Position: high orbit of Jupiter, Callisto L5
Population: 89 million, human majority
Governing Body: Jovia
Nexus Jovia is a sprawling space station megacity in orbit of Jupiter and the capital city of Jovia, a human space polity spread throughout most of the outer Sol system. The city is composed of several dozen separate rotating cylinder and sphere habitats, referred to as districts. Idrisah, Gillie, and Talita all grew up here; Talita in the the Garriton District, and Idrisah and Gillie in the Barlowe District. Guiomar lives in the Capital Ball, a spherical district in which most of the govermental and administrative functions take place.
Many of the cyclidrical habitats, like the Garriton District, have spokes crossing the center of the cylinder as part of the transportation system. These have cars that use inertia to take passengers from one side of the cylinder to the other. The districts are connected to one another through a microgravity "subway" system that can be accessed at the poles of its many spinning habitats.
Since the sun is too far away to provide a meaningful amount of energy, the Jovian system gets most of its power from tethers that extend out into Jupiter’s beefy electromagnetic field. Jovia's primary industries are hydrogen and helium mining from Jupiter's atmosphere, minor metal mining on The Jovian moons, and serving as a base of operations for many asteroid mining companies. Jovia is the first human poilty to make contact with aliens, and it continues to be a major trade hub between the Sol system and the rest of the galaxy through the Jupiter L1 wormhole.
Original station: A small manned outpost established to supervise autonomous hydrogen mining from Jupiter's atmosphere.
Expansion 1: The original station was becoming a pit stop for material going between the outer and inner solar system, and received an expansion to accomodate a larger crew.
Expansion 2: Expansion continued, both in business and in the crew itself, as some crew members were now choosing to have children on the station. Nexus Jovia now resembles a small city. More farms and housing are added to support the growing population.
Expansion 3: Population growth continued as people continued to have kids and immigrate to take mining, energy harvesting, and jobs based on the station. Housing in expansion 2 had ran out, so the farms from that expansion were converted to housing, and larger auxiliary farms were added.
Expansion 4: The population kept going up. The Martian government that Nexus Jovia was still governed by was reluctant to budget another expansion, as they still did not recognize Nexus Jovia as a nearly self-sufficient city but as a bloated mining outpost. Following worker threats, they agreed to fund the construction of 2 large cylinder habitats that included recreational quality of life additions.
Expansion 5: WW3 came and went, and Nexus Jovia is independent now, and also the capital of a small polity. Now in full control of their mining profits, the fledgling nation budgets a major expansion: 6 microgravity farms, 5 large cylinder habitat. More emphasis on parks and beautiful living spaces. (The Garriton district is part of this expansion.)
Expansion 6: Jovia experiences another surge of immigration from war torn areas of Earth and Mars, looking for opportunity in a fresh new place. Another, smaller expansion in the form of sphere habitats.
Expansion 7: First contact with bug ferrets happens on Jovia's doorstep, and they are now the hub to the rest of the galaxy. Their economy booms. Earth and Mars clamor for alien technology and their own local wormholes. Jovia needs bare minimum agricultural and food accommodations for visitors from a different biosphere. Two huge hoop-ring farms are added, and 7 massive cylinder structures. (The Barlowe district is part of this expansion.)
Jovia primarily uses the Solar Gregorian Calendar, though the Martian Common Era Calendar is still used in certain districts. The Martian Calendar and 24:39 hour day was the standard for Jovia pre-independence from the MFS during WW3, and the change was made as a gesture of their solidarity with Terran allies and a desire to prioritize business with them over Mars. Jovia is also majority secular, with its largest religious minorities being Christian, Hindu, and Astronomites.
One of most influential national holidays in Jovia is Easter Feast, sometimes referred to with the portmanteau "Feaster." It is descended from the Christian holiday Easter, though it does not always fall on the same Sunday of the solar calendar. And though Jovia's Christian minorities (mostly congregants of the Martian Church of Christ or Presbyterians) celebrate it as a religious holiday, it has experienced secularization through its association with Spring Cleaning Week.
