The Red Cage
The Red Cage is Ironhall's orbital sister: the arena-Station that hosts the league's off-world showpiece matches, the challenger circuit, and the betting marquees that the Core Houses will only attend in private.
Rules Reference
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Aesthetic | glitter |
| Anchor System | ironhall-arena |
| Controlling Faction | Ironball League Council |
| Fold Bleed | low |
| Population | 38000 |
| Role | satellite |
| Zone | Core |
Notes
Dangers: Crowd surge: the Cage's standing-room tiers are Kadiss-mapped but the surge pattern is its own kind of psi-load; a full Cage can rattle baseline humans sober., Boarding parties: when a match is fixed at the betting level, the fixers bring muscle; the Cage's corridor crews are trained for it but the muscle is rarely Family-branded.
Hooks: A challenger team's star player has been pulled from the Red Cage's bonded housing by a Family with an old indenture claim; the team is willing to negotiate; the Family is not; the party brokers., IronMind flags an officiating crew for 'cognitive drift' two hours before the cage-matches of the season; the crew chief hires the party to find the drift before the matches are cancelled., A Rim syndicate has smuggled an unlicensed psion onto the Red Cage as a 'ringer' for the betting circuit; IronMind has not flagged the psion, which is itself the story.
Lore: The Red Cage is Ironhall's orbital sister: the arena-station that hosts the league's off-world showpiece matches, the challenger circuit, and the betting marquees that the Core Houses will only attend in private. Thirty-eight thousand staff, players and bonded crew live on the station; the population turns over weekly during the season. The Cage Floor is the station's heart -- a hundred-and-twenty-metre octagon of permacrete over a sub-floor of pressure dampers, rigged for blood-sport and for the cameras IronMind uses to record every match. The House Block is where the Houses keep their permanent skyboxes; the Tunnels are the access corridors under the stands, where the players are walked to the Cage and where IronMind's sensor mesh is densest. IronMind watches every match and referees every foul; the Cage is where IronMind is most visible, and the most argued about. The standing- room tiers are Kadiss-mapped but the surge pattern of a full Cage is its own kind of psi-load, and a packed house will rattle a baseline human sober. The League Council treats the Cage as a showpiece; the betting syndicates treat it as a market; the players treat it as the only clean exit most of them will ever get. The Cage treats them all as product.
Notable: The Cage Floor: the Red Cage's central arena -- a hundred-and-twenty-metre octagon of permacrete over a sub-floor of pressure dampers, rigged for blood-sport and for cameras., The House Block: where the Houses keep their permanent skyboxes, the only part of the station the public is not allowed to walk through., The Tunnels: the access corridors under the stands, where the players are walked to the Cage and where IronMind's sensor mesh is at its densest.