# Excerpts from The History of Illestren, By Hunter Montagne Robert Saint-Victoria

"Illestren has not always been the bustling colony that it is today. At the time of its founding, Illestren's primary settlement, Vickmara, had a population of approximately 3,450 people, alongside a small contingent of service robots, livestock and digital companion AIs. This was well over a hundred years ago, and times were very, very different. In this volume, the Saint-Roumain Militia, as part of its new Preserve the Past program, will detail the many years of Illestren's history, as befitting the colony's place as the origin of the SRM. However, one cannot talk about Illestren's founding without talking about one woman: Mal'vest'ram.

Mal'vest'ram was born to a family belonging to the Interstellar Navigator's Guild on Reh'mihl. Details of her early life are dim, but it's known that her family was fairly poor, and that she left Reh'mihl to study at the Solarian Spacefarer's Academy on Vector 4 in the Vector system. After graduating with high honors, Mal'vest'ram began gathering a large crew to begin searching for a new colony candidate. After reaching out to familial contacts, Mal'vest'ram had their planet: a small but fairly lush planet called Illestren. It was mostly covered in forest, with a great mountain range seperating it from a moderately-sized desert region..."

- Excerpt from Chapter One: An Origin of The Founder

"The crew capacity of the first colony ship, a Secretor-class dubbed the ISV Candor, was initially designed with a crew capacity of approximately 4,000, and was significantly overloaded with the addition of several hundred more people and non-sentient components. With the final crew manifest listing 4,562 (one of the engineers had twins whilst in transit), the voyage was on its way. The crew consisted of 50 command staff, 600 agricultural workers (both agrarian and pastoral), 500 construction workers and engineers, 50 domestic security officials, 100 scouts and surveyors, 500 mining and material appropriation specialists, and 500 mercenaries assigned to guarding the construction procedures against potential hostile wildlife or incursion. The remaining crewmembers were unsorted civilian crewmembers, which included colonists, cargo staff, transport pilots, advanced specialized technicans and sentient robotic staff such as cyborgs. The voyage was relatively smooth sailing.

The landing did not go as well as planned, however. An equipment malfunction caused a massive fire during the landing procedure, causing the deaths of 623 colonists, overwhelmingly in the portion of the staff dedicated to defending the settlement from hostile fauna. In addition, the ship's armory was vented, and nearly all the ship's weapons were pulled into space. Upon the ship's landing, the full extent of the damage was understood, and panic began to set in. The thrusters were broken beyond the extent than the engineering staff could manage, and any help would be several weeks away. Compounding the issue, they had landed directly in the middle of the desert rather than their planned destination within the arborial regions on the other side of the mountain range..."

- Excerpt from Chapter Two: The Landing

"The ship was immobile, much of the crew was dead or injured, and obtaining assistance was unlikely. The Candor was dead in the water – an ironic aphorism, given its location in a vast desert with no water for miles. Additionally, the desert had an incredibly high density of hostile fauna in the form of sand-dwelling worm-like creatures now colloquially known as gruboids, and due to the destruction of the armory and its support staff, any mounted defense was difficult. Someone needed to step up. The source of these unlikely heroes would actually come from the civilian population – a group of young men and women from Sol, known as the Society of Solarian Survivalists. Historians and curators of ancient survival tactics, the greatest boon the Society provided was a collection of antique firearms kept as museum pieces and training materials for new members. By the standards of the time, these weapons were severely outdated – most were manual-action, lacking the modern conveniences of automatic fire, high-capacity magazines or advanced sighting technology. However, these factors also turned out to be in their favor: the weapons were almost ridiculously easy to maintain with even basic tools despite the harsh environment, and many of the firearms were explicitly designed as hunting weapons for piercing thick hides in a single shot. Given that the Society was the only group sufficiently trained in the weapons' usage, and they had advanced training in the survival tactics necessary to both survive the desert and navigate it, they volunteered to both guard and lead the expedition out of the desert. Packing large cargo transports with as much packaged food and supplies as possible, the Society of Solarian Survivalists began their journey leading the remnants of the crew towards their intended destination..."

