Galanova

Meyn-Sephir is the galactic capital and the seat of the senate. The Sephir dominate it — blue-skinned, six-eyed, and the people who worked out how to talk to the Liquimetal God before they worked out how to cross the distance between stars.

On average the Republic trends upward, steadily, for a very long time. Prosperity near the core is ordinary enough to be boring. That is exactly what makes it careless about its edges.

Outlying colonies sit on harder cycles. When one hits a downturn, lawlessness arrives and then gets quietly swept under the rug. Slavery is genuinely rare across the Republic — and it surfaces in those colonies anyway, tolerated through neglect rather than allowed by policy.

A Sephir's skin greys the farther from Meyn-Sephir they live, so you can see a colonist coming. The core calls them greyskins and does not answer their letters.

The Starpillar is the pillar of stars at the centre of the galaxy. It is visible from everywhere, a bright band across the sky, the way the Milky Way is to us.

Travel toward it and space grows thick. A standard colonial hyperdrive cannot cross thick space at all. Getting through means refitting the drive with exotic material — gravium, a metal that is wrong about gravity.

The Starplains are an island inside those barriers: a pocket of the galaxy holding several species who have only just become capable of faster-than-light travel. The Sylvari are there. So are the Korribak, and so is Ceta'Canaashen.

Lodestone Station mines and trades at the edge of the barrier. It is the last refit stop for anything headed inward, which makes it a crossroads for every people in the galaxy whether they like each other or not.