Project Permeance was founded by Txisa Haavu-Solarn after the disappearance of Prince Varethis'Daer Venar. For years Txisa and Daer had worked together across weapons development, Engineered biology, propulsion, and recursion energy research, and her unrequited love for him had shaped the course of her life long before he vanished. When he disappeared, she carried the work further alone, drawing a small team from within the Haavu family to continue it in the field.
Purpose
Txisa died long before the modern era, and the project she built has outlasted her by generations. It runs on her conviction that the work does not end when the people who began it are gone, and that Daer's questions lose none of their weight because neither he nor she remain to ask them. Permeance spans weapons and propulsion advancement, recursion energy research, Engineered biology, bioengineering, and experimental work that fits no single category, carried by successive generations of Haavu who inherit the mission with the bloodline. Its primary goal is reaching the uncharted continent, a landmass unmapped by Imperia Research's surveillance systems and unreached by any expedition in recorded history.
The team operates from two regions chosen for their proximity to the uncharted. In Kela, they work near the land bridge that connects the mapped world to the uncharted continent, using Kela's autonomous colonies and frontier infrastructure as a staging ground. In deep Inland Thazvaar, they operate near canyons that are said to lead to the uncharted through the planet's interior, though no confirmed passage has been documented. Both locations place Permeance in lawless territory, and both require the team to maintain the relay and propulsion infrastructure they need for their own experiments and survival.
Personnel
Permeance belongs to the Haavu family rather than to any institution. The team is thirteen members of the Haavu bloodline, three of the Solarn family, and a few dozen top tier engineers and contractors brought in for specialized capability. The Haavu members pursue work their lineage has been invested in since Xerik Haavu first designed the cannon systems that gave the Empire its technological supremacy. The Solarn members carry their own lineage's connection to the relay network and to the Solarn-Veykar convergence that shaped planetary infrastructure. The contractors come from outside the bloodlines, selected at the highest tiers of the registry and trusted because the stakes of the work allow nothing less.
Operations
No one gives Permeance orders. Their relays operate under the Solarn system, as all Haavu relays do, but the team maintains only what its own work demands: keeping experiments running, sustaining communications, surviving in regions where no other support exists. They deal with whoever controls the ground they operate on, trading with warlords, buying passage from syndicate crews, making arrangements with the autonomous colonies of Kela that shelter outcasts, criminals, and rogue engineers running their own unsanctioned research. The ethical grey zone is the operating environment itself. Off-record trade, improvised contracting, and selective loyalty are the price of doing the work where the Empire's laws do not apply and its infrastructure does not reach.
Dealing with whoever holds the ground does not mean dealing peacefully. Permeance clashes regularly with the Teytan and the Jerhit Syndicate while still having to negotiate with both for assets, materials, or passage available nowhere else. The relationships run hostile and turn cooperative only when necessity forces it, so the syndicate crew that sold Permeance fuel last month may be the one fighting them this month over a canyon route or a relay component. The project's secrecy makes this worse. Permeance personnel in contested corridors are routinely mistaken for syndicate fighters by contractors on manufactory contracts, drawing fire from Energy Wars crews who have no idea who they are shooting and no reason to ask. When a situation escalates past what the field team can survive, the main Haavu family sends unmarked airships to pull them out.
The Empire formally disavows the project and has informally tolerated it since its founding. Permeance does not threaten imperial stability, interfere with the contractor economy, or compete with Imperia Research for anything Imperia values. It pursues what Imperia itself has failed to reach: contact with the uncharted continent by means that do not depend on the surveillance and recursion systems that cannot penetrate it. Whether Permeance will succeed where Imperia could not is unknown. It continues regardless, a team small enough to fit inside a single compound, funded by family wealth, sustained by the conviction of a woman dead for generations whose refusal to let the work die became the project's founding principle. That is why the Empire leaves it standing.
The Restorers
The Restorers were a project planned by Permeance in the Era of Fracture and constructed across the Warlord Eras themselves. Three machines, each built on a human plan and two-legged, each at a different scale, the work carried forward by generations of Haavu after Txisa was gone. Redemption was the largest at fifty-six meters and fifty-one thousand metric tons, heavily armored, fitted with deployable anchors that locked it as a stationary platform when its heavy weapons fired. Repurchaser stood just under half that height with four wings and a Veykar propulsion frame, the lightest of the three and the unit whose low-altitude speed was itself the weapon, designed to drag a pressure front across a region heavy enough to flatten it without ever firing. Rectifier sat between them at forty meters and carried the full Recursion Control Core, the only unit ever fitted with it, and the only one ever completed and tested.
None of the three were ever deployed. The form had been chosen as much for what it would do to a person who saw it as for any practical advantage. A figure on that scale walking the horizon was meant to break a fighting line before any weapon spoke. The argument against using them was the same as the argument for. A weapon that announces itself cannot be unannounced. Once the world had watched a Restorer cross a horizon the option of quiet correction would be gone for the rest of recorded history, and the people inside the decision did not believe that trade was worth the warlords' end. The bomb was used instead. The Restorers were not. They are believed to still exist, and like much of Permeance's work, where is not known.