Worldbuilding

The Yinrih Ansible Protocol (YAP) is used to communicate between ansibles over the Underlay. YAP is a human-coined term, and the pun on the word yap referring to sounds made by various canids is almost certainly deliberate. Yinrih themselves call it simply Ansible Protocol.

YAP addresses are 27 trits long. A YAP frame consists of an inter-frame flag, a topology trit, a destination address, a source address, a 6-trit payload info field, the payload itself whose length can vary, a checksum, and then the flag for the following frame.

The topology trit says whether there are only two ansibles communicating point to point, or whether multiple ansibles are on the same link. Because of the physics behind tailstone and the Underlay, the link is a shared medium, meaning it's half duplex and only one ansible can talk at a time, so the topology trit dictates when an ansible can talk and for how long.

The source and destination addresses are self-explanatory for the most part.

The payload info field says what protocol the payload uses. It also dictates how big the payload is.

The checksum helps insure the message was received correctly.

The inter-frame flag separates one frame from the next.

I had a purdy packet diagram I made using the online Mermaid diagram editor, but they make you sign up for an account in order to export them 😝

Yinrih lack the raging hormones seen in human teenagers, so what's an adolescent monkey fox to do with all that extra time and energy? Why poke his pointy wet nose where it doesn't belong, of course.

Urban exploration is a common hobby among older pups and young adults. Cheap respirators such as one might find at a hardware store are worn to prevent mold inhalation when rummaging through abandoned buildings. The masks have become emblematic of the pastime among the general public, and in the Commonthroat-speaking world, the word for respirator, qlqlg (pronounced /huff, short low weak grunt; huff, short low weak grunt; short low weak growl/), has become a term for urban explorers in general.

While most explorers are in it just to see where they can go before being politely asked to leave, there are other reasons why a young monkey fox might want to skulk (hehe) around areas not frequented by the public. There's a large overlap with the drug scene, as many explorers are looking for a place to trip on mind candy. In fact, many of the species of mold that their iconic masks protect them from produce spores that are hallucinogenic when inhaled, and there's a subset of so-called h Hqlqlg (no-maskers) that specifically seek out areas where this mold grows in order to huff it.

Among the Outlanders of Moonlitter and the Outer Belt, urban explorers are called spaprql (singular spapr, pronounced /yip, overlong dipping strong grunt, chuff/), which is a type of thick but flexible paw covering worn to prevent lacerations and punctures. The term spapr has a narrower meaning when used by explorers themselves, where it refers to someone who is new to the hobby or otherwise overly cautious. Yinrih avoid covering their paws if they can help it, so someone who insists on covering them in spite of the discomfort is seen as either exceptionally well prepared or overly cautious, depending on who you ask.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44425631

Here's a minimal multilingual conlang database idea.

All words in all languages use the same lexeme table and the same pool of IDs. There is a language column to indicate which language a word belongs to. The words and meanings are stored in separate tables and connected via a senses table. If two words from the same language share a meaning they're synonyms. If two words from different languages share a meaning they can be translated back and forth.

The senses table has a rank column indicating how salient a particular meaning of a word is, with lower numbers being more salient. A sense with a rank of 1 is likely the meaning inferred by a listener without further context, and higher numbers refer to rarer senses of a word.

Importantly, lexemes and sememes can have zero or more entries in the senses table, meaning you can enter words or meanings on their own. Maybe you have a particular string of sounds but don't know what they mean yet, or have a particular concept you want to have a word for but don't know what that word is yet.

Ages are approximate, and reckoned after hatching[^1]

[^1]: Yinrih reckon age from conception rather than hatching. "Hatching" is a less accurate term for when kits leave the womb nest. The preferred English term is "yeaning". [^2]: Early childhood amnesia can end as early as 3 or 4 Terran years depending on individual and culture

I archive my stuff on The Lonely Galaxy Wiki https://constructed.world/.

I currently use DokuWiki but previously used MediaWiki. Before hosting my own site I had a TiddlyWiki on Neocities. Do you host your own site? Do you post your stuff in other places like forums? I'm active mostly on the CBB forum.

Dear Sister.

Thank you for your letter. I hope my reply reaches you well. At the time of writing, we are about to embark on our trade expedition to our fair sister city of Emeraldsmoke, there to trade the blood wine as discussed. The agreement in return is for a single canister of what we in the business call kvrna-krurot; that is, "black death", a very dangerous poison, suitable for application on spearheads and arrowheads and the like to guarantee a quick kill whilst hunting.

