#the timescales we're talking about here are long

[tanadrin]

Biomes of Sogant Raha: Xenogrowth and Xenogrowth Mix

[Map: major xenogrowth belts in central Rezana, showing full xenogrowth in red and xenogrowth mix in orange]

The recent biogeographical history of Sogant Raha can be divided into two major phases. The first of these phases concerns the planet as it was when the first Exiled arrived in orbit from a distant star. Driven by a soteriology that had grown up between legends of a lost paradise from which they had originated, and a future paradise embodied in a far-off exoplanet, whose atmosphere betrayed signs of a rich biosphere in its spectroscopic signature, an immediate debate began on what form human settlement on the new world would take.

This debate coalesced around two major ideologies that were in concurrence on many major issues, but which differed on a subtle but important point. The Instrumentalists sought to integrate humanity into this alien biosphere; they believed that human and Sogantine life should co-exist. The Renewalists sought to conform to the rigors of the Sogantine biosphere; they believed that the stewardship of Paradise was the highest priority. Both factions were extraordinarily conscious of the dark myths which stretched back into the first days of the Exile long ago, that said humanity was driven to flight, and the first Paradise laid waste because of the works of human hands. Both recognized that, in a cosmos in which living worlds seemed to be painfully rare, this was an opportunity that must not be squandered.

But despite the apparent consonance between these groups, the tension on what degree of importance to grant the human settlement of Paradise rapidly grew, and nearly resulted in civil war aboard the Ammas Echor. Two events prompted reconciliation. First, a joint surface expedition returned with the news that the native biosphere was safe for humans to inhabit, with little risk of disease spreading from humans to the xenobiota or vice-versa. Second, the Great Record, a genetic encyclopedia containing the whole genome of a vast number of Terran lifeforms and information on how to reconstruct living organisms from that data, was discovered carved into the bones of the Ammas Echor. This second discovery in particular threw the plans of both the Instrumentalists and Renewalists into confusion, and the Archivists, a third faction consisting of the heavily genetically and cybernetically altered caste responsible for shepherding the Ammas Echor during its millennia-long flight between the stars that had until then remained aloof, stepped in to broker a peace.

Under the watchful eye of the Archive, human settlement of the surface would begin, and steps would be taken to start the rebirth of terrestrial species that had been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years; but both would proceed along highly controlled and extremely cautious timetables, confined to small designated areas of the surface. Thorough computer simulations and carefully controlled ecological experiments would be undertaken before any expansion was considered; and the human population would remain tightly controlled for centuries to come. This was understood to be a price well worth paying to safeguard against the possibility of dealing irreparable harm to a unique world.

But not all the settlers were happy with this outcome. In particular, a small circle of radical Instrumentalists, augmented by geneticists and ecologists who felt that the Archive was suppressing legitimate scientific inquiry to keep the peace, began a rogue program of species-resurrection, believing that they could accelerate the Archive’s timetable considerably, without seriously endangering the native ecosystem. Working at Khoda Station, a weather observation post far to the southeast of the human colony, they started with various flowering plants before moving on to insects, birds, and (their crowning achievement) bottlenose dolphins. When this rogue operation was discovered, the Archive arrested everyone involved and ordered the destruction of Khoda Station and the sterilization of the surrounding land, to prevent the escape of any potential invasive species. One scientist who refused to evacuate was killed; but the dolphins, partially forewarned by the agitation of the humans, escaped into the open sea.

Further disruption to the program of settlement occurred two generations later; an epidemic of delirium, delusion, and madness began to sweep through first the planetside colonists, and then those who remained aboard the Ammas Echor as well. Only too late, the microbiologists of the Archive realized they had incompletely misunderstood the biosphere of Sogant Raha. Besides the familiar orders of cellular life, which resembled the biology of terran life in their structure, if not their particulars, there was a second order of life that was radically different. Non-cellular, chemically distinct--and in fact much more akin to human biology in composition--this order was principally microscopic, was found as a commensalist throughout the native biosphere, and had begun to colonize the endobiota, humans and the resurrected terran species. What was benign in the xenobiota that had co-evolved with the acytic clade had, for unknown reasons, begun to cause adverse reactions in humans. Led by a brilliant scientist named Kaituro, the Archive’s microbiologists raced to solve the underlying biological mysteries before the plague claimed the lives of the entire colony.

