Sandbox3:Lavillastrangiato

Bursa viewed from orbit, displaying the snowy surface.

Bursa is a planet in the Alaz-Khan star system, at the very edge of the territories of the Republic of Elyra. Home to millions of citizens and uncounted thousands among the non-citizen persons population, Bursa’s primary industry is the mining and export of phoron asteroids orbiting its moon, Asena, and its gas giants in the same system. It also has a notable tourism economy, owing to its perfect climate for winter sports, and its culture centers.

In 2457, Bursa was the site for Hiveship Lii’dra’s primary landing, a few hundred kilometers from the city of New İzmir. While the Hive was forced to retreat owing to the efforts of the Elyran Navy and Bursa’s armed forces, over forty-thousand civilian and military lives were lost in the brief battle. Bursa is still scarred by the conflict, and there are several political groups using anti-Vaurca sentiment in conjunction with anti-megacorporation politics to further the distancing of Elyra from the Republic of Biesel.

History

The system of Cairo 25-L was never seen as a particularly attractive vessel for colonization by the Arab League. At first glance, most of the planets in the system were small and lacking an atmosphere, with the rest being gas giants. On a second pass, however, researchers discovered something fascinating; most of the asteroids in the region, particularly the moon of Cairo III, contained phoron deposits. Cairo III was also the sole habitable planet in the region, though its distance from the system’s star meant it would be cold and harsh, unsuited for human habitation.

In 2207, the Morningstar I was the first vessel to touch down on Cairo III, near what would become the city of New İzmir. The shuttle was captained by biologist Ceyla Kurtulmuş, a celebrated researcher in her home country of Turkey. As the team established observation bases, colonists from Earth, Damascus II, and Persepolis alike were encouraged to assist in the efforts to build civilization. Ten years after the first human walked on the planet, Cairo III was renamed Bursa after Ceyla Kurtulmuş’s birth city, and the system and its star was renamed Alaz-Khan.

More cities were built to mine the hydrogen and gold deposits in what would come to be called the Aegean Mountains, and spaceports and mining cities developed to shuttle miners and phoron to and from Asena. Rich seasonal summer grass was discovered in the isles of Marmara, which birthed a surprisingly robust meat and agriculture industry. Bursa became the home of thousands of spacers, all sharing the common goal of developing their new system.

After the Elyran Revolution, Bursa was provided with a charter indicating its independence from the Sol Alliance, and its status as a member state of the Republic of Elyra, in 2305. The new Republic’s century of prosperity and self-reliance led to an explosion in population, prosperity, and cultural development. Bursa became a center for engineering and mining developments; Isfarshan I, the planet that would be rechristened Medina, owes much of the development of the magpulse drive to researchers that flocked to Bursa.

Beginning in the 2400s, the Elyran Armed Forces started to construct more bases on the surface of the planet, particularly in the mountainous regions where conditions were harsh. Despite this, little threat had ever come to the prosperous Republic, and most Elyran citizens saw their mandatory enlistment as a period to relax, socialize with similarly-aged peers, and gain some valuable job education in their chosen fields.

The Lii’draic Incursion

“The darkness felt like a physical thing, like a blanket that had been soaked and draped over you. It was so black that I could not see the end of my rifle, and eventually I could not even see my hands. My headlight did nothing in the face of it. I sucked air from my mask but it felt like no oxygen came to my lungs, even though I knew for certain I had a few hours left. I heard Nuri whimpering in panic and fear, and then I heard other sounds. Clicking, chittering, the grind of inhuman mouths." - Musli Veli, Out of the Shadows: A Personal Account of the Lii’dra Invasion, released 2460

In 2457, Hiveship Lii'dra warped into Alaz-Khan and launched an attack on Bursa, sending shuttles, dropships, and warforms to attack various population centers and economic centers across the planet. Black k'ois spores entered the environment, particularly in the heart of the mountains, which remains closed off to the public even after the development and deployment of cardox.

Environment

A map of Bursa.

Bursa is the third planet in the Alaz-Khan star system. Its sister planets are Ebren, a rocky, barren world close to the star, Ashina, a world with a surface of lava and rock, and beyond Bursa itself, Kyzaghan the gas giant and its two asteroid “moons”. Bursa is orbited by its moon Asena, which is mined frequently for its veins of phoron.

Bursa itself is primarily a subarctic planet, with an average daily temperature of -15 degrees Celsius. About sixty percent of the population resides within several hundred kilometers of the equator, where temperatures are milder. The planet has two megacontinents, Büyükada and Hatay, which sit parallel to each other; Büyükada is the slightly larger of the two.

