Triene is the kingdom at the deepest part of the Array. They are the only major kingdom that allows what we might consider slavery. They sometimes call it serfdom, but the reality is forced labor and bartering of obligations, even splitting up of families. This is only done in some places, but all over Triene there is also a policy of drugging most of the lower caste citizens to keep them compliant. Due to these facts, the Compact has expelled Triene, but they do try to make overtures in the hopes that the kingdom will change its philosophy.
Triene’s ruling class today has at the highest levels of the aristocracy the oligarchs, 144 highly placed citizens. The oligarchs elect a Queen from their number. Though it is not explicitly stated in the law, no woman other than a Vicitat has been Queen since the conquest 400 years ago. They simply hold too much power, and to select anyone else would destabilize the dynamic with the Vicitat and the Hafferin economy. The Queen then appoints five Pentarchs to run the internal affairs of Triene. These are usually from the Capital, Tana, or the second most prominent world, Tualt. Less often, a Vicitat or someone from a subsidiary world will be a Pentarch.
A Pentarch can in rare cases be someone not from the Aristocracy. This automatically conveys Nobility, and is the only way to have one’s family elevated to that status. Everyone else is at best a Functional.
The Queen decides foreign policy, but internally she consults with the Pentarchs, who go out and take care of their various administrations, with a lot of latitude. Queen means more than signing treaties and giving military orders. To achieve peace, the Vicitat had to accept certain clauses. Though the Vicitat are not a matriarchal society, the Monarch of Triene must be female. The Queen also must go through all of the Trienese Court training and ceremonies that go back thousands of years. Thus, the Queen is supposed to honor tradition, in exchange for being in power, the same as it was before the conquest. The difference is that one faction always holds the lion’s share of the political power, should they choose to exert it.
Triene is and has always been a place for a nobility of educated and highly-placed artists, but one of the advantages of the Hafferin bliss is that many of the common Functional and Prole citizens have turned to art. Even some serfs show enough promise to be elevated to prole. With millions practicing, and schools opening up dedicated to art, great artists are being discovered among the people. Some of these can even gain functional status (no Hafferin requirement).
The Vicitat are a culture from a world (Sactornat) that has advanced drug technology, helping to secure and preserve their political power.
They manufacture a mild narcotic, Hafferin, very pleasant, only a little impairing, but in a predictable way, and with no other negative effect, as long as you keep taking it. It’s like high-functioning opium, that makes you long to return to it for years after kicking, like returning to the bliss of the Matrix. Of course the lifestyle and media the Aristocracy provide for the populous help complete that experience.
The withdrawal symptoms from Hafferin are so slow and gentle as to be barely noticeable at first. The fondness becomes nostalgia, then longing. Within 3 years, an addict is 10 times more likely to use the drug again than they are in the year after stopping. By the time 4 years have passed, if there is no treatment, the addict is very likely to take action to return to the bliss of Hafferin, and the rose-tinted glasses of a life built around docility. After the 5 year mark, the symptoms begin to subside, and by the end of 8 years, even without treatment, the compulsion is minimal.
The Vicitat also have a special drug that increases the likelihood of getting telekinesis in a Sathafer (taskmaster) career path. This is not as widely known. Few Trienese actually gain the powers; only loyal and ruthless people are recruited into this role. Male Vicitat always get priority in testing and training, like a legacy privilege for ‘superior’ assholes who are elevated in rank. They often become officers to the other Sathafer.
There are Sathafer who deal with the populous, and there are psi crew aboard the Trienese starships (no name yet). Both receive a daily dose of the psi drug.
The Vicitat slowly conquered the Trienese, by addicting its people with drugs, 400 years ago. Triene was a feudal society, combining the Trienese and the Tualti, two TL-13 states, as well as a few smaller populations. They were already one of the great kingdoms, having withstood Morathi and Shadari incursions.
Triene culture has a very long tradition and history from before the Vicitat. They had arisen as a national identity, a small kingdom several thousand years earlier, another TL-11 republic, with no system more than three jumps away from any other. Feudalism was less necessary in the early days. Triene was taken and controlled by various larger kingdoms during history, but Tana was never taken in an invasion.
After space was neglected by two older kingdoms, the Trienese allied with the small but fairly powerful kingdom of Tualt, 1600 years ago, to stake the claim to space that would grow into what is now Triene. Tualti have historically been the builders and trainers of the Trienese marines and ground forces. Even four centuries later, there are elements of the military that resent being conquered by the Vicitat, and this is doubly true for the Tualti.
The pre-conquest Trienese did have indentured servitude as an option, which other members of the Compact frowned on, but basic rights were secured for the citizens, and their membership was maintained for hundreds of years.
