Shadow Hand
- Intent: To establish an industrial-agricultural city on Dromund Kaas, serving as the primary food and warbeast production hub for the Kainate’s military, ensuring the Sith war machine never falters due to logistical limitations.
- Image Credit:
- Click - ChatGPT by Me
- Headers - Teresa Zambrano | Darth Pellax
- Canon: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
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- City Name: Zal'vaskad ("The Blood Loom")
- Classification: Industrial-Agricultural Fortress City
- Location: Asha, Dromund Kaas
- Affiliation:
- Population: Heavy (Primarily Epicanthix, Sith Purebloods, Humans, with a servile caste of aliens)
- Demographics:
- Majority: Epicanthix (Labor Aristocracy & Warrior-Farmers), Humans (Industrial Laborers & Managers), Sith Purebloods (Overseers, Administrators,)
- Minority: Chiss, Arkanian, Umbaran (Technicians, Scientists, Climate Engineers)
- Servile Caste: Togruta, Twi’lek, Near-Human & Alien Species (Indentured Labor, Agricultural Workers, Beast Handlers, and Manual Laborers)
- Social Hierarchy: Rigid, Caste-Based, with a Stark Divide Between Overseers and Workers
- Wealth: High
- Zal'vaskad produces immense amounts of food, warbeasts, and essential resources, but its wealth is not for luxury, it is for function. Sith-Imperial bureaucrats and high-ranking Kainate officials prosper, while the worker and labor castes live under constant scrutiny, forced into efficiency.
- Stability: High
- The entire city is under strict regulation, ensuring maximum efficiency, zero tolerance for rebellion, and perpetual productivity. Dissent is crushed before it even begins, and every citizen understands their role in the Kainate’s survival.
- Freedom & Oppression: Every individual is monitored, categorized, and assigned their duties. Zal'vaskad is not a city for the free-minded, but for those who serve with discipline and unshakable purpose. Surveillance drones, security troopers, and Sith enforcers ensure no labor is wasted, no grain is stolen, and no worker fails their task without consequence.
- Description: Zal'vaskad is not a city of luxury or choice, it is a city of purpose. It is the Kainate’s most efficient food and warbeast production hub, supplying massive quantities of rations, bio-engineered crops, and Sithspawn livestock to sustain both the armies of the Kainate and the Sith war machine. The city operates under Sith-designed atmospheric stabilization towers, ensuring that Asha’s environment remains perpetually optimal for agricultural growth and warbeast domestication. It is an engineered ecosystem, blending brutalist industrial farming with Sith sorcery-enhanced livestock breeding, ensuring that no resource is wasted, and no harvest is lost. The city is built like a fortress, where entire sectors are dedicated to mass-scale farming, industrial food processing, and the training of warbeasts bred for Sith armies. Zal'vaskad is not a city where one seeks comfort, it is where one learns the true meaning of endurance, discipline, and service.
City Layout: Zal'vaskad is a city designed with absolute efficiency in mind, a brutalist expanse of factories, warbeast enclosures, and engineered farmlands, all dedicated to fueling the Kainate's endless war machine. The city's layout is a layered industrial grid, with each district serving a single, ruthless purpose, agriculture, warbeast breeding, military ration production, and genetic experimentation.
The city itself is divided into five primary zones, each serving a distinct function:
- The Overseer’s Spire (The Sith Administration & Control Center): The Overseer’s Spire is where the ruling Sith Pureblood bureaucrats and enforcers monitor every aspect of Zal'vaskad’s output.
- Daily production quotas are reviewed and enforced with brutal efficiency.
- Workers and overseers are purged for inefficiency or disloyalty.
- The city’s military forces receive their orders, ensuring total security.
- The Iron Fallow Fields (The Engineered Farmlands of the Kainate): Unlike natural farmlands, the Iron Fallow Fields are heavily mechanized, dark side-infused hydroponic megafarms, sustained through Sith bio-engineering and technological efficiency.
- Artificial Soil Enrichment: The land is infused with nutrients drawn from the corpses of the fallen, ensuring stronger crop yields and hyper-nutritional results.
