3TLÖN—Armouricca and the Immortal Grandees of Aiaea

Armouricca is a world with a long history of the failures and difficulties of planetary domestication. Re-settled and re-invigorated several times over tens of thousands of years, the planet basically resists becoming anything remotely earth-like. Suitable planets are hard to come by, and the people of the terrestrial diasporic oecumene [the terhumene] cannot bring themselves to commit fully to vacuum-based life in habs, domes, and ships, nor make the existential and psychic leap to mass transfiguration into vacuum-adapted bodies—thus, earth-ish planets are objects of obsessive and recurrent interest.

“Armouricca” is the name favored by the dominant culture these last two cycles of settlement and attempted domestication (“terraforming” a lifeless planet into the image of the Old Place being virtually impossible, making home-like has been a sufficient goal for some myriads of planets and other bodies ever since the First Age). References and archives across the galaxy identify the planet by its earliest name, Tertius Tlön, or 3Tlön. 

The Grandees of Aiaea, the dominant culture of Armouricca, claim a form of stable bodily immortality, and possess arts and technologies, memories and records, of a vast span of galactic history. The slipstream lanes connecting 3Tlön to other star systems were disrupted in the ‘Novan Collapse, with Juncto explorers finding new routes only in the last century; since then, visitors from the Juncto Alliance and its associated systems have steadily sought the knowledge, the records, and the purported wisdom of the Aiaea. The Grandees welcome novelty and diversion, but do not give up their secrets easily from their palaces and fastnesses, served by mortal retainers, biosculpted servitors, and machinic droids as obstreperous and difficult as their masters. 

You are among the visitors to Armouricca, courting the Aiaeia in pursuit of—what, exactly? Tutelage in ancient arts; access to treasures of knowledge and lost technology; the secret of reliable immortality itself? The Grandees allow a certain number of visitors to the surface of Armouricca, but there is not as who should say any obvious civilization beyond the support towers of the orbital ring where your shuttle docked; you must find your own way.