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Earen is the second planet located in the Lekna System, which can be found within the Vernarcan Federation near the border of the Falacian Dominion, in the Ervo Sector's Vernarca Nebula. Home to the oceanbound species of the Eanai, Earen is a world of great historical importance despite its small level of political power.

Due to its unfortunate physical structure preventing hydrothermal vents from coming into being on the ocean floor, Earen spent the majority of its history completely sterile, until around a billion years ago when life was seeded on the planet by the Ancient Builders of Nalaren. Earen, while the first such case discovered, is one of many worlds where this has occurred. In the modern day, it has a bustling population with impressive floating cities within the sunlight zone all the way down to crush depth, and it stands as the capital of United Earen, a member state of the Vernarcan Federation.

From a physical standpoint, Earen is among the very largest worlds with complex life native to it, at over six terrestrial masses. This means that the vast majority of species are extremely uncomfortable under its crushing gravity, and almost its entire surface population is composed of the Eanai. While it will never be the most important world in the seed cluster in which it lives, Earen's successful secession from the Falacian Dominion which conquered it in the hundreds of years prior kickstarted an entire new era in Vernarcan astropolitics with the Dominion's departure from the Yazera Pact and the beginning of its collapse into chaos and sectionalism.

Physical Characteristics

Earen, with a mass of over six terrestrial masses, is among the top tier of terrestrial worlds known. The planet has a mass of 6.44 M🜨, twice that of Erdath and over five times that of Teralla or Campura. The planet receives an incident solar flux from Lekna just 5% greater than that of Teralla, and as such its temperature is fairly similar if somewhat higher due to its thick atmosphere.

In terms of composition, Earen is unique among life-bearing planets in that a full sixteen percent of its mass is composed of water and its various ice forms. Its oceans keep going down for over 100 kilometers before the sheer weight of the ocean water causes it to freeze into various exotic ices, including Ice II and VII, and even up to the hexagonal Ice XI right up against the core. Beneath this infinite ocean can be found a more standard silicate-iron planetary structure, with a mantle uniquely solidified completely by the pressure placed upon it. The core is also mostly frozen solid due to the planet's advanced age, and as such Earen's magnetic field is relatively weak compared to what it was at its formation and even when the planet was initially seeded by the Ancient Builders.

Orbit and Rotation

Earen orbits extremely close to its parent star, Lekna. One full revolution around the star at a distance of 0.091 AU takes about 18.6 days, much closer in than any planet around Verda. However, because its host star is so dim compared to brighter F, G and K class stars where life is more easily found, Earen falls right in the center of the Lekna System's habitable zone. Its orbit has a moderate eccentricity of 0.10, which has little effect on its climate due to the massive amounts of water present on the planet.

Due to its extremely close proximity to Lekna, Earen is of course tidally locked. This means that Lekna is mostly fixed in place in the sky, although Earen's orbital eccentricity means that it seems to wobble around that point over the course of the orbit.

Atmosphere

As a superterrestrial world, Earen of course comes with a thick atmosphere. In this case, the pressure at the sea surface is over seven standard atmospheres, which is positively dangerous to some other species. This atmosphere is almost entirely composed of oxygen and nitrogen, as carbon/water-based life-forms are wont to do.

Earen's atmosphere was once primarily composed of water vapor and nitrogen, with everything else gradually breaking down over the almost 8 billion year existence of the planet. However, the introduction of life at the hands of the Ancient Builders a billion years ago resulted in the rapid oxygenation of the atmosphere, and soon approximately five percent of its gases were composed of photosynthetically generated molecular oxygen. This also created the Earen ozone layer, blocking Lekna's rare flare events from affecting the planet too badly.

Due to its complete separation from the planet's silicate crust, Earen's atmosphere has absolutely no radiogenic Argon despite its age, as many other terrestrial planets do. The atmosphere is also filled with highly variable amounts of water vapor from 0 to 6% of atmospheric gases depending on where you are.

