The Provisional Command Rig

The Provisional Command Rig (PCR) is a military installation aboard an natural gas rig that became unmoored from its home reality and was set adrift in the Real.

It is inhabited by the "Veliks"-- refugees from the nation of Velis, situated in a post-terran Crann in eastern Europe. They were invaded by the United States of the New Lands after refusing to submit to their rule and tithes.

History

After the Eclosion

The land that would eventually contain Velis formerly encompassed large parts of southern and eastern Europe, the entire Black Sea, the Middle East (including Israel and Anatolia) and parts of east Africa. Time has passed much more quickly in this Crann than normal, and they have experienced over 10,000 years of history while the two major US rump states have seen barely 200.

This land spent much of its early history in strife, a result of comprising many warring tribes, and civilization was completely destroyed on several occasions. As a result, they have very little knowledge of their past except in dimly recalled and fragmentary legends.

Velis

Eventually, stability returned to the Crann, and a nation called Velis was established in the black sea area, in what would be modern day

The Provisional Command Rig proper was situated off the northern shore of the Black Sea, a long abandoned natural gas rig. It was appropriated by the Velisian government to set up a black site to research several strange physical anomalies discovered by a scientist by the name of Nyko Čevsk.

Čevsk had discovered that it was possible to harness intentionality and focus to bring about physical changes in the environment that defied the conventional laws of physics. An extremely careful and scrupulous scientist, he quickly realized the potential dangers of these abilities, and petitioned the Velisian government to purchase the abandoned rig that would eventually become the PCR, in order to put some distance between his experiments and any population or industrial center.

He finally devised a system that allowed him to orchestrate reality bending effects, and began to experiment-- one of these experiments unfortunately, attracted some extradimensional attention.

Invasion by the USNL

The USNL, discovering the Crann in which Velis was situated, launched a full scale invasion. Many neighboring nations submitted without issue, and were outfitted with the infrastructure of control and constrained civil liberties that are hallmarks of USNL cololnization. Only Velis resisted, and the reprisal was swift and brutal.

The war only lasted a few days, all resistance was effortlessly eliminated by hordes of cloned, perfectly disciplined power-armored troopers who could jump over buildings and scale sheer cliffs seemingly efforlessly. Much of the command structure of the original Velisian government, along with a large population of refugees, was accepted aboard the PCR, and using the operator system to generate a break, they plunged the PCR and a large portion of the black sea around them into the Real.

Operation

The PCR uses the Operator system... a crude but ingenious technological workaround for generating Siol-like effects using the combined efforts of hundreds of people, known as "operators." Operators are always ordinary people, often children and minimally trained adults who are randomly assigned math problems to solve and submit. The results of their calculations aren't necessary, and they need not even be correct-- the important component to the operation of the system is the directed attention and effort of the people invovled.