South Eris

"Crash down here and you’ll find three fates waiting: the wreckers will strip you, the hunters will bleed you, and the survivors will use you. Pick your poison."

— Volkert MAA briefing to recruits

The Graveyard of Ships

South Eris is not a city but a killing field. The southern hemisphere is where Dysnomia’s torpedoes and pressors bring down intruding ships, deliberately forcing “landings” hard enough to cripple hulls but soft enough to preserve crews for capture. Over centuries, this wasteland has become a graveyard of wrecks: corvettes, fighters, SMC frigates, even pirate cruisers, all rusting together in twisted heaps. The landscape itself is hostile, choked with debris and stalked by ghouls and necroids. For House Volkert, this is not a blighted desert — it is a laboratory without walls.

Wreckers, Hunters, and Survivors

South Eris’s population divides into three castes:

• Wreckers scavenge relentlessly, stripping hulls, Cybernetics, and even corpses. They feed Materials to Agnes’s Gigafactorum in exchange for supplies, and sell hacked cyberware into the markets of Rome and Reme.
• Hunters are ghouls and necroids unwilling to live under Volkert’s tight leash. They prowl the wreckage like carrion lords, ambushing crews or scavenger gangs.
• Survivors are the unfortunates who still cling to independence. Crashed crews who never made it to Rome or Reme, they form ramshackle camps, dreaming of building a starship from scraps and escaping the nightmare. These communities are endlessly raided, studied, and recorded by Volkert drones circling overhead.

Each group despises the others, but Volkert considers them all useful test subjects in its ongoing experiments with Redspace contamination, survival psychology, and the evolution of lawless societies under constant pressure.

A Laboratory Without Consent

South Eris is more than a dumping ground — it is a controlled environment. Volkert uses the region to test new technologies, observe emergent behavior, and refine its tools of dominance. Survivors who organize too well might suddenly face a “field test” of a new Necroid shock troop or RAI weapon. Wreckers who stockpile too much may mysteriously vanish into Agnes’s chutes. Hunters who grow too bold may find their territory collapsing under swarms of Volkert drones. The southern hemisphere is allowed to fester not from neglect, but from design.

The Signal Blackout

Perhaps the most terrifying feature of South Eris is its silence. Quantum-locked communicators—devices that should function anywhere in the cosmos—fail here. No signals escape, no messages get through. This blackout ensures that no cry for help reaches the outside world, and no evidence of Volkert’s work leaks out. Rumors abound: some say the blackout is caused by colossal buried resonators, others that Eris itself has been hollowed into a Faraday cage. The truth, like most things on Eris, remains a carefully guarded Volkert secret.

The Role of South Eris

South Eris is Volkert’s sieve, its filter for the unwanted. Intruders, criminals, and the unlucky are all funneled here, and only a few claw their way into Rome or Reme. The region is a horror-show ecosystem designed for study, punishment, and amusement in equal measure. To outsiders, it is a cautionary tale of Volkert’s cruelty. To insiders, it is simply another part of Eris’s vast machinery of control: a place where desperation is currency, and every life is collateral.