Climate

Earen is tidally locked, but the effects of this are not as drastic as one would think. A smaller planet would have a much wider temperature gradient between its day and night hemispheres, but Earen's thick atmosphere and the enormous specific heat capacity of water prevent ice from accumulating much beyond a thin crust of sea ice over the anti-subsolar point occasionally breaking off chunks. Above the waves, the complete lack of landforms on the planet mean that winds can pick up to hurricane-force and stay there forever, whipping around the planet in an effort to equalize the temperature gradient that is there. Anything designed to float in the atmosphere enjoys a wandering existence.

The impressive greenhouse effect caused by Earen's thick atmosphere means that the average temperature is both more uniform and substantially higher than otherwise. Without the presence of these gases, Earen would be a frozen world.

Geography

As an ocean world, it is difficult to speak of any geographical features, as even the very ocean bottom is formed simply by the water's pressurization into exotic ice forms and thus is completely featureless and uninhabitable. From a political standpoint, the traditionally nomadic Eanai held highly mobile three-dimensional territories within the water, stretching across the planet and almost down to crush depth. The only actual physical feature on the planet is the ice cap, floating on the ocean above the antisubsolar point, in permanent darkness. This cap, being physically untethered from the planet's structure, occasionally drifts around, melting where it gets too close to the terminator and expanding outwards where it gets too far away from it.

Ecosystem

Earen's unique seafaring ecosystem relies on a cycle of decomposition, with dead organisms slowly sinking and living ones snatching up their remains before they get too deep. Due to the complete lack of interface between the planet's silicate structure and the open water, hydrothermal vents cannot form. Thus, life has no place to get its start nor nutrients to build upon, and so Earen was completely sterile for the first six and a half billion years of its existence.

This sorry state of affairs changed when the legendary Ancient Builders, hailing from Nalaren over a billion years ago, added Earen to their list of pet projects. While they modified the life on many other planets including Campura, Erdath, and Riojan, and built a great number of other constructs including the original Obilehem Intelligence, the seeding of Earen would be among their greatest works. Beginning with the introduction of phytoplankton in the upper layers of the water column and continuing with engineered life all along the carefully balanced food web, the project was almost completed with the planned creation and introduction of a proto-intelligent species, but the Ancient Builders fell to the Qomarat Empire before this stage could be begun.

Despite the project's abrupt termination as the Builders were forced to divert all their resources towards the fight for survival, it in fact succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, reaching a self-sustaining cycle and evolving a sapient species entirely on its own. Today, none of the animals and plants initially introduced by the Ancient Builders are remotely recognizable after a billion years of evolution, but their descendants continue to flourish across the waters of Earen.

A notable feature of Earen's ecosystem is the Nirri, great floating plant structures across the planet, which dead or alive function as the focus of the most ecologically diverse regions of the ocean.

Civilization

Population

Due to Earen's crushing gravity and complete lack of natural landforms, the vast majority of the planet's population consists of the native Eanai species. The few members of other species who live here must undergo gene therapy to prevent any possible nitrogen narcosis effects due to the enormous partial pressure of nitrogen present on the planet. During the Falacian Dominion's Occupation of Earen, many Falaci underwent such gene therapy to allow themselves to live on the planet, and even they took part in the expulsion of the Dominion from the planet in 78 AC.

Today, ~89% of Earen's 700 billion people consist of the Eanai, with an extra 5% made up of Falaci. The remainder is a miniscule fraction each of almost every water-based species within the Vernarca Nebula, and even the Lrenn and Tarasze have a non-negligible population in cities floating on the waves or in the clouds due to their origins on a super-earth.

The Eanai tend to eschew specific habitation structures, with their "homes" being more equivalent to cargo pants or jackets. The only real buildings in Earen that the Eanai themselves utilize include things like factories, shipyards, and stadium-like gathering structures. However, the immigrant population is much more liable to live in structures, particularly as most of them don't breathe water.

Government

The world of Earen and the rest of the Lekna System are governed under the flag of United Earen. As the name suggests, this government is primarily centered upon Earen itself, however it does include several other locations including the Prakka System and the white dwarf Egar. Much of the native Eanai remained on their homeworld, but a decent fraction of the populace elected to leave for metaphorical greener pastures elsewhere in the Vernarca Nebula, including the ocean world of Aglarond in the nearby Sumna System.