I hope our sisters in Emeraldsmoke are impressed by our recipe we have spent so long refining. I understand Sister Krmida is especially keen to hear their response. The recipe was originally hers after all.

Our expedition is smaller than usual, but please don't fret. I've done this many times with both smaller and larger caravans, and I've been on my own a few times as well. I will keep everybody safe on the road. Honestly, I thought I'd put the new girls through their paces, rather than let them go with a larger, safer caravan, for their first time.

Me and Sister Prmenta will be the senior Trademasters for this expedition. We will try to get regular messages to you as we make stops, and after we arrive at Emeraldsmoke, but please, if you don't hear from us, just assume it is a problem with the messenger worms. Be patient.

Regarding our good friend Prmenta, she still talks wistfully about the absent sunlight, as if she were actually there when it disappeared. She still desires the return of the Sun. I can sympathize with her desire, but I don't believe I can ever share it. From my point of view, the Sun is gone permanently. The world has ended, and there is now no possibility of a return to the world that was. We are living (or lingering) in the after-days of our world. It is not even the twilight of our world - that twilight has come and gone with the last sunset, which was over a thousand years ago (or so we estimate).

Anyway, I digress. On to happier things. I am pleased to hear that Sister Ankuria has expressed an interest in joining our household. I am happy to reply that she would be very welcome. I believe she would be a valuable addition to our coven, and I am excited to formally initiate her when I have returned.

Hail Father,

Kreda.

I sometimes feel embarrassed by this hobby. I'm a grown man playing make believe, and I don't have the excuse of saying it's for a book or game. But occasionally I gain useful skills through the course of my conworlding.

Over the weekend I ported all my Obsidian notes for the Lonely Galaxy to DokuWiki. Part of that process involved extracting the hashtags from each markdown file and transforming them into a format that the DokuWiki tag plugin could parse. This involved some Python regex nonsense.

Now I'm at work, and lo and behold, I'm encountering a nearly identical problem, porting an Obsidian vault to another format, with tag extraction being one of the steps. So I revisited the script I wrote for the LG wiki to see how I did it. It's one function with a single return statement.

def get_tags(some_string):
	return re.findall(r"#\w+",some_string)

So as shy as I am about this project, it is proving useful.

Some branches of Agentivist Neoshamanism believe that every species of living thing has a pool of mana distributed across the entire population of that species. Consuming members of that species grants you its portion of mana. The fewer specimens, the greater each individual's portion of the overall mana pool, and thus the more mana granted to the consumer.

YIP (Yinrih Internetworking protocol) is used to address nodes on the realspace internetwork. intra-planetary links are made with optical fiber, and inter-planetary and interstellar links are made using FTL Underlay tunnels.

The Allied Worlds, having a much denser population compared to Partisan Territory and the Spacer Confederacy, can afford a network of realspace repeater satellites that have much slower ping times but far higher bandwidth.

YIP addresses consist of 81 trits (27 BB27 digits). This gives YIP an address space of 3^81 or roughly 4.43*10^38. Since it's balanced ternary, half the space is negative and half is positive. This distinction is likely significant but I'm not yet sure how. Perhaps negative addresses cannot cross the borders between autonomous systems, making them similar to IPv6 unique local addresses or RFC 1918 IPv4 addresses.

A YIP address may be written in nine groups of three BB27 digits like this

bcd-fgh-jkl-mnp-qBC-DFG-HJK-LMN-PQb

The address may be further divided into a network prefix, subnet ID, and interface suffix.

Balanced bace-27 (BB27) is used in vulpithecine computing in a similar manner to hexadecimal. Yinrih computers are based on balanced ternary instead of binary, where each digit can represent -1 (written T), 0, or 1. Balanced base-27 uses 27 digits which can represent the decimal range -13 to +13. The Yinrih Internetworking Protocol (YIP) uses BB27 to represent YIP addresses.

The table below is a human-friendly version of what yinrih actually use. Yinrih numerals are written with the highest-order digit to the right, since yinrih write right to left.

For everyday use, yinrih use either base-12 or base-24.

• The Map
• Locations And Nations
• The Pantheon
• Magic and Might
• It's All Political
• The Past, Present, And Future
• Players' Backstories
• The Planes Beyond
• Environments
• Technology

Diarcesia, officially the Monarchy Diarcesian, is a sovereign entity composed of self-governing administrative units called diereses in western Bronte and overseas.

This is the original on-site photo of the recovered coilgun before it was transfered to Hightower's museum.

