I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Meet the natives

Or rather, not natives.

As we've examined before, the life-expectancy of our star means that anyone who lives here either underwent fantastically rapid evolution, or moved in for reasons of their own. And to be frank, super-fast evolution requires a lot more handwaving than I care to do right now. I'm struggling to find an explanation for it that thrills me, or that's even beyond generic, banal and half baked. Deities? Super-beings? Warped space-time-continua?*

None of that seems particularly interesting - it doesn't speak of conflicts and difficulties in itself, in fact it points at an annoying potential deus ex machina that I'd have to plot around all the time - if the super-powerful beings made them evolve super-fast, why can't they just fix all the other problems? Why did they let them get into these problems in the first place? Why didn't they make them evolve as perfect beings?

So I'm tossing the natives theory. The people that populate this planet - in fact, probably all but the most basic life that populates this planet - are invaders, people who've settled this freezing, radiation-baked lump of rock.

That gives us a whole slew of fascinating questions to answer:

• Who are they - where did they originally come from, and why did they leave?
• Are they colonists, or does this represent their whole species in one basket?
• Why did they choose such a difficult planet? Was it part of the challenge, is there something here they want? Did something make it similar to the environment they evolved on, or was this just the least-uninhabitable planet they could find in time?

As well as interesting questions to pose about their current level of technological and scientific development. Is it a collapsed former stellar civilisation, perhaps, or even a people fully equipped with scientific knowledge and ability?  What is their understanding of the world, and how has settling this planet changed that?

And - how long have they been here? Our star doesn't live very long, so their settlement here could only ever be - in an evolutionary scale - a short term solution.

One decision breeds a hundred more questions, but at least they're interesting questions.

* Oddly enough, there are more weird-plural-vowel conventions than just double-i's for latin words. But to be honest, I had to look that up.