Mericia System

System information limited due to Merician refusal to share said information

The **Mericia System** is a system in the north-east of the Tantalus Cluster that is the capital of the Merician Freehold. Settled by the survivors of a lost colony expedition from Keeper's Dance known as the Great Merician Exile, the fact that the system had been successfully settled by humans was unknown to the rest of the Tantalus Cluster for over 150 years. Even after the Merician Freehold re-established contact with the rest of the Cluster, the Mericia System remains largely mysterious, as the Mericians refuse to share map information about their home and tightly control access.

## Description

The Mericia system is named after the city of Mericia, a collection of hundreds of ships welded together to create an enormous space station. Mericia is named in honour of Adam Meric, the chief engineer of the first colonisation expedition to the system who successfully organised the survivors after the expedition met with disaster.

The Mericia system is also home to numerous complex, sprawling installations to exploit the system's two resource-rich asteroid belts. While the system is extremely rich in Drift and other rare materials, it lacks any planets that can be colonised. Accordingly, Merician culture and society is entirely space-based.

## History

The system that eventually became known as Mericia was first identified for colonisation by the company Keeper's Dance Fleet Yards. After establishing a Drift Lane to a stepping-stone system, in 0053 PCU, the company sent a construction fleet through a new Drift Gate to the next system. However, the fleet failed to return, and after a year, was given up as lost. The disaster ultimately cost KDFY its license to construct new Drift Gates.

Unknown to the rest of Tantalus, some of the colony expedition had actually survived: in what became known as the Great Merician Exile, the expedition had encountered a solar flare on its arrival to the system, destroying much of the fleet and wiping out the corporate leadership. Also lost were most of the components necessary to build a return Drift Gate, effectively stranding the colonists in the system. The expedition's chief engineer, Adam Meric, successfully rallied the survivors, leading them in attaching their ships together to create makeshift space stations and beginning exploitation of the system's rich mineral resources.

By the time of Adam Meric's death, many of these space stations had been attached together to create a floating city, named Mericia in Meric's honour. The Mericians established an innovative, spacefaring culture, and 157 years after the Exile, they successfully replaced the Drift Gate components destroyed in transit, and re-established contact with the Centrum Assembly in 0210 PCU.

To preserve the independence and privacy of their home system, the Mericians established Meric's Keep in the system they had departed from over 150 years earlier. For a long period, trade with the Merician Freehold was only possible via the Meric's Keep System. Some years later, however, a new Drift Lane, the most recent to be created in Tantalus, was established between the Mericia System and the Keeper's Dance System for ease of trade. The route is heavily policed by the Mericians, but less so than the route via Meric's Keep, as the Keeper's Dance-Mericia Drift Gate is located in KDFY-controlled corporate space and cannot be easily accessed by the public.

## Layout

### Gravitational governor

* Unnamed star - A Type Main Sequence Star

### Drift Gates

* Mericia-Meric's Keep Drift Gate
* Mericia-Keeper's Dance Drift Gate

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 The Merician Freehold | The Sojourn Lore
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 *The Sojourn Visual Dictionary - Edition One*
3. ↑ Confirmed by Daniel Orrett in a Discord message

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