The Blood Hound
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Intent: The creation of a world that has had very sparse contact with rest of the galaxy. It will be utilized first for a CIS Dominion. Once the Dominion is completed it will be converted to an outpost and an official ‘Smugglers Moon-esque’ location for the growing number of CIS Smugglers.
Image Credit:
- Miranda - Trip to the Dead Planet by Izat Abdraimov
- Cale City - Shanty Town Raid by Kevin Dubell
- Dead Hollow - Extraterrestrial Tree by Anton Sander
- Pandemonium - Carnival of Rust by KristinaToxicpanda
- Edits by [member="Srina Talon"]
Links: N/A
Demonym: Mirandians
Region: Outer Rim [Seswenna Sector]
System Name: DE001
System Features:
- Miranda - The Planet
- The Joker’s Moon - The Name Given to Miranda’s Only Moon [No known Life]
- Asteroid Belt - Filled with rock and stone as well as some iron and nickel metals. Fragments of starships that failed to pass through can also be found.
Major Imports: N/A
Major Exports: If anyone actually came to this remote and hidden world, they would find deposits of Zersium beneath the crust, ripe for mining. The people here have no idea it exists and have no use for it. There are other minute amounts of ore but nothing exceptional. Simply common materials that can be refined by basic means for shelter and tools.
Gravity: StandardClimate: Generally cold and rather inhospitable. There are times during the year when it gets warmer, however, the planet is never truly temperate enough to support long term attempts to cultivate edible agriculture or livestock. Sometimes, they get lucky, and find exotic mushrooms that can be used for sustenance. They are rare and difficult to gather.
Primary Terrain: There are ice, rock, and or small patches of dirt where occasionally some hardier greenery and flora make a rare appearance. It is just enough to support oxygen production. There are many sectors with long dead, almost, fossilised remains of trees. Liquid surface water is very hard to find and typically exists in water veins that flow underground.
Major Locations:
- Cale City - Aside from several small, destitute villages, this is the most densely populated area on the planet. If they were organized enough to have a Capital this would be it. It is a thatched together patchwork of slums that have somehow created an urban sprawl. There are no governmental bodies and no real authority. They have some electricity drawn by home-brew wind terminals to keep water and artificial food production going on archaic systems but otherwise have very little in the way of active, working, technology. They have no space ports, no modern conveniences, and no hope. No one comes to Miranda on purpose.
- Dead Hollow - Once upon a time Miranda must have had a very different climate. Separating nearly all of the areas that are occupied by what passes for humanity are large wastelands. Within these areas are vast fields of petrified trees that are little more than fossilized remains. Anything that was once living within them seems to have transitioned, over exceedingly long amounts of time, to stone-like substances. All organic materials have been replaced by silicates, all the while, maintaining their shape and form. These trees are used by the people for furniture, foundations for their homes, and even plain jewelry or figurines in some cases. It is also where the dead are disposed of. These mysterious sites should be considered nothing less than eerie. Villagers don’t like to venture among the dead trees past twilight and some even believe it to be haunted by those who have either been buried or burned among stone roots and dry, cracked, ground.
- Pandemonium - On Miranda, the sight of an intact starship is incredibly infrequent. Several dozen decades ago a small fleet of starships arrived that belonged to a cheerful and peaceful traveling circus named the Silver Stars. They’d had a run of bad luck. First, they’d been attacked by pirates, left adrift, with barely functioning equipment. They’d set up an SOS beacon but no one responded. When scanners revealed that Miranda had breathable oxygen, a human population, and safe, open plains to land on they made the decision to go to the surface. During the transit, their ships were further damaged by the asteroid fields but they felt comfortable they could make the necessary repairs.
At first, the circus-folk made the best of it. Inevitably, food and water began to run low. They started to ration, but, even with the minimal aid from the villagers, it wasn’t enough. The power from their star-ships did not last. The cannibalized technology from the Silver Stars ships did not provide enough for everyone. Tired, hungry, cold, and hopeless they began to change. No longer were they peaceful. No longer were they the kind visitors from the stars. The desperate people, hundreds of them, renamed themselves Pandemonium and in complete despair began to commit unspeakable acts. First, they began to raid nearby settlements. When easily accessible food ran out many suffered psychic breaks and turned to far more heinous methods of survival. They are now a blight to Miranda. A curse, and more than willing to express the darkest natures that humanity has to offer.
Native Species: Human [Uncertain-Colonists?]Immigrated Species: Human
Population: An estimated 7,000 to 9,000 people. [Numbers are far from exact and dwindling.]
Demographics: The vast majority of the population is made up of humans who are anywhere between late teens and early 50’s. There are a sparse few children and even fewer seniors due to the conditions of the planet. Food and water are scarce. Antibiotics are nonexistent. Only the extremely resilient or the very cruel survive.
Primary Languages: Galactic Basic
Culture: There is a strong sense of frightened apathy. They have little to no technology in which to use data-pads, save for what may have been salvaged from the old days and the Silver Stars. They have no means in which to create parchment. They do use slates made of the petrified trees and chalk from the dust to teach basic arithmetic and language. Once the slates are wiped clean with a dry cloth, they are used again, and again. Most knowledge is retained only through memory. There are storytellers, Orators, that are in charge of reciting history but that is all they have in the way of holding on to their past.
Mirandians go through the motions of living, but don’t truly live, because every day is a hellish struggle. There is a consistent theme of not getting attached to anyone, even family, because people come and go. One day they live, the next, they’re dead. They are strong in their own way, but so very broken down by poverty and starvation, that they often fight among themselves. Some of the people are better than others but many would be considered clinically insane. Nothing goes to waste in this world. Nothing. Everything has a use on Miranda. This has gone on for generations and is deeply ingrained in every man, woman, and child.
