Asterleth

[Cheka Man]

Asterleth is a very warm place.The star that it orbits is quite near the end of it's life and has began to swell.One day it will become a red giant and envelop the whole planet in flame. But for now there is merely the beginning of a runaway greenhouse effect...

Where once the seas were deep and cold, now they are hot, so hot that steam has started to drift up from them, like the steam from a pleasently hot bath. Most of the old life in them died out and drifted to the bottom, but over two thousand years, from the few creatures that could take the heat, new animals large and small have made these warm and mostly shallow seas their home. There are shoals of tropical fish in all kinds of colours, who feed upon the abundant plankton blooms and swim amongst new corals that replaced those bleached when the water warmed up. There are squids and octopuses as well, and there are one or two top predator creatures that can prey on anything else.

Because of the great warmth hurricanes are common, but the vast majority of the fish,squid and apex predators swim down to the bottom of the seas where the giant waves cannot harm them.

Near the poles the water is far colder and some of the old marine life that has died out elsewhere still lives within what were once icebound waters. When the seas heated they flooded much of the land, but some survived. The tallest mountian ranges, which once had sub-zero tempretures through all the year, are now perfect places for crops such as wheat and barley to grow, and are heavily terraced by those who call themselves the People of the Sky.All the mountian land that is not lived on is farmed by these people who are split up into many different tribes, one per mountian. Below them a steamy haze shuts off their view of the land below.

TBC.

[Maggot]

A terror of the watery depths,it devours anything in it's path. It is a shapless thing that resmbles nothing more than a vast pink blob that somehows posses the ability to propell itself in water. When spotting a  potential prey,it rushes to engulf the unfortunate creature and consumes it by wrapping itself around the prey and sapping it of it's life juices until nothing remains but a wizzened corpse. Trying to escape it is futile,as it sticks to anything it touches like gum.

 There are no males and females with reproduction being asexual and involving the process of splitting where one Rhuna merely splits into two. Extremely hard to find,they can only be seen at depths of 5000 meters below sea level or more. Most of them grow up to 40 meters or more.

[Maggot]

This a large fish that that and posseses two heads. Yes,two heads. Due to a quirk of evolution,the Deata has a head within a head. Within it's huge maw lies a smaller replica of it's roughly triangluar head,simmiliar in every detail from the shredding teeth to the black errie eyes.

 A fearsome predator,the Deata can grow as long as 50 meters and is covered in bony armour that makes it invulnerble to the jaws and teeth of  other predators that may be foolish enough to take on a beast of it's size. It attacks anything it's size or larger with ferocity,including the much feared Rhuna. Some Deactha corpses that have washed ashore bear large suction marks indicating a fierce struggle with a Rhuna.

 The male Deata is fiercely terrotorial and claims large parts of the ocean floor as his domain. Any other Deactha that strays into it is fair game. Juvenile Deactha especially are often devoured by any adult males they cross. For this reason,during the first few months after they hatche,the female Deactha is careful to keep a close eye on her brood,sometimes even hiding them in her mouth if she sees a male Deactha.

[Maggot]

This is an animal that is semi-amphibious,able to survive on both land and water. A maruder of both land and sea,one equipped to slay very well in both enviroments.

  The Thura is perhaps one of the most fascinatng animals of Asterleth of both land and water. Once in every 5 years,male and female Thura leave their streams and river homes and swim to the great ocean where they descend to the ocean depths to mate and spawn. This goes on for many months with males leaping on every female they see to fertilize her egg sac. each Thura is determined to  spread on as much of it's genes to the next generation as possible. For a good reason. When this mating orgy is finally over,ever single one of these beasts drops dead and dies,the piled mountains of their bodies an abundant feast for sea bottom scavengers like sharks and Deactha.

 But their progeny soon hatches. Of all the newly laid clutches that lie among the reefs and rocks of the ocean bottom,only a few remain uneaten but those few are enough. Each clutch contains hundreds of tiny eggs.
 
 The newly emerged hatcling looks nothing like an adult Thura. They are elongated eel like looking things with no limbs or fins,having only a long trailing tale that flows out behind them.

 Not all of these hatchlings will mature into adults. A divison quickly emerges among them. The first group is content to feed on tiny fish and shrimp. The second soon begins dining exclusively on other infant Thura. Only the second group develops the lungs and limbs that adults posses. With Thura,cannibalisim is about more than snatching an unsupecting meal. It ensures that the neccesary changes occur.

  Within a few weeks,those Thura selected for terrestrial life begin to grow bulkier and more muscular. Soon poweful limbs tipped with claws emerge,their tails shrinkand grow stumpy,lungs develop and a huge dorsal fin sprouts from their back. You now have a creature that resembles a 5 foot long salamader with a shark's dorsal fin. They then begin to make the great crossing to the streams and rivers their parents came from. Only half of of them will reach it,the others taken down by Deactha,Rhuna,sharks and other predators of the ocean.

 Those that do survive this dangerous journey soon find out that in their new home they are at the top of the food chain,with the rest of fresh water aquatic life helpless in their crushing jaws(and the occasional mammal that decides to have a drink,failing to spot the dark mass lurking beneath the deceptively calm lake surface.)

 They are so voracious,that if it wasn't for the fact that they frequently eat each other,the lakes and rivers where they make their homes would soon be devoid of life. So ravenous are they,that it is not uncommon to see a Thura choking to death after ambushing and attempting to swallow a larger one of it's kind.
 
