San Lucas

by on November 18, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas

I toured the rainforests of San Lucas after The War. I’d fought the Chinese with some of the Loco Cats, you see. They wanted to show me where they’d grown up. I returned the favor, though they thought my home was a little chilly. That’s fair. Their home is a bit warm for my sensibilities. But it only took one visit to see why nobody found them back in the day. Those rainforests are impressive at hiding anything from above, and the cats are nowhere near the most physically dangerous species on San Lucas. The cats are the size of a small horse. But there’s this rhino-hippo-crocodile fuel-of-nightmares thing the size of a large horse that actually holds the title of alpha predator on San Lucas. It’s got armored scales for a hide and jaws that can snap reinforced landing struts. Thank God they can’t climb trees.

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Lucas Cats

by on November 17, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas, The Races of Humanity

The cats of San Lucas seemed like standard, wild cats when humanity first settled their world. They hunted wild game, sampled the newly imported delicacies where possible, and learned to keep their distance from human settlements. They were smart enough to realize that human weapons were dangerous, but so were many Earth species. It never occurred to the colonists that the big cats were any more intelligent than that for the first several decades. They had other things to worry about. Life. Death. Et cetera. So they kept on going about their lives, driving off the more aggressive cats, going out on hunts from time to time, and doing all the other things that humans do in a new land.

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San Lucas

by on November 16, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas

61 Ursae Majoris is a G8V star which lies four lightyears off the Asgard hyperspace route. That makes it extremely easy to travel to, and it was the target of a major bidding war for international colonization rights. A consortium of South American nations won the rights and named their new possession San Lucas. Their colony ship arrived in 2178, a mere four years after Asgard’s expedition made landfall, and it became one of South America’s jewels in the stars. It also became the first world we met alien intelligent creatures on, though we did not know that until some decades after the Peloran made Contact with us. The experience caused us to change the way we explored, colonized, and studied planets in the future.

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San Lucas

by on November 15, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas

San Lucas was the first planet where we met an arguably alien, intelligent species. By the time I came around, we’d come to the conclusion it was normal that most worlds we lived on were a lot like Earth. San Lucas was no exception. The basic building blocks of life were there. Proteins. Plants. Insects. Reptiles. Mammals. Birds. Everything was closely related enough to that found on Earth that our earliest colonists landed and started living off the land without so much as a hitch. They picked a nice, temperate spot near the equator to live, where they could be warm and comfortable year round. It’s a bit warm for my Northern Minnesota bones, but I do have to admit that it is beautiful.

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Lucas Cats

by on November 14, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas, The Races of Humanity

The cats of San Lucas have many names. The official local name is Pantera de Lucas while scientists call them Panthera Lucas. The locals usually call them Lucas Felino or Loco Felino when they are annoyed. Or scared. They are most closely related to Earth’s Panther family of big cats that include Lions and Tigers. Bears need not apply. The primary difference is that the cats of San Lucas are smart. I’m talking human levels of intelligence, with forepaws as nimble as human hands. They were tool users when South America colonized the world, and had their own complex civilization. We didn’t know that at first. They were just big, wild cats who prowled the edges of our settlements for decades.

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