# Celeste Station

###### tags: `Lore`

### Overview:
Celeste Station is an expansive city-come-mining-town based on the slowly-crumbling moon of Religix orbiting Kalixis, mining the planetoid for rare industrial minerals and accelerating its already-disasterous disintegration.

### Operations:
Because Bezuts' space is considered a sacred, combined heritage of its peoples, it is not claimed by any individual entity, and nor are any stellar bodies or structures. Celeste Station is overseen by the Kalixis Stellar Council, a representative democratic governing body consisting of 15 representitives taken from the four primary nations that inhabit the planet. In order of council power, they are the PGF, Antechannel, Zale and the slowly-weakening Zohil. Based on the number of representatives they have, each nation has greater stakes on portions of Religix for their nationalized mining industries to prey upon, utilizing massive industrial drills and plasma cutters to plumb the depths of the moon's crust.

### Structure:
Due to the inherently unstable nature of Religix, very few if any permanent structures are established on its surface, especially residences or factories. Instead, Celeste Station is a massive orbital station that fully orbits the moon approximately once every thirty days on a continually shifting axis. Mining outposts (designed to be constructed and deconstructed rapidly to keep up with quotas and cracks in the earth alike) are quickly constructed from a combination of prefab structures and an expensive-therefore-larger form of the bluespace pods often found in the pockets of mining crewmen across the Frontier. Whenever Celeste revolves near a mining outpost, the outpost's crew, vital equipment and mined materials are shipped back up with them, leaving the structures behind to be destroyed. Occasionally, mining outposts are built on massive pressurized vents that, as the crust dislodges from the moon, propel it out of the moon's thin atmosphere and into space, leaving prefabricated boxes of loose mining equipment and forgotten personal items to litter the Frontier. In fact, many a scavenger has at least one story of looting a derelict mining station far from Kalixis just to find the logo of one of the national mining companies stamped on all the stationary or on the spare uniforms left in dressers.

### Economy:
Between exports to Kalixis and exports to other planets, Celeste Station outputs several billion tons of rare minerals and gases every year, primarily in osmium and helium. The unusually high level of output can be attributed to the moon's gradual disintegration brought about by the Roche limit, which allows remote mining drones and small vessels to easily locate and harvest veins of ore and gas. In addition to the massive volumes of industrial materials, the city is also a self-sustaining economy for its hundreds of thousands of workers – mainly due to the massive logistical and monetary strains of moving said hundreds and thousands of miners, pilots, technicians, quartermasters and office staff from the lunar surface and back every day. Instead, the city is a warren of shops, offices, and other staples of any mid-sized modern metropolis. Of the massive population of Celeste Station, approximately twenty-five to thirty percent of all staff onboard are not directly working in the mining field.

### The Coming Disaster:

Religix has been slowly coming apart for hundreds of years. Before mining operations began, scientists estimated that the moon would finish coming apart and form a ring around the planet after several thousand or even tens of thousands of years. However, after Kalixis began experiencing shortages of rare yet vital industrial materials, namely helium for use in metallurgy, geological surveys found that Religix contained unusually high volumes of the gas, alongside other rare metals and minerals. In the wake of this discovery and the ensuing mining rush often referred to as the Great Blast (referencing the early usage of plasma-based explosives often colloquially referred to as "maxcaps" as mining charges), scientists have now estimated that not only will the destruction of Religix take place within centuries or even decades rather than millenia, but rather than simply forming a ring, the resulting debris would pepper the planet with massive meteor showers and possibly devestate the surface. These cries from the scientific community have gone largely unheard by the governments and their mining operations, although civil unrest regarding the matter and demands for change have begun to grow louder in recent years. Time is running out for the people of Kalixis.