Shantytown

Important Factions, Players, and Locations
Gouge's Caravan

Diego Delgado-Moreno

The Benefactor

Current Events
The Psychic Savior of Shantytown - A mysterious psychic is fighting injustice!

Description
Shantytown. Something is always happening in Shantytown. Some mob group this, some business group that, some celebrity making waves, whatever. Put an ear out, watch a block, and in five minutes something will happen.

Shantytown is abnormally huge. Compared to Dusty Springs, the place is a metropolis, or as close to one a planet of prisoners could make. The center sections of the city are actually free of sand, save for when a sand storm blew in. Most buildings do not go higher than four stories. With plenty of space in all directions to expand, the streets are a tangled mess of buildings made from mudbricks, mined metal, stone, and wood, a symptom of the anarchic construction that goes on. Most residents, like in Black Lake, put solar panels on the roof to power appliances. A common feature of the buildings is to have an overhang made of solar panels propped up by steel beams or stone columns. The outer buildings are slapped with dust, tinted yellow and orange from the burning sun and wind-blasting sand.

The people in the city often crowded the streets, only clearing out when a truck or cart towed by Dune Steed threaten to run them over. Several open air markets were littered throughout the city, and neon signs mark restaurants, taverns, bars, and establishments of ill repute.

Clustered in the center of the city are several skyscrapers, former hotels and casinos from the city's origins as a vacation city. They are in varying states of disrepair, depending on whether the organization occupying the building cares to fix the facade. Particularly ambitious groups affix as many solar panels on the sides as they can, in the hopes of powering energy hungry devices, since no fossil fuel energy plants were made to keep the area clean and tourist friendly. There used to be a solar array in the desert area surrounding the city, but it has since been stripped and salvaged as the city expanded.

In a second center point a fair distance from the skyscrapers is the Cosmos Space Port. The only building openly maintained by the Dominion Military on Sutekh, all space traffic goes through it. It is somewhat of a mystery what goes on in there, but the military seems content to let things be as long as they are undisturbed.

History
When the luxury colony failed to turn a profit after 70 years of operation, the planet was abandoned. The mining operations also failed, since no one wanted to tame or live in the desert. While there was a wide variety of resources, it was not enough to justify continued mining once the luxury colony had failed. It was too expensive to recover most equipment, so most of it was left on planet along with the buildings. While it accumulated some wear and damage, when the Dominion found itself needing a prison that they could whisk away people to never be seen, Sutekh presented itself as an ideal location. It had an infrastructure, along with housing, power facilities, sparing the military the investment cost. The Dominion Military quickly re-purposed most buildings, and shipped down prisoners.

The Dominion is very large and suppresses many people. Soon, the military found they had a size-able number of prisoners doing essentially nothing. They expanded operations by resuming mining, oil drilling, and limited manufacturing operations all over the Desert region. The Dominion also had the prisoners build housing to prevent the current buildings from overflowing. This expansion came at the cost of the lives of many prisoners. It was also much harder to keep things secure since the Dominion expanded too quickly, and prisoner revolts occurred, which set back progress and killed some military men. None succeeded early on, but they kept growing in size.

Finally, after around 250 years of occupation and use, the Dominion Military had to focus its attention on other matters, and now unceremoniously dump prisoners onto the planet, without a care for them living or dying. For the next eight decades, the now relatively free prisoners began forging life anew, in Shantytown and the Desert.

Most new arrivals stay within Shantytown, afraid to try and forge a new life in the perilous Desert. Because of this, Shantytown has a dense mixture of many cultures from many planets all over the Dominion. Just about any species can be seen, and if the ingredients can be found, any dish can be eaten. Art and other expressive forms also mingle, leading to strange fusions.

Shantytown has no formal government, unlike Black Lake. Instead, several large factions lay claim to certain areas and advocate certain interests. While this is mostly peaceful, there has been conflicts before.