Apocalypse Redux

For all that humans were leaving Earth to “find something new,” most people just wound up going to very similar places to the planet they’d just left. And if they didn’t, they typically made things match, at least locally.

Anything that differed more than a few percentage points from humanity’s home typically had gravity manipulation arrays placed in homes.

And anything with a star that emitted in an unusual spectrum typically wound up with a very specific kind of window that filtered the light into something at least resembling “acceptable.”

And so on.

Humans liked their stuff just so, and there very few limits as to how much of their environment they were willing to change.

As such, even though the blue giant sitting in the center of the Horizon system should have made it a genuinely terrible place to live, and the closest thing to an inhabitable planet being a burnt husk that failed to even rotate, resulting in the starward side being burned to a crisp while the outward-facing one was icy, with just a tiny band of habitability wrapped around where the two met, it was still inhabited.

In fact, the entire damn system had been dismissed as “worthless” by surveyors … and in an instant, five thousand people seeking a challenge had jumped on the “opportunity” of cheaply obtaining a planet no one else would want to take from them. Even if said planet was almost a thousand light years from Earth.

And now, there was a single tiny city sitting right in that bad of semi-habitability, surrounded by lush greenery that was being sustained almost entirely of magic because it was functionally incapable of living off the local star’s light.

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