Teralla

"…where peace reigns, and hatred has no home."

-Salenya Payne, Representative for Teralla in the Verdan Federation Senate, 11 AC

"Teralla is a shining jewel, but a fragile one. We cannot sit back and rely on our friends to shield us, however steadfast they may be. We must stand together and fight for our lives and our homes!"

-Kearo Mohai, Grand Admiral of the Federation Defense Fleet, 147 AC

Teralla (also known as Delos, Eileithiya, Taro Nor, or Verda f-A) is a class-M Superhabitable Temperate Terra found in the Silky Way's Ervo Sector within the Verda System. It is one of the capitals of the Vernarcan Federation, the center of the political subdivision of the Verdan Federation within, and the homeworld of the Alorath and Kesstra species. After the founding of the Vernarcan Federation, Teralla was made one of the prototypes for its planetary classification, alongside Campura. The planet exists in a binary configuration with the marginally smaller planet Esera, and the two have a single medium-sized moon, Leno, orbiting at a distance. Most of the planetary surface is covered in liquid water, a feature naturally quite uncommon without sapient intervention, and it is one of the few planets known to possess active plate tectonics.

In 198 BC, with the last nations joining, the planet finally unified under the government of the United Nations of Teralla. A founding member of the Verdan Federation in 131 BC and later the Vernarcan Federation in 1 BC, Teralla became one of the most important worlds in known space, with strategic importance on par with or arguably just above planets like Varbudos, Campura, Darossa, or New Tarash. By the second century, Teralla's population included minorities of dozens of sapient species, including Kuna'uashi, Tarasze, and Eanai. Over six trillion people call the planet home across every continent and even within the oceans. The office of the Vernarcan Federation president is located on Teralla, as well as the headquarters of the Federation Space Force.

Through its history, the planet has been targeted by a variety of adversarial powers including the Tyran Empire in 5 AC, the Simiri Swarm in 66, the Alliance of Five on several occasions, and the Void during the final days of the War of the Broken Bow.

Natural History

Formation

Teralla, like the rest of the Verda System, is dated to approximately 1.93 billion years ago. By 1.91 Ga, the primordial Teralla (a somewhat larger world) had coalesced out of a large swathe of planetesimals and all the dust it could grab out of the dissipating disk. A collection of small moons quickly formed from the dust and gases surrounding it, but this process was interrupted by the impact of Ilita a couple million years later.

Ilita was a large planet similar in size to the original Praxis. Its impact destroyed the proto-Teralla outright, transforming it into a synestia and causing its very rapid rotation to spin off a massive chunk which would later form Esera. After the two worlds recoalesced, alongside the comparatively miniscule Leno, their surfaces gradually began to cool.

Neither of these worlds were anything close to habitable to anyone but the Thelsans. Between 1.9 and 1.7 Ga, a massive rate of asteroid impacts in what is now known as the Late Heavy Bombardment caused drastic changes to the surface geology of all three worlds, bringing substantial amounts of water ice from the far reaches of the system. This created substantial oceans on both Teralla and Esera, and probably Leno as well prior to the loss of its atmosphere.

The early atmosphere of Teralla, left behind after the primordial hydrogen and helium was stripped by Verda's ignition, was formed alongside the first oceans by a spate of volcanic activity releasing various gases onto the surface. Water vapor condensed into the oceans as the planet cooled enough to allow that, presumably helped along by water and ice delivered by the Late Heavy Bombardment.

During this time, Verda had less that 90% of its current luminosity, and only the copious volumes of greenhouse gases expelled from ancient Teralla's volcanic arcs prevented the oceans from freezing completely.

Origin of Life and Evolution

The first self-replicating molecules, the precursors to what is now considered to be life, were created in random chemical reactions in hot springs and tidal pools around 1.7 billion years ago almost the moment that water appeared on the planetary surface. Around half a billion years after this, the evolution of photosynthesis triggered an explosion in biodiversity as life began to tap the energy of Verda's light. This process also created an enormous amount of molecular oxygen, which accumulated in the atmosphere and formed the ozone layer. This finally made complex life above the water possible.

Around a billion years ago, shortly before the emergence of eukaryotic cells, the Qomarat Empire's territory included Teralla. It is believed that they may have inhabited Teralla briefly, and accidental panspermia from this inhabitation likely introduced the precursors to the mitochondria. While the creation of the Losekran Morphogenic Virus by the Ancient Builders of Nalaren quickly drove the Qomarat away from this region of space, this effect indelibly affected the history of Teralla.

Around this time, eukaryotes came into being when small cells entered symbiotic relationships with larger ones, eventually merging into a single organism. This occurred several times and paved the way to specialization, making multicellular life feasible as different parts of colonies started to do different things. With the ozone layer shielding the planet from harmful radiation and these new advances making complex life easier to sustain, life proliferated across Teralla's surface.

Sharp drops in greenhouse gases like CO2 after the proliferation of photosynthesis almost destroyed complex life on Teralla, covering much of the ocean surface in thick layers of ice. This era forced life to adapt to hardship, diversifying it and eventually triggering an explosion of diversity by the name of the Kodoban Explosion around 521 million years ago after the ice cleared. Multicellular life-forms abruptly went from the occasional sponge or sessile disk glued to a rock to an enormous variety of species across the oceans of Teralla, increasing the number of species by at least two orders of magnitude. While it was quickly followed by a mass extinction from the Nakaran Supernova around 480 million years ago, Teralla still came out with an enormous increase in biodiversity.

Just when life came onto land, it was almost completely wiped off the planet by a massive asteroid impact comparable in size to Salidar, creating an enormous ringed crater structure, the Iavath Crater, still visible from space today as the planet's most distinctive feature. This impact constituted the greatest mass extinction in the history of Teralla, with the extinction of almost 70% of biological families, 89% of genera, and over 90% of marine and terrestrial species.

For some time after the impact, the surviving species were all considered endangered, and only two thirds of them or so actually regained some semblance of their original numbers. While other mass extinctions occurred, including the impacts of a string of small asteroids and flood basalt eruptions across what is now Mesa Obsidian, none would ever reach this level of destruction again.

When most large mammals were killed off by those flood basalt eruptions, other branches of the tree of life, particularly avians, had the opportunity to diversify out of the "small creature that hides and gets eaten" niche, and evolve into an enormous variety of species. Soon, one genus of avians began to move towards carnivorous diets, giving them the energy to support a more powerful brain and paving the way for sapience.

Recorded History

Evolution of the Kesstra and Alorath

The ancestors of the Kesstra and the Alorath branched off from the Terallan avian lineage around seven million years ago. They began to use primitive stone tools roughly four million years later, spreading across the world and defining the beginning of the paleolithic era.

