Furthest Point

Furthest Point, also known as Bouvet II, is an independent colony world located in the Bouvet star system at the edge of the colonized territory. Formerly scouted and terraformed by a subsidary of , the saw it abandoned before proper colonization could take place.
While abandoned, early colonists and planetary technicians still made their way to the colony as the Covenant War raged on. Forgotten by the rest of Human space, the new residents carved out a rudimentary society for themselves with a focus on agriculture and self-expression. However, following an encounter with the Wealthian Coalition, an , the world became a territorial holding of the larger political union.
Still, even after the Human-Covenant War, the , and the , the world has remained mostly unchanged and untouched. To the few individuals who know of its existence, it remains a secret retreat for those looking to disappear, to be forgotten, or to start over. To its few visitors, the colony is best described as bland.
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==UEG Colony Record==
===Furthest Point===
:SYSTEM:
*Bouvet: A traditional medium-sized yellow star in the middle of its stellar lifespan, Bouvet has much in common with Humanity's home star, Sol. The star is named for an extremely isolated island on Earth of the same name. The extent of the star system is mostly unexplored and the full presence of it's planetary and asteroid bodies are unaccounted for.
*Palette: The green-tinted gas giant closest in orbit to Bouvet with a mass equivalent to Sol's Neptune. Due to its surplus of rich atmospheric gases and rings of enriched mineral space rocks, a Wealthian Coalition refueling depot was established in orbit of the gas giant to capitalize on the planet's extensive fuel benefits.
:SATELLITES:
*Farside: A moon lacking an atmosphere or tectonic activity, Farside is considered thoroughly lifeless and dead. It is a favorite of the Wealthian Coalition for dumping space junk. The only outpost on the moon is a Wealthian surveillance post and waystation for passing civilian and military starships.
:POPULATION: 1,300
:CONTINENTS:
*Green Splotch: Located in the Eastern Hemisphere, the smaller continent of Furthest Point is a vibrant, humid, and arable continent favored by the local residents and hosts the colony's only organized settlement, Ragged Ass Road. The continent gets its name from its distinct appearance from orbit.
*Dry Patch: Located in the Western Hemisphere, the larger continent of Furthest Point is an arid, dry, and inhospitable continent lacking in residents and vegetation. While unpopulated and mostly unexplored, the continent is a favorite salvage-and-dumping ground for space junk. The continent also has vast deposits of untapped rare-earth elements.
*Subcontinents: There are many sizeable islands and subcontinents that neighbor the larger two continents, however, due to a lack of exploration, remain unnamed. There hasn't been a sizable effort to survey or explore them in the Furthest Point's entire colonial history.
===Residents===
*Tobias Lensky: Founder of the Iskander Syndicate, retired to Furthest Point after being ousted. Living in temporary housing under a false name.
*Simon-G294: Rogue Spartan, biological offspring of Tobias Lensky. Extended visit, presence detected by marginal Naval Intelligence contacts but no official record.
==Colonization History==
===Pre-Covenant War===
Furthest Point was established as a prospective agriculture colony in the late , around the same time as the start to the . Due to economic slowdown related to the colonial civil war, colonization efforts by Naoto Technologies' colonization division slowed to a trickle and only terraforming probes were successfully launched and deployed to the planet to begin the automated transformation of the planet's biosphere to support human life. Before colonization efforts began, Furthest Point had been a lifeless, terrestrial rock with a single moon. However, it was already home to a sizable germ culture, signs of a stable magnetosphere, and a breathable atmosphere within the proximity of colonization guidelines for creating Earth Analog-type worlds.
Thirty years of planetary engineering later and the world was mostly terraformed to the required parameters, Furthest Point was beginning to look ready for human colonization. Then the Human-Covenant War began in , dashing any plans of colony ships coming to settle the new world. The had declared martial law and faster-than-light travel became highly regulated. Laid off from work, more daring engineers formerly employed by Naoto Technologies made dangerous pilgrimages with the assistance of Outer Colonial, black market-type ferry companies to reach the abandoned planet, bringing their belongings and families with them.
These settlers, numbered less than a thousand in total, arrived and found a planet still under development. The atmosphere was fine-tuned to an Earth-like state but diversification of the cloned wildlife was still limited due to the planet's unripe age. Even so, the settlers made themselves at home, comfortably settling in by building farms and homesteads. Recognizing their situation as one of Humanity's last colonized worlds before the Human-Covenant War and one of the furthest reached, they named the planet, "Furthest Point."
