=Ilmarinen= 
**Station Type:** [[eclipse-phase/Beehives|Beehive]]/[[eclipse-phase/Clusters|Cluster]]
**Allegiance:** Independent ([[eclipse-phase/Anarchists|Anarchists]]/[[eclipse-phase/Argonauts|Argonauts]])
**Primary Languages:** English, Farsi, Mandarin
**Population:** 7,000
Egocasting to Ilmarinen is a bit of a surprise to anyone who hasn’t done their research. They have a high-grade egocaster and deluxe facilities for fabbing and personalizing morphs, but every morph available for rent or purchase has vacuum and low-temperature adaptations at minimum. The ability to tolerate hostile environmental conditions is considered a requirement here; they charge you for these mods and won’t let you sleeve if you aren’t willing to accept them. Also, if you’re here for more than a short visit, most locals think you’re both cheap and foolish if you don’t upgrade to better temperature and vacuum tolerance or just go with a synthmorph. The few visitors who arrive by spaceship are also expected to have the same adaptations. The general opinion seems to be that anyone who lacks these adaptations is too foolish to survive here and will be too much trouble to deal with.
When you actually get inside, all these rules make sense. By the standards of the rest of the system, Ilmarinen is a place that’s remarkably casual with pressure and temperature. The people here make certain that any place containing delicate possessions or plants have stable and well-protected environments; most of the locals really like plants. Major portions of the habitat, however, have an inert atmosphere, no atmosphere, or are extremely cold. Most locations that don’t contain anything too delicate are designed to drop pressure or temperature if it’s convenient or useful. I once saw a small ﬁre break out one of the common areas when a ﬁre-spinning performance in a bar went drastically wrong. Some sirens went off, then the automatics dumped the atmosphere while pumping in –30 C helium. The ﬁre was out in a couple of seconds, and most of the locals just held onto something and drank up before their drinks froze. It took almost 20 minutes before the area contained breathable atmosphere again, and no one considered this worthy of comment. That’s life on Ilmarinen.
Coming from [[eclipse-phase/Luna|Luna]], this place is a bit shock. Like most of the rest of the system, most Lunars do their best to ignore the fact that swift and icy death waits outside thin walls. The residents of Ilmarinen do a whole lot less ignoring. The general attitude is that they’re living in space, far out where the sun doesn’t provide much in the way of warmth, and so they’d better accept and deal with this fact. It’s also a haven of morphological freedom. While there are a fair share of morphs that superﬁcially look human, there are plenty of novacrabs, exotic pods, xu fu, and swarmanoids.
The situation gets even stranger when you start attempting to describe exactly who lives here. You almost never ﬁnd anything like this sort of eccentric diversity in the inner system. You’ve got hackers, makers, techies, brinkers, semi-professional conspiracy theorists, radical morph hobbyists, mystics, and poets. The locals largely divide themselves into subcultures that are often fractious, cliquish, and sometimes impressively hot-tempered, but outside of these divisions, the locals cooperate quite closely with one another. It’s easy to see why: anyone who doesn’t feel like being social can ﬁnd their own rock to live on, either alone or with a few dozen like-minded fellows. Ilmarinen is where the more social and cooperative elements of our oddball and reclusive [[Neptune|Neptunian]] Trojan culture end up.
The other reason that people in the outer system end up in Ilmarinen is work. Many outer system habitats are focused on either exemplifying some ideology or on self-sufﬁciency. In short, they’re all about mining raw materials and keeping things ﬁxed up while they play various exotic social or political games among themselves. Ilmarinen is named after a mythological smith, and is well named. It’s the main hub for research and design out beyond [[eclipse-phase/Saturn|Saturn]], attracting a number of skilled outer-system technicians, designers, and engineers. Creating tech and augments that work in environments where temperatures start at –150 C and go down from there is no easy task. Recent upgrades in various cryonic temperature tolerance augmentations for biomorphs are the most well known of the recent products to come out of Ilmarinen, but they are far from the only ones. The savant morph was crafted here as a proof-of-concept that synthmorphs could be loaded with intelligence augmentations to the same level as mentons; savants are now one of the most popular shells in the hab. A number of perfectly ordinary pieces of technology, from smart rope to grip pads, have had minor tweaks from Ilmarinen techs to help them work better in extreme low-temperature conditions.
The residents of Ilmarinen work closely with [[Glitch]], despite the distance. Some of the initial software architecture in Glitch received patches designed by a Ilmarinen techs, and relations between the two habitats have been very close ever since. There’s a whole lot of concentrated and enhanced mental processing power over in Glitch, and being able to set even a small portion of it on a particularly tough design or materials science problem is part of what allows the best techs at Ilmarinen to accomplish some of what they do. Researchers from Ilmarinen regularly send forks over to Glitch to get advice, and there’s lots of neutrino com trafﬁc between the two.
This segues nicely into the reason I was here. The folks in Ilmarinen are expert problem solvers, but a few of the problems they’re asked to solve aren’t very nice. One of the project teams, called Azure Sun, has done work for both [[eclipse-phase/Xiphos|Xiphos]] and [[Proteus|Free]]. I haven’t been able to discover exactly what these projects entailed, but anything for either of those habs is likely to be nasty. The rumors I’ve heard about the mental enslavement hacks they use in Free sound fancy enough that they may have had some help. Also, according to a report I’ve seen—which may just have been bragging—Azure Sun also helped design some of the data security protocols and weapon targeting systems for Xiphos. I’m going to try to turn one of the members of this team and see if I can gain access to details of the work they’ve done. If I fail, then likely the only way to get this data will be some sort of snatch-and-grab of the data or one of the team members. I’m also recommending that the agent we’ve got over in Free look into the connection with the Azure Sun design team.
It’s also worth noting that it was explorers from Ilmarinen that first discovered the [[Discord Gate]]. Many of the locals are still sore about the way [[Go-nin]] stole it away from them. Many of them are not the type to forget a grudge or turn their cheek to such an act of aggression. No one openly talks about taking the gate back, but I’d bet my morph that someone here is making plans.

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