Endless Blue - Week 26 - The Floating Wheel

Anthropogenics

The Floating Wheel

Perhaps the third most important discovery that enabled civilization to flourish, behind language and fire, is arguably the wheel.  Historians and philosophers can argue the details, but work-relieving potential of the wheel has proven itself indispensible in every culture known.  An astoundingly simply invention -- the simplest shape, found everywhere in nature, and refined to become the greatest mechanical tool to push civilization forward -- the wheel's practicality is a little diminished when you can move in all directions.  Wheels essentially need traction to work, and when held aloft, floating in an endless ocean of water, there is little there for the wheel to roll across.  Even if the pisceans of antiquity kept to the sea bed with their wheels, the topography of the ocean floor is rough, usually steep, and most times less solid than packed earth.

This is not to say that the wheel doesn't exist.  I most certainly does, as there just as many inspirations for the shape under the sea as there are above the waves, and the utility of the pre-historical invention is simply too potent for civilization to have "never imagined it".  But on Elqua, the wheel gives up its prominence as the premiere contraption of the piscean mind in favor of a less tangible, but perhaps more understandable, development: domestication.

The domestication of animals as beasts of burden filled the roll of the wheel in Elquan prehistory.  Harnesses or even basic lengths of rope strapped to dolphins, manta rays, and other strong swimmers with high levels of stamina took advantage of the raw strength the beasts possessed to pull a sled or travois.  When loads were exceptionally heavy, the travois would be dragged across the ocean floor terrain, but with sufficient number of animals using their inate buoyancy, the weight of the load could be over come and the essentially be lifted into the water much like a helicopter might lift its cargo.  The domesticated animals, in a way, served as organic dirigibles, carrying cargo that would be impossible to move by hand.

Domestication is the practice of humans to selectively breed compliance into a species for the intent of exploiting their natural traits.  It is not just limited to animals (as expressed in the Packbreeder character class), but also included plants (as employed with the Culinist character class).
On our own world, domestication is as common as the nearest house pet or backyard garden.  Domestication of canis lupus familiaris (the common dog) took place almost 17,000 years ago, and cereal crops like peas and wheat were domesticated roughly 11,000 years ago.  The piscean equivalents would be delphis (pronounced del-fIz, a smaller form of dolphin trapped in a perpetual state of neotony) and the wonder grain ricelqua.

To achieve domestication in animals, the packbreeder needs to produce six criteria in the species.

Placid Temperament -- An animal must be able to adjust to its new environment and not become startled by any little movement or sound.  Essentially, it must modify its "fight or flight" reflex so that it is not the primary reaction to outward stimuli.  A beast that lashes out at the slightest provocation is better suited to become a beast of war, whereas a creature that is skittish and likely to bolt at any time becomes a burden to simply keep in captivity.

Pleasant Disposition -- Unlike the beasts of war packbreeder guide into combat, domesticated  animals must not pose a danger to their captor when held in captivity.  A dog is docile in comparison of its feral fore-bearer, the wolf,

Social Imprinting -- A domesticated animal must be able to accept another kind of creature (in this case, the packbreeder or owner) as the pack leader of it's pack/herd.  Without this implicit subjugation, a species would never achieve the level of dependency needed for domestication.

Captive Breeding -- If the animal cannot breed under the auspices of piscean packbreeders, there is no hope of selectively breeding the wanted traits.  Many animals reproduce in specific places, such as sea turtles along sandy beaches.  This migratory instinct that forces an animal to travel to a specific place to reproduce/give birth prevents the encompassing control a packbreeder needs to modify a species successfully.

Quick Maturity -- Coupled with captive breeding, if an animal does not reach maturity at a relatively fast rate and reproduce a subsequent generation in the lifespan of a piscean, no single packbreeder can fully influence the artificial selection of its traits.  If it would take multiple generations of packbreeders to produce any significant genetic change,  chances are a more fertile species would be better suited for domestication.

