Lore – Independent

A form of employment originating from post-WW3 California on Earth, Riggers are the freelance engineers who keep civilization running while civilization pretends they don’t exist. Hardware repair. Software development. Construction. Sanitation. Salvage. Mining support. The jobs no faction wants to staff permanently and every faction needs done yesterday. A Rigger bids on a contract, does the work, gets paid, and moves on. No benefits. No pension. No faction loyalty required.

A STEM degree gets you registered. Everything after that is your problem.

ZenFusion

Every Rigger works through ZenFusion — the only contract engineering platform in the Seven Realms. Founded as a Terra Alliance startup in the 2240s, ZenFusion grew fast enough that the Corporate Chamber tried to nationalize it by the 2260s. The board saw the vote coming, packed up, and reincorporated in Xing Hong under a Prefect-granted charter before the ink dried. The Alliance lost its golden goose. Every other faction gained access to the labor pool overnight.

Today, ZenFusion processes over two million job matches daily. Alliance megacorps, Imperium state enterprises, Directorate colonial administrations, Covenant infrastructure projects, independent settlements with busted water recyclers — they all post to the same platform. ZenFusion takes 28% of every completed job. Riggers call it “the bite.” The company calls it “service optimization fees.” Nobody’s laughing.

Riggers who need money fast take surge jobs. Most come back fine. Some don’t come back.

The Life

Riggers skew overwhelmingly male. The work is transient, the income unpredictable, and the lifestyle makes long-term planning a joke. No employer means no stability. No stability means no one wants to build a future with you. Most Riggers bounce between spaceports and temporary housing, carrying everything they own in a kit bag and a Nucleus Watch profile.

Marriage prospects are grim. The smart ones don’t bother pretending otherwise. When the loneliness hits, many Riggers spend their earnings on Leased Lilies. The money’s decent enough to afford a few hours of warmth, and a Lily won’t ask where you’ll be next month. It’s the closest thing to intimacy the gig economy allows. Some Riggers develop regular arrangements with specific Lilies — not relationships, exactly, but something adjacent. Familiar skin. A name someone remembers. Enough to keep going.

In the 23rd century, the term “Leased Lily” refers to a legalized form of contracted prostitution that has become one of the Sol System’s most economically significant industries. What began as a local practice on Mars has since spread to Venus, Earth, and the moons of Uranus, though Xing Hong remains where the modern framework originated and where the industry carries the most economic weight.

The profession’s rise can be traced to two converging factors: the eradication of sexually transmitted diseases through widespread Medi-Vap application, and the socioeconomic disruptions that eliminated traditional employment across multiple sectors. For many—particularly female college graduates facing a brutal job market—Leased Lily work offers income that office positions simply cannot match. By 2295, economists estimate that Leased Lily earnings account for 55% of Xing Hong’s Tertiary Sector GDP.

The legal framework in Xing Hong requires Lilies to operate under a sponsoring agency. These companies theoretically screen clients for safety, provide insurance coverage, and handle contractual disputes. In exchange, the agency takes a 31% cut, leaving Lilies with 69% of their earnings. Critics argue this system creates dependency while providing inadequate protection. Supporters counter that unsponsored work, while more profitable, exposes Lilies to dangerous clients with no legal recourse. The debate continues in district councils, though no legislation has passed in either direction.

Unsurprisingly, a shadow market exists. Unsponsored Lilies operate outside the legal framework, keeping their full earnings while accepting the associated risks. Prefect Dilinur’s administration officially condemns such activities, though enforcement varies dramatically by district. Lion District’s Constables investigate aggressively, Dragon District’s look the other way, Eagle District’s corporate security cares little, while Opera District’s Covenant rulers forbid the practice altogether. Nonetheless, when the average rent costs $3,000 Atomic Dollars monthly and a single premium appointment pays $800, the math pushes people toward whatever works.

Social attitudes toward the profession remain sharply divided. Venus, nicknamed “the Pleasure Planet” by admirers and “Lust & Rot” by detractors, celebrates Leased Lilies openly, with several political figures publicly involved in the industry. Xing Hong’s population proves more complicated. Traditionalist immigrants from the Covenant and Imperium view Lilies as symbols of moral decay, while others see them as pragmatic in an unforgiving economy. Prefect Dilinur maintains the status quo: neither encouraging unsponsored Lilies nor restricting operations. The industry is simply too large to touch without consequences.

Wild Fangs are frontier hunters — solo killers who range across the Seven Realms’ most hostile territories with nothing but blades and the spirits they’ve learned to wear. They don’t belong to any faction. They never have. Where armies march in formation and hordes breed in hive clusters, Wild Fangs hunt alone. They don’t command beasts. They become them.

