Telephus

Telephus is a 142,000-mile-diameter asteroid embedded in a crater in the northern tip of the Gamial Peninsula. It is now home to the central district of Star City, Tetro's capital.

Collision
Telephus collided with Tetro 2.2 billion Earth-years ago, creating a massive crater on Gamiala's northern coastline. After the collision, most of the asteroid remained intact and formed a dome rising out of the center of the crater. As Tetro's sea level rose, the crater filled with water leaving the top half of Telephus as an island just off the coast of Gamiala.

City of Stone


Around 418 million Earth-years ago, a small tribe of Frelians began to migrate north across the Gamial Peninsula. By 414 million Earth-years ago, the Frelians had reached the north coast of Gamiala and could see Telephus across a narrow channel of water. Driven by a desire for more secure and weather-resistant dwellings, they decided to turn the island into a fortified city. The city was named Telephus City after the asteroid, and over the next 32 million Earth-years, a 3,000-mile-wide band following the asteroid's shoreline was painstakingly carved into billions of structures that would house and support Gamiala's growing population for generations to come. This massive construction project was commissioned by an early Frelian government known as the Protectors of Frelian Enterprise. The original panel of 27 Protectors valued individual expression, and so provided little guidance or oversight for the project, allowing full autonomy for each builder involved. As an upside, this resulted in an enormous amount of experimentation in new styles and construction techniques. Every structure was unique, without a hint of any unifying theme, or even scale, for the finished work. The disadvantage of this approach was that most of the buildings' interiors unintentionally intersected somewhere deep within the rock. Due to the vast number of unplanned connections, it was possible to travel in a complete loop around the city without taking a single step outdoors. At this stage, Telephus City was a monument to Frelian creativity, ingenuity, and diversity. It was nicknamed "City of Stone" by the Frelians who had settled on Gamiala's north shore and gradually watched the city take shape from across the channel. The moniker was soon embraced by Telephus' inhabitants as well.

Growth and Expansion
By 370 million Earth-years ago, the number of Frelians living on Telephus grew to over 300,000. With the growth in population, Frelian culture began to evolve. As a social species, Frelians desired to function as a close-knit community. While they numbered in the low thousands, this was easily achievable, but once the population began to climb it was no longer possible for everyone in the city to be personally acquainted with everyone else, and this led to many Frelians seeking out ways to feel a sense of unity with other members of their society. At the same time, the Protectors of Frelian Enterprise were struggling to maintain control over the burgeoning city. Their solution was to disband, and reform as a private corporation called the Dramilian Federation which would provide a wide array of free and paid services to the city. Named after the original tribe of pyronates that colonized Gamiala, the Federation became popular among the Frelians of Telephus City. It did not take long for the Dramilian Federation to gain a monopoly on agriculture and hydrogen production. With most of the city's food and fuel now under its control, the Federation began to fill the void left by the Protectors of Frelian Enterprise. The company created a blacklist of individuals who disobeyed its policies, and encouraged all Frelians to honor the blacklist by ostracizing and refusing service to those who were named on it, calling their actions "non-communal". Soon most of the Frelian population was eagerly enforcing the blacklist, and the Federation began to enact policies that would bring Frelians together towards a common purpose, creating the sense of unity that so many had yearned for. 369 million years ago the Federation announced its most ambitious plan: to carve the remaining untouched stone of Telephus into a colossal central district with a cohesive design theme, symbolizing the power of a society united. Starting 3,000 miles from the shore, new buildings would be carved in an inconsistent style similar to the old construction, but moving further inland the designs would gradually become more uniform, until 11,000 miles inland where every structure would be identical. The city would be crowned by a 57,000-mile-diameter section at the top, consisting of six massive buildings surrounding a seventh. The seventh building, named "The Portal" would be Tetro's first starport, a future launching point for vehicles traveling into the depths of space. The plan was met with nearly unanimous praise from the citizens of Telephus City. For most, it represented the realization of a vision that had been a far-fetched hope millions of years ago for the first pyronates who settled on Gamiala. Construction was financed by the Dramilian Federation's massive accumulated wealth, and nearly a third of all Frelians alive at the time were employed in some form by what became known as "Civilization's Victory Project". As a result, work was completed in less than a million years. On the day of completion, the Dramilian Federation renamed Telephus City as "Star City", in celebration of the starport. Ironically, space travel was not invented for another 178 million years, so the building remained empty and unused for the first half of its existence.

Modernization and Current Status
Around 300 million years ago, the Dramilian Federation instigated the Unification War, which caused severe damage to many buildings on Telephus. The Federation's original method for repairing damage had been to pour molten rock of matching mineral composition over the damaged area, allow it to crystallize, then carve the new rock into the original shape of that area. But during the war's most destructive battles, thousands of cubic miles of rock were broken away every day by aircraft and projectile collisions. Reforging the rock was so time-consuming that buildings were being destroyed faster than they could be repaired. To solve this problem, the Dramilian Federation constructed a tungsten-graphene skeleton under the surface of the rock which preserved the outward appearance of the city while drastically reducing the amount of rock that needed to be reforged after a damage incident. Although stronger materials have since been developed, the Dramilian Federation has not upgraded Telephus' reinforced-stone construction, instead opting to reforge the several cubic miles of stone that are broken away each day by erosion and collisions.

Buildings
The central hemisphere of Telephus is composed of seven unique buildings: Fractal Tower, Dramilia Central, Telephus Grand Museum, Residence One, The Craftworks, Arborica, and The Portal. Today most of the interior space of these buildings is still unused, since they were designed with the distant future in mind. The Frelian engineers and artists that planned the city 369 million years ago were optimistic about Tetro's population growth and wanted the structures to comfortably accommodate the needs of a quadrillion residents.