This planet is dusty, windy, and the combination of the two leads to lightning in the sky. The atmosphere is oppressive and hot. Buildings clatter and rattle, many being half-destroyed. The inhabitants are thin, miserable, but pleased by the Astro Bistro’s arrival. Looking up, the moon is in pieces. Its home star is a red giant orbiting a white dwarf, hanging intimidatingly in the sky, on the precipice of destruction.
The Second Arret Empire resides on a small part of what’s left, its power very high but unable to stretch its influence out much further than a few thousand kilometres away from its capital, Issim.
The government is isolationist, xenophobic, and tyrannical, but the people that live in it are so hard done by that it is difficult for them to really care about any global politics outside their immediate lives. But since they are very superstitious and believe in the prophecy of the cards, they are hopeful.
Arretia was a good place to live before. Thousands of square kilometers of dusty, yet nutrient-rich gravelly crust meant they could grow food without much issue - though hard materials such as rocks and metals were harder to come by. This meant that those who could afford digging equipment were really the only ones with access to stone, and there begun to be a large class divide. Of course, those at the top began to believe that they somehow deserved their good fortune, and an old card game that used to be used by miners to pass the time was mistaken to be a message from eternal fate, and that the cards could be used to predict the future. Can they? Well, that’s up in the air.
Due to this material condition, it was sometimes easier to take stone and metals from others rather than invest the time and effort to mine and refine it yourself, so cities had to be smaller and more centralised so fewer materials needed to be used for walls to protect them. With the ever present threat of other cities, builders with artistic flair weren’t really appreciated as much as builders who could just get the job done quickly.
Cities became small, dense, circular blocks with a tiered pyramid structure, with the richest being in the centre and at the bottom and the poorest being in the outer strata. With common attacks, buildings had to be easily constructible and, due to their physiology, as risk free as possible to construct. So, modular shipping-container-like structures were created which could easily stack on top of each other. They’re grey but due to the dust they quickly turn brown.
For the poorest, they only get the one so all facilities have to be in there. They have a small grindstone and hand generator for power and food preparation. Hanging out is mostly done in indoor communal spaces so sports that take place in large places would not be invented, but it also means that houses just contain what is needed. Tables are low since they sit on their haunches, and chairs are just cushions. They have projectors for entertainment which can either project onto a light-scatterer for room light or onto a flat surface for watching things.
Richer city-dwellers get more than one room, which they can then use for having separate lower-down bedrooms.
Population density is very high, and without proper plumbing, waste is either dumped in the street or carried over to the outskirts of the city or just outside of it where it is deposited in large landfills.
The buildings are big stone and metal sheets with metal tubes bent into a strong triangular shape and framing the outside of the room. Each side has one hole which is either filled with a translucent hard crystal as a window, stone, or an entranceway
The outer lowest set of buildings is reserved for the disabled which is a large part of the population. This is because many injuries are inherited, and three arrets are required for reproduction. It also means that there is a much larger emphasis on safety for their own populace, but also maiming rather than killing enemies as one injury could mean suffering and hardship for their entire descendancy.
Outside the cities live many rural arrets which mostly do small-scale farming underground in cave networks. They only have a few of these modular pieces as they give a lot of their food to the cities to afford them, but they use those mostly as chapels and sleep in the caves behind the chapels. They worship some kind of fate as an idea, being strongly tied to the cards of the future, seeing hope and misery, death and life, destruction and creation, and abiding by those cards. It doesn’t help that many of their main sources of food are hallucinogenic, causing them to see visions.
Small insects are farmed and eaten. Fungi growing in caves, however, are the main source of food, alongside a kind of grain that is used for greenbread, and a potato-like vegetable that rounds out meals.
You need three Arrets to reproduce. One uses an ovipositor between their lower mandibles and sticks it underneath the second’s lower thorax. That one infuses the egg with a sample of themselves, and then lays on a third’s back, at which point it is inserted into that third one who carries it to term. There is no sex or gender distinction and they all use the singular ‘ey/em/eir’ pronoun. Injuries are inherited so they must be careful during all activities. This also leads to eugenically minded thoughts, where those that are too injured will be sterilized or killed to prevent them from raising a lame baby.
The first Arret Nation was, thus, authoritarian, aiming to prevent cities from fighting each other. But, as they reached a reasonable level of technology, an asteroid was discovered that would hit the moon in a very short amount of time. This became known as the Grim Strike. Dust and debris was kicked up into the air blotting out the star mostly as the moon broke apart into pieces and many of those pieces hit the planet, pretty much devastating it. The government enacted as many emergency powers as they could but the vast majority of arrets were killed and many were left with such injuries they begged to die before having to leave those injuries to their descendants. Only a few arrets exist that are unmarked. Space travel was made almost impossible as the dust would burn up all spacecraft trying to return.
There have been attempts to send off colony ships before, but information now has not been able to return. It does turn out that they have set up colonies in systems nearby and further from Arresol, but they have no way to send information back because it always burns up in the atmosphere so the colonists aren’t sure whether the arrets on their homeworld are actually alive still. The colonists have similar style homes, architecture, and governance but with differences in shape depending on materials available and less dense and more windowed cities thanks to them being the only arretfolk on the planets. The lost colonies are all called a variant of 'the Third Arretian Empire'.
After a few years, the arrets were reunified by its new leader Xitti, who now has reigned for a decade. Xitti, short for Monarch Traxittiveriti, Chosen Emperor and Representation of the Arretfolk to the Whole Universe, Prime Nova of the Arret Parliamentariat, and Emergency Controller-General of the Arret Military.
Xitti is paranoid leading to fear and tyranny. All that could be seen as a threat to em must be taken care of because ey have a lot of grief for eir loved ones and comrades. Ey believe ey are protecting them. But ey does have a good heart at eir core. Ey simply haven’t seen what’s really going on or have the right priorities.
Due to eir fear, ey delegate many roles to eir councillors, but those councillors are not allowed to meet with each other or see em any more than one at a time. Often ey will give them contradictory or self-serving information and directions.
The ruling classes believe that the rural arretfolk are far more dangerous and disgruntled than they really are so the military acts as police too, and surveillance is high even if it isn’t super high-tech - periscopes, torches, telescopes, etc.
They are researching ways to evacuate the world. Xitti has pledged to be the final arret to leave.
Rural arrets have little to no formal education, teaching communally in cave sections with a rotating set of teachers elected by lottery. They are also separated from their parents and not told who they are, to keep the military to find out that lame arrets have been breeding.
Arrets in cities are taught officially but due to small rooms they are given only short lessons and lots of homework instead. The military-education complex is the organization that controls teaching so most lessons involve propaganda for them.
Many phenomena are explained by the magic of fate. Happiness and love are rarely felt in this society so they are considered very important and holy special occasions with a magical twist relating to fate. That they can bend steel by moving it through holes in their body is explained as fate making it always wanting to have been so.
There are farmers, workers for making buildings, workers for making goods, research into spaceships that can leave and return, and weaponry.
The urban arrets do occasionally eat farm-grown food but there is not nearly enough of it. What they do eat a lot of is lab-processed food, which is made partly of fallen arrets. This cannibalism accentuates their worst survival instincts as their meat contains a hormone that tells the arret’s body that there is not enough food and activates an anxiety reaction to that. Xitti does not like the meat, ey are just very paranoid in general.
They do know that it is arret meat they are eating but they know that it is really a last resort as there just isn’t much food.