Adaptable Diet -- Animals whose diet consists of a single specific algae or species of fish make poor choices for domestication, as their finicky consumption habits require extra effort to cultivate.  Those species that can survive on the left-overs from piscean meals, or even whatever plant life is chanced upon in the immediate area mean less energy is invested into cultivating their meals and that extra effort can be put into whatever chore they are suited to accomplish.

The product of this intense genetic selection is the creation of livestock (animals that can be used by pisceans as sources of food, beasts of burden, or both).  Some animals make better muscle than meal, like the ever-present dolphins and porpoises.  Others are strictly raised little other reason that to be eaten, like albacore.  Then there are those animals used for their industrial applications, such as the oysters used in nacre production.  These species are bred with an marked increase of whatever profitable attribute in mind.  Finally, some species are bred as effort reducers, meant to take over menial tasks that pisceans are too busy or not well suited for, like pilot fish for cleaning and herding animal packs, or the bioluminescent algae used in bale-lights.

Plants, on the other hand, require much less stringent guidelines for domestication due mostly due to their immobility.  Domesticated plants bred for large-scale food harvesting are called crops, and here a culinist's skill can shine.  The application of a skillful culinist's abilities can breed out physical and chemical defenses (such as thorns or sour fruit), shorten germination times, increase harvest yields, or even create brand new types of plant.  An example in our own world is the root known as the carrot.  While most immediately think of the color orange when the vegetable is mention, the truth is that carrots come in a spectrum of colors, and the ubiquitous orange color is just one.  It is believed that the acari is one such result on Elqua, a carefully crafted species of plant that excels at its absorptive abilities when it is hybridized.  The cultivar (cultivated variety) of acari can be almost unidentifiable when compared to the wild variety. except for the tell-tale rubbery skein and gelatinous pulp.

An interesting effect of selective breeding and societal growth has developed into a class of animal that serves no real purpose other than the joy it gives to its owner.  These animals do not provide food, nor do they complete work.  Instead they exist solely at the whim of their master.  Called "pets", these domesticated creatures are usually the result of generations of packbreeders honing a species of fauna into a source of companionship and pleasure instead of purpose and need.  The plant equivalent would be a garden, and the flora of the deep can come in as varied shape, size, or color as the culinist's imagination can conjure.

Endless Blue - Week 25 - What Use is Shelter when Water Soaks Everything

Architecture 

What Use is Shelter when Water Soaks Everything

An understandable preliminary idea would be "what use are buildings under the sea?"  Is not the purpose of shelter to protect from the elements?  Here on Elqua, the element of water surrounds everything in every direction, with its life-giving yet material-destroying wetness.  There is no rain to keep out when water takes the place of air, after all.  And since life has evolved to live in soaked, cold environment would such protection ever be invented.

While these points have some validity, the need for shelter is still imperative for the growth and maturation of society as well as the protection of the individual piscean.   It forms the foundation from with to build future generations upon, contributing to dependable and stable surroundings.

True, weather like rain cannot function in an environment of tangible liquid.  That does not mean that there are not other sources of danger and risk to life that need to be addressed.  The oceans of Elqua have strong, torrential currents that meander throughout the seas.  No matter how well adapted an individual may be to withstand the temperature, when currents sweep through at speeds rivaling just a category 1 hurricane a hapless piscean will be battered about like a fish out of water.

Regardless of this, just because a species is evolved to flourish in an environment does not mean it is impervious to the fluctuations of temperature that the daily solar cycle creates.  We are perfectly suited to survive in our air-filled world, but spend all day, unprotected, out in the blistering sun or the cold night and your body will suffer from heat stroke or fall into hypothermia.  Even in temperate climate zones, try to sleep out under the evening stars and see how long until you begin shivering without some form of shelter, even if it is just a sleeping bag in which to nestle.

If there is any lesson the Endless Blue teaches, it is that life is eat-or-be-eaten.  Thus the most indispensible utility of shelter is the protection from predators.  Not all aquatic creatures operate on a luminal cycle, and while the pisceans sleep the night away the nocturnal predators are on the prowl.  A sufficiently sturdy domicile alleviates the majority of the need to post guards against the indigenous creatures.  A shut door is often enough deterrent to keep strays from encroaching into our living areas, and this is just as true whether those creatures have legs or fins.

