The Gori are a people without a world. They are a fleet — some sixty vessels of every conceivable make, crewed by a genuinely alien species of sharp, suspicious, profit-obsessed traders who carry their entire civilization with them through the dark. Where the Republic's other allies are places — a rising planet, a fractured world, a warrior-realm of three systems — the Gori are a moving market, sovereign on every deck, beholden to no soil. They will trade with anyone, friend or foe, and they trust no one, least of all each other.

Government: Plutocracy

Current Master of the Ledger: Grixx Talm

Main Fleet position: System XA5-006

Population: +- 2 000 000

Tech lvl: from Tier I. - 95% to Tier II. - 30% (depending on the ship)

Gori National Flag

Government

The Gori order themselves as a plutocracy: among them, wealth simply is authority. The captains of the richest ships and trading houses form the fleet's ruling council — the Factors — and the single wealthiest among them holds primacy as the Master of the Ledger, keeper and interpreter of the creed, on the reasoning that the richest Gori is by definition the one who has understood the Ledger best. Because the seat follows fortune, primacy can change hands as fortunes rise and fall — an unstable, intensely Gori arrangement. (This structure is proposed and may be adjusted.)

Diplomacy

The Gori are signatory in Vadeelan Nebula Treaty, which provides them Denebolian protection in defensive wars. Denebolian Republic values Gori and their connectins, therefore STARS has deployed four Horizon-class warships to permanently protect the main Gori Fleet.

Location

The main fleet shelters within the asteroid belt of the binary pulsar in the solar system XA5-066, where approaching ships routinely mistake it for drifting debris — a deliberate camouflage entirely in keeping with the Gori habit of hiding wealth in plain sight. Since the fleet was charted by a DASF reconnaissance vessel in 2022, STARS Beta Chapter has kept four Horizon-class warships on station to patrol and protect it — a measure of how much the Republic values the Gori, even as their decks remain closed to Denebolian law.

Culture

The Gori are peaceable by disposition and ferocious only at the negotiating table, where they are without equal. Their whole worldview is mercantile: every interaction is a transaction, every favour an entry of debt or credit. This philosophy is codified in the Ledger, their shared creed of commerce and conduct — at once etiquette, ethic, and their nearest thing to law — whose individual tenets are called Reckonings. Each Gori also keeps a private ledger, a lifelong account of what is owed and what is owed to them.

Appearance

Unlike most of charted space — the Bitherigs, the Eskana, the people of the Belt, all branches of a single seeded humanoid stock — the Gori are truly alien, sharing no common ancestry with the rest. They are short and wiry, standing barely chest-high to a Denebolian, with orange skin in shades of rust, amber, and ochre. Their eyes are large and gloom-adapted, often amber or black and faintly reflective — well suited to the murk of a ship's hold or an asteroid field. Their ears are large, mobile, and acute; a Gori, it is said, hears a lie before it has finished leaving the mouth, and the size and ornament of one's ears mark one's standing. Their mouths are small, their speech clipped and rapid, in a culture that prizes saying little and giving away less. They wear their wealth upon their persons — rings, ear-cuffs, worked-metal ornaments — for a fleet has no vault but the body.

Economy

Beyond their roving trade, the Gori run Gori Bank, a trade-finance house that operates within Denebol itself, dealing in Gori Trade Units and offering merchant loans, trade accounts, and fleet-partnership accounts to Denebolian commerce. The Gori Bank is considered as neutral wealth storing institution galaxy-wide. Many nations have accounts in the Gori Bank and actively interacts with them.

Black Market

Most of the galaxy's black markets operate aboard Gori ships, and the Denebolian Republic holds no jurisdiction whatever on any Gori deck — a sovereignty the Gori guard absolutely. Denebol not only tolerates this but quietly values it: through the Gori, the Republic can acquire or intercept illicit goods with no diplomatic fingerprints of its own. Furthermore by refusing any participation in the Gori Market the Republic and Accord Member states would effectively shut themselves from galactic netural market.