The Zhikhan Manufacturing Collective is a Thazvaari-rooted engineering house that became one of the Empire’s core builders of rail and siege infrastructure. Its output powers logistics, fortification, and long-range movement across continents—essential to the war economy, but distant from everyday civilian life. In the modern era it is locked in a quiet, persistent rivalry with Haavu Works and Weapons Systems over the remaining share of planetary energy outside the Joxi–Sentinel bloc.
Origins
Formed during the Era of Imperial Conquest (~3,500–3,000 years before modern Geba), Zhikhan was assembled from Thazvaari guilds that had resisted Geban expansion. These guilds specialized in coastal fortifications and rapid-deployment rail. After prolonged campaigns, Emperor Vaer’Karesh offered amnesty to surviving engineers in exchange for designs and service. Integrated as a semi-autonomous producer, Zhikhan shifted from regional defense to imperial-scale manufacturing.
Role and Competition
Zhikhan’s portfolio includes heavy rail, bridgeworks, armored trains, siege engines, and supply depots—systems that move armies and lock terrain. Civilian contracts exist but are secondary. Today, Zhikhan and Haavu contest the ~30% of energy not controlled by Joxi and Sentinel, targeting untapped geothermal fields and recursion-linked reserves, a rivalry marked by industrial secrecy, procurement battles, and occasional sabotage through intermediaries.
Vesselborn is the story of Geba — a world that has carried an empire for six thousand years.
It begins with Vaer’karesh, who unites five nations into the first empire and fixes a common language and law. Across the ages, the empire fights and finally breaks Thazvaar, welcomes Jeyrha through engineering and diplomacy, and liberates Berinu by choice. In Ngorrhal, the people of the mountain passes lose their ancestral name and are permanently renamed the Frost Sentinels, whose strength helps secure imperial rule. The Haavu cannon systems cement that dominance.
At its height, the empire spans continents and raises relay towers that bind cities, coasts, and passes into one network. Assassinations and civil wars follow — the Fracture — but the answer is not a vacuum. The Shadow Rule forms from imperial networks and manufactures peace, ending the warlord broadcasts and taking the world back from collapse. They are the empire made quiet: continuity without ceremony.
Today, the Shadow Rulers still govern from the background while the Energy Wars — covert struggles over power grids and relays in uncivilized regions — decide who controls energy, transport, and culture.
Stories range from relay-field defenses and inland recoveries to city governance and frontier resettlement; from rail lines and air programs that stitch regions together to festivals and work crews where culture and politics collide; from Frost Sentinel memory to families choosing the safety of hub clearings or the risk beyond the grid.
This is Geba. It began in silence. It has not yet ended.