The population is small and lacks the genetic diversity required to avoid rather gruesome birth defects. People are also deformed and scarred due to recovering organically from crippling disease and arthritis that leaves bodies curved and bent as they age. As everyone in the more civilized area of Miranda have become suspicious and paranoid by the terrifying people of Pandemonium they reject those from their society that are unsightly, diseased, or otherwise deformed. This has created an influx of the members to the former-circus troupe over time. The smaller the populous gets the more defects are on the rise.
Pandemonius either eats the outcasts or brings them into the fold.
Government: N/A - Governmental bodies are impossible. The closest thing to an authority figure among Cale City would be the Orators. [Storytellers/Historians]Affiliation: None
Wealth: Nothing of note. There may be old outdated credits hidden in the broken down ships that Pandemonium have used to build a ramshackle fortress but Miranda is a desolate wasteland. Aside from some hidden ore that they have no use for the people have nothing of value.
Stability: The people of Miranda are, for lack of a better term, close to the combustion point. Tensions are high everywhere. No one trusts anyone, food and water is limited, escape is impossible, and the future is exceedingly grim. Most will either die of starvation or live to become food. “Stability” is a fairytale word that none of the people on this planet have ever known.
Freedom & Oppression: What is freedom? They are starving, they can’t leave the planet for a better life, they can only trudge onward. Many choose to end their own lives just to escape the agony of falling apart one bodily function at a time.
Military: Some mercenary types, but, nothing official. Just a few of the remaining decent people still willing and able to stand up. Technology: Extremely Limited. Miranda had some basic technology from before the Silver Stars arrived, but, nothing of note. Most of the items they retained had broken down over time, lost power sources, or had otherwise broken beyond repair. The circus-folk brought a few droids to the planet but they are now mostly hole filled rust-buckets that make good end tables. Perhaps a half-dozen of them have survived, solely, on a wing and a prayer and their memory banks are extremely corrupted from a lack of memory wipes. Starships would startle them. Lightsabers would make the people wet themselves.
No one is really sure anymore how the first settlers of Miranda came to exist. Some say it was terraforming gone wrong, while others claim that hundreds of starships come to this planet against their will. To some people in the galaxy, the idea of a mystical force luring them into certain death is basically laughable. Especially, to those that have no connection, or zero knowledge of the Force. On Miranda, the people believe in the ghosts. They believe in beings that fall from the sky with pretenses of kindness, that turn to madness when exposed to their way of life. This is a planet of nothing. It is mostly barren, terrifying, and more than anything mostly empty. There is an entire half of the planet that is mostly untouched simply because the people lack the resources to explore.
There are several storytellers left in Cale City. They speak of their earliest memories and teachings when the nights are at their coldest and many huddle in the same place just to stay warm. The eldest, speaks of a time from long before his birth, when the skies were almost blue and the planet was nearly viable. There was a great cataclysm. It was the beginning of the end, an event so terrible, so heinous, that no one who survived had the ability to repeat the details. The Orator did not know what destroyed the first colonists that had been forgotten in the vast reaches of space.
But, they did know what came afterward. Violence. Disease. Famine. Death.
They adjusted their ways when the lights began to go out as multiple system failures cascaded through the remaining settlements. Government and chain of command failed. Entire villages descended into anarchy. They stopped relying on technology entirely, unless, it provided some way to survive. The only thing they focused on maintaining, or making spare parts for, were the hydroponic farms that had been salvaged, water creation units, and mining equipment to reach water that flowed underground. Starships, fell in pieces through the atmosphere on occasion, usually wrecked from the asteroid field that surrounded the planet, and they would pick the remains clean.
Nothing goes to waste on Miranda.
Daily life consists of foraging for food, whether it involves setting up wells for underground water or foraging for edible fungus. The general diet is usually a form of green, viscous, engineered algae that has just enough nutrients to keep the populace alive. They reuse every bit of fabric they find, working it into clothing, or blankets. Often, families will retire together, in one room, just to survive the night. No one thinks anything of it. There are Black Summers. Times in which the algae production fails.
These are times that Mirandians do not speak of willingly. While those of Pandemonium consider anything fresh meat, food, the descendants of the original settlers have resorted to consuming their dead. Starvation, disease, and hypothermia are the primary natural causes of death. Once people start to die off the villages and city recover by quickly cooking and devouring the remains. This has caused a variety of issues that add to genetic anomalies but through this despicable act, they carry on, despite the loss of humanity. The phrase that is commonly associated with the event is as follows: “All of you for all of us.”
Once peaceful, an entertainment troupe, that used to known as the Silver Stars holds the monsters that exist in nightmares. They have become a cannibalistic, brutal, and thoughtless culture that hide beyond the petrified tree forests. They only breach the dark lit grounds when collecting ‘sacrifice’ in the form of the deformed or maimed, or, if their desires bid them to raid the remaining villages. They have been this way for so long, wrapped in psychosis, that they no longer have the slightest shred of humanity left.
Every year there are fewer and fewer settlers. This is a toxic relationship that will soon lead to the deaths of both groups. When the original colonists are gone, consumed or wiped out, those from Pandemonium will also fail to survive. If something does not happen soon, if some sort of miracle does not come to Miranda, there will soon be nothing left at all. The settlers have never known hope to try and muster it, and they fully understand, that no one is coming to save them.
Life is simply about hanging on as long as they can. Survival, by any means, is all they know.
A huge shout out and eternal thanks to [member="Srina Talon"] who has taken a huuuuuuge part in making Miranda come to life but refused to sub this herself!
<3 Hyperlink added!
