Quest

Main industries: Tourism, Education. Some mineral exports

Quest is an anomaly; missing from most collections of planetary statistics, and even sometimes omitted from encyclopaedias. The problem is that its official population (as declared to the Astronomic Society by imperial officials) is generally stated in the order of 0±600, which the society accepts, but 3rd party analysis software often has problems with.

The planet has a permanent population of zero, for official purposes. It does, however, have 8 line stations, each with a crew of approximately 2000, who can request posting to other Imperial worlds if they have problems not being able to visit the ground. The lines are - unlike any other world - designated as either down-lines (5) or up-lines (3), and run an unusual elevator system which makes transport on each line possible in only one direction unless the system is overridden from both ends simultaneously. Elevator cars going up a down-line are sometimes used to carry mineral-rich sand up for export; in these cases, the sand is discharged directly into a pressure vessel as the elevator car itself is collapsed for storage.

The Challenge

The only major industry on the surface could loosely be called tourism. Vermen students between the age of 10 and 19 are often allowed to visit the planet, in groups of various sizes and with varying levels of equipment, to test whether or not a particular class (or sometimes, which members of a class) have sufficient evolutionary advantage to survive. These groups descend a down-line, sometimes with the aid of hang-gliders or similar limited aircraft. Adults from their school, family or other institution will then travel in orbit to an up-line station, and wait to pick up the surviving students. In this case, the students (or any adults who are eccentric enough to go hunting on the planet) must then cross nearly 6000 miles of hazardous terrain (including quicksand, plateaux of latent-heat aggregating and hydrosaturated crystals, deserts populated by a variety of big cats, mushroom forests wherever there is shade, and acid rivers) in order to reach the up-line.

Many school visits take place during the 3 or 4-month Festival break before the start of their final year, and staff will return home at the start of teaching whether their students have reached the up-line or not. Those who are late, or arrive at the wrong up-line, may be able to catch a taxi cruiser if they have money; or some institutions may leave credit with a shipping company to carry students home (with varying conditions about how late they are allowed to be, or other criteria). The unlucky few may be picked up on subsequent years (at their school's discretion), try to find money on the planet, or try to find or build a communication device and contact someone off-world who will fund their return journey.

Anyone on the planet who doesn't have a passage home booked (or a pilot on the line station waiting to collect them) is not permitted entry to even the up-line's ground side station.

The Ruins

Near the clockwise geographic pole of Quest, there are some ruins. These are approximately 1400 miles from Down-2 and 5500 miles from Up-1 (the nearest lines). These are built from a white substance which is incredibly resilient, but explodes into inch-wide crystalline shards if it is struck hard enough to break it. The crystals diffract light oddly, in a way vaguely similar to mosaiq crystal, but no further analysis of them has been made. The buildings are empty, and have floors made from black and white tiles of impure fused glass. There are no identifiable amenities, and the buildings cover an area approximately 2 miles across with large and small rooms scattered apparently randomly. The rooms are very simple, with flat, unornamented walls and roofs (where they survive) of the same material, either horizontal or at 37.2° to it. Most buildings are regular pentagons, though many are square or regular polygons with more sides. In all cases, what internal walls (and floors) remain either lie along diagonals of the building shape, or forming parts of a scaled-down model of the outer walls (shrunk towards the centroid of the ground floor).

It is speculated that this world may have previously been an abandoned world before the New Dark Ages, or that the world was previously used to host a secret Grand Synod meeting. However, there is no known explanation of why the buildings would be constructed so oddly.

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Timetable code: QST