The Aegean Mountains border Büyükada to the east, and prior to 2457, were home to several popular ski resorts. During the Lii’draic incursion, one of their shuttles landed badly in the mountains, spreading black k’ois; while the planetary government has assured the populace in official statements that black k’ois has been eradicated from the planet, the basin where the hiveship crashed is closed off from the public and under heavy military guard.

The mountainous regions are typically bordered by boreal forests, which give way to tundra in the farther north of the planet. The Marmara Isles near the southern pole are heavily forested but considerably warmer in clime.

Despite the particularly harsh temperatures in the poles of the planet, where it can reach up to -80 degrees Celsius, life finds a way. Most of Bursa’s native flora and fauna have adapted well to a subarctic lifestyle, being smaller, squatter, and covered in thick fur. Examples of such include:

• the Bursan ptarmigan, an avian that owes its shared name with the Earther species due to its wide, feathered feet that can walk on snow. Apart from this, its large yellow eyes and tall beak bear little resemblance to an actual ptarmigan.
• the white-muzzled elk, also known as a sleipnir among Basic-speaking biologists. It is a slender, furred creature that commonly travels in herds. It is nicknamed a sleipnir, after the legendary horse of Norse mythology, due to its six hooved legs.

Colonies of the domestic cat, felis cattus, are very common in Bursan cities, particularly New İzmir. These cats are typically thick-furred phenotypes suited for the chill of the cities. Unfortunately, their prevalence means that several unique avian species to Bursa are at risk of extinction due to hunting.

Another Earth-originating animal that has been bred for life on the planet is the Bursan cow, bos taurus. Artificially selected and genetically modified for thicker fur and layers of fat, the Bursan cow is a heavyset, hardy animal, usually around two meters tall at the withers. They are mostly bred in the south of Hatay and the Marmaran Isles, where grass and hay can be more readily grown, and their meat is described as having a unique, smoky flavor.

Economy

“Nobody wants to work anymore. Teenagers these days are too interested in getting a contract with one of the foreign megacorps than working for an Elyran company the way their parents did.” - Salman Shabir, Elco financial manager, in an interview with the Alaran Tribune, 2461

Bursa’s economy was founded on mining and herding of livestock, and to this day the planet is a center for the extraction and refinement of phoron, hydrogen, silver, and gold that occurs in the Alaz-Khan system. While stations exist orbiting Ashina and Kyzaghan, Bursa is always their restocking point. Bursa’s developed orbital infrastructure makes it a desirable port to base mining expeditions to neighboring star systems as well. The flat terrain on Bursa’s continents creates conditions suited for livestock herding where in the summer Bursan cattle is driven north to take advantage of nutrient rich seasonal grasses and give time for their winter pastures nearer to the equator to recover in time to feed the cattle when the seasons change again. On the whole Bursa has an urbanization rate of about sixty five percent with a disproportionate amount of those living outside major urban areas being non-citizen persons.

Prior to the Lii’draic Incursion, Osman Electronics was headquartered on Bursa before moving to Persepolis. Factories in Tawûsî and Alara built ships, massive automated drills, and hardsuits which were sold across the Republic. Many of Elyra’s electrical engineers who developed the automation used to mine on Bursa or Medina were educated in the Atatürk University of Sciences, and Osman frequently poached from the university to send them across the Republic. Osman Electronics was one of Bursa’s few relatively high-tech industries prior to the Lii’draic war and the already limited high technology sector of the economy has not recovered from the devastation of the war even today. Military development and testing for the Elyran Armed Forces has boomed on the planet in recent years, with the testing site codenamed “Anatolian Phoenix" in Hatay being the source of the infamous Elyran plasma rifle.

After Osman Electronics moved their main headquarters to Persepolis, concerns of a “brain drain” from northern Bursa has become more prominent as students move to more populated worlds in the Republic for their education. While some of these students return, Bursa’s industrial resource extraction based economy cannot generate enough opportunities for all of its ambitious youth. Continued youth unemployment also encourages recruitment into the Elyran military and migration to other worlds. Despite those pressures Bursa maintains a steadily growing population driven for the most part by growth in the planet’s traditional mining and agriculture. The development of the Marmara Islands has allowed the planet to diversify its agricultural sector to include the cultivation of fruit it would otherwise be too cold to grow and also to attract tourists. Bursa is generally considered to have a healthy economy by the standards of the spur but the highly competitive nature of the planet’s major industries have led to a high level of indebtedness among Bursa’s largest mining and agricultural concerns. A rising problem also takes shape in the quality of fresh water on Bursa which due to the Lii’draic invasion and tendency of mining operations to spoil ground water is often of poor quality. Many settlements must make use of expensive and complex water purification technology and poor water quality is among the most common complaints of its lower class and non-citizen population.

