Planets: Akkar

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Akkar

LIFE AFTER EXTINCTION

The vastadons of Akkar are a case for endings being new beginnings. They went extinct when a massive hunk of moon crashed into their world. But their bones found new life as the dry mix for designer concrete. And their nest of eggs are the primary ingredient in Universal Flavor – the stuff the Guild sprinkles on all the products they dub as “food” to make them palatable to nearly every species. Thanks to Flavor, everyone can eat everything – and more consumers means more coin for the Guild.

SURVEY REPORT

:::::::GUILD PLANETARY ASSESSMENT 1973-b:::::::

Planet: AKKAR

Location: Inner Regions

Diameter: 5,107

Moons: One !! CATASTROPHIC EVENT !! A rogue Tempest energy spike intersected the moon breaking it apart. Large pieces have made planetfall and orbital decay of remaining debris field is spreading.

Atmosphere: !! DEGRADING CONDITIONS !! Increasing haze from moon debris is degrading the atmospheric conditions rapidly.

Weather: Fluctuating conditions due to ecological collapse.

Temperature: Reduced solar heating due to increasing haze layer is causing rapid temperate shifts. Expect planet temperatures to continue to fluctuate aggressively.

Ecosystem: !! VASTADON COLLAPSE !! Moon destruction has led to the extinction of all vastadons. Limited remains will drive up prices until there is no more supply then market will stagnate.

Financial Assessment: Planetary ecological disaster will increase short term gains but will lead to a financial “wasteland.”

Spacelane Access: Orbital debris impacts are increasing and will render safe approach difficult within three standard years.

Overall Assessment: !! BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY & RISK !! Prices of Vastadon products will skyrocket bringing in additional funding. However the depletion of egg-based Universal Flavor will cause stagnation in food markets. Synthetic source of UF needed quickly.

Recommendation: Increase R&D budget for Universal Flavor replacement. Risk to food markets increases as vastadon eggs deplete. </>

Assessor 1704

:::::::END:::::::

BONE MINES

Universal Flavor can be credited for saving the Wilds from a very serious food shortage. The Tempest eruption abruptly cut off the Wilds from all Core Worlds supply chains, many of which were solely dedicated to supplying food to the workers and residents on Wilds worlds. Being the frontier, the Guild's presence in the Wilds wasn't set up to feed itself—or house itself, fuel itself, medicate itself, or any of the other things a more developed part of the galaxy would do. Operations in the Wilds were focused on exploration, resource extraction, and expansion. This was by design, for maximum efficiency.

It wasn't so great for redundancy.

Being cut off from the Core Worlds meant that suddenly the Wilds had severe shortages of fuel, food, and other critical supplies. Guild corporations had to think on their feet if they hoped to preserve any sense of an interconnected galaxy and sustain the people who lived there.

That meant getting creative—finding the upsides, possibility spaces, and workarounds. On Akkar, that came down to turning tragedy into taste.

When they think about Tempest destruction, most people in the Wilds think only about the worlds that were consumed, or those that sit at the edge of the expanding storm within reach of energy spikes and tendrils. But Tempest destruction reached far beyond that. Shockwaves of destructive energy branched out like spidering lightning, dealing damage all around the Wilds—including to the moon of Akkar.

When it was struck by a Tempest energy wave, Akkar's moon instantly fractured, and the smaller of the resulting two chunks plummeted directly into the world below. The impact set into action a chain of events that caused an extinction level event, wiping out the last known terrestrial beasts from the galaxy's Age of Monsters, the giant vastadons.

That could easily have put an end to the Guild industries on Akkar. And it did at first—the world was full of noxious air and gaping fissures. The Guild corporations packed up what was left and fled. But after a \"reasonable\" amount of time had passed, Universal Fashion decided to go back.

Formerly a luxury fashion brand, extremely popular among Guild elites, Universal Fashion (UF) once used vastadon hides, claws, and even eyes in clothing and accessory lines. When they arrived back on the world of Akkar, however, it was to discover the hides, eyes, and other soft tissues of the fallen vastadons were gone, thanks to the acute noxious environment post-energy-wave-strike. All that was left were the bones—and the eggs.

