Firefall Lodge
Humans made their playgrounds throughout the galaxy, wherever the universe presented a spectacle that suited their grand visions of themselves. Many of their haunts are found inwards towards the core, where stars jostle and tug each other in glittering irradiated skeins and clusters.
Firefall Lodge was built on the surface of a dead world that swings around, and often passes through, a visual marvel of stellar evolution: two aged supergiant stars that tumble around each other, smeared out into an unstable ring of cascading multicoloured fiery gases as they are slowly devoured by a brilliant little point of blue-white light at the centre of the system. The station was built on a grand scale, with high square piers, crossbeams and acres-wide ballroom floors of compacted obsidian framing vistas of flaming gas-drifts filling the sky above the black horizon of the planetoid. |
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After the war choked off the tourist trade, the last human civilians at the Lodge were cleared out by Just drop-troops in a brief, ugly massacre. The domestic staff and entertainers of the Lodge fearfully returned from their hiding places on the surface to form the nucleus of an odd little supply enclave. The violent sky-flares filled them with fear, as well as making it costly and dangerous to maintain reactive yet transparent shielding, so the Lodge's people mostly blocked out the view with heavy screens, forming little clusters of armoured domes at the edges of the Lodge's great halls as well as more relaxed communities in the deep storerooms and banquet-scale kitchens. Scavengers, refugees and space-flotsam of all sorts have added to the population, forming a trading post that serves travellers in this sector.