===Post-Covenant War===
The Human-Covenant War came and went, completely bypassing the small and forgettable Human presence on Furthest Point. The Covenant Empire never discovered them, and to the rest of the Unified Earth Government, the colony simply did not exist. The remoteness of Furthest Point was so great that after several of the that Furthest Point relied on for trade and communication were glassed, the locals lost all forms of exchange with the rest of human space for the better part of two decades. Then in , the Wealthian Coalition, a large Insurrectionist-aligned colonial faction, stumbled upon Furthest Point while following old colonial star maps recovered from glassed colonies with intact archives.
The annexation of Furthest Point followed. The Wealthian Coalition made themselves at home on the colony but did little to change laws, regulations, or cultural practices due to the planet's lack of significance in any form. It was simply another colonial backwater, with possible exception to the planet's natural resources, however, political affairs elsewhere have kept Furthest Point out of mind for the time being. The Coalition constructed a refueling station around the neighboring gas giant Palette, a moonbase on the colony's moon, Farside, and two security outposts in the colony's capital city, Ragged Ass Road.
Since annexation, Furthest Point has remained fairly stable and overlooked by the rest of the galaxy, even with sudden shifts in the political structure such as the onset of the Created Crisis. Black market trading remains the main economic exchange of the planet, selling agricultural products to Iskander Syndicate-sponsored traders in exchange for other commodities. The planet has become one of a few retreats chosen and developed by Tobias Lensky following his fall from grace within the Syndicate. After the collapse of his resistance organization, the Underground, he moved to Furthest Point and took up residence in one of the few apartment complexes in Ragged Ass Road, disappearing into the background of local society.
===Created Crisis===
Few developments have occurred on Furthest Point following the surprise ascension of the . They lack a presence on Furthest Point due to its status as a colonial backwater, and thus, the population continues to govern itself and remains unaffected by greater galactic politics. However, the collapse of the previous societal order has led to a significant cutback in interstellar traffic, dwindling to little more than a trickle.
With slowing trade, the isolated community of Furthest Point has seen a significant backlog of crops and food piling up. Due to the recent overabundance, large burn piles have been used during the days and nights to cut back on the overstock. These controlled burn piles and the smoke trails are so noticeable and distinct, they can be seen from low orbit.
In late , operatives of the began making trips to visit the planet in the lead up to major operations against the Syndicate. Due to Tobias Lensky's working knowledge and remaining intelligence contacts regarding his former organization, the UNSC's forces had sought him out for actionable intelligence that would service their conflict against the Created now that their fighting capabilities had been effectively halved by the Created's sacking of the .
==Topographic Details==
Furthest Point is a planet of unique though consistent geographic and topographic features due to its mostly-though-incomplete terraforming transformation. The majority of the planet is covered in water, less so than planet Earth at a decent sixty percent coverage by liquid water, predominantly salt-water oceans.
Two major continents mark the planet's surface on two separate hemispheres and are surrounded by large, sizable islands that could be described as subcontinents. Shallow oceans give way to many dotted islands across the planet's surface that vary in plant and wildlife along with varying climates depending on the location. Generally, the two continents land fairly flat on the tropical zones of the planet's equator and thus are warm year-round. Only the northern and southern-most islands are known to receive colder winters and occasionally freeze for months. Very small arctic regions form on the planetary poles depending on the season and the tilt of the planet.
Names of locations on Furthest Point are awkwardly generic and unoriginal, the desert continent in the Western Hemisphere is called the Dry Patch and is covered by miles and miles of sand broken up by the occasional river plain, oasis, mountain range, or expanding soil deposits. The wetter, tropical continent in the Eastern Hemisphere is referred to as the Green Splotch for its gooey-looking appearance from orbit. Due to land closer to sea-level, the Green Splotch is covered in swamps and flatlands that have proven to be quite fertile. The Green Splotch is home to the planet's only major settlement, the capital city of Ragged Ass Road.
As the only major settlement, Ragged Ass Road is home to an estimated 1300 people made up of several hundred farming families living in close proximity to one another along a long stretching main road that for the first decade of the colony's history went unpaved, leading to the town's name following incorporation.
Ragged Ass Road is a small shore city located along a well-protected oceanic bay. Locked between two sizable peninsulas, the town is well-guarded from extreme storms. The city's only spaceport doubles as its major marketplace and town hall. Everything else in Ragged Ass Road share conformities down to the same metal, , and fixtures used to build congruent warehouses, storehouses, and homesteads. Structures populate the rolling farmlands sparingly, running up to Green Splotch's distant, low-lying foothills compared to the steeper mountains of the Dry Patch.
Across the planet, ruins of automated terraforming installations can be found including atmospheric and weather towers to crashed fleets of service drones. Local children like to imagine these structures to be the remnants of a lost civilization but the adults of the colony know better and occasionally integrated salvaged terraforming machines into their existing infrastructure grids. Residents of Furthest Point reuse the old structures for promoting greater rainfall, weather analysis, augmenting drone fleets, and maintaining private property security against trespassers and predatory wildlife.