The Zebro 989 was designed and sold to colonies before the war as a budget armament for colonial security use. The 10x60mm ammunition slugs were sized to allow a versatile choice of loadings. All actual projectiles were encased in a compressed magnetic powder inside of a sealant layer. The powder would be dispersed at the muzzle, but unlike more advanced designs, the mechanism often caused a large spark or flash. The 989 had no recoil countering system. Some colonial forces added aftermarket recoil counters, but this example lacks one.

The optic originally came from a CLR-PV/6 disposable anti-armor launcher. It was common to salvage the optics, which were intended to be disposed of along with the launcher, for use on small arms.

In the polar swamp regions of Nasskugel, the guns' safety sensors for detecting clear bores often malfunctioned due to moisture. Against Zebro recommendations, it was common for forces to disable the clear bore sensors. While the chance of a slug not clearing the barrel was low, the repercussions could be catastrophic for the user if they fired a second round into an obstructed bore.

When the arweli invaded and the guns were used in war rather than against occasional hostile alien wildlife, they quickly earned reputations as being substandard. While the weapons were durable and needed little maintenance, none of their loadings were consistently effective against power armor clad arweli commandos. To shorten the guns to make them more maneuverable in the dense foliage, many had their stocks entirely removed and replaced with some sort of improvised sling attachment, as seen here. The 989s were sometimes called "Black Bess" in reference to ancient muskets of earth. The 989s were noted for their large, smooth bores and the feeling by those carrying them that they were as good as having antiques.

While they would be abandoned as soon as better small arms became available, some human forces on Nasskugel never got the chance to do so, and carried them through the end of the war.

The Lonely Galaxy is not a speculative biology project. I come up with flora and fauna as I need them, nevertheless I feel a bit sloppy about it. Yih's biosphere isn't terribly different from Earth's. Some of this is deliberate. I want yinrih culture to be more relatable while still being different, so their environment has to follow suit. Some of it is laziness. "Eh just stick an extra body segment on a bug and call it a day".

Anyway, here's a very basic insectoid body plan. It has organs analogous to antennae, but they're positioned on either side of the mouth. They're also much stronger, designed not just for sensing but also for grasping. It has two thoracic segments rather than one. Each thorax has a pair of legs and a pair of wings, for a total of four legs and four wings. There is an abdomen that does not differ substantially from that of a typical Terran insect.

As with IRL bugs, there's a lot of variation in this form, including possessing more or fewer thoracic segments, with wings and legs along with them.

Here's a few bugs I've come up with in the lore:

Fireflies: despite the name they're more like bees, living in colonies, feeding on nectar, and producing honey. Their name comes from their bioluminescence, which they use to communicate. They occupy a cultural niche similar to butterflies or ladybugs, being seen as beautiful and pleasant critters. Their association with light once made Firefly a popular given name, but its use has dropped off a cliff thanks to Lichlord Firefly, the leader of Partisan Territory.

Fur lice: ectoparasites that infest yinrih fur. They thrive in crowded environments like the floating cities of Welkinstead and on orbital colonies. There are two species, a basal form that lives on the surface of planets, and a more derived form that has adapted to microgravity, losing its wings. They may be eusocial, forming colonies on their host.

Armorbacks: marine animals in a related clade. They look very crab-like. Legends circulate among the salty-pelted sailors on the surface of Sweetwater of a gargantuan armorback capable of devouring the crew of a mini sub, and the sub along with them. It is said to be completely invulnerable except for a weak point on its ventral side. To kill it you have to flip it over on its back.

Nasskugel was one of the last planets discovered by humanity along a starway route.

The planet in some ways resembles earth in its very ancient path, with a thick atmosphere and humid surface. At the poles are massive swamps as the planet's conditions are long past even a technical ice age. Inwards from the swamps there are large oceans and bodies of water going into and breaking up the land; what land pokes through is covered in jungles approaching the equator. The equatorial region is too hot for humans to survive.

Despite the miserable conditions, much of the planet is still habitable for humans, and in '41 SD the first human colony set down. Over the next two decades more outposts on the planet were set up and people turned the planet into a home for themselves. Unique biological specimens were researched, and useful ones were grown, gathered, or hunted by the colonists as a large part of their economy.

However in '63 SD, Nasskugel was invaded by the arweli as part of their wide scale rapid surprise attacks on human controlled worlds. Nasskugel was seen as a stepping stone into the interior of human territory by the arweli, but when they jumped further in from Nasskugel the next human planet in had massed space assets to repel them. The damaged arweli fleet that returned to orbit over Nasskugel could not attempt to attack again, nor could they abandon Nasskugel defense to ensure human ships did not go through it to enter arweli territory.

