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Ustria

Ustria is a small land that had essentially nothing going for it for half of its history until an earthquake exposed a slow-flowing caldera. Used to make the most of scarce resources even more than other Slipstream inhabitants, Ustrians quickly learned to use the molten flow to make glass, and for a few centuries most high-quality glass in the Slipstream would be made here. Eventually, the glassworks evolved into a complicated and ever-changing complex of workshops in which all the heat and rare elements that the caldera brings forth are used to maximum efficiency. Ustria became able to specialize, importing its food from other lands for finished products.

When the caldera slowly cooled down and required more and more effort to be mined, Ustrians leveraged the technological base they had constructed into becoming the Slipstream's prime supplier of refined metal, prefabs and anything that requires specialized infrastructure to make. The primary resource of the land at that point being not so much raw resources but entrepreneurial capability, Ustrian efficiency turned on itself somewhat, and spawned an extremely liquid internal economy; if money flowers in Elvita, Ustria is the undergrowth, at times ugly but necessary.

Land Ustria has a surprisingly large Plat population, suggesting that it was colonized by refugees. It sits roughly opposite Elvita geographically, and features one of the three stock exchange in the Stream, the other two being in Elvita and Tarant.

Ustrian infrastructure still largely runs on geothermal power, which explains why heatsinkers have the only union on the land that hasn't been thoroughly busted. Heatsinks go deep enough that horizontal tunnels have been dug to crystal-mining camps in the deeps near Ustria -- this makes extraction and harvesting slightly safer than it would be elsewhere.

Ustria has a peculiar law, shared with Elvita, that a business can be considered its own person legally; this is called "corporate personhood" and is generally considered a very odd quirk of local law in other lands. Corporate charters require the making of a Hat of Representation, the wearer of which is supposed to be channeling the business in court and similar situations. Mergers require hats to be sewn onto each other, which leads to some of the more estabilished businesses being represented by veritable towering pillars of hats. It has been estabilished that damaging the hat does not harm the business, although completely destroying it forces a liquidation.

There is a saying that goes "In Ustria, you can buy everything -- and usually you have to"; most everything is reasonably priced, but nothing is free. Breaching a contract is considered a worse offense than armed robbery.

 (Stereotype: Dorf Fortress / Rapture)
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Page last modified on June 23, 2013, at 09:31 PM