Then came the slow and secret conquest.
The Vicitat fled from the center of the Array, along the Greater Void, as a result of the war with the Ushanti Union. In the war, the Vicitat were dwarfed by the Ushanti’s forces, but the Union’s supply lines were very long, and the Compact were an omnipresent threat. They kept much of the Union’s forces tied to defending against a potential attack. It took many months to get from their shipyards near the top of the Array, to Vicitat space, which was closer to the middle levels. The other great powers, who already had embargoes in place, started squeezing the Union, and supplying unrest within. Almerand especially took an interest, and supplied the Vicitat with a small TL-13 fleet to better defend themselves. Triene’s involvement and the Shadar’s sudden entry into the conflict turned the tide.
This did not prevent the Ushanti Union from committing genocide on them. The Vicitat didn’t have many worlds. 60% of all Vicitat died during the war, before the Alliance broke their military at the Battle of the Keranegi Gap. The remnants of the Ushanti went into survival mode, withdrawing far into the top of the Array, away from the Compact. Almost all of the colonies were abandoned. Some of them have risen up since, some even joining the Compact.
But not the Vicitat.
After the war, the Compact was clear that the Vicitat’s methods (including slavery and drugging their populace) would never fly for a member. The Shadar Empire especially wanted territory the Ushanti had abandoned, and it made the Vicitat very nervous, due to the Empire’s antipathy toward psionics. They asked for and got asylum in an area further down, near Trienese space. Sactornat, once close to the deepest part of their kingdom, was now near the heights of their new territory.
Then they began manufacturing and supplying their addictive drug to the Trieni, who didn’t know what hit them. Within a generation, the younger citizens, the ‘leaders of tomorrow’ were in danger of being unassailably under the sway of the Vicitat. The leadership of the Vicitat felt that theirs was the superior culture, and they were not content to be a client state. There had, after all, been a reason they were no longer welcome in the Compact.
While they still had a small fleet that had been provided by Almerand in the war, the Vicitat could never hope to defeat Triene in an interstellar war, and certainly not in ground combat, where the Tualti were (and are) dominant. They opted for a different approach.
The drug Hafferin was not made illegal by Triene, who saw the Vicitat as a refugee society they had sponsored, and that they could trust, a displaced kingdom that Triene had an interest in propping up. The drug did not seem to impair the functioning of low-skill workers, and didn’t seem to interfere with the creative process. The law became that some jobs could insist you not have used Hafferin within a month, a requirement that was adopted also for military service.
A large faction of young talented service men and women came up through the ranks, in enough numbers to make a difference. There was no coordination, no plan, not even a dream of cooperating to take over Trieni military vessels. Yet some Vicitat operatives were introducing a new, more proprietary formula of the drug, only to the Trieni military, not the public, that tests would not discover. Four years later, a wave of unreported symptoms related to Hafferin withdrawal led, almost simultaneously, to thousands of starship crew opting for the new Hafferin+. This gave the Vicitat even more leverage, over a portion of the military, a large portion of the common folk, and the ear of some of Triene’s nobility.
Eventually, there was a brief hot war, with the Tualti marines occupying the Trienese home world, Tana itself, in an effort to hold off the Vicitat, who had captured much of the star fleet to add to their own. Triene sent for help from other Compact signatories, but any aid was months away. To save her people, the Queen surrendered, and the Vicitat, to appease the loyalists, helped draft a new Constitution that purported to address many of their concerns in a negotiated surrender.
This appeased the Compact as well for a time. Then, within a generation it became clear that indentured servitude was becoming an unavoidable life path for many in Triene, and it only got worse. In 6820 a.r., the Compact kicked Triene out. Still, Triene negotiated with influential corporations to keep possession of the Pocket, near to the Core, their prize holding outside of their main borders.
Sathafer
While psionics are relatively commonplace in Triene (many have emigrated there from across the Array), some get special training and equipment. Many of these wind up as psion crew on Trienese star ships. The most powerful are instead enlisted as the Trienese equivalent of special forces, the Sathafer, so feared that many in the Array use them as boogeymen to frighten children into behaving. Sathafer are also sometimes colloquially referred to as taskmasters, and for some of them, this is an accurate term. If a slave escapes their owner and make it off-planet, often a Sathafer is sent in pursuit.
Fereen
Though all Trienese citizens are expected to honor the rights of ownership, not all provinces of Triene practice slavery. Many such exceptions are allowed to exist, for various reasons. The most prominent of these is Fereen Sector, the most psion-rich part of the kingdom.