Bora Bora

Bora Bora is the only moon of Yaiciz, the planet's main energy source and one of the empire's largest hard labour prisoner camps. Bora Bora is known empire-wide for the events of the Lotus Knight movie 'Sir Yaden and the Windmines of Bora Bora'.

## History

Designated as a luxury habitat during the Shangri-La, a tremendous terraforming effort was launched. While they managed the incredible feat of increasing the moon's surface gravitation to almost 1G and add a stable, breathable atmosphere, the problem ran aground when they tried to increase the local humidity. With Bora Bora's surface consisting mostly of porous rock with countless caverns, any water brought to the moon dissipated and never reached any concentration to make it a hospitable place.

With the end of the Shangri-La, the project was abandoned.

## Windmines

*From 'The Windmines of Bora Bora'*

> The constant storms that rendered the moon’s surface basically uninhabitable were pure energy, free to be harvested by anyone who could tame them. It took several decades and many flamboyantly failed attempts, but in the end a system evolved that was both simple enough to withstand the harsh environment and effective enough to be profitable.
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> Colossal wind-catchers were erected strategically all over the moon’s surface, acting as funnels that led parts of the storms down into the ubiquitous caves. Subterranean trough pits collected all the gravel and sand the storms carried with them, until the air was clean enough to be ejected through giant turbines. The energy generated was led towards the equator, where a huge microwave array sent the energy down to Yaiciz. As Bora Bora was in rotational lock with it’s planet, this was a fairly simple and reliable process, and there had been only very few incidents of scorched neighbourhoods on Yaiciz.
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> Ivan grimaced at the thought. Sure, the cheap energy from Bora Bora had paved the way to make Yaiciz one of the industrial powerhouses of the Empire. But it only came cheap in terms of money, not in terms of human lives.
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> For even as sturdy and reliable as the engines on Bora Bora were designed, there was one problem that could only be resolved by hard slave labour.
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> All the storms invariably carried dirt and rocks with them, the stronger ones even hurled around boulders the size of small cars. So the wind-catchers all sported massive grids to keep out the worst of the rubble that would threaten to clog the tunnels. Naturally, whatever size of grid you chose, there would always be a number of rocks just the right size to get wedged in, reducing the airflow and in consequence the profitability of the plant. Mechanical cleaning solutions were nice, but breaking down much too fast in the constant assault of dust and sand. Energy shields were prohibitively expensive, and that only left one sufficiently cheap solution.
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> Every time the storms calmed down, crews of slaves were sent out to the wind-catchers, cleaning the grids with sledgehammers and their bare hands. It was hard, unskilled work in an unforgiving environment, with living conditions dictated only by cost efficiency. Life expectancy was less than a year for most slaves on Bora Bora.
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> The fact that Bora Bora was a moon, with a surface that made survival almost impossible, also made it almost impossible to escape, on top of everything else. Always eager to make yet another credit, the owners of the power plants were quick to catch on and offered to take in those slaves too useless or unruly to be kept around anywhere else – over the years turning Bora Bora into the biggest hard labour slave camp of humanity.
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