Iris-Hong

Iris-Hong

Iris-Hong (or just Iris, or just Hong - the Chinese and English explorers who first charted the continent got into a massive argument about what to actually name the place, and they just both stuck) is a remote but sizable continent on Gaia, far towards the south end of the planet — Gaia doesn’t really have a proper Antarctic continent, but Iris-Hong is about as close as it gets. It is a rocky and harsh continent, consisting mainly of hills, but with a wide and tall range of mountains curling from the west side towards the center and a violently jagged rift in the continent, which doesn’t traverse the whole of Iris-Hong at all, located in the southeast of the continent, but which leads to vast caverns and is powerfully magnetic.

Iris-Hong is a genuinely beautiful place — mountains are visible in the distance, clear, mighty masses of stone and ice looming over the scientists and adventurer traveling its rolling but harsh hills of stones and scant soil, exposed faces of rocks like granite glimmering in the starlight, visible for kilometers and kilometers in the clear air. Furthermore, the air is often alight with vivid auroras — but auroras more intricate, large, and many-colored than anything on Earth, dominating the night sky with complex shapes and colors. It’s from these gorgeous auroras that Iris-Hong gets its name(s), from Greek and Chinese mythological figures for rainbows respectively.

Of course, despite being incredibly beautiful, Iris-Hong is also remarkably, remarkably inhospitable. It’s bitingly cold even in the warmest of its times and places, and it’s also all kinds of dry — the cold means that streams and precipitation are rare, and it takes serious effort to get water, often from groundwater — in which case one still needs to be careful not to punch into the cavern layer under the surface. All of this means that it’s exceptionally difficult for the Regime to establish settlements here. The place where this is the most averted is the Kia Kaha Mountain Chain (named after the constant reassurements one Maori expedition explorer made to his fellows exploring the continent to the first time). The Kia Kaha Mountains, titanic through not very long, are absolutely chock full of ores and transplutonics, accounting for a large portion of Gaia’s production of these resources, but even here it’s difficult to get many people living there so mostly one has little drone posts with a few guys and a LOT of mining drones dotted over the mountains, with oversight that is about as strict as Regime oversight gets.

The rest of the continent isn’t anywhere near as tightly and carefully organized. Iris-Hong is big, for the most part it’s empty, and it’s sparsely populated, even by Gaian standards. This leads to a brand of nomadic scientists that travel the hills of Iris-Hong — Joyriders, scientists often in pairs or on their own, who come both for the beauty of Iris-Hong and the large amounts of very empty, very hardy space. The lifestyle of a Joyrider is as such: get a grant from the Regime, get told to do whatever you want as long as you get results, drive wildly around Iris-Hong’s rugged terrain with old and battered equipment, and run wildly destructive experiments in rocky valleys where no one will miss anything you accidentally or intentionally blow to smithereens. It is a very, very Gaian lifestyle.

As one approaches the southeast corner of Iris-Hong, they find that their electronic equipment becomes more and more unreliable and has more and more frequent errors. This is because they are approaching The Rift, the jagged line furrowed into the rocky floor of the continent by some cataclysmic event centuries before humankind ever even saw Gaia through a telescope. The Rift is situated upon a truly profound amount of naturally magnetic metal — and stronger magnets than are usually found on Earth. Not only does The Rift have a tendency to disable or even destroy electronics, but the effect it has on the geomagnetic field around it is enough to lead to the stunning, impossible auroras above Iris-Hong.

Situated right on the edge of the Rift is an impromptu little village, or perhaps more of a basecamp, Perch Town. Perch Town is pretty much only there for one reason: to provide an aid and rest point for the spelunkers that rappel down into the depths of the Rift. The Rift leads directly into a dizzying and complex underground tunnel system, which humans on Gaia know very little about; they seem to find more and more portions of cavern every week without end, new twists, and new turns. The caverns are incredibly dangerous as well: some caverns are vacuums just waiting to be broken into, some are flooded, a few contain magma flows, and some contain explosive gas that will detonate and shake the whole area at a spark, instantly incinerating the cavern’s occupants. (This wouldn’t stop most Gaians). The strong magnetic interference of the Rift also means that the caverns under Iris-Hong will destroy any electronics that aren’t very hardened and very expensive. (This does stop quite a few more Gaians.) Still, if there’s any people on Gaia that will go into mysterious, cast and deadly places with nothing but antiquated equipment, it’s the Joyriders, and the caverns under the Rift are usually full of some of Gaia’s bravest, most curious, and most reckless, trying to divine what secrets lie underground... and also usually trying to open up boreholes within the vacuum caverns.