In terms of infrastructure, Furthest Point is behind the average Human colony by easily two-to-three hundred years even if the human structures were all built with modern materials and techniques. Following annexation by the Wealthian Coalition, a pair of security outposts manned by Wealthian soldiers were introduced that work in tandem with the colony's voluntary police force, the Volunteer Marshalls. For the Wealthians and their trading partners, Furthest Point presents little strategic or economic value and has become a dumping ground for mothballed starships and space stations among other junk scattered across the planet's landscape and the surface of the planet's moon, Farside. In regards to Farside, the moon of Furthest Point is a lifeless, atmosphere-lacking rock with little more than a radio dish array and the Wealthian-manned observation post. The outpost includes a waystation for passerby starships and Wealth's fleet of frigates and corvettes.
===Paved Streets===
Pathways through Rugged Ass Road run in many sorts of directions, often interweaving and intersecting, creating a spider web of trails entering and exiting the small coastal town. While the main road for which the town is named is a paved path as of 2550, using concrete and asphalt, the majority of roads and paths through town are created using the distribution of loose gravel and sand. The Ragged Ass Road street didn't formally get paved till the arrival of the Wealthian Coalition who assisted in its formalization. These less-traveled paths are distinct, leading off the Ragged Ass Road and on to nature trails, farm roads, and into the complexes of family farms. Road traffic, even with the complex and many unplanned roadways, is still sparse and uncommon with the majority of traffic occurring on days of worship where local residents will climb into their family and head to their houses of worship.
Along the less-traveled paths and on the days of lesser vehicle traffic, an arsenal of service drones and city maintenance workers in maintenance trucks survey long swaths of city paths to ensure roads are serviceable as mandated by the purvue of the city hall and City Services Brigade. Some of these drones are Wealthian-designed saddle drones, based on older Earth-based donkey drones. With their quadrupedal design, these saddle drones are efficient for investigating trails that extend beyond the reach of wheeled vehicles, capable of crossing through traditionally impossible terrain.
===Terraforming Remnants===
Due to the infancy of Furthest Point's status as an Earth-analog world, the remnants and hints of its mass-terraforming project remain evident across its surface. Crashed survey drones can be found buried in the deserts across the Dry Patch. Groundwater process plants and atmospheric development stations, shaped like giant bells buried in the ground, still stand tall atop mountains and hills. Typically, automated terraforming units will disassemble themselves in advance to human colonization at the order of the colonization charter company after the machinery report back a successful terraforming project, however, due to the political-economic circumstances of the 2490s, Naoto Technologies ordered a premature suspension in an effort to halt terraforming until a later date. Fearful that a rival venture company might attempt to seize the colony before their colonists could arrive, Naoto hoped to discourage poaching by leaving the terraforming job incomplete.
Colony seizure was a very real possibility, and with the advent of the Outer Colonies, had become a serious concern. Prospect challenges often led to brushfire wars between colonial corporations or between colonists of rival corporate ventures. And with the stretched thin and the limited by the Insurrection, it was unlikely intervention by government forces could settle the hostilities in what amounted to the Wild West.
Ultimately, the shutdown order arrived too late and Furthest Point reached a state of maturity threshold that made it adequate for human colonization. While still an incomplete job, the terraforming project was enough that a comfortable living could be cut out for would-be residents. And yet, the Insurrection and the Human-Covenant War that followed simply made that impossible for the prospects of Naoto Technologies. The colony was totally abandoned by corporate interests and fears of colony poaching proved unfounded. Even sixty years later, the ruins, wrecks, and intact remains of the terraforming mega-machines dot Furthest Point's surface. Many colonists living in Ragged Ass Road have formed local businesses around discovering, recovering, and salvaging the aged terraforming machines for parts and pieces of equipment that they integrate into their homesteads for their own convenience. Many terraforming machines have been integrated into Ragged Ass Road's infrastructure and the local power grid.
==Notable Locations==
===Ragged Ass Road===
The only formal settlement on Furthest Point, Ragged Ass Road is a coastal town nearing its sixty birthday around 2558. Settlers from disenfranchised walks of life, primarily out-of-work terraforming engineers from Naoto Technologies and poor Outer Colony families, came to Furthest Point to cut out a new and self-made living for themselves. That far out into the colonial frontier, the society that was born from the new residents was isolated and new, born from scratch.
The official language in Ragged Ass Road is UEG Standard English, however, a wide variety of ethnicities and cultures call Furthest Point home with a number of different religions, dialects, and cultures simmering together into a hybrid culture among a community of tight-knit homestead families. Everyone knows everyone and neighbors take care of one another. Drama, rumors, and gossip travel fast through town but the truth even faster when something goes wrong due to the smallness of the community. Russian of Wealthian origin has begun to take root in Ragged Ass Road due to the colony's annexation by the Wealthian Coalition in 2550, however, the way of life of the townspeople has yet to change even a degree, even with a small number of new residents set up in town from Wealthian Coalition-aligned colonies.