One morning, Kaituro’s colleagues awoke to a mystery: they found Kaituro in an isolation chamber meant for sterile experiments, hooked up to monitors for his vital signs; his body was alive and breathing, but he was brain-dead; the structure of his cerebellum had been destroyed, essentially liquefied, and replaced with a thick slurry of acytic microorganisms and neural protein. An IV in his arm indicated he had injected himself with a compound dangerous to humans but known to promote acytic growth, and a data feed connected to a port in his arm suggested he had been monitoring the activity of the acytes in his bloodstream for an unknown reason; but the data recorder was damaged, and the information unrecoverable. Whatever experiment he had been running was a failure; his body was incinerated that evening.

In subsequent months, the plague reached a fever pitch. Madness claimed the Ammas Echor itself, whose pilots drove it out of orbit and into the sea, a colossal loss for the colony which was still extensively reliant on the technology and fabrication facilities the ship provided. The planetside Archive strove to maintain peace, but panic and anger eventually caused a total political collapse; humans began to spread out across the planet, no longer unified by a single plan or purpose, and they brought with them various resurrected endobiota, which began to integrate themselves into the native ecosystem.

This is the essence of the first phase: a continuous history with the pre-human ecology of Sogant Raha, albeit with the gradual introduction of new endobiota. Although the technology used to resurrect endobiota was lost within a few centuries of the Ammas Echor’s destruction, by that time a huge portion of the Great Record had been transcribed, as it were, into living species. Some endobiota subsequently went extinct, outcompeted by xenobiota that were better adapted for Sogant Raha’s climate and soil, while others found new niches all their own. Oceanic endobiota were much less successful on the whole; besides the bottlenose dolphin, some species of kelp, and various species associated in coral reef ecosystems (which thrived in Sogant Raha’s warm, shallow seas), most oceanic endobiota simply could not compete with native life, and were not successfully resurrected.

Among some endobiota, a curious change occurred: some--but by no means all-organisms colonized by the acytes began to undergo radical changes in their morphology and behavior, changes that failed to be passed on to the offspring if the acytes were purged from them at an early stage of embryonic development. Rumors of monsters in the wilderness were followed by captured specimens of strange and dangerous beasts; and eventually, these were followed by bloody live encounters with humans. The natural world seemed to be turning against humanity.

Worse was to come: for a long time, it seemed that the human body had adapted to the presence of the acytic commensalists that had caused the original epidemic of madness; however, some centuries later, this epidemic returned in a new form. Now tending to cause primarily ataxia, tremors, insomnia, and mood swings, new outbreaks of acytic disease began to occur in a way that suggested they were caused by proximity, though no infectious agent could be identified besides the acytes themselves, which were present in the healthy and the sick alike.

At the same time, tensions were rising among states in the south of the world; investigation of the acytes showed that they had evolved a complicated signalling mechanism that stored a fantastic amount of energy, meaning that if they could be concentrated together in a high enough density, primed with the right signals and fed on the right substrate, they could be made into a powerful weapon.

Although this technology was abandoned as too difficult to control, and likely to promote vicious reprisals from competing states, knowledge of the technology spread to a transnational political faction that had come to understand the native biosphere as wholly hostile to continued human existence. Reports of ghostlike apparitions and many-limbed monsters composed of cold fire killing hundreds and shattering buildings were now becoming commonplace, coming where the new epidemic was most concentrated. Building on that earlier research, and using what was left of the sophisticated technology of the first colonists, they attempted to construct a machine that would permit them to selectively turn the acytic signalling mechanism against the native biosphere of Sogant Raha.

