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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 9, 2019 22:06:05 GMT -5
This topic is a child of the Zorah's Eye article directory.GHOSTS!The big desert around the center of the Eye goes by the name of Zorah's Iris, or sometimes the Iris Desert. It's a place of ghosts, wrecks, and sandstorms, a place so empty that the nothingness itself is something. It's a playground for optical illusions and spectres of all kinds. It's a graveyard for daft and desperate spacers and a giant wall to terrestrial travellers. It is a place so absolutely void of value that it and the Eye are transorbital bywords for emptiness. It's a miserable place. SECTIONS- Topography & Climate- Zorah Vitreum- Weather & Anomalies- Population
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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 11, 2019 23:46:53 GMT -5
TOPOGRAPHY & CLIMATE
The Iris is the meat of the Eye's terrestrial side. It's a flat, empty, massive expanse of land, completely drained of all life. It's nothing but white sand, white sand, and more white sand, churned up by hurricane-force sandstorms into a constant whirlwind of whipping dust. Visibility is non-existent. Even oxygen isn't a guarantee; the sheer quantity of sand in the air is enough to scour a pair of lungs or a set of filters in seconds. Lethal heat goes hand-in-hand with a lack of moisture, arable land, and any sense of comfort.
In some locations, there are little clusters of buildings dredged up from the Chambers of Myth. Most times, they're nothing more than ruins. Brick temples, highway chunks connected to nothing, wooden church husks, and more. On other occasions, they're the last leftovers of a Looney bunker that had the misfortune of turning up near the Eye. With all that loose sand, building underground is tricky. Most uproot to surface bases when they need to start expanding - if they ever find the resources for it. Even the most successful bunkers usually end up running out of food or raw materials if they don't turn their efforts towards evacuation.
Further in towards the Eye, craters and shipwrecks dot the sands from spacer attempts to get inside. Ships that miss the Eye too fast leave nothing but big holes near it. Ships that realize they're off-course leave behind impact trenches, debris trails, and, every once in a while, a complete wreck. Down-on-their-luck salvagers sometimes come in to try to pull apart hulks, but about half of their expeditions just add more shipwrecks to the location. Most husks are usually paired up, or even surrounded by emptied-out ships like a landship village.
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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 11, 2019 23:47:03 GMT -5
ZORAH VITREUM
Most spacers think the Iris is a big salt flat. Some sources even come up with funny ideas like limestone plains or gypsum deserts. The truth is that the Iris's sands are made up of a unique kind of glassy metamaterial in sand-scaled flakes. Each individual grain is a tiny, precision-cut matrix of light-bending microscopic shapes. "Zorah vitreum" is the scientific term for it. "Mirror sand", "ghost dust", and "spirit sand" are what most people know. The end results are eye-spiting dunes and deserts made out of trillions of tiny lenses and reflectors.
Where the special ghost glass comes from is as much mystery as it is fact. The sands of the Iris are heaved up from around the center of the Eye, from deep into the Eye's uncharted underground. They're spread around by sandstorms kicked off by anomalous winds from the Eye's terrorscapes. Just as the Eye's growing, so is the Iris. Every day, the ghosts and sands creep just a little bit further out. Thankfully, they're not moving very fast; most estimates put it at around 1-3 meters of growth a day. By that rate, it'd take a billion years and change - at the very least - for the Iris to eat up the planet.
On most occasions, it's hard to tell the Iris's sand from any other kind. It's just as dry and clingy as a handful from Naza's Prong or the Dead Angel Wastes, and ten times as painful on the eyes and feet. When a sandstorm kicks off, the sand starts showing off. With enough of the dust in the air, light goes haywire. Tunnels of light lead into fields of rainbows. Black fogs of pure darkness swallow up daylight and foglamps all at once. Ghostly afterimages of anything and everything dance like dust motes around landmarks and lost wanderers. Even infrared and ultraviolet light aren't off the table.
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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 11, 2019 23:47:23 GMT -5
WEATHER & ANOMALIES
The deeper you get into the Iris, the worse everything gets. Sandstorms are more frequent and intense in proportion to every step taken towards the Eye. The dunes get bigger, the dust gets thicker, and the phantoms get more aggressive. Terrorscapes start taking over to make matters more miserable. Reality itself turns into a target closer to the center, with concepts like heat, gravity, and sanity all up for grabs. Sometimes, the ghosts are real. Sometimes, they're so intangible that just touching one will rip you out of existence.
Being a desert, the Iris is all about sandstorms and heat. Heatwaves are common, sometimes so frequent that they set a new temperature norm in some regions of the Iris for years at a time. Being a desert made out of glass, full of terrorscapes, it's about a hundred times worse. Some sandstorms align to form magnifying glasses to the sun above, sending giant death-ray columns of skin-vaporizing heat roaming through the Iris. Some of the same storms end up leaving big seas of slagged mirror sand behind them, which stay molten for hours at a time.
Closer to the Eye, it gets even worse. Some heat-ray storms play around with gravitational anomalies and mirror sand to create a local phenomenon known as a spectre storm. Spectre storms are what they sound like. It's a rampage of ghosts made out of pure photothermal death. On most occasions, they're nothing more coherent than phantasmal flies and ectoplasmic blobs. On others, they're shaped like people - sprinting a million-man marathon across the desert. Being caught in one is a test of reflexes even an urban gunfight couldn't come close to.
Being situated near Aliah's Rupture and roughly near to Evispin, caustic weather is a major player in the northeast parts of the Iris. In the northerly regions, it's mostly acid rain and once-a-year caustic fogs. More toward the east, it's everything from acid tornadoes to gastric blizzards. Snowstorms occasionally poke in around the northern regions, mostly from the direction of the Jigges Icelands. Most turn straight into rainbow lightning storms as soon as they hit the Iris's heat.
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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 11, 2019 23:47:58 GMT -5
POPULATION
It goes without saying that the Iris is uninhabited. There's no good reason for any sane, living person to make a life where it's not wanted. Traders have nowhere to trade, travellers have nothing interesting to travel to. Rogues and marauders know better than to try to hide out where landmarks don't exist and visibility is a cheap joke. Rising buildings from the Chambers of Myth don't often turn up; the Eye pushes most of them aside into neighboring regions or gobbles them up when they get too close.
The only regular residents of the Iris are crashed-up spacers and the junkers chasing after their carcasses. Whenever a ship misses the bullseye on passing through the Eye, its only leftover destination - apart from existential obliteration against the Eye's funnel - is the Iris. Most of them end up vaporized on impact, but an unhappy few end up shipwrecked in the Iris. More hulks end up in the area from collisions up in orbit - which happen just about every time a station passes over the Eye. The result is a sparse junkyard not too much different from the Dead Angel Wastes. Salvagers come down to comb the fields for leftovers and survivors on occasion, but only the desperate kind. Atmospheric re-entry around the Eye is the definition of danger.
One of the gloomy parts about the Iris is that it's a nexus of MASTER network drop-outs. Whenever a malfunction sputters a pod out, there's a one-in-three chance that it'll turn up in Zorah's Iris. Most of them zoink back into existence closer to the Eye, where any Loonies inside are doomed to starve before anyone can figure out what happened. Rescue operations still run into the desert from better-equipped bunkers, but most aren't sent out for the people. By the time it's been realized that a pod's turned up there, most passengers will have given out to dehydration or a sandstorm. As a result, search parties are usually sent out just to scuttle the transit pod to keep it out of spacer hands.
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