On a more sociological level, shelter provides barriers to others of our own kind.  It draws borders between what is mine and what is yours, and serves as an obstacle for those that wish to deprive me of my belongs without my consent.  Theft is simply an unenlightened extension of foraging, but instead of finding the boon out in the natural habitat, it is found in the possession of another piscean.

Conversely, shelter prevents our property from being lost.  Domestication of livestock was a major contribution to the civilization of the wild, and without an enclosed area to pen in beasts of burden those same animals would wander off in their own instinctive attempt to forage for survival. 

Form and Function

The earliest shelter was that eked out between the coral reefs or the cracks in the rocky sea slopes by the primitive hunter/gatherer pisceans in prehistory.  It was only natural, as it was the same method used by all other animals in the seas.

Well, almost all others.  Many species evolved their own kinds of shelter in the form of carapaces or shells.  Chambered nautilus shells are perhaps the most visually memorable kind of self-produced shelter, where the animal excretes nacre to form a protective barrier around its body.  This shell is slightly larger than the creature itself, allowing it to withdraw into the shell, hiding its whole body from external threats.  As the animal grows, it adds onto the ever-widening open end of the shell, moves its growing mass into the wider section, and seals off a small portion of the opposite end with a wall that forms an anterior chamber -- hence the name "chambered nautilus".  The spiral formed by the circling chambers is a logarithmic spiral that follows the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8...), and is responsible for the inherent strength of the shell.

Piscean buildings follow much of the same pattern.  The most simplistic of buildings is the dome -- a single chamber.  There is little more sturdy than an arch.  Ancient structures in our own world still stand today based solely on the arch dynamic, without mortar to reinforce it.  A dome is simply an arch in 360 degrees.  Instead of adding floors to a building, the buoyant environment allows architects to build chambers in any direction they choose.  While the larger and larger chambers that a Fibonacci spiral entails would make a tower top heavy if built upward, putting the smallest chamber at the top, like a pinnacle, and winding downward is a solid design.

Another facet of underwater architecture is that there is no functional difference between a door and a window when the owner is capable of floating out either one.  Both are simply portals allowing ingress or egress from the building.  As such, portals can be positioned anywhere on a building -- walls, floor, or ceiling -- at any angle.  This can be used to add patterning to a spiraling design, as the chambers need not be placed at right angles to one another as we are accustomed to experiencing. 

Building Blocks

Masonry is not an alien concept in the Known World, and buildings have been constructed and torn down again and again for centuries.  Unless the other races co-opted an existing domicile or somehow coerced the Chelon to build it for them, all buildings trace their history back to early masonry construction.  Segments of coral, shell, basalt, or any other material have been interlocked to provide a barrier between the world without and the contents within, and it all hinged on the tacky material used to glue those solid blocks together -- mortar.

The key to construction has been the invention of hydraulic mortar.  Based on a mixture of ground lime, an aggregate of various corals, and the water present in abundance, mortar produces the permanent cementing of building parts into a lasting creation.  The lime and aggregate slurries are kept in separate containers until needed, at which time are mixed together either by hand (when small amount are needed) or in a mill-like device anchored to the rock or reef and driven by beasts of burden like dolphins.  The mix does not readily dilute in water due to the chemical properties created by the interaction of lime with calcium carbonate, and slowly sets despite the ever-present contact with water.  The curing time varies depending on the proportions of lime to coral and tempered by additional additives that add to the mortar's strength or flexibility.

The invention of this hydraulic cement is often given to the Mer engineer Whitaker Canvass about 120 years previously, but Kouton masons have been utilizing the agent for much longer than that.  Whomever actually discovered the fixative properties of lime, it has proven integral in the growth of civic populations everywhere, save for the few pisceans that prefer to keep themselves closer to the element of water as their precursors were, like the nomadic Locanth or the Narwahl Orcans.

