Name of World: The Lost Planet of Tremar.
System: Uriel
Year Initially Settled: 2253.
Affiliations: Independent, but trades with Coalition.
Governmental Style: Democratic.
Primary Languages: English, Mandarin, Norwegian
Primary Industries: Mining.
Current Leaders/Figures of Note: The Council is made up of representatives from each of the mines, democratically elected by the residents of Tremar. They take year-long turns as chair and have rotating elections every 3 years.
In-Play Characters from this Location: None.
Human Mutations: The ability to find a whole to which a part belongs.
Geography/Biodiversity: Tremar is a small planet, but its gravity is about 1.23g as compared to Earth's. This is owed largely to the dense ore that lays beneath its surface. While not a clean burning material by any means, it is abundant, efficient, and stable - making it a sought-after commodity for distant stations and, particularly, out-of-the-way enterprises beyond the CDF's reach.
The surface itself is craggy, mountainous, with arable land found only in small valleys pocketed across the planet. Much of it remains unexplored with only a few 'cities' established to this day, clustered all together on one side of the planet where the main port is. Small, struggling towns spiral out to the larger cities, but there is little to sustain them except for the mines, as most of the planet's trade centers around the sale of its ore.
It sits on the outer edge of the Coalition and can only be found by conventional, manual means - as with a physical, non-digital map. This usually requires the help of a native Tremaran.
History: One of the newer planets to be terraformed, Tremar was initially considered for a ski resort planet. Its location, far on the outskirts of Coalition reach, made it a prime 'vacation' spot, adding the allure of something difficult to reach to the natural majesty of its towering peaks and deep, sweeping vales. So the Coalition chose it as their next project. They were able to bring it up to habitability in a relatively short span - only 28 years as compared to the typical 50 - and broke ground on the new settlement in 2179.
And promptly lost it.
Those on Tremar at the time spent the next several years utterly and completely alone. It seemed that cracking open the planet's tough skin let something out - something that threw digital sensors off entirely and sent even old-fashioned compasses careening wildly. Not one of their transmissions received a single response. Without knowing what happened, getting off the planet seemed a terrifying prospect.
So it became that the first colony on Tremar was populated almost entirely by laborers, the people who were intended to set the planet up for its true inhabitants. They were the first to discover that the cause of the sensor disruptions was the incredibly dense material found just beneath the surface of the planet, which upon excavation continued to bug out any nearby positioning systems, but as they eventually learned when they eventually got it off-planet, to a lesser degree. They were also the first to discover its use as a fuel source.
That first city, to its credit, was gorgeous - planned out as a resort, after all.
It took nearly ten years of studying the ore and its effects, as well as taking short test flights off and around Tremar, to finally make an attempt off planet to the nearest Coalition hub. They never returned to Tremar.
In their absence, though, Tremar continued to grow - albeit slowly. Its first unintended colonists began to establish families, learned to harness the planet's ore for fuel, and farm what little land would grow anything. There wasn't much native worth eating, as it turned out, and the wildlife supply wasn't intended to arrive until after the infrastructure was laid.
They were a hardworking group who didn't plan to let the squidgy little planet beat them down - but they weren't scientists. They weren't looking for the terraforming mutations that slowly began cropping up, and because there were no physical tells, no one thought much of children always being able to find their way back home, or miners never getting lost in the tunnels. They simply took it for what it seemed to be: Tremar becoming home.
Years passed, and Tremar grew. The original colony expanded into the neighboring areas, developing the mountains around them. They adopted a charter and elected a council to represent them in major decisions - the first of which was leading another expedition to try to reconnect with the Coalition. Assuming it still existed.
The crew of the Dauntless was small, consisting mostly of young, bright Tremarans eager to do something exciting and new with their lives. The ship was old, but serviceable, and on the fuel they managed to synthesize from the planet's ore it was estimated it should more than be able to make the journey...
It was days before their navigation systems came back online, and a few more before they reached the next hub over. When they did, they learned that the previous ship had succeeded all those years ago... it just couldn't find its way back. While interstellar maps had Tremar marked on them, it was long designated a 'lost' planet. They knew where it was supposed to be, but as soon as a ship got within days of reaching the planet's system, it dropped off their maps. Even Sol-7, the star it orbited, had disappeared from sensors, and no signals returned from the system despite years of attempts to reach out.
The Coalition gave it up as an acceptable loss. Not happily, as any terraforming project cost an unseemly amount of money, but without much choice in the matter they made the case to investors that it would be more costly to keep trying to find the lost planet than to redirect the remaining funds from the project to a more suitable home.
The Tremaran crew were determined, though, and after resupplying and packing the ship's databases with as much information as they could bring, set course for home. The first half of the trip went just fine, but as they grew closer to where Tremar was supposed to be, nav began to fail. No matter what they did, they couldn't bring it back online. Were the path one easy, straight shot, they could have risked it - but after hours of deliberating, a vote was held to turn back.
A vote interrupted by Cassia Klade, who had over the course of their journey earned the respect of the crew for her inspiring words and the level-headed way she tackled the little problems they'd faced along the way. She asked them to trust her. Not that she knew what she was doing either, but to simply have it on faith that when she said she knew where home was, she meant it. The only person to dissent was the one Coalition representative who'd insisted his way on board back at the hub.
So they began the delicate, terrifying process of what amounted to navigating blind. Relying on Cassia's sense of direction and external tracking cameras, they made their way through the black. The trip was exhaustingly long and at times harrowing, having to find a path around and through countless miles of space trash.
The crew of the Dauntless had nearly given up when a distant speck turned out to be a planet. Not Tremar, but upon closer inspection, one of its siblings. The relief and celebration lasted all the way to port, where they touched down to, at first, skepticism, and finally a crowd that joined them in their revelry. They shared their story hailed as heroes, but the excitement over their return soon gave way to wonder at what they'd brought with them.
Tremar was lost some 30 years before she found the Coalition again, and there were plenty of advancements made in that time, all of which the people of Tremar set to work implementing.
Willis Tweedell, the Coalition's representative, was less excited for all of that. He impressed the importance of reconnecting with the Coalition, of defining a safe route for travel and fulfillment of the Coalition's original intentions for the colony... none of which Tremar was terribly interested in. They had their own government now, their own society, and with what the crew of the Dauntless learned on their mission, a mutation which set them apart as much as their slow-developing culture. Once they might have believed they needed the Coalition to survive, but clearly, that was no longer the case.
Tweedell didn't take that 'no' very well, but when it was brought to his attention he didn't have another way off-planet or back to it without one of them leading the way, he reluctantly agreed to see their side of things.
Negotiations lasted a year and a half thanks to the weeks-long travel time and the council of Tremar's refusal to make a decision its people weren't on board with. They ended with Tremar designated a free and independent planet, after the Coalition realized the planet could more or less drop back off their radar without its help. Tremar did agree, however, to establishing a trade line for the ore.
While this outcome meant more mines, it hasn't really had the effect of blowing up Tremar's development quite as much as one would expect. It's still incredibly difficult to get to the planet over a century later, and though the ore is both useful as a fuel source and there has been a great deal of research devoted to figuring out how to harness its signal-jamming capabilities in a practical manner, it's generally thought not to be worth the Coalition's time or effort. They're happy to leave each other alone for the most part.