Spoons
- Spoons sits in the Outer Rim, orbiting a dying red dwarf so close and so tidally locked that one hemisphere is a slagged daylight furnace and the other is a frozen, Warp-soaked dark where things move that shouldn't.
- The only livable ground is the thin band of permanent dusk between them, and because the planet's rotation wobbles instead of holding steady, that band doesn't stay put, it moves slowly depending on the season. So the planet's one settlement crawls with it, mounted on a ring of massive articulated anchor-treads dug into the soil to brace against the dusk-gales, lifting and resetting in a slow synchronized shuffle to keep pace with the retreating twilight forever. From orbit, that ring of treads looks exactly like a row of spoons laid bowl up, dragging a town around the equator to outrun both the killing sunrise and the thing waiting in true night.
- Nobody remembers the original survey designation. Spacers just started calling it Spoons, and it stuck hard enough to become official. The wider galaxy mostly ignores Spoons because there's nothing here worth fighting over and the weather will kill the wrong faction just as fast as the right one, which is exactly how it became genuinely neutral ground. Due to this it is respected by smugglers, the Bounty Hunter's Guild, the odd Imperial deserter, and even a rebel sympathizer or two.
- The reason Spoons has stayed neutral for so long is the mechanism behind the town. Nobody who passes through can be identified, which means nobody can be blackmailed, recruited, assassinated, or held to an old grudge while they're here. Imperial deserters drink next to Rebel sympathizers. Bounty Hunter's Guild members split a tab with people they might be carrying a contract on. That arrangement runs entirely on one piece of very old machinery, and it is breaking down.