Building design is far more varied than simplistic racial variations.  Architecture is as much an expression of art as it is the deployment of technology.  While the dome is the prototypical basis for all branches of consequent architecture, from that point it diverges in any of a hundred different directions.  Every architect expresses their ideas differently, and when presented with an empty lot and the potential for construction, they will present some unexpected visions.

Modern Examples of Piscean Buildings:

An adventurer can many times be judged on the tools employed in his career, and nothing says experience like owning a Locanthic hut.  Locanthic tents are masterfully made portable shelters, constructed from the rib-bones of whales and other large aquatic vertebrates.  The ribs form a star pattern, with the nexus forming at the top of the tent, and treated hides stretched between the bones.  The hut is easily put together, with the rib points digging into the clay seabed, lashed to coral, or pitoned into rock for anchoring.

Chelon cities are marvels of organic construction, using xanthellea to comprise their buildings, drawing out the coral and knitting it together in vast, interconnected caverns.    Completely mortar-less, the coral walls and ceiling are a solid formation that takes advantage of the coral's natural properties.  It has allowed the race to push the envelop of architecture and produce some of the most intricate and expansive buildings in the Known World.

Those few privileged enough to see a Lumulan settlement tell tales of their opaque glass buildings constructed of volcanic basalt quarried from the thermal vents that proliferate the region.

Endless Blue - Week 24 - All is not Blue Under the Waves

Oceanography

All is not Blue Under the Waves

Contrary to first impressions, terrain under the oceans is not a flat, featureless horizon of silt and sand.  In actuality, submerged land has as varied a morphology as the land above the waves, perhaps more so.  Here, with sea surrounding you in every direction, the currents that affect the formation of terrain consist of water instead of air.

The flow of the currents across the world are subdivided into gyres, large sections of repetitively circulating waters that make up the basis of oceanic climate and provide the impetus for aquatic weather.  As a result of this, the terrain of the Known World is complex, with many different types of habitat overlapping in the same area.

Aquatic Vegetation

Despite being surrounded by the Endless Blue, Elqua's underwater kingdoms are a verdant green.  Great swaths of kelp and seaweed blanket the ocean floor like the timberland and shrubbery of the surface world, with upsweeping and enveloping growths almost re-blanketing the area.  An underwater jungle, with the greens and browns of plant life in all directions, the variety and volume of aquatic plants rivals that of our own -- a rich field of broad leafy vegetation undulating in the ocean current.

It is the kelp forests and seaweed jungles that formed the basis for the nebulous borders of Elquan kingdoms.  Animals cannot exist in the open ocean without becoming easy victims to predators.  They require the dense cover and plentiful food sources the wild areas of aquatic vegetation offer.  To keep this balance intact, the political bodies of water have needed to enforce the concept of "no mer's seas" as buffer zones -- a form of environmental protection.

However, bowing under recent population explosions and exponential consumption needs, piscean cultivation has cleared a significant portion of the wild vegetation in favor of farmland dedicated to acari and ricelqua.  This clearing of sea plants has begun to devastate the natural habitat of ocean life. and for the first time the Known World is looking a little too small for its people, despite being nearly an entire hemisphere of the globe.

Sargasso Seas

Sargasso seas are an evolution of Elqua's kelp forests and seaweed jungles that has adapted into its ecological niche by no longer needing to bury its root system into the soil.  The sargassum's roots eek out nutrients from the water, while the leaves bobbing on the water's surface collect sunlight.  Complete ecosystems can form on larger patches of sargasso, and in many ways become miniature versions of the  mysterious migrating islands.

The godless have turned to the sargassum as possible relief to the increasing needs of the piscean masses, and their culinists have been hard at work trying to develop better hybrids of sea plants that can produce more, faster, and with less stress on the environment.  Unfortunately the unrelenting bias against anything from above the surface of the water, coupled with political fearmongering, has stymied most of the culinists' progress.

Coral Reefs

The great reefs of the Endless Blue are the anchor system for underwater life, providing shelter and food for so many of the indigenous life forms.  What we see as coral is actually a calcium carbonate excretion of the actual coral animal, the polyp, which lives in communities.  Many different kinds of polyps can co-exist in a reef, and each contributes to the beauty and longevity of the habitat.

