Sunken Beacon
Sunken Beacon is the cause of Pelagic Verge's most persistent administrative headache.
Rules Reference
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Aesthetic | ruin |
| Anchor System | PELAGIC-VERGE |
| Fold Bleed | high |
| Population | 200 |
| Role | satellite |
| Zone | Rim |
Notes
Controlling Faction: Independent
Dangers: The beacon is twenty fathoms down and the descent is a vertical dive through thermoclines and psy-resonant water; divers report the wrong memories surfacing., The beacon's transmitter still pings, but what it pings is no longer the Kadiss grid; the colony's grid state is being slowly overwritten by ghost-updates., Anyone who sleeps in the lower cradle wakes up with someone else's dive log in their head.
Hooks: Run a repair dive to the beacon's transmitter array before the next Kadiss sync window; the colony's grid state is six months stale and Confed is asking questions., Recover the original beacon operator's log from the drowned console room; the log is the only record of what the beacon heard before it sank., Find out which deep-diver crew has been taking unlicensed folds out of the beacon's lower cradle without telling the buoy-station chain.
Lore: Sunken Beacon is the cause of Pelagic Verge's most persistent administrative headache. The beacon predates the Kadiss grid and was drowned when the planet's pelagic depth increased a century ago; the colony built buoy-stations on top of it and kept using it because the alternative was no grid at all. The beacon still pings, and because Kadiss beacons sync only when the Fold is opened in the system, the Sunken Beacon's pings have become the colony's grid, ghost-written by whatever the beacon now hears in the water. The colony's Fold bleed is therefore not a local phenomenon; it is the beacon echoing a Fold it should not be able to hear. The drowned lower decks are the seat of the problem; the colony has stationed a permanent monitoring crew in the upper structure, but the unlicensed folds out of the lower cradle are the symptom that gets Confed auditors sent. Pelagic Verge is administratively a Rim outpost and acoustically a Fold listening-post; the difference is what gets you sent to Tide Coffin.
Notable: A pre-Kadiss inter-space beacon, drowned when the pelagic rose a century ago, sitting in twenty fathoms of water off Verge Anchorage. The beacon's upper structure has been retrofitted into a buoy-station monitoring outpost; the drowned lower decks are accessible only to licensed deep-divers.