Some random explanatory notes before I go to bed

[Ari Rahikkala]

The banner doesn't really symbolise much, as I said before I just whipped it up as a last resort because none of the more complex stuff that I tried worked out.

The wave is a perfect sine wave (plus aliasing). Thus it might remind one of the sea, but it's also, um, technological and stuff like that.
The black and white colours were really chosen simply because I didn't want to try anything more complex anymore.
The period at the end of the text is there simply because I'm proud that Straylight is a duchy again, and wanted to make a statement out of it. Once normalcy is restored, the new banner that I / someone else will make won't have the period anymore.
The skull and crossbones is not there as a symbol of piracy, in fact piracy is very uncommon in Straylight (I'll get to the reasons some other day). It's just a rather abstract way of saying "freedom on the sea".

As for the background, that's Sargassum, one of the older and more heavily populated sancts, and quite possibly the poorest one. It's quite small by modern standards, and considered extremely ugly, but the locals have better things to do than repaint the exterior every year. For instance, how to make enough money to move out and start anew somewhere else. The sanct lives on the old, heavyweight maricultural infrastructure built around it several dozens of years ago, which is still lucrative and provides plenty of work for the city - it's just that it's not lucrative enough and does not provide enough work, so Sargassum has plenty of what's best called... social problems.

As for the picture, that's based on the Kowloon Walled City, of course.