On Elqua, reefs are much more common that on Earth.  About 10% of the undersea terrain is covered in coral structures, usually (but not exclusively) clustered around intersections of imperceptible lines of energy called ley lines.  These are the areas that Chelon congregate and protect as part of the xanthellae that comprises their civilization.

Oceanic Ridges

These are the hills and mountains of the world, pushing up either through the collision of tectonic plates or by volcanic eruptions depositing new earth from the lava chambers below the crust.  They can reach through all levels of the ocean -- Shelf, Shoal, and Shore -- and even break the surface to form the tiny island chains of Elqua.

Canyon Trenches

The flip side of oceanic ridges are the canyon trenches that line the continental shelves.  These are the deepest parts of the Endless Blue, where the reach of sunlight falters and the cold, looming water saps the warmth from most every living thing.  Ecology here is that of the scavenger, often living off of the sinking bodies of the dead.

A variation of the canyon trench are underground caverns.  Entry to such a cavern can be miles away from the actual cave, and may meander randomly and quixotically, thinning and thickening their width along the raw rocky tunnel walls.

Brine Waterways

The composition of sea water is remarkably saline, but the distribution of that salt is not uniform.  There are places in the oceans where a greater density of salt has made the liquid sink to the bottom and fill in pools, becoming lakes and rivers.  The disparity in diffused material is often so great that you can literally see a difference in the two fluids, the brine possessing an almost oily, greasy-green tint.

These lakes and rivers form waterways just as normal lakes and rivers do on the surface world, with brackish brine flowing generally downward to the lowest depths.  The lower the flow of brinewater, the thicker is becomes from the pressure.

Many piscean culinists use this brinewater as a pereserving agent in food, especially meats.  Brining food draws the water out of the meat, essentially mummifying it so that it spoils at a much more reduced rate.  In conjuction with acari's denaturing acidity, Elquan cuisine is tangy mix of sweet and salty flavors.

Hydrothermal Vents

A hydrothermal vent is a hole in the bottom of the ocean that allows either the water above or underground springs to come in contact with molten rock from the planet's mantle.  This contact immediately flashes the water into steam, which comes billowing as scalding hot water.  They are the closest thing the Known World has to open flame.

While the waters around these fuming vents reaches the boiling point, life still manages to flourish here, in strange forms like tube worms anchored to the sedimentary pillars that form the vent, filtering nutrients from the waters passively.

The Lumulus Basin is renown to be covered in a multitude of these ducts, and it is due to these vents that the Lumulus learned the art of metal-smithing.
Chemical Seeps

Colloquially known as "poison water", chemical seeps are cracks in Elqua's crust that leak chemicals into the oceans.  Substances like methane, sulfur, and hydrocarbons are the most common, but even rarer elements and compounds can be found.  The topography that forms around seep habitats are the most unique in all of Elqua, and are often the sites where surface life re-adapted for underwater life.

Sea Snow

As ludicrous an image as it may seem, it actually does snow under water.  Normally the saline and other trace elements in ocean water prevent the sea from freezing solid, and instead keep the material in a liquid form despite its temperature dropping below its freezing point.  But sometimes the conditions are right for ice crystals to form and be carried by the water currents.
This phenomenon is relegated to the lowest depths of Elqua's oceans, where the gallon after gallon of water pressing downward actually compacts the water into its solid state through sheer force of weight.  At this depth there is little to no light, so consequently not much in the way of heat to melt the newly formed crystals, yet the fluid they are suspended in itself does not freeze.  These particles are then swept up in the ocean currents, whirling, swirling, twirling around in all direction under the grip of flowing water.  More like a flurry than falling snow, these specks can even be seen to "fall" upward as the currents drag them around until they clump together into larger chunks of ice or cling to something they impact during their travels.  Those chunks trapped at lower depths slowly increase in size as they accumulate more crystals, while those free floating ones eventually collect enough mass that buoyancy overcomes inertia and they rise upward, melting in the warmer currents closer to the surface.