Culture and Demographics

“When I was younger, Bursans used to eat, sleep, work, and stand together. Now all the young people think they’re going to find something better in New İzmir. They’ll come back.” - Anonymous Uludağ native for the holovision program Faces of the Republic, 2463

Most Bursans are typecast as friendly, despite their frosty planet, with strong inclinations towards filial piety. The planet’s citizens also have a common reputation of being incredibly patriotic, to an extent that is parodied or remarked upon by Bursans themselves. Flags of Elyra are ubiquitous in the major cities; an Extranet meme in Elyra is for tourists to create videos counting the flags they see while on vacation to Bursa. While the impression of Bursans is that they are by-and-large conservative, they are an especially secular planet, and practices that would typically be considered haram (such as consuming alcohol or pork) are less stigmatized among Bursans. Roughly thirty-six percent of citizens claiming no religion. The majority of citizens follow Sunni Islam, though a minority profess Christianity or Judaism. However, many citizens registered as Muslim consider themselves irreligious or predominantly secular, without changing their official government status on their proclaimed religion.

Military bases were quite common on the planet’s surface even prior to the Lii’draic incursion, taking advantage of the planet’s harsh conditions to stage survival exercises and build resistance to extreme conditions. In the aftermath of the incursion, however, a culture of military worship has begun to build significantly on the planet, particularly in the southern parts of the continents and the Marmara Isles. The population of north Büyükada, however, tend to be more dismissive or outright hostile towards military exercises and their personnel, owing to the slow response from the Elyran Armed Forces that led to thousands of deaths, injuries, and black k’ois infections.

Bursan food has many meat and dairy-based dishes. Doner kebab is naturally a popular street food and the most iconic example of Bursan cuisine, but soups and stews of meatballs and vegetables (such as eggplant, potato, and tomato) are more common in the household. Bursan cheeses and yogurts are also popular, and were promoted heavily as ways to adapt to the differing bacterial biosphere of the planet. Pide, a flatbread served with meat and cheese on top, is also a Bursan dish that has spread around Elyra for its popularity and versatility. Bursans themselves enjoy bragging to others that nobody can replicate their cuisine quite like a Bursan can.

Architecture in Bursa is built to withstand the bitter cold and heavy snowfall of the planet, and so is largely brutalist, concrete structures, originating from the practical need to keep warm during the planet’s colonization. This does not prohibit buildings from being elegantly adorned, however; a strong art deco movement emerged post-Revolution, with some of the greatest examples of such being the Atatürk University of Sciences in New İzmir, and the Balmumcu Museum of Elyran History in Tawûsî.

In the northern parts of Büyükada and most of Hatay, it is common in major cities for most of the populace to live in expansive apartment blocks, known as külliye. Külliye usually contain a small strip mall, grocery stores, entire floors dedicated to hydroponics, indoor parks, and mosques. The purpose of these spaces are twofold; the temperatures in the north of the continent made it impractical to construct multiple individual pieces of infrastructure, and was planned by the Elyran Coalition to increase morale and community-building in the early days of Bursa’s colonization. Moving to külliye in the northern parts of the continent was greatly advertised in the early 24th century by the Elyran government, promising lucrative mining jobs and further development around the area. The külliye became a symbol of Bursan unity, and much nostalgia has developed around them by elders and Bursan politicians belonging to the Elyran People’s Party.

However, in the aftermath of the Lii’draic invasion, when several külliye in Uludağ saw high rates of black k’ois infection due to their proximity and shared atmospheric systems, the külliye is gradually becoming a symbol of a lost post-war dream. Many young people have grown to see life in the complexes as stifling or overly insular, and have begun migrating to the southern cities and the Marmaran Isles, or even moving to other planets in Elyra, seeking a different life.

Non-Citizen Persons

Bursa’s population of non-citizen persons is largely employed in the mines of the Aegean Mountains, phoron refinement facilities on the planet’s surface, and the service industry on the Marmaran Isles. Many of them also work to harvest Kyzaghan and Ashina’s bountiful mineral deposits, using Bursa as their primary residence. Like elsewhere in Elyra, they are underpaid, often exploited for labor by their supervisors, and sent to perform the most dangerous tasks in already dangerous fields. However, owing to the close proximity many Bursans share with their neighbors, NCPs on Bursa are significantly less isolated from the citizen populace than they are on most of the Republic’s planets.

