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.

Where'd you lot come from?

Last week, our inhabitants became settlers from another world, which brought up a whole lot of new questions - namely, what the hell are you lot doing here, don't you know that thing's gonna blow soon? There are numerous reasons that these people could be here:

• a scientific outpost - maybe they're researching something in the system, the planet, or just wanted somewhere where people wouldn't want to come looking at their secrets
• strategic military position - if that sun were prematurely pushed into supernova, the resulting gamma waves could wipe out several nearby star systems.
• merchant through-fare - the system could be really well-positioned as a shipping port to service other systems.
• emergancy landing - oops, we broke the ship. And now we're stuck. Crap.
• intergalactic Australia - Step 1: export convicts. Step 2.... Step 3: profit!
• spiritual reasons - maybe they just like big blue stars, or the planet's at the conjunction of a bunch of celestial configurations.

There are more reasons, but there's only so much brainstorming I can do at 7am.

When I started this post, I was hedging towards intergalactic australia, but the military position's growing on me, too. The notion that a group of people live there so that they can, if necessary, destroy themselves by forcing their sun into supernova is intriguing.

No reason it can't be both, either - quite a neat solution to have your convicts guard the Death Planet. If the planet's living conditions aren't too hostile, their own sense of self-preservation should keep the superweapon relatively safe, with perhaps a few extra countermeasures* to ensure they can't take half the galaxy hostage by threatening to commit celestial suicide.

To avoid a planet-of-hats (TvTropes link: you've been warned. Dont' click if you have things you want to do today.), it would probably be best if the convicts were sent as settlers a few generations ago - what we have living there now is an innocent population of convict-descendants who are positioned as guards for the weapon, with maybe the odd surviving geriatric convict. If the military ever decides to use their weapon, said innocents will be punished for the sins of their forebears, purely because they had to form a home there to survive. I like the moral stickiness of that.

*note to self: think those up.