Okay, I am settling on Sundtia being Zhdez-holdout, and now I need to settle on exactly what the tensions look like, exactly.
As I've said, the Inukari push into the Ring has not been hostile, per se, they've just been very enthusiastic about expansion and the Zhdez mindset has been inadvertently welcoming. The Zhdez were unprepared for the Inukari legal system, which has ended up allowing Inukari corporations to sort of appropriate everything.
So Sundtia has a more Inukari-style government, rather than the Zhdez-style "bureaucracy that exists just to keep things coordinated." It's a throwback that the Zhdez aren't happy about, in that it goes back to the class-based "you must have this much telepathic ability to hold this post" in order to keep Inukari from simply taking over the government.
Sundtia, revised
I wrote up Sundtia awhile back as a somewhat major Inukari outpost, and decided not to carry that over into the wiki yet. The random-roll made it a Type A (starship construction yard) port, and that miiiiiiight be fine, but I have come around to seeing it as the line in the sand the Zhdez are trying to draw, rather than Adriannia. They are realizing that if they let the Inukari keep pushing, they'll just get rolled over completely, but pushback is really not in their nature.
If Sundtia Black is an important shipyard, it gives them a reason to hold that line. Perhaps Sundtia is the world to which all the Ring-based Zhdez have been pulling back to, and this is where they have the critical mass where Inukari are less comfortable colonizing, for fear of being "assimilated." This is also the point at which Inukari start thinking of the Zhdez as more of a threat, where before they were just the pushovers who got a start on planetary infrastructure and then backed out.
Recovery, and Melodite
I'm home and back to my computer, so no break after all, but pain killers made copying over Melodite into the wiki comical enough that I won't be doing too much original typing for a few days. But the streak remains unbroken.
Jump gate and jump field
One small thought before I head out: what if the correspondence zone/gate doesn't necessarily drop a ship into realspace, but instead it is dropping the jumpfield PLUS being in the zone that does it? Maybe hitting the precise(ish) midway point will do it even with the jump field, but you can do it by choice sooner.
Zhdez medicine
I've established that Zhdez medicine is the most advanced, by a large margin, both because of their psionic ability and because they've focused more on it. I've been thinking about what impact it has on the Ring:as Zhdez draw back their technological infrastructure. Manufactured items can be shipped from factories deeper into Zhdez territory, but medical care tends to need to be a little more local.
Inukari are going to have some reluctance to trust Zhdez psi-related technology, up until they realize the Zhdez are the only hope they have of getting some types of advanced care, especially life-extending care.
Some Inukari (and Terrans, to a lesser extent given the open hostilities) will want to visit Zhdez specialists, which is an interesting prospect. A lot of them will decide to stay, either because they've discovered it's somewhat more of a post-scarcity utopia (their explanation) or because they've been absorbed into the Borg (the suspicion of their family and friends).
I realized changes in how I do the blog thing means I can't stack up a buffer and auto-run it while I'm in the TL7 Terran medical facility, so I will backfill later, I guess.
Alliance/Union
I realized I've been inconsistent on whether it's "Terran Republic" or "Terran Alliance" and given that the Alliance and Union are Cherryh terms I should probably avoid it.
I have no idea why I've been using the native Zhdezplier instead of translating it like I have with Inukari Union; possibly because Terrans use English (or Russian) but also actual English stands in for Inukari Standard, whereas Zhdez are definitely Other.
Anyway. Terran Republic it is, then. I realize I haven't lined it out much in the blog, just kind of gone "oh, you know" about it, so most of it is new text. Not a lot yet, but it's got me thinking about it.
Another whale idea
What if: the difference between whales and other voidlife is that the whales are from a matter-based universe and other things are from the void? So only whales have a jump field, etc., and voidlife is hungry for matter (to convert to energy? I'm not sure) so whalefall is a thing in the void as well.
I've also been wondering about how, if exoplasm is the only way to get to voidspace, the first jumps were made. I think the answer is... beached whales. They can't safely sound in the correspondence zone, and sometimes if they do they get stranded/die in realspace, and that's how people learned the trick.
Maybe. Feels like it would take a lot of beached whales to get it figured out, which leads to the question of: how often does/did this happen, anyway?