Vortices

The technical term for whirlpools, a vortex is a turbulent, spinning funnel on the surface of the water with a downdraft, which may or may not reach down to the sea bed.  The water travels in a spiral pattern towards the center of the whirlpool, and is sucked downward.  They are formed by the complex interplay of Elqua's three moons on the tides of the planet.  Further, vortices have been known to form when sinkholes open up to underground pockets of lesser dense materials, like air pockets.  These are usually the most lethal, as the unfortunate soul trapped at the bottom of such a cavern cannot swim back up the waterfall-like funnel of the whirlpool.

Not all vortexes are manic spirals of circling descent and death.  Indeed, many are quite tranquil drifts, and the more expansive of these vortices are boons to travelers and caravans that can monopolize their currents to speed travel between destinations.

Red Tide

The red tide is a colorful misnomer for a species of blooming single-celled bacteria that appear red with seasonal regularity.  The danger presented by what would normally be a smorgasbord of phytoplankton is the virulent neurotoxin these bacteria give off.  It is a quick and efficient poison, killing most everything that simply swims too close to their infected waters.

Normally avoided at all costs, the currents of Elqua's oceans will sometimes drag the red tide right through heavily populated areas of the Known World, leaving a wake of destruction as they pass.  The civilized races consider it to be every person's humanitarian duty to warn unsuspecting settlements of an encroaching red tide, even in times of hostility.  This is a practice shared by the Locanth, though not any of the other primitive races.

Black Water

Only a rumor, but stories have begun surfacing of a new kind of red tide.  Inky black, as if absorbing all color and light from reality, spreading blobs of oozing darkness have apparently been appearing in the most remote reaches of the hinterseas.  Unlike the red tide, this black water does not kill an unsuspecting prey, but instead slowly engulfs it within it viscous tendrils.  However, no quantifiable evidence of its existence has ever been found, and with the tale's veracity coming from "a friend of a friend", most discount it as superstitious nonsense.

Endless Blue – Week 23 – The Vastness

Aerology

The Vastness

The oceans of Elqua cocoon the world in a thick, cool embrace that nurtures a complexity of life unparalleled.  The majority of the intelligent races are content to swim in their mostly borderless world, encapsulated in their blue underwater haven.  But there are few -- those with inquisitive minds and more daring natures, that seek to peer beyond the one border no one dare to cross: past the surface, into the Vastness.

Above the waves, existence becomes alien.  No longer do the waters envelop you in their comforting currents.  Instead there is only openness, expansive nothing, the vastness of above.  This is a strange world of waterless blue expanse filled with light that slowly corrupts into inky blackness.  When sudden and violent storms rage, their crackling anger fluorescing the sky with whipping curtains of color.  It is  here the Maelstrom resides, its year-long howling fury screeching across the globe as it parts the turbulent waters like a finger scratching in the silt mud, as if searching for some long lost dire need.

The Vastness is an emotionally charged term for everything that is not below the surface of Elqua's oceans.  Through constant religious propaganda anything "upward" has become tainted with images of damnation and suffering, that life above the waves is aberration and suffering.  There is much to be said of that fact -- what little land breaks the surf is a teeming jungle of savage creatures with the sole drive to feed on the lesser being.  The most basic survival law is to eat while not being eaten, and that is monumental achievement in the lush islands that speckle the Endless Blue.

It was from glimpsing these isolated pinpricks of land that Seamus Lorwynn, famed explorer, first pondered the origin of species and brought a new way of thinking, kicking and screaming in protest, to the world of the Endless Blue.

Climate

Climate under the waves is a function of the Gulf Stream as it draws cold water away from the polar regions and distributes it in the areas between the Tropics of Kraken and Cetacean.  Cyclically, it then draws the tepid, phytoplankon enriched waters from the tropics to the temperate regions, and finally back to the poles, where it serves as the basis of all food chains.

