- PLANETFALL -
- In Character -
Wormhole to OOC
MISSION YEAR
2192
- Timeframe -
Turns 1 - 25
2167 - 2192
or simply:
Years 1 - 25 since arrival
Flames rush by windows, the silent prayers and mutterings of colonists filling the phenomenally loud shock of atmospheric deorbit. Boneshaking vibrations rattle the colony pod, a sojourner cast adrift by the mothership, causing the faces of those that bump along in the small shards of metal and polymer to grow pale with both dread and fear. Clouds part before the descending fleet of lifeboats, mountains of vapor and exotic gasses giving way to the falling orbs of heat and light. Below the colonists unfolds an exotic world, a riot of lurid green, glittering sapphire, verdant orange, and sinister mottled crimson and violet.
Brace for landing. Brace for landing.
An automated voice, female but flat and monotone, echoes throughout the pods. Even as they leave the falling wreckage of the Harmony behind, long dead protocols guide the colony pods toward their chosen landing sites across the face of the world they had never been meant to visit. More juddering pops and groans; fins and rudders deploy from the sides of the metal modules, instantly multiplying the streams of fire each vessel emits, but arresting the headlong rush to embrace the soil. Velocity slows, and gradually friction-fires are replaced by simple streams of hypercondensed vapor whipping off of the control surfaces of those hunks of burnished steel and aluminium that hold hundreds of lives within their fragile tin-can hearts.
Parachutes. Deployed automatically, alongside landing buffers, propelled to their full extent by hidden mechanisms. Clouds are replaced by a canopy of alien trees as pods drift downwards on wind and breeze, anxious faces of colonists pressed against hardened glass windows to gain the first glimpses of their new home for... however long they were stranded here.
Some gazed out upon coastal lowlands, orange-hued vegetation sparse but tropical, glittering blue-purple seas stretching as far as the horizons, mats of fluorescent kelp and algae glimmering faintly even in the light of day. Trees with tops like balls of yellow-red fluff are scattered here and there on beaches of golden sand, swaying in different rhythms that do not match the direction of the wind. From the descending pods scatter multitudinous forms of life utterly alien, too far away to be really seen or categorized, but a hundred skittering limbs and upraised eyes taking in the strange event of a foreigner touching the Planet and deciding to move their owners elsewhere. The light of the sun in the spore-clouds given off by these powder-trees obscures vision slightly, sunset and noon the same almost, light diffused into a gentle peach glow which enfolds every facet of the lowlands and leaves few shadows.
Other colonists looked out upon thick jungles, trees as tall as skyscrapers reaching for the heavens, rivers running down from trunks the size of hills and entire ecosystems in their branches. Emerald leaves oppose the descent of some colony pods falling to earth, each as large as a building, but they part with comparable ease, allowing the wayward travelers access to the forest floor. As the pods descend from the canopy it grows wetter, and darker, leaves struggling to gain access to the light denied them by their fellows hundreds of meters above the jungle-forest floor- but trees are not the only inhabitants here. Giant creatures, some seeming to be grazers, others unmistakably predatory, lumber away from the unwanted intrusion. They pass under immense mushroom towers each as high as a house, through crawling black-green grass that shifts at their passage before closing up again as the animals disappear into the underbrush.
Still more of those lucky survivors of the Harmony touch down in fungal vortices, clear grasslands and scrublands of mixed crimson-purple, stands of pale violet trees contrasted with acre after acre of rolling hills the color of freshly shed blood and rust. Where the pods touch the ground the fungus recedes slowly, as if reflexively pulling away from the interlopers. On the horizons, at intervals throughout the plains, sudden mountains of deep magenta and scarlet reach toward the sky, their shapes not those of stone and rock but some living thing, communities perhaps of organisms which have grown so immense as to pass for geological features. Few creatures stir on the endless plains of fungus, but they are alive with activity nonetheless, slow shifts in the tapestry of colors visible even as the colony pods descend from space.
This is Planet. The new home of the survivors, for now.
Introduction curtesy of the G-tech corporation
- February, 2018
Note: Seas, continents and other Geographical formations, or even the planet/star can be named/renamed according to your preferences. The most popular choice will be integrated into
maps and the mechanics.