 They live for very long which is no suprise when one considers that it takes them 25 years to reach their full size of 35 or 40 meters.

[Cheka Man]

OOC-Thank you so much,Maggot.I really like the new monsters that you thought up for me.

IC-For the People of the Sky, every inch of their mountian homes is of great value.Their homes are made of bamboo wood,carefully cut into the right shape,and each family struggles to grow enough corn and, on the slightly lower slopes, rice, to survive. Hunger is common amongst them, and unwanted children, along with any rubbish that cannot be recycled, is taken along a bamboo bridge that extends out above the steamy void below them, and dropped.

To amuse themselves they tell stories and have riddle-games, wrestle, fight with blunt bamboo swords, and fly kites made from the bamboo and a kind of paper-plant that they grow.

Different tribes have different customs for the old and the dead. Some tribes venerate the old, some make the old leave the mountian, never to return, to die in the mists down below. Some tribes cremate the dead upon a bamboo pyre and use the ashes upon the fields, others drop them into the void or bury them and grow crops upon their graves.

There is very little stealing, because very few people possess more then others, but there are quarrels and fights, and occasionly there might be a rape or a murder. When there is a trial, the whole tribe acts as a jury and the tribal headman as the judge.For something small the penalty is a whipping and a public shaming, but for a severe offence people are either strangled or banished and forced to trek down into the void, where they are not expected to live long.

Men and women do most of the same work,although it is normally a man who heads the tribe.

[Cheka Man]

Asterleth would be quite a peaceful place if it were not for a new threat that menaces all of the mountian tribes, the Children of Illium, as they call themselves.

Illium is a planet that is around seventy thousand miles closer to it's star then Asterleth, and as such it has become a dry dusty desert with baking tempretures by day, freezing tempretures at night and not much of an atmosphere. Almost all the aliens who lived on it died, but several thousand managed to escape and landed their spacecraft,which now have no fuel to move any further, upon Asterleth.

Before the disaster a few of the richer countries on both Illium and Asterleth had developed space travel and had contacted each other and even traveled to each other's planets a couple of times,and they were talking about developing a trade network for things that niether planet possessed. Of course there was caution but it was certenly deep in the planning stage.

Then the star grew hotter and Illium burned. Nearly all of it's inhabitants died in agony on the surface, or fled to the deep caves only to starve to death when their food ran out. There were only a few spacecraft,and only time to make a few more. These had no "warp drives".None could travel through deep space and there were no hibernation chambers or any of that kind of technology.The spacecraft were little more then oversized rockets, with only enough fuel to reach Asterleth and land safely.

On board were the richest most powerful people of Illium, with their families and servants and bodyguards.

By the time they arrived Asterleth was in trouble as well. The oceans were warming up.Massive hurricanes and tornados were destroying the cities and the crops. Many had starved to death allready and the plains had allready become what they are today. The only good land was on the mountian tops and the polar regions, the rest had either been flooded by the warm oceans as they expanded or was disease-filled.

Much of the water seethed with bacteria. There was a deadly disease that could get through the slightest cut in the skin, where it caused the skin to peel off whilst turning the internal organs into mush.There was a deadly purple fungus that could choke the lungs,as well as infecting the skin,making sufferers scratch their skin off and then fall victim to the bacteria.And there were other diseases spread by mosquitos.

Whilst the Children of Illium are no more evil then humans (which can be pretty evil sometimes) they are determined to survive and if that means slaughtering the People of the Sky and taking their land, so be it. They can cope with the warm tempretures and humidity of the plains, can breath the air, and can drink the water, but food is more of a problem.They cannot grow crops because of the heat,have limited stocks of food left in their spacecraft, and not all the fish they catch are edible.

The Children of Illium had spacesuits with them, made of metal with leather on top, but the leather tore in the humid conditions and the moving parts rusted and had to be replaced by cloth.There were only a very few places where crops would grow, and many of the native fruits had either died out or caused stomach upsets or worse. Their weapons are now spears and sabres. They sleep in their spacecraft.

They soon found out that the only good land was in the polar regions or on the mountian tops, but the People of the Sky were not prepared to give up their land. The war that developed was savage on both sides.At first it was fought with guns, then,when the ammunition ran out, with hand-to-hand weapons, often laced with deadly fungus to make them more dangerous.Neither side took prisoners.

The "Children of Illium" ,are very much like humans, except that their skin is bluish,which protected them from ultraviolet radiation on their own planet, and they have tentacles instead of arms,with suckers upon them.

Any wounds that they have which draw blood have a high chance of getting infected because of where they now live and leading to their deaths, although bruises do not cause this problem. They also face danger from various types of disease which stalk the humid plains,and which also attack any of the Sky People who spend more then a few days or weeks upon the plains.

When they arrived they wiped out a few tribes quickly and took their mountians, but the others fought back with spiky bamboo defences, with rocks which they dropped or rolled down the mountian, and with the few guns that they possess...but now like the Children of Illium, the Sky People have almost no  ammunition.Also, the Children of Illium tire quickly on the mountian slopes and cannot fight for long periods of time up there.

[Cheka Man]

I edited the Children of Illium entry.   What do you think I should write about next?

[Maggot]

Interesting.. I would sure like to know more about the civilization that used to dominate Asterlath. Maybe you should start on that next. There are a lot things you could do with it.