San Lucas

by on December 10, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas

The South American colonists of San Lucas had a difficult road pacifying the single small continent they’d made their home. New Brazil was rich and beautiful, but it was also home to one of the most dangerous alpha predators we have found in our travels throughout the stars. A predator who enjoyed the taste of fresh human flesh. The colonists spent decades hunting, and being hunted by, that dangerous animal and slowly driving it away from every human settlement they built. It is hard to know exactly how many of the sabertoothed cats they killed under New Brazil’s forest canopies, but those hides became common decorations on San Lucas. And San Lucas made a fortune selling them and other local delicacies to the rich and famous of Earth’s upper echelons. They soon realized that a significant part of their domestic economy depended on a constant supply of the sabertooth hides. And so they created vast nature preserves to maintain a stable population for future harvesting.

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Hello, my name is Jack

by on December 9, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

It’s hard to wear white all the time. It gets dirty so easy. And no matter how careful you are, it will always show that you’ve been in a fight. Blood. Tears. Dirt. Scuffing. Everything shows when you wear white. And even the best smart fabric has a limited lifespan when it spends all its resources fixing up little stuff like that. I buy my outfits in bulk because I run through them, and that can get expensive. But it’s worth the cost. Because wearing white makes a statement to everyone who sees me. It says that I don’t like to get my hands dirty. I don’t like to fight. And every time I have to get into one, and come out looking like a dirty rag, it says something else. That I’m willing to pay the cost of fighting if I have to. I won’t hide it from anyone who can see. I’m willing to live with the consequences.

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Lucas Cats

by on December 8, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Races of Humanity

The single most and least successful species on San Lucas was based on Earth’s extinct sabertooth cats. The Albion engineered them up to the size of a draft horse, with the muscle and bone mass to support it, and a thick hide capable of deflecting any conceivable small arms fire. The stated goal of that first project was a biological tank. They were completely successful on that point. It was the attempt to graft human-level sentience into the new race that failed spectacularly. They have the brain mass necessary for hyper-intelligence, but we can’t see evidence that they use it. They are aggressive, combative, and dangerous as hell, but they lack anything like language or culture as seen in the other cats. They just don’t seem sentient, even though they should be.

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San Lucas

by on December 7, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas

The first continent humanity colonized on San Lucas was not much larger than Earth’s Australia. New Brazil had the largest population of sabertooth-descended alpha predator cats of any of the major continents, but it also had the largest deposits of heavy metals and coal in the tall mountain range that dominated most of the continent’s central region. There was a thick forest belt around those mountains where the stupid cats lived, and massive fuel reserves resided under the shallow underwater shelves that spread out in every direction for dozens of kilometers off the coasts. It was as if someone designed a continent with all of the raw materials a civilization would need to thrive, and then added an aggressive, unreasoning, natural predator the size of a draft horse who would fight you fang and claw for every square meter of ground you wanted. Humanity wanted all of it.

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Hello, my name is Jack

by on December 6, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I’m not a big fan of fighting. Yeah, I know, I’ve spent a lot of my life doing it. And I must say I do enjoy doing it while I’m doing it. There’s a real rush to coming out the victor in a battle of fisticuffs and wits. But at the end of the day, I’d be happy if I never had to fight again. There’s always a cost to it. Someone always looses something important when a fight decides anything. And when it comes down to it, I just don’t like taking things from people by force. It’s hard to keep your hands clean when you spend all your time fighting. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I wear white.

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