They succeeded beyond their wildest imaginations--in fact, they set off a cascading reaction that could not be stopped, and which began to destroy all native life on the planet. This era, dubbed “the Burning Spring,” resulted in countless acres of dead savannah and jungle that were consumed by wildfire, throwing thick smoke into the planet’s upper atmosphere, releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, and resulting in the deaths of millions due to famine and sickness. But as the Burning Spring passed over the world, endobiota--and endoflora in particular--seemed to revel in the destruction, rapidly claiming the territory yielded up by the native life.

It took many millennia for the global climate and human population to stabilize again; by the time it did, humanity could scarcely remember a time before, and the planet’s surface was now utterly transformed. This is the essential portrait of the second phase of Sogantine biogeography: instead of being dominated by xenobiota, with a small presence of endobiota and occasionally dense pockets surrounding human settlements, endobiota dominated the land-based biosphere, with significant intrusions into the ocean along continental shelves and in the upper water column, while the xenobiota was confined to dwindling refugia, mostly in the continental interiors, and the deep sea.

In the many thousands of years since the Burning Spring, the size of those refugia has continued to shrink. As they have dwindled, they seem to somehow become more conscious of the threat the alien intruders represent, and more unsparing in their defense. In those regions of xenogrowth mix, which seem to spread outward from and be supported by, the unmixed xenogrowth regions in their hearts, human life is impossible for any length of time. Both endo- and xenoflora here are unaccountably toxic, unusual and aggressive animals are found that are known nowhere else, novel viruses cause fulminant cancers and keratinous growths on the skin, and acytes within the human body seem to go haywire, causing neurological disruptions, hallucinations, and necrotic abscesses. It is rumored that beyond this nightmarish borderland, the heart of these refugia are tranquil and beautiful in comparison--remnants of a world once yearned for by humanity and now long-forgotten. But few have survived long enough to explore these regions.

Since these regions represent areas not available to use or exploration by humans, maps of Sogant Raha’s climate and biomes usually do not differentiate between types of xenogrowth or xenogrowth mix; the same colors represent forestlike, savannahlike, and grassland-like conditions.

[flecks-of-stardust]

yo you think the iterator and void worms are stronger than the higher beings?

i've had this ask sitting in my ask box for a while now, and now i actually have the time and dedication to sit down and think about this. so sorry for leaving it for so long, shit happens djsngjs the tldr answer of this would probably be uh. how are we defining each of these things exactly?

under a cut because i am verbose:

so first of all. what do you mean by 'stronger'? what metric are we using here? are we talking about theoretical knowledge? ability to do Something? capability of damage? it's hard to say which of these is 'stronger' when they're such different things. sure, the iterators call themselves biomechanical gods, and compared to slugcat? yeah, they absolutely are. but that's very much not the same thing as a higher being, they can't really be compared. same goes for void worms. all of these also depend on how you interpret each of these things. in other words, take my answer with a grain of salt, since some of my own headcanons are rather specific.

when it comes to knowledge, i personally think iterators and higher beings are fairly evenly matched. iterators are highly advanced, highly efficient supercomputers. given enough time and sufficient resources, they can theoretically find the answer to anything (except, obviously, the great problem. but we're not considering that here). for me, higher beings are sort of similar? they're not really omnipotent; they could be, i guess, but the state we see the higher beings in in hollow knight suggests otherwise to me. but they have all of eternity to learn and research and find the answer to something. of course the timescale of iterators is more finite, but for many questions, i think both iterators and higher beings would be able to find the answer. so i don't know who would necessarily win in this regard. i'll discuss void worms later on.

as for ability to do... whatever, it really depends on what that something is. i'm saying that a lot, but seriously. understanding the flora and fauna around them? both iterators and higher beings probably have it down pat. make social connections with those around them? possibly trickier for higher beings because of their status, but probably not an issue for either of them. creating... things, be it purposed organisms or. uh. children? sure. not a big deal for either of them, provided the iterator has enough resources.

