Jina

Jina is the Kua system’s second planet counting from the star. The route between the portals and both the planet Kua and Coriolis pass by Jina, but few ships ever stop here. The planet’s industry is not big enough to attract traders or transports. There are no spaceships permanently stationed in the settlement of Aram’s Ravine either. The Colonial Agency keeps a few ground vehicles, but nothing that can leave the planet. To contact the outside world, the inhabitants have to rely on free traders or other ships which come to the planet to visit the Cala Duriha, a luxury space station on Jina’s moon.   Jina has few qualities that make it worth a visit and many qualities that make you want to avoid it – acidified wastelands, frozen poles, and pounding heat over eroded highlands and dried up oceans. There is water below the planet’s surface and a few lakes and rivers just north and south of the equator. The poisonous air means that primarily only fungi, bacteria, and a few species of lichen can live here. There is some limited insect life underground and in deep crevices, of which the sturdiest example is a butterfly that in its larval form is well adapted to the climate, but dies shortly after transforming. Apart from the colony Aram’s Ravine, intelligent life on the planet is limited to a few tribes of odd acid-resistant barbarians. They could possibly be humanites, but this has not been thoroughly researched. Evidence against the humanite theory includes the fact that no traces of early Firstcome ruins that could have belonged to their masters have been found on Jina, which is common in other places with a humanite population.  

ARAM’S RAVINE

Aram’s Ravine is the only colony on Jina, located near the Lamka plateau north of the equator, where a natural body of water is present. The colony is the hub for everyone working the claims along the plateau’s fault line or the salt pits in the Desera delta. Aram’s Ravine started out as just one of the hundreds of prospecting endeavors that the Colonial Agency started in the Kua system. Like the majority of those projects, Aram’s Ravine turned out to be a disappointment – the bauxite findings were bigger on other planets and Jina’s toxic air made even small-scale mining expensive. The colonists that remained in Aram’s did so against their better judgment, clinging to a desperate hope that the place would somehow deliver what they had been promised.  

The ravine is steadily growing, and the rapid erosion has turned the colony into a pillar city full of columns formed of layers of tougher rock upon which the remaining buildings sit. Many houses have been lost over the years, having slid off the pillars and into the darkness below. Some people live down in the actual ravine itself, the bulk of them miners, but rumors say that some among these slummers seem remarkably unharmed by the acidic atmosphere, something attributed to supposed dealings with the wild barbarians that live on the other side of the plateau. The ravine dwellers are growing in numbers, mainly because the ore and salt mining operations work their people until they break, after which the unlucky survivors have nowhere else to go but down below. “Sooner or later, you’ll end up in the ravine” as the saying goes, which is doubly true as the ravine also functions as the colony’s only burial site.

 

ACID STORMS

The acid storms that appear so colorful and majestic from the halls of the Cala Duriha are a lethal threat down on the planet’s surface. They are caused by unique weather phenomena that concentrate the acids in the air to dangerous levels. In extreme cases, the acidity can be so strong that it immediately causes chemical burns to unprotected skin. An unfiltered breath during one such storm could be fatal, as the sensitivity of the membranes in the lungs is much higher than that of the skin. How the storms are created is poorly understood. Hand-cranked sirens in Aram’s Ravine warn the inhabitants of the coming danger and the streets are quickly empty, even though everybody knows that very few storms are dangerous enough to wound or kill someone in protective gear. People outside of Aram’s are warned by crackling messages over the Agency’s communicators. When the warning comes, one should quickly take cover underground, inside vehicles or in survival tents.