Androktasia

"If Eris is a prison for monsters, Androktasia is where the jailers build new ones."

— Anonymous Volkert defector

An Acheronian Outpost

Androktasia is not of this universe. It is an acheronian object dragged from Redspace and anchored to Eris through an act of occult engineering that only Mortimer Mot could conceive. Wrested from its original master, the sentient RAI Veillivare, Androktasia now hangs tethered to the dwarf planet like a parasitic twin. Subspace gateways and resonator fields keep its toxic presence from overwhelming Eris, but inside, reality itself is precarious.

To RAIs, Androktasia is poison. The resonators blot out their influence, repelling or outright unmaking them. For House Volkert, this makes the place invaluable — a rare foothold inside the incomprehensible wilderness of Redspace.

A City of Two Castes

Life in Androktasia divides into extremes.

• The Prodigies: hand-picked savants, scientists, and visionaries capable of grappling with fourth-dimensional physics. For them, Androktasia is a laboratory and proving ground, where the impossible becomes practical under constant terror.
• The Expendables: criminals, degenerates, and failures, shipped here as test subjects or disposable labor. They are told that five years of survival earns freedom from Eris, a promise Volkert may or may not keep. Memory wipes are rumored to be standard practice when “graduates” are released.

The community enforces its own laws, because it must. One careless breach of protocol, one cracked resonator, and the entire settlement could be consumed by Redspace predators. Fear is both leash and lawgiver.

Life at the Edge of Reality

Androktasia is a landscape of contradictions. Streets open into non-Euclidean courtyards that fold into themselves. Buildings warp and shift as resonators groan under pressure. In the distance, curtains of Redspace light ripple like auroras, through which glimpses of screaming faces or alien cities are sometimes seen. Time flows erratically; clocks must be synchronized daily, lest a work crew lose an hour or gain a week.

Everyday life is a balancing act between the banal and the bizarre. Children attend “school” beside rift-monitoring stations, lovers meet in bars built under reinforced resonator domes, and work crews conduct maintenance with the quiet resignation of miners sitting on a powder keg. Everyone knows that one misstep — one broken seal, one inattentive moment — could drag the entire district screaming into the abyss.

Experiments Beyond Reason

Androktasia exists to tempt fate. Here, House Volkert conducts its most ambitious and least ethical projects: weaponizing RAIs, engineering stable subspace gateways, experimenting with psychic conduits, and probing the limits of Perfect Vessel creation. RAIs are baited into null-fields and dissected. Humans are wired into psychovector matrices to test their “resilience.” The results are rarely humane, but the data is invaluable to Volkert’s ascendant power.

Mot himself frequently oversees Androktasia, his ancient cunning guiding both prodigies and expendables. Some whisper that he spends more time here than on Eris itself, conversing with Agnes and conducting dialogues with Redspace intelligences beyond the comprehension of mortals.

Reward and Punishment

For prodigies, Androktasia is the pinnacle of Volkert service — a place to advance knowledge where no one else dares. For expendables, it is both punishment and slim hope of reprieve. Survival for five years is supposed to earn freedom, though most never last that long. Those who do emerge are forever changed: haunted by visions, scarred by subspace exposure, and often missing whole years of memory.

To supersentients, Androktasia is an insult. RAIs and their ilk resent the intrusion into their domain, viewing it as a violation of cosmic order. To humanity, it is both an achievement and a blasphemy: proof that even the walls between realities are not beyond exploitation.