Pennacerti

Pennacerti is a mid-sized rocky planet, slightly smaller than Earth, with a beautiful native ecosystem. It also has two small moons. It’s native life is similar to Earth’s, with green plants, insects, and tetrapods. Much of its life’s resemblance to Earth’s theropods has earned it the moniker of ‘the planet of dinosaurs’.

It is home to a native sapient species known as the beamen. Their cultures are mostly unconnected by an internet, and are thus some of the most diverse in the Local Systems. To defend their interests, many of these cultures have come together to create a legal entity known as the UBC. Other nations with jurisdiction over parts of Pennacerti include the UHALE and Martian Union.

Planetary environment

Pennacerti is a rocky planet with a diameter approximately 90% that of Earths’. It has two moons; xeluna, a large, round moon with one-fifth the diameter of Earth’s moon, and Nolune, a small asteroid moon only a few kilometres across. Pennacerti has 346 24.5-hour-long days a year.

It has an axial tilt of 29 degrees, producing slightly more variable seasons than Earth. These seasons are usually divided into six (summer, blaze, fall, winter, chill, and spring), as based on the traditional beaman categorisation.

Pennacerti is known for its pristine ecosystems- and for good reason. The native beamen never went through the Industrial Age, and the immigrant aliens constructed their colonies using modern, reusable technology that had low impact on Pennacerti’s environments. Thus, Pennacerti has never faced issues like climate change, a depleting ozone layer, intensive mining, or plastic pollution.

That isn’t to say that there are no problems facing Pennacerti’s environment- for instance, deforestation or commercial hunting- but it is still home to some of the most clean natural environments inhabited by people.

(pictured: a map of the biomes of Pennacerti.)

Life
(main article: life of Pennacerti)

Pennacerti is sometimes known as ‘Earth’s twin’ for its similar lifeforms. At the base of its food chain are green plants, like mosses, ferns, cycads, ginkgoes, conifers, and grasses. Animals include coral, sponges, jellies, crinoids, molluscs (eg squid, ammonites, nautiloids), arthropods (eg insects, myriapods, crustaceans), and tetrapods (eg amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs). Pennacerti is also home to a few alien species that have adapted to life on the planet, like mammals.

Native sapient inhabitants

(Main article: beamen)

Beamen form some of the oldest known cultures; they have been specialising for specific environments for millions of years without developing industrial or spacefaring technology.

They have a wide range of traditional lifestyles: farmers, hunter-gatherers, fishers, nomads, townships, cultures that have even domesticated and selectively bred plants and animals. Since time immemorial, they have lived in a sort of grey area in technological progression, creating specialised technology and food-gathering habits, and yet never using it to form large cities or empires.

More recently, the status quo has been interrupted as the beamen have had visits from extraterrestrials. The alien species- humans, Azi lana, lomanos- have established cities and urban area in allotted territory.

A few beaman peoples have actually adopted this new way of life, moving into the cities or forming suburbs of their own- but they are a minority. Most cultures have simply kept going with what they’ve always done.

Current sapient inhabitants/nations

The main holder of land on Pennacerti is the UBC. The UBC, or the United Beaman Coalition, is a treaty between hundreds of seperate beaman cultures to help them all represent themselves and each other in front of the United Lexen Empire’s House of Representatives.

There are peoples that want to be left alone, or have never been contacted by aliens, whose territory would thus legally fall into a grey area that could be exploited. So, the cultures that are part of the UBC have seen to it that they legally represent this territory in order to protect those that might otherwise be harmed.

As the territory that is part of the UBC has been legally claimed and is regularly represented in the ULE House of Representatives, it is illegal for any government, business, or individual to travel on or exploit the land without the permission of the UBC, and any who do are legally culpable to the UBC itself.

The UBC has transferred these permissions to the individual peoples that live on the land, and thus they are legally allowed to control their own land and punish trespassers as they wish.

A few better-known beamen cultures part of the UBC include:

The Lo Lo people

The Takha tribes

The Vau’fax farmers

The Mûn eye people

The Xa-ey knights

The Tokail nomads.

Other legal powers of Pennacerti include the UHALE and the Martian Union. These nations control smaller areas of Pennacerti; usually cities or science outposts.