A 3.1 million year old specimen found in the desert outside of New Alival marks the earliest record of genus Alor, which branched into many species of archaic sapients, including the proto-Kesstra, Vasser, Denetha, and many other less populous examples. Even between greatly distant lineages, hybridization could occur, and genes of Kesstra and Vasser origin can be found in the majority of modern Alorath. Likewise, the proto-Alorath genome is fairly well-represented among the modern Kesstra.

Anatomically modern Kesstra first emerged as its own species in the far west of Mesa Obsidian, with major cave sites on the shore just across from the modern city of Delphis. The proto-Alorath branched off around the same time, migrating to the mountainous subcontinent of Hervidar. Kesstra continued to spread across the world, developing culturally with jewelry, funerary practices, projectile weapons, and seafaring technology arising by ~1,075,000 BC. Early artistic expression from them dates to this period as well, and at least one branch of the Alorath ended up merging fully into the dominant Kesstra population.

As the Kesstra spread across all corners of the world, they likely diversified. While most of modern Kesstra are descended from only a few thousand survivors of the Edron holocaust, hints of all of these groups can be found blended together. The warming climate forced the Denetha to migrate north, and they had died out before the wavefront of Kesstra expansion even reached their territories. The Vasser interbred so thoroughly that a distinction no longer made sense. The Alorath, by virtue of their separation by dangerous seas from the continents surrounding them and a non-interference policy later developed by the civilization as it advanced, maintained an independent genetic line throughout the Kesstra's presence on the planet.

Kesstra Civilization

Roughly 12,000 years before the fall, several independent Kesstra groups developed agriculture around the same time, ending millennia of hunter-gatherer dominance over the planet. The exact way in which this occurred has since been lost, but it rapidly proliferated through the Kesstra populations along various trade lines. After the food supply increased across the world, the population spiked. The earliest cities on the planet appeared in the far east of Keldun, with the eastern end of Mesa Obsidian following. The marshland cities of the ancient Irkre delta, today left high and dry by changes in the river's course, became the earliest unified civilization in Terallan history.

Writing is presumed to have developed shortly afterwards, but no samples from this era survive. The largest pre-technological cities of the Age of the Kesstra were found on islands, such as the seafaring empire centered on Windbreak Island in the south. Ever after, the center of Kesstra civilization could be found on the water. Various urban societies from the coasts of Keldun to what anyone else would call extremely remote islands grew rich off of trade, creating globe-spanning commercial networks. As the centuries passed, the dependence of Kesstra civilization upon the sea never waned. Ships got faster, ports got bigger, and trade networks expanded.

350 years before the fall, the first Kesstra orbital launch took place, beginning the spread of their civilization beyond their homeworld. Large-scale colonies were established around the inland seas of Esera and the slowly melting Okoro over the next century. Contact with the Silik of Sulpha brought technological exchange between the two races. Soon after, an initiative to terraform the desertified moons of Shirus and Doresyl began, estimated to last a few hundred years before the worlds would be self-sustainably habitable.

Shortly after the first interstellar missions by both species, the Kesstra and Silik fell into war over mining rights on the inner worlds of Moa and Praxis. The Vernarca Nebula was a quieter, emptier place during this time, and neither of them had made contact with any other species. With the impracticality of interstellar travel to both the Kesstra and Silik civilizations, they soon began to fight over high-value resources in the inner system planets of Moa and Praxis. Over the years, the two civilizations slowly ground each other down, with the various nations of both species constantly fighting over quibbles compared to what was coming.

The age of grinding, wasteful, pointless conflict came to an abrupt end when the first attacks of the Edrons came on the outer colonies at Taozora. The two species banded together in the face of the common enemy, rebuilding their hastily constructed war fleets to combat their implacable robotic foes. The Edron War was also used as a pretext to institute martial law across much of Kesstra civilization including large parts of Teralla, giving the unified military control over the governments of those territories.

The Fall

The final stage of the Edron War, one of the most well-documented parts of ancient Kesstra history, began when the traitorous Ovion Cabal of Esera revealed the existence of an accidental backdoor into the programming of the partially automated war fleets in exchange for leadership positions in a colonial government there. But the Edrons had no interest in subjugation or colonization of the peoples living in the Verda System, as exemplified by the near-extinction of the Moco, Zemim, and other species of the ancient Vernarca Nebula. The fleet was almost immediately rendered defenseless and inert, and quickly destroyed. The few ships which survived were all either in deep space or under refit.

Following the defeat of the Kesstra-Silik Combined Defense Fleets, the Edrons wrought devastation across the now-defenseless homeworlds of the two species. While the pre-civilization proto-Alorath lived away from most of civilization and were spared the destruction, the population centers of Teralla were destroyed with extreme prejudice. The presumed planetary capital at Bikran Island was nuked so hard that hints of radiation can still be detected today, over a million years later. The few survivors of the initial strikes were mostly hunted down by Edron patrols over the next months. The few who either escaped that fate went on to join the AWS Ziris and Karaman on their century-long flight, eventually losing their degraded technology and settling at Riojan, but the Kesstra had disappeared from their homeworld.

Rise of the Alorath

After the Edron holocaust and the disappearance of the Kesstra civilization, the already thinly spread Alorath population was reduced to just a few thousand individuals across the mountains of Hervidar. Due to the one-off nature of the catastrophe, however, the Alorath population rapidly began to rebound. The Kesstra great cities were highly irradiated craters or haunted by Edron kill patrols, and less than a thousand managed to escape this fate without the help of the Ziris and Karaman's exodus. Archaeological studies have confirmed that these few survivors either died of exposure, established small communities which later died out for various reasons, or made their way to Hervidar and merged with one of the surviving proto-Alorath communities. Some measure of Kesstra DNA can be found in almost all modern Alorath.

With the integration of the Kesstra, the modern Alorath had emerged as the species it is recognizable as today in the north of Hervidar. After this breakthrough, the species continued to develop in their mountainous homelands, with jewelry, projectile weapons and funerary practices becoming established among them c. ~50,000 BC. Shortly afterwards, the Alorath began to spread beyond Hervidar for the first time through the use of a smattering of small islands extending to the southwest of the lands of Hervidar. By 11,000 BC, the Alorath had reached all easily accessible land on the planet. Some began to explore the vast oceans beyond the slowly crumbling supercontinent, with the widespread Tolisal culture spreading across much of the far-scattered islands of the global ocean just like the ancient Kesstra once did. By "sheer coincidence", the expansion of the Alorath coincided with the extinction of a number of species.