Above the waves, the climate is much more stable, with tropic, temperate, and tundra zones very clearly defined.  With such great swaths of water separating the peppered specks of land, climate zones tend to stay very homogenized and ubiquitous.  The banded circulatory air currents keep most equitorial zones an amalgamous equivalent, with variation more the result of the evolution of life forms on land than from the weather itself.  Biomes are predictable to almost the degree of latitude, with altitude being the only variant effect on any particular island.  There is less erosion in this environment than under the sea, and despite planetary age rocks and stone formations have kept a sharper edge.  The sand that makes up the shore is a product of aquatic erosion, the eons of tidal waters lapping at the exposed ground wearing away sediment and  detritus.

This does not preclude the existence of air currents -- a Jet Stream most certainly does exist, but it does not meander over the world, tracing edges of continents and borders of mountain ranges.  Few surface objects affect its constant rolling around the planet, with the volcanic islands of the Spine of the World being the most numerous, and the Maelstrom being the most visual.  These introduce enough agitation into the otherwise calm climate zones to produce a variation of seasonal weather, such as monsoons.  This in turn have, over time, produced landscapes from the hyperhumid to the arid, and has given rise to Elqua's own rainforests, steppes, deserts, and even tundras.  Though rarely are more than two types of terrain ever found on a single island; such a limited space cannot support that level of minute variation without another source of interference contributing to the formation.

Weather

Usually, the weather of the Vastness is relatively calm when compared to our world.   A quick comparison between the Earth and Elqua illustrates the huge difference in storm systems between the two worlds.  This is primarily due to the nearly glass-smooth surface of the water.

Ninety-five percent of Elqua is covered in oceans, leaving only 5% to land mass.  Land mass contributes significantly to the formation of weather patterns by causing turbulence in air currents and providing surface areas of negative albedo for cooler air to shed heat.  By comparisson, our world has mighty continents that shape the flow of air around the land mass, and the variation of land altitudes -- from the deepest valley to the tallest mountain top -- further adds friction and movement to the atmospheric fluidity.

Since Elqua is comparatively a smooth round ball, air currents are not as dramatically excited by obstacles.  The tidal motion of the world, though complex due to the three moons, is essentially less choppy, and storm systems will instead tend to form bands around the planet such as those of gas giants than swirling vortexes between high and low pressure fronts.

This is not to say there are no differences in temperature.  There most certainly are.  Elqua is tilted on its axis, and rotates enough to have a day/night cycle.  This means the hemisphere closest to the sun during daytime absorbs more radiant heat from the world's sun, while the opposite point of the globe sheds heat quite rapidly.  This intake and release of sunlight-born heat is exacerbated by the albedo of the waters and the insulation of the ozone layer.

Remember how much more of Elqua is covered in water?  Nearly ¹⁹/₂₀^ths are covered in pristine waters.  Well, water has a interesting property called albedo, which means the amount of light reflected away instead of absorbed.  While water has a very low albedo, the waves formed by the tidal motion and deep sea currents cause light that shines down on the ocean to become scattered.  This is the familiar "glinting" that waves produce to the observer -- light that would normally be absorbed by the water as heat energy is being reflected back into the atmosphere.  With such a large surface of water to undulate and scatter light,  a much larger portion of light is reflected back into the atmosphere.

The southern polar ice-cap compounds this system.  Ice and snow are high on the scale of albedo expressing materials, so the southern polar region contributes to the heat cycle of the planet.  This is observable by the yearly melting of the ice-caps, where ancient rhodoarchaea bloom as they are freed from their cryogenic slumber, flowing down the newly created arctic rivers in a bright red flow, like a waterfalls of blood.  This jarring coversion of heat to melt the ice results in a lowering of both the gulf (water) and jet (air) streams as cold air and water seep into the heated areas.  As the cycle rotates, precipitation covers the south pole in fresh water, that freezes into ice and restores the extent of the Antarctic covered in ice to previous levels.

What keeps all this heat from escaping back into space is the ozone layer, intermittent cloud cover, and the strange over-abundance of noble gasses in Elqua's atmosphere.  The lower noble gases -- helium, neon, argon, krypton, and xenon -- make up a significantly larger proportion of the Vastness than they do in our own atmosphere.  Helium, for example, is abundant, at nearly 1% of Elqua's atmosphere (as contrasted by the 18 parts per million in our own air).  Argon, which in our world is .9% of the atmosphere, is over double that on Elqua -- an amazing 2.1%.  The rest of these inert gases exist in a range from 3x to 5x the predominance as that of Earth.

