Planets: Glance
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Glance
SALT LORD'S DOMAIN
At first glance, this world’s a hot mess. Scorching deserts, relentless suns, toxic insectoids with bad tempers. But it turns out, Glance’s parched landscape is a money maker. It’s the perfect place for mineral-rich waters from Leviathan to be evaporated, leaving behind fields and fields of fuel salt – which, after a bit of processing right here on Glance, powers the superlight engines in the starships that connect the galaxy. And all those barren, ugly salt fields make a colossal fortune for the Salt Lord, the ill-tempered autocrat who rules Glance… at least until the Guild works out a way to get rid of him without disrupting the fuel supply.
SURVEY REPORT
:::::::GUILD PLANETARY ASSESSMENT 2496-f:::::::
Planet: GLANCE
Location: Inner Regions
Diameter: 4,871
Moons: Two – (G1, G2) Further analysis has found no additional value.
Atmosphere: Increasing moisture content from LEVIATHAN water dumped on fuel salt fields is reducing the evaporation potential of the planet. So far productivity has dropped only 3-5% but will continue to decrease at an accelerated rate.
Weather: Dust storms. Small clouds increasingly spotted. Planetary dynamics changing due to added water content.
Temperature: Hot but decreasing as moisture content rises in atmosphere.
Ecosystem: !! INFESTATION !! Enhanced bug activity has reduced efficiency with equipment and worker losses increasing.
Financial Assessment: !! BUSINESS RISK !! Degrading political relationship with the Salt Lord is putting fuel production and profit margin at risk.
Spacelane Access: Access remains clear. As of yet no shortcut has been discovered through the Red Wall despite many assessments.
Overall Assessment:!! BUSINESS RISK !! Increasing local instability combined with decreasing output is threatening deal balance. Strong response is required.
Recommendation: Military intervention may be required to stabilize and optimize fuel production. Memo to HAVOC command dispatched.
Assessor 2311
:::::::END:::::::
SAND WRECK
The vast majority of salt fuel in the Wilds comes from the evaporation fields on Glance—which are filled with salt-saturated water from Leviathan. But the salt doesn't find its own way to the tanks of the Wilds' starships.
The salt fuel industry is built on the suns-scorched backs of the skimmers who work two shifts a day to keep pace with the speed of evaporation in the fields. Before the water from Leviathan even makes it from a tanker ship to the ground, it begins to evaporate in the extreme heat.
The world's perpetual thirst guarantees that every field can be filled and emptied in just a few hours. Then it's up to the skimmers to maintain the pace set by the relentless suns. They rake and scrape the chemical salts from the fields, working to the beat of the Salt Guard's footfalls. The Salt Guard are those lucky enough to have the Salt Lord's fleeting favor. But that also puts them within striking distance of his wrath.
A missed quota, an imperfectly raked field, a stray cloud that blocks the suns and lowers productivity—of which there are more and more as the millions of liters of evaporated waters alter Glance's climate—and whichever guards were on duty are held responsible and are apt to spend the next month in the fields. So they do what they must to keep production up, driving the skimmers to the edge of exhaustion and then filling their bellies with Morack jerky and tanker runoff.
It's a brutal life. Fresh water is impossible to come by. Food is rationed and often rotten. And conditions mean constant abuse to their skin, their lungs, and their internal organs.
So it comes as no surprise that those who live it day in and day out would do anything to wrest back some semblance of control. Even just one moment of disruption is the sweetest respite, a glimmer of hope that sees them through to the next brief night. Perhaps something like crashing a salt fuel tanker ship right into one of the guard towers.
This act seems to have been more than a glimmer of resistance. When put together with the water vault raid at the Salt Palace and the increased activity in the annexed port known as Freewater, the crashed tanker ship seems to be one small part of a well-orchestrated revolt.
Revolt on the one world responsible for connecting everyone and everything in the Wilds is a critical concern. It cannot be tolerated. It may be time for the Guild to step in. Or someone else?
"Yet another reason the Salt Lord cannot be entrusted with the salt fuel industry. The skimmers would be far better off employed by the Guild. If commercial rationale is not enough to tip the scales, let the skimmers' discontent and potential for grinding the galaxy to a halt be the incentive that stirs the Guild to rise."
// GUILD PLANETARY AUDITOR //
SALT PALACE
Once a failed luxury resort, the Salt Palace has new life as the home of the world's second Salt Lord, Tuzan. Tuzan's father, Loman, first built the resort hoping to draw wealthy visitors from the Core Worlds who would pay him large sums of money while sunning themselves next to shimmering pools of water that screamed of lavish expense.
While the resort dream died, the palace has lived up to Loman's hopes and dreams. Wealthy visitors do come, and they are ready to pay large sums of money—though it's for salt fuel, not resort features—while sitting next to glistening pools of water that have come at a great expense—to the planet's ecosystem and the parched skimmers.
Still, the newest Salt Lord is content and self-assured. So self-assured that there's a distinct possibility that he's lost sight of his own mortality as he's taken to covering the palace grounds in raw fuel salts.