capability for damage though. i'm assuming this is probably closer to what you mean by stronger? because. come on, iterators are buildings. they're gigantic, super high tech, but ultimately sessile buildings. if you mounted missile turrets on an iterator can i guess they could do ranged damage? but otherwise their capability for damage is mostly limited to brain blasting the poor slugcat that pissed them off too much i think. (and the rains, but that's not really the same thing.) their field of influence is very limited to their own facility grounds and what their technology allows them to do. higher beings, on the other hand, have magic at their beck and call. obviously this also depends on how you think their magic works, but for me it's based entirely on what the wielder can think of and whether they have enough energy to execute the action. so theoretically? higher beings can do anything. they could level an iterator if they wanted to and had enough energy to, and the iterator wouldn't be able to do shit. i guess in a way this makes them stronger? i think it's kind of a moot point, they're just really different things.

void worms? i don't have a clear concept of what i think they are. i have some theories, which involves some uh. fourth dimensional mumbo jumbo terminology bullshit, but in short i would consider them more fundamental than higher beings are. kind of. they could. theoretically beat higher beings on all of these metrics, i guess? i just don't think they'd care enough to ever bother. they're kind of just vibing in the void sea i think.

so uh. i guess my final answer is i don't know. depends on a lot of things.

[takenene]

episode 2 here we go!!!

you know what the intro has me thinking? walking with monsters had this recurring theme of talking about life's "first designs" and "prototypes" that kind of stuck with me and like. murder lizards were earth's THE animal for over one hundred and fifty million years. THAT'S A FUCK ASS LONG TIME. mammals as a fucking life form had a shine in the spotlight for HALF of that. the entire humans spices' existence is a b l i n k o f a n e y e. think how incredibly ancient sharks are in comparison. like. people tend to think of ourselves as the absolute PEAK of evolution, the ultimate end-all of life. but on the timescale the spices on this planet exist, we are not the final destination. perhaps we're still a draft.

anyway

i don't think i've ever heard the term badlands before?? what i'm thinking: mordor. hell. corporate america. what the episode shows me: erupting volcano. hell yeah XD spot on XD

wait didn't we have volcano dinos last season?? because i actively remember getting mindblown about volcano dinos before

proof i have incurable brainrot: the girlies are trudging the poisoned fumes galore with the power of being fucking HUMONGOUS. all I can think about? that one dr.st*ne plotline

girl how are those babies going to NOT insta suffocate in the fumes??????

MURDER CHICKENS!!! <3

OH MEIN GOTT THEY'RE SO FLUFFY I'M GONNA DIE 😍

AAAAAAND THEY'RE T I N Y???!?!?!??!

okay but i LOVE the, well, not humanizing, but the meaningful behaviour details the series put in from the very beginning. babies being silly and uncoordinated. sauropods accidentally bumping necks because they were looking in opposite directions. we spend only a tiny snippet of time with each spices, but they ALL feel real. alive. it's incredible.

btw how mister sir attenborough pronounces asia has me in stitches. 10/10 would never think to say it that way in english :D

DID HE JUST DROPKICK THAT GUY OFF THE CLIFF

once again i do not speak imperial >:/

ooooooh it's the spiky bois!!! :D i love ankylosaurs, have i mentioned? :D

sweet baby jeebus. you've heard of synchronized swimming, now get ready for synchronized HATCHING

dead babies so far: ||||||||

all right, so. i think the cgi this season is a bit more uneven???? i mean, don't get me wrong, it still looks absolutely amazing, but, in places, it's a little more stiff and video-gamey??? ish??? maybe???

i really enjoy the circular story format, though <3

[codenamesarestupid]

Hi, sorry, mathematical dumbass here, is 5x10^-25 seconds a long time or tragically short, I need to know because I would love to adopt that adorable omega white boy and need to know how much food to get him in advance

Hi! Thank you for your interest in becoming an adoptive baryon parent!

5x10^-25s = 0.0000000000000000000000005 seconds.

Sounds short, but let's put that into perspective! We're talking about subatomic particles here, after all.

The Planck time is, according to our current understanding of the universe, the smallest duration of time that has physical meaning. No current physical theory can describe timescales shorter than the Planck time (such as the earliest events after the Big Bang when the universe first came into existence). The Planck time is 5.39×10^−44 seconds long, or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000539 seconds.