United Earen, despite is importance to the Eanai people, is but one of over 150 member states within the Vernarcan Federation of varying sizes. Despite this, the common economy and government of the Federation takes good care of the planet, with various standards helping to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Due to its location near the Falacian border, Earen and the entire Lekna System enjoys great protection by the Vernarcan Federation Space Force.

History

Formation

The Lekna System formed deep in the mists of time, almost eight billion years ago. Very little can be said for certain about the era before the coming of life, as the planet's very nature precludes archaeological investigations. What can be assumed, though, is that Lekna itself likely began life as a flare star, occasionally increasing in brightness hundredfold in random directions. This is likely why Earen's original crushingly thick atmosphere was blasted away, and later replaced by its modern comparatively thinner one.

Across time, through the age of the Seven Nations and the long years of darkness, Earen was passed over by a great number of galaxy-shaking cataclysms, their effects lost to the pounding waves and forgotten. Earen's infinite oceans were completely sealed off from the planet's silicate crust, preventing life from naturally arising and proliferating in the completely sterile environment of the waters.

The Ancient Builders

Roughly a billion years ago, this all changed. The Ancient Builders of Nalaren seeded the planet with life on their expansion across the Vernarca Nebula, creating a fully functional ecosystem, negating the need for hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, and skipping over a billion years worth of evolutionary processes. The introduction of complex life to Earen also introduced the atmosphere's current proportion of roughly 5% oxygen, as well as the vital ozone layer protecting the planet from the flares Lekna sometimes puts off.

Earen would be the last and greatest scientific project of the Ancient Builders. A definitionally barren world, the entire ecosystem would have to be engineered from scratch. Various forms of oceanic life were imported from worlds across the Vernarca Nebula, carefully genetically modified to suit their own environment, and introduced to the oceans over a period of more than a century.

The Ancient Builders planned to continue guiding Earen's new ecosystem towards sapience, but the coming of the Qomarat Empire forced them to put all their effort into simple survival. The Ancient Builders were utterly destroyed by the empire, and Earen was left to its own devices and forgotten. With the fall of the Qomarat Empire in part to the Builder's counterstrike of the Losekran Morphogenic Virus, the Vernarca Nebula was thus abandoned once again.

Evolution

The Builders' disappearance and the fall of the Qomarat Empire in the eras after would leave the region seemingly lifeless once again, but the simpler life of many worlds continued to evolve, and Earen was no exception. The introduction of an engineered ecosystem allowed Earen to completely skip over the traditional earliest stages of the evolutionary process, beginning with a wide variety of multicellular species of various kinds.

These species responded to the unique evolutionary pressures of the ocean world in a variety of ways, many evolving impressive pressure resistance to retrieve sinking nutrients from the dead. Others spread out across the surface of the water, soaking up Lekna's candlelight rays. Still more turned to the more traditional arts of predation, some choosing plants and others targeting other animals.

Around the time of the Edrons and their empire rimward of the Lekna System, the creatures of Earen were beginning to attain sapience. For hundreds of thousands of years the family of protosapient species swam around the planet, hunting and gathering and slowly merging through interbreeding into a single species, known as the Eanai. The consistency of Earen's environment prevented any large-scale extinction events from occurring that weren't due to extraplanetary causes, and so the initial Eanai population was much more genetically diverse than many other species.

Eanai Civilization

The first signs of Eanai civilization came when the Nirri of the northern temperate zone began to play host to farmed seaweeds and small domesticated fish-equivalents. The inherently migratory Eanai began to concentrate around the Nirri where this was occurring, creating roving "cities" and the beginnings of the first native civilization.

Eanai technology continued to advance further, with a substantial bent towards biotechnology due to the rarity of metals and other inorganic materials. The Nirri continued to have ever-expanding infrastructure grown off of their photosynthetic tendrils, and the greatest among them needed to be carefully balanced to avoid a catastrophic sinking of the entire structure.

Roughly 3,800 BC, several metal-rich asteroids deflected from the vicinity of Feanoros made impact in the southern hemisphere, devastating the region with their impact before sinking quickly to the bottom of the infinite ocean. This decimated the local Eanai population and ecology, directly striking one of the Nirri and destroying it as well as superheating the water in the vicinity. The impact and its resultant ecological effects destroyed nearly half the population of the Eanai species, and displaced the center of civilization across the planet from the south to the northern hemisphere.

