The Missing

Lore & Background

Eridanos was sold to its colonists as a fresh start: a terraformed world, a fair contract, a life beyond the grinding monotony of Halcyon Station. What the Monarch actually delivered was an open-pit labor camp wrapped in corporate hospitality. The Union formed in the mess halls and the ventilation shafts, and the Church of the Broken God filled the void left by a God whose name was on the ship but whose face no one remembers. In that three-way tension, people simply stop showing up to their shifts. Their bunk beds are empty. Their ration cards go unscanned. The official line is 'reassignment,' but the families who knock on doors get nothing but a shrug.

The truth, as the player uncovers it, is messier than any single faction's propaganda. Some colonists were quietly relocated to off-books labor operations. Others were silenced for asking too many questions. A handful simply walked into the red dust and were never seen again, and no one in power will say whether they died of thirst or of a bullet. The Missing are not just a mystery; they are a symptom of a system that treats human beings as line items that can be written off.

The quest's emotional weight comes from the small details: a child's drawing taped to a locker, a half-finished letter in a dead man's pocket, a Union organizer who keeps a tally of names on a scrap of cardboard. The player is not solving a puzzle for a score. They are deciding whose story gets told and whose gets buried under the next quarterly report.

In Their Own Story

The air in the colonist housing block tastes like recycled iron. You crouch beside bunk 14-C, where the sheets are still creased from a body that stopped breathing three days ago. The name tag on the pillow reads a name no one in the Monarch's registry will confirm. A Union rep is waiting outside, arms crossed, jaw tight. "You find what I think you'll find," she says. It isn't a question. Behind her, a Church deacon is already chanting the Broken God's name over the body, as if recitation can stitch the hole in the world back together. The red dust presses against the window like a slow tide. Someone, somewhere, has already filed the paperwork. You just have to decide whether to sign it or burn it.

Reader's Guide

Quest Giver: A representative of the colony's civilian leadership (or a Halcyon crew member acting on the captain's orders) tasks you with investigating the wave of unexplained disappearances on Eridanos.

Objective: Discover what happened to the missing colonists and decide how to handle the evidence.

Key Decision Points:

- Whose investigation do you follow? You can pursue the Monarch's corporate records, the Union's underground contacts, or the Church's testimony. Each path reveals a different slice of the truth, and following one faction's lead can close off the others.

- What do you do with the evidence? You can turn findings over to the Monarch (locking you into their faction path and potentially triggering a crackdown on the Union), share them with the Union (escalating tensions and possibly sparking a confrontation), broadcast them to the whole colony (a neutral but volatile option that can destabilize all three factions simultaneously), or destroy the evidence and walk away (preserving the status quo but leaving the missing unavenged).

- If you sided with the Monarch earlier in the Eridanos arc, the Union contacts may be hostile or unavailable, limiting your investigation options. Conversely, siding with the Union early can make Monarch records inaccessible.

Outcomes:

- Monarch path: The missing are quietly reclassified; the colony stabilizes under corporate control but the Union is pushed underground. - Union path: A confrontation erupts; the colony fractures, and the Monarch's grip weakens. - Broadcast/Neutral: All three factions are thrown into open conflict; the colony becomes a powder keg for the final act. - Walk away: No immediate change, but the missing remain missing and certain later dialogue options reflect your inaction.

No strict timer, but faction-alignment choices made earlier on Eridanos can lock you out of certain investigation routes, so the quest is effectively time-sensitive in a narrative sense.

Did You Know?

• The missing colonists' empty bunk beds are a recurring visual motif in Eridanos' housing blocks, and the game never explicitly states a total number—leaving the scale of the disappearances deliberately ambiguous.
• The Church of the Broken God's prayers over the missing are one of the few moments in the game where a faction's actions feel genuinely compassionate rather than political, a detail many players cite as the reason they s
• The Union's tally of missing names is kept on a physical scrap of material rather than a digital record, a small worldbuilding choice that reinforces the colony's low-tech, resource-scarce reality.
• Depending on your choices, the fate of the missing is referenced in different ways in the game's ending epilogue, meaning the quest's resolution lingers even after the colony's main conflict is resolved.