Return of Civilization

Roughly 12,000 years ago, the nuclear winter-intensified ice age of the last several million years finally came to an end. The retreat of the polar ice back to Kesstra-age levels resulted in a warmer, more hospitable climate across much of the planet. By 11,000 BC, the Alorath had migrated to the majority of the accessible land of Teralla, with many groups making the treacherous journey across the Rathyl Sea by flight. Around this time, many groups of people began to independently develop agriculture once again, picking up unaware the seeds of the long-abandoned ancient Kesstra cultivars.

After these improvements in food supply took place across the planet, the population blossomed. Early proto-cities took shape a in the Capelbrar Mountains in the western crater rim, the Alival Twin Rivers, and the Irkre Delta in the far east. Herding societies developed on the high steppes and other places not quite fertile enough to farm around the same time, forming a number of nomadic nations which would come into conflict with the farmers throughout history. Only a very few retained their hunter-gatherer lifestyle after this point, like the Isuat nomads of the far north and various tribes in the rainforests of Kibral and Camarat.

The first true civilizations since the fall of the Kesstra arose around 6,000 BC, from the terraced peaks and hanging cliff-cities of Capelbrar to the desert-marsh kingdoms of the Twin Rivers of Alival. These great civilizations would be followed by the Illac Valley Civilization in the east of Mesa Obsidian, Kemar on south coast of the Iavath Sea, and the return of true civilization to the now-displaced Irkre Delta. All of these societies developed writing systems which evolved from methods of recordkeeping, allowing Alorath recorded history to truly begin. Central governments formed in these civilizations, as did distinct cultures and religions different to their neighbors and those who came before. Most early writing systems, starting as pictures inscribed in whatever they had available, became more simplified and abstract over time as the perennial tendency of sapient life to rush everything reared its head.

With civilizations comes trade networks, and these were facilitated by a number of things from walking or flying from place to place between strategically located camps to taking to the seas for long journeys across the continent. Armies were able to move faster with all their equipment after the domestication of the achwa. These developments allowed urban societies across the Terallan supercontinent to grow fat off of trade, exchanging stuff they had for stuff they didn't and creating widespread commercial connections. Civilization soon upgraded from cities to larger-scale states, with the Illac Valley civilization unifying into a powerful yet peaceful empire in the 59th century BC. The empires of Minrak and Alaita arose in the crater rim mountains near the receding power of Capelbrar around 5,700 BC. The warring city states of the Irkre Delta were unified into the first dynasty of Rono under the first king Hakoda, extending all the way up the Irkre river towards the mountains.

Civilization was not restricted to these regions, as other cultures arose across the world including the Eressilan Culture in the Neridian Islands c. 6100 BC and the Kahl in Hervidar c. 5,300. The Kahl were one of the first to develop ironworking, completely skipping the traditional bronze age that most civilizations underwent, and the Eressilan spread across numerous islands in the global ocean during their time before fragmenting into numerous disconnected societies.

These civilizations and their descendants evolved smoothly through the centuries until a mysterious event known as the Bronze Catastrophe, c. 2,800 BC. In this period, every civilization of Mesa Obsidian fell silent almost at once for suspiciously similar reasons. The Neo-Minrak Empire in the west avoided the collapse due to its isolation, but the others fell prey to a lethal combination of mounting economic pressures, invasions from nomadic groups, and failing crop yields across the continent. Much of the world briefly returned to the age of city-states, but with this clearing of the old players from the board allowed the age of empires to begin in earnest with the first major conquerors.

The Neo-Minrak Empire would fall just a few short decades later after a set of coups and independence movements fractured it into smaller pieces, sounding the end of the first age of Alorath civilizations. But it and its ilk would be succeeded by ever greater nations, from the Alizin Empire in southeast Ragana to the successors of the Irkre Delta city-states. As time passed, technology advanced and the age of empires continued. The nations of Keldun soon established colonies across the globe, conquering much of Mesa Obsidian by 950 BC in what was known as the Great Scramble. During this era, highly discriminatory beliefs arose in those societies, seeing the brighter-feathered peoples of the equatorial regions as inferior due to their distance from the northern kingdom of the gods or whatever. The descendants of the Eressilan established a great oceangoing empire extending well into the southern hemisphere, settling the islands of Kastri in earnest for the first time in Alorath history.

Magnetic Realignment and the Second Space Age

In 650 BC, Teralla's magnetic field began to diminish in strength. People started to spout conspiracy theories about the global elite killing those they deemed unworthy, or simply end-times doomerism, but life continued on as normal except with prettier light shows at night. Around this time, the nations of Lu and Durna in Keldun began to evolve in opposite economic directions. This angered a lot of people and was widely regarded as a bad move, as it began a Cold War which expanded to include most of Teralla. Seeing Durna establish a socialist economic system caused Lu to go out of its way to sabotage any other such system wherever it tried to arise and start spewing propaganda to make the very concept look completely impossible to both its own populace and that of its allies and pawns.

Despite its deeply unfavorable reputation to modern historians, capitalist-era Durna did contribute one very important thing to Terallan history. The first orbiting probe, Kusa, was launched in 528 BC from the eastern coast into an inclined orbit around the planet, and while this probe did little beyond temperature measurements, it was a monumental achievement for the Alorath people and set the zero point for the global calendar for centuries afterwards. Even though the technology was originally developed to lob world-ending weapons across the planet at each other, this use would be remembered long after the fear of nuclear hellfire had faded from memory.

As all this was happening, the space race continued. Lu managed to beat Durna to the punch in delivering manned payloads into orbit, and Durna returned to the lead with the first probe landing on Esera. The discovery that Esera was much less habitable than it looked put a bit of a damper on the space race's momentum, but the regions around the separated oceans seemed to be temperate enough to establish some form of settlement in. Thus, Lu and Durna both managed to land colonists on the planet around 495 BC. Shortly afterward, Tivala bootstrapped its own space program into existence from retired military equipment from Durna, helped out by its comparatively equatorial position near eastern tip of Mesa Obsidian, and Dromidus followed suit just a few hundred kilometers east.

Meanwhile, the two great powers started pitting smaller nations against each other in a series of proxy wars. This continued for the next 40 years until the Durnese Revolution in 481 brought about the end of oligarchic corporate control. At the same time, various right-wing governments supported by those oligarchs began to collapse, and even Lu started to fragment despite ostensibly "winning" the cold war. Newly elected President Zeri Mao is agreed to have gone too far in the concept of openness and transparency, and ironically Durna was the only one of the feuding pair to survive as a singular nation after the collapse of oligarchic corporate power there.

