Mecatol Rex

Center of the universe, last remnants of a lost empire, greatest city in the galaxy, blasted wasteland. All of these describe Mecatol Rex, former seat of the Lazax Emperors. Even three thousand years after the Twilight Wars brought all the Lazax had built crashing into ruin, the ruined heart of their domain still holds sway over the souls of the galaxy’s inhabitants. To those who see themselves as the next galactic overlords, Mecatol Rex is a prize to be won. To the representatives who serve on the Galactic Council, it is an arena. To the Winnaran Custodians who guard it, the world is a duty they may never be able to discharge. And to the Keleres and their support staff, it’s home, for a while.

The Sea of Desolation

Three thousand years ago, Mecatol Rex was a vast and gleaming ecumenopolis. Every square kilometer had been covered in towering buildings, broad avenues, and carefully manicured parklands. For the Lazax, it was not only the seat of their government. For billions of them, it was their home.

All this changed when the Empire fell. A Sol fleet broke through Mecatol Rex’s defenses and scoured the planet with an indiscriminate bombardment. Save for a few districts protected by defense grids, nearly the entire planet was blasted into rubble.

Millennia later, most of the planet remains a shattered wasteland of ash dunes and wind-worn rubble. The oceans are still choked with dust and toxic runoff, and the sky can fill with dust storms stretching across thousands of square kilometers. All of this is known as the Sea of Desolation.

Mecatol City

The only habitable land on Mecatol Rex is Mecatol City, the districts around the Galactic Council Chambers that survived the Sol bombardment relatively intact. In the years since, the survivors rebuilt those districts and began to migrate to them. These were almost entirely Winnarans, who had been largely ignored during the genocidal purges targeting the Lazax. As the galaxy collapsed into the chaos of the Twilight Wars, the remaining inhabitants of Mecatol City found themselves largely cut off from the rest of the galaxy. Only a few minor trading outposts and nearby colony worlds continued to send the occasional freighter.

The Winnarans adapted to life on Mecatol Rex as best they could. Large dust barriers were erected around the outer districts to protect against the vicious storms, deep aquifers were sunk to store potable water for the city, and great merchant halls and Imperial treasure vaults were converted into hydroponic farms to feed the remaining population. Then, with their survival assured for a while, a succession of Custodian leaders turned to attempting to rebuild Mecatol City’s central districts to some semblance of their former glory.

The Custodians invested centuries of labor in reconstructing the monuments of their dead masters. Many of these, when finished, were sealed to be preserved for some distant future. While some Winnarans protested this waste of labor and resources, the Custodian leadership held firm. Even though the Lazax were dead, on some level their legacy must be preserved.

So Mecatol City existed in a state of limbo and relative isolation for three thousand years. While most of the inhabitants have lived out their lives as best they can, and even the Custodian leadership spends most of its time overseeing the smooth functioning of a city of hundreds of millions of people, the official policy is that all of Mecatol City remains in trust until a new power arises to claim the Imperial Throne.

Mecatol City Today

Today, Mecatol City is a city of monuments and edifices, dedicated more to the glories of the past than the people who live and work within it in the present. However, in the outer districts, some semblance of a bustling and busy metropolis endures.

The Council Chamber

After thousands of years of darkness, the great beacon atop the Council Chamber shines again. The representatives of the various Great Civilizations meet and debate in the towering inverted ziggurat, attempting to preserve galactic civilization while simultaneously gaining advantage for their own faction.

The Council Chamber dominates the skyline of Mecatol City, looming nearly a kilometer in the air and spreading to cast its shadow over all nearby buildings. The Chamber once housed thousands of representatives and their staffs, and is certainly spacious enough to hold the few hundred Council representatives that make up the Galactic Council now. While a few of the Great Civilizations have set up enclaves in the old Embassy Quarters, most of the smaller planets simply have their representatives work and even live within the Chamber.

Scholara Imperialis

The Imperial academy managed to survive the original bombardment relatively intact, and was one of the few remnants of the Empire to maintain some function during the Twilight Wars. A few dedicated scholars from various worlds worked with the Custodians to keep a small academy operational, and over the millennia a trickle of researchers and scientists would make the pilgrimage to Mecatol Rex to study and contribute their own knowledge.

