HARD TIME

Legion Sketchbook

Before Article 19, the House of Reason sent many political prisoners to the Synth Mines for not conforming to the grand design. In Prisoners of Darkness, we see Major Owens getting his own personal tour of the mines, and seeing firsthand how the Republic had gotten its stranglehold on one of the most valuable substances on the edge.

Synth.

The miracle substance went undiscovered for millennia as mankind first scratched its name into the universe. Since mining had always produced the desired results for extracting materials from the ground, technology developed little when compared to leaps in movement and military kit. It was this lack of innovation that let the miracle material go unclaimed for so long.

Found on planets all across the edge, the term synth doesn’t mean synthetic. The material is highly unique among the table of elements because synth can turn into just about anything. With the right amount of pressure and control, the material is pressed against any other created material, taking on the exact properties at the molecular level. Need more impervisteel without an inverse gravitic smelter? Apply synth and double your volume. Don’t have another clear panel for that starship canopy? Apply a Synth patch to the damage and walk that crack, back.

When mining other materials with bore-drillers, excavators, and projection lasers, the mining companies were creating so much heat and friction, the synth was transforming itself into the very rock that contained it. Discovering the material by accident, most mining companies changing over to Synth mining wouldn’t even use bots. They feared the hyper efficient machines would dig into a vein and come back with nothing more than the surrounding rock.

Of course, this led to Synth mining becoming the number one boogie man of punishments. Using human and alien labor to crack into, and then delicately extract the material by “rubbing it” from the rock became the remedy of choice for the House of Reason to disappear certain people they deemed dangerous. The remote and deadly planets set up for the prisons made for convenient arguments when the dissidents would “fall off the rolls.” Never to be heard from again.

Want to see what becomes of the Major and the other prisoners he finds? Pick up Prisoners of Darkness!