Spirit Channeling

Wild Fangs practice spirit channeling, one of the oldest psionic disciplines in human history — rooted in indigenous shamanic traditions that predate the Atomic Era by centuries. Through meditation, fucking under open sky, hunting until exhaustion breaks something loose — they enter psionic states that rewrite how their bodies move.

During channeling, a Wild Fang’s eyes shift color. Amber. Violet. Sometimes the slit-pupiled gold of something that eats you. Their movements turn animal-fluid, reactions sharpening past human limits. Pain hits different. Fear tastes like excitement. The thinking mind doesn’t vanish — it just stops pretending it’s in charge.

Soldiers who’ve survived fighting Wild Fangs say the same thing: “Like some wild monkeys in human form!” The Wild Fang don’t disagree. They just don’t see the insult.

Weapons and Combat

Wild Fangs carry weapons that look like museum pieces — blades, spears, chain-weapons forged from whatever Zephyrium the local terrain provides. The mineral holds edges sharper than steel and hums with psionic resonance. These things cut through modern armor like it’s not there.

The primitive aesthetic is deliberate. Technology puts distance between you and the kill. Wild Fangs close that distance. They feel the blade catch bone. They smell the blood hit air. Rifles work fine. They just feel like cheating.

One Wild Fang can tear through targets that would tie up a full military squad. They don’t win through numbers. They win because they’ve stopped thinking like something that can die.

Attire

Wild Fangs wear as little as the weather allows — loincloths, wraps, cloaks when it’s freezing. Bare skin lets Aether flow during channeling. It’s also just how they live. Clothes feel like lying.

What they do wear tends toward trophies. Teeth from kills. Scales from dead companions. Zephyrium jewelry forged during rare settlement visits. Another Wild Fang can read your whole history from your necklace — where you’ve been, what you’ve survived, how dangerous you probably are.

Outsiders think the look is primitive. Wild Fangs think armor is what prey wears when it’s scared.

Sex Wherever, Whenever

Wild Fangs don’t go home. Most don’t have one. Their life is the frontier — scouting unmapped moons, tracking Radi-Mon incursions, setting up camps in places that kill anyone softer. Years pass between settlement visits.

This shapes how they form human connections…and mate. Wild Fangs meet on trails, share a camp for a night or a week, have many great fucks until they’re satisfied, then walk separate directions without promising anything. Relationships form like weather and pass just as quick. Children born out there grow up in the wild, learning to hunt and channel spirits before they learn to read. Some find their way to settlements eventually. Most don’t bother.

Sol System tourists call them savages. “Breeding like animals,” they sneer. “No marriage, no commitment, no civilization.”

Wild Fangs shrug and walk back into the wilderness. They’ve heard it. They don’t care.

Primarch Moro, whose Rakshasa Horde shares Proxima Centauri with many Wild Fangs, put it simply: “To live as great nature’s beasts is an elegant way of appreciating life itself. Let them love as they will, where they will. Their freedom is earned.”

Goddess of sex, love, and war. Chinese in origin, now worshipped across the Seven Realms by a small but devoted following that cuts across every faction line. Her name carries duality: 精 means both “essence” and “semen,” while 度母 invokes the maternal divines of East Asian tradition. She is the mother who guides through passion, devotion, and bloodshed alike. Most of humanity has forgotten her. The ones who remember tend to be dangerous.

Origin

Seed Dumu emerged during the collapse of Communist China, representing everything the regime had suppressed: individual desire, physical intimacy, the courage to fight for something personal rather than ideological. Her worship spread through folk religion in the post-war era, carried by refugee communities, merchant fleets, and soldiers who needed something to pray to before a battle or a bed. Over two centuries, she outgrew her Chinese roots. Shrines appeared on Mars, Venus, Uranus moons, and eventually Proxima Centauri — not through organized mission work, but through the quiet persistence of people who kept carving her likeness wherever they settled.

The Decline

In the 23rd century, Seed Dumu’s worship has largely vanished from the middle class. Her three domains have been stripped of sanctity by modern life. Sex is accessible and transactional — female college students graduate or drop out into Leased Lily work every year, and Medi-Vap eliminated the consequences that once made intimacy feel like a serious act. War is a resource game played between politicians and megacorps, nothing personal enough to pray over. Love is seen as an invented concept used to justify economic leverage — marriage for tax breaks, partnerships for combined income, rituals dressed up as romance.

A goddess who presides over all three has little to offer people who’ve reduced them to systems. Seed Dumu is now considered a luxury religion — maintained by those with enough power to understand what she actually represents, or enough wildness to still live it.

The Xing Hong Shrine

Her greatest temple stands within the Honghuang Administrative Palace, housing a five-story statue allegedly carved from the crystallized semen of the 108 men who founded Xing Hong. The statue’s white-gold composition has never been satisfactorily explained. Devotees believe Seed Dumu blessed the city’s Independence War in 2283. Whether or not this is true, Xing Hong won its sovereignty against odds that no strategic analysis can fully account for.