Since helium is lighter than oxygen -- the mainstay of either world's air -- it will rise in the atmosphere, taking its potential energy (as heat) into the upper stratosphere.  The helium is then dragged along the ozone layer by air currents to the gaps in the ozone above either global polar region, and there shed their heat.  The solar winds that form the planet's auroras drag it downward, heightening the colorful curtain effect so much it is visible in pure daylight.  The electrical storms that suddenly spring to life and rage unyieldingly until spent cause the turbulence necessary to disperse the now cooled helium back into the weather fronts and spread it across the globe.  The effects of the other noble gases are similar, but due to their atomic weight provide more impact on the redistribution of the atmosphere than the dispersion of heat.  As a side effect, it provides some strains of aerostat a constant source of light from which to photosynthesize, and a select few the potential energy to maintain their bioluminescence.

Beyond the Vastness

Perhaps the most blasphemous act of the godless is the realization that there is more beyond the strangely colored aurorae that dance at the poles.  The three moons of Elqua -- Oberus, Urowes, and Ymaris -- are well known by the scholars of the intelligent races, even if they hide the suspected effect those satellites have on a rare condition called lycanthrope.  Beyond this trinity of heavenly bodies, the so-called "stars" and the inherent repercussions of their existence, have frightened and angered the devout to very extreme reactions.  It only cements for the them that the godless' twisted fascination with the damnable Vastness is a sign of their degenerate and perverted ideals, and should be stamped out before they corrupt the right minded citizens of the Known World.  Luckily, one burgeoning mind somehow broke free of religious dogma and wrote rhetoric to gift the Endless Blue with a whole new paradigm of cosmology.

Even as a small child, Endira Mundi was fascinated by the hushed stories of twinkling lights in the night sky.  She braved potential ostracization and even death to indulge in her adolescent fancy of star gazing.  With her wide, black eyes peeking out in abject wonder just above the slow undulation of the waves, her nimble mind soared among the clouds and aurorae during the day and danced along the glittering diamonds of far away stars at night.  Eventually as the amazement of youth waned and the intellectual curiosity of adulthood waxed, she began to catalogue the position of the stars in rudimentary arrangements she called "constellations".  She charted the slow drift of these constellations as the seasons changed, noted the frequency of the new and full moons as their bizarre orbital paths criss-crossed the Vastness, and that gave birth to some of the higher forms of math.  It was from her preliminary notes that later astronomers deduced that the ocean-world of Elqua was perhaps twice or three-times the size as originally inferred from holy scripture.

Despite the intrinsic truth of her ideas, Endira's adult life was one fraught with persecution and prosecution.  She faced prejudice and outright hostility in her home currents, and a near constant conflict with local laws and magistrates kept her practically poorer than a beggar.  With the eventual slaying of her family at the hands of murderous zealot Olyhydrans, she eventually fled to a hermetic life in the Lumulus Basin.  While the xenophobic Lumulus shunned her as they would any other race, there she at least could embrace the one remaining love of her life -- peeking above the waves at a world so different, yet so close to her own.


The insert in the map of the night sky shows a to-scale measurement of the depths of the Elquan oceans and the extent of the world's atmosphere, weighted in density between cyan and white.  Almost half of the world's atmosphere is below the 6 kilometer mark, contrasted with 99% of the atmosphere by 38 kilometers.  These blue areas are the habitat of most of the areostats, with only a rare few venturing up higher into the thinning atmosphere.  The air finally thins to the point it is virtually a vacuum somewhere around 110 kilometers up, and at 650 km from the surface of the planet's waters the last vestiges of the stratosphere exist simply as random molecules.  By comparison, the 12 kilometers from sea level to the bottom of the Shelf seems rather shallow, until you realize that at those abyssal depths the weight of the water crushing in on top you is only acerbated by the downward pressure of that much atmosphere.