Leno remained untouched for the next fifty years. In a surprise upset, Dromidus of all nations was the first space program to do anything at all with the moon, achieving the first flyby, orbit, landing, and manned flyby in the same five-year period. At the same time, Durna's oligarchic government was collapsing in on itself and Lu was busy trying and failing to launch interplanetary probes around Esera to reach Jevethra. Lu finished its collapse in 466 as well, splitting into seventeen states across northwestern Keldun.

Leaving the Cradle

The 430s saw the beginning of a concerted effort by the nations of Teralla to establish colonies on its sister world of Esera. Only a few thousand kilometers away, it was tantalizingly close and yet so far. The colonies of the age of sail, while being much more morally questionable, at least had the benefit of being on the same planet and could trade with natives. Esera had no natives. The last of the Kesstra left behind after the Fall had died eons before. At the same time, manned explorations of Vijal, Rellis, and the moons of Jevethra were taking place to see if any of them were as suitable for colonization as the homeworld and its companion.

While the greatest excesses of hegemonic capitalism had been curbed with the Durnese Revolution, it was still a problem across much of the planet. Its continued presence as well as a general sense of apathy amongst the populace held back the nations of Teralla from actually dealing with the rising environmental problems of the era, including rapid sea level rise, pollution, and planetary warming. The crewed Epicco Trek mission to Jevethra revealed nothing as temperate as Teralla or even Esera, and so the Alorath knew that there was nowhere to go if their planet began to burn.

While the first official Eseran colonies were established in 495, these were minuscule projects requiring constant resupply from the homeworld. The collapse of Lu in 466 resulted in its colony of 170 people being cut off completely from Teralla, ironically resulting in the first self-sufficient offworld colony as they scrambled to establish farming plots in the surprisingly fertile dirt surrounding the site. Durna's colony of Maternica on the Sea of Ringol followed suit and also began to rapidly expand after the Durnese Revolution, reaching over 5,450 people by 450 BC.

The establishment of self-sustaining colonies on Esera gave the people of Teralla hope for their own world, and progress began to be made in the endeavour of cleaning the land, sea and sky. Genetically engineered variants of phytoplankton were propagated to rapidly seal carbon dioxide back into the ground, and great fleets of ships set sail on the oceans to cleanse them of the garbage so wantonly dumped into it by the nations of the past.

Meanwhile, the scientific bases on Okoro, Shirus, Rellis, and Doresyl quickly blossomed into self-sustaining colonies by ~350 BC. Smaller installations cropped up across much of the inner Verda System, spreading the Alorath farther than ever before. As with the empires of the Age of the Sea, distant colonies rarely supported control from afar, exerting this control grew more and more difficult for those remaining on the homeworld. One year after President Amari Sirka's election on a platform involving self-governance for Teralla's offworld colonies, they were killed over Doresyl in a catastrophic failure of their ship's fusion reactor in early 349 BC.

First Terallan Civil War

Sirka's successor, Alis Wasser, was seen by many as a non-entity, but these people would soon be proven extremely wrong. Their inaugural speech back in Delphis spoke of creating the peaceful world which Amari was working for, only for it to be followed by increasing erosion of sentient rights and the spreading of propaganda framing the colonial self-determination movements as efforts to undermine Teralla itself and take control. Freedom of the press was slowly undermined as the largest news networks quietly fell under control of those loyal to President Alis. The president also began the construction of the first purpose-built military starships in shipyards near Leno, claiming to the public that they were something much more benign.

Meanwhile, some of Alis' cabinet and the top generals in the United Teralla military undertook a secret effort to uncover the circumstances of President Amari's death, many of them suspecting that Alis was responsible. Unfortunately, the President was made aware of this by sheer accident, at which point they had General Romos arrested on charges of (completely unexplained to the public) treason. The minor Kellelai Belt colony at 17 Sirka's dome was sabotaged and the colony suffered catastrophic decompression, which President Alis promptly blamed on rebels and declared martial law throughout Teralla and its colonies. An executive order dissolved the Hall of Voices shortly after, when too many of its members spoke out against these actions.

Ironically, Alis' attempt to prevent the impending breakaway of the outer colonies merely gave them the impetus to fast-track their plans. General Daro, one of the imprisoned Romos' compatriots, attempted to stage a counterinsurgency and take down the Mad President. While he failed, he successfully fled into the Terallan countryside with several divisions of the armed forces loyal to him, turning the civil war into a ground conflict as well. During this era, transit times between Teralla and interplanetary targets were still measured in weeks and effective stealth technology would not be seen for centuries, so the outer colonies had plenty of time to prepare for the impending attack.

It was not enough. Alis' forces captured the most populous regions of the Okoro and Salidar colonies and declared martial law there, using it as a base from which to harass the stronger Shirus colony. Doresyl put up a much more impressive fight, but found itself under siege for some time. During the Salidar takeover, the colonies suffered heavy bombardment from Alis' fleet, galvanizing the colonies on Rellis and in the asteroid belt to fight against the new violence of the homeworld. With the highly valuable resources of the belt put towards its own defense, it became much more difficult for Teralla to continue the fight beyond where it was already, turning the First Terallan Civil War into a standoff for some time. Doresyl remained under crushing siege for the next two years.

The war reached a climax when Durna, a state on the surface of Teralla itself, broke away from the Terallan Union with the help of General Daro's counterinsurgent army. Alis' position rapidly grew weaker and weaker, as their attempts to retake the colonies were foiled by pre-placed defense installations in the space surrounding them. But the situation on Okoro, Doresyl and Salidar steadily worsened as the President's vise tightened. A massacre of protestors on Okoro worsened the president's public image in the still-independent worlds of the Verda System, but was swiftly covered up by the Terallan propaganda mills. With the weight of Durna and later other nations against the ailing Terallan Union, President Alis' regime began to crumble. Mass revolts on occupied Salidar and deep-range attacks on the fleet besieging Doresyl further damaged their position.

Age of Isolation

Verdan Federation Era

Early Vernarcan Federation

Parasitic Infiltration and the Simiri Swarm

Modern Era and the War of the Broken Bow

Natural Future

Without intelligent intervention, Teralla's future will of course be tied to its parent star, Verda. Stellar luminosity will increase as it has throughout history, reaching ~110% its current value within four billion years. Due to Verda's size and young age, it has around fourteen billion years left in its life, meaning that Teralla's habitability will likely remain for eons to come. However, around seven billion years from now, Verda will be 40% brighter than it is today, raising the average surface temperature substantially.

This point is unfortunately moot, as the slow tidal braking caused by Verda's gravity on Teralla's substantial tidal bulge slowly decelerates the planet's rotation, which slowly pulls back on Esera, which slowly lowers the distance between the two planets, eventually resulting in the two crashing back into each other around eight billion years from now. This impact, larger even than the one which initially created Esera, would almost certainly destroy both planets and create a synestia, which would eventually coalesce into Teralla version three. Teralla version three would likely never cool enough to retain water oceans, and remain an uninhabitable wasteland until Verda's expansion incinerates it.

