One of the two raptid home worlds, Pangea is a sweltering land of humid jungles and deep mystery-steeped forests.
Before the Sentience War, few humans had ever laid eyes upon this world, and its image existed only in stories told by travelling merchants – the only sort of human that the raptids could tolerate.
These merchants told stories of the most beautiful stone cities rising into the sky, each protected by a circular wall – like that of a nest. Then the jungles would take over and rule supreme until the next far-flung city.
Whether due to an affinity for nature or otherwise, the raptids have kept the urbanisation of this world to a minimum. The only well-used transport links between cities are aerial, and almost all industrial and agricultural efforts are handled aboard the planet’s orbital space stations or the other worlds of the system.
Outlying villages are mostly primitive in comparison to the cities. They are cut off from the outside world with only radios to keep them vaguely connected. The raptids here live off the land and participate in hunts, either prowling the jungles with their bare talons or racing atop saurians (a clade of reptiles that have the potential for domestication). The villages vary in construction. However, most have the commonality of being rooted in nature. Some are deep in the forests with communal dwellings rising up tree trunks and into the canopies. Other villages are nomadic and chase the seasons around the globe. Waterfront settlements exist by lakes or coastlines, and the raptids there are experts in diving for fish.
Over thousands of years, adaptations have diversified each of these primitive groups to be better suited to their unique means of survival. For example, raptids on the water have oily feathers so that they can dive without becoming drenched. While raptids living in the desert have lost almost all of their feathers and have thick, loose, wrinkly skin which staves off the sun. This diversification is the same on every planet, and raptids from the cities reflect this diversity proportionally.
Many citified raptids on Pangea see the villages as a useless way of life and frequently send in missionaries to enlighten them about the new ways of the world; they are often sent bearing gifts of technology. Many of these missionaries never return… or return in pieces at least! So far, very few villages have been abandoned to the promises of the future, and the Raptid Council on Gondwana allows them to remain, even having marked them as exempt from conscription during the war. It is thought by the Communion that Gondwana takes pride in the villages, not just on Pangea but throughout raptid space, seeing them as the vestiges of avian tradition and heritage.
Pangea is understood to be under the authority of Gondwana – the administrative heart of raptidkind. Despite this, no man or Raptid can say which planet came first or how there ever came to be two raptid home worlds. Neither can anyone say why it was Gondwana that took charge… The only thing well known is that the history of the raptids is faded and bloody.
Pangea does, however, play a critical role in the security and stability of the entirety of raptid space. The construction of warships is handled by the orbital stations, pulling resources from the many mineral-rich worlds of the system. Training of the military is conducted along the equatorial rainforests, and the navy is first trained on the sea-lakes before being sent into orbit and beyond. The Court of Aves has its Foreign Office in the city of Selm’a’kor; this is why it became the main target of the Pangean Campaign in the Sentience War.
In the aftermath of the Sentience War, many cities were destroyed or sundered, and in the dirty, blood-soaked rubble there festered a debilitating sickness – the Avian Flu. This is an ancient, almost forgotten disease – the same one that human scholars from the Capitol University partly attribute to the long-ago ‘degradation’ of the raptid species.
The Avian Flu of Pangea remains a mystery to the Communion, and it has led to the sudden exit of the raptids from the galactic stage. At first, this silence gave the Communards a sense of relief, but as time went on this became a dread. Many fear for the health of raptidkind. The rest fear for themselves and what the raptids are plotting under the dark shade cast by this ‘disease…’