kintsugi IN SPACE

"Wait, Kintsugi is airless? Aren't there lifebearing planets in this system?"
"Yeah, there are, but they also have a few... problems."
"Like what?"
"Well, we attempted to survey some of the landscape on one of the forested moons for habitability, and then a centipede the size of a city bus ate the drone. As it turns out, the biotechnological machines the ancient Kintsugians used more than ten million years ago were left behind when their empire died back, and they've been loose since."
"These are the original robots?"
"More like the partly biological descendants of the original robots, that have had the time to evolve into a vast amount of different creatures!"

And, if you look hard enough, in the right places, ten million or so years is long enough to evolve sentience, back from losing it at the end of the last civilisation as the tools of the masters went feral. The Whispering Grove, a collection of glittering metal trees to the north of the mostly-barren Kintsugi-γ, rustles slowly when people approach it, and seems to be capable of broadcasting and receiving shortwave radio signals, which the sessile trees seem to use to communicate with each other.

There's a singular, giant entity, within the hollow planet Kintsugi-ε, a gigantic, seemingly endless worm that slowly and inexorably slides through the deep caves. No-one has ever found its head, and judging by gravity scans of Kintsugi-ε, the worm, affectionately nicknamed Jörmungandr, is approximately the mass of a continent, and has likely been moving through that planet for tens of millions of years for some unknown purpose, likely lost with its builders.

The naturalists among the Modern Kintsugians have been making amusingly shrill, excited, noises about the spaceborne habitat dubbed "Big Dumb Object", a Charon-sized space station orbiting Plenet (Kintsugi-ζ, or Kintpiter), full of the fruits of megadecades of weightless evolution, something nearly impossible to find elsewhere in the galaxy. The thick atmosphere, and some manner of ancient alien gravity generator within the Big Dumb Object negate the effects of gravity within the station, and a massive jungle in permanent freefall occupies the free space in the station, occasionally anchored to struts that are as wide round as cities that hold the station's form together. Zero-gee evolution has resulted in some truly unique creatures, from jet-propelled creatures the size of cars, to massive grazing creatures that dwell in the open sky between the floating forests, eating from the haze of airborne plankton like enormous whales, bioluminescent patterns flickering along their sides, a means of communication between the remarkably intelligent animals. The soft light of an unfeasibly small contained star, likely linked to the gravity generators that have somehow survived the tens of millions of years, illuminates this cloud and sky-filled ocean.

And yet, there are other worlds in the Kintsugi system, worlds that have yet to be fully explored, and have yet to reveal even the slightest of their wonders.

#whoops I rambled again #can you tell that my special interests are worldbuilding and physics?

 

[DISTANT HAPPY SHRIEKING NOISES]

Thank you all!

 

An image of Kintsystem for easier visualisation, with speculative ideas for planets and moons.

α and β are the binary suns of the Kintsugi System.

γ is mostly barren, the solar and possibly intelligent trees scattered over its surface in thickets. Kinda warm.

δ is a small planet, somewhere between the sizes of Mercury and Venus, bonded to its tidally-locked moon by a space elevator the size of a continent, a massive and terrific feat of space engineering that has somehow lasted the ages.

ε has a far lower mass than its size and surface composition would indicate, and there is some biomechanical life on its surface, but the main attraction is the gigantic worm that slowly moves through the deeps below its surface in the hollow heart of the planet.

ζ is a gas giant many times the mass of Jupiter, a gigantic magenta orb hanging in the skies above the settlement of Kintsugi. Its many moons take advantage of the ideal temperatures for liquid water to form to bear much carbon-based life, but at least one of the moons is an ancient artefact that weighs more than the Pacific tectonic plate, and that Kintsugijin have affectionally nicknamed "the Big Dumb Object".

η is a colder world, thickly forested, and occupied by cold-adapted robotic creatures that live in the permafrost, along with some unknown creatures that live in the warmer waters under the frozen oceans.

θ is an ice giant, much like Neptune or Uranus, with an ammonia-saturated atmosphere in which live many strange creatures that never touch ground for their entire lives, with unfamiliar carbon-based biology that uses ammonia as a solvent. Also, pretty rings!

There are other things out there in the Kintsystem, were one to look for them, and the explanation I have given is by no means comprehensive, so go wild with your own ideas!

#I KEEP RAMBLING #has it really been that long since I space worldbuilt?

 

Oh my.

You've not so much put a match to the petrol, you've more thrown a grenade through the doors of the munitions factory that is my mostly-forgotten, decades-old space worldbuilding brain.

 

*Buzzes with ideas*