They could have turned around and left, but in post-Tempest times you made do with what you had. And they had old operating plants and a lot of remains of giant beasts. So they set to work to see what they could make of this extinction.

After some trial and error, it looked like the most promising product was going to be a bone dust concrete mix that they immediately started to market as luxury concrete. But in post-Tempest times, not many people were looking for luxury anything; people were just looking for the basics to survive, like hydration and sustenance. UF turned their attention to the eggs.

The extremely dense shell of the eggs managed to stand up against the noxious environment that had befallen Akkar and taken the skin off the vastadons' bones. What UF found inside the eggs was a viscous goo that proved not only to be edible, but to have a flavor that appealed to all species present. That was unheard of in foodstuffs. With the differences in palates across species, it was a challenge to find a flavor that could be enjoyed by even two to three different species, let alone over a dozen. They had found their new export—and a new lease on life as a food additive company.

Rather than packaging up the egg innards as they were, the newly rebranded Zestyon, Inc. had the foresight to stretch the valuable substance as far as it would go. They processed it into a powder that could be sprinkled on top of or mixed into foods of every kind. Rather than selling one product, they opened the potential to incorporate their flavor into as many foodstuffs as possible across the Wilds.

They called it Universal Flavor—the UF trademark still applied. It went a long way in saving the people of the Wilds from food shortages. Thanks to UF, food that would formerly have been inedible suddenly became craveable by nearly every species. UF opened the market to protein-rich food sources like Morack eel and cartilage sausage. Thanks to the vastadon egg goo, there was hope.

VASTADON LAB

The powdered food additive that comes straight from vastadon egg goo has made an outsized impact on the Wilds post-Tempest. This Universal Flavor has made it possible to feed the masses with food sources that would otherwise range from unappealing to nearly unpalatable. Morack eel is a prime example of a protein-rich food source that, thanks to Flavor, can fuel millions of people across worlds and species.

Without the discovery of the craveable egg goo, it's not an exaggeration to say that much of the Wilds may have starved—which is why it came as such a blow when Zestyon, Inc. admitted to the galaxy that there was a shortage of vastadon eggs, and soon the Flavor would run out.

This shouldn't have been a surprise considering that the vastadons who once made the eggs had been extinct for over 80 years. But the truth of the pending supply shortage doesn't seem to have dawned on Zestyon until recently. Only in the last few years have they started to look for an alternate approach and/or source. They've landed on one that's quite extreme: clone the vastadons and inspire natural egg production.

Zestyon's labs on Akkar are experimenting with vastadon DNA, altering it with the hopes of creating vastadons that are not quite so… vast—and, critically, that have a shorter reproductive cycle that generates more eggs. The overall goal is to create beasts that are easier to control and contain and are more product-focused than their predecessors.

Thus far, the experimentation has met with varying degrees of failure. But even though the eggs haven't yet produced viable clones, they have produced Universal Flavor. Unsuccessful eggs are drained and the goo is processed into powder. Anecdotal reports hold that the powder isn't as potent or craveable as the non-cloned version, that more is needed, and that it appeals to fewer species. Those reports have not yet been confirmed. Time will tell as the market trends more toward the synthetic. The Wilds waits with bated breath and growling stomachs.

TRAIN TROUBLE

The Wilds has faced many threats since the Tempest eruption, perhaps the most unexpected being the hordes of semi-clones dubbed the Marauders. Their violent pillaging of worlds that were struggling just to survive was like pouring salt on a wound—and then dunking it in a vat of acid. They were a scourge that kept escalating, and they seemed impossible to stamp out… until the Monarchs risked it all and attacked the Marauders at home in the Smudge.

It has been two years since the Monarch's successful offensive. And the Wilds exhaled a collective breath, relaxing into the idea that the Marauders were gone.

They're not gone.

There are rumors that the remnants of their hordes are responsible for the disappearance of the Monarch's habitat ship. Those are most likely not rumors—not based on what has been happening on Akkar.

