that comprise the board of directors constantly jockeying for control. Often resorting to violence and sabotage, these family squabbles occasionally threaten the majority of Liavara’s food supply. The last all-out war for control of the company 40 years ago led to famine across the sister cities.

CLOISTER OF THE ONEIROLIST

While barathus look upon their Dreamer cousins with a certain reverence, most fall well short of worshipping them. But the Cloister of the Oneirolist—an offshoot of the church of Ibra—believes the Dreamers were touched by something divine during their early exploration of Liavara, and their songs aren’t prophecies, but echoes of divine creation. Cult doctrine states that more of the divine song will be revealed if members can ascend to become new voices in the Dreamers’ chorus. To that end, members of the Cloister meditate, study existing songs, and make heavy use of hallucinogens to open their minds to whatever divine force still dwells within Liavara. Despite the fringe nature of their beliefs, they have several generous, anonymous backers who pay for the Cloister's opulent facilities and then some, giving them enough resources to hire adventurers to chase down any rumors surrounding the Dreamers or ancient mysteries of planet.

THE FAIRWINDS BUILDING

To many people, Fairwinds is Liavara. The oldest, largest, and wealthiest of Roselight’s gas corps, Fairwinds began as a pirate drilling operation and helped organize other criminals into a coalition that forced the Brethedans to acknowledge their claim to the world’s resources. The corporation still honors Besmara, who serves as a mascot aboard many of their rigs, lending an opportunistic menace to their corporate culture. They occupy the largest tower of the Gold District, and despite its opulence and expensive art, the entire building is a fortified maze designed to protect Fairwinds’ wealth, personnel, and secrets—a pirate fortress under gold leaf. While the company’s most famous CEO, Karobel Hark, died a century ago, Breg Castervin (LE female Half-Elf envoy) carries on her great-grandparent’s legacy, manipulating local politics to maximize her company’s profits and power. Castervin innovated local politics 20 years ago by transforming Fairwinds into a holding company, purchasing several media and security corporations to help control what the people of Roselight see and hear, and how far the law can reach.

HARK’S NEEDLE

The Fairwinds mining company dredged this enormous silicate crystal—over 70 feet tall and weighing 200 tons—up from one of Liavara’s lower layers years ago after it damaged a methane extractor. Rather than destroy or sell the curiosity, Karobel Hark erected it in Fairwinds Park as a public monument and show of wealth. The Needle displays no extraordinary properties other than size, which has baffled the city's scientists, as Liavara’s silicate crystals rarely grow larger than one or two feet long. Many Roselight residents and visitors can’t help but notice the Needle’s curious, obelisk-like shape, and it is also a popular subject for local spiritualists and conspiracy theorists.

OLD HARK PALACE

Upon assuming command of the city, Karobel Hark began diverting public funds to build an opulent palace for themself and their family. Because of certain legal loopholes, the Palace reverted to the city after the plutocrat’s death rather than to their descendants. Today, the Old Hark Palace stands as Roselight’s central government offices. The barathu administrators dread the upkeep costs, but humanoid locals adore the building's opulent scrollwork trim, rich murals, and rippling smart-material walls. The Palace serves as an art museum as well, displaying much of the Hark family collection to the public, though clear barriers and security guards denote where the museum ends and the offices of government begin.

PEACHBLOSSOM SPAN

Roselight’s second-largest park is an enormous bridge connecting the Gold District to the Saints District. Transit lines run underneath the structure, but most of the city prefers the manicured gardens, orchards, ponds, and walkways that line the top of the Span. Some vendors sell small treats and drinks, while others rent skyboats and windboards to tourists, and at night, the city sponsors musical and theatrical performances. The high foot traffic and easy access to two districts makes the area popular with spies who want to blend in with a crowd. Unlike most of Roselight, Peachblossom Span is not contained within a permanent dome. Its breezy access to the planet’s atmosphere provides part of its charm. A powerful shield generator in the bridgework protects the park from storms and toxic gas currents, but technology failures in the past have resulted in great loss of life, and some insist that the mystics who help tend the park are employed more to put down angry spirits than water the trees.

ROSELIGHT AVARIUM

Liavara’s rich native ecology is largely inaccessible to the people of Roselight, so interested barathu parties in the city constructed the Avarium decades ago, allowing their humanoid neighbors to marvel at the aerial ecology barathus take for granted. Popular species like the grazing kriegakos, bioluminescent fungi sprites, and cloud skates draw locals and tourists, and most of the city’s schools make an annual field trip to the unusual zoo. Much of the ticket fees go to support the city’s Xenowardens at the nearby Rose Garden.

