Bethany

Bethany is a rare kind of megacity world: fully urbanized, but never sterile. Where

Amber Krowe curates its sprawl into vertical stacks and engineered ribbons of control, Bethany lets the green survive—forest corridors, grassland reserves, mountain parkland, and coastal zones are stitched through the city rather than paved over. The result is a planet that reads as densely populated and industrious, yet livable and open in a way the Alliance's core worlds rarely allow.

Bethany's defining contrast is city and green in the same frame. The urban layer is continuous—metroplexes bleeding into one another across continents—but it is broken up by deliberate ecological seams: grassland reserves, forested belts, mountain ranges left as parkland and structural backbone, and oceans that carry shipping while remaining visibly alive.

Rather than pushing wilderness to the edges, Bethany folds it inward. Green space is not a luxury district here but a structural feature of how the planet was built, giving even its densest zones a sense of air and light. That balance of scale and livability is central to the planet's identity.

Bethany is the homeworld of the

Bethian people, a feline-origin race native to the planet. As the most populous species within the

Sun Jin Empire's multi-species coalition, Bethians form much of its demographic and institutional backbone, and their capital-world norms shape what the Empire considers “normal” across its bureaucracy, uniformed services, and everyday civic life.

Long before the war, Bethany was a central trading hub for the outer rim—a wealthy, well-connected crossroads world that eventually fell under

Systems Alliance occupation. That occupation was ultimately broken when Bethany became the site of the first major offensive of

Sun Jin Kaisara's rebellion.

The Bethians once governed themselves, but under Systems Alliance occupation their government was hollowed out into a vassal puppet regime—a local face for Alliance control rather than a sovereign body.

After the liberation,

Sun Jin Kaisara held true to her promise for every member world of the Empire: Bethany was allowed to rebuild its own government and govern itself. Even as the planet became the government headquarters of the

Sun Jin Empire, it retained its own independent planetary government rather than being ruled directly. The colossal starship

Esther was later created to serve as the Empire's true, mobile headquarters.

Bethanians carry the pride of a world that is enormous yet still feels like home—a megacity that never fully surrendered its green. As an outer-rim planet, Bethany's culture is shaped by distance from central authority: self-reliant, community-minded, and closely attached to the world itself.