Fuel salts are volatile. Even in their less potent, unprocessed form. Though it's rare, they can still be spontaneously reactive under the right conditions. Ultraviolet light encourages this instability. So there's a certain risk associated with piling fuel salts under the suns of Glance. The Salt Lord assumes that risk with zeal.
His palace grounds boast salt features in the form of sculpted mounds of singular colors that have been painstakingly sorted so there is not a grain out of place. These heaps stand as a testament to the Salt Lord's audacity—both to live in such close proximity to something so deadly, and to hoard the raw materials for salt fuel while most people in the Wilds still clamor to get their hands on just a single barrel.
The piles are a test, too—a test for the Guild dignitaries, wealthy investors, and wide-eyed spacefarers who visit the palace in hopes of striking a deal with the Salt Lord. Those sitting across the table from him during negotiations that happen in the double sunlight of the daytime have the pleasure of staring straight at the reactive piles. The possibility of an instant death must be at front of mind—which guarantees that the Salt Lord is never the one to flinch first.
"For a long time, I really thought they were fake. A deception designed to put pressure on buyers, to make the hot seat even hotter. But one day there was a spark, and just like that, three piles combusted in a matter of seconds. The entire cliffside shook as salt crystals violently formed from the raw materials. Those crystals are now on display in the entryway, daring anyone to doubt the true danger that awaits them inside the palace walls."
// BRYN, SALT PALACE GROUNDSKEEPER //
Recently, however, it was the Salt Lord who was in danger at the palace for the first time when it fell under attack by a group of skimmers hellbent on a revolt.
Word is that they arrived in the dead of the—very short—night and with coordinated effort extracted one of the two water generation and purification vaults. The skimmers have gone for a long time without enough fresh water and food. It seems that they will no longer tolerate these conditions.
The Salt Lord was not present on the night of the attack, but he must be wondering if he is still safe in his palace. Will they come back for the second water vault? Or perhaps for his head?
FREEWATER
Every revolt needs a headquarters—a place where plans are laid, resolve is hardened, weapons are amassed, and defenses are fortified. For the skimmers on Glance, this is that place.
Their presence here seemingly flew under the radar for quite some time. Long enough for them to fortify the old port, collect offensive weapons, and set a plan into action that has rattled the Salt Lord's position at the top of the fuel industry for the first time in 82 years.
It must be said, however, that this is merely an added benefit to their apparent primary goal, which seems to have been the extraction of a water generation and purification vault from the Salt Palace. They were successful.
The water vault now sits as a centerpiece in the fortification that has since come to be known as Freewater—meaning, simply, that the water is finally free. When the Salt Lord had the water vault in his possession, he hoarded the fresh water, using it in his pools, sea tanks, and planters before he would so much as consider sharing a drop with the workers who made his wealth possible.
For decades the skimmers survived on runoff, and even that was monitored by the Salt Guards. Now this group controls water production and distribution from their own vault. They make a point of ensuring that all who ask for water are given it freely. And they use it to grow crops that are also given freely to workers who were formerly malnourished.
The Freewater fortification has only become stronger as those who work it become healthier, hardier, and more clear-minded. There is no question in the minds of most who have been watching that the revolt has only just begun.
The question becomes: how far will the skimmers try to go? And what wake will their personal freedom cause across the Wilds? With salt fuel production threatened, the galaxy is once again facing the specter of disconnection. What should be done then? Should the skimmers be put back to work? Should the Guild intervene? Has the Guild already intervened? There are some who assert that this revolt was only so well planned because Guild corporations were involved, sneaking intel and weapons to the skimmers. If that is the case, what is the corporations' end game? Can they finish what they started?
APPROACHING GLANCE
When the Guild first began encouraging corporate expansion into the Wilds, Guild Boards were bombarded by bids from businesspeople who hadn't had luck in the Core Worlds. They hoped that there would be more opportunity, less monopolies, and more chance for luck in the Wilds.
The Guild greenlit a number of startups in the beginning, and the success of a few encouraged more hopefuls to draft proposals. Loman Brackish was one such hopeful. He had seen the success of luxury resorts on Wilds worlds like Olar and Detour and wanted part of that game.
When asked how his proposal was different and why it would stand out, he cited that he'd be appealing to the more adventurous traveler who wanted to go deeper into the Wilds frontier. He wanted to build a resort on the world of Glance, much further into the frontier than Olar or Detour, which sat just on the edge of Wilds space. He pitched the board on luxury adventure—but the real reason for his choice of Glance was that the land was significantly cheaper, which probably had a lot to do with the fact that the world was scorching and parched. He spent every last coin he had to buy up most of the world's land and build his first resort.
He sold the scorching landscape as part of Glance's appeal—nothing like it in the Core Worlds. And when the board asked him about pools, every resort needed a pool, he had an answer at the ready. There was a world filled with endless seas not too far away; he'd used the recently built spacelanes to ship water from Leviathan's seas to fill his pools on Glance.
Opening weekend lasted only half of a day—then Loman's resort dried up. Almost instantly, all the water evaporated under the heat of the two suns. The visitors left. The corporate officials packed up. And the Guild board left him with an impossible bill for his purchase of what amounted to nearly an entire world. They were just happy to offload it.