As the Eanai recovered from this devastation, they gradually learned new ways to probe the depths for a variety of artefacts, including the first sighting of the massive remnants of the initial platforms used by the Ancient Builders. Unfortunately, they were both still too deep to be physically reached before crush depth, and too deeply eroded to be of any use to construction efforts.

The asteroid impacts of the previous years turned into a blessing in disguise, however, as much later expeditions in the biotechnological submarines found the previously inaccessible landing sites of the meteorites, which would provide the way for the Eanai to finally leave their ancient homeworld.

Age of Exploration

The positively miniscule bootstrap provided by the meteorite metals was thought to be impossible to actually turn into a space program. However, the literally upwards-looking Eanai had a long-term plan to make it into space with as little resources as possible. The biotech they had been working with for the past several thousand years gave them a surprising amount of experience in the first principles of flight and rocketry that could be adapted with the new materials.

To use as little of the metal as possible to get into orbit, the assembly was flown into the upper atmosphere making liberal use of thermals and air currents and then released. In this way, the valuable metal was conserved. The probe was successfully recovered, and its mission to carefully map the trajectories of Earen's captured moons worked perfectly.

The Eanai's single-minded focus on expanding across space enabled them to use the remaining metal provided by the meteorites to build a vessel designed solely to mine material from the asteroid moons and return it to the planet to build even more vehicles. So began the age of exploration, as the new influx of extremely durable building materials allowed the Eanai to begin expanding across the Lekna System. Colonies in orbit of Feanoros were established, as well as on the moons of Samarka and Figol. Despite this harmonious expansion, the unification seen in these goals did not persist elsewhere in Eanai society until the beginning of the United Earen movement in 168 BC.

United Earen

In 168 BC, first contact was made between the Eanai and the neighboring Alorath hailing from Teralla. The existence of such a seemingly alien species, both culturally and physically different from themselves, shocked the cultures of the Eanai. Some saw them as inevitable invaders and destroyers, while others saw them as benevolent gods and still more (the correct ones) saw them as simply another group of people in the universe.

Eanai society was never divided into rigidly defined nations by the very nature of the species, but divided it was. Societies based around both regions of the ocean and the equivalent of guilds were spread across the planet and its extraplanetary colonies, and a unification of the entire species and an end to the eternal low-level feuding endemic to Eanai society would be a massive change in their history and culture.

As it was, the individually inconsequential blood feuds between the various societies had been ongoing for as long as anyone or anything could remember. The idea of ending the cycle was seen as almost anathema to being Eanai at all. However, the United Earen movement began to spread particularly through the lower levels of society with less stake in the hierarchies, and soon the first peace agreements came into being.

In the next thirty years, more and more of the societies unified, and United Earen as a nation came into being in 131 AC with the last habitats signing the peace agreement. Around the same time, the warp drive spread from Alorath-controlled space along the trade lines, enabling the first large-scale interstellar colonization in the nearby Prakka System 1.4 light-years away.