Trains carrying exports of Universal Flavor and luxury concrete have been the targets of attacks in recent months. At first it was thought that the attacks were carried out by competing flavor additive corporations looking to accelerate Zestyon's declining monopoly as vastadon eggs run out. But new evidence points to Marauders. The harpoons. The graffiti. It's almost as though they signed their raids.

And their signature points directly to their intent, albeit sloppily. It's become clear that it's not the Flavor or the concrete the Marauders are after, but very specifically the cloning materials and vastadon DNA samples that Zestyon has been using in their experiments.

If Zestyon has real hopes of making more vastadons, then the Marauders have real hopes of making vastadon semi-clones. No one in the Wilds needs that kind of threat.

LEAVING AKKAR

The broken moon of Akkar stands out like a scar. Both a mark of the trauma endured and a badge of survival. The Tempest did its worst—lashing out with a shockwave of energy that stretched halfway across the Wilds, travelling at impossible speeds, defying previously held beliefs of physical limitations, and striking this small moon with enough force to crack it in two.

While rocked to the core, the moon managed to stay in orbit, though the orbit is significantly shifted from what it was before. The path the broken moon takes is now much tighter and far less symmetrical, more of an oval orbit with tremors caused by its own lopsided rotation.

Initially, this precarious orbit was what made the moon the subject of scientific research and debate. The potential that the instability might lead to orbital collapse and plummeting of the moon into Akkar drew the attention of those prone to disaster speculation.

Probes were sent to the broken moon with the morbid hope that they would turn up evidence that could predict the end of that world. But the probes turned up nothing at all. Their sensors were fried, and their communications systems shut down on landing.

The scientific community was baffled, which piqued their interest even more. It took a pair of sensors made to fly directly into nascent supernovae to send back any kind of reading. The results were clear, the moon was vibrating with Tempest energies. Whatever shockwave struck it left behind more than just a scar.

Since discovering this, the scientific community has been clamoring to obtain more information; Tempest energies that are relatively safe to approach aren’t something found regularly in the Wilds. The broken moon of Akkar has the potential to provide answers to long-standing questions. What kinds of energies is the Tempest made of? What set of physical laws does it follow? What exactly is the Tempest?

Scientists claim they are on the precipice of discovery, but realistically they’ll have to discover how to build more robust sensors first.

MEAT PASTE FLAVOR

The meat paste market in the Wilds has exploded since the Tempest erupted. Meat paste is easy to make, simply packaged—usually in tubes—keeps well, and contains enough protein per serving to give the Guild’s manual laborers the energy they need to make it through a full day of work. And now it has an appealing taste, too, thanks to Universal Flavor. And to a much lesser extent, thanks to Unanimous Savor, the only other flavor additive to carve out a—very tiny—place in the market.

Zestyon, Inc. has had a monopoly on the cross-species seasoning game since their fortuitous discovery of preserved egg goo on Akkar and subsequent production of Universal Flavor. But they weren’t the first to come up with the idea that a single substance could appeal to multitudes of species and drive an enormous bump in sales for the food manufacturer.

Tastyon, the maker of Unanimous Savor, started out as a packaging manufacturer that specialized in making the tubes to package meat paste. They were Universal Flavor’s sole packager until Zestyon tired of them driving up the prices and took their packaging efforts in house.

Tastyon left, pouting, with pockets full of Flavor they planned to attempt to replicate and sell.

They haven’t yet been successful in their replication attempts—no one seems to be able to make a vastadon egg goo equivalent. But they have concocted some interesting seasonings that they’ve strategically sold to the lesser meat paste manufacturers. While Morack meat paste consumers can relish in UF’s signature flavor, those eating brisen, crabbit, or capralope meat paste can enjoy Tastyon's proffered alternative. At the very least it's a chance to get some variety.

It's worth noting that meat paste purists refuse any and all additives, swearing by the rich, sometimes gamey, often sharp flavor of straight paste—which is an acquired taste. Affinity for a particular kind of paste tends to be limited to those who grew up eating it.