Lore:Colonial Seed Vault

CULTURE

Colonial Seed Vaults

Denonyms: Pod Person Ruins, Seed Ruins, Plantman Domes, Biodomes, That placeI don't know what a demonym is, actually. Sorry. with the Gatfruit and Cherrybombs, The Fourth Stage of the Lovealand Experience. Other Names: Plant Persons, Plantgirls, Podmen, Replica Pods, Plantfolk Related Pages: Guide to Hydroponics (Replica Pods) Related Lore: Lore:Podperson, OnlyFronds Languages: SylvanA complicated, ancient language spoken by sentient plants. Contributors: GreytideSkye So my writing began here, so my writing shall end here. ---- User:GreytideSkye, also known as Extramrdo. Contactable at Discord @extramrdo, preferably through opening a Staff Ticket if it's staff related.

Gaia Noveaux, LASH: {2177, 2240, 2310, 2450}

Edenopolis, LASH: {2104, 2180, 2210, 2520}

New Sprout City, LAST: {2350, 2352, 2352, 2352}

Flowerida, LASH: {2210, 2210, 2320, 2321}

Meaningless digits, or heartbreaking tales? To the untrained eye, this is just a series of four different years, yet they portray the struggles of entire peoples as cold and concisely as they were born.

Colonial Seed Vault

Metal structures containing a number of Replica Pod terrariums, growing trays, sufficient electricity, and a directive, "To Spread Life". If you've ever explored a mining site, you've likely found a reinforced plant biodome somewhere, ne'er woken.

Akin to the Dot Com boom of the 2000s, as soon as 2100 hit and the technology to mass-print steel rooms and mass driver them into space, millions of Colonial Seed Vaults were sent out with folks' literal hopes and dreams with the promise of infinite prosperity. While historians call this era the (hover for tentative names)Bloomer Shooter era
Terra Forming
Plant Parenthood
Plantifest Destiny
Zeroth Migration, at the time there was no one predominant Seed Vault corporation to capture the zeitgeist and have the trend named after them. Both destinations and corporations took absurd, generic namesSeed Fund, Future You, Herbasecondlife, Family Tree Planning, The Foli Age... to destinations like Earth Reborn, Gaia Deluxe, Gaia Reimagined, Lush 7.
With hundreds of companies and millions of seed vaults, expect a lot of procedural generation and overlap.
----
On an OOC level, make whatever the fuck up you want, with the understanding that they're just names pitched to desperate people like a travel agent really trying to get kickbacks from a third-rate snorkel shack for chartering an entire boat for a day. to such an extent that even knowing the exact name and destination is rarely sufficient to trace ancestryNot that it would offer much legal grounds for inheritance, nor would the genetics be close enough to have any real similarity left. Fun fact: in humans, 8th cousins are genetically distinct enough that they're indistinguishable from more unrelated persons..

LASH

Let me introduce you to the LASH numbers. Earth, having launched more Colonial Seed Vaults than stars in the sky (Earth has launched exactly two stars into the sky.), promptly lost track of most of them. Individual families spent their life savings to get a drop of their blood aboard a Colonial Seed Vault, with the promise of an entire planet of homestead as their impending birthright, should they be willing to work it with a simple goal, "To Spread Life."

In those days, eternal life was but a dream, and even a second chance at breathing was impossibly miraculous. Plant people were that miracle, and what is Earth but where one profits off peddling miracles? Families bankrupting what little generational wealth at the dream of a second future, and sleazy grifters straining their necks looking up at how high they can charge for a trifle of work, neither in a position to keep immutable records for long. The companies surely haven't survived 400+ years, and families are just as volatile, losing traditions and secrets and records with each passing generation until ancestors are indistinguishable from strangers.

Thus, when they are eventually discovered, Colonial Seed Vaults are denoted by the name they were given, and four key years that summarize their journey: LASH.

