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Canopus III (Musashi) >

Spokey-dokey, peoples, this one is gonna be a little weird and need a bunch of backstory.

Colonized in 2052, Canopus III - better known as Musashi - was a mining world with a couple big cities and a tropical climate until 2289, when GENOM hit the WDF with a bunch of nasty shit including a brand new megaship. The GENOM megaship got taken down by the WDF Wayward Son, but the Son went down with it, and when they crashed together into the planet surface it got bad. Like, when it was done, Vesper was the only real city left on the planet, and most of the plant life had burned to nothing.

A hundred years later, it was also the site of the initial rebirth of the WDF, as they pulled together to finish the War of Corporate Occupation. Which was nice.

The surviving people of Musashi pretty much got pissy about everything and refused help in re-terraforming the planet, leaving it a useless desert with the occasional rocky outcropping. The planet's pretty much dying, what with no way to replenish the atmosphere and most of the water gone, making the people of Vesper looking at having to leave the planet inside of two generations.

Oh, yeah: and a giant monster came out of the desert and briefly attacked Vesper, which doesn't sound that weird until you realize that the monster was an actor who used to play giant monsters in movies 100 years before, and the last time anyone saw him he was regular-person-sized. But that's neither here nor there - then the really weird started happening.

First came members of a cult that was created from documents from a couple galactic epochs back. They revived a pre-Jedi Force tradition that apparently involved a desert planet, and started heading out into the desert. Sometimes people see them, involved in some kind of inscrutable errands, but they avoid people who aren't part of their cult. No one even really knows the name of it; just that sometimes more of them show up from offworld, a couple of cult reps who stay in Vesper meet them at the spaceport, and the ones in the desert come in and take them back out there. How they communicate, how they travel, how they actually survive, are not things anyone's been able to figure out.

Then the Musashi Seismology Agency - whose main remit is to make sure that abandoned mines don't collapse and cause problems - started picking up weird seismic activity in places that the planetary scans done on settlement said there shouldn't be any. Like, within the sandy areas, and in places that there were absolutely no damn faults.

After that bit of news, the next weirdness came when a bunch of climatologists looking to see if there was a way to fix the planetary atmosphere caught a reading on an orbital satellite, and when they put a camera on it, they found a storm.

On a desert planet. A damn typhoon. Three hundred miles across. With lightning. They got confused. As you would, right?

They sent out probes and found that there was, somehow, more oxygen coming up, restoring the atmosphere. No idea where it was coming from.

The storms and the seismic activity have been showing up more and more in the past couple of years. And people who have been going out on 'desert walks' who don't listen to the cult reps in Vesper aren't seen again. Those cultists tell people that walking too regularly, or with a constant rhythm, will result in the wrath of the Makers, or the Immortal Things.

Hitchhikers should take the advice of these cultists seriously if they decide to go out into the desert. (But why would you even do that?)

Otherwise, Vesper is a pretty shitty place. The dome's polarizers broke a century ago, and the water cycle is still screwy. The town makes New Seattle look like a desert and London look sunny. If you find yourself on Musashi in Vesper, I'd find a way out soon.

Potato Coffee is one of six clones sent out by a computer-run civilization to see if returning to the galactic community is a good idea, and it's not impressed.

--
Jen Dantes - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lady of Sith Tech Support.
"This may not be a good idea, but it's the only one I have."

But seriously, I am inordinately amused by this entry. Thank you!

I could see, in 7000-some years, how things might go in Dune's direction. Nice.

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Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge