Meteor Strike! Disruptions of Kuinuajuu
This is the first of our guest posts by people that submitted on our Contribution Page and got accepted for adding to the world of JUNO. This is from Nate Battalion, whose work is going to appear soon on the Mythrill Platform! You can also find him on Facebook and Instagram. Thanks to Nate for sharing his idea with all of us. Wanna know where the meteor struck? Check out our updated map on World Anvil.
Report made by Observer RG1212:
Following up on the report by chief observer JL1372, I began an assessment of a significant instance of a meteor impact on the surface of JUNO.
Initially, I find it notable that the meteor struck the smallest landmass on a planet, commonly referred to as Kuinuajuu, primarily dominated by water. Further observation will be needed to determine if some sort of magnetic field or attractive force drew the metallic asteroid to its resting place, or if it is to be credited to pure happenstance. As the Ngisikaa are the primary inhabitants of the island, I hypothesize that their development of culture through the sun crystals may have had something to do in drawing the meteor to them, although this is pure speculation.
We do know that because the Ngisikaa’s unique method of attaining sentience is through the connection to their crystal homes, the meteor almost destroyed the local population when it cracked the island and destroyed much of the infrastructure the people had built over the last several centuries. This event caused a great depression in their culture, a dark age of sorts, as previously intelligent beings regressed after having their crystal homes–and therefore their link to their ancestral knowledge–severed and destroyed. It is interesting to note that the event caused the Ngisikaa people to regress to a point where their “evolutionary path,” so to speak, essentially matches that of the two other sentient species’ in the world, bringing balance to the geopolitical power spectrum.
Speaking of the meteor itself, it does appear on the surface to be rather mundane, a typical mix of clay, nickel and iron, although my detailed scan of the object revealed some intriguing findings. Of note, the interior of the meteor exhibits the organic growth patterns noted in JL1372’s original report.
There are portions of the outer surface of the meteor that have crumbled away and exposed the inner crystalline structure to the exotic stellar radiation, and these portions have grown out of the pits in the surface of the meteor, similar to the way in which vines will crawl through dark spaces to reach the sun.
The Ngisikaa appear to be drawn to the meteor. Many who survived have constructed new crystal formations around or even on the meteor itself. The collective that formed near the meteor exhibits the signs of increased intelligence common to those with a sufficiency of crystal memories, but they also show an increased rate of affliction of the “memory lock” members of that species can develop when exposed to too many crystal memories, even if their primary memory stores are rather small. To compensate for this, the community repository for that village is the largest known Ngisikaa repository that exists.
A final note for further study: the sub-structural patterns of the meteor’s crystals are very similar to the patterns of memory crystals, even though the material of the substrate is different in elemental composition. Further study may reveal if the Ngisikaa could harness the meteor’s structure to store memories in a “super library” of sorts, though how such an experiment could be designed, I won’t speculate.