This week starts on the first Monday of April and is one of two compulsory maintenance weeks in the year for Jovian citizens. It focuses on the cleaning up of green spaces, biosystems, and microgravity farms in your place of residence; either the mega space station Nexus Jovia or one of the settlements on Jupiter’s moons. Jovian citizens are required to fulfill a minimum of 6 hours of maintenance during the first 6 days of the week unless they have a registered exemption; signups open the preceding week and there is generally a scramble as citizens try to get slots in some of the less exhausting or gross jobs. Easter Feast occurs on the final day, and wraps up the toil of the week with community potlucks and private feasts. Many people with family on the Jovian system will travel to see them for Feaster, and Nexus Jovia is at its most crowded during the Spring holiday season.
Perhaps the most important part of Spring Cleaning Week is the switching out of the microgravity farms. Older crops are harvested on mass and rotated out; older livestock are culled and butchered; and the algae and yeast tanks are drained, sanitized, and recultured. This effectively makes Feaster an anomalous early spring harvest festival, but in a place with no natural seasons. Many of the microgravity crop varieties grow much longer (both in length and in time) than their terrestrial counterparts, being unrestrained by gravity, and are continuously harvested from lateral shoots and just under the apical meristem. Crops such as lettuce and Brassicas have exceptionally sturdy, long "canes" and are used to make Easter brooms.
While Easter brooms are technically a tool, most of them are a symbolic decoration elaborately adorned with ribbons and flowers. They are traditionally given out to citizens as a reward for service, and particularly nasty maintenance tasks often give out proportionally fancier brooms. Households will often hang them on the front door or windows, one for each resident or each task completed. The fancier and more numerous the brooms, the better the bragging rights.
Compulsory maintenance weeks have their root in Nexus Jovia's history as a small mining station. Even as its population ballooned into the millions and it expanded to over a hundred km wide, the ethos of the little station has carried forward: the only thing keeping a space habitat from killing its inhabitants is continual maintenance by its inhabitants. April Maintenance Week's closeness to Easter was originally a coincidence, but after chabbits, (a GMO pet that lays colorful eggs) were introduced and popularized as a space livestock, the two became linked in practice. In modern Jovia, chabbits are a staple livestock prized for their eggs, meat, and manure. Easter Feast is usually not considered complete without whole roasted chabbit at the center of the table.
The second maintenance week is Fall Fixing Week, which begins on the first Monday of October and is concerned with the maintenance of electrical systems and infrastructure of the space station. Local scheduled power outages happen throughout the week as systems are checked and updated and the last day of the week is a celebration called Allnighter. It has a very short day cycle followed by a long night with lightshows, street carnivals, dancing, and costuming. Fewer people travel to Jovia for this event but it is quite popular locally, with different habitat cylinders within Jovia showcasing their infrastructure through flashy light effects and drone air shows.
New Years on the Solar Year is a minor celebration, as is the Martian New Year. But these are mostly usurped by the "Jovian Quarters," which are the Perihelion, Vernal Equinox, Autumnal Equinox, and New Year (Aphelion). Jupiter completes an orbit of Sol every 11.862 Earth years, so these celebrations occur about every 3 years on the Solar Calendar. The perihelion and equinoxes are major celebrations, but usually pale in comparison to the aphelion celebration. Traditional celebrations for the Jovian Quarters involve giving presents to family and coworkers and decorating with helium balloons, helium being one of the major exports of Jovia's gas mining industry. The balloons are sometimes patterned to look like Jupiter and its moons. Jovian years are often given unofficial names by popular news outlets and one’s Jovian year of birth is treated something like a generational cohort, or by some, as a horoscope. Jovian astrology ascribes different personalities to people born in different seasons and different fates to people born in different years.
Jovian Independence Day occurs on August 7th of the Gregorian calendar, the day that Jovia officially broke away from the Martian Free States in 2140. There are some arguments that it should take place on the equivalent day of the Jovian year, but most agree that using the Terran date is a way of honoring the assistance Jovia received from the allied Terran nations during the war. Besides, Jupiter’s year is almost 12 Earth years. Most humans prefer to celebrate holidays more than once a decade.
Independence Day celebrations usually involve putting the Jovian flag and colors all over everything, flying helium balloons, firing air cannons, and eating a lot of deep fried algae and yeast products in remembrance of the station’s subsistence off of these spacer staples during the war. The air cannons are usually fired at noon, then again after 41 and half minutes, representing the time lag it took for the declaration message to travel 5.01 AU to Mars in the pre-wormhole days. The festivities are said to officially begin after the second cannon blast.
The UoJ is the largest college in Jovia, and was the first formal institution of higher learning established on the Nexus. They are particularly well known for their science and engineering programs, and the UoJ is Talita's alma mater.