Synchronized Worlds of /vnug/
Systems, worlds, and habitats
Sestag
Sestag is a dim M-type main sequence star that serves as the sole host star of the eponymous solar system. It is considered the home system of /vnug/, with its colonists first making landfall on Despina, its fourth planet around 3000 AST. Since then, objects within the densely-packed solar system is gradually colonized as the newfound /vnug/ civilization rediscover space flight and began to explore nearby worlds.
With a mass of 0.162 M☉, Sestag is classified as a M5Ve star due to its brightness often dramatically and unpredictably increases significantly, although it is believed that its age of around 10 billion year has rendered it not as active as younger stars. Still, intense solar flare nonetheless has a significant effect on its inner terrestrial planets, necessitating adaptations and technological solutions to mitigate its deadliest effects.
The red dwarf star and its planets have been observed and named by astronomers before its colonization. With a lack of sign of life and the powerful stellar wind from the host star, it was deemed uninhabitable. It was not until the arrival of the /vnug/ colony ship that indigenous life was found on Despina, although it is believed that its biosphere was fragile and had been ravaged by powerful solar flare relatively recently before the arrival. Since then, life from both the planet and the colony ship has been significantly modified in an attempt to strengthen the biosphere in anticipation for future superflares.
As a red dwarf system, multiple planets orbit Sestag in a tight orbit. This, combined with the relatively old age of the system, leads to the six innermost planets being locked in orbital resonance, forming a chain of resonance that can be expressed as 2:4:6:9:12:18 in ratios of period. In addition to stabilizing the orbits, the tight orbits and their resonance also allows for frequent and inexpensive transfer of material between worlds – the synodic period of transfer between the synchronized planets are never longer than 50 d (25 d if Armilla is excluded), and transfer time is never above 11 d. This interconnections between worlds facilitate commerce and division of labor, allowing them to retain close economic, cultural, and political ties.
Major objects of Sestag system
| Companion | Temperature | Volatile | Composition | Mass | Semimajor axis (AU) | Orbital period | Eccentricity | Radius |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vulcanoid belt | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | 0.001~ | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Berenice | Warm | Airless | Ferria | 0.38 M🜨 | 0.021 | 2.78 d | ~0 | 0.62 R🜨 |
| [c] | Warm | M🜨 | 0.033 | 5.47 d | ~0 | R🜨 | ||
| Isaura | Temperate | Desertic | Terra | M🜨 | 0.044 | 8.43 d | ~0 | R🜨 |
| Despina | Temperate | Lacustrine | Terra | 0.70 M🜨 | 0.062 | 12.4 d | ~0 | 0.91 R🜨 |
| Armilla | Temperate | Marine | Aquaria | 0.44 M🜨 | 0.069 | 16.6 d | ~0 | 0.98 R🜨 |
| Euphemia | Cool | N/A | Gas Giant | 2.1 M🜨 | 0.091 | 24.9 d | 0.04 | 1.51 R🜨 |
| [h] | Cool | N/A | Gas Giant | 7.79 M🜨 | d | 4.75 R🜨 |
History
Exodus
According to local legends, the ancestors of /vnug/ once inhabited a gentle homeland as several different kinds of people. As they turned their attention to the stars, there was a growing fear that the people, lacking in commonality and endurance, would not survive the arduous journey to their new home. Because of that, the brightest minds among them created the first Belyms by combining the traits of the separate people so that they would “represent the commonality of the people distinct from others”. Most of them remained as frozen embryo, but a few of them were selectively raised and trained before being frozen, so that they may lead the people once the ship reached sestag, the new homeland. Soon after the colony ship departed, though, a catastrophe struck the world. Known as the Seventh Trumpet across the nebula, this calamity caused significant damage to the colony ship, and it spent the next three millennia adrift across the great void.
It is said that the fate of the ship was to perish in the vast deep space, but just like the ancestors of Belym who were once exiled from their ancestral homeland, their goddesses took pity upon them and granted them a new home once again. As the ship drifted into their destination, the goddesses commanded the star to flare, waking up the surviving crew and “the god within the machine”. Despite the severe damage sustained by the ship and the crew, they were able to use their last moments to sail into the nearby planetary system. Believing it to be their fated new homeland, the red dwarf was named Sestag, and its fourth planet was chosen as for landfall as it was deemed the most habitable world.
Although the planet, later known as Despina, was indeed habitable, it was nonetheless a very hostile world. Tidally locked to its capricious star, one side of the planet was frozen in eternal darkness, while the other side was constantly bombarded by unpredictable sunlight. Difference in temperature resulted in strong gale constantly blowing across the relatively thin strip of habitable twilight zone, and the indigenous ecosystem was on the verge of collapse following a megaflare. Fearing that neither the Belym nor native life would survive another stellar flare, the first Belym gathered all biological data they could and drastically altered both ecosystem in an attempt to strengthen both enough to survive in this new world.
