Shygyra (/ʃɨˈgɪər.ə/) was the gloomy homeworld of the Narxoxicrar in the Unknown Regions. It became a member world of the Golden Empire in 145 ABY.
Geography[]
Shygyra was only slightly larger than the largest of its nine moons, all of which had relatively close orbits. Shygyra's tides were difficult to predict without advanced computer forecasting, and so most Narxoxicrar lived far inland to avoid violent typhoons and tidal waves.
The presence of so many moons also caused the planet to be regularly blanketed in darkness even during "daylight" hours. As a result, many days had only a few hours of daylight in a full twenty-seven hour cycle. During a rare "full nine eclipse", Shygyra could be dark for days in a row. Many native fauna, including the sentient Narxoxicrar, evolved strong night vision and were nocturnal.
It rained regularly on many parts of Shygyra, and rivers, streams, and lakes were very common.
Society and culture[]
The Narxoxicrar dominated many areas of Shygyra, although others remained unexplored. Their cities usually grew vertically as well as horizontally, stemming from their ancestral practices of extending ground cities up into trees, or tree cities down to the surface. Only the largest spaceports had much in the way of artificial lighting; the Narxoxicrar themselves usually had glowpanels only in rooms with no windows, and they made little effort to cater to aliens.
Despite their general indifference to aliens, the Narxoxicrar did establish a trade in exotics hardwoods, selling some of their native trees to offworld furniture makers and sculptors.
History[]
Astronomers believed Shygyra had once been much larger, but that the planet had been fragmented in ancient history by a meteor impact, and that the debris had given birth to some or all of its nine moons. Opponents of this theory pointed to the absence of rings around the planet or an asteroid belt nearby, and believed instead that Shygyra had simply caught passing planetoids and comets in its gravitational pull, making them satellites. The choppy, dangerous seas and unpredictable tides meant that Shygyra's oceans remained almost completely unexplored by the Narxoxicrar until the coming of the Golden Empire.
The Chiss Ascendancy discovered Shygyra centuries before the Empire, but observed the technologically primitive state of the native sentients, catalogued the world, and moved on. The Empire, which had far fewer compunctions about interfering with developing societies, brought Shygyra into the Royal fold, although most Narxoxicrar were passive participants in government at best.