The Glass Ravine in BREACH | World Anvil

The Glass Ravine

"Watch that first step... it's a lulu...
While it was later possible, due to advances in breach stabilizer technology, to adjust the precise breach point back a dozen feet, the initial point opened barely a foot from a half-mile plummet (which would leave them on a narrow ledge with an equivalent drop beyond it, assuming they didn't just bounce). The most obvious feature of this world is a ~50 mile long canyon, roughly a mile wide. On either side, for most of its length, are the remains of what is likely a single immense building, or a tightly-integrated complex of buildings, leading back from the edge anywhere from five to fifty feet.

The ravine itself is vitrified, its stone layers fused to class in an instant by some sort of directed force. The most widely accepted explanation is an orbital laser or fusion beam of almost unimaginable power. (Searches for anything in orbit that might have produced it have found nothing, but they were also anything but exhaustive.)

Surrounding the ravine are vast open mining pits, extending far beyond the initial exploration zone. A long-distance high-atmosphere drone did spot hints of scrubland about a hundred miles away. While there are no obvious roads, rails, or other forms of a transport network, AI image analysis found evidence of a maze of marginally flatter, slightly shallower pathways forming complex networks that follow lines not related to any natural erosion. Tentatively, these have been identified as a side effect of some kind of hovercraft or possibly anti-grav, but terrain-hugging, vehicles.

The overall working theory is that this was a Precursor mining complex, as it bears the usual hallmarks of their activity: Overly grandiose in scale, and reduced to ruin. There is the further assumption that it was targeted in some form of war, hence the ravine. Geological examination of the mines shows they were rich in rare earths, and more specifically, those needed for breach stabilizer construction.

Local animal life runs to arthropods, the most dominant species somewhat resembling a cross between an anteater and a lobster. The world should be in roughly its Miocene epoch, but the geography is all wrong, as is the biology; stellar patterns indicates it's a world where Baseline is, of roughly identical mass, but otherwise having a unique history from the time of its formation from stellar debris.

Since early 2022, a significant amount of material that ended up in unlicensed stabilizers seems to have been sourced from here, in organized operationa sponsored (with full plausible deniability) by a consortium of what BREACH considers 'rogue states'.

World Type
Alternate Geography
Divergence
Hadean Eon
Current Year
N/A
TL
Ruins probably 10, Baseline visitors 8^

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