Launch

《 When was it accelerated?? 》
The year of the last human acceleration to the Colonial Seed Vault. "Accelerated" is key, as the initial launch date is well-assumed to be during the Podperson Boom of 2100. Any Seed Vault built, staffed, or otherwise initially launched beyond the advent of FTL travel is bizarre, likely some hobbyist project or catastrophic accident.
2100-2105 Untouched	Your Vault is vintage, launched directly from Earth orbit, unfettered en route, and arrived exactly where intended. It is also very likely late to the party and almost certainly forgotten. Depending on how soon you arrive, the galaxy has long since outclassed the technology you once knew. Your first colonists are waking up with outdated technology, no words from home, and the naive assumption that no man has ever gone faster than light. They are in for a rude awakening, much like any plant person.
	2110-2150: Late to the party. Tautologically, the later your vault was launched, the later it launched. The vault's families, the vault's corporation, so on, all went chasing fads that already expired. Perhaps the company overpurchased and was left holding the bag, perhaps the family bought onto one for pennies on the dollar, so on. By this point, these folk had inklings of better options and still chose a Colonial Seed Vault. Explore why that was.
2212-2255 First Migration	First Migration: Your family remembered you and was middle-class-rich enough to give you a push. Throwing good money after bad, they gave you a second chance at being the first to your destination. Best hope that the mercenary group paid to give you a shove didn't then sell coordinates to your inevitable destination for someone to scoop - or worse, poach once your colonists finish terraforming. If your accelerants were generous, they'd've left modern seeds and insights: deconstructive biogenerators, mothic plants, electric plant trays, plumbing.
2320-2465 Second Migration	Your family line was either too poor or too pragmatic to have helped you sooner. Perhaps they dug through historical records, or kept them safe for centuries, and only now that Bluespace travel is cheap can they nudge their heritage back onto a modern timeframe. And perhaps your family forgot, and by chance some wayward traveler found you, aiming you somewhere advantageous to them - hopefully a planet they're in no hurry to terraform, and not directly atop the capital city of their enemies.
2470-2480 The Terro-Tiziran War	Discovered in the heat of war, a useful resource or an innocent bystander. Either way, your vault's reality is shaped in blood (which really helps with making more Podpeople). There's practically no chance this vault made it to its final destination unfettered, instead used as a wave of reinforcements, an opportunistic resupply, a blessing of revivals for otherwise mourned soldiers, or abhorrently as a kinetic missile to drop on entrenched lizards. Plant people harvested of these vaults tend to have a reddish motif for some psychosomatic reason.
2480+ Whenever	By 2480, if your vault hadn't been discovered and hadn't arrived at its destination, you (or the launch parameters) were way off course. Space dust may have physically knocked you aside, or the unrealistic dreams of 2100 flung you at a star implausibly distant from Sol, where even then everyone would know the destination isn't going to work. There is but one fertilizer for your plantkin here: desperation. In whatever condition your vault is found, it is well past its prime. The lights might still be on, but the plants are woefully unequipped to deal with modern blights, and the plant people emerge emaciated through no fault of the equipment. (Again, likely some sort of psychosomatic reason.) Whatever life comes from this vault, does so in defiance of any God around, rebellion against a seemingly predetermined fate.

Launch also rarely includes the Launch Destination. For most Seed Vaults, the Destination is wherever you actually found it after all. For a scant some, more commonly those re-accelerated, misdirection and misfortune came, and where your Colony sprouted is not where it was intended to. Details here are usually scarce, as there's never been a strong incentive to keep accurate records. Whatever company launched this particular vault was one in a thousand identical companies, likely open for only a few months, with a generic name which might be engraved on some light switch deep in the vault. Tracing the company would be an exercise in futility, unless your narrative strongly demands otherwise.

Arrived

When it touched down.

Mostly a narrative function of "how old is your colony", but also a function of distance and attention. The further back this date is, the more you'd expect it to be close to Sol, or have been reaccelerated early. Details here dote on the state the Seed Vault arrived in, the initial environment encountered, and their struggles in forging a permanent presence.

Sprout

When the first generation finally established a foothold, allowing for sustainable Podperson life as the stepping stone toward their main objective, "To Spread Life." This is typically done within a single generation of Colonial Podpeople, but your narrative can stretch this into generational trauma. Arrived being equal to Sprout tends to happen when the Vault lands on an already-habitable world.

