Verces

Orbiting the sun between Akiton and the Idari, Verces is a highly civilized world, a cultural hub forever at the forefront of social and technological progress. Tidally locked, with the same side always facing the sun, it lacks the day-night cycle of most other Pact Worlds ; instead, the side known as Fullbright is constantly scorched by a never-setting sun, while Darkside is trapped in eternal frozen night. Fortunately, a narrow ring of temperate climate along the terminator line where the two sides meet has proven surprisingly welcoming to intelligent life, and today nearly the entire population of this cosmopolitan world packs itself into the sprawling megacities filling this ring, while the rest of the planet is left to fringe groups and monsters. While already heavily cultivated and industrialized by the native humanoid verthani before the advent of interplanetary travel, Verces proves hospitable to most of the major Pact Worlds races, having gravity and atmosphere similar to that of Absalom Station, Castrovel, and Triaxus. Most of its citizens, both native born and immigrants, live in the Ring of Nations that circles the planet along the terminator where night and day meet, relaxing in sky-gardens atop their massive urban towers or laboring in the gritty, workaday slums below where the slanted sunlight never reaches. Generally curious, egalitarian, and peaceful, the urban citizens of Verces are deeply proud of their patchwork planetary culture, which not only produced the Stewards but inspired the governing structure of the Pact Worlds. The lands outside the Ring are generally left to automated solar and water farming, sparsely populated by denigrated groups collectively known as the Outlaw Kingdoms: notorious bands of criminals, cultists, political exiles, survivalists, and—though most may be loath to admit it—a few unjustly maligned cultures indigenous to these harsh regions.

Geography

Over half of Verces is dry land, as the sun-scorched Fullbright hemisphere lacks any water. While local legends often speak of ancient seas that used to occupy regions such as the Firesalt Basin and the Keppenvos Badlands, the truth is that the several enormous dust basins in this area never held water in their current location but were rather seas from the Ring that tectonic movement carried into Fullbright, their water boiling away as they left the temperate region. Darkside, by contrast, contains most of the planet’s water and is full of half-frozen seas such as the Godswater and glaciers whose boundaries are obscured by snow and ice. Between the two, the Ring of Nations is primarily dry land punctuated by a few bodies of water. The fact that Verces is tidally locked means that Fullbright constantly bakes under the blazing sun while Darkside is in an eternal winter. In the terminator zone, temperatures slowly shift from near freezing on the edge of Darkside to over 100º F on the edge of Fullbright. Beyond the terminator zone, temperatures become much less hospitable, requiring the use of environment suits and special precautions for most machinery. There are no seasons on Verces; instead, the permanent imbalance in temperature is the main driving force behind its weather patterns. Superheated air over Fullbright rises and expands, while the frigid air over Darkside sinks and condenses. This effect pulls heated air toward Darkside at high altitudes, where it cools, sinks, gathers moisture, and flows back out at low altitudes toward the low-pressure Fullbright, where the cycle begins again. The wind thus constantly blows across the Ring of Nations from Darkside toward Fullbright. Storms arise erratically as a result of fluctuations in this pattern, and the terrain over which the wind passes also plays a role—the plains see windstorms that can reach tremendous strength, mountainous areas have gustier winds and greater temperature variation, and regions downwind of seas experience more rain. Being tidally locked also means that the planet lacks a day-night cycle. Light conditions never significantly change in any particular area, other than temporarily dimming during storms. Fullbright is always blindingly bright, while Darkside is lit only by the scattered lights of civilization. The colder, dimmer edge of the terminator zone is twilit, and bright stars can be seen in the few regions away from city lights; the slow movement of these heavenly bodies is the only cue the planet gives its residents as to the passage of time. In warmer, brighter regions, the stars are invisible, blotted out by a perpetual, static sunrise. While the unchanging light is often confusing and eventually exhausting for visitors from planets with a day-night cycle, native Vercites find themselves at home with the constant artificial lighting of starships and space stations but unnerved by the changing daylight and seasons of other planets, as they associate changes in lighting and temperature with geographical movement rather than the passage of time.