Yggdrasil

Summary
Yggdrasil has seen better centuries, and its unnaturally long-lived human masters know it. But the easy life has its price, and here it has proven to be the energy and motivation to continue pushing themselves forward. Instead, the humans have largely retreated into the Tree, the virtual world that dwarfs their own rather pedestrian system, with its single habitable planet ringed by a multitude of space stations and tiny moonlets.

Over the millennia, they have ceded physical exploration, commerce, and technology to the Hermod, a caste of physically powerful humans genetically engineered for mining the system’s enormous asteroid belt, whose copious deposits of rare-earth metals fund the extravagant fantasies of the Tree. Yggdrasil’s elite assume that these strong creatures are docilely following their orders and maintaining the status quo. But in reality the Hermod are quietly becoming the system’s real masters – and their ambitions extend well beyond Yggdrasil itself.

The Tree has now become an engine of entertainment, but it began with a much more noble purpose, as a storehouse for the accumulated knowledge and memories of Yggdrasil’s people. These troves, now buried deep somewhere beneath the pleasure palaces and fantastical landscapes that host nearly all of the Tree’s traffic, contain an enormous amount of technology and history of all the systems in the Local Group cluster. But accessing it without encountering the all-seeing eye of the Tree’s security forces has claimed the lives of many an explorer.

Politics & Trade
Yggdrasil’s tentacles extend through much of the cluster, but their touch is gentler now than in the past. With most of their leaders’ attention directed inside the Tree, Yggdrasil’s neighbors have grown more and more autonomous in the past few centuries, and they have paid less and less attention to their “subjects” in other systems.

But the Hermod do remember the older days, and they see their resource-rich neighbors as the key to success in their own system. More and more Hermod traders have appeared in Loki and Tigris recently, carrying not only their system’s rare-earth metals but also selling military grade technology – at a steep price, spreading words about – and plans for – the beautiful Tree and its docile participants, and softly whispering advice on building strong rivals to Yggdrasil.

Aspects

 * Virtual seduction


 * The new masters and the old


 * Ghosts in the machine