Prefects and their inner circles take her worship seriously. For Xing Hong’s governing class, Seed Dumu is not superstition — she is statecraft. The city was built on sex work, defended through war, and held together by bonds of loyalty that outlast contracts. She is the patron saint of all three.

Worship

Devotees seek her blessing through divination blocks (擲筊). Her responses are famously unpredictable — she has refused powerful officials while favoring apparent outsiders. Couples intending to marry in Xing Hong traditionally visit her shrine to let Seed Dumu see them together before they commit.

Curiously, Seed Dumu worship is widespread among Wild Fangs, including those in Proxima Centauri who have no connection to Chinese culture or Xing Hong’s traditions. Many carry small phoenix totems on their person. Some take divination seriously enough to carve white wooden blocks from local tree trunks, tossing them on flat rocks before deciding whether to accept a contract or choose a mate. No one has adequately explained why a Chinese folk goddess resonates with frontier hunters across multiple star systems. Wild Fangs don’t explain it either. They just do it.

Factional Attitudes

The Imperium classifies Seed Dumu as a “lesser divine second to the Celestial Dragon” — not persecuted, merely patronized. Her followers in Imperial territory worship quietly and without state support. The Zorian Covenant actively discourages but does not forbid her worship. The Alliance and Directorate are indifferent. Most of their citizens have never heard of her.

A tantric bonding rite older than any living faction. The White Bodhi Oath binds two lovers through shared vulnerability, oral intimacy, and the mingling of bodily essence into a single vessel. No marriage required. No priests. No witnesses. Just two people in a locked room deciding whether they trust each other enough to hide nothing.

Most of humanity has never heard of it. The two factions who understood what it could do spent a century making sure of that.

Origin

The White Bodhi Oath draws from Buddhist and Daoist sexual cultivation traditions predating the Atomic Era. Practitioners across Earth’s history arrived at the same conclusion independently: genuine intimacy between bonded partners produces psionic effects no solo practice can replicate. The Oath formalized this into a single rite.

In the early colonial era, the Oath spread through frontier communities on Mars, Venus, and the outer moons. Couples facing isolation and Radi-Mon threats found the rite’s effects were measurably, psionically real. Word traveled. Texts circulated. Practitioners taught small groups in private.

That was the beginning of the end.

Suppression

It survived in Proxima Centauri, preserved by Rakshasa-adjacent communities beyond either faction’s reach. As of 2295, the actual steps are unknown to anyone in the Sol System. The name surfaces in academic footnotes, dismissed as pre-Atomic superstition. The knowledge exists. Just not where scholars are looking.

The Oath’s rumored existence has fueled centuries of Western fascination with Eastern spiritual traditions. Many Valorans and Novians who explore Buddhism or Daoist philosophy do so partly because they believe these traditions offer freedoms their own societies deny them.

The Rite

Any couple whose love is genuine can perform the Oath. The difficulty is knowing whether the love is real. Most who learn the steps produce nothing. The Oath rewards truth, not technique.

The couple begins with shared study. Tantric texts read aloud — passages about bodies merging, essences mixing, the meeting point between flesh and spirit. They read slowly, or skim in silence while stealing glances.

Each shares a secret. Could be a betrayal buried for years, or a desire they’ve never spoken to anyone. The point is showing the ugly parts and watching whether the other person flinches.

Then the hard part — showing devotion through oral sex. The wife kneels and takes her husband into her mouth.

This act — taking his cock, the least dignified thing on him, right into her mouth, the center of her face, her dignity — is love at its most unconditional. And his surrender to her, the willingness to have his most vulnerable part held between her teeth, says the same thing back.

Tradition holds that 108 movements bring auspicious blessing — slow or swift, whatever feels right. She may be gentle or eager, setting her own pace. He may grip her hair, her shoulders, or her face. She trusts him not to hurt her. He trusts her not to bite down.

The rite continues until climax. She holds his release fully, no turning away. The couple then joins in a deep kiss, tongues mingling semen and saliva, tasting each other. Some stay locked like that for minutes, breathing hard.

Afterwards, she lets the mingled fluid drip from her lips into a vial. One session rarely fills it.

Phylactery vials are crafted from Proximan quartz — sourced from Rakshasa settlements or handmade by Wild Fangs. The quartz replicates bonded essence at roughly five times its volume. A single successful session yields approximately 25–30ml after multiplication. The vial’s full capacity is 108ml. A phylactery becomes minimally viable at 55ml. Most couples need three to four sessions to complete one. The fluid inside never expires so long as the bond holds.

Variations exist for same-sex couples, with adjusted procedures maintaining the core elements: shared study, exchanged secrets, oral intimacy, and mingled essence sealed together.