Habitable

When the Colonial Seed Vault has properly terraformed their local environment into something capable of sustaining Human civilization. This need not be the entire planet, but enough for a self-sustaining colony. (As in, capable of fostering human population growth over multiple generations. Does not necessarily need to produce all comforts of modern life on-site, but should be capable of accepting cargo traffic.)

For most Colonial Seed Vaults, the story ends here. The next line is the name of some human civilization, built atop the foundation set by the Seed Vault. By design this means asserting human superiority over the vegetables, but depending on the level of ethics brought or procured on-site, this superiority can range from "lasers" to "we know what forms to fill out to get SolFed recognition together, hand-in-hand."

If the Colonial Seed Vault fails, this is instead a LAST date, where T reflects the Termination of the project and the causes therein.

Examples, revisited

With our eyes properly trained, let's revisit the examples and see what stories they project.:

Edenopolis, LASH: {2104, 2180, 2210, 2520}

Untouched since the Podperson Boom of 2100, filled with people who took four entire years to raise the funds to buy their future. Took only 76 years to arrive, unaccelerated, so relatively close to Sol. Sprouted in only 30 years, so the initial Colonial Podpeople plausibly got to see the future they set out to make. And yet, it took 310 years to be Habitable. Edenopolis must have suffered from some hazard that meant plantfolk could survive but not humans, which could not be easily remedied (even by building an isolated shelter). I'd suspect the atmosphere was significantly damaged, high levels of CO2 or toxins that needed an entire planet of fresh, photosynthesizing plants to slowly purify over the centuries.

New Sprout City, LAST: {2350, 2352, 2352, 2352}

LAST, so we know this doesn't end well. 2350, pretty firmly into the early Second Migration, so it must have gone far before then, and been discovered later. Arrived 2352, just 2 years later, so very close to where it was intercepted. Sprouted in the same year, which we know to mean that the planet was already developed. Terminated in the same year, so whatever was on the planet did not appreciate the Podpeople. My guess? A band of bad folk discovered the New Sprout City vault, redirected it towards a nearby planet, and dropped it on a major metropolitan area. If it crashed nowhere, we'd've never known of it to have it recorded in the first place. Whatever happened was notable enough that we firmly know New Sprout City's name and history, so I suspect that a great deal of forensics was done, so something happened that warranted a great deal of forensics.

Flowerida, LASH: {2220, 2220, 2320, 2321}

2220, early First Migration. The family must've known of this vault and lept at the first opportunity to rekindle their investment. Arrived in the same year, so either it was basically already at its destination (in which case, why bother accelerating it?) or more likely, it was redirected to somewhere close. With such an immediate delivery, I wouldn't rule out the Accelerant remaining with the Seed Vault, which would likely make the Accelerant direct family or otherwise emotionally attached to the colonists. 100 years to Sprout, meaning that for 100 full years, all parties involved had to fight every single day for survival. Without constant tenacity over multiple generations, Flowerida would have been naught but a pile of compost. And yet, just one year after the planet is tamed enough to Sprout, it's domesticated enough to be Habitable. Whatever strife Flowerida encountered, it kept plantmen and men away equally, and as soon as it was solved, the planet became perfectly fine. I'd imagine something dramatic, a generations-long quest to save the day, and an obstacle strong enough to last a full century (so likely not an individual). A massive clash against unnatural forces until peace is restored.

Ironically enough, I personally know of Flowerida. Flowerida was intercepted by family, but was too damaged to go further, so had to settle for landing on the nearest planet with atmosphere. This hellhole rumbled continuously, each day threatening to erupt new flows of magma and explode. The Accelerants of Flowerida ultimately chose to detonate their ship's engines deep in the planet's core, hoping to calm it. Flowerida currently exists as a lovely, stable asteroid with a sealed atmosphere, perched atop the largest surviving tectonic plate from what was once their planet.

