: I'd have the rocky world be a planet in the same system, rather than a large
: moon. I mean, if you have a moon that masses four Earths in orbit around a
: Jupiter-sized gas giant, would that prevent rings from forming?

I don't know. Saturn's rings often have moons in the gaps - herding the rings. But a very large moon might have stolen any debris when it formed.

OTOH these rings are the result of a breakup of a Forerunner orbital. I don't know how it broke but they are not a natural formation. Maybe the two could coexist, story wise and astronomy wise.

: I think that, at one point, both Lekgolo and Kig-Yar were stated to be
: spacefaring before they were discovered by the Covenant. The population in
: the gas giant's rings could be a space colony.

Yes.

: Not like Huragok. The Huragok are explicitly stated to be artificial in
: nature. They're made of organic and inorganic nanomaterials, which makes
: me think they were originally a gift from a high-ranking Builder to the
: Lifeworker caste. It's just a gut feeling of mine. If they were designed
: by a Lifeworker, they'd be completely organic beings with cells, genetic
: material, the whole works. But a Builder would have looked at nature,
: decided that he could do better than that, and designed the Huragok like
: an engineer.

When they had a rocky home world we thought we knew their origins. But if they were found on a shattered Forerunner construct then all bets are off - even a natural origin.

: Every time you killed a Hunter in the games, you didn't kill all of it. The
: death of a Hunter probably occurs when enough individual eels have been
: killed to make the colony as a whole lose cohesion. Individual eels
: survive, extract themselves, and seek each other out. Wherever a warzone
: escapes the Covenant glassing (and let's be honest: what you call
: glassing, radiation-eating lava worms would probably call terraforming)
: surviving Lekgolo band together to form new colonies.

How fast do they breed? How many Hunters died in that area? Was the ring fragment radioactive. I need to watch again.

There was talk of the element being created by super-nova like conditions because of the detonation of the PoA's engines. I suppose that other elements could have formed.

Super Nova? Really?!? That's a big bang. The neutrinos would have fried the worms.

: When salvage hunters and colonists return, what will they find? Feral,
: hostile colonies with no collective memory of how they arrived on this
: hellhole? Silent, territorial colonies that just want to be left alone?
: Lonely , hopeful colonies willing to trade service for transport back to
: Te?

: Imagine Covenant ships taken over by Lekgolo. For their own reasons, these
: worms have banded together to crew massive starships and ply the starways.
: Certainly, they would be explorers. But maybe they are mercenaries. Maybe
: they are traders. What would they want for payment? What would they trade
: for?

: What would talking to them be like?

: I think that talking to a sufficiently large colony would be like talking to
: a crowd without individuals. As the conversation played out, eels would
: band together into blocs to ponder your questions and formulate their own.
: These blocs would merge and shift and split as the eels followed different
: conversational threads, until you are talking to one bloc about the
: weather while another bloc has progressed the conversation to the topic
: of, say, whether Thel 'Vadum will seek peace with the Ul'Tao tribe.

This voluntary acceptance and abandonment of individual conciousness sounds rather Buddhist without the Buddhism. Is this why Lekgolo have little interest in religion?

: Can we even speak of Lekgolo as a single entity? Maybe every faction out
: there would have Lekgolo colonies as vassals or partners.

Are they like water? Endlessly formless and adaptable to fit every shape. Empty your mind.

: Depends. They might actually be closer to us than Sanghelios, depending on
: where they are positioned in Covenant territory.

: *Googles, knowing that it's probably that one silicon monster in Star Trek*

: That would be pretty damn neat.

Beastarium says that is their arrangement with the Covenant on that non-canonical rocky planet.

: Thel sends a telegram to Te that simply reads "I can see your house from
: here."

: Lekgolo negotiations with Humanity are immediately terminated.

Be like water.

: In every single way.

Unfortunately: yes. Forward Unto Dawn grows on me with each viewing and in comparison with Nightfall.

: With the Hunters?

: I just want them to be played as Starfish Aliens to the hilt. The Elites and
: the Brutes are very much Star Trek aliens, basically humans with
: exaggerated character traits. Hunters are distributed colonies of lava
: worms that form collective consciousnesses. Their priorities, even some of
: their basic desires, ought to be completely different from that of a
: human. Perhaps even incomprehensibly so.

I agree, though truly alien is hard to write.

Sometimes, to me, Elites are just Klingons. And why are they monogamous given their biology and the way they raise children?