Mobile Frame Zero: The Ionian Calendar

The satellites of Jupiter have dominated the Sol system for over two centuries now, and it is from this moment that the calendar draws its name. The Ionian Calendar now tells us that it is the year 0243.

I‘ve started writing down new material for the second edition of Mobile Frame Zero! These writings are drafts and ideas, rather than complete game texts that will come from them.
Please support xenophilia to help MFØ:2.0 come into reality, then read and discuss setting lore and rule changes as they come into existence on the xenophilia Discord!

It was in the year 0000 that oligarchs, fleeing Earth’s collapsing ecosystem, first arrived to turn Jupiter’s moons and moonlets into tiny paradises, hanging gardens populated by the self-select. They call themselves the Ionian Hegemony of the True Children of Earth, but few of those élite in their lush, minuscule jungles and meadows venture to the planet of their ancestry, commanding their corporate agents from afar to take action there on their behalf. Instead of relying on an Earth they view as hopeless, they thrive on the hydrocarbon and energy wealth of the orbiting giant below.

They have been using that wealth to build the Jovian system’s first transit gate, operated as an independent corporation with shares held by the Ionian Hegemony

Venus is a mystery, with only periodic, cryptic transmissions either emerging from its thick cloud cover as either warnings or intended for unknown ears. Over a century ago, mining crews gently set floating cities high in the cloud tops. They can still be seen through telescopes, apparently thriving but never communicating directly with the rest of the Solar System. The cities remain active, with labor frames traveling between bubble platforms on errands too peculiar to see at interplanetary distances.

In centuries past, Mars had held promise for the many competing terraforming and colonization efforts. In the end, the thin atmosphere proved too difficult to overcome, allowing the radiation of space to pick apart the delicate molecules of life, turning polymers to dust that joined the rest of the red salt of the planet’s surface. Today, a scattering of nomadic humans live in the Valles Marineris containing the remains of Mars’ breathable atmosphere and free water. Its nomad clans venture out in their labor frames, only to explore the ruins of forgotten, collapsed colony cities, scavenging them for equipment and materials to make their valley grow greener. Domes, caverns, and the abortive anchor city of the space elevator high upon Arisia Mons call to them as they tease subsistence from the salt they have worked so hard for so long.

But their labor is not in vain. When the transfer windows are correct, they trade with the people of Earth the surreal plants that grow only in altered Martian soil, tended with guarded Martian techniques. Some believe that such plants might hold the key to Earth’s recovery, with their ability to grow in the salty soil and dry atmosphere. Others provide little-understood medicinal properties, while still others have euphoric and hallucinogenic properties that make them worth carrying on the long trip from Mars.

For its part, Earth struggles to adapt and recover from the ongoing climate collapse as storms scour its surface and the coastline swallows city after city. The horrors of the last centuries are slowly turning into cultural memory, with new societies tentatively sprouting on an Earth that few humans now call home. The drowned cities of centuries past are now home to amphibious communities while the new deserts of the world are home to merchant caravans carrying goods on the backs of labor frames guarded by heavily armed mobile frames to protect them from the bandit kings who know the ways of the desert just as well.

In Earth’s orbit swing the Four Pillars, space stations with populations in the tens of thousands, built as Earth’s stepping stones to the stars in an earlier age. Together, they form the Southern Cross, a beacon visible through hyperspace across the galaxy.

One of them, Mondragon Gate, glitters at all times with the coming and going of ships through the transit gate, a flow of vital materials from newly-discovered and developing colonies that send giving Earth the time it needs to recover. Mondragon represents a carefully balanced set of interests. Members of the Ionian oligarchy hold several corporate offices in the station next to the offices of the private Transit Gate corporations that negotiate trade between the colonies, and their trading partners among the Ionians, Terran tribal federations, other colonies, and the Southern Cross Federation, itself. 

The Colonies orient by the Southern Cross, sending the products of their labor frame-equipped farms, mining operations, and factories toward the Earth of their ancestors. But, increasingly, they reorient their transit gates  toward each other, developing economies without the need to rely on Ionian-backed military contractors to settle their disputes, Earth’s ever-hungry mouths.

In recent years, one colony, Celiel, has begun resisting the mandates of the Sol system. When it discovered for the first time that the gastropodal alien parasite that had been infecting their livestock was, itself, not only sapient, but civilized, the colony fractured into those who would fight against them and those who would fight beside them.

Possessed of their own loose, functional, but often acrimonious federated society, the Ijad’s civilization had escaped notice of the colony’s initial surveys. Their symbiotic relationship with the animal population of Celiele — which they call Shebehu — made it hard to recognize them as a species, and their habit of making small farm town with architecture that blends well into the environment meant that human explorers hadn’t recognized what they’d found until they had made a few horrifying faux pas.

Ijad society is nothing if not resilient, however. They possess expansive imaginations, keen and rational intellects, and a complex religion that forbids them to accept demands from any organization that behaves like their one historical experiment with a world empire did.

0243 is the year that the colonies resist Earth, the Ijad’s rapidly-spreading religion resists the colonies, and the Ionian Hegemony of the True Children of Earth sees a threat to its comfort.

Modular systems are a function of industrial society. But do people of The Fifth World still know how to agree to standards? With their acute interest in efficiency, I think they might have carried that lesson forward!

6 thoughts on “Mobile Frame Zero: The Ionian Calendar”

  1. Stoked for this in general, but especially the teasing of more developed world building with Earth and Mars changing from the previous lore in exciting ways!

    1. The people of Earth are legitimately trying to do what they can to make it a living world again. It’s easier to terraform Earth than Mars, after all. It’s just that everyone has given up on it except the people who live there.

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