Ortus

> ***“Ortus~***
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> ***Ortus~***
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> ***Aasha have mercy on thee, may your children stand up tall, and have your eternal beauty~”***
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**-Excerpt of the Commonwealth’s National Anthem, created during the foundation of OCN-**

Ortus is the adoptive homeworld of humanity, where they found themselves after the Exodus from Earth. It serves as the planetary capital of the Ortus Council of Nations, and then later of the Commonwealth. It orbits the L-class deuterium-fusing star Aasha, and is the only traditionally habitable planet in its system.

## **Before Humanity**

While Ortus may have been at one point a garden world like Zanaam, the biology of the planet was changed following what Scholars of Geography call the, ‘Pre-exile disaster’ in which the planet was subjected to an unnatural string of bombardment by asteroids and comets from the Orthan belt just outside of the planet’s space.

Originally, some theorized that Ortus once had a moon on which the planet would have rotated on or even rotates itself, yet that theory was quickly abandoned after it was discovered that the Orthan belt was littered with space rocks of sizes that would have easily made Ortus a target for bombardment.

No matter the case, the planet was entirely hostile to any real sentient creature. Fossil evidence from the early years show Ortus as a world that once had once been like Udkal, an ocean world full of great sea beasts. Yet, due to the planet’s lack of internal heating just some hundred million years prior the Exiles from earth, the planet had frozen its seas and snows covered the planet in chill.

Thus what was seabed and trenches, now became green plains and volcanic valleys. From this point on, Ortus had an explosion of life akin to worms and Trilobites back on earth, some even reaching some moderate amount of intelligence akin to that of earth-then-Ortan Crows...

Yet, eventually this would end as man erupted from the once waterlogged ruins near the lowest point of Ortus, and thus man would prosper amongst the stars.

## **After the Exiles**

When Ortus gave the now native humans the ability to live in the underground caves, a spark was lit in the minds of the inhabitants, a spark with which the thundering rivers of Tallport would be hydroelectrically damed, a spark that would make the Trilobathl beasts become the adorable Traltr cats. A spark which would cleave down mountains, and turn the glaciers above the planet into and endless supply of water for all peoples.

Yet, as the dark age ended, it was the discovery of the, ‘Pure water Trench’, that would spawn the OCN‘s native kingdom of Polanskt, and later through ministerial governance end the dark age after the human exilement on Ortus.

In fact, it was a great irony, that OCN was founded on natural gas, let alone a lake of natural gas so concentrated that histories of the time described as killing all towns within the region every hundred-or-so-years. One that OCN would sap dry, and make into the capital of the Commonwealth to come...

In recent years, the planet has become nothing but a white core of glaciers and ruins left behind to settle into what is nearing a ecumanopolis underground. Being shadowed even further by the, "Shadow Cities", which none but commonwealth Ciphers and Scholars enter. Being described by many new arrivals to the Commonwealth as a citadel that has been theorized to be several hundred thousand kilometres long and equally deep. It was here where Ishii, the OCN council, and Drahoslav Tesar announced their wishes for a human-lead-and-alien-allowed Democratic Republic. It was there, the news of the first intergalactic war where sent from, it was there where the the Commonwealth was birthed and will stand until the stars die.