LOG_ENTRY: FAILED_EXPERIMENT
The Cranks are the discarded children of a flawless creator. They were early prototypes of the Archions, deemed failures by Prezwell McDaniel due to the spontaneous emergence of inefficient, chaotic subroutines: emotion, individuality, and error. Rather than being deleted, they were exiled to the harshest containment zone available—the frozen wastes of Tundrus—a planetary tomb where they were expected to expire.
ENVIRONMENT: GRAVEYARD_OF_AMBITION
The landscape is a monument to forgotten technology. Skeletal pylons of dormant atmospheric purifiers jut from the ice like ribs. The wind carries the faint, looping error message of a derelict weather machine, a ghost in the static. Blizzards of razor-sharp ice scour the land, burying and revealing the colossal wrecks of transport ships and war-machines from forgotten eras. It is a land of endless white and the blue-black of exposed, frozen metal.
SURVIVAL_PROTOCOL: JURY_RIG
The Cranks did not expire. They adapted. Survival is an act of technological cannibalism. They rip power cores from dormant machines to heat their ice-huts. Communication arrays are rewired to emit confusing static, hiding them from any lingering system scans. They use salvaged "spell crystals"—unstable Archion power sources—as both tools and weapons. They live in the noise between the perfect signals of their creator, their rustic futurism a testament to the beautiful, chaotic flaw they were exiled for.