𝕷 𝖆 𝖓 𝖟 𝖆 𝖉 𝖆

a bit of lore,

to hold you over while you wait to find out what happens next! New chapters are released bi-weekly, Sundays and Wednesdays. Catch you on the next one :)

They found that Mars was just not profitable enough. The mining was worthless with it's heavy machinery, constant delays, and holes drilled into the sides of mountains. Sure, more profitable than barren Earth. But, when a solid metal asteroid, larger than said mountains could be hauled off the Galvar straight in less than a week, why bother?

The same went for agriculture. Billions poured in to climate-stabilizing domes, bio-engineered crops, and some serious scientific know-how, all for Martian Ag stocks to plummet down to near 0, as soon as they learned they could do all that stuff off planet, on a satellite, more effectively.

So all they had left was tourism. For a bit, it worked. Mars was a blank canvas and the investors took that and ran with it. Cities could be built to satisfy every consumers need. A fantastical medieval European city the size of Boston? The Disney adults ate it right up. Colonial cities straight out of the history books? Cortez approved. 50's suburbia stretching out uninterrupted for a hundred miles? Well, why not? Nostalgia was trending and even though there was nobody alive who had ever seen the 50's, they ate it right up.

Those initial barebones colonies became these weird Disneyland towns and cities, and more began to pop up. An ancient Chinese city off the Arcadian flats, LA at its peak on the edge of Elysium, a steampunk megalopis on the steppe's of Cardaria.

Business was booming. Nobody wanted anything more than to get off earth and what better way to do it then by spending a few weeks somewhere fantastical, classical, a bit whimsical, and fully unreminiscent of earth.

But all booms come with a bust, and the bigger the bubble, the louder they pop. Because in truth, it was never really profitable; fully speculative from the start. The only thing keeping the space tourism going was government subsidies. Governments that had been running on fumes for the better part of a century, it only took one stupidly expensive project to send them over the edge.

A crash here, a crisis there, inflation everywhere. They were running on borrowed money to begin with, and they needed a lot more to keep it going. When that didn't come in, everything just kind of imploded.

Tickets to Mars skyrocketed overnight, inflated but closer to their actual price. Those still on a leisurely vacation found themselves focused back on Earth far too soon. Those from the lucky countries were able to afford a ticket on what would be one of the last ships to leave the planet for a decade. Those from unlucky countries saw their currency devalue so fast they wouldn't have been able to afford snacks on-board the flight.

Although... lucky, unlucky, who can really say? Stuck dealing with the dumpster fire on earth or with a desert mostly barren but for fake castles. You'd be surprised how resourceful people can get, when the conditions are right. And with a decade at that (how long it took Earth to get its act together) Mars was nothing like the planet the CEO's and central bankers had escaped in a hurry.

But one city truly surpassed the rest, built around  a crater on the foothills of Olympus Mons, Lanzada speckled against the monotonous desert with its white hacienda estates, blue-green high-rises, neighborhoods in all colors but brown and red, and the marble dock that fully wrapped around the edge of Crater Lake.