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synodiporia_ooc2016-01-05 10:23 pm
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2016-01-05 10:23 pm
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ESCAPE FROM JUNKWORLD: JAUNT INFO.
Welcome to the Junkworld of Gehenna: a radioactive cinder twice the size of Earth, used as a rubbish heap and ship graveyard for centuries by cultures across the cosmos, guarded by automated gunstations (left by cultures from across the cosmos), and with its only native inhabitants being Leaping Fireworms who feed on metals and thrive in heavy-gravity environments. Occasionally used as a penal colony as well, but really a death sentence - the only way people are sent to Gehenna is being placed in gutted ships in decaying, unguided re-entry orbits. Still, over the centuries, some have survived this process, and settlements have grown on the surface, giving the world a total population in the high hundreds or low thousands.
And now, the Tachyon Storm is coming. Nobody knows exactly what that means, but it’s bad.
You see, tachyons are particles that travel faster than light and back in time, and the slower they are, the more energy they have. And what few sensors on Gehenna work have started detecting increasing bursts of tachyon radiation, denser and denser, slower and slower moving. The best guess is that some incredible high-energy phenomenon is coming in the near future. No normal lightspeed shockwave can be seen before it hits - so by the time anyone knows what it is, it’ll be too late. And judging by the rate the tachyons are slowing down, it’s only a few weeks away.
The refugees, prisoners, scavengers, smugglers, and accidental colonists of Gehenna have a plan - or some of them do. Smuggler ships small enough to slip to the surface past the automated gun satellites are too small to travel faster than light, and they don’t have time to call for a ride. But the planet is all but covered in wrecks, hulks, derelicts, and crashes, and two large, durable vessels of dubious design are nearly intact. It’s just barely possible to put them together, strap on the smuggler vessels as armed outriders, and blast off for escape.
But as the source of the Tachyon Storm gets closer, things are getting weird. The laws of physics are bending or breaking entirely. The ships, barely understandable or able to be kept together as it is, are behaving in strange ways, and that strangeness is carrying over to the synthetics and cyborgs who interface with ship systems to operate them. And everyone on Junkworld Gehenna had an agenda or an axe to grind, anyway - trustworthy, safe, sane people don’t wind up banished to radioactive cinders, after all.
Ancient, unknown ships falling apart around them. The combined dark secrets, dubious pasts, and skeletons in the closet of a hundred different interstellar scofflaws. Even with an oncoming shockwave approaching at least as fast as light, the open question is still: what’s going to get around to killing them first?
WORLD INFO
With a thick, murky nitroxy atmosphere similar to Earth’s, but one and a half times as much gravity and unstable plate tectonics, its land masses and shallow seas are entirely carpeted from (melted) pole to (melted) pole. The only pristine areas are recent impact craters.
As many species use fission or fusion for power sources, a wealth of radioactive material and waste is buried amidst the rest - not enough or close enough to the surface to cause widespread or severe radiation poisoning, but enough that lifespans are shorter (except among Hecatites and Diabolin), mutations and birth defects are more common (even among Hecatites and Diabolin), and in some few areas you can get a tan in the middle of the night, if you’re so inclined.
‘Scavengetown,’ the alleged capital of the planet, is nothing more than some safe and habitable wrecks piled around the edges of a crashed cruiser large enough that its side is big enough and flat enough to be used as a landing pad. The population is under a hundred, there’s no government, no law, just people living in proximity to one another for safety and trade. There may be other settlements, but they’re smaller and don’t have landing pads big enough for multiple ships.
Leaping Fireworms are burrowing, superheated, serpentine metal-eaters covered in ceramic scale plating. They range from one to five meters long. And they can, as the name suggests, jump an uncomfortably long distance- about three times their length, or one and a half times vertically. They melt through most metals at about the same speed as an industrial blowtorch, and consume the molten refuse.
Information on ships, technology, and the cultures and homeworlds of various aliens can be found in the corresponding sections. For those interested in carrying over characters from Questing Country - it’s been about a century, long enough that any humans, Spartoi, or Vodyanoi would be dead; any teenaged Gorgons would be in the prime of their middle age, and any teenaged Hecatites or Elves would be about space-thirty. Additionally, of course, elves, spartoi, and vodyanoi are not spacefaring races, and so unlikely to be encountered, although some elves were abducted into slavery by the Diabolin.