- Climate Regulation Towers: Sith weather-controlling pylons stabilize temperature and humidity, preventing the natural storms of Dromund Kaas from interfering with the harvest.
- Food Production Beyond Natural Limits: Crops grow at accelerated rates, ensuring constant supply for the Kainate’s military without relying on imports.
- The Bloodhorn Ranches (The Breeding Grounds of Warbeasts): Within fortified pens and massive biodomes, the Bloodhorn Ranches serve as the primary breeding and training grounds for various domesticated Sithspawn livestock and war beasts, bred for war and endurance from the Order of Arcane Syn. Including but not limited to:
- Terentasaur: A rare but devastating asset, these towering Sithspawn are bred for large-scale warfare and serve as living siege weapons when the ranch mobilizes its might for the Kainate’s armies.
- Misini Arira Drakes: Trained as the apex war mounts of Kainite cavalry, these formidable predators are raised for Sith shock troops, ensuring swift and brutal assaults on the battlefield.
- Tsûkda Maiaiyita (Maze Bulls): Fiercely loyal to the Kainate as devout warriors of the Eternal Rule, the Maze Bulls of Bloodhorn Ranch willingly dedicate themselves to the twin purposes of war and industry, serving as elite war mounts, shock cavalry, and laborers in the Kainate’s war machine. Bound by their own warrior code and faith in Darth Prazutis as a divine death-god, they see their labor and battle prowess as sacred duties, ensuring that both their bodies and their offspring are honed to absolute perfection.
- Wira Siqsa (Spined Demon): Stationed as living guardians across Bloodhorn Ranch, these terrifying creatures enforce absolute obedience through fear, ensuring no one, beast or worker, strays from their designated place.
- Nairi Zuhas (Fear Trackers): Utilized as intelligent herders and perimeter sentinels, these creatures keep Zal'vaskad's livestock in line while tracking intruders or runaway assets with relentless precision.
- Enforced Pack Hierarchy: All beasts are extensively trained and controlled through various means including beastmasters, ensuring they remain loyal to the Kainate.
- The Blackfoundry District (Nutrient Paste & War Rations Processing: While other cities craft ships, weapons, and armor, Zal'vaskad’s factories produce something equally vital: sustenance.
- Massive Food Refining Centers: Facilities that convert engineered crops and livestock into nutrient-rich ration packs for the Kainite military.
- Synthetic Meat Vats: Ensure that food production never runs out, using genetic cloning technology to create endless sustenance.
- Blood-Tithe Processing Plants: Plants that recycle waste material from slaughtered livestock into bio-fuel and industrial components.
- The Crucible of Flesh (Genetic Modification & Augmentation Labs): Hidden beneath the warbeast ranches, the Crucible of Flesh is where the Kainate perfects Sithspawn, warbeast augmentations, and experimental genetic modifications in joint projects alongside the Order of Arcane Syn.
- Sith Geneticists craft stronger breeds of livestock and war creatures.
- Mutations and alchemical enhancements are tested before mass application.
- Subjects who fail trials are repurposed into useful biological material.
Maximum
Zal'vaskad is one of the most heavily guarded non-military cities in the Kainate, as it is too vital to allow subversion or attack. A multi-layered system of security that ensures Zal'vaskad remains untouchable, self-sufficient, and eternally productive.
- The Sentinel Chain - Orbital & Long-Range Defense Grid: Zal'vaskad is protected not just from ground assaults, but from orbital incursions that might seek to disrupt the food and warbeast supply chains. The Sentinel Chain is a layered orbital and anti-air network that ensures nothing enters the city’s airspace without clearance.
- Orbital Defense Satellites: Linked into Dromund Kaas' greater planetary defense grid, these satellites track, scan, and fire upon unauthorized vessels before they ever reach the atmosphere.
- Sky Maw Batteries: Long-range anti-air turbolasers and ion cannons, positioned at key outposts outside the city, capable of destroying assault ships and bombers before they close the gap.
- Shield Conduits: Massive energy shielding pylons create a perpetual atmospheric dome, these comprehensive shield generators protecting the city from orbital bombardments, precision strikes, as well as extreme weather conditions that might disrupt production.