Gaia Noveaux, LASH: {2177, 2240, 2310, 2450}

If you've heard of this place, it's because you've heard of Penny Stil. She's an eighth-generation Colonial Podperson, which means Gaia Noveaux is presumably anywhere from 8 to 1600 years old. If you tried to find it, you'd have an easier time printing out the starmap and throwing darts until you hit it, than going to NTMaps and searching "Gaia newview", because you'd have to scrawl to at least the third page of results.

I won't say they're backwater. There used to not be water. Gaia Noveaux landed on a barren desert planet, whose claims to life were a tidally locked wave of dunes and enough gravity to hold any potential oxygen down. The garden itself, she was blessed with a full Harvest of four diligent workers and the full array of SolFed plant seeds. To Sol, this planet looks unsalvageable, but to these driven colonists, tis a blank canvas with none to interrupt or oppose. She rarely speculates why Gaia Noveaux was accelerated 25 years into the First Migration; it hardly matters and like most vaults, records of their initial launch are lacking.

From what Penny can gather, the first generation followed standard planting procedure as any invasive species would (Standard as in everyone winds up doing it, like yawning when someone else yawns, not because of some rulebook.) Coat the entire damn area in grass. Sand can't blow up dunes if it's covered in topsoil. A wide swath of plants to fast-track oxygen production and to quell the underlying landscape. Bioluminescent Fairy Grass to add structure to the endless swaths of grass. And with the environment neutralized, the first generation are mission complete. Collectively, they grow a patch of new minds.

The second generation, building upon the foundations of their ancestors, grow wood. Tall trees, with little underbrush to strangle them and no fauna to feast on them, grow impossibly tall in rapid haste. Each tree, hand-fed mathematically precise fertilizers daily by a coven of dedicated lovers. All wood and no bush is a bad time for everyone involved.

The third generation, after rationing what little blood remained, focused on perpetuating their people. With no humans to draw further blood from to prolong them, Gaia Noveaux turned to darker arts. Their biogenerators made monkey cubes, with human-similar blood. Through some alchemical magicIt worked like that, back in the day. random chimpanzees became random humonkeys, and with an absurdly large field of attempts, the mixed blood-froth would seed the next generation of Podpeople. From unspoken blood arose fresh minds, fresh bodies, potentially fresh Resonance? Through coincidence, and the massive scale required for forcing coincidence, new Podpersons arose, unrelated in blood or mission to those who came before. Current theories suggest that the right mutations at the right moment made a body that was compatible enough with a strand of stray Resonance, which meant that blood was viable for Pod harvest for just long enough to happen, and that doing this thousands of times resulted in tens of successes.

By Gaia Noveaux's own metric, this is what they consider their Sprouting, rendering the planet hospitable for a perpetual Podperson presence, making the third generation the one credited.

The fourth through seventh generations would finish what was started. The massive quantity of monkeys required to brute-force the miracles had the shocking, unforeseen consequence of there being a massive quantity of monkeys. Pedantically, this satiates the clause, "To Spread Life," but the newer generations saw the need to continue. Gaia Noveaux grew encrusted with jungle trees and jungle apes, dense clusters of vines and whines.

The seventh generation was the one to endure First Human Contact.

First Human Contact

A footnote in the recordbooks, a foregone conclusion given that there are space-faring beings to record and report the colony's LASH, but vitally critical to the future of the Podpeople in the Colonial Seed Vault. This is the moment that galactic outsiders intrude upon the ecosystem, neither necessarily as conquerors nor humans. This is the moment the colony's bubble of isolation is irreparably shattered, where the closed ecosystem of plant and ideas are irrevocably tainted by outside perspective. In a sense, innocence is lost.

A benevolent First Human Contact might truthfully explain the circumstances of the Seed Vault program, how they're legally the reincarnation of long-dead middle-class humans, how the lands they tend are intended to be claimed by their lineage, that there's no chance they've been remembered, that they're persons just like anyone else and deserve rights. A malevolent First Human Contact might act as intended: conquer and pillage, taking the land even if they're not of the vault's intended dynasty. With modern firearms, spacecraft, scanners, etc., this is how most surviving seed vaults end.