The Long Night
The damage done to the first Belyms during their exodus proved to be fatal, and they all died soon after they finished laying the foundation for the bioengineering and terraforming of the planet. Before their death, they instructed the “god within the machine” to raise and educate the first generation of the second Belyms in accord to their teaching, so that they would know the stories of their ancestors and the ways to survive in this new world. With that, the first generations of Belyms were raised by the machines commanded by the entity. However, the machines were made with building and maintaining the colony in mind, and were never intended to take up the mantles of the first Belyms of rearing the young. This, alongside gradual degradation of the system due to a combination of damage sustained during the voyage, improper maintenance, and strong stellar wind on Despina, eventually led to the “death” of the god within the machine.
Although the automated systems maintaining life support and engineering of native lifeforms would continue to function for millennia to come, a lack of leadership experience among the Belyms soon led to societal and political instability. The first colony was deserted as dissidents and refugees braved the hostile surface for the first time, establishing new settlements with varying degree of technology and life support salvaged from their birthplace. Although many of these colonies would fail, enough of them survived that the Belyms as a whole managed to prosper and spread across the twilight zone of Despina.
However, ideological division, competition for resources, unreliable communication and travel between the discrete settlements due to the constant strong gale and irregular solar flares prevented the rise of a unified government among the Belyms for the next dozens of millennia, as city-states waged wars against each other, empires rose and fell, and many Belyms abandoned failing settlements in favor of surviving in the wilderness with minimal contact with the rest of the population. While technology as a whole never regressed beyond industrial age, the Belym people are believed to have remained planet-bound until around 32000 AST, and most records during this period would be lost to war and time, earning it the name of the Long Night.
Demographics
Belym
Belym (“star people”) is the primary sapient species of /vnug/. As part of the greater human population, Belyms are bipedal humanoids with noticeable sexual dimorphism and several other traits differentiating them from baseline humans. It is believed that while some of the more obvious traits were inherited from their ancestors on Vitubia in the distant past, many of them were also deliberately selected and engineered, both to adapt to their native homeworld and as a means to separate them from the more numerous human population.
Based on archival records and local legends, the first Belyms – also known as Pyelinam – were the results of selective breeding and engineering by their creators, who hoped to distill the distinct characteristics of the ancient /vnug/ population to “unite the new people under a separate commonality”. Based on surviving visual records, it is believed that the non-human features of the first Belyms came from two main sources. The first source, reconstructed as some kind of humanlike possums, provided the Belyms with rodent-like ears, and a long, prehensile tail. The second source, on the other hand, leads to the Belyms having semi-digitigrade legs. Fragmented data also suggest there are additional physiological differences, but identifying them is deemed impossible, as the Belym embryos (“second Belyms”) on board the colony ship were further modified by the surviving crew for better adaptation.
Compared to the first Belyms, the second Belyms were granted more traits that would allow them to adapt to the environment of Despina and, to a lesser degree, rest of the Sestag system. Borrowing from indigenous lifeforms, their blood was redesigned to utilize hemerythrin and hemocyanin which, in addition to survivable affinity to oxygen even in cold and low-oxygen environment, could also facilitate healing of injury and greater resistance against cancer. From archived biological data, the Belyms were also given the ability to sense infrared through a collection of minuscule pit organs across their face resembling light freckles. Their skin was also given the ability to produce photopigment sensitive to ultraviolet, giving them frisson as a warning to impending solar flare before it reaches maximum intensity.
Palk'ai
Free people
The free people (moleym) is an umbrella term for everyone in /vnug/ that does not live in a permanent settlement. Instead, they usually belong to either a nomadic group living on planetary surface like on Despina, or in large vessels like submarine on Armilla or spaceship in deep space. While the limiting nature of their lifestyle means the free people makes up only a small portion of the total population of /vnug/, they nonetheless play a major role in /vnug/ society, culture, and even interstellar diplomacy.
Moleym originated as the “tribal people” of Despina during the Long Night. Before the advent of crystalline vitubium technology, the unpredictable solar flares and stellar wind from the host star rendered long-range communication and transport difficulty. Loss of knowledge and infrastructure to maintain and produce shielded electronics robust enough to withstand the environment of Despina means that all but the largest settlements on the planet were vulnerable to systematic failure and collapse with no venues to seek shelter from others. Constant conflicts between settlements also mean any refugees that could reach more sheltered population centers were often barred from entry due to hostility or strained resources.
