Geography

Viront Z85 is an “eyeball planet”, being tidally locked to the subdwarf star Nisaba. The local system is in the proximity of the Urashanum nebula, a hotspot for astral tourism since before the region’s development. The planet’s core is extremely dense and its rotation is extremely slow, allowing it to maintain a gravitational field and a thin atmosphere that is thicker and stormier at the equator. It has no natural satellites.

The side of the planet facing away from Nisaba is a glacial wasteland, in perpetual darkness. Conversely, the side facing towards Nisaba is constantly bathed in sunshine and is accordingly a scorched desert. Only the twilight zone bisecting the planet supports life – a shimmering band of potential that captivated the earliest settlers, in spite of the otherwise inhospitable terrain.

Viront has many landmarks – too many to name, with every skyscraper a glittering jewel in the planet’s crowded crown. It is easier to describe the planet’s starkly different biomes, along with their chief appeal(s) to investor and enterprise alike:

• The cold side of Viront is known to officials and GREY as Sector BLUE, and to citizens as the Bore – both because it is for the most part a featureless expanse of black ice, and because of the pits bored into it for industrial purposes. Though there is travel for pleasure into the depths of the Bore, which boasts spectacular aurorae half the time and unrestricted views of the stars for the other half, most of the work here is done by data centres and chemical plants leveraging the chill of the environment. The “brain” of GREY is itself encased at the pole, in a vast and self-altering complex producing so much heat that it floats in a continent-sized pool of slush.
• The hot side of Viront is Sector RED on documents, though it is more often called the Sera. Nothing survives here without shelter from the sun – but refuge may easily be sought under the kilometers of solar arrays, as thick as a jungle’s canopy in places, which capture as much of the endless starshine as they can bear to fulfill the power demands of the Vironti populace – and to feed GREY’s endless operations.
• Between the planet’s extremes is the terminator zone, originally dominated by a forest called the Mane (or Sector PURPLE). The lifeforms that evolved here are silicon-based and crystalline: from the sessile floral forms of the jet Obsina trees, iridescent Glasikal flowers and carnivorous Crozier houseplants, to parasitoid fauna like the wily Ossifox, endangered apex predator Ursirite, and Vespid lap-bugs. The least territorial of these species have been further bred and altered into fashionable and docile pets – though they are all toxic to non-native life, and there are accordingly strict prohibitions on exporting them off-world.
• The cityscape circling the planet is the Mezo, formerly Sector GOLD – even GREY can’t make the designation stick here. Bathed in a perpetual haze of tyrian twilight and bordered by the scintillations of the Mane, it is the longest and arguably the most vibrant of any city in the Alliance – a neon playground, a paradise of excess, home to billions of citizens and twice as many intrigues.