New Pavacho
"A ghost world where even the dust seems to carry grudges."
Children of a Dead Colony
New Pavacho, once known only as Pavacho, began its life as a forgotten food-production experiment of the Solar Commonwealth. Fungal vats, water squeezers, and atmospheric processors were set up, and settlers tried to wring a living from silica deserts and stubborn grasslands. Then, quietly, it failed. Whether due to costs, disease, pirates, or simple boredom, the settlers left or died, leaving behind a shell of ghost towns, exhausted mines, and wells. For decades Pavacho was nothing but dust and memory.
That changed in Year 99, when survivors of the New Century Rebellion—a short-lived movement that dreamed of swapping “royal families” every hundred years—fled their defeat and exile. The survivors pooled their meager resources and bought their way into Pavacho’s ruins. They restarted the fungal vats, ranches of Saturnite Spiders, and synthetic chicken farms, jury-rigged the atmosphere processors, and reactivated the old gravity spires. Overhead, they strung up their proudest acquisition: a second-hand orbital pressor, badly damaged but still casting light. Too close in orbit, it made the planetoid hotter than intended—but by then, adaptation was easier than fixing it. Pavacho became New Pavacho, the rebels’ exile and their descendants’ harsh home.
The Wasted World
New Pavacho is a harsh, jury-rigged world. Its breathable atmosphere is thin and unsatisfying to outsiders, but its people have adapted. Arid badlands, silica deserts, and brittle grasslands stretch between scattered settlements. Orchards of olive trees and vast spider ranches are the exception, not the rule. Deep wells tap the hidden ocean, and nothing—nothing—is wasted. Sewage plants are shrines as much as utilities, recycling every drop of water into life.
Life is hot. The damaged pressor burns down too close, creating a sweltering, arid climate at the edge of survivability. The Pavacheans embraced it, their skin tanned, their lungs remade by generations of mutation, their culture flavored by dust, heat, and defiance.
A Law of Guns
No central city anchors New Pavacho—only a sprawl of small towns bound by a loose alliance. Law here is embodied in the Sheriff of Pavacho, an elected gunslinger chosen in duels fought with D-HEWs on stun. Deputies form their posse from defeated challengers, while bounty hunters ride the wastes for contracts posted by towns. Nearly every Pavachean carries a sidearm, and more than one outlaw has discovered that “the town” itself will stand together if things go too far.
Ghost Steel and Jury-Rigged Fire
New Pavacho’s defenses are an echo of its culture—improvised, cheap, and terrifyingly effective. In orbit, garage-built harpoon satellites fling monomolecular tethers at intruding ships, dragging them into violent spins or tearing them apart outright. On the surface, jury-rigged starfighters—more often used as crop-dusters and scouts—sit hidden in barns until called up, joining in ragged squadrons to fight off raiders. These defenses are not elegant, but they are effective.
Mutation and Identity
The fungal vats and broken air processors left their mark on Pavachean biology. Their blood runs pale pink, almost white, their sclera eerily clear, and their teeth grow sharp and keratinous. What outsiders find unsettling, the Pavacheans accept as proof of survival. For them, the air of home is sufficient; for them, every other world is over-sweetened luxury.
Scraps, Smugglers, and Silk
Economically, New Pavacho scrapes by on spider silk, fungal protein, and livestock. They mint their own local scrip— bills of spider silk stamped with the alchemical sigil of a Century, a half-joke nod to their rebel ancestry. Smuggling is rampant, both in and out, and New Pavacho’s reputation as a nest of dangerous loners has only sharpened with the years.
Notoriety in the Black
Beyond its badlands, New Pavacho has gained a reputation in the wider Pan-Solar Consortium. Its people are seen as gunslingers and loners—romanticized by some, feared by others. They wander outward as bounty hunters, smugglers, mercenaries, or simply adventurers. Many find work where being taciturn, stubborn, and dangerous is exactly what’s needed. For better or worse, New Pavacho has earned a name as one of the notoriously unfriendly frontiers of Human Space.
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