Physical Characteristics

Surface

Like most terrestrial worlds, Teralla's surface is composed of a silicate crust of material. This crust ranges from six to fifty kilometers thick, varying in composition by age. Most of the planetary surface is covered in ocean water, with the global oceans constituting roughly 84% of Teralla's surface area. Indeed, in the planet's early history it may have covered it completely. The world ocean is generally divided between the greater "world ocean" and two smaller seas: the Iavath Sea, within the enormous crater left by the greatest mass extinction, and the Rathyl Sea centered on the islands of Hervidar, forming as the planet's supercontinent breaks up. There are also a great number of smaller seas as well as hydrologically distinct freshwater lake and river systems.

The ocean flows atop Teralla's oceanic crust, a much thinner portion of the crust composed primarily of basaltic rock due to its formation method. This crust is peppered with a great number of unique features, including vast abyssal plains, submarine mountains, oceanic trenches, and a globe-spanning mid-ocean ridge system creating new crust and driving tectonic activity. While the oceans have been mostly frozen over at several points in the distant past, a natural ice age has not taken place for over twenty million years. While the megastructures assembled by the old Verdan Federation remain in place, ice ages are unlikely to happen in the future, either.

Teralla's land surface makes up roughly 16% of the planet's surface area. The vast majority of this is taken up by the three successors of the newly broken up supercontinent: Keldun, Ragana, and Mesa Obsidian in order of smallest to largest. Other subcontinents exist, including the Hervidar "islands" at the center of the rift between the three continents, and the remote Kastri. The terrain of Teralla's landscape varies just as much as it does beneath the sea, from vast mountains which dominate the fractured supercontinent to lush and not-so-lush plains. The elevation from sea level varies from -380 m in Pagayin Canyon to the dizzying heights of Mount Kilane (11,342.5 m) at the center of the Iavath Crater. Beneath the sea, depths reach below 23 kilometers in the rarest and deepest of trenches.

Land may be covered by surface water in lakes, transient snow in polar regions, ice in high mountain ranges, artificial structures, or the abundant vegetation blanketing much of the planet's landscape. Most of the planet's land is covered in lush, pink-purple vegetation of a huge variety of species.

Tectonic Activity

Like most terrestrial planets, Teralla's crust is mostly composed of a mechanically rigid outer layer referred to as the lithosphere, broken into a multitude of tectonic plates, rigid segments which move relative to each other over the liquid mantle.

As these plates move across the planet, oceanic crust is subducted beneath the leading edges of the plates they intersect with at convergent boundaries, and upwelling of mantle material solidifies to create new crust at divergent boundaries as two plates move apart. Due to this recycling system, most of the ocean floor is less than 150 million years old, with the oldest just making it over 300 off the western coast of the Iavath Crater. This makes it distinct from continental crust, which is much thicker and can be up to 1.8 billion years old.

The eight major plates on Teralla are the Wonak, South Polar, Mesa Obsidian, Kastri-Taru, Ragana, Keldun, Siril, and Calvinsar plates. Other notable plates include the South Hervidar Plate, Alival Plate, Sarabin Plate, the Elosha Plate off the eastern coast of Keldun, and the Rosor Plate in the southern ocean. The Kastri and Taru plates fused together between 20 and 25 Ma. The fastest moving plates are the oceanic plates due to their lesser thickness and therefore mass, with the Sarabin plate advancing at a rate of 85 mm/a and the Wonak plate moving 61-73 mm/a. At the other extreme, the Mesa Obsidian plate moves at a typical rate of approximately 8.5 mm/a.

Internal Structure

Like all planets, Teralla's interior can be split into stratified layers by chemical or physical properties. The outermost layer is a very thin but physically and chemically distinct silicate crust, floating around on the least viscous layer of the definitely not solid trust me mantle. Beneath the mantle can be found a completely liquid molten nickel-iron core, beginning roughly 5200 km beneath the surface, atop a miniscule solid inner core. This inner core is rotating slightly faster than the rest of the planet, advancing by 1.2 degrees per year. The inner core is so dense and compressed by the weight of the rest of Teralla that there is almost as much downward gravity at the inner edge of the outer core as there is on the planetary surface.

Chemical Composition

Teralla is composed primarily of silicon, oxygen, iron, and magnesium, with the remainder consisting of traces of every other natural element. The most common such trace elements are sulfur, nickel, calcium, and aluminum, with these eight elements making up 97.9% of the planet's mass. Gravitational and chemical separation led to most of the denser elements, like iron and nickel as well as the siderophile elements that preferentially bonded with them, to be pulled into the core. The great majority of Teralla's crust is made up of oxide compounds of a wide variety of elements, mostly containing silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, or sodium.

Internal Heat

Teralla's substantial budget of internal heat is produced mostly by radioactive decay. Common heat-producing isotopes within Teralla's structure include potassium-40, which produces the atmosphere's Argon in its decay, uranium-238, and thorium-232. The planet's core may be up to 7,000º C, hotter than the surface of the sun, and with a pressure of up to 400 billion pascals. Early in Teralla's history before the decay of the short-half-life isotopes, the planet's internal heat production was much higher than it is today, allowing the oceans to remain liquid under the dimmer sun and increasing the rates of mantle convection and plate tectonics. This also allowed the creation of rare forms of igneous rock that rarely form today.

Magnetic Field

Unlike worlds like Sulpha, whose bare magnetic fields are stimulated by the interaction of the solar wind with the thick planetary atmosphere, Teralla's magnetic field is enormously powerful and generated by the molten outer core of the planet. The core is the site of an enormous dynamo process, taking the temperature gradient's inherent convective energy and converting it into electromagnetic fields. This field, a large dipole, is then amplified by both diffuse collections of metallic substances distributed through the planet's mantle and the similarly aligned field found within Esera. It thus extends far past Teralla and Esera's physical structure and well into deep space, reaching past the orbit of Leno. The poles of the dipole are highly inclined and mostly static, with the south magnetic pole currently wobbling in the Iavath Sea.

Due to unpredictable convection in the core and the just-as-unpredictable interactions with the mantle metal distributions, the magnetic poles often drift around and periodically flip entirely, doing so a few times every million years or so. The most recent one in fact began less than 800 years ago, showering civilization with stunningly bright planetwide aurorae as the field reinitialized after the poles flipped. With cameras long in use, this period was well-recorded, and early Alorath spaceflight even saw it from above. The Sunset Gallery in Delphis, among a wide variety of museums, also plays host to a number of impressive paintings inspired by this period.