The arweli ground forces landed to secure the planet and wipe out the humans to prevent them from being a long term threat. Orbital bombardment was held back on as humans were scattered in such low density that it was deemed to be inefficient, and the hot, wet world was seen as a paradise by the amphibian-like arweli who wanted to preserve it.

The human colonists originally put up defenses with the home guard and security forces fighting conventionally to defend the larger, slower floating colony hubs. As arweli ground forces intensified their campaign of extermination, the humans adapted with the military forces shedding helmets and armor and donning multi-spectrum camoflague anti-thermal suits which were like saunas in the conditions but could make them vexing for the arweli to track. The human colonies broke up into smaller groups of living space vehicles designed to move silently in rivers, or walk in swamps just above the waterline. The few remaining large human settlements were permanent outposts built at the bottoms of oceans, originally as research centers, but they had become central command centers.

The pictured helmet was of a type used very early in the conflict when human forces were still wearing old pre-war issued equipment. The one was found in an abandoned outpost on the southern polar swamp. Markings indicate it belonged to someone in the 6/1, or 6th Region, 1st Brigade Guard. The outpost was abandoned in early '65 SD, and it can be assumed it was left behind then although with poor record keeping there will likely never be an answer to who exactly it belonged to or what their ultimate fate was.

I differentiate between "figures" and "characters". Characters are given more of a personality, and might be someone you could identify with, as you'd expect from a literary character. Figures are people primarily known through their effect on the world around them, the stories told about them, etc.

I say this because back on the worldbuilding subreddit I read an exchange between someone who was explaining several historical figures in their setting, and another person who insisted that they were "characters", that they ought to be given complex personalities and internal motivations as you would when writing a story. The other person said more or less what I did above, that they weren't concerned with their personalities and life stories so much as their effect on the setting.

I have both characters and figures in the Lonely Galaxy. For figures, I have a few named Claravian saints.

Pre space age:

Redclaw: described in another post, the founder of the order of Farspeakers, more or less the monkey fox version of Samuel Morse.

Starlight: a healer and botanist who invented a type of self-adhesive fabric inspired by the spiky plant burs that would stick to her fur.

"Blast powder" Blessed Guts[^1]: a ~~test subject~~ I mean tertiary assistant to the research monks experimenting with manned projectiles. Martyred when the projectile he was piloting crashed into a canyon. He possessed an at times destructive interest in blasting powder and firearms, lending him his nickname.

Post space age:

Sunfire: a steadtree hermit[^2] and spiritual councilor who is (in)famous for a particular icon depicting him striking the muzzle of a penitent who sought his spiritual direction. The ritual is common in the Bright Way but often misunderstood by secular yinrih.

Clearwater: a poor bum who lived and died a drunken mess, whose fame in religion comes from him sacrificing himself to save a group of kids drowning in a pit filled with raw sewage, who, in a darkly humorous twist, has become the patron of lone bathroom-goers.

Greenleaf the Steadtree Hermit: credited, along with Iris the Hearthsider, for kicking off the War of Dissolution where a traditionalist faction of internal reformers seized control of the Bright Way from the majority of clergy whom they felt had grown corrupt and worldly. Most famous for calling the High Hearthkeeper a heretic to her face.

Iris the Hearthsider: A cleric aligned with the Pious Dissolutionists who preached against the ruling hierarchy's corruption and greed. Her name has become so ubiquitous among the pious that the word "iris" is almost a synonym for woman. Another Iris would achieve fame for being one of the missionaries to finally make First Contact.

Cloudlight[^3] the Sensible: a rather portly fellow known for his wit, down to earth wisdom and, common sense. One of the major figures hwo helped re-establish the Bright Way after the war.

[^1]: "guts", or viscera are considered the symbolic seat of emotion, so the name is less whimsical to the yinrih ear, perhaps better translated "favored soul".

[^2]: a type of ascetic similar to a stylite

[^3]: "cloudlight": sunlight reflected off the glaciated tops of convective clouds near sunrise or sunset, making it appear as though the sun is rising in the west or setting in the east.

Post image: a human artist's impression of the Claravian afterlife, the Empyrean, depicting a blessed soul immersed in the Uncreated Light. The Empyrean is sometimes derisively called "The farm" by irreverent humans.

Pious spacers will assume this posture while in torpor. The palms of the forepaws are raised, with the inner and outer thumbs pressed against the palm. The palms of the rear paws are pressed together. Yinrih are not unconscious during torpor, and often use the time to meditate.