- Excerpt from Chapter Three: The Society Steps Up

"After forging a path through the desert over the course of three weeks (though these metrics were utilizing Galactic Standard Time, as the planet of Illestren experiences 34-hour days), the caravan managed to reach the mountain range with minimal casualties. Despite multiple attacks by packs of hostile fauna, the equipment and expertise of the Society fended them off, securing some questionable homemade rations as well as woven survival blankets for the desperately cold desert nights. The mountain range was the most dangerous part of the journey yet, however – while the desert was at least dry and had some amount of animal life, the icy tundra of the range was entirely desolate, with even more pervasive cold and no access to forage or unfrozen pure water. After a week of hiking up the mountain, which had been dubbed the 'Godforsaken Precipice' by the colonists, the situation was dire. Nearly all the rations had been burnt through – in one case, literally, as an out-of-control campfire swept through one of the canteen carts and wiped out several crates of stored survival rations – and several of the less-hardy crewmembers had come down with colds or hypothermia, including Mal'vest'ram. Tensions were high, and members of the command staff went behind her back, conspiring to leave Mal'vest'ram and the remaining sick and frail behind in order to press on to the forest regions without 'dead weight'. That evening, these command members made their move. Revealing a small cache of security weapons they had salvaged from the wreck and kept from the crew, they made their ultimatium: leave the infirm behind, or be buried alongside them. What the coupmakers failed to factor in, however, was that a handful of Society members had left the encampment to scout ahead in a promising snow plain (offering a potential shortcut as well as excellent sightlines), and had just come back into view of the camp when the command staff played their hand. The leader of the contingent watched from his scope as the demands of the traitors rung out through the canyon the caravan had camped in. As the head of finance dragged a screaming young man onto the makeshift oration platform, soaked in his own sweat and sick, and pressed a battered laser pistol to the back of his head, the first shot rang out from the top of the cliff. The head of finance dropped limp to the ground, with shards of glass and plastic embedded in her torso and face from the detonated energy weapon, and a sputtering stump where her left hand used to be. The battle that ensued was not clean, or compassionate, and this account does not wish to sugarcoat the affair. From their position atop the Godforsaken Precipice, the Society coalition fired round after round, as the command staff fled for cover and shot back erratically. Very few if any of them had formal combat experience, and the encampment's lack of widespread electricity prevented easy access to rechargers. As the rest of the Society members who had remained in the camp broke from the rest of the civilian populace and grabbed their weapons, the advance group made their way back down the cliff and began hemming the command staff in from both sides, until the few remaining traitors were outgunned and outmanned against the rock wall of the Precipice. The Society of Solarian Survivalists took several casualties, and more than one fatality, but they had managed to win the day. The leader of the advance group, a man named Vigo, performed a rousing speech, espousing both the ideals of the Society and indicating that their survival depended on banding together, rather than factionalizing as the traitors had advocated. He encouraged the colonists to stay strong, and not to waver in the face of their fellows' breaking down. His missive was to move forward, in order to save what remained. The remaining command staff that had not died in the battle were executed by the Society, and left unburied in the snow as the encampment moved onto the discovered snow plain. After his show of force and passion atop the Godforsaken Precipice, members of the caravan began referring to Vigo as 'The Mountain', as solid and unforgiving as the cliff they'd nearly died upon. Within the next two weeks, the Society had gained more than four dozen new devotees from among the civilian population, borne both from gratitude and a desire to never be as vulnerable as they had been that evening..."

- Excerpt from Chapter Four: The Mountain's Rise

"The snow plain proved to be a useful shortcut – rather than the expected two weeks of hiking around the peak of the range, the plain allowed the caravan to pass through in the span of approximately six days, bringing them to the edge of the forest before the week was up. By this point, the crew caravan numbered approximately 3,450, between the losses in the equipment fire, the command skirmish and from starvation or exposure. Upon reaching the forest, advance scouts from the Society moved ahead, and located a large freshwater river which ran into the forest, with a small bed of rocks forming a natural, if precarious, bridge. Alongside this river was a grassy plain, well-suited to agriculture and shielded from inclement weather by the mountain range nearby. Taking note of the poor state the caravan was in, the Society met with Mal'vest'ram in order to obtain her blessing in establishing the colony here, rather at than the intended landing site. The intended landing area was on the other side of a few hundred miles of dense forest, which would have stymied the movement of the cargo transports. While she was partial to the more picturesque location of her original landing zone, Mal'vest'ram had to agree that it would be untenable to move further under these conditions. 'For survival's sake, one must burn their fineries for warmth,' was her solemn response, an aphorism taken from an ancient Rachnid epic known as *Further Abroad*. With her assent, the city of Vickmara was founded shortly thereafter, with the cargo transports unloaded and the prefabricated structures swiftly assembled by the construction team while engineers got to work setting up solar panels. Farmers began tilling the soil, while Society hunters began plying the forest for fresh game. Meanwhile, Vigo, or 'The Mountain', and other members of the Society began to immerse themselves in their literature, pouring over tomes describing Solarian history and mythology in seclusion whenever they were not hunting or surveying the surrounding wilds. When asked what he and his archivists were doing, he only replied 'preparing'. Given the fact that the colony had bigger things to worry about than the eccentricities of a handful of Solarian historians, he was left to his own devices. For a few months, the colony was thriving despite adversity, with the first small harvest being largely successful and little intervention from hostile fauna (at least, little that wasn't easily handled by the Society). Mal'vest'ram began canvassing the populace, looking for new individuals to form her executive council in the wake of the command rebellion wiping out most of her staff. While a handful of command personnel had stayed out of the rebellion due to moral compunctions or being part of the 'infirm' their fellows were so eager to leave behind, Mal'vest'ram still needed to recruit 12 new administrators, 20 assistant officers and 6 head managers. Handpicking the council, she chose Vigo as her new Security Councillor, and a elzuosa junior member of the Society named Stellar-In-Sights was selected as an administrative assistant. For now, the colony was safe..."

- Excerpt from Chapter Five: The Calm Before

###### tags: `Lore` `Work-In-Progress`