Loman had failed. He was in more debt than he could pay off in a lifetime, and all he had to show for it was a barren, sun-baked world. He was desperate for a way out of his contract. He would have done anything to break it.
And then the Tempest erupted.
In the aftermath of the Tempest eruption, the Guild was reeling from the sudden shock of being cut off from the Core Worlds' supply chains, the most critical of which was the salt fuel supply. The only salt fuel in the Wilds was whatever happened to be in spacelane refueling station tanks, planet-side fuel stations, limited military backup storage, and the few stray tanker ships that were in the midst of making deliveries in the Wilds.
The Wilds was never meant to be disconnected from the Core Worlds. The settlements here were not built to sustain a galaxy, they were supposed to be part of a larger system. Alone, without vital fuel to drive connections across systems, the Wilds would rapidly degenerate into a disconnected collection of isolated worlds with no way to reach beyond their atmospheres, let alone across the light-years.
Detached from the constant influx of essential goods and resources that would stop coming in from other worlds, many Wilds worlds would stumble, struggle, and eventually collapse. People on some worlds would not have enough to eat. Others wouldn't receive critical medications or potable water. Commercial goods would utterly dry up.
Staring down the barrel of this fate, the Guild refused to surrender. They scoured the Wilds for a solution—and Loman Brackish presented them with one. His resort pools may have been waterless, but upon evaporation, the water from Leviathan had left behind mounds of fuel salt. The Guild immediately saw the potential to turn Loman's misfortune into the enterprise that would save the Wilds. The only thing that stood in their way was Loman's contract; he owned nearly the entire world.
And now that things had turned around, he was unwilling to sell back even a small portion. With no other viable option and time running out, the Guild agreed to work with Loman.
They instantly acted to save the Wilds from disconnection—every drop of Salt Fuel that remained was used to transport water from Leviathan, saturated with fuel salt, to the newly-dubbed evaporation fields of Glance. Industrious workers from mines, construction sites, and factories across the Wilds were transported to meet the waters in the fields Glance; they became the first skimmers. Construction materials and machinery were delivered to the desert to erect saltworks processing plants, so skimmed salt could go straight to the reactors and then directly into fuel tanks.
Just as the last of the tankers and fuel stations of the Wilds were drained of the remaining salt fuel from before the Tempest, the burgeoning operation on Glance had produced enough fuel to act as a solitary stand-in for refueling. And a few months later it had produced enough salt fuel to refill all of the refueling stations around the Wilds and restart the Guild's engine of connection. What remained of the Concord galaxy had been saved.
But not before the people had a taste of disconnected life. A collective shudder was felt across the systems, the confrontation of a mortal fate. And then the thrum of starships picked right back up again, filling the echoing silence of the void between worlds once more.
"Loman became one of the wealthiest individuals in the Wilds and dubbed himself the Salt Lord—accurately. Now his son, Tuzan, holds the title. As long as the Brackish line continues to satisfy the Guild's salt fuel needs, their status won't be threatened."
// PALLERD, WILDS HISTORIAN //
REVOLT ON GLANCE
Hot, dry, and generally unpleasant. That was the popular sentiment among beings who had visited the suns blasted planet before the Salt Lord brought massive salt evaporation fields to Glance. Now, after years of industrial development and trillions of gallons of salt rich water shipped in from Leviathan, the sentiment has shifted to: Hot, mostly dry, and generally unpleasant.
The few clouds that do form in the higher altitudes come from the water dropped on Glance every day by the salt fuel industry. Most would agree that the singular pleasant thing about Glance are the spectacular sunsets. Having so much dust particulate in the air and more than one star can make for an amazing set of atmospheric fireworks.
There is very little life here outside of the skimmer towns, but some small desert creatures have evolved a meager existence in the barren sand flats and the rocky foothills. The sudden introduction of the Leviathan waters is upsetting the teetering balance of this ecosystem, but no one knows—or at least no one seems to care—what effect the industry will have in the long run.
The Salt Lord knows that the change to this ecosystem will ultimately alter Glance, and not all for the better. He is more concerned about the increasing cloud cover that will eventually reduce the efficiency of his evaporation ponds.
In fact, there are some who believe he would do anything, including sabotage his own salt factories, to ensure that if Glance falls it does not look like it was his fault. The assertion is that he instigated the revolt himself, using a plant to empower the skimmers and help them get them access to his palace and water vault. That way they can be blamed for the collapse of the salt industry and the galaxy, rather than waiting for the evaporation to falter.
It seems far-fetched to think the Salt Lord would go to such lengths to shirk blame, unless he is convinced blame is rapidly closing in. Perhaps the cloud cover is thicker or more damaging to operations than previously thought. Perhaps he is planting the seeds of a scapegoat now and hoping to hold off the final blow unless or until he needs it. But is he also planting the seeds of a new evaporation world? Does he know something the rest of us don't? If not, his actions will cause the galaxy to fall, and it won't matter who anyone thinks is to blame.",