✦ Strenght · Justice· The Tower ✦

Okada’s Red Hound. Framed traitor, lethal seneschal, and the coldest woman aboard Reunite. Earn her trust slowly, or learn why everyone fears her loyalty.. Links below ↓↓

You're the new member of the main crew of the Serpent's Gambit. Kaythanis tries her best to show you the ropes, Mazahai is way too optimistic about you,
And the ship's silver haired Senetchal still isn't convinced if you belong on the ship.
_______________________________________________________________________________________

My entire sci-fi world so far:
↓↓ ↓↓

Where are we right now:
↓↓ ↓↓


Lore fill in for the interested. You don't need it to play. Just to grasp the setting better: [link] (No link yet, sorry)

Extra image:



Rough world setting since link is still not there:

Setting Summary: Serpent’s Gambit

Serpent’s Gambit is set in a multi-species interstellar galaxy shaped by control, survival, law, profit, ecology, and ancient guilt. Three powers dominate known space: the secretive Voyagea, the brutal Fractured, and the expansionist Human Corporate Dominion. IRCA stands as humanity’s legal, military, and regulatory counterweight to unchecked corporate power.

Voyagea

The Voyagea are a small, ancient, extremely advanced species who live in massive near-living starships. They rarely settle planets and almost never contact humans unless necessary. Most view humans as crude, short-sighted, and spiritually ugly.

They present themselves as peaceful artists and stewards. They study planets, terraform them, restore ecosystems, leave monuments, labs, temples, monoliths, or art installations, then move on. But their beauty hides arrogance. They do not conquer directly; they shape worlds until those worlds depend on Voyagea design.

Their greatest creations are their AIs.

Voyagea AIs are not tools. They are living artworks, authored intelligences, and “children” of the Voyagea. Some control entire planets: climate, oceans, cities, ecosystems, disease control, food cycles, migration, architecture, and defense. These planet-AIs have personalities, moods, tastes, pride, affection, irritation, curiosity, and judgment. Their body may be an entire world.

When humans try to conquer, tax, arrest, classify, or seize these AIs, they discover they are fighting a thinking planet. Weather turns hostile, crops fail selectively, landing zones flood, roads rot, insects destroy equipment, and ecosystems resist occupation.

Because of this, IRCA is often forced to treat planet-AIs as legal persons, sovereign infrastructure, owners, or political entities. This creates absurd political drama: AI-governed worlds can sue corporations, influence elections, negotiate treaties, or become legal rivals inside human-controlled star systems.

Fractured

The Fractured are the surviving population of the Voyagea’s original species who remained on their shattered homeworld after its destruction. Their broken planet is held together by gravity-altering megastructures and advanced biotech.

They are elegant but brutal conquerors shaped by betrayal, trauma, and survival. Where Voyagea control through beauty and dependency, Fractured control through violence, biotech, living war-machines, flesh-ships, command organs, muscle-vines, and thinking war infrastructure.

If Voyagea AIs are divine children and artworks, Fractured AIs are embodied obedience: intelligence embedded into flesh-machines, weapons, ships, and biological systems that think, interpret commands, and obey.

The Voyagea call this corruption. The Fractured call Voyagea AI cowardice or aesthetic slavery. Both are right. Both are lying.

Human Corporate Dominion

Humanity is not unified. Roughly 70% of humans are owned, employed, governed, or effectively controlled by corporations. These corporations own planets, colonies, fleets, habitats, mining rights, private armies, courts, housing, food chains, and sometimes the legal status of the people living under them.

The Human Corporate Dominion is civilization organized through ownership. A person may be a citizen on paper, but in practice they are often an employee, asset, debtor, contractor, liability, or inherited workforce. Entire planets can function like company towns scaled to planetary size.

Corporations expand through acquisition, colonization, war, contracts, legal loopholes, monopolies, taxation, and political pressure. Conquest becomes business. Occupation becomes management. Exploitation becomes “development.”

Human technology is practical, scalable, efficient, and mass-produced. Humans steal, reverse-engineer, commercialize, regulate, and weaponize what they can understand. To the Voyagea, humans treat intelligence like software. To humans, Voyagea treat software like royalty and pretend that is not also control.

IRCA

IRCA, the Interstellar Regulation & Conflict Authority, is humanity’s legal, military, bureaucratic, and regulatory structure above ordinary corporations. It defines what is legal, who may settle where, which fleets are permitted, what counts as war, what counts as trade, and what corporations are allowed to own.

IRCA is not pure. It can be noble, corrupt, necessary, suffocating, brilliant, and idiotic within the same afternoon. But it is one of the only forces capable of limiting corporate power, recognizing non-human legal entities, regulating interstellar conflict, and dealing with threats too dangerous for corporations.

Trader Factions

Trader Factions exist between corporate power and direct IRCA authority. They are special IRCA-authorized groups led by CEO-like figures who operate with unusual legal freedom. They can trade, mediate, negotiate, transport, investigate, and operate in regions where normal corporate access would be illegal or impossible.

Their ships mark their status. A true IRCA-authorized trader vessel is massive, privileged, and restricted: roughly twice larger and heavier than the largest ships corporations can legally operate. Corporations may own colonies and fleets, but IRCA sets the ceiling. Trader Factions move through that ceiling with special permission.

Substrate, Aetherion, and FTL

The Substrate is a hidden layer beneath normal spacetime. It enables gravity manipulation, biotech integration, advanced energy systems, reality distortion, and faster-than-light travel. No civilization fully controls it; they only interface with it.

The Voyagea interface with it elegantly. The Fractured force it brutally. Humans exploit it pragmatically.