Although most people who lost access to life support system and agricultural infrastructure would perish soon afterwards, some of them managed to survive and adapt to the wilderness of the planet by forming hunter-gatherer groups subsisting on the increasingly robust native ecosystem, as well as raids on convoys and settlements for functional technology. Even though the settlements likely waged wars against the free people, the cyclical collapse of settlements, city-states, and even empires led to a constant supply of people adapting the moleym lifestyle. However, it is not uncommon for moleym to become sedentary once again, usually by conquering major settlements able to maintain their technological infrastructure, or by settling safe havens with abundant resources. It is even theorized that moleym plays a major role in the continued existence of civilization on Despina during the Long Night, as their relatively low reliance on technology allows them to preserve vital knowledge during periods of intense solar flares and the subsequent political instability and devastation.
Following the widespread adaptation of crystalline vitubium technology and the resulting planetary unification, the new government approached any tribal nomads they could find and offer to resettle them. It is said that many of them rejected the offer because they had come to appreciate their lifestyle, and believed that like all other technologies during the Long Night, crystalline vitubium technology would fail as well. However, some decided to accept the offers as long as they were allowed to maintain their existing lifestyle. These free people were soon used to staff exploration vessels in deep space and isolated colonies on other planets and moons, as the government considered their cultural emphasis on self-sufficiency offered better chance of survival should they encountered unexpected hindrance.
While many of the moleyms would eventually rejoin their settled compatriots, many of them still retain their practices and cultural mindset. This is most apparent and arguably influential among the deep space explorers of /vnug/ due to the vast distance between them and their homeworld. In some cases, it is said that what their ancestors warned has come to pass, as the crystalline vitubium technology used to maintain communication fails. It severs the group from the rest of /vnug/, and in extreme cases, its connection with their brain results in persistent and unpredictable behavior that ostracize them from the wider interstellar civilization. While tangentially connected to the /vnug/ government, many of these free people become de facto independent spaceborne communities. Some of them participate in interstellar trade, benefiting from their access to various markets both legal and otherwise, while some of them put their martial prowess to use as mercenaries and pirates.
Technology
As the first known technological civilization in Sestag system, most of the technological advancements of /vnug/ can trace their origin back to the spacefaring civilization of Vitubia, which has diverged significantly since the colonists were separated from their original homeworld. Difference in availability of resource and infrastructure, coupled by the adverse environment of Despina, forced the early colonists to modify or abandon many of their more complex development, before gradual development allowing them to slowly rediscover them in the following millennia, many of which showing significant difference during the reinvention process.
Crystalline vitubium
“I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the crystal – just as intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams an alien sensibility invades the periphery of my consciousness. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.” —Excerpt from early tester of Intelligent Neural Interface
The discovery of crystalline vitubium is often considered one of the most vital discoveries by /vnug/, as its unique properties allow the settlers to mitigate some of the worst environmental hazards of the system including long-range, high-bandwidth communication across the planetary system and beyond. It also plays a vital role in the development of Intelligent Neural Interface, a human-machine interface allowing the user to directly connect their mind to various mechanical and electronic devices.
While gemstone infused with vitubium is known to exist since before the Seventh Trumpet, they are considered separate from the particular form of crystalline vitubium discovered on Despina due to their fundamentally different effects and mechanism. It is believed that the unique crystalline vitubium structure is the result of the high purity of vitubium in the interstellar medium of Vitubian Nebula, combined with the different physical conditions in the planetary system. Not commonly found naturally, this crystalline structure allows for the extension of one’s consciousness into what is commonly described as an alternative dimension. Later development of crystalline vitubium technology leads to its ability to interface with machines and electronics, allowing the users to effectively control them with their mind, not unlike an extension of their body, while avoiding the worst drawbacks of direct mind-machine connection such as sensory overload.
While it has since been found in outer space, crystalline vitubium structure was first discovered beneath the surface of Despina. According to archival records, the first discovery of crystalline vitubium stratum is publicized in the wake of an expedition beneath the ice sheet of the antistellar hemisphere of the planet. Although the dig site was soon rendered inaccessible by the flow of surrounding glaciers, enough samples were excavated for study. It is eventually discovered that crystalline vitubium strata is a global occurrence, with multiple bands of high-concentration vitubium-infused material similar to iron, although the exact process of its formation remains uncertain.
Compared with its iron counterpart, crystalline vitubium strata are made of patches of highly regular crystalline structure of vitubium mixed with other metals and non-metallic compounds. It has been theorized that the vitubium strata are formed during particularly volatile phases of the host star, where intense, high-energy stellar wind covered the planetary surface with vitubium from the star, and subsequent geologic processes create the regular patterns due to the high temperature and pressure environment deep beneath the surface. This is supported by the relatively high abundance of vitubium in soil and rock closer to the poles and thus receive a larger amount of stellar wind. However, some have also proposed alternative theories of its origin, including them being remnants of multiple now-lost ancient civilizations that similarly made use of crystalline vitubium for their technology.