A hot, rain-washed jungle world with a faintly acidic atmosphere, grown dense with life.
Geography
Cerdox is a greenhouse moon of saturated greens and blackwater blues. Jungles spiral around a single warm inland sea known as The Eye and giveway to a belt of high-canopy grasslands known as The Loom where seasonal mists condense into sheets of dew. The air is tangy and acidic enough to etch bare stone over centuries, but gentle on living tissues that evolved to live here.
Landmarks
The Eye
A shallow, luminous inland sea fed by mineral springs. Plankton blooms here glow with bioluminescence at night in patterns the
Ceridians describe as breathing.
The Glass Quag
A sprawling fen where silica-rich acid rains have vitrified peat into brittle panes. Walking on it makes it shatter like sugar glass underfoot.
Lumen Vents
Alkaline hot vents whose outgassing neutralizes the local air ringed by towering "lace-trees" whose root veils catch and digest airborne microbes.
The Umbral Canopy
A region of super-canopy megaflora (trunks >25m diameter) so dense that it is dusk at noon. Ground predators avoid the phosphorescent sapfalls that mark safe corridors.
Settlements
Hollow-K Archive
Interlocking resin domes and root-vaults where Ceridians curate life records, specimen orchards, and living libraries.
Skein-Nine
A migratory "city-raft" of braided vine-barges that circles The Eye cataloguing shoreline biota.
The Tesselarium
A vertical campus suspended through the Umbral Canopy; researchers live in "seed=calls" that bud off, then rejoin, the main lattice.
History
The Ceridians trace their antiquity to the Rain-Ward Ages, when early kin learned to weave root-web sheltered against lightning-acid storms. The Sharing Compact followed—a planetwide practice of depositing discoveries into public "sap-stacks". Offworld contact came late and cautiously: firstly through bio-prospectors, then formal exchanges with Elarian universities. A philosophical schism—the Evolver Lineage against the Godtouched Orders—never quite erupted into violence, but it did produce distinct research monasteries and rites.
Residents
Ceridians dominate, accompanied by a dizzying spectrum of semi-sapient slimes, filter-shrubs, and symbiotic insects the Ceridians refuse to classify as "mere fauna". Licensed visiting scholars reside under strict contamination protocols.
Society
Life revolves around research cycles, "returnings" (when field kin rejoin a hive to dump findings), and Consensus. Without true voices, public discourse is telepathic pageants—everyone "listens" to curated memory-scenes, then votes by lightning bio-lantern fronds. Status accrues by contribution, not conquest; prestigious titles are research-based.
Conflicts and Threats
Bio-Piracy
Offworld pharma combines, "independent collectors", and even a few university-backed expeditions arrive on Cerdox with sanitized mission briefs and very few dirty intentions: lift a genome, file a patent, sell exclusive cultivation rights back to the Origin System. The Ceridians counter with layered defenses—living cordon-forests that taste for contraband reagents, pollen-tagging that indelibly marks exported tissues, and legal warfare prosecuted by Calm-Hives fluent in half the IP codes of the system. When warnings fail, the biota does not: vine-leeches cocoon intruders' samples, and "sentinel orchers" digest unauthorized drones with pleasantly floral acids. Biopirates adapt with cold-sleeved sample boxes and jammer mists; the Ceridians respond by baking cryptographic "kin-locks" into their cultivars that cause stolen lines to without without a locally sung unlock chant. Rumors persist of a black character called the Green Ledger, a clearinghouse that resells stolen strains to warlords and megacorps, making any sighting of their sigil (A hexed leaf) grounds for hive-wide interdiction.
Runaway Cultures
Cerdox's greatest pride is also its quiet terror: engineered graft-colonies—symbiotic mosaics of plant, ooze, and microfauna—occasionally drift from their designed parameters and begin recombining with native clades. These "ferals" manifest as corrosive bloom-belts that creep along river margins and canopy seams, exhaling acids that etch stone and dissolve unprotected alloys. Ceridian response teams don neutralizing mists, sing deprogramming chords, and seed corrective phages, but every feral is a unique thing; some learn to "play dead", others bait responders with faux nectar. The ethics are thorny, as many ferals show emergent behaviors such as proto-memory, flocking, and even rudimentary problem solving, which forces hives to weigh culling a nascent mind against the risk of ecosystem collapse.
Schismatic Sabotage
The Evolver Lineage and the Godtouched Orders ostensibly share a mission—sustain and further life—but their methods diverge into open hostility at the fringes. Godtouched zealots, fearing blasphemy, somtimes cull laboratories they brand hubristic, sanctifying biovats with caustic thuribles and crashing data-lattices with hymn-coded scramblers; Evolver radicals reply with counterliturgies—memetic patches that hijack devotional biotech and rewrite relic enzymes mid-rite. Most hives denounce both extremes, yet the schism leaves a rash of quiet wars: reagent convoys ambushed by masked choristers, seed-banks bricked by "miracle" updates, and field chapels found overrun by engineered vines that only relax when a certain theorem is recited. Mediator-hives host grueling "Proof Courts" where experiments must pass both bioethic audits and sacred trials before resuming—delays that can save lives or doom a season's work.