1. ink bulb
2. phalanges
3. ink duct
4. digital pad
5. claw

One of the few anatomical differences between yinrih and tree dwellers is the arrangement of the so-called "writing tract", the system including the writing claw, the ink duct, and the ink sac or bulb. In tree dwellers, the ink bulb and duct are located directly ventral to the phalanges, meaning each footfall applies pressure to the ink causing some to flow out passively onto the surrounding surface as the tree dweller walks or climbs. In yinrih, the ink duct and bulb have migrated slightly to the side, thus applying less pressure with each step, reducing or eliminating passive ink excretion. Presapient yinrih had to actively smear their ink onto surfaces in order to mark them, encouraging the development of the yinrih's primordial written language.

Yinrih have conscious control of the muscles that cause the ink bulb to contract, and ink flow relies more on the pressure applied by the contracting ink bulb than to gravity. This allows yinrih to write in zero-G.

Stormburg, also Stormboro or Stormborough, is the capital of Moonlitter. It is a floating city located on the planet itself. It is not open to the air like the cities on Welkinstead, since the atmosphere is not breathable. It is located in the eye of a perpetual cyclonic storm. No sunlight penetrates the deep clouds around it. The only natural light comes from the constant lightning from the surrounding storm clouds.

Why the capital was placed in such an inhospitable location has been lost to history. Unlike Welkinstead, Moonlitter itself has few exploitable resources, and the bulk of the population lives on the planet’s many moons. The location may have been chosen precisely because it did not favor any one moon, or perhaps to make life miserable for the politicians who have to live there.

This is Pascal from one of the stories I posted a while ago.

Following from my earlier post. This website will give you the Lagrange points for a two body system given their masses and distance between them.

I used Pluto (or a pluto-like dwarf planet with no moon) and the sun as examples, and I got about 6881688.874956055 km for L1, which is where the mini sun from my other post would have to go.

If I wanted the insolation from the mini sun to equal the actual sun on Earth, it would have to put out 810 zettawatts. That's a lotta watts.

But we're not talking about Earth. Yih has a solar constant (focal constant?) of arount 860 W/m^2, so we can shave the power output down to about 511 ZW. If we wanted it to equal the insolation at Yih's pole during the summer solstice which is 430 W/m^2, we get 256 ZW. Now that's the equator of our dwarf planet getting that amount of pseudo sun, the poles would get much less.

At this point I have to wonder, why bother with the lagrange point? Surely if I put the thing in LEO any savings on fuel provided by the lagrange point would be more than made up for by the lower power needed to get a reasonable amount of insolation, so we're back to my constellation of close-orbiting satellites. That's not quite as dramatic lore-wise though.

TL;DR, you need a magnetosphere to keep the solar wind from stripping your atmosphere. You could create an artificial magnetosphere by placing a really powerful magnet at the first Lagrange point such that the planet is shadowed by the object's magnetotail.

This is a lot simpler than what I had conceived, rings of satellites orbiting the planet and doing... something that keeps the atmosphere stable. Of course there's a lot more to maintaining a terraformed climate than just the magnetosphere, so maybe I'll need those satellites after all.

The Claravian Order of Farspeakers were responsible for building and maintaining the yinrihs' telecommunication infrastructure prior to the War of Dissolution, which ended the Bright Way's monopoly on much of Focus's economy.

The order can trace its roots back to before the space age, when research monasteries were first experimenting with aeronautics. It quickly became clear that they needed a better understanding of meteorology, and to do that they needed to establish a network of surface observation stations. These stations would need to send data in real time to a central location where the data could be plotted on a map to reveal the state of the atmosphere at the synoptic scale.

But before they could do that, they had to devise a way to send information beyond the direct line of sight in real time. Several methods were tried, none of which were satisfactory, though they had marginal success with a system of towers where signalmen would relay tail semaphore signals to one another. This system still relied on maintaining a clear line of sight between individual towers.

A few methods employing the recently discovered phenomenon of electromagnetism were attempted, but the monks were stuck on how to encode the information in a way that didn't require costly and complex infrastructure such as multiple wires and intricate transmitting and receiving stations.

The answer came not from the monks but from a groundskeeper at a particular research monastery. He is known to history as Redclaw, though this may have been a playful pseudonym. Yinrih claws are naturally rust-colored, so the name isn't much of a differentiator, akin to a human calling himself "two-arms".