Gaia Noveaux had as much luck as they had chimps: a distressingly overwhelming surplus. The first visitors to Gaia Noveaux were loggers and lumberjacksYou'd think these would be interchangeable, but then you'd get two axes and a hatchet buried in your face by John the Faceburier., spotting a densely forested jungle with no active spaceport. Free wood, effectively. This impromptu lumberjacking operation came to a sudden halt under the guerilla strikes of cultivated kudzu, and the gorilla strikes of an explosive population of cubed chimps, hundreds hydrating to life in the bowels of landed starcraft. Soon enough, a spacewise lumberjack recognized the cubed nature of their simian sabotage, surmised that some sapients smartly struck, stopped what they were fucking doingMostly alliterating. and initiated actual contact and negotiations with the hidden plantfolk.

Eventually, the logging company reached a deal to Pay for their wood, at a price slightly cheaper than sending a pack of Tower Cap seeds and a hydroponics tray. Gaia Noveaux logging is regionally profitable, but is neither unique nor cheap enough to warrant exporting for more than a few light years, and can't reliably support more than a total of a hundred logging employeesIncluding administrative and logistical staff, including pilots and managers and accountants and a single Clown. Single as in, one clown. The current one is non-monogamous and taken in several comedic directions..

Gaia Noveaux sees little traffic these days. There's no tourist appeal, the logging is mundane, the hazards great but mundane, and it's distant enough from typical space travel lanes. A number of Pod People went off with the loggers to "spread life" in the greater galaxy. Penny was not one of them. She was later... encouraged off-world because of her proactive stance on spreading life versus quality thereofmonkey-fighting ways on this monday-to-friday planet.. Gaia Noveaux is only notable in any capacity for how documented it isRead: Penny yapped an ear off to the archivists involved in this writing. No, we're not sure how an ear falling off relates to the yapping, nor is it clear whose ear detached or even if it was just metaphorical. This may just be a bit she does..

Work in Progress: Footer subject to change at a moment's notice. Do not take a red link's presence, struck-through or otherwise, as confirmation (or denial) of their canonicity.

Nova Sector Lore
	Common Species	Humans, Tiziran, Unathi, Moths, Azulae (Ceruleans), Slime Hybrids, Vox (Primalis et al), Tajaran, Synthetic Humanoids (and assorted robots), Pod Persons (Colonial Seed Vaults), Hemophages, Xenomorphic Hybrid
	Other Species	Genemodders (Felinids, Ice Walkers), Ashwalkers, Ethereals, Snailpersons, Teshari, Dwarf, Ordoht (Formerly Skrell), Plasmamen, Flypeople, Vulpkanin, Rouges (Abductorkin), Kobolds, Miscellaneous Species, Dullahans, Employee Golems, Ghouls, Changelings, Shadekin, Proteans, Ghouls
	Nanotrasen	Nanotrasen, Central Command, Emergency Response Corps
	SolFed	SolFed, Sol in 2566, The SolFed Armed Forces Notable Member States: Libraen Federation, Nanotrasen Government: Voting Cliques (Plasma Clique), Voting in SolFed
	External Groups	Heliostatic Coalition (HC CompactThe HC Constitution, the document formally defining the HC., HCAFHeliostatic Coalition Armed Forces (Ranks), CZDCommonwealth of Zvirdnyn Dominions, KMIFKemppainen-Morozov Industrial Fabrication, Expeditionary Police ForceHC's Cops (InspectorsThe Expeditionary Force. They inspect more than stations. (Quick Reference, SOPStandard Operating Procedure, LexiconLingo, chatter guide, manner of speaking.))), Interdyne Pharmaceutics, Cargo, MECU, Colonial Seed Vaults
	Hostiles	The Syndicate (Gorlex, Tiger Cooperative, DS-2, Syndicate Manifestos), The Void Imperium, The Spider Clan, Changelings
	Nova	The Nova Sector, IndecipheresLavaland, volcanic mining place., FreyjaIcebox and Snowglobe station frozen moon., BoletusSerenity Mushroomoon.
	Concepts	Bluespace, Plasma, Faster Than Light Travel, Resonance ("Souls"), Death, Timeline of Events in the Lore