History

2095

The Surface Crisis

A thirty-year period of cascading climate failure that displaced coastal populations and accelerated the move to pressurised seabed habitation.

2120

The first descents

The decades during which pressurised seabed habitation moved from emergency expedient to engineered practice on the continental shelves.

2138

The founding of Varangurd

The first three pressurised modules of what is now Varangurd Anchorage were commissioned in late 2138, ahead of schedule, after a surface storm displaced the previous shelter.

2151

The founding of the Bathymetric Conservancy

A research body chartered in 2151 to coordinate the human shelf survey; in time it became, by inertia, the operational polity of the human-side migration.

2155

First contact with the Tyrian Court

A scheduled meeting at saturation depth in late 2155 between Conservancy envoys and what would later be named the Tyrian Court — formal, brief, and mostly silent.

2156

The Treaty of Marker I

The 2156 protocol that made liminal-zone meetings repeatable; not a peace, not an alliance, but the procedure by which the survey continues.

2161

The Subsidence Wars

A six-year period of localised conflict between human enclaves on the shelf, during which several habitats were lost and the Pelagine were not party to anything.

2174

Second contact — the Pearled Council

In 2174 the survey learned that the Tyrian Court was not the only Pelagine polity. The contact itself was less surprising than the existence of a second polity at all.

2175

Vael's contract begins

A standard cartographer-naturalist contract, opened in late 2175, on the conditions under which most of the survey's contractors are engaged.

2188

The present survey

The archive's vantage point — early 2188, the survey ongoing, the work neither concluded nor near concluding.