Zeus
The winds scream along the surface of Zeus as another storm builds only minutes after the previous had expended itself. I can already hear it's torrential downpour loosed upon the digsite, but I didn't care. Lightning struck somewhere above the pit I was in. I could hear shouts of pain and warning. Scraping away mud with my bare hands. I knew it had to be there. I knew it. One of the men shouted down into the massive pit, but his words were smashed when a tumultuous rumble of thunder crashed down upon us. Such was it's force, people fell about as if an earthwquake had taken their legs from them. I to slipped in the mud, falling onto my back. My head hit something in the mud as I landed with a harsh crack and hollow thud. I awoke moments later, the fragments of my skull having fit back together and my greymatter rejoined. I spread my arms out wide s I looked up at the sky, water flowing into the pit as the rain came down harder than any storm I'd ever seen. I didn't care. My fingers found metal. Manufactured metal, notcheds and ridged with machined cuts and rivets. Jackpot.
Zeus is a rocky and incredibly flat world, with the landscape only being broken up by the massive plateaus that rise from the ground and the incredible network of canyons that turn the flays into a thousand isolated plates of land. The Yashate are commonly found on its surface, their clans laying claim to whole plates, where they ride their grav-bikes and other vehicles uninterrupted. Conflict only truly breaks out when the things underneath the plates are revealed. Gold Age technology. A lot of it. Sometimes it's a ship, long since buried by the mud and storms and varying in size from personal to carrier. It's not unheard of for these ship to be completely, or mostly, functional as well. Preserved in the mud. Other times, it's a whole facility that is unearthed.
Geography
Zeus rains more than Earth does on average, and not by an insignificant margin.
why then is the world considered arid, bordering on desert?
The plates.
The landscape of the planet, as mentioned previously, is carved up into massive plates and separated from each other by incredibly deep canyons, carved by the aforementioned rain. When the storms roll through, regular as they are, much of the land is hard-packed or already saturated enough that the water simply flows into the canyons and down to their depths. When the water is properly sustained, the flow creates rather spectacular waterfalls.
The next logical question would be in regards to where all that water goes. The answer is that it all flows, inexorably, towards theImperial Baths. It may flow directly, like a canal, or disappear beneath the surface for a time, but it always arrives at the Baths. The name is a purposeful reduction of what the baths are. Massive reservoirs, hold enough water to quench the thirst of whole planets many times over.
They dot the landscape, big enough to replace entire Plates and constantly churning the liquid they contain within. The level may fluctuate, but they are never empty.
Yashate vehicles are highly prized across the solar system, but even more so on Zeus for their reliability and hardiness against the elements.
Type
Planet
Included Locations
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