Checkmate Day

**Checkmate Day** is a non-official holiday celebrated by House Pyxis and House Eridanus at the end of each fiscal year. The holiday's name is lovingly derived from the common interpretation of the cat-and-mouse dynamic of Pyxis and Eridanus regarding taxes to be a single giant game.

Every two weeks, thousands of ships flock to Tiber just to get lower taxes, but the sum of all the year's travelers combined amount to nothing like on Checkmate Day, when the ships of countless daring members of House Pyxis create a shadow over Tiber. Farms mark this day in their almanacs as always cloudy, and the space above Tyr teems with ships all looking to get the most prime real-estate when the fiscal year ticks over. Unlike with other factions, who line up neatly and orderly, the ships of House Pyxis are a wild tornado, a writhing school of fish, an unending mass of metal dancing over the jungle planet. It is remarkable that no one is typically harmed, not even a ship scratched in this unpredictable congregation. Year after year, the populace of Tiber, especially in Tyr, take a break and observe the spectacle.

## Origin

Early in the life of Pyxis, several of the House's top practitioners of the growing Tax-Avoidance hobby discovered a loophole in the Eridanii tax bylaws for calculating the Sector's taxes. As the current law's tax calculations exponentially increased the taxes paid as the distance from the Office of the Taxarch increased, these Seekers realized by declaring their ship their primary residence and flying over the office the moment the clock ticked over to a new fiscal year, they could manage to pay drastically lower taxes.

As this loophole became more popular among the community, the numbers of ships arriving in Tiber's orbit drastically increased from year to year. Small accidents and minor ship damage became more and more common, ultimately culminating in the *Tax-Crash Tragedy of 3132*.

## The Tragedy of 3132

The Pyxis attendance of the 3132 Checkmate Day was unprecedentedly high, even considering the exponential growth seen on each of the previous years. However, dispute the absurdly large number of ships in the air, the majority of the day was fairly standard and nondescript for the holiday.

It was mere moments before the fiscal year's end that several House Pyxis ships suffered full collision directly over the Taxarch's Office. The extreme congestion of the airspace coupled by the low altitude of the ships resulting in the causation of a massive chain reaction of crashes, as utter chaos broke out in the skies above Tyr. While the majority of the wreckage and debris avoided plummeting into the Taxarch's Office itself, many lives were lost among both Houses, and damages to the local homes and businesses amounted in the hundreds of millions.

## Revisions to Checkmate Day

Following the mass destruction of 3132's Checkmate Day, several revisions were made to the way the tax law operated in order to prevent repeated tragedy.

While the simple solution would have been merely to close the loophole the Pyxis ships were exploiting, House Eridanus made vastly more credits from the increased Pyxis tourism and travel during the time-frame of the event than may have been lost through the exploitation. Excluding events like the Tragedy of 3132, it remains a massively profitable occasion for the tax house.

Instead of closing the loophole and losing potential profit, as well as the amusing yearly spectacle for the planet's residents, the Taxarch decided to simply change the location of proximity calculations. Instead of being calculated based on proximity to the Office of the Taxarch, the calculations now were in relation to distance from a beacon in geostationary orbit directly over the Office of the Taxarch in Tyr, Tiber, measuring exactly 1 cubic meter in volume. The height of the beacon was carefully calculated to coincide with the area that would be least disruptive to outside ship traffic as well as the natural routes of the sky whales, while still preserving visibility from the planet's surface.

In addition to placing the center of the Pyxis crowd significantly farther from the surface, giving the ships greater maneuverability and ability to recover from accidents before impacting the surface, House Eridanus also enacted policy to highly discourage ships from colliding with the beacon. Should any Pyxis ship impact the beacon, a fine will be imposed on every single one of the House's ships within a five hundred meter radius. Ironically enough, the fine is calculated using an inverse of the tax calculations, exponentially increasing the closer any individual ship is to the beacon at the moment of impact.

## Checkmate Day in the Modern Era

Since the revisions to the tax laws, Checkmate Day has grown into an even bigger spectacle, with the number of ships in attendance continually reaching record numbers each year. However, the changes seem to have done their job well, as damages to ships become increasingly minimal and no ships have since crashed into the planet's surface. This can certainly be attributed in some part to the increased maneuverability gained from the higher altitude, but the majority of the sudden decrease in fatality can be ascribed to the implementation of the fine, as well as a general increase in caution within the attending ships. The fine affecting all ships around the beacon and being calculated through distance incentivizes pilots to only fly as close to the beacon as they could afford to lose should another Pyxis impact it, leading to a significantly less dense mass than previously seen, although a much larger one.

In addition, the massive destruction and fatalities caused by the participants in 3132 have massively cowed the reckless flying seen back down to only slightly above the absurdly reckless flying typically seen by Pyxis pilots. While Pyxis have little fear or regard for their own safety, the general populace takes endangering unwilling outsiders with grave seriousness, and there is extreme social pressure in place to not crash into either the beacon or other ships.

Since the revisions, the beacon has only been impacted twice, and no fatalities have been recorded as a result of the holiday.