Skating Rink
Wheee!Another world that is presumed to be artificial, or deeply modified, though the possibility remains it formed naturally under some very unnatural (to Baseline) natural laws. The easiest way to describe it is, imagine a topographic map rendered in 3D, with no slopes or gradients, just straight vertical jumps, using a scale of between 3 and 10 feet shifts in elevation between the contour lines. That is, the size of the vertical 'steps' ranges from 3 to 10 feet, seemingly at random. It is also not true the jumps are perfectly vertical; each slopes from bottom to top by about 5 degrees.
Everything so far explored is made of one substance, a white material with marbling in various shades of grey through roughly 10% of the surface. The whorls and swirls do not show any meaningful patterns; some are isolated streaks of color an inch long, some stretch for dozens of feet.
The most important trait, however, is that the material is effectively frictionless. The first explorer careened down a 'ravine' uncontrollably, only stopping when they managed to kick themselves into a cul-de-sac and then use their jacket as a parachute to slowly bleed off their initial intertia. Rescue involved a drone, a rope, and some luck. (The Emerald Dunes had provided some protocols for this sort of thing.)
Attempts to drill into the material via drone have proven futile. Aerial scans of the surrounding terrain show the breachpoint opens into what would be a river delta, if it had water, one that followed natural-seeming lines, except for everything noted above. The source of the atmosphere, effectively identical to Baseline, is unknown. It follows a standard day-night cycle, and the sun has the same spectral qualities as Sol, but there is no moon and the stellar patterns are alien.
As a scientific curiousity, it's amazing, but until someone has a breakthrough in either analyzing the material or finding something that produces friction with it, exploration is not proceeding. PAIN has unofficially added this world to their officially non-existent 'Darwin List', places where the rescue of unauthorized breachers is placed at low priority.
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