Gardena
From a distance, the HA city of Gardena resembles a group of low, white hills clustered together on the dry savannah of the Tobian Plain.
These “hills” are, in fact, the hundreds of interconnecting windowless domes that make up the surface of the city. Thousands of kilometers of underground tunnels serve as both roadways and living spaces for many Gardenans. A large underground river runs through the middle of the city, providing it with plentiful water and moisture. This moisture is used by the residents to maintain their enormous underground hydroponics facilities. These facilities are made from older, abandoned tunnels or new, specially made tunnels. Many have engineered soil which has been optimized for growing certain crops. This has allowed Gardena to grow rich by retaining a virtual monopoly over many unusual food items, such as corn, coffee beans, cocoa and other plants which failed to adapt to Terra Nova when imported from Earth. Here, in the protected environments specially created for them, these species thrive and grow to unusually large sizes.
Since they almost never leave their domes and tunnels, the people of Gardena tend to have unusually pale complexions. Most Gardenans have a poor tolerance to bright lighting such as sunlight and suffer sunburns quite easily. Gardenans also tend to be xenophobic, to the point that most speak Intralingua rather than Universal French as their native tongue. Intralingua, with the multiple grammatical and syntactical similarities it shares with Universal French, is still the subject of a hot debate between linguists. Some claim that it is no more than a sub-language derived from Universal French, while others hypothesize that it is a separate language which branched out of Colonial French. Gardenans themselves do not really care.
Gardena is also the base of operations for a rebel movement called the Hehli. Sometimes calling themselves the Gardenan Underground, the Hehli believe that the Humanist Alliance has been completely corrupted by “contamination” from the Southern Republic. The only chance for survival is to cut Gardena off completely from the world above. This extreme xenophobia makes the Hehli very careful, although somewhat fixated on their way of life. The underground controls much of the deepest portions of the Gardenan complex and has established a safe community elsewhere in the MacAllen cave network. The Hehli do face the double threat of dealing with both Humanist and Republican enemies, however.