Today the Scholara Imperialis remains a mainly independent institution, welcoming scholars from all corners of the galaxy. The only requirement to access the records and facilities is that one contributes some useful research of their own. In addition, a growing number of intellectuals have renounced their own allegiances and joined the Scholara, hoping to contribute to the expansion of galactic knowledge.

Adminus Mecatol

The original building of the Adminus was bombed into rubble, but the Custodians built a new administration center in the remains of the old Imperial Navy base fifty kilometers north of the Council Chambers. Here the Winnarans oversee the day-to- day rule of Mecatol Rex. The Adminus building also serves as the central command for the Custodian Guard, coordinating their peacekeeping operations throughout the city.

Ruins of the Imperial Palace

The broken ruins of the Imperial Palace still sit on the shore of the Dorus River. The Winnarans never rebuilt the palace, preferring to leave its husk as a reminder of the terrible history of Mecatol Rex. However, the Custodian Guard do maintain a strict guard around the palace grounds. Even thousands of years later, treasure hunters try to sneak into the palace, hoping to find something worth stealing. The Custodian Guard refuse to confirm it, but it’s an open secret that in the heart of the bombed ruins, one can still find the shattered throne room and the broken remains of the Imperial Throne.

Keleres Facilities

The old Imperial Intelligence headquarters was destroyed in the bombing, and the Winnarans never rebuilt it. However, the reinforced sublevel bunkers were never breached, just sealed and forgotten. When the Council founded the Keleres, they gifted the entire Intelligence complex to them to serve as a headquarters; possibly because of the symbolism, probably because the land was the least valuable in Mecatol City.

Currently, the Keleres have expanded throughout the basement complex, although multiple sublevels still remain to be explored and mapped. A few areas were sealed off when the Keleres found relics of the old Imperial Intelligence and decided they were best kept a secret. The rest is a maze of situation rooms, armories, laboratories, archives, and a subterranean hangar complex.

Topside, the Custodians have allocated enough funds to hire a small reconstruction crew and clean up the old ruins. The goal is to construct a more imposing formal headquarters above the underground complex. With current funds, the new building should be complete within the next four decades.

The Polar Castelle

The only structures that still stand in the Sea of Desolation are the polar castelle, a pair of planetary defense fortresses built on Mecatol Rex’s north and south poles. There the whipping dust mixes with toxic, yellowed snow to eat at the black pour-form stone walls, while inside a few thousand Winnaran Custodian Guard count down the months until they can return to the relative comfort of Mecatol City.

Each castelle houses a massive orbital cannon capable of shattering a cruiser’s keel, and four squadrons of short-ranged interceptor fighters. These, plus a half-dozen corvettes and the shorter ranged antifighter batteries ringing Mecatol City, constitute the bulk of Mecatol Rex’s defenses. In truth, they are not even close to enough to see off a determined fleet assault. However, Mecatol Rex is also protected by its unique status as the former throneworld and seat of the Galactic Council. Whenever one of the Great Civilizations attempts to claim the planet for themselves, another of the galactic powers inevitably moves against them. The Custodian Guard only need to protect against pirate raiders and terrorist assaults.

Jun and Semani

Mecatol Rex is not the only planet in the Gul system. The rocky inner world of Jun and the outer mining colonies orbiting the gas giant Semani both hosted significant Lazax facilities and populations during the Empire’s golden age.

Jun suffered the same brutal fate as most of Mecatol Rex. The world hosted massive military bases and supply depots for the Lazax fleets, and this made Jun an irresistible target. After the Federation fleet secured its blockade over the city, a squadron spent a month shelling Jun from orbit and turning it into an irradiated wasteland.

The Semani orbital colonies were spared direct assault, though they were plundered by Hacan privateers on multiple occasions. As Mecatol Rex’s needs for exotic gases waned, many of the colonies were abandoned; today only a few small hab-stations and gas mines remain. It is rumored that at least one of the abandoned colonies has been retrofitted into a test bed for weapons research on the order of the Galactic Council.