- Tens of Thousands of Inhabitants
The Astones system has a dim yellow sun at its heart, and this star is orbited by an inhabited planet, a barren toxic world, and a gas giant with rings made from asteroids and ice chunks.
The inhabited system is dry for only a few months of the year and consists of endless fields of pointed stones in place of trees and lush wilderness. This world was once intended to become a mining hub, prospected and was accordingly settled during the Second Wave of Exploration. The jump gate meant to serve legions of slow boat freighters carrying off the ore of the world was never constructed and the trade ships never arrived, leaving the planet to slowly decline from its initially impressive industrial base.
Today, the natives wear shoes made from the tough hide of a rodent animal they call a Buskrin. Only a single settlement remains on the planet's surface in the wake of The Scream. It is estimated tens of millions of people died on this already dying world.
United Nations of Worlds member Zach Dimitriou is a displaced native of this world and mission logs have him describe the planet as follows:
“It was craggy and dim. Low clouds, wetness everywhere, and sharp stones in all directions. My people made these shoes out of hard buskrin leather. Buskrin was kind of a big rat, meaner than a sputtering drive core bouncing out of hyperlight. And their skin was adapted to the rocks, so we learned to use it.”
“I had to make my shoes each morning from a long strip of leather, when I was a child I mean. A day of scrounging among the rocks would tear up the bottom, and if you didn’t rotate the strip, or fold it, or flip it, you’d soon see blood in your trail. The stone was often so sharp and cold you sometimes wouldn’t notice you’d been cut for a few hundred feet.”
He paused as they reached the crest of a hill and were afforded a view southward over the great inland sea. “And the rocks,” he continued a little after, “came in all sizes but not many shapes. Little glass pebbles were sharp. Boulders: sharp. Jagged mountain ranges on the horizon and deadly patches of razor granite just under the surface of the fast-moving river. Everywhere you looked, rocks hogging the horizon, hogging the skyline, and making you stare down to watch your step if you dare move an inch
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