The Ruined Observatory
The Creators were fascinated by the night sky, and this was their greatest observatory, the Highland Array. The great dome projects from a sheer granite mountainside, accessable by twisted, dangerous metal gantries and pipes. Within its darkened halls and chambers lie banks upon banks of silently clicking databases, which continue to process and evaluate information gathered by the array. The array itself is a cluster of towers, twelve in all, ranging between a hundred and a thousand feet tall. This needle array projects from a split dome structure, at an angle of roughly 80 degrees. The array actually uses the planet's magnetic field as a receiver, gathering vast amounts of information from the cosmos and feeding it directly to the aging bi-polar computers. The telescopic equipment is not located in the array, but was instead constructed on Rym's larger moon, Tropos, and linked by remote to the observatory's control chamber and monitor system.
The observatory is no longer connected to the City Mind, its systems only recently re-activated. The culprit is Haxle, a rogue hoomiku scholar or the Haizat clan. Here he has secreted himself away, having decoded enough of the Creator language to comprehend their technical data and re-activate the array. He uses it to watch the stars, and to study the Eater. The hoomiku has spent many years roaming the wastelands and ruins, avoiding the Machines, and taking notes. He's really just a scholar, and will happily talk to outsiders, providing a wealth of information in exchange for foreign tales, scholarly wisdom, or curiosities. Haxle is outfitted with all manner of crazy inventions he's built up over his years of wandering, including portable moisture-condensers, a radiation meter, a rod which detects electrical currents, and a lodebow that can pick off targets nearly a mile away. A small part of the observatory has also been filled by a modest garden, where he grows everything he needs, though his cooking leaves something to be desired.
The Star Chamber
One of the observatory's most significant features is the star chamber, a spherical room lperhaps fifty feet across, and lined with tiles of black glass. A retracting glass bridge leads to a single pillar rising from the bottom of the sphere, a rail-encircled platform that observers can stand upon in small groups. A circular glass console rises from the center of the platform, presenting those who understand the Creator language with a means to control the telescopic array on the ocean moon. When activated, the bridge retracts, the chamber seals, and a magnificent three-dimensional layout of local space is projected around the observers. The display is mobile and quite accurate, its components having been re-aligned by the rogue hoomiku scholar after centuries of disuse.
The display allows those within the star chamber to observe any stellar phenomenon with amazing clarity. Here, Haxle has studied the Eater for years, observing its characteristics with a device that outstrips even the most fantastic of Arcanar telescopes. The hoomiku currently has the array set up with the black hole as its focus, allowing anyone in the room to study its various layers.
The Outer Edge is where Rym now lies, the furthest region of space threatened by the Eater's gravity well. It is at this threshold that escape is impossible; the begining of inevitable destruction, so to speak. The outer edge is full of stellar gas streams pulled from the surface of red and blue giants, as well as cosmic storms and temporal instabilities. Systems caught in the gravity threshold are subject to frequent meteor and comet impacts as lighter debris from local space is drawn into the Eater's grasp, crashing into heavier, slower-moving bodies on the way to the center. Time itself begins to stretch out, and visitors from other planes might return home after years on Rym to find that only days had passed in their native realm.
The Vortex Cloud, or bright gas belt, is the main concentration of dying stars being drawn into the vortex. Here, even the smaller stars begin to dissolve, their burning essence drawn away into the swallowing blackness. This creates the large nebular patterns that give the belt its name. The Vortex Cloud is full of cosmic storms and hot nebular gasses, the result of growing cosmic instability. Some of the stars exposed to the mounting gravity explode, others merely flicker out, and the resulting turbulance, debris, and radiation generally result in the death of all life-supporting planets drawn this far into the Eater's grasp.
The Crypt of Stars, or dark gas belt, constitutes the last visible remains of matter and energy visible in the night sky. This belt is full of collapsed stars, planetary debris, and cold gasses. At this point, time itself is constricted so heavily as to be almost non-existant. For this reason, despite being light years away, the actual temporal distance between Rym and the Eater is nearly insignificant. That is to say, if one were to see a distant star explode in Rym's night sky, the actual explosion may have taken place only a few weeks or even days before.
Oblivion is the named given to the Eater's core, the impenetrable blackness into which all matter, time, and energy is drawn. It is the end, a portal beyond which lie the endless dark gulfs of nothingness. As might be expected, there isn't a great deal to say about oblivion, other than it appears to be the lightless realm from which the Spiral first emerged. It may indeed be little more than a doorway, allowing the corruptive energies beyond its threshold to seep into a universe not meant to withstand them.
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