"How in the name of all the POWERS can you live in a place this cold?? You do know that it's well below freezing and temperatures outside could even make you HUMANS die in a few hours!"
Yeah, true, but it's quiet here. And it's only winter for 9 months of the year. The other three months are beautiful! -- Anon Guest
The world is silent, dark and deep. As the poem once said, I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. It's not a world most hospitable to life.
Well, not life as most people know it.
Nine months of the year, it seems like a frozen wasteland. Snows deep enough to bury a standard habitat at its maximum verticality. Hail, snow, sleet, gale force winds, all the unpleasant things.
And then, for three months, the planet swings close to its star. The planet all but explodes into life. Everything lives on fast forward because it has three months to have a life cycle before it's all put on hold for the rest of the year.
Juvenile development is at rocket speed. There's a species of bird that gestates during the entirety of the winter in order to birth live young. Which then eat as much as they can before the first snows fall. It's amazing.
And the plants. Good gracious Powers, you have to experience the plants. You can actually hear them growing. You can literally watch grass grow. You can see the flowers bloom.
Just remember to stay low because those pollinators book it. If you look like a random rock dropped by the glaciers, the fast-moving life forms will just zip right around you. And no, you can't set up the night before the dawn. Nothing on this world stops until it starts getting cold.
A battle-ready livesuits are good for this. The kind of livesuit that can double as a habitat for extended lengths of time. The kind that has cams everywhere to record everything.
And yes, they're the kind that are three times bigger than the wearer, but that's exactly what I need. I can post up at a survey point, lock the suit in position, and observe at my convenience.
Three months watching the world zip by. Then when everything goes back into slumber, I pilot it all back to base and spend a majority of the winter cataloguing everything. And picking out a new spot to survey.
It's a weird little world, I know. But it is so beautiful. I'm never bored.
[Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash]
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