#ahbo

Ahbo

“It’s… It’s incredible, Keio…” “It’s home.”

For once I thought it might be fun to do a moodboard monday thing so i did!! It uh… reminded me why i dont make a lot of moodboards (im not… good…) BUT i had fun and that’s what matters! This one is from Paper Stars, for the planet Ahbo!! Keio, one of the main characters comes from this planet, and keio and River visit it in the book!!

Ahbo was inspired by Europa, one of my favorite moons in our solar system (ours is pretty cool too of course). In case you couldn’t tell from the moodboard, it’s an ice planet and extremely cold, with a massive ocean of liquid water underneath the surface kept unfrozen due to underwater vents. The atmosphere is extremely cloudy with an almost constant snow storm in the upper atmosphere that frequently sinks lower to the ground, and that churns up intense wind storms below. The clouds cover so much of the atmosphere that very little sun reaches the planet. That combined with its distance from their sun leads to the frigid conditions. It also means that Ahbo is mostly left alone by the rest of the Galaxy, since it’s so hard to break through the clouds safely, let alone trying to land on slick ice with no landing structures.

Ahbo has got absolutely no land, just the ice, and so there are no living species on the surface beyond the Ahbox, like Keio. But under the ice, there are countless species of fish, kelp, and crustaceans bunched around the warm vents Of course, all of them are much, much larger than on Earth - the advantage of having an ocean multiple kilometers deep. The Ahbox hunt and eat these fish, using their skins to build shelters on the ice. I’ll talk more about the Ahbox in… some other post. The Ahbox live on the ice for a very good reason. To avoid the Water Demons. The Water Demons are massive creatures that are the top predators on Ahbo. They can be over 100 feet long, with a thick, bony, eel-like body. Their tails can snap and kill other fish nearby. If that doesn’t get their prey, they their long, clawed flippers, huge fangs, and the bacteria on said fangs that frequently leads to infections in wounds will do it. The water demons kill many Ahbox - including Keio’s mate.