The largest NCP diaspora on Bursa are refugees from the Empire of Dominia, particularly from Fisanduh. Many Ma’zals from other planets also undertake the dangerous journey across the frontier to end up on Bursa, finding it a similar climate to Moroz and Novi Jadran. The city of Tawûsî, on Hatay, has the highest percentage of Dominian NCPs, with around 10% of the population being of Dominian origin. Despite the discrimination that this population commonly faces, with the typical rhetoric being that they are spies for the Empire, Tawûsîans have begun to gradually assimilate some of the Imperial holidays into their city-wide events. The Feast of Devotion and Worker’s Day have seen some popularity among the Elyran public, with many celebrating it in turn with the blue-collar populace that built Bursa in the first place. The Feast of Remembrance has, in recent years, coincided with a small festival at the Bursa Memorial on the outskirts of New İzmir, in which both NCPs and Elyran citizens came together to remember the victims of the Lii’draic Incursion.

The other major NCP demographic on Bursa are Tajara. Primarily citizens of the People’s Republic of Adhomai who have volunteered or been volunteered for PRA work programs, Tajara are rare elsewhere in Elyra due to the heat (and in Aemaq’s case, humidity) endemic to other Republican planets. They are quite common in the mines near Uludağ, and live in the same külliye that their citizen counterparts do, and some M’sai Tajara are tapped for scouting the far north of Büyükada.

Tajara prevalence on Bursa has created an unusual attitude of tolerance combined with ignorance and condescension. Workers are lauded for their diligent service to the Republic by the public, while also being subject to stereotypes of them being unintelligent, unsuited for citizenship, or even less than sapient due to poor understanding of Elyran Standard.

Major Cities

New İzmir: The capital and second largest city by population on Bursa. Cosmopolitan and modern, New İzmir is the primary source of nightlife on the planet. In the early 2400s, much of the original külliye that made up New İzmir’s neighborhoods was demolished and replaced with more modern apartment blocks, with the city centralizing its entertainment district in New İzmir’s downtown. Stylish art deco high-rises coexist with squat brutalist administrative areas, all built around Kemal Square, where the Monument to Progress looms over the city. The Monument to Progress depicts the faces of several prominent figures in Elyran history, dating back to Earth origins; among them, the faces of Aslan Değirmenci, Ceyla Kurtulmuş, and Abd Al-Hamid. Bursa’s most lauded polytechnic, the Atatürk University of Sciences, resides here, and is frequently visited by representatives from Osman Electronics.

Uludağ: The largest city on Bursa by population, though it is gradually losing its population to New İzmir as many young people move from külliye to the modernity promised by the capital. Nestled in the Aegean Mountains, it consists largely of several külliye blocks and the city’s administrative building, with a few transport hubs to mines and New İzmir. Uludağ was particularly affected by the Lii’draic Incursion, with a fifth of the casualties in the total of forty-thousand consisting of Uludağ natives. The population is largely insular, conservative, and distrustful of military personnel, with young people frequently conscription-dodging. Much of the planet’s Tajara NCP population makes residence here; while there is generally peaceful coexistence between them and the human population, supporters of the Elyran People’s Party have begun publicizing conspiracy theories and spreading rhetoric that the Tajara populace will “replace” human Elyrans, particularly after the death toll of the Lii’draic Incursion.

Imbros: Not so much a city as it is an administrative district, Imbros is the largest population center in the Marmara Isles, and home to several seaside resorts and local markets. Warm summers and rainy winters characterize the general climate of the towns, and several resorts in the area have been built in a style similar to the Mediterranean isles on Earth; stucco walls, red-tiled roofs, and arched windows. It is a common vacation destination for Bursans and other Elyrans alike, and is reputed for both its fresh seafood and its prominent artist culture.

Alara: The center for many logistics operations and spaceports, located several miles down the Sarı River from New İzmir. Unusually for Elyra, one of the megacorporations has limited influence here; it is home to a small Orion Express spaceport, and Alara and New Suez are usually how Elyrans receive goods from Orion Express and the wider Spur. Winter sports like skating and hockey are common on Alara due to its place on Lake Böbrek, and Alara hosts the planet’s basketball team, the Bursan Phoenixes.

Tawûsî: The largest city on Hatay, a city with an economy centered around farming and natural gas extraction. It has comparatively mild winters compared to the rest of the planet. It houses the Morningstar spaceport, and is the primary residence of most of the NCP population on Bursa; around 10% of the city’s population is of Dominian descent. Because of this, Tawûsî hosts the annual Morozian Culture Festival (which is something of a misnomer, as the festival includes pan-Imperial culture) in early September, coinciding with the Feast of Joy. Recent crackdowns and attention brought to it by pundits of the Elyran People’s Party have led to the festival taking on more of an underground nature, with individual neighborhoods and community centers coming together to celebrate. Tawûsî is also home to the largest museum on the planet, the Balmumcu Museum of Elyran History.