Solar wind pressure compresses the day side of Teralla's magnetosphere to roughly 30 planetary radii, and elongates the night side into a long tail. Due to the solar wind's "speed of sound" being slower than the actual velocity of the wind, a supersonic bow shock exists within the solar wind between Teralla-Esera and Verda.

Charged particles are also often pulled out of the solar wind and trapped within the field lines. This creates the plasmasphere, defined by low-energy particles following the magnetic field lines, and the Eltanin radiation belts, filled with high-energy particles with functionally random motion. Early scientists believed the Eltanin belts to be quickly lethal to anyone passing through them, but merely passing through them does surprisingly little and orbiting within them full time merely requires basic shielding to be implemented on the craft. For REAL radiation belts, go to the Katheria System.

During particularly high-power solar storms, charged particles can be deflected from the outer magnetosphere and pulled along field lines into the atmosphere over the magnetic poles. This ionizes some atoms in the upper atmosphere, creating bright aurorae over these regions. During particularly strong solar storms, this can be visible from over thirty percent of the planet's surface. The magnetic realignment period of 800 years ago led to low-intensity aurorae being detectible across the entire planet, due to the severely weakened magnetic field strength.

Continents

Teralla's surface houses three defined continents, Ragana, Mesa Obsidian, and Keldun, as well as several separate subcontinents and innumerable islands throughout its seas. Across these continents can be found a great many different landscapes from forests and plains to mountains and canyons and deserts. Thanks to this extremely varied geography, Teralla is renowned for its diversity.

Ragana

The westernmost and second largest of the three continents of Teralla, Ragana is dominated by the Iavath Crater, the planet's most distinctive feature by far. Due to the impact distorting the continental crust, much of Ragana is composed of rugged mountainous terrain, including the dizzying heights of Mount Kilane in the dead center of the great crater. Ragana's terrain encircles the Iavath Sea, formed by the crater, and is adjacent to Mesa Obsidian to the southeast and Hervidar to the east. Ragana's southern coast is also home to the equatorial city of Delphis, the capital of the planet, and some of the planet's oldest Alorath civilizations can be found here.

To the west of the massive Iavath crater ring and the sea which it encircles, much of the "original" continent can be found in the shape it held prior to the impact. These regions, while still quite hilly, are covered in much more consistent plant cover than the heights of the crater rim, and as such held much more consistent populations across history. The major arcologies of Suda, Lycon, Tri Cabek, and Elbiro can be found on this section of the continent, with their surroundings filled with wild tundra to savannah and temperate rainforest. The northeasternmost portion of Ragana is occupied by the Ican Archipelago, a group of large islands stretching towards the northern ice packs. Most of these islands are uninhabited, other than the descendants of the Isuat nomads who still retain their native ways of life.

Mesa Obsidian

Mesa Obsidian is the largest and most southerly of Teralla's major continents. Stretching nearly a third of the way around the planet, its climate is highly diverse. The western end is dominated by the the Kibral rainforest, surrounding a number of comparatively small rivers descending from the Obsidian Spine running down the continent's length. This region is the highest biodiversity on all of Teralla's land area, and is still home to a few uncontacted (at their request) tribes.

To the east of the Kibral rainforest lies the more mountainous lands of Camarat where the Obsidian Spine seemingly splits in two to form an endorheic basin and the driest region on Teralla. This land home to the ruins of ancient Alival, the endorheic Tristan desert, and the modern cities of Jessop, Dilrak, and Chazar. Camarat is to the west of the savannahs of Rirek, wetter on average than Camarat seemingly by happenstance. The far western shores of Mesa Obsidian are separated fro Keldun to the north by as little as 93 kilometers of ocean in the straits of Faletta, making this region key to the waterborne trade of the past.

Keldun

On the western side of the crumbling Terallan supercontinent, Keldun is a highly varied landmass stretching from the western tip of Mesa Obsidian north to the Ican Archipelago. As such, its borders contain the greatest variety of climate zones out of any of Teralla's continents. Keldun's western shore stands in the shadow of great mountains, formed by the continent's tectonic collision with the oceanic place to the northwest, with large river systes flowing across the foothills and plains towards the east and the Rathyl Sea. In the north, the Ican Archipelago is shared with Ragana.

Keldun is home to Dromidus and Durna, two of the the most historically relevant space-age Terallan nations. The original site of the legendary Repository of Learning lies on the southwestern peninsula just east of Highport, although the modern organization now operates in deep space. Also found within Keldun's bounds are the modern arcology cities of Angial, Oroch, Kern, Lynmor, and many others. Today, Keldun holds the highest population density across all of Teralla.

Hervidar

Hervidar is the smallest continent, formed by uplift as the three larger chunks of the Terallan supercontinent pulled apart from each other. Due to sea level rise and subsidence roughly 3 million years ago, some of the continent's lowlands have been submerged, creating the appearance of a massive chain of large, mountainous islands spanning much of the length of the Rathyl Sea. The home continent of the Alorath species, the mountainous landmasses are home to a number of climate zones along their length.

The continent of Hervidar extends from roughly 400 kilometers to the east of Delphis on a great arc, curving northward and coming to a stop 750 kilometers south of the Ican Archipelago. Its three largest landmasses, Elbreth, Fyu, and Holkaidra, collectively add up to roughly 6.1 million square kilometers, with the smaller island groups adding another half million to the continent's above-water surface area. It is home to the arcologies of Calist, Battersea, Kevana, and Bop.

Kastri

Uplifted hundreds of millions of years ago by the convergence of the Iavath Sea Impact's seismic waves, Kastri is the smallest continent of Teralla. As such, much of its landscape is split into a number of smaller chunks and covered in various rugged terrain, marred by canyons and massive ridgelines. This terrain is filled with numerous specially adapted plants and animals, including the famous cloud forests of the continent. Kastri is a classical example of "weird terrain" found on the antipodes of massive craters elsewhere in the solar system and universe.

Due to its distance from the big four continents, Kastri has remarkable biodiversity and uniqueness in its flora and fauna, with a number of 'megafauna' species still residing in its echoing crags. Due to the continent's noncontiguous nature and the presence of numerous islands in its near and far surroundings, the official boundaries of the continent have been debated for much of its history. For now, the label of Kastri applies to the seven main landmasses as well as the islands of Kar Sintri, Darisan, and the Silanesian isles.

Oceans

These continents are separated by three distinct oceans. The largest by far, known simply as the World Ocean due to a lack of consensus, makes up ~80% of Teralla's ocean water. The Iavath Sea is surrounded by the rim of the Iavath Crater, and the Rathyl Sea is slowly expanding as the three continents move apart. Despite being underwater, the landforms beneath the seas are just as diverse as those exposed to the air.

