Torn Quest Lore Drop: The Lunar, Lunar Recruiters and the Criminal Network supporting them
To keep the basics short: the Lunar is the name the moon has in Rever. People are also trying to colonize it and there is also a centuries old long invested effort into terraforming it (Like with magic you have cities in there around which it is somewhat breathable and life sustaining, but outside of these magic bubbles you basically still need to walk around in space suits.)
Why are there colonies on the Lunar in the first place? Not to bring mankind forward, I can tell you, even if there are tons of similar official slogans to be found on the moon. No, it is mainly to extract ressources like helium3, silica, alumina and some more that are essentially very useful (raw or extracted or broken down) for building and powering magical tools and gadgets, etc.
And the people doing the work... most of them ain't there by choice. Like, there is a high likelihood of them being there, because they got "recruited" by a Lunar Recruiter. That effectively means getting abducted by them and them messing around with your mind and memories with light magic, so you will be very unlikely to break free and run away. Whom they pick as a target usually depends on whether or not they can get away with it. Like sapiens outside of the opal empire for example or the poor and powerless and generally people that don't have the means to really fight back. Sometimes they also go for riskier more specific people if offered a high enough sum of money or similar, but even then it has to be a reasonable enough risk at most.
Hell, in many in Rever children get taught that if someone asks if they want to go to the moon with them, that they should run the fuck away and find a trusted adult asap.
Why is that possible in the first place there? Well, the first colonies on the lunar were prison colonies and forced labour camps, established by the back then still ruling sapiens (and let's say Onorius Tiena or people like him had a hand in that), and turns out there is more than enough oxygen on the Lunar, it's just trapped within the minerals and you'd need to carry around enough nitrogen tanks with you to keep up the pressure and in short, inmates that escape can at the very least build for themselves a hideout in an empty well hidden lava tube.
And later on, when actual settlements and cities started to form, it became harder and harder for authorities on Rever to really control what's going on on the Lunar or even attempt to enforce any kind of law on it, without making a financial loss. Add to that, that rich and powerful people tend to want even more riches and more power (else they wouldn't be as rich and powerful as they are), so they will of course have a really really strong interest in having a few places where labor laws cannot exactly be enforced, and on top of that the labor being from people whom most at large wouldn't give a shit about.
Yes that means that there is as a result a hidden criminal network and economy going on between Rever and the Lunar, one that is financially strongly supported by a lot of the rich and powerful. And to detract the majority of other people away from that, the rich and powerful make a huge usage of plausible deniability. Like for example blaming faceless for being the main drivers of the Lunar recruiters, since "they're already used to hiding their true face all the time" or "it's just sapiens on sapiens violence, you know how petty those sapiens especially from the opal empire can be, of course they would make such a ploy happen :)" and so on. Hell, they can even keep a cut off opal limb from a victim of the opal virus around with them and even show it around, they just need to claim that an extremely skilled master artesian made it for them.
You get the point and I think you also get the theme here.
