#local guidebook

Most places you can go in the Galaxy are barren wastes of dust, ice, or radiation, but these hells are not good for nothing. Dead planets are often used by young species as refueling points in order to plunge deeper into the unknown. For those planets that are not exploited for their resources, there are other uses.

Organizations large enough to enact massive renovations to a planet have done innumerable things to whole planets. Many have been hollowed and filled with engines and decks and used as ships, others are sculpted into art pieces, and so many have been exploded (both for work and pleasure).

A more unique use was found by the Galactic Stewardship when they sliced the planet Socor in half. Each hemisphere was partially hollowed and transformed into an observatory.

Legends of pacts with otherworldly entities which would ensure immortality to some hungry individual show up on countless planets. The cost always seemed so small until some trick of language or genealogical secret was revealed, but in the case of the eternal slimes of Sheltek, the curse was much subtler.

The unknowable machinations of evolution were the slime's demons, and their curse was eternal youth through periodic pubescence. To maximize progeny, evolution decided that the fittest of Sheltek ought to live forever, and it's solution was an excruciating transformation to revert the slimes to and from their childhood state. In adulthood the slimes accumulate calcium from their diet which is deposited in their outer membrane. Their calcified exterior restricts growth and encourages a smaller diet of nutrient-rich and fibrous plants.

Their increased density is similar to their larval form just before pupation, and with a premade cocoon of calcium, they go through their transformation to adulthood again and again until predation or disease kills them. Their initial pupation is painless, the numbing is built into their genes, but evolution is still working on numbing the successive puberties. Thus, the slimes feel themselves dissolve into their slimy adult forms, a process which occurs over days.

Keletek-Ton hosts two sets of species. This is the case for many tidal-locked planets where the day side hosts radiation-hardened microorganisms or insects and on the night side resides cold-hardened microorganisms or blubbery megafauna. Keletek, however, finds itself in a different situation. Its relatively fast rotation, proximity to its star, and dense cloud cover has bred a species of plant which transforms the planet of the course of only 10 years.

At the beginning of the cycle, Keletek is an arid, hard landscape. Most of the water is locked in the polar ice caps until they melt away and allow the planet’s signature plant species, the sprinting vine, to to resume their part of the cycle. The vine, named for its extreme growing speed, awakens from dormancy as the ice thaws and begins covering the entire planet. As the growing proceeds and the water flows across the surface, the climate gradually shifts into a tropical rainforest.

While the majority of lifeforms on Lorathel-Gont aren’t any larger than an elephant, the majority of the biomass is contained in about 1000 individuals. The wandering continents are a few species of gigafauna which house large populations of macrosopic organisms on their backs as they walk their routes across Lorathel. The most prevalent species, the Lorathel Atlas Tortoise, similar to terrestrial tortoises but spread over an average of 1 million square kilometers, houses millions of plants and animals on its back.

The Atlas Tortoise occasionally uproots vegetation from Lorathel to eat, but the reason it has survived so long is because of its partially open gastric system and slow metabolism. Species that live on the backs of the Atlas Tortoise and other species of wandering continents instinctively deposit their dead in the pits which lead directly to its stomach, feeding their home.

The planet Myren's orbit is inhabited by a clade of spherical creatures which appear to be moons. The class Orbis contains only these creatures which only evolved on Myren. Orbis Gigantia Sapiens Gigans is the largest of the Orbis class and is considered Myren’s sentient species.

The class Orbis began as gliders in Myren’s skies who used their surface area to absorb solar energy. Gradually, their need to gather less-filtered energy and glide longer intersected and manifested by turning them into spherical creatures which absorbed unfiltered radiation from their sun, Sena, from Myren’s orbit.

Levatan was part of the first wave of refuge planets developed by The Galactic Stewardship before the Kuru evolved past the need for physical forms. It contains a number of balanced ecosystems made up of aquatic life from roughly 1.5 million planets across the galaxy which were deemed unfit to maintain the life.

As part of The Galactic Stewardship’s second bout of ecological engineering and mass terraforming, Levatan’s means of keeping the ecosystems from mingling is less robust than on later refuge planets like Kroken-Sol. A system of embankments separates distinct stable ecosystems. These banks double as a home for their own shallow water ecosystems, but invasive species from adjacent habitats do manage to cross over these from time to time.

The fiercely competitive botanical life has developed two peculiar adaptations: black leaves and active aggression. While the mighty trees of the cloud canopy absorb most of the sunlight and the greedy underbrush gobbles most of the nitrogen from the soil, the carnivorous plants that live among them make do.

Many forested ecosystems have developed passive aggression in plants, but so desperate is the need on Diona that active aggression has developed on multiple occasions. The gulping pitcher, the shooting pitcher, the trapdoor pitcher, the snapping flytrap, the Diona beasttrap, etc. all make the twilight of the underbrush more daunting.