Hydia

The Rose of the West Galaxy

Home of the hedonistic, narcissistic Hydians, this world is a glittering jewel, beginning with already beautiful natural landscapes and terraforming being done on the "uglier" portions of the planet. Cities are often carved from white marble and inlaid with rich enamel work or precious metal and stones.

Narsis

• Capital of Hydia, carved from exquisite marble, plated with polished brass and boasting an intricate network of canals and slave-driven floats, the effect of reflected light gives the town a look of perpetual sunset against the reflections of the red metal and translucent stone. Residents of Narsis, the richest and possibly most arrogant of all of Hydia, need not sully their feet with walking past their doorways, instead merely beckoning a slave float for all their travel needs. Here rests the Grand Palace, home to the Hydian queen and her court. The palace dominates the skyline like a castle out of Arabian Nights, glowing a deep red at true sunset.

Feldron

• The public face of Hydia and home to its chief spaceport. Similar in size to Earth's Hero City, polished roofs treat interstellar travelers to a city-sized mirror. Intricately carved buildings suggest the city was carved from a very large boulder, rather then built. Aliens to Hydia may find, though, the only hospitable areas of Feldron the spaceport and the bazaar, where the most beautiful color is deemed the color of currency.

Lotus Forest

• A forest to the west of Feldron. Trees here, once a year, sprout hundreds of trumpet-shaped flowers. About a century or two ago, a human diplomat brought a Lotus to Hydia as a gift to the Hydian ruling family at the time. The ruling family kept the lotus, deeming it an extremely beautiful flower for something not Hydian, and kept it. A storm one day carried this original lotus' seeds into a river, where the plant mutated in the alien conditions and grew like a weed. The Hydians, loving the vicious beauty of the flower, allowed it to stay in the rivers and ponds of this forest, thus the forest's name. There is a temple in here dedicated to a martial art based on this mutant plant's "violent beauty".

Onyx Town

• Originally called Faelmuul, the town got its name from the black Earth stone by the reputation it has and the populace it keeps, "a shard of onyx among shining diamonds". Beautiful by Earth standards, it is the dregs of Hydian society. "Ugly ones" live here, non-Hydians mostly. Hydia's black market meets here for trade swaps every so often, and a majority of its lower-class underworld works out of this town.

Maps

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  Hydia

Population: 19 billion
Government: Monarchy
Threat Level: Average
Resource Level: Average