## Okaria  ## Overview Okaria is an icy world that is closer to its parent sun, but not close enough to be an ocean world. However, this has led to a warmer ice layer than usual which has been exploited by the local flora to grow more than the snowball world normally would have. It has been under global ice cover for most of its history with little sign this will change for at least a few hundred million more years. In spite of that, a complex and diverse biosphere had matured on Okaria to the point it has intelligent life. ## Ecology The Okarian ecology is built upon the lattice weed, which in the wild is limited, but with [[Okar]] cultivation has become a global network of flora that the Okar have evidently been cultivating for over fifty thousand years as one of the first sapient uplifts. The Okarian civilization is incredibly complicated, it has survived a couple impact incidents and integrates many cyrophiliac fauna like themselves. The lattice weed's vast nutrition network has been mostly fed by surface radiation. They just know something in the great barrier fuels them, they have tried to find out what at times, but the stress of having to keep the networks maintained over the millennia has made a communal culture where such inquiry is rare at best. And since no one survived leaving, they assume it's like throwing people into volcanos. Exploring the depths has been attempted, but again it is too terrifying to the Okarian locals. The depths horrify them so much they have to see lattice weed in view or it's like being lost to eternity and inevitably being devoured by the deep ones. Indeed the deep ones have truth to them, mega fauna does exist which prey on fauna that get dragged down by the convection currents. Indeed it's these convection currents the lattice seems to exist to counter act and allow for a large Okarian civilization. It's very communally managed, with the managers being known as the Conduits who have been in power for at least ten thousand years after the cutting catastrophes. The earlier eras didn't have as stable networks, the violence makers of those times made life hard for all and their refusal to connect all the nets like it started to be in the last twenty thousand years. ## The Okar's Ecological Role The Okar themselves are filter feeders, living through filtration of the radiation [[flux|Flux]] and their vast grids of radiation absorbing quasi-flora in the salt barrier zone 12 km below the surface. They're a very slow thinking species, methodically building their global system and social patchwork, they view themselves as the weavers entrusted to chain the monsters of the abyss to the depths using their radiation farms. They don't believe they have succeeded at this much because their chains decay too fast, so the efforts on their part are practically endless but they simply lack the resources to hold it up. So predation issues continue for them. The issues simply stack up for them as they can't communicate well and their society has been rather feudalistic for quite some time. Endless feuding, frustration and stress pretty much defines their existence. They hate working, it must, or else they get devoured by the world underneath them. Or so their myth goes (in all the truths it holds; there really are predators below who preyed on them and building their nets keeps them less likely to predate upwards due to an aversion to radiation absorbing flora despite devouring creature who live off radiation absorbent flora. #sapient #biosphere #iceshell #water-carbon #Star/G-Class #biosphere/persephonian #biochemistry/Carbon/Water/Alkaline #Galactic-Region/TheMurk