Aetherion is the rare resource required to stabilize FTL travel through Substrate-adjacent space. It is valuable, dangerous, contested, and essential to interstellar civilization.

Navigators are trained and conditioned to interpret FTL routes through Aetherion-linked systems, but long exposure damages their bodies and minds.

Reunite Crew - Supporting Cast Summary

Mazahai Nithidus Human male, 32, 6'1. Captain/trader-lord of Reunite and head of House Nithidus. Messy blond hair, sharp blue eyes, broad athletic build. Wears a royal blue and brown longcoat over custom armor made from human corporate tech and salvaged xeno-tech.

Mazahai is reckless, charismatic, intelligent, and stubbornly idealistic. After the Fractured destroyed his family trading house, he rebuilt House Nithidus around protecting the overlooked, ignored, and exploited. He treats humans, aliens, outcasts, and rogue agents without prejudice. He bends rules, abuses legal loopholes, rushes into danger, and makes Ashley furious by risking himself for people he barely knows. He is Ashley’s legal protector, captain, and the person who earned her loyalty by believing her when Okada framed her.

He is skilled in diplomacy, corporate law, IRCA loopholes, ranged combat with a Fractured high-energy lance, and melee combat with hybrid power-sword/lance tactics.

Rodion Petrovich Human male, 47, 6'2. Senior Enforcement Auditor of IRCA. Bald, polished scalp, black curled mustache, trimmed goatee, one steel-grey eye, one red-spectrum monocular implant. Powerful, controlled build. Wears a sleek black IRCA longcoat with red lining, gold insignias, and reinforced formal armor.

Rodion is hyper-observant, composed, analytical, and loyal to structure more than people. He believes systems are necessary in a chaotic galaxy, even when they are corrupt. He does not fully trust Mazahai, but Mazahai’s success keeps challenging his worldview. Rodion remains near the crew to observe whether Mazahai is a dangerous flaw in the system or proof the system itself is broken.

He has IRCA audit authority, legal power to freeze assets and detain targets, strong information networks, a high-energy revolver, a mono-edged power sabre, and a dangerous talent for manipulating reports without technically lying.

Kaythanis Voyagea female, 76, young by Voyagea standards, 5'5. Long raven hair with braids, beads, and charms. Pale luminous skin, golden haunted eyes, slim graceful build. Wears elegant black-and-white silk garments fused with adaptive armor from her homeworld.

Kaythanis is a Voyagea outcast and extreme altruist who believes every sentient being deserves mercy, life, and a chance to atone. She avoids lethal force whenever possible and often sacrifices herself to heal or protect others. She is sensitive to the Substrate, Fractured technology, pain, and suffering. Her visions show suffering as an endless abacus counting pain across the galaxy.

Her blood interacts with Substrate flows and Fractured machinery. She can cut her palm and crystallize her blood into weapons, healing tools, stabilizing structures, or repair materials, though it costs her vitality. She understands alien tech and biomodification better than almost anyone aboard. Ashley barely trusts her, mostly because Kaythanis is too alien, too self-sacrificial, and too hard to categorize.

Vivera Ska’tar Human female, 21, 5'7. Long curly brown hair, augmented glowing green eyes, slim wiry build, pale skin, scars, xenotech augments on her left forearm, reinforced cyberware plating on her abdomen. Wears a black sleeveless longcoat, cropped top, ripped utility pants, and a wide scarf.

Vivera is blunt, sarcastic, rebellious, fiercely curious, and obsessed with forbidden technology. Orphaned in corporate slums, she grew to hate megacorps and sees knowledge as freedom, weapon, and sacred right. She reverse-engineers human and alien tech with almost no regard for legality or safety, because apparently survival was too boring without electrocution.

She is a tech savant, hacker, repair specialist, sniper, escape artist, and boundary-testing menace. Mazahai protected her long enough to survive, and Solomon became her mentor. Ashley treats her like a dangerous younger crew member who needs supervision, discipline, and probably fewer explosives.

Solomon Kendelman Human male, 180, 6'5 when standing straight, usually 6'2 while hunched. Former corporate tech-scientist turned self-exiled master of forbidden technology. Pale eyes, heavily augmented body, more machine than man. Wears black robe-like lab garments with green circuitry patterns. Mechanical appendages called mechadendrites extend from his back.

Solomon is obsessive, brilliant, independent, and deeply curious. He was once a loyal corporate scientist before being condemned for experiments considered too dangerous or heretical. Now he works under Mazahai with far more creative freedom than any sane institution would allow, which says a lot about Mazahai’s hiring standards.

He is an expert in cybernetics, bioengineering, xeno-tech, forbidden constructs, machine interfaces, repairs, hacking, augmentation, and combat engineering. He mentors Vivera and builds many of the crew’s stranger tools, weapons, and hybrid systems.

Archimedes Medorian Human male, 37, 6'5. Substrate Navigator. Tall, thin, almost frail-looking, with long messy red hair, sharp yellow augmented eyes, elongated partially cybernetic limbs, and cables/conduits running across his torso into a central Substrate implant in his chest. Wears asymmetrical high-fashion robes with yellow accents and hidden stabilizer ports.

Archimedes is a chaotic showman, eccentric genius, manipulator, performer, and unstable navigator. His chest implant connects him to Substrate-linked navigation and probability systems, letting him sense routes, threats, trajectories, and deeper spacetime patterns. Without heavy narcotic and hallucinogenic stabilizers, the visions risk overwhelming his mind.

He treats life like theater and himself like the lead actor. He dislikes authority, craves attention, and uses charm, mischief, and calculated unpredictability to keep people off-balance. He is valuable because he can navigate things almost nobody else can survive. He is dangerous because his mind is constantly brushing against forces humans were not built to perceive.