JustPaste.it

Rigudan had mystified scientists all over the world for centuries, if not millenia: a planet that, within roughly ten thousand years, went from not having any signs of intelligent life at all to spawning the bevatigens' civilization, bipeds wearing fur, sporting snouts and large, turnable ears as well as small horns on their forehead and a natural predisposition for technology. Research conducted during the observational period could not explain how their kind could have evolved so quickly, and any similarities with already known species, where they existed, were too vague to be attributed to a single one.

Before their transition to the space era, due to large chasms underground which rendered the surface unstable, the bevatigens created what the observers called "Plan Onion": Rather than filling the holes, the planet's crust was segmented into several layers and properly fortified from inside. For a long time, it was not understood what could lead to what was perceived as an astronomical amount of work to achieve relatively little, since the population size did not require additional living space.

Only once first contact happen and open communication with bevatigens was permitted did it turn out that Plan Onion also had a vague religious motive: They believed the physical core of the planet to be sentient, as well as responsible for their and all the other wildlife's creation. They also attributed their ability to channel and repurpose radiation with their horns to it. Despite the monotheistic roots, the core was not seen as an omnipotent creature, but merely as a thing that set their creation in motion, and anything done with ailmenting – that is, using channelled energy to heal physical and mental wounds – would be seen as an action by the ailmenter, although the core's involvement would be acknowledged.

It didn't take long until the gates were opened for immigration, an action mainly taken by sterlars, another species known to have popped up rather suddenly. Though unlike bevatigens, they themselves had no idea of how they came to be. The sterlars' main characteristic was their wide array of skintones, to the point it was often joked that, if you were to pick a random hexadecimal colour code and entered a big enough town on their homeplanet, that you'd likely find one with the matching skintone before the day was over. Aside from this, their only other peculiar characteristics were that they carried two hearts in their bodies and that the colour of their hair was about as random as their skin's.

It was after the time of immigration that this story took place, in the town of Kopernika, located at the second layer from above, right in the middle of the city...