Tatehan sat quietly for a moment absorbing the details of Reon Outpost's history. Letting it settle in his thoughts. He found himself kinda impressed.

He imagined how the city would be:

Towering structures of welded scrap metal, gleaming dully under the Martian sun, their surfaces pitted and worn but still standing. Or maybe they won't be worn, they would surely have been repaired.

Reon Outpost was going to be interesting if only he could visit it.

But he still had one more city to read about. One more piece of the puzzle before he could say he understood, at least on some level, the people he would be sitting across from at the summit.

Tatehan gestured at the holographic interface, pulling up the final entry on the list. The display flickered, the soft blue light rearranging itself into new text and images.

Iron Haven.

Founder(s): No Single Founder (Collective Settlement)

Established: ~ Long ago

Population (Current): ~38,000

Primary Industry: Iron Extraction, Metallurgy, Manufacturing.

Tatehan raised an eyebrow at the notation. No single founder. That was unusual. Every other city he had read about had someone at the center of its story, some individual who had driven the effort to create something lasting. But Iron Haven was different from the start.

He kept reading, and the story that unfolded was one of pure chance and collective survival.

Iron Haven had no grand vision behind it. It was, the archive noted with almost, a settlement born entirely out of desperation and dumb luck.

In the mid- (——), as Mars was still in the throes of its brutal early colonization period, there were countless people who had been displaced and abandoned.

These people wandered. Groups of them, sometimes alone, sometimes in ragged clusters of a dozen or more, drifting across the red expanse in search of anything that might sustain them. Water. Shelter. A settlement willing to take them in.

Most of them died.

But one group stumbled onto something extraordinary.

The archive displayed a geological survey map, overlaid with heat signatures and mineral density readings. A section of the eastern highlands was highlighted, and Tatehan leaned closer, squinting at the data. The region was rich—absurdly, impossibly rich—in iron deposits. Lines of nearly pure magnetite and hematite ran through the ground like rivers, some of them exposed on the surface where erosion had stripped away the regolith.

It was a metallurgist's dream, a place where you could literally pick up chunks of ore from the ground and have usable raw material.

The wanderers had no idea what they had found at first. They were just relieved to discover a stretch of land that was relatively flat, sheltered from the worst of the wind by a ridge of ancient volcanic rock, and dotted with shallow caves that offered some protection from the cold nights. They set up camp, intending to rest for a few days before moving on.

But then they noticed the rocks. And saw iron.

They guessed there were more.

And they were right. There was more of it. A lot more.

The wanderers had no advanced equipment, or industrial extractors or smelting facilities. What they did have were their abilities, their hands, and a desperate need to survive. Those among them with metallokinesis began the slow, painstaking process of extracting usable iron from the ore. Others with abilities related to heat manipulation worked to create makeshift forges, shaping the metal into tools, supports, anything they could use to improve their situation.

The first shelters were pitiful things, little more than frameworks of bent iron rods covered with scavenged fabric and patches of treated leather. They leaked when the thin Martian rains came. They rattled and were very weak in the wind. But they were shelter, and that was more than most of the wanderers had known in months.

So it was manageable at least.

Word spread, as it always did in those desperate times. Other groups of displaced people heard rumors of a place in the highlands where iron flowed from the ground and where anyone willing to work could find a place. They came in small numbers at first, then in larger waves. The settlement grew, not through planning or organized expansion, but through accumulation.

More shelters were raised and more forges were built. The iron lines were tapped deeper and deeper, the ore hauled up by hand and shaped into the bones of a city that had no name yet, no identity beyond survival.

It was one of the later arrivals, a woman named Catylen, who suggested they call the place Iron Haven. The name was not grandiose or poetic. It was simply accurate actually. This was a place where iron was abundant, and that abundance had become their haven, their refuge from a world that had tried to grind them down.

So…Iron Haven!

The name stuck.

Tatehan scrolled through the timeline of the city's development, watching as the years ticked by and the settlement slowly transformed. The leather-and-fabric shelters gave way to crude buildings of welded iron plates. The buildings became more sophisticated, incorporating scavenged materials and eventually, as the city's reputation grew, purchased supplies from traders willing to make the trip. By the time Iron Haven was a decade old, it had grown into a functional city, its economy built entirely on the extraction and processing of the iron that had saved its founders.

Unlike the other cities, Iron Haven had no dynastic lineage, no revered founder whose descendants carried on their legacy. Leadership rotated through a council system, with representatives elected from the various work guilds that had formed over the years. It was messy, often contentious, but it worked…it functioned. The people of Iron Haven had built their city collectively, and they governed it the same way.

The current council head, a man named Jorin Selles, was quoted in the archive:

"Iron Haven doesn't belong to any one person. It belongs to everyone who ever hauled ore out of the ground here, everyone who shaped metal with their bare hands when we had nothing else. We're not the prettiest city on Mars. We're not the strongest or the richest. But we're here, and we're not going anywhere."

'We're here and we're not going anywhere.., rhymes' Tatehan thought.

Tatehan exhaled slowly, closing the final entry.

What a day! Kinda boring if you looked at it but at least his mind wasn't bored.

He leaned back in his chair, letting his gaze drift across the empty library. Four cities. Four completely different stories. And in a matter of days, he would be sitting in a room with leaders from all of them, trying to talk about stopping the obscuron.

The thought was simultaneously exciting and exhausting.

Tatehan stood, stretching his arms above his head and feeling the stiffness in his shoulders ease. He had been sitting in this chair for hours, absorbed in holographic records and fragments of Martian history. The dim light of the library had not changed, but his internal clock told him it was late afternoon now, maybe evening, the day slipping away while he buried himself in research.

He glanced down at the small table beside him, cluttered with the remnants of his provisions.

He had brought something to eat while he researched before coming.

Two empty beverage bottles sat beside a half-crushed water container and a scattering of snack wrappers. He had survived the day on caffeine, hydration, and whatever processed nutrition bars the Red Crest Clan stocked in their dispensers.

As he walked out of the library, he couldn't help but wonder how he got to know how to use it by the way.

Seems he was smarter than he knew.

Just then, words flashed across his retina:

[Congratulations on studying the history of the cities you are about to engage in a meeting with!]

[You have gained lotts of knowledge points!]

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