So something occurred to me as I was scrolling my timeline and seeing fanart for The Locked Tomb scroll up my dash; New Roh and all the non-Empire human occupied planets are REALLY FREAKIN' ADVANCED as colony worlds go. Here we have the Empire which has actually stagnated, if not flat out reverted in a LOT of its developmental levels (specifically tech, but also governance, industry, most sciences, etc.) and some parts of the Empire have shortages on things that a supposedly advanced spacefaring civilization should just...have. Why the fuck are the Nine Houses using flimsy? That shit is hard to use and expensive to make and the production is torture on any environment and NOT RENEWABLE when you just gotta plant a few bamboo shoots in a field somewhere and next year you have more fuckin' bamboo than you can ever use so you cut a bunch of it down and pulp it and make friggin paper. The only thing you have to really worry about as far as the renewable-ness of the resource is keeping the soil fed...and if the Empire has LOTS of anything, it's corpses to turn into fertilizer. (Morbid, but true)
And yet, New Roh, before becoming a literal hellscape when Varun shows up, has so much infrastructure to spare that it becomes a refuge world when the Empire sends its walking WMDs called Lyctors after BoE.
Here's The Ninth House struggling to feed its people even though it's one of the most important houses in the system and meanwhile there's this "backwater" planet called New Roh that only starts to struggle to feed people when it takes on the escaped population of a DOZEN or so other planets.
New Roh had new construction, full industry, functioning space ports, agriculture, school systems, fast food, private and public transit...the Sixth House was having problems making babies.
This, more and more, makes me question the accuracy of Jod's account of Earth's final days in NtN, because a bunch of rich twats piling onto some custom space yachts with plans to just leave behind the most productive 99% managing to escape by the skin of their teeth and magically make not one but DOZENS of colony worlds that all become self-sustaining with rich, diverse cultures, multiple languages, healthy and robust economies, weapons manufacturers, black markets, etc.?
I don't care that it's been more than 10k years. If the ships that launched really only carried with them the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and the people that they decided would be good for shining their shoes, then that colony would have crashed and burned HARD before the first 10 years was up, forget the next 9,990.
𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗵𝗺𝗮: *sighs* All the males gods are unruly, disrespectful, volatile and highly unpredictable..
𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗵𝗺𝗮: *looks at Indra shooting his thunder bolts on random objects. Vayu yelling at him to stop. Rudra making the clouds roar loudly to scare mortals. Shiva meditating between this chaos. Vishnu staring at him with disbelief. Surya and Chandra quarreling on who's more popular. Varun and Agni, too quarreling on who's the best element. Yama threatening everyone that he is gonna commit homicide*
Man how did the gas giants and frozen no atmosphere Pluto have life on them to be killable enough to make an RB? Like Neptune really had enough juice to have fuckin Varun come out of it? I feel like I must be missing something here.
[Nona Font: (617): I realized it was late, and he was my brother in humanity and another incarnation of my own life force and consciousness, so I regained control of myself, thanked him for helping me, and went home.]