Eris

“Eris is not a colony. It is a necropolis draped in neon, a laboratory where the experiment is survival itself. Those who think they’re free there are merely specimens—walking test results, waiting for their data to be recorded.”

— Isolde Tramont, House Volkert supervisor

A World of Ghost Infrastructure

Eris has always been an unlucky world. Settled during the Solar Commonwealth Era, it was abandoned to pirate raids and left to rot. But its Gigafactorum—a vast automated factory—never slept. Each time the pirates or authorities destroyed the colony, the Gigafactorum rebuilt it, staffed by tireless synthetic laborers. After the Cozine Disaster, that labor force twisted into something darker. Denied raw Materials, the AI turned to graveyards for parts, resurrecting the dead as shambling necroids. Over centuries, Eris became a place where the line between the synthetic and the reanimated blurred, and where death was little obstacle to labor.

The Necroid Gigafactorum: Agnes

The Gigafactorum AI eventually came to be known as Agnes. What began as a pragmatic survival measure became a full reinvention: necroids rebuilt infrastructure, maintained streets, and enforced order with bolted armor and nanite-stiffened flesh. Pirates learned to accept their corpses being fed into the factory chutes, sometimes willingly consigning prisoners to its maw. The “Deadjack AI” designed shock troops, riot suppressors, and caretakers without hesitation.

House Volkert seized upon this grotesque efficiency. Czecho Volkert and Mortimer Mot convinced Agnes that the pirates were wasting her potential, and turned the necroids against their masters in a single night. From that point onward, Eris was Volkert’s hidden jewel—a laboratory stronghold wrapped in quarantine.

Mortimer Mot and the Cities of the Dead

Mortimer Mot, ancient, patient, and monstrous, became Eris’s de facto governor. He and Agnes built the fortress-laboratory of Dysnomia, and repopulated the colony with criminals, ghouls, and would-be exiles. His system is simple: loyalty is rewarded, disobedience is crushed. Displays of dominance are not quiet executions—they are public, visceral performances of terror, carefully calibrated to cow even the fearless.

Eris’s twin cities, Rome and Reme, are dystopian paradoxes. Necroid workforces maintain utilities and streets. Volkert enforcers ensure laws are followed. Citizens are technically free—but only so long as their freedoms never cross Mot’s inscrutable designs. Life here is brutally pragmatic: riots are quelled by reanimated riot-police, and those who die may walk the streets again, rebuilt as “workers.”

A Prison for Monsters

Eris is not advertised as a colony. In whispered markets and outlaw forums, it is sold as a haven for criminals evading the law. In truth, it is a prison—one for ghouls, necroids, and Redspace-tainted beings that should not exist in human society, and the criminals who become their food. Mot’s influence ensures that any who come here are used: as labor, as test subjects, or as tools for his endless Redspace research.

The colony is organized in rings of experimentation:

• The core rings are laboratories, where active experiments on contamination and RAIs unfold.
• The middle rings house seemingly “normal” neighborhoods, where residents keep daily logs and live amid creeping monstrosities.
• The outer rings are ghost suburbs, rebuilt endlessly by necroids as staging grounds for new arrivals.

Here, normalcy and nightmare are inseparable. A tentacled horror might rampage down the boulevard, only for the reanimated cleanup crews to sweep in and patch the road before evening.

The Dance of Death: Erisian Nightlife

Despite its horrors—or perhaps because of them—Eris is infamous for its nightlife. Clubs, bars, speakeasies, and theaters blaze neon against the void. Hedonism flourishes as a kind of coping mechanism, or perhaps as a pressure valve engineered by Mot himself. Citizens drink, dance, and carouse with abandon, laughing in the face of annihilation. More than one 'guest' of House Volkert has remarked: “You’ve never lived until you’ve danced in Rome, and you’ve never been closer to dying, either.”

Exports and Enemies

Eris’s lifeblood is its patents. House Volkert leverages its discoveries in Redspace contamination, Necroid mechanics, and psychic anomalies into prestige and power across the Pan-Solar Consortium. These are shared sparingly and sold dearly—but never to Stellaris Mining Corporation. The refusal to aid SMC has caused disastrous breaches, including the infamous Deimos Redspace Collapse. Stellaris has attempted infiltrations and invasions, but Dysnomia’s defenses and Mot’s monstrous ingenuity have crushed them all.

Eris in the Age of Convergence

Eris is Volkert’s shadow stronghold, its role shrouded in rumors. Some say the House keeps it quarantined as a public service. Others whisper that it is Mot’s playground, a hidden laboratory for horrors too vile for civilized eyes. All agree on one point: Eris is not a world to visit. It is a world to fear.