===Goldcrest Valley===
On the far end of Ragged Ass Road is an expansive river valley known as Goldcrest that extends around the inland portion of the capital city, in regards to local economic dynamics, it is agreed that the Goldcrest Valley is the most vibrant farming district in the city with the most on-record output.
Considered a shared city asset, the Valley is worked by the local workforce under the administration of city officials, the Department of Agricultural Affairs, with the general handling run by the local businesses formed between the local farming families. One corporate union is the prominent "Waffle-Davis Incorporated." Formed by the Wafflhauser and Davis families, Waffle-Davis Incorporated is easily the biggest private entity in the valley and largest in Rugged Ass Road, made locally famous for their adherence to ancient holiday festivities of Earth, particularly Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
In Goldcrest, Waffle-Davis Incorporated is known for significant crop production year-round including potatoes, wheat, sunflowers, and soybeans. Along with these crops, pumpkins and squash have shown some popularity during the holiday season. Local pine trees are also grown and managed by the corporation for building homes, fences, and for the occasional Christmas tree. On occasion, Waffle-Davis Incorporated has drawn bad press from its neighbors and trading partners for the excess number of damaged or tipped vehicles that have occasionally appeared overnight under mysterious-unexplainable circumstances. Most of the population has simply come to accept it as the "Davis Curse." Most people blame it on the local teenagers but few try to hold them accountable over it. To the south of the farming fields, there is the Goldcrest Valley's village center, "Farmer's Plaza." After the Ragged Ass Road's city hall, it is the second most trafficked site on the colony world being the point of transferring crops from warehouses and storage bins onto trucks and then sent to the spaceport to be traded or shipped off-world. During the holidays, Farmer's Plaza is the center of local festivities, usually hosted by the Davis and Wafflhauser families.
===Ragged Ass Road Spaceport===
A permacrete fixture constructed into the base of a large foothill near the center of Ragged Ass Road. The original hill and the surrounding land was flattened using repurposed earthmovers from Furthest Point's terraforming period. One of the first big structures constructed by the new residents of Furthest Point, the spaceport originally served as a mass community center where people lived and worked as homes went up, farms were cultivated, and ferried supplies arrived on-planet.
In contemporary times, the facility is used as a proper spaceport and all aircraft and spacecraft within the Ragged Ass Road space are directed there for landing and check-in. The facility features a main foyer terminal that was the first part of the complex to be constructed and is shaped like an odd half-circle tarmac and an interior-angled arrow pointed at the circle landing zone. A wide t-shaped runway points in both directions outside the central terminal with private hangars lining the taxiing area.
Law enforcement and Wealthian military craft are also parked here, ready on standby or performing airspace patrols. The local security fleet is most notable for including several military vehicles, including two . For the majority of the time, the spaceport is used as a community center and city hall. People gather there to discuss local concerns, local holiday gatherings, participate in court cases, and to sell their wares to visiting off-world traders who pay visits to Furthest Point to trade and barter. 
===Tobias Lensky's Apartment===
A dingy fifth-floor apartment flat located on the fifth floor of a tenement, the small property owned by Tobias Lensky is an unremarkable residence at the edge of Ragged Ass Road in relatively close proximity to the town's only spaceport. The interior space is somewhat cheap-looking and a little aged but decently taken care of. The interior is littered with medical equipment and has a musty air to it from a lack of fresh air.
Small and out of the way, few people live in the apartment complex that Lensky calls home, rather, they serve as a middle-ground temporary-housing option for wayfarers. The unoccupied flat spaces serve as another meager means of local income for the resident government of Furthest Point. Wayfarers, travelers, and traders on extended stays on Furthest Point have offered residency at one of the several apartment complexes that neighbor one another near Lensky's residence.
The vast majority of the neighboring flats remain empty year-round and are officially owned by individual homestead families. Rooms that are occupied temporarily receive a share of the rent money while the rest goes to the rest of the town's annual budget. The few permanent residents living in the apartment complex are old, lonely residents without families to care for them. A small group of local doctors and volunteers, the Old Crew, help the elderly with their day-to-day needs. The local hospital is only a short distance away from the apartment complexes.
Tobias Lensky is no different from his fellow elderly, however, with his background and connections, he requests a significant amount of privacy and alone time. Volunteers visit him significantly less, and only when called upon. Since Simon-G294 moved in, the house calls have decreased significantly.
==Appearances==
*Halo: Lonely Frontier
*Halo: Heaven and Earth 
Category:UEG Outer Colonies
Category:UEG Colonies