World Ocean

The world ocean makes up roughly 90% of Teralla's ocean surface area and surrounds most of the planet. With its depth reaching up to twenty-three kilometers below the waves, it went almost entirely unexplored for most of history and only properly received a survey during oceanic colonization efforts. Notable islands within the World Ocean include the Waimi Island chain and the lonely Windbreak Isle in the south, as well as the islands of Neridian to the east of Keldun, Amarnus near the equator, and the Line Islands in the middle of nowhere.

Iavath Sea

The Iavath Sea is almost unique in known space, formed directly by a supermassive asteroid impact on Teralla carving a massive mountain ring into the side of Ragana. The Iavath impact site remains the planet's most recognizable feature from space, and is home to the island of Kilane in the dead center and very little else.

Rathyl Sea

Unlike the other two planetary oceans, the Rathyl Sea is relatively new on a geological timescale. The sea began to form 75 million years ago as the Terallan supercontinent began to break apart, and is still almost completely cut off save the Straits of Faletta to the east, the Delphis Passage to the west, and the various pathways through the Ican Archipelago to the north. The sea is centered upon the islands/continent of Hervidar, and is relatively shallow and filled with numerous islands.

Orbit and Rotation

As a member of a binary planet pair, Teralla's orbit and rotation are inextricably tied to its sister world of Esera. Teralla exists in a binary configuration with the planet, with the two orbiting 79,113 km apart, and as such is heavily affected by Esera's presence. The two planets are in a state of double tidal lock, giving both a rotation period of 2.015 standard days and fixing them in each other's skies. The tidal lock also fixes Teralla's axial tilt at 49º, equal to the inclination of the Teralla-Esera binary orbit.

The Teralla-Esera binary orbits Verda at a distance of 0.824 AU once every 281 3/4 standard days, making the combined pair the fifth and sixth (or fourth and fifth, depending on where you list Jevethra) planets of the Primary Verda System and a part of the Middle Solar System extending from Jevethra/Teralla/Esera to the Kellelai Belt. The pair orbits at the fifth lagrange point of the Verda-Jevethra dynamical system, always 60 degrees behind the giant planet in its orbit.

The Teralla-Esera pair has a sphere of influence extending roughly 1.9 million km away from the barycenter, which marks the largest distance where an object can be gravitationally bound to them.

Surroundings

Teralla's sphere of influence is filled with a wide variety of objects, all the way down to the smallest of satellites. The most notable objects within its space are its binary companion Esera and major moon Leno.

Esera

Teralla is unique in the Primary Verda System for its comically oversized traveling companion, its sister world of Esera. The two worlds are close enough in mass to prevent the stabilization of the lagrange points and pull their center of mass above the surface of Teralla. They are both habitable, although to varying degrees. One or both worlds may have been initially populated via panspermia, and scientists have compelling arguments for the origin of life in the Verda System being on either planet, although other options are equally compelling.

Esera was created after the proto-Teralla suffered an enormous impact, destroying the planet's structure and creating a synestia, from which the modern Teralla and Esera were formed. It captured enough mass to become a binary companion, setting it apart from most results of such impact events. Unlike its companion, Esera is generally extremely dry, with only 37% of its surface covered in water, and is the archetypical "habitable desert world".

Both worlds can see the other hanging motionless in the sky, which inspired both the Alorath and Kesstra before them to reach for the stars.

Leno

The second largest object in the vicinity of Teralla, Leno was the first object to unambiguously orbit Teralla, rather than form a binary relationship. It is not large in major moon terms, at 1030 km in radius, but it is clearly visible in the skies of both its parent planets. Leno's surface is pocked with craters and canyons, and its radius means that it more than covers Verda's disk on the common occasions when its shadow crosses Teralla or Esera.

Leno's surface supports a population of several billion in domed and underground cities across the lunar landscape, including a large metropolis amidst the shadowed icy craters of the southern pole. The moon orbits Teralla and Esera once every 23 days, and its tidal lock and stark rugged features create some impressive views of the system near its surface.

Orbital Infrastructure

A wide variety of artificial structures can be found in orbit around Teralla, including a massive number of habitat stations of varying sizes and their associated surrounding infrastructure. Most notable is a set of artificial orbital rings, from which "elevator" travel between the surface and low orbit is possible. A similar set of structures exists around Esera, and the two are linked with a set of space elevator cables made possible by the double tidal lock configuration they orbit in.

In the space beyond Teralla and Esera's binary dance, there lies a large array of self-guided, miniscule mirrors, carefully programmed to ensure a stable climate on both planets, focusing more light on areas which need more energy, and decreasing light input in areas that need less.

Atmosphere

Teralla is one of two worlds in the Verda System to possess a habitable, oxygenated, and hydrated atmosphere without artificial intervention. At sea level, Teralla's atmospheric pressure is approximately 1.2 atm or 121.59 kpa with a scale height of approximately eleven kilometers. The atmosphere is composed primarily of nitrogen, oxygen, and argon, with everything else except water vapor making up less than a tenth of a percent of the atmospheric composition. Water vapor varies chaotically between 0 and 4%, over space and time, with an average of around 1%. This creates clouds covering around 2/3 of the planetary surface, with the oceans generating the majority of them.

The atmosphere of Teralla has been greatly affected by its biosphere, like most lifebearing worlds. The advent of photosynthesis triggered the replacement of the original, toxic volcanic gas atmosphere with an oxygen/nitrogen dominated air, and enabled the rise of aerobic organisms and the formation of the ozone layer. This layer blocks the vast majority of ultraviolet radiation from hitting the surface.

Teralla's atmospheric composition also creates a notable greenhouse effect, where a variety of trace gases are opaque to infrared light and prevent it from escaping from the surface into space. This effect, caused by a combination of the variable water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases, raises the average surface temperature from a frigid -20º C to the current 16. Were this not in effect, complex life would likely never have arisen.

Weather and Climate

While no atmosphere has a definite boundary, three quarters of the mass of Teralla's can be found within 15 kilometers of the surface. This layer, the troposphere, is home to all atmospheric circulation and wind. Teralla's slow rotation period means that poleward air at the top of the troposphere traverses the entire distance between the poles and the equator before the coriolis effect can pull air currents off course, negating the presence of circulation bands that can be found on worlds like Rellis and the gas giants.

Verda's light constitutes ~1380 W/m² of irradiance on average, decreasing as latitude increases. Due to Teralla's high axial tilt, temperature is more evenly distributed across whatever hemisphere is experiencing summer and poles and equator often experience similar temperatures during some parts of the year. As a result, Teralla's surface can be subdivided latitudinally into roughly homogenous climate zones into tropical, subtropical, temperate, and polar climates.