- The Immortal Bastion & Subterranean War Network: Beneath the city lies a heavily fortified connection to the vast underground fortress complex spanning Dromund Kaas, ensuring that even in the face of planetary siege, the city's war machine never ceases. Deep within these subterranean strongholds, the Immortal Legions, the vast army of the Kainate, stand in eternal vigil, ready to be deployed at a moment's notice. Armored troop corridors, hardened bunkers, and concealed transit networks allow for rapid reinforcements bothto the surface or across the globe, ensuring that any invasion is met with relentless, unyielding force from the depths.
- The Fleshwall Bastions - Perimeter & Internal Security Grid: Named after the warrior-farmers of the Ilam Bsaak, who defend Zal'vaskad not with fortresses alone, but with their own discipline, the Fleshwall Bastions are an integrated security network ensuring absolute control over movement, threats, and labor efficiency.
- Perimeter Wall & Gate Systems: Unlike many Sith fortresses, Zal'vaskad’s outer defenses are highly segmented, ensuring compartmentalized lockdowns can isolate any attempted breach.
- Shredder Trenches & Obstacle Killzones: The outer walls are surrounded by multiple layers of deep jagged trenches filled with electro-spikes, barbed caltrops, and directional smart minefields that allow defenders to activate, deactivate, or redirect explosive zones, preventing friendly casualties. These defenses use traditional mines.
- Sonic Disruption Towers: These non-lethal but incapacitating sonic emitters create an intense pressure field, disorienting enemies by disrupting their balance and hearing. These non-lethal emitters use known sonic weapons
- Bio-Scanner Barricades: At every checkpoint, farm entry, and livestock pen, bio-scanners analyze workers, enforcers, and beasts alike, ensuring no corruption, infestation, or sabotage occurs. These are equipped with standard bioscanners.
- Kainite Enforcer Garrisons: Elite warriors of the Ilam Bsaak, trained not just in combat but in ideological purity, patrol the worker camps, ranches, and production centers, ensuring that no laziness, dissent, or sabotage takes root.
- The Maw Warden Protocol - Beast Control & Defensive Asset Deployment: As a city that breeds and trains warbeasts, Zal'vaskad has turned its most fearsome creations into a living security system.
- Bio-Alchemic Control Implants: Every warbeast raised in Zal'vaskad possesses neural dampeners and control nodes, ensuring only Kainite-approved handlers can command them. Similar in function to restraint bolts or behavioral modifiers used in creature control. Beyond this, there are beastmasters present to keep them in line.
- Terentasaur Patrol Beasts: Specialized Terentasaur are stationed at key choke points, acting as organic sentinels, trained to slaughter intruders on sight.
- Darkside Beacon Control Centers: The Maw Warden Towers house alchemical signal amplifiers, allowing Sith overseers to release warbeasts against designated threats at a moment’s notice.
- The Crimson Harvest Protocol - Subversive Threat Response: Zal'vaskad is a city of rigid order and constant surveillance, ensuring any rebellion, sabotage, or deviation from Sith doctrine is crushed before it begins.
- The Crimson Harvest Dossiers: A vast database cross-referencing every worker’s productivity, loyalty scores, and genetic data, ensuring only the most devoted remain.
- Kainite Truthseers: Psychologically enhanced overseers, capable of detecting falsehoods, stress reactions, and deception in workers and soldiers alike.
- Dissident Purge Chambers: Any worker suspected of rebellion or inefficiency is taken below the city, where Sith interrogators and enforcers extract confessions or dispose of them efficiently.
- The Black Sickle Doctrine - Siege & Last Resort Protocol: If Zal'vaskad ever faces an overwhelming attack, the Black Sickle Doctrine is activated, a scorched-earth strategy ensuring the city is never taken, only destroyed.
- Self-Destructing Silos: Massive agricultural storage units are rigged to collapse, preventing invaders from seizing the Kainate’s war resources.
- Sithspawn Flood Release: If the city is lost, bio-warfare pens are detonated, unleashing ravenous Sithspawn hordes upon the invaders.
