Tek
The capital of Ma-tek is Tek. Tek was once the second city of the old EOTEF (Empire of the Eternal Flame). The name Ma-tek, according to scholars, is derived from a pair of Ancient Dth'gari words, amounting to a meaning of 'First-Second' - although this is a heavily disputed matter.
Nonetheless, if true, this means that the name Tek literally means 'Second', placing its inhabitation or perhaps reinhabitation firmly during what the Iluvauromeni call the Flame Era. The settlement is likely at least a thousand years in age; possibly older.
Tek is what might be termed the educational capital of the modern ICEL (Iluvauromeni Commonality of Everlasting Light).
Tek has a massive population, considering its relatively small physical size as far as land occupancy goes; still, despite being the most densely populated city in the ICEL, only just over thirty million people live in Tek - much smaller than the populations of either Nenya or Turath, the two other largest cities.
The buildings are all two stories tall at their highest, but always wide and impressive in stature; oddly, the architecture is designed to be reminiscent of the forest which, according to the rather sparse older local records, was cleared to make way for the city. All the buildings are either bronze in colour, or green, and sometimes grey-brown. There are no whites, and rarely ever many dark colours on view.
From the air, as with many of the cities in the ICEL, Tek is quite tough to spot, due to the low height and colouring of her buildings, as well as the natural-looking contours of the cityscape.
Tek has an excellent transport network and is the destination of ten million tourists a year; there is also a large transient student population, many of whom are in the city to study at the Tek branch of the Tek/Turath University, as well as the three other furtherment of education centres in the city.
As with the rest of the ICEL, travel to the city usually involves use of the national high-speed maglev train network, although owners of skycars may enter the city during office hours; travel inside the city by those who live in the city is almost always carried out via skycar, but there is also an extensive public transport network. Groundcars are illegal in the Commonality, and so there is a large 'land reclamation' effort underway to reclaim much of the land lost to the now-useless road network.
Tek is considered to be the second most important city in the Commonality, as it was in the preceding EOTED and EOTEF, behind Nenya and ahead of Turath, perhaps symbolizing the long-standing Iluvauromeni thirst for knowledge.