Falacian Occupation

Independence and the Falacian Cold War

War of the Broken Bow and Modern Times

@@ Line 52: / Line 52: @@
 *0.008% CO<sub>2</sub>
 *Variable H<sub>2</sub>O
-| albedo = 0.24
+| albedo = 0.44
 | age = 7.7 billion years old
 | rotation_period = Synchronous
@@ Line 107: / Line 107: @@
 Earen, with a mass of over six terrestrial masses, is among the top tier of terrestrial worlds known. The planet has a mass of 6.44 M🜨, twice that of [[Erdath]] and over five times that of [[Teralla]] or [[Campura]]. The planet receives an incident solar flux from [[Lekna]] just 5% greater than that of [[Teralla]], and as such its temperature is fairly similar if somewhat higher due to its thick atmosphere.
-In terms of composition, Earen is unique among life-bearing planets in that a full sixteen percent of its mass is composed of water and its various ice forms. Its oceans keep going down for over 100 kilometers before the sheer weight of the ocean water causes it to freeze into various exotic ices, including Ice II and VII, and even up to the hexagonal Ice XI right up against the core. Beneath this infinite ocean can be found a more standard silicate-iron planetary structure, with a mantle uniquely solidified completely by the pressure placed upon it. The core is also mostly frozen solid due to the planet's advanced age, and as such Earen's magnetic field is relatively weak.
+In terms of composition, Earen is unique among life-bearing planets in that a full sixteen percent of its mass is composed of water and its various ice forms. Its oceans keep going down for over 100 kilometers before the sheer weight of the ocean water causes it to freeze into various exotic ices, including Ice II and VII, and even up to the hexagonal Ice XI right up against the core. Beneath this infinite ocean can be found a more standard silicate-iron planetary structure, with a mantle uniquely solidified completely by the pressure placed upon it. The core is also mostly frozen solid due to the planet's advanced age, and as such Earen's magnetic field is relatively weak compared to what it was at its formation and even when the planet was initially seeded by the [[Ancient Builders]].
 ==Orbit and Rotation==
-Earen orbits extremely close to its parent star, [[Lekna]]. One full revolution around the star at a distance of 0.091 AU takes about 18.6 days, much closer in than any planet around [[Verda]]. However, because its host star is so dim compared to brighter F, G and K class stars where life is more easily found, Earen falls right in the center of the Lekna System's habitable zone. Its orbit has a moderate eccentricity of 0.10, varying its temperature somewhat over its orbit.
+Earen orbits extremely close to its parent star, [[Lekna]]. One full revolution around the star at a distance of 0.091 AU takes about 18.6 days, much closer in than any planet around [[Verda]]. However, because its host star is so dim compared to brighter F, G and K class stars where life is more easily found, Earen falls right in the center of the Lekna System's habitable zone. Its orbit has a moderate eccentricity of 0.10, which has little effect on its climate due to the massive amounts of water present on the planet.
 Due to its extremely close proximity to Lekna, Earen is of course tidally locked. This means that Lekna is mostly fixed in place in the sky, although Earen's orbital eccentricity means that it seems to wobble around that point over the course of the orbit.
@@ Line 177: / Line 177: @@
 The Eanai's single-minded focus on expanding across space enabled them to use the remaining metal provided by the meteorites to build a vessel designed solely to mine material from the asteroid moons and return it to the planet to build even more vehicles. So began the age of exploration, as the new influx of extremely durable building materials allowed the Eanai to begin expanding across the [[Lekna System]]. Colonies in orbit of [[Feanoros]] were established, as well as on the moons of [[Samarka]] and [[Figol]]. Despite this harmonious expansion, the unification seen in these goals did not persist elsewhere in Eanai society until the beginning of the United Earen movement in 168 BC.
 ===United Earen===
+In 168 BC, first contact was made between the [[Eanai]] and the neighboring [[Alorath]] hailing from [[Teralla]]. The existence of such a seemingly alien species, both culturally and physically different from themselves, shocked the cultures of the Eanai. Some saw them as inevitable invaders and destroyers, while others saw them as benevolent gods and still more (the correct ones) saw them as simply another group of people in the universe.
+Eanai society was never divided into rigidly defined nations by the very nature of the species, but divided it was. Societies based around both regions of the ocean and the equivalent of guilds were spread across the planet and its extraplanetary colonies, and a unification of the entire species and an end to the eternal low-level feuding endemic to Eanai society would be a massive change in their history and culture.
+As it was, the individually inconsequential blood feuds between the various societies had been ongoing for as long as anyone or anything could remember. The idea of ending the cycle was seen as almost anathema to being Eanai at all. However, the United Earen movement began to spread particularly through the lower levels of society with less stake in the hierarchies, and soon the first peace agreements came into being.
+In the next thirty years, more and more of the societies unified, and [[United Earen]] as a nation came into being in 131 AC with the last habitats signing the peace agreement. Around the same time, the warp drive spread from Alorath-controlled space along the trade lines, enabling the first large-scale interstellar colonization in the nearby [[Prakka System]] 1.4 light-years away.
 ===Falacian Occupation===
 ===Independence and the Falacian Cold War===