What does this mean for our quarked up white boy?

Well. From your point of view, your small white son may not have a long life. He will have succumbed to decay long before you even finalise the adoption paperwork, let alone give him any food. But to him, he got to live a long and happy life of 10000000000000000000 Planck Times together with you.

[coldflasher]

i just got back from picking out another cat at the shelter, she should be coming home tomorrow so everyone send good vibes!! (considering i got the call about gwyn literally like 3 hours before i was due to collect him i am feeling very nervous about the whole thing)

i don’t have any pics of her rn, i couldn’t take any bc she sat on my lap the whole time and refused to move. this seems like a positive sign

[mayasaura]

Okay, pre-Nona posting time. I don't have a coherent theory this time, but here are my impressions:

I'm expecting this book to mostly be setup for the next one, since it was originally just act one. Exposition, worldbuilding, and pieces moving into whatever place they'll need to be to scape some kind of resolution out of this mess. I'm not expecting to see many familiar face from Canaan House, apart from the obvious, because ofnthe timescale we're working with. Silas and Colum are coming back, but I'm not at all sure it'll be in this book.

The letter from Doctor Sex's study has got to be relevant. The "My darling girl, tomorrow you will be a lyctor-" one. This will probably connect with Cassiopeia, and why BOE has intimate but antiquated knowledge of the Sixth House. Hopefully we will also find out if the Sixth House even still exists after the finale of Harrow the Ninth, but maybe that will be left as a point of hanging tension because afaik Palamedes and Camilla don't even know it was threatened.

John is a wild card, and I can't wait to see what he'll do. He reached the breaking point of a ten thousand year long holding pattern at the end of Harrow the Ninth, and we're about to find out what God does instead of buying a firari and experimenting with cocaine because he's been dumped. His invasion? The second Resurrection? What does he have left to lose, and does he care if he loses it?

The Mithraem is gone and John is a creature of habit, so odds are good that he fetched up on the Erebos at some point in the six-month timeskip. Which means we may find out where we stand with Admiral Sarpedon. John ditched them right after one of the worst catastrophes in Cohort history to work from home, and I have a feeling that is going to have ramifications. Sarepedon's whole deal in the Iliad is responsible leadership through showing up and being there to lead.

I'm excited to see if Ianthe and Coronabeth's dual schemes will come into play yet. The Tridentarii have had a long-term plan they've been working on since before Gideon the Ninth. We've only had hints of the full shape of it so far, but it has to do with figuring out how the Resurrection was accomplished and rethinking the economic structure of the Nine Houses. So we're talking large scale, possibly empire crushing and/or apotheosis kind of big. Whatever they're planning got derailed by the events of Gideon the Ninth, but Ianthe has been working hard to get back on track. So has Corona, but I'm not sure if Corona is working toward the same goal as Ianthe anymore. Or perhaps they've course-corrected together; Mercy was able to put Camilla in touch with Harrow, so why not Coronabeth with Ianthe.

I'm almost certain that Blood of Eden intends to return to the Ninth. Wake still has an anchor there, and even if she didn't have unfinished business with the Tomb, her people won't want to leave her bones enslaved. Depending on how aware Wake was of her surroundings as a revenant, she may even know that the Tomb is open for the taking. If she asks, and maybe even if she doesn't, I think Pyrrha would go with them. Pyrrha once watched Wake die in the atmosphere above the Ninth, she liked Alecto, and she knows something about having been buried for a myriad.

Speaking of which I really really hope to hear a bit more about Anastasia. She's so interesting! She's been playing chess from beyond the grave, and I'd love to find out what her objective was.

And to close out, obligatory 'who is Nona' theory. Sort of. If I'm right, she's an ancient divine monster with the body and mind of a desperately sad schizophenic teenager. She loves completely and without conditions in a word seperated by factions, and I hope she doesn't have her heart broken. She's made up of mismatched pieces, and if those parts of her are separated she might not be Nona anymore. A transient existance. Cinnamon roll. Too good for this world, too pure. Alexa, play Simple and Clean by Utada Hikaru.