WORLD PREMISE
Twenty-three years ago the sky over Vesper-9 tore open.
The Rift was not a wormhole so much as a wound. Something on the other side bled through: living geometry, singing metal, beasts whose bones grew like coral and whose blood etched circuitry into stone. The first cities on the Glow Scar died in a week. The second week, the corporations arrived with orbital guns and lawyers.
They could not close the Rift. They could not hold the wilderness. What they could do was sell protection.
Now the planet is a patchwork of sealed arcologies, rust-belt freeholds, and a thousand kilometers of glowing badlands. National armies collapsed. Planetary government is a rumor. The people who still walk the surface do it inside Frames, walking war machines assembled from corporate surplus, scavenged Rift-tech, and whatever a wrench jockey can bolt on before dawn.
You are not soldiers. You are Wake Contractors: freelance Frame pilots who take jobs no standing army will touch. Escort. Retrieval. Extermination. Deniable war.
Your current ticket is with Company Nine, a mid-weight outfit operating out of the hangar-city Ironwake. The job on the board looks simple:
Escort Helion Combine convoy HS-17 through the Glow Scar to Relay Spire 4. Protect the sealed cargo. Do not open it. Hazard pay authorized for Helix-beast contact. Bonus for on-time arrival.
Simple jobs on Vesper-9 are how pilots get buried.
Something in that cargo is singing. The Ashen Covenant has already made an offer to steal it. Red Banner recon drones have been seen on the ridge. And last night, three kilometers out, a Helix-beast the size of a hangar stood up, looked at the city lights, and bowed.
Write your callsign. Paint your Frame. Check your hardpoints.
The Wake does not forgive a missed contract.
THE WORLD AT A GLANCE
Planet: Vesper-9 (“the Wake”)
Capital that still pretends: Helion Prime (orbital elevator + walled arcology)
Mercenary hub: Ironwake, a stacked hangar-city built in a dead quarry
The scar: The Glow Scar — a 400 km canyon of luminous glass, Rift-coral, and nesting beasts
Currency: Ledger-marks, ammunition, and favors
Tech level: Near-future military plus unstable Rift-tech. No clean transhuman utopia. Cockpits smell like coolant and blood.
What a Frame is:
A 6–18 meter biped, quadruped, or hybrid war machine. Neural-link optional, stick-and-pedal still common. Reactors run hot. Armor is layered composite and scavenged Helix-plate. Most Frames last three contracts before they are rebuilt into something else.
What a pilot is:
Someone who survived training, a wreck, or a war. Callsigns matter more than legal names. A dead pilot’s Frame is auctioned. A living pilot’s reputation is the only pension plan.
FACTIONS
Company Nine (player-adjacent)
A battered but professional merc company. Banner: a black 9 stenciled over rust-orange. They take dirty jobs and try to keep their people alive anyway. Command is Marshal Rhee, who pays on time and lies only when the contract requires it. Players are current contractors — not necessarily loyalists.
Helion Combine
White-and-gold corporate state. Owns the orbital elevator, most clean reactors, and the courts. Their Frames are beautiful, standardized, and disposable. They hire mercs so their own shareholders never see a body count. Public face: progress. Private face: they want the Rift weaponized, not closed.
Ashen Covenant
A faith grown in the Scar. They preach that the Rift is a mouth, and humanity should learn to speak its language. Their Frames are grafted with living Helix-tissue: breathing armor, bone blades, choir-radios that whisper. Some of them are still human. Some of them are rehearsing not to be.
Red Banner Remnant
What is left of Vesper-9’s planetary army. Heavy, painted, parade-proud, and starving. They still claim to be the legitimate government. They still field battalions. They hate mercs for taking the work that used to be theirs, and they hate Helion for buying the sky.
The Scavenger Courts
Junk-clan princes of the wreck fields. Law is duel, salvage rights, and blood-oath. Their Frames are ugly miracles: crane-arms, train-armor, six guns that should not fit. They will sell you parts in the morning and strip your wreck at dusk.
The Chorus
Not quite a nation. Pilots and beasts who have listened to the Rift too long. They move in eerie coordination. Their Frames do not always have pilots in the seat. When the Chorus sings on open comms, cheap neural-links seize.
The Ledger Guild
Neutral brokers. They write contracts, hold escrow, and blacklist anyone who burns a client and gets caught. Ironwake exists because the Guild needs a city that is not owned by a flag.
Helix-Beasts (not a faction — a weather system with teeth)
Rift-life. No two broods look the same. Known classes:
- Needles: pack hunters, glass-quill spines
- Choir-moths: airborne, scramble radios and minds
- Cathedral-walkers: building-sized, slow, almost polite until they are not
- Ink-floods: liquid colonies that climb into vents
- False Frames: beasts that learned the silhouette of a machine
Hosted and narrated by:
Tyurru
Started 09/26/26.
Scenes played: 1
License: Community License
