Jelan

*"The world of peace, the world of hope."*

Jelan

Jelan is a medium-sized Aolius-like world orbiting the red dwarf star Ora P. It is tidally-locked, with one face perpetually facing Ora P and the other forever frozen in the darkside away.

Jelan was colonised only 27 years ago, but is already a bustling hive of activity. Mass-migration, coupled with habitable conditions on its surface, have made its population skyrocket. Currently, Jelan hosts 49.3 billion people on it's surface, with the vast majority living in stone or bronze age equivalent societies. However, they all are progressing incredibly fast, and the entirety of Jelan will be brought up to the current technological level within fifty years.

Jelan is governed by the Union of Jelani Colonies, a sub-government of the Commonwealth of the Seddrath. Unlike Aolius, which has no centralised government, Jelani government has been forced to centralise to manage the incredible amount of migration on the planet, as well as controlling the populace through a large amount of laws (comparatively speaking).

## History

Jelan formed around 2 billion years ago around Ora P, a red dwarf star. For the majority of it's history, up until a few hundred million years ago, it was ruled by unicellular life with remarkable life spans. This accounts for the 'Carbon Layer' discovered in Jelan's crust - at one point the entire planet was covered in a vast sea of microorganisms a few metres deep, which feasted upon the dead bodies that continued to be produced. This ecosystem was devasted when a hyperflare occurred around 900 million years ago, killing off almost all of the microbes. Over the course of a million years, the remaining organisms, buried under billions of times their body weight, fused together and formed larger and larger cells, capable of ingesting the dead bodies of their ancestors. These eventually evolved once and for all into the multicellular life on the planet. An interesting characteristic of life on this planet is that it has cells typically thousands of times larger than their Aolius-equivalent. This makes for more redundancy and therefore much longer cellular life, leading to less breakdowns of the macro-scale organisms. The result of this is that the lifespan of two similar creatures - one on Aolius and one on Jelan, is drastically different. Jelani life has evolved to live over ten thousand times longer than the typical Aolius species.

## Biology

Life on Jelan, as mentioned before, as ridiculously large cells. Most cells are actually visible to the naked eye, appearing as tiny pinpricks that could fit through the head of a needle. This usually disconcerts most viewers, but it appears normal after a while. The large size of these cells means that there are a unusual absence of native diseases, as evolution has long since destroyed any "normal sized" cells.

Most animal-equivalents look like huge bulbs of amorphous balls - the balls being the cells. Each and every cell can specialize at any time, rearranging it's internal structure to better fit it's job within only a few hours, meaning that the very term 'species' can only be defined by DNA. And not even that. Genetic information, or at least their equivalent, is very limited and mostly describes the possible forms a cell can take and how it changes, nothing about the actual structure of the species. As such, there are only a few dozen different species of animal on Jelan.

## Orbit

As Jelan has only been colonised for 27 years, there has not been enough time for large-scale engineering projects to take place in orbit. The only noteworthy thing orbiting Jelan is the Jelani Gateway, a space station capable of servicing ten interstellar ships and hundreds of smaller ones.

Two years ago a small asteroid approached Jelan and was almost caught into a semi-stable orbit, but was slung out into the outsystem at the last second. This asteroid has since been colonised and named Baeralen, in honour of the engineer to devise and build the Jelani Gateway.

## Population

Jelan houses 9.3 billion Seddrath, the second most populated world in the entire Commonwealth after Aolius. Most of the population are confined to a relatively small region directly underneath the sun on the dayside, as this is where temperatures are closest to Seddrathi optimum, but smaller settlements have been founded in the colder regions. Indeed, even one has been settled on the exact antipode to the sun, in the centre of the nightside.