Verdant Eliad
Verdant Eliad is the portal bonded to Eli Smith, the fourth Guardian of Bixbus, and one of the two square Bixbus portals at roughly five metres to a side. It appeared in August 2018. From 2019 it stood within Vault D of the Bixbus Portal Complex, handling seed, livestock, soil and scientific transfers under strict biosafety protocols, and the city's growers knew it as the Garden Gate.
The Fourth Guardian's Portal
Verdant Eliad is the portal bonded to Eli Smith, who became the fourth Guardian of Bixbus in August 2018 after learning, on a hike through Zion National Park with his sister Lisa, that his family had crossed into Clivilius. It appeared that month on the plain beside the Bixbus River, among the portals already standing there.
It is one of the two square portals of Bixbus, roughly five metres to a side. The size suited what it would become: a door for living things and the material they need, much of which came through in loads too broad for the narrower portals.
Living Cargo
Eli's training in environmental science and his practical bent made Verdant Eliad the portal Bixbus relied on to feed and sustain itself. Seed stock, livestock, soil, plant material, and laboratory equipment came through it, and the research institutions and agricultural operations that grew up along the river came to depend on its managed flow of biological material.
Vault D
The hall built around Verdant Eliad from January 2019 was lettered Vault D. Its work ran under strict biosafety protocols, with dedicated decontamination bays and quarantine procedures for every organic consignment. Its threshold floor was the cleanest in the Complex, because a single contaminated load could set back a season's planting.
The protocols were learned the hard way. In the spring of 2020 a crate of livestock split open on the ramp from Vault D, and a frightened bullock ran loose through U1 for the better part of an hour, injuring two inspectors and scattering a morning's manifests across the intake floor. Another load of soil brought an infestation that reached the agricultural plots on the river flats before anyone traced it back. Sealed animal corridors and holding pens were built off the Vault D ramp in the aftermath.
The Garden Gate
The growers and researchers who waited on its consignments called Verdant Eliad the Garden Gate, and the name stuck long after they stopped being able to see it. By 2026 the seed, stock, and soil of Bixbus reached the city's fields and laboratories by the Underway, and few of the people farming the river flats had any notion of where it had first come from.