A location's climate can also be affected by its proximity to the ocean and the temperature circulation of the ocean and atmosphere, and coastal regions tend to vary less in temperature due to the massive heat sink that the water functions as. Finally, temperature obviously decreases with height as the amount of atmosphere holding in the heat goes down, resulting in very cold high mountainous regions compared to lower lands surrounding them.

Atmospheric circulation also creates all varieties of precipitation, from rain to snow to the extremely rare hail. Water condenses from the atmosphere and falls to the surface around ambient dust particles, before hitting the ground, flowing downwards through river systems or the water table, and entering a lake or ocean. This cycle is vital for the existence of land life, and also facilitates erosion of the surface.

Upper Atmosphere

Above the troposphere, the four universally accepted layers of the stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and exosphere can be found, with boundaries defined by the change in rate of temperature change with height. Due to this lack of hard boundaries, as the exosphere simply merges into interplanetary space at sufficient heights, anything above 125 km above sea level is generally considered to be in space as this is the height where any object must achieve orbital velocity to gain atmospheric lift.

Solar thermal energy boosts the trajectories of upper atmospheric molecules, creating a slow but steady loss into space. Some of them can increase their velocity this way to escape Teralla's sphere of influence entirely, particularly low-mass molecules like hydrogen. The loss of these reducing agents is generally considered to have been a requirement for the continued advancement of Terallan life and the retention of oxygen in the atmosphere. Most hydrogen today is tied up in water before it can escape, and most loss comes instead from methane bonds being broken.

Hydrosphere

The hydrosphere is defined as everything in Teralla's water environment, like the global ocean, inland seas, lakes, rivers, groundwater, and atmospheric water vapor.

Teralla's global ocean makes up approximately 1/3800th of the total mass of the planet, covering 83% of the planetary surface with a mean depth of ~3.5 kilometers. This results in a total volume of almost two billion cubic kilometers of water, approximately 93% of which is saline. Most of the remaining fresh water can be found in glaciers in high mountains and the ice caps, with the rest split fairly evenly between surface water and groundwater.

The very coldest regions of Teralla, almost exclusively in the highest mountain peaks as polar caps are completely seasonal, snow survives the summer months and gradually transforms into ice, creating glaciers over thousands of years. These bodies of ice are heavy enough to deform and flow under their own gravity, massively eroding the surface and leaving permanent signs of their existence even after they melt away.

The oceans of Teralla have an average salinity of 2.3% salt of various types, most of which was released from cool igneous rocks or active volcanism. Dissolved atmospheric gases are also present, which are necessary for aquatic life-forms to survive, and the high specific heat capacity of the water enables the oceans' use as a large heat resevoir, preventing the night side from getting too cold in winter.

Ecosphere

Teralla's ecosphere is the most diverse within the Verda System by far, and certainly near the top of the list in the Vernarca Nebula as a whole. Incorporating hundreds of thousands of species all across its surface from the smallest bacteria to the greatest of the beasts of the sea, the Terallan ecosphere has descendants all across the stars from Shirus to Riojan.

Teralla's life developed in the planet's early bodies of water some hundred million years after it formed, possibly after introduction via panspermia. Teralla's life has been shaping and inhabiting virtually every ecological niche on the planet, forming a tightly linked biosphere. Through this process, life has impacted Teralla's physical nature, significantly altering its atmosphere and surface such as in the Oxygen Catastrophe around a billion years ago. A variety of biomes can be found on Teralla, varying over elevation, temperature latitudes, and even humidity. Teralla's species diversity and biomass, like most worlds, reaches a peak in shallow waters and within forests, particularly in humid and warm conditions. On the other hand, freezing areas like the winter poles and high altitudes, as well as extremely arid regions are relatively barren of plant and animal life.

The liquid water found plentifully across Teralla creates an environment where complex organic molecules can interact easily and efficiently, and sunlight creates sufficient energy to sustain a metabolism at the base of the food chain. Organisms also take in nutrients from the soil, water, and the atmosphere, and these are recycled between different species along the food web.

Civilization

Urban Areas

Modern Terallan urban areas are generally centered around self-sufficient structures known as arcologies, with the sprawling cities of old slowly returning to the wild. These structures are carefully designed to be environmentally sustainable, with solar and fusion power cleanly providing their energy. While there are a great many who live in the wild, microfusion devices and matter replicators allow them to do so easily without damaging the natural environment around them.

Rapid transport between arcologies is possible through an expansive public air transit system, and most of the larger ones are connected directly to the planet's orbital ring structures, allowing even quicker transit across the planet and into space.

Alorath and Kesstra Environmental Effects

As the ancient Kesstra rapidly progressed through the technological tree, from the first fire to the age of coal-choked industrialism, it would have a great affect on the wider world around them. Even after the Edron Genocide and the last surviving Kesstra fleeing the planet, its effects were still felt when the Alorath rose to civilization almost a million years later well after the Edron fallout had faded. Carbon dioxide was still making up a substantial fraction of the Terallan atmosphere even as plants sucked it out of the air, and almost 2% helium remained in the air from Kesstra fusion plants.

The Alorath's rise to civilization compounded these problems, greatly exhausting the planet's natural resources. The million-year-old Kesstra plastics were piled upon further by brand new Alorath plastics, and ocean acidification started to happen again. This, as well as increasing urbanization of the world also caused the endangerment and outright extinction of countless forms of life.

While the Kesstra were nearly destroyed and forced to flee before they could fix their problems, those who killed them were long gone by the time their successors arose. Genetically engineered carbon fixing plants locked the excess carbon dioxide emissions back into the ground, restoring a more natural temperature and climate cycle to the planet.

Through the use of cloning technologies and temporal windows, many extinct species have been successfully resurrected. Contact with the descendants of the Kesstra exodus has brought even more who died too early for their genetic material to be useful, including several species of megafauna who met their end under the bombs of the Edrons.

The move from cities into arcologies led to a return of much of the planet to its natural state, part of which was done with the help of Alorath scientists. Where relevant, the ancient cities have been preserved for archaeological interest, but most have simply returned to nature. The massive forests of old have largely returned as resources can now be produced artificially or extracted from extraplanetary colony worlds. Water is clean again across the planet, with microplastics and other pollutants being systematically removed over hundreds of years.

While Teralla avoided the Kessler syndrome most long-inhabited worlds experience by virtue of a supermassive binary partner, the region beyond Esera's binary orbit proved to be a challenging cleanup as new habitats intermingled with positively archaeological ones. However, by the founding of the Vernarcan Federation, the planet's outer airspace was safe for planned flight.