THE SPIRE

A small, bustling bar founded by an Absalom Station émigré, the Spire is a popular watering hole for the city’s Stewards and Absalom expats. Situated at the base of Peachblossom Span on the Saints District side and specializing in affordable food and drink, it attracts little attention from tourists or elites. During Roselight’s annual Carnival of Winds, the Spire is one of the few bars to remain closed while the owner, Dolen Hazzerfel (LN agender Android engineer), disappears for the week to parts unknown.

UPWELL NOTABLE LOCATIONS

Beginning its life as an unusually mineral-rich moon, Upwell’s corporate masters insist the planetoid was begging to be hammered into steel and ceramic to achieve its fullest potential as a space station. Today, most of Upwell has been mined, refined, and built out, leaving only a dense, radioactive core called the Axle that serves as an enormous power plant for the city's extensive industrial infrastructure. The station’s habitable portions are roughly divided between the North Ring and the South Ring—aligned with the moon’s former north and south poles—which counterspin to provide stability. Eight thick spokes support each ring, and locals provide directions by way of which ring and spoke a business or bay occupies, such as North Spoke 2 for the second spoke supporting the North Ring. Thousands of spars, arms, and struts branch off from the rings to accommodate incoming and outgoing traffic.

FIRST UPWELL BANK

Beginning as a joint holding company owned by pirates and founded on secrets that would mutually assure destruction should anyone attempt to rob the vault, the First Upwell Bank has grown into a business juggernaut and is one of the few Liavaran corporations to make their headquarters on the orbital station. While it controls a significant pool of funds, much of First Upwell’s wealth exists in the form of corporate stocks and company scrip. Because the failure of any major business on Liavara could wipe out a sizable percentage of their resources, the bank is generous with loans and acts as a neutral negotiator between existing corporations.

HEXANE ARENA

Hexane Arena is Upwell's premiere sports complex, hosting various sporting events and musical performances. While its sponsor, Hexane Fuels, is far from the largest member of the Corporate Authority, the company certainly has a keen sense for how to endear itself to the public. Locals cheer on their favorite stormball (a sport unique to gas giants) teams from the stands, with games often turning into riots that rock the surrounding bars and eateries.

FLOTILLA COMMAND

The Corporate Authority maintains a sizable navy to maintain control of the airspace near Upwell and Roselight and hunt pirate mining operations that cut into their bottom line. FlotCom, occupying a large portion of the South Ring, directs, trains, and repairs the organization’s flotilla. On par with any other planetary defense force, FlotCom's equipment is top-notch, though staffing leaves much to be desired. The Corporate Authority’s military arm is still run like a business, and promotion is more about nepotism and bribes than genuine skill.

THE LISTING OMA

According to rumors, the Listing Oma dates back to when Upwell was still a moon and inebriated construction workers kept forgetting to break it down for parts. Located near the Axle and decorated with rough stone walls, a visitor’s initial impression is one of an asteroid miner dive bar rather than a space station. The Oma stands out for catering to barathus as well as humanoids, with tall ceilings and chemically engineered intoxicants that either life form can indulge in. Currently owned by the industrious Zybollo Mykinosk (N female Vesk mystic), the bar traditionally only changes hands as gambling stakes, with the proprietor choosing the game.

Natural Resources

According to major economic interests, Liavara is a planet of resources awaiting exploitation. The gas mines—more akin to petroleum platforms than true mines—fuel much of the local economy, with the cities exporting everything from helium and hydrocarbons to exotic compounds found nowhere else in known space. Mining platforms bob through the atmosphere using hover technology, magic, or ingenious applications of gas buoyancy. Each platform develops a unique character, but like Upwell, they generally attract a hardy workforce who put in long hours performing dangerous tasks. Equally important are the refineries, storehouses, and cargo haulers that take Liavara’s mineral wealth into orbit.
Roselight and Upwell both boast impressive biotech industries. While neighboring Bretheda has better-developed infrastructure and a certain prestige, Liavara has a fraction of the oversight; as a result, most Brethedan chemistry and biotechnology firms of note maintain at least a satellite office in either Roselight or Upwell. Combined with the planet’s unique flora and mineral wealth, Liavara enjoys a small but bustling trade in biotech augmentations.
Upwell specifically also offers some of the largest docking and shipyard facilities in the Pact Worlds, though the entrepreneurs behind the station focus their efforts primarily on the accommodation, modification, and construction of cargo haulers and tankers. Still, facilities exist to build and maintain the gunships the Corporate Authority uses to patrol the planet, and adventurous souls who grease the right palms (or similar appendages) can gain access to military-grade ship modifications with no questions asked. The station also caters to every vice imaginable, so long as the buyer doesn’t care about quality. Money comes easily in Roselight—at least to those who already have it—so the true currency of the city is information. Between prophets, libraries, and corporate spies, secrets can make or break an empire, so naturally, every secret is for sale. Disreputable souls looking for blackmail material need look no further than the shadowy supper clubs of Roselight’s evening scene.

Type

City