Talk:Vior'la
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Is there an official source for any of this info on Vior'la? Or is it all just user-created, unofficial, and made up? =/
Removed the above unsourced material from article. If there is a source please restore it and provide the source. --Rlyehable 15:40, 11 June 2007 (CEST)The surface of Vior'la is hot and dry, even for a Tau world and Tau from Vio'la tend to have darker skin pigmentation than most. Due to its orbit around a binary star, it swelters in a virtually constant summer. The majority of the planet's surface is dry and inhospitable; dusty red plains cover millions of square miles and parched deserts circle the equator. In both hemispheres mountain ranges stretch for thousands of miles and seem to scrape the stars themselves, lending credence to the theory that much of Vior'la's surface was once under water and some catastrophe in ancient times caused the seas to dry up, leaving Vior'la the arid place it is today. While there is no empirical evidence to support this, Air Caste stellar cartographers have noted an apparent discrepancy between the ages of formation of Vior'la's binary stars. The larger star appears to be much younger than the smaller; a fact that none of the Earth caste astrophysicists can yet explain, though its unexplained birth may have been the cause of the scouring of its oceans. Vior'la moves in a short elliptical orbit around its stars and once every six Tau'cyr its trajectory passes between the two stars (a Tau'cyr is the annual cycle of the Tau home world, made up of six Kai'rotaa. Each Kai'rotaa is dedicated to a particular caste, with the sixth dedicated to the race as a whole).
This time is known as the Trial by Fire and lasts for exactly five Kai'rotaa (roughly two hundred and fifty Terran days). During this time, Vior'la passes relatively close to the largest star and powerful waves of electromagnetic energy and sprays of plasma wash over its surface. A complex series of interactions between the planet's geomagnetic field and the solar wind constantly ripple the surface of the magnetosphere. Normally this passes unremarked, but the violence of the Trial by Fire is an order of magnitude greater than normal. The geomagnetic disturbance it causes grows and rages, finally developing into a fully-fledged magnetic storm. The net effect of this is a hugely unstable magnetic anomaly in Vior'la's ionosphere, resulting in massive degradation of communication, satellite and sensor performance.
Glittering plasma tornadoes, as wondrous as they are deadly, howl across Vior'la's sandy expanses, vitrifying whole swathes of desert sand. The spectacular Prism Desert in the southern hemisphere is one area of the planet that often bears the brunt of this, and once Vior'la has come through the Trial by Fire, the newly created rippling glass dunes and delicate crystal seas are a breathtakingly beautiful sight. Arcs of rainbow colour and rippling light refract through the gracefully moulded glass waves and many among the Earth Caste take particularly exquisite examples of this phenomenon to fashion into much sought-after ornaments and decorations. Each Trial by Fire reshapes the Prism Desert and those Tau able to travel from other septs frequently come to Vior'la to see them before the next.
During the Trial by Fire, the cities of Vior'la become hermetically sealed environments, vast domes swelling from each city's perimeter to envelop and protect those within. As storms wrack the surface, the cities become isolated but, other than this, there is no disruption to the Fire Warriors' training schedules. At this time, the planet itself becomes virtually unreachable, cut off from the rest of the Tau Empire. Only when the Tau'cyr reaches the Kai'rotaa dedicated to the Ethereals does Vior'la emerge from the swathes of plasma that envelop it.
Under normal circumstances, the planet's climate is dry and parched, the few fertile areas on the surface ingeniously irrigated by underground aqueducts and maintained by the planet's Earth caste. Those rare areas of water that do exist are carefully protected and, together with underground springs and moisture traps, form a vital network that sustains life on Vior'la. This hot climate seems to heighten the aggression of many of the young Fire Caste warriors and the training regimes at the famous Shas Or'es Academy harnesses this aggressiveness and moulds its students into some of the most fearsome Fire Warriors in the Tau Empire. The gravitational field strength of the planet is also slightly higher than on T'au, resulting in a minor muscle mass increase in the inhabitants.