Redclaw was not educated in the mysteries of Creation like the research monks, but he was a chronic tinkerer, and took a special interest in wires and batteries and switches and the like. He eventually developed a simple circuit consisting of a switch, a battery, and a sounder that would click whenever the switch was closed. He showed his handiwork to the monks, who dismissed it as a mere toy.

The local hearthkeeper, however, saw potential in this system, and encouraged Redclaw to continue developing it. Eventually Redclaw hit upon a way in which he could encode information by varying the timing of switch closures, creating a distinct rhythm that could be made to represent words. Compared to the monks' prior attempts, this system was almost too simple, requiring only a single wire and a ground return. To the monks' credit, they swiftly adopted the system once it was proven that it could reliably transmit messages, and telegraph lines were built connecting distant monasteries.

A distinct order was spun off from the research monks whose sole duty was to build, maintain, and operate this new telecommunication infrastructure.

Just as hearthkeepers tended increasingly advanced hearths, the farspeakers built more and more complex networks as the yinrih climbed the tech tree. Simple telegraphs evolved into telephone and eventually digital networks, and wires gave way to radio waves, optical fiber, and ultimately to FTL ansible links.

Junior farspeakers are called seekers both because they seek the wisdom of more established members of the order and because they're the ones who seek out and troubleshoot problems in the field. Senior farspeakers are called anchorites or anchoresses. They are so called because they tend to stay secluded in a central office, observing the overall network from afar. The order also tends to attract introverts who prefer to spend their time with machines rather than people.

TL;DR, noon on a distant planet like Pluto orbiting a sunlike star is about as bright as civil twilight on Earth.

I can't remember where I heard about "Pluto time" (probably a vsauce video) but the original NASA site with the calculator is archived and no longer works.

The site linked above seems to recreate the original. You input your latitude and longitude and it spits out the next time (evening or morning I presume) that it will be as bright as noon on Pluto.

I did some quick napkin math and determined that the luminous flux on Pluto at noon should be around 100 lux. I checked the outdoor light sensor at the time given on the site above and it's in the ballpark, around 80 lx. That's light enough you probably wouldn't need a flashlight just to get around but probably not enough to read by, maybe.

As for my own conworld, yinrih can see a much broader spectrum than humans, so my napkin math doesn't apply, but it does give an idea of how other things that require sunlight would fare. You're probably not doing agriculture without artificial lights, for one thing.

In the Outer Belt they cultivate a type of high-latitude plant with large leaves to absorb as much of the feeble polar summer sunlight as possible. It forms large cysts filled with a creamy liquid that it uses to survive the winter. Selective breeding has allowed it to thrive on the dwarf planets of the Outer Belt, but still with a heavy dose of artificial light provided by orbital infrastructure and terrestrial illumination.

Welkinstead is the anglicized name of the innermost gas giant of Focus. Its Commonthroat name is LLpLg /long low weak grunt; long low weak grunt; early falling weakening grunt; short low weak growl/, derived from LLg (outpost, colony or homestead) and pLg (cloud), "Welkin" being an archaic English word for cloud or sky.

Welkinstead is a member of the Allied Worlds, along with Sweetwater, Yih, and Newhome. The official language is Commonthroat. Welkinstead is a strong ally in its own right with the planet Moonlitter, the other of Focus's two gas giants.

The large floating cities that house the planet's population are clustered together along two subtropical high pressure belts. The subsiding air helps keep the poisonous gases from the layers below from upwelling into the breathable layer of the atmosphere where the cities can be found, though cyclonic storms occasionally bring gases upward , and residents must shelter inside until the storm abates.

Culturally, Welkinsteaders have a reputation for being provincial and loud, but also friendly and hard-working. Residents of Welkinstead's few moons, called Moonies have the same reputation among other Welkinsteaders as Welkinsteaders have among the rest of Focus.

The Moonie accent of Commonthroat has many of the same cultural connotations as the American English accents of the Southern US. The dialect has a prohibitive mood unique to itself formed with the modal particle Gr /long low weak growl, chuff/, a contraction of the standard G rnL, the imperative modal particle + not. Compare the standard

G rnL qdBq scBqp qnlqCbK
G   rnL qdBq-0  scBq-p   qnlqCb-K
IMP not drink-A water-3D make_sick-DOG
Don't drink that water; it'll make you sick!

With the Moonie:

Gr qdBq scBqp qnlqCbK
Gr   qdBq-0  scBq-p   qnlqCb-K
PROH drink-A water-3D make_sick-DOG
Don't drink that water; it'll make you sick!

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