- The Iron Maw Deadman Signal: If all else fails, Zal'vaskad’s Sith overseers activate a planetary distress signal, ensuring an orbital purge cleanses the city in fire before it falls into enemy hands.
Zal'vaskad was not born from ambition, nor from prosperity, it was forged out of necessity. When the Kainate reclaimed Dromund Kaas, they inherited a world drenched in dark side energy, its ecosystems battered by the planet's infamous electrical storms. Traditional agriculture was unreliable, and for the Sith Empire to function without dependence on outside sources, a radical solution was needed, one that would reshape the very way the Sith sustained their war machine. Darth Prazutis, the Sovereign of Dromund Kaas, oversaw the calculated genesis of Zal'vaskad, a city of engineered necessity, where science, industry, and Sith alchemy would eliminate reliance on external imports forever.
The Eternal Rule dictated that self-sufficiency was paramount for the Kainate's survival. No Sith war effort could afford to be dependent on external food supplies or biological assets. Dromund Kaas' inability to sustain large-scale agriculture had long been a weakness exploited by enemies in past conflicts. To rectify this, Prazutis declared that the Sith would not conform to nature's limits, they would reshape nature itself. Thus, Zal'vaskad was conceived as a hybrid city-fortress, equal parts agricultural powerhouse, industrial war-foundry, and Sith genetic crucible. Its construction was to serve three essential functions, to create a constant, high-efficiency food supply, to ensure the endless breeding of Sith warbeasts, and to act as a stronghold of industrial efficiency, processing and refining nutritional rations and biological assets at a mass scale. Zal'vaskad would never be a city of wealth or power struggles, it would be a place where only function mattered, where service to the Sith was the only true currency.
Under Prazutis' direct oversight, the construction of Zal'vaskad began with brutal efficiency. Rather than relying on conventional city-building techniques, the Kainate deployed a war-engineer caste, alongside Sith-altered labor forces, to create a city that defied nature's restrictions. The Iron Fallow Fields, massive hydroponic megafarms shielded from the planet's extreme weather, were developed to ensure accelerated food production. The Bloodhorn Ranches were established as fortified breeding grounds for Sith warbeasts, where creatures such as the Maze Bulls, Misini Arira Drakes, and Terentasaur were raised and trained for battle. Meanwhile, the Blackfoundry District was constructed to process food into high-energy military rations, ensuring the Kainate's legions would never be without sustenance. Hidden beneath the city, the Crucible of Flesh became a secret network of Sithspawn laboratories, where failed experiments were either refined or repurposed into raw biological materials. Nothing in Zal'vaskad was wasted, neither flesh nor function.
As a critical backbone of the Kainate's war economy, Zal'vaskad could never be allowed to fall into enemy hands. Under Darth Prazutis' command, the city was fortified with layered defensive measures that ensured its survival under any condition. Towering phrik-reinforced bastion walls, equipped with turbolaser turrets, missile pods, and automated artillery, formed an unbreachable perimeter. Beneath the city, a direct connection to Dromund Kaas' underground fortress network allowed for rapid deployment of reinforcements. In times of siege, the city's forces could retreat into vast subterranean bunkers and strike from hidden tunnels. Guarding these depths, the Immortal Legions, vast army of the Kainate stood ready to defend the city with unyielding ferocity. These warriors did not eat, did not sleep, and did not falter. If Zal'vaskad ever came under attack, they would fight until every inch of the city was bathed in the enemy's blood.
Today, Zal'vaskad is a city without indulgence or ambition, a place where only service matters, and where every breath is spent fueling the Sith war machine. There are no riches to be hoarded here, no political games to be played, only the endless cycle of production, training, and refinement. Those who live within its walls do not seek power, nor glory, they seek only to serve. Under Darth Prazutis' vision, Zal'vaskad ensures that the Sith will never starve, never weaken, and never falter. To live is to serve, and to fail is to be repurposed. The new city was officially christened with a name that exemplified its purpose in the language of the Sith: Zal'vaskad.
The Blood Loom.
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