Hibb

Hibb

(Cosmos)

Type

Moon

Orbits

Liavara

System

Pact Worlds system

Inhabitants

Bantrids

Source: Pact Worlds, pg(s). 210

Hibb is a small moon of Liavara, covered in stubby grass-like protrusions and very few bodies of water. Due to its lack of resources and pervasive stench that no filtration could overcome, it was never colonised by anyone. Hibb was widely believed to be uninhabited until recently, when previously-undiscovered tall towers rose from under its surface, and from them the bantrids emerged.

Geography

Until 313 AG, Hibb was an astronomical footnote, a small, chilly, resource-poor moon covered in short, thick grass and dotted with small lakes and hills. However, the moon exuded a hideous stench that resisted all filtration; starships that landed on Hibb all had to be sterilised afterwards.

In 313 AG, the vault-towers appeared. 57 have been identified, and more might still be hidden under the soil. Each tower is a cylinder hundreds of feet tall, with a width a third of their height. Vault-towers have ramps and lifts instead of stairs. Most have a ramp spiralling around the exterior, and are attached to a larger underground complex, inside which it can retract. Approximately half are in good condition, containing stasis-coffers full of bantrids. Another quarter had malfunctioning stasis-coffers, which killed the resident bantrids, while the others were presumably built for other purposes and contained no stasis-coffers. While most vault-towers are safe to visit, some still has ancient technology, which has degraded over time due to bugs and faulty sensors, and can prove to be a death trap.

History

The Worldseed was built by the decorated sivv officer Vheiransch, commandant of a research facility on Jedarat, in an effort to save its species when their empire collapsed after losing the war against the kishalee. The Worldseed was the size of a small moon, and held terraforming machines, construction equipment, siege engines and stasis chambers for sivv colonists and slaves alike. While the smaller Ark Prime launched without problems, building the Worldseed proved much more difficult, since the quantum hyperspace engines constantly failed within the large craft.

When the sivvs' bantrid slaves launched an uprising, they managed to detonate the facility's reactor, pushing the Worldseed out of orbit with bantrid workers still on board. Since the Worldseed's quantum engines were unfinished, the bantrids onboard entered stasis, even though they knew that doing so would erase their memories, in the hope that someone kinder than the sivvs would free them once day. The Worldseed eventually entered Liavara's orbit, and as it started gathering cosmic dust, it became virtually indistinguishable from Liavara's other moons.

In 313 AG, some stasis chambers inside the Worldseed, now known as Hibb, failed, causing the bantrids to awaken with species-wide amnesia. However, data about their history still exists in hidden servers under the false moon's surface.

People

The majority of Hibb's population consists of tens of thousands bantrids, who mostly still live in their cozy chambers inside the vault-towers. A small immigrant population exists, primarily academics fascinated by the vault-towers, treasure hunters seeking plunder, and evangelists seeking to spread their cultural, political and economic beliefs to the bantrids, who remember no society of their own. Beyond the vault-towers, Hibb's ecosystem is almost non-existent.